Remembering the Fallen: on this day in 1981, Lance Corporal David (Samuel) Montgomery, the Ulster Defence Regiment, was killed in Londonderry.

A part-time member of the regiment, which he had joined in 1975, he also worked at a timber yard on the Strand Road, a firm with which he had been employed since leaving school. Two directors of that firm had been killed by the INLA several years earlier. Lance Corporal Montgomery was one of six children of a family which had been forced to move to the Fountain Estate from the Northland area of Londonderry during the 1970s. A coal-scuttle containing a grenade had been thrown through their window, and they had no choice but to leave.

It was while he was clearing up at work in the late afternoon that two IRA gunmen simply walked in and shot him five times from behind. His killers escaped in a car which had been hijacked and was later found abandoned. Lance Corporal Montgomery died on the way to Altnagelvin Hospital. He had been a committee member of the Campsie Apprentice Boys Club, and a few months after his death a marble plaque in his memory was unveiled at the Londonderry Apprentice Boys Memorial Hall.

David, from Londonderry, was 27 years old.