23 Miles: Alfred Joseph Gabriel

Doris Gabriel
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  • Kids & Family

A true family history told in seven parts. Built from a recording made at Alfred Joseph Gabriel's 90th birthday in 2008, this series weaves his own voice, in his own words, together with the documented history of the events he lived through: the Blitz, a wartime convoy around Africa, and the week in January 1942 when the Japanese invasion of Malaya nearly ended his family before it began. Verified against military records, family documents, and newspaper archives, and narrated alongside the people who lived it.

Episodes

  1. Aug 16

    What Was Left Behind

    The war ends, and what follows is seventy-six more years most war stories never get to include: fifty years of Rotary, a fortune quietly given away before it was needed, and four children who scattered and built lives across two countries, a modelling career and a move to Sydney, an international cricketer, a national broadcaster's final announcer, a school that still stands in Singapore today. This closing episode follows where Alfred's family went, and closes on the church in Klang where it all began, still standing, eighty-some years later.

    What Was Left Behind

  2. Aug 16

    Growing Up

    Alfred was boarded away from his own parents at a strict Christian Brothers school, and later became a father who worked long hours and left most of the discipline to his wife. This episode covers his own childhood alongside how he raised his four children, Maureen, David, Ann, and Christine, in his own words.

    Growing Up

  3. Aug 16

    Occupation

    Three and a half years under Japanese occupation, and Alfred says almost nothing about them, a ransacked house, a job at a power station, and getting through to the end of the war. The shortest episode in the series, deliberately, because that's how he told it.

    Occupation

  4. Aug 16

    Before Doris, and Then Doris

    Before Alfred ever met Doris, he loved someone else, and his parents said no. This episode follows the arranged courtship that followed, the wedding held under bombing five days before the family was stopped at gunpoint outside Klang, and the week that decided whether any of the rest of this family would exist: a garbage truck, a doctor's letter, and a bicycle ride of twenty-three miles.

    Before Doris, and Then Doris

  5. Aug 16

    The Convoy

    With the Mediterranean closed by Italy's entry into the war, Alfred's route home to Malaya became an eight-week voyage the long way around Africa, sealed orders, a ship shaking under anti-aircraft fire before it even left port, and a landing in Singapore eleven months before the country he was returning to was invaded.

    The Convoy

  6. Aug 16

    Manchester

    Alfred's college nearly closed in his second year. Then the Blitz reached the city he was living in. His entire description of surviving it, at ninety years old, is four words. This episode looks at what he doesn't say, and what that silence tells you about everything he does linger on later.

    Manchester

  7. Aug 16

    Who He Was

    Alfred Joseph Gabriel was twenty-one years old, studying in Manchester, the day Britain declared war. This opening episode traces where he came from, a Sinhalese doctor's son and a Ceylon Burgher family who'd already crossed one ocean before he was born, and sets up the week in 1942 that this whole series is built around, a week that decided whether his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren would exist at all.

    Who He Was
  • 7 Episodes

About

A true family history told in seven parts. Built from a recording made at Alfred Joseph Gabriel's 90th birthday in 2008, this series weaves his own voice, in his own words, together with the documented history of the events he lived through: the Blitz, a wartime convoy around Africa, and the week in January 1942 when the Japanese invasion of Malaya nearly ended his family before it began. Verified against military records, family documents, and newspaper archives, and narrated alongside the people who lived it.

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