Greenham Control Tower actors to hit the airwaves

IN September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain landed at Heston aerodrome (now Heathrow airport) after visiting Munich. He announced, famously and incorrectly, that it would be ‘Peace in our time’.

The pilot who flew the Lockheed 14 aircraft was one Commander Eric Robinson, an experienced pilot with more than 5,000 hours of flying experience, over 1,000 of which had been spent on mail trips to Berlin.

Just two months later that aircraft, with Robinson at the controls and a foreign co-pilot on board, crashed onto the beach in Portishead, Somerset, close to the radio station there which later played an important role in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Besides members of the family, the local community and representatives of World Airways attended the funeral. There were also representatives from the German Embassy and the German Airways. Hitler himself sent a wreath.

Another pilot who regularly flew Lockheed aircraft to Germany at the time was one Sidney Cotton. Under the guise of promoting a new type of colour film, Cotton’s flight plans were dictated by the German government, but he often seemed to find himself flying off-track over military installations. Indeed, he sometimes offered to take top Nazi generals on his flights.

What the generals didn’t realise was that his aeroplane was fitted with a number of hidden cameras operated by a button hidden beneath Cotton’s seat. Cotton was working for MI6!

In fact, he was a friend of Ian Fleming, who also worked for MI6 and partly based James Bond on the charming womaniser Sidney Cotton.

These two stories have crossed paths in the mind of local playwright Andy Kempe, who once taught in Portishead just over the road from Commander Robinson’s grave.

He began to ponder on a few questions. What if the aeroplane that flew Chamberlain to Munich wasn’t Commander Robinson but a different pilot? And what if he later crashed on Greenham Common rather than in Portishead?

Greenham wasn’t an airbase at that time but several sites in the area were being pinned by the War Office as potential sites for RAF airfields. What if the pilot and his mysterious foreign co-pilot were secretly filming these sites?

What if an underwing camera shot off in the crash was dug up years later when the Common was being made ready to receive American cruise missiles? What if the origins and nature of the camera was recognised by a local mechanic who had good reason to want to expose the pilot as a traitor?

And what if a junior reporter for the local paper who fancies himself as a latter-day Sam Spade sets out to uncover this story of treachery, lost love and revenge?

The result of these musings is a new play called A Sign of the Times.

The play will be recorded in a new venture for Kennet Radio by Greenham Tower Theatre Co and broadcast in the New Year.