Silver pendant : Private R G Towers, 2/29 Battalion

Silver pendant, suspended from a short length of chain, cut from the outer part of an Australian florin.

Associated with VX36974 Robert George Towers, of 2/29 Battalion and his sweetheart Miss Lois Fay Henriksen. Towers, from Beech Forest, Victoria, enlisted on 11 July 1940, a few months before his 27th birthday.

Before leaving for overseas service, he gave Miss Henriksen a brooch which he had cut out and made from an Australian florin. He wore the corresponding outer part around his neck with his identity discs as a pendant. He said to her that when the two parts were joined together the war would be over and he would be home with her forever.

Towers was posted to Malaya and was subsequently captured by the Japanese. Miss Henriksen heard nothing more of him until just after the war when she was serving in the Australian Army Medical Womens Service working in a ward where ex-POWs were being treated. One of the men had been in a POW camp in Japan with Towers and had been with him when he died of illness on 8 November 1943. He knew of an officer who had brought Towers' effects home with him, and arranged for the effects to be sent to Towers' mother, whose address Miss Henriksen gave him. She went to see his mother and among the effects was the corresponding pendant to her brooch.