The Things They Say . . .

The Things They Say …

“… it seems probable to me that those who read this book will have been motivated to do so by nostalgia of one sort or another by romantic longings for those more innocent days of the 1920s and 1930s, for the racket and roar of primitive engines and the trembling of flattened grass behind a taxi-ing Moth. I do not want to deny such readers their retrospective pleasures, and if they feel that England and the World have become much dirtier and shabbier since those days, I share their sentiments very emphatically. It isn’t only in aviation that something has been lost” – Sir Alan J. Cobham in his excellent book “A Time To Fly”, reviewed elsewhere in this issue of Motor Sport, in which, however, he makes it quite clear that he was never one for looking backwards.

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“Now, forty years later, were it possible, I would join the Display again, tomorrow, to experience the thrills of seeing Geoffrey Tyson flying upside down so low that the top rudder parted the long grass …” – Mrs. Ron Price, who was Cobham’s glider-pilot, quoted in the above book, writing about the Cobham Air Displays.

(Did they really fly, inverted, as low as that? – Ed.)

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“Asked what speed he was doing, Mr. Burt said: ‘Only 70.’ PC Stancliffe, now in the role of the motorway patrolman, said: ‘You were doing nearly 140 – I was following in a Ford Escort.” From The Sun dated and Nov. 1978.