Interview with David Fellowes
Title
Interview with David Fellowes
Description
David discusses crew over photograph taken at RAF Hixon and goes on to describe flying and other activities while at OTU. He briefly mentions attending gunnery school and other gunnery training. He recalls their Australian skipper getting permission for them to go to Australian squadron. After HCU, David went to Lancaster 460 Squadron after Lancaster finishing school. He recalls first operation being flown with station commander Gp Capt Edwards VC DSO DFC (later Air Commodore Sir Hughie Idwal Edwards, VC, KCMG, CB, DSO, OBE, DFC). He tells story of a mid-air collision on operation to Munich where his aircraft suffered severe damage and the other aircraft went down. They diverted to RAF Manston and went back to RAF Binbrook by train with all the aircraft secret material. David goes on to recall being engaged by Ju88. He talks about other operations and incidents. He concludes his wartime experience with mention of flying operation Exodus and Operation Manna. Post war, David had a career on Shackletons with 206 Squadron as well as other training activities and then in civil aviation as an air steward.
The section describing his non-RAF service as a steward with BOAC, up to Christmas Day 1951 and material relating to training cabin crews etc. for civilian airlines were not included in the provided transcript. Includes contemporary colour photograph.
Date
2013-07-27
Spatial Coverage
Language
Type
Format
00:49:19 audio recording
Conforms To
Publisher
Rights
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
SBondS-FellowesDv10009, SBondS-FellowesDv10008
Transcription
DF: I’ve had the radio going all day. Well, I live on my own unfortunately.
SB: Oh right.
DF: Having lost my good lady.
SB: Ah. Ok.
DF: And it’s kind of, well company in a funny way.
SB: Oh, of course. No. I understand that. Absolutely. So this is your crew obviously.
DF: Yeah.
SB: Can you just tell me who they all are?
DF: The wireless operator, Jack Wilson.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Navigator, Dennis Collet. A very good trombone player.
SB: Oh really.
DF: He used to play in a band at one time.
SB: Right.
DF: My skipper, Arthur Whitmarsh. My mid-upper gunner Kenneth De la Mare, myself and my bomb aimer.
SB: Right.
DF: Jock Turnbull.
SB: Right.
DF: That’s who they all were.
SB: Right.
DF: Unfortunately, I’m the only one left. But I am in contact with the skipper’s daughters.
SB: Right.
DF: He, like me went into civil. And also although not here the flight engineer that we picked up at Con Unit.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Heavy Conversion Unit on Halifaxes. I’m in contact with his son.
SB: Oh, marvellous.
DF: He lives in the States.
SB: Right.
DF: We talk to each other on Skype.
SB: Oh, very good. Very good.
DF: So —
SB: Yeah.
DF: We do alright.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Good.
DF: That was the only picture that was ever taken at the 30 OTU Hixon but there is a little story I could tell you.
SB: Oh do. Do.
DF: My skipper, Arthur Whitmarsh we met first of all on a train.
SB: Oh right.
DF: He had finished his Advanced Flying Unit up in [pause] somewhere up in the Scottish borders somewhere where they’d finished their flying training on Oxfords.
SB: Right.
DF: And he was and two other Australian flight sergeants were on their way down to Hixon. Now, I met him at Crewe Station.
SB: I got, I got on the train at Crewe because I was going to Hixon. Well, going to Stafford the train and in piled these three Australian flight sergeants. We got chatting and I said, ‘Well, whereabouts in Australia do you come from? I know it’s a big place.’ He said, ‘Sydney.’ I said, ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got an aunt that lives in Sydney. She went out there after the First World War.’ And he said, ‘Oh. Whereabouts does she live?’ I told him the address. It was in a suburb called Marrickville and the road was Illawarra Road. Obviously a local name.
DF: Sure.
SB: And he said, well he said, ‘That’s where we live.’
DF: No.
SB: ‘In Marrickville.’ He said, ‘What’s your aunt’s name?’
DF: I said [pause] it’s gone [laughs]
SB: Yes.
DF: ‘Mrs Evans.’ So he said, ‘Well, I don’t know what to say about that,’ he said, ‘Because that aunt of yours and my mother go to the chapel together.’
SB: Good grief. Unbelievable.
DF: Yeah. Absolutely unbelievable. So [pause] you know, he said to me, ‘Well, look we’re going to have to get crewed up. Will you fly with me?’
SB: Yeah.
DF: So I said yeah.
SB: Yeah. Sure.
DF: And that was it.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And then of course when you know what it’s like at OTUs you’ve got to get crewed up. I did remember that chappie from Gunnery School. We then looked around for a navigator with big bushy eyebrows who was a studious looking laddie and we found Dennis Collett and he was fantastic. That Australian wireless operator he didn’t know Arthur but he came with us. He fitted in and so did Jock Turnbull.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Marvellous. Yes.
DF: And of course we formed a crew and you know that was just about it except that you know we bonded well altogether.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And we stayed together. We did everything together right up to the end of the war. So that was 30 OTU really.
SB: Yeah.
DF: From July to September ’44.
SB: Right. Do you mind if I take a photograph of that?
DF: Well, yes. if you can do.
SB: Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you.
DF: Do you want to, hang on let’s —
SB: Can we make —
DF: Lighter background.
SB: No, this is absolutely fine. I’ll tell you it’s a super little camera and they come out beautifully.
DF: That’s not bad is it?
SB: No. Excellent. Ok.
DF: I’m still struggling with a silly thing like a computer just gone kaput.
SB: Oh.
DF: I’ve just had to go out and buy another one.
SB: Oh really.
DF: But that’s by and by.
SB: So after Hixon then.
DF: Well, now. What did we do at Hixon?
SB: Ok, what did you do at Hixon?
DF: Create mayhem.
SB: [laughs] Nothing unusual about that then.
DF: Right. 30 OTU Hixon.
SB: Right.
DF: Well, we started off doing circuits and landings and when our skipper was qualified to go solo that was it and then of course but various things we went with various different pilots would come with us. You know, screened pilots. We’d done things like we even did a bit of formation flying would you believe. High level bombing straight and level and we did a lot of gunnery there. A fair bit of gunnery exercises which was quite good. And the first part of the course was on the ground but the next part of the course was in fact daylight flying.
SB: Right.
DF: And on the daylight flying [pause] we did twenty eight hours and fifty five minutes.
SB: Ok.
DF: We did a cross country. We did air to sea. Air to air firing. Combat manoeuvres. Everything really to train us up and gear us up for going on operations.
SB: Sure.
DF: Because that was what it was all about.
SB: Sure.
DF: But the Wellington itself we rather liked. But another little story about this, these Wellingtons was the fact that I think they had about forty of them at, at Hixon.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Did I write it on here. I wrote it somewhere. Oh, on the back of this. At Hixon. Yeah, thirty Wellingtons were based at Hixon taking part in raids on enemy targets. They did have Miles Masters for fighter affil, Martinets were carrying the drogue and Hurricanes were also used there. So we had a pretty good selection of aeroplanes there.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
DF: And one day we even sat there ready to take off. We saw a B17 come in.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And our wireless op said, ‘Well, that’s funny.’ He said, ‘Listen to the radio boys,’ he said. “In the mood,” was on with Glen Miller. He got a little reprimand actually for not using the radios for the proper use anymore.
SB: Excellent.
DF: Anyhow, that was the first half of the course. We then went on leave and when we got back we started the night flying side of the thing. We did circuits, landings, all of the cross countries. We’d done a special bullseye to Caen.
SB: Right.
DF: They wouldn’t count it as an operation but it was a bit, it was a hairy one.
SB: Right. Hairy in what way? How, how did that stand?
DF: Well, there was flak about and stuff like that.
SB: Right.
DF: You know.
SB: Yes. Yeah.
DF: Then we also did a bullseye. Did a couple of bullseyes. One was a special but don’t ask me what it was all about because I can’t really remember.
SB: Sure.
DF: It was only well it got us across to France and back.
SB: Five hours. Yeah.
DF: It was five hours.
SB: Yeah.
DF: So that’s all we did really there.
SB: Right.
DF: One other nice little thing I do remember about it it was divided up into flights obviously.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And the flight sergeant in charge of, I don’t know how many aeroplanes he had but he was one of the old-time ground staff flight sergeants. Whether it was fitter engines or mechanics I don’t know. But on the ladder going up into the aeroplane he had a mat and if you didn’t wipe your feet [laughs] on the mat before going up the ladder into the aeroplane to put it crudely he’d have your guts for garters on the grounds that the Wellington of course being a geodetic, geodetic construction had a canvas —
SB: Yeah.
DF: Sewn on.
SB: Yeah.
DF: He maintained that if you went up there in your dirty boots, flying boots and stuff like that he said and there was only a little tiny gangway going up from the rear door to the front you could take up dirt, grit and everything else. He said, ‘That gets in between the stringers,’ he said, ‘And the geodetic construction and it can cause wear and tear and rips.
SB: Yeah.
DF: So that was his idea. Anyhow, if we flew in one of his aeroplanes thereafter we always wiped our shoes before going up into, up into the aeroplane.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Very good.
DF: Really, when you come to think about it.
SB: It makes sense.
DF: It’s quite true.
SB: Yeah. Yeah.
DF: It is.
SB: Sure. Yeah.
DF: Just one of those little things.
SB: Yeah.
