1900s-1945
On 30 September 1940, the skies over Kent were anything but quiet. Among the many aircraft brought down during the Battle of Britain that autumn was a German ME109 fighter, which had been flying escort for a large force of German bombers. Hit in the original air battle, the fighter came down in flames in the garden of Kennards, landing between the pond and the driveway leading up to the house.
The pilot was Corporal Kurt Hubel, an experienced flyer. He did not survive the encounter; he had been killed during the fight itself, and his machine fell to earth without him at the controls. It fell to Leading Fireman Fred Faircloth, a member of Leigh's own Fire Brigade, to retrieve the pilot's body from the wreckage.
What followed has become one of the more poignant stories in the village's wartime memory. The body was reportedly carried to the churchyard in a wheelbarrow — a humble procession for a man who had been an enemy only hours before. The burial took place the very next day, and it was thought that the Vicar, Mr Sealy, conducted the service. If so, no details of that burial service have ever been found, and the exact form of words spoken over the grave remains unknown. One touching detail, however, has been remembered: after the ceremony, school girls from the village placed wild flowers on the pilot's grave.
Leigh was not unprepared for the war it found itself fighting. The village could call on more than twenty Special Constables, and it maintained its own Fire Brigade — the brigade to which Fred Faircloth belonged. Without such local men, the aftermath of crashes like this one would have been far harder to deal with.
Hubel's grave in the churchyard was not to be his resting place for long. During and after the war, the British government offered the families of dead Luftwaffe pilots three choices. They could leave their loved one buried where he had fallen, here in the United Kingdom; they could have the body sent home to Germany; or they could opt for reburial at the Cannock Chase War Cemetery in Staffordshire, which had been declared German soil for the purpose. Few families, it seems, chose to leave their sons in Britain. Hubel's family fell into that majority: they selected Cannock Chase, and in either 1961 or 1962 his body was exhumed from the Leigh churchyard and formally reburied there.
But the story did not end with the exhumation. A relative of Fred Faircloth, searching through a drawer, came across a German Iron Cross — a medal believed to have come from Hubel's body. The village's local history society took up the case, writing to German government departments in the hope of tracing the medal's rightful owners. The replies that came back were typically bureaucratic, speaking of delays rather than resolutions.
There is, however, a thread of hope. Steve Izzard, an expert on old crashed aircraft who lives in Tonbridge, had helped on the original excavation of the Kennards crash site. He had also been in contact with Hubel's nephew, a businessman in Hamburg, and was trying to reach him about the Iron Cross. It may yet be that the medal finds its way back to the family of the man who once carried it.
For those wishing to search for records of German war graves, the German war graves database can be found at www.volksbund.de/graebersuche. An earlier article about Corporal Hubel appeared in the November 2005 issue.
This piece appeared in the Parish Magazine of November/December 2005, marking the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Joe and Jill Kaye, who lived at Kennards after the war, would have known well the spot where the burning fighter came to rest — a quiet corner of a garden that once held a piece of the Battle of Britain.