A day of firsts; the thread about the start of the air war over Britain above the Firth of Forth

This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.

On September 3rd 1939, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, drawing the country into what would become the Second World War. This early period of the war is sometimes called the “Phoney War”, on account of the relatively limited military activity between France, Germany and Britain on the Western Front. However on Monday 16th October 1939, the air war over Britain commenced over the Firth of Forth as German bombers made their first air raid on the country of the war and the RAF squadrons defending Edinburgh went immediately to war.

603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron – an auxiliary squadron defending its home city from RAF Turnhouse – claimed the first German aircraft to be shot down by an RAF fighter over British territory in WW2 on that very day. At about 14:45, Red Section under Flt. Lt. “Patsy” Gifford fatally damaged a Ju-88 bomber near Cockenzie. The German aircraft, from squadron KG30, crashed into the Forth 4 miles offshore. The Cockenzie fishing boat Dayspring, skippered by John Dickson, rescued the crew. They admitted that they were reluctant at first to do so, but they were sailors foremost and overcame their misgivings to help those in peril on the sea.

Rear gunner OGefr. Kramer had been killed before the plane crashed and was never found, but pilot OLt. Hans Storp and crewmen Hugo Rohnke and Hans Georg Heilscher were saved and sent to the military hospital at Edinburgh Castle, the first German military prisoners in Britain of WW2. The grateful Storp gave his gold ring to John Dickson in thanks for his life.

Earlier that morning, at 09:30, the “Chain Home” radar station at Drone Hill in Berwick shire had identified two enemy aircraft approaching over the North Sea. At 10:21, Flt. Lt. George Pinkerton of 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron became the first RAF fighter pilot to attack a German aircraft over Britain when his Spitfire engaged and damaged a He-111 bomber over the Isle of May. This aircraft – one of two from squadron KG26 – had been on a reconnaissance flight to photograph the naval dockyard at Rosyth and was chased east out to sea where it evaded its pursuers, returning safely home. 602 Squadron had been redeployed eastwards to defend Edinburgh and the Forth and had been based out of RAF Drem in East Lothian for just 3 days.

A confused game of cat and mouse now commenced between the RAF and Luftwaffe all along the East Coast of Scotland for much of the morning and early afternoon as attempts were made to intercept sporadic German incursions. The radar sets failed to work properly and broke down, phantom raiders were reported by the public and the ground controllers got their calculations back to front and sent the defending fighters in the wrong directions.

That afternoon the weather was good – clear skies with only broken cloud. At 14:20, the Royal Observer Corps, trained ground spotters whose job was to identify and report enemy aircraft over land, confirmed the presence of Ju-88 bombers in East Lothian. These were 12 aircraft commanded by Haupt. Helmuth Pohle of squadron KG30 and had been sent on a mission to attack the Royal Navy at Rosyth, based on the reports from the morning reconnaissance flight that George Pinkerton and 602 Squadron had intercepted. Once again, those Spitfires were scrambled to meet the raiders. At 14:27, the anti aircraft battery at Dalmeny reported the bombers flying up the Forth. The attackers had been forbidden to attack the Dockyard itself for fear of civilian casualties, so aimed for the ships anchored in the Firth. While the gunners frantically phoned for permission to open fire, the bombs began to fall.

The first wave of attackers targeted the cruiser HMS Southampton. At 14:35, the 500kg bombs fell around the ship but missed; however two of her boats that had been anchored alongside, including the Admiral’s personal barge, were sunk. At 14:38 – three minutes after the start of the attack – the orders for the defenders to open fire were given and every anti-aircraft gun on land and on ships that could be brought to bare opened up. At the same time, the next wave of attackers, those led by OLt. Hans Storp, arrived. They approached from the south over Threipmuir Reservoir and commenced their bombing run.

