1 25 3 https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/1192/11765/PWestonJ1703.2.jpg 2faeb0311e15f568727cc9eb29f838bc https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/1192/11765/AWestonJ171130.1.mp3 ca67913cb7dd29e3f9fe480f551f519c 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 Weston, Jim James Weston J Weston Description An account of the resource Four items. An oral history interview with Flight Sergeant Jim Weston (b. 1922, 1539596 Royal Air Force) an identity card and photographs. He flew operations as a pilot with 23 Squadron. The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by James Weston and catalogued by Nigel Huckins. 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 2017-11-30 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 Weston, J Transcribed audio recording A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document SP: This is Susanne Pescott and I am interviewing James ‘Jim’ Weston, a pilot with 23 Squadron today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We’re at Jim’s home and it is the 30th of November 2017. Also present at the interview is Jim’s son, Steve. So, first of all, thank you, Jim, for agreeing to talk to me today. So first of all, do you want to tell me a little bit about your life before you joined the RAF? JW: Well, I worked in a paper factory and when the war started I was transferred to the engineering department and by 1940 and ’41 I was on munitions, on a milling machine, making aircraft parts. So when one of my friends had joined up earlier than me was killed in Norway and my other friend was waiting to be called up, so I went to Wigan to join up. They told me that the job I was in, my boss would get me off the list in reserved occupation but the interviewer said, there’s just one exception, if you volunteer for aircrew, and passed the interview and the medical, it takes preference, so that’s what I did, and that’s how I got in the Air Force. SP: And what was it that you particularly wanted to join the Air Force for? JW: I was interested in radio. I wanted to become a radio mechanic but when they did call me up some months later, it was to Blackpool to be an air gunner wireless operator. But while I was there in three months in Blackpool, an officer came round and said they were short of pilots and navigators, if anybody wanted to remuster, now was the time, so I remustered and got on a pilot’s course. SP: So, what was life like at Blackpool at that time? JW: Well, it was just a fortnight before the Americans came in the war in 1941 and there must have been a thousand men there, learning to be wireless operators, so, I joined this group that went to ACRC in London near Lord’s Cricket Ground in a group, of some flats. From there we were posted to St Andrews in Scotland to join ITW, Initial Training Wing on a pilot’s course. From there three or four months later, after ground subjects, we went to Perth in Scotland on Tiger Moths to learn to fly. So we weren’t told how we’d got on but I’ve been posted from there to Manchester, Heaton Park where people weren’t always easy. We were going to go either South Africa, America or Canada, that’s the three places that pilots were trained and everybody wanted America because we knew how good it was. But late in Autumn of ’42 we got a train to Glasgow and finished up on the Queen Mary which docked in Canada, sorry, docked in Boston, America and we got a train from there to Canada. But the Queen Mary, some weeks before, had collided with a cruiser and sank it and it had, its bowels were crippled, but they hadn’t got time to repair the ship, they filled it with concrete. So I went to America while it was like that some months later before they repaired it properly. So from, the train journey to Canada to a place called Moncton, we went to a Assiniboia to an airfield, it was a three day train journey to get to the middle of Canada and that, from there on we learned to fly Tiger Moths with a covered cockpit because it was very bad weather in Canada, the winter of Canada, I went past the part of the early flying, posted again to North Canada, to North Battleford to fly Oxfords, that meant we were going in to Bomber Command. So by May 1943, we finished the course and we all got wings, posted back down to Moncton again, ready to go for a ship, from there we moved to Halifax, in Nova Scotia, and we caught a ship back to UK, docking in Liverpool in 1943, June I think it was. And from there we went on further training to Scotland on Beaufighters eventually being swapped over to Mosquitoes which got me to Little Snoring in Norfolk where eventually I did a tour. SP: So, before we talk about your tour, do you want to tell me a little bit about what life was like while you were training, what would a typical day be like while you were doing your training in Canada? JW: Well, the first part of the training that we did in Perth on Tiger Moths, I think there were thirty of us, and we all have to do so many hours with an instructor, and the instructor threw the aircraft about a bit, mild aerobatics and two of the crew were constantly airsick and they were taken off the course to either be a navigator or a bomb aimer. It seems that they don’t mind you being sick in the back of the aircraft but not if you’re sitting- if you’re flying in it, so we lost two there and gradually the twenty eight of us moved to Canada and some more fell out on the trip. So we finished up eventually getting to Battleford with some more that joined us about thirty odd people that I’ve shown you on that photograph where we got wings. SP: So, when you were in Canada itself, what was the airbase like where you were, where were you billeted? JW: The airfield in Assiniboia was a grass airfield so we, it was all snow at the time we were flying on it. SP: Was that hard to [unclear]? JW: Well, if you can land an airplane on snow, you can land it anywhere because you have now perception of depth when you’re flying over a white blanket, like I say, some failed by the wayside by doing this. SP: And you flew quite few different planes there, you said, the Tiger Moths started off and? JW: Tiger Moth, from Tiger Moth to Oxfords. SP: Yeah. JW: And then we got back to UK, more Oxford training and eventually on to Blenheims and Blenheims, from Blenheims you went to Beaufighters and I was on Beaufighters when D-Day was announced. So we were taken off Beaufighters almost overnight and said, you going to go on Mosquitos now not Beaufighters, so, we got two hours dual on a Mosquito and then he said, off you go and that was the amount of training we got on a Mosquito, two hours. SP: And was it quite a lot different from the? JW: It was a faster aircraft altogether but a Mosquito. SP: Yeah. So, which was your preferred plane of those, which did you enjoy flying? JW: The Mosquito I think, that was, once you got over the odd things about it like slight swing on, take off it was a very nice aircraft that, never had any trouble with it. SP: Yeah, so, you then got posted to 23 Squadron JW: 23 Squadron, yeah SP: At Little Snoring JW: To do intruder work. SP: Do you want to tell me a little about what that was, intruder work? JW: My first trip was to Zuider Zee in Holland, find out the coastline, just a sort of break-in trip and then the next one after that was to Denmark and gradually we went into further ones into Germany with the exception of we did, I did three to Norway and all the rest were Germany. SP: And what would a typical trip be, what would the role be for you? JW: Well, we were briefed at two o’clock in the afternoon, told where we were going to go, if there were say thirty of us about to go out that night we went off at different times. It might be from two o’clock after briefing you could be going out as soon as it got dark somebody would be taking off. And then all those wait till four o’clock in the morning to do their take-off, so there was always a constant stream of people going back and to from Snoring.There were two squadrons on the station, 23 and 515. SP: I’ll just let the clock chiming there [clock chimes] [laughs], yeah, so we got 23 and 515, so, obviously you’d take-off, what would your, what would you be doing in your role on a trip then, so you’d take off and say a typical trip to Germany what would that be? JW: Well, we took off and I was low level, we never went above about two or three thousand feet down to four hundred feet except on a couple of special occasions when all the squadron were told to all go off at the same time and bomb a certain city to draw the night fighters from one part of Germany to give the heavy boys less trouble. Two of the stations to bomb were Bonn, BONN, we all went to Bonn one night and another night we all went to Wurzburg and we had to bomb from about fifteen thousand feet. And it was a clear night and as I went over the city I could see the trams running, you know when a tram goes over the points you see flashes, electricity, I could see all the trams are running, all the way through the raid, SP: Did you meet much opposition on the trip? JW: Never saw any German night fighters but a certain amount of flak, especially over a large city, if you flew over a large city, they’d poop off with the flak but when we went to attack an airfield, the airfield would never fire at you until you’d open the fire first. I suppose they thought they were cloaked in darkness and it was always blacked out the airfield, so, we’d find it, attack it and then the flak would started after we’d done the attack. SP: Yeah. Are there any particular operations that stand out in your mind for any particular events or anything? JW: Well, I went to a place called Kitzingen two or three times and that’s just north of Munich I think it is, and just south of the airfield there was a hill with three red lights on it for the German airmen, so if we got a bit misty all we had to do is find these three red lights and fly due North for two minutes and we were over the airfield. I actually attacked Kitzingen on Christmas eve, that was my trip to Kitzingen, and it was lit up and so we attacked it with cannon fire that particular night, the flak started but I’d had gone then. SP: Particularly how many planes would there be on those sort of operations? JW: Well, if we had news that one particular station was now harbouring night fighters the attack would be, there’d be about, three of us would be attacking the airfield in rotation, somebody might do it from seven till eight, I might do eight till nine, and somebody would do nine till ten, keep their night fighters on the floor. SP: So, how do you feel about those operations, cause obviously it was an operation that was really helping the heavy bombers, wasn’t it to keep them out of the air? JW: Yeah, that was the idea, intruders was designed for that reason so, once you’d done the trip over the airfield, you’d done your hour, if you have any bombs left or cannon fire left you’d attack a train or anything that moved over Germany at night so it was trains, we used to go after the engine. SP: Was that quite often, you had some time to do that or ammunitions left or JW: Yes, several, I can’t say the exact number, but it was occasionally we’d have to, have time to do that, yes SP: Anything else about that time in 23 Squadron that stands out or? JW: One particular night, I don’t know if it was January or February, I, my turn to go, say about eight o’clock at night, I can’t remember exactly but it was snowing very hard and there was snow already about an inch all over the airfield. So I could taxi round by seeing the blue lights through the snow till I got to take-off point and it was still snowing very hard and I couldn’t see the lights on the runway to guide me for a take-off only the first two or three lights. I sat there with the engine going for a minute or two and then a voice came out of the dark and said, aircraft at the end of the runway, take-off at your own discretion, that means they put it in your call so I figured it and then I thought, well, if I can see two or three lights now from here, as I progressed forward I’ll see the next few and the next few. So I decided to take off and I got off alright but as soon as we were airborne in the snow, I went on to instruments, turned round, this was going west, so I turned round to go east, so, I was over the North Sea when suddenly all the instruments stopped, they were locked, so I didn’t know, what height I was doing, what speed I was doing, so I was, it was still in a snow cloud and I was feeling, flying the aircraft by feel not by incident instrument and it suddenly started to stall, and my navigator shouted at the same time as I put the stick forward and I got out of the storm I thought, I climbed slowly, I wanted to get above the cloud and then drop down when I got through the side.Eventually I got over the cloud and I looked round and the instruments were still locked so I remember being shown a year ago about a direction finder in the tail here, hanging on the loop, on the barrel about this big and it was a direction finder, so, I looked around for the instrument was on the right hand side and by this time I was above the cloud and I looked round and found the North Star and set this gyro to zero for North and then I put a mayday call out. I got a call from, I forget the name of the place but it was Woodbridge in, where is it, near Ipswich I think it is, and it was an emergency airfield and they talked me down, I wanted to know what height I was at and eventually they talked me down and I landed. When I landed the instruments were still stuck and my navigator asked one of the instrument mechanics to come and have a look at it to confirm that I’d landed with no instruments that I’d had the trouble. So we, they put us up for the night and by this time the next morning it had thawed so I went back to Little Snoring then. SP: So, you obviously you had a night at a different base that time? JW: What? SP: You had a night at a different base that time, but you were based at Little Snoring, do you want to tell me a little bit about the airfield and the base there? JW: That was a couple of miles outside a little town called Fakenham and we got out once or twice into the town but not very often and about every seven weeks we got a leave which extended, you know, over the twenty seven weeks I was based there so I got a few trips home. The CO was a Wing Commander Murphy and he was a real toff, very, one of the old school. But I know on the airfield there used to be a Tiger, no, a Tiger Moth, a Magister aircraft, single engine and an Oxford and all the pilots were supposed to use these two aircraft occasionally, to get keep the hand in and I went to the CO Murphy and I said, I’ve got a weekend off now, can I borrow the Oxford or the Magister? And he said, take the Oxford, and I took it and flew it to the nearest airfield to Warrington, about two miles south of here and I stopped over the weekend and then flew it back. So next time I was off, a few months later, I went to him again and I said, can I borrow the Oxford? And he said, yes, but I want you to take my navigator with you this time, he was a flight lieutenant and he was from Liverpool but we couldn’t land at Liverpool, so we landed at a little airfield opposite Liverpool, on the other side of the Mersey called Hooton Park, so I dropped him off and another person while they went on leave and I came to Stretton and then on the Sunday morning I went back to Hooton Park, picked the two of them, pair of them up and flew them back to Little Snoring. That’s how good the CO was. SP: Yeah. JW: Yeah. SP: The benefits of being a pilot, I’ve not heard that before. Yeah. JW: Yeah, well, I went to Stretton four times, twice in an Oxford, once in a Magister and another time I was on a seven day leave when the rest of my friends in the squadron we have helped to do an air test and I said to one of them, while you’re doing an air test, can you drop me off at Stretton in Warrington. I took him to Warrington in about twenty minutes and he dropped me off and I came home and when I went back on the train it took me about twelve hours. SP: Definitely a different journey JW: Yeah. SP: So, you talked about your crew there, do you want to talk about your crew, who was in your crew? JW: My crew? SP: Yeah, your crew. JW: It was Don Francis, he was, at the time served instrument mechanic who transferred to aircrew and became a navigator, he was very, very good. Oddly enough, we only lost, was it, eighteen months ago he died. We were due to go and meet him and his sons and they rang us up and said Don had died overnight. So we kept in touch over the years, and met once or twice on reunions but was about to see him for the last time and we were too late, he’d died. SP: It’s good you kept in touch all those years to catch up. JW: Oh yeah, we did, yeah. SP: So, there were two crew on a Mosquito? JW: Two, yeah. SP: Yeah. So, and how did you crew up, how did you all get together? JW: We crewed up when we were on Beaufighters in Scotland, learned to fly a Beaufighter and as soon as you’re competent in it, we all got in one big room and there were say ten pilots and ten navigators and they just said pair up. So he came to me and said, have you crewed up yet? So, I said, no, he said, oh well, I’ll join you then and that’s how we met. SP: And it worked perfectly ‘cause you really got on, you kept in touch all these years. Yeah. JW: Yes, we did. [pause] One particular night, I wasn’t available for some reason and my navigator was spare and the CO Wing Commander Murphy went to him and said, would you like to do a trip with me? And Don said, no, he said, why is that? He said, well, I know Weston’s a damn good pilot, but I don’t know what you’re like. So, he wouldn’t go with him. But sometime later, Murphy did the same thing, to a flight sergeant Dougy Darbon and they got shot down. That was the end of Murphy. But there’s been a lot of talk about this Dresden being a cruel raid but actually it was my last raid and I had to go to an airfield in the Ruhr which was supposed to be a night fighter base which is on the way to Dresden but, there was, nothing happened, there was no activity at all and but Dresden was bombed twice I think, once by us and once by the Americans and there’s been a lot of talk about it being cruel, but it was no more cruel than these V-2s that were dropped on London and other places, that was just as bad as attacking, it was, anybody, didn’t it, the V-2? SP: So the, you were due to go to an airfield that was outside Dresden to draw the night fighters. JW: To draw the night fighters, or stop the night fighters getting off, yeah. SP: Yeah. JW: But, like I say, it didn’t mean a thing towards Dresden and it was the same as Cologne or any other German city, yeah. SP: Yeah. JW: Yeah, I remember one particular night, we’d been to an airfield and there was no activity and I said to the navigator, find me a town on the way back, city or a town, and he, he pointed he said 5 minutes will be so and so, and we, I forget the name of the town or the city now, so I dropped a bomb on that and then came back to base. The next night we were getting briefed for another raid, another trip and they announced that this particular city that we dropped one bomb on was due for a four hundred Halifax and Lancaster raid [laughs] so the people who had the first night they think, oh, that bomb, that one bomb, it will be all over in a minute, but four hundred more kept coming, I can’t remember the name of the city now. SP: You said on one trip you actually escorted four hundred Halifaxes. JW: Yes. SP: Can you tell me about that trip? JW: Five of us were briefed one afternoon to say you’re going to Norway tomorrow but today fly to Scotland , Dallachy, and wait there overnight. And if the raid is still on the next morning, there’s four hundred Halifaxes going to Bergen which is in north Norway after the U-boat pens. So we were told what time they were taking off and we took off an hour later because we were a hundred mile an hour faster and we caught them up, we could find, we were in rain or snow or cloud most of the way but my navigator had them on the radar we knew exactly where they were all the aircraft and as we approached Norway by a miracle about fifty miles away from Norway, the cloud disappeared and it was a perfect day. I was about fifteen thousand feet and I climbed higher because the bombers were gonna go in about fifteen and we could see little ships coming out of the harbour all going out to sea, they all knew what was coming up. Slowly these Halifaxes came over and hit these U-boat pens and in about five or ten minutes, there was nothing but grey smoke coming from the coastline and we’ve circled round and round waiting to see if any German fighters came up but there was no activity like that and eventually the four hundred has finished and we waited till they’d all dropped the bombs and still turned round. We had to escort them to, I think it was two degrees east or something like that, something beyond the range of their fighters and once we let them go, we catching them up again so and circled around to waste time and gradually as they all disappeared back to UK, we went back to Scotland to refuel at Little Snoring. We got back to Little Snoring and put the radio on at night and they said a force of, I don’t think they mentioned Halifaxes, a force of bombers attacked Bergen in Norway today and one aircraft was lost but it wasn’t lost over the target what, we found out later on its way back to UK it flew into a hill and so, it was a completely well worked out trip and nobody hurt at all. [pause] On one particular trip on the way to Holland, about fifteen hundred feet, two thousand feet, I could see V-1s coming the other way and I described it to the debriefing officer later and he said, oh, we know all about them, we are dealing with them. So I forgot that until some weeks or days, I’m not sure of the time, I was approaching Holland and I saw a light on the ground suddenly start to lift off and I thought it was a fighter or another, one of their aircraft about to take off and I followed it and watched it climb and I climbed so far after it and it was a lot faster than me and the last time I saw it, it looked like a star, the light had gone. I reported this to the debriefing officer and he said, ‘oh, we know all about them, you’ll be hearing about it’, so a fortnight later we found out that it was a V-2, I’d seen one take off but as I passed over the spot I told my navigator to plot the position so they knew where it was from but I do believe later they were moving these V-2 sites constantly to baffle the people who were seeing them take off. My last raid was on the night of Dresden. I had to go to an airfield in the Ruhr, it was supposed to be a night fighter base but it was complete darkness I went round and round and found nothing at all and came back to base, having not fired a shot because couldn’t see anything but Dresden was a target that was attacked by the RAF and the American Air Force in over two days so that was the end of my tour. I was, after some leave I was posted back to Scotland to a place called Charterhall where they were training other night fighters base to join the squadrons doing the work, I was on this base when V E Day, so I was posted to another airfield in Lincoln where I met another pilot from 23 Squadron and we were there two or three weeks, and there was a notice came on the notice board, they wanted pilots to train on single engine aircraft Typhoons, to go to the Far East, so I said to this Benny who was, I met there, do you fancy that? So he said, yeah, so we both put our names down this to go and train on single seat fighters. A fortnight later the postings came through, he was posted on Tiger Moths and I was posted on Dakotas which I did for the next three years. So, I joined a squadron at Manston, Kent, going back and to, to Germany and places like Gibraltar until ’47 when I was posted to Burton Wood in Lancashire waiting a posting overseas. Eventually the posting came in, it was Egypt and I was posted to Fayid on the canal zone and there’s, the chief officer of the canal zone, I met him and he saw my logbook and he said, oh, Mosquitoes, he said, I’ll put you on Mosquitoes. After all this training on Dakotas I was now going back on Mosquitoes and it was a PRU unit at Fayid. But they’d formed, photographed everything for five hundred miles in every direction so there was nothing to do until one day the CO came in the crew room and he said, can anybody fly an Anson? Well, I said, I can, I’d had a couple of hours, so he said, right, get yourself on a Dakota to Iraq [clock chimes] SP: Just wait for the clocks to chime [laughs] JW: [laughs] When you get to Iraq, at Habbaniyah, you wait there for a York to take you to India, I want you to bring an Anson back because the British were getting out of India at this time, if you remember the date, and so I flew this Anson back the long route all the way back to Egypt, got it back to Fayid and another, a week went by and he said there’s another aircraft in India, who wants to bring it back? Who wants to go? So two of us put our hands up and there was two, two were waiting there, two more Ansons so we did the same trip Habbaniyah. Wait for a York and when the York was approaching Habbaniyah the one, I was a passenger in this York and another York came alongside flying in formation and ahead was only about, fifteen, twenty miles away from Karachi when this other York, this suddenly decided to lift off and come over the top of those, and he came over the top of us and knocked the tail off. The York has three fins at the back and it knocked three foot off, every fin. What the pilot managed to get it down and they were both charged then with dangerous flying but we were very, very lucky that day we didn’t knock it all off. From there they realised there was no work for this PRU squadron (Photographic Reconnaissance Unit) and I was posted to a Dakota squadron at Kabrit, so that was a more interesting place and there lots of trips that we did to, we went to Greece, Sudan, Eritrea, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and India and in 1948, May 1948, how many? Six of us were briefed to go to Israel to bring out the air force, the British were getting out of Israel at this time, three of these aircraft went the first day and I was on the second wave and when we went down to flights the next day the CO was waiting for us, he said, there’s been some trouble at Ramat David, this airfield, the Egyptian Spitfires have come over, five of them and attacked all these Dakotas. One was blown up and burned out, one was damaged and they also attacked the control tower, so he said, you three are going but you’ve a Tempest escort to get you there. So we went off with these Tempest, we got to Ramat David and we evacuated personnel and equipment from there to Cyprus but as we went back, as we went to Cyprus at night time the next day we were in a bar, somebody brought a newspaper in and the headlines were RAF shoot down five Egyptian Spitfires. These Spitfires, they’d come back again and these two Tempests were waiting for them and they shot the five down, so that was the end of that. Actually this, the one that was damaged, was still working on the airfield and I waited with him and eventually he said, the pilot came to me and he said, I’m gonna take off and if it’s alright I’ll come over and give you a waggle and he said, you can take off then. He said, if it’s dangerous, I’ll come and land and I’ll come home with you. Anyway, he took off and he came back apparently alright, did this and then I took off and I flew the last aeroplane out of Israel back to Egypt. SP: So Jim, do you want to talk a little bit about your route to India when you were doing the transport? JW: Yeah, the CO of the Dakota squadron said that anybody can fly an Anson, they wanted to bring aircraft from India and I volunteered because I’d flown Ansons and he said, pick yourself a navigator, get a lift to Habbaniyah in Iraq and wait there for a York. This York will take you to Karachi, where there is an Anson waiting to be brought back. Well, an Anson can’t fly very far so I had to come back the long route, which is underneath Iran, what was it? Sharjah, Duwarni, and then we, to Bahrain we stopped the night in Bahrain and then the next day take off from Bahrain and go to Shaibah in Iraq, from Shaibah back to Habbaniyah, stop the night. The next day we took off and went to an airfield in the middle of the desert called LGH 3, Landing Ground number 3, which is halfway between Iraq and Israel, eventually we stopped at Israel, I can’t remember the name of the airfield, we stopped the night there and this particular night there was a fence all around the airfield because of wild dogs and on the second trip, one trip where just two of us went there was, we landed .The night before we left Karachi on the second trip this other pilot and myself went out into the town and had a few drinks and by we didn’t think we something we shouldn’t do, we had something to eat, the next day we both had the runs, so, all the way back we stuck with, having to get out until eventually we got to Israel. I mean, I was in one Nissen hut with my navigator and he, Peter was in another one next door and outside there was a toilet that had been built in between the walls, it was a concrete circle with a wooden seat on top with six partitions for the toilet and in the night, Peter was, he was still in trouble with his stomach, he got up with two lots of paper, one lit and the other one for the obvious reason and he lifted the lid off this toilet he was going to use and threw this lighted one down and it blew up and it woke us up the bang [laughs] and he come and stood in the doorway, we put the light on and he said, just look at me, and he was covered from head to foot in excretum from airmen long since gone and he said, I had to show you because you wouldn’t believed it tomorrow. So he went and had a shower, but, so we didn’t sleep again that night. SP: Yeah. On one of the trips as well you said that you stopped at a place called Habbaniyah and there was, you say there was a smuggler there JW: Oh, the smuggler SP: Yeah JW: We passed all these things on to him and made a profit on that and then brought some of the cigarettes back to Egypt to a shopkeeper on the base and made a profit on that one as well. Yeah. SP: Helped increase the salary a little bit [laughs]. JW: Actually, the one, the shopkeeper, he was caught selling these cigarettes and they hadn’t got a stamp on so they put him in jail for a few weeks. A Sudanese lawyer dressed in a smart suit came looking for me and he said, Weston? I said, yes. He said, did you sell some cigarettes to Mr so and so, I said, no, it wasn’t me, he said, oh, he told me it was you but he said, I realised you wouldn’t admit it but he said, in future if you get anymore cigarettes, he said, here’s my card, and this was his lawyer [laughs]. SP: [unclear] [laughs] JW: Another trip we did from Kabrit, there was some trouble in Eritrea so I can’t, I think it was either three or four aircraft, took twenty soldiers each, to quell this little riot, Eritrea, Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, and that was another trip we did, and when we landed there, I was told to go to a certain hut and it was just going dusk when I got to this hut and I put me tackle on the bed and there was no light on and suddenly the window was open and something flew in and clanged into this light and it fell on the floor and the regulars that lived in this hut, they all covered themselves with a blanket or a sheet and I did the same, I said, are they dangerous? They said, no, but aren’t they bloody awful. And it was, it turned out to be a dung beetle and it had flown it and hit the light and it fell on the floor and it looked like a little tortoise on the floor and then suddenly the wings sort of came out of the shell and it went up like a helicopter and out again through the window so I thought it was something dangerous but it wasn’t [laughs]. SP: And very unusual to see. JW: Yeah. SP: Yeah. So Jim, you also mentioned you were heavily involved with the Berlin airlift, so do you want to talk a little bit about that? JW: I will do, yeah. Now, while I was serving in Egypt, a CO came into the crew room one day and said he wanted crews that were willing to go to Germany as the Berlin airlift had started. The airlift had started in June, and in August they wanted more people so I volunteered to go, my crew went with me, and we got a lift to UK, Oakington in Cambridgeshire and the very next day off to Fassberg in Germany and started the airlift from Fassberg. So we go from Fassberg to Gatow in Berlin and back again in two trips a day until the Americans joined in the lift and they wanted an airfield so we were all taken away from Fassberg and went to Lubeck so that the Americans could have Fassberg only for themselves. So we started the airlift again from Lubeck and two trips a day and then you’d finished and the idea was, when we got a weekend off, when you went back to the base, your first trip would be two o’clock in the afternoon, go to Gatow, come back, reload, go back again to Gatow and then back home and then the next day you started at one o’clock and the next day after that you started at twelve o’clock and slowly went back in time. The idea was that everybody would share the night flying that was going on so you did this for about seven or eight weeks and then another weekend off. So when you’ve been on this about three or four months, when you’re having a meal, you didn’t know whether it was breakfast, dinner or supper because you’ve lost track of the day, the time and eventually I finished up doing over two hundred, around about two hundred and twenty trips to Gatow and we landed at Gatow, unloaded and then we either bring back old people or children to Lubeck to be reallocated so there was less mouths to feed in Gatow itself. So the Americans, like I said, they joined, the British went to Gatow and the others went to Tempelhof or Tegel, I’m not sure of the right one, the Americans, and this went on till the following, I think it was the following June when the airlift finished but we carried on doing it even though it was officially finished. The Russians had lifted the barriers on these places but they’d stopped transport coming in and trains so in the fact that the airlift was over but I remember doing two trips to Warsaw after the airlift was over. And I’ve been to a lot of places in Europe like Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Vienna and some places in the Middle East like Gibraltar, Malta and wherever you landed there at one of these places, a well-dressed man or woman would meet you and say, welcome to and take you to immigration but the difference was when we landed at Warsaw, I opened the door of a Dakota and standing underneath it were two rough looking soldiers, Russians with a Tommy gun and they pointed the Tommy gun at you and motioned it down like get off and that was the difference in [laughs] get in the reception, so I only managed to do that twice, yeah, to Warsaw. SP: You said you did a trip to Warsaw with some diplomats as well you took to Warsaw? JW: With what? SP: Some people to negotiate treaties. JW: Oh yes, I think it was five MPs were going to negotiate some sort of pork or bacon, deal with the Poles, I can’t remember what the other people were they were took in [pause] no, I can’t remember what they were, who they were but I only did two trips to Warsaw from what was the main airfield in UK at the time before Heathrow, I can’t even remember the name of that one now, it’ll be in that logbook. SP: We’ll copy your logbook, so it’s with the recording, so. JW: Pardon? SP: We’ll copy the logbook, so it’s with the recording, so, yeah. JW: Yes, ok. SP: So, obviously you completed your time with the RAF. JW: Yes, I came back to Oakington to do trips to Gibraltar and odd trips around Europe. When it was my time to be finished, the CO sent for me near the end of my tour and said, you’re wanted in air ministry, go to, go get a train voucher and you go to Air Ministry to meet and eventually either a wing commander or squadron leader and I went to Air Ministry on the train and then the Tube and I met this man and he said, I had to bring me logbook, and he opened me logbook and said, oh yes, he said we’ve got a record of this, he said you’ve got a well, a very nice setup, you’ve been a good servant to the RAF, is there something we can do for you? He said, like, where would you like to be posted to for your last few couple of months? So, I said, the nearest airfield to Warrington, the nearest flying unit to Warrington, oh, he said, right. I came back to Oakington, when me posting came through, it was Cranwell, now, Cranwell is the worst place in the world to spend your last days because if it moves in Cranwell you salute it, and if it doesn’t move you paint it white and I only found out, oh, years after, that the nearest airfield to Cranwell is Waddington and this chap in the Air Ministry had got it wrong but I didn’t realise it was in the time so I spent