Shropshire Routes to Roots

2b. Aircraft crashes: Handley Page Hampden crashes at Llynclys Hill

On Wednesday, 30 October 1941, a Handley Page Hampden I, P1294, from N° 14 OTU, Cottesmore, had just cleared the Berwyns. The weather was bad with heavy rain, poor visibility, low cloud base with and a bit of turbulence over Llansilin - Trefonen hill country. The pilot had just been given a corrected course for the final leg into the Rutland airfield, when suddenly for some unknown reason control was lost and the Hampden dived into the ground on the eastern slope of Llynclys Hill just short of the 'White Lion' crossroads.

Ken Southern, now of Wolverhampton, and Edward Lewis, Oswestry, had finished work early because of the weather and were cycling home along the B4396 Knockin road from Kinnerley, where the army camp, WD storage depots and military railway were being built. They take up the story:

We had just left Knockin when we saw a pall of smoke rising from just beyond The Cross at Llynclys. We pedalled like mad and soon could see the flames. We threw our bikes into the hedge and ran through the gate in the field. What a sight met us - the skeletal remains of a large bomber burning fiercely like the fire of hell. The tail unit, still largely intact was caught up in the high- tension cables which ran across the field in its flight-path. Whether it was trying to make an emergency landing we don't know. It might have been lost and had descended through the cloud to find its position.

A young farm worker was frantically running up the field with a large chain, followed by Tom Tudor, the farmer, who sank to the ground, out of breath. As we turned towards the aircraft the burning fuselage just collapsed. It was obviously too late to do anything for the crew. The horses were reluctant to go nearer the flames and did not budge. The fire service arrived from Oswestry and started to bring the fire under control. It would be just turned 2.30pm. They managed to extract the charred bodies from the smouldering wreck and laid them out in a neat line just yards away from their aircraft. All were so badly burnt that they just looked like hawthorn branches. The whole area was covered in aircraft bits, and there was a large hole in the hedge where the nose of the Hampden had gone through and burnt out.

As we did not actually see the crash, we asked Tom Hughes, the young farm lad, who came from Llanrhaeadr, what had happened. He was ploughing a field just beyond the crossroads and was turning the team ready to start climbing up the field when he heard an aircraft approaching low from the direction of Sweeney Mountain. The noise grew louder and his horses started to get agitated. The time was about 2pm. Then to his horror the black shape of a large aeroplane loomed out of the mist to his right, clipped the trees on the bank above the old quarry and roared towards him in the field, over the roofs of Llynclys Farm, over the hedge and ploughed across the field until suddenly halted by the line of high tension wires half-way across the field. Its nose made a large furrow in the earth until it buried itself as the huge mass reared up into the air and came to a standstill, the tail end snared up in the wires high above the ground.

As the dust started to settle he cautiously approached the wreck with the horses. He could hear a man screaming in the tail section and the smell of aviation fuel was overpowering. Other people were quickly on the scene but could do nothing to help the man shouting in the aircraft. The young lad said he would go and get a longer chain from the farm to try and drag the doors open. He was on his way back when he heard a loud explosion and saw a large column of thick, black smoke rising over the hedge. He came back on the field and the rest is as we have told it. The plane had blown up, possibly a spark from the electric cables. Nothing could be done for the crew.

Tight censorship meant that the loss of Hampden P1294 went unrecorded in the local newspapers, with not even a report of the funerals of the crew -

Source: Pratt, Derrick & Grant, Mike (2002) Wings across the Border Vol 2. Bridge Books, Wrexham. pp 81- 83