BACK TO LIFE

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2227, 15 January 1921, Page 3

BACK TO LIFE

A PHILOMEL MAN'S STORY

A strange slorv of :i coincidence in names, .and also nicknames, i> told by jin Es.-ex correspondent of the London Doily Express. Lx-bcr-n'eaut \\. ( lilt, ot the Essex ( onnl\ ’Constabulary, believed Unit his son, First-elns.s Petty Officer Reginald Clift, I LX., hud been dead for three years. One evening lit* was called out from his club to meet his son. Telling the story. * Sergeant Clift said : “Keg. has been in the Navy for IS years. The last letter I had from him was from Wellington, X.Z., in 1914, when he was chasing the Cleric an s in the South Pacific. 1 kept writing letters, Iml received no reply. Mv son (.ells me he neve'r received my letters.. He also wrote to me regularly. I became worried, and asked tin* Admiralty about him. They told me he was in HALS. Philomel. One day in the winter of '1917 I met a sailor wearing the Philomel cap ribbon. T asked him ii he knew ‘Lofty’ Clift. He was called ‘Lofty’ Clift in the Navy because of his size. The sailor answered: ‘I knew him well. Poor Lofty went down in action in the Tigris. 1 was there.’ Time went, on without hearing any word, and I accepted the sailor's story as true; so did his mother and other relations.” The explanation of Hie story was that there was another Clift on the Philomel, and he also was nicknamed “Loftv’ ’on account of bis size; ’and it was this second “Lofty” Clift who went down in the Tigris.