It is often difficult when visiting former wartime airfields to pick out period buildings or to be able to create a mental image of what they may have been used for. It is only through personal accounts and wartime images that some appreciation of the hustle and bustle of a busy wartime airfield can be gleaned – as Mark Hillier reveals.
Many buildings found on the various wartime airfields in the UK were constructed to standard Air Ministry patterns and were therefore similar from station to station. At some airfields, local buildings and farms were requisitioned, or even ‘acquisitioned’, to provide essential accommodation for personnel and one such airfield that had virtually no purposebuilt accommodation prior to its military use was the fighter station of RAF Westhampnett in West Sussex, now known as Goodwood Airfield.
RAF Goodwood, or RAF Woodcote as it was described in an account by a member of 610 (County of Chester) Squadron’s groundcrew in 1941, later became known as RAF Westhampnett. The airfield, however, did have a pre-war link with aviation through the 9th Duke of Richmond. Frederick Charles Gordon Lennox, the Duke of Richmond, Lennox, Gordon and Aubigny (1904-1989), had been a keen aviat…
