Wings

 Wings

As a small boy the youths around me wanted to be train drivers. And you could see why. It was an age of steam and steam railway engines that shunted and pulled trains. 

There was something wonderful about those powerful mammoths - the smoke, the steam, the boiler fires, the noise, oil, the huge moving parts of steel, and most of all the smell. 

What made this smell must have been a combination of most of the above. It was distinctive and exhilarating for small boys. 

As much as I loved those steam engines, it was aircraft and flying in them that sparked my enthusiasm for the new-fangled mode of using aircraft for transport and war. Making scale models and flying toy aeroplanes, powered by propellers and rubber bands, were not just hobbies but strong pointers toward the future. 

Thus it was that I took every possible opportunity to watch, to learn and to fly heavier than air aircraft. They were still mainly made with wood and wire, with canvas coated in dope.

So when the Second World War arrived, and when I was old enough to join our forces to fight the Germans, it was quite obvious it was the RAF that called. 

The death rate in 1942, when I joined up, was so great that our training airfields (mostly abroad in good weather conditions) were chock-a-block. So I was asked to return to civvy street where I first worked as a farm labourer and then at RAF Theale as a prop-swinger - starting up Tiger Moth trainers for aspiring pilots to accomplish their first solo flight.

There being no weather forecasting at the time, an instructor alone would fly up-wind to see if the incoming weather was suitable for first-time flyers. 

 

Unaccompanied, this left the second cockpit empty. Because of my unique position of being both in the RAF and out of it, I was sometimes offered this second pilot’s seat. Thus I learned to fly - a state that was quite natural to me.

So when a flying vacancy occurred in the RAF, I re-joined, now with considerable flying experience.

From then on my progress in the air was straightforward, despite a mighty crash (which is always supposed to make a pilot a better one).

Then came the ceremony in Oklahoma when I was awarded my wings, where the high-ranking officer could only use his left hand with which to pin on this hard-earned and proudly worn emblem.

The pin used penetrated my shirt and drew blood from my chest. But you expect wounds in war.

A Sporting Gun

 

Fine sporting shotguns often have a history of interest attached to them. Mine did. 

James Purdey, the peak creator of the gunsmith’s art, made such beautiful guns that one being offered today I see is priced at £165,000.- yes, just for one second-hand Purdey having passed through the hands of William Evans in St James’s. 

It so happened that William Evans, born into a long line of gunsmiths, worked for James Purdey before leaving them in 1883 to set up on his own, engraving on each of his guns “late of Purdey”.

The Chairman of Purdey at a shoot I was on, noticed my gun and asked to see it. “It’s the worst thing that ever happened to Purdey”, he said, “leaving us to set up on his own like that.”

Guns, gunsmiths and provenance mean a huge amount to this high level of sporting society.

My father may have bought our gun in the early 1900s and had the stock altered to fit him. He left it behind with his family at Stratfieldsaye Rectory when having been at Marlborough College, at Wye Agricultural College, and was working in Egypt, our then Protectorate. As the sand grouse shooting was good there, he wired his family to send his gun out to him. George V stamps were affixed to its leather case and just posted - like any other parcel of the day.

The gun came to me eventually and, as we were gearing up for an invasion by Hitler, I loaned it to the Home Guard before leaving for America as a refugee.  But before crossing the Atlantic, I, like many of us, extracted the shot from cartridges and replaced them with the shot mixed with melted candle wax. I never tested the results of this home-made transformation, but they must have been pretty unpleasant for an invading Nazi.

The Home Guard allowed the barrels to rust. The gun was returned to me but failed the proof tests for its barrels.

Short of cash, I could not afford new ones from William Evans. Then, hearing that all barrels were made at the same Midlands factory in England, I settled for the Gamages Department Store estimate - the cheapest by far. 

The new barrels were perfect but not adorned by William Evans’s or any other provenance.

I now had very little use for a gun, and regulations for their safekeeping had become strict and tiresome. So I gave the gun to a son, who also had no use for it and sold it at Sotheby’s or Christie’s Auction Rooms. It was a lovely gun - an object of craftmanship and beauty, though not all orginial.