Aeronautics: Off Sheerness

One bright day last week two young girls from London rowed out from Leysdown Beach near Sheerness. England, after a child’s ball that had floated away. Drifting a quarter-mile from shore they noticed near them a line of buoys that seemed to mark no reef, boat-mooring, fishnet or lobster-pot. As they gazed at this strange sight, five planes roaring out from the land circled over them. The girls suddenly crouched cowering in the bottom of their rowboat when the five began to dive on the innocent-seeming line of buoys, blazing away with machine guns. Four times the planes circled and dived, the machine guns hammering savagely. On the fifth dive, one plane fell at the rowboat. Its machine gun lashed the little craft with a whip of lead. One of the girls, Jean Chesterton, 17, fell dead, shot through. Her sister grabbed the oars, splashed frantically shoreward.

At a coroner’s jury inquest at Minster, Jean Chesterton’s murderer, one John Boahemia, Birmingham mailcarrier, sometime Territorial volunteer gunner in the Royal Air Force, testified that he had mistaken the rowboat for one of the target buoys. It was his first flight with a loaded gun, he said. The jury gave in a verdict of “death by misadventure.”