The event here in Cambridge went really well, I was very pleased with the turn out considering it’s a Tuesday, I counted 22 people there for the ceremony. Jenny Boon and her family were very pleased with the whole thing, and Jenny said after all these years she finally feels her uncle Dick Sampson has been properly recognised and acknowledged. It was great to see so many of our local RSA veterans turn out.
I also really enjoyed the chance to catch up with WWII RNZAF fighter pilot Noel Helean again. In December 1943 he had his Sabre engine die on him after pulling out of an attack and he was forced to glide down into the middle of northern France and belly land his No. 486 (NZ) Squadron Hawker Typhoon. He was taken into the care of the Resistance, and the doctor who took him in was arrested and taken to the nearby Amiens prison, only to be killed in the prison raid. From his hiding place in the farm house Noel saw and heard the Mosquitoes heading into the attack that day. He was holed up in the same farm house with a Spitfire pilot, two Canadians and at one stage for a short time the crew of a USAAF B-17, along with the house’s owners and their relations who came to live there! And he said they only had two beds in the tiny house. Noel said in the whole nine months in that house he only went outside on one occasion, when the Resistance needed him to cut a telephone cable.
At another point, I think before he’d gotten to that farm house, he was lead on a cycle trip by a British man who had married a French woman before the war and had never left with the coming of the war. Noel said he spoke French fluently with a Cockney accent! When Noel returned to France a few years back his guide drove him down the same route he’d cycled through France and it came to 21 miles! A scary trip to cover in a day.
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Jenny Boon, niece of F/Lt Dick Sampson, and her husband Roger, next to the panel on our Cambridge Cenotaph that has Dick’s name on it, and the wreath Jenny made of flowers from her garden
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WWII RNZAF fighter pilot Noel Helean with Jenny Boon
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Jenny speaks about Dick Sampson
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Cambridge RSA President Ray Tocker (left) and Cambridge RSA Vice-President Bob Devereaux (right) laying the wreath on behalf of the RSA
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I have placed more photos from today on my Wings Over New Zealand Show Facebook Page here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.722006857839761.1073741840.528909900482792&type=3&uploaded=5
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