How Volunteering Saved My Life…

Volunteering saved my life. It all started on 24^th August 2014, two Avro Lancasters and my natural curiosity led me to Google, and to learn that the Lincolnshire Bomber Command Centre was asking for volunteers.  My love of history and having grown up with stories from grandparents, how could I resist?

My first foray was to research the losses database, from which I discovered a renewed passion for World War 2 history and the people who had served. Both my grandfathers served, though neither in the RAF.  So, I actually blame Richard Todd and the Dam Busters movie for that.

Fascinated by history and learning that Bomber Command had been ignored and vilified after the war made me angry. I believe that anyone who serves their country is due respect. If volunteering at the IBCC could help right the wrong, then I was going to do it.

Once I had done the losses database the foundation for the centre, I began spreading my wings. One of these was interviewing veterans for the archives. What a pleasure and honour that was. Many-a-happy afternoon chatting with a veteran who didn’t believe that had anything to say. That their story was not of interest. Only to find a few hours later and they had told their entire life story.  Often having told stories and escapades that even their own family didn’t know about.

It was, and is, a lovely feeling knowing that I am helping to build a memorial and archive that can serve their memories for now and for future generations. What better way to learn history than to hear it from the people who were actually there? They are the ultimate storytellers of events that soon will become faded to many people. Too many generations between today and then.

I found the more I volunteered, in whatever capacity, the more addicted I got. The more I needed to know and learn. When I first began, I knew very little, now my nickname is ‘The Oracle’. I spend my days answering questions or solving genealogy puzzles.

Not only did I volunteer for the archives, but I needed my fix more often, and so began helping at events and functions. I was travelling a round-trip of 320 miles about every two months to be able to assist where possible, and when the opening came, I was here for a whole week. But with the opening came the knowledge that my volunteering days would be coming to an end. 

I was bereft and lost. I was still on contact with people at the archives and centre, but something was missing. So, on a whim, I ‘jokingly’ asked “Give us a job”. Two days later, they asked if I was serious, as it obviously meant moving to Lincolnshire from Essex. Nine weeks later, I had left my old job, moved to Lincolnshire and begun a job I could only dream about.

Now my days are spent front-of-house, meeting and talking to visitors and family to the centre. It is an utter pleasure and joy to be able to follow my dream through. It still feels like a dream. I have met wonderful people, heard amazing stories and had opportunities that I could never done before.

The volunteers I have worked with, and who are a massive part of the centre are amazing. They are a family who love the same things as I do. They are informative, friendly, supportive and fun. Life is pretty good now, and all because of Richard Todd and the two Lancaster’s.

Start your romance with the people who suffered and served with Bomber Command and listen to their extraordinary experiences here, on our Digital Archive

Want to find out about becoming a volunteer?  Click here

The Reluctant Researcher

Roughly 21 years ago in a previous life I was working as a mobile Surgical Chiropodist, most of that work involved seeing people over 75 on a regular basis. Several clients rapidly became friends as it’s hard not to sit for an hour in someone’s house and not hear part of their life stories. More often than not WW2 popped up in conversation, this was not a subject we’d covered more than briefly in school and not coming from a family with any military background or history it was an area I knew little if nothing about.

My main hobby at that time was amateur archaeology, and our local area did seem to have quite a lot of both known and unknown Roman activity, and I’d been involved in several local projects exploring and recording Roman sites. So, when one of my regular farmer clients announced he had boxes of fragments of Roman Pottery he’d picked up over a period of 50 years in his barn, and would I like to look at it, I couldn’t wait to get out there to have a look!

True to his word there were several large boxes of different size shards of amazing pottery, I was in my element, but he was more interested in a piece of metal on top of one of the boxes, it looked like a bit of old tractor to me!!!

He kept coming back to this piece of metal and in the end distracted my attention away from the pottery with a request, the village he lived in wanted to do a Millennium exhibition in the Church to mark historic events and he felt this piece of metal was important to the history and could I research it for him.

All he knew about it was it was part of wreckage from a WW2 accident on one of his fields. He had no idea of the date, just that it was winter, dark and very cold, he thinks there were 6/7 men killed as he’d had the terrible job of assisting the recovery team and he thought it was a Wellington.

With so little information to go on my only option was to read Chorley’s Bomber Command Loss books page by page….all of them….twice….as my first reading showed no Wellington’s lost there, and as Newark Air Museum found for me, the piece of wreckage was from a Lancaster. I can’t describe the emotions I experienced reading through those books, page after page of lists of names, I was shocked at my total ignorance of this event and humbled by some of the stories.

