Flashback

The Falklands War embrace that made page three

We look back on these pictures and joke, ‘Bet you haven’t been on page three like us!’ They are of all four of us – me, 21 at the time, my wife Faye, plus my older brother Michael and his girlfriend Sandra. It was 5am on 12 May 1982 and Michael and I were about to board the QE2 to go to war.

My brother and I have always been close, as were Faye and Sandra. We were lance corporals. I served with the Welsh Guards, and he the Scots Guards. We were both radio operators and often stationed around the world, so in a way this posting seemed like just another routine deployment.

In under two weeks, the QE2 had been transformed from a luxury liner to a troop carrier for 3,000 soldiers. There was a lot of media interest and crowds waved us off that day.

Faye and Sandra, also in the military, had wangled past security using their IDS and met us on the dock. We were saying our goodbyes, only half aware our pictures were being taken by the press. Little did we know that one frame, a quick snapshot where we’d swapped over and were embracing each other’s partners, would end up being the one that became really famous, featuring everywhere from the Telegraph to The Sun, wrongly captioned as ‘husband and wife’. We’ve laughed about that for 38 years.

The ship had been made warready, reinforced with steel, with a helicopter pad built over the swimming pool. Flooring was covered in cardboard, the bars closed and the grand pianos taken off the ship.

We spent the 15 days travelling down to South Georgia [the first island captured back from the Argentinians] training. It was only when we got near our destination that things started to feel ominous: the weather turned grey and cold and the waves were huge. When we spotted the Argentine submarine Santa Fe, partially sunk, war began to feel like a certainty.

My lowest moment of the conflict was hearing about the tragic death of fellow soldiers. We had been crammed into a landing craft for a whole night in a rolling sea. There was only enough capacity for half of the battalion to go ashore, and having reached land, I learnt that 54 soldiers I had been with the night before were killed when the ship they were on, the HMS Sir Galahad, was bombed. My brother, distraught, rang through on the radio to check I wasn’t on the ship.

An overriding memory is of it being wet and dark. One night we were stuck in a minefield. My job was to keep communications open within the battalion and upwards to HQ, but noise carries in the dark so I had to whisper updates through the radio.

Faye and Sandra were spared many of these details. We couldn’t talk, but we were able to send each other ‘blueies’, lightweight pre-folded thin blue pieces of paper sent by airmail.

When I returned, Faye and I settled down and had a family. Michael and Sandra got married and were together until Sandra died last year. Between us we’ve had six kids. We didn’t know until you told us that one of the pictures had been made into a jigsaw puzzle – we’ve now got Christmas presents for the whole family sorted.

I’ve had a brilliant career in the military and so many amazing opportunities – I’ve met the Queen twice, received an OBE and travelled the world. Being in a picture that captured that historic time (albeit wrongly captioned!) is pretty high on that list too. — As told to Lucy Dunn