Birmingham History

The local social history of Birmingham and its environs

You are here: Home / Archives for Castle Bromwich Airfield

Castle Bromwich Airfield (Part Two)

by 1 Comment

In August 1914 Britain declared war against Germany and six months later the playing fields at Castle Bromwich were requisitioned by the War Office for use as an airfield.

044 1914 CB airfield 1914 maxfields plane royal hotel
Alfred Maxfield’s plane on display at The Royal Hotel in Birmingham

Castle Bromwich – home of the Midlands’ first powered flight
The first air flight in Castle Bromwich had taken place five years earlier, not from the playing fields but Castle Bromwich golf course. The golf course had been set up in 1896 north of Bromford Road on the higher ground above the Tame valley.

Alfred Pericles Maxfield who had made that first flight in 1909 (six years after the Wright brothers) was both an early aviator and an aeroplane builder. He already made bicycles and motorcycles  from his works in Victoria Road, Aston, and then went on to design his own plane.

The body of the aircraft was mostly made from bicycle tubes and it ran on three bicycle wheels. The plane was powered by a 3hp Garrard-Maxfield motorcycle engine. Maxfield made a number of successful test flights from the golf course in the autumn of 1909, later that year exhibiting his plane in the Royal Hotel in Temple Row (site of Rackhams/ House of Fraser).

Castle Bromwich Airfield opened as a military airbase in 1915
There is some dispute about where later flights took place, whether from the golf course or the playing fields, probably the latter. The celebrated Bentfield Hucks (the first Briton to accomplish a loop-the-loop) flew a Bleriot from Castle Bromwich in 1911, giving passenger flights for up to two people.

Founded in 1909, the Midland Aero Club was one of the country’s earliest private flying clubs and operated from Dunstall Park near Wolverhampton. In 1912 the club moved to Castle Bromwich playing fields where a hangar was built. The club left for Elmdon in 1937.

In 1914 the Castle Bromwich playing fields was one of the control points for the Great Air Race form Hendon to Manchester and back. Eight pilots competed for the ‘Daily Mail’ Gold Cup, there was a prize of £400 and 80,000 people turned up to watch. A French pilot, Louis Noel ran out of petrol near Coventry and landed near a road where a considerate lady motorist gave him two gallons of petrol from her car. However, this only got him as far as Castle Bromwich racecourse where he crash landed and was unable to continue. The race was won by an American, Walter Brock.

Six weeks later Britain and Germany were at war.

In 1915 an air training squadron was set up on the playing fields. The scale of it was very small: initially there were only four aircraft and half a dozen trainee pilots who were accommodated in tents with a marquee for a mess. Pilots also used the footballers’ dressing rooms as living quarters. Later, barracks were built for the airmen. By the end of the war there were ten Royal Flying Corps squadrons training at Castle Bromwich airfield.

First-hand accounts survive from the pilots who trained at the base during the First World War. They make it clear that the siting of the airfield was far from satisfactory. The main sewage works was at the eastern end of the runway, but there were also still filter beds at the western end. It was not unknown for trainees to overshoot the runway and land in the sewage works. There was also the hazard of the railway line with its telegraph poles along the southern edge of the field. Furthermore, the only access to the hangars and workshops from the Chester Road was right across
the middle of the airfield.

As the numbers of trainee pilots increased, accommodating them became a problem: for a time many of them were put up in the jockeys’ quarters at Castle Bromwich racecourse (These were near the present junction of Bromford Road and Bromford Drive). Later others were found digs in Erdington and brought to the airfield daily by truck.

Inadequate Training
It must be remembered that this flying force was being set up little more than ten years after the Wright brothers’ first successful flight. There were no systematic training schedules and very few instructors. Some of those carrying out the training were trainees who had shown themselves most able, others were pilots on leave from the war in France, some of whom were suffering from the nervous effects of battle and probably the least able to inspire confidence in new recruits. The main aim of the camp was to get in as many training hours as possible before the new pilots were sent over to France.

Maintenance of the aircraft was minimal, partly due to a lack of skilled engineers but also because of the need to keep the limited number of aircraft in the air for as long as possible. Planes were taken out of service only when something went wrong.

One of the early trainees described his time at Castle Bromwich as ‘wonderfully easy-going and happy-go-lucky’. However, this cavalier attitude belies the statistics regarding injuries and deaths at the airfield. Research by the Midland Aircraft Recovery Group (http://www.aviationarchaeology.org.uk/marg/) has revealed a list of casualties at Castle Bromwich, the majority of which were caused by pilot error, the result of inadequate supervision and training, and a significant number by mechanical failure.

A Toll of Injury and Death
There were some 70 incidents at Castle Bromwich between 1916 and 1918; over 30 air crew were killed, never to see combat in France; some 50 were injured, many of them seriously.

