Category Archives: Film & TV

by | December 5, 2023 · 6:17 am

The Murder of Leslie Howard (6)

Leslie Howard was such a Hollywood star that we always think that he was the sole cause of  the BOAC airliner “Ibis” being shot down. The aircraft was actually owned by the Dutch, hence the flag on the top of the fuselage. I don’t quite understand how or why, but somehow BOAC were using a foreign airliner to fly some of their run-of-the-mill European trips, and the aircraft remained, throughout, Dutch property with an all-Dutch crew:

Could any of the other people on the plane, though, be the reason for the unexpected arrival of those eight heavy German Ju-88 fighters?

Perhaps the BOAC aircraft was destroyed because of Wilfrid Jacob Berthold Israel, a supposed British secret agent and a prominent Zionist, who was engaged in making sure that Jewish refugees could leave Spain and Portugal without difficulty to go to their rightful homeland. So far, he had helped 1500 of them, many of them children, to go there. Supposedly, Wilfrid had recently presented to the British government a very important proposal to solve the problem of getting Jewish refugees out of Europe to their homeland in Palestine. He was on his way to discuss increasing this exodus with Government ministers in London.  Here’s Wilfrid:

Perhaps the reason for the plane’s destruction was Ivan James Sharp, a mining engineer.  He was working for the British Government to offer the Portuguese and Spanish top prices for their tungsten, a hard, rare, metal used to produce various alloys and steels for weapon production. Also called “wolfram”, it was indispensable if you intended to manufacture armaments. Sharp had been trying to buy up 100% of the tungsten produced by Spain and Portugal. He was on his way to an important meeting at the Ministry of Economic Warfare.  I couldn’t find a picture of Ivan, but he began his career at the Camborne School of Mining in West Cornwall. They have a lovely example of a modern coat cof arms:

Perhaps the plane was destroyed because of Tyrrell Mildmay Shervington. Outwardly he was the Lisbon manager of the Shell-Mex oil company but, in the shadowy world of espionage, he was supposedly an agent of the Special Operations Executive. He was deeply involved in all of its many machinations across both Spain and Portugal and, according to some, he was the Head of the Lisbon Office.

Perhaps the plane was destroyed because of Francis German Cowlrick, a 67 year old civil engineer. He had worked for Babcock and Wilcox since 1905. Babcock and Wilcox made steam boilers, piping for steam, water tube boilers and welded pressure vessels, in short, as they said in an advertisement in 1937, “Everything for the Boiler House, including Valves”. They also produced electric cranes and pressed steel forgings. They manufactured munitions and tanks and boilers for Royal Navy warships. Mr Cowlrick was the manager and chief engineer for the company in Spain and Portugal. He was personally responsible for the designing and erection of a number of impressively large steam-generating plants in Lisbon, Madrid and half a hundred other places in Iberia. On this particular day he was travelling on behalf of the British Department of Overseas Trade. Here is one of the huge number of  Babcock and Wilcox factories which are situated all over the world. They are a truly gigantic, global concern:

Most of ther other passengers were ostensibly much more innocent. There was Mrs Rotha Violet Lettie Hutcheon and her two daughters, Petra Hutcheon, aged eleven, and Carolina Hutcheon, a baby some eighteen months old. Mrs Hutcheon was flying to rejoin her husband Allen, in England where he was a staff officer in the Imperial General Staff.

Mrs Cecelia Emilia Falla Paton was travelling back to England to start a new post as a secretary. She was the wife of James Paton of 53 Ullswater Road, Flixton in Greater Manchester. Kenneth Stonehouse, a British journalist, was working as the Reuters correspondent in Washington DC. He was accompanied by his wife Evelyn Peggy Margetts Stonehouse.

There were certainly no tourists in the aircraft. Everybody seems to have had a specific reason for being on board the “Ibis”.

It  is even possible to argue that the entire event was completely accidental. There doesn’t always have to be a conspiracy theory to explain everything that happens to famous people such as Leslie Howard.

For example, was it actually normal for the Luftwaffe’s Junkers  Ju88 fighters to patrol the Bay of Biscay in small groups? Were they so frightened of the RAF’s formidably powerful Bristol Beaufighter?

Or were the Germans still haunted by the bogey man of their worst nightmares, Das Fliegende Schtachelschwein?

Or perhaps we should accept as the true, the story told by the senior officer in the German fighter formation, Oberleutnant Herbert Heintze, who said that he had decided to shoot the plane down before the eight German aircraft ran out of fuel? Do you accept his word that they thought it was a bona fide warplane? After all, the DC-3 was camouflaged like a military aircraft. Why was the aircraft not silver or white? After all, it was an airliner. Why did it not have neutral markings? A green cross on a white circle. Why no Portuguese or Dutch insignia? One further complaint from German pilots was that their Luftwaffe superiors knew very well that this airliner made a regular flight from Portugal to England but they had not bothered to tell them. If they had known this, Heintze said, they would not have shot the aircraft down but they would have escorted it back to their own base in France. Whatever the solution, BOAC issued the following statement:

“The British Overseas Airways Corporation regrets to announce that a civil aircraft on passage between Lisbon and the United Kingdom is overdue and presumed lost. The last message received from the aircraft stated that it was being attacked by an enemy aircraft. The aircraft carried 13 passengers and crew of four. Next of kin have been informed.”

 

 

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by | November 17, 2023 · 6:17 am

The Murder of Leslie Howard (5)

Last time, I tried to show you some of the marvellous speeches and wonderful films that Leslie Howard created to defend Democracy and Freedom against the German onslaught. I do know if any of you actually watched any of the recommended titles, but keep your eyes open for them on TV. Howard truly was a very gifted man.

