There was the old chap who used to drink in my local some years ago. Rather shabby and down at heel, but always wore an RAF tie. Got talking to him one evening, charming old gent who’d fallen a bit on hard times and served in the RNAS and then the RAF in the First World War, and then re-enlisted into the RAF in the second. He had plenty of tales to tell, as did one of the stewards at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool right up to the 1990s, who’d marched into Jerusalem with General Allenby.
It was hardly a chance encounter, but there was an old family friend who had been a photographer in Liverpool before the First war, and then served in the RFC/RAF in both wars. He had met people like Claude Grahame-White and Samuel Franklyn Cody – Cody he remembered particularly for his powerful hands, and Grahame-White for his retinue of admiring girls.
My father’s older sister remembered seeing Cody flying his kites in Birkenhead Park, which would have been in 1902. She joined the RAF in April 1918 only days after it was founded, although just to confuse matters old photographs show her wearing RFC shoulder flashes. Total tennis nut who lived long enough to see Tim Henman play, but that’s another story.