Alistair Currah

The question everyone seems to ask is: Why are you so interested in RAF Gan? The second one is: When were you there?
Well, to answer the second question first. I have never been to Gan! I have never been in the RAF, or even the Boy Scouts for that matter!

On to an answer for the first question: My fascination with the place started at an early age when I used to hear RAF Gan mentioned on Ed Stewarts Radio 2 programme Worldwide Family Favourites. I used to ask my parents about it and of course they knew little, except that it was a RAF staging post "somewhere in the Indian Ocean".
This seemed to me to be a very romantic notion, a lonely RAF airfield sat in the middle of a tropical sea, with the screaming machinery of the 20th Century roaring in and out at all times of the day and night.

My fascination increased gradually as the years went on after RAF Gan's closure. Overnight it seemed, we had lost or given up these far off outposts. To be in HM Forces in the 50`s and 60`s meant postings to anywhere in the world, a fact not always appreciated by the men and women concerned! Of course these were the days when mail was the only means by which servicemen and women could communicate with home, so many of these places were indeed isolated and lonely.

But its all gone now. Gan, Changi, Seletar, Tengah, Labuan, Masirah, Kai Tak and many more have slipped peacefully into RAF history. Only now can people put on the rose tinted glasses and look back with fond memories and nostalgia to times and places long gone.

I hope this website allows you ex Gannites and others that share my interest to wallow a bit in how we were.

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