Bob Taylor enlisted from the Territorial Army aged eighteen when he weighed just 9st 11 lbs. He turned down the offer of being enrolled into the Officer programme and entered the Second World war having been made up to the rank of Corporal in June 1939.
He had been mobilised as a sapper in the 505th Field Company Royal Engineers, from a period in the TA in April 1939, and had gained his first promotion whilst on the fifteen days annual training at Lancaster.
He took part in the British Expeditionary Force that was sent to France on the 28th January 1940 before being taken off the beaches at Dunkirk on the 1st June 1940.
He remembered seeing himself and his comrades on pathe newsreel footage coming up a gangway which he saw many years later.
Later he was promoted again to CQMS and seems to have been and posted to the 624th Field Park Company and he spent a year and five months in Germany with them.
He wasn't demobbed from the Royal Engineers until March 1946, having been their interpreter and celebrating his 21st birthday aboard a ship en route to Aden. On the board ship Bob had taught groups of soldiers how to tie knots and conversational German during the very long sea voyage they endured on the way to the Middle East. He achieved the rank of sergeant and was then awarded the warrant officer post of CQMS having survived Tobruk and El Alamein. After France he was posted to Egypt, Cyprus, North Africa, Palestine, Iraq and then Germany till the end of the war.
The stories he told matched much of Private Louvain's fabulous diary, my father talked of being the regiments interpreter as he spoke good French and German, even down to the scattering in the waddies, where he went one way as his driver had been shot in the arm, and his mate Stuart Ettles went the other and was captured, only to escape from a train in Italy some months later. His photos show him during various stages of the war. The main photo I have does not have a record of whether this was 505th or 624th Field Coy.
We know that during WWII Bob and his mate Stuart Ettles had been in the same unit of the Royal Engineers the 505th Field Coy. and were in the desert together when surprised by German patrols, they were separated by their decision to go in opposite directions in their attempt to avoid the enemy. (the extract even mentions the situation) Ettles choice ended up with him being captured and held as a POW whilst Bob escaped. They had been in different trucks, Bob's driver was shot in the arm and he had to take over the controls, Ettles was caught and later escaped after he picked the lock of a goods truck whilst traveling through Italy by train, he found refuge on a farm and spent the rest of the war up in the hills with an Italian family who sheltered him.
Until 1988 he held the photographic record of the unit, and on the day of his funeral it was passed on to another old soldier from the same unit who had attended the church.
