Sterling Airlines

Charting Air Transport History with R.E.G. Davies
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4835-6517-0
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 316 Seiten

'Airlines: Charting Air Transport History with R.E.G. Davies' is a book created to celebrate the life and career of R.E.G. Davies, a leading air transport historian for over 50 years, first in commercial aviation, and then as Curator at the National Air and Space Museum. This volume is an edited compilation of contributions from many people who worked with, and/or who were friends with R.E.G. Davies, which also highlights Ron Davies's own achievements by including several of his own articles and reports.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sterling, Christopher H.

Leseproben

Chapter 2

R.E.G. Davies: Airline Historian

Valerie Lester
(with updating by the editors)

Ronald Davies knew more about civil airline history than anyone in the world partly because he lived through, and worked in, two thirds of its ninety years. He wrote 25 books on the topic. A highlight of his extensive personal library was some 250 loose-leaf binders, now managed by volunteers at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Air & Space, where he served for three decades as Curator of Air Transport. These binders—his dossiers— contain a peerless collection of articles and general information about all the world’s airlines, especially those of the formative years.

How does someone become such an authority? What meandering paths did Davies take to reach that point?

Early Life (1921-39)

Ronald Edward George (R.E.G.) Davies was born in Kent, England, on July 3, 1921. His mother was the head parlor-maid in the household of a “Miss Grace,” who Ron remembered might have been the sister of W.G. Grace, a famous cricketer. His father was a Chief Petty Officer in the Royal Navy. After his father retired, the family moved first to the Isle of Wight, then to Shaftesbury, in Dorset. Ron was four at the time. “I regard myself as a Shastonian—Shaston being the Saxon name for Shaftesbury; Paladwr is the Celtic name,” remembered Ron.

Ron was an only child, but not a loner. He played soccer and cricket, and did well at mathematics and geography, his favorite subject. He learned to love maps and to draw them at an early age by studying the map section in Fears Cyclopedia. He owned a dog called Fido, a cross between a wire-haired terrier and a cocker spaniel, whom he refers to as “one of our gang.” But perhaps the strongest intimation of Ron’s formidable ability to assemble and synthesize information came as a result of collecting cigarette cards. During his childhood, English cigarette companies like Players and Wills enclosed a card in each pack. Each card contained an image and information about a particular subject and made up part of a set. Topics included Footballers, Cricketers, Wonders of the Heavens, Products of the World, Cars, Trains, and (best of all) Aeroplanes.

“I supplemented my education with cigarette cards. I was quite a dab hand at playing games to win them, and was particularly good at “pitchings-on,” says Ron. “To acquire new cards, you had to ask someone who was about to light up ‘Do you have the cigarette card?’ If they gave it to you but you already had it, you’d swap it. There was huge competition at school to complete the set first.” With enthusiasm and perseverance, Ron amassed an excellent collection, and catalogued it with a graphic reference diagram. An avid young reader, his fiction included junior comics, then the “William” books and, later, “The Saint.” Shaftesbury Grammar School took care of Shakespeare, Walter Scott, and (in French) Victor Hugo and Molière. He admitted to not doing too well with Vergil and Livy.

“When I was at school, if we heard the sound of an aeroplane, we rushed to the window,” Ron continues.

The master of the class could not keep us away. After a while, instead of just looking, we specialized and began identifying types of planes as they flew over. I remember one time going to a local “barnstorming” air show, held in a farmer’s field, where I witnessed stunt flying and wing-walking, and entered a competition to guess an aeroplane’s fastest and slowest speeds (lost both times).

Ron was house captain for two years but had to leave school early. “My family wasn’t really poor, but we almost became so when my dad lost his job. To help out, my mother took in lodgers. My dad’s Navy pension came in every quarter, and this enabled him to treat the family to something special like a new armchair or my first bicycle.” In his teens, Ron saved his allowance of half-a-crown (2/6d) per week so that he could pay the entrance fee for the Civil Service clerical examination. In July 1938, just after his 17th birthday, he went up to London and spent an entire week taking the examination at Imperial College. He passed with flying colors (just short of the top 1%) and was offered a job awarding widows’ pensions in the Ministry of Health. He left school in July 1938 on a Friday and started work in London on the following Monday, at 25 shillings (£1.25) per week.

