RYDE airport has long been consigned to the archives but it was once the centre of a massive police manhunt for an armed robber who tied up a terrified woman and her daughter.

Hearing a firm rap on her front door, Myra Cooper believed it was a workman about to carry out urgent repairs at her home. Instead, she was confronted by a desperate former miner who menaced her with a knife.

"He pushed me and threatened me ," the company director's wife recalled of their ordeal. "He said 'Come on, I want your money.' I gave him £1 I had in my handbag and told him that was all I had. He asked where my husband kept his money and I told him he didn't have any."

The robber, later unmasked as ex-colliery worker William Roach, then demanded to know if there was anyone else in the house. When she replied her 10-year-old daughter Diane was upstairs, he forced her into a bedroom and tied them up.

"When I tried to call out to Diane to run to a friend's house to fetch the police, he placed his hand over my mouth and pushed me into the room. He gagged me with my nightdress, tied my hands with a bedjacket and pulled some of the bedclothes over me. He then tied Diane's hands behind her with cord from my husband's pyjamas.

"He told me 'If you scream, it will be the worst for you,' but told Diane that if she kept quiet, she would be alright."

However, 41-year-old Roach was incompetent at knot making. As soon as he fled with his meagre takings, Cooper wriggled free and called her husband who rang 999. Police intensified their search in the area of the airport and discovered him hiding in an old building.

Roach, who once held the rank of NCO in the army, appeared before Mr Justice Cassels at Hampshire Assizes in 1959 when he pleaded guilty to robbery and was jailed for five years.

The court heard Roach had worked as a barman but lost his job when a hotel on the island closed down. Pride would not let him fall back on drawing unemployment benefit which led him to embarking on crime to look after his partner and children.

Ryde Airport has a short history.

Officially called 'The Isle of Wight Air Port,' it opened on June 27, 1932, constructed on former farmland to the east of the road to Brading by the Wight Aviation Ltd. 

Its initial flights were confined to Portsmouth, Shoreham and Shanklin before expanding to take in the Channel Islands and Gatwick but services were hampered by its comparatively short grass runway of 670 yards which restricted the types of aircraft and number of passengers that could utilise it. It also suffered from strong cross winds that buffeted light planes trying to take off and land.

During the Second World War, it was heavily fortified amid fears it could be captured by Germany as a base for the Luftwaffe in preparation of an invasion. It no doubt explained the Government's attitude to private airfields when peace was restored and it was not until 1950  that private aviation and charter flights were eventually resumed but the airport was not a successful enterprise and soon closed. 

In the mid '60s, an industrial fair and a national rally of homemade hovercraft were held on the site. Other land was used as a go-carting track and the Jehovah Witnesses held a convention there.

The control tower was converted in a nightclub called the La Babalu which featured in the 1973 musical drama That'll Be The Day which was chiefly filmed on the Island. While most of the cast travelled from the mainland by ferry, The Who's flamboyant drummer, Keith Moon arrived in a helicopter, and Ringo Star turned up in a chauffeur-driven car, wearing a teddy boy's outfit he had used for the Beatles' Magical Mystery launch party. 

Today, there is no evidence of the airport which has become a leisure centre and a supermarket.