The first story. The youngest writer.
Blighty Or Bust is Ray Bailey’s own account of his dramatic escape in 1940 from a Nazi prisoner-of-war column – and his daring 2,000 mile journey from northern France to the safety of British Gibraltar.
Along the way, Ray has heart-stopping near-misses with German soldiers and Spanish police. At times he is exhausted, ragged and starving. Youthful energy, unfailing optimism and a talent for impulsive decision-making keep him going. This is a story of close calls and courage but also of human kindness. Ray is aided and befriended, concealed and cared for, by ordinary French and Spanish people who risk their own safety.
Ray’s escape is remarkable. So too is his memoir. It was written within a year or two of the events it describes, when Ray was just 22. We hear the true voice of a young working-class conscript: simple, straightforward, immediate. And thrillingly readable.
Blighty or Bust may be the earliest Second World War soldier’s memoir to have been written. Its author is surely the youngest ever to describe his wartime experiences at such length. Found in a rural auction sale in 2018, it is a treasure unearthed.
Raymond Bailey, known to his family and friends as Ray, was born on January 26th 1919 in Chester-le-Street, County Durham, the elder of two sons born to Margaret and William Bailey. When Ray was a child, the family moved almost 250 miles south to Dunstable in Bedfordshire. William’s father worked as a labourer at the Vauxhall Motor Works in Luton. Ray later joined him on an apprenticeship.
But like the majority of other baby boys born in Britain at the end of the First World War, it was Ray’s destiny to fight in the Second World War. He was called up almost immediately after war was declared. In May 1940, not much more than eight months after Ray’s call up, his battalion was deployed to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF)…
Ray Bailey’s adventures in Blighty or Bust took place between October 1939 and December 1940. But this book is also about another story besides Ray’s. It has taken eighty years for this second story to unfold.
The second story began with the book’s editor David Wilkins browsing the internet in the summer of 2019. A regular at online auctions, David spotted an interesting lot. A couple of photographs showed a bunch of old spiral-bound notebooks and some loose papers spread out on a table. A few sentences had been added by way of description.
It was a box of documents that related to a British soldier of the Second World War, a soldier who appeared to have been taken prisoner by the Germans and yet had made it home. It wasn’t a lot to go on but it was intriguing…
David Wilkins spent most of his working life in the charitable and public sectors. His work largely involved research and policy development in relation to social issues such as poverty, poor housing and public health. He also taught community work and health promotion at university. David retired from full-time work in 2015. He lives on the Isle of Portland in Dorset.
David has collected old diaries, manuscripts, letters, photo albums and other similar items for decades. Among his ambitions for his retirement was to bring some of the personal stories he has discovered into the public domain.
Blighty or Bust, David’s second such project, sets Ray Bailey’s thoroughly gripping and highly readable true story into its proper historical context.
His first book, also based on a found memoir, Schoolboy, Servant, GWR Apprentice, was published in 2017 by the History Press.