500742 Sidney Guest Royal Navy HMS Manchester from:Kidderminster, England Sidney Guest joined the Navy aged 18. He served onboard HMS Manchester during Operation Pedestal, when the ship was torpedoed he was identified as 'essential personell', and transferred to HMS Pathfinder.
In 2006 he was made an honorary citizen of the Maltese capital of Valletta in a newspaper article published in the Dorset Echo at the time he said:
"In many ways it was a nice surprise, but it brought up a few things which I would rather forget.
"I was quite moved when I received it. There are a couple of small incidents I recall that still upset me. I was on action stations on the bridge the whole time. One colleague nearby was firing a gun at German bombers overhead when his gun got stuck. The plane was bearing down on us but I managed to clear the ammunition for him, and he shot it down just in time. Some of the memories are a bit vague, but other parts I remember clearly. I will never forget being on that deck, drowned in seawater. We had plenty of near-misses, and of course I was scared. But I was so busy, I had a job to do and got on with it. We were awake solidly for five days and four nights. How we kept our eyes open and wits about us all that time, I'll never know. I remember longing to get to Valletta to put my head down, but we never got there. Once the merchant ships were in, we got out of there as fast as we could.
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