Robert Irwin Knight, bank clerk, left Downpatrick for Army service, initially as a sergeant with the British Expeditionary Force in France, surviving its chaotic retreat and subsequent evacuation from Dunkirk. Thereafter as a Commissioned Officer he served in the defence of the UK. Finally he took part in the Normandy campaign.
After retirement from a post-war career as an English teacher at Banbridge Academy, he wrote of his war-time service, a memoir notable for its wit and self-deprecation. He gives charming, penetrating descriptions of his fellow officers and men, of the people among whom they moved, the liberated and the conquered.
This humane and intelligent man has written the least militaristic account possible of his hopes and fear, his exhilaration and anxiety, during six years of service.
Written some forty years after the event, the memoir is enlivened with literary references, the fruit of his subsequent university study and of his teaching; and enlivened too with many hilarious anecdotes. No reader is likely ever to forget his account of the incident at Manchester station.
