1
25
59
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1875/46452/SHarriganD[Ser -DoB]v210002.mp3
bb25f9759fe68b4d9e2f7a48a1017036
Dublin Core
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Title
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Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-06-19
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.
Identifier
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Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire
Description
An account of the resource
34 items. Interviews with veterans recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.<br /><br />Interview with Bertie Salvage <br />Three part interview with Dougie Marsh <br />Interview with Terry Hodson <br />Interview with Stan Waite Interview with John Langston<br />Interview with Nelson Nix <br />Two part interview with Bob Panton <br />Interview with Basil Fish <br />Interview with Ernest Groeger <br />Interview with Wilf Keyte <br />Interview with Reginald John Herring <br />Interview with Kathleen Reid <br />Interview with Allan Holmes <br />Interview with John Tomlinson <br />Interview with Cliff Thorpe and Roy Smith <br />Interview with Peter Scoley <br />Interview with Kenneth Ivan Duddell <br />Interview with Christopher Francis Allison <br />Interview with Bernard Bell <br />Interview with George Arthur Bell <br />Interview with George William Taplin <br />Interview with Richard Moore <br />Interview with Kenneth Edgar Neve <br />Interview with Annie Mary Blood <br />Interview with Dennis Brader <br />Interview with Les Stedman <br />Interview with Anthony Edward Mason <br />Interview with Anne Morgan Rose Harcombe<br />
<p>The following interviews have been moved to the relevant collections.<br /><span>Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46454">Kathleen Reid</a></span><br />Interview with Wing Commander <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46467">Kenneth Cook DFC</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46456">Colin Cole</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/46464">Charles Avey</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46470">John Bell</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46459">Les Rutherford</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46460">James Douglas Hudson</a></p>
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Interviewer: It’s the 18th of May 2012 and I’m here to interview Mr Allan Holmes whose uncle was with 103 Squadron here. Right Allan, could you tell us about your uncle.
AH: I certainly can. Right. My uncle who was Frank Norman Holmes born at Twenty Foot in Kirmington and went to school at Kirmington. He joined 103 Squadron in 1941 and completed thirty ops with Geoff Maddern, Don Charlwood, Graham Briggs. I forgot the names of the others just at the moment. And then after they did the thirty ops he went to Finningley Gunnery Training, didn’t like that and volunteered for 582 Pathfinders and on the, that was in 1944, I think and he was lost on the night of May the 4th 1944 on a raid to Montdidier. That was the same night as the big Mailly raid where there was four hundred odd bombers. The other thing a little story about Uncle Frank was he was always late for briefings at Elsham because him and [pause] I’ve forgot his name now. Anyway, he was always looking, he was always going poaching and he got caught with the Lord Yarborough’s game keeper and was taken before Lord Yarborough who said to his game keeper, ‘What’s this man doing here?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘We’ve caught him poaching, my lord.’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘He can go shooting wherever he likes. Don’t bring him here again because he’s doing a far better job than you.’ And so that was some of the antics that they got up to. He was lost on May the 4th as I said 1944. He is laid to rest in a cemetery in Rouen in France. I don’t remember him because I was only about four years old then when he was lost. Another little story apparently when I was a little kid the, when he came home on leave my dad, my father and Uncle Frank they had a little air rifle, not very powerful I don’t think and they used to give me pennies to crawl under the table and they used to fire pellets at my backside. So they was always up to some fun and you know they had to have some fun in them days because who knows how long they was going to be here with us. They never grew into old men. He was always a young guy to me. There’s not a lot more I can say about him really.
Interviewer: You regularly go to the Mailly Le Camp Remembrance Service. Could you tell us something about that?
AH: Yeah. Mailly Le Camp. That was a big raid. Some Lancasters went from Elsham Wold. One of the old veterans Jimmy Graham was one of the men that flew on that and Jimmy was at the Mailly celebrations or commemorations this May which is 2012 with one or two others. Another Australian guy there as well. It’s very well attended. The Air Cadets from Scunthorpe and —
Interviewer: Immingham.
AH: Immingham. They also come along and form, they have the band which comes along with us and do various presentations, concerts and they do all the national anthems for all the cemeteries that we visit. The British, the Australian, the Canadian, New Zealand and they put up a good show for us does the Cadets. And we do various other visits after that to different cemeteries and the reception we get is absolutely fantastic from all the French people and all the standard bearers that turn out. Firemen. Everybody at every cemetery that we go to which is absolutely fantastic. So all the lads that we lost are all very well remembered and the cemeteries and the graves are all fantastic and well looked after.
Interviewer: That’s fabulous. Lovely. Thank you.
AH: So, there you go.
Interviewer: Thank you, Allan. That’s brilliant. Thank you.
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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Interview with Allan Holmes
1012-Holmes, Allan-N Lincolnshire Disc 2
Identifier
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SHarriganD[Ser#-DoB]v21
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2012-05-18
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
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
Second generation
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Format
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00:05:24 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
Pending OH summary. Allocated C Campbell
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Creator
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This Interview was recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.
Description
An account of the resource
Allan Holmes’ uncle was Flight Sergeant Frank Norman Holmes (1577142 Royal Air Force) who flew operations as an air gunner with 103 and 582 Squadrons. He was killed 4 May 1944 on an operation to Didier.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
103 Squadron
582 Squadron
air gunner
RAF Elsham Wolds
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1085/11543/PPritchardA1701.2.jpg
665f37b1fc773d7c481a87e32db937c5
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1085/11543/APritchardC170823.1.mp3
3aaf3d7ce542de333a9bec8d84eec5cd
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
A name given to the resource
Pritchard, Arthur
A Pritchard
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. An oral history interview with Carolyn Pritchard about her father, Arthur Pritchard (2206806 Royal air Force) documents and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with with 463, 467 and 97 Squadron until he was shot down. He was hidden by the French Resistance until the liberation of Paris.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Carolyn Pritchard and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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
2017-08-23
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.
Identifier
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Pritchard, A
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SP: This is Susanne Pescott and I’m interviewing Carolyn Pritchard today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We’re at Carolyn’s home and it is the 23rd of August 2017. So, first of all thank you Carolyn for agreeing to be interviewed today. So, first of all do you just want to tell me about your father and what he did before the war?
CP: Yes. As he joined up on his, on his eighteenth birthday he didn’t have, after leaving school he worked for a baker’s delivering bread and that’s it really. And then he joined up.
SP: Yeah.
CP: On his eighteenth birthday.
SP: Did he ever say why he wanted to join the RAF?
CP: No. No. No. He didn’t. He didn’t mention why.
SP: Ok. So he went into the RAF and do you know what, where he went first of all? What he did?
CP: Yes. He was, he joined up on his eighteenth birthday and he was, he did his training at St Athans in South Wales. He passed out as flight sergeant and was posted to RAF Winthorpe in Lincoln where he was introduced to his Australian crew as flight engineer. And that was on the 29th of February 1944. He joined the 463 Squadron. That was the Australian squadron in RAF Waddington. They did seventeen sorties while they were in Waddington and they were Germany, over Germany, France. And on the 9th no, sorry it was the 7th of May 1944, the pilot officer Bryan Giddings and crew, that was dad’s crew, they posted, they were posted to 97 Squadron. That was the Pathfinders and that was at RAF Coningsby. They completed another three missions. Seeing action in D-Day. On their twenty first sortie, that was the 9th 10th of June 1944, on a night raid over a railway junction at Etampes, that’s south of Paris, Pilot Officer Giddings and crew failed to return. Right. I don’t know how much —
[recording pause]
CP: After releasing flares over the target the Lancaster ND764 was hit by flak and they were then attacked from below by a night fighter. Many many years later when he was able to relate his story to me he recollected the moment the aircraft was hit. The inner or outer port side engine was on fire. He wasn’t sure which one it was. The suicidal height at which they were flying, the noise, the smoke in the cabin and unable to communicate amongst each other, the cramped conditions in the cockpit, no place to wear your parachute. He always stored it on the floor. Frantically searching for it, the rush of cold air from the open back door. That was the navigator jumping out. Then he trying to prise, prise open the escape hatch at the front. Every second was wasted. Making survival impossible. The whole episode could not have lasted more than a few minutes and before he realised it was a doomed machine he, he had jumped out.
SP: So, how Carolyn, when he told you that, how did you feel when he was relaying the story?
CP: Well, a couple of years later we’d gone back to RAF Coningsby to see the Lancaster and we were able to go on board. And I could then visualise because the Lancaster wasn’t aircrew friendly at all. It was so small and cramped. And I felt so sorry for the mid-upper gunner. Where he was positioned would have been impossible for him to get out. And the tail end Charlie was, he was in this small little cockpit and again that would have been impossible for him to get out and the aeroplane was going down so fast. And eventually when they did find the bodies they were found in, in the aircraft. Yes. The three of them.
SP: So three —
CP: Were, yes it was the bomb aimer, the mid-upper gunner was, he couldn’t get out and the rear gunner which was the tail end Charlie. They are the three that couldn’t get out. The pilot had jumped out when the plane was very very low but his pilot, his parachute didn’t open. And also the wireless operator. No. I’m muddling up now. It was the navigator. The wireless operator had jumped out already and it was the navigator that had jumped out without a parachute and he was found with the whistle in his mouth. So he’d obviously survived the crash but I don’t know how long and was trying to attract attention. Yes.
SP: And how was your father when he was talking about the story?
CP: He was, he’d put the whole episode really at the back of his mind all the years we were growing up. Even though he used to talk about them. The crew.
[recording paused]
SP: So Carolyn, obviously it’s quite emotional talking about your father and the crew there so can you just talk me through what happened then after he’d got out of the plane.
CP: Yes. Because the aircraft was on fire and it was so low he’d baled out and he’d sprained his ankle. So he was hobbling around the French countryside with a damaged ankle and famously asking villagers for the way to the coast. He was trying to get back to the coast. Eventually he’d arrived at a small village, Egly and entered the local church. He’d seen a local man at the altar and [pause] and told him in broken English that he was Welsh. That he was an RAF airman. The French man couldn’t speak English and what he did he took, he gave dad a glass of water and then he took him to a café opposite the church. On entering the café dad waved a hundred franc note from his RAF kit and ordered champagne for everybody in the, in the café. There was panic as the Germans were in the village and he was hastily ushered to the back room. A young teenage boy from the village was brought in. He could speak a little English and he asked dad to explain what had happened. Dad said that his aircraft had been shot at and that he’d baled out and, but he was really uncertain with the rest of the crew and he kept asking and asking how they were. So that they could check his identity with London they hid dad in a small air raid shelter underground and if they, if he hadn’t checked out right I think they would have just left him there. Once the ok came from London the local leader of the French Resistance was summoned and put him in the care of Monsieur George Danton and his family. They risked being shot if caught hiding a British airman and he was given a new identity, well an identity and civilian clothing. His ID was a deaf and dumb Frenchman. And a bicycle. He was moved from safe house to safe house until eventually he ended up in Paris. In Antony in Paris. He was always instructed to follow a parcel tied to the back of Mr Danton’s cycle. Not Mr Danton himself. And once they had arrived at Mr Danton’s house in Paris Mr Danton went into the building without the parcel. The parcel was still left on the bicycle and a few minutes later came out, picked up the parcel, took it into the house and then dad followed. And that was the time that they could embrace each other because they knew then that they were in a safe house.
SP: So, Carolyn obviously dad’s now in the safe house. Did he talk about what life was like in the safe house?
CP: Yes. He did. He kept a diary while he was there. Life was very mundane. And there was little food. Jam and bread kind of thing. And now and again they used to try and get a cigarette for him because he was absolutely desperate for cigarettes. And then they tried to teach him. They tried to teach him a couple of French words to just to get about and whenever it was a bit safe for them to go out Mr Danton used to take him to the, some of the airfields where the German, the Germans had their weapons and aircraft and say to dad, ‘You make sure that you remember this. That when you get back to the UK and you’re debriefed that you can tell them where things are.’ That kind of thing. Yes. Yes.
SP: So, how did he actually get back to — obviously he was in a safe house.
CP: Yes.
SP: How did he get back in to the UK?
CP: He was, he was in the safe house for over two months. And then there was the liberation of Paris on the August the 24th. Right.
[recording paused]
CP: Yes. On or about the 23rd of June they tried to get dad back to the, to the UK. They were expecting a Lysander aircraft to land on, on a landing strip but they tried a couple of times but it was, they felt it was too dangerous because the Germans were still, still around. So they had to, it was just too risky so they had to abort. They tried to get him out there but eventually he hitched a lift with a war correspondent for the Sunday Pictorial. A Rex North. And they eventually got to Paris. On the way there they were, he was given a bottle of champagne which I’ve, we’ve still got today actually in the house. Undrinkable. Yes. And eventually on the 24th of August he flew back in a Dakota to the French, from the French coast to Hendon. And at that time, after that he was debriefed. He had to go down to London to be debriefed to what he’d seen. And, and that was it.
SP: Did he talk at all about the debriefing? Did he say that was like or —
CP: No. He didn’t. He remembered. He had a marvellous memory. He’d remembered everything he’d seen while he was in Paris trying to help. Trying to help while he was back. No. He didn’t actually. No, he didn’t.
SP: And what happened after the debrief? Did he, what happened to him after that?
CP: Well he, he’d, he was allowed home. One thing. One thing that struck me when I was, I had always been speaking to him over the years was how he didn’t get any counselling and everything. There were so many people killed and he kept asking, ‘What’s happened to the crew? What’s happened to the crew?’ And they didn’t know. Even the crew, years and years later after speaking to the crew’s families they hadn’t known for years, well months, what had happened to them. And he was allowed to go home. Which, he came back to our little village here and, and that was it. He had a couple of weeks here and then he was posted to Scotland as an air traffic controller. So that was the end of his war. Yes. And where he met my mother.
SP: Right.
CP: She was in the RAF as well. She was a WAAF. Yes.
SP: So, obviously they met up in Scotland and then —
CP: Yes. They did. Yes. Yes. They met up in Scotland.
SP: And came back to live in Wales.
CP: Eventually, they did. Yes. They, they got married and always lived in this little village. Yeah. My mother was from Liverpool. Yes. Yeah.
SP: And then what did your father do after the war?
CP: He worked in construction. Working for big machinery. He was offered a career in the RAF as [pause] I think in Canada. They wanted him to be trained in Canada but he wasn’t interested anymore after going through such harrowing experience during the war. He didn’t want anything to do with flying. Yes. So he took a different career.
SP: What about you? How did it affect you growing up with your father’s stories? Was it —
CP: Well, it did. He always, he always, he hid a lot. He always talked about the boys.
[recording paused]]
CP: Yes. Always talked about the boys to our families. And as we were growing up we knew about them even though we had never met them. And when my sister Shirley and her husband had got married they had gone to Europe on their honeymoon and thought they would try and trace first of all the French Resistance families to try and get back in touch again. Which they did. They managed to, to get in touch with the French Resistance. That was in 1977. I think it was 1977. And eventually my dad went over for the first time in 1977 to meet the families of the French Resistance. And ever since, all his life he kept in touch with them. They either came to our little village here to see him or he’d gone back to see them. All always visiting the boy’s graves. By that time he’d known that they perished and they knew exactly where they’d been buried and the stories. The harrowing stories that followed. Yeah. So we did know the boys. And he used to come up with some funny stories about them. Like if he had a date with a WAAF they’d all go to the pictures together [laughs] Yeah.
[recording paused]
CP: Yes. He used to talk, like I said about the boys. One was an avid reader. Always had a book. Even when they went on, on their ops at night and the pilot used to have to say, ‘Put that light off,’ because he had this tiny little light in his, he was a upper-gunner. Just in case he attracted the Germans. And I think the rear gunner used to write poetry. I’m sure dad said he did. They were well educated. Very very well educated men. I think they taught my father a lot because first of all they couldn’t understand him when he joined the crew because he was Welsh speaking all his life. Had a very big accent. Welsh accent. Could hardly speak English to be honest. Yes. And they taught him a lot of culture. Yes. Took him to London on their time off when they had time off. And a few of them used to come to our little village when they, because they couldn’t go back to Australia obviously when they had time off and they used to come to the village here. My dad’s family had met them. Yes. Lovely men.
SP: And you kept in touch you say, with the Resistance.
CP: Oh yes.
SP: Did you keep in touch with the Australian families as well?
CP: Families, as well. Yes. And that, well he hadn’t really because I’m one of eight so during, during his time while we were growing up he had a lot on his hands [laughs] So he, he didn’t have time but as we grew up and we knew about the boys I used to try and say, ‘Oh, do you remember where they came from, dad?’ And all that. Anyway, I think it was in 2004. I think it was 2004 there was a knock on the front door and a man handed my father a letter and left. So he read the letter and it was a member of the crew. It was the Webb family. And they had found out my father, where my father lived, managed to get somebody that was connected to the 97 Squadron website, Ron Evans, to deliver, who lived in Wales, to deliver a letter to dad introducing themselves. Saying that if he didn’t want to get in touch, you know, keep in touch or get in touch with them that was ok. But my father was absolutely thrilled he had their address. They lived in Sydney so, and then we, I was on the internet then so I was able to email them and say yes of course. I think it was 2006 they came over from Australia and spent six weeks in Wales with us here. And that was very nice. And then the McGill family, that was the upper gunner, they came over in, I think it was just over two years ago and we went to the Bomber Command Spire. The unveiling of the Spire. They came and we were in touch and we’re still in touch with them all. Yes. We’re still in touch with the Australians. Lovely people. Send Christmas cards every year. Have letters from them. Yes. Unfortunately, part of, well the Giddings family they’ve, they’ve died. We’ve lost touch there. The Clements family the same. But the Seales we still speak to. The Webbs and the McGills. Yes.
SP: And how important is that to you to keep that contact going?
CP: Oh, it’s very important. Yes. The boys. Memories are still, still there. And actually the, actually both families the McGills and the Webbs we actually went over to France on different occasions to stay with the Dantons and to visit the graves. Yeah. So that they could see where they were. Yeah.
SP: So, we were talking about your father earlier. You mentioned on the day of the final flight.
CP: Oh yes.
SP: For the whole crew.
CP: Yes.
SP: They had certain superstitions. It didn’t feel quite right that day. Do you just want to share that story?
CP: Yes. Yes. They used to, well they used to, you know just before they taxied off for the mission they used to wee on the front wheel. But that particular night three or four WAAFs had come down to the air, airfield to wave them off so they couldn’t carry out the weeing. So that was the night that the plane was shot down so my father felt that if only they’d wee’d. Yeah.
SP: Did you talk about that? Saying that was a superstition that they had.
CP: They all, yes. They always carried it, they did that every time they went on a mission. Yes. But not that particular night. Yes.
SP: Just chatting, is there anything else you feel you want to say about that you haven’t had the chance to say about your father or any, the impact on the family or anything like that?
CP: Well, I think, I think going back to when they used to come back from their missions and then they were always, they always were given a big breakfast. And they’d be sitting there with their cigarettes obviously. And they used to call, they used to have tablets, uppers and downers I think but he never used to touch them. But the coldness of when they used to go into the mess and the fact that their locker had been cleared and as if they had never existed. You know, the crews that had never returned. I just felt that that was very sad and he always used to feel that was very sad. Yes. And the fact that he didn’t know, while he was in France, he didn’t know what had happened to the rest of the crew and he’d asked and asked and nobody knew and it was months later that he did find out and that was so, so sad for him. Yeah. Because they were best of friends. Did everything together.
SP: That’s ok. Alright. Well, I just want to —
CP: Yeah.
SP: Thank you Carolyn very much for sharing those stories and obviously the impact on you as well.
CP: Yes.
SP: So, on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre thank you very much.
CP: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Carolyn Pritchard
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Susanne Pescott
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-08-23
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
APritchardC170823, PPritchardA1701
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:26:53 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
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 Australian Air Force
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
Carolyns father, Arthur, joined the Royal Air Force on his 18th birthday. Following his training as a flight engineer, was posted to RAF Winthorpe. He was allocated to a crew consisting entirely of Australians. In February 1944 the crew were posted onto Lancaster aircraft of 463 Squadron at RAF Waddington. On the 7th May 1944, they were posted to 97 Squadron at RAF Coningsby. It was from RAF Coningsby on their 21st operation on board ND 764, they were shot down 30 miles south of Paris. Carolyn describes in detail the events, from the aircraft being damaged by anti-aircraft fire and then being attacked by a Luftwaffe fighter, to the escape from the aircraft and subsequent contact with French civilians who sheltered him up to his return to the UK after the liberation of Paris in August 1944. Following his return, Arthur was granted three weeks leave. He did not return to flying, instead he retrained and became an air traffic controller. He was posted to Scotland, and it was here he met his future wife. In the 1970’s, whilst on a holiday in Europe, her sister managed to establish contact with members of the French Resistance who had sheltered Arthur. In 1977 Arthur was able to visit them and the graves of his fellow crew who did not survive and remained in contact for the remainder of his life. Carolyn recalls her father describing a superstition the crew used to carry out before each opeion. Each crew member would urinate on the aircraft wheels before boarding. Several members of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force came to wave them off on their last opeion and discretion meant they were unable to carry out their routine.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Ian Whapplington
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Great Britain
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Lincolnshire
France--Paris
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-02
1944-05-07
1944-08
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
463 Squadron
97 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bale out
bombing
evading
final resting place
flight engineer
ground personnel
Lancaster
Pathfinders
RAF Coningsby
RAF Waddington
RAF Winthorpe
Resistance
shot down
superstition
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/921/11529/APescottSM171018.1.mp3
42ca6713ac5e82b8b008ab682176172e
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
A name given to the resource
Lawson, Homer
Harold Lawson
H Lawson
Description
An account of the resource
Ten items. An oral history interview with Susanne Pescott about her father, Flight Lieutenant Harold Lawson DFC (b. 1921, 1544881, 177469 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs and album. He flew operations as a navigator with 10 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Susanne Pescott and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-11-28
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.
Identifier
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Lawson, HA
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SP: This is Susanne Pescott of International Bomber Command Centre, talking today about my own father, Flight Lieutenant Harold Homer Lawson DFC. Today is the 18th of October 2017. My father, Harold Arthur Lawson was born 24th of August 1921 in Salford, Manchester. His parents were Arthur and Emilia Lawson and Arthur was a piano teacher. He also had two brothers, Arthur and Stanley. He went to Gresham Street School and was an altar boy at the Church of Ascension in Salford. After school, he went to Grammar School and worked for Acme Welders as an engineer before he signed up in 1941. He was aged twenty and he signed up at the recruitment centre in Padgate. I’ve actually got the letter that was sent from the Air Ministry, I think it’s really interesting that in this letter dated 22nd of September 1941, in the end paragraph it says, in wishing you success in the service of your choice, I would like to add this, the honour of the Royal Air Force is in your hands, our country’s safety and the final overthrow of the powers of evil now arrayed against us depend upon you and your comrades. You will be given the best aircraft and armament that the factories of America and Britain can produce, equip yourself with knowledge and how to use them. I can’t imagine what a twenty-year-old, his reaction would be to that, but I should imagine it’s quite daunting to have all that pressure suddenly seen. So, he started his training around the end of 1941 and he was trained to be a navigator and the training was at Scarborough, many crews were based at hotels in around Scarborough at this time, the Grand Hotel, which is still there today, was where a lot of the exams were carried out, not sure the exact hotel my father stayed at, but it would’ve been around that area. His nickname, as I said in the entry, was Harold Homer Lawson, he was nicknamed Homer and that links in to his role as navigator, as he was always seen as bringing the crew home. After his initial training, he moved to number 9 AFU in January 1943 to start training on Ansons and this was at Llandwrog in North Wales, which is now Caernarfon Airport. I think he did well to survive the initial training there as there were very high losses during this time on the Ansons due to its close proximity to the Snowdonian mountains. After there, he moved up to Scotland to 19 OTU which was Forres in Kinloss and here he met up with his Canadian pilot who was Johnny Hewitt who actually ended up being a lifelong friend as they kept in contact after the war as well. While he was here, they practiced lots of things, like cross country training, fight affiliation, high- and low-level bombing missions and foundation flying and formation flying and on here he was on both Ansons and Whitleys. In 1943 they were moved to a conversion unit, it was number 1663 and this was based at RAF Rufforth in Yorkshire and Yorkshire was where he was going to remain to carry out all his operations. Here he met his magnificent Halifax bombers, this is the plane he would complete all his operational tours on. And finally, in November ’43 he was posted to 10 Squadron and this was at RAF Melbourne in Yorkshire. 10 Squadron known as Shiny Ten, and completed quite a huge number of operations from there. His crew whom he met and crewed up with were Johnny, who I mentioned, Johnny Hewitt, he was Canadian, he was the pilot, my dad was the navigator, the bomb aimer was Erwin Bayne, known as Paddy, and he was from Ireland and, F Wheaton, I don’t know his first name, was the wireless op, Sam Smith was the mid upper gunner, and known as Titch to the crew, S Leonard, again I don’t know his first name, was the flight engineer, and M Grey, another Canadian, was the tail gunner and he was nicknamed Blondie. So, it was a bit of a baptism of fire for the very first ops, I can only imagine how the crew felt when they were told it was going to be Berlin, so the 29th of December they at 5.10 set off and that is 1943 to complete the first operation and it is part of the Battle for Berlin. So during this operation, they encountered and shot down a Junkers 88 and then returned to Melbourne 7 hours and twenty minutes later and found that the tail plane had a lot of flak holes in it. This was really to set the tone really for most of their tour of ops as they had several more encounters with German planes and shot down a further two during the thirty-eight ops. So, after the initial baptism of fire, it went a little quite during January and February but again started to get busy in March with several night operations over France, the crew also started to do a lot of minelaying operations, a very different role and quite a challenge for navigators because there weren’t any landmarks and talking to many navigators that have done from around that time, they tended to pick out the navigators who were good because of getting the exact location, so really proud that he was picked out for that. Moved on into April ’44, lots of missions over both Germany and France and that included missions to Essen and Dusseldorf and both of those missions, they were actually caught in searchlights and following an electrical storm on another trip to Karlsruhe they had to land at the emergency airfield at Manston as the engine cut out as they were flying over the east coast. In May the crew were attacked by a fighter over Mantes-Gassicourt so quite a lot of interaction with enemy fighters. But the busiest month [unclear] was June 1944. A lot of mining to start with when, throughout the Hague and then on D-Day, my dad and his crew took off at 2.55am to part, take part on the gun batteries at Mont Fleury, these were overlooking Gold Beach, and this was in preparation for the D-Day landings, his logbooks actually says, the second front started on that actual article. So talking to another veteran, Ken Beard, who was from 10 Squadron, and he set off from Melbourne only three minutes before my dad, so he’s seen exactly the same things, and he said, they weren’t told any details, other than to ensure that they didn’t drop their bombs early, and when they got over the Channel they could see exactly why and that’s because there were hundreds of ships sailing across the Channel at that time. It didn’t stop there on D-Day, they had another operation later that day, and they took off at 22.30 and flew to Saint-Lo where the Germans were based, they had to fly very low at two thousand feet. The rest of the month kept busy, very high activity with a lot more minelaying and started to get some day as well as night operations as well. On the 15th of June, on a trip to [unclear], the plane was once again in combat with the enemy, another Junkers 88, they managed to set his port engine on fire, but the plane cylinder head broke on the return journey making the starboard outer US as it says in my dad’s logbook. It’s worth noting here that the plane they were flying on at this time was a Halifax III, it was known as the Ol’ Ram, it had a fantastic nose art painted on it, which was a picture of a ram smashing three swastikas and painted by one of the groundcrew whilst it was at 10 Squadron. So, the plane was seen as lucky cause it was ZAJ with J for Johnny as the pilot, so they were quite pleased to get that on the majority of their operations. On another raid, on a daylight ops to Noyales on Chausseur, the starboard engine again had problems on the way down in but they carried on on their mission and feathered on return to make it home. You would have thought that might have been enough activity in June but then again, 28th of June, on ops to Blainville the crew had actually three combats on that trip and destroyed one Messerschmitt 210, the logbook actually reads, it hit the deck three minutes after the starboard wing was set on fire, so, a very eventful June which continued into July, at the beginning of July doing three trips over to the V bomb bases at Saint-Martin-L’Hortier, two of these night raids and one day, flak particularly heavy around this installation, the Ol’ Ram, the plane came back from one trip with flak holes in the port tail. I think it must have been quite difficult going on the, on these V bomb trips to Saint-Martin-L’Hortier on one of the flights I know that it’s reported that one plane dropped its bombs on another Halifax squadron and it actually crashed and killed all the crew and on another trip one of 10 Squadron’s own planes was actually shot down, so I can’t imagine having seen that on one trip, the courage they would have to have to go back day after day to the same destination is a very special sort of courage. The Ol’ Ram was hit more by flak on trips to the various railyards and then on the 20th of July the very last ops for the crew was a trip to Blowtrop and here they had a petrol leak on the port inner and the port was US again referred to in my dad’s logbook and the ammo tracks caught fire so a very eventful last trip. So, the crew completed thirty-eight operations and my father, I am very proud to say, was awarded the DFC in November 1944, I’ve got the original press article and that reads, it was given for gallantry and devotion to duty in air operations and actually refers to throughout an exact, throughout an exacting tour of duty, this officer has displayed exceptional ability as a navigator, and cool courage in the face of the enemy, on four occasions his aircraft has been engaged by enemy fighters and in the ensuing air combat three hostile aircraft have been destroyed. So, after they’d finished their operations at Melbourne, they went back to Forres, did more training and flying, this time on Wellingtons, and then ended up back in Yorkshire, at RAF Rufforth at a Conversion Unit. In May ’45 my dad was moved to 77 Squadron and at this point they were based at Full Sutton and he had a new pilot, Flight Officer Pickin and they were on Halifax VIs and then started training on Dakotas and this was ready for preparation to fly them to the Far East to support the Burma campaign. Lots of practice of supply dropping and glider towing and this was done at Broadwell and they finally set off on the 22nd of September 1945 on route to India. The route took them via Libya, Sedam and Yemen into India and then took them from the 22nd of September until they finally arrived at their destination on the 1st of October. October ’45 shows that the main trips they did were around India and the Khyber Pass and supply dropping and bringing troops back. I have a copy of a letter that my dad sent to his pilot, Johnny Hewitt, when he got the, the information that he was going to be sent over to helping the Burma campaign, so I’ll read a little bit out of this, so it just says, I left Rufforth and was posted here, 77 Squadron, ex Elvington, remember the time we all went to Elvington, and that will refer to a time when 10 Squadron had to pick up some planes for an operation and borrowed the ones from 77 Squadron and he also says that he was here on V E Day, didn’t even get one op from here where we are now on transport and I am converting to Dakotas in a couple of months. Talks about training and constantly lectures with the Far East and Burma and tropical diseases and learning about different forms of navigation again on the stars. It says as well to help with being able to navigate by the stars, they’ve wired off the Gee and H2S so that they can only use the stars to navigate. One of the comments he’s put in his letter, says, well, it looks very much that I shall end my life in Burma or some place, you can imagine me under a mosquito net, scratching elephant bites and sweating horse feathers beneath some tropical sun. So, I don’t think he was particularly looking forward to that tour. The logbook continues with lots of daily activities but then on the 22nd of November 1945, the logbook just stops, no idea why cause not like my father [unclear] to leave things unfinished but he has, I know he returned home and was demobbed in late ’46 but no more detail at all. After the war, I know he was taken back by his old employers and worked in engineering all his life, becoming a chief estimate with a company called Acro that then became known as Thomas Store. 1950s he met my mom, Maureen Chilton at Belle Vue Dances which is in Manchester. My father was strict Church of England and my mom came from a Roman Catholic family so you can imagine that wasn’t an easy ride, both sides of the families refused to accept the relationship, so on New Year’s Eve in 1955, my mom slipped out, carrying her wedding shoes and they got married at Manchester Registry Office with one friend and getting a member of public off the street to sign there as witness. And mom and dad went on to become great ballroom dancers winning many medals, so they early started at Belle Vue Dances [unclear] through the rest of their dancing years. Unfortunately on the 12th of September 1975, my dad died very early of a heart attack and he never actually spoken of his war years and the remarkable feats of bravery that he’d shown and really wish we could turn the clock back and hear those stories direct from him and actually you know, let him know how proud I was of him and what he did. I think in a way this is why I’m so privileged to be an oral interviewer for Bomber Command’s Digital Archive, I can hear these stories it makes me realise the sort of activities my dad would’ve been involved in but also to keep them for future generations and let them have the opportunity of listening to a family member recount those stories that I never heard. My research into my dad started about three years ago when I was looking into family history after about a year of research and talked to my brother he asked, would the logbook help? [laughs] Well, clearly that opened up a whole new avenue and it helped immensely. Unfortunately none of his crew was still alive by the time I was researching but I did manage to track down the daughter of his pilot in Canada, Johnny Hewitt, my mom had pulled out some old photos and there was a letter in there from Johnny from 1975 and it had arrived with my mom just after my father had died so really just being put to one side and it was saying that Johnny’s daughter, Pam, and a friend were going to be coming to Europe on a trip of a lifetime and could they met up with my dad and stay with them whilst they were over here. I don’t think the letter was ever replied to unfortunately because of the timing, so I started to look into the letter and try to find a phone number and but I couldn’t, I saw an address so I wrote to this address, didn’t get any information back after a couple of months, so I decided to phone all the J Hewitts I could find around Ontario [clears throat] just to see if I could find, if Johnny was still around, the pilot but again no joy. Think I must’ve been searching a few months each night and just looking on the internet, doing little searches with different names and I finally came across an article in a small Canadian paper, the Aurelian Times, it was talking about a Johnny Hewitt in the cross hall of fame and it had a little quote from his daughter saying that she hadn’t realised how important he was to the cross or how good he was because he didn’t shout about those things that he did, just like he didn’t shout about his time in World War Two and then I see that the daughter is called Pam, and I think, could this be the link that I was looking for? So, I emailed the editor of the paper and asked him to pass my details on to Pam, a week went by and then one night suddenly an email popped through, just saying, I am the Pam you are looking for, still gives me goose bumps now talking about it, but that started up a great correspondence with Pam. I sent her a copy of the letter her father had written, she’d never seen any of his letters so it was quiet precious to her and she let me know that she actually did come across and do the tour of Europe and she actually stayed with my grandparents, my dad’s father and mother who a lot of the crew went to stay with when they were up in Manchester anyway so they were all well known to them and Pam did a little bit searching and to my surprise she found three letters that my dad had sent in 1945 and 1946 and gave a real insight into his life and the sort of things that they were doing during the war. I think one of the things that quite surprised me from it was almost desperation from my father wanting to do another tour with Johnny and the rest of crew and said he got the crew together and could they all do another tour together, and the thing that just clearly showed the bond that they had and how difficult that must have been breaking up after all they’d been through and you know, despite the risks, they would still want to get together just so that they could keep that, you know, comrade and friendship going and on that. So I think whilst nothing can replace talking to my father about his time in the war, the letters, you know, filled such a void there and also talking to the veterans from 10 Squadron where I’m a member of the association and they can really bring it to life with several of the veterans being also on the same trips that my dad did. So, I hope that one day, you know, maybe I’ll come across a recording of his crew and until then I’ll keep my search continuing, so I’m hoping that people will find this of interest and useful and that maybe one of the relatives of my dad’s crew and the crew of the Halifax III ZAJ the Ol’ Ram will be able to find out a little bit more about their families, thank you.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Susanne Pescott
Creator
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Susanne Pescott
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
2017-10-18
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
Identifier
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APescottSM171018
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:22:23 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
Susanne Pescott talks about her father, Flight Lieutenant Harold Arthur Lawson DFC, who worked as an engineer before joining the RAF in 1941, where he served as a navigator. After completing his training, he was posted to RAF Rufforth and from there to RAF Melbourne on 10 Squadron, with which he flew 38 operations. His first operation was to Berlin on the 29th of December 1943 where they shot down a Junkers 88, for which he was awarded a DFC in November 1944. Among his various operations, particular relevance is given to the ones in June 1944, when they targeted a gun battery in Northern France in preparation of the D-Day landings and shot down two enemy aircraft. At the time, he was flying on a Halifax III, known as the Ol’ Ram for its particular nose art. In May 1945 he was posted to 77 Squadron at RAF Full Sutton, where he trained on Dakotas in preparation to fly to the Far East. In October 1945 he was then posted to India to drop supplies and bring back troops. She recounts her efforts made to find her father’s pilot, Johnny Hewitt, and getting in touch with his daughter.
Contributor
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Peter Schulze
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
India
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Berlin
France--Ver-Sur-Mer
France--Neufchâtel-en-Bray
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1943-12-29
1944-06-05
1944-06-06
1945-10
10 Squadron
1663 HCU
19 OTU
77 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of the Normandy coastal batteries (5/6 June 1944)
C-47
Distinguished Flying Cross
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
Ju 88
mine laying
navigator
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
nose art
Operational Training Unit
RAF Full Sutton
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Melbourne
RAF Rufforth
training
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1169/11738/ATurnerP170529.2.mp3
73d2287852145aa1989b5e640fc81de9
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
A name given to the resource
Turner, John
Albion John Turner
A J Turner
Description
An account of the resource
<a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/228620/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"></a>116 items. Concerns Flight Sergeant Albion John Turner (1911 - 1939, 561939 Royal Air Force) who joined the RAF as an apprentice in 1927. After service as a fitter he re-mustered as a pilot in 1935 and after training served on 216 Squadron flying Vickers Victoria and Valentia before moving to 9 Squadron on Handley Page Heyfords in 1936. He converted to Wellingtons February 1939 and was killed when his aircraft was shot down on 4 September 1939 during operations against shipping at Brunsbüttel. Collection consists of an oral history interview with Penny Turner his daughter (b. 1938), correspondence, official documents, his logbook and photographs. <br /><br />Additional information on Albion John Turner <span>is available via the </span><a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/228620/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">IBCC Losses Database</a><br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Penny Turner and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-05-29
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.
Identifier
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Turner, J
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SC: I think that’s now. So, I’m with Mrs Penny Turner at your house at [Buzz] Lowdham.
PT: Yes.
