Barnet was born on 10 August 1906 at 82 Thistle Street in Glasgow, Scotland. His parents Harris and Mary nee Seigal were born in Lodz, Poland and married there in 1901 before travelling to Scotland where their first child Dorathea was born in 1903. Harris worked as a tailor in Glasgow, and they went on to have seven children, Dorothea, Sarah, Esther, Isaac, Louis and Ellis. Barnet was the eldest of the four brothers who all served in the forces in WW2.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Barnet worked as a hairdresser and in 1929 he travelled to New York where he stayed with his married sister Dorothea and her husband Joseph Freedman. The 1930 US census states that Barnet was the proprietor of a barber\u2019s shop, but he returned to Scotland the following year. He met Esther Youngman and they became engaged in 1934 and married the following year at Queen\u2019s Park Synagogue in 1935. They had two girls Pamela and Gloria and when their marriage started to fail Barnet joined the Merchant Navy. Esther left their daughters whilst he was at sea, and they were adopted by Barnet’s parents. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Barnet joined the Merchant Navy before war broke out. After the start of the hostilities, it appears Barnet was transferred into the Royal Navy Reserve and underwent training as a gunner on Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships (DEMS). These merchant ships were equipped with a low-angle (LA) gun mounted at the stern as defence against surfaced U-boats and surface raiders, and a high angle (HA) gun for defence against air attack. As a Chief Petty Officer and Gunlayer, Barnet would have been responsible for the gun crews in charge of maintaining, loading and firing these guns. He saw action in the Battle of Narvik in Northern Norway in April 1940 and, later in the same year, he participated in the retreat from Dunkirk.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In May 1943, Barnet was on the 6,200-ton merchant ship Kanbe carrying copper in convoy from Alexandria to the UK via Freetown, Sierra Leone. On May 9th<\/sup>, just off the coast of Liberia, the Kanbe was torpedoed by the U-boat U-123 and it sank within two minutes. From a crew of sixty-six, only five survived. Barnet aged 37, died along with sixty others including his friend Lawrence Kaplan, another Jewish sailor from Glasgow.<\/em> Information courtesy of Michael Greisman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rememberingthejewsofww2.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Barnet-Haniford-700x988.jpg\")
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