Harry joined up the Navy before the Second World War and became a Fleet Air Arm pilot based in Malta.  He was shot down off the Tunisian coast on Easter Sunday 1941 and spent his prison days in the mountains of Algeria and the Sahara Desert.  

He did not accept his fate gladly and his twenty months as an internee were peppered with imaginative escape plan attempts which included adventures digging tunnels to the outside world, a bid for freedom posing as a French scout, and helping Houdini's former stage assistant to endeavour an escape inside a wine barrel.   These were all part of his wartime exploits.  

Shipped out of North Africa (following the Allied invasion in November 1942), he continued to service in the Navy until 1946.

When Harry eventually resigned his commission he spent the following thirty years overseas working for Shell in Malaysia, Ghana, Indonesia and Iraq, later retiring to live in the Worthing area before retiring to Nepcote.

Continue if you would like to read Bill Day's Rationing Memories.