KEPT HIS WORD

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LX, Issue 17, 3 March 1939, Page 1

KEPT HIS WORD

PROMISE MADE 21 YEARS AGO

THREE OF FOUR COMRADES

DEAD

(From The Guardian's London

Correspondent)

LONDON, February 11

Twenty-one years ago four soldiers in London promised to meet again in Piccadilly Circus, on a certain February night in 1939. This week the promise was due to be redeemed, but only one of the four kept his word. The others are dead.

At a minute to twelve one night this week Conrad Pope, an American engineer, crossed Piccadilly circus to the island around Eros. As Big Ben struck the first stroke of midnight he stood still, took off his hat, and gazed down Regent street, towards the Duke of York's column. Almost immediately he will return to New York content that he has kept the promise. Conrad Pope told why he came:—

"I'm not sentimental; I'm as hardbitten 4 as most. But if I'd ratted on this date just because I knew the others couldn't come, well ... I don't know ... I reckon maybe a promise wouldn't have meant anything to me any more."

His buddies were Theodore Roosevelt Kemp, who was bred on a Texas ranch; George Lewis, a Liverpool stevedore; and Edouard Labillet, a young lieutenant in the French Air Force. On a June day in 1919, Labillet crashed to his death. Lewis, oldest of them, never really recovered from war wounds; he died in 1927. Kemp was killed two months ago in a car smash in Arizona.