The Star: November 30, 2023

The Star Thursday November 30 2023
18
NEWS
Latest Canterbury news at starnews.co.nz
Young couple reunited by air race
ARRIVAL:
Maria
Wynands
(third
from the
passenger
aircraft
exit door)
disembarks
from the
DC-6A
Liftmaster.
Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport
to London. Maria remembers
mixing with some of the 63
passengers at a posh Kensington
Palace Hotel in the capital.
“We had a tour through
London, we had a beautiful
dinner and we met all the staff –
so it was absolutely fantastic.
“We were one big family in the
plane,” she said.
On departure from Heathrow
on October 8, the aircraft –
known as Dr Ir M H Damme
– was waved off by the Duke of
Gloucester. The flight was long.
Different aircraft made various
stopovers including in Rome,
Baghdad, Karachi, Rangoon,
Jakarta, Colombo, Darwin,
Brisbane and onwards.
Maria remembers a frosty
pre-dawn arrival at Harewood
Airport on October 11 – though
the RAF’s Canberra had already
taken honours in terms of speed,
finishing the day before.
The arrivals were heralded
on the front page of The
Christchurch Star-Sun. The DC-
6A Liftmaster won the transport
section (given it was carrying the
prospective brides and others) in
49 hours, 57 minutes.
From the 1970s, Maria and
Peter enjoyed travelling back to
Europe, where Maria’s father
was fulsome in his approval of a
successful marriage.
“My father said, ‘no I’ve
forgiven you’, because he could
see how happy I was.”
The couple were very happily
married and in their 65th year
of marriage when Peter passed
in 2019.
• From page 16
Maria, from her apartment at
Diana Isaac Retirement Village,
jokes that Peter (who’d had his
outward ship fare paid by the
New Zealand Government)
arranged the flight because he
didn’t want her to repeat his
trip on the boat, given all the
shenanigans he had witnessed on
board.
The couple had decided to
move away from post-World
War 2 Europe. Due to housing
shortages, and a slow gradual
economic recovery, they would
have been left living with family,
Maria said.
“It’s all Hitler’s fault we’re here.
Because we’d had five years of
war . . . and if Peter and I wanted
to get married in a couple of
years we had to live with our
parents. I didn’t want to live with
his parents and we couldn’t live
with my parents because I still
had two younger siblings,” she
said.
While living in Tilburg, Holland,
she’d grown up in a loving
family, with two older and two
younger siblings. Her father was
an officer in the Dutch army and
had strict views on some things,
including the trip out to be with
her fiancé, she remembers.
There was some history to the
challenge, with there having
been a London to Melbourne air
race in 1934.
Initially Maria and the
other passengers flew from
Maria Wynands with her daughter-in-law Tracey.
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