Sergei William Kadleigh 1945 – 1972
Sergei William Kadleigh 1945 – 1972 MB BS MRCS LRCP was a homeopath at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital who died in the Staines plane crash in 1972.
Homeopaths and homeopathic supporters Dudley Wooton Everitt, Marjorie Golomb, Kay Kadalla, V L Lanza, J Ruben, S Linger, Mary Stevenson, P Glennis Smith, Joan MacKover, John Robertson Raeside, Elizabeth Somerville Stewart and T Fergus Stewart also died in that fatal crash.
Sergei William Kadleigh was a friend of Marjorie Blackie, who wrote his Obituary.
There were no survivors when the plane crashed, less than four minutes after taking off for Brussels. Its wheels had been retracted and the plane was climbing when it suddenly dropped, skimming over high-tension power lines and across the tops of cars before crashing on its underside.
The impact broke the plane’s spine, ripping off the tail section and sending it spinning through the air. The fuselage slewed across the muddy field and hit a line of trees on the edge of a reservoir.
The plane had hit an incredibly small space – a field no more than 100 yards wide. The way in which it crashed suggested that it might have lost virtually all power; it came almost straight down, missing houses on either side of the field.
A stall, from which the pilot would need a lot of height to recover even if it were not of the dangerous “deep” variety, would have the same effect….
Thirty four Britons were killed in the crash, including the crew. There were 29 passengers from the United States, 29 Belgians, 12 Irish, four South African, three Canadian, one Thai, two Jamaicans, one Latin American, one Indian, one French Afrique, and one Nigerian. There were between 25 and 30 women passengers, as well as two or three children.
The Department of Trade and Industry said the pilot’s last message to ground control came two minutes after take-off. It said “Up to 60″ which the DTI said, “Is quite a normal message.” It means the pilot was climbing to a level of 6,000 feet.”
After the crash, wreckage was scattered for a radius if almost four hundred yards around the shattered fuselage. The hundreds of workers struggling in clinging mud and a steady drizzle to cut their way into the buckled remains of the plane were hampered through the night by hundreds of sight-seers flocking towards the area.
Mr. Cranley Onslow, Parliamentary Under Secretary for Aerospace, who went to the scene, said “callous” sight-seers were hampering the rescue workers. Two hours after the crash, all roads in the area were jammed by traffic.
The Trident, on flight BE 548 and code named G-ARPI, left Heathrow at 5.02pm with 109 passengers and nine crew members. By 5.06pm, it had crashed.
A man who had been driving along the A30 told police: “The plane just came whizzing in, along the road. You could have reached up and touched it.”
Heathrow aircraft control sounded the full scale disaster alert, and all airport emergency appliances, together with all available fire engines, ambulances, and police patrol cars for eight miles around sped to the scene. Nine hospitals in the area prepared to receive casualties, and doctors were brought in for emergency duty. In the event, they were not needed.
As the first teams of firemen reached the wreck site – throughout the night they were to work at considerable personal risk as the aircraft contained tones of highly flammable fuel – they clawed with their hands in desperate attempts to reach the passengers inside. A local doctor who ran to the spot said: “It was ghastly, sickening. A terrible mess.”
As police blocked off surrounding roads, other rescue teams began knocking down fences to enable ambulances to reach the plane. By 7pm, 70 bodies had been lifted from the fuselage and laid in long rows along the ground.
Long lines of rescuers formed in the steady drizzle, passing the broken bodies of the victims gently from the shattered fuselage to the ambulances. A number of the rescuers, police and firemen, were crying. One policeman said a small girl died in his arms as he carried her towards an ambulance.
One man was taken out of the wreckage with head injuries but died in hospital. He is understood to be Mr Melville Miller, managing director of Rowntree Mackintosh (Ireland) Limited.
A mobile crane was brought into the field to lift parts of the wreckage away; the rescuers could not use oxyacetylene cutters because of the risk of an explosion. Relays of ambulances began taking the bodies to the special mortuary.
Mr Michael Stephens, of Staines, said he was cycling along a road near by “When I looked up and saw the tail of a plane bounce into the air … then the rest of the plane burst into flames.” The fire was an isolated electrical fault and was quickly put out.
Miss Christine Wallis said she was walking past the reservoir with friends when “bits of metal began flying around us … the plane split up as it tore along the ground.”
Last night teams of investigators from the Department of Trade and Industry and the British Airline Pilots’ Association arrived at the scene to find out the contents of the flight recorders.
The same plane was involved in a collision in July 1968, at Heathrow. It was stationary at one of the terminal piers when a freighter jet carrying horses got out of control and crashed into its side. Five people were killed in the freighter. The Trident’s tail was torn off.
Two seconds after the droops were retracted, the stick pusher stall recovery device operated, causing the autopilot to automatically disengage and the nose of the aircraft to pitch down. At that moment, the stall recovery system was manually inhibited by one of the pilots.
The aircraft then pitched up rapidly, losing speed and height, entering a true aerodynamic stall and then a deep stall from which no recovery was possible. Impact occurred 20 seconds later. An autopsy on the captain suggested that he had probably had a heart attack during the short flight.
Sergei William Kadleigh’s Obituary is in The British Homeopathic Journal, Volume LXI, Number 4. Oct, 1972. Page 252. It was written by his friend Marjorie Blackie:
Sergei William Kadleigh MB BS MRCS LRCP
Dr Kadleigh first came to attend one of the intensive courses of the Faculty, and from that moment on was enthusiastic to learn more about Homeopathy, as he felt that it was what he was looking for.Since then he first helped Kathleen Priestman with visiting patients south of the Park, and came at least once a week, sometimes oftener, to sit in my practice. he also attended every possible lecture.
