Training and learning are the watchwords at RAF Cosford
MANY people may have visited Cosford without even realising it is a fully-functioning RAF station, the Midlands Museum a visitor centre dedicated to the history of aviation, and the RAF in particular.
RAF Cosford Wall Sign available to purchase here
Some may know Cosford as the venue for the only RAF-organised annual air display, or for those of a certain vintage, it may be remembered from a Saturday afternoon watching Grandstand, the base for indoor athletics in the UK for decades, the home of the annual indoor championships for more than a quarter of century.
But aside from the public and sporting role, Cosford is a major part of the Defence College of Technical Training (DCTT), delivering effective training to meet the needs of the UK Armed Forces.
Its training focus dates back almost 90 years, opening the year before the outbreak of WW2 as part of the RAF Expansion Plan, No.2 School of Technical Training (STT) one of the first units formed in July 1938.
Building work was intensive, with 38 hangars created, and five months after construction began the station was declared open, despite it being far from finished. Cosford was a joint aircraft maintenance, storage, and technical training unit, initially named RAF Donington after the parish in which it was located, changing its moniker soon after to avoid confusion with the nearby army camp of Donnigton.
RAF Fulton Block
Shortly before war was declared the Fulton barrack block was completed, at the time the largest single barrack block in the UK. It was named after an early RAF pioneer, believed to be Captain John Duncan Bertie Fulton, who was one of the first 14 officers of the Air Battalion, formed in April 1911. However, despite records stating that the widow of a Captain Fulton paid for the block – it was Grade II listed in 2005 – there is no record of Captain John Duncan Bertie Fulton ever marrying, so there is a degree of mystery over which Captain Fulton it is named after.
By the start of the Second World War, Cosford housed more than 3,500 trainees, with No. 2 STT training around 70,000 airmen during the conflict in engine, airframe, and armament trades, combining with No. 1 STT when it transferred to Cosford from RAF Halton.
RAF Cosford with Fulton Block in the foreground
It was midway through 1939 that No. 9 Maintenance Unit (MU) took up residence at Cosford, planes were stored, fixed, and modified before being issued to operation units, with spare parts for Spitfires also produced on site. Despite the importance of Cosford, it took around a year of the war before a decision was made to lay a concrete runway, taking off and landings by the likes of Vickers Wellingtons and Avro Ansons during the winter of 1940/41 turning the station into a ploughed field.
The fact that the landing ground resembled a field wasn’t a total disaster, however, with efforts to disguise Cosford from potential Luftwaffe attacks seeing cows brought in to wander the location, trees dropped in to surround planes stored on site. Records indicate the preventative measures were so successful that the station was only hit once by German bombers, and that was most likely by accident: the war period saw the industrial heartlands of the Midlands regularly attacked, and on one night Luftwaffe aircraft overshot their target likely due to bad weather, spotting Cosford by chance, they attacked the airfield, with thankfully no deaths or injuries.
The station became so busy that two overspill landing grounds were established at Brocton, near Stafford, and Weston Park north of Cosford, the site also becoming home to a Horsa glider manufacturing site; production started midway through 1942, the gliders crucial to D-Day operations and the push to reclaim European soil from Nazi expansion.
Among a Cosford first was becoming the home of the inaugural all-female Air Transport Auxiliary Unit, and there was also a RAF hospital established during WWII at the site, the most westerly of its kind in Britain, used primarily for repatriated PoWs from across the globe, with around 13,000 treated until 1948; it remained open to service personnel, and the general public, finally closing in December 1977.
Post-1945, work at Cosford was scaled down with No. 9 MU’s priority being storage rather than issuing new aircraft, and the station itself returning to its training focus, educating young engineering apprentices for future roles inside and outside the RAF; many RAF personnel will have spent time training at the station at some point during their military career.
As part of that training focus, the mid-1960s saw a new RAF School of Photography built at Cosford, the largest and most advanced photographic school of its kind in Europe, a few years later taking on the additional task of training Royal Navy and Army students, becoming the Joint School of Photography in the early 1970s; in 2003 it was renamed the Defence School of Photography and remains there today.
Several SEPECAT Jaguar GR3A used as instructional airframes at No. 1 School of Technical Training at RAF Cosford
The famous indoor athletics arena opened in the mid-1950s, its stature growing as the Amateur Athletics Association (AAA) held their annual UK Indoor Championships at Cosford from 1965 until 1991, athletes like Seb Coe and Daley Thompson regular visitors. The opening of the National Indoor Arena (NIA) nearby in Birmingham spelled the end for athletics at Cosford, the last event held at the RAF station in March 1993.
Today the station is central to the RAF mission to deliver high-quality flexible technical training to meet the needs of the UK armed forces for decades to come. As well as the Photography School, among other units based at the site north west of Wolverhampton is the Defence School of Aeronautical Engineering, No. 1 Radio School, the University of Birmingham Air Squadron and, to emphasis the venue’s sporting heritage, the RAF School of Physical Training.
But to visitors from across the country and overseas, Cosford is the home of the RAF Museum, the site opening in 1979 and now boasting one of the finest collections of military aircraft in Britain.
RAF Museum at Cosford
