Belongings

Uniform Bag

November 2020, Dotty Delafield received the following email from Rob Harvey, Brighton, UK:

Dear Mrs Delafield,

I sincerely hope you don’t mind me reaching out to your like this and on this particular email address, which was the only contact information I could find for you, but I am messaging with regards to a Blair H Harman, who I believe may have been a relative of yours (uncle?), who I have been researching online.

I am a collector of US Air Force memorabilia based in the U.K. and have recently acquired an officers uniform bag, which I believe may have belonged to Blair (his name and serial number are printed on the bag). If I have the correct person then please feel free to message me back.

Dotty replied:

Blair Harper Harman was my husband’s uncle and I’ve done extensive research on his military time. He wrote home almost every day and at his request his mother saved the letters. It does sound like it is the right person. Can you send me a picture of the bag? I would love to see it. I would love to hear how you found me. Thank you so much for reaching out to me.

Rob Harvey. replied:

I’m very pleased to receive a response from you and to discover that my sleuthing has connected me to the right person.

The bag has been in my possession for several months, as I say I collect US Air Force uniforms and objects and this came up at an auction house in a little town called Chichester on the south coast of England. The auction house had simply listed it as an army kit bag, but as I know a little about these things I recognised it as a USAAF officers uniform bag and so duly acquired it. It was until this morning that I’d bothered to google the names printed on the bag.

As well as Blair’s name there is also a Lt Col J S Spencer, who I can only assume acquired the bag after Blair as he has written his name over Blair’s (I assume it must have been common practise to recycle kit like this). I have attached some photos to this email.

Fortunately Blair had written his Army Serial Number on the bag, so I was able to look him up on NARA and found his enlistment details. There is a short bio about his on the American Air Museum in Britain site as well, which lists him has being from Pennsylvania. It was really then just a matter of Googling his name and seeing what else came up. There is a Find a Grave site which lists his name as Blair Harvey Harman, but I understand his middle name was in fact Harper. I happened upon the site you have created, again from just trying all manner of Google searches of his name and various other terms. The Google site with all of his letters and photos suggested there must be a relative alive, but It was only when I happened to look at the edit history of the site that I saw your name. The Find a Grave site lists one of his siblings as Betty Jane Delafield, so I just googled your name, found your work page and here we are.

What is quite incredible is that Blair was stationed at an airfield just 30 miles from my home town of Norwich. I now live in Brighton on the south coast, but grew up there and still have family there. We have a small museum in Norwich dedicated to the airmen of the 8th Air Force who served in East Anglia during the war and I have also discovered there is a small memorial near the old air field at Knettishall for the men of the 388th Bomb Group, on which Blair is named. Presently we are under Covid restrictions here in the U.K., but I’m hoping to visit the airfield and memorial as soon as I can.

The photographs and letters published online are quite incredible and I must say extremely poignant, particularly the final letters from his mother. To be sitting here in my study, with this grubby old bag that belonged to Blair and to see him as a young boy and then a young man in uniform is certainly quite emotional. I myself am currently just 12 years older than Blair when he died and can remember those years of my early 20s, studying at university and enjoying long carefree summers with friends. That Blair should have his life cut short so young and in the cause of liberating Europe from tyranny, is deeply saddening, but his service is worthy of the highest admiration.

Additional email from Rob H.:

In follow up to my last, the story of this simple bag becomes more extraordinary, so I thought I would share it with you. Having discovered the story of Sgt Harman I shared some photos with a friend, who also happens to be an amateur military historian and collector, and he discovered some details of the second owner, J S Spencer. Like Blair, this Lt Col Spencer has written his service number on the bag, which shows up in some old records here in the UK. Incredibly J S Spencer is a John Snowden Spencer of the Duke of Wellingtons regiment, who was awarded a Military Cross during the First World War in 1918, (in ww1 the MC was 4th down from the Victoria Cross) and Order of the British Empire in the 1939 New Years honours list. What a story this bag can tell!