‘I lost my dad to one of WWII’s greatest mysteries – I was amazed to find a letter he wrote about me’

A woman whose father died in World War II never got to meet him – but decades later discovered a stunning comment he wrote about her in a letter.

Flight Lieutenant Alfred ‘Ginge’ Culver DFM disappeared along with three other airmen and a famous war artist during a search and rescue operation over Iceland on September 2, 1942.

His wife had given birth to a daughter just eight weeks before the tragedy, which remains one of the greatest mysteries of the war.

Nearly 84 years later, that daughter Carol Lockwood has revealed the treasure trove of letters she discovered after her mother’s death in 1992.

Not only did it bring her father to life, it revealed his hope she would find a love like he felt for his wife.

‘I can’t wait to meet her…If she finds someone to love her half as much as I love you, my sweet, I shall welcome the lucky man with open arms. I love you,’ Ginge wrote on August 1, 1942.

Before joining the RAF aged 17, Ginge had worked as an apprentice at Anstey’s in Maidstone. He’d met his wife Olive, who was four years older than him, when she was serving at a local shop and instantly took a fancy to her.

In August 1935, he asked his employer to release him so he could join the air force. It would be a move that took him to an aerodrome in Bircham Newton, Norfolk, and Bawdsey on the Suffolk coast where he took part in the very first radio wave experiments.

In 1940, Olive and Ginge married and moved into married quarters, but within two years, in February 1942, he was posted to Iceland to join the Coastal Command’s 269 Squadron. His mission there: protect convoys travelling to relieve Russia and search for U-boats. Ginge got his Distinguished Flying Medal (DFM) when his Hudson was shot, and the nose cone was blown off, rendering him unconscious and nearly sucking him out of the aircraft.

‘But he was held in by the chin strap of his helmet, which was caught in his seat,’ daughter Carol Lockwood, now 84, explains.

‘The plane was going into a dive and very nearly hit the sea. The second pilot tried very hard to bring it back up again but he couldn’t. Ginge then came round and between the two of them, they managed to haul the plane back up’.

Later, during a debrief, Ginge pulled a piece of shrapnel from his thigh. On August 30, 1942, Eric Ravilious, the famous war artist, landed in Reykjavik, fascinated by planes, the sea and the ice. It was during an interaction in the officers’ mess that the Flight Lieutenant met the artist. Ginge reportedly said to him: ‘A fella’s gone down in the drink, we’re going to search for him tomorrow. Would you like to come with me?’

The next day at 5.30am the plane with a crew of five took off on its search and rescue operation to locate a Hudson that had gone missing the day before. One crew member on that missing Hudson was the brother of comedian Tony Hancock, called Colin.

Carol, who always knew from an early age the events that led to her father’s passing, says: ‘Three planes took off, the weather was supposed to be good. There’s no radio contact at all. Two planes returned, Ginge’s plane didn’t. There was no radio contact, no mayday, absolutely nothing.

‘And it’s a mystery to this day why nothing was ever heard about it. You’ll want to know why it happened, but we have no idea. No oil slip, no wreckage, absolutely nothing. It’s one of the great mysteries of the war.’

A search plane was sent up to look for the missing aircraft but they ‘searched and searched and searched and found nothing’. All five crew members were never seen again. Olive received the dreaded news that her husband was missing via telegram. She later heard from the British Red Cross of his death, and received a commendation from King George VI, stating that it was with great sorrow he learned of the pilot’s death.

Baby Carol, born only a few months earlier on July 1, 1942 would never meet her father. Church-going Olive never married again, believing anything else would be ‘second best’.

Although Carol grew up knowing about the circumstances of her father’s death, it wasn’t until her mother passed in 1992 that she found an ‘enormous cache’ of letters uncovering the details of the past. One handwritten letter dated August 1, 1942, detailed Ginge’s delight at learning his daughter had been born.

Reading the letters

‘I’ve received a load of letters and the birth news of Carol Mary, she sounds absolutely spiffing and I can’t wait to meet her. I love you,’ he penned. ‘She obviously has my good points; I wouldn’t let it worry you unduly. Later she will probably take after you, snaring unwary men and probably proposing to them. Not to mention, of course, that she will most probably likely be immodest to the point of indelicacy.

‘However, if she finds someone to love her half as much as I love you my sweet, I shall welcome the lucky man with open arms. I love you.’

And Carol did meet someone to love her (at least) half as much as Ginge loved Olive. In 1959, 16-year-old Carol spent weekends at Maidstone Sailing Club with her mother, where she met fellow club member Derek. The now 88-year-old jokingly describes ‘loitering with intent’ for several weekends in a row when he would see Carol standing outside.

One day, despite having the mark of a horseshoe on her forehead and a black eye, plus much persuasion from her mother, she finally approached Derek and ‘it all started from there’. They were engaged in 1960 and married on July 15, 1961 at Loose Church – the same site as her father’s war memorial and the place her mother is now buried.

Derek, who did national service from 1957-1959, had worked for the Goodyear tyre company in Norwich before he was offered a post at the Maidstone depot. His career took the family all around the country, from South London to Solihull, St Albans, and eventually back to Carol’s grandmother’s house in Pickering Street, Maidstone. In 2008, they settled in East Farleigh. Sixty-five years later, the Lockwoods are celebrating their Blue Sapphire anniversary.

‘We’re joined at the hip, we do everything together,’ Carol remarks. ‘We tolerate each other,’ Derek laughs. Together they have six granddaughters from their two sons, Ian, born in 1969 and John, 1973. From sailing to aircraft shows, going to the seaside, having fish and chips, the county show, and fostering 16 greyhounds, the pair share many interests.

When asked the secret to a long marriage, Carol says: ‘One or other of us will say, neither of us wanted a divorce on the same day. To which the reply usually is ‘Sometimes it’s got pretty close, five to 12 and five past 12 but we’ve never actually managed to want a divorce on the same day’. ‘We have divorces all the time, because I’m not good at map reading. We annoy each other to hell, but we’ve got each other’s back when push comes to shove.’

That being said, the Lockwoods admit they don’t talk things through and can go silent for three days before there’s a ‘thaw’. ‘And we pretend it didn’t happen,’ they chuckle. She adds: ‘Derek is able to shut things off, he’s Taurus… I tend to fester being Cancer the crab, on the inside there’s a lot going on.’ Their advice to couples who are starting out? ‘Work at it and don’t give in,’ they said. ‘Stick with it.’

In 2014 Carol and Derek made a pilgrimage to Iceland to mark the anniversary of Ginge’s death, after reading in his letters about a ‘spiffing waterfall’ he’d promised to show his wife.

‘I stood by that waterfall that he would have shown Ma, had things turned out differently,’ Carol said. ‘It really hit me when we took off in the plane to come home, we came south over the sea and I looked down on that dead, grey sea, and thought: Somewhere, at the bottom down there, there’s still a plane with five skeletons in it. That’s when it really hit me.’

At the time of 25-year-old Ginge’s death, his logbook records 1,950 hours of flying. If he had flown for another 10 minutes on the last flight, he would have topped 2,000 hours flying in his career. He was due to finish his tour and come home in October, a few weeks after he disappeared. He was going to be stationed at Detling and was set to be promoted to squadron leader.