On the night of 5th / 6th May 1941 this aircraft took off from Jurby airfield on the Isle of Man at 01.49hrs for the pilot to undertake an operational patrol. It is possible that low cloud was present off the west-coast of England on this night which effected visibility of the sea between England and the Isle of Man. At 03.05hrs he was instructed by his ground controller to return to base and he replied asking for a vectors (directions and distances to fly) to allow him to locate Jurby. Ten minutes later he again asked for a vector and over the next half an hour he continued asking for help in finding base. At 03.42hrs his aircraft was heard to overfly Jurby and he was contacted but replied that he could not see base but he stated that he was running out of fuel and that he was heading east before the fuel ran out, to bale out rather than to ditch the aircraft in the sea. It was later thought probable that the pilot had lost confidence in the ground station supplying him information. Just before 04.00hrs the aircraft was heard flying over the Cockermouth area with those on the ground believing the aircraft to be suffering engine trouble, almost certainly the aircraft was indeed running out of fuel. The aircraft crashed on the lower slope of Burnbank Fell, above Hudson Place Farm and broke up with part of the aircraft catching fire. The first people to the burning wreckage spotted what they believed as a patch of snow beside a fellside wall but on closer inspection it was found to be a partly opened parachute with the body of the pilot attached to it. He had indeed baled out of the Hurricane but being over high ground at the time his parachute had had not enough time to deploy properly and he was killed on striking the ground. The extensive research of air historian Mr Gilbert Rothery has been drawn upon in compiling this webpage, Mr Rothery's research was held in the Millom Museum and copied by historians Alan Clark and Mark Sheldon before it closed.
The crash site was extensively cleared in the days that followed the incident. In the years since the War the site is believed to have been visited by only a handful of people all with the permission of the farmers of the land. With this incident being one of a handful of lesser known air accidents in the Lake District myself and Mr Ade Harris set about researching the incident and where this occured before it goes out of living memory, this was very much the case with this incident. Mr Harris spent a lot of time locally and was able to speak to an elderly gentleman who took him to the crash site in 2012 but sadly Mr Harry Spencer of Iredale Place, died soon afterwards. After many hours of walking the land Ade Harris found a few small fragments of the aircraft but enough to confirm the location. I returned to the site with him in April 2013 to photograph the general area and the small collection of fragments located. The crash site is on private land and permission to visit the site was obtained from Mr Ken Bell of Hudson Place Farm prior to our visit.
Pilot - Sgt Bohumil Votruba RAFVR (787435). Of Czechoslovakia. Buried Causewayhead Cemetery, Silloth, Cumbria.
Bohumil Votruba was born on 7th February 1914 in Skalice, Czechoslovakia and had trained as a pilot there in 1938/39. When the German forces began their occupation of Czechoslovakia he left his home nation and arrived in France with a number of other Czech pilots and flew there. When France fell he left for England and joined the RAFVR. He joined 312 Squadron at Duxford and moved with them to Speke, Valley and finally Jurby in April 1941. He was buried at Silloth on 9th May 1941.
The aircraft crashed onto the lower slopes of Burnbank Fell from where this photograph was taken from.
Hurricane V6921 crashed in the area shown on this photograph.
A handful of tiny fragments are all that remain at the crash site.
