Interview with Andrew Barron. One

Interview with Andrew Barron. One

Andrew was born in Chichester in 1923. The family moved to Wolverhampton when he was about two years old and then to Dulwich just before the war. When he was 13 or 14 his mother enrolled him at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where he spent over three years as a cadet. Following a silly escapade, he was expelled from the Royal Navy. He attended the City & Guilds Engineering College during 1941-42 to get a degree in mechanical engineering. Andrew joined the University Air Squadron and spent a few weeks at St. John’s Wood before being posted to Brighton to an aircrew distribution centre. He was then sent to RAF Sywell, an elementary flying training school. Following a few weeks on Tiger Moths, Andrew was sent to Heaton Park to await pilot training. In April 1943 he sailed on the Queen Elizabeth to Canada for a manning depot at Moncton. Andrew chose to be a navigator / bomb aimer and spent some time at Edmonton and Mountain View. They went to various bases for training on different aircraft and then to a navigation school in Quebec. After he passed out in January 1944 as a navigator, Andrew was commissioned and had leave before going to the Bahamas where he flew on B-25s and B-24s.

2019-04-08

01:02:46 audio recording

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ABarronAJK190408, PBarronAJK1901

NM: So, my name is Nigel Moore, it’s Monday the 8th of April and I am with Andrew Barron, in his house and he’s going to talk to me about his time in 223 Squadron as a navigator. So Andrew, can you start by telling me about your childhood and growing up? Where did you, where were you born and go to school?
AB: Well, yes, well I was born in Chichester, I mean that’s a matter of fact, but my father was, as far as I know, he was a civil servant at the time, and he’d, he’d fought in the First World War, he’d, he was born in 1893 and so at the outbreak of the First World War he was about eighteen or nineteen and I think he was in the Territorials then, and anyway he fought there, he was sent to Mesopotamia and we never talked about that, you know. I don’t think, I don’t think veterans of the First World War did talk about their experiences any really, much more than veterans of the Second World War,: I think it’s taken the interest of our grandchildren really to spark off interest, you know. They’ve started taking an interest. Michael my son in law took us on a jaunt to the Western Front about twenty years ago and I was surprised at the number of young people, teenagers and early twenties and I think this is what has sparked our interest. As far as I am concerned, I’d been a student at the City and Guilds Engineering College in 1941 ‘42 when I joined up and prior to that I’d had an interesting career. My maternal grandfather had been in the Royal Navy, he’d been an engineer officer and I’ve often wondered since if his rather smart uniform and everything inspired my mother to push me into a naval career because when I was thirteen, thirteen and a half I was enrolled in the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, to become a naval officer, [laughs] and I had quite a, quite a pleasant time there really. We were, I’d, my father had been posted up to Wolverhampton in the early 1920s, I was born in 1923, I was about, I think about two years old when the family moved to Wolverhampton and I was essentially brought up in Wolverhampton and without realising it, I acquired a bit of a Midland twang, in fact enough that we were formed into, we were, at Dartmouth, we were formed into tutorships, three of us would be assigned to a tutor for our education, such as it was, and my, one of my co-cadets, Charlie Badcock, put the nickname on me of “Oiky Barron” [laugh] cause he had, he had picked up this twang. Obviously my parents either weren’t aware of it or didn’t assign any significance to it because, or I’m sure they’d have done something about it, but I often wonder whether it, whether it had any bearing upon my future career. Anyway, I spent three, three and a half years at Dartmouth and I got involved in some silly escapade. Somebody decided to pinch a rifle from the cadets’ armoury at Dartmouth and I happened to know a bit more about the, the makeup of the British standard military weapon at the time, the short magazine Lee Enfield, and they wanted these one or two guns that they’d pinched, they wanted them stripped down I think, so that they could hide them away more easily. Well Muggins knew a bit more about the rifle than any of the rest of them, so it fell upon me, and the result of that was of course it was very rapidly discovered and the miscreants must have, must have blabbed the name of their collaborators because I was, I was up before the Commanding Officer in no time at all and the result of that [emphasis] was that in the spring of 1940 the Admiralty informed my parents that they didn’t think I was suitable material for a naval officer and so I was ejected. And this again was a subject which was never discussed at home. The war was on for one thing and my mother and young brother who was, who was about three years old at the time, were evacuated to Wales where we rented a farmhouse for the holidays and so it was, you know it wasn’t a no subject, it just simply wasn’t, you know my mother [?] if my mother had been on the spot she would no doubt [emphasis] have probed my frailties, but she wasn’t, so she never did and father was, of course, commuting up to London. And we lived in, we’d moved to Dulwich by the way just before the war and so nobody made any enquiries. My father just went to work and the first thing he did was to put me in to a crammers establishment in Holborn, the University Tutorial College in Red Lion Square, which is just off Holborn to get my matriculation so that I could get into university and that duly happened and in the autumn of 1940 I was, I was enrolled in the City and Guilds Engineering College to get