the essential
The photo, taken in Albert during the wedding of the grandparents of the famous TF1 presenter, was recovered by an Australian soldier in the rubble of a house during the First World War. The latter brought it home to Australia, before his granddaughter sent the image back to France almost a century later.
The story is insanely beautiful. A wedding photo has been returned to Picardy after spending almost a century in Australia. And this is not just any wedding photo: The two people celebrating their union in the photo are none other than the grandparents of Jean-Pierre Pernaut, star presenter of the TF1 news, who died in 2022, reports France Bleu. But how could this photo have passed almost 100 years on the other side of the world?
“He vowed to send her away one day.”
In 2023, an Australian woman named Gill discovers a strange photo in the belongings of her grandfather – who fought in the Somme during the First World War. “This photo is of a wedding, we see around a hundred people there. My grandfather writes that he found the photo in 1916, explains this retired teacher. He found it in the rubble of a house in Albert, which had just been bombed. He took the image in his bag, telling himself that it was important: he vowed to send it back one day.
Returning to Australia after the war in 1919, Gill’s grandfather brought the photo with him. All his life, the soldier will try to return the photo to its owners. “We found a letter dating from 1960, addressed to the mayor of Albert but never sent, in which he explains that he wanted to return this photo to its owners,” explains Gill. “But at the time, he was poor and did not have the means to send this mail But it was his dream, my mission was to make it come true.
The photo of returning to the Pernaut family
To carry out his mission, Gill sent an email to the Somme 1916 Albert museum with the photo attached. The museum then shared the photo on its social networks. And thanks to the dedication of several Internet users, the museum managed to identify a descendant of the bride and groom in the photo: it is the Pernaut couple.
The granddaughter of this couple is also the cousin of Jean-Pierre Pernaut. She made the decision to first keep this photo, before then offering it by lottery to a descendant of the Pernaut couple.
