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By: - 21st January 2011 at 20:41 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Taken from the Airfield Information Exchange (AiX) forum and compiled by 'Carnaby' ;
No.43 Salvage and Repair Group
In the interests of security, it was decided by the Air Ministry that, from 4 October 1939, the term 'Salvage Centre' would be dropped and that the units would be renumbered within the normal system for Maintenance Units. Thus, No.l became No.49 MU, No.2 became No.50 MU, No.3 became No.54 MU, No.4 became No.58 MU, No.5 became No.60MU, and No.6 became No.63 MU.
From 7 October 1940 operational control of salvage was administered by a section of No.43 Group (Maintenance), known as No.43 Group Salvage, with a headquarters at the Morris Motor Works in Cowley. This administrative headquarters later moved to Magdalen College, Oxford where a plaque now commemorates the wartime association.
There were overlaps in coverage but some of the units were responsible for vast areas of the country. This resulted in the formation of additional MUs to fill the gaps and to spread the workload more equitably. No.83 MU formed at Woolsington, Newcastle on 26 July 1940 whilst No.78 MU opened at Bynea, South Wales in late 1940. The latter was a civilian-manned unit, parented initially by No.34 MU which itself had formed at Shrewsbury on 1 March 1940. The south-west was covered by No.67 MU whose base throughout the war was Winchelsea's Garage in Taunton, the south Midlands by No.65 MU at Blaby, Leicester, and the north of Scotland by No.56 MU at Inverness. Lancashire and Cheshire were the responsibility of No.75 MU at Wilmslow whilst Nos.71 and 86 MUs formed at Slough and Sundridge in Kent, respectively, to reinforce the teams in the Home Counties. In addition, No. 11 Repair and Salvage Unit at Mullusk was to be responsible for crashes in Northern Ireland, and RAF Jurby for those in the Isle of Man.
By 1941, methods of dealing with the thousands of tons of scrap had been perfected. Taking aircraft made by the Bristol Aeroplane Company as an example, each wreck was brought to a central depot where it was carefully examined by a company inspector. Such major portions as fuselages, which could be used again, had the damaged parts removed and replaced by those from other crashed aircraft which had suffered in a different manner, a process that was universally known as 'cannibalisation'. If, however, repair was not considered practical, the part was chalk-marked 'R to P' (Reduce to Produce) and was then stripped down to components. Each was then checked by a qualified inspector who passed it as usable or otherwise and the former were issued to various MUs throughout the country.
There was always a surfeit of some parts which never seemed to get damaged, however serious the crash might be, and these were sold back to Bristol for use on production machines! It was said that even the most hopeless-looking pile of metal scraped from some field would yield at least 20 per cent of its parts for further service, and thus save precious wartime man-hours.
Each salvage MU had its own particular difficulties, those located in the remoter areas of the UK obviously being most severe. In the flatter parts of England, basic salvage was easier but where dairy farming predominated great efforts had to be made to remove every scrap of metal from pasture-land so that they would not find their way into a cow's delicate interior! Coastal mudflats and marshes presented their own problems, usually because it was impossible to approach crash sites with vehicles and lifting equipment.
Well worth looking for other Cambridge links too ;
http://www.airfieldinformationexchange.org/community/index.php?
I suspect his Icland posting was not with 54MU , good luck in your search !
Posts: 1
By: chief10 - 21st January 2011 at 19:35
Could anyone help shed some more light on this unit my grandfather served in during the second world war.they were based in cambridge but i know he spent time in iceland.Thanks