1 25 12 https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/2996/54935/PMossAW19010005.jpg 6948c538d9a2374b40a8f3bf35bd0aaa Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mogg, Albert William - Photograph album Description An account of the resource 14 pages of photographs of his service life and time in India. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-04-20 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Mogg, AW Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Street scenes in India Description An account of the resource Left page. Left - city street with man bending over object on the ground and other locals in the background. Shops along side. Top right - crowded narrow city street wit woman sitting on right and other people standing. Bottom right - ox cart with sacks piled high in city street with shops. Right page. Top, two views down Nehru road towards the Metropolitan building in Kolkata with a car in foreground. Bottom left - view of Shankar Terrace Building New Delhi, Delhi, across a busy street. Bottom right - view of the Howrah bridge in Kolkata. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Civilian Type The nature or genre of the resource Photograph Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Seven b/w photographs mounted on two album pages Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context PMossAW19010005 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. India India--Delhi India--Kolkata Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource David Murray Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Delhi [entry point] Description An account of the resource This page is an entry point for a place. Please use the links below to see all relevant documents available in the Archive. Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. India--Delhi https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/2738/50888/SKaneWB19210816v10010.jpg 7242fa20a00a09144daf3e5f3a9e99fe Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Kane, William B Description An account of the resource Fourteen items. The collection concerns Flying Officer William B Kane DFC (b. 1921, Royal Air Force) and contains documents and photographs. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 75 and 115 Squadron. The collection was donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Barbara McKinnell and catalogued by Nigel Huckins. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-09-01 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Kane, WB Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Flying Officer William Baron Kane DFC Description An account of the resource Service history. After training as navigator/observer and bomb aimer completed a tour as Stirling bomb aimer on 75 (NZ) Squadron. Rested on training tours and the second tour as Lancaster bomb aimer on 115 Squadron. Subsequent postings to India and Israel. Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1942-04 1942-08 1942-11 1942-07 1943-01 1943-10 1944-01 1944-05 1944-09 1944-11 1945-07 1945-11 1946-05 Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. United States Florida--Pensacola Great Britain Scotland--Dumfries and Galloway England--Hertfordshire England--Cambridgeshire England--Suffolk England--Buckinghamshire England--Lincolnshire England--Norfolk India India--Bangalore India--Delhi Israel Florida Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Royal Air Force. Bomber Command Royal New Zealand Air Force Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource One page printed document Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Pending text-based transcription Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SKaneWB19210816v10010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. 115 Squadron 75 Squadron aircrew Anson bomb aimer bombing Catalina Lancaster RAF Bassingbourn RAF Feltwell RAF Little Horwood RAF Manby RAF Mepal RAF Newmarket RAF Waterbeach RAF Wigtown RAF Witchford Stirling training Wellington https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/2773/49053/SBondS-DidwellNv10001-0008.pdf 030433757df53ec24a70b206b0906969 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Didwell, N Didwell, N (Bond, S collection) Description An account of the resource 114 items. Corporal Norman Didwell served as ground crew on 99 Squadron at RAF Mildenhall from 1939 and then in the Middle East. Collection consists of documents and photographs of people, places and aircraft from the squadron's time in Great Britain, India and Cocos (Keeling) Islands. The collection was licensed to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Dr Steve Bond and catalogued by Nigel Huckins. This collection was provided, in digital form, by a third-party organisation which used technical specifications and operational protocols that may differ from those used by the IBCC Digital Archive. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-01-18 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SBondS-DidwellNv1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Letter concerning return of Indian Air Force Liberator (B-24) to the Royal Air Force Description An account of the resource Letter describes the challenges and problems of taking an ex-RAF Liberator that had been handed to the Indian Air Force at the end of the war and had now been donated back to the RAF for exhibition in museum. Details all the engineering work to get the aircraft airworthy and then the journey back to Great Britain. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1974-07-20 Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1974-07-20 Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. India India--Bangalore India--Pune India--Delhi India--Mumbai United Arab Emirates--Abū Ẓaby (Emirate) Egypt Egypt--Cairo Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia--Jiddah Italy Italy--Rome Great Britain England--Wiltshire North Africa United Arab Emirates Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Royal Indian Air Force Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Text. Correspondence Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Twelve page printed letter Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Pending text-based transcription Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SBondS-DidwellNv10001-0008 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive B-24 RAF Colerne RAF Lyneham https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/1875/46458/SHarriganD[Ser -DoB]v250002.mp3 8a097d5b21ae450b8b5f698d153762aa Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-06-19 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire Description An account of the resource 34 items. Interviews with veterans recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire. Interview with Bertie Salvage Three part interview with Dougie Marsh Interview with Terry Hodson Interview with Stan Waite Interview with John Langston Interview with Nelson Nix Two part interview with Bob Panton Interview with Basil Fish Interview with Ernest Groeger Interview with Wilf Keyte Interview with Reginald John Herring Interview with Kathleen Reid Interview with Allan Holmes Interview with John Tomlinson Interview with Cliff Thorpe and Roy Smith Interview with Peter Scoley Interview with Kenneth Ivan Duddell Interview with Christopher Francis Allison Interview with Bernard Bell Interview with George Arthur Bell Interview with George William Taplin Interview with Richard Moore Interview with Kenneth Edgar Neve Interview with Annie Mary Blood Interview with Dennis Brader Interview with Les Stedman Interview with Anthony Edward Mason Interview with Anne Morgan Rose Harcombe The following interviews have been moved to the relevant collections. Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46454">Kathleen Reid</a> Interview with Wing Commander <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46467">Kenneth Cook DFC</a> Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46456">Colin Cole</a> Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/46464">Charles Avey</a> Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46470">John Bell</a> Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46459">Les Rutherford</a> Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46460">James Douglas Hudson</a> Transcribed audio recording A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document Interviewer: This is an interview with Mr Wilf Keyte on the 15th of November 2010 at his home in Lincoln regarding his experiences in the Second World War. WK: I joined the RAF in December 1937 and I eventually made my way to RAF Scampton and joined 83 Bomber Squadron and I was working in the stores, in the Maintenance Flights of 83 Squadron. It had recently moved down from Turnhouse in Scotland and I stayed with the squadron until 1940 [pause] 1940, when I was posted down to RAF Henlow in Bedfordshire where I was, I was working on such things as the Queen Bee which was a guided missile aircraft which we had and it was used quite a lot in those days. But I eventually left. Left Henlow and was posted to the Orkney Island to RAF Skeabrae where I was the barracks, in charge of the barrack stores in in the Orkneys. I was only supposed to have stayed there for a maximum of nine months but in fact I was there from January 1942 until November 1943. I was given a home posting so they said to RAF Swinderby in Lincolnshire and I found myself in charge of the barrack stores at Swinderby. We had, it was a heavy bomber Conversion Unit where they were converting crews from twin-engined aircraft to four-engined aircraft. A mixture of Stirlings and and Lancasters they had there. I stayed, I stayed at RAF Swinderby for the best part of two years and I used to live near a village called Burton and the most remarkable thing about living out there that there was the ditches were filled with thousand pound bombs on the roadside. In fact, I had a bungalow which was next, next door to a bomb dump and I used to ride through this bomb dump to get to Swinderby. I stayed at Swinderby until in 1945 and I was, I was posted to RAF Syerston and at RAF Syerston I found myself involved with a force which was called the Tiger Force which was supposed to be to assemble a force of Lancasters, three squadrons I think it was to fly to Okinawa and the intent was to bomb Japan from Okinawa. And I was told that I was due to fly out to Okinawa in a Lancaster on the 15th of September 1945. Events of course took place with the bombing of Japan with atomic bombs which meant that the Tiger Force was was cancelled and they wrote, all the people were being sent here, there and everywhere. That as far as I was concerned it went on for about three months where I was sent down to number 5PDC I think it was. It was based at, in London and the Viceroy Court was the block of flats that we had. And we were repeatedly let go on leave and I finally finished up with amongst us there were six of us that had been there since August waiting to go overseas and the CO saw us. We decided that we’d had enough of messing around with waiting for this movement and we went off to the orderly room to ask if we could go on leave. And the CO came out and saw us and he said, ‘What are you —’ so and sos, ‘Doing here?’ And we said, ‘Oh, we’re waiting to go on leave sir.’ He said, ‘Oh, I’ll fix you.’ Well, the result was that next day we found, we found that we were, we were on orders to move and we went up to Waterbeach in Cambridge and we eventually flew out of Waterbeach in a Liberator and I was down in the bomb bay of this Liberator. We flew to Malta and stayed overnight and then the next day we went on to place called Castel Benito in Libya. It was called Idris Airport afterwards but we flew on from there the next, not the next day because we sat. There was no movement the next day. We flew on to Cairo and we stayed in Cairo for five days and then we flew on to Habbaniya in Iraq. And we eventually the next day we flew on to Karachi which is now in Pakistan of course and there they decided where we were going. Somewhere in India. And I was one of the people who was selected to go. Go down to Puna. What it was that the, we’d been going to the cinema and playing bingo and we started checking on how much was being paid out in prizes because we found out that the sums that were given in prizes didn’t work out how much people were paying. They did. The army were running it and they weren’t very pleased with us and they got rid of us to Puna over Christmas in 1945 and we stayed at, stayed at Puna until after Christmas. Then I went on to where I was scheduled to go and that was Avadi, which was a big base near Madras. And that’s when I came up against the Tiger Force again where I found out that the base had been built for springboard for the attack against Japan and it was for all three services. Fifty miles of rail tracks gives you some idea of the size of the place and we had even three English style pubs there. But before I left England I’d been selected for a commission and I went on from Avadi. I was given a hot weather posting up to a place called Kanpur in the Central Provinces. And it was while I was at Kanpur that a posting came for me to go down to Ceylon to do the officer’s training. And I was down in Ceylon at a place called Kandy which was up in the hills and I then found out why Mountbatten had moved his headquarters from Delhi, actually and the rest of the command had moved it from Delhi because it was beautiful in Kandy. It was like a warm summer’s day. And I completed my course, courses at Kandy and went back to where I came from which was Kanpur in India. But the wing commander I worked for said it was unfair for me to be promoted or commissioned on the same unit as I’d been working as a flight sergeant and he thought I should be posted but the CO said, ‘If he’s any good now’s his chance to prove it.’ But it didn’t last very long because they had a vacancy for an equipment officer at a place called Chakulia which was in the state of [Baha.] That was out towards the east side of the country and I went. I went to Calcutta where the headquarters was and I went in to see the group captain administrator and I was told I’d got to close this unit within a fortnight. And I visited the unit. It was three hundred and twenty miles from Calcutta and said, ‘No. It will take me six weeks to close that station down.’ And there was a door opened in the office and I didn’t take any notice of it but then the AOC walked in and he said, ‘The trouble with you people at Chakulia is that you’re away from all discipline and you’re enjoying yourself out there.’ And the group captain finally got a word in and he said, ‘He’s only been there forty eight hours, sir.’ Anyway, I went back to Chakulia and it did take six weeks because there were, there were several storehouses full of equipment plus a lot of vehicles we had to get rid of and the only place we could get rid of the vehicles was a place called Ranchi which was a two hundred mile trip by road and then you had to wait for the drivers to come back before you could send any more vehicles. But I finally did finish it and went back to Barrackpore near Calcutta and when we got there we were told, ‘Well, you’ve wasted your time because we’re scrapping all this stuff.’ And that’s what happened. It was all put up for sale. Everything that we had there. And I was sent to, to the on another closure job which was at RAF Dum Dum which is now Calcutta Airport and to close that station down and one of the things that we had there was, there was some Spitfires which were being shuffled from England out to Australia and they, we couldn’t get any pilots to fly them and so we were told to put the axe through them and make them unflyable. Well, eventually we moved. We did. We did manage to close the station down and took all the airmen out to Delhi for them to be sent elsewhere and I went up to Delhi and reported into the air headquarters and I was told by two flight lieutenants ‘Oh, you’ll be going to Singapore now but you’ve got to wait to see the wing commander.’ And I waited to see the wing commander and he said, ‘Oh, you’ve been here long enough. Go home.’ So that was the end of my tour in India. And I came home and eventually I was sent up to a unit called RAF Montrose. Eventually I found myself having to close Montrose down. I was, I was made the officer in charge of the marching out and I had to go through all the buildings handing them over to the Works Department to close RAF Montrose. And we moved up to a place called Edzell which was twelve miles inland and they tried to get me posted earlier but the CO said, ‘No. You wait until he’s finished his job,’ and they said, ‘Well, you’re not going to keep him.’ And they sent me down to the Group Headquarters at Hucknall and I left. I left that all behind me. Eventually I got to a place called Kidlington near Oxford. I’d been on an explosives course on handling and sorting explosives and I found myself closing units down all below. They were getting rid of all the bombs from RAF stations and they were being shipped and dumped out to sea. And I finally finished that job and I found myself being posted overseas again. So that’s, that’s the end of the story as it were. Interviewer: You were, your time in the Orkneys attached to Fighter Command. WK: Yeah. Interviewer: Can you tell us what you were doing? Your job more specifically? WK: Well, I was, I was, I went up there and I was in charge of the barrack stores. Interviewer: Right. WK: And I found, found myself getting another job because the RAF was expanding and the Navy were pulling out of a place called Grimsetter just outside Kirkwall and I was sent over, sent across to Grimsetter to go around and check all the barrack equipment. Blankets etcetera. In other words take over the station so that the RAF could move back into Grimsetter and that took me several months of course. Two months when I was working with the Navy. Interviewer: And you had your family up there. WK: Yes, we were fortunate enough that my wife and two sons they came up to the Orkneys and we, we lived on a farm in [unclear] and they enjoyed the life there. The one thing they didn’t enjoy was the wind which [laughs] because there was a paper in those days in the Orkneys which was called, “The Orkney Blast,” and it was aptly named, “The Orkney Blast,” because I was blown off my bicycle several times with the strong wind and even our coal lorry was blown off the road with the strong winds. But we lived with the cold wind in the Orkneys. You got used to it but when we left in November 1943 and we got on this ship at Stromness the sea was flat calm. It was just like sailing across a sheet of glass. It was most uncanny because the Pentland Firth is well known for the ferocious seas that you can get up there. Interviewer: Pathfinders. WK: Well, not so much the Pathfinders as it was. It was the [pause] I can’t remember the name now. The Tiger Force. Interviewer: Oh. WK: Yeah. [recording paused] WK: When I was in India I had, I’d been selected for an officer’s training before I left and I arrived, when I arrived in India they knew all about it and they sent me down to Ceylon and there was, there were two squadrons of Dakotas in those days. One was based, well both were based at Karachi and one flew eastabout and the other flew westabout and I went on the eastabout route which we took off at 6 o’clock in the morning because of the weather conditions. The heat was uncomfortable for flying and we landed for breakfast and then we flew on for another two hours and landed for lunch and night stop and it took a week to fly from Delhi down to Ceylon and [pause] sorry. Oh yes. The, when I, my final unit in, in India was in a place called Dum Dum. It was a village which had a reputation for rebels and one the reason it was named Dum Dum was because that was where the Dum Dum bullets were made originally which were well known worldwide for use by terrorists and the, they were flying the people out from Dum Dum when we, when we closed down up to Delhi and the CO decided that we were not going to. He and I were not going to fly in these Dakotas. That he sent the rest of the station and we we were sent aboard a BOAC York flying first class up to Delhi and the pilot was very kind to us. He did a circuit around Calcutta so that we could take a last look of it before we went home. Where they used to get, used to get tea — Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Wilf Keyte 1018,1019-Keyte, Wilf Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SHarriganD[Ser#-DoB]v25 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Claire Bennett This Interview was recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-11-15 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 00:20:26 audio recording Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Pending revision of OH transcription Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Description An account of the resource Wilf Keyte joined the RAF in 1937 and was based with maintenance units. He was posted to RAF Scampton and RAF Henlow where he worked with the Queen Bee missile unit. He was then posted in charge of stores to the Orkneys and then RAF Swinderby. Wilf was then posted to India where, again, he was in charge of stores and was given the task of closing stations in India before returning to the UK where he continued this role, including working with the Royal Navy to close their station at Grimsetter to return it to the RAF. Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1940 1942 1943 1945 Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Great Britain India England--Bedfordshire England--Lincolnshire India--Delhi Scotland--Orkney Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Julie Williams Maureen Clarke ground personnel RAF Henlow RAF Swinderby https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/1875/46442/SHarriganD[Ser -DoB]v110002 BellGA.mp3 e0b67d2a2816cebb32e23f476d305ba7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-06-19 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire Description An account of the resource 34 items. Interviews with veterans recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire. Interview with Bertie Salvage Three part interview with Dougie Marsh Interview with Terry Hodson Interview with Stan Waite Interview with John Langston Interview with Nelson Nix Two part interview with Bob Panton Interview with Basil Fish Interview with Ernest Groeger Interview with Wilf Keyte Interview with Reginald John Herring Interview with Kathleen Reid Interview with Allan Holmes Interview with John Tomlinson Interview with Cliff Thorpe and Roy Smith Interview with Peter Scoley Interview with Kenneth Ivan Duddell Interview with Christopher Francis Allison Interview with Bernard Bell Interview with George Arthur Bell Interview with George William Taplin Interview with Richard Moore Interview with Kenneth Edgar Neve Interview with Annie Mary Blood Interview with Dennis Brader Interview with Les Stedman Interview with Anthony Edward Mason Interview with Anne Morgan Rose Harcombe The following interviews have been moved to the relevant collections. Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46454">Kathleen Reid</a> Interview with Wing Commander <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46467">Kenneth Cook DFC</a> Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46456">Colin Cole</a> Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/46464">Charles Avey</a> Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46470">John Bell</a> Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46459">Les Rutherford</a> Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46460">James Douglas Hudson</a> Transcribed audio recording A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document Interviewer 1: Hello. One two one two. Testing. Testing. Testing. One two. One two. Interviewer 2: I’m just about to hit the button now. GB: Right. [recording paused] GB: George Arthur Bell. Born in Boston, 18.4.25. Interviewer: So, George we’re going to be talking about then. Now, part of your life — GB: Yes. Interviewer: Was around Boston as the war broke out. GB: That’s right. Interviewer: And I will begin there. What were your memories of that? GB: Well, my mother died when I was seven and there were three children. I’d got a sister sort of four years older and a brother four years younger and life was a bit difficult. We lived in Sydney Street. I was born in 75 Sydney Street and next door was my in-laws, my grandparents. My mother’s mother and father they lived there and they were quite helpful in their way but mainly we seemed to go, they were Shepherds their name and we mainly used to go to my father’s side, the Bells at Frithville where he was born and his mother and father lived there. And we spent of course you did everything on your bicycle then. There were no, not many cars and early on it was, we can just, you just got on your bike and went. But of course, I went, I went to school at Carlton Road. The, what was, what they called Elementary Schools then. I did sit the exam for the Grammar School but I wasn’t actually keen to go to the Grammar School really because I got on well at Carlton Road, I was into sport and football and that sort of thing, and I didn’t, didn’t get in. And there was another thing you could apply for which was the free place but I didn’t say anything about that so I didn’t enter that. I kept silent [laughs] But later, as it turned out later on both my teachers at school thought that I was material perhaps to go to the Grammar School and they got on to my father a bit and he said, ‘Well, right. We’ll, I’ll pay for you to go.’ And we applied to the Grammar School to go but it was getting on a bit and we got a rather curt note which I’ve still got from the headmaster saying that the places were full and that was it. So quite funny really. It’s not what you know it’s who you know but who you know. But — Interviewer: Very true. Very true. GB: But there we are so I eventually left school at fourteen and started work with my father who was a jobbing brick layer. A builder in a small way. He’d been in the trade all his life. He was actually left school when he was thirteen. I’ve got all his books and what he left at school and the work he did in well maths and writing and everything. It, and these days with all the advances in so called education it’s pathetic really what what’s turned out and his stuff when he was, when he was thirteen. But anyway, he worked for several local builders and I’ve got an example of his work is in that. In the book I’ve written in Boston. Interviewer: Yeah. The name of your book is what George? GB: The name of the book is, “Living the Lincolnshire Life.” Of course, the picture of the book on the front pages is my grandfather on the engine and, and his man Harold Evison called, his nickname was Keck. Keck Evison. I don’t know why oh why. And that’s one of my uncles. Uncle Fred. He was, eventually went to London and got in to the fish and chip trade. Interviewer: So what year was this then? Was this building up to the war was it? GB: Yes. Building up to the war. Yes. Yeah. And well it would be 1939 it would be because I left school in 1939 and started work with my father. I got fifty pence a week which is not a lot really. Not these days [laughs] for a forty eight hour week. I had a weeks holiday. My father was a fairly hard taskmaster in a way which he’d been brought up that way. He’d actually served four years during the First World War. He joined up when he was eighteen and came out when he was twenty one or two and had been awarded a military medal. Interviewer: Oh right. GB: In 1917. Which I’ve still got. And so he’d sort of been there done that. Seen quite a bit. Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. GB: Lucky to get. Interviewer: Yeah. GB: But — Interviewer: There was some hard men coming out of that war. GB: Aye. Yeah, but, and times, times were hard. I mean in those days well just after the war, well even when I first started you could fire a man in two hours. Just give him two hours notice and that was it like. No, no appealing or anything like that so [pause] but and we of course during the summer which was, we enjoyed it, it seemed a good summer as they did in those days really. And we used to go to Frithville up at where my grandparents lived and they were quite receptive and we used to do a fair bit of swimming with the neighbour’s sons. The Sergeants. They had a garage and they had two boys, Reg and John. Well, John eventually went on. He joined the Air Force and was awarded the DFM as it, as it so happens. Interviewer: So, this summer then really was the halcyon summer before the big conflict. GB: Before the, before the war. Interviewer: Yeah. GB: That’s in September. Then it started, didn’t it? Well, of course prior to that in 1938 there was a scare. The Munich scare that came on. Everybody was, they were busy you know sandbagging various places and whatnot and the playing field on Sleaford Road they dug a series of trenches which within about a month were full of water [laughs] so, useless really. Interviewer: Yeah. GB: But that was, that was how it went on. But — Interviewer: I guess so we move on now then. Obviously, it’s just gone past the summer and we enter into — GB: Into the — Interviewer: September now so — GB: Yes. Well, war broke out and we were quite busy really because father did a lot of the farm repair work which was, well needed and was sort of a Reserved Occupation and he got, got me, well not deferred but he got on as an apprentice. An indentured apprentice which was for five years which meant that you know subject to everything I should be eighteen and I should be nineteen before I should be conscripted. But which in some ways it, looking back it helped a bit. The war could have been won. Interviewer: I wouldn’t say it was easier though. GB: No. No. No, it wouldn’t. And we did a lot of work on local farms all around Boston and District and repairing things and you came across various things. I mean several aircraft crashed around about. I saw the one come down at Sibsey Northlands where the Memorial Service is held every year. Interviewer: Right. GB: I was working at a barn about, well about a couple of miles away. I didn’t actually see the plane come down but I heard it and saw the plume of smoke come up and — Interviewer: Was this a bomber or a fighter? GB: It was a bomber. It was a Lancaster. Interviewer: Right. GB: And of course they were still in there the blokes were. They never got them out or anything and they had this annual Memorial Service at Sibsey Northlands. You probably may have seen it. Interviewer: Yeah. GB: I did see that but of course you didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know then that it was a Lancaster that had crashed but you knew something had gone on but you, things were hushed up always really. You know, it didn’t [pause] Well, news was hard to come by really that, but that’s, that was one thing I saw. There was another on down Frith Bank towards Anton’s Gowt and a Manchester crashed down there on Cartwright’s farm. Interviewer: Ok. That’s interesting. GB: You could see that. Interviewer: That must have obviously come from Waddington then. GB: Well — Interviewer: Because that’s where they were based wasn’t it? GB: Aye. Maybe. I don’t know where it came from. You could see it, you know. As you went past the road you could see it you know about well a half a mile away in the [pause] And another episode was that – Interviewer: What year was that? Can you remember what year that was? 1941? Something like that? GB: I should think it, well it would, I should think it would have been 1941 ‘42. They phased Manchesters out, didn’t they? Interviewer: They did. Yeah. Yeah. GB: Because they were the two engines job and they went to four with the Lancs, didn’t they? And another, my uncle farmed at Lade Bank at Old Leake and there was a fighter crashed on his farm and it flipped over and killed the pilot. I think it was, I’m not sure whether it was a Hurricane or a Spitfire but two or three days later we walked to the farm, walked down and you could see where it had gauged the ground out and landed and of course it would have gone. Gone and picked up and away really. But that was another incident there. Interviewer: So, working on the land then or you were working obviously — GB: Yeah. Interviewer: During this period. GB: Yes. Yeah. Interviewer: What changes did you notice really? Was there — GB: Well, not a, not a lot really. But it, you know you worked from half past seven to five and [laughs] and then when you got home you went swimming or fishing or something to do with something like that. Interviewer: Did you notice a lot of troops in the area? Was there — GB: Not a lot. There were quite a few because they were I, eventually when I was fifteen joined the St James Men’s Club. That was, it’s now, oh gone. Where? Well, it was the St James Hall and the Church. The Church is all gone and the Hall’s gone and it was Wickes and now Wickes have moved and the whole caboosh has gone and this was a Men’s Club. In fact, I’ve got all the minutes of the whole set up from when it started to when it ended. They’re quite interesting. When you joined and who you were and all the rest of it and, and I was lucky to get in because the age you were supposed to get in was sixteen but with it being wartime and they, you know — [recording paused] Interviewer: Aye, are you ready? GB: Yeah. Yeah. Well, there was quite a few Land Girls of course. Girls seemed to be sparse in those days somehow [laughs] Didn’t, there wasn’t a lot of social life and we used to go to Frithville and they organised, well most villages did and you know whist drive and dance sort of things. Social evenings. And they were always well attended and they were quite fun. And we worked around about. I remember at, well the farm I was working on when I saw the Lanc come down or that incident there were three girls there. Roberts, I mentioned a bit in the book I think and there were, there were three girls. Aileen, Ena and Hilda and they were well Aileen was about, well three or four years older than me and she went on to marry a pilot, a bomber pilot and I think she’s still alive. Interviewer: Oh right. GB: But she must be a good age now. But I tried to contact them but they don’t seem to want to know anything really. That’s how people are. Interviewer: For some people it was a long time ago now. GB: Aye, yeah. Yes, but, and of course Ena she was about my age and we were working at one, on their farm and she, when the thrashing machine came to thrash the stacks and whatnot she of course you had to have a waterboy. It wanted a lot of water the engine did and she was waterboy and of course you know with working there and I would see this girl come and [laughs] I thought she was a bit of alright like [laughs] I was sixteen then. I’ll let you – Interviewer: [laughs] Didn’t get to see many around here. GB: No. No. And my cousin. Then they had a sister, Hilda. She was a bit younger but they all went to the High School at Boston. They biked. Likewise, at Sibsey Westhouses. We worked there for, then at the Everards. They were brother, two brothers worked at farm at either side there. Sibsey Westhouses and right at the bottom end there was another farm Tommy Farr farmed. He had four daughters and they would come from their farm and you would see them sort of and they biked up to Boston, the High School, from there and, you know. Interviewer: You know during this time you know obviously rationing occurred. GB: Yeah. Yes. Interviewer: Was in force. GB: Yes. Yes. Interviewer: How did that affect you? GB: Well, you didn’t have a lot of butter or anything like that and you just made do really. It’s, and just accepted it. It was just there and you got on with it. Interviewer: Did you live off the land though a bit better? GB: Well yeah. I think you did. Yes. Well, your folks were farmers weren’t they? Other: Yes. Eggs and — GB: Eggs and butter and that and milk and that sort of thing was. Other: Yes. GB: You were better off really. Other: Yes. GB: Well, near Bury St Edmunds you farmed, didn’t you? Other: Yeah. Interviewer: I was thinking about the pheasants as well in the fields around. GB: Ah, well that’s right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it was quite, but and then during that time, well when mother died my sister and I went to, during the funeral and afterwards we went to stay at, well my uncle, well this great uncle actually at Stickney where they farmed and I used to spend all my holidays there from then on. From sort of eight up to leaving school and I really, you know enjoyed it and got on proper well. It was quite interesting working on the farm. Interviewer: Yeah. GB: I mentioned a bit in the book about the duck shooting and rabbits and hens and that sort of thing and one, one chap well this was in Butterwick because it’s actually one incident where they were having a shoot and one of the farmers as you did on the last breed when they all broke. The pheasants and game broke out from the last breed and you would chase after the rabbits and whatnot and this farmer they were, he got carried away a bit with his gun and clubbed the rabbit and shot himself and killed him. Yeah. His name was Lyons. Bill Lyons. Interviewer: Oh dear. GB: And that but — Interviewer: That brings us in now really coming up towards the summer of 1944 really. GB: Aye. Yeah. Yeah. Interviewer: And obviously something arrived through the letterbox, didn’t it? GB: Well, that’s it, yes. Eventually it came through like, you know. It was inevitable which I expected and off I went to Lincoln then to join the Army. Which was, well a bit of a shock in a way really but you know you just got on with it. Interviewer: What did you go in as? GB: As a soldier. A private soldier. Interviewer: Yeah. GB: In the infantry. It was the barracks at Lincoln. Interviewer: Yeah. GB: The Lincolns were stationed there. The York and Lancs and the Sherwood Foresters. Interviewer: And which regiment were you? GB: It was Lincolns. Interviewer: You were the Lincolns then. GB: The Lincolns. Yeah. Yeah. But it was quite an interesting experience there. Discipline was pretty strict you know as it was but I mean on every Thursday you would have what they called a doubling day and you had to double. If it was doubling day north you doubled. And then on sort of once a month it was doubling all the way like. North, south, east and west like. You just, it was — Interviewer: So, were you, were you leading up to D-Day then and — GB: Well, not, not, yeah I suppose we would be really. We did sort of six weeks primary training, then twelve weeks infantry training. Then after that it was, you know just you didn’t quite know what you were going to do and where. And we, well I thought perhaps because I was, I was nineteen then and they sort of put us as if we were going abroad. Not in, not to France and Germany. And I went to a holding camp near Nottingham. Whatton they called it. It’s a prison now. And from there on, you know we used to go into Nottingham a bit. Nights out and whatnot and then eventually we, well got on a troop train from Gourock and went out to India. But you know it was about, well for about a week we were on a boat. Well, five weeks I should think. Interviewer: Wow. GB: And we went out. It was, well it was about a week before we set out from Gourock funnily enough and what not. I think there was about five thousand boats on there. And we then you had to go right out to almost to America and turn around because of the U-boats. Then once you got to Gib you were ok. The Mediterranean was clear then. Interviewer: Right. GB: Which was quite pleasant. But going to, well the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic it was pretty horrendous. It was rough and sort of about five thousand blokes were sick [laughs] And you know, what a mess. Interviewer: I can imagine. GB: And we were in the bottom, the bottom deck. H8 starboard. That was what — Interviewer: What was the name of the ship? Can you remember? GB: The Orion. Interviewer: The Orion. GB: Yeah. Interviewer: Ok. GB: Yeah. P&O. Interviewer: Right. GB: Yeah. The Orion. And we were right at the bottom and, you know if we’d been torpedoed well, I mean you’ve no chance like to get out of there. But we got to Gib and then we went to Aden and to you know through the Suez into Aden and, and then we stopped at Port Said for a, just a bit of a refresher and clean up and what not and it was quite interesting and it was, it was warm the weather. Interviewer: Yeah. So what time of the year did you arrive then in India? GB: In India? It was January 1945. Interviewer: 1945. GB: Yeah. Interviewer: So you were still expecting to go into Burma. GB: Well, that was it. That was what it was all about like, yes. You didn’t know where you were going to go in India or what. But, but I suppose somehow somebody did and you were allocated and you know got off the ship and went to a train and where it took you and we went to Jhansy to start with and then got on another train. Went off to Delhi where, and then joined the battalion. Second Battalion King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Interviewer: Oh. Right. GB: Who were stationed there then on what they called internal security because India then was a bit of a hotbed in a way prior to the segregation and you know the split as it were. But and of course a lot of people don’t know but the Indian, there was an Indian Army that fought for the Japanese. Interviewer: Fought with the Japanese. GB: For. Yes. Interviewer: Oh right. GB: With them. Yeah. Yeah. What they called [pause] I don’t know whether it was a Free Indian Army but there was definitely a sort of formation of I think about twenty or thirty thousand. A division anyway that fought with the Japanese. Interviewer: That’s interesting. So did you actually get, get up by the time then obviously getting into 1945 was the most of the fighting done or — GB: Yeah. Well, yes. We got into, we had been stationed in Delhi for quite a while and during that time it wasn’t, you didn’t see any tourist sights or anything like that. You know, if you went to [unclear] you didn’t see the Taj Mahal or anything like that sort of business [laughs] But it was quite interesting in a way. It was a bit of a peacetime station because you see the battalion had been stationed in Burma prewar because Burma was part of the British Empire then. Interviewer: Right. GB: Which not a lot of people knew or know and they were stationed at a place called [unclear] About forty miles north of Mandalay. It was sort of a hill station sort of thing. I’ve got books about it actually but and when the, when the war broke out they were pushed out and they had to scarper. Well, they were pushed back and had a bit of a trip, a rough trip to get back into India which, well they lost quite a few. But they’d not got, they had a new station in Delhi on what they called internal security which were sort of they had to keep peace in Delhi and well I mean four companies and a battalion and we always had one company stationed in the Red Fort at Delhi because that was the old city. And in case anything broke out they were there to quell it and — Interviewer: Yeah. It was quite obvious at that time that the Indians were wanting partition as well. GB: Yes. Interviewer: And independence, wasn’t it? GB: Yes. It was. Yes, it was quite obvious then because I remember doing guard duty on the Presidential Palace which, what it is now, it was Wavell he was the Viceroy then and he was in residence then. We used to have to do guard duties all spick and span and a fair bit of bull and that sort of thing like, you know. [laughs] But — Interviewer: Yes. GB: And I think Auchinleck was CnC but there’s not — Interviewer: So it seems everybody that didn’t make it in the desert were sent to India then was it? Yeah. GB: But during that time I got a bit, well I don’t know, I got a bit fed up really like that but you’re that age and I thought well the call came for, they wanted some volunteers for the Parachute Regiment. Paratroops. So I thought, well I’ll have a go at that. I can’t think why. Anyway, we had to go before the CO and you know say why you wanted to go or this, that and the other. I can’t exactly remember what I did say. Why I wanted to go or anything like that but in the end nothing came of it because the battalion were then ordered to move. To go down to Southern India for jungle warfare training. Sort of a completely different set up to what they’d had in in Delhi. I mean in Delhi it was in a way a bit like peacetime. I mean they’d got the regimental tailor and the [dersi?] wallah. I mean and you could get a shave in bed. A bloke, a shave wallah would come around and shave you in bed [laughs] The NAAFI was well stocked. Interviewer: The empire was alive and well. GB: Well, you believe what [laughs] anyway we got all I was in the advance party and up we shot down to near Ootacamund. It’s right in southern India which is a hill station. Well, we weren’t stationed there but it wasn’t far away. We were about forty fifty miles from it. A place called Gudalur at, I think it’s mentioned a bit in the book and one or two odd pictures and what not and we had this sort of six, six good weeks there doing jungle warfare training prior to moving on to Burma and what have you and which the, it was run by the Australians. They were sort of doing the [unclear] and what not. The training. They were a bunch of, well they were macho characters really. They’d been in New Guinea survivors really. They had seen service in New Guinea and they used to tell us you know sort of you join the Navy and you see the world and you join the Army you see the next — [laughs] Interviewer: It's very true isn’t it? It’s very true. Yeah. We’ll be coming to the end. So you finished then in India what? About 1946 as a timeline. GB: That’s right. Yes. Yeah. Interviewer: Came back to Blighty that year. GB: Yeah. Yeah. Interviewer: So when you came back then did you more or less just find yourself quickly demobbed. GB: Yeah. That’s right. It was. I mean the war finished in August in Japan. August the 15th and it was another well fourteen months before I got demobbed and even then I was Class B because I was a builder and had got a trade. You could advance. Get out a bit quicker. So I came out under Class B but — Interviewer: Did you return to Lincolnshire immediately then? GB: Yeah, I came back to Boston and started off with the well I had two or three days with another builder in Boston [Van Pleusen?] and then I got back with my father. Interviewer: Yeah. GB: And we just resumed. Interviewer: Right. Was there any war damage to repair around the local area? GB: Well, quite a bit of bomb damage in the area of Boston. It’s documented in the diaries in the two years when. When and where. In fact, there was, well you wouldn’t know but on the corner of Rosegarth Street, you won’t know where that is I should think. In West Street. No. Not far from the Railway Station into Boston in West Street. I’ve got some pictures of it actually where they dropped a bomb on the Royal George, the pub. There was a pub there and a bakery, Loveleys Bakery and it, two girls were killed that I went to school with. There was a family of four or five and the girls were killed. I knew them both well but that was quite — Interviewer: Did you ever, I mean the Americans were based just a few miles down the road at several bases. Did they ever come up to Boston or did you see them? GB: Well, not a lot. We didn’t see a lot of Americans. Not really, no. Mainly we had the paratroops. The, I’ve forgotten what division they were now but and our English — Interviewer: Were they English or American? GB: English. Interviewer: Ok. GB: And they were all local about here and their headquarters were at, where did we go to when they [pause] the Garden Centre out towards Newark. We’ve been there. Got the odd plants. Interviewer: Belton? GB: No. Not Belton. But it’s a house there where, where the headquarters anyway but you know we used to play when I was at the club. We used to play various battalions. Well, you know they’d go up to the club and have a game of billiards and they would organise matches. Snooker and table tennis and that sort of thing which was quite interesting really. Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s been fascinating talking to you George. I think we’ve covered a great deal really and thank you very much for giving your time. What we were looking for you’ve described beautifully. GB: Well — Interviewer: That’s your younger experiences prior to joining the Army in Boston. GB: Aye. Right. Interviewer: We’re very thankful for that. So that’s the end of the recording then with Mr George Bell. GB: Yeah. Interviewer: In Boston. And thank you very much. GB: Aye, well that’s alright. Yes. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with George Arthur Bell 1005,1006-Bell, George Arthur Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SHarriganD[Ser#-DoB]v11 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dave Harrigan This Interview was recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Civilian Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Pending revision of OH transcription Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 00:30:36 audio recording Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Description An account of the resource George Arthur Bell, (b. 1925), grew up in Lincolnshire. George lived around Boston at the beginning of the war. After leaving school he worked with his father as a builder, which George states was a ‘sort of reserved occupation’. George tells of the aircraft that crashed near him and the lasting impact that has had on the community. George remembers the Land Girls in the area. Three were called Aileen, Edna and Hilda. He also talks about rationing and how life in general was affected. He was called up to the Army and was posted to India and Burma. George was demobbed in 1946. Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Burma Great Britain India England--Lincolnshire India--Delhi Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Julie Williams Claire Campbell Maureen Clarke bombing crash ground personnel Lancaster training https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/1982/41571/LHope169139v1.pdf 6a2e8afbad645abb80eee3881f3c0b42 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Hope, Arthur Denis A D Hope Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-11-12 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Hope, AD Description An account of the resource 26 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Arthur Denis Hope (169139 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, correspondence, documents, newspaper cuttings and photographs. He flew operations as a wireless operator with 62 Squadron before becoming a prisoner of war. The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Bruce Neill-Gourlay and Pat Hoy and catalogued by Barry Hunter. Transcribed document A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document Frankfurt. Shot Down 19,40 Hrs over target. Five of crew blown to pieces two survivors. Taken prisoner 21st Dec 1943. repatriated [inserted] by Russian Allies [/inserted] Nearly lynched twice by civvies. [Inserted] Ju 88 Nightfigter belly/astern attack [/inserted] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A D Hope’s navigator’s, air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book. One Description An account of the resource Navigator’s, air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book one, for A D Hope, wireless operator, covering the period from 15 December 1942 to 28 April 1949. Detailing his flying training, operations flown, instructor duties and post war flying duties with 62 squadron, 1382 transport conversion unit and 240 operational conversion unit. He was stationed at RAF Madley, RAF Upper Heyford, RAF Swinderby, RAF Skellingthorpe, RAF Wymeswold, RAF Syerston, RAF Palam, RAF Dum Dum and RAF North Luffenham. Aircraft flown in were Dominie, Proctor, Wellington, Manchester, Lancaster, Dakota, Valetta, and Devon. He flew a total of 20 night operations with 50 squadron, the aircraft being shot down on his 20th operation and he became a prisoner of war. Targets were Nuremberg, Milan, Leverkusen, Mönchengladbach, Berlin, Munich, Hannover, Hagen, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Leipzig and Modane. