Latest news with #Legiond'honneur
Daily Mirror
08-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mirror
Child hero of WW2 who swept mines at 14 lays bare horrors for first time
On the eve of VE Day, Ronald Butcher, 98, has opened up about his astonishing childhood at sea for the first time because "We must learn from the past and be peacemakers" A decorated veteran who was a child hero has spoken out for the first time in 80 years about the true horrors he saw in the Second World War. On the eve of VE Day, Ronald Butcher, 98, has opened up about his astonishing childhood at sea during the war because: 'We must learn from the past and be peacemakers.'. He was only a 14-year-old boy when he was working on a minesweeper climbing on 'pin mines' to diffuse them and aged 15 in the Merchant Navy when his boat was sunk by a torpedo on his very first mission. He told The Mirror: 'I was left treading water in burning oil with my mates for three hours and we were calling out to each other and gradually the calls became less and less. "Three hours I was in the water, Croist. They were getting the injured out first.' READ MORE: Amazon's solar lights that 'look like real flowers' are the 'ideal way to add colour' to your garden He was eventually rescued by the RNLI but doesn't know what happened to his crewmates off the disaster just off he English Channel. He was sent to his local hospital in Thetford to recover. Still a child on D-Day in 1944, Ron then found himself off the coast of Normandy, when his new ship was hit by mines, five miles off Juno beach. Ronald was awarded the Legion d'honneur by the French for his service. His daughter Christine Lincoln, 61, said: 'He still wakes up in the night dreaming about swimming.' His new ship, the Francis C Harrington, was hit by two mines, as they tried to deliver vital supplies and more than 500 troops. Five of his crew were killed. Christine explains: 'The ship was patched up and they were a massive sitting duck for six days before they were towed back to England. While they waited the 'terrified' teenager watched as the skies turned black with bombs: 'I couldn't tell if it was day or night. We were all scared. We were five miles off the beach waiting to offload. But as soon as they could see us, they fired on us. 'Honestly, that's where I'm bloody sure I'd come deaf then, I couldn't hear nothin' or see anything. You didn't know the difference from daylight to darkness. It was midday, and it was dark and horrible. 'I could see the action on the breaches. Juno, our beach, was being fired on. The guns kept going. But the Americans got it worse; they died in their thousands.' VE Day: 80th Anniversary Magazine Specials To commemorate the 80th anniversary of VE Day, we bring you two special special collector's magazines that look back at events that led to the end of World War II in Europe and marked a new era. In the VE Day 80: Anniversary Collector's Edition we share photographs from the street parties that were held all over Britain, while esteemed author and journalist Paul Routledge paints a picture of how the day was bittersweet, mixed with jubilation and hope for the future, as well as sadness and regret for the past. Routledge also recounts the key events of the Second World War, including Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and Pearl Harbour. The magazine costs £9.99. Also available is World War Two - A History in 50 Photographs, a definitive pictorial account of the war. Carefully chosen from hundreds of thousands of images, this commemorative magazine shares 50 exceptional photographs - including many rarely seen shots - that capture the devastating moments, horror, hope and eventual triumph of World War Two. The magazine costs £6.99. He said an 'old boy' on the ship told him: 'We'll be all right (HMS) George V is coming'. I said 'Well, bloody hell, he'd better get his arse here soon! ' When the lead ship did arrive to save them, it let rip. 'When it fired on these pillboxes the Germans built along the coast, the bloody houses in England shook. That's when I lost my hearing in my right ear. 'I always thought three guns would fire seconds apart but they fired at the same time just a split second behind each other. ' Explaining how they carried on despite the damage to their ship, he said: 'There was a mat that was rolled down over the holes in the side of the ship. It would roll down and go down the holes and sea pressure would push the coconut matting tight to the steel.' The stunned teenager then had to take part in the gruesome task of clearing the bodies from the water below them. 