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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/127/11/ATurnerB150602.2.mp3
1c6080ee78c66828fc79e2847ce7791d
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Title
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Turner, Betty
B Turner
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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. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. The collection consists of an oral history interview with Betty Turner, (– 2015, 2146029), a photograph and two poems. Leading aircraftswoman Betty Turner served in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force at 92 Group Headquarters as a wireless operator. The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Betty Turner and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
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2015-06-02
Identifier
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Turner, B
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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Other persons present: Betty Turner’s daughter, Shelley Marshall [SM]
HH: Ok. Here we are, my name is Heather Hughes, and I’m sitting with Betty Turner who was in the WAAFs during World War 2, in Betty’s home in Bierton and it is Tue, Wednesday? , Tuesday, Tuesday the 2nd of June, 2015. Thank you Betty, so much, for agreeing to do this interview today.
BT: You’re very [emphasis] welcome indeed.
HH: Betty I wonder if we could start by talking about where you were born and grew up?
BT: I was born in Aylesbury, I went to school in Aylesbury, and [pause], I went from here and signed up when the war was on - well, at first, of course, I was working at, um, a very – when I was fourteen we had to leave school in those days at fourteen, and I had a job in a very exclusive shoe shop. I always loved that shop, I was bound and determined I was going to get a job there, and I did, and –
HH: Do you remember the name of the shoe shop?
BT: Yes! It was Ivords [?] and we had customers like the Dimbleby boys, their father was away in the war of course when they would come in, and there would be the sister and the two brothers, and mom would come in with them, and I would wait on them for shoes, not realising how famous they [emphasis] were going to be. Anyway, that was my – and then, I decided – I had a boyfriend, who was shot down, over France, and killed, and the very next day I said I’m joining the, the WAAF. I was seventeen at the time, and, so my mother said ‘alright, I’ll take you to join up’ to High Wycombe – we had to go to High Wycombe – and my brother at the same time wanted to come with us, and he said ‘I’m going to join up too’, but he was only fifteen. Anyway [pause, deep breath] I joined up, and this was in December, December 6th I always remember – the date of the, that Caley was shot down – and I, um, went to Wycombe as I say, the next day, and that was about the 7th of December that I actually went to give my signature –
HH: Was that in nineteen - ?
BT: Forty-two.
HH: Forty-two.
BT: Forty-two. But I wasn’t called until January – first week, I believe, but it was January anyway when I actually went, and I left here, and went to [pause] Gloucester. I think it was Gloucester.
HH: And is that where you went for training?
BT: Ye – well… Yes, to sort you out I think in Gloucester, your uniforms, and what you ought to be and things like that you know. I said driver please [?] [laughs] and they killed themselves laughing, I’m only five foot, I wouldn’t reach the pedals on the trucks at all [laughs]. But I think everybody asked to be a driver when they first joined up. Anyway, at that point we went to Morecombe for square-bashing, and when we came back – I think it was Innsworth, I’m not sure, you know, the memory fades a bit doesn’t it? But there [emphasis] they gave us some, sort of, tests [emphasis] about different things and they needed wireless operators apparently, and everybody had to sit around with a paper and pencil, and they would give you, er, records – they would play a record, and they’d say ‘now you’re going to hear some dots and dashes. All I want you to do is to tell me whether they’re the same each time or different’, and so the record would start and we would have to say write it all down, and I apparently did fine, and they thought immediately well ‘she’s ok she could be a wireless operator’, and after I had done my square bashing – that was first – they read that I was coming to Winslow in Buckinghamshire, and I thought ‘ooh dear’ - I wanted to go somewhere exciting [laughs]. But I, there you go, I came home – quite close to home anyway, only ten miles actually away. It was okay, I had the best of both worlds really didn’t I? They said ‘you’re going to 92 Group Headquarters – Bomber Command’. So, I, that’s what I did! I came over to Winslow, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of RAF around but it was because everybody was on shift work, and the hours would be – I can’t remember all the hours but it’s in that, um, brochure I gave you, from like eight o’clock in the morning ‘til midnight, long hours it seemed. Some were shorter hours and then we would have a couple of days off.
HH: And what did you do with your days off?
BT: I’d come home. And my father would, usually, ask me if I was alright, and did I need any money, and sometimes leave me ten bobs [laughs], ten bob, at the side of my bed, and I’d wake up in the morning and I’d say ‘whoopee I’ve got some money!’ [laughs]. We never had any money, and we always seemed hungry. We were always ready to go into a restaurant and eat if we could find a place to do it, you know, because restaurants, things weren’t easy in the restaurants at that time. Anyway so that was fine. The work was just really [emphasis] quite boring, because that’s all you did was put your earphones on and you had a key, and you had, um, you had receiving and you had sending of Morse code constantly, and it was [emphasis] pretty boring.
HH: But very vital.
BT: But vital, I suppose – well I found that out later, but I didn’t know what I did, and it was just different, really. In the morning we would check with the, all the stations that we had, and they’re on their paper – I can’t remember the names of them all – but the different stations that were in that 92 Group then they would send Morse back to us and you know we would answer backwards and forwards. Not plain language, most of the time, it was certain, certain codes that we would send to them. Every half an hour we would have to send a very very powerful signal – I can still remember it today it was V3A – and then we would give them the time, and we’d go ‘dee dee, dee dee’ [making Morse code sounds] until the second hand went onto the twelve we would hit the key, down, and um, apparently it was for other aircraft and everybody to get their time right, you know, er, it was a very powerful signal and it could be heard many many thousands of miles away, but we never knew why we were doing it. We never asked questions. We signed the secrets thing and we never spoke about what we did. My dad asked me about what we did and ‘oh I just Morse code, you know’, but nobody knew. We didn’t know why we were doing it. And then another time we would fill pages of five letter groups, and five letter groups, and we had a pad, you know, a pad of paper that size and it was asking you questions on – you wrote down what you could hear in five letter groups, and then when your pad was full, you’d take all of the girls’, if they had them you’d collect them up and take them into the main room of the house, because we were in like a, like a Nissen type hut part that had been built on the front of the house, so that it was separate. But in the house we would go for other things like we would get - have our pay parade ever Friday, second Friday morning, and ‘quote your last three letters’ and ‘come to attention’ and they’d pay you, which was very nice, on every other week that would happen and um, that was in the house – we’d go in the house for that, and there was also a lot of RAF personnel in the house but we never actually saw the room that they were in, and outside, at night especially, we’d notice a motorbike – a guy with a motorbike, and we assumed that he must be doing something with what we were taking over to the house – we didn’t know of course. And it wasn’t until I went to Bletchley Park, many years later, and I could hear the Morse code going, and after looking at all the things and listening to the people that were leading us around, what we did, and I’m thinking ‘gosh! I remember that’ and ‘I remember this’, and ‘I remember that’, and it dawned on me what we were doing. But it was years afterwards, prior to that I had no knowledge of what we did, at all. Yeah there was a um – but when we were on, um, hours off, of course, that was very nice, we’d also have dances, at camp, we – the girls, were in the stables of the big house –
HH: Was it kind of dormitory type accommodation?
BT: No, it was, strictly – you know what stables look like, with horses in them? Well, we were in those same things but we weren’t horses [laughing]. We had potbelly stoves to keep us warm, you know [laughing], and it had a gutter where the horses used to do their business and it would run down into the drain, but that was cleaned out [laughing] before we went in there. Oh dear, yes, and at times it would be very draughty.
HH: So did you each have your own stable then?
BT: Well, no, there were two of us in the one stable. Oh well, yes, two of us in each stable – pretty sure it was only two of us, yeah I think it was two, but of course, in the long building itself, there would be lots of, lots of stables. Eventually after I had been there about a – two years, I finally got to go in the house, but I’m sure that was servants’ quarters for the girls - some of the girls would go in there, and then any new girls coming along would go in the stables I suppose. Although, when war ended, when VE Day came along, it was very quickly destroyed, our cabin. Everything [emphasis] was destroyed very very quickly. And there was no more Morse code – nothing – it just stopped, and we were all posted to other places. Then [emphasis] I really enjoyed the work [laughs], I was posted to a place called Great Massingham – that’s up near the Wash, we decided, I’ve seen it on the map yes, up near the Wash – and it was, I was put in the Officers’ Mess, in the corner, with a telephone and a desk, and the calls would come in for the boys from their girlfriends or their wives, and I’d be the one to call out their name and say ‘you are wanted on the telephone’, and it was super [emphasis]. And in the morning, instead of going to the cook house like we used to do at Winslow, I would go and I would have a nice fried breakfast, the same as the officers would have. I’d have mine first though before I went on duty, then later on of course they would all come in and have their breakfast, it was very nice. That was a super job! And I actually saw the planes for a change, because we saw no planes on our camp at all, except the Wellingtons at, at um [pause] what is the – not Wing, not Wing, where - oh I can’t think of the name of the – but we used to have to go onto that field aerodrome when we were doing our experience flights which we didn’t enjoy very much really –
HH: What did that involve?
