Clement Edwards

Clement Edwards served with the Royal Army Medical Corps during the second world war and witnessed the German surrender at Lüneburg Heath and the horrors of the Belsen concentration camp.

As a newly qualified doctor, Edwards was attached to an 11th light field ambulance (LFA) unit, which landed on Sword Beach soon after D-Day; he and his colleagues then joined the Guards Armoured Division as it advanced through France and Belgium to northern Germany.

After British troops had entered Belsen, near Hanover, on 15 April 1945, 11th LFA arrived to help treat survivors. Edwards rarely spoke about this experience—only in his later years did he begin to open up to family and close friends, explaining how what he had seen had shaped much of his view of life. An estimated 35 000 people at the camp died of typhus in 1945, before and after liberation, and this had led to his decision after the war to concentrate on preventive medicine. He once remarked that he had seen both the depths to which humankind can descend and the remarkable strength of the individual spirit.

For a short period, Edwards also served as a medical officer to General Sir Miles Dempsey, commander of the Second British Army; and it was in that role that he witnessed, at Lüneburg Heath in northwest Germany on 4 May 1945, the unconditional surrender of German officers to the Allies under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. This event marked the end of the war in Europe.

Later Edwards and his unit were sent to Tromsø in Norway to help in the processing of surrendered German officers. He recalled that while in Norway he had walked on the hull of the battleship Tirpitz, south of Håkøya Island, which had been destroyed by Lancaster bombers on November 12 1944.

Born at Bridgend, south Wales, Clement David Edwards (“Clem”) was named after his uncle, the pioneering surgeon Clement Price Thomas, who in 1951 treated King George VI.

He was discharged from the RAMC in September 1946 in the rank of captain and then took up a position as house physician at Willesden General Hospital in northwest London.

From 1950 to 1960 he was medical officer at the Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) at Glascoed in south Wales. He subsequently spent four years in general practice in Monmouthshire.

In 1964 he moved to Aberystwyth, where he was assistant, then deputy, medical officer for the old shire of Ceredigion. He returned to the ROF at Glascoed in 1970, remaining there until he retired back to Aberystwyth in 1979.

In later life, his great loves were his four grandchildren and tending to his garden. Clem Edwards leaves Marjorie, his wife of 67 years, and their two children.