The Stain on the GlassBy

Charles Jeffrey Gray DFM L.d'H

ISBN 978-0-473-39828-6

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Contents

Preface 1

Chapter One 4Wellington Bomber crash in Brockhurst Wood Four Killed, one survivor What the local papers sayRear Gunner's mother makes last pilgrimageIn Memoriam, stained glass window in St. John's ChurchWhat the locals sayThe riddle of the crash siteLocating the sole survivor, hanging by a thread, the silken thread of a

parachute cord. Alive and well and living in New Zealand. What the official records say and the Court of Inquiry, 'Pilot panicked,

without due cause, previous accident may have unnerved him’.

Chapter Two 46Tracing the previous accidentLancaster Bomber crash on Standon Hill Devon, 1942, Four killed, two

survivorsVisit to the Squadron Flight Commander. 'No good will come of it.'Mystery of the crash siteWhat the local papers sayAttempts to trace the sole survivorWhat the official records say‘Inexperience, no disciplinary action.’

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Chapter Three 54Gwendoline Whiteman checks in, widow of Lancaster survivor The story of the Lancaster crash from log book and letters

Whiteman's concern for his pilot and belief in his later suicide His return visit to Standon Hill to exorcise the past

Chapter Four 110Hamilton New ZealandLunch with Clive Estcourt, ex-bomb-aimer and Wellington

survivor ‘I was told to put it behind me, to forget it.’Clive has really forgotten, no confirmation of 'Pilot panickedwithout due cause.'The trail that leads to nowhereNo traces of the dead pilot's family in New Zealand, only record of

four brothers, all killed in the war

Chapter Five 129Return to stained glass window and 86 years old mother of dead

Rear GunnerAfter forty years the full story of her son's last flight After forty years she prefers her own version What the old lady saysEnglish branch of pilot's family have taken him home to Durham

for burial.The ghosts are laid, no stain on the glass

Chapter Six 137For the love of Tom

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Copyright

The Stain on the Glass by Charles Jeffrey Gray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, SanFrancisco, California, 94105, USA.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.brockhurst.co.nz/the-stain-on-the-glass.

First published June 1984

Revised March 2009

ISBN & Author Information May 2016

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Illustrations

Illustration IndexIllustration 1: The Express - 18 May 1984.............................................2

Illustration 2: Locality Map.......................................................................3

Illustration 3: Maurice Lund (Left) with sister Grace Lund................5

Illustration 4: Operations Record Book No 11 O.T.U. January 1944.....................................................................................................................15

Illustration 5: Fire Brigade Darts Team. Archie Dunkin seated on left...............................................................................................................17

Illustration 6: Clive Estcourt's application to join Caterpillar Club. 27

Illustration 7: Clive Estcourt's application to join Caterpillar Club. 30

Illustration 8: Sgt Paul at Lancaster ControlsPhoto courtesy Ken Beauchamp................................................................................................60

Illustration 9: Illustration 8: Removal of wreckage Lancaster R5617 from Standon Hill June 1942..................................................................67

Illustration 10: Illustration 9: Crash Team on Standon Hill - (L to R)Reg, George Mudge, Taffy, Coley, Sgt Tibbles...................................73

Illustration 11: Illustration 10: Illustration 10: George Mudge, Standon Hill, Devon. 1985.....................................................................81

Illustration 12: Illustration 11: Sgt Clive Estcourt 1945...................111

Illustration 13: Flight Sgt A L Coulter................................................128

Illustration 14: Illustration 13: For The Love of Tom.....................134

Illustration 15: Illustration 13: Wellington Pilots Notes - Pilots Instrument Panel....................................................................................134

Illustration 16: Illustration 14: Wellington Pilots Notes - Pilots Instrument Panel - Legend...................................................................135

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Illustration 17: Illustration 15: Wellington Pilots Notes - Cockpit Port Side..................................................................................................136

Illustration 18: For The Love of Tom................................................136

Illustration 19: Illustration 17: Wellington Pilots Notes - Emergency Procedures...............................................................................................137

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Preface

he aeroplane came out of the night, circling low over the quietvillage.T

The noise of its passage woke the child. “Mummy, Mummy!” hecried, “there is an aeroplane afired and it’s going to crash”. Themother rose and went to reassure him.

Others heard it, people whose job it was to be awake throughoutthe night watches. Volunteer firemen came out into the station yardat the bottom of Green Man Hill and looked skyward towards thevillage.

An elderly man, hearing a noise downstairs, left his bed, selected atwelve bore from the gun cupboard and loaded both barrels.

In her bedroom at the back of Warren House, a young womanstarted awake at the sound of a fearful crash. Struggling with theblackout, she saw a blaze light up the trees of Brockhurst Wood.Her mother raised the alarm bringing wardens and rescue workersto the scene. When they came, the girl and her mother guided themalong the path into the wood toward the wreckage.

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Illustration 1: The Express - 18 May 1984

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Illustration 2: Locality Map

Chapter One

n the early hours of January 4th 1944 a Wellington bomber ofthe RAF crashed in Brockhurst Wood near the village ofFarnham Common. Of the crew of six only one survived. After

the war the people of the village clubbed together for a memorialand installed a stained glass window in the Anglican Church of St.John’s nearby.

IAlthough I had lived in Farnham Common for over twenty years,my first knowledge of these events came from a newspaper item. Alady of eighty-four, Mrs. Florence Payne, mother of the dead rear-gunner, Sergeant Victor Payne returned on a pilgrimage, revisitingthe site and the church. It was a moving story and I read it throughseveral times. And then, unbidden, the questions arose in my mind.The newspaper indicated that the bomber was crippled and theyoung airmen died trying to avoid the village.

In that year, the year of 1944, when I had completed my tour ofoperations with Bomber Command, I became an instructorreturning to my old operations training unit at Market Harborough.There we flew Wellington's, long since withdrawn from operations,training new bomber crews to feed the insatiable demands of war.

This particular aeroplane must have come from just such a unit, anO.T.U. and I wondered which one and tried to put myself backforty years in time, back inside the Wellington cockpit. Whatdreadful combinations of circumstance conspired against them?Why here in Brockhurst Wood?

There was one further slight link. Four of the crew were NewZealanders, including the one survivor. These young men had comevoluntarily from the other side of the world to help in the defence

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of freedom, only to perish here in Buckinghamshire. My elder sonnow lives in New Zealand and, more and more, I find myselfcommuting between the two countries.

On an impulse, I telephoned the newspaper and spoke to thereporter Joanne Dixon who had written the story. All she knew wasin her report based upon what the rear gunner’s mother and brother

had told her, and the newspapers files of forty years ago.

At that time we were not told why aeroplanes crashed, nor did weenquire. “Be like Dad, keep Mum,” said the posters. That someonedid enquire I knew, for there were men who quietly came and tookaway belongings, and others who visited the sites and wrote reports,and ascertained or guessed at the probable causes.

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Illustration 3: Maurice Lund (Left) with sister Grace Lund

I decided to ring the brother, Leslie Payne. I half expected to be toldto mind my own business. On the contrary, he was pleased thatsomeone was sufficiently interested to make enquiry from so longago, yet past forgetting. It was as a reminder that he had caused thestory to be published. I said we must never forget and I sensed thathe was moved and close to tears.

He told me what little he knew about the crash. One day after hereturned from Italy, back to his trade and his butcher’s shop, a mancame in announcing himself as a farmer. Not over fond of farmers,the butcher started in to give him short shrift. Something in thefarmer’s appearance arrested his attention and stopped him. Thefarmer was from New Zealand, here because their brothers hadbeen pals together and had died together, somewhere in a wood justnorth of Slough.

The butcher and the farmer set out and located the place, searchingfor fragments of the crashed Wellington. They visited the militarygraveyard and the air gunner’s Mother. The family offered suchhospitality as lay within their means and the farmer, in return, askedthat they come back with him to a new life in the South Pacific, butthey declined. For some time afterwards the farmer sent foodparcels, and the Mother knitted woollen garments for him. With thepassage of the years they lost contact.

Nothing more was said till one day the Mother hinted that shewould like to make a last pilgrimage to Farnham Common. Thebutcher laid it on and telephoned the newspaper which had coveredthe original story and that was how I first knew of it.

I put down the telephone, my questions forgotten. I clipped thenews item and wrote a brief letter to my son asking him to forwardthe cutting to the Auckland Herald where, perhaps, it would be readand strike a chord in some homestead in that far country.

English villages have a complex social structure, here overlaid byoverspill from the Capital. I needed to find the residents of fortyyears ago, those not caught up in the toils of war, who wouldremember the event and the spirit of the times.

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I started with Maurice Lund, the green grocer. Not an easycharacter, a man given to keeping his own counsel and difficult toapproach. He had a weakness though, a fondness for old machines,motor bikes especially, from his competition days. He wassympathetic towards those who liked old cars. I was surprised tofind that his interest extended to aeroplanes, but then I didn’t knowthat he’d spent the war making Hurricane fighters in a shadowfactory at Langley.

He remembered the Wellington, the direction of the approach andwhere it crashed. With a gesture of his hand, he swept away thebuildings where the market garden had been. There were no councilhouses then, all clear land, then the woods. It had gone into thewood, cutting a clearing amongst the trees. It was badly smashed upbut they had to cut it up more to get it out when they came to takeaway the wreckage. The kids had a fine time afterwards, findingfragments that had been overlooked.

Did he know where it had come from? Lincolnshire or, maybeLeicestershire, that’s what they had been told. What of the survivorwho crawled from the wreckage? “Didn’t crawl,” he said, “nobodycrawled, baled out, and went to a house in Templewood Lane,'Fernlea' most like, to ask for help, paper had it all wrong there.” Iwas to hear that remark, or something like it, quite often in the nextfew days.

He’d gone to see it, but hadn’t ever been back. People said nothinghad grown there since, but he didn’t know about that. We movedon to safer topics discussing the engines. Probably a Mark 10Wellington, with the Bristol Hercules. They pushed out about 1600horse power apiece; nearly double the power of the old Pegasus.Mind you, nothing like as reliable an engine, that old Peggy tooksome beating. I went away, struck by the idea that nothing grew onthe crash site, like a scar, the start of a legend.

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Vera, my next informant, and assistant inthe green-grocers shop. On the contrary, the site was distinguishableby the greenery. The trees and everything had come up greener,“because of the fire, you see. It has that effect.” “ I didn’t know it

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had caught fire,” I said. No, she hadn’t seen it, but the paper said itcaught fire, and the Fire Brigade came, and it stands to reason. Iasked if she could show me the spot and she gave me a strange look.I realised I’d made a faux pas, inviting a respectable lady of my ownvintage to come into the woods looking for heaven knows what.What would people think! However, next time I saw her, when Itold her that the Royal Observatory had calculated the precise timeof moonrise and moonset for me for the night in question, shearranged for her husband to take me, to be sure I found the rightplace, and no mistakes.

In fact I didn’t wait to be taken there. My wife Joan and I wentlooking, following the directions Maurice had given. Crash sites areunmistakable, and I thought I would recognise the place. I failed totake account of the passage of time. In forty years saplings growinto trees and mature trees decay and fall. When we came to a likelyplace, I stopped. There was something wrong. The clearing ranfrom north to south, Maurice had led me to expect north-west tosouth-east. Nearby nothing grew on the leaf-carpeted forest floor,the light cut off by the overhead canopy. Except in this place, wherethe light streamed in and the brambles and ground cover grew, starkgreen against the surrounding browns. I told my wife what Ithought we were looking for. “We must look for broken brancheswhere the bomber came in slicing off the upper foliage, then ancientscars on the tree trunks, all healed over, and all in the samedirection. Then finally, where they came to rest, some evidence offire damage.”

She was the first to find the scars. There weren’t many, but theywere there. There was no sign of fire. You could have passed theplace every day without a second glance. I wandered around for awhile, hoping for an inspiration, some clue to the past, waiting for Iknow not what, but nothing happened. No sense of unease or ofbeing observed came to me. If there were unearthly spirits presentthere, they failed to manifest themselves. Instead, I experienced asense of futility and of waste. Man’s pygmy efforts went unnoticedin the quiet woodland; nature had healed and obliterated the scars asif the airmen and their aeroplane had never been.

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Word got around in the village that someone was asking questionsabout the Wellington crash. The newspaper item had caused a rippleof interest. People began to tell me things, to suggest that I see oldso and so, or had I thought of enquiring here or there. It came tome that I could enquire of official sources. After thirty years, orsome such period, secret files are opened to the public and anyonecan have their penny’s worth. Aha, but where to start? The name“Air Ministry” came to mind. I dialled Directory Enquiries, numberone nine two. The Air Ministry are ex-directory, said the operator. Ifthe British have a passion for anything, it is for secrecy. In officialquarters it amounts to near mania. It sometimes takes the form ofname changing to throw enquirers off the scent. “They probablychanged their title,” I said, “try the Ministry of Defence.” Ittranspired that it was the Ministry of Defence (Air) that I wanted, Afor Air as opposed to A for Army, Historical Branch.

I struck lucky right away. I had a date for the occurrence, and thatwas the key to their filing system. The Wellington came from No. 11O.T.U., R.A.F. Westcott, part of No. 92 Group and the satellitestation was R.A.F. Oakley. Aircraft Z for Zebra, number 8793,crashed in a wood near Slough and caught fire on the 4th.January1944, at approximately 0200 hours. The training exercise was H.L.B.The pilot’s name was Warrant Officer Paul, a New Zealander.

Five men were killed, including the pilot, but there was onesurvivor. Under the heading 'Probable Cause', it said, 'Unusuallythick cloud may have misled the pilot.' “That’s all?” I said. Yes, thatwas all, only the name of the pilot was recorded. I asked about the'Probable Cause'. That didn’t make any sense. My informant saidthat though the ink on the card was very faded, it was quite plain, nomistake about that. “I don’t know what H.L.B. means,” she added.“High Level Bombing” I said, “Oh, of course.”

“I’m not familiar with Westcott, where is that?” I asked. “I’d ratherhoped you wouldn’t ask, I don’t know,” she said. We chatted for awhile as I wanted to be sure I had the details right. I told her a littleof what I was doing. She suggested I try the R.A.F. Museum at

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Hendon, their records might be more comprehensive. I thanked herand rang off.

My wife and I found several Westcott’s with various spellingsthroughout the U.K. There was one in Oxfordshire betweenBicester and Aylesbury. That seemed very likely, not too far as thecrow flies and went some way to answer the question of “Whyhere?” But what of Maurice and his Lincolnshire? Ah, yes, thebombing ranges were scattered around the Wash and East Anglia. Itseemed likely that they had completed their high level bombingexercise and were on their way home to Westcott fromLincolnshire, albeit off the direct track.

I turned back to my war time flying log books. What did weconsider high level in those days? Bomber Command used twentythousand feet. Where I had recorded the height against H.L.B.exercises, I found ten thousand feet. I also found that bombingexercises and navigational flights were sometimes combined so heneed not have been off track.

Now ten thousand feet would be a most practical altitude to choose,if hardly high level. In the short distance between base and thebombing range, with the slow rate of climb of the Wellington, he’djust about make that, starting by circling overhead to a safe altitude,then climbing on track. Additionally, and rather regretfully, I realisedanother thing. At ten thousand feet oxygen masks would not berequired. One strong possibility, some malfunction or misuse of theoxygen system might have to be discarded, if I ever got around tofinding the real reason for the crash.

When I told Maurice that they had come from Westcott, he wasright on it. That’s still there he assured me, some kind ofGovernment Establishment, no question about it, he passed it everyyear on his annual motor bike run to Banbury. He got out an oldbook about vintage cars, and looking about as if to be sure no onewas watching, he slipped it to me. “You’ll enjoy reading that,” hesaid.

I didn’t enjoy it. My mind kept wandering off like some restlessspirit, plagued by an unsolved mystery that must be pinned down. I

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realised that I had got myself involved in an investigation and mustbegin to take it seriously. In my time I have taken part in a numberof investigations, but more frequently, I have had to review theevidence and test it and make recommendations for the future. Icompiled a list of all the enquiries I would have to make startingwith the R.A.F. Museum.

The R.A.F. Museum keep their records on microfilm under twoheadings, aircraft movements and aircraft accidents. Not muchinterested in the history of the aircraft, I homed straight in on theaccident records. It was a couple of days before they could deal withmy query. Word for word, the report followed that of the Ministryof Defence. It could hardly be otherwise. When we came to the'Probable Cause', however, the Librarian seemed to hesitate,reluctant to continue. Eventually he asked if I had a pen handy, Imight want to write it down. I copied it down in disconnectedstatements as he read it to me.

“Pilot panicked in bumpy flying conditions without any foundation.

Previous accident may have unnerved him.

C.O. considers landing lights accidentally selected on cloud, causedpilot to believe fire existed.

Contributory factors: Darkness and unusually thick layer of cloud.May have misled the pilot.

Captain did not carry out correct abandon aircraft procedure.Attempted to crash land aircraft.”

There was a silence as I mulled it over. “I don’t like it,” I said, “Idon’t like it one little bit. I wouldn’t want anyone to see this,particularly relatives. Think of the distress.”

“As you pointed out, these records are open to all. Your reaction isnot unusual.” The Librarian paused. “A good many people whodelve into these records come to regret it. I’m sorry, but there it is!”

As the full implications sank in, I was stunned. “misled”, “panic”,“without foundation”, the words reeled in my head. On the otherend of the line, the Librarian continued, trying to help me. “The

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Public Records Office may have more details. Perhaps when youhave more detail it won’t seem so bad for the crew. They’re closedyou know, bugs in the air conditioning, all that paper and extrahumidity. Something akin to Legionnaire’s disease. When theyreopen you can ask for a full search. They have all the Squadron andUnit records.” I heard him out. He was being most understandingand very kind. I thanked him, said I might want to come back on it,to trace the aeroplane, see if there was any record of unserviceabilityor accidental damage, but not now. Certainly not now. I rang off.

The weather perked up and for a day or two I busied myself in thegarden and put the whole thing out of my mind, on the back burneras they say. I should have left it there but then Reg Savin stoppedme in the street to ask if I’d found out anything about the oldbomber crash. “No, no,” I said, “at this distance in time I don’tthink we will ever know, it’s all too long ago.” He persisted. “Youshould talk to Dennis. He heard you were asking about it. Denniswas just a lad. When he and his mates heard, they were down therelike long dogs. Nicked some of the bits, I shouldn’t wonder.Anyway, they met the survivor, next day that would be.” I looked athim. “This Dennis,” I asked, “Where do I find this Dennis?” Helooked astonished. “He’s painting the house next door, MrsWoodison's house, well maybe he’s finished, you must ask themissus there. Dennis says he wasn’t hurt, his ankle maybe, but that’sall. Told Dennis they thought it was all fields, looked all right in themoonlight, all right to land. What do you think?” “That survivor,” Isaid, “if he’s still alive, he’s the only man in the world who knowswhat happened, holds the key to the whole thing and I don’t evenknow his name.”

From that moment I was lost. I was now committed to finding thetruth, or whatever passed for the truth, of getting as close as washumanly possible. I set about finding the survivor.

I composed my check list of things to do:

1) Phone & Letter Public Records Office, Kew.2) Ditto Met. Office, Bracknell.3) Ditto Royal Greenwich Observatory,

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(Eastbourne?)4) Re check R.A.F. Museum, Hendon.5) Newspaper report January l944.6) Ditto Memorial Service, 19487) Church Records. St. Johns, Victoria Road8) Interviews: a) Occupier, 'Fernlea'.

b) Builder/Decorator, Dennis.c) Fireman, Archie Dunkin

9) Trace Survivor. a) Find name/rank/number.b) Recruit daughter-in-law, N.Z.

Suggest R.S.A.c) Try Caterpillar Club.

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It was back to Directory Enquiries on 192. First the long wait, thenthe imperious “Which town please?” “Greenwich, the RoyalGreenwich Observatory” I did know it had moved to Eastbourneand bits of it had been re-located in Las Palmas, but BritishTelecom didn’t. The operator became unhelpful. As far as she wasconcerned it had ceased to exist. For a moment I was stumped

Unlikely as it seemed, the meteorology chaps at Bracknell didn’tkeep records on the phases of the moon, I’d already tried that.

What about Slough Observatory? Because of Sir William Herschel,Slough had an observatory, Admiralty compasses and things likethat. The developers had pulled his house down, probably the onlybuilding in the town of any historic interest, but in the post-warhaste, that’s what they did. Slough Observatory had become SloughLaboratory. “We’re insects now,” said the girl. I explained aboutDirectory Enquiries. “Hopeless,” she said, “Try the LondonPlanetarium, they’re bound to know.”

At the Planetarium, they were indignant that I had misplaced theRoyal Observatory, and very scathing about British Telecom. Thegirl there knew the phone number by heart. “You must tell TheStandard, it will go nicely with their story of the eclipse of the suntomorrow.” “It’s not the sun I’m interested in,” I told her, “it’s themoon, I need to know the phase of the moon on the night ofJanuary 3rd/4th 1944, and the time of rising and setting.” “You willneed to know the Latitude and Longitude,” she said, “it’s not likethe sun, you know, all nicely tabulated. They will have to calculatethe times for you.” I’d forgotten. I never did like moon shots,generally forgot something, parallax in altitude usually.

The Royal Observatory told me the phase of the moon after a delayof perhaps two minutes. The calculations would take a little longer,perhaps if I rang back tomorrow morning. The moon was two dayspast the first quarter, rising sometime in the afternoon, setting earlyin the night, say about two o’clock in the morning. “The time ofmoon set would be helpful,” I said, “I’ll ring back tomorrow.”

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Illustration 4: Operations Record Book No 11 O.T.U. January 1944

Transcript of RAF Form 540 OPERATIONS RECORD BOOK

Place Date Time Summary of EventsWESTCOTT Jan 1st 12:05

1944 forced landed at WESTCOTT on cross country when port engine failedjettisoned fuel and bombs but could not maintain height. Belly landed on grass on25 Runway nearly removing control tower en route Details of bombs passed to

will also try to pinpoint position of bombs from the air

12:13/ Weather cloudy with cloud breaking to variable amounts during the day moderate12:15

WESTCOTT 2nd 10:50

16:4823:20 Air raid message purple 23.58 air raid message red 0042 Air raid message white

Weather fine at first but convection cloud developed at noon and persisted

WESTCOTT 3rd 00:10 Cattle between Watch office and perimeter rounded up and cleared from airfield02:20

near SLOUGH03:40 Agreed to take four aircraft from Wing their runway being badly out of wind03:50 Group informed us that five bodies have been located in the crash of 8793

04:40 Overdue action taken on WBS E no replies having been received to GroupBroadcast and no trace of aircraft having worked any MF/DF section

Page 2 04:55 One of the aircraft which landed from Wing had taxying accident Wingtip strucka bowser which had drawn into a dispersal

06:50 Group require us to provide an aircraft for Air Sea Rescue search

Visibility was moderate to good throughoutWESTCOTT 4th 10:11 First Air Sea rescue aircraft airborne Fourth airborne at 1037 hours

14:47 Last Air sea rescue aircraft returned22:00 Group state we may be required to stand by for diversion of one or more aircraft

From other stations in the group01:00 Diversion now cancelled02:43

Weather after a very slight shower around 0100 hours cloud dispersed and did notreform Winds fresh between NN/W and NW during the day but dropped off during

WESTCOTT 6th 12:00 Our two aircraft scrubbed from Eric exercise owing to technical faults23:40

WESTCOTT 7th 09:10 Group advised us that A.O.C, and S.A.S.O. will fly around all stations to inspectdaylight .A.A.I.‘s

11:40 Command Bulls eye tonight one aircraft took partWeather The cloud sheet broke temporarily during the day but thickened up withincreasing medium cloud late in period and slight rain commenced just beforeMidnight. Moderate visibility deteriorated slightly in rain. Light W/SW winds

WESTCOTT 8th 15:1015:15 QDM to Mount Farm passed to a Liberator on our circuit

of Unit or Formation No. 11 O.T.U.

Wellington aircraft ME 689 “S “of “D” flight SILVERSTONE Capt F/O Enock

Armoury F/L Truman dealing with recovery Silverstone will send a/c for crew

Fortresses 580 and 746 airborne for their bases at Coddington and Bassingbourne

Visibility improving after dawn Moderate to fresh W/ly windsGroup broadcast Command Bullseye tonight Route Portland 5020N 0015EBirmingham Happisburg Cambridge Mobile I. R. target Birmingham.First Bullseye aircraft airborne three aircraft took part and completed exercise

Visibility good with W/ly winds backing SW/ly

Informed Oakley that 8793 W/O Paul had crashed Observer Corps report a crash

Northolt taking all necessary action Crash 250 yards South of house called TheGrange Templewood Lane Farnham Common One survivor Sgt Estcourt

Weather Mainly cloudy with a period of continous slight rain during the eveningBut winds veered NW/ly at 2100 and cloud broke to small amounts

Air Raid message red 0255 Aie Raid message white

the evening with deterioration in visibility to 2000-5000 yds by end of period

Anson circled beacon but did not answer challenge

Darky call from “Featherbrain K” QDM to Mount Farm given

I was glad I’d checked, for I had already written off the moon.

From my log book I knew that Bomber Command had been out instrength the night before and we didn’t care over much formoonlight. Unlike the lady in the song, “Moonlight becomes you”,we tried to avoid it. Helpful, yes, but more helpful to night fighters.The official report clearly said, “Dark, unusually thick layer ofcloud,” which had baffled me. The house painter, Dennis Busby,mentioned moonlight, seeing fields in the moonlight. I began to seeit as a jigsaw puzzle. Many of the pieces were lost, possibly for ever,and the few I had so far, stubbornly refused to fit together.

At 'Fernlea', Mr Brooker, the owner, was busy with his bees. I keptmy distance and came straight to the point about the Wellingtoncrash. He remembered it well, mostly because his son was so excitedabout it and brought home some fragments. “The survivor went toa house in Templewood Lane,” I said, “I believe it was your house,and asked for help.” “First I’ve heard of it then,” he replied.Another part of the jigsaw refused to fit. The bee-keeper went onwith his work, looking for something. “I’m looking for a queen,” hesaid, “a virgin queen. Incidentally, these are New Zealand bees.” “Ah, you know they were mostly New Zealanders, who were killedhere?” He didn’t know. I told him I had been in Bomber Command,finally instructing on Wellington's. The bees seemed very docile,perhaps because of the expert handling, or the rather cold weather,or both, so I moved closer, watching him at work removing andreplacing slabs of bees. “I had a brother killed on Wellington's, reargunner, 26th or 28th October, 1940. They were using some newtechnique with searchlights, he's buried near Antwerp” he told me.“The boy who collected the parts, he was killed riding his bicycle inthe Beeches.” What could I say? I muttered something about notforgetting, we must not forget and I made my apologies forintruding and prepared to take my leave. “If you like,” he said,“come back again. I will look out the fragments for you, if we stillhave them.” He turned back to the bees. “These are my pets, youknow!” That much was plain, because of the way he handled them.He hadn’t found his queen, perhaps I had distracted him. “I hope

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you find her,” I called as I moved away. “You too,” he said. “What-ever it is you are looking for, I hope you find it.”

That was the rub. What was I looking for?

At seventy seven, Archie Dunkin was still very active. He couldn’tsee me till evening when he had finished the milking. It was rainingheavily when I arrived but his garden looked immaculate. Tidy sortof chap, I thought, should be good on detail, and since he was thelast survivor of the old volunteer fire brigade which had attendedthe crash, his recollections might be crucial. It was awkward at firstas, mistakenly, I didn’t go straight to the point. He showed me aphotograph of the fire team. I guessed that the one on the right, inthe back row, must be Archie. I guessed wrong. It was the dartsteam and that was Archie sitting in front. They used to play in a clubin Slough High Street, he couldn’t remember the name. “Thatwould be the old Leopold”, I said, “next to Suters as was, now

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Illustration 5: Fire Brigade Darts Team. Archie Dunkin seated on left

Owen Owen. Before that it was Hopkins and Son, Gentleman’sHaberdashery.” The atmosphere eased at once. I had established mycredentials in the most convincing way.

