The other flying circus

TELLING me that happy memories were brought back by Looking Back's earlier accounts of the visits of aviation ace Sir Alan Cobham's "flying circus" to East Lancashire in the early 1930s, 77-year-old local history digger Hubert Hartley - who remembers going to see its planes on the "airfield" up near the Sett End area of Blackburn - wonders whether readers can pinpoint the date of another old-time air show he saw in the town as a boy.

"Your articles reminded me of another flying circus before the Cobham ones," he says. "This one took place on a field off Livesey Branch Road - on the south side, maybe a quarter mile past Gib Lane going towards Feniscowles.

"The big name of the outfit was Kingsford-Smith, a noted aeronaut of the time."

Admitting his memory is fickle and this show might have actually have taken place after the Cobham shows at Guide in 1933 and 1934, Hubert, of Waverley Road, Knuzden is, in fact, too young to recall the first visit of Australian First World War air hero Charles Kingsford Smith's display to Blackburn as it took place in September, 1919 - before he was born.

But did Kingsford Smith he come back in later years after staging that first "Flying Week" at Witton Park, as Hubert's recollection suggests?

Certainly, he made a big impression on East Lancashire when he and a colleague first dropped in unexpectedly at Nelson in that first post-war summer 80 years ago. The pair, flying a war surplus DH6 trainer biplane and hoping to make money providing pleasure "flips" for holidaymakers at Morecambe in the same way as other flyers at Blackpool, got lost in the Pennine haze on their way from Leeds and landed at a farm near Walton Spire. They were soon surrounded by sightseers and quickly decided they could attract as many customers at Nelson as they could at the seaside. And despite the high cost of a ten-minute flip in their plane - the then steep sum of two guineas (£2.10) - by the end of two afternoons they had netted £40 and sold the plane to a local consortium who hoped to carry on where they left off.

That venture and the newly-formed Nelson Flying Club associated with it crashed when the plane was wrecked soon afterwards in an accident on the ground and by gale damage. But Kingsford Smith and his colleague had gone away with enough money to buy three more war surplus aircraft - two-seater BE2E biplanes - with which they and two ex-Flying Corps captains and two mechanics they hired went from town to town plying the "flips" trade.

They returned to East Lancashire for the September holidays, doing nearly a fortnight at Burnley with business so brisk all three planes were often in the air at the same time. Next, they came to Blackburn's Witton Park for a week where they charged one guinea for a flight over the town.

Kingsford Smith, later knighted for making the first east-west crossing of the Atlantic by air and taking part in the first round-the-world flight, was killed in 1935, aged 38.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.