Harry Parr-Davies was an accompanist for Gracie Fields and writer of some of her most famous songs, among them the World War II classic ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’.
Alas, on a 1939 Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary with Fields, Parr-Davies appeared to run clean out of luck, possibly while waving someone goodbye, when his glasses fell overboard. He was too short-sighted to read music without them, and in some embarrassment went to report his mishap to Fields. She in turn marched to the purser’s office to find out if there was any hope of buying a new pair on board — which there was not.
Just at that moment, however, a steward appeared and pinned a notice to the purser’s door: ‘Found pair of spectacles. Apply purser.’ Inexplicably, or so it seemed, they were Parr-Davies’ own glasses.
‘Most extraordinary thing,’ a passenger from a lower deck later told reporters. ‘I opened my porthole and put my hand out to see if it was raining. And into my hand fell a pair of glasses.’ — Jenny Crompton, from her book Unbelievable!: The Bizarre World of Coincidences (read for free)
