大象传媒

During 1944 (I was then 14 years old), whilst on the seafront above the Children's Playground (now the site of Southend Sea-Life Centre), I witnessed the wing to wing mid-air collision of two American B17 Flying Fortresses off shore and above the river. I think they were returning from a Mission and possibly control surfaces were damaged.

My imperfect memory recalls one of the aircraft plunging down and I feel that I saw 'black dots' falling from that fortress - members of the crew but again this is recall from sixty years back. What is certain is that the pit of that plane went down with it into the water just off Canvey Point. It is said that the pilot avoided crashing into Canvey Island and the possibility of hitting houses.

At that time my father was a police sergeant member of Southend Constabulary (long since absorbed into Essex Police). It was he who had the gruesome task of dealing with the recovered remains of that airman and had to remove personal effects such as identification tags, wrist-watch and the like for return to that brave man's relatives in the U.S.A.

In that same year, being a member of No 640 Flight (Southend High School) Air Training Corps, I joined a Gliding Course at Rochford Aerodrome (now Southend Airport).

The gliders were 'Kirby Cadets' (just about the wingspan of a Spitfire) and largely built, I think, from wood and canvas. In a single seat cockpit you proceeded, on the course, form static 'wing-tip balancing' to 'ground skills' pulled by a wire hawser attached to a rotating drum on a winching machine.

Next stage was the 'low hop' when you were pulled and 'took off' so that the glider was airborne at some small height above the ground - perhaps 20 feet.

On what would have been my first such 'hop' on coming down to land, I must rather have 'panicked', pulled the control stick towards me and the craft jerked with nose up to gain height. It was then that with little forward driver speed the wire hawser decoupled (though in fact I had not pulled the 'release toggle' in the cockpit to decouple). An age seemed to pass as the glider went into 'stall/sideslip' and I watched the ground come to meet me!

The port wing hit the ground first, smashing two or three feet off the end, the whole aircraft spun round and came to rest and I sat strapped in, unharmed, and awaited the arrival of the Chief Instructor and his companion trundling towards me across the airfield in their jeep. A tongue-lashing was delivered to me and I almost wished that I had been hurt (though not too severely!) so that I could have received some sympathy. The event scared me and I did not proceed and complete the course.

Several years later it chanced that the Chief Instructor and myself were employed by the same company and though of course he would not recognise and remember me, I reminded him of the incident. He told me that he was still involved in training lads to fly gliders, though by then at an airfield in Kent. Now they realised that dual control, two seat gliders were necessary. We do not leave a learner driver in a motor car to 'get on with it' alone, do we?

In those far off war days of much less extensive news coverage and possibly censorship for morale and other reasons, how many lads might have been badly injured or even killed in gliding accidents?

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.