Fragments recall a fatal day near Parham

Jan 19, 2012

Photo: Mel Good holds part of the mail plane’s propeller that crashed into Long Lake in 1930

Fragments of history can often be found by accident. That was the case recently for Hope Stinchcombe of Parham, owner of Hope’s Place, the historic general store in Parham (formerly the J. M. Good Store). “We were redoing the floor in the garage,” Hope told me, “when I found part of a plane wing. At first we didn't know what it was and we were going to throw it out but there was some writing on it and it was then that I recalled a story that Mel Good told me soon after I bought the store from him, about a plane that crashed into Long Lake.”

Melville Good certainly remembers that day. It was March 18, 1930 and Mel and his father were the first people to arrive at the scene of the crash, which had occurred that morning at 11:30 a.m. Mel was just nine years old at the time and was helping his dad Frank in the sugar bush on their property.

“It was a foggy day, desperately foggy, I remember. I was helping my dad make a sleigh that we used for gathering the sap. There was no school that day since Miss Lundy was sick. We heard a plane overhead and heard the motor shut off three times and then a big crash. We ran out there and saw the wreck. There was 22 inches of ice out on the lake and the tail end of the plane was all you could see of the plane; it was standing straight up in the ice. I got a glimpse of the two men inside the plane but their bodies were badly mangled and they were clearly dead. Seeing that really made an impression on me, and it showed me that there are a lot of rough spots in this world. It was a sad day for sure.”

Photo: 1930 headlines of the fatal Long Lake plane crash with photo of deceased pilot Henry (Herve) Simoneau

Mel located clippings for me from a newspaper that reported the crash. The two men killed were pilot Henry (Herve) Simoneau and radio operator Harold Robinson, both of Montreal. The plane they were flying was a mail plane, a Travel air cabin type that was en route from Toronto to Montreal.

The plane had left Toronto that morning at 9 a.m. under sunny skies but met a storm near Kingston. It was thought that the pilot changed course and headed to Ottawa but ran into mechanical trouble over Parham while attempting to land. One article said that Herve Simoneau, the pilot, had survived a crash just a few weeks earlier. It was also reported that Dr. Suddaby of Sharbot Lake went to the accident scene on Long Lake shortly after the crash and pronounced the two men dead.

At a coroner’s inquest that was held two days later in Sharbot Lake, Frank Good was the first witness called to testify. As reported in one article, Frank gave his testimony as follows. “I couldn't see the plane because of the fog but I could tell it was coming from the south. I could judge by the sound that the plane made a wide circle. The engine stopped; a minute or so later it started again and once more stopped. Then a few seconds later it was turned on full blast and a minute later there was a crash.” Frank recalled that it took him about seven minutes to get to the scene, where he found the wrecked plane and the mangled bodies.

Another article speculated that the plane had hit an air pocket and entered into a steep nosedive that caused it to crash into the ice at a very high speed. Whatever the cause, it was a day in Parham that many of the older folks can still recall in vivid detail.

Mel Good later showed me a second remnant from the crash: one half of the plane’s metal propeller that his father retrieved from the icy waters of Long Lake the following spring.

Hope Stinchcombe has the plane wing at her store in Parham as well as copies of the articles from the various papers that carried the story of the fatal crash.