From the Daily Sketch more than fifty years ago (March 7, 1955) as posted at Hold the Front Page blog a couple of days ago:
This is very much a personal view by Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC and
offers no scientific evidence for or against the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. In 1954 Cheshire, having been inspired by a photo of the Shroud face while recuperating from tuberculosis, toured Britain with an exhibition of Shroud photographs.
Extensive scientific tests were carried out on the Shroud in October 1979 and in 1988 radiocarbon dating was done on some samples of the cloth, the results of which indicated that the shroud was no older than the 13th Century. Some authorities claimed that the samples were from a medieval repair rather than the original Shroud material, so the controversy continues but one mystery remains, apart from whether it is the image of Jesus or not, how was it made?
I have posted On the Beliefs of Group Captain Cheshire back in 2011.
One Saturday afternoon, back in the fifties, while living in London’s Earls Court district, I was reading a book about Cheshire’s wartime exploits in the RAF. The hour was runnung late and I hurried off to buy food for the weekend. At a corner, just off the Earls Court Road, I passed an old school bus, with a man standing beside it. I had already passed him when I realized that the man’s face was that of Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, VC, familiar to me from the book I had just been reading. I turned and spoke to him. There was no doubt I was standing with Cheshire himself.. He was quiet, unassuming, soft-spoken, intent on showing me a picture of the Turin shroud inside the old school bus. It took some minutes before I realized that I had just had an encounter with greatness. By the time I headed for home, he was gone.