On Port Meadow with Alan Trinder and friends

I’d been invited by Alan Trinder to watch him fly. “I’ll be at Port Meadow between 7.30 and 11.30 in the morning,” said the email he sent the night before. “The conditions look good. I hope you can make it.”

This is not Boeing 747s you understand but model aeroplanes. The ones you build yourself out of wood, tissue paper and the like, some from kits, others of your own design, many intricate and exquisite scale models of the real thing. For Alan is part of Oxford Model Flying Club and at 92 is its oldest member. How could I refuse?

And so it is, early one fine sunny morning last week, I find myself cycling up the Woodstock Road, through the pretty village of Wolvercote, and into the car park that faces the Meadow on the other side. This looks south over 300 acres of floodplain towards the Oxford skyline of domes and spires, the river Thames meandering alongside. It’s an idyllic scene. Cattle drink, young horses rear and buck playfully, the odd dogwalker and runner criss-cross the huge open space.

Covenanted in perpetuity to the Freemen of Oxford back in the 10^th century, it is they who have given Alan and the 100 or so members of his club permission to fly here on Port Meadow. I’d first come across them the previous week. As I was making my way homeward. The weather was grey and gloomy, very different to today. A small group of enthusiasts had gathered on a flat 25 metre square of grass, ‘the patch’ as it is known, set aside as a landing strip for model planes with remote controls. This was a training session led by the club ‘chair’ Simon Burch which included among others three generations of the Crews family, supporting Ryan aged 14 and now the youngest radio control flyer they have. He passed the practical test needed to fly solo the week after I met him. It was heartwarming to see the concentration on the face of this young pilot as he manoeuvred his plane; fiddling with the controls, watching as it taxied along the runway, lifted into the air, managed the cross wind and came down safely and smoothly without crashing. Ryan even accomplished a perfect loop the loop. Bravo. His great grandfather had been a pilot in the RAF, so flying must be in the blood.

But after a gentle drizzle descended, curtailing the session for the day, I am now back to meet Alan. He’s a free flyer which means his planes are designed to fly on their own. Once you let go they are at the mercy of the elements, the skill being in the design using simple mechanisms like rubber bands and aerodynamic modelling to propel them through the air. It’s a different kind of model aeroplane flying entirely, often with painstakingly but lovingly home-made creations. And as he doesn’t need a special ‘patch’ to launch or land his planes, he’s positioned himself near to the old war time concrete shelter. All that remains from WW1 days when this part of the Meadow served as a training aerodrome for the Royal Flying Corps and was used by ground crew when pilots were engaged in target practice for aerial bombing raids. The first job in the morning was to clear the cattle owned by locals who continued to use their common grazing rights.

In the car park there is an information board showing photographs of what it once looked like, it doesn’t show up on aerial images, a large complex accommodating about 800 personnel, with more than 60 aeroplanes using 11 hangars. They replaced the sheds built by James Betts and Co in 1910 as part of a flying school for students and locals called the Imperial Aero, destroyed in a gale in 1911. After this it was used as a stopping off point for military manoeuvres elsewhere. Airman’s Bridge (formerly Toll Bridge on the Godstow Road) was so named in memory of two pilots who crashed while attempting to land on their way to Cambridge on September 10, 1912. Another 17 men were killed in flying accidents between 1917 and 1918 while training or visiting the Meadow. A stone memorial has recently been erected in the bathing area by the bridge on which all their names are inscribed.

Alan shows no sign of his age as he springs up from his folding chair to shake me by the hand. Dapper in aviator sunglasses and peaked cap, Port Meadow is his favourite place to fly he tells me. It’s where his parents first courted in the 1920’s, taking advantage of the aeroplane flights in ex WW1 biplanes. Available for a song, pilots set up their own little businesses offering joy rides. And although he was brought up in Cowley where his dad worked as a lorry driver managing waste paper collection, it’s where he started flying when he was a boy.

“My father built model aeroplanes,” he smiles. “The first of his I remember was a scale model of an American Bell P-39 Airacobra fighter. He was very keen. We used to go to Farnborough air show every year. I vividly remember seeing an aircraft bomb and burn a ship constructed out of scaffolding at the Hendon Air Pageant in the 1930’s. I must have been about four.”

He was hooked. Training as a pharmacist in the days when they made the pills and potions from scratch, he continued with his hobby as much as family allowed, buying the bits and pieces he needed from Papels the hobby shop on St Clements (now gone but so memorable for the huge wingspan of the model aeroplane that once filled its front window) or Howes on Broad Street (these days found in Kidlington). And now he’s retired he comes when he pleases. The weather being so good, this is his third outing to this spot this week.

“It’s difficult to explain what the attraction is,” he answers when I ask him. “I think it must be a genetic thing. The pleasure you get when you put bits of tissue paper and wood together and they end up flying and staying in the air under their own power. And you think I made that, and it flies.”

I can see that there is certainly something of the early Wright brother experimentation about it as I watch him tinker with or ‘trim’ as I now know it is called in the trade, the little E20 model he has with him today. Mucking about with the wings and the tail until after several attempts at flight it suddenly catches a warm current of air, climbs up straight, before circling in a wide loop and coming gently to rest on the grass.

There are competitions. For who can build the best scale replica of full-scale aeroplanes. Spitfires and Skyhawks, Tiger Moths and Swordfish. They do look truly amazing. But mostly they are competing for the longest flight duration. “I have won occasionally,” says Alan. “But only because the other competitors lost their models in the river,” he adds modestly.

But somehow I get the feeling that Alan is not here for the glory of holding the top trophy. He makes and flies these models for the pure joy of it all. For the magic. For when I take my leave, he’s excited to see that there’s another hour or two of flying left before he needs to head home. And as I turn to wave goodbye, I think I am beginning to understand the appeal. Standing alone against this ancient landscape, I watch as this time he propels by catapult the Oxcat glider he has built to a friend’s design. Up, up it flies, higher and higher, then turning in a half loop followed by a half roll which brings the model back the way it came, before descending in slow, relaxed circles to the ground.

Bravo I shout, as he runs to collect it for another flight. Bravo I say.

Free flying photographs of replica scale models courtesy of Oxford Model Flying Club

Alan Trinder

Early morning on Port Meadow

Airman’s Bridge – with the plaque dedicated to Lieutenant C.A. Bettington and Second Lieutenant E. Hotchkiss from the Royal Flying Corps who met their deaths in the wreck of a monoplane 100 yards north of this spot on September 10 1912

The memorial stone for the airmen who died on Port Meadow during WW1. It was erected in May 2018, on the centenary of the death of one of the pilots, and was part of the Wolvercote WWW1 Aerodrome Memorial Project, designed to raise awareness of Port Meadow’s lesser known heritage.