Dear Editor
I was fascinated to read Margaret Brown’s account (last week) of her time in the WAAF during World War Two for two reasons. Firstly, my mother was born near Chester, and as a young boy in the early 1950s we often drove past Hawarden airfield where Vickers-Armstrong had a factory that produced 5,540 Wellington and 235 Avro Lancaster bombers during the war.
Post-war the factory was used by Vickers to build 28,000 aluminium prefab bungalows. Number 3 Ferry Pilots Pool/Ferry Pool, Air Transport Auxiliary, was based at Hawarden for five years from November 5 1940 and its pilots ferried thousands of military aircraft from the factories and maintenance facilities at Hawarden and elsewhere to and from RAF and Naval squadrons throughout the UK and beyond. 295 Squadron (picture with Margaret Brown) had the honour of being the first to drop troops over Normandy on the eve of D-Day, while other aircraft of the squadron towed gliders to the landing zones. Incidentally, one can clearly see why the Australian lads were gathering around Margaret; I am sure she had many admirers.
A further link with the Australian and British crews who ferried aircraft around the world is very much closer to the Algarve. In 1942 two airmen were ferrying a Beaufighter of No. 236 Squadron from the RAF base at Trebelzue in Cornwall to Gibraltar when they crashed near Huelva. The British and Australian aviators, Sergeant Geoffrey Lennox Avern (RAAF) and Sergeant Philip Bernard Crossan (RAF), were members of 236 Squadron.
They are buried in the British Cemetery which adjoins the main Huelva Cemetery, where the ‘Man Who Never Was’ is also interned and whose body was used in a spectacular plot to deceive the Germans over the invasion of Sicily.
In June 1942 the 236 Squadron flew one of its more unusual missions when a volunteer crew attempted to drop a French tricolour onto a German military parade in Paris. The aircraft successfully reached Paris, but found no parade, and so had to satisfy themselves by attacking the Gestapo HQ before returning safely to Britain. Over 50 allied aircraft crashed in Portugal during WWII and at least six of those were in the Algarve or off its coast. But then that is a story for another day.
Chris Wright
Tavira
