Although Greg’s pilot’s log book shows that his first flight from Hursley Park/Worthy Down wasn’t until Thursday 16 May 1918, he must have arrived a little before then, and possibly had some initial classroom instruction before he took to the air over Hampshire.
So perhaps it was around 10 May that Greg arrived at Winchester station and was driven the five miles or so past what was then known as Oliver Cromwell’s Battery (an iron age hill fort, reused as a camp by the Roundheads in the English Civil War) to Hursley.
There he would have first set eyes on the magnificent Queen Anne-style mansion that is Hursley House, set in its surrounding parkland.
For a highly informative source of Hursley Park’s history from medieval times, through the building of the present mansion house and its role in two world wars to the arrival of IBM in 1958 and their continued occupation since then, look no further than Dave Key’s excellent History of Hursley Park site.
As Dave explains, towards the end of the First World War:
By 1917…[Hursley Park] Camp had given way to the Royal Flying Corps, first as Cadets and then as Observers, coming to receive advanced training in the Artillery [and] Infantry Cooperation School. Their departure in May 1918 (now as the newly formed Royal Air Force) made way for the camp to be taken over by the Americans who, like the British Army before them used the Winchester area as a staging post before embarking for France. In Hursley the US AEF [American Expeditionary Force] established a new Base Hospital by bringing together the British Military Hospital and Army Camp to create a massive new hospital to handle an expected 2,000 casualties. (https://hursleypark.wixsite.com/history/history-ww1-1914-1918)
So in mid-May 1918 Greg was probably one of the last cohort of airmen to pass through the portals of the “Arty. & Inf. Co-op. School” at Hursley.
Header image: Detail from a 1906 photograph of Hursley House. Reproduced by permission of Historic England Archive.