Interview with Samuel Adolphus Jordon

Interview with Samuel Adolphus Jordon

Samuel Jordon grew up in British Guiana and volunteered for the Air Force when he was 18. He discusses his journey to the UK, his training and work as a clerk.
While training at RAF Melksham the war ended. He was then posted to the Number 1 School of Administration Training at Kirkham. He was then posted to Compton Bassett before returning to Guyana in 1949.

2025-12-18

01:23:43 Audio Recording

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AJordonSA251218

DE: Recording now. So a little introduction. This is an interview with Samuel Jordon for the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive. I’m Dan Ellin. It’s the 18th of December 2025. It’s currently just gone, just coming up to 9pm in the UK and 1pm in the afternoon in Vancouver and this interview is taking place over the internet. Also present in the room is Samuel’s son Lester. Mr Jordon, can you start please by telling me a little bit about your early childhood, your life and where it all began for you please.
SJ: First of all let me thank you for having me on your programme. I’m looking forward to this interview. I was born on the 16th of October 1926 in British Guyana in South America. I grew up as any child would doing normal things. Nothing spectacular right and I went to school, I was in the Scouts, I went to church. I did the normal things of any child would, playing games and things like that. And on my eighteenth birthday, the 16th of October 1946, 1944, I looked at the newspapers and there was an article where there were a batch of personnel from the Royal Air Force advertising for recruits for the Royal Air Force. Now, most youngsters that I knew all went and collected applications. I can’t say I joined the Royal Air Force out of any patriotic zeal. I think it was more the adventure and the films that I’d seen during the war and I thought that’s exactly what I would like to do if I joined the Royal Air Force. I applied. Thousands of people applied. And eventually I was called for a test date. Given an intelligence test, medical and finally I received a letter saying I’d been accepted and on the 15th of December three days less eighty-one years ago I attested to serve King and country [laughs] with a big smile. On reflection what I realise is that we didn’t have a war, conscious war in the part of the world where I grew up. We had the shortages and blackouts and that sort of thing but the threats of war weren’t hanging over our heads so my joining the Royal Air Force was more of an adventure than patriotic zeal. We just spent the Christmas holidays and then we were out of Guyana. In fact, we, we were taken under the wing of the Army and we just spent a couple of days and we were off to Trinidad and we spent some time there. When I got to Trinidad there was two batches of Royal Air Force recruits similar to ourselves who had gone through the same process. Two hundred guys. Oh, let me say that eventually we recruited, they recruited two hundred youngsters. Well, not only youngsters because there were older people. I would have been among the youngest having been about two months over and above my eighteenth birthday but there were people way older than me at the time. But eventually we ended up with two hundred recruits from Guyana. When we got to Trinidad we found there were two hundred recruits in Trinidad and a hundred recruits from Barbados and we spent a little bit of time there tramping around in the square marching and marching and marching. Then we got on a troop ship and we were off to Jamaica. When we got to Jamaica we picked up one thousand five hundred Jamaican recruits. We didn’t spend any time in Jamaica and then we were off to Bermuda. We didn’t know we were going to Bermuda at the time. We ended up in Bermuda and ended up spending a week in Bermuda. What I suspect happened is that we were waiting to join a convoy because we woke up one morning and we were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s one of the most exciting sights I’d ever had in my life. As far as the eye can see on the ocean there were ships. The fact that we were on a troop ship it seems in convoys troop ships and white anchors travelled in the midst of the convoys and then the other merchant vessels are spread. As far as wherever you looked out onto the horizon there were all these ships around us and then there were corvettes and small ships, cruisers going between the convoy and we were on sea I’m absolutely certain for nearly two weeks. We saw no land from the time we left Bermuda until one day somebody said, ‘There’s green land over there.’ That was the first bit of land we saw from Bermuda and then that disappeared and we woke up one morning in a foggy place. We could hardly see the land and that was Greenock in Scotland. So we disembarked overnight. Disembarked, got on a train, travelled from Greenock right down to Wiltshire in England, Melksham to be exact and there we started doing recruit military training. I think that took about eight weeks and then we got, oh while we were in England, while we were at Melksham the war ended in June, July. June 1945.
DE: Yes.
SJ: And we saw wartime England as it was and being out in England in Melksham which is a village area, farming country we saw very little but that’s where I was amazed to see the staid British people as they were and I say English instead of British came to life. Bonfires. Everybody was out in the streets dancing. I didn’t drink alcohol at that time so while the older guys went into the pubs to drink I was invited to homes to have tea and cakes [laughs] and I thought that was funny. We got over that bit. Then we were trade tested and I had a selection of jobs which I could decide which one I wanted to do and I decided to go into admin. So I moved, I was posted from Melksham to Kirkham in Lancashire where I went to Number 1 School of Admin Training and this fortunately was during the summer so I spent a lot of time in Blackpool. It was a short bus ride from Kirkham station on to Blackpool and for the first time I’d never seen so many people in my life. Wherever you looked on the promenade I forget what tram ran there from one end to the next. It was just packed with people during the summer and people right out on the beach. And we did ours, training there I went into the accounts. I spent I think probably must have been eight weeks there and then I was posted to Compton Bassett in Wiltshire which was about eight miles from where I was in Melksham.
DE: Yes.
SJ: And I stayed at Compton Bassett for nearly three years. By that time we were sort of well the guys who were recruited from the Caribbean we joined up for the duration of the present emergencies.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: Which meant when war finished we should have been repatriated back home but we were interviewed and asked well what would we like to do in civilian life and I said initially I’d like to do law.
DE: Okay.
SJ: Right [laughs] Whatever the powers that be came up. I ended up at [unclear] and Devonport Technical College which is now Plymouth University and I did business administration and commerce. I did a year there. Then I was back in the Air Force again and on this occasion I went to Chivenor. This is outside Barnstable where they trained Spitfire pilots. I should add while I was at Compton Bassett that was a training station where they trained wireless operators and telephone operators. Chivenor they trained Spitfire pilots and I stayed there and in 1949 I got on a ship at Liverpool and was back to my home country in British Guyana.
DE: And I bet that was a slightly different sea crossing than the first one.
SJ: Oh yes. Oh, this one was great because although we were still in the Royal Air Force we were only discharged from the Royal Air Force when we actually got back home but we had [unclear] I think we had about six probably just, this was 1949.
DE: Sure.
SJ: So about eighteen of us, a couple of guys from Jamaica as a matter of fact the trip back was to Jamaica, Trinidad, back to Guyana. But I was very fortunate in that my first day on the ship in Liverpool I was introduced to a priest who was going out to British Guyana as assistant priest in my parish and he was so pleased to meet me. I was equally as pleased to meet him because the guy drank like a fish [laughs] and whichever port we stopped at we nearly drank ourselves to death. By that time I was a great drinker right. I have a picture of the guy and me in Jamaica and we were in a rum shop and we came out and took some pictures. This priest he had no civilian clothes so he was in his priest garb all the while. When we looked at the picture we are standing there with the girls from the rum shop and over our head is a big sign, “Dodgy Dick’s Bar.” [laughs] That’s true. He wasn’t happy because he’s got on his priest’s garb. We were in civilian clothes then because we weren’t wearing uniform. We had it. We didn’t wear that. We spent some time in Jamaica then back to Trinidad again and then I ended up back home.
