VETERANS and descendants of an RAF unit known as The Forgotten Squadron have met to mark the 100th anniversary year of its formation.

Members of 77 Squadron Association, including those who served at North Yorkshire airfields such as Leeming, Topcliffe and Linton-on-Ouse, met for a ceremony and reunion dinner at the Yorkshire Air Museum, near York and a service at nearby Elvington.

Rachel Semlyen, honorary secretary of the association, said: "Like all other Second World War organisations, we are increasingly and inevitably losing our veterans.

"Three veterans and and more than 30 descendants of Second World War veterans attended, including Ted Matthews, aged 91, a fight engineer on Halifaxes and Bill Ball who is also in his nineties, and flew on the Berlin Air Lift in 1948/49.

"The speaker at the dinner was Leeds author, Ken Cothliff, whose father was a Canadian volunteer flight engineer at RAF Tholthorpe, near Thirsk, in 1944 and died just seven days before he was born."

The 77 unit was largely "a forgotten squadron" after it was disbanded in the 1960s and it was not until the 1980s that a formal association was founded when the museum began at Elvington, near York.