Just had look at some Tudor pictures on t’internet, and you might be right. Anyone else got any thoughts?

Great pictures. Can anyone explain the patches of darker paintwork above each wing?

Ahhh….god bless local rags. Life would be so much duller without ’em.

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.

I read through the thread of three years ago, thinking first that the original poster was just indulging in some serious winding up, and then with the growing feeling that, ye gods, he really does believe in all this! I am amazed at the restraint shown by many of the posters: I am a moderator on another (non-aviation) forum and I know how easy it is to get carried away when faced with bone-headedness of such a high order. Well done everyone.
At the risk of opening another can of worms, did anyone spot the theory doing the rounds quite a few years back that the Wright brothers’ pre-1906 flights never took place, as a result of which the first sustained powered flight was therefore by Alberto Santos-Dumont?
One of the supposedly serious newspapers gave it half a page. I managed to get a letter in the following week pointing out that there plenty of eyewitness and character witness reports to the Wrights’ early flights, but it still raises my blood pressure even now to think about it.

Oh, that’s a b*gger…I’ll be at the Festival of Power at Cholmondeley Hall. Never mind, I’ll be with you in spirit as you’re (almost) within walking distance. Would have been nice to say hello.

The large buildings between Goldcliffe Close and the M62 are the various sheds of the Gemini Retail Park, notably Marks and Spencer (the lozenge-shaped one with the corner cut off) and its neighbour Ikea. All of them were purpose-built.
Most of the old air base was was to the west of junction 6 of the M62, so I would doubt the retail park was built on parts of the base. Somewhere I’ve got a 1960s one-inch map and I’ll try to find it, just to make sure.
The photographs on Google maps show the old hangars (now demolished) and you can just make out the line of the second runway. Last time I went past a few days ago there was next to nothing left, only the outline of the old taxiways where the concrete had been dug up.