Leonard Cheshire talking to a boys high school in Palmerston and to Catholic Overseas Aid in Auckland.
Title
Leonard Cheshire talking to a boys high school in Palmerston and to Catholic Overseas Aid in Auckland.
Description
First, talking to Catholic Overseas Aid in Auckland, Leonard starts with mention of previous visit when he got support for a project in India. He talks about his wife's organisation work in Poland, Yugoslavia and other parts of Europe. He gives detail of work in North India. During his second talk to a boys high school in Palmerston, he recalls his service career in World War 2. He mentions his first operational squadron and his New Zealand captain and continues with an account of his time on 617 Squadron and operations against V-weapon sites using Barnes Wallis's bombs and low-level marking attacks. He then goes on to describe being an observer of atomic bombing of Japan and mentions civilian casualties of WW2. Leonard gives advice to audience for the future to prevent further world wars. His talk continues with descriptions of his and his wife's organisations and work with the disabled. Submitted with caption 'Leonard Cheshire talking to Catholic Overseas Aid in Auckland about the Raphael project. He talks about his and Sue Ryder's experiences of serving in wartime and talks about the beginnings of Le Court. He answers questions on the sustainability and set up of the work in Raphael, Dehra Dun, India. Leonard Cheshire talking to a boys school in Palmerston, Australia about his work. He begins with his wartime service and talks about the importance of teamwork. He mentions his skipper, Lofty, who was from New Zealand. He talks about his operations to destroy the V weapons sites when he was Wing Commander of RAF 617 Squadron and being an observer of Nagasaki. He ends with his hopes for world peace, explaining the role disabled people can play in that goal'.
Creator
Date
2020-07-09
Language
Type
Format
Audio recording 00:59:19
Publisher
Rights
This content is property of the Leonard Cheshire Archive which has kindly granted the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive a royalty-free permission to publish it. Please note that it was digitised by a third-party which used technical specifications that may differ from those used by International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive. It has been published here ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre.
Contributor
Identifier
SCheshireGL72021v20029-0001, SCheshireGL72021v20029-0001-Transcript
Transcription
Leonard Cheshire Resonate Project
File title: GLC talking to a boys high school in Palmerston and to Catholic Overseas Aid in Auckland.
Date: ?
Duration: 59mn19s (76.8MB)
Transcription Date: 09.07.20
Archive Number: AV-S_570
Start of Transcription
[i. Talk to Catholic Overseas Aid in Auckland]
00:00: Group Captain Leonard Cheshire (to someone): Now this microphone is only for our own purposes, you won't mind that, will you?
00:04: GLC: Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, first thank you very much indeed for giving me the opportunity of meeting this afternoon, on a sunny Sunday afternoon after all the rain. I got it to my mind that I was coming to speak to a small committee of 10 or 12 people so I came very informally prepared, and I hope you'll allow me to talk as equally informally as I was expecting. And perhaps when I finish talking, we can have a discussion, or if there are any questions you'd like to ask, we can continue for a little while, just in a dialogue.
00:51 It's quite true that 6 years ago, I came to New Zealand from Australia in the hope of getting some support and interest for a particular project in Northern India, in which my wife and I combine to run. I should perhaps explain that - my wife who works under her maiden name, Sue Ryder, is in the South Island at the moment, we arrived on the same day but on different islands, - has her own little organisation which is legally separate but whose aims are fundamentally similar to those of my own Foundation. And she is particularly interested in those who suffered in the War under the Nazis, in the concentration camps. She's built 30 or so little hospitals in Poland, 12 in Yugoslavia, and has a few others in different parts of Europe and Britain. She also looks after all the non-Germans in German jails: Poles and Czechs, and a few Russians, who are there largely as a result of the War.
(2:18) Although the War is a long way away, and Europe is a long way away, nonetheless, you know that the Poles and the Czechs fought side by side with us, for what we hoped was going to be not only an end to oppression and aggression, but for a better world, a free world in which justice, and all the attributes that we want, would flourish. And they, unlike us, were over-run; we'd never known either in Britain or here in New Zealand what it is to be over-run, and occupied, but they did; and in most of their history, they have suffered some form of oppression of one kind or another. And it is quite remarkable to see the effect that this has had on them, their spirit of resistance, the strength, for instance, of their Catholic religion. If you go to mass on Sunday in Poland, you never have to ask what time mass is, you just go and there is mass, and you're very lucky if you get in! The doors are full. Moreover I don't know if it's common to all of us, but the Poles have an attitude of mind, so that if the government says that such and such a procession is not to take place, those who had no intention of taking part in them before, are determined to go! (audience laughs) And when on the 1000th Anniversary of Christianity in Poland, in order to make things difficult, having announced that this was not take place, having put detours on nearly every roads, the more detours they put, the bigger the volumes of people who wanted to get there became. I suppose we are all a little like that at heart. But I would say that in life, when things don't go well, when we are up against it, when you have difficulties in some peculiar way, the best seems to come out of us. We need difficulties in order to mature and to show what truly is in us. But when the War ended for the Poles and the others who had be taken away from their villages and put into these camps, the new life that they had hoped for and fought for, didn't eventuate. They were put into what was called “Displaced Persons Camps”/ D.P. Camps; nobody was allowed to work, you lived on charitable subsistence, you had nothing to do all day, no responsibility, everybody wanted to emigrate either to Canada or the States, or Australia or New Zealand, or Norway. But immigration committees were set up, and the sole criterion was health: 'are you strong enough to hold down a labouring job?' A man might come along and say, 'Well, I helped an RAF escape the Germans, I hid him and I was caught', the answer was 'We are not concerned with what you did, we are concerned with your state of health'.
(5:50) Well, it's not my function today to go into all that befell of people, the innumerable frustrations, endlessly waiting before emigration committees, queuing and inevitably getting a 'no' until finally they came to a point when they really didn't believe anything anybody promised them. So, Sue, my wife, has worked ever since those days in that field. As I say, although it's a long way from us, and although that was a long time ago, nevertheless their cause then was ours, and common to ours; and I also know as you do too, that the same truth still holds good today, that one can't isolate ourselves from what is happening the other side of the world, however remote it may appear to be. Ultimately, we will feel the repercussion whether for good or the opposite. It's clear to us as communication media improve, and technology advances that the world is one world, and the human family one family; and that what happens to one part of it affects the other.
(7:24) And moreover today, the poorer part of the world can see how the other part of the world lives, it’s noted; before the War, I don’t think it did. It nearly saw those of us who went out there, and worked amongst them, but today it knows. And it seems to me that if we want to live in the kind of world for which men have fought and struggled over the centuries, and worked, then we have got to go out and do something to put right that inequality. But of course, the immediate difficulty is to know, how does one do it? And the moment one looks at the problem, it seems so immense that one says, ‘Well, it’s hopeless. The little that I can do, is not even one drop in huge ocean’; well of course, it’s true, it isn’t more than one drop, but the essential thing to me is that it is a drop, and that the ocean after all is nothing but a vast collection of innumerable drops. And therefore, if each of us is willing to do something, it will in fact add up too much more than we ever might imagine.
(9:08) Well now, in my own case, after the War, because I too used to ask myself this question: what can an individual do in this highly organised sophisticated world, where governments seem to predominate, where so much still is set on planning, where we see these immense strides in technology and so on. One wonders where does the individual fit in? I don’t want for us to go through my own story except to say that after a while of wondering and feeling a little lost, not quite knowing what to do, quite unexpectedly I found myself confronted with an elderly man who'd been in the Air Force, with whom I’d had a little association after the War, who was in hospital, dying of cancer, and that was 1948, a year after the National Health Service had been introduced into Britain. You know of course -I expect you know- that Britain is a welfare state, and that if one were to believe what the State says then all our needs -anyway our medical and social needs- are met from the beginning of our lives to the end, on the sole condition that we make our fairly healthy weekly financial contribution. So, it seems very strange then that an elderly man in need of nursing to find that the hospital couldn’t keep him. Of course, one can see the hospital’s point of view, they said ‘We only have 24 beds, we have a long list of people waiting to come in. Here is one man for whom we can do nothing more. How can we block all the people come into that bed for perhaps 6 months, or perhaps a year?’, so they wanted him moved. And I thought that would be quite simple to find somewhere else for him, but I couldn’t. So, I tried to help him by taking him into a largish house that I owned at that time, but that I was trying to sell. For me, it was just a temporary operation, I thought it would help him over his problem, and by the time that had been solved, I would have sold the house.
