Ken Hay

Kenneth "Ken" Hay MBE was a British Normandy veteran, civic leader and schoolroom educator from Upminster in east London whose wartime ordeal and later life of remembrance made him known to generations of children as "Grandad Ken". He died after a short illness in September 2026 at the age of 101. The British Normandy Memorial, for which he was an ambassador, announced his death on Sunday, 20 September 2026, calling him an extraordinary gentleman whose remarkable life will never be forgotten.

Hay was born on 3 August 1925 in Barking. He served with the Home Guard as a young man, joking later that he was "Pike without the scarf," then volunteered in 1943 for the Essex Regiment at Warley before serving with the 4th Dorset Infantry Regiment in Normandy. He landed at Courseulles-sur-Mer days after D-Day. On a night patrol on 7-8 July 1944 intended to destroy a self-propelled gun, his group was trapped behind German lines by the 12th SS Panzer Division. Of about thirty men, sixteen including his corporal brother got back, five were captured and roughly nine were killed. Hay was sent to Zabrze in Poland and put to work in a coal mine as a prisoner of war.

When the camps were emptied in January 1945 he was forced onto a westward march of roughly a thousand miles across Poland, Czechia and Germany. Many died. Hay later said he once lay down to die from pain until two friends turned back and carried him with an arm around each shoulder. Liberated by American troops in April 1945, he reached his mother's house in Barking in time for Mass and VE Day. He married Doris, whom he had met in the Home Guard years, in 1947, and settled in Upminster from 1954.

Civilian life brought public service: Hornchurch Urban District councillor, one of Havering's first aldermen after 1964, the borough's first chairman of finance, long-serving school governor, and a Romford magistrate for twenty-two years. He received an MBE in the 2000 New Year Honours for services to the Upminster community, presented by Queen Elizabeth II, and later France's Legion d'Honneur. In February 2023 he became an ambassador for the British Normandy Memorial at Ver-sur-Mer; Havering also made him a Freeman. He spent his later years visiting schools, answering children's questions about war, and insisting it was his duty to pass the stories on. Asked by a thirteen-year-old how wars could be stopped, he answered with a word from Saint Paul: love. On People Forever he is remembered as Grandad Ken, the captured Dorset who came home and taught a country to remember.