Among his films, don’t forget “49th Parallel”, the horrendous tale of a U-boat whose crew members are forced to abandon it on the southern shore of the Hudson’s Bay in Canada and then make their way southwards to the USA. I will never forget the scene where the Germans slaughter the peaceful Inuits of a village they come across, just because the Inuits are not of the same race as themselves. Here’s a link to the complete film :

To whet your appetiote, here’s the film’s official trailer :

This is a very strong film. It was directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and the main parts were played by Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Anton Walbrook, Raymond Massey, Glynis Johns and Eric Portman. The film editing was by David Lean and the music came from Ralph Vaughan Williams. One detail that I particularly enjoyed was that :

“For the scene where the Hutterite community listens to Eric Portman’s impassioned pro-Nazi speech, the actors had to be all “hand picked faces”. Over half were refugees from Hitler.”

That says it all about the appeal of Nazism and racism.

Leslie Howard had done amazingly well with his films to defend Democracy and Freedom against the Germans. The Germans, of course, had long decided that Howard had to die.

The American-born traitor, William Joyce, who, as Lord Haw-Haw, broadcast on German propaganda radio to Britain, had even promised on the radio that Goebbels was personally going to have him shot. And Goebbels himself had made the same threats in “Der Angriff”, his own personal propaganda newspaper. Goebbels was not happy that Leslie had both directed and starred in, not just the anti-Nazi “49th Parallel” and “’Pimpernel’ Smith” but also in “The First of the Few”. He called Leslie, among many other things,

“Britain’s most dangerous propagandist.”

He viewed Howard as an irritant, a source of pain and, perhaps, a source of infection for Nazism, and a source, even, of death for German bigotry.

Linked with this is the theory that Chenhalls, Howard’s business manager, had negotiated a huge deal with the Portuguese and Spanish film industries. Vast numbers of English films were to be sold directly to companies in those two countries. All of the proceeds would then be spent on making new propaganda films.

Further to this, it has long been thought that both Leslie Howard and Alfred Chenhalls may have been British secret agents.

They were supposedly on the “Ibis” in the first place because they were returning from a job in Spain, whereby Howard had carried a top secret message from Churchill to Generalissimo Franco, trying to persuade Franco to stay neutral, not to join Hitler as an ally and not to close the Mediterranean to the British and thereby sever permanently their links to both India and Australia. And for this anti-German meddling, Hitler had decided that Howard had to die. Here’s Franco, whose first name was not either “Frank” and certainly not “Franco”. It was “Generalissimo” :

Those ideas about the real reason for the destruction of DC-3 Dakota “Ibis”, though, are just the beginning. There are lots and lots and lots more. So, let’s take a quick look at some of them……

Hitler did not like the fact that Leslie Howard had been working hard to win over the neutral Portuguese, trying to get them to allow the Allies to use the Azores for air and naval bases in the U-boat war. For this, he had to die.

Leslie Howard was merely an ordinary run-of-the-mill spy. For this, he had to die.

Leslie Howard was working hard at fundraising for the war. He was, given his mother’s background, a fluent German speaker and was turning out anti-Nazi programmes for the radio. For this, he had to die.

The presence of Howard and Chenhalls on that DC-3 saved the lives of seven year old Derek Partridge and his friend, the two little boys who were put off the aircraft to make room for the two important latecomers, Howard and Chenhalls. Several crewmembers immediately came to the door of the airliner and asked them to get off. As they left the aircraft, young Derek could not fail to see several aircraft with German markings parked around the airfield. He could see even more of them from the terminal building when he got back there. According to Derek, the BOAC aircraft was supposed to leave at 9.30 am but Howard was late. He was buying silk stockings at the departure lounge as a gift for a lady friend. They finally left at 9.35 am. Ironically that five minutes was fatal. It meant that the DC-3 ran into the eight German fighters. If they had taken off as planned, they wouldn’t have. The cruising speed of a Dakota is around 210 mph. In five or so minutes therefore, it covers just under twenty miles. If the DC-3 and the eight German fighters had been even fifteen miles apart, neither party would have seen the other. No lives would have been lost.

We may have a very long wait for the truth. Certain papers about the flight will be secret until 2025. Other papers which were due to be declassified in 1980 were not released and will now remain classified until January 2056. I’ll see you then!

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by | November 5, 2023 · 6:17 am

The Murder of Leslie Howard (4)

Last time I showed you a whole selection of what could be called “mistaken identity” conspiracy theories. Leslie Howard was erroneously identified therefore by the German intelligence service, the “Abwehr”, as Harold Thompson, Churchill’s bodygard.

Here’s Leslie Howard, in the wonderful anti-war play by RC Sheriff, “Journey’s End”…..

And here’s Harold Thompson (on the right), a man who was frequently appalled by Churchill’s apparently total disregard for his own safety. The best example of that was when Churchill stopped his staff car in Hyde Park and jumped out, armed with a Colt revolver, to do battle with the three members of the Irish Republican Army who were trying to assassinate him…….

……..sometimes Leslie Howard was identified as Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, despite the biggest hairy caterpillar in the world, that he had trained to cling to his top lip, irrespective of weather conditions…….

Sometimes the Germans confused Leslie Howard with Reginald Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfire, and in the grave for the past six years :

And,  an Old Boy of Nottingham High School, Alfred Chenhalls, Leslie Howard’s business manager, was repeatedly thought to be Winston Churchill. Bald, cigar smoking and fond of whisky, who else could it be?

