The Trotters' Friend

"Mr. Frame?" quavered a husky voice on a London telephone one night last week. "I'm a trotter. I need your help." The stocky, mild man at the other end of the line nodded comprehendingly. "All right," he said into the phone, "Where can we meet?" The unknown voice named a time and a place.

Sidney Frame, physiotherapist, hung up, took a moment to jot down the information on a slip of paper and returned to an arthritic patient in the next room. The following afternoon he pulled up his creaking Rover 10 sedan around the corner from Wembley Park underground station and waited. Some 20 minutes later, a man stared into the car and in the same husky voice that the physiotherapist had heard over the phone asked again, "Mr. Frame?" "Yes, indeed," answered Frame cheerily, holding the car door open. "Do get in."

That night, after a long drive and a long talk with the husky-voiced stranger, Sidney Frame had a telephone call of his own to make. "I've got another chappie for you," he told a friend in the special investigation branch of army headquarters. The words meant that Sidney Frame, "the trotters' friend," had just persuaded one more of the 7,000-odd deserters still missing from the British armed services to give himself up. "Sometimes I think he's balmy to do all this," said Mrs. Frame, "but then, I suppose every man must have his hobby."

Frame's hobby began one day last year when in a police court Frame ran across a deserter who had been picked up as a vagrant. He made friends with the man, investigated his case and found that he had "trotted" in 1944 because his wife had TB. "The case opened my eyes," said Frame. "I had always held the popular misconception that deserters were no-goods, but then it occurred to me that many of them must have had what they felt were good reasons."

He intervened with his army friends on behalf of that deserter and made it a point from then on to keep his eye open for others. Frame met and talked to many of the trotters, found them desperate and sick of their fugitive lives, but terrified of stiff sentences if they surrendered. As word got around that he had been able to help some get light sentences, others began to look him up. Nowadays, as many as ten deserters a week call on Frame.

Last week Sidney Frame led his 100th black sheep back into the army fold. Many of those who had gone before had written to thank him. Said one: "Thank God, I can now put my head on a pillow at night and go to sleep."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.