Wartime British Aircraft Advertisements

Cheers chaps, great adverts Allan and Dan. I love the Spitfire ones. More from the old magazines please. 🙂

I agree mmitch that they are great reminders. They are also wonderful slices of the social history of the time, which is why I love collecting and perusing Contact magazine, which has a cross-section of RNZAF life during the war encapsualted within its pages. Many of the ads have such great artwork that someone has lovingly designed and created, you don’t see that sort of passion in ads these days where its all digital. I mean, that Miles advert really makes me want to rush out and buy one. 🙂

Excellent thread Dave. I sometimes see these adorning the walls of a museum. They and all too few (static and flying) products still in existence are all thats left to remind us, of the companies who mainly shrivelled into something called Bae Systems. :confused:
mmitch.

Two adds from the September 26, 1940 issue of Flight that I found in the basement of a used bookstore a while back. All kinds of these adds but I went with the Rolls Royce and Vickers Armstrong adds.

Dan

As an aside to these adverts from Contact, you maye be interested that today I added 13 new scans of Contact covers to my Contact magazine database. The page is here
http://www.cambridgeairforce.org.nz/RNZAF%20Contact.htm

I just love Maurice Conly’s artwork, for an amateur who was almost thrown into the job when he failed pilot training due to a medical problem, he certainly did an awesome job of capturing the Air Force on canvas. There’s a lot of variety in his work (in later life he designed most of NZ’s coins and stamps up till the 1990’s). I particular like the cover with the ADU member on April 1943, and the Mossie on the Christmas 1944 issue. 🙂