The secret life of Billy Lang

One damp chilly morning last week a small group of us met at the Parc Gwyn crematorium near Narberth to say goodbye to Billy Lang, one of our Plaid members in Preseli. It was not an altogether sad occasion because Billy, who hailed from Fishguard, had lived a good life for a full 92 years. But there was something touching about the event all the same, because in a real sense we were Billy’s family. He was an only child, his parents died long ago in the 1960s, he never married, and as far as we know he had no other close relatives.

On the face of it Billy was one of those thousands of people who live their lives without disturbing the surface of public affairs. But it transpires that he had a secret war record. Aged 18 he joined the RAF in 1940 and became a Leading Aircraftman, working with ground crew in the UK and Egypt. Very soon, however, he joined the Special Services Brigade with which he served for much of the Second World War and was only demobbed in 1946. However, mystery surrounds what Billy got up to during this time as he hardly ever spoke about it.

After the war Billy worked on farms, at Trecwn and for a time was a lineman (pole climber) for the South Wales Electricity Board. Aged 37 the 1950s he became a deckhand with trawlers working out of Lowestoft and Milford Haven. After a few years he enrolled as an Able Seaman and later Bosun in a succession of merchant vessels.

For 27 years Billy criss-crossed the oceans of the world. He sailed the Pacific in ships from a Scots owned line. He worked out of Bristol down the coast of West Africa, to Cape Town and then on to Australia. He served on ore carriers that brought iron ore into Port Talbot. He sailed across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and down the coast of East Africa. In 1982 he was on a ship in the South Atlantic carrying water supplies to the forces that recaptured the Falklands. His last voyages before he retired in 1987 were on large container ships owned by Canadian Pacific that plyed the North Atlantic. At least three of the vessels he sailed on later sank. Sop Billy was a lucky man to sail with. 

He was extremely fit, strong and resourceful. He was also a very private man and fiercely independent, characteristics that were almost his undoing. After a fall in his Fishguard bungalow on the Thursday before the August Bank Holiday in 2012 he lay on the floor until the postman heard his cries the following Tuesday. Sipping water from a hot water bottle that had been near his bed and with a bag of nuts to hand Billy, as ever, had a ‘plan to survive’ and it worked. 

Friends who recently applied for his Service Record from the Armed Forces archive in Glasgow were told they would have to wait for 25 years. So it’ll be a long time before we know what Billy really did in the war.