大象传媒

I was 18 and training as a Civil Engineer in the Borough Engineers Department in Hendon in N.W. London. On the Friday all staff were told that if war was declared during the weekend we were to report to our various duty locations and be prepared to deal with Air Raids. I was to work in the Control Centre, receiving telephone calls about incidents and passing them to the Controllers for action.

I arrived there about 11.15 a.m. We sat around chatting and reading the Sunday papers when suddenly there was an explosion outside and very close by. We could see nothing for we were in a basement. We all thought it was our first bombing, especially when the sirens went.

Somebody went outside and saw smoke rising among some houses beyond the parish church next door to our building. Ambulances, fire engines and rescue tenders were sent. A plane had crashed on cottages and we heard that the pilot鈥檚 body had been recovered. No civilians had been killed. Several cottages on both sides of the narrow street had been badly damaged and the remains of the plane were spread across the roofs and the road. We were told that the Government had put an embargo on the reporting of this incident and we were to treat it as Top-Secret; it was not reported in the national or local papers nor on the radio.

I married a girl from Newport in South Wales in 1946 and after 38 happy years we retired to Honiton. One Sunday in early September 1989 my "Sunday Times" carried a series of articles commemorating the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of war and they had discovered the details of the incident in R.A.F. archives. The pilot was practicing landing his twin-engined Blenheim at Hendon airfield using only one engine; the plane lost height on the hilltop on his approach to the airfield. The pilot was Pilot Officer John Isaac from Newport; his family and my wife鈥檚 were neighbours. He was the first Briton to die on active service in the war.

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