Flying Officer Fred Colville KIA March 1944

[Hangarshuffle]

Collector is trying to trace family of wartime airman (From The Northern Echo) (http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/14495681.Collector_is_trying_to_trace_family_of_wartime_airm an/)


Spotted this story when I was reading the paper on the train the other day. Basically a dealer has come across the service jacket of FO Colville via a sale and is trying to find his surviving family (if any).
Chester le Street area features.
Anyone RAF on here with an interest maybe able to help him - emails for the dealer/collector are in the link.
Even this short blurb in the paper makes for incredibly sad reading really. Fred was an experienced air gunner on his second tour possibly with 97 Sqn - shot down and killed presumably I thinking on the infamous and horrible Nurnberg mission.
Website doesn't show the jacket but in the paper it was his service blue with AG badge, made by Moss Brothers Tailors.
Would be good if his family could get it back I suppose - Lord knows the story about how the jacket even has survived. Its all a long time ago.
RIP brave man, not forgotten.

[Archimedes]

Fred Colville was lost in Lancaster BIII ND390, and is buried in Durnbach War Cemetery (He was originally laid to rest at Ahorn, but as part of the CWGC policy of consolidation - ensuring that graves were properly cared for - he was reburied at Durnbach in 1947).

His pilot was Desmond Rowlands, who was featured here (https://www.facebook.com/RAFConingsby/photos/pb.1463649960598945.-2207520000.1459425397./1551687985128475/?type=3&theater) a few weeks ago.

Two asides - one of his fellow air gunners in the crew was Richard Trevor-Roper, Guy Gibson's rear gunner on Op Chastise; and of the seven crew members, six were commissioned officers.

(And yes, I will pass this on in case it's of any help)

[Hangarshuffle]

I'll have a look in the church at Chester le Street next time I'm in town - there is a memorial in there with Fred's name on it apparently.
Drifting the thread....it must be a shock to people, in a way, if one is approached out of the blue with this sort of thing, this sort of news and link to the past. I am not sure if I would even welcome it. I've often wondered how I would react. We lost an uncle in WW2 killed by friendly shell fire of which we never knew anything and my Father spoke little, and we also think we lost two boy sailors (cousins) in the RN in some sort of almighty RN battleship catastrophe. But it wasn't really remembered much. Not that we didn't care-it was just the war.
Stoic working class British families were a different breed altogether in and either side of WW2-these terrible things seem to have been accepted as just the way it was.