The fireman heard the noise of the aeroplane, well you know thecrippled noise they made, coming in low, struggling to get back tobase. No, I didn’t know. Did he mean like the old German bomberswhen they de-synchronised the engines and caused a “beat”. Notlike that, different somehow, not spluttering, not cutting, justcrippled and circling low, circling twice. They waited forHeadquarters in Burnham to ring through, sure enough, the phonerang. “ There’s an aeroplane circling, going to crash in your vicinity,get cracking,” said Burnham. They got cracking. They heard it crash.Not a bang, more a whoosh, a sound of falling trees. They went inby Templewood Lane, and 'The Grange', then on foot through thewoods. By the time they got there, others were on the scene.

“What about the fire?” I asked. There was no fire. “What about thefire in the air?” No fire, he would have remembered that. Oneengine jumped across the lane. It was lying beyond the fence, quiteseparate, ahead of the wreckage. The body of an airman hung in thebranches, the legs missing. They found the survivor in a housenearby, but which house he couldn’t say. The survivor was all right,sitting on a settee. They couldn’t understand him, funny sort ofaccent, Canadian maybe. I corrected him, not Canadian, NewZealander. Could be, funny anyway, wouldn’t say anything, just keptasking for his mates. They couldn’t tell him that. When there wasnothing more to be done, they returned to the Fire Station.

I was conscious of a keen disappointment. There were things sosharply remembered like snapshots, preserved when all else hadbeen forgotten. The papers had got some things wrong and so hadMaurice. Not unusual, specially for the papers. Had I asked oldGeorge so and so? No, I wasn’t sure what to make of him. “Just likehis father before him,” said Archie. “With his father, if the firstthing he told you weren’t a lie, the second thing would be.” Weparted cheerfully although the rain prevented a tour of the garden

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but he got out his prize cup to show me. One more win and hecould keep it, not the original, you understand but a replica.

I got back in my car and drove away past the handsome new villawhere the old volunteer fire station had been. I stopped and stoodin the rain looking skyward to where the aeroplane must havecircled. Green Man Hill hid the woods and the crash site from view.On the final approach from Beaconsfield, coming in from thenorth, the firemen could not have seen him, not until they startedup and drove to the top of the hill into the village and by then, therewould be nothing to see, unless there was a fire burning in the trees,somewhere in Brockhurst Wood.

It was time to check the newspaper files. I didn’t expect very much.Quite apart from censorship, the press were unlikely to publiciseanything that didn’t actively advance the war effort.

Hidden amongst the stately refurbished mansions of Windsor’saffluent business community, I located the narrow decrepit premisesof our local newspaper. The outer office was manned by a slip of agirl. Deafened by the din of pneumatic drills and gritty with brickdust, she directed me past the marble halls of the rich and powerful,the financial advisers, the developers, the legal eagles and confidencetricksters of all kinds, to another scruffy outpost of bygone glories.

I paid my £1 search fee and was led through a maze to a library.Bygone glories indeed! I lost count of time. I forgot my wife waitingby the car. I forgot the world of the present and became absorbed in1944. Sure enough, the first mention was brief and to the point andnot altogether accurate.

“FOUR DIE IN AIR CRASH”

“EARLY MORNING TRAGEDY IN SOUTH BUCKSVILLAGE.”

“ONE MAN SAVED”

“A Wellington bomber crashed in flames into a wood.”

I copied it down verbatim and then proceeded to look for furtheritems. The faces of young men stared back at me. Issue after issue

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containing photographs of young men, their successes and triumphschronicled, Qualified as pilot. Wings awarded. Promoted to officerrank. And side by side, still shown in their cadet uniforms, freshfrom these successes, the toll of the missing, believed killed, shotdown over Germany, died in action. Pupils from Slough GrammarSchool, apprentices from the Rheostatic, the favourite sons fromJohn Betjeman’s least favourite town. The issue of Friday, January9th 1948 brought me what I wanted, a detailed and factual accountof the memorial service at St. John’s Church. I made silent apologyfor all my unkind remarks about newspaper inaccuracy. Where elsein the world could I have found such a detailed and splendiddescription. It opened thus:

“FARNHAM COMMON MEMORIAL TO FIVE GALLANTAIRMEN”

Then followed details of the service, conducted by the ReverendC.W. Warner. The Reverend Warner was known and lovedthroughout the district, a great character.

My mind wandered off remembering what I’d heard of him. “I walkaround in dead men’s clothes,” he announced one day from thepulpit. But not that day. Warner knew his congregation. The lessonswere, “Comfort ye my people,” and “Let not your heart betroubled.” Mr. Jubb of Warren House read the lessons. It was Mrs.Jubb and daughter, Wendy who were first on the scene guiding therescue workers and A.R.P. Wardens. After the service, Mrs. Jubbtook relatives into the wood and laid a bunch of chrysanthemumson the crash site. The Rector quoted Binyons moving testament,“We will remember them.”

For the Jubb family, the memorial occasion must have been one ofintense sorrow, their son, Brian, missing on his first raid overGermany, reported killed in action in April, 1944. Copies of theorder of service and photographs of the window went off torelatives in New Zealand. Now, at last, I had the name of thesurvivor and could set the search in train. I retraced my steps to theouter office. “Did you find what you wanted?” asked one of the

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girls. I told them what I had found. Without a word, the girl openedthe till and handed me back my £1.

Now began a period of waiting whilst copies of the official reportscame to hand and people I wished to see came back from holidays. Ibecame aware of a deep sense of waiting, of tense expectation, ofsomething about to happen. It was as if a cast of actors hadassembled, unbidden, and were standing all about waiting for somemanner of play to begin, the final act in a drama that had its originsin the first few days of that most fateful year, the year when the ringbegan to close around Hitler’s Germany.

I tried to put the matter to the back of my mind, not to rush aheadnor come to false conclusions. There was a time, long ago, when Iwas instructing on Wellingtons and thought I knew as much aboutthem as any man alive, except perhaps, the designer himself, BarnesWallis. His fame, however, didn’t rest upon the Wellington. It washis bouncing bomb and the “dam busting” exploits that made hisreputation. His Wellington was immensely safe and easy to fly. Itsgeodetic construction gave great strength and flexibility. It couldtake tremendous punishment, the doped fabric clinging to the'chicken wire' frame keeping the whole thing together when, byrights, it should have been shot to pieces. Unfortunately, along withthe other bombers with which Britain started the war, it was alreadyoutdated and unable to match the tasks which were laid upon it. TheWellingtons took a beating. When the new heavy bombers camealong, few regretted the passing of the “Wimpey”, now down-graded to training use and, here and there, obscure mine layingduties in the Baltic or hunting down u-boats as they surfaced in theBay of Biscay

Despite myself, I began to categorise and examine all the knownways by which the Wimpey could be brought to grief. Heavenknows, both my students and I had tried hard enough in our day.One by one I discarded them. My jigsaw remained unsolved, thepieces opposed to each other, refusing to fit any kind of pattern.

I turned back to the Official Report. “Most Probable Cause!” It wasdamning. “Panic”. “Without Foundation”. Then the inexplicable

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contributory factors. “The unusually thick layer of cloud.” Bellsbegan to ring. It was a pound to a pinch of snuff that on the 4th ofJanuary the freezing level lay close to the ground. Any kind of cloud,unusually thick or otherwise, would contain icing and, if it werereally thick and full of super cooled water droplets, it would containthe very worst type of icing, glazed ice. I dredged through mymemory for the anti-icing system. A complete blank. Never mind, Iknew a squirrel, a chap who kept everything that came his way.Unfortunately, he had gone to live in Australia but I had no doubtthat I could borrow his Pilot's notes and mug up the anti-icing. Onething was sure, it would be quite unable to cope with anythingapproaching severe icing conditions. State of the art.

Was there anything else pointing that way? The crew were mostlyNew Zealanders. In addition to being a sprog crew, it was veryprobable that the European flying conditions had come as a shockto them. They would be unused to our winters, the long dark nights,the semi-twilight that passed for daylight, the fog and the smog, butworst of all, the airframe and engine icing.

Another thing from the report. “Landing lights on cloud caused himto believe he was on fire!” Really chaps, don’t give me that. Wherein the world could you find a pilot who, at some time or other, hadnot left his landing lamps on, only to frighten himself on going intocloud? If he had thought himself on fire because of that, I doubt ifhe would have reached the graduation day. But, if he were lookingfor ice, if he was trying to account for some terrifying loss ofperformance or engine malfunction, he would, most certainly, turnon his landing lamps to see if he was flying in cloud.

Kind Hearts and Coronets! In cobbling together some improbablecauses, had the authors of the official report handed me thesolution? It’s well known that, the further up the pole they go, theless they know about flying and the less likely they are to questionthe technical stuff. The C.O. was working on the first principle ofservice life, 'Bullshit Baffles Brains!' Undoubtedly a kindly man, hehad chucked in anything he could dream up as contributory factors,to lessen the harsh and uncompromising judgement.

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It was a dramatic moment for me. Had I been a betting man I'dhave put my shirt on the weather reports that were shortly to comethumping through my letter box. Turbulence, severe icing, heavycloud, the lot, it simply had to be. For some quite inexplicablereason the sense of waiting, did not abate. I addressed myself to theimaginary cast, “Disperse, you can push off now, it's over fellas. Iknow you've been waiting for the star player, the missing bomb-aimer. We don't need him now, I think we've cracked it!” They tooknot a blind bit of notice.

The blow fell the very next day. I read the reports in growingconsternation. Throughout the region, clear skies, no cloud at anylevel, high pressure, temperatures falling and closing the dew points,a small risk of fog perhaps, towards morning. My hypothesis fellabout my ears, shattered to smithereens, along with all the C.O.'scontributory causes.

What was it I had overlooked? It was curious that the villagers, thewitnesses from that night, could not remember the weather, notgive any clue as to what kind of night it was. Surely someoneremembered, the cold quiet conditions, the slight northerly windand clear skies. Market gardeners, farmers of every kind,greengrocers even, are all intimately involved in weather lore. Surelythat would stick in the memory.

I went back to my old flying log book. On the night of January 2nd.we had gone again to Berlin only to divert because of weather onour return. On the morning of the 3rd., we flew back to base aspassengers, courtesy of Number 50 Squadron. Just a minute. Thequestion of dates had me foxed. If the Wellington crashed on 4th ofJanuary, he had set out on the night of the 3rd. All along, had I beentwenty four hours out? Both my time of moonset and the weatherreports might be twenty four hours adrift. I made haste to repair theomission, but without real hope of making any significantdifference.

Events now began to race ahead of me. A customer in thegreengrocery shop reported that her son had woken her with,“Mummy, mummy, come quick, there's an aeroplane afired, and it's

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going to crash.” Vera came round to report it to me. She was out ofbreath from cycling or, maybe, from excitement. Not only that butWendy Jubb had watched it from her bedroom window. Thepossibility of an eyewitness filled me with delight. Things seen inchildhood are engraved upon the memory, sharp and in focus,whilst later events fade and are forgotten.

But first the visit to the site was arranged, a guided tour. It was acruel disappointment and a double blow. I was not convinced.Nothing had ever happened in this place, certainly no crash had everoccurred here. I kept quiet as it was many years since my guide hadbeen there and the wood was constantly changing yet forever thesame, one vista through the trees was just like the last. Besides, Irealised that I too had been mistaken on my first visit. Wishfulthinking had led me to wrong conclusions. Unmistakable evidenceof scars were no more than haphazard damage. I had not yet stoodupon the site of the crash, for I knew that such places are unique.

I took my wife into the wood to show her where we had been.From there we set off to back track the route that the firemen hadtaken. We wound up going round in circles on a hopeless quest.When we decided to call it off, we had to relocate ourselves. Theafternoon sun shining through the trees provided a bearing so wewere able to strike a line towards the village. We came upon astream meandering through a swampy bit and had to detour aroundit.

On the way, my wife stopped, struck by a discontinuity, a deepgouge running through the ridge we were on. She called me over.“Whatever could have made that?” The earth was dug over anddisturbed. “Pigs digging for truffles, perhaps?” About us, youngtrees crowded in on each other, vying for the available space. I setoff to walk around them. My wife stood still. To herself she said,“Now, come on fellas, give us a hand, will you?” She picked up apiece of metal, then another and handed them to me.

I stood there in the middle of the place where the young trees grew,where the fire had raged, looking at pieces of aluminium, distortedand melted by the heat, then more and more fragments came to

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light, with ammunition and spent bullet cases, torn and shatteredfragments of metal where generations of village children had dug forsouvenirs. We had lost our way and found the place at last.

I had been looking for a long scar, an attempted forced landing,clipping the tree tops at first as the fireman had described. It wasnothing like that. Perhaps they had gone in much more steeply,gouging the earth and tearing their way through the ridge. Severalmature trees barring the way must have been torn down before theirprogress was arrested and the flames engulfed them. The shatteredfragments gave mute evidence of a fearful impact. Spent bullet casesand distorted metal attested to an intense heat. The forty year oldsaplings, crowded together at an identical stage of growth, hadsprung from the ashes. The visibly charred logs confirmed, ifconfirmation was needed, that Z for Zebra had indeed crashed andburst into flames. I was driven to conclude that, whatever theirintentions had been, it was certainly not this. It was not possible forthe Captain to believe that either the crew or the aeroplane couldsurvive a forced landing in unknown terrain at night. Therefore Ihad to seek some other explanation, something that made a littlemore sense, away from the preconceived notion of trying to avoidthe village. Something catastrophic must have happened so thatWarrant Officer Paul ordered his crew to bale out. Stationed nearestto the hatch, I visualised the bomb-aimer unplugging his intercom,clipping his parachute pack to his chest, opening the nose hatchunder his position and stepping out into the night. Judging by thefact that he had survived the drop without serious injury, there musthave been sufficient height for a safe evacuation. No one followedhim out. I was left with the feeling that I had missed some vital clue.The question 'why' hung unanswered, suspended in time and space.

If the gods were with me and the bomb-aimer lived, I knew that Iwould find him and trace the story right up to that instant when he'hit the silk’.

I realised, with a shock, that two weeks had elapsed since I firstknew of the Wellington crash, and the names etched upon thestained glass were, by now, familiar. Furthermore, people in the

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village I had previously known only by sight, I now knew by namefor, in tracing the witnesses, I had learnt much of their lives andoccupations and got to know them. Although I had covered a lot ofground, I now had so many leads to follow up that I must abandoneverything else and devote my time to Z for Zebra and her lastflight.

Something worried me. Round and round within its mental cage, thetrapped creature ran, drawing me back to the crash site seeking ananswer. I had a preconceived notion, reinforced by those I hadquestioned, a picture of the aeroplane approaching at a shallowangle, attempting to land. If that were so, where was the evidence,the swathe cut through the trees. Around the circular crash site, thetrees stood tall and unblemished, every approach barred, no way in.He must have come in steeply, vertically almost. Impossible, therewas no crater. Then there was the gouge on the forest floor, runningthrough the man made ridge.

I talked to the gardener, Tony Durrant, a man who had worked onthe estate to which the woods belonged, for all of his life. Could heaccount for the ridge? Countrymen are incredibly patient withoutsiders who know nothing of the country-side, asking daftquestions where the answer should be obvious to all. Landowners,specially those who own woodlands, mark out the boundaries with aditch, throwing up the soil to form a ridge which continues to markthe boundary, even when the ditch has filled up. No fences then,within woodlands, too awkward and expensive, besides they trustedeach other in those days. My wife came with me and some youngercompanions who were curious about the site. Maybe they couldfigure it, younger, fresher minds, more imaginative and not so fixed.We were all baffled.

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It came to me that the side issues were taking over and I mustpursue the main lead and find the survivor. Once again I dialledDirectory Enquiries to locate the 'phone number of the CaterpillarClub. Once again I drew a blank. British Telecom's filing system, orlack of it, stood in the way. No Caterpillar Club. “Try R.A.F.,” Isaid, “tell me what you have under R.A.F.” They had Association,they had Club, they had - “Hold it,” I said. “Try Association.” TheR.A.F. Association knew at once. I dialled the Letchworth code andnumber. He must have joined one time, long ago. The men who hitthe silk banded together in a club. They took the silk worm for theirbadge, hence the caterpillar. For those who baled out in anger, thelittle gold emblem had red eyes, for the others green. It wouldn'ttake long for the secretary to check the list. I waited in an agony ofsuspense. She was sorry but no such name. Had I got the spellingright? No resemblance, he hadn't joined. Might he have joinedoverseas? If he had he would feature on their list. “Give me somedetails,” she said. “My colleague is away right now, but she knowsthem all. Sometimes the squadrons put them forward, sometimesthe units, we haven't missed many. Leave your 'phone number, I'lltry for you.”

27Illustration 6: Clive Estcourt's application to join Caterpillar Club

I put the 'phone down. What is it about this story, I wondered, thatcaptures the imagination? People really want to help. After all theseyears, I don't know anything about people, they keep right onsurprising me. I'd only just gone out of the hallway into the kitchenwhen the phone rang. “It's me again,” she said. “I knew it was you,you've found something.” She was just as excited as I was. Themoment she put the phone down, it came to her. He wasn't on thelist because he'd only just applied for membership. They'd verifiedhis story and he would be listed on the next reprint. “I'll verify it ifanything further is needed,” I said, “the important thing is he's aliveand well and living in God's own country and you're just about tospring it on me, you have his address, bang up to date.” I copied itdown. I could hardly wait. Two-thirty by my watch, knock off thehour for British Summer Time, add twelve and it is one-thirtytomorrow morning in New Zealand. Reluctantly, I decided it wouldhave to wait.

On my way into the village for my morning newspaper, I learnt thatDoctor Milward hadn't returned from the Navy until 1946 and bothdoctors who might have attended the crash were now dead. Icollected the address of young Max who had woken his mother withthe cry, “Mummy, Mummy, there's an aeroplane afired.” His motherwas living over towards Hedgerley and expecting me to call. WendyJubb, spinster of this parish, was due back from holiday soon and Iwas given an address in Sussex. Old George was looking for me totell me of his days as an Air Raid Warden and what he rememberedof the Wellington crash.

I headed for Templewood Lane and the beekeeper's cottage. If itwasn't 'Fernlea', then which house was it? Maurice wasn't sure. If itwas Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, they were long gone. House began withthe letter “H” and when was I bringing his book back? “Later,” Isaid, “later on, I have something to do now.”

I had to walk the route the airman had taken, I had to find thehouse. I hoped for a good reception. It was said that Mr. Thomashad loaded his shotgun and indicated that parachutists falling out ofthe night were not particularly welcome.

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Once you begin this investigation lark, your thinking takes up adifferent bent. Farmers and poachers have shotguns. There were nofarms this side of the village. This was the “Nob Hill” side ofFarnham Common, the top layer of an English village. On this sideof the Common, if you had a shotgun, it was because you were alandowner or, at least, one of the hunting-shooting fraternity. Thestory of the shotgun may not be true. Stories tend to grow with thetelling and with the years.

When I had settled the parameters, the flight line of the aeroplaneand the distance from the site dictated by his likely speed and rate ofdescent, I felt I could plot the position of the house on an ordnancesurvey map. If it was a large imposing house, easily seen at night,built over fifty years ago and occupying the right spot, that had tobe it. If, in addition, the name started with the letter “H”, theproblem was solved.

The lady who answered the door was charming. I enquired for Mr.and Mrs, Thomas, believing them to be long dead. You have to startsomewhere, especially when the name on the gate says“Huntsmoor” When she was convinced that I wasn't some kind of anut up to mischief, or worse, selling things door to door, she invitedme in. When we got nowhere on the previous owner line, she tookmy 'phone number because her husband would probably know.

“Before you go,” she said, “I must show you the crack.” We lookedat the crack. The builder who repaired it claimed it was due to thecrash, something to do with the aeroplane that crashed. It lookedjust like a crack in the plaster of the ceiling to me. It wasn't till laterwhen I told my wife that the possible significance hit me. Supposingthe aeroplane was shedding bits as it came on its final run? Wherewould that leave our 'Probable Causes'? Was it already breaking upin the air? Or was her builder dramatising, making conversation toreassure a lady with a trace of American accent?

She rang that evening. Henry William Thomas had, indeed, livedthere. She had a list of previous owners, dates, what they had paid,everything. I was content. I had found the survivor and now I hadfound the house.

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Joyce Lawrence 'phoned from Windsor. “Yes Joyce,” I said, “youhave something for me?” “I have indeed,” said Joyce. What she hadcaused a large piece of the jigsaw puzzle to drop neatly into place.Her friend, Ken Gribben was one of the wartime Specials. Ex -Policeman Ken, along with his regular counterpart, had attended atthe crash site. The aeroplane had been caught and held in the highbranches of the beech trees. There it had 'exploded' and burnt. Theengines had torn loose and carried on further into the wood. One ofthem had made a deep gouge through the boundary mark, a sort ofridge. When the men came to take the pieces away, they had to cutdown trees and cut up parts to get them out. The two policemencontinued to stand guard, keeping the public away until thewreckage was removed. Ken remembered it well. Everything on thecrash site tallied with his description. I poured myself a glass of wineto celebrate. It was New Zealand wine. “My word, fellas,” I said tomyself, “we have been busy today.”

Next morning I 'phoned Mary in New Zealand. Baby Charlotte washaving her evening feed. The satellite bounced our voices to andfro, creating waves of echoes. Mary had no success to report but theReturned Servicemen's Association were working on it. The presswere showing zero interest.

I passed the fantastic news about the previously unidentifiedsurvivor, alive and well, just down Highway One in Hamilton. Shecame back on about an hour later, simply bursting with news,caution and all thoughts of telephone bills cast to the winds. Lifehad been good to the ex-bomb-aimer, and I knew we had it made.There was nothing now to prevent the full story being told, nothingat least, that I could put a name to and yet, a nagging doubtpersisted. I addressed myself, with what courage I could muster, to areconstruction.

What happened in the dying few minutes of that last fateful flight inWellington Z for Zebra? I tried to focus my mind on the Captain,the Warrant Officer whose task it was to fly as a screen pilot withhis pupil crew, using his experience and knowledge to safeguardthem against hazard. Once I knew exactly what happened up to the

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instant when the bomb-aimer stepped out, it should be possible tobridge the gap between the house in Templewood Lane and thecrash site in Brockhurst Wood. It dawned on me that perhaps theWarrant Officer might be expecting a little more of me than that.There was the matter of the official report remaining on the file.

Sleeping dogs, 'tis said, are best left lying It may be that officialreports concerning matters arising forty years ago, are also best leftundisturbed. “Let the dead bury their dead.” There is always thepossibility that nothing may result, except more grief. The likelihoodof finding anything to overturn the official verdict and lift the blamefrom the Captain seemed slim indeed and out of reach. “We are ona hiding to nothing, fellas,” I thought, “I hope you know that.”

I had one last sequence to run to ground before I packed a bag andheaded for the South Pacific. The child, Max, who woke his mother,was now grown to manhood on the sunny side of fifty. His motherhad moved to another part of the village when the row of cottagesby the Forester’s public house had been pulled down. It seemedextraordinary that the villagers know each other so well, every detailof families and their movements. What kind of dream world had Ibeen living in, believing the English to be insular, standing alooffrom each other? This particular stratum of the village was almostone family, not related by blood but by some strong link ofbelonging and having roots set deep in South Bucks.

Remote though it seemed, the ‘crashed in flames’ theory could notbe completely discounted. A child crying out about an aeroplane onfire, about to crash, coupled with possible damage to a house inTemplewood Lane, located right in the approach path, began tobulk large in my thinking. First the mother, then the child. Afterthat, the attic in the house called Huntsmoor. It was thin, what abetting man would have called a long shot. I wondered what theAmerican lady would say to my suggestion that we climb up into herattic to look for the tell tale signs of repairs. I got in my car anddrew a complete blank. Both ladies were out. For the moment, I hadground to a complete halt.

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The optician ‘phoned to say my new glasses were ready, come andcollect. When I got there, it was Daphne Pearce my next doorneighbour on duty, doing her little pin-money job. As I walked inshe looked slightly embarrassed. “By the way,” she said, addressingthe only other customer, “this is the man collecting details on theold Wellington.” Her customer was getting on a bit and not muchinterested in Wellingtons. The mention of New Zealand, however,set him going. Ten years he’d spent there. Presently, his sister cameto collect him and we took it through hand again. Her husbandwould remember, she said, what with him being an Air Raid Wardenand all, living in Farnham Common. Fred would remember, butwhy didn’t I ask Mr. Bedwell? Mr. Bedwell, you know, the Bedwellwho lives in Green Lane, he keeps all the church records. Why notindeed? I left with my new glasses and the prospect of anotherwitness. Perhaps, best of all, I might have access to the churchrecords. Mr. Bedwell lived in my Green Lane and we had beennodding acquaintances for the last twenty years. He was away onbusiness, his wife told me. She didn’t know how the floor timberssupported the weight of paperwork that comprised the churchrecords. If I had come to add anything to them, Mr. Bedwell wouldwelcome me with open arms. She would rather I came to takesomething away. When I got to the bit about locating the survivor,it was evident that she shared her husband’s enthusiasm for St.John’s Church. She then told me something which pleased me verymuch. “You must write it up,” she said, “a little piece for theChurch Magazine.” I walked away having undertaken my firstcommission as a writer. I could have wished for nothing better.

Old George buttonholed me to tell me his bomb story. He saidnothing new about the Wellington, but I did get a fairly completetally of local accidents, incidents, doodle bugs, bombs and landmines. George and his mates in the A.R.P. were a bit weak on landmines apparently and, finding one hanging in a tree, attempted tocut it down. By good fortune, someone more knowledgeable camealong before they succeeded. These war time experiences upsetGeorge so that he was never the same again. He had to come underthe doctor for his nerves. Like a baby he was, couldn’t dress himself

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nor do up his buttons. He was completely unnerved. All his teethcame loose and had to be extracted. George had kept the parachute,hiding it in the house for a long time but it so worried him, he gaveit away to be rid of it. Parachute silk was in great demand. “Not theparachute my chap came down in, surely?” I asked him. No, theparachute on the land mine. I hoped it had found a good home, forI did hear of brides making them into wedding dresses, but my wifediscounted that, the panels were too small, but you could get severalpairs of cami-knicks out of them. Not quite so romantic perhaps,but gratifying, nevertheless.

I realised I was now three weeks into my investigation and preciouslittle to show, although I had located the survivor and uncovered alot of detailed information. Much of it made no sense, no sense atall. I was unhappy about the stained glass window. My wifeconfessed to feeling uneasy about that, it had always seemedexcessive to her. Mrs. Bedwell loaned me a small booklet, ‘St. John’sChurch History 1907 to 1957 written by the Rev. Hugh Robinson,Priest in charge’. Page 6 described the occupants of the village,gardeners, coachmen, agricultural labourers and domestics. Otherend of scale - Member of Parliament, barristers, doctors, well to do,dividing their time between their London houses and FarnhamCommon. Page 25 gave me the answer. The angel window in thesouth wall was “In memory of the crew of a Royal Air Forcebomber which crashed near the church on the way back fromoperations in 1944.” So that was it. The villagers had believed, allalong, that it was a crippled bomber returning from a raid overenemy territory. That explained the gallant airmen bit.

