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September 2022 September 2022
BERE REGIS FLORAL GROUP OBITUARIES
The next meeting of Bere Regis Floral Group will be on
Tuesday 13 September at 2pm in Winterborne Kingston John Royal
th
village hall. Area Demonstrator Marion Catt will be The death of John Royal who lived at Briantspuddle from 1997 marks the loss
giving a talk. of one of the last Pathfinder pilots who saw active service in World War 2. He
The theme for the month’s sales table will be jewellery, was also a keen golfer and in his earlier years, cricketer and hockey player.
scarves and handbags, but as always, any other items He loved the Dorset heaths. He was 97 when he died.
are welcome. In late November 1944 he turned 20 years of age and had just been posted
In August, there was a class for a beginners’ table by the RAF to 109 Squadron at Little Staughton in Cambridgeshire.
arrangement, led by Area Tutor Annette Parker. This 109 Squadron was one of several Pathfinder squadrons flying Mosquito
was a lovely afternoon with some beautiful arrangement produced by the aircraft, fast and manouverable and at the vanguard of the bomber fleet.
students. The job of the Pathfinders was to drop their payload of bombs, up to four, to
“mark the spot” for the heavier bombers. The marker bombs were often
brightly coloured, green or orange. The Mosquitoes were helped by “Oboe,”
a navigational aid which helped locate the precise spot.
The next wave of the bomber mission were the Lancasters and they dropped
their lethal payload as close as possible to the marker bombs. It was a brutal
business.
Between December 1944 and the end of the war in Europe John flew
between 25 and 30 missions. He always said it was ‘relatively safe.’ The
Mosquitoes were capable of dodging ground attack fire and the Luftwaffe
was quite moribund by this stage in the war. The bigger, slower Lancasters
were an easier target for ground fire.
He was always reluctant to dwell on this period in his life:
“I find myself thinking about those I knew who didn’t come home and the
empty beds in the dormitory.”
He was born in Camberwell. London in 1924, the eldest of five. The family
moved to Morden in Surrey in about 1928 and John was educated at Morden
Central School before leaving at 15 to work for Boots
in Morden High Street. He was good at sport and
most ball games. He liked to cycle from home to the
south coast and back in a day. Hence he visited
Brighton and Littlehampton before and then after the
start of war. He was dismayed by the barbed wire
keeping him off the beach.
In the first couple of years of war he saw the Spitfires,
Hurricanes and other aircraft in the sky and said “I just
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