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14 April 2023
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Vintage: What happened in the Stockport plane crash? How one of the darkest days in the town's history unfolded
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On 4 June 1967, a plane packed with holidaymakers crashed into wasteland near Stockport town centre - 72 of the 84 passengers and crew on board were killed. It was one of the darkest days in Stockport’s history. A plane full of holiday makers, travelling from Palma de Mallorca to Manchester Airport, crashed in a small open area at Hopes Carr close to the town centre. The crash claimed the lives of 72 of the 84 passengers and crew on board and left 12 people with serious injuries.
Miraculously, no one on the ground was injured, but the disaster had and continues to have, a profound effect on the lives of countless people.
It is still the fourth worst disaster in British aviation history and the third worst disaster to date to happen on English soil.
Here, 50 years on from the tragedy, using archived newspaper reports from the time and contemporary interviews with those whose lives were forever changed by the disaster, is the story of that fateful day.
The miracle behind the tragedy...
The passengers on British Midland Airways Argonaut G-ALHG were happy. They had enjoyed their Mediterranean holiday and were looking forward to returning home. The excitement mounted as the plane banked over Denton and they could see Stockport in front of them and knew they were only minutes away from Ringway Airport.
But in the cockpit, Captain Harry Marlow was worried. He was having trouble maintaining his height and he knew he would never reach Ringway.
No one on the ground was even scratched
Just one tiny wedge of wasteland nestles among the complex densely packed buildings in the centre of Stockport.
And it was there that the giant Argonaut airliner dropped to the ground. Aboard the plane 72 people died but no one on the ground was hurt.
Only yards away from the crash spot and lying directly in the airliner’s path, is the town’s ultra modern police-station, the 19th Century town hall and the town’s infirmary. To the left and right, streets of homes and towering blocks of flats in a town of some 150 000 people.
The Argonaut’s flight path took the plane towards the big buildings. It missed them all. This was the miracle behind a tragedy.
A last minute effort by the pilot of the aircraft averted an even greater tragedy for the people living in blocks of flats in Stockport. His plane crashed into an electricity sub station in Lower Carr.
The pilot, Harry Marlow, aged 41, of Nottinghamshire, had just radioed that he was in trouble and was seen to turn the plane away from the course which would have taken the plane straight into the flats. Instead, he hit the sub station overlooking the Tin Brook and was dragged from the aircraft with eleven other passengers.
One of the survivors who was pulled out from the front end of the aircraft was 15 year old Fiona Child, of Bramhall Lane South. She was taken to hospital.
Captain Marlow was cut out of the flight deck by Stockport policeman Pc John Heath, of Cheadle Hulme, who was helped by Brian Donahue, a civilian assisting with the rescue work.
They were only four minutes from Ringway Airport. Captain Marlow’s choice of crash site was remarkable.
Although the plane came down in the centre of a busy industrial town, nobody outside the plane was injured. If the plane had crashed five seconds later, it would have hit the Covent Garden tower block of flats. Ten seconds later it would have hit the police station; fifteen seconds later Stockport Infirmary could have been hit.
Captain Marlow and a stewardess survived the crash. Three more crew members were killed.
The plane, on impact, had broken into three sections; the front end with the pilot inside was comparatively whole, the middle fuselage and part of the wings remained for some minutes intact but then many explosions from the fuel tanks engulfed it in flames, making rescue work difficult and dangerous.
Rescuers were on the scene just seconds after the crash.
‘All I could hear was the tower calling Hotel Golf, Hotel Golf, are you receiving?’
The first signs of an impending disaster were heard by those on the ground, via the last radio transmissions from the plane, which answered to the call sign ‘Hotel Golf’. They gave an insight into what happened in the moments before the dreadful incident.
Amateur radio enthusiast Rodney Davies, aged 15, a pupil of Dialstone Lane Secondary Modern School had just switched on his radio, specially tuned in to aircraft control wavelengths, when he heard the last message from Ringway Airport’s control tower to the stricken plane.