Bang went my first writing commission. I doubted whether theparishioners would want to know it was only a training flight at thisstage in the game. I couldn’t blame the survivor, I would probablyhave done the same in is place and, once the subscription thing hadgot under way, he couldn’t stop them. By the time they had thewindow organised, he was long gone.

I went to see Mr. Bedwell on his return. After all, moral dilemmaswere more his line of country than mine. The church records would

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have to be set straight. He would have to consider what to publishin the parish magazine.

I took myself off to the R.A.F. museum at Hendon to see the lastexisting Wellington. Out of eleven thousand, four hundred and sixtyone, only one remained, not counting the wreck lying on the bottomof Loch Ness. It wasn’t possible to get inside it. For that I needed toapply to the Keeper of the museum and he wasn’t there that day. Iwould have to apply in writing, with reasons. No, not in triplicate.My application would be considered on its merits.

“Damned sight easier to get inside the one in Loch Ness,” Ithought. Back home, the next day, I sat down at the kitchen table toconsider a little. One day, I’d have to write it up, all those notes I’dmade, reports collected, data assembled, even if the Parish Magazinerejected it. I must have a title. I thought about it all morning. Myfriend Greg the artist came in and we kicked it around for a little.When my wife came back from shopping, she remarked, “Not stillsitting there?”, “I’ve not been idle,” I said, “been thinking out atitle.” “What is it then?” she asked. I told her, “The Stain on theGlass.” She didn’t like it, not one little bit, a horrible title. Besides,what was the stain? I defended my title, a good title, it advances thestory, does everything a title should, if anything, it was too good.When I thought of the title, the whole scenario was at oncerevealed, the jigsaw fitted, the complete picture emerged.

She sat down and I told her the story of Z for Zebra’s last flight, thedenouement!

Vickers Armstrong of Weybridge completed Serial No. Z8793Wellington lc and fitted the Pegasus engines on the 8th of July,1941. It went into stock at No. 9 Maintenance Unit awaitingallocation. It was allocated to No. 11 O.T.U. at Westcott and, nodoubt, a ferry pilot arrived to deliver it hence. That occurred on the30th July. Very shortly after, Z for Zebra suffered a flying accident,and on 12th September that year, was entered in the records of 43Group as ‘Disposal Account.’ The aeroplane was repaired by theCivilian Repair Organisation and, once again, restored to No. 9Maintenance Unit on May 23rd. of the following year, awaiting

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allocation. No. 26 O.T.U. took delivery on June 19th. 1942 andthere perhaps, she fared better, until, once again, on 31st May, 1943,she returned to her original home, No.11 O.T.U.

On the 4th of January, 1944, Z for Zebra suffered her second flyingaccident, having completed a grand total of 540 hours and 40minutes. She was ‘Struck off Charge’ on January 11th, 1944 withoutfiring a gun in anger or opening her bomb bays to attack the enemy.

“All right so far?” I asked. “We are dealing with matters of fact, sofar, of public record. I’ll tell you when we depart and enter the realmof probability and supposition.”

There is some confusion about the date of the occurrence.Confusion arises unless we stick to the military system of denotingnight as 3rd/4th. I think the accident happened at 02.00 on themorning of January 4th. The survivor has used January 2nd. in hisletter to the Caterpillar Club, meaning 2nd/3rd. He must have takenthe date from his logbook. Logbooks are generally entered up aftera flight and, in his case, after a week in hospital with suspectedconcussion. Where, I ask myself, did he get the information? Almostcertainly on his return to Westcott from the Operations RecordBook, (Form 540), under the entry January 3rd. 1944.

TIME SUMMARY OF EVENTS

02.20 Informed Oakley that Z for Zebra had crashed. ObserverCorps report a crash near Slough.

I rather suspect that whoever kept the Record Book at Westcott,forgot to turn the page at midnight. From the satellite field ofOakley, the record book is blank. No mention of the crash even. Allmy other sources are solid on the 4th, the morning of the fourth,3rd./4th.

Let me see, they are:-

1. Church Records2. Stained glass window3. Slough, Windsor and Eton Express4. Ministry of Defence (Air) Historical Branch

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5. R.A.F. Museum Archives. Separate Movement and AircraftAccident Records.

6. Brother of dead Airgunner7. Tombstones in Northolt Military Cemetery

It is vital to establish the date. Weather conditions may have playedan important part in these events and, unless we have the correctdate, we could have the wrong set of station weather reports and bemisled about conditions. The weather, as it happens, was stable, ahigh pressure system, fairly predictable and not liable to suddenchange. There is, however, one unpredictable factor, the mostunpredictable condition of all, early morning fog. We are blessedwith hindsight and have no need of forecasts. The actual dailyweather reports, the Air Ministry D.W.R.s for the dates in questionare available, covering all the stations in the region throughout thenight. Three nights, just to be sure.

I have no information about the flight departure. The log keeper atOakley was carrying the business of secrecy to its ultimateconclusion. I wondered what Group Captain P. Stephens had to saywhen he signed the record of the month’s events. I turn now to thesurvivor. “At the time, we were based at the satellite field of Oakleyand on a night bombing exercise at the nearby bombing range.”Although we know the aeroplane and the composition of the crew,we have no details of the flight, no time of departure, fuel load,route, nor yet the location of the nearby range. Back to the survivor.“The time was approximately 2 am. January 2nd. We had almostcompleted the bombing exercise, when the weather closed incompletely.”

I assumed, at first, that he referred to the weather at the bombingrange and not at base. We do know the weather at Westcott, thanksto their Ops. Record Book.

WEATHER

After a very slight shower around 01.00 hours, cloud dispersed and did notreform. Winds were fresh between NNW and NW during the day but dropped

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off during the evening with consequent deterioration in visibility to 2000 - 5000yards by end of period.

Now Met. periods are of six hours duration. They start at midnight.The period referred to, because of the reference to 01.00, must bethe midnight to 06.00 on the morning of the flight, whatever thedate on the Record Book. It is written with hindsight, as it comesunder ‘Summary of Events’, and we have to assume that thedeterioration in visibility was towards morning. At its worst, wehave 2000 yards, about a mile, about the length of a runway in thosedays, and getting marginal for an aeroplane with no landing aids,operating out of a satellite field. Is it the weather at Oakley that has‘closed in completely’? The probabilities are fairly evenly balanced,but I am inclined to the belief that it is the weather at his base thathas closed in. At least, that is what the Captain believes. Why? Ihave to turn to the Bomber Command Museum Archives and theCourt of Inquiry for a possible answer. ‘Captain panicked, decidedto crash land.’ Then later: ‘Captain panicked over believed fire inbumpy flying conditions without any foundations.’ Indeed, I canfind no foundation for a fire. The C.O.’s consideration that,‘Landing lamps accidentally switched on, reflected on cloud andcaused pilot to believe fire existed, followed by, ‘Unusually thickcloud layer may have misled pilot’ was a genuine well meaningattempt to explain the inexplicable. The inexplicable panic.

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind about the panic. The Court ofInquiry, the Air Accident Branch, the A.O.C. and the A.O.C. in C.all agreed. The C.O. tried to explain it. Their only source ofinformation was, of course, the sole survivor upon his return fromhospital.

“There was no fire,” said Archie the fireman. Mind you, he had tobe wrong, every other single person or report mentioned fire. TheFire Brigade took the longest route and were last on the scene.Someone had to stay behind to look after the fire engine.

The survivor, hanging on his parachute, with only one hookattached, saw the aircraft ‘crash and burst into flames’ before helanded. No doubt existed for me on the question of fire in the air.

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The balance of probability weighed heavily against it, just as therewas little room for doubt that it ‘fired on ground’, in the words ofthe official inquiry.

Back to the question of panic. If the aeroplane was on fire, the onlysensible course of action was to abandon it, to bale out. To attempta forced landing in unsuitable country, at night, whether on fire ornot, was madness and almost certain death. The only possiblereason for panic concerned the worsening visibility and the prospectof a difficult landing at base. A cause for worry certainly and even amoment of panic to a normal pilot but no more than that.

The answer had me by the throat. The Captain was not altogethernormal. ‘Previous accident may have unnerved him’, said the Courtof Inquiry. R.A.F. personal records are not open except to closerelatives and then, only in exceptional circumstances. There was noway I could think of that would uncover his medical history andshed light on his mental state. Not that I wanted to. I was now ableto visualise the scene on the flight deck, the scene that must havefollowed and must remain conjecture until the one person in all theworld who knew the truth, will confirm it. The pupil crew musthave been taken utterly by surprise. Not until the feverishpreparations for crash landing began would the slow realisationdawn upon them and the struggle at the controls begin.

Now I could hear Archie’s crippled bomber, the throttles openingand closing as the pilots fought each other, circling lower over thevillage. Now I knew what the bomb-aimer meant by the statement,“a chain of events took place very quickly.” In an agonising lastminute decision, he clipped the parachute pack to his chest, missingone of the hooks in his haste, released the hatch and was away.Remembrance of the cockpit lay-out flooded back upon me. Thescreen pilot’s seat and dual controls straddled the only access to theescape hatch in the nose. The rest of the crew were trapped insidethe aeroplane, their escape route blocked by the Captain, immovablein the right-hand seat. Back inside the fuselage, near the floor on thestarboard side, seldom used and little known, was anotheremergency hatch, a kick out panel. By the time they remembered it,

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got back and kicked it out, it was too late. The aeroplane crashedinto the trees of Brockhurst Wood before the parachutist reachedthe ground and he too, hung in the branches, less than a mile away.

My wife and I debated what must have happened then. We knewthe immediate sequence of events. We knew the bomb-aimer askedrepeatedly for his fellow crew members and the firemen could notbring themselves to tell him. That duty fell to the police next day.He eventually joined another crew and went on to complete anextended tour of operations, first with No. 75, the New Zealandsquadron and then No. 7 Pathfinder Squadron. From time to time,he returned on leave to Farnham Common.

We were left to guess at what passed between the CommandingOfficer and the lone survivor and subsequently, at the Court ofInquiry. An agreed statement emerged. The official report states,‘No evidence as to actual happening.’ The survivor writes, “Thecause of the accident and why the other crew members did not getout was not fully established.”

In my opinion, the Flight Sergeant bomb-aimer comes through withflying colours, his actions justified. Loyalty to his crew and hisfellow countryman, the screen pilot, over ride all else in his mind.Most likely, aided and abetted by the Wing Commander, whochucks in anything he can find by way of extenuating circumstances,they find the court sympathetic.

What good can come of it? After all, they are all dead. The A.I.B.have more than enough on their hands. The Captain panicked, thatwas evident, just why he panicked was beyond the scope of theirinquiry. The A.O.C. concurred. The A.O.C. in C. concurred.

I wrote to the survivor. I invited him to drop in on FarnhamCommon again. Thinking of the story of Mr. Thomas waiting forhim at the house called Huntsmoor with loaded shotgun, I assuredhim of his welcome. My wife concurred.

Somewhere beyond the scope of the Court of Inquiry and beyondmy reach, lay the true cause of the tragedy. What was the nature ofthe Captain’s past experience, the previous crash that had so

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unnerved him, that caused the catastrophic breakdown? Had hebeen pushed on beyond his limits, back to flying duties when thephysical damage had healed, but before the more serious mentaldamage was repaired? Did the thought of being classified as L.M.F.play a part? I could not answer neither could I, in my heart,condemn him. Who can truly say where the breaking point lies? TheWarrant Officer Captain and his crew are as much the casualties ofwar as their compatriots, on the memorial stones of Runnymede.

I had looked at the stained glass window, looking for some stainupon the glass itself but I had found nothing. No stain upon therecord, no blots and certainly no dishonour.

There were a few loose ends remaining, some letters to write andvisits to be made, but I knew it was over. If ever there had been acast assembled waiting in the wings for some strange drama tounfold, they had vanished, melting back into the shadows on seeingthe glass wiped clean

I started on the loose ends, the letters and the visits.

Mrs. Howlett was baking cakes for an afternoon tea at the churchhall. Between supervising events in the kitchen and allowing me tosample her wares, she was animated by talk of the Wellington crash.

She reminded me of where the cottages had stood and the layout.Her son’s bedroom looked towards Brockhurst Wood and eitherthe boy was awake or had woken on hearing the sound of anaeroplane. He called that the aeroplane was ‘afired’ and about tocrash. She was quite adamant about that. I was sorry to belabour thepoint but, if it was on fire before it crashed, that put a differentcomplexion on things. Could the boy have mistaken the landinglights for a fire? She didn’t think so. He had often talked of it and Imust speak to him directly. He would be fifty this year, so that madehim ten years old then and his memory of it would be very sharp

I told her a little of how contradictory things had been over thisaffair and how natural that was especially after so many years. Heraccount of the ‘woosh’ and the fire lighting up the village, accordedwith everything I’d heard, except for the fireman, Archie.

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At one time she worked for Mrs. Thomas at Huntsmoor, cleaningand the like, but knew nothing of any damage to the house. Veryunlikely, she thought. Did I know she had been to New Zealandafter her husband died, and had tried to find the relatives? Abouteight years ago, it would be, with her sister, altogether three ladieswent, a month each way by sea, and fourteen weeks there in all.They copied the names from the church window before they went.The R.S.A. had been very helpful. She told me of the Hall ofRemembrance in Auckland in a big park of some kind, verybeautiful. “That would be the Domain,” I said, “and the Museumwith its Hall of Memories. You found the names? Just one chap,”she said. “A man took us to a house in Parnell, but nobody knewthe family, they must have moved away.”

Altogether they had no luck, but in a place called Darfield they triedto track down Coulter. “You’ve lost me now,” I said, “are we still inthe North Island?” “Near Canterbury,” she said. “Ah yes, probablyChristchurch, I often get them confused.”

After they got back to U.K. she had a letter from Coulter’s sister, sothey had been close. “Someone from the R.S.A. took you to theseplaces?” “Yes, they were very kind, we thought if we found therelatives, they would like to know we came from the village wherethe boys had died.” I agreed that they would, they would take it verykindly indeed.

“Then there was something opposite,” she said, “something higher,something lower.” I hazarded a guess. “Do you mean Lower Huttand Upper Hutt?” That was it. No luck there either. “So you tracedthree of the families, to Auckland, to Christchurch and toWellington, but you can’t remember which name except Coulter,near Christchurch? That was right. I told her then how I had tracedthe survivor. He will find the other families for us should he beinclined, I thought, or Mary will if I can get her a few more leads.

Mr. Bedwell stopped me at the bank. Yes, the article for the ParishMagazine was just right. Unfortunately, it had missed the June/Julyissue but would appear in the next. He thought I’d done it ratherwell. That pleased me very much.

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I put my notes together and wrote up a more comprehensiveaccount. Joan did marvels with her typewriter, editing as she went.Before I got cold feet, I bundled the pages together and sent it offto a publisher who had been kind to me once before. The publishersent them back with equal speed and some severe strictures. Mytreatment, mixing aviation with detection didn’t work, he said, andthe punch line wasn’t strong enough. Was it possible that he saw itmerely as a piece of fiction, contrived in the author’s mind? Apunch line? Perish the thought.

Max Howlett ‘phoned through. He wasn’t as certain as his mother.Certainly he had seen the aeroplane flying over immediately beforeit crashed, then the sound of it and an orange glow lit up the sky.We agreed to meet where the cottages had been, to visit the site sothat he could tell me everything that came to mind from that night.The crash had played a large part in his boyhood, visiting the sitewith his friends, bringing parts home. Forbidden by their parents,the boys collected ammunition and stored it in the garden shedbehind the Police Constable’s house, along with scrumped applesand other youthful treasures. They clamped the bullets in a vice andhit the ends with a hammer but fortunately they did not succeed.

The constable’s son was their acknowledged leader. Another son,was living in the village. He too would recall the event and havesomething to add. My list of people began to lengthen again. ThenMax said something odd. He had been thinking about theWellington, in fact, he had been to the site only the night before,trying to remember something. “Your mother,” I said, “she’ll havetold you, that’s what set you off.” He sounded puzzled. “Can’t bethat,” he said, “I haven’t heard from her. Not since I got back fromScotland anyway.” We completed our arrangements. That eveninghis mother phoned. Had I spoken to Max she asked. I explainedthat Max had rung me, probably because she had mentioned myvisit. “I haven’t had a chance,” she said, “haven’t spoken to him.He’s been away you know.” She had found the letters, the letterfrom the sister and would bring them round.

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It worried me somewhat. I was still smarting from the criticism ofmy literary efforts and now, the little mystery. “There are morethings in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The unease had returned, the vague sense of unrest. I perceived thatnot all the cast had yet dispersed. Beyond the rim of consciousnessthere was something waiting and willing events forward. I hadthought the thing complete, written up, first explained, then rejectedand laid back to rest in the files, gathering dust and providing abreeding ground for microbes, to be forgotten for all eternity.

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Chapter Two

he telephone rang. Unsuspecting, I picked it up. The voice atthe other end asked if I was the chap making enquiries into acertain aircraft accident. “Yes,” I said. “This may interest

you,” replied the caller. I picked up my pen.TLANCASTER ONE SERIAL NO. R56I7

207 SQUADRON, BOTTESFORD, LEICESTERSHIRE.

24th MAY, 1942. FLYING ACCIDENT.

C.O.’ s FINDING:

RETURNING BASE DUE WEATHER. STRUCK HIGHGROUND TRYING TO KEEP BELOW CLOUD. DUEINEXPERIENCE.

STATION COMMANDER:

INEXPERIENCE OF CAPTAIN IN TRYING TO FLY BELOWCLOUD AND SQUALL INSTEAD OF ABOVE ANDAROUND IT.

A.O.C. :

NO DISCIPLINARY ACTION. FOUR KILLED, TWOINJURED.

NIGHT CROSSED OUT. SOMETHING SUBSTITUTED.

LOCATION: STANDON HILL, NEAR TAVISTOCK.

CAPTAIN SGT. PAUL

A/PILOT SGT. PATTERSON KILLED.

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I thanked him. My skin crawled. Goose flesh covered my arms. Itook the note pad to the kitchen and read it to my wife. She reactedin the same way. We looked at one another. “It’s just as youthought,” she said, “uncanny almost, returning in bad weather. Fourmore killed, oh dear, the poor boy.”

In some strange way, it was as if I’d caused it to happen demandinga previous disaster to account for the Wellington and the pilot’sbehaviour. Impossible, you cannot influence the course of events offorty two years ago. For an instant, however, a sense of guilt assailedme. My heart went out to the young sergeant pilot. Scarred by thatterrible accident arising out of his youth and inexperience, the fearhad lain dormant in his mind, only to return in an overwhelmingflood when fate decreed a near identical set of circumstancesnineteen months later, a time bomb hidden away, ready to explodeat a touch.

I realised the possibility of another survivor, this time from theLancaster crash. More research would be needed, delving into thepublic records. I had to have a name, to make a start on a trail longgone cold. A visit to Tavistock would be necessary, another site hadto be located and witnesses found. I had to shed more light uponthe scene, more than was conveyed by the brief, almost casualsummary of the official report. Mentally, I had closed the file andnow must reopen it.

Before I could do so, Max called me back. The owner of the woodhad given permission to search the site. Indeed, the owner proposedto come along as the whole thing was news to him. He had onlyrecently inherited the property from his grandmother. We met in thecar park of the Victoria public house. My wife and I confessed tothe owner that we had been trespassing. It had not occurred to usthat the wood was private. He was concerned lest news of the crashsite got out and bounty hunters and treasure seekers came tramplingall over his property. Mentioning Brockhurst Wood in an articlewould bring them. I agreed. The best I could do was to promise topoint out that the woods were private property and uninvited guestswere not welcome. There’s precious little danger, I thought, getting

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things published is not easy as I had discovered. What a good thingthe Wellington didn’t know it needed permission.

Max was unable to enlighten me further. There was no doubt hehad seen it but he couldn’t be certain that it was ‘afired’ as hismother claimed. He had often asked himself that very question.Could he have been mistaken, would the engine exhausts be visible,had the landing lights deceived him? He couldn’t say. One thing hewas clear on, which helped me considerably, was the engine noise. Itwas as if they were opening and closing the throttles repeatedly.That, I assured him, was almost certainly what they were doing,what Archie called ‘crippled’. We repaired to the Victoria for beerwhen we had exhausted the site, and ourselves, and the midges tookover.

I decided it was time to test reactions amongst the relatives andmention some of my findings to the butcher, Leslie Payne, inNewport Pagnell. His daughter answered. Dad had been admitted tohospital. I knew at once it was serious, that they were going throughthat very worst time, awaiting the laboratory reports. I knew becauseI’d been there. I passed on the news about the survivor. The girl wasgrateful, give him something else to think about, something cheerfulto take along on her next visit. What did she know of the crash, Iasked her? Her grandmother had told her a good deal. They wereshot up and badly damaged, flying low when they got caught in thebarrage balloon cable. That brought them down. They died trying toavoid the village. I told the girl to give her Dad my best wishes forgood results and a speedy recovery and tell him I’d write to him. Irang off.

I was dismayed by what she believed. Straightaway, I sat down andwrote to the butcher. Fortitude is, perhaps, an old fashioned word.Old fashioned or not, it is a quality sometimes demanded of us.That’s what I had to tell the butcher. Instead, I wrote about thesurvivor and how I’d found him. Sadly, I mentioned his farmerfriend, who had crossed the world to meet him and was no longerwith us. Altogether, it wasn’t very cheerful but it might divert himfrom his present trouble.

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Mrs. Howlett sent me the letters saved from her New Zealand trip. Ihad misunderstood her on some points. Three ladies went. Theother two were Ivy Watts and Ivy Oakes known by her nickname asSqueak. They made a very determined effort to find the relatives.The N.Z. Ministry of Defence were approached and sent details ofthe next of kin, giving them a good starting point. Her memoryfailed her on the names. It was the O’Callaghan’s they nearly traced,not the Coulters and, in fact, it was the only remaining O’Callaghan,sister of the dead man, who replied. Her letter gave an address inSouthland and that was how I was able to tell the butcher about hisfriend, the N.Z. farmer who came looking for him because theirbrothers died together in Brockhurst Wood.

I put aside the correspondence and turned my mind back to theCaptain pilot. I set about my task. Whatever more there was toknow, I began to suspect that the relatives would not thank me forit. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to continue.

My copy of the Wellington Pilot’s Notes came through the letterbox. At last. The cockpit was almost as I remembered it. ‘Steps ledup from the hatch to the starboard co-pilot’s position, giving accessto the rest of the aeroplane. It was clear from the photographs that,when the seat was locked in place and occupied, there was no wayback to the hatch. Where were the duplicated flying controls I sovividly remembered? Sure enough, I found them in the text. ‘Dualcontrols, coupled to the main controls can be mounted on a specialfloor extension forward of the starboard seat.’ I had a nasty momentover the throttles. They were not in the central position as I hadthought, but over on the far left side, out of reach of the instructorin the right hand seat. A similar arrangement must have existed toduplicate the throttle levers but I could not recall it. Later that day, Ichecked it out with another ex-Wellington pilot and drew a blank.He didn’t remember the throttles. In the centre almost certainly,well, perhaps not.

Landing lamps were a different matter. Two were fitted under theport wing. Young Max, looking from his bedroom window wouldhave seen the aeroplane silhouetted against the beams of the landing

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lights. To his youthful eyes, it would be ‘afired’. Although oneniggling doubt was removed, the throttles remained to bug me.Several things bugged me. The weather reports for the night of3rd/4th January still didn’t quite tally. I ran them to ground at thePublic Records Office. My researcher had slipped up, just as I had,on the date. The weather report from Westcott for the night inquestion was as follows:

WEATHER

“Mainly cloudy with period of continuous slight rain during the evening, butwinds veered NW’ly at 21.00 hours and cloud broke to small amounts.Visibility was moderate to good throughout.”

So that was it. No fog at 02.00 hours, no poor visibility, no weather,no problems at all, nothing closing in. Only in the mind of theWellington Captain, something closed in.

There remained one further quirk. Z for Zebra was an obsoleteMark 1C Wellington, replaced by a whole new series. What in theworld were they doing in an old 1C in January 1944? On the stationstrength of No. 11 O.T.U. I found ten of them, up for disposal. Ofthe ten, seven were approved, three were Category ‘E’, that is ‘writeoffs’. By the end of February, the aircraft strength was fifty Mk. Xsand two Mk. 111s. All the 1C s had gone, to disposal account.

It was time for me to dispose of my Wellington also, more andmore witnesses were crowding in and my queries about the throttlesstarted off a chain reaction. There’s old Harry, he did two tours onthem, he would remember. Have you asked Lindsay? When I didask Lindsay, I got a horrific tale about a Wimpey. The crew baledout and the bomb-aimer found himself alone. This chap had oftenwatched the pilot fly the thing. Suddenly he realised it had righteditself and was flying along unaided. Cautiously, he climbed into thepilot’s seat, taking care not to dislodge the controls. “To cut a longstory short,” said Lindsay, utterly oblivious to the telephonecompany’s meter ticking away, “he flew it back to base. Not onlythat, he got the gear down and did quite a respectable landing.” Iinterrupted him in quiet desperation. “Lindsay,” I said, “do youthink he noticed where the throttles were, do you think he’d

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remember?” Lindsay continued, still cutting it short. “Unique case,they gave him an immediate commission, in the field as it were, gavehim a Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, rarer than V.C.s, that one.” Iagreed. Only ever heard of one other, but another time. “They puthim on a pilot’s course as well,” said Lindsay. I interrupted again. Tohell with it, in for a penny, in for a pound. “What happened, did hefail the course?” “Certainly not, why don’t you write that one up,eh? That’s worth writing up, eh? Something worth writing aboutthere, why don’t you write something worthwhile, then, Gray?”

I had to leave the throttles. Word is, Doctor Milward has somethingfor me. I dragged myself away to concentrate on the Lancaster.

On the day prior to our departure for Devon, Mary came on theblower from New Zealand. She had located the sister of JeffO’Callaghan and been well received. No, better than that. There wasan overwhelming welcome and, indeed, an outpouring of all thatMrs. Watson knew of her brother’s death. With his chum, the reargunner, they spent the last day of their leave together, immediatelyprior to the flight. As she understood it, they were damaged andrefused permission to land at base, then further refused by anotheraerodrome, compelling them to land alongside the village. The reargunner’s mother was very bitter about her son’s death. I told Marythat the truth, or at least my understanding of it, wasn’t anything likethat and keep plugging for any of the others. Forget Darfield, that’sa blind alley. Somewhere in Lower Hutt there have to be relatives ofPaul. I promised to see if I could unearth anything helpful.

I sat there wondering if there had been some ghastly mistake. I hadto examine the possibility that the weather really had socked inthroughout the region and the captain was desperately seeking alanding ground. Unwilling to bale out, seeing what looked like fieldsin the moonlight, did he decide on a forced landing? Did he reallysee the village at the last moment and veer off into the wood toavoid it? This was the second time relatives had told me it was anoperational flight, shot up, badly damaged, caught in balloon cablesand again badly damaged, refused permission to land presumablydue to weather conditions.

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There were two questions to be addressed here. The first was theoperational aspect. I had irrefutable evidence to the effect that it wasa training flight. Besides, it was an obsolete 1C from a training unit.Not that that was totally conclusive. Butch Harris had chucked inhis entire reserves before. On the thousand bomber raids the traineecrews had gone out with screen pilots aboard. Anything that couldmake it into the air had gone out.

What I had to ask myself, was how the relatives had got hold of thisnotion. It hadn’t come from the C.O. writing his letter ofcondolence. That would be the stock senior officer’s model letter,tactful, non-committal, in the gallant performance of their duties.Regretfully, I had to conclude there was only one source, the solesurvivor. Did he indulge in a little line shooting? Perhaps, in tryingto evade the inevitable questions, he allowed the suggestion ofoperational damage to gain currency. If he did he probably meantno harm. It may even have brought comfort to the bereaved in theirterrible loss.

