Re-dedication: Bishop Rosemarie Mallett led the service in the memorial garden on Monday. Photo: Emma Sears/reelfeelproductions
By NEIL BENNETT
The memorial to the Croydon schoolboys and teachers who died in the 1961 air crash in Norway has been rededicated in a ceremony at Croydon Cemetery.
More than 200 relatives, classmates and family friends, gathered in the Lanfranc Memorial Garden to hear the service led by the Bishop of Croydon, Rt Rev Dr Rosemarie Mallett. The service followed, as closely as possible, the original memorial event that was held in 1962.
In total, 34 teenaged boys from what was then the Lanfranc Secondary Modern School, as well as two teachers and three aircrew died when the aeroplane taking the boys on a summer camping holiday in Norway crashed into a mountain as it tried to land at Stavanger Airport.
The cause of the crash has never been confirmed.
Diplomat: Dr Tore Hattrem, the Ambassador of Norway. played his part in the solemn ceremony. Photo: Barry Holder
But after more than 60 years, the Lanfranc Memorial Garden had begun to take on an uncared-for look, causing distress for the bereaved families who were already troubled by the feeling that the country, and even Croydon, had been too quick to put the memory of the disaster in the past.
Two years ago, Suzy Stowell from Sanderstead, whose uncle Geoffrey Crouch was a 15-year-old killed in the crash, scattered her father’s ashes in the Memorial Garden and thought that it was badly in need of renovation. Stowell ran a successful fund-raising campaign helped by the Archbishop Lanfranc Academy, which replaced the original school.
More than £60,000 was raised, enabling the masonry and patio stones to be replaced and the whole area to be replanted.
“The families have been really impressed,” Stowell said.
Memorial restored: a fund-raiser has helped to pay to renew and repair the stonework and gardens at the Lanfranc Memorial
“Their opinion was what I cared about the most and, thank goodness, they are all singing its praises and saying it looks spectacular.
“Growing up with my mum and uncle Peter, Geoffrey’s sister and twin brother, I knew the effect the disaster had on families. Uncle Peter said that their parents aged 10 years overnight.”
The rededication ceremony took place on the same day as Archbishop Lanfranc’s annual commemoration, when the new Year 7 intake visits the Memorial Garden to hear about what the school describes as “a very sad but very important part of our history”.
Stone symbol: the cross in the memorial garden is made of Norwegian granite
Simon Trehearn, the school principal, said that it had been a day of very mixed emotions: “Remembering the tragedy from 1961 but then seeing how the community has come together and made that restoration possible and how many people were there for the rededication service is really quite emotional.”
Among the guests at the ceremony were the former Bishop of Bath and Wells, the Rt Rev Peter Bryan Price, and Norway’s Ambassador to Britain, Tore Hattrem, who was born in Stavanger in 1962, a year after the crash on Holtaheia Mountain.
“When I was small my parents and grandparents spoke about the accident,” he says. “It was a shock and a terrible event which affected the whole population around Stavanger, so it was part of my childhood within my family and the community.”
In his address, Hattrem said he was remembering the boys, teachers and crew who died just outside his hometown but also “honouring all those who have carried their memory with such a faithfulness through the years, parents, families, friends, and classmates.
“What began in sorrow became something unexpected, a lasting bond between Croydon and Norway.”
Bishop Mallett says she knew very little about the Lanfranc disaster until she arrived in Croydon four years ago, but she has been struck by how it is a still-lived experience not just an event in history, especially for the Lanfranc boys who, for various reasons, did not go on the 1961 trip to Norway.
Contemporaries: 65 years after the air crash, more than a dozen boys who were pupils at Lanfranc in 1961 gathered at the dedication service
“Who knows what life has got round the corner for us?” she said. “I think that in terms of how we live our lives, we should live them as fully as we can because we really don’t know what the future holds.”
More than a dozen school contemporaries of the boys who died were reunited at the ceremony. They have shared their memories of 1961, and the disaster’s effect on their lives, in a third book about the Stavanger tragedy which has been written by Rosalind Jones, whose 13-year-old brother Quentin was one of the victims. Holtaheia. Chance-Challenge-Change will be published on the 65th anniversary in August.
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All those involved in the restoration of the Lanfranc memorial are to be congratulated. It is keeping alive the memory of those who died in that terrible air crash.