Our colleague Andrew Behan has kindly researched this man: Sergeant Alan Harvey Clayton was born on 15 February 1913 the son of Charles Hedley Clayton and Edith Gertrude Clayton née Wallinger. His father was a Foreman Electrician and during World War One served as a Wireman in the Royal Navy. (A Wireman was an electrician). The family lived at 12 Byrne Road, London, SW12. On 21 March 1923 his sister, Evelyn Bernice Clayton was born. The 1939 England and Wales Register shows him as a single man living with his parents at 12 Bryne Road, and that his occupation was a Stationers Clerk. In 1940 he married Valerie A Norrington in Wandsworth.
He joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, service number 1376606, and on 15 November 1942, aged 29 years, attached to 150 Squadron, he was a Wireless Operator/Air Gunner, aboard a Vickers Wellington Mk III bomber aeroplane, serial number BK301 JN-Q, with four other airman, Flight Sergeant John James Perry, RAFVR, Pilot: Sergeant John George Duncan, RAFVR, Observer: Flight Sergeant Hugh Laurence John Mackender, RAFVR, Navigator and Sergeant Francis Ferguson, RAFVR, Air Gunner. At 17.55 hours the areoplane took off from Royal Air Force Station Kirmington, Lincolnshire, (now Humberside International Airport), to lay mines off the coast of France. It was brought down by flak anti-aircraft gunfire and crashed in Saint-Lunaire, Ille-et-Vilaine, Brittany, France. There were no survivors and all five crew members were buried in Row A of the Dinard English Cemetery, Dinard, Ille-et-Vilaine. Alan Harvey Clayton was laid to rest in Grave 4 in Row A.
