We’re slacking!

Four pages and, although someone has spotted the Standard Vanguard, no-one has yet identified the manufacturer of the fire engine or the tractor (the crane we can be excused – I think this is its first appearance).

Your starter for one: Tractor – a BMB President. (http://tractors.wikia.com/wiki/BMB)

Adrian

Surely the believers already believe the story that the a/c hit the stumps square on and they left 3 parallel dents. Conversely so for the non-believers. Neither camps have a need or desire to pursue the matter further as their minds are already closed on the subject.

Just to be awkward, I believe that it’s a fascinating possibility, as I do enjoying both Spitfires and cricket. However, I find the apparent evidence of the marks thus far to be more compelling than the suggestion that someone “altered” the wing afterwards – especially because if that is so someone went to extraordinary lengths when they could just have told a journalist “oh yes, it hit the stumps and dented the wing”, and it would have become a “fact” by virtue of publication and repetition. No need to go the extra yard, when a word in the right ear will do it. If you were in the Press Corps, you could start your own rumour! I don’t say that it isn’t possible, because I’m sure it is, but it’s a ridiculous amount of effort to go to to make a point that could be made much more easily.

Merlin, football and rugby posts and cricket stumps may not be such a good analogy – the former are likely to be at the end of a field (depending on the size of the field, of course) while stumps will be somewhere close to the middle of the longest axis, along which you’d be trying to put your aircraft down.
(besides, if I keep the pot boiling, this thread will keep going, and it’s good fun!)

Adrian

I think we are now reaching the point of imponderables. We’re not going to prove it wasn’t a set of stumps that made the imprints (and they look OK to me) without someone actually measuring them – where the wrong gap might be fairly conclusive – but then you’d have to factor in the angle at which it hit them…

If the match was over, one umpire might have taken the stumps at his end out, while the other left them for the groundsman? Entirely plausible, if you’ve ever seen a big ground with several pitches like the one depicted in the photo. Alternatively, the aircraft swung once it had hit them, and missed the others, or hit them with the nose, or was sliding at an angle, or turning as it slid…. You get the picture – there are so many possibilities.

There’s also the point of why would anyone fake it? Maybe the original story of it hitting the stumps was made up for effect by a journalist – but in that case why on earth go to the trouble of putting three dents in the leading edge? Did the story really need the veracity – surely a bent Spitfire sat on the pitch was dramatic enough? And if the dents are fake, what happened to the stumps?

Of course, we could always work out how likely it is that the stumps could have done that damage – I can get hold of some stumps (substantial pieces of ash, unless it’s the hollow one for the stump cam that TV studios always like to show being smashed), all we need is someone willing to have their Spitfire belted with them. Anyone care to volunteer theirs?

Adrian

Pete, never mind Kenley, what does the OXO cricket ground look like today? :diablo:

Probably a housing estate…

Adrian