Death of Great Escaper Berkeley Cayford

Berkeley Denis Cayford DFC was an RAF Pathfinder Force navigator with Bomber Command during WWII and took part in the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III.

He went on to a 25 year career with BOAC and later became an independent aviation consultant.

BD Cayford was born in 1918 and grew up at 17 Rayleigh Road, Wolverhampton.

His Parents were Albert & Eveline (nee Merryweather). BD Cayford's father, Albert Cayford was a coachmaker and served for three years in the First World War, at the front line in transportation and logistics.

After the First World War Albert ran a successful coachmaking business in Wolverhampton making timber horse drawn vehicles. BD Cayford had one sister, Audrey (Lloyd). Audrey was a keen swimmer and taught BD Cayford to swim in the rivers of Shropshire, where they got into quite serious swimming training

Cayford was educated at a local grammar school where he excelled academically and at sport. He was a county swimmer and travelled with the British swimming team to the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

The experience convinced him war was inevitable and although he had taken articles with a local firm of solicitors he signed up to the RAF in 1938, neither wishing to spend a war in the trenches, nor at sea .

Cayford was trained to fly at Yatesbury and posted to 77 Squadron (Bomber Command) in Driffield, Yorkshire.

By the outbreak of war, he had gained his wings and become a navigator, flying missions over Poland, carrying out reconnaissance and dropping propaganda leaflets.

Thereafter they bombed bridges, roads and railways in an attempt to slow the German army before the Dunkirk evacuation.

The experience served him well when the Pathfinder Force was set up in 1942 to increase the accuracy of night bombing raids over Germany. Cayford was among the first navigators to be invited to join the force.

Cayford flew most of the big bombers including the Whitley, Stirling, Wellington and latterly the Lancaster. Following his first full tour of duty he was posted to Scotland to train new pilots and navigators.

He was then sent to Canada for a six month course of astral navigation before returning to Scotland. In December 1941 an Anson which he was navigating iced up and ditched into the Moray Firth, injuring Cayford. The crew spent nine hours in a dinghy in freezing fog (and thereafter three weeks in Raigmore Hospital).

In March 1942, during thick fog his Whitley caught fire and crash landed in remote countryside near Kinloss. Finding a farmhouse he shouted "British airman" three times at the front door, whereupon he felt a prod, and looking down, noticed a shotgun poking into his stomach.

In a broad Scottish accent the farmer asked: "Did you say you were a German?"

In mid 1942, Cayford became one of the first Pathfinder navigators with 7 Squadron, reformed as an elite force.

He was retrained as navigator bomber using the newly introduced H2S radar device; he was awarded the DFC in May 1943 and was recommended for further decoration in August 1943 following the raid on Peenemunde where his Lancaster pinpointed precisely the factories responsible for Hitler's flying rockets, the V1 and V2.

Cayford also took part in many of the night time raids over the industrial Ruhr. The experience, over Hamburg in particular where crews could smell the burning from 17,000 feet, left a deep impression.

The attrition rate among Bomber Commandwas high, more than 44 per cent of the entire force being killed. Among the operational crews the odds were far worse; there was a one in six chance of surviving a full operational tour of 30 missions and a one in 40 chance of surviving a second.

Cayford outlived most of his colleagues and cut an elegant figure with his labrador and Alvis Silver Eagle. Finally, on 23rd August 1943 his Lancaster was shot down in flames by a night fighter over Berlin.

He offered to climb out on to the wing to put out the flames by hand but his captain refused permission. Cayford parachuted onto a church roof and was hurriedly cut down by a German civil guard before being dragged into an air raid shelter. His entire crew, unusually, survived and the three officers on board were sent to Stalag Luft III.

There, Cayford served as a "penguin" for the disposal of soil from Tom, Dick and Harry, the tunnels used in the Great Escape. Cayford volunteered for the breakout: his plan was to travel across Germany as a Bulgarian labourer returning home (he spoke neither German nor Bulgarian) and he was allocated number 82 in the line of escapers.

The tunnel proved to be 15 feet short of the intended exit and it was not until 4.50 a.m of 25th March 1944 that Cayford reached the final ladder - at which moment the tunnel was discovered. The men near the exit turned and crawled back down the tunnel in total darkness, all the time expecting a German bullet up their backsides.

In January 1945 the entire camp was evacuated on three hours notice to avoid the POWs falling into Russian hands. In what became known as the Long March — a bitterly cold (-25C) forced march of some 1000 miles to the west — more than 200 men died of exposure, while a few at the rear of the column were strafed by RAF fighters.

After the war Cayford turned down the offer of a place at Cambridge University opting for the world of civil aviation.

He returned to flying with BOAC and operated Sunderland flying boats down to Australia. During one such trip he met his future wife, Christabel Robson, a WAAF officer returning from Singapore.

They married in 1947; she first used her married name to give consent for a general anaesthetic following an incident with a lorry while leaving the wedding reception.

The cherished Alvis was destroyed and the blameless lorry driver was so upset he offered the newlyweds his own car for their honeymoon, an offer gratefully accepted.

He was appointed managing director of Bahamas Airways in 1965 and, having returned the airline to profit, oversaw its sale to Cathay Pacific in 1969.

Cayford's final position with BOAC involved the introduction of jumbo jets into commercial service. He left BOAC at the age of 52 to set up a consultancy business, which he operated until late into his 70's and whose clients included the Saudi royal family. Cayford was a keen golfer, playing off a handicap of six for a time, until the age of 85 when a fall from a high ladder injured his shoulder.

Latterly he became an active gardener at his old rectory in Dorset. He retained a keen interest in flying, classic sports cars and the progress of his three grandsons.

In 2009, for the very first time, he gave a well-received talk about his war experiences to the pupils at Cheam School.

His wife Christabel passed away in 1996. Thereafter he lived with his partner, Gill Forrester. Berkeley Denis Cayford died on August 30, aged 92. Gill survives him, along with his two sons from his marriage, one a barrister Philip Cayford QC, the other an architect, Paul Cayford RIBA.