Page 30 - CAMPAIGN Winter 2021

28
CAMPAIGN Winter 2021
Obituaries
Michael “Mick” Sydney Saffery
Michael “Mick” Sydney Saffery, 86, of Stamford passed away peacefully on December 20th, 2020, in hospice care at Stamford Hospital. He was born in Margate, Kent, England, to the late Jack and Daisy Tod Saffery.
Mick joined the Royal Air Force at 17 and spent the next 22 years serving in the UK, Kenya, the Maldive Islands, Malta, Singapore, Italy and Christmas Island in the South Pacific as a telecommunications specialist. He was on Christmas Island in 1958; serving for ten months immediately after the Ministry of Defence made six open-air detonations of hydrogen bombs. He said he didn’t think anything about radiation at the time but spent his off-duty hours playing soccer on a field made of crushed coral, bathing in sea water and eating the sea bass he and his friends would catch.
He met his wife, Dee, in 1970 when serving at Commander Maritime Air Forces Mediterranean in Naples, Italy, while she was stationed with the US Navy at NATO’s Headquarters Allied Forces Southern Europe, also in Naples. They married and moved to England to England where he served until his retirement in 1974 when they then oved to the United States. Here he worked for the British Mission to the to the United Nations in NYC and for many years with Louis Dreyfus Corporation in Wilton.
19 years after the nuclear tests, he began to lose vision in both eyes, attributing it to the radiation which he had received. Surgery restored his vision and in 1981 he applied for radiation-related compensation from the British government. This claim was rejected so in 1983 he lodged an appeal with the Pensions Appeals Tribunals, a court which has medical experts to help make judgments. He was the first British veteran to receive a military pension for “attributable to service” radiation-related injuries, at the time as only one of only six such pensions awarded to the more than 17,000 claimants.
Mick is survived by his loving wife of 50 years on December 19th, Deirdra “Dee” Saffery of Stamford and his daughter, Jennifer Bartley and her husband Adam of South Salem, New York, and his sister-in-law Maureen as well as several nieces, nephews and cousins living in England.
Besides his parents, Mick is predeceased by his brother John and his beloved dog Max, just eight months before.
Flt Lt. Renzo Joseph Pasquini
Renzo Joseph Pasquini has moved, at the age of 88, to a higher plane joining his ancestors. He is the son of the late Cavaliere Menotti Pasquini of Tuscany, Italy. His great grandfather Vincenzo fought with Garibaldi to unite Italy as one of ‘Il Mille’ and later went on to become a founding member of the Croce Verde (the Italian equivalent at the time to the Red Cross organization).
A very private and stoic man, his formative years were spent in London dodging bombs during The Blitz. He once told the tale of how he and his Italian family would seek refuge in the local air raid shelter during the day. However, this changed the first evening when the night bombings started as the locals would not allow them into the shelter as they were ‘Italian’ and hence ‘the enemy’. That evening he and his family sheltered around the kitchen table with only a candle for company and two English neighbours who were pacifists. The next morning at first light they discovered the air raid shelter where they were refused entry during the night had unfortunately taken a direct hit.
To meet him, you would say that Joseph (as he went on to be more commonly known) was quintessentially the English gentlemen – often causing his daughters to giggle when their friends called and upon hearing his voice asked if the family had a butler. We say quintessential as well as no cup of tea could be served in the house
His military legacy is very much of important historic note as he was one of a handful of survivors who flew through the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb (more than once) for research purposes during Operations Grapple and Yankee – part of the British Nuclear Testing program in the 1950s.
In his words, “At the time we didn’t know why, and we didn’t want to know. We were far too busy preparing for our main event. Within ten minutes we would be flying through Grapple Yankee. We would be the first aircraft to fly into the nuclear cloud. We knew we would be flying in. But, we didn’t know if we would be flying out”.
Joseph spent the later years of his life campaigning for recognition of not only his fellow servicemen involved in the nuclear tests but also their families.