GRAHAM OUSEY, 1937-2008
I heard recently of the death of Graham Ousey, an aviation enthusiast of very long standing, on 4th May 2008. Thus ended the life of a very long-serving Ringway spotter.
I first met Mr. Ousey on 2nd May 1964, on a car trip with A. Fenton (“Mr. Tony”) from Ringway to Yeadon and Crosland Moor aerodromes. That day I learnt that like me he was also interested in steam railways, as we visited Huddersfield (Hillhouse) engine-shed as well as the aerodromes.
In the summer and autumn of that year 1964, he was often to be seen in the place where spotters gathered by the rhubarb field just to the south of Ringway Road nearly opposite Shadow Moss Road, which some spotters called the “outside place” and some the “approach”; he was nicknamed by spotters the “Gravy-man” – some said this was because he ate what they called “gravy butties”, others said that he had once had gravy poured over him – or was it just because “Graham” sounded a bit like “Gravy-man”? In later years, some spotters knew him – perhaps rather unkindly -as “Mr. dithery Ousey”.
I started running car trip to aerodromes, and on 26th February 1966 Mr. Ousey came on one, to aerodromes in Lincolnshire, along with a boy named Brian Firth – who indeed had recruited him. They both had to help with pushing the car when it got stuck in mud at Irby on Humber. At Kirton in Lindsey we arrived after dark and were unable to see any aeroplanes as the hangar was locked – but Mr. Ousey wrote down in his log-book a list of the planes supposed to be based there – whether he went so far as to “crib” them by underlining them in his “Civil aircraft markings” book I don’t know. He told me that day that he had been visiting Ringway regularly for 12 to 14 years, which seemed to me at the time an amazing record. Born in 1937, he would then have been 28, well over the then average age for a spotter.
Mr. Ousey came on many more car trips with me, and also went on Stuart W. Kirby’s car trips, though sometimes he would cancel for strange-sounding reasons – he told Mr. Kirby once that his mother wouldn’t let him go.He was a member of the Dinting Railway Centre and for years I used to go with him to the film-shows in the “Renold Building” in the UMIST; the last was on the 1st of December 1978. Sometimes he and I would travel in my car to steam railway events, and sometimes he came with me on rail tours, especially those organised by the Festiniog Railway Society.
In 1973 he joined the society P.B. Enterprises (Aero), with membership number 114. His first trip with the society was on 12th February 1973, to Halfpenny Green, Elmdon, Baginton and Castle Donington and from then on he was a regular participant until the break-up of the club in 1979.When I first knew him, Mr. Ousey was employed at S. & J. Watts, a wholesale drapery store, in what is now the Britannia Hotel on Portland Street, Manchester. He never married (although once he told me that he almost did), and lived with his parents on Grange Avenue, Cheadle Hulme. For several months in 1971/2 I visited him there, weekly, and listened to all his large collection of railway gramophone records; he also had a collection of railway books and photographs (bought, not taken). He never owned or drove a car.
There was also another very different side to Graham Ousey: he was a devout churchgoer, a High-church Anglican, associated St. Peter’s Church in Stockport, and earlier with a church in Gorton; he made pilgrimages to Walsingham Abbey in Norfolk and indeed had been intending to participate in a pilgrimage to Lourdes in 2008 but died without accomplishing this.
It may seem rather incongruous that in June 1979 I was with him on a coach tour of aerodromes in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, and during this, in the evening of 14th June, after enduring a day at Roissy, le Bourget and Orly, he walked around the shops in the Pigalle district of Paris, with “Uncle Horace” Gandy, Michael Grzeskowiak and – dare I admit it – myself. We believe though that this demonstrates the malleability and open-mindedness of Mr. Ousey's personality, and how this contrasted with his High Church beliefs; after all the party only WALKED around the sex shops out of curiosity, to merely observe another country's culture, but importantly refrained from sampling the goods on offer.
Mr. Ousey was the model for “Sir Theophilus Humbery” in an essay by the “Philosopher” in the May 1978 edition of “Winged Words”: “an elderly officer with a very high appreciation for all things intrinsically beautiful and artistic, still capable of intense enjoyment yet always retaining a marvellously unruffled calm even when everyone around him is in a flutter”.
After the break-up of “P.B.” I continued to see him occasionally on rail tours, the last such time being on 21st September 1985 when he was on a tour organised by Terence Waterhouse of “Traintours” to Swindon and Swansea.
The last time I ever saw Graham Ousey was on 25th January 1993 in the former Sherratt & Hughes’s bookshop, which had just been taken over by Waterstones, in St. Ann’s Square, Manchester. He told me then that his father had died but he was still living with his mother. David McCartney, however, saw him ten years later, in 2003, in the back lounge of the Airport Hotel, still industriously scribbling down registrations, and apparently wearing exactly the same clothes, including a gabardine coat, as in “P.B.” days.Graham only survived his mother by one year, then faded out of existence. His ashes were scattered in part within the abbey grounds at Walsingham, at one of the corner stones of the ruined abbey, and in part behind the R.A.F. memorial in the garden of remembrance across the road from the "Olymipic House" near Terminal 1 at Ringway airport. If he continued visiting Ringway regularly right up to the end, that means that his "twelve or fourteen years" which impressed me in 1966 must have grown to the amazing record of fity-four to fifty-six years by 2008 - making my just over twenty years of regular visiting (1962 to 1982) look rather paltry.
There is a photograph of him on this website, taken at Barton Pines aeroplane museum on 17th January 1976 on a “P.B.” trip.
P.B.H. (2013)
