THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN
THEIR FLYING MACHINES

Death on the Mountain

Most people go about their lives amiably enough without anything troublesome like strong passions to disturb the even tenor of their ways. Then there are others, the different ones, who find a mission early on in life and stay with it for the rest of their days. Alun Evans from Ammanford has been many things in his working life: postman, pest control operative (rat-catcher to you and me) and mature student being among them, and currently he's a librarian in Ammanford.

But from early childhood he developed a passion for anything to do with aviation which became the one constant throughout his varying employment fortunes. In recent years he has used his aviation interests to research several wartime flying accidents over Wales in which planes crashed during training flights, at times almost as dangerous an activity as combat missions over war-torn Europe. After finding several of these crash sites on remote Welsh hills he next tracked down the crew members who died on the flights in order to organise monuments to their memory. To date, four mountain-side memorials stand in lonely testimony to airmen who died on Welsh soil during World War Two.

Photo: Dedication ceremony for a memorial to the crew of a Lancaster bomber which crashed on the Black Mountain, a mile north of Llyn y Fan Fawr, on Saturday 5th September 1943. The hole at the bottom of the photo is the impact crater made when the plane crashed nose-first into the mountain. The helicopter that brought the memorial is standing by. The onlookers are mostly relatives of the crew and the stone was put in place on 5th September 1993, exactly fifty years after the crash. An RAF chaplain is delivering the service.

The following article by Welsh journalist Byron Rogers tells the story of Alun Evans and his search for the site above the tiny Carmarthenshire village of Myddfai where a Lancaster crew member died on the Black Mountain in December 1944.

THE SERGEANT AT CHRISTMAS
By Byron Rogers
From: The Bank Manager and the Holy Grail:
travels to the weirder reaches of Wales,
Aurum Press, 2003.

They are preparing to put up a war memorial in the village church, even though few of them are old enough to remember the event it commemorates. It will take the form of a wooden plaque. 'To the memory of Sgt. T. C. Jones, who died in this parish, Christmas 1944.' Nothing more. But then they do not need more, for it is something the village will never forget. This is their Christmas story.

There are already two war memorials in the village of Myddfai in Carmarthenshire, and they do not have many names, just four on that for World War I, three on that for World War II. You have to know how small the village is, in the foothills of the Black Mountain, how removed from all main roads, to realise the intrusion those wars represented and the overwhelming tragedy of those seven deaths. But there was an eighth death.

It was different from the others in that it did not take place on any far-off battlefield. It happened here. But nobody in the village met the man, even though for three weeks it might be said he was part of their community and he could see them, at least he could see their lights far below him, for the wartime blackout had been lifted. He might have heard them, too, calling to their sheep and their dogs, as he crawled towards them. He had a broken leg and, when they found him, had almost reached safety. It was the morning of Christmas Day. He was nineteen. This is the Stranger's story.

But it is also the story of another man fifty years on who heard it as it was passing into folklore, when people were beginning to add details of their own. Alun Evans, now in his early forties and a mature student reading for a history degree, was the local pest-control officer ('rat-catcher, if you like') and had heard many versions of the Stranger's story. The man had been on the run. He was an Army deserter. He had bailed out of an aircraft, though no one knew why, for, so it was said, the aircraft landed safely. But certain details were never questioned. He was very young and it was Christmas when his body with the leather elbows of a flying suit worn through from crawling was brought down, carried on a gate by farmers and laid, draped in the Union Flag, in Myddfai Church. It was just that everything else had become a mystery.

Who was he, this man who had tumbled into their small world? Where had he come from? Was there a family still living which remembered him? Alun Evans had asked such questions before and, through his researches, had answered them, for he was a man fascinated by two things: by flight and by the Black Mountain where so many flights had ended above his home town of Ammanford. For him it had started when he read that 350 planes had crashed during the war in north and Mid Wales. But it wasn't that, it was the fact that in popular folklore most had become German bombers, when almost every one was an RAF training flight, young crews just out of school let loose in Lancaster bombers, which, as he says, were then considered works day vehicles, little more than the equivalent of Ford Transit vans today. It was later he found out that their families knew little, beyond the bald official announcement of death and letters of condolence from commanding officers, of what had happened to their sons or husbands or brothers. Alun Evans decided to make it his life's work to change this.

