My Father, George Rawkins was a carpenter by trade. When war was declared in 1939 he wanted to enlist in the RAF but was told that he would be more useful making aircraft, rather than flying them. Carpentry was a reserved trade.

Living in Guildford the nearest aircraft factory would have been Vickers Armstrongs at Weybridge.

He went on to become the foreman of the production carpenters and later became "General Works Forman". He retired in 1971.

I also worked at Weybridge, then known as BAC. Since his death in 2004 I have spent some time gathering his papers and photographs. There has been various versions of that original 2013 work, the latest is here 2024 . This has much the same content as below but all the pictures and maps are able to be downloaded.

My time at Vickers, a semi autobiography / collection of maps and pictures. There are five pages here, on Google Sites. Please follow the links through my apprenticeship, or pick the menu icon [Top left]

Training School

R & D

Wind Tunnel

Maths in the '60s

• BAC left the site in 1989 it is now a mixture of Offices, Warehouses, Shops a Park and, of course Brooklands Museum.
• Perhaps you would like to see where the old Brookland's buildings were. The area today on Google Maps is here each icon has my notes about that building.

• You can also view the 1968 version of the BAC maps of the site (15 pages of maps).
• More links here and some YouTube videos
• Further reading on Wikipedia
I started this project in 2013 with the idea of using the software know as "Sketch Up", a 3D graphics system. Some pages are still there but only for reference.
• About Sketch Up
• Brooklands HTML (no pics)


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This page was updated on 27 April 2024
by Terry Rawkins