Stokesley correspondent Jan Hunter tells of how through her father’s war diaries, she is helping to discover the Second World War stories of servicemen, who are memorialised in a North Yorkshire church

IN November, a Second World War roll of honour, missing for many years, was re-discovered during a clean-out in a cupboard under the St Laurence vicarage stairs at Scalby, near Scarborough.

The document, which once hung in the church, is hand-painted with four flags at the top, including the Union Jack and RAF flags, with a small crown above. Underneath are the words “They Serve” in the present tense which indicates that the document was created during the war.

Below are the names of 122 men and 18 women of Scalby who were serving their country during the war. Those who lost their lives have a small red cross next to their name.

Each one of those names must have an incredible war story to tell, and churchwarden Sally McIntyre, who made the discovery, is appealing for information.

One of the crosses is beside the name of Guardsman Ronald “Dixie” Dean, a paratrooper who landed on Sword Beach on D Day – June 6, 1944 – and was killed within a few hours. There is a detailed account of his last hours in a book, Fighting with Commandos, written by his friend Stan ‘Scotty’ Scott. It tells how his unit struggled up the beach into an area that the Germans had flooded, dragging their bicycles through mud, reeds and water. German troops threw mortar bombs at them but these were ineffective because of the surrounding mud. They came under fire near the Orne Bridge, but pedalled across towards the town of Amfreville, but as they rounded a corner, a Maxim machine gun opened up and hit four of them, cutting off the leg of one man and killing Dixie.

Another name on the roll, with a red cross beside it, is that of Sgt James Riby Boyes of the RAF Volunteer Reserve, who died on April 27, 1943, aged 25. In May 2013, his family went to a lake in Enkhuizen in north Holland to salute the relative they had never met, as the wreckage of his plane had just been discovered there.

Yet to me the most poignant name on the roll is that of my father, Robert Arthur Welford, the young butcher of Scalby, who was recently married to my mother, Margaret Leadlay, when he joined the RAF in 1942. He began his time at RAF St Angelo, near Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, and then, in 1944, was sent to Egypt where he was stationed at 971, Balloon Squadron, Alexandria.

How I know this is that after he died in 1977, we discovered his war diaries. My mother who, knowing that I had aspirations as a writer, handed them to me and asked me to “do something with them”, and they turned out to be a fascinating read about his day to day life in the mess tent, where he was a cook. He writes about the films he saw, about his opinion of the officers – not good, and he was sometimes confined to camp for not showing them enough respect. The diaries reveal him sneaking out at night to cabarets and bars, and they contain vivid descript ions of the countries he visited, the hardship of losing friends and sleeping under lorries in the desert, the food he cooked and the nature that he loved.

“The path across the fields to the main camp cinema is covered with lizards, snakes and thousands of grasshoppers, and some large coloured flies as big as sparrows,” he wrote. “The dark sky is lit up by thousands of fireflies.”

He was stationed in Gaza in March 1944 and he describes the rows of tents, next to a swamp full of noisy bullfrogs which kept him awake at night, and a wood on the other side full of jackals. When three of his friends were shot in Tel Aviv, with one dying, he wrote: “I wonder what Hitler would have done in a case like this. This poor lad’s parents will get a ministry telegram telling them that their son has been killed on active service. What a hell of a world this is. It makes me wonder if there is a difference between right and wrong.”

The following day there were terrible sand storms which blew the tents away. A lot of the boys were ill with stomach disorders, and they missed their families. His entry is brief but is scrawled across a whole page: “Fed Up and Far From Home.”

After the roll of honour was discovered, I met Scalby historian Lesley Newton and we were able to link names on the roll of honour to people – my father’s friends who went to war with him – who he had mentioned in the diaries.

There was Walter Leahman, who worked in my father’s shop, and Pte S Swales, who was a good friend of my father’s and whose postings he recorded in the diary.

And then there is another of his friends on the roll of honour, Walter Thompson. His name doesn’t have a red cross beside it, but in March 1942, my father wrote that he had been reported missing in Singapore.

So there is another story that needs to be completed.

To see more of the roll of honour, go to scalbywarmemorila.wordpress.com. If you have any information about any of the names, please email scarboroughlesley@gmail.com