Reg Miles Audio Memoir

Reg Miles Audio Memoir

Reg Miles's memoir in three parts. Part one Reg describes his childhood in St Peter’s on the Isle of Thanet, his family, school, lack of money, and holiday jobs. Reg joined the Royal Air Force as an apprentice, known as a ‘Brat’, in January 1939. He went to RAF Halton No 1 School of Technical Training, which had four wings with 1,000 boys. After a medical examination, he was issued with a uniform and became a Fitter 2 (engines), looking after pieces of airframe. They were taught square bashing and he was promoted to leading apprentice. Reg recounts the antics of one, Johnny Shaw, who was expelled out of the Air Force. They did work in the extensive workshops, spending a few months learning how to use hand tools. Each one had a flight in a Tiger Moth. Reg then worked on engines (Merlins, Pegasus) then on aircraft. With the onset of war, his study was compressed and took his examinations after two rather than three years, becoming an Aircraftman 1st Class. Reg was posted as the sole apprentice to 34 Maintenance Unit in RAF Shawbury, which recovered crashed aircraft. His first job was removing instruments from a Spitfire. He talks of the importance of packing Masters onto sleepers and sandbags during transport, otherwise the centre section would hit the walls of humpback bridges. He was also tasked to remove burnt Ansons from a hangar. Part two Reg narrates how a Coles Crane sank in the mud when they tried to retrieve a Spitfire from a railway embankment. On another occasion, an aircraft was stuck in the roof of a village pub. They also had to recover an aircraft from a Welsh hilltop. He missed Christmas one year when their low loader was obstructed near the village pub. One plane they had to extricate had mistaken a chicken farm for a field and caused damage to the farm. They once had to close the tunnel in Liverpool to tow an aircraft. Reg recounts some incidents in which people lost their lives. Reg was transferred to 67 Maintenance Unit in Taunton. He details how they had to chop off part of a B-17 to get it back to the depot. Reg also performed the role of armourer for a time. He was sent to St. Eval in Cornwall where his first job was a Spitfire which had landed on a dry-stone wall. The Germans blew up the hangar where a recently restored Hurricane was located. Reg sought an overseas posting and sailed to South Africa on the SS Mooltan. He portrays life on board ship before he arrived in Bloemfontein at 27 Air School Bloemspruit. Reg carried out daily engine inspections of the Masters aircraft. They also had to make 104 Harvards airworthy, which were in a poor condition. Reg expresses his disquiet over the treatment of the African labourers. Part three Reg volunteered for aircrew, sailing back with the Mauretania and was posted to RAF Lympne. He was then posted to RAF St Athan for flight engineer training. He received instruction on Lancasters before going to a Heavy Conversion Unit. He joined a Canadian crew but with Halifax aircraft and Merlin engines. He was posted to a squadron with Les Lauzon (pilot) and carried out about six operations. He badly injured his hand whilst removing an elevator lock so did not fly on the operation when his crew went missing. Reg subsequently found out that the aircraft was shot down, but they escaped and were taken as prisoners of war. Reg subsequently joined 420 Squadron at RAF Tholthorpe and Jimmy Tease (pilot). His job was to stand next to the pilot and operate controls. He saw aircraft shot down, including a B-17 and witnessed V2s. Reg recounts some of the incidents they had with their aircraft and how they were dealt with. He gives a description of the FIDO aerodromes. Reg describes how the aircraft was struck by lightning in one operation. Reg received his commission and went to RAF Nutts Corner in Northern Ireland, a Transport Command station where he trained to fly Yorks. His final posting was to 242 Squadron at RAF Stoney Cross. Reg discusses his post-RAF life.

2009-01-23

06:46:46

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AMilesR20090123

23rd of January 2009 and I am Reg Miles and I am making this tape to try and list some of our history. I shall start from my earliest. Earliest memories. Unfortunately, today Phyllis, my wife is in hospital and has been there for about a week. She is recovering but we are both eighty five and have been married for sixty four years so we are not in the first flush of youth. So, I will now start. My first memories I would suppose I was two or three years old and we were living in a bungalow which is a low set house in a place called St Peter’s on the Isle of Thanet which is near Margate and Ramsgate. It was a small house but detached, had a small garden front and back and was built by my mother’s father who was a builder and I understood that she was given a sovereign which is a gold coin worth a pound whatever that was in those days as a wedding present which she gave to her father as a deposit on the purchase of this house. What she paid for it I have no idea. It just so happens today I have received very welcome news from a dear friend of mine in Canada, Lynn Barrett who some years ago contacted me via my biosite which listed which squadrons I flew with which were Royal Canadian Air Force squadrons I flew with on Bomber Command. And she was looking for information about her father who also flew as a navigator on the same squadron but had died young. and she had recently received logbooks and so on and so forth and was unable to understand quite naturally what all the Air Force jargon meant. Over the years I’ve helped her with this and she has been very kind and she volunteered, during one of our email exchanges I may have mentioned the fact that I knew nothing about my antecedents she volunteered very kindly to try and trace my family background at which I just heard today that she has done a remarkable job. I’m quite touched by it all and some later time when I get some more of this down I will start to list all the information that she’s got. But she’d got marriage certificates and this sort of thing. Both of my mother and father their marriage and my grandfather and so on and so forth. So back to the plot. As I say, I remember being about three years old. This was, there were two roads, row, roads built in between cornfields on the top of a hill at St Peter’s. At the bottom of the hill was the power station which provided the direct current electricity for the trams that had recently been installed. So, at the end of our road there was a tram line which went all the way into Margate and of course returned and most houses now were supplied with direct current electricity. DC electricity from this power station. In those days there was no general power and all houses that wanted power had to be close at hand to the tram line and they were supplied and obviously paid whatever had to be paid for this electricity supply. I remember that at the end of this road there was a very strange man that rode about on a motorcycle that had no tyres and of course as young children he was a figure of fun. Of course, subsequently I found out that he had been in the First World War which was a terrible place for anybody to be and was shell shocked and as they say not all there. A man to be pitied not to be made fun of. But that’s not human nature is it? I had friends there. Obviously boys of my own age. At the corner of the road there was shop which sold, it was also an off-licence which is an off-licence in those days was somewhere where wine, beer and spirits could be bought and also was a general shop where you could buy normal food stuffs. Very handy. The son was about my own age. Typical I suppose for the son of the shop he was a bit of a rogue and was always leaping over the back fence and getting empty bottles and then getting me to take them in the shop and get the money back on them. Then we’d go and buy ice creams with them or something like that. But let’s face it I was only four or five years old. Being surrounded completely by cornfields it was wonderful really. But when the corn was cut there was these acres filled with all the corn in what were called stooks where the corn was cut by what was called a binder reaper which cut the corn but didn’t do as the combines do these days. It just bounded up into sheaves of, I don’t know how thick they would be then. They’d be a pretty hefty armful for a man but and these were stood up with the grain at the top and leaning into the rows of a half a dozen or so all over the fields so that they could continue to dry. They were then in some cases they were taken by horse and cart to the farmyard and made into a haystack. In other cases, the combine, well no they didn’t have combines. I forget what they were called but this great massive machine turned up with a, towed by a, well I suppose you would call it a steam roller but it wasn’t. It was a steam [pause] God what do you call it? You’ve probably seen them. Like a steam roller except that it didn’t have a roller. It was just, you know wheels and it towed this thing about and also a very long belt would run from these, one of the big pulleys through this machine which threshed the corn and separated the grains and threw the straw out and the grains of corn were then put into the sacks and tied up and carted away and presumably eventually sold. All good fun for children. Dangerous things but in those days you know there was no sort of worry about people getting hurt. A little way away from the end of this road there was a place which was called a gypsy’s encampment and it was in actual fact it had been a planned road I think which had never been built and down both sides where houses would have been built were gypsy caravans. They were a pretty rough lot because their idea of breaking in a horse was to tie it tight and then hit it with lumps of iron until I suppose until it was so cowed it would do as it was told. I’ve, I used to have to go through this gypsy encampment. I can’t say as I was ever worried about it but then I’ve never been a person to really get worried about these things. Because my father had a what we called an allotment which was a few perches I suppose or [pecks?] or [laughs] whatever they were in those days of ground which he paid a rent from the council for and on which we could grow food which was very necessary. Wages were very small. Employment was, well it was what five, five more years after the First World War so there was a Depression so, you know, money was hard to come by. So whatever you could get by growing your own potatoes and all those other staples you could do and it was good. And I, I was only, oh God I couldn’t have been more than about five or six I suppose my father made a barrow affair with pram wheels and a large wooden box which I presume had held sugar or something like that and handles and one of my jobs was to go with a couple of pieces of wood and pick up all the leaves in one of the roadways some distance away and then take them around to the allotment and make a big heap of them. And at other times I would have to go some considerable miles away down on to the beach and fill it up with seaweed and do the same with that. You never queried things in those days. If you were told to do something you did it. I’m not perfect. Of course I wasn’t. I mean I did things I shouldn’t have done. I got beaten for being naughty. I seem to have been very hard on shirts and things. I was always climbing trees and falling out of them and all those sorts of things so things got torn. To me they were a torn shirt. Of course, to my mother and father they were a disaster really because you know there wasn’t any spare money to buy things. It was just a question of living. My father was a carpenter but he’d had no formal training as a carpenter. He had originally worked when they first got married with his father who was a bootmaker, repairer and so on and so forth but obviously there wasn’t enough money for two. Hardly enough money for one. So, he got a job. I suppose he got a job on the buildings. You know, helping the building and then I presume he started off as a labourer and he worked with the carpenters and fortunately my father wasn’t an idiot and although he’d had very little schooling due to periods of ill health he became very helpful to the carpenters. And he subsequently managed to save a little out of his money and bought a saw and a hammer and so on and so forth and was obviously trusted to do certain types of carpentry and became very very proficient. So he was then paid a little extra money and he was called an improver. But of course, his standard and his ability to educate himself and learn all the things there were about building and it was very complicated in those days because a carpenter did everything more or less from the word go he became a fully qualified carpenter. Didn’t pass any examinations. They didn’t exist in those days. It depended on the people you worked for. Were you good enough to be called a carpenter? If you were you were paid as a carpenter. If you weren’t you were paid as a labourer, you know. It was as simple as that. And of course, gradually over the years he became so competent that he became a foreman carpenter. He became in charge of whole building things and without leaping too far forward many years later to his great credit he was offered the manager’s job of the largest builder in Margate. Unfortunately, shortly afterwards he died but he did have the satisfaction of realising that he’d risen from nothing right the way through the building industry, had worked on enormous contracts and became so proficient and so well liked and so trusted that he was offered to be the manager of this quite large company. Anyhow, I digress and you will find I do an awful lot of digressing. So as a child I was kept busy. My first schooling was done at a place called Trinity School which was almost at the end of the tramline in Margate. Miles away. And I suppose my mother who’d come from a reasonably affluent background, her father was a builder and so on and you know come from a very large house and a large family and so on so she obviously wanted me to go to this Trinity School. So it was a question of getting on the tram and as I say I was four years old and I had to get on the tram at the end of the road with my tuppence or whatever it was this tram fare. And on my own I would go all the way into the school which was quite a long way and do my schoolwork or whatever it was and then catch the tram back home again. And you know obviously there was, well I suppose there were problems with paedophiles and things in those days but they probably kept a bit more low profile. I don’t know but of course you didn’t have the communication. You didn’t have TV. A radio was a very primitive affair and we’ll get to that perhaps and newspapers were things that you didn’t buy because you hadn’t got spare money. So, the King and Queen, and the Pope and the local Mayor and the Archbishop were all wonderful people and never committed any sins because you never knew about them. I remember on this, these trams they had slatted wooden seats. They weren’t upholstered. They had slats with gaps in them and the one I always seemed to sit on was just inside the doorway. They were double decker things you know but I always sat downstairs grasping my pennies or whatever it was for the fare. And beneath the one just inside the door was what was known as a sandbox. This was, had a load of sand in it and if the wheels were slipping because it was a, you know steel wheels, cast iron wheels and steel track so if you were going down or up a steep hill and they were slipping or there was ice or whatever the driver would just pull a bleeper of some sort and allow a certain amount of this sand to dribble out in front of the wheels so that they got a grip. And of course, one day I was sitting there and a coin slipped out of my hand, went through the slats into the sand box. I don’t remember what happened. I obviously went to school and came back again. But I do remember on this tram there used to be a man used to travel wherever he was going to work or school or whatever and at that young age of course you tried whistling and all those sorts of things and he taught me how to whistle with a warble which I did all my life until of course I lost my teeth and then the warble went with the teeth you know. That’s life I suppose. So I remember that. Just next to these row of houses was a very large monument which was erected by the farmer who owned all the land about. Quite a substantial affair and it was the highest point in Thanet and he’d put this large monument with a tall spire and everything on it and I’m sure it is probably shown on survey reports as being I’m sure it’s still there. It may have got knocked down. I don’t know but it was pretty substantial. On these fields of course we used to play and there would be all sorts things grown there. There was cow kale which was a very leafy sort of a cabbage thing with a very thick stalk which used to be cut to feed the cows in the winter because they were usually put away in barns and things the cows. Particularly the milk cows were but all the animals of that sort were put away. It was too cold for them to be out so turnips and mangelwurzels and cow kale and that sort of stuff were grown for them and one of the things we used to like to do was to snap the top off and peel the thick dark green bark. You know, the outer casings and inside was a lovely juicy stuff that we used to eat. God we must have had cast iron stomachs in those days. Anyhow, I digress. One of the things that used to happen in the cornfields after the corn was cut of course was the Circus used to come once a year and this was an attraction for us. We’d all be running around looking at the tigers and lions and elephants and Lord knows what. I can’t say I ever went into the Circus. I don’t think there was any spare money for things of that sort but it was you know interesting. It was another thing you looked forward to. And I always remember sometime during this time they had flying fleas. Now, these were little tiny aeroplanes with a sort of a lawnmower type motor and they were very very small. I’ve still got photographs of some of them on CDs and so on and there are still examples of them in various air museums. But these were little tiny things. But they all flew and they’d have races with them and all different sorts of stuff and they were called flying fleas. I mean that was basically the name of them I suppose as opposed to ordinary aircraft. And you’d occasionally get, not a Flying Circus but you’d occasionally get somebody land and in one of the cornfields and pay the farmer something for doing it and would be charging people for flights in the area. Now, my father obviously would have liked a radio but certainly couldn’t afford to buy one. I mean whatever it cost it was just too much money but he was a good carpenter and an intelligent bloke so he bought a kit and it was a Super, Superhet or something like that. Some something and he built this massive great thing but it was all valves and the valves, some of these valves were nine or ten inches high and not as thick as a toilet roll but quite as big as a small lemonade bottle that you’d buy these days for drinks. You know, the little bottles that you buy with water and stuff in about that size some of these valves and of course they chucked out a terrific amount of heat and they were DC. Low voltage. Twelve volts which meant, I think it was twelve volts it could have been six volts but I think it was twelve volts which meant they had to be run with an accumulator similar, similar to a car accumulator. But they were basically glass so you could see what was going on inside. Not that anything was but that’s how they were made in those days and you had to take them to somebody that charged these batteries. Well, I happened to go past one of these on my way to school. Now, after I stopped going on the tram when obviously money was so tight and mum couldn’t afford the tram fare I then had to go to a school at St Peter’s which meant going down this hill and over a couple of bridges and things that went over the railway line and to a little school at St Peters. There is a photograph in the CD of me at St Peter’s School. But on the way through there there was somebody that charged these batteries and even more important to me a few doors away was a blacksmith who always seemed to be having great big horses being shoed and the lovely smell of burning hooves and sparks flying and hammers banging and all that and they intrigued me no end. I’m sure I was late for school and late getting home many a day because I’d been there. And mothers worry when you’re late and the school gets upset if you don’t arrive on time and I suppose at that age I mean you don’t care do you. Anyhow, one of the jobs I used to have to do was to take this accumulator thing down to get it charged and then pick it up and bring it back home again and there was nothing, I wasn’t provided anything to carry it in. I mean my parents were stupid. They should have provided a little hessian bag or anything so that I could hold the handles. But I was just given the accumulator and said, ‘Take this in.’ Well, how do you carry a thing like that? You got your hands underneath it and you’d clasp it to your chest. Of course you do. And of course, a couple of trips up and down I suddenly found that the expensive overcoat or I suppose it was expensive because it cost a dollar or whatever and you got holes burned in it. Into it because of the acid because it’s sulphuric acid. I sort of got into a lot of trouble over that but I really, you know thinking about it in later years I thought well it’s all your stupid fault. You should have provided some way for this poor little kid to carry it. The other thing of course that I had were being you know a kid you got you kicked things and kicked tins and stones and everything. So I always wore quite heavy boots and the soles of the boots and the heels were literally solid steel with Blakeys and whatever else they called them on the basis that you’ve got to kick those and wear those out before you got to the actual leather and with the consequence of all this of course they were always a bit too big because everything was bought to grow into or second hand. So it didn’t much matter what size it was as long as it was a reasonable fit. And I remember to this very day queuing up with other deprived kids. It wasn’t everybody in the school. Just the deprived ones were lined up while Madam Bountiful came along and presented us with a pair of shorts or a jumper or something or other and we had to say, ‘Yes, ma’am, thank you kindly,’ or some rubbish like that. But I felt so desperately ashamed at that young age to think that I had to line up and get this when then you’ve got the rest of the class you know sort of giggling and laughing at you because you were standing out there. I don’t think they do it quite like that these days. In fact, people don’t seem to much care one way or another what they get as a handout. But I, it used to [pause] well it used to hurt my feelings. A bit of an old softie. Anyhow, now lots of things happened of course at this place. My brother was born when I was about eight. But other things happened. There is a photograph of my first girlfriend. Well, she said she was my girlfriend. You know, women do tend to take over and tell you what life’s all about. I’ve forgotten her name now. But anyhow, we were sitting in a deck chair and I suppose she thought it was funny she kicked out the bar that stops the thing from collapsing. It so happened I had a hand underneath there and of course my whole weight dropped on it and I squashed my little finger and I was in considerable pain I suppose. My father, no cars of course, there were no taxis or buses or anything like that out there, sat me on the back of his pushbike and cycled all the way into a Free Hospital in Margate. This was a long time before the Margate Hospital was built. It was when the, the hospital was where the Public Library was when I left England in ’64. Took me there. They looked at it, put a bandage on it and did nothing else and I have the scar to this day. It sort of healed itself up but it was a bit out of shape. So I still have that. And then he just put me on the back of his bike on the carrier and I put my arms around his waist and he cycled all the way back home again. That was that. What else? Oh yes. One of the things that my father and mother were given, as a wedding present I presume was a picture of cows and so on in a field and this was a massive great big oil painting. I mean it may or may not have been worth some money. I have no idea. But it was truly a big one. It was about six foot long, three or four feet wide and it hung on the wall behind a bed settee which they used to rent out I suppose you’d call it. We used to. Mother used to have visitors during the summer who paid to come and live there and she would cook and that and they would walk to the beach or whatever it was. Anyhow, this particular day the way you opened this settee was that you lift the back up. It was all on a spring-loaded thing. Lift the back up and then you can unfold the rest of it. You know, the bed pull. My mother and father, I think it was my father was actually sitting on the settee and I don’t know whether it was my mother that lifted the back but of course, it just caught underneath this picture which lifted it off the hooks and dropped it straight over my father’s head. So his head went straight through this picture. I don’t think we ever saw it again. I think it went, you know. Got chopped up for firewood or something. I always remember it. It’s funny how you remember these things. What else? Oh yes. In the front garden in those days of course most building materials were pretty cheap and a lot of the building materials that were used on these spec houses was second, third, fourth and fifth. Broken bricks and all the rest of it. This, this bungalow looked very nice but it was covered in pebbledash which is a cement rendering. And then these tiny little pebbles which are collected from some beach or quarry somewhere, little round pebbles not much bigger than peas are thrown.
[recording paused]
This pebbledash, the idea is that if you use, you know different kinds of brick, halves of brick, broken brick and all the rest of it and build it it can be built solid you know. Cavity walls or whatever. But you know you couldn’t leave it like it. It would look awful because you might have red bricks and grey bricks and yellow bricks and all sorts of things. Burned ones and unburned ones but they would plaster it and then pebbledash it so it looked very nice. And all the, when the building had finished there would be all bits of broken brick and tiles and whatever kicking about and instead of paying to get them moved away usually I mean they were just buried in a part of the garden any old way you know. There was always a few holes and things. Chuck it all in there and cover it up. So of course, when mother and father wanted to have a bit of a garden dad kept digging up all these bricks and tiles and slate and God knows what. So he just stacked it all up in big heaps and we ended up with a great big hole in the front garden. So what he did he used what he had there. Mainly there seemed to be a lot of broken tiles and that sort of stuff. He built a very pretty sunken garden with all the rubbish and a few steps up out of it and all this sort of thing and it was right outside the kitchen window. And I do remember this particular day I must have been a pain in the arse in one way or another [laughs] I was always up to something I suppose. I remember being in this thing, hiding in this hole while she had the kitchen window open and threw every knife and fork and spoon and any other kitchen implements at me for being a little devil. And then of course my father arrived home and I was then reported, ‘Look what he’s done.’ Well, I hadn’t done anything. Only dodge. Well, of course I had to have the obligatory whack across the bum and then pick up all the knives, forks, spoons and everything else and bring them in and wash them. But somehow or other I seem to have had a very happy childhood [laughs] but perhaps that was me. I don’t know. Of course, Jim came along and this meant that when the visitors came and there are a number of pictures of the girls that used to come. I mean you’ll see me there and you’ll realise that I wasn’t very old, four or five or six or whatever age I was. Jim came along. I was, during the school holidays which was five or six weeks in the summer instead of being able to run about in the cornfields with my other mates and get up to mischief probably climbing trees and tearing my shirt my job was to look after Jim because we’d got the visitors here. ‘I can’t look after Jim —’ blah blah blah. And there was all sorts of promises and threats made but one of the promises was that if I looked after Jim every day of the school holidays which was a hell of a long time for a kid of five or six or whatever age. No, I’d be eight wouldn’t I? Of course. Eight. I would get, I don’t know, a set of Meccano or something or other. A steam train or God knows what. Something was promised but I never got it because I presume I never did what I was supposed to do. I mean I was always in trouble for not looking after Jim. But as far as I was concerned Jim was a pain in the arse [laughs] you know. Who wants to be a nursemaid at that age?. There was the odd things that happened that I thought were grossly unfair. There was a very big house at the end of our road. I don’t know whether it was lord of the manor or whatever it was. There was all sorts of dark tales told about it and ghosts and blood curdling things and nobody ever went in there. But somehow or other it was reported that I had broken the back fence. Now, I could well have done it but I have no recollection at all of ever even being in that part of the place. But then of course memory can be a bit selective if you’re in trouble. Anyhow, of course it was reported to dad and you know so dad of course had to go and repair it all which fortunately as a carpenter it was no big deal. But I still resent the fact because I have no knowledge. I have a horrible suspicion that somebody else did it and blamed me you know. These things happen don’t they and dad being the sort of bloke he was said, ‘OK. I’m going to mend it.’ What else happened? All sorts of things happened. I may or may not have missed some things but that’s taken up enough of that tape. And then of course mother was upwardly mobile. She wanted to get back to the station in her life that she’d led I suppose as a daughter of a builder although she’d got herself pregnant at eighteen by that dirty man from down the other street. I just, just got this paperwork that Linda’s got me for and my mother was eighteen and my father was nineteen when they got married. They got married on the 2nd of June 1923 and I was born November the 24th 1923. So, get out your calculators. She was three months gone. So, well they made an honest woman of me [laughs] no, they made an honest woman of my mum and stopped me being a bastard. How about that? Right. Now, I don’t know what this is like. I hope to God it’s not terrible. So, dad was working as a carpenter all over the place. He used to go off with his tools on his handlebars and rain and snow and shine and all the rest of it and times were very very hard then. The tales he used to come home with, you know. ‘I’ve been for a job. Saw the boss.’ He said, ‘Do you smoke?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you use tailor made.’ ‘No. I roll my own.’ ‘I don’t want you. Waste too much bloody time rolling fags,’ you know. That was the way they talked to you. And then in other jobs he would, he would go and start work and then they couldn’t work because it was pouring with rain. So, the only shelter for them and their tools was the shed albeit very small but that contained the cement. It didn’t matter about the chimney getting wet but if the cement got wet it was ruined so all they could do was all of, all of the people that worked there would be to crowd into this cement shed and sit on top of the cement and all the rest of it. Now, the boss would check in the morning to see. Oh yes, they’re all there. Right. And he’d come back again say at half past three or 4 o’clock on his way home after he’d been on the boozer all day. Oh yeah. ‘Where’s Charlie?’ ‘Oh, he went home.’ ‘Right. When he comes tomorrow tell him I don’t want him.’ Now, it wasn’t as if they got paid. They didn’t get paid a penny for being there but if you weren’t there you’d got no job. I mean what a way to treat blokes, you know. I mean they’d got nowhere to leave their tools. They had to take them home each night because otherwise you know they wouldn’t, well there was nowhere to leave then anyhow. And you know they got wringing wet going to and fro but they had to be there. If you weren’t there you hadn’t got a job. The fact that you didn’t get any money was beside the point and most of these builders closed down for a couple of weeks in the summer and closed down a week or so at Christmas. You didn’t get any holiday pay money or anything like that. You just didn’t get a job and, you know that was it. You know. Terrible. And of course, it went full circle didn’t it and then it got the other way where you know it was you get loads of money for doing nothing. Hey ho. Well, now dad was building some houses at a place called Nash Gardens in Margate and I think at that time he was working for himself. In other words, he was doing second fixing which means all the doors and architrave and skirtings and windows, all that sort of stuff in houses and was you know getting paid for each house he did and the materials were supplied by the builder. So they decided to buy one of these. The usual, I don’t know what they were. Two hundred quid or something which was a fortune. So that’s, they did and I don’t know all the ins and outs of it obviously. I was a child and I had no business even asking questions. Seen and not be heard was the motto in those days. So the house was finished and dad had done all the second fixing and all the painting and everything else to save money obviously. All the lino and you know lino in those days was sort of a lot of it was oh tarred paper with printed pictures on it you know [laughs] Stuff that you had to be, I mean linoleum which had a canvas backing and would have had cork and God knows what and olive [pause] not olive oil. Various oils in it you know and so on. A lot of it was, was just printed tar paper basically and I mean you had to be so careful because you know catch it on something it just, it just tore like paper. Anyhow, this stuff was all taken up, rolled up, tied up and put on my little barrow and I was given the key around my neck and you take it and take it to this new house. I’ll tell you why. I don’t know how many miles it was but I bet it was five or six miles at least downhill, uphill, under railway lines, along main roads because there were no footpaths or anything and buses and trucks and through cornfields. Past where Granny Miles eventually bought a house to Nash Court Gardens. Take the, I mean I don’t know how I managed this stuff because these rolls of lino you know would be six or seven foot long and you know quite heavy because it was all the lino rolled up, tied up. I had to get them off and get them in the house and lock it up and then walk back home again. I don’t know how many trips I did. I can’t even remember being thanked. Only grumbled at if I took too long or damaged it or whatever. There was always something wrong obviously. So that was all done prior to moving. And then we did move of course and then I had to go to a different school. Salmestone School I went to. At that time Nash Court Gardens was a new road that joined on to an existing road but the usual sort of argument with the council and the builder. I think what had happened a sort of an unofficial bit had been knocked off of the fence so you could get through but you couldn’t get cars or anything. Not that anybody much had cars or those sort of things. So, I had to go to this other school. I do remember one day going down there. I mean I was say eight, nine whatever I was and there was a pound note or whatever it was and I thought good Lord. I took it home to mum and she said, ‘Oh yes, you’d better take that to the police station.’ ‘Alright.’ So I took it to the police station, logged it all in and all the rest of it. I’ve got a feeling it was three months, if you come back in three months and nobody has claimed it it’s yours. Well, of course these days I mean A, you wouldn’t take it and B if you did you would never see it again anyhow because somebody would have claimed it. Probably one of the coppers that worked there. No. I did get it but I’m sure mum had it. She was quick on the uptake with things like that. Salmestone School was alright but of course I hadn’t been there long when we had to do the Eleven Plus or whatever it was called which meant you either went to, you stayed where you were or you went to the Central School which was basically for boys and girls but they didn’t go to the Central School where I went they went to a similar Central School where actually Phyllis went. If you had a bent to make things or do things or be and learn French and do other things like that but be basically a tradesman of some sort or a qualified person in some area you went to the Central School. If you were a bit thick you stayed where you are and if you were extremely clever you ended up at Chatham House where you became a bank clerk I suppose [laughs] I don’t know. But anyhow, so but I ended up at the Central School which was quite an education because there were all sorts of things going on there and I joined the Bee Keeping Club and learned to work on bees. I took up athletics, cross country. I was quite good at cross country and various athletic things. I played soccer both for the school and for Margate Boys. I played there. I even represented Kent in an all-English quarter mile event but of course it was all a bit silly because I’d had no real training. I was leant a pair of spikes and I mean they were probably the wrong spikes anyhow. I subsequently found out of course that you use one sort of spikes for cross country and you use a different one for different kinds of events whether its high hurdles jumping or sprinting or whatever. And we left in the morning by train at the crack of dawn and went to Derby. I think it was Derby which is a fair way the other side of London and competed and lost and then got back on the train and came home the same day. And of course, when you got there you realised that you know, I mean Dad’s Army we were compared to the people that we were up against who had every piece of equipment you know. All the gear and stuff and the training and knew what to do. And, you know, ‘Where’s your blocks?’ ‘Blocks? What are they?’ ‘Oh, haven’t you got any? Oh, we’ll lend you some. Here you are.’ ‘What do I do with them?’ ‘Well, you put them in there and fix them.’ ‘Oh, how do I do that?’ [laughs] you know. Yeah, well you hadn’t got a hope had you? Not a hope. But there you go. I did quite well at school. I was, you know pretty good. I took after my dad to a degree. I mean I was sort of self-educated to a degree. I would enquire after things and the teachers would tell me. And I would, I would do art and do what I thought was good and was told to make it a bit, ‘It’s not quite dark enough.’ So I’d make it darker and they’d say, ‘Oh, now you’ve ruined it.’ Well, you know, if you want to make it more dark, you know show the poor bugger what to do. Not just leave him. Maths I was always pretty good at and English and so on and so forth. And somewhere along the line I suppose I decided that it would be a good thing to go into the Air Force as an apprentice. I probably read an advert somewhere and at that time you could get samples examination papers from the Labour Exchange which I did. Quite frankly when I started looking at them they were Chinese. I couldn’t understand most of it. Particularly the maths and science and the chemistry. Although I did science and chemistry and maths I mean we didn’t do logs and we didn’t do involved equation stuff in maths and the chemistry was very basic and the science was, you know kids’ stuff really. I think the English and that I was ok with. I’d done a bit of French at school. I wasn’t very good at that either. But, you know so what? So it was a question of either doing some more work and I mean normally at that age you leave school you know when you’re fourteen. You leave school and you’re out there earning a crust to help support the family but I was allowed to stay on a bit longer, I think about six months and fortunately I had some decent teachers that helped me with some additional teaching on subjects like logs and certain maths and oh I forget. These funny old equations and things. Algebra and stuff. We did it but not to the extent that I had to do it to pass the examination. Well, I did take the examination and I did pass which was a bit of a surprise because I wasn’t even fifteen when I took the exam. I wasn’t fifteen until the November and I went into the Air Force in the following January so, you know I’d be fourteen a fair bit when I took the exam so I suppose you know a bit of natural ability I suppose. We, during the period that I went to school I used to get a job which all boys had to get jobs during the school holidays. You weren’t allowed to sit around doing nothing. And I’m not too sure when we moved again to All Saints’ Avenue. It must have been, it must have been the last year I was at school because I used to, I used to go from All Saints’ Avenue during the summer to work at a photographers. Again, you know I mean I was fourteen when I took the examination. I must have been about eleven when I started working at each summer holiday on the sands. I first, first year I was carting the unexposed film with a cameraman. Now, in those days they had these enormous great cameras and the unexposed film was the size of a postcard and it was in a metal slide thing. It weighed a ton and each one had to be put into the camera and the metal slide pulled out before you could take the picture and then the star was put in, back in to prevent the film from being exposed. It was, it was paper with an emulsion on it. The Sunbeam which was a sort of upmarket car they had cameras with a roll of film in them but not where I worked. I did that the first year and I think the second year I was working in the Pavilion changing the exposed. They used to bring to a little hut on the seashore and I would in a dark room just a little red light in there would take out the exposed ones and put them in boxes and wrap them in special paper and all the rest of it. Red paper, black paper or whatever and put them in boxes and all these things had numbers on and I had been recharged these slides with new unexposed and quite often you had to repair them. They got sand in them, bent. The cameramen used to get absolutely fed up with the thing. And then I would take these up to the factory. And then the following year I was given the job of looking after, I must have been fourteen or, thirteen or fourteen of going by train to Sheerness which was a fair trot with a cameraman and I was responsible for running the office, taking all the orders, taking all the cash, paying all the outgoings and railway fares and all that sort of stuff and at the end of the day bring all the orders back. Go up to the office, to the factory and the office, give them all the orders and all the cash that I’d got that day and take from them the proof pictures. They used to print the ones that were, that came out of the cameras and then stick them on to sheets, big sheets of paper and they’d be sort of hung up around the office so people could say, ‘Oh, yeah that’s me. Oh yes. We’ll have three of that, two of that, one of that.’ Whatever. And I’d take all the orders you see. It was quite a responsibility. As I say I was only fourteen at the time. So, I did that before I went into the to the Air Force. Mum certainly didn’t believe in kids hanging about, you know. Get them a job. Keep them busy. I certainly happened to help dad in the garden doing various things. [coughs] excuse me. Sorry about that. A bit dry. I’ll try and carry on to the end of this tape and then have a breather I think. It’s, and I’ll have to play it back to see if you can make any sense of it. It was a while, after the summer and while I was waiting to go into the Air Force that I had to get a job again of course because they can’t have me hanging about. So, I got a job at a newsagent in Westgate. I can’t think of the name of them. I know it but there you are. I can’t think of it off hand. Anyhow, it’ll come to me. And a friend of mine also got a job there so we used to have to go there at the crack of dawn on our bikes and pick up all our papers and quite complicated you know. You’ve got to go to all these different houses and somebody has one Express and a Mirror and that sort of thing. But at Westgate you didn’t get that. It was always highbrow papers you know and you know if you put an Express where it should have had a Times you know you’d get in all sorts of strife. So we used to do that and then when you’d finished you’d come home. Sometimes they’d like you to go home on your bike. I wish I could remember the name of it. It’s all written down on one of the, on the CDs but anyhow it’ll come to me. This particular day we were coming back along the sea front from Westgate and lo and behold stuck on the rocks at Margate was a coal ship. The skipper had taken a wrong turning or missed the, missed the rocks and the ship had got stuck on the rocks and the only way they were going to get it off at high tide was to chuck all the coal out on to the rocks. Well, of course, wonderful. We got the, got the firm’s bikes which were all emblazoned with our names all over them and so on and on the back they had two nice big canvas bags for the newspapers but my brother filled it up with coal. So on to the rocks we went, filled the bags up with coal and all the rest of it and of course it was pretty obvious wasn’t it, you know. There’s a ship stuck on the rocks and there’s two boys filling the backs of [laughs] their bikes up with coal. There’s going to be a cameraman isn’t there about? If course, when we arrived to work the next morning we got the sack immediately because apparently these photographs were front page everywhere. You know, these two boys filling their bags up with coal. Anyhow, it was getting close to Christmas and I was due to start in January so I mean I wasn’t unduly worried. I mean I thought the people were stupid to sack me. I thought it was a bloody good advert for the company [laughs] but obviously I suppose people didn’t really want their newspapers covered in coal did they? Oh dear. Shortsighted. What happened after that? There must have been some things happening in around the area. I, yeah sorry we lived right opposite Hartsdown Park. I do remember trying to teach Jim to ride a two wheeled bike. All he could do was keep falling off and crying. I didn’t really have a lot of patience. I mean what was I? I was fifteen I suppose or getting on for fifteen. He was eight or nine years younger. Still wetting his knickers, I suppose. I don’t know. I do remember once that I was working with dad in the front garden there. We were putting some concrete edging or something in to make it easier maintenance. Of course, mum was still taking visitors. She always did, you know. You’ve got to make a quid. Didn’t matter how, you know you had to sleep or where you slept you know it was get the money in. And this little Austin 7 pulled up outside. In the back was a Great Dane which looked like a small pony and these two in the front and they, you know they was happy as Larry laughing and carrying on and all the rest of it and off they went. And mum of course poured lots of scorn on them, you know. They’re never anything you know. blah. Blah. Blah. The usual rubbishy thing. The funny thing is the one was Courtney who she married thirty years later. Nice bloke Courtenay and he’d been married donkeys’ years and then, I’ll get to Courtenay some other time but you know him and his wife were happy without a care in the world. They never had any money. They didn’t care. They had one another.