(12:00) But before he died, he said to me one day, ‘Len’, he said ‘I don’t think that you should sell this house’, he said, ‘I can’t believe that I have come here only for myself! I feel sure that there’s something else behind it. And you will find that there are others like me!’ Well, this didn't make a tremendous impression on me, and in any case, I wasn’t exactly the best of nurses. But I suppose it sowed some sort of a seed, and when, about 10 days later, I was telephoned by the porter of a block of flats in which my aunt lived, well I have several aunts but I had one in particular - still have - who was very fond of telling me what I ought to do, and usually what I was doing was the wrong thing! (audience laughs) And in this case, this -in her eyes- was the wrong thing. And she used to say this not only to me, but on this occasion to the porter in her block of flats! And I used to stop and have a cup of tea with him on my way up to see my aunt, so when she was letting him have hers infused, he whilst entirely agreeing with everything that she said - I think - (more laughter), said to himself that’s the solution to my grandmother-in-law! (more laughter) So that evening, he phoned me about his grandmother-in-law, who was 91, it was a very sad story, I've heard many sad stories since, and discovered that some of them when you go into them are not quite as bad as they sound, but this was a sad story: she was alone, she was bedridden, her husband in hospital, and nobody to do anything for her. So, the next thing I knew was she was down at this house, Le Court.
(14:11) And so, I was more or less launched on an unexpected trail which was to lead me to a problem, I would say almost a whole world that I never knew existed, and that is of the young long-term disabled; men and women, boys and girls, who either have an illness, or some form of disability caused by accident or perhaps by a virus of some kind or some infection, which has rendered them incapacitated; they’ve been through a hospital, the doctors and the physiotherapists, and rehabilitation units, with all their skills have done everything they can, and now there’s nothing more. So a young person, perhaps 22, who may perhaps have dived into a pool that was too shallow one Sunday afternoon, and in our language “broken his neck”, finds that for the whole of his life he’s going to be in a wheelchair. (15:37) You may remember one who came to New Zealand not long ago, called Danny Hearn, he was an inside three-quarter and he mistimed the tackle, and he broke his neck when playing against the All Blacks. He’s not in a wheelchair, but he’s very very heavily disabled. There are others more disabled, and so they have to face up to the fact that for the whole of their lives, they are going to be dependent to a greater or lesser extent upon other people, that whatever hopes they had for their lives, their ambitions, their inward aspirations and so on, are not going to be fulfilled. Well, it’s very difficult for us who are blessed with good health to be able to picture just what it means to a young person, whether this has happened slowly or very suddenly, to be faced with this
realisation.
(16:50) Now I think the world tends to feel that the only thing that can be done for such a person, is to put him in bed somewhere comfortably, and look after him. Not everybody thinks that, youth for instance have an exceptionally fine home, in the Laura Fergusson home, and everybody there is doing some work. But by and large, I think it’s fair to say that, this is what we, in general, tend to think; either we know nothing about them, we don’t realise that they exist, or we think that’s all that can be done. In fact, what they want is the reverse, they do not want to feel that they are going to be perpetually in somebody’s debt. They would like to feel that some day somebody can thank them! That they have some contribution that they can make to us, to the world, just as we all like to feel of our own lives.
(18:01) And I think that the only people -I don't want to generalise too much but I still think this is true- the only people who can really give them this opportunity and the help, and the environment they want is us; whatever our jobs, whatever our vocations whether in politics, a housewife, whatever it may be -us as ordinary individuals, in our spare time. Because their problem is no longer basically a medical one, it's a human one. They need the opportunity to rebuild their lives so that they can express themselves as they want, be themselves, feel at home. And the way that we are trying to do something, in our small field, and unfortunately only our small way, is to provide for those who need it, a home for life. A small home of not more than 30 or 35, where there will be nurses of course, but where the emphasis will be on a normal home-like family life. Where they can take some responsibility in the running of the home, have some say in it, where they can be taught a trade, one man may learn to paint by holding a paint brush in his mouth, we have one man who does this and earns £1700/year because he can paint such good paintings. We have a group of 3 in one of our homes near London who run a typing pool, they maintain commercial standards and charge commercial rates so they are rather slow in their output, and the only way that the one who types can do so is by blowing down a tube, he has a complicated electronic box called a POSM that converts the blow according to its frequency length and so on, into the operation of the key he wants; one of the others feeds the paper in, into the machine, takes it out and dispatches it. These little 2 or 3 have their own business. And although what they do may be very little, nonetheless they feel that they are really making a contribution towards they own keep, 'cause they are the same as you and me.
(20:51) There are others of course, who can't move at all, can never do anything, and one is tempted to think perhaps, what is their contribution? Well, even if their only contribution is to set an example of how to live with such a disability and remain patient, normal and cheerful, and not demanding and exacting, not complaining, then I think none of us in this room would dare to say that their contribution is necessarily less than ours. And I'm sure that many of us have often thought, wondered, what our Lord meant when he was in the temple, and he was watching people putting money into the collection box – a qorban - and he said that the old lady, the widow, with her farthing -a cent, or a fraction of a cent- had given more than all the wealthy with their big gifts; well, he wasn't speaking in parables, he wasn't speaking metaphorically, he was speaking literally. And therefore, what he said must not only be true, literally true, but it must be something that we need to learn. And I think it means that in reality, the value of a contribution, of anything we do, is not in the outward appearance, not in the size of the gift, but in its intention and what it has cost us. So, we seem to be faced with this paradox, it always appears when our Lord reveals himself to us. But to feed the hungry of the world, you clearly need millions of dollars, but nonetheless the contribution of the small person, which has cost them a lot to give, is the most valuable and achieve the most.
(23:18) So that leaves us with the truth that each of us has a contribution to make. And if we want peace in the world -which we all do- then we have the means of contributing for it, and what we must never do, is be put off because all that we can contribute seems too inadequate. We should not, I think, worry about the size of the problem ahead of us, if we look too far ahead, we feel it's useless, we won't walk, we won't take one step; we should only be concerned with that one little step. And we can never tell, in our own lives, individually and collectively, where it will finally finish us up.
(24:06) Well as I said, my wife and I have come to New Zealand and Australia because we need help for a settlement that we run in Northern India. Between us, we have I think about 150 or 160 little homes, averaging perhaps 30 or 40 in each, in South America and different countries of Africa, the Middle East and Bethlehem; 18 homes in India, and various countries in Asia, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, as well as 55 homes in Britain. And all those homes, regardless of the country, are locally run and financed, we've never gone anywhere with money and said 'Here is some money, will you start?'; we've always gone with nothing and said 'Here is a problem, this is the way it might perhaps be tackled, would you feel like tackling it?'. And that is the way that the homes have grown up. Even I might say, in the middle of Biafra -as it was once called- when they were totally cut off, when there was no way in, except through the night airlifts run by Inter-Church Aid -Catholics- by Caritas and the other denominations, and to a lesser degree by the Red Cross, in spite of that, in spite of all their privations, the committee never let go of those 30 crippled children, and actually increased the size of the home during the period of the war.
(25:49) To me, it is a symbol of the goodwill that you find in all human hearts, in any country, regardless of belief or colour, or anything else. But waiting only to be called out, in my opinion, not by the great appeals but by the individual; and what I think is the most important thing, is to be faced with one individual who is in need. Because when you are face to face with John or whoever it is, and you can see that he needs you, you can’t walk away; you can walk away from a big appeal but you can’t walk away from an individual. And the tragedy perhaps is that we don’t often enough come face to face with the individual.
(26:51) Well, this home in Northern India, is the one exception to the rule we have, that homes are locally financed, for 2 reasons. Firstly, because it’s much too large, it’s like a village of different homes, with leprosy patients in one, mentally retarded children or defected children in another, homeless children in yet another, and then 2 hospital wings; like a little village of individual homes. It’s much too large to be locally financed, and in any case the town -Dehradun- already has its own home, which the citizens do finance. But also, it’s there, as we hope, to encourage the homes in Asia to propagate themselves and expand; and also, of course, as a sign of the fact that we are genuinely concerned and interested in them. But the way we finance it, is the same basically as all the other homes, it’s person to person; we don’t ask for the large donations, we don’t even ask for donations to a central pool. But we try to find groups of people, or schools, or clubs, who would adopt one of the patients, one of the children, one of the leprosy sufferers, raise by some means or another $100 that it costs to keep him, feed him, nurse him for the year, receive a photograph of him, a little life history, and a letter once or twice a year so that there’s a personal link between the 2.