SC: Nottinghamshire. It’s 11 o’clock, the 29th of May 2017 and your father was Albion John Turner who was a flight sergeant pilot of a Wellington bomber on one of, if not the first bombing raid and was killed on the 4th of September 1939. So if you perhaps want to start now and explain anything about how you first —
PT: Yes. Well —
SC: Found out —
PT: The first time I found out I was a small child sitting on, in the gutter actually under the gas lamp.
SC: Yeah.
PT: With a load of friends in the street and we were playing Snobs. We’d throw them up and catch the stems on the back of your hand.
SC: Yes.
PT: And we were all playing and one of the boys said, ‘Where’s your father, Penny?’ I said, ‘I haven’t got one.’ He said, ‘Of course you have. We’ve all got a father.’ ‘No. No. I haven’t got one.’ So I ran in along the passage to my mother. I said, ‘Mother. Where’s our father?’ ‘He was killed in the war, Penny.’ I turned around and ran straight back and said to the boy, ‘He was killed in the war.’ And carried on playing Snobs. I knew nothing of that you should have a father.
SC: Yes.
PT: So I felt nothing.
SC: Yeah.
PT: But since then of course it’s slowly got in here and —
SC: Do you know what age you were at that? Or roughly.
PT: Probably around five I would say.
SC: Yeah.
PT: Yeah. Because we were sort of, we had quite a life. We didn’t have televisions. We weren’t very worldly.
SC: Yeah.
PT: We were children. We played on the Common.
SC: Yes.
PT: All day and only came home when it was nearly dark you know.
SC: Yes.
PT: We were free to run wild and play. So I played. Spent my childhood on the West Common.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And the ornamental ponds and Whitton Park.
SC: And where was this at this stage?
PT: All around Lincoln.
SC: Yeah.
PT: In fact, I’ve looked in the history books and they used to have lots of things for the war. The First World War was parked on the West Common. It’s the next street to where I lived you see. The Common.
SC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: In Lincoln. And so that’s the first time I found out and then November the 11th we would all stand around the War Memorial in the middle of Lincoln High Street and all the ladies were crying. It was miserable and we used to all get upset and I used to hate it because everybody was upset. You see as children we’d never really been told anything.
SC: Yeah.
PT: I was only one when my father was killed so I didn’t know anything.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And it was war days and you looked out the bedroom window you can see the bombers coming over and bombing around. It was a very unhappy childhood. Very unhappy childhood. Lonely. Hungry and cold.
SC: Yeah.
PT: Different to the children’s lives nowadays.
SC: Indeed. Yes.
PT: With an unhappy mother —
SC: Yeah.
PT: That cried a lot.
SC: Yeah.
PT: Because she was eight months pregnant with my sister you see.
SC: Yes.
PT: So she was born a few weeks after my father had been killed. So naturally she was very unhappy. That’s the first time I found out about it.
SC: And how did that then develop? How did you feel about it as time went by?
PT: Well, as time goes by you put it on the back burner. You sort of got on with your life and didn’t think about it until different things would crop up in life and you’d hear families that had got fathers.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And you saw the different ways you know. Different life they had.
PT: Yes.
SC: It was very much different. Yes.
SC: Yeah. And how much of a relationship with the RAF did you have as a child then?
PT: Well, none really afterwards because all I knew was that my mother, she was with her friends on the [pause] on the first night it was my mother. They were comforting her. And the second night my mother and her friends were comforting this other friend that she’d got two boys and her husband had been killed. And those two boys I have to say were paid for by the RAF to go to a better school and everything. And mother always felt that that was a bit [pause] because we were girls.
SC: Yeah.
PT: We didn’t get any help at all.
SC: Yes.
PT: But the boys did. Yeah.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And mother thought that was a bit.
SC: Yeah.
PT: Yeah. But times have changed.
SC: Yes.
PT: There’s even a young lady pilot in the Red Arrows now.
SC: Of course, yeah.
PT: I follow the Red Arrows all the time.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And, and, but yes, there’s a lady Red Arrow. Whereas today that wouldn’t discriminate between a lady and a man.
SC: Yes.
PT: Yeah.
SC: And what were your memories of RAF Scampton or —
PT: Well, you see being as I was one and a, just eighteen months after I haven’t really got any.
SC: No.
PT: But I’ve always sort of hovered around and wanted to know things, you know
SC: Yeah.
PT: But because it was too painful I put it all at the back but I can see it’s all in that box there.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And I’m glad for them to have it at the museum.
SC: Yeah.
PT: Yes.
SC: Yeah.
PT: Yes.
SC: Good. Yeah.
PT: I can’t think of anything else.
SC: Well, if there are any other —
PT: Yeah.
SC: Memories or thoughts of how it affected you.
PT: Just the thing. The Red Cross. The Red Cross would every now and then which delighted us we could go along and choose some clothes from the Red Cross.
SC: Gosh.
PT: Which was nice. And that was nice and [pause] and dried milk. And I think it was powdered egg.
SC: Gosh.
PT: Powdered egg we got.
SC: Yeah.
PT: Yes.
SC: Yeah.
PT: So, but no it was very, it was very, we didn’t get any handouts like you get today.
SC: Yeah.
PT: You know.
SC: Yeah.
PT: There were no handouts at all but, yes.
SC: Yeah. And how did you come to research your father’s history in the RAF? You’ve obviously got all the photographs.
PT: Well, no. It’s all that my mother had got in this box.
SC: She’d gathered it.
PT: Because I’m the eldest and I’ve got it.
SC: Yeah.
PT: One thing that’s really brought it home to me which I won’t mention any names but on Facebook I got friendly with someone that we knew. She lived down near the river and they’ve got, they had about ten children and I spoke to her and I said, ‘Yes. It was very poor in our days. It was —’ mentioned different things. She said, ‘Oh yes, but we had a wonderful childhood. And she said they had a barge. I think the father used to go up and down on the barge and I really envied her now. I’ve looked back and saw what a wonderful childhood they had.
SC: Yeah.
PT: They had nothing as money but they had togetherness and they had a father.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And they had a home life and a mother that was happy apparently and she pulled me up on what I’d said. And I realised that I’d had a lonely childhood.
SC: Yes.
PT: Always on my own. Mother was at work. Don’t mind if I —
SC: No. No. No. You, yeah. Yeah.
PT: Always on my own and always lonely waiting for her to come home from work.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And it would be dark and we would waiting under the gaslamp to see her coming. And wait for her to cook something and soon as the fire got a bit of heat we had to go to bed.
SC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: It was a lonely, unhappy childhood.
SC: Yes.
PT: And this girl that had come from a big family that we thought would not have ended up she’d had a wonderful childhood she said.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And all that.
SC: Yeah
PT: And of course, she’d got her father and the things that they got up to.
SC: Yeah.
PT: She played in all the places I did but she had the happy childhood and we didn’t.
SC: Yes.
PT: And it wasn’t ‘til I got all this out and you hear other people’s stories that you realise you didn’t really have a childhood.
SC: Yeah.
PT: You were unhappy.
SC: Yes. And part of that is because —
PT: Yeah.
SC: It wasn’t explained.
PT: I never spoke, never spoke to her about it, to anybody else
SC: Yeah.
PT: Because if I said this to my family or my husband as was they wouldn’t understand.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And they said, ‘Pull yourself together. Stiff upper lip.’ Which I’ve always done.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And never talked about it.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And so that going and asking my mother where my father was, that was the only time that I think it was ever mentioned.
SC: Right.
PT: So that’s why I’m like a —
SC: Yeah
PT: And that’s why when we went to the Spire day in September when I came back from that I nearly had a breakdown.
SC: Yeah.
PT: Yeah. I insisted that my son came. Both sons and grandson and I drove them there. We got through it but leaving that field, I’ve got a photo of leaving that field where all the people had something to do with the same thing that I’d held inside me —
SC: Yes.
PT: All my life. I didn’t want to leave that field and it really made me, I felt raw and I came home.
SC: Yeah.
PT: You know, I really wanted to cry and scream out loud like perhaps I should have done if I’d known.
SC: Yeah.
PT: When I was one a half that my father had just been killed.
SC: Yeah.
PT: You know and, and that’s why I didn’t go last week because I thought no you’re going to get yourself in a mess again. But it was nice because my niece went.
SC: Yeah.
PT: And found out from the photo there wasn’t the one but as I say it doesn’t matter. It’s just putting a poppy in to say that was for him.
SC: Yeah.
PT: You know.
SC: Yeah.
PT: Yeah.
SC: So —
PT: So I don’t know what other people’s feelings are and I’ve never been able to talk to Carol, my sister.
SC: Yeah.
PT: Because I know it hurt her the same.
SC: Yes.
PT: So we haven’t spoke about it.
SC: Gosh. Yeah.
PT: You know.
SC: Yeah.
PT: It’s just something you carry on with your life and we’re lucky to be alive.
SC: Yeah.
PT: But, and then when that happened last week, all this and you realise that mans never learned anything. We are still at war because they said —
SC: Yeah.
PT: That that war was going to be the war to end all wars you know and —
SC: Yeah.
PT: It’s not. It will never stop will it?
SC: Yeah.
PT: You know.
SC: Unfortunately, not.
PT: No. No. But yes, there should be, you know a place where people can go and see what happened.
SC: Yes.
PT: And hopefully learn from it.
SC: Yeah.
PT: But —
SC: If we can learn the lessons that would be —
PT: Yeah.
SC: Yeah.
PT: But I’ve just read a book.
SC: Yeah.
PT: I can get it up on here. And if I’d read that because I believe in nothing now since I’ve read this book. What was it? Something else.
SC: I’ll turn this off next to you.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Penny Turner
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Steve Cooke
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-05-29
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
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Sound
Identifier
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ATurnerP170529
Format
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00:12:28 audio recording
Language
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eng
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
Second generation
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Lincoln
Description
An account of the resource
Penny Turner’s father, Flight Sergeant Albin John Turner, pilot of a Wellington bomber was killed in action during the first bombing operation on the 4th September 1939. Years later, when she was five years old, her mother told her that her father was killed in the war. She explains that her mother received no help from the Royal Air Force, which she claims aided widows with sons rather than daughters. She has no memory of her father and realises that she had a lonely and unhappy childhood. She also describes her emotions upon visiting the International Bomber Command Centre and hopes that people will learn a lesson about the atrocity of war.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939-09-04
Contributor
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Adalberto Di Corato
Julie Williams
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
bombing
childhood in wartime
grief
killed in action
memorial
perception of bombing war
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1146/11702/PStewerdPD1501.1.jpg
8daa737e457ea945bb49e8175d74b365
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1146/11702/AStewardPD150814.2.mp3
6c4791960a316c88d664b57ab65544f8
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
A name given to the resource
Steward, Peter
Peter Dennis Steward
P D Steward
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Peter Steward (b. 1933, 1922441, Royal Air Force).
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-14
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
Steward, P
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SB: This is Sheila Bibb interviewing Peter Steward on the 14th of August 2015 at his home in Erith. Peter, could we start off with you just telling me a little bit about yourself, your family, background detail?
PS: I was, I was born in 1933 and my father at the time was a milkman, working from, from Belvedere village, called Home County Dairies. When I was — my earliest memories are of Woolwich Road in Erith which was a two up two down terraced house, and they’re very vague apart from instances where father built Meccano models et cetera. My father was always an unskilled man insomuch as that he never had a trade and worked mostly as a labourer or a fitter’s mate. He was called up during the war and after a spell of training and — also at RAF Calshot on flying boats and Catalinas — he was posted to India so I didn’t see him again until 1946. He never rose above the rank of LAC but his brother was a sergeant in the Air Force from 1933 and my cousin also was in the RAF from 1933 cousin Vic [clears throat] was an aircraft fitter, mostly on Lysanders, my,cousin Owen was a radio operator air gunner on 75 Squadron, which was 75 New Zealand Squadron, and he was stationed at Feltwell, flew thirty missions and was killed on his last one. Been married six months, rather tragic. [background noise] Having two other uncles in the Air Force, I left school at fifteen and I went to work at Woolwich Arsenal in a factory making German tank spares but I didn’t like it very much and with a fellow worker, Bob Rowe we were, went up to London, saw the posters in the RAF building in Kingsway and decided to join the boys service, which we both did. From there we went to, for training to RAF Compton Basset to train as telegraphists, which was like for us at seventeen was like torture [laugh]. It was wooden huts, coke fires, um, lots of bull and school of course on top of this so for eighteen months it was heavy going but it was, looking back on it, it was quite fun as well. From there, I was posted to Comms Central, which was Telecommunications Central at Stanbridge and we actually lived in Bletchley. I was there almost two years and a posting came up for Germany. Well, first of all I had to report to High Wycombe which was Headquarters Bomber Command and there we formed a convoy of Gee and Oboe equipment to take to Germany so we went by convoy. I can remember going from Dover to Dunkirk, where the French wanted to have a look in the radio vehicles but of course they were sealed and so there was a bit of kerfuffle but anyway they didn’t get their way and we pressed on to RAF Wildenrath in Germany, where we set up the headquarters. After we’d been there about six months they had a small monitor unit. This consisted of a RVT, a radio vehicle, with monitoring equipment and we would chase about over Europe, checking the main Gee chain, the central European Gee chain, which was also H, HS, H2S for the blind bombing and so, for the next two years, that’s what I did, chase around Germany between Winterberg, Osnabruck, Neustadt, um, Weinstrasse [?], Spijkerboor in Holland. These were all radar units on this Gee chain and all to do with Bomber Command but the closest I ever got to aircraft was at Wildenrath which was a fighter station anyway but we did see, I had a couple of Canberras land there once and that was the closest I got to aircraft from Bomber Command [laugh]. Anyway, after two years I came back to the UK and then I was with different commanders. So, that was my total experience of Bomber Command really.
SB: What time frame was that over?
PS: 1951 to ‘3. [sound of aircraft]
SB: Okay and you say you were chasing the different—
PS: Radar units.
SB: Radar units. What exactly?
PS: We were launching them. We could trigger the H2S system from, from a vehicle carrying a transmitter, a radar transmitter, and I was the radio man ‘cause we had a radio set in there so we could communicate back to back. No telephones then [laugh] so it had to be done with Morse code over a radio.
SB: Yeah and do you know why you were attached to Bomber Command for that or —
PS: As a telegraphist we would be attached to all sorts of units, stations, so you never travelled as a squadron, you always travelled as an individual. For example, I was at Andover in Hampshire with Maintenance Command and Suez blew up and I got posted out there purely to set up a new airfield called Tymvou. I believe it’s now the Turkish airfield on Cyprus and, we arrived and it was just an airstrip, that was it, and we had to prepare this for the French paras and so there we were in a Landrover with a Very pistol waiting for their first aircraft to appear. Bang! Red light, ‘Sheep on the runway.’ Bang! Green light. ‘It’s clear. Come in.’ But that was only for, I was only there for six months in that time and that was, again that was with Signals Command rather than — well, it was Near East Signals Command, yeah, but it was always to do with Signals after that. That was my little —
SB: Okay, so do you have any other interesting stories [slight laugh] from that time or —
PS: [clears throat] We had, we had our first car in Germany. Four of us bought a, Opal Capita between the four of us, served us mightily in Germany, it did. Used to go to all the wine festivals in it. And in the end, coming back, somebody said, ‘Who’s going to drive it back to England?’ Nobody fancied taking it back so we drove it into a quarry and she died [slight laugh].
SB: What was it like being in Germany that soon after the end of the war?
PS: I was shocked. I’d seen the Blitz here in London but when I saw Cologne for the first time with the cathedral still standing but nothing [emphasis] at all around, as flat as a pancake, because by that time the debris had been cleared but it was still just one huge open space around the, the dome. And [sigh] I can’t remember the other town now I went to, that was — it changed hands two or three times during the war and it was absolute flat, very little apart from the railway station there. So, that was my first — and yet we didn’t find any, any ill feeling from the locals towards us. In fact quite the opposite. We used to get invited to wine festivals in different villages. So, you know, we got on with the locals very well. And 72 Signals Unit, they employed two Germans, one for driving and one for general duties around the station, and, but the guy, the driver used to drive Rommel [laugh], quite, quite a change. We were also then at that 72 Signals Unit, Adernau, is right on top of the Nürburg Racing Ring. So I’ve driven a three-tonner around that ring [laugh]. Never got higher than sixty but still [laugh]. Yeah, that was a good time in Germany.
SB: Yeah, so —
PS: I mean, Germany was still split it two then and we were there purely for the Cold War. So, these stations were set up to take our bombers into Eastern Europe. So, we had one or two exercises, you know, to get this thing off and on the ball but our targets, funnily enough, used to be so I understand in England. It would be a bridge or a manhole cover in Sheffield or something like that [slight laugh].
SB: Yes. So, going back to before you got that posting how did you feel when you were told you were going to Germany?
PS: Oh, I was looking forward to it. Excited. Yeah. I wanted to see it, you know. We had — as a kid you had all this hatred for this country that was, you know — well, it had killed my cousin for a start and taken my father away and close relatives, uncles, and so I suppose pretty angry at the time. I thought so, I’d see what these swines are like and it was an eye-opener and, a lesson in humanity I suppose. No, we found, as I say, all these small units we had — maybe it was because we were small units, twenty-two men at the most, that we were accepted, not as conquerors, but as guests almost.
SB: Good. So, how long did you actually stay in the Air Force?
PS: Twelve, fourteen years all told, yeah. I came out. I had to. My first wife had multiple sclerosis so I spent all my time looking after her and — but she died then. So, looking back, I thought I’d love to have stayed in, done the lot, you know, but it wasn’t to be.
SB: What did you do afterwards?
PS: I went into Fleet Street believe it or not. Communications again, you see? I, met a friend who said, ‘Go and see this chap Chambers who runs an agency in Fleet Street. He’s an ex-RAF warrant officer.’ And so I went and saw him and he said, ‘Can you still handle a keyboard?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’m sending you over to Australia and Associated Press.’ He said, ‘They want a keyboard man.’ So anyway that was an eye-opener. And, of course, most of the work, although it was a keyboard it was using punch tape and, so you were on the news desk and they were putting stories in front of you you send them all over the world. All of a sudden you’d get a flash signal in front of you, you know, about some disaster or something so you had to ring the bells and get that off. And from there I went to the New York Times, London Bureau. From there to the last six weeks of the Daily Herald. Then The Sun took over the Daily Herald and I moved to the Daily Express and I was there until Fleet Street folded as it were. Well, it were — every time I’ve had a job it’s become redundant, you know. From there I went into the print industry in general and every time I got to this company it would fold so [laugh] at, at sixty I thought I’m calling this a day. That’s it. Finish. So, I took some jobbing gardening jobs up and then official retirement, you know. Yeah. Quite eventful.
SB: So, would it be fair to say that your Air Force stint actually had quite a major impact on your life?
PS: Oh yes, definitely. It altered you, it made your life style for you. It really [background noise] did me and the joy is now we formed an ex-boy entrants union and, association and now we meet every year. It started off with five of us meeting up at the RAF Museum and that five is now two thousand, all ex-boy entrants. In fact [background noise] where is it? That’s me at just about seventeen, standing next to [unclear] Cliff. [unclear] That’s, that’s at Compton Bassett under training. And that’s — there we are two years ago.
SB: Lovely.
PS: Yeah, and, yeah, as I say, we meet up there at RAF Cosford [background noise] and that’s the only photograph I’ve got. I was on 72 Signals Unit.
SB: Okay. We’ll get a photo of that in a bit.
PS: [background noise] Yeah. As I say [background noise] I took so many photographs for some reason or other. [pause] But it was before the RAF took it over. A, youth, youth hostel with — so a big walking area. Obviously our radar units were on top of mountains but that was our domestic site.
SB: Very good. Right.
PS: No longer there I believe, so I’m told. I haven’t been back since so —
SB: [background noises] Have you actually been back to Germany or any of those places?
PS: Yeah. I went back once [loud background noise] but I didn’t, even then I didn’t get to the cemetery to my cousin’s. He’s buried in Kiel [?]. I didn’t get back there unfortunately. I went with a mate and saw my ex-brother-in-law and that was it. It was a sort of a flying visit more or less.
SB: Yeah. You said your father served in the war?
PS: Yeah. He served mainly in India. As I say he was away until 1946. My cousin was 75 Squadron [background noise] and that’s what he would have been doing on the aircraft.
SB: Very good.
PS: Feltwell is in Norfolk. This is a copy of his, his, um, log book, marked with a star. And as I say, what’s the date there? ’41 and ’42 he was killed. That squadron has the second biggest loss of life in the Bomber Command.
SB: Very sad.
PS: Oh it is. I lost several mates, lost three in Cyprus, four were killed in an air crash in Malta, two in Aden so, you know, even in so-called peacetime it still happens. But when I first went to Cyprus in ’56, of course, we had to go armed everywhere, which was quite strange, walking around with a Sten gun all of — over your shoulder all the time. But I never had to use it. We did get shot at first, first night in Cyprus. We — they took us out to the airstrip. No-one knew where it was first of all then someone said, ‘Oh I know where that is.’ Of course, there was no fencing or anything, just this airstrip with a bit of concrete runway, and they said, ‘Well, here’s your tents.’ We hadn’t got a gun between us and that first night we bivouacked, about three hundred yards from the road. A car come down there Bang! Bang! Bang! And luckily we were in these little safari beds but they didn’t come anywhere near us anyway, probably they were using shotguns. The next day the landlubbers [?] said, ‘Give us some weapons please.’ [laugh] ‘Look after us.’ As I say, we were supposed to be preparing an airstrip for the French and then we brought in the first French aircraft by Very pistol and the first thing off the aircraft that landed was a radio vehicle so they could communicate with the rest of the planes. Where was our equipment? On a ship broken down at Malta. This was for the Suez do. Complete farce it was, really.
SB: You improvised? [laugh]
PS: Yeah. We did. We had to. But they all, had all German equipment, the French, even a mini tractor comes out, a mini bulldozer comes out of one of these aircraft, smooths off a stretch of sand, plane goes over, it expands, it’s a twenty-two man tent. All German stuff. All their equipment was, was German, amazing stuff. But their field kitchen was lousy. [laugh] We didn’t know whether to eat with them and because we didn’t have any facilities at that time. And all they had was these two big cauldrons filled with slop [laugh] and a little jerry can filled with red wine which was like vinegar. So we said, ‘Oh this is enough of this.’ So we lit a fire, pulled out a big frying pan and had eggs and bacon [laugh]. Yeah, but that was interesting.
SB: So when you, you said you went to Cyprus, Aden, all the rest of it, what were you doing when you finally left?
PS: I was back at RAF Amport, which believe it or not is a RAF centre for padres and I was in the Signals section there. A really, really, horrible boring place, terrible. But that was my last posting. I couldn’t carry on after that, as I say, because of my wife. But no, I didn’t like that part at all. It was so, it was like being an office worker, you know.
SB: So, what was your favourite part of the whole experience?
PS: Undoubtedly Germany, with, with Cyprus a close second, yeah, yeah. Because I went back to Cyprus in ‘60, to Episcopi, which was Near East Headquarters. I was in the communications centre there. [clears throat] But it was a nice life on Cyprus. We had a married quarters, lived out, out of the camp, in Limassol and so, it was sunny atmosphere, the beach et cetera. Yeah, we enjoyed two years there.
SB: A far cry from Kingsway?
PS: A far cry from Kingsway, yeah.
SB: Yeah. Are there any other influences that you think that time has had on you?
PS: Well, only the ability to look after yourself, you know, compared to some some blokes. We all felt they can’t cook, they can’t clean you know et cetera, you know, so all that came second — what else?
SB: How about your family? Has it affected their lives?
PS: My wife doesn’t, I mean my second wife, doesn’t want to know anything about the Air Force at all [slight laugh]. She’s bored with it you know. She was, she was interested in ballet and things like that. She used to run a ballet school once. But, she trained, trained at the Royal Ballet School but she was, I’m afraid too big chested to make a ballet dancer. But but she loved the garden as well, so — she was a painter and decorator as well for a while, she got a City and Guilds et cetera, her and her friend, and they used to do it, you know, for a living.
SB: Different.
PS; Quite.
SB: Okay so I think that probably winds up your experiences very nicely then but thanks very much for that Peter.
PS: You’re welcome, very welcome.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Peter Steward
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sheila Bibb
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-14
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AStewardPD150814, PStewerdPD1501
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:25:30 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
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
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
Peter Steward was born in 1933 and speaks of not seeing his father during the war due to his father's service in the RAF. His uncles and cousins also served. After leaving school at fifteen, Peter worked at the Woolwich Arsenal factory and joined the RAF boys service. He trained as a telegraphist at RAF Compton Bassett and was posted to RAF Wildenwrath in Germany with 72 Signals Unit in 1951-53, working on the European Gee chain. He speaks of the welcome he received from the German people and his shock at seeing the aftermath of Allied bombardment. He remained in the Air Force for fourteen years, also serving in Cyprus before working in the newspaper industry. After retirement he formed an ex boy entrants union.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Germany--Wassenberg
Cyprus
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1951
1952
1953
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Carolyn Emery
Gee
ground personnel
H2S
military living conditions
Oboe
radar
RAF Compton Bassett
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1037/11409/AMorrisM150720.2.mp3
042adcb94e32f04a3e4e4706c07f4b52
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
A name given to the resource
Morris, Malcolm Francis
M F Morris
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Malcom Morris (b. 1940, 1931621 Royal Air Force). He served as ground personnel post war as an armourer at RAF Waterbeach and then in Aden.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-07-20
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
Morris, M
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SB: This is Sheila Bibb interviewing Malcolm Morris at Cliffe in Kent on the 20th of July, I think it’s the 20th and I’m going to ask a few basic questions and then we will get into a little bit more detail. So, Mal, can you just start off by telling me a little bit about yourself, where you were born, your family, anything like that.
MM: I was born, as I say, in Herefordshire, in a place called Lower Bearwood near the village of Pembridge. My, I was a single child and an actual fact, I was rather late one cause my mother was forty when I was born and I was an only child at the beginning of the war 26th of July 1940. We were basically in a farming area although my father worked for the Herefordshire County Council driving rollers, road rollers, he was actually, he was called up during the first world war and went to the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry but never went to the trenches which is probably why I’m here basically and in the Second World War of course he was too old for start and also it was a reserved occupation mending the roads. He could’ve had a farm, his father’s farm but he didn’t want it so that went from, it was not a big place, just a small [unclear] so that went away from us as such. I attended school at the local church school followed by the secondary school cause I failed the eleven plus miserably so basically as I say, I was secondary school failed. The sergeant prompted me to apply to join up, and I found I could apply as a boy entrant at fifteen just as I left school, which I did, I went to RAF Cosford for the inauguration to see if I was fit, if you might say, which was quite an easy day as far as I was concerned, I was surprised I passed it, basically it was put square rolls in round pegs and things like that and I was told, yes you can join up and go down where you want, go down to St Athans in a month or so’s time, which is what happened. I spent eighteen months at St Athans being trained as an armament mechanic then, up to senior aircraftsman standard, which I passed out as but being still young I stayed as a boy entrant so for my first couple of years in the real Royal Air Force mostly at Waterbeach I was a boy entrant until I managed, to get all my [unclear] was coming through when I was seventeen and a half so then I got luckily, fairly lucky, I got on a fitter’s course fairly quickly and also what they call a conversion course cause first off they trained us as armourers fitters guns just that side of it but then they wanted it, when they lost the other trades, things like turrets and one or two other small arms parts of the armament, it did all come into one and I did a conversion course to become a junior technician and then they posted me out to that lovely place called Aden and I thought I would be going to Khormaksar working on everything under the sun when I got there they said, get on that coach, you’re going to Steamer Point, where is that? It’s down in the harbour but it was a much better place than Khormaksar and easy, it was an MU and I actually worked on a large bomb dump, I’m talking both air force, navy and army material which mostly we were looking after destroying at times. Basic throwing everything we didn’t want in the sea because at the same time at Khormaksar 8th Squadron converted from Vampires with 20mm guns to Hunters with 30mm guns and we had lots and lots of ammunition and I’m talking thousands of rounds. I threw, threw most of it into the sea and then they found out I’d thrown one lot I shouldn’t have thrown away [laughs]. But it was one of those things that happen. I did two years in Aden getting the general service medal for Arabian Peninsula although basically I hardly had a shot fired [unclear] or twice but not much. I returned to England and went to eventually RAF Northorpe at Coastal Command headquarters just looking after the small arms weapons, there was about fifty of them we were told there was two of us to do it, it was basically boring and I couldn’t get on, I couldn’t pass me corporal tech at the time so the flight sergeant said to me, how would you fancy a post in some [unclear] flight sergeant down there another junior tech who wanted to come to Northwood so we exchanged posts and I went to St Mawgan and I ended up on 206 Squadron for the best part of six years. Funny thing was that when I got to St Mawgan I met another lad in the armament trade and his [unclear] was up in Dartford in Kent so and I had a car, so he cottoned on to me and I used to drive him off to Kent where I met his sister. She is now my wife and has been for fifty odd years. Unbelievable really because I from London to St Mawgan and then suddenly going to court a girl up in Dartford in Kent, it was unbelievable, anyway that happened. We went up to Kent last eventually when the squadrons moved up to Kinloss to chase the Russian submarines round the North Sea, it was a bit closer than St Mawgan. Basically I loved it on 206 when they said to me one day the squadron leader engineer said, Corporal Morris, we are going to send you on a torpedo course. I said, I don’t want to go on a torpedo course, I’m happy in the squadron, I want to stay here. Oh, he said, you got to go, it’s a good idea for your career. I never really believed it, anyway I went. I got to RAF Newton on a pre-course, electrical course, and met the other half dozen armourers there and they said, oh, you are Corporal Morris, are you? Yeah, why? He said, well, you are going to Changi with us. Hello, nobody told me that! So I decided I’d pass the course, which I did and eventually got posted to Changi as it happened, my wife obviously came with me etcetera and by the time she was pregnant with our first eldest son which she produced in RAF Changi hospital and eventually the second one before we left the tour as was well at RAF Changi hospital, so both of our sons were born at RAF Changi. I served in the torpedo section which was basically air-conditioned and very, very nice and clean and after we’d been there about six months the group that I was with [unclear] at that time we just about looked at every torpedo and cleaned them up and repainted them so everything was alright after that, nothing hardly to do really and I got posted back to England and the funny thing then was when my post had come through it said 26 Squadron and I looked at the other blokes, by which time I was a sergeant by the way, I looked at the other blokes and said, 26 Squadron? That’s a Squadron in Germany, you don’t go from Singapore to Germany. They said, read the rest of the title, brackets, Royal Air Force regiment. Damn it, I don’t want to go to the regiment, anyway I’ve got no choice, come back and got posted to RAF Bicester with 26 Squadron on the regiment as a sergeant armourer on Bolfords guns, the latest version of what of course they had in the war the early versions, ours were, they could be electronically controlled but we didn’t have the radar to do it. If they wanted the radar, they had to borrow it, basically ask the army if they could use theirs [laughs]. Anyway that lasted for about a year when the regiment squadron was posted to Gutersloh and as it happened I didn’t realise that but I was still immune to be posted overseas unless I asked nicely. So the adjutant called myself as a sergeant armourer and a corporal radio lad on a Friday afternoon and he said, we think you are doing well because up till then I’d been the back end of the air force as far as it goes. We’d like you so much, would you like to come to Germany with us? You can go and ask your wives you’re both married, go and ask your wives whether they want to go to Germany and I looked at this corporal and he looked at me and we looked back at the adjutant and together we said, no thank you sir. So we got posted out and I got posted to Honington when I’d become part of what was by that time Strike Command on the Buccaneers early, the early squadron, 12 squadron Buccaneers, mostly the Mark IIs. I served in most of the sections and squadrons, on that squadron at Honington, I didn’t go on a nuclear weapons site although I loaded the nuclear weapons etcetera onto the Buccaneers because we were in those days fighting the Cold War etcetera, which was quite a good thing in the end but I found, by this time I managed to get up to chief technician which was the maximum rank I got and I was put in charge of the carrier bay but ended up doing just about everything else, loading Martels, specialist Martel man, the ejection seats of course, nuclear weapons, standard bombs. If the squadron couldn’t do it which at the time they were still in the bases of [unclear] and I ended up doing it with my lads which annoyed me cause my workers backing up on the section. So anyway that happened and I went on and from there the next posting came through and again a funny one, 112 Squadron in Cyprus, what’s that? Luckily one of my junior techs had been posted out to 112 so I did know that it was Mark II Bloodhounds, surface to air missiles. So I already had a contact on the squadron which was Andy so myself and my family went out in June ’74 and if you know the history of there, the Turks walked in in July and basically buggered up everything. We were not allowed to fight them, I think it was Callaghan was the foreign secretary then and he wouldn’t allow us to fight them. Mind you we hadn’t got a lot to fight with, I think we had a regiment squadron in Akrotiri, the royal Scots up at Episkopi where I was actually based and a couple of tank companies over at the other side, the eastern SBA as it was called, we were the western, which is the Sovereign Base Area, but our radar told me, by the radar lads of course that they could watch the Turkish F100s lifting off Turkey and lock onto them and could shoot them down quite happily except they weren’t allowed to. And luckily they didn’t come and bomb us although they went over the SBA a couple of times but they didn’t drop anything and the silly thing of the air force people [unclear] they put 56 Squadron Lightnings up with the F100s to escort them across, our missiles didn’t know the difference so we couldn’t fire anyway so we were immune from, we didn’t fire at all. Things quietened down, unfortunately the families were sent home because of the problems, had to be sent back to England which didn’t help very much cause my wife by that time had three children, we had three children, two boys and a girl, which is all we we got now and she eventually ended up at the place where they make air publications and I can’t think of name off the top of me head and she was there for about six months and then the powers at bay said to 112 Squadron, so good we gotta keep you on, so your family has gotta come back whereas some went home and I was considered an essential personnel by that time [laughs] but unfortunately although I was a chief tech to get a married quarter, which you couldn’t live out by that time, you had to live on married, on the site or on the camp, they said, oh no, we are going to change the system, the people who has got the least time to do are getting the married quarters first, so basically an SAC had no points with just a wife could get a married quarter was with three children and they were still in England, took about six months, not a happy time. Eventually she came back and we got a married quarter of course in Episkopi which went on alright, was gonna be nice, the Turks had quietened down, they had got the bit in the north in Cyprus that they wanted and then someone else come along and said, oh, we’ve decided to disband the squadrons in Cyprus, that was 112, 56 and the, I think it was two Falcon squadrons they put on at Akrotiri at that time. Thank you very much, when are we going home? As it happened obviously a senior NCO in the sergeant’s mess, I was a partner of the warrant officer who posted armourers around the Mediterranean, Gibraltar, Malta, I think [unclear] had finished by that time and of course Cyprus so he said to me, he said, hey Mal, you’re a chief tech with a qualification for torpedo, I said, yes, he said, how do you fancy going to Malta to finish your tour? And I said yes please and as it happened he was going there as well as the engineering warrant officer [laughs] so we went over to Malta with the family of course which was, I thought was quite nice but my wife wasn’t very keen on Malta, I don’t really know why, we lived out in Malta so she got on alright with the local people. As it happened the lady above her was Maltese although married to an RAF serviceman of course. So she got on quite well but she didn’t like it very much. And of course that time which is ’77-’78 Malta was closing down because of the president his name [unclear] he was checking us out basically because the Libyans were giving him all the money. So we started to pack up and my wife said let’s gonna go home so basically I sent her home. She went home and she went home to her mother at the time but I was now sort of [unclear] to requirements so they just said, well, we don’t want you here anymore you might as well go as well, so it only lasted about a month and I got back home and I was then posted to Marham again the specialist qualification came up, the Martel section. I didn’t like it. Anyway we got a quarter at Marham, settled down there basically with the children [unclear] school etcetera and because I was coming towards the end of my twenty two year contract time by that time I had put in for the last postance, it was overseas Cottesmore, oh, and Wittering but I got Marham so I wasn’t too bothered, alright, anyway went to the officer in the charge, but didn’t get on with very well, but that’s another story, I said, oh, we are going to post you to Coltishall, where do you want to go? I said, I don’t want to go now, oh, he said, you got no choice, you gotta go, it’s your last tour post and you’ve only got a year eighteen months to do. So, I went over to Coltishall which turned out to be quite well actually, by this time of course the family was still in Marham, I was at Coltishall but I got a quarter at Coltishall fairly quickly because the problems with Cyprus and being on a [unclear] I got more points than normal so I was quite high on the points list by that time, so of course my wife come over to with the children to Coltishall so we lasted the last twelve months, eighteen months, I was basically 6 Squadron chief tech in charge of the bomb dump being the Jaguars they were back up for Germany if the balloon went up, if the Cold War become hotted up we were supposed to go over the Jaguars and land on the motorway [unclear] but we never did and basically was exercises to go over to Germany or Netherlands or wherever they decided to go. I think I was out on the forth [unclear] Hercules with about a half a dozen blokes and fourteen cluster bomb out on the bomb dump to look after, so that happened once or twice, which was, my daughter was about eight by that time, the trouble was they used to put the siren out when the exercise started and daddy disappeared to camp on work or come back with this gun, his [unclear] disruptive combat so [unclear] all the rest of it and she was in tears basically and eventually a day or two later once we’ve loaded the Hercules etcetera away I flew for a fortnight or so or used to be ten days on exercise, so my daughter hates this siren and I’ve got one on the car and I’ll bring it up now and again and forty years old she still hates the siren. So basically I was at Coltishall coming up to the end of my time, I applied to sign onto 55 but by that time the Air Force was starting to shrink and they didn’t want chief, high chief techs they wanted Indians so they didn’t allow me to sign on, they did offer me forty seven but I always thought, seven years and I give the government two thousand pounds a year cause I get a pension that way and I know I said I went out instead. What didn’t help and I don’t want it necessarily said was actually the [unclear] group captain on one because he did something wrong in admin put all I didn’t get nothing out of it some poor corporal in the general office that I didn’t even know got a reprimand for giving the wrong information so I left the Air Force out of a bit of a cloud, it was the time I went and the other thing that decided the two us myself and wife the school, local school send [unclear] things in how many places your children [unclear] six months well we used those up and turned the page over and put another half dozen on the back because we are going in and out of Cyprus etcetera, so basically I left the Air Force in 1980 with myself, my wife and the three children and I got the job as a refrigeration engineer. I couldn’t spell it when I left the Air Force, a month later I was one for a firm called Hobart engineering in the Ipswich area and basically I was the Kent engineer for Hobart’s [unclear] travelled for twelve years till they made me redundant. So I was quite happy [unclear] and that’s about my lifetime.
