George Scales, War Hero and Generous Friend of RDFRS



George Scales, a gallant former naval officer and highly successful farmer and businessman, has become, in his mid eighties, one of RDFRS's most generous benefactors. He has no urge towards self-glorification and would be content for his generosity to be quietly appreciated rather than ostentatiously publicized. I have of course expressed my gratitude to him privately. The opportunity to do so publicly, and in a way I am assured by one of his closest friends he would not mind, arises because he has unfortunately fallen into ill-health. His eyesight has deteriorated so that he can hardly see, and his back is collapsing so that he can hardly walk. He is going to have an operation, but before they could do that to an 86-year-old man they had to fit a heart pacemaker. This has just been done, and George is now awaiting the operation, and badly in need of cheering up.

To give something of the flavour of this remarkable man, the following note has been kindly supplied at my request by Ian Baird, a close friend of George and the author of his biography.

"After a disastrous school career, George joined the navy as a rating, and was soon captain of a ship which took part in the Normandy Landings in June 1944. On one of his trips when he was taking tons of ammunition to the beaches, the unloading squad of forklift vehicles failed to arrive, so George and his crew ran the stuff down onto the beach by hand. It took nine hours and was carried out under constant German strafing for the last four hours of the run; had anything hit the growing pile of ammunition, they would all have gone up. For this action, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre (with silver star) by the French Government, an award which was delayed - by sixty-three years, finally arriving on December 6 last year. Since the war, he has been a farmer, although he prefers to think of himself as a businessman whose business happens to be farming. In the mid 1990s he moved into thatching-straw, where he now commands a major share of the market in the East of England, and where the change has enabled him to remain very profitable at a time when 'standard' farms are finding it much harder to do well. He has been a regular correspondent in the letters columns of The Times and of several farming journals. He is a man of strong principles, and one of the strongest is his belief that while religion holds sway, much goes wrong – hence his enthusiastic support for RDFRS."

Above is a picture of George being presented with the Croix de Guerre by the French Naval Attaché, 63 years after the award was announced. The fact that he didn't bother to put on a suit for the occasion is endearingly typical. In all sorts of ways, George Scales is a one-off. He gives a whole new meaning to phrases like 'Stands no nonsense from anybody' and 'Bulldog courage'. Where others stand and wait, George charges in with direct action – a direct action that is always fully in the spirit of the law even if it remains only just inside the letter. I have never met anybody quite like him. I am proud to be associated with this indomitable old fighter.

I thought his operation might provide an opportunity for some of our readers who have the welfare of RDFRS at heart to send him some such brief message as "Get well soon George and thanks for your generosity to the cause of reason, secularism and science." George doesn't do e-mail, and rather than publicise his home address (which I'm sure he would hate) I thought the sensible thing would be to invite people to write in to this thread. Later, I'll print out the whole thread and send it to him.

Richard