Coventry Airport 70th Birthday not celebrated
04.05.06
Painstaking research by a local historian has revealed a forgotten birthday at Coventry Airport. Ralph Page has spent years researching local aviation history and recently discovered the airport was set to mark its 70-year milestone on May 1 - an anniversary which had somehow been overlooked over the years after the airport changed hands several times.
Created as a joint venture between Armstrong-Whitworth Aircraft Ltd and the former Coventry Corporation, the site's official opening and first flight occurred on Friday, May 1, 1936. No record of that event exists in the Evening Telegraph, but the paper does record a flight by test pilot Alan Campbell-Orde, in a Scimitar, 25 days later.
Mr Page was only four at the time but still vividly recalls the occasion. The 74-year-old bachelor said: 'I remember as a little lad seeing someone cutting a ribbon. It was a freezing day. My father was fanatical about planes and we used to go there on a regular basis.'
The airport was built by Armstrong-Whitworth Aircraft Ltd which already had a plant at what is now Jaguar's Whitley research and development site (then called Whitley Abbey), just off the A45, in the early 1920s. After developing the Whitley bomber in the early 1930s, the firm needed to expand.
Mr Page said: 'Everything came together, and in 1935 there were 3,000 labourers armed only with shovels who swarmed to this site to slice off the top of the hill and create Baginton Airport. They slept under bushes, in barns and wherever they could, and in 10 months they had built the airport. The men not only provided Coventry with an airport, but helped transform the city into an international centre of industry.'
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