JACK Edwards' last-ditch appeal for British passports for a group of deserving Hong Kong women has fallen on deaf ears, yet again. And, by a sad stroke of irony, one of Jack's fellow campaigners in the fight for passports for the wives and war widows, Luigi Ribeiro, died last Saturday.
Mr Ribeiro, 89, was a fourth generation descendant of early Portuguese settlers in Macau.
He joined the Hong Kong Volunteer Regiment when Japan entered the war (Portugal, it will be remembered, remained neutral throughout the conflict).
He was captured when Hong Kong surrendered on Christmas Day, 1941 and - like Jack Edwards and many of his comrades - spent three years and eight months as a prisoner of war of the Japanese Imperial Forces; an experience that killed so many, and left those who survived emotionally marked for the rest of their lives.
In 1981 the surviving (non-British) ex-members of the Hong Kong Regiment were finally granted British passports, but their wives and the widows of their dead comrades were not.
Since then Mr Ribeiro had a constant worry about the well-being of his Chinese wife, now in her late 80s, and a letter written by him was published in these columns - posthumously - on Monday, following this latest refusal by Great Britain to pay out on some of its debts of honour.