“The man in the control tower was dealing with three planes at once,” said Rodney of Tintern Grove, Stockport.
“He asked the plane ‘Are you still in contact’; there was no reply and he moved on to deal with another plane. That was all I heard.”
Rodney wasn’t the only youngster to overhear communications between the plane and control tower.
Howard Johnston, aged 11, of Cheadle Hulme, tuned his radio to the airport wavelength.
He said, “The control tower said to the captain ‘You are over shooting’ and the captain replied ‘I am having trouble with the rpm’.
“Then the control tower told the pilot to go around for another approach and climb to 2 000 feet. They asked his height and he replied ‘One thousand feet
“Control came in again to ask his height and he replied ‘Eight hundred feet and dropping’. They said he had about eight and a half miles to run.
“The next thing that happened, only a few seconds later, was a message from the control tower to the pilot ‘You have gone off the radar screen’.
“The pilot replied ‘I am down to 500ft can I have full emergency services please?
“The reply from the control tower was ‘They are already waiting. You have six miles to go’
“Then there was silence and all I could hear was the tower calling ‘Hotel Golf, Hotel Golf, are you receiving?’
Suntan lotion, skipping rope and twins’ passport in the wreckage
Eye witnesses told of the screams of women after the plane crashed into the small brick building across the road from a garage in Carr Brow.
But they stood little chance of rescue as the wrecked plane exploded and caught fire.
Local people who had rushed to the scene and had started the rescue operations before the arrival of the police, ambulance and fireman, from Stockport, Cheshire and Manchester, stood helplessly by as the fire blazed.
The ‘package deal’ holiday plane, a DC4 Argonaut, of British Midland Aviation, on charter to Arrowsmith Tours of Liverpool left Manchester on Saturday night for Palma, Mallorca and had started the return trip with a load of returning holiday makers shortly after 5am on Sunday morning.
The 79 sun-tanned passengers, who had spent 11 days on the island, were almost within sight of the runway at Manchester Airport when disaster struck.
Souvenirs of their holiday were taken out of the wreckage, a bottle of suntan lotion, broken watches, a straw sandal, the broken top of a snorkel, a high heeled white court shoe, cans of drink, a ‘no smoking’ notice, the charred handle of a skipping rope and a passport for twins. Yet by a strange quirk of fate, a crate of miniature liqueur bottles were removed intact from the wrecked plane.
When the flames died down rescue workers moved into the remains, completely clearing the wreckage in one and a half hours.
Stockport’s Centenary Hall and a Salvation Army Citadel were turned into emergency mortuaries to which a constant stream of ambulances carried the unidentified bodies.
‘What I’ll never forget is the agony on the faces’
High praise for civilian volunteers who were soon at the scene came from one of Stockport’s police inspectors, Mr John Ruston. “Their behaviour was outstanding and exemplary. People worked without stopping. They behaved like trained rescue workers, carrying away belongings of the victims which were salvaged from the rubble,” he said.
He himself had the task to sort out those belongings; there were shoes, bathing tackle lipsticks, photographs and money, all that was left. There was too a plaque ‘fasten your seat belts please’ and an orange coloured seat belt.
Motor patrol Pc William Davies, of Stockport Constabulary, who was among the first at the site, described the scene. He said, “I’ll never forget what I saw. When I arrived some people were half out, half in the plane, screaming with pain. One of my colleagues, some of the civilians and I dragged them out with their clothes burning. But what I will never forget is the shouts for help and the agony on the faces of other passengers, who screamed from behind the planes windows. We could not get near them because of the intense heat. Both from the plane and the building on Waterloo Road which caught fire when the tail of the plane demolished it.”
Rescue operations after the plane crash were a swiftly combined operation by the public services of Manchester, Stockport and Cheshire. Many local residents took part.
A considerable number of police, fire and ambulance men who were off duty either went straight to the scene of the disaster or reported to their headquarters, where their offers of help were readily accepted.
