You might have your family, your neighbours or your old work mates to meet up with, or a British Legion bar where you can enjoy a pint and a bit of banter with the boys who used to be with the other Services - but, sometimes, it’s just nice to meet up with the people who are the same age as you, and who’ve been through the same experiences.

That’s what the founders of the Old Dux Association thought. Founded in 1995, the Association meets twice a year in May and October at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) at Duxford, near Cambridge. All ranks and trades are welcome. Its aim is a simple one – to reunite old friends who have lost touch over the years.

So, to mark the 90th anniversary of the RAF, and also the 90th anniversary of RAF Duxford, in 2008, Legion magazine invited some of its members to the Battle of Britain hanger at the Cambridgeshire Museum. The six veterans we gathered served at Duxford in the 1950s – the time of the cold war, the Berlin Airlift, the Suez Crisis and the Korean War. It was a time when World War II was still fresh in people’s minds and there were still shortages and there was little money to go around.
                                                                                   

Les Millgate, formerly of 64 Squadron, was stationed at Duxford in two stints between 1952 and 1958, where he flew Meteor jet fighters. He learned about the organisation through a driver for his local Volvo garage. “Once I came along to a meeting,” he recalls, “there were so many people I hadn’t seen for probably 40 years.”

Doreen Cross, one of several WRAFs in the Dux, tells a similar tale. She recalls the first time she and her husband Larry (a former engine mechanic) attended a meeting. “We turned up at the Red Lion pub, where they’d all stayed the previous night. I knew the first four people I saw at the breakfast table when we walked in. After four decades, that’s quite emotional.”

One of the co-founders of the Dux is Jim Garlinge. The former engine fitter had lost touch with one of his best friends from the 50s, ‘Bob’ Hope, so when he heard from him after 25 years, they got to wondering what had happened to their other old mates.

Jim takes up the story… “Bob asked me about old so and so, and then another old mate and another. Then he got talking about other associations people had set up and looked to recruit members. He asked me if I was keen – and I was. We thought we’d have a go.”

The Old Dux now have more than 300 members. And they’re still attracting new blood. Jim recalls that even last year, when manning a stand last May in Duxford’s Battle of Britain hanger, a man came up to him.
“I just looked at him and said: ‘Tom Jones’. He looked at me and went ‘Jim Garlinge’. I hadn’t seen him since 1959. But he’d heard about the organisation, so thought he’d come along.”

 “We make a lot of effort to find people,” recalls Jim. “Bit it has been a long hard struggle at times, you could go weeks and months without finding anyone and then you’d pick up a scent of someone.”

Building up the membership took adverts in Legion, airforce magazines, on radio programmes and on Ceefax. Another founder member, Don Chappel, a former airframe mechanic, even scoured electoral roles.

Don says it’s easy to explain why the Dux is so important to its members: “It’s the cameraderie and the nostalgia. All the people are from my generation. When you leave these camp gates, you go to mix with all generations. There’s a different balance out there - what’s good for one isn’t necessarily good for another. I was born in 1935 and there’s been a lot of changes since then in terms of what’s acceptable what’s not. The reason I look forward to these occasions is because everyone speaks my language.”