DE: And what did you do then?
SJ: When we got back home the government had a commitment that people who had served in the military they will find jobs for them but I wasn’t interested in working with the government as such. I joined a British firm. We had a large fire in Guyana in 1945 that destroyed half the city and the sugar company which owned practically every commercial thing that was going on in British Guyana but their buildings were destroyed completely and they were able to engage John Mowlem to come to Guyana and to build their head office all over again. I should mention John Mowlem because the Houses of Parliament, the House of Lords were damaged during the war and I remember distinctly during my visits to London seeing the signboard “John Mowlem” outside of the Houses of Parliament. They literally rebuilt or whatever damage was done to the House of Lords they did that. So I was familiar with the name and I started with that company. I told them when I joined I know nothing about building. I wasn’t satisfied with the pay. I said, ‘I will work with you a month. If you satisfied with me you keep me but at the end of the month I expect you to increase my pay.’ Which they did. Right. And I worked with them until the very end of the contract from 1949 until 1951.
DE: Okay.
SJ: And then I eventually ended up in the same building. The head office of the sugar company working in that sugar company for about from 1951 to 1953 or ’54. Then I was transferred to the rum company where they exported rum all over the world until 1957 and then I got my first managerial job where I went to shipping. I was a secretary of the Trade Association that represented major shipping companies in the country until nineteen [pause] I worked with them from 1965 until 19, no from 1957 to 1965. Then I left that company and went into the timber industry which was owned by the Commonwealth Development Corporation and I worked with them from 1957 until 1977. And I left that company and worked with the tobacco, British and American Tobacco until 1985 when I retired from work.
DE: Okay, and, and somewhere along the line you ended up in Canada.
SJ: Not immediately. In fact, I had no intentions of my going out of Guyana anywhere but all of my children went abroad to study and they all, with the exception, I had seven children at that time with exception of one they all lived abroad.
DE: I see.
SJ: The children at that stage thought their mother and I lived too far away from them and they came down. Well in fact they had to deal with me because their mother was quite prepared to go where her children were. I was determined I wasn’t going anywhere.
DE: Oh, I see.
SJ: They worked on their mother and then they worked on me. I don’t know how they decided where we were going to live but we ended up living in Canada. I thought if I’d lived in any country I’d have gone back to England. But during the period of time I was in the Air Force I travelled all over England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and I was fortunate very early to get into contact with a British family. The son was in the Air Force. [unclear] myself and he took us to his parents’ home for a weekend and realising that we didn’t have a home in England of our own they insisted that we should always spend time with them and we were literally members of the family. Literally members. We couldn’t go anywhere before we went to that home first. If we wanted to go on holiday then we would talk.
DE: What was the family name and where? Where was this?
SJ: Barton-Shirt. Edward Barton-Shirt. Mum and his children Eddie and Pat. Eddie was around the same age as myself but he had joined the Service. You had to do two years National Service after the war. So, he came in. He was about the same age as I would have been at that time.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: And the younger Barton-Shirt was about twelve years old. We were totally integrated into that family. Totally integrated in that family.
DE: Was this, was this in Sheffield?
SJ: They lived in Sheffield.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: They lived in Sheffield. Now, I maintained contact and somehow or other they disappeared somewhere within the 1960s or 1970s. I lost contact with them. Now, my daughter who lives in England that you met —
DE: Yes.
SJ: Paula, she went to Sheffield University to study and eventually married one of the lecturers at the university and ended up living in England. So my first trip back to England was in 1996 having left in 1949 and the first thing I did was to try to find the Barton-Shirt. family.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: They lived in Sheffield surprisingly where the family lived. We went on the radio. We went to the press advertising that I was looking for this family unable to make any contact with them at all. We even went to the national registration where they’ve got the register for voters and I could find their names up till in sometime in the ‘60s. They may have died and the children may have got married and lost contact. To this day I’m still hoping I’d be able to make contact with those people. The children at least. One of the children at least.
DE: Yes.
SJ: Grandchildren.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: So in a nutshell that, that is from beginning to end. I just celebrated my eighty-one years with my daughter here a couple of nights ago. 15th of December 2025. 15 December 1944.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: Ended up drinking.
DE: So that’s —
SJ: That’s it in a nutshell.
DE: Yeah. That’s, that’s a nutshell. I know, I know when I met you at the IBCC this summer that you have some wonderful stories to tell about your time in the RAF so I’m trying to think what it was that we talked about.
SJ: There are lots of things that I [pause] As I said I travelled a lot in the Royal Air Force due to the friends that I had. Wherever they lived, you know they would invite me going out at weekends. I’d spend time in their areas and so on. That’s why I travelled all over England.
DE: And how did you travel around?
SJ: Well, in the Service we got leave every three months so at the end of the three months I would get a week’s leave and the fact that I didn’t have a home in England I could ask to go anywhere so I got a, I always got a railway ticket to Wick. I’ve never been to Wick. The furthest I got was Inverness.
DE: Okay.
SJ: I never but, Wick is the end of the railway travel as far as the railways were concerned.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: But I got as far as Inverness and that was as far as I wanted to go.
DE: So how did —
SJ: And Ireland. Go on.
DE: How did you do that with a ticket to Wick?
SJ: Well, I’ll tell you the trick about this ticket to Wick is that with the railway warrant you got when you get off the train you hand it in to the railway station but the fact that I never went to Wick I never had to hand in this railway station, this ticket. So whenever I go on to travel to London I just pulled this thing out and showed it to the conductor and he just looked at it and that was it. Now, it has a date so what we would do we would get ink eradicator, it’s a yellow piece of, it’s for [pause] and just eradicate the date and put in a new date. Eventually the ink eradicator took out the ink and the colour of the paper so we had to [unclear] white. But every time you go on leave you get a new ticket so when that ticket gets to the point where you can’t use it you just scrap that one and put, but we always, we always had a stack. I said every three months you went on leave so you here you’ve got four of these tickets and that allowed me to travel wherever I wanted in England. All I would do is pull this thing and show it to the guys and the conductors never bothered with you. They knew what it was and most of those guys would have been in the Service themselves so they knew what it was all about.
DE: Yeah. Of course.
