Actung, Actung, welcome to We Have Ways 12 Days of Christmas Guess, where we're talking to a famous face about what the Second World War means to them.

On this episode of our Christmas specials, I spoke to politician, author, adventurer and podcaster of course,

Rory Stewart about his father and uncle service records in the Second World War.

Actung, Actung, welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk and our latest Christmas special, and we've got a particularly special guest today.

He's an adventurer, a writer, landowner in Scotland, politician, charity boss, and also now of course, co-host of

the most successful political podcaster there is, certainly cooperating out of the UK at the moment.

It's Rory Stewart, Rory, it's lovely to see you, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Now, the tentacles of the Second World War obviously run very deep, but there's a personal connection for you, isn't there, because your uncle was not only involved, he gave his life.

Yes, so my father and his brother, both Scots, both went off to school together as little boys aged eight.

Same school right the way through then they went to the same college at Oxford and they joined the same regiment, they both joined the Black Watch.

But they were posted to different battalions during the Second World War, so my father eventually landed just after D-Day,

and was wounded at a battle actually called Rory, which was a...

He's like, I'm all about Rory, right?

But his brother was sent with the Angus paternal of the Black Watch to the Middle East and was wounded at Alamein,

returned to a hospital in Jerusalem, was panched up, deployed back to what is now Libya, and then was moved across to Sicily,

and was eventually killed in Sicily.

Right.

And so my father whose parents were living in India, and who was only 11 months younger than his brother,

had lost essentially the only person in his life, I mean it was an extraordinary thing after 20 years of being completely inseparable for that to happen.

Goodness me, it is amazing how these losses affect people.

I mean I remember talking to Tony Ben, whose older brother, I think he was called Michael, was in the RAF and was killed,

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