Liverpool & South West Lancashire FHS - Forum

Hi All

Apologies if I should have chosen a different forum for this! I am tying up some loose ends in my 20c genealogy. When I interviewed an elderly family member, who had previously lived in Frodsham, some years ago she mentioned an aircraft accident in which a relative was killed or injured and I need to find out more about this person. Sadly the relative is now dead, so I cannot revisit this recollection.

She recalled that the young man who she thought may have been in the air force at the time but for some reason was on leave was killed when an aircraft hit a steeple while on approach to Speke airport. She thought the incident took place around 1935.

Liverpool archives and the RAF museum have no record of this, but acknowledge that their records are patchy. They recommend possibly looking at newspaper records, but before doing so I wondered if any elderly members amy be able to recall this incident to help me narrow down the search.

Many thanks

Hi and welcome to the forum. You may well be lucky in that somebody might have a recollection of the event, fingers crossed. In the meantime I think you need to try and ascertain the name of the person and then from the death indexes perhaps the date can be identified.

This is what would be needed to try to pinpoint the event in the newspapers.

Alternatively you could try a couple of other local forums with a similar request, http://www.yoliverpool.com/ being one of them.

Hi
There was a Tom Campbell Black who died in a plane crash at Speke Airport 1936, sorry not to be of much help.

Tina

Campbell Black was a famous aviator, and the accident in which he was killed came when a landing RAF light bomber taxied into his plane, which was also taxi-ing, so no collision with a steeple involved there.

Family legends are notoriously vague and misleading as we know from our own experiences.

You say that this is a family member who was involved in the accident, if so then you need to create a family tree around the person who told you the story and collect as many names and ages as possible, you never know Tom Campbell Black could well be the person if you could only tie the names together.

Hi
I've emailed Cuz Tommy who is a mine of info on Garston/Speke.

Tina

Hiya....I lived in Speke until I was 15 and now live in Garston...I have to say I have never heard of this accident , but You can find out if it did happen...speke has a site for all ex Speke people and they will know
http://www.spekeliverpool.co.uk/
go to the Guestbook ...read through it ....and you will probably see someone on there that is into the Historical side of Speke...leave your query in the guest book......good luck
allan