Poignant stories of 10 young men buried in city war graves
Nicola Rippon recounts tragic tales of brothers and former school pals buried alongside each other in a graveyard in Littleover
BROTHERS killed in air crashes within 18 months of each other. Their former school friend, a decorated fighter pilot, buried alongside them. An army medic killed on one of the worst nights of the Sheffield Blitz.
These are just some of the stories of the ten young men buried in war graves in a suburban Derby churchyard.
At the ancient St Peter’s Church in Littleover, among the gravestones of generations of villagers, are the last resting places of men who gave their lives serving their country during the Second World War.
Across Britain there are thousands of such clusters of graves, in small churchyards, in chapel burial grounds, in municipal cemeteries.
Unlike the huge sites across Europe and Asia, where lie the dead of major battles, these war graves are largely those of men and women who died here and whose families had the comfort of laying their loved ones to rest closer to home.
In Derbyshire alone, there are 221 separate Commonwealth War Graves sites in cemeteries and churchyards. Each grave is lovingly cared for by a combination of local authorities, church workers and a team from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s officers and volunteers.
Each grave is kept tidy, its inscription remaining as legible as the day it was carved. Each tells a unique story.
The gravestones at Littleover are no different.
On September 30, 1944, the Derby Telegraph reported the death that month of Sergeant Pilot Ron Wright of 22 Valley Road, Littleover. The notice is simple enough. Sergeant Pilot Wright “lost his life on active service”.
His gravestone, quite different from the white Portland stone normally used for war graves, tells a more poignant tale. Unusually, it marks the single war grave of two men: Ron and his older brother, Kenneth, for the Wright family suffered a double tragedy. Eighteen months before Ron’s death, Kenneth had also perished.
Both were former Bemrose School pupils serving with the RAF Volunteer Reserve. Both were sergeant pilots who met their end on UK soil at the age of 21. Both died in accidents that illustrated the dangers faced by all RAF pilots no matter where they were flying.
Kenneth, a keen sportsman, volunteered in 1941 and completed his pilot training in South Africa.
He was killed in February 1943, alongside another pilot (coincidentally, also named Wright) when their Oxford
II flew into the ground at Sunnyside Farm near Ingoldsby in Lincolnshire. Ron earned his wings in the USA.
He was killed when his Oxford I hit power cables at Toft Farm, Dunston Heath, near Stafford, before crashlanding.
Just behind their shared grave lies that of another former Bemrose School pupil, and coincidentally their friend, John Van Schaick of Ridgeway Avenue, Littleover.
A Spitfire pilot, in November 1941 he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal for “valuable and courageous service while in combat with the enemy”.
The Derby Telegraph reported that he had “made well over 100 operational flights, the majority of which have been carried out in offensive sweeps over enemy occupied territory”.
On February 20, 1943, 21-year-old Flight Lieutenant Van Schaick was flying a Miles Master trainer with another pilot when their aircraft crashed into a field at Berrington, Ancroft, near Berwick upon Tweed.
According to the police report, both men were killed, and the aircraft destroyed. John Van Schaick was buried with what the Derby Telegraph described as “full RAF honours”.
Navigator Frank Bowers, of Village Street, was one of a crew of five in a Stirling bomber that suffered engine failure on take-off from Shepherds Grove, Suffolk.
Bowers’s friend, radio operator Tom Collis – also a Derby man – was in the
same crew. The two 20-year-olds, both sergeants, were making a training flight when the outer starboard engine failed and, before the pilot could make adjustments, the aircraft “slammed into the Watch Office”, killing the pilot and most of his crew.
Sergeant Collis is buried at Nottingham Road Cemetery.
Flight Lieutenant Douglas Ronald Greenup, of Jackson Avenue, Littleover, joined the RAF in 1935.
He trained as a pilot in 1938, and served in Egypt before the war, eventually joining Bomber Command.
He was an experienced pilot and, by the time he took to the air for the final time, had already had an eventful war. In the autumn of 1942, while on a raid over Germany, Greenup’s plane was struck by lightning but he managed to continue his mission and reach his target.
According to the Derby Telegraph, on the way home the veteran pilot’s “machine was caught in the searchlights and his engine failed. The bomber began to lose height and he ordered his crew to bale out”. He managed to bring home his plane and safely crash-land at an airfield.
In April 1943, Flight Lieutenant Greenup was less fortunate. His Wellington bomber took off from RAF Marham in Norfolk on a cine-camera exercise.
A structural failure caused the starboard wing to break away and the bomber crashed, killing all nine crew. Douglas Greenup was 26.
Each of the stories of the men in the churchyard is as important as any other; each had friends, family, work colleagues and neighbours who loved and respected them.
Twenty-one-year-old Flight Sergeant William Haggan Morley, a wireless operator/air gunner, was killed in an air accident during a night-time practice flight in August 1941.
Before the war he had been severely burned in an accident at the British Celanese factory at Spondon,
The family of Frank Musgrove, of the Pioneer Corps, lived in Alvaston. The 38-year-old veteran who served in Egypt, Palestine and India, and latterly in Normandy, died in hospital in Edinburgh in August 1944.
Royal Army Medical Corps LanceCorporal Edward Holmes, 20, a RollsRoyce engineering apprentice before the war, died in the Sheffield Blitz on the night of December 12, 1940 as he tended hospital patients.
Only the previous morning, the young medic had returned to the Yorkshire city after visiting his parents and sisters in Shaldon Drive, Littleover.
Each of the war graves in Littleover churchyard, from the earliest – that of former Ranby’s store staff member Sergeant Pilot Eric Wardel Knight, 20, of the RAF Volunteer Reserve who was killed in a motorcycle accident at Cleethorpes in September 1940 – to the most recent, that of Warrant Officer Class 1 Maurice Rudge, 28, of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, who died in July 1946, is a lasting tribute to the sacrifice of the young man it commemorates.