Wallsend’s Chris Flanighan has uncovered his grandfather’s heroic WWII past, brought full circle by the arrival of Norway’s last wartime merchant ship, S/S Hestmanden, on the River Tyne.
00:00Chris Flanagan from Wallsend has spent years piecing together the extraordinary wartime journey of his grandfather,
00:08Karlof Thorsen, a Norwegian war sailor who risked everything to support the Allied cause during World War II.
00:14As a teenager, Karlof fled Nazi-occupied Norway, joining the Merchant Navy and serving aboard Allied convoys.
00:22So, my granddad was Karlof Thorsen and he was a Norwegian war sailor. He left Norway when he was 22 due to the Germans invading Norway.
00:32Didn't return back until after the war, so he basically was on a number of different ships ran by a Nova ship.
00:39And some of the experiences that he had was, it's unbelievable to look at and see.
00:46So he was all over the world really, right away from Newcastle, he was all over.
00:53Some of the places I can't even tell you because I can't even read the PR work.
00:57But he ended up in Nova Scotia, it's Camp Norway, which was a machine gunner camp and he trained to be a machine gunner out there.
01:06So then from there, he was then on board being a machine gunner for his merchant ship.
01:13So my dad had actually started the family tree and we had knew that there was a medal that had been missing for about 40 odd years.
01:20We couldn't trace that medal.
01:22And what had happened was, I stuck a post on Facebook to Norwegian Heritage and a gentleman from Norway called Jens got in touch with us and says,
01:31Oh yes, these medals need to be awarded to them. So they then come across to Britain and a gentleman called Victor Malskog came up from London and delivered them to her.
01:42So there was the Convoy Cup, the Norwegian Machine Gunners medal.
01:47And then about six weeks after that, six, seven weeks after that, we ended up getting the King Harold's Freedom Medal that had come through as well that he was entitled to.
01:56A ceremony at the Trafalgar Memorial in London marked the formal presentation of the medals, a deeply emotional moment for Chris and his family.
02:05Now the arrival of the SS Hesmanden on the River Tyne has brought their journey full circle.
02:12The SS Hesmanden is a reversed symbol of Norway's wartime sacrifice.
02:19So for myself, it's sort of getting the chance to see what ships he had been on.
02:23But it's it's not just for my grandfather's legacy.
02:26I would say it's for every single war sailor who, you know, they're on board ships, they weren't military men.
02:31They were there to help the cause of the Second World War at the end of the day.
02:35So it's it's not just my grandfather's legacy.
02:38It's nice that I'm actually going down that route and seeing his legacy.
02:43But it's for like sort of untold stories as well that haven't been told and to get to go on board and sort of see that and pay respect to the men and women that did give up their lives for us really is phenomenal.
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