After reading through these letters in the months after discovery my first thought were of typing them up and of trying to have them published. With the coming of internet and, as I edited them piecemeal over the years and gradually gained proficiency in placing information online, I decided that it would be easier to give them a separate website.
Personal acknowledgements:
My grateful thanks go to the last surviving Turner, my uncle Michael, for identifying some of the more obscure aspects of these letters; to proper local authors (not an amateur like me) Bob Collis for his aviation notes and the extra contributions in the text, and to Chris Brooks. Finally my brother Derek Sims, for introducing me to computers a few years before the letters were found in 1995 and persuading me that a PC was going to be better than my Amstrad PCW9512 - as usual he was right!
The references quoted in the notes to the text of the letters are:
Port War by Ford Jenkins, published 1946 by Cowell of Ipswich and to Peter Jenkins, believed to be the current owner of the copyright but who I have been unable to contact, with whom I attended ballroom dancing classes in the basement of the Hatfield Hotel in the 1950's!
The Blitz Then and Now edited by Edward G. Ramsey, published in three volumes 1987-90 by After the Battle, London, and to Bob Collis again who was one of their researchers.
Chronology of the War at Sea 1939-1945 by Jurgen Rohwer, published 2005 in a revised edition by Chatham Publishing of London.
Battle of the East Coast 1939-1945 by Julian Foynes, self-published in 1994.
Fortress Lowestoft by Robert Jarvis, published 2002 by the Heritage Workshop, Lowestoft.
Bomber Command Losses of the Second World War volumes 1-8. by W. R. Chorley in various editions published by Ian Allan and Midland Publishing from 1992,
and a brilliant website naval reference resource source which was and still is: