Retirement for Mr RAF Cosford

Having overseen the transformation of a local aircraft collection into a museum of national and international standing, he is this month retiring as general manager.

As for his legacy, you only have to stand at the museum and look around.

Looming large over the site is the huge new Cold War exhibition which represents a multi-million-pound investment and opens in February.

Nearby is the gleaming modern visitors' centre, which finally gave museum visitors the sort of facilities that they expect in this day and age, and was a mark of ambition, too - the Cosford museum was aiming to be a first-rank professional museum, and it meant business.

There have been hiccups along the way.

The "In Defence of the Realm" extravaganza in 1990 sounded a good idea at the time. There were Vikings and Saxons, the Romans, knights on horseback . . .

Markets

Trouble was, the public did not warm to it, and stayed away in their droves.

It lost £40,000, plunging the museum into crisis.

Salvation came in an unusual form. A series of Sunday markets, which upset some locals, were highly profitable and pulled in the cash.

Another hiccup was the inspection of the old hangars during which the buildings inspector fell through the roof and was left dangling by his left leg. He had to be rescued. Naturally, this counted as a "fail".

The silver lining was that the Ministry of Defence forked out to repair and renovate the three hangars.

Through thick and thin, and when times have been hard financially, the museum has always had one priceless asset in the bank - the people working there.

"I shall miss my staff, particularly the ones who have been with me all this time," says Mr Francis.

"Loyalty works down, as well as up. "And I shall miss the volunteers. They have been absolutely brilliant," he adds.

"I won't miss the job itself. Things change, and when you get to be 65 you don't want to change too much. It's time to go.

"I haven't got anything that I want to do any more. There are no more challenges and no more things to grab hold of and shake up.

"I took a lot of risks in those early days. Risk has been engineered out of everything now. You can't take risks any more. You can't stick your head over the parapet any more.

"It isn't as exciting any more, and I miss that."

Incidentally veteran journalist Russell Mulford is simultaneously stepping down from his museum role, which might be described as "chief writer-upper" for the museum. It is Russell's talents which have helped bring it into the public eye.

"He found an untold number of stories," says Mr Francis.

"He would come in here, with his outsider's eye, and tell us what the story was."

Mr Francis spent 22 years in the RAF, including stints at GCHQ at Cheltenham and Shape (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe).

"I only had one tour of duty where there were any aeroplanes, and that was Tern Hill," he says.

He started working part-time at the Cosford museum in 1979, helping out the curator Derek Eastwood, who was a friend from his air force days.

Vision

Mr Francis became administrator on March 3, 1983. Three days later Mr Eastwood died unexpectedly. It was a tragic time and also one which left Mr Francis, from the museum point of view, holding the baby.

"My vision was to cover all the aeroplanes on the site - there were 18 to 20 aircraft outside - and to make the existing buildings suitable for exhibition. The existing buildings were in a dreadful state."

The transformation of the museum over the years has taken a lot of moving and shaking, and also a lot of going round with the begging bowl. But he succeeded in persuading funding partners that here was a venture they could invest in.

The watershed came in 1998 when the Cosford Aerospace Museum, as it had been called, thanks to its improved facilities reached the status of being a national museum - the RAF Museum, Cosford - bringing with it financial stability as it became funded entirely by the Ministry of Defence.

"We had made the grade."

So Mr Francis will be leaving with a metaphorical "Mission Accomplished" banner behind him.

But the staff and volunteers won't be seeing the last of him, as he will be keeping his hand in by working part time in the air show office at adjoining RAF Cosford.

"I will be only across the road. I shall still see them. I shall come back and haunt them."

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