Another rather different theory suggests that Leslie Howard rather than Churchill, was the real target of those eight Luftwaffe aircraft. By now, Howard had become a hard core enemy of the Third Reich, reverting back to his origins as……

“a Jew who was a ferocious and prominent critic of Nazism”

By 1943, Howard frequently expressed himself much more actively than merely speaking up occasionally in interviews.

Indeed, he was soon not just starring in anti-German propaganda films, but he was directing and producing them himself, using as much of his own money as he dared.

On one occasion, his royalties from “Gone with the Wind” paid for his anti-Nazi productions. And in those movies, Howard did not hesitate to name and shame. In one film, he speaks of the Germans’ plans for the rest of Mankind, the people who had suffered the dreadful fate of not being born German. Howard was sure that Hitler would destroy for ever the political systems they had adopted…….

“Every day reveals the utter and desperate determination to smash us to bits, root and branch and to wipe out every trace of democracy.”

But……

“we are better than them”

In 1941, Howard made a fifteen minute film entitled “From the Four Corners” (1941). This is a still from it:

And here is a speech that may well make the hair stand up on the back of your neck :

“And so our fathers’ minds crept along and their ideas of justice and tolerance and the rights of man took shape in the sunlight and the smoke, sometimes standing still, sometimes even slipping back, but slowly broadening with the centuries. Some of those ideas are written down in the constitutions of our commonwealth and some are unwritten. We just try and carry them in our hearts and in our minds. Perhaps the men who came nearest to putting them into words were those Americans, many of them the sons of British pioneers, who, founding an independent nation, proclaimed:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those words and that spirit were born and nourished here, and your fathers carried them to the ends of the earth. They are our inheritance from the past, our legacy to the future. That’s why you came here – to defend them.”

Here is a link to the complete film. It is fifteen minutes that may well reaffirm your faith in good old fashioned democracy:

In “Pimpernel Smith”, he discusses Nazi philosophy with the film’s head of the SS,  who has just captured Howard, the man who has helped countless political prisoners to escape from Germany:

“von Graum : Why do I talk to you? You are a dead man.

Smith : May a dead man say a few words to you for your enlightenment?

You will never rule the world, because you are doomed. All of you who have demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed. Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back. You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another, leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred. And still you will have to go on, because you will find no horizon, and see no dawn, until at last you are lost and destroyed. You are doomed, captain of murderers. And one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words…”

You can watch the complete film of “Pimpernel Smith” if you click on this link :

Having said that, the film is so good that you may wish to buy a much better quality DVD of it for around £10.

Like millions of people in the world, Leslie Howard had little reason to love the Germans, but, as a Jew, the appalling anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis in the 1930s really sealed the deal.

Howard wrote: “Britain’s destiny has been to uphold tolerance in religion, thought, speech, and race–– the mainspring of democracy. We have still far to travel on the road to true democracy, but only the Germans have made no progress in this direction. Britain, with her great gifts has helped populate five continents and shown that the white man and the coloured man can live in peace together.”

Few of us, more than eighty years later, would quarrel with those sentiments.

 

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by | October 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

The Murder of Leslie Howard (3)

Last time we were looking at how the airliner in which Leslie Howard, the film star, was returning to England, was shot down in the Bay of Biscay by the German Luftwaffe, resulting in the deaths of every single person on board, including the children. Here is some of Leslie Howard’s best work, taken from the now controversial “Gone with the Wind” :

 

Since that first day of June 1943, there have been literally scores of theories put forward as to why Leslie Howard and the rest of the civilian passengers and crew of the DC-3 “Ibis” were all murdered in this callous fashion. Shot down into the waters of the cold Atlantic Ocean, while travelling to England in an aircraft which was unarmed and the property of a neutral country, namely the Netherlands. And this attack was clearly directed at somebody, because the attackers were eight Junkers Heavy Fighters, armed to the teeth and clearly, sent specifically to destroy this inoffensive DC-3 Dakota.

Leslie Howard’s business manager, Alfred Chenhalls was a fat, bald man who loved to smoke cigars and who occasionally drank alcohol in sensible quantities. It was extremely easy to mistake him for Winston Churchill. What do you think ? Did a German spy see Chenhalls get on the plane and immediatelyt telephone the German Embassy in Lisbon?

Which one is this?  Churchill or Chenhalls?

And is this the Prime Minister or a party going bon viveur, who liked nothing better than drinking the very best whisky in large quantities?

“Two bottles for each of us, barman !!! “

As we have seen elsewhere, Leslie Howard was not an English landowning gentleman, but a Hungarian Jew. He supposedly resembled Churchill’s bodyguard, Detective Inspector Walter Thompson. Similarly, Detective Inspector Thompson had the air of an archetypal English gentleman, self assured, self confident, upper class and, most of all, slim. Here’s Leslie Howard:

And here’s Walter Thompson, on the right:

There are other theories, of course.

How valid is the theory, though, that Leslie Howard was supposedly the virtual double of Sir Anthony Eden, England’s Foreign Secretary at the time? Here’s Eden at the age of around twenty, as a student at Oxford University……….

There is though, a bit of a giveaway which is tremendously helpful in any “Pick-out-Anthony-Eden” competition. The real Anthony Eden, for his entire adult life, had that stonking great moustache which he fixed into his nostrils at seven o’clock every morning and then didn’t take off until midnight.