By now, both 602 (City of Glasgow) and 603 (City of Edinburgh) squadrons were in the air. Yellow Section of 603 attacked Storp and put his port engine out of action. The plane limped towards East Lothian out to sea, in a futile attempt to escape, which was where Red Section under Patsy Gifford brought it down. The victorious 603 were now ordered to return to Turnhouse to re-arm and re-fuel, leaving the defence in the hands of 602 Squadron. Blue Section, under George Pinkerton, spotted the aircraft of Helmuth Pohle over Inverkeithing and gave chase through the broken cloud. Pinkerton and his wing-man Archie McKellar attacked, killing two of the German machine’s crew and incapacitating both its engines. It headed for the sea near Crail and ditched three miles off of Fife Ness. The time was somewhere between 14:45 and 14:55, the Observer Corps putting the crash at the latter time, but McKellar and Pinkerton are credited with gaining the “first kill” before Patsy Gifford in some chronologies.

The events of October 16th had not yet concluded however. About 25 minutes after Pohle’s machine crashed, another Ju-88 bomber appeared over the outer reaches of the Forth. It had escaped interception up to this point as the ground observers had initially thought it to be a friendly Bristol Blenheim (an easy mistake, as the two were somewhat similar and the Ju-88 was a brand new aircraft and almost totally unseen by British eyes this early in the war). It found the destroyer HMS Mohawk off of the fishing village of Elie & Earlsferry and attacked; dropping its bombs and firing its machine guns at the ship.

By the time it was chased off by one of 602 Squadron’s Spitfires, 13 men including First Lieutenant E. J. Shea had been killed. Her captain, Commander Richard Jolly, was fatally wounded but refused to abandon his post and brought his ship safely back to Rosyth before dying a few hours later. In total 16 men from the Mohawk would lose their lives that day.

The last of the raiders that day appeared in ones and twos across the Lothians around 16:00 and were chased across the Forth, RAF Turnhouse, Edinburgh, Leith and Portobello by the Spitfires of 603 Squadron, but to no avail. Minor injuries were caused across the city from broken glass as bullets fired in the sky came down to earth and painter Joe McLuskie, working on a house in Abercorn Terrace, Portobello, was hit in the stomach and had to undergo emergency surgery in Leith Hospital. The raid had also claimed its first animal victim of the air war over Britain when Lady, a spaniel belonging to Mrs Mercer of Alma Street in Inverkeithing, was struck by shrapnel from falling “friendly” anti-aircraft shells and had to be put down as a result. The noise of the bombs and guns had panicked the animal and it had run off into the street.

Off of Crail, a fishing boat hauled four ditched German airmen from the sea. Crewmen Kurt Seydel and August Schleicher were already dead, Kurt Naake was mortally wounded and would not survive, leaving pilot Helmuth Pohle – nursing a broken jaw – as the sole survivor. He was sent to the naval hospital in Port Edgar. The bodies of Seydel and Schleicher lay in state at St. Phillip’s Church in Portobello, their coffins draped in Swastika flags, and were buried with military honours observed by a respectful turnout of locals at Portobello Cemetery. The proceedings were led by Henry Steel, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, and many men from both 602 and 603 Squadrons were in attendance with the pipe band of 603 providing a musical lament. The pair were re-interred in a German military cemetery in England after the war.

Both Patsy Gifford and George Pinkerton would receive the Distinguished Flying Cross award for their efforts that day. Gifford, a reservist who was in peacetime a lawyer and town councillor from Castle Douglas, was sent to command 3 Squadron RAF in November 1939. He was shot down and killed over Belgium in May 1940.

Gifford and Pinkerton both have claims to their “first”. However neither claimed either the first British or first RAF aerial victories of the war. On September 26th 1939, Lt. Cdr. Bruce S. McEwen of 803 Squadron Fleet Air Arm and flying from HMS Ark Royal (therefore a Royal Navy aviator and not in the RAF) shot down a German Do-18 flying boat over the North Sea off Norway, the first British aerial victory of the way. The below photo was taken by the destroyer HMS Somali when they rescued its crew.

