AERONCAS

Quiet skies and old aeroplanes…

Arthur W J G Ord-Hume tells his remarkable 70-year-old story of Aeroncas

If you had popped into Somerton on the Isle of Wight in those heady days immediately after the end WWII, you would have found a typical aerodrome facing an uncertain future, as its wartime usefulness was no more. Visiting aircraft were few and far between, occasionally parked on the grass was the odd RAF Tiger Moth, which had braved the Solent crossing from Eastleigh. American

Piper Cubs, all with Yankee ‘NC’ registrations followed by a host of numerals, sometimes made social visits, no doubt to cement wartime relations with locals before being repatriated to the ‘land of the hamburger’. Seagulls soared uninterrupted through skies unsullied by the unexpected arrival of occasional RAF machines which had once used the field in an emergency in time of conflict.

Owners Saunders-Roe had flown countless Walrus amphibians from the turf once used by Spartan

Airlines with their triple-engined Cruisers. Wartime visitors had included a Dakota and a disorientated

German pilot in a Messerschmitt Bf.109!

Yes, Somerton was a peaceful oasis on the rising ground to the west of bustling Cowes where, in pre-war days, yachts had assembled and raced for kudos and trophies. War took its toll though, and yachts were now almost the nautical version of hen’s teeth, especially at Cowes, which was only just getting used to having restarted a regular ferry crossing to the mainland.

Anyway, if you had been at Somerton in 1947 you would have found a few interesting relics abandoned in the hangars. Besides some identifiable bits of Walrus, there were several obscure airframes, stripped of everything useful, which were heaped in one of them.

One was never quite certain whether they were recent, survivors of better times, or simply things nobody wanted any more. Over at Gatwick Racecourse, for instance, loads of abandoned pre-war aircraft, many stored six and more years in the open, were being piled up and burned as plans were made to expand the small grass airfield which served the racegoers.

But sharp-eyed observers in those far-off days at Somerton would have had no difficulty recognising a large and semi-circular rudder as being that of an American-built Aeronca C.3. The rest of the aircraft, lying about the earthen floor of the hangar, was not so

Main Paul Simpson poses with G-AEVT, a British-built Aeronca 100, in his back garden at Pinner Hill in 1948. The original wings were beyond repair, so they were replaced by those from G-AEVE, the so-called Aeronca Ely. This was the aircraft he crashed as a result of wind shear.

“There were no instruments, no bracing wires and the engine looked as though it had spent some years reclining at the bottom of a rather unkempt cesspit ”

Left I pose with our handiwork as Paul clicks the shutter on the box camera. The aircraft was finished in light blue and silver. With its British-made Aeronca J.99 JAP engine, J A Prestwick’s copy of the American E.113C flat twin. The Peterborough-built Aeronca 100, G-AEVT, was slightly different from the US original with its wooden ailerons and mass-balanced control surfaces.

easily identifiable. Since aircraft preservation and conservation was an unheard of and clearly eccentric occupation, nobody thought to attempt rebuilding these old relics. As an example of this, a tatty old Hornet Moth was turfed out to be burned at Gatwick. It was spotted in time by a lunatic enthusiast who asked the workmen with shovels and boxes of matches if he could have it. “Yes. take it away,” they said, assuming that he must be some sort of utter fool. Which he did. It still flies today!

Certificate of Registration

Well, a young ex-RAF chap called Robin BrodieJames happened to be at Somerton and saw the Aeronca and asked if he could have it. There was an exceptional bonus with this heap – an engine and, of all things, the pre-war logbook and Certificate of Registration! He was not to know at the time, but the last two items were vital if he was ever to succeed in getting this heap of bits back into the air.

The chap he spoke to saw the opportunity to make an unexpected load of money. “Thirty-five quid,” he said hopefully. The young man duly handed over a fist-full of big, white, folding fivers and then tied the Top When all was complete, G-AEVT was loaded onto Paul’s family car for a pre-rush hour drive to Elstree Aerodrome. This poor snapshot was taken in the dimness of dawn in January 1950. Note the open sunroof where the co-driver (me) will sit for the journey. aircraft onto his very elderly – but fortunately angular – car. The lot crossed the Solent to Lymington aboard the small car ferry.

