Frank Lester Beresford was born on 8th Sept 1913 at Wolverhampton. His father, Charles, served in the Worcester Regiment in WW1 and was posted as missing at Hooge, near Ypres in June 1916 when Frank was less than 3 years old. His body was never identified, and he is commemorated on the Menin Gate at Ypres.

When WW2 broke out in Sept 1939, Frank (age 26) was living with his mother in Tattenhall, Staffordshire and working as an assistant in a wireless shop. At some time in the first 6 months of the war he joined the RAF at their training station at Padgate, near Warrington.

By 1943 he was an air gunner at RAF Morpeth and was involved in training gunners at the No 4 Air Gunnery School which was based there. Also in the early months of 1943, he married Joyce Williams, their marriage being registered in Central Northumberland.

He must therefore have been newly married when he was involved in the fatal mid-air collision over Morpeth on 29th March that year. He was on a training flight in a Blackburn Botha aircraft (piloted by Fl. Lt. Zarski who is buried near him at Morpeth churchyard). They had completed their planned flight and were preparing to land at the airfield when their aircraft was in collision with a second Botha plane taking off for a similar flight.

Sadly, all crew of both planes died in the accident. They were buried a few days later in a military funeral at St Mary’s Churchyard in Morpeth. 

Frank’s widow, Joyce, re-married after the war. She died in Wolverhampton in 1990.

[The story of the fatal mid-air collision at Morpeth is told in “Air Crash Northumberland” by Russel Gray et al, published by Countryside Books in 2008 (ISBN 978 1 84674 112 8)]