William Tweddle Audio memoir. Five

William Tweddle Audio memoir. Five

Doug Tweddle flew as a pilot with 9 Squadron based at RAF Bardney for his tour of operations. This part of his self-recorded interview covers the last days of the war and the changing face of the RAF in the post war years.

00:51:48 audio recording

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Prior to take off as you know we’re losing power. Let me see now. Which way did it pull? No, it must have pulled to the right. Anyway, I went down to the corner to compensate for the swing that I knew that I would get with losing that engine and I said, ‘Well, at least I’ve got the width of the runway to play with.’ So it was an absolute regular morning. I went down, incidentally of course we still had a big bomb on because there was no suitable trolley at Carnaby to take it off. So we went down the runway, lifted off, I got a couple of hundred feet up and there was this almighty whoosh again. So there I was with another one feathered. I had to go home so I went down to Bardney. Well, it took a lot of time and put it down quite quietly, taxied in and Jim Bazin, and the old engineer leader, Wing Commander [unclear] came out. I’ve never seen him go up a pair of ladders as quickly to have a look at what was wrong with my inner engine. Well, when we got the outer covers off the [unclear] casing and the supercharger they were all, there was a hole there where the gasket was sort of bolted and the gasket and the whole lot had gone. And obviously on that engine when you sort of opened up there was little or no power at that point. So, I gave him the travelling 700 or whatever. I just decided that I’d got away with it that day and the engineer said, ‘Leave that to me, Doug. I’ll sort it out.’ Well, I don’t know whatever happened. I wasn’t terribly interested. But that was one day when I should have definitely stayed at home. There were days like that in your flying career. As no doubt you appreciate there are some days when you would have been better if you’d stayed in bed. But that was the 14th and we were up the next day, the 15th and we were off to Arnsberg which is another of these bridges and again with our Tallboy. I should say by the way that at this a point when we were doing these bridges we picked up a most fantastic escort of Mustangs from 11 Group from Horsham St Faith and down that part of the country with Mustangs with long range tanks and we were welcomed by this escort which of course used to meet us over the other side. On our side of the bombing line because they could come on quickly. But whoever was particularly leading the crews that day was on the button until the wingco agreed the support wing and you felt you could have gone to Tokyo you know. But this particular trip we did a [pause] we brought the bomb back again and when we were coming back I was deputy leader that day. I think George cancelled. The Canadian was leading the squadron on this occasion and Joe was an Australian. I forget which aircraft he flew but we always seemed to cross the Rhine just about where that bridge was at Remagen. The bridge that eventually the Americans, well the Americans had at that stage headed for to get over it. We seemed to cross the Rhine at that point and Joe lost an engine before we got back to there. He had an engine on fire and he tried to feather it before he used his fire extinguishers and he didn’t appear to be successful so he baled about four of his crew out. Then finally he got the engines stopped. Now, when he counted heads he had the rear gunner, the wireless op and himself left so he called out and said what had happened and I told him that, I got hold of George [unclear] said, ‘I’ll hang around. I can see [Jonah],’ and I fired a verey cartridge. We identified each other. I said, ‘I’ll stay with [Jonah] if you like because the normal particularly with the fighter boys there was to come back over the Rhine into anything like a safe position but the fighter boys would say bye bye and shoot off and then you would, when you deemed it safe you’d say, ‘Well, proceed independently.’ Because we were normally be flying these trips in sort of two nines. Two columns of nine stepped down. And a little bit erksome but when you were back over your own territory the lads liked to push off on their own and you would say, ‘Proceed independently back to base.’ So I said to George, ‘Well, if you keep hold of the main mob I’ll escort Jonah. I said, ‘I’ll look after [Jonah] and we’ll make our way back [unclear] and I thought well we’d go down to Woodbridge and that would give him plenty of time to settle down and his w/op could do the engineer’s work so they could get down adequately. But [Jonah] wasn’t for going over the Channel. As it was getting a little darker now I don’t blame him. So my crew said, well, I said to Paddy who after all the wireless op’s the man who sends out signals and what have you so he said, ‘Let’s go to Brussels, Doug.’ He said, ‘That’s a great place.’ But although we were heading in that direction I thought well we’d better get down sooner. So we came across an aerodrome where the original Fairey aviation people were. I believe they called it Gosselies but it’s near Charleroi and it’s a sort of a strip. A metal strip an American laid out in the ground. Then I gather it’s about eleven hundred yards and it had a church steeple right at one end of the runway and I called up on the D button, D-Doubty dog button which was common to everywhere in the flying world in those times. Not only flying but the Observer Corps and everyone. If you called out on D-Dog someone answered you. So, the American came out. As a matter of fact I could see him walking out of with a trailer [unclear] under the tarmac in front of the tower looking up. I said, ‘Have you had a Lancaster down there?’ He said, ‘No. We’ve never had.’ I said, ‘What’s that in the corner? A Fortress.’ And he said, ‘Yeah. That’s right.’ I said, ‘If you can get a Fortress in,’ I said, ‘We’ll have a go at putting a Lanc in.’ I said, ‘By the way I’m escorting my mate and he has only got two of the crew left.’ So I said, ‘I think the idea is that I’ll come in and land and then I can talk him down and explain any problems to him.’ ‘Ok.’ Most cooperative the Americans. So, I went in again. It wasn’t a clever landing by any time but anyway I made it, got settled down, turned around chatted to [Jonah] then he came in. This happens under those conditions. He made a magnificent landing. And there we were on the other side of the Channel and put ourselves in the hands of the Americans who you can’t argue with the way they organised themselves beautifully. We went along to the transit Mess at Charleroi. First of all we went along to the town major. They appoint a character like that and he runs the place. And I’m looking at my logbook now on the other side from the entry sheet I’ve got two little chits sellotaped on. One is the office of the town major at Charleroi and the ticket for the 16th of March. “This authorises the bearer to three meals starting with dinner. SC Curtis, Captain, Town Major, Charleroi.” And above that another one. “Bearer entitled to one meal.” But they were good and they gave us the usual the Americans rations. A great deal better than we had. And then they arranged that we stayed out overnight at some billets arranged by the Belgian Blue Cross. So, we turned up in the house of a dear old lady who was a potato merchant and her daughter. They shared the house. The daughter had a very nice MG sportscar so when we’d got our billets organised where we were going to sleep she said, ‘Well, why don’t you come up for a drink?’ Because we were all cooped up in Charleroi then. Well, we were in our flying kit with our flying boots and our side hat and our white polo neck pullovers, you know. So we went into this big restaurant with a lady’s band up on the stage. About seven girls playing in this orchestra and when we first went in we got rather a steely, well not welcome looks to put it mildly. But then she explained to us that in the gear we were dressed in, even in my case with a pair of pilot’s wings on it doesn’t look unlike the German field kit. I didn’t quite appreciate this to point out. Anyway, once it was established who we were the drinks came flying in so we had rather a hard-won night. So the next morning I got [Jonah] and his w/op and gunner in with me and we took off. We got off all right because well we flew home. The signals had all been [unclear] on the way back in transmission [unclear] and they said I was supposed to have crashed and Jonah was somewhere else. But anyway when we got back and we told them all what a splendid night we had had and how entertaining you can imagine the old man setting up a crew that would go back to pick up the repaired kite when the new engine was put in were all going to have a lot of fun. But just when we were thinking it was about time we should push after this because I was going to fly them down you see having been there once before. When [Jonah’s] kite came on to the circuit, tore around, landed out came a flying officer and a corporal. The flying officer was the pilot and the corporal was doing the engineering. They put another engine in and brought it back and delivered it to our own fields. So we were both pleased and annoyed at the same time. So that was that little Charleroi episode. I’ve never been back to the place. It was a coal mining set up I think in Belgium. There’s a canal I remember running right down the middle and I don’t know. I suppose really I’ve been on the continent often enough I ought to have gone along and seen if the people were there. I should think the old lady is bound to have gone but these things you are always promising to do but you never do. March the 19th our next sortie. A very similar thing. Another big bridge at Vlotho. V for Victor L O T H O and that was again on that trip with a Tallboy and a deputy leader and wind assessor. I don’t remember anything particularly exciting about that. The, incidentally when we had these escorts of [pause] when we had these escorts were fighters it was very interesting. They gave you top, middle and bottom cover beautifully until the flak started coming about and then they just disappeared