NEARLY 50 hardy people turned out as the temperatures plummeted on Saturday at 8.49pm to remember the moment exactly 79 years earlier that an airman had sacrificed his own life to save the townspeople of Darlington.
The town’s MP, Peter Gibson, and mayor, Cllr Jan Cossins, laid wreathes at the memorial on McMullen Road at precisely the time that on January 13, 1945, Pilot Officer William McMullen crashed into the farmland behind having steered his burning Lancaster bomber away from the last houses at the east end of town.
Indeed, the mayor was moved to tears as she told how, earlier in the day, she had been speaking to a friend, now in her eighties, who had been an infant in Teal Road as the stricken plane had passed over and may not have survived if McMullen had followed his crewmates and abandoned the bomber and left it to crash.
Because McMullen, 33, died on a training exercise, he never received the bravery award that many in Darlington in 1945 felt he deserved, although Mr Gibson is now asking the Government’s property division to name the forthcoming Treasury offices, which are to be built on the Brunswick site beside the inner ring road, after the Canadian airman who was stationed at RAF Middleton St George.
It has now become traditional for townspeople and members of the Royal British Legion to gather in McMullen Road on the anniversary of the moments that the drama was enacted in the skies above, with The Northern Echo’s Chris Lloyd telling the story.
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