A RECENT Remember When about a crucial World War Two air strike brought a flood of memories for an 88-year-old Wroughton man.

Our story about railway worker’s son Roy Eveleigh, a 22-year-old navigator on a Barracuda dive bomber which attacked German battleship the Tirpitz in 1944, was spotted by retired legal executive David Spalding.

As a young second lieutenant in the Fleet Air Arm, Mr Spalding was asked by Mr Eveleigh to join the naval guard of honour at his Christ Church wedding toward the end of the war. The two had never met before and were never to meet again, but were brought together by mutual comrades.

“Ray contacted me – I was on leave,” said Mr Spalding. “He said he was being married and would I be interested in joining the guard of honour?

“The next thing was, we went to the Mall where Ray lived with his parents. I think there were four more of us. We did our sword drill and just missed the ornaments on the mantelpiece.”

Mr Spalding’s guest at the ceremony was a friend, Betty, who has now been his wife for 65 years. The couple have four children, five grandchildren and three great grandchildren.

Mr Spalding didn’t take part in the attack on the Tirpitz, and claims to have had an easy war. As with many veterans, however, the truth is a little different.

The son of a Railway Works storehouse worker, he joined the Fleet Air Arm having previously been in office at the GWR. “If you passed your clerk’s exam you had made it. I liked railways and steam trains and so on but I hated the work – clerking. It was soul destroying.

“I joined in October of 1942. I went to Bristol. I said I wanted to join the submarine service. I was told not to be an idiot, and that as a grammar school boy I should join the Fleet Air Arm.

“A boy of 19, flying a plane – I loved it.”

Basic training on Tiger Moth biplanes at Sealand in Wales was followed by further training on Harvards in Ontario and then final training in Dorset.

Posted to Arbroath, his duties included training navigators in Albacores over the bleak and dangerous North Sea, where danger came not only from Nazi shipping but occasionally also from his own side. “We’d sometimes be shot at by mistake from Merchant Navy shipping.”

Mr Spalding loved flying and wanted to remain in the service after the war, but memories of seeing First World War veterans thrown out of the forces with few prospects prompted him to rejoin civilian life and become a legal executive.

He later spent 12 years in senior roles with Swindon Sea Cadets, and saw one of his sons become a naval offcer.