Banquet 2024 – update

Detailed planning for the Coachmakers’ Banquet 2024 has now begun in earnest. Please mark this date in your diary: Friday 17th May 2024 at the Guildhall in London.

Tickets will go on sale in mid-January 2024.

The draft programme for the event is as follows:

1800 Champagne reception
1855 Master’s welcome and Grace
1900 Dinner is served
1930 Fleet Air Arm veterans speak
2020 Two Admirals in conversation
2120 Loyal toasts
2125 Post Horn Gallop
2135 Master’s speech
2140 The response by the Lord Mayor
2150 Address by 1st Sea Lord
2200 Affiliated Units’ Person of the Year Awards
2210 Prize draw
2215 On stage entertainment
2230 Master’s concluding words
2235 Master and guests retire – carriages

The signature display piece in the Great Hall of the Guildhall during Banquet 2024 will be a floodlit flying replica of a 1914 Bristol Scout.

Bristol Scout No. 1264

The Bristol Scout was designed in the second half of 1913 by Frank Barnwell and Harry Busteed, the Bristol Aeroplane Company’s chief test pilot.

Bristol Scout No.1264 is a replica of an early Bristol Scout Type C, the first type of British wheeled aircraft to fly from the deck of a Royal Navy aircraft carrier, HMS VINDEX, at sea in 1915.

With the help of Theo Willford, this example was built by David Bremner and Rick Bremner, as a tribute to their grandfather, Flight Sub Lieutenant FDH Bremner, who flew Bristol Scout No. 1264 with the Royal Naval Air Service No 2 Wing in the Eastern Mediterranean at the beginning of World War One.

After finding parts of the original in their grandfather’s shed, David and his brother Rick built the replica in 2010. Based around the original control stick, rudder bar and magneto, from the Bristol Scout their grandfather had flown and brought back to UK as souvenirs when ill-health saw him invalided out of service in 1916 (don’t ask), they built most of the aircraft themselves from scratch but the engine came from New Zealand.

Flt Sub Lt “Bunnie” Bremner served with the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and he was known as “Bunnie” because of the way his nose twitched. Probably one of the more mild afflictions developed by those who flew such fragile contraptions in hostile environments at that time.

You will be able to see this unique tribute on display in the Great Hall of the Guildhall on Friday 17th May 2024 at the Coachmakers’ Banquet 2024.

Tickets will go on sale in mid-January 2024.