The Army (1939-46)

In April 1939, Davies volunteered for the Territorial Army (the British equivalent of the National Guard) and also started to study for the executive grade in the Civil Service. When the Second World War began in September, the Territorial Army swung into action, doing guard duty all over the country. Ron remembered:

On 27 August 1939, when we returned from Territorial summer camp, we signed on into the regular army. The next day I was guarding the Royal Air Force Fighter Command Headquarters at Stanmore, in north London. Our experience was minimal. We each had a rifle. We didn’t have much training, except to obey the sergeant major’s commands on the barracks square and on route marches. However, after the evacuation from Dunkirk, things became serious, and we prepared for a possible German invasion.

Ron underwent training on the Vickers machine gun. His instructors, Middlesex Regiment “old soldiers,” put the trainees through their paces. “They brought us quickly up to scratch,” says Ron. “I could still perform the drill today,” he claimed more than 60 years later.

In 1941, Davies was sent to a garrison in Budareyri, a little fishing village on the east coast of Iceland, where he continued his training. Iceland was strategically important because, if the Germans had taken it, it would have become a huge naval base for convoys and ships like the Bismarck, and a serious threat to the Allies. “We were there for almost a year, half a year training for Arctic warfare, and half training for mountainous conditions, all the time carrying our machine guns as well as our survival kit for camping out on the snow. We were very fit from carrying our guns on long route marches over the mountains, and were described in one newspaper as Britain’s toughest troops.” Paradoxically, the Arctic/mountain training was wasted—he would later land at sea level in Normandy during a heat wave.

On his return to Britain in 1942, Davies went to South Wales for training, and was soon driving a Universal Carrier, a small, versatile, tracked vehicle, ideal for swift mobility over rough ground where trucks could not venture. His regular passengers were the platoon sergeant, and the range finder for the Vickers gun.

Ron had what people would call “a good war,” in the sense that he saw quite a lot of action in his 1944-45 tour from the Normandy beaches to the Netherlands, but was never wounded. He merely suffered a hit by stones from an exploding mortar shell at Fontenay-le-Pesnil, where he also enjoyed the company of ants and stinging nettles while lying in a ditch to avoid fire from a German tank.

I had the distinction of being dive-bombed by the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force, and the Royal Air Force was much worse! Must have mistaken my little carrier for an enemy tank. It was very hot, and the ground was hard as concrete. There was a churchyard nearby, and my mate, Sam, and I found a wheelbarrow and transferred a gravestone to the top of our slit trench (fox hole) and crawled in. Safe as a concrete bunker! Our unit, the 49th (West Riding) Division, somewhat depleted from earlier action against the Panzers, took Le Havre, moved swiftly into Belgium, and then to Holland where we spent several months, guarding the Nijmegen bridge over the Rhine, until the end of the War on 5 May 1945. We were out in the field two days out of three, and finished up as occupation troops in the Ruhr area of Germany.

During the 1945-46 British occupation of the Ruhr, he turned in his faithful carrier, after driving it some 4,000 miles “mostly in 3rd or bottom gear, and at the end, burning almost as much oil as gasoline.” On demobilization in April 1946, with active service counting double, his papers confirmed that he “had served His Majesty’s armed forces for not less than twelve years, with a record of undetected crime.”

His Majesty’s Civil Service (1946-50)

After six weeks of home leave, Davies returned to the British Civil Service in mid-1946, where he was assigned to the newly formed Ministry of Civil Aviation, in the Economics and Intelligence Division. His duties involved monitoring danger areas of the United Kingdom, mostly Army and Navy firing ranges, and airfield and airport data. This post provided him the opportunity to flex his map-making skills.

In the fall of 1947, he transferred to a new section of the Ministry, the Department of Long Term Planning. It was headed by the young Peter (later Sir Peter) Masefield, fresh back from the British Embassy in Washington; it was here that Davies began his education in airline economics. “Working with Masefield and his technical adviser colleague, Peter Brooks, as technical adviser, and both of them pilots, was the equivalent of attending a university tutorial every day.” During this period, Ron...