Tributes paid to Solihull D-Day war veteran Dennis Keen

Jul 17 2009 by Rebekah Oruye, Birmingham Mail

WARM tributes have been paid to a former Second World War soldier from Solihull who became of the longest serving members of an international veterans’ association.

Normandy veteran Dennis Keen was born in May 1925 and raised in Knowle with his parents and sister.

As a youngster he attended Solihull Boys’ School before joining the Bakelite company and then working alongside his mum and dad for the ambulance service in Knowle.

It was in 1944, just a month after his 19th birthday, that Mr Keen was called up to serve in the army and landed with thousands of other men on the beaches in Normandy.

He returned to the French coastal town many times to help to coordinate the 50th, 60th and the recent 65th year remembrance services.

Mr Keen’s widow, Betty, met her husband when they both worked for branches of West Midlands gas works after the war ended.

She described him as a “hardworking, devoted family man.”

The 79-year-old said: “He rarely spoke about his time in the war. He saw so many horrors and went through some terrible experiences he did not want to re-live it.”

Soon after the birth of his children, Dennis Jr and Gill, Mr Keen studied at Ruskin College, Oxford, and achieved notable success in personnel management. He retired in 1985, having reached a senior management position and serving more than 37 years within the British Gas Board.

He was an avid member of a modelling club in Knowle.

The Keens also ran two popular youth clubs in Shirley – The Annexe and Green Lane.

Betty said her husband was particularly proud of his work at The Annexe, being able to persuade the local Teddy Boy gangs and later Mods and Rockers to put their imagined differences to one side. Since his retirement, the couple devoted time to the Normandy Veterans’ Association (NVA), Mr Keen being branch secretary and national membership secretary until he was diagnosed with cancer in 2008.