The Years between the Wars –
an airfield of dual use: military and civil.
The First World War came to an end on 11th November 1918 leaving large stocks of aircraft engines and other parts in the hangars at Castle Bromwich, including numbers of Handley-Page 0/400s biplane bombers built in and around Birmingham. These had been checked and tested and made ready to be flown to their receiving squadron.
After the war some were retained by the RAF while the surplus was bought by the Handley-Page company who converted them into passenger planes mostly for a London-Paris service.
In 1919 the War Office (under Winston Churchill) decided to retain Castle Bromwich airfield permanently for use by the RAF, later licensing it to the Midland Aero Club. However, some land, buildings and railway sidings were returned to the Drainage Board.
A Base for the AAF
In December 1926 Castle Bromwich was as set up as one of the bases for the newly-formed Auxiliary Air Force. This was (and is) a voluntary reserve whose purpose was to provide reinforcement for the regular force. New facilities including hangars were built on site to accommodate the reserves who trained here at weekends and during their holidays.
The 605 Squadron is associated with Castle Bromwich. Formed in 1926 as a bomber unit, part of the AAF, it was known as the County of Warwick squadron and recruited largely in the Birmingham area.In 1939 the 605 was designated a fighter squadron and moved to Tangmere near Chichester; during the Battle of Britain it operated from RAF Northolt.
By the outbreak of the Second World War there were some 40 full-time RAF personnel posted here and 15 aircraft. With fewer flying hours and a higher level of skill available in flying and maintaining aircraft, the number of accidents decreased dramatically. Nonetheless accidents including fatalities still occurred and appear to have been equally balanced between pilot error and mechanical failure.
The British Industries Fairs
In 1920 the British Industries Fair opened a Midlands offshoot of its London exhibition, initially in disused hangars at Castle Bromwich adjacent to the railway and with the entrance on the Chester Road next to the station. Over the years, a series of buildings were constructed with trade exhibitions held there from 1920 until 1956. The intention was to present a shop window of British goods to overseas buyers. However, the exhibitions were also extremely popular with the general public.
There were soon initiatives to establish Castle Bromwich airfield for commercial use. The first of these unfortunately was the victim of the weather. An air service was run during the 1922 British Industries Fair from London to Birmingham, but suffered cancellations and saw limited use due to high winds and above average rainfall that year. The service was more successful the following year, although it did not immediately lead to regular services.
I933 saw the beginnings of an air service between Birmingham, Cardiff, Plymouth, run by the Great Western Railway. Passengers were bussed from Snow Hill Station to Castle Bromwich Aerodrome and flew to Plymouth via Cardiff, Teignmouth and Torquay in a Westland Wessex 6-seater. It took just over an hour to get to Cardiff, 2 hours to Plymouth at a single fare of £2 and £3 respectively, twice the rail fare. The route was very soon extended to Liverpool, London and Brighton.
It 1934 Imperial Airways and a number of railway companies set up Railway Air Services which flew de Havilland DH86 biplanes over a route linking Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester, Castle Bromwich and Croydon. Tickets could be bought at any railway station. Planes left Glasgow daily at 8.45 am, stopped at Castle Bromwich for Birmingham at 12.15 pm and arrived at Croydon at 1.05 pm. The return flight left Croydon two hours later.
The King’s Cup
The King’s Cup Race is an annual event inaugurated by King George V to encourage the development of the light aircraft industry in Britain and was originally open only to British and Commonwealth competitors. The first contest took place in September 1922 with a course from Croydon to Glasgow and back with a first stop at Castle Bromwich. (The race continues to this day with a break only from 1939-1945 during the Second World War). However, the race did not attract much public interest or enthusiasm in Birmingham. In the ten years since Bentfield Hucks had performed his breath-taking loop-the-loop at the airfield the sight of an aircraft over Birmingham had become commonplace.
The Birmingham Air Pageant
Indifference was changed to enthusiasm by the Birmingham Air Pageant, the largest in the country outside RAF Hendon. The two-day show in July 1927 attracted over 100,000 people, most paying to watch from the one shilling enclosure. The Air League Cup Race started from Castle Bromwich and there were RAF display teams performing aerobatics and mock warfare. Imperial Airways showed off their new Argosy, renamed ‘City of Birmingham’, a deluxe airliner which could carry 20 passengers in style between London and Paris. The Lord Mayor, Alderman A. H. James flew over Birmingham in the plane.
A Municipal Aerodrome
During the late 1920s there was national campaigning by air transport enthusiasts for a network of municipal aerodromes to be built and there was intense civic rivalry as to which city should be the first. Manchester won the race in 1928 with an air strip laid out at Barton to the west of the city. Castle Bromwich was put forward as an obvious choice, being an airfield already. Sites at Shirley and Elmdon were also proposed.
However, with the coming to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933 and the increasing threat of conflict in Europe, the Air Ministry decided the following year that Castle Bromwich could not be used for civil or commercial purposes. More hangars were built and the airfield became a squadron headquarters.
Even without the Air Ministry’s intervention, it is doubtful that Castle Bromwich would have become Birmingham Airport. The litany of accidents caused or exacerbated by the location of the site is testimony to that. In a letter to the Birmingham Mail in 1929 a writer who tagged himself ‘The Lost Horizon’ described his own experiences of flying at the airfield. Due to the fog and smoke blown from the city’s industries towards Castle Bromwich, the writer maintained that flying between October and April was all but impossible. On the day of writing visibility at the airfield was down to 200 yards while on the west and south sides of the city it was 20 miles and more. He hoped that all other possible sites would be be explored before money was wasted creating a municipal aerodrome at ‘Castle Fogwich’.
Housing
In 1920 Birmingham City Council took over the former barracks known as hutments on the airfield, some on Park Lane, to help alleviate the City’s severe housing shortage. Some of the occupants were ex-servicemen, some were workers at the nearby Dunlop factory.
In 1933 questions were asked of the Health Minister in the House of Commons regarding flooding in some of the dwellings. The hutments had been built as temporary accommodation for servicemen in the first place and were only intended by the City Council to be occupied temporarily. However, the so-called ‘Bungalow Town’ for some one hundred families remained in use until 1935 when the wooden buildings were demolished, that may have had more to do with the expanding use of the site by the RAF in the face of the possible German threat.
For part 4, click here.
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