Welcome To RAF Davidstow Moor
50.635N 4.61W
Air Ministry AM S584074[136]
SX150 850
700 acres
970 ft above sea level
3 miles from the foot of Roughtor and Brown Willy.
On the sites of the tenements of Larkaburra, Griggs Down, Higher Griggs Down and Goosehill.
Wartime Telephone Number:
Davidstow 122
Central Registry - Ext. 57
During it's brief history RAF Davidstow Moor in North Cornwall was home to Coastal Command squadrons involved in Air Sea Rescue [ASR], U-Boat hunting and anti shipping patrols. Personnel came from the UK, Canada, United States, Poland, Australia, New Zealand, Czechoslovakia and Holland.
My father Claude Knight was stationed there and the airfield was part of my Royal Mail post round. I have been lucky enough to talk to many people with first hand experience of what went on there in wartime. This has been an ongoing project over the last 40 years.
The site is intended to give the researcher access to my personal archive which includes squadron and airfield records, details and lists of personnel, both service and civilian, the memories of those I have talked to and corresponded with, my own photograph collection, a local crash log, background information about the area and it's people before and after the war and anything else that may be of interest.
It will be as full a record as I can make it but until it is complete please feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions or would like to add to the site or my archive.
How to find RAF Davidstow Moor
RAF Davidstow Moor lies two miles north east of Camelford in North Cornwall. It is at the junction between the A39 and the A395. The main entrance today is past the site of the Dairycrest factory and entered from the A395. The aerodrome is crossed by the road from Camelford to Altarnun. You can find a Google Map of the airfield here.
Coastal Command
RAF Coastal Command 19 Group
Coastal Command was founded on 14 July 1936 as part of the Royal Air Force. Its role was to defend the UK from seaborne attack and to protect British shipping. In February 1941 19 Group Coastal Command became operational. It covered an area to the south west of England. RAF Davidstow Moor became part of 19 Group Coastal Command. It's intended role was to strengthen 19 Group's anti U-boat campaign in the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay.
Function
Davidstow Moor was initially intended to be a satellite station to RAF St Eval but later became a parent station in it's own right. It became operational on 5 November 1942.
www.rafdavidstowmoor.org
If you wish to contact the owner of the site then please send your email to:
rod@rafdavidstowmoor.org
Alternatively you can contact the web designer at:
webmaster@rafdavidstowmoor.org
We would like to thank you for visiting this web site and hope you find this part of the world wide web informative and easy to use.
Last Update: 30 March, 2010
16-10-09: Template and CSS updates finished. The Operation Record Book for August 1943 is now online.
14-10-09: We are currently redesigning the site to make the HTML code more efficient and during this we are updating the cascading style sheets. Over the next 24hrs there may be some formating errors. We are aware of theses errors and they will be corrected as soon as possible.
07-10-09: Due to the popularity of widescreen displays the old full width layout of the site was starting to become unreadable. I have now altered the site pages so that they have a recognised standard width of 900 pixels, this keeps the length of the text lines shorter and more readable. I am also in the process of changing the style sheets so that all pages have a more unified look and feel to them, this includes a change to the on-screen font from Times New Roman to the more readable Verdana. If you have any comments on these style changes then please contact the webmaster at the email address below.
07-10-09: Please note that as from 07/10/2009 all the web pages on this site have had their filename extensions changed from .htm to .html. This may cause links from other sites and search engines to function improperly. To help with this problem I have redirected all '404 errors' (i.e. page not found) to an error page as is standard practice. I have contacted other site designers and asked them to alter their links.
