Philip Boyd
Leading Aircraftman, 31 Squadron
Service number 1687510
Died 21 Dec 1945
Buried Jakarta War Cemetery, Indonesia
Age 39
Headstone Inscription
‘A DEAR SON AND BROTHER LOVINGLY REMEMBERED BY FATHER, MOTHER, BROTHERS AND SISTER’
Philip Kupinsky served as Philip Boyd.
Philip was born on 4 Feb 1906 in Grodno, Belarus to Morris and Annie nee Goldstone. He had two sisters and two brothers all born in Belarus and the 1911 census shows that the family had moved to Skinner Lane, Leeds by 1911 where Morris was working as a tailor. In WW1 Morris enlisted into the 9th Battalion Labour Corps.
In 1939, Philip was working as a tailors cutter and is listed as an ARP Warden. He joined the RAF in 1941.
In Indonesia, four days before Christmas 1945, seven airmen were being conveyed from the airfield to their mess area when the lorry, which had stopped at a corner, was fired on from nearby houses. The airmen immediately ducked down and the driver was about to move off when the lorry was lifted by the explosion from a grenade or home-made bomb rolled beneath it. Flight Sergeant R B Williams (WOP/AG), Corporal W G E Frost (Instrument Repairer), LAC P Boyd (SEW), and AC1 G E Rowbottom (Electrician) were killed while Sergeant Weeks and LAC Taylor were injured. A Sikh soldier nearby, shot and killed several of the attackers