OUR story from a couple of weeks ago on the memoirs of the 4th Lord Gainford has been brought crashing down to earth. Lord Gainford, you will remember, was a member of the Pease family who grew up in Swale House in Richmond.
His parents were keen early aviators, and aged about four in 1930, they took him for his first flight – or “flip” – in an Avro 504, flown by showman airman Captain Ted Fresson, who had landed in a field near Richmond specially for the occasion.
The safety belt in the passenger seat wasn’t very long, so young George’s father simply sat him on his knee in the open-topped plane and held him tightly as they enjoyed a flip over the town looking down on the local landmarks.
But…
A First World War Avro 504 biplane
“The plane you pictured was NOT an Avro 504K,” said David Walsh in east Cleveland, whose email landed just as others along very similar lines from Ian Saunders and Peter Richardson were beginning their flights through the ether. At the same time, a letter was winging its way through the post from Bill Bartle in Barnard Castle.
“It is in fact something totally different, a Miles M2 Hawk, a British two-seater light aircraft of the 1930s, of which only 55 were built,” said Peter. “The Avro 504, on the other hand, was a tremendously successful early British biplane which first flew in 1913 and served right through the First World War mainly as a trainer, but also as a fighter and a bomber.
Yorkshire Air Museum’s AVRO 504 biplane heads for the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme commemorations in 2016
“Around 9,000 of them were built to serve with the Royal Flying Club, the Royal Naval Air Service and, of course The Royal Air Force when it came into being on April 1, 1918.
“The Avro 504 was so successful that production continued until the early 1930s.
“Including the examples that were exported and those built under licence, in all a total of over 11,000 were built.”
David and Ian had researched the plane that we pictured.
“What you showed was G-ACOC, a Miles M2 Hawk light monoplane aircraft first registered on March 10, 1934, to Commander C Croxford of Catterick,” they agreed.
Who Cmdr Croxford was we do not know, but it seems likely that his plane could have been photographed by the Peases in or around Richmond.
Cmdr Croxford sold his plane in June 1937 to pilot Philip Bradley who kept it at Tollerton Airport in Nottingham until August 2, 1937, when he hit a tree on take-off at Bourgelden in Alsace in France. The plane was destroyed, although neither the pilot nor his passenger were hurt.
Can anyone tell us anymore about Cmdr Croxford of Catterick?
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