Mr. Harry Waddingham of Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, England (UK) sadly passed away on 26 March 2026, aged 109.

He was born on 16 October 1916.

He was the 3rd OLM in the UK.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2026/03/27/harry-waddingham-second-world-war-navy-spanish-civil-war/

Harry Waddingham, oldest known British veteran of the Second World War

As a young seaman weighing 10 stone his first ship was a cruiser off the coast of Spain during the Spanish Civil War

Harry Waddingham, who has died aged 109, was the oldest known British veteran of the Second World War.

Waddingham joined the new entry training establishment, HMS Ganges at Shotley, as a boy seaman aged 16, and his first ship was a cruiser off the coast of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Specialised as a seaman gunner, though only weighing 10 stone he found he was more agile than larger men and managed more easily as a shell-loader, especially on the upper deck in “cold, wet and nasty seas”.

He was soon advanced to leading seaman, and qualified as a “spring bosun” or physical training instructor (PTI), and was sent to the destroyer Wakeful.

Waddingham recalled the organised chaos of evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk, where, while Wakeful lay off in deeper water, he took the ship’s whaler inshore. Summoned by an army officer to “come closer”, he refused, for risk of grounding, and when soldiers on the beach rushed his boat, he fired two shots into the water. After several journeys from shore to ship, with many hundred extra men embarked, Wakeful was no more than a powered, unstable hulk unable to manoeuvre when she was attacked by a German E-boat in the early hours of May 29. Only four troops onboard and 25 of Wakeful’s crew survived: Waddingham was plucked from the water by another destroyer.

Next, he served in the de​stroyer Juno and witnessed the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941, but on May 20 she was bombed by the Italian air force off Crete, capsized and sank within two minutes. Some 116 men were killed, but as a gunner on the upper deck, Waddingham was among the 104 survivors.

Then he served in the Hunt-class destroyer Mendip, on North Sea and Channel escort duties, where he manned the Holman projector, a pneumatic-driven, improvised weapon which fired a hand grenade and was intended as a last-minute defence to deter German divebombers. He recalled the occasion when the pneumatics failed and the grenade plopped out of the barrel and fell into the ship’s motorboat, destroying it – and the rollicking he received from the first lieutenant, who even in wartime had invested his own money in smartening the boat. When Waddingham read Tony McCrum’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph, he exclaimed: “That’s the fellow who gave me a blast!”

For some years after the war, Waddingham suffered from the oil which he had ingested, and thought at one stage that he himself would die. “That’s nothing,” he said, recalling his family’s war efforts with pride. “I was one of the Waddingham boys: three were in the Navy and two were in the Army.

“Cousin Roy was a stoker in a coal-burning minesweeper and was sunk in 1939. Cousin Jack, he was on a corvette in mid-Atlantic [and] was lost, so I was the only one the left. My cousin Billy was captured in Greece, and he was a prisoner of war for years, and he came back thin as a rake and never recovered. And my other cousin, [Douglas], he got the Military Medal for bravery, but didn’t last long from his wounds.”

Harry Waddingham was born in Fulham, west London, on October 16 1916, while his father was fighting in the Canadian army on the Western Front. He proudly told an interviewer that the first born of every generation was plain “Harry”.

Waddingham’s father and  uncle had been English ex-pats in Montreal when the First World War broke out and both volunteered for the artillery. His parents met during Harry senior’s brief deployment to Northern Ireland: post-war, he returned temporarily to Canada to complete his service. The younger Harry was brought up by his mother in Belfast until 1922, when the Troubles had broken out, and the family thought it safer to move to East Anglia. Young Harry grew up in Clacton-on-Sea.

When the Second World War was over, Waddingham  obtained a teaching diploma and joined the Royal Air Force’s educational wing. He retired in the rank of squadron leader before becoming a PE teacher and running the CCF at Archbishop Tenison’s Grammar School at the Oval in Lambeth. He subsequently became principal of the Streatham and Tooting Institute.

He was introduced to Freemasonry when he was treated in a Masonic hospital, but it was at Archbishop Tenison’s that his masonic career began. He was initiated into his school Lodge 5163 in London in 1954, founded a Surrey lodge and joined several other craft lodges in Sussex, notably the Royal Sovereign Light Lodge, where he was installed as worshipful master at the age of 100.

On his birthday, Waddingham used to speak from the pulpit of St Peter’s, Bexhill-on-Sea, and when he could no longer mount the stairs, he spoke from the chancel steps, dapper, upright, shoulders back, medals shining and with a glint in his eye.

When asked the secret of his longevity, he would respond: “A daily tot of Navy rum (not before midday), not eating after 6pm, the support of his church, and the fellowship of the Masons.”

​Harry Waddingham, born October 16 1916, died March 26 2026

Rest in peace.