high up out of the way until it settled down and they came back again. And as I previously mentioned I said there was only one way where one engine stops down he said because at this stage of the game we never avoided flak. You know, if you were running into a flak day and night there was little point in trying to avoid it. You might steer into something else. Night fighters were one thing but flak was another. This was where in the assessment of good or bad luck there flak was a big thing. You either got it or you didn’t. You know, you get pieces but there was very little you could do about it. That was the 19th. On the 22nd, I was out again. These are all in Y. The 22nd I was out again and I set off originally as the leader to go to Bremen and we were going to a big bridge in Bremen again with a Tallboy. On that occasion I wasn’t flying. My engineer, Charlie, his wife Rosa had been bombed out in London I think with a V-1 or something and he’d been sorting her out with some billets in Lincoln. So I was flying with the, Jim Bazin’s engineer and you know we used to take off and from Bardney and climb in sector and assemble as a group particularly if we were going with another two squadrons or something. Well, I was busy over Nottingham or thereabouts climbing in sector when my port inner CSU packed up. All I remember was a howl and this temporary engineer of mine [unclear] really remarkable he just shot up and out his finger in that feather button and fortunately for us he got it stopped because we were there with a Tallboy right above Nottingham and normally if you didn’t get a runaway engine stopped you were lucky to catch it in the first place. But if you didn’t get it stopped well it seized and burned because you had virtually unlimited revs and then you’ve got a fire. And if you’ve got a fire things are serious you know. So I was grateful for Jim’s engineer. He really did a good job there. Then we had a problem because I was supposed to be leading this and again George [unclear] was the deputy and I couldn’t tell him what had happened to me because we couldn’t break radio silence. That meant that George and the rest were heading off towards Bremen thinking that I was at the front and I wasn’t and I wanted to tell him that he was the governor. So I had a word with Cas, my navigator and said, ‘Where is the nearest dropping ground to get rid of this Tallboy?’ [unclear] I decided I had to drop it out on this occasion. He said, ‘Well, it’s really halfway in the middle of the North Sea.’ And he figured out that by the time we got there to drop it we wouldn’t get back to Bardney in time to warn George that he was nearly on target. Well, we wanted to give him a little more news than, you know to make his mind up on what he was going to do. So we then found with a little more looking at the back of our mind that there was an emergency dropping zone in the Wash just off Kings Lynn. So that was much nearer. We figured that was where we would go so we dropped it and we dropped it safe. Incidentally, it could be dropped safe very well. But we put it down and my bomb aimer saw the splash it made. It didn’t blow up of course. It went in. But as that place always had a fair amount of people with fishing boats and what have you I think someone must have got a hell of a scare. So deep down in the Wash somewhere there is a Tallboy. I don’t know whether it would ever go up. It is probably so well buried but that’s where it wound up and of course we got back to our own field in time to brief George that he was on his own. Well, he had a rough day that day. He lost a motor over Bremen and then he was coming back and I think I told you before his engineer was a big policeman called Edward. The man I brought back from Russian. And when they were coming back over the Frisians they got hit again and lost another. So George was flying with two on one side and Edward who was tireless friend just pushed the other two throttles, the two workers at the top of the box and locked them and said, ‘George, don’t worry about it. I’ve been on an engine handling course. And these are [unclear] go in any circumstances. So they came home on two on one side and an oleo problem. They went down on the first nearest field that they found in Norfolk. Well, as you probably realise you can. A Lanc will do almost everything on three that it can do on four especially when it’s empty and light. It was really no problem. You can in fact fly it on two. In fact, you can fly it on one. I once did try this in, unloaded of course in daylight. Got to a safe height. Feathered three and you lose height. Not a great, not very quickly but of course you lose all the facilities that you get at each end. The dynamo, generators, [terra] control, you lose a lot of things. But it was just to say how good the kite was so to land on two was no big problem except that there was no going around again. You could go around on three if you had a strong leg but you couldn’t go around on two. So the obvious thing was you aimed well into the field because the old axion that it’s better to go through the far edge at taxiing speed, or running speed than it is at flying speed. Well, the story that George told was that he went out through the far end of this field, which wasn’t a big one and finished up at straddled the road. Now, would you believe it the local bobby got off his bike and said, ‘Hello you lads. What’s going on?’ I love that story from him. True or not it’s typical. It would make a good cartoon that. But the, that was the Bremen trip and then I got to the last one that I did. March the 23rd. Again in Y, and this was the big railway bridge at Bad Oeynhausen. It is not far away from [pause] Bad Oeynhausen was the land-based headquarters of Montgomery’s. Not far away from Minden. That part of the world. By this time I mean the Gerry knew what we were doing and he hadn’t seriously put up any opposition. But on this day it was a lovely day and we had got a look at this place and believe it or not with eighteen Lancs we had ninety six Mustangs escorting us. Really, it’s almost the entire wing were looking after us that day and I was on top of the [forward?] column and when you went in to bomb we got a lot of flak and I got the hydraulics hit and I got hit in one of my tanks but it, fortunately it self-sealed but we had a marvellous bombing action on this. We blew this bridge into the river and we got about seven hits out of eleven bombs. Mine didn’t actually hit the bridge it did the entrance to it and put a railway train down in to the bottom of the ridge foot because when the war was over we went back over there and did a low level trip to have a look at this place and our engineers had built a trestle bridge alongside to make up for it. It was a very important place. But anyway one or two of us got hit on that and a very interesting incident. One of our lads Mike [unclear] who was a solicitor down Devon way. I meet Mike at reunions. He still comes along and his gunners reported the twin engine aircraft about a thousand yards astern. A fighter. Well, in those days there was a drill and a patter for this and we had a manoeuvre which was known as a corkscrew. Then when you went into a definite corkscrew it was rather a violent action. The idea of it was that fighters could never really get the gun on you because you were in a constantly changing situation but very very strenuous to carry out. Not very good when you were in close company. In fact, you wouldn’t do it. Mike, Mike’s rear gunner had just called out, ‘Fighter. Fighter. A thousand yards behind.’ And then there was a bang and they were hit in the wing root. Fortunately, it didn’t go off. It turned out later to be a cannon and he lost the starboard elevator clean out so he’s left really with half the elevator and to help him to pull the cord effectively he put himself a bit of rope on and get one of the lads to do a bit of two six for him when he was pulling it. But in the process of doing that the rear gunner I think must have got a hit on this kite and slowed it down a shade and later we heard that two of the flight sergeant Mustang lads claim to have shot this aircraft down and they claimed it to be a 262. This new German twin jet which was an excellent aircraft I gather and that’s the one that you’ve got on my tail on your Cologne photograph and that’s the one that for the first in our experience appeared in the sky. And when we read what Galland, “The First and the Last,” Adolf Galland’s book we were eternally grateful for Hitler stupidly not allowing that aircraft to go to Fighter Command in Germany but retaining it with some silly idea that it would make a bomber. Had it got amongst us and the 8th Army at an earlier stage I think it would have created havoc. Also on that particular trip John Macintosh who has now just retired as a captain of British Airways 707 man. A 707 man reported a missile which seemed to follow him. So we were probably beginning to see too the beginning of the homing missile rocket. So it was rather a nice trip on which to back out because things began to look serious when they could chase you like that and as they do it now disappear up your jet pipe and we couldn’t afford him to come back and become, get this superiority anymore. Well, that was the, we didn’t know at the time but that was the end of it and the, after that we were doing, in April we were doing some wind finding tests and all kinds of things. Then I recall, I forget when the original Hiroshima bomb went down but I recall going into Lincoln one day with a friend and seeing on the placards, the newspaper placards boards, “Americans drop atomic bomb.” And we made some typical disparaging remarks about our young friends and said, ‘Oh, what the hell were they up to this time?’ Well, what they were up to finished the whole business and that was it. Hands were put up and the game was over. Stayed for a while. That would be the 1st of May. We, you know we carried on doing some local flying. Even corkscrew practice I see here for the gunners. But you can’t switch off a big machine when you’ve got it going like that. But it was very noticeable both in the Mess and in the squadron when hostilities ceased. I can see by old newsreels that most people shot off and danced in big cities and some went home. But I recall that we went down to the pub, the Jolly Sailor in Bardney. Got ourselves tippled a bit again. Prior to this we lost our group captain. The New Zealander McMullen. He’d gone off to other places and as happens we were saddled with a group captain who came back from Canada where he’d been suitably tucked away and the first time I saw a flat hat for a groupie with scrambled eggs on the front, McMullen always wore the side hat and this man then went on to tell us that he thought it was time that we behaved like real airmen. And I recall that he laid on a religious semi-deliverance service in the hangar to which he invited [unclear] C of E’s, Jewish rabbis, you name it, [unclear] lads, the lot. I think he’d got about a dozen there. The rest of us were down in the village and I remember we came back in the back of a lorry because we weren’t fit to do anything else. But May the 4th I notice there is an entry here now [unclear] crew plus twenty four POWs from the base in Juvencourt in France to Dunsfold and back to base. I recall this trip. We pushed off, landed in this French field, taxied around and over the horizon came these big American open lorries with ex-POWs who had been coming out of the camps. They had been broken up into groups of twenty four and they marched around. We stuck them into a Lanc. They climbed in. You can imagine how tight it was. You were to get them all over the main spar for the take-off. After that they could sit about. Well, with the luck that I had I picked up a bunch of Sikhs and there they were bless them with they’d no, they’d no material apparently to have a proper pagri or whatever they called it and they had a piece of rag tied in their hair. But oh marched over, put up a cracking salute. Obviously top-class soldiers. They’d been taken at North Africa apparently. Hadn’t seen a great deal after that because we brought them back to England. And such was the traffic at Dunsfold that we just taxied around the peri track, came to a halt and there was the WVS and everybody emptying these kites, feeding them. These Indians just stood. They hadn’t got the faintest idea what to do. They were in a strange land surrounded by strange people and the last I saw as I taxied away were people coming out, getting hold of them by the hand and leading them off as if they were children. We did that a couple of times. On the second occasion on the 12th of May we went to Brussels and Dunsfold, instead of going to Juvencourt, that’s right, went into Brussels and dropped them again at Dunsfold. Flew back to the base again. And you know how crazy can you be? On the 22nd of May with my own crew I did a night cross country from base to Bury St Edmunds, Boscombe, Bideford, St Tudwal’s in Wales and back to base again. I can’t imagine what that was going to teach me but you see as I say you couldn’t switch off. On the 25th of May we went out over the North Sea and dropped a lot of incendiaries. Some of these things were getting rather ripe and they were dangerous. So we got rid of a lot of those. We’d picked up a new group captain by then. Wing Commander Dupont. He wasn’t very popular neither. Jim Bazin had an early demob number. He had gone home. Du Pont got me to run him down to Gransden Lodge to play golf with the chief constable of Buckinghamshire I think I remember him telling me. I don’t know why he thought I was a bit sharp with him because he was a man who when he introduced himself to 9 Squadron, well the [unclear] introduced and stalked out of the room right away which we knew was a bad sign. Du Pont then got up and said that I wasn’t new, he wasn’t new to 9 Squadron. That he had been a flight commander of 9 Squadron when F for Freddie Pickard who was the, if you recall the star of “Target for Tonight” which was done by 9 Squadron on Wellingtons and Freddie Pickard was later killed on the Amiens jail job on Mosquitoes. This man had the cheek to tell us that he had been Freddie Pickard’s flight commander. Well, he told us that he’d been all over the world in Training Command. He’d been to Canada, South Africa, Rhodesia, New Zealand and he said, ‘I’ve been rather unlucky as far as operations are concerned.’ And the entire room as if briefed said, ‘You’ve been bloody lucky.’ So that didn’t endear us to our new CO neither. So things were changing and I was saying you could detect a change almost immediately. People began to remember that they had a letter saying that within twenty miles or less of Lincoln there was an aunt who had lived there for the last three years and their mother wanted to know why you’d never visited her. Well, people began to move in their own independent way. They began to pick up again and push off and do things which while they were operating they would never do. You stayed around your station and the local pub. The other thing which you didn’t bother about some people began to pick up that and in many ways began to drift away from each other. It was very noticeable but very normal. On the 31st of May I see I’ve got another cross country. Base to Newcastle, Carlisle, back to base. I don’t know why