(28:44) And I’m sure you can imagine what it means to somebody far away in India who feels abandoned, whose life has been broken by disability, suddenly to realise that in New Zealand or Australia, or wherever it might be, there is a group of people interested enough to find the money to keep him, and to axing letters, and as it were to know him and support him as an individual. It may be a very little link, but it is a link, and I can testify myself what a great difference it makes to those who live and work in that settlement.
(29:32) Well, as I said in the beginning, it’s a very great pleasure to me to be allowed to meet you today, because I know how many organisations and orders and so on you represent, and how your own lives, in one way or another, are devoted to the kind of thing that I’ve been trying to describe. I thank you most warmly for this opportunity, and if there were any questions or any discussions, or anything, I’d be very happy. Thank you very much.
[30:04 to 30:06: audience applauds]
30:07: GLC: …personally I think, instead of the rich countries giving aid, the correct thing would be for every nation to be taxed according to its national income, so there’s a world tax that deals with these problems in the same way that there’s a national tax. And then, instead of the poorer countries feeling that they are beneficiaries, and feeling that even though it isn’t spelt out, there’s a bit of a political string -which to be honest I think there slightly is in most cases- you would have a different situation. And until we get to that point, we won’t really get a satisfactory solution to it.
30:49: GLC: You ask me whether people are generous enough to fulfill all our requirements. Your first question, ‘can we keep pace?’, I hope we can keep pace because we are throwing everything onto local groups, they run their own homes, it’s up to them. This is the essential basis of everything we do. It doesn’t depend upon a central administration or upon me, though we are trying to build up a liaison between them. Well, of course, people’s generosity is pulled out into so many fields, we can only expect a very small share of it. I don't so much think that it’s the money that’s lacking, it’s not the money that counts so much, it’s the people. And if you are given the people, they will find the ways and means of finding the money, and everything else that is needed. We are essentially trying to get people to do things rather than asking them to give money. And in every home, we have a nucleus of permanent staff, or paid; but we supplement that to a large extent by what we call “the slaves”, and those are the voluntary helpers, we may get university students come for a month, or for weekends on their holidays, and “slave” as it’s called.
32:05: Man: That’s good.
32:06: GLC: Oh, I think that’s wonderful! If you run a local home, people can see it, so that the appeal is not on your ability to make an appeal, it’s on them seeing the patients, that's what I was trying to say. The moment you’re thrown back upon having to make an appeal, a lot of your funds go towards the expenses of raising money, and we won’t do it; I mean, we are not trying to argue that others shouldn’t, but we won’t. And we say that virtually everything given must go to the person it’s been given for. And therefore, we must do our organising on a voluntary basis, and not resort to paying appeals organisers, buying advertising space, and so on. There may be one reason why we didn’t receive so much publicity this time.
32:54: GLC: The local Indian Authority, I find, extremely cooperative. They actually gave us 30 acres of land where Raphael is situated. We don’t get much in terms of governmental grant. But you see, if you did get a governmental grant, you’re only taking it away from another field where it’s needed. So, we don’t really try to get it, except we do get a subsidy of quite a shilling a day, which is quite a lot by their standards, for some of the leprosy homes. But the Indians, we find, particularly good at building up their own organisations. We started with £100 and nothing, not an acre of land or anything in India in [19]55, and they built up 18 homes entirely under their own efforts. And when we offered Ceylon for their first home, £300 to get started, they said ’No, we’d rather bank the goodwill’. I find them remarkable.
33:54: GLC: Yes, you’re asking whether it will continue after our lives. Well, unquestionably, because it does not depend upon me. Each local committee runs itself and is responsible to a central trust in that country. And there’s no question about…My wife, it’s a bit more difficult because she’s operating in Eastern Block countries, prison visiting, that’s more difficult to delegate. But I can’t believe that it would..., I mean, there are so many people behind her, and the whole intention is to build up an organisation to continue it, or else you build nothing.
[ii - GLC talking to a boys high school in Palmerston]
34:31: GLC: Mr Mayor, Headmaster, ladies and gentlemen. I too wasn't expecting to have the pleasure of coming along to meet you, nor to talk to you, but I'm very appreciative of the opportunity of doing so; and of meeting you informally and seeing a little of the school. I'd also like to thank the Mayor very much for your kindness in giving up this morning to be here, very kind of you. One of the reasons why I've come to New Zealand is in the hope of softening up the ground a little before the British Lions come in July. I think I can succeed.
35:28: A man: I don’t think you’ll make much impression here!
35:33: GLC: Anyway, I hope you'll give them the warm welcome that I've had in my last 4 days in Auckland, and now here.
Well, I'm not quite certain whether you'd like me to talk about the War, whether you'd like me to talk about what we are doing since for the disabled in different parts of the world, or a little bit of both? What do you think?
36:00: Man: A little bit of both.
36:02: GLC: A little bit of both.
36:04: GLC: Well, the War hit me -if I may put it that way- when I was just finishing as an undergraduate at Oxford -which is the university- and like most of you I had my own hopes and plans for what I was going to do, but the war came along and then that was that, and there was no option but to fight it. I joined the Air Force because I'd been a member of the Air Squadron at Oxford. And in the Air Force they had a very kind and thoughtful system when you were going through your training, they invited you to put down your choice for where you wanted to go as an operational pilot; and we used to sit down for quite a long time, scratch our heads, and decide where we wanted to go. The one place I did not want to go was “Bomber Command” because the idea didn't particularly appeal to me. But having given my 3 choices, none of which were Bomber Command, I found myself posted to Bomber Command. Well, you wonder what on earth was the idea to invite me to make this choice. Well, I remember turning up at my first operational station, in Yorkshire, just about the time of Dunkirk, early June 1940, with some apprehension. But of course, the moment I turned up on the station, I found everybody taking everything perfectly normally, and as a matter of course, and there was no room for anybody to be different from the others and look worried.
(38:00) But I learned what I think most of us learn, that things that you don't look forward to often don't turn out as bad as you feared. And moreover if you're a member of a team, a member of others doing the same thing, then life is a great deal easier, you find that you can go along in a way that you never thought you would.
(38:28) I had a piece of great good fortune in my squadron, the system was that you had the captain of the aircraft, and he had what he called a “Second Dicky”, that means a second pilot; and you did a few trips with him, and when they thought the time was right, you would launch on your own. All captains used to fly the aircraft over enemy territory, and when the enemy coast was safely behind, they gave their Second Dicky a kick -usually on the backside- and say 'Get into the seat'; so that when you came to do your first operation, you were flying for the first time in what you might call the “hot seat”.
(39:25) But my captain was a New Zealander, he was 6ft5, and his name was Long (audience reacts and laughs). So, what do you think he was called? (someone says Shorty) Shorty? He could have been called Shorty, but he was called Lofty. Well, Lofty was different, and on my 2nd trip, as we got within sight of the enemy coast, he gave me a kick, and said 'Get into the seat, Cheese' - he used to call me- 'and fly!' Well, I've never forgotten the debt that I owe Lofty, because every time we flew, he let me do part of the flying over enemy territory, and through flak, so when I got to fly on my own, I was familiar a little with what it was like, and to me that was a very great thing to do, and I hope that I have not forgotten the debt that I owe Lofty.
(40:43) I served for approximately 4 years in Bomber Command, and was finally posted -or anyway volunteered to go, because this is what I wanted, and you had to be a volunteer to get into that squadron- to 617 which was known as the Dambusters. You may possibly have seen the film or read the book; I don't know. But a lot of us had thought during the war that necessary though heavy bombing was, because it was the only way of reaching and destroying the tanks and guns before they could get out onto the battlefield where they had almost overwhelming superiority against the Ally forces; necessary though heavy bombing was we could have done it with more precision, and with less damage to civilian lives.
