Honoured veteran says he's one of the 'lucky ones'
Geoffrey Roberts, 99, from Peterborough, will become a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to commemoration of the Battle of Arnhem and to charity.
His daughter, Claire Welburn, said: "It's taken him a while to come to terms with it, because he always says, 'I didn't do anything'."
Mr Roberts was captured in the Battle of Arnhem in September 1944, in which more than 8,000 British soldiers were killed, missing or taken prisoner.
The battle was a failure, as the Allies did not secure a bridge over the Rhine at the Dutch city of Arnhem.
Mr Roberts was sent to a prisoner of war camp and put to work in a coal mine until the end of the war.
Ms Welburn said her father went back to the Netherlands every year to pay his respects.
"Every time he goes back, it's very emotional, every year we always go to Oosterbeek Commonwealth War Cemetery," she said.
"He goes straight to his two friends Plummer and Brown, who died during the battle."
She said her father wanted to praise the Taxi Charity for Military Veterans, which helped him with his annual visit.
Mr Roberts, who was born in the Chelsea Barracks in London in 1925 and celebrates his 100th birthday later this month, joined the Army in 1942.
Ms Welburn said her father was surprised when he found out he would become an MBE.
"His first words actually were, 'I'm not very happy about that'," she said.
"He always says, 'the heroes are the ones lying in the cemetery', and he's just one of the lucky ones."
Other people in Cambridgeshire awarded honours include:
Prof Timothy James Cole FMedSci, Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London, appointed CBE for services to medical statistics.
Philip Albert Colligan, Raspberry Pi Foundation, appointed CBE for services to engineering and technology for societal impact.
Prof Gordon Dougan FRS FMedSci, University of Cambridge, appointed CBE for services to vaccines and to global health.
Prof Emily Fleur Shuckburgh OBE, University of Cambridge, appointed CBE for services to climate science and to the public communication of climate Science.
The Rev Canon Dr Malcolm Arthur Brown, Church of England, appointed OBE for services to the public witness of the Church of England.
Follow Peterborough news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
'It's important to remember ordinary fighting men'
WW2 veteran joins the Royal British Legion - at 102
MBE for RAF veteran known as town's 'Poppy Man'
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Atlantic
19 hours ago
- Atlantic
The Growing Cohort of Single Dads by Choice
Charlie Calkins grew up in a big extended family. We're talking about nearly 30 cousins—some of whom had their own kids. When he was in high school, he spent a lot of time with those young children: a position that some surly teens might resent but that Calkins adored. The idea that someday he would be a father himself seemed, to him, only natural. He just needed to wait for the right partner to show up. So he did: He waited and waited. He went to business school. He built a career in tech. He traveled. And he went on dates. When a relationship didn't work out, he'd return to 'professional mode'—bouncing between 'intermittent surges' of dating and work. 'I spent a lot of my early adulthood going, When everything's right, it will happen,' he told me. 'I'm definitely a The stars will align kind of person. And then one day it hit me: They were not aligning.' That's how Calkins ended up, in his 40s, making an appointment with a fertility clinic—and eventually, over the course of years, getting matched with an egg donor and a 'gestational carrier,' or surrogate. At 49, he became a parent. Now he's living in Durham, North Carolina, with a 7-year-old son and a daughter who's almost 2. Single mother by choice has become a common term for unpartnered women who have intentionally become parents. You rarely hear of single fathers by choice, which makes sense given that they're much more rare. But this population, it appears, has been expanding—slowly, over the course of a couple of decades, and then more notably in the past few years. The exact count is unclear; most surveys don't differentiate them from widowers or men separated from an uninvolved co-parent. Still: Susan Golombok, a University of Cambridge psychologist and the author of We Are Family: The Modern Transformation of Parents and Children, told me that before this millennium, single dads by choice were virtually unheard of. Based on my conversations with kin researchers, fertility-industry professionals, and adoption centers, that's certainly not the case anymore. Over the past few years, Yan Dekel, a community manager for an organization called Men Having Babies (MHB), has noticed what he described as 'a radical change' in single-fatherhood interest. The nonprofit hosts conferences in a number of large U.S. cities (and abroad) to offer parenting or surrogacy information, legal advice, financial aid—but the main audience was always intended to be coupled gay men. As recently as 2021, Dekel told me, only a few single men would show up to a typical conference. Now the 'singles' session' tends to bring in about 50 men. In some cities, that represents a whole quarter of all the conference-goers. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising given that singlehood rates have been rising for years, more steeply among men than women—leaving lots of would-be dads without a co-parent. But the fact that single men are deciding to start families on their own, some of them paying extravagantly for egg donation and surrogacy, might also say something about just how important fatherhood is for many men today. Multiple family-planning professionals told me that the coronavirus pandemic was a turning point for a lot of single fathers by choice: It led to a 'reorganization, reprioritization of what's really important in life,' Jennifer McGill, the chief operating officer of the Maryland fertility clinic Creative Family Connections, told me. Some men are deciding that being a father is what matters to them—even if romance isn't in the cards. American households are dramatically more diverse than they were a century ago. Gay couples are adopting or using fertility