Returning from Africa, Walter Bowles took up private flying again as soon as it was authorised, flying the Auster demonstrator G-AGTO with Mr Shipside, the sales manager in March 1946.
A month later he bought G-ADJV, a Hornet Moth which he based at Elstree. Log book entries include White Waltham, Panhanger, Cambridge, Bovingdon, Shoreham, Cowes, Stanstead, Kidlington, and then Lympne and Deauville for the 1947 Deauville Air Rally. The following week an entry next to a flight from Elstree to Redhill is qualified "for Le Touquet but turned back at Ashford owing to storms."
de Havilland
Hornet Moth
Apart from a brief period during which the Hornet was being mended after an engine failure on take off which resulted in crash damage, when he flew the Auster Autocrat G-AIBP and a Fairchild Argus G-AIYO he travelled with ADJV all over Southern England and the continent in the next two or three years.
1948 brought the first flight in a Miles aeroplane since 1938 when he had briefly flown a Hawk Trainer - better known to thousands of RAF recuits as the Magister.
The 'plane in question was Messenger G-AKAV, collected in August 1948 from Woodley (the Miles factory) and flown to Elstree. A few days later he took my grandmother and my then teenage mother for what he described in the log book as "two weeks holiday at Cannes with Margery and Sylvia. No incidents except held up overnight on the way down by bad weather at Lyons. Messenger ran perfectly throughout." (See routing here) Surely an excellent ad for the Miles marque.
After the journey the plane was returned to Woodley for its C of A and Walter pickled up G-AGOY his second Messenger, the experimental M48 with fully retracting flaps.
This he flew for the rest of the season.
Miles M-48
Messenger G-AGOY