AR501

And, if it is of any use, another one.

Best wishes

If I may offer some info – the hampden crashed two miles from the airfield

Apart from the Wellington mentioned above, the hill did not claim any other a/c. The operational record book for 22 OTU contains the following poem:

The versatile runway

There is the sound of aviodomy by night,
When Wellesbourne’s Wimpeys in reluctant flight
Pass o’er the King’s Head; Ah! the natives say
‘The runway for tonight is B to A.

The C-D runway bears on Wellesbourne House
And you should hear the Flight Commanders grouse
‘The wind is light; that runway’s short,’ they say
So kindly lay the flarepath B to A.

The E-F runway faces up a hill,
A sight that makes most pilots quite ill,
And so, unless a gale blows down that way
We leave the dammed old runway B to A.

Blue Robin, if you care to PM me you are welcome to come over and see the many photos, log book copies and letters from veterans who served at Wellesbourne in WW11

I have just looked inside the cover of the book and YES, it is Harry A Smith!

Hi Ant,
Thank you for adding / correcting information. Back in ’81 Peter Vaughan Fowler asked me to make two models of his Lysander and the info re ‘training role’ came from Hendon, during my research.

I have just been in the loft and dug out the Air Extra published to coincide with the opening of Hendon. It states that R9125 was delivered to 5MU on Aug 2nd 1940, then allocated to 225Sqdn. Subsequently served with a number of different units and on October 15 1944 was alocated to 161 Sqdn.
The item then says ‘ although it is not certain whether or not this aircraft actually carried out any such operations.

If it’s my photo in ‘the well known magazine’, I was there at 5:00am and not having yet seen a copy of the mag, the ‘undercarriage up’ shot was taken on the return of 558 as it passed and turned, undercarriage down The joy of long lenses!

Keep smilin!