services; divorced parents are finding new partners and creating big blended families; friends are platonically co-parenting. Our norms for kinship are simply loosening up, and that can create a 'reinforcing phenomenon,' as Ron Poole-Dayan, MHB's founder, put it: The more single dads you see around you, the more likely you might be to become a single dad yourself—and the more likely you might then be to inspire someone else's choice. Of the seven men I spoke with who were either a single dad or in the process of becoming one, most mentioned having a single-parent friend or having gone to an MHB conference: something that made the possibility feel a little less abstract. The experts I spoke with had the sense that single fatherhood by choice is more common among gay men than straight ones. Gay men, for one thing, would likely need to adopt or use a surrogate to have a kid whether they were partnered or not. Perhaps more important, they may be more accustomed to imagining what a family could look like beyond the bounds of societal expectations. And in recent years, Poole-Dayan told me, the gay community has seen a real 'demographic recovery' after the AIDS epidemic took so many lives beginning in the 1980s. A new generation of gay men has made it through young adulthood with more health, stability, financial security, and societal acceptance than many before them ever had. All of those factors can make starting a family feel more possible. For straight single dads by choice, the leap away from convention might feel more 'daunting,' Batya Novick, a therapist who works with clients seeking to grow a family, told me. Novick started her practice, Calla Collective, in 2016—but only in the past year and a half have single men started coming to her to talk through whether they should have a kid. Whereas the gay men she's worked with generally haven't planned to give up on dating at all, the straight ones, she told me, seemed to be pursuing single fatherhood 'in the face of defeat versus the face of choice.' She's seen them struggle with a feeling of failure for not finding a wife, with 'latent grief' as they adjust expectations, with isolation as they search for anyone around them having families in nontraditional ways. Some clients wrestle not only with how they'd make single parenthood work logistically and financially, but also with what becoming a sole caregiver means for their sense of self, she told me: 'There is this almost unspoken de-masculation.' They're considering this in a moment when many of the traditional trappings of manhood—a spouse, a breadwinner's paycheck, an ambient sense of power—are no longer a given. Women are now graduating college at higher rates than men. A growing share of jobs require a degree, while many industries that traditionally favored men—physical labor, factory work—are in decline. As fewer women (thankfully) rely on men for financial security, fewer straight men can rely on marriage. Conversations about 'toxic masculinity' have put some men on the defensive; others see the traditional model of manhood as something to move away from. But toward what? Fatherhood, whatever questions about identity it might raise for some men, can also be an answer. Richard Reeves, as the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, talks to—well, a lot of boys and men. And he told me that he sees many of them placing great importance on becoming a dad, in a way he didn't always notice. For so long, he said, 'fatherhood was mediated through motherhood': Many straight men became dads almost by default, and their relationship with their children often remained fairly indirect. Picture a family tree, he told me, in which the lines between a mom and her children, and between herself and her husband, are solid—but a dotted line runs between that dad and his kids. Because fathers weren't expected to give as much, in terms of the time and labor of child care, many of them also gained less in close, emotional relationships with their children. Today, though, fathers on the whole are far more engaged than they used to be. Even just from 2015 to 2023, the time that 25-to-44-year-old fathers spent on child care in an average week increased by about two and a half hours. That time climbed significantly from 2019 to 2023, perhaps a sign of what McGill, the fertility-clinic COO, had described as men coming out of the pandemic wanting to 'spend those moments with their loved ones before it was too late.' And when Pew Research Center polled young adults without children in late 2023, it found that 57 percent of the men surveyed said they hoped to have kids someday, while only 45 percent of the women said the same. Perhaps as pressure on women to become mothers has loosened, allowing more women to choose to remain child-free, some men are undergoing the opposite revelation: realizing that some of the qualities associated with parenting, such as care and tenderness, need not be so relentlessly feminized; that parenthood could be a much-needed source of purpose. Single fathers by choice, who have the ultimate solid line between themselves and their kids, give Reeves hope. 'People are realizing,' he said, 'that fatherhood has to survive gender equality.' For many of the single men I talked with, fatherhood dangled a promise of deeper meaning in life. They told me they wanted to multiply love, to teach a child all that they'd learned, to re-create the warm family dynamic they'd experienced as a child. One New York dad, Raghav Nayar, said that he craved both a sense of purpose and of 'human connection.' Like many men, he'd never quite learned to open up to people emotionally. He was academically and professionally successful, yet unfulfilled. But he was inspired by a Buddhist tale he'd heard, about a child whose mother gives him the top of a glass of milk: the tastiest part, with the highest concentration of butter. A parent, the story goes, doesn't expect anything in return for their love. He wanted to feel that kind of transcendent selflessness. 