And what about the idea, quite widespread at the time apparently, that the Germans thought that Leslie Howard and Reginald Mitchell, designer of the legendary Spitfire, were one and the same man? Leslie Howard we have already seen, and here’s the designer of what began its life as the Supermarine Shrew :

In my mind, the best fit is “Churchill and Thompson v Howard and Chenhalls”.  And we must not forget that the only images of Churchill or Leslie Howard seen by most of the attendees of the Dakota’s take-off from London would have been either crudely printed photographs from newspapers or perhaps slightly better quality pictures from magazines. Moving pictures would have been from Howard’s films, or for Churchill , the two minute Pathé News films shown in cinemas during the interval. In other words, confusion was a great deal easier in 1943 than it was in 2023.

It was by no means a completely ridiculous idea, therefore, to suggest that “Churchill–Chenhalls” was on that plane from Lisbon. And for the Germans, it was well worth organising an attempt to shoot down the plane, even if the Prime Minister was supposedly at an important conference in Algiers.

How easy it would have been to alert Berlin, who could then have contacted the fighter base, probably at Mérignac near Bordeaux in southern France, and then telling those eight Junkers Ju88C-6 heavy fighters to take off and intercept the DC-3. Such attacks were in actual fact very rare in the Bay of Biscay, so this particular Luftwaffe operation must surely have been for a specific reason, and for a specific and important target.

And now a whole second level of conspiracy theories swings into action. Perhaps British Intelligence invented the entire story of Churchill’s being on board “Ibis” that day, so that he could fly back home to England in his own private aeroplane, an Avro York. Here’s an excellent short film giving you all the relevant facts about the Avro York, which was basically a different fuselage, set on a pair of Lancaster wings:

 

There were plenty of people who believed this story that British Intelligence had told the Germans that Churchill was returning to England in the DC-3 that particular day, and that he would be refuelling near Lisbon. In this way, his Avro York would be able to return to London in peace, even if the Dakota finished up in pieces.

And so it goes on, round and round in ever decreasing circles with very little beyond well informed guesswork and random supposition. These are certainly very far from being guaranteed truths.

In 1943, the earliest rumours to surface were that “bon viveur” Alfred Chenhalls had actually been mistaken for Churchill by German agents as he walked out to the plane in Lisbon. Furthermore, this explanation is known to have been the one favoured by Churchill himself. At the same time, though, Churchill was certainly puzzled as to how German intelligence could possibly believe that he, with all the resources of the British Empire’s armed forces and those of the United States at his fingertips, should be reduced to travelling in an unarmed, relatively slow and vulnerable commercial airliner.

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by | September 17, 2023 · 6:17 am

The Murder of Leslie Howard (2)

Last time, we read the most widely accepted version of the shooting down and killing of Hollywood star, Leslie Howard, by eight Luftwaffe Junkers Ju-88 heavy fighters:

Those two outstanding German authors, Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, though, tell a much blacker story of the destruction of BOAC’s Dakota DC-3 “Ibis” in their recent book “Soldaten”.

………….During the war, the conversations of German POWs were recorded without their knowledge by their British captors. One of two prisoners in a particular prison camp near London had actually been in one of the Ju88s which had shot down Howard’s Flight 777:

His name was Dock and he said:

“Whatever crossed our path was shot down. Once we shot down – there were all sorts of bigwigs in it: seventeen people, a crew of four and fourteen passengers; they came from London. There was a famous English film-star in it too; Leslie Howard. The English radio announced it in the evening.

Those civil aircraft pilots know something about flying! We stood the aircraft on its head, with the fourteen passengers. They must all have hung on the ceiling! (Laughs) It flew at about 3200 meters. Such a silly dog, instead of flying straight ahead when he saw us, he started to take evasive action. Then we got him. Then we let him have it all right! He wanted to get away from us by putting on speed. Then he started to bank. Then first one of us was after him, and then another. All we had to do was to press the button, quietly and calmly. (…..laughs…)……It crashed…. They were all dead. Those fools don’t try to make a forced landing, even if they can see that it’s all up with them.”

The Allies proclaimed the act a war crime, and so too did a large number of neutral countries. After all, the Germans had shot down an aircraft which belonged to a neutral country (the Netherlands).

Not all of the names of the Ju 88 pilots who carried out this war crime have survived the Nazis’ frenzied burning of their own archives and records, but among the guilty men were:

Oberleutnant Albrecht Bellstedt, Staffelführer Oberleutnant Herbert Heintze, Oberfeldwebel Hans Rakow, Leutnant Max Wittmer-Eigenbrot

Bellstedt and Wittmer-Eigenbrot were both killed in the war, the others I have not been able to trace. No more BOAC daytime flights from Lisbon took place until the end of the war.

The flights which did take place were all at night, over a totally different route, completely beyond the range of a Ju-88. The British authorities responded to the DC-3’s failure to arrive by despatching a Short Sunderland GR3 flying boat to look for it. The aircraft, EJ134, was piloted by the brave Australians of 461 Squadron. The crew was James (Jim) Collier Amiss, Wilbur James Dowling, Alfred Eric Fuller, Ray Marston Goode, Albert Lane, Edward Charles Ernest Miles, Harold Arthur Miller, Kenneth McDonald Simpson, Philip Kelvin Turner, Colin Braidwood Walker and Louis Stanley Watson. Here’s a picture of RAAF 461 Squadron, looking for all the world like a flock of gigantic white geese:

The Australians found nothing whatsoever on the surface of the sea, but they did find the very same group of eight Ju88C-6s that the DC-3 had already met, at more or less the very same place where it had met them. Sunderland EJ134 and its crew then won their place in aviation legend. In a prolonged battle, the flying boat lost one engine and its tail turret. Messrs Dowling, Goode, Miller, Simpson and Walker were all injured and poor Ted Miles (27), one of the two side gunners, was killed. They did manage, though, to shoot down three of the eight German fighters. Of the other five, only two made it all the way back to Bordeaux. The other three were never heard of again. Six out of eight shot down. That should teach them not to attack unarmed airliners flying from neutral countries.