Another Do-18 would become the first German aircraft brought down by an RAF aircraft flying from the British mainland, was claimed by a Lockheed Hudson patrol aircraft of 224 Squadron Coastal Command out of RAF Leuchars on 8th October. The Hudson, actually a modified American airliner and intended to be a bomber and reconnaissance aircraft, proved to have a surprising capability as a long range fighter in the early part of the war.

And two weeks after 602 Squadron’s Pinkerton and McKellar brought Helmuth Pohle’s war to a premature end off of Crail, Archie McKellar shot down an He-111 bomber of squadron KG26, flown by Uffz. Kurt Lehmkuhl over East Lothian. This was the first RAF victory that brought down a plane over land, the machine making a crash landing in the Lammermuir hills near Humbie.

Another He-111 was shot down by 602 Squadron out of RAF Drem on February 9th 1940, with Squadron Leader Douglas Farquar bringing it down in a field just outside North Berwick.

This was the first chance for British intelligence to get a close up look of such a machine in a flyable condition and it was therefore partially dismantled and towed away for onwards transport to the Boffins down south. The plane was put back together, repaired, and commissioned into the RAF as part of the “Rafwaffe” of captured machines. Here it is seen going down Dirleton Avenue in North Berwick to the bemusement of onlookers.

Remarkably, there’s a colour cine film of it going down Musselburgh High Street, exciting much local interest, on its way to RAF Turnhouse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwhXwLhWDEc

Hans Storp’s Ju-88 would suffer the misfortune of being the first pilot and aircraft to be shot down twice in the war, when in December 1939 a re-enactment of his last flight took place for the propaganda film “Squadron 992“. An RAF Bristol Blenheim (which the observers had confused with the German Ju-88 back in October) stood in for the German machine on this occasion. The Cockenzie fisherman John Dickson, his crew, and their boat the Dayspring reprised their roles from that day and played themselves for the cameras.

You can watch the film Squadron 992 on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XycuXAtLyo4

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The “High and Dry Club”: the thread about 30 years of the Forth car ferries running aground again, and again (and again)

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

Talking about ferries running aground, you might think that kind of thing is unfortunate, so spare a thought for the brand new Firth of Forth car ferry Robert the Bruce which ran aground at South Queensferry on Saturday 24th March, after barely 3 weeks in service. The vessel was on its penultimate cross-Firth trip of the day and became stuck fast at South Queensferry at the Hawes pier. It was not until late on the Sunday that she was successfully refloated. “New Ferry Boat Stranded at South Queensferry” said the headline in the Scotsman.

Barely a week later, on April 5th, Robert the Bruce suffered the ignominy of grounding once more at South Queensferry, ending up sitting high and dry, perpendicular to the pier. “New Ferry Boat Grounded Again” said the headline in the Scotsman.

The hapless vessel was aground again 3 weeks later. It took 5 hours to get the passengers off. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to run aground once in a month may be regarded as a misfortune; to run aground twice in a month looks like carelessness. Three months later? You’ve guessed it. “Robert the Bruce” was aground again. This was getting to be rather common and the local paper hardly gave it a second mention, devoting only a single sentence to the mishap.

The ferry boat Robert the Bruce ran aground on Sunday, but was refloated at high tide without any apparent damage

In all, in her first 4 months of service, Robert the Bruce would run aground four times. Her identical sister ship Queen Margaret managed to avoid this awkward habit entirely. For now…

The Forth car ferries were the brainchild of, were built by and were operated by the William Denny & Brothers shipyard in Dumbarton. Sir Maurice Denny had crossed the Forth in the old vessel Dundee one day and had thought to himself that a purpose-built car ferry (or pair of ferries) could provide a much more efficient service. As a captain of industry he had only to pick up the phone to the London and North Eastern Railway to set the wheels in motion. The LNER paid for the ferries and leased them back to Denny, who operated them. This arrangement meant that even if the ferries poached traffic away from the railway, the railway would still profit from them.

