Happy New Year
December Christmas Lunch: Chairman, Tony Farrell, welcomed 21 members, 20 partners and guests and our esteemed Christmas speaker Reverend Malcolm Newman. The Raffle raised £57 – presented to Malcolm for his charity – this year the Samaritans. Malcolm told us that the Church had agreed to match our donation.
The Chairman reported the sad death and a silence was observed for Dennis Evans who passed away on 13thNovember. We will carry a eulogy in our February’s issue.
Outings/Events:
The Quiz in November raised £427 for the Chairman’s charity. Today’s collection raised £82.
The March trip to Wilton’s Music Hall is now full.
Lunch changes by 10.30am the prior Tuesday to chris@moniz.co.uk T: 020 8660 6063. Please also report any Member News to Chris.
Please email vincent@fosdike.com with articles/news for the Newsletter.
Speaker today: Linda Duffield: ‘The Canadians at Kenley’
6th February 2025: Ian Worley: ‘The Whitbread Round the World Race 1977/78’
December Guest Speaker: Reverend Malcolm Newman
We were delighted to welcome our customary Christmas visitor (not Santa Claus) but the Reverend Malcolm Newman who was on splendid form and gave us a background to some familiar aspects of Christmas which I suspect most of us would not have been aware of, including a school child’s suggestion that Mary and Joseph should have tried Premier Inn!
X-Mass (just a cheap contraction of our time), to avoid writing the full form? Well if this was the motive it goes back much further where it is found in monastic documents 2000 years ago under the guise of the X overwritten with a P. Used partly as a time and ink saving device, and also as a code incorporating the Greek word for fish, a secret sign for underground Christianity. X-mass was more openly used when emperor Constantine converted to Christianity.
Christmas songs were traditional but Carols as we recognise them probably had their origins in psalms which could only be sung in church until the 17th Century when Hark the Herald Angels Sing was written. Even so singing carols in the street was illegal unless done by recognised “Waites” and this may well remain on the statute books. They were banned during Cromwell’s time and special “quiet” ones were developed to avoid the carol police.
Cards came into being when marketed by John Horsley and Henry Cole in Victorian times. They cost about a shilling and originals now sell for about £125,000 at auction. In 1870 by royal order the postage for X-mass cards was restricted to a halfpenny for December and penny stamps could be cut in half if necessary. Crackers were developed in 1845 with gunpowder supplied by Brocks the firework company we know today. Kissing under the mistletoe became customary in the 17th Century. Whilst Christmas pudding incorporating actual meat, raisins, prunes and spices can be dated to the 14th Century.
The Christmas tree was first noted in Latvia & Estonia in 1441, and candles were supposed to burn off the old year. Turkey became popular fare in 1526.
The Reverend Malcolm finished his “address” with a very amusing rhyming account of how we struggle to ingest Turkey in various forms over the 12 consecutive days following the 25th of December! Thank you Malcolm – Please do come again next Christmas.
Helicopter over the North Sea – by David Carpenter
When I left the army in 1975 having flown helicopters for ten years, I was fortunate enough to get a job with British Airways Helicopters. They operated flights to the North Sea oil and gas rigs and platforms from Aberdeen, Sumburgh at the southern tip of the Shetlands and a private heliport at Beccles, little known, in Suffolk.
The mainstay of the North Sea flight operations then was the Sikorsky S61 helicopter, the civilian version of the military Sea King. It was originally well suited for the task with two pilots, twin engines, instrument capability, a limited icing clearance and the ability to operate in the worst weather the North Sea could throw at us.
As the East Shetland basin, some 120 miles Northeast of Sumburgh, was developed it was clear that the capacity and range of the S61 was inadequate. The workers, known as ‘the bears’ – (because most of them had sore heads from the night before!) – normally worked a week-on/week-off or two-weeks on/two-weeks off cycle. To reach the East Shetland basin they had to be flown to Sumburgh airport in fixed-wing aircraft and then shuttled to the fields in a fleet of S61s about 18-19 at a time As the Brent field alone had about 1000 workers there at any time, that meant a lot of flights and transfers at Sumburgh.
Shell, operators of the Brent field, decided that something better was needed and reached an agreement with British Airways that three, eventually six, Boeing Chinooks would be purchased. These were again civilian variants of the twin-rotor helicopter used by the RAF. The Chinook had a range in excess of 600 nautical miles and could reach the Brent easily from Aberdeen with 44 passengers. It was an excellent aircraft, again twin engines, a good navigation fit and an efficient AFCS (automatic flight control system), the helicopter version of an autopilot. It also had an impressive underslung load capacity.
It even had a coffee machine and a toilet, quite important if you think of the amount of coffee you can drink during a five hour, occasionally nine-hour, flight. It entered service and was very successful. I flew it for three years and enjoyed the experience very much. We also had the services of a cabin attendant – any flight with more than 19 passengers must have a cabin attendant.
There was a story of the captain who went to the toilet en route and, like the three old ladies, became locked in the lavatory. The cabin attendant, being a resourceful young lady, simply gave the fire axe to the largest ‘bear’ she could find and invited him to open the door. A red-faced Captain returned to the flight deck resolved, I’m told, to drink less coffee en route.
On one occasion we were asked by a large national company if we could demonstrate the load lifting ability. We arranged with them for a large water tank to be fitted into a lifting frame to give a total weight of 18,000 lbs, well within capacity. We flew to the agreed site and inspected the load. The gauge on the side of the water tank was indicating the correct amount which, plus the weight of the frame and tank, gave a total of 18,000 lbs
We took off, hovered over the load under the instructions from the loadmaster behind us in the cabin. It should be mentioned that the pilots can’t see the load and must rely absolutely on the loadmaster. The load was hooked on and I began to lift. The cable tightened and I increased power (measured as percentage torque in a helicopter) And increased power! And increased power? Eventually, only when I had applied the two-and-a-half-minute maximum take-off power limit, did the load reluctantly leave the ground. I staggered into forward flight where I was able to reduce power and we flew around the agreed circuit.
As we approached the hover the power required went up and up and up and I lowered the tank to the ground as quickly as possible. Something was clearly wrong. We checked the water gauge. As expected. We checked our graphs – aircraft, particularly helicopters, are very sensitive to variations in temperature and air pressure. All as planned. We were just about to admit defeat when one of the ground handlers went and thumped the water gauge. Whereupon it began to rise, eventually indicating a total load of 23,000 lbs. We had been more than two tons overweight!!!500 gallons of water was drained and the test went like clockwork after that. ‘Phew!’ as Biggles used to say.
