After the Game

From Cardiff, in Wales, a four-engined Avro Tudor V took off one day last week for the 200-mile hop across the Irish Sea to Dublin. Aboard were 78 passengers (72 men, six women) and a crew of five bound for a championship Rugby match in Belfast.

The Welshmen went by bus to Belfast, watched jubilantly while their team won. Then they returned to Dublin, spent a morning eating steak for breakfast and buying souvenirs for their families--toys, canned fruit, nylons, a string of pearls. At the airport, customs officials grinned and waved as the Welshmen sang a final chorus of Land of My Fathers. The big plane took off at 2:10 p.m.

Back in Wales, six men were kicking a football about in a field near Llandow airport. Just after 3 p.m. they stopped to watch the plane come in to land. Tom Newman, 29, turned to his father and said: "Look, he's coming in low. Something is going to happen." Then, suddenly, the plane flopped over on its back and fell with an earth-shaking thud onto the green turf.

Farmer Evan Thomas ran to the scene. Said he later: "The smoke of the engines was curling from the wreckage. Through it walked two men. They were the only things that moved." The two survivors Farmer Thomas saw were Gwyn Anthony, 26, and his brother-in-law, Handel Rogers, 32, both of Llanelly. They had been sitting in the tail. Said Gwyn Anthony: "The nose seemed suddenly to go up and then there was a crash ... I heard a cry. It was Handel. We called to each other and found we were both alive."

Souvenir cups & saucers lay crushed in the wreckage; nylon stockings and burst food parcels were jumbled with the torn sections of human bodies. The plane did not burn. There was one other survivor, Melville Thomas, a colliery fitter from Llanharan. Eighty were killed. It was the worst crash in aviation history.

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