Raf Faygate – Sussex

no not really… I received the back issue of ‘After The Battle’ which had an article about wartime a/c recovery in the area and the role of 49 MU… seems like they had it quite well set up with stripping of the a/c on site then the big lumps going off to Adderbury in Oxfordshire for melting down/disposal.. . so doubt if theres any large lumps were dumped on site.. The article was written in the 80’s and all that the author found was a couple of small pieces of what may’ve been a/c skin laying around.. the dismantling site appears to have been under what is now the wood yard so anything that was disposed of on site would be difficult to get at, buried under large logs and in a clay soil.

as an aside, theres a local company called Park Aviation about 2 or 3 miles from the WW2 site which seems to scrap/dismantle more modern beasties.. last time I peered through their gates there was the front end of a Harrier and a midget submarine! they are also ‘credited’ with scrapping Canberras and Phantoms..
I wonder if it was started by an ex-49MU man who got a taste for dismantling aeroplanes!

Neil.

Guzzneil
Any up date on research of RAF Faygate?

well I had a look in the local library and the place is mentioned in a couple of local history docs where they’ve recorded the memories of local people etc.. and there was a newspaper cutting from the local paper about the units reunion… basically all the info was that it was number 49 MU that was based there.. their job was to recover crashed a/c and wreckage and move it back to Faygate for removal of anything useful… of course the local paper went for the sensationist bit and went on about body parts found in the a/c etc… they must’ve recovered some large lumps of aircraft as there were memories of Queen Mary ‘low-loader’ trucks bringing the traffic to a standstill in Horsham as they made their way back to base…. i can’t see on the current site where any dump pit may’ve been, so i shall await the back copy of ‘after the battle’ to see if someone else has already been through this…

one of the other roles of the unit was to provide maintenance cover at Coolham, which was an ALG for Tangmere..

one of the other ‘memories’ of the place was the apparently awful ‘entertainment’ that was put on for the staff and locals by a travelling concert party – shades of ‘it aint arf hot mum’ in deepest Sussex…

Neil.

Dezz….I would think salvage law comes into play, NO messing with MOD ‘licences’ etc on crash sites, gotta be worth a try. Where there’s smoke, there’s also usually fire somwhere.
Many of the surplus lend/lease a/c in Aus where dumped off carriers at the end of the War.
If anyone actually has anything ‘solid’ the TV would be interested and I have good contacts.

Happy Hunting,

….and hoping that it’s not an ammo dump that you may find…..

I recon that there must be some truth in these rumours, does anyone know what actually happened to all the, not necessarily “scrap” shall we say, unwanted aircraft and stuff at the end of the war? There must have been loads and loads of it. I cant believe that it was all melted down and made into saucepans or what ever??? For a start, I think, that much stuff coming on to the market at one time would have made the price of scrap metal drop drastically.. may be to the point that it was more cost effective to dig a big hole and bury it all rather than go to all the trouble of striping it off the aircraft and trying to sell it, after all when the first world war finished didn’t they burn a lot of aircraft that weren’t wanted? Just think… the war’s over we have a lot of stuff no one wants, we have all these service men standing around doing nothing, To quote a line out of a certain film, give them a bloody shovel…… incidentally if you do dig up something, which I think is probley illegal, I wouldn’t broadcast it, get in touch with a local archology group or someone as other-wise you will probley have allsorts of tw@s down there trying to dig it out with a jcb or something
Dezz 🙂

Been hearing these type of rumours for years and theyve been discussed on the forum on and off. Most of them seem to be like the urban myths we all keep hearing. Yet to hear of anyone coming up with the magic find.

‘Guzzineil’…seem to recall some time ago in FP there was talk of a dissused railway tunnel (Winchester-ish) that was supposed to be filled with fuselages, wings and parts; the tunnel mouths where later filled with earth and planted with trees. With the rail link to Faygate could this be it? What other sites have been known to be used as dumping grounds? (Know about the attempted recovery of 6 Lancs in Lincs some years ago)

I Have also heard rumours of RR dumping ‘quantities’ of Merlins and other spare parts that were surplus to requirements at the end of hostilities. So many rumours of these sites, one of them has to turn something up…

best of luck, who knows what you might find…..

Wasn’t RAF Faygate the MU where they took german aircraft that were shot down.. I seem to remember thats wjhere X-Rays BF109 machine (if it is the one in India) was taken there!

Just realised it was probably a Maintenance Unit, which might not have been on an airfield.

There used to be one in Newark, 58 MU I think, which was next to the railway station. It was just a T2 hangar a yard and some huts. The hangar was there until a few years ago, but was taken down to make way for a supermarket.

58 MU was a salvage unit also recovering crashed aircraft from the surrounding area. Its funny but the same story existed about this unit burying aircraft. We even went to look where they were supposed to be buried a couple of times. Apart from a couple of Nissan hut shells we didn’t find anything!

Although called ‘RAF Faygate’ its not actually an airfield more a Maintenace Unit type set-up with the wrecks being delivered by road or rail..

I’m back down there tomorrow so will try and have a poke around in the local library.

thanks

Joe

thanks for the link to the airfield lists, have been looking such a list for Scotland for a while, found a few surprises!

Ken

Are you sure it was called RAF Faygate? I have this airfield directory bookmarked. It list’s a lot of airfields in Sussex but not Faygate.

buried treasure.. What?

Besyt thing to do is seek landowners permission and try searching with a metal detector to see if there is anything there..