DURING the First World War, aerial combat was very much in its infancy. The shocking bombardment of Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby by German warships in December 1914, showed how vulnerable the east coast was to enemy attacks, and so in March 1916 the 36 (Home Defence) Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps – the forerunner of the Royal Air Force was formed at Cramlington.
Its job primarily was to see off Zeppelin airships that were coming over and dropping bombs.
The early bi-planes were extremely rickety flying machines so 36 Squadron had quite a few small airfields along the coast - Marske, Redcar, Easington, South Shields and West Hartlepool, for example - but it also had a number of designated landing grounds (LG) inland where a plane could land if it was in trouble. These LGs were usually flat pieces of grassy farmland.
“The airfield was never an airfield in modern terms as it was no more than a field which had been surveyed and found suitable for a military biplane to land if short of fuel or, more likely the case, lost!” says David Thompson. It was an LG.
“There was also a LG at nearby Bishopton too, but there are no others in the Teesside area of which I am aware,” says David.
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Paul Stretton draws our attention to Spennymoor airfield which was one of 36 Squadron’s LGs. There’s a plaque commemorating it on the Fortune Inn – now a Chinese restaurant but formally the Masons Arms, a pre-1850 coaching inn – which is a field in front of it. Soldiers overseeing the landing ground are said to have been billeted in the pub.
36 Squadron also had landing grounds at Catley Hill to the east of Trimdon.
“My father, Maurice Gordon Sprentall, was born in 1920 and lived till he was 99,” says John Sprentall. “He was an airframe engineer in the RAF during the Second World War and told some very interesting stories – one day, after a squadron of Mosquito landed after a bombing run over Germany, his first job was to cut the telephone wires from the tailwheel of one of the aircraft.
“I remember him telling me some years ago about an airfield near Marske.”
This was probably the biggest of them all, probably more of an airfield than a LG. Planes had been landing on a field outside Marske since 1910, but by the end of the war, this strip had grown into a proper aerodrome: it had 17 hangars, had a special spur railway connection, and was guarded by two pillboxes.
It was particularly an air gunnery school, with WE Johns, the author of the Biggles books, being stationed there, and for five months of 1918, the 25th Aero Squadron of the US Army Air Service was there.
Like all the landing grounds, it returned to civilian hands at the end of the war, and now much of it has been built over, although we think the pillboxes can still be seen.
- Any other landing grounds? Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk
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