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:
“We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)