226849 L/Stkr. William Gregg Royal Navy HMS Janus from:Co Durham (d.23rd January 1944 ) William Gregg is my uncle, my mother's brother. My mum lost contact with William in 1942 or 1943. He had previously served on HMS Queen Elizabeth which had been attacked by Italian frogman Commandos of the Decima MAS in Alexandria Harbour. My mother told me that she must have last seen William after this attack as he was home on leave in England and was still wearing his tropical white uniform. He had married a girl named Peggy. We later learnt that they had son, Robert, who died of cancer in the 1970s. In the early 2000s my mother, who was starting to suffer from Alzheimer's, asked me to 'find William'. I live in the US. My mother had an idea that he had emigrated to Canada after the war. With the help of the Salvation Army my father was able to provide me with more information, and I was able to ascertain that, by looking at the crew records of HMS Queen Elizabeth and by assuming that William had served on her solely, I was barking up the wrong tree.
I subsequently discovered that William had served on HMS Janus and, sadly, discovered that he is commemorated on the Royal Navy memorial on Southsea Common. I then had the somewhat bizarre experience of actually taking part in World War Two, at least as our family is concerned, by having to tell my father (himself an RAF pilot veteran of WW2) that I had discovered what happened to our young sailor. We both wept, howling in anguish and regret that the RAF, in particular, was unable to stop William's death, and that William had died about a month after my mum had met my dad.
Advanced Alzheimer's has one merciful aspect: that the sufferer loses all sense of the passage of time and of the order of events. Thus, when on one of our visits to the nursing home, when Mum asked 'Did you find William?' I was able to truthfully reply 'Yes Mum, he's in the Navy, he's with his mates on patrol in Italy'. Mum died a few months later, Dad died eighteen months after that. God bless them, the sailor, the airman and the land girl.
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