ILL-HEALTH

Waipa Post, Volume 43, Issue 3328, 28 July 1931, Page 7

ILL-HEALTH

PUSH-BIKE VISITS TO VILLAGES. This is the story of a V.C. captain who, haunted by the fear of a nervous breakdown, gave up his job and for over a year on a push-bicycle, delivering frilit and vegetables from village to village in an effort to regain his health and keep his home together. It is the story, too, of a wife who helped him to show a smiling face to the world when his health threatened to ruin the business his pluck had built up.

He is Captain D. W. Belcher, who now has a fruiterer’s and florist’s shop at Calverley Road, Tunbridge Wells, and for his gallantry during the second battle of Ypres on 13th May, 1915, he was awarded the V.C., being the first territorial ranker to achieve that honour.

“I first got a job with a cigar merchant in London,*’ Captain Belcher said. “After some time my nerves gave way, and I had a bad breakdown, and a year or so after I went to work for a firm in its antique department, but I had not been in the' new job long before my health went again, and the doctors told me I had to get an open-air life or things were going to be serious.

“I went to Tunbridge Wells, where my wife had been struggling to run our present business to help to keep the house going. We hadn’t any capital—my health had run away with that —but we manged to keep the business. She worked in the shop and I went out on the round.”