Overall, the Germans were very wary, if not simply afraid, of the Sunderland flying boat. It was an extremely heavily armed aircraft and a formidable opponent.

No wonder they called it

“Das Fliegende Schtachelschwein”, the Flying Porcupine”

This phrase  has proved particularly useful in all of my many trips to Germany, especially those to Berlin Zoo. And one day, when I ask for a cocktail called “A Flying Porcupine”, the barman will know how to make it!

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by | September 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Newark Air Museum (1)

The original Newark, or Newark-on-Trent, is a market town in Nottinghamshire in England. It stands on three important routes, namely the River Trent, the ancient Great North Road or A1, which ran from London to Edinburgh and it is also on the main East Coast railway line:

Newark has an historic castle which was “slighted” or put beyond military use in 1648.

Outside the town, Newark also has an air museum.

Nowadays going out to visit anywhere is not really feasible for me, so my daughter went as my ambassador, accompanied by her boyfriend, urged to take photographs of whatever she thought was a warplane. And she is no aviation expert, but she certainly knows a hawk from a handsaw and a Halifax from a Hastings. She wouldn’t know a Hampden from a Hereford, though, or a Harrow from a Sparrow or a Bombay. Who would?

The majority of Newark’s aircraft are from the 1950s and the Cold War. Here’s an English Electric Canberra PR7, the photo-reconnaissance version. This one, WH 791, served at RAF Tengah in the western part of Singapore. Top speed : 580 mph

This is a Gloster Meteor two seat conversion trainer, the T7. This particular aircraft, VZ634, was in service from 1949-1958 with 247 Squadron, 609 Squadron, 141 Squadron and 41 Squadron. As a fighter, the Meteor was used by 16 foreign countries and Biafra. Top speed : 585 mph

Here’s another fighter, the Hawker Hunter. At Newark, it’s an F.1 interceptor fighter, waiting eagerly for those Bears, Bulls and Badgers to show their evil Commie faces over the North Sea. Hunters were used by 21 other countries and had a Top Speed of : 623 mph. Nowadays everybody seems to have forgotten “The Black Arrows” aerobatic team and their manœuvre with 22 aircraft, certainly a world record at the time. There’s a link here.

The de Havilland Sea Venom was a two seater shipboard strike fighter, one of the comparatively few aircraft to have been twin boom. At Newark there’s an “FAW.22” or “Fighter All Weather”, WW217, one of only 39 built. There’s a family tree here, starting with the de Havilland Vampire, then the Venom, the Sea Venom and finally the Sea Vixen which operated from carriers as late as 1972.

This is the Avro Shackleton, the last in the line which ran from the Avro Manchester to the Avro Lancaster to the Avro Lincoln and finally to the Avro Shackleton. It was a long-range maritime patrol aircraft, and was used by the British and the South Africans. Top speed : 302 mph

Here’s a closer view of some of those propeller blades:

The only American warplane here is the North American F-100D Super Sabre, a single-seat fighter-bomber. This individual was used by France’s Armée de l’Air, and served in France, Germany and the old French colony, Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, today’s Somalia. In total, it had a career of 4,459 hours in the air. Top speed : 924 mph, Mach 1·4.

I think it was an F-100 that dropped the napalm in “Apocalypse Now”:

Next time, a look at some of Newark Air Museum’s civilian aircraft, some more of its foreign aircraft and its various bits of aircraft.

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by | September 5, 2023 · 6:16 am

The Murder of Leslie Howard (1)

A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of blogposts about the Short Sunderland flying boat. In at least one of them, I talked about how a civilian airliner, with the film star Leslie Howard on board, was shot down over the Bay of Biscay on June 1st 1943. Howard, and the crew and all of the other passengers were killed.  I mentioned those events because, the following day, a Short Sunderland was sent out to look for the missing airliner. They didn’t find it, but they did find the eight German fighters which had shot down the BOAC Douglas Dakota DC-3. There then ensued one of the legendary battles of the Second World War as the Sunderland fought off a pack of Junkers Ju88s. That particular series of blog posts, though, concentrated on the Short Sunderland flying boat and the Junkers Ju88 long distance heavy fighter.

This series of blogposts which begins today, however, concentrates not on the aircraft involved, but instead the still unanswered question of……….

“Why did the Germans have to destroy that airliner ?”

And first of all, let’s take a look at the man who is usually put forward as the prime suspect for the reason that the Dakota had to be destroyed……..

Leslie Howard was a film star who starred in “Pimpernel Smith”, “The First of the Few”, “Of Human Bondage” and most famous of all, “Gone with the Wind”, a huge smash hit in 1939. Here he is in “Journey’s End”:

Howard’s father was Ferdinand Steiner, a Hungarian Jew, and his mother was Lilian Blumberg, from an English Jewish family of German origin. Howard had originally styled himself Leslie Stainer in an effort to anglicise his real name of Leslie Howard Steiner, but eventually he decided on the name by which he is known nowadays.

On June 1st 1943, Leslie Howard was in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, with his business manager, Alfred Chenhalls. They intended to take the civilian passenger aircraft of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines which, even in wartime, made a regular morning run between Portela Airport to the north of neutral Lisbon and Whitchurch Airport near Bristol in England. Neither Howard nor Chenhalls had tickets, so two passengers were turned off the aeroplane to make room for them. The lucky two were a little boy called Derek Partridge and his nanny called Dora Rove. Or, in another story, one of the two passengers was a Catholic priest, Father Holmes. Or perhps the lucky two were George and William Cecil, recalled from their boarding school in Switzerland.

