Cardington was the home base of the ill-fated airship R101 that crashed at the edge of a wood near Beauvais in France on 5 October 1930 on her maiden voyage to India. It was as a result of this early air disaster, blamed on faulty design coupled with bad weather, that the British Government abandoned investment in airships.
The R101 had been thought, like the Titanic, to be indestructible, but buffeted by a storm the vast airship, 777 feet long, plunged into the group and within seconds the hydrogen in her buoyancy chambers was ablaze, reducing her to a skeleton. Only six of the 54 crew and passengers survived the inferno. The RAF ensign was brought back to Cardington church.
Many of the bereaved families later reported omens of disaster preceding the doomed flight. The coxswain, Mr W.G. Hunt, had told his family he feared he might never return, while others had embarked on the shop notwithstanding foreboding dreams. Most poignantly, as Walter Radcliffe, one of the riggers, was leaving home, his little son suddenly cried, ‘I haven’t got a Daddy!’
Among those who died in the crash was the Director of Civil Aviation, Sir Sefton Brancker, whose horoscope, cast five years previously, when the airship was still being designed, left the years following 1930 blank. Again, when a friend went to inform the wife of the R101’s commander, Flight-Lieutenant Carmichael Irwin, of his death, she said they had both known he would not come back – she was Scottish, he was Irish, nationalities traditionally said to possess ‘the second sight’.
At a seance conducted in London three days after the crash by Mrs Eileen Garrett, an Irish medium, and at another three weeks later, a friend of both Brancker and Irwin said that he recognized their voices reliving their last moments.