Bob Stacey’s funeral on Feb 1 was a very special occasion. The church was full, and in honour of Bob’s war service his old regiment, the Grenadier Guards, arranged for two Guardsmen to attend. The moment when the bugler played The Last Post was profoundly moving.
I know that a number of people had hoped to attend but in the event couldn’t make it.
So here is the eulogy I was privileged to be able to give at the service.
Richard
BOB STACEY
I was deeply touched when Tim and Sue asked me to deliver the eulogy to Bob. Throughout our time in Langford the Stacey-Kibble clan have been my family’s oldest and closest friends in the village. I’ve known Bob pretty much all my life. Bob’s wife Lora, Tim and Sue’s mum, helped my mother at Lockey House for 30 years, Lora’s elder brother Jack Kibble helped my parents in the garden for even longer. As kids Staceys, Kibbles and Kemps grew up together and played together. That’s why Kate and I feel really honoured to be asked to take part in this service for Bob.
Bob was born on the 7th of August 1923 in Reading – and christened Ronald John, but was known as Bob all his life. His father Fred was a wireless operator in the Royal Navy. When Bob was six the family moved to Leafield near Witney, where Fred worked at the wireless communications centre – Leafield was where Bob grew up.
The Second World War started when he was 16, and when he was 18 he joined up. He was a tall lad, 6’3”, and so he was posted to the Grenadier Guards – you had to be at least six foot to join this regiment, one of the oldest and most famous in the British Army. Bob is one of the very last WW2 veterans who served with the Grenadiers, and it is with great pleasure that we welcome two of his modern day regimental comrades who have come today to honour his passing.
In 1942 battalions from the various Guards regiments were being formed into a new elite unit of motorised infantry and tanks – always referred to as Guards Armoured Division. Bob volunteered to be a tanker and did his training on tanks at Bovingdon in Wiltshire.
Guards Armoured was formed principally to play a key role in the invasion of Europe and it was with the tank squadrons of the 2nd battalion of the Grenadiers of Guards Armoured that Bob served in one of the most tumultuous phases of the war. The division landed in Normandy June 12 1944, in the first week after D Day, and fought throughout the campaign in Northern Europe right up to the end of the war.
Bob was a tank driver. The Grenadiers were equipped with American Sherman tanks – or Ronsons as they were sardonically nicknamed by tankers because of the ease with which they caught fire when hit. If you’ve ever looked inside one you will know that the interior space is pretty cramped, yet the Sherman had a crew of five. Fitting five 6’+ guardsmen into a Sherman can’t have been comfortable. The fighting in Normandy was bitter and dangerous, and on one occasion Bob and his crew mates were lucky to survive when the tank he was driving was blown up when it went over a mine. Fortunately the explosion just blew off the tank’s tracks rather than set it on fire. Anyway they were immobile and a sitting duck, so they all baled out and had to run back to cover under heavy machine gun fire. There they were met by the regimental adjudant, an old style cavalry officer, whose greeted them with “Hello chaps, I see you are unseated”.
After the eventual breakout from Normandy the division fought its way across France and into Belgium, where it had the pleasure of liberating Brussels, before moving on into Holland.
Driving through one village, which had been battered by the war passing through, the road suddenly collapsed and the front of the tank Bob was driving dropped into a large sewage pit – they had to bale out and the tank dragged out. Apparently that didn’t make them the most popular tank and crew for a while.
Tank crews became a close knit group – they had to be, not just because they were crammed together in their tank, but because their survival depended on them all working effectively as a team. The five of them messed together and bivouacked together beside the tank, or under it if they were in a dangerous spot. Bob’s tank commander for much of this time was Captain James Bowes-Lyon, the Queen’s first cousin. He would receive food parcels from the Palace, which he would share with Bob and his crew mates. James Bowes-Lyon also survived the war and went on to command the Grenadiers.
In Holland Bob was involved in one of the most famous operations of the war – Market Garden, the attempt by the Airbourne Brigade to shorten the war by an audacious parachute drop to capture the bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem – immortalised in the book and film “A Bridge Too Far”. The tanks of Guards Armoured were the spearhead trying to fight through to relieve the Airbourne and secure the bridge. They didn’t quite manage it, successfully capturing the bridge at Nijmegan, the one before Arnhem. The fighting was brutal and in this battle Bob’s officer was killed by a sniper. Tanks Bob drove were blown up or hit four of five times during the NW Europe campaign – par for the course for front line tank crews. Bob was very fortunate to survive his war physically unscathed. Towards the end of the war the Grenadiers were in Northern Germany and Bob was involved in the liberation of the women’s concentration camp at Freibourg.
