Black Diamonds (59 page)

The weekend she and Peter planned to fly to the South of France for their Whitsun break, Joe was due to be in Paris on business. Perhaps they could meet, Kick thought. If her father would not give his formal consent to their marriage, he might at least give it his blessing.

When Kick came
into the room after finishing the call, Ilona had never seen her looking so ecstatic. Joe had agreed to her suggestion: she and Peter were to meet him for lunch at the Ritz Hotel in Paris on Saturday 15 May.

Kick then made a second call, to her friend Janie Compton. ‘The meeting was absolutely vital to her,’ Janie recalled. ‘She telephoned to ask me if I would go with them. So much depended on it. She wanted moral support from me. I knew Joe quite well from the time when he was Ambassador – when Kick and I first became friends. I think she thought Joe wouldn’t like Peter, wouldn’t see the point of him at all. Joe was so ANTI what he called “you bloody aristocrats”.’

Janie, recently married to Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook’s son, was unable to go. Resigned to the fact that they would be going alone, Peter and Kick spent a couple of days together at Wentworth before leaving for France. Jean Oliver, who worked in the post office in the village, was up at the house one afternoon during their brief visit. ‘I’d gone up to the house to see my friend. She was the chef’s daughter. We were sitting outside the kitchen door chatting, and Peter and Lady Hartington walked past. They looked so happy and carefree. Peter wanted to show her the family mausoleum. We watched them set off across the Park and I remember she was wearing an immaculate pair of beautiful white shoes. There was all that coal dust and muck around from the open-cast mining! They’d be ruined, I thought!’

Peter and Kick left Wentworth on Wednesday 12 May – the evening before they were due to fly to France. On the drive south to London, they called in on Tom Fitzwilliam at Milton Hall, a few miles outside Peterborough. Mindful that his cousin might be sensitive about welcoming Kick, as he opened the door
Peter said to him
:

‘Look, I’ve got Kick outside. May I bring her in?’

‘For God’s sake do,’ Tom said. Over dinner, Peter told Tom what they were about to do. ‘We’re going off to try to persuade old Kennedy to agree to our getting married.’ With a laugh, he added, ‘If he objects, I’ll go to see the Pope and offer to build him a church.’

36

They were late.
The ten-seater
private jet Peter had hired to fly the two of them to the South of France was due to take off from Croydon Airport at 10.30, and Kick was still packing. Waiting for her at the house in Smith Square, Peter teased her about her voluminous luggage: they were only going away for a long weekend but her two large suitcases contained enough clothes for several weeks. Besides the surfeit of outfits, she had also packed her Devonshire jewels and an assortment of expensive lingerie – a blue silk negligee, lace-embroidered camisoles and a selection of black lace
jarretelles
. For the four-day trip, they were taking 187 pounds of baggage – most of it Kick’s.

They left the house in a hurry. Ilona Solymossy was there to wave them off.

‘Wish me luck,’ Kick yelled as their car pulled away.

‘Should I cross my fingers?’ the housekeeper replied.

‘Yes, both hands!’

‘I will even cross my feet!’ Ilona shouted, laughing.

By the time they got to Croydon Airport they were half an hour behind schedule. The De Havilland Dove was waiting for them on the tarmac. Peter had hired the plane from Skyways of London, an exclusive Mayfair-based charter firm. It had cost him £81.
^*
He had chosen the same model as the one owned by his great friend Prince Aly Khan. Skyways had also provided a pilot. Aged thirty-four, Captain Peter Townshend was highly experienced: in the course of his career, he had clocked up almost 3,000 hours in the air, 550 of them as Chief Pilot in an RAF Bomber Squadron during the war.

The route to the Riviera was one Townshend had already flown eleven times that year. The flight plan was routine: Paris by noon, with a short stopover for refuelling, and then on down to Cannes, with an anticipated arrival time of around 3.30 p.m.

It was 12.45
– forty-five minutes later than Townshend had anticipated – when the Dove, after its delayed departure from Croydon, landed at Le Bourget, the stylish art deco airport favoured by the international jet set, nine miles to the north of Paris. Peter and Kick got off to stretch their legs while the plane refuelled. As they headed into the terminal, Peter, on a whim, decided to telephone his Parisian friends: would they like to join them for an impromptu lunch in the centre of Paris? Telling Townshend they would be gone for just forty minutes, Peter and Kick caught a taxi to the Champs-Elysées – a twenty-minute drive away.