SJ: There was a funny one. If you go to London you can buy a ticket, a daily ticket for travel on public transport until the end of the day because it has the date around the edge of the ticket and the month. So when you use it for the first time in the morning the conductor would click the month and that particular date and then we would stick the thing in our forage cap. So when you get off the bus or the train you just show the guy this thing and he’d allow you to go through. But they were also doing the same thing we had during the Service. So they would stop you if you were in London and say, ‘Let me see that ticket.’ But you knew you’d be using that. The same thing we did with the tickets. We would keep them clean so the next day [unclear] you don’t buy another ticket [unclear] but if, if you were caught using that they fined us five pounds. Right.
DE: Okay.
SJ: So the guy, ‘Let me see that ticket.’ And then he’d ask you, ‘How did you get on this route? Did you walk down the stairs? Did you get in the lift? Did you get the escalator?’ But that was fun, right. A lot of fun with that. And the same thing on the train. In those days you travelled from London to usually if I go to London I’m going to Scotland. It’s a direct one. London, Edinburgh. London, Glasgow. One stop. Newcastle.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: You start at 10 o’clock at night from Euston or Charing Cross. You arrive in Edinburgh at 8 o’clock the next morning or Glasgow. The train is full and people will be standing in those days. The train is filled to capacity. It’s not these fancy trains you’ve got now in England. You got a corridor.
DE: Yes.
SJ: From one end of it and people standing from 10 o’clock at night until 8 o’clock in the morning because the carriages as such have got into little compartments. Little long carriage and get you to the toilet or to get off the train but the trains were always packed with people. If you didn’t get a seat in one of the cabins in the carriage you’d just stand there all night until the next morning. So the conductor hardly could walk from one end of the train to the next. If you saw him once you were absolutely sure you were not going to see him again until you get off the train.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: That was one of the funny ways but I thoroughly enjoyed my service. I was surprised that you folks were interested in me being in Bomber Command. We got to go to Fighter Command, Bomber Command but fortunately the fact that I was in administration in pay accounts the pay accounts is the same area whichever section you are in the Air Force. Exactly the same thing. So I could work in any Air Force station at any time.
DE: Yes, of course. Yes. Yeah.
SJ: So it didn’t matter what Command I was in whether Fighter Command, Bomber Command. Wherever you had it. Any station the pay accounts was exactly the same.
DE: Yeah. And, and what, what was your working day like?
SJ: Oh, I worked like a civilian. I went to work on Monday mornings at 8 o’clock. I finished at five. I worked on Saturday until mid-day and then I didn’t go back to work until Monday morning. The weekend was mine. Go where I like. Do what I like.
DE: Okay.
SJ: Fixed.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: No parades. Never. From the time I finished the military training I never went on a parade. Never touched a weapon. Right. Totally divorced from what I would say actual warfare. I did exactly the same thing in the Air Force that I did as a civilian as far as working hours are concerned.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: No parades. No saluting nobody. No nothing.
DE: Yeah. And who were you working with?
SJ: Pardon me?
DE: Who were you working with?
SJ: Well in the accounts I’ve got some pictures if you want. I can show you the entire Accounts Department group.
DE: Yeah. I’d like, I’d like to see those. Yeah.
SJ: There were only three [pause] there were only three West Indians that I worked with. Two West Indians that I worked with. We had only three West Indians in the headquarter building and when I went to Chivenor I was the only West Indian in the headquarter building.
DE: Did you ever did you ever experience any trouble with that? Any racist, any racism or anything?
SJ: The answer to that point blank is no. In the Service I can say this for a fact it would not have been tolerated. The authorities would not have tolerated race in any form of action but the fact that we were so few in numbers that [pause] you could complain. Other chaps complained about race. As an individual I have never once experienced anything that disturbed me as far as an individual as far as race. All my friends were white people.
DE: Okay.
SJ: English people, Scots people, Irish people. Whatever they were I never lived in a billet with other West Indians other than when I first went to Compton Bassett. I had a Jamaican and a Trinidadian guy and after they disappeared after the end of the war. I never lived in a billet with any other black person other than myself. I know nothing about race. Absolutely nothing. I had one terrible experience and I’m glad it happened at the time when I was leaving England. I went to stay with my friends, the family in Sheffield and I had to catch the transport to go home in Liverpool. I travelled as I said from Sheffield to London and when we got into London it was very late and I used to say if I’m in London there’s a big club at Waterloo, Waterloo Station. I went to that Service Club and they were full and they were trying to find accommodation for us. There was myself and two Jamaican guys surprisingly. They were trying to find accommodation for us and they couldn’t find a Service Club within reach where we could stay. Eventually they ended up calling hotels and they’d got a hotel in Paddington, right. We were told to go down to Paddington. They had made arrangements for us to stay there. Myself and these two Jamaican guys. When we got out at the hotel they had what they then called in those days a pea souper.
DE: Yes.
SJ: We got in a taxi and all you can see is the rear light of the vehicle in front of you. Nothing else. It’s all fog. The taxi dropped us right in front of the hotel in Paddington and left and when we got there what the people at the Service Club did not say is that we were black. So the hotel did not expect to see black people turning up. We were in civilian clothes not in uniform. And the guy said they had no accommodation for us and I knew immediately what had happened. We were black and when we said, ‘We were there. We heard a clerk in the Service Club spoke with you and you knew three people were coming.’ But the guy in the Service Club didn’t say, ‘There’s three black people.’
DE: No.
SJ: He’s saying, ‘We’ve got three RAF lads,’ because we were still in the Air Force then. Back in the Air Force and as far as they were concerned they were expecting three RAF white guys. So when three black guys turned up this guy is really surprised and he insists he had no bookings for us at all. We insisted that we are not leaving the hotel so he called the manager and then the manager comes and says, ‘Oh, this guy is he is a porter and he didn’t have the authority to take reservations,’ and things like that and we insisted that we were not leaving the hotel until they satisfied the booking, the reservations that were made. And the guy at one point, ‘I can only find accommodation for two.’ And we said, ‘Three or nothing at all.’ The guy realised he had us hooked. He couldn’t find three and we were saying, he could only find two and we walked out of the hotel into the fog and didn’t know where the hell we were going.
DE: Oh dear.
SJ: By the time you got out of that hotel door you’d got this fog.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: You don’t know where you are. I’ve never walked around in Paddington. I didn’t know where I was. We didn’t know where we were going. We just walked. I remember passing the Albert Hall. I remember passing Hyde Park from Paddington. Where the Albert is in relation to Paddington to this day I haven’t the faintest idea and we walked and walked and walked. This is now early in the morning we are on the street.
DE: Sure.
SJ: And we went to the police. In those days the police was the people’s friend. You had a problem the first person you went to was the police and we saw this police and we told him what applied to us and he said, ‘You’re just lucky. There’s a West Indian student hostel off Hans Crescent [unclear]. Well, we were near to that place. He said, ‘You might be able to get accommodation there.’ Fortunately when we went to Hans Crescent we were able to stay the night at Hans Crescent. That’s the only experience I’ve had where I’m saying because I was black.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: I was discriminated against.
DE: And that was because you were in civvies rather than in uniform I guess.
