Andover’s biggest funeral to commemorate a flying pioneer

The death was the result of a flying accident on Salisbury Plain in which Wilson was a passenger in a French Nieuport IVG monoplane, flown by Captain Eustace Loraine. Both men were killed.

Bert Wilson, as he was known, was an Andover man whose grandparents were in the hotel trade and had kept successively the Bush, the New Inn, the White Hart and the Star and Garter. However, his father took up farming and the young Bertie was born at Roman Cottage on the Winchester road.

That seems to have failed during a difficult period and the Wilson family moved to a house in Junction Road where they took in boarders.

Bert’s first job was at Tasker’s as an engineer but while working on an aeroplane at Basingstoke he realised that this was what he really wanted to do, so he left the firm and joined the Corps of Royal Engineers, working as a mechanic at the Army Balloon factory in Farnborough. He progressed in 1911 to the new Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers at Larkhill. By August of that year his No 2 company still had only nine aircraft for which he was responsible for maintenance.

All aircraft of this period were subject to the vagaries of the weather and in the week of the accident, many flights had to be postponed or curtailed. An early flight by Captain Loraine on the morning of Friday 5 July showed up a fault in his aircraft that caused it to over-bank during some steep turns and he was only just able to land it successfully. Staff-Sergeant Wilson looked over the aeroplane, made some adjustments and then, as a passenger, accompanied Loraine on a second flight in order to see exactly what the problem was. Unfortunately, the aircraft over-banked again but this time there was not enough height to pull out of the dive and the aircraft crashed about a mile from Stonehenge at Fargo Bottom. Both men were still alive as help arrived but Wilson died a few minutes later, while Loraine died in the nearby military hospital at Bulford the same day.

The funeral in Andover took place just three days later on 8 July and the huge affair was largely a military occasion. No doubt the logistical skills of the army were brought to bear and the atmosphere of the day was almost that of a state occasion. Soldiers began to arrive at the Wilsons’ home in Junction Road for several hours before 3 pm when at last the coffin, draped with a Union Jack and carrying his tunic, helmet and sword, was brought out and laid on a gun carriage.

A single High Street image, one of four by photographer Fred Wright that the Andover Advertiser included in a special supplement to the newspaper that week, cannot capture the entire extent of the procession but it is still impressive. First came the firing party from the Royal Engineers and then the band of the Duke of Cornwall Light Infantry from Tidworth. After that, the buglers and then the gun carriage. Further back, were the mourners in horse-drawn coaches, then a detachment from the Wessex Division Army Service Corps, followed by more Royal Engineers, the 4th Dragoon Guards, the 18th Hussars and the Norfolk Regiment. Five military generals also walked in the procession and finally of course the officers and men of the RFC, followed at the last by members of the public.

From the perspective of the present day, we might wonder at the enormous reaction to the deaths of the two men, for both Staff Sergeant Wilson in Andover and Captain Loraine in his home town of Ipswich. The answer is that these pioneer flyers were the stars of their time. Indeed, the accident itself filled the front page of the Daily Mirror the following day, as a national tragedy. Little more than two years later Andover, along with almost every other community in the country, would have to get used to the news of its sons being killed in World War I; but in this relative period of peace, when the advent of powered flight had seemed so exciting, it was a dreadful blow. Almost every flight was recorded in Flight magazine and by July 1912, only 250 people in Britain had yet learnt to fly. The Royal Flying Corps was still only three months old and this was its first fatality. Even worldwide, with all the crackpot experiments that had been going on since the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903, only 158 people had so far lost their lives to flying.

Staff Sergeant Wilson was buried in Andover churchyard in a line that contains the graves of many Andover worthies who were laid to rest decades before. From 1869, most were buried in the cemetery that lies to the north but space was found in the old churchyard for the flyer where a simple ceremony takes place every year as part of Remembrance. The grave is distinguished by its unique engine and propeller attachment to the stone cross which over the years has sadly suffered from both vandalism and the elements.

Miles away, another memorial was unveiled, exactly one year after the crash, at the junction of the Salisbury to Devizes and Amesbury to Shrewton roads in a corner of the field where the crash occurred. In recent years however, the site became more and more inaccessible and it has now been moved to the grounds of the Stonehenge Visitor Centre. Air Vice-Marshal Barry Newton instigated a complete restoration of the memorial in 1996 and in 2012 it was again renovated before being moved to the new site where it can be seen by a far greater number of people and is in fact closer to the actual site of the crash.

(My thanks to Craig Fisher for suggesting this article and for providing much of the information. His much fuller article appeared in the 2015 edition of Lookback at Andover.)