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As dawn broke on October 27, 1965, residents thought the Second World War had started all over again.

Hundreds of feet up in the air above the city centre was a giant barrage balloon, one of the wartime ‘defenders’ sent into the air to destroy enemy planes. And there were fears the gas-filled balloon could blow up, damaging buildings or even causing an aircraft to crash.

Barrage balloons were deployed in the sky in large numbers during the war. Tethered to the ground with winch cables, their job was to make it difficult for German bombers to achieve any accuracy when trying to hit targets below, like docks and factory buildings, and also to destroy fighter planes that attempted to shoot them down. A bullet through the balloon’s canvas would ignite the hydrogen it was filled with, causing an explosion.

The blimp that appeared over Cambridge that morning in 1965 was an antique, and had been in use at RAF Cardington in Bedfordshire, where technicians had attached weather forecasting equipment to it. Some time during the night, it had broken free from its moorings, and propelled by the wind, had dragged its wire cable 30 miles across country towards Cambridge.

As the balloon flew over the city, the cable got snarled up in some scaffolding on Magdalene College – and stuck there.

Dons and students were awakened by the noise of the cable creaking and looked out of their windows in horror. Searchlights beamed upwards and picked out the huge inflatable.

At Cardington, station controllers were alerted to what had happened, and an RAF team was despatched to Cambridge. When they arrived, Magdalene was evacuated, for fear the invader might crash to earth and explode.

Watched by a large crowd, including our photographer, a highly delicate operation involving the fire brigade then began to bring the blimp to the ground. Extreme care had to be taken to avoid protrusions that might pierce the canopy and trigger the gas.

It took a long time, but finally it was lowered to the ground next to the ancient college buildings. It did not explode, and after being emptied of gas, it was taken away by the RAF men.

Amusingly, the noisy arrival of the balloon during the night, its steel cable clanging on rooftops, was mistaken by some residents for loud music. Some thought it was Irish band the Clancy Brothers, performing at the first-ever Cambridge Folk festival at Cherry Hinton Hall. Others attributed the racket to a gig at the Regal, where a few days before some rowdy young men called the Rolling Stones had been on stage.