The drone of flying engines heard at night can be a melancholy sound. After lights out in the dormitory at a Hertfordshire boarding school, I would reach up to pull the curtain aside and open the window. There was no double glazing, just a window with metal casement stay and I would lower the stay onto one of the pins to fix the window open and listen to the sound of aircraft climbing out from Luton Airport.
The airport’s 07/25 runway is ten miles from the school as the crow flies so aircraft taking off in the south westerly direction would pass to the north of the school during their climb. I have memories of a propeller driven aircraft, probably Bristol Britannias operated by Britannia Airways or Monarch on their way to Spain, Italy, Greece, or Portugal.
It was a sad sound in the stillness of the night, like the call of a lonely animal. As I lay there listening and looking out for and occasionally seeing the lights of the aircraft I would wonder about the people aboard; the air crew, the cabin crew, and the passengers. I still do, when I look up and watch an airliner fly overhead so high that its type is barely discernible. Is anyone aboard aware of the everyday miracle they are experiencing?
I feel that same sense of melancholy when I see footage of the various aircraft graveyards and breakers’ yards, or private collections where aircraft stored outside have fallen into disrepair, covered with foliage and mould. The aircraft sit patiently waiting for a rescue that will only come for a lucky few. The chosen ones will be cleaned and perhaps restored to display conditions. Rarer still, their engines may be restored, and life will flow through their electrical and hydraulic systems again, but most die a slow quiet death.
I wonder too about the pilots who fly aircraft and deliver them to air salvage companies like Air Salvage International (ASI), based at Cotswold Airport (formerly RAF Kemble). What do they feel about the aircraft’s final flight? When they taxi the aircraft, park it, and shut down all its engines and electrical systems, do they pause to give it a final thought? Do they listen to the aircraft as it quietens into a sleep from which it will never awake? This is all a bit whimsical and fanciful, but it’s the legacy of a boyhood imagination. For the pilots who fly such aircraft, repetition and routine has probably drummed out all such ideas even if these contemplations ever arosebut then again these anthropomorphic ideas are well known. Every ‘plane, train, automobile, and ship had a personality and was often to referred to as ‘she’, though less so these days.
RAF Beechwood Park
Perhaps, as I lay in that dormitory bed, I was unconsciously tapping into the memory of the land nearby. Maybe some of the memory of past events seeps into our subconscious as we sleep over or near certain places. A short walk away from where I slept there was an airfield at which aircraft that had been taken out of service were dismantled. Just like the airliners flown into Cotswold Airport today on the final flight of their life, bombers of various sizes were flown in this airfield to be dismantled. ATA (Air Transport Auxiliary) pilots would fly Shorts Stirlings, Bristol Blenheims, and American Seamews into a 1,260-yard grass runway-oriented SW/NE near what was to become the school buildings twenty years later. This was Beechwood Park as mentioned by ATA pilot Lettice Curtis in her book “The Forgotten Pilots”.
RAF Beechwood Park, also known as Satellite Landing Ground (SLG) No.12, was one of fifty secret dispersal fields used by the RAF’s Maintenance Units (MU) to hide aircraft from enemy air attack. It had no landing lights, so movements were in daylight only, and the airfield buildings consists of only a few specially constructed camouflaged hangars. It was operational from about the spring of 1942 to March 1946, though details vary. The aircraft that landed here were either damaged or at the end of the working life. They would have been already stripped elsewhere of their armaments, radios, and other internal equipment. The aircraft were dismantled for spares by a team of about 25-30 civilians and three officers who were billeted at the Sebright Arms in Markyate. Some of the airfield crew were billeted in Nissen huts near Beechwood Farm and the rest were residents who lived nearby.
During these years, had you been an ATA pilot who delivered a damaged bomber into Beechwood and then made your way by road to the ATA ferry pool at Luton you would have seen grass runways, RAF recruits training in Miles Magisters, and military aircraft being manufactured and tested. Your ATA ferry pool would probably have at least one Avro Anson or Fairchild Argus to drop pilots off at various starting points and pick them again when their delivery had been made, weather and daylight permitting in the case of airfields with no runway lighting. If the pilot couldn’t be collected in this way, travel back to the pool using a travel warrant by road or rail was the alternative method of getting back to base. Pilots would take an overnight bag with them on each ferry flight in case the return trip couldn’t be completed in a day.
Three decades after the last bomber was broken up for spares nearby, I lay in that dormitory bed listening to the airliners from Luton begin their journey to destinations in Europe. The grass airfield of Beechwood is long gone but not forgotten.
Cover image credit: By © User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92989920