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Great Britain. Royal Air Force Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. France Germany Great Britain India Italy England--Herefordshire England--Leicestershire England--Lincolnshire England--Nottinghamshire England--Oxfordshire England--Rutland France--Modane Germany--Berlin Germany--Frankfurt am Main Germany--Hagen (Arnsberg) Germany--Hannover Germany--Leipzig Germany--Leverkusen Germany--Mönchengladbach Germany--Munich Germany--Nuremberg Germany--Stuttgart India--Delhi India--Kolkata Italy--Milan Germany--Ruhr (Region) Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Royal Air Force. Bomber Command Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Text. Log book and record book Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource One booklet Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LHope169139v1 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1942 1943-06-03 1943-06-04 1943-08-10 1943-08-11 1943-08-15 1943-08-16 1943-08-22 1943-08-23 1943-08-30 1943-08-31 1943-09-01 1943-09-03 1943-09-04 1943-09-06 1943-09-07 1943-09-27 1943-09-28 1943-01-01 1943-01-02 1943-01-03 1943-01-04 1943-01-05 1943-01-07 1943-01-08 1943-01-20 1943-01-21 1943-11-10 1943-11-11 1943-11-18 1943-11-19 1943-11-22 1943-11-23 1943-11-24 1943-11-26 1943-11-27 1943-12-16 1943-12-17 1943-12-20 1943-12-21 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Mike Conncock Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Review Oct 2024 16 OTU 1660 HCU 50 Squadron aircrew Berlin Campaign (23 August 1943 – 25 March 1944) C-47 Dominie Heavy Conversion Unit Ju 88 Lancaster Lancaster Mk 1 Lancaster Mk 3 lynching Manchester Operational Training Unit prisoner of war Proctor RAF Madley RAF North Luffenham RAF Palam RAF Skellingthorpe RAF Swinderby RAF Syerston RAF Upper Heyford RAF Wymeswold shot down training Wellington wireless operator https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/2182/39858/PNyeAF22020267.jpg 4525d6e298a001317e3715b568fa8b0e https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/2182/39858/PNyeAF22020268.jpg 67af4f58bb7f8eca62a98c204c9ca325 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nye, Albert Frederick Description An account of the resource 171 items. The collection concerns Albert Frederick Nye (b. 1925, 1877087 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, service documents and photographs. He flew operations as an air gunner with 207 Squadron before being posted overseas. The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2237">album of his service life in India.</a> The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Lynn Corrigan and catalogued by Lynn Corrigan. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-03-03 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Nye, AF Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Baoli Vasant Vihar Description An account of the resource A well where water is reached by a series of descending steps; called a 'stepwell'. Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1967 Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. India India--Delhi Type The nature or genre of the resource Photograph Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource One b/w photograph. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context PNyeAF22020267; PNyeAF22020268 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/2182/38465/PNyeAF22020027.jpg eaf13b2364b7b1c7a0f749fe4784b85d https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/2182/38465/PNyeAF22020028.jpg bf426e3604ca97379d99890185de9d4f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nye, Albert Frederick Description An account of the resource 171 items. The collection concerns Albert Frederick Nye (b. 1925, 1877087 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, service documents and photographs. He flew operations as an air gunner with 207 Squadron before being posted overseas. The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2237">album of his service life in India.</a> The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Lynn Corrigan and catalogued by Lynn Corrigan. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-03-03 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Nye, AF Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The iron pillar of Delhi Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context PNyeAF22020027, PNyeAF22020028 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. India India--Delhi Description An account of the resource The iron pillar of Delhi. Annotated on the reverse 'Iron Pillar of Delhi'. Type The nature or genre of the resource Photograph Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource One b/w photograph https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/2182/38464/PNyeAF22020025.jpg 87a622396c7d4cc5bf1480cc55e73f73 https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/2182/38464/PNyeAF22020026.jpg 315c0325d82eed1fb54d633a6b109c79 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nye, Albert Frederick Description An account of the resource 171 items. The collection concerns Albert Frederick Nye (b. 1925, 1877087 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, service documents and photographs. He flew operations as an air gunner with 207 Squadron before being posted overseas. The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2237">album of his service life in India.</a> The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Lynn Corrigan and catalogued by Lynn Corrigan. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-03-03 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Nye, AF Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Qutab Minar Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context PNyeAF22020025, PNyeAF22020026 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. India India--Delhi Description An account of the resource A view of the minaret Qutab Minar framed by an arch. Type The nature or genre of the resource Photograph Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource One b/w photograph https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/731/10730/ABurtenshawF180218.mp3 3ae35c5e1a49af72a408f7545f1c56aa Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Burtenshaw, Francis F Burtenshaw Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Francis Burtenshaw (b. 1924, 14650932 Royal Air Force). The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-02-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Burtenshaw, F Transcribed audio recording A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document FB: Yeah. TO: So, what year were you born? FB: 1924. TO: And where did you grow up? FB: Where did I grow up? In Teddington, where I left and turned the key on my house that’s thirteen months ago to sell my house to come here. Yeah. And I failed my 11 Plus, but it didn’t go against me in anyway because, you know I seem to, when I went to the Council School they were a very good school and believe me there's none about them now. There's no schools about them right now. The masters although they were very strict we respected them. We respected the masters and the headmaster. He even interviewed my mother and father to see how I was getting on and everything at school. We had everything there. Sports. Swimming. Everything. Athletics. You know. And then I left. I left there in 1938 and I was, you know, automatically sent a letter from Hawker Aircraft to say that I was assigned there and would I report there. And that's where I went. All I started doing was fetching and carrying. That's all I knew about aircraft. And then as time went on I used to sit in all the Hawker Hurricanes that they fought the Battle of Britain with. I actually sat in them, you know. Yeah. And a Scottish engineer called Jock Golds. He was a very very clever engineer. He sat me down one afternoon and he said, ‘Now, Frank,’ he said, ‘I'm very pleased to have this interview with you.’ He said, ‘I’ve just come to see what you know.’ After an hour he said, ‘Well, Frank,’ he said, ‘You don't know a lot. But we're going to teach you.’ And they did. Oh yes. They did. Yeah. And then I got my calling up papers for the Army. 1938. Yeah. No. No. Not 1938. 1942. And I reported to the Royal West Kent Regiment at Maidstone in Kent and we went through six weeks of constant, I mean all us lads, we were all fit from school and you know you could stand it but I mean we had to climb over walls, climb through barbed wire. Your name it you had to do it, you know. Physical training twice a day. And do you know who brought that in? General Montgomery. Under his orders. Twice a day physical training. Yeah. And then I went to, I went to an Army Battle School and from then onwards I my eyesight is very short sighted and I went before a medical board and there were some quite high-ranking officers there and they asked me all questions. And I said, ‘Well, you know we don't think you're fit for combat. Not with your eyesight. But we’ll, we’ll put you in a, in other activities.’ Which they did. And then it came on and on and we were sent to India. Yeah. We went there and I got, I got to Bombay and there’s a big military hospital there called [unclear] And I was put in there because I had constant haemorrhaging from the nose and I collapsed. I didn't know where I was and they put me in the military hospital in Bombay. And then as time, there were some wonderful specialists in the Army then. There was the ENT specialist operated on my nose his name is Major [unclear] and they did it all properly. It was done in a big operating theatre and all my nose was cauterized and everything and then they decided that my blood count was very very low so they decided that they would start treating me. Well, you couldn't get any blood plasma in those days. It was all there for the lads down up at the front at Kohima. So, we had oh, what was it? Injections of what was it, Sandra? Liver. Liver injections we had in there twice a day and it built me up again. And then they discharged me from there and then onwards I went and I got put on this draught for India and we went on board the SS Strathaird. P&O Liner. Twenty five thousand tonnes. How many troops on board? I'd better tell you what it was designed for. It was designed for the Australia first class run. P&O. Now, of course it was taken over by the Army so we were put on this Strathaird and there was five hundred first class passengers on the SS Strathaird before the war to go to Australia. How many of us do you think was on there? TO: About three thousand. FB: Six. Yeah. And we were so lucky because the German Air Force, and the Rommel, you know, the German Army, they were advancing on Cairo. And the two officers that stopped them going was Wavell and Alexander. Wavell was the Viceroy of India. Did you know that? Yeah. That’s where my office was. Right next door to Wavell’s office in Delhi. Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah we had some very high-ranking officers. Have you ever heard of General Auchinleck? There you are then. Yeah. And he was the commander. He was. Him and Wavell was transferred to India Command and they sent Wavell and, and Alexander to the Western Desert to fight the, with the 8th Army. Yeah. And then I saluted Auchinleck so many times in the HQ. Used to walk past him you know. He had a massive Great War room there. You've never seen anything like it. How, how the, how the allies got everything together to fight that war considering the Japanese had got the upper hand I'll never know. I'll never know how they did it. The organisation in those, a bit different than what they got in Westminster now. They couldn't organise a tea party. They couldn't organise a tea party up there, all the old, you know. It's so sad really. All fighting one another except they should be, you know, doing other things. But as time went on in Delhi I, my friend, two friends and I when we, when we arrived at the training camp in Doolally, it was called Doolally, just outside Bombay we were summoned to the major’s office and he said, ‘Well, you chaps.’ He said, ‘How did you manage this?’ So we said. ‘We don't know, sir.’ ‘The posting you've got is unique.’ And he said, ‘Report to the station tomorrow morning with your kit. You'll have your own carriage and you’re going to New Delhi.’ And then we were introduced to all the people in Delhi because we had to do, had to do all this work on intelligence and we produced a resume of activities every week. That’s three of us did that. But that was all done by the other staff and it was all, do you know what a Roneo is? Oh. That's a very old-fashioned printer. And the old, the old Indian [unclear] they used to print it off but the girls in the office they were stenographers. You know, typists. And they had a, I can never remember what that was they used to print it on. Once they did a sheet it goes. It went on to the Roneo. Then they, we had to send all these things out to all the various Commands you know. Yeah. Yeah. So as time went on of course we were, we were, three of us were made Sergeant because we were handling classified information, you know. And I used to ride about Delhi on my bike with my dispatch case and, and you know I wasn't at all afraid or anything like that. No bother there then. No. Delhi was quite quiet, you know. But then in 1947 Mahatma Gandhi, he stopped the fighting because the Muslims and Hindus and the Sikhs were all fighting one another. And I came out in April ‘47 and that started in ‘48. That did. Yeah. Then as time went on because we used to live in the bungalows at the [Arun?] Stadium in Delhi. That was a stadium, you know for things and yeah, we used to live there. But I see you are to do with Bomber Command well Bomber Harris heard of him? TO: Yes. Yeah. FB: Oh sorry. I thought you must have heard of him and of course the Germans laid waste to the East End of London you know. But the point about the German Air Force was in the Battle of Britain they'd got antiquated aircraft. They've got quite a lot of aircraft they’d had before that period of time. The only one that was, that stopped us was the Stuka. Now, that, all the time you know. Yeah. And what about them poor devils that are on the beaches of Dunkirk? Yeah. Stukas. Coming down all the time dropping bombs on them. Yeah. Oh yeah. And then yeah of course Teddington where I live you now do you know Teddington.? Well, you should go there one day it's a very nice little place and there's a plaque on the, on the docks on the, I'm lost for words now Sandra. Other: Locks. FB: The locks. The Teddington Locks. And that's where a lot of the boats went to Dunkirk. And they were organised by Mr Tough, Douglas Tough and Bob Tough, his son had just started and they were the ones. They said to all the skippers that had private yachts to come immediately and be interviewed and make sure you’re sea worthy to go where you are wanted to go. And they organised the whole lot. Yeah. Because we had the British Navy as well. I mean they were, played a part. They played a big part in the invasion in 1944. You know. The Germans were behind the Western Wall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Sandra said to me, ‘Shall I tell you who my Colonel was?’ Enoch Powell. Heard of him? TO: Yeah. FB: Oh right. Yeah. He was my Colonel. He was deputy director of [unclear] Yeah. Yeah. Yes. He, he was a good man but he stepped out of line didn’t he? You know. A lot of problems there. Here you are. I think he did a good job while he was in his, in his office you know. Yeah. Bur of course, we got bombed at Teddington, you know. The Royal Air Force were chasing these bombers and they were coming back over our town because they were fully loaded with bombs and they dropped two bombs right near my house. Yeah. Yeah. They, they were definitely being chased, you know. Then they went all the way along the river to Kingston and our factory only got one hit. One hit. Yeah. One hit they got. But yeah, I mean the [pause] have you heard of, heard of what is it now? Have you heard of Sydney Camm and the Hurricane? TO: I think so. I'm not sure. FB: He designed the Hurricane. Yeah. And he designed several other planes. Yeah. Of course, the other man, who designed the Spitfire was Mitchell. Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you they were wonderful planes and the pilots were alas a lot of our pilots got killed, you know. You know, they did a good job in breaking up the German advance but, you know they had to pay for it. Barnes Wallis said when it came through that they had penetrated the dams, ‘I am so delighted.’ And he broke down. And he said, ‘Fifty young men's lives have been cost in doing that. What I have done.’ You know. He was so cut up about it, you know. He’d lost all his, lost all the men. Yeah. So, you know, Teddington where I was born is a very nice town, you know. Yeah. Well, I came back from India in ’47 and my father was a fishmonger in Teddington and he and my mother had been running that shop all through the war getting whatever they could for the local people. And I didn't know what I was going to do. Now, I've got a letter, my son's got it, it’s, it’s sent to me by General Auchinleck. And it said, “I am very pleased to hear that you were part of our team and thank you for all your services.” My son’s got it. Another one from the First World War is one my father got. Signed by Winston Churchill. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My father was in the artillery in the First World War. And then I didn't know what to do so I thought I'll go in and give it a try and I gradually built a business up. And when I left there in ‘90, in ‘90 it was, it was a going concern. Nobody wanted it then but I reckon somebody would do now. Nobody wanted it. No. No. But yeah, my friend, one of my friends he lived in Halifax. That's where he came from and his father was Chief Inspector of Police. Yeah. He was. His father. Up there in Halifax. And another one of my customers was Superintendent Wilfred Dawes, Chief of the Murder Squad. He was one of my customers. Yeah. So, you know. Is there any, is there any other topic you want to talk about, you know. TO: Could you tell me a little bit more about your time at the aircraft plant? FB: Oh yeah. The aircraft factory. Yeah. That's what I was going to say. I’m rattling on here. I’m not going on about what you want. Yeah. Yeah. Hawkers in Kingston was a very antiquated factory and even the stairs when you went down you were doing this it was so antiquated. Anyway, they, they started to update it and they put all modern machinery at the, in the base of the aircraft factory and gradually built it all up you know. They had a day and night shift there. Yeah. Day and night shift. Oh yes, of course two friends of mine who worked in Teddington for a builders in fact a friend of our they went to Hawkers. Why do you think they went there for? TO: Hurricanes. FB: Yeah. To build the Hurricane fuselage on a, on a jig. On a jig, you know. Do you understand what I mean? Goes over the air frame. Well, the first Hurricanes they built were wood. The fuselage was wood and the fuselage was covered in canvas and dope. That was what, it smelt terribly, you now. The men that used that they were, had to drink milk all day long, you know. They tightened up all the wings then. Then of course they improved on it and they started putting [unclear] on the Hurricanes then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, my old friend the Scottish man [Jock Gold] he was, he was the Chief Inspector of flight at Dunsfold and he was the one that said if a plane was alright or it wasn't, you know. Yeah. He was a very nice man he was. Yeah. So yeah. Oh we had, see what they did they, they put all these smaller aircraft units all over the country so that they weren’t you know open to all the bombing, you know. And the coaches used to come every day to Kingston and take the men to wherever they wanted to go. To the factories you see. Yeah. Yeah, there was, because it was, it was there was a lot of labour people around the government during the war. There was a mixture like, you know. And there was [pause] there was a man, the Minister of Food. His name was Mr Woolton. He commanded all the food in the country. And then there was, who else was there? A minister of aircraft production. What was his name? TO: Was that Beaverbrook? FB: You’re right. You’re right. Correct. Beaverbrook. Correct. Yeah. You’re correct. Beaverbrook. And because he was a very wealthy man and now, what was he? He owned, he owned newspapers, didn’t he? Beaverbrook. I think he did. TO: I’m not sure. FB: Yeah. TO: Something like that. FB: He was a quiet man you know. You see, my sister lives at Seaford and her neighbour Mr John Anderson. Are you familiar with the word Anderson? TO: Oh, the Anderson shelter. FB: Correct. Yeah. Anderson shelter. We had one in our back yard. I never went in it. I was, we were sitting in our lounge one night and these bombs came down my mother had two scientists that were billeted with my mother. My mother used to look after them and, you know while they were at the[MPL and these two bombs came down. I don't know how my, how my house sustained it but like that you know. It's got a good foundation my house. Yeah. But yeah, of course they’re thinking about the German side of it. You know, because they were, the trouble was the Nazi Party were very nasty people. Well, like the Japanese really. I mean, they were the same. But yeah, but Herman Goering he was the commander of the Luftwaffe but you know I’m just trying to think what else happened at Kingston. You know. I used to, I used to go there every day on my bike, you know to the factory. But I don't know what other activities well you know we used to have light activities you know. We used to have the Hawker Club at [Hamm] which you know you’d go there for relaxation, you know. But yeah I could still see a lot of the, I mean we had all the craftsmen there at Kingston. Tin bashers, you know. They used to mold, you know the front of the aircraft and that. And there was, what were the other men? Oh, coppersmiths. They, they made the undercarriage for the — TO: For the fighters? FB: Pardon? TO: The undercarriage for the fighters was it? Yes, but what was the name of it? A very famous man who invented that. It was, the only word that comes to mind with me is pneumatic but it was it was a marvellous invention that because they went on later on in the years where you’re seeing all these big planes landing with four hundred people on board. The same thing, you know. Yeah. I’m just thinking about the coppersmiths. Hydraulic. That's the name. That's the word. Hydraulic. And yeah, if course what enabled the Spitfire and Hurricanes they set up a plan where all the girls that were in the lookouts you know. They knew the radar. They knew they were coming and they used to put the word out and before they even arrived to bomb the airfields they’d taken off. And then when the airfields were built, were bombed as soon as they'd gone they used to fill them in again so they could land. They landed on grass, you know. The two fighters. The Spitfire and the Hurricane. Yeah. Merlin engine. Very clever. Clever. Yeah. That was in the Merlin engine was in the, in the big bomber. What was the big bomber now? TO: The Lancaster. FB: Correct. Yeah. Yeah. That was a Lancaster. My friend flew one of those. He trained in Canada, in Calgary and he married a Canadian girl. My wife and I were invited out to stay with him after the war. Yeah. In Canada. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, there was, there was other aspects about [unclear] my friend Peter Hall sadly passed on in 2005. He was in command of a gun boat in the Channel and he got into trouble with the Germans and he got sunk. So, he was immediately, was assigned to another boat and where do you think he had to come and get it? TO: Teddington. FB: Correct. Yeah. Built by Tough brothers. And yeah, and my mother was in the shop this morning, this is a true story and she heard this shuffling ch ch ch. What's that? All of a sudden this voice shouted out, ‘Eyes left for Mrs Burtenshaw.’ That was my mother. That was Peter. Come to pick up his boat. Oh yeah. I’ve got some stories I’ll tell you. Yeah. Yeah. He, he was in command of a minesweeper in the Channel on D-Day. Yeah. Old Pete. Have you heard of Hampton Grammar? TO: No, actually. FB: No. TO: No. FB: Well, it was a very famous school there. A lot of the boys from there went into the Air Force, you know and it was a very good Grammar School. There's another one around here called Latymer. That's, that's a quite a good school. Yeah. Private school. But yeah, I'm just trying to think about other aspects of, of course Kingston you wouldn't know it now to when we were there you know. Not with the factory. That's all gone. That's one of the law courts now. See. The Guildhall at Kingston is the law court but the Hawker factory and all that’s all gone. Yeah. TO: How would you describe the working conditions inside the factory? FB: Pretty poor in ‘38 and a bit precarious. Those stairs that we used to, you see what happened was we were getting the men on the roof, you know what they called overlooking the situation. You know, as soon as they got the signal that the bombers were coming they used to sit it the signal and we all had to evacuate downstairs into fallout shelters you see. They were only brick shelters. If we'd got, if we'd got a direct hit we were a bit, we wouldn’t have survived. But then of course it was a modernised, you know. Yeah. Yeah. As the war went on. Yeah. Yeah. There was a lot of good engineers there. Mr Viney. He was the chief of the machine shop. No. He’s, oh, I’m getting the department I was in, inspecting them was run by Mr Jefferson. He was the Chief Inspector. He lived in Teddington. Yeah. But yeah. Any other. Any other things you can think of? TO: What was your everyday routine at the factory? FB: Factory. Well, when I first went there I was fetching and carrying as a boy. I had a senior man with me. He used to give me a tick on the pack and he used to say, ‘Now, Frank. I want you to go and get this.’ But the point was that all the spare parts and jigs and everything else were, you know, very scarce so if I got the order that I got to get to a jig it will probably be in the hands of a welder. So I used to go and see the welder and he would say, ‘Well, come back in half an hour and you could take it.’ You know. He’d done his job with it and that was the job I’d got on. I used to have to go to the drawing office and get all the drawings and that was the [unclear]. The [unclear] and the, you know they were all there. All those drawings. Yeah. But you see and then I advanced. A very menial job I had. I, we used to stamp all the parts you know and all the parts that went into the aircraft were called, they were put in annealment. Annealment troughs, acid to protect them against whatever they wanted to do, you know. But yeah, that was my general thing because the Chief Inspector came up to my, up to my address, my bench and he said, ‘How would you like to go into the Inspection Department, Frank?’ So I said, ‘That would be nice, sir.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Report there on Monday morning and you can start there. And that's where I learned a lot of things, you know. Technical drawing and everything I learned when I went there. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, that was the end of me there. I wasn’t considered value enough to stay there so I had to join the Army. TO: Don’t forget your drink by the way. FB: Oh, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. [pause] TO: Do you remember the preparations that were being made for the war? FB: Well, I was only fourteen. Shall, I tell you where I was when the air raid siren went off? I was fourteen years old and I was standing at the top of my road and the air raid siren went off. Mr Chamberlain said we have no known reply from the Chancellor of Germany. We are now at war with Germany. That was the start of it. But I mean, I still can't get through my mind how they organised everything because the Americans after Pearl Harbour they came in and they helped us a lot of course, you know. All our Liberty ships. Heard of them? How many did they used to turn out a week of those? I don't know. Loads. They were all, launched them sideways you know. Yeah, and yeah, because the Americans they, it was Churchill. I mean are you going to go and see the film? TO: May do. Maybe. FB: Not worried. TO: I don’t know. I’m not sure. I don’t go to the cinema that much. FB: Yeah. Well, you know what, you know what it’s called don’t you? TO: Yes. FB: Churchill. Yeah. The man had just got the award for it, hasn’t he? Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, preparation. Yeah. There was a lot that went on, do you know but it didn't go on fast enough because Churchill kept on saying to the government do this, do that, you know. They knew what was going on in Nazi Germany but of course in the end of course he became Prime Minister and things started to move then, didn't they? Yeah. So, yeah, preparation was as much as it could have been, you know. But I mean we, we could have, if it hadn't been for twenty two miles, no Channel Tunnel there then we would have been overrun. Yeah. Yeah. That’s, yeah that was, that was our defence really. TO: What did you think of Churchill? FB: Well, a wonderful man. What could you say? Made mistakes. He made mistakes but who doesn't make mistakes when you're in command of a, you know, that sort of thing you know. They sent, they sent two battleships to the Pacific the Repulse and the Renown both sunk by the Japanese. No air cover. No air cover. Yeah. The Japanese torpedo planes came over. That was it. You know, and there was about eight hundred men were there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah I'll never forget Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he said, I can't, I can't pronounce the word he said but he said the Japanese government have just performed the most historically, I think it’s not quite the right word, act against the United States. And he said we will do our best to stop them, you know. They had to drop the atom bomb on them in the end because they couldn't, you know they couldn't think how they were going to get rid of them, you know. It could have taken another three years to win that war. The Japanese. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah the, yea, those two fellas in Teddington, they were both carpenters and they both worked for a local builder and they, they went and started work on the fuselage in the, in a Hurricane. And then, oh yes another man he used to make his own cycles his name is CR Philbrook and he uses to walk around in his work coat and everything and he got, you know when you heat up things? It was in the back of his shop. He used to mould all these various parts for the, they were his own make, you know. His name is CR Philbrook. He was in Teddington. Yeah. Sir Charles Darwin was at [MPL] Yeah. He was there. Have you got any other ideas of what you want to ask about? TO: When you were sent out to India — FB: Yeah. TO: Was there a concern that Japan would invade India? FB: Pardon? TO: When you were sent out to India — FB: Yeah. TO: Was there a concern that the Japan would attack the country? FB: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. They had come across the water to Singapore and there was no stopping them. But they, they got to Imphal and Kohima and my old friend, there's his watch look, his uncle was in the battle of Kohima and he was blinded, his uncle was. But the, yeah they were well dug in there but, you know, but, you know, the 14th Army, you know they, once they started to win the Japanese started to run down to Rangoon. You know. And then that was, you know the start of the better time for us. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm just trying to think. I used to make, when I was at home you know I had a little workshop in my garage and I used to make all sorts of things that I learned to make in Hawkers you know. But yeah, it was, they, they reckon today at the moment there's only sixty six apprentices that are qualified at the moment, you know. And they are all, they are employed by a [unclear] company. Yeah. They often give it out on the TV, you know. But these people who are employing these people are now skilled you know. My son got an apprenticeship and he did well for himself. He’s been twenty one years now, San. Yeah. Twenty one years of it. Other: What for? FB: Andrew. Other: What his business? FB: Eh? Other: What? His business? FB: Yeah. Other: Forty one. FB: He’s a professional Carpenter. Yeah. He’s very fussy about his work Yeah. He’s not doing so much work now because you know he was, well he's taken on all sorts of work isn’t he. Yeah. Yeah. You’re, where did you say you were based at? TO: Well, I'm actually doing this independently as a hobby. FB: Oh right. TO: But I share the recordings with the International Bomber Command Centre. FB: I see. TO: So, they have it preserved. So — FB: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Ever been to Manston? TO: No, actually. No. FB: No. TO: No. FB: That was another aircraft aerodrome, you know and there are pictures in there. My friend lives in Broadstairs, and her cousin was on the, on the raid on the dams and his picture’s in there. Yeah. Yeah. Peter. Yeah. He was a, in one of those things but yeah we used to go there quite often to the Manston Airport. Had our lunch there and had a ride around in the bus and all that, you know. Yeah. TO: What was your impression of General Auchinleck? FB: Auchinleck? Well, I presume he must have done a very good job in India, you know but I’ve not really got a lot of, you know, knowledge about him. Yeah. There's a book called, “The Unknown Soldier.” That’s about him. Yeah. Yeah. Cawthorn was one, he was in India but yeah but it's very, the word went around that all that we’d been sent to India for originally was to defend the empire, you know. To stop the Japanese getting into India. All that was wasted because you know they got this partition came along. Muhammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan and Pandit Nehru, India. They were the two main ones. Are you familiar with their names? Oh, you are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. TO: What was your, what do you remember about Enoch Powell? FB: Well, I'll tell you he was a very very reserved man. I mean I, when I was sitting in my office in Delhi I could do that and touch him on the shoulder, you know. But he didn't have a lot to do with us. General Cawthorn, he was the one that always used to speak to us, you know. But Cawthorn was higher than him but he, he couldn’t, you know, we couldn’t really, in direct contact with him. But I took my files to the Houses of Parliament to see Enoch Powell. I was invited there and we arrived one afternoon and the sergeant at arms at the House of Commons tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Mr Burtenshaw, Mr Powell will see you now.’ And we went into his room to see him, you know. Talking about Delhi and all that. You see he was in the western desert. Yeah. Yeah. Some of those people had a really rough time. Yeah. Yeah, cause the Chindits they were very brave people. Oh dear. I knew several. I knew several officers that used to go behind the Japanese lines. Yeah. And they always survived, you know. Yeah. They always survived. So, yeah, all the old airfields in England, I don't know if they sold a lot of them off. I went to Malta to Gozo and they had an Air Force unit and of course the Germans very nearly got in to, nearly got in to, that's gone isn't it? Gozo. Malta. Malta. Yeah. Malta. Yeah. You know, my general admiration is for those people that organised that war. They really knew what they were doing. Can you imagine all the people that had to be employed? Civil servants sending out calling up papers. You know. And not only that, railway passes. Report here. Report there. You know. Get on a train. Because they had military police at most of the stations. You know, you didn't get past them unless you’d got a pass. Yeah. But yeah, I mean the, of course Bomber Command it got so massive in the end under Bomber Harris that you know they, what was it? Where was it they bombed? TO: Do you mean Dresden? FB: Was it Dresden? It was wasn’t it? TO: Yeah. FB: Bomber Harris. Yeah. Yeah. He got rolled over the coals over that didn't he? Yeah. Yeah. Old Bomber Harris. Yeah. Yeah. TO: What do you think of General Wavell? FB: Wavell. A very good man. He was the one that stop the Germans from getting to Cairo with Alexander. And then Montgomery and Alexander took over in the western desert. But yeah, he did a very good job in, you know, in defence. I mean they got very close to Cairo, you know. They could have easily captured it. Yeah. So yeah, they could have done. Yeah. Wavell. Peter Montgomery. One of my officers. the Viceroy's social secretary. He used to organise all the Viceroy's things that went on in the Viceroy's Palace. He came in our office and he said, ‘How would you three chaps like a nice treat tonight?’ So, we said, ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Well, get yourself up to the Viceroy's Palace and you’re invited to a band concert.’ And we got there and were seated and then all of a sudden the band struck up, “God save the King.” Wavell and Lady Wavell appeared. He was in his Army uniform with his red sash and Lady Wavell was in a white crinoline gown with a blue sash. Then we all sat down and the concert started. That wasn’t the finish of it. Captain Montgomery said, ‘Are you fellas hungry?’ So, we said, ‘Well, we are a bit, sir.’ ‘Go and see what's in the next room.’ Couldn't believe it. It was all laid up in there with all the various people, you know eating all this. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, the people that lived in India say back in the 20s or so had a very good life. And at Singapore. The same thing. All had servants and there wasn't and of course it all gradually [pause] oh, sorry, it all gradually went pear shaped in the end, didn't it? The old British empire. Yeah. TO: You can have some of your drink whenever you want. It’s fine. FB: Pardon? TO: You can have some of your tea whenever you want. It’s fine. FB: Oh. Oh, it is my tea, is it? Yeah. Well, yeah I don't want to bore you with things but I've, I’ve got one or two things that, you know I don't like too much about my general make up now but you can't do anything about it. It's just one of those things, you know. You know and I, I mean I, I I put down how I survived to my mother. She was a very good mother, you know. And also Sandra’s mum. She did a lot to help me, you know. Yeah. I’ve got, like this illness this elements I got that put me in here was a [pause] what was it called Sandra? Other: Duodenal ulcer burst. FB: Pardon? Other: Burst duodenal ulcer. FB: Yeah. Burst duodenal ulcer. Five weeks I was in there. Yeah. I was lucky to get away with that. Yeah. Other: At your age. Yeah. FB: Yeah. TO: Do you remember anything else about Wavell at all? FB: General Wavell. Well, I mean I saw him enough in Delhi. He used to, you wouldn't dare in a foreign country now, you wouldn't dare arrive in an open car like Kennedy did and Wavell used to go around in all his full regalia in his Rolls Royce. Yeah. Yeah, everywhere he went he had an escort but you know. Yeah. Oh yeah, we, I used to go down to the Royal Engineer’s Headquarters in Delhi every week and pick up the maps of China and India and all those maps us, three of us had to put them all in envelopes and post them to the various Commands where they were all in, you know. They all knew what they were about, you know. Oh yeah. Yeah. I can still remember two officers. General Carton de Wiart, [unclear] and Major [Fox-Holmes] Chinese Intelligence, Chinese Intelligence Wing, Calcutta. Yeah. And he came, he came to join us, major what did I say his name was? [Fox-Holmes]. That’s right. [Fox-Holmes]. He came to join us in Delhi and he said to me one day, ‘I’ve got a job for you, sergeant.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well, be careful, won’t you?’ I said, ‘Well, where am I going?’ Well, he said, ‘You’re going to the old city on your bike and I want you to go to Olivetti.’ You know the one. No? TO: Typewriters? FB: Typewriters. And he said, ‘I want you to go there to Olivetti and get a portable typewriter and bring it back here.’ And I did. I went all the way into the old Delhi and got it and brought it back. Yeah. Yeah. We had quite a lot of interest but my most interesting job was on my bike everyday to the Viceroy's Palace. That was my most interesting job. Yeah. TO: And what did you, what was your impression of the Viceroy's Palace? FB: Magnificent. I’ve been sat in the throne room where the King and Queen used to sit. I sat on that. All beautiful polished floors. All the buildings were beautiful in India. Oh yeah. The British, the British Raj they did quite a lot for India. I mean railways they built and everything else, you know. But, yeah, Wavell, he [unclear] [That's what I don't like about these places is not a lot of activity, you know] But yeah Wavell he was quite a high up officer you know because one of the officers that came before him was Kitchener. You’ve heard of the Battle of Omdurman? You have. Yeah. TO: Churchill was there. FB: Yeah. Yeah. That’s correct. Four years it took to get that back. They murdered General Gordon in Khartoum and they had all these, [unclear] who they were, the enemy were all on camels and horses and they overran the British Army. So, what did Kitchener do? He loaded all his artillery on to all the dhows in the, in the Nile and took them up the Nile to Khartoum and lined them all up along and when the Mahdi started to attack they got a shock. Artillery. That was the end of them. But the British, the British have been in so many, involved in so many things in their lives, you know. The British people. Army and that. My uncle was in the Army. He was in the Army. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think Wavell played his part all right. TO: What were the, what were your working conditions like in India? FB: Working? TO: Your working conditions [unclear] FB: Yeah. We were in the government buildings, you see. Oh yeah. Very good. Yeah. And the living conditions as well. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’ve lived out in the sticks in India in tents. That’s not so good. I managed to progress from that. TO: And what were the, were you working with people of different nationalities in the office? FB: Yeah. Well, we had all Indian messengers, you now. Mainly [pause] what were they? Not Sikhs. I don’t know what they were now but yeah we were well organised in our office. We had everything to hand and everything, you know, for coping with all what we got to do, you know. Yeah. Every week we used to send out hundreds of envelopes for the Commands, you know. Yeah. Yeah. We did. Then came the day in 1947 when we were told, ‘You’re on your way home.’ TO: Did you have to take medicine? FB: Pardon? TO: Did you take a lot of medicine in India? FB: No. The only medicine I had to take when I had my, when I was in Bombay I had to take a medication called M&B. Have you heard of that? No. Well, that was the forerunner to the [pause] one they’re using now a lot. Other: Antibiotics. FB: Antibiotics. Yeah. Yeah. M&B. Yeah. Yeah. All in all I had a very interesting time, you know while I was there. Yeah. TO: And when you were handling these classified documents were you ever concerned that there might be spies around? FB: Oh, absolutely. But not, not really. I think it was so quiet in India then. At that particular time. I used to ride from the office up to the Government Buildings and I never ever gave it a thought that anybody was going to attack me or anything, you know. No. And the secretary to the Viceroy, he was an English, oh a very thorough gentlemen, you know and I used to take the dispatch case in to him. He used to come out and he used to say, ‘Good morning, Sergeant. How are you today?’ I'm very well, sir. Thank you.’ ‘That’s alright. I won't keep you long.’ And he used to take all the paper that he wanted out of the, and put the ones back in and I used to take them back to the, to the office again, you know. So purely and simply our job was admin, you know. It wasn't combat. You know. I mean I I mean I, I hadn't got any idea I was going to go into combat. I'd been to Battle School. I’d been to one but, you know. Not too bad. It wasn't too bad. I’m glad I went there because it was very interesting. Very interesting. Yeah. Indian Railways, you know, Indian Railways were a marvellous thing that the British built, you know. Yeah. Yeah. All the hill stations and everything, you know. Yeah. TO: Did you have to sign the Official Secrets Act when you joined the Service? FB: I can't remember if I did or not but I mean we were all under the thumb, you know. You daren’t, I mean even to this day what I’ve told you I would never have told anybody else in those days. No. You were just silent, you know. Didn't say anything. One of the captions in England during the Second World War was, “Walls Have Ears.” Yeah. Yeah. “Walls Have Ears.” TO: And when did you hear about the Battles of Kohima and Imphal? FB: Oh, well, in Delhi of course. We were in direct with the 14th Army. Oh yes. We knew about that very well all the time, you know. Yeah. But yeah, that was where they met their match there. The Japanese. All the Japanese Army were peasants. They’d never had anything in their life and they was determined to get what they wanted. Right. They mistreated a lot of our men. Terrible. Yeah. Yeah. TO: Did you have any contact with Lord Louis Mountbatten? FB: I saw him. In my room here there’s a picture of Wavell presenting a Gurkha with his Victoria Cross. It’s in my room here. Yeah. Mountbatten was sent out there by a Labour government to expedite our exit from India. Didn’t make a very good job of it. Caused a lot of bloodshed, you know. We should have stayed there another year. Yeah. Sandra and I, we used to go to the reunions every year in London. India Command. Didn’t we? A friend of mine, he was, he was the Viceroy's Gardener. Charlie Reader. He’d been in service of the Indian government for fifty years. He was in charge of all the gardens. Yeah. Yeah. All the Viceregal Gardens, you know. Yeah. TO: And what kind of rations did you have in India? FB: What for? TO: What kind of rations did you have in India? FB: Oh, well, where I was very good. We had a mess. Sergeants and WO’s mess and we had all this food. Yeah. Great Army cooks. TO: Sorry. I’m just going to pause for a second. [recording paused] FB: They were all Indian. Anglo, because there was a lot of Anglo Indians in India you know. Intermarriage. A lot. You know. Most of the girls in my office were married to Englishmen, you know. And there was a special place like a village where they all used to live, you know. Most of them were Army, you know. Yeah. But yeah, I'm just trying to think what's the name of that place was where they were. I forget that. When we had very hot seasons, forty or fifty and we used to carry our beds. And the Indian word for bed his charpoi and we used to carry them outside and we got mosquito nets on poles and we used to carry them outside and then over the fence from us was the [unclear] It must have been hundreds and hundreds of years old and it must have been a lot of battles based around Delhi, you know. And every night the wolves howling. We were one side of the fence and they were on the other. Oh dear. Yeah. Yeah. It was quite an experience. Oh, we went, we went through on the Bay of Biscay on a trooper. Four days rough seas. None of us could do anything. Terribly rough. Very rough. Yeah. Very rough. TO: Were you afraid of a U-boat attack? FB: Well, not really because we got, we got, we got right up to the Suez Canal and we hadn’t seen anything and we were told that the German Luftwaffe made a raid on the week before we got there but we didn’t see anything and we went straight through the Suez Canal. You know. but because that was the Battle of the Atlantic really. You know. German U-boats. Very bad. Yeah. Very bad. Yeah. Are you, do you work or are you at college? TO: I’m at, I work for the Civil Service at the moment. FB: Oh yeah. TO: In Ofgem. FB: In where? TO: Office of Gas and Electricity Markets. FB: Oh, I see. Yeah. TO: What did you think of Chamberlain? FB: Chamberlain? TO: Yeah. FB: Neville Chamberlain. Well, he tried his best to keep us out of the war but I'm afraid it didn't work. You know. He went to Munich. He was trying to, you know maintain the peace but in the end it didn't work. So that was it. We had to go to war with Germany. Yeah. We’ve had some famous statesman in England you know. All the, Gladstone and all those people. You know. All famous politicians. Yeah. TO: Do you remember hearing about Dunkirk? FB: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, being in Intelligence. [unclear] the boats. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We all heard about that. Yeah. That was a bit of master planning to get them out of there with the Germans all around, you know. Get them out of Dunkirk. Yeah. Yeah. A friend of mine [pause] what was his name now? In the Army. Oh yeah, there was a, we were on the troop ship and I was walking down the, one of the gangways and I spotted this young officer. So, I went up to him and I said, ‘Sir.’ ‘What can I do for you, Private?’ ‘Well, Sir, I know you.’ ‘Do you?’ ‘Yes, I do and I know the school you went to.’ He was a local boy from Teddington. He was an officer in the British Army. He’d just become a sub-lieutenant. Yeah. Quite a surprise he was. Yeah. TO: And what did he say then? FB: Pardon? TO: What did he say when he knew, when he realised it was you? FB: Oh, you know, he didn’t actually know me but I said, ‘I know you because of the school you went to.’ You know. Yeah. Yeah. And I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had been at Kohima, you know. They were all young officers, you know. Yeah. TO: At the, at your office when you heard about Kohima was anyone worried that Japan would win? FB: It was a vital battle. Yes. Vital. The Japanese didn't have enough backing to get in there. They were stopped at Kohima and Imphal. Yeah. The battles. Yeah. Yeah, [unclear] very good. Very good Army. A disciplined Army. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's [pause] yeah. Sorry. TO: Sorry. Were you going to say something? FB: No. That’s alright. TO: Ok. FB: Yeah. TO: Before the war started had you read about Hitler in the papers? FB: Yeah. Yeah, we didn't seem to be unduly worried then. Of course, they all, everybody was getting issued with a gas mask in a little cardboard box. Everybody got one. Yeah. Gas masks. They thought the Germans were going to use gas. Yeah. But yeah, it was, yeah it was, it wasn't too bad really because as soon as the war started the rationing came in, you know. You were only rationed with certain commodities, you know. Other: They were still on rations when I was born. FB: Eh? Other: They were still on ration when I was born. FB: Yeah. It was. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. It was. Yeah. And they were, clothing and everything was rationed, you know. You got coupons, you know. Petrol was rationed. TO: Do you remember, did you have any favourite wartime entertainers? FB: Oh yes. Lots. George Formby. Tessie O'Shea. Other: Vera Lynn. FB: Eh? Other: Vera Lynn. FB: Vera Lynn of course. She went to Burma. Yeah. Entertained the troops. She's over a hundred now. Yeah. Yeah. TO: And what do you remember about the Blitz? FB: Well, you see being in Teddington we were lucky. They were flying over us and that's when I told you that I reckon they were being chased by the RAF and unloaded their bombs on us. But we were lucky we, we didn't get blown up. But, oh the Blitz was terrible. My father went up there one, well he run, he managed to get through on the phone to the market. Can you imagine? All that bombing the night before and they told him that if he could get there he could have as much fish as he wanted. So he thought, I'm going to go and have a go and he went up there and he got over the London bridges, all the hosepipes and everything and got to the market and came home with quite a lot of valuable fish for people, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, it was, oh, my father he was a, you know, a tough man he was. Oh yeah. Really really tough. Yeah. The Blitz was terrible but you see the trouble was that a lot of the people used to go down to the shelters at night and one of the shelters got a direct hit. That was terrible. Yeah. One of the shelters got a direct hit. Yeah. Yeah. TO: And what were the conditions like in the shelter at your factory? FB: Well, they were only fall out. They weren’t, they weren’t, you know, just all you, all you did was just sit in there and we all thought well what are we sitting here for? There’s nothing happening. So, that’s when they started to put these Observer Corps men on the roof. And as soon as they got word that the Germans were coming over the, over the Channel we got the word in Kingston. Everywhere, you know. Because you know I think that saved a lot of lives. We didn’t get bombed during the day in Kingston. Only at night. One night only. Yeah. Yeah. One night only. Yeah. TO: And what were your, what about, I was going to ask you about rationing in this country. FB: Pardon? TO: I think I’ve already asked you about rations in this country? FB: About? TO: Rations in this country. FB: Rations? TO: Yeah. FB: Well, anybody living in the country was alright because they could get the chickens and rabbits and eggs but people in the town they got very meagre meat rations, you know. Anything like that was very meagre. Yeah. But we used to, I’d sell a lot of rabbits in my shop. Fresh rabbits. Wild rabbits. Everybody came and bought them. They, you know they couldn’t get meat, you know. Meat and fish and that sort of thing. You couldn’t get meat. No. You had to sort of have a look around and see what you could find, you know. TO: What can you tell me about your, the training that you went through in the Army? FB: Pardon? TO: What training did you go through in the Army? FB: Oh, God. Yeah. I, we had physical training twice a day by order of Montgomery. I went to a Battle School and we had to lay on the floor under barbed wire and they were firing live ammunition over our heads. And the Sergeant major said, ‘Don't put your head up otherwise you'll lose it.’ Yeah. That, that was it so after the war my last posting was a German POW camp and I was in the office with several other sergeants and I used to have to go down to Retford in Nottingham to a hotel and arrange for three lots of accommodation for lecturers coming from Germany to lecture prisoners of war. I used to do that very often. And then one day I was told to take a trainload of German prisoners to [pause] Oh, God, where did I go with them? Yeah. I forget where we went but you know we were, we were transferring them back to Germany, you know. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know and of course I finished my days up there, you know. Yeah. Retford in, Retford in Nottingham. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of farms around there where the Germans were working, you know. [unclear] Farms. All sorts of farms they were working on. Yeah. Even today they're telling us they can't do without the immigrants because they’re all working on the farms. Nobody else would. Nobody else would do the job. Yeah. Yeah. So, there you are. Do you have to travel a lot in your job? TO: No, not really. FB: No. It’s an office job is it? TO: Well, yeah. FB: Mainly. Yeah. Yeah. Where is it you actually live? TO: I live in Chiswick at the moment. FB: You live in Chiswick? Do you really? Oh, right. Yeah. TO: Were you never worried that Britain might lose? FB: There was times. Yes. There was times. Yeah. You see, but you see the Germans were planning that. Were planning an invasion of England but our people had got so many inventions, you know. I mean, they to my mind what they were going to do when the Germans came over they were going to set fire to the sea, you know. To stop all the invasion boats coming in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Churchill. Well, Churchill went to America several times. He was flown there to the White House to have words with the president and he said to the president, ‘We are very very short of destroyers.’ You alright? Other: Yeah. But he said if you've got any. They gave us fifty destroyers. Of course, they were all antiquated so they had to, you know do a lot of work on them before they could even use them in operations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, of course the two ships that were built in Scotland. Eighty five thousand tonnes. The Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary. You know that, don't you? How many troops do you reckon they brought to England at a time? TO: Ten thousand. FB: Fifteen thousand. TO: Wow. FB: Sleeping at night and sleeping during the day. Yeah. And they had this all worked out when they came across the Channel so the U-boats couldn’t get there, you know. Yeah. Oh yeah. TO: Did you have any relatives who were in the Forces? FB: You know, I — Other: Tony. FB: Eh? Oh yeah. My brother in law. Tony. He was at an American air base. Yeah. He was RAF. Yeah. I can't think there was anybody else. Other: Of your generation. FB: No. Other: It was World War One. FB: Yeah. Other: Most of them were in. TO: And do you remember, what do you remember about VJ Day? FB: My daughter’s got that. You’d like to see that. She’s got all the memorabilia. She’s got the VJ and VE Day both. What are they called Sandra? Pamphlets. She’s got them. And Delhi. Delhi Victory Parade in 1945 and ‘46. Yeah. A fantastic parade, you know. Oh yeah, all of the people in London went mad didn't they? Yeah. Yeah. To think that they’d the last they’d been under great deal of pressure, you know. Yeah. They did very well really. The civilians. It was all a bit of aggro at the time. Yeah. A friend of mine had a fish shop in Chiswick. I think they sold it to either Marks and Spencer’s or Sainsbury's. They owned a lot of shops, my friend and he sold the, you know, things down. TO: Do you remember the reaction in your office when the news came in that the war was over? FB: Oh, yeah. Well, terrific, you know. I mean we got it pretty quick in Delhi, you know. Very quick. Yeah. Very quick. Yeah. Yeah, it was over. They didn’t stop fighting finally for a few days I don’t think, you know. Yeah. War is a horrible thing. Oh. God, I don’t know what to say about it all really. You know. The Germans they really did bomb London very heavily. They did. Yeah. They did. Yeah. We had to be, oh, yeah, a customer of mine he built all the waste land in London. His name, his name was National Car Parks. Remember them? That was him. Other: Hobson. FB: Eh? Other: Hobson. FB: Oh. Yes. Yeah. What was, yeah. He’s a millionaire. Other: In Teddington. FB: Eh? Other: In Teddington. FB: Yeah, he lives in Teddington. Where I lived. He’s got a beautiful house. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, I, this, all this came on me this illness and you know, I had to come in here. I didn't have enough money to, it’s very expensive here. So sadly, my Sandra there, and my son, how they did it I'll never know I just used to sit in the back. Sit there quiet as I could and they used to tell me what they were doing and what they were getting rid of. You see, my wife and I lived there for, how long was it in, San? Fifty. Other: You lived there for seventy five years. FB: I did. Yeah. But mum and I lived there from nineteen, what? Other: ’55. FB: Fifty five. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. Other: Until 2000, when mum died. FB: Yeah. That’s right. I had some more built on the house, you know. Make it bigger. But — Other: We had a shelter in your garden. FB: Yeah. We did, didn’t we? Yeah. Yeah. Yes, we did. Yeah. Now, I’m just wondering what we’re going to do to my house. I can’t go near it I can tell you that. Yeah. My house was on the main High Street, just off the main High Street and I used to spend a lot of my time in Marks and Spencer’s and all those places, you know. Going around trying to keep me amused like, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. TO: How do you feel today about Germany and Japan? FB: Well, it's such a long time ago now. I’ll tell you a story about that. We were, my wife and I were in Venice and we were sitting down by the unclear gondoliers and this young Japanese guy walked up with a camera and he stood on one of those things and he went and he fell in. So, me, very naughtily said, ‘That's one for our boys in Burma.’ [laughs] Yeah. I’ve had how many? Oh, Sandra's got a Honda now. If you want to buy a car. Other: That’s not Japanese. FB: Honda. Honda. Honda. Honda. Yeah. Anyway, Sandra had my wife’s car and some lady unfortunately bashed into it and wrote it off so we had to get another one. The one she’s got now. Other: [unclear] machine. FB: Yeah. Yeah. She’s had that a while now but they were only talking about Honda’s this morning. The bloke on the radio said don’t ignore Honda. Honda. They’re good. They know what they’re doing. Yeah. The one that Sandra had of my wife’s we were quite surprised it rusted underneath and they wouldn't pass it. Yeah. Which is very unusual. Yeah. Other: That wasn’t mum’s. That was the second one. FB: Oh yeah. Yeah. Other: But I think it's sad about what do you, what else do you think about Japan and Germany now. How they've — FB: Well, not really. Mrs. Merkel, of course, she's not one of our favourite friends I'm afraid. I mean Japan as well. I don't know a lot about them now. A friend of mine he was a surveyor. No. A designer. He designed a lot of places in Japan and that sort of thing. But — Other: Well, Raffles was one of them, wasn’t it? Yeah. Raffles in Singapore. FB: And the Carlton Tower in London was another one my friend designed. I never hear from him now. One of my best friends. Shame, you know. I’m so sad about that. Whether they split up or not and that caused it I don't know. I really don't know. Yeah. You know, it's just one of those things. Yeah. No. The Japanese are clever. Japanese are very clever at copying. Copying things. The Japanese. You know, they can get plans and copy them and produce them, you know. Yeah. They had those aircraft carriers that attacked Pearl Harbour, you know. That was a bad bitter blow to America. Yeah. TO: Do you remember hearing about Pearl Harbour? FB: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. They, they, very nearly, the Americans very nearly caught a cold there but they managed to get out of it. Yeah. Pearl Harbour was, what was it? You know. A complete surprise attack. You know. Other: Like 9/11 really. FB: Eh? Other: Like 9/11 FB: Yeah. Yeah. Same. Same type of planes and everything really. Yeah. TO: During the war did you, had you already heard about the way the Japanese were treating prisoners of war? FB: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I met some of them in Bombay. Bayoneted. You know. They didn't mess about. The Japanese. No. Very cruel people. Yeah. Have you seen the Bridge on the River Kwai? TO: Yeah. FB: Oh, you’ve seen that. TO: Sure. FB: Yeah. Yeah. TO: What's your best memory of the war? FB: What’s my best memory? [laughs] Coming home I suppose. Coming home. You know. You know, I wasn’t at all afraid when I was in India. You know, things were so quiet then, you know. But yeah. Yeah. We'll have suddenly notice to get packed up we came out of Delhi and got on the train. Bombay. We had to wait there some while. The ships were all full up, you see. Yeah. TO: And what’s, what was the worst part of your war would you say? FB: Well, I suppose that early part when I was, you know called up and in training and all that. Then when I went to India I was under tents. Under canvas for a while. You know. Yeah. We were under canvas you know. That's you see I was lucky I was born a bit late. Later on. You know. 1924. You know, I didn't actually sort of get called up that early like the others did, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Other: You still did five years though. FB: Eh? Yeah. Five years. Yeah. [pause] FB: A friend of mine, his name was Porch. He had a shop in Chiswick. Fishmongers. Yeah. TO: What do you think of films that have been made about the war? FB: Well, I think the Americans weren’t that well informed of a lot, you know they, they, ever heard of the, “Merrill’s Marauders?” Yeah. That was one of theirs. Yeah. Of the Americans. Yeah. Because they had a tough time in the Pacific, you know. On the islands. Okinawa and all those areas. Very tough. Oh yeah. Yeah. Alright, Sandra? Other: Yeah. FB: Are you sure? Other: Fine. FB: Yeah. So, yeah. TO: Were you surprised when the, when the war with Japan ended? FB: Yeah. We, we actually heard about the nuclear bomb. You know, it came so suddenly. You know, and Harry Truman, the American president and all he said was, ‘The buck stops here.’ And down went the, they had two bombs didn’t they? One at Nagasaki. And one at, where was the other one? Other: Hiroshima. Other: Yeah. FB: Hiroshima. Yeah. Yeah. TO: How do you feel today about your Service? FB: Well, I mean I often think back and think what would have been my future, you know, if I hadn’t gone in the Army, you know. Or I could have, I probably would have been with my father, you see. You know, I probably would have been with him then but, yeah. I didn’t, didn’t regret going. No. I still see myself walking out of my factory with my toolbox. Going home. Going home and getting ready to report. Yeah. In Maidstone. Yeah. TO: And is there anything else you remember about the victory celebrations in Delhi? FB: Well, Americans provided a lot of entertainment, you know and oh, the Royal Marines Band was there. And a lot of English footballers you know. They played various competitions and that. But yeah, they were quite some days they were. Yeah. TO: Did you ever see the people in India being mistreated by the Europeans? FB: Pardon? TO: Did you ever see Europeans in India mistreating the population? FB: Oh no. Not really. That came, you know the Indian princes were defeated by the British Army but I mean most of them were fairly well treated, you know. The, you know, the railway workers and all that. Tough old job that was going in the Indian, Indian Railways and that. Yeah. Are you alright in that chair? Other: Yeah. Fine. FB: Are you sure? Ok. Yeah. Yeah. The Indian Railways went right up to the Himalayas you see. I went to the Himalayas. I went there. Yeah. Eight thousand feet up. Yeah. Then my wife and I went to Sicily and we went up Mount Etna. Yea. Yeah. We had some good times while it lasted, you know. When my wife died Sandra used to go with me to Cyprus, you know. Cyprus was good. Yeah. So all in all I suppose it didn't work out too badly. TO: When did you hear about the Holocaust? FB: Oh, God, that was just, I’m trying to think really now. One man I knew was in the, in the brigade that relieved Holocaust and he said they knew who they were going to shoot because all the prisoners were thin and the guards were fat so they shot them all. Yeah. All the guards, you know the guards, the Japanese guards were all fat and the other poor people were all thin, you know. More or less on their last legs. It was a terrible thing. Yeah. TO: Is there anything you want to add? FB: Pardon? TO: Is there anything that was quite important to you during the war which you’ve not mentioned which you’d like to talk about. FB: Well, I mean, I was out there for about six months before I got, before I got any mail, you know. Yeah. Are you, are you comfortable in that chair? Other: I’m fine. FB: Are you sure? Other: Yes. FB: No. well, no. It was general. I used to go to GHQ. I used to go up there on my bike and so did the others every morning about six and we used to come back about nine at night, you know. All our meals were [unclear] and everything and we had salt tablets to avoid getting what do you call it? You know when you come — Other: Dehydrated. FB: What? Other: Dehydrated. FB: Dehydrated. That’s right. Yeah. That’s right. We did. Yeah. Yeah. Dehydrated. Yeah. TO: Anything else you want to say at all? FB: Pardon? TO: Is there anything else you want to add? FB: Not really. No. TO: Ok. FB: I’ve gone through most of it. TO: Thank you so much for your time. FB: That’s alright. It’s quite alright. It's been nice to meet you anyway. TO: It’s been nice to meet you too. FB: Yeah. Yeah. TO: Thank you. FB: So, you say you’re based in Chiswick. TO: That’s right. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Francis Burtenshaw Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tom Ozel Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-02-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ABurtenshawF180218 Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Pending revision of OH transcription Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 01:42:45 audio recording Language A language of the resource eng Description An account of the resource Francis grew up in Teddington. After school, he went to Hawker Siddeley Aircraft, where working conditions improved with modernisation. He learnt about Hurricanes, designed by Sydney Camm. They started to build smaller aircraft units over the country to spread the risk of bomb damage, with workers going by coach from Kingston to the different factories. Lord Beaverbrook was appointed Minister of Aircraft Production. Francis recalls the tin bashers who moulded the aircraft fronts and coppersmiths who worked on the hydraulics. Francis initially took things to different departments before learning technical drawing in the inspection department. Francis was called up for the army in 1942, reporting to the Royal West Kent Regiment for six weeks’ training, followed by Army Battle School. He was sent for an administrative role in military intelligence in New Delhi, handling classified information, and was made sergeant. His colonel was Enoch Powell, deputy director of Military Intelligence. In his work he encountered high-ranking officers and describes the work of Archibald Wavell, General Claude Auchinleck and General Walter Cawthorn. He also met Lord Louis Mountbatten and refers to General Carton de Wiart and Major Fox-Holmes from the Chinese Intelligence Wing. Francis outlines his work and excellent working conditions, including the Viceroy’s palace. He recalls the Delhi Victory Parade and celebrations. He returned home in 1947 because of partition. Francis’s final posting was returning German prisoners of war to Germany. Francis reflects on his wartime service, the politicians and his views on the countries involved. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant British Army Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Julie Williams Sally Coulter Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Great Britain England--Kingston upon Thames India India--Delhi India--Mumbai Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 Auchinleck, Claude (1884-1981) https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/472/8355/ABlandC150817.mp3 7d011bdc0c7786974101ce4ef3b8516e https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/472/8355/PBlandC1501.jpg 47607dc4beca689cae653908ef391be8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bland, Charles C Bland Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bland, C Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Charles Bland (538762 Royal Air Force). He served as an engine fitter. The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by Charles Bland and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff. Transcribed audio recording A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document CB: My name is Charles Bland and this is my story of what, the Air Force I suppose. I started off in grammar school, Boston and from then I did my school certificate and my school certificate results were sufficient that I was able to become, join the Air Force as an aircraft apprentice in February 1942. February 1942. It was the first time you’d left home and we all had to arrive at Marylebone Station and it was, what was it, February the 18th, I think it was, February the 18th, and so I left Boston, got down to London and, and found on Marylebone Station a great number of boys, all the same age as me. Most of them the first time they’d ever left home and so I consequently got on this train and I happened to, it was a non-corridor train and you had the compartments and I got in the compartment and they were all Geordies. You sort of, I mean, I’d never met Geordies before or anything and the, the chap who - [machine pause] CB: Yep okay, we got in the carriage and that was the first time I’d sort of been away, more or less, and mixed with a lot of other boys from different parts of the country. Eventually we got there and we got to Halton and we, the first time we’d ever been in a room, we got to a room and there was twenty two of us in the barrack room and all of us were exactly the same. Most of us had never left home before and the most, I got, my chap in the next bed to me was a Scotsman, a chap named Jock Blythe and, but anyway that’s how we, we eventually got in and then we, then they, we all had to go off and get in the mess and we all sort of got together but then, of course, became the thing of joining the Air Force and the first thing we had was a medical, and the medical I failed. I failed because in this, for some reason or other, the Air Force had decided that you had to have bite, what were known as biting points and I had one biting point short so therefore I was not fit to be in the Air Force and for some reason or other, I was discharged. So I never, I didn’t join, so they sent me back to Wendover Station and there was another chap who finished up an armourer and myself who had failed our medicals and we stood on the platform station and waiting for the train. Both, well, dispirited I suppose, and the next thing was, the warrant officer who was known as Beefy Paley eventually came on and called out our names. What was his name? Damn, I can’t remember. Anyway, he became an armourer. So he said, Charles Bland, so we all went back, the two of us went back to Halton and for some miraculous reason they found us a biting point, so I was in the, I eventually got in the service. So I - MJ: What was your failing biting point? CB: The biting. I have no idea. This biting point was how your teeth clamped together I think, I don’t know, I never did find out, but I was in the Air Force. I didn’t care much then. And so we, I came, went back and but then of course, because I’d dropped behind, I was at, my number is a hundred behind where I, where the chaps were originally, but anyway that all came, it all came about but so on February the 19th, February the 19th, I joined the Royal Air Force and got sworn in and got this number, 578762, but [pause] but you see where the people that I was with, I should have been 662 not 762 but anyway, I went back to visit the beginning. All the initial because there were several methods of getting in as an apprentice. There was service candidate in which was all based on the fact that you had a father or something in the Air Force. By examination which was then you went on, did the exam and various, how you finished up on the exam, or what was known as a direct entry. I was a direct entry because I had sufficient, I had a oh, God knows, what they were called? Credit standards. I think credit standards in my school certificate in maths, physics and chemistry and that allowed me to go as a direct entry. I was a direct entry with others but all of us, a direct entry were in the beginning, direct entry and service candidates had the first choice and then the others who had, did the examination, depended on where you came in the examination, what you got, how you got treated, but anyway that was it. We all got uniforms and we all won and we all got our classes, all got our classes, but then you had to be, oh I remember this, in this, in my barrack room where these, these, all these people joined in and you all had trades. Now, the trades all, you had the one, was the radio trades, ‘cause they went to Cranwell, they didn’t do at Halton but then the others that were all picked out. You all got selected, if you like to put it, what you were going to be. You’d put down on your exam, on your joining what you’d like to be but it didn’t, yeah, it didn’t necessarily mean you did, because, we, in this barrack room where we were, ‘cause we had all those, I wanted to be an engine fitter. Some wanted to be riggers, armourers and instrument makers. Those were the Halton trades and we, we came back and I always remember, oh God, I can’t even remember his name now. Damn, damn but anyway, anyway this we all went this way selected and we got selected and said, you know, I was going to be an engine fitter. That was all. Then there was Jock Blythe, he fancied airframes so he was, and he was alright, but then we had one chap come back and he come back to the barrack room after being selected, and he was in tears and we didn’t quite understand why he was crying, and we thought maybe something had happened, but he came back and said, you know, I mean we were boys and I mean, we’d only met each other [unclear] but you know you’d think well, why, you know, some sympathy for why he was crying. And why he was crying was that they’d made him an airframe fitter, and he wanted to be an engine fitter, so that was why he was crying. I met him years afterwards and he always, he always used to say, you know he always used to, he was a crew chief same, crew chief with me [unclear] for years on, but it was this business that he cried when he was at Halton, went years on. Years on ‘cause he knew that he, he wanted a different trade. Oh that was something, yes, he cried because he was made an airframe fitter and not an engine fitter, and there we are, but then we did all the, we did all the training that was necessary. Well boys, when you get boys, boys together, all sixteen year olds and you see you, they, you sort of went, you, I think that you went there, you became a disciplined hooligan I suppose really. It was nothing. Because you all went there like choirboys but after you’d been with all this lot, you became you know, as apprentices. I don’t know how you sort of became, I don’t know, you’ve got, because funny enough how, because you treated NCOs and everything as they were but you’d, I suppose you’d got a cheekiness and whatnot, I don’t know, but you survived. Well survived. I can’t say that but, but a chap, an ex-apprentice I met years and years later and he had been, he had been a Japanese prisoner of war, and for some reason or other although he didn’t talk much about it, but he, his, he reckoned that his survival as a Japanese prisoner of war because he, he treated the Japanese the same way we treated NCOs and whatnot as apprentices, and he put his survival as a Japanese prisoner of war to the fact that he’d been apprentice, and that was his attitude towards authority. So that was it. But that was a digression from that. Anyway, I left Halton after I managed to get an AC1, oh, and I got thrown out of a class once through laughing, but then of course the, but then days as apprentice were something that, incidents, I’ll mention a couple of incidents. One which, [unclear] because I mean you all swore, you did all sorts of things and the one was that I always remember we were doing, we had, of course, you had engineering drawing. We did all this business there and engineering drawing. Our instructor was, oh, a very studious squadron leader I think. Obviously [unclear] he was just like a parson and of course, we all lot we had a, because you had, I mean as boys you buggered about, I mean it was, you know. It was one of the things and I always remember my, one of my colleagues, well I’ll say classmate [unclear], Rickards his name was, and he, he was on there and the he said, oh, and of course there that the thing was you’d always buggered about and of course, we were doing engineering drawing and his, his statement was, ‘Who’s the thieving sod who’s pinched my rubber?’ And this was part of everyone talked about, but the instructor was a bit like a parson he was, and he stopped the class and he said that, he said that it was getting beyond when one boy called another boy a thieving sod. Well, I mean that was of course, that all went and that, that was being an apprentice and then all sorts of things. You were hooligans really, because you did, you did, you know, filing and all the, all the rest of it. You learned how to file, you learned how to rivet, you learned how to do all sorts of things and the, another thing when you did welding or, welding was one and of course, we had, you always got somebody there who was, would get rather picked on. Picked on in a class and one who was a, who was trouble was a bloke named Bryce, he came from Devon and Trevor Boone was another, he was, Trevor Boone was a, he was a bit of a softie. He was rather, he had a tendency I suppose to be bullied a bit. Yeah, because Bryce was a bugger you see, he was, he, we’d do soldering abrasion, welding, welding and of course all doing, we’re doing, we’re doing that. Not arc welding, it was oxyacetylene and of course, then of course, a pair of pliers that you use and Bryce, of course, played his flame on Boone’s pliers, so that when poor old Boone picked his pliers up, he got his hands burned. Devilish things sort of like that. Oh, and then of course, you, ‘cause we had, there again, McDonald beds. Now, McDonald beds were solid iron beds but they had castors on because you had to, you had to make your bed up in the morning. You had this bed. Which, one, the bottom half slid into the top half and your blankets had to be your biscuits which were the three biscuits. Mattresses, or whatever you like to call them, had to be stacked on one another. Your blankets had to be folded with, we had sheets, so the sheets had to be put between the blankets, and then one blanket wrapped around the whole lot that so it sort of made like a sandwich, if you like and it, that was it. Beds have to made up as laid down. That was the one of the comments that you had to do, yeah. But then we, when we managed and the time came then and of course, we had our drill and had to be marched up and down and of course, we had the pipes and the drums and we were all, and it was, it was you carried your books, you carried your overalls and you had these horrible ground sheets which were meant to be capes, and the trouble was when it rained, and you were marching and whatnot, your legs got soaking wet because the damned ground sheet came to your, it was only came to just below your knees, you know, the edge of it, but there we are. What else did we do? We used to march back and forth and, oh aye, that was another thing. We had, because we had various engine, as engine fitters of course, we started off on basics, which was the old Gipsy engine, a four cylinder Gipsy engine we had and then of course, you, you moved off, but then of course, we were in, at Halton we were in, started off in what was known as the old workshops, and then they decided, because we had airmen and wartime fitters there, they decided that they’d move the apprentices to the new workshops which was, if anyone knows Halton, I don’t know if they’re all like that now, but the old workshops, the new workshops were newer buildings and across the other side of the road. I can’t remember our position now but anyway it was across the other side of the road and we all moved. There was a to, going down into the new workshops was a downhill run, if you like to put it, and of course, we happened to be when we, when they changed to the new workshops, we happened to be on the radial engines, which were mercury engines, Bristol Mercury’s, and we were on radials and then we had to move the whole class and our engines from the old workshops to the new workshops, and we had an instructor named Mr Petty. He was the instructor. And so as a class, we moved our engines, but the thing is, when you get a bunch of boys and all of us, they decided to move these engines and of course, these engines were in stands, on castors so we pushed them up to the top of the hill, but then there was a downhill run to the new workshops, so of course they decided then, of course, being boys and whatnot, we decided that the only way to get these down there was to run them down and stand on the stand so that it went down like a trolley. Well of course, this was all, this did very well until we came and there was a kerb by the side and of course the next thing was, one of the engines of course, hit the kerb and thank goodness there was a bank there. It went into the bank and tipped over but it was not completely over, but of course, it had hit this bank and of course, we came down. We had to heave this engine back on its trolleys and push it back into the workshops, and then of course the thing was, we all got there, and the comment, Mr Petty said that he could not understand why one of his engines had got soil amongst the cooling fins, but nobody enlightened him that it had fell, it had fallen over. But then you had, and I always remember, you know, all, you know, you remember these sorts of things. I remember we had another instructor was a Mr Palmer and Mr Palmer was quite a, he said, ‘If you’re using a hammer, use it’. Don’t, you know, don’t dilly dally with it. Use it. And there was a boy called Hind in our class and, Mr Palmer, I don’t know what happened there, whether it was a hard face or whatnot, but he hit something. The hammer head came off and it finished up in Hind’s stomach so it, it was quite funny really because all it was, was Mr Palmer just extricated this hammer head out of Hind’s stomach and carried on. Hind was a bit breathless but never mind. But there was the other thing we used to do oh, and that was again Butch Hind, was, we did magnetos of course, but then of course, using magnetos of course, you can charge, you know, the thing is, you get a spark and whatnot but they were doing magnetos, and it was found that Hind, by judicious of winding these hand starter magnetos up, that Hind could be charged up and I don’t know if it was, he wore rubber boots or, so he was, you had to gently sort of, Hind would hold the leads and get himself charged up and then someone would go up, put a finger near his ears and he’d get a crick across the ears, you know. It was, oh we did all sorts of things like this, I mean, it was ridiculous really. And we had, we had a lot of civvy instructors and we had one for basic was a Mr Tatum, and Tatum could do anything with a piece of metal that I know, but then you had, he used to be doing because you had to have your, some on the file and some on top. You had to hold the files correctly and if you weren’t holding the files correctly and you were doing something, you suddenly found you had a whack on the finger, because you weren’t correct and he used to come around and give you a whack on the finger. But it was, you know, I suppose, brutal really. I mean you wouldn’t have it now, ‘cause they was being mistreated or something. I don’t know but I mean, you, you just accepted it. You accepted it. Well he was, but I’m okay. There we are. Then of course, you had your various exams, and that was another one. Petty, another one. He got killed. He went aircrew and he became a pilot, he got killed in a Canberra. Colin Petty. And we had, during exams, now there was various means of making bolts and one was what was known as a cold headed bolt, which had all these had different markings in, ‘cause this was all part of the thing of knowing what your markings of all these various equipment and steel and everything were, and one was, a bolt was known as a cold headed bolt and it was a bolt where the head had been pressed in cold. Not, not been turned. It was pressed and this had a ring around the top, but in the exam, it was, ‘How do you recognise a cold headed bolt?’ And of course, Petty didn’t know, and so Petty wrote, ‘Wears a balaclava helmet’. He got seven days for that, seven days jankers for that, for being frivolous on an examination paper. That was how, that’s how things were, you know, you got done for everything. You couldn’t smoke. Oh you got a smoking pass at eighteen, but you weren’t allowed to smoke everywhere and the toilets down in workshops of course. Toilets, yeah, and you could hear nearly because you could have puffs, I mean, you could make a cigarette end last with a pin [unclear] till the last puff. Oh dear, it was all sorts of things like that. As an apprentice, you did everything, always pushed to the limit, and it, and all your instructors. Oh, and there was another incident, I always remember that we had a named, chap named in our class, Dicky Burke, and Dicky Burke was, he was a oh, he was the same as anyone else, but one time we had a, we had a notes. A corporal, I can’t even remember his name, a corporal was giving, he was an instructor and of course he said well we had to, I can’t remember what it was. Anyway, he said take, get your notebook and take these notes, and Dicky Burke said, ‘We’ve already got these notes’, and the corporal said, ‘It doesn’t matter, you’ll still do it’, you know. And under his breath, Dicky Burke said F you, and the corporal heard him and so he was wheeled up to the squadron leader, and in less than two hours, Dicky Burke was, was doing a stretch of twenty eight days in the guardroom, but he still had to come to, well he was doing a stretch but he, he, he was doing his spell in the guardroom but he still had to come to school. He still had to do his doings, so one of the corporal apprentices, a bloke named Ted Atkinson who was a friend of mine, had to go to the guardroom and march him down to school and then march him back up to the guardroom for his, his lunchtime and any off duty, so he did his twenty eight days on off duty, more or less, so he was one of these, one of these incidents that, but he did the twenty eight days and was shovelling coal from one side to the other and all the rest of it, but as I say, they used to make you do anything. I don’t know, but that was Dicky Burke and his twenty eight days. I’m trying to remember humorous incidents of things and very, it was, of course we were apprentices anyway but then, of course, the other thing was they had Air Training Corps, ‘cause they were the civilian side. I mean, most of them were the same age as us but of course, we were apprentices as opposed to theirs was, well Air Training Corps wasn’t it? People that you join and they had the Air Training Corps come and did a spell well in the camp near Halton, which of course upset those, a bit of an upset, and of course the apprentices raided them as normal, it was normal sort of business. Used to, oh dear oh dear. Apprentices. The other one was, all daft things really. And of course, you had not money, you used to get, we used to get paid a fortnight of three [unclear], nearly new two shilling pieces. That was our pay. Three, three every fortnight, which well I mean you had, you could buy chips in the NAAFI and the old rock cakes and whatnot, but, but then of course, there was, generally you used to run out of money or something and they used to do odd, and there was one, one time, oh, what was his name? He was short of money, and then the thing was that we had, because there was twenty two of us in a room, twenty two of us including a corporal or a snag which was a LAA, a leading aircraft apprentice. He had one stripe on his arm and then you had a corporal apprentice, a corporal he had was probably in the bunk at the end of the room, was the corporal apprentice, but then of course, then they’d get someone short of money and one of the, one of the, one I remember is, I can’t remember his name now, never mind, short of money and then it said it was ha‘penny around the room. That would give him ten pee. A ha‘penny around the room and he’d run around the barrack block stark naked which was a, oh God that was brass and of course, he said he’d do it and that so everybody had to donate but then of course, you had to, then had to, everybody, this was immediately transmitted all around the rooms that he was going to run around the block stark naked, and so that meant that everybody was, when he set off, everybody was at the barrack block windows, shouting and cheering him on as he went around. And that was another incident, anything to make money. And then there was, you had jankers, ‘cause that was another one. Your jankers, seven penneth for doing anything. No I managed to avoid that, I wasn’t caught smoking or missing church parade. Anything to scrounge. You get seven penneth and then, but then you were allowed, they decided that you, that the jankers would be separated from the other boys. For what reason I don’t know. And there was a Corporal Croft. He was a corporal in the, DI we had and they put him in charge of, ‘cause we had the barrack blocks but then we had wooden huts, and they decided to put the, the jankers in the, or a wooden hut with this corporal in charge which was then, ‘cause he was Corporal Croft, and that was known as Croft’s Cottage, but I think, I think they abandoned that because you got all the ne’er-do-wells who wanted to pinch anything or anything all at, do and that was not, they weren’t distributed ‘cause they used to supposed to do jankers in the cookhouse and they were the ones that always got fed the best, ‘cause they always managed to purloin something. Food or something. It was, it was all part of the game. Part of the game. I mean the best of it was of course, some of the worst offenders became commissioned officers. That was the best of it wasn’t it? I mean years, years on. There was one there, Hammer Mallet, Tom Mallet. He was, he was one but he became a squadron leader engineer. Just shows you, doesn’t it? How to become commissioned? Become jankers, you know. But then, that was the years. Went through that lot and of course came, I mean we were doing our drill with our rifles and bayonets and all the rest of it as well, and then came the day of passing out and then you had to do, but then you had your exams but then your exams depended on where you were doing, whether if you got, if you got called that you would do your oral exams and boarded, as they used to say, and you’d go for your board to these, you know, either senior NCOs or officers and you were questioned on your trade. I mean, as well as written exams, you had written exams as well which was, you know, like school and whatnot, but your boards were you were all against mostly to gain your trade. They asked you, you know, how you would identify some stainless steel or some question how would you do this or do the other, various things so, but then you, you’d do your board and then if you were you didn’t know how you were doing, you sort of go back again and then, and sit down and go back where you came from and then someone would say, ‘They want to speak to you again’. And you’d think, now that meant either one of two things. That A) you hadn’t got enough marks to pass out or B) you got sufficient marks that they were doing, that they were doing you that instead of AC2 pass out or AC1, you got an LAC. That, that was the thing but I mean, you had to know whether you’d done well enough or poorly or not because if they asked you back in again and you’d done very poorly and you were only getting to re-boarded, you again to become an AC2 and I got, I had to go back again because I didn’t get an LAC. Anyway, I did, I finished up AC1, that was how I passed out. I passed out then from Halton, that was then and they said, right oh, where we are posted. Where were your choices to be posted? Well I come from Lincolnshire so I suppose you put Lincolnshire. I mean, ten to one you never got what you put down for. I put Lincolnshire and I got, finished up, posted to Kirton Lindsey. That was, and of course the thing was, in those days, and you used to get trains and you didn’t know where you were and blackouts, and you get on a train. There was several of us all posted to Kirton Lindsey, I think about four, four of us posted to Kirton Lindsey, and of course the thing was, on these trains, you didn’t know where the hell you were going. You got a train, you had to get a train to so and so, and then of course, the only time you ever knew where you were, was if some porter called out, you know, the name of the platform or stop where it was, and we got out at Kirton Lindsey. There was four of us and some airmen as well, and so we got out there and some of the airmen were worldly, more worldly wise, get transport, and they eventually came, got transport and of course, it’s a blackout, you didn’t know where the hell you were. Got to, went to this, got to the station and eventually the guardroom and we were then sent to transit block. Transit block. And the transit room, you went in there and you, you were, I can’t even remember now whether you had, whether there was bedding in there or you had to go to the bedding store and get your blankets, I think. Anyway, doesn’t matter. Got there and eventually we got dished out to the general office, and then we were given wherever we were going, so it’s, you were sent down to the tech side and then they decided where you were going, ‘cause I mean, they were riggers or fitters. I finished up in R&I. R&I. We were doing majors on Spitfires there. Got R&I, some of them got others. And there was another place called Hibaldstow, which was a satellite of Kirton Lindsey. Two of them got sent to Hibaldstow. As I say I was sent to, to R&I. I don’t know, I think I was the only one out of our group who went to R&I, which is Repair and Inspection, which was the major. We were doing majors, majors on Spitfires but, so we used to have the flights when the flights board there, I mean, I mean, oh, and the other thing was, I must have mentioned this, the other thing they had now, so that we, we had, ‘cause we had WAAF fitters as well and we had, I was put into, put into a gang with Corporal, Corporal Shear was in charge and I was put in this gang and of course, I was an, I was an AC1 apprentice fitter. Apprentice, ‘cause the others in the gang were all wartime blokes. One was a bank clerk, one had been, one was, one had been a waiter, I think, but they were a good lot anyway. [pause for phone] CB: So we, now, we got to Kirton Lindsey now so that we got to the WAAF fitters, and I was put in a gang, and I can remember Corporal Shear was the corporal in charge, and all the others were wartime. Well one was a fitter, two mechanics I think, we were doing majors on Spitfires and Sadie was the WAAF, and Sadie was, I mean I was only, what, eighteen and whatnot, but I didn’t fancy her really, but I think she rather well she, I don’t think she fancied me. All she did was bugger me about really, ‘cause she’d sort of, if you were doing on the engine and whatnot on there and she was sitting on the main plane she’d, and you were doing something, she’d suddenly put her legs out and wrap them around you, you know. But she wasn’t my type at all, so I didn’t really fancy her and she, the trouble with WAAFs. they either overtightened things or didn’t tighten things up enough. Couldn’t, plugs. They never put the plugs in tight enough and they’d bloody shear off a bloody two by eight or something like that, but anyway that was, that was the WAAFs. But incidents. Incidents, oh the other thing of course, they were Mark II Spitfires and they had Merlin 12s, and they had Coffman starters and cartridge so that you had a cartridge, and one of the things was the flight sergeants, ‘cause we had, oh all part and parcel, you had to, you had your sort of annual booze up and whatnot, and of course, then money had to be put in and the flight sergeant used to fine you for A) for being late if you were late for work or whatnot you’d, he’d fine you sixpence or something, which all went into the fund, and they used to do cartridge starters. I mean, you had to be starting a Merlin on, with a cartridge. You could do it with one cartridge or two but if you had more than two, he used to fine you sixpence a cartridge. So, so the thing was, you had to make sure it was primed and everything before you could, he’d be there, but he’d listen to you, and you would fire up on one and you’re all right. Fire up on two and if it didn’t fire you think, God there’s another sixpence gone you know. So that was the fine, I mean that was a fine for using too many cartridges, but that that was one of the things. The other incident here I always remember, we changed over from Mark II’s to Mark Vs and the Mark Vs were coming in, and this was during the summer of 1944. The warm weather. And we came, we were in, we were in R&I and of course, we were what, duty crew, if you like, and of course we were at, they were bringing in these Mark Vs and we were, all of us nice summer evening it was, sitting outside and we were all thinking of going down the boozer, and he said, ‘Righto we’ve got, we’ve got four, four Spitfires coming in.’ And they were all sitting there in the sun, at the wall by the hangar and the first one came in and of course, then you were all sitting there. Who was going to see the first one in, and I said, ‘Oh bugger it, I’ll see the first one in’, and off I went in to see the first one in. Taxied in and, lo and behold, it was when, when the pilot of course, took her helmet off, it was an ATA pilot. A blonde. She had blonde hair, and who she was I don’t know, and of course, I saw this one in and of course immediately the others saw this girl taxiing this one in, they all rushed out to see the others in, but anyway I don’t know who she was, I’ve no idea. But I often think of the ATA pilots because, oh she was older than me but, and she had blonde hair and I often wonder, having seen ATA pilots, you know, years gone on and wondered who it was. But that was, we got Mark Vs then instead of, but then of course, the time came and then the incident I mentioned of the only time we got involved in Bomber Command in those days was, we had a Spitfire lab down at North Creake, which had Stirlings on and we had to do an engine change, and doing this engine change underneath the belly of a Stirling. That was quite interesting but then that was, then I’ve, then of course, my posting overseas came so then I went up to Blackpool and met all, a lot of the chaps who were at Halton with me. So that was, so we were at Blackpool there, getting kitted out. Marks and Spencers of Blackpool, well then because they had all the, which was Marks and Spencers, had all the kit in there so you, and was it when the Tower, well anyway, that was September ‘44. We went, went to Gourock. Gourock and then we boarded this, I can’t remember even, can’t remember what my, my draft number was. Anyway, but anyway we were boarded on the Orion and the thing was, was this a battleship, no, it was a cattle ship, because there were five thousand, five thousand troopers, troops in it. That was an incident. There was Army at the bottom, Air Force in the middle and the Navy at the top ‘cause they were the best. Anyway, so we, we went out on that, through the Suez ‘cause then, I think they’d cleared the Med of subs and whatnot. We went to India via, via the Suez Canal and not around, around the end of South Africa. That was it, no incidents. We had some ex Australian prisoners of war on board and they were well fed, and they used to give us a bit of grub now and again, but and then eventually we got, got to India, but of course, the other thing of course, I’d better mention it that was the, the beginning of my marriage I suppose, ‘cause this friend of mine, who had had the, the corporal apprentice, had to go back to my brother in law who was, he was also at Halton but he was two entries after me, and my friend was a corporal apprentice, was in charge of his room and my brother in law, Bill, he, he gave my, he had a twin sister who became my wife, but he’s, this corporal apprentice started writing to Margaret, but then, I don’t know, it all petered out or something, and then of course, we came on, came on the boat going to India and of course, was one of the things, anyone got any girls to write to? And he gave me Margaret’s address and said, ‘Don’t tell her I gave it to you’. So I came out of the top of my head was a load of rubbish that I found her address floating on the deck of a bloody troop ship, you know, but anyway that was that. I wrote to her and of course that was, we got out to India and I was then posted from [unclear], I went to a place, I was posted down to Ceylon to a repair and salvage unit,121 RS, oh R&SU I suppose. We just used to call it just RSU. So we went down by seven days on the rail, down to India, down all the way down in from Bombay, down all the way down India. Took us a week. Then to Ceylon and we eventually ended, finished up in a place called Vavuniya in Ceylon, and we formed, well I think we formed this R&SU there. We serviced Beaufighters. We had two Beaufighter squadrons and a Spitfire squadron. I can’t remember the Spitfires, but the Beaufighter squadrons were 22 and 217, and we did engine changes and then I got, I got detached to 22 Squadron because they were short of fitters, and I got detached there for a, for a spell. So, I was doing, working with 22 Squadron but then of course, everything changed and they decided that we were going on a, we got, we got sent, we got notification we had to pack up, what was it? Operation Marbrisca I think it was, and get everything, gear and of course it never came about and we then, we moved the whole lot, the unit moved up into India. And Marbris, that was an interesting thing because it was years, years later after I came back home and the I went to, went to school and there was a master at school who had also been out there, but he was in, in SEAF or SEAC operations and I mentioned about this, oh years about this Operation Marbrisc, and he told me what it was. It was in actual fact, they were going to take the island of Phuket. I mean we called it something else as you can imagine which is, I mean, is a holiday island now, and the idea was, they were going to build an airfield on Phuket and operate from there against the Japanese, but then he said that the casualty situation would be, was exorbitant and they cancelled it. So that was where we were going. This Marbrisc. Anyway, that was cancelled and we moved up into South India, basically to, I think it was preparation for the Malayan invasion, ‘cause we moved about. God, as an RSU, we sort of did anything. We did some servicing on Thunderbolts of all things. Then, then we sort of petered out and did nothing really. We sort of, all we did was, oh and then of course the next thing was, they said, oh we got to, we get issued with jungle green, so we all got issued with jungle green and we had, then we