(41:46) And when 617 was given the job of blowing up the V3 sites, you may have heard of the V1s and the V2s, the V1s were a pilot-less aircraft and the V2s were a rocket, and none were precisely popular in England at the time, there was also a V3 that was being built and this was a large gun capable of firing a 500lb shell every minute into London; and we were told that if this happened, the Government would have to be evacuated. Well, we were all junior pilots in those days, and junior pilots don't always have the respect for authority -if Mr Mayor will forgive me for saying this- but perhaps they might, and we used to say that if the Government were evacuated we couldn't see that the war effort would be very seriously damaged (some stirring in the audience). Nevertheless, our job was to destroy these sites. And these guns had been put under 50ft of reinforced concrete by the Nazis, and there was no bomb that could possibly touch 50ft of reinforced concrete. But Barnes Wallis, the scientist, the very famous scientist, who I might say had practically every invention except the Wellington that he's ever made rejected by the Government -I suppose- but has still kept on inventing, and still is today at the age of 83, who designed the “Skipping Bomb” that blew up the dams, designed a deep penetration bomb which he called “Tallboy”, which if dropped from 16000ft, would penetrate 90ft of earth, and blow up these guns from underneath. Hitler had not thought of putting 50ft of reinforced concrete underneath them. The only difficulty was that he wanted this bomb to drop within 15 yards of the perimeter of the site; and when I said to him that doing it from 16000ft wasn't going to be easy, he said, 'Oh...well, if you're going to pepper the whole of Northern France with my bombs, then there is not much object of my building them, is there?' So that was all the sympathy we got from Barnes Wallis.
(44:36) Nevertheless, we had to do it. So we had to devise a means of doing what most of us in the squadron had in fact wanted to do from the beginning of Bomber Command, and that was: precision bombing, picking out a target and destroying that, and leaving the houses around it. And in order to do it, it was necessary, in our opinion, to drop a marker, it's a coloured flare if you'd like that would burn for about 15mn, a magnesium flare of a particular colour for the particular night, so as to make certain that the Germans didn't put down a decoy marker somewhere. Absolutely dead centre in the target so that all the heavy bombers up above could see it, and in order to do this, we considered the only way was to come in point blank at extreme low level, and dive from it. And this was the technique we used.
(45:52) We were given for our first target an aero-engine factory at Limoges in France. Limoges is a town where they make beautiful china, but the Germans had taken over one of their factories and were building a very important aero-engine -or important to them- in it. The difficulty was that there were 500 girls in the night shift when we came over to bomb, and we had to get them out. And the way we did that was to do 3 very low-level runs at about 25ft in a Lancaster -which is a 4-engine bomber- above the factory, hoping that they would take the hint. (audience reacts) Well, fortunately, as we discovered later, they did, except for one girl who was curious by nature -which doesn't always pay- and she didn't go further than the ditch, put herself down in the ditch to see what was going to happen, and she was hit by a splinter but not too badly; otherwise, they all streamed away across the fields.
(47:10) And so bit by bit, we perfected this technique until we were fortunately able to blow up these 5 V3 sites which had been built in Northern France, in the Pas-de-Calais, with Barnes Wallis' bombs.
(47:24) Following that, as your Mayor's just told you, I was posted out to the Pacific, and finally took part in the last operations of the War: the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. And that of course, was a very different type of operation. I think all of you have seen photographs or films of an atomic bomb, and you don't need me to describe what it looks like; To us as we went out on that attack, I think the only thing that concerned us was -although this may sound hard- was ending the war, because every single day I don't know how many lives were being lost, in thousands not in hundreds. And at that time, the only way of winning the war was to mount an invasion against Japan, and that was going to cost an estimated 2.5 million lives, the estimate might have turned out in the event to have been wrong, I don't know, but certainly the loss of lives and that invasion on both sides would have been a million plus [48:47 unclear] a few tens of thousands. So, for us, I think, that was the only thing that mattered. I think today, probably, one remembers the bomb, one remembers the bombing, but one has forgotten why that war had to be fought.(49:19) Other wars are fought that one feels are not necessary, but that one, 1939, was a matter of life and death. You probably know that in Hitler's concentration camps, off the battlefield altogether, 20 millions men, women and children were deliberately exterminated, put to death, that was part of Hitler's plan to subjugate the world, and dominate it by his new ideas and his desire to re-people the world with what he considered the best type of mankind, the Aryans, the North Europeans.
(50:00) In a peaceful age today, and sitting in this classroom, it is difficult to believe that such a situation could arise, but unfortunately it did. And one can't help feeling that had governments and politicians been more realistic, we would never have got to the position where Hitler was so strong and able, practically, to bring us all to our knees. But be that as it may, it seems to me that the one essential is that we should see there's never going to be a World War again. All of us want to live in a world that is peaceful and just, and free. But the question is, what can we do about it? What can you or I do to achieve that? And you, after all, are the architects of the future world, in the same way, I suppose, we were when we were the same age. I think that most of us feel that the problem is so great, that only something which is on a world basis, which is a major cause or crusade or campaign, can achieve anything in the goal or towards the goal of world peace. We think perhaps that only governments or big organisations have any say in it, but I don't think that's true. What I think is true is that each of us has a part to play, each of us has an essential part to play, and the mere fact that what we can do seems very little and very inadequate, is no reason for not doing it. But each of us, in our own way, according to our own opportunities, must do something to make the world a better place, at least for somebody.
(52:35) And above all, we must go out and try and do something to put right the inequality in the world. Some nations have comparatively so much and others comparatively so little. So long as that situation exists -the poor and the rich- the world will never live at peace, because the poor will bear resentment towards us, and will feel we are taking everything at their expense. And it allows those who have political ambition to seize upon this situation and use those who are poor and hungry, and who don't get their rights, to use them as a mean of achieving their political ambition. It must be seen that we are really interested in them, and within our resources willing to do something.
(53:35) And I would say one thing that impressed me more than anything since I started the work upon which my wife and I are engaged, is the deep concern that you find everywhere amongst the young generation, amongst you -schools and universities- in the needs of other people; I don't think that existed in my day when I was at school, this is something new since the War, which offers us, in my opinion, real hope for a better world, for the future.
(54:15) Without going into details, our work lies amongst the disabled, the young disabled, people in their teens, twenties and thirties who suffered either an accident and become paralysed: perhaps dived into a pool that was too shallow and hit a rock and broken their neck, or a car accident; or an illness like Polio or Multiple Sclerosis, or heart condition or something. Something which leaves them semi-paralysed and unable to manage on their own, in other words, dependent upon other people. And we're trying to give them a home for life, where they really will feel at home, feel that it is their home, where they can be themselves, and above all have the opportunity to do something. Because everyone of us, you and I, have our hopes, our ambitions for life, we want to feel our life is going to be a good one, a useful one, that it's going to mean something to somebody else. The one thing we don't want is to feel that we are dependent upon other people, always having to receive and say 'thank you': 'Will you please take me to the bathroom, will you please please bring my lunch, could you cut this out for me, could you light the cigarette for me'; none of us want to be in that situation, we want to feel independent. And in our small way, we are trying to do this
(55:52) We have between us about 150 homes in different parts of the world. My wife works largely in Poland and Yugoslavia, the countries that were overrun by the Nazis, and had their countries virtually destroyed. My own homes are in about 20 countries: Africa, India, Asia, South America, the Middle East, Spain, Portugal, 55 homes in Britain; you wouldn't think that in Britain with the highly developed National Health Service there is a need but there is; because all the State can do is to put you in a hospital.
