A gas engineer from Warrington who looks after nearly 350 war graves of soldiers who died in the First and Second World Wars hopes D-Day 80th anniversary commemorations may lead to others coming forward to do the same.
Andy Floyd, 58, is part of a team who volunteer for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, cleaning and keeping tidy the final UK resting places of 300,000 war heroes.
Today, Thursday 6th June is also the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, when more than 150,000 soldiers landed by air and sea in Normandy, France, to launch an offensive against Germany.
This week is also Volunteers’ Week (3rd to 9th June), the annual national celebration of volunteering, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.
Andy, from Warrington, who served for 10 years in the Royal Engineers, now works as an emergency gas engineer for Cadent.
He is part of the team of engineers ready to respond quickly to reports of smells of gas and other gas-related emergencies, across the North West.
Before and after
Like every employee of Cadent, he gets two extra days of paid leave every year for volunteering activities in support of good causes in his local area.
Andy has just started to use his to match the commitment asked of by CWGC – which asks its volunteers to carry out a minimum two days’ volunteering at nominated cemeteries.
He is now the lead volunteer for three sites, which involves looking after 302 graves in Warrington, 11 in Padgate and 30 in Knutsford cemeteries. He makes sure the headstones are cleaned and the areas immediately around them are kept tidy.
In the North West, CWGC currently has vacancies for people to do the same in Greater Manchester (specifically Bolton, Salford, Oldham and Tameside), Lancashire (Blackburn, Preston and Chorley), and Cumbria (Barrow, Ulverston and Cockermouth).
Andy Floyd
For more information, visit https://www.cwgc.org/our-work/volunteer/
“We should always honour them and keep their memory alive. I can think of no better way to use the two days of volunteering that Cadent gives me,” he said.
As well as his own service, there is also a personal, family connection to this for Andy. Both of his grandfathers, Alf Floyd and Geoff Gibson, died in the Second World War.
Geoff died in Dorset, following an accident involving a tank while preparing troops for the actual D-Day landings.
Alf was captured while fighting Italian units in North Africa and was later transferred to a prisoner of war camp in Germany. Severely injured, his repatriation was arranged by The Red Cross, and he died at home in the UK. Alf is buried in a churchyard in Warrington, with a headstone bearing the crest of the Royal Artillery.
Cadent’s volunteering offer to its employees is part of a commitment to be a ‘force for good’ in the communities it serves. Over a five-year period, Cadent has pledged to deliver a minimum of 3,000 volunteering days. See https://cadentgas.com/sustainability
