The Lost & Found CLUB

Playboy Bunnies partying once more. Bowie’s bandmates reunited. Wartime foes turned into friends. Over 20 years, the Mail’s Missing And Found column has made them all possible — as the woman behind it recounts

NOT a single letter has piqued my interest quite like the one posted through my door one day in April, 2017.

It was from a woman called Barbara Haigh, 66, who had a charming but rather racy request: would I track down her fellow former Playboy Bunnies so she could invite them to celebrate 50 years since the scandalous club in Park Lane opened its doors?

‘Inevitably, I’ve lost touch with many former employees,’ she wrote. ‘ And I was hoping you might locate as many as possible for our golden anniversary reunion at the Hippodrome Casino in Leicester Square.’

It turned out that a 20-year-old Barbara, tired of competing in beauty contests in her hometown of Liverpool, had seen the role advertised in an entertainment weekly and moved to London to take up the job in 1971.

‘My father was a police chief superintendent in Liverpool and disapproved. But then he and my stepmother came to London and I took them for dinner in the VIP room at Playboy. They met several of the club’s directors, who came over, introduced themselves and put my father’s mind at rest.

‘They were the happiest years of my life. I was there until the club closed.’ After reading that, how could I not help? So we printed Barbara’s request in our Missing ... And Found column, which is dedicated to reuniting long-lost friends, colleagues and family members. The response was extraordinary. Around 30 of the former cotton-tailed Bunny Girls ( mostly grandmas now) responded — all of whom were thrilled to learn of the glitzy West End reunion.

One was Mary Messer, 73 at the time of the reunion, who had been a croupier Bunny at the club from 1966 to 1969 and whose picture from those heady days (together with colleague Bunny Gloria) graced our column.

Another was Denise Irace, who wrote to us: ‘I was the London Club’s first Chinese Bunny, known as Su-Lin. When our paper in Singapore, the Straits Times, interviewed me and put me on the front page, my horrified parents ordered me back home at once, as I was supposed to be studying in London...’

THE

bash itself was, of course, utterly marvellous. And as M&F, as we nicknamed it, celebrates its 20th birthday, it stands out as one of the most memorable reunions we have orchestrated. But each one is special in its own different way.

Stories of old Army buddies, searches for wartime evacuees and reunions with long-absent relatives. So much of our common social and cultural history is crammed into M&F, which has reunited at least 3,000 people.

Readers who have spent years combing online forums and social media sites for someone from their past but have failed to succeed have been reconnected through us.

The idea for the column was conceived one day in early 1998 after a letter landed on the desk of the paper’s then editor-in- chief, Sir David English. It was from a reader in Somerset who explained that due to a family break-up many years earlier, his wife had lost touch with her brother.

She was getting old and yearned to find him again before it was too late. To her great delight, an amateur detective from Anglesey called Gill Whitley tracked down her brother and the estranged siblings were reunited.

The Mail reader then explained that Gill’s success had inspired her to help others reconnect with estranged relatives and friends.

He went on to suggest that the Mail might publish an uplifting article about Gill’s service.

Deeply moved by the letter and with his instinct for human-interest stories, Sir David commissioned a feature from me which would be published and perhaps followed by articles about other people who had been reunited after many years apart.

The Mail duly published my feature and it developed into a regular column. Each week we took a story about someone being sought, as well as a tale of a recent reunion.

At first these reunions came about chiefly through Gill Whitley’s tracing expertise. As the column gained a wider audience, more and more of the ‘missing’ were located directly. For even if the person being looked for didn’t see the column, a friend, neighbour, workmate or cousin might read it and alert them.

In recent years Missing ... And Found has acquired a small band of skilled researchers who, purely for pleasure, follow the column and set themselves the task of tracing the missing persons. They are quick and successful at ferreting around archives. I simply write up their findings and cross my fingers that there will be a happy ending.

I’ve loved all of M&F’s wonderful reunions, but some stand out.

The column has, for instance, twice brought together former wartime adversaries.

In 2009, we reunited one-time German PoW Heinz Bottger with Englishman Stanley Lamb, the guard who befriended him at PoW Camp 801 on Guernsey in 1945.

Heinz, who was living in Hamburg, travelled to Newcastle to visit Stanley and the octogenarians gaily recalled their Guernsey days when Heinz tried (and utterly failed) to teach Stanley the German language.

In the same year, we reunited an Argentine woman, Andrea Maroño, 43, with Michael Poole, 53, the Royal Marine she had known in Buenos Aires in 1982, shortly before the Falklands War.

They had struck up a relationship over the few weeks that he was there, but then the war dragged them apart and although they kept in touch for a while, their lives moved on. But they never forgot each other.

‘I was very young,’ Andrea reminisced at the time. ‘Only 16, and he was 26. Britain, Argentina, Falklands, Malvinas ... we came from opposite sides of the war, but it was a beautiful love story.

SuDDENLy

he was sent to the Falklands and it was over. I don’t want to bother him. But he meant a lot to me and I just want him to know I still think of him.’

Michael’s sister, a Mail reader, spotted that Andrea was using the column to seek him.

Two days after the Mail printed her letter, this message arrived from Andrea: ‘Michael’s sister told him about your story in the newspaper. He contacted me by email and we chatted on an internet messenger. He showed me your article on the webcam, with his photo. I can’t express how thankful I am. I’ll never forget this.’

Children in wartime have also been a recurring theme. In 2015, for example, we reconnected Billy Plain and Alex Belcher with Kenny Salmon and John Miles — two pals with whom they roamed their North London neighbourhood of Finsbury Park during the Blitz.

As Billy wrote at the time: ‘Our memories are still vivid: watching a doodlebug fly over the roof of our house and crash into King’s Cross Station, watching dog-fights in the air, collecting shrapnel.

‘We slept on the platform at Finsbury Park Tube station. All around us, houses were destroyed while we were mucking about in the streets ... and every one of us survived without a scratch!’

I’ve a particular fondness for tales where someone is looking for old friends with whom they had shared a life-enhancing experience.

Their typically enduring sense of joy was demonstrated in John Matthews’s search last year for his fellow travellers on a three-month expedition across Africa in 1975.

Starting from Johannesburg, he recalled how they ‘took a flight around Victoria Falls, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, saw pink flamingos in Kenyan lakes and wild elephants gambolling in the sea, and crossed the Sahara’. There were 18 in the group, ‘plus a guide and driver, Bill Wallace, who led us across politically precarious Africa and maintained our old vehicle — a Bedford 3-ton ex-Army truck.’

The M&F write-up attracted the attention of five of John’s fellow adventurers, as well as the intrepid expedition leader, Bill Wallace.

Last summer, we featured a particularly extraordinary find.

Mike Taylor, now 71, hoped to discover more about his parents’ early lives: ‘Mum married my father, Ernest Withers, a policeman, in 1947 and I was born the following year. But in 1950 my parents split up and I never saw my dad again.’

His mother had died long ago, having never told him much about his father, so he was hoping to fill in some blanks about him by tracing her friends.

yet the column managed to directly track down his dad, aged 98 and living in Kent. Before long, Mike was on the phone speaking to his father for the first time.

‘How mind-boggling is that!’ he later told me. ‘I’m going to visit him next weekend. There are also two half-sisters I never knew I had. I’m ecstatic about this excellent result. It’s changed my life.’

What an example of the power of our little column, still appearing every Saturday in the Mail.