[recording paused]
One of the things I forgot to mention was that when dad was doing these houses, doing all these second fixing there was a row of houses and he did the lot. I remember, I wasn’t very old of course he took me down there. I used to go down there and I used to go with him weekends and that when he was working on the back of his bike and I was his mate and I used to sweep up all the sawdust and shavings and bits of wood and clean, clean the rooms out and build a fire, put the kettle on, make a cup of tea and keep him company. Well, that was one of the things I did and then just before I went into the Air Force mum and dad put me on, put a party on for me I suppose at All Saints Avenue and poor old Phyl she still has a go at me all these years later. I mean she wasn’t my girlfriend at the time. I mean I didn’t really have a girlfriend but you know we had a bit of a party there and Primrose Brown, who was a big girl and her father had all the donkeys on the beach you know and I don’t remember it much but mum does. But I apparently was sitting on the stairs kissing Primrose Brown and for some reason or other mum took exception to that and has not ceased to remind me about this. I can’t remember the last time she reminded me about it. You know. There we go. Primrose Brown. And you mention Primrose Brown to her and she’ll say, ‘Oh yes. I remember.’ You know. ‘Dad was sitting on the stairs kissing her.’ Oh dear, what a swine I am to be sure. Now, this must be just about the end of this.
[recording paused]
Saturday the 24th of January about half past nine at night. Phyllis is still in hospital and is likely to be there for the rest of next week I think. She has yet to get out of bed and do a bit of walking at which until she does that really she couldn’t come home. And I am having a meeting sometime during next week probably Wednesday with Gillian and some of the social workers from the hospital to discuss all the arrangements. Tony has just been and invited me for lunch at their house so I shall run over there tomorrow. Right. So, January I received my railway warrants, instructions how to get to Paddington Station from Margate and details of what clothing etcetera I should take. Very minimal. And so, I think it was the 24th of January I left Margate on my own of course. Just fifteen. I got to London, got on the Underground and went across to Paddington Station where there were about a thousand boys milling about, some with parents of course and went wherever I was supposed to go. They gave full instructions and boarded the train and arrived at Wendover. We were met there with RAF trucks which took us, all four thousand of us to Halton. Number 1 School of Technical Training for engine fitters, riggers. There were also artificers there, the Navy boys, but they were all apprentices. We were going into what was called 4 Wing. There were four Wings at Halton and each Wing had about a thousand boys in it so at any one time there were about a thousand boys there. Then 4 Wing were given allocated bed numbers and so on and so forth. There were three, three storey barrack blocks. Issued a knife, fork and spoon. The usual sort of thing. Led by the hand to where the cookhouse was and a bit of a check and the very next day it all started of course. Medical examinations. Some failed of course and were sent home. Various eye tests were done. Some boys thought they were being very clever and cheated. They weren’t cheated, they didn’t cheat. They thought they were cheating. In actual fact they were put there to just do, some of these eye tests consisted of millions of little dots of different colours which hid a number or a letter. If your perception colour wise was poor you hadn’t got a clue what they were. If your eyesight was normal you could. But printed down at the bottom of the chart was usually a false number, letter or whatever and of course some people said oh it’s so and so and of course it wasn’t. They had to take the test again. Well, that was all, oh yeah so the doctor said, ‘You’ve got flat feet, Miles.’ Fortunately, I can think on my feet and I said, ‘Oh yes, sir. I do a lot of cross country running and that’s why my feet are a bit flat.’ He must have been an idiot because he didn’t know any better. He said, ‘Oh yes. Oh yes. Fair enough.’ Of course, in those days if you didn’t have high arched feet you were considered to have flat feet and if you had flat feet you really were just a bit sub-perfect. Of course, subsequently it’s been found with all the various Services that people with flat feet can march longer and stay active much longer on their feet than people with high arched feet. There you go. But this happens all the time doesn’t it? Almost every week there’s something been found that it’s wrong. So medical examinations. The usual sort of drop the decks. Oh yes. Cough, and so on and so forth. And as far as I’m concerned I’d never had a medical examination as far as I know. I mean I might have had my bum smacked when I was born but that was about it. But mum was a good cook and we didn’t go in for frills and fancies because we couldn’t afford them so mainly the food was good solid food and I suppose you know I was healthy enough. And then of course it was a question of uniform. Well, the old story came up again you, I know you don’t take size nine and a half you take eight. Or eight and a half. You know, boots. And of course, you know everything was measured and you were issued with uniform that fitted you not you know to grow into because I suppose they presumed you’ve done your, you finished your growing and most of us had quite frankly. There were some skinny ha’paths that suddenly shot up at a high rate of noughts. And then we after all this was done and we were issued with a uniform and so on and we looked a right shower I should think. The most uncomfortable thing in the world were the boot. I swear they were made of armour plate. There wasn’t anybody that could walk about they hurt your ankle bones and so on and so forth and the corporal in charge of our particular barrack block he said, ‘You want to piss in your boots.’ he said, ‘Stand them by your bed, empty it out in the morning and then put them straight on wet and don’t taken them off again for a couple of days and they’ll fit and they’ll be lovely.’ Well, I can imagine what all these mothers would have thought of their little darlings running about in wet feet in January in England. But I must say I did. Well, in my feet and water from the shower. Left them overnight, emptied them out and put them on and I must say you know paddling about in wet boots all day long wasn’t very pleasant but it did stretch this horrible hard leather. Particularly around the ankle bones. And within a few days we were alright. The only trouble with them was of course you couldn’t get a shine on them. You know you’d taken out any shine in them off and of course this was in the days when you know everything had to be bold. Boots had to shine and buttons had to shine and all the rest of it which is all a load of rubbish because you know if you went into battle what would you want shiny boots and shiny buttons for, you know? You want to be so nobody sees you. Oh well. And then we, when we had to go and, in groups and be sworn in and swear to do all sorts of desperate things and for that you received the Kings Shilling which you didn’t actually get but it was included with your first pay. Now, as far as I can remember your pay was something like six shillings a week or something like that or even less. Like perhaps no I think it was five shillings a week for the first year out of which they took four shillings I think so you got a shilling which was to buy your personal items such as metal polish, boot polish, toothpaste, cigarettes, sweets. Your personal items. You couldn’t get a lot for a shilling could you? Twelve pennies. Ten cents. And then you were then told what trade you were going to be taught. I was lucky. I was told I would be a fitter. Fitter 2. Engines. So, which suited me. I preferred that than rigging which is you know all the air frames and all that sort of stuff. Looking after the bits and pieces of the air frame. So, then you start your, your training. The training consisted first of all of a week or two of doing nothing else but square bashing. Learning how to march, learning how to salute, knowing the commands. That sort of thing. Understanding the, and the position of the various flags and emblems and so on and the bugle calls. What they meant which most people didn’t have a clue and never bothered. Some people joined the band which to an extent was alright. It gave them certain privileges or should I say they didn’t have to go and do lots of duties which if you weren’t in the band you had to do. But of course, they were at the beck and call of the various band masters and everlasting blowing bugles and bagpipes and bashing drums and marching about and all that sort of stuff. So I didn’t bother with any of that. And after you’d finished your square bashing and that sort of thing I suddenly was promoted to leading apprentice and I thought this is, you know really I’m the youngest one of the whole four thousand people there. You know. Only just fifteen. The entry was between fifteen and eighteen so some boys had been there three years that were eighteen when they went in they were twenty one you know which is a big gap at that age. Anyhow, I was put in charge of a room with about twenty kids there. I suppose because I showed a bit of initiative and always had done. Didn’t get any extra pay of course or anything like that and it meant that I, you know had to make sure that the room was clean and march the boys in my room you know to various things like meals and to work and so on. That sort of stuff. Anyhow, and of course we started down in the workshops. Now, the workshops at Halton were extensive. Terrific great workshops and we would spend the first two or three months doing nothing else but learning how to use a file, a hacksaw, measure things accurately and so on and so forth so that you had a good grasp of the basic tools using hammers and chisels and all this sort of thing and you had to make certain things. The first test was just a piece of flat metal about a quarter of an inch thick and a couple of inches square which was just hacked off with a shearing machine and you were given this piece of tatty looking thing and you had to file it flat and square to give them dimensions. Use a micrometre and a vernier to make sure it was perfectly square and flat and perfectly, perfect thickness all over and all that sort of thing. Time consuming, boring perhaps but you know when you’ve been doing this for some while you had a mastery of hand tools. And there were other, as you progressed over the first few weeks you had all sorts of other things. One we had to do we were given some various pieces of this, this steel. We had to file it all nice and flat and then we had to mark out a triangle in the middle of it and cut this triangle out and make it it had to be absolutely perfect. And then you had to make triangles that fitted in it perfectly and you were only allowed to put a thin film of oil on it and then take it to the instructor to be checked and assessed and the triangles had to stay within the, you know I don’t know about three or four triangles. I can’t quite remember but they had to stay there just for this thing through all of them. And I coped with all that sort of stuff because I’d always been messing about with tools with dad and at school. I was always making things and you know we had a carpentry thing at school and one of the half lap joint I always remember which was two pieces of wood about an inch and a half square which had to have a half lap joint made until you ended up with a little square. Well, I finished mine ages before. I mean dad was a carpenter. I was always mucking about with saws and planes and chisels. And of course, you know just hanging about and of course being me I carved the four legs into a bird [laughs] I always remember that day. The poor old woodwork master nearly died when he came around. ‘You’ve finished yours, Miles?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘What? Oh. What’s this supposed to be?’ ‘Well, I sort of made a bird of it.’ [laughs] Oh dear. And that was me I’m afraid. I always have done things like that. Anyhow, you carried on doing this down at the workshops. And one of the lads in my room decided to join the band so he took up the bagpipes, terrifying instrument they are when, so he used to play the bagpipes as we marched to work down to the workshops and that. And it wasn’t bad really because he, he’d sort of learned some local, some popular songs of the day, “Deep Purple,” “South of the Border,” and a few other things like that which I’m sure weren’t on the agenda for the bandmaster but so, you know that was I always remember that. You know, it was sort of, we were a bit different. And soon after we started we, we were all taken one at a time for a flight in a Tiger Moth to go over, just fly over Halton just to see what it looked like from the air [pause] Excuse me. And then we started doing engine stuff. We worked on Merlins and Pegasus. We had a number of aircraft. We used to go down to the aerodrome and work on aircraft down here starting on the running procedures and things of that sort. There was also a science laboratory where we used to go and do testing on tensile strengths and impact testing of metals and the technical stuff like that and also the design of aircraft engines and propellers and so on. And we also used to do Social Studies I suppose it was called where we went to a lecture room, you know. Sort of [unclear] sloping seats, tiers of seats and the same as they have at universities. A similar sort of set up. And in fact, basically a sort of a pseudo university where we were given a very good education quite frankly because we did not only the technical side but there was the, you know the educational side of things. There was one day of the week was always sports. Church on a Sunday of course unless you had a free Sunday. Plenty of time for relaxation and so on the first year. Leave of course, you know. All our civilian clothes were taken away from us as soon as we got our uniform. I’m not too sure what happened about them. I have a feeling they were all packed up in some sort of a bag and then when our first leave came up we were given it. Given our uniforms to take home, our civilian clothes to take home. The money we were paid, not paid, the money they kept back was was used for two things one to pay for any damages and replacements you needed over and above the normal expirety of clothes. So if you broke your big china mug you didn’t get another one for nothing. You had to buy it. If you ruined your uniform you had to buy it. And of course, out of that shilling that you had you had to keep your hair cut which you paid for and so on. But the remainder, anything that was left over you were given when you went on leave. You had a travel warrant of course when you went on leave. You didn’t have to pay. But you would, you know you’d have the rest of it so you know you’d have three or four pounds which to go on leave which was you know quite nice. You’d got a few bob in your pocket so that you could you know do a few things on leave. I can’t remember how long it was before we went on leave. It was probably three or four months or more. It might have been as long as six months before we got our leave then. You know, they’ve got to make sure that they’ve got you sorted and trapped and so on and so forth before they let you go out. So you kept sort of fairly restricted but it was, it worked. It wasn’t hard. It was different. It was, well you had to look after yourself and keep yourself clean and tidy and so on and so forth and that and as I say I was made a leading apprentice within a few weeks I think so I had twenty blokes to keep an eye on. One in particular was, oh dear what was his name? Jones? It’ll come to me. I’m trying to do this without referring to notes or anything else because I think perhaps it’s more of a free flowing if I just sort of rabbit on about my experience and memories of what I actually did. Otherwise, you know if you start reading notes it all becomes a bit sort of structured and so the way I did it you probably forget things but it doesn’t really much matter. I do remember that there were some very wealthy people in my, in 4 Wing and I presume the same applied elsewhere. From what I can understand we had Indian princes whose parents sent them there to get a good solid sound engineering education so that when they went back to their whatever they have in India, princedoms do they? They had somebody that had a good sound grounding. And there were even aircraft manufacturing families that sent their sons and grandsons and those sort of things to Halton and they had to pay. Pay to get them out of the Air Force afterwards. So, they went there and they did their training and got their education and they were then bought out by their family. And somebody told me, I can’t remember the actual figures and they wouldn’t really mean very much because a pound then was a lot of money. Nowadays, you know two dollars or whatever you say oh yeah [laughs] you know, it’s nothing. I was told which might put things in perspective that to buy somebody out of Halton when they had finished their training would, would buy a short row of reasonable quality worker’s houses which would give you some idea of just how much the training cost. A lot of Halton had already had once belonged to the Rothschild family. The Officer’s Mess was a magnificent place. I never went in there of course. I might have done in later times but you know I never got around to that. But it was a magnificent house which is the Officer’s Mess but, and also as I can’t quite remember where it was but there had been some absolutely glorious stables built when the Rothschild’s were there and we were given this, not given it per se but we used it with you know the authority and with [unclear] as a sort of a hobby shop and they had all sorts of bits of gear down there, you know. And so before the war broke out when life was relatively easy it was used quite frequently. And I remember somebody or other, a young chap that was in his last year so he you know he’d done two years there and he was on his last year. His folks had, you know bought him a new car. I think it was a Ford, a new car and he decided that he was going to take it all to pieces right down to the last screw and nut and bolt and put it together properly so that all the gears meshed perfectly and so on and so forth and I remember going in there and giving him a hand at times, you know. Everybody, all the various people that were interested would go in there and say, you know, ‘What are you doing?’ Oh, so and so and so and so. ‘Give us a hand to do this.’ you know and you’d spend a day or something mucking about and it was because the whole attitude of the place was learning and doing things. And of course, then at the end of that year in September the war broke out. So suddenly instead of life being casual and lovely and [laughs] it suddenly turned into a nightmare because instead of having, doing sort of four or five days a week, one day of sport and Saturdays and Sundays were off and all that sort of stuff it was seven days a week flat out doing all your lessons. They said, ‘Right. You’ve done nearly a year. You’ve got just over another year to complete your three years.’ So you know in the last year you did two years’ work and you did do it. I mean it was nothing unusual to go back to school in the workshops or down at the aerodrome or wherever you were doing your instruction after, you know work. Which was sort of unheard of and then you still had to set your normal examinations, periodic examinations through and then your final examinations and before you left Halton. But you see you signed on for I think it was twenty four years from the age of eighteen. Well, I went in at just fifteen and if I’d have done my three years I’d have been eighteen and then I started my twenty four years. But in actual fact as I only did two years of training and I took my examination at the end of the second year I was only seventeen. So I took the examination and I knew that I’d passed but I didn’t know what my marks were. Whether I would just scratch through or got through with an Aircraftsman First Class. Very very few ever became LAC, Leading Aircraftsman from Halton. You know, you’d need sort of ninety nine point nine percent to do that because let’s face it I mean you, you were a tradesman basically but I mean it’s all schoolwork and so on and so forth. Even though you worked on aircraft down at the, down at the aerodrome and you worked on engines the whole thing is very different when you get out into the real world. So as far as I’m, you know I’d finished at Halton. I was now classed as a man except I wasn’t a man because I wasn’t eighteen. So there I was out in the big wide world working on aircraft and facing all the dangers that you do when you are you know a Service personnel and I was still only getting boys pay. So I think, I think the pay for the last year was ten bob a week. So I was getting ten bob a week and I ended up on various Maintenance Units working all over the country doing all sorts of job. And basically, I was running these you know about eight or ten blokes in a gang because basically I was the only one that knew anything, really anything about aeroplanes. I mean they were garage mechanics and stuff like that. In fact, one place I was at the CO threatened to put me on a charge because he promoted me to corporal. I said, ‘You can’t promote me to corporal. I’m a technical tradesman and the only way I can get promotion is to pass examinations and as I don’t even know what rank I am I don’t know whether I’m an AC1, LAC or what it is but probably AC1 but I’m only getting paid a boy’s pay. I’m not getting paid a man’s pay.’ Oh, he carried on. I think he was a recycled bank manager or something like that. I was going on a charge and blah blah blah and, ‘You report tomorrow with your corporal’s stripes on,’ and so on and so forth. Well, of course he put all the paperwork into the Air Ministry and of course it came bouncing straight back. So when I fronted up to him the next day without my badges up he said, ‘I’m sorry Miles. You’re quite right. I cannot promote you but in view of the fact that you are doing a man’s job they’ve decided to pay you a man’s pay and you did pass out as AC1. So you now, although you’re not eighteen you are now classed as a man and you will get a man’s pay.’ I don’t know what it was. I shouldn’t think it was a great amount but there you go. That’s what happened.
[recording paused]
Sunday morning now. Whatever the date is. Soon after 5 o’clock in the morning. Had a reasonable night’s sleep for a change. I suppose not having Phyllis here I’m sleeping a bit better. Got quite a few things to do before I go out. I have to sort out the dustbin and I think I may have told you I’ve got a stinking dead bird in it so I’m going to get rid of all the rubbish around the house. Not that there’s much but you know it needs to be put in the bin and I’m going to fill it up with grass cuttings. Try and stifle the stench of that bird and all the blowflies. That dustbin will have to go out this evening for collection early in the morning. I shall be glad to see the end of that one. I must do some washing. I’ve got dirty clothes and stuff to do and the towels need to be washed. I like to do those every few days. With a very high humidity if you’re not careful you get not exactly mold growing but you get this sort of rank smell on things if you don’t keep everything absolutely clean. Tony came yesterday evening and went in to see Phyl in the hospital and they’ve invited me to go over for lunch. So I thought I’d go. Break up the day a bit and I shall go and see Phyl this morning. See how she is and take anything. She wanted some socks or something. Her feet are getting cold. And then tomorrow her feet will be too hot obviously. Poor old love. I’m just making a, having a cup of tea and a few bits and pieces about the Halton thing. I joined the Cross-Country Club for 4 Wings and competed quite successfully and got a couple of very nice medals in cases. Barrington [unclear] medals. I have a feeling I gave them to Gillian but I wouldn’t be sure about that, some while ago, who knows to make sure that they didn’t get lost but one may have got stolen. Who knows. Things do. There are some light-fingered people about and you can never be sure. I did get quite a number of medals at school for running. Lord only knows what happened to them. I suppose things vanish. Kids play with things and they get lost and dropped and so on. As soon as the war started of course in September I’d taken my bicycle up to Halton so I could ride about on it and that was all bicycles were taken away. Any excuse to take things off you and the apprentices had to cycle about but not on your own bike. Oh, deary me no. I mean I was given a rusty old clapped-out Service bike that weighed about four ton when I went out. Go and report. It’s your turn to go and do these. Halton was in a sort of a valley with hills all around. Very pretty place. But there was all these scares of land mines and so on and so forth so we had to go and do a land mine check. Cycle around the hills and make sure there was no bombs or parachute mines hanging on trees and things. You see we didn’t know, well I’m not talking about us but I’m talking about England didn’t know very much about what a war was all about so of course it was all sort of fast learning or trying to find out, you know. Soon found out. What else? What else? Oh yes. Mum and dad were living in Dover because dad was working down there and it got pretty, pretty horrendous down there so dad decided that he’d, he’d move mum up to, that’s my mother up to Wendover to, you know be away from all the shelling and bombing and whatever was going on down in Dover. And at the same time he with his sisters and mum’s brothers decided to move their grand, my grandparents, the Miles’ up to Wendover as well because it wasn’t very nice down there. Down in Margate. And my grandfather of course was a very good bootmaker and repairer. Excellent you know. The old school thing. Things were done properly. So they, I don’t know all the ins and outs of this and of course you weren’t ever told and you were too busy with whatever you were doing yourself but I know that he, they got him a shop in Wendover to start up. You know, to do his boot making sort of thing and of course, there was a lot of hunting fishing type people about there. And of course when they found that they’d got, excuse me this bootmaker who they could take their fancy country type boots and stuff in and they were returned to them as if they were new, completely repaired you know, all the stitching repaired and everything else and of course, you know, he was inundated with work. And you know they, granny, my granny and Grandad Miles you know were living sort of very comfortably in a much better situation than they were in this sort of quite frankly a bit of a very working class sort of a house you know all jammed together in this little square with alleyways that went either way. And then at the end of each alleyway there was a pub, you know. I mean it was spotlessly clean. I mean, granny and grandad were you know the old school. Everything was the, her front doorstep was done with a white whatever it was they used to use. Everything was scrubbed and polished and don’t you dare make a mark when you went there, you know. You were frightened to touch anything. But where they were in Wendover was a much much nicer situation. But of course, when the war finished no, no they didn’t want to stay there. They didn’t want to sort of have a nice country life with more money and all that. No. No. They wanted to go back to their little place where they could trot up to one or the other pubs in the evening and have a few pints with their old mates and swap over yarns. So they did. Everyone, we all thought they were rather stupid but as you get older you want your own little nest. Although in Phyllis and my case we seemed to have been having recycled nests all our life. Never mind. Back to Halton I suppose. Now, what else happened there? Oh yes. Well, when granny and granddad moved up and mum, my mother moved up there of course I wanted to go and see everybody you know. You do. So, I applied for a weekend pass which I got and wanted to get my bicycle. Oh no. I couldn’t have my bicycle. I think the sergeant in charge, and mine was a lovely brand new bike I think the sneaky devil was using it for himself you know. Like people do. So I was given one of these rat trap Service bikes. Horrible thing. Anyway, off I went and of course, quite a long trawl. I can’t remember how far it was but I came tearing down this corner. In this case I was only a bit of a kid anyway, I came tearing around this corner on this great tank of a bike and the brakes hardly ever worked and we come around the corner and there of course was a great herd of sheep all over the road. Some old farmer was moving them from some place to another. I’d got no show of slowing or stopping and I couldn’t go charging into these sheep so I ended up you know hitting a tree or something or other and of course bent the crossbar so that I couldn’t steer any more. I could only turn left or right. I couldn’t turn both ways. So I eventually got to Wendover and of course the usual thing. You turn up. My dad had driven up in his funny old car he’d managed to buy. He got special rations of petrol for it and of course, [laughs] whereas Reg as usual turns up. Trouble. He’s got this bike that he couldn’t ride. He’d managed to get to Wendover but he’d certainly never be able to ride it back. Nowhere at all in Wendover would even think of repairing it and quite frankly it wasn’t a minor job. I mean the frame was all bent. So dad had to put this bike on the roof of this little car he had, a little old Singer or something I think it was, lash it down and drive me back to Wendover at the end of my forty eight hours. And then of course I had to then take the bike back to the sergeant who raved and ranted like they do and, ‘You’ll have to pay for this Miles.’ I probably said, ‘Well, if you’d let me have my own bike I wouldn’t have had all this trouble.’ What else did we have to do? Oh yeah. Well, in in this room that I’ve, you know I was in looking after everybody sort of thing we had two Shaw’s and one was Johnny Shaw who was a bit of a rogue. I don’t know why he joined the Air Force but I suppose he had his own idea of why he joined the Air Force. He must have. And it wasn’t long before Johnny said, ‘Book me in will you?’ I said, ‘Well, where are you going to be, John?’ He said, ‘Well, I want to go to London this weekend and I can’t get a weekend pass. I had one last week so, I’m going so you know you book me in as if I’m here.’ I said, ‘Oh alright.’ You know. Why, why should I worry? So he went off and he came back and like he’d turn up in the middle of the night when he should have been, you know back earlier. But he just turned up and he’d wake me and say, ‘Here you are, Reg. There’s a couple of packets of fags.’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, thanks.’ You know. ‘No problem?’ ‘No. No.’ And this went on for, you know a while and then this one night he turned up a bit earlier you see and I said, ‘What have you got there?’ He said, ‘Oh, a suitcase.’ I said, ‘Well, what do you mean? Where did you get that from?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I picked it up on the train,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a look,’ you know. He opened it and it was a woman’s suitcase you know. A big suitcase with her name and everything on it. I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Oh well, it was there so I helped myself to it.’ I said, ‘Come on. Put the stuff back in and take it down to the guardhouse. Put it behind next to the guardhouse.’ This was the middle of the night, you know. ‘Take it down to there. Leave it next to the guardhouse and somebody will find it and the poor woman will get it back.’ ‘Yeah alright, Reg.’ So off he went. And one of my jobs was to take two or three of my chaps out each morning at the crack of dawn. Sort of 6 o’clock or whatever and go around and pick up any loose bits of paper and you know check the area around the barrack block. It was a three storey place with six big rooms you know holding about twenty, twenty five boys in each room. So each, each room had a leading apprentice and each room took a turn. It happened to be my turn. Go out there with the boys and that. Johnny Shaw had hung women’s clothing on every notice board and fence and oh God. So we gathered it all up. Put it all back. Found the case of course. Put it in the case and took it down and said we’d found it, you know. I took it into the guardhouse and said I’d found this and they said, ‘Oh, you know, this woman was stuck. She’ll be worried I’m sure.’ ‘I’m sure she will,’ you know. wartime you know you can’t get any clothes and all her possessions were there. And of course, I said to Johnny, ‘That’s it mate. I’m not booking you in again. That’s the end of the line as far as I’m concerned with you, you know.’ So, he said. ‘Well, please yourself mate.’ He said, ‘But I’m still going.’ You know. Ok. And then a few months later you know the, we were down in the workshop and, you know military police, RAF military police came in and found me and said, ‘Where is all your room?’ So, ‘They’re basically here,’ you know. ‘Well, gather them altogether and march them back to the barracks.’ Now what’s going on? Got them altogether, checked the area and marched them all back to the barracks. A fair old trot. ‘Stand by your beds.’ And there was officers and God knows what there and they proceeded then to turn the place upside down but they knew what they were looking for apparently. This particular Johnny Shaw had been forging the signature of the instructors and withdrawing from stores verniers and micrometers and any, any, you know, expensive bits of gear and then taking them into town and selling them. And of course, when it turned, when you know things were sorted out a bit he just vanished. But it was found out that he he’d got a flat in London and he’d got this girl of his living there and he was supporting her and all the rest of it and you know there was a lot of kerfuffle about this and you know everybody was accused. I mean I was accused. What have I done? You know. You know what it is. They try and throw a bit of mud and hope it’ll stick and I said at the time you know, I said, ‘Well, Johnny Shaw —' he was chucked out of the Air Force, you know, ‘Johnny Shaw will either end up in prison or a millionaire.’ Well, very very many years later and I’m talking very many years, fifty, sixty years later with some of my contacts in the Haltons. If you were an apprentice in the Air Force it was like belonging to a big club I suppose. Like all belonging to a university or whatever. You were, you were an apprentice. You were called a brat while you were there and when you left you were an ex-brat and if you were an ex-apprentice people knew you’d had a good basic training. You knew what you were talking about as far as engineering was concerned. And so of course through the years and the internet and so on people have contacted me. You know, ‘Are you the Reg Miles that used to be — ’ so and so and so and so and, ‘Yes,’ and there would be a bit of mail flowing to and fro about things and I suppose I must have asked one of them, you know, ‘Did you ever meet anybody in town?’ They said, ‘Oh, yeah. Johnny Shaw. He turned out — ’
[recording interrupted]
And Wendover. It wasn’t Wendover it was High Wycombe. So High Wycombe not Wendover and I cut off a bit of Johnny Shaw so I hope you got that bit ok. Johnny Shaw and High Wycombe and I’m just trying to look at the thing.
