An emotional radio reunion as Anastasia’s hero is found
RTÉ Radio One listeners couldn’t believe their ears last week when Joe Duffy’s Liveline spoke to Mary Thompstone, who works at St Aidan’s Services in Gorey and lives in Kilanerin, as she told an incredible story about how her late mother Anastasia (Anna) O’Donoghue as a young woman in her early 20s was saved from drowning near Cahore by an unlikely hero in 1953.
Anatasia went on to lead a rewarding life, filled with love of family, her vocation of nursing and her fondness of place in county Wexford as she came from a farming family (O’Donoghues) of Barnaree-Crandaniel, Kilmuckridge.
After her passing in 2016, her daughter Mary and the family decided on continuing her mothers’ legacy in trying to find the man that had saved her all those years ago.
Little did she know that within a couple of days of contacting a radio programme, she’d be speaking to the man himself John Eldred (84), who now lives in the UK, live on radio.
Researchers on the programme also revealed that John had been given a bronze medal at a special ceremony for bravery for saving Anastasia in the same year.
Describing it as a Christmas miracle, Mary said there are now plans in the pipeline for them to speak to him again and the may even meet up. ‘I have a to do list at home and every year John Eldred would be on that list. I contacted the programme thinking it might be a bit of a long-shot but I’d try it.
‘I expected they might be able to find a family member of his, but finding him was more than anything I would have expected.
Mary said that as Anastasia was coming to the end of her life, her family began to think deeply about what John Eldred had given them.
‘My mother and my aunt Rita had gone looking for John, and my mother sent him a briefcase and a British encyclopedia.
‘Throughout her life she never forgot him’.
John Eldred described receiving those presents from Anastasia and holding them dear, and Mary said that this meant a lot to her family that he had kept them.
‘His humility really struck me and his humour was amazing.
‘All along I just couldn’t get over why he would just do that for a stranger, his family must have brought him up to be such a man. He had some amazing inner strength like no other person I’ve ever come across in my whole life.
‘He seems to just be a beautiful man as he played it down what he had done completely,’ she said.
Rita Stokes (84), Anastasia’s sister who was on the beach on that day in 1953, said Anastasia would have been absolutely thrilled to know that contact had now been made with her hero John.
‘All her life she would have wanted to meet him again and over the years, the story would come up and we would tell it and retell it.
‘She couldn’t swim all her life, she was like a stone and she couldn’t float. I remember her saying she prayed and prayed, and kept thinking if she waved her hands someone would see her.
‘We were a mile from the point where we went in, and seagulls were hovering over her. I used that as my mark as I could see her because of that’.
Although there was no help to be seen, Rita ran up the beach after she thought she had seen people but her mind played tricks on her as it turned out to be horses in the distance.
She eventually climbed a garden wall and came into an orchard where she saw John Eldred with his family.
‘I couldn’t get a word out and I pointed towards the sea. It all went from there as his father told him to save her, his father must have trusted that he could do it.
‘I couldn’t believe how young he was, the same age as I was, but he was an extremely brave 17 year old’.
From there, John got down to the beach, entered the sea and saved Anatasia.
He told Joe Duffy that he had been taught life-saving during his education in England, and his family were living in Howth at the time and he just so happened to be on their holidays in Wexford.
He said he remembered the event and Anastasia as if it happened yesterday, and described the current as ‘quite strong’.
Rita said that she always looks back on the events of that summer as miraculous.