My wonderful late father Malcolm served during WWII with Montgomery’s division of the British Army, and jumped onto a Normandy beach a few days after D-day, along with the rest of the division. He was a morse code operator. One of my strongest memories of him was when I took him (for his 80th birthday present) for a tour of some of the Normandy battlefields and military cemetries.

In Bayeux, at the British military cemetry near the cathedral, he asked to be left alone as he walked slowly past the graves of the servicemen who’d died in the conflict, many of them under 20 years of age. It was the only time in my life that I saw him crying. He was clearly laying some ghosts to rest that day, and would often remark in later years how much the trip had meant to him.

To this day I still tend to stop and pay my respects when I pass war memorials, and so it was that I stopped by one in Bedford, my home town, recently. I happened to have my camera with me, and took this photograph of the plaque commemorating the victims of WWII:

The name “Janice M Harrington” struck me, I can’t recall having seen a woman’s name on a war memorial before, and made enquiries with my local council, which owns the land on which the war memorial sits. They weren’t able to answer my questions on the matter, but recommended I try to find something about the woman’s demise at the British Newspaper Archive, which I did, successfully.

The following PDF consists of three pages, the first and second with newspaper articles on Miss Harrington’s death at the age of just 23, in 1944. Bottom line, a plane piloted by her and/or another female pilot, 29, crashed due to pilot error before landing at an aerodrome in England, killing them both. A tragic loss of two young lives.

On the third page, for a little light relief, I’ve included the second paper’s advert on the same page, aimed at female smokers, for Craven ‘A’ cigarettes, “For your throat’s sake”. Don’t we all miss the days when smoking cigarettes was a health-enhancing habit, endorsed by doctors?

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