It’s interesting to think that both sides of our family experienced flying in the 1920s – The Hyde side by George being in the RAF as a boy entrant (scholarship) and the Morgan side by grandmother Nellie telling a tale of winning a ride in an aeroplane as a school prize.

The tale was told of going up  in a trip with Sir Alan Cobham in a large plane; with the Mayor and lots of other people. Other details were fairly sketchy. Some other details were that it was “somewhere down by the ‘lighthouse’ (Dyffryn – Peterstone west of Newport)” and that she had to get there by pony and trap!

So with this is mind, we decided to go an find out if it was true.

Given the little we had to work with – and that Nellie was still in school, we thought it would be somewhere between the ages of 11 and 14 – so 1926 to 1929.

Today, we attended Newport Central Library to look at the local history section – and in particular the Argus reference archive.

Low and behold on 7 September 1929 – we found the following!

So it was the truth!
The day of the event was the 6 September 1929.

In terms of the plane itself it was a Giant Moth, called the Youth of Britain:

There was some coverage of his tour in Flight (this entry is from a few weeks later):
https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1929/1929-1%20-%201329.html?search=sir%20alan%20cobham