Wright receives his George Medal from Sir Evelyn Baring, Governor of Kenya
Officer in the Kenya Police who won the first George Medal of the Queen’s reign for his bravery in a ferocious gun battle
Ernie Wright won the George Medal, the first of the new reign, while serving as an Assistant Superintendent with the Kenya Police Force at Illeret in the Marsabit District near Kenya’s northern frontier with Ethiopia in 1952.
Wright, with 40 men, was about to enter a village to search for illegal weapons when he and his patrol came under heavy fire from a party of between 250 and 300 marauders from over the nearby border. The raiders had raped and murdered women and children while the local men were out with their herds.
A savage seven-hour battle ensued during which, according to the citation, “Wright commanded his men with gallantry of the highest order . . . courting extreme danger in order to rescue a Section which had been cut off and surrounded. His leadership of his men throughout was exceptionally fine. He personally rendered first aid to the wounded under heavy fire showing complete indifference to his own danger.”
Neither he, nor the other officer involved, Graham Clark, who along with two other policemen, was awarded the Colonial Police Medal for their courage that day, expected to survive it. His son Thomas inherited the hat Wright was wearing during the action: it has a neat bullet hole through its crown.
Ernest George Wright was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1923, the eldest of three sons of Thomas and Norah Wright. He was educated at Dame Allan’s School for Boys. His father, who had served on the Western Front in the First World War, kept a tailor’s and outfitter’s shop.
On leaving school Wright served with his father for a year in the Home Guard before being called up in February 1941 into the RAF and beig posted to Bomber Command.
After training, partly in Rhodesia, he flew as a bomb aimer and navigator in the Halifaxes of 201 squadron, based at Pocklington in Yorkshire, flying six operations before the war ended and the squadron was transferred to Transport Command, reaching the rank of flight lieutenant. He did not quite live to see the new memorial to Bomber Command unveiled in London, but on being shown photographs of the statues, he commented that they made the aicrew look too old: “We were all children, really.”
After the war Wright, attracted by what he had seen of Africa in training, joined the Kenya Police. Apart from the battle of Illeret he saw much other service, including as ADC to the Governor-General, Sir Evelyn Baring. He won a Colonial Police Medal during the Mau Mau years and reached the rank of Assistant Commissioner.
Though Wright retained a love of Kenya and its people all his life, and spoke several local languages, he and his wife, Sarah, the eldest daughter of the 12th Earl Waldegrave, whom he had met at Government House, returned to England on Independence in 1962 with their two small sons.
He found congenial work as recreation manager for the Bristol Water Company, where his own fly-fishing skills and his love of the outdoors made him popular with the fishermen and birdwatchers of Chew Valley Lake and the other company reservoirs, though his police skills less so with poachers.
Though he remained a proud Geordie all his life (his renderings of Cushy Butterfield, Bladon Races and The Egg Song were memorable), he developed a great affection for Somerset and it for him: he became Mayor of Wells, and then chairman of the Mendip District Council in 1984/5. As well as enjoying country sports he was a keen hockey, squash and cricket player, continuing to turn out for the Chewton Mendip Cricket Club until late in life.
His sharp wit and deliberately gruff humour, based on a quizzical observation of the many different worlds he had inhabited, persisted through a long and debilitating illness which he bore with the courage he had displayed in the skies over Germany and at Illeret.
He is survived by his wife and two sons.
Ernest Wright, GM, CPM, public servant, was born on February 25, 1923. He died on June 9, 2012, aged 89
Squadron Leader Phil Lamason
пилот "Ланкастера", оказавшийся в плену в Бухенвальде
Bomber pilot who was betrayed to the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald from where he was rescued on the orders of the Luftwaffe
Baling out from his stricken Lancaster with four members of his crew over Paris during a raid on marshalling yards outside the city in June 1944, Phil Lamason was at first hidden by the Resistance, then betrayed to the Gestapo and, with other Allied airmen, sent not to a PoW camp but consigned to the concentration camp at Buchenwald in direct contravention of the laws of war.
