RAF Drem sat on the flat farmland north of the village of Drem, a few miles inland from the Firth of Forth. In peacetime it could seem an unremarkable grass aerodrome. In wartime it was anything but. Its location made it a natural shield for Edinburgh and the naval base at Rosyth, and during the Second World War it became a busy Fighter Command station, a night-fighter and radar proving ground, and later a Fleet Air Arm night-fighter school. It also gave its name to a runway lighting system adopted far beyond East Lothian.
West Fenton and the First World War
The story begins before the RAF existed. The airfield’s early identity was West Fenton, used in the First World War as a landing ground for No. 77 Squadron on Home Defence work. By April 1918 the site had expanded into a more organised training station, with No. 2 Training Depot Station formed there and using types such as the Avro 504, Sopwith Camel and Sopwith Pup. After the Armistice the airfield, by then commonly known as “Gullane”, was caught by demobilisation. No. 2 Training Depot Station disbanded in 1919 and the station closed shortly afterwards.
Like many former wartime grounds, it lingered as an idea as much as a place. There were occasional uses and exercises, but no sustained flying until the late 1930s, when rearmament gave the Air Ministry reason to look again at every useful patch of ground within reach of the coast.
Back into service: training first, then fighters
Drem returned to life in March 1939 with No. 13 Flying Training School. The arrangement was short-lived. Once war began, the airfield’s value as a defensive station outweighed its value as a training base, and Fighter Command units moved in.
That move paid for itself quickly. On 16 October 1939 the Luftwaffe raided Royal Navy ships in the Firth of Forth. No. 602 Squadron was scrambled from Drem to intercept, part of what is often described as the first air battle over Britain in the war. In the fighting that followed, 602 Squadron claimed one of the first aerial victories over Britain.
For a station that had only just resumed an operational role, it was a sharp introduction. It also set the tone for Drem’s war. The station was there for moments when the enemy came close to home, and for the routine that made those moments survivable: readiness, patrols, convoy cover, and the constant, slightly wearing business of watching the North Sea.
A hard lesson in the air-defence system
Early war also brought mishaps that had nothing to do with German aircraft. On 21 December 1939, Spitfires from Drem were involved in the mistaken shootdown of two RAF Hampdens returning over the Forth. Both ditched; most crew survived, but one airman drowned. It is remembered because it shows what a coastal fighter station was dealing with in 1939: limited identification aids, winter weather, imperfect information and a great deal of pressure to act quickly.
The “Drem” lighting system
If you want one reason why RAF Drem mattered beyond its local patch, this is it.
In 1940 the station became associated with a new approach to airfield lighting, developed under Wing Commander Richard Atcherley. The idea tackled a real problem: how to guide fighters like Spitfires and Hurricanes back to a safe landing at night without creating blinding glare for the pilot or an obvious beacon for enemy aircraft. The “Drem” system used lights arranged around the airfield in a largely circular pattern, including lights mounted on poles, visible to aircraft in the circuit. They could be dimmed, reducing their usefulness to anyone outside the immediate landing pattern. The scheme proved popular and spread widely.
It is one of those practical wartime inventions that feels almost humble until you remember what it meant in human terms: fewer wrecked aircraft, fewer dead pilots, fewer night landings turned into funerals.
A rotating cast: day fighters, night fighters, rescue and radar
Drem’s operational life was characterised by movement. Squadrons came north to cover Scotland’s “quiet” sector, to rest, refit, train, or convert. Spitfires and Hurricanes were common sights, but as the war developed, night-fighter units became more prominent, including Blenheims and later Mosquitos.
Several other strands ran alongside the fighters. From 1942, air-sea rescue units regularly operated from the station with aircraft including Avro Ansons and Supermarine Walruses, part of the life-saving infrastructure that sat behind every North Sea sortie.
Drem also hosted specialist work. A Radar Development Flight formed there in December 1942, later becoming No. 1692 (Radar Development) Flight, evaluating radar and night-fighting equipment for a year. That sort of unit rarely features in the popular memory of fighter stations, but it mattered. Night fighting was part tactics and part electronics, and Drem became one of the places where the two were made to fit.
Among the overseas units at Drem, the re-formed Royal Australian Air Force No. 453 Squadron arrived in June 1942 with Spitfires, adding another layer to the station’s wartime identity.
The Fleet Air Arm arrives: HMS Nighthawk
From late 1942 the Royal Navy began using Drem for night-fighter training alongside the RAF presence. The arrangement grew. No. 784 Naval Air Squadron, a night-fighter training squadron, operated from Drem, and in 1945 the station’s naval status became formal.
One vivid glimpse of that late-war naval role comes from the Imperial War Museums’ Admiralty photographs. On 11 May 1945, German delegates arrived by air from Oslo at Royal Naval Air Station Drem, handing over details of German minefields and defences along the Norwegian coast. It is the sort of scene that brings the station’s geography into focus: East Lothian was not far from the sea lanes to Norway, and Drem could serve as a practical hub for the messy administrative work of ending a war.
The Royal Navy Research Archive records Drem’s facilities and the naval squadrons based there, including 784 and the formation of 732 Night Fighter Training School in May 1945, as well as 770 Fleet Requirements Unit.
Closure, afterlife, and what you can still see
After the war the pace dropped quickly. The airfield returned to RAF control in March 1946 and closed at the end of that year, though No. 3 Gliding School continued to use Drem until September 1947.
Much of the airfield has returned to ordinary life. The runways were grass, and there is now no visible trace of them, but the perimeter track survives in places. A few buildings remain from both world wars, including Bellman hangars. Part of the former WAAF accommodation now houses a small exhibition within the Arts and Crafts Gallery at Fenton Barns Retail Village, which itself occupies several wartime support buildings.
That is RAF Drem’s real shape as a story. It is not one heroic episode and then silence. It is a working station, repeatedly adapted: home defence in the First World War, a brief training revival in 1939, a Fighter Command base at the moment Britain first felt the air war overhead, an innovator in night landing aids, a platform for rescue and radar development, and finally a Fleet Air Arm school as the war’s centre of gravity shifted north and west.