Hello Everyone
I have joined this community because I am trying to find information about the above gentleman which arises from a moving family story from WW2.
My mother who is still alive at 92 served as a very young WAAF at the Canadian built RAF "super-hospital" at Wroughton in Wiltshire. She was there from 1943 to her demobilisation in 1945.
My mother is an attractive, vivacious kind hearted woman and she made many friends and had many admirers working under often shockingly traumatic circumstances, including nursing some of the young men facially reconstructed by the truly remarkable surgical pioneer Archibald Macindoe.
Amongst her admirers and a close friend was a young Scots navigator in Bomber Command called Charles inevitably "Jock" Stobbie. He had been transferred from active duty to Wroughton when the bombing campaign ended in 1945.
Whilst there he contracted Polio in the little reported epidemic that broke out at the end of the war and my mother spent hours with him when he was in an Iron Lung. Before this he had written a love letter to my mother in Gaelic a treasured possession.
He did get better. My mother was demobilised and married my father another young man working as a ward master having been a Rear Gunner in Bomber Command. He and Jock were rivals. My mother said to Jock "Dont fall in love with me Jock, Im in love with Stan". "Too late" he said. She was demobbed and they didnt stay in touch.
Its haunted my mother ever since and she would dearly like to find out what happened to Jock.
I have tried but its difficult to find records as I am not a blood relative or kin. As he was a Navigator he would have had a rank usually Flight Lieutenant but there were a number of Navigators who were Flight Sergeants.
My mother recalls his family were from Sterling. I'm afraid this is all I know.
I note there is controversy about the Sept status or otherwise of Stobbie or Stobo.
I wonder if any of you fine folks can help me find some information about this by all accounts lovely and gallant man whom my mother has talked about regularly for ever since.
Richard Lilley
Bookmarks