Paddy’s photos

My grandfather James Maurice McDowell left Belfast in the late 1930s and went to fight the Germans for the British Army. (He won.)

I was told that he worked as a postman, which was one of the most dangerous jobs in the home defence force, given that if Hitler had invaded, the first thing he would have gone after would be the communications staff. My grandfather aquired the nickname “Paddy” due to him being Irish (of the Protestant Northern Variety.)

He then was sent to Hamburg to work as a civil engineer in postwar recovery, and ended up stationed at the French Consulate.

There are no photos of him actually fighting, but there are a shitload of him with lots of ladies.

After Hamburg, he went to Kota Kinabalu in Borneo, where he worked for Cable and Wireless as a civil engineer (Cable and Wireless, in Malaysia, in the 1940s.)