DF: It reminds me still every time I get on an aeroplane and I’ve been flying all my life. I still wipe my shoes before I get on board.
SB: Yes. Yeah.
DF: So that was, that was all we ever did really at —
SB: Ok.
DF: At OTU.
SB: Right.
DF: But after the OTU I went to 16 1481 Gunnery Flight at Ingham.
SB: Right.
DF: Now, Ingham was up the road on the opposite side of the Great North Road from Scampton.
SB: Ok.
DF: And there was a Gunnery Flight there.
SB: Right.
DF: Flying Wellingtons.
SB: Right.
DF: And all we used to do were exercises with the camera gun.
SB: Right.
DF: Oh, total flying time three hours. One flight thirty minutes.
SB: Oh right. Ok.
DF: Another flight twenty five minutes, forty minutes, thirty five minutes.
SB: Right. September October ’44. Ok.
DF: 27th of September.
SB: September. Yeah.
DF: To the 2nd of the 10th.
DF: Right. Right.
SB: Then of course after that I can’t remember where the rest of my crew were. Skulking around somewhere.
SB: So which of your crew did go there then? Was it just you? Or —
DF: Just the two gunners.
SB: Oh right. Right. Ok. Yeah.
DF: We were being prepared in actual fact. When I went to our squadron at Binbrook we were experimental on a lot of gunnery stuff.
SB: Oh right.
DF: Village Inn. AGLT.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Stuff like that and we were also quite a well advanced squadron with oh a lot of the new aids that came out.
SB: Right.
DF: We kind of used them and tested them because when we left our Conversion Unit which was 16, what was it?
SB: Sixteen.
DF: 1656.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Lindholme, on Halifaxes. We, my skipper being an Australian, got permission to go to an Australian squadron and he asked us if we would like to go with him.
SB: Oh right.
DF: To an Australian squadron. Well, we had heard a little story about going to Commonwealth squadrons and one of the good things was that the Commonwealth squadron’s governments Australia, New Zealand, Canada told our government, ‘You’re not putting our people into any old accommodation.’ Like Ludford in the mud.
SB: Oh yes. Yes.
DF: That kind of stuff.
SB: Yes.
DF: They’re going to have to go to proper peacetime stations where there is —
SB: Right.
DF: Proper accommodation.
SB: Right. Right.
DF: So we were all in favour of that and of course we went to Binbrook. 460 Squadron.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And we were allocated the day we got in, we never [laughs] we didn’t think it was unlucky at the time, Number 13 Airman’s Married Quarters you see and you had this house to yourself. You went to your, the Mess for your food.
SB: Yes.
DF: Played bridge, all the, you know recreational side of things. But as far as sleeping was concerned you stayed in Number 13 Airman’s Married Quarters.
SB: Oh, that can’t be bad.
DF: And it was good.
SB: Yeah. Sure.
DF: And we didn’t mind it being number 13. None of us were superstitious so it didn’t make any difference. When our skipper was commissioned the only difference it made then he did go and sleep in the Officer’s Mess.
SB: Right.
DF: But the rest of us had, six of us had the house to ourself. We used to get a coal ration. We used to get a coke ration to look after, keep the place warm.
SB: Yeah.
DF: We had to keep the house warm and I used to share a room with my flight engineer, old Arthur Sheppard. It was a smallish room. It had a nice little fire between the two beds you know from a house point of view.
SB: Yes. Yeah.
DF: And God, we lived. We did very well.
SB: Very good. Yeah.
DF: There you are so that’s just about it. I must say though this business of going to Ingham most of the pilots there were in fact Poles although I didn’t have any registered in my book.
SB: Right.
DF: But they were a bit of a mad lot.
SB: Were they?
DF: Oh yes. It was good. But in fact I can honestly say I’ve, I’ve enjoyed my flying life.
SB: Good.
DF: From start to finish.
SB: Yeah. Excellent. So after HCU which was Lancs. Sorry, Halifaxes.
DF: Halifaxes.
SB: And then 406.
DF: We did the Lancs.
SB: You did Lanc, yes Lanc Finishing School.
DF: We did Lanc Finishing School. How long was it? Wait a minute. Lanc Finishing School. Got there on the 13th. Left there on the 18th.
SB: Oh, Lindholme again. Right.
DF: Yes. At Lindholme.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, right. Ok.
DF: Familiarisation. Circuits and bumps. Circuits and bumps. This is really just generally for the —
SB: Sure.
DF: For the pilot.
SB: Yes.
DF: Although, oh dear, oh dear I can remember the one of these screened instructors said, ‘You know you can throw a Lancaster around a bit.’ And you’re sitting in the rear turret and one moment I was looking down at the earth like this. Then the next I was looking up at the stars like that [laughs] which gave you a lot of confidence in the air frame though.
SB: I’m sure.
DF: I think it was.
SB: Yeah.
DF: To my mind it saved my life.
SB: Really?
DF: The Lancaster. Of course, then we went to 460 Squadron at Binbrook and the best one, the best things I can tell you there is that where the pilot, we did a couple of cross country and bombing flights on our own.
SB: Yeah.
DF: One at night time. And then on our first operation normally your pilot would go as a screened you know with an experienced crew.
SB: Yes.
DF: It wasn’t like that for us.
SB: Oh right. Right.
DF: This gentleman here Group Captain Edwards who was station commander.
SB: Yes. Yes.
DF: Group Captain Edwards VC DSO DFC said, ‘I’ll take them altogether.’ Well when the word got around on the mayfly that night they said, ‘Oh you poor buggers. You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.’ Well, we went. He was very good actually. We did get shot up [pause] by American flak.
SB: Oh, really? Right. And this is to oh Freiburg. 7th of November. Right.
DF: Yeah.
SB: Yeah. Ok.
DF: And he was not amused.
SB: I imagine not.
DF: And neither, we had a screened navigator and I think it was his around about his fiftieth trip or something and he was going back to Australia as a screened and Group Captain Edwards my good old friend, I met him afterwards once or twice he had a habit of getting to the target and going down and having a look. They didn’t tell us that before. And the navigator said, ‘Well, you’re not doing it this time sir.’ He said, [laughs] ‘I’d rather bloody bale out.’ So he didn’t and we came back.
SB: Marvellous.
DF: And then we just carried on and of course then I got involved with Village Inn and Z training. You’ve heard of that. All that kind of stuff.
SB: I have. I have. Yes. Yeah.
DF: Which I think was very very good and we carried on and on and on.
SB: You did a full tour there.
DF: Yeah. Let me have a look for anything. Got a couple of —
SB: The other —
DF: Flak holes on the one.
SB: Right.
DF: I went to Gelsenkirchen and the bombsight Gee, Y and Village Inn was and the RT was all u/s but we went.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Saw jet planes over the target.
SB: Oh right. Right.
DF: Nuremberg. Came back. The port outer was u/s on that one. We lost it. Munich. I’m going to France for this. We had a mid-air collision.
SB: Oh really. Right.
DF: Another Lancaster. They didn’t survive.
SB: Oh, this was over the target or coming off the target.
DF: No. This was on the way to Munich.
SB: Right.
DF: Just coming up the River Rhine and we were flying at fourteen thousand feet. We were in cloud. It was bumpy. Horrible. And we all decided the best thing to do was to get up. Get above it. And as we were coming out of the top of the cloud you could see other aircraft had got up there and it was quite bright you know. The moon was up and another aircraft came out just from underneath us and stuck his port wing into our fuselage just after the main door. The prop [unclear] the trailing edge of our starboard wing and ruined the ailerons. There was a hole in our aeroplane from the trailing edge back to the door just about and all the floor disappeared. It was a wonder the mid-upper’s turret didn’t fall through but they did get him out of that afterwards and up the front. I was left down the back. My skipper did say to me, ‘Well, David if you fancy it you can bale out.’ I said, ‘Not likely.’ I said, ‘You could still get attacked by fighters.’
SB: Yeah. Yeah.
DF: So I said, ‘I’ll stay.’ The other poor, the other aircraft just went down. Hit the ground and blew up. We immediately dropped our bombs. Well, we went into a spin and we dropped our bombs safe, then climbed up to twenty odd thousand feet to get above the icing level.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And flew back to Manston. Put it down there and the funny little story about that Manston we couldn’t, there was a whole lot of snow there and we couldn’t get an aeroplane down to us to pick us up and take us back. So they said to me, ‘Take all the secret stuff of the Village Inn and Z equipment out of the aeroplane and bring it back up with you.’ The people at Manston gave us a railway warrant from where was it? Margate or somewhere like that, Folkestone to go up to London and up to Binbrook. We called in first of all at, we hadn’t had a shave for a couple of days. We felt scruffy. We were still in our flying kit because you don’t carry anything else.
SB: No. Sure.
DF: And we went into this pub which was run by a couple of ladies whose husbands whose job it was were in the Services. So we had that and then we just appeared on the way up to London. Got our train out of London. I think it was, pretty sure it was Waterloo and there was an SP there. He tried to stop us you know, ‘What the devil are you?’ He was going to have us for walking around like this. My skipper used some Australian polite words [laughs] put him, soon put him right.
SB: Yes, I bet. I bet he did.
DF: And we went back. Got back up to Binbrook. All we did then was —
SB: Just for the record the 7th of January ’45 that was.
DF: Yeah.
SB: That collision. Right. Ok.