The design was innovative and Denny had high hopes it would catch on. The vessels had a large, open car deck, with small passenger cabins fore and aft. There were ramps on each side at each end for loading and unloading vehicles. The bridge sat high above the deck on a gantry in the middle of the ship to give a commanding view in all directions. Propulsion was by paddle wheels, an antiquated system on paper, but one which had certain advantages when manoeuvring at slow speed and which was brought up to date with each paddle being independently driven by an electric motor. This, coupled with rudders fore and aft, meant for superb manoeuvrability and the ability to change power and the direction of drive very rapidly. Diesel engines under the car deck drove the generators for the motors, and exhausted through a pair of slender funnels. This arrangement allowed the ferries complete roll-on, roll-off operation for rapid loading and unloading and the ability to move forwards or backwards at the same speed and no loss of handling.

Perhaps in sympathy with and to share in Robert‘s blushes, the older companion Dundee decided to get in on the action and ran aground at South Queensferry in 1939. Again, her passengers and cars were stuck aboard for hours, the Evening News printing an atmospheric night time photo of her with the ghostly outline of one of the piers of the Forth Bridge behind her.

The Forth ferries survived WW2 without further incidence but on 18th August 1947, perhaps as a late celebration of victory, one of them ran aground again in the mud off South Queensferry. This time however it was the Queen Margaret at fault, and Robert the Bruce redeemed herself by towing her off the mud.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/23666168@N04/37190198854

In 1949, the ancient Dundee was replaced by a new vessel, the Mary Queen of Scots, identical to Robert and Margaret except that post-war economies meant that the electric drive system for the paddles was replaced with a hydraulic one. To welcome the new member to the team, Robert the Bruce decided to show off as only she knew how, and on April 3rd 1950 she ran aground. Again. At South Queenferry. Again. This incident was on account of the mooring rope that should have been thrown to the pier landing short combined with a sudden gust of wind that blew her onto the mud before the engines, idle at the time, could respond.

Queen Margaret tried to repay the towing compliment from 1947 back and rescue her stricken sister however the tow rope broke and then the tide receded, making further rescue attempts on that tide impossible. Two hours service was wasted and Robert had to wait to be rescued on the next high tide.

Friday May 23rd 1952. Guess what happened. Go on. I’ll give you one guess… Wrong! It was actually Mary Queen of Scots which grounded this time. Strictly speaking she didn’t run aground, as she found herself stuck when the tide receded while she was both loading vehicles and taking on oil, the additional weight incurred settling her on the mud beneath her keel. Attempts by Robert the Bruce to get her off the mud at South Queensferry proved fruitless and again they had to wait for a high tide to free her

Never one to be outdone by her sisters, two months later Robert the Bruce managed to run aground 50 yards short of the pier at South Queensferry. Queen Margaret came to the rescue and tower her off the mud before the tide left her high and dry after a 20 minute struggle. It was almost a year before one of the ferries ran aground again. This time it was Mary Queen of Scots: caught by the combination of a westerly wind and an autumn equinox tide “which tends to empty the river” on August 27th 1953. She was left high and dry in the middle of the Firth for an hour and a half until a change in the tide allowed her to come unstuck. This left the passengers of a bus trip sorely disappointed; they had crossed on one ferry while their vehicle followed on the next (Mary Queen of Scots) and got stuck mid-stream. By the time the bus made it over, he found his passengers had given up and headed home to Edinburgh by alternative means.

In 1955, due to booming traffic, the three Forth ferries were joined by a fourth Forth ferry (try saying that in a hurry), when the slightly larger Sir William Wallace joined the fleet.

True to the established tradition, Robert the Bruce welcomed her by running aground! On March 12th 1955, in dense fog, she hit a mudbank some 500 yards short of the pier. This time it was an exceptional spring tide at fault. It took an hour and a half to free her.

