The Seventh Annual Dinner
Saturday 15th November

This year the venue chosen for the Squadron’s Annual Dinner was the excellent Grasmere House Hotel at Salisbury.

The week end’s proceedings opened with those who chose to fly in to Old Sarum – six Squadron aircraft arriving in time for an informal lunch at the flying club. Later in the day Mike and Mary Smith and Denis and Margaret Woodhams touched down on the hotel back lawn in R.44 G-ILTY. The balance of members arrived by car during the day.

During the course of pre-dinner champagne cocktails a magnificent firework display was held just across the river in a meadow with a backdrop of Salisbury cathedral. Naturally we thought that this was in the Squadron’s honour, put on by Dale Naug the proprietor of the hotel but it turned out to be a civic do. Nevertheless this made an exciting start to our evening.

Sixty members and guests sat down in the attractive dining room for an excellent dinner. Rear Admiral Scott Lidbetter QCVS was our principal guest and speaker followed by a very brave, lucid and amusing Jill Ashmead who described the trials and tribulations of building an aeroplane in her house.

Denis Woodhams, as usual, had us in fits of laughter, followed by Arthur Record who shamelessly went way over the allotted five minutes allowed by Squadron tradition. He was readily forgiven however for his hilarious description of surviving a ditching in a choppy sea. This experience was shared of course by Bernard Maslin and Dennis Stanley when the three octogenarians ditched in their 172 off the Scillies during the Squadron fly-in to St.Marys in October.

Neatly following on was one of two special guests, Julian Puckney, the skipper of the trawler Semper Allegro, the crew of which plucked the sodden, saturated and shivering survivors from the English Channel. An SAR chopper belonging to 771 Squadron at Culdrose, the CO of which is Lt/Cmdr David Cunningham, our second special guest, then winched up the three beleaguered survivors, re-freezing them again in the rotor downwash so that they were very relieved to thaw out in the calm surroundings of Truro hospital. Bernard Maslin was extremely fortunate to have his licences and personal papers returned to him having been recovered from the sea by a French trawler.

The dinner ended with a few rousing verses of the FAA Squadrons A.25 ditching song.

Michael Bonham Cozens deserves a vote of thanks for organising so well the 7th Annual Dinner, and the proprietor of the Grasmere House Hotel, Dale Naug, for an excellent evening.

Report by Ron Dobree-Carey.