Also, I hope you managed to find the right gifts for your loved ones, I have personally been struggling this year to find the right presents but seems like somehow and by sheer luck, I managed to ace it!
A few months ago, the German airport customs destroyed the Mighty Jingles’ Zippo lighter. He loved that zippo as it had his ship’s name, “HMS Newcastle” engraved on it and it was a gift from the Royal Navy after he did his 22 years.
For the past months, I have been searching for a replacement and I managed to find one in an antique store. An HMS Newcastle Zippo. It was also engraved and has a nice crest stuck to it, Jingles' did not have the latter.
It did not say from which ship it belonged to and to be honest I am not very knowledgeable on the matter, it could have been from the D87 that he served on or from the WWII-era C76.
The Zippo lighter arrived just before Christmas and I wasn’t sure of its condition, so I decided to give this one gift earlier to him. If he did not like then I would try to procure something last minute before the Christmas day.
It turns out the zippo belongs to the D87’s predecessor, the C76.
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On 15 June 1942, it was hit on the starboard side forward by a torpedo from the German S-56 E-boat while on an escort mission from Alexandria to Malta and received substantial damage. This ship was patched up in Bombay, India (today's Mumbai) and fully repaired in New York, USA. According to the wife of Arthur Lott, an HMS Newcastle Torpedo Operator who’s now deceased but was aboard the ship when the incident happened, the ship had to sail backwards all the way to the US in order to receive repairs.
Also, on a lighter note, pun intended, according to Sarah Hussey, her grandfather P.O. Douglas Glen Pring that served in the ship between 1939 and 1947 and his shipmates re-christened as Roman Catholics so that they had the excuse to leave the ship while in port every Sunday in order to “attend church” given that the only God Botherer on board belonged to the Church of England.
After WWII, the ship took part in the Korean War acting as flagship and gunfire support provider for the UN in the early 1950’s and was decommissioned and sold for scrap in 1959 in Scotland.
With all this said, I gave the zippo as a gift while being completely oblivious of its background to Jingles and he was struck in awe…I got him a still functional zippo from WW2 and couldn’t be more in love and happy with it.
And rest assured, this zippo won’t see airport customs!