[recording paused]
I don’t know but he obviously did very well for himself and the last I heard he’d died. Seems to happen to people don’t they? They do die. What else happened at Halton? All sorts of things. One of the, there was a lot of very skilled people there. The apprentices, you know their hobbies and so on. I always remember the operating lever for the showers was a great enormous brass lever with a very big brass knob on the end of it and some of the people took them off and carved them. One of them made a stand for an aircraft so you could buy cast brass castings at a local shop where you could spend hours shaping them and putting all the various control surfaces and all that sort of thing. Yes. They, they’d taken this thing and they’d made a stand of it and the ball at the end they cleaned it up perfectly and carved a map of the world. You know. Brilliant work. God knows how long it must have taken them to do it. But that, it was interesting in that way. Soon after the war started of course there was a bit of panic I suppose everywhere and one of the things we used to have to do which was all part of our training was to have to do this current affairs type of stuff you know. We’d go and we’d have a bit of a lecture to you about who was what and what country was which and all the rest of it. And apparently one of the instructors had told the truth. Terrible isn’t it? He told the truth about the situation. How we were situated. How we were situated there, you know. I mean the war had not been on very long. It was pretty obvious that we were going to get booted out of France and we were ill-prepared and nobody was on our side sort of thing. And he, he must have said, you know things are going to be very tough. Well, somebody made a big deal of it and the next thing I know you’ve got the secret police or whatever. CIB or whatever they used to call themselves, Criminal Investigations Branch up there and as I was a leading apprentice for this you know, you know they sort of called me up and they were cross examining me and all that sort of thing and trying to make me say that the chap was spreading alarm and confusion. Well, as far as I’m concerned he didn’t. He just was saying the truth so that we knew where we stood and I said so and I was only sixteen or so. I don’t know what happened to him. While I was at Halton of course the, the troops were evacuated from France and some of the barrack blocks were empty with people that had passed out and gone on about their business. So they were put into these barrack blocks and these chaps had turned, what they’d done, a lot of them it’s an absolute disgrace really. They were RAF blokes. When they were told to you know pack their kit and get the hell of it and get down to the Dunkirk and so on and so forth they’d emptied out their kit bags of all their clothes and stuff, gone into the NAAFI and filled them up with cigarettes. So any equipment they had and any clothing they had they dumped it all and just filled them up with cigarettes, you know. Funny attitude isn’t it? So there they were. They wanted, you know a decent tie or something like that they were bartering with the boys you know the youngsters with cigarettes. I thought it was a disgrace but you know. I suppose human nature wherever you go. They were more interested —
[recording interrupted]
When I finished at Halton I was posted to 34 MU, Maintenance Unit which was at Shrewsbury in Shropshire which is top end of Wales. Just a bit below Liverpool. And this was a Maintenance Unit. Basically it was recovery of crashed aircraft. All makes. In some cases, it was just salvaging rubbish. In other cases it was dismantling a perfectly good aircraft that for some reason or other had landed perhaps in an inappropriate place because it had run out of fuel or landed on an aerodrome and flipped over. This sort of thing. We were equipped with Coles Cranes and Queen Mary low loaders and I was in a gang. There are some photos on the computer. I was in a gang with a retread sergeant who had been a lorry driver or something in the First World War and he was an optician by trade. Nice old boy but you know he got dragged back in I suppose and the rest of us were, well I was the only apprentice but the rest of them were, you know handymen, garage hands, labourers, you name it. With a consequence of course that in another time it sort of depended on me to say you know what should be done because I had at least been trained on the aeroplanes and engines and stuff and I suppose well it was learn by experience. So I took the bike up there with me and we were in Nissen huts. I have a feeling we were down a sort of a back track somewhere near the sewerage treatment plant but it didn’t smell but that’s what it was. A few Nissen huts and of course we were out on the road all the time. I mean gumboots were the order of the day. I can’t remember having much in the way of overalls. I think if we had them they were got so damned filthy and you never got them cleaned because we’d be out. Well, you’d go out on a job and then you’d get sent to another job and then you pick up rations from wherever you could which might be an RAF place, an Army place, a Navy place depending where you were. So you might be away from base for three or four weeks or longer going from one aircraft to another. The very first job that I went on was, and I’ll try and remember all the different jobs but they won’t be in any particular order and I’ve probably missed some and forget some and ramble on bit a but I’ll do the best I can. It was reasonably interesting. The first job I did was went to an aerodrome called [pause] oh dear. Now what was it called? Shawbury? It was. I think it was Shawbury which was the other side of the main town of Shrewsbury and it was fairly large aerodrome but basically, it had Ansons and they were used to train navigators and I think wireless operators. So the first job, new boy, you know I wasn’t even eighteen, I was only about seventeen was a Spitfire upside down near the edge of the runway. And apparently the pilot had been injured or whatever and he’d come in and landed with his undercarriage down but he miscalculated and the thing tipped over and it was upside down. My job, new boy, get the instruments out. There was a number of things in the aircraft that got stolen if you didn’t watch it. The gunsight which was important, the clock, they went you know. A few other instruments had to be taken out. So while I was under there you can imagine there wasn’t much room because the thing was lying on its back a bit crushed. Crawled under there undoing all the bits and pieces and pulling stuff out. They were taking the propeller off and removing the wings so that we could pick it up and turn it up the right way and load it on properly. As little damage as possible. It would go back to the factory and you know in a week or two it would be in the air again. So I was working about there and they were taking the wings off and, and the construction of the Spitfire wings was very strong construction. The main spar really consisted of a square steel tube with other steel tubes put inside of it so that gradually as it went from the root end out to the tip it tapered and you know by the time you’ve taken the [unclear] off and undone various nuts and bolts the only way to get the wings off was to wag them up and down a bit. So I was under there and I was working away and then plonk I felt something. I thought, oh God it might be bloody oil or something. When I looked it was blood. I looked up. What had happened this poor bugger had I don’t know whether he died or not but he certainly lost a lot of blood and there was this pool of congealed blood on the floor which was now the ceiling and of course it fell all over me. Lovely. Finished what I was doing, got out you know and we were miles from anywhere and the chiefy said, ‘Oh God.’ He said, ‘Well, the only thing we’ve got,’ because we used to drain the petrol out the aircraft. One of the first things you know get the petrol out. High octane green colour it was and stung like the blazes. Had a lot of lead in it. The only way I could get any of it off was to wash it in petrol and which wasn’t very nice or easy for that matter. And of course, we always used to take a packed lunch type thing so there you are with blood everywhere and you’re eating corned beef sandwiches in the middle of nowhere. Lovely. Anyway, while we were doing this there was, well they also had Masters there. That’s right. They had Masters. Master. I think they were 1s or 2s. It doesn’t matter but they had Masters there. And it was a pilot training place as well and while we were there we, this plane was coming in to land and an aircraft when you pull the throttles back if you haven’t got the undercarriage down a horn blows to remind you, you know you’ve got the throttle back so you’re landing. Where’s your wheels? You know. Get them down. So you’ve got a very loud horn blowing. This plane came in to land with the horn blowing. The canopy was open slid back and we were all waving like mad at the pilot and he waved back in a grand manner I suppose. That was his first solo. He waved back completely oblivious of the horn blowing of course. Oh dear. He crunched down on the runway and hadn’t got the wheels down. So, whether he got washed out or not I don’t know but it meant that when we finished the Spitfire [laughs] we’d got a Master to do as well.
[pause]
The whole business of doing these aircraft was really a sort of a, ‘What do you think is the best way of doing it?’ Sort of thing, you know. You get, you take the wings off of course obviously. You get your crane and pick up the fuselage and you know very carefully turn it around the right way. Your low loader you’ve got certain trestles and things. You put the plane on trestles. We had loads and loads of sandbags that, you know we used to pull up the sand wherever we were. We’d, you know it’s the sort of thing that the more you, like the removalists I suppose. Every time you did a job you found something you hadn’t got so you sort of helped yourself to things wherever you were to make life a bit easier. Ropes and struts and whatever. Lashings. So you’d put the fuselage on trestles and the wings would go into sort of stowage along the side. We had big high rails that we could lift up and lock up so that we could tie wings to them. And the Spitfire was quite good because the fuselage, the wings were attached almost directly to the fuselage. There was no centre section as it were. The Master was a rather different kettle of fish because the Master was made of wood. Plywood and so on so there was a very strong centre section which was I suppose about eight foot wide or perhaps a bit wider than that to which the wings are fixed to and the undercarriage is fitted in the centre section. A very strong part. It has to be you see. So when you’re, when you’re loading the Masters and that type of aircraft we found from bitter experience that there was a lot of humpback bridges in that part of the world with high brick walls also humpbacked as it were and unless you packed up the three or four sleepers either side of on the rails of your low loader and then sandbags and things and put the plane on top of that when you came to one of these humpback bridges the centre section would hit the wall. So, you know first time you did one you realised and you had to stop and get your crane and pick it all up and sort it out there and then. But after you’d done one or two you know you remembered that that’s how you had to load them and of course, the information would get passed from one crew to another crew. Sometimes the other crew didn’t take any notice of you. I mean, I always remember we, we picked up a Master at the same place later on and there was another crew picking up a Master. And we’d said, ‘You know, you’ve got to pack them up on three sleepers —’ and whatever it was. I think it was three sleepers of sandbags to clear these walls. ‘Oh no. No, you don’t.’ Now, of course they let their crane go along in front of them and they followed behind the crane and we were behind them and of course they got to the wall, to the hump, to the first hump backed bridge and root end of the wing just came down on the wall didn’t it. So they had to get somebody to go and get the crane and turn it around and come back and lift the thing up and do what they should have done. The other thing that we used to have to do because of some of these things that we were carrying about were very wide you know we always liked to try to put bits of rag and flags and stuff on them. And the best place to get flags was when the roadworks were working they would be either putting flags down the middle to show which side of the road you should use and not use the other side because they were working on it. Or if they were painting the lines and in those days they used to do it with a brush. They would have all their nice little flags stuck in empty paint tins all down the road. Well, of course, it was more times than not we were actually standing in the back of the low loader going back to base or wherever we were going and it was quite easy for people to lean over the side as we went by and pinch their flags. Well, I suppose we were using the same bit of road a lot because you know there was this particular aerodrome had lots of crashes. We were always in and out of this one. So of course, the blokes on the road got a bit pissed off didn’t they? So what they did they concreted the flags into these paint tins. You know, gallon paint tins and of course, the next time we were going along one of the boys leaned over and grabbed the flag and the next thing you know he was laid flat on his back in the middle of the road because it was too heavy for him to pull. So the blokes on the road were very happy about that. Our chap wasn’t too happy but I mean in those days you know you got up and got on with your work. We’d moved a number of aircraft there but one job we did at that particular, Shawbury. Was it, Shawbury? We were, we were told to go there and hangar so and so and so the job was in the hangar and when we got there it was I don’t know how many there were. There must have been twenty or thirty, I don’t know, I wouldn’t have a clue, Ansons and they were all burned out. Every one of them. And the Anson is a sort of steel framework with fabric over it. Twin-engine. Two Cheetahs I think they were. Quite, quite small radial engines and they were packed in in the hangar. Pretty stupid. They should have been disbursed but there you are. Packed in there and they were pretty tight. And when we got there of course the whole thing was burned out and it was just like an elephant’s graveyard because it got so hot that it had partially melted propellers which were aluminium and and the engines and stuff like that was sort of looked a bit liquid in places and they were just these steel frames because all the fabric had burned off and the rudders were sticking up you know and so it was starting to go rusty. Oh dear. So it was quite, quite a big job really. It was really a sort of a scrapyard job because everything had to be just dragged out and chucked on low loaders. Get as many as you could in each low loader. It was no use trying to save anything. It all had to go to be recycled, you know. It was all burned. Nothing worth saving. While we were doing it there we thought what happened here then? And the chap that was stationed there he said, ‘Well, one of the chaps was on guard duty.’ A couple of nights previous it happened. He was on guard duty, walking about with his rifle and his five rounds of ammunition and [laughs] ‘Don’t you dare use them because that’s all we got.’ And he heard a German bomber going over. This was night of course. He heard a German bomber going over. You could always recognise them, you know they had different engine noises had obviously been up to Liverpool. So I suppose he got a bit excited and he could see this plane so he fired at it. Now, he must have hit the damned thing because quite frankly you know if he’d have fired and missed nobody would have, the people in the plane would have had no idea. But he must have hit it somewhere. Well, it upset them because they’d got a hang up. They’d got a bomb that hadn’t dropped and they managed to release it. I suppose they thought right here you go. They dropped it. It landed on the concrete just outside the hangar and bounced. Now, it had supposedly bomb proof doors but the apex above the doors was all girders thing and was just covered in tarpaulin strapped in there you know. And it went straight through between the beams, landed on the centre of the floor, you could see the marks where it had landed. It landed in the centre of the floor, missed, missed all the aircraft and would have gone out the other end of the hangar but it hit the girders at the end and of course, went off. Of course, that set light to everything in the plane, burned all these aircraft and all the rest of it. The chap that was on guard got put on a charge. I don’t know what the result was but he got put on a charge and the charge was firing at an unidentified aircraft. Well, crazy wasn’t it? It was identified. But that’s the trouble. No, I was looking at that particular aerodrome has got quite a sort of a history you know on one of the internet sites and that and there’s absolutely no mention of this. None whatsoever. There was all mention about Charlie Farnsbarn and wing commander this, that and the other in charge of this squadron and that squadron and no mention of this at all. I can’t remember the number of the training squadron. It is some FTS or whatever. So that, that was at Shawbury. While we, while we were based at Shrewsbury we used to get the sent all over Wales. All sorts of places and I would try and remember oh we even went to the Potteries. We got sent to the Potteries where a Spitfire had landed. I don’t know. It had been shut up or run out of fuel or God knows what but it had landed on the slope of the embankment of the railway cutting. Can you imagine? You know, a slope there. It was forty five degrees or more and the plane was on that. The pilot got out ok apparently. Well of course the trains had to slow right down as they went by because if it went too fast the vibration this thing would slow right down slide down on the track and wreck the train. So we had to get that out. Now it was somewhere on the Potteries. I can’t remember the name but it doesn’t matter but the access to this was across a bit of waste ground and we just drove across this. It was sort of dirt and mud. Drove across it. Got to the thing and had a look. Alright. Well, it’s no use. We can’t work it on here. We’ll have to pick it up and bring it on to the dry land you know so we can get on it because if we start trying to take things off here it was bound to slide down. Oh well, better get the crane over you see. And that Coles Crane was driven by, it had a Polish crew, I’ll always remember this. The driver was about six foot seven, and the crane operator couldn’t have been much over five foot. Anyhow, we said, ‘Well, you know, go over there and we want you over here so we can lift the —’[pause] ‘Yeah, righto.’ So they drove across. Of course, unbeknownst to us this bare piece of ground was, in actual fact was a water reservoir which was a concrete tank.

And a big one you know. That was a big tank and probably because it was old and damaged they just filled it up. Well, of course the worst thing to do is to drive over that with a great big thing like a Coles Crane which is heavy and of course this was all wet. I mean you could walk across it. You could drive a small truck across it but you couldn’t drive a damned great crane across it. Of course, as they drove across it sunk and sunk and sunk until this thing had sunk so far that the wheels disappeared and the only thing that stopped it from going any farther was in actual fact the floor of the cab and the floor underneath the actual crane section was all you know big plates, steel plates underneath the actual crane at the back. Oh dear. Well, we tried. You know, we got another Coles Crane up seeing as we’d got to get a Coles Crane up. You can’t pull him out and we hadn’t got any long cables. You didn’t get a digger on there with a big Coles Crane. You don’t want to go down. So as it was a reservoir there was a workshop there somewhere and we said, ‘Have you got a cable we can borrow? You know. To tow this plane.’ He said, ‘Well, yes. It’s the only one we’ve got, you know. You won’t damage it will you?’ ‘No. Of course not.’ Well, of course we did didn’t we? I mean it was a great line. I don’t know. It was a hell of a long cable and the time you sort of fastened it here and taken it around there and tied a few knots around of course him and this chap had pulled up with you know with the cable edges kinks it in. But we couldn’t pull it out. Couldn’t pull it out. So I can’t remember how we got this. We must have gone around the other side. The other side of the railway line with the crane and something or other and picked this thing up and you worked from the other way. The last I saw of the poor Polish blokes they were digging out the mud from all underneath it. The only way they could get it out was to just keep digging and digging and digging and then jacking it up and putting timbers or bricks or anything that they could scrounge underneath the wheels. Lowering it down which pushed the timber back down in there and I presume eventually they got to concrete at the bottom and then they could lift the, lift the thing up and put timber and whatever else down so they could drive it out. I should think it must have taken a few weeks and they had a hell of a job afterwards to get all the clay and mud off it. That was that little episode. But then another one we went to a village. I can’t remember where these places were you know. It’s a long while ago. We went to this village because the chiefy had been given a direction. Sometimes you got a map but sometimes you just got, you know directions such and such a village. Aircraft in this village. Sometimes he would have details of the aircraft and sometimes he wouldn’t. So we got to this little village and the village pub and then we looked around. We couldn’t see any aircraft. Better go in the pub, you know. Always a good idea to go in the pub because you could always get a few fags. Nowhere else could you get cigarettes. Everything was rationed you know. Go in there. Speak with the landlord. Chiefy. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Have you come about the aeroplane?’ ‘Yeah. Well, come upstairs.’ It was [laughs] stuck in the roof. I can’t remember if it was a Hurricane or a Spitfire, one or the other stuck in the roof. I don’t know how I, a perfect landing quite frankly. It made a hell of a mess of the roof. I think we managed to take it all to bits mainly and cart it down a little bit down the stairs and lower it down with chains and tackles and stuff. And then of course the poor old landlord had to get the roof mended. Then another one. I don’t know what it was. I have a feeling it might have been a Beaufort or a Blenheim or something stuck up on a Welsh hilltop and it was a right mess and we couldn’t get a crane up there. No way could you get a crane up there. We had [unclear] what we used to put up there. They were massive great things. Yeah. So we managed to drag most of it down you know with a truck and put ropes on it and pull it and chuck it over the edge and then drag it a bit farther. But the engines being radial engines you know you could roll them a bit. I mean they’re damned heavy things and you wouldn’t want to get in the way of them they’d kill you. But once you’d got them rolling you know if you could sort of get them rolling and you could just stand back and let them go and that’s what we did with these, with the two engines, two radial engines. You left all the cowlings and everything on them and they just bowled merrily down. I have a feeling one of them went astray and landed in a stream or a lake or something. I know we had a hell of a job to get it out. But that was another job there. And then we had an aircraft that had landed in this paddock field and I can’t remember what was wrong with it but it wasn’t, there was something wrong with the aircraft. It wasn’t, it was only a little single seater thing. It wasn’t very big. I can’t remember what it was. Anyhow, we got it going and all the rest of it and chiefy went and rang up from the local pub or wherever he went and they sent out a pilot and it was one side of a very deep cutting, road cutting. A lot of that in Wales you know where there are so many hills and that. The only way to get a reasonable road was sometimes to dig a cutting like you would for railway lines. So, a pilot came, taxied it about you know. Yes, that’ll be good. Started up, tore down this field, got airborne and I don’t know what happened whether the engine cut out or whether he, I don’t know but he landed in the field the opposite side and that wasn’t big enough. So we ended up by the next day going up and taking it all to pieces and shipping it back you know to a factory somewhere. And then I can’t remember which plane this was, it was quite a big one and we were bringing it down through the, it was Christmas Eve I think it was from memory. We were bringing it down. It would be Christmas Eve 1940 I should think. It might have been ’41, who knows but anyhow one of those years and very windy twisty uphill downhill road in Wales you know. A narrow gutted. I don’t know how, well there were hardly any vehicles around even before the war you know. Never had any money for cars. Mainly horse and carts and things. Farming areas you know, sheep and that sort of thing and we were bringing it down in the Queen Mary and we got to trying to get through this little village and we got stuck and we were in a pickle because our crane was behind us and he couldn’t reach us. Reach the low loader. We needed a crane in front of us to do it to help us and we got stuck right by the door of the local pub. How convenient. And we couldn’t go forwards, backwards or anything. We were just jammed there because it was a very windy road to get through and you know with a bloody great low loader with an aeroplane on it and we needed to get a crane down the front. So of course, the chiefy had to lay it on. I know we were there all night on guard. He said, ‘I want you to watch it. They’ll only steal it, you know.’ Well, actually we did very well because the locals had to go past us to go into the pub and also past us to go back out again and so we did alright. We got, you know some booze, coffee, sandwiches. I can’t remember what the favourite food of the Welsh was but you know but I mean we were pretty fed up because by the time we got back to base Christmas Day had come and gone and you don’t get afters you know. If you’re not there you don’t get any. I know we arrived the day after Christmas Day. I think it was a Christmas Eve we got stuck there. We got back to base you know a couple of days later. So that was another one we did in that area. Another one was, I can’t remember where it was but it was you know we turned up at this this little town and it was very nice properties, you know. houses and that and chiefy said, ‘Well, this is the one.’ We pulled up. Scruffy looking lot you know. Gum boots, unshaven, covered in grease and stuff. I mean we’d been on the road for days. I mean that was another little bit of the history in actual fact. We’d all run out of fags. Even the chiefy. He smoked a pipe which he broke the stem so he got this little bit of pipe stuffed and he had a big hairy moustache. A bit like mine. And none of us had got any tobacco or fags and of course we had to carry all our worldly goods with us. I mean you weren’t, you know when you went back to base I mean you had your kit bag that you had with you and that’s what, you know. And I remembered in the bottom of this bag when I was on leave one time I showed my uncle, which is Eric’s father, [Baydon.] they had a butcher’s shop up in Cliftonville and I had, I suppose some girls arrived. The farthings in those days a bit of copper farthings had a head of a queen on one side and on the other side they had a wren I think it was and what I’d done is I’d filed the wren out and the head out from another one and left a little tag so that I could drill a little hole and then I had them silver plated and they made nice little bracelet things you know. Gave them to the girls. You never knew how lucky you might be. So I must have shown him these. ‘Oh,’ he said and he went to the bank and he got a bag of farthings. I don’t know how much it was. Probably a couple of quid’s worth or whatever and he gave them to me and he said, ‘Will you do me some?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Of course I will.’ And I remembered these were in the bottom of my bag. Nobody, we none, we hadn’t got any money because you know we hadn’t been paid. We’d been out on the road and all we were getting was a bit of food here and there whenever we could and I said to chief, I said, ‘Chiefy, I’ve got these farthings in here. Can we get some cigarettes from the pub?’ Well, I fished them out and we, oh that was a little general shop, that’s right. We went in the general shop you know so you’ve got cigarettes and you know yeah you can only have ten or five or something it was each sort of thing and then I paid her with farthings. Well, she nearly died. I mean we counted all these farthings to and fro to pay for these cigarettes. I’m afraid Uncle Baydon never ever got his farthings. I’ll have to tell Eric one day. He never got them. Anyhow, I digress repeatedly. Anyhow, we turned up at this house and chiefy said, ‘Well, this is the address.’ But it’s a very nice looking house with a nice sloping front garden, little hedges and things you know and flower beds and stuff. ‘Oh. Oh well,’ he said, ‘I’ll go and see.’ So he, off he trots and he goes around and goes to knock on the front door. Poor old chiefy goes around the back and bang bang and I can see a bit of arm waving and that and he says, ‘Come on boy,’ And we go around the back and it was a chicken farm and the whole back of the house as far as you could see was all these high wire netting. Sort of ten foot high wire netting. Hens with lots of chickens in them all the way or had been lots of chickens and just at the back of the house there was a very pretty goldfish pond but there was an aircraft. The engine had dropped off and gone into the pond and cracked the concrete of course so all the water ran out so all the fish died. And as you looked back up the back there there was all this wire netting that was torn off and cracked up and dead chickens all over the place. Oh my God. And the farmer was not pleased. He was very pissed off. So the chiefy said, ‘Oh, yeah. Well, we’ll come in the back way.’ He said, ‘No, you bloody won’t.’ He said, ‘There’s enough damage there,’ he said, ‘But I’ve got blokes fixing it all up,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to, you know —' Letter to the Air Ministry and all this sort of thing. I can’t remember what the plane was. It had a radial engine but what the hell it was I can’t for the life of me remember. Probably a Harvard or something, you know. A training plane. The bloke had had trouble and he saw this, this field, came in and landed. Of course, it wasn’t a field it was a chicken farm with all these. We, you know he wasn’t very helpful the bloke there. We didn’t get a cup of tea or anything but we managed to get the engine out and we had to roll it around you know. ‘Don’t you do any more damage. You can’t bring a crane. You can’t.’ Oh, you know, he was a helpful sort of bloke. So we had to roll it around the side of the house and squeeze it through this gate and so and so forth. When we got around the side of the house somehow or other it got away from us and it went straight across all his lawn and his little hedges until it ended up in the road which was good because we had a crane out there [laughs] We could pick it up. As far as I can remember we took the rest of the plane to bits and we sort of humped it around through the side of the house and put it in the truck. And all we got from him was a load of abuse. I mean I don’t suppose you were very happy at the fact but it wasn’t our fault was it? I don’t know.
