Australia navy veterans in graveside tribute to tragic friend

On Halloween morning, 54 years after his death, Ernest Sydney Howes had visitors.

A party of 17 - nine sailors and their families - stood around his grave at the Hong Kong Cemetery in Happy Valley yesterday, playing music and laying flowers against his tidy headstone.

"He was an engineer, like all of us here," said Ray Hassall, 75, Howes's shipmate on the Australian destroyer HMAS Voyager.

The men were serving on the ship when Howes died, under mysterious circumstances, in Hong Kong in 1958. Six years later, the Voyager was sliced in half in a crash off Australia's Jervis Bay, killing 82 people on board.

The men from the Voyager were reunited at Howes's grave yesterday, drawn together by strong bonds built from having spent much time together in cramped quarters at sea. They had previously gathered every year in Australia to reminisce. This year, they chose to come to Hong Kong, where they lived for six weeks in 1958, and to pay their respects.

Wan Chai, a favourite haunt of sailors on shore leave in the 1950s, was where Howes was found unconscious in a bar near today's Neptune II disco.