Unique act of rememberence

For Ron is the last surviving member of the tank crews he commanded in France, North Africa and Italy. Every year he takes four wooden crosses on which he has written the names of his crewmen killed in action and places two on an A13 Cruiser and the other two on a Crusader - the tanks in which he served.

But the last of the crew who survived the war passed away this year and Ron, 80, is determined to keep their memory alive.

For the last 13 years, since his wife died just 18 months after they retired to Bear Cross, he has helped out at Bovington Tank Museum, often taking school children on tours of the growing collection of tanks and memorabilia. And now he can be seen on television screens as a contributor to the Discovery Channel's War Months series (the last of which goes out at 9pm on Monday).

"The children love to get inside the tanks on our battle days and they like to meet a veteran - I seem to be quite in demand these days," says Ron, laughing off his semi-celebrity status within the museum.

"I'm one of only two veterans on the staff here - the other, Harry, is my driver in the Sherman when we make up the exhibition crew - so I get called on to take school parties round. What has helped keep our memories alive is that the two world wars have been given more of a priority in the National Curriculum.

"Some people I meet are still indifferent to the war, mainly women in their 30s and 40s I find, and they ask very pointed questions to try and catch me out. I've spoken to some of them, not with any aggression you understand, but just to make them realise that there are documents which bear Hitler's signature that detail plans to remove every British male aged 17 to 65 and deport them to labour camps on the Continent. That is a fact and that is what we were up against."

Ron has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the war and the role played by tanks in it - he was there for most of it - but has taken the trouble to research the background. He knows, for instance, the illness that saw Rommel removed from North Africa just before the Battle of El Alamein where he saw Rommel's replacement salute and shake the hand of the officer who captured him on the field. He fought long and hard in the Italian Campaign and, having expected to push up through Austria and into Germany, was ordered west in the so-called Race for Trieste, as General Tito's Yugoslavian forces were pressing to annex the Italian port they had contested before the war.

"Oh, it was all quite friendly as it turned out. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had decided how Europe was to be managed after the war and Trieste was to remain part of Italy. We got there just after the Yugoslavs and told them to turn back. We spent most of the days playing football with them; then at nights we would arrest them for trying to get into the town!"

A sense of humour is an essential part of Ron's make up and a major part of the armoury that enabled him to survive the horrors of war. He loves to regale his school parties with frontline funnies - trading used tea leaves for eggs with desert bedouins, carrying wicker baskets full of chickens on the back of his tank, washing his clothes in petrol (there was more petrol than water in the desert), the tank crew that came to a sticky end in an Italian treacle factory ...

"We were sent into this factory which the RAF had bombed as it was thought to be a gas station. There were three huge structures that looked like a gasworks. When we got there we found the area was under a foot of thick, black molasses. The lead tank went in first and suddenly sank into a bomb crater filled with this treacle!

All the crew could do was get out and sit on top until they were rescued. Did they ever get some stick after that?!"

But for all the lighter moments - and Ron mines a rich vein of them - war was anything but a barrel of laughs. Walking around the tank museum we pass under the 88lb gun of a massive German Tiger tank. When he says: "They murdered us with those things," you know he means just that. In whichever theatre of war Ron played out a grisly dance with death, he retained a stoic acceptance of the frightful things he saw around him.

"The Tigers would fire these exploding shells. Our Cruisers fired solid shots so if they landed two feet in front of you in the desert, you could walk straight over them. The exploding shells, though, would go off and take the man with them - in pieces.

"I have to say it, I still remember the first German I killed. He was stood no further away from me than you are an arm's length. I didn't stop and think, it was just out with my revolver and job done. I came away from that, and for the rest of the day, I was quite chuffed. This is what I was trained to do and, well, now I'd done it.

"It was only that night, when we were resting, that I stopped to think about it. We'd found a lovely dry ditch and I was getting my head down on a bed of dry leaves when I started to think 'Oh, that was someone's son. That was someone's father'. It's difficult, but that's what we were there to do. We were fighting for King and Country."

Unlike millions of others, Ron was a regular soldier before war broke out. He joined in 1936 - "Not because of unemployment but because I was bored with the clerical job I'd got after leaving school."

His father had fought in the Great War with the Dragoons; and his grandfather saw action in the Boer War with the Wiltshire Regiment and was a Chelsea Pensioner.

"I joined the cavalry - the 10th Hussars - and we had to be mechanised almost overnight as war broke out. We got a horse, a sword and a splendid uniform when we joined. We really felt we were something. But when war broke out we were totally unprepared. Then, you have to remember, we lost or had to leave behind all the equipment when the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated at Dunkirk.

"My gunner managed to smuggle his Vickers machine gun on to the fishing trawler that brought us home from Brest. We were told not to bring the 2lb gun aboard so I dropped it over the harbour wall - it's probably still there.

"But when we were reunited with our regiment, after most of them had got home, we were quite the heroes because they thought we were dead and we turned up with this gun. I was really proud of that!"

The reason he was separated from his regiment during the evacuation is because he had stayed with his colonel's turretless tank in a field repairs station when the rest of the troops moved out.

Five years later, in Lubeck, Ron came across a German firing range on which some of the abandoned tanks the BEF had left behind in 1940 were still being used as targets.

In Italy he had a reputation for using more ammo than anyone else.

"The German Panzers used to reverse into haystacks with just the tips of their guns poking out. They'd aim at a turn in the road, fire on us and then drive off. So I used to fire at every haystack I came across - I was always arguing with the supply team about the amount of ammo I needed. They said we used more than the rest of them and I always used to say that was because we were still alive!"

Ron, who built a solid career in social work after leaving the army in the early 1950s, continues to work two days a week at Bovington. Mostly, he loves it and doesn't mind recalling his memories of war.

But he will hold his own special memorial on Sunday when he places his crosses on the tanks in memory of the men with whom he formed a bond that few have any real appreciation of at the dawn of the 21st century.

"I just want to make sure they are not forgotten."