[recording paused]
Another thing I remember us doing we had to close a Liverpool tunnel and go to Speke which was an aerodrome the other side of the river and shut the tunnel and tow this aircraft all the way through the tunnel. I don’t know where we were taking it. You know. You know, it was unusual to shut the tunnel but that’s what we had to do. Another job we did was a Hampden. They were all, we had to be very careful on those because they were the only plane that I ever worked on that had cable cutters fitted. They were little sort of like very sharp chisels with a cartridge behind them and the idea was if they hit a cable it slid along the wings and ended up in this little jaw, tripped a lever and the chisel cut the cable. That was the theory. I don’t know whether they worked or not but there was a lot of chaps lost their fingers because when you were, you know lifting wings and that if those things were still there it was easy for your hand to slide in there and wumph. So the first thing we had to do was to go and set them off. Now, I remember putting a screwdriver down there. It just cut it in half. Bumph. Like that. I think that was, that was the aerodrome where the crane drivers and his mate I don’t know if they’d gone for a drink or something I don’t know and the chiefy wanted the crane moving. So, ‘Go on, Reg. You can drive that?’ ‘Yeah, of course I can. Of course you can.’ I mean I was sixteen, seventeen. Of course, I could drive a crane. Never been in the bloody cab before [laughs] What did I do? I don’t know what I did do. Whatever I did I sheared the drive shaft. So when this crane driver came back they were not well pleased. I was not allowed anywhere near a Coles Crane in the future [laughs]. Oh dear. Another little thing we had, we did too was the Manchester which was the forerunner of the, basically the forerunner of the Lancaster and which was a very big aircraft. It was only a two engine aircraft. Two great big vultures as opposed to the four Merlins that they eventually ended up. We worked on one of those. I can’t remember a lot about it. I don’t know whether we were just a backup crew or what there but I remember working on it. Just laying flat in the mud. I think the trouble with those engines were they were useless things. They didn’t last very long. They were always packing up so that was another job we had to do. That was a Manchester. Then we went, I remember we went to work on an aircraft on an aerodrome and it was an aerodrome that was just grass and they still use them these days I think. They put goose necks out. They were really like a big watering can basically. That’s what they looked like only in metal not plastic with a big spout and they had a wick in there and it would be filled up with kero and they’d light them and they would, they’d lay it out in a certain pattern so you got a sort of like a T at the end and then a row of these goosenecks. I can’t remember which way you were supposed to land on them but this sergeant had laid out the goosenecks and was standing there and the pilot came in and landed the wrong side and killed, killed the poor old sergeant. We had to clear the plane up. You should have seen the mess this body had made of the wing. You, God you thought it had hit a truck. I suppose coming in at a hundred and fifty miles an hour and made a right mess. And it was somewhere in that area that I was working on a plane with a mate of mine and it was the undercarriage had collapsed or something. We lifted it up and we got it on trestles and he and I were working. He was working on one undercarriage leg and I was on the other getting it down and knocking it and all the rest of it so that we could you know get the trestles out and move the plane and I heard a sort of a bit of a grunt and I looked across and I said, ‘Are you alright mate?’ And he was sort of sitting there and I thought, I don’t know, he doesn’t look very happy. So, I went over to him. He was dead. What had happened was the trestle because there wasn’t much room underneath. He was sitting there with the head just touching the underneath the aircraft. His trestle must have dropped a quarter of an inch, half an inch. No more. And it just broke his neck, you know. I had to crawl out and say, ‘Hey chiefy,’ whatever his name was is dead. Good lord. And on, it was one of those jobs there when we were using these shared legs. God. They consisted of a steel pole with a big round breastplate about eight or nine feet tall and top of that we used to put a beam, a piece of what was called a high beam with a block and tackle on it. It was all pretty heavy stuff and then you put stay wires down and all this to lock it down and you could pick up an engine and back a truck under it and all that sort of thing. And I know we were working on this something and of course something happened. It collapsed and this whole lot landed on my leg which sort of hurt a bit. So I ended up in hospital. I was only in hospital for a few days while they did a few checks. All very basic you know. ‘Can you walk?’ De de de, ‘You’re alright.’ I don’t know whether that was the reason why I’ve always had trouble with one of my knees. It could well be. Anyhow, it didn’t kill me so that was that thing. And then another time we were, I was working on this German plane and it was just a burned out wreck you know and we used to get a bit fed up with people wanting souvenirs. And so this woman kept calling out, ‘Can I have a souvenir? Can I?’ I just grabbed a bit of stuff, took it over to her and gave it to her and she said, ‘What is it?’ I said, ‘It looks like the bloke’s scarf.’ So there was a big scream and how do you do and of course —
[recording paused]
She happened to be sergeant copper’s wife. Of course, I got in a bit of trouble you know but we were only there for a few hours and we were off so who cares. Another job I got given too while we were, while I was at Shrewsbury, 34 MU [pause] when they had a load to go somewhere and in this case it was Spitfires. Bits and pieces and some whole bits of Spitfire to go down to Supermarine’s factory at Southampton. They had to take somebody down there whose job was to be responsible for the loads because the driver was just the driver. So I don’t know how I got picked, you know. Seventeen year old, you know. You only want to truck the other, one end of the thing to the other. So, I went with this bloke. Well, these are all professional truck drivers you know that had been drafted into the various Services and that’s all they did. They drove trucks. And they sort of had girlfriends and sleeping arrangements all over the place. I remember this. We had a hell of a journey from up there all the way down. Down to Southampton with this stuff and of course everywhere we stopped, we had to keep stopping for petrol and all sorts of things. He got it all organised. I think he was a bit of a rogue. Well, they all were. People would say, ‘Oh, can I have a souvenir?’ And so he was flogging bits and pieces to them and I know there was a bit of a kerfuffle one day because he’d, he’d flogged this bit of a German aircraft and it actually it had got RAF roundels on it, you know. Slam the door and drive away sort of thing. We were lucky we had anything left by the time we got down to Southampton. But I forget where we stopped. Somewhere or other we stopped and he said, ‘Right. Well, we’re not driving any more tonight.’ He said, ‘I’m going to park it in this coal yard,’ he said, ‘Because I know them here. Park it in the coal yard,’ he said. I said, ‘What happens to me?’ He said, ‘Well, you can do what you like. Sleep in it or whatever.’ I said, ‘Well, you know, don’t I get some food?’ He said, ‘No,’ and he just buggered off. He’d got some girlfriend there you know and I remember I stayed the night in this bloody coal yard. Sleeping on a seat or something in the coal yard with a coal fire and all the fumes. Coke it was. Terrible. Anyhow, we eventually got to Southampton and unloaded it and drove back again. But I never ever got that job again. I’ll tell you if anybody said, you know, ‘Would you like —?’ ‘Oh no. Not me this time. I’ve done my whack.’ So that was that. I’m just trying to think of anything else we did at Shrewsbury. I’m sure there were. I mean there was a lot more planes that we must have picked up and crashed planes. We seemed to have one in the river and one in the sea but I can’t remember the details of it so perhaps the best thing to do is to say right. Well, that’s probably the end of 34 MU. We then got transferred to 67 MU which was at Taunton in Somerset. Same gang. I think we took our own trucks and stuff as well because we had a big old, we had a big Chevy. It was all steel. A steel Chevy and I know we were on one job, I don’t know where we were. [Marston?] Anywhere driving along. We were in the back of the truck. I used to hate it in there because, because they had no back to it it sucked all the fumes into the back of the truck you know. Terrible, you know. we had stinking headaches. I know we were driving along and suddenly there was a terrific crash and God knows what and what had happened we were going across a crossroads and a chap on a motorbike with his girlfriend/wife whatever on the back he’d driven right into the side of us and he hit the side of this steel truck with his face so you can imagine how dead he was. His wife/girlfriend wasn’t much better off and we were right out in the middle of nowhere. So we had to sort of get him and her into the back of the truck and his motorcycle and go to the nearest town or something. I don’t remember all the ins and outs of it. I remember the blood and the gore and the pain and the poor woman she was in a right old state. And another job we did down there, a job down there we did all sorts of jobs and I have to tell you about them all. They’re in no order because I can’t remember. But there was a Flying Fortress. I think the RAF had got a few Flying Fortresses from America to try them out and they weren’t successful and this Flying Fortress was somewhere down in Somerset or Devon and we had to go and load it up so we stripped it all and we got it all loaded. We’d got the fuselage and all the bits and bobs but the worse thing was the centre section. Now, I told you about the centre section from the Masters which were timber. This was metal and it was a big, big, big lump. Not only was it pretty long but it was very wide and to get it back to the depot and then forward it on to, it had to go to Speke. A company in Liverpool. We used to use the police and that to tell us where we could go because you know we’d got low power lines, bridges, telephone wires, you know, all sorts of stuff like that. Overhanging trees, buildings you name it. Used to go to them and they’d say, ‘Oh yes, you can use the road around there.’ Well, we were going around in circles for about a week trying to get back to the depot and we just couldn’t. And just about every aircraft we worked on particularly if it was a big one they all had these, well they were called fireman’s axes. They were metal handles. Metal axes for hacking your way in or out if you were, you know in trouble. So we’d always got a number of those. Those were very useful. So what we had in the end the chiefy said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘We’ve had enough of this.’ We just chopped foot holes and hand holes in this. In the wing near the centre section you know and got up there and we cut off about six foot of these. Chopped it all off, chucked it in the low loader and then we could get home. I mean it wasn’t worth, I don’t know why they wanted it all in one big. It was rubbish you know. So that was that. What else did we do? Oh yeah. That was that place with the fence. I think I may have mentioned it on one of my things. The fence. This would be the CO. We had one rifle and five rounds of ammunition. Don’t fire the gun. Don’t lose the ammunition. That’s all we’ve got. Though in actual fact we used to bring loads of ammunition back from crashes so you know we had a lot more ammunition than just five rounds because we were having, we were unloading aircraft, you know with Browning guns and cannon guns and there was a bit about that I was going to tell you about that too. Now, the place we had at Taunton was, had been a commercial garage and used new car place so it was quite well built and it even had its own playing field and it had the home and away changing rooms plus quite a big area and you know, the showrooms and all that sort of thing which was commandeered by the office staff and we had to go and unload the coal trains for them. So there we are, a very expensively trained engineer going and unloading the coal for people pushing bloody typewriters about. A disgrace. Anyhow, this thing was surrounded by a spiked rounded fence which you’ve probably seen. About five eight diameter steel rods with a sharpened point. Six, six foot six tall and it was all surrounded with this and he decided that as we’d got no defence whatsoever he would turn us into a battalion of pike men. So here we go again. All the highly skilled trained people out there with files not angle grinders. Oh deary no. No such thing [unclear]. Files filing off the nibs that held the spikes in, every other one and they were then had a number painted on them and everybody was issued with a number so had a practice. Blew a whistle or something or other and you all charged out to get your pike to defend the place against perhaps a couple of Tiger Tanks and 88m German guns, you know. Ridiculous. Well, can you imagine the chaos? A, most people couldn’t lift their pike high enough to get it out. You’ve got to lift it up and get it out of the bottom rail and then you’ve got to pull it down at an angle to get it out the bottom. I mean really it needed to come out the top. And how did you find your number? Written on there in white paint. You just grabbed any one and it was absolute chaos wasn’t it? I think he might have changed his mind and put it all back together again. And he was the, the wally who had me in and made me a corporal. ‘Put your stripes up tomorrow, Miles,’ he said, ‘I want you to you’re able to run the squad and you know so — ’ I said, ‘Well I’m not eighteen yet.’ That’s nothing to do with it.’ You know. ‘I want to see you with your corporal’s stripes up tomorrow.’ I said, ‘Well, you can’t promote me because I’m a technician and the only way I can get promoted is to pass examinations to show that I am competent.’ And I said, ‘In actual fact I don’t even know what rank I am. I’m still getting paid boy’s pay.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ You know, he couldn’t understand all this. No. No. He said, ‘No. No. You, I want —’ I said, ‘Well, you can’t.’ He said, ‘Well, if you’re not,’ he said, ‘You’re on a charge.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m sorry but you can’t do it and that’s it.’ Well of course the next day he apologized. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Miles. You’re quite right. I cannot promote you. But —’ he said, ‘In view of the fact of what you’re doing you have passed out as AC1 and you will be getting a full man’s pay from now onwards.’ So I got something out of it I suppose. That was that. Now, where. I’ve just been writing all notes down to make sure I’ve got this. So then another thing we’d been out getting crashed aircraft in and bringing them back and all the rest of it and then suddenly I was called in. He said, ‘Now we need an armourer too because all these guns, you know and Brownings and [cannon] guns and bombs and God knows what have all got to be properly packed up and the ammunition has all got to be, and these are the regulations.’ He gave me the regulations. He said, ‘The station warrant officer has got one half of the changing pavilion.’ He said, ‘You shall have the other half.’ And he said, ‘I want you to be station armourer.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m an engine fitter really.’ [laughs] You know, and I was only a boy wasn’t I. ‘No. No.’ He said, ‘You’re competent to do this.’ So I had the regulations and I had this thing and I managed to get a bench and a few tools and stuff that I needed in there and I started reading the regulations. Well, and this little room had been piled up with ammunition, Browning 303, Brownings you know out of aircraft and cannon guns and that. Oh my God. So read the regulations and there was great piles of verey cartridges. You know the coloured cartridges that each time you went out on an op you had the colours of the day issued to you so that you could fire a verey cartridge with the colours of the day so that, you know if you couldn’t, if your radio was buggered or whatever you know they would know you were fake, err friendly. There were great heaps of these things. Damn dangerous you know all this stuff mixed up together. I read the regulations but the first thing is all this verey cartridges and ammunition must be burned. Safely burned to make them safe and then you know it was just rubbish what’s let the caps and stuff to go off. So right. A big heap out the front, a bit of straw or whatever I could find and set light to it you see and normally they just burn. But of course, no. They wouldn’t do that. They started flying out. Lightning flying out like fireworks and of course next door was the station warrant officer you know. A retread from the ’14/18 war [laughs] I suppose. Got his little bit of stick under his arm, the usual sort of thing and of course, as he marched out of his, his door to see what was going on of course these things were flashing up all over the place. You know, I started to get a right rollicking. I said, ‘I’m doing regulations, sir. You know. I mean I have to do this. I have to make them safe.’ I mean all this stuff could have blown up. But that was the first thing. Then the next thing was I had to, a lot of these guns and barrels were bent. You can imagine when a plane crashed you know the barrels were sticking out. They were quite often the first thing that hit the ground. They bent and if, if the belts and that were still on there would be a bullet up the spout. The belts had been pulled off but there was one up the spout and you couldn’t get it out because you couldn’t release the blocks. Well, what do I do? I’d got no idea. So I had a good look and I thought well the easiest thing to do is to use, you know a centre punch or something like that and just whack the end of the bullet which will fire the bullet to go up the spout. It wasn’t straight to barrel. Never straight to barrel but make it safe. I can then get the, the breechblock out. I could get it out until I got rid of the bullet. And of course, every time I did that he nearly jumped a foot. Came in and started raving on. I said, ‘Well, I’m just doing my job. I mean this is what I have to do. Regulations.’ [laughs] You know, I think he was a bit [unclear]. The other side of a bit of a plywood partition and there’s these guns going off and barrels flying about the place. And all this ammunition had to be packed and of course I didn’t know anything about them did I but once I started to read the information all this 303 ammunition there was a regulation that explosive ammunition would not be, you know. One of these silly how to fight a war and be friends or something crap. You couldn’t have, by international agreement you couldn’t have explosive ammunition that was smaller than point three of an inch. So that’s why Britain had 303. So they could do what they liked you know. And of course, this ammunition was all marked because there was no use firing an ordinary ball ammunition at an aeroplane. I mean, yeah you’d hit it but I mean it would just go straight through and out the other side. It was only fabric or thin aluminium wasn’t it so you’d have to hit something pretty solid like a, like a pilot or the engine or something or other to cause damage. So of course, they had explosive ammunition and they were all coated with different colours which don’t ask me I can’t remember now. I had a feeling one of them was white but what that indicated I’ve forgot now. I can’t remember. So of course, I had to sort all this stuff out and it had to be specially packed in these, these special ammunition boxes and wrapped in wax paper and all the information written on labels and fixed to the boxes and all that. So I had all that. There was loads of stuff to do and I was doing all that and I suppose that was all he was concerned about. Somebody with a bit of, a bit of sense to get the thing sorted. So I was doing that. I did the ammunition and the guns and the breechblocks. The breechblocks had to be packed separately and could not go with the guns. You know, the Brownings. Couldn’t go with the Brownings and couldn’t go with the ammunition. Some they didn’t want you know somebody getting hold of guns, breechblocks and ammunition and starting their own war I suppose. I must say most of the Brownings weren’t much good because they’d all got bent barrels. So that was that and then there was a number of cannon guns in there. Now, I didn’t even see one up close really. I mean we’d worked on aircraft but I don’t think any of them that I worked on had cannons. Even the, you know the Spits and Hurricanes hadn’t got cannons on I worked on in the early days. And the same thing applied to the cannon gun. Well, I mean I knew a bit about the Brownings because I’d had a few to pieces you know during the course of pulling them out but when it came to the cannon gun I hadn’t a clue. Where the hell is the breechblock? You know. Anyway, had a good look around it and I thought oh and of course they’re long things. About twelve foot long you know a decent sized cannon gun. And there was a big nut on the butt end with a locking tab. I thought well that’s it. That’s, that’s, you undo that and you can get at the spring which you know works and everything. So I stuck this thing on trestles that were so long that I had it almost sticking out the door. I had to have the door open while I worked on it. And I undid this nut and I kept undoing it, undoing it and it was a big nut about a couple of inches across this nut and yards and yards of thread and I just got to the last thread. You know I could feel that it was going to pop and it flew out spring and all as our sergeant major walked out the door next door. I’m sure he thought I was after him. Very you know sort of diving back in, said a few rude words to me and then I could get the breechblock out, you know. The other thing with the cannon guns most of them were drums. They had a drum which fitted on the cannon gun which had the ammunition in it that I don’t know what it would be. About twelve inches long and about I don’t know twelve fourteen in diameter and the, the ammunition was fed by a spring which you know the whole thing was full up with these things and the spring pushed the shells in to the, the actual gun. Of course, they had all bent and battered you know and the only way to get the ammunition out was to cut a hole with a hammer and chisel where the actual exit was and then get the ammunition out. And you know I [laughs] I was sitting on the bench one day with one of these things, I had a box to catch the ammunition on the floor and I was shaking this thing when the door, the door burst open and the sergeant came in and he said, ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing? You’ll kill us all.’ And on and on. He said, ‘You know, call yourself an armourer.’ I said, ‘No. I’m not a bloody armourer. I’m an engine fitter.’ ‘No wonder.’ Blah blah blah. He’d just come from Shaibah. He’d never seen any of these guns. The only thing he’d ever seen was an air cooled, which was you know a pea shooter. So he, you know he knew the markings on these and these were the very sensitive cannon guns because again you know there was no use just having just ball ammunition. It would have gone straight through and out the other side. You need something to go and hit the plane and it would explode and phosphorous and God knows what. Someone with an incendiary. Anyhow, he was alright. I explained what was what and of course I had to sort of train him a bit as to what was in and I, he wanted to stay, he wanted me to stay with him. I said, ‘No. No. I’m not an armourer. I’m a bloody fitter.’ I had to stay with him for a little but he’d got a, he was issued with a truck, a small truck and prior to him coming somebody else must have gone to the aircraft and taken the, any bombs off the planes. So I had to go with him for a few trips until he sort of got a bit au fait with what modern aircraft looked like and I don’t know what old rubbish he’d been working out in Shaibah. Shaibah. There’d been some tales about Shaibah then. And for a week or so and then I ended up going back to my proper job you know. So that was my short stint as a station armourer. I mean it seems amazing doesn’t it in this day and age? There I was. I wasn’t even eighteen. I was handling with official sanction all this explosive stuff and you know stuff that could have blown up and blown the whole bloody place up quite frankly. I don’t know. Right. Now. What else have I got here?
[pause]
Oh yeah. We, we did a bit, a bit of work around the place but basically we got, we got shifted down to a place called St Eval which is in Cornwall. I think it’s in Cornwall. Anyhow, it’s a fair way down and we were, we were working from St Eval and the first job we got there was a Spitfire and it’s all dry stone walls down in that area. You know they’ve got so many rocks and stuff in the fields that the only way to get rid of is to build walls with them. So they build them about three foot wide and just keep piling up the rocks you know and this Spitfire had touched down, bounced and had come to rest on the top of this wall. You wouldn’t believe it would you? The pilot was there when we were working on it and he, I said to him, ‘How did that happen?’ He said, ‘I’m buggered if I know,’ he said. Having trouble and he said he just bounced and landed on the wall and it stayed there. And I noticed that written down the side was his name and in Latin which I cannot spell and probably pronounce incorrectly was, “Semper in excreta,’ and I’m sure you can work that out for yourself what it means. That was a Spitfire. At the end at St Eval when we were there and prior to being there it had been Beauforts, torpedo bombers which had been harassing the German coastal shipping and ports and stuff and there was a quarry at the end of the runway and our next job was a Beaufort that was in there that was taking off with torpedoes or land mines or something and hadn’t made it and landed, crashed in the quarry and of course blown up. There was bits all over the place. So we could get a crane in there and pick up the stuff and one of the engines and there was an engine missing and we eventually found it on a ledge quite high up in the quarry partly covered with rocks and stuff that had fallen on top of it. So I got the job, I don’t know why I always seemed to get these jobs. I got the job. He said, chiefy said, ‘Go up and put some slings on it, Reg and we’ll get the crane to pick it up.’ Silly sod. Of course, I get up there and I’m working around the back of the engine getting the slings and I thought the bloody oil and stuff here. God what a mess I shall be in and anyhow, got the crane on it, picked it up. It was half a bloke. One of the crew. And you know oh dear it was enough to make you feel sick and there was a lass standing at the top of the quarry looking down and she said, ‘What have you got there, son?’ I said, ‘I’ve got a bit of a bloke here.’ She said, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Have you got a sack?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘Well, I’m a nurse,’ she said, ‘I’ll come down and put it in the sack for you.’ And she apparently had a little house or something near the quarry, and so I held the sack while she picked up half a bloke and stuck it in the sack. I thought ugh. You know, it had been there for some days and hot and that. Creepy crawlies all over it and of course when we got back for our meal what did we have? Rice. I’ll tell you what. Every mouthful felt like maggots. But there you go. So that was that. I’m trying to make a few notes here for you so I can [pause] so many things happened and you forget. While we were at St Eval of course the Germans decided it was payback time so they came over and they really blasted the place. We had all sorts of capers there. In the hangar there was a bloke from Hawkers repairing a Hurricane and the Hurricane fuselage is a bit like a model aircraft. It a steel tubular framework but it has formers, wooden formers and wooden strips of wood and all the rest of it and they’re all covered in fabric. Just like a model aeroplane really basically and the chap had just about finished it ready to put the fabric on it, you know. It looked a picture and of course, the naughty Germans dropped a bomb which flattened the bomb proof door which fell on the Hurricane. Just the bit that was sticking out was the propeller. That did that. Of course, in the process of that there was a lot of damage and you know like a barracks that we were sleeping in got damaged and so on and so forth and obviously no point staying there. So what we had to do go with our truck and find a field somewhere and we had tarps on board because we always were covering things up so and we spread this tarpaulin out and we sort of laid in like a row and then pulled it up. So there we were like a row of pigeons. I don’t know how many there was in a gang. About nine. And then a few days later we were allocated a empty house at a place called Treyarnon Bay. A lovely little place but these were all houses that belonged to people with money obviously and they were their sort of holiday places but they were all taken over by the military. So we had an empty house and of course you slept in every room. You just, you know were issued with what they called biscuits which were mattresses in three, three bits. Put them on the floor wherever. And our food was issued as bulk rations when we were there so we’d cook it there. Most of the time we weren’t there of course. We were out somewhere else at different places. One of the things we got used to down there was cider called scrumpy. Very potent stuff. The, this sergeant armourer had just come back from the Middle East and he said, ‘Well, I’ll go and get a beer.’ I said, ‘You won’t get any beer here. The only thing you can buy in Taunton is cider.’ ‘Oh my God. That bloody kid’s drink. Bloody lolly water.’ I said, ‘You just watch it mate.’ He goes out and he gets, gets drunk on cider. Well, not only is it pretty potent but I can tell you what. It’s a wonderful laxative. He was not the same man for a number of days. The poor fellow. That was the cider. One of the jobs we also got I can’t remember what it was. What aircraft it was but it was a Naval aircraft base somewhere or other down that way and we nearly went potty because they’d play this damned tannoy all day long and then they were blowing trumpets and things and gabbling [unclear] and you know, ‘What the hell’s that?’ Oh, that’s make and mend or that’s go to lunch or stand and wave your legs in the air or something. I don’t know. Crazy place. We weren’t there very long fortunately but I mean I remember we were going back, going from the hangar we were working on some aircraft that we were taking to bits and shipping out to somewhere. Some busted and broken thing and we were walking across this parade ground and the window flew open and this bloke raved and ranted. How dare we walk across the quarterdeck. Quarterdeck my ass. It was bloody bitumen mate you know. Where are you? Still back in Nelson’s time? And I know somebody said I don’t know what the local town was but somebody said you know I’m in not a bad town but a picture place or something like that, you know. Righto. Yeah. We got all tarted up and wondered up to the gate to catch the bus about a quarter of an hour before the bus was due you know. Plenty of time. We couldn’t get out. ‘Come on mate. Open the gate.’ ‘No. No. No. The Liberty boat has gone.’ ‘What are you talking about? The bloody Liberty boat.’ ‘No. No. The last Liberty boat. The next Liberty boat will be after the boat, after the bus has gone so that the people that have just come on the bus can get on the Liberty boat.’ Oh God. You know. Living in the bloody Dark Ages. So we never got out. We didn’t get out. So just as well. We saved our money didn’t we? Now what else? While we were at St Eval of course we travelled down south. I think I may have mentioned it somewhere about that. The Whirlwind. We were working on another Beaufort. We’ve got a photograph of the crew working on it. We were working on a Beaufort down there and I think there might have been another plane you know. You get a bit confused over the years what you’ve been working on. What you haven’t been working on. And we were staying at a café and you know got a bit of sleeping quarters there at Penzance. And we were going to get our food there and this first night we trooped into the dining room for our evening meal and eight or nine hungry blokes sitting around waiting for it. And a woman comes in with a Cornish pasty about nine or ten inches long. A great hefty looking thing. We thought well that’s not much for all these blokes. But then we got one each. I must say they were very nice. A very nice Cornish pasty. But we did watch a Whirlwind collide with another one and its tail got broken off and it dived down. Down that area somewhere. I’ve got some correspondence going on at the moment with some aviation archaeologists who were looking for the Whirlwind. Whether that one is still there or not but we watched it go down. It came down in a screaming dive and it hit the ground some distance away from us. Pretty rocky sort of ground down there. When we got there all that was sticking out of the ground was a few sheets of tin and a hand with a ring on it. The left hand had a ring on it. He must have had his hand out of the canopy when the thing hit the ground and the canopy shot forward and just chopped his hand off. It was obviously reported and I was, chiefy must have handed his hand in to somebody or other. But they are doing some more enquiries after all these years. I mean that we were told that you know we should say about doing it and chiefy checked it up and they said, ‘No, leave it where it is. You know, it’s down to deep. We’d need excavators and cranes and God knows what to get that you know. He’s buried so leave it.’ That’s what happened to that. But there is some correspondence going on at the moment about that. While I was at Taunton I got a bit fed up with this. You know, I mean I was trained as an engineer to work on aircraft engines and all I was you know a sort of garbage collecting. You know some of it was a bit interesting but mainly it was picking up crashed aircraft and sticking them in a truck and I mean you didn’t need to be skilled and once you’d been doing it for a few weeks anybody could do it you know. You didn’t have to be trained. They could just use a little common sense undo this, undo that, undo this. Oh yeah. Undo this. Here we go. So I, I put in for an overseas posting and was accepted and had a medical and all the rest of it and I had my embarkation leave and reported to I think it was Padgate which was an enormous camp. They had a parade ground that you, God you know you could run a half a dozen football pitches on it and I remember being lined up there with thousands of other blokes and we were issued with cold weather gear, and hot weather gear. So we had two. Apart from our own kit bag and our own little personal case we had two other enormous kit bags. One full up with [topies] and khaki long shorts and that sort of thing and the other one full up with not wool, not snow skis but, you know all that sort of stuff and we were all lined up there in rows answering our name and I said to the chap, ‘Was that my name called out?’ And they called it out and he said, ‘Yeah, it sounds like you.’ Report. Oh God. I staggered out there with all this gear to the adjutant. ‘Go and hand your gear in Miles and go back to your unit.’ Yes sir.’ So did all that and got a railway warrant. All the usual things and went back to my unit and I said, ‘You know what about what’s all this about?’ And he said, ‘Those chaps are going overseas to where it’s a bit dangerous and you’re not eighteen and you can’t go with them.’ Oh. I found out afterwards they were going to Russia and a lot of them didn’t even get to Russia because the ships were sunk so I missed that one. But it wasn’t long after that that I was, ‘Right. Well, you’ve had your embarkation leave. Blackpool.’ Right. Go to Blackpool. Got to Blackpool. Civvy billets up there. Usual bits and pieces. One of the things I did do though which I was a very good roller skater. Did a hell of a lot of roller skating as did Phyllis you know in our young days. All sorts of daft stuff we used to do. But they had an ice-skating rink at Blackpool and I thought that would be nice to try. Well, the first couple of times you go you can’t. Your ankles sort of fold over you know and you are going along on one side of your boot on the blade. But as soon as you realised what you’ve got to do you’ve a much tighter shoe and boots on you know make sure you strap yourself up tight and get the idea of it better it’s surprising how well you can ice skate and I was told during that time that if you could roller skate you could ice skate. If you could ice skate you couldn’t necessarily roller skate. And I even learned to dance you know. I mean pathetic dance but dance. Not dance on my own but dance with, you know a partner. That’s the only thing I can remember about Blackpool and it wasn’t long afterwards that you know in these trucks for Liverpool. And on the docks there and you’re faced with a black wall which seems to go on forever with a small hole in it and that’s the side of a ship and this was the Mooltan. Mooltan. I always thought it was a ten thousand tonner but in actual fact it was twenty thousand tonner. I got some pictures on the thing of it. And we boarded this thing, we were given numbers and things of where you’d got to go and we arrived down in the bowels of the thing and it was basically a passenger cargo ship . So you know we were down in the bowels with some wooden tables and stuff like that and lots of hooks to hang your hammock up. I think I might do something about hammocks another day. I just got —
[recording paused]
Ah well, I’m going to, this is good enough for this series. It’s Thursday, the 27th of January 2009. Phyllis is still in hospital. She’s been there two weeks now. I really don’t know what’s going on. She certainly seems better but obviously she was much more poorly than we realised and probably just about got her in time to get her in hospital and sort some of these problems out. I shall now copy this bit. I shall read this lot and then copy the whole thing on to CDs and send them off.
[recording paused]
There’s a little bit of this tape left and I just thought that I had a meeting today with various experts at the hospital and what we can do for Phyllis and for me and we can do some, some good results. Both for me, I mean it’s pretty obvious that I was getting tired and it was pretty obvious that Phyllis was not being properly cared for and that. Not my fault but, so there will be a lot of changes being made shortly which I hope will make life a lot easier for us. A lot, a lot of mistakes on some of this stuff. There was all sorts of aircraft that we, that I did work on and I’d forgotten all about and there was all this business where I kept saying Wendover when it fact it was what the hell it was called. I’ve done it farther back so these things happen. You sort of get in a rut but I shall now there are two, there’s two 90s and a 45 so I’ll put them all on CDs and see how he go from there and do some more another day you know. I’ve got a lot to do because we haven’t even gone to south, we haven’t got on the boat yet and we haven’t got to South Africa and we haven’t come back from South Africa and we haven’t, we haven’t on the Bomber Command or Transport Command or got married or [unclear] and come to Australia and been a sapphire miner and and so many different things. Well, a lot of boring stuff to come yet.
[recording paused]
27th of March, just after two in the afternoon. The last one I finished off from memory with a little about Phyllis. Subsequent to that she’s been in and out of hospital and eventually has had to go into a nursing home. We managed to find a very good one. She’s extremely comfortable. She’s got her own room. Her own bits and pieces, telly and pictures and we bought her a little fridge and she’s looking much better. She’s getting better medical attention, being properly looked after. Not that I wasn’t properly looking after her. She’s now getting all the attention that I couldn’t give her mainly because the doctor wouldn’t come so on and so forth. So she’s very happy. I’m not sort of ecstatic at the moment because I’ve just been told or a few days ago that I’m going to have to move out of here as this is a house designed for people in wheelchairs. Where I’m going I’ve no idea. The Department of Housing have been quite nice to me but regulations are regulations so I’m going to have to go. So end of that. We’ll worry about that when it happens.
