I'd started to put together a posting on Frank Greed before Remembrance Day, to lay out something of what he did in Yeovil during WWI, but then Ancestry.uk came along and gave me free days to investigate all the war records of Lionel Waller and the other family soldiers, so I had to concentrate on that.
Here's the first bit of what I was working on. I have just learned how to add maps, too. You can zoom in and out on them and move around just as you would on the Google maps site.
Westland, the aircraft company that Frank Greed worked for during WWI, was a true Somerset company. Apparently, every bomber that was built at the Yeovil factory during WWI was "delivered to France complete with a barrel containing cider in the rear to act as a form of ballast". That's what I call a good use of space.
Frank's work involved making wooden propellers for the aircraft, that much we know. Whether it was an assembly line type of set-up or if his carpentry skills were used as required for the whole planes, I cannot say. There is now an aviation museum in Yeovil, which would be interesting to visit one day.
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| Westland N16 with wings folded |
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| A horse drawn cart takes wings of Short Type 166 from factory to Yeovil 's Great Western Railway junction. |
aircraft images credit: http://flyingmachines.ru/Site2/Arts/Art5845.htm
http://www.abct.org.uk/airfields/yeovil
wooden propeller (from Swiss aviation museum): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_War_I_wooden_propeller.jpg
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