A Legend Of Canadian Airmen

A Memory of Brislington.

My family lived in Westbrook Road, off West Town Lane, Brislington, from early 1949 until April 21 1958, when I was just over 11 years old. We suddenly left on that day and moved to Hertfordshire, and apart from one nostalgic return on my racing bike in my mid-teens I didn't come back again until 2009.
On that first return in the early 1960s it was like coming back to a ghost town, in that all the places were almost exactly as I remembered them, but virtually all the many people I had known - children AND adults - had 'disappeared'.
When I returned late in 2009 it was after the death of both my parents, and although I didn't come back to live in Brislington I wasn't far away, and i have spent the last 6+ years digging through and writing about my memories of the 1950s.
One of the first things to hit me when I returned to live in the area was on my first return to Westbrook Road, on a peaceful little estate on the edge of the Knowle Golf Course, overlooked by Flower Hill.
It wasn't that all the late 1940s houses had been re-skinned in brickwork, to match the old orange facing blockwork. - It was that when chatting with a few of the locals who now lived there, it seemed that several of them had been aware of a 'legend' that the estate had originally been home to many 'Canadian Airmen' for some reason.
- Fortunately I was able to put them right on the facts about this.
At the end of World War Two, my Father and other RAF crew members who had survived their spell in Bomber Command, left the RAF and joined BOAC ( now BA ). Not long afterwards, with world air travel rapidly expanding, the opportunity arose for BOAC pilots to take overseas postings, in order that crews could swap over in distant countries on long trips.
Thus it was that very early in 1947 my own family of four moved out to Canada to live in Montreal. However, within a year this 'perk' was ceasing. The new long-range Boeing Stratocruiser had been developed and BOAC were buying several - and the only place with hangars large enough to house them at that time was at Filton, Bristol, where the large hangars originally constructed for the ill-fated Bristol Brabazon had been built. Filton thus became the training airfield for this new aircraft, and many crew families were brought back from Canada to train on it.
With several families arriving back in the UK at the same time and needing to be housed, suitable accommodation was sought and discussed by the airline, and it happened that a large new Council Estate was being built off West Town Lane. - And it was thus that about a dozen or more BOAC families arrived back in England from Canada and settled in as some of the first residents on this estate, most of them moving into Westbrook Road.
- Canadian airmen ? - Not really, but I can see where the 'legend' came from !
As the years passed, so the BOAC crews gradually moved away, as the long drive along the A4 up to London Airport for each trip - and the return journey - used to take in excess of four-and-a half hours, once training at Filton was complete in 1950/51, and so these families gradually moved away towards London from 1951 onwards.
By 1958 only three BOAC airmen remained in Westbrook Road, and when my Father moved us away in April of that year the other two crew members remaining had just retired and were 'left behind'.
There is of course a lot more about 1950s Brislington to this story, and a few years ago I finished my first book about it, - "A Kind of Bereavement" - which will shortly be published.

John Liles

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