Falklands hat comes home to a hero
A FALKLANDS veteran has been reunited with the sailor’s hat he last wore 38 years ago as HMS Invincible sailed home to Britain at the end of the conflict.
Richard Farrand was a 23-yearold leading engineer aboard the famous aircraft carrier when he lost the hat after 166 days at sea.
He lost it when the crew began celebrating as they sailed into Portsmouth at the end of the 1982 conflict with Argentina.
But a dealer in military artefacts, who discovered the hat among a job lot of memorabilia, took the
Paul Jeeves
trouble to track down its owner. And nearly four decades later it has been returned to Richard.
The father-of-two said: “I have no idea how I lost it. It just disappeared as we sailed back into port and I never thought any more of it.
“To be honest, we all had a few beers on the way back in.You know what sailors are like. It passed in a bit of a haze and somewhere along the way the hat went missing.”
However, the dealer had tracked Richard down online and sent a note to his company. Richard said: “I’d forgotten all about it. It never crossed my mind until one day a bloke I work with said, ‘You’d better come and have a look at this’.”
The dealer, Jon Potter, from Bucks, had written: “I deal in Sporting & Military antiques and may have a cap from Invincible that could have been yours.
“Inside it’s marked ‘LMEM (M) Farrand’. If it was yours I’d be happy to re-unite the two of you.”
Richard, 60, said: “I was bowled over. I couldn’t believe how generous he was. I told him I would pay whatever the hat cost him and the postage but he would not hear of it.
“He said he had sold everything else in the lot and made a profit so I could have the hat for nothing.”
Jon, 59, who runs online site Gradwells, said: “My grandfather was in the Navy and I know what these things can mean.”
After 14 years in the Navy, Richard, from Marsden, West Yorkshire, spent 25 years in the police force. He now works as a commercial diver.
Last year he made an emotional return to the Falkland Islands.