Genealogy Forum UK

My late father, who was in the Navy in WW2, talked a lot about a his friend Harry Yarwood, who joined the Navy with dad in 1939. They did some of their training together, then dad was assigned to convoys to Africa, while Harry drew the short straw and got the Russian convoys, on which he died, I think on his third voyage.

I'd like to find out more about Harry. Some of my dad's information may not have been 100% accurate - he only really opened up about his wartime service when he was gone 80 and was mentally going downhill, but my mother remembered dad talking about Harry when they first met at the end of the war.

Sadly, I haven't been able to find anything out through Ancestry - where else could I look?

The National Archive, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Try googling Harry Yarwood Russian Convoy, if it's the same one he was on HMS Achates.

https://www.wrecksite.eu/peopleView.asp ... 8lE5IHsA==

Free access
while were on lockdown https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

rockyfowler wrote:https://www.wrecksite.eu/peopleView.aspx?dz9CVfOShIjaKT8lE5IHsA==

THANK YOU ROCKY!!

I wish I'd found this while my dad was alive (he died in 2013, aged 93)

This is what dad told me around 2007, when we were at a pub near Portland Bill, where he was stationed for part of the war:
Dad volunteered at the same time as three friends from the scouts- Harry Yarwood and dad joined the navy, another ("the posh one") joined the RAF and another joined the army. All except dad died during active service. He often thought of them, but especially of his pre-war best friend Harry, who died on a Russian convoy.
Dad told me that many years later, he borrowed a book on the arctic convoys from our local library. One chapter of the book was about the convoy on which Harry took his final journey; this chapter listed the grim numbers of the naval and merchant seaman who died on this convoy: my father wrote, in ink, in the margin "One of these was Harry Yarwood, aged twenty, of such-and-such a street, Bethnal Green." Len explained that he didn't approve of vandalising library books, but felt that at least now there was be memorial to his old friend, however small, somewhere.

Now I know Harry is remembered online and at the Chatham memorial. My dad would have loved to know that.