Always in our hearts (From York Press)

Always in our hearts

10:11am Monday 7th November 2011 in History articles

ON a Thursday in the autumn of 1942, a young gunnery sergeant sat down in Hull to write a letter to his wife in York.

Sgt Richard Robinson Hunter – known to his wife Violet and friends as Dick – had volunteered a couple of years earlier and had been posted to the 3/2nd Maritime Regiment of the Royal Artillery.

A former Rowntree worker, the 29-year-old had, since joining up, served as a gunner on merchant navy ships on Russian convoys, taking vital supplies to Murmansk and Archangel.

That Thursday, he was waiting to hear whether he would be required to serve on another convoy, or whether he’d be able to visit his family – Violet and the couple’s two young sons, James and Brian.

“My own darling wife and sons,” he wrote. “I am hoping if there is no further news to be home tomorrow…”

Even if he was asked to join another convoy, he added, the money would come in useful. Violet was pregnant with the couple's third child, a daughter later to be named Sylvia. “Don’t look at it too bad, dear,” Sgt Hunter wrote to his wife. “We have got to have money for our new baby...I will only do one trip and I should be home for Christmas, all being well.”

He asked Violet to give his love to the two boys, and told her he loved her. And he added: “Darling, if I do not come home tomorrow, you will know I have gone to sea…”

It was the last letter Violet was ever to get from him.

Sgt Hunter joined a convoy bound for Newfoundland, as gunnery sergeant on the merchant ship SS Empire Leopard. In Newfoundland, the ship took on board 7,410 tons of zinc concentrates and munitions, and shortly after joined 44 other ships and a small number of escorts sailing for Liverpool.

In the early hours of November 2, however, Convoy SC-107 was intercepted by a “wolf-pack” of German U-boats. Several convoy ships were torpedoed, including the Empire Antelope and the Empire Leopard. The Antelope sank, but all her crew were rescued. The Leopard exploded: and of the 34 crew and seven gunners aboard, only three survived. Sgt Hunter was not among them.

His daughter was born a couple of months later, in January. Sylvia never knew her father. “But although I never saw him, I still love him with all my heart,” says the 68-year-old mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, who now lives in Dringhouses.

Her own mother never forgot her husband, she says, and never married again. “I think she never gave up hope ...”

She talked to her mother often about her father. The picture she gained was of a decent, loving man, who didn’t drink or smoke and put his family first. One of her most precious mementos is that last letter her father wrote: faded and much folded now. “In that letter… that’s my dad.”

Every Remembrance Day, she and her family remember the father she never knew. And it still angers her that he was never given an official Russian Convoy medal. His name is inscribed on a memorial at Portsmouth, and at Nestlé in York.

But when she wrote to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in the 1992 asking that they consider her father for a medal, she got a letter back rejecting her request.

“It is not in the tradition and practise (sic) of our country to award medals and other decorations posthumously,” the letter said. That still rankles for Sylvia. The men who gave their lives on convoy duty are the forgotten men of the war, she says.

It is just over 69 years since her father died. But he’s never been forgotten: not by his family and descendants. And one thing is for sure: he will be at the forefront of their thoughts on Friday, when Remembrance Day comes around once again.