BT: It involved flying around with a pilot, and I think we were supposed to work the set I’m not quite sure [laughing] I can’t remember. It was to find out how difficult it is to keep on frequency so they wanted us to experience, you know, what it was like to fly – I only went up a couple of times though [pause] but it was – I would not volunteer to go. I did not [emphasis] enjoy it. Sometimes the pilots used to make fun of us, be heading for a barrage balloon and say ‘oh I don’t think I’m going to tell her’ [laughing]. They would tease us, in other words, they would tease us, and it wasn’t very nice really. But we did have fun when we were all off duty. We put on pantomime, well we put on one, and then there was a play. But unfortunately, just before I got to Winslow, there had been a Wellington come down and go into one of the houses and kill several people, and one of our sergeants managed to get some people out, and he got fairly [pause] badly burnt in a couple of places, and he got recommended for that. He really was quite a hero to the rest of them, they were all saying ‘what a great job you did’. But it was all over with when I got there – the rubble was there of course, they were cleaning up, but it was quite scary, really scary. [Pause] Our - we would try and get to work, or go down to – we would have bicycles a lot of us. I took my own bike to camp so that I could cycle home if I wanted to, although I preferred to take the bus – was easier.
HH: But did you use your bicycle around the camp?
BT: Yes. No, no we couldn’t cycle around our camp, we were at a big house, and all we had was a big driveway.
HH: Okay so you didn’t need to.
BT: We had… huts, the stables where we slept, and we had to come out and go to the bathrooms and bath huts and stuff there and then another hut was for our meals. Our canteen was at the other place, because we used to have to cycle through the village back to where we worked. The men were lucky, they were able to have lodgings and they had a landlady that would fix them meals and they would have lovely hot dinners when they got home at night and we had to go to the cook house. We had a cook house. But at the end of the war things began to happen a bit more – towards to end of the war, when the prisoners of war from Germany were coming back home we were, they, we were asked to go and volunteer to welcome the prisoners coming back, which was rather good.
HH: And where was that?
BT: That was at Wing I believe – I’m sure it was Wing although no place ever had a sign on it so we never knew where we were really. I think, from what I could work out, that it was Wing, and they were [pause] quite, quite a sad looking lot coming home but so thrilled to be coming home. And I always remember this one boy asked our girl that was our telephonist – one of our telephonist girls – if, um, he would call – if she would call his mother on this number and he gave her, and she said ‘yes I’ll do that for you’, so, when we got back to camp, she was doing some work there, and she phoned this number, and it was the mother that answered the phone, and she said ‘John would be seeing you in a couple of days’, and it was just the noise and um, a man came on then, and this man said ‘who is this?’ and she said ‘well I’m LACW’ so-and-so, what her name was, ‘I’m just telling you that your son will be home in a couple of days, probably, they have to go to a, a centre first for certain things’ - he said ‘well I hope you know what you’re talking about, because we’ve already been told that our son is missing, believed dead – believe killed’, and he was – well, we all cried. I think about it now and I cry a little bit. Yeah, so, um -
HH: That’s one story that at least had that happy ending.
BT: Yes, I know – I won a book once for writing that story out because I said I’ll never forget it. I said a lot of things I do forget, and a lot of things I think I imagine, ‘oh I couldn’t have done that, surely I couldn’t have done that’ sort of thing, ‘I wouldn’t tell anybody that I’m not going to say’ – and, but, I know that was true, because it, it caused such a – the rest of us in, at the cook house – we were all sitting around the table then when she was telling us about it, and we were all [emphasis] practically in tears. But I wonder how many times that happened, you know, I’m sure it must have happened lots of times, I’ve heard of it since actually happening. On this, “Next Generation”, or that “Last Generation”, the programmes that they’ve had – I’ve loved that series I’ve been watching it and I think ‘good on you!’ [laughs] you know, and they’re still going strong, it’s lovely.
HH: Betty what rank did you attain -
BT: LACW
HH: - in the WAAFs?
BT: Leading Aircraftwoman. So I started off as an AC2 and then an AC1, and then an LACW. Yeah. But um, I don’t know that I deserved it – maybe I did [laughs]
HH: I’m sure you did.
BT: I don’t know. I have my pay book still, and it said I was a keen and willing wireless operator, ‘very efficient’ it says [laughter] so –
HH: Well done.
BT: But it wasn’t any good trying to get a job after the war because [laughs] nobody wanted a wireless operator [laughs], a wireless operator.
HH: It would be good to talk about after the war. I just want to go back and ask you what kind of, what kind of [pause] relationships did you have with other WAAFs? I mean did you form quite a strong bond together?
BT: Oh we did yes, um, and it we were going on leave, one or two of us would go together. In fact, when I went on leave with my friend, she said to me, ‘where shall we go for our leave? When’s yours coming up?’, I said ‘mine is coming up on so-and-so’ – ‘so is mine’ she said, ‘let’s go a long way away’, because we would have a free travel warrant, so, I said ‘ok, well where will we go?’, she said ‘let’s go to Edinburgh’, I said ‘that’s a good idea, let’s go to Edinburgh, and we got on the train, and we had a wonderful journey. It was all the forces in the train, and she was a comedian anyway, and she had the place in stiches, it was hilarious [laughs] that whole trip was funny. And we went to the YMCA, YWCA I should say, and booked in, and we put our money in their safe, as they have, and when you go out you just take a certain amount of money with you. This parti – the f – second night I believe we were there, we decided to go to the Cavendish Ballroom, we were going to go to a dance, okay, so we bought our tickets to go in but when we got inside we realised we hadn’t taken enough – to buy our tea, that, or drink or whatever we wanted, and I said well it’s not far from where we’re, you know where we’re staying, ‘I’ll get the trolley, car’ or whatever it was at that time, and ‘I’ll go back and I’ll get us some more money’. ‘Okay’ says my friend, and when I got back to the Cavendish ballroom, there she was, sitting with a couple of Americans. And I said ‘oh, hi’, she said ‘this is so-and-so and this is so-and-so – I told him you like to dance because he likes to dance too’ [laughs], so I said ‘oh alright, I’ll dance with him’, and we not only danced with them, we spent, um, our days, because they were on furlough as well, and we were on furlough, or ‘leave’ as we call it, ‘furlough’ as they call it. And that whole week we spent going to pictures, but Sunday was a very miserable sort of day in Scotland –
HH: Still is in Scotland!
BT: [laughs] we had so many cups of tea, we were, we, we just floated, and we went to the zoo, and we went to, oh I don’t - I can’t remember where we went, but we went to the dancing again, we went, and when I got home back to camp, my friend that I had met in Scotland phoned me and asked me to meet him in London when I was next off. So I said ‘alright’ and we met a few times, and I brought him home to meet mum and dad, and he was in the Eighth Airforce – the American Eighth Airforce –
HH: Eighth in the East!
BT: And, um, we met quite a few times, and then one night the phone rang, I answered it, and – no, I was told, there’s a - you’re wanted on the phone, so I answered it and it was Fred and he said ‘hi Betty, we’re gonna go home, we’ve gotta get ready for the Far East’ because the Japanese were still fighting, of course, and he said ‘but, I want you to marry me before I go – will you marry me?’, and there was a – this is - I don’t like to say this because it makes me feel so stupid – there was an ITMA show on, and the saying was ‘ee, I’ll ‘ave to ask me dad’ in a Northern accent [laughing] and I thought he was kidding me, and that’s what I said [laughing]. Well he didn’t listen to our shows of course, he’d be listening to Jack Benny or Bob Hope or something, and he said ‘well okay then’ [laughing] ‘okay Betty, you ask your dad’ [laughing] ‘if he says, if he says yes’ [laughing]. So anyway I asked my dad and he said ‘no I don’t think that’s a good idea, I think you should just get engaged’, so the next night when Fred called me I said ‘no dad says I can’t get married, but we could get engaged’. ‘No’ he said, ‘I don’t wanna leave this country ‘til I’m – ‘til you’re with me, and you’re married to me’, so [laughing] I said ‘oh alright then, where – ‘ [laughing] how silly now I think about [laughing] so silly, and I, so I said ‘oh well alright then, when?’. Well this was just after VE Day, he said ‘June the 9th’ [pause] I said ‘gosh that’s, that’s awfully quickly, I don’t know if I can do that, because’ I said ‘you do a lot of investigating of girls and I’d have to go through that and that takes a long time’. ‘No’ he said, ‘it’s alright because my, my commanding officer is a, married to a WAAF and he knows what to do and he can just go straight through to your WAAF officer and he will know exactly your character’ etcetera, etcetera, and, um, ‘there’ll be no problem’. So I said ‘ohh, okay, June the 9th it is’, he said ‘besides it’s my birthday and [laughing, unclear] on my birthday’, so, that’s what happened.
HH: So where did you get married?
BT: In Saint Mary’s church, in the local church in, in Aylesbury, and we had neighbours helping us, and my c-, my warrant officer, he, uh, booked a hotel in London for a couple of nights, and we had all sorts of volunteers for sandwiches because it was very difficult [emphasis] to get things, and the girl across the road, was a Belgian girl married to a British tommy, and she had come over and she was the same size as me. She still had her, her wedding gown, and she said ‘you can borrow my wedding dress’, I said ‘well I want to be married in uniform’ – my father wouldn’t let me, but I wanted to be married, but he said ‘no you’re not, you only get married once and I want you to be married in white’ so –
HH: You were married in white.
BT: - I was married in white, yup. And we had a nice, quite a nice wedding and reception at mummy’s house. We were squashed but it was alright, we had fun. But then, we went on the train, to London to the hotel that my warrant officer had booked for us. As a matter of fact he sat in the same carriage as us, and my husband said he was quite upset, he kept staring at me like, staring at him, like ‘you’d better look after that girl’ [laughs]. Oh well, yes.
HH: And then did he depart soon after that for the Far East?
BT: Yes, yes, about, about two weeks. No - I don’t know that it was two weeks, it could have been – it could have been less, I don’t know, but it was a quick, quick time. I know I met him a couple of times in Norwich because he was going, and I went up there quickly to see him before, before he left, and that was it and I didn’t see him again until the following February.
HH: And what happened then?
BT: Well, what happened then? I went over on the Queen Mary, I went down to um, what was the name of the place… was it Innsworth? Think it was Innsworth, for about four or five days, waiting to go on the boat, and they did an FFI (Free From Infection, as you know) with everybody, and those of us who were in the We- couldn’t give a darn about that we were used to that monthly you know, but some of these poor girls had never had anything like that done to them and, they didn’t like it at all, and some of them had babies. But, um, we got on the Queen Mary and so many days later we arrived in New York, and I had said to my husband, ‘if you’re not in New York to meet me, I’m not going to get – I’m going to get a boat back, I’ve got enough money, I’m going to get a boat back’, and he said ‘well I’ve been called up to go to spring training down to Texas because he was with, being picked for the Dodgers, Pat Derry [?] had signed him up for spring training to see, along with many others, I might add – because he played baseball here with the American Air Force, and he said ‘so I don’t know if I can’, I said ‘well if you’re not there I’m not, I’m going, going home’, so anyway he said he would be there no matter what. So I wasn’t ever really sure. And then they were calling over the tannoy ‘would Betty Ethel Turner please come to dockside’, well my name isn’t Betty Ethel Turner, it’s Betty May Turner, and we were in alphabetical order in this cabin – we even had a Major Turnipseed’s [?] wife, in there [unclear, laughs], anyway, um, we all helped Betty Ethel Turner get things in her case, but she wasn’t expecting to go, they were going to take the girls that weren’t being met to their own organisations, and anyway - so I, and I was a bit disappointed when Betty Ethel went, but anyway about ten minutes later they called out ‘will Betty May [emphasis] Turner please report to dockside’ and everybody helps me get all my stuff together. So I’m walking down the gangplank, and here’s poor Betty Ethel Turner coming back with her bag – ‘they tried to give me to your husband’ [laughing], I can’t tell you how he said [pause] but he said ‘that is not my wife!’ and he [unclear, laughing, possibly ‘worried him to death’].
HH: So you were reunited – you were reunited?
BT: So he was very relieved when I came down the pla – in fact he jumped the barrier, he shouldn’t have done of course but he did. And they all looked so different, they were in zoot suits and those fedora type hats, you know, so [emphasis] different. Yes.
HH: And how long did you spend in the States then?
BT: Twenty-four years.
HH: Where were you living?
BT: Detroit, Michigan.
HH: And how did, how did you feel about leaving and going to live in the States?
BT: I didn’t – I was unhappy leaving my family of course, but really it was excitement for me and if you’ve been away from home living since you were seventeen, I, by that time, well I spent my 21st birthday in the mid-Atlantic, on the Queen Mary, that was my 21st birthday. That’s why I was glad my dad said yes I could get married - well, they didn’t really agree but they agreed to in the end, because they could stop me up to twenty-one, they could have stopped me, if they’d really wanted to. But, I had a good life out there, but he didn’t make, he didn’t make the baseball team and he came back four weeks later, so I, when I went I was totally alone with strangers, and it was, it was strange, but, you know, after, after he came back we lived with his parents while [emphasis] we built our own house in the next block. And then of course I had my girls, and I belonged to the Daughters of the British Empire out there, which is an organisation as, as you probably know, and um, and then it all sort of went – mmm, after twenty four years I suppose it would have been, I, in nine- in the year before I bought him a set of golf clubs for Christmas [laughs], which I never should have done I suppose really, I never saw him again he was on the golf course – well that’s just a, a, you know , a thumbnail story.
HH: So you just came back, you just decided to come back?
BT: Well Donna had come back here, my oldest daughter, we sent her over to see nan and grandad as a, as a graduation present when she was eighteen, now she was older than I was when I left home, oh, when I left home the first time, and so it seemed ok but I did miss her terribly. And then of course this one was going, and one thing and another and I thought [sighs] ‘can’t be doing with this’, and um he, more or less agreed to it of course. He didn’t remarry, I didn’t remarry, I did have a partner for many years, here, but um, after I’d been here a while.
HH: But you’ve done this amazing thing to reassemble your family near Aylesbury.
BT: Well, part of it, yes. But it w – my mother was dead against divorce, they thought it was terrible my getting a divorce, but my mother was ill for a while and I would go over every day, take her a – do the house cleaning and, and look after her, and when she went into hospital she didn’t come out again – she was ninety-odd mind you, ninety, ‘bout ninety-four actually I figured. And um, then my father, and she said to me ‘everything happens for the best you know, because’ she said ‘what would we have done’. And then of course dad became ill, and I had him here for two years before he went to hospital for only just a few days and died, and he was ninety-seven when he died.
HH: So you’ve got longevity in your family.
BT: Well, I, I don’t know I don’t think so – well, so far it’s been long, but, I do have, um, I do have cancer. So I, you know, you never know do you? No.
HH: But it’s been in more recent years, Betty, that you have taken to producing these really very beautiful artworks about your memories of the WAAF – tell us about that.
BT: Well, well, when you’re alone more than anything – because I really didn’t start, um, well, Terry wa – did I do it while Terry was alive?
SM: Not so much.
BT: Not a lot, did I? I would – I know, it was a Christmas, he said ‘what d’you want for Christmas?’ and I said ‘I really would love some watercolours for Christmas’, and I’ve got a box of watercolours that he bought me for Christmas, with brushes, and I started, and I didn’t do very much at first, not at first, and then I – he was poorly, and I nursed him for about six years before he died, and all that time that he was poorly, I was able to sit and do my painting and stuff. And I did a lot of it then, quite a lot of it, and then after he died, and he’s been gone six years – so it’s been about twelve years that I’ve done the painting.
HH: And now, you could’ve chosen all kinds of subjects to paint, but you chose something quite specific, why?
BT: I chose, because I could see them. I could see the girls that I’ve painted. I would get, I would get a book and look at some, one or two, that I’ve painted with a plane in it possibly I’ve had to copy, because I wasn’t on an aerodrome, and they were, and I wanted to recognise them as well, you know, but others I’ve just remembered when we were, for instance, cleaning our, cleaning our irons in the dirty – everybody says we had lovely hot water, we never [emphasis] had lovely hot water, by the re- time the rest of us were coming out of the cook house that water would be ho-, warm, lukewarm and greasy, the grease would be floating on the top, but we still had to rinse them you know. What else would we do? Well we had, nowhere to, nowhere to wash the [unclear], anyway – and so that’s where I’ve done most of my art. Or if somebody call– once or twice somebody’s called up ‘Betty would you do one with so-and-so’, um, ‘I’d like one, I’d like a birthday card for my, for my mother, she’s going to be ninety’ or something ‘and I want - and she was in the WAAF and I want you to do a postcard or a birthday card for her’, so I would do one, one of those, and te- and Shelley my daughter, bless her, she copies them, well not copies them, yes she’s got a copier, and I, so I try and keep the originals and the copies, and the copies go. And that’s what the Association does when I do a card, I send them a copy and they keep it.
HH: In your view, do you think that the WAAFs have received the recognition that they deserve in the years since World War 2, for what they did?
BT: Absolutely not, no, that’s a - that’s a real sore point with me. I could go into the town for Memorial Day and the men, the - ‘come on, come on, let’s line up’, and then I’m there, and I even have my tie and my blue shirt and my blazer with a, with my medal even, but they w-, they wouldn’t bring me to the front. The men come to the front, and you, you know, sort of thing, but it’s like that all the time. And the memorial in London, well. Those coats on a hook. I haven’t seen it, I’ve seen it in a photograph, but I haven’t – I don’t go up to London, I’m not in a fit state to go up to London really, I s’pose I could go, I could persevere and go, make up my mind I’m going, I would love to see the Bomber Command memorial thing up there, I think that must be wonderful – but it’s just the bomber boys isn’t it, the boys that flew, who were absolutely wonderful I think, but everybody else behind those boys were wonderful too, weren’t they?
Other: Indeed.
BT: And everybody - I go to museums and it’s all planes and where are the WAAF? They were there. But you don’t get any recognition at all. Very seldom anyway. The films – you see films of the boys and the planes, but very few WAAF. It might be a love story so they have to put a WAAF in it.
HH: I was going to say -
BT: And she’s an officer’s [unclear] –
HH: - it seems to me that that seems, you know, if you look at, films and things since the war that’s been the way in which WAAFs have tended to be portrayed is as partners or as the love interest rather than as, you know, serious participants in the war effort.
BT: Yes. That’s right, yes, yes. That’s right.
SM: Can I say something here? The one thing that I notice going to the WAAF reunions is the amazing variety of jobs that they had, that the WAAF had during the war. The engine fitters, the plane deliverers, there are so many other things that they did that were men’s jobs, and these little ladies who looked as though they couldn’t blow a feather away, were just fantastic. I was just full of admiration for them, and that isn’t recognised enough.
BT: That’s right. That one woman that we were talking – one lady that sat next to you – what did she do, Shelley?
SM: She was a Stirling engine fitter.
BT: A Stirling engine fitter.
Shelly: And she was four-foot-nothing.
BT: [laughing] Now she’s a four-foot-nothing.
HH: Do you think that that started during the war though? In the sense that there was a certain ambiguity to the role that women were playing, I mean, it was obviously a necessary role to release um, men to take part in front line duty, and especially in Bomber Command with the attrition rate being quite high, um, but there was still nevertheless an ambivalence as to whether women should be playing that role.
BT: Oh yes, oh yes.
