Hooptedoodle #335 - Me and the Bird Man...

Another Hooptedoodle - three on the bounce is normally a sign of something or other. On this occasion, it's because life is a little upside-down at the moment with my son's school exams - not a great deal of upheaval for me, since the Contesse is doing the organising and transport, but I have had a few days on my own at home. I've taken the opportunity to make decent progress with prepping more soldiers for the French Refurb, but I am reluctant to post yet more photos of bare-metal Les Higgins figures and the pervading mess. I could, of course, just keep quiet for a few days, but that could set a very dangerous precedent.

Yesterday I was reading about an incident I saw - or at which I was present, I suppose - when I was a small boy. On Whit Monday, May 21st 1956, I was taken by "Uncle" Duggie - a family friend - to the air show at Speke. Duggie was a Liverpool police officer, he was ex-RAF (he had been a middleweight boxing champion in the RAF) and he had more brass neck than you would believe, so he was an ideal man for taking you around - he seemed to know just about everybody, and he was quite happy to walk into areas which were supposed to be off-limits to the public.

Valentin demonstrating some of his later wings, suspended from a scaffold. If anyone thinks this looks like a bad idea, please put up your hand. [This set-up was a pose for photos, one of which subsequently appeared on the cover of his book]

It was a lovely, hot day. The place was packed. One big attraction was the scheduled appearance of the French Bird Man, Leo Valentin, who was to fly with strapped-on wings for our entertainment. Not much happened in those days - not like this. The events of that day, I learn, were also remembered by other, eventually more famous Liverpool kids than me - George Harrison and Paul McCartney were there (at that time they both lived in the new council housing estate at Speke, close to the airport), as was Clive Barker, the sci-fi writer and film-maker. Of course they were. There were 100,000 people there - anyone who could get there was bound to have been there - a big family holiday-out for the whole city. I was a very timid child, and was very worried about the Bird Man, and some of the planes were a tad noisy, and I didn't care for big crowds - so it wasn't such a perfect day for me, maybe!

Liverpool airport is at Speke, which then was outside the south end of the city. I remember being parched with thirst - no-one carried water in those days, for some reason, and queuing for a cup of industrial tea didn't seem such a great idea. I also remember that it was very hard to see much. If you were a small person, it wasn't a straightforward matter to see the sky between the adults. Valentin's flight was delayed - when he eventually made an attempt it was in a period when the crowd had started to wander around the airfield, and the events, which certainly did not last long, almost appeared incidental - many of those present must actually have been unaware of it. Valentin's approach run (with a new, larger style of wing, ferried up in a DC3) was pretty much unnoticeable (we couldn't hear the commentator anyway), his exit from the plane went wrong, he damaged one of his wings in the doorway, and I got a very brief glimpse (between adults) of Valentin, wrapped in his parachute, falling to the ground, maybe a mile away. There was a bit of a collective gasp, but a great many people around me never noticed.

A strange atmosphere fell over the place. It was one of those "nothing to see here, move along please" moments - the organisers obviously had to allow a slight gap for emergency reaction, but the show must go on. It was only when I got home (via the 82 bus) that I realised what had happened. I had simply assumed that Valentin wasn't flying today. In fact his emergency chute had failed, and he'd fallen 9000 feet into a cornfield, at Halewood. He was, of course, as dead as a door-nail. For some reason the local paper made a big fuss about the fact that his watch was still working. Someone missed an advertising opportunity there. Here's a nice little, rather homespun, video clip, to which I link with humble thanks and no permission.

Valentin had been a war hero, and was given a fancy military funeral in France - none of this reached the UK press. As far as I was concerned, he was really just another example of a common phenomenon of the times - you queued for hours to see something, and then nothing happened. Well, not for me - obviously things must have been a bit intense for him.

I believe this is the actual Beverley, at actual Speke, on the actual day [actually]. I am not on board - not bloody likely.

At some point in the afternoon Uncle Duggie got us past a rope barrier to look at a Blackburn Beverley and chat with its pilot - a friend of his from the RAF. Although the official record of the show says that the Beverley was a "no-show", I can confirm that it was very much there, and it did perform a fly-past later, with Duggie's pal at the controls. Duggie had managed to negotiate a look inside the thing, and asked me did I want to have a look around it - not flying in it, you understand, just having a peek, which wasn't allowed either. Since my timidity would not allow me to do anything which was not permitted, and since claustrophobia was another problem to add to my aforementioned list, I declined. I am ashamed to say that I turned down the opportunity to look around a newly-commissioned RAF Beverley, in 1956. Sorry, gentlemen. Sometimes I wonder how I ever survived this big, tough world. Sometimes I think that if I had a time machine I would go back and give myself a kick up the backside.

When there was no airshow, the spectator gallery on the roof at Speke was quite a popular attraction. I went a couple of times - it was very windy up there, and there weren't many planes to look at, I can tell you. What a miserable beggar I was!

Speke airport is now known as Liverpool John Lennon Airport. It always strikes me as ironic that Lennon himself only had a very brief involvement with the airport as a youth, when he was (I think) fired from temporary employment as a gopher in the cafe, for having a generally unhelpful attitude and making a deliberately unsavoury job of the sandwiches. That's how you go about getting an airport named after you. Charles de Gaulle had to work a bit harder for his airport, maybe.