264117 Maj. Valentine "Paddy" Hehir British Army 3rd Btn. Royal Tank Regiment Paddy Hehir joined the Tanks after serving as a bugle boy in Lydd, Kent.
He was in the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment from the early 1920s to 1960 and claimed to have been the longest serving officer in the history of the Regiment. He always won the veterans' sprints at Bovington Camp sports day because each officer got one yard for every year of service. But he was a champion miler, so might have won off scratch.
He served in all the Tanks major conflicts, including the Desert Campaign, Alamein, Greece, Italy and finally the push through northern France to Belsen.
One of his best friends was Bill Close, whose book, A View From The Turret was, in my opinion, (I'm Paddy's younger son) the most compelling first hand account of the war I have read.
Dad was celebrated in a song, Up the Blue, which was a sarcastic reflection on how little credit they got despite being so often the first to go 'up the blue' forward into enemy territory, where, they sang, the flasher Regiments took the glory.
Before retirement he was QM of Bovington Camp. But he continued to wear khaki for many years, first as a full time officer in the Territorial Army in Paisley, Scotland, then when he and mum moved to a village on Longleat Estate - near where Mum came from in Warminster, where he was a gatekeeper, supposedly keeping the tourists safe as they passed the double sets of gates into the lion enclosure.
Supposedly, because one day he shut the outer gate, and turned to discover a lion twenty yards away sitting on the veranda of Dad's little wooden watch house. Fortunately it had just had lunch.
Dad saw that Lord Bath had no idea about how to run the stores, filled with tourist tat and sold at the gates, so he came up with a plan and his Lordship made him QM of Longleat.
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