Barely a month ago I was reminiscing about an infamous event
which occurred 50 years ago, and how, despite my tender age at the time, like
many others I remembered vividly where I was when I heard the news.
Today is the 25th anniversary of the destruction of
PanAmerican Airlines Flight 103 from London to New York, over Lockerbie, in the
borders of Scotland, at approximately 7pm on Wednesday 21st
December, 1988. Like the assassination
of President Kennedy, I have a vivid recollection of where and when I heard
the news.
I was travelling to Barrow in Furness with one of my bosses,
Archie, for a meeting at the Vickers Shipbuilders' Trident Submarine yard. When the train left Preston, the guard walked
through announcing that news was coming in of an airliner exploding over
southern Scotland. That was about all he
could tell us then, but we listened to updates as we were driven by car from
Lancaster Station to Barrow, and when we arrived at the hotel we watched TV
bulletins.
I don’t think we really had much inkling of quite how
horrific this crime was at that time. It
was, after all, dark so the full extent of the destruction was not visible, and
it was not yet confirmed that the explosion was a result of terrorist
action. We could however see that the
small town of Lockerbie had suffered catastrophic and fatal damage from falling
parts of the plane – an entire wing, full of fuel, as it turned out.
This had been a miserable couple of days for me. My then girlfriend had just done a “Dear John”
on me and I was still reeling from the shock and grief. The news however brought home to me that many
others would be far more shocked, and have far greater reason to grieve, than I.
The trip was eventful in other ways too. The purpose of our visit to Barrow was to
discuss the shipbuilder’s claims for “capital allowances” on the cost of construction
of the yard where the Trident boats were being built, at almost unimaginable
expense, with the company’s tax inspector.
Somehow, and the company staff swore it was pure co-incidence, it came
to pass that the hull of one of the subs had to be moved across the yard for
the next phase of construction. A vessel
the size of a modern cross-channel ferry, with about 7 or 8 decks inside its
hull towering high above us as we stood on the floor of the yard, was slowly
moved on a series of rail-borne bogies.
This was the first and last time I have ever seen, in reality, that
cartoon image of someone’s jaw literally dropping. The inspector immediately agreed the tax
allowance claim, measured in hundreds of millions.
And finally, a
revelation about my boss, Archie. He had
always struck me as a miserable, grumpy git, a true “Dour Scot”, and I had been
dreading the thought of spending a couple of evenings in his exclusive company,
but he turned out to be an amusing and thoughtful companion, and a good
listener to my tales of woe.
Seven years later, in November 1995, my wife and I had a
long weekend in Washington. We paid a
visit, as one does, to the Arlington National Cemetery, to see John F Kennedy’s
grave. While there, we came across a
cairn, a neatly constructed pile of small rocks, 270 of them, one for each of
the victims in the aircraft or on the ground, built in memorial to the
incident. It is almost impossible to
remain dry-eyed in front of this monument.
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