There is a story that the take-off was delayed while Howard went to collect a small parcel full of silk and nylon stockings, a present, perhaps, for his wife and daughter. While filming, Howard was pretty much a serial adulterer, who said….

“I never chased women but I couldn’t always be bothered to run away”

The aircraft was a Douglas DC-3-194 called “Ibis” with the civilian letters G-AGBB. Here it is, complete with its Dutch flag:The aircraft had hardly ever been impeded by the Luftwaffe on its 1,000 mile, seven hour, flight:

In actual fact, though, the Germans had already attacked the aircraft on two occasions in the previous six months. On November 15th 1942, it had been challenged by a single Messerschmitt Bf110 Zerstörer heavy fighter and on April 19th 1943, it had been ambushed by a patrol of six Bf110s. Here’s the nightfighting version of the Bf-110. The Zerstörer heavy fighters would have lacked the radar antennae….

On both occasions, the camouflaged airliner escaped a watery grave. The first attack involved a party of very high ranking American Eighth Air Force officers which included Ira Eaker. They were saved when the Bf110’s engine caught fire as it attacked. Everybody in the airliner, both passengers and crew, was terrified. In the second attack, the pilot, Captain Koene Dirk Parmentier, dropped down to the waves and then climbed steeply into the thick low clouds.

On the other hand, though, the trip had been made more than 500 times between 1939-1943 without the slightest problem.

On this occasion, though, just after midday, they were shadowed  initially by two Junkers Ju 88s over the countryside of northern Portugal and then of north-western Spain. They broadcast a message “we are being followed by enemy aircraft” and then “we are being shadowed”.

At around 12.45 pm eight different Junkers Ju88C-6 fighters of Gruppe V / Kampfgeschwader 40 spotted the “grey silhouette” of the DC-3. The Ju88s were flying with six aircraft abreast, fifty yards or so apart, with another two flying above them and acting as “spotters”. They had apparently been told to look for a twin engined grey aircraft. Their commander, Oberleutnant Heintze, had been told to carry out rigorous patrols during June and to shoot down the aircraft they found. This is a Junlers Ju-88 heavy fighter:

The Ju88s attacked the airliner at between 6,000-10,000 feet over the Bay of Biscay some two hundred miles north of the Spanish coast. One of the pilots, Oberleutnant Albrecht Bellstedt, radioed to his companions: “Indians at 11 o’clock, AA”. This meant enemy aircraft ahead, slightly to the left, attack, attack. One fighter came in from above and one from below. With their heavy calibre cannons, they set the Dakota’s port engine on fire and this then spread to the wing. A radio message was picked up from the wireless operator, van Brugge: “I am being followed by a strange aircraft….Putting on best speed….we are being attacked by enemy aircraft….cannon shells and tracers are going through the fuselage…. Am wave hopping and doing my best.” Oberleutnant Heintze, however, drew level with the stricken aircraft and quickly realised that it was a civilian airliner. He immediately stopped the attacks. Three, presumably, crew members, jumped out of the DC-3, deploying their parachutes but they did not open as they were already on fire and all three fell to their deaths. The aircraft plummeted into the sea where the wreckage floated on the surface for a very short period and then sank. By one o’clock, all four crew members and all thirteen passengers, including Leslie Howard, had been killed.

The four members of the crew were the pilot, Quirinus Tepas MBE, the second pilot, Captain Dirk de Koning, Cornelis van Brugge, the radio operator, and Engbertus Rosevink, the flight engineer.

Whoever was their intended target, the Germans were certainly serious about killing him or her. They had sent eight twin engined heavy fighters from Gruppe V / Kampfgeschwader 40 in a deliberate attempt to intercept that lone Dutch aircraft. If they had come across it purely by chance then surely there would have been just a single fighter involved, at best two, surely not a group of eight. And after they had shot down the DC-3, the German fighters circled the floating wreckage and took photographs of the burning plane before it finally sank. You don’t do that with just any old aerial kill. It has to be done for a very special reason. But that reason has never been found.

Here’s Alfred Chenhalls, Old Nopttinghamian, and Leslie Howard’s business manager. And with a cigar in one hand, and a whisky in the other, he’s a Winston Churchill look-alike. Apparently…………..

Don’t forget, though. In this day snd age, it was by no means simple to identify a famous person. They might have seen them in the cinema, but apart from this, there were only newspapers, magazines and, most of all, the radio. The latter, of course, was useful only for voice identification!

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by | January 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Why I am what I am (2)

Last time I mentioned a number of things that linked me to my Dad insofar as interests, hobbies and sports were concerned. I soon discovered that that was really only the beginning of the story.

I rather think that I studied Russian because Fred used to speak so frequently of the Russians during the Second World War. In the bookcase at his parents’ house, he had a pamphlet borrowed from an RAF library. It was entitled “Our Soviet Friends”, and it had pictures of the dam at Dnepropetrovsk:

He told me how, in the RAF, anybody wth knowledge of Russian could name their own price for helping to liaise with our new surprise allies, once the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Towards the end of the war, Lancasters, on rare occasions, used to bomb the Germans and then carry on to Russia to land. When they came back they brought more bombs and often, one or two souvenirs.  On one occasion, my Dad had had a drink from a flask of coffee made up for the aircraft’s crew in Leningrad. I had to satisfy myself with my early attempts to learn the language, with the woman of my dreams…..

