Connel spy story still grips historians
Intrigue still surrounds the story of how a small plane carrying a spy crash-landed near Connel 78 years ago this month.
The cloak-and-dagger drama of the Westland Lysander aircraft hitting the ground after running out of fuel on October 19, 1940, on its way back from France continues to fascinate wartime historians and aircraft enthusiasts.
Oban’s War and Peace Museum recently put one wartime aviation researcher wanting to visit the crash site in touch with a RAF expert in the town.
A Facebook appeal for more local knowledge of the event also went out recently on Information Oban.
A tiny model of a Westland Lysander, just like the one that crash-landed with M16 agent Philip Schneidau aboard, can now be seen at the museum on the Corran Esplanade.
Bill Leach from the museum said: ‘We try to display a photo or a model of every aircraft that landed in Oban so to include a Lysander as a result of this odd story was a golden opportunity for us.’
One account which gets a mention in a book We Landed by Moonlight by Hugh Verity is that, on what was probably the first clandestine pick up of the Second World War, a Flight Lt Farley left the Battle of Britain base Tangmere, West Sussex, in bad weather to pick up Schneidau – code name Felix.
After the pick-up, believed to have been from somewhere near Fontainebleau, France, the aircraft’s radio cut out and the altimeter stuck.
Cloudy conditions were so bad it was impossible to read a map by moonlight. With no navigational aids, the pair were left 16,000 feet up and off course. The fuel tanks were running empty when ground was finally spotted, but the pair were worried they could still be over occupied territory.
As the Lysander struck the ground, the wings came off. The pair escaped unhurt but within minutes two men appeared with rifles.
The soldiers running towards them turned out to be the local Home Guard, who arrested them at gunpoint. The pilot and spy had thought the men were speaking Walloon, a Belgian language.
The guards phoned their commander before taking the pair to RAF Oban where their story was checked out before they were dispatched to the south of England.
The aircraft was guarded for several days before being moved to Connel railway station where, after several weeks, it was eventually taken away.