A man has revealed how a series of chance discoveries led him to discover the truth about how his uncles died during World War Two – and brought to light a painting of one of them.
Chris Bryan-Smith from Oswestry in Shropshire grew up knowing twin brothers Anthony and Martin Bryan-Smith died while serving with RAF Bomber Command.
Improvements in online databases allowed him to look up records and trace where one of the brothers crashed. When he posted the story on Facebook this summer, he was contacted by a surprised RAF museum curator who had the portrait.
Bryan-Smith said the eyes of the man he saw in the painting looked so much like those of his own son.
When he was young, he knew the brothers had died in the war and that they had lived in Beoley, Worcestershire, but while people would often talk about the war, little else was said about them.
He said: “When I was growing up, my family didn’t talk about them much as it was too painful.
“People didn’t talk about the losses. Funny incidents, yes, recalled with great gusto. But not the horrors.”
As a result, the 74-year-old said: “I didn’t feel like I knew them, they were almost like numbers when I was growing up.”
All he really knew was that Anthony Bryan-Smith died in 1940 when his Hampden aircraft crashed north of the Humber estuary on the way home from a mine laying mission and Martin’s Lancaster was shot down on D-Day in 1944.
Little changed until 2005, when he said “I went on the internet one day out of idle interest and all this stuff came up.
Noting that a lot of this information would only have been found in a records office in the past, he said: “It didn’t really occur to me that it had become so available.”
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