My father, Cecil Newton, was one of the last surviving British Army Sherman amphibious tank soldiers who landed in Normandy in the first assault on D-day, 6 June 1944.
Two years previously, he had joined the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards as a gun loader, training in the innovative and top-secret Duplex Drive (DD) “swimming” tanks. On 3 June 1944, they sailed from Lepe Beach in Hampshire for France. Wading ashore on Gold Beach at dawn, they attacked the target blockhouse and the crew surrendered.
On attacking Verrières on the 14 June, they prevailed, but 90 infantrymen and troopers, including Cecil’s best friends, were killed, haunting him all his life. They fought through devastated Normandy villages, the liberation of Lille, Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands, and into Germany, where his brother Frederic, of the 5th Royal Tank Regiment, was killed by surrendering prisoners.
Cecil, who has died aged 101, later founded the Creully Club to ensure that the names of the 127 of his regiment killed in Europe were not forgotten. From the terrible battles he participated in, Cecil believed strongly in the need for resilient links across Europe to help prevent further wars, and flew the EU flag, with the regimental flag, from his garden. Every May he would cycle in Normandy to check on the memorials he helped erect.
He was born Hugh Cecil Newton in Llanrwst, Wales, to Katie (nee Thomas), who was from an Anglesey farming family, and Frederic, a cotton broker in India who then worked in the Hindu newspaper London office, when the family settled in Muswell Hill, north London.
Cecil was educated at the Stationers’ Company’s school, but with the outbreak of war was evacuated to Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. On finishing school he joined the Home Guard at Muswell Hill and volunteered as a naval clerk in Leicester Square. In 1942 he volunteered for the army, and after training at Bovington Camp, joined the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards. The next two years were spent in training, before heading to France.
When his tank was hit in the battle for Tripsrath, Germany, in November 1944, a shell shattered his leg and he was shot in the chest. Cecil developed gas gangrene, but thankfully penicillin was available. After six months in hospital he was invalided out of the army.
After the war Cecil trained as a surveyor and started the Swindon office of Bare, Leaning and Bare, becoming a partner, and settled in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, with his wife, Joy (nee Lidstone), a nurse and botanist whom he married in 1955. He worked on numerous projects in Wiltshire, including the Railway Village in Swindon.
His civilian interests included helping found the Aldbourne Civic Society, which led to the protection of bronze age barrows in the parish, bird-watching, cycling, painting and playing the piano.
In 2016, he was given the Légion d’honneur and honorary citizenship of Creully, and in 2019 the primary school in Creully was named after him.
Joy died in 2012. He is survived by their three children, Claire, Richard and me, and two grandchildren, Joseph and Oscar.
