D-Day veteran visits Longest Yarn exhibition at Peterborough Cathedral

One of the few remaining D-Day Veterans remaining in the UK has paid a visit and praised the Longest Yarn Exhibition currently being hosted at Peterborough Cathedral.

Les Budding (99) paid a visit to the Cathedral on Friday (March 28) to both view the exhibition and chat with his visitors of his experiences of the landings in 1944.

The exhibition features a display of knitted and crocheted scenes from D-Day, which have had seen thousands of visitors come through the doors during its month-long stay in the city.

Les, who in now based in Aslackby, near Bourne, was just 18-years-old when he served aboard Landing Craft Flak 34 on D-Day. His orders were to provide covering fire for the first wave of troops storming Sword Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944.

Les received training in

“On D-Day, we had no idea what our role was going to be having carried out the landing. We had all our training up in Invergordon in Scotland- doing dummy runs onto the beach- for six months but nobody ever said what we would be doing.

“The thing that sticks with me is the noise, we were a poor little landing craft so didn’t get any protection from all of the guns. A lot of our men used to get these little pin pricks in their ears and have blood running down their faces; purely from the noise.

"We were known at the S Group but we didn’t know what that meant until D-Day itself. It meant that we was going to be on Sword Beach, that was the extreme flank, where the big bombarding ships, battleships and cruisers were.

"We arrived at the lowering position, there were two big carriers with 2000 troops and we went in at 7:25am. We were six miles from the beachhead with bombs being blasted and the big guns being opened up. We made our way towards the beach with five rocketships firing from behind our heads defending us. All the other beaches only had two rocketships behind them but we had five.

"There was 1050 rockets in the racks ready to be fired. The air was ablaze with rockets. They were that big that they were hitting each other and diving down into the sea. Two of three of the ships were hit by rockets falling onto their decks.

“We put up such a terrific fight. We all had our own targets, while having to find our way through this debris.

Speaking about the exhibition, Les added: “The exhibition is absolutely brilliant, it must have taken so many hours. The amount of exhibits is never ending!”

The exhibition is only as Peterborough Cathedral until Monday, March 31. Peterborough is the final stop on a tour across the country, before it travels to America. It is then planned for it to remain in France.

Visiting the display at Peterborough Cathedral is free – although visitors are encouraged to donate, with a suggested donation of £2.50.

Work is already taking place on a ‘sequel’ to the display, which is set to be shown at Peterborough Cathedral next year.