DF: On the 22nd we did a wide cross country.
SB: Right.
DF: On the 28th we went to Stuttgart and we had a hard night.
SB: Yeah.
DF: We had come back with a JU88 over the target and we were hit by heavy and light gun fire. That it was [unclear] in half because it was we got it. Just claimed it as destroyed.
SB: Yeah. But you saw it coming did you?
DF: Well, yes and no. We were coming out of the target. We dropped our bombs, the photoflash had gone. We were just running out and it was quite bright down below and there were two Lancasters on one side slightly down and there was a Halifax on this other side. You had to look out for aircraft coming out of a target because, you know the chance of a collision were pretty great. Our wireless operator, we always had him with his head in the astrodome to look out for fighters or bombs coming down or anything else.
SB: Yes. Sure.
DF: And he had spotted a Focke Wulf 190 going over at an angle to us. So that gave us an idea there could well be something happening and just as that was said around the back of these two Lancasters and that afterwards made me rather cross. This JU88 went around the back of these two Lancasters and lined up on us and we both opened fire at the same time and I can still see bullets whizzing past me.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DF: Anyhow, he hit the fuel tanks. We lost fuel. The mid-upper was hit by metal shrapnel [pause] but we flew home and that was it. Another trip done.
SB: Yeah. Now, can you, can you recall was he using the upward firing Schrage musik cannon or was he —
DF: No. No.
SB: He was using the front gun was he?
DF: He was using the front guns.
SB: Oh right. Ok. Ok.
DF: Oh no, we would be looking out for him because he would have had to have overtaken us.
SB: Yes. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.
DF: And we were a bit far. When you dropped your bombs and you’d used half your fuel load.
SB: Yeah.
DF: You speed to get —
SB: You skedaddle a bit [laughs] Yes.
DF: And that was on the 28th and on the 2nd we’d done another one to Wiesbaden. I did a mining trip one night. Oh, it was horrible. Went to Denmark mining at ten thousand feet and on the way back we got diverted to East Fortune, Edinburgh. We got hit by flak on the [unclear] Where else did we have something happen to us? [pause] [unclear] searchlights, flak, enemy fighters seen. Evasive action taken [pause – pages turning] Nuremberg again. Had our rear windscreen shattered but flew home. Did a daylight on Bremen. We had, it was supposed to have been good fighter cover with Mustangs but there was fighter activity but we got, lost two starboard engines.
SB: Gosh.
DF: So we had a two-engine landing back at base. So it went on and on. U-boat pens. Then we got our old aeroplane back. They mended it.
SB: Ah right. The one that you’d taken to Manston.
DF: Yeah.
SB: Right.
DF: AR Oboe. [unclear] searchlights. Oxygen was u/s in my turret. Trims were unserviceable. I just put down the whole trip was an NB.
SB: Right.
DF: A bloody nightmare. Berchtesgaden. Exodus.
SB: Right. Oh, the POWs. Yeah.
DF: Yeah.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Operational flights on Manna.
SB: Oh, right. Yeah.
DF: Manna. Non-operational hours on the squadron was forty eight. Total operational hours a hundred and ninety five. And then I went into BOAC.
SB: Oh. Right.
DF: And not having, they didn’t issue logbooks so I —
SB: So you just carried on.
DF: I carried on.
SB: How long did you fly?
DF: And on and on and on until I’ve got about six logbooks.
SB: Oh right.
DF: I mean look at this for one flight. This was in 1951. London to Lisbon. Lisbon - the Azores. Night stop then. We split crew as there was Bermuda. Bermuda to Nassau. Nassau to Bermuda. Bermuda to New York. New York to Bermuda. Bermuda to Bermuda. The [pause] something happened. Had a fire on the flight deck and made an emergency descent. Bermuda New York. New York — Nassau. Nassau — Kingston. Kingston to Nassau. Nassau to Bermuda.
SB: Oh, what a hell of a job. [unclear] I see.
DF: Oh, this club was good. How about this then. Hang on. Is that not the one? [pause] Oh some of them we went down [pause – pages turning] Azores. Azores. Azores. Yeah. How about this for a good one. London to Lisbon. Lisbon to Bathurst. Bathurst to Dakar. Dakar to Santa Maria, that’s the Azores. Santa Maria to Bermuda. Bermuda to Nassau. Nassau to Kingston, Jamaica. Kingston to Panama. Panama to Lima. Lima to Santiago. Santiago to Lima. And work your way back home.
SB: Ah you were flight steward by this point then.
DF: I was.
SB: Right. Yeah.
DF: [unclear]
SB: Yeah.
DF: What happened was my first flights were with BOAC. Went to Aldermaston at Reading. It was an airfield then.
SB: Yes.
DF: And they were converting service people to civilian life.
SB: Right.
DF: Now, I hadn’t had a job in civilian life. I left school and joined the Air Force —
SB: Ok. Yeah.
DF: And hadn’t got a clue but I did know I’d like to fly and the RAF found me this job.
SB: Oh right.
DF: With BOAC.
SB: Right.
DF: That was at Aldermaston. Flew on Yorks, Dakotas, they were just training flights.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Then I went to [One Line] and started.
SB: Right.
DF: Backwards and forwards. Backwards and forwards until my last flight with them. End of operations with BOAC the 25th of the 12th.
SB: Christmas Day, 1951.
DF: ’51. Yeah. Yeah. And we had a fire in that engine. That’s why we went Bermuda to the Azores, Azores to Bordeaux and then came back Bordeaux empty. Got rid of the passengers. I got called back and went into the Royal Air Force again.
SB: Oh, did you?
DF: I was called up.
SB: Can we just pause here?
[recording paused]
SB: You went back into the Air Force again when you left BOAC.
DF: Yes, well they called me up.
SB: Oh right.
DF: Because they, because they’d got me in to —
SB: Right.
DF: I was on a funny Reserve.
SB: Right.
DF: And I got called up and I left the Air Force as a warrant officer and they said, ‘Well you can’t be that anymore.’ Down to a sergeant again unfortunately. But there I did a refresher gunnery course up at Leconfield. And then I went to 206 Squadron.
SB: Oh.
DF: Down at St Eval.
SB: Right.
DF: Shackletons.
SB: Shacks. Yeah. Yeah.
DF: And I was the only regular gunner there and Shackletons were nice. They had nice big guns on them. Twenty mils.
SB: Yeah.
DF: It was alright. And I stayed there oh what three, three and a half odd years.
SB: Right.
DF: And of course while I was there I did radar. Radar nav, ASV and all, all the stuff that you do on —
SB: Yeah.
DF: A Shackleton, you know.
SB: Yes. Yeah.
DF: Everybody did it. It didn’t matter what trade you were you learned it. And my time was up and then I went up to Shawbury as a safety pilot.
SB: Ah.
DF: On Chipmunks
SB: Oh, right. Right. Yeah.
DF: Got up there and had the opportunity of going either on Vampires, Ansons or Chipmunks. I said, ‘A nice little aeroplane the Chipmunk. That would do lovely.’ I used to fly around on those. Used to do two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. The idea teaching air traffic control people how to do GCAs.
SB: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
DF: And they started on the small aircraft like a Chipmunk and then after a few days, ten days or so on Chipmunks the Anson would be going in and then having a twin engine job. Then of course they would end up on the —
SB: On the Vampires.
DF: On the Vampires.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Which was very good.
SB: Yeah. Yeah.
DF: And I liked that job very much.
SB: I bet you did.
DF: That was yeah I was happy as anything. Well, I had one big moan. I knocked up six hundred odd hours on these Chipmunks. The civilian authorities would not count it towards to getting a pilot’s licence.
SB: Really?
DF: No.
SB: Oh.
DF: Because I hadn’t been properly trained.
SB: Bizarre isn’t it? Completely bizarre.
DF: That’s the way the Air Force worked.
SB: Well —
DF: Not the Air Force.
SB: How the civil side worked.
DF: The civil side. Yeah.
SB: Yeah.
DF: That was the way they worked.
SB: Yeah.
DF: So I was out there flying one day and the [pause] I got called back. The flight commander chap, a bit of a sir, and he said, ‘David, you’re posted but —’ he said, ‘I could get you off.’ I said, ‘Well, what’s the posting?’ he said, ‘To Bassingbourn. 230.’
SB: 231 OCU.
DF: Yeah. Canberras he said and I said, ‘Well, what am I going to do down there?’ He said, ‘You’ve got to start an aircraft reccy school.’ Well, I was a qualified aircraft reccy instructor. You know, I was a qualified instructor in the Air Force. Period.
SB: Right.
DF: And you’d got to start this school up because most of the people out there at the start of the Suez Campaign hadn’t got a clue as to what aeroplanes they were doing. What they had. They couldn’t tell a one from another.
SB: Right. Right.
DF: So myself and another laddie we started a school and it went very well. We had all ranks coming through from air commodores down to lowly pilot officers.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And it was good fun and it was while I was there I got married. But then all of a sudden this station commander called me up and said, ‘We’re closing it now.’ Because there was no need for it, you know.
SB: Yeah.
DF: The [unclear] and he said you can, he said, ‘You can go and do an admin course and come back as station warrant officer.’ ‘No.’ ‘Steady on,’ he said. ‘No sir.’ And he blew his top.
SB: Really?
DF: He did, yeah. He didn’t like being said no to. But I wasn’t frightened of him [laughs] even if he was a group captain.
