Wartime plane crashes that happened on our doorsteps
When a plane crashed near their homes, Reg Hough and his pals didn’t think twice about investigating.
The youngsters were never averse to a bit of mischief, be it scrumping apples, or collecting cigarette butts for German prisoners of war. But this time they got a big surprise.
“We found these two bags of potatoes, and we opened them up to see what was in them,” he recalls.
“They were filled with body parts.”
Our recent story about the day a Lancaster bomber crashed over Wednesfield, near Wolverhampton, brought back memories for a number of readers who remembered the disaster.
Reg, who now lives in Fordhouses, remembers watching the drama from the garden of a neighbour’s house in Hyde Road, Wednesfield.
“In those days it was unadopted, and when I say I unadopted, I mean it was really rough, it was full of big potholes,” he says.
“There was a place we called ‘the Dump’, it was a prison camp for the Germans, and we would collect the nubs of the cigarettes. If you took them to the Germans, they would make us toys out of wood, they were very friendly.”
On the day of the crash, Reg, who was eight, and his friend Arthur Turner, also eight, were in the garden of nine-year-old neighbour Harry Grainger.
“We were standing by the fence, and it came right over,” he says. “The one wing was over Harry’s house, the other was over our house, it was that low.
“I remember seeing a man standing in a doorway, he looked like he was about to jump. It went straight down, within a few seconds it had crashed.
“Mr Grainger, Harry’s father, sent us out into the road, but when it all died down we went over to have a look, to see what was going on.”
A few yards from their house was Patrick’s Farm, whose owner kept horses and a travelling circus in his fields.
“It had a wall around it, and we were always clambering over,” says Reg.
It was there that the lads found the bag of body parts.
“When I say body parts, it wasn’t like a hand or a head, it was small bits of flesh, they had all been blown to bits,” he says.
While it came as a bit of a shock, Reg says he took the discovery in his stride.
“We weren’t stressed, we were tough kids, not like they are today,” he says.
Reg believes the pilot was probably heading towards a nearby pool to make an emergency landing.
Pilot Bernard Hall, flight engineer Ronald James O’Donnell, navigator Reginald Henry Smith, air bomber Victor Francis Dobell Meade, wireless operator Gordon Leonard Rabbetts and air gunners Vincent Reginald Woodburn and John Alfred Sills all died in the crash.
Last month it was revealed that roads on a new housing estate off Lakefield Road will be named after them as a tribute.
The crash created a 5ft crater in the ground, and the men were buried at the scene, with a local church minister performing a simple funeral ceremony. The men were later given memorials at cemeteries in their home towns.
They were serving with 630 Squadron operating out of East Kirkby, Lincolnshire, and the crash took place just nine days after Germany had surrendered and the war in Europe was officially over.
Edna Higgs, now 86, has often wondered whether the airmen had been performing a fly-past to thank members of the Girls’ Training Corps (GTC), which met at a nearby school.
“We used to send them boxes, and darn socks for the airmen,” she says. “We know they used to appreciate because the took us up to Cosford where the airmen would wait on us.”
Edna remembers on the day of the crash she was on her way to a GTC meeting at the nearby school.
“I was about 12, and I wasn’t really old enough, but Joyce Sutcliffe was the officer in charge of it, and she would pick me up.
“She had a car and she came and picked me up. Lichfield Road wasn’t a road at that time, it was all fields and it was just a lane.
“We got towards the end and the police were there, it was all fenced off, they told Joyce she would have to turn round. You could see where it had happened, there was a big hole in the ground.
“I have often wondered if they were flying past to thank us, it was right behind the school where we met.”
Mick Spear, who now lives in Finchfield, was playing football at Wood End playing fields as he watched the plane hurtle towards the ground. “When it came over Wood End Park, you could see it was going to crash,” he says.
Lew, now aged 80, was playing in Luce Road, Low Hill with an old bike wheel early in 1945, when he saw a Tiger Moth come crashing to the ground.
Lew recalls he was off school because he had been to the dentist in the morning.
“I was clattering up and down Luce Rd with my de-spoked bike wheel and just reached the top end of Luce Road outside the home of Billy Crook, a Wolves’ footballer, which was the last house at the top end of Luce Road on the right, when I heard a noise which was a lot louder than the racket I was making with my wheel.
“I stopped and looked up just as a silver-coloured Tiger Moth aeroplane flew over just skimming the chimney tops.
“I knew then something was wrong, the engine was spluttering and I could see quite clearly the pilot leaning out of the open cockpit over the side of the plane, as though he was about to jump.”
The plane disappeared from Lew’s sight, flying towards the Britool factory in Fourth Avenue.
“I heard a loud thud, by this time I was standing in Fourth Avenue, as I looked in the direction the aeroplane had gone,” he says.
“I saw part of the fuselage and tail sticking up in the air, it had actually crashed in the front grounds of the Britool factory.
“I ran across the road and stood on the low boundary in wall in front of the factory peering through the fencing in front of the offices, staring through the metal palisade fencing at the wreckage of the plane.
“The front of the plane had disappeared below the ground and there was what I thought at the time was steam coming out of the ground.”
Shortly after the fire brigade arrived and covered the wreckage with a green tarpaulin, Lew recalls, adding that’s how it remained until the next day.
He went out early the next morning to see what would happen.
“I was about to give up on my vigilance, when I saw a massive RAF lorry which had a long low loading trailer trundling along the road in the direction of the Britool,” he says.
“I hung around watching a small squad of RAF personnel loading the wreckage on to the back of the lorry and covered it with a tarpaulin, while the other group made good the damaged flower beds and lawn, before driving off down Fourth Avenue.”
Lew, a retired building inspector who now lives in Pendeford, points out that the Britool factory was immediately behind the office block, and on the opposite side of the road was a sprawling council estate.
“Really the pilot had very little choice but to put the plane down into the only clear green area he could see, which was the lawn and flower beds in front of the Britool office block which was surrounded by a high palisade metal fence.
“The direction from which the plane came, it had actually flown across one of the largest and most densely populated council estates in Wolverhampton.”
Fred Whitehouse also recalls another crash in Lichfield Road, Wednesfield, about half a mile from the one in May, 1945.
Fred remembers seeing a Spitfire crash into the side of a house on July 18, 1942.
He had been with his mother on a Saturday afternoon, foraging for vegetation to feed the rabbits they kept at their home nearby when they saw a plane come hurtling through a hedge.
“A wing clipped a lamp post, and it skewed around, it skidded on the road, leaving grooves in the road surface, before crashing into the kitchen of No. 468, breaking into several large pieces of wreckage.
“After seemingly an age, but maybe only a few minutes, the pilot struggled out of the cockpit section appearing to be unhurt,” he recalls. “The road which was previously empty apart from my mum and me, very few cars though, as it was wartime.”
Half a century later, he discovered the pilot who had emerged from the wreckage was famous Spitfire test pilot Alex Henshaw.
After seeing him on a television programme, Fred wrote a letter to him, and to his surprise Henshaw sent him some photographs of the scene, and the pair chatted on the phone.
“He thought he was going to be burned alive because he was covered in the liquid, but apart from some bruising he was largely unharmed,” says Fred, now 84 and living in Bradley. “He very kindly sent me some photos of the crash scene from his own collection, which I treasure.”
