My wife and I are connected in three ways to the attack. We were living in London then, both of us working in West London. At the time, over a few short years, there were several major disasters affecting the UK: the Bradford City stadium fire, the Heysel Stadium disaster, the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise at Zeebrugge, and the King’s Cross tube fire. After Pan Am 103, there was the British Midland crash at Kegworth, the sinking of the Marchioness on the Thames, and the Hillsborough football ground disaster, all of which left a major legacy. People felt punch-drunk from such large-scale losses of life, and the Troubles were still ongoing in Northern Ireland.
1.) Our first connection is to the village of Lockerbie. If the flight had come down one week to the minute earlier—i.e., on December 14th—we would have been passing Lockerbie on our drive back to London from Glasgow, where I had been attending a scientific meeting. Our oldest daughter was with us in the car. Until then, we had not heard of Lockerbie, but when we heard that the plane had been blown up over the town, we were stunned.
2.) By September the following year, 1989, we were living in New Jersey—I was working in Philadelphia—and we were looking for a house to rent in the village of Haddonfield. By an astonishing coincidence, we ended up renting the family home of Norma and Stanley Maslowski, who had moved out after their daughter Diane was killed on that flight. They couldn't have been kinder to us, in particular Diane's sister, Susan, even in their desperate grief. We have great memories of that house, as our twin daughters returned there after their births in Philadelphia. We were very sorry to leave the house in 1991, as I was returning to Ireland to take a new post.
3.) From reading through the biographies of all of the victims, and although I did not know this at the time of her death, nor did I meet her, I think it is very likely that Flora Swire and I were working at Queen Square at the same time. I understand she was doing a PhD in the Institute of Neurology, while I was working in the Neuroradiology department as a senior registrar. The timelines certainly suggest that we were there simultaneously.
Through these coincidences we have always felt tied to this outrageous act of terrorism, and the victims have always had a special place in our hearts, especially Diane, although we never met her. This website is a wonderful resource for those of us whose interest, although never dimmed, was reawakened in light of several recent TV and film productions remembering the disaster.