And, despite the large numbers involved, the rescue work proceeded in an orderly manner and with a minimum of fuss.
Some police officers who were alerted by telephone at first thought that their Sunday was being disturbed by a civil defence exercise, only to find that what was normally a routine drill had become a tragic fact.
The rescue workers were in and out of the wreckage, despite explosions and leaping flames, said an eyewitness. Their faces and hands blackened by smoke, some of them wearing blood stained shirts, they paused only to accept mugs of tea from Salvation Army women and WRVS members who had set up an emergency canteen.
Altogether, 30 ambulances from Stockport, Manchester, Altrincham and Cheshire ran a shuttle service between the crash scene and hospital and the two temporary mortuaries hurriedly set up.
Fire brigades from Stockport, Manchester and Cheshire provided 35 appliances, three of them relief machines standing by for fire calls. At King Street West fire station about 125 firemen took part in the operation.
Civil defence volunteers came from all over Stockport. There were about 30 of them, representing the whole staff of volunteers in the town, while a further corps stood by in Stalybridge in case they were needed.
Building site workers, emergency employees of a nearby garage, Salvation Army bandsmen, and local residents all played their part.
The local Salvation Army set up a liaison officer with Stockport Police to help the relatives of the passengers who streamed anxiously into Stockport police headquarters all afternoon. They provided relatives with accommodation.
Police came from Manchester, Stockport and Cheshire, many of them off duty and while some helped search the wreckage, others kept at bay the hundreds of people who swarmed round the area, trying to catch a glimpse of the scene of the crash.
The same people kept other police busy on traffic duty when the approach roads became thick with sightseers cars.
But their behaviour was praised by a senior police official, who said that the sightseers had not impeded the rescue work and had done as they were asked by police who were controlling the crowd. He added that it was amazing how the rescuers first on the scene had worked quietly and efficiently without supervision. He said, “Everyone seemed to know what to do without being told. In fact, in the early stages there was no one in command of the rescue operation.”
People came out to see what was happening
Other news reports painted the bystanders, the ones who came simply to see what was happening rather than help, in a different light.
Mr Leonard Massey, the chief constable of Stockport, complained that the crowds at the disaster had hampered rescue work and had behaved as though they were going to a football match. “They have been a terrible nuisance,” he said. “About 20 extra police have had to be on duty taking care of the sightseers. Some of them have been coming in on ton-up machines with transistor radios. One rescue worker, who had worked for eight hours, said angrily: “It was like Blackpool prom at the height of the season: Everybody had come to see a nice plane disaster.” The town was crowded with cars. Police tried to control the throngs but many forced their way through. At one time 20 people were standing on the sagging roof of a derelict house.
Strangers united in tragedy
Five miles away from the crash scene at Manchester Airport, stunned and weeping relatives of the holiday-makers aboard the plane were told of the crash by Manchester Airport director Mr George Harvey. He called the 45 people waiting for the flight into a private lounge to make the announcement half an hour after the crash. Several women fainted and airport first-aid teams went into action, treating people for shock.
The first hint of impending disaster came at 10 o’clock when instead of hearing the announcement of the flight’s arrival, relatives at the airport saw fire engines and ambulances racing onto the runway. Captain Marlow at the controls of ‘Hotel Golf’ had radioed ahead that he could not maintain height
At 10h30am a message of the airport loud-speaker system assembled relatives in one lounge and the 45 strangers were suddenly united in tragedy.
At lunchtime the first short-list of survivors arrived from Stockport Infirmary.
Relatives of the survivors were rushed into a fleet of taxis, some to go to Stockport Infirmary. As news of the crash was broadcast, the airport was inundated with phone calls and British Midland set up a special office to reassure anxious callers.
‘How many have got out?’
Even as he was being stretchered away with serious injuries, the thoughts of the pilot of the stricken airliner were only for the safety of his passengers.
