This advert appeared in the Gazette in March 1925 with a ‘representative’ of the paper recording his experience. The 3 seater Avro 110hp was piloted by an experienced and decorated veteran of the first World War. The rivers Exe and Lowman were visible ‘for many miles’ and the town ‘presented a splendid panorama’.
This advert for The Cornwall Aviation Co is promoting passenger flights from the Racecourse, Tiverton, in 1925, promising looping and spinning for only £1!
Although, it is reported, that a large number had taken a flight, very few had paid the extra money to experience the looping or spinning. The reporter, however, felt quite secure, even during the ‘hair-raising stunts’.
It has proved quite difficult to find artefacts relating either to flying or to the venue for the flights, ‘the racecourse’. We have photos of the first plane to grace the skies above Tiverton. This was in 1912 when it landed at Knightshayes.
Frederick John Snell wrote the preface to his ‘Chronicles of Twyford’ in 1892. There is a copy of this book in Research Room at the Museum. He devotes 4 pages to the races at Tiverton.
Front cover of The Chronicles of Twyford, being a new an popular history of Tiverton by Frederick John Snell, M.A.
By 1815 ‘it is evident that the Tiverton race meeting was an established institution’. The last official meeting was held in 1874, just a year after the full size poster that we have in our archive collection.
The small writing under the RACES says ‘will take place on the Old Race Course Half-a-mile from the Town’. Snell identifies the course as being on the Bampton Road (as it was then) which places the Race Course somewhere near the Hospital in Kennedy Way.
If you are interested in reading more, the text from Snell’s work has been transcribed online as part of a site devoted to John Slusar’s four volume work ‘Racecourses Here Today and Gone Tomorrow’.
Written by Museum Volunteer, Sue B