The incredible story of how a pensioner hi-jacked a war memorial and convinced a lot of people that he’d tended it all his life . . .
ON SUNDAY, February 25, there will be a poignant ceremony at a war memorial in Endcliffe Park, Sheffield.
It will be the 80th anniversary of the incident in which the United States Flying Fortress bomber Mi Amigo crashed on the site in 1944, where the memorial now stands. All ten crew were killed.
Thanks to £21,000 raised by the Sheffield branch of the Royal Air Force Association, comrades in arms of their American counterparts, it now looks a lot smarter and tidier.
In recent years it had become what some might say tawdry and garish, certainly vulgar, after 87-year-old fantasist Tony Foulds set up shop there claiming to have tended it all his life.
That would have taken some doing as the memorial was not erected until 1969.
His story is that he was playing with friends in the park when the bomber, trying to make an emergency landing, crashed into some trees trying to avoid them.
He recalls seeing the pilot waving a warning. Ever since then he has lived with the ‘guilt’ of surviving. And out comes a handkerchief to wipe away the tears.
The story does not stand up for a moment. For a start the bomber was not trying to make a belly landing but spiralled down from the sky, according to contemporary newspaper reports.
And no other person that day has come forward to verify his story.
Curiously, no one had seen him at the annual ceremony down the years – always faithfully reported in the local press – until he became news.
Somehow he had evaded journalists and park users until the ‘story’ came to light in 2018..
There is no mention of him in the book Mi Amigo by local military historian David Harvey, which forensically explores the crash of the Flying Fortress and its aftermath.
So how on earth had it happened?
I set out to find why and published the result in two blog posts read by thousands. The story would make a comic novel, perhaps something after Tom Sharpe.
It involves lazy journalism, council officials content to overlook the facts, a credulous TV personality and an old man who let his imagination run away with him.
But let Tony tell you himself. An amateur video in December 2017 recorded him saying he had noticed the uncared for memorial two years before and decided to tidy it up.
So that takes us back to about 2016. It certainly doesn’t mean he ” spent his life paying tribute,” as eulogised in a letter to him from United States ambassador Robert W Johnson in February 2018.
It can be seen in a new display board at the site dedicated to the crew – and Tony.
Tony Foulds may have pottered about the monument unnoticed for years but for the fact that Sheffield-based TV personality Dan Walker decided to take his dog for a walk through the park on a crisp January day in 2018.
And there he met Tony.
As the then BBC Breakfast host tweeted excitedly a little later: “Just met an amazing man in Endcliffe Park. Tony Foulds was an eight year old playing in the park when a US plane crashed in February 1944.
“He has diligently maintained thè memorial ever since. He was planting new flowers. What a man. I am in bits.”
Excited Dan might have reflected how the story had gone unreported for over half a century. Or followed the first law of journalism: check your facts.
Which shows that sitting on a sofa in a television studio is no substitute for real journalism.
And very soon that sofa was occupied by Tony Foulds who repeated his story to the nation. No one sought to question it in the BBC.
In Sheffield they did. Local residents who regularly used the park were baffled by the sudden appearance of this old man whom they had unaccountably overlooked.
Some posted corrections on the BBC Breakfast website and reported them being taken down. Staff at BBC Radio Sheffield were ordered to stay silent.
Regardless, Dan Walker, or those close to him, realising that the following 2019 would be the 75th anniversary of the crash, hit upon the idea of celebrating it in a big way with Foulds as the centrepiece.
He tweeted again, this time with the hash tag #GetTonyAFlypast for the following February and the US ambassador swiftly agreed.
In the meantime Foulds became a celebrity. He was showered with honours and awards, among them a Btitish Citizen Award. There was an online campaign to give him an MBE, which went unheard.
He was even the subject of a portrait competition at the city’s biggest art show.
He was given a flight over the city along the route the Mi Amigo was supposed to have taken and money flowed in to a special web page dedicated to the ‘upkeep’ of the memorial, despite the fact it belonged to the city council.
Of course, local politicians jumped on the bandwagon. One MP enthused about Foulds in parliament while then council leader Julie Dore, with the same sense of judgement she displayed in the Sheffield Tree Scandal, proposed him for a local heroes’ ‘star’ outside the Town Hall alongside more deserving names such as astronaut Helen Sharman and Marti Caine.
It didn’t aeem to matter that local historian Harvey pointed out, as he had in his book and on my blog, that the attempted belly landing was an urban legend which arose as late as the Nineteen Nineties.
“There is no factual evidence to support or corroborate this story,” he has said.
Dan Walker has never spoken to him, although he missed a call from the star a few days after he had tweeted and Walker didn’t follow it up.
The BBC, incidentally, claims he was consulted but they didn’t ask the right questions. Harvey was at the flypast but just asked about the fate of the pet dog on board.
Surprisingly none of the local media wanted to touch the real story. An embarrassed contact at my old paper the Sheffield Star said they were only going to report Foulds’ claim, not support it.
The Yorkshire Post was no better. “At this stage having assessed all the material presented to me by one of my best journalists I am not minded to publish, ” editor James Mitchinson told me in an email.
The day of the flypast was a big event. The BBC broadcast it live and thousands crammed the park to watch USAAF and RAF planes overhead.
Ten men might have died but it was Tony Foulds, eyes welling with tears, who was the focus of screen attention. There was even a live chat between him and Walker, then halfway up Mount Kilimanjaro.
Contrastingly, a religious ceremony in the park got scant TV time.
The affair was all too much for one local resident who protested to the council that the evidence did not support Foulds’ story.
Then chief executive John Mothersole wrote back: “Given the role of the BBC in picking up on the story and initiating the event, I think that fact checking should fall to them.”
So much for due diligence.
And the BBC subtly shifted its ground. From flatly declaring on news bulletins and magazine programmes that Foulds had been tending the memorial from day one, it now misleadingly said:
” Tony has not claimed to have tended the memorial site for decades. He regularly visited but has only been looking after it for the last few years.”
Contrast this with what Dan Walker tweeted and claimed on TV. “He has diligently mauntained the memorial ever since (1944).”
The flypast and outside broadcast certainly brought publicity and put the memorial in the spotlight, even though Foulds, making almost daily appearances there, turned it into a gaudy shrine.
Perhaps it is for this reason that Sheffield RAFA refused to go on the record about his spurious claims.
Author David Harvey, is charitable. While putting the blame on the BBC for the inaccurate reporting, he says “Poor old Tony has found himself in a position where he can’t retract from his ‘local hero’ position as it would be extremely embarrassing for him.”
He adds:”What gets my goat is that the story should be about the ten airmen. Sheffield had a lucky escape. It’s one of the city’s greatest stories.”
Should anyone still believe in the truth of Tony Foulds’ claim I advise them to read David Harvey’s excellent book.*
In it he details contemporary newspaper and eye witness reports of the Mi Amigo falling out of the sky.
Nowhere is there any mention of the plane attempting a belly landing and trying to avoid schoolchildren.
There were certainly children playing in the park but the plane crashed into trees.
It had circled the city for some time but Endcliffe would have been a postage stamp of a landing strip for such a big plane. In fact, the engines failed and it fell out of the sky.
So will Dan Walker, now with Channel 5, and the BBC mark the anniversary by admitting the big mistake?
Will the local Press finally print the real story?
Over to them . . .
*Mi Amigo, The Story of Sheffield’s Flying Fortress, is published by ALD Print, Sharrowvale Road, Sheffield, at £6.95.
You can read more here https://wp.me/p5wFIX-19H and here https://dawesindoors.wordpress.com/2019/07/04/phony-tony-gets-his-star/
Another helping from Martin Dawes 
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