TRAGIC HOLIDAY

Evening Star, Issue 22955, 12 May 1938, Page 11

TRAGIC HOLIDAY

BRITON S BODY FOUND SNOW GIVES UP ITS SECRET Two months after he disappeared while on a ski-ing holiday in Japan, twenty-four-year-old Gunnery-lieuten-ant T. A. Peacocke, of Hammersmith, London, was found dead in the midst of the mountain snows. The fact that one leg was broken, and that there was a ski near by, suggests that he had an accident, and was either frozen to death or died of exhaustion. Lieutenant Peacocke vanished after leaving his hotel for a ski-ing expedition in the Nikko and Shigakogen Mountains, in the Nagano Prefecture. First news that he was missing came when the manager of the Toio Hotel, Tokio, told the police that the Briton’s luggage remained unclaimed. Police and the British Embassy began investigations immediately, and it was learned that Lieutenant Peacocke had planned to catch the P. and O. liner Comorin from Yokohama for Singapore on February 23. It was then discovered that he last registered at the Kanaya Hotel, at the famous tourist centre of Nikko, in the middle of January. After that there was no trace of his movements. Lieutenant Peacocke, the younger son of Mrs P. A. V. Peacocke, of Luxemburg Gardens, Brook Green, was born in Trinidad and educated at St. Edmund’s School, Canterbury, and Jesus College, Cambridge. He went out to Singapore last year with the Royal Artillery. He last wrote home to say he was going. ski-ing in the Japanese mountains. Nikko is 93 miles, by rail from Tokio, and is a favourite centre for its magnificent mountain scenery, rivers, and lakes. It is on the River Daiya, which is spanned—near ’ the hotel where the missing Briton registered by a “ sacred bridge.”