Bob didn’t talk about his war much, but it must have been a pretty traumatic experience, and I suspect that, like for many of his generation, the war helped to define the man he was to become. I always had a great respect for Bob. Part of that stems from what I know he went through and achieved as a young man in the war. But it is more than that – it is respect and admiration for the man I knew in Langford. So let’s move onto happier times.
After being demobbed in 1947 Bob moved back to Oxfordshire. He met Lora Kibble in Witney, and they got married in 1948. At first they lived with Gramps Kibble, Lora’s dad, at No 3 Lower Farm Cottages. Sue was born in 1950 and Tim in 1952. When Gramps retired from being old Mr Hook’s shepherd they had to move out of the tied cottage, and lived in the small cottage at the back of Lime Tree House – things were pretty tight financially and literally, Lora and Bob, 2 young children and Lora’s brother Reg, in a small house with beaten earth floors. Fortunately before long they were able to move up to The Elms in 1964 – where Bob continued to live after Lora’s death in 1993 until 2 years ago when he moved to the Elizabeth Finn care home at Bradwell Grove.
Bob trained as a bricklayer and stonemason at Bartlett’s in Witney, then worked for old Mr Taylor in Carterton and at Cyril Collett’s yard here in Langford, whilst also doing bits and pieces on his own. My father had always wanted to build a gazebo. In 1965 he asked Bob if he could build one. After he agreed to do it Bob went home and said to Tim, then in his early teens “what’s a gazebo?” (good question, we were asking the same thing in our family). Anyway it got built and an elegant structure it was, and still is – Bob always thought that he had designed it, while my father was convinced that he had. It has a heavy stone ball which needed fixing to the top of the roof – Bob sent young Tim up to do that sort of dangerous stuff.
Tim was also doing building work around the area and in 1976 Bob and Tim got together to form R&T Stacey, a building company, which initially under their joint management, and then with Tim alone, went from strength to strength, and was an important employer in and around Langford. Many of us are grateful to R&T Stacey for our conversions and extensions.
Despite having been a tank driver, after the war Bob never drove again – he didn’t have a licence. That didn’t stop him buying a vehicle – a biscuit coloured Morris commercial van. The van was used mainly to transport Bob and the members of the Crown darts team to and from matches in pubs around the area – Joey Gibbard, Willy Truman, Harold Godwin, George Farmer, Aubrey Willis, Bill Smith, and the driver, the only one of them with a licence, Jack Lafford. Nowadays most people know Jack as Derek Lafford – but Bob had given him that nickname when he was a lad and it had stuck. It wasn’t for ages that I worked out that Jack and this Derek were the same person.
Anyway one night the Crown darts team were making their way back from a match – Jack driving, the rest in the back, no seats so sitting on old beer crates as per usual– and they suffered a puncture over by Oakey’s Barn. In their happy and relaxed state the location of both the jack and the wheelbrace managed to elude them, so someone had a bright idea – if they all crowded onto the side of the van opposite the puncture, then the lean would take the pressure off the damaged tyre sufficient for Jack to drive back to Langford. One shredded tyre but safely home.
Bob always enjoyed a game of something – darts at the Crown, skittles at the Royal Oak, snooker in the snooker barn at Lockey House, and golf when he had the chance. Playing golf at Weston-super-Mare with Tim one time – part of the course there runs alongside a main road, Bob swiped at his ball which shot off sideways, followed by a loud clang as it clearly successfully connected with a passing car. A short while later an irate chap appeared demanding to know who had done it. Bob meanwhile had quickly grabbed another ball and dropped it at his feet. “Not me, mate”, pointing downwards, “this is my ball here”.
Bob Stacey was a grafter. He believed that it was up to each one of us to make something of life. There was no swank about him. He didn’t suffer fools gladly which sometimes didn’t make him the easiest person to be with. He believed that respect was earned by what you did rather than who you were. Years ago working over at Common Barn Farm, the Ponsonby place, a young Rupert Ponsonby once said to him, “Mr Stacey, you know that one day you’ll have to call me “My Lord” – “Well you know where you can stuff that” was Bob’s response.
Bob died peacefully at the venerable age of 99 years and 5 months. It would have been wonderful if he could have made the hundred and received his telegram from the King. But it was not quite to be. However, when he was in his mid 90s the French government chose to recognise the sacrifice and courage of the British and Commonwealth soldiers who had taken part in the Liberation of France by awarding those veterans the medal of the Legion d’Honneur. The Dutch government followed suite with their Liberation Medal a few years later. These were truly well deserved honours, of which Bob was immensely proud. So let us in turn salute Bob, both as a man of Langford and for all he did and went through as a young man on our behalf, and bid him a last farewell.