SB: Ok, so that’s given me some food for thought.
MM: It did [laughs]
SB: [laughs] So I think if we go back now to when you first joined up and you are fifteen so that’s 1955, war has been over for ten years but we’ve still got an awful lot of things going on how did that influence your decision, do you think?
SB: Not at all. I would say not at all because as I said earlier I did want to join the air force but didn’t think I would be qualified to any extent and when I was offered the boy entrant I just jumped at it, to be quite honest. Again, the headmaster of the school who, hang on, he did cane me now and again, gave me quite a good recommendation although I was considered the best athlete at the time and I’ve gone downhill since then but I was considered the best athlete at the time in the school. So I had quite a good recommendation from the headmaster which must have influenced a little but I was right at the back end of the boy entrant entry, I think with my entry I was within about the last twenty numbers.
SB: Ok, so, the war itself didn’t seem to influence you. How did you feel about the possibility of maybe getting into another war and having to?
MM: Never really gave it a thought and it was the case or you buy it, obey the orders anyway and get on with it, which is what happened with the odd places I was, with the small wars like Aden, Cyprus, I never really got influenced in Northern Ireland, I nearly did because 26 Squadron the regiment were going to be sent to Northern Ireland but this is when they went to Gutersloh instead so, phew, I didn’t get to Northern Ireland because it was still active in those days and of course the Buccaneers were back up for lots of places which could have had wars, we used to go to Norway and even took them to Singapore for a month. After, that was after the Air Forces had left of course so the Buccaneers would have been in the war if it was going to be but we never really thought about it, to be quite honest. If it happens, it happens.
SB: Let’s talk a little bit about the planes that you done, mentioned Buccaneers, you also mentioned Shackletons. Can you tell me a little bit about what you liked, didn’t like about the varying planes?
MM: Well, if you know the Shackleton, which is my longest Squadron really, I was actually on the squadron, I was actually working on the Mark IIIs, which is the one with the tricycle undercarriage as opposed to the tail draggers, the two’s and the one’s, the two’s and the one’s were still bombing up wise, were still operating as the Lancasters did in the war with the winch, that you literally had to winch up the bombs which was hard work but the Mark III they had based that similar to the Vulcan where we had hydraulic jacks to lift the large frame which had the torpedoes on them so basically the Mark III Shackleton was, as far as I was concerned, was excellent. Ah, we did a thing called the search and rescue standby for a week, we had a Shackleton on one hour standby to take off for a search and rescue anywhere over the Atlantic or wherever basically required and if the first Shackleton went, the squadron had another Shackleton virtually ready at the same time but not quite ready, they had to call people in, especially at Kinloss because I was by that time I suppose the senior corporal, because there was only a corporal armourer and a sergeant armourer went off from St Mawgan to Kinloss, so I was considered the senior corporal for that sort of thing and for an S&R, search and rescue load of, what we had on them? We had the SAR staff sonobuoys and flares but they were all on the beams, there were only four beams that we put on and but they were all already on the trolleys set up on the beams so it only had to be pulled out to the aircraft, fix up the hydraulic jacks two of them, do one at a time and up they went. In fact I could actually, actually I haven’t and I have done, I could load the Shackleton for that in twenty minutes flat as long as I had a couple of blokes to obey and they knew what they were doing, if it was armourer’s great but otherwise it could be anyone else that actually knew because we helped each other on the Shackleton’s. So many a time at Kinloss I’ve be in bed and a quarter across the road from the main gate but there’d be a knock on the door and I’d stick me head out of the window it’s marvellous SAR’s been called out, we need the next load, oh damn, out of bed, get dressed, on me bike, cross I went, loaded the Shackleton up because there was other ground crew there to look after the Shackleton as such, they just needed a specialist armourer there, in about within two hours I was back on bed [laughs] and often the second one didn’t take off so cause I had to get up again [laughs]. That was the Shackletons of course they went round the world, I luckily got a trip to Singapore with them although that was into the Borneo confrontation and of course we never saw anything really of that, we were just looking for the gun runners basically on the South China Sea. As I said, on the Shackleton, if they went on a training trip to fire the guns, they’d take up one of the armourers missile from one of the others whatever to clear the stockages that invariably happened [laughs] and they gave us a go, so that’s how I come to fire guns out of a Shackleton which was a bit unusual for a ground training, I did hit me target, mind you it was the South China Sea at the time [laughs], my sergeant it seemed when he went up, he actually hit the smokefloat that they dropped down, canister about like two [unclear] so he actually had that they say, well none of the aircrew never got near they just got the South China Sea like me, which was I suppose handy because I’d been, it was Changi that we went on a detachment and of course later I was posted to Changi as a torpedo specialist so I knew the area but nothing great about it. Mostly then I also had Buccaneers later which were of course the nuclear Buccaneer, they carried two nuclear weapons, six hundred pound 177, nuclear weapon, the English-made version by the way, because I did actually put nuclear weapons on Shackletons which a lot people don’t realise they did, but we had to borrow them off the Yanks, the Yanks had a bomb, a special weapons bomb dump at St Mawgan and Machrihanish for this but we just had to ask them, we’d like to put two on our aircraft in a month’s time. So, sign here, a sort of thing. Which was one of the funny things there, I happened to be on tour six that we were doing the test in the early days, this must have been about 64, 63, 64, we were designated to do the test with the Yanks to see that ours went up and whatever, very little we did, it was just the case of doing the checks on the switches and things, I did the switches and the chief read the book, and I turned one switch the wrong way and the Yank said, stop, stop, that’s it, start again, so half an hour back again, I’m starting the book again and then one day we’ve been putting these on and off for a month or two, not too regular, they’d all come out painted I can’t remember now maybe blue or green and then one come out a different colour, one colour or another so we got them on the aircraft flew away for an hour or so, just to do whatever they had to do, and while we were there the Yank obviously stayed with us in the crew room, who was looking after the weapon, we said, hey, why is that a different colour? He said, man, that’s the real one! [laughs] Oh, and we got taken off [laughs], we’ll do this gently [laughs] took it off and waved goodbye to it. And until I went on the Buccaneers I never saw another live one, I did see live ones on the Buccaneer, but not often and actual fact the Buccaneers as to my knowledge, in the squadron anyway, they didn’t take off with a weapon on board, they may have channelled down the runway a little bit but they just come back and we took them off. They must well have been flown sometime because the navy had them as well on their Buccaneers but as far as I know we never flew one off on Honington in the time I was there it had actually flew off or if it did it was only a training weapon, but by the time I put mine on and gone back for a cup of tea I didn’t care where the aircraft went, I just had to wait till it come back again. So that was the Buccaneers mostly. It’s interesting time on the Buccaneers cause I became a specialist, took the course on the Martel guided weapon, was a TV guided or a radar guided Martel, two versions, which is why I ended up at Marham on the Martel section and I also got a Martin Baker course for a week on the ejection seats, they were just starting to fit rocket seats, the Harrier which needed a big rocket seat cause that could be going down when it’s crashed, as opposed to be flying along, so they had to have a good boost up to get into the air at what they called 0 0 feet, they could actually pull, no that they wanted to but they could pull the ejection seat handle and when they were sitting on the ground doing nothing and they’d still come down [unclear] I don’t think they ever tested it as such and I went to Martin Baker it was really nice, couple of pints at dinnertime and a meal and all sorts and for a week was really nice, we actually met in passing the man called Benny Lynch who in the back, just after the war, back end of the war, he was one of the first ones that ejected out of a Meteor in test and done more ejections than anyone else. I think by that time he had broken just about every body in, bone in his body and basically he was, basically just about at it but he was still kept on by as an idol of Martin Baker. That was the Buccaneers so and the only other aircraft I didn’t work on a lot but just out bomb up now and again was the Jaguar, as I said, I was mostly in charge of their bomb dump so if they went on detachment I was in charge of all the bombs and got them set up and put on the carrier or whatever required and the armourers on the squadron actually did the loading as such although they used to call me in now and again if they had a problem, mostly it was a problem I had caused or my lads had because they hadn’t quite done the right thing with whatever the fusing etcetera had to be done, so there was a few problems now and again. And that’s about my main time with the aircraft.
SB: Ok. Are there any particular stories that come to mind from your time, you’ve mentioned being able to fire into the South China Sea and so on, you have already mentioned a few things but are there any other incidents at all that you’d like to share?
MM: The one that amuses me a lot, on 26 squadron of the regiment they had thirteen Bulfords guns, twelve of them were obviously on the [unclear], four on each, three four is twelve, yes, but my gun was the thirteenth. But when I went to the regiment and the lads showed me everything and said, where’s this [unclear] on my infantry, he said, oh, they’re in, it’s in that building over there in the, we were working out of an old MT, one of the old MT buildings over there, but he said, well, we don’t know, we’ve taken bits off it like it’s what the Air Force called a Christmas tree, I if we wanted a part, we took it off there before they sent us a bit and after the time we didn’t bother to put it back on the other gun, cause we probably used it on something else eventually, so eventually it came around that we were going to take the squadron was going down to Manorbier to fire the guns and of course they wanted to fire all of the guns cause they were talking of going to Germany and we had to test the barrels and all sorts of things, so I said to the lads, I said, we are gonna have to get this gun out. And they said, well, we will have to be a bit careful the ones that have been there so we went up, opened up, started to push this gun out and I don’t know if you know but the wheels of the gun are locked down [unclear] when it’s being dragged along the ground, but when the gun is going to fire they take them up and it sits on feet, unfortunately this thing fell on the ground, luckily none of the lads got injured so anyway this gun [unclear], so I told their officers in charge etcetera, this gun [unclear] it and they said oh well, went through the system and they said, send it back to Stafford, so we [unclear] rigged it so as the wheel stayed up coming down and it disappeared behind the truck and a new gun, a gun from Stafford that was being refurbished come back to us, all nice painted etcetera etcetera, ok, alright so we dragged, in fact I went on the truck, dragged my gun down to Manorbier and the regiment obviously set their guns out cause they could set all twelve onto the firing range and carried on for half a week and then they said, right, now we’ll try your gun, I said, alright, we are going to fire this, he said, no, you can’t fire it, well, I got six armourers, ah, they said, but you’ve been trained how to load it [laughs], we were servicing the bloody thing but we weren’t being trained cause they put them in from the side and all sorts so, anyway one of the sergeants in the [unclear] took my gun, put it up on the range, started off red, he had tips of five rounds, very like a 303 but bigger and they started firing it, fired about two or three rounds, bang, bang, bang, now stopped, oh shit, called us out, and what they do? Don’t know, got jammed with a mechanism going back before you can’t move it cause it’s too big but two Welshmen that had done this for years, they had a trolley about the size of that table and a big piece of lead basically that you can hardly lift up on a chain but these done it so many times they, oh, we got another jammed gun, it was pointed in safe direction by the way [laughs], and they come up and one of them lifted this and swung it round and hit it in the right place and the gun went and fired, bang, stand a couple of times, we got a bit fed up with this, one of my corporals a very nice, very good lad Scotsman, he what it was cause I hadn’t got a clue, I hadn’t been trained on the guns and this was just experience and he said, you couldn’t get ammunition was called forty seventy or forty sixty it was just slightly bigger, the one, the seventy is slightly bigger but what he reckoned Stafford had done he had bolted the slideway for the ammunition to go in, one side was forty and the other was sixty so basically it was [unclear], skewed as you went down, he sorted this out and changed the bolt etcetera etcetera by which time they finished firing so he never did find out if it fired that way, it went to Germany and I don’t know. But the other things as well that the lads said, they’d been there before to Manorbier of course they said Sarge, he said, it’s bloody horrible there, we give out all the ammunition that’s basically our job on the day unless the [unclear] stops. And come the evening we got all these empty cases back and we gotta, we box’em and put this free of explosives, he used to take us hours to, he said by the time we got back to the camp at Pembrey, starts with the P but Welsh area anyway is a small camp, army camp, small, all the food had gone more or less, I thought, what am I gonna do? Hang on, he says, that a senior NCO must certify free of explosives so he’s fired the gun and he’s got [unclear] he knows it’s free of explosives, each gun had a sergeant in charge of it, I thought, right, make out a list, you will put all the empty cases back in the boxes, seal them up, the lads were doing it of course. Not my lads but his lads, because they had time between the aircraft flying over and things like that to do this sort of thing and certify it and sign it, so all we had to do basically the armourers as such was travel down the back of the guns, at the ones they stopped firing and pick it all up on a three tonner, take it down to a building and stick it all in the building, the next day I had to certify that it was all empty and take it down to the trains at Pembroke Dock, put them on a train, seal that and send it back to Stafford or wherever it went, I don’t know, and this was right because the sergeants weren’t too keen on doing the job but my army officer, the warrant officer on the squadron so it was the case of the warrant officer says and they did it [laughs] and it worked beautifully. The lads, in fact my lads were just about the first ones back because the others, the regiment themselves had of course cleaned the gun and strip it down, [unclear] over for night time etcetera so our lads were just about the first ones back to the cook house so they thought that was great [laughs], so from the lad’s point of view I scored but from the regiment point of view I didn’t like it. I got to know how to do things cause being only a sergeant, the flight sergeants were in charge of the flights and if I wanted something done like their guns cleaned, I’m talking about their private work, I say private, their individual work which they were allocated of course, the SLR by that time, self-loading rifle, I had the armoury as well to look after, although I had a couple of lads doing that of course, every [unclear] they knocked down a barrel and if anything was dirty they said gun number 24 or whatever is dirty barrel, so I used to phone up the flight sergeant and say, so and so and so and so and so and so of your people have got dirty weapons, oh, I can’t be bothered by, warrant officer so and so says and five minutes later they were done, the armoury clean and their weapons [laughs] so it worked out alright but it took me six months to work all this lot out by which time I got the chance to leave and I did [laughs].
SB: Right, so, I think we’ve covered a fair amount of your time.
MM: Good! Crakey, yes!
SB: In there so unless there is anything else you can think that you’d like to add to it? I mean, maybe one question I can throw to you. You said the war, Second World War, didn’t influence your decision to go in but how did you feel about those people who had taken part in, in war, those people who did fly in Bomber Command, how did you feel about it?
MM: At the time I went in because there were still so many in the Air Force, for instance my old chief on 206 Squadron went through the war from an apprentice, he was I believe an apprentice at the beginning of the war and he went through the war and ended up as a warrant officer but only on a temporary rank. And I felt a bit for him because eventually he chased the Japanese back up through Burma and went into Japan with them and became forces of occupation, he was told us that as a warrant officer he sent him out with half a dozen blokes and a truck and get rid of all the Japanese war stores and the Japanese way of storing stuff is different to our way, I mean, we put ammunition in one place over there and furniture over there and food somewhere else and paperwork everywhere else, spread out all over the place, the Japanese didn’t do it that way, they put everything in smaller places, so the ammunition, food, weapons, vehicles, obviously the weapons and ammunitions was part of what the old warrant was telling me destroyed of course. But they had everything else, they had furniture, clothing, well, because, like a large barn basically they used to tell us [unclear] where it was sort of thing and the door was there, well, because of the war etcetera you were worried about booby-traps which is part of why he went of course and the armourers so they used to blow the doors open as opposed to try to open them with a pickaxe or whatever [laughs], they used to blow them open, the trouble, well good thing from this point, I can tell you now cause he’s dead but the good thing about that was when the bang went off, all the local people, we knew about these things, turned up and wanted half of what they could get so basically you sold it to them what he could but the ammunition of course or the weapons etcetera and he ended up quite a rich man basically, in Japanese money though, which was a bit hopeless. Cause he was also involved with the Shackletons earlier on in the nuclear weapons and I reckon that’s where he died of leukaemia but again shouldn’t say this I suppose but the government won’t recognize the blokes from that time and the same thing with the war, the government never recognised it till they put the memorial up in Green Park, which I went to in a couple of years ago, three years ago now, wasn’t it? Couldn’t really, Churchill was good, he was the man of the time, the man we needed, but basically I, I and others of the same thing, we blame Churchill for the devastation we caused in Germany which really didn’t need to happen, it’s the, it’s hindsight it’s easy, hindsight is the, I always say, hindsight is the biggest and best management thing in England, the only trouble is they haven’t got any foresight. And the same thing he didn’t recognise Bomber Command basically way after he was dead etcetera which I think was a, since knowing all about it, was really a thing we shouldn’t have done and we are still in the same thing now, we hardly recognise the people that come back from Afghanistan etcetera, we have trouble looking after them, we shouldn’t, the Armed Forces Covenant, which I try and [unclear] a little, and try and see about but it seems to be dead in the water to be quite honest, where they should look after everybody after they come back out of the forces not just Afghanistan but because when I left the Air Force and went to Dartford, cause my wife comes from Dartford, luckily we put our name down on the Dartford council list, they wouldn’t put my name down because I didn’t come from Dartford, my wife they could put down so we basically since we’ve been married best part of twenty years, we’d had our list down so we got a council house which was most unusual. Although of course we were at Coltishall and because I was going out and the Air Force basically sent me an eviction latest six months beforehand so I sent out to the local council Norfolk and they said, oh no, we are not interested in you, you didn’t come, you come from Herefordshire, you go back to Herefordshire basically. And then I read the small print and it said, if you have worked in the area for a year or eighteen months or so, you can qualify to go on the list and I looked at the wife and said, you work for Birdseye, in the local frozen fruit factory for the last couple of years? Yes, we’ll put your name down instead so we did and we got the letter back where you could see [unclear] put her on but we haven’t got a place for her. But luckily the Dartford council come up with a place. That’s the sort of bad things about the way the Air Force or the government run the Air Force, shall we say. And of course 12 Squadron lately, they were flying Tornadoes of course out of Lossiemouth and went to the various Iraq and Iran and things and then they were told, oh, well, that’s it, we’d had enough, we don’t want Tornadoes [unclear] or 12 Squadron disbanded so they disbanded 12 Squadron the only one left operational is 6 Squadron [unclear] I was on and all the rest have gone and they disbanded 12 Squadron and then they suddenly found out they hadn’t got enough Tornadoes to carry on, so 2 Squadron was disbanded as well, and instead of, they just added the flag over to 12 Squadron and gave them the aircraft and then went on of course to have the Typhoons so 12 Squadron are now back in operation with a first lady wing commander in charge of the squadron, I think she still is on in charge, got a backseat as opposed to a pilot as such although she’s done quite a few Afghan operations etcetera but as a backseater as I called it as opposed to a pilot. I think she’s still in charge. So that’s, the government can’t get it right, no matter what they try, talk to Cameron now and he’s trying to go and bomb’em and we don’t wanna know.
SB: Ok. Were there any other people you came across who had actually been part of Bomber Command?
MM: Well, my chief was, he was Bomber Command before he went overseas to Far East, he was in Bomber Command with the Lancasters quite a bit. And of course I met quite a few in the fifties, stroke early sixties but most of those were chief technicians or flight sergeants, warrant officers sort of thing so, basically down a corporal level, the only one I actually knew fairly well for a while was in the war was in Aden, he was an LAC there, Yorkie, yes, LAC, I don’t know he never wanted [unclear] but he actually helped arm up [unclear], Spitfire at Biggin Hill [unclear], I went through the war but as an LAC and he was talking now in his forties he was still an LAC, he just didn’t want to go any further so but he never really told us many stories of the war as such, that was one of the ones that as I say he was at Biggin Hill for a while and reckoned he helped arm up the Spitfire for, well, he’d be then I think Squadron or wing commander by that time, I think, got that a bit mixed up, have I? I don’t know.
SB: Ok, thanks very much Mal.
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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Interview with Malcolm Francis Morris
Creator
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Sheila Bibb
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-20
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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
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AMorrisM150720
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Pending review
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00:46:26 audio recording
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Second generation
Description
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Malcolm Francis Morris, who was a child when war broke out, remembers joining the RAF as a boy entrant and then serving as an armament technician during the Cold War. Describes his training at St Athans and being then posted to Aden, where he was in charge of a bomb dump and occasionally disposed of the ammunition. Remembers various episodes: serving on 112 Squadron in Cyprus in 1974; being awarded the General Service Medal for the Arabian Peninsula; taking a specialist course on ejection seats and one on torpedoes; his posting back to England on various stations; handling different kinds of weapons. Talks about his experience with the Buccaneers and Shackletons and gives technical details about the nuclear armament of the aircraft. Expresses his critical views on Churchill regarding the destruction of the German cities during the war and the neglecting of veterans.
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Peter Schulze
Spatial Coverage
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Cyprus
Germany
Great Britain
Singapore
Yemen (Republic)
South China Sea
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
bomb dump
ground personnel
perception of bombing war
RAF St Athan
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/730/10756/ACrozierH180216.1.mp3
88e4c998b4fef8844c1a1f0fa0dfe4c7
Dublin Core
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Title
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Burkitt, William Frederick
W F Burkitt
John Burkitt
Description
An account of the resource
16 items. A photograph album, photographs and documents concerning Sergeant William Frederick 'John' Burkitt (1922 - 1944, 1320846 Royal Air Force) He flew operations as a flight engineer with 9 Squadron from RAF Bardney. The collection also contains an oral history interview with Hilary Crozier about her uncle. <br /><br />Additional information on William Frederick Burkitt is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/103229/">IBCC Losses Database.</a><br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Hilary Crozier and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-09-26
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.
Identifier
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Burkitt, WF
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Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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RP: This interview is being conducted on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Rob Pickles. The interviewee is Hilary Crozier. The interview is taking place at Mrs Crozier’s home in Cornwall on the 16th of February 2018. Also present is Trevor Crozier. Good afternoon, Hilary and thank you for inviting me to your home. We’re here to discuss your uncle, William Frederick Burkett. Perhaps you could start by telling us when and where he was born, some of his background and when he joined the RAF.
HC: Ok. Yes. Well, he was christened William Frederick but everybody in the family called him John. He called himself John so I will refer to him as John during the course of the interview if that’s ok.
RP: Yes. That’s fine.
HC: Right. He was, he was born in North London. He was the third child with two older sisters. Desperately need, wanted a son. My two grandparents desperately wanted a son and he came along quite quickly after the second daughter was born. My grandfather was a master carpenter and he’d been in the, sorry [pause] he’d been in the Royal Flying Corps during the war and not flying but I think he was there doing maintenance. But he was caught in a mustard attack, a mustard gas attack and he was never fully healthy after that and I think it was a bit of a problem within the family afterwards. But anyway, when the war broke out John was seventeen coming up eighteen. Engineer, mechanic or whatever by trade. I think he was in a Reserved Occupation but I don’t know what he was doing exactly. So he didn’t actually have to sign up and volunteer. My mother recalled some disagreements between him and his father because John was desperate to, to join up and sort of join the effort. Join the RAF. And his father was very very set against it and, you know they had quite a few debates I gather about this. But his, eventually his father said to him, ‘You will not join. You will not join up. Over my dead body will you join up.’ And sadly in March 1943 at the age of forty nine he died. My grandfather. And —
RP: Was that as a result of bombing or natural?
HC: No. No. He was ill. I mean, he never really fully recovered. He had a heart attack. He never, never really fully recovered from the mustard gas —
RP: Oh right.
HC: Attack. And so he just, he just sadly had a heart attack and died. That was in March 1943 and by October ’43 John was at Bardney. You know. Sort of preparing to fight the war. So sadly it was over his dead body really. John himself was a lovely chap actually from what I gather. He was very well, very popular, very well loved by everybody. My mother and her sister Irene, Rene we used to call her, they were very fond of him and it was a terrible terrible loss when he eventually died. To the whole family. But he loved tinkering around with mechanics, engineering, doing that sort of thing. He had the motorbike which he spent hours working on and just generally he was a happy, cheerful, nice man as I gather. So his, yeah their upbringing was quite comfortable really I think initially. My grandfather being a master carpenter he used to build pianos and somebody else did the work. He was in partnership. But then in the ‘20s the Depression came along and things got hard and he turned his carpentry skills to making coffins and he became an undertaker. Did both really. And my mother used to recall the children coming home from school in, in you know after school and they’d be sitting on half-finished coffins eating their tea in the kitchen.
RP: In the coff [laughs]
HC: It was. Yeah. So I mean they didn’t think anything of it really.
RP: No. No.
HC: I don’t think.
RP: Yeah.
HC: But it was just the life. The life that they knew.
RP: Yeah.
HC: But anyway I think he was a respected man, their father, in the community and he was quite popular as well. But sadly as I say his health never recovered from the war, the First World War and he died very young. And so that was, that was them really.
RP: So, when John had joined then do you know his sort of his history at Bardney? The numbers of sorties and —
HC: Well, I’m not entirely sure. He joined up in, he actually arrived at Bardney on the 11th of October in 1943 and his final mission was on the 22nd of March 1944.
RP: So when he arrived at Bardney he’d obviously been through training.
HC: Yes. Yes.
RP: So he must have joined quite, almost —
HC: Yes. Almost immediately after my grandfather died I imagine.
RP: Yes.
HC: He joined because yeah, they had the, they had their initial training, didn’t they?
RP: Yes.
HC: And then went on to another training —
RP: Yes. They trained.
HC: Centre.
RP: They trained as an airman.
HC: Yes.
RP: Then trained for the particular skill you have. Yeah.
HC: That’s right. And so he went to his, the second part of the training and that was when they selected, where the crews were selected.
RP: Yes. They have —
HC: Self-selected as I always think.
RP: That’s right. It is If you sort of liked —
HC: Yeah.
RP: The look of the guy who was a navigator you spoke to him and —
HC: Yes. Yes.
RP: If you gelled I think that that’s how they went about it.
HC: That’s right. And my understanding is is that Flying Officer Manning and Flying Officer Hearn, John and another sergeant called Peter Warywoda. Warywoda. He, the four of them formed the core of the crew. Other people came and went but those four were the initial sort of heart of the crew if you like. There was others joined them a little bit later. John Zammit who was possibly from America. We’re not entirely certain about that.
RP: I have heard it. Yes. He’s referred to as from the USA but —
HC: Yes. Yes.
RP: Someone might be guessing of course.
HC: Yes. I mean, I mean the only thing I’m saying is, or the thing that makes us wonder a little is Marcel who was, Marcel Dubois, the plane eventually fell in their in their little village really and he has been doing a lot of investigation to, in to the last flight of the LM4.
RP: So, Zammit is a Maltese name.
HC: Yes.
RP: Zammit is a Maltese name, isn’t it?
HC: Yes. That’s what Marcel was saying was that he’s gone to, he’s contacted many people in Malta. Many people in New York.
RP: Yeah.
HC: Where there are quite a lot of Zammits as well.
RP: Yes. Yeah. Because they would have emigrated of course.
HC: But he never had any response. He never had any reply so he doesn’t really know who, you know sort of where he came from.
RP: Has he tried the War Museums in Malta? Because they —
HC: I think he’s tried everywhere.
RP: Tried them all. Yeah.
HC: He’s been very extensive.
RP: Yeah.
HC: The interesting thing is that after they, after they died they were all buried in the, together in the cemetery in Brussels, Evere, and subsequently Zammit, John Zammit was actually, actually exhumed from that position and moved to the American War Cemetery. But after a while, I mean I don’t know why they did it but after a while he was re-removed from the American Cemetery and put back.
RP: Dear oh dear.
HC: In to Brussels. But unfortunately there’s now a complete crew between him and his crew. So, so they didn’t put, you know he wasn’t put back where he came from.
RP: I wonder if that was because they proved he wasn’t an American.
HC: It may be that they thought he wasn’t an American.
RP: Yeah.
HC: So, we don’t really know really.
RP: Ok. But tell me a little about your friend Marcel then. He seems to have been instrumental in finding out the information of John.
HC: Yes. Yes. It, I mean we didn’t know much more. We had a photograph in one of the bomber squadron books which had a picture of the crew including John out, behind the famous Johnny Walker Lancaster. We didn’t really know any more, too much more about what had happened. And then completely out of the blue in the mid-90s, around about ’94 ’95 I think it was we received a letter from the council, the North London Council where my, John’s family home had, well had been. And it was about, Marcel was trying to find people who were relatives of the crew of LM 430 which was the last mission for John and his crew. And the council were very good because by that time my mother had died, my aunt had died and the house had been sold. So somebody from the council went to the location and then they knocked on a few doors and fortunately they found a friend of my aunt who was still alive and still living there just a couple of doors down. And she happened to have our details and so they were able, the council were able to get us in contact with Marcel Dubois. Now, Marcel was thirteen years old as I understand it when, I may not have that exactly right but I think he was about thirteen when the plane came down in his small village in Belgium. And some of it fell in, it was broke into two big parts and a number of other parts and of course it fell into various gardens and some of it was in his aunt’s garden and some of it was, I think in his. I’m not entirely sure about that. But he just then became fascinated by the crew and what happened to them and their last mission. And in the ‘90s he very painstakingly tried to build up a view, or a picture of what happened, the last crew. Where they went. The last, sorry the last mission. Where they went and how the flight sort of came to its end really. And he was very successful.
RP: So I assume they, they’d bombed Frankfurt. They were on the return leg. Yeah?
HC: Yes.
RP: Yeah.
HC: Yes. Yeah. That’s right. They had. They left at, he had all the timings. I mean he was, and he’d actually worked out a little plan about their exact route and everything so we’ve got maps and things for that. So he did an awful lot of work. They, they left Bardney at ten past nine in the evening. Sorry. Sorry. Ten past seven, 19.10 in the evening and flew as though they were making for Hanover rather than Frankfurt and then, because I think they were trying to put the Germans off a little bit as to their route. And then they then diverted to Frankfurt as they got a bit closer but of course the Germans apparently already knew where they were going. By ten to ten they knew that. But they, they John’s plane was a little bit unfortunate that they’d sort of drifted slightly off course. So they were supposed to arrive for the bombing mission and I think the main bulk of them did arrive almost on time. I think Marcel said they were a minute late which was pretty good going for, for the main run. The main run. But John and his crew were a little bit later. They arrived a bit, a little bit afterwards so they were a little bit on their own which is not a good position to be in.
RP: No. No. Which is why you get picked off, I assume. Yeah.
HC: Yes. Yeah.
RP: Which is a very —
HC: Well —
RP: Just a twist of fate, isn’t it?
HC: Yeah.
RP: You’re a few minutes late and, but that’s you’re, that’s what happens.
HC: That, that’s right. Yes. Yes.
RP: Yeah.
HC: And they managed to, they managed to jettison all their bombs bar they had a crate of phosphorous bombs. Or a carrier of phosphorous bombs. They couldn’t, they couldn’t get them, get them to go. It was jammed or something. Now, under normal circumstances they, they would have just jettisoned the whole thing but there had been an order that very afternoon. That very day when they had had their briefing that they were getting short of these bomb carriers and that they should not unless they absolutely had to jettison them. They should bring them back.
RP: Oh right.
HC: Now, Marcel could never work out whether it was an order from the Bomber Command itself from higher up or whether it was just a local thing and Group Captain Pleasance had made that [pause] you know the station commander had made that order. So that subsequently was going to have some disastrous results for them.
RP: So they were carrying phosphorescent bombs. They’re hit. Which it just adds to the fire I guess.
HC: Yes. As far as I understand they had one crate. Just the one crate of these bombs but they didn’t, they did not jettison them. Together with the normal crew I haven’t mentioned that but the actual, the group captain on this particular occasion had joined them for their flight. I think it’s, and they weren’t really supposed to do that but anyway he was there. George Caines, who was the w/op the wireless operator in the crew he said that he actually didn’t really interfere with them. He sat behind the pilot and didn’t, was quietly spoken and didn’t really say anything or didn’t interfere with the actual mission really. So not, nobody sure why he went or what he went for or what the reason was. I understand he’d been two or three other times in different aircraft. So I —
RP: So do you know how many sorties John had done before that? The last one.
HC: No. I don’t. He, his first mission, he arrived on the 11th of October in Bardney. Their first mission was a few days later. I thought it was that same day but actually I realise now I’ve re-read it and it was a few days later and they got quite badly shot up on that first journey. And that first, their first mission and they lost their rear gunner and, who was, who was killed and another gunner, I think it’s the middle turret gunner, I think —
RP: Mid-upper. Yeah.
HC: Yeah.
RP: Yeah.
HC: He was quite badly injured. But they got the plane back safely. They then I believe and again this information from what Marcel found from George Caines when he interviewed George Caines. He, they were then shot up again sort of a day or two later. So they had a pretty sticky start really to their, their flight. The four original crew members who we originally mentioned were still together but they started to lose a couple of other. I mean obviously the rear gunner was killed and the other one was injured so they had to be replaced. And the wireless, the original wireless operator who was not George Caines he, well he sort of had a little bit of a breakdown. He’d had a tough time of it and so he was sort of quickly removed from the vicinity. I understand they didn’t like —
RP: No. They tended to —
HC: Lack of moral fibre I think they called it but —
RP: Yeah. Yes. They tended to be posted to a particular area in Scotland, I think.
HC: Yes. Yes. He was [pause] So, so the rest of the crew were coming and going and they said there were another, another ten missions before I think it was they [pause] I think that might have been before Zammit, John Zammit joined them. So I really don’t know how many missions he did. In the one archive it says possibly twenty but to my mind that doesn’t seem that many for an experienced crew in —
RP: It depends how, the frequency because they might fly the sortie and then have two days off and —
HC: Yes.
RP: Or if the aircraft had been damaged it could be another a week or so.
HC: Right. Yes.
RP: But you probably, you would expect probably maybe three or three or four a month at least I would have thought.
HC: Right.
RP: Possibly.
HC: About right then because it was five months.
RP: It depends on the serviceability of the aircraft.
HC: Yes.
RP: And as you say if there was a crew member had been injured and they can’t get another one.
HC: Yeah.
RP: Although towards 1944 yes they were starting to feel the pinch in getting crews I think.
HC: Yes.
RP: Because so many of them had died. I think that was the problem.
HC: Yeah, that was the thing I think. That’s, that was right.
RP: So training. They still kept to the same training regime so they still had a fairly lengthy training period.
HC: Yes. Yes. So that may well have been right then. Twenty in five months.
RP: It was a possibility. Yeah.
HC: It would be possible wouldn’t it?
RP: You mentioned someone actually survived the crash. Did they bale out?
HC: Yes. What happened, let me tell you what exactly happened.
RP: Yeah.
HC: And then —
RP: Please do. Yeah.
HC: And so, so they, they arrived at the, where they, at Frankfurt a little, a little bit behind the others but not much. They jettisoned all their bombs bar this crate of phosphorous bombs. They then decided, well obviously returned, wanted to return as quickly as they could and they thought that they could catch up with their other comrades really and the other, the other aircraft and they didn’t think there was that much time, that much gap between them. That they could make, make the time up. But unfortunately again they wiggled off course slightly. They just drifted again off course. It was quite bumpy I gather. It was a bit rough up there I think that, on that particular time. Night. Whether it had any difference, made any difference I don’t know but anyway they were still slightly off course. One aircraft on its own a little bit away from the others was fairly easily picked up really and they were flying back. They were just around about the Halle area of Belgium when they suddenly got hit by what they thought was flak. It got the bomb, the crate of bombs that they hadn’t jettisoned because of the instructions. Whether, they would have done had the group captain not been on board the plane. They may have done. We don’t know. But anyway, this what they thought was flak hit the plane. It then, the bombs exploded, caught fire. Immediately what they thought was flak had hit them the pilot, the skipper, Manning he said to them, put your, told the people to put their, put their parachutes on. Told all the crew which they did. And then before jettisoning oh before jumping out he thought he could try and put the flames out. So he did the —
RP: Yeah.
HC: Fast manoeuvre that they do but still thinking it was flak he didn’t, I don’t think he took evasive action. He just did the, I think he just did the, he flew fast to get the flames out. But unfortunately what he didn’t realise because it was the phosphorous bombs, that the air in the phosphorous it just made it worse and the flames then licked along the undercarriage of the aircraft, caught the fuel tank. But also, and the fuel tank exploded. Now, the assumption was it was either more flak or the, you know the fuel tank just got, just exploded because of the fire but what had happened in fact was that one of the German top night, well I think he was probably the top fighter, night fighter ace, Schnaufer was his name had actually come up underneath the aircraft and shot them. The first shot seemed to hit the phosphorous bombs. And then he hung around and then came in for the kill and he shot them a second time. So whether it was the flames that got the fuel tank or whether it was the, you know Schnaufer’s guns I don’t know. So, that was what, that was what happened. The plane then broke in half. Nobody obviously by that time, nobody could get out really. It was a bit too late. Perhaps they should have jumped immediately. I don’t know. But they didn’t. And as I understand from Marcel that because of the way the Lancasters were built, the very large bomb compartment it’s a weakness. It has a, as he called it a bit of a weak backbone. And so where the wireless operator which was George Caines sat was right at the beginning of the bomb bay. So the plane split open and George Caines fell out. Fortunately, he had, as I said they had their parachutes on and George, he was sort of semi-conscious but just enough to be able to pull his ripcord, and so he fell out. The parachute didn’t fully open but he landed in amongst the trees which broke his fall. And then he said by the time he got to the ground his parachute had gained sufficient air just to sort of not kill him really. He was injured but not critically badly as far as I understand it. I mean, I don’t know what his, the full extent of his injuries were but I do know he had a dislocated knee but I don’t know what else had happened to him. And he was picked up by a local chap from the village. A man called Mr Pissens and he took George into his house and he was able to eat a meal so he obviously was sort of sufficiently ok. And George stayed overnight with Mr Pissens in his house. Mr Pissens then went to look at the plane and all the other, the others were all were all dead. I’ve seen two accounts. Marcel mentioned that they were all still strapped in their seats.
RP: Yeah.
