Captain Howard Pixton, who had witnessed Waterbird being test-flown as a landplane at Brooklands, won the Schneider Trophy for a seaplane contest in 1914 at Monte Carlo. The Trophy was presented by Jacques Schneider, who shared the same great-grandfather as Henry Schneider, a Barrow-in-Furness industrialist who from 1869 until 1887 lived at Belsfield (a Hotel since 1892), Bowness-on-Windermere.

During World War 2, the Belsfield Hotel was requisitioned for training WAAF officers as 12 Officers’ Cadet Training Unit from July 1944 until it was disbanded in November 1945. Their varied duties included: Accounts, Air Raid Warning, Catering, Code and Cypher, Equipment, Filter [processing radar information], Intelligence, Ops ‘B’ [scrambling pilots into action], Photographic Interpretation, Radar, RAF Administration, Signals, and Torpedo Assessment.

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