The following year, it as Queen Margaret’s turn again and on December 2nd 1956? she was stuck at South Queensferry once more. It would take a whole 3 years in service for Sir William Wallace to join the “High and Dry Club”, which she first managed in February 1958. Again it was at the South Queensferry end and she had 40 cars on board when she got stuck. The passengers were rowed ashore and either bussed to Edinburgh, or waited 5 hours in the Hawes Inn for their cars. One hopes that the refreshments provided were only teas and coffees. She repeated the act at the end of September that year, getting within 20 feet of the pier at South Queensferry and then grounding on the mud. 50 passengers were taken ashore in the lifeboats. She became stuck at 740AM and it was not until a high tide at noon that she floated free.

Queen Margaret tried something new and rammed one of the piers of the Forth Bridge in February 1961 when the wind and tide conditions conspired against her and made controlled progress impossible. There was one last grounding hurrah for the Forth ferries, when this same vessel took to the Hawes Pier mud for 1 and a ¼ hours on the appropriate date of Friday 13th October 1961. It took the combined efforts of Sir William Wallace and Mary Queen of Scots to free her.

In the final decade of the ferries on the Forth, Sir William Wallace added an additional dimension to the difficulties of running the service; she was bigger than her sisters but had the same engines and same sized loading ramps, so was slower and took longer to load and unload. This made her a logistical pain in the bum for keeping to schedule and her smaller sisters frequently had to slow down when crossing against a tide or current to let her catch up. Her car deck was also slightly differently arranged and her master found out the hard way that if he packed them on tightly the same way as the other ships, then they became wedge in, couldn’t get onto the ramp and thus couldn’t get back off again! The solution was simple but inelegant – the ship sailed around to the other side of the pier and all the cars reversed off instead.

The owner-operators of the ferries went into liquidation in August 1963 and so the liquidators continued to run the service for a further 13 months until September 3th 1964 when the last sailed before the Forth Road Bridge was opened. Guests of honour on the last scheduled voyage were HM The Queen and HRH Prince Philip. Queen Margaret had clearly no sense of occasion and humour and refused to run aground with the royal party aboard.

As a postscript, I should note that nobody was harmed in any of these groundings, beyond the feelings of the ships’ masters. In actual fact, considering the intense scheduling of the route over 30 years hard work, in tricky waters, they actually had a pretty enviable safety record. In the late 1950s, all four ships ran an all-day service at 15 minute intervals, making 40,000 crossings a year, carrying 1,250,000 passengers, 600,000 cars and 200,000 commercial vehicles.

The Forth ferries were laid up at Burntisland after the end of their working lives and the three oldest ones were unceremoniously scrapped. The press were far more interested in the new Road Bridge to be interested in three old ships. The newest and largest, Sir William Wallace, spent a few years service at Islemeer in the Netherlands before being scrapped too in 1970. After 30 years of car ferry service, the scores on the doors for running aground were:

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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Caught for a moment without cars, Queensferry High Street provides a glimpse of a world now long gone. More pics and info: https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/queensferry/southqueensferry/index.html

#Scotland #Queensferry #Edinburgh #SouthQueensferry

It was a beautiful autumn day in #SouthQueensferry today. I got a lovely view of the #bridges

#Scotland

Forth Bridge, South Queensferry, West Lothian, c.1940s - RA Series RP Postcard

https://www.ebid.net/uk/for-sale/forth-bridge-south-queensferry-west-lothian-c-1940s-ra-series-rp-postcard-223181270.htm

#SouthQueensferry #ForthBridge

Spaceships over Edinburgh: the thread about the Scottish flying saucer craze of 1950

Sunday 24th September 1950 was a momentous day in Scotland. Just over 3 years after American aviator Kenneth Arnold sent the world flying saucer crazy, the Scottish local papers (the West Lothian Courier to be precise) reported the arrival of the phenomenon in this country, specifically over the Firth of Forth! (Except the paper only published once a week, so this breaking news had to wait until the next Friday…)

