Thomas Rayney Jackson

The photograph is shared by the Trust with kind permission from the 11th Armoured Division Facebook Group and its Black Bull Research Team with additional information from the Eastbourne College WW2 Roll of Honour.

Remembering Thomas Rayney Jackson, Killed in Action, 30 July 1944.

He was born on 6 July 1914 at Woolwich, the son of Alan Rayney and Phyllis Mary (née Whatley) Jackson of Blackheath SE3, and the elder of two Eastbournian brothers, entered Blackwater in September 1928, leaving in summer 1933.

A sound, even brilliant scholar, he reached the Classical VIth, gained a Higher Certificate, and won the Duke of Devonshire’s Classical Prize and the Hollins Translation Prize. He was a house prefect and head of his house, a sergeant in the Officer Training Corps, and a 2nd XV colour.

He left school in July 1933 and went up to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he obtained a BA in History and, in his fourth year, took the teaching diploma. He had started on the career of a preparatory schoolmaster with Merton Court at Foots Cray, Kent, when the war broke out.

He enlisted in the Royal Armoured Corps and was trained as a wireless operator. As a trooper in the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, with the 11th Armoured Division, he was killed in Normandy on Sunday 30 July 1944 while repairing his tank, which had struck a mine. He had previously served throughout the final campaign in North Africa with the Queen’s Royal Lancers. He was 30. He was first buried near Vacquerie, then exhumed and interred in the Saint Charles de Percy War Cemetery, Calvados, Basse-Normandie, Grave I.E.13.