UK tells NZ war vet – go home

A former sailor from Wanganui who joined the Royal Air Force during World War II and also fought with the RNZAF has been told he has no right to live in Britain.

Noel Bevan settled in Wearside, Sunderland, after the war, married and raised three children but has now been told by British immigration to return to his native New Zealand, the Sunderland Echo newspaper reports.

Mr Bevan married his UK sweetheart, Marjorie Dumble, in 1944, and worked until his retirement 19 years ago. Now the 84-year-old has just six weeks to prove he's entitled to stay in the UK or face expulsion.

He was returning to Newcastle Airport after visiting his daughter in Spain when immigration officers stopped him and said he had no right to be in the UK, even though it has been his home for more than 60 years.

Faced with leaving his home at Chester Mews, Mr Bevan said: "I'm devastated. I've lived in Sunderland all my adult life.

"I met my wife here, raised my family here and I fought for this country - and now they say I'm not entitled to be here," he told the Sunderland Echo.

Mr Bevan was working on a British steamship during World War II when he was captured and taken on board a German supply ship, the Altmark.

More than 300 British sailors, from ships sunk by the German battleship Graf Spee, were imprisoned on the Altmark when the destroyer HMS Cossack ran it down in a Norwegian fjord in February 1940. The men were freed in hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets.

In London, Mr Bevan joined the Royal Air Force and spent the next four years in the RAF and also in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, serving in Malta and Egypt.

Through a friend in the RAF he met his wife, and they had three daughters: Angela, 65, who lives in Spain; Sandra, 60, who settled in South Africa; and Judith, 59, who lives in Sunderland.

Mr Bevan said he had never held a British visa but was allowed to stay in the UK because New Zealand was part of the Commonwealth.

His daughter Judith, a community worker, said: "It's absolutely ridiculous. He's lived here for all these years and has fought in the war. How could he go back to New Zealand? Most of his friends there have passed away now.

"He hasn't got anywhere to live. Here he's got his own house, and he's too old to uproot and leave."

A Home Office spokesman said he could not comment on an individual case, but the local member of the European Parliament, Martin Callanan, said: "It would seem an extremely bizarre decision by the immigration services. With all sorts of illegal immigrants roaming the streets, I would have thought the immigration services could make more deserving cases for deportation than Mr Bevan."

Lily Taylor, 83, chairman of the RAF Bomber Command Association of the North East and its Sunderland branch, said the expulsion threat was disgraceful.

"It makes you wonder if this country is worth fighting for if they are going to do things like this."

- NZPA