I have blotted out a lot of the details... but I do remember the silence

Fifty years ago today, 33 people plunged to their deaths in Britain's worst ever coach crash on the Dibble's Bridge in Yorkshire. The renowned sculptor Lincoln Seligman, 75, one of the first on the scene that day, reveals his memories in a poignant interview

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IT was meant to be a fun day out to the Yorkshire Dales on a sunny Bank Holiday. Dorothy White, 62, a former Lady Mayoress, had organised the trip for 45 ladies from Thornaby-on-Tees to go to Grassington.

The popular Good Samaritan had been running the outings, known as Auntie Dorrie's Mystery Trips, for 30 years.

But on May 27, 1975, while driving on a downhill stretch of the B6265 road at Dibble's Bridge, between Greenhow and Hebden, stand-in coach driver Roger Marriott, a British Steel Corporation security officer, missed a gear and applied the brakes of the yellow Bedford bus.

His actions should have halted the coach immediately but the brakes proved insufficient, despite having only been serviced one week earlier. Instead, the coach accelerated and heated the brakes until they failed, leaving it to career down the 1,300-metre steep hill to the bottom of the valley.

After crashing through a steel crash barrier and the bridge's stone parapet, it plunged five metres into the garden of a cottage below and landed on its fibreglass roof.

The aluminium sides of the coach buckled on impact with the ground, leaving most of the passengers dead in a mangled metal coffin.

It was, and remains to this day, the worst road traffic accident in British history - a total of 33 people lost their lives including Dorothy White and the driver. Only 13 passengers survived.

Lincoln Seligman, a 25-year-old barrister from London, was first on the scene with his girlfriend Patricia. The couple were staying at Patricia's family's holiday cottage situated below the bridge.

Lincoln, now 75 and a world renowned sculptor and painter, has granted the Daily Express a rare interview to recall his memories of that terrible day.

Half a century may have elapsed since the disaster but he has never forgotten its sights and sounds.