Like many landlocked British counties, RAF activities in Herefordshire have been limited in the century or so that air power has paid a crucial role in the defence of these shores, but even during World War Two there were only three active stations within its borders, one of those limited to technical training.
A number of sites in the county have been used as airfields, including Hereford Racecourse and Lugg Meadows on the outskirts of Hereford, both used as bases for No. 50 Gliding School, but the day-to-day business of the RAF was mainly restricted to three locations.
RAF Hereford/RAF Credenhill
Opened – 1940
Closed – 1994, site turned over to the Army
Also known as RAF Credenhill, Hereford is best known today as the regimental depot of the SAS, moving there in 1999, the former RAF station redesignated as Stirling Lines in 2000.
(RAF Hereford September 1940)
A non-flying station was created at the site five miles north east of Hereford at the start of WW2, creating a mini-city of wooden and brick buildings, RAF Hereford designated as a School of Technical Training. The station underwent continual development during the war, increasing the number on site to 7000, with courses offering training in many technical specialisations to air crew and related personnel.
RAF training courses continued post war, the station eventually passing to the Army in 1994, five years later the SAS moving in.
RAF Madley
Opened – 1941
Closed – 1954
Three runways were laid and a number of buildings were constructed on arable land six miles south west of Hereford, between the villages of Madley and Kingstone, creating an RAF radio signals training school.
(Eric Sykes was based at RAF Madley during World War Two)
More than 4,000 radio operators (including Eric Sykes) were trained at Madley, with a Mountain Rescue Team formed at the station in 1944 due to the high number of accidents at nearby mountain ranges over the border in Wales – the population of Kingstone village growing from 300 to 5000 during the war.
The most infamous flight from Madley came at the end of WW2 when Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy Fuhrer, boarded an aircraft that departed the station in October 1945, his destination Nuremberg, where he would stand trial for war crimes. Hess had taken a solo flight to Scotland in May 1941 under the auspices of an attempt to broker a peace deal, but ended up imprisoned at the Tower of London before being transferred to Abergavenny in Wales, where he spent three years incarcerated before standing trial.
RAF Shobdon
Opened – 1939
Closed – 1953, now a civilian airfield
(Present Day Shobdon Airfield)
Starting life as an army camp, Shobdon acted as a reception point for casualties evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940, before a runway was constructed in a joint project between the RAF and the US Army in 1943, No. 1 Glider Training School moving to the station seven miles west of Leominster. Glider pilots were trained in advance of the Normandy and Arnhem landings, the Gliding School closing in 1953, shortly before the site was handed over to Herefordshire County Council.
