Danny,
You are really ruffling the feathers of nostalgia at the moment. In 1957 I was sent on my first solo in a glider at St Athans by Lt Cmdr Brett Knowles RN. He was quite a character and drove an old Daimler which used to belong to Sir Bernard Docker. Orignally it had a 12 cylinder engine under a very long bonnet, a nightmare when pulling out of blind junctions. Knowles had replaced it with a Perkins diesel. He had been on a recent Greenland expedition where he was most famous for quickly removing anything useful from a Hastings which crashed while dropping supplies to them.
He was one of those larger than life characters, especially in the gliding world at that time, I wondered if any other readers would remember him.