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There is nothing particularly unusual about the 1960s transistor radio, which has recently found a new home on a shelf in Jill McClean’s lounge in Warkworth.
Typical of its era, it runs on batteries and only receives the AM frequency, plus two shortwave radio bands. But to Jill, it is as precious a memento as she could wish for.
Along with a few photos, letters and a wooden tray made in a school woodwork class, it is all she has to remember her twin brother Jack Williams, who was killed in action in Vietnam in June 1969.
“I remember celebrating my 21st birthday by myself,” Jill recalls. “It was an eerie feeling. Thank goodness I had my close friends from training college to support me.”
The return of the radio to Jack’s family started with a chance meeting at an Anzac service in Timaru in 2019, which Jill’s older brother Grant, who was travelling around the South Island, attended with his son.
Vietnam veteran Peter Anderson was also at the service and noted that Grant was wearing Vietnam medals on the right side of his chest, alongside medals on the left side which were obviously his own.
Later, at the South Canterbury RSA, Grant asked if there was anyone from Victor Four Company there.
“We asked him if he was looking for anyone in particular, and he said his brother had been in Victor Four,” Anderson recalled.
It was then that Anderson made the connection that Grant’s brother Jack was the soldier who had sold him a radio when their paths crossed at the Burnham Military Camp in late 1968.
Williams was about to ship out to the 1st Battalion RNZIR, 28th Commonwealth Brigade in Terendak Camp, just north of Malacca, in Malaysia.
“He must have been a bit short of money and decided to sell his transistor radio,” Anderson told the Timaru Courier.
“He wanted $20 for it – quite a lot of money in 1968. That explains why my name and regimental number are printed on the inside back flap.”
On a trip home to NZ from Vietnam, Anderson sold the radio to his sister. Just over 50 years later, she returned it to Anderson in good working order so he could pass it on to Jack’s family.
Jill says Grant carried the radio with him while he toured the South Island and then recently decided it was her turn to have it.
“I use the tray Jack made in woodwork nearly every night and now I have his radio, just another little reminder every time I see it.
“Jack was an outdoors sort of boy – always fishing, camping and swimming in the river – and joined the Regular Force Cadets straight out of the 4th Form.”
He was just 20 when he was killed on his first operation on June 17, 1969, shortly after arriving in Vietnam.
He was buried in the military cemetery in Terendak Camp. His body was repatriated to New Zealand in 2018 as part of the Te Auraki return of NZ service personnel who were buried in South-east Asia, and is now buried in Waipukurau Cemetery in Hawke’s Bay.
