A Monthly Publication

Such is the modesty of Brian James Holmes that when offered the chance to be featured in the Newsletter he came up with a list of other worthy citizens who he thought should take precedence. Brian considers himself a comparative newcomer to the town, but even though West Norfolk has a Peterborough postcode (and receives television programmes from Yorkshire) the mere fact that Brian was born in Norwich makes him much more ‘local’ than our borough council, which for the past thirty-five years has made some pretty awful decisions affecting the wellbeing of Hunstanton at meetings held in King’s Lynn!

In 1936, when Brian was just four years old, his father volunteered to move with the recently sold Aircraft Department of Boulton & Paul Ltd (B&P) to help set up a factory on a Greenfield site in Wolverhampton, to be called Boulton Paul Aircraft Ltd. Brian’s father made his first visit to the new site travelling by train through Birmingham and the Black Country and wondered if he had made the right decision in taking his family away from the countryside of Norfolk. Fortunately, the site of the new factory was in the country on the outskirts of Wolverhampton.

The family left many relatives in Norfolk, so trips ‘back home’ were frequent, even during the war when Norwich was a target for German air raids. Brian has vivid memories of this period in his young life and well remembers seeing V1 rockets flying overhead.

As soon as Brian and his brother Jack were old enough they became apprentices at Boulton Paul Aircraft (BPA) where their father kept a close eye on both of them in his role as Superintendent of the Flight Shed. This experience engendered a love of aircraft that has stayed with the brothers to this day, even though Brian did not return to BPA after completing two years national service at the age of twenty three.

However, he did pursue a career in mechanical engineering, mostly in the Chemical Plant industry, based mainly in Sheffield, but travelling all over the world as a technical adviser.

   In 1954 Brian married Dianne Barker who had been working in the wages department at BPA when they first met. Dianne was from Kidderminster, where her father was one of this country’s leading carpet designers.

Brian and Dianne had three sons over a period of seven years: Jonathan, Julien and Jeremy. The Holmes boys are now aged 54, 49 and 48. Brian confesses to mixing up the names of the three J’s, but has less trouble with the names of his four grandchildren: Sarah, Matthew, Kit and Bethany.

It is a sore point with Brian that the name of Boulton Paul Ltd became extinct, even though the company still survives in the hands of the American company GE Aerospace. The original name is, however, kept alive by a group of former apprentices who formed the Boulton Paul Association (BPA) and by their endeavours created a thriving Heritage Centre within the factory, which now attracts aircraft enthusiasts from all over this country and further afield.

The centre also recalls the history of Boulton & Paul in Norwich by displaying many artefacts from both companies; but the main activity is restoring remnants of Boulton & Paul Ltd and Boulton Paul Aircraft Ltd and constructing replicas of aircraft. It took eighteen years to build four such aircraft of the many produced by the companies.

Brian’s main contribution to this project is depicted in this photograph, in which Brian is ‘flying’ the aircraft he built over a period of three years, which he had first to design, before it cold be built, as only photographs and an indication of the overall dimensions existed. Meanwhile his older brother, Jack was Project Engineer on a replica build of the famous Defiant.

Since retiring to Hunstanton in 2002, Brian has continued his involvement with the Heritage Centre, producing the BPA quarterly magazine, which is delivered to members in various parts of the world. He has also given many presentations on B&P and BPA to groups of all kinds throughout Norfolk.

This has not stopped Brian from becoming a very active member of Hunstanton Civic Society and he is currently responsible for arranging an extremely interesting series of presentations by a diverse range of speakers at the regular meetings of the Society in the Town Hall on the first Tuesday of the month, with specials thrown in, such as the appearance of Wing Commander Wallis at 7 pm on Tuesday 22^nd September.

Brian is the first subject of this series of potted biographies to turn the tables on the interviewer by coming up with a dictionary definition of a Turnstone, which reads as follows: “A short legged dumpy wader”! Say no more, the description is quite apt, but the pseudonym was actually chosen to depict the energy of those little birds that appear to leave no stone unturned in their search for food along Hunstanton beach and across The Green, especially in autumn and winter.

In human form, ‘Turnstone’ has formed a friendship with the longer-legged Mr BJ Holmes, which has led to a number of well received PowerPoint presentations on subjects appertaining to Hunstanton. For example, in August  the double act appeared at St Nicholas Church Hall in Dersingham (as part of the Village Voice Live series of talks) to illustrate why Brian’s adopted home town should revert to its original name of Hunstanton St Edmund.

In September, Brian will be putting on another exhibition in the Coal Shed Gallery, which will once again provoke demands from locals and visitors alike for the restoration of the Hunstanton to Lynn Railway. Brian is already working on a PowerPoint presentation to coincide with the exhibition, which might well include a few well chosen words from a certain dumpy wader, for whom Brian (a very good goal keeper in his younger days) always provides a safe and reliable ‘pair of hands’…