Mike’s brother is researching the family tree, and Mike received an email telling him that their maternal Grandfather was stationed in Orkney, at Walls, at some time between 1914 and 1920.
Well, well, well.
Flight Lieutenant Arthur Leslie Russell was a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, and was presumably in Orkney to help with the protection of the Scapa Flow anchorage. This air cover was primarily provided by the Royal Navy Air Service, but the RFC and the RNAS merged to form the Royal Air Force in 1918.
He was there in the First World War, not the Second, but he might have known some of the places in this booklet
We’re very taken with the idea that Grandpa will have been to places here that we go to. Very probably visited St. Magnus Cathedral. It’s a strange, and pleasing thought.
As a Flight Lieutenant in the First World War, Grandpa Russell will have been piloting some of the first ‘planes to be built – with no parachute, firing at enemy ‘planes with a hand-held revolver.
After he was shot down over German occupied territory in Europe in 1916, the pilot of the German ‘plane landed and approached him, they shook hands, and he was marched off to captivity as a prisoner of war for three years. A gentlemanly way to approach enmity.
Would that happen now?
On his return to civilian life he became traffic manager at the old Croydon aerodrome, which was then the airport for London at the beginning of commercial flights.
Imagine that – different times indeed!
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