Forging Leadership: Marcus’s Journey from Cadets to Future Army Aspirations
Recently we met with Company Sergeant Major Marcus who recently was given the extraordinary honour of supporting a small group of veterans at the 80th D-Day commemorations in France.
Marcus has been a dedicated member of the cadets since he was 12 years old. Through his commitment to the cadets, Marcus has developed a unique set of skills, including discipline, responsibility, and leadership. His experiences range from assisting in training sessions and participating in adventure activities.
Marcus’s aspirations extend beyond his current role as Company Sergeant Major, with ambitions to follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue a career in the Army. His story is one of dedication, growth, and a profound sense of duty. Join us as Marcus shares his experiences, the impact of the cadets on his life, and his plans for the future.
I first joined cadets when I was 12. So, it’s been five years; it’s a big commitment but it’s been good. It gives you a set of skills that you’re not really able to get from other youth organisations. You learn discipline by being told, right, you need to be here at this time, and if you’re not, that’s your problem. It gives you responsibility and there are five ranks (promotions) for people to achieve; if you are good enough, then you get to the high levels like Sergeant Major company. That leads to more responsibility and it builds a sense of confidence.
I enjoy it a lot; I’m going to sound like an ad for cadets! Not many people enjoy drills, but hey! We’ve also got shooting, which is quite a big part of Sedbergh Cadets. You go out, you shoot at targets; you try and get a better score than you did last time. You’ve got the field exercise, which quite a lot of people look forward to – and then adventure training where you can go kayaking for a week, rock climbing. And I think one of my mates has just come back from mountaineering over in Canada. They fly you to different parts of the world to help out with or to do different exercises and it’s just overall a good thing for young people to be involved in.
I feel like, for me, Sedbergh has benefited me by allowing me easier access to places like Sandhurst – I would absolutely love to go there. My dad was in the Army (he joined the Army at 16) and I’d like to follow him for a general career. To me it seems like right thing to do. The Army’s massive; you’ve got engineers, logistics and everything, but for me, I’ve always looked at either infantry or engineers, because I’m technically minded. Quite a few of my old Company Sargeant Majors have gone into the army. One of them has just become a royal military police officer and two or three of them gone to Sandhurst. They absolutely loved it and have said to me that it’d be a brilliant thing for me to do. So, I started looking at it and thinking I could actually do that.
At the D-Day celebrations in France I was the cadet who stood behind Sergeant Richard Brock as he gave a speech in Bayeux War Cemetery. My main role was to aid him and the other five veterans that we [BAE] took out to France. I was a helper to make sure that they were a fine and didn’t get too overwhelmed by the situation – and then just to be there if they did. A bit like the distressed pause that Richard had towards the end of his reading. Although I supported him, I think he’s a really strong man. Even at a hundred, he’s an amazing man and I think he could have done it on his own, but I think it just helped that I was there.
I went to his hundredth birthday party, which is probably the oldest birthday party I’ve been to. We just had a bond from the time of meeting each other. When I was told I was going to meet a World War II veteran, I was like, wow, absolutely I’m doing this. It was just lovely to be there in Bayeaux and to do the role with someone as nice as Richard was absolutely amazing.
For me the 80th D-Day anniversary was quite a poignant event because I was stood and in the vicinity of people who had lost friends and family to the D-Day invasions. And the fact that I was there to help somebody that had been on the beaches and I’d literally asked myself what actually makes a man run headfirst into a machine gun? I was talking to Richard and he came up with the answer of a “bit of blind stupidity, bit of justice for others”, which was absolutely one of the best answers I think I’ve ever heard to that question. I just loved being stood with him and it was just so poignant that I was stood with a man who had practically saved the world.
It was a hugely emotional event for the veterans. I’d say it was a mix of vulnerability and then banter – there were quite a lot of jokes that Richard was cracking but you could tell that the veterans were still suffering and that some of them had not fully come to terms with how many people had lost their lives in that attack. But they were all kind of saying, we’ve all been there, we’ll get through it together. It was just absolutely amazing to see because in about 10 years, unfortunately, we’re not going to have those people left. To see them all practically holding their arms around each other going, yeah, we did this, we helped each other, we did our jobs. If you asked any of them what they did on that day, 98% of them would just say, I did my job.