JOHN GULLIVER - World War Two memories - Snapshot of Ted Stormer, the quiet hero
Published: 23 September 2010
by JOHN GULLIVER
Snapshot of Ted, the quiet hero
TED Stormer’s face flashed in front of me when I read of a campaign to put up a memorial to the 60,000 airmen who died in the bombing raids over Germany during the end days of Hitler’s regime.
Ted was a middle-aged photographer for the old Camden Journal and the Hornsey Journal when I met him in the 1970s. Small, quiet, kind, unpretentious, and a very good photographer, we got on well together.
When I heard he had been in the RAF during the war I asked him what it was like.
Reluctantly, he told me he had been a photographer shooting reconnaissance pictures for analysis – images showing possible targets, and the damage done by the raids.
I asked him about the dangers he must have faced – and all he could say was: “The planes were so noisy!”
He didn’t say a word about the hours spent hunched up in a small turret, on the under-carriage of the plane, probably a Lancaster, as enemy flares lit up the sky, and shells exploded all around him. Nor of the times when Messerschmitts must have picked out his bomber and attacked it.
Nor did he talk about the high percentage of planes that never came back.
As I said, Ted was a quiet man, a quiet hero. Like so many who survived those bombing raids, he sank back into civilian life, and never talked about the war, his war, to his colleagues. Nor, as I discovered, did he talk much to his wife about his wartime heroism.
So many of his comrades never came back.
His widow Beatrice, now 94, remembered how Ted once said he had accidentally kicked the liver of a friend on an airfield – all that remained of he and his crew who had all been killed in a crash landing.
“I miss him so much,” said Beatrice, who lives in Crouch End. “It was such a perfect marriage, such a wonderful love story.”
They met at Paddington station in March, 1942 when both boarded a train for the West Country – he to get back to his billet, she to her home. The next day he called for her at home and proposed.
She said no, but after six weeks agreed to marry him.
They were wed at Stratford-on-Avon in August 1942.
Yet, it was only a cruel act of fate that ended in Beatrice meeting Ted in the first place.
She had become a top girl at a Warwick public school and was destined for Cambridge University to read maths.
But following the tragic death of her younger brother Bill from meningitis, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was withdrawn from school.
Otherwise, she would have gone on to Cambridge, and would never have met Ted.
Her ambition was to enter the India public service in order to help those treated so badly in the days of the Raj.
She believes her granddaughter, now a paediatric surgeon working in Malawi, is fulfilling her own ambition to help people.
During the war she stayed with Ted at various postings, afraid whenever he went on a raid.
“He never talked about it before – or even after the raid,” said Beatrice. “It was like that during the war. I was worried, I knew he might not come back. Oh, all those men were so brave in the war!”
Proud of her Ted, Beatrice said he photographed the Queen so many times on assignments for the local Press, that she would say to him: “Oh, Ted, it’s you again!”
Beatrice said Ted told her the Queen would ask after his wife’s health as well as that of her son, whom she remembered was called Anthony.
In his conversations with the Queen, Ted talked about his wife and how they sent their son to a public school known to the Royal family.
He died 13 years ago at the age of 81 – the day after his 55th wedding anniversary. Stacked around his bedside were congratulatory cards from his family and friends.
I am making public for the first time what sort of a man he had been.
He was one of the heroes of Bomber Command and those who sacrificed their lives in those raids should be remembered. A memorial for these gallant men would be a fitting way to keep them in the public memory – a way to remember such quiet heroes as Ted.
Terry takes a ‘sympathetic’ look at evil
FIRST came the “hymn” of the classic Sympathy for the Devil by the Stones, and then a tantalising talk by the philosopher Terry Eagleton – it all happened before a congregation of 400 who packed into Conway Hall on Sunday morning.
Eagleton was giving a discourse on the nature of evil – the subject of his latest book (published by Yale University Press).
The Sunday “service” was organised by the newly formed secular society, the School of Life Parish, based in Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury.
As I saw the women stewards shepherding the people into the hall, all smart, intense, with sharp intelligent faces, I thought of what the Suffragettes must have looked like when they burst on to the scene more than 100 years ago.
Some Venezuelan verse!
NOT the usual role of an ambassador I’m sure, but I hear the Venezuelan who fulfills that position in London will be reciting poems from the first English edition of Gustavo Pereira.
The ambassador, Samual Moncada, clearly a fan of Pereira, will recite his poems at a free event at the Bolivar Hall in Grafton Way, Fitzrovia on Tuesday evening at 7.30pm.
He told me: “Gustavo Pereira is one of the greatest contemporary poets in Venezuela, deeply rooted in his country but universal at the same time.
“He transcends the barriers of his native language.
“I am delighted to see his work published in English for the first time.”