Colonel Ivor Watkins Birts' 1931 4½ Litre Supercharged Bentley

The original owner of Bentley chassis MS3936 Colonel Ivor Watkins Birts was killed in a plane crash in 1944 at the age of 34, when it appears he may have been on some kind of SOE war mission.

The grave of Colonel Ivor Watkins Birts, first owner of Bentley chassis no. MS3936

 

Birth: 1910, England
Death: Apr. 17, 1944, At Sea

Lieutenant Colonel, Royal Artillery.
Service No: 132903

Son of William Lomas Watkins Birts and of Lilian Grace Birts (nee Stephens); husband of Marie Josephine Birts (nee Bain), of Westminster, London. B.A. (Oxon.). Barrister.

 

RAF 525 Squadron’s Vickers Warwick III (#BV 247) aircraft, with fourteen air crew members and passengers aboard, had taken off from RAF Station St. Mawgan, Newquay , Cornwall, on a scheduled service flight (England to Algiers Maison Blance airport, via Gibraltar), when it exploded in mid-air and crashed into Watergate Bay near Newquay Bay. All 14 on board the aircraft perished in the crash. The Warwick was thought to be carrying several top-secret agents, military advisers, linguists and top-secret documents, as well as thousands of £100 bills and possibly boxes of gold (thought to be for use in helping to finance European underground groups).

 

The passengers included two French officers enroute to meet with General Charles DeGaulle in Cairo; two Polish couriers enroute to Warsaw; one senior staff officer enroute to Cairo; one Greek expert enroute to Greece; one Hungarian / Canadian enroute to Hungary on an S. O. E. mission; three S. O. E. officers; and one Russian-speaking MI6 officer enroute to Yugoslavia to meet with Tito partisans.

 

Burial:
Fairpark Cemetery
St Columb Minor
Cornwall Unitary Authority
Cornwall, England
Plot: C. of E. plot. Cons. Grave 685.

 

At Hampton Court’s Concours d’Elegance Motor Show in London, September 2017