This is the photo of a funeral in Blessington in April 1941. You can see the army and you can see the Union Jack Flag.
A bomber aircraft crashed on the hills near Blessington killing 4 young men. Kenneth Hill, the pilot, from Croydon, at just 23 was the oldest member of the crew, the navigator Jack Lamb and two air gunners both from Old Trafford, Stanley Wright and Fred Erdwin.
On the night of 17 April 1941 their squadron was assigned to a bombing mission on Berlin. At an early stage in the war this was a risky long range flight deep into Germany in an aircraft with minimal navigation equipment. They took off from their base in Yorkshire at 2030 hours. The weather was poor with almost complete cloud cover across the North Sea.
It is not known whether Kenneth Hill and his crew reached their target. The next that was heard from them was when they were picked up by a signal station in Norfolk at 0217 requesting a position fix. They had clearly returned across the North Sea but for some reason they did not respond but continued flying west across the breadth of England.
They continued over the Welsh mountains and across the Irish Sea. They had overflown by more than 100 miles and still their aircraft continued west. It is perhaps hard to imagine an aircrew flying that far astray. But who knows what was going in the final phase of the doomed flight? Was the pilot incapacitated? Did they have hypothermia or fatigue? Or maybe it was a combination of fear, poor training and deficient equipment that set them off course?
However there was no such rescue for Kenneth Hill and his crew as their bomber droned west across the Irish Sea. Their aircraft was recorded over Dublin just after 0400. A Garda in a Kildare station logged the aircraft overhead at 0418. The plane then made a U-turn which took it back east over mid Kildare.
The Garda station at Hollywood south of Blessington logged it overhead at 0432. And then nothing more was heard or seen of the plane until two days later when turf cutters on Blackhill above Ballyknockan came on bodies and wreckage.
The plane probably ran out of fuel after over eight hours in the air — plunged into the slopes which faced west over the filling Blessington lake.
The Irish Government approved a funeral with military honours. The crew’s coffins were taken down the street in Blessington by Irish soldiers while an Army band played the Funeral March. The funeral took place in the St. Mary’s.
They were then buried in the adjoining graveyard where their graves are marked by Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones. They have not been forgotten in Blessington. Family members of the men have visited the graves in subsequent years.