me last time in Cranwell and then I came out in 1950. SP: And what did you do then after? JW: Oh, I went back to the same firm I’d worked at. When, you, did I tell you about joining the Air Force, oh, I got, when was it? I went to Wigan, I’ve told you about going to Wigan and the boss got to know about it and said, you’ll not get your allowance, have I mentioned the allowance? SP: No. JW: No? Oh, when I went to join up at Wigan, and then they said you could only join up as aircrew. SP: Yeah. JW: So, my boss got to found out and he said, I’ll get you off, you know, so I didn’t say anything so a couple of months later my posting came through and I had to go to Padgate and he came to me and he said, I tried to get you off and he said, they tell me you joined flying unit so, I said, yes, he said, you’re not getting your allowance, you know. Apparently if a married man from this firm got called up, he paid his wife so much and if you was single, he paid your mother so much and he said you’ll not get your allowance, so, I said, oh, I managed to say that I’m not bothered about the allowance, I said, I’m going into a war and I thought, well, and twelve months later, while I was in Canada, I got a letter from me mother to say that the manager or the director of this firm had sent for her and said that where’s your son, and she said, he’s in Canada learning to fly, he said, oh, he said, I’ll start paying you this allowance. But I never told me mother about this allowance but she was due it so he started paying it, and he said to her, have you got a job or your husband got a job and she said, no, I have not, me husband’s in a job, he said, well, I’ve got a job for women in munitions part of this factory but would you like a job? So, he gave her a job and he said to her, your husband, tell your husband to come and see me and he gave him a job. And so, they both worked right through to the end of the war. And eventually when my time was over in 1950, I met a girl from the firm that I was going to marry and he sent for me the boss again and he said I believe you are going to marry, so I said, yes, he said, has the firm bought you anything? So I said, no, he said well, what would you like? And I said, I’d like a bedside cabinet in walnut, he said, go and buy one, or get one made, and give me the bill and I am the only man or woman in that factory that ever got a wedding present off the boss. It was on his conscience all that time. SP: Yes, yeah. And what was the company called? JW: Chadwick’s paper mill. SP: Chadwick’s paper mill. JW: It’s on the side of the river, across there but it’s gone now, it’s been flattened, it’s gone so SP: It’s based in Warrington JW: It’s based in Warrington, yes. SP: Yeah. JW: It’s quite a big firm, there’s about four hundred people working there. SP: Yeah. So that was your wife then. JW: That was the end of time, yes, when I got married, yeah. SP: And did you stay at Chadwick’s for the rest of your…? JW: I stayed there for a while. And then I wanted, when Steven came along, me first, and I wanted more money and I went to another engineering firm and went to several jobs like that until eventually I was working at one when the new boss at the Chadwick’s phoned the firm I was working at and said ask Jim to come and see me and he offered me another job, more than I was working, more money than I was working so I went back to Chadwick until it finished again. And then from then I finished up with a job at the college in Warrington as a technician which I served me time there till I was sixty five, that was, that’s thirty years ago I’ve been retired. SP: You’re ninety-five now. JW: Yeah. SP: Ok. JW: So, that’s the end of my story. SP: There was a lot of really interesting, lots of different experiences there that you shared with us so on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre we would like to thank you for your time today, Jim. JW: Right. SP: So, thank you. JW: Ok. SP: Addition to interview with Jim, so, over to you, Jim. JW: Twinwood’s an airfield, is a satellite of Cranfield, I was there in the June of ’44 and it was the airfield that Glenn Miller took off for his last flight to France and disappeared, Twinwoods. SP: Yeah. JW: I think his band was based in Bedford, Bedfordshire and he was on his way to fix up a date for his band to come and play in Europe, France or somewhere like that when he disappeared and they’ve never found any trace of him at all. SP: And did you see him at all on the base? JW: No, I was there some months before him, SP: Right, yeah. JW: People said, where did Glenn Miller fly from? And I think he came from a place called Firstford, American base and for some reason came to Twinwoods because that his band was based in Bedford itself and it made some sort of reckoning with him and then he took off in a Norseman, it’s a single engine aeroplane with just him and the pilot. [pause] SP: Ok, well, thank you very much for that, it’s one of those things we will never know until maybe they find the plane and it see whether or not JW: Might be 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 Jim Weston. One Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Susanne Pescott 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 2017-11-30 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 AWestonJ171130, PWestonJ1703 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 00:54:13 audio recording 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 Description An account of the resource Jim Weston joined the Royal Air Force because he wanted to become a radio mechanic. While training at RAF Blackpool as air gunner wireless operator, he re-mustered as a pilot. He remembers being posted to 23 Squadron at RAF Little Snoring, where he carried out intruder operations against enemy night fighters. He witnessed the take-off of a V-2 rocket. Jim remembers his last operation to Dresden, targeting an enemy airfield nearby. At the end of the war, he was posted to a Dakota squadron in Egypt. He then flew around 220 trips during the Berlin airlift. He spent his last days with the RAF at RAF Cranwell before coming out in 1950. On being demobbed, Jim went back to work at a paper factory. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Peter Schulze Eunice Watson Steph Jackson Maureen Clarke Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Canada Egypt Germany Great Britain England--Lincolnshire England--Norfolk Germany--Berlin Germany--Ruhr (Region) Iraq--Ḥabbānīyah North Africa Iraq Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1940 1941 1943 1948 23 Squadron aircrew Beaufighter bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945) C-47 Flying Training School Initial Training Wing Magister Mosquito Oxford Pathfinders pilot RAF Cranwell RAF Little Snoring sanitation Tiger Moth training V-2 V-weapon https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/890/11129/AHumesEL170826.2.mp3 8e7d785f41f1ca0887f9c3ad8481803a https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/890/11129/PHumesEL1701.1.jpg b7e2bdab74eff6b6808ac8b8bdfd9361 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 Humes, Eddie Edward L Humes E L Humes Description An account of the resource Three items. An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Eddie Humes (b. 1922, 642170 Royal Air Force), RAF personnel document and a memoir. After serving in Balloon Command, he flew operations as a navigator with 514 Squadron The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Eddie Humes and catalogued by Nigel Huckins. 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 2017-08-26 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 Humes, EL Transcribed audio recording A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document SP: This is Susanne Pescott and I’m interviewing Eddie Humes today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We are at Eddie’s home and it is the 26th of August 2017. So first of all, thank you Eddie for agreeing to talk to me today. So, did you want to tell me about your time before the war? EH: Well, before the war, I left school at fifteen, with my ‘tric but didn’t follow education through partly because of the circumstances at home, you know. We had a big family and needed workers and employment situation was bad unless you wanted to go in the mines and my parents didn’t want me to go into the mines so we had a little bit of an argument and eventually they agreed to me going to the RAF and the following, follow on is printed in just another story so there’s no point in me going on that. Uhm, I got my wish eventually, I got onto aircrew, that’s in there as well. I joined in on the 3rd of May 1939 and did my basic training, drills and what have you, and then expected to be posted to be a rigger on aircraft but the war was imminent and when we met to be told where we were going, I was told I was going to a balloon squadron and it didn’t please me very much and but the comment from the powers that be was you’re in the Air Force now, you do as you’re told so I was posted to a balloon centre, training centre and stayed there till I passed my exams. And then I joined a squadron where 90% of the people on it were over fifty, they were auxiliaries who at night and that was their choice to be balloon operators, I wasn’t very happy but that was the situation. Finished the training, went to a cricket ground in Leyton, Essex and our billet if you like, put it that way was a tennis hut which housed twelve of us with cold water and nothing else virtually and our balloon was flown from there and I kept asking, could I transfer to aircrew but nobody wanted to know. Fortunately I played football fairly well and on one occasion when we were coming back, I spoke to one of the officers and he said, make another application straight away, so I made another application to transfer to aircrew and they sent me to a drifter on the Thames to fly balloons from a drifter on the Thames which was, again wasn’t very nice, a) it was at the mouth of the Thames and we got the incoming tide, the outcoming tide which, I wasn’t a sailor, it didn’t suit me very much, there were half a dozen airmen and half a dozen old, very old sailors, fishermen and sometimes we got the balloon up before the German fighters came, other times we didn’t and if we didn’t get it up, then we were strafed. Fortunately, I was posted back into the East End of London onto another balloon site, which had few younger people than I was used to previously and it was during the Blitz, there were all sorts of stories but they don’t want. Uhm, and then my posting came through, did I still want to go to aircrew? And I was in, a week I was in St John’s Wood with lots of other people a) who were transferred and b) who had just joined up and we were there for two or three weeks and then posted to St Andrews in Scotland, the university, and we did our training, were billeted overlooking the golf course which was nice and we did our ground training at the university, part of it, this consisted of everything, gunnery, Morse code, astro, everything, and when that was finished again as a result of football I had a leg injury and I, I wasn’t there for the passing out parade sadly but we were then posted to Manchester, which was a holding centre, and at Manchester normally you stayed for two, maybe three weeks and you were posted abroad, you were told what you were going to be, and you were posted abroad. We were told, I was told that, we were on parade, that there was going to be, that I was going to be trained as a navigator, I didn’t mind that even though I’d flown and soloed I didn’t mind that at all but there were some Belgian pilots there who had already flown against the German Air Force and they were reclassified as navigators as well, so they turned off and went down to the Belgian embassy and we never saw them anymore. But we’d been there, dozen of us had been there about getting on twelve weeks and we talked among ourselves and they designated me as the senior airman only because I’d been in the Air Force the longest, to go and see the adjutant and I did that and the adjutant said, ‘You’re not here’. I said, ‘I am here, obviously, and there are a dozen others beside me’, and he made a few enquiries and he said, ‘Right, you better go off home on leave’ and we went on leave and ‘We’ll call for you when we need you’. And about three weeks afterwards we were called back and expected to be posted abroad like everybody else but unfortunately, we were posted to Bridgnorth. And we did the remaining of our ground training at Bridgnorth. And then from Bridgnorth we went, up to this time the only aeroplane we’d seen was Tiger Moths at school in Scotland. And we went from Bridgnorth to Dumfries to do our flying training and there we were in pairs, two trainee navigators to each aeroplane, we flew on Ansons, sometimes in the morning, sometimes during the day, sometimes in the evening, that was quite an experience, and obviously we were putting into practice all that we learned on the ground. Getting near the end, when we were getting near to our examinations, people came in from that’d been trained in Canada and they’re already sporting their brevets and their stripes, commissioned, badges and so on, which didn’t please us very much, and it pleased us less when we were paired up with them to fly and they’d never flown over a darkened city, all their flying had been done over places where there were lights and they had to learn practically all over again at night-time. Anyway, we got over it and obviously satisfied the examiners and got our stripes and so on, went on leave and were posted to Chipping Warden, that’s in Oxfordshire and there we met the Wellington for the first time and met crews, pilots, air gunners, bomb aimers, all the rest of it. And you had a couple of weeks to wander about and get to know people in between lectures and then you were gathered together and you were expected to crew up there, some did, some didn’t but it was voluntary, you weren’t directed to anybody and said you’ve got to fly with him, you’ve got to fly with him, it was voluntary. And then you complete so many hours on Wellingtons, we had pilot, bomb aimer, navigator, wireless operator, rear gunner, five and then at the end of your training, if you passed satisfactory for the officer commander, we went on leave and then you got a posting to your conversion unit and when I got to the conversion unit, it was Lancasters and we were, well, I was surprised because they had radial engines, they didn’t have inline engines but that’s what we were going to fly, Lancaster IIs and the place that we were at was called Little Snoring which is a particularly peculiar name, but we did our further training on there, we picked up another gunner, mid-upper gunner and an engineer, completed the training, posted to Foulsham to join 115 Squadron and when we got to 115 Squadron, we thought 115 Squadron, but we were told, no, you’re not, you’re forming 514 so we were then into 514. We transferred, took aircraft from Foulsham, flew to Waterbeach and we were very happy at Waterbeach because it was a peace time aerodrome and all the buildings were brick, hot and cold water, bathrooms and so on and so on. So then we again, we settled as a crew and had to do all sorts of training until we were called on operations. And on squadron, we were delayed going onto operations because we had to train on a new system called Gee-H, which was navigator’s job and it was something like a television, it had two, what do you call them? Two bars going across in opposite directions and when the, the underlying one, the navigator pressed the bomb, to drop the bombs, uhm that took some time because we had to do high level and low level, we had to practice near Lincoln at high level and near Heeley [?] at low level, but again, we became proficient and that was satisfactory. Our first operation was to, and there is some doubt in here, but it’s verified in the pilot’s logbook, that we went to Biarritz, which is the north of Spain, border of Spain and France and we couldn’t quite believe how easy it was ‘cause there was supposed to be other aircraft there but we didn’t see any other aircraft and we didn’t have any opposition, there was no flak, nothing and when we got to Biarritz, circled round for a bit because we were supposed to wait for other aircraft but they didn’t come so, we bombed and came home. But when we got to the British coast and were heading for home, we were picked up by our own searchlights and directed west and each time we tried to turn and go home, they picked us up again and directed us west again and eventually we landed in Exeter, which was a Polish fighter ‘drome and as we landed, one of the engines packed up, so we were there for a few weeks, a couple of weeks and ordered home, we had a military escort home and when we got home, the rear gunner was getting off the train and somebody kindly helped him with his parachute but they held onto the silver handle and the thing blowed out. Well, we were in trouble when we got back to base, the navigation officer and the commanding officer didn’t like it all and they weren’t ready to believe our story, but eventually after enquiries they found that a Wellington had put out a mayday call and the observer corps had mistaken us for a Wellington and taken us to Exeter, so that was all sorted out. And we just went on, we did four or five to Berlin, Mannheim, Leipzig, but the logbook, I don’t know this, I did ten, the pilot and the rest of the crew did twelve, and I did one with another crew to Mannheim. And then, as I say, we went to Nuremberg, which wasn’t a very pleasant, and then Aachen was the next trip we were to do and the shortest virtually and that’s when we were shot down coming home from Aachen. The port wing was hit first, and then the port engine, port outer engine caught fire and the engineer was adamant that he could put it out but he didn’t for a few minutes and eventually the engine fell out and obviously the aircraft couldn’t fly on, so the skipper told us to abandon aircraft. I got smashed all the navigation instruments and so on, tore up the log and got to the escape hatch, found that it was open and the bomb aimer had done his job, opening the escape hatch, as I went to go through, I noticed that his parachute in the whole day had gone without his parachute he’d gone but his parachute was still there. And as the aircraft was spinning, I tried to get out but I couldn’t, I couldn’t get out with the force, and I pulled my own parachute, that pulled me out of the aircraft and in doing so, it broke, I