A Mearns man who was one of Scotland’s last surviving D-Day veterans has died. He was 90.
Arthur Grant was a teenage distillery worker when he was cast on to the sands of Normandy during the Allied invasion on June 6, 1944.
Mr Grant from Stonehaven served as a private in the Royal Pioneers Corp and landed at Sword beach, Luc-Sur-Mer, after six weeks of training.
Born on the Crathes estate in July 1924, he was the youngest of the six children of Walterina and William Grant, the head gardener on the castle grounds.
After the family moved to Stonehaven, Mr Grant’s first job was as a gardener at Cowie House, before he went to work at the town’s former Glenury Distillery.
Soon after conscription in 1944, he was sent across the English Channel to Normandy along with thousands of other troops.
He spent his first two days in Normandy dodging German shells with only boiled sweets for food, one night sleeping side-by-side next to a fallen comrade.
A corporal by the end of the European assault, Mr Grant fought in Normandy until the end of Operation Overlord in August 1944, after which he moved through Belgium and Holland.
In the town of Goes, in South Beveland, he was billeted with the Blomaard family and formed a friendship which would be rekindled almost 20 years later.
In the late1940s he took up a career as a railway trackman, around the same time as he began seeing his wife to be.
Mr Grant married Agnes in Stonehaven’s Dunnottar Parish Church in 1951 and had a son, Brian, who stays at Drumlithie.
Mr Grant was a loyal member of the Stonehaven and District Angling Association for many years.