I may like French because, in 1940, Fred had wanted Britain and France to merge into one country just like Churchill had said. Fred was a keen European and, like Churchill,  he wanted a “United States of Europe”. As members of Bomber Command he told me, though, that the French could often be difficult to work with. Here is a Bristol Blenheim of the Free French Air Force in North Africa…..

I have always had great regard for the Poles because Fred said they were great blokes, and that he had joined up so that Poland could be freed from the invading Germans. A few years ago, I was in hospital for a operation, and there was a Polish van driver there that nobody would talk to because he was Polish. Except me, and if Fred had been there, he would have spoken to him, too. Racism can be amazingly petty.

I try to like poetry, because I know that Fred had claimed so often that poetry was an integral part of his life. He liked to read peoms out loud to his classes at school, his favourite being “Flannan Isle”.

I did a series of five blog posts about the mystery of Flannan Isle, as portrayed in the poem, and the first one is here. The rest can be found by merely searching for  “Flannan”. And when you’ve done that, don’t forget to watch this film with its own, made-up, explanation of the three men’s disappearance….

I’m sure that I became a teacher because Fred was a teacher and I felt that a teacher was a good thing to be. In the mid-1970s, the money was excellent and I didn’t automatically have to live in London.

I always worked hard as a teacher because Fred told me that at the end of each day, you should always ask yourself the question, “Were you just given your wages, or have you earned them ?”

I worked all my life at the High School, 38 years, because when he took me there for a job interview in 1975, I could see that Fred was enormously impressed by the school. To him, and to me, it looked like something out of a film, such as, perhaps, the old version of “Tom Brown’s Schooldays”…….

In actual fact, after his death, I found that, when he was a boy in the 1930s, Fred’s Uncle George  had bought him a present, the book of the film “Tom Brown’s Schooldays”.  They didn’t shoot this film at The High School, but if they had wished to, it would have been entirely appropriate from the architectural point of view….

Fred read a lot about the Second World War, and one of his favourite books was a German doctor’s story of Operation Barbarossa, a book called “Moscow Tram Stop”. The High School has its own tram stop, called “High School”. That fact has always reassured me that I had made the right decision to work there for so long.

 

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by | September 23, 2022 · 6:16 am

The Sandiacre Screw Company (10)

The brave young men from the High School who died defending their country have left relatively little behind them. Sometimes we have a  few blurry photographs of school plays (the “woman” next to the teacher, and the boy in the middle of the very back row);

And sometimes we have a few blurry pictures of them in their uniforms:

We have some nice pieces of writing in the Nottinghamian magazine from Frank Corner and from John Walker. In the School Archives, John Grain’s school cricket blazer has hung on a hook there since 1936 and will hopefully continue to hang there until “towers cave in and walls collapse”. Whenever I saw it, I always thought that John could not possibly have imagined such a lonely fate for his blazer. No, he thought that one day in 1980. when he was 61 years old and a fat old man, he would come up to visit his old school and get them to dig out his old blazer and he’d then try it on. He’d say:

“Look! It almost fits me!”

And everybody would laugh and say:

“Why!  You can’t even get it over your shoulders! You must have grown a lot of muscles in the last forty five years! Perhaps the army made you fitter!”

And then he’d go back to his grandchildren and tell them where he’d been that day, and what it was like when he was at school.

We have a couple of Keith Doncaster’s poems.

In addition, we also have a lovely picture of the Officers Training Corps in 1937, with Keith on the left hand end of the very front row, looking extremely youthful and nowhere near his calendar age:

Keith Doncaster though, is the only casualty from the Second World War, of around 125 men, of whom we have a cinefilm. It was originally for sale on the internet but it can now be watched for free on BFI-Player, courtesy of the BFI, the British Film Institute. The four-minute film is silent and rather blurred, but everything is recognisable.

The title is “Shenstone and Longmoor Farm May-July 1943” but most of it clearly shows Keith in the garden of the family house in Sandiacre, relaxing on leave in the early summer of 1943.

Keith is in full, impeccable, RAF uniform, his hair shining with the traditional Brylcreem. He is a very slight young man, looking much younger than his actual age:

And then you can turn it into a close-up:

Then we see him walking towards the camera:

Then he’s on the lawn scratching the cat’s ears,:

He’s walking around the lawn, and then sitting down on a garden bench:

His sergeant’s stripes stand out in a pale grey world. What must be his father is there, wearing his office suit and smoking a cigarette:

A very old couple is there too. They could be Grandma and Grandad, but equally, they may well be the gardener and the cook:

There are shots of what must be Longmoor Farm with cows. One of them is very tame and Keith can scratch the back of its head and neck just like a dog:

Back at Sandiacre, the humans are still a mystery. Keith is with an elegantly dressed woman that may be his mother:

Certainly Dad is there, this time without the hat:

Back on the farm there is a herd of cows in a field, then two calves are let loose in a field to scamper and chase each other like two dogs:

But who are the two men? The cowmen? Alas, we will certainly never know:

And one of the stills I produced is quite lovely:

One more blog post, before Keith Doncaster fades back into history.

The home movie is available at

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-doncaster-shenstone-and-longmoor-farm-may-july-1943-1943-online

and of slightly lower standards of presentation, at

https://www.macearchive.org/films/doncaster-shenstone-and-longmoor-farm-may-july-1943

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by | July 2, 2022 · 6:17 am

An impossible Beatles Quiz (2….the Answers)

I know that a lot of you have already offered me your answers to this quiz and I have checked them and told you your scores. Anyway, for the benefit of Mr Kite and anybody else who doesn’t yet know whether their answers were right or wrong, here are the answers to my second even more difficult Beatles quiz. Hopefully, you didn’t do the quiz by writing “Dunno” ten times. Or:

“Dunno”, “Dunno”, “Dunno”, “Dunno”, “Dunno”,

“Dunno”, “Dunno”, “Dunno”, “Dunno”, “Dunno”.