HC: And they had probably died very quickly. Lost consciousness with the oxygen depletion. But some other people, there was another report that their bodies were outside the plane. But I don’t know. I don’t know which is correct. But anyway all of the others died very quickly as I understand it. Anyway, the following, George stayed overnight in Mr Pissens’s house. The following morning a detachment of Germans arrived. They were billeted in a farmhouse fairly close by and had been searching and they picked up George Caines and he was then a prisoner of war for the rest of the war. And the rest of the crew were removed from the aircraft and taken to Brussels where they were buried on the 24th of [pause] it may have been the 25th but they were buried a couple of days later in Brussels.
RP: So, the chap who rescued George Caines. Did he get in trouble then for hiding him?
HC: Well, I don’t, I’m not, I don’t think so. There was, there was, I saw one report that said he had been arrested but I don’t think he, I don’t think so. He may have been temporarily. I don’t think he got into bad trouble. He just held him overnight. I mean he gave him up immediately in the morning when the Germans arrived. I don’t think it was in his mind to try and hide him but I don’t know. I can’t give you [any information] about —
RP: So George Caines survived the war as a prisoner.
HC: George Caines survived the war and he lived until 2011. So —
RP: Oh, that’s good.
HC: Yes. Marcel was able to track him down, trace him and he interviewed him on the 20th of, sorry not on the 20th, in the year 2000 and so he got a lot of his information —
RP: Oh, that’s good.
HC: From George Caines so it’s as accurate, I think as we can make it.
RP: Yeah. Yes.
HC: But interestingly enough nearly all the records say that the plane was shot down on the 23rd of March but it was, which was the following day but it was actually the 22nd of March. The day they flew out. It was shot, the plane was shot down at ten past eleven in the night. And we have evidence of that because of Schnaufer’s logbook. And there was somebody, I think he was called Rumpelhardt was his co — I don’t know. I don’t think they called him a co-pilot but the, the other person who was in the plane with him and perhaps he’d be a navigator. I’m not sure. But he, they both in their logbooks had recorded the shooting. The time that, they weren’t sure whether it was a Lancaster or a Halifax but subsequently it was obviously it’s the Lancaster. And there was some other correspondence, some other information as well that confirmed that from the radar I think. The German, sort of radar people. So it was, it was actually the 22nd that they were all shot down and not the 23rd. Which was a bit, a bit sad really.
RP: Yeah. It is.
HC: Yes.
RP: So it’s a fairly comprehensive report though because you don’t always get that when someone’s been shot down. It’s always hard to find out information.
HC: No. No. It’s just, you were just shot down. I mean, in a way you don’t want to know.
RP: That’s right. Yeah.
HC: I mean, you know it feels so tragic because there was, I mean there was, you know the drifting off course didn’t help.
RP: No.
HC: Not being able to release their phosphorous bombs clearly didn’t help. The pilot being a little unsure and trying to put out the fire with oxygen and air which would actually cause the phosphorous bombs to burn more. You know. It was just [pause] The group captain being on board the plane. Did that make any difference? You don’t know. I mean we just can’t. We just don’t know. And so it was yeah quite a —
RP: It would be interesting to read the form 540 of the squadron to see why the group captain went and what the explanation is in there.
HC: Yes. Nobody’s been able to find out. Marcel, I’ve seen a, because he writes, I’ve seen something he’s written on the internet as well and he says he’s got his theories but he’s not saying what he thinks his theory is. So, so we don’t really know what that is. But I mean how much impact it had or how much you know sort of him being there we just don’t know. We don’t have a clue really, do we?
RP: No.
HC: And it may have had no significance at all. I mean I wish to heavens they’d jettisoned their phosphorous bombs but, you know right at the scene. You know. But they didn’t.
RP: No.
HC: And that was that. Which was a shame but having said that Schnaufer was the top fighter ace and they probably wouldn’t have stood a chance regardless anyway. But, yeah which is a great shame really. Yes. I think Schnaufer ended up with a hundred and twenty one kills which it’s, it’s a lot of people.
RP: It is.
HC: Yeah. Yeah. They used to, it was a technique that he was very skilled at was actually sort of creeping up underneath the aircraft because they were blind in the middle.
RP: That’s right.
HC: Sort of in the belly of the aircraft. It was just a technique that he perfected. And he just was able to shoot down so many planes. And the other interesting thing is when Marcel interviewed George Caines even in 2000 he still believed that they got, that they were caught by flak. He didn’t believe that it was a night fighter ace until Marcel was able to provide him with the evidence and there was the information then that they were actually shot down by Schnaufer and not unluckily caught by flak. But my understanding is and George, I think George Caines sort of indicated it when he was speaking to Marcel was that the [pause] they mostly chose to think it was flak. I suppose they didn’t really like to think there were these aircraft because they were pretty lethal. It was a pretty lethal thing if they were got from underneath like that.
RP: I don’t think they ever solved the problem to be honest.
HC: No.
RP: Because it’s got such a large bomb bay you can’t have a really a mid-lower observation post.
HC: Yes.
RP: It’s just because that was the point of the Lancaster. It was one big bomb bay.
HC: Yes. Yes. So, so I think it was easier to think that you were randomly hit by flak than actually there’s people stalking you from underneath and coming up and shooting you dead. I mean it’s just a, yeah, it’s a, a terrible thing to have to think about each sort of when you go out.
RP: So have you been able to visit the cemetery to —
HC: Yes. Yes. We, we I mean Marcel has been fantastic and I think he, you know sort of so much credit should go to Marcel for everything that he’s done really, and yes I acknowledge what he’s done. He, he what he did in the end he found, you know he sort of that he got as much information as he could about as many of the crew as he could. There’s just one outstanding and that was somebody called Albert Finch who was the rear gunner on the night. He can’t find any information about him and, but he’s still trying. I mean Marcel must be you know sort of well into his eighties now I suppose but I still communicate with him occasionally on email and whatever so —
RP: Yes.
HC: He’s still —
RP: Yeah. Its unusual. Even if they’ve not registered interest or no one in the family.
HC: Yeah.
RP: Has researched him there won’t be any information about him that’s the thing.
HC: He’s still searching. Still searching. So, but anyway what he decided to do and it was a wonderful gesture they had a plaque made with all the names of all the individuals of the individual crew members who had died that night. And they they’ve fixed the plaque on to the side of the wall of one of the nearest house to the main part of the aircraft that crashed and we actually had a, just a wonderful visit there. Marcel had arranged it all. And it was like the grand opening of the plaque. Or the grand unveiling the plaque I should say and, but first of all though he organised a service in the Cathedral and there was many of the dignitaries from Halle in Belgium were there. 9 Squadron was represented by the squadron leader then who was a man called Watson. Squadron Leader Watson. And there was somebody from the Belgian, I think it was the military attaché I think from the Belgian [pause] government I suppose, isn’t it? Really.
RP: Yes. Must be. Yeah.
HC: Yes. And he attended. There was many local people and all the old veterans had turned out. Probably a little bit like our Royal British Legion, I think. And so we had a very moving service there. We went to the, to the cemetery and we spent time with the, at the coffin and you know accompanied by all these people. And then we went back to the village and there was the grand unveiling of the plaque and the local people had provided a really nice tea for everybody and it was just, it was just a wonderful occasion.
RP: That’s very good of them, wasn’t it?
HC: Yes. It was tremendous.
RP: Amazing.
HC: And they’ll be remembered now forever more.
RP: Oh yes. Well, thank you for that. I think we’ve probably covered everything there but it’s amazing that you’ve had, you’ve had so much research done.
HC: Yeah.
RP: It’s great.
HC: I think it’s Marcel really. Everything we know is down to him and his sort of just doggedness really. And yeah, we just, well we just you know sort of feel as though his contribution should be acknowledged but you want to acknowledge the contribution of the, the sort of the people who died. I mean they were so brave going out night after night, weren’t they?
RP: That’s right.
HC: Doing this job.
RP: Well, hopefully through this, you know the IBCC with the digital archive will have, you know many interviews like this you know about all the crew.
HC: Yes.
RP: Various people.
HC: Yes.
RP: And that’ll be there. So his name, John’s name will be remembered and we’ve obviously mentioned Marcel.
HC: Yes.
RP: In this interview so that will be —
HC: Yes.
RP: That will be remembered.
HC: That’s good. I’m pleased about that. So, yeah I mean there’s one other very, well a great irony. I always consider irony of life that on the, at the age of twenty two on the 22nd of March John’s life came to an end. For me at the age of twenty two on the 22nd of March —
[recording paused]
HC: For me on the 22nd of March my life started. I got married. It was, I mean what a coincidence.
RP: Twenty two.
HC: Yeah. I was aged twenty two. On the 22nd of March I got married.
RP: Goodness me.
HC: On the 22nd of March at the age of twenty two John died.
RP: Amazing.
HC: It’s terrible.
RP: It’s strange, isn’t it?
HC: Yeah. Dreadful irony.
RP: Well, thank you very much for talking to me Hilary, it’s been fascinating. I appreciate your time. Thank you.
HC: No. Thank you.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Hilary Crozier
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rod Pickles
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-16
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ACrozierH180216
Format
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00:34:31 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
Hilary’s uncle, William Frederick Burkitt (known as John), was born in North London. He joined up in October 1943 and after training as a flight engineer, was sent to RAF Bardney. During their first operation they were badly hit and the rear gunner was killed and another badly injured. On another operation the crew had to jettison the bombs, apart from one crate of incendiaries. Their aircraft, LM 430 was hit, and the incendiaries and fuel tank exploded: John and all the crew, except one, were killed on 22 March 1944 crashing into a house in Belgium.
Marcel Dubois was a child in Belgium at the time and because some wreckage of the aircraft landed in various gardens in his village he became fascinated with the crew and extensively researched them and the details of their last flight. The station commander had also been on the flight.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Belgium
France
Germany
Great Britain
Belgium--Brussels
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-10
1944-03-22
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
crash
flight engineer
incendiary device
killed in action
Lancaster
memorial
prisoner of war
RAF Bardney
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/754/10752/ACoulsonW180207.2.mp3
0e9d5b6e44f81a7e472aa3fe9680857b
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
A name given to the resource
Coulson, Bill
William Coulson
W Coulson
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Tony Coulson about his father, Warrant Officer William Coulson (1921 -2018). He flew operations as an air gunner with 138 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-17
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
Coulson, W
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
TC: Right. We’ll do some of the stories. The, the [pause] the ones that do the personal bit and then let me just think. I need to do the Clarkson story. The Duraglit one and the, my mother’s and the, my mother’s and that would —
MG: Ok.
TC: Some of the incidents that Bill has told us through the years concern, and reactions to the flights or the operations that he’d been on. And one particularly bad operation coming from Norway they’d been beaten up by a lot of flak and they managed just to scrape into an emergency runway in, on the coast of England. They got there and they were debriefed, and they were sent to the mess to get something to eat and they were eating there with their aeroplane, you know being rescued from the mess that it was in and they went in to the mess, ate and Bill Clarkson thought I’d like some more bread. He said to the other lads, ‘Anybody else want some more bread?’ And some of them said yes. So he went up to the young WAAF who was on the counter and said, ‘Excuse me, can I have some more bread please.’ And she looked at him and looked at the lads and then said, ‘More bread? Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ It took the rest of the crew about ten minutes to calm Bill Clarkson down and to inform the young lady that yes indeed they know. The did know there was a war on. Another incident that occurred was when they were sent out to take a spy over to France and they were returned because of bad weather. The operation was cancelled and [pause] Sorry. It wasn’t France. Another operation was when they were sent to send a spy over to Norway and the operation was cancelled due to bad weather and so they had to fly and they ended up in Kinloss. They had their flying gear on and they were received until the, everything went well until the next morning when they’d taken their flying gear off and they were standing by the Lancaster and a particularly officious Red Cap came along and said, ‘Why is that guy in civilian gear?’ Because obviously he was a spy and he’d been dressed to land and blend in to the Norwegian background. ‘Where’s his papers?’ And obviously being a spy he didn’t have any. And so then they mustered the guard to come to this aeroplane and it took all of Heck’s persuasion and finally pulling seniority and phone calls before they were able to fly off and take the spy back where, to Tempsford where he’d come from. Another one concerns my dad’s marriage to my mother in February of 1944 [pause] They got married on February the 8th. February the 8th 1944. Sorry. Another story concerns my dad’s marriage to my mother in February 1945. They got married in Scunthorpe. The crews came up to Scunthorpe and helped with the celebrations and my mother was walking along again with a pilot on each arm and about fourteen young men surrounding her going to the dance hall in Scunthorpe saying, ‘I can’t decide who I’m having the first dance with.’ And my dad piped up, ‘Yes, you can. It’s me.’ And later on they honeymooned in London, again with both crews because they were all on leave together and it didn’t seem unusual that they should all stick together even on their honeymoon. And previous to the trip out in London my dad had said to my mother, ‘Oh, it’s important I get some Duraglit. I’ve got to actually clean my uniform and so she said, ‘Right. We’ll do that and make sure. I’ll remind you later.’ And so the two crews are walking down a side street in London and they see a barber’s shop. And above it was the legend, Durex, which was a well-known prophylactic. But in my mother’s rather confused and maybe over excited mind she’d mixed that up with Duraglit and so she piped up, saying, ‘Bill, you said we’d need some of that for later.’ Bill’s comments to me on the event was, ‘And you know neither of those crews ever repeated that story to me for the rest of the time that I knew them.’ Yes. Another rather tragic bit of that story was the second week. Dad was at Tempsford and it was obviously a secret aerodrome. Even people in the area didn’t know about its existence and my mother knew that.
[ringtone – interview paused]
Another sad aspect of that honeymoon was the second week that my mother spent in digs near Tempsford. Sorry. [unclear] again. Sorry. I’m not thinking.
MG: That’s not a problem.
TC: Another sad aspect of that honeymoon was mother was staying in digs near Tempsford which was obviously a secret aerodrome. They were dealing with SOE and other nefarious organisation and so the locals, many of them didn’t even know it was an aerodrome. Many of them just thought it was a farm. Or at least that’s the story we were told. She was going to the market in town and she got on the bus. Now, out of the window she saw a Stirling on training exercises. Now, she knew that my dad was on training on that day and this was February 1945. The 14th. And so she thought, ‘Oh, that might be Bill up there on training. There were only three of the Stirlings on training that day so she knew Bill might be one of them. Unfortunately, an American Mustang pilot at the same time who’d been involved in the training exercises decided to try one last attempt at a low-level attack on the Stirling and he misjudged the timing and actually took the tail end of the Stirling off as he crashed into it. And both aircraft fell to the ground and were, nobody survived obviously. My mother was twenty one, married for a week and she’d just witnessed a tragic accident that meant that possibly she had a one in three chance of having lost her husband. You can imagine how distraught she was. Furthermore, there was no way that she could get in contact with the aerodrome because it was a secret aerodrome and therefore had no contact with the public whatsoever. And so she had to wait until 6 o’clock that night to find out when my dad came out of the camp to see whether he was alive or not. One interesting story with that was that as the bus went along and my mother was in tears and being comforted by some other stranger that she didn’t even know was the local bobby was riding on his bike to investigate the accident and he flagged down the bus and put his bike on it and said, ‘Take me to Tempsford.’ Right. That’s two stories. What’s the name for it. Do you want just the last one of course. I’ll just finish. Right. Bill’s war career must have been an extraordinary event for a young lad from Scunthorpe. Never been out of town. No formal education. Left school at fourteen. And it was something that I know did shape him as a person but something also that he didn’t ever really talked about other than at the ludicrous level when, when I used to ask him as all little kids did, ‘Dad, what did you do in the war?’ And he said, ‘Well, I used to fly in aeroplanes and me and Churchill used to have a cricket bat and used to fly over Germany and hit people on the head.’ I said, as I grew older I said, ‘That’s ridiculous. Come on. Tell me.’ He said, ‘Well, I used to drop mail and supplies.’ And he said, ‘I didn’t mind dropping the supplies but the mail was difficult. Especially when they had the lower letterbox.’ And it was that kind of facetious attitude that dad had all the way through until about twelve, fifteen years ago and he’d reached eighty odd. We’d taken him to RAF Duxford for his eightieth birthday and he just wanted another flight. So he paid all his birthday money. In fact, quite tragically he said, ‘I know you’ve given me this money. Do you mind if I spend it on this flight?’ And it was a 36 de Havilland that was doing joy rides around Duxford. And we said, ‘No. Of course not.’ And he went up there and that kind of triggered things, the trip to Duxford and he did start talking more and more about it. And even then when he went to work part time, at eighty he was working part time at Scunthorpe United on the gate and he used to tell some of the older gate men some stories and he became affectionately known as Gunner Bill. And even to that day I still work at the ground and they ask me about, ‘How is Gunner Bill doing?’
MG: Ok. Thanks very much Tony. That’s been really helpful and obviously thanks to Bill for allowing us to be, to be here with him and I’ll stop now.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Tony Coulson
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Michael Grant
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-07
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ACoulsonW180207
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:12:07 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
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
Second generation
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Bedfordshire
England--Lincolnshire
Description
An account of the resource
Bill Clarkson was flying on operations from RAF Tempsford dropping agents and supplies over occupied territory. On one occasion they were recalled due to bad weather and had to return with the agent on board. Obviously, he was in civilian clothes and caused a security incident at the aerodrome. On another occasion when the aeroplane Bill had been flying on had been badly damaged and they had been forced to make an emergency landing. When Bill and his crew asked for more bread with their meal they were met with the incredulous words of the WAAF, ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on.’
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-02-08
1945-02-14
138 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
crash
Lancaster
love and romance
RAF Tempsford
Stirling
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1062/11457/APayneJB150608.2.mp3
d15cef4ebe65bbad4bec4356ee9b1cbb
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
A name given to the resource
Payne, Brian
John Brian Payne
J B Payne
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Brian Payne (b. 1932, 2530371, Royal Air Force). He served on Canberas 1951-1959.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-08
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
Payne, JB
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
MH: Good morning to anybody that’s listening to the recording of this morning. I have the pleasure of interviewing Mr John Payne at his home address xxxx xxxx. The date today is Monday the 8th of June 2015. The time by my watch now is 11:41 and basically, I’ve got the purpose here to interview Mr Payne regarding reflections and memories of his time with the Royal Air Force, dating between 1951 and 1959. He will also be touching on a very interesting subject also about his father, who was potentially one of the first people to join the combined service back in 1918, in the formative year of the Royal Air Force having moved over from the Royal Flying Corps. There may be other points that Mr Payne wishes to touch on. I may or may not be taking notes during this and there may or may not be some direct questions at the end, but I’m now going to hand this recording over to Mr Payne and I’ll get him to run through his story.
JBP: My Christian name is Brian. This was the name of a close friend of my father’s, who was two years older than him. In 1916, he was called up in Bradford to join the Bradford pals, trained as an infantryman, went over to France in January of 1917 and was killed on the 22nd of February 1917, on the Ancre River, which is not far from Rheims. In 1940, things were looking difficult. The evacuation of Dunkirk was taking place, Hitler’s armed forces seemed to look unstoppable, we lost most of our equipment left in France. Churchill had just taken over and formed his first war cabinet and everything looked black, but as a seven year old boy, these things were not in my mind at all. One day, my father left his bureau open and I had a look inside, and I saw the usual kinds of things, and in one corner, there was a little portion set aside for technical notes. I didn’t know what they meant but what I did know was, that there were three photographs, and they were photographs of biplanes in front of a hangar. So that evening when dad came home, I said to him, ‘What are these photographs, Dad?’ And he said, ‘Well, when, in 1918 when the First World War ended, I was flying one of those aeroplanes and I was training to be pilot, but I didn’t finish my training because the armistice stopped all the flying so I never got my wings’. Well, as a little boy going to school with other little boys, this was a goldmine. This was a wonderful thing to find out. That my father had been a pilot in the Air Force, even if he didn’t go flying and dropping bombs and things on Germany. He was there, he did his bit, as far as he could and from then on, I dreamed of going into the Air Force and flying. I didn’t mind whether it was flying as a pilot or a navigator. I just wanted to be able to say, ‘I’m aircrew in the Air Force.’ Times passed. I got myself seven credits at school certificate, which was very unusual because mostly, I just worked for other people I enjoyed and looked forward to having as my teachers. And I got one A level. Not enough to go to university but plenty to go into the Air Force to fly, and I was called up as a national serviceman. Started off by going to Padgate and learned to dislike drill corporals who hazed us from day, dawn to dusk. 6 o’clock in the morning reveille till bed time, and got the uniformity that they wanted in terms of what we were wearing and how we cleaned equipment, and then off to a grey Hornchurch to be graded as a potential aircrew, and when I finished the grading, they said, ‘You’re a grade three pilot, but you’re a grade one navigator’. So I said, ‘I’d like to try being a pilot first’. So that October, I was sent up to RAF Digby, where they had Tiger Moths, and I had a marvellous time. The only snag is, the twelve hours that I flew, I always had an instructor with me. Never went solo. Never, never did landings on my own. And that really meant that I could only look forward to being a navigator, but I consoled myself that if I was a navigator, I might not kill myself as easily as if I was a pilot, and with that thought, I went on. Now, the Air Force was in a phase of expansion when I joined them but the majority of the aircraft were World War Two aircraft, propeller driven, and by that time the speed of aircraft meant that propellers couldn’t be used to power aeroplanes because they couldn’t go fast enough. They came up against a problem called the speed of sound, which didn’t do anything good for propellers, and jet engines were coming in, witness the Meteor and the Vampire, which were our front line defence but when it came to Korea, and the North Koreans invading the South Koreans then the, one of the few occasions when the United Nations Council sent troops somewhere to fight, and we were one of the sixteen nations that answered the call of the UN, sent people out to Korea, but of course, we found that the Koreans had jet aircraft from Russia, MIG15, and these MIG15s could play havoc with our slower piston engine aircraft, the bombers, and the fighters weren’t very good against them either, but I was going in on this wave of enthusiasm about the first jet bomber in the country, which was the Canberra. The B2 Canberra. Oh, and I did want to fly that aeroplane. I was hoping I could get on to that aeroplane, to fly a jet bomber. My father had been enrolled in the Air Force a fortnight after it became the RAF from being the RFC and the Royal Naval Air Service, so he started something new and here was I with a chance perhaps of flying in a Canberra. Well off we went for our training. They opened up some temporary camps. First at RAF Usworth near Newcastle, which was a dump. We were in wooden huts. Fortunately, it was February when we went there, when it was bitterly cold, and by the time we finished it was August and it was nice and warm, but we couldn’t get anywhere from the camp very easily, because the buses didn’t run very frequently to Sunderland or Newcastle, and certainly, there was no Sunday morning service to either place from Usworth, so we were out there, trapped on an airfield with nothing to do, but I passed that. Had some adventures, like a compass being wrong in the aircraft and me flying over cloud for an hour, an hour and a quarter and finding us miles away from where we should have been, because the compass was in error by five degrees, which is a lot of miles if you’re flying at two hundred miles an hour. From there, I went down to Lichfield, which again was another temporary, it was a wartime training base where they had Wellington B10s. My course went through successfully, most of them anyway, but a couple of, four of the lads were involved in crashes. The first was a Wellington that was doing a let- down, and the trainee navigator set the coordinates wrong for his Gee set. Instead of letting down to the airfield, he let down in the side of a hill, but they all three survived it because the pilot pulled the nose up as soon as he saw the hillside, and he kind of, was climbing, and the hillside was climbing a bit faster, so eventually, the hillside hit him underneath and he was going on alright until he hit a wall and then it broke into pieces. The other accident happened when they were in the circuit, coming in for final landing. The pilot made an error, the co-pilot was killed, one of the navigators was trapped in the wreckage and the pilot went off to find help and the other navigator stayed with his mate. The fog came down. It took them four hours to find the aircraft. Having got through that, we had a joyful occasion when I got my navigator’s brevvy, and I was confirmed as a pilot officer in the royal service, and incidentally, my initial commission as acting pilot officer was signed on the first day of the current Queens reign. What a long time ago that was. It’s like having a first, first cover stamp isn’t it? Well then, the moment of truth. Hardly anybody from our course at Lichfield went on to jets, just me and two others. We were told we were going to Bomber Command Bombing School at Lindholme, now notorious as a prison, where we did the practice with the Mark 14 bombsight that the Lancasters and Lincolns used, which was called the T2 bombsight for the Canberra. Unfortunately, the bombsight was only an area bombsight in the Second World War and they could have an accuracy of up to four hundred yards with the bombsight. In jet aircraft, the areas were even bigger. It was not a successful bombsight. The work hadn’t been done sufficiently in advance, but we were grappling with flying near the speed of sound at high altitudes, and the problem with the visual bombsight is, you couldn’t see the target when you want to release the bomb, because it was too far ahead to allow for forward propulsion, before the bomb eventually went down vertically, and our experience with a jet bomber dropping inert bombs, just cast metal with explosive inside and a fuse was never very successful. But the time came when we went to 231 Operational Conversion Unit at Bassingbourne, and this was the big time. I was very lucky because the first pilot that I crewed up with, with a Scottish navigator that we had under, Pilot Officer Ford was sent off one day to do circuits and bumps, part of his training before he could fly with his crew, and he took off and got lost and landed downwind at RAF Duxford, which was an inactive fighter station. We never saw him again. And then we got crewed up with a Flight Lieutenant John Garstin, and he was a major influence in my life. We flew together for two years. He was a career officer on a regular commission, destined to go a long way. He’d already served as a aide-de-camp to the governor of one of the Caribbean islands, and he’d instructed at the Initial Training Unit at RAF Cranwell, which is a prestigious post too, so he’d obviously destined for future roles. Anyway, I got him for two years flying in our Canberra which was Willie Howe 725. We got it brand new from the makers via RAF Binbrook where they fitted the particularly RAF equipment in to the aircraft and made it ready for operational use. As flight commanders Terry Geddoe was A Flight commander and John Garstin was B Flight commanders. Flight commanders had their own aircraft. Terry’s was 724 and ours was 725. 724 ended up in a fire dump and was written off, 725 ended up at RAF Duxford, now the Imperial War Museum, Duxford, where it stands as an example of the B2 bomber. The training was interesting but when we finished the course, I had done roughly two hundred and fifty six hours flying since joining the Air Force and there I was, a navigator observer, in the first jet bomber to be flown by the RAF and was I proud? My word I was. From Bassingbourne it wasn’t a long haul up to RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire. We got there on the 26th of May 1953. A date engraved in my mind because the first four crews to go to flying on 15 squadron in the Canberra era, or the Canberra chapter as well call it in the [pause], oh never mind. There were five squadrons building up their strength. There was 15, 10, 10, 10 squadron, 15 squadron, 44 squadron, 56 squadron and 149 squadron and we were all training to become operational in the first eighteen months of our stay at Coningsby, but in the following August, we were sent, we’d been there fifteen months or so, we were told we were going to go to Cottesmore, because they wanted to lay a three thousand yard runway at Coningsby for the V force when it finally arrived. So off we went to Cottesmore, which was a very happy time. Nine months there and off we went again. This time to RAF Honington, which had just had a three thousand yard runway installed for the V force, and there we stuck until the Canberra squadron was dissolved in 1957, but a lot went on before then. For example, the first serious detachment that we did from one of these bases, was from Honington to El Adem. This is in North Africa, near Tobruk famous for the battles between Bernard Montgomery and Rommel in the 1941 and ‘42 years of the Second World War. So it was exciting to go to such a historic place. We were there to fly a week’s intruder exercise over Greece, where they had the ancient Meteors and the ancient Vampires, so we had to fly at a low speed so they could catch us. We cruise normally at .72 Mach, but for those exercises, we had to cruise at .66/67 Mach so they could catch us, so that was quite fun. But I remember about that is the gritty wind, all day and all night - blowing, blowing, blowing - and as dusk fell, you could hear the explosions of mines that had been laid in the Second World War and not cleared, just lying there corroding. Expanding, contracting, expanding, contracting, until all of a sudden, they went off. We did make one visit, we went forty miles along the road from Tobruk, to a famous area where the forces really clashed. I can’t remember the name of the area but there was a peninsula, and on it was a German war memorial. We went up to this war memorial. Everybody started going quiet and whispering, and we looked at the ages of the people on this war memorial, and it was covered. All the granite was covered with names hundreds of young men, and I guess we all had the same thought. Eh up, this could be us. We were a very subdued bunch going back to the officer’s mess at El Adem that evening. When we got there, the local paper was in. They’d discovered the body of a Second World War soldier who’d died in 1942 in the Africa Korps and they found him, twenty yards off the main highway between Tobruk and Benghazi. Twenty yards, in a bit of a scrub, sitting behind a machine gun. Again, it brought it down to earth. And when we got back to England after our attachment, people were beginning to write about Suez and Egypt, and the possibility of confrontation, because Nasser, in July of ’56, nationalised the Suez Canal. Now it’s perfectly logical why he did it, which I can say now in hindsight, ‘cause I can’t remember very much about my attitude at the time except that, oh dear, this is what I got paid flying pay for. It started off with Nasser wanting to build the Aswan Dam. He wanted to build the Aswan Dam because he wanted to control the waters of the Nile, to make them more useful agriculturally, but also as a source of power to power electricity stations and improve the infrastructure. All very laudable, but for that he needed loans, and at the time that the Aswan Dam was starting, or was waiting looking for funds, first the Americans, then the British said, oh, we’ll lend you some money, but after that, Abdul Gamal Nasser made the mistake of buying his weapons of war from the Russians. Not from America and not from England, which upset the politicians. So they said, ‘Well, if we can’t have your orders for aircraft, you can’t have our, we’re going to nationalise the Suez canal, because if we can’t have your loans, we’ve got to pay for it somehow and we’re ongoing with the work’. Now, Anthony Eden had been one of the leading pacifists in the run up to the First World War, and had accompanied Baldwin when he went with that paper peace in our time. He was a sick man, but he wasn’t going to make the same mistake with a dictator again as he’d made with Herr Hitler, and he decided that the, the legal side of international lawyers should tell him whether the nationalisation of the canal was legal, and much to his chagrin, the lawyers said, providing he pays a reasonable compensation to the shareholders, he’s quite within his rights, and it’s quite legal for him to nationalise the Suez canal. This wasn’t what Anthony Eden wanted to hear, but Mr Anthony Eden decided that he was going to teach this fellow a lesson, and he thought of gunboats, which was his age, and he thought the Canberras would do the job. It just showed how little he knew. We knew what we were being prepared for. We were told not to talk to our wives and girlfriends, which we didn’t. We were confined to camp and it all got very tense. Then we were ordered out to Nicosia in Cyprus. At the time there was the EOKA shooting British officers in the back, so we didn’t fancy really, going to Nicosia but when we got there, we found we were alright, because they wouldn’t let us out of camp anyway. Every square foot of the airfield was occupied. There were no permanent accommodation for junior officers, they just slept in tents. The food, with all the people on board, was atrocious, and to cap it all, it was my twenty fourth birthday, and two days after my twenty fourth birthday, my pilot Dennis Wheatley and I were in the briefing room, preparing for our first raid over Egypt, because war had been declared. When they told us that, I just wanted to get on my own for a bit and think out what it could be like. It was a bit scary, but we’d been sent out there in our lovely Canberras. There’s only two problems. The first problem was, we had no way of navigating the aircraft accurately, because the system that was used over Europe was called the Gee system and this was two, two, a master station, two slave stations and they sent out signals. The master sent it out direct to the aircraft and sent one to the, same signals at the same time, and then the two slaves retransmitted the signal to the aircraft, so the aircraft had three readings, and from that, could fix their position by use of a special chart overprinted with Gee values, so we could look at the Oscilloscope and take the C readings and plot the aircraft’s, and that was how we were trained. But there was no Gee station over in Cyprus, nor could they build one in time, but we hadn’t any other aids. We hadn’t even got an astro compass or a bubble sextant. That didn’t do, that didn’t work very well in a fast flying aircraft anyway so we were without navigation aids. And the first raid we went on, was at Kibrit airfield, and we had, we couldn’t, the straightforward way, would have been go due south from Cyprus to the mouth of the Suez canal, go up the Suez canal, and bomb Kibrit airfield, but we thought that, or the powers that be thought, well even the Egyptians will have anti-aircraft gun going up the canal, so if we go up the canal, we’re liable to get shot at so we’d be clever, we’ll fly a series of three courses, and come around like a big question mark. Based on Cyprus, we went down the arm, then round, round, round and at the third turning point, the Valiants would come from Malta, and they would drop markers on the turning point, so we would know where to go to start our bombing run, and then some Canberras of 138 Squadron would mark the target with different target indicators so we’d know what to bomb. Well, nobody had thought that flying three legs without any nav aids is easy to do, because a slight mistake in terms of piloting the aircraft could put you miles off course. And so it was. When I came to the time when we should have been at the last turning point, there were no TI’s from the Vulcans that I could see. I couldn’t see anybody attacking any airfields within visual range of our aircraft. I’d not seen the canal, but it should stand out on a, on a dark night. In fact, there we were, with six one thousand pound armed bombs, going back to an airfield we didn’t know, very close to a large mountain. So Dennis said, ‘We’d better jettison our bombs’, so we went out to sea and dropped the bombs in the water, and hope nobody was swimming underneath. So ingloriously, we went back to base, not having even seen the target. The fact of the matter is, that until that flight, I’d never seen TI’s anyway, ‘cause they were economical during peacetime. They didn’t use everything there so TI’s didn’t get dropped. The next airfield to be attacked was Luxor, which is down to the south of Egypt, and the reason we were attacking Luxor was that Nasser had put his IL28 bombers, the Russian jet bombers, down there out of sight, he hoped. They lined them up on a runway and the air, the photo reconnaissance people saw the aircraft, so that was our target. So we were sent there, in the dark again, but that’s a maximum flight for a Canberra. We have one bombing run, one bombing run only. Well, after our first incident, we were very unhappy, me and Dennis, because we’d not even found the target. On this occasion, the TI’s were dropped and we saw them. A lovely sight. It was November the 5th again. But because of the limitations of our bombsight, built as it was during the war for Lancasters and Halifaxes and Stirlings, flying at two hundred knots, the maximum speed you could fly was three fifty knots, which was way below our maximum speed, and the maximum height you could bomb was twenty five thousand feet, because that was all, we liked to fly at forty thousand feet so going, flying over at high level, coming down to a bombing level, dropping the bomb then climbing up again. We did a cruise climb from the Luxor target, on the first occasion, to conserve fuel, it’s a way of flying a long way. We got to forty eight thousand feet and I have never been as cold as I was that day. Neither had Dennis. It was freezing at forty eight thousand feet, but we got back and joined the queue of aircraft waiting to land, but this time, we had dropped our bombs, and you know how big an airfield is. We missed it. So our bombs fell just outside the perimeter, as did a lot of bombs, but the interesting thing about the debriefing was, the intelligence officer debriefing us was trying to put our bomb burst closer to the target than we wanted to, and I said to him, I said, ‘Look’, I said, ‘I dropped the bloody bombs. I know where they went. You put them where I said, not on the runway, I didn’t hit the runway’. Well when we got back home, it was agreed that it had been a failure. It had been a complete waste of time sending the Canberras, because we didn’t have an accurate wind to put on the bombsight, we had blind navigation, just dead reckoning and that’s anybody’s guess, dead reckoning, so they sent us back the next day to the same airfield, but they had us take off half an hour earlier, so we’d have the last of the light to bomb by, which was intelligent, but didn’t help the results much because we still had no accurate wind over the bomb, over the airfield. Nobody transmitted one to us. So we’d flown all that way by dead reckoning and again, this time I could see the bombs drop, and they did drop inside the airfield, but they dropped on a place which was neither good nor useful. It didn’t disable the airfield and it didn’t disable the IL28s. As it happened, the following day, the French sent in a low level attack force and destroyed them all, but what a waste of time. And then the fourth raid I did, at Suez, was with our squadron commander, Squadron Leader Scott, and I was flying as nav plotter instead of single navigator, so the nav observer went down in the nose and he map read from the coast to the target, and from the target back to the coast, so I didn’t have anything to do except sit there and listen to the conversation, but the final attack was a place called El Marsa barracks, and by this stage, we were supporting the Army in, just out of Port Said. But the nice thing was that, a few days later, they sent us back home to England. That was, that was marvellous, that was the good news, because it got us into our own beds, and good meals and things like that, but they wouldn’t let us off camp. We were still restricted and we were told that although we’d come back in early November, that beginning of, end of December, we were going to go out to Malta, Exercise Goldflake was a kind of surveillance from Malta of the area when it had all calmed down and has a wing of Canberras out there, so we had another month to serve so it was coming up to three and a half months before we’d see our loved ones again [pause]. But when I started doing research on the internet, and the National Archives, it was interesting because so much was glossed over, but I understand that Sir Anthony Eden didn’t have a war cabinet for this particular operation, he just worked with one single senior civil servant, but the planning of the whole exercise made you feel that it was a kind of a mismatch. Senior officers were keeping their stiff upper lip type faces, but I think they were fuming inside because of the way that the arms had been used, or not used properly and all the embarrassing things that could be said, perhaps weren’t said by those in authority at the time [pause]. It was strange drawing up all of a sudden. I had a feeling of how people were when they were going to war, in a real war, not an adventure like this one, and I wrote a little song about it. Have you heard that song “Flying In a Jet Plane,” John Denver?
MH: Ahum
JBP: Well, just right on the top. I won’t, that’s it, that’s it. I won’t, I won’t, I’ll just say it to you rather than sing it. I can sing it but I’m all flat. This is, “Flying In a Jet plane” by me. I pay full tribute to, certainly to John Denver, because it was his thing that started it off -
All my kit is packed
I’m ready to go.
The moon is full, the coach is slow.
I’ve a three hour trip to base, my weekend’s done
Tomorrow is a flying day. I’m 536 we’re on our way.
Flying east, towards the rising sun.
So kiss me and smile for me.
Tell me that you’ll wait for me.
Hold me like you’ll never let me go,
Because I’m flying in a jet plane. I don’t know when I’ll be back again.
Oh Anne, I hate to go.
All leave is cancelled. Weekends too.
The future’s bleak, but I love you.
You fill my waking thoughts the livelong day.
Every place I go, I think of you.
In my sleep at night, I dream of you.
Pray for peace to hold. Not all outright war.
So kiss me and smile for me. Tell me that you’ll wait for me.
