MEMORY RESTORED

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23259, 31 January 1939, Page 6

MEMORY RESTORED

ENGLISHMAN IN AMERICA CONVERSATION AT CRICKET [from a special correspondent] .♦ London, Jan. b 'An Englishman who lost his memory While working in America, and was given up as dead by his parents in Cheshire, has regained full possession of his faculties, thanks to a conversa'jtion during a game of cricket. In the summer of 1936 Tom Mathias, ■on of an English Rugby international, ,was in the United States. He was attacked by malaria for the fifth time. 11l and worried, he wandered from State to State, from job to job. He had lost his memory. One day Mathias played cricket with ether English "exiles.'' During the came he talked io a business man from Nottingham. They discussed England. The Nottingham man was puzzled bv the vagueness of his new friend's recollection of places. Dimly Mathias remembered Nottingham. He said ho thought his mother came from that city. More questions, and he remembered his mother's maiden name, then knew for certain that she was a Nottingham woman. The Nottingham man remembered her. The rest was easy. A letter to Mrs. Mathias in England, and the_ mystery was cleared up—which intensive searches by the police and wireless broadcast -appeals throughout the American continents had failed to solve. Tom Mathias came home for Christmas.