Janet Gulland posing beside our Supermarine Swift on 21st March (Julian Temple).
flying displays over Brooklands remain bleak. Fascinating memories of all aspects of
Brooklands have been recorded for our archives since the mid-1980s and extracts from some of these oral histories will be included in the new Aircraft Factory exhibition. Plenty of potential interviewees remain and I would like to hear from anyone willing to help with this very rewarding work. Our latest session saw Tamsin Birch and myself interview retired Vickers/BAC/British Aerospace aircraft engineer Janet Gulland (known to many of us as the long-serving Chairman of the RAeS Weybridge Branch) about her career. This began when she was Vickers’ first female graduate engineering apprentice in 1958 and included work on Scimitar production at South Marston, in the Flight Test Department at Wisley (including test flights on Valiants and VC10s) and then on other military aircraft programmes at Brooklands and Kingston, until she retired in 1992.
Historical research is another important task which involves many of us on an on-going basis; some of this reminds us of the notable past events with 2017 including, for example, the 90th
CAR RIDES
February half-term We kicked-off with an exceedingly busy day which led onto an otherwise non-stop and unre- lenting week, marred only by the arrival of a huge downpour of rain at lunchtime on Wednesday (which knocked out the afternoon session).
The queues never seemed to get any shorter and we even had to overrun on Friday, such was the popularity of car rides. At times we had to pull out all the stops with all the cars and drivers
57
Replica 1911 Antoinette flown in the Magnificent Men... film seen at Brooklands c1970 (BAC photo WH45 via Brooklands Museum).
anniversary of Parry Thomas’s tragic death at Pendine Sands and that the Brooklands Aero Clubhouse will be 85 years old in May. Other new historical information can be found through random searches on the internet or in our archives and collections and even through chance conversations. A good example of the latter is that I recently discovered the fate of the purpose-built flyable replica Antoinette monoplane used in the classic 1965 film Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines. For many years I knew only that it had been acquired by Surrey resident Eric Sk- ingley and then housed in one of BAC’s vast flight sheds at Brooklands in the early 1970s, when it also appeared at a Brooklands Society Reunion. Eric later told me that it was sold to Switzerland in 1993 but on chatting to one of his former neighbours (Ted Angiolini) I learned the sad news that the aeroplane had survived in outdoor stor- age near Leatherhead until scrapped just over a decade ago! If anyone else remembers seeing this unique machine at Brooklands in the 1970s, I would be delighted to hear from them.
Julian Temple Update
we could muster, but still the visitors kept coming. The weather ranged from bitterly cold and overcast to bright sunshine, which called for a mixed bag of thermals and sunglasses for the team, and some welcome hot tea at the close of play each day.
The traffic lights on the Finishing Straight did stall things a little at times and the cars often tended to arrive back together, but otherwise it seemed to work well. We even found time to
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