Hold me like you’ll never let me go.
‘Cause I’m flying in a jet plane. I don’t know when I’ll be back again.
Oh Anne, I hate to go.
The die is cast. Now the war’s begun.
We fly by night till the bombings done.
Then we fly back to England once again.
A month in Malta, for our crews,
Then we are told the welcome news, of leave for every other man.
So kiss me and smile for me.
Tell me that you’ll wait for me.
Hold me like you’ll never let me go.
‘Cause I’m working in a jet plane. Navigating back to you again.
Landing gently in your arms. Landing gently in your arms.
That’s my poem. A better singer than me can sing it to you [laughs]. Well we got back to England, after our stay in Malta, which was quite pleasant, it’s just that we weren’t seeing our girlfriends and wives, you know, but when we got back, we found that the Canberra squadron, 15 Squadron was being disbanded and this would take place on the 17th of April 1957. This would mean that the Canberras would all go back to the maintenance units and be handed out to other squadrons that were being formed. We’d be, we’d all go our different ways, but the squadron would reform with the Handley Page Victor in 1989, so it wasn’t going to be disbanded for very long, and it could become a Victor squadron, but I’d got to decide what to do. I went home for my first leave in February, and I discussed seriously with my father whether to resign my commission immediately and come out of the Air Force, but he said, ‘Don’t be so precipitous, it’s been a big shock and you are a Christian, but let’s look at the options’. So we went through the options. I didn’t want to fly in the V bombers, ‘cause I didn’t, I didn’t want to drop a hydrogen bomb or atom bomb on anybody and we eventually decided that the best use I could make of my time, would be a navigation instructor, so I went back to the squadron and discussed it with our friends, and the CO got me some forms to apply and I was taken in number 46 staff nav course, which was a course designed for two things. The first was to broaden your experience of the way that navigation was conducted in each of the commands flying, you know, Fighter, Bomber, Coastal and Transport Command. I think that’s all. If I’ve forgotten one, put it in, and the second purpose is to learn how to write staff papers and appreciations, which was very, very useful in my future life, as an insurance consultant. I enjoyed the course, I came out second, and then a guy called Polly Parrot, who was in the Air Ministry on his ground tour, he rang me up one day. He did junior officer postings. He said, ‘Brian’, he said, ‘I’ve got some good news for you. You’ve got a posting to 231 OCU at Bassingbourne. How does it feel?’ I said, ‘That’s great’. I said, ‘When are you getting out of your ground job?’ He said, ‘Oh next year. I’m coming out and I’m hoping to get on the V force’. I said, ‘I’ve got a girlfriend in Sheffield that I think I want to marry’. But I went off to OCU and I got some very good helping from the chief instructor, who took me under his wing and got me working properly. He gave me confidence, and then the Indian Air Force started coming through Bassingbourne, as part of a deal for them to buy our Canberras, we’d train their pilots, navigators, and I got friendly with a Flight Lieutenant Nath. I couldn’t pronounce his Christian name, so he said, ‘Oh call me Juggy’. So Juggy Nath he was and we got on like a house on fire. He came up one November the 5th to our home at Sheffield and met my parents, met my girlfriend, only she was close to being my fiancé then and my young brother who was setting off fireworks, and he really enjoyed himself, and then years later, I got a telephone call out of the blue and we were in here, about 1985, and he was flying with Indian Airways as a captain, and he’d just got married for the first time. He was in his fifties then, at fifty five then, a wing commander in the Indian Air Force he was, and he phoned on spec, and tried some Payne’s in the address book and got hold of me, so we were delighted, and he brought his wife up and came. The first time he was up, he talked to my parents and enjoyed that, so he talked in the evening to my parents. A thoroughly wonderful occasion. Doing research for this about eighteen months ago, discovered that a Wing Commander Nath, N A T H, was the most decorated Indian Air Force pilot in the history of the Indian Air Force, and my friend Juggy, who was a bit of a playboy. He didn’t like flying desks, he loved flying. He loved anything to do with sport. Very keen sportsman and good fun as well. And then the following, I’d been at Bassingbourne six months and just settled in nicely, I made the one major mistake of my career. Polly Parrot rang up and said, ‘I need a station navigation officer at RAF Finningley’, which is very close to Sheffield. ‘Are you interested?’ Of course I was interested. Oh great. So I went up there and the, not that the group captain I didn’t know, but the wing commander was a navigator in charge of the operations room, and he was security cleared to deal with V bomber crews and his deputy, Pete Harle, squadron leader, he was an H bomb specialist and he was cleared to work with these crews, but I’m a flight lieutenant, station navigation officer, the squadron’s navigation officers outranked me. I was only a flight lieutenant, they were squadron leaders. Wing Commander Dawson kept all the interesting stuff about navigation so I began to wonder why I was there, ‘cause I’d got nothing to do. Nothing to do. No security clearance to help with the V bombers or anything in any shape or form. I once tried marking the log, a chap on the squadrons, and the wing commander came and tore me off a strip, the group captain, no, the squadron leader on the squadron, ‘You shouldn’t be marking my men. Give over’. And then they made the post a squadron leader post. Well, two months before, the corporal in charge of the map store had left after doing two years national service, and the only job I could see I could do was the map store CO. So I was flight lieutenant in charge of the map store for the last four months of my service and then came out in civilian life, where I had a totally different career and married Anne. And that’s the story of my life in the Air fFrce. I rest my case.
MH: You’ve had quite an extended career there. Well, extended in what you’ve done but squeezed into a short period of time with the RAF. I’ll go back, take you all the way back if I may to your father, and what his experience was and the way that, did he infer on you any, any, the way that he was trained or was that something you found out afterwards from him? Did he give you any stories regarding his training in the early, early years of the RAF?
JBP: The most infuriating part about it is, that my father had one photograph of three trainees on his course at Old Sarum airfield, but he’d sent home many letters and many photographs to his parents, and they hadn’t kept any of them. We have one letter dated the 1st, the 2nd of January 1919 when he’s trying to impress his mother by what he’s doing, and he calls himself the second in command of the navigation empire. He says, ‘It’s the officer here’, and he says, ‘ and I’m there to do the odd jobs that need doing when he’s making a presentation, but as we’re not doing presentations at the moment, you can see I’ve not much to do, but we discovered the other day that the coke burning stove in the hut causes an upward draft. We had a brilliant idea that we would make hot air balloons and fly them, but they didn’t work so we made a windmill, and the windmill went round on the current so we painted it in RAF colours and had it suspended, so that it would go around all the time. If brass hats came in we would just say we’re checking that the draft, that the stove doesn’t need filling up at all’, and he went on like this, pulling his mother’s leg and, ‘Look at the headed notepaper’. Old Sarum. It’s embossed, not just your printed stuff, yeah. Because my grandmother was a bit of a social climber. Victorian governess type. No, the research I’d done about my father’s training and the training of pilots in the First World War threw up some very startling facts. Fourteen thousand four hundred aircrew were killed in the First World War. Eight thousand of those aircrew were killed in training accidents before they ever got to the front. In other words, our training system killed more of our aviators than the enemy. After the war, when they looked at the records, the German Air Force had twenty five percent of the casualties as the British Air Force up to 1917. It’s shocking. Ok, it was a new world, aviation. The Germans and the French were the major aviators before the First World War. Our generals were, they could only see as far as the cavalry, and they didn’t show any enthusiasm for anything to do with flying. They found out very quickly in the First World War that flying was very important, because the French and the Germans had them, and the English didn’t, so until they got themselves sorted out, which took a year or so, they were under represented and the reconnaissance done by the British was good. It convinced the commanders in the field that they were worth having. Particularly when they had these big pushes like the Somme, and then the pilots had to fly contact patrols, otherwise they had to keep in contact with the front line to be able to see how close the Germans were and whether they could machine gun them out of their positions, but of course, when you’re flying that close to the front line and somebody’s lobbing shells from your side and from their side, the chances of a shell hitting you is not remote so many of the aviators killed. The figures don’t match up to the Army, but then the number of flyers engaged compared with the number of the Army soldiers engaged was quite different as well, but the losses were very high. And the training of aircrew was a problem, because when the war started, we only had, I think it was a hundred and eighty qualified pilots in the whole of Britain, and training was hit and miss. It started off with, in about 1909 that if you wanted to learn how to be a pilot, you got on to this kind of flimsy box kite thing. There was one seat and that was for the pilot. So, the pilot would sit on the seat with the controls in front of him. No dual controls, just one set of controls. Then the trainee would get in through the barrage of spars and things that are holding the aircraft together, and he would be invited to sit behind the pilot so his knees were touching the pilot’s sides and his hands were touching his shoulders, and then to feel the movements the pilot was making, and then the pilot, the instructor, would get out and say, ‘Now you try. I don’t want you to make any turns. Just go up forwards and down forwards’, and it’s surprising how many people crashed like that. You see, the engines of the aircraft weren’t powerful enough. They just take the aircraft up off the ground, but the flying speed forwards and the stalling speeds when they dropped out of the ground were probably three or four miles an hour different, and they didn’t have a kind of speedo to see how fast they were flying. They had very primitive instruments. Couldn’t fly in a wind over five miles an hour ‘cause they’d go backwards. It slowly improved but we were totally reliant on the French. We had to buy, for the bulk of the war, we bought French engines, French aircraft until we started developing our own in 1915 but the war had been going on a year then and it was a very slow progress, and there were great periods when the Germans had the upper, they had the control over the air over the front lines and that was horrible for the soldiers, and they, they found a way of firing through the propeller. That was the big thing. So you aimed the aircraft and fire through the propeller and shoot down the enemy aircraft. And the Germans had an aircraft which wasn’t very successful but it was a good gun platform, and it was called an Eindecker, and these Eindeckers used to go up and our pilots didn’t think they could shoot at anybody, you know, nobody couldn’t shoot anybody down, certainly not through the propeller, and then the Eindecker got into the position where it could shoot the British aircraft down and shot them down in droves. We eventually found an aircraft that could fight the Eindecker. It had three guns facing forwards, called a Pusher biplane, and it had three, three guns facing forwards but the observer had to take great risks with his own life to fire one of the guns, ‘cause he had to balance on the edge of the cockpit to stand up to this gun to fire at the back of the aircraft and there were no training manuals. People were posted to be instructors like the Army does, you know. ‘Right boy, you’re not volunteering but you’ll be an instructor now. You’re now posted as an instructor to ‘blah blah blah’. Go and instruct’. You don’t tell them how. So that you’d think you had just come out of flying training. Hopefully, he had a good pilot to instruct him but many of them weren’t. A lot of the pilots came out of the front line with shattered nerves. Do I fly at all? So when they were made into instructors, unfortunately they used to send people off far too early in their training, so many of them got killed because they shouldn’t have been flying alone, but one of the, the reason was that the instructor was trying to avoid flying, and then you got pilots sent back from the front who were a threat to the squadron if they were going out on a reconnaissance, and they got sent back and made into instructors. In fact, they’d make anyone into instructors if they could, and the instructors privately called their pupils Huns, because they were as liable to kill them as much as the Germans. And then, in 1917, a chap who’d been in the, been flying as a pilot and then as a squadron commander, he went to Trenchard and said, ‘I think we can organise flying training so it’s more useful’. The kind of flying training that we were giving to people was basic training, but it had nothing to do with flying in war. So, we didn’t teach people manoeuvres that are dangerous. Many of the instructors wouldn’t know how to do it anyway. The ones who were straight to instructing from training school and this chap had the novel idea of training people to fly and fight at the same time, so all the training was to do that, if there were any risky manoeuvres, then people had to go through these over again and again with the instructor until he had mastered it, because shying away from not mastering something wasn’t on. And fortunately, he’d been in the post a year at Gosport when my father joined the Air Force, and by that time it was organised along the lines that he pioneered. Great man. So my father got proper training. The aircraft were equipped with dual controls. They had a tube that they could blow the whistle by the other pilot’s ear and you could talk through the tube, and that was called a Gosport Tube, and altogether more time was given to training people before they were sent out, because in periods when the Germans had the control of the skies, they were shooting down our aircraft and we were losing pilots like mad, so the front line commanders were asking for more pilots and the training programme couldn’t produce them, and it wasn’t until 1917 that Trenchard wrote a letter, which Haig signed, sent to the cabinet, war cabinet and they increased the aircraft squadrons from forty to a hundred, and specialist units were created. But a lot of the pilots, a lot of the instructors, had to be trained to instruct in this new way. So you started by training, nobody had been training instructors to instruct until that point, and everything happened in the final year, and I was glad that my father went into the Air Force when he did, ‘cause if he hadn’t have done I might not be here. That’s a long answer to a short question.
MH: What did your father do when he came out of the RAF?
JBP: Well the first thing he did was to be diagnosed with tuberculosis in his left leg, and he required six months treatment for that, and fortunately they were able to cure it but he always had a weakness in his left leg. Then he had another eighteen months looking for a job because, when he went, went in the Air Force, he’d been apprenticed to be an engineer, engineering draughtsman but he’d not finished his course, so he applied for something like that, but he’d not finished and other people had and they got the job. But eventually, in 1921, he got a job and he worked for the same firm from the age of twenty one to the age of seventy four. Same firm. It changed ownership three times. Each time the business was failing and somebody bought it out, but it was a good record. He saw good times and bad times. One of the good times was, he went with a friend, Jack Webster, on holiday at Towyn in Wales, and Jack had married a girl called Mary Haye, who was the elder sister of Florence Haye who was a zoology and botany graduate from the Liverpool University, and she was the only female taking that degree, all the rest were fellas. So she was kind of in advance of her time but she’d not had a boyfriend even though she was twenty six by now, because if you got married between the wars, you had to give up teaching and she liked teaching so she gave up men, until she met my father and they got married in 1929, but there were one or two moments. Mother’s family was a working class family. Did all the shopping, Gibbet Street in Halifax, and Florence’s dad who was a thimble maker by trade, but it was mechanised in the war years so they weren’t made by hand any more so he was unemployed at the end of the war, and had a very rich great uncle called Uncle Joe Allen and he had a posh house at Maidenhead, and he had the franchise for importing into Africa the products of a certain Mr Ford for the whole of Africa, and he gave my grandfather a job in the Gold Coast, Lagos, importing Ford vehicles, and my granddad told us of an occasion when the local chieftain decided he wanted a Ford car so he went along and explained it all to him, and couldn’t help noticing that the chief was looking very disappointed and very upset. So he asked him what the matter was and he said, ‘Well you sent me a picture of this car and where’s the lady that goes with it?’[laughs] Anyway, the Haye family didn’t drive cars at all so my mother was out with my father in his Austin 7 and they were having a row as they were driving along. She didn’t, not knowing what she was doing, she switched off the ignition. The only time he hit her.
[Ringtone tune. Reminder for medication]
JBP: My pills. I hope they appreciate the nice music [pause]. There was a pause while he took his pills.
MH: Yeah. Yeah.
JBP: Who has not put his pills out this morning?
MH: What we’ll do is, we’ll temporary pause the interview at this time so Mr Payne can have his pills because they’re more important to be honest. So we’ll pause this for a second.
[machine paused]
MH: Welcome back, this is a continuation of the interview with Mr Payne. The time now is 13:04. Mr Payne had some medication to take so we decided to pause at that time to give him due time to do that and he’s happy to continue, which I’m very grateful to him for. We were just finding out about your father and what he had done after his days with the newly combined Royal Naval Air Service and Royal Flying Corps, a bit about his training that he’d done and then subsequent to that that he’d stayed with the same company for a phenomenal amount of time. What was it that he was doing for that company?
JBP: He was an engineering draughtsman, which was what he was being trained for, been training, but he was joining a company called Hall and Sons in Rotherham who were struggling with the changing conditions in industry and commerce, because it was about that time that the big recession started in about 1925 or so and they were having to multitask, so my father found himself the only draughtsman but also expected to go out and make calls on people as a salesman, but in doing that he found he’d got a capacity for being a salesman and by the time the company, Hall’s, was sold to British Automatic Refrigerators Limited, my father was a full time salesman in Bradford for them, and as the recession deepened, so he had to give up his car, and he was walking around selling freezer units to butchers because they had to install freezer equipment in their shops in order to keep the meat fresh. About 1932, 1929 they got married, in 1930, my mother gave birth to a still born child at six months, simply because of an infection she caught, and in 1932 I came along and brightened their lives and my father sent a card to my mother a month before I was born, ‘Whoops mum, soon be hitting the high spots with you. John Payne’, with a little ditty on the back of it as well. He’d got a nice quiet sense of humour. My mother was one of six girls and they all liked Raymond, as he was called, and he got on well with his mother-in-law as well. In fact, he got on with most people, he was very even tempered. He’d got a nice sense of humour and was very reliable. Everybody found him very reliable which was one of the reasons for his success as a salesman because as I found it certain, if you were honest with people, it’s very highly valued and so it should be.
MH: So you come along in 1932.
JBP: Yeah. My sister Anne came along in 1935. my sister Margaret in ’38, but my brother Robert decided to wait out the festivities of the war and came along when peace was declared. The only trouble was that my mother, who had gone back to teaching during the war as her war work on the Monday, she had an interview with the headmaster who said, ‘I’m delighted to tell you, Mrs Payne, that the teacher who went to the war from here, the biology teacher, is not coming back to Sheffield, so you can work full time at the job you love’. She was very pleased, went out and rang my father to tell him the news, went to the doctor’s on Friday and guess what. ‘We’ve done some tests Mrs Payne, and you’re having a baby in August’. So she, you know, she’d done her bit and my father called the baby ARP, because he didn’t taken any air raid precautions. So he was called Anthony Robert Payne [laughs]. Now Robert was a common name in the family, Robert. But like my father, another thing about my father, he couldn’t go into military service because of his deafness and his TB hip so he joined the air raid wardens, known as the ARP, and he went to the first meeting with the group. What do we call you? Now my dad hated Raymond, because it was a family name, and he hated Henry which was his other name, so he says, ‘Call me George’, so ever after, whenever it suited dad, ‘Hello George,’ we knew he was an air raid warden in the war. He also, not a religious man but a very, very sincere Christian. In the time when the evacuation of Dunkirk was taking place, he was in hospital having been diagnosed with having gallstones, and in those days, it meant an operation and the aftercare was botched and he got an abscess on his wound, and the surgeon came in and told mum and dad that if it burst inwards, that was it. End of story. If it burst outwards, there was a good chance of recovery, so they had three weeks with this hanging over their head, and dad, being a regular church goer anyway, he and mum were praying about it, and so was the extended family on both sides, and one day dad was by himself in the, in his cubicle in the ward and he had a sense of a presence with him, and he got the sense of words kind of appearing in his mind, ‘You’re going to be alright. Don’t worry’. And he didn’t, but the impact it had on him afterwards, he started regular bible study, he became a preacher in the Plymouth Brethren, and he was a very popular preacher. He did an awful lot of appointments by request. Took a number of weddings in their tradition and funerals. He preferred the weddings. They had adult baptisms, you had to be converted and then baptised, so as a sixteen year old, I had to get into this water with this old man. The only consolation was the girls had to do that and they looked lovely with their dresses clinging to them [laughs]. But he used to bring people home from the morning service, and he’d bring people home who were on their own and he called the lame ducks. And my mother had a spell in a psychiatric hospital in her fifties and she went to Middlewood, and she met a couple of ladies there and there were nothing wrong with them. They’d just been put in a mental hospital and left and become institutionalised. So my mum, when she got discharged from hospital, she said to the psychiatrist, would it be possible to take these two ladies out occasionally. Just they seem very subdued. So he said yeah, and later, about four months later, he said, ‘Mrs Payne you’ve made a tremendous difference to these ladies. They’re coming alive’, and mother always said, they kept coming to her house till they died, but she said isn’t it awful that people can be locked away in our civilised society and, of course, after that the legislation they brought in to close mental hospitals, because so many people were put in there, you know, put in there for having a baby out of wedlock, or because their father was wealthy and didn’t want them around. Shocking it was. So he really lived out his life of faith and I wouldn’t say there were any of us who are as good as he was. I’d like to be but I wouldn’t, I’m not.
MH: Did he, or did he carry on any sort of passion towards flying? Did he fly much after?
JBP: On the -
MH: Did he have the opportunity to?
JBP: On his eightieth birthday I took him down to Old Sarum airfield where the Shuttleworth Collection is based. Have you heard of them? Of course you have, yeah. And they were flying the Avro 504K which was the training aircraft he used, and I took him down there because that was the day when the flying displays were being done by the Avro, and he really liked that. And then we saw an oil painting in the shop, and I bought it, and he had it in his bedroom till he died and then it went to my grandson, who has got it over his bed now. So the link’s being continued although Nicholas has just got a degree in geology, so I can’t see him going to fly.
MH: But your passion came alive when you went into your father’s bureau.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: It touched you then.
JBP: That’s right.
MH: The bug, as such. As some people call it.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: From a photograph.
JBP: We all get touched by bugs, don’t we?
MH: We do.
JBP: Passion.
MH: Passions.
JBP: Passion. Yes.
MH: But your passion, then, continued through.
JBP: Yes. I didn’t, my long term aim was to fly. I tell you what were a hell of a culture shock and that was going on my honeymoon. Not, not the interesting bit, but the first time that Anne had flown, and we were taking off at three in the morning, in the pitch dark, and we came across the Mediterranean coast on our way to Rome. at first light, and that was magic. The only thing that wasn’t magic was buying some bloody tickets when I’d been paid for flying [unclear]. I did feel that. [laughs]
MH: So you joined the RAF in ‘51.
JBP: Yeah. National serviceman. The number of 2530371, and I was an aircrew Cadet.
MH: Just to make sure that I’ve written that, 2530371.
JBP: Yes.
MH: And that service number made -
JBP: National service number.
MH: National service.
JBP: The regulars were 414, first three letters.
MH: Ok. Did that then go, that also then picked up your national service number or did it become completely different? Your regular service number.
JBP: No. I kept the national service number.
MH: But it had a prefix then of 414.
JBP: No 414 was the one that was issued at Padgate.
MH: Ok.
JBP: Other access camps might have had different numbers, I don’t know, I only know Padgate. I was a national service man until the 14th of November 1951 when I applied for a permanent commission, a four year commission with four years on the reserve, which I extended when the direct commission system came in which, I think, they extended to a twelve year commission with an option of coming out after eight years. I went on to the direct commission before Suez and I took the four, the eight year option after Suez.
MH: What recollections, or what impressions when you were at RAF Digby learning first, learning first how to fly on Tiger Moths?
JBP: Oh, that was magic. Without a doubt the best flights I ever did, even though I was a Canberra navigator, the most exciting flights were Tiger Moth flights. There was the Chipmunk came in to replace the Tiger Moth. I used to love flying the Chipmunk, but flying in an open cockpit is something, something else. Something completely wonderful. And you can do so much over a small area because you’re flying quite slow relative to jets. You can hover almost. You can keep inside the airfield perimeter and just do your -
MH: Yeah.
JBP: Your stuff. I liked everything about the Air Force till Suez.
MH: Suez was the turning point.
JBP: Yeah [pause]. It was the start of this book I suppose. If I go back I could, I could tenuously link it to get it out of my system. By the time it was happening I wanted to go, and if we’re going to, I didn’t want the war to start. I wanted it to be done diplomatically like I said in the song, but I was quite committed to go into action if necessary. I wasn’t suddenly questioning whether I should go or not. My attitude was, well I’ve been paid flying pay for five years, they’re entitled to my service up front, and once it started, you just wanted to get it finished as soon as possible [laughs]. But I think there is a report on the bombing. I’ve been trying to get to the National Archives, I’ve been trying to get a report on the, there was a survey done of the bombing results on the airfields, and I’ve read fragments of other people’s books on the subject, which makes me believe that this does exist, but I couldn’t find a way of getting to it ‘cause I’m not very good at those websites. I’m sure there was a report done and they took nine major airfields and we didn’t close one of them. In all the bombs, we dropped and we didn’t close one of them. An enormous number of bombs and a lot of them dropped outside the airfield perimeter and that’s the shocking thing.
MH: You can reflect in some ways looking back just over a decade back to when Bomber Command first started out. The bombing missions to Germany and such like.
JBP: Yes.
MH: The accuracy there that was portrayed.
JBP: In 1941 a report came out and it showed that aircraft bombing with direct reckoning and star sights, which were the only two things they had at night, nine out of ten bombs dropped were more than five miles away from their target. Only one bomb out of ten was within five miles of the target and these were five hundred pound bombs. They weren’t a thousand pounders. And the area of devastation was only about a hundred yards. So the safest place to be was the target.
MH: Yeah. It’s strange to think of it like that, but that is, that’s a correct statement.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: Yeah. But it’s interesting, though, that, as you said in part one, that the bombsight that was used by the World War Two Bomber Command bomb aimers was the same then, just over a decade later, in the jet era, in the Canberra.
JBP: Yeah. And the forces against, the forces acting on the bomb and on the aircraft had greater, one of the examples is astral, astral navigation, using the stars. Now it all started with ships at ground level or at sea level, and bringing down the star sight on to the horizon to get the elevation of the star, to then be able to draw a great circle line, which on a short distance is a straight line to get a fix but you don’t have an actual horizon in an aircraft so you’ve got to put something in, so they found with low speeds, you could put a bubble in, and the bubble is acted on by the forces of gravity and where as a sea, seafarers could take two or three sights and that would be enough, we used the bubble sextant we had to take sixty sights, all automatic and they averaged out sixty sights of this star and then you got on the tables, and plotted this on your chart and you looked for three stars so that they crossed at a hundred and twenty degrees, a hundred and twenty degrees, a hundred and twenty degrees and your probable position was inside this ‘cocked hat’ as they called it. I was taught that in basic air navigation training. I used it once when I was at Lichfield on a night exercise, and I used it once on the staff navigator’s course when we were looking at Coastal Command and Transport Command and the way they navigated. Never used it otherwise. And I went to, from St Mawgan to Gibraltar on a staff nav course and I was navigating by lines of pressure, with the aircraft being steered by the gyro not a compass. I tried to understand that because I’ve got the notes down there and I tried to understand it now, and at eighty three, I just can’t understand it [laughs], at twenty four I was navigating by it and got there. Yes. The equipment lagged way behind the aircraft. That was the problem we had, we always had. Nowadays, the way they take modern star sights I’ve not been trained so I don’t know them, but the early ‘50s was, 1952 was the biggest size of the Air Force in war or in peace. That was the most resources there but a lot of those the jet engines made everything redundant, and we had a lot of other aircraft.
MH: It’s my understanding that, yeah, because I think Bomber Command still had things like the, well the Americans called the Superfortress, but we called it the Washington.
JBP: Yeah. That’s right.
MH: Which was still around -
JBP: Well 15 Squadron had Washingtons before it had Canberras.
MH: So, I mean, if you think of the size of the Superfortress, you know, the Washington compared with the Canberra, quite a fundamental change.
JBP: It is.
MH: In aircraft type, etcetera.
JBP: And when the yfirst displayed at Farnborough by Beamont, on behalf of English Electric, the way that he flew it was like a fighter, and some old fuddy duddies in the air ministry said, ‘You don’t fly a bomber like that. It’s a light bomber not a heavy bomber’, and of course, the heavy bombers did spectacularly well. The Vulcan, the Valiant and the Victor. They really were agile aircraft, but when you got to those speeds, the G forces that you can vector a G force into the horizontal and vertical. The G forces were far greater on equipment in the aircraft, and the T2 bombsight we used in the Canberra was a modification of the Mark 14, which as you rightly said was designed and built in 1940, after the Bomber Command said you don’t want to lose any more crews, but if you wanted an accurate bombsight, you had to fly straight and level for so long and you can get shot down while you’re doing it. You go for a bit of evasion and then you accept an average error of four hundred yards, so what blanket bombing was, was seeking to knock out the factories, seeking to kill the workers who worked in those factories, because they were in the zone. Just pass the zone with enough bombers to allow for breakages on the way there and a certain number of bombs, the probability is, you covered every point of the carpet, but you kill civilians and that was a deliberate policy before Bomber Harris took charge of Bomber Command. He just carried it out. He gets blamed for it but it was Churchill that was the prime instigator.
MH: I’ll step you back in time if I may.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: Back to your favourite aircraft being the Canberra. Could you take me through, or take the people that are going to listen to this later on, through right the way from mission start to mission end? What would have been your role and what you did, what you wore, because I remember you saying when you got up to a very high level of forty eight thousand feet, you found yourself very cold.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: And reflecting upon that bombers during the World War Two, of course, had problems with freezing guns and that sort of thing, that they couldn’t then operate to defend themselves, so it’s the similar sort of scenario there, with the freezing element.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: But then the crews in World War Two, of course, wore the sheepskin clothing, etcetera, that was designed to keep them warm and the leather helmet, etcetera. If you could take us through what your, how you, your day would have gone from mission start to mission end.
JBP: Right. Yes, I can do that. I’ll think of a particular mission. I was flying an exercise, a Bomber Command exercise, testing out capabilities of ships at sea and aircraft finding them. I’m stationed at Honington, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, a member of 15 Squadron. My pilot is Flight Lieutenant John Garstin. The nav plotter is Flying Officer Jock Logan and the navigator observer is myself [pause]. We have a meal and then we’re taken by RAF vehicle lorry or bus or Land Rover to the briefing room, collecting on our way, the parachutes which are the type which you sit on [pause]. We go to the, entering the briefing room we go to get our equipment out of the store, which is where we keep it. The first thing that I put on is some thermal underpants, stretching down to just below my knee and a thermal top. The next item of clothing I put on, if its winter, it’s a woollen cover for the body and the arms. If it’s summer, probably nothing particularly special. A thick pair of socks, because it’s amazing how cold you get in your feet and extremities, so you need a thick pair of socks, woolly socks and flying boots which are designed so that if you get shot down over enemy territory you can cut off the, the bit of a boot that looks like a flying boot and you’re left with a pair of reasonably serviceable shoes, which look a bit like shoes for escape and evasion. Having got yourself dressed in that gear, you then put on your flying overall. In my day they weren’t the colours they are today, it was a kind of grey blue with the squadron badge on the pocket and the rank on the shoulders, on little bits of material that can be slid on and off and used elsewhere. The next item of clothing is a pressure vest. Now a pressure vest, the function of the pressure vest is if the, what do they call it, we were pressurised down to a certain level for operational work. If we were flying at forty thousand feet, then the cabin pressure is pressurised to make the inside of the cabin twenty five thousand feet, so flying at twenty five thousand feet, if you’ve got an explosive decompression at that artificial height, you quickly go to forty thousand and this is where the pressure vest kicks in. The moment there’s any change of pressure, the pressure vest inflates and the inflation is to guard against damage being done to your breathing. It’s connected up with the oxygen system which is fed to you under pressure anyway, and there’s a clip on here, the oxygen mask attaches it to there, attaches to your helmet. Your helmet, strangely enough is not made of thick material, it’s made of a cotton. It’s washable cotton with the earpieces in and the, the nose I say, the nose of the thing fitting over you like that. You couldn’t operate at high levels without oxygen. You’re flying at forty thousand feet, there’s no way you can do without your oxygen. You’ve got to be taking your oxygen in otherwise you will start hallucinating, and as an observer, I had a little bottle of oxygen for when I went forward to the nose, or came back from the nose, I wasn’t on the mains supply system I had my own bottle, so I had to make sure I got that. Over the pressure vest I’d got what is popularly known as the Mae West, which is the bright yellow jacket with inflatable front like the famous actress. When you’re flying, you fly encased in your pressure vest, and on top of the pressure vest, no, your flying suit is underneath your pressure vest. That’s right. Switch on to the oxygen. I’ve got to look at the bomb bay and check that the bombs that we are going to drop are the ones that have been specified at the briefing, and I check that any settings that have to be made before take-off are made. I can set the bomb pattern inside the aircraft. It’s next to where I sit. It’s just here. And if you’re down in the nose, and you’ve got to suddenly set a pattern to come back, crawl back, set it, crawl forward. In other words, the aircraft was very cluttered as you saw. Because of the extra navigator and the extra bank seat on the original plans, all the space that would be available to a single nav isn’t available, because that’s put aside for the observer, and because of the observer the pilot seat instead of being centred under that plastic dome is to one side, so tall pilots kind of get a bit bent. They’re flying this way and this is crushing their head over like that, and they often have a bone dome on up on their helmet, so that the result is flying like that and not being able to see very well that way, and you can’t see behind anyway. No mirrors. There should have been a radar called yellow putter, but yellow putter proved to be unworkable in anything like operational conditions. It just didn’t work, so they scrapped it. We never had it on my squadron. We weren’t experimental, we were just routine main force. Dogsbodies. Having got all our equipment and our helmets, making sure that we have the right oxygen mask because we fly T2 bombers, we fly T4 dual control training aircraft and they provide one T4 training aircraft per squadron, so that we always have something to do CO’s checks and things like that in. But when you fly in the T4, you don’t have a pressure vest ‘cause the aircraft doesn’t go to that height. It only goes to twenty five thousand. You don’t do long trips so there’s only room for one navigator, because the two pilots have to have got to have bank seats. You’re mainly flying local simulations so you don’t have wing tip tanks, so you can do high speed runs in one of those, which is rather fun. Go to maximum four hundred and fifty knots, liked doing those, and occasionally we’d do full load take off, when we’d put six one thousand pound bombs on board and the pilot could feel the change in the trim, both taking off and landing. That was important that we did those regularly, ‘cause you’d be flying with twenty five pound practice bombs, they don’t make much difference to the handling of the aircraft, but six thousand pounds of bombs makes a big difference. You don’t do fancy aerobatics with six thousand pounds bombs on either. We then go into briefing. The briefing would be in terms of first of all, telling us what our target is and how we are to approach the target, what formation we are going to fly, the turning points and the times we’ve got to be at the various turning points. The emergency alternatives to our own airfield if we come back and we’re clamped up with fog or things like that. They would tell us where the enemy, for the purpose of the exercise, where the enemy are. That’s reported. Where they were steaming, which part of the North Sea we should be looking for and generally giving us data about the meteorological conditions, both on the way to the target and at the target. We always treat winds given to us by Met offices as a bit sceptical because they were seldom rarely right, and one of the jobs of the plotter is the navigator observer, he works the radar and gets the fixes every four minutes and then the plotter takes those fixes off my chart, and puts it on his chart and uses it to calculate variations in wind, which would call for a variation in course, and then you [unclear] travel at that time, at the back point, the pin point. You’ve got to hit it at the right time and we prided ourselves of getting there within six seconds, whereas the standard that was set which was easy with Gee. Now, when it came to dropping bombs, there were two briefings. The first briefing is if we were dropping twenty five pound practice bombs, one at a time, on the target. We could drop eight of those in two hours. The reason being that there is more than one aircraft using the bombing range at the same time. People on the ground have receivers so they can hear what the pilot says, so if you’re on your bombing run, your pilot switched on to transmit at the end of the bombing run, and you can hear the nav observer saying, ‘Steady. Steady. Steady Right. Right. Steady. Steady. Steady. Steady. Bombs gone’. And the pilot would echo, ‘Bombs gone’. And the people on the ground would then know, in so many seconds, a puff of smoke would show and we’d know where the bomb landed, and it was up to the people in the bomb proof shelters to get these bearings, pass them to a central control point by telephone. They would plot the three positions and get the fix of where the bomb actually hit and its relation to the target, so it could be 2 o’clock, a hundred yards. Mine laying was five hundred yards. That was visual bombing. GH bombing. I told you about Gee to get fixes, say where the aircraft position is, well GH uses the same equipment and the oscilloscope in the aircraft, but in this case, the master station, not the one that transmits the original signal, it’s the aircraft that puts the signal and it gets two replies and one gives you a course to steer to go over the target, pre-computers on the ground and the other gives you four points that you would check off one, two, three, four and when you tick off number four, you drop your bomb, so flying along in an arc, like that, and these lines have changed at right angles to that line, so you can navigate saying, ‘Right. Steady. Steady. Steady’, like you can with a visual bombing, but radar bombing at forty thousand feet is a lot more accurate, because with radar, you don’t have to see the target with your eyes. Visual bombing you’ve got to see the target with your eyes and often, if you are that high, the target is over the hill so you can’t see it. There are practical limitations with the visual bombsights.
MH: You mentioned Gee.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: Was it the same sort of Gee system that the navigators would have had to rely on during Bomber Command in World War Two?
JBP: Definitely.
MH: The same, the same system, it hadn’t changed or had it been -
JBP: No, Gee had had its life, because the nice thing about Gee was that you kept the security of the aircraft, your own aircraft. An aircraft that transmits signals can be homed on to. The Germans could create a radar which could home on to the transmitters from, say, with aircraft with H2S, H2S bombing system was a radar bombing system where the sea was black, the land was light green and built up areas are bottle green. Now that was transmitting a signal ever millisecond or so and an enemy fighter could home in on that signal and blast it. And missiles, of course, are even more effective at homing into signals like that. So what was nice about Gee was that it was a passive system. The aircraft didn’t transmit anything. It just took a signal from a master station and then when they came in, two signals from the slave station and with the oscilloscope it could be a calculated reading, and you go to the chart, plot those two readings and that gives the position of the aircraft. Now you could, we practiced a thing called GH homings, Gee homings [unclear], and that was used extensively in Bomber Command when we were using the Gee systems in the mid-40s, because you could pre-determine from your chart what signals you needed to see to be in a certain position at a certain time.
MH: Right.
JBP: So you’d put these points that you wanted to put down and then you’d go back on the arc of the signals to where you wanted to start tracking on to that. So say you were, went to Berlin, massive big target so it doesn’t really matter where you hit, but if you got a line going through the target, another line telling you when you got to the target, like a homing back to base, you can actually fly a course using Gee, a bit more complicated than GH but you could do that from 1942 onwards, ‘cause GH came in in 1944 and there was no doubt that, by the time I joined the Air Force, visual bombing was in decline, except for the Canberra, because they couldn’t miniaturise the H2S radar enough to fit into the Canberras size of aircraft, and what advantage we had and this, for many years, people don’t realise this the Canberra was a wonderful high altitude aircraft. You’re talking about it going, it had world records for fifty seven thousand feet at one stage, but an aircraft that could fly at that height and manoeuvre is very rare and the fighters with swept back wings couldn’t do that. The MIG15s found, always found Canberras a headache because when you tried to formate on it, you couldn’t get near it and if you tried to outmanoeuvre it, the Canberra was far better because of the big wing section between the engines but I felt very happy flying in Canberras. It was a good aircraft, just as the Mosquito had been before it because it was a replacement for the Mosquito.
