SWITCH ON FAREWELL TO IAN

We were sad to learn of the passing earlier this year of Ian Peacock who was a wellknown contributor to RCM&E, especially during the editorship of David Boddington. Our thanks go to Kit Spackman, a close modelling friend, who sent the following letter recalling his time spent with Ian:

My friend of many years, Ian Peacock died at the end of January, and yesterday I went to his funeral. You might have thought that this was a sad occasion but not so. To give an idea of Ian and his thinking the order of service had instructions for folding it into a paper dart printed on the back. I was expecting some of the congregation to actually fold one up and fly it up the chapel, but they didn’t. His son did fold one and place it on the coffin however, his thinking obviously being that Ian would need something to fly in the life hereafter.

Ian was a total aviation nut and he worked for Vickers at the time they were building Valiants and Viscounts. One of his tales concerned working on the Valiant’s fin 30 plus feet above the ground and they were issued with safety harnesses attached to sprung reels in the hangar roof.

Of course, they were NOT permitted to abseil down the fin while wearing the harnesses - no more needs be written about that…

I met Ian in 1972 at a Birmingham IPMS (International Plastic Modellers Society) meeting and we hit it off right away, both of us thinking slightly off the normal track, and we were both radio control flyers as well, so we had more than one common interest, but both aviation related of course. The radio control aspect broadened into model boats and we both built several of them.

Ian’s plastic kit builds were mainly 1/48 scale, at the time when the Monogram Mosquito was THE kit to have, and Ian built almost all the Monogram range at one time or another. Later he got to like the Tamiya 1/100 scale range and built at least one of every model available, many of them with non-standard colour schemes once I’d developed my home decal printing technique. At one time or another I always had one of Ian’s decal schemes under development on my various laptops.

Ian’s primary interest was flying models, both control line and radio control, with the occasional move into free flight models, and for a while he ran his own firm, Peacock Models, manufacturing kits for radio models in his garagecum-workshop.

Back in the 70s and 80s there was a full-size aerobatic display group in the UK called The Barnstomers, which was headed up by the late David Boddington. David was also a serious aeromodeller (and a well-known editor of RCM&E) and he wanted to add some model flying to their display routine. He asked Ian to put a programme together. I mostly flew R/C gliders then and Ian suggested we have a go at aerotowing a glider from the ground, casting off at altitude and then both the glider and the tow aircraft each