I didn’t want to embarrass the respective pools of Liverpool and Manchester enthusiasts who for years overlooked them until ‘some bloke from the South’ sneaked up and grabbed them. (well I did really )
It wouldn’t be the first time! The Manchester based Preservation Society never could seem to see the value of scrap.
I recall arriving home from college (studying Newcastle Brown Ale at the time), at Christmas, in about 1971/2, and making the usual enquiries of the Preservation Society…
“Anything new turned up?”
“Oh nothing much, just a DC3 nose in a yard in Warrington”
“Really, I’d like to go and see it?”
“Oh, it’s hardly worth the trip. It’s completely shot, you can push your finger through the skin.”
A day or two later, me and my pal are staring at a front fuselage, upside down in a large puddle, trying to work out what it is.
DC3 it isn’t, as it seems to have had a plexi-glass nose. While still pondering it, a shower passed over us. The rain had the effect of temporarily reviving the almost faded, olive drab paint finish. Then, a row of red bombs and the remains of nose art started to appear…it was a B17, and there was a B26 close by!
We went back on New Years Eve, tooled up to do some serious souvenir grabbing. We spent a freezing, miserable day trying to remove the control columns from the B17.
By the time we’d succeeded it was almost dark and we began to worry that maybe the yard had closed and forgotten about us. We made our way back to the hut, to find everyone inside and already well into celebrating the New Year.
When the boss saw the state of us, he glanced at the columns and said:
“Give us a quid and b*gger off.”
We happily obliged!
(And we went back later and got the B26 throttle box).
The sections eventually ended up at Duxford, I believe, but were scrapped (again) some time later. Can anyone remind me of their identities as I’ve mislaid the notes I kept at the time?
Here’s a poor photo of one of the B17 columns, with a B24 wheel perched on top for comparison.
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