A war was raging, but that didn’t stop pilots enjoying themselves.

William Leefe-Robinson, forced to land at Port Meadow airfield in Oxford by bad weather, spent the evening at the theatre, then stayed the night in a top city hotel.

He and a fellow pilot were ferrying passengers in two planes from the Midlands to Gosport, Hampshire, via Farnborough in late 1915.

Leefe-Robinson later wrote to his mother: “We got as far as Oxford when the weather – wind, rain and fog – got so bad that we had to land.

“I saw a machine already on Port Meadow, so I landed there too. The other machine turned out to be one which my best friend was also taking to Gosport.

“To shorten a long story, we had an A1 time in Oxford – got the local police and volunteers to guard the machine, put up at the Mitre Hotel, saw Deja Vu at the theatre, and enjoyed ourselves generally.

“We were followed about most of the time by a band of small boys who would insist on cheering every now and then.

“Next morning the sky was perfect – and we decided to go on our way via Farnborough where we would fill up our petrol and oil tanks.”

At that time, Port Meadow was not being used as a Royal Flying Corps (RFC) base.

Although it had been converted to an airfield in 1911, RFC training did not begin there until 1916. Before then, it was used as a training ground for university and public school battalions.

Historian Peter Smith, of Arthur Street, Osney, who is researching airmen with links to Port Meadow, has discovered that Leefe-Robinson went on to become the first pilot to shoot down a Zeppelin. The German airships killed more than 500 people in Britain in bombing raids.

For his feat in 1916, he won the Victoria Cross and a £3,500 prize (worth £265,000 in today’s money).

He was then posted overseas as a captain in 1917 and under Squadron Leader Arthur Vere Bettington, flew as flight leader of six new Bristol fighter aircraft. He was in one of four shot down and was taken prisoner.

According to Mr Smith, the squadron had been issued with poor instructions about how to fly the aircraft – the two-seater was designed for aggressive, not passive flying.

After his release, Leefe-Robinson died of flu in December 1918, a month after the war ended.

* Squadron Leader Arthur Vere Bettington was the brother of Claude Bettington, one of two men killed in the first crash near Port Meadow on September 10, 1912. Lieutenant Bettington, the pilot, and his observer, Second Lieutenant Edward Hotchkiss, are commemorated by a plaque on Airmen’s Bridge, near the Trout Inn in Godstow.