For Des McLindon, August 1968 is “just a haze”. Yet as his mind spools back half a century, there are pictures, pieces of memory of a particular day, which emerge from that haze. It was the day he learned of the plane crash in Germany that claimed his sister’s life.
Friday, August 9 was the day in question. Maureen, his 20-year-old sibling, a student nurse at Liverpool’s Broadgreen Hospital, had departed from Heathrow airport that morning on a flight bound for Innsbruck. It was her first-ever flight and she was travelling with her cousin, Mary Fletcher, and six fellow members of the Liverpool Catholic Ramblers’ Association, all looking forward to a walking holiday in Austria.
“I was working in Skelmersdale as a joiner, building a new town up there,” remembers Des, now 77, sitting in his home in the Wavertree district of Liverpool. “I got my lift home, jumped on a bus to Penny Lane and then came down the road. My wife, Veronica, opened the door and said: ‘There’s been an air crash, I think it’s your Maureen’s.’ The father of another of the girls, Jean Baxter, who lived just around the corner, had been down and told Veronica he’d heard something about a plane crash. ‘Oh, he doesn’t know what he’s on about,’ I said, ‘it couldn’t be our Maureen.’ ”
Tragically, it was. Her flight, British Eagle EA802, had crashed into a motorway embankment between Munich and Nuremberg shortly after 2pm local time following an electrical failure. All 48 people on board lost their lives. Maureen was buried alongside Jean Baxter, a teacher and friend from Our Lady of
Good Help parish.
“The thing about it, she’s still 20, she will always be 20,” says Des’s brother, Peter McLindon, of their sister. It was Peter who had seen Maureen off the night before, leaving her at a Ramblers’ gathering on Hope Street in Liverpool city centre before the party’s overnight train journey to London. “You know how it is, brother and sister – ‘Bye,’ ” he says. He had planned to join the group a few days later, but: “We’d tried to book the flight and we couldn’t get it.”
The other members of the Ramblers’ Association who perished in the crash were Mary Bryon, Monica Hanna, Barbara O’Keefe, Valerie Humphreys and Irene Rawlinson. None of them were older than 25.
Contemporary reports add layers of poignancy. The Liverpool Echo revealed that Barbara O’Keefe, a 25-year-old PE teacher from Blessed Ambrose Barlow School, had complained to her mother “of dreams in which she had a premonition of the crash”. Her boyfriend, Mike Humphreys, who had been waiting at Innsbruck airport to welcome the group, also lost his sister, Valerie, another teacher, who had stepped in as a last-minute replacement.
Ann O’Brien, a retired Liverpool teacher, grew up on the same street as the Humphreys family. Irene Rawlinson was her sister’s best friend. As a girl, she had played netball with Barbara O’Keefe. “Barbara was just the life and soul of everything – she just lit up the room when she went in,” she recalls. “They were all very bright. People just couldn’t believe it.”
The other victims from Liverpool were also Catholics, six members of the same family from St Mary’s parish in Woolton: Eileen Staunton, her son Peter and daughter Eileen Hall, and the last-named’s children, Barbara, Veronica and Brendan.
In the wake of the tragedy, there was a memorial Mass at Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral on Sunday, August 25. The McLindons, who had to use a neighbours’ phone to get clarification of Maureen’s fate, received a telegram from the Queen offering her condolences. “My husband and I were very distressed to hear of the crash of the British Eagle Viscount,” it read.
To mark the 50th anniversary, Des McLindon will travel to Langenbruck, the nearest village to the crash site, for a Mass of Remembrance on Sunday. Relatives of two of the other women, Mary Fletcher and Jean Baxter, are travelling too.
……..
It was not until 2008, and the 40th anniversary, that the McLindons visited Langenbruck for the first time. There, in the cemetery of St Katharina’s Catholic Church, they found a carefully maintained memorial for the victims. Etched into the wooden cross was the date of the crash. The villagers, they discovered, had held a service every five years in memory of the victims.
“We were walking in a procession and this elderly man began talking to me in German and started crying in front of me,” says McLindon of the trip. “Somebody explained that he’d been a young fireman who was called to the wreckage.”
In a quiet corner of Bavaria, the years had not diminished the sympathy for their loss. “We didn’t know those lovely people out in Germany had for all those years shown such respect.”
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.