'The parsons corp were captains with a collar, and they were covered in blood. The bodies were floating and sinking. They were in punts, pulling the dead onto the landing craft, pulling bits of legs on. 'We had to give a bit of a hand for the last two hours. We went up the coast and were told not to say where we took them off to. 'It was an old derelict chapel…they cleared it out, made it look a bit decent and the back garden was about three or four acres which the Government took over.' He said they dug out a 20ft grave, explaining how the pit was as high as the ceiling in the hotel we were speaking in, during a trip to the Netherlands with the Taxi Charity for Military Veterans. 'There were three weekly boats from Juno at that time, one behind the other. Terrible. We ended up in a bloody pub. The Parsons were in there too, we covered ourselves in beer.' His daughter, former nurse Christine, 61, said opening up during this week's trip head of VE Day has transformed her dad 'This trip he has been given respect, love and he's come alive. 'At home he would sit quietly in his chair and I would ask him 'Are you all right dad?' and he'd say; 'I'm just thinking'. But he'd never tell me what about. I could see he was sad though. 'Sometimes in the morning he would say he'd had a terrible night, but I thought that was physical now I think it might have been the nightmares. 'But people have been really listening to him and he's been able to talk to people who have been through the same thing as him. To me when he arrived on this trip he was a tightly closed bud and now he's blossomed." During our chat Ron admits to his daughter he had 'a little one' - a nightmare - recently, about climbing on a mine aged 14 to diffuse it with a 'giant spanner'. He tells his shocked daughter he had been ordered to do this on his Uncle Bill's minesweeper in Lowestoft and it was not just a dream. His uncle and cousin were later 'blown to bits'. He also opened up to the Mirror by the end of the trip, saying: 'When I left the war I had a job to sleep. I was fighting the bloody enemy, swimming, where I don't know. I used to dream and shout 'help'. My mother and father used to come and wake me up and sort me out. That gradually went. ' But when his daughter gently asks if he ever has them now, he says: 'Sometimes! I did have a little nightmare a while ago. I was ordered to go on these pin mines and climb up with a bloody great spanner with grips on and take the horns off. ' Asked if that's what he had to do during the war and he told her 'yes!' explaining: 'They put a rope around my middle and lowered me down because I was the lightest. I was 14. I left school at 13 and I was a mine sweeper with Uncle Bill,' he told her. Ron went on to explain how he joined the Merchant Navy rather than go down the coal mines as a Bevan Boy after lying about his age and they turned a blind eye. During his military career he did at least five convoy crossings of up to 70 ships across the Atlantic taking things to be repaired in Canada and America, dodging 90ft waves and enemy submarines. 'It was dangerous in the Atlantic. It took 15 days one way to go to Canada. It's a long way from northern Scotland down the coast of England then across the Atlantic, that's 15,000 miles. ' Ron later joined the British Army for more than 30 years as a civilian officer where he met members of the royal family regularly working his way up to become an officer. With his wonderful booming laugh he tells us he met 'all the royals' but the Queen was his favourite. 'The Queen was wonderful. When she spoke at first she was like a Hoorah Henry in front of the public, but when she was on her own with us in the offices, she was one of the boys. She had two voices,' he chuckled. On VE Day the great great grandad will be lighting the beacon near his home and urges: 'Keep telling your children. Get it in their little heads what happened.' Ron added: "We must learn from the past, be peacemakers and work together to make the world a better place. "We must never forget how futile war is and that every person killed is somebody's child. No matter where they are from, their families will never recover from it or be the same again."
