Commemorating a hero

Alistair Kerr
Jun 13, 2016
2 min read

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Robert Nairac's English roots lie in the Worcestershire town of Kidderminster. A new housing estate is planned for Kidderminster, with several roads to be named after local VC winners. There is now a movement to name one after the town's only GC winner: Robert Laurence Nairac GC.

Robert Nairac's connection with Kidderminster began when his maternal grandfather, Dr David Dykes, a Scot from Cathcart near Glasgow, became a General Practitioner in the town well before the Second World War. In the nineteen-thirties he acquired a junior partner, Dr Maurice Nairac, who was Robert's future father. Dr Nairac, in addition to practising general medicine, was an eye surgeon at the Infirmary in Hill Street. In due course he married his senior partner's daughter Barbara. Their three eldest children were born in Kidderminster.

During the Second World War both doctors served as Medical Officers in the 6th (Kidderminster) Battalion of the Worcestershire Home Guard.

Between 1946 and 1949 Dr Nairac worked in his native Mauritius, where his younger son Robert was born in 1948. On their return to the UK Dr Nairac settled in Sunderland, which now claims Robert Nairac as a distinguished adoptive son and has commemorated him on a memorial to the town's surprisngly numerous armed service personnel killed in action since 1945.

Robert Nairac is commemorated in a number of other places in the UK. He has the distinction of being commemorated twice, on Panels 171 and 173, at the National Memorial to the Armed Forces at Alrewas, Staffordshire.

This was not an error; his name was first placed there when he was reported missing, believed killed, in 1977 and again after his death had been formally certified. Nairac has a memorial window in the Guards Chapel in Westminster but not - despite rumours to the contrary - on the Memorial Clock Tower near Hereford where the SAS record the names of their dead in action.