MEMORY RESTORED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 February 1939, Page 7

MEMORY RESTORED

ENGLISHMAN IN AMERICA. CONVERSATION AT CRICKET. An Englishman who lost his memory while working in America, and was given up as dead by his parents in Cheshire, has regained full possession of his faculties, thanks to a conversation duriifg a game of cricket.

In the summer of 1936 Tom Mathias, son of an English Rugby international, was in the United States. He was attacked by malaria for the fifth time. 11l and worried he wandered from State to State, from job to job. He had lost his memory. One day Mathias played cricket with other English "exiles.” During the game he talked to a business man from Nottingham. They discussed England. The Nottingham man was puzzled by the vagueness of his new friend’s recollection of places.

Dimly Mathias remembered Notting- | ham. He said he thought his mother I came from that city. More questions, and he remembered his mother's mai- | den name, then knew for certain that | she was a Nottingham woman. The I Nottingham man remembered her. The rest was easy. A letter to Mrs Mathias in England, and the mystery was cleared up —which intensive searches by the police and wireless broadcast appeals throughout the American continents had failed to' solve. Ton? Mathias came home for; Christmas.