The sailor who kissed the Iron Lady

Mick Fellows once enjoyed a brief encounter with Margaret Thatcher, said Jack Malvern in The Times (U.K.). During the Falklands War, the British Royal Navy diver was ordered to deal with an unexploded bomb that had hit the HMS Antrim. With the ship coming under attack from the air, he called colleagues in the U.K. for help. All they could suggest was that he keep the bomb level, and perhaps notify his wife about the situation. Fellows unleashed a torrent of profanities. “What I didn’t know was that this conversation was being broadcast to the Cabinet Room, where Margaret Thatcher was listening,” he recalls. Later, having succeeded in saving the ship, he was invited to meet the prime minister. “She said she wanted to meet the angry man. She told me she had heard a lot of swearing [working] in her father’s grocery, but said, ‘You taught me some words I didn’t know.’” Thatcher showed him a map of the Falklands that was under the Cabinet Room table, and asked him to point out where the Antrim had been. And then, he says, “the prime minister kissed me on the lips. I stood up so quick, I hit my head on the table. She said to me, ‘Ever since I was a girl, I’ve always wanted to kiss a sailor.’”

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