(56:28) All those homes are locally run and financed except one, in Northern India, a very large home which we used to supplement, but the 18 Indian homes do. We look after 120 lepers - leprosy patients - 80 mentally defective children, 60 orphans, and a hospital ward for about 60, some TBs and others disabled in one way or another. And that is financed -the only home that's not locally financed- it's financed largely from support groups in Australia and New Zealand; and the way we do it is not by asking for the large donations, but we ask people, groups of people, a school, a club, or whatever you like, families in one street, to adopt one of the children or one of the leprosy patients, to raise if they can the $100 that it costs to keep him, feed him, nurse him and bring him up for one year; and you receive a photograph of Shanti or whatever her name is, her life history and you get a letter once or twice a year so that you know him as a person; and he knows that far away in Australia, someone is interested enough, and to be behind him. And I'm sure you'll appreciate what a difference that makes to somebody who's helpless and otherwise friendless. And in my opinion, it's precisely this personal interest that counts. It's not so much giving to the big organisations, it's being interested in one individual; that may seem very, very little, and you may say 'It's just one drop in a huge ocean', it is, but after all the ocean is made up of nothing but little drops. And I think that if each of us all over the world is willing to add our little drop then eventually we may achieve what we all want: a better world, a world free of war, free of inequality and of some of the injustice that we see around us, far away as well as at home. And I'd like to say how much I appreciate the opportunity of having been allowed to speak to you and of meeting you for these few moments together, my first visit to your city. Mr Mayor, thank you for coming along and for your sponsorship. And thank you Headmaster for your invitation. And to you may I offer my warmest wishes not only to your school but for your future careers wherever that may take you. Thank you very much.
59:18: Applause
59:18: Speech Ends
59:19: End of recording
End of Transcription
File title: GLC talking to a boys high school in Palmerston and to Catholic Overseas Aid in Auckland.
Date: ?
Duration: 59mn19s (76.8MB)
Transcription Date: 09.07.20
Archive Number: AV-S_570
Start of Transcription
[i. Talk to Catholic Overseas Aid in Auckland]
00:00: Group Captain Leonard Cheshire (to someone): Now this microphone is only for our own purposes, you won't mind that, will you?
00:04: GLC: Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, first thank you very much indeed for giving me the opportunity of meeting this afternoon, on a sunny Sunday afternoon after all the rain. I got it to my mind that I was coming to speak to a small committee of 10 or 12 people so I came very informally prepared, and I hope you'll allow me to talk as equally informally as I was expecting. And perhaps when I finish talking, we can have a discussion, or if there are any questions you'd like to ask, we can continue for a little while, just in a dialogue.
00:51 It's quite true that 6 years ago, I came to New Zealand from Australia in the hope of getting some support and interest for a particular project in Northern India, in which my wife and I combine to run. I should perhaps explain that - my wife who works under her maiden name, Sue Ryder, is in the South Island at the moment, we arrived on the same day but on different islands, - has her own little organisation which is legally separate but whose aims are fundamentally similar to those of my own Foundation. And she is particularly interested in those who suffered in the War under the Nazis, in the concentration camps. She's built 30 or so little hospitals in Poland, 12 in Yugoslavia, and has a few others in different parts of Europe and Britain. She also looks after all the non-Germans in German jails: Poles and Czechs, and a few Russians, who are there largely as a result of the War.
(2:18) Although the War is a long way away, and Europe is a long way away, nonetheless, you know that the Poles and the Czechs fought side by side with us, for what we hoped was going to be not only an end to oppression and aggression, but for a better world, a free world in which justice, and all the attributes that we want, would flourish. And they, unlike us, were over-run; we'd never known either in Britain or here in New Zealand what it is to be over-run, and occupied, but they did; and in most of their history, they have suffered some form of oppression of one kind or another. And it is quite remarkable to see the effect that this has had on them, their spirit of resistance, the strength, for instance, of their Catholic religion. If you go to mass on Sunday in Poland, you never have to ask what time mass is, you just go and there is mass, and you're very lucky if you get in! The doors are full. Moreover I don't know if it's common to all of us, but the Poles have an attitude of mind, so that if the government says that such and such a procession is not to take place, those who had no intention of taking part in them before, are determined to go! (audience laughs) And when on the 1000th Anniversary of Christianity in Poland, in order to make things difficult, having announced that this was not take place, having put detours on nearly every roads, the more detours they put, the bigger the volumes of people who wanted to get there became. I suppose we are all a little like that at heart. But I would say that in life, when things don't go well, when we are up against it, when you have difficulties in some peculiar way, the best seems to come out of us. We need difficulties in order to mature and to show what truly is in us. But when the War ended for the Poles and the others who had be taken away from their villages and put into these camps, the new life that they had hoped for and fought for, didn't eventuate. They were put into what was called “Displaced Persons Camps”/ D.P. Camps; nobody was allowed to work, you lived on charitable subsistence, you had nothing to do all day, no responsibility, everybody wanted to emigrate either to Canada or the States, or Australia or New Zealand, or Norway. But immigration committees were set up, and the sole criterion was health: 'are you strong enough to hold down a labouring job?' A man might come along and say, 'Well, I helped an RAF escape the Germans, I hid him and I was caught', the answer was 'We are not concerned with what you did, we are concerned with your state of health'.
(5:50) Well, it's not my function today to go into all that befell of people, the innumerable frustrations, endlessly waiting before emigration committees, queuing and inevitably getting a 'no' until finally they came to a point when they really didn't believe anything anybody promised them. So, Sue, my wife, has worked ever since those days in that field. As I say, although it's a long way from us, and although that was a long time ago, nevertheless their cause then was ours, and common to ours; and I also know as you do too, that the same truth still holds good today, that one can't isolate ourselves from what is happening the other side of the world, however remote it may appear to be. Ultimately, we will feel the repercussion whether for good or the opposite. It's clear to us as communication media improve, and technology advances that the world is one world, and the human family one family; and that what happens to one part of it affects the other.
(7:24) And moreover today, the poorer part of the world can see how the other part of the world lives, it’s noted; before the War, I don’t think it did. It nearly saw those of us who went out there, and worked amongst them, but today it knows. And it seems to me that if we want to live in the kind of world for which men have fought and struggled over the centuries, and worked, then we have got to go out and do something to put right that inequality. But of course, the immediate difficulty is to know, how does one do it? And the moment one looks at the problem, it seems so immense that one says, ‘Well, it’s hopeless. The little that I can do, is not even one drop in huge ocean’; well of course, it’s true, it isn’t more than one drop, but the essential thing to me is that it is a drop, and that the ocean after all is nothing but a vast collection of innumerable drops. And therefore, if each of us is willing to do something, it will in fact add up too much more than we ever might imagine.
(9:08) Well now, in my own case, after the War, because I too used to ask myself this question: what can an individual do in this highly organised sophisticated world, where governments seem to predominate, where so much still is set on planning, where we see these immense strides in technology and so on. One wonders where does the individual fit in? I don’t want for us to go through my own story except to say that after a while of wondering and feeling a little lost, not quite knowing what to do, quite unexpectedly I found myself confronted with an elderly man who'd been in the Air Force, with whom I’d had a little association after the War, who was in hospital, dying of cancer, and that was 1948, a year after the National Health Service had been introduced into Britain. You know of course -I expect you know- that Britain is a welfare state, and that if one were to believe what the State says then all our needs -anyway our medical and social needs- are met from the beginning of our lives to the end, on the sole condition that we make our fairly healthy weekly financial contribution. So, it seems very strange then that an elderly man in need of nursing to find that the hospital couldn’t keep him. Of course, one can see the hospital’s point of view, they said ‘We only have 24 beds, we have a long list of people waiting to come in. Here is one man for whom we can do nothing more. How can we block all the people come into that bed for perhaps 6 months, or perhaps a year?’, so they wanted him moved. And I thought that would be quite simple to find somewhere else for him, but I couldn’t. So, I tried to help him by taking him into a largish house that I owned at that time, but that I was trying to sell. For me, it was just a temporary operation, I thought it would help him over his problem, and by the time that had been solved, I would have sold the house.
(12:00) But before he died, he said to me one day, ‘Len’, he said ‘I don’t think that you should sell this house’, he said, ‘I can’t believe that I have come here only for myself! I feel sure that there’s something else behind it. And you will find that there are others like me!’ Well, this didn't make a tremendous impression on me, and in any case, I wasn’t exactly the best of nurses. But I suppose it sowed some sort of a seed, and when, about 10 days later, I was telephoned by the porter of a block of flats in which my aunt lived, well I have several aunts but I had one in particular - still have - who was very fond of telling me what I ought to do, and usually what I was doing was the wrong thing! (audience laughs) And in this case, this -in her eyes- was the wrong thing. And she used to say this not only to me, but on this occasion to the porter in her block of flats! And I used to stop and have a cup of tea with him on my way up to see my aunt, so when she was letting him have hers infused, he whilst entirely agreeing with everything that she said - I think - (more laughter), said to himself that’s the solution to my grandmother-in-law! (more laughter) So that evening, he phoned me about his grandmother-in-law, who was 91, it was a very sad story, I've heard many sad stories since, and discovered that some of them when you go into them are not quite as bad as they sound, but this was a sad story: she was alone, she was bedridden, her husband in hospital, and nobody to do anything for her. So, the next thing I knew was she was down at this house, Le Court.
