THE daughter of an RAF pilot, one of five men lost when a prototype Victor bomber plunged into the Irish Sea in August 1959 – a story recounted in the Mourne Observer and on television by the BBC last summer – has paid an emotional visit to Mourne.
Elizabeth Morgan, who was just three when her father Raymond died, met former trawlerman Sam McKibbin, who took part in the extensive ocean-bed search for the missing 40-ton aircraft. Nine fishing boats from Kilkeel and Annalong were amongst those involved and their endeavours, over a six-month period in 1960, helped to determine the cause of the crash.
In this heartfelt letter of thanks, penned after her weekend visit from England drew to a close, Elizabeth describes Sam as ‘a living link to my father’ and how talking to him ‘has given me my very own connection and memory’.
Elizabeth’s Letter
Instinctively, human beings choose order and routine over chaos and discontinuity, but experience has taught me that it’s often the unexpected and unpredictable element of chance that initiates the big moments of change in our lives.
This story is no different, a story that began on 20 August 1959, when Victor bomber XH688 catastrophically nosedived into the sea, just off the Pembrokeshire coast, resulting in the loss of five lives.
This was the event that brought me to Northern Ireland, 65 years later, to meet someone who, until a year ago, I’d never heard of.
He is a retired trawlerman from Annalong and his name is Sam McKibbin. I am the youngest daughter of the plane’s pilot, Raymond James Morgan.
My meeting with Sam would never have happened if it hadn’t been for my son, Tom, who just happened to see a BBC Northern Ireland news feed pop up on his phone last August with the words ‘Victor Bomber’ in the title.
We live in Cheshire, England, and how this story from Northern Ireland flashed up on his phone is a mystery and one of those one-in-a-million chances that could so easily have been missed.
Tom followed the link to BBC journalist Niall McCracken’s interview with Sam McKibbin, who was one of the many men involved in the biggest sea search of its time. Accompanying the interview was Terence Bowman’s mid-1990s coverage of the plane crash in the Mourne Observer.
It took me a few days to process this renewed interest in an event that has haunted me all my life, not least because I have no memory of my father, I was just three years old when he died.
This tragic event was further complicated by the secrecy surrounding Britain’s nuclear B2 bomber when it disappeared off the radar.
In the hours and days following its disappearance, nobody really knew what had happened to it, which meant there were restrictions on the reporting and dissemination of information about the crash, and the details remained classified for many years afterwards.
A lack of factual information prompted speculation in the press, especially in the immediate aftermath, some of which was upsetting for my mother and sister, who was 12 when our father died.
It took over a year to gather all the information and reconstruct the plane from the pieces trawled from the sea, to determine the cause of the accident.
It was only last year that I was finally given the official accident report and I’m sure that was due to Niall McCracken requesting more information from the MoD and Air Ministry – previous attempts by my family to obtain more information had been denied, with those same authorities stating they remained classified.
The operation to recover and reassemble 600,000 pieces of the plane – some fragments were no bigger than a finger nail – took nearly 16 months. It was only then the cause of the crash could be identified by accident investigators: a simple human error of applying too much protective paint to the sleeve that secured the pitot tube, an instrument that measured the speed of the plane, causing it to shear off from the starboard wing during its routine high speed manoeuvres.
I believe this protracted period of uncertainty to find the cause of the crash only added to the grief of the families, at least it did for my family, and had the effect of submerging the shock and intense feelings of personal loss into a suffocating vacuum of dark silence, particularly so for my mother and sister.
Looking back at news reports of the time, I’m struck by the fact that for the most part the plane took centre stage; in a sense this masked the human loss and the effects of sudden death on the families who lost a husband or father that day.
Sam McKibbin was one of the many men involved in the search for plane wreckage.
He worked on the trawler Green Hill and it was the crew of this boat who recovered co-pilot Gerald Breakspere Stockman’s watch.
Their discovery was critical, as it pinpointed the exact time of impact from which a more accurate search area could be determined.