I did that. Probably because I wanted to have a look at the old town, old city. Then what happened at this point Churchill had promised in one of his conferences with the Americans that when our war was over we would give them some help. But the thing was really a gesture. The Americans were coping very well on the far side. There was nothing we could do for them except that we did have Tallboys and they didn’t have that. So it was decided that 9 and 617 would draw some tropicalised Lancasters, white painted and they would be based in Okinawa and, but they said was anyone who was over the age of thirty and done more than thirty trips wasn’t going. They were going to fill up the squadron with the younger Australian and New Zealand men who had arrived and hadn’t seen a great deal but felt that that part of the world was more their tough part anyway. So another argument. I lost out on that. I don’t think I would have wanted to go really. So, I was transferred to 50 Squadron who were at Skellingthorpe at that stage but I only stayed there one night and then the squadron moved off to Sturgate which is near Gainsborough. And on the 23rd of June I took the crew and some passengers and we went on what was officially called a Cook’s Tour. Base, [unclear] Osnabruck, Essen [unclear] base. That was purely a low level look at Germany to see what we had done to the towns. We went around at one thousand feet. We were rather appalled. July the 3rd post-[unclear] exercise. I wasn’t flying Y then. I was in W. A postmortem exercise. Flensburg. Base, Flensburg, base. Flensburg is in the foot of Denmark and what happened then was our radar people went out and sat on this radar at Würzburg and the big radar detection gear. We flew a raid in and they were to see how it functioned, what it looked like. Incidentally one of our squadron was killed on that particular trip. Something went seriously wrong with his aircraft. It seemed a pity that it should happen at that stage when it was nearly all over. And then on July the 18th , 8th I was sent off on a night cross country. Base to Reading, Cap Barfleur, Leval, Rouen, Cherbourg and back. Then to come home and do some high level bombing and I remember playing hell about that. I thought to take my crew back over the continent to do practice bombing having completed our operational tour plus and bearing in mind you could always be killed with an aircraft even when there is enemy around or not. I couldn’t see the purpose and I expect by then I was a bit of a bolshy to say the least. So, life began to take on that new form for a while until the 5th of August. No. The 15th of August and we then did, went on a new trip called Dodge and this was ferrying troops from Italy back to the base. We took off from Sturgate again. Flew down to the Warboys and that area. Picked up people who were going to Italy. Went to Pomigliano which was just north of Naples. Picked up some POWs plus returning soldiers, stuffed their gear in the bomb bay and brought them back home on about a seven hour trip. Very pleasant coming down the Med in the sunshine with George in. We were supposed to stay one night in Naples but the weather was doubtful and we felt it ought to be doubtful. We nipped down to Sorrento to make it last a little longer. But those went on into September. October I see I’m still doing them. We had a very rough trip on one of those. I recall being very badly knocked about north of Corsica way with extremely bad weather. I was about the only kites that got through to Italy that morning. We had been flying through the night. The kite full of, I think it was Nurse that went in. There was a hell of a row about it and I remember playing hell with the wing commander when I landed because I’d had no rest the previous day and took off at four at night and flew through the night with these people on board. That was a careless thing to happen. And so it went on. I see in November we were still flying to Pomigliano. December, on the way out I went out to Marignane which is the, really the airport for Marseilles in the south of France. I was carrying some freight on that occasion and I remember getting involved with that very powerful dry wind of theirs that nearly put my engine temperatures out the top. But then I’ve got some more here. I went to, I spent a very enjoyable week in [pause] that’s right. In Berlin. This was another of these trips that should have taken, you landed one day, you were shown around a bunker and the stadium and one or two more little things and came back the following day. But I went off in January. That’s right. January the 19th with snow on the ground. I took some wing commanders and squadron leaders from Group, from Bawtry and we got stuck in Berlin for a week which is alright because we had taken a lot of green coffee beans and actually the longer you stayed the more money you wound up and as we were getting at that stage one hundred and twenty marks for a packet of American cigarettes that cost us one and six pence and in the Mess you could buy any kind of spirit for a mark of [glass] you can imagine that things were alright with the world. We had