Harry Marlow, aged 41, was seen to lift his hands to his head and ask: “How many have got out?.... How many have got out?”
Witness Michael Toole, aged 58, a brewery drayman of Alberta Street, Stockport, said, “The captain was only concerned about his passengers.”
Police chief ‘broke down and wept’
Police chief Leonard Massey was close to tears as he told the tragic story of the disaster.
“Everybody was so gallant. The rescuers, the policemen, the people who lived in the houses nearby risked their own lives to go in and out of the aircraft to save as many people as they could,” he said.
“Afterwards it was too much for a lot of them. They broke down and wept. So did my policemen. This has been a dreadful tragedy.” Rescuers could hear passengers screaming from the rear of the plane as an explosion sent flames sweeping through the length of the fuselage.
Police motor cyclist George Oliver scrambled through a split in the aircraft to pull out six people. Then he was forced back by the explosions.
Mr Massey added, “The people who were first on the spot were prepared to take any risk to save those in the plane.”
The wonderful response to give blood
The dramatic scenes in Stockport Infirmary were described by the matron, Miss Marjorie Dalton, a consultant surgeon, and Mr A House, the hospital administrative officer at a press conference days after the crash.
Immediately on the news of the crash the whole of Holden ward was cleared and the hospital’s major accident unit went into operation.
The unit is headed by the senior orthopaedic surgeon and by an amazing coincidence, he was on his way to the hospital and passing the crash scene so he was able to make an immediate assessment of the situation. “Everybody acted in a wonderful way,” said the matron.
By 10h45am, additional staff was arriving and staff from other hospitals came and volunteered as well as other people. Many were ex-nurses.
Miss Dalton said morale was high in the ward and the 11 survivors still in hospital were making good recoveries.
The survivors had received lots of letters and the hospital itself had received telegrams of good wishes to the patients. The surgeon said that some of the patients were still having sedatives ‘as and when necessary’.
Both operating theatres had been in full use from 2pm to 9pm. Nine patients had emergency operations, with the air hostess undergoing major surgery.
“No fewer than 64 people came to the hospital to volunteer to give blood. Although we had sufficient and we directed them to the blood bank. I think it was a wonderful response from the public,” Mr House said.
Here is a full list of those who survived the disaster and those who sadly died:
Survivors
Captain Harry Marlow, 41
Stewardess Julia Partleton, 25
Vivian Werrett, 20
Mary Green, 42,
Allan Kee Johnson, 22
Fiona Child, 15
Albert Owen, 27
David Ralphs, 20
Lilly Parry, 50
Susan Howarth, 20
Billy Wood, 13
Harold Wood, 15
Victims
Crew
Co-pilot Christopher Pollard
Engineer Gerald Lloyd
Steward Tony Taylor
Passengers
Dorothy Ackroyd
Michael Ayland
Janet Ayland
Herbert Benton
Phyllis Benton
Christine Benton
James Booth
Eliza Booth
Catherine Brooks
Ronald Cowgill
Annie Cowgill
Philip Cruse
Bernard Dowd
Jane Dowd
Sarah Gill
Alice Godwin
John Harland
Olive Harland
Alan Hughes
Kathleen Hughes
Elsie James
Arthur Kemp
Elsie Kemp
Roy Latham
Margaret Latham
Mabel Mellor
Lillian Nolan
Julia Nolan
Eva Owen
Arthur Reynolds
Ethel Reynolds
Edward Shaw
Gloria Shaw
Jeremy Shaw
Maxine Shaw
Norman Smart
Jillian Smart
Alexander Smith
Glenise Smith
Arthur Smith
Rachel Smith
David Smith
Harry Stansfield
Joan Stansfield
John Stansfield
Brian Stott
Ann Stott
Alan Taylor
Jean Taylor
Philip Thorne
Jean Thorne
Peter Thorne
Raymond Tomlinson
Phyllis Tomlinson
Ann Tomlinson
Michael Tomlinson
Thomas Walsh
Jean Walsh
Jeanette Walsh
William Walsh
Gertrude Williams
Paul Williams
Joseph Wilshaw
Marjorie Wilshaw
William Wood
Joan Wood
Source: Manchester Evening News
Miraculously, no one on the ground was injured, but the disaster had and continues to have, a profound effect on the lives of countless people.
