On the park
A small stone marker on the floor of a wartime hangar, on the spot where Major Glenn Miller played his last airfield concert.
On the old hangar base
The memorial stands at the edge of the lodge site, on the concrete slab of one of the airfield hangars. Information boards around it tell the story.
How to get thereThe marker
The memorial is a triangular engraved metal plaque set on a stone plinth. It stands on the concrete slab base of one of the hangars at RAF Kings Cliffe, and that floor is still there, cracked and weathered, at the edge of the lodges.
Information boards stand around it. One carries a map of Station 367 as it was. One tells the story of the airfield. One is given over to Glenn Miller, and carries a photograph taken at the concert itself.
3 October 1944
By the autumn of 1944 Major Alton Glenn Miller was the most famous bandleader in the world, and a serving officer in the United States Army Air Forces.He had brought his Army Air Forces Orchestra to Britain that June to play for the troops.
On the evening of 3 October the band played in the hangar here at Kings Cliffe, to the airmen of the 20th Fighter Group and whoever else could get in. It was the last concert Glenn Miller gave on an airfield.
The hangar is long gone. The floor it stood on is not, and neither is the spot where the band set up.
Ten weeks later
On 15 December 1944 Miller boarded a single-engined Noorduyn Norseman at RAF Twinwood Farm, near Bedford, bound for Paris to make arrangements for the orchestra to follow. The aircraft took off and was never seen again.
Neither Miller nor the aeroplane has ever been found. An Eighth Air Force inquiry put the loss down to a combination of human error, mechanical failure and the weather. Eighty years on, it is still the version most people accept and nobody can prove.
Why it is here
It marks one evening, and a good deal more than one man. Kings Cliffe was home to thousands of British and American airmen between 1941 and 1945, and many of them never came home. There is no way to mark all of that on a hangar floor.
So it marks the night the music was louder than the war. A famous man who went missing ten weeks later, standing in for everybody else who did.
The slab has been left where it is rather than built over, and the boards were put up around the marker so that anyone walking up can read what happened here.
Getting there
From the lodges there are two ways in: through the Alton Miller cul-de-sac, or through Little Morton. Either drops you onto the old hangar base in a couple of minutes.
The public bridleway runs up the eastern edge of the park and reaches the same place. There is a gate at the end of the lane, there to keep off-road vehicles and motorbikes off the land, for the safety of guests and the wildlife that lives here.
The Glenn Miller board, with the memorial beyond it
The story of Station 367, on the old hangar slab
A map of the airfield as it was
The airfield museum sits beside The Command Post, a few minutes away.