Daily Mail
05-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
D-Day hero, 99, who ferried Allied troops onto beaches of Normandy as a teenager laughs with Keir Starmer during VE Day procession - ahead of tea with the King at Buckingham Palace
A 99-year-old D-Day veteran had a prime position for today's VE Day commemorations - right next to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. Albert Keir was pictured having a chuckle with the PM ahead of the military procession this afternoon. The pair had the best seats in the house on the specially built dais on the Queen Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace to watch the procession of 1,300 members of the armed forces and Nato allies. Mr Keir, who was part of a crew ferrying US troops onto Utah Beach in Normandy during the D-Day invasion in June 1944, is among more than 30 Second World War veterans attending celebrations in London to mark VE Day. Another of the veterans, Bernard Morgan, 101, was seated next to the Princess of Wales. The pair got on similarly well. The Royal British Legion has worked with their families and the Government to ensure as many as possible can be there to see the procession through London. The veterans are set to have tea with King Charles and Queen Camilla later at Buckingham Palace. Mr Keir served in the Royal Navy for three years from 1942. Speaking of his experience of D-Day, he said:'At night when it was dark, the sky was lit up with all different sorts of colours, tracer bullets and different things. And the noise was colossal... 'And the firing from the sea over our heads blasting the beaches was very bad. 'Took some standing that did. It's very difficult to try and get it out of your mind.' Before the war, Mr Keir had been working as a painter and decorator after leaving school aged 14. He was discharged shortly before the end of the war so he could help repair and build houses. Mr Keir was awarded France's highest award, the Legion d'honneur, in 2015 and last year was honoured with the Freedom of Derbyshire by his local council. A total of 31 veterans were due to attend official events today, including 26 watching the parade, which headed from Parliament Square to Whitehall, then to Trafalgar Square, Admiralty Arch, The Mall, and finally to Buckingham Palace. Mr Morgan worked as a codebreaker during the war. He landed on Gold Beach at 6.30pm on D-Day, becoming the youngest RAF sergeant to land in Normandy during the war. He remembers receiving a secret telegraph message two days before VE Day which read: 'German war now over, surrender effective sometime tomorrow.' When the end of the war was officially confirmed on May 8, Mr Morgan and his comrades lit a huge bonfire and celebrated until late into the night. He said: 'It's so important that we make the most of these opportunities to remember what happened, not just to celebrate the achievement, but also to ensure that such horrors never happen again.' RAF veteran Alan Kennett, who will turn 101 on May 29, formally started the parade as he received the Commonwealth War Graves' Torch For Peace from air cadet warrant officer Emmy Jones. Mr Kennett was in a cinema in Celle, north-central Germany, when the doors burst open as a soldier drove a jeep into the venue and shouted: 'The war is over.' He said the cinema erupted with joy, and celebrations soon spread through the streets. Alfred Littlefield, aged 101, joined the Royal Engineers and served during D-Day, when he swam in with supplies from the launches under shell fire. His unit stayed on to build the temporary Mulberry Harbours, which facilitated the rapid offloading of cargo onto beaches during the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. Ann Johnson, aged 101, served in the Land Army during the war as a tractor driver. Arthur Oborne, aged 99, joined the army in 1942 aged 18 and later became part of the 30th Corp - also known as the 'Desert Rats' - which took part in the D-Day landings and subsequent advance across France. Barbara Hurman, who is soon to turn 100, volunteered to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service - the first all-women's branch of the British Army, formed in 1938 - when she was just 17 years old. A veteran of the Women's Royal Naval Service, Betty Hollingberry was one of six sent to work on HMS Pembroke V in Eastcote, west London, where she helped operate the Bombe machines designed to break German Enigma codes. Charles Auborn, 99, joined the Army aged 18 in 1944 and served as a gunner. When victory in Europe was announced, he was sent to Belgium with the view to being shipped out to assist the Americans in Japan - but the atom bomb put an end to that. His officer returned from the UK with new orders: 'How are you boys for shorts?' - as they were being sent to Egypt. He was sent on to Palestine, Tel Aviv, and finally Tripoli before being demobbed in 1947. Ann Johnson, aged 101, served in the Land Army during the war as a tractor driver Arthur Oborne, aged 99, joined the army in 1942 aged 18 and later became part of the 30th Corp - also known as the 'Desert Rats' - which took part in the D-Day landings and subsequent advance across France Royal Navy veteran Cyril Jones Alston, 98, began his service on his 18th birthday in February 1945 to serve 'until the end of the period of the present emergency.' Douglas Hyde, soon to turn 99, joined the Merchant Navy in 1944 aged 18. He was part of a secret operation to liberate Europe and spent months going back and forth to the beaches deploying munitions and amphibious vehicles. On VE Day, Mr Hyde bumped into his brother in Antwerp, Belgium, and they celebrated the end of the war together. Royal Marines veteran Francis James Grant, 99, served on D-Day and was tasked with patrolling beaches