a degree in Mechanical Engineering. I don’t know what I’d have done with it when I’d got it, but again the war was on so nobody knew what anybody was going to do with anything, in fact. And when I got to the City and Guilds I discovered that the University Air Squadron was still a going concern although they no longer did any flying training, they, if you joined the university air squadron at, in London you joined the air force as a u/t pilot, which I did in November 1941, and that had two advantages. One was that I acquired the airman’s number of 1398741 and having a 1 3 number had some advantages in the following few months and we did, we did the ITW – the Initial Training Wing – which was the square bashing and all that sort of thing and so come the summer of 1942, by which time I’d twice failed the, what was it, the not the, it was the, oh god I’ve forgotten what the examination was called, but it was the intermediate BSE. I suppose it was the equivalent of the higher, the higher matriculation, anyway it was the entry exam for the university and I failed that twice. It was in the days before they had – hm, what you call it – before it was, you had modular examinations; you took the whole lot and if you failed one subject or a couple of subjects you had to take everything again. And one, I think the first year I failed physics and passed chemistry and the second year I passed chemistry and failed physics, so I finished up in the July of 1942 without any academic qualification and I was called for the colours and by then they were all 1 8s so the fact that I was a 139, that was quite a bit of a one up to the other erks. Plus the fact that we’d been issued with standard RAF uniforms with standard brass buttons, not the chrome ATC buttons, which we should have had as we were part of the Air Training Corps, and being a diligent young man, I’d polish my buttons very, very diligently, so diligently in fact that the raised portions of the eagles on my brass buttons had holes in them [laugh]. The drill corporals thought that was terrific you know; greatly admired that was. So there I was at ACRC, the Air Crew Receiving Centre, or arsey tarsey as it was generally know, as a, promoted to leading aircraftsman ready for the next stage. And the other thing I discovered that during that time the rules had changed and I was no longer a u/t pilot, I was a u/t pilot/navigator/bomb aimer, PNB. They changed the rules so that, you know, if you failed they had a wider field to put you into and I was posted, I spent about a fortnight I think at St John’s Wood and then I was posted down to Brighton to another receiving centre. I think that one was called, you know, I’ve got the documents there if you want the actual proper terminology, but it was the, it was the I think it was an Aircrew Distribution Centre. And we were a very polyglot lot there was in our squad, we had several soldiers who’d re-mustered to the air force. They got fed up with, with you know, being soldiers doing nothing in Britain and there was, there were some [emphasis] re-mustered aircrew. There was one chap I remember, Douglas, D.E. Batten who claimed to have been the rear gunner sole survivor of a Manchester which was shot down over Belgium in presumably 1940, late ‘40 or ‘41, sometime or I dunno would have been ‘42, ’42 yes. I looked him up in Chorley’s encyclopaedic list of all the Bomber Command casualties and there was no mention of this chap’s name, so he, probably another line shooter who was, who just decided to change his trade, but yeah, I spent about a fortnight at Brighton, it was very pleasant, it was a nice summer, 1942, sunny and that., and we didn’t, we didn’t apprehend the danger from the Messerschmitt 109s which were sent over to strafe the gasworks just three or four miles up the road from where we lived in Brighton. So we carried on and then after about a couple of weeks I was sent to Sywell in Northamptonshire which was an Elementary Flying School, Flying Training School of the RAF’s to be graded as to our suitability for pilot navigator or bomb aimer, and you did about twelve or fourteen hours in Tiger Moths and I emerged as a suitable candidate for pilot training. And then after that it was up to Heaton Park and I arrived at Heaton Park, Manchester, in about middle or late October, September, yes, September 1942, and to await posting to some school for pilot training. Well in fact I mouldered at Heaton Park for about five months because rumour had it that one of the troopers had been sunk with great loss of life and so there was a hold up on cadets being shipped away abroad. But in fact what we didn’t know of course was that all the training was being held up to give priority to the troops being shipped to North Africa for the invasion of West and North Africa. So it wasn’t in fact until April 1943 that I was posted out of Heaton Park. In fact I was posted out twice. I was there, I was there all kitted up in my webbing and everything else and when my name was called out with one or two others and I was told I was off the draft and I was to go back to me billet. Well, no explanation was given, and like everywhere else at the time, you weren’t told if you didn’t need to know, you weren’t told and if you asked you were not very popular, you know you don’ ask questions, you just obey orders. So I stayed there for about another two or three weeks, and then we finally did push off, we boarded this train and in the early hours of the morning we disembarked on the quayside which we later found was the Clyde and there was the bulk, the vast grey bulk of the Queen Elizabeth waiting to take us somewhere else. And I think, well I say I [emphasis], I mean I can’t speak for anybody else, but because, I don’t think we discussed these things, I mean some blokes chatted to each other about what was going to happen and what was happening and so on but I didn’t, I suppose I was too well disciplined. Excuse me, I must go and have a pee I’m afraid, I’ve got a very loose.
