Remembrance Day: Armed Forces

Peter Prinsley Excerpts

Tuesday 11th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Peter Prinsley (Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket) (Lab)]

Sergeant Archie Schlapobersky, of the 12th Field Squadron of the South African Corps attached to the British 8th Army, fought at Monte Cassino, the bloody battle for Italy. Nearly 12,000 of his fellow South African soldiers—all volunteers—did not survive world war two. Archie became a farmer in Swaziland after the war, and his daughter, who is my wife, remembers him jumping out of an old army truck and lying on the ground, with his arms and hands over his head, when the first aeroplanes flew over the small British African colony. He had what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, but that was not widely recognised in soldiers returning from the terrible war.

Squadron Leader Derek Prinsley, my father, was a young doctor who served in East Anglia and the middle east. His war experiences are vividly described in the early chapters of his book, “New Ideas for Old Concerns”. Many airmen were killed and many injured when planes crashed on runways, and he wrote of extracting stricken pilots from the burning planes as if this was normal for young medics. Many of my father’s medical student friends did not return and did not join the NHS as he did when it was founded. He did not speak of it, but he had not forgotten them, I am sure.

The Times today carries the obituary of Monty Felton DFC, who has died at the age of 101. He flew 30 operations as a navigator in a Halifax bomber. Of the 125,000 airmen who flew with Bomber Command, 55,573 were lost. That is 44%—the highest in any branch of our services.

We speak today of remembrance. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), who spoke in Prime Minister’s questions last week of the AJEX parade. Thousands of Jewish citizens of this country and of the Commonwealth fought in the great conflicts of the last century. The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women marches each year on the weekend following national remembrance, and I too will march this week with members of my family to honour the 80th anniversary of the end of the war. Monty Felton DFC never missed the parade.

In a small synagogue in Norwich, there is a war memorial. There are 10 names—three sets of brothers. In Vienna, the great cosmopolitan capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, there is another beautiful synagogue, which survived the war because it is concealed behind a façade of Viennese houses. In the lobby, I saw a memorial to the fallen Jewish soldiers who fought for Austria in the first war. It was unveiled in 1929. Adjacent is a memorial to the thousands of Jewish citizens of Vienna who perished in the Holocaust hardly half a generation later. The juxtaposition is quite chilling.

I am of the generation whose parents fought in the war. Many did not speak of it, and my own father spoke of it only in great old age. It is right that we who are here today speak of it, for this was an heroic generation who fought a war that began with Polish cavalry and ended with nuclear bombs.