PERSONAL ITEMS

Grey River Argus, 5 October 1949, Page 4

PERSONAL ITEMS

The death occurred yesterday after a long illness of Major Percy Eustace de Bathe Brandon, 0.8. E., V.D., J.P., F.C.S. (N.Z.), a veteran of the Boer and First World Wars, and a member of a pioneer Wellington family. He was aged 73 years. Mr W. Stewart, Principal of the Greymouth Technical High School, left yesterday for Wellington, where he will attend the annual conference of the Technical Educational Association.

(Inspector W. Kane, formerly of Masterton, arrived yesterday afternoon, to take charge of the Greymouth Police District, in succession to Inspector M. J. Angland, who is to leave to-morrow on transfer to Nelson.

The Albion Hotel guests include.—• Miss M. P. Sargent (Capetown South Africa); Mr W. Plane (Masterton); Misses A. Gibson, H. Allard (Wellington); Mr and Mrs A. Cameron (Invercargill), Mr S. C. Trott, Mrs M. P. Marlow (Dunedin); Messrs W. A. Pickford, M. F. Beswick, E. Marlow, J. Lamb, M. Cairns, W. J. Souter R. V. Souter, W. Hallowley (Christchurch).

Yesterday, at Wellington, Leading Aircraftsman, F. H. Bunker expressed deep appreciation of the co-operation of the British and New Zealand AirForces, which had made his journey possible, on his return from a 12,009 miles dash by an R.A.F. Lancastrian to see his seriously ill mother at Dagenham, Essex, England. The Lancastrian was in New Zealand on a training flight at the end of August when Bunker received word of his mother’s illness and arrangements were made to fly him to Britain. He returned by an R.A.F. York, which arrived at Dhakea on a training flight on Monday.

An Auckland telegram states: Sam Sum-Sue-S'um, the last of three prisoners of war companions who were repatriated together from Japan to New Zealand, was buried in the mercantile marine section of the Waikumete cemetery. His two former companions were a Scots lad and a Welsh boy. Sam was one of the few who escaped when the tanPatella, from Singapore 1 , was torpedoed in the Indian Ocean. He 'was taken to Japan as a prisoner of war to join the British soldiers and civilians there. He soon began in A self-effacing way to do things for them. His Oriental mind enabled him to give a warning when anything nasty was approaching and tell them how best they would be able to avoid it. Evacuated to New Zealand in 1945 he entered the Grcm Lane Hospital as a tuberculosis patient. Sam was everybody’s friend He made the first cup of tea in the morning and cherished a photograph of his wife and child in Singapore. Sam recognised only one nationality, maintaining to the last that he was “British Mercantile Marine.”