Thomas Carney
 | Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire 1944. Flight Sergeant Tommy Carney (2nd from right) Air Gunner, 619 Squadron, 5 Group, Bomber Command, RAF. He served in Lancaster bombers from 1943 to 1945, and then spent almost six months based in Germany. He was 21 when this photograph was taken, and volunteered for air crew service when he was 18.
Tommy Carney was born the son of a shipyard labourer and grandson of coal miners and grew up on Sunderland's Barbary Coast, under the shadow of the many shipyard cranes along the north side of the River Wear. He left school at the age of 14 and started at the JL Thompson shipyard in Sunderland, then the largest shipbuilding town in the world, as an apprentice plater. | As a young apprentice during the "hungry thirties" - when many of Sunderland's shipyards had been more or less closed for years - he worked on the prototype of what would become the Liberty ship. He recalled seeing Cyril Thompson, son of the Owner of the Yard, leave for the US in 1940 with the plans for the Liberty ship, which was designed, and later built, at Thompson's yard at the North Sands, Sunderland. As a shipbuilding apprentice, Tommy was in a reserved occupation, but nevertheless joined the RAF shortly after Sunderland had been heavily bombed, with much loss of life and housing destroyed, and many of the shipyards on the river badly damaged.
Tommy resumed his interrupted apprenticeship after the war, and worked in Sunderland shipyard all his working life, retiring as yard manager at the North Sands yard where he had served his apprenticeship, though by then the yards had been nationalised and were owned by the State - something they never recovered from and, after a 500 year history of shipbuilding on the river, the last shipyard in Sunderland closed in the early 1990s.
Tommy married Jean Hume in 1951 and had three boys, Alan, Thomas and Peter. |
Submitter: Linda Roy Was Cramlington
Thomas Carney
Published in the Sunderland Echo on 20th June 2011:
Deeply missed but loved and remembered with pride today and always.
Treasured memories, from Alan, Peter and all your loving family.
Remark:
619 Squadron was formed in the summer of 1943 and disbanded after the war was won. In the meantime the squadron lost 85 aircraft and almost 600 men in 23 months of operations as main force squadron of No. 5 Group of Bomber Command. It had provided three of the Command's master bombers and shared bases, aircraft and crews with its better-known sister squadron, No. 617 Squadron (of Dambusters fame).
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