There are some people you carry with you long after you've stopped sitting in their classroom. Léon Ellison was one of mine.
Léon was one of my electronics tutors at Royal Holloway. A genius and a gentleman, in that order and both completely. The kind of teacher who made hard things feel reachable, and who treated a slightly-lost undergraduate like the engineer he hoped you'd one day become. I owe him more than I ever told him.
After I graduated I ended up working at Royal Holloway myself, and that's when I had the real privilege. I got to help on several Science Open Days, and he was the same. The kindness was the same. But you could see the love of the subject light him up in a way you don't always catch from the other side of a work bench. He didn't perform science. He shared it.
He died in 2024. I only learned this week, from a BBC News piece, what he'd been quietly doing for the twenty years or so since I last saw him.
He'd built a Lancaster cockpit.
Not a model. Not a sketch. The full cockpit of an Avro Lancaster bomber, from the ground up, in his back garden in Binfield. He started, the article says, after watching The Dam Busters. He bought every book on the subject. He tracked down the original drawings where they still existed. He photographed every Lancaster he could get to. Then he went into his workshop and fabricated the lot.
His son Adrian put it best. "He built it from scratch." Of course he did. That was Léon.
This week, the cockpit was winched out of the garden and driven up to the Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre in Lincolnshire. Metheringham was a 5 Group station, home to 106 Squadron's Lancasters from late 1943. The engineers there plan to turn Léon's cockpit into a working simulator. Which, knowing him, is exactly what he'd have wanted. He always preferred things that did something to things that just sat on a shelf.
The timing has a strange weight to it. The cockpit arrived in Lincolnshire on Monday 11 May. Today and tomorrow, 17 and 18 May, marks the anniversary of Operation Chastise: the Dambusters raid, eighty-three years on. Whether the timing was deliberate I don't know, but it could hardly be more fitting.
There's another thread here that I can't quite leave alone. I fly a Cessna 172 out of Elstree, a long way short of the Lancasters of 106 Squadron. A while back I caught the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight's Lancaster passing low over the airfield, and put it on the channel as a Short. Same aircraft type as the one Léon spent two decades recreating from drawings. The BBMF flies out of Coningsby. Metheringham is fifteen miles down the road. He'd have liked that, I think.
I'm not going to pretend I knew Léon well in his later years. I bumped into him at an engineering show in Farnbrough of all places a few years ago, but we lost touch the way you do when you're young and you assume there'll always be time. There won't be. There never is.
But I learned electronics from him. I learned that careful people, the genuinely careful kind, are usually also the kindest. And I learned, watching him at those open days, that the best teachers don't perform their subject. They love it out loud, and let everyone else catch the spark off the side. When I walk around the Cessna now, checking it over, taking my time with the things that matter, I'd like to think there's a bit of Léon's classroom in there somewhere. I'll never know for sure. But I'd like to think it.
A genius and a gentleman. Rest easy.
References:
The BBC News piece on Léon's cockpit and its move to Metheringham: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g4k540e5yo
