A visit to the Wigram Air Museum - Wayne

Tensing Place

Most of my childhood years were spent in Christchurch at my parent’s home in Tensing Place, Riccarton.  This subdivision was developed in the late 50s, and our street was named after Tenzing Norgay who, with Hillary, reach the summit of Mount Everest on 29 May 1953.  As we lived near the Wigram Air Force Training Base, one of my vivid childhood memories was hearing the relentless grinding noise of the Harvard Aircraft and the shooting down of the said planes with a wooden rifle.  Eight year old kids do the same today, but with a laser. The Wigram Air Force Museum has an original Harvard on display.  So on Friday 20^th March, I cycled to Wigram to see what all the noise was about.  It turns out that I had frequently cycled between Tensing Place and Wigram as a child to attend piano lessons: my piano tutor was not only the wife of a serving Air Force Officer, but had adopted the teaching methods of his Sergeant Major.

Wigram Air Base

The Air Base is named after Sir Henry Wigram (1857 – 1934), a Christchurch businessman and politician.  In the same year that the Wright brothers made the first controlled, powered and sustained flight in 1903, Wigram was elected as a Member of the NZ Parliament.  Within 5 years, Wigram was pressuring his parliamentary colleagues to create a NZ Air Force.  The idea was visionary, given that it would be another year before French aviator, Louis Blériot, made the first flight across the English Channel.  It took another eight years and the First World War for his vision to become a reality, and in 1916 a flying school was established at Wigram, using land that would be official gazetted as an Air Force base in 1939 just as the world was being pushed into a second War.  The base was closed in 1990 following the end of the cold war. Wars have a lot to answer for. 

The RNZAF

The first time that the RNZAF operated overseas was in 1930 during an uprising of an ‘independence movement’ in Samoa and the Air Force dropped their first bomb in anger on a boat of rebels.  Fortunately the bomb missed its target, which turned out to be a boat of nuns on a missionary tour from Australia. 

The RNZAF provided support following the Murchison 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck at 10:17 am on 17 June 1929 and the 1931 Hawke's Bay 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck at 10:47 am on 3 February 1931, killing 256 people.

The RNZAF can now only boast of 60 aircraft, which is a significant reduction from the frantic days of the Second World War when it operated 2,400 aircraft with 57,000 men and women – which is nearly the population of New Plymouth City.  Of these 57,000, 10,000 became POW.  Of these 10,000, just 33 managed to escape the Axis camps.  Of these 33, Warrant Officer Gordon Woodroofe of Matamata managed to escape on 8 September 1944 after 3 years in captivity. 

The Harvard (North American T-6 Texan)

The Harvard that the Air Force Museum has on display was used to train pilots in NZ for the Second World War and continued to do so into the 1970s.  Designed by North American Aviation, the aircraft boasts a single 447 kW Pratt and Whitney Rotary engine, the same engine that made the grinding noise to kept me awake at night. Of the 17,000 units build worldwide, the RNZAF purchased 202, initially using the Lend-Lease program under which the United States supplied Allies with war materiel between 1941 and 1945.  The team have done a sterling job restoring the plane – I could not find any of the holes created by the bullets that I had fired at the aircraft 50 years ago from my bunker in Tensing Place. 

 

I would recommend a visit to the Museum, particularly if, like me, you grew up in Riccarton and wanted to see what all the noise was about.

What all the Noise Looks Like