It is still the fourth worst disaster in British aviation history and the third worst disaster to date to happen on English soil.
Here, 50 years on from the tragedy, using archived newspaper reports from the time and contemporary interviews with those whose lives were forever changed by the disaster, is the story of that fateful day.
The miracle behind the tragedy...
The passengers on British Midland Airways Argonaut G-ALHG were happy. They had enjoyed their Mediterranean holiday and were looking forward to returning home. The excitement mounted as the plane banked over Denton and they could see Stockport in front of them and knew they were only minutes away from Ringway Airport.
But in the cockpit, Captain Harry Marlow was worried. He was having trouble maintaining his height and he knew he would never reach Ringway.
No one on the ground was even scratched
Just one tiny wedge of wasteland nestles among the complex densely packed buildings in the centre of Stockport.
And it was there that the giant Argonaut airliner dropped to the ground. Aboard the plane 72 people died but no one on the ground was hurt.
Only yards away from the crash spot and lying directly in the airliner’s path, is the town’s ultra modern police-station, the 19th Century town hall and the town’s infirmary. To the left and right, streets of homes and towering blocks of flats in a town of some 150 000 people.
The Argonaut’s flight path took the plane towards the big buildings. It missed them all. This was the miracle behind a tragedy.
A last minute effort by the pilot of the aircraft averted an even greater tragedy for the people living in blocks of flats in Stockport. His plane crashed into an electricity sub station in Lower Carr.
The pilot, Harry Marlow, aged 41, of Nottinghamshire, had just radioed that he was in trouble and was seen to turn the plane away from the course which would have taken the plane straight into the flats. Instead, he hit the sub station overlooking the Tin Brook and was dragged from the aircraft with eleven other passengers.
One of the survivors who was pulled out from the front end of the aircraft was 15 year old Fiona Child, of Bramhall Lane South. She was taken to hospital.
Captain Marlow was cut out of the flight deck by Stockport policeman Pc John Heath, of Cheadle Hulme, who was helped by Brian Donahue, a civilian assisting with the rescue work.
They were only four minutes from Ringway Airport. Captain Marlow’s choice of crash site was remarkable.
Although the plane came down in the centre of a busy industrial town, nobody outside the plane was injured. If the plane had crashed five seconds later, it would have hit the Covent Garden tower block of flats. Ten seconds later it would have hit the police station; fifteen seconds later Stockport Infirmary could have been hit.
Captain Marlow and a stewardess survived the crash. Three more crew members were killed.
The plane, on impact, had broken into three sections; the front end with the pilot inside was comparatively whole, the middle fuselage and part of the wings remained for some minutes intact but then many explosions from the fuel tanks engulfed it in flames, making rescue work difficult and dangerous.
Rescuers were on the scene just seconds after the crash.
‘All I could hear was the tower calling Hotel Golf, Hotel Golf, are you receiving?’
The first signs of an impending disaster were heard by those on the ground, via the last radio transmissions from the plane, which answered to the call sign ‘Hotel Golf’. They gave an insight into what happened in the moments before the dreadful incident.
Amateur radio enthusiast Rodney Davies, aged 15, a pupil of Dialstone Lane Secondary Modern School had just switched on his radio, specially tuned in to aircraft control wavelengths, when he heard the last message from Ringway Airport’s control tower to the stricken plane.
“The man in the control tower was dealing with three planes at once,” said Rodney of Tintern Grove, Stockport.
“He asked the plane ‘Are you still in contact’; there was no reply and he moved on to deal with another plane. That was all I heard.”
