About Letters from the Front and me

Hello. Stan Barton here. Stanley George Barton if you want to be official, but all my family – and my mates – call me Tim. I was brought up by Mum Kate and Dad Alf in Slough, Buckinghamshire Yes, it’s Berkshire now but that’s because they messed around with boundaries.

 I joined up to do my bit,  just under a year ago it was, July 1 1943. For the duration of the emergency, it says in my pay book.

Also according to my pay book I’m 14 stone, 5 foot 7 and a quarter inches tall with a 34 inch chest. Fair complexion, brown hair and blue eyes with a scar on my left forefinger. Don’t miss a thing, those Army doctors.

Joining up runs in the family. Dad was in the Great War . . . the war to end all wars, they called it. He was a sapper. I’m with the East Riding Yeomanry and they’ve put me in a tank. I worked for a company in Slough making fuel pumps for De Havilland aircraft, so maybe they thought that as a turner and grinder I’d come in handy if the tank breaks down. As you’ll see, I became my crew’s head chef instead!

Anyway, that’s enough of that. This is my story, told through my letters home to Mum, with odd nods to sisters June, Daisy and Pat and brothers Bill, Ernie and Bert. They are posted in real time, so a letter I sent on June 6 1944, is posted here on June 6 too. There’ll be other letters  from other people but I’m getting ahead of myself there.

There will be gaps, in the bits where we are not allowed to contact the outside world and the post isn’t exactly the most reliable when you are in another country. To give you a rough idea of where it all took place, I have included diary entries from one Cpl Joseph Priestley. He was in my mob too. Click on that link and it will take you to his full diary, and I have to say he did a better job of keeping a diary than I ever did.

Stan ‘Tim’ Barton, June 2014