James Holland
speaker
22,142 appearances
48 recordings
7 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 4d ago
James Holland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 45 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 10.
Appearances
My wife's grandfather was Stanley Paul Smith, Stan, a spitfire and Mustang pilot who flew with forty three squadron across North Africa, Tunisia, Malta, Sicily, and Italy between nineteen forty two and nineteen forty four.
And then with 611 Squadron, from Arnhem through to the end of the war.
Towards the end of his life, with his memory going, he said something out of nowhere that nobody in the family understood at the time.
There was these poor buggers in the water.
I never forgot that.
That was it.
He never explained it.
When the log books came down from the loft, I went looking for what he meant, and found it, a log entry from the twenty seventh of March 1943, after a torpedo bomber intercept off the Algerian coast.
I saw two aircraft floating and in flames, men in water waving.
Convoy fired on us.
Italian aircrew in the water.
and then the Royal Navy opening fire on their own air cover.
That was what he'd carried for sixty years.
My grandfather was William Cummins, a merchant navy officer from Middlesbrough.
He left the tape recorded memoir submitted to the BBC People's War Archive, completely verbatim, dead pan Northeast, and extraordinary.
He survived the torpedoing of SS Thurso in june nineteen forty two by U five two.
In the chaos below decks, William grabbed an axe to free the lifeboat, but his hand landed right on top of his wallet, his watch, and his Rolls Razor.
He took the axe.
The watch sank off Lisbon and he was still bitter about it decades later.
He used to say You know where there is a good watch?
Showing 341–360 of 22,142 · page 18 of 1108
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