D-DAY veteran John McOwan died this month, aged 103.

Below, we pay tribute to one of Peeblesshire’s war heroes...

“Dawn broke to a sight I shall never forget…” wrote D-Day veteran John McOwan, nearly 80 years after landing on Gold Beach, Normandy, on June 6, 1944.

It was not the first landing on enemy soil for the former Sergeant McOwan, of the Royal Auxiliary Ordnance Corps (RAOC), later to become the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.

Mr McOwan also took part in the Italian campaign, coming ashore at Salerno in 1943.

After serving throughout the Second World War and becoming the face of a generation on billboards in London and Portsmouth for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the 103-year-old passed away peacefully in his sleep at the Peebles home were he lived for 70 years.

D-Day did not define Mr McOwan, who was born in the maternity hospital on Tweed Green and was training to be an optometrist at Heriot Watt College when war was declared in September 1939.

Initially his Peebles territorial unit was sent to man gun emplacements, below the Forth railway bridge, before Mr McOwan was transferred to the RAOC to train as an instrument mechanic.

Like many of his generation in later years, he did not like to talk of his war experiences and it was only during the Covid-19 pandemic that he wrote ‘A Centenarian’s Memoirs of WWII’ in longhand for his three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

After being discharged from the army in 1946, Mr McOwan returned to Peebles and with his brother Kenneth followed their father into the jewellery business at 28 High Street.

Both were skilled craftsmen but Kenneth tended to do watch and clock repairs while John ran the sales side.

As well as running the shop, the pair supplied watches for the Crowning Lady and were called on to turn the chimes off on the Old Parish Church at Beltane.

Mr McOwan married Betty Reid on December 3, 1947 at St Andrew’s Church and their only child daughter, Eleanor, was born a few years later.

Mr McOwan did not return to Normandy till, aged 75, he joined the Royal British Legion cruise in 2019. But in the 1950s he made a number of summer holiday visits to the Dutch family, in Eindhoven, where he was billeted in the winter of 1944.

The McOwans moved to Rosetta Road in 1955 and, once Eleanor was at school, Betty joined her husband part-time in the shop.

Away from business, in the 1950s Mr McOwan was known as an apiarist with hives set up on the edge of Peebles Golf Course and was a keen ballroom dancer at the Ex-Servicemen’s Club in School Brae.

He was also an expert River Tweed fly fisherman for salmon and trout, preferring beats below what is now Cardrona, which had nice peaceful pools.

Any extra salmon he caught were smoked locally.

Mr McOwan sold the business in 1991 and had about nine years of retirement till Betty passed away in the year 2000.

Mr McOwan was a keen gardener and his front garden was spectacular in the summer with rose pergolas and trellises on the house walls.

Another hobby was painting and such was his skill in acrylics and pastels, he was asked to do commissions and sometimes sold work in local cafés, though he was not too concerned about making money.

He also painted landscapes with a number of Peebles studies and a large crowd scene painted in a French impressionistic style dominates his living room.

In 2007, his D-Day service was recognised with the award of France’s Légion d’Honneur which was finally sent in 2023.

This medal became the centrepiece of a framed display of his honours above his fireplace.

At the 80th commemoration of D-Day on June 6 this year, Mr McOwan joined veterans and service personnel at Peebles War Memorial.

At that service, military historian Sir Hew Strachan said: “John McOwan, now 103, went ashore on Gold Beach in Normandy, having already served in North Africa and Italy with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. We are privileged to be in his company.”

A service for John McOwan will be held in the Park Hotel on Friday (December 6) at 11am.

Interment will be at Peebles Cemetery at 12.30pm, where a plot is reserved next to his wife.