NM: Ok
AB: As I say, I mean as far as I was concerned I thought, oh yes, we’re you know we’re fireproof the Queen Elizabeth, you know, rocketing along at thirty.
[Other]: Are you all right darling?
AB: Yes thank you my darling.
[Other]: Apparently the docs have just phoned, they say they’ve been trying to phone us all morning. Well the phone hasn’t rung.
AB: I thought you know we were fireproof, it wasn’t until quite recently that I discovered that we actually sailed from the Clyde about two days after the biggest convoy submarine conflict of the North Atlantic during the war. Two convoys left Canada, one was a slow convoy I think, something like about five to eight knots and the other one was a fast convoy, eight to twelve or eight to ten knots, something like that, anyway, they sailed at such a time that they met more or less in the middle of the Atlantic and so did a whole lot of, what is it, I forget what the Germans called their, their groups of u-boats, their u-boats were sort of formed into groups of fifteen or twenty, something like that, and they were strung out in a line north south more or less in the middle of the Atlantic, and when one of them spotted anything interesting they’d send out a signal and they’d all converge on this spot, and this had happened that there had been this tremendous battle I don’t know how many merchant ships and u-boats were sunk, but a great number, and we just missed that, it would have been, you know we wouldn’t have had a chance I don’t suppose if we’d been a couple of days earlier. Anyway we got to Canada and we were duly sent to a Manning Depot, the RAF Manning Depot at Moncton. I really don’t remember very much about that. I was a, I think I was a, I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t disinterested, I just, I never kept a diary of course, for one thing, and what letters I wrote home would have been fairly heavily censored and I’m quite sure that I wouldn’t have included anything interesting in them. If I had, and my parents didn’t bother to keep them or anything so I’ve no written record of what I got up to in Canada, it’s only just memory and as far as I was concerned Moncton, you know, the lights were all on, you could come out of the mess at eight or nine o’clock and then go to the cinema, you know, everything went on until the wee small hours, I don’t think the, none of the vittling or anything like that made any great impression on me. And anyway, in due course we were marshalled on to a train, again I don’t remember quite how spartan the train was, fairly spartan I expect, for our trip across Canada and I don’t know at what point we were informed where we were going, we just went and what impressed on me, I remember though being impressed by the, by the Great Lakes, this, the fact that this train was umpteen carriages long and we wound our way along the north coast of I think it’s Lake Superior, the top lake anyway of the Great Lakes and you could see the front of the train from a way in the distance there somewhere, and we wound our way across and we stopped here, there and names were called out and men dropped off and they were posted to all sorts of exotic places like Saskatchewan and Assiniboine and Swift Current and so on and the only thing I remember of that was that somewhere out in this the Prairies which was flat as a pancake and as featureless as a pancake and there was an edifice which would have done service as a bus stop in Britain and there were two or three civilians lounging against this building and two of them at least were fairly obvious of Red Indian origin and as the train pulled out sort of a couple of wags leant out and went [whooping noise] these two, these two chaps sort of lurched forward as if they probably would have hauled him out and done him if they’d, if the train hadn’t got away. Anyway, we ended up at Calgary as far west as the RAF’s aerodromes stretched and from Calgary we were, or some of us were shipped up to an aerodrome called – what the devil was it called? – Red Deer? No, that was the nearest town. Boden, Boden Ontario, Boden Alberta, and the nearest town was Red Deer and you know, a number of us got out and that was it and we did our, started this flying training and I got to the point where I was sent up on my first solo and I think I took about an hour and a half on this first solo; I know I touched down, several, more than once, several times, and sort of took off again because I didn’t think I’d made it properly and at the end of it I was, I was sent up for another go around with the Chief Flying Instructor, at the end of which he said that he didn’t think I was suitable for pilot training, what did I fancy? And I thought to myself PNB, navigator bomb aimer. No, I don’t think I’d like to be a bomb aimer, what – fly to Germany in a blacked out bomber and drop the bombs and then fly home again. I had no idea that the [cough] that the bomb aimer in fact did a lot more than that: he helped the pilot, he helped the navigator, he helped anybody