CIGARETTES may have proved a lifesaver for one Swindon war veteran, who now makes models to remind him of his army days .

Tony Cleverly, 88, of Stafford Street, avoided selection for the Normandy beach landings on June 6, 1944, because of the cigarette he smoked on a training exercise at Salisbury Plain ahead of the Second World War D-Day operation.

“We had been sent out on a 26-mile run and half way round I realised I still had my pack of cigarettes with me,” said Tony.

“I stopped off and had a crafty one in a wooded area, but of course the rest of the group dropped me and by the time I had finished I couldn’t even see them on the horizon.

“When I got back to base, the seniors questioned me, so I had to make up something instead of admitting to smoking. I said I had pulled my groin.”

The lifelong Swindon resident’s senior officers were unprepared to take anyone below 100 per cent on such an important operation, and so he was left at home.

Tony did serve on the Continent later, as a part of Operation Varsity in March 1945, which involved him and 16,000 other paratroopers being dropped in western Germany to aid the efforts of ground forces crossing the Rhine into north Germany.

Tony, known as “Titch” by some of his superiors, served in the Third Brigade of the Sixth Airborne Division, and joined up in 1941 after two years with the Wilts Home Guard in Swindon.

He was forced to leave the army two years after the war finished, as his mother fell ill and he cared for her at their Regent Place home, which now faces the stage door at the Wyvern Theatre.

Now, after retiring from his final job at the old Pressed Steel factory in Gipsy Lane, Tony enjoys crafting wooden Anglo-Zulu War models with just a small knife and paintbrush. Hundreds of models adorn the shelves and benches of his garage, after 20 years of creation.

“When I first started I made a mess of it,” he said.

“I sat in that little shed and thought ‘how would they do it in a toy factory?’ “The first thing I had to do was make a template and I was not a bad sketcher. I cut the drawing out and put it on the wood and sawed around it with a tiny little saw. I would take it from there with a knife.”

His brother Norman once owned a helmet similar to those used in the 1879 conflict, which inspired Tony to use the famous Battle of Rorke’s Drift as a template for his models, which take about two days each to make.