Love Letter Rescued From Seabed After Plane Crash
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Their love couldn’t be damaged in transit.
Although 35 souls died on Jan. 10, 1954, when a Comet, one of the world’s first commercial passenger jets, crashed into the sea off Elba, bags of airmail were later recovered from the seabed.
And a water-stained love letter penned by John Jenkins, a lonely merchant sailor, to his future bride Pat Dagger reached her more than six weeks later and became a special part of their history.
Today, the letter, along with others from their courtship, sits in a wooden box in their Victoria home.
They met at a dance, like so many young couples in the early 1950s. Jenkins was 18, a midshipman with the British Merchant Navy, on his first two-week leave at home in Plymouth, England. Pat was 17, working for the Western Morning News and Evening Herald.
“I had two Saturdays to go dancing at my favourite dance hall, the Guild Hall, which had the best band in town,” Jenkins recalled.
“I was standing at the bar with some buddies having a pint and they started playing a favourite tune of mine. I put my glass down to go and listen to the band. What I didn’t know was that they made an announcement on the floor that it was ladies’ choice. So I got a tap on the shoulder.”
Pat usually went to the Duke of Cornwall or the Continental, which were more upscale dance halls. But she couldn’t get in that night.
“I saw him on the edge of the floor and I thought, ‘Well, he doesn’t look bad, you know,’ ” laughed Pat.
And Jenkins, turning round, thought the same. “Oy yoy yoy. She looked good to me.”
One marriage, two children and 50 years later, they still look good to each other.
After their first dance, they had another date — a movie then promised to write. On Jenkins’s next leave, they saw each other almost every day, but “in the space of a few years, you didn’t see much of each other,” Pat said.
“Letter-writing was the only means of correspondence in those days,” Jenkins said. “I wrote lots of long letters. It was lonely on the ship.”
“My Dearest Pat, Thank you very much for your two letters which I have just received. I was thrilled to pieces about getting two letters from you here, as it is the first I have received from you this trip .”
