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Lew Skelton is an NZDF Sergeant-Major. The military is not just a day job – he has an interest in military history and is a bit of a collector. His family doesn’t mind a bit of a collection, which is lucky as it includes a World War II Jeep and a New Zealand-built bren-gun carrier often parked up on the lawn of his Feilding home.
Some time ago, Lew acquired a US Army pith helmet via Trade Me. He wasn’t after a hat, as he recalls it, and he doesn’t collect American military ephemera. There were other pieces the seller had which interested him: the hat was part of a job lot. When it arrived, the hat went into a box in the shed, to be looked at some other time.
Some other time turned out to be the first lockdown of 2020. Like many others, Lew used the enforced stay-at-home to do a bit of sorting. In his case, “doing a massive tidy-up” of the memorabilia tucked away in the shed. For the first time, he looked hard at the hat, turning it this way and that. He knew it was not uncommon for soldiers to swap hats: he judged that this may have been a trade between a New Zealander and an American in the Pacific, where both nations had troops in proximity.
The hat told its story. Among other locales inked around its brim were “Suva”, “New Caledonia” and “Guadalcanal”. When Lew tipped the hat over he found a name: LJ Kirk.
With time on his hands, Lew decided to find out what he could about LJ Kirk, starting with the Auckland War Memorial Museum’s online cenotaph. There he was: Captain Lesley James Kirk, and a link to a Listener story about him. The story I wrote, “I only want to be with you”, was first published in the Listener in 2012 and again in 2019 as part of WWII commemorations. It’s Les’s war story, told through the letters he wrote to his son, my father Christopher.
Some social media sleuthing later, Lew sent a Facebook message explaining how he’d acquired the hat and how he’d found me via the Listener story. His message included something equally unexpected.
“This the odd bit,” he wrote. In 2019, he and his family had made a trip to New Caledonia. While there, Lew visited Bourail, the picturesque Commonwealth war cemetery. “I am not sure why, but I took about seven photos that day. After reading your grandad’s story, I went back into my phone and, bugger me, I took a photo of your grandad’s headstone.
“I think it was because I thought it was such a nice spot that I wouldn’t mind being somewhere like that if I ever died overseas.”
Lew closed his message saying, “I think that if any of my hats I have written my name in ever turn up in years to come I would like them returned to family. Please feel free to get in touch.”
I did. Please, I asked him, let me buy the hat. No, Lew wasn’t having any of that. He didn’t want money, he just wanted the hat to return to the family of LJ Kirk, whom he considered the rightful owner.
Rightful? Among the place names recorded on the hat’s exterior are places and dates that come after Les’s death on November 2, 1943. He died of wounds after being shot in the Solomons, specifically Soanatabu, Mono Island, the last amphibious landing of the war. He was 32. He left a widow, Molly, and Christopher, 8.
After his death, his kit was gathered up and returned to Molly in Auckland. The hat stayed behind: Lew assumes another solider acquired it. It kept travelling the Pacific until the war ended, and it came back to Aotearoa and eventually into Lew Skilton’s care.
It took some convincing for Lew to even accept money for couriering the hat to Auckland from Feilding. It arrived, a week before Christopher’s 85th birthday. It’s now a few short weeks from his 89th. Today, the hat hangs on a wall in his study beside Les’s photo and medals.
The hat is the memento that came to us. Other “war heirlooms” left the family much earlier.
My father’s future stepfather also served in the Pacific, a lieutenant in the NZEF (New Zealand Expeditionary Force). It would seem that when shiploads of returning soldiers, sailors and airmen came home, customs checks were scant. Charlie Cameron disembarked and came home to Tauranga with a canvas bag containing a .45 caliber Colt pistol – standard issue to American troops – and a Reising submachine gun, as used by the US Marines.
Different times. In the 1950s, Dad and his stepbrothers would take the pistol and the Reising when they went deer-hunting in Taupō, where the family had a bach. “Nobody whom we met in and around the forest ever asked why we were out shooting with such weapons,” he recalls.
A Reising would achieve national infamy as the weapon used in Auckland’s 1963 Bassett Rd murders. Both the Cameron Colt and the Reising were surrendered to police in the 1960s, although by then, the tale of the Colt had taken another turn.
By the later 1950s, Christopher was working for Fisher & Paykel in Auckland. A US warship was visiting Tauranga, and via the RSA, Charlie Cameron was asked to arrange a deer-stalking trip to Taupō for two of the officers. He in turn asked Christopher to host the trip. F&P was happy to allow him to go: he clearly remembers Maurice Paykel saying, “Give our American friends a good time.”
Good time had, Christopher drove the men back to their ship the next day. “One of them said, ‘Your Colt needs upgrading.’ He took mine, went on board and came back to the wharf and gave me a shiny new Colt, and a box full of .45 ammunition. I remember very clearly being a bit nervous walking past police and other people on the wharf as I went back to the car.”
Different times.
To read more about what to do with war memorabilia, go here.
