RAF Northolt

Just as in Plymouth, they did not know what kind of fuse they were dealing with.

On a bright day in June, I visited RAF Northolt, a base on the outskirts of London, to observe a training exercise on air-dropped weapons.

Learning how to correctly assess an old rusting bomb takes time and practice.

Bomb disposal is a dangerous job, but Hambly told me, "Knowledge dispels fear." Bomb disposal as a specialism was created in the Second World War.

"Risk to life comes above everything, for the public but also for us, and risk to property comes second," Hambly told me.

But when a bomb is eighty years old, even this equipment can be unreliable.

At RAF Northolt, a five hundred kilogram German bomb was perched on a grassy verge.

The bomb, which was inert, had been placed there at an awkward angle for bomb disposal technicians to assess in pairs.

[upbeat music] And with war over, Alice was free to visit her son for an important family occasion.

At Northolt Aerodrome, our cameraman meets Princess Alice of Greece.

The princess is the mother of Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, formerly Prince Philip of Greece.

While Princess Alice had been stuck in Athens, her son had fallen in love with another princess.

Napier came with Ken Bloomfield, the Senior Civil Servant of the Executive, and his Senior Advisor, Tom Roberts.

All three were helicoptered in the Aldergrove airport, where, joining Faulkner, they took a plane bound for RAF Northolt.

Behind them, they left a world where ministerial cars no longer worked because of a lack of petrol, where the routes were closed off by the strikers in depth, and they had to be helicoptered from army bases to cabinet meetings and back, where the writ did not run even as far as Dundonald House.

with a body of dedicated civil servants served them.

But Wendy did have other better things in her life, and her life was looking promising.

She was very close to her family, her mother and father, Pamela and Bill Nell, her younger brother, Peter, an RAF technician who was then stationed at RAF Northolt, and her older sister, Jane, and Wendy especially adored Jane's children, Wendy's niece and nephew, whom she would regularly babysit for.

She had a good job.

She'd done well at Longmead and Hugh Christie schools and West Kent College, and had initially trained as a hotel receptionist.

Yeah, I mean, there, there was some ...

I mean, this for me, this is, this goes back to, um, RAF Northolt, um, years ago, um, where a very similar accident happened where this was a, a, a executive jet rather than a, uh, uh, anything else.

But it was, um, yeah, sh- touched down halfway down the runway with a tailwind, with the crew arguing between them about who was doing what.

Um, and it went across the, um, the main arterial road into London.