Having spent the last month reading all 401 pages of this thread thus far, I just wanted to say thank you to all those who have contributed to make it, as Danny says, "the best of all threads".
I am woefully under qualified to contribute - my military/aviation career consisting of 3 years in the school CCF RAF Section encompassing many afternoons on Primary glider bungy duty on the school playing fields, and half a dozen flights with 5AEF from Marshalls in Cambridge (including stick time mainly on Chipmunks, but also on the infamous Husky - much to the distress of the backseat occupants who knew it was my first time at the controls!).
The one thing I would like to ask, but suspect there may be no one around who can really answer it, is what the Marshalls input was to the RAF training in the early war years. I have heard it said that they developed a much improved training scheme which was subsequently adopted as the standard RAF training scheme. I'm guessing that anyone who was trained by Marshalls would be even older than our current 'senior' aircrew - but you never know.