A handwritten letter found in the aftermath of the Falklands War 40 years ago has been reunited with the Argentinian soldier who wrote it, following the intervention of the Argentinian ambassador to the UK. 

As previously reported by The Stray Ferret, the blue-coloured airmail letter – known in the armed forces as a “bluey” – was found around a year after the end of the Falklands War by Jim Phillips, who was posted to the Falkland Islands’ capital, Port Stanley, as a lance corporal in the Royal Engineers. 

It had been written by an Argentinian soldier during the war but had never found its way to the intended recipient. 

Jim said: 

“The letter was actually posted in Port Stanley during the war, but it never got out because we’d bombed the runway.” 

Jim, who now lives in Ripon, kept the letter but mislaid it during a house move. It came to light again just before Christmas 2022, and he immediately contacted the Argentinian Embassy in the hopes of reuniting the letter with its writer. 

Jim, now 64, met the Argentinian Ambassador, Javier Figueroa, in March and handed him the letter over lunch at Grantley Hall, near Ripon. 

Mr Figueroa, who has long taken a special interest in the Falkland Islands and last year said the war had been “a tragedy”, promised to do everything he could to ensure the letter got back to its rightful owner, named as a Corporal Balbuena, a conscript in Argentina’s 3rd Mechanised Infantry Regiment. 

Then and now: Corporal Danny Balbuena on Sapper Hill in the Falkland Islands in 1982, and today in Buenos Aires with his dog. PHOTOS: Danny Balbuena.

And now, after a “postal delay” of 40 years, the letter has finally been returned to Mr Balbuena, who is now retired and lives in Buenos Aires. In a message last week, Mr Figueroa wrote: 

“We hereby want to inform you that the original letter written by the Argentine soldier has reached its original hands in Argentina. 

“This has been possible thanks to the honorable gesture of Jim Phillips, deployed in the area between January and June 1983 after the Malvinas conflict. 

“At a time when many soldiers’ personal items are being auctioned and sold online, we want to publicly express our gratitude to Mr Phillips and, on behalf of Mr Balbuena, his happiness to be reacquainted with this part of his personal history.” 

Jim has since regularly exchanged Whatsapp messages with Danny Balbuena, 60, and has even found out the identity of the letter’s intended recipient. He said: 

“Danny was only 19 at the time, and he’d written the letter to his girlfriend. Sadly, she died a few years ago, so he’s absolutely over the moon to be reunited with the letter he wrote to her. It means a lot.” 

Jim said he and Danny “are striking up a good friendship” and intend to carry on their correspondence. He added: 

“I’d really like to thank the ambassador for all his work on this. He’s been so helpful in this matter, it’s been untrue. He’s really gone above and beyond.” 

Radio operator Corporal Danny Balbuena (far left) of Argentina’s 3rd Mechanised Infantry Regiment, with comrades on Sapper Hill, East Falkland, in 1982.

The Falklands War was fought over 10 weeks in 1982 and began when the right-wing military government of Argentina sent a surprise invasion force which took possession of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia on April 2. 

The UK, then led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, dispatched a task force of ships, aircraft and soldiers to take the islands back. The armed conflict, which ended on June 14 with a British victory and the capture of more than 11,000 Argentine soldiers, claimed more than 900 lives, over 70% of them Argentinian.

Read more:

• Falklands veteran meets ambassador in Ripon to return Argentinian soldier’s letter
• Royal Engineers to remember the Falklands dead at Ripon ceremony
• Ripon man auctions 255 bottles of whisky for Falklands veterans

A veteran of the Falklands War has presented a soldier’s letter he found 40 years ago to the Argentinian Ambassador to the UK in the hopes of finding its original owner. 

Jim Phillips, who lives in Ripon, was serving with the Royal Engineers in Port Stanley when he found a “bluey” – a blue-coloured airmail letter often used by soldiers posted overseas – which had been written by an Argentinian soldier to his wife or girlfriend back home. 

Knowing how much soldiers and their families in all countries value hearing word from each other, he wanted to return the letter, but it was lost during a house move. 

Fortunately, the letter came to light again just before Christmas 2022, when Jim was looking for something else. He said:

“I instantly sent an email to the Argentine embassy in London to help me get this letter to either the sender or recipient, or either of their families. I informed the embassy as I was coming down to London I could pop it into reception. No, they said, the ambassador will come to Ripon to accept the letter from me personally.” 

So last week, Jim met the Argentinian Ambassador to the UK, Javier Figueroa, over lunch at Grantley Hall, near Ripon, to hand over the lost letter.

