9:10am Wednesday 30th December 2009
By Gazette newsdesk
A MOVING but ultimately tragic story of romance between a teenage schoolgirl and the trainee naval officer who became her ‘secret’ fiance has been told in a remarkable new book.
South Lakeland artist June Tower penned her fascinating biographical account - Maritme Mail - after re-reading copies of almost a thousand letters she exchanged with her dashing suitor John Treleaven between 1946 and 1950.
The original letters, which give a fascinating account of naval life in post-war Britain as well as telling an intensely personal story, were donated to the National Maritime Musuem in the 1980s.
The correspondance began in January 1946 after June, then 15, metJohn at a church house party in Streatham Common, London. They became secretly engaged after John proposed by letter in October and the pair continued corresponding until after their marriage in April 1950.
A year later - a day after they celebrated their first wedding anniversary - John was dead.
The midshipman lost his life with 74 other men when the submarine HM Affray sank while on a training exercise off Portsmouth.
Their bodies still lie at the bottom of the English Channel.
June, now 79, recalls being left devastated by the tragedy but almost 60 years on does not blame anyone for it, even though it was suggested at the time the sinking could have been caused by mechanical defects.
“I was angry and heartbroken,” she told me. “We had only been married a year. On April 15, the day before the Affray sank, we had the most wonderful first wedding anniversary, sailing in the Channel with three of John’s naval friends.
“It was to be the last day of their lives. After I said goodbye at the end of the day, I never saw any of them again.”
But losing John made her determined to give something back to life, so she enrolled as a trainee nurse at St Thomas’s Hospital.
While working in the National Health Service, June met her second husband Julian Tower and the couple settled in Kent. In 1990, they retired to Natland.
However, June never forgot her first husband and their tragic love story.
She kept all their letters until 1986 when she decided to donate them to the Maritime Museum because of their significance as a social history of the Royal Navy and Britain in the austere post-war years.
The collection, which also includes photographs and other memorabilia, has since been described by the museum’s Caird Library curator of Manuscripts, Andrew Davis, as ‘our most important collection from the mid-twentieth century’.
June said she feels a particular sense of pride that they are now kept alongside letters from such naval luminaries as Nelson, Hardy and Collingwood.
“The letters are an echo of a lost age,” she said. “We kept our engagement secret becasuse I was still at school doing my ‘O’ levels and didn’t want to boast about it. In those days you had to behave properly.
“We were so happy when we finally convinced our parents and vicar and John’s captain to give us permission to marry.”
In the prologue to her book, June says: “You can never forget a great tragedy in your life, like the loss of the Affray . . . However, we both knew we had not got long together and reading the letters again was an acknowledgement and acceptance of a love and friendship that is rare.”
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