Making the news once again

One thing is for sure, though, it is hard to believe the following tale is anything other than a happy coincidence, not least when the years involved are considered.

A little over a week ago Derek McCloskey from Drumahoe just so happened to be in the right place at the right time to help a member of staff in Brigade Cricket Club.

A small job of work needed to be done, which necessitated the moving of the fridge. Not a problem to Derek, who rolled his sleeves up and got stuck in.

Here’s the twist: Under the fridge unit were a few pages from the centre of a newspaper. That newspaper was the Sentinel and the pages dated from July 31, 1963. Nothing bizarre in that? Read on: Staring out of one of the photographs was someone that Derek recognised - his sister-in-law’s brother, Clarkson, except that Clarkson is only 39 years old and the newspaper pages are 48 years old.

Clarkson is a brother of Anne Hamilton, from Abbeydale in the Waterside, and Derek is married to Christine, who is the sister of Anne’s husband, Ian. The person Derek saw and thought he recognised was none other than Clarkson and Anne’s father, William Heaney, dressed in his best suit on his wedding day, proudly posing for a photograph with his new bride, Olive (formerly Parkhill), of Stevenson Park, Tullyally.

Sadly, Olive died three years ago, but Anne was so captivated by it that she got the page with the wedding photo colour copied and framed it with the intention of giving her dad a surprise.

“I don’t know what they were at in the Cricket Club, but a member of staff asked my brother -in-law to help them move the fridge, but when they moved it that’s when they looked down and saw the newspaper. When they opened it out it was pages from an old Sentinel from July 31, 1963. It is a brilliant coincidence that when he looked down he saw my mum and dad’s wedding photograph. They got married on July 27, 1963, so it is just amazing that it was my brother-in-law who found the paper,” she said.

“He realised he recognised the features on the person he was looking at but knew it could not have been my brother Clarkson, but Clarkson looks exactly like my dad and when you look at the picture you can see as clear as anything that they are very alike. It is pure coincidence, but it is amazing, too.

“There’s lots of stuff on the pages, it’s unbelievable. There’s a murder, something to do with the houses in Gobnascale being built, and it’s strange because lots of people must have seen that paper lying there over the years, and yet it just so happens that it is my brother-in-law who finds it.

“Mum died nearly four years ago in June, and it would have been lovely for her to have seen this. When I gave dad the framed copy on Wednesday night whenever he saw it he was emotional, and I know my mother would have loved it,” she said.

Anne plans to give the original copy of the paper to her dad - once she has finished showing her friends and neighbours the original copy, she says she’ll give that to her dad too.

“It’s lovely to see it. Aunty Anne is in the picture as is my cousin Rosemary and my uncle, Jim (Parkhill), and my dad’s brother Derek, who was the other groomsman. There’s also detail about what my mum wore on her wedding day,” she said, adding: ”It’s just lovely to have and my mother would have loved seeing it.”