An Edinburgh Lawyer, Mr A. M. Leggat, and his family were on a Sunday drive to South Queensferry. They had just got out of their car and were watching a train cross the Bridge when they spotted something at a height of about 2,000ft, “a cigar shaped object, moving east to west“. Mr Leggat said that he joked to his wife “it’s probably a flying saucer“, at which point the object turned and climbed higher. “It became a circle, with a quite definite dark outside rim” he told the Courier, “it looked exactly like a perfect smoke-ring. We watched it for about 2 minutes.” He estimated it to be about 50 feet in diameter and that there were others who had seen it too. The Daily Record also joined in the reporting, its columnist The Gangrel scoffing that it caused “no excitement amongst Edinburghers” as “almost anything leaves these chaps cold”. The Linlithgowshire Gazette was dismissive too: it was a well known fact amongst informed locals, it said, that “residents often observe similar phenomena under certain weather conditions, when the smoke from passing trains forms rings and rises up soon to disappear from view“.

In a very strange coincidence, just the week before, another local paper – the Falkirk Herald – announced that the new B-movie The Flying Saucer was going to start running on the Odeon Circuit in the country from 9th October.

Flying saucers of a feather, flock together, and soon there were two: on Sunday 22nd October, Mrs Mary Mulvey, a newspaper seller, spotted three “round dark-coloured objects with small tails” flying over St. Andrew Square in the city. Her husband and a bus driver – Mr Bob Kirkhope of Lauriston Terrace – corroborated; “I saw three disc-like shapes fairly high up and travelling in the Daklkeith direction” said Mr Kirkhope to the Aberdeen Press & Journal. The resident meteorological officers at Turnhouse and Pitreavie airfields were scornful and said they must have been “low cloud formations or weather balloons“. But the folk of Annan and Peterhead begged to differ; they had seen them too!

Sixteen year old twins, Ann and Elizabeth Weightman of Newington Avenue, Annan, told the Sunday Post that they had watched them in the sky at night, approaching from the north and hovering over the town for 10 seconds. And in far off Peterhead, 15 year old schoolboy Ian Cruickshank of Prince Street, reported to the police that he saw a flying saucer “hurtling across the sky“, as reported the Dundee Courier. His mother said “my boy was quite excited about it. It was quite genuine“, her son adamant that “It is no schoolboy joke. I had just come out of the house when a high-pitched whistling sound from the sky attracted my attention“. His friends did not agree and he would tell the Courier that they teased him over the matter.

On 28th October, an un-named “Glasgow Sunday paper” received a report of a flying saucer over Kirkintilloch. They refused to print the story or be directly identified with it but the Kirkintilloch Herald didn’t! The paper joked that as a dry town (i.e. there was no sale of alcohol on public premises in the town, until 1967) that the only flying saucer was the head of the man who came home late and drunk from the fair. There would be no Spaceships Over Glasgow until Tuesday 5th December when a man came into the office of the Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser to report seeing a flying saucer over Raywyards (an area of Airdrie). The paper was able to correlate this with sightings over Glasgow and Loch Long shortly afterwards.

The craze inevitably reached the Kingdom of Fife, and on December 19th the Courier and Advertiser published a remarkable photo of an actual flying saucer over Leven municipal golf course!

But don’t dismiss the photo as a hoax, it was a real flying saucer: but just a flying model of one, the work of two young friends – George Russell and Don Beaton of Leven Aeromodellers Club,. The pair had been flying their saucer and shocking (and entertaining locals) over the course at the end of their string since May that year. The two were trying to rekindle interest in their club, which they had been members of when younger in the war years, and had ordered the plans of the Sorcerer model by mail order and built it, complete with tiny 2-stroke engine, themselves.

After this year of Saucery, things quietened down in the new year. They would flare up every once in a while in the next few years as a reported “sighting” would lead to copycats. The Evening News’ resident poet “MacNib” penned a humorous verse in response in July 1954

Saucy Saucers.