(14:11) And so, I was more or less launched on an unexpected trail which was to lead me to a problem, I would say almost a whole world that I never knew existed, and that is of the young long-term disabled; men and women, boys and girls, who either have an illness, or some form of disability caused by accident or perhaps by a virus of some kind or some infection, which has rendered them incapacitated; they’ve been through a hospital, the doctors and the physiotherapists, and rehabilitation units, with all their skills have done everything they can, and now there’s nothing more. So a young person, perhaps 22, who may perhaps have dived into a pool that was too shallow one Sunday afternoon, and in our language “broken his neck”, finds that for the whole of his life he’s going to be in a wheelchair. (15:37) You may remember one who came to New Zealand not long ago, called Danny Hearn, he was an inside three-quarter and he mistimed the tackle, and he broke his neck when playing against the All Blacks. He’s not in a wheelchair, but he’s very very heavily disabled. There are others more disabled, and so they have to face up to the fact that for the whole of their lives, they are going to be dependent to a greater or lesser extent upon other people, that whatever hopes they had for their lives, their ambitions, their inward aspirations and so on, are not going to be fulfilled. Well, it’s very difficult for us who are blessed with good health to be able to picture just what it means to a young person, whether this has happened slowly or very suddenly, to be faced with this
realisation.
(16:50) Now I think the world tends to feel that the only thing that can be done for such a person, is to put him in bed somewhere comfortably, and look after him. Not everybody thinks that, youth for instance have an exceptionally fine home, in the Laura Fergusson home, and everybody there is doing some work. But by and large, I think it’s fair to say that, this is what we, in general, tend to think; either we know nothing about them, we don’t realise that they exist, or we think that’s all that can be done. In fact, what they want is the reverse, they do not want to feel that they are going to be perpetually in somebody’s debt. They would like to feel that some day somebody can thank them! That they have some contribution that they can make to us, to the world, just as we all like to feel of our own lives.
(18:01) And I think that the only people -I don't want to generalise too much but I still think this is true- the only people who can really give them this opportunity and the help, and the environment they want is us; whatever our jobs, whatever our vocations whether in politics, a housewife, whatever it may be -us as ordinary individuals, in our spare time. Because their problem is no longer basically a medical one, it's a human one. They need the opportunity to rebuild their lives so that they can express themselves as they want, be themselves, feel at home. And the way that we are trying to do something, in our small field, and unfortunately only our small way, is to provide for those who need it, a home for life. A small home of not more than 30 or 35, where there will be nurses of course, but where the emphasis will be on a normal home-like family life. Where they can take some responsibility in the running of the home, have some say in it, where they can be taught a trade, one man may learn to paint by holding a paint brush in his mouth, we have one man who does this and earns £1700/year because he can paint such good paintings. We have a group of 3 in one of our homes near London who run a typing pool, they maintain commercial standards and charge commercial rates so they are rather slow in their output, and the only way that the one who types can do so is by blowing down a tube, he has a complicated electronic box called a POSM that converts the blow according to its frequency length and so on, into the operation of the key he wants; one of the others feeds the paper in, into the machine, takes it out and dispatches it. These little 2 or 3 have their own business. And although what they do may be very little, nonetheless they feel that they are really making a contribution towards they own keep, 'cause they are the same as you and me.
(20:51) There are others of course, who can't move at all, can never do anything, and one is tempted to think perhaps, what is their contribution? Well, even if their only contribution is to set an example of how to live with such a disability and remain patient, normal and cheerful, and not demanding and exacting, not complaining, then I think none of us in this room would dare to say that their contribution is necessarily less than ours. And I'm sure that many of us have often thought, wondered, what our Lord meant when he was in the temple, and he was watching people putting money into the collection box – a qorban - and he said that the old lady, the widow, with her farthing -a cent, or a fraction of a cent- had given more than all the wealthy with their big gifts; well, he wasn't speaking in parables, he wasn't speaking metaphorically, he was speaking literally. And therefore, what he said must not only be true, literally true, but it must be something that we need to learn. And I think it means that in reality, the value of a contribution, of anything we do, is not in the outward appearance, not in the size of the gift, but in its intention and what it has cost us. So, we seem to be faced with this paradox, it always appears when our Lord reveals himself to us. But to feed the hungry of the world, you clearly need millions of dollars, but nonetheless the contribution of the small person, which has cost them a lot to give, is the most valuable and achieve the most.
(23:18) So that leaves us with the truth that each of us has a contribution to make. And if we want peace in the world -which we all do- then we have the means of contributing for it, and what we must never do, is be put off because all that we can contribute seems too inadequate. We should not, I think, worry about the size of the problem ahead of us, if we look too far ahead, we feel it's useless, we won't walk, we won't take one step; we should only be concerned with that one little step. And we can never tell, in our own lives, individually and collectively, where it will finally finish us up.
(24:06) Well as I said, my wife and I have come to New Zealand and Australia because we need help for a settlement that we run in Northern India. Between us, we have I think about 150 or 160 little homes, averaging perhaps 30 or 40 in each, in South America and different countries of Africa, the Middle East and Bethlehem; 18 homes in India, and various countries in Asia, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, as well as 55 homes in Britain. And all those homes, regardless of the country, are locally run and financed, we've never gone anywhere with money and said 'Here is some money, will you start?'; we've always gone with nothing and said 'Here is a problem, this is the way it might perhaps be tackled, would you feel like tackling it?'. And that is the way that the homes have grown up. Even I might say, in the middle of Biafra -as it was once called- when they were totally cut off, when there was no way in, except through the night airlifts run by Inter-Church Aid -Catholics- by Caritas and the other denominations, and to a lesser degree by the Red Cross, in spite of that, in spite of all their privations, the committee never let go of those 30 crippled children, and actually increased the size of the home during the period of the war.
(25:49) To me, it is a symbol of the goodwill that you find in all human hearts, in any country, regardless of belief or colour, or anything else. But waiting only to be called out, in my opinion, not by the great appeals but by the individual; and what I think is the most important thing, is to be faced with one individual who is in need. Because when you are face to face with John or whoever it is, and you can see that he needs you, you can’t walk away; you can walk away from a big appeal but you can’t walk away from an individual. And the tragedy perhaps is that we don’t often enough come face to face with the individual.
(26:51) Well, this home in Northern India, is the one exception to the rule we have, that homes are locally financed, for 2 reasons. Firstly, because it’s much too large, it’s like a village of different homes, with leprosy patients in one, mentally retarded children or defected children in another, homeless children in yet another, and then 2 hospital wings; like a little village of individual homes. It’s much too large to be locally financed, and in any case the town -Dehradun- already has its own home, which the citizens do finance. But also, it’s there, as we hope, to encourage the homes in Asia to propagate themselves and expand; and also, of course, as a sign of the fact that we are genuinely concerned and interested in them. But the way we finance it, is the same basically as all the other homes, it’s person to person; we don’t ask for the large donations, we don’t even ask for donations to a central pool. But we try to find groups of people, or schools, or clubs, who would adopt one of the patients, one of the children, one of the leprosy sufferers, raise by some means or another $100 that it costs to keep him, feed him, nurse him for the year, receive a photograph of him, a little life history, and a letter once or twice a year so that there’s a personal link between the 2.
(28:44) And I’m sure you can imagine what it means to somebody far away in India who feels abandoned, whose life has been broken by disability, suddenly to realise that in New Zealand or Australia, or wherever it might be, there is a group of people interested enough to find the money to keep him, and to axing letters, and as it were to know him and support him as an individual. It may be a very little link, but it is a link, and I can testify myself what a great difference it makes to those who live and work in that settlement.
(29:32) Well, as I said in the beginning, it’s a very great pleasure to me to be allowed to meet you today, because I know how many organisations and orders and so on you represent, and how your own lives, in one way or another, are devoted to the kind of thing that I’ve been trying to describe. I thank you most warmly for this opportunity, and if there were any questions or any discussions, or anything, I’d be very happy. Thank you very much.
