Prayers for dad who died coming home

It was May 2, 1953 and Elizabeth was leaving with her three sisters and mother Edna. Even as the girls were boarding the plane, they looked back at their father to remind him that they would be waiting for him to join them a week later. But that was not to happen, Donald and his family never met again.

The Comet aircraft of the BOAC that Donald took the following week from Dum Dum, crashed at Jangipara near Kolkata killing all 37 passengers and seven crew on board. Whatever remains could be found were buried at Tollygunge Cemetery in south Calcutta. Donald’s wife Edna died a few years later in the UK.

In this ‘‘journey of love,’’ as Elizabeth puts it, there were others too — Storey’s eldest daughter Jean, fourth daughter Val and her husband Wyn Buick. Elizabeth’s daughter Sarah and her husband Christopher also accompanied the group as they offered tributes and prayed at Donald’s grave in Tollygunge. ‘‘The crash shattered our lives as we lost our dear dad,’’said Elizabeth, who finds it hard to talk about the accident. Her daughter Sarah explains: ‘‘Since this is the 50th anniversary of the crash, we thought we would come to Kolkata and offer prayers at the grave.’’ Storey’s second daughter is in South Africa and could not come, Sarah said.

She recounted that her mother often talked about their life in Kolkata. ‘‘She was very fond of her father and breaks into tears whenever she talked of my grandfather,’’ Sarah said.

And a book on this tobacco major titled: Challenge and Change – The ITC story 1910-1985 by Champaka Basu incorporates a few lines on Donald Payne. It mentions: ‘‘Indeed Donald Storey, Chairman of the Company in the early fifties, was so sensitive to the dangers of this mode of transport that he issued a circular to all managers to say that anyone who did not wish to travel by air need not do so. Tragically, he himself was the victim of an aircrash. The Comet which was carrying him back to UK on May 2, 1953 met with disaster. The story goes that he gallantly sacrificed his reservation on an earlier flight for an expectant mother anxious to get home.’’