SB: Right.
DF: I said, ‘No, sir.’ I said, ‘I joined the Air Force to fly. If you can’t fly me I’ll go elsewhere.’ ‘Alright. You can.’ And I did. I did leave.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And I went down and I got a job with Hunting-Clan.
SB: Oh yes. Yes.
DF: Hunting-Clan had just got Britannias and they’d got a [trooping] contract but they’d got nobody to run their cabin staff.
SB: Right. So that’s what you did.
DF: I did. I went down there. But of course you know when you get into civvy aviation well it’s a, everything can go for a ball of chalk.
SB: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
DF: And that went for a ball of chalk. They decided they were going to get rid of us. I suppose I flew with them for a couple of years and the ops director who I knew in British Eagle he phoned me up. He said, ‘Do you want a job, David?’ And I was then chief steward and purser with them for a while until they lost a Viking. Do you remember?
SB: Yes, I do. Yeah. Yeah.
DF: Schoolboys.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah.
DF: And I was involved in the inquest into this, all of this because I trained cabin staff but I mean you can’t train cabin staff against an aeroplane flying into a mountain.
SB: No. Of course you can’t.
DF: Anyhow, it ended up that I had to have, start a proper training school and I did all crew members. They all had to come. Even British Airways or BOAC as it was then —
SB: Right.
DF: Weren’t doing a lot in that field and they gave me an old fuselage. It was a Viking one but we equipped it up with escapes lines.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And all the other equipment.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And I became the safety training officer.
SB: Well, well gosh. Crikey.
DF: And I used to go out and fly now and again just to keep my hand in. After that British Eagle unfortunately went to the wall.
SB: Yes.
DF: Terrible thing about it was when I got home on the Friday my wife told me I was redundant.
SB: Really?
DF: Because it was on the television before we were told.
SB: Oh dear.
DF: Anyhow, and we lost out. I lost a lot of pension out of that. Pension money disappeared. So oh dear oh dear. Then I heard of a company I don’t even like really like being associated with [laughs] Donaldson.
SB: Yes.
DF: Mr [unclear], the man with the bottomless pit as he said and I helped him get off the, his airline off the ground. I wrote a lot of the tech manuals for safety.
SB: Right.
DF: And stuff like this.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Because I used to do it with Eagle.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And I did all the training and I was also in charge of all the cabin staff so I recruited all that lot. I did quite a lot with him actually. Got him, saved him a lot of money. I made a lot of money for him too. And then one day he come in and the chief pilot in and he said he wanted us to sign certain things and when I looked at the small print I said, ‘No way.’ He wanted us to sign some of the training off that had been not done.
SB: Oh right.
DF: And Bishop who was the chief pilot at the time said, ‘Not bloody likely.’ And I said, ‘No. Neither am I.’ He said, ‘Ok, you’re both fired.’ Yeah. So we looked at each other, shook each other’s hands and we went across to the wooden hut which was a pub just across the road. Went in there and had a pint [laughs] Didn’t want to ask too much. Two days, two days later —
SB: Yeah.
DF: I’ve got a better picture of that one.
SB: Oh ok.
DF: I’ll get it in a minute.
SB: Right.
DF: Two days later I got a job with Tradewinds as loadmaster and safety officer because I knew them. I used to do work for them.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Oh right.
DF: And so I stayed with them.
SB: That was Brits again, wasn’t it?
DF: Right to the end. Eh?
SB: That was Brits again wasn’t it? Britannias.
DF: No.
SB: No.
DF: CR44s.
SB: CR44s. That’s right.
DF: That’s right.
SB: Yeah. Yeah.
DF: And later we got [7 Os] and then I became chief loadmaster and safety officer. I did the whole top British security course for aviation because in small airlines you’ve got, you know you double up on jobs.
SB: Oh, of course you do. Yes. Yeah.
DF: And I thoroughly enjoyed that. I had a good time with them.
SB: Very good.
DF: And we, I flew until they ceased trading. They just decided to cease trading. They could see the end was coming for that kind of work.
SB: Yeah. Yeah.
DF: So they ceased trading, paid their bills except for the money that was owing to them you know. All very reputable.
SB: Did it properly. Yes.
DF: It was done properly.
SB: Yeah. Yeah.
DF: And then I [laughs] blow me if I didn’t go and get some jobs out in Hong Kong. I started a couple of airlines up there doing their manuals.
SB: Right.
DF: Bits and pieces.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Which was quite good.
SB: Yeah. I imagine it was.
DF: I mean at that time I was over sixty five. So I’ve had a good life altogether.
SB: You certainly have. Goodness me. Yeah.
DF: I’ve been around the world a bit.
SB: Yeah. Absolutely. Now, what have you got in here?
DF: Now, there’s a good picture you can [pause] that was taken about three days after the mid-air collision [unclear] at market. I’m still in my flying kit.
SB: Oh yes. That’s very good. That’s the signatures of all of us.
DF: Right.
[pause]
SB: Oh yes. That’s very good. Yes.
DF: I’ve got a slightly better one of that. The Mosquitoes. I don’t think would be of any interest to your really. That’s Group Captain Edwards. That was our aeroplane.
SB: Oh yes. That’s nice. I’d like to take a shot of that if I may. It’s ok. That’s ok. No need to take it out.
DF: You’re getting more Lancaster stuff than anything else.
SB: Well, it’s all good stuff. It really is. Not, although the book at the moment is Wellingtons there’s this is all good stuff. I was chatting to a Coastal Command Liberator chap yesterday. So that’s a well-known shot isn’t it?
DF: Yeah.
SB: Churchill coming out.
DF: That was, that’s not Churchill.
SB: Oh, isn’t it?
DF: That’s Mr Curtin.
SB: Oh sorry. I beg your pardon.
DF: Yes, the Australian.
SB: Yes. That’s right.
DF: [ARG]
SB: Yes.
DF: That is the aeroplane that went to Australia. It’s in a museum out there.
SB: Yes. A museum in Perth. That’s right.
DF: In Canberra.
SB: Canberra. Yeah. I’ve seen it there.
DF: It’s in good nick.
SB: It is.
DF: Our wireless operator, the first time he’d ever seen snow would you believe. There we are. That’s when our mid-upper got wounded.
SB: Oh. Oh yes. Is this your aircraft? Is this —
DF: Yeah. Elizabeth was his, became his wife.
SB: Oh.
DF: That was the skipper.
SB: Right. Let’s just take a shot.
DF: There he is on top of the aeroplane with one of the ground staff. Now, I think we were one of the few aeroplanes that had names on the engines.
SB: Oh.
DF: Apparently they were the names of the sergeant, Australian sergeant’s children.
SB: Oh really?
DF: Bits and pieces all over the place. I do have a big picture of that and that.
SB: Yes. That’s a nice shot.
DF: I must do another, another book. That’s the aeroplanes going over the Alps to Berchtesgaden.
SB: Right. Oh right, yes.
DF: Just another Lancaster over the target.
SB: Yes. Yeah.
DF: Another picture of that in Nuremberg. That’s our aeroplane again.
SB: Yeah. Let’s get another picture.
DF: It’s got a crack in it.
SB: That’s ok. Photoshop is a wonderful thing for clearing that. Cleaning that up.
DF: That’s an FM 87.
SB: Oh yes.
DF: With the turret.
SB: Yes.
DF: AGLT.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Just information about our squadron. We dropped more bombs than any other squadron. Little bits of blue.
SB: Well, as I say my, my cousin was on 460 at the same time.
DF: Was he?
SB: Yes.
DF: As me?
SB: He’s obviously, yes same time as you. Yes.
DF: What’s his name?
SB: Small world isn’t it? Oh gosh. Ted Milligan. He was a bomb aimer and his captain was [Lyle Loxley?]
DF: Funnily enough, Milligan. That name rings a bell a bit. Captain’s name doesn’t. Do you know what flight he was in?
SB: No. I don’t. No. Yeah.
DF: Operation Manna.
SB: Oh yes.
DF: I took these pictures out of the rear turret with a box camera. Scramped a bit of film. I’ve used those in various things. Me and my flight engineer in our little room. It was a good, we couldn’t grumble. My skipper again. That’s our aeroplane again. Responsibilities for a prisoner of war.
SB: Yes. Yes.
DF: Fighters. German. That’s 460 Squadron.
SB: Yeah.
DF: That was at Chemnitz. Cloud. Leaflets. What else have we got? Not much else. Ah, I was, went into the training.
SB: Oh right. Yes. Ok.
DF: There I’ll be.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Then again. 1945 I was in India. That was our Christmas menu.
SB: Oh right [laughs]
DF: Next to 460 Squadron being bombed up. Me out in India on an Indian motorbike.
SB: Ah. Right.
DF: Lovely motorbike that was and the little thing that came to you.
SB: You are going to be an air gunner.
DF: Well, I didn’t intend to be an air gunner. That was 460 Squadron.
SB: Yes, I have a copy of that.
DF: And that 460.
SB: Yes.
DF: Oh there.
SB: That’s a better one. Yes. [pause] yes. That’s very good. Thank you.
DF: That’s just of me RAOB.
SB: Is it ok to have a photograph of you today?
DF: But I’m in scrap.
SB: Oh, well we allow that. Another one to be sure. Marvellous. Thank you very much.
DF: What did that come up like?