Rodney wasn’t the only youngster to overhear communications between the plane and control tower.
Howard Johnston, aged 11, of Cheadle Hulme, tuned his radio to the airport wavelength.
He said, “The control tower said to the captain ‘You are over shooting’ and the captain replied ‘I am having trouble with the rpm’.
“Then the control tower told the pilot to go around for another approach and climb to 2 000 feet. They asked his height and he replied ‘One thousand feet
“Control came in again to ask his height and he replied ‘Eight hundred feet and dropping’. They said he had about eight and a half miles to run.
“The next thing that happened, only a few seconds later, was a message from the control tower to the pilot ‘You have gone off the radar screen’.
“The pilot replied ‘I am down to 500ft can I have full emergency services please?
“The reply from the control tower was ‘They are already waiting. You have six miles to go’
“Then there was silence and all I could hear was the tower calling ‘Hotel Golf, Hotel Golf, are you receiving?’
Suntan lotion, skipping rope and twins’ passport in the wreckage
Eye witnesses told of the screams of women after the plane crashed into the small brick building across the road from a garage in Carr Brow.
But they stood little chance of rescue as the wrecked plane exploded and caught fire.
Local people who had rushed to the scene and had started the rescue operations before the arrival of the police, ambulance and fireman, from Stockport, Cheshire and Manchester, stood helplessly by as the fire blazed.
The ‘package deal’ holiday plane, a DC4 Argonaut, of British Midland Aviation, on charter to Arrowsmith Tours of Liverpool left Manchester on Saturday night for Palma, Mallorca and had started the return trip with a load of returning holiday makers shortly after 5am on Sunday morning.
The 79 sun-tanned passengers, who had spent 11 days on the island, were almost within sight of the runway at Manchester Airport when disaster struck.
Souvenirs of their holiday were taken out of the wreckage, a bottle of suntan lotion, broken watches, a straw sandal, the broken top of a snorkel, a high heeled white court shoe, cans of drink, a ‘no smoking’ notice, the charred handle of a skipping rope and a passport for twins. Yet by a strange quirk of fate, a crate of miniature liqueur bottles were removed intact from the wrecked plane.
When the flames died down rescue workers moved into the remains, completely clearing the wreckage in one and a half hours.
Stockport’s Centenary Hall and a Salvation Army Citadel were turned into emergency mortuaries to which a constant stream of ambulances carried the unidentified bodies.
‘What I’ll never forget is the agony on the faces’
High praise for civilian volunteers who were soon at the scene came from one of Stockport’s police inspectors, Mr John Ruston. “Their behaviour was outstanding and exemplary. People worked without stopping. They behaved like trained rescue workers, carrying away belongings of the victims which were salvaged from the rubble,” he said.
He himself had the task to sort out those belongings; there were shoes, bathing tackle lipsticks, photographs and money, all that was left. There was too a plaque ‘fasten your seat belts please’ and an orange coloured seat belt.
Motor patrol Pc William Davies, of Stockport Constabulary, who was among the first at the site, described the scene. He said, “I’ll never forget what I saw. When I arrived some people were half out, half in the plane, screaming with pain. One of my colleagues, some of the civilians and I dragged them out with their clothes burning. But what I will never forget is the shouts for help and the agony on the faces of other passengers, who screamed from behind the planes windows. We could not get near them because of the intense heat. Both from the plane and the building on Waterloo Road which caught fire when the tail of the plane demolished it.”
Rescue operations after the plane crash were a swiftly combined operation by the public services of Manchester, Stockport and Cheshire. Many local residents took part.
A considerable number of police, fire and ambulance men who were off duty either went straight to the scene of the disaster or reported to their headquarters, where their offers of help were readily accepted.
And, despite the large numbers involved, the rescue work proceeded in an orderly manner and with a minimum of fuss.
Some police officers who were alerted by telephone at first thought that their Sunday was being disturbed by a civil defence exercise, only to find that what was normally a routine drill had become a tragic fact.
