Past & Present Page 7

The war soon became quite inevitable and civil flying was finally banned on August 31st 1939, and the RAF VR was called up and mobilised on September 1st. All the best pilots and instructors were swept up gradually into the RAF in the preceding months. The Club continued to function on a purely social basis until 24th October 1940 when the RAF requisitioned the airfield, the remaining assets were sold off and the resulting sum of £3,700 was loaned to the Government on an interest free basis as a patriotic gesture.

In the meantime, in May 1935, the Luftwaffe had been over taking high level vertical photographs of the airfield as a potential future target!

Before the Club was forced to leave Braunstone one interesting thing happened, an Air Defence Corps was started in Leicester, and presumably at the airfield. This was No 1 Founder Squadron, and by September 1939 there were 200 squadrons in Britain altogether - they later developed into todays A.T.C.

The remaining Tomtit aircraft that were sold off with the Clubs assets mostly went to Test Pilots for their personal mounts, and one, G-AFTA is the last of these still flying, believed to be in The Shuttleworth Collection at Old Warden.

During the war Lindsay Everard was knighted for services to aviation and commerce. All through the war the Clubs engineer (Tommy Warren), helped to keep Britains Spitfires in the air, still working as an aero engineer.

After World War II the Braunstone field was not released for flying, so the Club was homeless, during 1946 Flt.Lt. Roy Winn kept it going using his cafe in the Market Place in Leicester as its address.

Sir Lindsay Everard was still the President of the Club, and generously offered his private field for the Clubs use as soon as it was released from RAF hands. It had somehow acquired a Clubhouse in the intervening years so the Club took up residence in 1947 and hired aircraft to get members flying again.

Immediately there was much to-ing and fro-ing by the various reformed civilian clubs visiting each other in the post war euphoria and we find entries from all over Britain and as far afield as Switzerland in the Visitors Book.

The Leicester Gliding Club also had hangerage on the same field and the old pre-war County Flying Club went into voluntary liquidation and merged with the L.A.C. donating £1000 to Club funds in the process. This must have been very welcome in the hard times just post war.