YESTERDAY IN MELTON MOWBRAY

THE BUTCHER'S LAD, THE BARNSTORMER AND THE GRUBBER. Samuel Summerfield was one of eight siblings born in South Derbyshire in 1894 into a farming family. In 1900 when he was just six years of age, his family re-located a few miles south to the small market town of Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire where his father was to set up in business as a grazier and butcher providing meat for the local market. As a very young man, Samuel set himself the task of teaching himself to fly a heavier-than-air machine in the nearby fields and was later to obtain one of the first ‘British Aviators Certificates’ issued. During the Great War as a Captain in the Royal Flying Corps, he assisted in the training of the brave young pilots, who from all walks of life would fight and die in great numbers over the killing fields of France and Germany. In later years ‘Sam’ was to earn a living ‘barnstorming’ and providing leisure flights with a travelling air circus. At the age of 40 and unmarried...

Early Aviation around Melton Mowbray. The small market town of Melton Mowbray was once an important link in the aerial defence of these Islands, detached as they are from the mainland of Europe, at a time when even the concept of an airfield or aerodrome as we understand it today was but a mere whim in the fancy of an increasing number of enthusiasts who were tinkering with the mystery of the yet to be understood practicalities of the concept of powered flight, man in control of a dirigible machine which he could literally fly in the sky to wherever he wished to go.  But how forward looking were those daring young men at the time?  Around the turn of the last century, a non-stop saga of wars and related conflicts around the world were being created and exacerbated , often stirred by the increasingly confused politics of an expanding and competitive  Europe. Britain had ensured that Queen Victoria's red-coated troops were retained and widely  ens...