August 2014
August began quietly, after the return of my daughter-in-law and grandson to Manchester at the beginning of the month. The house seemed very quiet after they had left. Our first visit of the month was to help celebrate Paul's cousins' 50th wedding anniversary, which they held close to the house of one of their daughters in Cambridgeshire. It was an extremely pleasant occasion, with some old slides from 50 years ago to look at and speeches after the meal, and then tea in their daughter's garden after that.
Paul and I and my sister had decided to stay the night near Cambridge, and picked a hotel close to the station so that my sister could catch a train from there go to work on Monday. My plan had been to do sightseeing in Cambridge, but, after a conversation with somebody at the party the previous day, Paul said he would prefer Duxford, so we went there instead.
We arrived early just after it opened, and seemed to spend hours in the first huge hangar full of aircraft. It's hard to take them all in, there are so many, and you can go inside some of them.
That's a Hawker Harrier hanging from the ceiling, and you can see there are lots of other aircraft on the floor. There's a complete mixture of planes of all ages, and you can go inside some of them.
This is Concord, next to a Lancaster Bomber.
You can go inside Concord, though there may be queues at busy times. I went inside. The light was very poor as you can see, since the windows are so small. At least I can say I've been on Concord!
This particular Concord never took passengers, it was used for testing, so part of it is still full of scientific instruments for monitoring purposes. Some of it is set up as a passenger plane though, and you can see how narrow it was.
I would have loved to go inside the Lancaster Bomber, but that wasn't on offer. I did go inside a York, a cargo plane built after the war using the Lancaster wings, tail and undercarriage, but with a larger fuselage.
I admired this De Haviland DH9, a World War 1 aircraft.
It was apparently one of the first aircraft to be stationed at RAF Duxford.
Having spent several hours in this hangar, we thought it was time for lunch, and fortunately there are several places from which to choose, most of which try to have a Second World War flavour about them. No powdered eggs though! I had a very nice filled baked potato, and then we went on to other hangars.
There's another area dedicated to the Second World War, with many fascinating aircraft. This is not a Spitfire but a Hawker Hurricane, complete with pilot.
It was the Hurricane, not the more famous Spitfire, which was the main British fighter in the Battle of Britain.
Of course I also needed a photo of the German Messerschmitt 109.
This particular aircraft fought in both the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain, and shot down 5 allied aircraft, apparently. At the end of September 1940 its engine failed and it crash landed in a field in East Sussex. The pilot was shot and wounded as he got out of it, and was captured.
There were many fascinating aircraft in this hangar, as well as lorries and air raid shelters, and a great deal of information. The air-raid siren was particularly evocative. I think I can remember the sirens, and I certainly remember the air-raid shelters, we had an old one in the garden of our family home in Surrey. I wish I could post more photos - I have a particularly nice one of an auto-gyro - but I am having difficulty posting any at all with the updated iPad and our useless network, so I am keeping the numbers down.
My back was starting to give me trouble, so I went to look at the re-constructed control centre, which I only knew from old films.
This one was particularly hard to photograph, as the light was so poor, so I'm afraid it's rather dark.
My last one is the old pre-fab, an even poorer photograph because of window reflections.
It was set up and furnished exactly as a post-war pre-fab would have been. Unfortunately, you could only look in through the windows, so photos were a bit of a problem.
I can remember old 'utility' dressing tables just like this one after the war, and the sewing machine also looks familiar. My mother had one not unlike this, albeit with a more modern-looking case, but I can remember several that looked exactly like this. And, like most people right after the war, my mother made all our clothes, though she didn't have the luxury of a tailor's dummy like this one lost in the window reflections on the right. In fact I don't remember buying a dress in a shop until I was a student in the 1960s.
We spent at least 5 hours at Duxford, and I don't think we saw half of it. But we were both tired and my back was hurting and we were miles from home. So we left around 3.30 and went home. We clearly need to make another visit to see the rest!
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