18. The Limpsfield Cricketer , the Actor and the Plot to kill Churchill (The Mystery of BOAC Flight 777)

Immediately prior to and during WWII The Bower House, Limpsfield was owned by Major Fred Partridge, whom after the war was awarded an OBE for service as a Foreign Diplomat. Our records are otherwise patchy on Major Partridge’s service details,

Fred Partridge was a keen Cricketer for Limpsfield but largely became unavailable for matches for the duration of the War, believed to be on service overseas. He was, in fact seldom seen in Limpsfield during Wartime, but returned to Captain the First XI in seasons 952-1954. He had an American Wife (described to me by an elderly former Limpsfield Cricketer as “very forceful” and “….quite the mouth on her” who would regularly describe Frank as “off spying somewhere !”)

BOAC Flight 777A was a scheduled British Overseas Airways Corporation civilian airline flight from Portela Airport in Lisbon, Portugal to Whitchurch Airport near Bristol, England.
On 1 June 1943, the Douglas DC-3 serving the flight was attacked by eight German Junkers Ju 88 fighter planes and crashed into the Bay of Biscay, killing all 17 on board.

There were several notable passengers, among them Oscar Winning actor Leslie Howard (Ashley Wilkes in “Gone with the Wind”, “The Scarlet Pimpernel” and also twice nominated for a Best Actor Oscar (“Berkeley Square” and “Pygmalion.”).

One theory suggests that the Germans attacked the aircraft because they believed that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was aboard; another suggested that it was targeted because several passengers were British spies, including Howard. During the Second World War, British and German civilian aircraft operated from the same facilities at Portela. Allied and Axis spies watched the incoming and outgoing traffic. The Lisbon–Whitchurch route frequently carried agents and escaped POWs to Britain.

Flight 777 was full and several would-be passengers were turned away, including British Squadron Leader Wally Lashbrook. Three passengers disembarked before departure.
Derek Partridge, the young son of a British diplomat who was returning to his Family home in Limpsfield from the United States where his Mother had enrolled him in school, and his nanny Dora Rove were "bumped" to make room for Howard and Chenhalls, who had only confirmed their tickets at 5:00 the night before the flight and whose priority status allowed them to take precedence over other passengers.

A long-standing hypothesis suggested that the Germans believed that the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was on board the flight. Churchill's history of World War II suggested that the Germans targeted the commercial flight because the British Prime Minister's "presence in North Africa [for the 1943 Casablanca conference] had been fully reported", and German agents at the Lisbon airfield mistook a "thickset man smoking a cigar" boarding the plane for Churchill returning to England.

The death of the fourteen civilians including Leslie Howard "was a painful shock to me", Churchill wrote; "the brutality of the Germans was only matched by the stupidity of their agents".

Derek Partridge went on to enjoy an acting Career in Rhodesia and narrated the documentary “Leslie Howard: The Man Who Gave a Damn “ sixty-five years after the downing of BOAC Flight 777.