Along with a couple of others we did unpick the full story of Lancaster W4270 QR-T, although it took 11 years to find relatives for all the crew, we built a Memorial, and recorded a short film to tell their story, and I remember saying in the voice over how we wished all could be commemorated in such a similar way.

From that day on barely a day goes by when I don’t find/get a request for help, sadly the most common request is for photos and as my fellow researchers will know they are often the most difficult to find, I always hope that we can trace other crew members relatives who may just have one. So, from really not being at all interested in Bomber Command research it is now very much part of my daily life, still with probably only a 50% success rate, but hundreds if not thousands researched, but like many other similar researchers I now
know some of the first places to look!

This is why to me the IBCC is so important, the walls and Memorial are wonderful, a fitting tribute, but to me the importance is it has created a fantastic free to use and easily accessible research resource where families can send copies of any crew photos/documents, any research we do now as time move on needs recording if future generations are to be able to access and learn from it.

To search the archive click here

To find out more about the IBCC and how you can support our work please click here

As a volunteer Tour Guide at the International Bomber Command Centre I am very aware of the need for fund raising for the centre.  Therefore on April 23^rd 2020 I intend to replicate the Land’s End to John O’ Groats cycle ride I undertook 47 years ago to the day.

As you can imagine there are now new challenges attached to it – age is one, I’m not getting any younger and the fact that the majority of today’s A class roads, if not all, are now too dangerous to utilise.

What hasn’t changed, except for running repairs because parts are difficult to obtain, is the bike.  I will be using the same Claud Butler that has transported me thousands of miles over the last 50 years. It normally doesn’t come out if it’s raining now!

To give you a little background to how all this came about I have to go back to 1972. I owned a rather tired looking B.S.A. pushbike whilst stationed at RAF Thorney Island on the Hampshire coast. As my RAF mates kept reminding me at the time that the initials stood for Bits Stuck Anywhere I thought I would upgrade.

So I gave it away and bought a second hand Claud Butler for £14 and stripped it down and rebuilt it in the confines of my barrack block bed space at the base. Problems occurred every time there was a C.O.’s room inspection as I had to hide various parts in wardrobes and lockers.  I had previous history in this department as 12 months prior I had done exactly the same restoring a tandem – now that was difficult to camouflage.

Once the bike was complete word soon spread of my desire to do an End to End as a solo challenge. But you can’t do anything quietly on a RAF camp and within days I had a riding companion and a 2 man crew towing the Station Commander’s caravan.

The trip was made official and completed in six and a half days and a cheque was presented to the Sunshine Home for the Blind in East Grinstead.

Winding the clock forward now to October 2019 and a thought kept surfacing as to whether it could be done again as it approached the 50^th anniversary. Mentioning it to my son brought the response ‘Well if you are going to do it, do it before it’s too late.’ Never has he said a truer word as three years ago I underwent a major 5 hour operation for prostate cancer – but that’s another story.

So on Wednesday 23^rd April 2020 the pushbike will be wheeled out – it had better not be raining!- and using country lanes , B class roads and GPS we will see together whether we can add another thousand miles to the clock.

To follow Roger’s story and other blogs please click here

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The Squadron Apple

Raised by Doug Campion and planted at Easton Walled Gardens, Lincolnshire.

In 2002, right at the beginning of the restoration of Easton Walled Gardens, the phone rang.  It was Doug Campion, a neighbour from Colsterworth and a keen amateur tree grower asking if I would like any trees. Of course, I said Yes. Despite being in his 90s, he helped me plant an oak and a walnut. Then, one day, Doug arrived with a small apple tree he had grown from a pip. We planted it together and waited.

The first fruits soon came and much to our surprise they were good. Large, firm, yellow-green apples festooned the tree in October and November. It looked like this new variety was a keeper. Each year, the tree continued to grow and produce fine, healthy crops.

What should we call it? Doug was proud to have been a RAF engineer and my grandfather had been in 12 Squadron during WW2 and flown Lancasters and Wellingtons from sites across Lincolnshire. After two years of flying missions, his flight navigator recorded in his log book: ‘Pilots’ 21^st birthday.’  He met my grandmother while she was serving in the WAAF and they were married for over 50 years.

Meanwhile in Lincoln, Tony Worth was coordinating an international drive to commemorate those in Bomber Command who had fallen. At an inaugural fundraising event surrounded by a Lancaster, veterans and young airmen and women, it seemed obvious to me that we should honour those who had risked and given so much. After some discussion, we called it ‘The Squadron Apple.’