[pause]
I was just going on board the SS Mooltan which was a twenty thousand ton mixed cargo passenger vessel. The cargo holds had been converted to carry passengers or should I say troops. I don’t think troops are passengers. So the bolt, the watertight boltheads had doors put in so that they would, could be shut in case of damage and tables, not tables, well tables yes and and benches bolted to the floor, deck I suppose. You don’t have floors on boats. You have decks. So we all trooped on board and we were told where to go and there was a big bustle of people trying to find places to put their stuff, almost impossible and lots of hooks for hammocks. We were all issued with hammocks. Some of the people of course that got in there first decided they’d sleep on the tables. Just stretch their hammocks out and lay on the tables and some slept under the tables and some slept on the floors and the rest of us hung hammocks up. I didn’t rush about. I don’t believe in rushing about. Let them all haggle over which ones they wanted. And of course, the only one that was left was just about over the stairwell. Just about over the entrance from the next compartment. Just about next to the toilets. Anyhow I put my hammock up, climbed into it so I was straight out but I’d done it up too tight and soon found out that you would leave them hanging pretty loose and you’d sleep like a banana. Most uncomfortable but I suppose I slept every, there every night for six weeks so I suppose I must have got used to it after a bit. We, the ship moved out into the, to the river after a bit. You could hear it sort of gurgling in a way and, and we stayed in the river for a couple of days I think, as far as I can remember and eventually moved out in convoy into the Irish Sea. We had no idea where we were going. There were one or two people that seemed to know left from right, east from west, north from south. I certainly hadn’t got any clue and in any case the people that knew all along I think. So we went out into the Atlantic a convoy of ships. We had a battleship and various destroyers and things and it got rough and of course ninety nine percent of us were terribly seasick. Me amongst them of course so you couldn’t eat anything. And all I had left in the way of money was something like ten bob because that’s all I was getting paid and there were people on board of course that had a lot more money than me. And I was smoking the cigarettes and a pipe at the time but the chance to smoke a pipe on board ship was pretty hopeless. And I very soon ran out of money. And of course a lot of people bought, everything was cheap on board you know. Tins of fruit and tins of cream and all that sort of stuff and cigarettes were very cheap and one that was extremely cheap was called [pause] what was it called? [pause] Oh God. Some South African name. they were a sort of oval foul smelling Turkish type cigarette and even the smell of them was awful. And of course people bought them because they were cheap and then they couldn’t smoke them so they gave them to me because I hadn’t got any you know. Terrible things. But when you’re addicted and hanging about all day and every day with nothing to do but stare at the sky and hope to God you would be sick or at least put us all out of our misery. Hope the Gerries sink us because we were pretty awful for quite a while but it wears off after a bit and the food was pretty good and the fresh air I suppose helped. And it was very very rough the first couple of weeks. I suppose it was. We had this great big battleship. I don’t know which one. It was behind us. I mean you could see its bottom more than you could its top most of the time. It was just I guess we were doing the same. And when we got oh, a couple, I don’t know how long it was, a couple of weeks out, perhaps not as much. I don’t know. I can’t remember. But the battleship and quite a lot of the other ships peeled off and vanished and somebody knowing said, ‘Oh, they’re going to Gibraltar and into the Med and so on and so forth. Well, whether they were or not I don’t know. We eventually pulled into a place in Africa where we just pulled into the river and it wasn’t very pleasant. It didn’t rock about but by this time we didn’t mind it rocking about. We’d got used to it and but it was a pretty fetid smell and we were just parked in the river. Some poor chap there who had been terribly seasick apparently all every day, was so seasick in fact that they were fearing for his life they onloaded him there and he went back to the UK. I don’t know how he went. A place called Freetown which you’ll no doubt find on the map is just below that big lump that sticks out in Africa. So knowing where we were we got some vague idea that we might be going to North Africa via South Africa. No idea. I mean they didn’t tell where you were going or what you were going to. You just went. We then carried on and it was very pleasant in some ways. There was flying fishes which I’d never seen before and dolphins and whales and all sorts of things. A number of terrible accidents of course. The, because this had been converted from a cargo ship into a, well to carry troops they’d had to put stairways in which consisted of timber staircases which sort of went up twenty flights turned, turned right and went up another twenty flights and so on around in a sort of a square circle until they got to the top deck and it was a long way up there. And to catch a bit of breeze at the top to push it down to the bottom to the other decks below they’d put these canvas like [unclear] on the top deck. Well, in actual fact they were above the top deck. I don’t know what they, it was a sort of a bit which was railed all off with big signs all around. Do not go inside here. Well, when you’re crowded almost knee to knee on a, on a ship like that any little space you can find your own of course you do. So, there were a number of people that sort of got through the railings. Been in there and somebody leant on this canvas thing. I suppose it looked pretty solid with all the wind blowing it. Well, it ended up with him going all the way to the bottom. Splat. It sort of killed him right where our mess deck was. Toilet facilities the first couple of days. You know I was trying to sleep in this blasted hammock where I was. Being exactly where I was I got the benefit of everybody trying to be sick at night. Not only from our own little area but from next door and other places coming to this toilet which I happened to be sleeping above. Well, that was, that was enough to make you even sicker but you weren’t allowed above out of your, you know out of your quarters during the night. And of course, you know everything was battened down and everything was welded up so that no light would shine out. There were obviously German submarines about. They’d have found, you know the Mooltan with God knows how many thousand troops on board a very choice target. But to accommodate all of the vast numbers of troops they’d built very enchanting toilets more or less on the top deck. It consisted of a trough that went from well about mid-deck to one side and then the same. Another one went the other way and there was a slight slope of course on the deck you know to shed any sea that got on to it. Mind you it was right at the top of the ship. It was a great way up. And they’d put these sort of metal troughs that ran right across and then disappeared over the edge of the ship so it went straight into the sea. And on this, very close, in fact touching were not toilet seats but chunks of wood with a round hole in the middle. So you know there you sat in all your glory and hoped you’d brought some toilet paper with you. But of course, it was a great delight for people who didn’t want to go or decided to lighten up their own day. They would find a bit of wood somewhere and found a candle or something. You could always find things if you were looking for them. They’d nail a stub of candle onto a piece of wood and then light it and then put it in at the top end you see and then would roar with amusing laughter as it floated down scorching the bums and other bits and pieces all the way down until it went overboard. That was the sort of height of the amusement on board I suppose. While we were on there I, I don’t know, it could have been about halfway, six weeks or so I suddenly developed a raving toothache. So I reported sick and the ship’s doctor or the doctor that was looking after the troops. [unclear] I said, ‘I’ve got a bad tooth.’ ‘Which one?’ I said, ‘This one there.’ He said, he immediately banged the one next to it you know. I said, ‘No. This one.’ ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you my equipment.’ His dentist chair was a chintz covered armchair. His, his dental equipment was a few rusty old plier looking things. He said, ‘I haven’t got anything I can give you to take the pain away so —’ he said, ‘If it still hurts tomorrow you turn up on sick parade,’ he said and, ‘I’ll get it out for you but —’ he said, ‘It is not going to be easy. I’ll have to get one or two people to hang onto you because I haven’t got anything to give you to stop the pain.’ He said, ‘All I can do is get hold of some of these and try and get it out.’ Funny thing. It never hurt again until it must be a year or so later when I was stationed at Bloemfontein when it suddenly started. And of course when they came to take it out it was just rotten chips wasn’t it. It must have been mind over matter I suppose. I don’t really know. What else happened on board?
[recording paused]
One of the things that I remember with joy about the ship and a lot of other people the same we used to be issued a small loaf. I don’t know how. Sort of like a very large roll each day and that was our bread ration made obviously on-board ship and it was delicious. We had, you know you had to save it for the rest of the day if you wanted it but I can tell you a lot of people ate it hot first thing in the morning. I always remember that bread. It was so very nice. I suppose it was so different from the rest of the squalor we were living in. The food as you can imagine was pretty sort of basic you know. When you’re making food and then some of our chaps used to have to go and fetch it, you know from the galley in buckets and stuff like that you know. The tea was in buckets. The food was in buckets. So there was a lot of sort of potato and chewed up meat type stuff you know. I can’t ever remember getting anything that looked like meat. It was good and wholesome and enjoyable but it was the bread that I remember so much about.
[recording paused]
[singing] And I say to myself what a wonderful world I live in with wonderful people who love me and care.
[recording paused]
So where do you reckon that came from? Well, I’m sat sitting here all on my own doing this and there are times nowadays when I get a bit depressed. For all the reasons of after sixty four years of being married to Phyl she’s now elsewhere. I spent ten years looking after her and that’s been a drag. Well, I say a drag. That’s been terrible just letting her go really. I still love her. Of course I do. You don’t stop loving somebody after all those years. But it’s, it’s hard being on my own again not knowing where I’m going to live. Anyhow, mustn’t go on like this. So we carried on in the sea. It was lovely you know. Sunny and warm and comfortable and not over hot. And then we sort of turned around and started to go in an entirely different direction and of course we were going to North Africa. We were going up the Suez Canal or somewhere but we didn’t. We went a little way up and pulled into a port [pause] oh here we go. More food. More [pause] no, we got off. I don’t know whether everybody got off. I’m sure they didn’t because there were so many people on the darned thing but we got off us crowd of fitters and riggers and so on and went to the railway station in trucks. The usual thing. And then put on, on a train. Where were we going? No idea. And we travelled, I don’t know it must have been a couple of days or quite a while anyhow and then we ended up in this place and when you got out the station there was a sign saying Bloemfontein. Well, where was Bloemfontein? God knows. I mean we had no idea. We knew it was bloody hot. We obviously had to put our khaki on on the ship you know because it was getting a bit warm. And of course, typical issue stuff you know. Long shorts and very old socks with boots and you name it, you know. We looked a right mess I suppose. And we eventually ended at this camp which they said was 27 Air School Bloemspruit and there was absolutely nothing. I mean there were just these huts in the middle of nowhere and, you know there was no runway. It was a grass runway which they used to cut but it was a dry desert sort of a place and we had these barrack blocks, corrugated iron roof. Brick built place. Corrugated iron roof with the old stable type doors at the ends and the usual sort of beds and very little room to put anything but, you know somehow or other you always manage don’t you to make yourself comfortable. And the next day we go on parade and get dressed and all the rest of it in whatever you, whatever we were wearing. God knows. I can’t remember for the life of me. All I know is that the very next day we had to form an honour guard for a pilot that had been killed during training and we were issued with rifles and had to fire a salute. Well, I had fired a rifle but a long long time ago. So that was our initiation. I was sent to one of the servicing flights so my job as an engine fitter was to check the engines on the on the planes every day to make sure, do the daily inspection and check them and make sure they were ok for oil and they were all air-cooled engines so it was only oil you had to check basically. But the riggers would check the rest of the side of it and there was I’m not too sure, I don’t think they had radios. I can’t be certain so I won’t say anything but you know the various trades, instrument makers and stuff and you would have to check the engine and if you found it had got a rough run you’d have to find out what was causing it. It was usually an oiled up plug. These were Bristol, not Bristol. Oh God [unclear] anyway they were Miles Masters made of wood and radial engines so that quite often you got the bottom because every cylinder on an aircraft engine has two plugs for safety and it just gives you a little bit more power. And usually with radial engines if you’re not very careful you do get holed up bottom plugs in the bottom couple of cylinders and you have to be very careful with hydraulics. [hydraulicsing] if you don’t check before you start an engine, particularly a radial engine by rotating the propeller by hand if there is as sometimes happens a lot of oil gathers in the cylinder and it can be such that it will basically take up the compression space. So if you started up with a normal starting procedure and the engine fires on all the cylinders except this particular one that’s got a lot of oil in it as the piston comes out of course it doesn’t compress the air because there’s none there. It just hits the oil which is incompressible basically. Fluids are not compressible under normal conditions so it hits that and of course it does a lot of damage. I mean it could sort of bend the connecting rod, damage the piston, break the piston rings and if you had hydraulics then you had to take the engines out and put another one in. So that was one of the jobs. Check various things for leaks and oils and so on and so forth. We had a number of African labourers I suppose you’d call them that were working with us to do the dirty work. Quite frankly I was horrified at the way the African native people were treated. We’ll go in to that a bit more later on. I don’t know how far this thing’s going. But no, the work was alright. You got used to doing it. You got used to being out on the flights in the hot weather because the grass grew quite quickly at one time of the year. But it ended up sticking up like pieces of wire because obviously it wasn’t fertilised or anything. It was very coarse rubbishy old stuff. It was so abrasive that actually wore the tips of the propeller and they had to be trimmed otherwise the little bits would fly off and they could do a lot of damage. Not only to other aircraft but also to human beings you know because they’d come off at a fine rate of knots. But generally speaking it wasn’t bad and I had a friend called Daker who was an ex-apprentice the same as myself and we got on alright. There was a concert party which I joined and there was a dance band which I had visions of joining but my trumpet that I’d bought when I, when I was in England I didn’t take it with me obviously and so I sent a letter to my folks, “Please post it to me.” They did. It eventually arrived. I don’t think they were very happy. It must have cost a small fortune I’d imagine to send a [laughs] trumpet in wartime to South Africa. So I was, you know inducted into the dance band. Very soon I was told by the lead trumpeter who was I think a professional trumpeter you know in a band. They were all professionals. They all had sort of professional names. There was Pinkie Williams that played a liquorice stick. Clarinet. No, the lead trumpeter he said, ‘You’ve got a beautiful tone, Reg. It’s just a shame you can’t play a trumpet very well.’[laughs] So I used to go out in to an empty building away from everybody and take the music and practice and practice and practice. It was very difficult playing second trumpet because you don’t play the melody you see. You, when you look at the music there’s bip bip and then there’s a gap and then there’s a blug and then a bip bip and burh. So you were all the time you were on the stage you’re counting until it’s your turn. Well, you know, I mean I wasn’t very good so I did the bip bips and the burps and whatever it was all in the wrong bloody places. I mean I couldn’t hear what was going on obviously, I was too concentrating on what I was doing but I knew I was making a right pig’s ear of it all because I got some dirty looks from everybody. I joined the concert party which was, that was a bit of fun. What we used to do, they, I had nothing to do with anything. I used to just do what I was told to do which was usually rubbish. But we used to practice and then the local cinema which in Bloemfontein was called the Bioscope. That’s what it was called. It was the Bioscope. There was two cinemas. One was sort of an ordinary like we would recognise as a cinema here even today. You know it was that sort of thing you know. The seats you sat in and sort of usual programme a main feature, and a news and a small feature. So about once a month we would put on a show instead of the small feature and people liked it. They quite enjoyed it. They, you know they were having a good laugh. We had a few, few very good comedians and I was always playing some foolish thing and I, one of the things they had me doing I can’t remember what, how it all worked but I had to run onto the stage, trip, miss the orchestra because our band used to be in the orchestra pit playing the, you know whatever music, miss them and sort of disappear from view and not hurt myself. Well, almost inevitably I would do this and almost inevitably I’d land on the back of my head or somewhere. I’d sort of stagger out, you know when the lights went down to go back to the back of the stage. Bleeding, all bruised or something or other. Well, they kept making me do it. I suppose I was such a prat they let me carry on. Another one, oh one of the silly things we had to do, one of the, one of the things they made me do I had to wear a funny hat or something or other and some rather large boots and very long shorts. You know, the really long shorts that go down just over your knee. Well, I suppose the kids wear them these days but in those days you know if you were going to be smart you had to have short shorts. And I’d have to wander on the stage looking vacant which I was most of the time I suppose [laughs] with the biggest heaviest piece of bloody rope they could find and it was a great lump of rope they’d got from somewhere and I would stagger on the stage with this you know and keep calling this mythical dog that was on the end of this rope. And of course they’d got some little tiny pooch, a Pekinese or something, I don’t know and they got this tiny little dog tied on the end of this rope. I heard the audience laughing but you know I didn’t think it was very funny but I was only sort of you know a fill in act. They gave me all this rubbish to do so and I made friends with people. It’s I was only young. I don’t know. God I was only, I think I was not quite eighteen you know. Just a baby. Oh dear. And I used to go down the town and it was very nice there in the certain parts of the area. It was very mild and of course you had all the lights on and there was plenty of food, chocolate and cream and all that sort of stuff which you know we hadn’t seen for years. Well quite frankly we hadn’t seen it ever before because we just couldn’t bloody well afford it. Then suddenly you know there was all this available and whatever spare cash you’d got you could buy this sort of stuff. I used to go down and of course you’d catch the bus into town and you had to be back by, before midnight. Another thing that always, I always remember its strange how these little things you know you remember. Parked just outside of the camp gate was this sort of shed on wheels sort of thing. You know, a chap used to sell all sorts of stuff. And the thing that I used to enjoy more than anything else when I came back from town was to pay I don’t know, coppers for a hard-boiled egg. You know, just break the shell and that. I thoroughly enjoyed that. I always remember that. One night I was waiting for the bus and I’d missed it. Or went to get the bus and I’d missed it and this car pulled up and they said, ‘Are you going back to camp?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Oh hop in. We’ll give you a lift.’ So there was a chap driving it and there was a woman with him and a young girl of about ten I suppose she was. So they drove me back to camp and chatted away to me all the while and the woman particularly. The bloke was a bit of a sourpuss. I found out more about him later and, ‘Oh, this is our phone number and you know, if you’re down in town give me a ring when you’re going into town next time and you know we’ll go and have a thick shake.’ Or, I forget what they are called now. They used to have these sort of all sorts of mixtures of fruit and cream and ice cream and that’s you know, I had teeth then. So, I suppose I must have sort of well rung them or whatever and I met the woman there. Their surname was [Florrey] but I can’t remember for the life of me. I might even have some pictures but I can’t remember the names of any of them. The daughter. I think I’ve got photographs. They’re all there on a photograph. Anyhow, the husband was a solicitor I think and his wife was well a bit flighty I suppose but I was only about eighteen. You know I mean quite frankly I mean offers were being thrown at me and I was too bloody dim to even realise what they were but that you know. So, I used to call her auntie and I think now she must have been so bloody annoyed every time I called her that because we, we’d go and a have a cup of coffee somewhere and I’d thank auntie and all this and then we’d go out to their place and auntie would say, ‘Well, you can sleep here tonight.’ You know. ‘Oh, I’ve left some. Left some of my clothes here. I’d better take them.’ Well, you can imagine what clothes she’d left there on purpose. But you know poor old thick Reg wouldn’t have a clue would he? And I’d stay there. Perhaps, you know get a pass so I could go out you know. You had to get permission and stay like say Friday and Saturday nights. Then go back late Sunday so I was ready for duty on Monday. And there was all the, they were in some Tennis Club or other you know and they used to get lots of girls there. They’d have these meetings and I got the glad eye but I mean I didn’t see it did I? I was too thick. I really was too thick. And I always remember one, one evening there they had they were having a meeting of the Tennis Club. It must have been in the wintertime because it was quite cool and they had a nice little coal fire burning and they had native servants of course. They were in the little shed out the back. That’s where they lived and they had to have passes and all the rest of it. I mean they couldn’t go. They had to have a pass to actually come and stay in there overnight. But they were there to do the cooking and the cleaning and all that sort of thing. Yeah. We were sitting there and I said, ‘Have you got any bread?’ And she said, 'Yeah. Plenty.’ I said, 'I’ll make you some toast.’ So, ‘Toast?’ I said, ‘Yeah. I’ll make it on the fire.’ I mean they’d never heard of it so I don’t know what I got. Whether I got a poker or something or other and tied a fork to it, whatever and I started toasting bread on this fire and then I was, you know whacking loads of butter because butter was you know cheap as chips. Oh, you know. They thought it was wonderful all this you know and while they were having this meeting. But this was they had dogs and cats and things and I was just sitting there doing this and the cat, little kitten came in and I, ‘Puss, puss, puss, puss, puss.’ And suddenly everything went quiet. Carried on with toast and I started again, saying it again and the bloke who wasn’t really interested in the tennis he was sort of hovering about here and there, he said, ‘Reg, come outside a minute.’ I went outside. He said, ‘You mustn’t say that word.’ I said, ‘What word?’ He said, ‘Well, Puss, puss, puss. That’s an absolutely disgusting word, you know.’ I said, ‘What does it mean?’ He said, ‘Well, you know that’s a rude word about women.’ I said, ‘Oh my God,’ you know. I said, ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise. I didn’t know.’ Of course, when I went back in again I mean there was girls were giggling weren’t they. They thought it was bloody amusing this bloke saying this. But you know it was quite nice there. Friendly. Auntie used to take me out whenever I was a there. Her husband was a sour faced thing. I suppose, you know she was a bit flighty I suppose and I suppose he sort of felt I was having it off with her but I wasn’t. I was too stupid. She was, you know quite a nice looking woman but there you go. I made friends with other people. When it rains in that part of South Africa a bit like it does in North Queensland, you know. It doesn’t muck about you know. The gutters there are really deep. They can be over a foot deep. Twelve inches or whatever that is in this funny measurements we now use. And you know, I’d sort of been caught in that and it really comes down. Hailstones and so on and so forth. And of course I’ve seen the natives that get trapped in it. They, they sort of lay down in the gutter, you know and get pounded with rain and ice and stuff. And one day I must have been I don’t know why I was where I was, perhaps I was going to the bus or whatever and it started to rain and I was in a sort of a domestic type, not a domestic, an area where there was housing and things but the odd little shops and that and there was a shop with a, the front door was set in a bit you know. And so I went in, it started pouring with rain, I nipped in there and I was standing there and it was a hairdressers and somebody came out and the woman that was inside said, ‘Oh, would you like to come in and shelter?’ And I said, ‘Oh, thank you. And this was Nabia Masood who was a very nice young lady and we got very friendly and not very very friendly but very friendly. She was Lebanese. I met her sisters and her father and she was a Catholic. I always feel terrible about Nabia because she was a very very nice woman not much older than me. I mean a few years older. She had her own hairdressing business and all the rest of it. I was made very welcome by the family. Dad didn’t care for me much because I wasn’t Lebanese and I wasn’t a Catholic. But the sisters, I’ve some photographs in the thing and Nabia were very nice to me. And I, I when I sit here and feel lonely at times I think serves you bloody right because Nabia, I’m afraid to say she fell in love with me. She tried not to show it but she did because I suppose I was a decent sort of a bloke and all the rest of it and she sort of offered herself and I refused categorically. I said, ‘No. No. No. I’m very fond of you and I certainly enjoyed having a little kiss and a cuddle but that was it.’ I feel good about it in lots of ways because although I was young I still had a sense of decency or I did have a sense of decency. I think I still have a sense of decency. My dad was a decent bloke so perhaps it came from him. I never took advantage of her good nature. I never did anything that she would ever regret. I never did anything she would not be able to [pause] well not tell other people but we had no naughty secrets. She was a very nice companion. I enjoyed her company. She wanted to come, when I had to go to Cape Town to come back to England she wanted to come down there. I wouldn’t let her. I did like her. I mean I did like her a lot but let’s face it you know I was eighteen, nineteen all that. I didn’t like South Africa very much. I could tell you a lot more about South Africa. I was there for quite a while and I have to tell you about things that happened and Nabia Masood was a wonderful companion to me and I always feel when I feel lonely I realise how she must have bloody felt when I went back to England. She must have felt devastated. There was nothing I could do about it was there but you know when I feel lonely I think how she must have felt lonely because obviously she was very much in love with me. And I mustn’t keep going on about this but there you go.
[recording paused]
[singing] If we could only love the ones that love us wouldn’t life be so much happier for everyone? But we don’t love each other. We don’t love each other anymore.
[recording paused]
Well, there you go. I just have to burst into song occasionally. I get I’m a bit lonely at times. Go and see Phyl tomorrow. Gillian and Robbie have been away for a week. I’ll go and help or at least I hope I help Robbie and I see Gillian. You know, she pops in and has a bit of chin wag. Tony rang. I’ll see him Sunday because they’re going to the Gold Coast or something somewhere tomorrow. Oh well. Back to South Africa. Lots of little tiny things. I’ve tried to remember all the things. By and large the African native natives are quite religious and it, the first time you see a group of them coming from out in the bush somewhere you know they’ve got these little villages or whatever, a dirt road or sometimes no road at all they come across you know. It’s just as flat as a tack in some parts of the country and that’s where we were in South Africa. Orange Free State. Now called the Free State I think. I think it was the first place they found diamonds in South Africa. Picked up in a river, from memory. You’d see them come past the, the gate. You know, sometimes I was on guard duty. They seemed to always grab their technical people to go and do all the guard duties for some strange reason. Doing guard duty and you’d see them coming along on a Sunday going to church. Very erect people. Particularly the women because you know they carry a lot of stuff on their head. I don’t know how they do it but they are very erect. But you’d see these women going along you know in their brilliant bright clothes they wear absolutely you know you wouldn’t miss them. But they’d be bare foot and they’d got big feet. Their feet would be bare and their posh shoes would be on the top of their head so that when they got to town they then put their shoes on. Sounds crazy but I mean the only way. You couldn’t possibly walk in those sort of shoes for miles and miles across the veld. And of course, they had a, they had a negro mayor of their, of their own sort of I don’t know what you’d call them. Almost call it a compound I suppose. They had basically a camp, a patrolled camp in town where they lived. And for them to go and live, you know to go and work in a house and live there they had to get a permit you know signed by the owners of the house and all the rest of it and in those days God help you if you didn’t have your permit with you, you know because the South Africans by and large quite a large people and those descended from the Dutch and I can tell you they were brutal to them. But you know what happened in the, in the end about all that. Now, they had the local mayor and he looked a figure of fun as far as I was concerned but he, I suppose they saw the dressings that the Queen’s entourage wore so this local mayor got himself a top hat and a frock coat. So can you imagine he would have khaki shorts or whatever colour shorts. Possibly nothing on his feet. He would have a top hat and tails which through age of going green and he, that was his uniform. He walked about the town. Everybody knew he was the mayor of the native compound or camp because they couldn’t, they couldn’t stay where they wanted to. They had to stay in that compound unless in actual fact they lived out of camp or they worked for somebody and the people they worked for provided them with sleeping quarters. And the sleeping quarters were a shed at the end of the garden. Well, that was that part of it. Now, while I was there they had a Master that crashed out in, out in the bush somewhere. There are lots of photographs on the CD so you could find it if you looked. So we had to go out and do it and as I had some experience I was chosen to go and we went out and found the thing. It was upside down. We turned it up the right way and as far as I know the pilot was alright. I didn’t quite have, I think it ran out of petrol or something or other or perhaps the engine packed up. The Masters being wood were suffering quite a lot through deterioration of the bonding because it was all glued together obviously. The, the actual aircraft battery was in the stowage near the rear. And of course teaching people to fly they were in and out landing, take off, landing, take off and a lot of rough landings. Batteries in those days were not sealed like the ones we have these days so acid came out. That was starting to rot the plywood and the other timbers in the fuselage.
[recording interrupted]
And having a lot of problems with them and there was concerns about reliability. So, suddenly in flew a hundred and four American Harvards. Now, these Harvards had been deck cargo somewhere. I don’t know about all of them. I think all of them had been deck cargo. But unfortunately, the crew on the ship could not keep their sticky fingers off. They’d all been sealed properly so there was no water could get in but canopies had been opened, propellers had been turned and so on and so forth. And they flew in and I and [pause] I’ve got a feeling it was Daker, my mate Daker, certainly me, was given the job of checking the engines and other mechanical bits and bobs on these hundred and four Harvards. Well, I mean I spoke to some of the pilots that brought them in. They said, ‘What a load of rubbish these are.’ And some of them were absolutely a load of rubbish because when you, when you checked them to run them up the engine was about a quarter power. It made a terrible noise and they had to go and have the engines taken out and taken to pieces and they were a lot of them were found to have got sea water in them which had wrecked half of them. Some of them you’d get in there and sit down and put your hand on the radio which was on the right-hand side and it would fall off the wall because it was all, you know it was all aluminium and the last thing aluminium likes is sea water and air.
[recording paused]
Robbie has just called to see me which I was quite surprised to see him so late. He just picked William up who had been looked after by another family. As Robbie said William suddenly finds his own family much more to his liking because he was the last man standing there at this other place. He even looked at me with a bit of pleasure. Terrible things again. They went to this health farm place apparently and the food was horrible as Robbie said but they were doing all these exercises and of course Gillian had to do the exercises. She’s buggered up her back. She’s in hospital in Brisbane. So Robbie’s had to leave her there, come back here, pick up William. He went in to see Phyllis and Phyllis apparently has been a bad girl wandering about in her room without her wheelie walker and has fallen over and hurt her leg. But they rang Gillian because Gillian had arranged everything that I was not to be phoned. So there we go. So I don’t really know what’s happening. I mean Robbie’s had to take an extra week’s holiday for this rubbish he’s had to go through and now he may have to take another week because of Gillian being in hospital. So I’m going to go and see Phyllis tomorrow anyhow and then I will sort out with Robbie. I’m only getting, I’m only telling you this because by the time you get this it will all be old history but I just thought I’d, as I’m talking I’d tell you about it.
[recording paused]
Now, when we were on guard duty there was a fence which more or less surrounded all the aerodrome part where the aircraft were and so on and in that area the Zulus were the guards and we guarded the gateways into it. Now, the Zulus were in their traditional sort of garb and they used as a weapon a short throwing assegai which had quite a large head but a very short shaft to it. And I’ve seen them set up quite a thin stick and from some distance away they threw these assegais. They could hit this thing. It was no bigger than one stump of a cricket wicket, you know. Wham. They split it in half. You didn’t want to be wandering about there at night. The, the blokes that did the cleaning work and so on and various other ones about were allowed to get hold of a jam tin. You know, a commercial jam tins that they used at, in the cookhouse and they would use that to scoop up the food out of our, well what we threw away. I thought it was disgusting but there you are. I suppose that’s food isn’t it? All sorts of strange things. We were told if you, if you give them a cigarette don’t give them a cigarette only give them the butt and make, they have to hold both hands out to take it because they might have a dagger in their other hand. You know, all this sort of funny business. Of course, the Ossewabrandwag were very prominent in the Orange Free State when we were there which was a pro-German Dutch organisation that went around blowing up telegraph poles and power poles and generally being a pain in the butt and of course there were a number of incidents. I wasn’t involved in any of them, I suppose because I never got into the situation but there had been situations where you know a chap had had a come on from a woman and gone up to her place and you know was sort of getting around to it as they say and suddenly in would walk a couple of Ossewabrandwag blokes. Give him a damned good hiding, take all his money and chuck him out in the street you know. And some got done the same way on their way home but were perfectly innocent you know. So it wasn’t, you had to be a little bit careful. And I did mention about the other cinema. The other cinema was a bit of a flea pit. The strange thing about it was that it wasn’t quite as modern and along the back of every row of seats on the backs of the seats were like tables and you could watch the film and order food at the same time. It didn’t sound very hygienic but there you go. Well now there must be something else. I’ll switch this off.
