Oldest bell-ringer seeks war hero who saved his legs
THE world’s oldest active bell-ringer is searching for the man who saved his ability to walk during the Second World War.
A bell-ringer since before he was called up in 1939, Dennis Brock, 98, was treated by an Italian soldier after becoming ill through malnutrition in a prisoner-of-war camp.
But Mr Brock has never been able to thank the man.
Now he is searching for the mysterious individual who gave him back the use of his legs – and saved his bell-ring- ing career. The Italian lieutenant used a ground-breaking serum injection into his lymphatic gland.
Mr Brock only knows he was called Antonino Alessi and was aged around 25 and serving as a tenente – or lieutenant – in the Italian army in the Ferrara area in 1943. He wrote to the hospital after the end of the war but never received a reply.
Mr Brock, who served as a lance-bombardier, was captured by German soldiers in North Africa in June 1942 and spent the rest of the war a prisoner.
He became ill while interned in a camp in Italy in 1943. A British doctor recommended that he be transferred to a local cottage hospital, where he received the pioneering treatment from the Italian, who had learnt it in Abyssinia. He said: “He did an experiment, with my agreement. He said, ‘You’ll never walk again if it fails,’ but it didn’t fail. I climb up bell-tower stairs and I can still drive a car.
“The doctor told me I probably wouldn’t make old bones, but I had just got married, and my wife said, ‘You leave that to me’ – and she looked after me so well.
“If I saw him again, I would take him by both hands and say, ‘Look, I’m still walking!’ And someone up there has been guiding him and guiding me too.”