Royal Air Force, No. 50 Squadron, Service no. 1457270
Born: 1922. Killed in action: 30th September 1943, aged 21
Story
Bernard came from a well-established Kippax family. His mother, Frances Farrar (1895-1957) is pictured here with her parents William Farrar (1853-1939) and Annie Child (1858-1932), plus her parents’ adopted son George Watson Farrar (1908-1974). William’s mother, Susannah Firth (1821-1912) was at one point the oldest woman in Kippax.
Sergeant Bernard Ridsdale served in the Royal Air Force, no.50 Squadron pictured below:
On 29 September 1943 at 6.24pm, Bernard was on board Lancaster Bomber JB143, which took off from RAF Skellingthorpe on a minelaying mission. His plane was attacked by a German night fighter, JU-88, and ditched in the North Sea at 1:43am on 30th September 1943. All of the crew got out of the bomber, but Bernard did not survive. The surviving crew were Pilot P/O Ron M. Code RCAF; Flight Engineer Sgt A. E. Langford; Air Bomber Sgt E. F. Coling; Wireless Operator P/O A. Noble, Air Gunner Sgt H. J. Boyton and Air Gunner Sgt C. R. Moad RCAF.
On 11 July 2016, one of the survivors of the crash, Eric Coling (pictured below) was helped by his Care Home to attend a reunion of the no. 50 Squadron, and related his story. Eric had lived in an orphanage until the age of 14, then worked on the railways, before joining 50 Squadron at RAF Skellingthorpe in Lincolnshire, as a bomb aimer and observer flying Lancaster bombers.
When their Lancaster bomber was struck, the Pilot Officer Ron Code of the Royal Canadian Air Force, put the Lancaster into a steep dive, hoping that the increase in speed would extinguish the fires on board, but when that failed, they were forced to ditch the plane in the sea. All the crew survived the crash but the emergency dinghy failed to deploy. As the Lancaster bomber went under, Eric crawled out onto its wing and took an axe to the appropriate compartment and freed the dinghy. It was whilst Eric and the crew struggled in the choppy waters to board the dinghy that the navigator and his close friend, Sergeant Bernard Ridsdale, was swept away by a wave.
Eric and his comrades drifted in the sea for five days before being spotted and taken aboard a fishing vessel, the Niels Aaen, which sailed into the Danish port of Thyboron on 3rd October only for the RAF men to be captured by the German Wehrmacht. Eric became a prisoner of war and spent the remainder of the war in Stalag IVB Muhlberg.
At the event on 11th June 2016, Eric saw the names of all members of 50 Squadron personnel who were killed in action inscribed on a series of steel walls adjacent to the main spire, and his attendant said to the Yorkshire Post: “Eric was very keen to confirm that the name of his friend Bernard Ridsdale who died on that fateful September night in 1943 appeared on the list of names. We quickly found it and it was a very poignant moment.”
Bernard’s body was never found. He appears on the Runnymede Memorial, panel 163. At the time of his death, he was living at 1 Hepworth Street, Wheldon Road, Castleford; and left his estate valued at £179 0s 7d to his father James Ridsdale (1892-1973).
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