Joint Project Leaders David Hassard and Bill Downey report…
The demand for talks on Kingston’s aviation heritage
continued
through 2019. Despite never having actively promoted them we gave 29
talks this year with an attendance of 956 including 221 school
children. This brings the total over the last eight years to 224
talks
to 8,488 people. The most popular talk remains “Bat Boat to Red Arrows”
covering the whole history from 1912 to 1992 followed by “Sopwith
Aviation and its aircraft through the Great War”. “The aviation
industry in Surrey in the Great War” also attracts some groups, whilst
new talks this year were “Sir Thomas Sopwith” for a group visiting the
Brooklands Museum and recently “The Great Atlantic Air Race 1919”.
Enquiries about bookings for talks can be made via
kahp2012@hotmail.co.uk We do not charge for talks but donations from
some talks this year have maintained our funds at a level which allows
us to continue with the project and keep our website running as a
digital archive with worldwide access.
Surprise activities this year have been three
unplanned
exhibitions. One was in Dorking for the Surrey County Council “Surrey
in the Great War Project” and two at Claremont Fan Court School in
Esher linked to their new Science and Technology Centre named after Sir
Sydney Camm who based his Hawker Aircraft design team in their historic
mansion from 1940 to 1945.
Thanks to our volunteers we were able to display our Hawker Aircraft Company exhibition panels, photographs and paintings. In addition we had a new Sir Sydney Camm slideshow running on their large TV and displayed new information panels summarising the Hawker aircraft design work at Claremont.
The “100 Years Ago This Week” e-mailed Newsletters
have remained our main focus throughout 2019 with 51 issues. The number
of subscribers worldwide is more than 600.We plan to continue
researching and publishing the historical Newsletters but although
there are significant developments for the Sopwith company in 1920
there are probably not enough events and contemporary photographs to
support an issue every week. We are hoping to go back and expand the
information on the Sopwith School of Flying and Sopwith Aviation
Company activities in 1912 and early 1913 which was summarised very
briefly in our first newsletter in May 2013.
These historical newsletters are an experiment in
tracking down as much information as possible about the company and its
products and sharing our findings chronologically 100 years later. We
have deliberately resisted adding comments or drawing any retrospective
conclusions. However, faced with the exceptional achievements of the
Sopwith Aviation Company since 1912 quantified in the last newsletter
we are tempted to explore the reasons for such success and have started
to list significant contributary factors, some obvious, some less so.
This needs much more study and consideration. If you know of
existing analyses or studies of the reasons behind Sopwith’s unique
success or would like to share your own thoughts on this, do please get
in touch with David Hassard via dh20tg@gmail.com.
To sign up for the weekly e-mailed Newsletters
please go to <kingstonaviation.org/sign-up-for-our
newsletter.html>.