Royal Air Force

MD 's father, barrister John Frederick Drabble , also attended Cambridge , and served in the RAF during the second world war. In 1945, newly demobbed, he stood as Labour candidate for the Tory seat...

Her father, Victor Valentine Gee , was dominant in the household. He was a socialist, an Old Labour man, yet at home he was an unreconstructed conservative authoritarian. He had been born into...

As a teenager she socialized with trainee British pilots at a Royal Air Force base near Johannesburg.

GBS was visited during the second world war by an RAF officer who had the greatest admiration for her Rakonitz novels (which had been recommended to him by his aunt, who lived in the same...

In this book she both re-introduced Albert Campion to his many fans, and tried to picture the coming post-war England. The cast of upper-middle-class characters are transformed by their entry into war service in...

MJ co-wrote a comedy called Sweet Liberty with her brother Bernard Jaeger , who was in the RAF at the time.

Back in Baghdad in October 1931, FS began to increase her writing pace. The Royal Air Force printed her maps, and she published in the Geographical Journal. She also disguised herself in an 'abba...

FS published her first article in the Times: about the capture by rebels and the negotiated release of two RAF pilots during the process of British handover of Iraq to the Iraqis.

ET and her family had their first spell at Scarborough in Yorkshire, where her husband was posted as a reservist with the wartime RAF . They were there again for about the same season...

After her return to England, LB bought herself a country home: the manor house at Hemingford Grey in Huntingdonshire, twenty yards from the towpath of the Great Ouse, which dates back to...

EN sold Well Hall, which she could not afford to keep up, and moved with her second husband, the Skipper , to two converted RAF huts outside the village of St Mary in the...

This book deals (often satirically) with Martha's experience as a member of a rather amateurish Communist Party group in Africa during the Second World War. The wave of local political consciousness is brief, brought about...

Back at home in Cheltenham, Mary finds the stagnation was worse than anything that I had pictured. Her mother (much younger than her father) died early; her stepmother was formerly her father's landlady...

WP used patois for the first time in A Hero's Welcome, and found it liberating. Set in the Caribbean in 1947, this play features three young women looking for a path in life and...

The story is set in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where a young couple, Isabel and Philip Carey, are living in the harsh winter and austerity conditions of 1952, coping with the newness of...