'If I raise a child who is a good human being,' he told me, 'I can't ask for anything else.' Becoming a single dad by choice tends to be difficult—in some ways that are unavoidable, and some ways that reflect persistent skepticism about men's fitness as parents. Single men can't legally adopt or access assisted reproductive technology in every country, so many of them travel to the United States just to get that chance. But even in America, some adoption agencies view single men with suspicion, and many don't actively recruit men. In some states, surrogacy is illegal or requires overcoming legal obstacles; in every state, it's complicated and extraordinarily expensive. A hopeful father must choose an egg donor, who will undergo a slate of medical screenings, and find a surrogate, who may well live in another state. Legal contracts have to be drawn up to ensure that the father will be considered the sole parent (and not the surrogate, who would otherwise hold parental rights). Because so many people need to be paid, the price of this undertaking hasn't gone down much over the years, even as it's become more widely used, Sheeva Talebian, a doctor at CCRM Fertility in New York, told me. All in all, it can cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars. And, of course, that's just the start of raising a child, which itself is prohibitively expensive for many Americans. Men Having Babies provides financial assistance to some aspiring dads, but the organization has also been pushing for insurance plans to cover these costs. So far success has been limited. In 2019, for instance, New York passed legislation making IVF a mandated health-plan benefit for large-group insurance policies—and in 2021 issued an anti-discrimination directive for same-sex couples. But surrogacy coverage still isn't required, so single men and gay male partners are out of luck. And many insurance providers still define infertility as the inability to conceive after a year of trying, rather than the inability to conceive without medical intervention. MHB has tried to galvanize people around these issues—but has struggled, even within the LGBTQ community. Poole-Dayan thinks many people see parenthood as integral to a woman's purpose but as an extra treat for men, especially gay men. This is the flip side of the misguided assumption that all women want children and will be deprived without them: that men can't truly be deprived of parenthood. 'The average person doesn't think of us as childless,' he told me. 'A lot of discrimination is tolerated and a lot of support is withheld because of that. And this is without even talking about those people who are actually looking at what we're doing suspiciously.' The donor-and-surrogacy process can also take years, which is difficult given that many single men start it, McGill told me, in their 40s—when they realize they're running out of time. Male fertility does decline with age, though not at a rate as steep as for women. But men still face emotional, logistical, and existential limits on their child-rearing window: They might not want to carry around a toddler when they're 60, or leave a still-young child parentless when they die—and men face a shorter average lifespan than women. Greg Larson, an aspiring dad in New Jersey, started looking for egg donors in 2022, had embryos created by the end of 2023, and now he's matched with a surrogate—but she hasn't gotten pregnant yet. If everything goes perfectly, he might have a baby around his 46th birthday, next May. If things don't work out with this surrogate, he might not start all of this over again. And yet, despite the obstacles, becoming a single dad by choice can be empowering. It means not waiting for a partner to complete your life, knowing what you want to prioritize, actively creating the life you want, even if it's not what anyone expected of you. For the men I spoke with, making this decision also pushed them to be vulnerable enough to ask for help, or to build community. Calkins has four sisters, two of whom are local and all of whom adore his kids. He finds himself texting 'the aunties' little updates—the kind of thing he might, in a different world, be sending to a spouse. Larson has met other aspiring single dads through Men Having Babies; they talk about navigating the surrogacy process, how to date while they're in the midst of it, what to tell romantic prospects about the possibility but not certainty of near-future fatherhood. 'It's really cool,' he said, 'the people that you pick up along the way that you get unexpected support from.' The men I spoke with never set out to buck tradition; they just wanted to be dads. But that decision spurred some of them to consider what it means to be a good father—and a good man. Nayar told me he notices now how rarely he sees another father in the park with his kid. Sometimes when he does, he thinks the father seems a little begrudging, walking slightly behind the child, and he wonders how many of these dads were told by their wife to take the kid out to play. He understands: He, too, is stretching to be not just a provider, that classic masculine trope, but also a nurturer—someone softer, more open. The other day, when he was visiting his cousin's two daughters, the 5-year-old got in trouble and ran into the living room and hid behind the couch. He picked her up and took her to the mirror, and they looked at their reflections together. 'You are wonderful,' he told her. 'And you don't have to worry about anything.' In an ideal world, these single dads by choice might prefer not to be single. But many of the experts I spoke with told me the ones they knew were notably steady and optimistic. And that made sense to me: The ones who have made it this far are the ones who really want fatherhood. 'I don't know quite how to explain it,' Calkins told me, 'but I was just so confident and comfortable with the fact that I wanted to be a parent. And I was going to love being a parent, which I do.' Getting to this point, despite the effort and technology involved, felt like the most organic thing in the world to him. And in a way he never quite expected, the stars ended up aligning after all.
Fox News
2 days ago
- Fox News
Prince William and Kate Middleton's big move forces two families out of their homes
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Forbes
3 days ago
- Forbes
How To Unlock True Inclusion Through Open-Ended Questions And Allyship
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