The raft incident in the clay-pits
Coming off the M1 motorway at Junction 13 and taking the old Bedford Road past Marston Gate Industrial Estate (previously the site of Marson Valley Brick Co and its twenty-five tall chimneys) you come to the village of Brogborough. Continuing on down ‘new’ Brogborough hill, you come to a fork in the road. In a strip of land between the A421 and the Bedford Road, there was once ‘old’ Brogborough hill, so steep that lorries had to use first gear to climb it. In the 1960s, this hill was bypassed to reduce congestion to the new M1. The old hill was used by reckless local kids (not me) as a gravity-powered run for wooden trolleys with pram wheels, with bloody consequences for some, that is another story.
Back to the fork: the left branch goes to Bedford, the right takes you to Lidlington, between the two is the 220-acre Brogborough Lake, used today by windsurfers.
In the 60s the lake didn’t exist, it was an abandoned clay pit known as ‘The Knot-Hole’. More than 20 metres deep, with precipitous sides, its floor was a series of long, parallel, rain-filled channels separated by low islands of soil that had been deposited by a machine to expose the Oxford Clay below. For good reason, the pit was fenced off with notices saying, PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED; there had been a number of drownings. These warnings did not deter Beasley Troop, who used the area for Covert Operations, Survival, Escape and Evasion, and other training.
In the summer holidays of 1961, Colonel Beasley led a team into the pit to carry out a dangerous amphibious operation. Intelligence had informed the Colonel that a rival force had built a raft in a large water channel close to an island with a pair of nesting swans. The team included the Colonel, Stan Novak, Johnny McNamara, myself, and young Melvin Burr on his first active troop operation. Melvin’s mother was not happy with him mixing with the more feral elements of Brogborough’s juvenile community. We managed to turn him to the dark side this day as his parents had, uncharacteristically, gone out and left him at home alone.
Entering through a hole in the fence concealed by a low bush, we momentarily stood on the pit’s upper edge gazing in awe onto Conan Doyle’s ‘Lost World’, before descending the gradient into that mysterious landscape. At the bottom, it was difficult to spot us from the road unless we travelled far into the middle of the pit, here we could operate freely, untroubled by adults. Removed from civilisation except for occasional incursions by the likes of us, it was a quiet, natural, primaeval world disturbed only by the calls of lapwing, moorhen, curlew, peewits, ducks and gulls.
My enduring memories of trips into the pit are of laying on warm earth, straining to see the dark dot of a skylark, singing high overhead; bulrushes, frogs, frogspawn and tadpoles; hunting for the nests of ground-nesting birds; jumping with fright after tripping over a hare or rabbit that dashed off unexpectedly from underfoot: and the sheer variety of the animals, plants and wildflowers.
To move between islands, we jumped the three or four-metre water gaps that separated them. In places the gaps were more than five meters wide, for these, we carried a square plywood board on a long string with a spike tied to the string’s free end. We’d secure the spike and throw the board into the centre of the gap, then run down the bank and leap onto the board like a stepping stone, and push off hard onto the next island. Providing you were quick and hit the board’s centre, the upward pressure of the water took the impact allowing you to clear the gap. However, occasionally landing off centre, the board would skid, causing the jumper to fall arms raised into the water. The last person across pulled out the spike so we could retrieve the board for the next channel.
We eventually found the raft tied to a post in the same lake as the swan’s island. At about two and a half metres long by one metre wide, it wasn’t a big raft. It was made from an angle iron frame covered with wooden planks to form the deck; onto its centre was nailed a bent metal sheet that made an open-ended, inverted V-shaped, cabin about one-and-a-quarter metres high. The whole thing was kept afloat with round ten-gallon oil cans, stuffed beneath the angle iron frame. It was not the most elegant of vessels, it sat very low in the water and was only sensibly capable of taking a crew of three. Johnny Mac decided to go for a swim, and Stanley sat on the bank and lit up a cigarette. Colonel Beasley took up a position aft, Melvin disappeared into the cabin to shelter from the sun, and I was ordered forward on the raft with a stick to fend off any aggression from the swans. We untied the line and pushed off. Colonel Beasley, using a large plank as an oar, slowly manoeuvred the craft across the water towards the island. The raft wallowed in the water under its own weight and that of the crew. The swans became agitated at our approach, and the cob took to the water with his wings outstretched, aggressively hissing and flapping its way towards us. In an attempt to scare off the angry bird, the Colonel began bobbing up and down, bending and straightening his knees, causing the raft to see-saw along its length. So violent became the motion that I had to hold onto the cabin for support. Then, at one rise of the bow, an oil can shot out from under the raft, sailed in a lazy arc and hit the water with a splash in front of the swan, which retreated back to its island. The Colonel, seeing my discomfort, continued rocking the raft. The next rise of the bow was higher than the last, and three more cans shot out. As the bow rose up even higher for the third time, cans shot out one after the other and didn’t stop. Colonel Beasley floated off and swam for the land as the aft end of the vessel began to submerge. I was left floundering as the raft, standing at a high angle like the Titanic, slipped beneath the turbid green waters. For a moment I was left stunned and floating among the cans, it had all happened so fast. I was then struck with a terrible realisation:
‘WHERE WAS MELVIN?’
He had gone down with the raft. He couldn’t swim. I spun around, but he was nowhere to be seen. The water was too murky to see below the surface, and I didn’t even know how deep it was. Anxiety turned to fear, if his mother found out I had a hand in this, she’d kill me; my mother would kill me. Treading water and contemplating how I was going to explain all this to the police, I slipped into a stupor, not knowing what to do.
In this dejected state I began to pray, ‘Oh, dear God, please don’t let Melvin drown’.
Suddenly, I began to rise up out of the water: ‘I didn’t mean, take me in his place, God’.
I looked between my legs and saw Melvin’s head where he had bobbed up like a cork. The next thing I knew, his arms were wrapped around my neck in a drowning man’s grip. Now we would both die. In a moment of clarity, I remembered a life-saving technique I had seen on TV. I closed my fist and smashed it into his face. It didn’t work, I did it again with more force. He let go, bringing his hands up to his bleeding nose. I grabbed a nearby can and thrust it at him. He grabbed it and floated on his back with his arms and legs wrapped around it. I distanced myself from him trying to think what to do next. That’s when I heard the thud of running feet and a splash. Johnny Mac swam past me doing a fast crawl, took Melvin by the back of his collar, and with a one-handed breaststroke swam back to shore dragging Melvin with him. A little shaken but none the worse for his experience, we dried Melvin off and managed to get him home with his mother none-the-wiser.
I don’t know if Mrs Burr ever found out about that incident, I certainly wasn’t going to ask her, but a while later the family moved to the six houses a little way outside of Brogborough and away from the immediate influence of Beasley Troop