Denzil Cooper

I had the great privilege of meeting Mr Cooper in 1986, when I visited his practice at Beggars Bush in Birmingham when he was an ophthalmic optician. Indeed, a pioneer of contact lenses he was, I was but a teenager. When I was delivered there by my parents, having seen the film, Bridge Too Far I couldn’t help but notice in his room, the pictures of what I knew to be horsa gliders and artists impressions of the unmistakable Arnhem bridge. I had attended his optician appointments for several years before, and after my service in 2RRF. But those pictures hung there all that time, and in the same vein as Digby Tatham-Water’s umbrella, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking. However ultimately I couldn’t resist and so I did. Mr Cooper then asked me did I really want to know?, to which I readily agreed. My appointment was 1 pm. He cancelled the rest of the afternoons appointments and proceeded to tell me in detail about his experiences in Normandy and Arnhem. That the glider that they had didn’t carry a stick of soldiers, but a jeep and a six pounder antitank gun which was crudely bolted to the frame of the glider . I interjected - didn’t bother you that there was three quarters of a ton of American jeep parked 6 inches behind your head, crudely bolted to piece of wood, and that the entire idea of landing a glider was that the friction on contact with the ground made everything within it want to go forward ? No, he said it was a job and we had to do it, and that was that. Mr Cooper then told me about the Battle of Arnhem and that he and a few others had managed to get through to the Arnhem bridge with two para and that he was running along the river riad when a German mortar bomb landed behind him, and that, and I quote ‘the poor lad behind me took the brunt of it, and sadly he was killed’ but part of it ended up in the back of his knee. But Mr Cooper carried on with his story, and I saw in his expression, the brief and inevitable resignation of his statement about the lad behind him. He went on to say that , some of the depot lads realised that it was the last big battle of World War II and they didn’t want to miss it. In a matter of fact way, Mr Cooper said that they had all been killed to a man. Like all human adversity and every British soldier will relate, there is always humour, Mr Cooper delighted in telling me that the glider pilots gathered and their sector was in a park and after three days he hadn’t been for a proper shit. But there was a public toilet in the park, but it was in the middle of no man’s land. As a proper Englishman, he decided that he was going to have a gentlemanly time to himself. He described running across the flat grass of the park, the Germans letting fly with all the lead they had at him but he made it to the public toilet block and sat down and ‘enthroned’. However, the roof had been blown off , and as he sat there doing his business, he looked up, and Dakotas were flying one way and intermittently German fighters the other. All the while II SS Panzer korps flinging mortar bombs at him, and he looked at me with a glint in the eye, and he said he chuckled to himself at the ‘ridiculous’ situation .
It was Mr Coopers irreverence about his incredible ordeal that made me join up and although Northern Ireland, intermittently traumatic as it was, will never live up to being dropped into a foreign land and fighting off SS panzers with rifles. All I can say is thank God for Denzel and his generation for our liberty, RIP, Mr Cooper. We salute you.