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Here’s to 100, it’s been a ‘Pledger’ PREMIUM
Zamandulo Malonde Features reporter 15 April 2021
When you survive a torpedoing during a world war at the age of 20, reaching the milestone of 100 years old would be the furthest thing from your mind.
But Gqeberha’s James Pledger, who celebrates his 100th birthday on Thursday, has done it and the Royal Air Force veteran expects a letter from the queen to mark the occasion.
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Deur Candice Bezuidenhout 14 April 2021 06:06 James Pledger with three of his great-grandchildren, triplets, Kyra (left), Ava and Callum Pledger on their thirteenth birthday recently. Photo:supplied
AFTER surviving World War II and even making it out alive when the HMS Ark Royal sank to the bottom of the ocean in 1941, James Pledger, a well-known maker and repairer of violins in Nelson Mandela Bay, turns 100 years old tomorrow.
Jim, as he is more commonly known, was born in a little village called Barkway, in rural Hertfordshire, England, on April 15, 1921.
After the war ended and he was sent to a military hospital in South Africa for treatment of a misdiagnosis of TB, he met and fell in love with a nurse at the hospital, Marie Jeppe.