MH: And did as many roles.
JBP: Yeah. And it was the only aircraft that served fifty six years operationally in the RAF. No other aircraft has gone beyond fifty years. I’d like to say it was because of myself you know [laughs]
MH: What would you say was your happiest time or your happiest moment or your happiest reflection in the RAF?
JBP: It sounds silly. We were only at Cottesmore for nine months, but there was a couple from Sheffield who joined the squadron two months after I did, and the husband was called Alf. Alf Bentley and his wife was Joan Bentley and they were quite a bit younger than me. In fact, they were the youngest married couple on the squadron. I think he was just, Alf was just on his twenty, just over twenty when he came to the squadron, and they had a son in ‘54 and twins in 1956. No. They were both born the same. Yes, Steve was born in January and the twins came in Christmas of the following year. They had three in ten months and I’m godfather to the eldest, and at the time that Steven was born, they had a sixteen foot caravan on the caravan site, and we had the main gate for RAF Cottesmore and next to that was the wooden huts for junior officers, ‘cause they didn’t have a properly built mess and we were all close together and the station similar, so there’s three groups. So the pattern we got into was that myself and Harry Tomkinson and Bob Haines, Bob flew as a navigation plotter in Pete Dyson and Alf Bentley’s crew, and we’d go up in the evenings to their caravan, and sometimes we go to the station cinema, and sometimes just play card games and board games, and of all my moments in the Air Force, the best moments were eating soft biscuits that Joan were trying to get rid of, and playing, playing monopoly and laughing like anything with Steven sleeping away. The day I came out of the cinema, I got a post here playing cricket at Usworth, and knocked a tooth out -
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Brian Payne
Creator
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Mark Hunt
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-08
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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
Identifier
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APayneJB150608
Format
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01:51:04 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Second generation
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Cambridgeshire
Cyprus
Greece
North Africa
Egypt
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
England--Duxford (Cambridgeshire)
Description
An account of the resource
John Payne was born in 1932 and went into the Royal Air Force as part of his National Service, becoming a Navigator on the Canberra aircraft with 15 Squadron. His father went into the combined service in the First World War, and was training to be a pilot when the war ended in 1918. This prompted his desire to fly. John tells of his enjoyment of flying the Tiger Moth aircraft during his training at RAF Digby, and his experiences of his many travels to RAF stations.
He spent some time in Greece, taking part in intruder exercises, and also recalls his time spent near Tobruk and tells of his experiences including visiting a German war memorial. John participated in the Suez Canal crisis, and details his operations in Cyprus and Egypt, and the problems that this created from a navigational point of view. He tells about his meetings with Flight Lieutenant John Garstin and also Wing Commander Nath, the most decorated pilot of the Indian Air Force and the part they played in his life. John flew the T2 Canberra named Willie Howe 725 now on display at Duxford.
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
Temporal Coverage
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1956
1957
15 Squadron
aircrew
faith
Gee
memorial
navigator
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Digby
Tiger Moth
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2468/11768/AWhymarkR171103.mp3
d15b6bbb5d4a4b59a1d617d0068cd018
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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Whymark, Jack
John Percy Whymark
Description
An account of the resource
X items. <br /><br />The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Jack Whymark DSO DFC (1920 -1945, 616289, 53481 Royal Air Force) and contains a<span>n oral history with his son, Robert Whymark. </span><br /><br />He flew operations as an air gunner with 103 Squadron and was killed 04 October 1945 during Operation Dodge. <br /><br />The collection was donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Graham Thurlow and Robert Whymark and catalogued by Lynn Corrigan. <br /><br /><span>Additional information on Jack Whymark is available via the </span><a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/230288/">IBCC Losses Database.</a>
Date
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2017-11-03
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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
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Whymark, JP
Requires
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[his log book, correspondence, documents, objects and photographs].
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
RM: Tactical.
JM: Right. This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Julian Maslin and the interviewee is Mr Robert Whymark. And the interview is taking place at Mr Whymark’s home in Little Haywood in Staffordshire on the 3rd of November 2017. Robert, could you please tell us a little bit about your background and your awareness of your late father’s service.
RW: Right. Thank you, Julian. Very firstly my thanks to the IBCC for this opportunity and all the volunteers that are doing the work. I’m Bob Whymark. Only son of Jack, or John as he was christened. He was also known as Johnny. Flight Lieutenant John Percy, but we don’t talk about that, Whymark DSO DFC RAF. He was an air gunner. Robert is a name slightly out of the family tradition. I’m not sure where that come from. I don’t know of any others but the surname is originally Breton I’m told. We could claim 1066 and all that if we did the connection. There was a Robert de Whymark who was the Sheriff of Southend in 1086. They say everybody’s descended from a royal so we might be Harold the III’s lot. He was a big friend of William the Conqueror. However, more realistically we are immediately down from a load of farm labourers in Norfolk and Essex. I’ve gone back about mid-1700s. My dad’s father went to school with my other gran, my mother’s mother in the1890s in the village. My dad was born 10th of January 1920 in Grays, Essex. He had a sister nine years younger. He seems to have been quite bright because he got a scholarship to Palmer’s Boys College for secondary education. His first job was at the Bata Shoe Factory in Tilbury which was seven miles each way on a push bike. Rain or shine. Character building as we called it. He joined the Royal Artillery Territorials when he was fifteen, 1935 to ’38. And then he went into the Air Force in October of ’38 as a ground crew mechanic armourer. He went to St Athan for a mech’s course. I followed twenty-six years later in 1964. His first posting was 17 Squadron Hurricanes at Debden and Martlesham Heath. He was also on the Allied Air Strike Force in North West France, Le Mans, Channel Islands. The same time as Dunkirk was going on. He had to burn the Hurricanes as they French wouldn’t give us any fuel. He was evacuated in July 1940 and went air gunner for safety reasons as he told my mother. He’d gone to school with my mother. They had boys and girls separate schools with a fence between them of course. His best friend was somebody called Mervyn who married Eve who was my wife- my mother’s best friend. There’s more on that at the end of this tale. So, he went aircrew. Evanton in the Cromarty Firth was an air gunner’s training place and Salisbury Plain. There were two areas there. Twenty-four hours of flying time later he was put on first tour with 149 Squadron at RAF Mildenhall. December ’40 to April ’41. He was a Wellington rear gunner. He did fifteen ops from December to March over Europe. The first five all ended in some sort of tears. One with two crash landings, one shot up by anti-aircraft fire and two diversions for fuel. Then there was an outbreak of peace until operation number fifteen over Cologne where they were coned in searchlights for six minutes. I spoke to a guy who’d been coned at twenty thousand feet for about four and he said he’d never felt so helpless in all his life. After that 148 Squadron was formed in Kibrit which is on the Suez Canal. They also went to Malta. This again was on Wellingtons. April to September ’41, he did two hundred hours for a tour so that ended up as thirty-nine ops. He did twenty-four ops in North Africa. A lot of Benghazi’s and Malta in the thick of their bombing. They were actually bombed by a Junkers 88 on landing and ran off into the quarry which snapped the Wellington in half. People who know how they are built, which is rather like the Forth Bridge know that was quite an achievement. They also discovered when they got back one time that a shell had gone through the fuselage side to side. Didn’t explode of course. Nobody noticed. He then came home by troop ship from Suez, stopping off at Aden, Durban and Trinidad. He then had about two hundred hours of instructing duties at RAF Manby and West Freugh near Stranraer February ‘42 until October ’43. This was while the Battle of Berlin was on so he may have been rested from that or else I wouldn’t have been here. He did have one off operation mid-way November ’42. They used to take training troops and boost up the number of crews for some raids. He was detached to RAF Syerston, 106 Squadron. There was an American pilot who’d come up through Canada and over, Joe [Curtin?] He had a DFC from his first op which was while he was on pilot training. They’d been hit by a phosphorous shell in the cockpit and it blinded him for a while. The flight engineer kept it going and then he landed it. He got another DFC later on before he was killed. This was Guy Gibson’s squadron before the Dam Busters. Their op was to Danzig. Or Gdansk Harbour. It was ten hours fifty-five minutes in November of ’42 as a rear gunner. He went into Leconfield for fuel. So, it was fairly tight because it was only twenty minutes hop over to Syerston, between Newark and Nottingham. Back to West Freugh. Promoted to warrant officer and then at the end of that was commissioned. His second tour was from February ’44 to May ’44. Quite quick. 10 squadron- 101 squadron, sorry. RAF Ludford or Mudford as it was called, Magna. He did twenty ops in less than three months. The last one was his number sixty, the night I was born, 20th of May ‘44. He got a DFC for this tour. The first one was to Leipzig and there were seventy-nine aircraft missing which is about three hundred and fifty-three men, I think. No. Four hundred and fifty-three, I beg your pardon. He then flew in DV290 Lancaster five times. Once to Berlin, seventy-three aircraft were lost then which is four hundred and seventy-five people. The same, same as Afghanistan over fifteen years. Now, while those deaths were obviously terrible it does give a perceptive. Four hundred and seventy-five in less than eight hours. The Nuremberg raid — he should have been killed twice on that — ninety-seven aircraft were lost including the photo Mosquito the next day, plus eleven that crashed in UK on recovery. So, about six hundred and fifty people there. He’d flown in DV290 so many times he wrote it down again for that raid. It crashed at Welford near Newbury. They were all killed. Over the target they were nearly hit by a Halifax on its bombing run. He had to side slip. He also had a do at Aulnoy which was a railway yards in North East France. They were coned for nine minutes at six thousand feet with, “accurate flak” as he put it. A night fighter pilot got seven aircraft in two sessions there. He was cruising the searchlights. When the ack-ack stopped our crews knew that night fighters would come in. He must have been down refuelling when they were in the lights. Nobody knows how they got away with that. Another tactic the night fighters did was to attack the mid-upper gunner first as he couldn’t help the rear gunner. They did say that the rear gunner was the loneliest job in the aircraft, and I’m sure it was, but the mid-upper wasn’t that mid, it was quite well back and he could fire backwards. So, they took him out first if they could. The only time he’s recorded attacking anything was at over Schweinfurt where they were attacked by a Junkers 88. He said he fired three hundred and eighty rounds and hits on the fuselage. He didn’t claim anything and they were damaged by flak. He then did a gunnery leader’s course. And then third tour, which nobody could make you do, was from September ’44 to October ’45. That was on 103 Squadron at RAF Elsham Wolds. The main runway is now the slip road up to the Humber Bridge. It’s almost all Severn Trent Water. A heavy gravel type company operates on the main field and there’s a big industrial estate. One hangar is left. The big one. They can’t get that down. He was a mid-upper gunner on all of these trips. He was gunnery leader so he didn’t have a dedicated crew but was still busy. He started daylight ops then as well. He did a few Manna, Exodus and Dodge operations. That was dropping food to the Dutch, Exodus was re-pat of prisoners of war and Dodge was bringing people back from Italy. He did eighty-one ops but as he was grounded in January by the big boss he didn’t record all of them. Two or three veterans I’ve spoken to have said he was probably up to ninety-five or ninety-seven. His DSO citation says that he flew with weak or disturbed crews. Not a good idea I don’t think. There was a Canadian crew. [ Sachs?] was his name. It doesn’t say whether they were weak or not but he flew with him six times on the trot. Then he changed crews and they both went off to Dessau near Berlin and Sachs was shot down. His DSO for this tour was one of eight hundred and seventy to the RAF. As he was not a captain it was very rare, if not unique for a flight lieutenant to get that medal. Probably the leadership element came from his appointment as gunnery leader. He was then killed October, yeah October the 4th of 1945. This was a Dodge operation. He and the pilot were going mental doing admin, the pilot said. I’ve got a letter from him to his nephew. They picked up nineteen women passengers at Glatton or Honington, Peterborough Airport now. It was a filthy night. Many aircraft turned back to Istres, Marseilles, as did they after an electric storm and engine trouble, they radioed. I’ve spoken to crew members on this operation and they confirmed the weather. I’ve spoken to the navigator of the other aircraft that was with them and they were the last to talk to the aircraft. They were posted missing. Nothing was ever found. Six crew, seventeen ATS and two nurses were lost. A week before, twenty-five passengers, male, had been, went missing. Same area — plus a crew of six of course — same weather conditions. And a month later the same numbers. So, three Lancasters, ninety odd people all vanished within six weeks. No trace of any of them ever found. One of the girls was a Lance Corporal May Mann. She was engaged to a Warrant Officer Basil Henderson who was on General Alexander’s staff. And this is where Mervyn comes back in. He was waiting in Naples, Pomigliano for my dad. Basil was waiting for his fiancé. Basil had been the filter warrant officer for General Alexander’s staff and Mervyn had spent the whole of the North African Campaign trying to get past him. Basil eventually met my mother through correspondence over this accident and they got married in 1948. I was four. I remember Mervyn turning up, took one look at Basil, he spoke just like Lionel Jeffries, and he said, ‘Oh gawd,’ he said, ‘I don’t suppose you’d let me in here either.’ That’s my first memory. That’s the family link if you like. Basil died in 2008, my mother in 2014. My dad of course, when he was twenty-five. He would have been ninety-eight in January. I’ve been through his logbook, I think he should have been killed about thirty-seven times properly. All raids were difficult, in fact even flying was because of crude navigation equipment — not the navigators — technical problems, maintenance was difficult, weather, and they used to say, lastly, the enemy. But he had some scrapes and lucky escapes by changing crews or aircraft or what have you. They say that for every one hundred aircrew, fifty-one were killed on ops, nine were killed in UK training type crashes, three were seriously injured, twelve were POWs, twenty-four survived. Now, if you’re very sad you’ll have totted that up to ninety-nine. I can only assume that the one spare bloke went AWOL or something like that. However, that’s the basics of his story. I — all I know is that I have no memories of him. Luckily, he met me. I know many people who were killed, their fathers were killed before they were born etcetera. So, we had a little bit more than they did.
JM: Thank you. Thank you very much.
RW: Alright. That was —
JM: Was, was your decision to join the air force in any way influenced by your father’s career?
RW: Yes. About fifty percent. I was at grammar school. I did two years in the fifth form to achieve four GCSEs. Mainly because of these guitars we’ve been talking about and I was trying to be Eddie Cochrane really, and I missed any sort of technical training. I was too old for an apprenticeship. I had a couple of years at the telephone manager’s office, telephone engineering, and then went in the Air Force as much for the education as my dad. But certainly, that was that. My stepfather had no problems about talking to me about it. He said — I remember him when I was four saying to me, ‘I want to marry your mother but I’m not going to make you change your name because of your dad.’ Well, I didn’t know anything about him then of course. But I found out later on. Mervyn, my dad’s best friend from school was a big help. He tidied up some puzzlement I had about this last accident because my mother had the idea that my dad had been pulled out of bed because somebody had broken their leg playing football or something. Well, he’d obviously had time to arrange it. In fact, they were all up at Brigg on the Monday. On the weekend before they had a big dance, probably for VJ-Day. She was up in Brigg, stayed probably at the White Hart. They all piled off back on Monday morning. He telephoned her to say that he’d be down on the Saturday. Of course, they took off on Wednesday, crashed on Thursday morning. The pilot was a big friend of his. He’d just been picked to be Bomber Harris’ personal pilot and he’d done some — he’d got a lot of hours but there’s not much about him, so I don’t know what he was up to. He may have been slightly clandestine. He’d written a letter to his family, I think they were in Leeds, and he said, ‘We’re going mad, Jack and I, so, we’re off to Naples’, he said, ‘I’ll see you on Saturday for my great coat.’ Right, he had a very young brother who didn’t have any kids ‘til he was about thirty-seven. So, he had a nephew of the pilot who’s the same age as some of my kids. He’s about fifty now. And all he knew was, his uncle — he thought he flew Lancasters, and he found the 103 site so he wrote to David Fell, the historian then. He passed it all to me and we emailed and I said, ‘Your uncle’s service number was —’ this that and the other. And it was weird talking to this lad. That I knew more about his uncle than he did. Now, we’d been brought up in just south of Middlesbrough because Basil was a Durham lad originally. He was living down in Harold Wood at this — during the war. ,He moved back up north. I said, ‘Where are you?’ to this nephew of Jeff Taylor’s, the pilot. And he said, ‘Oh. We’re in Thirsk.’ Which was about eight miles from where we were living. And he came over one Christmas Day and he had a crew photo and this letter. It’s a bit poignant. And I helped him a lot I’m glad to say. I’ve got a pile of research from all the veterans on 103 and other historical branches. They had my dad down as second pilot in one letter. So, I queried that, and they said, ‘Oh, he may have been in the bomb aimer position,’ because this last — these Dodge ops were part of bringing back the 8th Army who were about to mutiny. It was called Dodge because some cretin at Air Ministry decided they’d dodged D-Day by daring to be overseas for six years all through North Africa. I hope he was —had it explained to, you know. So, that’s what they were doing there.
JM: So, the nurses that were on board. The women that were on board. Do you know what they, what they were doing? What was their role?
RW: Seventeen were in the ATS. Army auxiliary.
JM: Territorials.
RW: Territorial girls. They were sort of secretarial I believe. And drivers maybe. They were all — they’d been right through the North Africa Campaign from Tunisia right through. My stepfather was at Dunkirk. He got off the last ship from a jetty. Didn’t have to do any wading out. Because he was a Durham lad it upset him because the Durham Light Infantry were left as a rear guard. He wouldn’t talk about that. I persuaded him to give me his medals to get mounted and we found he’d been mentioned in despatches three times. Which was — he was in the Supply Corps.
JM: Very unusual.
RW: So, that was one down from a decoration frankly and so on, but he was well thought of. He didn’t get back from Italy until 1946. They lived in Warwick Road opposite Earl’s Court and we moved. That was my first sort of basic memory is up from Chadwell.
JM: Can I —
RW: Yeah.
JM: For the tape. Can I just clarify, my understanding is that on occasions the Lancasters might well be full of Italian POWs going home, and when they got to Bari or to Pomigliano then there would be British servicemen coming back to the UK.
RW: Yes.
JM: And it was this route that these ladies were on when the aeroplane went down. It was the return journey.
RW: No. Going.
JM: They were going.
RW: Going.
JM: Right. So, they were going out to Italy.
RW: Yeah. It has been put in some research that was, not stolen from me, but passed on without my knowledge. I corresponded with a Canadian guy who’d been at Elsham in ’42 and he wanted to know if anybody knew anything of that era. I said, ‘Well, I don’t but you might be able to help me.’ Told him that story briefly and he crossed it over that we were coming back. They were coming back.
JM: That’s fine.
RW: But they were actually going out.
JM: Yes.
RW: Now, the army I’m convinced had lost these girls. They’d been up to Liverpool twice on, for a troopship which would have had to come right out around the outside of Ireland because of the mine fields that were still about. They weren’t reported missing ‘til this troopship docked a fortnight later. The army would not release any information. Basil, on the staff of General Alexander couldn’t find anything out. And his — this girl’s mother, Mrs Mann, she put an advert in the paper and my mother was told about that so they corresponded. I’ve got a lovely letter from Mrs Mann about this and she’s saying ‘We couldn’t find anything out. We’ve written to everybody.’ And my mother was able to put her in the picture immediately. In fact, this Mrs Mann was more — as — concerned about my mother losing her husband of course. And so on. They were living near Harold Wood.
JM: Another aspect of it which is interesting and I don’t understand clearly is we are now in peacetime —
RW: Yes.
JM: It’s the October of 1945. The war has been over some months and yet the Lancasters were still carrying gunners. Why was this? Because you would have thought that had they not had those there would have had room for more passengers.
RW: Yeah. I’m not — I don’t think they’d removed the guns but that wouldn’t have affected the number of passengers. My dad was basically doing admin. I think he was virtually on a jolly as we call it.
JM: Right.
RW: Hence this bomb aimer’s position. Crowd control or what. I’ve seen how they load up the Lanc for that when I was instructing at Cosford. They’ve got a museum and there’s a big clump of them in the middle and then they go front to back for weight and balance. So, fifteen was in the bomb aimers position. It would be a cosy little fit. Sixteen was right at the back by the toilet you know. Which was no fun. There were nineteen passengers. So, there was a number fifteen. So, it’s nineteen to one whether my dad was sitting next to the, this ATS corporal, my stepfather’s fiancé. Which would have been a bit spooky.
JM: Yeah.
RW: Her middle name, funnily enough, was Eleanor. Which my stepfather said he never knew. He had her shoe brushes as a souvenir which was what you used to do. My mother was Eileen and my dad called her Eileena. And he always said that if he knew he was going in he’d shout her name out. Now, she says that on the day, Thursday morning, she sat upright in bed thinking she’d heard his voice. And then they got a phone call that night from a friend of his at Elsham. He said, ‘Look, they’ve gone missing. I’ve asked them not to send this awful telegram,’ which they did. He said, ‘I’ll come and see you. I’m on my way to Ramsgate. I’ll drop in on you at Grays,’ near Tilbury, in Essex. Now, that’s a bit of a trek by train and stuff for him so that was very good. He turned up on Saturday morning with my dad’s father and it all came out. He’d got the full chapter and verse by then.
JM: Yes.
RW: But the army would not tell anybody anything for some time.
JM: My understanding is that the passengers in the Lancaster would sit on simple seats and they had no oxygen which would have —
RW: Yes.
JM: Limited the height at which they could fly at.
RW: Yes.
JM: Is that correct?
RW: Yes. And the heating wasn’t brilliant either. But they were both — there were two of them with passengers from Honington. I beg your pardon. That should be Conington. It was because of Honington and Coningsby they called it Conington. I hope I’ve got that right. Yes. It was an American B17 base so they knew. The, Glatton, was on the other side, there was a grass strip for Spitfires and such. Different accents. Yeah, they were sitting on rudimentary canvas seats or their kit bags. You’d think something like that would have floated up to the top but it didn’t. Three times.
JM: Do you have a theory as to what caused your father’s aircraft to crash?
RW: They did report to the other guys that they were down at two thousand feet. I went off the point there because I spotted that mistake. They were down at two thousand feet. They were in a filthy electric storm. The other two, ten minutes behind. The other aircraft was in pitch black but clear, if you understand that. They could see Corsica so they knew they were that far. They crashed off Cap Corse which is the north point of it. There are sort of pot holes in the sea so there’s — the three other crews saw an explosion or fire on the sea, they knew what they looked like of course, and they plotted a latitude longitude which I’ve plotted myself. There was a misprint in one of the reports which made it east-north-east of Cap Corse which was too far, too close to Italy. It was the other way, west-north-west. And that was that. But as I say, they were both low down. The rest of them — there was about twenty aircraft up that night going — they went over high level because they were on oxygen and whatever. Yeah.
JM: So, it might well have been weather related.
RW: Well it was —
JM: The electrical storm may well have been a factor.
RW: Yeah. They were struck by lightning. Or, they did report engine trouble so they were turning back to Marseilles they said.
JM: Robert. Thank you very much.
RW: Ok.
JM: Is there anything you wish to add? You’ve given us a very, very, thorough account.
RW: Right. Good. Thank you very much. No. If anybody wants to get in touch by all means. I’ll pass my — I’m on record with the IBCC people. And, Julian, I’m sure will be able to —
JM: Yes. Absolutely.
RW: Tidy up the link.
JM: Yes.
RW: But I’ll be delighted to help anybody with any further information or questions.
JM: Thank you very much on behalf of IBCC. Thank you very much Robert.
RW: Thank you.
JM: Thank you.
RW: Cheers, Julian.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Robert Whymark
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Julian Maslin
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-03
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
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Sound
Identifier
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AWhymarkR171103
Conforms To
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Pending review
Format
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00:30:54 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Second generation
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
North Africa
Poland
France--Cape Corse
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Leipzig
Poland--Gdańsk
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945-10-04
Description
An account of the resource
Robert Whymark’s father John ‘Jack’ Whymark took part in three tours of operations. Initially Jack was trained as a mechanic and was posted to 17 Squadron at RAF Debden and RAF Martlesham Heath. He then volunteered for aircrew and trained as a gunner. He was posted to 149 Squadron, 106 Squadron, 103 Squadron and 101 Squadron. He was killed when his plane flew into a storm en route to Italy as part of Operation Dodge.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Emily Bird
101 Squadron
103 Squadron
106 Squadron
149 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
crash
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Service Order
Hurricane
killed in action
Lancaster
missing in action
Operation Dodge (1945)
RAF Debden
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Manby
RAF Martlesham Heath
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Syerston
RAF West Freugh
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1040/11413/AMullinA161208.2.mp3
2eca126a2d2bb6576780d3a6f5725d4d
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
A name given to the resource
Mullin, Ann
A Mullin
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Ann Mullin. Her father, Sergeant George Fredrick Bedwell served as a wireless operator on Lancasters. Additional information on George Fredrick Bedwell is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/101500/">IBCC Losses Database.</a> <br /><br />The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-12-08
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
Mullin, A
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: This is Julian Maslin recording an interview with Mrs Ann Mullin as a second generation interview on the 6th of December 2016 at Ann’s home in Rugeley in Staffordshire. Ann, I wonder if you could start this interview by telling us a little bit about where and when you were born and something about your growing up memories.
AM: I was born in Aldeburgh in Suffolk but I lived at 2 Chapel Road Saxmundham with my nan. I’m stuck now.
JM: You were born in Saxmundham in Suffolk.
AM: I was born in, yeah. I was born in Aldeburgh Hospital but I went back to Saxmundham. 2 Chapel Road with my mum, my granddad and nan and my mother because my dad was already away. Yeah the war was already started and he volunteered. So he went first I think. I’m not sure when he started. It would have been then.
JM: And when you were born please?
AM: 6th of December 1939.
JM: Right. And so your father was in the RAF.
AM: Yes. He volunteered. So I think he, I can’t remember that because I was just born, you know.
JM: Yes.
AM: But I know he was at home when I was about four or five. And I used to walk up the road with him. And they brought me a little chair for a doll and I kept sitting on it. And he took me up to a Common somewhere when we moved to Knodishall not long after that, which is near Saxmundham. And he took me up on the moors and there was a dead rabbit and I climbed up on him and he had to carry me home because I was terrified of it.
JM: So it was a very affectionate relationship.
AM: Oh yeah. I can remember. I can remember him so well. Really, like it was yesterday. It’s weird because I can’t remember other things but I can remember him.
JM: You saw him in his uniform.
AM: Yeah. Oh yes. The photo was with, well I will get that back but the photo was with him in uniform and me with a beret on the top of my head.
JM: Wearing his beret.
AM: Yeah. No. It was mine.
JM: Yours. Oh right.
AM: It was his. He had one of those hats you know that they wear.
JM: Yes. The forage cap.
AM: The pointed ones. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. I remember that. And I’m trying to think what else. We went to meet the bus once and he didn’t turn up so I don’t know if that was when he was missing or a time before because I can’t remember seeing him after that. I just remember a few things you know. And —
JM: So were you, when you were a young woman and perhaps when you married and had a family were you aware of your father’s role in Bomber Command? Or was that something that only came back later on?
AM: No. I knew. My mother talked a lot about it.
JM: She did.
AM: She got married again but that wasn’t very good.
JM: Right.
AM: And I don’t want to talk about that.
JM: No. No.
AM: And she used to tell me he was, he had, you know he volunteered to go because he wanted to go in the RAF. He didn’t want to do anything else. And if they go, call for you you get in any old thing they want you to go in, don’t they? So he went in to the RAF. And my brother was born about, he was born, my dad was killed at New Year. I don’t know if it was the 1st or the 31st. It was in between. That was what it said wasn’t it? And my brother was born on the 23rd of February so it was only a few weeks after. And I remember him being born as well. And I can remember going on the bus to tell Granny Bedwell. That would be my dad’s grandmother. That George was missing and we had to fetch the lady next door. She, Granny Bedwell was in hysterics nearly. So we left there. But yeah I remember all that. And I used to ask, ‘When’s daddy coming home?’ All the time. For years and years. I can remember. And then I said, ‘Oh he’s missing but he’s not gone. He’s alive. He’s in a prisoner of war camp or something,’ you know. Make out I thought he was going to come back but he never did, did he? Yeah.
JM: No. We’ll come to his story in a moment.
AM: Yeah.
JM: But in terms of your life have you actually done any research on what your late father did? How he served?
AM: Well, my brother does a lot doesn’t he? And you know he’s sent me things and that. So I’ve had quite a lot of information.
JM: Yeah.
AM: About all that.
JM: And what can you tell us please about what your father did?
AM: He was in the rear. Rear turret. He was a, I think he was a bomb aimer. No. I don’t think he was a bomb aimer. I think he was a —
JM: Rear gunner.
AM: Rear gunner. Yeah. A rear gunner. Yeah. But he was something else. Navigator I think. That’s what it said in the list that Johnny got. Yeah.
JM: And he was on a Lancaster squadron.
AM: He was on the Lancasters. Yeah.
JM: Do you know which squadron it was?
AM: 9th. 9th Squadron.
JM: 9 Squadron.
AM: Volunteers. Yes.
JM: 9. Yes.
AM: Yeah. I do remember that.
JM: Yes. That was a very important squadron.
AM: Yeah. Johnnie found all that for me. My brother. So —
JM: Yeah. Do you know how many operations your, your late father completed?
AM: No. I don’t know. I mean It was towards the end of the war so, because it ended about six months after that.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
AM: So he must have gone through a lot mustn’t he?
JM: Yes. He must.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Yes. He must.
AM: He went down in Germany. The crash site.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Johnnie knew it. I don’t know where it is.
JM: Yeah.
AM: I’ve never been. I don’t think I could cope with that.
JM: No. No. So you don’t know what happened to the aircraft?
AM: I think it just crashed.
JM: Did it?
AM: They found the crash site. Yeah. Yeah.
JM: So perhaps mechanical failure rather than enemy action.
AM: I don’t know. I’m not sure. I don’t know. I don’t think John knows either.
JM: No. No.
AM: No. I just know it crashed.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Probably shot down.
JM: It’s possible. Of course it is.
AM: Yeah. It could have been, couldn’t it? Yeah.
JM: Of course it is. Yes. And is your late father buried in Germany?
AM: Yes he is. I’ve never been there either. Hanover.
JM: At Hanover. Over Hanover.
AM: Is that where it is? I always get mixed up with Hamburg and Hanover but I think its Hanover.
JM: Hanover. Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah. I did have a photo of that. I don’t know where that’s gone now.
JM: Well, perhaps we can find that and —
AM: Yeah. Johnnie might have got that one.
JM: And scan that in. Yes.
AM: Johnnie might have got one.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
AM: And he’s on the War Memorial in Saxmundham because we went to see that.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. So were you involved in creating that war memorial? Or was it simply a—
AM: No. It was happening in Saxmundham. It took them a long while to get it up I think.
JM: Yeah.
AM: His name was on it. And I saw his name in, in — where is it? Oh God. Where we’ve just been? Lincoln.
JM: Yeah.
AM: I saw his name on there.
JM: Right.
AM: That was a bit sad there.
JM: So you went you went to the Spire for the opening and saw his name.
AM: Yes. Yes. We went on the Spire. It was a bit sad sometimes.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Because they had these students and they were pretending to be in a plane. You know. In the air. You’ve probably, did you go to it?
JM: I did see it.
AM: Yeah.
JM: I was there.
AM: And it was a bit scary. It really made me cry.
JM: Yes. It was very —
AM: To think he went through that, you know.
JM: It was very very well produced I thought.
AM: It was really well done but it was sad wasn’t it?
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
AM: Yeah. I was upset over that.
JM: Yeah.
AM: So were several people I think.
JM: Do you know whether the squadron got in touch with your mother after your father was lost? Was there any contact?
AM: I don’t know. I’ve never, never thought about that. I knew he was missing but it must have been confirmed at some time but she didn’t tell me. Or I’ve forgotten. I don’t know. Because I kept asking for him but in the end I think I stopped. I must have done.
JM: Yeah. And it was a telegram was it? That notified your mother that he was missing.
AM: I’m not sure because the telegram he sent, the one that I’ve told you I’ve got a picture of which my grandson’s got at the moment that was, that just said he was coming home. And it was, it was 1943 but I can’t remember the number. The month now or anything. But I know he was killed. I’ve always hated New Year and I don’t know why. And then I realised when Johnnie found out that it was at that time. And I didn’t know but I might have known really you know.
JM: Yeah. So this is very interesting that even though you were really a very small person at that time. Really a child and —
AM: Yeah.
JM: The loss of your father had an impact on your life.
AM: It lasted all through it. You know. To think, why. Why? Right at the end of the war more or less.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Wasn’t it? Yeah. Yeah, it did. It really upset me. My nan worshipped him as well. She always talked about him.
JM: Yeah. I would have thought that possibly the squadron commander might have written to your mother. That often happened.
AM: It probably did. I haven’t seen anything.
JM: No.
AM: But I’ve got, I had a lot of stuff, you know off Johnnie but he might have something about it.
JM: Yes, well —
AM: I don’t know. I can imagine she would. They usually do, don’t they?
JM: They very often did.
AM: But they all knew he was missing because I went with my granddad to tell Granny Bedwell so, yeah.
JM: You wouldn’t know the name of the pilot who was your father’s pilot?
AM: No. I don’t know that. No. No.
JM: Right. Ok.
AM: His parents lived in Kings Lynn and we used to go there as well.
JM: So you grew up after the war coming to terms with the fact that your father had been lost.
AM: Yes.
JM: In action.
AM: Yes. Yes
JM: Is it possible to say what affect that had on your upbringing?
AM: I just, if my stepfather said anything to me I’d say, ‘My dad’s coming back.’ Things like that, you know. I didn’t want him replaced.
JM: Right.
AM: No.
JM: So I need to be clear about this. Your mother remarried. Was that soon after the war?
AM: Oh no. It was. No. I was about ten or eleven I think.
JM: Right.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
AM: It was quite a while after.
JM: Yeah. So your mother remarried.
AM: She knew already anyway.
JM: Right.
AM: You know, from family.
JM: But this, this new father figure coming into the family was something you had some difficulty in —
AM: A lot of difficulty.
JM: A lot of difficulty.
AM: Yes.
JM: And I know you don’t want to talk about that.
AM: No. I don’t want to talk.
JM: And I’m not going to press you.
AM: No. No.
JM: But it’s important for the record.
AM: Yeah. No.
JM: That we understand that.
AM: No. No. I didn’t, didn’t like him at all.
JM: No.
AM: I tried but —
JM: When, as you were going through your life and you were having your own family etcetera there would be, perhaps a film. The Dambusters or something of that sort.
AM: I watched it.
JM: Or something on the radio.
AM: Yes.
JM: How did you feel about that?
AM: I can tell you whenever I went to the pictures and there was, it was a war film I used to have a panic attack.
JM: Go on.
AM: You remember that don’t you? When I’ve said I’ve watched war films and had a panic attack watching them. Yeah. I forgot about that.
JM: So you’re saying that if you saw a film or perhaps a documentary.
AM: When they were all in — yeah. In an aeroplane.
JM: In an aeroplane.
AM: Then I used to get a panic attack. I couldn’t breathe.
JM: And how long would that go on for?
AM: Not long. It used to go off.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Someone told me to deep breathe.
JM: Right.
AM: And you’d get over it, you know. So —
JM: And you were looking to see if there was any evidence of your father.
AM: Well, if anything on the pictures and you know the documentaries that are on.
JM: Yes. Yes.
AM: On National Geographic.
JM: Yes.
AM: And everything. Aren’t they? Oh yeah. I always still look for him.
JM: Yeah. So you’re still looking for him.
AM: I’ve never seen him have I?
JM: No.
AM: I might do one day. He could be on one of them you know. Yeah.
JM: It’s possible.
AM: Yeah.
JM: What about reading? Did you, did you read of, about the bombing war at all?
AM: I read books all the time about the war. I’ve got a pile of them up that corner.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah. It’s always about that.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
JM: But —
AM: Because I remember, I remember the siren going off and my mother saying, saying to my mother, ‘Wake me up when the siren goes,’ but she never did. But we didn’t get much in Saxmundham anyway. But when we went to Kings Lynn we were always in an air raid shelter.
JM: Yeah.
AM: And there was a man there who showed me this watch. You know an old fashioned one.
JM: Yes.
AM: Yeah. And he used to sit and show me that. So, I remember the air raids a lot.
JM: Yes, because the East Anglian coast was quite a vulnerable place.
AM: Yes, it was.
JM: Wasn’t it?
AM: Well, we weren’t quite on the coast but they used to bomb the railway where we lived in, in Saxmundham. Always bomb holes all over that field. And then we had German prisoners after the war. Well, I think it must have been in the war. It wouldn’t have been after would it? All in a big pit digging. I don’t know what they were doing but we used to talk to them. One had a dog and it was the equivalent of snowy. And my mother went mad because we’d been talking to them. But they were young kids. They were young.
JM: So there was no resentment.
AM: No.
JM: Even though your father had been killed.
AM: We didn’t have resentment to the Germans. No. No. Not really. Didn’t like Hitler. I hate him. I still hate him. Yeah. But these they were young kids. They, some of them spoke English. But I never went to see them again.
JM: No.
AM: Because she told me off that much. You can understand can’t you? Yeah.
JM: And when you’d done the reading and and watching the programmes has that in any way — has that affected your view of what Bomber Command was doing because as you said earlier —
AM: Not really. No.
JM: They weren’t very popular.
AM: No. They weren’t.
JM: But how did you feel about it?
AM: Oh I thought they should be popular and it’s come around now. They’ve got, I wanted them to have some sort of memory and they did in the end didn’t they?
JM: Yes. Yes. The Bomber Command clasp.
AM: Because he didn’t even want to talk about it, Churchill. He just didn’t, didn’t notice them did he? Sort of thing.
JM: He forgot them.
AM: He forgot them. Yeah. That’s it. But somebody obviously didn’t because he’s, they’re all back on now.
JM: Yes.