The second question of weather was now uppermost in my mind. Inour notoriously fickle climate, a few hours can bring dramaticchanges and one day be totally unlike the next. If my informant atthe Public Record Office had sent me the weather for the wrongdate, what else was wrong? The thought continued to niggle, somuch so I stopped to cross check everything so far. A quitemonstrous idea flickered across my consciousness. “Do yousuppose,” the walrus said, “do you suppose the date was wrong?”Come off it! Do you suppose the bomb-aimer was right and allthose other sources were wrong?

The photocopies arrived from the Public Records Office. Beyondquestion, there was something wrong.

Place Date Time Summary of events

WESTCOTT 3rd. 02.20 Informed OAKLEY that 8793 W/0PAUL had crashed. Observer Corpsreport a crash near SLOUGH

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The flight had taken place on the 2nd according to the survivor. TheWestcott log book said the 3rd. Everything else said the 4th., themorning of the fourth. By good fortune, I had ordered photocopiesof two pages of the log covering the first eight days of January 1944.On the second page I noticed that the 5th. January was missingaltogether. I pencilled in the 5th between 22.00 and 01.00. Then Inoticed the item about the Air Sea Rescue aircraft. On the morningof the 3rd., Group requested four aircraft for an Air Sea RescueSearch. If the dates in the log were correct, they didn’t get themairborne till next day. Poor devils, they must have drowned by then,or died of exposure. I renumbered the dates and all the items madesense. The Wellington crashed on the 4th. The survivor had got itwrong in his logbook. As I thought previously, the station log washis only source of information and, that too, was wrong.

Only one puzzle remained. What had they done with New Year’sDay? I suspected that, being a training unit they were given NewYear’s Day off. By the time the Orderly Room came to type up thelog entries at the end of January, they had forgotten. They put itright by slipping a day later on and the second error disguised thefirst.

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Chapter Three

he Public Records Office at Kew assured me they were againopen for business. The Health and Safety Executive certifiedthat the building could be used without danger.T

The bugs were defeated. It was not Legionnaires’ disease. TheOperations Record book for 207 Squadron, R.A.F. BomberCommand, would be available on arrival.

We were given every assistance but the Log Book could not befound. It was out. ‘What exactly, do you mean, out?” Someone musthave drawn it out by prior request. I looked about the hushedreading room full of people, all beavering away. Who were all thesepeople? What were they doing? Which one was delving into 207’saffairs!

The computer was having a hiccup, a ten minute delay. My wife hada suggestion. “What about Mr. Reis?” Of course. I had been incorrespondence with a Mr. Reis. When he appeared, he wascourtesy itself. The difficulty was speedily overcome. Down in thebasement, the staff were engaged in transferring the content of theSquadron’s record book to micro-film. Mr. Reis returned smiling,with the record book. We were soon engrossed in the history of 207and the events of 1942.

Sergeant T.K. Paul arrived at Bottesford on November 22nd.1941,fresh from his Operational Training Unit and reported for duty. Theorderly room staff recorded his posting, W.E.F. November 25th.,and entered it up the following day. The Squadron had moved fromWaddington nine days before. They stood down for one day andthen returned to full effectiveness. It is unlikely that Sgt. Paul knewof the existence of the Operations Record Book and perhaps, it is a

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pity that such things were secret, for he would have found much tointerest him there. Turning back the pages, he would have read thenames of many brave men who served in France during the FirstWorld War. A line drawn in red ink denoted the end of the previoushostilities. The Squadron must have demobilised, for they broughtthe selfsame log book back into use when the Second World Warbegan.

No. 207 was equipped with Manchester’s, the twin enginedforerunner of the more successful Lancaster. No great successattended the Manchester. It was grossly underpowered. The Vultureengines could only be described as mechanically unsound. Theperformance on one engine was lamentable. Along with a goodmany other war planes, the name has passed into the limbo offorgotten things, unsung and unlamented.

Indeed, the whole of Bomber Command was going through a badpatch. Ill equipped and poorly organised, they awaited the comingof a leader to lift them and bring a sea change in their affairs. Such aman had only recently been appointed.

Courage alone was not enough to overcome their difficulties.

The young Sergeant was lucky. He came under the wing ofSquadron Leader Beauchamp, an experienced and much decoratedpilot. In the manner of the time, and on that squadron, the Sergeantflew as second pilot with the Squadron Leader and his crew. Heopened his innings on January 2nd. 1942 with a trip to St. Nazaire.Unable to find the target, they proceeded to Le Havre and then toCherbourg, with no better result. Bombs were set to ‘safe’ andjettisoned. They landed at Shrewton running short of petrol.

During January, they made five sorties, concentrating on theChannel ports. Increasingly, their affairs were dominated by thepresence of the German ‘pocket’ battleships, Scharnhorst andGneisenau, lying up in Brest. Churchill chivvied the Air Marshals,lamenting their lack of dive bombers and, what he called their ‘fearof injury’. The battle cruisers lay within easy reach of BomberCommand and yet, defied attack. Early February brought severalalerts and, on the 4th., the Squadron came to standby as it was

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thought the Germans were about to slip anchor and force thepassage of the Dover Straits. Herein lay the opportunity for a swiftretribution. Beset by external disasters and the imminent fall ofSingapore, the Former Naval Person prepared to eliminate thepocket battleships.

The breakout came on the 12th. Six Manchester’s of 207 Squadron,armed with 500 lb. armour piercing bombs, were dispatched toattack them. Three failed to get airborne. Another two failed tolocate the target. One claimed to have made an attack but wasunable to verify the results. The pilot was awarded a DistinguishedFlying Medal. What Churchill said is not recorded. The two battlecruisers, accompanied by the Prinz Eugene, made their way up theChannel, running the gauntlet of the shore batteries and all the seaand air forces, apparently unscathed.

The episode rocked the British public and their confidence in theconduct of the war. The authorities made haste to reassure them.Behind the scenes, however, great efforts were being made toimprove the sorry state of Bomber Command effectiveness. Theaffair of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau was about par for thecourse at that time.

Altogether, Sgt. Paul took part in nine operational flights in theManchester’s and acquitted himself well. It was evident, reading thepages of the Squadron Record Book, that Beauchamp was a man ofconsiderable stature and character. On the night of March 10th, theymade their last Manchester flight together, setting off for Essen.The flight lasted a bare twenty two minutes. Excessive sparks wereseen coming from the port engine. They made an immediate return,bringing the bombs back with them.

Better times lay ahead. On March 13th, the Squadron was re-equipped with their new Lancasters. Nine crews were sent on leavewhilst the remainder underwent an intensive training programme.This upturn in their affairs apparently continued when theyrecommenced operations with their new equipment.

The Squadron Leader and his crew were to make two further tripstogether. On April 25/26th, they bombed the Heinkel works at

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Rostock, returning safely with slight flak damage and, on 6/7th Mayattacked Stuttgart. Two nights later, Sgt. Paul, still acting as secondpilot, joined Flight Sergeant Walker on a further trip to the Heinkelworks, this time at Warnemunde. He was then considered fullyfledged and given his own crew. Amongst the new arrivals posted into No. 207 Squadron on May 17th from No. 16 O.T.U., ActingPilot Sergeant Paterson gets his first mention in the operationalrecord book. He joined Sergeant Paul’s crew. We learnt,subsequently, that the Squadron Leader’s wireless operatortransferred to Paul’s crew, giving us a glimpse of Paul’s character,suggesting, as it does, that he was well liked by his fellow crewmembers. The new crew commenced training together

On May 24th, disaster struck. Page 85 of the log book refers:

Bottesford 24.5.42. Fine with occasional showers. Six aircraft detailed foroperations but later cancelled. One aircraft carrying out night cross countrycrashed on the Devon moors near Tavistock. Captain Sgt. Paul seriouslyinjured. Four crew killed, one slightly injured.

The injured Sgt. Paul gets a final mention on the 28th when he isofficially posted off the Squadron to R.A.F. station Bottesford, witheffect from 25.5.42.

Squadron Leader Beauchamp continued his tour of operations andlater, took charge of the Lancaster Conversion Unit he had helpedto create. He devoted two pages of the Squadron log book to a briefhistory, mentioning the move to Swinderby, the amalgamation with61 Squadron’s equivalent, and the formation of 1660 ConversionUnit as a separate entity. Beauchamp ran it ably until a new WingCommander arrived to take charge. Now with D.S.O. to add to hisD.F.C., he completed his brief narrative and signed off with aflourish.

I combed the records for a clue as to the identity of the ‘slightlyinjured’ survivor and drew a blank. The Ministry of Defence wereable to add some further details. They confirmed that the fatal crosscountry took place at night. The time of the crash was put at 11.30.I queried it, surely they meant 23.30 hours? Yes, that was correct,but what it actually said was 11.30. They confirmed Standon Hill,

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South Devon, and two survivors. I explained my difficulty. Onesurvivor, Sgt. Paul, was accounted for, killed in a subsequent crash. Icould not trace the other as I did not have his name. Could theyproduce a name? There was a long wait and I sensed some doubts,perhaps a little rule bending. Eventually, my informant came back.Sgt. Whiteman was the other survivor. No initials, no serial number,just the name. It was enough. Sgt. Whiteman featured on every crewlist with Beauchamp and Paul, generally next in line. That put him inas navigator, or bomb-aimer, perhaps even, wireless operator. Afurther search of the Squadron Record Book would turn up themissing details. Then, if he had survived the war, there was a chancethat he still lived and, perhaps, an outside chance that I might findhim.

Whatever gods there are, they decided now to take a hand. Luck,coincidence, call it what you will, I felt I had only to reach out tolocate the survivor. The reason for this feeling soon becameapparent. It grew upon me that I already knew the Squadron Leader.I knew a Beauchamp who went by the name of Ken. The man Iknew was a marvellous chap, what we used to call a naturalgentleman, which has nothing to do with station or birth. MyBeauchamp never mentioned the war as far as I remembered, out ofa natural modesty, but all along I must have known or suspected adistinguished career. There could hardly be two so alike.

It seemed wildly improbable. My wife was loathe to believe it. Backin the early fifties, I flew with him in a Hermes. There was the entryin my flying log book, young Sgt. Paul had been most fortunate.Next day, the Officers’ List provided precise details. rank, initials,service number, the lot. Where was my Beauchamp now? I calledthe airline welfare department. They scratched around for a whilebut no such name, not on their retired list, not on the twenty fiveyear club list, simply not listed, sorry. I began to wonder if I hadinvented him. Suppose he had died, would they know that? The girlwas getting flustered. I was wasting time and money. I made a fewmore calls selecting from my retired fellow Captains and wasrelieved to learn that I had not imagined him. He’d gone to groundsomewhere in the West Country. I tried the Pension Fund. They

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knew at once because he was drawing the money. They weren’tparting with his ‘phone number. I’d have to write in. “It’s O.K.,” Isaid, “just so long as he’s alive and still living in Devon.” “NotDevon,” said the girl, “Somerset.”

Directory Inquiries excelled themselves. They gave me the numberwithin seconds. He wasn’t home that day, nor the next. “Ken,” Ithought, “if you’ve gone and died on me, I’ll never forgive you.”The waiting was very bad. All the while, questions kept piling up. Icontinued probing. Sergeant Whiteman I now knew to be thewireless operator. He was a WOP/AG. I had his initials and servicenumber and the date when he completed his tour and left theSquadron. In August, he followed the Squadron Leader to theConversion Unit. I wondered briefly, if he followed his Captain intothe airline business. Would they know if he had? One thing aboutour great national airline, it never changes. Last time I flew homewith them, I met an old Chief Steward. He looked ancient enoughto be one of the guys who came to us from the Queen Mary.“Older, Captain,” he said. I asked him what it was like now, all thesechanges, re-organisations, redundancies. “You should know betterthan that, Captain,” he replied. “It never changes. The buns arealways stale and the Flight Engineer still gets the chicken.” I wasimmensely reassured. The Chief leaned over to take my tray away.“The Lord’s in his heaven, all’s well with the world.”

I ‘phoned Beauchamp again on the Saturday of the Wimbledonfinals. Unless he had come into a fortune, he would be homesettling down in front of the T.V. About fifteen minutes before theladies' match was due to start would be a good time to get him andset up a meeting. I got straight through.

It only took a few minutes to establish that he was the right man. Iput him in the picture, the Wellington crash and the ParishMagazine. Then I mentioned the link with another crash, leading meto 207 Squadron and Sergeant Paul. He knew immediately andstarted to tell me.

“After the accident, Paul suffered a personality change. From beingthe very best type of quiet New Zealander, he became something of

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a spiv. Mention sugar, or anything on the black market, and hecould get it. He hung about for a time, then he disappeared. I don’tknow what happened to him.” The way things were going, we wereboth about to miss the ladies’ final. I got some more details andarranged to telephone again and agree a visit. I wanted to give himtime to put his mind to it so that, when we met, he would be readyfor me.

“You were on the phone a long time,” my wife said. “Was thereanything else?” Indeed there was. They found Sgt. Whiteman sittingnot far from the aeroplane, quite unhurt. Sgt. Paul was wanderingabout nearby. He had concussion but was otherwise O.K.Beauchamp didn’t visit the site, nor take a part in any subsequentinvestigation. If it were true that they were found not far from theaeroplane, it suggested that rescuers were quickly on the scene.Dartmoor is a wild and desolate place, difficult of access. They musthave crashed very close to human habitation. It was night time,23.30 hours. Someone must have seen them go in to be found soquickly. It didn’t seem quite right to me.

Two men escaped, comparatively unhurt, when four were killed.That, too, seemed strange although such things are not uncommon.Beauchamp had no idea why they crashed. He didn’t know whatthey were doing flying so low, unless they were lost and attemptingto keep below cloud with the ground in sight. That didn’t quite jelleither, unless the carrots were more effective than I was prepared toadmit. He will be looking at it now with forty years aviationexperience behind him and not as he thought of it then. It’s quitedifferent. In those days, aeroplanes just crashed, today we have toknow the reason.

Sometime afterwards, Whiteman wrote to Beauchamp who kept theletter, so we may have a start. Whiteman married very young, hiswife was in Newark having their third child about the time when thecrash occurred. They planned for a boy to be named Paul MerlinBeauchamp. Turned out to be a girl.

My wife was getting very excited. “That would be the maternityhospital in Newark where my sister, Kathleen, was a midwife. It’s

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getting very close to home.” Close indeed, now touching both ourlives.

The Wimbledon tennis final seemed remote and unreal, of littleaccount. By comparison, the Lancaster crash was immediate andabsorbing. Down the long corridor of the years, the echoesreverberated, driving us to action. We made our plans to visitDartmoor. This time the Met. Office did us proud. Instead of photocopies, they loaned out the actual charts for the 24th and 25th ofMay. Hastily, I had them copied and returned to safe keeping. Therewas time to study them briefly before we left. “It would be more tothe point if you had today’s charts,” my wife said. “We could dowith a forecast for the next few days.”

At seven o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 24th May 1942, thecharts showed a weak front clearing the country, leaving goodconditions behind it. Plymouth was the nearest reporting centre,giving a fair representation of the day’s weather. Caution must beobserved in these matters. High moorlands produce their ownlocalised variations and a coastal station cannot be held trulyrepresentative of those inland. The charts showed fine weatherobtaining throughout the day, partly cloudy with the base runningabout 2000feet and no significant change, away to the west,however, a marked frontal system was approaching rapidly,tightening the isobars and presaging stormy weather with strong togale force winds. The chart for the following morning showed thissystem just through Plymouth.

I decoded the 18.00 report and the following 01.00, spanning thetime of the crash. There were no weather problems that I coulddetect except that, far out to the west, had the cross country routetaken him there, he may have encountered the approaching frontalsystem and its attendant severe weather. I made a particular note ofthe fact that Double British Summer Time was in use and the Met.Office charts were, of course, timed in G.M.T. It was upon thislatter point that the whole investigation now began to turn.

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As we motored along the old A30 to the West of England, therewas plenty of opportunity to review the evidence so far anddetermine the questions that needed to be asked.

It was a night flight, a night cross country. Almost certainly, theys t a r t e d f r o mBottesford in daylight.The official time forthe occurrence was23.30 hours, D.B.S.T.Mrs. Gibb of theRoya l Greenw ichObservatory, downthere at Eastbourne,calculated the time ofsunset at Tavistock tob e 2 2 . 0 9 . C i v i lTwilight ended at2 2 . 5 1 , t h e o l d‘ l ight ing-up’ t imewhen the sun was sixdegrees below thehorizon. During CivilTwilight it is possiblet o w ork w i t ho u tartificial light and thesea horizon can beclearly seen. NauticalTwilight ended at

23.50 when the sun reached twelve degrees below the horizon. Forall practical purposes, the air navigator is concerned only with CivilTwilight when he can see and be seen. The period thereafter, whenthe sea horizon is not clearly defined and artificial light becomesnecessary, is generally referred to as dusk.

All the reports said ‘night’ but one had ‘night’ crossed out andsomething substituted. The most likely substitution would be ‘dusk’.The observer’s altitude, of course, affects the time of sunset, and all

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Illustration 7: Sgt Paul at Lancaster ControlsPhoto courtesy Ken Beauchamp

the other times, by making them slightly later. Since we know he isflying below the height of the terrain, this is not significant, delayingthe timings by about five minutes, or six at the most. Why were theyflying so low? If it were true that they encountered bad weather, asthe official finding indicated, constantly forcing them to descenduntil they jagged it in and turned back, why did they remain at theselow levels? The only bad weather they might have encountered wasout to the west, far off in the Atlantic and common prudencesuggested that, when they left the weather behind, they climb backto altitude.

Again, almost certainly, there would be an altimeter error. Not muchof an error, admittedly. I made it of the order of 150 feet, an overreading of that amount. In other words, he is lower than theinstrument tells him because of the pressure distribution and havingset his altimeter at base upon departure.

The official Inquiry said, ‘Inexperience. Flying below cloud insteadof above or around it.’ I could accept that, provided it was daylightor perhaps even dusk. ‘Inexperience’ was all right, although bothPau1 and Whiteman had at least a dozen operational flights behindthem, but they were new to the Lancaster, and the rest of the crewwere very new indeed. That said, I didn’t like it much. They were,after all, on a training flight, the final night cross-country, simulatingan operational flight, in an aeroplane with a normal operationalheight of 20,000 feet. What were they doing below 2,000 feet? TheA.O.C. added little to the official verdict. ‘No disciplinary action’was his comment. What an extraordinary thing to say. The findingwas inexperience, not indiscipline. Did the notion of unauthorisedlow flying cross his mind? The penalty for such indiscipline was verysevere, an almost certain court martial. It was, indeed, a possibility,but not unless there was sufficient daylight. Everything said night,except where night was crossed out and something substituted.Beauchamp would be able to set us to rights on all these points.

As it turned out, we were made most welcome. I doubted if I wouldhave recognised my ex-colleague if we had met in the street and hefreely admitted he did not remember me at all! We concentrated on

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Paul and his time on the Squadron. Certainly it was a night flight.Beauchamp could not account for the fact that the aeroplane was solow other than being lost and making the oldest mistake in thebook, attempting to stay below cloud, or descending through it, tolook for a land mark. He brought out his log book and an album ofphotographs, featuring both the aeroplanes and his crew. For thevery first time, I found myself gazing at the likeness of the youngman who had occupied my thoughts over the past few weeks. Paulwas handsome and well set up, of rather a serious disposition, in thephotographs at least. Beauchamp loaned me a snapshot and one ortwo photographs of the Manchester. I turned down the generousoffer to borrow his album. Such things are too precious to be lentout. We discussed the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau and thenumerous attacks 207 had made upon them at Brest to so littleaccount. The breakout, when it came, took the British by surpriseand the cruisers were well under way before they were discovered.The Squadron instructions were not to approach them unless therewas adequate cloud cover, more than five-tenths, for fear ofLuftwaffe escort. In the event, only one aeroplane from 207 did getclose and made an attack. The gallant pilots of the old Swordfishbiplanes who perished in their endeavours, had no more successbut, unbeknown at the time, the minefields which the aeroplaneshad sown in their ‘gardening’ operations, took their toll and inflictedserious damage.

We now came to a setback. The Squadron doctor from that timehad just died. They had attended his funeral only three weeks ago.“Most inconsiderate of him,” I said. “he would have known aboutPaul and the treatment he was given, and his state of mind,everything?”. A door had closed. I was assured that he did havetreatment in the chief R.A.F. hospital for such cases but where thatwas, Beauchamp was unable to say. A worse setback-was to follow.Mrs. Beauchamp was against the whole enterprise. What goodwould come of it? 207 was her Squadron too, she had served atBottesford and known Tommy Paul. Anything that might reflectupon him, or the Squadron, worried and concerned her. It was morethan just the Senior Officer’s lady, flying to her husband’s defence,

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although it was that too. Her husband took the opposite view.Whatever the truth was about the accident, it should be brought out.I was caught off balance. There was nothing, to my mind, to bringdisgrace on anyone, rather the reverse. We were dealing with bravemen, doing their best in a war that had engulfed half the world.Only the relatives of the dead men could judge such an issue. Mightthey not wish to know the full circumstances? Not for the first time,I took a leaf from the Reverend Warner's book and quoted Binyon.We must not forget. I thought of the butcher from Newport Pagnellwho had caused a paragraph to appear in a newspaper so thatpeople would remember. I thought of the sister in the far Southlandwho was pleased that anyone remembered. Could things bedifferent here in the West Country? Nothing I said served toreassure her. A line from Hamlet crossed my mind, ‘The lady dothprotest too much, me thinks.’ Was it possible that there wassomething hidden, something to find, some disgrace from long ago?It made me uneasy and uncertain of purpose. Yet I had occasion tothank her for she had alerted me to an altogether different reactionand, in the next few days, I was to be reminded of the fact.

We took away the letter that Whiteman had written to his skipper. Itwas addressed to Wing Commander Beauchamp, D.S.O., D.F.C., soI had been one out on the rank. I urged them to visit the PublicRecords Office at Kew and examine the Squadron Record Bookbefore the micro-filming was completed and the book itselfvanished from public view. We took our leave in good order andheaded west into Devon.

You can't mistake it as you get into the Devon countryside. Theroads are narrow and congested at the best of times. High banksenclose them with trees and hedges planted on top, screening thecountryside from view. The fields and farms lie hidden and secretivebehind their protective screen. We took the route via Okehamptonso that, when we came out presently on the moors, the full beautyof the country was revealed. At a point where we could see StandonHill away on our left and the valley of the River Tavy below, weslowed and stopped to study the lie of it. It was as I had thought.The aeroplane must have approached from the south-west quadrant,

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otherwise it would have come to grief earlier. Even at the time itcould have made little impression on the barren hillside and theprospect of finding any trace of it on the moorland was slightindeed.

Without further delay, we took the road to Peter Tavy, pushing oninto the hill country, my wife map reading from the ordnance surveymap, until we reached a dead end at Prousentor Farm. The buildingswere neglected and run down in the way of hill farms everywhere.Whoever bothied there was not at home. In the barn a dog whinedand scraped at the door anxious to be free. We pushed open thegate leading to the military area and pressed on following the armyroad to Standon Farm itself.

A platoon of squaddies was in occupation and the smell of baconfrying perfumed the air. Presently, a subaltern appeared. He quicklyset us to rights, where to find the Ranger, old Smoky Fagg, and thefarmer who leased the land, cheeky sod, always complaining aboutdisturbing his stock, and a warning not to go picking up metalobjects. Metal objects were what we had come about. It crossed mymind that we could use a troop of soldiers in the next day or twoand I envied them their billet in the newly refurbished farmbuildings, for it was time to look to our own accommodation. Themoist south-westerly air stream was bringing in an overcast, piling itagainst the hillside to produce a persistent drizzle. We stood for awhile surveying the hill, the steep faces strewn with boulders. Noaeroplane yet built could survive a crash in such a place. Only on theridge, or beyond it, could two men have lived to crawl from thewreckage. We walked as far as the gate leading on to the hill. Thesilence was accentuated rather than broken by the noise from thearmy generator. I had been wrong about the farms and what weshould find. These were not the sort of places to stay in the handsof one family for generations, or to be continuously occupied. Theebb and flow of national prosperity dictated their use or disuse.Subsistence farming is for the very hardy. Probably in harsher times,in the early forties, Standon Farm was owned and inhabited, butnow the farming community had withdrawn further down the rivervalley. We made haste to follow them there.

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In the village of Peter Tavy we stopped to enquire at Chubb Farm.Mr. Dodds and his family were finishing off the milking and pleasedto relax and turn their minds to our enquiry. His father would haveknown for he’d been here then, and in the Specials. I bowed myhead for it was evident that Mr. Dodds senior, had passed on. BillBellamy would know. He was getting on a bit and living inTavistock. Uarn’t no trouble, he’d ‘phone old Bill and see what heremembered. It turned out Bill didn’t remember and I felt a keendisappointment

My wife was busily making notes. There was Mrs. Lynd, just pastthe shop at Wisdom Cottage, and Mrs. Polly Abel. Follow thetelephone wires to Wapsworthy. As we already knew, Mr. Abel hadthe lease on Standon Farm. Probably, Ted Ballard out Asburtonway, or Mr. Friend near the kiosk, turn left in by the gate. TheBallards had been at Standon Farm. Mr. and Mrs. Perkins in thesquare house, ‘Grattan’, over the bridge, he was in the Home Guard.There was Mr. Guest who kept the archives and had just held anexhibition on the villages, but he wouldn’t know, ‘fore his time. TheTavistock Gazette and the Tavistock Times were in Brook Street.“The newspapers often keep records,” I said, “specially localnewspapers, they publish things from their editions of fifty and onehundred years ago.” Mr. Dodd observed that they might not be upto that in Tavistock yet, but I could give it a try. Mr. Dodds was afind. Best of all, he didn’t think it odd that strangers should comeenquiring. Only that we had left it late. The people who lived herethen, were mostly very elderly, or moved away, or moved on. Theirsons and daughters went away to the war and knew nothing exceptto hear their elders speak of it, but nothing at first hand. We headedfor Tavistock and the Bed and Breakfast quarter, buoyed up withhigh hopes for the morrow.

We were up early and down to Tavistock, there to make a start toour enquiries. I was glad that I had come fore-warned, makingenquiry on behalf of a relative who wished to know whatever therewas to be discovered about the crash. My little story was not theliteral truth but, to explain the link between Brockhurst Wood andStandon Hill, was more than I could accommodate, and so it served

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its purpose. I hoped for forgiveness although, by now, I wasconvinced that the relatives would certainly wish to know.Moreover, had I been a believer in other worlds, and in the presenceof spirits excluded from them, somehow condemned and enslavedby past events, to linger on into the present, I would by now havebeen prepared to acknowledge some such existence. They had not,it must be said, taken any part in the affairs of Standon Hill. If theyhad any influence upon events, now was surely the time for them tocome forward, for I was aware that we needed all the help we couldget.

The little market town of Tavistock was thronged and bustling. Inthe Square, the Morris Dancers clicked and wheeled and themummers drew a curious crowd. We had to drag ourselves away.The newspaper offices were closed.

We made enquiry at the bookshop in King Street, eliciting thenames of local authors. One had written a book on the Lancasterand another on airfields.

Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy were at home and, once they were convincedwe meant business, recalled what they could of the Lancaster crash.We tried the Police Station asking for the Sergeant Thomas who hadattended, reversing roles on them, even to the notebook. Then, inthe official tourist information office, a lady, by the name of Ruth,came up trumps, God bless her, and turned her local knowledge toour advantage. She phoned Mrs. Abel. Mrs. Abel did not rememberbut put forward some names. There was a Mr. Palmer farmingCreason Farm, out by Mary Tavy, or his neighbour Mr. Cousins atNattor Farm and they would know something.

