John Fishwick Leeming (8 January 1895 – 3 July 1965) was an English entrepreneur, businessman, early aviator, co-founder of the Lancashire Aero Club, gardener and author.
The 1901 census records the family living in 7 Demesne Road, Withington, together with Lucy Clifton (governess) and Florence Clark (servant, domestic).
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 that same year 1924, the glider was completed and taken to Alexandra Park Aerodrome Manchester where it was tow-launched into the air behind a high-powered car, frequently being damaged and repaired during its exploits.
In July the same year Miss Winifred Brown of the Lancashire Aero Club won the prestigious King's Cup Air Race in Hanworth, West of London, despite tough opposition from numerous famous pilots, flying the very latest aircraft, in front of a 30,000 crowd.
In 1926 John Leeming, chairman of Lancashire aero club and Bert Hinkler (1892–1933), the Australian chief test pilot of A.V.Roe Avro Manchester, two daring airmen decided to lift the nation's spirits by being the first aircraft to land on a mountain in Great Britain.
The plane had only a 30 yard run-up to the rim overlooking Red Tarn (a lake), as they flew back to Woodford, some 90 miles away south of Manchester.
Leeming was good at securing publicity for his airline, as Flight magazine reported frequently at the time: Between 1926 and 1928, Leeming, using his good contacts with Sir Sefton Brancker (U.K. Director of Civil Aviation), the Royal Aero Club and the city leaders, orchestrated an eventually successful campaign for Manchester to construct the UK's first municipal aerodrome.
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.
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.
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.
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] As Lieutenant General Sir Philip Neame wrote 'Leeming gave up running the mess in December 1941, after we had been in Florence for three months to devote himself to the plot'.
But he delighted to appear to others as simple and easily overcome by circumstances, a pose which he developed so successfully that he managed to get himself repatriated as a very bad nervous breakdown case.
As he describes in his book, 'In the late afternoon, of 8 April 1943, we went aboard the British hospital ship, which was lying at the quay ready to sail for England.
I walked quickly up the gangway, and as I felt my two feet touch the ship's deck I looked up – I suppose I am too sentimental – at the flag flying from the masthead.
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.