Twelve Days of Radar – Day Eleven

Christmas menu

For our 11^th instalment of our Twelve Days of Bawdsey, we are taking a look back to a Christmas dinner held at the site 70 years ago. In our collection, we have a menu card from a Christmas dinner held at RAF Bawdsey in 1953, kindly donated to Bawdsey Radar by Betty Mitchell, a senior aircraftwoman at the station during the Cold War.

The card (below) gives great insight into the daily lives of the men and women who lived and worked at the site. Six courses were served that day, including hors d’ oeuvres, fillet of plaice meuniere, as well as a traditional Christmas dinner. There were also many dessert choices available, including Christmas pudding, mince pies and strawberry sundaes with meringue. They certainly ate well! The meal would have been a particular treat as the rationing of some items, particularly meat, was still in place until 1954.