SB: Oh.
DF: Terrible.
SB: No, not at all.
DF: Have you seen, have you seen the Bomber Command book?
SB: Yes. I have it. Yes. Yes. I have it.
DF: Well, you’ve seen the picture of me in it.
SB: Yes.
DF: Now, that was a good picture. Oh, that’s not too bad.
SB: Lovely serviceable.
DF: Seen that and not come up on [pause] Right, I got skin cancer out in India and it flares up a bit.
SB: Right. Ok.
DF: And I had to have it taken out. Removed. Doctored.
SB: Well, David that’s been excellent. Thank you very much indeed.
SB: Oh right.
DF: Having lost my good lady.
SB: Ah. Ok.
DF: And it’s kind of, well company in a funny way.
SB: Oh, of course. No. I understand that. Absolutely. So this is your crew obviously.
DF: Yeah.
SB: Can you just tell me who they all are?
DF: The wireless operator, Jack Wilson.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Navigator, Dennis Collet. A very good trombone player.
SB: Oh really.
DF: He used to play in a band at one time.
SB: Right.
DF: My skipper, Arthur Whitmarsh. My mid-upper gunner Kenneth De la Mare, myself and my bomb aimer.
SB: Right.
DF: Jock Turnbull.
SB: Right.
DF: That’s who they all were.
SB: Right.
DF: Unfortunately, I’m the only one left. But I am in contact with the skipper’s daughters.
SB: Right.
DF: He, like me went into civil. And also although not here the flight engineer that we picked up at Con Unit.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Heavy Conversion Unit on Halifaxes. I’m in contact with his son.
SB: Oh, marvellous.
DF: He lives in the States.
SB: Right.
DF: We talk to each other on Skype.
SB: Oh, very good. Very good.
DF: So —
SB: Yeah.
DF: We do alright.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Good.
DF: That was the only picture that was ever taken at the 30 OTU Hixon but there is a little story I could tell you.
SB: Oh do. Do.
DF: My skipper, Arthur Whitmarsh we met first of all on a train.
SB: Oh right.
DF: He had finished his Advanced Flying Unit up in [pause] somewhere up in the Scottish borders somewhere where they’d finished their flying training on Oxfords.
SB: Right.
DF: And he was and two other Australian flight sergeants were on their way down to Hixon. Now, I met him at Crewe Station.
SB: I got, I got on the train at Crewe because I was going to Hixon. Well, going to Stafford the train and in piled these three Australian flight sergeants. We got chatting and I said, ‘Well, whereabouts in Australia do you come from? I know it’s a big place.’ He said, ‘Sydney.’ I said, ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got an aunt that lives in Sydney. She went out there after the First World War.’ And he said, ‘Oh. Whereabouts does she live?’ I told him the address. It was in a suburb called Marrickville and the road was Illawarra Road. Obviously a local name.
DF: Sure.
SB: And he said, well he said, ‘That’s where we live.’
DF: No.
SB: ‘In Marrickville.’ He said, ‘What’s your aunt’s name?’
DF: I said [pause] it’s gone [laughs]
SB: Yes.
DF: ‘Mrs Evans.’ So he said, ‘Well, I don’t know what to say about that,’ he said, ‘Because that aunt of yours and my mother go to the chapel together.’
SB: Good grief. Unbelievable.
DF: Yeah. Absolutely unbelievable. So [pause] you know, he said to me, ‘Well, look we’re going to have to get crewed up. Will you fly with me?’
SB: Yeah.
DF: So I said yeah.
SB: Yeah. Sure.
DF: And that was it.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And then of course when you know what it’s like at OTUs you’ve got to get crewed up. I did remember that chappie from Gunnery School. We then looked around for a navigator with big bushy eyebrows who was a studious looking laddie and we found Dennis Collett and he was fantastic. That Australian wireless operator he didn’t know Arthur but he came with us. He fitted in and so did Jock Turnbull.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Marvellous. Yes.
DF: And of course we formed a crew and you know that was just about it except that you know we bonded well altogether.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And we stayed together. We did everything together right up to the end of the war. So that was 30 OTU really.
SB: Yeah.
DF: From July to September ’44.
SB: Right. Do you mind if I take a photograph of that?
DF: Well, yes. if you can do.
SB: Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you.
DF: Do you want to, hang on let’s —
SB: Can we make —
DF: Lighter background.
SB: No, this is absolutely fine. I’ll tell you it’s a super little camera and they come out beautifully.
DF: That’s not bad is it?
SB: No. Excellent. Ok.
DF: I’m still struggling with a silly thing like a computer just gone kaput.
SB: Oh.
DF: I’ve just had to go out and buy another one.
SB: Oh really.
DF: But that’s by and by.
SB: So after Hixon then.
DF: Well, now. What did we do at Hixon?
SB: Ok, what did you do at Hixon?
DF: Create mayhem.
SB: [laughs] Nothing unusual about that then.
DF: Right. 30 OTU Hixon.
SB: Right.
DF: Well, we started off doing circuits and landings and when our skipper was qualified to go solo that was it and then of course but various things we went with various different pilots would come with us. You know, screened pilots. We’d done things like we even did a bit of formation flying would you believe. High level bombing straight and level and we did a lot of gunnery there. A fair bit of gunnery exercises which was quite good. And the first part of the course was on the ground but the next part of the course was in fact daylight flying.
SB: Right.
DF: And on the daylight flying [pause] we did twenty eight hours and fifty five minutes.
SB: Ok.
DF: We did a cross country. We did air to sea. Air to air firing. Combat manoeuvres. Everything really to train us up and gear us up for going on operations.
SB: Sure.
DF: Because that was what it was all about.
SB: Sure.
DF: But the Wellington itself we rather liked. But another little story about this, these Wellingtons was the fact that I think they had about forty of them at, at Hixon.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Did I write it on here. I wrote it somewhere. Oh, on the back of this. At Hixon. Yeah, thirty Wellingtons were based at Hixon taking part in raids on enemy targets. They did have Miles Masters for fighter affil, Martinets were carrying the drogue and Hurricanes were also used there. So we had a pretty good selection of aeroplanes there.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
DF: And one day we even sat there ready to take off. We saw a B17 come in.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And our wireless op said, ‘Well, that’s funny.’ He said, ‘Listen to the radio boys,’ he said. “In the mood,” was on with Glen Miller. He got a little reprimand actually for not using the radios for the proper use anymore.
SB: Excellent.
DF: Anyhow, that was the first half of the course. We then went on leave and when we got back we started the night flying side of the thing. We did circuits, landings, all of the cross countries. We’d done a special bullseye to Caen.
SB: Right.
DF: They wouldn’t count it as an operation but it was a bit, it was a hairy one.
SB: Right. Hairy in what way? How, how did that stand?
DF: Well, there was flak about and stuff like that.
SB: Right.
DF: You know.
SB: Yes. Yeah.
DF: Then we also did a bullseye. Did a couple of bullseyes. One was a special but don’t ask me what it was all about because I can’t really remember.
SB: Sure.
DF: It was only well it got us across to France and back.
SB: Five hours. Yeah.
DF: It was five hours.
SB: Yeah.
DF: So that’s all we did really there.
SB: Right.
DF: One other nice little thing I do remember about it it was divided up into flights obviously.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And the flight sergeant in charge of, I don’t know how many aeroplanes he had but he was one of the old-time ground staff flight sergeants. Whether it was fitter engines or mechanics I don’t know. But on the ladder going up into the aeroplane he had a mat and if you didn’t wipe your feet [laughs] on the mat before going up the ladder into the aeroplane to put it crudely he’d have your guts for garters on the grounds that the Wellington of course being a geodetic, geodetic construction had a canvas —
SB: Yeah.
DF: Sewn on.
SB: Yeah.
DF: He maintained that if you went up there in your dirty boots, flying boots and stuff like that he said and there was only a little tiny gangway going up from the rear door to the front you could take up dirt, grit and everything else. He said, ‘That gets in between the stringers,’ he said, ‘And the geodetic construction and it can cause wear and tear and rips.
SB: Yeah.
DF: So that was his idea. Anyhow, if we flew in one of his aeroplanes thereafter we always wiped our shoes before going up into, up into the aeroplane.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Very good.
DF: Really, when you come to think about it.
SB: It makes sense.
DF: It’s quite true.
SB: Yeah. Yeah.
DF: It is.
SB: Sure. Yeah.
DF: Just one of those little things.
SB: Yeah.
DF: It reminds me still every time I get on an aeroplane and I’ve been flying all my life. I still wipe my shoes before I get on board.
SB: Yes. Yeah.
DF: So that was, that was all we ever did really at —
SB: Ok.
DF: At OTU.
SB: Right.
DF: But after the OTU I went to 16 1481 Gunnery Flight at Ingham.
SB: Right.
DF: Now, Ingham was up the road on the opposite side of the Great North Road from Scampton.
SB: Ok.
DF: And there was a Gunnery Flight there.
SB: Right.
DF: Flying Wellingtons.
SB: Right.
DF: And all we used to do were exercises with the camera gun.
SB: Right.
DF: Oh, total flying time three hours. One flight thirty minutes.
SB: Oh right. Ok.
DF: Another flight twenty five minutes, forty minutes, thirty five minutes.
SB: Right. September October ’44. Ok.
DF: 27th of September.
SB: September. Yeah.
