Coldstream Guards
Born: June 13th 1918
Died: December 11th 1940
Age at Death: 22
Killed on active service, December 11th 1940
Roy was born in Plymouth to Stanley Skeate and his wife Mary (née Fraser). By the time he arrived at the College his mother was living in Hove. His father, by this point a retired major in the British army, was halfway across the world in Salamaua, a staging post for gold prospectors in New Guinea that would be destroyed in heavy fighting between the Allies and Japanese in 1943.
In the war he served with the 3rd Battalion of the Coldstream Guards. He died in December 1940, almost certainly in the successful assault on the Italian defensive position at Sidi Barani, the catalyst for the utter rout of Italian forces in North Africa, the day after Frank Duesbury (q.v.).
Skeate is buried in the Halfaya Sollum War Cemetery.