Jack Sweet is a local historian in Yeovil and remembers as a young boy climbing through the perimeter fence on the Westland airfield to play cricket

 

 

The fencing around the airfield was, at least on the Westland Road side, not very high. In fact, it wasn’t even chained link, it was just wire but you had the Westland Police Department, their Headquarters, shall we say, at the main entrance and, of course, they could look across at anything going on and we used to go and play cricket on this piece of land which is now, I think, the Westland Road car park. Usually, the policemen were quite, what can we say, quite relaxed about it because there wasn’t a lot of flying back in. In the evenings you didn’t fly so much in the forties, the late forties. I’m talking about forty-six, forty-seven. Most of the flying had been done during the day but this would be in the evening and we used to go across there and play cricket in the summer. Now, occasionally one of the factory policemen would come charging across and we would disappear quite quickly but on the whole, they knew we were there and, if an aircraft was coming in for any reason, then we would be shouted at to get off, but I can’t remember that happening very often. I do remember occasionally being chased. It was part of the fun. I think it helped them because they were probably bored to death because nothing much was happening and about twenty youngsters from that area playing cricket, well, let’s have a bit of fun. Let’s go and chase them off, you know.

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