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At last I have found a use for this
very unusual piece of music from the 1930's.
As some of you may already know,
my Dad was in the RAF during the war.
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(Wish I had my Dad's good looks.)
He was a maintenance engineer on ground crew,
and as far as I know, he never got round to
learning to fly.
He went up on the planes for 'test flights',
and once told me how he was involved
in 'target towing'!
His job was to sit in the rear of a
Westland Lysander and wind out a wind-sock behind the plane. The gunners on the ground would take pot-shots at the wind-sock for practice!!!
I understand, they used blanks rather than live ammunition.
Whilst in the RAF he got into building model aircraft in his spare time. Some were made out of Perspex and some from solid brass.
These were not meant to fly, they were more of the sort of thing, to sit on the mantle-piece at home.
After he got 'de-mobbed' I remember him coming home with this huge model aeroplane kit.
It was a flying model of a Lysander, similar to the one he did the 'target towing' in.
The war must have ended before he got round to building it.
It lay there, up in the loft, for probably twelve years,
before he thought I was good enough to build it.
Well I did, and the finished model won First Prize
in a Model Engineering Exhibition.
(Yes Helen, I still have the certificate somewhere!)
I also know there is a photograph of the finished model somewhere,
although I have still to track it down in Dads vast hoard of old pictures and negatives.
What I did find however, were a couple of pictures of other models I built way back around 1958. (I was sixteen then.)
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A four engined Handley Page Halifax.
(This model won the First Prize the following year.)
After this I was banned! (Only joking.)
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Another picture of the Halifax,
this time with a model Hurricane.
We even had a "Workshop Manual".
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(This is actually a spoof for Angus!)
About sixteen years ago, I took Dad down to
Brooklands,which had been recovered from the bottom of a lake.
There was a bit of a museum there with lots of Vintage bits including this Rolls Royce engine from a Hurricane.
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His Baby!
Dad knew where every 'nut & bolt' came from,
even after fifty odd years!
I could probably write a book on all the goings on
connected with aircraft. Brother Colin took up flying and even now my nephew Owain represents Britain in the
Microlight flying competitions.
But what started me on this rambling old blog,
was when, on one of my riverside walks, I noticed a chap flying a radio controlled model aircraft in the 'regatta' field where I had been playing a couple of weeks earlier.
From here down - is now OUT of DATE.
Now take a peek at this.
He has a wee camera under the planes wing, and using an electric motor,
it is powered up to a couple of hundred feet and then it glides around filming.
The motor runs for about 30 seconds at the start.
As it glides around, you can see terrific views of the Thames, Cookham and even Bourne End in the distance.
JUST MY LUCK.
After all this effort - the chap has closed his
YouTube account!
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Sometimes I think I'll just give up!
Sorry. This has made a right mess of my blog.
This is the sort of thing us brothers could have only dreamt of, all those years ago when we were young 'aero-modellers'.
And just to finish.
One of those trees in the arial shots is no more.
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It blew down into the river a couple of weeks ago.
A week earlier I was standing just yards away
playing the organ on a similar windy day.
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