Shell Bay
SHELL BAY: Temporary Landing Ground
Location: Just S of Sandbanks and to the SE of the chain-ferry which links Sandbanks with Studland
Period of operation: 1934 only?
NOTES: In April 2016 I received an e-mail from Judith Morena, who lives in France, with a fascinating picture attached. Judith explained that she had recently come across this photograph which is of her seventeen year old mother, Mabel Crumpler, and it is captioned; "Summer 1934. Shellbay". The aircraft is a de Havilland DH.60G Moth. At that time her mother was living fairly close by in the Poole area.
Knowing the area quite well I was astonished to see this photograph as Shell Bay is, to say the least, a pretty marginal place to land on - and - presumably, as is the case today, would have had a fair amount of people around during the summer months.
My guess, and it really is only a guess, is that the pilot, (possibly also the owner?), may well have been conducting 'joy rides', which was a popular undertaking from English beaches from after WW1 until WW2. And, indeed, some operations were conducted from beaches before WW1. In a few cases 'joy-ride' operations continued long after WW2 - see SOUTHPORT, LANCASHIRE, for an example.
It is also a reasonable assumption that the pilot simply decided to land there just for the fun of it! Could anybody be kind enough to offer an explanation?
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