A Grave Beneath the Lincolnshire Fields: Remembering Lancaster ED503

There are war memorials in village squares, beside churches and on the edges of old airfields. They are places we expect to find remembrance.

And then there are places like this.

In the middle of a working field at Sibsey Northlands, near Boston in Lincolnshire, surrounded when I visited by rows of broccoli, stands a small granite memorial.

It would be easy to pass the field without ever knowing what lies beneath it.

The inscription reads:

HERE LIES THE CREW

OF A LANCASTER BOMBER

WHICH CRASHED ON 29TH JANUARY 1943.

THIS MEMORIAL IS THEIR FAMILIES' TRIBUTE

OF LOVE AND REMEMBRANCE.

Those first four words matter.

Here lies the crew.

Because this is not simply a memorial erected close to the place where an aircraft once crashed. Beneath the earth are the remains of Lancaster ED503 and five of the six airmen who were aboard her when she fell from the Lincolnshire sky on 29th January 1943. 

Standing there, with crops growing all around it, that is extraordinarily difficult to take in.

ED503

Lancaster III ED503 belonged to No. 9 Squadron, then operating from RAF Waddington.

She was an exceptionally new aircraft. ED503 had only been taken on charge by the squadron on 23rd January 1943, six days before the accident, and research into her history records that she had accumulated only around 85 minutes of flying time. 

Her crew, however, were not inexperienced. Flight Lieutenant Robert Frood Lind and his men had recently transferred from No. 61 Squadron at RAF Syerston. They had already flown eleven operations together in Lancaster Is. Their regular navigator, Warrant Officer E. English, remained with 61 Squadron to complete his operational tour, which explains why only six men were aboard ED503 that afternoon rather than the Lancaster's more familiar seven-man operational crew. 

The six men aboard were:

- Flight Lieutenant Robert Frood Lind RAFVR — Pilot

- Pilot Officer Charles W. H. Cocks RAFVR — Bomb Aimer

- Sergeant Donald A. Brown RAFVR — Air Gunner

- Sergeant John Doran RAF — Flight Engineer

- Sergeant Thomas Henry RAFVR — Wireless Operator

- Sergeant Thomas Wishart RAFVR — Rear Gunner 

29th January 1943

This was not an operational sortie over occupied Europe. It was a training flight.

Records describing the accident identify it as a fighter affiliation exercise, in which a bomber crew practised defensive manoeuvres against a fighter aircraft. A Spitfire was being used to simulate an enemy fighter attack on the Lancaster. 

At around 3.30pm, ED503 was flying over the flat country around Sibsey.

According to the account recorded in Lincolnshire aviation crash records, the Spitfire pilot saw the Lancaster climb steeply towards the sun. Then something went terribly wrong.

ED503 entered a near-vertical dive.

She did not recover.

Seconds later, the Lancaster struck the fenland at Sibsey Northlands. 

There has been speculation over the years about exactly what happened during those final moments, but no definitive cause for the accident has ever been established. The official Lincolnshire heritage record simply states that all six men were killed and that the cause of the crash could not be determined. 

That uncertainty somehow makes the story even harder. There was no enemy aircraft. No flak. No burning German city beneath them.

After surviving eleven operational sorties, their lives ended above the fields of Lincolnshire during an ordinary training flight.

The ground swallowed the Lancaster. The impact was catastrophic.

ED503 struck the soft fenland with such force that it created a deep crater in the waterlogged ground. The geology of the area — described in records as quicksand and soft subsoil — made recovery extraordinarily difficult.

Attempts were made. The fire service tried pumping water from the crater in an effort to reach the aircraft and the men inside it. They could not.

The wreckage continued down into the ground and recovery eventually became impossible. 

Only one man came out. Rear gunner Sergeant Thomas Wishart had been thrown clear during the crash. His body was recovered and returned to Scotland, where he was buried at Dalkeith New Cemetery.

His five crewmates could not be reached.

Robert Lind.

Charles Cocks.

Donald Brown.

John Doran.

Thomas Henry.

They remained with their Lancaster. And they remain there today.

Because their bodies could not be recovered for individual burial, the five men are commemorated on the RAF Memorial at Runnymede. Yet unlike so many of the names carved there whose final resting places were lost somewhere over Europe or beneath the sea, we know almost precisely where these five men are. They are beneath a Lincolnshire field. 

Their families came back

After the war, the families of the six airmen did something incredibly moving. They paid for a memorial to be erected on the crash site.

With the permission of the landowner, the granite cross was placed on the exact spot where ED503 had disappeared into the earth. It was built and consecrated in 1947. 

It was not a grand national monument. It was something far more personal. A marker placed by mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters and the people who had waited for these men to come home.

That perhaps explains why the inscription is so simple: Their families' tribute of love and remembrance.

More than eighty years later, the field is still farmed. When I visited, broccoli grew around the memorial. Beyond the small chain surrounding the stones there was simply farmland, open sky and the flat Lincolnshire landscape.

There was something almost unsettling about how normal everything was. Crops grow. Seasons change. Farm machinery passes. Generations come and go. And beneath it all, ED503 is still there.

So are five of her crew.

I have visited many places connected with Bomber Command, but there is something different about standing somewhere like this. Usually we look at an aircraft, a photograph, a name on a wall or an empty piece of concrete and have to imagine the people who once occupied that space.

Here, there is nothing to imagine. They are under your feet.

Six men lost their lives. Five young men climbed into a Lancaster one January afternoon in 1943 and never left this field.

The Memorial in the Field

Today the site is cared for by the Sibsey Lancaster Memorial Trust, which exists to preserve the memorial and ensure the crew continue to be remembered. A service of commemoration is held at the site each year. 

And perhaps that small memorial in the middle of a farm says something important about Bomber Command. Not every aircrew death happened over Berlin, the Ruhr or occupied Europe. Not every Lancaster was lost to a night fighter or flak.

Training itself carried enormous risks. Aircraft failed. Accidents happened. Experienced crews could leave an English airfield in daylight and still never return. Lancaster ED503 flew for barely more than an hour during her entire existence.

Yet more than eighty years later, her story remains written into the landscape.

When the broccoli has been harvested, another crop will eventually take its place. The field will continue to be worked just as it has for generations. But in one tiny corner stands a granite cross. And underneath it is a Lancaster. A pilot. A bomb aimer. An air gunner. A flight engineer. A wireless operator.

Five men who never came home.

Here lies the crew.

Perhaps no other words are needed.