When Teesside Airport was used for spy gadgets and nuclear weapons

The airfield officially opened 80 years ago on January 15, 1941, as Bomber Command’s most northerly base during the Second World War, and for most of its wartime life it was home to squadrons from the Royal Canadian Air Force.

The display, put together by Sedgefield aviation historian Geoff Hill, features items that tell the stories of hero airmen, like Andrew Mynarski and William McMullen which will be well known to Memories readers.

Geoff has put some very quirky items on display, including the spy-like gadgets which were designed by Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, to help airmen who had been shot down.

There’s a compass hidden in the stem of a tobacco pipe, or tucked away in the heel of a flying boot, or discreetly positioned in a packet of Wild Woodbine cigarettes. Such items may not have aroused suspicion if found upon a captured airman, but there are also compasses hidden inside a shaving brush and a hairbrush – would the enemy not find it a bit odd if their prisoners were eager to consult their male grooming kits?

But Geoff has also put in the display his magnetised razor blades. When tied to a piece of string, the blade would spin so that the manufacturer’s name on it was pointing to magnetic north so the airmen knew which direction he needed to make his escape.

Geoff even has a truly Bondesque flexible saw which was concealed inside a bootlace.

After the war, the Canadians went home and RAF Middleton St George largely became a training base. But towards the end of its military life, in the late 1950s, its runway was extended so that it could accommodate Britain’s nuclear bombers.

The V Force, made up of Valiant, Vulcan and Victor bombers, was fitted out to carry long range nuclear missiles. It had ten main bases, but it was strategically unwise to keep all your eggs in one basket and all your bombers in one place where they could be easily wiped out, so there were another 26 airfields known as “dispersal bases” which enabled at least some of them to keep out of the way.

RAF Middleton St George was one of those bases, with Vulcan bombers operating from about 1959 to 1963.

Although very little was written about the country’s nuclear capability at the time, a 1959 “at home” MSG magazine – “at home” days were open days when members of the public were encouraged to visit the RAF at home – has a space age bomber swooping around the globe on its cover.

And Geoff’s exhibition also includes a picture of a Vulcan at the south side of the airfield.

It is believed that it was on that south side, near the old and isolated church of St George, that the Blue Steel nuclear missiles were stored. These monsters of mass destruction were tipped with a 1.1 megaton Red Snow thermonuclear weapon that would be fired from the underside of the Vulcan at 70,500ft. It would then travel at Mach 3 a maximum of 575 miles to its target.

The Vulcan in Geoff’s picture is painted “anti-flash white” because, having launched the missile, there would not be time for the bomber to retire to a safe distance, and so the coating was designed to reflect at least some of the thermal radiation.

This, of course, was the time of the Cold War with Russia. Perhaps the closest the world ever came to nuclear conflict was in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, although then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan refused to order the V Force to disperse from its 10 main bases to its outliers like MSG as this would have been seen as too provocative by the Russians.

In 1963-4, as MSG was prepared for transfer to civilian authorities, there were secret Ministry of Defence tidy up operations on the south side of the airfield.

The first civilian flight from the new Tees-side International Airport was on April 18, 1964, but which time the nuclear days were over, but it is still amazing to think that there was nuclear activity in the heart of a country community.

GEOFF HILL began his collecting in the 1960s. “I was a rambler,” he says, “and we found lots of crash sites of Second World War aircraft and in those days, you didn’t need permission to take things from them.”

Geoff’s father, John, had been in the Royal Army Service Corps and, as a tank transporter driver, had landed on D+2-Day and fought his way across France and was present at the relief of the Belsen concentration camp.

Geoff, a building contractor who ran the Marshall & Hill DIY shop in Chilton from 1968 to 2000, began putting on exhibitions and his collection grew so that it was housed in a museum room in the St George’s Hotel – the former officers’ mess – at the airfield. The hotel is now closed and so select items from the collection have this week gone on display in the airport’s departure lounges.