and escorting allies. Royal Navy veteran Frederick Pickering, 100, was on board a ship when he heard an announcement come over the Tannoy that there was victory in Europe. That day, they all celebrated on board with two tots of rum, and later went on to do a Victory March in Livorno, western Italy. Gilbert Clarke, 98, lied about his age to join the RAF in 1943 and trained in Kingston Palisades RAF camp in Jamaica, before being sent on a troop-carrying ship to Britain via the United States. Henry Ducker, 104, was called up to join the Air Force aged 19. He undertook several radio control courses during his time in the Air Force and was responsible for running control centres wherever he was posted to. Jim Miller, 100, was serving in the Army's armoured cops when he arrived in Normandy three days after D-Day on June 9 1944. He ended up meeting his wife in Berlin while serving there during the liberation. Army veteran Joe Mines, 100, was sent to clear mines aged only 18 and alongside four other men. John Mortimer, 101, was just 20 when he landed on Sword Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944. 'There were thousands and thousands of ships on either side of us, loads of vehicles, tanks and artillery,' he recalled. 'It was dangerous, there were snipers all around. It was noisy, smoky, and smelly, and I saw lots of casualties.' John Davies, 102, was 17 when he joined the Merchant Navy in 1940. He was at sea on VE Day, and could not get any beer when he came back two days later as everywhere was sold out due to the celebrations. John Whitlock, 100, joined the RAF aged 18 and trained for two years before being posted to join RAF New Zealand Squadron 490, operating out of West Africa on marine patrols in Sunderland flying boats. During the Soviet blockade of Berlin, he flew supplies into West Berlin until the blockade ceased in 1949. Joy Trew, 98, from Bristol, remembers being fascinated with aviation ever since saw German aeroplanes drop bombs over her school playground, and joined the Women's Junior Air Corps aged 17. Joyce Wilding, 100, from Surrey, enlisted in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Fany) aged 18. She was on a day off travelling to London with her colleagues when victory in Europe was announced. She said: 'We went to Piccadilly where there was a stream of people singing and dancing; we joined a crocodile and did the Palais Glide down Piccadilly, there were soldiers up lampposts, it was extraordinary.' They made their way to Buckingham Palace and witnessed the King, Queen, and Winston Churchill waving to the crowd from the balcony. 'Being outside the palace, you could hardly move - there were so many people cheering and singing,' she added. Olga Hopkins, 99, from St Albans in Hertfordshire, served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force as a wireless mechanic. Remembering VE Day, she said: 'I was lying in bed in my Nissen Hut at midnight, listening to the American Forces Network, when a Tannoy announced, 'The war is over.' 'We jumped out of bed, threw on our battledress, and joined a party at the sergeant's mess.' She recalls singing Don't Fence Me In with friends, adding: 'We had a whale of a time.' Norman Brown, 101, joined the RAF aged 18 and was later stationed in Cape Town, South Africa, travelling in a large convoy of ships that took six weeks to get to Durban. After the war, he was stationed in Germany to help with maintaining peace, cleaning up and rebuilding, just outside of Hamburg. Norman Trickett, 98, joined the Home Guard in Portsmouth in 1942 at the age of 15. He later fought through Northern France, Belgium and Holland. He was captured by Germans at the beginning of May 1945 when leading an advance scouting patrol and ended the war as a prisoner in Bremerhaven, northern Germany. Robert Piper, 99, joined the home guard at the age of 14 at the outbreak of the war. He then lied about his age to sign up and joined the Royal Sussex regiment, before being transferred to the Royal Signal regiment attached to 15th Scottish infantry. Ruth Barnwell, 100, joined the Women's Royal Naval Service aged 17 when her brother's friend was killed on HMS Hood, which was sunk during the Battle of the Denmark Strait on May 24 1941 by the German battleship Bismarck. She said she was 'very happy' when she heard the war had ended, but added that it was a 'normal working day' and carried on with her duties at the Combined Operations base HMS Quebec in Scotland. Royal Navy veteran Ruth June Bourne, 98, was a Bombe machine operator and checker at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, during the war. On VE Day, she went to London with a colleague to celebrate. 'We waited outside the Palace chanting 'We want the King',' she said. 'The royal family came out, and we went mad cheering. 'People were climbing lampposts. 'I climbed onto a window ledge shouting, 'Three cheers for the British Navy'.' RAF veteran Thomas Greenfield, 101, from Sussex, volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm. Army veteran Tom Stonehouse, 99, landed at approximately 8am on Gold Beach on D-Day. He remembers 'losing lots of Essex Regiment friends in the Battle of Caen' from June to August 1944. His wife's birthday is on VE Day, so the couple always celebrate the birthday and their war memories together. Zena da Costa, 100, from Southport in Merseyside, was evacuated as a child and signed up to the Women's Auxiliary Air Force at the age of 18. She had trained as a hairdresser and always regretted telling anyone this, as she subsequently got the job of doing all the officers' hair. As she wanted to get involved with driving, she constantly nipped out to drive trucks that were left around her unit until she was reprimanded by having to peel potatoes.
