THESE sleek aeroplanes should have had York stamped all over them. They were designed and built by Airspeed Ltd, the aircraft factory set up in York - but which later relocated, lock, stock and undercarriage, to the more forward-thinking town of Portsmouth.

The pictures come from a large archive of aviation memorabilia owned by Terry Ashton, of Hull Road, York. He is a collector of everything from model cars to posters, but he inherited the aircraft collection from his father.

Ronald Ashton, who died in February, aged 84, was once passionate about all things aeronautical.

"My dad was a very unusual man. He was a postman, but he had a fascination with aircraft," says Terry.

"He wrote to practically every aircraft company in the world asking for photos and information."

Then the Second World War intervened. Mr Ashton, a gunner, was captured and put in Singapore's infamous Changi jail. He was forced to work on the Burma railroad, and narrowly escaped death in an air raid while on the bridge over the River Kwai.

He survived being marched hundreds of miles to the Chinese border, all on a starvation diet.

"When they found him, he was about five-and-a-half stone," says Terry. "He was the last of his company left."

On his return home, Ronald Ashton's attitude to aircraft - and to his collection - had changed. "He never showed any interest after the war. He never brought them out or showed them again."

He worked for the Post Office in East Yorkshire for 55 years, receiving a medal for his long service from the Postmaster General. At one time he delivered mail to TE Lawrence, later known as Lawrence Of Arabia, who lived in the county.

The late Mr Ashton's collection of aircraft pictures and documents takes you back to the glory days of air travel.

It includes a souvenir programme for the National Aviation Day Display Campaign, organised by air ace Sir Alan Cobham about 70 years ago. Terry said this flying circus came to York: and what a day out it must have been.

It included a "Premier Display of Aerobatics" performed by a pilot in a de Havilland Tiger Moth: "the aim is to display the capabilities of a modern aeroplane and the liberties which can be taken with it".

The programme also promised "Dancing In The Air" from Airspeed three-engined planes. On a later page there is an advert for the Airspeed Ferry, "the most economical craft for air transport yet produced", made in York.

Yesterday Once More has touched on the Airspeed story before, most recently in the article on bouncing bomb inventor Barnes Wallis.

The great engineer worked with Nevil Shute Norway on airships at Howden, but when the R101 airship crashed in 1930, the programme was abandoned.

It was a bad time to be out of a job for Nevil Shute, as the engineer-turned-author would come to be known. He had just become engaged to a nurse at York Hospital, called Frances Heaton.

So he decided to start his own aeroplane manufacturing company. In his 1953 autobiography Slide Rule, Shute explained how he would venture out from his home in the St Leonards Club in York, opposite the Theatre Royal, to cities across the north of England for meetings with potential financial backers.

But the American depression was just beginning to bite on this side of the Atlantic. Finding investors proved a major headache. In the evenings he would seek solace in his writing: the man who would become famous around the world for A Town Like Alice and On The Beach began penning his novel Lonely Road in York in the winter of 1930.

Shute and his designer, Hessell Tiltman, took an office near York market at 15 shillings a week and decided to call their enterprise Airspeed Ltd.

At the first board meeting in a York solicitor's office in April 1931, it was resolved that the company would begin by building gliders, and it would rent half of the empty bus garage on Piccadilly.

Airspeed's works for its first two years boasted about 6,000 sq ft in floorspace, tiny by aircraft manufacture standards. Shute created a little office and set half a dozen woodworkers to the task of building gliders.

Meanwhile, Sir Alan Cobham, an enthusiastic member of the Airspeed board, had ordered two passenger aircraft for use in his National Aviation Day flying circus. They called it the Airspeed Ferry.

The first glider flew in 1931. It was dismantled, placed in a trailer and towed behind an old Buick car for tests at Sherburn-in-Elmet aerodrome.

Moving the first Ferry to Sherburn proved more difficult. Reassembling it at the aerodrome would have been very costly and inefficient. Instead, they towed it on its own wheels in the middle of the night with a police escort.

The Ferry was a success, and the fledgling company really started to take off. And soon it would it would be forced to fly the York nest.

"Clearly if we were to go on building aeroplanes we should have to move from the bus garage in York to some location on an aerodrome," wrote Shute in Slide Rule, "and I began to visit various cities in England that had set up municipal aerodromes to ascertain what help they would give us if we were to move the company to their aerodrome.

"York was, unfortunately, rather backward at that time and it was some years before an aerodrome came into being for the city."

Meanwhile, Airspeed made more Ferries and proceeded with the design of a monoplane six-seater called the Courier in York.

This was to become the first British produced plane with a retractable undercarriage. The twin-engined model was to be called the Airspeed Envoy, and it could be converted to both civilian and military use.

But these would not be built in York. If Clifton Airfield had been developed they might have been.

Instead, in March 1933 Shute moved Airspeed to Portsmouth, which had a new municipal aerodrome on the edge of town. And York's chance to become a plane as well as a train city crashed and burned.

- A week today is the 50th anniversary of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It will be the subject of next week's Yesterday Once More.

Do you have any special memories of the day? Did you take part in a local street party, or travel to London to see the procession? Do you have any photographs of the big day?

If so, ring me on (01904) 653051 ext 337, write to Chris Titley, The Evening Press, 76-86 Walmgate, York YO1 9YN or email chris.titley@ycp.co.uk

Updated: 10:53 Monday, May 26, 2003