British Army
After leaving school in 1937, Secombe became a pay clerk at Baldwin's store. With war looming decided in 1938 that he would join the Territorial Army. Very short sighted, he got a friend to tell him the sight test, and then learnt it off by heart. Serving as a Lance Bombardier in No.132 Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery. He would refer to the unit in which he served during World War II in the North African Campaign, Sicily, and Italy, as "The Five-Mile Snipers".
When Secombe visited the Falklands to entertain the troops after the 1982 war in the islands, his old regiment promoted him to the rank of sergeant – 37 years after he had been demobbed.
Read more about this topic: Harry Secombe
Famous quotes containing the words british and/or army:
“Why is it we never get our bad medicine in small doses?”
—Edmund H. North, British screenwriter, and Lewis Gilbert. First Sea Lord (Laurence Naismith)
“Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own,—because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)