The last weeks of the bombing war
In April 1945 RAF Bomber Command was still attacking Germany’s fuel supplies. On the evening of 7 April a Lancaster of No. 9 Squadron, serial HK788, took off from RAF Bardney in Lincolnshire at 18.37 to bomb the benzol plant at Molbis. On the way home, in the early hours of 8 April, the aircraft caught fire. It dived into a field at Lyford, about four miles north-north-west of Wantage and around 400 yards south of the parish church and Manor Farm. None of the crew survived.
The crew
The seven men who died were:
- Flying Officer Alfred Edward Jeffs, pilot, aged 29
- Sergeant Clarence Victor Higgins, flight engineer, aged 23
- Flight Sergeant Kenneth Charles Mousley, navigator, aged 36
- Warrant Officer II Hugh Alexander Fisher, Royal Canadian Air Force, air bomber, aged 24
- Flight Sergeant Campbell McIntosh McMillan, wireless operator and air gunner, aged 20
- Flight Sergeant Willy Thomas, air gunner, aged 20
- Flight Sergeant Gordon John Symonds, air gunner, aged 20
Gordon Symonds had been born and brought up in Wantage, so he died only a few miles from home. All seven are buried together in the war graves plot of Oxford (Botley) Cemetery at North Hinksey.
Remembering them
For more than sixty years there was no memorial in Lyford itself. In October 2008 a stone tablet, paid for privately by the widow of the wireless operator, was dedicated in the village church of St Mary the Virgin, where it is fixed to the north wall of the nave. It names all seven men and records that their Lancaster crashed at Lyford on 8 April 1945, ending with the RAF motto, Per ardua ad astra. Local clergy led the service, and the actor Richard Briers attended and read Noël Coward’s poem ‘Lie in the Dark and Listen’, written in tribute to bomber crews.
Visiting
St Mary’s church stands on the green in Lyford, a small village off the A338 between Wantage and Frilford. The crash site is private farmland south of the church. The graves can be visited at Botley Cemetery, Oxford.