Alfred Denis ‘Andy’ Parsons

Alfred Denis Parsons, known as Andy, was my father. He disappeared in the South Pacific en route from Samoa to the Tokelau Islands in October 1955. Andy was handsome, a golf and tennis player, a boxer and a swimmer. He studied medicine in Trinity College, Dublin graduating in 1938. He joined the British Army in 1940 and served throughout the war in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was evacuated from Dunkirk, awarded the Military Cross for Gallantry at the battle of El Alamein in 1942 and was seriously wounded in Anzio, Italy in 1944. He and my mother married in 1945. They emigrated to New Zealand in 1947, where I was born in 1951. His unexplained disappearance is a tragedy from which we can never fully recover. Read all about it in ‘People Like Us’.