“WAR is futile, it proves nothing,” said a World War Two veteran who survived five years in a prisoner of war camp.

Fred Reeves, 96, of Halstead, always observes the two minute silence on the eleventh hour of Armistice Day but has long since given up any military connections.

He said: “I feel I have done my time.”

Fred, then 24, signed up to the Territorial Army in 1939 after playing cricket and football near the barracks.

“Several of us got bitten by the bug and joined the TA,” he said.

See this week's Halstead Gazette for the full feature