Wigan author's account of famous meteorite landing is turned into BBC radio play

Wigan businessman Russell Parry made a literary name for himself in 2014 when he wrote a book about the space debris landing in an Appley Bridge farmer’s field 100 years earlier.

And now a long-held dream of a broadcast version is becoming reality when a three-part dramatisation by Russell is put out by the BBC next month.

The 33lb meteorite remains the fourth largest ever to come down in the UK and it caused a particular stir at the time because the police at first confiscated it and it led to years of protests by scientists who wanted to examine it. It was only with the intervention of the British Museum that the rock was surrendered for examination.

Eric Lyons, the owner of Halliwell Farm where it landed, was eventually given it back and he went on to sell it to the British Museum for the then princely sum of £252. It was subsequently broken up for further examination by boffins and to be displayed around the world.

Russell’s book The Appley Bridge Meteorite did so well that it led to years of public speaking engagements, including one at the American Museum of Natural History in New York where one of the fragments is kept.

But he long wondered whether it had further mileage as a docudrama.

Russell, who runs international food hygiene courses by day, said: “It was in about 2018 that I first thought about converting the book into a radio play. It is quite a dramatic story. When the meteorite came down on October 13 1914 with a series of explosions the First World War had only recently started and local people at first thought Appley Bridge had been the victim of a German Zeppelin air raid.

"Then the police seized the meteorite from the land owner – probably at the behest of the coroner – which led to uproar from the scientists who launched a petition.

"I put it to the BBC who liked the idea. It was all set to go and then Covid came and I heard nothing more until last October; then from January it’s been all systems go. I was asked to turn it from one long episode to three shorter ones, so I had to come up with a couple of cliff-hangers. I also set some of it in the present day with a schoolgirl doing a project on the meteorite and getting recollections from her grandmother which then takes us back to the factual events of 1914 through to the 1920s.

"It has been recorded by BBC Radio Lancashire with producer Garry Scott championing it for me and getting together a group of actors from Blackburn who play all the parts.”

The Appley Bridge Meteorite has now been recorded and will be broadcast on BBC Radio Lancashire on September 7, 14 and 21 (times not yet announced). Thereafter it will be found on BBC Sounds and Russell says that he would love it if it was picked up by other stations, especially BBC Radio 4.