Those flying saucer yarns are back
Some say, a prelude to attack
By Martian airmen one foot high
Who guide these saucers as they fly.

These little fellows have been seen.
With big eyes and a nose between.
Clark Gable ears which they can wriggle.
Antennae such as clipshears wiggle.

These flying sorcerors, as they’re called.
Are highbrow and completely bald
And far advanced in many ways,
A friend of mine who knows them says.

I’m scared about these little creatures.
Not just for their revolting features:
The thought that sends me off my rocker
Is – ten to one they’ll take up Soccer.

In November 1954, publisher Ian Girvan (of that town in Ayrshire) formed Flying Saucer Service Ltd. to act as a receiving and clearing house for information on UFOs. His business partners were Desmond Leslie and George Adamski, authors of the best-selling Flying Saucers Have Landed. As well as being a prominent UFO-ologist, Ian Girvan (also known as Waveney Girvan) was immersed in right wing politics, having been in the British People’s Party, National Front and Independent Nationalists movements. He nonetheless found time to publish the quarterly Flying Saucer Review until his death in October 1964.

In May 1955, Girvan and his partners received the unlikely support of the otherwise sober and unimpeachable figure of Lord Dowding, (Air Chief Marshall High Dowding, 1st Baron Dowding, GCB, GCVO, CMG), the former Commander-in-Chief of the RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. Dowding, a national hero credited with a crucial role in the air defence of the nation, shocked everyone and verified to the Daily Sketch paper that the reports from February 1954 of a flying saucer that had landed at Lossiemouth in Morayshire and where a “Martian” had made contact with the witnesses, who had taken photographs, were all true. Dowding had apparently been won over to the belief of flying saucers by Desmond Leslie, Flying Saucers Have Landed co-author and partner in the Flying Saucer Service, and became a firm UFO believer in later life.

But Dowding’s bold Lossiemouth claim was actually the result of him being the victim of an elaborate and highly convincing hoax by Cedric Allingham, a fictional figure created by Peter Davies and his friend one Patrick Moore (yes, that Patrick Moore), to take advantage of the gullibility of the British UFO-ologist scene. Cederic Allingham fabricated a photograph of the Lossiemouth UFO and “Martian” and also a corroborating, sworn statement from an entirely fictitious but unimpeachable witness, local fisherman James Duncan. He published these claims and other verifying evidence in apopular 152 page book, Flying Saucer From Mars.

Allingham’s blury photo of the “Martian” he claimed to have met at Lossiemouth looked remarkably like a photo of Peter Davies with his back to the camera wearing an outfit including suspenders… But somehow Dowding, who had proved a dedicated, single-minded and organisational mastermind at Fighter Command, was taken in by it.

It was probably Patrick Moore who wrote the book, and he even acknowledged “meeting” with Allingham to lend credence to his existence. But he and Peter Davies sensibly denied all knowledge of it and made sure that their creation was impossible to pin down for interviews or meetings. But Dowding wouldn’t take no for an answer and used his personal reputation to track down the understandably elusive Cederic Allingham, and to convince him to give a lecture to his local Flying Saucer Club in Tunbridge wells. Moore and Davies were backed into a corner by Dowding and it would prove necessary for Allingham to appear if they were to maintain their illusion. And so appear he did, to deliver the lecture to a triumphant Dowding. Except it was actually Peter Davies in a false moustache

Moore and Davies would keep up their silent pretence for over 30 years, long after Dowding had died, before other authors pieced the rather obvious clues together and identified them. Moore was careful to never completely confirm his part in it, despite convincing proof to the contrary (including the photo of Davies as Allingham, in his garden with his telescope).

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Caught for a moment without cars, Queensferry High Street provides a glimpse of a world now long gone. More pics and info: https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/queensferry/southqueensferry/index.html

#Scotland #Queensferry #Edinburgh #SouthQueensferry #UndiscoveredScotland