This Is Guernsey

By Nicci Martel

Gordon Grantham and Dora Hanley at the dance. Dora worked as a machinist in Manchester during the war. (0576489)

NEVER forget, urged guests at Specsavers’ spectacular Liberation Tea Dance. Most all of the 792 people invited to the event had lived through the Occupation or were evacuated during the Second World War.

Others had their own wartime experience in the UK or on the frontline. But the message from them all was clear – the real meaning of Liberation Day must live on.

‘You have to be of a certain age to really understand just how important it was but it should never die out, it needs to be remembered forever,’ said 87-year-old Dora Hamley.  ‘It should go down in history and people need to know the Channel Islands were the only place in the British Isles that was occupied,’ Dora’s  husband’s family was in Guernsey during the Occupation.