My father, Albert Tipping, who has died aged 95, was a signaller in the Royal Artillery during the second world war, and was mentioned in dispatches for his part in the invasion of the Walcheren Islands in the Netherlands in 1944, having volunteered to fight alongside 47 RM Commando on the Scheldt Estuary, directing artillery fire on to the German army.
Albert, along with Captain DG Bishop and a fellow signaller, Joe Hurrell, set off at 1am on 1 November, and for two days, amid the heat of the battle and under fire, transmitted coordinates back to the 15th Medium Regiment on the other side of the estuary. The men finally made their way back to the body-strewn beach at Westkapelle, from which they swam to a navy craft for extraction. Finding that Joe could not swim, Albert and Captain Bishop somehow managed, in full kit and in icy cold waters, to get themselves and Joe to the boat. The subsequent journey to Ostend was squally and they were all seasick.
Albert was born in Birmingham: his father, also Albert, did various jobs, including bedstead fitting and brass casting, and his mother, Mary Ann (nee Clarke) was a housewife. He attended Hope Street school then joined the Territorial Army under-age in 1939, a working-class boy from the back-to-backs seeking only a camping trip to the seaside. But when war broke out, his knowledge of Morse code, a by-product of his boyhood enthusiasm for building crystal radio sets, soon led to his being conscripted as a wireless operator.
Albert served on Drakes Island and Breakwater Fort in Plymouth Sound, helping defend Plymouth dockyard until D-day, and spent the final year of his army career in Schnackenberg on the River Elbe, helping to rebuild a stricken Germany. During that time, he learnt to speak German and developed a lifelong love for Goethe’s poems. His “camping trip” adventure finally ended when he was demobbed in 1946.
After his war experience, Albert was active in the Spiritualist church and the Psychic Research Society, constructing electrical gadgets to support ghost-hunting trips. During this time, a comical séance led to his first meeting with a young Wren, Ivy, whom he married in 1948.
Albert could repair almost anything mechanical or electrical and had many jobs during his career as a self-taught engineer, finally retiring after selling his tool hire business in Okehampton, Devon. He was a lifelong socialist, Labour party member and trade unionist; he was saddened by what he saw as the increasing erosion of hard-won workers’ rights.
Albert is survived by Ivy, their two children – my brother Peter and me – three grandchildren and a great-grandson.
