The Wartime Memories Project - The Second War

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227094 L/Cpl. Edward Robert "Ted" Scarth British Army 1st Battalion The Buffs East Kent Rgiment from:Hackney, London (d.9th December 1941) This is in memory of my Uncle Ted, who I never met as he died in WW2 only 21 years old. He was my father's older brother. He believed really strongly in fighting Fascism. Mosley's Blackshirts used to march through east London where his family lived and hold rallies. My grandmother Millicent {Ted's mother} used to tell me stories of having to go the the local police station to bail Ted out after getting into fights trying to break up the rallies etc. Both my grandmother and Ted were members of the Communist Party during the war as were lots of people at the time as they believed Communism was the antidote to Hitler and Facism. Ted had been learning Russian at night school because of this. He was proud to fight in the war, and with The Buffs East Kent Regiment was sent to the Western Desert to fight. I have read letters that he sent home, obviously no content about details of where they were etc but he believed in the war he was fighting and also wrote of how much he missed everyone back home. He and his wife Edie had a daughter Edith born in 1940. He spoke of maybe going to live in South Africa after the war. He was killed in action on 9th December 1941 in Tobruk, Libya and is buried in the Knightbridge Cemetery at Acroma, Libya. I think of how awful it must have been for my grandmother and father and his wife to hear that news so close to Christmas. My grandmother placed a memorial in the local Hackney Gazette which read "We are still fighting, Ted". She wanted the inscription on his grave to be written in Russian and the War Graves Commision have translated it for me. It reads "The most holy and heartfelt tears that I have seen in this world are the tears of poor mothers". I am very proud of Ted and I am told I look like him. Dorothy Scarth Add to this record.  Related Content: Siege of Tobruk Can you help us to add to our records? Add a record to our website. The names and stories on this website have been submitted by their relatives and friends. If your relations are not listed please add their names so that others can read about them Did you or your relatives live through the Second World War? Do you have any photos, newspaper clippings, postcards or letters from that period? Have you researched the names on your local or war memorial? Were you or your relative evacuated? Did an air raid affect your area? If so please let us know. Help us to build a database of information on those who served both at home and abroad so that future generations may learn of their sacrifice. Contact us. Celebrate your own Family History Celebrate by honouring members of your family who served in the Secomd World War both in the forces and at home. We love to hear about the soldiers, but also remember the many who served in support roles, nurses, doctors, land army, muntions workers etc. Please use our Family History resources to find out more about your relatives. Then please send in a short article, with a photo if possible, so that they can be remembered on these pages.

The free section of the Wartime Memories Project website is run by volunteers. We have been helping people find out more about their relatives wartime experiences since 1999 by recording and preserving recollections, documents, photographs and small items. The website is paid for out of our own pockets, library subscriptions and from donations made by visitors. The popularity of the site means that it is far exceeding available resources and we currently have a huge backlog of submissions. If you are enjoying the site, please consider making a donation, however small to help with the costs of keeping the site running. Hosted by: The Wartime Memories Project Website is archived for preservation by the British Library Copyright MCMXCIX - MMXXIV - All Rights Reserved We do not permit the use of any content from this website for the training of LLMs or for use in Generative AI, it also may not be scraped for the purpose of creating other websites.