Thomas Fergus Stewart 1910 - 1972

Thomas Fergus Stewart 1910 - 1972 was on the Board of Management of the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital, and (his wife?) **Elizabeth Somerville Stewart **1913 - 1972, who was also a homeopath, both died in the Staines plane crash in 1972.

Homeopaths and homeopathic supporters Isabel Campbell, Dudley Wooton Everitt, Marjorie Golomb, (Sisters) Kawther Theresa Kandalla and Ludi Marylone Kandalla, Sergei William Kadleigh, Mary Stevenson, Joan Mackover, John Robertson Raeside, and Elizabeth Sharp Hawthorn 1918-1972, also died in that fatal crash.

In the 1972 Trident Air disaster, 16 local Homeopathic doctors were killed and two benches in Queen square are dedicated to them.

One hundred and eighteen people were killed last night in the worst air disaster in Britain. They died when a BEA Trident airliner ploughed into waste ground only a few yards from the Staines bypass on the outskirts of Heathrow Airport-London.

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 Its wheels had been retracted and the plane was climbing when it suddenly dropped, skimming over high-tension power lines and across the tops of cars before crashing on its underside.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.

The experienced 51 year-old Captain Key certainly knew better than to retract the slats at this stage of the flight. Investigators later proved that it was intentional and not a mechanical problem with the equipment involved. So why did he do it? And why didn’t Second Officer Keighley or S/O Ticehurst override the captain’s fatal decision?

Without a cockpit voice recorder (CVR), which were not required in Britain at the time, we will never know for sure. The Air Accidents Investigation Board (AAIB) concluded that Second Officer Keighley was too inexperienced and that Ticehurst was preoccupied with the passenger in the cockpit (another BEA captain on a return flight).

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.

Elizabeth Somerville Stewart’s Obituary is in the British Homeopathic Journal, Volume  LXI, Number 4. Oct, 1972. Page 247, and was written by Hamish William Boyd.

T Fergus Stewart’s Obituary is in the British Homeopathic Journal,  Volume  LXI, Number 4. Oct, 1972. Page 247, and was written by Hamish William Boyd.

Obituary of Thomas Fergus Stewart TD, MB, CHB, FRFPS Glasgow, MRCP, F F Hom and Elizabeth Somerville Stewart MB, CHB, British Medical Journal 15.7.1972 page 181

Dr. T F Stewart, medical superintendent of Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital, and his wife Dr. Elizabeth Stewart, died in the Trident air disaster at Heathrow on 18.6. Dr. Stewart was 62 and his wife 59.

Thomas Fergus Stewart was born on 29.4.1910 and graduated in medicine at Glasgow University in 1936 after distinguishing himself at rugby and boxing. After holding house physician posts at the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital, Yorkhill and Bellshill, he was dispensary physician at the Victoria Infirmary from 1939 to 1941. He had gained the degree of FRFPS in 1938 and the diploma of membership of the Faculty of Homeopathy in 1941.

Entering the Royal Air Force in 1941, he rose to the rank of squadron leader by 1946. He continued his association with the City of Glasgow squadron (602) Royal Auxiliary Air Force after the war as senior medical officer and developed his general practice together with his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Somerville Hamilton in the Langside area of Glasgow.

He became a physician to the Homeopathic Dispensary in 1946 and SHMO to the hospital in 1955. In 1957 he gained the diploma of F F HOM and was appointed consultant physician to the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital in 1958, taking over the duties of medical superintendant in 1963.

He was always a tremendous enthusiast for the promotion of homeopathy, was president of the British Congress at Gleneagles in 1961, and in the lat few years had been British representative of the International Homeopathic League, attending congresses in Paris, Athens, London, Buenos Aires, and Philadelphia. He contributed numerous papers to the British Homeopathic Journal and took a prominent part in post graduate teaching in Glasgow.

Tommy Stewart had a wide range of interests. A sincere and practicing Christian, he was an office bearer of the Trades House Lodge of Glasgow and a member of the Kelvin Rotary Club. He was a keen skier and sailor, taking up both these sports in his fifties. In working with him, first in practice and then in hospital, I always found him a man of tremendous energy and enthusiasm. He was an optimist and could always see success lying ahead, and his own personal efforts were in no small measure associated with the fruition of the plans for the new homeopathic hospital due to be built shortly in Glasgow. His wife Betty, who also graduated in 1936, was a gentle and sincere person and devoted much of her time to the work of the hospital. Both will be sadly missed by patients and colleagues alike. They are survived by a son and a daughter. Hamish William Boyd.

T Fergus Stewart wrote Homeopathy, virus diseases and researches in the Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy: 48,39,1959, Dr Tom Paterson in the British Homeopathic Journal, 56, 1967, pp.257-60