HH: Did you feel that, that at the time?
BT: Where I was stationed, not so much, because there were quite a few WAAF there and the men, they would not be on the set as much as we would be, but they would be charging the batteries and all sorts of things like that you know, and you – the men that were there a lot of times were photographers and guards, that – we would be teased, as WAAF, I mean they would say ‘go fetch something’ and it wasn’t there or it- ‘what the heck do you want’ you know, no, you got used to that sort of thing. Or if they had a joke, oh, ‘tell Betty, she’ll laugh’, you know, and I’d laugh but I wouldn’t know what they were talking about sometimes, hadn’t a clue [laughs], very innocent, sort of, you know, but um, it was – but I’ve noticed it a lot more since the last, oh I don’t know, I don’t think when I was in the states that it ever came up, because they didn’t know what WAAF were in the – I did have some friends that were in the WAAF though that married Americans, ‘cause we had this club where quite a few English girls and quite a few of them were in the WAAF, or several of them were in the WAAF anyway, because they were working with Americans some of them, on camp, and they, they were closely working with them and became friendly, very friendly, some of them. But on the whole it was since I’ve been here I notice the, the, sort of - Oh, if I told people, and I don’t do it very often, I’ve done it more lately than I ever have in my life, I’ve said I was in the WAAF and they say ‘oh were you? What did you do?’ and I’d tell them, ‘oooh’, you know, the minute you mention Bletchley Park that’s the only way you’ll get any notice, because that’s had publicity, and, you know, that sort of thing. I don’t know. But I do wish we had – on one of my friends, as a matter of fact my best friend, Jane, she thought that we’ve got to have a memorial up at the Arboretum, we’ve got to have something, and she started, and she planned it, and it was taken out of her hands by a few people in the Association, and her village, and it was built not the way she wanted it to be built, and she was warned that it wouldn’t last this particular way these people were going to do it, and it just broke her heart and even now we’ve got to spend a lot of money now getting it cleaned up and straightened up the way – actually, it would be better to take it down and start all over again, the way Jane wanted it done, it’s been so sad and we’re spending too much money on it, keeping it clean. And one thing and another, and that’s the only one we’ve got, that I know of, there, and that’s at the Arboretum, up your way, isn’t it?
HH: It’s Staffordshire isn’t it? Alrewas.
BT: Yeah. It’s quite a lovely place, but terribly disappointing that particular – so it’s good to have something, isn’t it?
HH: And I hope, very much, that you will approve of what we plan to do in terms of commemorating the WAAFs’ contribution in the new Bomber Command centre.
BT: I hope so. And I wish you the very best of luck in getting it done. I know that I won’t be alive to see it, but I shall hope that my family will go and see it.
HH: Well Betty thank you very much for that interview [telephone rings]
BT: Oh sorry, I’ll turn it -
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Betty Turner
Subject
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World War (1939-1945)
Great Britain. Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Great Britain. Women's Auxiliary Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Betty Turner served in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force with Bomber Command at 92 Group Headquarters, Winslow, and later at RAF Great Massingham, reaching the rank of leading aircraftswoman. She recounts living in chilly stables, being quite bored by Morse code, and the life-long bond that was forged between her and other Women’s Auxiliary Air Force members. She married an American whom she met during the war and they lived together in the United States for 24 years. After their divorce she settled close to her family in Aylesbury in the United Kingdom, where she had grown up. Betty Turner has been painting images from her days in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force for twelve years because the memories of her service remain so vivid; some have been used for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force Association annual Christmas card.
Creator
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Heather Hughes
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
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Christina Brown
Heather Hughes
Format
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00:50:39 audio recording
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ATurnerB150602
Date
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2015-06-02
Language
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eng
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Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Norfolk
United States
New York (State)--New York
New York (State)
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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.
Type
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Sound
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
arts and crafts
entertainment
ground personnel
love and romance
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
RAF Great Massingham
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/293/3448/PManningL1501.1.jpg
a932014196985b7e102fd8d9c5f40876
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/293/3448/AManningL150402.1.mp3
e116fe794ee51b51bca07a58e1108044
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Manning, Len
Leonard Manning
Len Manning
L Manning
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. One oral history interview with Sergeant Leonard "Len" Manning (1892872 Royal Air Force) and his log book. He flew operations as an air gunner with 57 squadron before being shot down.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Len Manning and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-04-02
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
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.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Manning
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SB: Okay, so, let’s start off with a, a very brief introduction, for my own benefit, it’s, um, it’s the 2nd of April, 2015, and this is Sheila Bib speaking with Leonard Manning. [Pause] So, I understand from our talk yesterday, be it a brief one, you were born in Paddington -
LM: Yes
SB: But basically brought up in Walthamstow.
LM: Yeah, yeah.
SB: Okay, perhaps to start off then, could you just tell me a little bit about your family, and living in Walthamstow and life before the war?
LM: Um, we had [? unclear] pretty standard life, I mean w- there was nothing special the family [?] my dad was an engineer, and um, mum used to do odd jobs around, and I went to one of the local schools [pause] didn’t get very far there because I failed the eleven plus, and then didn’t get a chance to do any more because the war started and [pause] I went to school until I was fifteen but some of that was up in Norfolk ‘cause we were evacuated - in 1938 I think it was, just before the war - up to Windham in Norfolk, and we stayed up there, as a number of people did, while it was – they thought things were gonna happen and they didn’t so [laughing] we all came back, and then later on it started again so [laughing] we went back up to Norfolk and I stayed up there until we came back. After I left school and started working uh, at, at a wood woodwork factory. I was a wood machinist, all like wood turning [? Unclear] that sort of thing, until I was called up, and I was called up at seventeen and a half, and always having wanted to get into the RAF I joined the Air Cadets in 1938 - which was the Air Defence Cadet Core in those days, it changed after the RAF took it over it became the ATC, and then you had to belong to that if you wanted to be into Air Crew, so obviously I joined that, and, um, when we moved up to [pause] Windham in Norfolk I, I did work up there for a time in a woodworking factory, but I did start a squadron of the ATC up there, because they hadn’t got one, and we started that, and, as I say, we came back and I worked for a time until I, I was eventually called up, and, [laughing] they said, asked the usual questions ‘what would you like to do?’ and like all the other lads ‘I wanna be a fighter pilot’ [laughs]. So he said ‘well, if you want to be a fighter pilot we’ll send you home on two years deferred service and then we’ll call you up and send you to Canada’, so I said ‘I don’t want that’ [laughing] so he said ‘why not?’ I said ‘all my friends are gone, I’ve got no one around me at the moment so I want to go, what can I do?’ so they said ‘well if you volunteer for air gunner we’ll take you in in a fortnight’s time’ so, that’s what I did, idiot [laughs]. And, it went off there – couple a weeks’ time I was called up and sent to Regent’s Park, in the blocks of flats opposite the zoo, where we were kitted out, and did a lot of drill and inducted into the rules and regulations of the Air Force, and then having got that sorted out they then sent me up to Bridlington, which was initial training area, where we did lots [emphasis] more drill, lots more aircraft recognition, which we did all the way through – you never, never missed aircraft recognition [laughing] no matter what else you had, you always had that. And we did clay pigeon shooting on the beach up there which was quite something – the weekends all the locals used to come out and watch us and cheer and clap if we hit anything, if [emphasis] [laughs]. And they said one day ‘right, it w- today will be the day you’ll fire a machine gun’, so we said ‘ooh that’s a good’ – so they took us up onto Flamborough Head, and sitting up on the cliff was, um, a Browning machine gun on a tripod, pointing out to sea, and an amourer sitting there with a box of ammunition, and we lined up, and, as we- when it was our turn, the armourer gave us a, a belt of am- ammunition, five round [laughs], which we had to put into the breach – far in, ‘cause didn’t last a second did it [laughing] it was a real waste of space. And that was that, so, having got all the initial training over was then sent to [pause] Bridgenorth, which was elementary gunnery school, was there for six weeks, doing all the normal gunnery things and hydraulics and what have you, and then having finished the course there we sent to number one gunnery school, which was in Pembrey in South Wales, and, um – where we started flying, that was where we first started, and the pilots, who were piloting the planes for us, were all ex Battle of Britain [pause] pilots so that, that, they were a bit, bit lunatic [laughing]. They tried, I think they, they were trying to frighten the daylights out of us, which they did [laughs].
SB: What year was this?
LM: That, um, that would have been forty [pause] forty-three I think [pause] yeah. And we did all sorts of things there, dingy drill, firing machine guns into the see at, at targets and firing on drogues that were towed by aircraft [pause] and all the other stuff that air gunner had to do. And having passed out there, was another six weeks training, we got our wings and became sergeant straight away, and they sent us off to [pause] OTU, which was Operational Training Unit, which I think was Silverstone, where we flew Wellingtons. We picked up our crew there and it’s true what they say, they put us all in a hangar, mixed us all up, ‘sort your crew out yourself’ and you went, just went round them [laughing] it was, it was hit and miss really ‘cause you, you didn’t know them from Adam and yet you saying to somebody, you know, ‘do you want an air gunner’ or [laughs] ‘I want a pilot’ and that was it, and you picked your crew, and that was it, you stuck it. The only one you didn’t have was the flight engineer because the Wellingtons were, weren’t four-engine so they didn’t have e- enough instruments there for a flight engineer. So we flew cross countries there and did fighter affiliation battles with Spitfires, and [pause] having done that – um, where did we go to from there? [pause] – yes went to Swinderby which was where we transferred to four engines – they had Stirlings up there, terrible old things they were, and got used to flying four engines, and we were flying out, doing circuits and bumps [?] one night at Coningsby – when they were out on operations we used to do, do circuits and bumps while they were on ops – and we landed on the main runway and our, our [laughing] undercarriage collapsed [laughs] right in the middle of the intersection of the main runway so they couldn’t use any of the runways, so they weren’t very happy with us because they hadn’t got the equipment to move it because the Stirling is a lot bigger aircraft than the Lancaster so they obviously hadn’t got the equipment to shift it so they had to wait until the next day to move it. And from there we went to, what they called? Lanc conversion unit where they converted some to Lancasters, and we had a few weeks there, that was at Silestone [pause] and that wasn’t very long but we got used to the, we picked up the, our flight engineer when we started flying Stirlings so we’d now got a full crew. And from there we were sent to a squadron, which was East Kirby, and we were there for a few weeks doing circuits and bumps and the usual cross countries and gunnery exercises until our first operation, which was [unclear, possibly Rouergue] in the South of France. Well, we, flew that one and [pause] it was quite spectacular because we hadn’t seen anything like this before and we flew over- flew into the target and it was all lit up, flares were being dropped and bombs were going down and it was all, all happening down there, but nothing was happening above [emphasis] it so we had quite a, an, an easy flight so we thought ‘if this is gonna be it [laughing] it’s a piece of cake’, how wrong we were [laughing]. And the next flight we did was daylight raid on Cannes when they were having problems getting the Canadians out of there so they sent a thousand bombers over in daylight, and that was unusual, and you know, it was quite unusual to fly along and see all of the other aircraft because at night you didn’t see them. It made you think [laughing] how close they were [emphasis] to you and how many there were there. And we flew in there and, um, dropped our bombs, and we, when we turned ‘round I had a good view of the target because it was smoke and debris flying out to about five hun- five thousand feet – was quite spectacular. But when we got back, we were told we were on again that night! So we thought [laughing] ‘we don’t like this’. So, anyway, we had a sleep, and some food, and [pause] then we were briefed for a raid on [pause] [unclear] in Northern France which was a railway goods yard, and we took off for that [pause] I suppose that would have been about [pause] ten o clock, and as we crossed the Dutch coast we got coned by searchlights, which isn’t very good. And having dived and turned and done all the evasion bits we were fortunate that we managed to get out. But having done that we got out of the bomber stream, which was our defence against the German radar, because if you got out of the bomber stream they could pick you up individually on radar which they couldn’t do when you were in the bomber stream. So, anyway, we altered course for the target again, and a little, little while later there was a massive explosion in the, our port wing, and immediately flames started coming past the tu- my rear turret which stopped to wo- stopped working immediately, because the hydraulic motors that drove the turret were operated from, from the port engine. So that was that. So I had to wind the turret round by hand to get the doors lined up with the fuselage, and climb out into the fuselage, which was really burning then, it w- when I looked up the fuselage it was just like looking up the mouth of a blow lamp. It was frightening it really was. And my s- parachute, which was stowed in the fuselage, was smouldering, that was already going, so I went and got it and tried to get it on my, the two hooks on my [pause, laughs] parachute harness, but as the plane was going down I could only get it on one, couldn’t get it on the other. And my rear g- my mid upper gunner, he got out of his turret, I saw him get out, he came down towards me and went out the door which was down towards the turret, and he went, and, um, I didn’t struggle any more with the parachute because I thought ‘if I hang about here I’m not, I’m not gonna make it’ so, I just jumped out and into the night, just jumped [emphasis]. Hit my head on the tail plane [laughs] which wasn’t very good. You weren’t supposed to do that, you were supposed to roll out you see? You got time to do all this, you take your helmet off and you sit down and you roll out – no way [laughs]. So, anyway, I’m counting down and I thought, I don’t know, I looked up and I saw the thing was smouldering away there and I thought ‘I hope I get down before this thing catches fire and drops me off’. But anyway, on the way down I felt s- I was leaning to one side and I felt something brush my face, I put my hand up and it was the intercom cord on my helmet which was caught up in the parachute which was fortunate because I hung on that, and that probably took some of the weight off the para- off the harness that was burning, and [coughs] being that it was night I was thinking well we- where am I gonna land, am I gonna land in a tree or [laughing] in a pond or somewhere nasty. In fact I landed in the middle of a field flat on my back, and as soon as the parachute dropped around me it, it burst into flame, so I jumped on that and put it out and stuffed it in a hedge. And by this time I was badly burned on my face and all down my arms, and I thought ‘well let’s see if I can find a lane’, which I did, came out on a lane and I thought ‘if I head South, I might meet up with some troops eventually’ and that’s what I did. And I walked for about, I suppose eight miles, and I was really [emphasis] in pain then and I could feel this running down my face, I thought I was bleeding to death – of course it wasn’t, it was the burns, and as I say I collapsed on this farmer’s doorstep and they must have heard me moaning and came out, took me in, and I was fortunate because they were members of the resistance. So they took me in and put me to bed, and, um, the following day they got a doctor to me - uh, a, one of the resistance people – came and sorted my burns out, and moved me to another house in the same village. And because of course the Germans started looking for me then, they were hunting all over the place, so they, they moved me from one house to the other, and eventually they decided that enough was enough and that, they moved me out of that village and they sent, sent a resistance bloke to take me to the next house, and [pause] he came and his code name was Lulu [laughs]. And off we went through the woods and we got to a stage where he suddenly said to me ‘I’m lost’ [laughing] [unclear] good thing for a guide. So anyway he said ‘I’m going, I’m going to that house to s- see if I can find directions’, and he stuffed a Luger pistol in my hand, sat me in the hedge and said ‘If, if I get into trouble don’t ask any questions just shoot’. Well he came back and he, he, he hadn’t had any trouble, and off we went, and we finished up in a tiny little village called Latretoise, and um, to a little café. Well when I say café all it was, was a room in a house although they had, not only had the café they also had a small hotel on the other side of the courtyard which the Germans used to use when they came into the village, and it was run by two elderly ladies. I think the youngest one was, when I was there I think she was fifty-seven then, how old her mum was I don’t know. But I mean for two old ladies to, you know, take in somebody like me and risk their lives, if they, if they’d have been caught they’d of shot me and them no, no argument. So, anyway, they – oh they, in the meantime, before they moved me up there, they, they sent um, a resistance man to interrogate me to make sure I wasn’t a German because Germans were dropping people over there to get in with the resistance to find out what was going on. So anyway I’d got all over that and [pause] anyway these these two old ladies they couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak French so there was a lot of arm waving and shouting. And [pause] they gave me a bed in the hotel across the yard and I used to have my meals in the- behind the café, in the room there, and [pause] I lived with the family, you know, as w- as one of the family. But there were three other people there, men there, who were hiding from the Germans, the Germans wanted them for forced labour in Germany and they weren’t gonna go so they went into hiding, and we used to all have our meals together, and there was also a young lady that used to come in to see us, brought us cigarettes and money, and she was about the same age as me ‘cause I was nineteen then, and she was a forger, she used to forge papers, she was brilliant she really was. And, um, anyway we had one or two nasty scrapes there [pause] they came, somebody came into the café one day and said that [pause] German tanks were coming towards the village so that, when anything happened like that I, they used to put me upstairs in the ladies’ bedroom, and I’d stay there until the Germans went, and anyway the following morning I got up and looked out the bedroom window and there’s all these German tanks [laughing] lined up in the courtyard, Germans strutting around I thought ‘here we go’, and um [pause] that was quite nerve wracking because we didn’t know when they, if they were gonna come into the café and come up stairs and you know find me, but they didn’t, and the following day they moved out so things got back to normal. There was a big orchard behind the hotel where I used to be able to go in and walk about, play about, and, um- but I wasn’t allowed in the café itself, because you know, you never know when the Germans were going to be in there. And another time we were sitting in the back room – I think there were five of us, having our evening meal – and the Germans were in the village and they came into the café and that that was alright because normally they didn’t used to come into the back of the café so we thought we’d be alright, and anyway, Madame Beaugart [?] came back to get some change, and this German followed her out, followed her back, [laughs] stood in the doorway, and he looked all round and I thought ‘this is it, we been caught’, but um she gave him his money, just turned round and walked out and that was that so that was a bit of a relief. But I could wander about, I could get out into the village, not very far but I was told not be about when the postman was about because he was suspected of being a collaborator. So we carried on like that, and [pause] one day, not thinking, I thought the Germans had gone and I walked into the café and there were two German stranglers sitting there having drinks. Anyway, Madame Beaugart [?] she, she realised what had happened she started beating me about the head with a, with a dish cloth ‘get back to work!’ [laughs]. And beat me out and I went out and we got away with that one. But I think that was the last time we saw the Germans because the next day I think, the, a couple of resistance lads came into the village on a German motorcycle and sidecar which they’d taken off the Germans [laughs] somewhere, and they said that the Americans were on their way to the village and were setting up a field hospital in one of the fields outside the village. So the next day I went down and found an officer who said he’d take me into Paris [pause] in a couple of days’ time, where they’d set up a reception centre for people like myself ‘cause there was thousands of us, floating about in France. So they set up this hotel in Paris, a Hotel Maurice, which had been the headquarters of the Gestapo, and he said he’d take me there in a couple of days’ time so I went back, they gave me lots of tinned fruit and coffee and stuff as, as they always did, for my friends in the village who were very grateful for that, and the following night there was a massive [emphasis] party, there really was. And all the good wines came out and it went on nearly all night, and the following day I said goodbye to them, went back to the Americans, and he took me into Paris in a jeep to the Hotel Maurice where we stayed, I think, for a couple of days, and um, we did roam about Paris a little bit but it was quite dangerous because the resistance were rounding up all the people that had been collaborating and- were shootings going on in cafés it wasn’t very safe. And, the- they then flew me back to Hendon, where I was interviewed by MI5 and they took any guns or knives you had on y- they took them off you and interviewed you to make sure you were, you were who you said you were [laughing]. And having got over MI5 they then took me to Hotel Maurice, um, in London, where I was interrogated by bomber intelligence, who wanted to know what I’d done with their Lancaster [laughs]. Having got over that, they- we sent telegrams home, and they said ‘right, you can go home on leave’, and the only identification was a piece of paper, a scrap of paper about three inches by two inches, type written, ‘this is to certify this is Len Manning’ and that was it, nothing else. So anyway, having sent the telegram, I went home, and of course living in London I got home before the telegram obviously, and I always remember I walked into our road, and one of the neighbours was coming down pushing a wheelbarrow, he was going over to his allotment, and he looked up and he saw me [background noises] and he thought he’d seen a, seen a ghost, and he ran back up the road to my parents, and then all hell let loose, they all came out because they hadn’t heard from me for three months. So, that was that. I went backwards and forwards to the RAF hospital, I think it was at the Middlesex Hospital, for medicals and eventually I was given [unclear – perhaps ‘no on sick leave’] and medically discharged, and that was that.
SB: What a fascinating story.
LM: I’m glad you enjoyed it.
SB: Yeah, yeah. Can I just go back over a few –
LM: Yeah [emphasis] sure.
SB: a few bits and perhaps, clarify – um [pause] going back before you said you were in the A- ATC because you wanted to [pause] fly and -
LM: Yeah
SB: So on, um, [pause] what were your feelings, you know, you said you were sent up to Norfolk in thirty-eight because you said they thought something was gonna happen, how did you feel were you eager for this, or –
LM: Oh yeah, I was keen for it, yeah. Always been interested in aeroplanes and things like that so obviously I was keen to get in the ATC and do some of the training.
SB: And then when nothing happened in thirty-eight and you were all sent back again
LM: [laughs] yeah
SB: Frustrated, or-?
LM: Yeah I was frustrated, yeah, yeah.
SB: Um, did you have any brothers or sisters who fought.
LM: I had a brother, yes, he eventually joined the RAF. He was [pause] an aircraft fitter. He used to repair the fuselages, do repairs and stuff like that. He finished up down in Saigon I think it was [pause] and eventually he was discharged and, but while he was in, there, East there, he contracted TB. And you know what they used to do then was then they carve half your ribs out, so he didn’t have a very good time, and [pause] dad was in the, at that time when I came out he was in, that time he was in the control commission in Germany. He had the equivalent rank of a major, and he was looking after again the transport going in Hamburg. Mum was in the Land Army, so we all did our bit [laughs].
SB: Yeah, yeah. And had your dad fought in the First World War?
LM: Yeah he was in the First World War yeah and he wasn’t in the Second World War obviously, he was too old and I think he was in a reserved occupation anyway, being an engineer. [coughs]
SB: So [pause] y- your parents, well, your dad had been in the Army, your mum was Land Army, how did they feel about you boys going to the Air Force?
LM: Um, I can’t remember them ever, ever saying anything about it really, I can’t remember their, their attitude to it, not really, no.
SB: Ok. So, after the war, what happened then?
LM: I was registered disabled for a time, which meant that I could – most companies had to take a certain number of disabled people so it meant that I could get a job fairly easily, and a light job anyway. And I found a job in a plastics company, looking after their duplicating and printing office, which was quite good, and being nosey I used to get down into the factory and find out what was going on and what how they did this, that and the other, and eventually I got out onto the technical side, and spent the rest of my life playing about with plastics, in various stages. And I didn’t have any qualifications, because at that time while I should have been studying I couldn’t, and all my knowledge was picked up, actually on the shop floor, practically. And I finished up as a Works Manager of plastics company Wood Green, which eventually went bust,
SB: So, how do you think your experience during the war affected life afterwards?
LM: [pause] I don’t think it did really. [pause] No really no. But when I came out of the war – not when I came out, a long time afterwards, when I got to a stage where – and I had two daughters, by the way – and, when they were off hand and we wanted something to do and I joined the RAF Association and became their Welfare Officer, and their Chairman. I was Welfare Officer in London for fifteen years I think [clears throat], ‘cause when I moved up here, I joined the RAF Association again and straight away the had me awarded a Welfare Officer so that was it.
SB: So, it has impacted you in some ways, but just, what you, doing for hobby or [unclear]
LM: Yeah, that’s right.
SB: Yeah, um, can I just, o- over some of the place names, obviously this is going to be typed up, could you just clarify the spelling of some of them, so that –
LM: Um
SB: The village you stayed at in France
LM: Latretiose, which is capital L-a-t-r-e-t-i-o-s-e. Latretoise.
SB: Right, okay, and then the hotel in Paris –
LM: Hotel Maurice
SB: Is that -
LM: M-a-u
SB: r-i-c-e?
LM: Yeah
SB: Okay, and then in South Wales you were at Pembrey?
LM: Pembrey yup.
SB: Which is P-e-m
LM: P-e-m-b-r-e-y I think it was.
SB: b-r-e-y. Okay, yeah, I think that was it. Just ones which could be slightly confusing when we’re writing it up.
LM: We know [unclear] – we know it’s [laughs]
SB: Yeah, yeah, but those I know so that’s not, that’s not a problem, but those were just three which I thought ‘I’d better check that spelling’. Right, so [pause] let’s get back to the time when you were actually in France. How frustrating was it to be [pause]
LM: Stuck there? It was, it was frustrating because at that time, um, obviously it was after D-Day and the Germans were on the retreat, which meant that they were guarding all the bridges and main roads so they could get back easily which meant that it was difficult for us to move around so that’s the reason I, I stayed in the café for three months. Because they wouldn’t move me any further away. Although I did get taken out one, one time, a chap turned up in a car [emphasis] I couldn’t believe it, and he took me to a ch- a big chateaux, somewhere, don’t know where it was, and they obviously didn’t like giving you names, but he had a big library there and he had a lot of English books and he lent me some English books which I took back with me, but when I came back he wrote to me because he was, evidently, he was the Chief of the, one of the segments of the resistance, and he came over to be interviewed by the BBC and I went up to Bush House to see him when he was being interviewed, which was quite interesting. But [pause] I didn’t go back to – you see there’s two places involved here I don’t think I told you this, where the bomber crashed was Basvelle [?] and that is not a ‘ville’ it’s ‘velle’ – I have this argument with [unclear] ‘it must be ‘I’!’ [laughs].
SB: Bas-
LM: -velle.
SB: Ok, yup.
LM: And the other place was Latretoise so there’s the two different things. And [pause] fifty years afterwards I hadn’t heard a- um, mum used to write to [pause] the, the girl that [pause] used to bring us cigarettes and stuff – Madeline her name was, and [pause] so, they kept in touch for a while but then it all petered out. And then fifty years afterwards, I was reading the Air Mail, which was RAF Association’s magazine, and one of the adverts was for anybody that flew in a certain Lancaster get in touch with these people in Basvelle. So I wrote to them, I didn’t know what they were after, and they wrote back and said they wanted to have a memorial service over there, and they’d like me and any others, members of the crew to [pause] attend, which I did. But they went to an awful lot of trouble to find that the rest of the crew – because amazingly I had some addresses, of the [pause] relatives of the crew members, which I was able to give them, and amazingly, quite a number of them had moved on, the, I think it was the Bomb Aimer, he had an address up in Blackpool, and he, they were still [emphasis] there. Couldn’t believe it. Fifty years after the war and they were still there. Unbelievable.
SB: Quite incredible.
LM: Anyway, his parents were still there but he wasn’t, he’d been, ‘cause he, um, I didn’t, I didn’t tell you this, when the bomber crashed, four of the crew went down with the plane, and three of us got out, the Gunner who I said I saw jump out before me, he had a very similar experience to me, he got in touch with, eventually with – funnily enough the first house he went to they wouldn’t have anything to do with him, the woman said ‘no I’m sorry, I can’t take you, I daren’t do it’, and she gave him another address, I the next village, and he went there and they, they took him in. But the amazing thing is the house that he went to at first was the house that the actual Mayor, there now, lives [laughs]. And the navigator, who also got out, which I can’t make out why, I never could, because all the others around him was killed, but he got out somehow or other, but anyway he landed and he was the only one in the crew who really knew who we were, being a navigator. Hopefully [emphasis] he knew where he was [laughs]. Anyway, he wandered off, and I think he spent a couple of days [pause] rummaging around and keeping out of the way, and begging food from various farms, but funnily enough he didn’t get taken in, and he came to a river, which he knew would eventually lead him into Paris, and he started wandering along there and walked into a German [unclear] battery [laughs] he got caught. So he spent the rest of the war as a Prisoner of War. And the [pause] what a, oh yeah the Flight Engineer, he was found some way away from the others with his parachute unopen beside him, so whether he was blown out or panicked and didn’t pull the red cord we don’t know, but he was found quite some way away. But it was his relations that were still living in the same house, fifty years on. And by the side of him they found a silver Florin which they gave to his, I think it was his, his sister, who I’d met, Joan, who I’d met up with – I’d met up with him several times, but eventually they died, well they’ve all died now, I’m the only one left. [Pause] and I think that’s about it. The four of them are buried at, in, in Basvelle, and that’s where we go every five years, in fact we were there last year, and, for a small village, I mean the, the, the Basvelle was a village, I should, I should think that it’s probably fifteen, twenty houses. But thousands [emphasis] of people turn out, it’s unbelievable. I can show you [gets up].
SB: Please.
[Background noises]
LM: [unclear] that’s the Len book. [laughs] Now how often do you get a book specially for you? And what she’s done she’s put together the whole story of our visits over there, and [pause] she’s really thorough, she’s really good, a real good organiser.
SB: That’s fascinating.
LM: Are you still recording?
SB: That alright? [laughs]
LM: [laughs] yeah, I gotta watch what I say [laughs].
SB: This is lovely.
LM: It must have cost them a fortune.
SB: Yeah
LM: Because she, I think she had six of those – she had one done for each member of the crew, with just their story, and there you are, there’s some of the crowds. And I mean, look at the standards. I turned up outside the Town Hall one, one day and there were fifty standards, lined up outside there, couldn’t believe it.
SB: Did they manage, well, when they, located you were any of the others still alive at that point and able to go to Basvelle?
LM: Yeah the Navigator, he was still around, but he was the only one, but he didn’t turn up at the first couple anyway. And I don’t know why. Yes they, they spent an awful lot of money, that village, on things like this, I mean they have a, a meal there for probably two hundred people. Guests and Mayors from all the villages around. You know they did one for each of my daughters, and my granddaughter.
SB: ‘Tis a beautiful record.
LM: ‘Tis int’it.
SB: I’ve never seen one like this.
LM: No. And the other thing is that they’re always giving me medals. Can’t get any medals over here but over there you can get medals every time I turn up [laughing]. The latest one, is that one in the frame there. [background noises] It’s very heavy. It’s like the old desk thing. But that’s a silhouette of my face, as I am now, and then w- as I w- was, and then the Lancaster. I mean that’s a one-off, must have cost a fortune.
SB: Yeah! Absolutely. Heavens. Well [unclear]
LM: Yeah I did that because I thought ‘well what do I do with it’, you can’t leave it lying about and you don’t want to stick it in a drawer, so.
SB: You make the point there, can’t get medals over here nut you get them there. How did you feel about that?
LM: Very annoyed. Because I did two or three campaigns for the Bomber Command, medal, which we didn’t get, we got a bar, to our other medals, but we didn’t get the, didn’t get a medal anyway. But they’re still fighting for it, I mean I, I, I got an award for what I did.
[background noises]
SB: [unclear] try and get the medals?
LM: Yeah, for that and the things I do with the school kids as well.
SB: Yeah. Yeah some recognition but –
LM: Yeah when I got, when we got, I’ve actually got the bar, they refused me three times [laughs], when I eventually got it, I rang Radio Suffolk to tell them that I’d got it because they’d been helping me with it, and somebody came on and said that ‘well how did you get your bar? Was it presented?’ I said ‘no, it came through the post’ they said that’s disgusting [emphasis]’. The next thing I knew the Mayor of Sudbury rang up and said, ‘Len, be ready tomorrow at ten o clock, I’m taking you up to Ipswich Town Hall where the Mayor or Ipswich will present you with your bar’ [laughs] we got it. But so anyway he picked me up and we went up to Ipswich, and there was the Mayor of Ipswich there, and the, um, Mark Murphy from Radio Suffolk was there, the press was there, and we were in the Mayor’s parlour, we had tea and they got all the silver out [laughs] you know, it was quite something, and so that was presented there. But that, that was presented by the, that award was presented by Mark Murphy from Radio Suffolk, but there was some, some people there and it was, you know, it was really something to be there w- in among that award. I mean that was a special award, I, I, the others, there were three of each, for each type of award they were, they were doing, there were firemen there, there were the police there, there was a little girl there that been in a fire and got, all her face was burnt away, terrible. And it was a real honour to be there it really was, but they really laid it, laid it on.
SB: So, so you personally have had recognition but a lot of them presumably haven’t.
LM: Yeah, that’s right they haven’t. But the other thing is that every year, and in fact I’m off at the end of this month to Holland, they invite Air Gunner, ex-Air Gunners over there, to, they been doing it for years, it’s only Air Gunners, funnily enough, and, to a town called Dronton, which is one of the towns that was built on reclaimed land from the Zuiderzee [?], and they tell you when you standing in the square, beautiful square, if you’d have been there fifty years ago you’d be six foot under water [laughs]. I mean it’s as new as that, it’s amazing, it really is. But I’ve had I think, four medals from Holland.
SB: At least your efforts aren’t totally unrecognised [laughs]
LM: [Laughs] no it’s amazing.
SB: Well I’m glad something came out of it, but this is a remarkable piece –
LM: That’s something else, isn’t it?
SB: That, that is, yeah, really remarkable. Ok, I think that probably covers –
LM: Yeah well if you think of anything else you can always give me a ring.
SB: Yeah, yeah, exactly, so I’ll stop recording.
LM: Oh sorry would you like a cup of tea or coffee?
SB: I’m fine, thank you very much.
LM: Sure?
SB: Yeah, absolutely. [background noises] I’ll stop recording, at this point.
LM: It was my ninetieth birthday in, in January, hence all these planes. Planes on cakes, I finished up near three birthday cakes [laughs].
SB: And lots of planes [laughs].
LM: There’s even that orange one from my great-granddaughter.
Dublin Core
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AManningL150402
Title
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Interview with Len Manning
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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.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
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eng
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00:51:15 audio recording
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Pending review
Creator
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Sheila Bibb
Date
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2015-04-02
Description
An account of the resource
Len Manning grew up in London and worked in a factory before he volunteered for the Royal Air Force. He flew operations with 57 Squadron before being shot down over France. He spent three months living with supporters of the Resistance in a small French village and hiding from the Germans while he recovered from his injuries.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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France
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
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Christina Brown
57 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bale out
bombing
crewing up
evading
fear
final resting place
Lancaster
Operational Training Unit
prisoner of war
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Silverstone
RAF Swinderby
Resistance
shot down
Stirling
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/4/9/PAndersonW1501.1.jpg
b8318f95c9e8a84de911a5de119b51d1
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/4/9/AAndersonW150517.1.mp3
ef44f5cd625b5a6c6073e5750d52d7b0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Anderson, William
William Anderson
Les Anderson
W L M Anderson
William Leslie Milne Anderson
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer William Leslie Milne Anderson (1925 - 2018, 196733 Royal Air Force), and one photograph. William Anderson was a flight engineer and flew operations in Lancasters with 166 Squadron from RAF Kirmington.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by William Anderson and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-05-17
Rights
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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. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
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Anderson, W
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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WA: My name is William Lesley Milne Anderson, and I’m recording this for the International Bomber Command Centre, on the seventeenth of May, 2015 [pause] at – where am I [pause] at Beverley, in Yorkshire.
MJ: Right that’ll –
WA: Right [pause] I was a flight engineer on Lancaster aircraft. My rank a, at the end was flying [emphasis] officer. [Pause] I went to Edinburgh Aircrew Recruitment Centre when I was eighteen and a quarter, hoping to join the RAF and to fly. Everybody wanted to be a pilot. I went there with a school pal of mine who was going to join up as well, but we were told, at that time, if we wanted to be down for pilots, if we pass the various medical and tests, we would have to wait for nine months before we were called up. So this friend of mine decided, ‘fair enough’, to accept nine months wait so that he could eventually become a pilot, whereas I decided that I’d go for something else, and when I asked what was available to go more or less straight away I was told ‘a flight engineer’, so I said ‘that’ll do me fine’. [Pause] I w – when war broke out I’d only be, oh, fourteen [pause] and [pause] but, I thought ‘well, if I’ve got to go into the forces, I would rather fly somewhere than walk in the Army [laughs] to get there’, so that’s why I chose the Air Force. The training was at a place called Saint Athan in South Wales, that was after – well funnily enough, I had to report to Lords cricket ground, and that was where we had a medical and were issued with a uniform, and then we were marched along to a part of London called Saint John’s Wood, and when we had to go and collect our pay one day we were marched to the zoo [emphasis], I thought – was funny, I been in the Air Force and I’ve landed in a cricket ground, in a block of flats, and I get paid from the zoo [laughs]. So I thought ‘when do I see an aeroplane’. However, I was, was going to have to wait quite a bit longer [emphasis] because after, think it was a fortnight or three weeks, we were posted to Torquay, and when we got to Torquay we found that quite a lot of the hotels [pause] had been taken over by the RAF, and there, once again [emphasis], no aeroplanes in sight! But we did the basic training, the marching, ohhhh, the guard duties, even a bit of clay pigeon [emphasis] shooting, and this went on for about twelve weeks, and after the twelve weeks we were sent off to Saint Athan, and at last [emphasis] thank goodness, there were aeroplanes, because [pause] it was – I can’t remember exactly how long, but it was interesting, not sitting in little classrooms, but in a big [pause] building – a hanger I suppose – divided up into sections, where you could hear what was going on just across the wooden division that was separating you from the next group. So anyway – oh I missed the bit out where, at – the important bit, was I couldn’t swim [emphasis] [pause] and, they didn’t tell me, when I got to Torquay, until I got to Torquay, that I had to pass a swimming [emphasis] test, and so they took us down to the harbour, and the Corporal lined at the squad I was in [?], on the harbour, and told us we were going to jump in, and swim down just about twenty yards to a set of steps so that we could climb up to the top again. Luckily we had a Mae West , but [emphasis] my name being Anderson, on some occasions, is very handy because quite often you’re first, but in this case there was a chap called Adams before me, and when the Corporal said ‘Adams, jump in’, Adams said ‘I can’t swim, I’m not jumping in’, and so he said ‘Anderson, in you go’, and I said ‘I can’t swim, I’m not jumping in’, and so he said ‘if you go in the way I tell you to, you’ll go in and hit the water without doing yourself any damage. If I’ve got to push [emphasis] you in, you might land on your head or your back or your behind’, so bearing in mind that we got a Mae West on, he said ‘curl your toes over the edge of the harbour wall [pause] hold your nose, and take one step forward’, and of course, went down, and when I opened my eyes under water I saw millions of little bubbles, and with a Mae West on I was shot to the surface and up, and somehow or other I managed to get to the steps – don’t know how. But, when all the squad had been in, there was Adams, still in the water, still in the same spot where he’d jumped in, paddling like mad but going nowhere. So the Corporal said, ‘one of the swimmers, jump in, drag him to the side’, and that was our introduction to swimming. The rest of the swimming was done in the baths. And then, when we got to Saint Athan we carried on with swimming there. [Pause] Now, so, we did quite a bit of training at Saint Athan, I would say it was a very good course, and so, when the course was finished, although we’d made some friends during the time we were there, we were broken up by being posted to different placed training units up and down the country. I landed up in 1656 Heavy Conversion Unit at Lindholme just outside Doncaster. That was where I met the crew. The six other crew had been together for a while, flying of course, in two-engined Wellingtons, and the Conversion Unit was to convert them to four engine aircrafts so they had to pick up a flight engineer. At that time, which would be [pause] forty-three [pause] forty-three, most of the Lancasters were going from the factories to the squadrons, so we were actually trained on Halifaxes [pause] and then after a course there we went for a fortnight to RAF Hemswell which at that time was number one Lancaster finishing school, and we were only there for [pause] two weeks, and I seem to remember [pause] most of the work that we did there was ground work on the systems different in the Lancaster from the Halifaxes and the flying [pause] consisted only of circuits and bumps, daylight, circuits and bumps at night, and the number of flying errands we did was eight, and we were sent off to the squadron, and the squadron happened to be 166 Kirmington, which nowadays is, of course, Humberside International Airport. [Pause] At Kirmington [pause] it was a fairly basic [emphasis] airfield, had only opened in forty-three, near the end of the year, and [pause] roundabout in the countryside there were lots and lots of trees, forest, and the, the huts, the mission huts we were in, were in the trees. Fair bit of walking to be done to get to the airfield if you happen to miss the transports, but [pause] on the whole, it was Kirmington village, the people were very good to us, although I didn’t particularly drink, there was only one pub in the village [pause] that was in forty-four by this time – May. Now [pause] oh, got stuck, um, yes. The crew that I joined at Lindholme contained three Canadians, the mid-upper gunner, the rear gunner, and bomb aimer, were all from Canada. The pilot was English, from Halifax, the navigator was from Leicester, and the wireless operator was from a village – I’ve forgotten the name of the village again, but up somewhere around Newcastle. [Pause] Anyway, off we go, and start operations. We were lucky [pause] inasmuch that the battle for Berlin had finished roughly in the January of that year, because Berlin causalities had been heavy. Many of the trips that we did were not long trips because at that time – [pause] oh, forgotten, sixth of June, D-Day, that was the start, that was my first operation, sixth of June, D-Day, and that was to a marshalling yard north of Paris. A lot of marshalling yards had, were being attacked to make sure that the troops and supplies didn’t reach D-Day, er, reach the [pause] [knocks on something] [pause] and of course [pause] doodlebugs had put in an appearance, and so they had to be taken care of, and so many of the doodlebugs were, weren’t very far in to France, so a number of the trips were fairly short. For that we were thankful. Some of the trips of course were quite long. Anyway, we had got there in May, forty-four, and we did our last trip on the thirtieth of August forty-four. My skipper, the navigator, and myself, were all posted back to Lindholme as instructors. My skipper decided that he would like to stay in the RAF and by this time he had become a squadron leader, so he applied for a permanent commission. He stayed in and did his time after the war was finished, and finished up as Group Captain Laurie Holmes DFC, AFC [pause] and the OBE [laughs]. [Pause] When the war finished, because of my age I knew my demob group was a long way off, and I didn’t see much point in instructing to pass crews on to still to squadrons as if the war was still on, so I applied to join Transport Command. [Pause] Just as well, because, although the war finished, May, forty-five, I didn’t get out until, somewhere about August forty-seven! [Laughs]. But in that time I saw quite a bit of the world and got paid for it in Transport Command, flying on Yorks, which was virtually a Lancaster with a different shaped body. First flying carrying freight, because they changed the shape of the body so that freight could go easily in, or seats could be put in for passengers. After a number of trips taking us as far as Delhi and back, we were reassessed and went on to passenger carrying. Still Yorks, of course this time with seats in, and we went as far as Changi, Singapore, and that was our turnaround point, and came back. [Unclear muttering] [break in tape]. Well luck [emphasis] had to play a big part in things, I mean as I said earlier on, many, a number of our flights were fairly short because it was the time when doodlebugs were around, and they had got to be get rid [emphasis] of. Also, when you found that you were maybe down for mining. Mining was considered a, oh, quite a, you know, easy [emphasis] flight, mining, going along drop some mines in the water, come back. But we, one night, had to go to a place about fifty miles from Russia, right along the Baltic, and there were the airfield next to us, or closest to us, was called Elsham Wolds and there they had a, oh well all together there twelve Lancasters going mining at this target, all that distance away, and five were from Kirmington, and seven were from Elsham Wolds. Now because it was near the end of our tour, [unclear] some systems and some squadrons where, as you were classed as being more experienced, you moved up, from say maybe the third wave, to the second, to the first, and somebody got to be first in dropping – until this particular night we were down to drop first, the mines. But we went out with four hundred other aircraft that were going to Keel, but so we left this country, crossed the North Sea, in the company of four hundred other aircraft. Didn’t see four hundred aircraft but nevertheless, that’s what they said there were there, and then they turned off to starboard, to head for Kiel, where we kept on along the Baltic – twelve of us, supposed to be. As we got near the target [pause] a searchlight popped up, and another one, and another one, the three of them started waving around and we thought ‘they know we’re coming’. However, after they’d waved about for a little while they all went out – sigh of relief. So we were supposed to drop first. So we dropped and went through the target a bit and turned away and headed back, and as we turned away the searchlights came on, so the rest of the aircraft had to come through searchlights, but, although there was fire from the Baltic, from ships in the Baltic and [emphasis] from the harbour, we didn’t see any aircraft shot down. However, we had been told that we might not get back into Kirmington because of weather and so we were given an alternative route back to land at Lossiemouth, North of Scotland, so we landed up there, and but there weren’t twelve Lancasters, but we didn’t think much of it at the time because [pause] we knew that the weather was such that we weren’t getting back into Kirmington or Elsham, so then, landed somewhere else, maybe couldn’t get into Lossiemouth, or anyway, I don’t know, but it wasn’t until the next day that we got back to Kirmington that we found that we had lost two out of the five aircraft and word came through from Elsham Wolds that they had lost three out of the seven. Which meant five out of twelve, which wasn’t a very good result, and yet [emphasis] in coming back all [emphasis] that way, along the Baltic, we didn’t see an aircraft being attacked, or an explosion, but when the chap called – Squadron Leader Wright [?] came to read or to write the history of 166 Squadron, in doing research, they found the bodies had been washed up in, er, countries bordering the Baltic, from, from the raids. So, there we are – luck. Lost five out of twelve aircraft, but you haven’t seen one attacked, you haven’t seen one explode, you haven’t seen one on fire, you get back to Lossiemouth without any problems, you know.
MJ: And that’s unusual.
WA: Aye. But five out of twelve, aye. But for a mining trip, and people were thinking ‘oh, Holmsey [?] and crew they’ve been lucky they’ve been down to do a mining trip tonight’ you know, aye [laughs]. So, aye it’s, I don’t know. Anyway, anyway up there, that’s [break in tape].
MJ: On behalf of the International Bomber Command Oral History Project, I Michael Jeffries would like to thank Flight Officer Anderson for his recording on the date of the seventeenth of May, 2015. Thank you very much.
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with William Anderson
Description
An account of the resource
Flight Officer William Anderson began his service in the Royal Air Force at the age of eighteen when he signed up in Edinburgh. In this interview he speaks about his training, reporting to Lord’s Cricket Ground in London, being paid at the London Zoo, and having to learn quickly how to swim in Torquay. After training at RAF St Athan, he was posted to 1656 Heavy Conversion Unit, and joined a Lancaster crew based at RAF Kirmington. His first operation was on D-Day to a marshalling yard near Paris. After that Anderson recounts stories of going on mine laying operations, particularly one over the Baltic, where five out of twelve aircraft were lost on one operation.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Michael Jeffries
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Christina Brown
Heather Hughes
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AAndersonW150517
Subject
The topic of the resource
World War (1939-1945)
Great Britain. Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:30:43 audio recording
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-05-17
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
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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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England
France
Wales
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
England--Devon
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
France--Normandy
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Scotland--Moray
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1656 HCU
166 Squadron
bombing
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
mine laying
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
RAF Hemswell
RAF Kirmington
RAF Lindholme
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF St Athan
RAF Torquay
recruitment
searchlight
training
York