Notes: 1. The memorial was placed here mainly through the efforts of local man, Keith Robson. In later years the bench rotted and was to be replaced.
2. On 31st May 1944, a Short Stirling III, registration LK517, of the RAF’s 1654 Heavy Conversion Unit, based at Wigsley (near Lincoln), took off for a 5 hour flight of navigational and bombing exercises.
The crew were warned that cumulonimbus (thunder) clouds, with tops up to 20,000 feet (6,000 metres), were forming over the Pennines, and were expected to move east.
About 4.45 pm the Garrison Engineer of a Prisoner of War Camp near Darlington heard an aircraft, and, from the unusual noises it made, it appeared to be in difficulties. Shortly afterwards he heard two muffled explosions, immediately followed by the sound of the aircraft’s engines at full power, and in his words “producing a noise such as I have never heard from any aircraft before”. He then saw pieces of the aircraft falling out of the clouds.
This aircraft, which proved to be Stirling LK517, crashed between Middridge and Shildon, just off Spout Lane, opposite the access road to (the then existing) East Thickley Farm, in “Store Fields”.
3. The members of the crew were
Pilot Officer Stanley Wilson, 27, of Newcastle;
Flight Engineer Sergeant Donald Curtis, 23, of Ebbw Vale, Wales;
Navigator Sergeant Nathaniel Crawford, 30, from Larne, County Antrim;
Bomb Aimer Flying Officer John Brooks, 36, of Salford;
Wireless Operator Sergeant Fred Bates, 21, of Blackpool;
Air Gunner Sergeant Thomas Parr, 27, of Droylsden, Manchester;
Air Gunner Sergeant Walter Lawton, of Liverpool.
4. See Stanley Wilson’s Every Name a Story entry