Mr Figueroa, who has long taken a special interest in the Falkland Islands and last year said the war had been “stupid”, promised to do everything he could to ensure the letter got back to its rightful owner, a Corporal Balbuena.

In an Instagram post on the embassy’s account, Mr Figueroa called the the episode a “heartwarming story”, and said he “appreciated Mr Phillips’ gesture“.

The Argentinian soldier’s letter 

Jim said: 

“Hopefully, the Argentine soldier concerned is still alive and this letter will find its way back to him and perhaps he can then deliver it personally.

“On a personal note, I would like to thank Ambassador Figueroa for taking the time to come to Ripon to accept the letter, also to thank him for his hospitality, friendship and help in getting this letter home.” 

The Falklands War was fought over 10 weeks in 1982 and began when the right-wing military government of Argentina sent a surprise invasion force, which took possession of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia on April 2. 

The UK, then led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, dispatched a task force of ships, aircraft and soldiers to take back the islands, which are internationally recognised British Overseas Territories.

The conflict, which ended on June 14 with a British victory and the capture of more than 11,000 Argentine soldiers, claimed more than 900 lives, over 70% of them Argentinian. 

Read more:

• Royal Engineers to remember the Falklands dead at Ripon ceremony
• ‘We felt apprehension, but not fear’: Harrogate seaman remembers the Falklands War
• Ripon man auctions 255 bottles of whisky for Falklands veterans

When Diego Sanchez decided to follow an English club he was seduced by Simon Weaver’s men in yellow and black rather than the more obvious options.

The 17-year-old schoolboy lives in Buenos Aires, almost 7,000 miles away from Wetherby Road.

He first heard about the club after reading an article about cult favourite Simon Ainge who became an unexpected goal machine in 2016.

Two years ago Diego then set up a Twitter account called Harrogate Town Argentina that has amassed over 1,000 followers and charts the highs and lows of the club in Spanish.

Fiery passion

Despite being so far away, he might just be the most passionate Town fan there is online.

Tweets include ‘HOYYYYY JUEGA EL HARROGATEEEEE’ (Today Harrogate plays) and ‘MARK LA COBRA ESCOCESA BECK ARRANCO ON FIRE EN DARLINGTON’ (Mark ‘The Scottish Cobra’ Beck is on fire at Darlington).

He also celebrates like he’s there in the ground every time the team score a goal:

https://twitter.com/HarrogateArg/status/1559620586627891201?s=20&t=SYjtMXY488eTTQ4fWpy3Pw

Committed fan

It’s not easy following a club on the other side of the world and Diego says it requires a lot of patience and commitment.

Fortunately, games are now streamed live over the internet and the time difference is only four hours.

His favourite player is Jack Muldoon and social media gives him the chance to interact with his heroes. He describes the feeling when a player likes one of his Tweets as being “a caress to the soul”.

 He said:

“[Jack Muldoon] is a player that when he catches the ball he gives you the illusion that anything can happen. 

“Another thing that makes me very happy is being able to interact with the players or with the club’s coaching staff. Any small gesture like a thank you for an edit or a like on a tweet is like a caress to the soul.

“My favourite player was Connor Hall (who has since left for Port Vale) because I was able to interact with him through social media. He seemed a very good person. I am very happy for him and for what he is achieving at his new club”.

Read more:

• Harrogate Town make four transfer deadline day signings
• Simon Weaver: Harrogate Town have been through a ‘cycle of change’

Diego is also a River Plate fan, who plays in the 100,000-seater El Monumental stadium. The fiery atmosphere there is legendary and a bucket list visit for football fans around the world.

But Diego yearns to be in the kop end at the EnviroVent Stadium and would love to visit Harrogate one day to watch a game.

Credit: River Plate FC

Diego said:

“If one day I get to attend a Harrogate match it would surely be crazy for me.

“I still haven’t imagined it, but if it happens, I would try to enjoy it as much as possible.

“Here in Argentina, the fans are among the best in the world, I know El Monumental and the atmosphere there is crazy.”

Trust in Weaver

Harrogate Town are on a bad run of results and have lost their last five games but they can always count on the support of their fan in Argentina. Diego added:

“I feel a bit worried about the recent form in the last few games but I fully trust the guys and Weaver to come through.”

You can follow Diego on Twitter here.

The Stray Ferret is publishing two articles this weekend looking back at Harrogate’s links with the Falklands War.

Yesterday, we spoke to Harrogate woman Christina Nelson who was only 22 when her husband Stephen Heyes was killed aboard HMS Ardent aged 21. Read the article here.

