The Rev. David Youngson has submitted the following:
C.I. BARKER All records found in respect of this person do not list a second forename
7597976 Private BARKER Clifford
Royal Army Ordnance Corps
Light Aid Detachment
Attached 151st Infantry Brigade
The son of Harold Lancastle Barker and Elsie Barker of Hartburn, County Durham he was born in 1919. He was killed in action on the 14th November 1942 aged 22 and is Remembered on the Alamein Memorial, Egypt, Column 83.
The campaign in the Western Desert was fought between the Commonwealth forces (with, later, the addition of two brigades of Free French and one each of Polish and Greek troops) all based in Egypt, and the Axis forces (German and Italian) based in Libya. The battlefield, across which the fighting surged back and forth between 1940 and 1942, was the 1,000 kilometres of desert between Alexandria in Egypt and Benghazi in Libya. It was a campaign of manoeuvre and movement, the objectives being the control of the Mediterranean, the link with the east through the Suez Canal, the Middle East oil supplies and the supply route to Russia through Persia.
The ALAMEIN MEMORIAL forms the entrance to Alamein War Cemetery. The Land Forces panels commemorate more than 8,500 soldiers of the Commonwealth who died in the campaigns in Egypt and Libya, and in the operations of the Eighth Army in Tunisia up to 19 February 1943, who have no known grave. It also commemorates those who served and died in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Persia.
The Memorial was designed by Sir Hubert Worthington and unveiled by Field Marshal The Rt. Hon. Viscount Montgomery of Alamein on 24 October 1954.
Clifford Barker is remembered in Stockton on S138.52 and in Thornaby on T70.01
