Bill Goldfinch

Oct 15 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

IT WAS built from bed slats, floorboards and bits of wire, all held together by stiff upper-lips made in Britain, but reluctantly exported to Colditz Castle, the forbidding heap of ancient stones in eastern Germany.

But the glider, created for would-be escapees, never flew the 500 yards from the building’s roof over the River Mulde to a field flat enough for landing.

By the time it was ready for its maiden flight in 1945, the Americans were advancing. The escape committee decided the adventure could provoke terrible reprisals form the Germans, who had, a year earlier, executed the 50 men who had tunnelled out of Stalag Luft III (the Great Escape).

Although the two-seat glider was assembled by the PoWs for the astonished Americans, it slipped into the history of romantic warfare.

In 2000, modern technology was used to make another glider to the original specifications for the Channel 4 documentary, Escape from Colditz. It was launched for a three-minute flight at RAF Odiham, Hampshire.

Watching with pride was Flight Lieutenant Leslie James Edward (Bill) Goldfinch, designer of the Colditz glider.

Goldfinch was flying on a Sunderland transport plane, which crashed into the sea during the evacuation of Greece in 1941.

He was one of four survivors taken to a hospital captured by the Germans. He was sent to Stalag Luft I, near the Swiss border.

A foiled escape bid with Flt Lt Jack Best led to both men being sent to Colditz, reserved for the most recalcitrant prisoners. Among them was Kenneth Lockwood, escape committee secretary, whose obituary was published last week.

Goldfinch watched the drift of snowdrops and realised that an escape in a glider might be possible. He started drawing his designs for the plane. Tony Rolt, a racing driver, was project organiser. Hank Wardle, a Canadian, helped with the construction carried out in the utmost secrecy in a workshop behind a false wall above the attic.

The idea was to catapult the glider (wingspan 33ft) from the towering castle over the town at an expected speed of 30mph. The catapult was a rope stretched tense by the one-ton weight of a suspended bath-tub, from which it was to be released.

In civilian life, Goldfinch was borough engineer in Poole, Dorset, where he lived with his wife and daughter.

Bill Goldfinch, engineer; born July 12, 1916, died October 2, 2007.