At 1.30 they had not returned. Townshend, waiting on the apron at Le Bourget, was becoming increasingly anxious. That morning, he had checked the meteorological reports: bad weather was forecast over the Rhône Valley, directly en route to Cannes. Climbing down from the Dove, he crossed the tarmac to the control tower to get an update on the weather.

He was given a chart that had been made up at nine that morning: a violent thunderstorm, with abnormally heavy rainfall, was expected over the Rhône Valley at around five o’clock. The flight south would take three hours: if they were to avoid the storm, they would have to leave immediately. To compound his anxiety, the meteorologist told him that the latest update from weather stations in the south suggested that conditions over the Rhône Valley, and to the south-east of the Massif Central, were worsening.

‘The pilot,’ the meteorologist reported later, ‘did not take notes. He went off, came back and seemed visibly worried about the delay caused by his passengers who had not yet returned. “I’m going to be late,” he told us, speaking in French, “and it is very boring.”’

At two o’clock – the Dove’s revised departure time – there was still no sign of Peter and Kick. Townshend, in communication with air traffic control at Le Bourget, altered the take-off slot to 14.20 – almost two hours later than his original flight plan.
At 14.20
he altered it again to 15.00; and again, at 15.00, to 15.30. Minutes after he had moved it forward for the fourth time, the couple, accompanied by their lunch guests who had come to the airport to see them off, finally returned. Townshend was furious. Forty minutes had turned into two and a half hours. The delay, he informed them coolly, meant they would be flying over the Rhône Valley at precisely the time a violent thunderstorm was predicted. All commercial flights had been cancelled: although there were no rules governing private aircraft flying in bad weather conditions, the meteorological office at Le Bourget had advised him not to fly. In his view, it was too much of a risk: he intended to cancel the flight.

Annoyed, Peter began to argue with him. What was a little rain, he said. He was not afraid of turbulence: he had crossed the North Sea in storm-force winds in a small motor torpedo boat. Nothing, surely, could be worse than that. Besides, if they did not fly that afternoon, they would have to call off the trip. It was Thursday: they had to be back in Paris by Saturday morning for the meeting with Joe Kennedy at the Ritz. There was no point postponing the flight until the following morning for the sake of spending less than twenty-four hours in Cannes. Changing tack, Peter then exerted all his charm.

‘Why did Peter have to be so ruddy stupid!’ his niece, Barbara Ricardo, remembered bitterly more than fifty years after his death. ‘It was so stupid. So utterly stupid to go and fly when they’d been told there was a storm and that it wasn’t safe. If only he’d been more sensible. You see, he was so spoilt by my grandmother. As a child he always got whatever he wanted. He wanted to go, therefore he must. The pilot was an absolute idiot. Peter must have offered a huge amount of money to get the man to fly. That’s my opinion. The pilot should have been more firm and said, if you want to go and get killed, go and kill yourself. But I’m not going to get killed.’

Townshend – whether bribed or persuaded by Peter’s charm – gave in:
at twenty minutes
past three, firing the plane’s engines, he taxied to Runway 5 for take-off.

From a report compiled by the Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses – the French air accident investigation unit – based on the Dove’s onboard radio and navigation logs retrieved from the wreckage of the plane, it is possible to piece together the details of the flight.

After take-off, climbing to 1,500 feet over Fontainebleau, the Dove headed south-east for Auxerre. At 16.17, flying at 150 knots at a cruising altitude of 9,500 feet, Arthur Freeman, the co-pilot and radio operator, noted ‘Loire ahead’ in the navigation log. For the next forty minutes, aside from a small deviation north to avoid turbulence generated by heavy cloud, Townshend stuck to his flight plan. At 16.50, Arthur Freeman asked Lyon air traffic control for a weather forecast for Cannes, where the plane was due to land at 18.30. Ten minutes later, Freeman entered ‘Rhône ahead’ in the navigation log. At 17.02, as the aircraft approached the Rhône Valley, Lyon radioed the forecast back.

Crucially, as the air accident investigators noted, Freeman had not inquired about the weather conditions immediately ahead.