There he and 167 other Allied airmen were held in grim conditions of deliberate starvation, torture, beatings and disease designed to kill as many of the inmates as possible, He might well have perished, had it not been for two things: his own determination to preserve the discipline among his fellow airmen which he knew was vital to their survival in such atrocious conditions, and “honour among combatants” , which actually brought the Luftwaffe to their rescue after several months of privation.
Lamason had on numerous occasions attempted to smuggle news of their illegal detention to the Luftwaffe, which as he knew, was responsible — not the Gestapo — for RAF prisoners of war. Eventually several senior officers of the Luftwaffe arrived at Buchenwald in October 1944, and were so appalled by the conditions in which their fellow, if enemy, airmen were being held that they ordered the camp authorities to release them immediately, and had them transferred to the PoW camp for air force officers Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Silesia, where they spent most of the remainder of the war.
This curious episode, and Lamason’s role in it, was for decades buried among the scattered factual debris of war, until elements of it were included in a Canadian film in 1994 and in a book, Night After Night: New Zealanders in Bomber Command (2005), by the New Zealand author Max Lambert. It was more fully described in a US documentary, The Lost Airmen of Buchenwald (2011).
Lamason emerged from Buchenwald with a reputation — he had already been awarded two DFCs on bomber operations — enhanced. Many airmen who found themselves at Buchenwald acknowledged that they owed their survival to the fortitude he displayed and the camaraderie he engendered, as spokesman, for the group, throughout the community of captives during their ordeal.
Philip John Lamason was born at Napier in the North Island of New Zealand in 1918. After leaving school he worked as a livestock inspector before joining the RNZAF for basic pilot training. In 1941 he came to the UK where after operational training on fourengined bombers he joined a Stirling squadron with which he flew a tour of operations.
He was awarded an immediate DFC when his Stirling was attacked by a night fighter on its return from a raid in April 1942, and set on fire. He ordered his crew to set about extinguishing the blaze while he performed classic evasion manoeuvres which threw the fighter off its aim when it came in for a second attack. After losing their assailant completely, he nursed his damaged aircraft back to base. After a period on instruction duties, he was posted in early 1944 as flight commander to No 15 (Lancaster) squadron, with which he participated in the series of raids known as the Battle of Berlin, and the disastrous Nuremberg raid of March 30-31, 1944, in which 96 out of the 795 bombers dispatched were shot down, and a further ten aircraft were written off after landing. In numerical, though not percentage, terms it was the most costly RAF raid of the war.
With the advent of the Normandy invasion Lamason’s squadron was put on to targets of tactical significance in France, whose destruction or damage might materially affect the German ability to respond to the landings. Among these was the Paris marshalling yards raid of June 8, which aimed to disrupt reinforcements to the Normandy beachhead by rail.
Two of his crew were killed by flak, but Lamason steadied his Lancaster and ordered the other four to get out, following them by parachute. For a period they were sheltered by the French Resistance, but the Gestapo discovered them and they were subjected to treatment reserved for spies rather than combatants. After interrogation in the notorious Fresnes prison they were, with a large number of other airmen, both British, Commonwealth and American, herded into cattle trucks for the journey to Buchenwald near Weimar in Thuringia. By this time Lamason had been awarded a Bar to his DFC.
After their deliverance from Buchenwald, Lamason and his fellow prisoners made a slow recovery from their maltreatment and emaciation in Stalag Luft III. Another ordeal was to await them. In January 1945, in one of Europe’s coldest winters for years Lamason joined inmates in the enforced “Long March” westwards from the camp, designed by the Germans to prevent their being liberated by the advancing Russians. Many prisoners perished on the route, but in April Lamason and other eventually reached the advancing Western Allies, and freedom.
At the end of the war Lamason returned to New Zealand, where he farmed in the Manawatu-Wanganui Region of the North Island. Towards the end of his life he was interviewed by the writer Max Lambert, for his book; Lambert was profoundly moved by the unvarnished tale of suffering and fortitude in the face of cruelty that Lamason told him.
Lamason married, in 1941, Joan Hopkins. She died in 2009 and he is survived by two sons and two daughters.
Squadron Leader Phil Lamason, DFC and Bar, wartime bomber pilot, was born on September 15, 1918. He died on May 19, 2012, aged 93
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
