Local History
In 1870-72, John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Betchton in the following terms:
"BETCHTON, a township in Sandbach parish, Cheshire; 2 miles SE of Sandbach. Acres, 2,594. Real property, £6,722. Pop., 798. Houses, 152. There are extensive salt-works and a Methodist chapel".
The salt works and Methodist chapel are now long gone, along with the school, post office and Hassall Green's village pub.
In Anglo-Saxon England, prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, the area we know today as Cheshire was divided into administrative areas called Hundreds, in common with much of the country.
From around the 13th century, the county was also divided into areas known as the Ancient Parishes. Initially, these parishes were created for ecclesiastical purposes: every parish came under the clerical care and jurisdiction of a parish priest, and the parishes defined which areas came under which priests. The reforms to the church in England originally instigated by King Henry VIII began the process of the Ancient Parishes taking on secular responsibilities, and a split gradually developed between the church parishes and the civil parishes we know today. Betchton is such a civil parish, and the parish council has no connections with any religious organisation.
Betchton at War
Although Betchton wasn't directly involved in the war effort, it played its role in a plot to deceive enemy forces and protect a Cheshire airfield from attack.
In 1939, the Royal Air Force opened RAF Cranage near Byley, just north of Middlewich, as a training and aircraft maintenance unit. In 1940 when bombing attacks by the Luftwaffe were regular occurrences, the station took on an operational role, housing 96 Squadron which was equipped with Hawker Hurricanes. The squadron had a night air-defence role, and protected the port of Liverpool from German bombers.
Inevitably, the Byley station itself became a target. The RAF could ill afford to lose it to an enemy raid, as it was the only night fighter station in the north-west and a decision was taken to create a decoy airfield in an attempt to trick enemy bombers. The decoy was built some eight miles or so from the "real" airfield, in Betchton, north of Hassall Green and east of where the M6 motorway is today. The dummy airfield was a "Q"-type night decoy which displayed lights to make it appear from above to be an active airfield, and was designated Q102A.
Listed as operational throughout 1941 and 1942, the site was decommissioned in 1943 and the land had returned to open fields by 1946. Nothing remains today of the decoy airfield, although part of the control bunker remains as shown in the photographs on the right. The site is on private property and cannot be accessed via any public right of way.
The decoy was manned by four RAF personnel. In May 2015, the last survivor of the four, Aircraftman 1st Class Jack Bowser passed away.
Aircraftman 1st Class Jack Bowser
AC1 Bowser was the last surviving member of the four-strong RAF crew who manned the Betchton decoy airfield.
Born in Leeds, he was posted to RAF Cranage in 1941. In early 1942 he was transferred from Cranage to the decoy airfield and remained there until July 1943 when he was posted to the middle east. By that time, the threat from German bomber command was seen as having passed, and the decoy airfield was no longer required.
Like many before and since, he quickly formed an affection for the Cheshire countryside and returned to live in Sandbach after the war.
Jack retained strong views of his time at Cranage and Betchton. In 2003, he was interviewed by the Sandbach Chronicle about his opposition to planning permission being given to Scottish Power to build a £70 million power plant on the site of the Cranage airfield. He voiced the concern that the young generation would begin to lose sight of what his generation fought for if old airfields and military sites were not preserved or, at least, commemorated in some way.
The interview also contained a few personal reminiscences, including the occasional sighting of a German Luftwaffe aircraft landing at Cranage. No cause for alarm – the aircraft had been captured and was being used in an aircraft recognition course. He also mentioned the reason why he joined the air force (he didn't fancy the idea of the army, and chronic seasickness emphatically ruled out the navy) and the impossibility of walking into the Three Greyhounds at Allostock and not finding it "full of Yanks".