AM: Which is good.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
JM: And you’ve never been to Germany at all.
AM: I lived there for a year. Two years. No. About a year. No I was there for two years. I had my daughter out there because I was married to a soldier.
JM: Right.
AM: Yeah. We’re divorced now.
JM: Yeah.
AM: You know. That was a long while ago.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah. I had my daughter out there. My other daughter.
JM: And what was it like? Living in this country which was associated with the loss of your father.
AM: We lodged for about four weeks before we got our own place but the woman was lovely who we were lodging with. But the husband, he never spoke to us at all. And all he did was watch war films. He was in his lounge. We were never allowed in there. We just stayed in our room and the kitchen and the bathroom and that. Never went in there. He used to sit on his own watching war films.
JM: Gosh. What — may I ask what —
AM: He never spoke to us once.
JM: What years were this please?
AM: In the 60’s.
JM: In the 1960’s.
AM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because I got married in ’62 and we went to Singapore and then after we’d been in Singapore for a year that was the time Kennedy died. And then we went to Germany and I was there about two years. Julie was two when we came back.
JM: Right.
AM: And Andrew was about three.
JM: Do you remember the base that you were on?
AM: Oh. Hang on. I’m trying to think. I can’t.
JM: No.
AM: I don’t remember very well. I do know where it is. It was oh dear. Hang on. [unclear ] the town [unclear]
JM: Right.
AM: And I think we were there.
JM: I just wondered.
AM: I can’t remember what it was called.
JM: Because some of those bases weren’t far from Hanover. And I wondered if —
AM: I think it was away from there.
JM: It was.
AM: I had Julie in Munster.
JM: Right.
AM: Which was the nearest hospital and that was about two hours away.
JM: Right.
AM: So, no. I’m trying to think. It was [unclear] the town we were in. But I can’t remember the name.
JM: No.
AM: I know, I remember the one in Singapore but I can’t remember that one.
JM: That’s quite ok I was just wondering whether when you had been living in that part of West Germany whether there had ever been any opportunity or feelings to go to see where your —
AM: No.
JM: Where your father was lost.
AM: I didn’t want to go and look at the grave at the time but I wish I had now. We were thinking about it but you know I was having a baby at the time and she was only a baby so, and then we came home anyway.
JM: So you had to —
AM: I would have liked to have gone. I would.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. Would it be fair to say that had you found his grave you would have then had to accept that your father was lost?
AM: Yeah. There wouldn’t have been any hope then would there? There wouldn’t have been any hope.
JM: So hope would have gone.
AM: And then I’d just have said it’s probably not him in there you see. Yeah. I still don’t want to accept it. I mean he’d be dead anyway probably now. Although a lot of the veterans aren’t, are they? They’re still around.
JM: Yeah. Have you ever been involved in any of the veteran’s organisations or had any help from any? Such as the Royal Air Force Association or SSAFA.
AM: No. Not really.
JM: Never. Ever asked for any support?
AM: SSAFA. We had SSAFA. The SSAFA was, everyone had SSAFA. We had SSAFA in Singapore. I can’t remember whether we did in Germany. But SSAFA was there.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah. But I was too young then I think to do anything like that.
JM: Yeah.
AM: You know. It’s affected me more as I’ve got older and I don’t know why. I mean when I was tiny obviously I was upset but it’s just I still look for him. Like Emma said, you know.
JM: Perhaps it was because you were busy looking after a family and work.
AM: Well, yeah that’s it. You haven’t got time to think about things have you? No. Yeah, I think so.
JM: Do you think this interview will help you?
AM: I think so.
JM: To make sense of it.
AM: Yes. Yes.
JM: Because you’ll know that you’re speaking to a family of people with similar experiences.
AM: That’s it. Yeah. That’s it.
JM: And speaking to the future.
AM: I expect there’s a lot like me are there?
JM: There will be.
AM: Yeah.
JM: There will be.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Yes.
AM: So, yeah.
JM: Yeah.
AM: I think so. I wanted you to come anyway. I kept on about it. Yeah.
JM: You did. You did. And I’m sorry I couldn’t get here any earlier.
AM: That’s alright. I know. I realise when you said.
JM: Circumstances. Yeah.
AM: Some of them are really old aren’t they? So —
JM: Well, we’re losing veterans every month.
AM: All the time. Yeah.
JM: Men in their nineties.
AM: Yeah.
JM: And as —
AM: They’ve done well though haven’t they?
JM: They have. They’ve done very well. And those who are mentally sharp are marvellous men. Unfortunately many of them aren’t mentally sharp.
AM: No.
JM: But their families know the stories.
AM: Their families know. Yeah.
JM: Yes. Yes.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Yes. Right. I’m going to stop there just for a moment.
[recording paused]
JM: Let me just. Now, there’s a topic that I’d like to raise with you if I may Ann and that concerns your views on the damage that was done to Germany in the bombing war. Have you got any feelings which you’d like to share with us?
AM: They were just people like us, weren’t they? They didn’t want Hitler towards the end did they? No. I think it’s horrible. I don’t, I don’t like that at all. There’s children there and old people and you know. No. I don’t like that. But we had it didn’t we? They did it to us so it was just tit for tat really but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t want to, I don’t know, think too much about it because loads I mean they were probably worse off than us.
JM: I’m sure they were in many ways.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Yes. Yeah.
AM: Because they didn’t have any decent government had they?
JM: No. Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Do you remember your mother ever saying anything about that because after all that had taken — ?
AM: No. I can’t remember her ever saying anything. She didn’t like Germans though. I know because the reaction I got when we were talking to those army men.
JM: Yeah.
AM: You know. The prisoners of war. No. She didn’t like them. But I don’t think she’d want them all to be bombed. Although we were as well. No.
JM: Have you ever been over to the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight at RAF Coningsby? Have you seen the Lancaster there?
AM: We went — where did we go?
[recording paused]
AM: We went —
JM: So you were saying that you haven’t been to Coningsby but you may have been somewhere else.
AM: We went to Duxford.
JM: Right.
AM: And we were looking at the, we went straight to the Lancaster obviously. And there was a nice man there and he said, ‘You can come up if you want and have a look,’ and he got me in. But then I thought oh he must have had awful claustrophobia when he was in there. There’s not room to move is there?
JM: No.
AM: Yeah. Yeah. I did go in it. I loved that.
JM: Did it make you feel closer to your father?
AM: Yes. It did. Yeah. But then I thought, well he must, it must have been horrible for him in there. He obviously didn’t mind. Yeah.
JM: And when the aeroplane went down were all the crew killed? Do you know?
AM: I think so. I think —
JM: Yeah.
AM: It was complete. Johnnie knows more about that than I do.
JM: Yes. Right. Ok. Well —
AM: Yeah.
JM: When I meet your brother that information will come out. Yeah.
AM: Definitely.
JM: Is there anything else that you’d like to tell us? You know. Feelings or reactions that we’ve not touched on this afternoon.
AM: Not really. No. No. I don’t think so.
JM: I hope you found it useful.
AM: Yes.
JM: It’s certainly been very interesting.
AM: Yes. Yes. Even though I keep losing my words now and again.
JM: That’s fine. You’ve done very well, Ann. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. That’s wonderful.
AM: Oh great.
JM: Thank you, Ann.
[pause]
JM: This is an additional piece of information that Ann wants to give us relating to her late father’s service in the war. Ann —
AM: So what you do you want me to —
JM: About the barrage balloons.
AM: Oh yeah. My mother wanted him, he wanted oh God he volunteered to go in the RAF as you know. And then my mother told me afterward that she’d stopped — she said she didn’t want him to go to Canada. And he didn’t go. And then he got killed so she always blamed herself for it. It wasn’t her fault was it?
JM: So he might have been going to train as a navigator.
AM: Yeah. As a navigator. I know he did rear gunning but I thought he was a navigator. But obviously if he couldn’t we got that wrong. But I must have heard it somewhere so I think probably my mother said he was going. You know, that’s what he was going to be trained to do.
JM: Right. Right.
AM: And if he had have done he would have been there a while wouldn’t he?
JM: And you were telling us that he’d worked on a barrage balloon.
AM: Yes. At the beginning. I think it was my Auntie Nancy that told me about the barrage balloons. I hadn’t heard about that. But they were in Kings Lynn. There were loads of them. I can remember them when I was tiny because we used to go to Kings Lynn a lot because his mum and dad lived there. Yeah.
JM: So it’s quite likely that your late father was —
AM: He started off. Yeah.
JM: Started off on barrage balloons.
AM: He did start off on barrage balloons. Yes.
JM: And then was trained for aircrew. Possibly for navigation.
AM: He got more money as well.
JM: Oh yeah. He would have done.
AM: That’s why.
JM: Yes.
AM: Yeah.
JM: And then if his training for navigation didn’t work for some reason then he becomes a —
AM: A rear gunner.
JM: A rear gunner.
AM: Yes.
JM: And I was telling you that 9 Squadron is one of the most respected and admired squadrons in Bomber Command.
AM: Yes. I like that.
JM: Yeah. Based at Bardney, near Lincoln.
AM: Yeah.
JM: And flew Lancasters. And was a part of some of the most important bombing raids in the last year of the war.
AM: That’s right.
JM: Including the raids against the German battleship Tirpitz.
AM: Yes.
JM: So it’s possible —
AM: Find out about that.
JM: It’s possible that your father was involved in that.
AM: Yes.
JM: So we’ll look that up.
AM: Yeah. That’s great.
JM: Thank you Ann. So I’ll just —
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Ann Mullin
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Julian Maslin
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-12-08
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
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Sound
Identifier
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AMullinA161208
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:22:45 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Civilian
Second generation
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Description
An account of the resource
Ann Mullin’s father, Sergeant George Fredrick Bedwell was killed in action. She found it difficult to come to terms with the loss. She found it impossible to visit his grave although she lived in Germany after the war.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944-01
9 Squadron
aircrew
childhood in wartime
killed in action
memorial
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/820/10803/AFisherJ170124.2.mp3
af1ed094dce2d464caf521e9583889c4
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
A name given to the resource
Fisher, John
J Fisher
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with John Fisher. His father, Flight Sergeant George Bedwell, was a wireless operator with 9 Squadron. He was killed 1/2 January 1944. <br />The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.<br />Additional information on George Bedwell is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/101500/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">IBCC Losses Database.</a>
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-01-24
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.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Fisher, J
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Julian Maslin. The interviewee is John Fisher. The interview is taking place at Julian’s home in Stafford. Also present is Ann Mullin, the subject of a separate interview. John, I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about your background. Where you were born and a little bit about your upbringing at that time.
JF: Yeah. I was brought up in Saxmundham in Suffolk. A little village on the A12. And that was seven weeks after my father was killed in the war. My first, I suppose early memory after that was probably only about a year later sitting in my pram and seeing tanks come across our driveway. And I often wondered what they were for but never actually at the time because I was only young and couldn’t ask it. I was brought up in a, obviously a house without a father. I’d never really asked why. Other children obviously had fathers. And children I played with and visited had fathers but I didn’t have one and I never asked why because I didn’t know what the question was. It must have just appeared natural and nobody ever told me why I didn’t have a father. And I suppose it was really, really only later in life, I suppose as late as late ‘50s early ‘60s when I really started to discover things about my father. Ann obviously knew. Ann Mullin, my sister obviously knew a little bit more about it because she was young when he was killed but I didn’t know anything at all. I think it was probably only when his medals arrived through the post unannounced that I started to wonder what that was all about. And of course I was probably, I don’t know, what was I? Thirteen, fourteen then. And started to ask questions of things like that. And then, I think about three or four years later his logbook suddenly turned up and it had obviously been in some water somewhere because it was very, very crinkled up. So I started looking at that. About that time there was going to be a pause of many many years because I’d met my wife [laughs] And that was in 1963. And three years later we were married and then we spent the next forty, thirty, forty years odd bringing up a family and making a living and all the other things you do which stop you doing the things you really want to do. So I suppose it was really about, just as the millennium turned really that I started to think what could we find out about my father. So I started asking a lot of questions. We have, had an Auntie Nancy who was really, who was my mother’s younger sister or middle sister. And she was able to fill me in a lot of things but she only knew so much and they only came out in little bits and pieces because they didn’t talk about such things and nobody talked about the war. My mother never talked about the war. And it was sort of a, not a blur but they obviously knew about it but I didn’t know where I fitted in. So just after the millennium we, my wife and I started to think because I’d got the logbook. And then we started to thinking about how can I find out a bit more about this. And that took then another two years. Because we’d still got a son at home who was heavily involved in the bank of mum and dad.
[recording paused]
JM: The pause was for a coffee break. John you were saying —
JF: Yes. So we, we started to think about what we could do to try and find out what, what really happened to my father. I knew he was buried in Hanover. And I think, I’m not sure, I think Ann may have visited the cemetery. Ann is sitting here by me so did you actually visit the cemetery? You didn’t did you?
AM: No.
JF: While you were in Germany.
AM: No. We were in the other end of Germany. Are you still on there?
JF: Yeah.
AM: Yeah. We were in [unclear] which was not, about forty miles from Munster. I think the next, I can’t remember what the next town was.
JF: Yeah.
AM: It was a long way away from Hanover. I know that. I didn’t really want to go.
JF: No.
AM: It would upset me too much.
JM: I think that’s an important point, Ann. When we met before you told me a little bit more about why you didn’t want to go.
AM: Yeah. I just —
JM: Could you say that again please?
AM: Yeah. I didn’t really want to go because I knew I’d get upset. And he wasn’t really there then wasn’t he?
JM: So, it was really —
AM: I always thought he was coming back. I used to say he’s just missing. He’s lost his memory. He’ll come back. All. Every time. Every time I had to had an argument with my step father I used to say he was coming back.
JM: I’m sure you must be speaking for many relatives of downed airmen. I’m sure you must. That’s a most important point.
JF: Yeah.
AM: I did remember him and, you know —
JM: Yeah.
AM: I remember going to tell Granny Bedwell that he’d gone missing. And I didn’t understand it all but she was upset so I thought this is something horrible but I couldn’t work out why. You know, you don’t think about it, do you? I was only about six. So —
JM: John, if you could carry on. Take on the story.
JF: Yeah. I’d talked before to my mother when we were on our own about visiting and suggested we ought to all go together to Hanover and she said she just didn’t want to go. And I assume it’s a similar reason to Ann really. She didn’t really believe it. I know she got married again and that, but that’s you know another story. But she just didn’t want to go. So I’m now sort of around 2000, 2002 and I thought we’re going to do something about this now. Try and find out. The first thing I did was to go to RAF Cosford which is just ten minutes away from us and ask people there what we could do. And they let me look at the book which said, yeah. They crashed. Missing over Weyhausen. And so my next logical step, being a nosy reporter was to find a newspaper in Weyhausen. The local newspaper. And try and find a journalist there who might be able to help me and they may have records or something. So, I found one in a place called, in near Weyhausen, in Gifhorn, which was the area. And it’s a guy called, sorry I phoned the number. I phoned the number of this newspaper and the first person who answered was a guy called Joachim [Gris] and, ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Hello Joachim, I hope that’s how I pronounce his name,’ because I couldn’t pronounce his name. I thought it was Joachim and he said, ‘What can I do for you?’ And I explained where I was and who I was and that. He said, ‘You’re most unfortunate,’ sorry, ‘You’re most fortunate because I’m known around here as something of a World War Two buff.’ And he said, ‘I’m sure you know what one of those are.’ I said, ‘Yeah. We’ve got several in England who are the same.’ ‘Well, I’ll be very interested in this because it’s, it’s the sort of thing I like to investigate.’ So from that we had a natter and that and I gave him details. I emailed him with details out of my father’s logbook and all the details of the plane and things and the records from the RAF. And he then set about, which I didn’t know at the time he set about looking through Luftwaffe records to see if he could actually find anything. One of the early things he came up with out of his own paper in fact, was a photograph of a crashed plane which had appeared in there. It had been issued by, by the Luftwaffe. Presumably by their press office to show, look what we’ve just shot down. The plane was a little bit mangled. It was on the front page of their paper. And he thought that might be it because it was actually shot down the same night that my father’s plane was shot down and over Weyhausen. So I took this to RAF Cosford where they identified it as a Hastings.
JM: Halifax.
JF: Hastings.
AM: Halifax.
JF: Hastings. And they actually said, ‘No. This is a Royal Canadian Air Force plane.’ And they, they contacted a group of people who had been looking for this particular plane because one of the crew was an international, I say international, a nationally known radio broadcaster in Canada and they’d been looking for what fifty, sixty years for this plane. Or news about it. So they sent all the details to them and we assume now they will do the same. Go through records and they will find out what happened. According to the cutting the, all the crew perished in that so there wasn’t going to be a survivor anywhere. But of course it was a Hastings. It was a bit of red herring but it helped somebody else out of a problem. Meanwhile, Joachim decided to go to the National Records which is some miles away apparently. It’s about a hundred and fifty kilometres away or somewhere where they kept all the microfiche records. And eventually by keying in some key dates he found out that in fact my father’s plane crashed in another Weyhausen some miles away from where he was. I didn’t know there were two Weyhausens. And it’s the Weyhausen near the big Volkswagen factory which is still there at Wolfsburg and of course have a famous football team nowadays. Once he’d found that out he was able then to triangulate that with all the Luftwaffe pilot reports and eventually he came up with a guy called Wittgenstein, Prince Wittgenstein who was the Red Baron of the day. And Prince Wittgenstein actually downed eighty three planes during his short career. He’s also, I should say prince, he was a member of the royal family of Germany. And in fact he was related to our queen through Queen Sophia of Spain I understand. That may not be totally accurate but he has a, he has a relationship somewhere along the line with our queen. But then again they probably all are. They’re all related. He found out anyway. He’s the guy who came out of the clouds and shot my father’s plane down. The nasty story for him is that two weeks later he came out of the clouds to try and get another plane and crashed into it and he was killed. So he only lasted two weeks. Lasted two weeks after shooting my father’s plane down.
JM: John, I think I should pause here and ask you a difficult question. You found this photograph and this record of the man who had taken your life and the lives of many other allied airmen. What were your feelings about that?
JF: Initially, I think I’d like to throw bricks through his window [laughs] but not really. In reality it was a war. He was fighting a war just like our people were. I mean, we have to say my father had just bombed the hell out of Dresden. You know. Or my father’s plane. He hadn’t. He was a radio operator so he didn’t actually press any buttons but he was part of that. But we were fighting for freedom. We were fighting for our country. The German people were not necessarily fighting for their country. The German people were fighting for peace. That’s what they wanted. And they wanted to be rid of the Nazis. Whatever anyone said they were a cruel nasty lot and this is why when eventually we turned up in Hanover to stop with some people the first thing they did was to apologise for the war. And these were only a young couple in their thirties who had no experience of that war. And they just said, ‘We’re sorry about the war and we’ll help you any way we can while you’re here.’ And that was nice.
JM: Thank you. Did you find out whether Wittgenstein had any surviving family members?
JF: He has many, many, many surviving families. In fact, I trawled recently through the internet just to try and find out who his families were and there are Wittgensteins everywhere. You’ll see them mentioned in the last few weeks doing things. Either going to visit our queen, going to weddings, funerals of other Wittgensteins. And there seems there’s a whole lot of them. A whole lot of them.
JM: And have there been histories or biographies written about Prince Wittgenstein’s war service or the service of —
JF: Yeah. Certainly. There is a whole website devoted to Prince Wittgenstein who shot my father down because he was the Red Baron of the day. Nobody else had downed eighty three aeroplanes. And he, he was a night fighter. He, he was the probably their top night, well he was their top night fighter. He was the top, top fighter pilot and probably a big loss to the German Luftwaffe. But the one thing we realised is that they were very efficient. So when Joachim, Joachim came to look for the Luftwaffe records he was able to get out of those records the very docket which was signed on the spot. Noted on the spot of what the Germans found when they visited the site. And he was able to copy that and send that to me. And that clearly showed they’d found four, it didn’t, it wasn’t specific I think, they’d found four or five bodies in the aeroplane. The plane itself was intact and with the rear gunner still in place. Two others apparently had baled out, and either killed or died and were found in the top of a tree. But just to take that now a little bit back a bit. So in 2002, after two years Joachim had come up with the story. He’d found it was Weyhausen. He then contacted the mayor of Weyhausen and the mayor instantly said to him, ‘I have memories of this and I think there are people in the village that will have memories of this.’ And he asked around and found two people who were in the local school at the time and remembered the crash. And, and they even heard it. They heard it coming down. They remembered being taken to the site by their teacher the next morning and they were all gathered around this plane. And the name of the guy was Frederick Tager who, a very, very nice guy and still very young outlook and he remembered everything. He said the plane was there. The tail gunner was still there. Most of the plane was buried four or five feet in the ground. It had come straight down nose and ended up against an oak tree. They were cleared off by the Luftwaffe people and the military guys who came because they said there may be unexploded bombs in it. In fact, there weren’t. As it turned out there weren’t any. They’d dropped them all over Dresden of course. But they were cleared off and the Germans apparently because a lot of them still crept up in the trees and watched and the German people apparently stripped the plane of any useful things and some of it was taken away and the rest was buried. And that’s, that’s that. We visited in 2004. We were helped. My brother in law came with us. And his wife. The four of us went. Went to Hanover. Rented a car and seventy kilometres to Weyhausen and Wolfsburg. And we were met by the mayor. Had a reception. A nice reception. The mayor and various other people. And because Joachim was a journalist there was an entourage of ten journalists with him [laughs] because he was obviously making a bit of money out of it as well. He said he would from the start. And we had a bit of reception in the mayor’s parlour and everything and some drinks and things and a chat and the German press took some photographs and things. We were then taken to the site by this man who, one of the two men who originally remembered it. And it was in middle of a forest. It had all grown up and been replanted since it happened but the oak tree where the plane was was still there so he was able to identify it very, very clearly. In fact, there were still some gouge marks in the oak tree which we saw and he said they were almost certainly caused by the plane. And so we laid, we basically, we laid a wreath. Sorry about this.
[recording paused]
JM: We just had a short pause there.
JF: Yeah. The mayor quite kindly said he would pledge to lay a wreath every year on Remembrance Day. We should have gone back the next year to, to the Remembrance Day but I was ill unfortunately and so we couldn’t go. But we will go soon. And I’ve been ill off and on since but we will be going. We’ve said we will come back again. Meanwhile, the next morning we appeared in, on the front pages of about, I don’t know it was ten, twelve German newspapers and there may be a lot more who I didn’t know about which Joachim was responsible for. He’d also contacted our local paper, the Stafford Newsletter and eventually they came out to see me as well and we did some things. And we went, we’d previously gone to the Hanover Cemetery to see the graves of all the men and one thing I learned then was that in fact, this was from the curator or manager of the cemetery in fact all the remains were buried there. They weren’t just nominal graves. Which I hadn’t known before. I thought they just put them in a collective nominal grave and they didn’t. They were, that was all the bodies, they recovered them. They were quite efficient like that. The cemetery beautifully laid out. In fact it was on, on the garden programme the following week as one of the best gardens in Europe. It was a moving experience but it’s something we had to do. I don’t know what will happen. The plane. There’s quite a large chunk of the plane still there that I would think, we were told by the mayor there will be a lots of planes in that area and probably the only reason the night fighter was patrolling that area was because of the factories nearby. And that would probably have been normally been a safe route out from a raid because taking a large sweep round the north and coming back over the side of Spain and stuff. But on this occasion it wasn’t. He would have been patrolling there at the same time. I haven’t actually done a lot more about this since and I’ve sort of, that’s the one thing that I set out to do. It’s probably which I would never have done in my younger days. Most people don’t have time to do this sort of thing. And there must be thousands and thousands of people in the same boat who have lost somebody but won’t know anything about it. I’ve since of course become an interviewer for the International Bomber Command Centre and interviewed some flight crew myself and I’ve found out their experiences. And that also has been an experience for me to hear out what they got up to and how they survived. Some of them flew many, many missions. It’s, it’s, I would do it again.
JM: John, you’ve given us a very vivid story of this particular research journey. There are one or two questions that are in my mind. One of them is I wondered whether you’d ever come across relatives or friends of any of the other crew members from your father’s crew?
JF: I have tried and tried to find them. The reason I probably can’t — my father was the only married member of the crew. The rest were just young and he was the oldest at twenty four. The rest were eighteen, nineteen and I suspect they were the son of somebody and those people have now died since and nobody after that has had any memory of them because they weren’t married. They didn’t have children themselves so there is no one to keep their memory alive. I have tried looking. I’ve put messages on websites. On, on sites that relate to the war and relate to Number 9 Squadron even. But I have not yet come across a single person and I suspect I won’t. I will try again when the Centre is open because that, the information which is going to be on the Centre will have so much information about other people and things that some of those, it may just strike a chord. But I think there has been a greater awareness lately of the World War Two and of the sacrifice that people gave up. My father was looking after barrage balloons in Hyde Park and needed more money. Ann was on the way. And he took that extra shilling a week to become, to become air crew. That was —
JM: How do you —
JF: A high cost.
JM: How do you know that that was his motivation for remustering?
JF: I was told by my auntie, my mother’s sister that that’s what he did. Now, whether that’s right or not but somebody must have told her and I presume he told her at some stage. ‘I’m going to do this and I can get an extra shilling a week for this.’
AM: John.
JF: Ann may have heard this story.
AM: Yeah. I was just going to say my mother said he should have gone to Canada to do something but she wouldn’t let him. And I think she felt guilty then because, you know —
JF: Yeah.
AM: He was going on some course which he’d probably be here now. Well, maybe not now but, you know.
JM: So we have one of these situations where —
AM: A decision was made.
JM: A decision like that.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Had such a profound —
AM: Yeah. Made a difference.
JM: It really did.
JF: Yeah.
AM: She always wanted to go to Canada after that but she never got there.
JF: No. No. No. One of the things I think which we both know. He played the piano, didn’t he?
AM: Yes. He did.
JF: And a brilliant pianist and played in a band.
AM: Yes, he did. He was in a band.
JF: At, doing Glen Miller stuff and he probably would have gone on to be quite good because musically he was quite, he was really good. And I think that’s where my mother and him met. Is that right?
AM: I’m not sure. I’m not sure.
JF: Once again it was my Auntie Nancy who said all this.
AM: Yeah. Granny Bedwell had a piano which I used to go bang on.
JF: Yeah.
AM: Because I wanted to be like my dad.
JF: Yeah.
AM: I couldn’t.
JF: Yeah. We think my mother and father met at the Market Hall in Saxmundham.
AM: They used to have dances in there.
JF: We know that they had a first date in 1937 at the Picture House in Saxmundham because I’ve got the ticket.
AM: A picture of it.
JF: Yeah. I’ve got the ticket and I’ve given that now to the local museum. And I think probably eventually we’ll hand over the logbook and medals and everything to the local museum.
JM: Super.
JF: That’s it.
AM: I think that’s the ticket.
JF: Yeah. That’s it. Yeah.
JM: So what age was your father when he lost his life?
JF: Twenty four.
AM: Twenty four I think. I’m not sure. I’m not sure.
JF: Yes. He was.
AM: Twenty three. Twenty four.
JF: He was twenty four. Yeah.
JM: So a picture is emerging of the young man with family responsibilities.
JF: Yeah.
JM: With a sense of national commitment. And commitment to the national cause.
JF: Yeah. He’s got one daughter.
JM: He’s got one —
JF: And another one on the way.
JM: Yes.
JF: Me.
JM: Yeah. And makes this step to, to remuster as aircrew and he does a number of operations and then he loses his life.
JF: I think he did twenty four.
AM: [unclear]
JF: I don’t know that for a fact but I think that’s another thing which I gleaned from somewhere.
JM: Yes.
JF: Probably out of some records somewhere.
JM: Yes.
JF: We know nothing of his thoughts at the time of course. We just don’t know them because there’s no records anywhere. I did, while I was in Lincolnshire on my last visit there was a pub near where he was stationed and one of the, I spoke to someone who said, ‘Yes. Number 9 Squadron. They used that pub. And that’s where your father played the piano.’
AM: Oh.
JM: Because 9 Squadron was based at —
JF: And I hadn’t heard that one before.
JM: No. 9 Squadron was based at Bardney.
JF: That’s right.
JM: And there were two pubs based in the local village.
JF: Yes.
JM: Both within walking distance.
JF: Yes. That’s right.
JM: So it could have been one of those. I think one’s called the Black Dog.
JF: I think it was the Dog and Duck or something.
JM: Black dog, I think. Something of that sort. Yes.
JF: Something like that.
JM: Yes.
JF: And, and I was told then and I think actually that’s when we [pause] yes that was on the last visit. That would be for, I forget where it was now. A training session or something.
JM: Yes.
JF: Yeah. And, yeah, he said, ‘That’s where your father played the piano,’ because that’s where they all gathered.
JM: That must have been very moving. To have seen that.
JF: It was. Yes. I don’t think I can go there because it’s not there anymore. Something like that. Or it’s closed. It’s now a house. Something like that. Yeah. That’s my story.
JM: Yeah.
JF: And I would really love to hear of other people who would like to go through that same measure because if they follow what I did they won’t get Joachim now because I think he’s retired and gone off somewhere else. But there are loads of people who would help them and they, they shouldn’t sort of think oh, I don’t know, I’ve no idea where it is and I don’t know where I’m going to find it. It’s easy. It did take two years but it’s fairly easy.
JM: Well, we know that there are quite a number of privately published books available where families have —
JF: Yeah.
JM: Made researches of this sort.
JF: Yeah.
JM: But I’d like to think that the interview that you are giving today will encourage people who perhaps haven’t gone that far to take those first steps.
JF: I hope they do and I hope the children of those people do it as well because that’s further memories for them and that will show them exactly what they fought for.
JM: Yes. Yes.
JF: And you have to always remember that RAF people were volunteers and they didn’t have to do it. Ok the alternative then was ground crew. Ground forces —
JM: Yeah.
JF: And things, but it was a volunteer organisation.
JM: Would you say that this family research that you’ve done has that significantly affected your view of what Bomber Command did during the Second World War? I had the impression when you started out telling us although you grew up as a young man after the Second World War that you hadn’t really been totally aware of what had been going on and that this story has actually increased that awareness. Is that fair?
JF: No. I hadn’t really. Because you’re so busy growing up, aren’t you?
JM: Yes.
JF: There was only one incident that really came back to me about what war is all about. That was when myself and two neighbours. I suppose we were only nine and ten then or something like that and we used to go fishing in Saxmundham in a particular pool which was up a big steep hill. Past the church up a big steep hill and we’d go fishing there. And one day, on our way back we decided to stop in a copse which was very, very overgrown with ivy and everything. And we came across a well and we thought this is lovely. This well was covered in ivy but we uncovered the top of it and it had got a thick concrete top on it. A really massively concrete top about a foot thick. And we thought that’s strange isn’t it? You don’t put that on a well. So we played around on the top for a while and lit a fire on top. You always light fires when you’re youngsters. And then we started exploring the sides of the well and could see that a lot of the bricks around it after we pulled the ivy away were actually crumbling. So we got our knives out and that’s the other the thing you always carried when you were young, a knife [laughs] and started scraping away. We scraped away one brick and pulled some others out and then some others. Lit some bits of paper, shoved them down the well and we could see by the light of that before the flames went out that there was a lot of metallic things down there and didn’t know what they were. So we all, by this time we’d got a hole about two foot wide and being careful we didn’t fall down we all picked up bricks and collectively threw one each down this well. There was a massive explosion. A fire ball whooshed straight up in the air and we fell backwards. I lost all my eyebrows and a bit off the hair. Julian, my friend lost his and Christopher, his brother lost his eyebrows. And we fell backwards and we ran like hell and while we were running away, ‘Don’t tell anybody. We mustn’t tell anybody. Don’t tell anybody. Don’t tell anybody.’ And this is the first time I’ve ever told anybody [laughs] including my mother. Anybody. We gather because we did creep back later, it and they were all, there was lots of iron things and things around. I assume that they were incendiaries. But they appeared to have been very unstable.
JM: Yes.
JF: Now, there were other shapes of things down there which wouldn’t have been set off by the incendiaries. I can only assume, I can link these probably with the tanks that I first saw sitting in my pram after, just after the war rumbling by. I think they dumped all their surplus in that well because they would have been heading down that hill from the coast and I think that’s what happened. The bad news is that after many, many years that well became the garden of, on a new estate of a house. I visited it a few years ago and we couldn’t really find it but we knew where it was and it was still covered up in ivy and stuff. We assumed it was filled in. Julian, my friend, you’re Julian, asked somebody about it. He said, ‘Oh yeah. That was filled in and it was — ’ such and such. Now, I think the house belongs to somebody who I used to know in Stafford but I’m not sure so I won’t talk about him because the poor devil is sitting on a bomb probably. We did, we met up at a reunion of Leiston Grammar School about four years ago and the first thing Julian said, ‘Have you told anybody?’ And I said, ‘No. No. We wouldn’t do that.’ He said, ‘Perhaps one day we should do.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but not yet.’ So my mother knew that we lit fires in the woods so we said we had a flare up in a fire. We’d lit it with a, we used, used to get tins of paint from a local builders and off their scrap yard and used them to start a fire with, you’d like to find out. So we said it flared up, and we all got burned. That’s how we explained that because nobody would even believe us —
JM: No. No.
JF: If we said a well blew up.
JM: Right. Now, John, if I could ask you another question here. These researches that you’ve told us about they more or less coincided with the time when the, the perception of Bomber Command in the national psyche was changing. Leading to the development of the Bomber Command Memorial in London and the award of the clasp to surviving Bomber Command aircrew.
JF: Yeah.
JM: I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your views as to how Bomber Command was, has been treated.
JF: Yeah. I think what it is which I’ve ascertained since of course the proper, there was a lot of anti-propaganda around. The war was also very political and there were people in the military who decided for one reason or another that you could only fight wars on the ground and that there was no other way. Tanks. Tanks and men. And that attitude I think remained. The other thing was bombing or carpet bombing which is what we were really involved in then caused a lot of, a lot of ordinary people to die. Thousands upon thousands. Especially if you look at Dresden and places like that. And even Berlin and Hanover. They all suffered. So it wasn’t really very nice or courteous to talk about it and people didn’t. They forget that we were on the receiving end of such things as well and, you know deadly V bombs and things. There was no stopping them. They just killed masses of people. Not military stuff. Just people. And the whole point of all of that was to, to turn people against war and to disillusion them and to dishearten them and say, ‘Let’s give up. Let’s talk to Hitler.’ And it was the other way around as well, you know [unclear] And it was only really later in years wasn’t it and we’re only talking now after the millennium that things really started to change and people suddenly said, ‘Hey, these people actually did a brave job. They died for this country. Why shouldn’t we honour them?’ And, and the Memorial in London was, I suppose really the start of this new feeling. And now the International Bomber Command Centre has, has enhanced that really. And I suppose, and also I think the military or the people at the top used the excuse that the RAF was a volunteer organisation. Therefore it couldn’t be officially recognised. And so they didn’t do anything really. They just volunteered and they went out and bombed people and that was it. That was wrong. That was wrong because without the RAF Hitler would never have given in that quick. Because the, the country was demoralised purely by the bombs. We couldn’t have done that with people on the ground. We would eventually have probably but we couldn’t have done it that quick. And we have to remember our country at the time was bankrupt. We’d borrowed so much money off America and other places that we hadn’t any money left. So you know it was essential to finish that war quickly. And I think it would have gone on and on and on had it not been for Bomber Command.
JM: Thank you. Could I ask you another question, please? You and your sister are obviously direct descendants of your father. You’ve done this research. What has been the effects of this research on younger generations and on the family as a whole? Is there a discernible reaction?
JF: Yes. I’ve spread this around my own family. My own children. The grandchildren are still a bit young to understand but one of them is nineteen. They’ve all seen this. They’ve all seen it and they’ve realised what went on. My grandchildren are all in America, and my children and so they’re a little bit out of the war they were. Although America were involved later on but they were still a bit out of it. The general population didn’t get involved. But they’ve all seen the information which I’ve got and the press. The press cuttings and things. And they understand now what went on. Which is quite good. And I think I’ve read recently that our children are now going to be told about World War Two more as part of their studies. That I think is essential because the future of the world really can be only peace. War achieves nothing and it never does in the end. It’s a temporary solution. It doesn’t achieve total peace. We’re now at verbal war with the, with the EU. You know. That’s ok. Verbal’s ok. That doesn’t matter.
JM: Jaw jaw.
JF: It’s war and fighting that destroys the world and could well do in the end. Terrorism is something we didn’t have then. It didn’t exist. You fought a war. Went in and fought it and came out and there was a victor. That doesn’t happen anymore and its made war worse I think. And I think the younger generation are getting to realise this. That if we continue to have wars involving people and nuclear bombs and all the rest of it there will be no war left. No world left. Because that’s the, that’s the state of war nowadays and weaponry. Its, its so disastrous whereas before it was very very very directional. I don’t know. I don’t think I’d like to be a younger generation now because the future I don’t think is particularly good.
JM: Perhaps I could turn to you Ann now as we’re drawing to the end here. We’ve met before.
AM: Yes.
JM: You gave me a very full interview. And now you’ve heard what your brother has to say.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Has this changed your views at all? Has it added to your knowledge? Do you see things in any way differently?
AM: No. I knew it pretty well. I knew Johnny went to Germany and all that. You know. I was there but I mean the people we stayed with, the lady was lovely. We went, the first three weeks we were there we didn’t have army quarters. And the man there never spoke to us once and he watched war films on the telly in just black and white obviously in those, it was the sixties but he was horrible. But the lady was lovely.
JM: Just a different experience.
AM: He hated us. I know. You could feel it. But you know. We hadn’t done anything had we?
JM: No.
AM: You know.
JM: It’s an interesting contrast.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Because your experience of meeting German people was quite different from yours at that —
AM: Yeah.
JM: But perhaps, was it at a different time?
AM: Yeah. Sixties.
JM: Would the proximity to the war? So that might explain the difference do you think?
AM: ’63, ’64. No, ‘64 because I had Andrew then.
JF: We’re talking just sixteen years.
AM: Yeah. Yeah.
JF: After the war and memories would still be very very much alive.
