My father died in January 1944, when his Wellington crashed in the Peak District at Middleton-by-Youlgrave, near Bakewell whilst on a training flight.  All six crew members aboard were Australians.  I turned three on Anzac Day that year and my younger brother was only three months old.

I remember searching for his name on the wall of the Hall of Remembrance at the Australian War Memorial on an early visit, and being relieved to find it among the 4,600 or so who are listed as having died while serving with the RAF – a substantial number of the 10,562 Australian air personnel killed or listed as missing in WWII. (A previous paper recorded that 6,500 air deaths in Europe were combat losses and 5,100 were from training accidents.  The proportions were similar in all air forces).

I attended Oxford University worked in Oxford 1970-73 and during that time went to Adastral House and found that my father had been buried in the Commonwealth Airmen’s Cemetery at Chester, and I could then visit his grave.  I was a researcher, not a student – and the University was only part of the team.

In May 1995, I received a telephone call at my home in Brisbane.  The caller identified himself as a resident of Brisbane but the son of the Chairman of the Middleton-by-Youlgrave Parish in England where the crash occurred.  He said that his father had told him that the Parish wanted to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II by erecting a memorial to the young Australians who had died, and sought my approval for the project.

“Wonderful”, I said.  “What do the other families think?”

“We don’t know any other families” was the reply

I found that they had managed to track me because I had answered correspondence from various historians over the years, usually telling them that unfortunately I couldn’t assist or advance their research.

My mother and my uncle, both extant at the time, gave the project their blessing.

My first job was to get records and information, and then to find the other surviving next-of-kin.  It was comforting to see how complete the information was – matter-of-fact, handwritten notes listing next of kin, parents, date and place of birth, last known address, rank, serial number, place of burial, grave number.

Finding living relatives turned out to be much more difficult.  A genealogist suggested asking the papers to publish a letter, which I did.

The mail arrived, and kept coming.  I heard from the Secretary of the Wellington Association, who told the history of the aircraft – where it was produced (Chester), where it had served and been refitted.  A member of the Bomber Command Association in Sheffield offered similar information.  A man in Melbourne wrote to say that he had been a child in the village at the time of the crash and had been woken by the noise. He then cycled to the site in the morning with his friends.

Within a week the living next of kin of five of the six crew members had been found.  One surviving sister (of four) was tracked down to Adelaide, the two children of the only other married man (Melbourne and Hobart) the brother of one (Stanley, Tasmania), the brother and niece of another (Melbourne) and, of course, my own family.  The “last known address” proved useful – one family was found by knocking on doors in a the street in Brunswick, Melbourne which had been recorded some 52 years before.   Senseless with the indefinite article.  The street was the one which was recorded.

The remaining crew member was intriguing.  He had grown up with my father in Coorparoo, in Brisbane and my uncle recalled playing backyard cricket with him.  Our family had even  necessary? sold his family the land upon which their house was built.  He had gone with the AIF to Greece, been repatriated, joined the RAAF, and died with his childhood friend.  His brother had already been lost over Germany.  Later, I found his aunt, living at The Grange, in Brisbane.

My brother and his wife, myself and my wife, and the brother of the tail-gunner and his wife then went to England and were joined by a man who had graduated from the navigators’ course with my father at Cootamundra who remembered him from those days. 

The Middleton-by-Youlgrave Parish Chairman was wonderful.  A retired major-general, he had retrieved the crash report, which included the met. information and the training flight briefing, and which recorded the difficulties the crew had experienced with a faulty radio and poor oil pressure in one engine which involved changing aircraft and then changing it again. The delay in takeoff (which meant they flew alone and not in formation) and a closing weather system. 

Research into the crash had taken a year to complete.  He borrowed a light aircraft and photographed the route and the crash site.  The site, on high ground at a farm near the village, was well-known:  it is a small village and the event was chosen because it was the closest the village came to the hostilities. 

Another man collected information of the crew members provided by their families, for an exhibition.

The fellow navigator was interesting.  My father’s aircraft had not exploded or burnt when it crashed, and he remarked that someone must have activated the fire extinguishers because “otherwise, they always burned”.  His Stirling had crashed six months later.

On 20 August 1995, the close families had a short service at the crash site, with the Australian flag draped over the rebuilt stone wall.  The ash and oak trees between which the cockpit came to rest were still there.  The navigator brought the programme/menu from his graduation dinner in 1943, with my father’s signature on it.

Later we went back to the village, and dedicated the memorial.  It is a small cast bronze plaque with a picture of a Wellington, its number, the date of the crash, and the names, ranks, serial numbers and ages of the six crew, fixed to a stone monolith and located close to the edge of the school playground, so that it is visible from the road.  The citation reads “Erected by the Parish in August 1995, the 50th anniversary of the end of the War”

463-467 Squadrons (the Australian Lancaster squadrons in Bomber Command) sent a standard bearer.

At the party in the hall, a woman of my age presented me with a copper cylinder, about 350mm long and 70mm diameter.  It was a fire extinguisher from the aircraft, retrieved by the salvage crew and given to her father as a memento in appreciation for his assistance during their work.  The crash site was on his farm.  He had hoped to present it to me in person, but had died just two months previously.

Later, I found that our host has lost his father, a brigadier, in heroic circumstances in Burma.  His body was never recovered.  Some time after the end of the war, a young Japanese gentleman arrived at the village and presented him with a ceremonial doll.  He said that his father, also a high-ranking officer, had committed suicide upon learning of Japan’s surrender, but had charged his son to commission the making of the doll, and to present it to the son of “the bravest man I have ever known”

There is one other WWII memorial in the village – to those from the village who were killed in Burma and North Africa, also far from home.

My wife Gwenyth and I revisited the village in June 2005.  The memorial is wearing well and has thankfully not been vandalized.  The Parish Chairman and his wife both turned eighty in September.  They continue to live a stone’s throw from the school and no more than a mile from the crash site.  The number of names on the Parish Roll remains at 120.