The rescue workers were in and out of the wreckage, despite explosions and leaping flames, said an eyewitness. Their faces and hands blackened by smoke, some of them wearing blood stained shirts, they paused only to accept mugs of tea from Salvation Army women and WRVS members who had set up an emergency canteen.
Altogether, 30 ambulances from Stockport, Manchester, Altrincham and Cheshire ran a shuttle service between the crash scene and hospital and the two temporary mortuaries hurriedly set up.
Fire brigades from Stockport, Manchester and Cheshire provided 35 appliances, three of them relief machines standing by for fire calls. At King Street West fire station about 125 firemen took part in the operation.
Civil defence volunteers came from all over Stockport. There were about 30 of them, representing the whole staff of volunteers in the town, while a further corps stood by in Stalybridge in case they were needed.
Building site workers, emergency employees of a nearby garage, Salvation Army bandsmen, and local residents all played their part.
The local Salvation Army set up a liaison officer with Stockport Police to help the relatives of the passengers who streamed anxiously into Stockport police headquarters all afternoon. They provided relatives with accommodation.
Police came from Manchester, Stockport and Cheshire, many of them off duty and while some helped search the wreckage, others kept at bay the hundreds of people who swarmed round the area, trying to catch a glimpse of the scene of the crash.
The same people kept other police busy on traffic duty when the approach roads became thick with sightseers cars.
But their behaviour was praised by a senior police official, who said that the sightseers had not impeded the rescue work and had done as they were asked by police who were controlling the crowd. He added that it was amazing how the rescuers first on the scene had worked quietly and efficiently without supervision. He said, “Everyone seemed to know what to do without being told. In fact, in the early stages there was no one in command of the rescue operation.”
People came out to see what was happening
Other news reports painted the bystanders, the ones who came simply to see what was happening rather than help, in a different light.
Mr Leonard Massey, the chief constable of Stockport, complained that the crowds at the disaster had hampered rescue work and had behaved as though they were going to a football match. “They have been a terrible nuisance,” he said. “About 20 extra police have had to be on duty taking care of the sightseers. Some of them have been coming in on ton-up machines with transistor radios. One rescue worker, who had worked for eight hours, said angrily: “It was like Blackpool prom at the height of the season: Everybody had come to see a nice plane disaster.” The town was crowded with cars. Police tried to control the throngs but many forced their way through. At one time 20 people were standing on the sagging roof of a derelict house.
Strangers united in tragedy
Five miles away from the crash scene at Manchester Airport, stunned and weeping relatives of the holiday-makers aboard the plane were told of the crash by Manchester Airport director Mr George Harvey. He called the 45 people waiting for the flight into a private lounge to make the announcement half an hour after the crash. Several women fainted and airport first-aid teams went into action, treating people for shock.
The first hint of impending disaster came at 10 o’clock when instead of hearing the announcement of the flight’s arrival, relatives at the airport saw fire engines and ambulances racing onto the runway. Captain Marlow at the controls of ‘Hotel Golf’ had radioed ahead that he could not maintain height
At 10h30am a message of the airport loud-speaker system assembled relatives in one lounge and the 45 strangers were suddenly united in tragedy.
At lunchtime the first short-list of survivors arrived from Stockport Infirmary.
Relatives of the survivors were rushed into a fleet of taxis, some to go to Stockport Infirmary. As news of the crash was broadcast, the airport was inundated with phone calls and British Midland set up a special office to reassure anxious callers.
‘How many have got out?’
Even as he was being stretchered away with serious injuries, the thoughts of the pilot of the stricken airliner were only for the safety of his passengers.
Harry Marlow, aged 41, was seen to lift his hands to his head and ask: “How many have got out?.... How many have got out?”
Witness Michael Toole, aged 58, a brewery drayman of Alberta Street, Stockport, said, “The captain was only concerned about his passengers.”