I already knew something of this man. My cousin, a hill farmer who had on occasion called Alun Evans in to deal with wasps' nests, talked with awe about someone he seemed to consider the modern equivalent of the Ancient Mariner. A nice man, but you might as well forget the rest of the day if you get him on to the Second World War.'

It was twenty years ago that Alun Evans heard about his first wrecked plane on the Black Mountain. A hill walker himself, he met others who talked of finding craters up there with twisted bits of metal in them and of scattered ammunition lying around. But finding these, at 1800 feet, in that terrifying expanse where Carmarthen shire and Breconshire meet, was something else. Stray from its sheep-tracks at any time outside the brief window of summer and there is the very real possibility you may never come down from the bogs and the sink holes. The weather changes abruptly up there. Members of the SAS have died on the Black Mountain, and even now Alun Evans, who knows it as well as any man living, never goes up without leaving a large-scale map at home, with instructions to his wife as to when she should phone the police. The map is in their front parlour, a small room his wife abandoned long ago to what he calls his obsession. A large propeller stands behind the door, and there are models of planes, bits of metal and a whole wall given over to his books and files.

That first wreck of his came when he found a long ditch with four deep gouges torn into the mountainside, which indicated a four-engined bomber, and the fact that nothing grew there was a measure of the fireball in which eight young men had died. This was when he discovered that the Black Mountain was a graveyard for planes, six having come down within a radius of five miles. Remote ness and danger have deterred souvenir hunters, so he knows of the complete tail section of a Wellington in a place where even he dares not go.

Having found that first plane was a beginning, for it was not just bombers that had crashed. 'My two children were small, and I wondered whether these men had had children, whether they had been married, and it was then that I decided to trace their families. It seemed to me that if there were any of these still alive, they must often have wondered where it took place, this event which changed their lives. I looked around me at that desolate place where I found my first wreckage and there was nothing at all to say what had happened there. I remember thinking, I will see to it these men are remembered.'

And this is what he did. His researches produced a date. The date produced a list of names from the Ministry of Defence, which in turn produced the names of the next of kin from the War Graves Commission, also of the towns where the dead airmen had lived. There the trail ran cold, but he advertised in the local papers of those towns, which was when the first letter he had waited for, and dreaded, came. For how would the families react to his intrusion? He need not have worried. The letters, at first formal ('Dear Mr Evans, I am the brother ...'), changed as soon as contact was established. 'Dear Alun, May I thank you ...'. In the end there was a memorial to that first plane on the mountain, and he met them, these people he felt he knew already and who felt they knew him. He stood there with them and felt things were at last complete. But there was another death he could not put out of his head, the death at Christmas.

It is now 1998 and a bleak winter's day of wind and rain as he and I begin our climb. At this height farmhouses have been abandoned, some in living memory, others long ago. There are still sheep in the today. It was later he found out that their families knew little, beyond the bald official announcement of death and letters of condolence from commanding officers, of what had happened to their sons or husbands or brothers. Alun Evans decided to make it his life's work to change this.

I already knew something of this man. My cousin, a hill farmer who had on occasion called Alun Evans in to deal with wasps' nests, talked with awe about someone he seemed to consider the modern equivalent of the Ancient Mariner. 'A nice man, but you might as well forget the rest of the day if you get him on to the Second World War.'

It was twenty years ago that Alun Evans heard about his first wrecked plane on the Black Mountain. A hill walker himself, he met others who talked of finding craters up there with twisted bits of metal in them and of scattered ammunition lying around. But finding these, at 1,800 feet, in that terrifying expanse where Carmarthenshire and Breconshire meet, was something else. Stray from its sheep-tracks at any time outside the brief window of summer and there is the very real possibility you may never come down from the bogs and the sink holes. The weather changes abruptly up there. Members of the SAS have died on the Black Mountain, and even now Alun Evans, who knows it as well as any man living, never goes up without leaving a large-scale map at home, with instructions to his wife as to when she should phone the police. The map is in their front parlour, a small room his wife abandoned long ago to what he calls his obsession. A large propeller stands behind the door, and there are models of planes, bits of metal and a whole wall given over to his books and files.

That first wreck of his came when he found a long ditch with four deep gouges torn into the mountainside, which indicated a four-engined bomber, and the fact that nothing grew there was a measure of the fireball in which eight young men had died. This was when he discovered that the Black Mountain was a graveyard for planes, six having come down within a radius of five miles. Remote ness and danger have deterred souvenir hunters, so he knows of the complete tail section of a Wellington in a place where even he dares not go.

