Lieutenant-Colonel M. Crawford
8th Battalion, Middlesex Regiment (MG)

As we got over London bridge and into the city more people about and when we got to the East End, such places as East Ham, East Sheen etc there was the most wonderful demonstration by the people of London, all the poor people rushing out giving us tea, buns, potato chips, cigarettes and soap … It was very touching and made me feel that the spirit of the Country is very good at heart and that one should not believe what the Daily Mirror writes.

(Quoted in Ben Kite, Stout Hearts: the British and Canadians in Normandy 1944, 321)

Born on 9 July 1901 in Cork, Ireland, Mervyn Crawford was commissioned into the Middlesex Regiment in 1921. He was posted to the Far East, serving in Shanghai in the late 1920s and in Hong Kong in the late 1930s. By 1938, he had been promoted to major and took command of the 1/8th Middlesex Regiment in May 1942. The next year, it was redesignated the 8th Battalion, the machine gun unit attached to the 43rd Wessex Division.

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