SJ: Yes, oh no but you see this is what happened. The guy at the Service Club was saying, ‘I’ve got three RAF people.’
DE: Yeah.
SJ: [unclear] it’s civilian clothes they’ve got on. They accepted three RAF people and we turned up there in civilian clothes. That’s the first thing. They were not expecting to see people in civilian [laughs] they expect to see three guys in uniform.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: And I think that’s where the misunderstanding began and it developed. What their ideas were I don’t know but I came to the conclusion because we were black.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: We were not admitted to this you know. We weren’t given accommodation basically.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: But I was glad this happened on my last day.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: I was glad. If that had happened at any other time I’d have been out of England like a flash.
DE: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. What was your accommodation like when you were, when you were working or when you were training? I mean it must have been a bit of a shock coming to —
SJ: No. I lived in a barrack room like everybody else. In a barrack room, twenty-five guys but eventually when I got promoted to corporal I had my own little room at the end of the barrack room. So that you got twenty-five guys but the guys who had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t in charge of anybody.
DE: Okay.
SJ: As a corporal you had this room as your accommodation so I was comfortable. No. I have no complaints. Absolutely no complaints being in the Air Force. No complaints about anything. Food. As a matter of fact I should add this bit. That we had asked to get, we weren’t accustomed to the English food. Potatoes and that. We had a rice as a staple meal and seasoned food and so on. Curry and stews and things like that. When we asked the administration whether they could get rice and allow us to cook our own food but they said it depended on the number of West Indians they had because everything was rationed.
DE: Yes.
SJ: And they are not going to get a bowl or rice for one guy or a couple of pints of rice. If they had enough West Indians where they could requisition enough food for that group they would do it and I was very fortunate that where I was at Compton Bassett they had enough West Indians. They didn’t always able to get a supply of West Indian food but whenever they can. So we had a guy in the cookhouse. We had curry every single day [laughs] Every single day. What was funny is that as I said I worked with British, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. Now they didn’t, well curry, as you know curry is a smelly thing. You are cooking curry you could smell it two miles away. So the people in the mess got fed up of this curry smell because [unclear] but they wouldn’t touch the curry, even my friends they sat there they had the other thing and one guy who had been stationed at Aden and he had eaten that kind of food stuff, you know. He started taking curry and the other guys see that he didn’t die.
DE: Right.
SJ: He didn’t have diarrhoea. Eventually so many people because we all had our own friends and we ate at different tables and the West Indian meal now started circulating amongst the British guys. There was this. So they now had only the West Indians could eat the West Indian food in the mess because when they ate that food it meant that the food that was allocated to those people left behind and at that time because after I left England they were still rationing food. So they banned everybody else from eating West Indian food other than West Indians. So for the first time race played [laughs] its ugly hands against my people.
DE: Yeah. I expect they were —
SJ: But other than that, other than that the accommodation I said initially I lived in a barrack room with twenty-four other guys. Then I had my own little room at the end of the barracks where I got my own stove. Different things like that. No problems. But I wasn’t in charge of those people.
DE: No.
SJ: But I just went to work as I said at 8 o’clock in the morning. Finished at 5 o’clock. They had different jobs to do. As a matter of fact a lot of the guys that I worked with at one stage worked in the Accounts Department as well.
DE: I see.
SJ: Life was good to me. Life was good to me in the Air Force.
DE: Good.
SJ: What I know as a civilian as a civilian and I don’t think civilians normally you know relish military life where you are told as I said fortunately in my job I didn’t have anybody in charge of me. I wasn’t in charge of anybody. I just went to work. I’d got a hundred people on the payroll to deal with every two weeks.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: I just went back down and did my payroll. Two weeks again I’m paid. And this is the funny thing when I go to pay I’m escorted by two officers. Guarded by two officers but they weren’t escorting me. They were with me making sure I wasn’t cheating the Air Force. I had one on both sides to me. When you prepared the payroll you do it in pencil so when you’ve got a hundred men in front of you there and you called the name one officer is looking to see that the amount you called is written in pencil and then you put it in ink.
DE: Okay.
SJ: One is on the left hand side. One the right hand side. Right. So if you see a guy comes for pay and this guy gets sixteen pounds the officer is watching you write sixteen pounds at the side of there. Right. I’m escorted by two officers. I felt like a king. I thoroughly enjoyed that aspect. I never see myself as a military person to be fair. I don’t.
DE: No.
SJ: Not all the military parades and that and people. What surprises me right now is when I look at parades to see Royal Air Force people walk around with rifles on their shoulders but they must be out of the Royal Air Force Regiment because as you will recognise in the Air Force people have jobs. They can’t take you off your job, Bomber Command you are looking after planes, mechanics, drivers that sort of thing you’ve got no time to go marching all on the square [unclear] marching up and down the place. So I’m always surprised when I see a large bunch of people marching around. Air Force people.
DE: Right.
SJ: With a rifle over their shoulder.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: But as you know they’ve got the Royal Air Force Regiment.
DE: Sure.
SJ: I know the band is something different. The band is a band anywhere. You can always send a band on a parade and I’m always very much surprised when I see a large bunch of Royal Air Force people tramping about in the street on a parade.
DE: So, you did, you did the marching up and down the square but that was during your training I guess.
SJ: That’s just, that’s just initial military training. Everybody has got to learn how to shoot a gun and I went as far as machine guns but at the end of that training from the day I left I’d say I’d never seen a weapon anywhere other than in a guardroom. The Air Force people [unclear] weapons and things like that. Even in the guardroom the guards didn’t have guns in there [unclear]
DE: Yeah. So did you get the adventure you were looking for when you, when you volunteered?
SJ: No. I volunteered with the express intention aircrew.
DE: Okay.
SJ: That was my intention. But by the time I joined the Air Force, the Royal Air Force in 1949 they were always winding down. Don’t forget when the war finished I was only in the Air Force about seven or eight months when the war ended.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: And this is a funny thing. The courses that I went on I was the only private. Two of us. Everybody else was sergeant or warrant officers. They were aircrew people who had already become redundant as aircrew being, and they were young people as well being retrained because they went out they had to wait until their Service number came up before they could be demobilised and as you know in the Service you get demobilised based on your length of service and your age.
DE: Yes.
SJ: The older people came out first and those youngsters that were flying they were still in their twenties. Some of them a little older than that but I’m sure I never saw, well the guys that I trained with I think one sergeant he wasn’t even aircrew. He was something else. He would have been probably in his thirties or his forties so those guys would have had to wait some time before their numbers came up before they could be demobilised. So they became redundant and they were trained to do ground staff work as we would call it.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: Well, the people I associated with nine times of the ten in the Service were all NCOs and senior NCOs at that. Even my drinking mates who had joined the Service. NCOs don’t go around with privates but as a private with NCOs in Blackpool all those guys were, aircrews all you started as a sergeant or flight sergeant.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: The people [unclear] they were all, but the Air Force then had the same thing like the military. I don’t know about the Navy where rank too plays that very important part because people had jobs to do and you don’t have a sergeant or a warrant officer shouting at you. You go to work and you do your job. That’s it.