who needed it, and he manned the guns if necessary but I still didn’t fancy it anyway, I wouldn’t have fancied it. I’ll be a navigator. Then I thought no, I don’t want to be a navigator and fly in a blacked out bomber to Germany, I don’t know why I didn’t consider any other option of a navigator’s work. So I thought about it a bit more and then I thought well I’ll be a Nav B, which was the navigator/bomb aimer which was the equivalent of the, of the pre-war observer in the days when there was just a pilot and an observer. The pilot flew the aeroplane, the observer did everything else. He, he navigated the plane to wherever it was going and he, he dropped the bombs when they got there, he took the photographs if they wanted them and so on. So I said I’ll be a Nav B, which I [unclear] suppose was quite a good choice and I was at the RC, Canadian Air Force Manning Depot, Edmonton at the time because obviously it was the nearest suitable dumping ground and there were a whole lot of Canadians on their preliminary training of course and a whole lot of Commonwealth airmen like myself who were having a go at something else, you know. There were chaps who’d been and got within about three weeks of getting their wings and had done something naughty, probably low flying, and been turfed out ‘cos the RAF was very strict on discipline like that, you know, you, they were very strict on low flying, because a great many airmen killed themselves low flying because they thought they knew it all and they didn’t. And so I spent another two or three weeks at Edmonton which was quite good fun actually, we just mucked about and wasted our time, there was no, there was no training of any call, we weren’t, we weren’t taught anything, we could just do what we liked more or less and that’s what a lot of them did. The nerve had it or the word had it, that the Canadians had, they had big parade squares on all their stations and the Station Headquarters was built on the one side of this square and marked off with posts and everything and it had the flag, and when you went past the flag you saluted the flag. [laughs] Well, that didn’t suit the Commonwealth airmen, particularly the Australians and that, and the Brits: they didn’t go for this saluting the flag so we’d march all the way round the three other sides of the square to avoid going past the flag. But the Australians apparently took it one stage further: they commandeered the fire axes from the barrack blocks we were in because they all wooden barrack blocks and there were fire axes at strategic points and the Australians pinched the fire axes and chopped down the flagpole, but anyway that was another thing. So then we were posted to, for the next training I was, next stage in our training and I was posted to Canadian Bombing and Gunnery School at Mountain View, Ontario, which is just about in the middle of Canada and that was about a, it was about a week’s journey, something like that and I was issued with a huge ticket, was a great long ticket a yard or more long all folded up, and sent on me way. And for some reason, I don’t know why, I hitch-hiked down from Edmonton to Calgary, although the transportation covered this and that was interesting. I tried flagging down, um, what did I do? I think I tried, I tried flagging down a hearse and the chap said oh there’s a three-hundred-pound woman in there, I didn’t sort of really quite understand how heavy three hundred pounds was in human weight, and anyway they took me a few miles and then they, they dropped me off., and I tried I think a young couple who were honey, honeymooning and they took me a few miles and then a vehicle stopped and it was full of Ukrainians because the Prairies were heavily, were heavily colonised by Central Europeans, the Ukrainians particularly, because when the American and Canadian railways were pushing their way through hostile Indian territory of course, were pushing their way through to the west they needed, they needed staff to, to live in settlements along the way which were refuelling stops for the railways, they had water and they had timber and of course that progressed as they wanted to, they wanted to settle these people, not just have them as, as settlers, so they canvassed Central Europe to find places which were similar in climate and soil where people would come and settle and live there and the Ukraine proved to be a very fertile place, and that’s where the North American tumbleweed came from apparently. The tumbleweed was endemic in the Ukraine and when they brought their seed with them, they brought the tumble-weed seed as well, so the tumbling tumbleweed came from the Ukraine. But anyway, this car was full, was full of Ukrainians about a dozen of them and somehow they crammed me in [laughs] and took me a few more miles and I ended up in a van that was taking eggs to market in Calgary and then from Calgary I went, I went west to see what Victoria was, Vancouver were like because my grandfather, maternal grandfather, had been in the