A pair of wartime binoculars have been returned to their owner’s family – nearly 100 years after being lost – marking the end of an international quest.
John Oldham-Malcolm, formerly of Telford, has been handed back binoculars lost by his grandfather in Italy in 1919 just after the First World War.
They were engraved with the words “H L Oldham Royal Artillery” and belonged to Col Hugh Langston Oldham who lived near Wellington.
Col Oldham was a Deputy Lieutenant for Shropshire, a founder member of the Church Assembly and lived at Leaton Grange until 1965. He also owned Overley Hall, near Wellington, from 1919 where they lived until 1936.
Col Oldham was the eldest son of the Archdeacon of Ludlow, and was elected Vice President of the Wrekin Division of the Conservative Association in 1922.
He founded and was the first chairman of the Shropshire Service Funds Council as well as being vice president of several branches of the British Legion and county director of British Red Cross Society.
Mr Oldham-Malcolm said: “He was also chairman for many years of the Wellington and District Cottage Hospital, President of Wellington and District YMCA and president of Wellington Area Boy Scouts.”
Dr Werner Sorg, an Austrian Surgeon, inherited the binoculars after his father found them in an Italian ditch shortly after the First World War but returned them to the family last month when he moved house following a newspaper appeal.
Dr Sorg had a friend in England who helped him track down the Oldham family via the internet and writing to local papers.
A former neighbour in Wellington and a local solicitor alerted Mr Oldham-Malcolm to the search and the two parties finally met in England to hand over the binoculars.
“I was really pleased when I got the binoculars – it has been nearly 100 years,” said Mr Oldham-Malcolm, who used to live in the Telford area before recently moving to Cornwall. He was vice chairman of Telford and Wrekin Primary Care Trust until 2003.
“It is great to have the binoculars back,” he said. “Really astronomical that, A, that they were found and B, that they were still hanging on to them.”