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LETTER of the MONTH

The advert from The Aeroplane 80 years ago featuring No 218 Squadron Stirling W7530 (left), and a picture of its crew.

Eighty years ago this month, e Aeroplane included an advert for Short Brothers which featured a Stirling I, W7530/Q-HA. As the son of the navigator on this Stirling, I thought your readers might be interested in the fate of the aircraft and its crew.

W7530 was built by Austin Motors at Longbridge and was fi rst delivered to No 218 Squadron at Marham, Norfolk on 8 May 1942. It was the replacement for Stirling R9313, which had crashed in Sussex on 5 May 1942 having been shot down in a ‘friendly fi re’ incident involving a Hurricane/Turbinlite Havoc combination based at Tangmere. ankfully, all the crew survived, although on the night of 20-21 June they were not so lucky.

W7530 departed Marham at 23.30hrs under the command of 40-year-old Sqn Ldr Harold Ashworth, joining 286 other bombers whose target was the German port of Emden. On the way back, the aircraft was intercepted by a German night fi ghter over the Netherlands and, despite the heroic eff orts of the crew, was shot down, eventually crashing in a fi eld at Wadway, north-west of Hoorn, a city north of Amsterdam.

Sadly, Ashworth and the upper gunner, 19-year-old Sgt William Watt, died in the crash, while the front gunner, 22-yearold Sgt William Whitehead, perished as his parachute failed to open. e remaining fi ve crew members bailed out successfully, including my late father Plt Off Alan Green, the navigator, who had just turned 22. After a couple of days spent hiding in a copse, supported by Dutch farmers, Alan made his way towards Amsterdam to meet the resistance, although he was arrested at a nearby tram station and became a PoW, eventually ending up in Stalag Luft III, famous for the ‘Wooden Horse’ and the ‘Great Escape’. Meanwhile, the other four crew members were quickly taken prisoner, the second pilot, Flt Lt Des Plunkett, and the wireless operator, Reg Attwood, also ending up in Stalag Luft III, while Sgts omas Mulroy and William Hayden, the rear gunner and fl ight engineer respectively, were sent to Camp 357.

Ashworth had been a celebrated civilian pilot before the war, having gained his licence in 1928 and competed in several air races; he was posthumously awarded the DFC in June 1943. Des Plunkett went on to play a major role in the ‘Great Escape’, fi rstly as the ‘map-maker’ and then as the 13th man out of the tunnel. He evaded capture for two weeks and travelled the furthest of all the British escapers, but was arrested on the Austrian border. Having suff ered weeks of torture and interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo in Prague, he was eventually sent to Stalag Luft I for the remainder of the war. is was my father’s 23rd mission and his 16th with Ashworth as captain, although they had in fact fl own together a total of 33 times on training and operational duties prior to this fateful night. My father’s

Bomber Command career started with seven missions on the Wellington, including the famous ‘Channel Dash’ in February 1942. He was involved in a number of notable raids, such as a top-secret mission to bomb the Skoda factory in Pilsen on 25-26 April 1942 (Operation ‘Canonbury’) and the fi rst thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, when his crew had AVM Baldwin on board W7530 as an observer. Having survived the ‘Long March’ in January/ February 1945, he ended up in another overcrowded camp near Berlin, before being liberated by the Russians and handed over to the US Army. Although he survived the war, its eff ects caught up with him, as he died suddenly on his 56th birthday in 1976.

In 2011, I started researching his story, starting with a trip to Stalag Luft III with my family. Later that year, I discovered there was a memorial on the crash site, which had only been built in 2010. A hastily arranged visit with my two sons led to a civic reception on our arrival, as we were the fi rst relatives of any of the crew to visit the memorial. Incredibly, I was introduced to the son of the farmer who had helped my dad and was then presented with pieces of his parachute harness which they had kept all these years, having found my dad’s parachute after his capture. Apparently, the parachute itself was used to make a wedding dress, a common practice during the German occupation.

