Wigan Album

Peter the waiter on, (I can’t remember his surname) who worked for a number of years for my father at the Wellfield Hotel, Beech Hill. Peter I can describe simply as a gentleman in every sense of the word. Polite, kind and thoughtful. He may not have been the most “efficient” of waiters but he was a lovely man. He’s seen here standing outside the Hotel’s side door entrance, probably on his way to a summer evening stint serving the Wellfield customers.

Always smartly dressed he was unfailingly on time and never let us down. Perhaps this may have reflected his military career where he served in the North African campaign. He was, as you can probably tell from the photograph, a very amiable man and liked to tell jokes at times. They were often “terrible” but we didn’t mind, we knew what to expect, but I hasten to add, they were always “respectable”.

He liked, on occasions, to speak “French” but instead of saying thank you with the words “merci beaucoup”, he would often use the phrase, “Mersa Matruh" which sounded very similar. To the uninitiated it went over people’s heads, and at the time I was a callow teenager, it certainly went over mine.

Peter never really spoke about his war experiences, something which is not rare amongst ex-Servicemen. However, having watched many war documentaries I now realise that Mersa Matruh was a port and the terminus for a single-track railway, which passed through El Alamein. Mersa Matruh served as a vital British military base during World War II and was a major objective of Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, which captured it during the Battle of Mersa Matruh in 1942.

It’s some 50+ years since Peter and I were working together at the Wellfield but I simply wish I’d found the time to have a chat with him to find more about his experiences, as a “Desert Rat”. I was glad I knew him, even though it was for a very short time and I’ve often wondered what happened to him.