My Uncle Sid was a passionate lover of all things mechanical. He loved anything to do with the railways, owned several motor bikes and was one of the first people in our area to buy a motor car. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, he was the one who famously drove his car on the ice covering the River Avon from Shakespeare’s Boatyard to King John’s Bridge during the really bad winter of 1963….with me in the front passenger seat! A deed that almost cost him his manhood when my Mum found out about it!His greatest love of all however, was the aeroplane and it was Uncle Sid who would occasionally take me in his car to the outskirts of various airfields (civilian and military) to just sit in the sunshine and watch aircraft of all shapes and sizes taking off and landing while we ate sandwiches and drank lemonade (at least mine was lemonade).He would take the time to explain all about them to me (the aircraft that is, not the sandwiches), identifying their various types and their probable destinations.It was also around this time (1960/1961) that I began to keep a written diary and one of my first entries was to describe the day he took me to an air-show up North and how he paid for both of us to have a ride in an old, 1930s passenger biplane.That plane was a deHavilland Fox Moth and I wrote the following passage about my very first experience of flying in my diary that very evening….

Uncle Sid paid £2 10 6d (!!!) for us to go in a Fox Moth Biplane. We sat inside a small cabin at the front and the pilot sat outside behind us like he would in the Gypsy Moth that we looked at earlier. We flew around the airfield and over a river. The landing was a bit bumpy (and slightly worrying) and the noise of the engine was very loud. It was the best thing ever. I do think though that Uncle Sid is more of a boy than me sometimes!"