It was Lyon’s last radio contact with the Dove. It is also the moment when Freeman’s navigation log stops. Flying at 10,000 feet, the plane had entered the fringes of the storm in the region of Vienne, a little north of the Ardèche mountains. ‘In all likelihood electrical discharge in the atmosphere generated by the thunderstorm rendered radio transmission impossible,’ the accident investigators reported. ‘Also,’ they concluded grimly, ‘the attempt to control the aircraft in the turbulence prevented the crew from undertaking any other activity.’

For the next twenty-eight minutes, violent updrafts bounced the Dove thousands of feet through the air. According to the inhabitants of the Vienne, who were lashed by torrential rain, hail and forked lightning, the storm was of quite exceptional strength.

At 17.03, one minute after its last contact with the Dove, Lyon’s air traffic control also lost contact with a DC 3 flying on the same flight path through the region. A thirty-two-seater, the DC 3 was a bigger plane: later, the co-pilot reported that visibility was zero and the turbulence so intense that both he and the Captain had had to wrestle with the controls to keep the plane level. Fortunately for the crew of the DC 3, they had hit the cumulus nimbus at an altitude of 2,500 feet and were able to descend out of the cloud to make an emergency landing at Valence airport, not far from where the Dove crashed.

No such option existed for Townshend. He had flown into the storm at an altitude of 10,000 feet – the point where the turbulence is generally at its greatest – and the conditions were even more extreme than those encountered by the crew of the DC 3. Extraordinarily, as the accident investigators noted – incredulous at his insouciance – Townshend had made no attempt to find an entry above or beneath the cloud base, the standard procedure when confronted by threatening cumulus nimbus.

‘
Even modern 747s
would not fly wittingly into a thunderstorm at an altitude of ten thousand feet,’ a commercial pilot explained. ‘Thunderstorms are known to be one of the most formidable hazards in flight. That’s why today’s planes are equipped with systems to warn of their approach. You either climb above the storm zone or you descend below it. You don’t fly through it.’

What Townshend did not know as he grappled with the leaden controls to keep the Dove on course was that the gale-force south-east winds were dragging the plane into the eye of the storm above the Ardèche mountains. Given its ferocity, it is probable that atmospheric static knocked out the electrically powered artificial horizon gyro – a device that measured the plane’s position in relation to the horizon. Flying blind in thick cloud, the dials of the instruments on the Dove’s dashboard – notoriously difficult to read at the best of times – spinning uselessly in front of him, Townshend became disoriented. He had no way of knowing where he was, or whether he was flying up or down. He may also have suffered hypostasis – a blackout caused by a lack of oxygen. At 10,000 feet, he was already at the upper limit of flying without breathing apparatus. The updrafts in a storm of the intensity of the one over the Rhône Valley that afternoon were capable of sucking a plane thousands of feet upwards, above the oxygen threshold.

Whether as the result of damage caused by the extreme turbulence or a lapse of consciousness, at around 17.30 Townshend lost control of the Dove.

For the last minute or so of the flight, everyone on board must have known the plane was about to crash.
Both Townshend and Freeman
stuffed handkerchiefs into their mouths – a standard military procedure to avoid biting through the tongue in a crash landing. Hurtling towards the earth in a steep dive, the massive vibration and the whine from the over-revving engines indicating the plane was out of control, the Dove shot out of the cloud base 1,000 feet above the mountains. Confronted by a ridge directly ahead, in a last desperate attempt to pull out of the dive, Townshend yanked the controls sharply towards him. It was too much for the Dove: the massive g-force broke the plane in mid-air, the right wing cracking first, causing one engine to tear loose, then the other. The fuselage followed its own trajectory: landing vertically, it was embedded in rock on the ridge when Paul Petit and his father discovered it.

All four passengers, the autopsy concluded, had been killed on impact.

It was a two-and-a-half-hour climb up the mountain from St Bauzile, the nearest village, to the site of the crash. Some hours after Paul Petit and his father had found the plane, the Mayor of St Bauzile, accompanied by the Petits, several gendarmes and a local journalist, struggled up the stony path leading to the summit of Le Coran to examine the wreckage. Later, Peter and Kick’s bodies, carried on makeshift stretchers, were laid on the back of Petit’s ox cart and hauled down the mountain to the Mairie at St Bauzile.