Man reunited with father's wartime documents found hidden in desk drawer

A man has told of his delight at being reunited with Second World War documents that belonged to his father after they were found hidden in a desk 18 years after he died.
Martin Reid bought the desk at auction four years ago but only discovered the folder of documents recently when he was moving furniture and found them behind a drawer that had been stuck.
Mr Reid discovered the papers had belonged to the late Ian Rodger, from Glasgow, who served with 2 Squadron of the 6th Armoured Division Signal Regiment, a unit of the British Army, and fought in Italy and Tunisia during the war.
After hearing about the discovery following an appeal for information made through the Church of Scotland, Mr Rodger's son Sandy came forward to claim the documents.
He travelled from his home in Rye in East Sussex to meet Mr Reid in Edinburgh on Thursday and to thank him personally as he collected the folder.
Mr Rodger, 62, said he had a collection of his father's old papers and letters from the war but had never seen the contents of the folder before, and he thanked Mr Reid for his 'kind return' of the documents.
He said: 'In January 2021, with my 90-year-old mother Isabel's health fast deteriorating, I travelled from home in Sussex to Glasgow to help her move into a care home.
'Under lockdown rules this allowed little time for preparation or even a proper goodbye, and then I was left with less than two days to clear her flat, trying to preserve the memories of her own and my father's long and rather remarkable lives.
'In the process I missed a folder of papers which had fallen behind a desk drawer, and, but for Martin's kindness and initiative, they would have remained lost.
'I am hugely grateful to Martin and to Cameron Brooks from the church for their detective work, and to the multiple people who saw articles about the appeal and got in touch to let me know.'
The folder contained photographs, letters and maps relating to the British Army's involvement in the campaign known as the Liberation of Italy between 1943 and 1945.
Ian Rodger held the rank of captain during the war and can be seen in a wartime photo which appears to feature Major Jack (John) Profumo – who later became a secretary of state but whose political career ended after an affair with Christine Keeler came to light in the 1960s.
After being demobilised, Mr Rodger practised as a solicitor in Glasgow, co-founded Scottish Opera and was involved in the Scouts and Wellington Church of Scotland in Glasgow where he was an elder.
He died aged 91 in 2007 and in March 2021 his desk was put up for sale at McTear's Auctioneers in Glasgow. His widow Isabel died in February 2023.
Mr Reid, from Lanark in South Lanarkshire, bought it for £110 and used it regularly at his home over the years, not knowing the historic papers were hidden inside until he found them in late March this year.
Mr Rodger, a business consultant, said: 'The papers add to a fascinating collection of letters maps and photos, telling the story of the 8th Army's advance through North Africa, Italy, and into Austria in the last three years of the war, defeat of the Germans turning into the race for Berlin which shaped Western Europe for the next 50 years.
'The perspective of a signals officer, constantly on the move, keeping troops connected to their command, offers an amazing overview of the conflict.
'There isn't much mention of the human cost of the war, and my father never really spoke of this, perhaps typically.
'But it's a proud and detailed account of an extraordinary endeavour, told by a young man who, with the benefit of hindsight, survived and could be said to have had a 'good war'.
Mr Reid said he is delighted to have been able to reunite Mr Rodger with his father's papers.
'This was a story that certainly captured the imagination of many people and Sandy got in touch with the church the morning the article was published, which was rather astonishing given he lives on the south coast of England,' Mr Reid said.
'The maps, letters and photographs are utterly fascinating and provide a really important insight into the British Army's involvement in the Italian campaign against Adolf Hitler's Germany.
'Sandy is a lovely guy and very proud of his father and it was very moving seeing his reaction as he leafed through the folder and shared anecdotes.'

