OUR report of the McMullen anniversary included an eyewitness account of the crash from Geoff Craggs, who was about 12 at the time, and remembered seeing the Lancaster bomber come over his family home in The Causeway, off Yarm Road.

Geoff has much stronger memories of a second crash in the area, perhaps soon after the war had ended. It occurred out-of-town, at Morton Palms, opposite the Old Farmhouse Inn which is midway between the Morrisons supermarket and Middleton St George on the A67.

A fighter, presumably heading back to the airfield, had come down in a field about 100 yards north of the inn, and Geoff, in his early teens, went out to see if any treasures could be salvaged from the wreck.

“It had nosedived straight into the ground,” he says. “It had made a big hole in the ground and the RAF men were digging it out when I arrived.

“I was looking for Perspex that I could make rings out of.

“They’d covered the plane with a tarpaulin, and I turned it back and there was the body of the pilot underneath – there was a pair of flying boots and his legs had been cut off but were still in the boots.”

Geoff would love to know, and so would we – please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk if you have any information about this accident.