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If this is the last time he ever visits Normandy, Sergeant Richard Brock concedes, sitting in Caen – Carpiquet airport, Normandy, on Wednesday afternoon, it certainly feels very different from the first time he came.
Brock turned 100 years old last week, celebrating with a vast and raucous party at Morecambe Golf Club. He was – and very much is – hale, happy and hearty, yet can’t help but be reminded of how he felt precisely 80 years earlier.
At that time, in June 1944, he was barely out of his teens and among some 2,000 men on board the Ocean Vigil when she set off down the Thames Estuary, doodlebugs dropping all around, for a destination only a few knew.
Brock was an infantryman in the East Lancashire Regiment’s 1st Battalion, and had never left northern England when he was called up two years earlier, aged 18. After training on Salisbury Plain, the South Downs and Brecon Beacons, he gained the rank of Driver IC (In Charge) before travelling to Kent to prepare for the Normandy landings.
He arrived the day after D-Day, scrambling down the side of his ship on Gold Beach as part of the 130-strong HQ Company as shells rained down. Going the other way was round after round of battleship gunfire from the Allied Forces. There was no option to turn around; the only direction was forward, into battle, into Nazi territory, and the first target was Caen.
It was, he says, “hell on earth”.
So yes, different from his situation on Wednesday when Brock and his son, Tony, arrive at BAE Systems on the banks of the River Ribble in Warton, Lancashire, for a very special flight to Normandy for the 80th anniversary commemorations.
BAE’s site at Warton was in operation as a support base for the US Air Force during the Second World War, and remains a vast and vital plank in Britain’s current aviation defence armoury, with responsibilities including the Typhoon, Hawk and new F-35 Lightning II, and the proposed Tempest sixth-generation fighter.
On Wednesday, though, the company briefly halted operations to use its aerodrome to fly five D-Day veterans and their chaperones to Carpiquet. Early in the morning, as their passports are checked and boarding passes printed in a small departure lounge, Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again… plays from a small speaker.
“I think we go through duty-free now, don’t we?” Brock, a Murray Mint in his mouth, quips as he strides, unaided, from the desk. He looks 40 years younger than he is, and while he might not have the strength he did at his peak as a master butcher in Lancaster, he remains quicker of thought than most people a quarter his age.
In the bright morning sun, a rack of medals glint on his chest. On one end is the Légion d’honneur, the highest order of merit in France. In his hand is his 80-year-old green beret from East Lancashire Regiment. It still fits perfectly.
“How old are you?” Brock asks Ken Benbow, another veteran, as we wait in departures. “I’m 98 – 99 very soon,” comes the reply. “Ah, a youngster,” Brock says. After a quick survey, it turns out the combined age of the five veterans on board is 497.
Brock tells the group about his “marvellous” birthday party at the weekend. His wife, Patricia, died a couple of years ago. They had been married for almost 75 years, and it was the impending D-Day commemorations that gave him a new lease of life to push on and regain some strength in grief.
At the party on Sunday, he made a short speech and paid tribute to Patricia. As he started to speak, a small bird appeared and landed on a ledge next to the assembled crowd. Many people, including Brock and his children, noticed the bird stayed close until the speech ended, when it disappeared again. “She was there in spirit,” Brock says.
All week, D-Day veterans from all over the Allied world are rightly being treated as celebrities in Normandy, with all the attendant fanfare and motorcades that come with such a life.
The veterans’ star treatment begins at Warton, where a guard of honour, comprising BAE employees – among them test pilots, firefighters and executives – applaud them onto the Embraer 145 bizjet.
On board, over an afternoon tea so sweet it could sustain a regiment, Brock gazes over a Britain drenched in golden sunshine. If this is Britain’s lightest hour, we have these gentlemen’s generation, who saw it through the very darkest, to thank for it.
Brock is a flirt. A kiss on the hand here, a wink there. On the ground in Carpiquet, as French ground staff flock to say “Bienvenue” to the coming heroes, he is in his element. We arrive mere minutes after King Charles’s burgundy helicopter: the police motorcade has yet to set off.
“Ah, we’ve just missed the King,” I inform Brock, as we stroll across the tarmac.
“No, he’s just missed us,” comes the reply. He looks around. “Changed a bit, Caen. Been a while since I was last here.”
