Vigil

Vigil BBC1

I’m enjoying Vigil on BBC TV. The drama set aboard a nuclear submarine based on the Clyde being shadowed by Russian and American U boats serves as a reminder that nearly 70 years on there is still an unofficial Cold War being waged. The Russians still seek intelligence that would benefit them just as they were doing in the 50s when Peter Begg was developing nuclear propulsion for warships built on the Clyde. A leading criminologist told me about Occam’s razor when I told him Peter’s story; in other words that the simplest theory is the most likely. We still believe Peter’s disappearance was connected with his work and with the information he possessed about nuclear warships. The truth is still out there.

The Road to Glencoe 18.7.16.

My cousin and I were searching for information about Peter’s disappearance in Glencoe more than sixty years ago. We’d started with the newspaper cuttings and then when I spoke to someone at his old address in Glasgow who remembered him, I began to think it might just be possible that other people might still be alive who had known him.

We had the cutting naming two of Peter’s friends so Bev and I started searching for people called Larkin and Drew in the Glasgow area.  Nothing came up under Larkin, but one paper gave Mr Drew’s address as Balloch by Loch Lomond.  A search online came up with a family of that name in the town, so I wrote a polite letter asking whether they may have had a father or an uncle aged around 90, who may have been a climbing friend of Peter Begg’s.  A couple of weeks later I got an email from a Mr Drew stating “I’m afraid that I have no family connection”.  What surprised me though was his email signature which named him as:

“Project Leader,  BAE Systems Maritime – Submarines”

So he was working on a naval project similar to the one Peter had been on all those years ago. A coincidence?  When he went missing, Peter was employed at Yarrows on the new YARD project developing nuclear powered frigates.  Yarrows were later taken over by BAE.  You could reason that there would be many people living in that area who might be employed at BAE, but of the same name and all those years apart?  It was strange.

Now we were determined to find Peter’s friend.  Bev and I trawled the internet some more. Eventually, I found a newspaper article about the funeral of a well known mountaineer near Loch Lomond. Listed as one of the speakers at the service was an Eric Drew. I sent it to cousin B.

It can’t have been more than a day later and she rang me.

“I’ve just spoken to Eric Drew” was her opening gambit.  She had tracked him down to a village near Glasgow and rung him up.

We’d found our man.  There had been a stunned silence, she said, when she’d told him who she was and why she was calling.  She gave me his number and told me he was expecting my call. I wondered how he was going to react to us getting in touch, digging up an old mystery from sixty years ago.

“I searched for him every weekend until the end of the year” he told me “I still wake up at nights wondering what happened to him”

Again, the reality of Peter’s disappearance and its effect on those who had known him hit home to me. An old man of nearly 90 still haunted by his friend’s apparent death on a mountainside all those years ago. What more could he tell us?

10.8.16. He Will Not Be Lonely

Eric Drew is a tall, still active man in his late eighties, with a devilish sense of humour. He has spent most of his life climbing the mountains and walking the hills of Scotland. He got to know Peter Begg when they joined Yarrows Shipyard on the same day to work on the Yarrow Admiralty Research programme together.  Sharing a love for the mountains, they often went climbing and when Eric came back from a holiday on Arran in September 1954 to hear  Peter had disappeared, he was worried, but convinced he would find him. 

“I searched every weekend until January” he told me when we went to see him at home near Glasgow in July, only giving up when the winter set in and his feet were damaged from the cold and frost.

“I’ll never forget the look in their eyes” he says when he recalls coming down from the mountains for the last time, to meet Peter’s parents’ expectant gaze, and having to tell them he was giving up the search.  “Oh it was terrible. I let them down”

The letters he wrote to Peter’s parents Grace and Harry in the weeks following his disappearance are a moving testament to friendship and loyalty:

“Now I realise how everyone feels about Peter being on the hill” he writes “but he is not alone. Others are up there lying beside him and many times I and my friends and his friends too who knew him will be beside him. He will not be lonely in the land which was truly his second home”

He still wakes up at night wondering what happened to him.  Did he set off for the Lost Glen, trip and lose his footing, fall down a crevice?  Did he fall into the river and get swept out to sea at Glencoe?  No, he was too experienced, fit and capable to die in such a prosaic way, concludes Eric.

So how can he have simply disappeared?

According to Eric, someone gave Peter a lift up to Glencoe from Glasgow that Friday evening. He spoke to him at the time, but now can’t remember who he was or where he dropped him.  Who was Bryan Larkin, I ask, the other man named in the newspapers as being a friend of Peter’s who helped search?  Larkin worked at Yarrows. He was a bit of an attention seeker Eric tells me, someone who put themselves at the forefront of the story, speaking to the police as though he was a close friend.

And Eric says that Peter called himself by his middle name in Glasgow “Just call me Ernie” he told him.  “Why would that be, I ask?”  “New identity?” replies Eric.  This is just what I and my cousins are starting to believe – that Peter/Ernie did not die in Glencoe, but chose to disappear.