John F. Leeming

John was born in Chorlton Lancashire in 1895, the youngest son of Henry and Edith Leeming. He had an older brother Henry (born 1886) and sister Jessie (born 1888). The 1901 census records the family living in 7 Demesne Road, Withington, together with Lucy Clifton (governess) and Florence Clark (servant, domestic).[1] John's father Henry was an employer in a Silk & Cotton Manufacturing & Oil Merchant business together with his older brother John H Leeming. John was sent to a preparatory school in Southport, and sold his first published article at 13, and later became internationally known for his books, which sold in large numbers. Whilst at school he first saw the pioneering efforts of powered flying at Birkdale near Southport. In 1910 when John was 15 years he made his first glider and tried it on the sands there. The family moved to Hale in 1915 and in 1923 were living at Alderbank, 40 Ashley Road, Altrincham. In the spring of 1918 John (now 23 years) married Gladys Birch and they lived first at 38 Albert Road from 1920 to 1923 and later 23 Spring Road, Hale.[2] They had two children David and John. The latter was involved in the Downside Abbey Air Crash of 15 May 1943.

With the upsurge of aviation during the First World War, John built his next glider in 1921 in his parents' cellar, later moved to their garage at Bowdon Cheshire (now Greater Manchester), as it got bigger, then the greenhouse. In 1924 he flew his fifth glider which he had built from scrap from A.V.Roe & Co at their Woodford Airfield, with friends Tom Prince and Clement Wood and known as an LPW' after their initials.[3] All his later gliders could be dismantled and stored in a garage. He crashed the glider and rebuilt it with a Douglas motorbike engine installed but it was too heavy to fly and they could only trundle around the field. The aircraft was based at Alexandra Park Aerodrome just outside Manchester City Centre from early 1924 until 1925 when the group moved to Woodford Aerodrome on invitation from the Avro Aircraft Company.

In the early 1930s he built Owlpen, York Drive, Bowdon where he developed a two-acre garden, all up the left hand side of York Drive and Theobald Road. At the end of the plot near to the Lady of the Vale Convent he spent the whole of the 1930s developing the garden and built The Barn out of reclaimed handmade bricks and old oak beams and with a Priest's Hole.[2] During this time he became an expert on delphiniums and wrote The Book of the Delphinium (1932) and The Garden Grows (1935) on the building of the garden. He bred pedigree sheep and had an interest in bee-keeping. In 1936 he created 'Claudius the Bee' for the Manchester Evening News[2] for which Walt Disney bought the film rights. In that same year he wrote Airdays, based on his experiences as a pioneer of gliding and light-aeroplane flying in Great Britain. The house itself named ' Badgers', in Theobald Road Bowdon, was built after the war in 1948. He is said to have helped fund the neighbouring Bollingworth House given by Fanny Baxter to establish Our Lady of the Vale Convent on condition that he reserved the right to use an entrance from Theobald Road. His wife Gladys lived there for the last five years of her life.[2]

John joined the Royal Air Force in 1939 and was commissioned a flight lieutenant and appointed to Air Marshal Owen Tudor Boyd as his aide-de-camp. John accompanied Boyd on his way to Egypt, in November 1940 as the new Deputy Commander of the British Air Forces in the Middle East. En route for Malta, the Wellington bomber in which Boyd and his staff were passengers was forced down over enemy-controlled Sicily by a group of Italian fighters.[6] They destroyed confidential papers by setting the aircraft on fire, which included some £250,000 in currency, 11 million pounds in 2019. John was taken prisoner and to Villa Orsini[7] close to the Sulmona PG 78, POW camp near Rome in the Abruzzo. 'He organised and ran the house, mess and batmen, and looked after us very well'.[8] 'Leeming became one of my great friends in captivity. He had left his business at the beginning of the war to join the RAF., having been for years a skilled amateur pilot'.[8] He later was transferred to Castello di Vincigliata camp near Florence, where he was to hatch his plan for escape. He took inspiration from a book published in 1920, The Road to En-Dor? in which tells the true story of how a couple of British officers' attained freedom from a Turkish prison camp in WW1 through an extremely elaborate pretence of mental illness.[9]

After the war he wrote about his repatriation in April 1943 by feigning paranoia in The Natives are Friendly (1951). He also told of his experiences as a prisoner of the Italians during the Second World War in Always To-Morrow (1951). His war-time adventures in Italy inspired him to write some novels like It always rains in Rome (1960), A Girl like Wigan (1961), and Arnaldo my Brother (1962). Leeming described himself as 'a reluctant engineer', but retired as the managing director of a Broadheath firm, a suburb of Altrincham near Manchester, England which, amongst other feats, made money by extracting oil from rags and then selling the discarded material for further use.[2] He died in 1965 aged 69.