As in the first quiz, all of the questions and answers involved Sergeant Pepper and the other LPs after this.

1     Who had a silver hammer?

One of the comparatively  few Beatles songs about a serial killer:

“….Maxwell Edison majoring in medicine
Calls her on the phone
Can I take you out to the pictures, Joan?
But as she’s getting ready to go
A knock comes on the door
Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer
Came down upon her head
Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer
Made sure that she was dead.”

Your clue was about coffee. What brand of coffee is it in the picture ?

Maxwell House, of course. No marks for anybody who thought it was either “Nescafé’s Silver Hammer” or  “House’s Silver Hammer”.

2     Who always arrived late for tea?

This is a humdinger of a question, though I say so myself. In the song “Cry baby, cry” on the White Album, the song suddenly includes various verses from the Beatles version of “Sing a Song of Sixpence”, which is one of the many traditional English nursery rhymes:

“Cry baby cry
Make your mother sigh
She’s old enough to know better
So cry baby cry
The Duchess of Kirkcaldy always smiling
And arriving late for tea
The Duke was having problems
With a message at the local bird and bee”.
Kirkcaldy is a town in Scotland, and the home of Raith Rovers Football Club.

The photograph provides an easy answer. Look at the name of the pub:

3     Which fairground attraction gives its name to a Beatles song?

Well, as everybody knows except Charles Manson, it’s a helter skelter, as we English call it:

When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again

Charles Manson didn’t know what a “helter skelter” was, and interpreted it differently. Paul McCartney explained:

“Charles Manson interpreted that ‘Helter Skelter’ was something to do with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse….. It’s from the Bible, Revelation . Manson interpreted the whole thing – that the Beatles were the four horsemen, ‘Helter Skelter’ was the song – and he arrived at having to go out and kill everyone.”

4     What was the name of the lovely meter maid?

In the song her name is Rita:

“Took her out and tried to win her
Had a laugh and over dinner
Told her I would really like to see her again
Got the bill and Rita paid it
Took her home I nearly made it
Sitting on the sofa with a sister or two
Oh, lovely Rita meter maid
Where would I be without you?
Give us a wink and make me think of you 
Lovely Rita meter maid, Rita meter maid“

5      What was anybody doing in “Penny Lane?

There are so many that you could make it up and probably get it right! Here’s a list:

“a barber showing photographs             all the people stop and say hello

(a banker with a motorcar) the little children laugh at him behind his back

I sit                      a fireman with an hourglass  he likes to keep his fire engine clean

the pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray                               she feels as if she’s in a play

the barber shaves another customer       we see the banker sitting waiting for a trim        the fireman rushes in”

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6      She was a working girl, north of England way. But what happened to her?

Well, success on a fabulous scale:

“She was a working girl
North of England way
Now she’s hit the big time
In the U.S.A.“
7      What had the crabalocker fishwife pornographic priestess done to be such a naughty girl ?

She had been so bad, in actual fact, that the song was banned immediately from the BBC.

“Yellow matter custard
Dripping from a dead dog’s eye
Crabalocker fishwife pornographic priestess
Boy you been a naughty girl
You let your knickers down  I am the eggman
They are the eggmen
I am the walrus
Goo goo g’ joob”
And here again are the said knickers:

Apparently the BBC did not allow any reference on air to sex, body parts south of the navel, underwear in the same location and so on. For the BBC censor, the mere use of the word “knickers” was enough to condemn the song into the fires of hell. Implied drug use saw off a further two Beatles songs, another was banned  for mentioning suicide, and the final one was banned twenty years after it was released for political reasons.

8     Who has a barrow in the market place and what did Molly do?

Well, in “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” :

“Desmond has a barrow in the market place”

and Molly gets up to quite a lot. Any one of :

“Molly is the singer in a band                         Molly says “I like your face” as she takes him by the hand

she begins to sing                       Molly stays at home and does her pretty face

in the evening she still sings with the band                      

happy ever after in the market place                  Molly lets the children lend a hand*

The picture, by the way, refers to the fact that a group, called “Marmalade”, released this song as their own single.

9     Which two other colours are mentioned in “Yellow Submarine” as well as yellow?

Take your pick:

White, red, brown, blue and possibly purple. That’s about it for me.

And the origin of the song? Well, Paul explained:

“in that moment before you’re falling asleep – that little twilight moment when a silly idea comes into your head – and thinking of ‘Yellow Submarine’. ‘We all live in a yellow submarine…”
One Spanish soccer team is nicknamed “The Yellow Submarine”. An explanation here…..

10   “Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly.” Who is it?”

Well the song begins with the answer:

“Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes”
The song is, of course,  “Lucy in the Sky  with Diamonds”. Its origin is:
Either
John Lennon’s son, Julian, comes h0me with a picture and tells his Dad, “It’s about “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.
Or
Lysergic acid diethylamide
Or
It’s taken from Alice in Wonderland when Alice is in the boat. Lewis Carroll was a hard core user of Lysergic acid diethylamide, of course.
Or

“It’s the image of this female who would come and save me – this secret love that was going to come one day. So it turned out to be Yoko, though, and I hadn’t met Yoko then. But she was my imaginary girl that we all have.” (John Lennon)

Supposedly, we even know the identity of “Lucy”.

“She was Lucy O’Donnell, and she was a fellow pupil at Heath House, a nursery school, with Julian Lennon. She only found out she was in a Beatles song when she was 13, in 1976.”

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