quite an interesting time there. Getting towards the end we qualified for another NAAFI ration of some bars of chocolate and fifty more cigarettes which we promptly sold because I was a non-smoker anyway. But that kept us going for the remainder of that week. So, then we finally got back from that. We brought all kinds of things back. Cut glass, nylons, anything we could find and there was a lot of it going on. Sholto Douglas and Tedder’s wife had been in with their husbands about a week before we and when they took off a spare Dakota followed them out. Their loot prompted another aircraft to carry it in. I could have made a fortune if I’d known what I was doing. And that was the end. I got around to the 14th of March is my last trip. A cross-country. Route D. I don’t even know what it was. But I was demobbed about the beginning of the 1st of [pause] April it must have been because I remember I went down to the Lincoln races the day before. The day before the handicap that ran Lincoln in those days and an old chat with Prince Monolulu, I got a horse. A tall black man who used to haunt the race courses in those days. A tipster. The following day I went down to Uxbridge. The next morning I had a cup of tea in bed by a batman. That was the first time that had ever happened in my life. And then I went through the mighty machine at Wembley where I got a suit, a shirt, a pair of shoes and what have you and then I was on the train and went home. I didn’t want to fly any more after that. I was half invited to be interested in going to BOAC as it was in those days. Several of my wartime colleagues did. John MacIntosh, [unclear] and they’ve since retired as senior captains on BOAC. They would come to do’s and I suppose they made themselves quite a bit of money. In 1950 I got the yen to fly again and went up to see Jim Bazin who was then the CO of County of Durham fighter squadron at RAF Ouston. I joined on the 10th of December as the auxiliary adjutant. I used to fly on fine days. We had Spit 22s to start with. I didn’t fly those but later on we had Vampires and Meteor 7s. The Meteor 7 was an ugly aircraft so we used to go there and then we had a fortnight of summer camp each year which took us to Sylt, to Bruggen in Germany. To Gibraltar in ’55. To Northern Ireland. I enjoyed that. We used to go at weekends. Saturday to Sunday. Deserted my wife I’m afraid about it. I used to take them over though. There was a lot of social life to it and as I say that clown Duncan Sandys came up with this silly statement. The best thing he ever did was to marry Churchill’s daughter. The clever fellow. But he knew nothing about this business and he closed down the Auxiliary Air Force when I remember the CO at the time was Squadron Leader Steven, now lives up in Dunollie Castle in Oban. Steve made a report about this and we really got rid of about four hundred trained pilots. Not wartime men. The bulk of them were young men who had flow DH26s by being National Service pilots and we got rid of them and now whenever since then we’ve been short it has cost literally millions of pounds to train because people read it wrong. My next little episode I’ve got in my logbook is a very elegant entry. On September the 15th a friend of mine was flying Shackletons with 8 Squadron up at Lossiemouth and he found out looking through my logbook that I’d flown out to Lossiemouth on the Tirpitz affair. Well, the Air Force now is inclined to seek a little publicity. It’s not adverse to it and he went back and the next thing Margaret and I knew we were invited up for three days to spend with them and they laid on a trip for me to fly in a Shackleton of 8 Squadron, early warning to recreate the Tirpitz trip flying to Tromso. And we flew out in the Shackleton to do it. Group Captain Stuart-Paul who was the station master, he came along. Squadron Leader [Lincoln] who had been flying Shackletons for years, he and I flew as one pair. Stuart-Paul and Mike, my friend flew in the other team who flew an hour on and an hour off and we tried as well as we could without going to sixteen thousand. We had flown the route again. Quite remarkable. He took almost exactly the same time. We [unclear] to the fjord at Tromso and we went to where we knew the ship had laid. Now, I had a stupid feeling that I would see some evidence of it but of course it’s been converted since I suppose into millions of razer blades. But there was nothing there. I thought I detected on the land some alterations of vegetation where I knew a tall boy had landed and gone off but then we flew home in the evening again as it got dark and flew through the new oil fields and it’s quite a fantastic site because we were doing all this at about a thousand feet. And I was taking my stint because when you weigh up a Shackleton is just like a Lanc only a little more sloppy as a matter of fact. There was about eight or nine in the crew and all I seemed to be doing was sitting eating Chinese food all the time. They kept sending it up in platefuls which made it different from the boiled sweet and a thermos flask that we used to live on in the good old days.
Anyway, there it is.