The list of accidents makes depressing reading. Some pilots crashed into trees on take-off or landing, others flew into the telegraph wires along the railway, hit stationary aircraft on the ground or flew up into planes that were airborne above them. Most common was the failure to complete manoeuvres correctly. Many pilots crashed while carrying out turns or loops, side-slipped or stalled while banking too steeply; or failed to land correctly. A small number of accidents were due to adverse wind conditions while in flight or fog on landing.

The reasons for many of the accidents due to mechanical failure are not detailed; most are just recorded as ‘engine failure’, caused no doubt by insufficient maintenance of the aircraft. Some accidents are hard to stomach. One trainee pilot was injured when he was forced to land after his plane ran out of fuel; he hit a tree and was badly injured.

Injuries and deaths also occurred due to structural failure and fabric being dislodged from the wings; a whole wing collapsed in one incident. One pilot fell to his death from his aircraft while performing a loop when his safety straps broke; the seat of another trainee came loose jamming the controls and he too crashed to his death.

Most of the aircrew were British although some came from Canada, Australia, India and South Africa. A number of Americans are listed. The majority of those killed were taken home to be buried, though some were interred at Curdworth and at Castle Bromwich.

Memorials in Castle Bromwich graveyard
2nd Lt D K Billings 71 Squadron RFC (Royal Flying Corps) died 14.9.1917; David Kitto Billings was from Chicago, Illinois. CWGC (Commonwealth War Graves Commission)
2nd Lt Lucien Herbert Higgs 5 TRAINING Squadron RFC died 8.6.1917 aged 25; Lt Higgs was from Brussels; the monument is in the shape of a cross and must have been put up at his family’s expense.
Lt P C Monyhan 54 Training Squadron RFC died 22.5.1918 CWGC; killed while flying.
Corporal C N Ryder 4 Squadron; Australian Flying Corps died 10.4.1917 CWGC; killed while flying; Clifford Newton Ryder was from Sydney.
2nd Lt William Moorwood Staniforth Queens Own Yorkshire Dragoons 28 Training Squadron RFC died 23.3.1917 aged 32.
Captain Edwin Tufnell Haynes, DSC DFC Royal Naval Air Service, Royal Air Force died 28.4.1919 aged 24; Haynes from Derbyshire was killed in 1919 after the war flying a Bristol Fighter and is commemorated by a private monument. “Let those that come after, see to it that his name be not forgotten”

044 1914 CB airfield 1917 cemetery Higgs
In Loving Memory of Lucien Higgs died 1917

The Germans had gained initial superiority in the air and the British made a great push to produce more aircraft and the pilots to fly them. Soon after the opening of Castle Bromwich airfield some 2000 pilots were in training there. Most stayed for a maximum of only six months and, although it was the flying aces and their daring battles in the sky who caught the public imagination, the emphasis was rather on air reconnaissance in the early days of military flight.

As industrial activity in Birmingham increased with the war effort, the prevailing winds brought smoke and pollution in the direction of the airfield which was low-lying by the River Tame and already prone to mists and fog. The airfield was then increasingly used for testing aircraft made in the Birmingham area and elsewhere. These were tested on the ground and in the air and included Handley-Pages manufactured by the Birmingham Carriage Company at Smethwick and the Metropolitan Wagon Company at Saltley, which were stored in large purpose-built hangars and then flown out the fighting squadrons.

Castle Bromwich Airfield (Part One)

by Leave a Comment

The history of Castle Bromwich airfield is almost lost in the mists of Tame.

It was heads or tails, Castle Bromwich or Elmdon for Birmingham Airport in 1933. In the end Elmdon’s more open site and better atmospheric conditions gave it the edge over ‘Castle Fogwich’.

The airfield, which was incorrectly known as Castle Bromwich, was operational for some 40 years and lay north of the River Tame alongside the Chester Road. The site is now occupied by Castle Vale, a housing estate developed in the early 1960s.

Castle Bromwich Airfield – not in Castle Bromwich
That stretch of land was however never in Castle Bromwich whose ancient manor had the course of the River Tame as its northern boundary. The airfield lay in the medieval manor of Berwood, a sub-manor of Erdington which, like Castle Bromwich, was part of the extensive manor of Aston. However, the railway station which opened on the ‘wrong’ side of the river in 1842 was called Castle Bromwich station, the airfield was known as Castle Bromwich a hundred years ago and the Spitfire factory (now the Jaguar) and Fort Dunlop have always been described as being at Castle Bromwich. In placename terms, if you make a mistake often enough and long enough, it becomes de facto correct.