But we only had one tree. Apple varieties have to be cloned to keep them true which means taking a small piece of wood (‘the scion’) from the parent tree and grafting it on to a new rootstock. The first year produced rather scrappy results (none of the gardening team at Easton had ever tried to propagate trees like this before) but in 2018 we made some good clean unions and began to keep a small stock of these trees for RAF commemorations.  The newly finished International Bomber Command Centre found out about our offer and on 30 January 2020 we delivered three trees to site manager, Roger Williams. The trees will be planted in the grounds in the next few weeks. Eventually they hope to make crumbles for visitors to the restaurant using their own apples.

To find out more about the Easton Walled Gardens visiteaston.co.uk

A Passion for Memorials – From a very young age, I have always had an interest in the exploits of Bomber Command and during my thirty-year long RAF Career I was fortunate and privileged enough to have both served on several former Bomber Command airfields and also a former Bomber Command Sqn itself. Even more so, I had the unique privilege of meeting several veterans and listened to their stories with great interest. Of note, Wherever I have been posted to, my “library” of Bomber Command related books always came with me and for “inexplicable reasons” has always expanded in the process!

Some ten years ago, I was based at RAF Benson, Oxfordshire, serving on 78 Sqn (a former 4 Whitley and later Halifax Sqn of 4 Gp Bomber Command) Towards the end of my three-year tour, I re-read Martin Middlebrook’s epic work “The Nuremburg Raid” and concurrently also became aware of the existence of a memorial to a Halifax that crashed in the Chilterns Hills with the loss of all its crew on its return from the infamous raid of the night of 30^th – 31^st  March 1944.

Noting that the location of this memorial was less than thirty minutes away from Benson, on my next free week-end I drove to the site with the intention of just visiting it.  There then followed at least an hour of wandering aimlessly round in varying sized circles in the depths of Cowleaze Wood before I literally stumbled onto the memorial. Pausing to read the names and remember the seven crew who died at this site, I simply decided to take a couple of photos of it . . .

This specific aircraft, 51 Sqn Halifax LW579 MH-V, was the last of no fewer than six Halifax’s lost by 51 Sqn on this Op. As it turned out it appears that this aircraft was highly likely to be attempting to make an emergency landing at Benson when it was lost.

On return to Benson, I then wondered just how many other Bomber Command memorials existed in the local area. After several hours of pre planning routes and researching each of the individual back stories, I began to venture out again on subsequent weekend to visit increasingly more memorials sites. Fairly rapidly, one memorial became two, and after ten years of work on the subject, several memorials eventually became an awful lot more!

For information on the crew of LW579,  please click here

To read more about Tony’s search and some of the stories behind the memorials see our Blog Space

Main image:

Memorial Stone in Cowleaze Wood, on the Buckinghamshire / Oxfordshire county boundary remembers the crew of 51 Sqn Halifax LW579 MH-V who were killed here on the night of 30-31/03/44

This was the first memorial I visited in 2010. These particular images were taken during a return visit in 2019 – and I managed get lost on the second visit as well!

Tony Hibberd, IBCC Memorials Archivist

Brocklesby Lancaster crash

Wednesday 4th March 2020

As well as being a Volunteer Tour Guide at the IBCC, I’m also a member of the 44(Rhodesia) Sqn Association.  I flew on 44 (R) Sqn from 77 to 82, during the Vulcan era, and became an Association member as it was formed when the Sqn was disbanded in the mid-80’s.  It was through this connection that I became involved in the 75th Anniversary commemoration of the crash of Lancaster ME442 of 44 (R) Sqn at Brocklesby on 4 March 1945.

44 (R) Sqn Association was contacted some months ago by Garry Mahon, who is a nephew of Fg Off John “Jack” Ryan, the RAAF Captain of the ME442 on that fateful day in 1945.  Garry was attempting to organise a 75^th Anniversary commemoration, to mirror the 50^th Anniversary commemoration in 1995, and sought the Association’s help.  With the Association’s Chairman – Gp Capt (Retd) John Laycock and Secretary – Sqn Ldr Henry Horscoft’s help, Garry made contact with Lord Yarborough’s Brocklesby Estate Office and Flt Lt Terry Marsden RAFVR (Retd), the local RAFA representative at Kirmington.  With Lord Yarborough’s kind permission (as the woods are not normally open to the public at this time of year), Flt Lt Marsden’s terrific support and everyone involved pulling together, the event was organised for Wednesday 4^th March at 11:00 at the crash site Memorial located in Brocklesby Mausoleum Woods.  At this point, as neither John Laycock or Henry Horscroft could attend the memorial service in the woods, due to ill health and the rough terrain in the woods, I was asked if I would represent the Association and was only then told I would have to make the introduction on the day! However, with Peter Jones support from the IBCC digital archive, writing the introduction became an easy task.

