2Lt. David Walter Thornton
British Army Royal Engineers
from:Tackley
My father David Thornton joined the British Army shortly after the outbreak of the 2nd World War. He died in 1958 when I was three years old so I do not have many memories of him. I am told he contracted dysentery a number of times fighting in Burma, after this announcement was published in the Oxford Mail, and that this weakened his system, leading to his untimely death in 1958. The press article implies that he was with the BEF in France and escaped at Dunkirk. He met my mother Violet Loveless while she was serving as a Wren in Ceylon, I believe in 1943. They were married in 1947.
When he returned from the Army after the war, he set up his own building company in Chipping Norton.