DF: To the 2nd of the 10th.
DF: Right. Right.
SB: Then of course after that I can’t remember where the rest of my crew were. Skulking around somewhere.
SB: So which of your crew did go there then? Was it just you? Or —
DF: Just the two gunners.
SB: Oh right. Right. Ok. Yeah.
DF: We were being prepared in actual fact. When I went to our squadron at Binbrook we were experimental on a lot of gunnery stuff.
SB: Oh right.
DF: Village Inn. AGLT.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Stuff like that and we were also quite a well advanced squadron with oh a lot of the new aids that came out.
SB: Right.
DF: We kind of used them and tested them because when we left our Conversion Unit which was 16, what was it?
SB: Sixteen.
DF: 1656.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Lindholme, on Halifaxes. We, my skipper being an Australian, got permission to go to an Australian squadron and he asked us if we would like to go with him.
SB: Oh right.
DF: To an Australian squadron. Well, we had heard a little story about going to Commonwealth squadrons and one of the good things was that the Commonwealth squadron’s governments Australia, New Zealand, Canada told our government, ‘You’re not putting our people into any old accommodation.’ Like Ludford in the mud.
SB: Oh yes. Yes.
DF: That kind of stuff.
SB: Yes.
DF: They’re going to have to go to proper peacetime stations where there is —
SB: Right.
DF: Proper accommodation.
SB: Right. Right.
DF: So we were all in favour of that and of course we went to Binbrook. 460 Squadron.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And we were allocated the day we got in, we never [laughs] we didn’t think it was unlucky at the time, Number 13 Airman’s Married Quarters you see and you had this house to yourself. You went to your, the Mess for your food.
SB: Yes.
DF: Played bridge, all the, you know recreational side of things. But as far as sleeping was concerned you stayed in Number 13 Airman’s Married Quarters.
SB: Oh, that can’t be bad.
DF: And it was good.
SB: Yeah. Sure.
DF: And we didn’t mind it being number 13. None of us were superstitious so it didn’t make any difference. When our skipper was commissioned the only difference it made then he did go and sleep in the Officer’s Mess.
SB: Right.
DF: But the rest of us had, six of us had the house to ourself. We used to get a coal ration. We used to get a coke ration to look after, keep the place warm.
SB: Yeah.
DF: We had to keep the house warm and I used to share a room with my flight engineer, old Arthur Sheppard. It was a smallish room. It had a nice little fire between the two beds you know from a house point of view.
SB: Yes. Yeah.
DF: And God, we lived. We did very well.
SB: Very good. Yeah.
DF: There you are so that’s just about it. I must say though this business of going to Ingham most of the pilots there were in fact Poles although I didn’t have any registered in my book.
SB: Right.
DF: But they were a bit of a mad lot.
SB: Were they?
DF: Oh yes. It was good. But in fact I can honestly say I’ve, I’ve enjoyed my flying life.
SB: Good.
DF: From start to finish.
SB: Yeah. Excellent. So after HCU which was Lancs. Sorry, Halifaxes.
DF: Halifaxes.
SB: And then 406.
DF: We did the Lancs.
SB: You did Lanc, yes Lanc Finishing School.
DF: We did Lanc Finishing School. How long was it? Wait a minute. Lanc Finishing School. Got there on the 13th. Left there on the 18th.
SB: Oh, Lindholme again. Right.
DF: Yes. At Lindholme.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, right. Ok.
DF: Familiarisation. Circuits and bumps. Circuits and bumps. This is really just generally for the —
SB: Sure.
DF: For the pilot.
SB: Yes.
DF: Although, oh dear, oh dear I can remember the one of these screened instructors said, ‘You know you can throw a Lancaster around a bit.’ And you’re sitting in the rear turret and one moment I was looking down at the earth like this. Then the next I was looking up at the stars like that [laughs] which gave you a lot of confidence in the air frame though.
SB: I’m sure.
DF: I think it was.
SB: Yeah.
DF: To my mind it saved my life.
SB: Really?
DF: The Lancaster. Of course, then we went to 460 Squadron at Binbrook and the best one, the best things I can tell you there is that where the pilot, we did a couple of cross country and bombing flights on our own.
SB: Yeah.
DF: One at night time. And then on our first operation normally your pilot would go as a screened you know with an experienced crew.
SB: Yes.
DF: It wasn’t like that for us.
SB: Oh right. Right.
DF: This gentleman here Group Captain Edwards who was station commander.
SB: Yes. Yes.
DF: Group Captain Edwards VC DSO DFC said, ‘I’ll take them altogether.’ Well when the word got around on the mayfly that night they said, ‘Oh you poor buggers. You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.’ Well, we went. He was very good actually. We did get shot up [pause] by American flak.
SB: Oh, really? Right. And this is to oh Freiburg. 7th of November. Right.
DF: Yeah.
SB: Yeah. Ok.
DF: And he was not amused.
SB: I imagine not.
DF: And neither, we had a screened navigator and I think it was his around about his fiftieth trip or something and he was going back to Australia as a screened and Group Captain Edwards my good old friend, I met him afterwards once or twice he had a habit of getting to the target and going down and having a look. They didn’t tell us that before. And the navigator said, ‘Well, you’re not doing it this time sir.’ He said, [laughs] ‘I’d rather bloody bale out.’ So he didn’t and we came back.
SB: Marvellous.
DF: And then we just carried on and of course then I got involved with Village Inn and Z training. You’ve heard of that. All that kind of stuff.
SB: I have. I have. Yes. Yeah.
DF: Which I think was very very good and we carried on and on and on.
SB: You did a full tour there.
DF: Yeah. Let me have a look for anything. Got a couple of —
SB: The other —
DF: Flak holes on the one.
SB: Right.
DF: I went to Gelsenkirchen and the bombsight Gee, Y and Village Inn was and the RT was all u/s but we went.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Saw jet planes over the target.
SB: Oh right. Right.
DF: Nuremberg. Came back. The port outer was u/s on that one. We lost it. Munich. I’m going to France for this. We had a mid-air collision.
SB: Oh really. Right.
DF: Another Lancaster. They didn’t survive.
SB: Oh, this was over the target or coming off the target.
DF: No. This was on the way to Munich.
SB: Right.
DF: Just coming up the River Rhine and we were flying at fourteen thousand feet. We were in cloud. It was bumpy. Horrible. And we all decided the best thing to do was to get up. Get above it. And as we were coming out of the top of the cloud you could see other aircraft had got up there and it was quite bright you know. The moon was up and another aircraft came out just from underneath us and stuck his port wing into our fuselage just after the main door. The prop [unclear] the trailing edge of our starboard wing and ruined the ailerons. There was a hole in our aeroplane from the trailing edge back to the door just about and all the floor disappeared. It was a wonder the mid-upper’s turret didn’t fall through but they did get him out of that afterwards and up the front. I was left down the back. My skipper did say to me, ‘Well, David if you fancy it you can bale out.’ I said, ‘Not likely.’ I said, ‘You could still get attacked by fighters.’
SB: Yeah. Yeah.
DF: So I said, ‘I’ll stay.’ The other poor, the other aircraft just went down. Hit the ground and blew up. We immediately dropped our bombs. Well, we went into a spin and we dropped our bombs safe, then climbed up to twenty odd thousand feet to get above the icing level.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And flew back to Manston. Put it down there and the funny little story about that Manston we couldn’t, there was a whole lot of snow there and we couldn’t get an aeroplane down to us to pick us up and take us back. So they said to me, ‘Take all the secret stuff of the Village Inn and Z equipment out of the aeroplane and bring it back up with you.’ The people at Manston gave us a railway warrant from where was it? Margate or somewhere like that, Folkestone to go up to London and up to Binbrook. We called in first of all at, we hadn’t had a shave for a couple of days. We felt scruffy. We were still in our flying kit because you don’t carry anything else.
SB: No. Sure.
DF: And we went into this pub which was run by a couple of ladies whose husbands whose job it was were in the Services. So we had that and then we just appeared on the way up to London. Got our train out of London. I think it was, pretty sure it was Waterloo and there was an SP there. He tried to stop us you know, ‘What the devil are you?’ He was going to have us for walking around like this. My skipper used some Australian polite words [laughs] put him, soon put him right.
SB: Yes, I bet. I bet he did.
DF: And we went back. Got back up to Binbrook. All we did then was —
SB: Just for the record the 7th of January ’45 that was.
DF: Yeah.
SB: That collision. Right. Ok.
DF: On the 22nd we did a wide cross country.
SB: Right.
DF: On the 28th we went to Stuttgart and we had a hard night.
SB: Yeah.
DF: We had come back with a JU88 over the target and we were hit by heavy and light gun fire. That it was [unclear] in half because it was we got it. Just claimed it as destroyed.
SB: Yeah. But you saw it coming did you?
DF: Well, yes and no. We were coming out of the target. We dropped our bombs, the photoflash had gone. We were just running out and it was quite bright down below and there were two Lancasters on one side slightly down and there was a Halifax on this other side. You had to look out for aircraft coming out of a target because, you know the chance of a collision were pretty great. Our wireless operator, we always had him with his head in the astrodome to look out for fighters or bombs coming down or anything else.
SB: Yes. Sure.