There was 8 of Fg Off Jack Ryan’s relatives in Garry Mahon’s party travelling from Australia and they also wanted to visit the IBCC during their visit to the UK, so I arranged to host them at the IBCC on Tues 3^rd March.  They were all very impressed with the Centre and felt it was a very fitting tribute and memorial to all of the Bomber Command men and women who lost their lives.

So to the event itself on the 4^th March.  It started in the car park in Great Limber village at 10:00, following an early morning drive over the Lincolnshire Wolds.  We were transported to the Memorial site, via a rough woodland track, in what can only be described as an agricultural trailer with seats down the sides, pulled by a 4-wheel drive.  Luckily the crash site Memorial, deep in Brocklesby Woods, was bathed in warm early Spring sunshine.   There were probably about 50 people at the commemoration as, in addition to the 8 Australians, there were also many family representatives from 5 of the 6 RAFVR crew members of the crashed Lancaster, who had made the journey from all over the UK to be there.  The RAF and RAAF also sent representatives, Barry Wallis represented the IBCC and the Earl of Yarborough also attended.  Following my introduction, the Act of Remembrance was led by Rev Lee Gabel and Flt Lt Terry Marsden RAFVR (Retd) and included prayers, exhortation by Garry Mahon, the Last Post, 2 minutes silence and Reveille followed by laying of crosses by the relatives of the crew members and the other organisations present.  The commemoration ran exactly as planned and everyone, including Lord Yarborough, were very moved, and said it was a fitting tribute to brave crew who lost their lives at Brocklesby Woods 75 years ago.

Following the Memorial Service, we all met up at the Marrowbone & Cleaver pub (the one owned by Guy Martin) in Kirmington for lunch, which gave us all an opportunity socialise with all the families of the crew.  Overall it was a lovely day which both my wife and I will long remember.  A list of the crew members of ME442 and copy of my introduction are printed below.  Also attached are pictures of the commemoration at the crash site and some pictures of the Australian visit to the IBCC on the 3^rd March 20:

The Crew of Avro Lancaster ME442 – click on the names to see more information on each man from the IBCC Losses Database:

Fg. Off. John Ryan Pilot RAAF 

Sgt. Thomas. Jarman Engineer RAFVR

Flt.Sgt. Richard Russell Navigator RAFVR

Flt. Sgt. Hubert Terry Air Bomber RAFVR

Sgt. Harry Birch Wireless Op RAFVR

Sgt. Herbert Payne Air Gunner RAFVR

Sgt. William Rogan Air Gunner RAFVR 

For other stories and news see our Blog Space here

 INTRODUCTION BY WG CDR (RETD) PHIL DAVIES REPRESENTING 44 (RHODESIA) SQUADRON ASSOCIATION:

Lord Yarborough, Ladies and Gentlemen.

We are gathered here today to commemorate the lives, bravery and camaraderie of the seven 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron aircrew who flew Lancaster ME442, which crashed here 75 years ago today, in the early hours of the 4^th March 1945.

At 18:42 on the evening of the 3^rd March 1945 – the 2,000th night of the Second World War – their Mk 3 Avro Lancaster, coded KM-V, took off from RAF Spilsby, under the command of Flying Officer Jack Ryan of the Royal Australian Air Force, along with his six Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve crew.  They joined a raid consisting of 212 Lancasters and 10 Mosquitoes of 5 Group, to attack the Ladbergen aqueducts, part of the Dortmund – Ems canal.  The raid was successful, over 100 metres of canal bank was destroyed and both aqueducts were in ruins, putting the canal completely out of action for the rest of the war.

As they returned to their Lincolnshire air base, Flying Officer Ryan’s aircraft was intercepted by a Junkers 88C night fighter.  This was the first night of the Luftwaffe’s Operation GISELA, a new tactic by the Germans, whereby instead of attacking our bombers on their outward run, they targeted them as they returned home.  Approximately 200 German night fighters prowled the night skies over England, lying in wait for the returning bombers, attacking either as they landed or were circling in readiness to land.

Sadly, Flying Officer Ryan’s aircraft was shot down by the night fighter and crashed in flames at approximately 1AM in the morning on the 4^th March 1945, tragically killing all seven crew members as it came to rest against this tree.

On behalf of 44(Rhodesia) Sqn Association, and all those who have served on the Squadron over the last 75 years, we salute this crew’s bravery, dedication to duty and ultimate sacrifice.  We will always remember them.