Hospital Ceremony

In the heavy February fog, orbiting aircraft stacked up over London's airports in the biggest queue in seven years. In midafternoon, visibility worsened, and some of the airliners circling over Epsom Downs were ordered to land at Gatwick Airport, 25 miles south of London. At 4:50 p.m., with dusk closing in and visibility at only one mile, a Turkish Airlines Viscount reported that it was on Gatwick Airport's standard instrument landing system, and coming in. It was coming in too low.

Seconds later, with what a control-tower officer called "awful suddenness," the Viscount disappeared from Gatwick's radar screen. Three and a half miles from the airport, the big turboprop plane topped the pines in Jordan's Woods, cut a 30-ft. swath through the saplings, slammed into an oak tree 50-ft. tall. Both wings and all four engines were sheared off. Exploding fuel tanks set fires among the pines. The plane's tail, which had snapped off, hung eerily from a fog-shrouded tree.

It was from the tail section that the only survivors came. "They came out from the fog and the trees," reported a farmer's wife, Mrs. Margaret Bailey, who heard the crash and drove to the scene. "One of them said, T am the Turkish Prime Minister. Quickly get help. There are others trapped.' "

Turkey's 59-year-old Premier Adnan Menderes was flying into London from Istanbul with a planeload of Turkish officials, Members of Parliament and newsmen for final talks on a Cyprus settlement. His secretary had pulled him through a hole in the wreckage. Margaret Bailey, a former nurse, drove them through the woods to her 14th century farm cottage, wrapped them in hot blankets, served them tea and some of her precious 1868 brandy.

Fifteen people, including Menderes' Minister of Information and Chief of Cabinet, the managing director of the Turkish Airlines, and an M.P., died in the crash. But back home, near the mosque on the Golden Horn where Adnan Menderes worships, the throats of 200 sheep were cut in gratitude that Menderes was among the ten survivors.

Suffering from shock and bruised ribs, the Premier was moved from Mrs. Bailey's cottage to a private room on the third floor of London Clinic. It was there that Adnan Menderes, in pajamas and dressing gown, received British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Greek Premier Constantine Karamanlis three days after the crash. Somebody brought them one of the hospital's fountain pens. And in that most undiplomatic of settings, the three men signed the agreement that ended the four-year dispute over Cyprus and brought the island the promise of independence for the first time since the 12th century. It was what Menderes had come for, and the signing took only ten minutes.

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