A 40-year blanket mystery
It was a New Year clean-out that sparked Gabrielle Bundy-Cooke to seek an end to a 40-year family mystery.
The Palmerston North City councillor is looking for the owner of a Scout blanket her family found on the side of the road in 1979 when they lived in South Taranaki.
‘‘It’s been kept in the attic in a box of stuff I hadn’t opened for about 24 years,’’ she said. ‘‘It just got put away and not opened until the other day when I was just getting a few things in order and having a clean-out, but it’s looked after my china and crystal.’’
The blanket has a number of Scout badges on it from around New Zealand and some from Australia, and is quite worn and fragile. She said she was going to throw most of the stuff from the box out or give it to charity, but first sent some pictures of it to her children and was promptly
told off. ‘‘They said don’t throw those out, that’s our childhood.’’
The badges alone could be worth a bit of money, she said, but she’d gladly donate the proceeds back to the Scouts if she couldn’t track down the owner.
Bundy-Cooke said her family had always meant to find the owner but the attempt kept getting put off.
‘‘Back then you had to go into town and put an ad in the paper just to try and find the owner. So it got put off and we’ve kept a hold of it,’’ she said.
Earlier this week she tried a different approach, posting a picture of the blanket on Facebook.
Her listing has since been commented on more than 70 times and been shared more than 300 times. One reply from Rex Moi helped verify the age of the blanket and possibly the owner.
He said the badges on the blanket showed the original owner went to the Australian Scout Jamboree in 1964/65 and also the New Zealand Jamboree (probably as a Venturer) in 1969.
The original owner would now be around 68 years old.
Bill Anderson hoped the owner could be found and said the blanket had some very old badges on it.
‘‘I have some old ones like them and I been in Scouting nearly 50 years,’’ he wrote. Bundy-Cooke said she was looking forward reuniting the blanket with its original owner. ‘‘I’m excited to think we’ll find someone who will love it.’’