TheRiddlerArchive

Hello, The story of the crash was told to me in the early 1980’s by my grandfather, who was a policeman in Otley in the 1940’s and attended the scene. As a child my grandparents took me and my cousins along the route through Burley a number of times on days out, before the bypass was built. The story of the crash made quite an impression on me. As he drove us past, Granddad pointed out gouge marks along the front of the buildings by the corner on Main Street and explained that the army truck in question had taken the bend too fast and tipped over. It had a canvas top and so the soldiers inside were unprotected. The marks on the building, he said, were caused by the helmets of the men within being scraped along the wall. The story of the unfortunate Canadian soldiers had added resonance for my two cousins as they were born and raised in Toronto, where they still live today. We often discuss grandad’s police stories. He was very good at relating them, and when we were young we would badger him for all the gruesome details. He was very good at knowing just how much to tell us without going too far! (Although I have to say that the story of the origins of the marks on the building was one of his more grisly tales.) My grandfather went on to work in road safety for the Ministry of Transport later in his career. I think he was inspired to go into that line of work by the appalling accident scenes he witnessed in his early policing days, at a time when safety features in cars were non-existent. Perhaps his memories of this tragedy played into that. It occurs to me as an adult that the impact of the vehicle itself may have been more likely to have damaged the building’s stonework, but that’s just speculation on my part and of course, unlike granddad, I wasn’t there at the time.