Where They
Served
A 1935 SINGER LE MANS SPORTS CAR BOUGHT AT BRIGHTWELLS GOES ON A JOURNEY OF WARTIME REMEMBRANCE What was your all-time favourite car?’ Elizabeth Halls asked her father, Bryan Wild, just after his ninetieth birthday. ‘That green Singer Le Mans sports I had during the war,’ he answered without hesitation, and with a smile. ‘I loved that car.’ So when a green 1935 Singer Le Mans 9 sports car came up for auction at Brightwell’s classic car sale in March 2014, bearing the number plate CHU 944, which seemed to recall her father’s favourite wartime song, the Chattanooga Choo Choo, and the year in which he bought his own Singer, 1944, she just ‘had’ to buy it. Bryan Wild died in 2012, a few weeks after that conversation. Since then, Elizabeth has edited and compiled his memoirs, ‘Flying Blind: the Story of a Second World War Night-Fighter Pilot’ now published by Fonthill Media. During the war he flew 14 types of aircraft and saw action over Great Britain, the Mediterranean, North Africa and Germany. ‘My father started the war with nine lives and ended up with just the one,’ says Elizabeth. ‘He both made and lost many friends. He loved the RAF but felt he might have used up all his luck so left after the war and became a teacher. Like many, he did not talk about the war until he was much older. I knew about his log books and photographs, but it was only after he died that I read his wartime diaries and realised he had written up a full account of which I knew nothing, which was tucked away under the attic stairs.’
of men who flew alongside Flt Lt Wild over seventy years ago, and she hopes that the ‘Where They Served’ project will bring alive the history of the RAF and those who served at the various airfields, especially those who died and never saw the peace they won. She is particularly grateful to Brightwells for supporting her ‘Where They Served’ tour. The Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund is the RAF’s leading welfare charity, providing financial, practical and emotional support to all members of the RAF family. We are here for serving and former members of the RAF, as well as their partners and dependants, whenever they need us. We help members of the RAF family deal with a wide range of issues: from childcare and relationship difficulties to injury and disability, and from financial hardship and debt to illness and bereavement. For more information visit: www.rafbf.org Twitter: @RAFBF
‘Flying Blind’ will be launched in style in 2015. Driving her beloved Singer in memory of her father, Elizabeth will be visiting all 60 airfields on the UK mainland where he landed in those times, raising money for the RAF Benevolent Fund. Starting in April and finishing in September 2015, her travels will take her from Cornwall to Kent and to northern Scotland. The sixty airfields today range from those still in use by the RAF such as RAF Valley and Brize Norton, to those that have disappeared under the plough, or have been put to other uses: industrial estates, civil airports, a solar farm, a prison, for example. Elizabeth will be meeting en route some of the families
Follow Elizabeth on www.wheretheyserved.com @wheretheyserved /wheretheyserved or donate via www.justgiving.com/wheretheyserved