No. 139 The Trusty Servant
William Martin( D, 75-80) writes:
I enjoyed the Afterburners and Aerodynamics article in TS 138. The picture of the Slingsby T21 reminded me of when Andrew Gould( G, 75-80) and I went to do our glider training with the RAF at Weston-super-Mare( I can’ t remember if Charles Corrie was on the same course). We had one T21 and several‘ Kirby Cadet MkIII’ tandem trainers( see picture) at our disposal. The T21 was a side-by-side configuration and designed more for soaring. At the end of the day, our instructors took us up‘ joyriding. in it until one cadet put his knee through the stressed canvas fabric( these things were all like that!) and put an end to the fun.
The Mk III could only be described as an‘ aerial toboggan’ with an open cockpit. You went up, you came down, end of. We used winches to launch, which gave us a very powerful heave into the air up to 1,000 feet. One of my abiding memories was coming off the top of the winch at 1,000 feet and seeing the glorious vista of the Bristol
Channel lit by the setting sun just before we had to release the winch cable to commence our crosswind leg.
The winch operators were protected by a wire mesh cage to prevent them from being hit by falling winch cables but it was quickly discovered that the cage also had the effect of spreading anything soft all over the winch driver and so the tradition started of launching, the instructor flying the glider up the launch path until he judged it was directly over the winch and then yelling
Kirby Kadett Mk III
at the cadet to drop two eggs on the hapless winch operator below. We never actually succeeded in hitting the winch drivers, but the effect would have been‘ interesting’ if we had!
A less happy memory of that training was making a downwind landing( on the orders of my instructor) and ploughing through the electric fence at the end of the airfield. One of the posts flew over my right wing but luckily didn’ t hit it, otherwise that would have been two gliders written off.
The OW Football Club is 150 years old. Or is it?
On 13 December 1975, the Old Wykehamist Football Club celebrated its centenary with matches and a dinner at Win Coll. The event was reported in The Wykehamist of 4 th February 1976, but there is no record of how this date came to be chosen.
Gordon Baker( H, 84-89), has posed the question whether the OWFC is 150 years old this year. A straightforward answer you might think given the celebration in 1975 but things are rarely that simple at Win Coll!
The likely source for the 1975 Centenary is a notice in The Wykehamist of 23 rd March 1875 that refers to an‘ Old Wykehamists’ Club’, whose first AGM was held on 26 th January 1875, and that it could be made available( Resolution 3)‘ for getting up Football matches for Old Wykehamists’. Those present at the meeting would have been absolutely clear which code of Football they meant. What isn’ t clear to a reader 150 years later is whether they meant Association Football( only being abbreviated to‘ Soccer’ by The Wykehamist in 1965) or Winchester Football( normally referred to as Football). Other references in The Wykehamist in 1873 and 1874 suggest that they meant Winchester Football. Separate articles tell that matches under Association Rules were being played by an OW XI from 1877.
But, in 1879, The Wykehamist reported that‘ the Old Wykehamist Football Club collapsed entirely last season’. And then, in January 1882, The Wykehamist includes reference to the fact that‘ an Old Wykehamist Football Club be formed to play according to Association Rules’
Evidently another source was required and the endlessly useful 50 Years of Sport gives the date as 1882. However, it also states that there were earlier, separate, OW association football clubs in both Oxford and Cambridge, and the 1875 date may therefor refer to the Oxford club as that did exist by 1875.
Current OW footballers may therefore like to hedge their bets and celebrate twice- in 2025 and in 2032. Any excuse for a good dinner.
We look forward to welcoming the OWFC players and supporters at their sesquicentennial event in Short Half this year.
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