On 21 June this year, I returned for the 80th anniversary of the loss of W7530. After visiting the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Bergen, where around 250 RAF crew are buried, to lay fl owers at the graves of the three crew who died, I went back to the memorial, where I was greeted by some local people and members of their remembrance committee, who are so respectful of the sacrifi ce and courage of the crew of W7530 and all the other men lost in Bomber Command in World War Two. Stuart Green I enjoyed the BAe 146 STA article (Aeroplane October 2022) very much. It’s always interesting to read about projects one has worked on and to reminisce. I was employed at BAe Hatfi eld throughout the 1980s, completing an apprenticeship and then moving into the reliability department that formed part of the safety and certifi cation group. I worked on the failure modes and eff ects analysis for the STA para door, which was designed and fi tted at Cranfi eld. I made a few visits there to review the FMEA work with one of their engineers. e door was an up-and-over arrangement; initially opening inwards, a bungee counterbalance assisted the lifting and lowering. It travelled on a (rather rough) track over the fuselage to stow upside-down on the opposite side of the fuselage in front of the rear service door. It wasn’t an easy operation, and even with the bungees it was a bit of an eff ort.

I’m pretty sure I took the accompanying photo at Farnborough in 1988. e arrangement was, very obviously, totally unsuitable for operations where rapid deployment was necessary. e picture shows the open para door in its stowed position and a Land Rover on board; I wonder how diffi cult it was to load. I think a strut was also required beneath the rear fuselage during loading and unloading. I once watched some army types wriggling a small six-wheeled utility vehicle on board one summer’s evening. Matt Southam, Hatfi eld, Hertfordshire

It was good to see the news item about the O/400 nose going on show at Stow Maries in the October edition of Aeroplane. Many thanks. I would like to point out, though, that as it is always important to have facts recorded correctly for future historians a number of points — as presented in the text — are somewhat misleading or incorrect. e photograph of the cockpit has the caption, “…although the padded seat covering didn’t originally come as standard”. is statement is not true. e original drawings for the O/400 have sheets devoted to the seating, giving full details of frame construction, springing, padding and covering. e original covering called up is of ‘black American cloth’ (an original type of the ‘leathercloth’ used today), also used for the cockpit coaming. e seat buttoning is as near as we could get to that shown on the drawings and as seen on the very few original photographs that show the seats in any detail. As these aircraft were built by a number of diff erent companies,

there may well, of course, have been variations in their fi nal appearance. But padded they were. e microfi lms used by the Paralyser Group are indeed from the original HP drawings, but they were produced by the Imperial War Museum (part of the consortium that saved the Handley Page archive material after the company ceased to exist in 1970) and copies bought from them at signifi cant cost in the 1980s. e original drawings may now be with the RAF Museum. We have also had other original drawings donated The BAe 146 STA’s side over the years and had access to the invaluable loading door was a tight O/400 drawings held by the Shuttleworth squeeze. Collection, which fi lled in much important detail. It is true that we have found no defi nite knowledge on manufacturing techniques used originally, and any information on that will be most welcome. All the steel brackets (mostly 14swg) for our replica nose structure were lasercut shaped blanks which we folded up using simple bending bars. e origin of the ‘Bloody Paralyser’ story is a mystery. In their day the O/100 and O/400 were ‘Handley Page biplanes’ or ‘Handley Page twins’ — never, ever ‘Bloody Paralysers’. e fi rst time any reference was made to this, that I know of, is in the book Forty Years On… issued by the company to its employees and others in 1949. ere are also variations on the story itself as to who coined the phrase, and how. Maybe one day a researcher will come across some original 191415 documentation to substantiate it. Bryan Bowen, chairman, The Paralyser Group

As one of those who took part in Short Sandringham VP-LVE’s pleasure fl ights (Flight Line, Aeroplane November 2022), it was nice to recall the trip and the hospitality of Charles Blair, Ron Gillies and Maureen O’Hara. Maureen made us cocktails from behind the spar bar, called Maureen O’Hara Specials. I remember them well. Charles invited us all to visit the cockpit and allowed us to stand on the navigation table and look through the astrodome at the Ring of Kerry. We also had a chance to sit in Maureen’s chair, which is still in position in the preserved Sandringham [at Solent Sky — Ed]. ere was an opportunity given to the public by Edward Hulton to visit his Sunderland conversion. It landed on the Pool of London, was towed through Tower Bridge and moored at an old pier alongside Potter’s Fields, on the Southwark side directly opposite the Tower of London. I visited on 14 August 1982. For a modest £1.50, you could go on board from the boarding fl oat and walk round the whole aircraft. As Denis Calvert says, the absence of an accredited conversion prohibited its passenger-carrying in the UK. Both visits were, each in their own way, the last of their kind for me. Robin Dawson

Watch out for a full feature on Sunderland G-BJHS, coming up in a forthcoming issue — Ed.