Mystery of missing WWII aviator solved
Family learns his plane shot down in Holland after bombing raid
The generations-old mystery of what happened to a young Niagara Falls man, who traded his business suit for a wartime aviator’s uniform and disappeared off the face of the earth almost 80 years ago, has finally been solved.
And for the family of Harry Farrington, discovering his fate has led to a long-awaited sense of closure.
Sitting in her home a stone’s throw away from A.N. Myer Secondary School, Farrington’s sister, Edith McLeod, cradled a framed photo of her brother and his fellow bomber crew members, his medals and the Silver Cross medal her late mother, Bertha, received as the mother of a soldier killed serving his country.
Farrington was just 22 and had a bright future in banking when he volunteered to train as a pilot, rejecting the offer of a much safer role of a mechanical ground crew posting, said McLeod’s daughter and Harry’s niece, Fiona Taylor-Williams.
His dad, Arnold, died when Farrington was 18 and his brother, Clifford, died of diabetes, leaving only his mom and his sister. McLeod said the manager at the bank, where Farrington had qualified to become a banker, told him he didn’t have to go overseas be
cause of his family situation.
“The bank manager came to our house and said, ‘I tried to talk him out of joining because you are all he has, but he wouldn’t listen,’” said McLeod, 94. “He felt it was his obligation.
“My mother said if he feels that way, it’s fine.”
Farrington’s flying skills were good, but he had difficulty landing, so he was given the job of navigator on the Short Stirling Bomber BK716.
Stationed in England, Farring
ton married Kathleen Blease who had survived a strike on her flat by German bombers not long before, in 1943. They married but duty called: The newlyweds only got two days’ honeymoon before he had to report back.
After a number of highly dangerous bombing runs from his base in England against Germany, on a particularly stormy night on March 29, 1943, Farrington’s bomber was returning from dropping bombs on Berlin
when it was shot down and crashed into a lake north of Amsterdam in Holland. It’s believed all seven crew members — including Farrington, then 24, fellow Canadian John Francis McCaw of Belleville, and five British crew members — died in the crash.
For the better part of 12 years, after a fishing boat’s anchor caught wreckage of a plane, it was believed the wreckage was that of a different Short Sterling. But a forensic analysis of the tail section eventually found the serial number matched that of Farrington’s plane.
On July 25, Taylor-Williams received an email from the curator of a museum in Alberta, telling her he believed Harrington’s bomber location had been discovered.
His mother died never knowing his fate.
“I can’t imagine the loss she suffered through,” said TaylorWilliams, who lost a son to cancer. “You never get over the loss of a child, and she’d already lost one and her husband.”
McLeod recalled the day when the first telegraph was hand-delivered to the family home on Orchard Avenue to say her brother was missing in action.
“I walked up Main Street to get ink for school,” she said. “My timing was very bad.”
Her mom was home alone when the knock on the door came.
“I came home and it was dead silence,” she said. “I went back to her bedroom and she had the telegram in her hand.”
Taylor-Williams said her family will most likely fly to Europe to attend some kind of funeral service when a time and location are determined.
McLeod likes to dwell on good memories of her brother, recalling the tall, handsome young man who was a superb horseback rider.
“He was a very good brother and he was good to my mother,” she said. “We were lucky.”