Incredibly, the watch was intact, with only the strap missing. Listening to Sam recall this moment during my visit to his home was poignant, made more so because he was actually there and saw the watch. Of all the thousands of mechanical, impersonal pieces recovered, this small timepiece was the only ‘human’ evidence to have survived that catastrophic impact.
It’s often the personal memento that triggers moments of intensely vivid reflection. For me, as I imagine it was for all the other families, the recovery of that watch was and remains the most valuable, yet heartbreaking memento mori, a reminder of one man’s lifespan, recording the exact time he and the other men on the plane died.
It was later that day, following my trip to Annalong, that I began to understand why I’d made this journey, that I’d been searching for my own personal connection to my father.
Everything I’d known about him had been handed down from family and friends who knew him.
Whilst this was certainly essential for me, I had never felt, until now, that I was a part of his life. Meeting Sam changed all that.
He was a previously unknown, but living link to my father and this is why talking to him has been so special and has given me my very own connection and memory, if that makes sense.
So it is with profound gratitude that I thank Sam for meeting me and sharing his story.
He and his wife Heather and her sister Wilma made me feel so welcome; indeed within minutes it felt as if I’d known them for many years, I will always remember and treasure the warmth and kindness they showed me and my son Tom, his wife Kate and my three grandsons, Finn, Gabriel and Theo, who remember the wonderful cakes they provided – ‘scrumptious’ was how they described them!
I must also thank Martin Cassidy, who gave me a fragment of the plane that his Uncle Jim had kept from the wreckage.
Jim was a trawlerman on a different boat and had kept the piece until just before he died, when he passed it on to Martin.
When Martin saw Niall’s interview with Sam, he contacted Niall for information on how to ‘return’ the fragment to me.
Such unprompted generosity of thought and spirit has to be commended and it was with great pleasure that I was able to meet him during the trip, both to thank him personally and to add another connection to my father.
And finally, my thanks must go to Terence Bowman and Niall McCracken.
This trip would never have taken place without them. The unwavering support they have shown me throughout this process has been a source of strength to me.
There have been many times along the way when doubts and fears overtook me, when I wondered if I could face the ‘strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief’ to borrow a beautiful line from one of Seamus Heaney’s poems, but I now realise it’s been the silent pull of unresolved grief that has been at the centre of this very long journey.
It is in wonder and joy that, after meeting and talking to Sam, Martin, Terence, Niall, Heather and Wilma, I am now able to feel a sense of my father and a sense of peace. My heartfelt thanks to you all.
Northern Ireland is a beautiful country and one that I will return to in the future. The Mourne Mountains embraced my family, the weather was perfect, and we enjoyed great food and friendly staff in The Harbour Inn at Annalong and The Kilmorey Arms, Kilkeel.
We stayed at Parkview House, Kilkeel, and thank Paul and Cath for the lovely Airbnb accommodation – the boys just loved the pool table and basketball net!
It is only fitting that I end this story with the names of those who died that day in August 1959:
Squadron Leader Raymond James Morgan
Squadron Leader Gerald Breakspere Stockman
Flight Lieutenant Ronald John Hannaford, D.F.C.
Flight Lieutenant Lewis Nicholas Williams
Mr Robert Hugh Williams
Memories of catastrophic bomber crash and massive search by local trawlers to establish the cause resonate to this day
By Terence Bowman
SIXTY-FIVE years ago this summer a top secret Mark 2 Victor bomber on a routine test flight plunged into the Irish Sea off the Welsh coast, resulting in the loss of its four-strong RAF crew and a senior observer from Handley Page, the company which had built the 40-ton aeroplane.
The crash on 20 August 1959, involving a prototype of Britain’s latest and fastest military aircraft, was headline news, including locally in the Belfast Telegraph, but after initial press interest had died down, the story, like the ill-fated four-jet Victor, disappeared ‘off the radar’.
