Building bombers that saved Britain
WHEN the last airworthy Vulcan delta- winged bomber overflew Woodford recently it was saying goodbye to its spiritual home.
Thousands watched as its Rolls Royce Olympus engines throttled up over Stockport’s quiet suburb with their powerful roar.
Woodford closed in 2011 and hundreds of aircraft workers went home for the last time.
This year the diggers moved in and the hangars came down. All should be cleared by Christmas, with the exception of the new Avro Heritage Museum.
The man who began it all, A.V. Roe, was inspired as a young ship’s engineer by the sight of an albatross soaring alongside his ship in the South Atlantic.
He started building model aircraft in the early 1900s and finally a triplane, which he assembled under a rented railway arch.
By the start of WW1 he was supplying the Royal Flying Corps from the basement of a Manchester mill. His bombers were used in a raid on the German Navy’s Zeppelin sheds.
In 1926 Avro, as his company became, started operating from fields at New Hall Farm, Woodford. By the 1930s he had become Sir Alliott Verdon-Roe and was briefly a member of the British Union of Fascists.
All that changed when Britain declared war on Germany and Woodford went onto a war footing. War winning bombers were assembled there, having been brought by road from their manufacturing base at Chadderton and from Metro Vickers in Trafford Park. Among them was the famous four-engined Lancaster – 47 a week being delivered to the RAF at the peak of production.
Thousands of workers toiled around the clock seven days a week for the first two years with no-one having a rest day or holidays. Roy Chadwick was the inspired designer and he was the man who initiated the Vulcan design in 1947 when the RAF requested a superfast air- craft capable of delivering a nuclear deterrent.
Ironically Chadwick was killed later that year in the crash of an Avro Tudor at Woodford. Thankfully the Vulcan he helped design never delivered its most lethal payload, but during the Falklands war in 1982 it dropped conventional bombs on the runway at Port Stanley, aiding British Forces in their ground assault. Woodford will now be re-developed for housing and part of the runway will become a peaceful tree lined boulevard.
Read stories about local heritage in Stockport Heritage Magazine £2.80 from newsagents, bookshops and at www. stockportheritage magazine.co.uk