Eighty years is a long time, but some things stick. After landing on D-Day plus one, he was sent to Caen to finally capture Hill 112, a tactically important vantage point outside the city that one or two divisions had so far failed to seize. “The RAF sent 1,000 Lancaster bombers in waves, but we still weren’t able to get to it.”
Eventually they managed it, but not without heavy losses. One injury was to the driver of a Bren Gun Carrier, meaning Brock had to take over for the advance to Hamburg, which took more than 10 months. He didn’t return home until August 1947.
“Marvellous, just marvellous,” Brock says, as he receives rounds of applause from the airport departure queue, and meets Stephen, his driver from Jaguar Land Rover’s Armed Forces Community Network, which has laid on a fleet of vehicles. Stephen is a British Army veteran who retired in 2013 as Second-in-Command of 2nd Battalion The Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment.
“Blimey, not often I get to shake hands with and be driven by an officer like you,” Brock says to the younger man, with genuine modesty. “I think your rank is now ‘superstar’,” Stephen tells him. Brock rebuffs the compliment. But the fans keep coming.
“Sir, I work with the US military, and I just wanted to say thank you for saving the world. God bless you, there is a special place in heaven for you; I am so lucky to meet you,” an American woman in reception at his hotel gushes, clutching his hand. Brock, an understated Lancashireman, looks a little nonplussed. “Oh,” he says. “Well that’s alright.”
But he and his peers are indeed here in Normandy as the stars; and they have made the extraordinary effort to be here in part to represent all those who weren’t lucky enough to make it so far. On Wednesday evening, at the end of a long day, Brock travels to Bayeux War Cemetery with Marcus Lilley, a thoroughly impressive 17-year-old cadet from Sedbergh School, Cumbria, and reads a short tribute to those men. Lilley, who is completing his AS Levels, is only months younger than Brock was when he joined the Army.
To see them side by side is to understand quite how innocent and courageous Brock’s generation was. Of the 130 men in his company that landed on Gold Beach, only 19 made it home.
After a ceremony in Bayeux, Brock and the group manage a few hours of rest before another early start. “They’re all amazing, I genuinely don’t know how they do it,” Lilley says, looking at the veterans, the oldest of whom is 84 years his senior.
But these are men well drilled for operating under duress. On Thursday morning they travel to the opening of the Sir Winston Churchill Centre for Education and Learning in Ver-sur-Mer.
There, the security and cameras may make it seem as if King Charles III and Queen Camilla are the guests of honour, but really it’s the veterans themselves. One small note of disappointment comes when the group lines up for an extended time for a pre-arranged meet and greet with the King and Queen, only for them to take an alternative route entirely.
Nevertheless, they’re otherwise delighted to be treated as the heroes they are by dignitaries and leaders from around the world. The Prime Minister, Lord Cameron, Grant Shapps and Sir Keir Starmer all stopped to chat and hear their stories; the King and Queen were near enough; and Sir Tom Jones sang for them.
Brock’s immediate takeaways are always going to be worth hearing. “Tom Jones has got old, hasn’t he? He can still sing, mind…” he says, back at Caen-Carpiquet. Shoes a little dusty, tie slightly askew, but otherwise he and the group look as fresh as the moment they landed for this whistlestop tour.
He has enjoyed meeting the politicians, who were very polite and courteous, but the most rave review is saved for Akshata Murty, Rishi Sunak’s wife. “She’s very, very beautiful, inside and out, a lovely person.” On that point the group seems in agreement.
A few hours later they are back in the air, returning to Warton, where a TV crew films their arrival. “More cameras!” comes a cry. Theirs is the spotlight this week; they’re enjoying it really.
It was never in doubt that Brock would make the trip – he wanted to be here to keep those memories alive. “There are some things you don’t forget,” he says of that day 80 years ago.
Before leaving he gives a short reading in the cemetery in Bayeux, to pay tribute to those who didn’t make it home. “In those desperate battles they gave their lives for the peace we enjoy today,” he says. “I have never forgotten them. Their families and friends have never forgotten them. We will remember them.”
If this is Brock’s final trip to Normandy or not, it’s our job to make sure we always do.
Waiting in the airport before flying home, I remind him that next year is the 80th anniversary of VE Day. Perhaps the occasion for another trip? He weighs up the idea, then nods. “Yeah,” he says, “I’d be up for that, if I make it.”
Read Sergeant Brock’s story in his own words – and stories from other D-Day veterans here.