Joan improvised a picnic lunch and we went back to the car andreviewed the morning’s progress before setting off.

We had learnt something of three Harvey brothers, each onefarming on the places nearest to the hill, spending their lives withinsight of each other and neither one had issue, excepting one. Therewas a child stillborn. The farms had changed hands during the years.All along I had convinced myself that Standon Farm had a chiefpart in the drama. It lay along the most probable flight path and was

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nearest to the hill at the end of a passable motor road, then probablylittle more than a track. We had three names in mind as tenants.One of the Harvey brothers once, a Mrs. Fone once, and a Mr.Ballard twice. All now dead. We had become used to the question,

‘What is your interest?’ and the almost invariable concomitant,‘What good will come of it?’ This time we took the main road toMary Tavy and on towards Creason Farm. Mrs. Palmer waspreparing the family meal and awaiting her husband’s return fromthe outlying Nat Tor. She was deeply suspicious. On an impulse, Iproduced the pilot’s snapshot and handed it to her. For a while shestood still, shading her eyes, focussing on the picture. “Was he theone who wrote to Mrs. Fone, d’you think?”, she asked. Verycarefully, she handed the picture back to me and I put it away. “Ishouldn’t think so. He was killed later in the war. The other survivorwas called Whiteman, the wireless operator, he may still be alive. Ihaven’t found him yet.”

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Illustration 8: Removal of wreckage Lancaster R5617 from Standon Hill June1942

Mrs. Palmer took us down the garden where we had anuninterrupted view of the hill. We had already learnt to call it‘Stannon’ as the Devonians did. She pointed to the ridge andindicated where the crash had taken place. She herself, served in theW.A.A.F.s and was away at the time, but her mother, Mrs. Fone,lived at Stannon Farm. The two survivors made their way down thehill and her mother took them in and looked after them. One ofthem wrote to her mother, right up to the time she died about threeyears ago. She thought they kept the letters. She took us back to thehouse and went off to search for them. I waited anxiously, unable tobelieve it. If we had letters from just over three years ago, we wouldcertainly find Whiteman. Mrs. Palmer came back empty handed.After a little while we left. Her husband would be home shortly andwe would be likely to meet him en route in a red Subaru pick-up.

We met in the road and Mr. Palmer backed up on to the moor andtook time to show us the best way on to the hill. He looked ratherpointedly at our attire as if to say we were hardly equipped forwalking, but we reassured him. We had more suitable gear in the car.He himself had been to see the place, but long ago, there would benothing there. The moor had burnt over several times since then.Yes, he believed the aeroplane had caught fire and burnt but it wasonly what he had heard. The young man with him, his son Isurmised, was equally helpful and might have come with us but itwas a busy time, bringing the sheep down for shearing. StannonFarm was our best starting point, then straight up to the ridge. Thetwo men went off shortly for their dinner and we made our wayback to the Hill Bridge and picnicked by the weir, enjoying the sightand sounds of the river, planning our afternoon.

By the time we set off, the slight drizzle of the morning had eased,and the cloud base lifted. At Stannon Farm, the squaddies were offinto Tavistock for the afternoon, leaving only a picket in charge.Another fry-up was underway. We had to dissuade the officer’s bullterrier from coming with us. A group of men on horseback werefetching sheep off the hill and we waited for them to pass. My wifespoke to them but they knew nothing of aircraft wreckage and weset off, scrambling over the boulders till we made it to the ridge.

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There the ground flattened out into a plateau, falling slightly andextending away to the horizon. We were looking for a needle in ahaystack and so we set about it, walking in a zigzag along the ridge,quartering the ground as best we could. The south westerly windblew strongly up there along the top. Our passage disturbed thehidden skylarks so that they took off, climbing vertically into the aircurrents, filling the air with song. Of the aeroplane we found notrace. We found eyebolts set into concrete and wondered briefly, ifthey had been made for some form of gantry to lift heavy engines,but abandoned the idea. We found corroded warning signs left bythe military and even a pair of earphones, but a spike driven into theground suggested an earth connection, and signals. Of spirits orghosts, there was no trace, no aura of mystery, only the wind andthe skylarks and the clouds racing above.

We gave up several times and restarted. I could not fathom theroute the recovery team had taken, although I knew they had beenthere and removed everything and stacked the pieces against thewall of the churchyard in Peter Tavy. They must have used horsesand farm carts made into sledges. They must have been verydetermined. “We were, at that time,” my wife said, “if youremember.”

Only when the day was far advanced did we admit defeat and rathershakily made our way back to the car. The bull terrier helped us withthe last of the picnic. The pickets were frying again. We set off,retracing our route, to make our mark with the people, to see if theletters were found, and to recover something from the day if at allpossible.

Right at the last, when I thought there was nothing more to begleaned, Mrs Lynd surprised me. She got up and went to thetelephone. Her nephew, Eric, was immediately concerned, so sheassured him that all was well, then mentioned a man wanting to talkabout the Lancaster crash. Eric was thirteen at the time, he was offup the hill the very next morning, before the rescue party, and sawthe wrecked aeroplane lying on the moor. It had touched very closeto the summit, just beyond the ridge, on the flat where the ground

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began to fall away and skidded along. The fuselage was broken intwo and overturned, the mid upper gunner crushed in his turret.Ammunition from the machine gun belts was scattered everywhere.The bombs had not gone off, and there was no trace of fire.“Bombs,” I said, “I didn’t know he was carrying bombs.”

Everything Eric told me had the ring of truth. If he said there werebombs, I believed it, there were bombs all right. A thirteen year oldboy, up there before anyone else, would take in every detail, andremember it. We had been wasting our time with the very old,struggling for recall, neglecting the youngsters. Eric was now anaero-engineer with the Rolls Company in Bristol and so we moved,inevitably, to the cause of the crash. There, I could not help him for,although I was in possession of the salient facts, I was utterlybaffled as to the cause. Mindful of his aunt’s telephone bill, I had toring off. He made me promise to write to him if I uncoveredanything and I took my leave of Mrs Lynd and her friend, BillBellamy’s sister and, to myself, I said farewell to all the villagers whohad helped us and been so kind, who had set their first suspicionsaside and told us everything they could remember, for the sake ofthe young men who must not be forgotten.

I now resigned myself to the realisation that, in order to establishthe cause of the crash on Dartmoor, I must find the wirelessOperator/AirGunner Sergeant Whiteman. Without him the thingwas a mystery, defying explanation. We headed for home.

The R.A.F. Association came to mind. I buttonholed the localbranch chairman, retired Group Captain George Donaldson whowas walking his dog around the Beeches. The dog was very pleased.It had reached an age when it went with the man out of a sense ofduty and long familiarity, and any excuse to flop down waswelcome.

The Chairman was delighted to be roped in. They would scan theirlist of members looking for him and, failing that, would run anadvert in their agony columns of the ‘Where are you now, Ginger?’variety. One chap had organised a reunion that way. WholeSquadron turned up. I promised to let him have precise details. The

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conversation drifted off to other things. The dog settled itselfcomfortably, its grizzled muzzle between its paws. Accidentinvestigation reminded the Chairman of the time when he was sentalong to a unit to sort things out. Rather too many accidents,apparently. Couldn’t think why, but he must have acquired somesort of reputation. One chap had crashed, beating up his girl friend’shouse, usual thing, didn’t pull up in time. Court martial offence. Avery senior officer took him aside. Double barrelled name, fell outwith Park1 on the Big Wing Theory, you remember. I didn’tremember, I’d been in Bomber Command. He forgave me. “Lookhere, George,” said the senior officer, “don’t be too hard on ‘em.Discipline’s all very well, keep that fighting spirit alive at all costs.Fighting the war for us, those chaps. Who’s going to fight the warfor us if we start locking ‘em all up?”

By the time we parted, I had been roped in also. I just managed toavoid an invitation to go flying at Denham and brush up on myslow rolls. “Whiteman,” I thought, “the things I do for you, aboveand beyond the call of duty.” A chance meeting, yes, but theChairman had shed light upon something which puzzled me. ‘Nodisciplinary action,’ said the A.O.C. I felt his comment to be less ofa puzzle than heretofore.

I got off a number of letters. I entertained the faint hope thatWhiteman’s letters to Mrs. Fone were still in existence and might yetbe found, providing a clue to his whereabouts. His letter toBeauchamp dated from 1943 and so was no help. It did, however,tell us something of the young WOP/AG. He wrote a good hand, anatural correspondent and I liked his style. The nub of the letter washis enquiry about a mention at Bomber Command of an exploitthey had shared. The first of the wartime campaign medals had justbeen issued, the 1939-43 Star. Whiteman wondered if this mentionconstituted a Mention in Dispatches and the wearing of an oakleafemblem. Even as he wrote it, I felt he knew the answer. WOP/AGsmight share in the dangers and the exploits of an operational tour,but, not as a rule, in the distribution of medals, Whiteman had only

1Sir Keith Park - Commanding Officer No 11 Group Fighter Command

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just come to realise what was meant by the expression, ‘a pilots airforce.’

I went back to the Public Records Office and the Squadron RecordBook. I didn’t have to look far for the ‘exploit’ that had given rise toa ‘mention’. It went something like this. Leaving the target area,beset by searchlights and anti-aircraft fire, and with one enginealready out, they dived to sea level, and skimming the surface, madetheir escape. Not quite. In the failing light, they hit the water andbounced off again, bending the propellers and losing another enginein the process. By some feat of airmanship and sheer bloodydetermination, Beauchamp kept the Lancaster in the air,flying at 100 feet and 120 miles an hour until eventually, he gained alittle height and brought them back to base. Merely reading the briefofficial record caused me to sweat. Not surprisingly, it caused amention at Headquarters. If ever a man deserved a ‘Mention inDispatches’ it had to be Whiteman. If it is any help to you,Whiteman, and it’s little enough, you have a mention now.

The news editor of the Tavistock Times telephoned in answer to myquery. Their files covering the wartime issues were lost or destroyed.She suggested publishing my letter, changing it slightly, making it anappeal to the public for information. She scented a story and wouldI write it up for them? It just so happened that May 24th, 1942, washer birthday! I promised to write it up for her, mostly because it washer birthday.

The newspaper appeal brought immediate results. An organisationcalling itself the Devon Preservation Society had come intoexistence about fifteen years ago with the aim of locating anddocumenting all the aircraft crashes which had occurred in Devonand Cornwall during the war years. The president of this body calledfrom Torquay, offering whatever information they could provide.They had a file on the incident and, indeed, pieces of wreckage fromthe site and amongst their members was a man who had worked onthe crash recovery team. The president gave his name as RobinHood and I thought at once that he must be kidding me. There wasnothing unreal about his information, however. He knew where the

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flight had originated and the names of the crew and where they wereburied, or at least two of them. These two were buried at a placecalled Buckland Monachorum, just south of Tavistock. He had noinformation on the others. The Royal Observer Corps was trackingthe flight and it circled twice, then the noise of its engines stopped,instead of fading away. They alerted the nearest R.A.F. station atHarrowbeer. A medical team with an ambulance went out andfound the survivors on the moor and brought them back . Themedics then joined the main rescue party which set out at daybreakand, at first, could not find the place again. Number 67 MaintenanceUnit provided the crash recovery teams. Their records were no

longer available. From that, I guessed that the Preservation Grouphad them, via the member who had worked there and these recordswould be the hard core basis for their activities and the fact thatthey knew the location of about twenty crashes on Dartmoor alone.

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Illustration 9: Crash Team on Standon Hill - (L to R) Reg, George Mudge, Taffy, Coley, Sgt Tibbles

I had heard of these groups and occasionally they made the presswith spectacular finds, but I knew nothing of them. Indeed, when Ifirst made enquiry at the Bomber Command Museum, I was asked ifI belonged to one and sensed a strong atmosphere of disapproval ofall such bodies. There was perhaps, something ghoulish in theiractivities. Robin Hood was at great pains to reassure me on thatscore. Their object was to preserve exhibits for museums and thelike. Whatever the truth of it, their activities took up a great deal oftheir time, but they were not commercial. To be commercial, Igathered, was the besetting sin, to be writing a book, or planningcommercial gain, was beyond the pale. I hid behind my imaginaryrelative. Besides, I had been part of that time as a Lancaster pilotand that gave me a legitimate interest, if one was needed.

I went to bed that night with my mind in turmoil. “We must getsome sleep,” said my wife. “We won’t solve it lying here.” Therewas silence for a time, then my wife spoke again. “Why did theybury two at Buckland Monachorum?” I came wide awake as theimplications sank in. Why indeed? Sleep went out the window. Ifone of them was a local man, we had the explanation, the key to thewhole thing. We got up and brewed tea. I checked over the notes Ihad made whilst Robin Hood talked. Mellish and Pankhurst wereburied at Buckland Monachorum. Mellish was a Canadian.Pankhurst was the observer. The term, observer, meant he was thenavigator. If the navigator was a local man, might he not be buriedlocally at his families’ request? If he and the Canadian were buddies,they would bury them together. It made a terrible logic. All thepieces fell together. If one were a local man, might they not descendto circle the place where he lived, then turn away on course,climbing slowly back to altitude? Only the navigator would realisewhere, precisely, the cross-country route took them, right close tohis home. It all pointed to Pankhurst.

We looked up Buckland Monachorum. St. Andrews was a famousand ancient church, the church of Sir Francis Drake and steeped inhistory. There would be church records going back to that time. Thetrail which had long gone cold came suddenly alive again. IfPankhurst were a local man, that would explain the circling, the low

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altitude, even in the very late nautical twilight when most of the lighthad faded and darkness reigned. There was a slight crescent moon,one day past the first quarter. At nearby Plymouth the weatherreports showed only small amounts of cloud.

The Canadian bothered me slightly. My wife thought that wassimple. They were pals. What bothered her was the thought that, if alocal man was involved, no one had mentioned it. Such a thing wasalmost certain to be known. It was a niggling doubt which spoilt anotherwise perfect explanation.

My wife was right, we could not solve it here. Another trip toDevon would be necessary. I needed to find the last resting place ofall the crew members. Dead men, they say, tell no tales. Perhaps not,but in this case, they might indeed tell us a great deal. Before we leftthere were other things to do, another search at Kew for the recordsof the Royal Observer Corps and the Maintenance Units forconfirmation of Robin Hood’s story, and the search for Whitemanhad to be extended. I wrote to the National Insurance people inNewcastle enclosing a letter for Whiteman. Their computer wouldshortly be scanning for him to start payment of his old age pension.It might as well scan the lists for me whilst it was about it.

We drew a blank on the Royal Observer Corps other than somehistorical background. At the start of the war, it was transferred toFighter Command of the R.A.F. They were paid one shilling andthreepence an hour. They bemoaned the lack of a proper uniform,comparing their lot unfavourably with the Home Guard. From timeto time, Senior Officers investigated their complaints to no avail.The only detailed records which had survived belonged to a unit inKent from the Battle of Britain days. I’m sure we got a rather lop-sided view of the Corps. They deserved a better history. Of theiractivities in the West Country we found nothing.

We fared little better with the Maintenance Units. Number 67 ofTaunton and Culmhead, was formed from a handful of people at alocal Morris garage at the start of the war. It grew in strength andimportance. Detailed records were kept of work carried out, but ofthe crash recovery teams we found precious little. The number of

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teams had to be rapidly expanded and several civilian teams wereloaned from the Morris works at Cowley.

If they kept records and accounted to their Headquarters, none of itfound its way into the archives. The Operations Record Book ofNo. 50 M.U. at Cowley mentioned the loan of several recoveryteams to Taunton, suggesting a hectic activity there. Only one actualcrash got individual mention, that of a Heinkel which struck someoverhead cables and thus came to grief. To recover such anaeroplane, more or less intact, must have been something of afeather in their cap. Robin Hood and his merry men had the best ofit and the Public Records Office had little more to offer. Whilst wewere there I withdrew the record book for 207 again and sneakedanother look at their history. They had not disbanded after the firstwar as I assumed but continued in service with only one short breakat the start of the second. It was fascinating stuff, a roll call offamous names, visits by royalty, service in Turkey and Sudan. I tookanother look at Beachamps part in the conversion to Lancasters andthere it was, a requirement for a cross country flight at maximumweight to complete the training. The only way to increase the weightof a bomber was to put things in the bomb bay. Unlikely as itseemed our aeroplane may have carried bombs. I handed back thebook with some regret, so that the process of micro filming couldcontinue and the precious document itself, be preserved forposterity. Posterity, in a way, will be the loser, for micro film will bea poor substitute for the actual book, hand written in its early stagesin the heat of battle, or the heat and sand of the desert and Sudaneserailway coaches.

The West Country was drought stricken and overrun by summervisitors. We set course directly for Buckland Monachorum. Hiddenaway in its delightful village, the Church of St. Andrews continuedto serve the spiritual needs of the people, as it had done forcenturies. Successive generations from before the time of Sir FrancisDrake and the Spanish Armada, filled the graveyards. Thecontractor who kept the place tidy, took time to show us themilitary section with its single row of War Commission headstones.At once, my theory about a local man collapsed in ruins about me. I

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realised, by my reaction, how much store I set by it. I stood silentlyby the graves of the fallen, waiting for the atmosphere of peace andtranquillity to calm me and disperse the feelings of bitterdisappointment. I realised, too, that I was more heavily involvedthan I was prepared to admit. Were it true that relatives of the deadmen had asked me to discover everything there was to be known ofthese events, I had long since exceeded my brief and must nowproceed upon my own behalf until I had unravelled it, or was forcedinto an admission of defeat.

The men buried in the military section were all flying crew. Therewere three dates involved, therefore three separate flying accidents.Despite this, they were not buried in chronological order, buthiggledy piggledy, all mixed together. It grieved me, somehow, thatthe men who had died and fallen together, did not lie together sideby side. “Were it my son,” my wife said, “I would be outraged. It’ssomehow so callous and unfeeling.” The War Graves Commissionmust have done their best. I suspected that, sometime after the war,they had come along and engraved the tombstones, stuck them inthe ground and gone away again, another task in their arduousendeavour completed as best they could. I noted down the detailson the headstones, the faces in shadow and too difficult tophotograph, little more than name, rank and number, with a text.‘She hath done what she could’ came to mind. “That,” said my wife,“is the worst thing you could say of anyone. I should hate to have iton mine, don’t you ever do that.” Only one had anything personal.,‘beloved son of -----Alberta, Canada.’

We spoke to the verger, but the Vicar was away, so we had to leaveBuckland Monachorum to return on the morrow.

The Vicar was a young man, most helpful and understanding. Hewas new to the parish but cheerfully opened the massive safe andput the contents at our disposal whilst he prepared for the morningservice. The last burial book was dated 1925. The entries stoppedabruptly, ‘See Cemetery Authorities.’ I remembered what the vergerhad said. She was busy putting the final touches to the churchbefore the service, and confirmed it. The records were taken away

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because of the damp and stored in Plymouth. The contractor wholooked after the cemetery, said he worked for the Parish Counciland knew the name and the phone number of the Clerk to theCouncil. So the local council had taken over responsibility for thecemeteries from the church in 1925 and would have the burialbooks from that time onwards. We walked slowly away, regrettingthat we could not stay for the service, conscious that the morningwas slipping by and the need to locate the records pressed upon us.In the car park a young man delayed us, asking questions about adead pigeon. A nutter, I thought. Then, perhaps again, he’s got hispriorities right, maybe he has the right of it.

Plymouth yielded nothing. The Registrar for births, Marriages andDeaths was quite firm. Deaths in the District of Tavistock would beregistered there and nowhere else.

We located the small Public Records Office, shunted away amongstthe rammel of a trading estate. Familiar with the system at Kew, wewere soon poring over the records of Buckland Monachorum.

Events of great national importance, hemmed in by a multitude oftrivialities which serve to make up the sum of human existence,clamoured for our attention. Diverted again and again by items ofinterest, we endeavoured to find some reference to one particularmemorial or burial service from that time. Over the years, throughpeace and war, the religious services at St. Andrew’s Church rolledon, filling successive record books, special events and special peoplegained a brief remark, here and there, at the will of the incumbentpriest. We found no reference to the airmen and turned to thevisitors books. Surely, sometime after the war, when the churchreopened to visitors, someone must have come to visit the gravesand, perhaps, signed their names in the book. We were at once,defeated by the immensity of the task. A gypsy found her way intothe quiet of the reading room, determined to sell her charms andbring good luck to those fortunate enough to buy from the Romany.She brought a touch of the outside world, and the present with her.We packed it in and headed out of the city without even a glimpseof Plymouth Hoe.

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The lady who undertook the duties of Parish Clerk was absolutelycharming. She understood at once why anyone could get involvedand caught up in such a thing. She produced the burial book andread from it. Only Mellish and Pankhurst were buried at St.Andrews. Of the others she had no trace and, therefore, they couldnot be buried in her parish. She explained the procedures to me and,I think I understood them dimly. The death certificates would haveto be raised in Tavistock, the parish where the deaths occurred, andthe Registrar would have them. All four deaths would be registeredthere, but not necessarily the place of burial. The R.A.F. atHarrowbeer would, almost certainly, have a hand in it. She couldtake me to the lady who had written a history of R.A.F. Harrowbeer,and also the Lt. Colonel who had organised a memorial to thestation and those who served there.

“Just follow me,” she said. I endeavoured to follow her, through theholiday traffic and across the old airfield to her friend’s house. Shewaited patiently for me to catch up when necessary. Around the oldperimeter track, the people picnicked in the dispersals, where theSpitfires had stood in the defence of Plymouth. The runway hadbeen dug up, leaving only the hardcore underneath. I was soon tolearn that the rubble came from the bombed buildings of Plymouth,the airfield construction too late and the bombings over by the timethe Spitfires arrived. A Polish squadron had come with the firstbatch of fighters and they were remembered because they danced intheir flying boots, ready to take the air. I liked that. Indeed, I likedboth the ladies who were so helpful and at once, became interestedand involved.

I learnt a great deal of the R.A.F. Station and its short existence.Undoubtedly, Harrowbeer had organised the search and rescue onStandon Hill and cared for the survivors, and registered and buriedthe dead. I came away with a copy of their history, plus a leaflet ofthe commemorative stone and ceremony and the warm feelingengendered by the bonds of common interest.

It was late in the day by the time we reached the Registrar’s office inTavistock. By good fortune, the registrar was working late and

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happy, to oblige. She produced the register for 1942, opened it atpage thirty and handed it to me. I started to read the entries. Under‘Cause of Death’, the words were repeated, ‘Aircraft crash, multipleinjuries.’ A sense of utter finality overcame me. This was what itamounted to eventually for all of us, an entry made in a fair handupon the pages of an official register. Date of birth, full name, dateand cause of death, little else, no birth place, no mention of burial.But so young, so soon, was quite terrible. I gazed, unseeing, at thepage for some time before handing the register back.

The Registrar’s son arrived to collect her and take her home, thenhe sat down, and waited. More to myself than to the Registrar, Irepeated the questions. Why were the two men buried at BucklandMonachorum, yet not side by side? Why were they buried in anotherparish and not where their deaths occurred and not where they wereregistered? But why, in heaven’s name, were they not together asthey had fallen? Where were the other two? Andrew Paterson, agedthirty one years and Leonard Marvin Smith, aged thirty.

The Registrar was caught up in it. It was odd to say the least. Shecould give me the name of the undertakers and the address of theWar Graves Commission if I wished to follow it up. I thanked her.“I haven’t the heart for it,” I said. “There is possibly one survivor, Imust concentrate on the living.” The Registrar made a few notes. “Iwill have enquiries made and try to find out for you and let youknow.”

With any luck I would catch the news editor of the Tavistock Timesbefore they closed. I enquired for her of the birth date, May 24th1942. It was ladies day all right. She was cheerful and bustling andhappy to see me. Her news item had produced one more response.George Mudge, farmer and contractor, had come in and told hisstory which would appear in the next issue of the mid-weekGazette. There would, almost certainly, be more. They would thinkabout it for a while, then come in. Market day would bring them.The Devonians were naturally reticent and not people to pushthemselves forward, but they were deeply interested in local eventsand liked all the details to be correct, and complete. I could have

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hugged her. George Mudge was a real find, and we were notdisappointed.

George and his wife lived on their farm just outside Tavistock.“Turn right by the lay-by, through the white gate, along the farmroad to the bungalow,” he said. The views were truly spectacular.We took time to admire them. My wife knew the country better

than I did and was able to identify the more distant points away intoCornwall. That pleased George.

They had a wet spring in 1942 and the crops were late. Georgeremembered particularly, having invested his money in a Fordsontractor and started in the contracting business. Farmers were beingurged to grow more food and the marginal hill farms were puttingmore land under the plough. Much of the land had been too wet to

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Illustration 10: George Mudge, Standon Hill, Devon. 1985

get on it and, therefore, business was slow. When he was offered thecontract to salvage the Lancaster’s engines, he jumped at it, althoughhe knew the country was difficult, maybe impossible. The R.A.F.had sent two recovery teams, making fourteen men in all becausethey knew it was difficult country. Not that it helped much, for theyheld no suitable equipment, other than one truck per team, and along trailer. The farmers were now very busy, making up for losttime and not disposed to loan their equipment or give a hand. Aseparate team came independently to deal with the bombs. They,too, lacked equipment, and took wires from the farmer’s fence todrag the bombs from a gully. Thousand pounders, they said. Georgeturned to me for confirmation, but I couldn’t help. The bombs werea surprise to me, fused or not, but I had to accept them, for here,indeed was confirmation.

George made a good job of recovering the engines. Three of themlooked O.K., but one was strange, like made of pumice stone. I triedto explain about alloy and how overheating or fire affected it. Hisdescription of pumice stone was most revealing. One engine hadbeen on fire, or had caught fire on impact. It must have ’fired onground’ for the survivors would have made mention and the enquirywould certainly have taken it into consideration and brought it intotheir findings. Nothing else had burnt and George seemed reluctantto accept any mention of fire, even in one engine, when he salvagedthe engines, they asked if he could bring down the rest of thewreckage and he readily agreed, having by now, found a passableroute to Brousentor gate. Because of the spade lugs, he could onlygo on the land. Road work meant fitting rubber bands. We spent alittle time discussing wheels and tyres and the old Fordsons. He hadto drive most carefully, every yard on the hill meant risking his metalwheels, as the solid rocks lay hidden just below the shallow surfacelayer. Risk it he did, bringing the major pieces down by trailer untilmost of the stuff was cleared. He kept one bit and now produced it.It was a lens shaped piece of glass. “Part of the bombsight,” Iventured. George returned it to his pocket. “That’s what they toldme. Someone gave me the pilot’s helmet, but I never used it, didn’t

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like to somehow.” His wife intervened. “We used it for twine,” shesaid. “It hung in the barn a long time and just rotted away.”

When we had exhausted the subject, George got up. “I’ll just bringthe photographs,” he said. I could hardly credit it. “Photographs,” Isaid, “you have photographs of the crash site? One of the recoverymen had taken them with a Kodak and sent them to George. Hestill felt bad about it, for he never did reply, got caught up in hisown business and somehow never wrote. There they were, smallfaded snapshots, four of them. They had hunted all day and onlyjust found them before we arrived. Well, bless you George, andbless your cotton socks. With the aid of the photographs we mustsurely find the place.

We were late back to the Half Way Inn. The landlord had given usup and changed the linen and re-let the room. It was no problem,they had another and we tumbled into bed. Tomorrow, on StandonTor, amongst the bracken and the heather and the song of theskylarks, we must surely succeed.

