Alert reader pegs location in photograph at heart of mystery

A recent streetscape image of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, taken from the Portsmouth Avenue bridge, between Shapley Island and Goat Island. It shows the same background captured in a mysterious photograph of a woman who might be the daughter of a Royal Navy veteran during World War II. Google Maps

An eagle-eyed reader of a story that ran in Sunday’s Sun Journal managed to nail down where a mysterious photograph was taken.

This mysterious photograph is labeled “MY DAUGHTER, LOREEN” on its reverse side in the handwriting of Jack London Gradwell, whose sons in England never heard of her until they saw the photo long after their father’s death. Provided

The story focused on an Englishman’s search for a woman who might be his sister, captured in a single photograph on which the man’s long-dead father wrote, “MY DAUGHTER, LOREEN.”

The snapshot showed the woman sitting on the deck of a boat, with a port in the background.

When Stephen Arbour of Augusta saw it, he recognized the location captured in the photograph: The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, on Seavey Island in Kittery.

With a little sleuthing on Google Maps, he even found a streetscape photograph shot recently from a nearby bridge that apparently captured the same background. Note in particular the long, low, white building over her left shoulder.

With the location of the picture seemingly locked down, the prospects for a Maine connection to Loreen appear much stronger.

Nobody has yet to come forward with any clue about who she might be or whether she could possibly be Royal Navy veteran Jack London Gradwell’s daughter.

Gradwell’s son, though, did find another bit of evidence of his father’s connection to the HMS Saker, the Royal Navy’s World War II land-based office in Lewiston from 1943 to 1945.

Of all things, it is a wartime Christmas card that Jack London Gradwell sent to his wife in Bolton, England, on Nov. 24, 1943, apparently from the United States.

A 1943 Christmas card from Royal Navy sailor Jack London Gradwell to his wife in Bolton, England, sent from his US assignment on the HMS Saker, a land-based naval unit housed at the airport in Auburn. Submitted photo