got to have equipment to do this invasion or whatnot, well, back up so we got a lot of new waggons and cranes and all sorts of things, all ready to do this repair and salvage, I suppose because we were supposed to, I think, we were supposed to service two Beaufighter squadrons and a Spitfire squadron. I don’t know whether they were the same ones that we had before but, but then of course, they dropped the atom bomb and that was, that was the end, that was the end of our sortie to Malaya, but, but then of course, the whole thing wound up. What was the next troubles? ‘Cause it became, the whole thing then, the war had ended and all the blokes that were in the war in Europe were getting demobbed, and people with the, on the unit with the same demob number were not being demobbed, because they were in the Far East, and then of course, we came, these problems what do they call them? What do they call them? Riots I suppose. I think they termed them as riots when they were bloody you know, I don’t know, you were nearly court martialled but anyway, but then of course that all, this came, the whole of India was like that but of course, we were regulars so we, we weren’t involved. They, we, we just didn’t get involved in all that, any of these struggles at all, but then of course, our lot folded up and we were posted to, and then they said, oh we’re going on occupation force Japan. Don’t know why that was and we went to a place in India called Tambaram to get to move out but then they cancelled the whole lot so we were left then with all this gear and whatnot, in this Tambaram, and then they decided that we were going to be disbanded, we were. So all the equipment had to go back. All these new lorries and cranes and whatnot, so they were all moved and taken to a place called Visakhapatnam, I think it was. Viso we called it, and they took all this and there was hundreds and hundreds of vehicles. All just, all lease lend stuff. And that was, and they shifted us to a place called Redhills Lake, which had been a flying boat station, to disband. Well, and of course the thing was, and it had a lake there so we did a bit of swimming. That was for a while and apart from that, we did nothing, just sort out equipment, half of it got dumped in the lake and then the day came when I was posted. We were posted, we were distributed and I was posted to 353 Squadron at Palam, and that was Delhi, and that was right up north, and so the next thing was of course, to get the train from, was it Madras, I suppose. I think, I can’t remember where, so, to Delhi and oh, it was a troop train. It was marvellous, marvellous train because it had been a casualty train for, for carrying wounded, not a trooper and oh, it was most comfortable. Had a real good trip ‘cause against all the others we had a, ‘cause normally the trains in there you had same as the doings. You had the hard wooden benches and the ones that slap down on chains for sleeping on, but anyway that was, but anyway we got to Palam and that was 353 Squadron was a Dakota squadron, but then of course, they’d centralised servicing really so that it didn’t matter what squadron you were on, you were, you were put in workshops. I was in engine repair and in engine repair was you did anything really. A Pratt and Whitneys, it didn’t matter what came in and you said, because Palam was a, was a main, well it’s now Delhi airport isn’t it? I think, yeah, and Dakotas, but we used to get all the mail stuff come through. That was the Yorks. And we had also the, was it British Air? Not British, BOAC was it? BOAC in those days. And it had BOAC Yorks came because the airport was at, was at Palam. Well it was Delhi Airport, but part of Palam, but just around the peritrack and so I did, I did a spell with Dakotas and Yorks. I had engine changes on Yorks. We actually did a minor inspection on Lancasters that flew in. Oh, I did a couple of jobs on BOAC Yorks ‘cause they had landing trouble and they had no fitters, and they used to get sort of co-opted on the engineer, BOAC engineers. They had no, no people at all, so I did a couple of jobs on BOAC Yorks while I was there and then of course, came a time that I didn’t get mid tour leave although I’d put my name down, I wasn’t lucky enough to get any. And then of course in April, oh, then of course the Partition was on. India was, and things were not, things were not very good then. You, you didn’t, if you wanted to go out you made sure that at least there was two or three of you together, ‘cause things, I don’t know why, they sort of didn’t like us really. And then in April, I got a raise and I came home in April. I came home. I went out on the Orion and came back on the Chetril and then we arrived back. It was quite, they say about you know seeing England when you come back, it was, go on, anyway we landed at Southampton and we had to be shipped up to Burtonwood near, oh where is it near? Oh God, Burtonwood. Warrington isn’t it? I think it’s at Warrington. Up there. Anyway, when it comes to the point there, we got back to there and everybody was, of course all they wanted to do was get home, and they would have flown us and said this, that and the other, until everyone was chuntering and whatnot the bloke at Burtonwood said, ‘Right’, he said, ‘Get on the lorries and you can go to the bloody station’, you know, it’s up to you where, you know, you go. We’d got our warrants and I think there was, I think a train going south and a train going north and it cleared the station. Didn’t care, you really didn’t care where you went as long as you left there and on the way home. So, I sort of, I got from Warrington to Manchester, and Manchester and of course, while I’d been, while I’d been overseas, my parents had moved from Lincolnshire. They’d moved to Yorkshire, and so I didn’t know where I was going home so the [pause] got to, I got to Manchester and got to Leeds, and I thought what and I got my parents’ telephone number so I thought, oh I’d better, I’d better ring them and let them know, and so I phoned up and my mother answered and of course she said, ‘Oh your father’s in, in the Isle of Man at the moment’, ‘cause I said, ‘Well can you, can you pick me up at the station?’ And so anyway the incidents, isn’t it? So, so I said, ‘Well I’ll go to Harrogate’. I had to go to Harrogate, from Leeds to Harrogate and the, get in the train and the, ‘cause I had two kit bags and your webbing and everything and you know you were sort of carrying these down, and of course I’d asked where the train, the - [phone ringing] CB: Train was there and of course I’d got my kit bag on, and you know you’ve got a kit on, a kit bag on your arm, your webbing and a kit bag on the top, and of course there was an airman in a carriage doorway, and I says, I said, oh you know, ‘Open the door’, and I bend over and let the kit bag drop on the floor, and my father was on the, on the train and he picked it up, so and that’s how I met my dad. He came and then my sister, mother at the station. So, incidents, you know, that, ‘cause I came back and of course my father was on the train with the gear, and so [pause, crying] my mother and sister at the station. The incident I’m trying to think of. Not that is, ‘cause I didn’t, oh dear, I didn’t stop by. Okay now then, we’ve got to, we’ve got to Knaresborough, that was where my parents lived, so and the next thing I had to do, as I’d been writing to Margaret for, oh, since, when was it? 1945. I wanted to get down to Hereford, so I went down to, went down to, go down to Hereford but it’s quite strange really that I’d been writing to her there, but it was, I’d got down to, got down from Manchester, get down to Hereford and the, the last stop before Hereford is Shrewsbury, and I debated whether to get off the train. Why I don’t know but there we are, but anyway it all worked out. We met on Hereford station and that was, that was it, so the beginning of our relationship. Yeah. Anyway, then that all finished and the next thing was of course, we got posted and then, oh God, that was it. Posted, posted to Wheaton, Wheaton, what the hell was at Wheaton? I thought what on earth’s there? Blackpool, near Blackpool. So off I goes to, to Blackpool. Get back on the train, get off at Wheaton and what’s Wheaton? Trainings. Bloody training station, nothing to do with aeroplanes. Bloody drivers, fitters, blacksmiths, welders, everything bar anything to do with aeroplanes, and I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ So, anyway, of course, I arrived on the station and this is in, and I thought, you know, and I went and they said, you’re going to, you’ll be on one wing, I think it was. MTMs, Motor Transport Mechanics. So what the hell am I doing here? And anyway of course, I went in to the general office, off I went, report to squadron leader so and so, so I went to him and I immediately I went in there and of course, there was a few, there was an MT fitter and whatnot, and me. So, anyway, I immediately said, complained, ‘What am I doing here?’ you know, and MT and all the rest of it, and this officer, whoever he was, said I was posted as an instructor. I said, ‘I don’t know anything about MT at all’. And this, I remember this officer, who he was, he said, ‘You’re an ex-apprentice, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes sir’. ‘Well’, he says, ‘In that case’, he says, ‘You can do any bloody thing’. So that was that. That was me teaching motor mechanics, MT mechanics, and I knew nothing about bloody brakes or anything like that. Well, I think, anyway so I went down to this, where was it? Where I was supposed to be? The phase office, that was it, the phase, the phase office, and there was a sergeant MT fitter there, and I said, ‘Well I know bugger all about motor transport’. He said, ‘Well I’ll tell you what’, he said, ‘I’ll put’, he said, ‘You’ll be on’, I’ve forgotten what it was, but he said, ‘I’ll put you with, there’s a civilian instructor’, he says. ‘You can have a spell with him’, he said, ‘You’ll pick it up from there’. Oh God love us all. So, anyway, I was with this, oh I can’t remember his name, and he was an ancient civvy and so I was picking up brakes and steering, and I never knew there was a blinking theory on brakes and how line up and all this business at all, and of course I was doing this and that, was the, I was on the first week. There was a fortnightly course for this MT mechanics. A fortnight course so I was in there for a fortnight. I’d done one week and there was a fracas in there, and one of the corporal instructors had clobbered a, or hurled a coupling at one of the trainees, and he was then immediately taken off instructing, and the only person to take, put on, was me, and he was on the second week and I’d only done the first week, and the second week was completely, was ridiculous. But anyway, so I had to do it. Have you ever taught, taught people about something you know nothing about? Well, that was what it was with me, instructing people. I had to try to gain a, oh dear, it was ridiculous, but anyway. Then, of course the, funnily enough, then they started to, a phase on diesel engines. Well funnily enough I’d been very interested in diesels, even in India, and I had my father send me books on diesels, high speed compression ignition engines and whatnot, and so therefore I knew quite a bit, and when they started this phase on diesels, I said well I, you know, I’d done diesels. Oh, they were quite, and shoved me on diesels straightaway, so that was, that was the way it went. I finished up doing diesels and did various other things and then of course I, I, I, I wanted to get away from Wheaton. I’d liked to get down south somewhere ‘cause I mean I was courting then, I mean, and it’s a long way from, from Wheaton, Blackpool down to Hereford, which I used to do on a blinking short weekend. It was bloody fast because I used to have to, I’d travel all night back and have, get my breakfast and kit bag and sort of virtually go straight to the classroom, you know, and get straight, but anyway, but then of course I, I got, I got a what was it a payform 36 posting, because for somehow reason, I don’t know how I managed it, but anyway down to Hereford. At Hereford. And I was still instructing but when I got down there, I found out there was nothing there, it was equipment assistant. Stores bashers. I thought what the hell am I doing here? But then of course, I got there and the next thing that I’d got there was another, in fact an apprentice, ex-apprentice was a bloke named Don Rigby, and he was posted there as an instructor. He was, he’d managed to get a fitter one scores in his career and so the two of us there. What the hell were we doing here? But then of course, we went down to the general office who sent us to this. He said, ‘Yes, you’re definitely posted here’. I thought well someone had made a mistake, you know, but then we went to, the pair of us went down to see this squadron leader, equipment, and I said, ‘Well what are we doing here?’ I mean. ‘Well you’ve got to tell them all about’, you know, ‘it’s yours to sort of give them an interest in the mechanical things of aeroplanes and engines’. And I thought what am I doing, and we had no syllabus, we had nothing, so we had to, between the pair of us, we sort of worked it out, but God what a, talk about a working week. I think we, our working week was about two or three hours, all week, working week was two or three hours, so we were there so I mean, but we got on ‘cause all the equipment, all the store bashers, instructors, were all senior NCOs. We were the only corporals there in the doing but, we got on very well with them because if they wanted to go off shopping, we’d take their class on, you know. It was, it was or if, you know, something they were getting short of time and they’d, they’d use our time and it was doing but anyway, that that all went on and then that collapsed but then of course, at that period of time, I’d been courting. This was 1949 I get, I got married, we get married. So, I got married in 1949, got back off the honeymoon, to the bunk was a piece of paper slipped under the door and it says, ‘Go to the general office ‘cause you’re posted to MCOS’. MCOS. What the hell was that? MCOS. Never heard of it. Nobody doing and this was at Wythall, which is just outside Birmingham. So, Wythall. Wythall. But anyway I’d never heard of a Wythall. No airfield that I knew of at Wythall, but anyway MCOS. We’d no idea. So anyway gets to MC, gets to, my, my colleague who was the other corporal there, he got posted, he got posted to, he got his posting to Suez Canal, so he was, he was gone anyway and there was MCOS, so got down to Wythall and doing I found out that this was what was known as the Mobile Classroom Operating Section. So I was back on instructing only in a mobile classroom. I was, as I’d done diesels and they put me on wheels and tyres for starters because I’d been, I’d been steering and whatnot, but then that, that, I can’t remember but I think the instructor on diesels, he was posted and they knew I’d had, done diesels instructing experience and they put me on to the diesels. So that was that, but that was out on the road for six weeks and back at Wythall for a fortnight, so we roamed the countryside teaching. You went to any station that wanted you and you’d instruct on whatever’s going there, but there’s that was the biggest lot of rogues. The drivers, mostly the drivers, ‘cause you had a driver and instructor with each wagon and the drivers, I think they were the biggest bunch of rogues I’ve ever come across. Pinch anything. And oh, and then the other thing of course we, we were at Wythall which was, had been a balloon base, but Austin’s had taken half of it over to store, you know, their manufactured equipment and whatnot. Gearboxes and whatever you could think of and of course, it was, this was all partitioned by wire netting from the mobile classrooms and of course, knowing the drivers and whatnot and the people that were in Austin’s store place and whatnot, people got, stuff got passed over the wire which as the drivers were traversing the country, you’d get to a transport café and you could sell anything so, you know, parts of cars got sold but then they got wise with it, because the police, Air Force police and whatnot, got wise to it and you got, they, they stopped the wagons at the guard room and got searched and so you couldn’t have any, any Austin components in there, but they used to be fiddling the thing. They used to, somebody, one bloke even moved a whole family because, I mean, the classrooms were big and so they use it like a pantechnic and one of the chaps moved somebody there. I mean they used to, these corporals would do, do anything really. That, but of course the thing was, you see, once once you got to the station where you were instructing course they had nothing to do. You were doing the instructing. So they sort of you know did anything really. It was quite. They were a bunch, a really, especially one - [Pause] CB: Right. So having, Wythall, so we’d finished these mobile classrooms and then I got posted to the Middle East. The canal zone so, and the canal zone, went on a, oh what was it, oh I can’t remember the boat, but that was another one, anyway we got to, got to Abihad and Abihad was 109 Maintenance Unit, and that was the repair of Merlin engines, and they were set up, sort of posted on, to start up a repair service on Hercules but that never came about, and I finished up on the overhaul of the propellers. That was, that was a standard sort of a job but it was, the mid, then of course we had the problems, in fact when my wife came out, the problems of the riots and all the rest of it which that we were, we lived in Ismailia, we had a flat in Ismailia but then all the problems came and we got, if you’d got enough points, my wife, we got, what, a hiring on the Canal Road, which is not far off the Great Bitter Lakes, you know, where the canal goes through and we, we got this hiring which was a bungalow, it was sort of quite a complex of bungalows. It was typical Egyptian, oh, and of course, I must have mentioned that our bungalow was the only one with a bath, all the rest had showers. We had a bath and this bath must have been built by the Egyptian who made the tombs and whatnot, ‘cause it was like a big concrete but we were the only one with a bath, but then we had no hot running water so the only way we had a, the only way you could have a bath, in fact the ladies, my wife’s friends and whatnot, well, service people that lived there, they had a bath, you could have a bath and by having two primer stoves and put the zinc bath on top of the two primer stoves, get the water heated up enough, tipped in to this massive bath and put some cold with it and then you could have a decent bath. But the ladies, all the wives, we were, there were quite a number of us there and of course my wife would ask the ladies if they wanted to have a bath, so they come and we’d heat, well my wife organised it and they’d have a bath then. Anyway, that was so that was it, but at that point in time was, was the, my wife was pregnant with our first child, and the point was then, then there was this big expansion programme of, I suppose with the V bomber pilots and whatnot and they wanted fitters and riggers back, back home and I was premature re-patted, but then there was a major problem of my wife was pregnant and of course, she had to come back and they, they, it depended on if they couldn’t come back, I’d have to go out, but then it depended whether the aircrew on the aircraft would bring her back. Would they have her and that and it was a Hastings flight and they said yes. So my wife who was, oh was she near, I wonder if, ‘cause that was, oh she’d be at least eight months. She must have been eight months so it was really, you know, it was touch and go, but anyway she came. They decided to take her so we, she came back in this Hastings or we came back in this Hastings and of course, the bloody thing went u/s in Malta, so we all had to get off and of course, she was the only woman on board the aeroplane. The rest was all, all men. She was the only woman and of course, then, of course in those days, there was no family accommodation. There was only women’s and men and so my wife finished up in this Nissan hut all by herself and me in the, with the, ‘cause I was a corporal, with the rest of the men and because I was doing and then I remember in a morning, some chap out there says, ‘Is there a Corporal Bland in the hut?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I am’. He said, ‘Your wife wants you’. I thought, oh God, you know, we’re not going to have the happening in Malta, you know, but no well when I went out she said, ‘When are you getting up?’ So that was it but eventually we, they got the aeroplane serviceable and we came back, and then of course, they wanted to put us in transit, and my wife said no I’m not going in transit, I want to go home and I’d bought a camera out there and then I had trouble with the customs. I said, ‘You can keep the bloody camera’. But they didn’t like that much, but anyway, we finished up at, where was it? Swindon Station. God knows what. Coming back in the milk train ‘cause we were going back to South Wales to her home in Newport or [unclear] and so we had there. So we, we finished up on this, and oh, Swindon it was I’ll always remember that. She was wanting to lay down and I said, ‘Alright’. and then of course, it was a bit chilly or something. Was it? I don’t know, but I know a porter came in and lit a fire in this waiting room, ‘cause there was only the two of us, and so eventually we, she, she kipped down on me, but anyway we got the milk train, we got back to, got to Newport and got a taxi from there and of course, the thing, because she was pregnant, my wife wouldn’t, wouldn’t tell her parents that she was on her way home. So, so we arrived completely unannounced, caused consternation as you can well imagine, but anyway that was it. I got posted to Worksop and she had the baby in Pontypool, and I think she’d have been better off in a military hospital then she was in a national health. I didn’t, she didn’t get treated very well there at all, anyway, that’s by the by, so we got to Worksop and I was on Meteors. So, posted to Worksop. Worksop which was an old wartime airfield which had been renovated, and we got Meteors there. So of course, I was, I was then a corporal still and then I got, I passed my senior technician’s exams, so I was a corporal, but I wasn’t really due for my senior, ‘cause at the time, wasn’t due for my senior and then I got my third. My sergeant came through, so I was a sergeant senior tech qualified. So that was the way it went on for the time being. I hadn’t, the time was it, wasn’t to go for the chief so that was the way it was. So I was on Meteors there in R&I, in Meteors so that was, that was my spell there. Then that went on till was it 19-? I think it went on until 1955, and then a friend of mine who was also at Worksop, and he was a great reader of AMOs and he said, he said there’s an AMO about this new V bombers and they’re looking for aircraft servicing chiefs. ‘Oh’, I said, ‘that’s a good idea’. ‘Oh’, but he says, ‘They’ve got to be aircraft fitters’. Well I‘m only an engine fitter, I wasn’t an aircraft fitter. He was an aircraft fitter. Anyway, he volunteered for it and because he was an aircraft fitter, he finished up with it. Anyway, he was waiting and then, then they changed it and he came to me. He said, ‘Ay’, he said, ‘They’ve done, they’ve done a change on the AMO’. He said, ‘They’re taking on airframe and engine fitters’. ‘Oh’, I said, ‘Right’. So I went straight into the office and volunteered, and saying that was in 1955 and, yes and that was at the beginning of ’55. Must have been because then I had to go and they said alright, and I got this and I had to go to Brampton for an interview for this aircraft servicing chief. So I went there for this interview and a panel of officers, wing commanders and educators and electrical officers and so I had to, you know. What the hell for I don’t know. They ask you all sorts of questions. So that was it. You didn’t know anything about it at all until, when was it? It would have been, when would this be? July, August something like that, and it came through and told me that I’d got to, I’d now got to, where did I have to go first. I had to go Wheaton first, to get, to go on an airframe course. So I went on this airframe course, which was quite a small one. I don’t think I learned much more than I knew in the first place, but anyway I went on this airframe course and then from then on, I sort of moved on to, we had to then, had to go down to Melksham to go on the instrument and electrical course, so having done that, we went to Melksham, and then they allocated you from Melksham. It depended on how well you did, what you, what aircraft you went on, ‘cause the Valiant was in progress ‘cause there were Valiant crew chiefs, had been trained and I can’t remember how many crew chiefs there was. Twenty of us on the course? Was it? I can’t remember now how many, but anyway, then it worked out the Victor came in and the Vulcan and, and the Valiant but some Vulcan crew chiefs had been trained before, but out of my course there was four Victors that were on the Victor. There was eight, eight, was it eight? Yeah, eight Vulcans and the rest were Valiants. So that’s how I was, and they did you, on the, you were allowed to volunteer which aircraft you want, went, went on but it depended on your position in the final exam which aircraft you got and fortunately, I came top so I was able, I had my pick of Vulcan, I didn’t want the Victor. All the others were interested in was the Victor, I wasn’t interested in the Victor at all so I went and got on the Vulcan. So then from Melksham, we went on to Avro’s. Was it Avro’s? No, no, Avro’s weren’t first. Where did we go? Boulton Pauls power fliers I think. Boulton Paul. Was there Avro’s then? I don’t know. A V Roe’s. And then you had to do, Bristols was the engines you had to do that so that was the end of, I mean, this was taking you up from, so that was, what are we saying? Was it May? May or June? I don’t know, ’55? So this was 1956 and we were all posted to Waddington, all of us, and all the crew chiefs, the Vulcan crew chiefs, were at Waddington. Half of us had nothing to do. In fact, what did we do, because I’d been in, here it is you see, you come back that you’ve been MT, so you’ve been working on MT and you’ve got an MT driving licence and whatnot, so I finished up driving a bloody lorry, making a car park. That just shows you. Crew chiefs. We were doing sweated labour if you like. And then the first Vulcan arrived in, was it June? July? Anyway, whatever it was and that was it and of course, the only one that was Geordie Colley, who was the number one, and so it did a while and then he had to go down to Boscombe Down on intensified flying trials. And then during this space of time, they’d allocated crew chiefs for the OCU. The first squadron which was 83, which became 44, and then the second squadron was 101, which was going to be at Coningsby and of course, we’d all been buggering about this long, so four of us, we decided we’d try to jack up the system a bit and we get posted to Coningsby. We were all ready for the Vulcan when it came, what a doing that do. Anyway, I got nominated by the engineering officer to go as number two to Geordie Colley, so I finished up going down to Boscombe Down on the intensified flying trials with this XA 895. That was the first Vulcan. The other one of course, the one that crashed, was Broadhurst was 897 and I was 89, with 895, so I went down there with Geordie Colley and then Geordie Colley’s wife had a baby, so I was left on number 1 with this bloody aeroplane that I knew, well you say you knew nothing about. You were one of the ones that knew anything and everybody, before they did a bloody job, came and asked you was it right, and you had no bloody idea either so it was, and that was the way it went. So I did my spell at Boscombe Down, fell out with the engineering officer, and so he sent me back, which was very nice. So I came back to Coningsby. I get back to Coningsby. No aeroplanes at Coningsby so what, what do we do? You’ve got a crew chief here with no aeroplanes in the wrong airfield because they’d decided the Vulcan wasn’t going to Coningsby, it was going to Finningley, so we got four, four crew chiefs all trained up in the wrong place, wrong time, wrong everything, you know. So I went in to the squadron leader, Coningsby was on C&M I think at the time, ‘cause they were, they were, they’d got some Canberras there I think, but then I went in to see, ‘cause we went there, went in to see the engineering officer who was a squadron leader OCUEng, and so anyway ‘cause then he says, oh, do airframe and whatnot. ‘What have you done, Chief?’ I said, ‘Oh, instructing MT’. ‘Just the man’, he says. ‘You’re in charge of MTSS’. So here am I, a fully trained Vulcan crew chief, in charge of MT servicing, so that was, that was it and I thought, well crikey I’m a, you know, I’ve got sergeants here, MT fitters. I’m not, you know, qualified but anyway it didn’t matter, and then there was another chief tech there doing, so anyway and then the flight sergeant came so I was able to hand over to him without any trouble at all. And they put me then, the MTO said, ‘Oh you’d better come on the MT operating section’ and that was, I went on the MT operating section and that was when, I suppose, I achieved an ambition as a small boy. As a very small boy, all I wanted to do was drive a big lorry, and so anyway, ‘cause I had the MT operating section and whatnot, the MT, I had a 658 to cover me on everything and I managed to drive one of these damned great snow ploughs. So I thought I’d achieved a very ambition of long ago when I was a little boy, so that was it, but then, then of course things all changed and then the next thing that happened they, where was I? Was I still at Coningsby? Yeah. Or was I oh, no we got posted to, did we get posted to Finningley? Got posted to Finn, oh the, we managed to get ‘cause the first squadron was posted to Finningley so they managed to get, we managed to get ourselves, four of us, back posted to Finningley, and of course when we got to Finningley, of course there were new, new quarters. No no equipment barrack equipment in them or anything. We were posted, so the barrack, the barrack warden, you know, he said, ‘I can’t’, you know, ‘I haven’t got the men. I haven’t got transport’, I haven’t got do this, that and the other to furnish these quarters, which need doing, so what we did, I’d got the 658 and I could drive the truck, so we furnished the quarters. The four of us furnished our own quarters out of the stores and all the rest of it, so we furnished our quarters so that we could move the families in. So that was, that was Finningley, and then of course all this was done, and then the next thing, they detached me back to Waddington, ‘cause they, they were taking the Vulcan to America on a bombing competition. So they detached me back to Waddington so that I could go on this, the SAC bombing competition with these, with the Vulcans and because you weren’t allowed to, you were only allowed, you weren’t allowed to have two crew chiefs per aeroplane, the thing was you’d got to have, in your crew, you’d got to have a crew chief standby in case the original crew chief went sick, so I was, this was the best of it was, I was an engine fitter and basically an engine fitter, so I went as an airframe, an airframe mechanic. I went as an airframe mechanic to Florida on the bombing comp, so that was it, but then of course that all went. Came back home and then of course the second squadron, ‘cause the first squadron, the ones that were at Waddington had all got, been crew chiefs and got their aeroplanes, and my friend who got killed, Taf Everson, he got 908, XA908 but, and anyway they, they, he went and everyone got their aeroplane and because I’d been in America, course I was way down the list, so I eventually, eventually when was it? Would have been ’57, would it, then? Yeah, ’57 aye, yeah. Came up and I went to, I had to go to Woodford and I picked up XH475 that was, that was my aeroplane, so anyway I went up there and got that and became part of the squadron, you know. That was the crew chief. Didn’t matter what you were. And of course, got this aeroplane and took it all over the place. Got stuck all over the place. Lost an engine in Goose. Pump failure. So that was on. Got hydraulic failure, the hydraulic system in, where was that? Oh God. It was, oh dear. Where was that? And that was in America. What happened to it? I can’t remember. That was somewhere and then of course we got, come back and you did the ranges. Then they had the, what was it, oh I can’t remember. The exercises you had to go to. Butterworth. Was it profiteer? I don’t know what it was, I can’t remember now. So I took 475 there. I was flying, I was flying with the wing commander’s squadron. Flew out there and got out there flying and whatnot. I had a day off and of course they wanted to do something, and they, my aeroplane, I had a day off and I came, went back and found that some daft bugger had closed the bomb doors on the safety razor and broken one of the bomb door links. Oh God. And that was, I said, ‘That’s a brilliant one isn’t it?’ So, anyway, only had to be, how am I, there we were, how were we going to get back and there’s all the gear we’d got there and of course, you opened the bomb doors and we could open them and put all the stuff in and then you had to, we’d close the bomb doors. The only way then was we had, got local blacksmiths to make a turn buckle, and with turn buckle, so you could close the bomb doors and once you’d closed them, we wound them up so that you couldn’t open them. Anyway, took the fuses out and everything, so I had a bomb door, bomb bay full of US equipment, all my tyres were, had been burnt and worn, so I said to the wing commander, I said, I said, ‘I’ve got no I’ve got no gear in as I can use’. I said, ‘If we get left behind, we’re stuck’. He said, ‘We won’t get left behind’. But then of course, the next thing that happened was, I don’t know how, crack! My bomb aimer’s window was cracked. Oh dear. So I said to the wing commander, I said, ‘We’ve got a cracked bomb aimer’s window’. I said, I said, I said ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘We’ll have to fly back with it’. I said ‘I’ll do a pressurisation and see’, you know, ‘if it’s alright’. He said ‘We’ll do the pressurisation on the way home’. That was it. So I flew home with a bomb bay full of rubbish, a bomb, a cracked bomb aimer’s window and came home that way. Landed and that was it. We managed without any trouble. I can’t remember, did we have any troubles? I normally get all sorts of troubles and that but, but I didn’t. I think we got back home without, and then of course, that was it. And then of course the next one was the CnC and whatnot, wanted to go on a lecture tour of America or something but he, he didn’t go in mine. He went on, I forget, was it 909? I think it was, with his own crew chief, Bill Neane I think, but then that got, flew via the Azores to Bermuda. Got to Bermuda and the inverter failed and his brakes, a brake failed. The CnC wanted another aeroplane to go in so that was it. God knows what time of night I got knocked up in my night quarter, and they said, ‘Chief, we’re going, we’ve got to take, get an aeroplane to Bermuda. His inverter’s gone, brake units so we’ve got to take all the spares’. So there’s me, middle of the night with a pannier, getting bits and pieces and loading it all up, and then off we get to go to Bermuda via the Azores. The Azores. Always remember the, the, was he, is it Portuguese? I think he was, this officer looked as though he’d come out of, oh what’s the name? I can’t think of the place. He had tassels on his uniform and all sorts of things, and did I want compression. I said, ‘Did I want compression?’ I couldn’t figure out what he was on about. Eventually I worked out that he, ‘Did I want compressed air?’ Oh yeah, I wanted compressed air, yeah, so, but anyway that was left there without any trouble at all. Got to Bermuda and then of course met the crew chief and the crew of this 909. Landed there, got off the aeroplane and I got, got met by two Canadian Navy petty officers with a big bottle of whisky. ‘Come and have a drink mate’, you know. We’ve got, you know. I said, ‘I can’t drink and do’ and anyway my other crew chief there I said, ‘Alright we’ll have a drink’. So managed to have a couple of whiskies, but we’d got to change everything on these two aeroplanes because of all the gear from his aeroplane had to be transferred from mine to his and all the rest of it, so we did a pannier change and wheel change with the only support we had, ‘cause it should take four men to winch a pannier down off a Vulcan, was two crew chiefs and two drunken Canadian naval petty officers. So, but we managed and that, that was that. We had a bit of a problem. They had an electrical problem on start-up. It was robbed of, robbed a component off the aeroplane and that was my aeroplane ‘cause I’d been, I’d changed, I’d made, well I’d thought I was going to go through with, with 476 but then, I don’t know whether the CnC wanted Bill Neane. I don’t know what it was but I finished up with this heap of rubbish in Bermuda instead of going onwards. And then, oh dear that, where did we get to? Yeah. Two drunken petty officers winching the pannier. It was amazing we got it down but anyway, we got it down. We got the gear changed over and everything, and Bill Neane wouldn’t drink anymore so as I was stopping, I was stuck. These two petty officers and whatnot decided we should finish this bottle of whisky. Oh God. What a thing isn’t it? So that was it. Then they, that changed over, then of course, they all got in. The bloody aeroplane went u/s again. That was the one I’d brought in so the CnC had to go, he had a date in America, the CN not the CnC was he? Not the CnC. Whatever he was. Whoever he was he had to go on by, by American transport and how humiliating really. So then of course, I had to rob, I robbed the aeroplane, robbed the u/s aeroplane to get this one serviceable. Then of course, had to get to America, and of course the CnC was acting as co-pilot, so of course there was one pilot missing, so the only way was the co-pilot that came up, came over with me, had to go on to America with this, with this, this other aeroplane. I don’t know how they finished up but anyway the co-pilot came back, but then, then of course the problem came, of course, I had this, left with this aeroplane in Bermuda with brakes troubles and inverter troubles. They’d sent an inverter, they’d sent an electrician out via BOAC to give me assistance on this electrical stuff, but then of course, he came out and I said, ‘Righto we’ll, we’ve changed the inverter. We’re alright. We’ll change, do the brake change.’ We can do the brake change and of course he was an electrician, and of course all he had to do to help me was to jack up and whatnot, and of course then, there was, then came a sorry tale. I got the jack underneath to, to change the brake units on this and I found that the bogie beam had a crack in it, a crack right along the end. Oh, at the end. I thought, what the devil do we, so anyway, all I got, I said to the captain, I said, ‘We’re in trouble here’. I said, ‘We’ve got a cracked bogie beam’. ‘Oh dear’, he said. So anyway, I’ve signals going back and forth, this cracked bogie beam. I said ‘Well we could drill a hole at the termination of the crack, but then the bogie beam takes all the stress of landing’. So I thought, oh well, but anyways I left it up to the UK air to decide, so they sent out a Doughty draughtsman, techno, oh, stress man or something, to see whether there was any possibility of doing this and he came out, and of course, no. Obviously he wouldn’t say it was even, if it probably was, because if it had cracked and the aircraft had crashed, it would have been him, so that was, that was it, so I was left there with this bloody aeroplane, with the rain pouring down, wind blowing, with this, with this aeroplane. Salt air was making things go a bit rusty but anyway they decided, well they had to change the bogie beam, the bogie beam. I don’t know [unclear]. The bogie beam carries the whole aeroplane of four wheels on one side, you know so, and the weight of the aeroplane so that had to be jacked up. The thing was, was all the equipment, was getting the equipment out to me in Bermuda and of course, the Air Force in those days, hadn’t got any bloody transport aeroplanes at all I don’t think, so they had, they had to hire, hire a DC6 to carry this. So I’d got four jacks, one hydraulic rig ‘cause retractions had to be done, so I had four jacks and a hydraulic rig, and of course they sent it out in this DC6, but fortunately they sent two, a chief tech out of their hydraulic bay and another rigger who was, he was, he was ex Halton boy, the same as me. So we had a chief tech, me a crew chief, a chief tech rigger, a sergeant rigger and a sergeant electrician and the aircrew, and these jacks all had to be built up ‘cause they couldn’t fly them in the aircraft whole so they were all in bits, so I had to build all these jacks up, fill them with hydraulic oil and do everything there to get these jacks up before we could jack the aeroplane up. And the other thing was a negotiation with the, the master sergeant of the hangar, ‘cause there was only one hangar on Bermuda and that was, had the doors welded open so that the wind could blow through it ‘cause otherwise it would have blown off and this, as I say, this master sergeant looked like Geronimo. I’m sure he was Indian anyway and we got on but he, he was not, he was a hard looking man and of course then he said, I said, well you know trying to negotiate use of this hangar for jacking up. He said, ‘Yes’. He said, ‘You can have the hangar but’, he said, ‘For twelve hours only and that’s all’. Twelve hours. I thought, bloody hell and all that, you know we’ve got to change and do hydraulic tests and everything on this, but anyway we managed it. And then a dry, to drive these axles out of the, of the bogie beam was, was the only way we could use - the Americans had solid chocks like sleepers and the way we drove these axles out of there was by one of these chocks and heaving it like a battering ram, but anyway we got the axles out. We got it all done anyway, and all the rest of it and retractions and the wind was blowing through the hangar, but we managed it. We did, we did it all. Much to, well we had to do it in the time, we hadn’t got much option and anyway, we got it out and on the, then of course all trouble started ‘cause then of course, I got water in the pitot system. That was ‘cause of all this terrible rain and the pitot head covers were bloody ridiculous so that was another job I had to do. Clean out, get all the water out of the pitot system. So that was it. ‘Righto’, he says. ‘That’s it. We’ve still got to do an air test’. So we got down to do, I forgot to mention that the only power, the only power source ‘cause the Vulcan bombers was a hundred and twelve volt DC and the only power source they’d got, ‘cause the Americans don’t use it, they use twenty eight volt but the, and only one we could do was borrow. They had a hundred and twelve volt for the, was it the Britannia on the, BOAC, BOAC side or British, yeah, British Airways side of Bermuda, so I had to borrow their diesel generator when they weren’t using it, so that was another thing. So I had to borrow this and then they had to tow it across the airfield to me. So anyway, that was, that was that was another thing, borrowing it and negotiating and all the rest of it. So we got that, got that done and eventually got it, got it started and, ‘Righto, we’re off’, you know and, oh that’s right. When I found that it goes boring off again and, that’s right and of course, they shut down and came back. I said, ‘What’s, what’s the trouble?’ ‘We’ve got no ASI’, no Air Speed Reading. This was when I found out that these pitot head covers were no good ‘cause I got water in the pitot system, so that all had to be drained, all that drained, done, everything else. ‘Have another go’. So we had another go, air test. Off they went and they flew around. I thought, ‘Oh we’re in business here’, they landed and I said, ‘Any?’ ‘Yes. Compass’. Oh dear God. Compass. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ They said, ‘Our readings are wrong’, you know, somewhere along. I said well you know, so after much investigating, I thought, well it’s near impossible, the two pilot’s repeaters were duff. I thought it’s either that or the master indicator. The master. And I thought, if it’s the master, we’re in trouble ‘cause we’d got to do a compass sweep and all the rest of it for that. So anyway, back goes signals and the next thing comes out an instrument maker who happened to be an instrument maker off my entry of course, so I knew him personally. A chief tech. Instrument came back BOAC. I mean his, his, his excess weight baggage was off because he’d bought a compass, a master indicator, the blinkin’ whole bloody bag of shoots with him, and what state to do a compass sweep if he had to. Anyway, it turned out it was the two, as I thought it was, the two pilot’s repeaters were both u/s. Most unusual. So, anyway, that was, that was changed. I mean, mind you in this period I know all this stuff had to be packed up and whatnot and landed on this DC6, to be flown back home and so that was another job. And where had we got to? Oh aye, the compass, that was it. Oh, that was it. Then the other thing was, the thing that was before the compass, I can’t remember. Number 3 tank on the portside had developed a bloody leak and the Mark I tanks were not what I’d call brilliant. Anyway, the only way I could do it was, I thought, well I don’t know what I can do with this leak, and the Americans had some, had some peculiar sealant that they had, ‘cause they used a similar sort of thing that I used, and after much, as I say, I’d got to know this, my master sergeant quite well and I had a long chat with him, and I said, ‘Well have you got some stuff that I can maybe cure this leak?’ ‘Cause I knew where it was. The tank where the pump housing and everything was, prone to split. The bolt holes tend to split so I, after much talk with this man I dropped the, I dropped the pump on number 3 tank and lathered this sealant in place, hoping it would do it because I mean, the tank change was beyond and so I had a go. It wasn’t, it wasn’t much good at all but then of course, we’d had the air test. We’d had everything done. We were all ready to go home, but with this tank and I said ‘Well’, I said, ‘We’ve got the pilot who was’, Beavis, his name was. Who was he? He finished up a, was he master of the Royal Air Force or something? Mike Beavis, and I said to, and John Ward was the co-pilot, I said, ‘Well look. I can, I can put fuel it for you to go home’, because by this time, we were, we were, this was the only thing that was stopping us. I said, ‘To go home’, I said, ‘Look, we either if you can work it out with number 3 tank empty, we can make it’. I said, ‘Otherwise’, I said, ‘I’ll fill number 3 tank’, and this was number 3 tank port, I said, ‘And then you use all that fuel off that tank for everything to empty it’. And then I said, ‘What’s left we’ll just have to let it leak out’. And so John Ward did his calculations, that we could fly back with that number 3 tank empty, so I then sort of took all the fuses out, took the pump off it and everything. Well, the pump was there but I took the fuses out and everything so that the pump couldn’t overheat or anything, and that was, so we flew back from Bermuda to the Azores. So we land back to the Azores and so I said we were alright from the Azores back home with still number 3 tank empty, and then, of course, oh damn. The Azores, we started off on my pack that I’d got, with the battery pack that I’d got in the bomb, in the pannier, started up and was doing and then they said, Number 3 inverted, was the one that I’d changed, we’d changed in Bermuda. Number 3 inverter had gone down. I said, ‘Oh God’, you know, I said, I said, ‘Well we’re sunk’. I said, ‘I’ve no spare inverters that I can change’. I said we, we, I said, ‘Look. It’s, it’s number 3. We can go on’. Number 3 was the sort of standby. I said, ‘We can either’, to the captain, I said, ‘Look. We either wait here and I get an inverter to change it or we fly home on everything we’ve got with no spare’. So, after a bit of a discussion they said, ‘We’ll, we’ll, go home’. So we started up and flew home. Got, ‘cause we came from Finningley really. Course we landed at Waddington and of course, we had to there for customs clearance of all things. So we landed at Waddington and the wing commander was there to greet us, and my captain who was not the, not the first pilot, he was the navigator, ‘Oh’, he said, we could, he said ‘If you put a brake chute in, we could fly home couldn’t we?’ I said, ‘Look’, I said, ‘I’ll put you a brake chute in but’, I said, I said, ‘I’ll walk home’. I said, I said, ‘That’s a bloody heap of rubbish this is’. A heap of rubbish. So anyway, the wing commander was there and so I said, ‘Well that’s it’. And, and that aeroplane at Waddington, took them a fortnight to get it serviceable enough to fly it to Finningley. So that was, that was me. I came home after months in Bermuda and the wing commander said, ‘You’d better have a couple of days off’. But that was a bloody aeroplane. Bloody aeroplane. 909. XA909. It wasn’t mine, it was Fred Harrison’s. It wasn’t one I fetched, and then oh, after that, we went to, we went on a, to Butterworth. Went to Butterworth and then we, because this was when they shut my damned, did I tell you about that. I haven’t put that on there have I? No. I can’t remember, I’ve told that much. They shook my, they shook my aircraft [unclear], broken the bomb doors. I had to take 9, I had to take, the aircrew wanted to go, were minded to take an aircraft to Manila in the Philippines from Butterworth, and mine was u/s with these bomb doors, and the only one I could take was 909. The engineer said, ‘Do you mind taking 909?’ ‘Cause that was the one that I was stuck in Bermuda, Bermuda with. I said, ‘I’ll take anything as long as it's serviceable’, so, and that was the only, the only range I ever did where I had a serviceable aircraft from start to finish. I flew there no troubles. No troubles there and flew back and that was the only, only trip I ever did in a Vulcan where I didn’t do, didn’t have any problems. MJ: On behalf of the International Bomber Command Archive I’d like to thank Warrant Officer Charles Bland at his home in Lincolnshire on the 17th of August 2015. Thank you for the recording. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Charles Bland Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mick Jeffery Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-08-17 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ABlandC150817, PBlandC1501 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Language A language of the resource eng Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Vivienne Tincombe Maureen Clarke Carolyn Emery Description An account of the resource Charles Bland joined the Royal Air Force in February 1942 and went to RAF Halton as an Aircraft Apprentice. He tells of his training at Halton, and describes the different trades and his exams to become an Leading Aircraftsman 1st Class, where he was then transferred to a Repair and Inspection Unit (R&I) working on Spitfire engines. He went to India via the Suez Canal and then on to Ceylon to 121 Repair and Salvage Unit, looking after two squadrons of Beaufighters and a squadron of Spitfires but he says that he could turn his hand to anything. He was posted to instruct at a Motor Transport Unit, and spent time learning about the maintenance of other equipment including diesel engines. Charles was posted to 109 Maintenance Unit, repairing Merlin engines, although, at this time, the V bombers were coming into service. He trained as a Crew Chief and, after passing exams, he was assigned to the Avro Vulcan XA908, at RAF Waddington. Charles describes the work he did when the Vulcan had hydraulic failure at Goose Gree; the bombing competition in Florida, where the aircraft suffered broken bomb bay doors and a cracked bomb aimer's window and the trip home from Bermuda with no fuel in one tank and a broken bogie beam. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 02:21:37 audio recording Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1942 1944 1945 1949 Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Great Britain Egypt India Malaya Sri Lanka Egypt--Ismailia (Province) England--Buckinghamshire England--Lincolnshire England--Yorkshire India--Delhi India--Tambaram India--Vishakhapatnam Sri Lanka--Vavuniya North Africa Beaufighter C-47 fitter airframe fitter engine ground crew ground personnel Meteor military discipline military service conditions RAF Boscombe Down RAF Coningsby RAF Finningley RAF Halton RAF Kirton in Lindsey RAF Waddington RAF Worksop service vehicle Spitfire Women’s Auxiliary Air Force York