HE HAD A JOB TO DO …. AND HE DID IT!
As well as the laying of a wreath at the Baldock memorial on Sunday by ex-army Legend Tony Simpson and present day scrum half Harvey Howman, the club are remembering their own fallen through club “grave finder” Adam Winwood.
As the senior club in North Herts and the only rugby club in the area to be founded before the Second World War, Letchworth lost 18 young men in the conflict between 1939 to 45. Some of these played for both the town side and the Tabulators in the 1930s as unbelievably two sides existed in Letchworth when the rest of North Herts was a rugby desert.
Oliver John Sinnatt was only 22 when he fell on the 6th of June 1944 … D-Day, the longest day … and the first wave of the allies to liberate Europe from the Nazis.
Oliver was the son of Dr Oliver Sturdy Sinnatt who had won an MC in the First World War and his wife May who had moved to Meadow Way Letchworth from Sleaford some four years before. Young Oliver was a lieutenant in the R A C (Royal Artillery) and was in the thick of the fighting from the outset. A brother officer who wrote to his parents told them how the lieutenant “had a job to do” and in so doing, with great bravery, he lost his life. In order to facilitate an attack he got out of his armoured car to cut some wire in their path. They successfully did this but himself and his fellow operator were both killed by enemy fire before they could move off. If it had not been for his intense sense of duty he would have been safe. This however was typical of the younger Sinnatt who was a fearless rugby player in his youth. He had been with the Home Guard for two years and as he was in a reserved occupation he need not have joined up, but both he and younger brother David had listed with the RAC. The citation in the local paper The Citizen read his loss would be deeply and widely felt by his family and friends.
Now after the passing of nearly eighty years three men of Letchworth have made the pilgrimage to his grave in Northern France at RYES MEMORIAL CEMETERY BAZENVILLE. Treasurer Chris Taff Marshall and marketing officer Leslie Wilsher joined Winwood in laying a cap and wreath on Sinnatt’s grave in the dying sunlight on Armistice day … at the going down of the sun this Legend who will remain forever young was duly recognised for a job done well.
It goes without saying that in the Letchworth Rugby tradition he was toasted long into the night by the travelling triumvirate.
Sleep well, Lieutenant Sinnatt.
Brian Burke
