Great Britain. Royal Air Force - Silvered Wings

My grateful thanks go to Graham Pitchfork for pointing me in the right direction and also to Bobby Gainher for all the help and advice he gave me as copy editor. But many others have also greatly assisted by providing pictures or checking my draft chapters and making many helpful corrections and suggestions. They are: Reg Barlow, Martin Barraclough, John Blake, Alan Bramson, Sandra Brind, Iain Browning, Steve Burr, Ray Deacon, Neville Duke, Veronica Dunne, David Emmerson, David Exton, John Fricker, Michael Graydon, Rod Hall-Jones, Rachel Huxford, Michael Jones, Min Larkin, Bob Lightfoot, Ian Macfadyen, Chrissy and Gordon Morris, Rob Neil, Alan Pollock, Mo Short, Michael Turner, John Urmston, Michiel Vogelpoel, Ken Wallis, Nigel Walpole and Andrew Wight-Boycott.

The book is sold for the benefit of the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund.

While every effort has been made to identify the copyright owners of all the photographs, in some cases this has not been possible. If the author has infringed anyones copyright he apologises and will, of course, pay any fees due.

Appendix 2

Aircraft Flown

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

As a small boy I spent most of my time building, flying and crashing model aeroplanes. Most of my school holidays were spent in the company of a near neighbour, John Urmston, who shared the same passion. We were at kindergarten together and have been good friends ever since; he will feature significantly as my story unfolds. He designed a 5 ft span Tiger Moth, powered by a 7.5 cc petrol engine which we built together it even had movable controls from the cockpit, but I have to admit that he built all the difficult bits. The caption in my photograph album reads it even flew after a fashion, but John added in his own hand it flew bloody well!

Each year I used to follow the reports of the Kings Cup Air Race, which at that time was a major national event well covered in the newspapers and I hoped, one day, that I might be able to take part in it. The only other ambition I had at that time was to own one of those magnificent Mercedes sports cars.

Our 5 ft span flying model Tiger Moth.