Berwood, a lost placename
The name of Berwood, like that of Castle Bromwich, is Anglo-Saxon and means open woodland where pigs were grazed. The manor house stood here from the 12th century off Farnborough Road and was for hundreds of years in the hands of the Arden family.

It is difficult to understand why the medieval manor house should have been built here (now Farnborough Road). Although this is fertile soil rich with alluvium, good for crops and livestock, it is part of the floodplain of the River Tame and must have known floods during the winter months. Sometime during the 13th century a moat was dug around the manor house, a symbol of status rather than a defensive measure.

Berwood was administered as part of Sutton Chase, although it did not lie within Sutton manor. A keeper of this part of the chase had a residence here where he would put up guests of the Earl of Warwick on expeditions hunting for deer.

By the 17th century moated halls had lost their status and Berwood Hall fell into ruins. It was replaced by a farmhouse which served as the airfield’s officers’ mess during the First World War. The building survived until the expansion of the area as Castle Bromwich airfield during the Second World War.

Berwood – Castle Bromwich’s dark side
The open area of flat land on which Castle Bromwich airfield was to be built was requisitioned for essential services before the First World War.

As Birmingham expanded rapidly during the 19th century, the disposal of sewage became increasingly problematic. Some sewage was run into the River Rea where it was carried off into the Tame, the Trent and ultimately the North Sea. The system for houses away from the river dated from the Middle Ages: so-called ‘night soil’ was collected by night men from privies and cesspits and taken in carts beyond the town boundary where it was spread on farm land to be decomposed by the elements. It was then sold to farmers and market gardeners as fertiliser.

Up until the middle of the 19th century, the system proved just about adequate. But the population in industrial towns such as Birmingham was growing apace and the quantity of night soil was outstripping the ability to dispose of it. Then in the 1850s there were catastrophic floods in Deritend and Digbeth caused by sewage backing up from the mill weirs along the River Rea downstream. So Birmingham began to construct a piped sewage system which carried waste to fields in Saltley and beyond, bought or rented by the town council where it was spread. The sediment was allowed to dry and sold as fertiliser and the water allowed back into the river.

044 1914 CB airfield 1868 sewage farm generic origin unknown
A sewage farm in 1868 – origin unknown

But the problem was far from solved. Sewage farms took up large areas of land as the process was a slow one. In 1862 the Borough Surveyor, W. S. Till, estimated that at Salford Bridge, the Tyburn, Berwood (and later Minworth and Hams Hall) some 60 tons of solid matter produced by a population of 250,000 was produced every day.

And the heavily populated areas of Kings Norton which included Balsall Heath, Aston andHandsworth were still discharging 12,000,000 gallons a day directly into the rivers, most of which passed along the Tame at Castle Bromwich.

By 1877, under the leadership of Birmingham mayor, Joseph Chamberlain, the Birmingham Tame & Rea District Drainage Board was set up and given authority and finance to act across the various boroughs concerned.

The system of spreading sewage over the fields needed ever larger amounts of land. Starting from the initial farms at Saltley, land was bought from Salford Bridge out to Minworth. In 1881 William Bagot of Pype Hayes Hall sold some 350 acres of Berwood Farm’s land to the Drainage Board and about the same again in 1888; this was a large area of treeless flat land along the River Tame with Plants Brook running across it (now Castle Vale). The field hedges were removed and Plants Brook was diverted to the east of the site. This large area of level ground alongside the river was ideal. However, the method had its limitations.

As the population of Birmingham grew, ever greater areas of land were needed; suitable sites for sewage farms alongside the rivers were a finite resource. But by the end of the century Birmingham had devised a system of passing sewage through filtration tanks which separated the solid matter as sediment. The system needed much less land than the old method.

Filter beds were built alongside the Kingsbury Road near Plants Brook and continued up to the outbreak of the First World War. With the men recruited as soldiers the work was completed by women, conscientious objectors and German prisoners of war. The filtration system released large areas of land which the Drainage Board sold for largely for farming; this was good fertile soil.

Castle Bromwich Playing Fields
‘For the youths of Birmingham’

From 1909 a large part of the former sewage farm was rented from the Drainage Authority by the Birmingham Housing Reform & Open Spaces Association as a recreation ground. In 1913 Birmingham City Council rented additional land here. Much of the site was given over to football pitches, some 60 at its greatest extent. There was no access all the way to Castle Bromwich by bus and, although the railway station was very close to the playing fields, this was not a cheap option.

In 1914 the City Council widened the Kingsbury Road to the Tyburn House Inn in order to extend the tram line from the City Centre giving better access to the fields and so ‘encourage their greater use by the youths of Birmingham’. It was also planned to extend the line from the Tyburn along the Chester Road as far as the entrance to the playing fields.