[recording paused]
Oh yeah. There was some, oh Dak and myself, Daker, we decided we’d go on holiday together and we picked Muizenberg which is right down near Cape Town. It’s sort of Cape Town’s on one coast and Muizenberg is across in the, a bay the other coast. A Toc H there. So we booked in there. We didn’t really realise how long it would take us to get there. I don’t know. I think it was two or three days on the train to get there. Quite a while, you know. It’s quite interesting in some ways because you got the, some of these deserts you go through and there were one or two Service lasses on the train. I don’t think anything happened. Dak may have done. He was a good looking fella. Anyhow, we got down to the Muizenberg and got this little unit place in the, oh dear, Salvation Army. One of those church things and we shared a room and Dak was out on the veranda and I could hear him talking to somebody. I looked out there and there was this really nice, beautiful young woman on the next balcony and he was chatting to her and chatting her up and all the rest of it and when he came I said, ‘Are you going?’ He said, ‘I’m going to meet her tonight.’ I said, ‘Oh, you’ve done well, you know. Clicked right away.’ ‘Oh, she’s lovely.’ I said, ‘Yes. Beautiful.’ So off Dak went that evening. I don’t know what I did. I don’t know. Perhaps I went out and had a few beers or something and when I got back quite early there was Dak. I said, ‘Oh hello. What’s happening?’ ‘God,’ he said, ‘I picked her up,’ he said, ‘And I said, ‘Well, do you want to go for a meal?’ And she said, ‘Oh no. We’d better go home.’ And he said, ‘We’re not going home,’ he said. It wasn’t a very, you know brilliant sort of house and of course mama was a big black negro and she was what they called Cape Coloured. Her father was a white man of some sort. And it was somehow, it was that with that sort of combination some of these, some of these girls were absolutely you couldn’t tell but there was a great ban on anybody, you know. It was government regulation and we had to be careful what we did. We must not cohabit with natives or part natives or anything else that was this business of half-moons on nails. If you didn’t have half-moons on your nails you know they’re down at the quick you were obviously a negro or something or other. All sorts of things like that. They were, they were a terrified people, you know. I and Dak and I’m sure just about every decent looking RAF bod there got invitations, more than invitations, almost coercion to get going with their, with you know, the white daughters of various families. Because for some reason they felt that if you came from England you couldn’t possibly have any negro blood in you and they wanted you know the white man to marry their daughters. And I mean all sorts of things were put up you know. ‘Come back after the war is over and I’ll give you a share of the business,’ and all manner of things. It’s amazing. I don’t know what happened now of course. I didn’t like the country. I suppose because of all this apartheid business and so on and so forth. Anyhow, we had our holiday there. I can’t remember it as ever being a highlight and went back to camp. And through my relations, the Haltons I’d found out that I had an uncle in Krugersdorp apparently and Lynn has done a lot of work on all this sort of stuff and she would probably know. well, not about this little bit but I have told her. Three, three Haltons, my grandfather and his two brothers went to South Africa soon after the First World War to make their fortune. Two stayed there and my grandfather came back and started his own building business eventually and you know it went on from there. I got their address and wrote to them and they invited me to come to stay for a holiday which was, you know interesting and I met one of my grandfather’s brothers. The other one I didn’t meet but he had in actual fact married an Afrikaner woman and I’m not too sure where he is. I’ve got some information but it was a bit vague. But I did meet one of the sons, Jack who was training to be a pilot in the South African Air Force and of course it turns out years later when I eventually traced Jack again and not having had much to do with him that he’d flown Spitfires and so on in Italy. North Africa and Italy. But in actual fact while I was servicing the aircraft at 27 Air, oh God, in Bloemspruit he was learning to fly. I didn’t know of course. Anyhow, they made me very welcome and Krugersdorp is up near Johannesburg so obviously I saw Johannesburg. This is all in 1942/43 just in case you’re not aware of when it was when I was out there. These enormous heaps of brilliant white quartz were left over from the crushing thing were an eye sore in some ways around Johannesburg. Not only were they an eyesore but they were a health hazard because when, when the wind blew these were not sand but crushed quartz and they were so sharp. These little tiny grains were so sharp and that’s what caused a lot of the lung problems because down the mines they had hoses running all the time when they were jack hammering so that kept the dust down. But I don’t know. I have a feeling they’ve done something about these heaps but they were enormous heaps all around the outside of Jo’burg because you know there’s mines all under Jo’burg. In fact, I think they’re opening more now because the price of gold’s gone up yet again. One of, one of my uncles, whatever you call, I don’t know what, what is your grandfather’s brothers? Are they uncles? Oh, whatever they are. Anyhow, one of, one of the other sons an older son was a superintendent of mines in the deepest mine in the area and I can’t remember what it’s called so don’t ask me. Oh, you didn’t. Oh, well, that’s alright [laughs] There are two, two veins of gold. There’s the, don’t ask me which is which, one is a south reef and the other one is the north reef and they go through the earth at a quite a, not forty five degrees but quite a, quite a big angle. And of course, they were found on the surface and as as they followed them they’ve had to put shafts down and deeper and deeper and deeper. You can imagine they went along. And the one I went down was oh terrific, they took me, I was taken down and shown all around and it was wonderful and I was allowed to pick up little bits of [pause] One of the reefs, I think it’s the north reef is, is black quartz and it’s only about three inches wide and the gold is in nuggets. Actually in nuggets you see like little cubes of gold. The other reef is often thirty, forty feet wide in places and is composed of white quartz pebbles and around each pebble you can actually see the gold as if it’s been sort of sprinkled around it. Little tiny grains of gold all around and that’s where the quartz comes from when they take it to the surface and crush it. So, I went all down underground and some of the negroes, because it was all negro labour down there I remember one chap there was wedged in quite a small area with his jack hammer and all the water going. Then he was hacking out this north reef where the black quartz. And my uncle or whatever he was said, ‘Oh you want to take a sample of that.’ So I took a piece and chucked it in my pocket. He said, ‘You’re alright, Reg. You’ll be alright.’ And then he took me around the treatment plant. Well, the stamping mill is enough to drive you crackers because it’s just great big steel stamps coming down crushing all the rock. It flows across like water because there’s lots of water about. It flows across sheets of [corduroy] which pick up the free gold and as far as I can remember every so often they take the [corduroy] up and put it through the furnace which just freed the gold. It then goes into cyanide tanks. Oh no. It flows over mercury or something and then the mercury combines with free gold and that’s, you know reheated. Then it’s mixed with cyanide and then it [pause] no wait a minute. It’s been first of all, yeah it mixes cyanide and the, it’s run into these great big tanks and the actual dust falls to the bottom and the gold combines with the cyanide water. Then it’s put through a centrifuge which gets rid of the, any more dust and then it goes into another big area where you’ve got boxes filled with zinc shavings and these boxes are like oh about two or three inches thick and about a couple of foot square and there would be fifty or sixty of them all lined up in a tank and dozens and dozens of these tanks and this water flows in at the top and runs out at the bottom and goes back and gets recycled. And every so often they’ll take the first box out with the zinc and take it into the melting place. This is melted and it’s all, it was all pretty crude in those days. They melt it in a great big pot over a furnace and it’s poured into an enormous tapered mould. Poured into this thing upside down so the small end’s at the bottom and so on and so forth. And they turn it upside down and give it a bang when it’s, you know hard and the bottom will all be you know the big part will all be zinc and the top bit will be a bit of gold. So they hacksaw that off and chuck it on the floor and then when they’ve got a pile of these lumps of gold they’d be melted on their own and poured into these big ingot moulds which they lined with old newspaper and then poured it in. And of course smoke and flames all over the place but apparently the newspaper stopped it from sticking to the cast iron. And all along the side of this, it was all done by native labourers and there was a white supervisor there to make sure they, and all along one wall was all these racks. Well, actually, they were old safes but they couldn’t shut the doors because these ingots of gold were too long, you know. They couldn’t shut the doors and the supervisor said, ‘Oh well, we’ve got a strong bloke here. Any one you can pick up and get it up off the floor you can have.’ I thought oh blimey. I’ll have a go at this knowing full well I was being conned. So I got on my hands and knees and I got one that was just about you know I could slide out on my back which I did. I don’t know what it weighed. About four hundred weight I think or perhaps even more. I couldn’t even move. They had to come and pick it up and roar their heads off. They thought it was highly amusing. They never got stolen these things. That’s how it was done in, you know when I was there in 1942/43 and it was quite interesting. And I met all the, all the family and there are quite a few photographs. I’ve since got in contact with Jack again after many years. His wife died unfortunately of cancer and he doesn’t seem to have much contact with his kids. He’s married again and I do write to him occasionally and send him DVDs and CDs particularly about aircraft that he’d actually flown I thought he’d be interested in. So, our contact is very tenuous but it was nice to catch up with them again.

Jack and I were getting a bit fed up with the way we were being treated. The usual sort of thing. We were doing all the work. Other people were getting a promotion. Of course, we just thought it was bad luck when in actual fact of course I found out years later that it was Air Ministry policy that you didn’t promote if you could possibly help it ex-apprentices and people like that. Promote the people that were only in for the war because then you’d still have the, the other people to carry on in the Air Force when the war was finished. The other people would leave and you would be left with the people that had been properly trained. A cunning lot aren’t they? Ah well, we were, we saw a notice then to say they were looking for air crew, volunteers for air crew so we both volunteered and of course a lot more did as well. I just started to grow a ‘tache, moustache at the time because the lead trumpeter said, ‘You want to grow a moustache, Reg. it will stiffen your top lip. You’ll be able to play a bit better.’ So, when I went up for interview of course the air commodore or whatever he was there said, ‘Oh you, you’re trying to grow an aircrew moustache.’ And I had to put him right, you know. I don’t know as he liked that very much but still we both got accepted and we ended up going by train down to Cape Town. In fact, we were in billets almost next door to where we did the Toc H when we went on holiday and we stayed there for a while. One of the things we did sort of notice particularly down there it didn’t seem to be so bad in Bloemfontein but down in Cape Town I suppose a lot more business and so on. There was a terrible shortage of glasses and they were using, cutting bottles down. I can’t quite remember how they did it. They did say something about how they filled them up to a certain level with, with the hot oil and gave them a bang and they cracked off and then they ground the edges. But I tell you what you had to be very careful or you could have cut, cut your mouth quite easily on them. We weren’t there for very long. About a couple of weeks I think and that was where Nabia wrote and asked me if I would, if she could come and stay down and see me and I wrote back and said she couldn’t because I was sailing shortly. And the next thing I know I’m up in front of the CO because I’d written a despatch date. I’d no idea when we were going. I told him why. Oh dear. I got into trouble of course but you know. And then we set sail for the, for England in the Mauritania. A much more pleasant trip going back I can assure you. It didn’t take us very long. I can’t remember how long it was but she was sailing on her own and we hacked along at a fair old lick and ended up in the usual place I suppose. Liverpool. And from there I went home on leave of course. Mum and dad were renting a house just outside of Dover because dad was doing all the work at Dover. Couldn’t, couldn’t recognise mum. She was very very slim smoking cigarettes and she’d always been quite fat and wouldn’t smoke. But she was. I suppose the strain of everything you know. It was a pretty tough sort of old life. I remember unpacking my kit bag which had been packed for some weeks, months perhaps and in the bottom I’d got some biltong which is dried beef or could be any sort of animal I suppose and it was green. But then most biltong seemed to be green in those days. I, you know, no. Nobody was very keen on biltong. I don’t know what happened to it. It probably got slung out for the dog. And I was on leave there for I don’t know a couple of weeks I suppose and they tried to post you to somewhere close at hand. I got posted to a place called Lydd which had been a very famous aerodrome. It was on the coast not far from Dover and it was used a lot in the early days of flying. Bleriot and all that lot they used to fly from this little aerodrome across to France and when I got there it was Typhoons of Fighter Command. They were, while I was there they were changed from fighter to I forget the name they gave it to. It was something to do with interdiction into France and Germany shooting up tanks and trains and stuff like that. So I was working on Typhoons. Terrible damned engines they were. They were Napier Sabre twenty four cylinder H section sleeve valve. When the, when the aircraft was in flying position they were flying off a grass runway which was pretty lumpy and the prop only cleared the ground by about four inches. Many a time the pilot went off and came back and cursed us because it was a gutless wonder he said. Of course, as soon as you checked the prop you found the prop was bent. You know the tip of the prop was all bent where it had hit the ground on the way taking off which meant taking the prop off and taking the engine out. Putting in a new engine because they didn’t do many hours. I can’t remember was it was but it was about twenty hours before you had to change the engine. They were all prototypy things. Enormous great propeller on them. I was working on a plane there one day and a flight sergeant across the way was taking a propeller off. I suppose they were taking the engine out or something out and I kept calling out to him, ‘You’re banging it the wrong way, chiefy.’ Because we used to use, we used to make our own hammer. We used to get a big empty fruit tin or something like that and pieces of steel pipe and whack a hole in the side of this, halfway up in the side of the thing and split the pipe, put it inside and then fill it up with led and then cut the tin off and chuck it because you couldn’t use, you had to use a led hammer and you had a special spanner for undoing these things. You know a great big, a really big spanner. But you had to use a led hammer because of the impact. The splines on the propeller shafts were very fine and the propeller shaft was really hard steel. very hardened steel and of course it fitted without any movement whatsoever. A perfect fit. And if you did it with a sledgehammer you would have ended up by fracturing something and he was hitting this thing to undo it and I knew he was hitting it the wrong way. Kept calling out to him but he told me he knew what he was doing. Of course, the last time he hit it he had the bloody shaft off. This damned great propeller dropped down. He was lucky he didn’t kill somebody. Oh dear. Hey ho. While I was there of course the, I was about the only fit person there. I mean, you know I’d just come back from South Africa. I was brown as a berry and had been well fed for a couple of years. Not like the poor buggers in England. And he tried to convince me to stay. He’d promote me to this, he’d do that and do. I said, ‘No. I’m going.’ ‘As a flight engineer you know you won’t last long. You’ll get killed,’ and all that. I thought well, you know, so what. So, you know I didn’t get on very well with them there. One night I was on you know a late shift. Used to have to do late shifts. They were having a big do in the Sergeant’s Mess and of course there was all sorts of officers and that coming to the Sergeant’s Mess from all over the place. So a lot of aircraft were parked by the, by the Mess and as I say there were no runways. Just grass. And there was a dusk patrol out in Typhoons and the weather was starting to clamp in and they were told to land at Manston which was very close by air but a damned long way away by road and plus the fact that their cars were at Lydd and they would be elsewhere. No chance to getting to the party. Well, they weren’t going to do that were they? So they lobbed in one after the other, one after the other all got in and the last one that came in of course miscalculated and he hit a row of these damned aircraft. Not the RAF aircraft but they, you know most senior officers had their own particular aircraft they flew. Made a right mess of it. Went charging down the grass and swivelled around and stopped. We went out to him and you know oh my God, you know. So we were, we got a tractor and that to tow it back where it belonged and do some service on it. See if we could get it right for the next day although the undercarriage looked a bit of a mess. And oh I don’t know it must have been a half an hour later we could hear the ambulance clattering away to come around and normally it just had, you know another erk like us in it. So I laid on the ground, put my leg up in the air and of course it happened to be the station medical officer didn’t it? You know, it had to be didn’t it because all these other officers were there. Well, they got a bit of a rollicking for that but you know, who cares? It wasn’t very long after that I got my posting to I think St Athans I went to. The first place. I went to St Athans to do, do a course on being a flight engineer. What I had to do and all the rest of it and instruction on the type of aircraft I was likely to go on. I was supposed to be going on to Lanc 2s which were a Lancaster with Hercules engines. While we were there we, I finished that course and came home I think it was some time after Christmas and then I was sent on a course somewhere up in the Midlands. Coventry or somewhere or other to do a two or three weeks at a factory where they built the aircraft so you could know where all the bits and pieces fitted you know. Quite a complicated thing. So I did that at the Lancaster factory which was quite interesting and well I suppose ninety nine percent of the people working there were girls. They were women, you know putting them together. But I can’t remember any sort of interest or romance or anything happened. It might have happened to other blokes. It certainly didn’t happen to me. I don’t think I was looking much. And then from there we went, I went to a Heavy Conversion Unit where we, where I joined up with the crew and of course, when I got there I got the shock of my life. A, I was joined up with Canadians because they hadn’t got any flight engineers so I had an all-Canadian crew plus the aircraft were entirely different and so were the engines. I mean they were Halifaxes with Merlin engines. Halifax 2s and 5s and I’d been trained on Lancasters with Hercules. Oh dear. So I had to learn all the different stuff in a very short space of time and of course at the same time I had to do training in Morse Code and training for the navigator. I had to do all the star shots with a sextant. Oh, what else did I have to do? I don’t know. There seemed to be very little [laughs] We had to do our training in life saving in the swimming pool in our, in full kit you know. Turning over dinghies and all that sort of stuff. And then we went to Battle School. This was I presume it was something that was brought in later on in the war. I can’t even remember where that place was but anyhow you turn up there and the first thing to do all the badges of rank are taken off. In fact, all your clothes they more or less told you to put away and you were given overalls to wear. It didn’t matter what rank. There were very senior officers that had done two tours, and two tours on Bomber Command they’d still got to do this. And we used to have to line up at the crack of dawn before you’d had breakfast or anything at the parade ground. Well, the parade ground wasn’t bitumen. It was ploughed up ground. Dirt you know. Oh God. And of course, the people in charge they put the right sort of people in charge. They were staff sergeants and whatever else. Warrant officers from the Army. Commandos I think they were. Anything to you know to chase these poor old brylcreem boys about. So we, we ended up there and we had all sorts of things and escape exercises and they’d take you out with maps. I mean we’d no idea where we were and they’d take you out with maps and dump you miles away two at a time and say, ‘Right. Find your way back.’ You know, with a map. Well, you’ve got to find out where the map is first of all. But there were a lot of Canadians. Their attitude to war seemed entirely different to ours because one of the exercises we had to do was at night. They’d kick you out at, you know sort of just when you were sort of dozing off about midnight they’d get you out and take you out in pitch dark. Chuck you out in pairs with a map and this was on the Yorkshire moors and places like that. Well, you know we were trying to get back and all the rest of it. A lot of the Canadians never even bothered. They just went to wherever they could you know. Some of them pinched stole a bus. Found a bus and they all piled in the bus and drove off somewhere and then turned up later on. Some obviously found some female accommodation that welcomed them with open arms. Stayed away for a few days and then staggered in saying they got lost. I don’t know quite what happened. I can’t remember what exactly happened. I know we got back but you know how or why or what I haven’t got a clue. So we did all that and then our last exercise of course was to act as the police for another crowd that were going through. They were worried about us trying to catch them but we weren’t all that keen. And then we got posted to a squadron and of course we turned up there, a slightly different aircraft again and different engines. Hey ho. But that was with Les Dawson and the crew and you know we were getting on alright and we started our operations of course. A lot of training flights as usual getting used to being checked again by the more senior members of the squadron who checked to see whether you knew what you were doing. I know we had a navigator. I can’t remember what his name was but I know one of our first things we had to do after you’d done a bit of circuits and landings and under supervision you then had to do a cross country which meant going sort of going to north of Scotland and then out to the sea and then coming back in over Wales and all that sort of thing and we got lost. The navigator had got no idea where we were so the skipper and I because my job was sort of second man to the skipper. I had to teach myself how to fly the damned thing and all the rest of it and so I was sort of standing by the skipper all the time. Of course, when we realised we were lost you know I was reading the beacons, the flashing beacons all over the place and trying to sort out where we were and of course when we got back you know the navigator got the sack. You can’t have that sort of navigator who’ll get lost over England. I mean how do you go in France and Germany? So we got, we got another navigator and then we started our operations. I could get my logbook out but I won’t bother because the logbook’s got it all in. What we did. I can’t remember what we did. We did about, I don’t know six or seven operations together and I could, you know I could sort of sit and go down through my logbook but it wouldn’t be terribly interesting would it? And there was a photograph taken of that, of the whole squadron at that time. One of, one of the jobs I had to do obviously with the skipper was to marshal the aircraft. You know. We used to go out, just us, the skipper and myself and we’d, I’d start the engine up for him and brakes and all that and we’d taxi and put the aircraft in a sort of a queue fully bombed out and fully fuelled up and ready to take off. Then we’d get out and one of the little Canadian WAAFs would have driven us out there and we’d get in a truck and go back and have our last meal before. You know, eggs and bacon or whatever we used to have and then get our parachutes and all the rest of the gear and get all ready to go and then get taken out to the plane a bit later on and ready to take off. You’d marshal while it was light, you know. It’s a lot easier to park the aircraft like that when it’s light and I suppose of course by that time our fighters had mastery of the air over England otherwise it would have been a very tempting target for anybody wouldn’t it? You know, with all these bombers lined up full of fuel and full of bombs. And one of the things I had to do when we were marshalling the aircraft was to remove the elevator lock. The elevators were locked sticking up so that any wind that blew pushed the tail down because otherwise they would have tipped up and banged the props and that what’s the name. And there was a quite a heavy lock in it but it was, it was a big about an inch diameter steel pin that went through a lever and the lever was about four foot long operating these things like a, and it went across another beam and it was just like a big pair of scissors. Very very dangerous and you know you always had to make sure the pilot had got hold of the control column, was holding it tight back against his stomach while you got this pin out and then you’d tell him it was out and he could, you know lower it down. So I called out to Les. I said, ‘Have you got the control column, Les?’ ‘Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.’ Ok. I’m taking the pin out.’ Of course, I got the pin halfway out and then of course it just jammed. I pulled it and of course Les hadn’t got hold of the control column. He’d got hold of the little WAAF up there. Good luck. And of course, this damned great arm came down. Well, fortunately, I must have felt it coming because I’m, a lot of flight engineers lost all their fingers. I didn’t. I got a very nasty gash right across my hand of course and I couldn’t go that night and you know I got bandaged up and so on and so forth and went back to the billet. And then I, when I heard our planes coming back in again you know a few hours later I went out to see how they all were and how they’d got on and my crew weren’t there and I naturally assumed they’d had a problem. They’d landed somewhere else. Of course, I went in to see the adjutant and said, ‘Where’s my crew?’ ‘Oh my God,’ he said, ‘I’ve just sent your mother a telegram to say you’re missing.’ I said, ‘You mean they’re —’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘They’re missing. They’re not coming back.’ Oh dear. I said, ‘Well, this is my dad’s phone number you’d better phone him in Dover because — ’ I said, you know it’s [pause] So he phoned through to my dad and I spoke to him and told him what happened. Well, I didn’t tell him what happened. I just said, ‘I’m ok. I’m probably coming home tomorrow.’ And of course they did. They sent me home. Couldn’t do anything there anyhow and I’d get posted to another squadron. So I went home all bandaged up. One arm bandaged up and so on and dad met me at the railway station. Took me home. When we got home mum wasn’t there. She was up at the little shop which was a Post Office and place where the telegram had come from and of course when I turned up you know the only people there were the young girls that were working there. The blokes had all gone in the war but I thought I’d be on a promise here alright, you know. I just, I told them I’d just swum the Channel with one arm and all the rest of it, you know. Full of bull. But the next morning when I woke up I had a most enormous lump at the back of my ear, a raving headache and all sort of my scalp was all full of mist. Dad took me to hospital which was underneath Dover Castle. All built in the chalk under Dover Castle. And then they decided that I should go to some recuperation place which was basically an empty mansion up the valley. You know, up the Dover valley which was the night, the 12th 13th of June I think it was or thereabouts then. It was the night when the flying bombs started coming up the valley and the ack ack guns were firing at them and I was laying in bed behind plate glass doors. I thought they were firing at me. It was very uncomfortable. They had, they had no medication much. Painkiller was an aspirin or something. I was in a raving thing. The doc said, ‘We can’t do anything. We’ve just got to drain your scalp.’ It was apparently poisoned and possibly some of it to do with this shock and my hand had to be stitched and all the rest of it. So I laid in this place for about a week I suppose until one Sunday he came around. He said, ‘Ah that’s nice and ripe.’ He said, ‘We’ll do that.’ And he just leant over with a scalpel and slit this lump around the back of my ear and popped out this thing that looked like a small golf ball. ‘There it is. That’s the lot.’ he said, ‘And you’ll be getting better soon.’ Well, I soon got better and I soon, you know it wasn’t long before I was feeling bright and breezy again and I had to get in touch with the Air Ministry and say I was alright. And then I got a note to report to another squadron which is what I did and I started with Jimmy Tease and well I finished my tour with Jimmy Tease. I’ve got a lot more to say but this is getting to the end of the tape so I don’t know whether I’ve got enough room to sing you a little song. Probably not. [sings] When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls and the stars begin to twinkle in the sky. Through the mist of a memory I hear you calling me when the deep purple night starts to fall. Wasn’t it awful? This has got another three or four minutes I suppose or seconds or whatever it is to go and that will be the second side of the first tape which will be another fifty minutes. So I’ve done this afternoon well an hour and three quarters I suppose of tape. I then have to play —
[recording interrupted]
He’s been in a home for many years but I managed to find Les’s phone number and stuff through the Canadian Air Force. Whatever. And after many many years and I got his phone number and I rang him and I told him who I was. Now, he, he’d been a prisoner of war. He’d crashed the aircraft. There was quite a bit about Les that I got eventually from, from him and other people before they vanished but basically they got hit on the way out of France. They got hit by ack ack fire which set light to the plane. Most of the people managed to get away. He told them to bale out. The mid-upper gunner couldn’t bale out because his parachute had got burned. That’s what, that’s where the fire started. Les told him to take his parachute but the chap wouldn’t go and he stuck with Les and they landed the aircraft but now it’s a blazing aircraft likely to fall to pieces at any minute. Pitch dark. They’d got no idea where they were. They landed. Well, Les landed the plane with a hell of a lot of difficulty I can assure you in a field and they got out and ran like hell and it blew up and I think one of the engines was found over a kilometre away. Les and the rest of the crew apart from what was he? The navigator? Oh, it’s all written down somewhere but I can’t remember where it is and it really would spoil it all if I start reading things out. There was a lot of this stuff written elsewhere so the reason I’m doing this is to save me typing. Anyhow, Les got, basically Les and the rest of them got captured and spent his time in prison camp and then of course they got repatriated you know when the prison camps were overrun and they went back. In actual fact, I’ve got a feeling that most of them were repatriated while I was still flying on 420 Squadron because I got a phone call from one of the crew just as I was getting ready. I think the camp was shut down which it did before a raid and I think I was in the Mess having my egg or whatever you had before you took off and I was told to come to the phone. Well, you know my heart went bang bang bang because mum and dad were in very, and my brother were in a very dangerous place in Dover and I thought it was that. But it wasn’t. It was one of the crew had found out where I was and managed to get through to me to say that they were all ok and were going back to Canada. And you know that was the only, and then the phone was cut off straightaway. You know I hardly had a chance to say a word because you know it was all tight security. So I knew they’d got back and I knew, I knew but I didn’t know what had happened until many many years later. But when I rang up eventually and rang up Les and spoke to him and told him who I was I stood there with tears running down my face because the first words he said to me, ‘How is your hand?’ And I thought this poor man. All those bloody years flying a plane on a raid, crash landing it, going to a prison camp and all the while he was at prison camp and all the while he was living his life and married and kids and all the rest of it he couldn’t put it out of his mind the fact that he’d chopped all my fingers off because he didn’t know and I didn’t really know either. I mean it was just blood and bits of bone and skin about all over the place. And off they went. So there’s, you know I thought poor man. All those years. So of course I put him right. I said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with my hand, Les. I’m, you know I didn’t lose anything.’ ‘Oh, thank God,’ he said. I’ve spoken to him a couple of times but I managed to, the only time I can communicate with him now is through his daughter and son in law which occasionally I mean they’ve obviously got busy lives as everybody seems to have. It doesn’t matter who I know they’re all too bloody busy. Yes. Yes. I know. You know who I’m talking about. So poor old Les is still as far as I know in a home but I think he’s getting to the end of his life. I had an email from his daughter not so long ago to say you know, Les remembered me and all this. So I would think it’s, well he may have even gone by now. But a hero that man. A hero. No two ways about it. Where was I? Oh that was, that was Les Dawson. I digress. You may have noticed I occasionally digress and you know what I mean, don’t you? You know who I’m talking to. Yes, you know. Right. The next squadron was 420 Squadron at Tholthorpe in Yorkshire and with Jimmy Tease was the pilot and to digress slightly just a few days ago, only a couple of days ago I think I got an email from Jimmy Tease’s daughter who I’d never had any contact with before telling me to log on to this, that and the other and so on and I had all sorts of problems trying to log on to it. I even sent an email to my brother, my brother, my son Philip because he’s a computer whizz and he couldn’t do it so I came back to Jim’s daughter and said, ‘Look, I can’t. I can’t get on.’ So she gave me some new instructions which I did and I got on to, through google I got onto a Canadian news broadcast and also I managed to get the old broadcast that had taken place on the, oh I’ve forgotten which day in March and there was Jimmy in his uniform. He doesn’t seem to have put on an ounce of weight. I guess he’s had various new uniforms made. He looked resplendent with all his medals and so on and so forth. Poor old Jim lost his wife not so long ago so I guess he’s feeling a bit lonely as well. He didn’t look too brilliant. I mean I’m short, fat and bald and broke. I mean he’s tall and skinny and you know, a bit [pause] how can I say? A bit gaunt. Anyhow there he was. Somebody or other had painted our Easy Lady in very bright colours. Far brighter than anything we had on the aircraft. In fact, what we did have our chap that painted had to make it darker because the CO said, ‘Oh God, you can’t go flying over Germany at night with that thing on, you know.’ So somebody had painted it in very bright colours and Jim was at some museum and was giving a little speech or opening the thing or other. He does a lot of this, Jim. He seems to be reliving his Air Force days you know whereas far as I’m concerned they’re dead and gone. I live them through sort of books and through people and Lynn whose father flew with the same squadron, 432 Squadron, he was a navigator. He got through alright but he did die young and Lynn and I have, you know communicated with one other. Emails and so on and so forth. We’ve sort of got very friendly with one another. I mean she’s done a lot of work for me and the family. She’d done all this research into our antecedents and we seemed to have on one side of our family we seemed to have cabinet makers and carpenters and the other side of the family we seemed to have labourers and illiterates. There doesn’t seem to be any queens, kings, people with money or anything else so that’s probably why I’m just a Mr Plod, you know and sort of go about my way and do my work properly and all the rest of it. My dad was a clever bloke. I suppose a little bit of cleverness has rubbed off on me. Anyhow, off I go digressing again. I’m not going to go through my logbook and say which operations I did and all that. We had a few hairy ones because Jim and I were sort of a team you know because I was the only one that didn’t have a seat. My job was to stand next to Jim who was in his seat and all buckled in and so were all the other crew members. I stood next to Jim and operated all the controls for undercarriage, throttles and all that sort of stuff and also had a control panel behind and various levers for changing fuel tanks and checking on fuels and temperatures and all this sort of stuff. My job was to be there and one of my jobs was to learn to fly the damned thing. Well, we were all young and pretty bloody foolish I suppose and perhaps I was a bit more serious and more sensible than the rest of them. I kept saying to Jim, ‘If you get hit and injured or even killed what are we going to do? You know, the plane might be alright. Why shouldn’t we try and get home.’ You know. And even if we got home and then we all baled out because my landing was bound to kill us but you know if we got home at least we could bale out and you know not be captured and all that sort of stuff. So eventually he sort of said, ‘Alright.’ So as it had no dual controls it meant I had to get Jim to get out of his seat. So you know trim the aircraft so it flies straight and level then let me get in. Well, you know I hadn’t been trained as a pilot and they’re shocking things to fly. They really are because you know you feel the nose is going down, all the instruments show you are going in a bit of a dive. You pull the control column back. Nothing happens. You pull it back a bit more and still nothing happens. What’s going on? The next thing you know you’re almost in a climb and you’re going to stall if you’re not careful. Everything is delayed for what seems like half an hour. It’s seconds really I suppose. But you learn that you do the correction and then you put it back to neutral. So you pull the control panel back and then put it back into the central position and the nose will come up and you’ll be level or you might just have to push it a little bit and back up. It’s sort of, it’s not like flying a fighter or driving a car. Things don’t happen when you do it. So you can imagine it was a hell of a job trying to learn to fly it particularly when all the rest of the crew were [unclear] you know, ‘Oh God, he’s not back in the bloody cockpit again.’ You know, ‘I shall be air sick.’ Oh shut up. ‘Get back in, Jim. Kick him out.’ You know. I said, ‘Well, I’m trying to do it for us.’ ‘Oh, get out.’ You know. And I know coming back when we started to do daylight raids which are the most terrifying. The first one we ever went on, I don’t know Jim didn’t say anything nor did I but I’m sure he was as terrified as I was because flying at night yes you, you know there was a chance of banging into one of your mates because there was, you know all these aeroplanes all going to the same place. None of us had got any lights on and you were all flying roughly at the same height so you know the chances of somebody dropping their bombs on you happened a lot and you dropping the bombs on somebody else happened a lot and the aircraft banging into another happened a lot. And then you got these very unfriendly Germans flying aircraft at you and firing at you and also some krauts down on the ground shooting up guns at you. It’s all very unsporting of them. I mean all you were trying to do was kill them. I mean where was their sense of fair play? That was alright, you know. I mean there was all the shells bursting and so and so but when you did the first daylight raid and you came around towards the target and all you could see was the whole sky as far as you could see from ground level to well above you was just one solid mass of clouds of smoke and the terrible acrid stink of explosions and stuff and they were still coming up and going off. And you could see them coming up and going off and you thought well we’ll never get through this because as you went through it you know the propellers and the wings and that were blowing all this smoke all over the place. It took a little while to realise that the ones you can see had gone off. There was no danger. It was the one you couldn’t see that hadn’t come yet was the danger. But the first sight of it I remember looking at Jim and he’s sitting there with a steely look on his face and holding the control column and I’m standing next to him to operate the things. Oh my God. We’ll never get through this. Ah, but we did and come to it when we were doing daylight raids and coming back off raids I used to say, ‘Jim, now come on. Let me learn how to land.’ You know. ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well, look. See those clouds over there?’ You know, they might be fifty miles ahead of us you know. ‘Let me try landing on a cloud.’ You know. ‘Oh, all right.’ You know, and he’d tell the rest of the crew, ‘Oh here we go.’ We’d make sure we were well away from enemy, you know aircraft and that’s that. [coughs] Excuse me. And so you know I tried landing on a, on a cloud and make Jim do my job. You know, lower the undercarriage and put flaps on I wanted and altered the throttles and all that sort of thing. I don’t know how many times I tried it. Not a great deal. A number of times and it was pretty bloody hopeless obviously but I mean what looked like a flat cloud fifty miles away when you get there it’s far from flat. Jim would say, ‘Now, you made a very good landing Reg,’ he said, ‘Except you were about thirty feet underground.’ [laughs] You know. So they were sort of some of the things we did. We obviously saw aircraft shot down. I mean, I remember seeing a Flying Fortress. Some shells had hit the wing and blown up half of one wing off. Outboard of the outboard engine and it just sort of toppled around in the sky. We occasionally saw a parachute come out but how the hell do you get out of a thing like that? Just spinning you know. Pretty hopeless and those sort of things don’t cheer you up very much. And of course the job I was doing before I went to South Africa was trying to repair or mainly picking up crashed and burned aircraft you know and people said, ‘Well, how could you do it?’ Well, there you go. We also saw some of the V, V-2s which is these rockets that the Germans, a clever lot of buggers the Germans you know. These rockets, I mean when they came back down again they were exceeding the speed of sound so you didn’t hear them coming. You heard them coming after they’d exploded. Yeah. That’s right. Faster than the speed of sound. Anyhow, doing all these ops and stuff you know I mean yeah you get sort of I suppose you were fairly young and, but you see lots of people go and don’t come back and you know, I mean I’d had one crew go and not come back, you know. And people said, ‘Well, how could you do it?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’m just that sort of person.’ You say you’re going to do something you get on and do it. But, you know we used to have all the Canadian things that come you know and the lady, a lot of Canadian ladies came over with these various things and were bringing tea and cakes and chocolate and cigarettes and all sorts of stuff and of course the Canadian WAAFs were a bit of a shock to me. We won a prize of some sort for bombing very accurately or something or other and of course we went to Canadian 6 Group Headquarters. Well, I mean these Canadian WAAFs had these, I don’t know, I suppose they were quite pretty sort of hat things on. They were nothing like the WAAFs hats at all and of course the Canadian girls were highly made up. Lipstick and all the rest of the stuff and of course, after the Plain Jane English girls I mean the Canadian boys liked it. You know, I looked and I thought well I don’t know, you know but I suppose it’s what you’re used to. There were certainly some pretty women amongst them or young ladies. And let’s face it all my crew were from Canada and when I went on leave I couldn’t even invite any of them to come and stay. A, there wasn’t anywhere to stay and B, I even had to have a permit to get into the Dover area because it was a restricted area. The whole area was fenced off and it was only for people that actually lived and worked in there and if you didn’t work there and if you didn’t live there on your bike. Double decker buses had all their top decks, all the windows painted black on the outside so you couldn’t scratch it because the paint was on the outside of the windows. And I mean when I, when I used to get off the train to go on, you know to go on leave when I went off the local, at the local railway station which wasn’t very far from actually where my folks were renting a house there was a copper there. ‘Oh, have you got your pass mate? Where do you live?’ You know, and all this sort of thing. And every time when I went on leave it might have been the same copper but I mean you know I didn’t just walk through. I was checked most thoroughly to make sure I was who I said I was and oh no, he knew me. So you know I couldn’t offer any home cooking or anything else to any of my crew. And it was the other way around of course. When I went on leave they’d all got boxes and boxes full of cakes and bread and biscuits and lollies and God knows what they’d been sent by their family. Their families in Canada. So I’d usually go home with a bag full of all sorts of goodies you know. My brother he’d love all the lollies and chewing gums and sweets and stuff because everything almost down to a glass of water was rationed during the war. It was terrible. So while I was on this squadron Canadian boys all played horseshoes and the various other things and pool and so on and I’d never been terribly interested in that sort of thing. I’ve always been a bit of a loner I suppose. A miserable bugger I suppose. And I went to see the engineering officer and I asked him if he’d got an old engine. I mean they were bloody great big heavy things. He said, ‘Well, what do you want it for?’ I said, ‘Well, you know I know what goes on inside these engines and how they work but I said, you know even most of my engineers, flight engineers haven’t got a clue,’ I said. ‘Because I was an apprentice. I was, you know trained properly. And as for the rest of the crew well you know the whole thing is a mystery so I thought I might section an engine.’ He said, ‘What a good idea. We’ve got plenty of old engines mate.’ So he found me a little hut away from civilisation and everything else for that matter and he put me an engine in there on a stand and I’ll tell you what it’s a big heavy crane job. I had a little work bench and a great pile of files and hacksaws and hammers and spanners and you name it and he locked it all up and gave me a key and kept a key himself. And when we weren’t flying, and I never used to look at Daily Orders, Jim used to say we’re flying or we’re not flying so I mean that was all I was interested in. That was my job was to fly and other jobs didn’t get entered into it. I know once we all had to parade because the Prime Minister of Canada was making a visit. His name was King. I think. King, yeah. Of course, we all lined up in two or three rows and as we were all wearing basically the same uniform but the only brevets and badges we could get were the Canadian ones so we all looked more or less exactly the same except we just had RAF and they had RCAF on their, on their shoulder and stuff like that. Or Canada, I think. I can’t remember off hand. Anyway, poor old King he was being introduced to the various crew. I think the first three people he spoke to were all poms, you know. ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘London.’ London? Canadian squadron. Oh yeah. Well, of course our flight engineers and so they realised you know. They steered away from flight engineers. And I mean I remember the Canadian boys used to say, ‘Joe for King. Home for Christmas.’ Now, Joe they were talking about Joe Stalin so get Joe Stalin in here to run Canada and we’ll all be home for Christmas [laughs] you know. A load of rubbish. But, you know these are little things that I remember from what happened during my war and I’m not going to give you a long list of all the operations I did and where I went and what happened but things happened. I flew. I flew with Jim. Jim and I worked together. Coming in to land one, one day unbeknownst to us of course because we’d got flak damage and all sorts of things one of our main undercarriage wheels had been punctured and the tyre was flat but it doesn’t look flat does it you know until it hits the ground. Of course, when they hit the ground landing it just locked up solid with the punctured tyre which and that was all deflated immediately, locked the wheel and the wheels are made of magnesium alloy and it just ground along the runway. It didn’t rotate and Jim managed to hold it straight and it just ground half the wheel away you know but we all got out all right and we had a few other things happen. We, you know we had damage and we had to land one night on a FIDO aerodrome which was an aerodrome lit up with, down both sides of the runway, they only had a few of them. One was at Manston and they had a couple in Yorkshire and that area. Lincolnshire perhaps. Very big runways. Very long. Very wide and most of them had sort of tunnelled under them on the sides a garage space for cranes, ambulances and things like that well away from actually where a plane would land so that they could come out and rescue the crew or drag the plane away. We had, from memory we had no brakes. Some of the hydraulics had got shot away so it was sort of landed without any brakes and any way to retard our speed. I do remember one. One place we landed. The end, we got to the end of the runway and kept going. We couldn’t stop and we went across a potato field and the potatoes had been ridged up across our path. It was like roller skating on corrugated iron. It was very bumpy. When you stopped you got out you know. Thank God. Switched everything off you know. I did, you know all the engines and shut down everything. Turned off the main power and then you sort of drag out with your parachutes and bits and bobs and hope someone will come along with a truck and take you somewhere so you can get debriefed as to what you’ve done that night and put your head down. I mean you just go and they tell you, take you to an empty hut and there were beds there with no blankets. You just lay on the bed and get a few hours sleep because you’re pretty tired you know. It was a sort of a bit of an exhausting sort of a job. And then the next morning you know it would be my job to go and check the aircraft and some, you know sometimes it had been towed back and somebody had repaired it and put some fuel in it and all the rest of it. At other times they hadn’t and you had to go around and try and sort things out and get it fixed and if you couldn’t get it fixed you’d leave it where it is and get some transport. Sometimes they’d fly a plane in for you from your, you know base and you just piled in a bomber and sit on the floor and they’d take you home and the one that you’d left there would be repaired or dumped or whatever and you’d end up with a new plane. We had a lot of things like that. Flying into a FIDO aerodrome you can see it from over a hundred miles away. It looks like a lit-up post. It seems to stand vertically. Of course, it isn’t but that’s what it looks like from a hundred, about a hundred miles away. You could see it. And what it is it’s got a pipe down both sides of the runway with little jets sticking out and it’s fed with kero and petrol. Any old rubbish more or less that will burn and they just turn on the pumps and the stuff squirts out in a fine mist out of the jets and they run down both sides of the runway with a jeep with a pole sticking out with a great lump of rag alight and just drives down and sets light to it both sides. And when its foggy and misty that’s the only way you could get some of us back you know. I mean otherwise well you know half your bomber fleet would be lost in one night. So that’s sort of reminiscent. I mean, we did a raid one time there. I think our radio went. We didn’t know it had gone and we took off in appalling condition and Jim and I flew this bloody aeroplane. I don’t know how we did it. It was absolutely pouring down. You know, heavy rain and sleet and the whole aircraft kept getting struck by lightning or was picking up static electricity because some of the sides of the aircraft looked as though they were, weren’t even there. Strange phenomena you know. They sort of, and when I looked out of the astrodome because I used to have to take star shots and things the radial aerials that started roughly just near me and then went down to the tail two of them you know in a triangular section there would be what looked like candles rolling along the aerial. They were, you know rain, rain that was rolling along the aerials but it was sort of lit up with static electricity and sometimes you know you’d see like a big lump of rain or whatever it is fall off them somewhere and it almost seemed to explode and we flew through this bloody awful muck for hours and they said it would be clear when you got to the target and it was just like driving out of a door. And there was the target in the bright moonlight and all the rest of it. We did our bombing. We turned around and dived back in again and flew back and I got a feeling from, I can’t remember now. I’ve still, I’ve got Jimmy’s logbook as well. As well as my own. He sent me a copy of his logbook in a way because we had a few arguments about what happened when and of course we managed to reconcile things. He, Jimmy even had trouble with another chap that was a pilot on the same squadron who went at the same time as him. Their, their, recording of the actual target and the rest of it was totally different from ours [laughs] There you go. Now, that was more or less that. But I was, I was digressing wasn’t I? I was, I’d got this engine and bits and bobs and so on and so forth. I used to go down there and happy as Larry. I mean it was. I wore the oldest battle dress I could get, I’d got and you know the oldest Glengarry and all the rest of it and I used to go down on my bike. I don’t know what happened to that bike. I’ve got a feeling it got left behind somewhere. But anyhow, so you know pulling the engine to pieces you get greasy. I mean we had no way of washing down there of course and just a few rags and my uniform got greasy and you can imagine what it was like filing and sawing and hacksawing and all that sort of aluminium. I mean it gets everywhere doesn’t it? You know. I mean I used to get absolutely covered in it but I, you know I’d just go back and sort of hang that a bit more, put the uniform on the floor and put it on again next time I went and you know otherwise I’d be wearing something better. So I was down there working away merrily one, one day and I’d been there some hours I think. In fact, I used to forget about food. Happy you know hacking and sawing and making things. And the door burst open and this flight sergeant said, ‘Are you Miles?’ I said —
[recording interrupted]
And he said, ‘Are you Miles?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, 'We’ve been looking for you all day long.’ And he said, ‘You’re in all sorts of trouble because you’re supposed to be at squadron headquarters having an interview for a commission.’ He said, ‘All your mates are there and the AOC is there and all the other officers and you are not. So come on.’ I said, ‘Well, I’d better go and —‘’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ He said, ‘My instructions from the from the station commander is, ‘Find him and bring him and don’t let him go anywhere.’ So I’ve found you and you’re coming with me.’ Ok. I thought oh bugger. I didn’t want a commission anyhow. They kept on and on. The CO kept on sign this, sign that. ‘Do as you’re bloody told, Miles. You sign it.’ ‘Ok.’ You know. Easy come easy go. So we cycled to the station headquarters and parked my bike outside and I walked in the door and there was all my mates, well not all of them, some of them had already had their interviews because it was well into the afternoon and they were all sitting around there you know with every buckle and button polished highly and they were still rubbing the toes of their shoes on the backs of their trousers and all the rest of it and making sure they didn’t make any creases and all the rest of it. And in comes Reg filthy dirty. Got the dirtiest looking Glengarry on, all covered in aluminium dust and he was covered in aluminium dust as well as was his uniform and his, what boots or whatever he had on I’m sure weren’t shiny. They were probably thick with grease. Oh dear. And there was the station warrant officer. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘There you are. You’re in next.’ Oh. And he looked so happy. Well, he would do wouldn’t he. So, ‘In you go, Miles.’ Next one in you know. Stood at, there’s the CO, my CO, my squadron commander, my station commander, the AOC with badges from his wrist to his neck you know and rings of this, that and the other in all his glory and they’ve all got their heads down writing notes about the last person that was there. And the first one that lifted his head up of course is the one that had got the least to say for himself which was my squadron CO and he looked up and you could see the pallor of death go over his face as he saw me. And I thought, oh my God. You know. And then they looked up one after the other. One after the other until the AOC had finished his bit of screed and he looked up and I’d already saluted and given my name and number and all the rest of it. ‘You Miles?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Where have you been?’ I said, well, I thought the only thing to do was to tell the truth so I told him the truth you see. So oh. Yeah. And he turned to the next senior one, he said, ‘Do you know anything about this?’ ‘No, sir.’ And so it went all down the line right down to everyone down there. None of them knew anything about it. They said, ‘Well, nobody knows anything about it.’ I said, ‘Well, the engineering officer.’ And he’s not here of course. He’s in the hangar. ‘Right. Get him on the phone.’ So you know the AOC kept looking at me and I expect he thought oh my God what have we got here? And he got the engineering offer and he spoke to him and he, you know, he said, ‘Have you got a chap, Miles sectioning an engine? Oh yeah. Oh, you have. Is he doing any good? Oh, is he? Oh.’ And so it went on you know and I only heard one side of the conversation but it seemed as though the engineering officer had confirmed everything that I said. Then the AOC, I don’t know what his name was, he put his, he put the phone down, he said, ‘He’s very pleased with what you’re doing, Miles.’ He said, ‘Well done. Well done. Well done indeed. You’re the sort of bloke we want in the Air Force you know.’ He said, ‘You’re an ex-apprentice. Oh, very good. I’ll be the first to buy you a drink when you get into the Officer’s Mess.’ That was the sum total of my interview. [laughs] ‘Thank you, sir.’ ‘Well, off you go. See you later.’ So I walked out you see and I said to my old mate sitting there, I said, ‘Well I’ve got mine. I don’t know about you lot.’ And I turned to the warrant officer. ‘I’ve got mine but I won’t see you in the Mess,’ you know and I did. I got a commission on the basis that I was covered in aluminium dust. And of course, in actual fact I realised that when I got my commission and I got my service number it was so much lower than all the other people that I was flying with you know when I went on to, when I was flying with the RAF again. I mean I was flying with squadron leaders and wing commanders whose, whose service number they’d got was you know millions more than mine. When I told them what my service number was they couldn’t believe it. They said, ‘56125? An officer’s number?’ ‘Yes.’ You see I’d been given a permanent officer’s number and the idea obviously beyond the AOC was that I was a little bloke that should be encouraged to stay in the Air Force after the war. We’ll get to that at some later date. I do regret in some ways not staying in. On the other hand the RAF got a bit, got a bit daft you know. You’ve got these people that suddenly decided that we’d got to return to the fifteenth century and this is how gentlemen behaved and all this bloody silly nonsense. They weren’t in the war. They found somewhere to hide during the war. We got on and fought the war and then you know it was the old story well we’re taking over now. There will be a little few stories about that. So I finished. Well, I wanted to stay flying with Jimmy Tease and the crew obviously because you know you form a bit of a bond when you, when you’re under those sort of circumstance but my CO one day and he said, ‘Oi, you’ve done more than your fair share.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve only got one or two more to do with the crew and you know we will all finish together.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘Here’s your commission. Here’s all your ration coupons and so on. Go and get yourself a bloody uniform. Don’t come back until you look like an officer.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ And another bloke there was got commission at the same time so we went off trying to find uniforms. What a game. We ended up in a place called Harrogate which is a famous place for invalid people imbibing or whatever they do there and we both managed to get uniforms there. Obviously uniforms made for somebody else who never came to pick them up. So you don’t ask questions. You get your uniform. It’s modified to suit you, your rank’s and all the rest of it sewn on and your various badges and so on and so forth. And you know you’ve got a bank account which I’d already got a bank account anyhow and all this sort of thing and your pay was paid into the bank account. You had to travel first class which was very good when you’d got a warrant but not so bloody good when you wanted to go on leave but you’d got to travel first class you know. So that meant that you’d got to pay. You know you couldn’t travel second class. You’d got to travel first class. So, Jimmy Tease and the rest of the crew went on and finished their tour but I wasn’t there so you know I mean I got shipped off to go and get the uniform and when I went back Jimmy and the rest of the crew had gone and I’ve only just found out that I think it was one more trip. One more operation and I could have finished with them because I did some extras you see [laughs] I was greedy I was told. I was greedy. How dare you do any more, you know. You’ve done more than your fair share. Let somebody else have a turn. Sounds a bit crazy now doesn’t it? You know, when people are risking their lives and you’re being greedy [laughs] because you’re doing more than your share. Oh dear. I think I might switch this off now. It’s about 5 o’clock. I may do some more later on and I must have a cup of tea or something or other.
[interview paused]
So this is in October 1944. I’d finished. Went on leave. Mum and dad had moved back to their very nice house in All Saints Avenue in Westbrook so I came on leave. My bicycle was still there so I must have left it there. I don’t know. It must have been left there during the war or whatever so I used to ride around town and walk about and try not to [pause] try to dodge the column because people want to salute you if you’re in an officer’s uniform and all the rest of it you know and you’ve got flying badges up, you know. They seem to want to find you and salute you and I wasn’t very keen on being saluted. But in the process I’m cycling up Cliftonville. I suppose I was going up to see Eric and co up at the butcher’s you know and who should I see but Phyllis Dyke in a WAAFs uniform showing more than the normal amount of leg than Phyllis ever showed. I can’t remember whether she was on her bike or what but anyhow I got talking to her and she came down to my folk’s place. And she was stationed at North Foreland and we got, I got chatting to her about this, that and the other and so on and so forth and she was telling me all about her boyfriends and so on and so forth and mum and dad liked her. Then I kept asking her if she’d marry me. I suppose I must have fallen in love with her. I don’t know. I mean what do you know. You’ve just come out of a bloody war. You’re as daft as a brush and you sort of wondered whether, why you come out the other end of it and what’s life all about and you’ve been made into an officer so now you’ve got to be extra special good and all this sort of nonsense. All wrong isn’t it? You know, you go in the Air Force as a boy of fifteen and you, you come out you know a few years later as an officer and all the rest of it you know which you never ever thought would happen to you. Never even envisaged it but there you go and eventually after a lot of chat and arguing the toss and I suppose she eventually agreed she’d marry me. I don’t think she wanted to but then I don’t think she really wanted to marry anybody quite frankly. But who knows. So I then got instructions to report to a place called Nutts Corner and it had to be in Northern Ireland didn’t it? Where else would a place be called Nutts Corner? So I had to report there in April I think it was. So I had a fairly good leave and well, all sorts of things happen then don’t they? You know, when like when you finish at a squadron I mean the last time you have a flying entry doesn’t mean that you’ve left the squadron and you’re free and fancy free. And the first entry that you have during flying isn’t the first entry because I don’t remember where I actually, what day I went to Nutts Corner but I’m sure it would probably have been [pause] oh I don’t know. Just before Christmas or even just after Christmas. My first record is flying in April at Nutts Corner. When I got there of course I didn’t know what was going on. They don’t tell you where you’re going do they? They just tell you to report there. When you got there I found it was a training squadron for Transport Command. And of course, you know from earlier on of course if you volunteered for a second tour and like Nick, not Nick, Don Nicklen. Called him Nick then but suddenly found out when he became a civilian he was Don. Hey ho. Don, when he finished his tour he stayed in England and was sent to a squadron. To a training squadron to teach you know, navigation and so on and so forth. Anyhow, I got there and the usual situation. We were all officers milling about in the Officer’s Mess I suppose and this flight lieutenant came up to me and said, ‘Would you like to be my engineer?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, why not,’ sort of thing. So that was, what was his name? [Poore.] Flight Lieutenant Poore. We got on like a house on fire. We were, we were training to fly Yorks which were actually a Lancaster with a different fuselage so that it could carry passengers or freight and we were doing training on I think, what we were training on? I have a feeling we were flying bloody Stirlings but let me have a look in my book. [pause] Yeah. Oh no. No. That’s not it. Don’t get carried away. No. Where are we? Oh dear [pause] It’ll be here somewhere. Oh yeah. They were Yorks. Yeah. That’s right. So we were training on Yorks to fly passengers and so on and so forth and you know lots of lots of ground training you know for the engineers checking all the, the bits and bobs on an aircraft and of course the York was different from anything else I’d been on so it was a new learning curve. It was a more modern aircraft. It had only recently been designed. It was designed sort of after the Halifax and Lancaster were well into service. It was, you know a recent design. Although the design had started some years ago nothing gets done overnight but, and it was a very good aircraft. It was like flying a, the beauty of it was as far as I was concerned was that the flight engineer was the second pilot and he had his own seat next to the pilot. There were no spare pilots. Let’s face it, you know pilots were being killed, pilots were being trained still so I was his. I was the second pilot and the engineer. So I did all my engineering work but I, you know I sat next to the pilot in a proper seat like they did in a Lancaster. And we’d sort of chat. If for any reason we had to manually fly it well I would do a bit and he would do a bit and so on and so forth. So I suppose eventually I became reasonably decent at flying a York. Mind you I wouldn’t like to try one now. I wouldn’t have a clue now would I anymore? Must be getting old. Anyhow, we did our training and I sort of asked Phyllis to marry me and all the rest of it. So she eventually agreed and we fixed the date and of course I was in Northern Ireland so I couldn’t do much so she and her family and my mum and dad sorted it all out and on the 28th of April 1945 I managed to thumb a lift when the course finished. Thumbed a lift on a plane to England and trains and God knows what and got there. Got to the church on time and we went away on our honeymoon. I don’t think either of us thought much of it. It wasn’t the shining light that we both thought it would be. I suppose perhaps very innocent or ignorant or whatever. But anyhow, but we are still married and we’re coming up for our, well our wedding anniversary is on the 28th of April nineteen, no 2009 and we were married in 2005. What are you talking about? 1945. God, you don’t half know how to ramble on you fool of a man. 1945 we were married and we shall be married sixty four years this coming April. Is that right? Sixty four plus forty five is 2009. So, and still married. I have no intention of divorcing or anything else like that. I mean, I haven’t had any offers from anybody that wants to marry me so what’s the point? I mean I still love old Phyl. I still go and see her. I still do what I can and I still try to do things to please her and I’ve just got a little idea to buy her something for our wedding anniversary present. Something that she’ll find useful and enjoy. So we’ll see how we go. I must have a look around when I go shopping and see what I can find. I’ve always tried to buy her something. And I’m supposed to be talking about my life not about, although I digress. You may have noticed that this digress. If Lynn’s listened to this she’ll giggle because I’m sure she’ll say, ‘Here he goes again. He’s off. God knows where he’s going to end up.’ He knows where he’d like to end up but he’s not going to end up there. He’s going to carry on with what he’s doing and he’s going to behave himself. So that was it. We got married and then I had to report back to duty and, which I did and I went to 242 Squadron at Stoney Cross and we were with Flight Lieutenant [Poore] and we had a navigator and a wireless operator and that’s all. I did everything including acting as steward. We had quite a decent galley onboard the passenger one and I think we were flying freighters to start off with. Local flying, a bit of cross country, radio range which was a new thing. Three engine flying and landing. It was all training you know to make sure that you could fly the aircraft on three engines because you were going to be flying passengers and you were doing cross countries so that’s, that’s what we did for the first month or so in May and June. Then we started. I had to fly with a squadron leader because I’d had some time off and now my crew were having a bit of leave so I had to fly with a squadron leader for a couple of weeks or so who decided that he was going to give me a good run for my money and you know he said, ‘Right. We’re off. We’re going to Malta.’ Oh yeah. And we went to Malta, to Cairo and then I don’t know whether he wanted to do a bit of shopping out there or what but you know we flew off for a few hours here, there and everywhere and ended up back in 242 Squadron after, well I don’t know. A week or ten days and he was obviously quite happy was Squadron Leader MacDonald, whoever he was. And my skipper turned up and we did a bit of flying and then I don’t know what happened then but suddenly they hadn’t got an engineer for flying a Stirling. Now let’s be honest about this I’d never even been up close to a bloody Stirling. They were a pretty ugly looking plane. They were a four-engine bomber. The first of the four engine bombers. They had Hercules engines which I’d been used to on, on my thing. Yorks had Merlins and so on so you know I’d been flying them with all different engines and so on but the Stirling, the aircraft, I hadn’t got a clue. It was a funny thing. It was all electric. Instead of hydraulics everything was electric and I was just flown over there and said, ‘Right. Well, half an hour. Have a look around. This is, this is a Stirling and you’re the flight engineer and off you go.’ So we flew from 242 Squadron in Stoney Cross to Castel Benito in North Africa. What a dump. Sand everywhere. Oh. And then we went to, from there to, where did we go? Israel. Well, it wasn’t Israel then but that’s where we went. And then we went to Shaibah which is in Iraq. Right next to where, you know the war is going on now as then and out to Karachi which was India but is now Pakistan and then across the other side and down to Ceylon which is now Sri Lanka and, and then all our way back as a flying engineer in this bloody Stirling. I don’t know how many hours I did but I suppose I was picked because I’d, I’d flown as a flight engineer and done all sorts of, flown all sorts of different aircraft I had but was obviously slated to stay in the RAF. I was a flying officer by this time and I suppose I was pretty confident, you know. If a job, if you’ve got a funny job get Reg. He does it. I know somebody just like that that’s only a million miles away from here that every time there’s a shitty job she gets it. Don’t you Lynn? [laughs] Don’t you lie to me [laughs] I’m doing this for you to a large extent. I mean If anybody else listens to it well serves them bloody right. But you know I’m doing it for you, old Dutch. I might sing to you in a minute if you’re not careful. Then what did I do? Oh yeah. Well, we carried on. I carried on doing that and every time we went to India or anywhere like that I would bring back carpets and stuff because Phyl, Phyl for some strange reason had got pregnant. I don’t know how that happened. Nor does she I don’t suppose. She, she’d been put up to be an officer in the WAAF but I think it all went by the board. You know what it is. You know, suddenly the war was nearly over and this was sort of, you know the middle of ’45 so we were looking, you know at the, the end of the war. In Europe anyhow. And she’d come out and she’d got herself a requisitioned house. It was a dirty old house that had been empty for years. Gas lighting, outside toilet, one cold chap. Oh dear. Poor lass you know. Lovely young woman, pregnant and dumped in a place like that. All wrong. All wrong. But there you go. That’s, that’s we were working class people so that’s what we got. But I was an officer in the Air Force so of course you know we were climbing up the social ladder except of course eventually I decided that my marriage was more important than being an officer in the Air Force. So I kept flying in and out. It’s terrible you know. I mean, people think it’s all right but you know you keep flying out from England out, out to India and all those hot places you know. North Africa and so on and so forth where it’s hot and sweaty. You don’t get a minute’s peace. Sometimes you’re flying sixteen hours a day, you know. They wouldn’t allow you to do it these days but there you go. I mean we were short of trained pilots and air crews for passengers. We were flying passengers about all over the place and bringing back prisoners of war from the Japanese. God that was a sight to make you cry your eyes out. And I remember one day we had a Lancaster at 511 Squadron which was our sort of taxi. You know, anybody wanted to go somewhere they jumped on a Lancaster. Can you imagine a big four engine bomber you know and one day there my skipper said, ‘Reg, we’ve got to go out to Prestwick up near Liverpool.’ He said, ‘We’re going to take the Lanc. Just us two. We don’t want anybody else you know. You can map read and do what you normally do.’ I thought here we go. Another job. So you know I just went and started it up and we hopped in and got cleared from control and off. Off we flew up north. Of course, when we get up near Liverpool it was thick cloud. Couldn’t see a thing on the ground. Oh, well. Turn left. Let’s go out the Irish Sea. The Irish Sea is down here somewhere. Go out the Irish Sea. What do you reckon? Oh, we must be out in the Irish Sea now. Ok. We’ll let down over the Irish Sea. Yeah, oh yeah. We’re over the sea. That’s good luck. Dropped down low under the cloud and then fly back in on a reciprocal course to Liverpool, ‘Oh there’s Speke. That’s the place.’ You know [laughs] oh no. It was Prestwick. It wasn’t Speke. Anyhow, we’ll lob in there. I forget what it was. I think it was some little tiny small parcel that the CO wanted. It wasn’t very big. A birthday present for his wife or somebody or other or his girlfriend. Who knows? I mean, you know, let’s face it all the rules and regulations that apply now certainly didn’t exist then. Just imagine, you know just taking a four-engine bomber and flying up there with, you know just the skipper and myself. Hey ho. But there we did. Oh it was about three and a half hours I think we flew and we just kept flying in and out to India and Ceylon and so on and so forth until the regulations said that if you had a certain number of points you could apply to come out of the Service. Well, I had enough points. You know, I’d done the, I’d done the time. I’d done the flying. I’d done the tour on Bomber Command and all the rest of it so you know. So, I applied to come out which rather shook certainly Phyllis you know because I was getting reasonably decent pay as a flying officer and it wouldn’t have been much longer before I got promoted to flight lieutenant. And, you know, I mean life was sort of fairly pleasant and this bugger of a bloke that she’d married suddenly comes one home one day and says, That’s it. I’m out of the Air Force.’ I mean biggest shock she ever got and, ‘Well, what are you going to do for a job?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’ll work in a garage,’ you know. I mean. Work in a garage? Crazy. I tried various things. Well, the first thing you know was to sort of get the house clean and tidy and strip the filthy disgusting wall paper and stuff and repaint it and, couldn’t buy anything but we managed to get a bit of paint and stuff here and there and the gas mantels kept breaking and all this and poor old Phyl was heavily pregnant. Well, actually Tony was born and I was still in the Air Force because when I told my CO the situation he said, ‘Well, you can’t fly. You can’t fly now until your wife has had the baby, you know. You’re under too much strain.’ You know. So on and so forth.’ I didn’t know all this. These regulations. But that’s what I was told so of course I went on leave and as usual, you know the first baby it didn’t, didn’t arrive at the specified time and then I had to keep ringing up and saying, you know, ‘Well, it hasn’t happened yet.’ And in the end he said, ‘Right. If it hasn’t happened by —’ such and such a date, ‘You’ve got to come back anyhow whatever happens.’ Well, it did happen by the specified date and I just had to leave her in a nursing home and well, she’d got her mother and my mother who was absolutely no bloody help but her mother and her sisters and that I’m sure came to the rescue. And then eventually, well I went back and I just came out the Air Force then. I suppose all this business of you know poor old Phyl with the baby and that sort of just couldn’t see her struggling along like that. I can’t remember why but I can imagine why. So I came out the Air Force and I came home and we started to make a life for ourselves. We’d had loads of carpets and stuff I’d brought. Stacks of carpets. I still had a few of the large cigars I used to buy in India and I was found by my parents sitting on the floor smoking a bloody Churchill cigar which was about a foot long scraping the paint and the wallpaper off and of course they were horrified to think ,you know their son who was now an officer in the Air Force chucked it all in. My CO had said to me when I left, he said, ‘If you want to come back. If you change your mind anytime between now and when you’re —
