John Baskeyfield was born on 18 November 1922 in Burslem, one of the six pottery towns that make up Stoke-on-Trent. His parents were Daniel and Minnie. He left school, trained as a butcher, and was working in that trade when his call-up papers arrived in February 1942. He was nineteen. The 2nd Battalion South Staffordshires were glider infantry, part of the 1st Airlanding Brigade in the 1st Airborne Division - the kind of unit that flew into combat in unpowered wooden gliders and walked out fighting. He served in Sicily and Italy in 1943, then came back to England to train for the next operation. Photographs of glider infantry from this period show very young men in oversized jumpsuits standing beside very small aircraft. Most of them look like they should be at school dances.

Operation Market Garden was supposed to end the war by Christmas. The plan was to drop airborne divisions onto a string of Dutch bridges, hold them until British armor arrived overland, and use that corridor to cross the Lower Rhine and outflank Germany. The 1st Airborne got the farthest bridge, at Arnhem. What the planners did not know - or chose not to act on - was that two SS Panzer divisions, the 9th and the 10th, were resting and refitting nearby. The paratroopers dropped on 17 September into a battle they could not win. Only a small force under John Frost reached one end of the Arnhem bridge, and they were overrun on the 21st. The rest of the division, including Baskeyfield's battalion, was pushed back into a shrinking pocket around the village of Oosterbeek, where they tried to hold a perimeter and wait for relief that did not come.

On the morning of 20 September, Baskeyfield was put in charge of two 6-pounder anti-tank guns at a T-junction on the Benedendorpsweg, the southernmost road between Arnhem and Oosterbeek. His guns faced up the Acacialaan, where any German armor coming down from the north would have to pass. When the first attack came, he held fire until the lead tank was within a hundred yards. He let his men in the houses behind him deal with the infantry. The 6-pounder was a small gun for the job, but at that range it could go through armor. In the initial assault, his crews destroyed two tanks and a self-propelled gun. The Germans pulled back. They came again. By the time the second wave was over, almost every gunner around him was dead or wounded, and Baskeyfield himself was badly hurt. The official citation, published in The London Gazette on 23 November 1944, describes him crawling between his two damaged guns, firing each in turn, until he was killed at his post. He had been a soldier for two and a half years.

When Arnhem was liberated in April 1945, British Grave Registration Units swept the battlefield and recovered the dead. More than 1,700 men were buried in the Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery. Baskeyfield's body was never identified. His name is on the Groesbeek Memorial, with the other Commonwealth soldiers from the campaign who have no known grave. Four other men received the Victoria Cross for actions at Arnhem - including Major Robert Cain of Baskeyfield's own battalion, which made the 2nd South Staffordshires the only British battalion to receive two VCs in a single engagement of the Second World War. Robert Cain went home. He lived until 1974. He sold cars on the Isle of Man. John Baskeyfield is still somewhere in the soil around Oosterbeek.

A tree stands on the corner of Benedendorpsweg and Acacialaan where his second gun was. It is called the Jack Baskeyfield Tree. In Stoke-on-Trent there is a twice-life-size bronze statue of him, erected in 1990 at Festival Heights by sculptors Steven Whyte and Michael Talbot. The primary school that bore his name from 1994 was renamed Saint Nathaniel's Academy in 2014, a decision the local paper called an insult. A retirement community on Angels Way in Burslem and an Army Reserve Centre on Anchor Road both still carry his name. The artist Terence Cuneo painted his action. In 1969 a Staffordshire filmmaker spent three years making a short film called Baskeyfield VC. None of these things bring back a young man who would now have been a hundred and three. They are all that can be done.