Home is the Halifax: An Extraordinary Account of Re-building a Classic WWII Bomber and Creating the Yorkshire Air Museum to House It by Ian Robinson

Author:Ian Robinson [Robinson, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / Aviation
ISBN: 9781909166813
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2012-09-19T21:00:00+00:00

C-160 Transall unloading Bristol Hercules engines at Evington.

Ian ‘Lucky’ Thompson. 427 Squadron, waiting for the ‘Lancs’ to catch up!

THE THREE LONDONERS

Once we had started looking in detail at the outer wings from the Hastings at Catterick, we were to discover very badly corroded sections of the main spars, and this caused us considerable worry. But yet again, good fortune was shining down on us as in London we had three very loyal supporters, all ex-RAF. They were Bill Lord, Don Smith and Alf Belson. They were all very active in the local RAF Association, and much to my amazement Bill phoned one day to say they had discovered two brand new Hastings outer wings at a scrap dealer’s yard in the south of England. They were in box packing cases and to all intents and purposes they were brand new. Apparently the ‘scrappie’ had bought them purely for the wood content – as you can imagine the packing cases were pretty big.

Our three supporters set about raising several thousand pounds to purchase the wings on our behalf and to pay for transporting them to Elvington. A truly magnificent effort from these exceptionally great supporters. The ‘three Londoners’ as we nicknamed them, continued to support the museum by raising money (I think the Chiswick branch of RAFA became involved) and Bill and Don collected some undercarriage wheels for us. Bill’s part-time job was working for television, chauffeuring various celebrities about, but his own mode of transport was a Morris 1000 estate, complete with trailer, and his mate Don told me of frequent hair-raising adventures when they were collecting bits and pieces for the Halifax project.

The pièce de resistance was when Bill wanted to apply heat to an axle that was locked in a Halifax wheel hub. He had a friend who worked in the Concorde hangar at Heathrow and without any hesitation he took the offending hub into the hangar where they were working on Concorde. Bill lit his welding torch and just before he started to work on our bit, security men appeared from all directions. Bill, Don, Morris 1000, trailer and all were evicted unceremoniously and told: “Don’t ever come here again!” Bill took all this in his stride, but Don was a little disturbed to say the least.

Our next major problem was the undercarriage. With the exception of the Halifax V, all were equipped with the French-designed Messier units, comprising a large casting in magnesium. To the best of my knowledge at that time no examples existed, and because it was not designed by Handley Page, no drawings were available to us. However, much to my surprise and delight, I was told that one example of the main wheel arch did indeed exist and it was owned by the RAF Museum, although in store at Cardington in Bedfordshire. New to our scene was an engineer called John Wilkinson, who ran his own engineering works near Leeds. John said that if we could get this example of an undercarriage leg, he could use it as a pattern to manufacture the rest from scratch.

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