Daily Mirror
03-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mirror
VE DAY 80 YEARS ON ‘I helped defeat the Nazis - but I couldn't even tell my own mum'
Ruth Bourne's war work was so secretive not even her own parents knew about it - but while they saw her as a giggly teen, she was actually codebreaking at Bletchley Park. Now, 80 years on from VE Day, the Birmingham native has opened up about her historic actions. Clever Ruth Bourne's work was so secretive her mum never knew how she helped win World War II. As a teenager, Ruth was chosen to work at a top secret site, Bletchley Park, set up to decode Nazi messages. Despite admitting to being a 'giggly' teen, she took her role in the war very seriously and when her mum pressed: 'You can tell me, I'm your mother.' 'I thought; 'right if I tell my mother. It will be all over Birmingham in 20 minutes!' she told The Mirror. Winston Churchill called Ruth and her colleagues his 'special hens' who had 'laid so well without clucking'. Ruth, now 98, living in north London, kept silent about her important work until she was in her nineties and the demands of the Official Secrets Act were lifted. 'I'm proud we kept the secret. My parents died and never knew what I did. We did what we were told, you know!' she told The Mirror. 'I told them it was confidential secretarial work.' Ruth, whose dad was a doctor in Birmingham, only told her husband Stephen Bentall, in the 70s. 'I think they would have been pleased with me now. You know, now that it all came out and I've got the medals. ' In recognition of her service, Ruth was awarded the Legion d'honneur in November 2018. Ruth, whose dad was a doctor in Birmingham, had studied French, Spanish and German at school and turned down a place at London University to read languages to join up with the WRNS Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) aged 17. 'My initial application was refused. But the second time I was accepted. I was sent to Scotland to a training camp very near Loch Lomond, a little farm that had been turned over as a barracks for the training of Wrens. Everybody got a category where they were going to serve; motor transport, signalling, and they all had badges to sew on their uniform. But half a dozen of us had no badges and we thought 'what have we done wrong?'. ' The new recruits joining with Ruth in 1944, were told they had been picked for SDX, standing for 'Special Duties'. 'We thought we were going on the HMS Pembroke, we never saw the sea. We fetched up in Euston. Initially we saw a petty officer and she interviewed us and she said the work you are going to do here is highly secret and confidential so once you're in you won't be allowed out,' Ruth recalls. 'The hours are antisocial, there's no promotion, you get higher specialised pay when you are trained. If you don't like the idea you can leave now. We stayed and were then sworn in and we had to sign the Official Secrets Act. I'm told that you must never tell anybody anything you've done here, or anything you've seen or anything you've heard. ' Ruth served as a Bombe Operator at Eastcote and Stanmore and would years later return to act as a tour guide at Bletchley museum for 25 years. The Bombe machines she worked on were designed by Alan Turing to crack the Enigma code. 'A lot of us should come straight from school, girls of 17, 18 and 19 who were extremely naive. We were still silly and giggly. All we knew is we were breaking enemy codes. We didn't know the ramifications. 'We didn't know how incredibly difficult it was to break German codes. We didn't know there were 168 million, million, million possible ways.' Her work was 'repetitive but exciting' when the cry of 'job up' was heard, it meant the code had been cracked. At its peak, almost 9,000 people worked at Bletchley, three quarters of them women. Ruth remembers only a handful of Bombes when she arrived. Eventually there were more than 200. 'The only time you ever spoke about our work was when one girl might say to the other girl; 'What are you doing tonight? Sitting or standing?' We worked in pairs and it meant if she was standing you were operating the bombe. If you were sitting, you were in the checking room, operating the other machine. ' At the time she didn't appreciate how much the Bletchley codebreakers had helped with the planning of D-Day. "I didn't really comprehend the enormity of what was going on. Everything was spread out. So what you got as a bombe operator, was just a little bit of the jigsaw, we didn't get the whole picture. 