DE: Yeah. Yeah.
SJ: This supervision, well Army as you know, Air Force guy, the Army and the Navy completely different to the Air Force in every respect.
DE: Yes. Yeah [pause] I’m trying to think of some of the stories you told me when we met. You had, you had one about WAAFs and singing.
SJ: There are so many stories I can’t think of any. Any particular. One way to make you laugh is that I started knitting.
DE: Oh really?
SJ: [unclear] I’d got nowhere to go and the girls were there and I joined a knitting class. I never got past the scarf. I never even finished the damned thing. Where we lived we lived a good life. I mean if I were drinking the things will sort of pop up in my mind. Sit there no bar and you know age always made all the difference. Dimmed the memories in that kind of way. I sometimes can tell some really funny stories of my drinking days. But I became a good drinker. We would go out, four of us in a group we never, the least we would drink was about eight pints of beer and in those days the pub opened at 8 o’clock and closed at ten. So in two hours we would at least buy two rounds of beer for each other.
DE: Wow.
SJ: And if the crowd was bigger and as I said fortunately the war finished shortly after I joined the Air Force and then we started having demob parties. We had to go. Everyday somebody was being demobbed. A group of people. You would go to the pub. As long as you get your order in by the time they say, ‘Time gentlemen please,’ when the evening ended there was beer still left on the counters the guys are going everybody wants to buy the guy a last drink.
DE: Yes.
SJ: Nine times out of ten everybody is as drunk as hell. No. I enjoyed being in the Air Force and as I said we were removed from the horrors. The only experience I know when I was at Chivenor we had a couple of deaths. These were guys being trained. They’d come straight out of flying school. They were going to Chivenor to learn to fly Spitfires and I remember at least three cases on my, that I’d been dealing with flying one guy. He is in clouds. This was in Devon when I was at Chivenor between Barnstable and Ilfracombe. In that area.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: And he comes out of the cloud to find where he was, he was almost on the ground and crashes. Another guy he’s flying, he has some problems with his aircraft and he ejects and he tries to get up to the cockpit. He probably hits the button on the parachute. He comes out in the parachute left in place. It took days before they can find his body. The height from which he came down he was buried in the ground.
DE: Oh dear.
SJ: And we had another incident. One is clouds, coming out of clouds and crashing on the ground. This guy his parachute being left in the cockpit and he comes out without. That’s the only three incidents that I remember [pause] But the funny part of it is it is all gone now. It’s just a big [pause] my Air Force days now really it’s, it’s done.
DE: Yes. Yeah.
SJ: It’s grey. It’s grey. But by surprise I can still remember the names of the people I worked with.
DE: Okay. Yeah, who were they?
SJ: I’ve got some pictures here if they are any use in your [pause] Lester can take them if you need them.
DE: That would be wonderful. Yes, please. Yeah.
SJ: If you need them. Lester, you want to take that picture off the wall there, that picture off the wall there.
DE: If we keep, yeah if he could do that later on I’d like to keep talking if that’s okay. I’m just struck you said that England, the UK felt very different when you first landed. You landed in Scotland.
SJ: That’s right. Greenock. Just outside Glasgow.
DE: Yeah. What were your first impressions?
SJ: Well, I ended up, I ended up every time I went on leave I went to either Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, Aberdeen. I always went to Scotland. I really liked going to Scotland. I always went to Scotland.
DE: Did you take the High Road or the Low Road?
SJ: The answer to that is no.
DE: Railway all the time. Yeah.
SJ: Yes. And as I said usually if I went on leave we always had somebody, you know. My English friends who normally wouldn’t be travelling but the fact that they could get away a railway warrant we will, you know they will, we will go as a group. [unclear] I remember going to Galway. My friend, Dooley, Chris Dooley he lives in Galway and I went with him to his home in Galway. Now, they had the Grand National is in Galway. We turned up there. The hotel where we should have stayed, the fact they had the Grand National they were full. The guy again started trying to say, well by this time we were in uniform. Well if you go to Southern Ireland you have got to wear civilian clothes.
DE: Yes.
SJ: [unclear]The guys tried to find other hotel accommodation and couldn’t find it. We were drinking in the bar while this guy is trying and eventually he said, ‘Well, look. All I can do for you is if you don’t mind I can put you up in one of the rooms where the staff who you know overnight in the hotel and he got a bedroom. There was three of us. Two other West Indians and myself. My friend Chris Dooley he lived around the corner. The guy put us up and there we drank until the pub closed. Then we went up, stayed in the thing and I got sick.
DE: Oh dear.
SJ: I vomited all over the place [laughs] So the next morning we went downstairs. The manager said, ‘Oh, you guys had a good time,’ he said, ‘Yes but there was one thing.’ He said, ‘What is it?’ ‘No no you had better have your breakfast first.’ Because I thought he was going to throw us out of the hotel. After we had a good breakfast I said, you know after and this guy was drinking with us from the bar. I said, ‘When we went upstairs you know I got sick.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ By the time we got back upstairs from the dining room that bedroom was cleaned out, fumigated, ‘Laddie, don’t you worry about that.’ You know. Another experience I’ve had you are going to enjoy this one. In this again this is Southern Ireland we went to the Guinness factory.
DE: Okay.
SJ: The Guinness brewery. I’m in the crowd and then there’s a guy he’s alongside of me. He’s talking to me and says ‘You know I’ve never spoken to a black man before and I saw you in this corner and I left my group so I can come and talk to you.’ Anyway, we did the tour of the brewery, shown the various brews that they’d got and what I found out with Guinness Guinness makes a different brew for every country that they serve. Every area they send a representative around to find what the people’s taste is. So if you are drinking Guinness it’s not going to taste the same way if you are in Ireland and you drink it in Scotland. If you are in Scotland you drink it in England. They blend their drink. This was the taste of the territory where they are serving it. This guy obviously he was not a Guinness man. He just went on the tour and he did [unclear] After the tour was finished they carried on at a beautiful bar and you can taste any blend that they’ve got and they say you can drink yourself to death if you want. But this guy he’s not a Guinness man so he takes me to his pub and I got [unclear] Again I say the fact that I was there this thing I don’t know how it got on to talking about religion. Most of the Irish people are Catholics but one hell of and this is why I am absolutely certain the Irishman likes a scrap. He likes a fight. He would make a fight even if it isn’t there. Before I know it this crowd and one hell of a fight takes place and the guy he just eased me out through the crowd and took me to his home. He said, ‘While you are here on holiday you are free to come to this.’ It’s the only place I’ve walked along the street and a guy doesn’t know you, tap you on the shoulder, carry you into a pub and buy you a drink. Do you know I have the highest regard for the Irishmen but he likes to drink and they are the most friendly. The Irish first, Scottish next, Welsh. Well, the English people [unclear] still and in those days the English were English right but the Scots the Irish they were more relaxed people to get along with.