[recording interrupted]
When I when I left the squadron I went to see the CO and he told me that if I came back, changed my mind and came back before the, my leave was over I could rejoin as if nothing had happened. But I didn’t want to. I’d got Phyllis, a new baby, I’d had enough of war. I just wanted to have a bit of love and affection and be at home I suppose. Of course, my mother and father came around to see them in this [unclear] house that had been vacant for years. There was one of a terrace houses. Not bad houses but you know they had a sort of a decent front room and you know a small sort of living room shall I say but it was pretty basic sort of place. A gas lighting, one cold cat, outside toilet, you know. I’d been used to much better and Phyllis obviously had as well but we made a home there. It was very difficult of course. Everything was rationed. Furniture was rationed. Phyllis’s sister Sheila came to stay and she was courting an American airman and I went out, one morning I went into the front room and found the settee we’d just bought was laying on the floor with the back all smashed off. Usual sort of rubbish. You buy as best you could. It was all on coupons but I mean the body was made of Tate and Lyle sugar boxes and stuff you know covered over with sacking and then a bit of cheap plastic covering and that. It was all rubbish but [pause] and I just burned it on the fire. We were rationed with coal and all that sort of stuff you know. A terrible life really. But I had to find a job of some sort. So I thought it would be a good idea if I went to work in a garage and I, a garage that was near where my folks lived in All Saints Avenue, they’d sold that house and moved elsewhere I saw the bloke there and he said, ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t want paying I just want to come and work for a couple of weeks. See what it’s like.’ ‘No. No. No,’ he said, ‘No. I can’t have you doing that, you know.’ And he did everything he could to make life difficult. I mean one of the first things he did was gave me a box full of bits of pieces and he said, ‘That’s a lorry engine. Put it together.’ Well, thank you very much. It would be nice if you knew what it was supposed to look like when you’d finished. So obviously it was a bit of a struggle. He said, ‘Don’t you know how to do it?’ I said, ‘Well, I haven’t really worked on lorry engines and I mean what sort of lorry is it?’ You know. So and then he was a bit of a Jack of all trades and his garage was a bit, a bit suss because if you close the garage doors at night and weren’t very careful you got an electric shock because somewhere along the line the doors when you closed them completed a circuit and he didn’t know why or how. How anybody didn’t get killed. And [pause] but this was when would it be [pause] just the start of the summer I suppose and a lot of boarding houses were trying to get back into business again. You know, take holiday makers in Margate and a lot of the places had been shut up for years and the boilers down in the basement which supplied all the hot water for the, you know all the different bathrooms and so on and so forth they’d been empty for years. You know boilers were frozen up in the cold winters and the cast iron casings of the boilers had cracked so he was going around to weld these things up and he was a bit of scruff. And in one place we went when it thawed of course water poured everywhere so somebody dumped loads of straw down in the basement where this boiler was and he started sorting it out to whirl it up and the sparks flying all over the place. The next thing I know he’s got the straw alight. Then the oxygen line and the acetylene light caught light and oh God what a caper. And, well we managed to repair it I suppose and I thought it was a bit of a rough old job. And when we got back to the garage with all the gear you know oxygen, acetylene bottles and all the rest of it he was throwing spanners all over the place you know and he threw one well I thought he was throwing it at me so I threw it back at him and damned near hit him you know. ‘What did you do that for?’ I said, ‘Well, if you’re going to throw spanners at me I’m going to thrown them back.’ You know. So we didn’t last very long. A couple of weeks and you know he said, ‘Well, here’s your pay.’ I said, ‘I don’t want your bloody pay.’ I said, ‘I didn’t want your job.’ You know. Well, I went to the Labour Exchange to try and sort something out and they said, ‘Oh, got just the job for you. Manager of a private laundry.’ Oh yes. ‘You go and report to this private laundry.’ And they were all women in there of course and saw the woman who owned it. ‘Oh yes. Just the bloke we want, you know with your history as an engineer and all that.’ Oh yeah. Right. Well, I mean they did everything they possibly could to make me look an idiot. I won’t bore you to tears with it but you know I mean you know these Hoffman Presses. These steam presses. ‘There you are,’ she said, ‘Operate those two presses and this is a pile —’ And when I say a pile a mountain of pillow slips. They’d been doing all this fancy stuff for private places and they’d all got these frills around the edge. Well, I’d never seen a Hoffman Press. I’d never worked on one had I? You know. And I had the two to do and I was doing the best I could. She’d come along after about a half an hour and screw them all up and chuck them back in the basket. ‘They won’t bloody do. You’d better go on the Calender.’ That’s not a calendar like you tell the date. Calender. It’s a steam filled rollers that you put sheets through. They are about twenty foot long and they had two women putting the sheets through flat in the front and I was at the back. I was supposed to collect these sheets. How the hell do you pick up a sheet, you know a big sheet, double sheet when two people are putting it through. You can’t. It was crazy. A couple of days of that and I was oh God. And I’d been doing painting some pictures on the walls in the nursery and all the rest of it and she was asking when I went to the Labour Exchange they said, ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘We’ll send you on a course to be a commercial artist.’ I said, ‘I’m not an artist.’ You know. ‘I mean these are just rubbish sort of things.’ ‘Oh yes you are.’ I thought you’re just trying to get rid of me. You know. And my dad came around of course. He was superintendent of the building or something or other and he said, ‘What are you going to do? I said, ‘Well, I don’t know dad. I don’t know.’ I said, ‘I can’t go back in the Air Force now because, you know if I go back in I’ve got to go back to square one. I don’t fancy that.’ He said, ‘What are you going to do?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘You’ve got to have a job. You can’t just hang around at home you know.’ ‘No dad.’ ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ll get you a job with a firm.’ I said, ‘Doing what?’ He said, ‘Well, the lowest of the low is a painter’s labourer and —’ he said, ‘I’m sure we can find you a job as a painter’s labourer.’ ‘Oh God. Yeah. Ok.’ So I started this job as a painter’s labourer and after a few days my job consisted of humping ladders about and we were painting, well I wasn’t painting, I was just a labourer holding the bottom of a wooden ladder that seemed to stretch to the sky in the main High Street while the painter got up and painted some windows or something. I was holding the bottom of a ladder when along came a couple of very junior officers from the same squadron. ‘Hey Reg, what are you doing there?’ I said, ‘You want to be careful. These jobs are hard to get you know. You don’t hang about in the Air Force you know. All these jobs will be gone if you’re not careful.’ God, Reg. God. I felt about two inches tall as you can imagine. And I had lots of jobs like that you know doing, oh God. Washing ceilings and dirty holes and in the brewery. It’s in that book that you sorted out you know. [unclear] the brewery. I was in there. Tea boy. Make the tea you know, gather bits of wood up and stuff. I got everything to make the tea and there was nobody for the tea and I said, ‘Don’t you want tea?’ They said, ‘No. Come and have a beer.’ I said, ‘Beer. You must be joking.’ Come on. Do as you’re told.’ Well, they were all standing around there drinking and I said, ‘Well, this is a funny old set up.’ He said, ‘You haven’t tasted beer like this. This is special beer that the brewers make for themselves.’ And they showed me this barrel. Enormous great barrel and he said, ‘You’ll never be able to buy it anywhere. Don’t worry about that.’ So I had, well, I’ll tell you what it was. It didn’t taste like beer. It was just warm honey. So you know, so we didn’t [unclear] but all those sorts of jobs you know. It was very soul destroying but I was at home and you know I bought myself a bicycle. Not a racing bicycle. God knows where that one went but just an ordinary bike so I could get to and fro. Come home to lunch if it was possible and that sort of thing and apparently my dad was in the manager’s office in the firm that I was working for you know and of course they’d followed my progress during the war in bombers and all the rest of it. You know. In action I suppose. One of the few that was actually doing something. And he said, ‘Well, how’s your son doing? Is he still in the Air Force?’ And that. So when he told him what I was doing he said, ‘What a bloody waste. We need an engineer. Would he go out to Manston and you know sort out our depot out there? It’s just a derelict but I’m sure he could do it.’ He said, ‘Well, I expect so.’ So dad said about it and I went in and saw them and, yeah. Yeah. And I said, ‘Well, I shall want some tools and stuff,’ And so and so, ‘Well, you can open an account at — ’ so and so. One of their places and you know buy some bits and pieces. I said, ‘Well, I need to buy some of my own. I’ve still got a few shillings left.’ So I went out to this place and of course I was going I’m sort of proper wages then. Went out to this place, quite a trot to ride out on a bike and I rode in the gate and this, you know it was just a junkyard. There was piles of timber and concrete and bricks and everywhere, all over the place and this old boy said, ‘Hey, who do you want? What do you want?’ I said, ‘I’ve come to take over.’ ‘Have you?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘What a mess,’ you know. ‘What goes on here.’ He said, ‘Oh, trucks come in and we just dump it any old where.’ I said, ‘Well, isn’t there any record of it?’ ‘Oh, no. We don’t do that.’ I said, ‘Well, doesn’t anybody ever come out and want some of this stuff?’ I said, ‘It’s all on licence this stuff, you know. It’s worth its weight in gold.’ Bricks and timber and paint, you know. Every, every, they were doing big jobs and every job there was always stuff left over. Sometimes it’s the wrong stuff. The wrong stuff has been bought so what do you do? Take it down to the depot and leave it there and then maybe it’ll come in handy. This sort of thing. And there was all this different machinery been used during the war so special machinery for concreting runways and all sorts of stuff like that. Didn’t know what half of it was but you know I could recognise roughly what it did and it was just laying there you know rusty and you know wanted repairing or whatever. Something doing to it and used you know. Rebuilding was starting and everything was bloody valuable. So I sent the old boy back where he came from. He was a brickie’s labourer and you know he was past it and I took on a young fella to help me. And there were lots of sheds there and they, you know they’d have all these sheds for jobs and then when they were finished they were taken to pieces you know and make a little flat pack of them. Send them out there just stacked up. Sheds everywhere. So, right we’ll put some of them up and we put them up and then started sorting things out, you know. And it wasn’t long before, you know and then I got the power put on, and I got the phone put on and all this sort of thing and then I started repairing machinery and getting machines done. And then I started making lists of everything so I would take a list into the office and ask you know for them to type it up and you know do copies so that all the foremen in the office had copies of this stuff. So they would know which machines they could have that were ready to be used and so on. And I suppose over the, I was there for about twelve years and I made it from just a rubbish dump into a really first class work. I built an enormous workshop. I repaired all the trucks. I did all the welding. I can tell you about some of the jobs which I will do. I will tell you about some of the jobs I did. It’s best if I just ramble a bit for now it’s 9 o’clock at night, I’m getting a bit tired. You know we’ve had a few problems what with Gillian and mum and all sorts of things today. It’s the, it’s the, it’s my Saturday. Friday in Canada. Lots of problems today. So I’ll pack up and do some more tomorrow.
[recording paused]
I went and saw Phyllis this morning. Took her Sunday’s paper because I went and got it about 6 o’clock and not much in it. I’d soon read it so. Robbie rang me last night with Gillian’s telephone number in the hospital. She’s now waiting for a specialist to come and see her so I don’t know how much longer she is going to be in hospital. Hey ho. Never ending story. So I went down and saw Phyl and had an hour or two with her just chatting. And I’m cooking lunch and I thought I’ll do a bit of this. Tony and Olivia are coming to see me later on. So we were talking about [unclear] in Sandwich. A firm my dad was quite a senior man in for many years and he was doing a big project in, oh in Crawley and managing the whole thing himself when he died suddenly which he did with a Stoke Adams which was a blood clot to the brain I think. They had to employ seven experts in every different trade to take over from him and he was doing it all himself. You know. I must take after my dad a bit because I’m a bit like that. Anyhow, I mustn’t keep praising myself. You’ll think I’m big headed. And I am. So some of the jobs I did I got some real shockers. My dad was about the worst one of the lot because he always tried to get me on to do work on his jobs. ‘Oh, you can do it, Reg.’ Well, of course you know I did do it. There are other people in this world that are exactly the same. There’s a young lady in Canada who I correspond with occasionally and she’s just the same and she’s only a young bit of a slip. I keep telling her you know not to do so much but I’m wasting my breath. So she’ll carry on doing what she wants to do like I have I suppose. I just wish she could enjoy life a bit more. Never mind. Right. Some of the jobs I did I can’t put them in any particular order because I can’t remember dates and times and so on and so forth. One of the jobs that my father had was to build a factory particularly designed and made for knitting stockings and panty hose. It had to have natural light. It had to have no columns or beams or anything throughout the whole of the knitting floor because of knitting. I don’t know anything about knitting machines but apparently they are very long things and they need lots of room and they [unclear]. So, and it was all made in concrete. So a site was prepared. He took, he took the job on and the site was prepared and had to be excavated because there had to be a lot of storage underground. The knitting floor was more or less on ground level and I was drafted in. They built me a brick building with a corrugated iron roof and they said, ‘Right. This is where you are going to work.’ I said, ‘Well, what about I’ve got all this stuff out of the depot?’ ‘You’ve got another bloke out there. If he runs in trouble you come and see him but this is where you’ve got to work. You’ve got to make all the shuttering and all the reinforcing.’ And I said, ‘Oh, my goodness. What?’ Anyhow, they put up this, this brick sort of building for me. It wasn’t very big but there was a workshop for me so I could get all my gear in there and in came the materials. First of all there was truckloads of marine ply. There was lots of marine ply because they’d been making marine ply by the millions of ton in Canada and other places and shipping it to the UK for making all these fast type things. Well, of course they didn’t want any more. They’d got all this ply so it was sort of on ration but if you wanted it for a building you could have it. But other things you couldn’t get. One of the things they couldn’t get was steel angle. It was like gold dust. But what they could get and there was a lot of this about. When they started getting rid of all the Army and Air Force beds because you know there was no Army and Air Force, not millions like there had been. These side rails all ended up in the, in the scrapyards and they’d got cast pins on them and cast ends on them and they were relatively cheap so they bought bloody thousands of these things. And they needed some timber for reinforcing the ply and they could get off ration fresh cut chestnuts. Apparently a lot of chestnut trees were being cut down so you could get fresh cut chestnut so that came and it I stored it all up in the roof above the roof trusses over. All this chestnut was put up there. Just a, by the way when I finished the job and they were ready to demolish the hut or this building that I’d been working in they couldn’t get some of this chestnut out because it had so twisted and bowed with the, because it was green that they left it there and it, you know it was demolished when they demolished the building. Right. So, what was my job? First of all my father said, ‘Come in here. Here’s a drawing of what you want made and then we want these columns —’ which had a, what is it? Parallel column. Concrete column. I don’t know, twelve foot long with then a big mushroom top. A big square mushroom top. These had to be made and, well had to be erected and [unclear] in situ with all the reo, the reinforcing rods in and the reinforcing rods also came out the top of this thing. So then the shuttering had to be made for the floor. So right. So what I had to do was to oxy cut the ends of these bits and also cut all the knobs out and then mitre them and it’s terrible stuff to cut. It’s high carbon, very thin, very very very springy, high carbon. So when you try to cut it it didn’t cut like ordinary mild steel it, it bobbled and burned with all the carbon in it and then once I’d, I’d made these I think I could get two sides out of a, two sides of a shutter for the square pans and hundreds of square pans to go to make the floor for the knitting floor and then I’d got to work them all together again. I had a hell of a job because of this carbon. It was not easy and the plywood, I must have had a carpenter in there helping me cut the plywood because the plywood all had to be cut to size and shape and all the rest of it and hand drilled. So I brought all my drills and stuff from the workshop. I had to drill hundreds of holes and put countersunk bolts in to make it up. So I was making all these columns so they, you know they would be cast into the base floor. And then when they were, when all those columns were done I had to take them all to pieces and use what I could of the materials to make up the pans. I had to make these pans about, oh I don’t know two foot six square or whatever that is in the funny measurement so that they could be laid on a scaffold framework and bolted together to form a continuous flat floor for the concrete to be poured for the knitting floor. So that was a big job and at the same time I was making special tools for bending and reinforcing because in the back the roof was a barrel vault. You won’t understand what that is but it does tell you it was a barrel vault and it was a bugger of a thing. And there was so much reinforcing in this barrel that in actual fact it couldn’t, with conventional machines you couldn’t bend it so I had to make something which I did. I made two or three of these things and I don’t know, I never got any thanks for it of course but I made some machines with hand ones to make the special ones. Bits to [unclear] it couldn’t be done on the normal machine. But when I’d done all the columns and all the pans and that I thought well that, you know I’d be going back to [unclear] and get on with my proper work because there were machines to repair and all sorts of things and I used to have visit sites. Whenever they had a breakdown of course I had to leave what I was doing and go all over the place and repair concrete mixers and stuff that had broken down. That sort of thing. Oh well. That’s the boys. Tony.
[recording paused]
So Tony and Leslie have just been. They’ve been in to see mum. Had a chat and offered some help when I have to move and said that they’d probably got doors and stuff that I may need so that was good. But there’s a sudden rainstorm just coming up so they’ve decided to go very sensibly. I’d better not carry on talking all about this this knitting thing because it’s getting all terribly technical. Just to say that I then had to make all this most complicated shuttering for the barrel vault and that was big. And then they were hoisting up the concrete to do the barrel, the roof of the barrel vault and of course they had trouble with a little crane they were using and I had to go up and fix that and one of the wires on the cable caught on my, the ring that mum gave me when we got married and it just flipped the ring off and I watched it drop right the way down where they were pouring concrete in to this bloody great hole about ten foot square and you know three foot deep and it just whoof and it went and in went more concrete. I mean it was gone. You’d never, you’d never find it even if you dug it all out. But you couldn’t so that’s where my ring went. I’ve got, I’ve got gold on that job [laughs] But the job eventually got finished. I obviously, oh the last job I had to do was this was the first job that was ever done in England to our knowledge where this new plastic paint was used which was apparently invented in America. And they sent all this special plastic paint over and they sent the experts over from there and I had a list of what spray gear they needed and I had all the spray gear that was necessary. It was fairly ancient stuff but it was all as per and it had to go in a pressured container and then long hoses so they could get up and spray all this barrel vault. It was a big, big area and they gave me all the dilution details and all the rest of it and I got all this stuff ready and the experts turned up from America you know and there was everything and everything was checked as per. Yes. Right. And we had these long pipes that went from the spray pressure container right up into the ceilings so a bloke could stand on the scaffolding, there would be two pipes, one carried the paint, the other one got the air pressure so he could spray, you know all this roof. It had a special sort of insulation. I won’t bother you with that. You often see it in airports. It’s what is called permanent shuttering. It looks like wood shavings which in actual fact it is mixed with concrete or cement and makes these big slabs which are put up and they stay there but also they have got a soundproofing thing. So if you look up in the ceiling sometimes you’ll see what looks like wood shavings. That’s what they are. So anyhow they came down and the painter, one of the firm’s painters got up there and I said, he said, ‘Righto.’ And well it just dribbled out like pudding and I said to the chap, you know, I said, ‘Well, we’ve got the dilution you asked for.’ I said, ‘I never thought it would work.’ ‘Oh yeah. That’s the proper dilution.’ I said, ‘Well look, there we go.’ I said, ‘Righto. Shut down. Drain it all out, stick it in drums.’ I said, ‘I’ve got all these hoses to clean up. We’ll mix up another batch and you can be here when we dilute it.’ So we did another batch, you know. Five gallon drum of this paint and so on and so forth and I had to flush all the paint out of the hoses, mix it up just the same. Oh. So I said, ‘You’ve got your facts right?’ ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah. That’s the lot.’ I said, ‘Its rubbish. You know, it wants three, four, five times as much water with it.’ You’d never spray. It was like trying to spray pudding. So we kept diluting it and diluting it and diluting it until in actual fact we got, you know, I said, ‘Look, you’ve got all the pressure you wanted. You’ve got all the special jets and everything else you said you needed and wanted.’ ‘Oh yeah. You’re perfect.’ I said, ‘Well, somewhere along the line you got your figures mixed up between America and here.’ So that that was probably the last job on that job that I did.
[recording paused]
Well, I’ll try to not be so technical because you don’t want to know all these ins and outs and ifs and buts and whys and wherefores of it. Another big job that dad was doing they were building a new telephone exchange. It was a very big building and controlled by a government clerk, clerk of works who had to check everything you know. When it said four coats of paint every coat of paint had to be tinted slightly a different colour so he could check that in actual fact you could get these four coats of paint and it was all terrazzo inside. Which is, I don’t know if you know what terrazzo is but it’s an Italian thing and it’s basically chips of marble with colouring cement and all the rest of it and you find it in public toilets or used to years ago and in public buildings and it’s put along the floors and its put up as a cove, skirting type of thing and stairs are done with it. I mean it lasts forever if it’s looked after. So all this was going to be terrazzo but they couldn’t do the terrazzo until the handrails. It was all these beautiful handrails. You have a metal rail and the metal core rail and then on top of that it’s all the wooden ones. You have to go into a decent building to see it. Where you’ve got the curls at the bottom and the wood handrails goes up and then it changes direction. All that’s cut out of the solid and made to a pattern. So they draw it all up and then it’s made to a pattern and they come down and it fits perfectly. Clever stuff. It’s really clever. Anyhow, this particular firm had the job to make and fit the steel handrails and the core rail ready for the other people who had the contract to put, to supply all the carved oak handrail and all the rest of it. Well, they’d got, and all this had to be done before the terrazzo was done because the terrazzo people will not let you go anywhere near their stuff until all your work’s done. So the handrail ought to be finished apart from the wood before they do the terrazzo because one little tiny bit of metal or anything else it turns to rust you know. And I’ll tell you a bit more as we go on. Right. So dad calls me down. ‘Got a little job for you, Reg.’ ‘Oh, yeah.’ ‘See this handrail?’ And I said, ‘Oh my God. It’s like a row of trees. There isn’t anything straight.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘They’ve, they’ve done all they’re going to do and they’ve buggered off.’ And so we refused to pay them anything for it but they’re not going to come back because they’re quite frankly don’t know what to do. I said, ‘Well, what have I got to do?’ He said, ‘Well, what you’ve got to do is to put it all up as straighten it. Put it all up as it should be and make proper out of the metal core rail and then the people, when you’ve done it the people that make the handrail, the wooden handrail will come down and have a look. And if they’re happy with it then the terrazzo people can do the terrazzo.’ And then you know. I said, ‘Oh God. Where do I start?’ He said, ‘Well, you know they’ve got to be [unclear] this has got to be done.’ So I was there for weeks cutting, welding, splicing, half laps and a hell of a job until I got it all done and then down come the people from London who were doing the wood part and they came down and checked it all night to alter a couple of little things here and there. They wanted a screw countersunk and that sort of thing but yeah, ok. So then the terrazzo people came in. They were already working somewhere else in the building doing you know offices and toilets and God knows what but they’ve got to come and do all these staircases and there was about four flights of these very wide staircases going right through the building. So they, you know they came and had a look. Yes. They’d do it. And so they started doing it and they brought all their own machinery from Italy and what had happened they, they had this special grinding machine that they used for grinding the, because they basically mixed this stuff up, put it all down like you would sort of concrete or cement. Smooth it all out as best they can and get it quite more or less fit. Then they go with this special grinder and loads of water where they grind it all and make it all perfect. Get all the curves and everything and everything nice and flat and perfect because they put brass rails and things like that in it you know for tread. You often see a brass rail. Sometimes a black rail in the tread which is all, you know bonded in and then ground all nice and flat. Well, what happened this little petrol engine they had packed up. They’d taken it to two or three local garages and nobody, ‘Italian? Oh my gawd no.’ So dad said, ‘Oh, Reg will fix it.’ Here we go again. So I took it out the back out of the way from everybody and found out the problem. It was easily fixed. It was just that you needed to know the theory you know. All engines are the same. It just doesn’t matter where they’re made they all work on the same principles. So I got it fixed for them and of course you know they tend to go overboard the Italians you know. They didn’t speak much English. Just a bit but you know they were sort of we had a love in while they were thanking me and they were showing me how to do terrazzo, you know because I was living in this bloody horrible little house and I thought it would be nice to put some terrazzo all around the sink you know. So they were showing me and they were showing me some of their secrets and and one of the secrets, once they got it all cleaned and they wouldn’t let nobody else anywhere near it. It didn’t matter you know. It was all barricaded off, ‘You cannot go in that room because we’re working in it.’ It doesn’t matter who you are. People on the bus. People who owned it. No. ‘When we’re finished, yes. But until we’re finished —' And they showed me what they were doing. After they’d ground it all and of course they’d got all this foam that seemed to build up with it all as they ground all this concrete and marble and stuff and got it all perfect and then they’d wash it and wash it and wash it and get it absolutely perfectly clean and dry it. They would be on their hands and knees drying it all. Then they’d send somebody down to the local shop for bottles of milk and they poured all these bottles of milk all over it and squeegeed it all in. And that’s what cured the floor. It stopped, this little bit of grease in the milk stopped the dirt from penetrating the pores in this terrazzo because it, you know although it was sort of cement type stuff with these marble pebbles by the time they’d ground it it was sort of a bit porous you know. You could see the little holes in it. But that’s what they sealed it with and they sealed it with milk. Then they had some special polish they put on and polished it all over the top of this milk you know. So, I don’t know what it did but it didn’t go smelly. So that was that job and I thought well that’s good. I can go away now. And dad said, ‘You’re not finished.’ I said, ‘Oh gawd what now?’ He said, ‘They haven’t done anything about the handrails all around the outside of the building. There were all curved handrails that went sort of from one level to another and little bits here by doorways and oh my God. He said, ‘It’s all there. But,’ he said, ‘They’re not coming back. You’re going to have to fix it.’ I said, ‘Drawings?’ ‘Yeah. There you are.’ And that, what these little walls were about two foot high and they curved all around. All around different levels and so on and top were Portland stone cappings which is a white sort of a natural stone and holes were cut through the Portland stone which lined up with holes that were left in the brickwork and what you had to do was to put the handrails in there and then join everything up, weld and bolt and screw and get them all up and get them all perfect a certain, a section of it. Brace them all and make sure they were right and just you know get dad or somebody to come and, ‘Are you happy with that?’ ‘Yeah. Ok.’ Then you’ve got to pour cement in in all these holes but leave about I don’t know about three quarters of an inch with no cement in it. So you do all that around there and it’s all braced up and then in about a week’s time when the cement and concrete’s gone off nice and hard you can come around and finish the job. What you have to do afterwards then is to set up a brazier and all the rest of it and pour molten lead into these holes so that it actually is above the level of the concrete and of the Portland stone. Then you’ve got to use a caulking chisel and hammer to pound it down so it seals all around the stone and also around the steel of the leg so that never ever can any water get in. Then it will never go rusty. So, you know, well fair enough. Sounded like a fairly reasonable thing to do so got all the handrails and loads and loads and got them all around and all plumbed and concreted in and all the rest of it. Had a labourer to knock up some concrete you know and do all that. Check everything. Right. Dad said, ‘Better come down and do this lead.’ Ok. So I’ve got plenty of old scrap lead out at Manston so, and a brazier, a coke brazier and great big ladles especially for lead. Took all that down there and I thought right. Righto. I had a look around. Ok. Right. Lead nice and hot and all that and you’ve got to pour it in one once. You can’t pour lead in two or three spurts because as soon as the lead stops pouring it forms a skin. So it must be poured in one lump so that the skin is at the top otherwise, you have various layers of skin and then you haven’t got continuity and that’s where the water can get in. So it has to be poured in one go. So you got this hole. Righto. Poured the lead in, came up nice. Nice sort of bubble above the surface. Right. Step back. Bang. Lead went everywhere. Me, the building. What had happened was the hole was a bit damp. A bit of moisture. So you poured all this molten lead in it turned the moisture that was in the hole to steam. The steam pressure built up. The lead was still slightly molten so it just blew. You can’t hold these things back and there was a whole side of the building, this dark red brick was covered in little sparkling bits of clear shiny lead. Oh my God. So back to Manston. Get my welding gear, my oxyacetylene gear. Every hole had to be heated with the oxy to get it bone dry before you could even think of pouring lead in it and of course dad came out and said, ‘What the bloody hell is all that? Oh well,’ he said, ‘You’d better pick it all off.’ [laughs] Fortunately, lead tends to get, goes dark in a few days particularly in England with all the wet and cold and that. So that day I managed to pick a lot of bits of lead out of the brickwork but a couple of days later it was still there but you couldn’t see it because it had all oxidised so I got away with that. But that was an awful job. all around the outside of the building, you know and dad just accepted the fact that, ‘Reg can do it,’ you know. And Reg, I suppose did it. I mean another job I got was also one of dad’s jobs. He was building a complete new children’s homes for I suppose for children who had lost their parents. I forget the name of it now. It’s well known worldwide. And what had happened the, the site had been prepared by a contractor and the site had originally been surrounded by a very high spiked railing fence like the one I was talking about during the war. Sort of seven foot high or something like that you know and what they’d done of course they’d come in with bull dozers and things and they just pushed the fence out the way and made great heaps of it and then they run in and they’d had to excavate for roads and all the other sorts of things. It was a whole village they’d built and of course my dad got the job of doing it all and of course it hadn’t really occurred to him or anybody else about all these bloody railings. And of course when it, when the, you know and getting near the end of the contract and he was starting to read the fine print of course all these railings had got to be replaced and put back where they were or basically where they were in the first place. But there they were a great tangled heap of various tangled heaps of all these railings. So there was a local blacksmith in Margate and they’d obviously come to him and taken one to him and asked him how much he would charge to do it in the early days. You know, when the contract was being priced. He’d given them a price to do the, to re-straighten them all out and remake them and weld them all up and put them as new. So when they, when it got around to doing the railings, oh right. So they put, you know got a load put into a lorry and took them around to the blacksmiths and he said, ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I only want one at a time. I can’t. No, I can’t. How many have you got?’ And they said, ‘We’ve got a hundred.’ ‘Oh, my goodness gracious me. Oh just bring me one at a time.’ And they said, ‘Well we can’t do that. We’ve got all these hundreds. They’ve all got to be done, you know.’ ‘Oh, it’ll take me a couple of years.’ They said, ‘Well, it can’t take you couple of years, you know. The contract’s got to be finished in a few months.’ So, phone call to me. ‘Could you just pop down?’ I went down to the site and saw dad and he said, ‘See this great — ’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘We want you to sort that lot out and make them.’ I thought, oh my goodness. Where do I start? He said, ‘Well, look there’s, there’s some extras.’ Because we’d got gateways and so you won’t need the railings there but he said, ‘They’ve all got to be straightened out.’ I thought, oh that’s a bit of a job. He said, ‘I’ve had a word with the manager and this is the price they’ve got to have them done. If you can do them for less than that with your chaps and all the costs of oxyacetylene and labouring and so on and so forth you’ll get the difference. You’ll get a bonus.’ He said, ‘I think you can make quite a lot of money on it.’ I said, ‘Oh yeah. How much?’ So he gave me a figure and I said, ‘Oh, yeah. That sounds good.’ I can make some money on that. I said, ‘But I have to organise, you know.’ I’d got two or three blokes working out there by this time. I said, ‘No. We can’t muck about with this. It’s got to be done properly. I’ll have to make some jigs so that you know what you’ve got there comes out. It’s all taken to pieces, it’s all straight out and put in a jig and they’re all —