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Last updated on 24 July, 2023 at 10:43 AM

84th Entry

Trog Gillott said in an email on 29 Dec 18:

For the last 10 years or so I have toyed with the idea of trying to contact an old friend of mine, Stan Folds, but never got round to doing anything about it. Recently whilst watching an RAF recruiting advert on the TV a wave of nostalgia swept over me and I decided to search the web to see if there was anything there relating to the 84th and of course there was. One of the first places I looked at was the list of members already contacted and it was a bitter disappointment to see that Stan had died last year. On seeing that I was in two minds as to whether to go ahead and make contact, but here I am.

Stan and I had a common interest in motor vehicles whilst at Locking which continued when we were posted to RAF Neatishead in Norfolk. There we had a happy friendship exploring Norfolk and enjoying a common interest in anything to do with cars. He had a Ford Y type, which I borrowed when my Singer Le Mans sports car was poorly, (quite often). I could relate many of these including the time we were driving to his parents' home in Walthamstow when the Singer's clutch failed and we had to hitch a ride in a lorry to get to London. The many times we would drive back from a pub at the dead of night, in his car, and he would turn the ignition off and back on causing the unburnt fuel in the exhaust to explode like a series of gunshots, how childish but so funny at the time. The time whilst at Locking that Stan, Tony Smart and I drove from Weston to Beer in Devon, in the Singer, to visit Stan's uncle. Unfortunately he wasn't at home but it was a good day out.

However I did get a warning to get rid of the car or I would be in trouble, so I had to be very careful after that.

Anyway enough of these snapshots suffice to say our friendship culminated in him being my Best Man at the wedding to my first wife in Ipswich. At that time I was no longer stationed in Norfolk but had been on a course at RAF Newton and the AEI factory in Leicester on the TIR system linked to Bloodhound 1 and was stationed at RAF Breighton in East Yorkshire. This meant I rarely saw Stan after the wedding, just when our paths crossed when we happened to be at the same station at the same time. He ended up buying the Singer off me after I abandoned it at RAF Coltishall with a broken crankshaft. I think the last time I saw him would be at Breighton in 1964 just before I went back to Locking on a Type 85 Linesman course.

After the Type 85 course I was posted back to RAF Neatishead and stayed there until I retired from the Service in 1970. I had taken an RAF sponsored computer programming course in London prior to leaving and then became a trainee Programmer in Norwich. That job lasted until 1972 when the company closed and I moved to Leeds at the head office. I stayed in computing until I retired in Halifax in 2005, and then continued my classic car restoration hobby up to the present day. My current 'toy' is a 1973 Rover P6 2000 TC, which I took for a drive this afternoon.