Few if any members of the public ever knew about the extensive operation that was mounted, at a cost of approx. £3m., to recover the missing aeroplane and to determine the exact cause of the catastrophe, which placed the whole future of the multi-million pound Victor programme, in the era of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, in jeopardy.
Nor were they aware that a small flotilla of fishing trawlers from Mourne, six from Kilkeel and three from Annalong, played an important role in not only helping to retrieve 70% of the bomber but also in ensuring the Mark 2 Victor would remain in service until the early 1990s.
Under the control of HMS Harrier, the search off the Welsh coast involved some 1,500 men on board 27 trawlers and 12 Navy ships. At the time it was described in official documents as ‘probably the greatest search operation of its type ever undertaken’.
The Kilkeel boats, which were engaged in the search from June/ July to November 1960, were Ambitious (skippered by Ernest McKee), Castle Dawn (Howard Forsyth), Melita (Louis Campbell), Ocean Gleaner (Bertie McBride), Shemeriah (David Wilson), and Unity (F. J. McKnight).
The Annalong trio, comprising Green Hill (Jack Chambers), Green Isle (Hayden Chambers) and Green Pastures (Victor Chambers), were involved between early April and November 1960.
The rewards for the men’s involvement in the search were far from substantial. The sum of £500 a week per boat was mentioned but that was an all-inclusive sum covering fuel, oil and provisions, along with wages for the crew. What mattered was that the earnings remained consistent during the period of the search, whereas trawling for fish as a living depended on the extent of the catch.
It wasn’t until the Spring of 1960, some seven months after the crash, that a sizeable piece of the plane was recovered by a Welsh trawler involved in the search.
As a result all the trawlers, now including those from Mourne, were directed to a new area, measuring some 16 square miles.
The trawlers cast special fine nets manufactured by Courtaulds, which used a tough new man-made yarn called Courlene. When the final signal ‘return to harbour – search complete’ went out on 19 November the trawlers, backed by a number of salvage vessels, had carried out more than 12,000 hauls and nearly 600,000 pieces of the missing 40-ton bomber had been recovered.
Ambitious achieved the record for a single trawler’s recovery for any one month – 27,574 pieces of Victor wreckage. Green Pastures set the record for a single day, netting no fewer than 7,395 fragments on 30 June 1960.
The total catch represented an amazing 70 per cent of the aircraft which had shattered on impact with the sea. It gave the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, which pieced together a crude skeleton of the Victor bomber in a huge hangar, enough information to be ‘reasonably satisfied’ regarding the cause of the accident (to which Elizabeth Morgan refers in her letter).
The story, which for many years was shrouded in official secrecy, was first made public in a meticulously researched book called ‘Operation Victor Search’, which was written by Douglas A. Koster, Second Mate on the salvage vessel Twyford, and published by Suffolk company Terence Dalton Ltd. in 1979.
A copy came into my possession at the Mourne Observer some 15 years later.
Realising that as far as local readers were concerned it was potentially ‘the greatest maritime story never told’, I obtained permission to serialise the book from February to May 1994, concluding with coverage of a reunion night in Kilkeel which had brought together a number of the Mourne trawlermen who were involved in the operation.
And yet, the power of the local press notwithstanding, the search for the lost bomber remained largely untold outside the Mourne area. That was until July 2023, when, following an approach I’d made to the BBC earlier in the year, a three-minute report, with senior journalist Niall McCracken retelling the story through words and pictures, was viewed many thousands of times on the BBC World News website followed by a Radio Ulster report of similar length and again on the BBC Northern Ireland Newsline programme.
All three reports featured an interview with Annalong man Sam McKibbin, one of the last survivors of that ‘greatest maritime story never told’. It was the online coverage that was drawn to the attention of Cheshire-born Elizabeth Morgan, daughter of pilot Raymond Morgan, and which led to her recent visit to Mourne, including a deeply emotional meeting with Sam at his home in Annalong.