Many of Leeming's books have been translated into French, Italian, German, Danish, Finnish and Dutch

• The Book of the Delphinium, 1932, 76 pages, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd, London, several illustrations
• Pilots 'A' Licence, 1935, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd, London
• The Garden Grows: a Story, 1935, George G Harrap & Co., London
• Manchester & Aviation, 1935 ?
• Airdays, 1936, George G Harrap &Co., 301 pages, some b/w photos, (author's experiences as a pioneer of gliding and light-aeroplane flying in Great Britain)
• Claudius the Bee, 1936, George G Harrap & Co., London, 128 pages, Illustrated by Richard B.Ogle. 128p ISBN 0-245-53584-5 (also in French ('Jacky au pays des abeilles'), Dutch, German ('Claudius der Hummelkönig'))
• Thanks to Claudius, 1937, George G Harrap & Co Ltd,157 pages (also in French)
• The Natives are Friendly, 1951, E. P.Dutton & Company, New York, 1951, pages 195–222, (PoW, World War II experiences)
• Always To-Morrow, 1951, George G Harrap & Co. Ltd, London, 188pages, Illustrated with photographs and maps, (Tells of the author's experiences as a prisoner of the Italians during the Second World War)
• A Girl Like Scranton (a novel) 1961, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, New York (title changed for US readers)
• A Girl like Wigan, (a novel) 1961, George G Harrap & Co (exotic adventure across Europe)
• It always rains in Rome, (a novel), 1960, Avon Books, (A hilarious account of what happens at the end of the war when the townspeople of Fontana d'Amore discover that their 14th-century bridge is about to be blown up by overzealous liberators on the one hand and a retreating enemy on the other) (also in German ('Die Brücke von Fontana d'Amore'), Italian, Dutch, Danish)
• Arnaldo my Brother, 1962, (a novel) 1962, Harrap, UK, (using his experiences at Villa Orsini and Castello di Vincigliata) (also in German 'Mein Bruder Arnaldo')

• LPW Glider
• Vincigliata
• Lancashire Aero Club
• HMHS Newfoundland
• Helvellyn

• 1901, UK Census Records for England,
• Altrincham Historical Society, Biographies of local people.
• Lancashire Aero Club, History, http://www.lancsaeroclub.co.uk
• Playing with Strife, (1947), The Autobiography of a Soldier, Lt-Gen. Sir Philip Neame, V.C., K.B.E., C.B., D.S.O., George G Harrap & Co. Ltd, 353 pages, (written whilst a POW, in Vincigliata - Campo PG12, contains a scale plan of Castello di Vincigliata, and photographs taken by the author, just after the war)
• Farewell Campo 12, (1945), Brigadier James Hargest, C.B.E., D.S.O. M.C., Michael Joseph Ltd, 184 pages contains a sketch map of Castello Vincigliata page 85, (no index)
• Happy Odyssey, (1950), Lt-Gen. Sir Carton De Wiart,V.C.,K.B.E.,C.M.G.,D.S.O., Jonathan Cape Ltd, in PAN paperback 1956, re-printed by Pen & Sword Books 2007, 287 pages, ISBN 1-84415-539-0 (Foreword by Winston S Churchill)
• To War with Whitaker, (1994), Hermione Ranfurly, William Heinemann Ltd, London, 375 pages, ISBN 0-434-00224-0
• Always To-Morrow, (1951), John F Leeming, George G Harrap & Co. Ltd, London, 188 pages, Illustrated with photographs and maps, (Tells of the authors' experiences as a prisoner of the Italians during the Second World War)
• The Natives are Friendly, (1951), E. P.Dutton & Company, New York, 1951, pages 195–222, (PoW, World War II experiences)
• Airdays, (1936), George G Harrap & Co., 301 pages, some b/w photos, (author's experiences as a pioneer of gliding and light-aeroplane flying in Great Britain)
• Manchester's early airfields: establishment, development and operations,(2004), R.A.Scholefield,an extensive article in "Moving Manchester", Lancashire & Cheshire Antiquarian Society, ISSN 0950-4699
• The Lancashire Aero Club: Three Score Years and Ten, (1992), Peter Maher, Lancashire Aero Club, ISBN 0-9524099-0-9
• http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/index.html The Flightglobal Archive, of 'Flight Magazine' published during the 1920s and 1930s, featured numerous articles on aviation and business news concerning John Leeming, his wife Sarah and associates, Lancashire Aero Club and his company, Northern Airlines (Manchester) Ltd.
• List of unreleased Disney animated shorts a. List of unreleased Disney animated shorts and feature films, Date: 1947, Series: Mickey Mouse, Title: Mickey and Claudius the Bee, Description: 'Mickey is shrunk down to the size of a bee and given a tour of the hive by Claudius'. This cartoon was explored as a possible release. But, for a variety of reasons, production was never completed, and this cartoon was never made.