Following support for RAF Leeming’s family day last year, the Glass Sellers Charity is deepening its commitment with a new investment in family-focused STEM education for the children of service personnel.
There is a particular kind of English understatement that greets you at the gates of an RAF station. No fanfare, no ceremony: just a young airman checking identification with brisk courtesy, beyond him the low hum of a working base going about its business and every so often the breathtaking crack of a jet lifting off or dropping in to land, so sudden that conversation simply pauses to let it pass overhead. Leeming’s skies are busier than they might first appear: Hawk T2s from the joint RAF and Qatar Emiri Air Force training squadron, elementary Tutor aircraft from the university air squadrons practising their circuits — and on quieter days the low growl of a Cold War-era Hunter jet flown by civilian trials specialists, a fleet of ex-Swiss Air Force veterans that has made Leeming its home since 2023. It is easy to forget that behind the neat hedgerows and military borderlines sits one of the most important training and operational stations in the country and one bound to the City of London by a friendship now well into its second decade.
The Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers’ affiliation with RAF Leeming is not new. It was established in 2018 by then-Master John Poulten, who formalised the relationship with the station’s Commanding Officer of the time, Wing Commander Andrew Coe, now a Freeman of the Company. What is new is the shape that relationship is now taking. Following the Charity’s support for the station’s family day last year, the Trustees have agreed to invest in family-focused STEM education for the children of service personnel based at Leeming, the latest step in a friendship that has grown steadily and quietly since Poulten’s original agreement seven years ago.
I travelled to Leeming recently to discuss this next stage of support directly with the station’s current Commanding Officer, Group Captain John Lawson, in his office at the heart of the base. It was not my first visit. Last September the Company attended the station’s 85th anniversary celebrations, an occasion that underlined precisely why this relationship continues to matter. It was there that Group Captain Lawson gave a speech I have not forgotten. He spoke of the unsung heroes of our armed forces: those who serve with no recognition from most but who serve all the same. He meant the wives, husbands, partners and children of military personnel, who shoulder the daily challenges of service life every bit as fully as those who enlist to serve their country, often without a uniform, a rank or a word of thanks. It is precisely these people the new STEM programme is designed to reach.
Group Captain Lawson greeted me warmly, waving away any formality almost before I had crossed the threshold. His office had a welcoming feel befitting the manner in which Leeming is commanded rather than the grandeur I had perhaps anticipated from films and mental imagery. “Call me Geordie,” he said, and the conversation that followed had the easy candour of two people already on the same side of an idea rather than the stiffness of a first meeting. I had also been struck earlier by Lisa, his personal assistant, whose approachable, professional manner and evident love of the RAF set the tone for the whole day. Lisa has herself served in the military and now serves her country still, in the crucial role of a civil servant, a quiet continuity of service that seemed to sum up something of the station itself.
What struck me most was Geordie himself. His passion for people and for doing right by them is not a line he trots out for visitors; it is stitched into the way he talks and the way he listens. I had seen something of it already, having walked the base at his side back in September: his people greeted him warmly and with total respect, and he greeted them in the same spirit. It was not deference so much as genuine regard, running the length of the base from the very top, through the senior officers and the commissioned ranks, to every person who serves their country there, who serves us, who defends our national security and does it willingly and with pride. This is a team, unmistakably, and it shows in every exchange, however small.
Under his command, the station has developed a reputation not merely for operational excellence but for the quality of life it offers those who serve there and the families who support them from the sidelines, often invisibly. Talking me through the base from behind his desk, the hardened aircraft shelters that still bear the scars of the Cold War, the married quarters and the messes where families gather in the evenings, he described activity after activity: youth clubs, sports facilities, community outreach programmes, welfare initiatives for spouses and children. A base, he made clear, is not merely a military asset but a community. A community thrives only when its people are valued as more than their role on the flight line.
It is this ethos, more than any single programme, that has kept the Glass Sellers’ attention fixed so firmly on Leeming since 2018. The Company’s charity has long taken the view that support is most effective when it reaches the people who rarely receive recognition: not only the servicemen and women in uniform but the husbands, wives, partners and children who carry the quieter burdens of service life, the postings, the absences, the uncertainty, with a resilience that rarely makes the news.
The Glass Sellers’ engagement with the armed forces is not confined to Leeming. The Company has, in recent years, also developed affiliations with HMS Artful — one of the Royal Navy’s Astute-class submarines — and with the London Army Cadets. Together these three relationships give the Company a rare vantage point across the services and a correspondingly broad sense of where charitable support can do genuine good.
For the Glass Sellers Charity, science, technology, engineering and mathematics education sits close to the heart of its giving strategy: RAF Leeming offers a rich seam of opportunity. Service personnel possess, almost as a matter of course, precisely the kind of technical and problem-solving skill that STEM outreach for children so badly needs. You need only watch an engineer coax a decades-old airframe back into the sky or watch a signaller build a field-ready communications network from a standing start, to see the raw material for a first-class STEM education wearing a flying suit. The Company’s ambition is to help fund and facilitate activities on base that put these skills to work for the families and children who live there.
What distinguishes the Glass Sellers’ approach is a deliberate shift within the Company’s charitable arm towards a more hands-on model of giving. Rather than distributing funds at arm’s length, individual trustees are increasingly taking direct responsibility for particular strands of the Charity’s work, ensuring that every pound donated is deployed for maximum impact on the maximum number of people. Members of the Company carry between them a remarkable depth of knowledge, skill and experience, and giving is not limited to funding alone; time, ability and hands-on involvement increasingly sit alongside financial support.
The relationship, moreover, continues to run in both directions. Members of the Company will be visiting RAF Leeming again later in the year. The Company will in turn have the pleasure of welcoming Geordie and members of the station to Livery events in London, a fitting reciprocity for a partnership now well into its second decade and built, from the outset, on mutual respect rather than mere patronage.
Leaving Leeming that afternoon, past the same unassuming gate I had entered by that morning, it was hard not to reflect on the quiet dignity of the place and on how much good can flow from an old City institution choosing, year after year, to look outward: to the people who serve and to the families who serve alongside them.
Liveryman JS July 2026
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