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.
Finally back online
Finally after months of emails between ourselves and the old web hosting company I have given up and bought a new domain name - www.rafdavidstowmoor.com.
This is exactly the same as the old .org site and eventually the two will be run side-by-side.
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: 10 April, 2011
09-04-11: After much trial and error I have now included the header roundel and the menu sidebar in a fixed DIV so that as you scroll down the longer pages the menu stays on-screen. It has been quite difficult to get this working in both firefox and internet explorer together. I currently know of a couple of graphical glitches on the site when using IE and will fix them shortly.
04-04-11: A new, more powerful search facility has been added to the site and is more inkeeping with the design as it doesn't plaster our webpages with adverts and donation buttons. If you wish to use the facility on your own site you can download and install to your server here.
04-04-11: The Fairey Gannet photographs taken at the Cornwall At War Museum have now been incorporated into the RAF Davidstow Moor template to give a more unified look and feel to the page, you can view them either by going to the links page or by clicking here. I have used a great little piece of javascript called highslide which if you are interested can be obtained from here.
03-04-11: I have finally given up trying to get the old web hosts to release the .org domain name so that I could transfer the website to our new host. www.rafdavidstowmoor.com is exactly the same as the old site and we will soon begin to upload some new content. I apologise for the delay in bringing the site back online. Many lessons have been learned!