Police chief ‘broke down and wept’
Police chief Leonard Massey was close to tears as he told the tragic story of the disaster.
“Everybody was so gallant. The rescuers, the policemen, the people who lived in the houses nearby risked their own lives to go in and out of the aircraft to save as many people as they could,” he said.
“Afterwards it was too much for a lot of them. They broke down and wept. So did my policemen. This has been a dreadful tragedy.” Rescuers could hear passengers screaming from the rear of the plane as an explosion sent flames sweeping through the length of the fuselage.
Police motor cyclist George Oliver scrambled through a split in the aircraft to pull out six people. Then he was forced back by the explosions.
Mr Massey added, “The people who were first on the spot were prepared to take any risk to save those in the plane.”
The wonderful response to give blood
The dramatic scenes in Stockport Infirmary were described by the matron, Miss Marjorie Dalton, a consultant surgeon, and Mr A House, the hospital administrative officer at a press conference days after the crash.
Immediately on the news of the crash the whole of Holden ward was cleared and the hospital’s major accident unit went into operation.
The unit is headed by the senior orthopaedic surgeon and by an amazing coincidence, he was on his way to the hospital and passing the crash scene so he was able to make an immediate assessment of the situation. “Everybody acted in a wonderful way,” said the matron.
By 10h45am, additional staff was arriving and staff from other hospitals came and volunteered as well as other people. Many were ex-nurses.
Miss Dalton said morale was high in the ward and the 11 survivors still in hospital were making good recoveries.
The survivors had received lots of letters and the hospital itself had received telegrams of good wishes to the patients. The surgeon said that some of the patients were still having sedatives ‘as and when necessary’.
Both operating theatres had been in full use from 2pm to 9pm. Nine patients had emergency operations, with the air hostess undergoing major surgery.
“No fewer than 64 people came to the hospital to volunteer to give blood. Although we had sufficient and we directed them to the blood bank. I think it was a wonderful response from the public,” Mr House said.
Here is a full list of those who survived the disaster and those who sadly died:
Survivors
Captain Harry Marlow, 41
Stewardess Julia Partleton, 25
Vivian Werrett, 20
Mary Green, 42,
Allan Kee Johnson, 22
Fiona Child, 15
Albert Owen, 27
David Ralphs, 20
Lilly Parry, 50
Susan Howarth, 20
Billy Wood, 13
Harold Wood, 15
Victims
Crew
Co-pilot Christopher Pollard
Engineer Gerald Lloyd
Steward Tony Taylor
Passengers
Dorothy Ackroyd
Michael Ayland
Janet Ayland
Herbert Benton
Phyllis Benton
Christine Benton
James Booth
Eliza Booth
Catherine Brooks
Ronald Cowgill
Annie Cowgill
Philip Cruse
Bernard Dowd
Jane Dowd
Sarah Gill
Alice Godwin
John Harland
Olive Harland
Alan Hughes
Kathleen Hughes
Elsie James
Arthur Kemp
Elsie Kemp
Roy Latham
Margaret Latham
Mabel Mellor
Lillian Nolan
Julia Nolan
Eva Owen
Arthur Reynolds
Ethel Reynolds
Edward Shaw
Gloria Shaw
Jeremy Shaw
Maxine Shaw
Norman Smart
Jillian Smart
Alexander Smith
Glenise Smith
Arthur Smith
Rachel Smith
David Smith
Harry Stansfield
Joan Stansfield
John Stansfield
Brian Stott
Ann Stott
Alan Taylor
Jean Taylor
Philip Thorne
Jean Thorne
Peter Thorne
Raymond Tomlinson
Phyllis Tomlinson
Ann Tomlinson
Michael Tomlinson
Thomas Walsh
Jean Walsh
Jeanette Walsh
William Walsh
Gertrude Williams
Paul Williams
Joseph Wilshaw
Marjorie Wilshaw
William Wood
Joan Wood
Source: Manchester Evening News
