Out of the Past

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 11, 14 January 1936, Page 9

Out of the Past

LOVER’S MASCOT RETURNED Two remarkable cases of battlefield trophies being returned to friends of the dead men who owned them have been revealed by the British Legion. Miss May Blyth, noted radio singer, was called to the telephono while at a dinner party in London recently and informed that a bow of pink ribbon, a woollen golliwog mascot and a programme of a concert at wnich she had sung "My Dear Soul," had been found. They had been retrieved from the pay book of Private Albert Edward Perry, of the 3rd Norfolks, who enlisted on March 9, 1917, Miss Blyth left the. telephone dazed. For Perry had been .. fiance, and she had giv him those souvenirs a few days before he went to his death.

Now tho golliwog and the programme are back in her possession. Perry’s mother is to keep her son’s pay book. In the second case, a German exservice man forwarded to the legion the aviation certificate of Ist Class Air Mechanic Russell, which he had kept as a war souvenir for IS years. A Cairo reader of the British Legion Journal identified the photograph on the certificate as that of a comrade of No. 43 Squadron, Royal Air Force. Ho wrote to say that Russell lived m Brighton. ,

The legion was able to trace the next of-kin to Air Mechanic Russell, whose aeroplane was shot down over Douai in 1917 by Richtofen.