DE: I see.
SJ: This was a good experience and I benefitted tremendously. Maturing at eighteen years of age until I went back home with twenty-three.
DE: Yeah. I bet. Yeah.
SJ: If I had not gone to England I don’t think the life that I lived and I lived a very comfortable life, a very very comfortable life, we weren’t rich but we didn’t need anything. All my children went to universities. They are all professional people.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: And I lived a very comfortable life. I have absolutely no complaints about having living in this world and I’m glad I joined the Royal Air Force. That’s what the Royal Air Force did for me.
DE: Oh, that’s excellent.
SJ: I’d do it all over again. I’d do it all over again. I’m so convinced about that that I said that if I were inclined towards politics and I were to hold a position where I can direct people’s lives I would make it compulsory for every youth to do a short period of service in the military. Compulsory. When they are very young. I think military life is not your own when you are in the military and I think that sort of chaperoning and I’m using that in inverted commas. That control that other people have on your life you realise that’s not the way I wanted my life forever. But it straightens you out. It either makes you or breaks you.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: But normally it doesn’t break you. It straightens you out and you never forget military training and military discipline. You never ever forget it. I still walk and count my steps when I’m walking. I still say, ‘One. Two. Three. Four.’ I don’t say, ‘Left. Right. Left. Right.’ But I actually literally count my steps as I am walking on the street.
DE: Oh, okay. Yeah.
SJ: I’ve run out of words [laughs]
DE: It’s been wonderful chatting to you. Yeah. I’m, I’m what I normally sort of ask at this point is if there are any other anecdotes or stories that you’d like to tell me and the people out there.
SJ: Well, I’m sure there are many but it’s not [pause] I wasn’t prepared for this really. Right.
DE: No.
SJ: I’ve got to sort of jot down things because I’m sure there are lots and lots of things that I’ve got at the back of my memory but again as I said a lot of things have faded out and these things pop up when you are not even thinking about it.
DE: Yeah. Yeah. You need the right sort of, the right question just to spark the memory I guess.
SJ: I tell you what I’ve got two articles that I wrote for my daughter.
DE: Okay.
SJ: If you would like I can get Lester to copy them and send them to you.
DE: That would be wonderful.
SJ: My daughter is, I said her husband was a university lecturer and he’d asked me to talk [unclear] here to write something about my life and I wrote about the family.
DE: Right.
SJ: I wrote exclusively about the family and then I wrote another thing about Service life in general. I could get Lester to print them out and send them to you if they are any use.
DE: Yeah, that would be wonderful. Yeah. I’m just trying to —
SJ: Because my daughter actually had those articles published on the BBC.
DE: Oh, in the peoples, the People’s War stories. Yes. I know the, I know the thing. Yeah. I’ve just got some notes of that you had a story about running around wearing long johns or underwear or something.
SJ: Oh yeah. That [laughs] Well, that’s funny. Again that would have a racial intonation.
DE: Oh.
SJ: I’m the only black guy in the [unclear] You know, 10 o’clock, lights out. The ablutions are outside. You are in a barrack room with twenty-five guys and all you can see is the, well we were, long johns was not a normal issue. The fact we were West Indians we got jerkins and things like that. Mainly because the authorities said look, we don’t belong to this [unclear]. We’d got leather jerkins and we were the only people. Right. It’s only like the mechanics and people who work outdoors would get a leather jerkin to wear. The jerkins got extra order clothing. We got these long johns.
DE: Okay.
SJ: I slept in my long johns. Right. If you wanted to get to the ablutions you had to get out of bed, there is no light or anything. All you are seeing, you can’t see me. All you can see are these long johns and a vest. The fellas [laughs] said they once saw a spook dashing down the corridor to get down to the ablutions. So that’s the kind of joke that I enjoy because I can imagine myself being in the opposite direction seeing something like that.
DE: Yeah. So it sounds really like the RAF really did look after you if they you know they found and sorted you out with curries and —
SJ: There’s absolutely no question about that.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: We were protected by the Royal Air Force. The Royal Air Force did think about ways in which they can make us comfortable. For instance sugar. The sugar ration that I got when I became a student was three quarter pounds of sugar per week and when you go to the mess you got an urn with tea which had no sugar right but the Air Force decided all West Indians were given an extra ration of sugar. All you had to go was go to the store and you got enough sugar every week. After a while we got accustomed drinking the tea from the urn and we never used the sugar. So when I was going on leave this family in Sheffield I turned up with a big bag of sugar. It’s like Santa Claus coming from the North Pole. Imagine people with three quarters pound sugar per person home for a week.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: And I turn up with a big bag of sugar because the sugar is in the store. Nobody questions you why are you not using the sugar. But I’ve got sugar there for three months and I’m going away. We don’t bother so much until we are leaving to go someplace. Wherever we are going we will be walking about with sugar and you hand it to somebody it’s like Christmas.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: No. No. We were really looked after by the administration. Once you brought something to their attention if it’s something they can do they do it. I never wear boots in the Air Force. I wear shoes.
DE: Okay.
SJ: And you had to be a warrant officer or an officer to have shoes as an issue. I wore shoes as an issue because I tell them I can’t wear these new boots. They were hurting my feet. And you have to have this chit. The doctor gave me a chit that I should not wear boots and that was the end of it.
DE: Fantastic.
SJ: I wore shoes for my entire Air Force service and this was when I was in the recruit stage wearing those heavy boots.
DE: Okay. Wow. That’s good.
SJ: For me, yes.
DE: Yeah. Oh, well done.
SJ: No. But I’m surprised that Bomber Command would want to talk to a guy like me but as I said being in administration you could work in any Command.
DE: Yes. Yeah.
SJ: Whether Fighter Command you know your job is not specific to a particular type of station.
DE: No, but —
SJ: You will always have an administration at a headquarters building and once you get to a headquarters building.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: The jobs are the same wherever you go whatever you do.
DE: Yeah. A lot of, a lot of —
SJ: I was lucky that, I was lucky that I selected that particular type of work when I was in the Air Force.
DE: Yeah. A lot of my work and my research I’ve been looking at ground staff because for every one chap who flew there were eight to ten people on the ground doing all sorts of different trades.
SJ: Well, without those people you can’t get in a plane.
DE: That’s precisely it. Yeah.
SJ: I used to say when people asked me about the Air Force, civilians I say, ‘Simple. Have you ever flown in a plane?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘What does the pilot do?’ They don’t know. ‘Well, how many people from the time you get to the terminal building deals with you until you get on a plane? You only know the pilot [unclear] but all of those people have to do something.’
DE: Yeah.
