Sgt. Albert Henry Rowson
British Army Middlesex Regiment
from:Edmonton
My father, Albert Rowson was an Edmonton, North London lad. He joined the Middlesex Regiment Duke of Cambridge's Own in 1939 when it seemed war was about to break out. He enlisted for two years, which turned out to be seven years. He married my mother, Hilda, on Christmas Eve 1939, even though his commanding officer wasn't keen to give permission. (I am still not sure he did.) My father was a keen footballer and had just been spotted by a Tottenham (spurs) football scout but Hitler put paid to that. He became the regiment's boxing champ and won many a biscuit barrel and medals. Within a year he was promoted to sergeant. In June 1944 he, with his unit, boarded a ship bound for Sword Beach. He always told me the film A Bridge Too Far was a very accurate account of how it was. He was a Vickers machine gunner. He told my mother he was nowhere near the fighting but the Daily Herald put a picture in the paper which showed my father's platoon right in the thick of the fighting. My father wasn't in the picture but my mother knew all the lads in the picture as they had been at their wedding 2 years prior. The Middlesex Regiment pushed all the way through France to the Netherlands. It was in the town of Moot on 20 October 1944 that he was badly injured. The surgeon who operated on him and saved his leg from amputation kept in touch with him for some time. When he was taken into the field hospital he told the surgeon he couldn't take his leg off because he was about to have a baby. The surgeon said that was a first as he never delivered a baby on the battlefield! I was born three days later.
After he was shipped home my mother used to take me to the North Middlesex Hospital to visit him. The nurses would pass me around from service man to service man as their families could not visit them. As soon as he was in a wheelchair he used to escape from the hospital and go home, which was close to the hospital. My mother didn't know how he did it as he was in a full body cast. The ward sister went mad when they wheeled him back into the ward. At one stage after they gave him crutches he escaped again, so the sister took the crutches away. The war was coming to an end and many of the lads were home from the front and would wait for the sister to leave the ward and aid his escape. After one of these break outs she had him transferred to another hospital much further from home.
My father was promoted to Lieutenant in 1946 and transferred to the Royal Medical Corps. He escorted soldiers from England to their units in Egypt and then looked after military prisoners, one of which made me a wooden jeep. I also had a stuffed elephant and a squirrel made by prisoners. My father's legs have caused him problems for years. Shrapnel still emerged from time to time. His footballing and boxing careers came to an end. He still played cricket until his sixties. Sadly he passed away in November 2016 aged 97.
