For those of you who are perhaps members of the ‘Friends of The Suffolk Regiment,’ you will have seen in our last magazine, an article I wrote about Colour Sergeant ‘Bill’ Barwood, who served twenty-one years with the 1st Battalion, Suffolk Regiment from 1933 until 1954.
Bill was one of six Sergeants that remained with 1 Suffolk all the way through its service with the 3rd (British) Infantry Division, from the day war was declared in 1939, until the Battalion transferred to 1st Infantry Division in 1947 in the Middle East.
Earlier this year, I was fortuanate enough to be able to secure his medals at auction and I have been piecing his career and life with the Regiment together bit-by-bit over the past few months.
Whilst looking for something else the other evening, I was trawling through a box of photographs belonging to a soldier who served in the Suffolk Regiment in the 1920s and 1930s and I stumbled over a photograph of Bill taken when he was part of the detachment from the 1st Battalion that participated in the Coronation of His Majesty, King George VI, y lining the procession route in London.
The detachment were photographed at Crownhill Barracks, Plymouth in their blue patrol uniforms with peaked caps before they travelled up to London by train. Curiously they all wear khaki web belts, I would have thought that the Tegiment possessed enough white buff leather ones to wear instead? They would have looked a great deal smarter (in my opinion!)
Together with the Colour Party, twenty two men were travelling to line the route at six-foot intervals and all would wear roses in their headdress which was customary when the Monarch was on parade (to celebrate King George II, placing himself at the head of the Old Twelfth at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743).
Imagine therefore my surprise when looking for a photograph from Shanghai, that I looked down and saw Bill staring back at me. He is standing left in the photograph above. Whilst I had a photos of him taken before D-Day and after VE-Day, and in Palestine, I had nothing of his pre-war, so it was a welcome surprise and something else to add to the folder with his medals and other bits I have on his career.
Bill never got a mention in my first book, but his time with 1 Suffolk was certainly an interesting one. A Dunkirk veteran and later Quartermaster Sergeant in ‘C’ Company, he had many narrow scrapes in his service so if a revised edition gets published, then he’ll definitely be in it!
Comments