Description

A fine art giclée print on Hahnnemuhle 310gsm paper 40cm x 30cm. The edition is numbered and is limited to 75.

The Somerby Land Army Girl Strip is from the original cartoon by ‘Lovejoy’ and is featured in Grahame Warner’s book of the 10th Battalion – Arnhem: Eight Days to Oblivion.

A piece of ‘para humour’ for your smallest room perhaps?

Shipped in a cardboard tube

£35 including postage & packing to UK addresses

£45 including postage & packing overseas

The Army Girl striptease is recounted in Vic Gregg’s autobiography

Extract from page 119 of Vic’s book ‘Rifleman’-

 “I had now reached the ripe old age of twenty-five and it was in one of the pubs in the main street of Somerby that I first set eyes on a completely naked woman. It was Friday night, and this pub was full to the brim with servicemen, locals and a contingent of Land Girls. We had no idea of what Land Girls were. Whatever they were, they could certainly put away vast quantities of beer. As the evening progressed and the noise and intoxication increased, one of the girls had stripped off and starting dancing on one of the tables.

The pub was in uproar, everyone was singing, cheering and shouting ‘encore’. I was quite shocked by this display. I wasn’t a prude; I’d experienced the fleshpots of India, Palestine and Cairo, not to mention Italy, where the local women were only too ready to donate their favours for a tin of bully beef or a bar of chocolate. Those women could be excused, they were on starvation rations. But this was a new experience, not only for myself but also for some of the older regulars. We had been away too long. This was the new England, a land at war.

I was still a virgin. In the desert women were hardly ever a topic of conversation. More to the point was the lack of decent food. One of my mates said that when he made it home, he was going to spend his time eating chocolate ice creams while sitting on the toilet and enjoying the luxury of pulling the chain.”

There were two pubs on Somerby Main Street in 1944. One was the Rose & Crown, now re-named the Stilton Cheese. The other, the Three Crowns, now a private house.

On his 18^th birthday in 1937, Vic enlisted in the Rifle Brigade. He saw action across North Africa, was a driver for the Long-Range Desert Group and fought with The Rifles at El Alamein. He joined The 10^th Battalion, The Parachute Regiment in 1943 as a Vickers machine gunner in Support Company. He fought with the Battalion during the invasion of Italy and Arnhem, where he was taken prisoner. As a POW, he was sentenced to death for sabotaging a Dresden factory and saved only by the Allied bombing of that city which blew apart his prison. His post-war life was equally fascinating and extraordinary. In 2020, at the age of 100, he is one of the very few ‘Last Men Standing’ of the Battalion.

Read his full story in ‘RIFLEMAN’ Bloomsbury Press 2011