1659 HCU Topcliffe
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This image, supplied by Lloyd and Susan Campbell shows Cameron Clare Campbell visiting the Pub once again
thirty some years later, in September of 1977.
The air and ground crew of spent time in the local Yorkshire area. The story below is quoted from Readers Digest, The Canadians at War 1939/45. Readers Digest quotes Peter Kirby, a Yorkshireman, as told to writer David Carmichael for The Canadian(no reference cited)
"On nights when the weather was too bad for flying, the bomber men would come riding on their bicycles into our village of Sutton-on-the-Forest. Some would go into the Black Swan Pub, but most would walk up and down the streets, talking to people, looking at the gardens and handing out gum to us kids. They were good to us. Not just the things they gave us, but the way they treated us-as if we were their kid brothers back home. They used to take away my father's Alsatian dog and get it drunk. Once they did the same thing to our goat."
The article goes on to state 'The Canadians helped gather Yorkshire's harvests, courted Yorkshire's girls became regulars at pubs like the Punch Bowl, the Black Bull, the Shoulder of Mutton and the Black Swan which they irreverently called the Mucky Duck. The people of Yorkshire accepted them with affection.'