October 2025

This month I would like to highlight two recent developments that show Cornwall continues to remember those who served during the Second World War and especially those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Billinge Road on the West Carclaze Garden Village

First of all, a new road at the West Carclaze Garden Village on the outskirts of Penwithick, near St Austell, has been named after the D-Day veteran Harry Billinge MBE. Harry, who came to live in St Austell after the war and worked as a hairdresser until retirement, served with 44 Royal Engineer Commando which landed on Gold Beach at H-Hour, 6.30am, on the 6^th June 1944. As they stormed ashore in the first wave Harry was one of only 4 members of his unit to survive the landing. One of his comrades died in his arms.

Harry came to national prominence in later years when he raised more than £50,000 for the British Memorial Trust to honour those who never made it home. The Memorial lists the names of the 22,442 service personnel who died under British command on D-Day and in the Battle for Normandy. (Technically, everyone in the land forces on D-Day was under a British Commander, General Montgomery, but we understand the distinction!)

Harry Billinge fundraising at Par Market

Harry was made an MBE in 2019. He died on 5^th April 2022, aged 96.

British Normandy Memorial from air showing Union Flag Design

British Normandy Memorial statue

Harry urged people to turn back to God saying love was the strongest thing on earth. “We could blow one another up but you don’t love one another. Love is stronger than death. Our Lord Jesus overcame death and said He’ll be back, and He will. But today they’ve got no time for God. King George VI used to have a day of prayer. It’s a pity we don’t have a month of prayer because we’ve got so much to thank God for. Love is the answer and love comes from God.”

Pencalenick Headteacher Mr Joe McGovern with Lt Com Brookes, RNO Falmouth by the new memorial

Secondly, a new memorial to the men of the 1^st Engineer Special Brigade was unveiled on 1^st October 2025 at Pencalenick House (now a school for children with special needs) which was their Headquarters during their stay in Cornwall prior to D-Day. In a ceremony attended by the whole school and led by Headmaster Mr Joe McGovern, a granite memorial was unveiled by the school’s youngest and oldest students and wreaths were laid by the Resident Naval Officer Falmouth, Lt Commander Trevor Brookes, and by students of the school. A minute’s silence was held for those who lost their lives, both in Exercise Tiger and on D-Day, with the bugler and standard bearer being provided by the Royal British Legion Truro Branch. There was also a display of wartime photographs of the Americans in Cornwall, including a number of Pencalenick, and from the Wave 44 Re-enactment Group an US Army jeep and ambulance stood proudly outside the main entrance to the house. The event had been organised by a small team of staff and the Friends of Pencalenick group.

The 1^st Engineer Special Brigade, led by Col Eugene M Caffey, had been pulled out of Italy in November 1943 with the 531^st Engineer Shore Regiment and arrived at Pencalenick on 9th December 1943. With accompanying signal, medical and quartermaster units that was a movement of 198 officers and 3148 enlisted men. With the requisition of Pentewan Beach and The Winnick as a military training ground the 531st moved to Heligan and Duporth Houses with some units based as far away as Par and Treliske, leaving the 1st Brigade Headquarters at Pencalenick.

Planning for the invasion began in earnest in the second week of February 1944 when a security room was set up on the first floor of Pencalenick House for the study of top secret material. Only a very limited number of people were given the security clearance to view the D-Day plans and those of the exercises leading up to it. These were known as BIGOTs. BIGOT, which stood for the British Invasion of German Occupied Territory, was chosen by Churchill before America came into the War (Churchill set up a group to start planning the invasion two days after the fall of France in June 1940) and remained the security classification even when Eisenhower took over the planning role. Everyone with knowledge of the D-Day planning work - Operation 'Overlord' - was security cleared and was listed on what was known as the 'BIGOT list'. This list was co-ordinated from the fifth floor of Selfridges in London.

Captain James Ralph Jordan, 1st ESB HQ, at Pencalenick March 1944

Rob Endean and John Domery recreate a wartime photograph at Pencalenick

Thus you had to be authorised to enter the security room and could not remove anything from it. The documents it contained included the plans, the loading tables and maps as well as the latest intelligence on the far shore. There was also a sandtable model of Utah Beach. 173 officers and men of the Intelligence (S2) Section were assigned to the operation and security of just that one room – all of them BIGOTed. There were two armed guards on the door 24 hours a day. Other US servicemen guarded the house. The perimeter of the grounds was protected by British servicemen. The Americans considered it the most secure location in Cornwall.

The 1^st ESB practiced on the training area of Pentewan Beach, on many of the smaller beaches around the south Cornish coast, and in the major exercises held on Braunton Burrows in north Devon and at the Slapton Sands training area in south Devon.

US military vehicles once more outside Pencalenick House

The 1^st Engineer Brigade were part of the ill-fated Exercise Tiger when German E-boats attacked a convoy of LSTs in Lyme Bay on 28^th April 1944. The Brigade lost 413 dead with 16 wounded. There were 14 officers from 1^st ESB on Exercise Tiger, 10 of them BIGOTed. There were concerns for the security of the D-Day plans until those 10 officers’ bodies were found as the water was searched over the next 4 days. Two of the officers were from HQ based in Pencalenick House.

The Brigade were tasked with clearing Utah Beach for the landings, and it is remarkable that there were more casualties in Exercise Tiger than on the whole of Utah Beach on D-Day. Today just behind the beach stands a memorial to the men of the 1^st Engineer Brigade, one of the first to be erected after the war in November 1945. So it is fitting that this newest of memorials should be unveiled in Cornwall at the House where their HQ was based in the run up to D-Day and where their journey to Utah began.

Thus names and stories, the contribution of the many who served and of those who died in order to win our freedom and allow us to live in peace lives on. As I write this on the day of possibly the most horrific anti-Semitic attack in Britain in over 100 years, out-stripping the anti-Semitic riots of August 1947, then the telling of those stories of what we were fighting for, the evil we were seeking to defeat, is all the more necessary. All that is needed for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. We must speak out and, as Harry Billinge so often proclaimed, ‘Love one another for the Jesus way is the only way to stop the horrors of war. I know. I was there and I never forget the boys who died on D-Day.”