Club helps 'find' a father on poignant Anzac Day

The Club through the auspices of Past President Bryan Johnston and a strange quirk of fate helped New Zealander Jill Rivers 'find' her father Eric Hunter on a very poignant Anzac Day for her on April 24.

Eric was a distinguished bomber pilot aged 25, who had flown a number of wartime sorties over Germany and on March 14 1942 was piloting a Wellington Bomber from Norfolk to RAF Aldergrove when it crashed into the side of Slieve Donard.

This crash first came to PP Bryan's attention when he gave a talk to the Rotary Club of Belfast, Christchurch, New Zealand and had an incredible coincidental meeting with Eric's 92 year old brother Allan, a speaker at the Club that day. Hearing he came from Northern Ireland Allan told PP Bryan about the crash and that he was buried here. PP Bryan offered to locate and send back photographs of the grave which he did together with details of the crash site obtained from Ernie Cromie, Ulster Aviation Society. PP Bryan subsequently heard that Jill wanted to visit her father's grave.

Jill (now 73) was just a four month old baby back in New Zealand when her father died and he had never seen her as she was born after he left. On Anzac Day, accompanied by PP Bryan & Helen Johnston with whom she was staying, she laid a wreath on the grave in the Commonwealth War Graves section of Belfast City Cemetery. She felt: "At my father's grave, I could hardly contemplate what was happening. I'd known about this man all my life, but he had not been real to me. But to see his grave gave me a sense of closure and deep connection."

She was also taken to the crash site on Slieve Donard which had also been identified by Ernie Crommie. Strangely the grass has not regrown, still just bare rocks and dark coloured with traces of the wreckage embedded in the stone. Ernie gave Jill a piece of the plane wreckage. She noted: "Visiting the crash site was a very, very deep emotional experience. This was where his life ended. I was closer to my father here in Northern Ireland than I had ever been before."

Jill and PP Bryan also met the Deputy Lord Mayor Alderman Guy Spence and before she leaves Belfast she will, again in a quirk of fate, meet Belfast Club member Teddy Elliott who grew up in Newcastle and as a small child remembers hearing the crash and going to the site!

PP Bryan notes that Jill leaves having felt closer to her father than she had ever felt and is finding leaving these shores extremely difficult.