The history of the world could have been very different if a dramatic and little-known incident in Croydon had taken a more tragic turn.
Britain’s heroic wartime leader Winston Churchill may not have been there to say “we shall never surrender” if he had not miraculously escaped death in Croydon.
The future Prime Minister came to the town in 1919, making his way down Purley Way to Croydon Aerodrome with an old friend, who was a war hero.
At the airstrip, at the time London's main international airport, the outcome of a war which would break out 20 years later could have been sent spiralling in a very different direction.
So what happened when Winston Churchill came to Croydon?
Learning to fly
The story begins with a typically eccentric wish from the then Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air.
Churchill had, at the age of 44, decided he wanted to learn how to fly – despite his long-suffering wife Clementine sensibly telling him it was a bad idea.
The future two-time Prime Minister wrote in a memoir Thoughts and Adventures that he was frustrated he could not learn more quickly due to his age. But he persisted to try and get what he called “flying sense”.
He wrote that because he wouldn’t listen to his wife’s advice to stop flying he was “fated to have a much more melancholy adventure”.
Churchill wrote that on a summer’s day in 1919 he “motored down with Colonel Scott to the Croydon Aerodrome for an evening flight”.
Colonel Jack Scott was a World War One fighter ace who had the dubious honour of teaching Churchill how to fly.
Their trip to Croydon prove an unfortunate decision.
In the skies above Croydon
Churchill took the controls of a small plane and took off without any drama. He rose above the trees that ringed the Croydon airfield at that time, banking left.
When he tried to level the plane off the control stick moved – but the plane didn’t. The flying machine was heading downward for the dirt, even when the experienced colonel took the controls.
“The machine rushed earthwards helplessly”, Churchill wrote some years later.
Because they weren’t very high above Croydon, there wasn’t enough time to switch the engine off and on to correct the plane’s dangerous plunge.
Churchill, who had fought bravely in the Boer War, was a realist about the likely outcome. The last thing he saw could well have been Croydon from the air.
He wrote: “I saw the sunlit aerodrome close beneath me, and the impression formed in my mind that it was bathed in a baleful yellowish glare.
“Then in another flash a definite thought formed in my brain: ‘This is very likely death’.”
Nothing the pair in the plane tried could pull the plane out of its rapid dive. The future war leader braced for impact.
“It struck the ground at perhaps 50pmh with terrific force,” wrote Churchill. “Its left wing crumpled and its propeller and nose plunged into the earth.”
Churchill suffered “unendurable oppression” across his chest as he was crushed by the seatbelt strapping him into the cockpit and he took the “whole absorption of the shock”.
Then he collapsed “gently” onto the dial in front of him, somehow unhurt. His instructor was not so lucky.
Churchill wrote: “I leapt out of the shattered fuselage and ran to my companion. He was senseless and bleeding.”
Churchill waited with his stricken flying instructor at the wreck of the plane, fearing it would explode, and was at the ready to drag him to safety.
Thankfully no fire or explosion came. The colonel survived and Churchill walked away unscathed.
Just 20 years later war would break out and he would become the figurehead for allied resistance against the Axis.
Things could have been very different indeed if he had not had a lucky escape on his visit to Croydon.