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When it is wet, it is happy; when it is drained of water, it starts rotting again. A similar process happens with fens. But whereas peat is extracted from bogs to be used for compost, most of our lowland fens have been drained for agriculture. That flush of minerals from the groundwater makes them fertile places, once drained. Peat in the northern hemisphere is mostly made up of mosses. They call the shots; they are the ecosystem engineers. These tiny, centimetre-high plants are alchemists, taking only what falls from the sky and creating a kind of immortality for themselves as they strive to be dead and alive at the same time. They do this by pickling themselves and everything that falls into the bog in acid, which means nothing entirely rots away. The bog mosses' pickle juice also prevents bigger plants from doing too well and shading out the moss. The mosses do this in such style, too. They don't stick to the run-of-the-mill green – they come in every jewel tone imaginable: golds and oranges, neon-green emeralds, lobster pinks and deep wine reds, in russets and chestnut browns, their colours turning with the seasons, deepening across the summer. What appears flat from a distance up close rises and falls in miniature mountains of hummock-type mosses, with valleys, pools and lawns of looser types. The things that live on and in this world have run with this otherworldly theme. There are the giants: bog bush-crickets with their huge antennae; emperor moths with their peacock-like eyespots on their wings; darters, damselflies and dragonflies of all colours that often come to peer at you curiously if you sit for a while. This is to say nothing of the green-eyed horseflies, which are a terrifying size, although it is hard to not be beguiled by their giant emerald eyes. There are frogs, toads, lizards, snakes and so many spiders, including one of Britain's largest, the raft spider. Spend long enough at a bog pool and you might spot one floating, waiting for the vibrations of prey, only to run across the surface of the water and pounce. They go for prey as large as tadpoles, but if you frighten them, they dive and swim underwater. Imagine that – a swimming spider! These are just the easy-to-spot guys. There is an abundance of tiny insects: pseudoscorpions, gnats, midges (not all of which bite), strange-looking larvae and tiny micromoths that flit about. These bring an abundance of other wings. Peatlands are hugely important habitats for birds: hen harriers, golden and white-tipped eagles, merlins, owls, jack snipes, golden plovers, curlews, lapwings, pipits, snow buntings, grouse, dunlins, redshanks and, at coastal edges, strange-looking ducks. A chorus of beings in full song for those intrepid enough to venture in. For that is the thing about bogs: they are not hugely interested in wowing you. The mountains have good views and the forest has majesty; the sand dunes sculpture and the wildflower meadow an easy romance. But the bog is quite happy to be passed over – it will share its best secrets only with those who carefully tiptoe in and are patient enough to wait a while to see what comes out once they have settled down. The bog has other secrets, too: underneath this living layer, preserved in all that peat, is an archive of our past doings. A healthy bog grows just a millimetre a year, which puts in context anyone who tries to argue that cutting peat is sustainable. It is important to remember that less than 13% of our bogs are considered healthy, or in a near-natural state. But each millimetre is a record of everything that happened that year: it holds big data, such as fragments of moth wings or pollen and seeds, and tiny microbe data, such as all the amoeba that dined on the semi-rotting plant material before it got weighed down by water. This allows scientists to take a core sample and tell you what the climate was like 6,000 years ago, which plants grew there, which moths fluttered and which bees buzzed, who crawled over and passed by. There are other buried treasures. The most famous are the bog bodies, including Denmark's iron-age Tollund Man and Ireland's bronze-age Cashel Man, but you can also find hoards of coins, jewellery and weapons, as well as pots and pans, fishing nets, whole canoes, carts and cartwheels and even butter. When our ancestors buried all this, they knew it wouldn't disappear or rot away. It is believed that this is why so much of it is decommissioned, broken and bent, just in case the bog was a portal to another world and the undead might be able to use it when they rose again. Ritually buried bog butter is often found near bog bodies. It represents such a huge amount of milk to a culture only just beginning to farm that if it wasn't a gift to the gods, perhaps it was a gift to the bog itself. The bog certainly represented seasonal abundance for those who knew where to look. It was a source of plant medicines, dyes and fibres. Then there is the rich foraging opportunity: cranberries, bilberries and cowberries, as well as all the meat and eggs from otters, fish and fowl. Not an easy place to get on or off, but useful nevertheless. The reverence our ancestors felt for bogs is a lesson we need to remember. They aren't barren or desolate, although many are certainly remote. They shouldn't be drained or burned to make them productive, nor should they be extracted from. What they need is our respect, because peatlands are the air-conditioning units of the world. Their long-term storage of carbon and filtering of water is helping to keep our climate cool. And no one needs the air-con turned off now. Cors y Llyn near Builth Wells in Powys is a great example of a quaking bog, with strange, stunted ancient Scots pines growing on it. This perfect little bog is surrounded by wonderful orchid meadows (above) and you can nearly always find wild cranberries creeping over the mosses. There is an accessible boardwalk. The Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland is a Unesco world heritage site and perhaps the crown jewel of the UK's peatlands. The biggest blanket bog complex in Europe, it is rich not just in bird life, but also in neolithic structures. Start at the RSPB Forsinard Flows reserve. Swarth Moor is a raised mire next to the village of Helwith Bridge in Ribblesdale. It is home to three nationally scarce species of dragonfly – black darter, common hawker and emerald damselfly. There is well-surfaced bridleway around the southern edge, leading to a viewing platform that gives you a peatland vista without you getting bogged down. The South Pennines is good peat country, with moors galore. Highlights include the moorlands around Gunnerside village, Haworth Moor (above, of Wuthering Heights fame) and Tarn Moss, a raised bog owned by the National Trust. Marches Mosses, a group of lowland raised bogs on the border of Wales and Shropshire, are not without the scars of human intervention – peat cutting, drainage for agriculture, forestry – but still there is a wealth of peatland wildlife, particularly damselflies and dragonflies. There are trails around Bettisfield Moss, Wem Moss and Fenn's and Whixall mosses. Dartmoor in Devon is a vast upland area of peat; much of it is damaged and dominated by purple moor grass, but restoration work is changing this. The visitors centre at Postbridge has Tor Royal Bog, the only raised bog in Devon and Cornwall, while the nearby Fox Tor Mire is a good example of a valley blanket bog. Peatlands by Alys Fowler is out now (Hodder Press, £20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply