Interview with Ray Hooley
Title
Interview with Ray Hooley
Description
Ray Hooley was at school in 1939 when war broke out and was evacuated to Mansfield. When the boys were returned to their school in Nottingham their shelter was in the basement and they were horrified to find when they went down for the practice that the old swimming pool had been drained and was filled with coffins. He joined the Observer Corps where he helped plot, track and triangulate aeroplanes in conjunction with other centres. He was called up to National Service and joined the Fleet Air Arm as an electrician, and worked as ground crew on Seafire and Barracuda aircraft. He decided to join the selection process as a gun crew member to compete against other crews and made the final eighteen, and competed at the Royal Tournament at Olympia. When he came out of the Fleet Air Arm, he became a draughtsman for the Dorsey Exploration Company who were mapping sites for potential oil exploration throughout the country. He went to work for the Rolls Royce aero, rocket division who were testing the Blue Streak missile, and went up to the Spadedaam testing range in Cumbria. He went on to work for Ruston and Hornsby engine division in Lincoln, and is friends of The Museum of Lincolnshire Life.
Creator
Date
2018-09-13
Language
Type
Format
00:59:31 audio recording
Publisher
Rights
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
Identifier
AHooleyRE180913
Transcription
MS: So, I’ve got some stuff to go through first of all. So, the time is 10.24. We’re at [buzz] at Lincoln. I’m with Mr Raymond Edward Hooley and you don’t mind being called Ray, do you?
RH: No.
MS: In fact, prefer it.
RH: Prefer it. Yes
MS: Right. The interviewer, that’s me Michael Sheehan and the purpose of the interview is it’s in relation to the International Bomber Command Centre. There are no other persons present. Mr Hooley, Ray has consented to be interviewed without anybody here. One thing I’ve got to say to you Ray is that anytime if you want a comfort break, the loo, anything like that just say and we’ll just stop the interview. No problem at all.
RH: Ok.
MS: So, are you happy to be interviewed?
RH: Yes.
MS: Good.
RH: Certainly.
MS: Lovely. Just a quickie then the idea of these recordings and I’m looking at this now is to, it’s a vital part telling the story of Bomber Command for future generations. And, so the idea is that the University of Lincoln with the IBCC are involved with these interviews and that’s what we’re doing today. The quickest way to start this it to say what were you doing before the war? Before it started.
RH: I was at school. In 1939, just before war broke out I passed the Eleven Plus to go to Grammar School. When the day came to go, I was surprised to find I had to go to the Victoria Train Station in Nottingham and not the school. We were being evacuated. The whole school was. They decided they would evacuate because they were expecting lots of bombing raids and so on. Nothing had happened at that point, but they were being safe rather than sorry. We were evacuated to Mansfield, about fifteen miles from Nottingham, but reckoned it wouldn’t be a target like Nottingham might be. And that was the first time I’d left home with my two years older sister looking after me. Eleven year old me. First time away from home. Both of us. Her school was also evacuated. She was at the girl’s Grammar School, and fortunately we had a relative in Grantham. An uncle. He had a pawn shop, and he had a car and we were billeted with him.
MS: In Mansfield or Grantham?
RH: That was Mansfield.
MS: Mansfield. Yeah.
RH: Yeah. And it was interesting because as kids you know we were always investigating and we had to search out all the air raid shelters in Mansfield which were usually old caves because Mansfield is built on to sandstone and it’s full of caves. People used to live in them at one stage. But we had great fun finding, discovering these caves which normally were closed, but they’d been opened up as air raid shelters. So —
MS: During the war. What year was this?
RH: This was ’39.
MS: Right, In the, in the sort of false war before it all got [underway].
RH: Yes. But we had problems. We shared the Mansfield Grammar School for boys, and we went in the mornings and they went in the afternoon and there was the usual thing amongst lads. You know. ‘Oh, you’re Mansfield. We’re Nottingham. We’re better than you.’ You know. And they said the same and there were scuffles and it got a bit, a bit nasty. And as first formers we were the targets so we had to be make sure when we left because as we left school the Mansfield lads were coming in and there was a long drive, about a quarter of a mile drive up to the Mansfield Grammar School. And so we had to run the gauntlet as it were. So, we had to learn to be nippy, or stick close to the older boys, you know who you know, we felt safer then. But this situation deteriorated, and the teachers started bickering at each other protecting their wards you see. And then that lead to the councils bickering.
MS: Really?
RH: To support the teachers. So after about four months, this isn’t working and we had to go back to Nottingham. So the evacuation was reversed. There had been no raids in Nottingham at that time so they thought oh, you know we got over the first fright. It’s not so bad after all. You can come back. But when we got back to Nottingham our school, High Pavement Grammar School had been taken over by the ARP as their headquarters. What shall we do? Of course, the girls came back in sympathy with us and they’d got a school. We could share their school. So, we went in the morning and the girls came in the afternoon.
MS: We’re fighting the girls.
RH: The boys all left notes in the desks, you know for the girls who they never saw [laughs] and it was a different relationship altogether and that went on for about a year. And then the ARP had a more purpose-built headquarters assigned to them and we got our school back. So, I didn’t see my Grammar School until nearly two years after I’d supposed to have joined it. Well, then the air raids were starting so when the sirens went, we, we had to go down in to the school basement. High Pavement Grammar School was a big block, multi storey old Victorian block in the middle of a residential estate. Couldn’t expand anywhere so, you know it was a very old-fashioned school but they had a basement. In fact, there was a swimming pool in the basement. This had been emptied. The first time we went down when the sirens went we were, well the younger lads especially, upset to find that the swimming pool had been filled with coffins. Cheap coffins for emergency, you know. In case of mass deaths. This was covered over with a tarpaulin eventually and after we’d had a few sessions down in the basement we lads, some of us anyway, ‘We’re not going down there. It’s a stuffy old hole and we might get buried if they bomb it.’ But we wanted to see a bit of the action. Sirens went. The German bombers were coming over. Most of them going over towards Coventry and Sheffield you know. And we went up on to the roof. It was very, you know, banned.
MS: Yeah. Sure.
RH: We were supposed to be down in the shelter but as far as I remember we were never missed. But we used to go up on the roof to spot these bombers. Well, the anti-aircraft guns were firing at them from around Nottingham. It had a screen of anti-aircraft bases and in those days we didn’t collect marbles, well we did before the war but once the war started we collected shrapnel. It was usually bits of anti-aircraft shells. Because a barrage of anti-aircraft shells is quite a lot of shrapnel comes down as you can imagine. So, you had a pocket full of shrapnel. It tore your clothes to bits but you swapped the small pieces, several small pieces for a bigger piece, and if you got any with any writing on it well you got the prize then, you know. So, whilst we were up on the roof and the anti-aircraft guns were going we were listening to tinkling sounds of metal hitting earth, you see. Oh, over there. I must remember that and when we were out to school we went looking for the shrapnel. So that was my memory of the early days of the war, you know.
MS: Did you ever get hit by the shrapnel?
RH: Sorry?
MS: Did anybody, any of your colleagues get hit by the shrapnel?
RH: Oh no. Never. You never thought about that. That you could be hit by it. We were just listening, you hoped it was closer so you that could pinpoint —
MS: Right.
RH: Where it handed landed. Yeah. I suppose half way through my five years at the Grammar School I joined the Army Cadets and reached the exalted place of corporal. So, I did training. I was in charge of squads doing certain operational duties, you know and when the, when I reached the fifth form there was this opportunity to join the Observer Corps because you were always made aware of what you could do. I mean in the summer we went away on farm camps for example, you know and slept in village halls in Lincolnshire, and did potato picking and harvesting in the summer, and had a grand old time driving tractors and things, you know. And it was whilst I was in the Army Cadets that I heard about the Observer Corps. So, right, so my first night on the Observer Corps, I can’t remember how I got there because I lived at Aspley which was about three miles from Wilford. Must have gone by bus, but going in to this graveyard at midnight or just after, because we had to be there for the time they returned which was generally about dawn. It was just getting light, you know.
MS: The return of the bombers.
RH: But you can imagine negotiating this graveyard because it’s on a hill. The crematorium is right on the top and the graveyard is all around and it’s full of marble chips, and you get the moonlight shining on the marble chips, and the clouds going over and you can see all sorts of things from up there floating about the, the graveyard. But when the bombers started to appear of course we were concentrating on them then and the thing was to watch for any aircraft that appeared to be damaged, or if the engines were giving trouble. If the engines didn’t sound right, you know or they were flying low, too low, you’d think they could be in trouble. You’d take a bearing on them. Telephone it back to base, and this was happening from all the different observer points and the triangulation was taking place. So, we would take as many bearings as we could until that aircraft disappeared from view from us. And I forget how many of us there were, but there were several of us so one would be, once you spotted one you were assigned to that, getting the bearings, and the others were watching for other planes of course. You might have two or three at the same time. And it was fascinating and we felt that we were really part of the war, you know. As kids it was a big thing.
MS: Can you just go back and explain first of all I know we discussed this earlier but exactly where was your observation point in Nottingham?
RH: Where was — ?
MS: Where? Tell me exactly.
RH: The observation point?
MS: Yeah.
RH: Right. The observation point was the roof of the crematorium chapel at Wilford Hill cemetery. Wilford Hill is on a hill.
MS: Yeah.
RH: And the crematorium is right at the top, so it’s a perfect viewing point. You could see over the whole of Nottingham.
MS: Did you have any protection up there?
RH: I wasn’t up there when Nottingham had its bigger raids, so I imagine that on those occasions they would also be spotting damage to Nottingham. I’m not sure but —
MS: It’s, am I right in saying it’s actually very very close to the centre of Nottingham?
RH: It’s on the outskirts of the Nottingham.
MS: On the edge of the city.
RH: Nottingham is surrounded by places like West Bridgford, Broxtowe, Mapperley. They’re, they’re all separate estates if you like, and Wilford had a village, there was a village of Wilford but it was attached to Nottingham. It was part of Nottingham.
MS: Lovely.
RH: Yeah.
MS: And could you just explain a little bit more detail about how the triangulation took place and what was the purpose of it?
RH: Well, we knew more about what we were seeing then what happened in the base. We never saw the base.
MS: Yeah.
RH: But we were told so that we would know what part we were playing. We would take a bearing on an aircraft. Other spotting places would take their bearings. We would all be relaying our bearings, and bearings that were relayed at the same time were plotted from the base, triangulated to pinpoint the aircraft. So, at base they were more interested in the aircraft’s route. Which way it was heading and if it came down where it was likely to come down. Sometimes they would come down whilst the spotters were spotting it. I didn’t experience that whereas when I was on duty we saw plenty of aircraft in trouble because a lot of them got shot up as you know. But they always were still limping until out of sight you know, but obviously going down. So, we were concentrating on the next until the last aircraft and everything was quiet. We can only imagine what was going on at base. They would have triangulated. Some will have come down and they’ll have alerted the services and the emergency services would have homed in on the crash spot much quicker than if they hadn’t had this information I suppose.
MS: Yeah. Did you, where was the base?
RH: I never, never discovered. It would be somewhere in Nottingham. In a safe place I imagine. In a bunker somewhere. We didn’t worry about things like that.
MS: That’s alright. It’s —
RH: I think if I’d been older I would have been a lot more inquisitive. Yes. because a lot of things were happening in our lives at that time. You know, you’re going to school. You’re in the Army Cadets. You’re wondering what you were going to do when you leave school, and all the rest of it. And this was, this was an adventure if you like during that period of —
MS: You were playing your bit.
RH: Teenage.
MS: You were playing your bit as well.
RH: Well, yeah, you didn’t feel like that. It felt like a chance to have a bit of adventure in your life, you know. It was, it was something that we found fascinating as young boys, you know. We were part of it. Ooh, you know, the bombers, you know. They were relying on us to you know spot the guys in trouble.
MS: Did you ever, did you have any adults with you at all?
RH: There was [pause] we used to get visits. Yes. There was always one adult at least assigned to whatever group was, was on there on duty. But you know it’s a long time ago and I can’t remember what sort of conversations took place between, between us.
MS: What training did you have?
RH: Sorry?
MS: What training did you have?
RH: Well, we were just told in some sort of detail what we were doing, why we were doing it, how it worked, and this was how we knew that there were other observer stations. They were all doing what we did, and it was coordinated at headquarters and they were pinpointing and following the course of this aircraft in distress.
MS: Could, did you ever see, were you ever close enough to see the serial numbers on the sides of the aircraft?
RH: No. And it, it wasn’t that light. It was usually at twilight, you know.
MS: Yeah.
RH: It, it was dawn. They must have gone off about midnight and were returning in first light. I don’t know how long they stayed airborne, the Lancasters. Do you?
MS: I think they could stay airborne for about eight hours.
RH: How many?
MS: Eight hours at least.
RH: About eight hours. Yeah.
MS: At least. Yeah.
RH: Oh, so they could say —
MS: And that’s, that’s a neighbour, is it?
RH: No. It’s a guy who’s come, he’s been cleaning my guttering all the way around.
MS: Right.
RH: And when he got to one of the down pipes he found it was blocked.
MS: Right.
RH: And that was the end of his day’s work yesterday so I said, ‘Oh, can you fix it?’ He’s a young lad. He’s nineteen. He, he’s in the Reserves waiting to go in the regular Army.
MS: Oh right.
RH: So, he’s doing any jobs he can get hold of. He’s a friend of my daughters who live at Bassingham. Not far from here. And they said, ‘Oh, he’s looking for work. Can you find any work for him?’
MS: So, you have. Now, do you know —
RH: I don’t like going up ladders so much now.
MS: No.
RH: So, I thought the guttering was a good job for him.
MS: Right. You know when you were taking bearings —
RH: Yes.
MS: What did you, what, what did you have? What was the device you had to take the bearings?
RH: Do you know I can’t remember the detail,. It was some sort of scope.
MS: Yeah.
RH: I imagine.
MS: On a tripod like this?
RH: It was on a tripod but no I couldn’t describe that.
MS: That’s alright.
RH: To be in any way meaningful. We used to, it must have been a telescope sort of device like a theodolite.
MS: Yeah. Sure.
RH: Something like that. Yeah, because I used theodolites a bit later in life, and [pause] yeah, it probably was a theodolite. I mean you used whatever was available at the time for things like that, didn’t you?
MS: Did you, did you only take azimuth bearings, or did you go for elevation as well or was it just literally —
RH: I think the instrumentation indicated the elevation. So, we were mainly getting the angle.
MS: Yeah. That would make more sense. Yeah.
RH: Yeah.
MS: How did the war affect your home life?
RH: Well, being one of ten children it didn’t affect my, I was the hero of the family. Well, I wasn’t the hero because I had two older brothers who joined the forces, but they were away from home. But I was in uniform because I was in my Army Cadet uniform of course.
MS: Yes.
RH: To make it look a bit better and yeah, I, I used to leave home knowing I was, I was, yeah, I was in the Army, in effect.
MS: So, you used to go to school. You’d have homework.
RH: Yeah.
MS: You’d then go out. How many nights a week?
RH: I can’t remember that. I know we had a rota. Probably two. I think two nights a week. Yes. There would be one midweek, and always one at weekends. Yeah.
MS: And then you’d, so you’d go through, you’d go out about midnight.
RH: Yes.
MS: And then you’d go to school the next day.
RH: Oh yes. Yeah [laughs] Well, we were on, I forget how many hours it was. I mean [pause] we had to, probably after midnight. I think it was about 2 o’clock in the morning we got there. So, I had to sleep at home and, and get up at two and we must have had a special bus to take us because buses don’t run at 2 o’clock in the morning.
MS: No.
RH: But the only way I could get there then was by buses. We didn’t have cars, you know. I think there was, in the close where I lived there was one car. And that was a taxi that the chap didn’t own himself, you know. He was driving it for a taxi firm. But yes.
MS: Was there a curfew?
RH: I’m sorry I can’t remember more about this but —
MS: Don’t worry. Was, was there a curfew?
RH: A curfew?
MS: Yeah.
RH: There was a blackout.
MS: A blackout?
RH: Oh yes.
MS: But you could travel about no problem at all.
RH: Oh yeah.
MS: Yeah.
RH: You got used to the blackout. Yeah. it was just like the thick fogs you know. If you got both at the same time.
MS: You wouldn’t see the aircraft.
RH: Yeah.
MS: What else can you remember about your experiences as a child during the war? As a teenager.
RH: Well, the first bit was the evacuation part. The second was the roof of the school.
MS: Yeah.
RH: Waiting for shrapnel. The next big memory was when Nottingham had what we called its big raid. Mass, mass raid and they did target Nottingham. They wanted Raleigh and Boots, and the gun factory. Royal Ordnance factory. And the marshalling yards at Towton. They were all targets. So, we were in our air raid shelter at home in those times. We had Anderson shelters and we, I always remember this we, we dug a hole to bury it completely. Most people had them in a bit of a hole, and then a mound over them. We made sure that ours had plenty of stuff over it. And so we, we dug a, about a seven foot deep hole, and had steps going down to it.
MS: Oh right.
RH: You know, you know the Anderson shelters.
MS: Oh yeah. Absolutely.
RH: And then we had a two foot mound of earth over the top of it and we had food stored in it for emergency, you know. Tinned fruit and that sort of thing and so we were down in the air raid shelter when the big raid took over. We could hear all the, the bombs going off and our main thing, well firstly we hoped they didn’t target the outlying estates but they weren’t likely to anyway. It was just a big housing estate we were on. A council house. But first thing in the morning we were off in to town to see the damage. Didn’t think about all the mangled bodies, you know. They’d probably been still working on them. But we were just interested to see how much damage and to look for any trophies, you know. I’m ashamed to say. Looking for old fire, incendiary bombs. Burned out ones and things like that. You got some really good trophies after the big bombing raids. Yeah.
MS: Well, it wasn’t only children who were finding trophies. It was adults as well.
RH: Well, I suppose they were. Yeah. Well, yeah, they appreciated bigger and better trophies I suppose. We were just happy with our chunks of shrapnel, you know. Pieces of bombs. Especially if they had markings on them. They became real traders, you know.
MS: German markings,
RH: Then I joined the Army Cadets, and that was interesting because there was a place at Bedford where we trained. Bedford Park. It was a big house with park and they sort of loaned it to the War Office for, for training purposes. So, we had training, you know. All the usual stuff. Trenches and learning to fire rifles. Learning to take a Bren gun to pieces. Clean it. Put it back. You had to do that in a certain number of minutes, you know before you got your next equivalent of a badge if you like or a stripe. So yeah. So, it was like being in the boy scouts in a way but a bit, a bit more, a bit more meaningful.
MS: Warlike [laughs]
RH: Yeah. So, yes it was still boyhood until I left school. My first job when I left school was with the Ministry of Works, and it was working with surveyors who went around the local area working out what compensation should be given to people who had had iron, ferrous stuff taken from their property like iron railings.
MS: Yeah. Sure.
RH: Any big house with iron railings that were cut off at the bottom and you can still see them to this day, you know. The stumps.
MS: Yes.
RH: If they’d not been replaced and they were compensated. The surveyor, well the owners had their surveyor and the Ministry had their surveyor and between them they arrived at a figure of compensation. That was one of two jobs they did. The second was going out in to the country where open cast coal mining had been done and compensating the farmers for the loss of their land whilst this coal was being got out.
MS: What year was this?
RH: Straight after the war. ’46. ’45/46 it started and I was working with this surveyor. He had an estate agency business in Heanor, in Derbyshire, and he said to me, ‘You don’t want to be doing this all your life do you? Working as a civil servant.’ So, I said, ‘Well, it’s a bit boring, isn’t it? Yeah.’ It wasn’t for him. He was out doing the surveying. I was just doing the office work when he came back. Occasionally I went out with him, and that’s how I got friendly with him. And he said, ‘Would you like to work for me?’ And I said, ‘Doing what?’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve got an office in Heanor,’ he said. ‘And we collect the rents from all the surrounding countryside.’ He said, ‘You’d be in charge of the office. And, you’d be collecting the rents.’ Well, that sounded my own boss more or less because he was working for the Ministry and I’d be out at this office on, on my own. So, I thought well that sounds good so I said yes and I met him at the office one weekend and he said, ‘Can you drive?’ I said, ‘Oh, I’ve driven tractors. I’ve never driven a car.’ I don’t think I’d ever sat in a car at that time. I’m not sure. But I’d driven tractors on the farm camps. We used to go from school in Lincolnshire. So, he said, ‘Oh, if you can drive a tractor, you can drive an Austin 7.’ You know. He said, he said, ‘These are the keys,’ he said, ‘It’s in a lockup at Codnor.’ Well, this was about five miles further into Derbyshire, and the route was really up and down. That route out of Nottingham it’s through Kimberley, Langley Mill, Heanor, Codnor, every one was, was a hill. He said, ‘Catch the bus to Codnor.’ He told me where this lock up was. It was in a, up a private drive and a row of lockups. So, I couldn’t say no, could I? And I couldn’t say, ‘Well, I don’t know how to handle a car,’ you know, so I went off with these keys, found this lockup. The car had been driven in so had to be backed out. So, my first experience of a car was backing this car out of the garage and then down a narrow drive onto the byroad that it, the drive came off. It was a narrow drive. It took me about half an hour because I kept backing in to the site [laughs] but I managed to not to scrape it all but eventually I got out on to this side street. Then the main road was the main Nottingham Road from Nottingham to all these.
MS: It's the Ripley Road.
RH: Heanor and so on.
MS: Yeah.
RH: And so, it was a busy road. So, I had to wait there. I’d got there in first gear. Oh, and I found the handbook by the way. How to start the car. I went through all that before I dare do anything, you know. And anyway, I sat until I could see nothing either way on this main road then I ventured out. I travelled in bottom gear all the way to Heanor. Five miles up and down these hills. When I reached Heanor that was at the top of the hill and he was standing on the pavement looking a bit annoyed. ‘Where have you been all this time?’ I said ‘Oh, I had trouble starting the car.’ I was wet through with sweat by the way. And I pulled it in to the curb, put the brake on, stopped the engine, heaved a sigh of relief. I’d made it. So, I said, ‘It wouldn’t start.’ He said, ‘It always starts,’ he said, ‘There’s no problem with this car.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not used to cars, you know. It wouldn’t start for me.’ So anyway, he gave me my list of addresses, all in country cottages or villages to go off and collect some rents. So as soon as I drove out into the country I found a quiet spot, quiet lane and I drove up and down it, did three point turns and spent an hour just learning the controls of the car before [laughs] before I collected any rent.
MS: No licence.
RH: No licence. No. No nothing. You didn’t want them then. It was still wartime things. Later on, you could drive on a provisional without a person alongside you. So yeah. I learned to drive and, you know. There were no regulations.
MS: How old were you at this time?
RH: Pardon?
MS: How old were you at this time?
RH: Well, I was sixteen going on seventeen I suppose. Yes.
MS: Driving around the countryside.
RH: Well, I was sixteen when I left school. No. I’d be seventeen then.
MS: Yeah.
RH: So underage. Everything, yeah. But I’d driven a tractor you know [laughs] so —
MS: So you must be able to drive.
RH: Yeah. But I soon realised that he’d kidded me into working for him, to get some cheap labour.
MS: Yeah.
RH: To work in his office while he worked for the Ministry. So, I realised, you know I needed to do something a bit more positive. So, because he was a surveyor, surveyor came into my mind. I thought building surveyor, that’s, that would be a good job. So, I went to college then to study for building surveyors and valuers sort of career and I spent a year doing that. Learned how to use a theodolite and did a triangulation around the college buildings and things like that. Very interesting but unfortunately, I hadn’t gone far enough. It was part time. It wasn’t full time. It was Trent College evening classes and I hadn’t gone far enough to give me exemption and I was called up at eighteen and went down to Corsham to be kitted out and, ‘What branch do you want to have?’ So, I’d studied the different options and I thought well the radio mechanics was the longest course. It was a six month course. All the other courses were three months so, I thought, well if I’m going in, I’ll make them pay, you know. I’ll learn something. So, I said I’ll be, I’ll go on the radio mechanics. ‘Oh, well that’s the one course you can only have it if you sign in for twelve and five. Twelve regular, five reserves.’ So, I thought, well ok, in for a penny in for a pound I might as well make it my career. Why not see the world. So, I said, ‘Alright. I’ll sign up for twelve.’ So, the guy said, ‘Well, I have to tell you, you can’t do that on the spot. You’ve got to have forty eight hours to think it over and then you can sign.’ So, I said, ‘Well, I don’t need forty eight hours. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll sign now.’ ‘No. This is obligatory. We advise you to go home and talk it over with your family.’ I said, ‘No. They won’t have any influence. Waste of time going home.’ He said, ‘Well, go in to the NAAFI.’ Corsham was a recruiting, it was also a demob centre. So, he said, ‘Talk to some of the old salts who are here for demob, and get a better idea what you’d be letting yourself in for.’
MS: Good advice.
RH: So, I thought, well, that’s good advice so I went into the NAAFI and I got talking to some of the old salts. You could always tell because their collars, bell bottom sailors, their collars were all bleached. Old timers always bleached their —
MS: Yeah.
RH: Because that was a status thing.
MS: Yeah.
RH: The paler it was the longer you’d been in. The more washes it had had, you know. So, I got talking to a guy and fortunately I met two guys who were from Nottingham. My home town. And I told them what my plan was and they said, ‘Well, you’d be a fool. Remember it’s peacetime. It won’t be like wartime. You might be bored stiff. Why don’t you take the electricians course, because the electrician’s course is the first part of the radio mechanics course anyway? So, if you still liked it after three months you could change to radio mechanic and then you could sign on if you wanted to.’ I thought well I’ve nothing to lose if I do that.
MS: Yeah.
RH: So yes. On the Monday morning I went in and I said, ‘No. I’ll take the electrician’s course so, and if I like it after three months I might have the opportunity to change.’ ‘That’s good sense. Good sense.’ And I never regretted that either because I found that three years of peacetime at that time with everything being economised, you know. There was very little flying. I was ground crew on Seafires, Barracudas, and did major inspections. And the most exciting part was going up to do a check on the instruments in flight. You had to do both.
MS: Yeah. What were you flying in?
RH: Barracudas.
MS: What’s the Barracuda? Because I know what a Seafire is.
RH: It’s a dive bomber.
MS: Right.
RH: A two seater dive bomber. And thereby hangs a tale. I must have a quick word with this guy.
MS: I’ll put this on standby.
RH: Yeah.
[recording paused]
RH: Eh?
MS: Right. Before we were interrupted by your tradesman who needed paying. Have you paid him?
RH: Yeah.
MS: You have. Right. He’ll be a happy man now then.
RH: Yeah. He can go now.
MS: You were reminiscing about your time in the Fleet Air Arm. I understand you joined the gun crew.
RH: Yes. Having joined the Fleet Air Arm, and thinking I was going to be in for about two years I thought this is going to be boring so I began to look for something more exciting and I discovered that the Fleet Air Arm had a field gun crew training for the Royal Tournament at, at Olympia. And I watched them training in 1946. That’s when I was assigned to Lee on Solent, and I saw the crew training and this looked like something exciting enough to relieve the boredom so I enquired about it. The possibility of joining. But I was too late for that year. They’d already whittled down the numbers to the final crew, and I set my sights on the following year. When the following year came, I volunteered. There was about a hundred and fifty volunteers from the Fleet Air Arm all around the world and that was whittled down to about forty which would give you two crews and a couple of spares so that two crews could train opposing each other and we started training. Then we got a, a message that an aircraft carrier which had been at sea when the volunteers were making their applications, they’d had no opportunity to apply for some reason so they decided that was unfair. So there must be, they must be allowed to volunteer another group, about thirty from that aircraft carrier. So, we all had to go through the rigid selection process again, and the selection process was really rigorous. It was punishing. It really was because they wanted to weed out the people who hadn’t got staying power and, but the one advantage we had is we knew what it would involve and we knew where to sort of keep our reserves ready for the next bit which we knew was going to be harder. And although some of the guys, they didn’t want to go through it again and they dropped out but I was still determined to, to have a go and I got through the second selection process, and that meant I was in the, in the squad and made the final eighteen that went to the tournament at, at Olympia. And that was a great occasion. That went on for just over a week I think, and finished up after we had competed with each other, each other, there were three other teams, so competing with them twice. Rather like the Football League do. And there were different trophies to be won. The fastest time, the best average time and so on, and we carried off all the trophies that year and —
MS: The Fleet Air Arm did.
RH: We were heroes [laughs] We were heroes.
MS: You were the new boys.
RH: I thought, well I’ve got some real good Brownie points now and when I get back to Lee on Solent I’ll perhaps have a chance to get a better, a better ship that’s going somewhere interesting like Australia or America, you know. But that wasn’t to be because most of the ships had been mothballed in Scapa Flow and they were, the Navy were economising. They were keeping as few ships as necessary at sea and only the one aircraft carrier which I thought I could have gone to Gibraltar on I learned that finished up doing a world cruise and had a whale of a time. They were feted and wined and dined wherever they —
MS: And you’d missed it.
RH: Put in port. And I missed that.
MS: Because you’d gone to the —
RH: But, but I wouldn’t have missed the Royal Tournament.
MS: No.
RH: You know, so six of one and half a dozen of the other. I think on balance I probably was happy with what I, the choice I’d made because I did have a chance later in life to see the world, and we’ve done a few cruises with them but we’ve had to pay for them [laughs]
MS: Just one final question if you don’t mind. When, first of all, thank you very much for everything you’ve told me. It’s, I’ll explain what we’re going to do with it shortly. It won’t be anything horrible. What, how did you make your career after the Fleet Air Arm? What’s been your career through the rest of your life?
RH: Right. Well, coming out of the Fleet Air Arm I was too late to go back in to the building training that I was, building surveying training. But I was looking for something that involved outdoors as you do and I saw an advert for a draughtsman for the Dorsey Exploration Company. They were a subsidiary of BP, or at that time the Anglo Iranian Oil Company and this Dorsey Exploration Company were a seismic survey party going around doing seismic surveys, looking for oil around different parts of the country. So, I thought that’s just the ticket, you know. So, I applied and got the job. The job was, as a draughtsman was to plot on maps where the geophones should be planted to get the echoes from the substrata where the oil is lying, and then to make a map of the results of the echoes which were registered on these, what they called geophones which were set out in certain patterns. And by doing lots of patterns, lots of little explosions to get the echo from the rock strata there was a system of plotting that underground strata. So I was making a map of the underground strata that we were interested in where the oil hopefully was lying. And we did surveys. Started off in Nottinghamshire, then went to Wiltshire, then went to Lancashire, then went to Dorset, and then went to the Isle of Wight. It just suited me fine this did, but eventually back to the base which was a Research Centre at a place called Kirklington. Kirklington Hall was an old mansion in beautiful grounds. A lovely place to be and, and we, we spent some years there then analysing these results and me drawing my maps. Eventually that came to an end and BP suffered a huge blow when Iran nationalised their oil industry, and it included them taking over the biggest oil refinery in the world at a place called Abadan with no compensation to BP. So BP had to pull in their horns and they closed down the Dorsey Exploration Party as a survey party and the people were all absorbed in to the BP’s Research Centre at Sunbury on Thames. And at that time, we in Nottingham were offered that chance of going to Sunbury on Thames, to you know what, question mark, or leaving with a golden handshake. So, I chose the golden handshake. Got three hundred and eighty pound [laughs] after nine years with, with them. But it was enough to put a deposit on my first house, you know, and get my first mortgage. And I moved from there to Rolls Royce at Derby and sort of with their aero division. But whilst I was there, after a few months they started a new division, the rocket division developing engines for the Blue Streak rocket ballistic missile. That was a sort of excitement that attracted me so I applied to, to move and was accepted and went up to Spadeadam in Cumbria where the test bay was, and spent two years there after which the Blue Streak was cancelled as being obsolete, which was a blow because that was exciting. Testing that engine. It drew people from miles around. Especially after dark to see the flames going down the chute from the exhaust of these rockets. The rocket was tethered but the engines shot their exhaust down a concrete spillway, and you could see across the valley. People used to queue up in their cars along the old Roman road between Carlisle and Newcastle and they used to watch this fireworks display. Every night we were testing these engines twenty four seven. And —
MS: Expensive firework display.
RH: It was. It was, it was a fancy firework display, and after that of course I had the chance of going back to Derby. Well, they say never go back don’t they and I didn’t fancy going back to Derby. And Ruston and Hornsby at Lincoln who I’d only barely heard of, I knew they made excavators because I’d seen them working quarries and I thought excavators. Yeah. Exciting piece of machinery. So, I applied and got a job but when I got to Lincoln, I found that it wasn’t with Ruston Bucyrus, the excavator builders. It was with Ruston and Hornsby the engine builders. Diesel engine builders. Of course, you don’t see their products. They’re in ships, they’re in basements, and so on so I’d not seen anything of Ruston and Hornby products. I only knew about Ruston Bucyrus so it was a bit disappointing to find out I was going to a different company to what I expected. But it didn’t take me long to realise what an amazing history Ruston and Hornsby had. They’d built everything you could think of.
MS: Have you been to the Museum of Lincolnshire life?
RH: Oh yeah. I’m a friend of them.
MS: Well, you’ll know then.
RH: Anything with the name Ruston on it I’ve put it there.
MS: Is that right?
RH: Oh yes. Yes. I’ve spent my life collecting Ruston stuff and getting it restored one way or another and put in the museum. Yes.
MS: Oh, right? I’m pleased to meet you in that case. Wonderful.
RH: I’ve bought a traction engine back from the south of France. I’ve brought another one back from Australia. Oh, I’ve been involved in all sorts of things. My shed, well I don’t know what time you’ve got but my shed’s full of paperwork and photographs of the different projects I’ve been in.
MS: Now then, you mentioned a book earlier on.
RH: Yes.
MS: Is that to do with your wartime experience?
RH: Well, it’s to do with aeroplanes I suppose. Ruston’s, in the First World War were the third biggest builder of aircraft. Two thousand seven hundred and fifty aircraft they built. And, and Robeys built aircraft. And Clayton Suttleworth. Lincoln, there were more aircraft built in Lincoln than in any other town.
MS: In the First World War.
RH: In the First World War.
MS: Right. What I’ll do then is I will have a look at that but I’ll close this interview down first of all, right. And look at this in a second.
RH: Yeah.
MS: Right. What I’ll deal with first of all I’ll close the interview about your experiences.
RH: Yeah.
MS: During the Second World War down.
RH: Right.
MS: And I’ve got to do it with some formal stuff here.
RH: After, I’ve got this. This is what we were given when we finished.
MS: Oh right. Right. I’m looking at a certificate. “City of Nottingham. Civil Defence Service. The Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of the City of Nottingham convey to Raymond Edward Hooley their warm appreciation of the untiring services rendered during the war 1939-1945 in the Civil Defence of the city.” Signed in July 1945. And witnessed by the town clerk. If you want that to go in to the collection then I’ll tell Peter Jones and he’ll, a copy of it anyway, and he’ll, in fact, I tell you what can I take a photograph of it?
RH: Yeah.
MS: Right. I’ll do that.
RH: I can photocopy it.
MS: You can? I’ll take a photocopy off you later in that case.
RH: Yeah. Yeah.
MS: That’s great. So, I just need to read this to you. In a minute I’m going to ask you to sign a declaration. Yeah.
RH: Yeah. That’s ok.
MS: And what you’re saying is you confirm you consented to take part in the interview, which you did and they’re asking you to assign to the University of Lincoln all copyright for use of any media, and you understand it won’t affect your moral right to be identified as the performer in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Now, do you agree that your name will be publicly associated with the interview we’ve just taken and all personal details will be stored under strict confidential conditions, and will not be shared with third parties?
RH: I’m happy about that. Yes.
MS: Ok. So, I’ll just tick that. Do you grant permission for me to take your photograph for the Archive?
RH: Yes.
MS: Ok. You don’t need to put any make up on [laughs] Right, and do you agree to the interview being made available online so people can get the interview.
RH: Yes. Yeah.
MS: Lovely. Right. Yeah.
RH: I’ve got a website by the way.
MS: You have. Really?
RH: It’s a Ruston website.
MS: Ok. We’ll talk about that in a minute because I’m quite interested in that.
RH: Yeah.
MS: Especially after I’ve been in —
RH: I’ll give you my letterhead which has the website address on it.
MS: Alright.
RH: And you can —
MS: No. I am genuinely interested.
RH: Yeah.
MS: I’m going back to that museum.
RH: I don’t know if you knew but last year I won the Civic Award. Lincoln Civic Award.
MS: No.
RH: Two years before me it was the Red Arrows. And the year after me, which is now is Lincoln City Football Club.
MS: So, you on your own. Right.
RH: Me on my own.
MS: Is that to do with your work at the museum?
RH: I don’t remember any one on their own. Due to my, well the Lincoln Civic Award is awarded to the person or group who have done the most that year to raise the awareness of the name Lincoln around the world.
MS: Oh right. Ok. Well, I’m pleased to meet you [laughs] I am actually. Right. Just to let you know the Archive, well it aims to be the most comprehensive repository of information on Bomber Command and just out of interest they have just opened their database to the public and before I go I’ll give you a link to it because you might just be interested to go on —
RH: Yeah.
MS: And see. I mean, I think it’s three million items will be going on there.
RH: Yeah.
MS: They’re only part of the way through it.
RH: Wow. That’s at Canwick Hill.
MS: No. It’s at the university.
RH: Oh, at the university. Right.
MS: Yes. It’s the university. It’s a collaboration between the university and the IBCC, but it could be that some parts of the interview you’ve done today might appear, some snippets of it might appear actually, you know as you go around the building.
RH: Yeah.
MS: How you hear voices. Your voice might be on there so you might hear yourself. Right. Any details you provide on this document will not be made publicly available. The agreement that we are now going to make is governed, excuse me, in accordance with the English law and the jurisdiction of the English courts. So, are you happy to sign that?
RH: Yes.
MS: Yeah. Right. So, if I give you this. There’s a pen. And if you sign on the top line for me, please.
[pause]
MS: That’s lovely. Thank you very much indeed.
RH: It’s a bit shaky these days.
MS: That’s alright. I was just going to say your handwriting’s better than mine. So, R E Hooley. And I’ll take the photograph of you if I may. My phone. So, try and look handsome. Let’s turn this off.
RH: No.
MS: In fact, prefer it.
RH: Prefer it. Yes
MS: Right. The interviewer, that’s me Michael Sheehan and the purpose of the interview is it’s in relation to the International Bomber Command Centre. There are no other persons present. Mr Hooley, Ray has consented to be interviewed without anybody here. One thing I’ve got to say to you Ray is that anytime if you want a comfort break, the loo, anything like that just say and we’ll just stop the interview. No problem at all.
RH: Ok.
MS: So, are you happy to be interviewed?
RH: Yes.
MS: Good.
RH: Certainly.
MS: Lovely. Just a quickie then the idea of these recordings and I’m looking at this now is to, it’s a vital part telling the story of Bomber Command for future generations. And, so the idea is that the University of Lincoln with the IBCC are involved with these interviews and that’s what we’re doing today. The quickest way to start this it to say what were you doing before the war? Before it started.
RH: I was at school. In 1939, just before war broke out I passed the Eleven Plus to go to Grammar School. When the day came to go, I was surprised to find I had to go to the Victoria Train Station in Nottingham and not the school. We were being evacuated. The whole school was. They decided they would evacuate because they were expecting lots of bombing raids and so on. Nothing had happened at that point, but they were being safe rather than sorry. We were evacuated to Mansfield, about fifteen miles from Nottingham, but reckoned it wouldn’t be a target like Nottingham might be. And that was the first time I’d left home with my two years older sister looking after me. Eleven year old me. First time away from home. Both of us. Her school was also evacuated. She was at the girl’s Grammar School, and fortunately we had a relative in Grantham. An uncle. He had a pawn shop, and he had a car and we were billeted with him.
MS: In Mansfield or Grantham?
RH: That was Mansfield.
MS: Mansfield. Yeah.
RH: Yeah. And it was interesting because as kids you know we were always investigating and we had to search out all the air raid shelters in Mansfield which were usually old caves because Mansfield is built on to sandstone and it’s full of caves. People used to live in them at one stage. But we had great fun finding, discovering these caves which normally were closed, but they’d been opened up as air raid shelters. So —
MS: During the war. What year was this?
RH: This was ’39.
MS: Right, In the, in the sort of false war before it all got [underway].
RH: Yes. But we had problems. We shared the Mansfield Grammar School for boys, and we went in the mornings and they went in the afternoon and there was the usual thing amongst lads. You know. ‘Oh, you’re Mansfield. We’re Nottingham. We’re better than you.’ You know. And they said the same and there were scuffles and it got a bit, a bit nasty. And as first formers we were the targets so we had to be make sure when we left because as we left school the Mansfield lads were coming in and there was a long drive, about a quarter of a mile drive up to the Mansfield Grammar School. And so we had to run the gauntlet as it were. So, we had to learn to be nippy, or stick close to the older boys, you know who you know, we felt safer then. But this situation deteriorated, and the teachers started bickering at each other protecting their wards you see. And then that lead to the councils bickering.
MS: Really?
RH: To support the teachers. So after about four months, this isn’t working and we had to go back to Nottingham. So the evacuation was reversed. There had been no raids in Nottingham at that time so they thought oh, you know we got over the first fright. It’s not so bad after all. You can come back. But when we got back to Nottingham our school, High Pavement Grammar School had been taken over by the ARP as their headquarters. What shall we do? Of course, the girls came back in sympathy with us and they’d got a school. We could share their school. So, we went in the morning and the girls came in the afternoon.
MS: We’re fighting the girls.
RH: The boys all left notes in the desks, you know for the girls who they never saw [laughs] and it was a different relationship altogether and that went on for about a year. And then the ARP had a more purpose-built headquarters assigned to them and we got our school back. So, I didn’t see my Grammar School until nearly two years after I’d supposed to have joined it. Well, then the air raids were starting so when the sirens went, we, we had to go down in to the school basement. High Pavement Grammar School was a big block, multi storey old Victorian block in the middle of a residential estate. Couldn’t expand anywhere so, you know it was a very old-fashioned school but they had a basement. In fact, there was a swimming pool in the basement. This had been emptied. The first time we went down when the sirens went we were, well the younger lads especially, upset to find that the swimming pool had been filled with coffins. Cheap coffins for emergency, you know. In case of mass deaths. This was covered over with a tarpaulin eventually and after we’d had a few sessions down in the basement we lads, some of us anyway, ‘We’re not going down there. It’s a stuffy old hole and we might get buried if they bomb it.’ But we wanted to see a bit of the action. Sirens went. The German bombers were coming over. Most of them going over towards Coventry and Sheffield you know. And we went up on to the roof. It was very, you know, banned.
MS: Yeah. Sure.
RH: We were supposed to be down in the shelter but as far as I remember we were never missed. But we used to go up on the roof to spot these bombers. Well, the anti-aircraft guns were firing at them from around Nottingham. It had a screen of anti-aircraft bases and in those days we didn’t collect marbles, well we did before the war but once the war started we collected shrapnel. It was usually bits of anti-aircraft shells. Because a barrage of anti-aircraft shells is quite a lot of shrapnel comes down as you can imagine. So, you had a pocket full of shrapnel. It tore your clothes to bits but you swapped the small pieces, several small pieces for a bigger piece, and if you got any with any writing on it well you got the prize then, you know. So, whilst we were up on the roof and the anti-aircraft guns were going we were listening to tinkling sounds of metal hitting earth, you see. Oh, over there. I must remember that and when we were out to school we went looking for the shrapnel. So that was my memory of the early days of the war, you know.
MS: Did you ever get hit by the shrapnel?
RH: Sorry?
MS: Did anybody, any of your colleagues get hit by the shrapnel?
RH: Oh no. Never. You never thought about that. That you could be hit by it. We were just listening, you hoped it was closer so you that could pinpoint —
MS: Right.
RH: Where it handed landed. Yeah. I suppose half way through my five years at the Grammar School I joined the Army Cadets and reached the exalted place of corporal. So, I did training. I was in charge of squads doing certain operational duties, you know and when the, when I reached the fifth form there was this opportunity to join the Observer Corps because you were always made aware of what you could do. I mean in the summer we went away on farm camps for example, you know and slept in village halls in Lincolnshire, and did potato picking and harvesting in the summer, and had a grand old time driving tractors and things, you know. And it was whilst I was in the Army Cadets that I heard about the Observer Corps. So, right, so my first night on the Observer Corps, I can’t remember how I got there because I lived at Aspley which was about three miles from Wilford. Must have gone by bus, but going in to this graveyard at midnight or just after, because we had to be there for the time they returned which was generally about dawn. It was just getting light, you know.
MS: The return of the bombers.
RH: But you can imagine negotiating this graveyard because it’s on a hill. The crematorium is right on the top and the graveyard is all around and it’s full of marble chips, and you get the moonlight shining on the marble chips, and the clouds going over and you can see all sorts of things from up there floating about the, the graveyard. But when the bombers started to appear of course we were concentrating on them then and the thing was to watch for any aircraft that appeared to be damaged, or if the engines were giving trouble. If the engines didn’t sound right, you know or they were flying low, too low, you’d think they could be in trouble. You’d take a bearing on them. Telephone it back to base, and this was happening from all the different observer points and the triangulation was taking place. So, we would take as many bearings as we could until that aircraft disappeared from view from us. And I forget how many of us there were, but there were several of us so one would be, once you spotted one you were assigned to that, getting the bearings, and the others were watching for other planes of course. You might have two or three at the same time. And it was fascinating and we felt that we were really part of the war, you know. As kids it was a big thing.
MS: Can you just go back and explain first of all I know we discussed this earlier but exactly where was your observation point in Nottingham?
RH: Where was — ?
MS: Where? Tell me exactly.
RH: The observation point?
MS: Yeah.
RH: Right. The observation point was the roof of the crematorium chapel at Wilford Hill cemetery. Wilford Hill is on a hill.
MS: Yeah.
RH: And the crematorium is right at the top, so it’s a perfect viewing point. You could see over the whole of Nottingham.
MS: Did you have any protection up there?
RH: I wasn’t up there when Nottingham had its bigger raids, so I imagine that on those occasions they would also be spotting damage to Nottingham. I’m not sure but —
MS: It’s, am I right in saying it’s actually very very close to the centre of Nottingham?
RH: It’s on the outskirts of the Nottingham.
MS: On the edge of the city.
RH: Nottingham is surrounded by places like West Bridgford, Broxtowe, Mapperley. They’re, they’re all separate estates if you like, and Wilford had a village, there was a village of Wilford but it was attached to Nottingham. It was part of Nottingham.
MS: Lovely.
RH: Yeah.
MS: And could you just explain a little bit more detail about how the triangulation took place and what was the purpose of it?
RH: Well, we knew more about what we were seeing then what happened in the base. We never saw the base.
MS: Yeah.
RH: But we were told so that we would know what part we were playing. We would take a bearing on an aircraft. Other spotting places would take their bearings. We would all be relaying our bearings, and bearings that were relayed at the same time were plotted from the base, triangulated to pinpoint the aircraft. So, at base they were more interested in the aircraft’s route. Which way it was heading and if it came down where it was likely to come down. Sometimes they would come down whilst the spotters were spotting it. I didn’t experience that whereas when I was on duty we saw plenty of aircraft in trouble because a lot of them got shot up as you know. But they always were still limping until out of sight you know, but obviously going down. So, we were concentrating on the next until the last aircraft and everything was quiet. We can only imagine what was going on at base. They would have triangulated. Some will have come down and they’ll have alerted the services and the emergency services would have homed in on the crash spot much quicker than if they hadn’t had this information I suppose.
MS: Yeah. Did you, where was the base?
RH: I never, never discovered. It would be somewhere in Nottingham. In a safe place I imagine. In a bunker somewhere. We didn’t worry about things like that.
MS: That’s alright. It’s —
RH: I think if I’d been older I would have been a lot more inquisitive. Yes. because a lot of things were happening in our lives at that time. You know, you’re going to school. You’re in the Army Cadets. You’re wondering what you were going to do when you leave school, and all the rest of it. And this was, this was an adventure if you like during that period of —
MS: You were playing your bit.
RH: Teenage.
MS: You were playing your bit as well.
RH: Well, yeah, you didn’t feel like that. It felt like a chance to have a bit of adventure in your life, you know. It was, it was something that we found fascinating as young boys, you know. We were part of it. Ooh, you know, the bombers, you know. They were relying on us to you know spot the guys in trouble.
MS: Did you ever, did you have any adults with you at all?
RH: There was [pause] we used to get visits. Yes. There was always one adult at least assigned to whatever group was, was on there on duty. But you know it’s a long time ago and I can’t remember what sort of conversations took place between, between us.
MS: What training did you have?
RH: Sorry?
MS: What training did you have?
RH: Well, we were just told in some sort of detail what we were doing, why we were doing it, how it worked, and this was how we knew that there were other observer stations. They were all doing what we did, and it was coordinated at headquarters and they were pinpointing and following the course of this aircraft in distress.
MS: Could, did you ever see, were you ever close enough to see the serial numbers on the sides of the aircraft?
RH: No. And it, it wasn’t that light. It was usually at twilight, you know.
MS: Yeah.
RH: It, it was dawn. They must have gone off about midnight and were returning in first light. I don’t know how long they stayed airborne, the Lancasters. Do you?
MS: I think they could stay airborne for about eight hours.
RH: How many?
MS: Eight hours at least.
RH: About eight hours. Yeah.
MS: At least. Yeah.
RH: Oh, so they could say —
MS: And that’s, that’s a neighbour, is it?
RH: No. It’s a guy who’s come, he’s been cleaning my guttering all the way around.
MS: Right.
RH: And when he got to one of the down pipes he found it was blocked.
MS: Right.
RH: And that was the end of his day’s work yesterday so I said, ‘Oh, can you fix it?’ He’s a young lad. He’s nineteen. He, he’s in the Reserves waiting to go in the regular Army.
MS: Oh right.
RH: So, he’s doing any jobs he can get hold of. He’s a friend of my daughters who live at Bassingham. Not far from here. And they said, ‘Oh, he’s looking for work. Can you find any work for him?’
MS: So, you have. Now, do you know —
RH: I don’t like going up ladders so much now.
MS: No.
RH: So, I thought the guttering was a good job for him.
MS: Right. You know when you were taking bearings —
RH: Yes.
MS: What did you, what, what did you have? What was the device you had to take the bearings?
RH: Do you know I can’t remember the detail,. It was some sort of scope.
MS: Yeah.
RH: I imagine.
MS: On a tripod like this?
RH: It was on a tripod but no I couldn’t describe that.
MS: That’s alright.
RH: To be in any way meaningful. We used to, it must have been a telescope sort of device like a theodolite.
MS: Yeah. Sure.
RH: Something like that. Yeah, because I used theodolites a bit later in life, and [pause] yeah, it probably was a theodolite. I mean you used whatever was available at the time for things like that, didn’t you?
MS: Did you, did you only take azimuth bearings, or did you go for elevation as well or was it just literally —
RH: I think the instrumentation indicated the elevation. So, we were mainly getting the angle.
MS: Yeah. That would make more sense. Yeah.
RH: Yeah.
MS: How did the war affect your home life?
RH: Well, being one of ten children it didn’t affect my, I was the hero of the family. Well, I wasn’t the hero because I had two older brothers who joined the forces, but they were away from home. But I was in uniform because I was in my Army Cadet uniform of course.
MS: Yes.
RH: To make it look a bit better and yeah, I, I used to leave home knowing I was, I was, yeah, I was in the Army, in effect.
MS: So, you used to go to school. You’d have homework.
RH: Yeah.
MS: You’d then go out. How many nights a week?
RH: I can’t remember that. I know we had a rota. Probably two. I think two nights a week. Yes. There would be one midweek, and always one at weekends. Yeah.
MS: And then you’d, so you’d go through, you’d go out about midnight.
RH: Yes.
MS: And then you’d go to school the next day.
RH: Oh yes. Yeah [laughs] Well, we were on, I forget how many hours it was. I mean [pause] we had to, probably after midnight. I think it was about 2 o’clock in the morning we got there. So, I had to sleep at home and, and get up at two and we must have had a special bus to take us because buses don’t run at 2 o’clock in the morning.
MS: No.
RH: But the only way I could get there then was by buses. We didn’t have cars, you know. I think there was, in the close where I lived there was one car. And that was a taxi that the chap didn’t own himself, you know. He was driving it for a taxi firm. But yes.
MS: Was there a curfew?
RH: I’m sorry I can’t remember more about this but —
MS: Don’t worry. Was, was there a curfew?
RH: A curfew?
MS: Yeah.
RH: There was a blackout.
MS: A blackout?
RH: Oh yes.
MS: But you could travel about no problem at all.
RH: Oh yeah.
MS: Yeah.
RH: You got used to the blackout. Yeah. it was just like the thick fogs you know. If you got both at the same time.
MS: You wouldn’t see the aircraft.
RH: Yeah.
MS: What else can you remember about your experiences as a child during the war? As a teenager.
RH: Well, the first bit was the evacuation part. The second was the roof of the school.
MS: Yeah.
RH: Waiting for shrapnel. The next big memory was when Nottingham had what we called its big raid. Mass, mass raid and they did target Nottingham. They wanted Raleigh and Boots, and the gun factory. Royal Ordnance factory. And the marshalling yards at Towton. They were all targets. So, we were in our air raid shelter at home in those times. We had Anderson shelters and we, I always remember this we, we dug a hole to bury it completely. Most people had them in a bit of a hole, and then a mound over them. We made sure that ours had plenty of stuff over it. And so we, we dug a, about a seven foot deep hole, and had steps going down to it.
MS: Oh right.
RH: You know, you know the Anderson shelters.
MS: Oh yeah. Absolutely.
RH: And then we had a two foot mound of earth over the top of it and we had food stored in it for emergency, you know. Tinned fruit and that sort of thing and so we were down in the air raid shelter when the big raid took over. We could hear all the, the bombs going off and our main thing, well firstly we hoped they didn’t target the outlying estates but they weren’t likely to anyway. It was just a big housing estate we were on. A council house. But first thing in the morning we were off in to town to see the damage. Didn’t think about all the mangled bodies, you know. They’d probably been still working on them. But we were just interested to see how much damage and to look for any trophies, you know. I’m ashamed to say. Looking for old fire, incendiary bombs. Burned out ones and things like that. You got some really good trophies after the big bombing raids. Yeah.
MS: Well, it wasn’t only children who were finding trophies. It was adults as well.
RH: Well, I suppose they were. Yeah. Well, yeah, they appreciated bigger and better trophies I suppose. We were just happy with our chunks of shrapnel, you know. Pieces of bombs. Especially if they had markings on them. They became real traders, you know.
MS: German markings,
RH: Then I joined the Army Cadets, and that was interesting because there was a place at Bedford where we trained. Bedford Park. It was a big house with park and they sort of loaned it to the War Office for, for training purposes. So, we had training, you know. All the usual stuff. Trenches and learning to fire rifles. Learning to take a Bren gun to pieces. Clean it. Put it back. You had to do that in a certain number of minutes, you know before you got your next equivalent of a badge if you like or a stripe. So yeah. So, it was like being in the boy scouts in a way but a bit, a bit more, a bit more meaningful.
MS: Warlike [laughs]
RH: Yeah. So, yes it was still boyhood until I left school. My first job when I left school was with the Ministry of Works, and it was working with surveyors who went around the local area working out what compensation should be given to people who had had iron, ferrous stuff taken from their property like iron railings.
MS: Yeah. Sure.
RH: Any big house with iron railings that were cut off at the bottom and you can still see them to this day, you know. The stumps.
MS: Yes.
RH: If they’d not been replaced and they were compensated. The surveyor, well the owners had their surveyor and the Ministry had their surveyor and between them they arrived at a figure of compensation. That was one of two jobs they did. The second was going out in to the country where open cast coal mining had been done and compensating the farmers for the loss of their land whilst this coal was being got out.
MS: What year was this?
RH: Straight after the war. ’46. ’45/46 it started and I was working with this surveyor. He had an estate agency business in Heanor, in Derbyshire, and he said to me, ‘You don’t want to be doing this all your life do you? Working as a civil servant.’ So, I said, ‘Well, it’s a bit boring, isn’t it? Yeah.’ It wasn’t for him. He was out doing the surveying. I was just doing the office work when he came back. Occasionally I went out with him, and that’s how I got friendly with him. And he said, ‘Would you like to work for me?’ And I said, ‘Doing what?’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve got an office in Heanor,’ he said. ‘And we collect the rents from all the surrounding countryside.’ He said, ‘You’d be in charge of the office. And, you’d be collecting the rents.’ Well, that sounded my own boss more or less because he was working for the Ministry and I’d be out at this office on, on my own. So, I thought well that sounds good so I said yes and I met him at the office one weekend and he said, ‘Can you drive?’ I said, ‘Oh, I’ve driven tractors. I’ve never driven a car.’ I don’t think I’d ever sat in a car at that time. I’m not sure. But I’d driven tractors on the farm camps. We used to go from school in Lincolnshire. So, he said, ‘Oh, if you can drive a tractor, you can drive an Austin 7.’ You know. He said, he said, ‘These are the keys,’ he said, ‘It’s in a lockup at Codnor.’ Well, this was about five miles further into Derbyshire, and the route was really up and down. That route out of Nottingham it’s through Kimberley, Langley Mill, Heanor, Codnor, every one was, was a hill. He said, ‘Catch the bus to Codnor.’ He told me where this lock up was. It was in a, up a private drive and a row of lockups. So, I couldn’t say no, could I? And I couldn’t say, ‘Well, I don’t know how to handle a car,’ you know, so I went off with these keys, found this lockup. The car had been driven in so had to be backed out. So, my first experience of a car was backing this car out of the garage and then down a narrow drive onto the byroad that it, the drive came off. It was a narrow drive. It took me about half an hour because I kept backing in to the site [laughs] but I managed to not to scrape it all but eventually I got out on to this side street. Then the main road was the main Nottingham Road from Nottingham to all these.
MS: It's the Ripley Road.
RH: Heanor and so on.
MS: Yeah.
RH: And so, it was a busy road. So, I had to wait there. I’d got there in first gear. Oh, and I found the handbook by the way. How to start the car. I went through all that before I dare do anything, you know. And anyway, I sat until I could see nothing either way on this main road then I ventured out. I travelled in bottom gear all the way to Heanor. Five miles up and down these hills. When I reached Heanor that was at the top of the hill and he was standing on the pavement looking a bit annoyed. ‘Where have you been all this time?’ I said ‘Oh, I had trouble starting the car.’ I was wet through with sweat by the way. And I pulled it in to the curb, put the brake on, stopped the engine, heaved a sigh of relief. I’d made it. So, I said, ‘It wouldn’t start.’ He said, ‘It always starts,’ he said, ‘There’s no problem with this car.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not used to cars, you know. It wouldn’t start for me.’ So anyway, he gave me my list of addresses, all in country cottages or villages to go off and collect some rents. So as soon as I drove out into the country I found a quiet spot, quiet lane and I drove up and down it, did three point turns and spent an hour just learning the controls of the car before [laughs] before I collected any rent.
MS: No licence.
RH: No licence. No. No nothing. You didn’t want them then. It was still wartime things. Later on, you could drive on a provisional without a person alongside you. So yeah. I learned to drive and, you know. There were no regulations.
MS: How old were you at this time?
RH: Pardon?
MS: How old were you at this time?
RH: Well, I was sixteen going on seventeen I suppose. Yes.
MS: Driving around the countryside.
RH: Well, I was sixteen when I left school. No. I’d be seventeen then.
MS: Yeah.
RH: So underage. Everything, yeah. But I’d driven a tractor you know [laughs] so —
MS: So you must be able to drive.
RH: Yeah. But I soon realised that he’d kidded me into working for him, to get some cheap labour.
MS: Yeah.
RH: To work in his office while he worked for the Ministry. So, I realised, you know I needed to do something a bit more positive. So, because he was a surveyor, surveyor came into my mind. I thought building surveyor, that’s, that would be a good job. So, I went to college then to study for building surveyors and valuers sort of career and I spent a year doing that. Learned how to use a theodolite and did a triangulation around the college buildings and things like that. Very interesting but unfortunately, I hadn’t gone far enough. It was part time. It wasn’t full time. It was Trent College evening classes and I hadn’t gone far enough to give me exemption and I was called up at eighteen and went down to Corsham to be kitted out and, ‘What branch do you want to have?’ So, I’d studied the different options and I thought well the radio mechanics was the longest course. It was a six month course. All the other courses were three months so, I thought, well if I’m going in, I’ll make them pay, you know. I’ll learn something. So, I said I’ll be, I’ll go on the radio mechanics. ‘Oh, well that’s the one course you can only have it if you sign in for twelve and five. Twelve regular, five reserves.’ So, I thought, well ok, in for a penny in for a pound I might as well make it my career. Why not see the world. So, I said, ‘Alright. I’ll sign up for twelve.’ So, the guy said, ‘Well, I have to tell you, you can’t do that on the spot. You’ve got to have forty eight hours to think it over and then you can sign.’ So, I said, ‘Well, I don’t need forty eight hours. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll sign now.’ ‘No. This is obligatory. We advise you to go home and talk it over with your family.’ I said, ‘No. They won’t have any influence. Waste of time going home.’ He said, ‘Well, go in to the NAAFI.’ Corsham was a recruiting, it was also a demob centre. So, he said, ‘Talk to some of the old salts who are here for demob, and get a better idea what you’d be letting yourself in for.’
MS: Good advice.
RH: So, I thought, well, that’s good advice so I went into the NAAFI and I got talking to some of the old salts. You could always tell because their collars, bell bottom sailors, their collars were all bleached. Old timers always bleached their —
MS: Yeah.
RH: Because that was a status thing.
MS: Yeah.
RH: The paler it was the longer you’d been in. The more washes it had had, you know. So, I got talking to a guy and fortunately I met two guys who were from Nottingham. My home town. And I told them what my plan was and they said, ‘Well, you’d be a fool. Remember it’s peacetime. It won’t be like wartime. You might be bored stiff. Why don’t you take the electricians course, because the electrician’s course is the first part of the radio mechanics course anyway? So, if you still liked it after three months you could change to radio mechanic and then you could sign on if you wanted to.’ I thought well I’ve nothing to lose if I do that.
MS: Yeah.
RH: So yes. On the Monday morning I went in and I said, ‘No. I’ll take the electrician’s course so, and if I like it after three months I might have the opportunity to change.’ ‘That’s good sense. Good sense.’ And I never regretted that either because I found that three years of peacetime at that time with everything being economised, you know. There was very little flying. I was ground crew on Seafires, Barracudas, and did major inspections. And the most exciting part was going up to do a check on the instruments in flight. You had to do both.
MS: Yeah. What were you flying in?
RH: Barracudas.
MS: What’s the Barracuda? Because I know what a Seafire is.
RH: It’s a dive bomber.
MS: Right.
RH: A two seater dive bomber. And thereby hangs a tale. I must have a quick word with this guy.
MS: I’ll put this on standby.
RH: Yeah.
[recording paused]
RH: Eh?
MS: Right. Before we were interrupted by your tradesman who needed paying. Have you paid him?
RH: Yeah.
MS: You have. Right. He’ll be a happy man now then.
RH: Yeah. He can go now.
MS: You were reminiscing about your time in the Fleet Air Arm. I understand you joined the gun crew.
RH: Yes. Having joined the Fleet Air Arm, and thinking I was going to be in for about two years I thought this is going to be boring so I began to look for something more exciting and I discovered that the Fleet Air Arm had a field gun crew training for the Royal Tournament at, at Olympia. And I watched them training in 1946. That’s when I was assigned to Lee on Solent, and I saw the crew training and this looked like something exciting enough to relieve the boredom so I enquired about it. The possibility of joining. But I was too late for that year. They’d already whittled down the numbers to the final crew, and I set my sights on the following year. When the following year came, I volunteered. There was about a hundred and fifty volunteers from the Fleet Air Arm all around the world and that was whittled down to about forty which would give you two crews and a couple of spares so that two crews could train opposing each other and we started training. Then we got a, a message that an aircraft carrier which had been at sea when the volunteers were making their applications, they’d had no opportunity to apply for some reason so they decided that was unfair. So there must be, they must be allowed to volunteer another group, about thirty from that aircraft carrier. So, we all had to go through the rigid selection process again, and the selection process was really rigorous. It was punishing. It really was because they wanted to weed out the people who hadn’t got staying power and, but the one advantage we had is we knew what it would involve and we knew where to sort of keep our reserves ready for the next bit which we knew was going to be harder. And although some of the guys, they didn’t want to go through it again and they dropped out but I was still determined to, to have a go and I got through the second selection process, and that meant I was in the, in the squad and made the final eighteen that went to the tournament at, at Olympia. And that was a great occasion. That went on for just over a week I think, and finished up after we had competed with each other, each other, there were three other teams, so competing with them twice. Rather like the Football League do. And there were different trophies to be won. The fastest time, the best average time and so on, and we carried off all the trophies that year and —
MS: The Fleet Air Arm did.
RH: We were heroes [laughs] We were heroes.
MS: You were the new boys.
RH: I thought, well I’ve got some real good Brownie points now and when I get back to Lee on Solent I’ll perhaps have a chance to get a better, a better ship that’s going somewhere interesting like Australia or America, you know. But that wasn’t to be because most of the ships had been mothballed in Scapa Flow and they were, the Navy were economising. They were keeping as few ships as necessary at sea and only the one aircraft carrier which I thought I could have gone to Gibraltar on I learned that finished up doing a world cruise and had a whale of a time. They were feted and wined and dined wherever they —
MS: And you’d missed it.
RH: Put in port. And I missed that.
