'TAKE UP SLACK'.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

above the Bowl and had a stagecoach up there.
Ladi Marmol was hill soaring at the time and
decided to take a closer look. Unfortunately his
low pass, as low as only a Marmol pass could be,
upset the horses which bolted with the stagecoach
in tow. Luckily, their course took them along the
top of the Hill and not down the slope. Another
time, one of Ladi's beat-ups frightened a bus driver
who finished up off the road. Ladi subsequently set
up a crop spraying company at Southend which no
doubt enabled him to continue his adventurous
low flying.
One of the all-time great characters of the London
Gliding Club was Doc Slater who died in 1988 in
his 93rd year. Alan E. Slater studied medicine at St
Thomas's Hospital, qualifying in 1922 just in time
to dash down to Itford and see the great gliding
competition organised by the Daily Mail. He was
passionately interested in music, photography,
meteorology, model trains, model aircraft and, not
least, gliding. Joining the London Club at its
inauguration in February 1930, Doc decided to
Charles Ellis in Gull IV with Lawrence Wright, 1939.
jump the learning curve by going on a gliding
course at Rossiten in Germany where he became
the first Briton to achieve a gliding certificate, his
'A'. In 1931, he got his 'B' at Dunstable and his 'C
after joining the Kassel 20 syndicate in 1932, when
he flew in the first British Nationals at Furness. Doc
took over the editorship of Sailplane and Gliding in
1933 and in 1946 edited the journal of the
Interplanetary Society.
At every World Championship up to Australia in
1974, Doc was to be found taking notes. Being
very short sighted, and wearing thick pebble-
lensed spectacles, Doc would do this with his
pencil about two inches in front of his eyes. He
was an avid attender of the International Vintage
Rallies, often making his own way there by boat,
train, bus, hitch-hiking or walking - all this in his
late seventies. On one return trip from the
Continent when Mike Thick dropped him off at a
London train terminal at midnight, he found he had
to wait several hours for the first train to
Cambridge, his home. He decided to doss down on
a bench but was rudely awakened by the Transport
Police. Asked what he was doing, Doc, who had a
bad stammer, tried to explain that he had been
gliding. This was not well received and he nearly
got arrested for vagrancy!
Doc was very talented musically, could play
practically any instrument and could sing, when his
stammer miraculously disappeared. He always
carried a penny whistle (flageolet) in his inside
pocket and needed no encouragement to launch
into a spirited rendering of Eine Kleine Nacht
Musik, always terminating with a vigorous shake of
the flute to get rid of the accumulation of spit.
Ann Welch recounts how Doc could play on the
piano almost any concerto or symphony by ear. On
the way to a World Championships, he found a
Man of so many
parts, the much
loved Doc Slater.
TAKE UP SLACK • 25