Brodie-James, born in 1929, was fresh out of the RAF. He had decided to take up farming so had bought some land at Worplesdon between Guildford and Woking and, from a small holding there, launched himself on his new career. In his spare time, he thought, he could rebuild the Aeronca and fly it about from his fields. Ah... the dreams of youth!

Now, flying, compared to farming, is easy. Farming is hard work. It calls for unending hours and the rewards are uncertain. A slave to weather, the life of a farmer is unenviable. Those who have never experienced it reckon it’s a golden opportunity to cavort with nature – and fly your own aeroplane in the copious spare time you expect to have at your disposal. (At this prospect, the ‘real farmer’ explodes in a rage and shouts ‘spherical objects!’ at the top of his voice.)

It took the pure-minded Robin Brodie-James two summers to realise the futility of his hopes. In the interim, his dreamed-of aeroplane stood in an open-fronted barn which doubled as a cowshed. For

some reason, cows love aircraft and enjoy rubbing against them and chewing their fabric. In desperation, Brodie-James re-covered the fuselage in red-doped fabric – and fenced off the corner of the barn. This kept the animals at bay, but not all of the weather.

A desperate advertisement in the Exchange & Mart newspaper revealed he had reached the end of his tether. It read: ‘For Sale: Aeroplane, complete but in pieces. £35.’ My friend Paul Simpson and I were mad enough to consider this a reasonable project.

Paul had recently had the misfortune to write off his Aeronca 100, G-AEVT, which we had rebuilt at his home on Pinner Hill. He had taken off from Loughborough Aerodrome in Leicestershire to fly down to my landing strip behind my parents’ house in Hatch End, but when at a height of no more than 200ft, he was smitten by a squall line. The little Aeronca’s 37hp motor was a poor advocate for combating wind shear on climb-out and G-AEVT was driven vertically into a narrow ditch. Miraculously this ditch had saved Paul’s life as it allowed the full force of the impact to be taken on the wing-roots rather than the nose. It still put him in hospital for a long, long time though.

Parental rules…

The whole experience had somewhat altered our positions in life. Paul’s father was decidedly firm in his mandate to forbid Paul from ever attempting to go near an aeroplane again, let alone ever think of owning one.

My own parents, already deeply disappointed in me for not having followed what they viewed as a potentially promising career in music, were less forceful in their proclamation, but my father espoused that a ‘happy Ord-Hume household would be one that was free of contamination by things that flew’. And he didn’t just mean bluebottles in the kitchen. Put bluntly, he trusted that our house, garden, family and entire blasted environment would never see another aircraft close up. It was expected of me, as a good young lad, not to disobey a parental three-line whip.

And now there was the chance to acquire BrodieJames’ Aeronca for the price he had paid for it. The problem was that neither Paul nor I had anything like that amount of cash to spare. Apart from looking after my newly flying Luton Minor, plus being the breadwinner for two, now rather infirm parents, I had long considered Dickens’ Mr Micawber to have been my unofficial accountant.

But Ord-Hume’s ‘laws of acquisition’ kicked in. The first of these proclaims that lack of funds will not prevent the acquisition of something that you fancy. And the second asserts that space will always expand to accommodate an extra object, regardless of size, shape or weight. I managed to scrape together £17.10/- and Paul managed to gather up the same amount. We drove down to Smarts Heath Road in Worplesdon, met the owner of the Aeronca and dutifully handed over our hard-gotten gains.

The aircraft really was a mess. There were no instruments, no bracing wires (and the Aeronca has hundreds of the damn things...) and the engine looked as though it had spent some years reclining at the bottom of a rather unkempt cesspit. But the whole thing had its vital logbook and a certificate of registration.

Experienced as we were at tying aeroplanes onto Paul’s gallant pre-war car, we made short shrift of loading up. One might add here that modern cars are quite useless at transporting light aircraft. Old cars had durable bumpers at front and rear. Onto these one could tie stout cross beams of ‘four-by-two’ front and back, which enabled a wing to stand along each side of the car. And there were plenty of places to which one could anchor a tow-hook for the fuselage.

