THE baby celebrating VE Day in the arms of his grandmother, dancing to the sounds of a Darlington town centre barrel organ, is today building a German Focke-Wulf fighter which he hopes will one day the only airborne version of the plane in the world.
Stan Howes, the son of an RAF pilot, was just nine months old on VE Day and he was living in his grandmother’s house in Brunswick Street, which is off Darlington’s inner ring road - Stan’s old school at the top of the street is now The Forum music centre.
The other splendid photograph which survives from this street party is on Page 32, with the cooling towers of Darlington’s wartime power station in the background, but, as Stan was such a nipper, he can’t remember anything about it.
He was born in Hull, but came to Darlington with his mother, who was an Aycliffe Angel, to escape the bombing of his home city while his father was away flying bombers. They stayed with his maternal grandmother Willesden in one of Brunswick Street’s terraced houses.
Despite his infancy on this historic day, the war shaped Stan’s life.
“I haven’t a clue what my father did,” he says. “He was a wonderful guy but used to change the conversation if the war came up.
“When I was very young, before I had seen an aeroplane, I went up to him and said ‘daddy, when I grow up, I want to be a pilot, I want to fly aeroplanes’, and that was it, end of, and I’m still in the same frame of mind.”
And he did fly aeroplanes, first as a flying officer in the RAF in the 1960s, then with the Air Training Corps, and now in his self-built planes. He has a two-seater acrobatic RV4 kit plane which he keeps at Teesside Airport, but in his workshop off North Road, he is working on his sixth plane: a Focke-Wulf 190.
“The Messerschmitts, Spitfires and Hurricanes were introduced in 1937 so weren’t new when the war started,” says Stan, who has written perhaps the definitive history of RAF Goosepool, or Middleton St George. “After we had won the Battle of Britain and the war changed, we were suddenly attached by this strange aircraft in August 1941 – it didn’t dogfight, it just dived down on everyone.”
This was the FW-190, and it took Britain many months to first capture and analyse one and then adapt the Spitfire to match it.
Stan’s is modelling his plane on one flown by the German ace, Josef Priller, who shot down 107 British aircraft in 307 missions.
“He was the top scoring ace in the Second World War – Black 13 was his ident,” says Stan.
Stan’s will be three-quarter size with a 26ft wingspan and powered by a 300hp engine. Having spent three or four years on it, it should be ready in another two.
“The fuselage is here, and the engine and the propeller although as it is three-bladed, it is in bits,” he says. “We are now in the process of doing the cowlings.
“Everyone knows about Spitfires, Hurricanes and Messerschmitts, but the Focke-Wulf was a very rare bird – I think there are about 50 Spitfires dotted around the world, but there aren’t any 190s in Europe, and I decided to do it for that uniqueness.
“It will be based at Teesside and I’ll take it to airshows in England and on the continent.”
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