NEARLY 50 hardy souls turned out at 8.30pm last Saturday night to hang around on a Darlington street corner and remember Pilot Officer William McMullen who, 79 years ago to the minute, had sacrificed his own life to avoid crashing his bomber into the houses of the east end of town.
Mayor Jan Cossins was in tears as she told how only that day she had been speaking to a lady in her 80s who, as a baby in Teal Road, had been under the stricken Lancaster.
Jean Kirkland was also present. “Percy Green worked on my granddad’s market garden off Haughton Green,” said Joan, whose family had one of the very first stalls in Darlington covered market in the 1860s and who still run Alfred Robinson & Sons market garden, “but before that he worked with horses at Lingfield Farm, where the plane crashed. He must have gone to the crash site because he had the bomb jettison handle – a little oblong, olive green thing, that you pull up with two fingers.”
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Percy is believed to have lost his parents when young, and when he died, Jean inherited a little tin of his treasures, which included this intriguing horse medal.
It says: “Concours Agricole. 21 Juin 1925. Frasnes lez Buissenal.”
A “concours agricole” is an agricultural show or competition, and Frasnes lez Buissenal is a very small village in Belgium, between Brussels and Lille. And 1925 is too early for Percy to have won the medal himself as he was a young man in 1944 when clambering over the crash site.
Can you tell us more about the medal or Percy or a concours agricole?
And next year is the 80th anniversary of McMullen’s death. How should Darlington mark it?
“MY father said to us girls one day, come outside and see what’s happening, and we did, and there, coming down our little village street – we’ve only got the one street – there was a whole battalion of Scottish soldiers, 100 or more of them, wearing kilts and playing bagpipes,” says Margaret Littlefair. Last week, Margaret, 72, told us tales of Walworth Castle and we said she lived in Chilton.
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Only she doesn’t. She lives in Hilton, which is a one street hamlet to the north-west of Darlington, between two of our favourite place names: Morton Tinmouth and Wackerfield. We need to listen more carefully.
“Then they turned up to our farm and when they got to the yard,” continues Margaret, undeterred, “they took off their boots and put their feet in the water in the horse troughs – they’d marched down from Scotland.
“Next morning they were up and off, they didn’t tell us where, but after the war, we were going on the train to Blackpool, and in the carriage was a Scottish soldier. We got talking, he told us how he had been injured, and it turned out he had been one of those soldiers who came to our farm. He said they went across to Dunkirk and that there were hardly any of them left to come back…”
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