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Miles Aircraft was a big part of my life when I was a boy during WWII. Situated at Woodley Airfield in Berkshire, some five miles from my home in Reading, it became a magnet for me in those war years. By the time I was twelve I spent hours ‘designing aeroplanes’ and, having sent one design to Miles Aircraft, I was invited to visit their factory where the problems of my ‘design’ were discussed very seriously and I was later shown their pioneering moving production line. This was typical of their progressive approach to young people and, just three years later, I became a student at the Miles Aeronautical Technical School. Sadly, within just two years, Miles Aircraft was forced to cease trading and the School was taken over by the Reading Technical College. I completed the course and, in 1948, began work in Reading as a structural design draughtsman. Three years later, I returned to Woodley Airfield to work for Handley Page as a Technical Artist. It was a change of career that I would follow for the next ten years, completing many interesting projects across a wide range of industries. Among these was a cutaway illustration for the magazine ‘Aeroplane’ of the Miles M100 ‘Student ‘, then under construction at Shoreham. It was to be my last direct involvement with the aviation industry, which had begun and ended with Miles Aircraft. From the mid 1960s I moved into management roles in technical advertising and publicity, returning to Berkshire in 1975 to establish my own company, from which I eventually retired in 1996. Over some twenty years my interest in aviation had resolved into just one of a number of hobbies, but when , in the early 1980s, various local people said they knew nothing of Miles Aircraft, I felt I must do something about it. This wasn’t just an important part of local history, it was part of my personal history! That was when I first had the idea of producing paintings of the main Miles types, even though, by then, I hadn’t produced a single oil paintings in my life. However, that was soon to be put on hold. By 1985 I had joined the Berkshire Aviation Group and was soon leading their efforts to transform an old Miles Aeronautical Technical School hangar into an Aviation Museum, a task that took up all my hard-pressed spare time for the next eight years. At the same time, I began to learn all I could about the wide-ranging and unique aviation heritage that Berkshire enjoyed for some two hundred years. The fact that the Museum is there today is, perhaps, testimony to my efforts but, sadly, it has never become the really professional museum I originally planned and worked for. Personal pressures ended my day-to-day involvement in 1993 and aviation again played no part in my life for more than three years. In 1997 I began my very first oil painting, a Miles M4 Merlin. In the following two years a total of six of my paintings were selected for the prestigious ‘Aviation Paintings of the Year’ Exhibitions, four being from my ‘Berkshire Aviation Heritage’ collection, which was growing rapidly. Today, the collection numbers more than fifty oil and watercolour paintings and it is still growing . Click here to see the collection. I hope you enjoy looking at my paintings.
December 2007
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