Danny and the Battle of Britain at Home Day.
And now September was on the horizon and there were two small problems ahead The first would be my Examination "B", postponed from March, which I now had to take early in the month. And looming behind that was an even scarier prospect - the Battle of Britain At Home Open Day on a Saturday afternoon in mid-month. Every year most RAF Stations were butchered to provide a public holiday - or that's what it felt like to be the reluctant hosts on these occasions.
Setting aside the numbers of pilots killed training for, or performing in the various aerobatic displays on the day (which, so the rumour went, was fast approaching the number killed in the actual battle itself), these affairs were an administrative and logistical nightmare. On the flying side, if you had a well-practised "party piece" on your unit (which let us out !), you were in duty bound to go round with it to as many other Stations as you could reasonably fit into the afternoon. The grateful recipients' ATC would then have to integrate your Show with all the other acts that had been offered to them, and compose their Flying Programme for the day.
Everbody sent as many of their "own" aircraft as they could spare to other places, where they would be novelties, for static display, (and naturally Spitfires were in demand everywhere, Vampires not far behind). Only having one Beau, we hung on to that. We managed to get (IIRC) a Lincoln, a Meteor and a Mosquito. With our own Spitfire, Beau and Vampire we had quite a respectable line up to show the public. A second Spitfire would do LL flypasts and climbing rolls; the Tiger could do the ever-popular "crazy flying" act to fill in gaps in the flying programme.
The people who were flying our Spitfires and Vampires away for static display elsewhere now had the new-fangled Civil Airways system to contend with. As all our normal flying was over Anglesey or the NW coast of Wales, this normally troubled us very little. The occasional Harvard trip to 12 Gp. at Newton was flown VMC under the airways.
There was very little other air traffic in the area in those days, apart from one of the very first airways (Amber whatisit ?) between Speke and Collinstown. The only user was an elderly DC-3 which plodded twice daily along the route (which incidentally cut straight across Valley's "Safety Lane", or vice versa, whichever way you look at it): we took no notice of that at all.
The very idea of "Controlled Airspace", into which RAF aircraft could enter only with permission, seemed preposterous to us in the early '50s. Who did these people think they were, to say that every RAF pilot, in an RAF aircraft, did not have the absolute right to fly all over His Majesty's domains (which the RAF had so recently and so valiantly defended) where and as often as he pleased, and to alight wherever he wished, without "let or hindrance" ? Those were the days !
All this was apart from the mundane requirements of all such events: car parking, Public Address announcements, collection points for lost children, Portaloos (or whatever served the purpose if they had not been invented), St. John's Ambulance for minor scrapes, etc. Fortunately NAAFI jealously guarded their monopoly to feed and water the horde of visitors which was likely to descend on us - free entertainment being in short supply in that area - so they looked after that side of the business.
But for us there would be more to it than that. Enough for the moment, though.
Goodnight all,
Danny42C
Goodbye, Fred (RIP).