Kenneth Philip Cleary

Kenneth Cleary joined the Patrol as a 17 year old clerk, waiting to go into the Marines. After joining the Marines he worked with Minor Landing Craft in the Far East reaching the rank of 2nd Lieutenant.  After the war he left the Marines and served overseas in Sarawak, Borneo, with the civil service as a deputy registrar before changing careers to work for Showerings Babycham, a multinational drinks company.

In an interview in 1996, Cleary recalls how the local children knew something was not quite right. They would shout at him in the street “Hey Mister, you're not proper Home Guard”. The fiction did not fool the young lads of Bath, who knew the Home Guard did not carry around Thompson sub-machine guns !

Cleary recalls that there was one per Patrol and they were to take it in turns to take it home for a week to practice handling it. He was never comfortable “wandering through the streets with this gangster gun”. Rumour has it, he said, that Colonel Gubbins had a friend in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacho and Firearms and the Tommy Guns, at least, had been seized from Prohibition gangsters.

At the time of a reunion in January 1950 he is living at 16 South Circular Road, Kilmarnham, Dublin, Eire

He spoke Malay, French, Dutch, Spanish and two Chinese languages.