The way it was

Stuntman Dave Brookland ‘flying' a family saloon off the edge of a quarry

Dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse with Juno, her great dane, in 1970

In 1970, four years before the Health and Safety Commission was established, Joe Weston-Webb paid stuntman Dave Brookland £55 to drive a family saloon off the edge of a quarry. The already battered Ford Popular had been fitted with wings, a tail-plane and a propeller, but nobody really expected it to fly. It travelled a short distance horizontally and then plunged 100ft into the water (see below). Brookland was trapped in the icy depths for about 45 minutes, surviving off a bottle of compressed air, before being rescued by divers. ‘He just sat there quietly breathing,’ recalls David Lewis-Hodgson, who was sent by magazine to cover the event. ‘Imagine sitting in a wrecked car at the bottom of an abandoned quarry with about an hour’s worth of air.’