Man listed among the fallen lives and laughs

Press, 17 May 1984, Page 1

Man listed among the fallen lives and laughs

By

PETER COMER

For some of his old friends at the Rangiora High School centenary at Easter, it was as if Mr David Dawson had returned from the dead. As far as they were concerned, the young Mr Dawson did not return from the fighting in Greece in 1941. For almost 40 years, his name had been among those of the fallen on two war memorials in his home town of Rangiora. In fact, Mr Dawson is very much alive and living in retirement in the peaceful South Canterbury town of Geraldine.

“I thought about getting them (the inscriptions) rubbed out but then I thought, ‘why bother?’ ” said Mr Dawson from his home this week.

One of those pleasantly surprised to see Mr Dawson at the school reunion was Mr Humphrey Clark, of Rangiora.

“We were good friends through school and after that, but he went away to the war before me,” said Mr Clark. “I knew he had been taken prisoner in Greece, but I never thought he came back.”

Mr Dawson said he had spent four years in a prison camp in Austria

Since the war ended he has worked in Australia, and even back in Rangiora for a time, but for many he was just a name among the lists of the fallen on the Rangiora Cenotaph, at the corner of High Street and Ivory Street, and on the Roll of Honour at the War Memorial Hall in Albert Street. While Mr Dawson was enjoying the proceedings at the high school centennial celebrations, his name was read out as an old boy who had been killed in action during World War 11. Far from being put out, Mr Dawson thought it quite

amusing. As far as the New Zealand Army is concerned, he officially ceased to exist in 1941.

No doubt this would have made it very difficult for Mr Dawson to apply for a war pension, but he did not. Inquiries with the Army records office at the Ministry of Defence headquarters in Wellington revealed that he had been posted missing in 1941.

“There is nothing more on the file, which may have been where some of the confusion arose,” said a spokesman for the records office.

He said that war memorials and cenotaphs were not administered by the Ministry of Defence or any other Government agency, but by local bodies.

The Rangiora Borough Council, which is in charge of both the Cenotaph and the Memorial Hall, had not

been aware of Mr Dawson’s case before being approached by “The Press” yesterday, said a spokesman.

The secretary of the Rangiora Returned Services Association, Mr Harry James, said there had been “a few red faces,”

He believes the problem might have been that Mr Dawson was widely known in Rangiora by his nickname, “Bunny.” “Everyone called him Bunny, so if the name ‘D. Dawson’ came up it might not have rung a bell,” said Mr James.

“We sometimes get chipped about someone who was killed and whose name is not there, but I have not heard of it happening the other way round,” he said. It is also the first case of its type that the Army records office is aware of from World War 11, although there was a similar case after World War I.