UNCLE ALBERT
29th January 1945, Nottinghamshire
In the dark night sky above the village of Hoveringham a Lancaster bomber circled, its engine spluttering. It was a training flight, and on board was a crew of 7 British and Canadian airmen, including the Flight Engineer, Albert Mercer, aged 23. As horrified villagers watched, the aircraft burst into flames and exploded, scattering pieces of burning fuselage across the surrounding fields. None of the crew survived.
30th January 1945, Southport
Olive made her way home from the station in the cold, blackout darkness of the January night. She was happy and excited, thinking about the handsome young man she had met on the train to Liverpool a few weeks earlier. As she turned into Chester Road and walked towards the house, she became aware that something wasn’t right, and as she turned her key in the lock she realised that there were no lights on, no smell of cooking, no voices to be heard. Heart thumping, she made her way into the living room to find Mum, Dad and 14 year old brother Billy, huddled round the fire. Billy turned, tears streaming down his cheeks: ‘Albert’s crashed’.
Hoveringham, 60 years later
Janice had almost given up hope of finding anyone in the village who remembered the crash. She had always known about Albert, her mother’s older brother, who had been killed in an air crash during the war, but no details had ever come to light. Why did the plane crash? Was he killed instantly? Had there been an investigation? The last door she knocked on was opened by an elderly gentleman. ‘Oh yes, I was only a child at the time but I remember it well …’
Hoveringham, 2009
Walking across the fields adjacent to her home with her brother David, a former RAF pilot, Helen was anxious to try out the metal detector she had been given for Christmas. Within minutes they discovered several pieces of jagged metal, which David identified as aeroplane fuselage. Intrigued, they made enquiries locally, and found eye witnesses, children at the time, who had seen that fatal crash in January 1945. One gentleman also mentioned a lady who had knocked on his door some years earlier, and who had left a name and phone number.
Olive was my Mum, Janice my sister and Albert my uncle, although I never met him as he died 5 years before I was born. He loved music, motor bikes and horses and by all accounts was the life and soul of any party. Growing up, we knew that Albert had died in a plane crash during the war, and we had visited his grave in Southport’s Duke St Cemetery. The events described above might have been the end of the story, but Helen discovered that there was not just one crash, but two, within weeks of each other in January 1945, in which 14 young men from Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand had perished. Over the next 12 months she managed to make contact with the families of all but one of them, and in May 2010 we were all invited to the dedication of 2 memorial stones, erected on the land where the aircraft crashed. Helen also wrote a book: ‘The Courage of the Small Hours’, describing each individual airman, the wartime background and the role played by Bomber Command during the war. Finally, the huge and tragic sacrifice made by those young men so long ago had been recognised.
Uncle Albert would have been 100 in August 2021.
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Helen later wrote:
The Lancasters were based at RAF Syerston and both crews were on their final training flights. The aircraft crashed for different reasons, but reading the accident reports, it would be fair to assume structural or engine failure played a part as crews in training were given ‘beaten up’ old aircraft to learn in, which had been retired from active service. They frequently suffered structural disasters.
Of the 125,000 young men who served as aircrew in Bomber Command, nearly half were killed (55,573). Of that number, roughly 8,500 died in training accidents. There were 15 aircraft crashes in the local area around Hoveringham during the war, mostly heavy bombers, and around 100 young airmen died in the skies above and in the fields around us in this quiet corner of Nottinghamshire.
Pamela
February 2021
Last Updated on March 16, 2021