now fulfilling a commercial role closer to that intended by its original founders than at any time in its 75-year history. Oxford City Council bought the now-familiar airfield lying between the Woodstock and Banbury Roads in 1935 in order to establish something then called the Oxford Municipal Aerodrome.

The council paid £19,671 for three tracts of land, with Campsfield Farm at their centre, from the Duke of Marlborough and farmers Frank Henman and G.J.E. Bulford.

Negotiations to buy the 580 acres of flat land had been conducted in secret ever since The Oxford Times had urged the council to establish a commercial airfield back in 1932.

This newspaper had argued then that, as civil aviation was developing with internal airlines and mail flights, the city would be left behind without its own airport, in much the same way as Abingdon had been left behind in the previous century – losing its county town of Berkshire status in 1867 – after turning its back on the railway.

But although originally bought with commercial purposes in mind, with war on the horizon the impetus for early developments at Kidlington came from the Royal Air Force which planned to establish a fast-track training school for pilots there. In 1938 a machine gun emplacement was established near the old farm buildings at what was then referred to by the City Engineer as Campsfield Aerodrome.

During the war the airfield – which to confuse matters further was sometimes called Kidlington, or Oxford, or even Thrupp Aerodrome, in official documents – was twice attacked by German Junkers. First, in November 1940 when a lone Ju 88 flying at just 50ft dropped five bombs, killing one airman and, setting on fire two Harvard aircraft; a bomb that failed to explode closed the road (now the A44) for a while.

Second, in August 1941, when a night-flying Ju88 attacked an Oxford aircraft with tracer fire and then overflew Kidlington, dropping bombs on the plane, but luckily missing it. Minutes before, the German pilot had destroyed another Oxford over Sturdy’s Castle, killing its pilot, and he went on to shoot down yet another near Weston-on-the-Green, killing its pilot too.

Sadly, though, it seems that most wartime casualties at Kidlington resulted from accidents. In the afternoon of March 4, 1943, alone three Spitfire pilots lost their lives: two were killed in a collision ten miles north of Oxford and one crashed at Kidlington.

Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia, lost her life on January 5 while delivering an Airspeed Oxford aircraft to Kidlington. She bailed out in the Thames estuary but her body was never recovered. Some aspects of the incident are still secret.

Talking of secrets, the wreckage of the Messerschmitt Bf110 in which German deputy Führer Rudolph Hess flew to Scotland, apparently to negotiate peace terms in 1941 was flown to Kidlington and temporarily went on display – until whisked away as “Top Secret”.

Hess had arrived at the Duke of Hamilton’s estate in Scotland, and the Duke was flown to Kidlington to meet Sir Winston Churchill who often stayed at nearby Ditchley Park.

Not until 1959, did the Air Ministry finally cease to operate from Kidlington, returning the field to full civil use. In that year Lord Kildare moved from Dublin and established Vigors Aviation at Kidlington as the main UK Piper distributor. In 1962, CSE was founded as a commercial pilot-training enterprise. It was owned mainly by members of the Guinness family, though Lord Kildare was its managing director. In 1967, it rented the airport on a 21-year lease from Oxford City Council at £7,000 a year. By 1968 the training school was so successful that the airport was Britain’s second busiest in terms of aircraft movements after Heathrow.

In 1981, CSE bought the 577-acre airport from the council for £1.4m – not much compared to the £55.4m which present owners Reuben Brothers Holdings paid for the airport in 2000, even though its area had by then been depleted to 375 acres. Only very very recently, though, with the expansion of scheduled services, has the airport begun to resemble the civil airport which the city council originally envisaged.