Having found that first plane was a beginning, for it was not just bombers that had crashed. 'My two children were small, and I wondered whether these men had had children, whether they had been married, and it was then that I decided to trace their families. It seemed to me that if there were any of these still alive, they must often have wondered where it took place, this event which changed their lives. I looked around me at that desolate place where I found my first wreckage and there was nothing at all to say what had happened there. I remember thinking, I will see to it these men are remembered.'

And this is what he did. His researches produced a date. The date produced a list of names from the Ministry of Defence, which in turn produced the names of the next of kin from the War Graves Commission, also of the towns where the dead airmen had lived. There the trail ran cold, but he advertised in the local papers of those towns, which was when the first letter he had waited for, and dreaded, came. For how would the families react to his intrusion? He need not have worried. The letters, at first formal ('Dear Mr Evans, I am the brother ...'), changed as soon as contact was established. 'Dear Alun, May I thank you ...' In the end there was a memorial to that first plane on the mountain, and he met them, these people he felt he knew already and who felt they knew him. He stood there with them and felt things were at last complete. But there was another death he could not put out of his head, the death at Christmas.

It is now 1998 and a bleak winter's day of wind and rain as he and I begin our climb. At this height farmhouses have been abandoned, some in living memory others long ago. There are still sheep in the fields but their owners have moved down, for the winters are terrible, as they were that December in 1944 when for three weeks fog and torrential rain closed in over Europe and made possible the German breakthrough in the Ardennes. Conditions this day are much as they were then, and from where we are, heads bent against the rain, we can see the weather changing beneath us as the gale blots out the valley. It occurs to me that I would not last a night out in the open here. 'What would he have eaten in those three weeks?'

'We don't know. He'd got down to the fields, there might have been kale, but he must also have had emergency rations.'

The constant rain had flooded the valleys and up here now streams had become rivers, brooks had become streams, so the whole hillside moved with red water. The rest was mud and broken gates. We waded through a stream and suddenly there were walls indicating an approach to somewhere, but walls so thick with lichen it might have been above the clouds, then more walls and stunted trees. 'This is it, this was where they found him.'

On the afternoon of 9 December 1944 a Lancaster with a largely Canadian crew was making a training flight, when at 2 p.m., 24,500 feet above Carmarthenshire, flying in cloud, it entered severe turbulence and went out of control. This plane already had a record. Just three days earlier it had suffered engine failure in a raid on the Ruhr and five members of another crew bailed out over the Continent, thoughs the pilot later managed an emergency landing at RAF Manston. This time it went into an uncontrollable, screaming dive.

It is thought that they had flown straight into the centre of a huge cumulus nimbus cloud when a powerful updraught threw the Lancaster on to its back. The RAF records at Hendon record only that the pilot managed to regain control at 8,000 feet, but that by then, 'through a misunderstanding four of the crew had bailed out'. The plane, with three still onboard, made an emergency landing on Fairfield Common, an airfield near Swansea.

You have to rely on your imagination for what really happened up there, the crew being thrown about so that one of them, the wireless operator, hurled against the main spar, was bringing up blood even before he jumped. Alun Evans found this out from 166 Squadron Association, of which the plane had been part, for facts were beginning to emerge. He had names now, that of the Canadian pilot R. H. Chittim, who had stayed on board, and that of the flight engineer, Trevor Jones, one of the four who had jumped.

He had also discovered that the plane itself, with the surviving members of the crew, was lost the following month in a raid on Germany, and this is one of the grim ironies that surrounds this story. But as to what happened on the Mountain, the mysteries persisted. Alun Evans contacted the War Graves Commission and was told that Sgt Jones had died on 9 December, even though the village knew he had lived for up to three weeks after that. But the Commission also informed him that Sgt Jones had come from Hucclecote near Gloucester and was buried there. Alun Evans wrote to the Mayor of Gloucester, asking him to suggest the local paper with the widest circulation in the Hucciecote area, which was how the story appeared in the Gloucestershire Citizen. The result was a letter that began, 'I have read your story of my brother Trevor in the local paper ...'.

