Those Magnificent Men

Part of the long stretch of beach with Filey in the distance

Just to the south of Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast, England, lies the small town of Filey. It’s a pleasant little place and follows the pattern of many UK seaside resorts of being quiet in the winter and very busy for the summer season.

Many of the summer visitors are attracted by the beach which extends for four miles and can be nearly a quarter mile wide at low tide. Many of them will not realise however that for a brief period in the early twentieth century Filey and its beach were once an important centre for the then fledgling and pioneering aviation industry.

In 1910 formal permission was granted by the local authorities to Mr J.W.F. Tranmer, a retired businessman, to build a hanger next to Filey beach and to use the sands as a practice ground. This was the birth of the Filey Flying School which for the next two years turned this normally quiet backwater of Yorkshire into the home of an intrepid group of aviators who helped push the boundaries of flight.

As well as pleasure trips and training lessons test flights for the Leeds built Mercury monoplane also took place on the sands in 1911.

A Mercury 1 monoplane on Filey Sands

A tragic accident occurred in December 1911 in which one of the schools trainers and a passenger were killed. The school managed to survive for until it shut in late 1912 and moved to Hendon in London.