“Where’s the bloody Falklands?” was Harrogate sailor Neil Harper’s first thought following the Argentine invasion on April 2, 1982.

The former Harrogate High School pupil was always destined for a career at sea. He spent his formative years as a sea cadet in Harrogate and his dad was in the Royal Marines.

He was 19 when the British government dispatched a naval task force to the islands in response to the invasion.

Mr Harper joined the Navy aged 16 and was an able seaman gunner so knew that his services would be required.

“When it kicked off I was back in Harrogate on leave so it was a case of ‘get back to the ship’.”

After returning to Portland in Dorset, the captain of HMS Argonaut told the crew:

‘I can’t tell you where you’re going, but you’ll have a damn good idea.”

‘Attack after attack’

Mr Harper said the feeling onboard the ship on the 6,000-mile journey “was of apprehension, but not fear”.

He said:

“We were all a bit young and stupid!

“It was finally a chance to do the job were trained to do.”

The sailors encountered  the Falklands’ unusual landscape, which Mr Harper described as being like “The Yorkshire Moors without the trees”.

“There are rolling hills, tundra grass and peat bogs. It’s quite bleak and it can be very, very cold. But it can be absolutely glorious down there too. You can see killer whales, penguins, seals and birds that are only found in the Falklands.”

Many hoped the crisis would be solved through diplomacy, but the fighting was fierce.

On May 21, HMS Argonaut faced assault from the sky. Mr Harper remembers “attack after attack” and frantic efforts to save the ship.

An unexploded bomb that was dropped on the HMS Argonaut

He said:

“They hit us with two 1000lb bombs, one in the boiler room and one in the diesel tank.

“Neither exploded luckily, but it caused a fire. We lost all power and were headed towards Fanning Head with no steering or working engines.

“At the time you were too busy to think about what’s going on.”

Two of Mr Harper’s friends, able seaman Iain Boldy and able seaman Matthew Stuart, were killed.

‘Are we gonna win?’

Lieutenant Peter Morgan is credited with saving HMS Argonaut after he dropped one of the ship’s anchors to use as an emergency brake.

The crew worked around the clock to restore power and radars. The captain sent out a signal to the crew to say they couldn’t move the ship, but could still fight.

Over the space of a couple of days, HMS Ardent, HMS Antelope and HMS Plymouth were also bombed.

Mr Harper said:

“We knew the Ardent had been hit. So there were thoughts of ‘what’s going on over there — and are we gonna win?'”

Once-in-a-lifetime assignment

Stray Ferret journalist Tim Flanagan was chief reporter for the Harrogate Advertiser in 1982.

He said the war was the talk of every pub, shop and workplace in the town.

Journalists at the paper kept a close eye on events due to the military connections in Ripon and at Pennypot in Harrogate.

Journalist Tim Flanagan in 1980

Mr Flanagan remembers interviewing Harrogate woman Christina Nelson, Stephen Heyes’ widow, not long after he died. She told him how Stephen’s pet cat Charlie still missed him, which has stuck with the journalist 40 years on.

“For a young woman, she was very poised. She was still in shock. She was courageous and a very brave person to speak about it. She wanted him to be honoured.”

Harrogate soldier Gavin Hamilton was also killed during the war and posthumously awarded the Military Cross for bravery.

Valentines messages

A year after the war was over, the newspaper sent Mr Flanagan to the Falklands. It was a once-in-a-lifetime assignment for a local news journalist who normally didn’t get further than Northallerton.

He stayed aboard HMS Sir Tristram to visit Royal Engineers from Ripon who were helping to rebuild runways and clear mines.

Mr Flanagan took with him some special messages from the wives of Harrogate district servicemen who were stationed there.

“I flew out on Valentine’s Day 1983 and went there with various things. I took messages for sweethearts and three or four Valentine’s cards. 

“I got a lot more on the way back from the soldiers, and asked to drop off flowers, chocolate and letters to their wives.”

Legacy of war

The war lasted just 74 days but 40 years on, time has not healed all the mental wounds brought on by the conflict.

The UK government’s treatment of its veterans, and their widows, have made it more difficult for them to receive closure.

Christina Nelson has campaigned for the government to subsidise expensive air travel to the islands so widows can visit their partners’ graves.

She said:

“I’ve not seen Stephen’s grave since the 25th anniversary. The government should do right by us. I’d love to go again, but I will not beg. It should be our right, but they are not bothered.”

Like many veterans, Neil Harper has suffered from PTSD. He left the Navy in 1989.

