The news came this morning that 1/Suffolk veteran, Harry Hughes had passed away peacefully, aged 98.
Harry served in 17 Platoon from early August 1944 when he joined the Battalion in Normandy, right through to Palestine, where he was demobbed in 1947. He was the last known survivor from ‘D’ Company
Harry was an enormously likeable man. Forthright and very much down to earth, he had lived and worked in the Suffolk town of Hadleigh all his life. He agreed to have his memoirs published back in 2016 which told a frank and very much unvarnished, view of life as a fighting soldier with the Battalion in 1944-45.
Harry was a strong, hardworking man, he was always active (having been a champion footballer, playing for the Battalion in Palestine), working in and around Hadleigh. I would often see him walking a pack of dogs around the town for exercise, a task he happily undertook for the owners of his local pub in which he played darts for many years.
I first met him in a car park one lunchtime and casually asked him if he was Harry Hughes and for over an hour we stood and spoke of his service and of his war. Such was the length of our chat that I had to get another ticket for the car park having gone over my limit and I was also told off for being late back to work, but he had a crystal-clear memory for people, recalling names out of legend that I had not heard of before. He added so much to the jigsaw in just those few minutes that I had to follow it up with a visit to his house, which revealed than another Suffolk Regiment veteran was living just two doors down from him who had served later in Trieste.
Harry was awarded the French Legion d’Honneur in 2015 having only applied for his service medals just a few years before. He was a great character of regimental life and a shining beacon of his generation and what they endured, but sadly now that generation have all but left us.
It was highly appropriate, if one could use such a word in this context, that he left us peacefully on the 80th anniversary of the battle of Venraij (Venray) - a battle in which he and 1/Suffolk played an active part and one which he remembered with much clarity when I met him seventy-five or so years later.
Farewell Harry. God speed to the great parade ground in the sky.
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