Black Thursday – 80th Anniversary

RAF Pathfinders Archive

2 years ago

Every year at this time we remember the Pathfinder crews lost due to fog and low cloud on Black Thursday, 16/17 December 1943. The Pathfinder dead for fog-related crashes were two from 83 Squadron, six from 156 Squadron, fourteen from 405 Squadron, and twenty-eight from 97 Squadron, fifty men in all.

Memorial stone for the heavy losses suffered by 97 Squadron on 16/17 December 1943. The stone was most generously donated to the Archive in 2023 by Benoît Howson, a Frenchman, who designed it.

The stone is currently on show at the Heritage Centre, RAF Station Wyton, and it is hoped to get permission to locate it in the Memorial Garden.

Remembrance

In this 80th anniversary year we are particularly remembering the foundation crew of our Archive, the Thackway crew of 97 Squadron. Five of the crew were killed in a Lancaster crash near Hardwick, east of their home airfield of RAF Station Bourn: they were Ted Thackway, Sandy Grant, Tony Lawrence, George Grundy, and Jack Powell. There were two survivors: Peter Mack, who was critically injured, and Leslie Laver, who was uninjured and returned to flying with another crew a month later, only to lose his life on his first operation with them.

The Funerals of the Thackway Crew

Ted, far left, with his family in 1938.

Standing: Ted, his father, his younger brother Jim; seated, his mother Elsie with youngest son John

Within hours of the 50 Pathfinder aircrew deaths, telegrams were sent to all the bereaved families. The one below arrived for Elsie Thackway, telling her of the loss of her beloved son Ted. Elsie collapsed, and for a while her youngest son John, then just eight years old, thought that she would die of grief.

On Wednesday, 22nd December, 97 Squadron’s ORB noted:

Today S/L Mackenzie, Sgt Lawrence and six dominion aircrew who were killed on the 17th December were buried at CAMBRIDGE, the Station Commander, Squadron Commander, some officers and aircrew NCOs attended. The twenty other personnel were conveyed to their various home towns for burial, a representative of the Squadron was in attendance in each case.

The Sergeant Lawrence named above was Tony Lawrence; he was Ted’s mid-upper gunner. He was buried next to the bomb aimer on the crew, Sandy Grant, who was a Canadian.

The coffins of Sandy Grant, Tony Lawrence, and Donald Mackenzie at Cambridge

The bodies of Jack Powell, the navigator, and George Grundy, the flight engineer, were taken back to their home towns. George was buried at Undercliffe, in the Eccleshill district of Bradford. His favourite sister, Joyce, was shattered by his death. It long remained a memory in the family that when the undertaker collected George’s body from the railway station, he exchanged some brief words with the guard on the train. He was told that when the train had started on its journey, the guard’s van had been full of RAF coffins. The guard had found the experience very harrowing.

Jack was buried at Wakefield Cemetery by his grieving widow, Agnes. His coffin was sealed when it arrived back at his home town. The family were told it would be best for them not to look inside, and they did not do so.

Left: Jack Powell; right, George Grundy

Ted’s body was taken back to his family who lived at Bilton, near Harrogate. Nancy, Ted’s close friend, never forgot the senior RAF officer who came back with Ted’s body ‘with orders not to leave the coffin’. He did not leave the coffin for a moment. Even when the grieving family gathered in the sitting room prior to the funeral, he was still there; it was not until Ted had been buried that he left.

Jim, Ted’s brother, had idolised Ted. He had followed him into the RAF, but as a member of ground crew, not aircrew. In his grief he was unable to comprehend why RAF Station Bourn had failed his brother:

“There wasn’t enough help for them. There wasn’t enough help. If our Ted had been coming in on my station, we would have got them down.”

Jim said he had seen too many aircrew taken out of crashed planes, and he desperately wanted to see Ted, to make sure that it was all of him in the coffin and that they had not just made up the weight with sandbags. But the officer kept in strict attendance, and none of the family saw Ted’s body. Nancy wrote: ‘We all knew the reason for that, even though we were told he only had a tiny mark on his temple’.

Some time after the burial, Jim was told by the RAF – far too late – that he could have looked in the coffin if he had wished.

The funeral was held at the local church, St John’s, where Ted had once been a choir boy. Later that day they buried him at Killinghall, a couple of miles away, in the village in which his mother had grown up. Ted’s grandfather, Grandpa Wrightson, was churchwarden there for the church of St Thomas. Perhaps it was due to him that his grandson’s grave is so prominent, right by the main door of the church. Ted’s is the typical War Graves headstone, inscribed with the RAF badge.

Underneath the family’s tribute has been carved: ‘Greater love than this no man hath’.