Fire officer John Cox is retiring with an extraordinary career of service behind him.

Mr Cox, 65, from Greenfield Road, Devizes, was one of the firemen to attend England’s worst ever air disaster, the crash of the Piper India Trident at Staines, near London, in 1972.

All 118 passengers and crew died when the aircraft, which had just taken off from Heathrow airport, landed in a meadow a mile short of Staines high street and close to the busy Staines bypass.

Mr Cox, who was a sub-officer at Sunbury fire station at the time, was among the first on site, but his father, also John, a divisional officer, was already there and taking charge of the operation.

Mr Cox said: “It was almost surreal. It was 5.30pm and the middle of rush hour, but the plane had landed in a sunken meadow and it was very quiet.

“There was a haze of fuel hanging in the air. It was eerie.”

The tail section of the plane had broken off but the rest of the fuselage was intact. Electrical wiring and high tensile steel cables hung everywhere and Mr Cox and his colleagues had the distressing task of removing the bodies from the aircraft.

He said: “We were waist deep in bodies for three hours.”

Despite huge amounts of fuel still aboard the plane, there was no fire, until towards the end of the operation.

Mr Cox said: “We were almost finished when a fire did break out.

“It was caused by all the duty-free spirit that had spilled in the crash. But we soon had it out.”

Eventually, the cost of housing prompted Mr Cox and his wife Jane to leave the Home Counties and head further west.

Mr Cox said: “We couldn’t find a house for love nor money. We were gazumped three times.”

Without any particular enthusiasm for moving to Wiltshire, Mr Cox applied for and got a job as a station officer in Swindon. Among his first call-outs was a coach crash on the M4 with 18 fatalities.

Mr Cox retired from uniformed service 15 years ago but stayed on in a civilian capacity and became an expert on communications. He was instrumental in getting the tri-service call centre at police headquarters in Devizes up and running.