DF: And he had spotted a Focke Wulf 190 going over at an angle to us. So that gave us an idea there could well be something happening and just as that was said around the back of these two Lancasters and that afterwards made me rather cross. This JU88 went around the back of these two Lancasters and lined up on us and we both opened fire at the same time and I can still see bullets whizzing past me.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DF: Anyhow, he hit the fuel tanks. We lost fuel. The mid-upper was hit by metal shrapnel [pause] but we flew home and that was it. Another trip done.
SB: Yeah. Now, can you, can you recall was he using the upward firing Schrage musik cannon or was he —
DF: No. No.
SB: He was using the front gun was he?
DF: He was using the front guns.
SB: Oh right. Ok. Ok.
DF: Oh no, we would be looking out for him because he would have had to have overtaken us.
SB: Yes. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.
DF: And we were a bit far. When you dropped your bombs and you’d used half your fuel load.
SB: Yeah.
DF: You speed to get —
SB: You skedaddle a bit [laughs] Yes.
DF: And that was on the 28th and on the 2nd we’d done another one to Wiesbaden. I did a mining trip one night. Oh, it was horrible. Went to Denmark mining at ten thousand feet and on the way back we got diverted to East Fortune, Edinburgh. We got hit by flak on the [unclear] Where else did we have something happen to us? [pause] [unclear] searchlights, flak, enemy fighters seen. Evasive action taken [pause – pages turning] Nuremberg again. Had our rear windscreen shattered but flew home. Did a daylight on Bremen. We had, it was supposed to have been good fighter cover with Mustangs but there was fighter activity but we got, lost two starboard engines.
SB: Gosh.
DF: So we had a two-engine landing back at base. So it went on and on. U-boat pens. Then we got our old aeroplane back. They mended it.
SB: Ah right. The one that you’d taken to Manston.
DF: Yeah.
SB: Right.
DF: AR Oboe. [unclear] searchlights. Oxygen was u/s in my turret. Trims were unserviceable. I just put down the whole trip was an NB.
SB: Right.
DF: A bloody nightmare. Berchtesgaden. Exodus.
SB: Right. Oh, the POWs. Yeah.
DF: Yeah.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Operational flights on Manna.
SB: Oh, right. Yeah.
DF: Manna. Non-operational hours on the squadron was forty eight. Total operational hours a hundred and ninety five. And then I went into BOAC.
SB: Oh. Right.
DF: And not having, they didn’t issue logbooks so I —
SB: So you just carried on.
DF: I carried on.
SB: How long did you fly?
DF: And on and on and on until I’ve got about six logbooks.
SB: Oh right.
DF: I mean look at this for one flight. This was in 1951. London to Lisbon. Lisbon - the Azores. Night stop then. We split crew as there was Bermuda. Bermuda to Nassau. Nassau to Bermuda. Bermuda to New York. New York to Bermuda. Bermuda to Bermuda. The [pause] something happened. Had a fire on the flight deck and made an emergency descent. Bermuda New York. New York — Nassau. Nassau — Kingston. Kingston to Nassau. Nassau to Bermuda.
SB: Oh, what a hell of a job. [unclear] I see.
DF: Oh, this club was good. How about this then. Hang on. Is that not the one? [pause] Oh some of them we went down [pause – pages turning] Azores. Azores. Azores. Yeah. How about this for a good one. London to Lisbon. Lisbon to Bathurst. Bathurst to Dakar. Dakar to Santa Maria, that’s the Azores. Santa Maria to Bermuda. Bermuda to Nassau. Nassau to Kingston, Jamaica. Kingston to Panama. Panama to Lima. Lima to Santiago. Santiago to Lima. And work your way back home.
SB: Ah you were flight steward by this point then.
DF: I was.
SB: Right. Yeah.
DF: [unclear]
SB: Yeah.
DF: What happened was my first flights were with BOAC. Went to Aldermaston at Reading. It was an airfield then.
SB: Yes.
DF: And they were converting service people to civilian life.
SB: Right.
DF: Now, I hadn’t had a job in civilian life. I left school and joined the Air Force —
SB: Ok. Yeah.
DF: And hadn’t got a clue but I did know I’d like to fly and the RAF found me this job.
SB: Oh right.
DF: With BOAC.
SB: Right.
DF: That was at Aldermaston. Flew on Yorks, Dakotas, they were just training flights.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Then I went to [One Line] and started.
SB: Right.
DF: Backwards and forwards. Backwards and forwards until my last flight with them. End of operations with BOAC the 25th of the 12th.
SB: Christmas Day, 1951.
DF: ’51. Yeah. Yeah. And we had a fire in that engine. That’s why we went Bermuda to the Azores, Azores to Bordeaux and then came back Bordeaux empty. Got rid of the passengers. I got called back and went into the Royal Air Force again.
SB: Oh, did you?
DF: I was called up.
SB: Can we just pause here?
[recording paused]
SB: You went back into the Air Force again when you left BOAC.
DF: Yes, well they called me up.
SB: Oh right.
DF: Because they, because they’d got me in to —
SB: Right.
DF: I was on a funny Reserve.
SB: Right.
DF: And I got called up and I left the Air Force as a warrant officer and they said, ‘Well you can’t be that anymore.’ Down to a sergeant again unfortunately. But there I did a refresher gunnery course up at Leconfield. And then I went to 206 Squadron.
SB: Oh.
DF: Down at St Eval.
SB: Right.
DF: Shackletons.
SB: Shacks. Yeah. Yeah.
DF: And I was the only regular gunner there and Shackletons were nice. They had nice big guns on them. Twenty mils.
SB: Yeah.
DF: It was alright. And I stayed there oh what three, three and a half odd years.
SB: Right.
DF: And of course while I was there I did radar. Radar nav, ASV and all, all the stuff that you do on —
SB: Yeah.
DF: A Shackleton, you know.
SB: Yes. Yeah.
DF: Everybody did it. It didn’t matter what trade you were you learned it. And my time was up and then I went up to Shawbury as a safety pilot.
SB: Ah.
DF: On Chipmunks
SB: Oh, right. Right. Yeah.
DF: Got up there and had the opportunity of going either on Vampires, Ansons or Chipmunks. I said, ‘A nice little aeroplane the Chipmunk. That would do lovely.’ I used to fly around on those. Used to do two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. The idea teaching air traffic control people how to do GCAs.
SB: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
DF: And they started on the small aircraft like a Chipmunk and then after a few days, ten days or so on Chipmunks the Anson would be going in and then having a twin engine job. Then of course they would end up on the —
SB: On the Vampires.
DF: On the Vampires.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Which was very good.
SB: Yeah. Yeah.
DF: And I liked that job very much.
SB: I bet you did.
DF: That was yeah I was happy as anything. Well, I had one big moan. I knocked up six hundred odd hours on these Chipmunks. The civilian authorities would not count it towards to getting a pilot’s licence.
SB: Really?
DF: No.
SB: Oh.
DF: Because I hadn’t been properly trained.
SB: Bizarre isn’t it? Completely bizarre.
DF: That’s the way the Air Force worked.
SB: Well —
DF: Not the Air Force.
SB: How the civil side worked.
DF: The civil side. Yeah.
SB: Yeah.
DF: That was the way they worked.
SB: Yeah.
DF: So I was out there flying one day and the [pause] I got called back. The flight commander chap, a bit of a sir, and he said, ‘David, you’re posted but —’ he said, ‘I could get you off.’ I said, ‘Well, what’s the posting?’ he said, ‘To Bassingbourn. 230.’
SB: 231 OCU.
DF: Yeah. Canberras he said and I said, ‘Well, what am I going to do down there?’ He said, ‘You’ve got to start an aircraft reccy school.’ Well, I was a qualified aircraft reccy instructor. You know, I was a qualified instructor in the Air Force. Period.
SB: Right.
DF: And you’d got to start this school up because most of the people out there at the start of the Suez Campaign hadn’t got a clue as to what aeroplanes they were doing. What they had. They couldn’t tell a one from another.
SB: Right. Right.
DF: So myself and another laddie we started a school and it went very well. We had all ranks coming through from air commodores down to lowly pilot officers.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And it was good fun and it was while I was there I got married. But then all of a sudden this station commander called me up and said, ‘We’re closing it now.’ Because there was no need for it, you know.
SB: Yeah.
DF: The [unclear] and he said you can, he said, ‘You can go and do an admin course and come back as station warrant officer.’ ‘No.’ ‘Steady on,’ he said. ‘No sir.’ And he blew his top.
SB: Really?
DF: He did, yeah. He didn’t like being said no to. But I wasn’t frightened of him [laughs] even if he was a group captain.
SB: Right.
DF: I said, ‘No, sir.’ I said, ‘I joined the Air Force to fly. If you can’t fly me I’ll go elsewhere.’ ‘Alright. You can.’ And I did. I did leave.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And I went down and I got a job with Hunting-Clan.
SB: Oh yes. Yes.
DF: Hunting-Clan had just got Britannias and they’d got a [trooping] contract but they’d got nobody to run their cabin staff.
SB: Right. So that’s what you did.
DF: I did. I went down there. But of course you know when you get into civvy aviation well it’s a, everything can go for a ball of chalk.
SB: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
DF: And that went for a ball of chalk. They decided they were going to get rid of us. I suppose I flew with them for a couple of years and the ops director who I knew in British Eagle he phoned me up. He said, ‘Do you want a job, David?’ And I was then chief steward and purser with them for a while until they lost a Viking. Do you remember?
