It appears then that when my brother and I saw it drop down below the trees it must have carried on even further, turned 180 degrees and came in from the Bromley end, that’s when Dan and his sister must have seen it, if the pilot had carried on he would most certainly have been over a built up area, it’s possible that he saw the cricket pitch when passing low overhead and decided that it would be an ideal place to put the plane down.
I too collected small pieces of broken propellor as souvenirs and was surprised to see that it cosisted of resin-bonded plywood with a black coating and not aluminium.
If Dan and I had known their value at the time we would probably have sold them on Ebay by now.

Thanks for the welcome Mark and Baz, from where we were standing the spitfire was flying low and slow at almost tree-top height passing behind the pub ‘The Garden Gate’ where McDonalds now is, it then dropped down out of sight. As for the identity of the hurricane pilot Baz :rolleyes: we saw and heard him before the spitfire came into sight flying low behind us passing over the Downham estate then he banked sharply to the right which would take him over towards the Beckenham area…If I’d known 50 years later you would be asking me who he was I’d have waved him down. 😉

Regards, Bill.