Jack Knox: Small items hold big memories — are they yours?

Last week’s column about veterans of the Second World War’s Burma campaign got Gary Hanko rooting through his cupboards.

The Victoria man emerged with a brass mug — a small stein, really — that he thinks belongs somewhere else.

The signatures of 10 individuals are etched on one side. On the other are the year — 1945 — and the name of an army outfit, the 221st Anti-Tank Battery of the Royal Artillery, attached to the Fifth Indian Division of the British 14th Army.

The mug’s story and the identity of those whose names it bears are a mystery to Hanko. “I got it in a box in the auction at Lunds about two years ago,” he says.

It bothers him to own what could, potentially, be somebody’s much-missed memento. “It belongs to someone. It doesn’t belong to me,” Hanko says.

“I don’t want to sell it. I want to give it to its rightful owner.” Failing that, Hanko, who served five years in the navy in the 1950s, wants it to go somewhere appropriate.

Local Burma veterans haven’t been able to help. By 1945, the 14th comprised half a million men from every corner of the Commonwealth, reportedly making it the largest single army in the world (seems ironic that it was known as the Forgotten Army), but only a handful of those who served in it live on Vancouver Island.

One of their number, Michael Finnis, was in the artillery, but his unit fired 25-pounders, not anti-tank guns. (“I never did anything special,” he said Wednesday. “I was just one of the umpteen hundred.”) The signatures (at least the legible ones) on the mug don’t match the names of the local veterans.

Hanko hopes a bit of publicity will solve the puzzle.

Which brings us to another mystery, this one from reader Fern Mackedie.

Mackedie and some friends were in Sidney on Aug. 2 when they came across an old black and white photo in the parking lot behind the Capital Iron store.

Showing a group of eight children in front of what appears to be a ferry, the picture was dated 1963. That led Mackedie and friends to wonder if it had been brought out for a 50th anniversary of some sort — again, meaning someone might be regretting its loss.

“It was well marked with a date and names on the back, and we thought it would be easy to track down the owner of the picture,” Mackedie said. Only three full names were written — Barry Carpenter, Debbie Lawson (or Larson) and Bud Bellamy — but they thought that would be enough.

Alas, such was not the case. They have tried Google, the phone book, even called Prince Rupert to follow a lead — no dice.

So now they, like Hanko, are turning to the public through the Times Colonist.

Sometimes it works. One of the best, and oddest, examples came two years ago when Cobble Hill’s James Walter approached the Times Colonist after finding a prosthetic leg in the Cowichan River. That, along with some RCMP sleuthing, helped lead to its recovery by the Victoria man who had lost it while tubing.

And every year, readers are reunited with items inadvertently donated to the Times Colonist book sale: photos, passports, love letters (though frequent readers may be dismayed to learn the urn of cat ashes remains unclaimed).

In any case, it’s nice to live in a town where people go to such lengths to search out strangers just on the off chance that those strangers might be missing their treasures.