MEET THE AUTHOR

Rosemary Collins talks to DAVID BREMNER, the author of the new book Bristol Scout 1264: Rebuilding Granddad’s Aircraft

How did you get the idea to rebuild your grandfather’s First World War aircraft?

I grew up with my grandfather, and he used to tell us stories about his days flying in the First World War. When he died in 1983, my dad and I were clearing out his workshop and in it we found these three parts. He’d never mentioned them, but I was reasonably sure that they must be aircraft parts. My brother Rick and I have always been involved in flying, and a friend of ours suggested that we might investigate rebuilding grandad’s aircraft, Bristol Scout 1264, from the three parts. It took about seven years of research and six years of building, but now we’ve rebuilt the whole rest of the aircraft exactly as he had it, and I fly it.

The book interweaves the stories of Frank Barnwell (who co-designed the Scout), your grandfather’s service and your rebuilding of the aircraft. Why did you structure it like this? I suppose that the various strands knitted themselves together into a convenient sort of length. If I had just talked about flying, then the book would have been only a chapter or two. If I had just talked about the research, then again it wouldn’t have been enough to make a full book. Doing it this way, (a) there’s a substantial amount of meat in it, and (b) I hope it will interest different sorts of people.

Did the experience change your perspective on your grandfather?

Yes, absolutely. To read his logbook and then to experience what he experienced in flying 1264, you get to understand him as a 23-year-old. He was quite a different person then compared with when I knew him. It’s been one of the more enjoyable personal journeys for me to try to get to know him, and actually I now feel empathy with him to a much greater extent. I think that he and I would have been very similar to each other if we had been contemporaneous. We both enjoy flying, and we both like tinkering with things.