'We knew where ten or twelve of the German divisions were. We did our best to make it very favourable for the D-Day invasion. We knew that the Germans believed that we were going to invade further north than we actually did. ' Ruth remembers clearly the end of the war as she celebrated with the millions outside Buckingham Palace: 'We were in Stanmore and I think it came over on the radio, 'the war's over.' We were incredibly elated and two or three of us ran out. Into the road. 'There wasn't very much traffic in those days because there was no petrol and we stopped a car, We linked arms and waved telling him 'the war's over. the war's over. Come and have a cup of tea'. We walked just up the pathway and we asked the regulating office, can we bring this civilian for tea? And we had tea. Everybody was just euphoric so all the rules were broken. 'We were kids and we happened to have a sleeping out pass and we went into London and the tube was buzzing with 'the war's over, the war's over'. Everybody was going to Buckingham Palace, so we got on the bus and we joined the crowds gathered there and somebody started up the shout, 'We want the King. We want the king'. 'And would you believe it,.eventually, the royal family came onto the balcony and they waved. Everybody waved whatever they had on to wave; gloves, scarves, hankies, coats. People climbed on the lamp posts, wherever there was a lamppost there was somebody on it. Everybody went wild. That bit I remember very well. 'There were perfect strangers talking to each other in little groups. People spoke to each other and linked hands. And then there was a Conga.' When the evening came Ruth went to Hyde Park joining a group of American soldiers who'd lit a little bonfire. 'I think they may well have used the benches or the litter boxes, whatever they could. We all sat on the grass around the fire and we sang songs, some old songs, some modern songs. Then we found our way back to our billets and I don't think anybody slept very much that night. We were all highly elated and incredibly relieved.' But after the celebrations Ruth's work continued and this time it was to dismantle the bombe machines wire by wire. 'Churchill didn't want certain people to know that we could still break into Enigma. I remember sitting out on a warm, sunny day with the soldering iron. There were five miles of wire in each bomb machine.' Ruth only found out how life-saving her work was in the 1990s. "It was only when I saw the Enigma machine at a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society that I realised the enormity of it all," she said. Ruth is now rightly proud of her female colleagues: 'I think there were approximately 1800 girls. And they kept the secret. How can you put that in your words? How important that was? "Nobody ever talks about the hens 'who were laying so well without clucking'. They are put to one side. I think the World ought to know that we were there and we were not clucking and we were only kids from school.' VE Day: 80th Anniversary Magazine Specials To commemorate the 80th anniversary of VE Day, we bring you two special special collector's magazines that look back at events that led to the end of World War II in Europe and marked a new era. In the VE Day 80: Anniversary Collector's Edition we share photographs from the street parties that were held all over Britain, while esteemed author and journalist Paul Routledge paints a picture of how the day was bittersweet, mixed with jubilation and hope for the future, as well as sadness and regret for the past. Routledge also recounts the key events of the Second World War, including Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and Pearl Harbour. The magazine costs £9.99. Also available is World War Two - A History in 50 Photographs, a definitive pictorial account of the war. Carefully chosen from hundreds of thousands of images, this commemorative magazine shares 50 exceptional photographs - including many rarely seen shots - that capture the devastating moments, horror, hope and eventual triumph of World War Two. The magazine costs £6.99.