Below The Aeronca we bought from Robin Brodie-James was an Americanbuilt model imported by the Aircraft Exchange & Mart Company at Hanworth. It also had the original E.113C engine but, to comply with our airworthiness requirements, it had been modified to dual ignition. After we had loaded up the aircraft in an all-too familiar manner, the owner and his dog posed for this starboard view of our caravan. By coincidence, this aircraft was G-AEFT – one letter different from our first model.

Access to the car was then over the bonnet and down through the sunroof (for the main driver), while the essential co-driver sat on top of the car, legs dangling through the open sunroof, to shout instructions to the bloke working the wheel and pedals below, while providing clear hand signals to bemused fellow motorists.

We set off from Surrey in this fashion for the drive back to my home at Hatch End. Pre-planning had ruled out all possibility of taking the machine to Paul’s home since it was reckoned likely to induce a family conflict that could only end painfully. For me, I had the benefit of an empty shed and was relying on the fact that every afternoon my father went for a walk that I had a clear line of sight across the fields, which would give me 10 minutes warning of his return.

We turned into the end of my road and waited, eagerly watching my front gate. At last my dear old dad appeared and set off down the road. We swiftly completed that final 200 yards and untied the aircraft from the car, standing all the pieces in the front garden. We carried the wings round into the back garden and put them securely in my storage building. It was then that I realised there had been a small miscalculation and the remaining space in the shed was fractionally too narrow for the fuselage. With a Dickensian assumption that ‘something would turn up’, we struggled to get the undercarriage off the Aeronca’s fuselage. It wouldn’t budge!

Fuselage storage

A good 30 minutes later we succeeded in detaching both legs and turned our attention to the matter of fuselage storage. The engine was removed easily enough but we now found we could not take the fuselage round the side of the house for, unlike the slim wings, there wasn’t sufficient room through the back gate. Drawing upon those hidden reserves of energy that desperation engenders, we lifted up the fuselage and man-handled it out into the street and through a field gate into my little airstrip. From here some supreme effort lifted it up and heaved it over the garden fence into the vegetable patch.

At this point eager eyes spotted my father advancing along a distant footpath. He was less than 10 minutes away… In a blind surge of effort, the fuselage was shoved into the shed. No, it didn’t quite fit but desperate times call for desperate actions and, to the accompaniment of a painful scraping sound and brute force, it more or less fitted and the door was heaved shut. Moments later, my father arrived in the front drive and commented on how hot and flustered we both looked. Later that evening, when an air of painfully artificial normality pervaded the Ord-Hume household, I happened to look outside the front door. There on the grass for all to see was the unmistakable presence of a pair of Aeronca undercarriage legs complete with Dunlop Aerowheels! And my father had not noticed them…

My plan was that very gradually I would introduce the new acquisition to the family in about a month or three. In reality I was thwarted by the postman. You see, my father had the same two first initials as me and so, when an official letter addressed to ‘Arthur W Ord-Hume’ arrived, it was dad who opened it.

I must say that he was jolly good about it in the end, especially as it dawned on him quite quickly that the ‘change of registered owner of an aeroplane’ document probably did not apply to him as he didn’t own an aircraft. But, he thought, he might know somebody who did – in which case it might just explain the often furtive behaviour of his aviative son...

Which is the story of how G-AEFT became accepted into the Ord-Hume family. Later on, I may just relate to you what happened next. ■

Top Paul enlarged the cabin of G-AEVT by adding windows behind the pilot but with G-AEFT, as well as this, we added a second door. ’VT’s sole cabin entry was on the starboard side: ’FT now had a door each side. We also gave ’FT a British-style pitot head on top of the cabane strut instead of underneath one of the wings.

Above G-AEFT, the aircraft that came from the home of a disillusioned farmer and lived in my garden shed for the duration of its rebuild, is still flying. This is a recent shot of it climbing away. Interestingly one notices that the E.113C has been replaced by a JAP engine. The giveaway is the rocker box covers.