MEMORIES 125 and 129 reported on the crash of a Stirling bomber at 5.15pm on Wednesday, May 31, 1944, onto the Co-operative farm at West Thickley, Shildon.

All seven members of crew – led by a Newcastle pilot – were killed.

Valerie Johnson was only five at the time but her mother told her how they were among a group of mothers and children returning from the pictures in Bishop Auckland.

“We were walking along the old railway line which leads from the King William to Shildon station,” she says. “Before the Jubilee Estate was built, there was a completely open view towards the Store Farm.

“My mother and most of the other ladies gazed in fascination at the plane.

“Then they realised that one lady who had lived in London for part of the war had pushed her son onto the ground and was lying on top of him to protect him.”

Den Ewbank, who was taken to see the wreckage by his father, says: “The inquiry put the crash down to pilot error, but the crash report states that there was something stuck in the scavenge pump of one of the engines.

“These aircraft were notoriously underpowered and so the height from wheels to cockpit was huge to give it extra lift at take-off.”

The Short Stirling bomber was on a training flight from RAF Wigsley in Lincolnshire.

The men who perished, all members of the RAF Volunteer Reserve, 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; and Air Gunner Sergeant Walter Lawton, of Liverpool.