The U3A works on a four weekly cycle, which I am guessing (without doing any reasearch whatsoever, hence the guess) could get out of synch with the calendar months pretty quickly. Actually, thinking about it, if a month has five weeks, then nothing would be scheduled there. Anyhow, to lock the 20 day cycle (nothing happens on weekends), the first Wednesday of each month is the monthly meeting for the whole of Gosport U3A.
Today, being the first Wednesday of February I attended my first monthly meeting. I’m not going to assume that I will be able to get to every meeting, but if I can attend one or two, I’m going to be happy.
At the meetings, there is obviously news about U3A, for example, there is a new group starting, Military History. Now, I am passingly interested in that, but given that I am already attending two history groups (local – which is almost guaranteed to have a bit of a military focus, and general – the one I missed last week was about the Marconi Scandal. I only knew of it because it is mentioned in one of my favourite TV shows; Downton Abbey. I would quite like to have been at that session, but I had chosen Philosophy instead, which was OK, but I’m going to say, probably not as interesting. I’ve put my name down for the History session – sorry, that was a massive diversion, back to the story.
At the monnthly meeting, there is also usually a speaker. Today, was a Mr. Stephen Hoadley. He gives talks on a variety of history related topic. Today’s talk was about Spitfire. It was a slightly different perspective than usual, not focussing on the heroics of The Few, but the development of the plane, the Ministry of Defence issued a document titled only “F.7/30” you can google it, or one link is here; https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/british-f-7-30-fighter-specification.29612/
As you can see, it’s a specification for an aircraft. It led to a competition that resulted in…The Spitfire. Mr Headley’s talk covered what happened when the production factory in Southampton was bombed, and highlighted the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) – The organisation of (mostly) women, who delivered completed aircraft to their operational base.
I have to say that his presentation was excellent, seriously informative and plenty of humour. If I get a chance to go to any of his other lectures, I will most certainly take that opportunity.
The header picture? The silhouetted rather blocky ship is the AICC Fenghuang, a car carrier, with the capacity of 7,000 cars. The two people looking out over the water, are Elayne and Aurora.
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