broke my femur, as I say in the story, on the way down, the only person I wanted was my mother, pray to God that I’ll be alright. I hit the ground and I didn’t hear the aircraft anymore and shortly afterwards there were some foreign voices and I called for help and I called in English of course and they told me to be quiet and they were Belgians and they took me to a house, took me in there, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t see them, couldn’t see the house, couldn’t see what was inside it [unclear] blind, and when I woke up in the morning, there was a group around me and I could only assume they were praying ‘cause they were all voice were monotonous and they brought the doctor, and the doctor looked, he said, I’m sorry, I can’t do anything, you’ll have to go to hospital and the only hospital is a German hospital. So, they called the Germans and he put garden, took wood from the railings in the garden and put a splint on my leg and the Germans came to take me and the lady wouldn’t let them take my, take the, me without the sofa, I had to go on a sofa and this was verified by her daughter, whom I’ll talk about later who was there at the time and she said, my mother wouldn’t let them take you without the sofa. And then, I went to the German hospital, wondering what gonna be in front of me and they were very kind, first meal wasn’t very pleasant but they were very kind and they did the operation, they said, we’ve got to operate, there wasn’t much I could do about it, I couldn’t say no, and I was put, when the operation was completed, I was put into a room, a kind of pleasant room, with French doors and big open window, big frame window, and in traction, no plaster or anything like that, I was just in traction and there was guard inside and a guard outside and when I asked why they were there when I couldn’t walk, I was in traction, they said, it’s to stop the Belgians from coming in and taking you out. So, that was fine for a few weeks, quite enjoyed myself there, didn’t do anything of course, just talked to the German guards who wanted to, didn’t want to speak English, they wanted to speak, they didn’t want to speak German, they wanted to speak English, for when they came to England and they, they ruled England. And then one night I was, flares dropping round everywhere, you could see them out of the window, and within minutes the place would be being bombed and the hospital was very badly damaged. My ceiling came in, the door and the windows came across the cage, fortunately the cage stopped anything from dropping on me and in the morning the surgeon came, he was still in his apron, which was pretty bloody, and he had a scalpel in his hand and I thought, that’s the end for me, but it wasn’t, he was fully apologetic, and it wasn’t the Germans’ fault, it was the Air Force fault for bombing the place. Well, he said, obviously you’ve got to be moved, is not, your leg’s not ready yet to come out of traction so he said, I’ve got to take it off, you can’t be moved as you are, so they took it off, and the way I went in a back of a lorry and the lorry went over a bomb crater and I fell off and broke my leg again. We stopped overnight in a place that was a rest home for German forces and that was just overnight and of course again I had several people come to look at the strange fellow and then I went to Brussels and in the Brussels hospital we were in an annex and there were several aircrew in there, injured aircrew, American, Canadian, there was even one Italian, he wasn’t aircrew, and one Russian, who ill, they’d been put in there and we stayed there for about, I suppose, seven or eight weeks, I’m not sure. And then again, the British forces were coming and the German officer in command came in and said if we would sign a letter to say we’d been well treated, he would leave us there. So, obviously we signed it and the Germans left and on the morning, I’m not sure, the sixth or seventh of September, the British headed into Brussels but just before they came into Brussels, our doors burst open and the SS came in and we said, you know, we got this paper, well, not me, the commander senior officer said, we’ve got this paper and they just tore it up and said, you know, doesn’t mean a thing. And we were put into a bus and headed out of Brussels which was in a state of chaos because they were evacuating Brussels and Brussels, part of it was on fire. It wasn’t a pretty sight, and on the way out of Brussels, we were attacked by RAF fighters and the, there was a wing commander with us, and he took his life in his hand because the two old German guards were old like home guards, they wouldn’t get off the bus, so he tackled them and disarmed them and we got off the bus and went into a pigsty on the side of the road, and whilst we were there, three, three people made the attempt to escape. Now, I know that one of them survived and got back home because he was on our squadron and I know he got home but I don’t know what happened to the other two. And when it was all over, we were put back on board and taken to Holland. We arrived in Venlo and were, the bus was attacked by Dutch people who thought we were Germans and we were taken to a convent, excuse me. The, whoever was in charge put us on the top floor of this convent and when we asked the nuns why we were on the top floor, they said, well, it’s a tall building and maybe no one will notice you’re here. And we were there for three or four days and then one of the Canadian prisoners got a bit furious and he walked out onto the balcony and looking over and people saw him and waved and of course, as it happened, there was the Gestapo down at the bottom and we were quickly shipped off to Dusseldorf in Germany and Dusseldorf was a workers camp, French, Polish, Russians, Italians and we had a couple of brushes with the French people because they were taking the British Red Cross parcels and we were getting the, the rubbish, you know, the French which was not as good as the British ones and they said, well, they were entitled to it because they were working, we weren’t, as NCOs, you didn’t work, only a few volunteered to work, and we didn’t have any problems with other people, the Russians came and helped, they were glad to have a cigarette or a bite of bread or anything that we could give them ‘cause they didn’t get anything, they had to sort out for themselves, and the Germans put the Polish people on guard at the Russian compound and the Russian people on guard at the Polish compound and they weren’t bothered much about the Italians and that, that was alright until we were moved from there and the medical officer, the French medical officer asked me, would I leave my crutches and take a stick, I said, well, I can’t walk, you know, which going back, that had happened in Belgium, in Brussels, the Germans told me to walk, I said, ‘I can’t walk, I’m still in a cage’, so they gave me crutches and said, they took the cage down and said, walk, so I did my best, and the same thing happened in the French camp, they asked me to leave the crutches because they were short and would I walk with the walking stick. Well, being young and stupid I said yes, I managed alright and then we went from there in cattle trucks, yeah, I think was there, yeah, from there in cattle trucks to, no, I’m sorry, we went from Venlo to Dusseldorf in cattle trucks and the cattle truck was divided by a barb wire, sort of fence across the inside of the truck, and the German guards were on one side and eight of us were on the other side, and during the night, there was quite a commotion, one of the German guards had got too close to the fire and his uniform, his overcoat had caught fire, there wasn’t much we could do about it because there was barbed wire between us and his big moan from then on was what is the officer going to say when he arrived in Dusseldorf? Well, we don’t know ‘cause we arrived in Dusseldorf just after a bombing raid. And when we got off the train and on the busses, the people quite rightly were annoyed about the air raid and they tried to attack us but the German guards kept them in their place and we arrived at the interrogation centre where we were put into single rooms and there was no windows in my room, no heater, just a bed with a straw mattress on it and a little signal that if you wanted to go to the toilet, you pushed this signal and a guard would come and take you but we had, they tapped on Morse code between the pipes but I couldn’t read the Morse codes, too quick for me and if your neighbour banged on the wall, that meant that he was going to put his warning down that he wanted to go to the toilet and then you’d put yours down and so you kept the guard running up and down all the time. That was a couple of days there, then we went for interrogation, now we’d been warned back home about the interrogation, what would happen and what wouldn’t happen and so on and the things they told us exactly happened. You got a form [coughs], you got a form to fill in and as I say, what we’ve been told would happen did happen, we were given a form and asked to fill in all the details on the form and you wrote your number, your rank and your name and handed it back [coughs] and they warned you that you hadn’t finished and gave it to you back then and you gave it back to them and this went on a few minutes and then they appeared to get cross, which we’d been warned about really, and a hand went under the table and obviously pressed a button and there was a shot outside and again we’d been warned about that and they said, that’s what happens to the people who don’t cooperate [coughs] and they gave me the form and I gave them back 642170 and he appeared to lose his temper, he didn’t but that was his attitude and he said, ‘As it happens, we know more about your squadron than you do’, and he handed a cap down, he said, the name was inside, Stead, Sergeant Bill Stead and he said, ‘He was on your squadron, wasn’t he?’ Well, I knew damn well he was but I couldn’t say that to him. He said, and the squadron did this and the squadron did that and I just sat there. Eventually he said, ‘You’re a waste of my time, you’re a waste of everybody’s time’ and he called the guard in and I was transferred to another place a few hundred yards away and there we got new uniforms, American uniforms and a case full of good pyjamas, soap, toilet, all the rest, all the things you needed and you had to be careful what you were saying because you didn’t know whether the people in there were planted by the Germans and we’d been there two or three days, we went to our first prison camp, no, not to the first prison camp because we were, those who were injured like me went to a camp near Meiningen in Thuringia and it was an old opera house and there were, I suppose, a hundred or more people in there who’d been injured, different types of injuries and in there was that, Warrant Officer Jackson who got the VC for his efforts, he was in there at the time and you were there until such times as you were transferred to another prison camp and whilst you were there it was quite pleasant because there were concerts and meetings and outside of the camp there was a group of circus performers who practiced every day and that was quite good for us but we didn’t know how they’d evaded being in the army, we never found out and then we were transferred to a camp in Poland and this camp in Poland was fairly new, it hadn’t been open very long and we were given a block number and at the beginning there were six or seven of us in the room but after a few weeks the place had filled up and there were I think twelve in the same room, twelve bunk beds, and I say, we didn’t grumble about, we knew we were there for a while and there was a stove on one wall and in the Red Cross parcels we used to get something called Klim, was a milk spelled backwards and when the tin was empty, we used to put it on the pipe and extend the stove a little bit further and would eventually get it into the middle of the room, so everybody could get warm because of this pipe and then that’s when the Gestapo would come in and smash it all down, start again. And again we had concerts and we had education classes and so on and so on and then Christmas eve ’45, no, ’44, I was shot down ’44, Christmas Eve ’44, we were told to pack our things, we were likely to be moved, and we had a concert that night, there was a Christmas concert, and we had a priest there, we had mass as well, and in the morning, we were told to move, we had to get out, the Russians were advancing and it’s a rule of war that prisoners have got to be moved away from the battle front and so we set off and we walked, the snow was very deep, very deep indeed but we set off for Germany, we were in a place called Kreuzberg, Poland. We set off for Germany and by the time we got to the river which divides Poland and Germany, we picked up children, people had left their children, left them, thinking we’d look after them, but of course we couldn’t but we walked across the river which was frozen to a place called Oppeln and the children were moved away, I don’t know what happened to them, but from then on it was a case of walking, a few nights in a camp, walking, a few nights in a camp until we got to Lamsdorf, which was a, thousands of prisoners in there of all nationalities, thousands and the first room I was put into I wasn’t very happy, they weren’t, they weren’t clean, they weren’t, they weren’t very nice people to be with, let’s put it that way, you didn’t want to live with them after what you’d had in the other prison camps and I asked for a move and I got a move, was to a oh no, I was taken to a camp for interview by the Swedish Red Cross to see whether I was suitable for repatriation but it transpired that I wasn’t bad enough for repatriation so I moved to another camp, which was an army camp, and there were only two or three airmen there, they’d had airmen before but they’d been moved and we were sort of in with the army, we weren’t there very long and then everybody was moved and when the move was mooted, you were told to get yourselves in groups of seven or six, seven or eight, and there was a group of people there who said to me, will you join us? And I said, yes, of course, you know, I’d join anybody, they’d been prisoners since Dunkirk, so they knew the ropes and I said, yes, willingly. They said, well, the thing is, we want somebody to be quartermaster and you are obviously not one who can go and pinch things and take things for your own, so , you’ll be quartermaster and we will keep the things coming in which worked out very well. And we left there, walked down, walked through, I used to walk during the night and sleep in the woods during the day, in case find a source, walk in and think we were German troops, so we walked during the night, slept during the day and ate during the day obviously and then we got a lift on cattle trucks, about forty was in the truck, and we finished up in Prague and when we got off the truck, you were allowed off the truck to use the loo and ladies came like the WVS, German equivalent of the WVS and gave us soup, no, gave us hot water from the engine so that we could make soup and we did that but that wasn’t a good idea because the next day we were all complaining with stomach ache, the water from the engine obviously hadn’t been very clean but we got over it and this was the routine for the next few days on a truck for a while, off a truck walk and we got to Munich and when we got to Munich, there wasn’t room for us at Munich so we stayed the night and set off walking again the next day. And by this time we were in Austria and we were put into a school in Austria but not the original people I was with, about eight of us airmen and a couple of strangers and I think the second night we were there, I went out the morning ‘cause there were no guards, I said, ‘Well, where have the guards gone?’ They weren’t there, young boys actually, they had taken over from the old men, but they’d gone and I saw a lot of people going to church, I asked them, ‘Why are they going to church?’ I said, I was a Catholic and that wasn’t a feast day, as far as I knew. And they said, oh, you don’t know that the war is over. So, I went and told the others, and we walked to a nearby airfield with all the aircraft there was smashed in, they’d been destroyed by the Germans. And the Americans came through and told us to hang on they ‘d be other trucks coming through and they’d bring us food and what have you which they did and then they picked us up and took us to Reims, in France, and there we were grouped and told then aircraft would be flying back in and again with my luck the aircraft that we were going to fly back in, the navigator was missing all the night, and the people I was with, the army people said, well, you’re a navigator aren’t you, I said, ‘Yes, but the pilot might not want me’, anyway they went to the pilot and said, this fellow’s a navigator, and the pilot said, ‘How long was it since you flew?’ I said, ‘Oh, about twelve, thirteen months or so on’, he said, ‘Well, you think you can map read till we get to England?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m sure I can’. So, they gave me the map and off we went. And we got to England and when we got to England they were in wireless contact then and we stopped at a place called, an aerodrome called Wing and there we weren’t very happy, we were taken to a tent and fumigated [laughs], we had puffers put up our sleeves and down our necks and what not and a bit humiliating but there, it had to be done and from there we went home on leave. And at the end of leave, we came back to Cosford and we stayed at Cosford to people like me who were wounded, who had recuperation. And the Japanese war ended, and I remember it well, I was in the swimming pool, and when somebody came in and said, the war in Japan is over, I got out the swimming pool got dressed and went, went to what I thought was home. But, oh, I had a pass to go home, but by a direct route, I couldn’t divert southwards, I had to go northwards and on Woolhampton station, train came in for Liverpool and the next thing I knew I was on the train for Liverpool, I thought, what am I doing here? Well, I’d left a girlfriend who lived near Liverpool but actually in my prison time, I never heard a word from anybody, father, mother, family, friends, no one, it was a bit of a joke when the post came there was nothing for me but I’d moved so many times that nobody had an address and when they wrote it was just passed on and it never caught up with me. Anyway, I got to Liverpool and I thought, well, here it goes, and I went over to my girlfriend’s house, knocked on the door, mother opened the door, she said, ‘What do you want?’ And I said, ‘I’m Eddie.’ ‘Eddie who?’ she said, ‘cause I’d lost, well, about three and a half, four stone in weight and my clothes were pretty, new uniform was pretty hopeless, it was hanging on me, and I was nearly black with the sun being out in the weather all the time and she said, ‘You’d better come in then’, ‘cause she didn’t remember who I was. At roundabout half past five the door opened, Nora came in, looked across the room, saw me and went out again and it transpired it, she had a date for that night but she called to her friend’s to cancel the date and from then on we were together and we married in the September of ’45. And, well, we stayed married for seventy years. And then I was discharged from the Air Force because I wanted to fly and they had so many fliers they didn’t want people who’d been injured, so, they had enough fliers. So I took discharge and went to a special unit where you worked out what you’re going to do afterwards and I made the suggestion that I’d like to be in education but again it came up the question you haven’t got university qualifications and you haven’t been to a training college and so on and so on, however I got over all that, and the education officer said, ‘Why don’t you go a step higher and try for teaching?’ I said, well, you know, as has happened in the past, ‘I might qualify for teaching’, he said, ‘If you’re qualified as a navigator, you’re qualified for teaching’. So, I had a test and passed the test, and I went to a teacher training college, they wanted me to go to, the one year, but I wanted to do a two year and I, I became a teacher. And eventually I spent a couple of terms in the Wirral, near Liverpool and then I came to Worksop taught fifteen year old, fourteen, fifteen, it was the first year I had children had to stay until they were fifteen and I had the first class in this particular school, fourteen, fifteens, they’d all, they weren’t, I’m not being unkind, the majority of them weren’t clever, they hadn’t passed the eleven plus, they hadn’t passed the thirteen plus, but some of them were quite bright, anyway that’s beside the point, and I stayed there for ten years. And then we talked it over and Nora had a good job, we talked it over and it was become quite obvious that I was going to get any further in a secondary school, I was in an all age school, so I decided to transfer to primary school, and we moved to Bishops Stortford in Hertfordshire and I was deputy head there for, I think 1967, ten years, and then I got a headship in Derbyshire, [unclear], and I was head there until 1984, then I retired. Came here. And that’s the story so far. Well, I eventually got in touch with what’s the squadron association and began going to the reunions and I had the wife of the commanding officer wanted to start a museum and she asked all of us who were there and at that time there’d be about eighty, ninety ex-squadron members there, if they had anything that would start the museum and I asked, I said, ‘I haven’t got anything really but I’ve got my prisoner of war identity card, would that be of any use?’ ‘Oh yes’, she said, ‘Let me have it. So, I did. And I suppose a couple of years afterwards, I got a phone call, ‘Please don’t put the phone down, I’m not a double glazing salesman, my name is Clive, you might remember my uncle, Clive Hill.’ I said, ‘I remember him very well, he was my engineer.’ ‘Oh’, he said, ‘Well, can we start from there? My mother has been ill and they have told her that her illness was due to worry about not doing anything about finding what happened to her brother.’ Rightly or wrongly, that’s what they’d said, and he said, ‘I’ve taken over and the Ministry of Defence wouldn’t give me any information about anybody but my uncle, they wouldn’t let me have your information. But I’ve talked to the secretary of the association, squadron association and he has given me your address and phone number, can I talk to you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, of course.’ And she’d gone down to Waterbeach to the museum, to try and find out something about his uncle and he’d given up and as he walked through the door, coming out, he saw this card on the wall and eleventh of April ’44 and he said, that was the night my uncle was shot down. And there was only one aircraft shot down. So, you must be the survivor, he said, I had an inkling there was a survivor, because there’s only six people buried. And, well, from then on, we kept in contact and the then secretary of the association was ill and he wanted to give up and Clive took over and all the information was dumped on his doorstep and he’s been the secretary ever since and he does a fantastic job and of course we’ve kept in touch as families, we’ve been away together, we went to Belgium together, to put the monument up, he went to Belgium to find the spot and as he was looking round, the farmer came up and said, you know, are you from the police, are you looking for somebody? He told him why he was there and of course things blossomed and they gave us the plot to put the memorial on. And we were entertained for the weekend by the local council. SP: Did you ever meet anyone from the farm after the war? EH: Oh yes SP: Who had taken you in? EH: Yes, the wife of the farmer came to the last reunion and was delighted and so were we. And I met the sister of the family that took me in, but she died. We stayed with her overnight at the time we were putting the monument together, but her brother had died and her parents had died, she was the sole survivor. And we’re still in touch, Clive he, if he can’t arrange a pickup for me on squadron association reunions, then he comes himself, comes from Castle Bromwich, picks me up and takes me and then brings me back again, which is a long journey. So, we are looking forward to next year, which would be the seventy-fifth anniversary of the squadron forming, so hopefully we get there. I think that’s about everything. SP: Okay, Eddie, well. EH: I can remember as I’ve been helpful or not. SP: That’s been very detailed, so thank you very much for your time on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre. It’s been an EH: Oh, thank you for putting up with it SP: Excellent story, lots of details. Thank you very much for that. 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 Eddie Humes Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Susanne Pescott 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 2017-08-26 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 AHumesEL170826, PHumesEL1701 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 00:54:55 audio recording 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 Royal Air Force. Bomber Command Royal Air Force. Balloon Command Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Great Britain England--London England--Cambridgeshire Belgium Belgium--Brussels Germany Germany--Düsseldorf Germany--Ruhr (Region) Germany--Thuringia Poland Poland--Łambinowice Description An account of the resource During the war, Eddie Humes flew as a navigator on Lancasters with 514 Squadron. In May 1939, he chose to join the RAF instead of going to work in the mines. He was initially expected to be posted as a rigger on aircraft but was then sent to a balloon training centre, which didn’t please him very much. After finishing training, he applied for transfer to aircrew but was posted to a balloon drifter on the Thames and, from there, to the East End in London. When his posting to aircrew came through, he transferred to St John’s Wood for aircrew training and then to St Andrews and to Manchester, where he trained to be a navigator. Eddie was then posted to RAF Chipping Warden on Wellingtons, RAF Little Snoring and to RAF Waterbeach on 514 Squadron. He remembers his first operation to Biarritz and gives a vivid and detailed account of when they were shot down in 1944 over Belgium, on the way back home from Aachen, when the port wing was hit. Six members of the crew died in the crash, leaving him the sole survivor, breaking his leg in the landing. He was taken in by a Belgian family but, because of his severe injuries, he was handed over to the Germans, who brought him to hospital, where he underwent surgery and spent a long period of convalescence. He then spent the rest of the war being moved from camp to camp, in Belgium, Germany and Poland and was then forced to march hundreds of miles from Poland to Austria, from where he was sent to France and repatriated. After the war, he went into teaching and ended up as a deputy head, until his retirement. He joined the squadron association and together with the association’s secretary, his engineer’s nephew, he went to Belgium to build a memorial to his lost crew. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Peter Schulze Carolyn Emery Maureen Clarke Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1939 1944 1945 514 Squadron aircrew Anson bombing Gee Lancaster Lancaster Mk 2 navigator prisoner of war RAF Dumfries RAF Little Snoring RAF Waterbeach Red Cross shot down Stalag 8B the long march training Wellington https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/764/10765/ACushingTEC180115.1.mp3 add33b5bbc53891f76d0dd4060454ec4 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 Cushing, Thomas Eric Chad T E C Cushing Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Thomas Cushing (b. 1936). He grew up in Norfolk and remembers the building of RAF Little Snoring. 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 2018-01-15 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 Cushing, TEC Transcribed audio recording A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is Monday the 15th of January 2018, and we’re at Little Snoring in Norfolk with Mr Thomas Cushing to talk about his experiences as a youngster before, during and then after the war. What are your earliest recollections of life, Tom? TC: We moved into the Old Hall at Thursford which was in flats actually and my early recollection obviously was there. I went to school in Thursford which, we originally had to walk. We used to walk across the park down in to the village. The Old Hall at Thursford down there, they took the main part of the hall down in 1916 and the part that was left was the servant’s quarters and there were three families living there. One were the Boulter family, and the other was the Hill family. My first recollection of Little Snoring was my father coming home one day saying they were going to build an airfield at Little Snoring and he couldn’t understand how they could possibly get an airfield at Little Snoring because it was full of woodland and there were also a lot of not pits, they used to have these marlpits which they dug out to put soil on the land to help it. Fertilise it when they didn’t have fertiliser in those days. He then said that they were originally going to have the airfield at Great Snoring but for some reason or other they couldn’t get one of the runways in there so they just moved it over. My next memory, thoughts of Little Snoring were that they were carting aggregate through the village. They had a big aggregate pit actually in Thursford, and these trucks were going non-stop through the village. Did you want to stop? CB: No. Keep going. TC: They were going non-stop through the village carting aggregate down. My father also had two lorries carting aggregate on to the airfield, and because of that we used to visit the airfield and I’d visit it with my father. I can remember driving up the main runway when they were actually laying the concrete, and the mixers were there and there was a huge heap of soil on the side of the runway because they had these big earth movers which all they did was just graded the soil out, and heaped it out on the side of the runway. Obviously it was eventually spread out and I can remember the chaps actually tamping the various sections of concrete down, and it’s quite interesting because they had a big, they had a, what did they call it? A well, put down and they used to pump the water out to all the mixing sites because obviously they used millions of gallons of water and all the runways on Little Snoring airfield were laid over the winter period of 1942/43 in about four months. And there was a hundred acres of concrete laid. And when you think that every truck that came on the airfield with aggregate was a three ton truck, and all the cement came in to Fakenham Station and was carted out here also on three ton trucks it’s quite, something quite remarkable really. The airfield, in actual fact when they moved in in 1943, in August Lancasters came in here, they were Mark 2s they hadn’t actually finished building the hangars. They were still being built and probably other works were being done as well. I remember the Lancasters arriving on a beautiful August day. I was in the Old Hall and we were actually inside the drem system and I can remember them flying around. Some were coming around fairly sharply. The others ones were going out further and coming in more discreetly. I always felt and I thought the chaps who were coming in tight were probably the experienced than the ones that were going further out and coming in. After that we were aware that they were taking off night time, going on bomber raids and I used to look out of the window and see the lights, because I could see the lights when they were taking off on the north south runway and see them taking off and they’d be climbing up and you’d just see the lights droning around and eventually those sounds would disappear. And we became aware that they were having a lot of losses, and in actual fact 115 Squadron who were flying with Mark 2 Lancasters lost eighteen crews in four and a half months. They actually bombed Peenemunde from here, and my father actually picked some Canadians up hitch hiking in to Fakenham and remembers them talking about the lights and various lights and what was going on on this raid. My next, obviously we were aware of Little Snoring. We couldn’t believe it when the, at the end of the war they dispersed but my father was also friendly with Group Captain Hoare who was the station commander. He didn’t know Group Captain Simms who was the first station commander when the Lancasters were here but he knew Group Captain Hoare. And I don’t know quite why but for some reason he always used to take him to Thorpe Station in Norwich when he went on holiday, and went to pick him up. You’d think that a group captain would get a vehicle to take him there wouldn’t you? But after the war we came down on to the airfield as Group Captain Hoare took us down to look at a Mosquito, and I can remember climbing into it and I sat in the navigator’s seat which was set back from the pilot’s seat and my brother sat in the pilot’s seat. I just felt a bit envious of this but why we didn’t change over I don’t know. But I can remember saying to Group Captain Hoare, who stood outside the aeroplane, ‘You can’t see out of it very well.’ And he said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘When it gets up level you can see out if it beautifully. It’s a beautiful aeroplane.’ Trimming his moustache with his hand. And the other thing, the other person we met up here with was the padre, and because my brother and I were being sent away to Gresham School which was in Holt as a boarder we were both very backward at everything and the old padre came and gave us some extra lessons. And one day he took us down to Ely and I can remember we were following a three ton truck which was an RAF truck and every time he tried to pass it this truck seemed to drive out into the road to stop him. Eventually we did get past and he waved at Dan and he went out and swore at the driver like a trooper. The thing, he took us down to show us around Ely Cathedral and the only other thing I remember was he had a dog which sat in car with us, and I remember going in to a shop where he bought some dog biscuits and dog food. He eventually left, and I understood that he lived off the airfield with his mother but he’d actually come from South Africa and I think that’s where he went back to. And whether he wrote to my father or not after the war I don’t know but I never did hear any more about him or anything of him. And his name was the reverend, well I say reverend, he was Flight Lieutenant Golding. After that, as far as the airfield was concerned they closed it down, and for a time they had a lot of Mosquitoes here which they sold all over the world to other Air Forces. They were just doing them up. And I obviously, was away at school and I should say during the war we were visited by two, 214 Squadron members. And the reason this came about was that Pete Boulter who was the other family in the Old Hall joined the RAF and became a flight engineer, and he flew from Wyton on Stirlings with a chap called Dick Gunton, who was also a flight engineer and they, in actual fact I think were probably about one of six crews that did the whole tour. The rest were all shot down. One of the other ones was a chap called George Mackie who was a pilot. They then went to Waterbeach where they were on a training station which they absolutely hated and they couldn’t wait to get back on ops again. And Dick Gunton said one night in the mess Squadron Leader Sly who was also a survivor of 15 Squadron and said, ‘I’m going back on ops again flying Lancasters.’ Which also happened to be Mark 2s, ‘And I want one of you two as my flight engineer because you’re both in my opinion very good.’ And Dick Gunton said, ‘We tossed a coin,’ he said. ‘And Pete won.’ He said, ‘Though in actual fact, he lost because after about the fourth op he was shot down and killed.’ The whole crew were killed. Dick Gunton then came to Sculthorpe, and while he was there obviously realised the Boulter’s lived at Thursford, and he came over to see Mrs Boulter but Mrs Boulter was away. Her husband was working up in London. Mrs Boulter was away. He got chatting to father and they became friends because they were both interested in old motor cars and Dick Gunton and George Mackie used to come, well right through 1940, the end of 1940. It would be 1943 through in to 1944 when they actually moved to Alton. But we still saw them from there. And I remember Dick Gunton was flying D-Day night and they shot down an ME410. He used to fly with Wing Commander McGlinn and Wing Commander McGlinn flew with all the top chaps, the station navigation officer, the station engineer officer and the station gunnery officer. And the station gunnery officer apparently was in the back of the Lancaster when the, the Flying Fortress when they shot this ME410 down. My next memory of the airfield basically was we, we just used to, I used to drive over it after — I ought to probably go back. I went, I was at Gresham school, and I was useless at maths. And when I left school I joined the Army and when I went up for WOSB I failed WOSB because I was useless at maths but I did manage, through my Army career to become a substantive sergeant after thirteen months which was apparently quite good, Which was a War Office appointment. You could be appointed by your local station. But anyway having left the Army my father at some time during his life had bought the laundry which he had very little interest in, and I was sort of shoved in there at the deep end. And when I joined there, there were thirty six people working there and later when my younger brother left school he came and joined me. We didn’t get along at all well and didn’t have a very good relationship at all, but we did build the business up and when I left there in 1982 when we split up we were employing a hundred and eighty people. We were doing all the American bases in England, which were about ten at the time. We used to send out a vehicle at night time to go around all the bases. And although I didn’t like the laundry it was very lucrative and we managed to make a bit of money and it was after this that I was shooting one day with a friend who was called Martin [unclear] who worked for Saville’s and we owned land at Thursford. We owned a farm there, and we owned the laundry and this chap Martin [unclear] said, ‘Little Snoring airfield is coming up for sale. It borders your land at Thursford. Why don’t you buy it?’ And I said, ‘Well, I can’t possibly afford to buy the airfield,’ I said, ‘It costs a lot of money.’ Some seven hundred acres all in all. He said, ‘Well, you’ve got two brothers. Why don’t you go to the bank and see if they’ll, you can borrow the money?’ To cut a long story short the bank did loan us the money and we bought the airfield. But Little Snoring originally belonged to Lord Hastings and 1947 he sold up Little Snoring and the Air Ministry bought Little Snoring Airfield. But in 1966 they decided they didn’t want it any more. They offered it back to Lord Hastings who said he didn’t want it but he would obviously get it sold and he offered it to the farmer who was farming the most land on the airfield and the only thing, this was the Ross family and old Billy Ross said, he said, ‘I’ll buy the land I farm,’ which was about two hundred and fifty acres, ‘But I don’t want the rest of the airfield,’ which was farmed by two other farmers and obviously there were concrete runways. Well, Lord Hastings didn’t want to sell it individually. He wanted to sell the whole piece. And anyway, we bought the airfield and it caused a lot of ill feeling from the Ross family. The younger ones in particular because they felt their father should have bought it but they had the chance to buy it and they didn’t. That’s how it worked out. Anyway, I actually started looking after the airfield because I was always interested in it. And around that time about, I used to drive around the airfield and I could only see a lot of RAF people with blank faces and I thought I’d start trying to collect the history of the place. Which I did. And the first person I managed to contact was a chap called Bruce Martin who was a Mosquito pilot on 23 Squadron, and he used to keep his motor car in a cart shed of Billy Ross, and old Billy Ross said he’s got an Airviews business now at Manchester Airport. He said, ‘If you got in touch with Manchester Airport they’d probably tell you how to get in touch with him.’ Well, I actually did get in touch with Bruce Martin and he actually came down here and took some photographs eventually. No. He had actually flown over and taken some photographs in 1966, the year we bought the airfield and I didn’t know that. And he said, ‘Oh, the manager of British Airways at Manchester Airport is a chap called Bob Preston who also flew from Little Snoring on 214, sorry 515 Squadron.’ I contacted Bob Preston, it’s just sort of how things got going and I’ve got photographs from Bruce Martin and I got photographs from Bob Preston. And Bob Preston said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Five years ago,’ he said, ‘One of my pilots in Paris was given the card of Chris Harrison, who was actually working for the Goodyear Tyre Company in Australia but he flew from Little Snoring as well.’ So I wrote to Chris Harrison and had a long letter back from him saying he was delighted that somebody was interested in what he did during the war. And he wrote, as I say this long letter and he said, he said, “More and more through the years,” he said, “I felt very guilty that I lost contact with my navigator.” He said, “He was brilliant.” And he said, “If hadn’t been for him I wouldn’t be alive.” He said, ‘But we lost contact when we finished our tour. He went to a navigation station and I went to a pilot training station.” At the bottom of it he put a PS, “Before the war he worked for ICI.” Well, this at the time was sort of in the 1970s and working at the laundry I had a number I used to ring in London if we ran short of supplies of any sort. We used to buy salt and chemicals from ICI, and I had a dry cleaning manager who was a Ukrainian who’d fought in the German Army during the war and daren’t go back to Ukraine because he’d have been shot. And he was one of these chaps who was very good, very clever but he used to very bad with his supplies and tended to run out of things so I had to ring this place in London where I spoke to this lady who used to send these things up usually by the next day. So I rang her and said, ‘Could you put me in touch with your personnel department?’ She said, ‘Yes. You’re trying to trace somebody are you?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I said. There were seven and a half thousand people I think working for ICI in this country then. She said, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘We’ve got twelve people work in this office.’ I said, ‘Very unlikely he would be working there.’ She said, ‘You never know. She said, What’s his name?’ I said, ‘Michael Adams. ‘She said, ‘We’ve got a Michael Adams working in this office.’ It was him. CB: Wow. TC: And they obviously put me in touch and he came, Chris Harrison came back and stayed with him. And one day after I’d learned to fly up here, this was sort of in the early ‘70s this car arrived, I was just about to go flying in a friend’s Stearman who had come to take me for a flight, and this car turned up and he introduced himself as Michael Adams and his wife. And I said, ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I was just about to going flying.’ The Stearman actually stood there. He said, ‘Good heavens,’ he said, ‘I did a lot of my training on them.’ I said, ‘You can go in my place.’ Which he did. And when he died his wife wrote to me. I kept in touch with him over the years. In fact, one time he used to send out seventy two Christmas cards to people who were stationed here. And when he died his wife wrote to me and said, “He always remembered how kind you were to let him take that flight in the Stearman.” Then it was just a question of one person knowing another person and I eventually got in touch with people in Australia, New Zealand and even Canada, and collected quite a nice collection of photographs. One of the people who helped me quite a lot originally was Wing Commander Lambert. I can’t remember how I contacted him but his pilots and navigators didn’t like him at all because he wasn’t kind to them in any way apparently. And Chris Harrison, I told you about, who was in Australia said that they used to do these ops where they did a, fly over the canals at fifteen hundred feet, and shoot up the flak that shot at them. And the bomber Mosquitoes used to fly underneath and drop mines, and he said, ‘We did an op on the Kiel Canal and when we came back we heard that all the bomber Mosquitoes had got DFCs and we hadn’t got anything.’ He said the next time when they did the Dortmund Ems canal he was going out with a WAAF in the ops room. She said, ‘You’re all going to get DFCs tonight.’ He, he knew they were going on this Kiel Canal op. Anyway, when he reported to duty they said, ‘Oh, you’ve been scrubbed. You’re not going now.’ So he just went back. ‘The next day I found out that Lambert had taken my place.’ And he said he’d done the night flight test on his aeroplane and Lambert had actually taken his aeroplane and got a DFC for it. And I met another, knew another chap called Terry Groves who actually flew on that op, and he said that when they called up Lambert was nowhere to be heard. They didn’t, he didn’t actually go on the op at all. So he was flying somewhere over Germany. So as I say Chris Harrison wasn’t very pleased. He always felt that Lambert had pinched his DFC. Over the years I obviously met a lot, quite a lot of people who’d been stationed here. Wing Commander Russell who was 23 Squadron commander lived at Blakeney for some time. There was a chap called Ron Steward who was a Lancaster navigator. He lived near Aylsham. Another pilot, 515 Squadron pilot Frank Bowcock lived in Fakenham. I shall have to stop for wind. CB: Do that. That’s good. TC: Is that alright? [recording paused] CB: It’s really good. Just, quickly. Ok. TC: Chris Harrison worked for, it would be De Havilland before the war and no, sorry he worked for Rolls Royce in Derby and he, he was on Reserved Occupation because he was an engineer on building engines. But he eventually persuaded them to let him go and he went for pilot training in America. While he was over there they were building the factory that were building Packard Merlins and they were having some sort of trouble with the assembly line, and they, what did they call it? Seconded or they took him off training for six months to work with Packard Merlin. And because of that he had the choice of when he’d finished his training as to what he could fly when he came back. And he said, ‘We’d heard that Mosquitoes were finishing their tours, whereas Lancasters weren’t so he said, ‘I thought I’d go for Mosquitoes.’ But in actual fact the Mosquitoes did have quite a lot of losses here because they were doing low level intruding work. So that’s how he became on to fly Mosquitoes. And I assumed that he’d gone on training and, and for some reason or other hadn’t qualified. The normal thing then was to post this Michael Adams. Post them on to navigators. Ok. Can you — CB: We’ll stop there for a bit. [recording paused] CB: And by the way the, in going, Michael Adams what you’re saying is that he did pilot training on Stearman which was why he was interested in the Stearman. TC: Yes. Yes. CB: Yeah. TC: Yes. CB: Can we — TC: I’ll just — CB: Can we just do a step back to the construction of the airfield? TC: Yes. The first, they first started constructing on the north south runway, and they gradually worked north on the, on that runway. And the next one was the northeast south west one. That came, that went across towards Great Snoring. And the last runway they put in was the main runway. I can remember coming around on several occasions with my father while they were doing this. One day there was an old keeper’s bungalow which stood to the eastern side of the airfield where they actually did the, they had all the, what do they call the people who set out the place? CB: The surveyors. TC: Surveyors. CB: Yes. TC: They had all the surveyors in there and that was their office and they had cars parked alongside of that. And during the war of course they were, all we heard was when they were building the place a lot of explosions going off all the time. And what they were doing was blowing up tree stumps. CB: Oh. TC: And one of these tree stumps had actually blown up near this, these cars parked and it completely flattened an Austin 7 and it just sat there literally with this huge tree stump plonked on top of it. That’s something I remember very well. The actual bungalow was eventually moved after the war down to Langor Bridge which is about two miles away, and rebuilt by a chap called George Owen. I think he bought it off the Air Ministry. Apart from that just coming around the airfield seeing it rebuilt I know there were a lot of Irishmen here which I understand were billeted all around the place, and the foreman of all the works was a chap called Morrissey. An Irishman. A really big man. A tall man and he was called Lofty, and after the war he started up in business on his own and he was the first person in this country to make a concrete tile because he was friendly, or knew an Englishman who’d been over to America before the war who’d said they used to make tiles of concrete over there. Apparently he made some samples of these concrete tiles, flat tiles with pin holes through them and took them to the council and they agreed to put them on. And the first concrete tiles were put on a bungalow in Thursford, built by this builder Morrissey. And I stayed, obviously friendly with the Morriseys and Lofty Morrisey did a lot of building for us over the years. I was going to get him to build this house. He built my first bungalow in Fakenham but I was going to build this house but the biggest problem with him was he’d start building, then leave it and then go and build somewhere else. And of course when you want something built you want it completed. But I still know his son Jim Morrissey who is still in the building trade. Have I, have I — CB: What was the sequence then when they build because they’re building runways and taxiways. TC: Yes. CB: And then dispersals. TC: They were, they were actually building all the houses the huts and accommodation places at the same time as well. And it’s quite interesting. All the drains were dug out on the airfield with drag lines. They didn’t have any JCBs in those times. And when you think of it it’s quite a, quite an effort really. The airfield obviously was extremely well drained. All the runways were drained. All the dispersals were drained. And when we bought the airfield in 1966 one of the first things was to get the land, which was obviously disrupted through bad drainage, we had to get it all re-drained which we did gradually over the years. When we three brothers bought the airfield my older brother was farming at Thursford. My younger brother was more interested in the laundry. As well my laundry duties I also looked after the airfield. And when we eventually split up in 1982 I acquired the airfield, and my younger brother kept the laundry. My oldest brother had the farm at Thursford. I can’t remember. Have I done the Army bit? CB: No. TC: I haven’t? No. I went, I was away at school at Gresham School, and when I finished school I joined the Army and went up for a WOSB which was to become an officer. But of course I was so bad at mathematics I failed my WOSB, and spent my time in the ranks. But I did raise or rise up to become a sergeant in thirteen months. A substantive sergeant which at that time I understand was quite a, quite an achievement. CB: I should imagine it was. What were you doing in the Army? I was I was actually in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. We used to supply everything. Everything the Army had apart from food and fuel. It’s now the Royal Logistics Corps, and I think they supply everything but I, unfortunately I was stationed in the country. I tried to get abroad but it didn’t work. CB: What was the meritorious activity you did to get such fast promotion? TC: I suppose I was just good at my work and I took exams. I used to go up to Chilwell to do exams, which I passed. The only thing that did happen towards the end of my time Suez was attacked by us and the French, and we painted all our lorries up, all trucks and vehicles up ready to go to Suez, and we were literally bound to go within three or four weeks. And it all came to a close. Stopped. So I didn’t have to go and I was quite pleased about that because it was near my time for coming out and a friend of mine who’d actually been demobbed a few months earlier was called up and he was still in the Army when I came out. He was on Army Emergency Reserve. CB: So did they have to repaint them the colour they were originally? TC: They did. They painted, yes they painted them back again then. Yes. They were painted this desert colour. A sand colour. Then I came back and went in to the laundry business which my father had acquired at some time or another. When I started there there were thirty six people there. The highest paid man was earning ten pounds a week, and the highest paid lady was earning seven pounds a week. It gives you an idea how things have changed. And this was in 1956. And eventually my younger brother came and we managed to build the business up and when I left in 1982 we were employing a hundred and eighty people. CB: What, what was the motive? How did you manage to grow the business so much? TC: Well — CB: What did you do? TC: I decided from an early age that going around to houses picking up family bundles wasn’t really very lucrative and I managed to get a lot of contracts doing bulk work like hotels and factories. We did ICI at Stowmarket, in fact. But we also did a lot of American work and at one time we were doing virtually every American base in England. We used to send a truck out overnight to pick up stuff which came back to us the next morning. A lot of that had to go back the next night. CB: Did you invest a lot in machinery too? TC: A lot of machinery. Yes. Yes. They always said that by the end of the time I was there you could afford to spend twenty thousand pound to get rid of one person. But it was still quite labour intensive and I think we were one of the first people who employed people from France. We took on a family and put them up and board because we were desperately short of staff around the area. In fact, my brother and I used to go out to the villages at night time asking if they knew anybody who wanted to do work, and we actually had five vehicles bringing in people every morning from all the surrounding villages. I think now the laundry is not in the family anymore. I think now, that a lot of employees are apparently from Spain and Portugal. But then as a complete change I had actually done a bit of farming. Obviously my father was a farmer and I’d done a bit of farming in my holiday time and the airfield, there were a hundred acres of land on the airfield and I farmed that for a while. Basically until I retired. CB: Was that arable? TC: Arable, just arable land. Yes. In, in the about the 1970s I started collecting this history of the Airfield and over the years I’ve met a lot of people who were stationed here. Chris Harrison, who I mentioned earlier always said could I try and contact a chap called Terry Groves, who was a pilot on 515 Squadron and he said he was one of the only people he ever met who was completely fearless. He was rather like Micky Martin who actually came here, a Dambuster, who came here and flew with 515 Squadron, and I tried very hard to trace Terry Groves, he used to apparently drive speedway bikes before the war, and wasn’t successful. But one day a car turned up outside my house. The window was cranked down and this chap said, ‘My name’s Terry Groves. I used to fly Mosquitoes here during the war.’ I said, ‘Hello Terry, you’ve lost your moustache.’ He said, ‘I don’t remember you.’ He said, ‘You weren’t on the squadron, were you?’ I said, ‘No. I wasn’t.’ But anyway, we became quite good friends and he had a daughter living at [unclear], in fact and he used to come up here quite a lot and because I learned to fly in the 1970s off the airfield here, I did actually take Terry flying one day which he very much enjoyed. CB: What had he done after the war? TC: Mundane jobs. Wartime had been his, his greatest time. When he left here he went to Swanton Morley and he’d actually done thirty ops here, and asked to stay on because he said, I said, ‘Why did you want to stay on ops?’ He said, ‘I must have enjoyed it,’ and he said, anyway, they said, ‘No. You need a rest.’ But I persuaded them to stay on, but he said they said, ‘Well, you can two or three more.’ He said, ‘I’d done another twelve before they realised it,’ he said, ‘And then they did post me out to Swanton Morley.’ Well,’ I said, ‘That’s unusual. You have would normally have gone to a training station.’ He said, ‘Well, he said, I went there because they were still flying ops from there.’ And Micky Martin was there as well apparently, and one of the things he did tell me was one day a Spitfire arrived there, and just parked up on hard stand, and he said, after a week it was still standing there. He said, ‘I’d never flown a Spitfire. So I went around to see if a flight sergeant, said, ‘Can you – ’ flight engineer I presume, ‘Can you get that Spitfire started up for me?’ And he said, ‘‘Yes, I can.’’ He said, ‘Anyway, I got in it and took off with it.’ And he said, ‘The only thing was you had to change hands when you took the undercarriage up.’ I think it was over the other side of the cockpit. The lever, and he said, ‘When I took my hands off the throttle,’ he said, ‘The throttle friction nut was loose, and it wouldn’t keep tight.’ And he said, ‘Every time I took my finger off there the engine faded.’ He said, ‘Anyway, I eventually did sort this out and —’ and he said, ‘I, I flew this Spitfire for several months. I used to, and I was the only person who used to fly it. Nobody said anything. I used to fly it down to London.’ And go down to see his wife. He said, ‘Anyway, one day Micky Martin said, ‘What’s that Spitfire I saw you flying the other day?’ He said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I only fly that. I don’t let anybody else fly that.’ He said, ‘I’m going to bloody well fly it.’ Anyway, he said, ‘Next thing I knew he took it off, and he roared over Addison at [unclear] Hall who sat outside with all his papers on the desk which blew everywhere and,’ he said, ‘And after that the Spitfire disappeared.’ But he used to fly down to London apparently in an Oxford with Micky Martin, and they used to land at some airfield there. I think during the war, it was just the way they were. One interesting thing was going back to the war, war years 115 Squadron started off at RAF Marham. They then went to Mildenhall. Then to East Wretham, and then came to Little Snoring. And when I was being taught at school we were being taught by an ex-pilot called Malcolm Freegard. and he flew from Marham but I didn’t realise until I started doing the history of Little Snoring that he’d actually flown with 115 Squadron from Marham, and he didn’t know they’d come to Snoring, because he was actually shot down over Germany and became a prisoner of war in Stalag 3. And he said that he was in an acting group there, and people like Rupert Davies were there who eventually became the Maigret. I don’t know if you remember him. Is that, do you want to stop? CB: Yeah. [recording paused] TC: And he said that in actual fact a lot of these, most of the people on the camp were really fed up with the people who were trying to escape because, he said every time they were caught all the privileges of the camp were stopped. And he said, ‘Not only that they pinched all our, our bed boards.’ So he said, ‘We were probably sleeping on about three bed boards which wasn’t very comfortable.’ And he said although he helped disperse soil around the camp when they were digging it out but he spent most of his time, he said they actually piled most of the soil under the theatre apparently. And I remember him saying that at the end of the war they were put on a train to be sent eastwards away from the Russians, and he said they stopped at a station somewhere and he said, there was a small vent that he could open up, because they were stuck in these cattle trucks. He said, ‘I opened this up for some fresh air and was looking out,’ and suddenly there was a crack right near his head, and he looked around and somebody had shot at them with a rifle. So he said, ‘I thought after all I’d been through to nearly be shot at the end of the war.’ CB: Yeah. TC: But we used to lead him on through some red herrings to talk about the war, so we didn’t have to be taught Latin or something although I can’t remember what. He was a very nice man and I took him down to a reunion at Ely. CB: Yeah. TC: At Witchford. You could land at Witchford at that time and I actually flew down there one time to this reunion. I went to several reunions after the war for 115 Squadron, and 515 Squadron started having reunions back here in the 1990s, and I met a lot of the people who used to come back. But I eventually stopped it because in the end it was becoming too much for the older ones, and the only people coming back really was the children and I wasn’t really very really interested in children coming back to reunions so I that’s why I stopped it. CB: How did you run it? What facilities did you have that made it practical? TC: I had a small museum out here, and we used to, in actual fact meet in the Flying Club. The McAully Flying Club Clubhouse, and we used to get a fish and chip van come around to provide the food, and, and they, they were very good. One year I managed to get the Battle of Britain flight over here and a Mosquito. Not a Mosquito, a Spitfire came over and did a display which was quite nice. CB: The museum itself. What were the contents of that? TC: It was basically the, quite a lot of things that people had lent me, given me and had my photographs in there. But it was basically a wooden hut which had actually been a sergeant’s mess at Langham, which my father had bought. And it got to the stage where nobody was coming back, and it needed quite a lot of work spending on the roof and whatnot, so the majority went down to Flixton Air Museum. And I’ve still got a few pieces on a table out in one of my barns which I show visitors when they come, and as I say the majority of the stuff either went back to people who, who owned it, or it went to Flixton. CB: How did people know about your museum? TC: For quite a long time I had a notice in the church, and one interesting thing happened from that was, one day a person turned up from there and said looking all round, very intrigued, he wasn’t a pilot or anything he was just interested in what happened during the war. And he said, oh he said quite interestingly he said, ‘I was staying he was staying in a campsite down in Devon last year and the chap there said he was a Mosquito pilot serving up in Norfolk.’ And I said, ‘What was his name?’ He said, ‘I just can’t remember, he said. Everybody called him Josh.’ And, I said it was obviously Josh Hoskins, I said who I’d tried to contact but never been successful. He said, ‘Yes, it was him,’ and he said, ‘I’ve got his address at home. I’ll let you have it.’ Anyway, he let me have this address and telephone number, and I rang him up and had a chat with him, and I can’t remember why, I had quite a long chat with him, but I. He was very friendly with Bob Preston who was the manager of, became the manager of Manchester Airport, British Airways. And Bob Preston had always said, ‘If you ever manage to trace him please put me in touch.’ Anyway, I rang him back, and said for some reason or other I can’t remember why, and his wife answered the phone. And she said, oh she said ‘I’m so pleased you rang him,’ she said, ‘He’s dying of cancer. He’s not expected to live many more weeks, she said but you’ve bucked him up enormously.’ And anyway, I rang Bob Preston who I was still in touch with and told him, Bob Preston went down to see him the next day. CB: Really. TS: Which I thought was very nice. CB: Excellent. Yeah. TC: So that sort of thing was incredibly rewarding. CB: I bet. TC: More rewarding than most things that could happen, and over the years another thing that happened was, if you go to the church you’ll see that there’s a poem in there written by a chap called Steve Ruffle who was ground crew on 23 Squadron, and he came up here and I had quite a long chat, and just as he was leaving he said, ‘Oh,’ he said, he said ‘I wrote a poem, he said when I left here after the last time.’ He said, ‘It’s not very good, he said, but would you like a copy?’ and I said, ‘Yes I would.’ And I think it’s the best poem I’ve read of any poem written after the war, and in this poem he mentions a friend of his who’s an artist, and he’d actually done all the record of the scores of the kills and the rewards. And these boards were hanging in the officer’s mess and they were rescued by a lady called Mrs Whitehead who entertained the troops in her house during the war. She lived in a farmhouse in the village, and she went into the officer’s mess one day after the war because she heard a noise in there, and somebody was about to chop all these boards up for firewood, and she cleared him out, and she put these boards in the church and they’re there to this day. CB: Fantastic. Yeah. TC: And anyway these boards were done by a chap called Douglas Higgins. This chap, this chap Steve Ruffle’s friend and he said, ‘I feel very said. I lost contact. We were great friends during the war.’ He said, ‘I lost contact with him.’ Anyway, he’d mentioned him in this poem. You’ll see that in the poem if you go to the church, mentioning the artist who did the murals on the wall, and he said he was my friend. And anyway, everybody who came back to the airfield after that, I said, ‘Do you know, did you ever know Douglas Higgins or anything about him?’ And this went on for years. And one day a WAAF came back and I said, ‘Did you know Douglas Higgins?’ Her name was Mary Hicks. And she said, ‘Yes, he lives down the road from me in Sheffield. I still see him.’ So I put them in touch and they met again. They met up every year until Steve Ruffle died. CB: Amazing. TC: And Douglas Higgins is still alive to my knowledge at a hundred and two. CB: Is he? TC: And he came back here two years ago when he was ninety eight, well he’s. No. Four years ago. He’s about a hundred two, not, but I haven’t heard from him and I should probably ring him up very shortly and have a chat with him. But he was a very religious man, and happiness sort of comes out of him. He’s one of these people, and, but as I say he’s still alive and he did a lot of painting, and I’ve still got one of his paintings here now that he did. When he came back to me, it’s a painting of the church. He looked at this painting and said, ‘That’s very good. Who did that?’ Because I had my name over it and I took my name off. He looked. He said, ‘Oh, I don’t remember that.’ And he’d painted it. I’ll just show you that. CB: Do. TC: I’ll just show you. It’s a very nice painting. [recording paused] CB: You’ve talked about people coming back here, and we know as a background that actually so many people in the forces never wanted to speak about what they had done. Do you think it’s different? There’s a difference between speaking about it and coming back? What makes them come back? Or has made them come back? TC: I think a lot of them had worked all their lives after leaving here and generally I think they suddenly look back on their life as they gain, as most people do, things they’d done when they were young. Dick Gunton who came to see us during the war, he used to see us during the war. I managed to trace him up to Lancashire, and he didn’t really want to know anything about anything. He said, ‘Don’t ever put me in touch with anybody. I don’t want to know anybody that I’ve ever met during the war.’ And he said, in actual fact, he said, ‘I felt in the war, I rose to the rank of flight lieutenant,’ which I think is the same rank as captain in the Army and he said, ‘I was the head of engineering on RAF Oulton’ he said, ‘And I, I reached, that was the time I reached my pinnacle.’ He said, ‘After that my life,’ he said, ‘I had a small garage and nothing very much happened,’ he said. And I felt Aubrey Howell who was a, a Lancaster pilot came back here, and he had the small graphic works, but his bomb aimer was a millionaire apparently, and the difference of during the war Aubrey was a very strict, apparently in, in, in the aeroplane and they survived their tour of ops and Aubrey Howell actually did eight trips to Berlin from there, and he’s, he’s sadly dead now but I did meet him on several occasions. I think some of the people, an example probably is probably Wing Commander Russell. I met him on several occasions away from the airfield, and he was very helpful in letting me copy his photographs and talked about it all. When he came back to the airfield, I just felt he didn’t want to be here. I took around my little museum I had here at the time and he showed very little interest in it all. And I just felt he wanted to get out and away. And he actually learned to fly again from Swanton Morley, or got his licence back, but he never ever landed at Little Snoring in spite of the fact I invited him on many occasions. Other people who’ve come back, I think it was basically the fact that they’d worked their whole lives and were thinking about what they did when they were younger and I think over time, I was in the Army you tend to remember the good times rather than the bad times. For example, doing forty eight hour guard duty over a snow cold weekend with snow blowing in the hut you were sleeping in. CB: Yeah. TC: But, you know that’s just an example. But I think a lot of the people, Wing Commander Russell’s navigator, one of his navigators, I actually wrote to him I knew where he was he saw Wing Commander Russell and said he’d had, ‘This chap, Cushing write to me about Little Snoring airfield. He said, ‘I’m not interested in that. I don’t want to talk about that.’ That was it. CB: You were reported to the boss. TC: Yes. Yes [laughs] but — CB: Do you suppose that there are some experiences that are too dramatic, too traumatic for people to want to address? TC: Yes. I, I can tell you — CB: And how does that come out? TC: Tell you something else. A chap called John Derby contacted me, and said he’d like to come back and visit the airfield, and he was a mid-upper gunner on Lancasters. And when he got back here he wanted to go down on to the main runway. That was the only place he was interested in. The end of the main runway, he walked around there on his own. I stood talking to his wife. When he came back he said, ‘My crew left here,’ he said, ‘In 1943.’ He said, ‘I wasn’t with them and they all got shot down and killed.’ And he said, ‘I felt guilty about it all my life.’ And he, in fact what he didn’t know was in fact there was a survivor and he was a chap called Heath. And I met him years later and he said they were flying over Stuttgart, I think it was, and he said he suddenly heard the shout from the rear gunner, ‘Fighter,’ and machine guns going off. He said he looked up because he was the bomb aimer, he looked up and there were tracers coming right down the length of the Lancaster, and he said they must have hit the pilot because I know they had an armoured shield behind them but he said the pilot slumped forward. He said, ‘The next thing I knew I was on the parachute.’ He said, apparently the whole aeroplane had blown up and he said, ‘The next day the Germans took me out to where we’d bombed the night before and it was a false town near Stuttgart.’ He said, ‘But I had the great satisfaction of being on the outskirts of Stuttgart,’ he said, ‘When the Air Force came back the next night and bombed the hell out of it.’ But John Darby who I was talking about he had actually won the DFC. He’d been shot down over Europe and escaped I understood through the Pyrenees out of Spain and he got a DFC for that. He was a warrant officer. And literally a few months later his wife rang me up and said he’d died, and he wanted his ashes spread on the airfield, on the airfield where he’d walked. And she came down here and we had a little service out there. CB: Lovely. TC: And there are several lots of ashes from people who served here during the war. There are two couples who met here near the flying, near the control tower. They worked in radar. Both of their ashes spread there. And two or three others as well. CB: In spreading the ashes do they have some kind of memorial plaque? TC: The only thing is — CB: On the site or what? TC: There is a little plaque on the control tower. CB: Right. TC: But one of them, there isn’t. I ought to really put it up. A chap called Tom Hodgson. He died. CB: Was this — TC: He was a fitter. CB: Is this control tower the watch office type? TC: It is the watch office. CB: Yes. The original. TC: It’s known as the watch tower. CB: Yes. Yes. TC: But I always call it the control tower. CB: Can we just go back to this feeling of guilt? TC: Yes. CB: Of being a survivor. What is it? What is it that gives them that feeling of guilt would you say? TC: I don’t really know is the answer to that. It’s obviously, I think they think, ‘I should have been there and I shouldn’t be alive. I survived and they’re dead.’ I’ve just read a book about, “The Cruel Sea,” about Nicholas Monsarrat and how things happened there. And similar things happened with them. People survived shipwrecks. CB: I mean the notion is, the actuality is that on a Lancaster or the big aeroplanes the crew is the family. TC: Yes. Oh, yes. Yeah. They all, they all went out together, drank together even if they were flight sergeants and officers. CB: Which was, yes. TC: All on Christian name terms. CB: Yes. They worked, toiled and died. TC: Yes. CB: As a family. TC: Yes, they did. Yes. CB: And is this the basis of the guilt? TC: The majority of the Lancaster crews and the bomber crews stayed together and in touch. I think it was possibly, I don’t think it happened quite so much with the Mosquito crews for some reason or other. I think they split them, went their separate ways more. CB: I suspect it varied according to when the end of the operations were. TC: Yes. Yes. CB: And what people did later in the war. TC: One of the people I met was Buddy Badly who was a New Zealander and he was a brilliant pilot apparently. And when he was doing his training in Canada he hadn’t qualified as a pilot but he was sent up in a, in an aeroplane, told to do stall turns and he did this stall turn and when he started to go down he couldn’t move the elevator. It was stuck. So he was going straight down and apparently he was up at about eight thousand feet and all he could see down below was snow and ice because it was mid-winter there. And he suddenly thought the only way I’m going to level this aeroplane out is to climb over the back seat which he did and levelled it. And he found he could fly it by reaching over the seat and controlling the aeroplane like that. CB: Crikey. TC: And he called up the station and said that he was in trouble and couldn’t move the elevators and apparently the wing commander took up and came through beside him and said, ‘You’re never going to land that. You’ll have to bale out.’ He said, ‘It was getting dusk,’ and he said, ‘I was still miles away from the airfield.’ He said, ‘I looked down and all I could see was snow and ice and I thought they’ll never find me.’ And he actually took the aeroplane back and landed it. CB: Gee. TC: And didn’t even damage it. And for that he got the Kings Commendation for flying before he’d even qualified as a pilot. And he then did a tour in the Middle East and came back to Little Snoring and there is a story in the book I’ll tell you. They had a photograph taken when they arrived from the Middle East. 23 Squadron. There were several of the squadrons around here were flying Mosquitoes and they had a reunion of all the people that had been in 23 Squadron, and Group Captain Heycock who was station commander at West Raynham had also been a 23 Squadron commander. And they had this photograph which I have in my album and I’ll show you. They had this photograph taken where they all had their fingers up. The next photograph, which obviously was a serious was taken and Buddy Badly was standing behind Group Captain Hoare and held a wine glass so it looks as if the wine glass was standing on Hoare’s head. And when the photographs came out Hoare was furious, called Wing Commander Murphy in who was the squadron commander and said, ‘I want him kicked off the squadron. It’s an absolute disgrace ruining this serious photograph.’ And Murphy said, ‘I’m not going to do that,’ he said, ‘He’s one of my best pilots.’ Anyway, Buddy Badly had various situations. He landed a Mosquito back at Woodbridge because I think he’d lost an engine and had been shot up badly. And the next thing that happened they were over Venlo about a fortnight later and they attacked this airfield. He went over there with George Stewart on a Day Ranger, and he said as they went over the airfield George Stewart shot up this JU88 but he said there was nothing in front of me and they said they would obviously never go back, he said. Anyway coming back over the coast there was this big Freya mast and he thought, ‘I’ll have a shoot at that. At least I’ll shoot at something.’ And he went down and shot this thing up and there was a German standing there with a little machine pistol shooting at him and he knocked his engine out and he couldn’t get any rudder controls either. CB: Jeez. TC: He said the only way he could go up was on the trim tab and he said, ‘I said to the navigator,’ because he’d lost an engine which wasn’t on fire apparently, just stopped, he’d feathered it he said, ‘We’re never going to back to England.’ He said. ‘You’ll have to bale out.’ But he said he’d got a new navigator and the navigator said, apparently while the navigator was trying to get up, he accidently pulled his parachute cord, and, and he said, ‘I had silk all over me everywhere,’ he said, ‘And I was fighting to get this parachute silk out of the way,’ so he could see what he was doing. He said obviously there was no way he was going to bale out without a parachute so he flew the aeroplane back to Woodbridge and landed it there on one engine. Which took quite a long time I understand. Two or three hours I think. And anyway, he said he rang up from Woodbridge to Little Snoring. Group Captain Hoare answered the phone and he said, ‘Could you send an aeroplane down to pick me up?’ And Hoare said, Hoare said, ‘No. I bloody well can’t. You can find your own way back.’ He said, ‘So I had to gather my parachute.’ Which he had to bring back which he had, and the navigator was carrying his all bundled up and they came back to Little Snoring. So Hoare was still feeling a grievance. Anyway, Murphy went on ops on the 2nd of December which was a couple of months later I think, was shot down, was killed, and Buddy Badly was posted out the next day, he said. So Hoare never did forget. The other thing that they said about Hoare was that when he arrived at the station Micky Martin was here who had the DSO bar, DFC bar, and of course Hoare had the DSO and DFC, and what the chaps on, the pilots and crew on 515 Squadron said was that Hoare had him posted away because he’d got more medals. CB: Yeah. TC: But he did twenty two ops from Snoring. CB: Did he? TC: Micky Martin. CB: Yeah. TC: And he was actually mentioned in Cheshire’s book of calling him up while they were on ops. CB: Fascinating. We’ll pause there. TC: Yes. Ok. I think we’ll just peruse — [recording paused] TC: I took flying the chap who was actually fearless on 515 Squadron, he said they were coming back off ops one night when they had a radar on the Mosquito which could pick up on anything coming up behind them. He said they were flying along, and this blip came up on the radar and he said, ‘I did a 360 degree turn.’ And they had this ASH radar which had a thin beam. This way rather than a round beam, from an oblong beam. He said he couldn’t pick up anything in front of them, he said anyhow this, this actually happened three times. This blip kept coming up he said and it was rumoured that you could pick up your shadow, and so it was a false reading. He said, ‘I said to my navigator [Doc Wray?] I’m going to ignore it this time.’ But he said, ‘At the very last minute,’ he said, ‘I was coming up. There was a Halifax coming up a bit above us,’ He said, ‘At the last minute I lost my nerve,’ he said, ‘And as I turned,’ he said, ‘Machine gun bullets came up and shot the Halifax down.’ CB: Jeez. TC: So, he said, there was something behind them. CB: Jeez. TC: He said, ‘We scarpered like mad then for home.’ CB: Jeepers. TC: Because, he said we obviously couldn’t find it on our radar. But the radar that 85 Squadron had which was a, high flying radar apparently had a better, they could pick things up better than this narrow radar. That’s the only thing I really want to say. [recording paused] CB: Just returning to the construction of the airfield what’s the, what was the position there? TC: My father was friendly with Frank [Prune] who founded Little, Great Snoring, and when Frank [Prune] heard that they were going to build an airfield all over his land he wrote to the Air Ministry saying that, giving all the production, it’s very good land there apparently, saying that he produced this that and the other. And obviously didn’t want the airfield to be built there. But it didn’t make any difference and they said he was actually crying in his beer in the pub in Fakenham. And it was only because they couldn’t get one of the runways in. I don’t know which one it was. Long enough. But they just moved the airfield over to Little Snoring. That’s it really. CB: But the land here was owned by whom? TC: It was, it was owned – CB: By — TC: Lord Hasting, which I have already mentioned. CB: By Lord Hastings which you mentioned. You mentioned it. TC: Yes. CB: What I meant to say was — TC: Which he wouldn’t have bothered I’m sure. CB: Do we know anything about his? Do you know anything about his reaction to that? TC: No. I don’t. No. CB: Right. Ok. TC: A lot of the airfield there was a woodland came right up the centre of the airfield. CB: So they had to take the woodland down completely. TC: Cut the woodland down. Yes. Yeah. It was a fairly new woodland apparently. CB: A final thing could you describe what a drag line is and how it works? TC: It’s a caterpillar, tracked vehicle with obviously a cab. A cab on it. It had a long crane like construction out front with a bucket which hung free on cables and it was just literally dropped on to the soil. And I think they could adjust the angle of the bucket and they pulled it towards them. Pulled it towards the digger. It was a very, very rudimentary type of digger really. And when, when you think of all the things that, all the drains that were dug out they were all put in, and I presume they, they must have been used I would think even to do the smaller roadways and the perimeter tracks. The only other machines they had were these big American earth movers which had a big wheel on the front with a cab and the engine sticking out, and they had this huge container at the back which can literally drag along and, and lift the soil up into it, and they could also deposit that from it— CB: into a bucket, TC: A big bucket. Yes. I can draw one even now. The way they looked. I think they still use a similar type machine. CB: Now, the runways were concrete on top but what was the composition of the — TC: Absolutely nothing underneath. They were just put straight down on to the clay. CB: Oh. TC: And if there were pits which there were, which were pits that were used to take out soil to fertilise the land, they would fill those in with rubble, and all of those pits where they were they would drain right up to them to make sure they were never wet. [noise in the room] TC: Did I hear something? CB: You did. A ting. Right. Thank you. [recording paused] CB: So we’ve had a really interesting conversation. Thank you, Tom Cushing. Fascinating. TC: I hope it's useful to you. [recording paused] CB: Right. TC: I lived in the Old Hall at Thursford as I’ve said and I could see across to the airfield which was to the west. And one morning I looked out my bedroom window and saw a Lancaster upended in a drain. When I started a history of the airfield, trying to trace the airfield I tried to find out which Lancaster this was. And I got the daily record sheets of 115 Squadron, went right through and there’s nothing in it. After that I asked anybody who came back if they remembered the Lancaster, and nobody did. One day a person I flew with, a friend of mine who was a manager at Keiths of Barsham said he’d had a shoot there one day the previous week and one of the guests had said his father had crash landed a Lancaster at Little Snoring. I said, ‘Was he a Canadian or Englishman?’ He said, ‘I think he was an Englishman.’ I knew a Canadian had gone off the other end of the runway. And anyway, to cut a long story short it was this chap, Howard Farmiloe, and I got in touch with him. He was a land agent in Devon. He came back and told me all about it. They’d been on their way to Berlin and been shot up by a night fighter and lost a port inner engine. He said everything else was going ok. The gunners claimed to have shot the intruder down. Over Berlin they’d lost another engine from another fighter. He’d flown all the way back to Little Snoring, they were the first drem lights they’d seen on two starboard engines and he said, ‘We’d actually done quite a good landing.’ Probably shooting a bit of a line, but he said quite a good landing. And he said, ‘I couldn’t understand why going down this runway which was at that time it was 07, why we weren’t pulling up.’ And what he didn’t know was that the runway is twenty feet lower that end. At the eastern end. So, he went off the runway and upended in the drain and he said, ‘When I got to the end of the runway I thought about pulling the undercarriage up,’ he said, ‘But two nights earlier I’d done the very same thing at the station I was at with similar problems of no hydraulics and wrecked a Lancaster and been told off by the wing commander for wrecking a perfectly good Lancaster. Anyway — ’ he said, ‘We, we all clambered out,’ he said, ‘Up and walked up to the control tower. Told them we had a Lancaster down.’ He said, ‘They didn’t believe us but they sent out the fire truck and saw it there.’ Eventually we actually climbed over it and I collected some [ash] spent cartridges which were in the front of the aeroplane which eventually got lost somehow or other. I think, somebody stole them. Eventually they, they put a balloon under the tail of a Lancaster and put sleepers up on to the airfield and winched it back on to the airfield. They did actually fly again and it was shot down some months later. CB: Oh. TC: But not, not with him on board, because he’d finished his tour and he was the youngest man to get the DSO in the RAF. CB: Was he really? TC: Yeah. CB: Let’s just to cover one point which you mentioned then, which was, drem lighting. Would you like to describe what that was and how it worked? TC: It was literally a circle right round the airfield with bleed off points which came into the runways. And when that runway was in action obviously all the other ones were out so there was just one. So they knew exactly which one they had to go in on. CB: So this is lights on poles. TC: Lights on poles. Yes. CB: How high are these poles above the ground? TC: Telegraph poles size. CB: Right. TC: Height. CB: But you can’t see them from a great height. You can only see them from low. TC: I think you can see them from a great height. Yes, the ones that were there. CB: Right. TC: But the ones on the runways were shaded. CB: Right. TC: So you can only see them when you were coming down low. CB: Right. TC: I have actually got some old, three old cast iron drem lights. CB: Have you? TC: Yes. CB: Fantastic. TC: Which were the last three I found on the runways. CB: Amazing. Thank you. [recording paused] CB: So we’re looking at the album here and part of the airfield. TC: Yes. Over the winter of 1943/ 44 they stored a lot of gliders here before D-Day, and we came down to the bottom end of the airfield and the chap standing on a guard gate there obviously a bit bored took us across down to this field. This field here, and showed us round the gliders. CB: This is on the edge of the airfield between the runways. TC: Yes. They stood, they had several on the standing down here I presume, some up here. They had twenty two altogether here apparently and they all disappeared before D-Day. Ok, that’s it. [recording paused] CB: We’re, we’re looking at bicycles. All, everybody had their bike. TC: Yes. When 115 Squadron left Little Snoring they took off, bombed Berlin and landed back at Witchford. And Aubrey Howell said that every crew had all their bicycles on board and all their private kit because, he said they weren’t going to leave their bicycles behind to be stolen. And one crew was shot down. A chap called Woolhouse, because any, any record you ever see it’ll say that he took off from Witchford but he actually took off from Little Snoring. And when I first heard this story Aubrey Howell told me, I thought, well are they exaggerating? Was it true? But Wing Commander Rainsford came back here who was a wing commander at 115 Squadron at Little Snoring, and while we were walking down the runway he said, ‘Of course. you know,’ he said, ‘They took off from here, bombed Berlin and landed back at Witchford.’ I said, ‘Are you sure?’ He said, ‘Of course I’m sure.’ He said during the evening Witchford rang up and said it was fogbound and they said they were probably going to have to land them back here.’ But he said, ‘Later on they rang and said the fog had dispersed so they went back to Witchford.’ It’s interesting, Woolhouse whose aeroplane was shot down, and I often wonder what the Germans might have thought if they had seen seven bicycles in it. CB: Seven bikes in the Lancasters. TC: There’s another interesting story to that, I’ve had somebody in touch with me recently who’s going to dig Woolhouse’s aeroplane. CB: Ah. TC: Which is in Germany, and he said that although all the crew were killed he said he’d, he’d talked to two schoolboy witnesses who said they saw two parachutes coming down. So they think probably the other two might have been executed. But he’s going to do a dig on that this summer apparently. So I told him to look out for bicycle parts. CB: Absolutely. TC: That’s Aubrey Howell and his crew. 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 Thomas Eric Chad Cushing Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Chris Brockbank 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 2018-01-15 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 ACushingTEC180115 Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Pending review Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 01:15:01 audio recording 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 Civilian Royal Air Force Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Great Britain England--Norfolk Description An account of the resource Tom Cushing lived alongside the site of what became RAF Little Snoring in Norfolk. He watched the construction of the airfield over time and the daily life of the operational squadrons thereafter. After the war he continued to be interested in the history airfield and he purchased the site. He founded a museum on site and started researching the history of the airfield. Over the years he met many former RAF staff who had been based there. Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1942 1943 1944 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Julie Williams Maureen Clarke 115 Squadron 515 Squadron childhood in wartime home front Lancaster RAF Little Snoring runway