[30:04 to 30:06: audience applauds]
30:07: GLC: …personally I think, instead of the rich countries giving aid, the correct thing would be for every nation to be taxed according to its national income, so there’s a world tax that deals with these problems in the same way that there’s a national tax. And then, instead of the poorer countries feeling that they are beneficiaries, and feeling that even though it isn’t spelt out, there’s a bit of a political string -which to be honest I think there slightly is in most cases- you would have a different situation. And until we get to that point, we won’t really get a satisfactory solution to it.
30:49: GLC: You ask me whether people are generous enough to fulfill all our requirements. Your first question, ‘can we keep pace?’, I hope we can keep pace because we are throwing everything onto local groups, they run their own homes, it’s up to them. This is the essential basis of everything we do. It doesn’t depend upon a central administration or upon me, though we are trying to build up a liaison between them. Well, of course, people’s generosity is pulled out into so many fields, we can only expect a very small share of it. I don't so much think that it’s the money that’s lacking, it’s not the money that counts so much, it’s the people. And if you are given the people, they will find the ways and means of finding the money, and everything else that is needed. We are essentially trying to get people to do things rather than asking them to give money. And in every home, we have a nucleus of permanent staff, or paid; but we supplement that to a large extent by what we call “the slaves”, and those are the voluntary helpers, we may get university students come for a month, or for weekends on their holidays, and “slave” as it’s called.
32:05: Man: That’s good.
32:06: GLC: Oh, I think that’s wonderful! If you run a local home, people can see it, so that the appeal is not on your ability to make an appeal, it’s on them seeing the patients, that's what I was trying to say. The moment you’re thrown back upon having to make an appeal, a lot of your funds go towards the expenses of raising money, and we won’t do it; I mean, we are not trying to argue that others shouldn’t, but we won’t. And we say that virtually everything given must go to the person it’s been given for. And therefore, we must do our organising on a voluntary basis, and not resort to paying appeals organisers, buying advertising space, and so on. There may be one reason why we didn’t receive so much publicity this time.
32:54: GLC: The local Indian Authority, I find, extremely cooperative. They actually gave us 30 acres of land where Raphael is situated. We don’t get much in terms of governmental grant. But you see, if you did get a governmental grant, you’re only taking it away from another field where it’s needed. So, we don’t really try to get it, except we do get a subsidy of quite a shilling a day, which is quite a lot by their standards, for some of the leprosy homes. But the Indians, we find, particularly good at building up their own organisations. We started with £100 and nothing, not an acre of land or anything in India in [19]55, and they built up 18 homes entirely under their own efforts. And when we offered Ceylon for their first home, £300 to get started, they said ’No, we’d rather bank the goodwill’. I find them remarkable.
33:54: GLC: Yes, you’re asking whether it will continue after our lives. Well, unquestionably, because it does not depend upon me. Each local committee runs itself and is responsible to a central trust in that country. And there’s no question about…My wife, it’s a bit more difficult because she’s operating in Eastern Block countries, prison visiting, that’s more difficult to delegate. But I can’t believe that it would..., I mean, there are so many people behind her, and the whole intention is to build up an organisation to continue it, or else you build nothing.
[ii - GLC talking to a boys high school in Palmerston]
34:31: GLC: Mr Mayor, Headmaster, ladies and gentlemen. I too wasn't expecting to have the pleasure of coming along to meet you, nor to talk to you, but I'm very appreciative of the opportunity of doing so; and of meeting you informally and seeing a little of the school. I'd also like to thank the Mayor very much for your kindness in giving up this morning to be here, very kind of you. One of the reasons why I've come to New Zealand is in the hope of softening up the ground a little before the British Lions come in July. I think I can succeed.
35:28: A man: I don’t think you’ll make much impression here!
35:33: GLC: Anyway, I hope you'll give them the warm welcome that I've had in my last 4 days in Auckland, and now here.
Well, I'm not quite certain whether you'd like me to talk about the War, whether you'd like me to talk about what we are doing since for the disabled in different parts of the world, or a little bit of both? What do you think?
36:00: Man: A little bit of both.
36:02: GLC: A little bit of both.
36:04: GLC: Well, the War hit me -if I may put it that way- when I was just finishing as an undergraduate at Oxford -which is the university- and like most of you I had my own hopes and plans for what I was going to do, but the war came along and then that was that, and there was no option but to fight it. I joined the Air Force because I'd been a member of the Air Squadron at Oxford. And in the Air Force they had a very kind and thoughtful system when you were going through your training, they invited you to put down your choice for where you wanted to go as an operational pilot; and we used to sit down for quite a long time, scratch our heads, and decide where we wanted to go. The one place I did not want to go was “Bomber Command” because the idea didn't particularly appeal to me. But having given my 3 choices, none of which were Bomber Command, I found myself posted to Bomber Command. Well, you wonder what on earth was the idea to invite me to make this choice. Well, I remember turning up at my first operational station, in Yorkshire, just about the time of Dunkirk, early June 1940, with some apprehension. But of course, the moment I turned up on the station, I found everybody taking everything perfectly normally, and as a matter of course, and there was no room for anybody to be different from the others and look worried.
(38:00) But I learned what I think most of us learn, that things that you don't look forward to often don't turn out as bad as you feared. And moreover if you're a member of a team, a member of others doing the same thing, then life is a great deal easier, you find that you can go along in a way that you never thought you would.
(38:28) I had a piece of great good fortune in my squadron, the system was that you had the captain of the aircraft, and he had what he called a “Second Dicky”, that means a second pilot; and you did a few trips with him, and when they thought the time was right, you would launch on your own. All captains used to fly the aircraft over enemy territory, and when the enemy coast was safely behind, they gave their Second Dicky a kick -usually on the backside- and say 'Get into the seat'; so that when you came to do your first operation, you were flying for the first time in what you might call the “hot seat”.
(39:25) But my captain was a New Zealander, he was 6ft5, and his name was Long (audience reacts and laughs). So, what do you think he was called? (someone says Shorty) Shorty? He could have been called Shorty, but he was called Lofty. Well, Lofty was different, and on my 2nd trip, as we got within sight of the enemy coast, he gave me a kick, and said 'Get into the seat, Cheese' - he used to call me- 'and fly!' Well, I've never forgotten the debt that I owe Lofty, because every time we flew, he let me do part of the flying over enemy territory, and through flak, so when I got to fly on my own, I was familiar a little with what it was like, and to me that was a very great thing to do, and I hope that I have not forgotten the debt that I owe Lofty.
(40:43) I served for approximately 4 years in Bomber Command, and was finally posted -or anyway volunteered to go, because this is what I wanted, and you had to be a volunteer to get into that squadron- to 617 which was known as the Dambusters. You may possibly have seen the film or read the book; I don't know. But a lot of us had thought during the war that necessary though heavy bombing was, because it was the only way of reaching and destroying the tanks and guns before they could get out onto the battlefield where they had almost overwhelming superiority against the Ally forces; necessary though heavy bombing was we could have done it with more precision, and with less damage to civilian lives.
(41:46) And when 617 was given the job of blowing up the V3 sites, you may have heard of the V1s and the V2s, the V1s were a pilot-less aircraft and the V2s were a rocket, and none were precisely popular in England at the time, there was also a V3 that was being built and this was a large gun capable of firing a 500lb shell every minute into London; and we were told that if this happened, the Government would have to be evacuated. Well, we were all junior pilots in those days, and junior pilots don't always have the respect for authority -if Mr Mayor will forgive me for saying this- but perhaps they might, and we used to say that if the Government were evacuated we couldn't see that the war effort would be very seriously damaged (some stirring in the audience). Nevertheless, our job was to destroy these sites. And these guns had been put under 50ft of reinforced concrete by the Nazis, and there was no bomb that could possibly touch 50ft of reinforced concrete. But Barnes Wallis, the scientist, the very famous scientist, who I might say had practically every invention except the Wellington that he's ever made rejected by the Government -I suppose- but has still kept on inventing, and still is today at the age of 83, who designed the “Skipping Bomb” that blew up the dams, designed a deep penetration bomb which he called “Tallboy”, which if dropped from 16000ft, would penetrate 90ft of earth, and blow up these guns from underneath. Hitler had not thought of putting 50ft of reinforced concrete underneath them. The only difficulty was that he wanted this bomb to drop within 15 yards of the perimeter of the site; and when I said to him that doing it from 16000ft wasn't going to be easy, he said, 'Oh...well, if you're going to pepper the whole of Northern France with my bombs, then there is not much object of my building them, is there?' So that was all the sympathy we got from Barnes Wallis.
