Uncle Henry

Uncle Henry standing on the left, my father and Uncle Elie on the right. Sitting my grandfather, a aunt and my grandmother.

Uncle Henry was an obsessive collector of books, magazines and old newspapers.  In fact, he liked his newspapers so much that instead of wallpaper he had hung pages from  The Daily Star, The Daily Record, The Socialist Worker and other working class editions.  The linoleum throughout the house was cracked and there was no carpet in the house.  A large parlour which should have served for entertaining guest was stacked ceiling high with books on railway engines, ships, carpentry, philosophy, history, needlework, and various other arcane copies of out-of-print texts.  When he died, my mother had to hire a truck to take away this fire hazard.  Countless black plastic bags were used in the process.

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But he wasn’t always like that.  In his earlier life, Henry Sless was an Engineer Officer on the Ohio when she sailed in 1942 in a convoy to Malta.  He was awarded the MBE.  Later, he was awarded the DSC when his ship the San Cipriano was bombed.  Being the last living survivor of the Ohio, he was presented the Malta Commemorative Medal. “Who knows whether Malta could have carried on the fight had it been deprived of Ohio’s most precious cargo?” said Saly Stellini, the High Commissioner for Malta at the award reception.

The tanker played a fundamental role in Operation Pedestal, which was one of the fiercest and most heavily contested of the Malta convoys, in August 1942.^[2] Although Ohio reached Malta successfully, she was so badly damaged that she had to be effectively scuttled in order to offload her cargo, and never sailed again. The tanker is fondly remembered in Malta, where to this day she is considered to be the savior of the beleaguered island. (Wikipedia)

The damaged tanker OHIO, “supported by Royal Navy destroyers HMS PENN and HMS LEDBURY 

For forty years he was Secretary of the Engineers Union and after retirement died in 1996 in a wheelchair at the Inverclyde Hospital. 

His son, Maurice, being a Buddhist monk and having renounced all worldly involvement, decided not to attend the funeral and returned all his possessions to my mother, included a set of medals which was sent off to the Garnethill Jewish archives in Glasgow and a gold hunter’s watch protected by a removable gun metal case.  His sister arrived late from a log cabin somewhere in Canada accusing of mother of stealing money from his estate and his second son, David, remained in a home in Glasgow having the mental age of a nine-year old although he was in his forties.  He looked uncannily like Prince Charles.  The inscription on the watch reads:

PRESENTED BY

MEMBERS OF THE

GLASGOW JEWISH INSTITUTE

AND FRIENDS

TO

HENRY SLESS, M.B.E., D.S.C., M.N.

ON HIS

RECEIVING THE AWARD OF

M.BE. For Gallantry at Sea

31/8/43

I last saw him in Calder Street in Glasgow carrying a newspaper, wearing a baseball cap out of which a hank of greyish hair hung down to his shoulders as he shuffled along in his sandals.