RAF Bircham Newton Heritage Centre – Research Facility – Barrie Loftus (41st)

A few years ago I heard that RAF Bircham Newton had a Heritage Centre. Living about 35 miles away I thought I really had to go and investigate. Being a former Erk I was, and still am, adverse to volunteering for anything but somehow that visit resulted in me becoming a “volunteer.”

Speed ahead to this year and I was “volunteered” yet again! As has been reported previously to the Association, the Heritage Centre has undertaken a mammoth task of setting up a research facility. This covers the life of the Station from WWI to its closure in 1963 and we now have a mountain of information relating to every Squadron which served at Bircham Newton. We are still adding to that data. Where I came in was when we decided to extend this approach to the post WWII years, especially since the Administrative Apprentice Training School actually played a prominent role. Obviously, with Dixie Dean and myself being former Apprentices and already in captivity we were naturals for the role of creating the Apprentice Record.

To date we have created a record of everyone who trained at Bircham from the 32nd Entry to the 46th Entry. The information gathered includes Surname, Forename, Nickname, Entry, Trade, Enlistment Date, Graduation Date, Rank on passing out, first posting after graduation and a record of any recourse to other entries, remustering or indeed anything else of interest. There are still gaps in our knowledge base but I would estimate we are over 80% complete.

However we subsequently had a meeting – always a mistake! It was decided we should attempt to include information after we left Bircham Newton and became respectable members of society. We therefore added information on year of retirement, rank on retirement, what (if anything) we did to keep us out of mischief, where we resided, another miscellaneous record for anything of interest and, unfortunately, the year of the final posting to the great airfield in the sky. This is where I have a problem – obtaining any necessary information. There is info on the internet regarding 41st to 44th Entries but for all the other Entries there is very little information available.

So to the purpose of this article – I need your help! I would love to hear from anyone who can provide any data as described above, either regarding their training at Bircham or what they got upto on retirement from the RAF.. Just to demonstrate our masochism, we intend to repeat the exercise for Hereford and St Athan but currently have little or no access to research information. However, I stress this is a future exercise but any information would be gratefully received.

RAF Ruislip may be a step too far!

My e-mail is BL41@live.co.uk and I would be very pleased to be inundated with data from you.