Telegraph
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
VE Day is ‘last big chance to thank Second World War heroes'
Amongst the polite mingling, finger sandwiches and Union flag-themed slices of cake was the serious feeling that this would be one of the last gatherings of Second World War veterans to ever take place. Six decorated attendees, aged 96 to 100 years old, convened at London's glamorous Ritz hotel on Friday, marking almost 80 years since the famous VE Day outing of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in the same hotel. The tea party, organised by the Royal British Legion (RBL), was the official launch of the charity's commemorations to mark the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day. It brought together Bletchley Park Enigma machine operator Ruth Bourne, 98, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) transmitter hut attendant Joyce Wilding, 100, Private Joe Mines, 100, codebreaker Bernard Morgan, 100, RAF soldier Gilbert Clarke, 99, and former child evacuee Doreen Mills, 96. The high tea was billed as 'one of the last opportunities to come together and say thank you' to those who served the country from 1939 to 1945, ahead of the RBL's formal VE Day celebrations on May 8. 'This is one of the last major opportunities for the whole nation to pay tribute, to say thank you, to those that served, and to pay tribute to their courage and fortitude,' Mark Atkinson, director general of the RBL, told The Telegraph ahead of the poignant anniversary. 'There's not so many of us that are with it [any more] in a way,' Ms Wilding, who enlisted as a FANY aged 18 in Surrey, said over bites of The Ritz's Victoria sponge cake. The centenarian, whose role as a transmitter hut attendant involved tuning powerful radios to receive messages from agents in occupied Europe, added that they formed a 'wonderful camaraderie' at the time. 'I must say it was a wonderful time of my life, [even] with all the tragedies and the terrible things that went on, but VE Day was just joyous, it was unbelievable,' she said. 'We danced the hokey cokey all the way down Piccadilly and ended up in front of the Palace.' Ms Wilding was one of two veterans at the high tea event – and among an estimated 100,000 people in 1945 – who decided to celebrate the historic moment outside Buckingham Palace. 'There was an electric feeling going through the crowd,' said Ms Bourne, who was a Bombe machine operator and checker at Bletchley Park during the war. She was awarded the Legion d'honneur in recognition of her service in 2018. Ms Bourne, who was only 17 when she joined the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) in 1944, added: 'In the end, we all broke out. We started shouting: 'We want the King, we want the King!' 'And believe it or not, they came out, the King and the Queen, Princess Elizabeth in her khaki uniform and Princess Margaret. Of course, we went wild. 'People were climbing up lamp posts, there wasn't an empty lamp post to be seen. We had a scarf, hat, whatever we had, we waved. I think that was the most exciting moment of my WRNS career, seeing the Royal family.' Similarly to Ms Wilding, she spent the evening dancing down Piccadilly Circus, while a few miles down the road the two princesses were famously given permission by their father, King George VI, to go incognito among the revellers and to celebrate at the Ritz. 'The story is they did a dance through the Ritz Hotel,' Ms Wilding said of the now infamous tale, which has been immortalised in the 2015 film A Royal Night Out and in Netflix's popular dramatised series about the Royal family, The Crown. Ms Bourne said 'no one knew it at the time,' and that the crowds outside the Palace were too busy 'doing the conga'. She said: 'That's the old fashioned dance we were doing, complete strangers, holding on to one another. It was like we were all one great big family.' As part of their national programme of celebrations to mark VE Day, the RBL is launching a range of downloadable resources available to all schools across the UK to help teachers plan related activities in classrooms. At Friday's tea, three schoolchildren were invited to meet the veterans to ask them about their experience of the war and were able to observe Mr Morgan's original telex, which he received two days before VE Day to tell him the Germans are surrendering, and which he has since refused to give to any museums. Mr Atkinson explained: 'You want to make sure that children are learning and talking about the Second World War… it's very important. 'It was great to have children here today to meet directly with people who were there 80 years ago, to hear their stories. That's a core part of what the legion has a responsibility for, it's making sure that the service and sacrifice is never forgotten.' After speaking with the children, Ms Wilding remarked: 'I think it's lovely to know that they know about it, because so often I find that the younger ones are not really very knowledgeable, because they've never lived through an air raid or anything like it.' 'One didn't realise how near, you know, with Hitler, we were,' she added. 'We could have been in trouble really.'
