I did my first flight at Teesside Airport air show in 1968 in a Britten Norman Islander. I remember the Lightning display being short, but spectacular. I never knew it when it was RAF M st G. I wonder where the Spitfire and Tempest are now !
I attended an unforgettable week's 'camp' with our school CCF at MSG in April 1963. This was an amazing flashback- the Spitfire and Tempest , the buildings, etc. Thank you.
Some memories for me, I was a young meteorological assistant at MSG back in the early sixties. I remember 92 sq with Hunters and 33 sq with Javelins, followed by 226 OCU with Lightnings. There is some really nostalgic stuff on RU-vid!
For 40 years the Welbeck Estate Group based in Norway have specialised in the purchase of entire UK former MOD sites, mainly servicemen's housing estates, also airfields and entire sites at places such as RAF Hemswell, RAF North Coates, RAF West Raynham, RAF Edzell, Strike Command HQ RAF Bawtry and RAF Sculthorpe. Since 1981 Welbeck's stated aim is the preservation and upgrading of military properties rather than redevelopment, having acquired 36 sites to date.in all. Welbeck's chairman, Roger Byron-Collins is the son of an RAF Aircrew Officer of 40 years' service and all his colleagues have an RAF background. Welbeck Estate Group (twsq.co.uk) first military purchase was the entire NCO MQ housing estate at RAF Faldingworth, Market Rasen, Lincs in 1981. Over the ensuing 40 years the following military facilities acquired included the following:
Hi - these are my Grandads films, and he kept fantastic records but sadly this film is with out date and out of series from the rest of the films. Happily i am off to a family party this weekend so will see if his surviving children can deduce a date. Best regards
THE NORTH OF ENGLAND - BILLINGHAM, DARLINGTON, MIDDLESBROUGH, NEWCASTLE, STOCKTON, YORK & YARM - NEIGHBOURS AND LOCAL HISTORY Most people living in the North of England think they know their neighbours and local history but how would you know your neighbour worked for MI6? Most who knew the Fairclough family didn’t have a clue that from the seventies Bill Fairclough was a secret agent (MI6 codename JJ) working for various intelligence agencies. What’s more they had no idea he was following in his parents’ footsteps. Bill's parents met during the Second World War when his father, ostensibly working for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), worked secretly on creating bombs to wipe out the Nazi's industrial hinterland. They married in Yarm in 1941. After the war in Europe ended in May 1945, Dr Richard Alan Fairclough continued to work for British Intelligence (MI1). Not long after retiring from ICI in the seventies, Richard Fairclough opened and ran an antiquarian book shop business in Yarm until his death in 1987. The book shop was a bit of an enigma as it was also a haunt for spooks. When not gated at St Peter’s School, York Bill Fairclough spent most of his childhood and early teens in the North East of England. As a child in the fifties he was educated at Red House School in Norton. He lived in Billingham and then in a vast white house (once the home of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) in Norton Green overlooking the duck pond. In Bill’s teens, the Faircloughs lived in Middleton St George and later in Yarm. He also lived in flats he rented near nightclubs he helped run during the late sixties and early seventies in Portrack, Stockton-on-Tees and Jesmond in Newcastle upon Tyne. Conveniently for him they were near the offices of the firm of Chartered Accountants he worked for in Middlesbrough and Newcastle upon Tyne. So if you lived, worked or visited any of these places you may well have unwittingly encountered this “spooky” family, been their neighbours or inhabited the houses they lived in. A quick web-search will even disclose some of the addresses where they lived. Mind you, if you live in any of them now, best sweep them for bugs! Details of where the Faircloughs lived and worked are given in most of Bill Fairclough’s bios on the web such as can be found at everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/bill-fairclough. If you were as fascinated as we were, you can also read the raw fact based thriller Beyond Enkription, the first stand-alone novel to be released in The Burlington Files series (theburlingtonfiles.org/#/reviews). It’s a memorable and distinctively different noir espionage thriller based on his and his family’s experiences in 1974.
