No. 139 The Trusty Servant
Vox Senum
In TS 138, we published a selection of memories about Tony Ayres. Oliver Morgan( Coll, 73-76) writes with the following correction:
Thank you for publishing recollections of Tony Ayres in TS 138. I write to correct the anecdote‘ I shot a boy once’, based on my intimate knowledge as the boy whom Tony Ayres shot.
It was in November 1973, near the beginning of my second year in College. It was a Thursday morning. The entire class and Tony were all dressed in Corps kit for drill practice.
It was indeed a Physics experiment gone wrong. The goal of the experiment was to measure the momentum and energy of an air rifle pellet and thus calculate the muzzle velocity. Tony did change the aim of the rifle to avoid a pulverized section of the target block. The apparatus had no protection and I was seated at the lab bench ten feet away. The pellet glanced off the block, became sharpened in the process, and buried itself in my neck, coming to rest a centimetre short of my carotid artery. The other eleven boys in the classroom laughed at first, but everyone became silent as Tony ran from the room, instructing me to follow, but not to run‘ in case the bullet falls out.’
The day proceeded with other hilarities. The College nurse drove me up to the hospital but we became stuck in a traffic jam in the rain, and she advised me to walk myself into the Emergency Room
whilst she found a parking spot. When I walked alone up to the desk in rainsoaked Corps kit with a blood-soaked bandage around my neck and announced I had been shot, they assumed a practical joke was being played and I was strongly criticized, until they realized the blood was real.
My father( Deputy Director of AWRE) did downplay the incident and did not require even an apology. As the injured party I did not find it funny at all, and 51 years later the details remain vividly clear.
I am glad to hear that Tony remembered the incident but sad to be identified merely as“ a boy”. Please publish more of this story.
1959: Nigel Stevenson( a young instructor and Royal Navy officer in his 20s) about to send Bob Pirie( aged 19 and in fact already a solo pilot) off for his‘ first solo’ in Imperial College Club’ s T21B, Daisy.
2022: Move the clock forward 63 years and the same pair re-enact the briefing in on of the T21s at the Gliding Heritage Centre at Lasham.
Nigel Stevenson( H, 49-54) recounts a 63 year gliding re-enactment:
I have much enjoyed the various contributions from and about Bryan Thwaites and his cohort of gifted mathematicians in TS136- 138. I benefitted from Bryan’ s time on the staff at Winchester in two ways; in my final term as a pupil there he was my mathmā Don and I joined the RAF section of the CCF. As a result I learned to fly gliders at Lasham.
The two photographs were taken 63 years apart. The original was taken for a 1959 book called Go Gliding. As the two people who appeared in that picture were still around and involved in gliding, we re-enacted the shot 63 years later.
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