another London airport early in the
morning and check her HS125 Dominie
inside out, removing all the panels.”
Julian was only supposed to be at
Northolt for 18 months, but he was
kept there nearly four years – across
which he also had plenty of part-time
jobs in order to help bring up his
family. His next posting was to RAF
Halton. During this time, his brother-
in-law got cancer, leading to Julian
shaving his head in support of him,
thus raising a significant sum of money
to start the Churchill’s cancer ward.
A spell in Pembrokeshire followed
and then the final RAF move…to
Brize Norton in 1992, where Julian
was trusted with internally fitting Her
Majesty the Queen’s VC10 aircraft. In
1995, however, the forces were being
cut down, and in September of that
year Julian exited the RAF. He’d built
up a portfolio of qualifications by this
point, including one in advanced wood
machining from Reading College;
a beautiful handmade coffee table
situated underneath the television
in his living room is evidence of his
skill as a carpenter, the house itself
representative of his talent for design.
In January 1996, getting £12 a week
and having to pay a rent recently
tripled because he was no longer in
the forces, Julian was knocked off
his motorcycle next to Blockbuster
in Carterton by a young girl who had
passed her test a week before. He flew
as high as the Blockbuster building
and recalls reading the video shop’s
sign upside down while cartwheeling
through the air. He was on the ground
for an hour and a half; he’d broken his
leg, wrist, pelvis and coccyx plus his
testicles had exploded on the bike’s
petrol tank. Traction was later required
to put his head back in place following
a near case of internal decapitation. “I
was on so much amitriptyline I felt like
I was a Dalek floating.” Arthritic due to
years in the forces and damaged from
the motorbike incident, Julian began
work at Oxford Magnets, Eynsham
(now Siemens), where he could sit
down more. He then moved on and
joined the Arrows F1 team. “It sounds
bonkers!”, the ex-service personnel
said of this chapter in his life, “but
when you’re doing carbon fibre a lot
of the time you can sit down at a desk
and do it like that.”
Still, it seems Julian took on too much
too soon after his accident, and a
bit more sitting down clearly wasn’t
enough. “In 2001 I had a nervous
breakdown and my knees were
swelling up like melons from standing
for too long. I had a really dark period
where I was just laid on the settee
crying.” Later he would land a part-
time job at Flightline in Minster Lovell
before setting up his own business in
carpentry and joinery with his son.
2008 marked the first of four road
traffic accidents in as many years
for Julian. An old van he bought and
transformed into a motor caravan
(with a flat screen television and
shower) was hit while stationary in
Cirencester by a vehicle going 40mph,
causing whiplash to Julian and his
wife. In 2009 our Carterton character
was ran into at traffic lights in London,
and it was also in this year that Coco
headbutted his owner, leaving him
with very little sight in
his right eye. By the
Foxbury Farm turn in
Carterton in 2010,
another accident
caused Julian
a nerve
compression
and
paralysed
left arm. The
next year,
he was sat
in his vehicle
Coco the Weimaraner © Emma Gray, Magical Memories
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