Archaeologists have unearthed a trove of artefacts from a Second World War Spitfire that crashed in a Cambridgeshire field 75 years ago, including a personalised cigarette case belonging to the pilot. The Mark 1A Spitfire X4583 had lain six feet beneath the peat near Peterborough since it plummeted to the ground during a training flight on 22 November 1940, killing 20-year-old Pilot Officer Harold Edwin Penketh.
The excavation, which began on 5 October, was prompted by a conservation project to restore the agricultural landscape to wetland. Over six days, experts recovered the plane's starter motor, cockpit control panels, parts of its oxygen system, a complete fuel tank, and sections of the Merlin engine. A well-preserved rubber head-rest and wing parts were also found, along with a watch and a golden cigarette case bearing the initials 'HEP'.
Work was temporarily halted when a bone fragment, believed to be from Pilot Officer Penketh, was discovered. Permission to resume was granted by a coroner on Thursday. Archaeologists dug two metres down and located the original excavation site where the pilot's body had been recovered by RAF Wittering seven decades ago, a process that took an entire week at the time.
Matthew Lodge, a 39-year-old volunteer from Yaxley, Cambridgeshire, photographed the historic finds. He described the moment the propeller was extracted as 'great' and noted the poignancy of seeing the cigarette case with the pilot's initials. 'It was really very interesting from the moment they turned the field from a small hole to finding bits of the plane,' he said.
Stephen Macaulay, senior project manager at Oxford Archaeology East, is overseeing the dig. The excavation aims to recover parts before the site is transformed into wetland as part of the Great Fen project.
