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Enquiries You must ask elsewhere for information about other Squadrons or the wartime RAF. There are plenty of books and on-line sources: the Glossary, Sources and Sites & Links pages may help. For more information about 211 Squadron RAF and its men, contact me if you wish and I’ll help if I can. Linking to this site Linking to individual pages Citing this site 211 Squadron enquiries
To find your way around the pages of this website, you might want to start on the Site summary page, which is like a map of the site with comments. Or use the Site search page to find what you are looking for. The latest version of this site is available from the author on request, gratis, as a CD-R. 211 Squadron Survivors Association With the passing years, Ron’s health has declined and the ranks of the Survivors have thinned. Like many of its kind, the Association thus passed into inactivity several years ago. However, in October each year, a group of Burma-era members of 177 Squadron and 211 Squadron continue to gather for dinner in London. This website has never been formally connected with the Association. It is simply a personal effort of mine, as son of 211 Squadron Sgt Observer, Nobby Clark. Over the years I’ve enjoyed very cordial relations with ex-Squadron members (many of them Association members) and with their families. Deeply appreciated, their interest and assistance have contributed greatly to the richness of this 211 Squadron history as it stands today. Contributing website material What the site does lack is a better chronological account from official records. Future updates will therefor concentrate on this material which will ultimately result in a more complete and coherent picture of 211 Squadron and its personnel. Many wonderful pictures and narratives have been contributed by the boys or their close family. I cannot adequately express my thanks for the generosity, variety, and quality of all the material put forward to date by Squadron members or their families, either to me or through Adrian Fryatt, Elizabeth Kaegi or Ian Carter. New material remains of great interest. Anything you feel able to share will be welcome, handled with respect, and returned promptly. Contributors need not feel that they must toil to write up a fully formed story. I will happily compile a page from whatever you care to share. The briefest biographical details, an old letter, even just a Service Record Form 543: a page can be made from quite small beginnings. Having said all that, a number of ex-members of 211 Squadron have put forward their own stories as first-person narratives. Deeply appreciated, in the main these appear word-for-word (with any amplifications of mine clearly shown in the usual way, in square brackets). If you have something that you think should be part of this story, please contact me.
On scanning images For the clearest results that will enlarge well on screen, please scan original B&W photos as grayscale for preference, at 300dpi, with no sharpening, no enhancements and no corrections of any kind and please, at the highest practical level of JPEG quality. Check your images after scanning with eg the Windows Picture & Fax Viewer. Press the + button several times and you should still see an image free of little blocks of tone. Blunders Internet practice Printing the site First check Page Setup in your browser, and either select Shrink to fit or set page margins to the smallest allowable. You might like to try printing 2-up and both sides, if your printer set-up allows it. Through your browser, check your Print/Printer/Properties options. At any update, current pages are likely to be revised and new pages added. See the Site Updates page for details. Site navigation In this simplest possible website layout, each page is just one mouse-click away from every other page. The order of material is a sensible compromise between background, chronology, theatre, and individual narrative. So on this site, the Home page is an active page with useful content that briefly introduces the Squadron, the aim of making such a record, and the navigation menu: the long list of page name links that sits at the top of the left hand column on this and every page. To go from one page to another, just pick a link and click. The foot of each page carries another simpler set of links: to the Home page, the Site summary, on to the Next page or back to the Previous page, or to the Enquiries page or the Site Search page. To go to the page you last looked at, use your browser’s Back button. Within-page navigation: Most pages are quite long. Use your keyboard [Home] [End] [Page Up] [Page Down] keys, click-and-drag the scroll bar on the right, or use the mouse scroll-wheel to move up and down each page. The Squadron summary page acts as a narrative site map, introducing the site pages in context, again with live links. Screens and browsers All pages are without frames and free of pop-ups or cookies. They should work well in any recent browser. For ease of reading, you may wish to set your browser’s viewing options to a sans serif font like Arial, at medium size or smaller. For printing, I choose to reset to Times New Roman. Photographs With few exceptions, photographs on this site are reproduced as near as practicable to their original state: monochrome, in their entirety (ie full-frame), near original size and with little or no enhancement. The images come from a variety of sources varying greatly in quality, from original prints and negatives, from 60 year-old half-tone newsprint and photogravure, from copy negatives and prints, from photocopies, from laser and inkjet prints, and from scans of every level of quality. For Web purposes the images are stored in JPEG format at a notional 72ppi and at or near the highest “quality” level (ie web quality not archival quality). This way, pages will load with reasonable speed and print at reasonable quality but individual images will neither enlarge or print well. The space limit offered by my Internet service provider is most generous but to deter image theft and to leave plenty of room for growth there will be no thumbnail links to higher quality pictures. If you need higher resolution copies of photographs from this site, contact me. Stripping images from websites like this without asking, without attribution or a link to source and without their carefully developed captions is dishonest, slipshod and an insult: to the men, to the intelligence of readers, and to future researchers. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute or re-post images from this website without my express permission, nor without an agreed form of acknowledgement: all you have to do is ask. And yes, I do find and pursue breaches. Patiently, politely, repeatedly and with success. And I do not care how long it takes or how far I have to go. Error 404 Page not found On spam Archival preservation
Other Internet archives The life span of personal non-commercial websites can be quite short, often only a handful of years. Often good aviation history sites, with rich and unique content, pass into oblivion when the site owner can no longer maintain them. Anyone who has gone to the effort of creating and maintaining a well-researched private site with unique and sound content could assist future researchers by finding their local web archiving programme and putting their site forward for possible preservation. For other web-archive programmes, try this Austrian summary of National and State links http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~aola/links/WebArchiving.html. The Internet Archive also known as the Wayback Machine offers a hands-off but very imperfect alternative. Although frequent, archive copies are often quite incomplete (frequently lacking images and/or pages in whole or in part). And to find archived instances of any site you must know the original URLs or addresses of the site during its existence. For this site, they are: Copyright Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland. The 211 Squadron badge is British Crown Copyright/MoD, reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office.
www.211squadron.org © DR Clark & others 1998–2008 |
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