I've been sent a request from Eric Holmes, who wishes to trace people who may have know his father from rugby playing days in Sheffield in Sheffield, from about 1946 to 1950. He is circled in yellow on one of the photographs in the photo album 'Back When Photos Were Monochrome'. Click here for pictures
Please let me know if you can help, and I will put you in touch with Eric (email simon.bebbington@virgin.net)

Eric's email reads:

I am sorry I know very little about my Father's rugby playing, most of it occurring before I was of an age to take any intelligent interest. I know none of the faces in the photograph, although ther might be one who also appears in a photograph of, I think, fellow students, which add to the idea that this was a university team.

He was called Axel Richard Anderson Holmes and was born in Colchestor in 1920, his father had been an immigrant from Denmark around 1910, meeting his mother, a Bradford girl, in Woolworths. He very quickly became successful and well off enough to send his sons to Haileybury public school.

During the war Axel served in India with the Royal Army Medical Corps, returning to England in 1946 to train as a doctor in Sheffield University between 1946 and 1950 I think, which is when he played most of his Rugby.

While in India he met and married my mother Jasmine Karuna Jayseelan which I think provably created quite a of a stir in the family. She joined him in England in December 1946. They lived in lodgings for a period eventually settling in Hillsborough. I was born in 1950 after which I think his playing began to lessen as responsibilities for supporting a family came to the fore.

My father never talked much about himself or his life, most of what I remember comes from my mother, who although still alive, does not have a clear recall of these days. Finding out about his interest in playing rugby is part of piecing together those times so something remains of what in retrospect was a very ordinary but also remarkable journey.

I appreciate that there is very little to go on and that most of the people will be elsewhere, but it would be wonderful if there was someone who could remember those days, the games played and some of the stories of those days.