REQ..info on Hooton Park gliding club 1950s

[davecalveley]

Coming to the end of a lockdown project ....have been researching/cross referencing all known resident civil aircraft ever based at Hooton Park and am now trying to find the i/d of any gliders used by the Wirral gliding club based there in the 1950s and how many did they have .....is there a book or site that lists operators for each BGA number? ... similar to G-INFO for powered aircraft....the only ones that do show up are the ones that did go onto the main register (in the G- AL .. range) before reverting back to BGA numbers in early 60s



Any help much appreciated...

Dav

[viscount]

Well, there is Phil Butler's M.A.S. published 'British Gliders'. 1st edition 1970, 2nd Edition 1975 with the 3rd and final edition 1980. However it does fall short of what you are looking for.

The 3rd edition does cover every BGA number from 1 right through to 2690 with type, c/no, month/year of 1st C of A issue and a wide comments column including the likes of former and subsequent identities; also sections with paragraphs on the main sailplane manufacturers; all Class 'A' registration to that point of time; summary of powered gliders; summary of military gliders WW11 and ATC, Service gliding associations, BGA tri-gram registrations cross reference AAA to EHR, BGA Competition numbers; UK hosted World Gliding Championships 1954 and 1965 entrants list.

Excellent if you have an identity to confirm type etc, but not intended for historic research into owners, clubs or specific locations.

I was looking at a list of 1950's Hooton Park based aircraft recently - the question now is where did I come across it? May have been in early Merseyside magazines, have you had access to the early years (late '56 onwards) MGAE/MSAE Northern Aeronews/Merseyside Aeronews/Flypast? The Liverpool Central Library do have some years, donated by the late Don Stephens some years ago - access has to pre-booked. I've got a back-logged list of research to do for others and myself, if imperative I'll have a search through for you.

[davecalveley]

Thanks Brian
Have those..... and as you say they dont cover who the owners or operators have been etc.....assume all on paper records at BGA....the Wirral club will have only had a few aircraft and a search of 3000+ would be simplified by any help provided..

As mentioned have done the powered stuff but if you do find the list would help by comparing lists

Regards Dave

[seaharrierfa2]

Dave, there was a publication called the British Soaring Yearbook that I have used. If you Google it there are several on line you can then search through by owner or location etc.

s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/bga-sg-archive/Books/BRITISH++SOARING++YEARBOOK+1986-87.pdf

There is a full list of trigrams and BGA numbers, a list of competition codes but normally just owner and base. There are some competition numbers to trigrams but sometimes the owner info is different so I guess unreliable. Not sure how far the books go back I’ve only used the 1980’s versions of which there at least three.

Bob

[davecalveley]

Thanks for that Bob it only started in 1981 though ..just written to Phil Butler as only had an old email address for him ...if PHB doesn t know then nobody does!