It is undoubtedly fortunate that the only recorded attempt to land an aeroplane on the College’s playing fields was made during the school holidays.

On the afternoon of Saturday 8 January 1938, Mr Ronald Gower took off from Mascot in a Taylor Cub light plane. He was flying over Camperdown at 2500 feet (762 metres) when the engine cut out. He picked out Newington’s ovals as the most likely place for landing and glided the plane down. It appeared that he would reach the oval, but the wind lifted the plane and he crashed into an iron railing at the rear of the College.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reported the following Monday, ‘the under-carriage was damaged, the fuselage ripped, and the engine displaced.’ Apart from suffering ‘slightly from shock’, Mr Gower escaped injury and was able to supervise the removal of the plane to Mascot.

The accident seems to have been the result of a confluence of circumstances. The same Taylor Cub plane had made a forced landing, for reasons not reported, at Randwick racecourse the day before while three other aeroplanes were damaged by sudden gusts of wind in Sydney on the day of the crash.

Mr David Roberts
College Archivist