THIS week, Peeps into the Past take to the skies with the London Transport Flying Club (LTFC) that was founded in 1931 and has been based at Fairoaks Airport near Chobham for 76 years.
Reader Bernard Newnham alerted me to a film the club that can be viewed on YouTube. The film was made to mark the club’s 75th anniversary.
The club has a fascinating story that began when some bus drivers put an aircraft on a low loader and took it around the bus garages of London. The club they formed was the largest of its kind in the world.
While I watched the film the penny dropped, because my 90-year-old father-in-law often recalls that when he was a young boy his father “took him up in his aeroplane”.
This airman was a mechanic for London Transport, based at its garage in Enfield. He must have been a member of the then-London Transport (Central Buses) Sports Association Flying Club.
It’s likely he learned to fly when he was in the Royal Flying Corps, and later the RAF, during and after the First World War. However, he did not fly from Fairoaks, as members of the club first flew from aerodromes north of London.
Broxbourne in Hertfordshire was one of them, where I expect my father-in-law took to the skies in the years prior to the Second World War.
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Back then members of the club had sixpence a week deducted from their wages for membership fees. By 1937 the club owned four aircraft and had a membership of 1,200.
The cost of dual flying instruction was eight shilling an hour, solo flying cost 10 shillings an hour, and if the pilot took up a fellow member the cost was 14 shillings.
In 1946, the club transferred to Fairoaks, where club member Ted Baker had already been instructing RAF pupils.
The club used an existing flight hut that members converted into a comfortable clubhouse. A smaller hut was rented from the Air Ministry for use as a tea room, along with a hanger on the southern perimeter of the airfield.
Ted Baker appears to have been something of a legend at the club at which he had learned to fly. Once he had returned to the club after the Second World War, he became its chief flying instructor and manager, retiring from those duties in 1969. By then he had flown 11,000 hours with the club, 7,000 as an instructor on Tiger Moths.
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Club members often travelled to Fairoaks in London Transport buses. Periodically, aircraft were replaced and new ones added. For example, in 1953, two ex-RAF Tiger Moths were purchased and one remained in service until 1964. It was later sold to comedian Dick Emery.
In 1991, following a meeting between the London Transport Sports Association and the club’s officers, it was proposed that the club would close.
However, the members took over the club themselves and the London Transport Flying Club Limited was formed and is still going strong. It states on its website that it is “an amateur sports club administered for and on behalf of its members. Those interested in joining will ideally be in current flying practice.”
Thanks go to Bernard and the LTFC for the photos seen here and Michael G Jones, author of Fairoaks Airport – an Illustrated History, which includes details of the club.
If you have some memories or old pictures relating to the Woking area, call David Rose on 01483 838960, or drop a line to the News & Mail.
David Rose is a local historian and writer who specialises in what he calls “the history within living memory” of people, places and events in the west Surrey area covering towns such as Woking and Guildford. He collects old photos and memorabilia relating to the area and the subject, and regularly gives illustrated local history talks to groups and societies. For enquiries and bookings please phone or email him at: [email protected]