Originally Posted by
UA_Flyer
Thanks everyone for being so helpful. I really appreciate some of you went extra miles to seek information and share them with me here.
A few pieces information that I vaguely remember:
- After landed in London, we ended at Victoria Station. The reason I remembered it is because we needed to take a train to Torquay, and my father said we needed to go to Paddington to take the train. Did BA fly from the Middle East to LGW in 1977? We could have taken a bus from LHR to Victoria but I thought getting to Victoria seemed more likely from LGW.
- A couple of days after reaching Torquay in the middle of the summer (July to be exact), I experienced my first Sunday roast lunch and scone and cream tea. This may help with with looking at the timetable for the summer months/mid-week flights
- Also, I remember clearly it was a 747 with 3-4-3 configuration with multiple lavatories in the back of the plane. on each side of the aisle..
- The stopover in India and the Middle East were short. No more than 2 hours at each airport.
Looking at the possible flight paths that have been kindly shared in this thread so far, it appears I am down to the following possibilities:
HKG-CCU-BAH-LHR
HKG-CCU-DXB-LHR
HKG-DEL-DOH-LHR
HKG-DEL-MCT-LHR
One poster mentioned Mumbai could be another transit point in India.
I will look into the linked timetables to seek more information. It was 47 years ago, so it requires a lot of digging.
Again, thanks so much. This has been very helpful.
I did quite a lot of this sort of thing during covid, and it does sound like you're systematically working through and writing down memories, which is what I did. I had a document and I'd look at it from time to time and write down odd things I'd remember in a sort of stream of consciousness - this included recalling seeing a film on a trip to Denmark which turned out to be a Lars van Trier premiere on tv, "the element of crime", which pinned down dates very precisely once I'd figured out what it was. Similarly I remembered listening to a radio show on return from a trip to the US in 1980 and was able to find it in the online Radio Times. It's detective work, it's fascinating, and in many cases I was linking to memories of my own parents while doing it, I found it very cathartic.
As I mentioned, passports are invaluable if you have them. Photographs can yield clues. Remembering events at the destination can also help. I discovered a stack of credit card receipts which had payments for a trip in a box in the loft. I was able to find some official records here and there, particularly for US trips in the 1990s. Why your father travelled and why he took you may help pin things down. You also need to be aware that memory can play tricks on you, I found I'd conflated memories from several trips, I'd put memories into the wrong sequences. Memory is a fascinating thing.
There are limits to what you can do, but it's surprising how much you can discover as a function of the time you're prepared to put into it, and to an extent how much you are willing to spend. The timetables are available, not always inexpensive as they're quite collectible, but then again they have a resale value.
As regards Victoria, if I remember rightly pretty much everything went to Victoria for onward travel back then, if you took the tube or even an taxi or a national express. It doesn't indicate a Gatwick start necessarily. To this day I can't remember details of my travel to the airport for some trips, or even how I'd have approached buying a ticket for Heathrow before the internet (I guess I'd have gone to a ticket office, but have no recollection of planning a trip on train and tube).