The Eastgate plane crash

 The licensee when this photograph was taken of the Butcher's Arms between 
1885 and 1913 was Samuel Bolton, who also farmed in North Fen, and the 
two ladies posing for the camera appear to be his wife and daughter.

The Butcher's Arms  public house at No 32 Eastgate was destroyed when a German bomber crashed on it during the Second World War. The aircraft, a Junkers 88, was shot down by a Royal Air Force Bristol Beaufighter plane just before midnight on 4th May 1941 while on its way to a bombing raid over the Midlands and nose-dived into the building which was demolished and seven people inside were killed. They included the licensee, Charles Edward Lappage, aged 63, his wife Fanny Elizabeth, aged 59, and two relatives, Mrs Lappage's sister, Mrs Violet Frances Jackson, and her daughter, Mrs Minnie Gertrude Cooper, who were also staying in the house, and three soldiers who were billeted there. 

Mrs Lappage's son George Stephen Lappage, and his wife Eva, were living in Grantham at the time and were due to visit for the weekend but had called off the trip at the last moment. "Had we gone, we too would have been killed", recalled Mrs Lappage in later years. "The first we heard about the tragedy was when the police fetched us. The  irony was that both Mrs Jackson and Mrs Cooper also lived in Grantham and had gone to Bourne to escape the bombing because the town was a target as a result of the munitions factories based there."

Two of the German aircrew were found dead some distance away while another later gave himself up and a fourth died in the crash and his body is believed to be buried on the site in the wreckage of the plane which embedded itself in the foundations. A comrade of the Luftwaffe crew visited several years ago to see where his friends had died and they were named as: Adam Becker, pilot, Reinhold Kitzelmann, radio operator and Karl Focke, observer. The gunner, Rudolf Dachsehel, survived the crash. 

The site of the Butcher's Arms was cleared after the war to make way for a garage development by the late Jack Edmund Lovell (1929-2005) of Riverside Motors but a 1,000 lb. unexploded bomb was found eight feet below the ground during excavations to install a new underground petrol storage tank in 1959. Residents in Eastgate spent an anxious night after the discovery, fearing that it might explode. 

The bomb had buried itself so deeply in the ground that its presence was undetected when the crater caused by the plane crash was covered over and left. It was unearthed by a mechanical digger and the driver alerted the police who called in a bomb disposal expert but a preliminary investigation revealed that it was not likely to explode but the area was cordoned off for the night and many residents went to sleep with friends and relatives as a safety precaution. 

Among those first on the scene was Ernie Robinson who was on duty with a team of volunteers from the town's Civil Defence unit based at the Old Grammar School in South Road that had been specially trained to deal with air raid casualties. In later years, he recalled the scene when they arrived:

We heard the plane coming down. It was only on the other side of the Abbey Lawn and so we did not have far to go and we turned out immediately. It was a shambles, a real mess. Soldiers from the Loyal Regiment were billeted in Eastgate and one of them who had been on guard duty had been killed. There was not a lot we could do to help and it was really a case of clearing up as best we could. We found two of the German aircrew and carried off their bodies to the stables behind the Six Bells public house in North Street. The police station was next door in those days and they took over as soon as we arrived and we left them searching through their clothing to find some identification. Bourne was usually peaceful during the war years but it certainly was not on that occasion which turned out to be one of the busiest nights of the war.

The following morning, a squad arrived from RAF Newton near Nottingham and loaded the bomb on to a lorry and took it away for disposal. The officer in charge said that it was still "live" in that it still contained its high explosives but it was "safe" in that the fuses were not energised. The excavations also unearthed two clips of live ammunition, electrical wiring and a fuel pipe from the aircraft. The garage was demolished in 2001 to make way for new homes which were completed the following year.

Jack Lovell's garage on the site of the former Butcher's Arms. It
was demolished 2001 and the site is now occupied by houses.