Date of birth:

March 16th, 1922 (Staffordshire, Great Britain)

Date of death:

August 28th, 2008

Service number:

7406037

Nationality:

British

Harold Gordon Challenor was born on March 16th, 1922 near Bilston in Staffordshire. The family moved to Watford, where his father became a nurse in a mental hospital. At 14, Harry was sent to work in the local barber's shop. As a teenager he went on to pursue a variety of lines of work, including nursing in the same asylum as his father.
In 1941 when, having been turned down by the Navy and the RAF, he was called up for the Army. Assigned to the Royal Army Medical Corps on the strength of his nursing experience, he was posted to Algiers. There two officers – one of them Randolph Churchill ­– arrived in his camp looking for recruits for 62 Commando, which in due course became part of 2nd SAS Regiment.
Challenor volunteered, but having lost his first Commando beret he had to make do with a Tank Corps one: hence the nickname "Tanky", which stuck with him for the rest of his life.
Because of his personality, he was noted by his commanding officers, and he was soon transferred to a fighting unit. On September 7th, 1943, as part of Operation Speedwell, Challenor and five other SAS soldiers were dropped by parachute several hundred miles behind German lines in the Appenines, north of La Spezia; after their landing rendezvous, the group split to attack separate targets ­and four of the six were never seen alive again.
With Lieutenant Thomas Wedderburn, who was nicknamed "Tojo" for his short stature and thick glasses, Challenor moved across mountainous terrain by night until they found their objective, a tunnel on the La Spezia-Bologna line. As they finished placing their charges, they heard a train approaching on the "down" line and had to sprint for their lives out of the tunnel. Moments after the first explosion, a second train rattled into the tunnel on the "up" line. Both trains were derailed and destroyed amid an almighty cacophony of torn metal and splintered wood, and the line was completely blocked.
A few days later, Tanky and Tojo blew up another train on the Pontremoli-La Spezia line for good measure, then set off southwards in the hope of finding the Allied lines. They walked for 300 miles until they reached L'Alquila, some 80 miles north of Cassino, where the Allied advance had stalled. Here a peasant matriarch, Mama Eliseio, took them in ­until they were finally captured, just after Christmas.
Wedderburn was to spend the rest of the war in captivity but Challenor, having been told he was about to be executed, did not linger: he simply walked out of Alquila PoW camp disguised as a washerwoman, and returned to the Eliseio family farm, where he stayed, severely weakened by malaria and pneumonia, until April. Then he ventured southwards again, only to be recaptured just short of the front line. This time he made a run for it in bare feet, and got through. Given a cigarette and a mug of tea, he sat on an ammo box and said repeatedly: "I've done it, you bastards."
Having recovered from it, he went on to participate in the autumn of 1944 in Operation Wallace in northern France, in which SAS units in armoured Jeeps carried out guerrilla warfare to disrupt German transport and troop movements.
Numerous close-combat episodes were to follow in which Challenor gave expression to what had become a visceral hatred of Germans, ­and his unit was in the vanguard when the Rhine was crossed in March 1945.
Promoted to sergeant, he went on to serve in Norway and Palestine.
After demobilisation, Challenor worked in a foundry, but in 1951 he answered an advertisement to join the Met, and began his new career as a constable in Mitcham. He transferred to CID and established himself as a tough, hard-working detective. Various of his defendants claimed to have been beaten up or have had evidence planted on them but, at first, this did not prevent conviction. In 1963 started his downfall when he was proscuted because of hitting a suspect and putting a half-birck in his posessions. By the time Challenor appeared at the Old Bailey in 1964, charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, he was deemed to be unfit to plead and was sent to Netherne mental hospital with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. After a very extended stay there, Challenor returned to a quiet home life and eventually found work as a solicitor's clerk in Norbury.
On one occasion, dispatched to Brixton to obtain a statement from a remand prisoner, he remarked to a prison officer: "I used to come here as CID, then I came as a prisoner myself, and now I'm here for the defence. That's what you call bloody good all-round experience." The remand prisoner took a different view, and asked for a new solicitor.
Challenor published a memoir, ‘SAS and the Met', co-written with Alfred Draper, its cover displayed, in counterpoint, his wartime medals and a half-brick.

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Period:

Second World War (1939-1945)

Rank:

Lance-Corporal

Unit:

Army Air Corps

Awarded on:

November 9th, 1944

Citation:
“This NCO was dropped by parachute near Borgo val di Taro, north of Spezia, on September 7, 1943. The total detachment consisted of two officers and four other ranks. After landing the detachment split, Lance Corporal Challenor accompanying one officer. This small detachment succeeded in derailing two trains on the Spezia-Parma line on night of September 14 at a point north of Pontremoli. Again, on the night of September 18 a third train was derailed south of Villafranca. Having no further explosives the detachment started to return to our lines. During this time the enemy were continually searching for escaped prisoners of war, and on December 27 the officer was captured. Lance Corporal Challenor continued southwards alone; he was captured north of Chieti, but succeeded in escaping later from Aquila prisoner of war camp. He continued south and on April 5, 1944 was again captured while attempting to pass through enemy lines; on April 7 he again escaped and reached our lines. Throughout the seven months spent behind enemy lines this NCO displayed the highest courage and determination.”

• - Gazette Issue 36785 published on the 7 November 1944
  - The Independent-Obituaries
  - The Times-Obituaries