The day began slowly and the first call lay with the police. The man,who previously told me Sergeant Thomas was dead, now told me itwas safe to go on the ranges. No firing during August, they wouldnot shoot me today. At the newspaper office they had kept a copyof the Gazette for me. There was shopping to do for our return anda courtesy call to make at Creason farm to see Mrs. Palmer. Theletters had not been found and so, must have been destroyed whenthey cleared out her mother’s effects. Her mother’s name wasDoidge and her second husband’s name was Fone. They had thelease of Stannon Farm from the military. Mr. Fone died during thewar and her mother had to give up Stannon and find someone totake on the lease. This was a hard time for her mother and theW.A.A.F.s sent the daughter home on leave and then transferred herto nearby Harrowbeer. On the point as to whether the survivorsfrom the Lancaster had been brought to Stannon farm or madetheir own way there, she could not be sure. It now seemed unlikelythat Whiteman had been the letter writer. The soldiers who came toguard the site while the wreckage was being removed, were billeted

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on Stannon farm. It would be only natural if one of them wasbefriended by the family and kept in touch. Mrs. Palmer stubbornlyshook her head. She would keep on looking for the letters. If thisWhiteman was the survivor, he was the letter writer. He wrotebecause her mother had helped them when they needed it most.

The day was warm and still. We parked at the edge of the firingrange and went in by the Ranger’s hut. Mr. Abel’s son warned usthey were running a bull with the herd by the round wood. Weplanned to give him a wide berth and circle towards the ridge andorientate ourselves with the snapshots, following a route that wouldbe passable to a tractor fitted with solid metal wheels and spadelugs. If the snapshots were all taken in the vicinity of the crash site,we had it made. One shot looked back down the hill towards theround wood. The stone walls and the woods were unaltered. Wepositioned ourselves on the exact spot. It was obvious that thephotograph was taken en route to the site. Now it got really tricky.Limited by the need to remain on a navigable track, we had toorientate now on one picture which showed the actual wreckage.The photographer had stood below the level of his subjects,showing them against the skyline. Behind them the contour slopedfrom left to right. Beyond the contour, another distant hill appeared,barely showing above the horizon. Only one precise spot couldsatisfy those three dimensions. It was heavy going, but we weredetermined. Although the skylarks were there, they no longer sang.Some change in the seasons must account for their behaviour. Nowit was the turn of the butterflies and the meadow browns were inprofusion. As we went we examined a dozen possible sites trying todistinguish between shell and mortar blast, mindful of George andhis tractor, until at last, we satisfied all the requirements and stoodwhere the photographer had stood, or somewhere very near. In oursearch, my wife disturbed a lizard sunning itself, but nothing elsecame to light.

Where was the gouge the propeller had made, the one which madethe first contact with the ground so graphically described by GeorgeMudge? Where were the fragments the recovery teams had missedand the scrap dealer who came later and the more recent

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preservation buffs? We found the gully where the bombs could havelain. The ground would be boggy and soft in the wet. There was apatch where the sheep and cattle liked to congregate. The recoverymen had thought the aeroplane must be descending and mistakenthe height, and George thought so too. That opened up the whole360 degrees of the compass for his approach. The tufted scrubvegetation would soon cover over any scars, and the weather erodedthe tracks they had made. I concluded that we were somewhereclose, but not close enough and the one little stroke of luck weneeded was not forthcoming and we must give it best. We camedown off Stannon Hill by the way we came, for fear of the bull. Weate our picnic, too tired really to enjoy it, and packed up and ran forhome.

I telephoned Robin Hood again. He had his filing systems backunder control and we compared notes. There was nothingoutstanding. They had not located the burial places of the twomissing crew members. His information led him to the conclusionthat the wreckage caught fire. I could not support that, except forone engine. All the information we had said they were carryingbombs, which was very strange indeed. Contrary to my expectation,they had no written records from the crash teams, only therecollection of members. I told him about the photographs andpromised to send copies to back up their exhibit in Okehamptonmuseum. We agreed to keep in touch and meet sometime.

Mrs. Palmer wrote and enclosed two letters dating back to 1945.Whiteman and his wife, Gwendoline, had indeed written to Mrs.Fone and here was proof of it. It also went a long way to supportmy belief that the survivors made their own way down the hill toStandon Farm, where Mrs. Fone took them in. I could not see howit could be otherwise. The rescuers would be unable to locate themon the moors that night and common prudence dictated that theywait for daylight. The preservation society had evidence thatWhiteman was taken to station sick quarters at Harrowbeer,suffering from general bruising. Paul was admitted to TavistockGeneral Hospital because of bruising and shock, then transferred toan R.A.F. establishment at Torquay.

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Up in Newcastle, the British National Health and Social Securitypeople were on strike, but worse, they had no record of Whitemanand sent my letter back with a pre-printed form to say so. Withouthis national insurance number, they could not trace him. I wrote tothe Ministry of Defence to see if they had the magic number. Isuspected the DHSS of programming their computer to respondonly to the numbers, and anything else caused it to stall. Myexperience of them was not reassuring.

I ground to a complete halt. The mystery of the moors had medefeated. I could not, for the life of me, account for the crash.There was no logical reason why they should be flying acrossDartmoor in the dark below the safety height. There was no weatherproblem, except that the enquiry accepted the story of ‘returningdue to bad weather.’ There was no unserviceability, although oneengine carried evidence of fire, for if there was a problem, thesurvivors would have told the enquiry and they in turn, must surelyhave considered it and given it prominence in the findings. Therewas no valid reason for a training flight to carry bombs, fused orotherwise. Landing with bombs on board was not generallyaccepted as a healthy occupation, and besides, it might infringe thenormal maximum landing weight of the aeroplane, but no doubt207 Squadron did things their own way.

Worst of all, the casualties were not buried together, but split up,and two could not be found. One of them, Pankhurst, was buried atBuckland Monarchorum under Paterson’s serial number. As theClerk of the Parish Council pointed out, they died at 23:30 onSunday May 24th but, not only that, if the records were to bebelieved, their deaths were registered and they were buried that self-same day, which she thought was quite remarkable.

The Wellington crash investigation had fairly raced along as ifimpelled by some outside agency and, fanciful as it may seem, therehad been an aura of expectancy, then of homecoming and a sense ofrelease.

The Lancaster enquiry, on the other hand, had proceeded fitfully,rubbing strongly against the grain as if silently and secretly opposed,

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and unwilling to yield its secrets. No good will come of it, they said.Yet I had met nothing but kindness and great charm and I hadfallen for the lovely Devon countryside and its open moorlands but,more than that, the people had stolen my heart away. Out theresomewhere, Whiteman went quietly about his business, or if nothim, his wife, Gwendoline, who had taken up the correspondenceto comfort Mrs. Fone in her troubles when her husband died,compelling a move from her beloved Stannon Tor.

I would have to write to the Central Registry at Somerset House, orwhatever they called it now, and enquire of him there. But not yet. Ipreferred to think of him alive and that I should find him. OnlyWhiteman, and perhaps his wife Gwen, knew the answers, andtogether we could retrace it and set the ghosts at rest.

The R.A.F. Association magazine, Air Mail, came through the letterbox. I looked in vain for my appeal, trying to locate Whiteman.Tucked away in a corner was some cackhanded explanation fromthe editor to the effect that there were so many, they had to be heldover. I re-wrote the appeal. It might get into the next issue. I lookedthrough the magazine. There was very little of interest, but in twoplaces I detected a sour note, an instant resentment of any criticismof Bomber Command’s efforts during the war. “Oh dear,” Ithought, “what will they make of my remarks about theManchester? Are they ready for that yet?”

I wrote to the Ministry of Defence, but without any real hope. Theydidn’t reply. I wrote to the old R.A.F. Records Department atGloucester having found their new title. I rang my friend at theBomber Command Museum to ask if he could try his contact at theMinistry of Defence. He doubted if they would have recorded sucha thing, and seemed reluctant to ask.

Beauchamp wrote enclosing a further photograph of Paul and astudio picture of Whiteman taken when he was commissioned andwearing his new uniform. I had a copy made and returned theoriginal, along with a brief history of the aftermath of the crash. Myquest for Whiteman ground to a complete halt.

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The Plymouth firm of Undertakers wrote to me. They had a goodline in sympathetic and kindly letters. The other two gentlemen weretaken to Millbay railway station in Plymouth. The body of SergeantAndrew Piker Paterson was sent to Rugby, presumably to his homeand that of Leonard Smith to his people in Newent. One smallmystery had been cleared up for me. All the casualties wereaccounted for. The undertaker had also cleared up another matter.There appeared to be a muddle over service numbers and I hadconcluded that Pankhurst was buried at Buckland Monarchorumunder the service number belonging to Paterson. The change overhad occurred in the Cemetery Burial Book but all the other recordswere correct and, in fact, Pankhurst’s headstone bore the correctserial number, i.e. 1260384 and that, in the end, was all thatmattered.

In my letter to Beauchamp, I mentioned one or two slight odditiesabout the crew composition. They were one short. The normalLancaster crew was seven men. They were six. They were older thanthe average, three of them being in their thirties. This suggested acrew cobbled together for the occasion and not a group on apermanent footing. If Paul had been given his own crew, it wouldsurely be complete and unlikely to include Whiteman. Later on inthe war, co-pilots were replaced by flight engineers. It seemed to methat there was a slight problem over co-pilots. If, during mid tour,they were cleared as Captain pilots, where did their crews comefrom? The crews could hardly have progressed through the O.T.U.stage without a Captain. Very unsatisfactory. What seemed morelikely was that the unfortunate co-pilot completed his tour as part ofthe original crew but, to keep his hand in and make life easier allround, he was authorised to fly in command on some flights suchas, in this case, a night cross country.

Something else bugged me. Increasingly, in my telephoneconversations with Robin Hood of the voluntary research body, Igot the feeling that we were at cross purposes. Eventually, I declaredthat there must be two crash sites on Standon Hill. Just supposingthere were two crashes, one an operational flight, the other on atraining exercise. Everyone, myself included, would assume we were

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talking of the same event. People would not be able to rememberdates and thus identify and separate them. The two incidents wouldbecome inextricably muddled. My suspicions stirred something inRobin Hood’s mind. I told him of George Mudge who, like himself,had come forward in answer to my newspaper appeal. Next thing, Igot a letter from Robin. A small group had gone to Standon Hillwith George, to locate the site which George had cleared. They wereunable to find it. George could not remember the exact spot.Having looked for it twice myself, I was not surprised. Robin wasdisturbed to find that George had led them to a position close toLynch Tor just to the east of Standon Hill itself. His previousinformation and knowledge of the crash, where the group hadcollected parts of an aircraft, lay much further west towards Nat Torand Nat Tor Down. He went back to his records to try to resolve it.Mr. Palmer, the farmer from Creason, was adamant that GeorgeMudge had cleared the wreckage of another aeroplane altogether,certainly not the Lancaster.

I hated the idea of two crashes, but the conviction grew upon me.There must be two. It was the bombs that did it. They caused me tolook for other discrepancies. I could not resolve the question of fire,nor did I think it important until I had isolated the two incidents.The site that George had cleared, where he had led the researchgroup, and the snapshots looking back towards the round wood, putthe crash site too far from Standon Farm for my liking. All along,several things were near certainties, or bankers in betting parlance.

The date and time of the Lancaster crash was a matter of writtenrecord, so was the movement of the rescue team from R.A.F.Harrobeer. Locating the site and the survivors at night, onDartmoor, must have posed great difficulty as the Harrobeer recordbook confirmed. For the survivors to have come down off the hillby themselves, shocked and bruised as they were, required that theymust have crashed fairly near human habitation, near enough toreach it in the dark using only flash-lamps.

Whiteman’s letter to Mrs. Fone confirmed their presence at theFone homestead of Standon Farm. It also betokened a strong

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indebtedness, for their stay must have been very brief, mostprobably only overnight. With daylight, the rescuers and the Foneswould quickly have made contact. The fate of the survivors fromthen on was also documented by R.A.F. Harrobeer, Whiteman toStation sick quarters and then back to his squadron to complete histour of operations and Paul to hospital. I was less certain of the partplayed by the recovery teams. If two crashes occurred at differenttimes, and most probably differing aircraft types, it was more thanlikely I would get to hear of both, but without necessarily being ableto distinguish between them.

I made a start with Robin Hood. His team had previously located acrash site on Standon Hill. They had taken away pieces of thewreckage and were arranging with the museum at Okehampton toput the pieces on permanent display. Robin believed that this wasthe Lancaster of 207 Squadron. The location George Mudge hadtaken them to was altogether different. The wreck George hadcleared was the one young Ray Ellis had visited as a schoolboy,because he too saw the bombs. The mid upper gunner, said Ray,was crushed in his turret. That did not necessarily prove that theaircraft was a Lancaster, other aircraft had mid upper turrets.Neither man could, of course, be positive about the date, nor theyear, or even of the season.

If No. 67 Maintenance Unit and Mr. Mudge had cleared one site,who had cleared the other? I asked Robin to check his records.Although he could not be sure, and clearly his records were notaltogether satisfactory, they suggested that altogether three aircraftcrashed on the moors near Standon Hill. The third one close to theRiver Tavy could be discounted. The other two would have to begiven further study and research. In this the key factor was the dateof occurrence. All the official records were chronological. Iremembered that there were casualties from three separate incidentsburied at Buckland Monarchorum.

By this time I had completed a brief history of the flight and sent itoff to the Tavistock Times as promised. Rather hastily I telephonedto explain the doubt I now entertained. Hold publication, I said. We

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agreed on a modified version, leaving out the reference to bombs,maintenance units and George, leaving in only the verifiableaccount. Phew! Only just in time. The newspaper was about topublish the story, verbatim.

The Devon Aircraft, Research and Recovery Team, (DARRT forshort), went into action. A chartered aeroplane went off to searchand photograph Standon Hill from the air, looking for possiblescars. We began to plan another ground search. The snapshotswhich George had loaned me went off to Torquay so that theteam’s experts could attempt to reproduce and enlarge them. Iphoned George and I think he was enjoying himself and all the hoohaa. He didn’t know of any other aeroplane crashing, but if Mr.Palmer were determined on it, so it could be. I ascertained that theweather down there was still holding and the view just as fine.

Whether one aeroplane or two, it really made little difference. Theaftermath of the crash was of secondary interest, but very importantthat it be correct and verifiable lest an error or misinterpretation castdoubt upon the rest. Reluctantly, I was forced to accept the fact thatI might not be able to locate Whiteman and thus obtain verification.

I telephoned the Registrar at, what used to be called Somersethouse, where the national records of births and deaths are kept. Itturned out to be St. Catherine’s House in Kingsway. I explained theproblem of finding Whiteman on the assumption that he was stillalive, but what if he were dead? How could I ascertain that? I’m notsure they understood and I detected a note of thinly disguisedimpatience. The records were kept in year order. I would have toplug my way through every year for forty years. It was at least,alphabetical. They would undertake a search for me, covering a fiveyear period, for a charge of ten pounds, five into forty. Eightypounds. Add five for the certificate. It was an entirely negativeapproach but I could see that it might have to be done. If it yieldednothing, then the search could go on. Meantime, and sooner or laterI had to face it, with or without Whiteman, I had collected all theinformation I was likely to get and must now begin a reconstructionof the crash on the basis of the most probable circumstance. In my

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days as a navigator, working for my First Class Navigation ticket, Irecalled a procedure known as finding ‘the Most Probable Position,’an M.P.P. for short. That was what I had to plump for, as a positivefix lay outside my reckoning.

The starting point had to be the official finding, and the words,‘Due Inexperience!’ What precisely did the Squadron C.O. mean bythat? Sergeant Paul was, by the standards of the time, a fairlyexperienced pilot. He had at least twelve operations behind him,admittedly only three on Lancasters. By that yardstick, the wholesquadron was inexperienced on type. It was in mid March whenthey took delivery of the first Lancasters. When I came to examinethe records of the other crew members, I came upon a quitedifferent interpretation of inexperience. The radio officer,Whiteman, was an experienced crew member, about mid tour,although I had not totalled his operational flights.

The co-pilot, Sergeant Paterson, arrived on the squadron w.e.f. May17th. 1942, one week prior to the crash. The Canadian, Mellish,arrived with him. Both came from No. 16 O.T.U. at Upper Heyfordwhere they had completed their crew training on Wellingtons. Sothey had exactly one week to settle into their new unit andcommence their Lancaster training. No argument aboutinexperience there, that’s what I’d call inexperienced.

The observer, Sergeant Pankhurst, had fared slightly better, he hadarrived from the same O.T.U. on May 3rd. I was unable to traceSergeant Smith’s posting notice. It’s possible that his name wasomitted in error, or he may have been on the squadron for sometime. I could not be certain. What was certain from the postingdates, was that they were not a crew in the ordinary sense, trainedtogether as a team at their O.T.U. and arriving together, or within aday or two of each other. Only Paterson and Mellish were together.‘Cobbled together’ was the expression that came to mind and bestdescribed the crew. I could not account for the seventh missingmember. Whiteman, I knew, had shared the ‘exploit’ withBeauchamp on the 22/23rd May, only two nights before the fatalcrash, and so there seemed every probability that he had been

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pressed into service to make up the numbers. Altogether, I felt veryunhappy about the crew composition and wondered how, or why,the flight had been authorised. Hardly a propitious start.

I reconsidered the remark, ‘Returning base due weather’. Theweather chart for Sunday, May 24th. 1942, showed a frontal systemtransiting the country and, just a little over twenty four hours behindit, another system was approaching rapidly. At 07:00 GMT onMonday morning, the latter system had passed Plymouth. This mustbe the weather responsible for the return to base, encountered bythe Lancaster off the south west of England. The overrunning cloudahead of the front could well have been the cause of the aircraft’sdescent in an endeavour to stay below it. Closer to the front, as thecloud base continued to lower, the flight must need to descend everfurther to stay in the clear. During the enforced descent, thenavigator would be busy recalculating his airspeed and takingaccount of the changing winds, so as to keep his airplot going andhis dead reckoning up to date.

Eventually the flight plan was abandoned and the decision made toreturn. An unplanned change of course resulted. The navigator,having handed up a return heading, must now positively fix hisposition, if at all possible, to confirm or refine the course to steer. Itwould be quite incorrect to assume that they were ‘lost’ at this point,or even uncertain of their position. What is certain is that even anexperienced navigator would be busy at this stage and would needto have his priorities right. The pilot required a course to steerimmediately the decision was made to return to base, followed by anestimated time of arrival at the next turning point, or at base itself ifproceeding direct. One or other of them had to take the safetyheight into account. Once clear of the weather, there was no longerany reason why the flight should remain at a low level. At nearbyPlymouth, straddling the time of the crash, the weather reports weregood, yet the flight continued at low level towards the high ground.

Here, then, the lack of experience, or indecision, or lack ofknowledge of the nature of the terrain came into play. Theinexperienced crew, cobbled together, unused to each other and

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lacking in team work, make their fatal mistake. The navigator washead down at his charts, very busy, and in a way, probably resistantto the idea of an immediate climb which would add to hisnavigational work load. The wireless operator bashing his morse keywas getting off a signal to base, passing the revised ETA which thenavigator had given him.

With the last of the light fading from the sky, the pilots were now infull instrument conditions. Paterson, perhaps slightly bemused by itall, would be involved in engine power settings and fuel flows. Paulis preoccupied by his decision to return and, mentally, casting aheadto their arrival. Suddenly, without warning, the starboard outerpropeller makes contact with the ground digging a corkscrew gougethrough the turf. The aeroplane slews and lurches violently to theright, at one instant in level flight and making two hundred miles anhour, the next striking the ground and careering violently along theridge. Within seconds it is all over in a fearful deceleration, theaeroplane stationary and broken in two, the front sectionoverturned, the engines torn loose and separated. The two crewmembers on the port side, miraculously spared the worst of theimpact, are alive and outside the aeroplane on the moorland, oneseated beside the fuselage, the other wandering nearby. Within thetorn wreckage, the rest of the crew are dead. Dazed and broken, thesurvivors eventually pull themselves together. Whiteman, badlyknocked about but relatively whole, is the first to concentrate ontheir plight and take action.

At this point, my ‘Most Probable’ theory outruns its limitations. Didthe farmer, Mr. Fone and his wife, alerted by the noise of anaeroplane overhead, climb from their bed and set off up the hill tofind them, or did the survivors make their own way to safety? Onceagain, one man, one man alone if he be still alive, can give theanswer.

I ran an advert in the Personal Column of the Daily Telegraph. Itsaid, ’T.A.Whiteman, ex-WOP/AG, 207 Squadron, or wifeGwendoline, contact writer/researcher, C.J. Gray.’ I gave mytelephone number. It cost £5 a line and took up four lines. They

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made one error in the type setting and inserted it bang in the middleof the ‘Thanks to St. Jude’ lot.

I planned a follow up, ‘Anyone knowing the whereabouts of T.A.Whiteman, etc.’ All my previous enquiries had gone unanswered ordrawn a blank. A letter to his last known address came back marked,‘not known’ and, curiously, someone had added, ‘Gone to Devon.’

The advert appeared on a Friday and we stayed home throughoutthe weekend waiting for a call. As things would have it, we gotseveral unexpected calls. Ditmas ‘phoned on his way home toBritish Columbia. After he rang off, I realised I didn’t have his newaddress. I hadn’t heard from Gutteridge since 1941 but he ‘phonedthat weekend and I learnt that he took part in Sir Vivian Fuchs’sAntarctic Expedition back in the fifties. By Sunday evening, I’dgiven up. My wife took the call. It was Gwendoline Whiteman.

Tom Whiteman died on December 29th, 1979. He went peacefullyand easily at home, as we would all wish to go. The line was noisyand barely audable. I had to be sure I got the exchange and ‘phonenumber right before asking Gwendoline to ring off so that I couldcall her back. The line was still lousy but her voice was strong andclear. This is the story as Gwendoline told it to me.

At the time of the accident she was in hospital giving birth to hersecond child, Dawn Beauchamp Whiteman. She left her first born inthe care of a neighbour and took herself off to Retford. SquadronLeader Beauchamp came, to bring her the news. He didn’t knowhow bad it was, but Tom was believed to be all right, not badlyinjured, and safe. Tommy Paul was thought to be alive and theothers were killed. She made haste to return to their lodgings toawait Tom’s homecoming. At first he told her very little butgradually, over the years, he told her in dribs and drabs, and it goton his mind somehow and changed him, and he felt he had to goback to Devon and the scene of the crash.

It was a ‘sprog’ crew, at least the pilot and navigator were sprogs,and they got lost and came down to see where they were. Tomshould never have gone on that trip, he only went to make up thenumbers. The rear gunner had completed his tour of operations,

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maybe two tours of operations and he shouldn’t have been there.She thought perhaps he was a Canadian. Tom had saved his crewbefore. Once on a mine laying trip, the navigator made an error butTom got them bearings from a station in the south of England andbrought them home. She only knew about it because his fingerswere raw from extending the trailing aerial and bashing on his morsekey. But this time he could do nothing. They crashed into the HighTor.When Tom came to, part of the aeroplane had fallen into a sortof valley and was burning fiercely. A Home Guard with a pitchforkappeared on the scene and Tom was arrested and taken off to jail.They let him go the next day and he made his way home, wearinghis flying boots and whatever else he stood up in. In London, theS.Ps picked him up for being improperly dressed. Beauchamp usedto say Tom was a terrible line shooter, perhaps the biggest lineshooter in the R.A.F., but my Tom always said Beauchamp was thefinest pilot in the Air Force and that was no line shoot.

They had a hard time after the war, getting settled, what with threechildren, no house and no job, but they made it and Tom wasalways good to them. He got a job in Coventry, that was before themotor industry collapsed and, eventually, when they could afford it,he bought a car and the very first thing he wanted to do was to goback to Devon and find the place they called the High Tor. They setoff for Devon and stayed in some terrible pub, well you know Tom,but they found the crash site and the wreckage was still there. Theweather was awful with low cloud and drizzle and poor visibility,just as it had been on the night of the crash. It was a dreadful place.The old lady was still alive, but the farmer had died. I ventured thename, Mrs. Fone. Yes, that was it, Mrs. Fone. The farmer was herhusband, presumably he was the Home Guard who came on Tomsitting by the burning aircraft but she wasn’t sure. They were goingback the next day but the car broke down. They spent the rest oftheir time getting it repaired and had to set off home directly. Itexorcised something for he didn’t talk of it again and didn’t everwant to go back. He got it out of his system, whatever it was.

I made sure I had the gist of it and some directions and arranged todrive up to Cheshire the next weekend. There were papers and

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photographs she had kept. Yes, he got his mention in dispatches,and the navigator also, and Beauchamp got a bar to his D.F.C. Sheremembered Tommy Paul. He was a big husky fellow with a streakof wildness in him. She remembered him specially because, the firsttime they met, he picked her up straight off the ground and twirledher round and round, and laughed and set her down again. No onehad ever done that and she always remembered him because of it.Did she know that he had been killed later in the war? Yes, sheheard that he had been shot down by a night fighter and been killed.

“I’m worried,” I said, “in case my enquiries should cause you painor distress, going back over these events again.” “Oh no, quite thereverse.” I was reassured. I went out to check the tyres and dip theoil. What Gwendoline had told me complicated the issueimmeasurably. Now I had the last available pieces of the jigsawpuzzle in my hand. No one now remained of the original crew tocontribute anything further. If, indeed, there was a mystery as towhy they came together for just one fateful flight, and why exactly,they made that last descent into the darkness would remain forevera secret, shrouded in the mist of time, and hidden in the wild hightors of Dartmoor.

Gwendoline Whiteman awaited our arrival with her daughter,Heather, who had come to see fair play. They made us mostwelcome and, straightway, we got down to cases. She producedTom’s flying log book and a family scrapbook which his mother hadkept.

On the Tuesday, May 26th, two days after the crash, he wrote to hismother in Coventry to tell her all about it. This is what he wrote:

“Just a short note to let you know I’m O.K. On Sunday night, Sergeant Paul,a new second pilot, two new navigators, a new mid upper gunner and myself,went on a Cross Country. Near the Isle of Man we met some bad weather, soPaul turned for home. We crossed Exmouth and flew over towards Camp. At22.45, we hit a high Tor on Dartmoor. None of us knew anything about it. Ican remember a tremendous crash, thousands of sparks and a burst of flame.My head hit the wireless and that’s all I remember. Next thing I can rememberwas lying face down in the bog about 15 yards from the kite. The plane was

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blazing furiously and I couldn’t get near it for the heat. It was 23:05 so I musthave lain in the wet for about 20 minutes. The plane was in four parts and hadbroken in half just behind the wireless, so I must have been thrown clear. ThreeHome Guards turned up and took me down to a farmhouse about two milesaway. I couldn’t see out of my right eye and was scared stiff I was blind in it.However, it was only dried blood from a cut over my eye. They gave me cleanclothes and a hot meal and bath. The woman there sewed up a big tear in mytrousers and dried my clothes in front of the fire. They had a phone and Iinformed Bottesford. When the fires had died down a bit they found Paul nearthe aircraft, with a damaged back. The Medical Officer from the aerodromearrived at five o’clock and rushed him to hospital at Plymouth (6 miles away.)”

“I am now in a nursing home near Harrobeer Aerodrome under treatment forshock and bruises. I’m feeling O.K. now and I hope to get back to Bottesfordtoday. The other four however, perished in the fires. They are looking after mewell here and the S/Ldr. M.O. is very kind and so are the W.A.A.F.nurses.”

Tom then went on to tell his mother of the episode two days earlierin the Baltic when they struck the sea and limped home on twoengines. Gwendoline read the letter aloud, refreshing her ownmemory of events while we listened intently. Next, she read the AirMarshal’s Routine Order commending the skilful airmanship andperseverance of the crew members involved in the Baltic minelaying. Somehow, in her mind, Gwendoline had these two incidentswidely separated and it was only now that she realised they laywithin two days of each other. There was much else besides in themother’s scrap book, leaflets saved from the bundles they haddropped, copies of orders and crew lists filched from the noticeboard, the ‘Mayflys’ of his time on 207 Squadron.

