Gliding Heritage

 HELP PRESERVE OUR GLIDING HERITAGE - by Wally Kahn

The achieved aim of the Vintage Glider Club to keep older gliders flying is wonderful and extremely praiseworthy.  But I believe that we should also work as hard to preserve all the written and printed historical material which chronicle and detail the development of our sport.

To that end, I have been collecting all the gliding books published in the UK (over 100 to date), have been able to complete my sets of 'Sailplane and Glider', 'Gliding' and 'Sailplane & Gliding' from the start in 1930 and have had these beautifully bound.

This collection I am bequeathing to our movement and hope that we can find somewhere to house it so that present and future glider pilots can have access to it for their enjoyment and research purposes.

The growing pile of other gliding material is still nowhere near big enough! Gems like the Itford meeting programme, the 1930 Dorset Club Handbook, 1930 and 1931 BGA Journals have been found and have now been safeguarded for the future, but there is still a huge amount out there which must be saved.

Help preserve our heritage, seek out anything written about our sport. Any and all bits of paper concerning gliding in the UK must be secured.  If you have not any storage space, you can safely entrust it to me to add to all the other material - it will be catalogued and kept safe until a permanent home is found.

There is another way you can help! During the long winter evenings, write down your memories of gliding clubs you have visited, your own club, gliders, people - anything. In years to come they will be as fascinating as London Club's Ted Hull's wonderful videos are now!  Style and spelling are not important, the contents are, just as the filming techniques in Ted's early films would not have won many Oscars - but who cares!

When I wrote my book 'A glider pilot bold..', I tried to include a very wide spectrum of the more than fifty years of gliding I have enjoyed. Remember, people are as important as gliders, our memories feast on anything!

HOW YOU CAN START YOUR OLD COLLECTION

Every day, booksellers around the world are keen to sell their stock of used books and they sell a very large percentage vja the internet. I recommend the following as being the most useful :- www.abebooks.com ; - www.haybooks.com ; - www.addall.com and www.amazon.co.uk

To-day, 1st July, as I write this piece, I used 'abebooks.com' and using the following as 'keywords' it listed the number of books in each category! 'Gliding' - 1686, 'Soaring' - 2048 and 'Sailplane' - 79!!!!  Of course not all books are strictly what we want, hang gliding books and a few strange titles do appear from time to time.  Good hunting!

Reprinted from VGC News, Summer 2003