John North: The day the bomber came down

LEST we forget, and Lance Henderson clearly hasn't, it was these columns which began the campaign for a memorial to Andrew Mynarski VC.

It will be unveiled at the former RAF Middleton St George - former Teesside Airport, too - on June 4, family members flying in from Winnipeg for the emotional occasion.

Mr Henderson, now in Durham, is anxious that the kin of another Winnipeg airman killed in action know that their son is also remembered with honour.

Lance was a 13-year-old in Crook, 63 years ago this Saturday, when a Wellington bomber came down near the village of Roddymoor, a mile to the north, shortly before 6pm. All five crew members died.

They'd been on a training exercise when an engine caught fire. Flight Sgt David Roberts, a member of the Australian air force, struggled to avoid Roddymoor's tight circle of houses and tried to land in a nearby pond.

Instead, the plane crashed and exploded. Young Lance grabbed his bike and pedalled quickly to the scene and has never forgotten it.

"I was just a boy and it affected me deeply," he says. "A few years later, I was in the RAF myself."

It was another 40 years, however, before he formally researched the crash - and began a campaign of his own.

"It was quite extraordinary, really," Lance recalls. "We still lived in Crook at the time and a millionaire Australian sheep farmer who'd also flown Wellingtons came to stay next door. He asked me what I knew about the 1942 crash and I realised it wasn't as much as I thought."

The crew were Flight Sgt Roberts, 21, fellow Australian sergeants Rae Groom and Angus Roberts, and Canadian sergeants Robert Boates, an air gunner, and William Neil Reeves, a 27-year-old air observer from Winnipeg.

They're buried, side by side, in the war graves section of the West Cemetery in Darlington.

Lance Henderson wanted a memorial in Roddymoor. Though it never materialised, Wear Valley council commissioned a brass plaque - and then appeared to forget about it. Now it hangs in the North East Aircraft Museum near the Nissan factory in Washington.

"I think it must just have been in a cupboard or something," he says. "It took a long time to get it properly exhibited but we're there. At least it's appreciated in the museum."

He's sent pictures of the crash scene, the war graves, the plaque and other information. Since there are Winnipeg folk at the June 4 ceremony, he says, perhaps we could ask them to seek out Sgt Reeves's relatives, too.

That duty will be done, of course.

MORE wartime nostalgia tomorrow evening when the Normandy Veterans' Pilgrimage Club holds its VE Day Gala at the former Federation Brewery in Dunston.

"A bit of a do," says Lilian Turnbull, the organiser, though it's going to be a bit more than that.

As well as the military, war workers like Bevan Boys, factory hands, Watch Ashore ladies and ("of course") Aycliffe Angels will all be reunited in the five-hour extravaganza.

Music's by the Wearside Big Band and a "40s-style" DJ. The memories will go on and on.

LAST year they had Cannon and Ball, this weekend it's George Hamilton IV - in a tribute concert to Hank Williams - who headlines the sixth annual Whitby Gospel Music Convention.

Organised as ever by Paul Wheater, who's doing a Jim Reeves tribute, the three-day event is based on the Spa Pavilion.

On Saturday morning, world famous Shadowmancer Graham Taylor, once vicar of the church across the road, will be speaking and giving his testimony.

Other singers and groups are from all over Britain and beyond. The Citadel Salvation Army band's from Stockton.

* Details on 01947 810561 or www.paulwheater.com

...and finally, Mark Lawson is reckoned the cultural face of the BBC - an egghead, it's said, who also writes learned columns in The Guardian.

A reader swears, however, that in previewing a Radio 4 programme on the National Railway Museum extension in Shildon, Lawson said he was particularly excited because it was the town in which he grew up.

We can find no trace of it, though apparently there's an uncle in Newton Aycliffe. Is the cerebral Mr Lawson really from Culture Gulch? And if he is, is the town big enough for both of us?

The train that was seven weeks late

RAILWAYS are becoming something of a permanent way hereabouts: the delightful Maude Warwick, 80 next, has been on from Middlesbrough with memories of Kirkby Stephen East and of the batten down winter of 1947.

We've halted at KSE two or three times recently, pondered times and seasons, collected a few train numbers. This, as it were, is from the iron horse's mouth.

Maude was a clerk at Kirkby Stephen from 1942, sometimes from 7am-10pm - "there was nothing else to do; you were never far from a coal fire" - transferred to York, gained a history degree as a mature student, became a Workers' Educational Association tutor organiser on Teesside.

The station, she recalls, officially became Kirkby Stephen East in 1950 but that the new name didn't appear in the timetable until 1959.

The line closed three years later.

Particularly, however, she remembers the night of February 3, 1947, when the last train left Kirkby Stephen for Darlington and got there seven weeks later.

Even before the notorious Stainmore summit, the locomotive had become stuck in the snow. Every night at 11 o'clock, says Maude, a train would leave Penrith carrying Polish servicemen still billeted at Lowther Park who were charged with clearing the blockage.

"They were given a meat pie and some tea and expected to get on with it. I think some of them resented it because they were officers and it was slave labour, really. It was also wasted effort. As fast as they cleared it, the wind would blow the snow back next morning."

On the morning of February 4, The Northern Echo carried two inside page paragraphs headed "Snow drift stops local trains".

By the following morning, snow covered most of the front page - "Winter's whip hand in Britain."

There were no buses, no milk, no power, no candles, no nowt. Folk in Sunniside, above Crook, were already said to be going hungry; Redcar had been assailed by its biggest waves for 30 years, two died on the Whitby moors.

We also reported that passengers on the 7.55pm from Penrith to Darlington had been taken back to Kirkby Stephen, put on a special train to Carlisle at 1am and thence on the 5.35am from Carlisle to Newcastle. Homeward via Darlington, some reached Barnard Castle 20 hours after they'd left Penrith.

By Tuesday, February 11, the men trying to clear the blockage were three miles further back than they'd been the previous Thursday; on February 17, the School of Military Engineering unsuccessfully carried out experiments using flame throwers.

The late Ken Hoole's book on the Stainmore Railway records that "jet engines" sent from the National Gas Turbine establishment, explosives from the army, manpower from across the north.

By March 7, parties digging from the east and west were just a mile apart - then it started snowing again.

Thereafter, the Echo - like the elements - appears to have left the poor locomotive stuck on the Cumberland/Co Durham border, up to its oxters in snow. It was Easter, says Maude, before they were able to free it. "I don't think they were able to use it again."

REPORTING the meticulous restoration of the class Q6 steam locomotive 63395, we said two weeks ago that the engin e had spent all its long working life based at Darlington.

Not so, says retired railwayman Bill Simpson from Barlby, near Selby, assigned to clean the Old Dear - one of 15 Q6s when he started at Selby shed in 1948.

It left Selby for Darlington in 1959, chuffered off to Consett in 1963 and to Sunderland two years later before being "withdrawn" - a railways euphemism, meaning condemned - in 1967.

Mr Simpson eventually became a fireman, but can't remember if he worked on 63395. "What I do remember," he says, "is that it wasn't half hard work."

TRAVELLING by train from Sheffield to Scotland, Stephen Gay picked up last week's column - a train trip in itself - and decided that it could be a vehicle for his upcoming talk to the North-East branch of the Railway Correspondence and Travel Society.

It's called Through Kirton Tunnel, a Railway Journey From Sheffield to Cleethorpes - and, hardly coincidentally, is also the title of his new book.

The talk's at Darlington Arts Centre on Saturday, May 28 at 7pm. Non-members are warmly welcomed, signed books available.