navy in those parts, well so we understood anyway. He had a number of souvenirs of western Canada and China, and we don’t quite know where those came from, anyway, I went there and then I got on the train and about a week later I got out at a place, well I don’t know what the place was I got out, but anyway it was the railway station for Mountain View, Ontario and it was Canadian Number 6 B and G School. And that was very pleasant. We worked the Canadian system, that was we worked ten days and then we had a four days off, then we worked another ten days and another four days off and so on. And it was a polyglot station too. Excuse me. We got a half a dozen New Zealanders, we got, we got about the same, I think, Canadians too. Some of them were sergeants and they were like the chaps back in England they were re-mustered they decided that they didn’t want to stay in the Canadian Army doing nothing any more so they joined the, they re-mustered to the air force. There was one Canadian Jew, Moses Levine, and I think all the rest were made up of Brits, so it was, it was a polyglot course. We spent about six or eight weeks there, very pleasant: it was the summer, it was hot, as far as I, we were issued with khaki uniforms. The locals took us down on the beach, because we were on the shore of Lake whatever it was, Lake Eyrie or Lake, I think Lake Eyrie, we were on the shores of that and they took us down for a weenie roast [laugh] which was an introduction to these rather peculiar North American sausages, the weenies, the German sausages. And then at the end of that, oh we used to go up in twos and threes, it depended, we flew up in Ansons to do bombing, bombing training and Bolingbrokes to do gunnery training. The Boligbroke was the Canadian, the Canadian made Blenheim and you had, I think you had four aspiring gunners and one lot of bullets had red paint on them, one lot had green, I think another lot had yellow and another lot were plain, and you used to fire at a Harvard which was, which was a trainer, single seat, well it was a, I say it was a single seat trainer, it was a trainer for the pilots who were destined to go on to single seat, to become single seat fighter pilots. And we were, the train on those things they used to count the number of coloured holes – if any – and you know, assess your ability from that. And then the gunnery, the bombing was done in Ansons, which dropped little, I think they were fifteen-pound bombs, they were bomb shaped, and they let off a puff of smoke when they hit the ground and there were observers in towers on either side of the range and they used to line up on these, on these exploding bombs and from that they’d, they’d assess your accuracy. So that was the bombing, the gunnery and then it was off to navigation school. Well up we went to Quebec. [Laugh] We got out there and they said: ‘No you’re too, you’re too early, you’re not due for the next, you’re next due for the next fortnight so, you know, buzz off on leave.’ So off we went on leave again! And I and a few others decided to go down to New York and that was, as a boy one of my favourite articles of reading was the Great World of Adventure and they were death defying stories beloved of the old Victorians of the white man against the black man and the red man, and there were you know, tales of Africa and North America and all these forts, Fort Ticonderoga and other places on the, on the border between English America and well, it was of course French Canada. I don’t think the Americans ever, well they did see themselves, they had, I mean Louisiana and Alabama and these southern states were American, Canadian American but the northern states were, were French Canada and anyway I hitch-hiked and stopped off to have a look at places like Fort Ticonderoga and other places that I had read about which had been reconstructed and I remember I had a lift from an American naval lieutenant commander and he said what are you doing, I was going to New York and he said, oh I want to catch that bus or something, so he put his boot down and he had me on the edge of the back seat clutching the edge of the back seat [laughs] as he went screeching along trying to overtake this bloody bus! He did in the end and I got on that and went down to New York and did all the sights, went up the Rockefeller Centre and oh you know, all the things, and being a very um, a very, what’s the word, erm, I can’t think of the word anyway, I didn’t know nothing about anything, I didn’t know what sex was, I didn’t know anything about anything like that, you know, and so, which is probably just as well cause I never got in to any trouble and I had a good enough time in New York. Then it was back to work and learning how to be a navigator and we were, we were paired up for that and I was paired up with a, one of the New Zealanders, Johnnie Johnson, came from Christchurch, in er, he’d been a schoolteacher Johnnie Johnson had, and I enjoyed that, I did anyway, it was great fun. I remember [?] learning where