The 'Introduce yourself' Thread

vaughan;132721 wrote:

Living as I do midway between Bramcote and Nuneaton I,ve developed an interest in local airfields.
Before their demise my parents lived in Wellesbourne Mountford , so I,m on here to glean more information if anyone can point me in the wright direction.

Vaughan

Hi Vaughan, welcome to the forum.

It's not an area that I am familiar with, but if you haven't already seen it here is the thread for Wellesbourne Mountford: /community/showthread.php?1050-Wellesbourne-Mountford&highlight=wellesbourne

Welcome to AiX Vaughan.

These are some of the airfields (active and disused) in your area. You can find details of each via the Search function:

Hi Paul,

Welcome to AiX. Always great to have another Leicestershire local on here

Steve

Not come across Brinklow or Southam before, any more info?

The Brinklow thread is here:

/community/showthread.php?9372-Brinklow-Bretford&highlight=brinklow

Don't seem to have one for Southam but it was under Flying Training Command about 9 miles SE of Warwick approx NGR SP430620 here:

wtp2.appspot.com/wheresthepath.htm?lat=5...te&lov=None&rov=None

Thanks PTE, I'll investigate further

I,ve heard that there was some sort of grass strip at Grandborough, just south of the Dunchurch to Daventry road, what can anyone tell me about this ?.
Also, another puzzler for you, in the 60,s old workmates would speak of the flying from another grass strip on Harbury lane which ran from the Fosse way to the Leamington to Bishops Tachbrook rd south of Leamington. It was called Bonniksons, I think.
Finally looking at the attached map reminded me of the blister hanger that stood for years at the Warwick grass strip on the south eastern corner of the site.

Great site brought back lots of memories :-D.

Vaughan

Welcome to the forum Vaughan! Enjoy! Cheers!

Also, another puzzler for you, in the 60,s old workmates would speak of the flying from another grass strip on Harbury lane which ran from the Fosse way to the Leamington to Bishops Tachbrook rd south of Leamington. It was called Bonniksons, I think.

That was Leamington later known as Bishops Tachbrook. AKA Bonniksens (spelling?)

Was originally the Royal Leamington Spa Aircraft Park and School of Flying in the mid 1920s listed in the Automobile Association book of landing grounds. During WW2 was used for Whitley aircraft repairs and had a couple of Bellman hangars.

/community/showthread.php?10724-Leamington-Spa&highlight=leamington

My name is Colin Boyd, age 64, now a retired Professor of Management living on Hornby Island in British Columbia.

My interest in this forum lies in the fact that I was born and raised on the campus of what was Cranfield College of Aeronautics, now Cranfield University, and formerly RAF Cranfield. I copy below a post that I have made on the Cranfield forum in the Bedfordshire airfields section so that people can understand my background.

Ironically, at the age of 24 I returned to live at the Cranfield campus to study for an MBA degree in 1974-75. I did not go back there because it was my birthplace, but because Cranfield School of Management was the only business school to offer a one-year MBA program at the time. I stayed on to do a Ph.D. at the school, with a desk situated just 50 yards from the building where I started attending Primary School at age 5! I emigrated to Canada to become an academic in 1978.

Here is the material that I posted on the Cranfield forum...

---

My father was Joseph Alexander Boyd, otherwise known as Paddy Boyd. He served with the RAF in WW2 and landed in France on D-Day +4 with a forward servicing unit looking after Typhoons and Spitfires that were landing on temporary steel mesh runways. His unit did refueling, rearming, and minor airframe repairs. He and his crew had many encounters with strafing German fighters. He once dived under a fuel bowser rather than a nearer repair truck during one raid, only to see the repair truck blown to bits.

Both he and my mother had served at RAF Cranfield during the war, but not coincidentally. My mother was the boss of the NAAFI there for a year, and can still show you (at age 97) where her office was within the space now occupied by the Social Club.

My father was the second employee ever of what would eventually become the Cranfield College of Aeronautics, starting in 1946. RAF Cranfield was designated as the main receiving point for all of the aviation loot plundered from Nazi Germany by the UK at the end of the war. Russia, France and the USA all stole their share of the loot, including personnel such as Werner Von Braun.

My father sat for many months opening crate after crate after crate of plundered aviation-related goods. This was the origin of RAF Cranfield becoming the centre for the study of aeronautics within the UK. He himself plundered a few things. In my house I have a beautiful brass inclinometer, and a Luftwaffe recording barometer that he somehow smuggled back home from these crates.

All of the pictures that you might see of the historic planes stored at Cranfield in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s were planes that he was in charge of. He was the boss of the engineering side of the Department of Aircraft Design, helping all the Masters students construct and conduct their thesis experiments. All of the planes in his hangers were the examples that his students could inspect to aid them in their studies – they were not just museum pieces, but were practical illustrations of aircraft design.

His most famous acquisition was the TSR2 (# 220?), which he had delivered from Boscombe Down to Cranfield. This is the one that eventually ended up at Cosford.

The picture of the planes in post #5 shows only about half of his total collection of planes. If others prompt me, then I will try to name them all, and possibly rename some of the ones shown in this picture.

As a kid I sat in every one of those cockpits. While playing as a mad kid I also fell off the wing of the Lancaster/Lincoln bomber shown in some of these photos, falling onto a blast-deflecting earth berm where a piece of flint gave me a scar on my knee that I have to this day. I will forever recall the difficulty of trying to crawl over the mid-wing-spar of that plane while trying to get from the front of the fuselage to the back!

I should at least mention that he had both V1 and V2 missiles on display in his hanger at Cranfield, and also a curious one man German unpowered gyrocopter that would be towed along behind a U-Boat so as to give an increased field of vision above the horizon. The flying boat that can be seen in the picture in post#5 was a Saunders-Roe SR./A.1, a flying boat jet fighter.