Ivor Jones, a retired aeronautical engineer, had been in Burma when his brother died, but his wife Edna, who had sung in concert parties with Trevor, remembered those terrible weeks when he had merely been reported missing. The other three airmen had been found safe and well the same day. All that had been found of Trevor was his neatly folded parachute, which was when the family ordeal had begun. For though it was said that he might have lost his memory, the RAF police were openly searching for a deserter. The result was that when the family first heard about Alun Evans's search, they were upset, as an old wound was being opened.

So what had happened? There were search parties out on the Mountain, so why had he not revealed himself to them? Why had he crawled 3 miles from where his parachute had been found? What follows is Alun Evans's theory. Trevor Jones, disorientated in that dive, was in great pain, having broken his leg on landing, but he had also come down in a landscape where a massive ground exercise had taken place before D-Day.

'Where he was, there would have been spent ammunition and wrecked vehicles which had been used for target practice. Until the 1950s there was even an old Churchill tank up there. He must have thought he was on a battlefield. And the searchers who were out would have been calling to each other in Welsh, which must have sounded foreign to him. It is possible that in his state of mind he thought he was in Occupied Europe.

It is also possible that the incessant rain blocked out all sounds altogether, for he was making his way down towards the lights below him. This is the more poignant explanation, for below him was safety and Christmas, and he had almost made it - when he was found he was off the mountain and among fields, at the gate of Pentregronw Farm, deserted when the Army moved in for its exercises. The fact that he had managed to survive so long was a tribute to his fitness. Trevor Jones, Alun Evans discovered, had been an athlete.

He began to find out more, for the Vice-Chairman of the Gloucester King's School Society, where Trevor had been a chorister, wrote to him. There were photographs now of a good-looking young man. People who had known him began to write, remembering a cricketer and a mathematician. One old friend mentioned a bride who had her bouquet put on Trevor's grave. At Christmas, a half century on, another Trevor Jones, a schoolmaster named after his uncle, attended a candlelit midnight mass in Myddfai church.

'It was very moving,' said Judith McSwiney of the parochial church council. 'The story itself was moving enough, the way they carried him down the mountain and then, when they might have put him in some morgue, chose to lay him out like some great hero in the church. And on our Christmas Eve the priest took one of the poppies from the Remembrance Day wreath and put it in the crib, for now we had someone else to remember.' By an overwhelming majority the council voted to put up a plaque.

'My husband and I came down to meet Alun Evans,' said Edna Jones. 'At first we'd been a bit upset, but that was before we realised what a wonderful man he is. We went up the mountain with him. It was a terrible day. When we saw the landscape through which Trevor had come we couldn't believe it. I had some yellow roses with me, for it was a song he had loved singing, "The Yellow Rose of Texas". When we got to the place where he was found, Alun and the farmer whose father found Trevor, they went away and left us. I was glad his father and mother hadn't seen where he died. But there was some thing very moving about it, we knew so little, we'd just tended the grave and thought it such a waste. So we just stood there. And it was an ending.'

[Byron Rogers: First published in 1998. Reprinted in The Bank Manager and the Holy Grail: travels to the weirder reaches of Wales, Aurum Press, 2003.]

Note on Byron Rogers

Byron Rogers, a Welshman from Carmarthen who emigrated to England, has filled a good few column inches with characters and places that have passed his way as a journalist and historian. Brought together in several collections, they make an impressive body of work. Consistently the funniest and most unusual journalist writing today, he is a historian of the quirky and forgotten, of people and places other journalists don't even know exist or ignore if they do.

He writes for the Sunday Telegraph, Guardian and Saga magazine and was once speech writer for the Prince of Wales, but in recent years has researched and written five books. The first three were: An Audience with an Elephant and other encounters on the eccentric side (2001); The Green Lane to Nowhere: The Life of an English Village (2002); and The Bank Manager and the Holy Grail: travels to the weirder reaches of Wales (2003). His biography of J. L. Carr, The Last Englishman, came out in paperback in 2003. Carr, novelist, artist and schoolmaster, is perhaps best known for his novel, A Month in the Country, which was made into a successful film in 1987. Byron Rogers' latest collection of journalism is The Last Human Cannonball and other small journeys in search of great men (2004). Just the titles of these books are pretty good clues what to expect once you start browsing their pages. His biography of Welsh poet and Nobel nominee R. S. Thomas, The Man Who Went into the West, was published in 2006.

Date this page last updated: August 23, 2010