Rustington Museum unveils unsung heroes’ stories

The Unsung Heroes exhibition at Rustington Museum gives a voice, after their death, to the soldiers, sailors and airmen who found it so difficult to talk about what they went through in life.

Museum curator Jessica Petit was more than pleased by the response to an appeal she made for people to come forward with the memories and stories of their loved ones who served in the two world wars.

The displays, marking the 90th anniversary of the Royal British Legion, give a fascinating insight into the experiences of seven ordinary men who went off to fight for King and country.

One, Tommy Harrison, served in the airborne division of the Royal Corps of Signals, working close to or behind enemy lines to listen in on messages.

He was reported as “missing in action” by the authorities, as cover for his top-secret operations. For some of that time, he was staying with a family on a farm in Belgium which hid Tommy and his comrades in a barn.

One of the family painted a superb portrait of Tommy which, at the end of the war, he rolled up and carried home under his arm. The striking picture of a young man who later served as an Arun councillor for Rustington, and as a leading light in the village Royal British Legion, is one of the highlights of the exhibition.

He also received the French honour for gallantry, the Croix de Guerre, from General de Gaulle at the end of the war.

Tommy and his wife, Florence, who succeeded him as a councillor following his death a few years ago, ran a pub near Chiddingfold and a small hotel in Worthing before taking over the Stetson Hotel in Littlehampton for a number of years.

Two of the men featured in the exhibition were involved in the notorious long marches of prisoners-of-war, and a logbook kept by one of them reveals the hardship of the trek.

One of them, Lance Cpl Albert Mankelow, from Littlehampton, endured the rigours of a P-o-W camp in Poland for four years, before being marched off to Germany as the Russians advanced in 1944. He kept a diary every day of the march.

Tragically, Albert died two years after the war finished, as a result of being hit on the head by the rifle butt of a German officer four years earlier.

Another wartime diary on display belonged to Edgar Sopp, the father of Rustington historian Mary Taylor, together with a tiny black cat he carried with him everywhere for luck.

His diary describes his unit advancing through the French countryside after D-Day and the devastation they saw in every town.

The diary ends abruptly, after he witnessed the awful sight of a woman who had been shot through the head. It was as if his threshhold of coping had been reached, and he could no longer record the grim details.