Kershaw Street honors Doylestown WWII veteran

One of the 11 Doylestown veterans memorialized in Maplewood has a second street named for him in England.

Air Force Second Lt. Samuel E. Kershaw Jr., a fighter pilot, died Feb. 21, 1945, when his P-51 Mustang crashed 40 minutes into a training flight near the village of North Stifford, about 50 miles northeast of London.

In the 1990s, as a housing development went up on the crash site, an Englishman who had heard the plane explode as a teenage student began pushing to honor the American pilot.

The man, Ken Rydings, reached out to an American genealogist in Florida whose maiden name had been Kershaw. She turned out to be no relation to the pilot, but agreed to help Rydings research his background.

Through additional digging, Rydings concluded that Kershaw, 23, had not blacked out from oxygen deprivation, as Kershaw's family had been told at the time. Rather, it appeared the plane had crashed due to structural failure. He also grew convinced that Kershaw heroically had maneuvered his plummeting plane away from the village and a school filled with young children.

On Sept. 3, 1999, the housing developer unveiled a plaque honoring the fallen pilot, and a sign for the neighborhood's new main street.

Its name: Kershaw Close.