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Finding Tom
In 1940, a Durham
soldier killed in the
evacuation at Dunkirk
was buried in an
unmarked grave.
Seventy
years later, using a photo kept
by his sweetheart, his brother
has found his resting place and
written about about his search.
He talks to Chris Lloyd
"I CAN still remember the day in 1946 when
Lukey Wood came home to Wingate," says
George Rodgers. "We were ushered out to
play. When we returned, we could see that
Dad had been crying - but he never told
us what Lukey had said."
Lukey had brought James "Slogger" Rodgers news
of his son, Tom. The two had been best friends since
school in the colliery village in west Durham. They'd
joined the Durham Light Infantry within a fortnight
of each other in 1938 to escape the privations of the
pit - Tom had had his thumb ripped off by a pony
putter - and, two years later, Lukey had seen Tom die
in the heat of battle.
Slogger - so called because he was the strongest
hewer at the Wingate coalface - knew Tom had been
lost trying to stave off the Germans while the rest of
the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was
evacuated at Dunkirk. Slogger also knew that Tom's
body had never been recovered, and this played on
his own wartime experiences.
"My father had been in the DLI in the First World
War, had been wounded on the Somme, half his lower
right jaw was blown away," says George, who was just
three years old when brother Tom was killed.
"Unbelievably they patched him up and sent him
back out until he was wounded in the hip at
Passchendaele.
"He didn't speak much, but he always said that
under a white flag they would go out from the
trenches and collect the dead and bury them behind
the lines. Then the Bosch - he always called them the
Bosch - would shell the graves, so on a night-time
all the little bits of them that had come up had to be
reburied.
"He believed that is what had happened to Tom."
One final indignity for Slogger Rodgers came from
his own side. He was invited to the unveiling of a
memorial to the BEF in Dunkirk on which was
inscribed Tom's name. The cost of the trip would be
£56, said the official invitation.
"It might not sound a lot now but it was a great
deal of money in the early 1950s, and he threw his
war medals, along with Tom's, out of the window into
the garden."
George went outside and picked up the pieces. He
also picked up the pieces of the story. "When Dad was
dying in 1959, I made a promise to him to find out
what happened to Tom."
The result is In Search of Tom, a book published
today.
The search had to wait until George - a mining
surveyor who, once the pits closed, became a maths
and science teacher - retired in 1999.
The search began. Regimental sources and
veterans were spoken to, the scene in France - the
village of St Venant - was visited. The first success
was tracking down Tom's sweetheart, Annie
Warriner. She had never married, but she still had
his photo. It showed him to be surprisingly tall, a six
footer, with a toothy grin and a distinctive gap
between his teeth.
The biggest breakthrough came when Lukey Wood
was tracked down. Only he wasn't Lukey Wood.
"They'd lived in the old cornmill in Wingate and
his father worked in the pit lamp cabin," says George.
"One day, his mother's pinny caught fire and she died
from the burns. Lukey didn't get on with his
stepmother, so he left home and changed his name
to his mother's maiden name of Bowden."
Luke Bowden was found in Hull, and was able to
tell George what Lukey Wood had told his father
back in 1946.
LUKEY was in D Company of the 2nd Battalion
of the DLI, Tom in B Company. They'd last seen
each other on May 15, 1940. Then the German
assault had intensified - on May 16, Lieutenant
Richard Annand in Lukey's B Company had won the
war's first Victoria Cross for rescuing his batman in
a barrow.
By May 26, the Battalion had been pushed back to
the village of St Venant. It was running out of men
(only 57 of its 740 made it home alive). It was running
out of ammunition. It was running out of officers.
"They were the rearguard," says George.
"Operation Dynamo (the Dunkirk evacuation) had
started. They were expendable.
"On the afternoon of May 26, their last officer was
killed. Within two hours, every gun emplacement
was taken out by the Germans. St Venant was
surrounded. They had no idea what was behind them
or where they were or where they were going to.
"That night, the Germans lit bonfires so no one got
any sleep. The artillery started at first light, followed
by the attack."
Nearly 70 years later, you can feel fate conspiring
as George tells Tom's story. B and D companies,
haemorrhaging men, were driven into the fields,
towards where the River Lys was crossed by an old
humpback bridge near a farmhouse.
Lukey and Tom's Bren gun units arrived at the
bridge at the same time. Under heavy fire, they swept
diagonally over the bridge to set up defensive
positions on the other side. "Lukey said: I saw your
lad go down and I saw him stand up with his Bren
gun on his hip still firing,'" says George.
"Then a shell landed close by and Lukey was
wounded in the leg. They were out of ammunition
and the order was given: every man for hisself."
Now George had a location. With the help of the
St Venant historical association, he located the
location. The hump-back bridge was still there,
bullet marks still visible. The farmhouse was still
there, shell holes still visible. The farmer's daughter
was still there, and to her the battle scene was still
visible in her memory.
She had hidden the cellar while fighting raged
around. Then her father had been ordered to dig
graves for the five DLI men killed by the bridge.
"She showed me the exact spot," says George. "She
said how she used to take flowers to it until the
Germans stopped her."
In 1942, the bodies were exhumed and examined by
the Germans and reburied in unmarked graves in St
Venant cemetery.
Members of the French historical association dug
out the 1942 German mortuary records of the five
DLI men.
They asked how tall Tom was. About 6ft.
They asked the colour of his hair. Brown.
They asked: "Did he have teeth at the front like one
of your comedians?"
"Like Terry-Thomas?" replied another of Tom's
brothers, Jim, referring to the gap-toothed
entertainer from the 1950s and 1960s.
"Yes," they all cried, waving Annie's photograph
of her never-forgotten sweetheart.
The records showed that the 6ft brown-haired gaptoothed
DLI man killed at the humpback bridge was
in grave 154 in the cemetery.
"You can't put it into words," says George. "It's a
feeling of intense emotion and elation, almost joy,
that you have found your brother after all these
years. There will be parts of him in that grave. He's
buried in that cemetery. I have fulfilled my promise
to my father."
■ In Search of Tom by George Rodgers is
published by Comorant Publishing of
Hartlepool for £7.99. It is available in WH
Smith, Hartlepool, where George is
signing copies between 10am and 1pm
today. Details at www.riddlewrites.co.uk
10:01am Thursday 8th May 2008
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