Clothall Common
CLOTHALL COMMON: Private airstrip and model flying?
Location: E of the B656 (the old A507), 1nm E of Baldock (Now a housing estate)
Period of operation: 1960s but only for ULAA - PFA types in the earlier years? Possibly still used up until the early years of the 21st century, especially for model flying
NOTES: I have been here to visit, in about 2002, seen the hangar and glimpsed a couple of dust laden very old aircraft stored within. In the mid 1970s it appears that the Auster J/4 G-AIJS, 7FC Tri-Traveller G-APYU and Cessna 175B Skylark G-ARML of Woolmer Aircraft Ltd were based here. When I visited this site it appeared only model flying was taking place.
SOME MEMORIES
In an article published in the September issue of Light Aviation magazine Pete White describes coming upon CLOTHALL COMMON purely by accident when hitch-hiking with a friend in their ATC garb nearby in the 1960s and getting stuck for a while near Baldock. Their attention was grabbed by hearing; “……the wonderful sound of a twin-cylinder JAP engine ‘putt-putt-putting’ around the sky and, lo and behold, it was attached to the front end of an Aeronca 100.
We walked in the direction it had just landed and discovered CLOTHALL COMMON (my capitals) and met Albert Etheridge building a Curry Wot in the hangar, Jes Wilson who owned one of those new Beagle Terriers and John Chapman the owner of the delightful little Aeronca ‘bathtub’ we had previously been watching.
When John offered to take us two young intrepid travellers for a flight in his Aeronca G-AEWV we were absolutely delighted. The memories of looking out of the front screen at a lonely little spark plug and the rockers merrily singing away as we floated about the evening summer sky has stayed with me and epitomises the grass roots flying that I now enjoy being a part of.”
A PERSONAL MEMORY
Many years later Pete White was a founding member of a group that acquired the Aeronca
11AC Chief G-IVOR – the main subject of that article. I have a picture of G-IVOR in my Air
Shows article - see CRANFIELD.
Reading the phrase, “one of those new Beagle Terriers,” takes me back. When about fourteen
or fifteen I and my good friend Mike Parker had saved up for a flight from WHITE WALTHAM.
The old pilot with a gammy leg, (probably about my age as I write this), walked us out
to a Terrier. It was only a short local ‘flip’ but all we could afford in those days, but even so
we were treated to a stall turn to experience zero gravity.
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