SLIDES 0646-0650
STOCKPORT AIR DISASTER, JUNE 1967
A little over 49 years ago, at just after ten o'clock in the morning on Sunday the 4th of June, a British Midlands Airways Canadair C-4 Argonaut returning from Mallorca crashed into Hopes Carr right in the centre of Stockport.
Seventy-two of the eighty-four people aboard were killed and it is still, at time of writing, the fourth worst aviation disaster in British history.
News reports from the time tend to suggest that the pilot, who was one of the few survivors, chose to bring his aircraft down as best he could in an open area, with the plane reportedly making a sharp turn and levelling out just before impact. but the accident investigators could not find any evidence to support this notion. The official report maintains that the aircraft would have been uncontrollable under the circumstances after it lost power, despite what eyewitnesses who saw the plane come down claimed. Despite Stockport being a fairly busy urban area, however, there were no fatalities on the ground.
There but for the grace of, etc.
The house we lived in was (and still is) about a mile away from the crash site, so we were probably never in any real danger, but these incidents do rather make you think, even though I was utterly oblivious to it all at three years old,and I imagine that most of the family would have been on their way to church when this all happened.
According to the current Wikipedia entry, "The accident drew a large crowd, estimated at around 10,000 hampering the rescue organisations..." and it would appear, unless these were taken a couple of days after the accident happened, my Grandfather was one of those doing the hampering.
Mind you, looking at these pictures, you can immediately tell that "drew a large crowd" is something of an understatement, because there's a heck of a lot of people there who appear to have come to have a gawp at the aftermath of this tragedy, even long after the fact with the flames out and the area, presumably, declared "safe", and you do begin to wonder what passed for entertainment back in the late 1960s.
It does rather fit in with his slight tendency to photograph engineering disasters that have turned up from time-to-time in both the slide collection and his youthful box brownie pictures that you can find elsewhere on this blog if you feel like going looking.
A little bit of history there Martin.
ReplyDeleteI remember Dad saying that the hot dog sellers were doing a roaring trade. Dad was called in to help as part of the disaster plan they had going even back then. Being a social worker I can imagine that he was in demand to help with grieving relatives. It seems the plane just clipped the top of the local Infirmary - that floor being the childrens ward - so things could have been even worse than they were. A horrendous day all round. I didn't know these photos existed!
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