Herbert Horace HACKSLEY

Herbert Hacksley's photograph on the war memorial in St Aldates Police Station, Oxford. Image courtesy of John Stobbs.

Herbert Hacksley was born on 9 November 1918 in Luton, Bedfordshire. His father was Henry Hacksley, originally from Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. Henry and his siblings worked in the local industry of straw hat making. Herbert’s mother was Violet, née Bell, who had been born in Wheathampstead near St Albans, Hertfordshire. She grew up there and later in Hyde, not far away in Bedfordshire. She and Henry married on Boxing Day 1912 in Luton. Their first child Harry was born in September 1916. Henry died in the spring or early summer of 1918, aged only 27, when Violet was pregnant with their second child. Herbert was born that November, two days before the Armistice which brought an end to the First World War.

Three years later, in 1921, Violet, Harry (now aged four) and Herbert (aged two) were living at 18 Bailey Street, Luton, with Violet’s parents Arthur and Alice Bell. The household also contained four of Harry and Herbert’s uncles, and two aunts.

As a young man Herbert moved to Oxford, and on 1 June 1938, aged nineteen, he joined the Oxford City Police, warrant no. 467, collar no. 106. According to the Police Register he was 6ft ¼in – exceptionally tall for the time – and had been an enamel inspector and tester before joining the force, with no previous public service. The police personnel records and occurrence books are closed for a hundred years from the 1940s so we don't know how it was that Herbert came to join the Oxford City Police.

In 1939 Herbert was living in lodgings at 3 Whitehouse Road, Grandpont, with the landlady Hannah Bolton and three other young male lodgers – another two police constables, and a wholesale factor motor storekeeper. On 3 November 1939 his colleague and fellow lodger PC George Winchcombe was assaulted by a drunken off-duty soldier in George Street. The assailant later apologised and said that it was his first leave for several months.

Despite being a police constable (a reserved occupation), Herbert joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) Volunteer Reserve as a Leading Aircraftman, service no. 1320081. He was attached to the No. 3 British Flying Training School which was based at South Cerney in Gloucestershire.

In October 1941 Herbert married Gladys Pitt at St Aldates Church in Oxford. Gladys was two years older than Herbert, and lived at 12 Western Road, Grandpont with her parents and two siblings; she worked as a typist. Not long afterwards, Herbert and his fellow recruits were sent to America for pilot training. They were stationed at the Spartan School of Aeronautics in Miami, Ottawa County, Oklahoma. This school was sited at the Miami Municipal Airport, which had opened in 1937 and been taken over by the United States Army Air Forces in the summer of 1941. As part of the 1941 Lend-Lease Act (whereby equipment and aid were given by America free of charge to the Allies, on the basis that such help was essential for the defence of the United States), RAF flying cadets received a 20-week basic flying course, taught by civil contractors. This continued at Miami until November 1942, by which time America had joined the war. In this period British personnel were a common sight in Miami; they became a part of the community and lasting relationships were formed.

On 31 August 1942 Herbert was on a training flight in a Vultee BT-13 Valiant, an American trainer aircraft introduced in June 1940. At around 9:30am, during a formation cross-country exercise, Herbert’s plane collided with another Vultee BT-13 Valiant, about one mile north-east of Chanute in Kansas. He and his crewmate, RAF Leading Aircraftman Alan Brown, who was from County Down, Northern Ireland, were pulled from the wreckage, but both later died in hospital. The two RAF airmen in the other plane, Harold Burman (who was from London) and Donald Harfield (from Dorset), were also killed. Herbert was 23, Alan was 19, Harold was 21, and Donald was 17. Their military funeral was reported in the local newspaper. The War Graves Register noted that Herbert was a Methodist, and that his wife Gladys was living at 12 Western Road, Grandpont, Oxford (the home of her parents) at the time of his death.

The four young cadets were buried next to each other in Miami (Grand Army of the Republic) Cemetery, in a row of graves of fifteen young British airmen who lost their lives during flight training. The inscription on Herbert’s gravestone reads 'Loved and remembered always'. At the end of the row is a stone honouring Frantie Manbeck Hill, a local woman who ‘adopted’ the plot. She voluntarily tended these fifteen war graves and kept in touch with the families of the casualties until her death, aged 89, in 1982. She and her husband are buried nearby.

Herbert is commemorated on several war memorials in Oxford (in addition to the one in St Matthew’s Church in Grandpont): the memorial in St Aldates Police Station; on the Oxford City Police memorial in the church of St Michael at the Northgate, Cornmarket; and on the Thames Valley Police memorial in Kidlington. There are only three other men in the Second World War sections of those police memorials; one of them is Frederick Thompson, another of our 24 Men of Grandpont and Cold Harbour.

Herbert is also named on the Oxford City Second World War Roll of Honour in the church of St Michael at the Northgate on Cornmarket, and on the war memorial in Luton, where his mother Violet continued to live at the home of her parents until her death in 1951.

After the war, in June 1946, Herbert’s widow Gladys (then aged 29) sailed to New York and travelled on to Miami in Oklahoma, to see where Herbert had served, and to visit his grave. Her visit was hosted by the Reverend Harry Curtis, minister of the Miami Presbyterian Church, which perhaps Herbert had himself attended. Gladys returned to England in November. Her occupation was recorded in the ships’ registers as ‘civil servant’, her height as 5ft 4in, and her hair and eyes as brown.

In early 1948 Gladys married Edwin Wakefield, who was originally from Grantham, Lincolnshire. They had two children. Gladys died in Abingdon in 1996, aged 80. Edwin died in 2023, just short of his 101st birthday.

Research by Frances Stobbs.

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