He loved general practice and this is what he wanted to do. He would indeed have been an expert homeopathic physician. He had a real flair for Homeopathy, and his was such a particularly charming personality, that he got on with everyone.
After finishing a hospital job he cam into my practice as a full time assistant and, as he said, he enjoyed every minute. We found him most congenial and co-operative with work with and patients loved him.
After only a month in the practice we received letters from dozens of patients telling of his sympathy and and understanding. We have certainly lost a most outstanding homeopathic physician and his friends are coming to enquire about Homeopathy becuase “Bill” found it so inspiring and satisfying.
Of interest:
Sergei William Kadleigh 1922? – 1972 father of Sergei William Kadleigh 1945 – 1972, AA(Hons), Dipl. ARIBS was a prestigious Russian born British architect. (Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry (his partners in Kadleigh, Fry and Drew), and Patrick Horsbrugh (his partner in Kadleigh, Horsburgh & Whitfield).
There is a William Kadleigh Academic Department of Homeopathic Medicine at the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital
William Kadleigh Memorial Fund which supports young homeopathic doctors.
Chairman: John Stephen Hughes Games,
The William Kadleigh Memorial Fund is an unregistered connected charity whose capital funds are held and managed by the British Homeopathic Association on behalf of the Kadleigh Committee. The committee determine the disposition of funds and report at least annually.
The Kadleigh Trust 1987:
A Research Council is being formed, which will include representatives from The Homeopathy Research Trust, The Kadleigh Trust, The Faculty of Homeopathy, The British Homeopathic Research Group, the Research Council for Complementary Medicine, together with some other people actively engaged in research. It will be “Chaired” by the Medical Research Director of The Blackie Foundation Trust….
Sue :: Jan.01.2009 :: British History :: 5 Comments »
Dear Sue,
Bill Kadleigh was my closest friend from the age of 8 when we both arrived at the same boarding school in Bedfordshire, right through public school at Uppingham Rutland, and then to London University where I read engineering at Imperial College, and Bill medicine at Barts. We shared his parents flat in South Kensington for some time during this period in the sixties.
I knew his Russian grandmother (‘Dub’), his mother Leslie (a brilliant painter), and his father Segei (an architect), who introduced Bill and I to Boulestin Restaurant in Covent Garden, where we went many times.
I was living in Greece at the time of the fateful air-crash in 1972, working for BP, but returned to London for the funeral.
I was looking up someone else with a similar name just now and chanced upon your website. I am working in Abu Dhabi now for a year or two but come frequently to London. I had no idea there was a William Kadleigh Dept of Homeopathy at Bristol, altho’ I know that Leslie and Sergei moved to live in Bristol some time after Bill’s death.
Incidentally he was born in August 1945 (not 1942) !! I have a lovely oil painting of the Blue Mountains in Jamaica done by Bill’s mother when Sergei was on mission for the World Bank there – Bill used to go there during school holidays sometimes. I also have an excellent black and white photo of Bill – quite large (10″ x 6″) which could be digitally reproduced to hang in the Department at Bristol if this was of interest.
Best wishes
John Bridger
Hi John
Thank you so much for your comment – I am pleased to resolve the link between Sergei the homeopath and his father the architect. I emailed the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) to try and find more information but only received an automated reply….
I will get back to you on the photograph – and I am grateful for the extra information you have provided on Bill Kadleigh and his family. It is important to gather this information together, as I was quite surprised that there was very little known about the homeopathic victims of the 1972 aircrash.
Your friend Bill was a very distinguished man who had the great fortune to have known Marjorie Blackie and some of the other great homeopaths at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital at that time.
What a loss!
Sue
Hi Sue, to let you know sergei senior’s birthday was 6th August 1916– died on 7th December 1998— you will hardly believe this . i went to work for Sergei and Leslie n 1995 and stayed with them looking after leslie until her death in March 1997. I stayed on as housekeeper for sergei and cared for him until he also died in1998. I was at Sergei and Leslie’s death and funeral as both of them were the last in their respective family lines.
here’s the strange bit– In 1972 i was on the perimeter road where the plane crashed,at Heathrow airport with my then partner and 3 children [ i had lived in Slough until 1966] and was visiting relatives for the weekend, we used to go to the airport to watch the planes take off. It was a horrifying scene and it was not until i met Sergei some 25 years later that i knew the names of any of the passengers and that “Bill” was one of them.. Strange you see because i did not know the family before 1995 and that i was at all 3 persons deaths . Call sign of the Trident by the way was Papa India . Rosa
Hi Rosa
I am so grateful you have taken the time to add this information to my blog site… and to add these incidental facts to our growing story of this terrible crash. Bringing this alive does honour to those who died by keeping their stories alive.
Truth is far stranger than fiction!
Regards.
Sue
I was at Miss Ironside’s Junior School in Elvaston Place, off Gloucester Road, London, from 1950-1953. I was friendly with Bill, and often used to go swimming with him at Kensington Close baths and then back to the family house at 63 Abingdon Villas W8.
I remember Leslie and Sergei as being lively and bohemian and can still see and even smell the house. I remember Bill’s nanny, Webbie, a cat called Puskin, and the paved back garden with its high white walls. Leslie taught me how to paint easter eggs.
Then we went to our separate schools and, sadly, lost contact. I never saw Bill again.
My father happened to scan the passenger list after the Papa India crash, and saw Bill’s name. I was going through a severe depressive episode at the time, and my parents did not tell me of Bill’s death till three years later.
I went to Sergei and Leslie’s flat in South Kensington for dinner. We drank and laughed a lot, but the tears were so close to the surface. I broke down as soon as I was safely out of the house.
My mother remembered Bill as a wild but irresistible boy, who used to call her ‘Little Whiskers’ because of her facial hair. She remembered his strong little neck, and his resemblance to the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens.
It’s unbearable to think of what might have been…