all the stars were. I remember when I was a small boy in Wales on holiday. I mean it was, I mean that was absolutely perfect viewing weather and my father trying to point out different constellations and it was just a jumble of, jumble [emphasis] of stars you know, and you couldn’t tell one from another, I mean now when you know the, you’ve been taught the stars I mean on a good night you can go out and you look out oh yes, so and so Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and all the rest of them and the Plough and that. They had a trainer, a celestial trainer which was, which was like the thing, the thing they use in um, oh god, in museums and observatories where they have projections of all the stars and they can show you what any constellation looked like at any time within the last twenty, thirty, forty thousand years, something like that. Very interesting. [laughs] If you, that again was, many, many years before I came to appreciate the value of the stars. And anyway, so in due course I passed out in January 1944 as a Navigator B; I think I was top of the course, anyway, very near the top of the course, second or third. And again, did I have the inevitable leave? No, I don’t think I did actually. I think we were posted. Oh yes, I did have leave of course because I was commissioned and I had to get a uniform and everything, so I had ten days or a fortnight’s leave before boarding a train to go down to the Bahamas [emphasis]. Oh that was, you think oh gosh that’s a bit of a plummy sort of posting but in fact the general opinion was the chaps weren’t very keen on it because the buzz word was that all the, all the chaps from headquarters in Washington and other places where the RAF had, had you know, posts buying aeroplanes, selling bombs you know, and doing everything else necessary for the conduct of the war, and the rumour was it had, rumour was it that these chaps used to swan off and have a good time there and you know, and keep an eye on the RAF cadets or whatever they were, who were training, but it was all bloody, bloody word of it, of any of these chaps, not likely [laughs] – I mean would you have gone down to the Parade Ground to see how the chaps were getting on? Or oh yes, I’d like a flight in a Liberator, or something else, whatever they were flying, you know, just to see how the chaps are getting on? Not bloody likely! You’d be off down the nearest well, place of disrepute. So in fact it was, it was quite enjoyable, quite enjoyable and come August ‘44 there I was, it was different, again I was different from the others, it was a bit like, it was a bit like arsey tarsey, you know, I was, I was the odd bod, you know, I hadn’t gone through the Stansted – the Stansted? – the standard training rigmarole, I got to, I got to 111 OTU as it was called at Nassau in the Bahamas and me and the pilot were odd bods again because there were two sets of training: the first set of training was on the twin-engined Mitchell, which was one of the American light bombers, it was the one that the Americans used to fly off the aircraft carriers and bomb Tokyo just to frighten the Japanese and anyway the normal practice was that you’d get two pilots put together and a navigator and they would be the basic crew of a B-25. Well it didn’t happen with us. As far as we were concerned, old Pop Hedges, he was called Pop because he was twenty-six, and he was quite old was Pop, worked for the [unclear] Smoke Company I think, in Watford, anyway he was, Pop and I were put together but we had a staff pilot too who was actually captain of the aircraft all the time and we flew all these exercises and so on and then we were posted across to Oaksfield, which was where the Liberators operated from, the B-24 Liberator which was the RAF’s long range reconnaissance anti-submarine aircraft, excuse me, and you were there crewed up with a pilot who’d, who’d um, no you weren’t actually, because the chaps who came across from, oh god, from, what’d I say, Oaksfield, anyway, they came across, the chaps who’d been training on the, on the twin-engined, came across as a captain and second pilot and navigator crew and they picked up RAF elements, wireless operators and air gunners who’d been shipped out from England and they made up Liberator crews. We came across and we were put under the command of a pilot, an RAF pilot who’d done about a half a tour with the RAF and was sent to the Bahamas to take a command. He was going to be a captain and so we were put under the command of a little Scotsman, Scotty Steel, and I was the second navigator to Freddie Freek, who’d done again, a half a tour as a navigator in Coastal and we had a half-tour wireless operator, near time you went, near time I went I suppose.
NM: Yes it is.
AB: And so that was it, and I.
NM: Tell you what, Andrew that’s a good place to stop, for now and we will pick this up again.
AB: The demise of Andrew Barron at Nassau!
NM: No, no, fantastic. Good place to stop, in the Bahamas isn’t it!
[Other]: Ah yes! [laughs].