Military Families Support Group: Queen & Country Exhibition.

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      Mother of killed soldier wants support for memorial art

Feb 24 2009 by David Whetstone, The Journal 

THE grieving mother of a young woman killed in Iraq has spoken in support of an art work commemorating the fallen.

Elsie Manning, from South Shields, learned on Remembrance Sunday 2006 that her only daughter had died.

Staff Sgt Sharron Elliott, of the Intelligence Corps, was in a patrol craft that was hit when a bomb went off under a bridge. Three others were also killed.

An inquest heard the deaths might have been avoided if the vessel had been fitted with an electronic blocking device.

Now Sharron’s photo, along with those of 135 other British service personnel killed in Iraq, features in Queen and Country by artist Steve McQueen. McQueen, who won the Turner Prize in 1999 and was awarded the OBE in 2002, was an official war artist in Iraq and afterwards had the idea of commemorating those who died by putting their photos on stamps.

Facsimile sheets of stamps are displayed in a cabinet going on show at mima, the Middlesbrough art gallery. But the artist feels the project won’t be complete until the stamps are adopted by the Royal Mail.

In Elsie Manning’s flat it is clear that remembrance is an everyday affair.

“Sharron is remembered in every room,” says Elsie. “She was the best daughter anybody could wish for.”

A framed sheet of Steve McQueen’s facsimile stamps featuring Sharron hangs on the landing.

Elsie says: “Steve wants people to buy stamps and post letters so they’ll drop onto doormats and it means these young people will be remembered. I think it’s a wonderful idea.”

Elsie was working in an old people’s home when Sharron died. She had watched a Remembrance Day parade with some of the residents before returning home.

“I had my feet up when there was a knock at the door.

“Colin (Elsie’s husband) went to answer it and in came this bloke. I knew what he had come for but I didn’t know who for (two of Elsie’s four sons were also serving in the armed forces).

“I didn’t think it would be Sharron. You don’t expect a woman to be killed, that’s the bottom of it.

“I didn’t want any of them to have been killed because it would have been the same whichever one of them it was.”

The bringer of bad tidings was from the Army.

“It was his first time, bless him. He stood there in his civvies and he had this black briefcase. Mark, he was called. I said, ‘Thank you, Mark’. He came back next day and he didn’t have to.”

Elsie draws comfort from the fact that Sharron was doing a job she loved and at which she excelled.

She had joined the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) in 1991 and became only the second woman to qualify as an aircraft technician.

She then joined the Intelligence Corps and began working undercover, saving many lives, Elsie has been told. Elsie says Sharron was popular with her comrades. “They called her their diamond geezer girl,” she recalls.

After her death they chipped in to buy a sundial memorial which stands in Cyprus but can be moved with each posting. Sharron is also commemorated in a garden of remembrance at Chicksands, the Bedfordshire headquarters of the Intelligence Corps.

But outside the military, service deaths can become statistics.

Among many sources of anger and frustration which make grief harder to bear is the perception that deaths in action seem to have dropped down the TV news schedule. “Isn’t it important any more?” says Elsie.

Paradoxically, as the roll of honour lengthens, the loss of an individual soldier seems less worthy of headlines.

Steve McQueen’s stamps, she suggests, will help to keep the sacrifices being made – by soldiers and their families – in the public eye.

 IN a statement, the Royal Mail said yesterday: "The role and sacrifice of Britain’s servicemen and women play a key role in our special stamps programme every year.

"In 2008 we produced stamps celebrating the RAF and issued a set to mark the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War on 11 November 1918, and in September this year we’ll be issuing stamps depicting Royal Navy uniforms.

"Royal Mail receives around 3,000 requests every year for special stamp issues, but only 10 subjects can be chosen. Therefore, it is impossible to accommodate every request."

QUEEN and Country by Steve McQueen will be on display at mima, Middlesbrough, from March 18 until May 3. See today’s Culture magazine, Page 6, for more details about the project.

Edited by Elaine - 25 Feb 2009 at 12:07am