I then took up the story starting with the Wellington crash that hadled me back to the Lancaster and Dartmoor. Gwendoline read againthe forgotten letters she herself had written to Mrs. Fone. Step bystep, we traced the reconstruction through the photocopies fromofficial record books and all the photographs and documents mywife and I had so painstakingly assembled. I gave her copies of thephotographs of the crash site and of George Mudge, the farmer

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who cleared the wreckage because, as she said, “Such a goodlooking man!” In return, she gave me the precious flying log bookand letters to copy and a tattered photograph of Beauchamp and hiscrew.

Her house, perched high on the side of an escarpment, overlookedthe town and away beyond to the Mersey where sea and sky blendedtogether. The shifting weather patterns and the fitful winter sunlightwent unnoticed as time stood still for all four of us. We came atlength, full cycle to the Wellington and Tommy Paul, and thestained glass window that bore his name.

“How strange,” said Heather, “as a child I always thought hecommitted suicide.” We looked at her. Speaking very quietly, mywife asked her why.

“Dad must have told me. Dad said he killed himself.” Gwendolineintervened. “Tom heard that Tommy Paul died in a crash. I don’tknow how or where he found out but he went and made enquiries.Thereafter, he declared that Tommy Paul killed himself. He flewthat aeroplane into the ground.”

We sat in silence looking at one another, aware that something hadhappened that changed things and could not be unsaid. At length Ispoke up. “You will not be surprised to know that, after all theseyears, I have been forced to the same conclusion. What did it for mewas the remark by his Commanding Officer, “Previous accidentmay have unnerved him.” Only then could I understand why theWellington crashed.

“What happens now?,” said Gwen, “what will you do next?” Ioutlined what remained to be done. Along with the DevonPreservation Society, I hoped to find the Lancaster site andpositively identify it. The actual cause of the crash must foreverremain shrouded in mystery. Of the three possibilities I had in mind,all I could do was to outline each case and bring an open verdict,suspending judgement. When she first met young Sergeant Paul,when he had lifted her up and twirled her round, he said somethingshe could not forget, that stood between them and she had to set itaside

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“I nearly made a widow of you then, didn’t I?”, he cried. Sherepeated his remark, a remark that had seared itself upon hermemory.

After a little while, I told them of Clive Estcourt, the New Zealandbomb-aimer, who opened the Wellington hatch and parachuted tosafety. “He will tell me about Paul and what happened,” I said, “andwhether we are right. He has kept his secret now for forty years andmay prefer to take it with him to the grave. But if the gods are withme, when he hears the full story, he will realise that it was nodisgrace and no fault lies with Paul and this will be the lastopportunity to tell the truth, the last chance to set the recordstraight. And then,” I said, “if I can, I will put it on paper for I thinkit is a story worth telling, a tragic story to stand alongside other greathuman tragedies, although it does not concern the rich or thefamous, but belongs to the common, ordinary people, whosometimes do uncommon and quite extraordinary things.

The visit to Cheshire forced me to look again and revise myconclusions. Whiteman’s letter to his mother, and his logbook entry,gave the time of occurrence one hour earlier than previouslysupposed. The Royal Greenwich Observatory calculated the time ofsunset at 22.09 and the end of civil twilight at 22.51. Whiteman gavethe time of occurrence variously at 22.31 and 22.45, both within theperiod of Civil twilight. This was borne out by the official recordcard held at the Ministry of Defence, where NIGHT was crossedout and something, perhaps DUSK, was substituted.

From the very start, it seemed most likely that the Lancaster crashedin daylight. Indeed, the whole investigation hinged upon it. DuringCivil twilight, by definition, it is possible to work without artificiallight, and the sea horizon can be clearly seen.

There are a limited number of ways in which an aeroplane can bebrought to grief and, thereby, strike the ground. All along thedifficulty had been the question of time. If the official time wascorrect, then the crash happened at night and none of the possibleexplanations could be accepted if darkness prevailed.

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The official enquiry plumped for ‘inexperience, flying below cloudinstead of above or around it.’ That explanation only made sense ifit was daylight. It implied a choice. The inexperienced pilot will,generally, choose to fly below cloud in order to see where he is but,if it is dark, this course avails him little.

It also raised another difficulty. We are told the weather is bad. Allthe accounts say so. ‘Returning to base due bad weather’, is theentry in both the Squadron and the Station record books. This isrepeated on the official crash records held by the Ministry ofDefence and the Bomber Command Museum. Whiteman writes, tohis mother from the nursing home and mentions returning to Campdue to bad weather. The problem, of course, is that the Air Ministryweather charts and station reports for Sunday, 24th. May, simply donot bear them out. I was forced to conclude that the bad weatherwas brought in as a whipping boy and never seriously questioned.

Next to the official explanation, the second most favoured was thatsuggested by Squadron Leader Beauchamp and GwendolineWhiteman. They were a ‘sprog’ crew, two new navigators and onenew co-pilot and they got lost and descended to see where theywere. That too, demanded daylight, for how could they see wherethey were in the dark, especially if flying below cloud? But thisexplanation did not rely too much on bad weather, only on daylightand so, was a little more credible. If, as I believed from the Met.Office Charts, the weather was quite good, no more than partlycloudy, then descending below cloud to see where they were, didn’tmake too much sense.

George Mudge, the farmer, and the men who cleared the wreckageaway, believed the aeroplane was descending and flew into theground in cloud and darkness. I could find no compelling reason tobelieve this although it was better than the others. But, if theweather was good, as I believed, and it was daylight, the argumentdidn’t stand up to examination.

My interpretation was that they had decided to stay below cloud, theoverrunning cloud layers of the approaching frontal system whichthey could have encountered if their route had taken them west.

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Whiteman’s letter and logbook did nothing to support my “mostprobable’ theory. Indeed, his mention of the Isle of Man and, in thenext line, the town of Exmouth and a return to Camp, presumablymeaning base, blew everything wide apart. Even supposing he gothis islands muddled and really meant the Isles of Scilly, I wasdefeated by his subsequent logbook entry giving the time ofdeparture as 18.00 and a flight duration of 4 hours and 25 minutes.It simply didn’t add up. In his logbook he pencils in an entry of fivekilled, subsequently inking in six killed, presumably when he hearsof Paul’s death. It seems that the flight went off with one crewmember short, the rear gunner didn’t show. Either that, or there’s abody lying undiscovered out there on the moors!

I tried to rearrange the pieces of the puzzle. Substitute Isles of Scillyfor the Isle of Man. That, at least, puts us in the right part of thecountry. Then juggle with the time of departure. We can safelyassume he makes up his logbook each month, in time for themonthly summary. The flight details would normally be kept byBarnes, the navigator, but for this crashed flight, he has to obtainthem as best he can from the orderly room or the watch office. It ispossible now that our old friend, G.M.T. comes back in and thetime of departure should read 20.00 local time, two hours later. Thatgives approximately 2½ hours out of base before the crash. TheLancaster is covering around 200 miles for every hour of flight and,constructing a four and a half hour cross country route is stretchingthe wartime limits of U.K. airspace, never mind one which ends upmore than an hours flying time from base on top of that. Adeparture at 20.00, proceeding via the Isle of Man, then perhaps viaLand’s End to a further point on the south coast, or even directlyback to base, would just about fit and bring us to Dartmoor in anelapsed time of two and a half hours. Too many suppositions havecrept in and the line has to be abandoned. Tom’s letter to hismother, whilst clearing up several hitherto confused orcontradictory points, regrettably takes us no further towards anunderstanding of the basic cause of the crash.

One possibility which may have pre-occupied the A.O.C. and givenrise to his cryptic ‘no disciplinary action’, must be mentioned. As a

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Squadron they were a versatile bunch, not altogether committed tothe main force role of attacking the German heartland, but involvedin minelaying and other low level activities. During May, Whitemanis engaged in extensive practise flying, formation low level stuff andthe minelaying episode where they struck the sea, immediatelybefore the fatal flight. Is it possible they were indulging in a spot ofunauthorised low flying in both good weather and daylight? There,but for the grace of God.

The episode when they struck the sea evading enemy attack came tothe attention of Air Marshal A.T. Harris himself. He issued an orderdrawing attention to Notable War Services. Squadron LeaderBeauchamp, his Navigator, Sergeant Barnes and Wireless OperatorSergeant Whiteman, are singled out for particular mention. It readslike a citation. The Squadron C.O. could hardly fail to react to sodirect a pointer.

Gwendoline Whiteman said the S/Leader received a bar to hisD.F.C. The others waited in vain. By the time the C.O’s attentionhad been drawn to the Air Marshal’s comments, Whiteman wasalready in his sights, but this time in connection with the loss of anaircraft, not in saving one and, possibly tarred by association. Nodisciplinary action indeed. No Distinguished Flying Medals either.Alas, poor Barnes. If Whiteman couldn’t have one, neither could he.

Gwendoline told me that her husband became very protectivetowards Sgt. Paul. That these two were drawn together was onlynatural, but she wondered about it. But then, years afterwards, whenthey had visited Devon, her husband’s preoccupation with the crashlessened and was forgotten. He had been active for a time in ex-service organisations, but then put them behind him. He nevercollected whatever it was, the mention in dispatches perhaps, andgave his campaign medals away. Heather corrected her. He gavethem to the children as playthings, for she remembered playing withthem.

I read through Whiteman’s logbook again. He led a charmed life.Even at O.T.U. on the old Hampdens, doors had come adrift andengines caught fire. Once, by mistake, fortunately using only

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practise smoke bombs, they had bombed Oxford railway station. Inthe remarks column he noted, ‘Good Results’. On the Manchestersand then Lancasters, he cheerfully noted engine fires and failures,attacks by Spitfires and ME 109s alike, and then various arrivals,belly landings, crashed in farmyard, overshot the runway into field,hit sea, crash landed base and crashed High Tor, Dartmoor. Someline shooter! For a moment I entertained the thought that I ought tocheck Tom's story with the Oxford Mail. If someone had bombedOxford railway station I felt it must have made their front page, butI decided against it.

I felt sorry I had not been in time. Not just to hear how they hadcome to grief, although that too. But just to have met him, I’d haveliked that. Gwen's parting words rang my ears. “Tom would haveenjoyed it.”

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Chapter Four

hen we left Gwendoline Whiteman’s house in Helsby Ilooked out specially for the barely visible silver line thatmarked the route of the old Manchester ship canal. There

in the heyday of Britain’s industrial might, ocean going liners couldbe seen ploughing their way through the meadows, sailingmajestically across open fields, apparently without benefit of water.

WThe late afternoon sun picked out the waterway and, away in thehaze towards Liverpool where once the bustle and clamour of agreat seaport could be imagined, all was quiet and still. No shipssailed the canal. No hustle and bustle engulfed the port. Decline anddecay lay all around, not visible, but present and palpable all thesame, felt rather than seen.

I was aware of a change in our affairs, an ending to an era ofindustrial strength, of European wars and mighty endeavours.Britain stood at the threshold of some great sea change but what, Icould not detect nor imagine. The sense of purpose and therightness of things that had attended us was gone and a morehedonistic age had arrived. The wartime generation, the TomWhiteman’s, were leaving the stage and soon, we should all be gonetaking with us forever our small knowledge of great events, ourindividual recollections forgotten, vanished into the blue haze of thedistant horizon, as if it had never been.

A rare sense of history had, briefly touched us that afternoon. Fromthe scrap books kept by Tom Whiteman’s mother and our searchingfor the truth that lay behind the Lancaster crash, we had beenfleetingly aware of the powerful current that sweeps the human raceforward and carries us onward and then away, to be seen no more.

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The year was now on the turn and I knew it was too late to find thescraps of wreckage that remained on the moors before the onset ofwinter. We promised ourselves a visit together with the coming ofspring and the better weather. I began to plan for Robin, of thepreservation society, and George Mudge, the farmer, forGwendoline and ourselves, to search Standon Hill again and findwhatever remained. Not that there was anything the mute fragmentsof metal could tell us. No power on earth could tell us anythingfurther. Standon Hill must keep its secrets beyond the reach of myenquiries, the reasons why buried forever in the bare hillside.

But, with the darling buds of May, I knew that Gwendoline wouldwant to revisit Dartmoor and that I should not be able to resist untilI had some tangible evidence of the Lancaster’s existence in myhand and the others would want to come, each for his or her ownreasons. Together we planned to set a date.

Things were altogether different in the case of the Wellington.There, on the far side of the world, the sole survivor from twoaircraft crashes would be able to tell me, precisely, what had befallenhim and confirm or deny my theories as to what bad happened onthat winter’s morning of the 4th. of January, 1944. Unbeknown tomyself even, I had begun to set great store on the evidence of theex-bomb-aimer, the New Zealander whom I knew only by the nameof Clive Estcourt.

In preparation for my visit to Hamilton, I began to review what Ishould say and how best to explain my interest. I went to the shedand located the fragments of the aeroplane I had collected inBrockhurst Wood, particularly the first piece my wife had found.Before I could take it to New Zealand, I had to remove any tracesof soil, because of the strict quarantine they observe concerning allmatters of imported vegetation or anything that has been on a farmor in the soil. I recalled how we had searched the woods in vain,until, I think, on our third attempt, my wife had found the crashsite. She came upon a place where the young trees grew, crowdedtogether, saplings competing with each other for the available spacein the broken canopy of the beech trees. A massive groove in the

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earth caught her attention. The line of spoil that marked some oldforgotten boundary was scarred by it. She stood quite still andaddressed an imaginary crew. “Come on fellas, you have to help usnow!” She looked down and there, under her foot, lay a piece oftorn metal. She picked it up and called to me. “Is this what you’relooking for?” It was exactly what I was looking for. It was only thenwe saw we were surrounded by fragments of metal, all that remainedof the Wellington, Z for Zebra.

I don’t know why, but the idea of a ghostly crew standing around,willing us on to find what was lying under our feet, persisted in mymind. It came back to me as I polished the torn fragment ofaluminium. What genie trapped inside its bottle might not nowrespond?

I had written my account of the Wellington and my explanation ofwhy it crashed and sent it off to the Editor of a magazine. A coupleof months went by and I heard nothing. The chap had acceptedarticles from me before and I had come to value his opinion and Iwas disappointed not to hear from him.

Eventually, I telephoned to enquire of him and the manuscript I hadsent. “You haven’t heard then?” said the girl. Heard, I had heardnothing, what hadn’t I heard? “Mike was killed in an air-crash, justrecently,” she told me. “The old Varsity from that preservationsociety in the Midlands, be was on board that when it went down.They were all killed”.

Somewhat stunned, I expressed my regret. I wondered if she couldtry and locate my manuscript and she promised she would. I heardno more and presumed it had not been found. I did not expect it tobe found. The unhappy conviction grew upon me that he had takenit with him.

I stopped polishing the metal fragment and packed it away. The verynext day, I heard from my researcher in New Zealand. Lynette was adistant relative, (no pun intended.) Because she lived in the city ofWellington, my daughter-in-law, Mary, had recruited her to try andfind any surviving relatives of Tommy Paul. Lynette wrote to Maryfrom the ferry boat, for once making a calm passage out through the

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heads of that notoriously stormy place. She had made a start bywriting to all the Paul's listed in the telephone directory, seeking aconnection.

Her letter was postmarked two weeks before and this is what shewrote to Mary:

‘The circular letter has netted two good leads, one in Wellington, the other inDunedin. I have written to both. The Wellington lady, Mrs. L.A. Paul is norelative of the Paul family we are tracing but she has a friend who knew anotherMrs. Paul who lived in Normandale and lost four sons in the last war. I had asick feeling of recognition when I opened her letter and a nasty dread that thetrail would be dead as there were no surviving relatives mentioned All is not lostthough, as one of the four brothers could have been married and, provided we canget his name and his wife's maiden name, we may be able to find someone yet.”

She went on to details of the Dunedin contact, but I could neitherread it nor understand it. I was overwhelmed by the sense of dreadand recognition which had assailed her. Once again, the goosebumps rose. My skin crawled. The thought of that poor motherwho had lost all four sons hit me as a hammer blow. How could shebear it? How are such tragedies to be borne? What quality is therewithin the human breast that can be summoned to support suchstark and fearful tragedy? I put the letter down unseeing.

Two months were to elapse before I re-read her letter and came torealise that I had missed something of importance. I decided to donothing further to clean the piece of wreckage. New Zealand wouldhave to take its chance. I mentioned, however, the coincidences, callthem what you will, associated with it to several people. My friend,Greg, who owned the picture gallery in the village, laughed at sofanciful a story. The picture framer, Nick, on the other hand, laiddown his tools and confronted me direct. “Are you taking that pieceof metal with you to New Zealand?” he asked. “Are you proposingto carry it on the aeroplane?” He seized my arm. “On no accounttake it with you. You must leave it behind!” Greg and I laughed andteased him. “You can’t be serious.”

“Never more so,” he said. “Suppose you were to ask the otherpassengers what they thought, what do you think they would say?

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Get that out of here, get that thing off the aeroplane. That’s whatthey’d say.”

“I wish you hadn’t mentioned that“ my wife said. I scoffed at thenotion but, somewhere at the back of my mind there arose somehalf remembered tale of a monkey’s paw and I took the piece ofmetal my wife had found back out to the shed, and substitutedanother fragment to take with me upon the journey to present toClive Estcourt. In such matters you canna’ be too careful.

There was no difficulty when the time came, in locating Estcourt’splace in Hamilton. The day started foggy, shrouding the fertileWaikato plains and we drove cautiously at first until the sun burntthrough the stratus and, at once, transformed the morning. Cliveand his English wife were awaiting our arrival. I could see hislogbook and photograph albums laid ready and without further ado,we were seated and listening.

Gradually we were transported from high summer in New Zealandto the depths of a U.K. winter, to a wartime airfield in Oxfordshireand a crowded Nissen hut. Low cloud had persisted throughout theevening into the night, hampering the flying programme. The crewwaited for either the conditions to clear or a decision to scrub,Estcourt was asleep in his chair when, sometime close to midnight,the instructor came in and rousted them out. To the bomb-aimer'ssurprise, the weather outside was now clear as a bell and heremembered clambering aboard through the nose hatchway to hisposition and very shortly, they were airborne, he rememberedstowing his parachute pack in one of the two bins provided, andconfessed he didn’t always do that but generally slung it somewhereand got on with other things.

The bombing range lay just to the north of the satellite field ofOakley, itself not far from their main base at Westcott. They musthave climbed overhead the field, for the old Wellington would,almost certainly have its engines de-rated for training use andperformance was not its strong suit in any case. Estcourt was notcertain what height they went to, but he thought it to be eight ornine thousand feet. He was a difficult man to interrupt, or to

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question, preferring to tell his tale in his own way and not to bedistracted by interventions. I let him run.

They were flying a clover leaf pattern, no, not a clover leaf, more afigure of eight. This took them overhead the airfield prior to eachbombing run and the detail was going well. He felt they were gettinggood results and a nice grouping of the practice bombs, when theweather began to deteriorate.

On their final run in, the bombing range disappeared, obscured bycloud. They continued for some little time afterwards, hoping to getthe last bomb away. The pilot was ‘nervy’, he said, the screen pilotthat was. His pilot, young Coulter, was flying the aeroplane quitecalmly, with Paul directing him and in charge. At length, they wereforced to abandon the detail and started to descend, circling theirbase. Estcourt expected to break through the cloud at any momentand find the aerodrome beneath them and see the DREM lights andgo straight in to land.

The instructor, Paul, previously described as nervy and edgy, nowbecame panicky and kept fretting about an engine fire. There was aglow, certainly, as of landing lights reflecting in cloud, but no sign offire, and both engines seemed all right. At this point, with theinstructor panicking about fire, they hit a bump, a heavy isolatedbump. The bomb-aimer thought they had hit something, perhaps abarrage balloon or its cable, but afterwards concluded it was nomore than turbulence.

Over the intercom, Paul gave the order to bale out. Estcourt at onceremoved his helmet and, from that moment, was cut off from therest of the crew. He experienced an instant of sheer panic. He couldnot remember how to get out. The idea that somehow he mustsmash the glass panels flashed through his mind. Then heremembered the hatch and how to use it. Only weeks before, theyhad gone through the drills for opening the hatch. On the ground itopened easily, being hinged on the left and operated by its releaselever. They had been warned that, in the air, because of theslipstream, it could be difficult, but now, he was quite calm. Heremoved the parachute pack from its stowage and clipped it on. He

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pulled the lever to release the hatch. Nothing happened. Heremembered the duck boards alongside and lifted them to gainaccess to the catch and the hatch opened. He eased himself out feetfirst. For a moment, he hung there, his chest and parachute packcaught on the lip of the opening before he pushed himself clear.

His next recollection was of floating free and a feeling ofexhilaration. He had made it!The handle of the ripcord wasin his hand, the parachute hadopened and he was safe. Thefirst niggling worry began.Suspended in the dark overunknown country he realisedthat, in his haste, only one cliphad operated. The ‘chute washeld to the harness by a singlepoint.

Then he noticed the aeroplaneflying directly towards him, itslanding lights full on. Surelythey must see him and turnaway. It must be possible tosee the white silk canopy inthe landing l ights . Theaeroplane passed above himand he watched its progressuntil, suddenly, the noise ofthe engines stopped and itpitched down steeply at about45 degrees. “Ah, good,” he

thought, “they’ve all got out. They are following some approvedprocedure. They have managed to cut off the fuel and cause a pitchdownwards and are avoiding the risk of the aeroplane flyingonwards by itself.” That was the correct drill he imagined. He lostsight of it.

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Illustration 11: Sgt Clive Estcourt 1945

He landed abruptly and rather painfully in a tree. The ‘chute caughtin the branches, leaving him hanging some distance from theground and he could not figure out how to get down. Perhapsfoolishly, he undid his harness and fell heavily. Apart from grazinghis left side, he was unhurt. There was a road nearby runningthrough the wood. Eeny, meeny, miny, mo! He turned left andfollowed it. From a bend in the road he could see a house amongstthe trees and went to the front and approached the door. He learntsubsequently, that the road was called Templewood Lane and thehouse was Huntsmoor. Mr. Thomas came to the upstairs windowoverlooking the doorway and demanded to know what he wasabout. It was not true about the shotgun but, nevertheless, hisreception was hostile. On the previous evening a terrible personaltragedy had occurred at Huntsmoor when the Thomas’s daughterdied in childbirth. Unbeknown to Estcourt, it was to a house ofsorrow that he came seeking help. If his welcome was less thanenthusiastic, it was hardly surprising. Mr. Thomas wrote later,apologising and explaining his behaviour that night and the familybefriended the New Zealander, inviting him back to the village andintroducing him to their friends and entertaining him in the Victoriapublic house.

Sometime later that night, Estcourt was taken to Slough Hospitaland it was next day before they told him about the others. He wasshocked to hear it for he was sure, in his own mind, they hadescaped, that they had followed him out.

After a day or two, he was discharged to make his own way back tocamp. In the Sergeants’ Mess he was greeted with some surprise anddisbelief, they thought he was a ghost returned. The authoritiesquestioned him closely. When that was over, the C.O. advised himto forget all about it and put the whole matter behind him. He wasallocated to another crew. He hardly knew the chaps who werekilled. They had been together only briefly on the flying details,proceeding separately through the classroom instruction and he hadfriends outside in a pub in Aylesbury.

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The C.O. forbade him the funeral. They would send an officialrepresentative. There was nothing there, the coffins would beweighted, for there was nothing left of them to bury. He was takenon another flight, presumably to see if he was all right andquestioned further about a possible barrage balloon, but nothingwas found, no reports came in about that, and he had time offbefore his new crew caught up, and life went on.

He embarked then upon a detailed description of his tour ofoperations and subsequent career. It was interesting enough and, atsome point towards the end of the war, we had all come together atan operational training unit at a place called Silverstone, and I feltsure I knew his pilot, Aussie Layton, hut it was not what I had comeabout and I sought to head him off and return to the question ofthe Wellington.

In this I failed entirely. Clive was not to be diverted. It was sometime before I was able to return to the night of January 4th, and theWellington crash. The question of the date was a bit of a puzzler.His logbook recorded January the second and he was prepared toadmit to it being incorrect by one day, technically the morning ofthe third. I tried to explain the slip up and how it had occurred. Heremembered quite clearly, that they were given a day off on NewYear’s Day. The station was closed down and he recalled what hedid that day and why he remembered it.

I left him with copies of the Station Record book entries for thefirst five days of January and the key to unlock the puzzle and triedto home in on the actual flight, and the reason why the crashoccurred. Curiously, he had never at any time, attempted to askhimself the question, ‘Why?’. The C.O. had advised him to put thematter behind him and forget it, and that’s what he did. He admittedthat the aeroplane was functioning perfectly and, apart from thebombing range becoming obscured by cloud, there was no weatherproblem. They had plenty of fuel, indeed, they had 900 gallons, herecalled. It didn’t seem right to me, but I let it go and checked thePilot’s Notes later. As I had thought, the total fuel capacity was only750 gallons, so the figure of 900 was very suspect. The fuel system

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on the old Wellington was something that gave the trainee crewsgrave problems, particularly the engine nacelle tanks which wereintended as the last reserve, to be turned on when the main wingtanks were emptied. It was only too easy to mistake the ill designedON/OFF fuel cocks. If they were mistaken, and the nacelle tankswere inadvertently turned on at the start of the flight, being higherthan the others gravity ensured they were the first to drain. Thereserve fuel would thus be consumed first and, if the flight wereunduly prolonged, when the crew came to turn the reserve fuel on,apart from the fact that they were now turning the cocks to OFF,and not ON as they thought, the tanks were already empty, andcomplete silence would then ensue as both engines ran down andstopped. But no, Clive dismissed any thought of fuel shortage, orfuel system mismanagement. I attempted to close the gap betweentheir known position circling over their base and the crash in thecounty of Buckinghamshire, just north of Slough. How had theymanaged that? Had they diverted or were they diverting to anotherairfield? No, they were circling; over their base throughout. Theyhad not allowed for drift, he thought. As gently as I could, I tried topoint out that this presupposed rather a strong wind aloft, whichwas unlikely in the known meteorological condition. Drift on thebombing runs must have been his prime concern and, as bomb-aimer, he most of all, would have been aware of it. As it turned out,he claimed to be quite knowledgeable on navigation and Idiscovered that he had started his training as a pilot, only to bewashed out in Canada at a late stage on the Harvards. There werethe two final check flights in his logbook. I was aware of a growingsense of frustration and disappointment. I had placed so muchreliance upon this interview and it was becoming clear that Clivehad no idea why they crashed, nor had it ever occurred to him toaddress the question, or ask himself why. From the time they hadbeen unable to complete the last bombing run and get the last bombaway, he had taken no further interest in the flight, or theirwhereabouts or, if he had, he had not understood what washappening and his recollection of it was nil, completely blank.

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I turned to the subject of Tommy Paul, their instructor. He didn’tknow him. It was their first and only meeting. He knew him to be afellow New Zealander. He believed Paul had completed a tour ofoperations on Wellingtons in the Middle East, he wasn’t a trainedinstructor and it was thought to be his first flight as such. Iproduced the photographs of Paul taken with the Lancaster crew,showing Beauchamp and Whiteman, and told him what I knew ofPaul’s background and his time on 207 Squadron at a period whenthe war in the air was a deadly and dangerous business and not thepushover it later became. I told him of the Lancaster crash whenPaul had killed four of his crew. But nothing put forward the theorythat Paul’s state of mind was such that he had taken the crew totheir deaths without any due cause. There was no fault or defect inthe aeroplane, no fire, no shortage of fuel, no real weather problem,no barrage balloon, no need to bale out, no need for a forcedlanding, no cause whatever, except in his mind. I read from theofficial Court of Inquiry finding.