MS: Because you’d gone to the —
RH: But, but I wouldn’t have missed the Royal Tournament.
MS: No.
RH: You know, so six of one and half a dozen of the other. I think on balance I probably was happy with what I, the choice I’d made because I did have a chance later in life to see the world, and we’ve done a few cruises with them but we’ve had to pay for them [laughs]
MS: Just one final question if you don’t mind. When, first of all, thank you very much for everything you’ve told me. It’s, I’ll explain what we’re going to do with it shortly. It won’t be anything horrible. What, how did you make your career after the Fleet Air Arm? What’s been your career through the rest of your life?
RH: Right. Well, coming out of the Fleet Air Arm I was too late to go back in to the building training that I was, building surveying training. But I was looking for something that involved outdoors as you do and I saw an advert for a draughtsman for the Dorsey Exploration Company. They were a subsidiary of BP, or at that time the Anglo Iranian Oil Company and this Dorsey Exploration Company were a seismic survey party going around doing seismic surveys, looking for oil around different parts of the country. So, I thought that’s just the ticket, you know. So, I applied and got the job. The job was, as a draughtsman was to plot on maps where the geophones should be planted to get the echoes from the substrata where the oil is lying, and then to make a map of the results of the echoes which were registered on these, what they called geophones which were set out in certain patterns. And by doing lots of patterns, lots of little explosions to get the echo from the rock strata there was a system of plotting that underground strata. So I was making a map of the underground strata that we were interested in where the oil hopefully was lying. And we did surveys. Started off in Nottinghamshire, then went to Wiltshire, then went to Lancashire, then went to Dorset, and then went to the Isle of Wight. It just suited me fine this did, but eventually back to the base which was a Research Centre at a place called Kirklington. Kirklington Hall was an old mansion in beautiful grounds. A lovely place to be and, and we, we spent some years there then analysing these results and me drawing my maps. Eventually that came to an end and BP suffered a huge blow when Iran nationalised their oil industry, and it included them taking over the biggest oil refinery in the world at a place called Abadan with no compensation to BP. So BP had to pull in their horns and they closed down the Dorsey Exploration Party as a survey party and the people were all absorbed in to the BP’s Research Centre at Sunbury on Thames. And at that time, we in Nottingham were offered that chance of going to Sunbury on Thames, to you know what, question mark, or leaving with a golden handshake. So, I chose the golden handshake. Got three hundred and eighty pound [laughs] after nine years with, with them. But it was enough to put a deposit on my first house, you know, and get my first mortgage. And I moved from there to Rolls Royce at Derby and sort of with their aero division. But whilst I was there, after a few months they started a new division, the rocket division developing engines for the Blue Streak rocket ballistic missile. That was a sort of excitement that attracted me so I applied to, to move and was accepted and went up to Spadeadam in Cumbria where the test bay was, and spent two years there after which the Blue Streak was cancelled as being obsolete, which was a blow because that was exciting. Testing that engine. It drew people from miles around. Especially after dark to see the flames going down the chute from the exhaust of these rockets. The rocket was tethered but the engines shot their exhaust down a concrete spillway, and you could see across the valley. People used to queue up in their cars along the old Roman road between Carlisle and Newcastle and they used to watch this fireworks display. Every night we were testing these engines twenty four seven. And —
MS: Expensive firework display.
RH: It was. It was, it was a fancy firework display, and after that of course I had the chance of going back to Derby. Well, they say never go back don’t they and I didn’t fancy going back to Derby. And Ruston and Hornsby at Lincoln who I’d only barely heard of, I knew they made excavators because I’d seen them working quarries and I thought excavators. Yeah. Exciting piece of machinery. So, I applied and got a job but when I got to Lincoln, I found that it wasn’t with Ruston Bucyrus, the excavator builders. It was with Ruston and Hornsby the engine builders. Diesel engine builders. Of course, you don’t see their products. They’re in ships, they’re in basements, and so on so I’d not seen anything of Ruston and Hornby products. I only knew about Ruston Bucyrus so it was a bit disappointing to find out I was going to a different company to what I expected. But it didn’t take me long to realise what an amazing history Ruston and Hornsby had. They’d built everything you could think of.
MS: Have you been to the Museum of Lincolnshire life?
RH: Oh yeah. I’m a friend of them.
MS: Well, you’ll know then.
RH: Anything with the name Ruston on it I’ve put it there.
MS: Is that right?
RH: Oh yes. Yes. I’ve spent my life collecting Ruston stuff and getting it restored one way or another and put in the museum. Yes.
MS: Oh, right? I’m pleased to meet you in that case. Wonderful.
RH: I’ve bought a traction engine back from the south of France. I’ve brought another one back from Australia. Oh, I’ve been involved in all sorts of things. My shed, well I don’t know what time you’ve got but my shed’s full of paperwork and photographs of the different projects I’ve been in.
MS: Now then, you mentioned a book earlier on.
RH: Yes.
MS: Is that to do with your wartime experience?
RH: Well, it’s to do with aeroplanes I suppose. Ruston’s, in the First World War were the third biggest builder of aircraft. Two thousand seven hundred and fifty aircraft they built. And, and Robeys built aircraft. And Clayton Suttleworth. Lincoln, there were more aircraft built in Lincoln than in any other town.
MS: In the First World War.
RH: In the First World War.
MS: Right. What I’ll do then is I will have a look at that but I’ll close this interview down first of all, right. And look at this in a second.
RH: Yeah.
MS: Right. What I’ll deal with first of all I’ll close the interview about your experiences.
RH: Yeah.
MS: During the Second World War down.
RH: Right.
MS: And I’ve got to do it with some formal stuff here.
RH: After, I’ve got this. This is what we were given when we finished.
MS: Oh right. Right. I’m looking at a certificate. “City of Nottingham. Civil Defence Service. The Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of the City of Nottingham convey to Raymond Edward Hooley their warm appreciation of the untiring services rendered during the war 1939-1945 in the Civil Defence of the city.” Signed in July 1945. And witnessed by the town clerk. If you want that to go in to the collection then I’ll tell Peter Jones and he’ll, a copy of it anyway, and he’ll, in fact, I tell you what can I take a photograph of it?
RH: Yeah.
MS: Right. I’ll do that.
RH: I can photocopy it.
MS: You can? I’ll take a photocopy off you later in that case.
RH: Yeah. Yeah.
MS: That’s great. So, I just need to read this to you. In a minute I’m going to ask you to sign a declaration. Yeah.
RH: Yeah. That’s ok.
MS: And what you’re saying is you confirm you consented to take part in the interview, which you did and they’re asking you to assign to the University of Lincoln all copyright for use of any media, and you understand it won’t affect your moral right to be identified as the performer in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Now, do you agree that your name will be publicly associated with the interview we’ve just taken and all personal details will be stored under strict confidential conditions, and will not be shared with third parties?
RH: I’m happy about that. Yes.
MS: Ok. So, I’ll just tick that. Do you grant permission for me to take your photograph for the Archive?
RH: Yes.
MS: Ok. You don’t need to put any make up on [laughs] Right, and do you agree to the interview being made available online so people can get the interview.
RH: Yes. Yeah.
MS: Lovely. Right. Yeah.
RH: I’ve got a website by the way.
MS: You have. Really?
RH: It’s a Ruston website.
MS: Ok. We’ll talk about that in a minute because I’m quite interested in that.
RH: Yeah.
MS: Especially after I’ve been in —
RH: I’ll give you my letterhead which has the website address on it.
MS: Alright.
RH: And you can —
MS: No. I am genuinely interested.
RH: Yeah.
MS: I’m going back to that museum.
RH: I don’t know if you knew but last year I won the Civic Award. Lincoln Civic Award.
MS: No.
RH: Two years before me it was the Red Arrows. And the year after me, which is now is Lincoln City Football Club.
MS: So, you on your own. Right.
RH: Me on my own.
MS: Is that to do with your work at the museum?
RH: I don’t remember any one on their own. Due to my, well the Lincoln Civic Award is awarded to the person or group who have done the most that year to raise the awareness of the name Lincoln around the world.
MS: Oh right. Ok. Well, I’m pleased to meet you [laughs] I am actually. Right. Just to let you know the Archive, well it aims to be the most comprehensive repository of information on Bomber Command and just out of interest they have just opened their database to the public and before I go I’ll give you a link to it because you might just be interested to go on —
RH: Yeah.
MS: And see. I mean, I think it’s three million items will be going on there.
RH: Yeah.
MS: They’re only part of the way through it.
RH: Wow. That’s at Canwick Hill.
MS: No. It’s at the university.
RH: Oh, at the university. Right.
MS: Yes. It’s the university. It’s a collaboration between the university and the IBCC, but it could be that some parts of the interview you’ve done today might appear, some snippets of it might appear actually, you know as you go around the building.
RH: Yeah.
MS: How you hear voices. Your voice might be on there so you might hear yourself. Right. Any details you provide on this document will not be made publicly available. The agreement that we are now going to make is governed, excuse me, in accordance with the English law and the jurisdiction of the English courts. So, are you happy to sign that?
RH: Yes.
MS: Yeah. Right. So, if I give you this. There’s a pen. And if you sign on the top line for me, please.
[pause]
MS: That’s lovely. Thank you very much indeed.
RH: It’s a bit shaky these days.
MS: That’s alright. I was just going to say your handwriting’s better than mine. So, R E Hooley. And I’ll take the photograph of you if I may. My phone. So, try and look handsome. Let’s turn this off.
Collection
Citation
Michael Sheehan, “Interview with Ray Hooley,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed April 26, 2024, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/9338.
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