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Raymond Bailey was born in 1919, the son of a miner. He left school aged fourteen and began work as an apprentice lathe operator at the Vauxhall Car Works in Luton. In 1939 he was in the first wave of young British men called up to fight in the Second World War. After basic training, Ray's battalion was posted to France and thrown into some of the bloodiest fighting of the entire conflict. In June 1940, just a few weeks after arriving in France, Ray found himself among the thousands of British soldiers captured at the catastrophic Battle of St Valery. David Wilkins spent most of his working life in the charitable and public sectors. He also taught at university. Outside of work he has long collected old diaries, manuscripts, letters, photo albums and other similar items. In 2019 he gambled on a box of old notebooks at auction and discovered he now owned Ray Bailey's wartime memoir. The Longest Walk is David's second book based on a found memoir (his first book was published in 2017). |