‘Captain panicked: decided to crash land’

‘Captain panicked over believed fire and bumpy flying conditions, withoutany foundation.’

‘Previous accident may have unnerved him.’

Clive Estcourt was unable to add anything. The Court of Inquirystated, ‘No evidence as to actual happening.’ They had questionedEstcourt closely at the time when it was all fresh in his mind andgleaned nothing. Forty years later, when it was no longer of anyimportance, except to a very few individuals, with no reason to hideanything and a new knowledge of Paul’s background, we came upwith exactly the same result.

I realised that my disappointment centred, almost entirely, upon myown unwarranted assumption that Clive would remember, or knowmore than he had previously owned to, or that, over the years, hewould have drawn further conclusions, and almost certainly askedhimself why. When his wife went out to prepare lunch, be told us oftheir early days together in New Zealand, after the war. She didn’tlike it and couldn’t settle down. They decided to return to the U.K.

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and he was fortunate in being able to get a passage for them and beable to pay for it. He threw up his job and set about the terriblebureaucratic business of clearing his affairs with the Inland Revenue.Then a letter arrived from the U.K. His wife read it. She turned toher husband and announced, “We are not going back. We will stayhere.” He had no idea what was in the letter. He was able to cancelthe arrangements without loss. Someone was delighted to have theirberth on the ship.

We waited expectantly. Eventually my wife ventured, “What was it,in the letter that caused her to change her mind?” He didn’t know.He had never asked. He was not the sort of man to ask himself,“Why?”, and to this day, he simply didn’t know.

It was a splendid lunch. Outside the window the sun beat down anda small cool breeze moved the draperies. The bees and thebutterflies went about the serious business of collecting nectar fromthe brilliant flowering shrubs. We paused briefly, to takephotographs on the bungalow steps set amidst an immaculategarden in a pleasant suburb of a thriving and prosperous countrytown.

We took our farewell, my last sight of Clive, trim and erect, wavingfrom the driveway. What blind chance, what mysterious fate decidesour course! The sole survivor from his first crew, he had lived andenjoyed his life whilst they, trapped inside the Wellington, unable toreach the only exit, had perished in the fog and waste of war.

The quotation from the stained glass window came back to troubleme. ‘They asked life of Thee and Thou gavest them a long life evenfor ever and ever.’ It seemed cruel and mocking, beyondunderstanding.

Some little time after we returned from New Zealand I re-read theletter which Lynette Wright had sent me from Wellington. Lynette isdistantly related, but I’m not very good at these things and neverquite understood the exact relationship. On the other hand, my wifeis particularly good at family matters. Presently, I called her over tosee if she could untangle the information which Lynette hadobtained from her two informants. In short order, my wife

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constructed the Paul family tree and then it made sense and, almostcertainly, we had the right family.

Tommy Paul’s father hailed from Lanark in Scotland. In 1913 hemarried a girl from County Durham and their wedding lines wereregistered in Wellington, New Zealand, giving his profession as‘Soldier’. Margaret Isobel Rose Paul, nee Savage, gave birth to theirfirst born also in 1913. In 1916 they had a second son, followed in1917 by their third. Thomas Keith Kay was born on September30th at a place called Miramar in Wellington, N.Z.

If our information and assumptions were correct, there had to be afourth son to complete the ‘all four sons killed in the war’. Theremay have been sisters also and we knew there were relatives inDunedin in the South Island, but now we knew he had kin in theNorth of England and in Lanark. Somewhere along the line Tommyseemed to have dropped the name Kay, becoming T.K. Paul. Itseemed likely that he had sought out and visited his U.K. relatives.If we needed to know more of him, we were looking in the wrongplace and on the wrong side of the world. Somewhere up there inthe border country there would be people who knew him and whoclaimed him and cared what happened to him.

It then so happened that family affairs claimed our attention and thewhole matter faded from mind. Gwendoline Whiteman decided tomove from her home in Cheshire and go to Yorkshire to be nearher daughter. The visit to Dartmoor to track down the Lancastercrash site was put off and, all too soon, the summer fled away

In the village, the greengrocer, Maurice, took sick and died. Wewent to the funeral service and sat in the pew directly under theangel window, seeing it from the inside for the first time, reading theinscription and the by now familiar list of names.

It was not until one day, driving home from Warwickshire, we tookthe road to Aylesbury that was to bring us to Westcott and the oldwartime airfield. The place was still in military hands and warningsigns proliferated. We wondered, and not for the first time, what itis that the military find to store in such places that causes them tohang on to so many dumps and old hangers.

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Where the runway ended, just by the roadway, behind the newbarbed wire fences, we could see right along its length, the endsmarked by white crosses with the surface eroded away and pitted bythe weather. There was the perimeter track where once theWimpeys had taxied to reach the takeoff point. Away in the distancethe wartime buildings stood closed and shuttered, guarding theirmysterious contents, bulking dark against the skyline. One sign wasmore explicit. ‘Keep out. Explosives store.’ That should do it, Ithought. That will keep them out.

We drove through the village past the housing estates along narrowlanes. We should have continued on towards the old satellite field atOakley but, somehow, it seemed pointless. There was nothing wecould learn of events so long ago from the harvest fields so prodigalin their heavy crops awaiting the coming of harvest weather. TheAustralian cricketers, over to defend the Ashes, started some jokeabout ‘not so much a poor summer as a mild winter,’ and it stuck.The heavens wept. We turned back on to the main road towardsAylesbury.

Whatever it was that triggered things off again, my mind turnedback to where it had all started for me and the old lady who cameon a pilgrimage to Farnham Common. That was it. I needed to tellher all I knew of her son’s death and then let the matter rest and beforgotten forever.

I telephoned the brother, Leslie, the butcher from Newport Pagnell.His wife answered. Leslie was in bed, dying of cancer. The old ladywas still alive and would be pleased to hear from me. Mentally shewas very robust, she would like to hear of the survivor and talk ofher son. I was given directions to an address in Cranfield. Someonewould alert the old lady to my visit. I expressed my regrets about thebutcher as best I could and felt guilty for not having enquiredsooner and rang off. They’re going now at a fair old clip, I thought.

Old George Butler, the one time air raid warden, who tried to lowerthe landmine down from the tree and, had he succeeded, wouldhave assuredly gone up with it, passed on during the winter. Heswept the snow from his neighbour’s driveway, and succumbed.

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Maurice Lund, greengrocer extraordinary, and village character, asalready mentioned, had gone.

My dear friend, Lindsay, to whom I had turned for information onthe layout of the Wimpey cockpit with special reference to thethrottles, had just died of the dreaded throat cancer. I should haveto get a move on or soon, there would he no one left from thosedays, no one to question, no one to tell, no one to give a damn.

On the very next weekend, we set off to visit Mrs. Payne, mother ofthe dead nineteen year old rear gunner to hear from her own lips,the story as she knew it and her memories of the boy and of thattime. We took with us all the records and information we hadcollected together. I realised that much of it would be of littleinterest for it went back to the formation of 207 Squadron, to thedays when it was part of the Royal Naval Air Service before theformation of the R.A.F. itself, to the first pencilled, hand writtenentries in their first record book. From those far off days weskipped over the years until the arrival of Tommy Paul and theunsuccessful Manchesters.

We had photographs of Tommy with his crew and his FlightCommander Pilot, Squadron Leader Beauchamp with their firstLancaster. All the record book entries were there from Squadronand Station containing the terse announcement of a crash onStandon Hill in Devon. From that we had pieced together the storyof rescuing the survivors and bringing down the dead airmen, thenthe engines and, finally, the wreckage. As far as we could we tracedthe crew members to their last resting places, dipping out only onTommy Paul, accepting that the accident had affected him andsomehow, changed his personality.

Then we came directly to the second accident, the crash ofWellington Z for Zebra at Farnham Common. From the solesurvivor and from written records and witnesses who had seen orheard it, or imagined they had, we knew what had happenedalthough we could not say why. Although much of the evidence wasconfused and contradictory, half remembered, half forgotten, themain thrust of it was clear enough. With Tommy Paul in charge,

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now promoted to Warrant Officer, the trainee crew had taken offfrom Oakley to drop their practice smoke bombs on the nearbybombing range. Acting under his instruction, they had dropped allbut the last when cloud obscured the range. Up to that point thingshad been normal except perhaps, the pilot was edgy and nervous.Thereafter things went disastrously wrong. They became lost anddisorientated, the pilot believing the aircraft to be on fire. Finally,perhaps convinced that they had struck a barrage balloon cable, heordered the trainee crew to bale out and proceeded to attempt aforced landing, at night, in unknown terrain with its inevitableconsequences. Only one man stationed above the escape hatch wasable to escape and so lived to tell the tale.

How much of this would be known to the relatives? The reargunner’s mother would not have been told the full story, only thatthere had been an accident during training and that her son hadperished. How much would she wish to know of that night, or theevents leading up to it? I rather suspected that all I could do wouldbe to hear her out and, myself, concentrate on the survivor, tellingher of his whereabouts. I was scarcely prepared for what I wasabout to hear.

The village of Cranfield straggled along the road, long and narrow.It was dominated by the airfield alongside and the Institute ofTechnology. ‘Boffins’ came to mind, a slang term fallen into disuse.As things would have it, we stopped to ask directions just short ofour destination and found the house readily.

Mrs. Payne was expecting us and so, without further preliminaries,she started to tell us everything she knew and remembered. Herstory did not follow any chronological order but jumped about,picking on this and that, going back to weave in some forgottenthread. For her age her memory was remarkable, and robust wascertainly a good description. There were times, however, when Idoubted if we had come to the right house or were speaking of thesame event.

Young Victor Payne knew neither sorrow nor sadness. The memoryhis mother treasured was of a boy unsullied by the world, clever and

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hard working, beloved by all who knew him. He joined the A.T.C.and did well, gaining many credentials. Eventually, when he was oldenough, he volunteered for the R.A.F. to he a pilot. Here he failedand she thought it was because he had not been to college, but laterhe could try again. Meantime, he went to somewhere in Wales, tolearn to be an air gunner. However, with the credentials he hadgained, he could have done anything on that aeroplane. Indeed, onone occasion, he had navigated it home when the others had beenunable. We gained a picture of a very nice young man, perhaps givento a little exaggeration in his letters home and a mother seizing uponhis every triumph and finding excuse for any little failure or setback.

He came then to Westcott, just nearby, for they were living inAylesbury at the time and he could cycle home borrowing hisbrother's bike and bringing his friend home. It was twelve milesaltogether. Then a darker picture began to emerge. They went fromWestcott on the thousand bomber raids, she said. One day, she hadbeen out visiting somewhere in Ruislip or Northolt and they saw anaeroplane flying over, apparently in distress. The searchlights weretrying to guide it to a safe landing. Someone said, “Perhaps yourVictor is in that aeroplane?” and indeed, she had often thought ofthat when she saw aeroplanes going over. The notification cameshortly after, and that confirmed it. It was her Victor’s aeroplaneand they were trying to land and they crashed at Farnham Common.They had the barrage balloons there or at Slough and they musthave hit one. They were trying to avoid the village, that’s what theysaid afterwards. But not just that. They had been to Stettin and itwas the furthest they went, about two thousand miles. She turned tome for confirmation. It was, I said, one of the furthest targets.

The old lady got up and went out to fetch the photographs. Shereturned with a pathetic little bundle wrapped in brown paper andcarefully undid it. Inside were a few precious photographs and somefaded newspaper cuttings. The photographs were a surprise to me,taken by an official photographer at the funeral service. Mrs. Payneinsisted we see them in the right order, each party of pall bearers inthe sequence in which they unloaded the motor transport andcarried the coffins to the water logged graves. When the last

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photograph was shown, I realised there was one missing. Thereshould be five parties, not four. Five men were killed. Where wasPaul? His relatives had come and taken him away. “He was a NewZealander,” I said. The old lady insisted that the relatives had comeand taken him, he had relatives nearby. She was a little confusedabout Paul. In her construction of events, he had no place. Thepresence of an instructor was contrary to her long held beliefs.

I concentrated on Estcourt, the bomb-aimer who had escaped andsurvived. She had all but forgotten him, mixing him up with thepilot, running them together. She was grieved he had not come tovisit her. The Commanding Officer forbade him, I said. TheCommanding Officer told him he must forget it, put it behind himand carry on. I refrained to mention he was forbidden the funeral,and the weighted coffins. The old lady seemed to take it in andrecognise the sense of it. It set her mind to rest. She could come toterms at last with Estcourt. “Of course, of course, that's what hehad to do.”

I told her a little more of him, he had married a local girl fromAylesbury and then gone back to live in New Zealand but herinterest was not aroused. She had made her peace with him and thevisit was not wholly wasted. Besides, I too had learnt something.Tommy Paul was not buried with the others. He had indeed foundrelatives to care for him in this country. There was only one thingremaining. I had to write to the Commonwealth WargravesCommission to see if they knew where he lay. That, I thought, willdo it, that will be the end, it can now he set aside.

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Chapter Five

t this point Joan prepared to type the words 'THE END'and put her faithful typewriter to bed but no, eventsintervened. As Prime Minister Harold Macmillian was wont

to observe “Events dear boy, events.”AKen Williamson called and introduced himself as cousin to ArthurCoulter the trainee pilot who died in the Wellington crash.

Ken was over on a visit to UK and one of the tasks he had sethimself was to see the crash site and the stained glass windowUnfortunately he had not allowed himself sufficient time to dothings justice. I offered him a copy of my notes on the subject butwe both recognised they were far too comprehensive for hispurpose.

Joan and I sat down and we prepared an abbreviated version intime for his departure, and so it came about that we began a partialrevision. Several things cried for our attention, the first being the re-appearance of the barrage balloon story.

Here it was again although admittedly from the same source. FirstMrs Payne, mother of Victor and her firm conviction that a balloonbrought them down, then in 1984 a letter written by JackO'Callaghan's sister from Lumsden and now Ken four years later, Isearched for the Lumsden letter.

It was dated Lumsden 27.5.84.

“Jack spent his last leave with Mr.and Mrs Payne and Victor and they wererecalled from leave for this trip. My understanding of what happened (and as Istated at the beginning, this is all unofficial) is that the plane was damaged overenemy territory and they could not get enough height to bale out Once they

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reached England they requested permission to land at the nearest airfield. Thisrequest was apparently refused and on their way to their own base they hit abarrage balloon and the final act of the crew was to avoid the village and crashinto the woods.”

I decided the Barrage Balloon story deserved serious attention.What was the case for the balloons?

Firstly, the relatives of the three dead crew members believed it, asdid the writer of St Johns Church history and the local press. Also itwas generally accepted and common knowledge amongst thevillagers. These beliefs however stemmed from the same root.

Secondly, the wife of the owner of the house called Huntsmoor hada crack in the plaster ceiling of the living room and her builder saidit was damage from the plane although there was no sign of roofrepairs.

Thirdly, Clive Estcourt, the survivor, reported that they encountereda heavy isolated bump as if they had hit something which heafterwards put down to turbulence. He reported this on return tohis unit and the matter was investigated then dismissed.

I had to confess that my knowledge of Barrage Balloons was slightThey were however a familiar sight over wartime Britain and thetheory, I believe, was that they acted as a deterrent against low levelattack from the air. Further than that, they were perhaps a comfortto the city population, something visible was being done for theirprotection. It was strongly rumoured that they failed to bring downa single enemy aeroplane but scored well against our own. When theAmericans came over in large numbers for the invasion, they put itabout that if the cables were cut the whole place would sink.

From my own experience their location was marked and known atbriefing, and when raised they operated a short range transmitteremitting a squeaking note as a warning that you were near, acomfort if that was what you expected, or a worry if not.

I also knew that some aeroplanes were fitted with cable cutters oneon each side, the theory being that the cable would slide along the

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wing leading edge until it entered a slot when, bang, the cutter boltwas fired and with luck the aeroplane would survive.

I could dimly remember that some of the Wimpeys were soequipped, a piece of doped fabric disguising the place to discouragepeople sticking broom sticks in to check for a response.

The RAF were responsible for Balloons and formed a separateCommand to go alongside Fighter and Bomber and CoastalCommands.

Another visit to Kew was called for. The Civil Service had asplendid canteen there with a chef who knew his stuff and there wasfish on the menu on Fridays and so next Friday it was.

Sadly, on arrival, we learnt that a new neighbour was moving inalongside the Public Record Office, the dreaded Inland Revenueand what little car parking space was available to the public wascordoned off with 'no entry' signs While my wife kept guard on thecar I rearranged the barriers to make space available and we parkedup and headed inside.

The nearest balloon unit was at Langley just east of Slough guardingthe Hawker factory and airfield and their headquarters was RAFUxbridge. Barrage Balloon Units were given Squadron numbers bythe RAF and No. 956 Squadron though based at Langley sometimesreferred to themselves as Colnbrook, the next village.

The log book entry for Jan 3rd read as follows “At 0949 hours Site13 became a casualty by breakaway. Cable fracture at 1400 feet fromrip link which did not fire. At 1203 hours Site 9 Balloon yawed andsplit itself on bed.”

The log book entry for Jan 4th.1944 read as follows:

“Ridge of high pressure over the area Winds decreasing NNW 15/20mphWeather bright dry with sharp frost at night. Time 00.01 Category Threeballoons were raised to 1500 feet on lightning risk decreasing. At 09.27 hoursall balloons close hauled for cable inspection and examination on report ofaircraft crashing and were then returned to 1500 feet.”

Dated a week later I found another entry, Jan. 11th as follows:

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“F/lt Brockes of No 11 OTU visited investigating crashed aircraft”.

Presumably he drew a blank. Of his subsequent report to his unit Ifound no trace It may well be that he also visited other Balloonunits on the west side of London with like result but I gave up atthis point and continued to scan the affairs of Squadron No. 956.

I was mightily impressed by the calibre of the Commanding Officerand his staff. Keenly aware of the problems of boredom and moralethey appeared to encourage social events. The concrete bases weremarked out in squares and games of deck quoits took place withteam events. Transport to Slough was provided to visit theswimming baths and other places. Although the officers mess wasquite small they had strings of visitors from Whitehall, seniorofficers, VIP.s, civil servants and the like, and they invariably stayedto lunch. That suggested to me an excellent cook presiding in thekitchen, matched by an equally capable mess catering officer whoknew his way around the market gardens of the area, and the lesswell known abattoirs of Colnbrook.

In Jan 1944 they had a strength of 10 RAF Officers and 1 WAAFOfficer, other ranks totalled 214.

In Feb. another item caught my attention

“Hurricane Aircraft impacted the cable of site 14 at 100 feet from the ground.The balloon broke away. The D/P Rip link and the 1st and 2nd series D/Psfired. Aircraft landed safely but wing tip, port side was severed.”

An outfit that comes clean on such an occasion as the near loss ofone of their own Hurricanes is squeaky clean in my book but I didfeel anxious as to what became of breakaway balloons with orwithout a length of cable trailing behind. I turned the pages to theend of the logbook.

Some time, before the war ended, the Balloons were hauled downfor the last time, and the unit disbanded with the entire Commandincorporated into Fighter Command. The C.O. made a last entry inForm 540, calm, matter of fact, and bade farewell to that chapter ofhis life.

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With no balloon expert to guide me on DP links and the like, it wastime to extricate the car from the car park, and head back down theA4., past the Colnbrook bypass towards Langley and Slough. Ibelieve that the Langley airfield was considered at one time as apossible site for the new London Airport, but the choice fell insteadon Hounslow Heath, and the Langley that Maurice Lund knew,became a factory and housing estate.

Regretfully, and remembering the words of the chap at the RAFmuseum that things might not look so bad for the crew when I hadinvestigated further, finding a damaged cable or a balloon goingadrift in the night, would have altered things for Tommy Paul andgone a long way to exonerate his decision to crash land.

I'm sorry Tommy, it was not to be.

Only one last thing remained to be done, now we knew Tommy'sburial place in Durham via the Commonwealth War GravesCommission. We began to plan a visit to my mother in Scotlandtaking an easterly route via Newcastle and auld Reekie then up thecoast to Aberdeen taking it leisurely, in our camper-van.

I penned a letter to Mr Edwards, editor of the Durham Advertiserseeking contact with anyone related to Tommy Paul and hepublished it verbatim.

We had a reply two days later, a telephone call from MichaelRichardson of Durham. He explained that he was of the Savagefamily and his aunt, Mrs Sarah Savage, was cousin to Tommy Paul'smother, Isabelle. His Aunt was getting on a bit, but lively and welland would welcome any information on the Wellington crash, andindeed he too was most interested and excited. I copied down hisdetails and arranged to call back and so eventually the matter of avisit was arranged, to visit his aunt at her home and meet him at hisplace of work in Durham, and then proceed to St Oswalds church.

A day or two later, a letter arrived from a Mrs Margaret Wood. Shevoluntarily attended some of the military burial plots at St Oswaldscemetery in particular those of North East fighter pilots who died inthe 1940s Battle of Britain. Although Tommy Paul was clearly not

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connected she included him for good measure Her knowledge ofDurham and vicinity was to prove most valuable.

I needed to be aware that Durham was home to a famous regiment,the Durham Light Infantry. In a corner of the gardens in theCathedral close, I should look for a pink rose. An army officerbrought it over from Ypres in 1918 and planted it there and everyyear it continued to bloom. In the summer the gardens are peaceful

with the birds for companyand in the evening the batsfly out from the cloisters. Iwarmed at once to Durham.I always did have a warmspot for the Geordies.

It was getting on in thesummer of 1986 when we setout, reaching the city brightand early with time to lookaround the Cathedral close.It was all quiet. The studentswere still on vacation.

Finding Mrs Savage's homein Green Lane was easyenough, although ease ofparking did not figure in thecouncil plans when they laidout the old folks bungalows.Mrs Savage was standing inher doorway wearing herdressing gown, and on thelookout for the nurse toarrive and give her a bath.No, no please come in, itwould be all right. Indeed her

nephew was right, Mrs Savage was 86, becoming housebound butwith all her marbles. There were two branches of the family, one in

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Illustration 12: Flight Sgt A L Coulter

Durham and the other in Sunderland. She was on the poorer side.The Savage family of Sunderland were well known, lived in thedistrict these last 200 years, ran a dairy business, supplied the prison,a valuable contract, and they must have organised Tommy's burial intheir family plot, as she had no part in that. She got out her box ofprecious things and rummaged for letters and photographs. Forsome years she and Isabell had corresponded then lost touch. Sheseemed uncertain as to whether Tommy Paul had come to see her. Ithought probably not. From time to time we kept a look out for thenurse and then took our leave She stood in the doorway wavingcheerfully, still in her night attire, watching us go.

We were in good time to meet Michael at his work place in the Cityand he led us inside a large chamber where he was caretaker. There,comfortably seated, we exchanged information, for his part detailsof the family, and on ours filling him in on the Wellington andLancaster story. He determined to come south to see for himselfand we encouraged him to do just that.

St Oswalds was a fine old church, though locked and closed thatday, with the grave yard neatly trimmed. There was no sign of recentburials and no one about. We headed out of town along a busythoroughfare keeping an eye on the left side for the Council runcemetery and spotted the gates in time. The gates were large, andcast iron and very rusty, hanging drunkenly on their hinges. Theplace was overgrown and unkempt but very soon we found TommyPaul's last resting place. It was not difficult to pick out the lightcoloured military head stones carefully tended and weeded.

Just as we had been told, and sharing a wide plot, he lay next to hismaternal grandparents, Robert and Lydia Savage. We had not beenable to locate the Savage family member from Sunderland who hadarranged for Tommy Paul to be buried here, nor had we attemptedto locate his Scottish family, but otherwise we had done what wecame for.

When we had paid our last respects, we walked back to the gatesand climbed on board the camper-van and headed north.

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Chapter Six

nce again the typewriter was put away this time in the atticand the notes were filed, and gradually we forgot thematter and got on with our lives. We may have missed the

outings and the impromptu picnics but we were no longer troubledby loose ends or things uncovered or not considered.

O If ever the matter was mentioned when Mary our daughter in lawcame over, she confessed that she felt it somehow incomplete, itcould not end there, there needed to be a final act. Since she went toschool here and spent much of her early life in Farnham Common, Ithink maybe it gave her a proprietary interest and perhaps the earlynotion that a cast had assembled, unsought, as part of a drama stillto unfold, appealed strongly to the thespian within her.

More than sixty four years after the aeroplane crashed, on the 26thof Aug. 2008, things took a dramatic turn. Another retired aviatorGerry Davies was scanning the front page of a Wellingtonnewspaper 'The Dominion Post' when a reference to FarnhamCommon caught his eye, and stopped him in his tracks.

Jenny Ling was the reporter. She led off with the headline “For thelove of Tom”. Before long an e-mail was winging its way to my sonRobert in Auckland and forwarded to me here. By virtue of moderntechnology I was reading the story as the ink was barely dry. Thestory Jenny told was a love story taken from the pages of theWellington College magazine.

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All unknown and unsuspected by me on this side of the world,Tommy Paul had a sweetheart, Miss Violet Dunn, a girl he met in1934 on the beach at Takapuna. They fell in love and decided tomarry. But Tommy went off to war in 1940 and with a good manyothers, he failed to return. Violet stayed faithful to his memory overthe long years, and decided at age 92 that her tale of love and warwould live on for generations by making a gift to Tommy's oldcollege of 1.5 million dollars. Of this sum $1million goes to build amemorial hall and the remainder into a fund to benefit those boyswho might otherwise struggle to pay for outings and the like.

It seems she came to England after the war and visited the placewhere Tommy Paul and his crew died, and the place where he wasburied, and stayed on to work in Europe for some years beforereturning to New Zealand and settle in Auckland.

What ill luck that her visit was not remembered, nor mentioned bythose people she must have encountered here who took her to seethe crash site, and so I missed out altogether on Miss Dunn.

And now the year is once again on the turn, and the beech trees ofBrockhurst Wood are once again shedding their leaves. In the widerworld the financial system is coming apart at the seams, anincoherent chorus of “Noises Off.”

Another actor has taken centre stage in the last act of this drama,the play that Mary visualised, that had not quite ended.

Now I have the answer to the oft repeated, and oft evaded question“What is your interest?” and “No good will come of it.”

The person most affected in all of this, may wish to know, and makereply.

If Miss Dunn wishes to hear it, and follow the paper trail, I mayhave go back on my chosen title, and join with Jenny Ling in hers,“For the love of Tom.”

Tales of war, of heroics and tragedy, are soon forgotten, but tales oflove live on, and are eternal.

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THE END

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Illustration 13: For The Love of Tom

By The Same Author

If you enjoyed this book you may like to check the authors other works whichare also available as e-books.

It’s Pull To Go Up

Charlie Gray (Jeff as he was later known) left school at 14 and was set for alife as a farm worker in the North of Scotland when World War II intervened.

Chance took him into the RAF as a bomber pilot and his luck held though thewar and led him on to a successful flying career in British Airways and GulfAir.

This is one pilots story and gives a rare insight into the changes in aviation fromwar time Britain through the introduction of the wide body jets which are nowmost peoples only exposure to aviation.

http://www.brockhurst.co.nz/its-pull-to-go-up

Also shortly to be published:

http://www.brockhurst.co.nz/collected-articles

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Illustration 14: Wellington Pilots Notes - Pilots Instrument Panel

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Illustration 16: For The Love of Tom

Illustration 15: Wellington Pilots Notes - Pilots Instrument Panel - Legend

137Illustration 17: Wellington Pilots Notes - Cockpit Port Side

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Illustration 18: Wellington Pilots Notes - Emergency Procedures