IT was a photograph sent back from the front, where William Les Harrison was serving with the Royal Navy, that led to him meeting and marrying his wife Marjorie.

Mr Harrison, of Bradwell, was just 18 when he joined up to serve with the navy during the Second World War.

And a picture taken of Mr Harrison and two friends, who were serving with him from North Staffordshire, sparked a correspondence which would eventually lead to wedlock.

Mr Harrison, now aged 83, said: “We had our photograph taken – it was me, Doug Handley and Ken Williams, who was from Shelton.

“Doug sent it home and his sister must have seen it. At the time I had blond hair, not grey like it is now, and she asked if she could write to the ‘blond one’.

“We struck up a correspondence and ended up getting married after the war.”

Mr Harrison should have been exempt from call-up to fight, due to his essential work as a miner. But when he received his call-up papers in 1943, he decided to join the navy, having been a sea cadet.

He was put to work on gun boats, serving on the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and in the Far East, where he took part in the war against Japan.

He has particular memories of his time at Rangoon, in 1945, part of the Burma campaign. While back home in Blighty people were celebrating victory in Europe, his gunboat was tasked to sail up a river to engage the Japanese.

Mr Harrison said: “We had gone about half a mile when we were fired upon, machine gun fire. It didn’t hit us, it seemed to hit all around us. We returned fire, but we could just see the top of something sticking out above the trees in the jungle, so we fired at that, then we could see black smoke billowing up.

“We came to a blockade, so we turned up a tributary in the river, where we thought the Japanese were. It wasn’t very wide. We were only a 72ft-long boat, but we couldn’t turn round.

“As we went up through the jungle I remember seeing four bodies, hanging down from a tree. We didn’t know if they were British, Japanese or Burmese, but there was nothing we could do about it, because they might have been booby trapped, so we just sailed on.

“We went so far, then we hit the bottom (of the river), so we had to reverse all the way out. But it was a very fast-flowing river. We got hit by a big log and started leaking in the engine room.

“We found a place where we could stop for repairs. But there’s no street lights in the jungle. I remember sitting against these machine guns and looking out to sea. At that time, we had heard people in Trafalgar Square had been dancing in the streets because of the war coming to an end and I thought, ‘No-one back home knows about this’.

“It was one of the worst nights I have ever had. There were all these noises from the jungle, and if the Japanese had come down, that would have been it for us.

“The next day came some Chinese carpenters, who patched us up.”

Earlier in the campaign, Mr Harrison’s crew had captured a small group of Japanese – a rare occurrence given Japanese notions of honour, which meant most enemy soldiers preferred suicide to capture.

Mr Harrison said: “A war correspondent who was with us asked one of them what he thought about the war. He said, The Rising Sun is withering’. They were just like us. From what I had read about them in the newspapers before I joined the war, you would think they were animals.”

After the war, Mr Harrison reluctantly went back down the mines. He retired due to ill-health in 1972, following an accident.

The widower has one son, Flight Lieutenant Keith Harrison, who served in the RAF. He also has one granddaughter, Michelle, and a great-granddaughter, Kensey.