SJ: The pilot doesn’t get into a plane and just fly it. There’s lots of work that has to be done before that pilot can get to the plane and take off and land it and the Air Force is like that. Everywhere I went if I said I was in the Royal Air Force, ‘Did you fly?’ The civilian mentality is that if you were in the Air Force everybody is flying a plane. The Air Force didn’t start off with only pilots. Other people got to do a hell of a lot of work before pilots can get in the plane and take off.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: And land it.
DE: Yeah, and there’s all the trades from clerks to —
SJ: Now that, now that you can actually have drones and all soon you might not even be using pilots. Much [unclear]. But you still have to have the ground staff people to keep putting those things up in the air and take them out of the air again.
DE: Of course. Yeah. Did you, did you have anything to do with any WAAFs while you were in the Air Force?
SJ: Yes. I’ve got pictures here of WAAFs. Not necessarily me [pause] we live as a group. As a group. I mean the only thing is that the WAAFs they had their own billets away from the male. That was out of bounds. But our entire day to day operations were women and men. A lot of women in admin the same as they’ve got men. We moved around together. We went to the pubs and drink together. We went to dances blah blah blah blah. As I said I experienced nothing to do with race when I was in the Air Force.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: Two of my friends, the two guys at that both of them got married and lived in England. Never went back to their country. And this is out of the same friendship group. The people that they work with that they eventually got married to.
DE: I see.
SJ: And I was just lucky [laughs] I escaped. but I did a Zoom like this for the RAF Museum in London.
DE: Oh yes. Yeah.
SJ: It’s something that I did. A Zoom similar to what I am doing with you. Yes. This was about two or three years ago.
DE: Oh, okay. I see.
SJ: No. My, my daughter seems to get a lot of well I won’t say pride but somehow or other well let me put it my way I realise that I am a museum piece. No. The amount of attention you gentlemen showed me even in that little thing and it happens every time I returned in the last couple of years. One is that not many people are ninety-nine years of age who served in the military so that now makes me almost exclusive. I’m talking to people now who says, ‘I’ve never spoke to a ninety-nine year old in my life.’ You know, nobody. Right, that’s alive in ninety-nine year. Where I am living here in this retirement I am the oldest male. I’ve got over a hundred people living here but not many people here turn ninety-nine year. It's like Father Christmas. Santa Claus has just come from the North Pole. I’m being treated now like this is what happened at Bomber Command. Paula and I sitting down there in the canteen having a drink.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: I don’t know, well, Paula actually likes telling people, ‘My dad has been in the Air Force,’ and it registered on them. People come and giving me gifts. I think the mere fact that I’m alive that’s the first thing. This guy actually was alive when this war was going on. Of course, they are all younger people. They can touch you.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: I admit I was in a Mall a couple of days ago. I was sitting there and a guy happened to be talking to me in the food bar and then I don’t know how we got around to my saying I’m ninety-nine. ‘You are ninety-nine years of age.’ ‘Yes.’ He just wanted, he said, ‘I haven’t ever spoken to a ninety-nine year old and it’s a big high.’ [laughs] I’m now being treated like a celebrity and I’m beginning to enjoy it. I get free drinks when I go, well I belong to the Legion and we usually have you know the Legion dinner, veterans’ dinner.
DE: Yes.
SJ: Once a year. When I first came to Canada the veterans’ dinner the Legion, well I lived in the Legion building. You had to be a veteran to get accommodation. There were about eighty-two apartments and everybody belonged to the Legion. So when we have the Legion dinner all the tables were occupied but in a Legion dinner now you’ve got a problem [pause] I was in the Legion on November the 11th and I don’t know anybody in the Legion. It’s all civilian now. It’s now a club. The Legion. I mean a lot of Legions have closed. Right. In Canada where they don’t have a lot of service clubs that can maintain a membership. Those Legions are closed. I mean there are three guys since I’ve been living in the area who are RAF people I don’t even know where the hell they’re stationed. I only know they are because they appear in uniform. RAF uniform but they are not within any walking, driving distance of the Legion I belong. I hadn’t seen them for the longest while until this last November I am there. They had me surrounded almost. If I weren’t black I don’t think they’d remember me [laughs] [unclear] I said ‘But I missed you chaps for the longest while’, but they’re not near to the Legion so wherever they come from, I don’t even know where, where they’re stationed. I never even asked them they may have told me at what station they are but there are no RAF places near to me that I know of.
DE: No. No.
SJ: In the area I live and I live near to Vancouver.
DE: Yeah. Well, during the war they were all over towards, well they were all in the east and the mid, yeah.
SJ: I don’t know where there’s an Air Force station in Canada. I don’t know.
DE: No, I don’t know now but there were, there were hundreds because, thousands, thousands of pilots trained there yeah.
SJ: During the war I have no doubt. In fact while I was in England on this last occasion I, I wanted to go back to the [unclear] particularly Compton Bassett where I was. Now Compton Bassett where the station was what was then the Great West Road. Our station was separated from Salisbury Plain where that White Horse is?
DE: Yeah. Yes, I know, yeah.
SJ: From my station I am looking up at that White Horse as clear as daylight. I had a bicycle so I could ride my bicycle around. I gonna walk up on that, I’ve never really gone around Salisbury itself but I just crossed that Great West Road and I’m on that Salisbury Plain. From the station I’m looking straight up on the plain where that White Horse is. And I would have liked to have gone back there. My grandson, Ola’s son he has just graduated from Sandhurst in December of not this last year so now what do you call it? A company, battalion commanders on that. He’s going to end up in the mechanised division of war wherever that is. The exams. I went to Sandhurst a while back. My grandson arranged for us to have a private tour of Sandhurst.
DE: Wow.
SJ: And I was shocked that I got a major [laughs] chaperoning me around.
DE: So where —
SJ: [unclear]
DE: You are definitely a celebrity. Yeah. Fantastic.
SJ: I’m beginning, I’m really, I’m really beginning to enjoy it to be quite honest. At first I paid no attention. Well right now it’s so significant the way people look at me you know as if I come from space. ‘He’s not real. He doesn’t belong here.’ I really enjoy life now to be quite honest with you.
DE: That’s great. That’s great. I’m really enjoying talking to you so yeah thanks. Yeah.
SJ: Well, I’ll get Lester to take out some pictures and he will send that to you on this thing.
DE: Yeah. That would be wonderful.
SJ: I’ll give you the batch that I was, my the hundred I was with and I’ll get one or two which is based on the question you asked me and he can say you can select what you want.
DE: Oh, that would be absolutely fantastic. Thank you very much.
SJ: And thank you, Dan.
DE: Right. Unless you’ve got any other stories that you’d like to tell me I think I’m going to stop recording now. Anything else?
SJ: Well, when I talk with Paula she is the person who is going to jog my memory and if she thinks there is anything worthwhile she will probably get in touch with you folks and if you need it I can always fill in the blanks.
DE: Yeah. I think there was just one other story that she, that she reminded you of when we met before and it was to do with WAAFs and singing Scottish songs or something shortly after you landed in Scotland.
