13 September 1971. I was a twenty-four year old post graduate engineering student at Imperial, London hitch hiking north on the M6 going home. The fog had come down in the night, it was hard to tell when in the dark. I’d got as far as Knutsford services. It was about 8:30 am. I went into the transport cafe looking for a driver going at least as far as Glasgow and preferably right up. I bought breakfast for a driver going to the Fort [Fort William] who had offered me a lift. That was when the coppers came in. “M6 is shut lads. Major pile up on the viaduct. Anybody got any first aid skills willing to help? If you are go with my mate.”

Knutsford services is about eight miles south of Thelwall viaduct. In those days the viaduct carried three lanes of traffic north and three lanes south with no hard shoulders for access. Now that bridge has a hard shoulder and carries only four lanes of traffic, but they’re all for north bound traffic. A parallel bridge for south bound traffic opened in 1995 some time. Both halves of the modern viaduct are just short of a mile long and go over the Manchester ship canal and the river Mersey which is tidal at that point.

Three of us were taken to the edge of the viaduct in a police transit bus. What a sight! The motorway was blocked by dozens of vehicles, I later found out it was two hundred. Visibility even with the emergency mercury lights was very poor because they were so far away. The screams! If I live to be a hundred I shall never forget the sights, sounds and smells. We were given rapid training in use of morphine and given a bag of preloaded hypodermics. Interestingly I’ve never read about that or met anyone who knew about it. I can only assume that that sort of thing is handled at a very high level and a blanket silence is maintained, though it has to be said I was never told to keep my mouth shut, and I don’t know if any of the others were either because I never saw them again.

At one point I saw some bits of bodies. The carnage was appalling. I had to climb over and through the wreckage. Ambulances couldn’t get any where near, but more doctors had started to arrive. Dawn was normally at about eight, but it was difficult to tell due to the fog whether it was day or night. The nightmare was made worse by the poor visibility, but still I can’t forget what I saw and experienced. I was there for twenty odd hours, the fog for two days, but it was a week before the M6 reopened.

It was later determined that at about eight more than 200 cars, trucks and tankers piled up, five vehicles burst into flames, 10 people were killed and 70 injured. It was the worst accident ever recorded on British roads. There may have been worse since. I don’t know and I don’t wish to.

I’m in my early seventies now. I haven’t had a nightmare about it for decades, but I still wake with the cold sweats in the middle of the night. I’d had a wait of nearly an hour for a ride at the Blue Boar Watford Gap Services, the ride that took me to Knutsford. If I’d managed to catch the waggon driver who drove off before I could catch his attention, the one whose waggon came from Glasgow, those body parts I saw could have been mine.