“We were offered no psychiatric help when we got back. It was a case of ‘man up and get up with it’.”

He returned to the Falklands in 2019 with some fellow seamen who he served with.

He added:

“Like any sort of trained blokes, we try and not shed a tear, but we do. We talk and remember, we’re a support group.

“It was time to go back and put a few demons to rest.”

255 British military personnel died in the war. Three islanders and 649 Argentine soldiers also died.

The Stray Ferret is publishing two articles this weekend looking back at Harrogate’s links with the Falklands War.

Today, we speak to Harrogate woman Christina Nelson who was only 22 when her husband Stephen Heyes was killed aboard the HMS Ardent aged 21.

HMS Ardent was sunk by Argentine bombs 40 years ago this month, on May 22, 1982.

Twenty-two British sailors died.

Ms Nelson told the Stray Ferret she finds every anniversary difficult. The couple had only been married for one year before his death.

“It doesn’t seem possible that I’m here at 62 and he never made it.

“He’s not growing old and grey and wrinkly. 

“He said that to me before he left, ‘you’ll go old, grey and wrinkly but I’ll never grow older than 21’.

“He knew he wasn’t coming home.”

Meeting

Stephen, who was from Wigan, was 16 when he joined the Navy in 1976.

His first ship was HMS Cleopatra, a frigate that had been adopted by Harrogate since the 1940s. It was even given the freedom of Harrogate in 1979 and sailors aboard the ship would sometimes march through the town.

Ms Nelson, who went to Harrogate High School, worked for the Ministry of Defence on St George’s Road.

She attended an MOD dance at the Royal Hall where she met Stephen, who was there with some fellow sailors from the Cleopatra.

Ms Nelson said:

“Me and my girlfriends went out, we had no idea we’d bump into a group of sailors – there’s no ground water in Harrogate!”

Stephen knew he’d met the girl for him as, two weeks later, he hitchhiked to Harrogate from where he was stationed on the south coast and proposed.

Their wedding was two years later at Christ Church on March 28, 1981, which Ms Nelson remembers as “all done on a budget but we didn’t lack on anything”.

Stephen was a huge Roxy Music fan and their first dance was the song ‘Dance Away’.

Navy career

After getting married, the couple together lived in Devonport, Plymouth.

Stephen was a seaman in electronic warfare and “absolutely loved it” in the Navy, said Ms Nelson.

But unusually for a sailor, he couldn’t swim.

She said:

“He was terrified of water. When they told me it sunk, I said they won’t find him as he can’t swim.”

The stricken HMS Ardent. Credit: HMS Ardent Association

HMS Ardent was attacked by at least three waves of Argentine aircraft on May 21. It sank into the Atlantic Ocean the next day.

But at the time there were only rumours that a ship had been hit.

Ms Nelson was working part-time at a Ladbrokes bookies and her boss told her to go home after the rumours spread.

She spent an agonising night on the phone with military officials, hoping to receive an update on Stephen. She was eventually told that his ship, HMS Ardent, was not in that area where the attacks happened.

But that all changed when a customer came into the shop and said: “Bloody hell, you wouldn’t have thought they’d sink the Ardent.”

Ms Nelson said she knew then that Stephen had been killed.

Read more:

• Free war grave tours at Harrogate’s Stonefall Cemetery next week
• Ripon soldiers in Cyprus to undergo mammoth charity challenge

Good memories

Stephen was an animal lover and had adopted a stray cat called Charlie, who would still wait for him to come home long after he died.

Ms Nelson said it was a sign that he was still with them in some way.

She said:

“Every day at 4pm, Charlie would meet Stephen after work to have his tummy tickled. After he died he still did the same thing.”

Christina now lives in Alicante, Spain. She spent last weekend’s anniversary with one of Stephen’s old friends from the Navy, who had cycled over from Benidorm.

She said it still doesn’t seem real that four decades have passed by since her husband’s death.

“I’m sat here looking at pictures on the wall — how the hell can it be 40 years?”

Stephen and Christina’s wedding day in Harrogate

Christina said she likes to remember Stephen as a big-hearted family man.

She added:

“He was just somebody with a smile that could light up the room – when he smiled you knew he was there. He didn’t have a nasty bone in his body, he was a gentle soul.”

Stephen Heyes was one of 255 British military personnel that died in the war. Three islanders and 649 Argentine soldiers also died.

Tomorrow, we speak to Harrogate Falklands veteran Neil Harper about his experiences during the conflict. We also speak to journalist Tim Flanagan who reported on the war for the Harrogate Advertiser.