Tuesday May 22 2012
History Archive
Village History
Q-Queen’s final minutes
Posted on June 19 2011 at 11:03:05 0 comments
Last year, The Village carried an appeal by Delwyn Griffith, of the Midland Aircraft Recovery Group, for help in pinpointing the crash site of a Blenheim bomber in Cofton Hackett. His report on that fateful night in 1941 follows . . .
At 20.34 hrs on March 21 1941, 25-year-old Pilot Officer Ian Murray Shirlaw took off in Blenheim ‘Q-Queen’ (T1892), one of six aircraft from 105 Squadron, based at Swanton Morley, Norfolk.
With him were navigator P/O Cyril Peter Dugdale, aged 20, and gunner F/O John Olaf Mair, aged 33; their target the submarine pens at Lorient in NW France.
At this stage in the war, squadrons were sending out small numbers of aircraft on raids. For example, on November 28 1940, P/O Shirlaw’s was one of five aircraft sent to attack Dusseldorf; of these, three suffered technical failures and only P/O Shirlaw and Sgt Wilson actually bombed the target, starting fires in the docks area.
On December 31 1940, P/O Shirlaw (pictured below) and one other had been sent to bomb an oil refinery at Bremen in daylight, but both aircraft had to abort the mission owing to lack of cloud cover.
During this period 105 Squadron was also practising ground controlled approach (known as ZZ procedure) that would use radio signals to guide aircraft to their home base in conditions of poor visibility.
Altogether 60 aircraft from a number of squadrons took part in the raid on Lorient. The 105 Squadron history states that their six aircraft bombed successfully, but the Bomber Command War Diary records that bombing results were poor owing to low cloud over the target.
This cloud extended back across Britain and, combined with unpredicted changes to the wind speed, caused serious navigational problems. The temptation in conditions like these was to descend, hoping to break cloud cover and spot a reference point on the ground.
The danger with employing this tactic was that both the depth of the cloud base and the height of the underlying terrain were unknown quantities as two of the attacking force had already found out with fatal consequences, one flying into a hill on Dartmoor, the other into a mountain in Snowdonia.
At midnight P/O Shirlaw’s aircraft was seen approaching Bittell Reservoir from the south-west at a very low altitude. The witness, Henry Heynes, of Cofton Richards Farm, himself a qualified pilot, assessed that the aircraft was in trouble, and the crew looking for somewhere to make a forced landing (although he couldn’t know this, ‘Q-Queen’ had had to turn back from two missions already that month because of engine trouble).
Accordingly, he hurried to a large flat field behind the farm, known as The Lady Field, and tried to signal to the aircraft with a torch. He watched the Blenheim turn back in a westerly direction and then return on a north-easterly course.
This time ‘Q-Queen’ struck the cable of a barrage balloon moored near Cofton Hall, one of five protecting the Austin factory at Longbridge. Even so it seems that P/O Shirlaw was able to bring the aircraft down under control, landing in a field just beyond the railway line that leads from Worcester to Birmingham.
This is a narrow field, however, and slopes steeply away in the direction of flight. There was simply not enough room for the aircraft to stop and, at three minutes past midnight, it crashed into the bank of the River Arrow that runs along the bottom of this field. There was no fire, but rescuers found all three crew members dead in the wreck.
The pilot’s brother, Denys Shirlaw, later spoke to Ian’s Commanding Officer who told him that Ian’s aircraft had received battle damage while over France, a fact confirmed by witnesses Colin Newell and Jill Broom, who saw holes in the aircraft the following day.
Communication between the cockpit and the gun turret ceased (examination of the bodies would later reveal that F/O Mair had been killed by enemy fire).
On returning to England, P/O Shirlaw faced a dilemma. Being unable to find his home base, he and his navigator could have bailed out, but there was no way to reach the gun turret from the cockpit and, believing he may have an injured man on board, he elected to descend and look for a place to land.
Whether he was circling Bittell Reservoir in order to fix his position or whether he had sighted nearby Longbridge Airfield and was making a landing circuit will never be known.
For Bomber Command the night was not over; yet another Blenheim was to crash in Lincolnshire. From the 16 men involved in these four crashes, there was only one survivor.
Witnesses who visited the Cofton site the next day saw that the machine had been dragged backwards into the field ready for dismantling. It appeared to be intact apart from the front being smashed and one engine left in the bank of the river.
After the salvage crew had left, local children picked up a few bullets that had been missed, but little else remained. A thorough search of the area with metal detectors on Monday May 2 2011 failed to find any trace of the aircraft which would seem to support the evidence given by the witnesses.
The RAF’s ‘Form 1180’, on which the outline of an aircraft accident is recorded, states: “Use of WT navigational aids might have avoided the accident, but not known whether WT was serviceable.”
‘Q-Queen’s gunner, F/O John Olaf Mair, was cremated in his home town of Woking, Surrey. Ian Shirlaw and his navigator, P/O Cyril Dugdale, share a joint grave at Kinver St Peter’s churchyard extension where a pair of memorial gates was erected by the Shirlaw family after the war in honour of their eldest son.
* I should like to express my thanks to Ben Solloway, former Keeper of Barnt Green Waters, for his invaluable help in gathering witness evidence and guiding us to the crash site of T1892.
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