Herefordshire's St Owen's Cross was, for several decades, the scene of some dreadful accidents. Flashback recalls how the crossroads almost claimed the life of one of Britain's best-known politicians.

IN 1963, a cargo of Lucozade landed one of Britain's most famous politicians in hospital, fighting for his life. And after winning that battle, Michael Foot was to declare: ''Hereford General Hospital is an institution devised by man; yet it came nearer to revealing supernatural powers than a confirmed rationalist like myself chooses to admit.'' While heading back to London after a constituency weekend in Ebbw Vale, the Labour MP and his wife, Jill Craigie, decided to take a picturesque route through Herefordshire.

At St Owen's Cross, Jill failed to stop at the junction and a Lucozade lorry coming from the Hereford direction struck the side of the car. The couple were taken to the General Hospital, and in the biography 'Michael Foot,' author Mervyn Jones relates how Foot, when lifted out of the ambulance, was able to say: ''Mind you don't put me in a private ward.'' Husband and wife were operated on during the night and Foot's life - his lungs had been pierced - was in the balance. He recovered consciousness after the operation just as a Salvation Army band in the street outside the hospital was playing 'Beulah Land, Sweet Beulah Land', a hymn that he had often heard in his Methodist boyhood. He knew the lines: 'I look away across the sea, Where mansions are prepared for me.

'He was later to describe the experience: ''I thought for a few seconds, in my half-dreamy state, that the rendering was being given by a more celestial choir. Then the mist faded; someone arrived with a bed pan and I knew I was restored to the care of earthly angels.'' And he added: ''Miraculously, the latest skills and contraptions of modern science were there on the spot, ready to be used at the shortest notice. Mansions were prepared for me.'' Jones recalls how Foot had been told by the doctors that less than a decade before, survival from such an accident would have been considered inconceivable.

Foot had refused not only to have a private ward, but even to be transferred to a London hospital. He wanted to demonstrate that the National Health Service worked well, not only in a prestigious teaching hospital, but also in an average general hospital. He wrote: ''The ministering angels supplied every form of available comfort, including a fabulously diverse assortment of drugs only recently discovered. And, of course, this modern miracle is repeated for multitudes of others every day of the week all over the country. Compared with the situation in the 1940s and 1930s, the development is prodigious. ''Had we trusted to the old ways and the time-honoured means of distributing medical care, the cost of new discoveries would have removed them far beyond the reach of most people.

''All the new inventions and all the most expert practitioners would have been concentrated more than ever in a few hospitals, mostly centred round London where the few select patients could afford to pay. ''This was the fatal trend which Aneurin Bevan broke when he introduced the National Health Service. ''Like many others, I owe my life to the change. Had it not been for the Health Service, heavenly or hellish mansions would have been prepared for me prematurely. Moreover, I would be bankrupt as well as dead.''

He gave up smoking while at Hereford, but the negative effects of the accident were serious and lasting. As a result of a broken leg he was left with a lopsided walk. He walked for miles and miles, but with the aid of a stick. And as biographer Jones wrote: ''Although the stick became a trade mark, like Chamberlain+s umbrella or Churchill's cigar, it contributed when he was leader of the Labour Party to an impression of declining strength.'' Many years after the accident Michael Foot returned to Hereford in far happier circumstances. He turned up at Edgar Street to watch his beloved Plymouth Argyle take on Hereford United.