SB: Yes, I do. Yeah. Yeah.
DF: Schoolboys.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah.
DF: And I was involved in the inquest into this, all of this because I trained cabin staff but I mean you can’t train cabin staff against an aeroplane flying into a mountain.
SB: No. Of course you can’t.
DF: Anyhow, it ended up that I had to have, start a proper training school and I did all crew members. They all had to come. Even British Airways or BOAC as it was then —
SB: Right.
DF: Weren’t doing a lot in that field and they gave me an old fuselage. It was a Viking one but we equipped it up with escapes lines.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And all the other equipment.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And I became the safety training officer.
SB: Well, well gosh. Crikey.
DF: And I used to go out and fly now and again just to keep my hand in. After that British Eagle unfortunately went to the wall.
SB: Yes.
DF: Terrible thing about it was when I got home on the Friday my wife told me I was redundant.
SB: Really?
DF: Because it was on the television before we were told.
SB: Oh dear.
DF: Anyhow, and we lost out. I lost a lot of pension out of that. Pension money disappeared. So oh dear oh dear. Then I heard of a company I don’t even like really like being associated with [laughs] Donaldson.
SB: Yes.
DF: Mr [unclear], the man with the bottomless pit as he said and I helped him get off the, his airline off the ground. I wrote a lot of the tech manuals for safety.
SB: Right.
DF: And stuff like this.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Because I used to do it with Eagle.
SB: Yeah.
DF: And I did all the training and I was also in charge of all the cabin staff so I recruited all that lot. I did quite a lot with him actually. Got him, saved him a lot of money. I made a lot of money for him too. And then one day he come in and the chief pilot in and he said he wanted us to sign certain things and when I looked at the small print I said, ‘No way.’ He wanted us to sign some of the training off that had been not done.
SB: Oh right.
DF: And Bishop who was the chief pilot at the time said, ‘Not bloody likely.’ And I said, ‘No. Neither am I.’ He said, ‘Ok, you’re both fired.’ Yeah. So we looked at each other, shook each other’s hands and we went across to the wooden hut which was a pub just across the road. Went in there and had a pint [laughs] Didn’t want to ask too much. Two days, two days later —
SB: Yeah.
DF: I’ve got a better picture of that one.
SB: Oh ok.
DF: I’ll get it in a minute.
SB: Right.
DF: Two days later I got a job with Tradewinds as loadmaster and safety officer because I knew them. I used to do work for them.
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Oh right.
DF: And so I stayed with them.
SB: That was Brits again, wasn’t it?
DF: Right to the end. Eh?
SB: That was Brits again wasn’t it? Britannias.
DF: No.
SB: No.
DF: CR44s.
SB: CR44s. That’s right.
DF: That’s right.
SB: Yeah. Yeah.
DF: And later we got [7 Os] and then I became chief loadmaster and safety officer. I did the whole top British security course for aviation because in small airlines you’ve got, you know you double up on jobs.
SB: Oh, of course you do. Yes. Yeah.
DF: And I thoroughly enjoyed that. I had a good time with them.
SB: Very good.
DF: And we, I flew until they ceased trading. They just decided to cease trading. They could see the end was coming for that kind of work.
SB: Yeah. Yeah.
DF: So they ceased trading, paid their bills except for the money that was owing to them you know. All very reputable.
SB: Did it properly. Yes.
DF: It was done properly.
SB: Yeah. Yeah.
DF: And then I [laughs] blow me if I didn’t go and get some jobs out in Hong Kong. I started a couple of airlines up there doing their manuals.
SB: Right.
DF: Bits and pieces.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Which was quite good.
SB: Yeah. I imagine it was.
DF: I mean at that time I was over sixty five. So I’ve had a good life altogether.
SB: You certainly have. Goodness me. Yeah.
DF: I’ve been around the world a bit.
SB: Yeah. Absolutely. Now, what have you got in here?
DF: Now, there’s a good picture you can [pause] that was taken about three days after the mid-air collision [unclear] at market. I’m still in my flying kit.
SB: Oh yes. That’s very good. That’s the signatures of all of us.
DF: Right.
[pause]
SB: Oh yes. That’s very good. Yes.
DF: I’ve got a slightly better one of that. The Mosquitoes. I don’t think would be of any interest to your really. That’s Group Captain Edwards. That was our aeroplane.
SB: Oh yes. That’s nice. I’d like to take a shot of that if I may. It’s ok. That’s ok. No need to take it out.
DF: You’re getting more Lancaster stuff than anything else.
SB: Well, it’s all good stuff. It really is. Not, although the book at the moment is Wellingtons there’s this is all good stuff. I was chatting to a Coastal Command Liberator chap yesterday. So that’s a well-known shot isn’t it?
DF: Yeah.
SB: Churchill coming out.
DF: That was, that’s not Churchill.
SB: Oh, isn’t it?
DF: That’s Mr Curtin.
SB: Oh sorry. I beg your pardon.
DF: Yes, the Australian.
SB: Yes. That’s right.
DF: [ARG]
SB: Yes.
DF: That is the aeroplane that went to Australia. It’s in a museum out there.
SB: Yes. A museum in Perth. That’s right.
DF: In Canberra.
SB: Canberra. Yeah. I’ve seen it there.
DF: It’s in good nick.
SB: It is.
DF: Our wireless operator, the first time he’d ever seen snow would you believe. There we are. That’s when our mid-upper got wounded.
SB: Oh. Oh yes. Is this your aircraft? Is this —
DF: Yeah. Elizabeth was his, became his wife.
SB: Oh.
DF: That was the skipper.
SB: Right. Let’s just take a shot.
DF: There he is on top of the aeroplane with one of the ground staff. Now, I think we were one of the few aeroplanes that had names on the engines.
SB: Oh.
DF: Apparently they were the names of the sergeant, Australian sergeant’s children.
SB: Oh really?
DF: Bits and pieces all over the place. I do have a big picture of that and that.
SB: Yes. That’s a nice shot.
DF: I must do another, another book. That’s the aeroplanes going over the Alps to Berchtesgaden.
SB: Right. Oh right, yes.
DF: Just another Lancaster over the target.
SB: Yes. Yeah.
DF: Another picture of that in Nuremberg. That’s our aeroplane again.
SB: Yeah. Let’s get another picture.
DF: It’s got a crack in it.
SB: That’s ok. Photoshop is a wonderful thing for clearing that. Cleaning that up.
DF: That’s an FM 87.
SB: Oh yes.
DF: With the turret.
SB: Yes.
DF: AGLT.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Just information about our squadron. We dropped more bombs than any other squadron. Little bits of blue.
SB: Well, as I say my, my cousin was on 460 at the same time.
DF: Was he?
SB: Yes.
DF: As me?
SB: He’s obviously, yes same time as you. Yes.
DF: What’s his name?
SB: Small world isn’t it? Oh gosh. Ted Milligan. He was a bomb aimer and his captain was [Lyle Loxley?]
DF: Funnily enough, Milligan. That name rings a bell a bit. Captain’s name doesn’t. Do you know what flight he was in?
SB: No. I don’t. No. Yeah.
DF: Operation Manna.
SB: Oh yes.
DF: I took these pictures out of the rear turret with a box camera. Scramped a bit of film. I’ve used those in various things. Me and my flight engineer in our little room. It was a good, we couldn’t grumble. My skipper again. That’s our aeroplane again. Responsibilities for a prisoner of war.
SB: Yes. Yes.
DF: Fighters. German. That’s 460 Squadron.
SB: Yeah.
DF: That was at Chemnitz. Cloud. Leaflets. What else have we got? Not much else. Ah, I was, went into the training.
SB: Oh right. Yes. Ok.
DF: There I’ll be.
SB: Yeah.
DF: Then again. 1945 I was in India. That was our Christmas menu.
SB: Oh right [laughs]
DF: Next to 460 Squadron being bombed up. Me out in India on an Indian motorbike.
SB: Ah. Right.
DF: Lovely motorbike that was and the little thing that came to you.
SB: You are going to be an air gunner.
DF: Well, I didn’t intend to be an air gunner. That was 460 Squadron.
SB: Yes, I have a copy of that.
DF: And that 460.
SB: Yes.
DF: Oh there.
SB: That’s a better one. Yes. [pause] yes. That’s very good. Thank you.
DF: That’s just of me RAOB.
SB: Is it ok to have a photograph of you today?
DF: But I’m in scrap.
SB: Oh, well we allow that. Another one to be sure. Marvellous. Thank you very much.
DF: What did that come up like?
SB: Oh.
DF: Terrible.
SB: No, not at all.
DF: Have you seen, have you seen the Bomber Command book?
SB: Yes. I have it. Yes. Yes. I have it.
DF: Well, you’ve seen the picture of me in it.
SB: Yes.
DF: Now, that was a good picture. Oh, that’s not too bad.
SB: Lovely serviceable.
DF: Seen that and not come up on [pause] Right, I got skin cancer out in India and it flares up a bit.
SB: Right. Ok.
DF: And I had to have it taken out. Removed. Doctored.
SB: Well, David that’s been excellent. Thank you very much indeed.
Collection
Citation
D Fellowes and S Bond, “Interview with David Fellowes,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed June 13, 2025, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/collections/document/49402.
Item Relations
| This Item | dcterms:relation | Item: Transcript of conversation with David Fellowes |