SJ: Oh yes. Yes. Oh, yeah. That one. As I said we arrived in Greenock that afternoon and we couldn’t see anywhere. It was just a grey landscape. I was surprised the next morning when that fog by the way it’s a beautiful fog. You can see the land rising from the water and going up in the air. Now, they gave us rations because they knew that we were going to take the entire day to travel from Greenock down to Melksham in Wiltshire. But as we got off the troop ship on to the railway station the women’s army whatever they are, you know, the civilian women.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: Who went around —
DE: The Voluntary Service, yeah.
SJ: Yeah. The Voluntary Service. They were at the railway station. In fact, they were there to greet us but they had, this was early in the morning we came off so they’d got breakfast for us and my friend, one of the guys he was a good tenor. While they were serving he started to sing and we weren’t drinking and he was singing, “Loch Lomond.” And these women I’m sure they were the first, I don’t think, I think the West Indians of the Royal Air Force are the only black contingent that served in England in uniform. I have seen a group of people even in the Army or the Navy we, my country sent I’m sure about four hundred in the Royal Air Force. I said we had one thousand five hundred Jamaicans when I went and there were two batches that went to England.
DE: Yes.
SJ: In 1944. A batch earlier than myself. I have never come across an Army group where they can say even from the colonies went to England as a group as we did. The volunteers. I’ve never met a group and I travelled as I said all over England. I stayed at Service Clubs so you come across all sorts of people. Wherever I stayed if I saw a black person they had on a Royal Air Force uniform.
DE: Yeah. Okay.
SJ: Right. So I would want to think as far as the military is concerned I’m saying this only from observation the Royal Air Force is the only Service unit that actually brought people from the colonies into England during the war to serve in England.
DE: Yes.
SJ: You had people and they had a South Caribbean force serving with Montgomery by the in the African desert war whatever that was.
DE: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SJ: The Navy to a lesser extent but the Army you had a South Caribbean force that served overseas. Went overseas and they went to Egypt and those places.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: The Royal Air Force is the only Service that actually took colonials as I would say and only West Indians. Only West Indians from the Caribbean into England and their service was in the United Kingdom.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: Their service was in the United Kingdom.
DE: Yeah. So what happened when this chap started singing?
SJ: So this guy now he started singing and these women, this is my impression, ‘Here are some savages who just came out of the jungle. They are singing a Scottish song that they know.’ They don’t mind him singing but the guy they said “Loch Lomond”. ‘Where the hell do you know “Loch Lomond” from?’ These women stopped serving and they burst into tears [laughs] holding each other and crying like hell. Well, at that time I wasn’t thinking about race. I was just thinking the impact because what had happened when they stopped serving we were hungry. We had to stop the guy from singing so they can continue serving us. But the guy was a good tenor. As a matter of fact one of our friends, one guy who came with us ended up as one of the jazz singers in his day in London.
DE: Oh, okay.
SJ: And playing at a night club, Claude Holder. Funny enough where Paula lives in South Clifton this guy turns up there with a troupe to entertain the people in that village and she writes to tell me. I said, ‘Claude Holder is my friend. He and I were in the Air Force together.’ Because he lived in England after the, he remained in England and as I said he was also a good entertainer but he did entertaining. Right. I’ve got pictures of him as well. I said, ‘Well Claude Holder is my friend.’ Right. No, those women. I could never forget that you know but I think the general thought is that white people think all black people can sing. Even if you are croaking they think that is singing.
DE: Right.
SJ: That’s the first thing people ask me if I am in the Legion. To sing a song.
DE: Okay.
SJ: Not karaoke. People would sing and I’d say to them, ‘I only sing when I am drunk,’ you know. Do you know how many free drinks I got from that? Nobody has ever seen me get drunk yet. I get a hell of a lot of drinks but never get round to the singing. So I only sing when I’m drunk and they would buy me beers and I’d slowly I’d drink. ‘We’re ready for the sing song.’ ‘I haven’t got drunk yet.’ Well, it has its compensations in the kind of way. Right. But if I lived my life all over again consciously it’s not something I think would want to do but I wouldn’t miss it. If I had to live my life and I had to make the choice I would want to do a short period. I’m not going to like it mind you. Even the type of job I did I said I was comfortable.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: Civilians are not Service people. We think and we like to do things for ourselves. We don’t want people to say every minute of the day you do this or you don’t do that and we do this. It has a penalty. Nobody enjoys that kind of thing and whether you like it not in the Service your life is regulated in a way over which you have absolutely no control. But I think for a short period of time if people were subjected to that we might all end up being better human beings. Absolutely convinced about it. I’m really glad that in fact I had the experience myself.
DE: That’s absolutely wonderful. Thank you ever so much. That’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
SJ: Thank you for having me, Dan.
DE: That’s been brilliant. You’ve been talking to me for an hour and twenty minutes so —
SJ: That’s long. I shall be in England shortly. My grandson that I said who has just come out of Sandhurst has just got married and he’s going to have his family, only Paula lives in England.
DE: Yes.
SJ: His mother’s side but he wants to have his family and we are scattered in Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, [unclear] Russia, Soviet Russia, Canada, United States, England. University in the West Indies. Right. So the family are all around the place and they live, they didn’t go back to Guyana to live.
DE: Sure.
SJ: So my grandson he knows all of them. He would like to have us as a sort of this marriage thing at some sort of get together where his wife, his wife is Ukrainian. As a matter of fact he started out as a Marine Cadet and when he got to the age where I think it’s eighteen he had to come out. He then became a Reserve. Then he went to the University in Wolverhampton where they had some sort of military training combined with scholastic training and that was how he applied to go to Sandhurst. Right. He wanted to be a marine having gone to Sandhurst where they don’t train Naval people. Now, while he was a Reservist he was training Ukrainian soldiers right now. That had trained in England and he has been doing this thing for a long time he is now going on to his thirties and he has been training them for several years. Right. So the girl that he married she is Ukrainian and she was the interpreter with the group of Ukrainians that he worked with and eventually they became boyfriend and girlfriend.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: They almost got married [unclear] a couple of months, four months now since they got married so he’s hoping to have a reception for his West Indian family group. So I should probably be in England, as a matter of fact Paula was saying it is sometime during the summer of next year.
DE: Oh well if we can work it so we can meet up.
SJ: No. No. now that, now that I know you chaps personally I will certainly because you’re not close whenever I go to Paula’s first we drive out to Lincoln or whatever the other place is there.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: There are only two places I can go when I am there.
DE: Yeah and I’ll —
SJ: No, I will certainly make an effort to see you guys.
DE: That will be great and I will buy you a beer and see if I can get you singing.
SJ: No. No. Not one. It’s got to be more than one. I’m not a one drink man [laughs] No, you buy me one and I’ll buy you one in return.
DE: That sounds like a plan.
SJ: No, I’ll be looking forward, I will come to England and will come and see you guys.
DE: Right. That’s wonderful. I’m going to stop recording now.