When war came in September 1939 the Anson equipped most of Coastal Command’s general reconnaissance squadrons. Its job was to watch the North Sea and the approaches to British ports, escort convoys and report anything it found. On paper it could carry two 100 lb bombs inside the fuselage and small bombs, flares or smoke floats under the wings, and it had a fixed forward-firing Vickers gun and a Lewis gun in a manually operated dorsal turret. In practice its patrol radius was short and its weapons were barely adequate against a submarine.

The early months exposed those limits. An Anson made the first RAF attack on a U-boat within three days of the declaration of war. Weeks later, Ansons of No. 233 Squadron dropped anti-submarine bombs that skipped off the water and exploded close to the attacking aircraft. On 3 December 1939 an Anson attacked a surfaced submarine that turned out to be the Royal Navy’s own HMS Snapper; the bomb that hit her broke four light bulbs. These episodes were less about the Anson than about the weapons it was given, but they hastened its replacement by the Lockheed Hudson.

The Anson still had a defiant moment left. During the Dunkirk evacuation No. 500 Squadron flew patrols over the Channel, and on 1 June 1940 the crews of three Ansons held their own against nine Bf 109s, an action examined below. By the end of 1941 the type had largely left front-line patrol work, and its future lay in training.

The Empire Air Training Scheme, known in Canada as the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, was the largest aircrew training programme the Commonwealth ever attempted. Schools in Canada, Australia, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia trained pilots, navigators, wireless operators, air gunners and bomb aimers away from the risk of German bombing. It needed a twin-engined aircraft with room for an instructor and several students, docile enough for beginners and robust enough to fly all day. The Anson fitted. It was chosen as the standard twin-engined aircrew trainer, and although the RAF expected the Airspeed Oxford to take over, the Anson stayed in training for the whole war.

Britain could not ship enough of them, so Canada built its own. Federal Aircraft Ltd in Montreal coordinated a network of Canadian factories from 1941. The Anson II used American Jacobs engines and hydraulic undercarriage operation, and the Anson V, intended for navigator training, had a moulded plywood fuselage and 450 hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp Junior radials. Canadian production reached 2,882 aircraft. The RCAF used 4,413 Ansons of all marks, and the Royal Australian Air Force received several hundred more.

For a young navigator from Saskatchewan or Queensland, the Anson was the first aircraft in which flying became teamwork: the pilot holding a heading, the navigator plotting, the wireless operator working the set. Many of those crews went on to Bomber Command’s heavies, including Chadwick’s own Lancaster.

The Anson I carried a crew of four in its coastal role: pilot, bomb aimer or navigator, wireless operator and gunner. The pilot sat on the left in the nose under a generous glazed canopy, with a fixed .303 Vickers gun firing forward. Behind the cockpit, the cabin held the navigator’s chart table and the wireless station, and further aft a small manually traversed dorsal turret mounted a single Lewis gun.

In the training role these stations became classrooms. Navigation schools fitted extra tables and instruments so that two students could plot simultaneously while the staff pilot flew a set route; gunnery schools used the turret for air-to-air firing practice; and bombing schools used the nose position for bomb-aiming training with practice bombs. The aircraft’s stability and low wing loading made it a calm platform for all of them.

Power came from two Armstrong Siddeley Cheetah seven-cylinder radials of roughly 335 to 350 hp each in the Mk I. Canadian marks used American engines because British engines could not be spared: Jacobs radials in the Mk II and Pratt & Whitney Wasp Juniors in the Mk V.

• Anson I: the original coastal reconnaissance and training version with Cheetah engines and a hand-cranked undercarriage; the most numerous mark, with roughly 6,700 built.
• Anson II: Canadian-built with Jacobs radials and hydraulically operated undercarriage; commonly given as about 1,400 built, though some Canadian sources quote higher figures.
• Anson V: Canadian navigation trainer with a moulded plywood fuselage and 450 hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp Junior engines; a little over 1,000 built.
• Avro 19 / Anson C.19: postwar transport with a redesigned, taller fuselage and later metal wings and tailplane; about 250 built for the RAF.
• Anson T.20, T.21 and T.22: postwar navigation and radio trainers, the last Ansons built before production ended in March 1952.

No meaningful wartime unit cost survives in the sources consulted, and the Anson is far too rare today for a market rate to exist. What can be said is that operating one is a serious undertaking. Two radial engines, a wooden or composite airframe that must be kept dry, and a scarcity of parts put it in the same category as other twin-engined warbirds. A rough estimate for a privately owned airworthy example, covering fuel, oil, engine overhaul reserves, maintenance and insurance, is in the order of £1,500 to £3,000 per flying hour. That is a judgement based on comparable types, not a published figure.

The restoration of Mk I MH120 in New Zealand shows the scale: more than a decade of work and, by its owner’s estimate, contributions from over 100 people.