(44:36) Nevertheless, we had to do it. So we had to devise a means of doing what most of us in the squadron had in fact wanted to do from the beginning of Bomber Command, and that was: precision bombing, picking out a target and destroying that, and leaving the houses around it. And in order to do it, it was necessary, in our opinion, to drop a marker, it's a coloured flare if you'd like that would burn for about 15mn, a magnesium flare of a particular colour for the particular night, so as to make certain that the Germans didn't put down a decoy marker somewhere. Absolutely dead centre in the target so that all the heavy bombers up above could see it, and in order to do this, we considered the only way was to come in point blank at extreme low level, and dive from it. And this was the technique we used.
(45:52) We were given for our first target an aero-engine factory at Limoges in France. Limoges is a town where they make beautiful china, but the Germans had taken over one of their factories and were building a very important aero-engine -or important to them- in it. The difficulty was that there were 500 girls in the night shift when we came over to bomb, and we had to get them out. And the way we did that was to do 3 very low-level runs at about 25ft in a Lancaster -which is a 4-engine bomber- above the factory, hoping that they would take the hint. (audience reacts) Well, fortunately, as we discovered later, they did, except for one girl who was curious by nature -which doesn't always pay- and she didn't go further than the ditch, put herself down in the ditch to see what was going to happen, and she was hit by a splinter but not too badly; otherwise, they all streamed away across the fields.
(47:10) And so bit by bit, we perfected this technique until we were fortunately able to blow up these 5 V3 sites which had been built in Northern France, in the Pas-de-Calais, with Barnes Wallis' bombs.
(47:24) Following that, as your Mayor's just told you, I was posted out to the Pacific, and finally took part in the last operations of the War: the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. And that of course, was a very different type of operation. I think all of you have seen photographs or films of an atomic bomb, and you don't need me to describe what it looks like; To us as we went out on that attack, I think the only thing that concerned us was -although this may sound hard- was ending the war, because every single day I don't know how many lives were being lost, in thousands not in hundreds. And at that time, the only way of winning the war was to mount an invasion against Japan, and that was going to cost an estimated 2.5 million lives, the estimate might have turned out in the event to have been wrong, I don't know, but certainly the loss of lives and that invasion on both sides would have been a million plus [48:47 unclear] a few tens of thousands. So, for us, I think, that was the only thing that mattered. I think today, probably, one remembers the bomb, one remembers the bombing, but one has forgotten why that war had to be fought.(49:19) Other wars are fought that one feels are not necessary, but that one, 1939, was a matter of life and death. You probably know that in Hitler's concentration camps, off the battlefield altogether, 20 millions men, women and children were deliberately exterminated, put to death, that was part of Hitler's plan to subjugate the world, and dominate it by his new ideas and his desire to re-people the world with what he considered the best type of mankind, the Aryans, the North Europeans.
(50:00) In a peaceful age today, and sitting in this classroom, it is difficult to believe that such a situation could arise, but unfortunately it did. And one can't help feeling that had governments and politicians been more realistic, we would never have got to the position where Hitler was so strong and able, practically, to bring us all to our knees. But be that as it may, it seems to me that the one essential is that we should see there's never going to be a World War again. All of us want to live in a world that is peaceful and just, and free. But the question is, what can we do about it? What can you or I do to achieve that? And you, after all, are the architects of the future world, in the same way, I suppose, we were when we were the same age. I think that most of us feel that the problem is so great, that only something which is on a world basis, which is a major cause or crusade or campaign, can achieve anything in the goal or towards the goal of world peace. We think perhaps that only governments or big organisations have any say in it, but I don't think that's true. What I think is true is that each of us has a part to play, each of us has an essential part to play, and the mere fact that what we can do seems very little and very inadequate, is no reason for not doing it. But each of us, in our own way, according to our own opportunities, must do something to make the world a better place, at least for somebody.
(52:35) And above all, we must go out and try and do something to put right the inequality in the world. Some nations have comparatively so much and others comparatively so little. So long as that situation exists -the poor and the rich- the world will never live at peace, because the poor will bear resentment towards us, and will feel we are taking everything at their expense. And it allows those who have political ambition to seize upon this situation and use those who are poor and hungry, and who don't get their rights, to use them as a mean of achieving their political ambition. It must be seen that we are really interested in them, and within our resources willing to do something.
(53:35) And I would say one thing that impressed me more than anything since I started the work upon which my wife and I are engaged, is the deep concern that you find everywhere amongst the young generation, amongst you -schools and universities- in the needs of other people; I don't think that existed in my day when I was at school, this is something new since the War, which offers us, in my opinion, real hope for a better world, for the future.
(54:15) Without going into details, our work lies amongst the disabled, the young disabled, people in their teens, twenties and thirties who suffered either an accident and become paralysed: perhaps dived into a pool that was too shallow and hit a rock and broken their neck, or a car accident; or an illness like Polio or Multiple Sclerosis, or heart condition or something. Something which leaves them semi-paralysed and unable to manage on their own, in other words, dependent upon other people. And we're trying to give them a home for life, where they really will feel at home, feel that it is their home, where they can be themselves, and above all have the opportunity to do something. Because everyone of us, you and I, have our hopes, our ambitions for life, we want to feel our life is going to be a good one, a useful one, that it's going to mean something to somebody else. The one thing we don't want is to feel that we are dependent upon other people, always having to receive and say 'thank you': 'Will you please take me to the bathroom, will you please please bring my lunch, could you cut this out for me, could you light the cigarette for me'; none of us want to be in that situation, we want to feel independent. And in our small way, we are trying to do this
(55:52) We have between us about 150 homes in different parts of the world. My wife works largely in Poland and Yugoslavia, the countries that were overrun by the Nazis, and had their countries virtually destroyed. My own homes are in about 20 countries: Africa, India, Asia, South America, the Middle East, Spain, Portugal, 55 homes in Britain; you wouldn't think that in Britain with the highly developed National Health Service there is a need but there is; because all the State can do is to put you in a hospital.
(56:28) All those homes are locally run and financed except one, in Northern India, a very large home which we used to supplement, but the 18 Indian homes do. We look after 120 lepers - leprosy patients - 80 mentally defective children, 60 orphans, and a hospital ward for about 60, some TBs and others disabled in one way or another. And that is financed -the only home that's not locally financed- it's financed largely from support groups in Australia and New Zealand; and the way we do it is not by asking for the large donations, but we ask people, groups of people, a school, a club, or whatever you like, families in one street, to adopt one of the children or one of the leprosy patients, to raise if they can the $100 that it costs to keep him, feed him, nurse him and bring him up for one year; and you receive a photograph of Shanti or whatever her name is, her life history and you get a letter once or twice a year so that you know him as a person; and he knows that far away in Australia, someone is interested enough, and to be behind him. And I'm sure you'll appreciate what a difference that makes to somebody who's helpless and otherwise friendless. And in my opinion, it's precisely this personal interest that counts. It's not so much giving to the big organisations, it's being interested in one individual; that may seem very, very little, and you may say 'It's just one drop in a huge ocean', it is, but after all the ocean is made up of nothing but little drops. And I think that if each of us all over the world is willing to add our little drop then eventually we may achieve what we all want: a better world, a world free of war, free of inequality and of some of the injustice that we see around us, far away as well as at home. And I'd like to say how much I appreciate the opportunity of having been allowed to speak to you and of meeting you for these few moments together, my first visit to your city. Mr Mayor, thank you for coming along and for your sponsorship. And thank you Headmaster for your invitation. And to you may I offer my warmest wishes not only to your school but for your future careers wherever that may take you. Thank you very much.
59:18: Applause
59:18: Speech Ends
59:19: End of recording
End of Transcription
Collection
Citation
G L Cheshire, “Leonard Cheshire talking to a boys high school in Palmerston and to Catholic Overseas Aid in Auckland. ,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed April 23, 2025, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/40207.
Item Relations
This item has no relations.