When one is young a century seems almost an aeon, mythical in its earlier days, peopled with men whose names are forgotten, or remembered only as seen on mouldering tomb stones in village churchyards. But to me, although only in the earlier seventies, the hundred years spanned by the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain (as it was originally called) is little more than “an evening gone”.

P. Y. Alexander, an engine enthusiast, was one of its early members, and a close friend of an uncle of mine, and I met him in his later years.