AM: I mean, you know —
JM: Yes.
AM: I got on quite well with the German people that I met. But not him.
JM: No.
AM: He was — and I’ve never lived anywhere like that before, you know. I’d only been married a few years then so —
JM: Do you think he might have served in the German forces?
AM: Oh. I think he had. Definitely.
JM: So that might explain his —
AM: Yeah.
JM: Reluctance.
AM: But he was just horrible.
JM: It’s been a fascinating, fascinating afternoon listening to you both. I realise that through my incompetence at the beginning of this interview I forgot to ask you to give your father’s full name and rank and where, where and when he was born. Could I ask you to do that now please just for the record?
JF: Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
JF: Over to Ann I think. George Kenneth.
AM: George Frederick Kenneth.
JF: Frederick Kenneth.
AM: Bedwell. And he was a flight sergeant. And I don’t know where. I think he was born in Kings Lynn.
JM: Right.
AM: Or it could have been —
JF: Oh, actually —
AM: I’m not sure.
JF: I’ve only just discovered this.
AM: Oh. Do you know where he was born?
JF: Yeah. He was born in Lewes. Sussex.
AM: Lewes? Where’s that?
JF: Lewes. That’s on his birth certificate.
AM: Oh. Oh. I never knew that.
JF: Yeah. Lewes. Sussex.
JM: Right.
JF: I don’t know why. We don’t know how.
AM: Oh.
JM: You don’t know anything about his parents.
JF: Oh, we know about his parents.
AM: Yeah. Granny Mabel. Granny Mabel.
JF: Yes.
AM: And Granddad Walter.
JF: His parents were living, we don’t know where. I presume they were living in Saxmundham somewhere. Or Leiston.
AM: I don’t know.
JF: But we don’t know. They may have come up from Lewes.
AM: Yeah. They were in Kings Lynn during the war.
JF: Yeah.
AM: Because we went.
JF: Yeah.
AM: We went there.
JF: They went off to Kings Lynn because his father was working. Got a job in a factory there for war munitions and then he was lodged up with our grandmother.
AM: Granny Bedwell.
JF: Yeah. Granny Bedwell. And that’s as far as —
AM: I think my dad lived with them.
JF: And the stepfather —
AM: Oh him. Yeah.
JF: Lived with them as well.
AM: Yeah.
JF: He came from a Dr Barnardo’s Home. That’s about —
AM: Emma’s still got all that on her phone ready to put, print out. Haven’t you Emma?
JM: But we don’t know, you don’t know where his musical talents originated from.
JF: We don’t.
JM: No.
JF: Absolutely. No. His job was a roundsman at the International Stores.
AM: Yeah. He used to drive, ride a bike didn’t he?
JF: Rode a bike.
JM: Yeah. We don’t know.
JF: He used to bike from Leiston every morning to Saxmundham which was five miles. And that was his job. But he —
AM: My eldest son’s inherited that. Andrew. He can. He just learned the organ and everything, didn’t he?
JF: Yeah. Yes.
AM: He still does it. He’s still in bands.
JF: Yeah. Ann’s son was a bandsman in the —
AM: The army. Yeah. He was in the army.
JF: What regiment was he in?
Other: The Queens Own.
AM: The Queen’s Own Highlanders.
JF: The Queens Own Highlanders. Yeah. And then he went on to form his own band in Sweden.
AM: He still goes. There’s a royal family in Sweden and everything. So yeah, he’s got it, I think.
JF: Yeah.
AM: I never got it.
JF: No. I tinker.
AM: I plonked away at a piano. I thought I can’t do this.
JF: No. We’ve no idea how he learned. We can only assume that his father and mother, one of them could play the piano.
JM: Yes. Yes.
JF: That’s the only thing.
JM: I know when I’ve met one or two other ex-wireless operators they have often told me that they, they were selected for that partly on the fact that they had been in the Air Training Corps. They’d learned the Morse Code. They had some interest. Some prior interest in radio. But I don’t get the impression that your father was like that.
JF: No. In fact, he —
AM: I thought he was rear gunner as well. Yeah.
JF: That’s right. He went in as a rear gunner.
JM: Right.
JF: He failed all the tests.
JM: Ah.
AM: He didn’t want to shoot people.
JF: No. He didn’t want to shoot. He failed them. Yeah. On the, they did a number of flypasts and shooting at targets and he failed. So he then went for training as a, as a radio operator.
JM: Right.
JF: And obviously picked that up quick.
JM: Yes. Had an aptitude for it.
JF: Yeah.
JM: You had to send and receive Morse at a certain level.
JF: Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
JF: Yeah.
JM: It wasn’t an easy task in any sense, was it?
JF: No. No. No.
JM: And the wireless operator was very often a sort of Jack of all trades in the crew because he would be needed to support other crew members as look outs or do whatever was needed as part of the team. But there’s no record really of your father leaving any evidence of that in his letters or —
AM: No.
JF: Nothing at all. No.
JM: No. No. No.
AM: No. I read all my mother’s letters at the time.
JF: Yeah. The last letter home we assume was the one where I was conceived.
JM: Good.
[recording paused]
JF: Just, just to end this, Julian. There are lots of unanswered questions I think. We’ve been able to piece together some of the answers but there are a lot which are not. But we’ve got enough to get a picture of my father and having been to the site where his plane crashed a lot of people have not been able to do that. They’ve just been told they were missing and that’s it. And of course those, rest of that crew were unmarried and over probably just a period of a few years they were probably forgotten about almost. There was nobody to remember them. But we’ve, we have answered a few questions between us. I hope it encourages more people to do the same.
JM: John and Ann, thank you very much indeed.
JF: Thank you.
AM: Thank you.
JM: Very good.
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Title
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Interview with John Fisher
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Julian Maslin
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-01-24
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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
Identifier
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AFisherJ170124
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Pending review
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Format
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00:47:55 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
John Fisher was born six weeks after his father was killed on an operation over Germany. He became more and more curious about what had happened to his father and finding out more about him and the events leading up to his death as he got older. John’s father had been a wireless operator based with 9 Squadron. John began researching with the help of RAF Cosford and made contacts in Germany to help fill in the gaps of his knowledge. He also visited the crash site and the graves of his father and his crew.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Germany--Hannover
9 Squadron
aircrew
childhood in wartime
final resting place
killed in action
perception of bombing war
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/810/10793/AEdwardsM180621.1.mp3
b7de32541c9e2101b84c4b3d9b8dfe83
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
A name given to the resource
Edwards, Frederick
F Edwards
Description
An account of the resource
26 items. The collection concerns Frederick Edwards (b. 1923) and contains his log book, maps, navigation charts, service documents, and photographs. He flew operations as a navigator with 101 Squadron. There is also an oral history interview with his son, Martin Edwards.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Martin Edwards and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-14
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
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Edwards, F
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JH: My name is Judy Hodgson and I’m interviewing Martin Edwards, son of Frederick Edwards for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We’re at Mr Edwards home and it is the 21st of June 2018. Thank you, Martin for agreeing to talk to me today. Can you tell me about, you know, your father? His date of birth, where he was born and early years that you know.
ME: Yeah. Sure. That’s not a problem. Dad was born on the 20th of June 1923 in Belvedere in Kent which is now a part of Greater London. The family house. We had a farm and he was one of eight. He was the second son. Second eldest son. His eldest son was Harry. Yeah. And he went to St Augustine’s School in Heron Hill in Belvedere and then on to Brook Street School in Erith. His brother Harry got a scholarship and got to the Grammar School. But the family couldn’t afford to send more than one so dad just stayed at school and did the General Certificate or whatever it’s called, of education that they took then and then left at fifteen. I don’t know what he did after work but he ended up, I think he was an office boy at a company called Sloggett’s which was a builders. Now, whether that was before or after the war I don’t know. But he definitely worked with Sheila Hancock. She was a secretary there so she probably doesn’t remember him. And then he, he started his active service in 1943 and he, he trained to be a navigator which he got sent to Canada to be a navigator. Then he came back in to the UK and was in 101 Squadron for thirty ops and bombed Dresden. Part of them, but Ludwigshafen, Berchet — Hitler’s bunker. He bombed that as well. And one of his proudest claims is that the people he flew with, or his crew they never lost a single person. They came back and everyone came back safe. Always. He has some funny stories to tell. He had some funny stories to tell. One of the, one stories he said, he’s told me was, was when they’d flown to the target and it was fog bound so they had to come back and dump the bombs in the North Sea. And the pilot, who it appears he had the same pilot all the way through, a Flight Officer Brooking, he said, ‘Well, where can we bomb, Fred?’ And he said, ‘We’ll go and bomb the Frisian Islands.’ So they plotted a course to the Frisian Islands and bombed the Frisian Islands and then flew home. And the commandant or whoever it is said, ‘Any successful? Anyone successful mission?’ Everyone said no except for dad who said, ‘Yeah. We bombed the Frisian Islands.’ ‘Ok. Fair enough.’ Other funny stories. There’s lots of funny stories. They used to, because of the trip they’d taken and France was already being, they were already fighting in France when he was flying so they’d fly over to France and then up through France over the trenches and then up in to their target in Germany. And as they crossed the trenches what the rear gunner would do they’d take all sorts of rubbish out the, out the mess and they’d throw darts and anything they couldn’t down on to the Germany trenches hoping to at least hit one or two Germans. But the rear gunner used to take a bottle of wine with him with a cork and then he used to drop the cork and then the bottle of wine and they said, ‘Why did you do that?’ He said, ‘Well, Fritz is sitting down there in the trench, the cork hits him on the helmet, he looks up, ‘Was ist das?’ and gets the bottle in the face.’ That was the theory anyway. In practice they were probably miles apart. But that’s not the point. The biggest disappointment I think was Dresden because he felt very upset that people seemed to indicate, and over time that they went there to intentionally burn, burn Dresden. Which they didn’t. He just went to bomb his, bomb his targets and come back and the fact that the wooden houses, they caught fire was an unfortunate result but he was very upset that it seems now being diverted that, or the impression is that they went to Dresden to burn it down and they didn’t. Although those deaths were very unfortunate but he really didn’t like that. That people were sort of saying, ‘Oh, well, you know, you were nasty,’ sort of thing. Amusing stories. The rear gunner who shot a cheese sandwich. Sorry the upper gunner who shot a cheese sandwich. This is the one story that all my family remember. And they had a bomb aimer, not a bomb aimer, I think it was the radio operator who didn’t like cheese sandwiches. So every day you’d fly off and you get your cheese sandwiches because that’s all you’re going to get. And he goes, and he really had not a good time of it or whatever so he threw his cheese sandwich out the port in the roof where dad took his mirrors. And as it flew past the upper mid-upper gunner he shot it. A big burst of fire. He said, ‘What was that?’ ‘Well, I don’t know but it was going really fast.’ So when they came back to land, ‘Any hits?’ He said, ‘Does a cheese sandwich count?’ ‘Fine. Never mind.’ Other stories. The hung up bomb. He, they flew out and one of the bombs was hung up. It was stuck in its cradle. So they opened, the bomb doors were open and they opened the hatch. There’s an inspection hatch or something in the plane and they were holding on to my dad who was only five foot three. And he’s trying to kick this bomb out while you’ve got the bomb doors open and everything like that and they couldn’t shift it so they came back. And they flew to the airport and they let go of the flares which, because the radio gear had been shot out. They sent the necessary flares out to say that they’d got a bomb hung up. They came in to land. They were given permission to land. They were waved in and went straight in to the hangar where everyone was and two wingless wonders as dad used to call them came down and went, ‘Didn’t quite understand the flares, old chap.’ He said, ‘Oh, we’ve got a bomb hung up.’ ‘Oh f —.’ And everyone was diving for cover. Sorry. Sorry about the language but [laughs] so everyone was diving for cover because they’d got this bomb that could have gone off at any moment. You know. So no problem. So it didn’t go off thank goodness. So that was, that was that. Other stories. I’m trying to think. There was, there was the bomb aimer. He, you always used to get a prism. The bomb aimer would get a prism in a bag. He’d have to sign for it and go out and then he’d put it in to the necessary hole in the plane to lay the bombs. And they were going along and they’re reaching the target and the bomb aimer had lined everything up and he turned away to check that the bomb doors were open and everything was right. He turned back and the prism was absolutely shattered. The ack ack had hit the prism and it shattered. So had he been looking in the prism it would have smashed his face up. But just by doing the checks, safety checks he got away with it and so when they got back they go, you know to return the prism he goes, ‘Shh,’ and just lets out loads of glass shards over the bloke’s desk. ‘There it is.’ He goes, ‘Oh thanks. Yes. I don’t think I can fix it though.’
[recording paused]
ME: Well, I’ll sort of go back to the beginning. His service record which you would probably be interested in. He started. He’s got a summary. Well, I’ve got his logbook. That’s the point. I’ve got a lot of his stuff which will be on the, on the site. There’s the map when he flew to Dresden. The actual map he plotted the course and came back. Plus all his notes. The logbook. What he did. Where he did it. Where they crossed the coast. What times it was and everything like that. So he started his service in, on the 30th of the 9th. 30th of September 1943 and he ended it on the 30th of the 9th 1946. Right. He completed thirty operations. The last three which I’ll talk about later because they are important to me. But he bombed Ludwigshafen which I’ve been there. This BASF lives at Ludwigshafen and he’s bombed them twice so [laughs] I thought of going to tell them but I don’t think they’re very keen. And he bombed Hitler’s bunker as well. So he did, he did quite a few of the right sort of bombings. So, yeah I mean we could go through the ops but these are all recorded. So Essen, Ludwigshafen, Kirn. Standard Hanover, Hanau, Bottrop, Kleve, Dresden. There we go. Dresden. The 13th of the 2nd 1945.
JH: Right.
ME: That was his mother’s birthday. The 13th. And he died in the 13th of the 2nd 2015. Seventy years. The anniversary of him bombing Dresden. Or being navigator that bombed Dresden. In the plane that bombed Dresden. Which is just incredible. So, yeah. Bottrop, Mannheim, Ludwigshafen it’s all there. Kirn, Dessau, Misburg. Bombed. Sixteen bombs. Air test. Oh, air test bombing. That wasn’t an operation obviously. His last three operations are the ones I really want to talk about. And that was his sandbag dropping. All that sort of thing. Positive. And again Berchtesgaden which is where Hitler was.
JH: And he kept the same —
ME: That was the last. Last op. Twenty six of them. That was the last op that he did. Bombing.
JH: The pilot was the same. Yeah.
ME: Oh Brooking. Brooking. Yeah. His pilot. Brooking, all the way through. The same pilot. A Mr Brooking. He got promoted quite a lot. Started as a flight officer. Whatever his name was. Oh, one of the things he used to say with crash landings. He said, you fly back and it would be on automatic pilot and he said you get almost to the end, seven minutes to landing and he would go and wake the pilot up and say, ‘Seven minutes to landing, skipper.’ And he’d go, ‘Where do you want? What’s the heading?’ He’d give him the heading and they’d go and land it. And he said most, most of the crash landings they had were due to pilot error. Forgot to put the undercarriages down and other things like that. Lock them down. Because they’d just woken. It had been a ten hour flat. The bloke. And he said when he was, when he was flying the skipper said to him once, ‘Why don’t you come up the front and have a look what’s going? How can you sit back there and not know what’s happening?’ And he said he went to the front of the plane and there’s tracer bullets and the wings were like only a foot apart on the planes and there was things diving everywhere and he said, ‘I went back and sat down,’ he said, ‘I’d rather not know.’ But you can imagine the pilot. The stress the pilot must have been under. So coming back, automatic pilot, once you got over the trenches and you’re back switch the automatic pilot on and he had a kip. Then he’d wake him up. Seven minutes before landing. ‘Seven minutes to landing, skipper.’ ‘Alright. Heading?’ And then he’d take them in. Incredible.
JH: What planes were —?
ME: They were Lancasters.
They were Lancasters. Yeah.
JH: Yeah. Yeah.
ME: Yeah. Lancasters. They were all asleep. Dad was the only one that was awake. He went to Whittlesford on his eightieth birthday. My uncle took him. Uncle Harry. Well, Sally and Harry. Harry and Elsie took him to Whittlesford. 101 Squadron were still there. And he was going through the plane and the guide, one of the ladies, the girls who did the guides he said they didn’t know what, there was a hole in the floor right by where he sat and they said, ‘What’s that for?’ And he said, ‘Oh that’s where you drop the flares out.’ If you wanted to, you know send up flares you didn’t. You dropped them out there. You lit them and you dropped them out that hole. And they didn’t know. And so he’s trying to explain things to this guide and all the other people on the trip are going, ‘Come on, we’re going,’ He goes, ‘No. No. No. He can stay as long as he wants. He’s one of us.’ You know. So she let him prattle on forever. But yeah that was his eightieth birthday so that would have been 19 — quick calculation 1993. No. 2003. Yeah. Eighty. Twenty. Yeah, 2003. Yeah. So it wasn’t that long ago.
JH: No.
ME: But they’ve just shifted from Whittlesford. 101 Squadron. It’s only just moved. Well, was moving then sort of thing. So I think that’s why he was taken. But, yeah the last three trips. The last operations he did was sort of, [pause] turning the page, the Manna droppings. And this is, when I was a kid he used to say, ‘Oh, we’d fly the plane and we flew it so low that you could look up to people on hay bricks.’ You know, haystacks. You were that low you were looking up at haystacks. And I thought, oh yeah. Right. Yeah. Blah. Blah. Blah, you know, ‘Yes dad, I believe you. Not.’ He said, ‘Yes. We had to do this low level flying.’ Right. And then later on when I was older he told me about these Manna droppings. And I said, ‘What were those?’ He said, ‘Well, basically Hitler was, well the Germans as well were starving. They were still occupied. Holland was still occupied and they were absolutely starving, and they couldn’t. No food or anything so we, we dropped food for them. For the Dutch to eat.’ The freedom Dutch fighters or whatever, the Dutch people to eat. And he would fly in, they would fly in low level to a designated place only a couple of foot off the ground by the sounds of things, and they open the bomb doors and chuck everything. And everything would drop out. So no crates. Loose foods in tins. Well, the eggs would have broken I guess. But I think it was tinned. Dried eggs.
JH: Dried. Yeah.
ME: And he said they banked as they flew in there was no one there they couldn’t see any bodies. As they banked and flew away all the food had gone and they still couldn’t see anybody. They just had to clear the field really quickly so they must have been hundreds of people waiting for this to drop and just dropped it. No crates. No nothing. Just dropped it out. and then they flew away. And they did three of those. And that’s, and years later my cousin, Harry’s daughter had married a guy called Phillip and dad died and when dad had died I was talking to him afterwards and I told him about this Manna thing. The Manna drops. And he said, ‘I wish I knew because he saved the lives of my family.’ And he and that too me should be what is lauded about what happened in the war. That’s the thing that people really should. That’s the just incredible act of bravery to fly in that low to save people’s lives. It’s completely the opposite of killing people. Saving people’s lives. It’s just an absolutely brilliant story. And to actually know somebody whose family had survived because of it. just incredible. Even though he bombed the Frisian Islands.
JH: Yes.
ME: [laughs] Which I’m sure they’ll forgive him for. I mean, I guess that’s where the, anyway after that he did his thirty services. Never lost a man as I said. They never had the same crew but he obviously had the same pilot. And I wonder where he is. I wonder if he’s still alive. It might be nice to meet him. Anyway, that’s and so then he went in to, went over to serve the rest of his time over in Egypt and flying bodies to the central, to the crematoriums and what have you. One of the funny stories. When I was at school I was learning German and I came back and said, ‘Oh. I’ve started to learn German,’ and dad went to me, ‘Oh, fish paste is best.’ And I goes, ‘What?’ He said, ‘That’s German for what time it is.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not. It’s wie spät ist es. Not fish paste is best.’ So these are the phrases they were supposed to learn in case they were shot down. I don’t think he would have got very far, do you? [laughs] And again when he came back from Egypt some Arab came over or something oh [unclear] ‘What?’ And these are the phrases they picked up while they were out there. So they were, yeah just ferrying bodies left, right and centre. Get them all back. You know, from the desert and everywhere. All the fighting. So they were getting them all back to the cemeteries in Libya and wherever. Egypt.
JH: And what were they flying? What planes were these?
ME: Oh, they were flying Dakotas.
JH: Oh right.
ME: Yeah. American planes. One time he was out there it snowed and he said it was the funniest sight he’d seen because all these Egyptians thought the end of the world had happened because it was snowing. It doesn’t snow [laughs] and they’d never seen snow before and they were all praying to Allah and running around in circles. It was just a bit of snow. It didn’t settle but it was snowing. So he just thought it was hilarious. Then he came out, left, and he came and he met mum. Well, that, that is a romantic story in itself.
JH: Oh, tell us.
ME: Yeah. It’s a romantic story. I mean mum’s still alive but she’s not well bless her. But she, he was, I’m a DJ right. I’m a mobile DJ. I’ve been a DJ since I was seventeen. He was the first mobile DJ. He would put his wind up gramophone in a wheelbarrow and his 78s and wheel it down to the local Youth Club and wind it up and play the records. And they were all jive records. You know the old. And the Royal Air Force Band and all sorts of things like that. So him and mum were great jivers. But that’s not the story. Mum went back to my gran one day and said to gran, ‘I’ve seen the man I’m going to marry.’ And gran said, ‘Well, what’s his name.’ So, ‘I don’t know his name. I’ve just seen him.’ And she’d seen him wheeling his wheelbarrow. And she cornered him and obviously ended up marrying him [laughs] Fought off all opposition and ended up married. So we guys haven’t have much chance at all. We’ve, I’ve decided that. And they were married sixty five years and they were in love. Oh just the stories I could tell about that is just —
JH: And when did, what year would they have married then?
ME: They married 1949.
JH: Ok. Right.
ME: And they built their own house. Dad was, as I said working in construction so he went to Night School and became a surveyor. Taught himself basically. Went to Night School. Paid for himself to go to Night School. Learned to be a surveyor. And where we lived, Belvedere was bombed out because I mean one of my ex-girlfriends her grandparents were bombed out seven times because we were south of the Thames. So the planes, the German bombers would come up the south of the Thames and just bomb everything because the arsenal was there. And they didn’t know where it was exactly but they knew it was south of the Thames so they just bomb along south of the Thames. So when I was a kid I used to play in these bomb holes and pretend they were bomb holes. And when you grow up you realise they were bomb holes [laughs] So you played war in actual bomb holes. But no, they got a bombed out site, boarded site. A house. Dad, dad designed the house. They dug the, mum dug the foundations and then he employed builders and they built the house. Family house. And so and my sister was born 1950. So they were married in ’49. So just checking [laughs] And it well just he was a surveyor and ended up working for several companies and ended up at housing construction in London where he was a quantity surveyor. So basically his job was to price. If you were building a housing estate which they were he would price up the housing estate and they’d invite tenders. And they’d all come in. He’d lock them in a drawer and then he’d go out and price the job up and come back and find which tender was closest to what he estimated the cost to be. Not the cheapest. The closest one to what he estimated it to be. But the corruption in the, there was so much corruption there he said because they had this little box that said percent discount which was always empty when he put the tenders in to the drawer and when he got them out it had already been filled in so that it was, percent discount was closest. But we won’t go into corruption in government because that’s just too much because he was as honest as the day is long. He would not. He hated it. The corruption was just too terrible for words. But —
JH: Was he working in that right through to retirement then?
ME: Yeah. Yeah. I mean he basically took early retirement. They shut County Hall down. He just took early retirement. So he retired at fifty six and moved down to Kent. In to this lovely village called Woodchurch. It’s got two pubs, one church, one cricket square and a windmill and it’s just archetypal, and you just go in, drive around and go out again. It’s not really. Jan Francis lives there. You know, Jan. “Just good friends.” Jan.
JH: Yeah.
ME: See, name dropping everywhere. Sheila Hancock. Jan Francis. Just loads of them. But a story he did tell about in the war, the Windmill Theatre. Very famous theatre in London which was open twenty four hours throughout the war seven days a week and it had naked women in there. And there were always naked women. They weren’t allowed to move. They just stood on the stage while the acts were going on and what have you. And he told me of what they called the Windmill Steeplechase. And I said, ‘What’s that then?’ And he said, ‘Well, basically the guys in the front they would stay there for ages and if they, once the act ended or whatever they would leave and the people in the seats behind them would jump over to the seat in front and the people behind them would jump over the seat in front. So everyone would move one forward. So the people at the back would slowly move down and then you go home. You’d probably spent all forty eight hours rest. All your R&R was spent in the Windmill Theatre jumping over seats. But the Windmill Steeplechase. Now, no one’s ever heard, no one’s ever told me about that since. Dad was the only person that told it to me. So that was quite amusing. The Windmill Steeplechase. But no, I mean he had, he had a great life. He just really was honest. He enjoyed his golf.
JH: Is that what he did in retirement really?
ME: Yeah. I mean he was.
JH: Golf and —
ME: Golf was basically his passion but mum joined him with golf as well. She couldn’t, if you can’t beat them join them and they just used to go on holiday and just play as many golf courses as they could. Just go somewhere in the UK and play as many golf courses as they could. But I mean the rows, the only rows they ever had, the only rows were well when one of them played more golf than the other in a week [laughs] It was like, ‘You’re playing more than me.’ ‘So.’ So they used to play three or four times a week. But no, I mean it was they were incredibly in love. I mean I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean I’ve never been married because I could never compete with how in love they were. Dad would come home from work and snog her face off before we could have our dinner. I was just like wow. She’s, yeah it’s just incredible.
JH: Well, thank you Martin for allowing me to record this interview today and, yeah I’m sure everyone will enjoy all the memories that you’ve been able to record about your dad. Thank you.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Martin Edwards
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Judy Hodgson
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-06-21
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AEdwardsM180621
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:23:14 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
Martin Edwards recounts the war-time stories of his father, Frederick Edwards. Frederick was born in Kent in 1923, and lived on the family farm. He joined the RAF in 1943 as was posted to Canada for training as a navigator. On his return to England, he finished his training and joined 101 Squadron where he completed his tour of thirty operations in Lancasters. Martin tells several humorous stories told by his father, including the time the mid-upper gunner shot down a cheese sandwich. On another occasion, when the aircraft had a hung-up bomb, Frederick tried to kick the bomb free without success, and as their radio had been damaged, they sent flares upon their arrival and were directed straight into a hangar, where they told senior officers and everyone scattered. Often on the return journey, the crew went to sleep after they left enemy territory with the aircraft on autopilot, except for Frederick, and it was his job to wake the pilot up seven minutes before landing, to take control. During his time on operations, none of his crew were killed, although the bomb sight was hit by anti-aircraft fire whilst the bomb aimer was looking away. Frederick told Martin that he was disappointed in the reaction he got from people after the war about the bombing of Dresden. His final three operations were Operation Manna food drops over Holland. He was then posted to Egypt where he flew C-47's carrying bodies of servicemen to the cemeteries. He finished his service in 1946.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Nick Cornwell-Smith
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Egypt
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
North Africa
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Berchtesgaden
Germany--Dresden
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
1946
101 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
C-47
Lancaster
navigator
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Elsham Wolds
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/864/11106/PHaytonK1701.1.jpg
ef6b69d8536b3e5ebdb6b4231318428f
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/864/11106/AHaytonK171004.2.mp3
2342cec6176bee1aa281e272dd002da5
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
A name given to the resource
Hayton, Ken
K Hayton
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Ken Hayton about his father George Stanley 'Stan' Hayton (1912 - 1971). He served as a fitter at RAF Woodhall Spa and RAF Riccall.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-17
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
Hayton, K
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JS: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Joyce Sharland. The interviewee is Ken Hayton. The interview is taking place at Mr Hayton’s home in Andover on the 17th of October 2017.
KH: Yes.
JS: Right. So, Mr Hayton, can you tell me about your father?
KH: My father was George Stanley Hayton. Always known as Stan. And before the war he was employed by Lloyds Bank. He was born in Durham City in two thousand and err now then let me get this right [pause] in 1912, and lived in the city all his life until his death in 1971. In, around about the early time, early days of 1940 he was given permission by the bank to join the Royal Air Force as a volunteer. Which he did. And I know that he did join as a volunteer because initially his uniform had the letters VR under the albatross on his shoulder flashes. It would be 1940 that he joined up because I have recollections as a small boy of going to Durham Station to see him off. I believe his initial training took place at RAF Padgate. And then after that was completed he went on to his trade training as a fitter armourer which I think took place at Lytham St Anne’s. I’m not sure about that but I think that’s where he went. Once that was completed he was posted to Bomber Command into 97 Squadron which was based at RAF Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire. A satellite unit to RAF Coningsby. And he remained there right throughout the war or almost to the end of the war. And towards the end of the war he was posted to RAF Riccall in Yorkshire where he was involved in preparing all the redundant 303 Browning aircraft guns for storage in case they were ever needed to be called back into service. He was demobbed from RAF Waddington in around about the latter part of 1945. I do believe that he was offered a commission if he was prepared to stay in the Royal Air Force but his duty he felt was to the bank who had released him early. So he then was demobbed and joined Lloyds bank where he remained employed until he retired after having served forty years. During his service at Woodhall Spa he was involved in bombing up Lancasters for raids over the occupied territories and when 617 Squadron was due to take, take-off for the Dams raid 97 Squadron was moved back to the parent unit at Coningsby and 617 Squadron came in to Woodhall Spa. I can only think that that was done from a security point of view because it would be much easier to maintain security on a single Squadron station like Woodhall, rather than on the main base of 617 Squadron which was of course RAF Scampton. My father was involved in the bombing up of 617 Squadron for the Dams raid. And I only learned about this when after the war and the production of the film, “The Dambusters,” my father and I went to see it at the cinema in Durham. And on the way home we were discussing various things in the film and it came out that my dad had been involved with 617 Squadron. And when I asked him about the parts of the film which showed the aftermath of the raid on the countryside I said I wondered if that was anything like what had actually had happened and whether the filmers had got it anything accurate. And he said, ‘Yes. It was just like that.’ And immediately after that he said, ‘But don’t tell your mother I said that.’ I can only think that that comment was made because he had been taken over the Dams in one of the Mosquito reconnaissance aircraft which did the photo reconnaissance after the Dams raid. I’ve no proof of that but I can’t see any other reason for the comment which he made except that he was there. He had been very much involved in the bombing up of the aircraft and this I think was why he wanted to go and see the film because neither he nor I were great film goers. When he was at Woodhall there was an incident at a bomb dump near Snaith which is not too far away from Coningsby and Woodhall when a Lancaster came down on the edge of the bomb dump and my dad was involved in the clearing up operations. And I think that had an effect on him because we never ever had chops as a meat meal and he could never stand the smell of lamb being cooked. No other reason that I can think of for that reaction other than the involvement that he’d had in clearing up what obviously must have been carnage with the Lancaster coming down on the, on the edge of the bomb dump. At one time during the war my mother and my sister and myself went down to Woodhall Spa because my dad couldn’t get any leave. It was during a high pressure time I think of bombing raids and he wanted a pushbike. And being the elder of the two children I was given the responsibility of looking after the bike. I can remember feeling quite proud that I’d been given the responsibility of taking care of this bike all the way down from Durham to Woodhall Spa. During that journey we passed through York Station not long after it had been blitzed by the Luftwaffe and it really was in a very bad state on one side of the station. Of course the Luftwaffe went for York because it was a main railway junction during the war and if they could have disrupted the railways it would have had a marked effect on our war effort. The other effect I think that I learned about with on the family was when my father came home on the odd occasion that he could get home on leave he always changed out of uniform into civvies before he saw my sister because my sister was younger than I was and she thought that the RAF was a sort of box that my father was locked up in and the uniform always brought that home to her. But we can only think that that was one of the reasons that dad always got changed as soon as he came home. There was not a lot of other effect on us as a family except that once my father had joined up we moved out of the council house and went to live with my maternal grandparents in the city which overlooked the river and the Cathedral. And just thinking about that period in the early days of the war Durham City is what might be regarded at the centre of a hub of a wheel with the perimeter being on the three main rivers. The Tyne, the Wear and the Tees with the shipyards in Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. And at the beginning of the war we used to get all the air raid warnings if enemy aircraft were coming in for any of those three places. But we never had anything over the city. And eventually we stopped getting air raid warnings unless the aircraft were heading inland. So we were very, very fortunate. Not so my wife who was a Sunderland girl and she lived through the various Blitzes in Sunderland and it had obviously an effect on her as a young girl. Much more so. And I didn’t realise until after we were married and we were talking about things that had happened during the war how fortunate we had been as a family because my maternal grandfather was a great gardener and had allotments which provided vegetables. And we also had an orchard at the back of the, at the back of the house so that we always had fruit. And he kept chickens in the orchard so we always had meat. And it made me realise, talking to my wife just how lucky we had been having all those facilities when I heard of the sort of things that she had had to put up with in Sunderland. So, you know there were many things that happened during the war which folks don’t realise. I mean that was only a distance of twelve miles between Durham City and Sunderland and yet such a difference in the effect on families that lived in, in those two places. My maternal grandfather had been a forge smith in Yorkshire and at the beginning of the First World War he was sent up to Durham to work in the forge there. And they sent him away from Yorkshire because the recruiting officers were fed up with him trying to join the forces and told him he was much more valuable making the armaments for the forces rather than him going out into Europe. So that was how the family from Yorkshire came to be based in Durham city and how my parents met. Because my paternal grandfather was trained as a pharmaceutical chemist and during the First World War he was stationed in Mesopotamia. I think as part of the Northumberland Fusiliers. But I’m not certain about that. He eventually moved into the motor trade and that was how I knew him all my life. The effect, I think on my mother wasn’t anything that I ever knew about or thought about. She had started training as a teacher before the war and of course like all women had to do something and once my sister got to school age she went back to teaching. So as a family we were still a fairly compact unit. Whilst we were living with my grandparents as I say we were in a house that overlooked the river and the Cathedral. And there has been for many many years the knowledge that if ever the Durham Cathedral were to come under attack for any reason whatsoever St Cuthbert who the Cathedral is dedicated to and who is buried in the Cathedral would save it. And of course Von Ribbentrop was determined to obliterate all the main Cathedrals in the United Kingdom if he could. And shortly after the raid which destroyed Coventry Cathedral we had an air raid warning in Durham and that was as I say by this time quite unusual. So we were due to go down into the cellar of the house which was our air raid shelter but looking out of the window there was the mist rising off the river. And of course the river is an ox bow around the central peninsula of the city on which stands the Cathedral and the castle. So this mist rose off the river and it’s always been said that that was St Cuthbert’s way of protecting the Cathedral. And certainly that mist blanketed the whole of the city and we could hear the German aircraft over the top of the city. It was definitely German aircraft because their engines weren’t synchronised like the English or British aircraft engines were. And they were over the, overhead going around and around. Nothing happened and eventually they flew off. The all clear went. And as the all clear went the mist descended back to the river. And I can vouch for that because as a youngster I saw it out of the windows of our house. My grandparent’s house. And it’s made a lasting impression as you can probably gather. I really don’t know that there’s much else that I can say apart from the fact that my own Royal Air Force service which was three years as a regular and two and a half years on the reserve and during that time the one thing that I was very proud to wear was my father’s cap badge. Sadly, I no longer have that. I have my own cap badge but I think my father’s cap badge must have gone back with my uniform when I had to return it to RAF Fenton which was my call up base when my two and a half years reserve service was ended. The only other thing of my father’s which I have apart from his ‘39 ‘45 Star and Defence Medal is a piece of metalwork which I know was part of one of his trade tests in which I think was part of the bomb release mechanism for a Lancaster. I can’t be sure about that but the trade test would be taken after he’d started working on Lancasters so I think it’s a fair assumption that that’s probably what it is. I don’t know that there’s much else that I can say.
JS: You said you recall going to the station to see your father off.
KH: Yeah.
JS: How old were you then?
KH: I’d be about seven.
JS: About seven. And you went with your mother and your sister?
KH: I don’t think my sister went. My sister would only be about three. Three and a half and so I don’t think she went. She would probably stay with my grandparents. But I, I can certainly recall going to the, going to the station in Durham and seeing, seeing dad off on the train. Little bits of things like that they do stick in your memory and you know it’s a bit like the [pause] the memories of the 9 o’clock news during the war. Alright, as a youngster you don’t appreciate everything that is being said but the things that stick in my mind are Big Ben, and my grandparents sitting in the lounge and everybody being quiet and listening to the news. It was a nightly ritual and you know its little things like that which, you know I think need to be kept in mind. And I think future generations need to know how important it was to us at home to know what was going on. And the only way we could get recent, decent reliable news was the BBC. And you know it was important to everyone I think and I’m quite certain that my family weren’t any different from countless other families throughout the country. At 9 o’clock every night the wireless was turned on and we had the news. There wasn’t all the current news from the battlefield and all the rest of it and I think it’s perhaps just as well. I think we get too much of this instantaneous news now and it doesn’t give people time to digest really what’s happening. Yeah. Instant gratification in a different form. Perhaps I’m being old fashioned.
JS: Did, as far as you’re aware did your mother ever receive letters from your father. Was he able? Could he write letters? Could he communicate? Make phone calls perhaps. Do you ever recall him making contact when he was away?
KH: I don’t recall any phone calls. I don’t think, in fact I don’t think we had a phone in the house so that wouldn’t have been possible. Letters I think possibly he did get able, he was able to send. I mean as he was based in this country I don’t think there was any problem in that respect. But it didn’t sort of register on me as a, as a youngster. I mean that’s not something that I would have been aware of I don’t think. The only things that I was aware of were, you know the pleasure of having him come home on leave on the occasions when he could get home. And as I say the occasion when we went down to Woodhall Spa and it would be during my school summer holidays. And the one, the one thing apart from the pushbike being my responsibility the one thing that I can remember of that little holiday from our point of view was seeing a Lancaster loop the loop. Which was totally out of order. And I believe talking to my father afterwards that that particular exercise had such a damaging affect on the airframe of the aircraft that it was written off and I believe the pilot was severely disciplined because obviously you don’t write off expensive aircraft. But it shouldn’t, it shouldn’t have happened but I can remember seeing it and was quite surprised. It was just one of those little things that come back to mind as you, as you think about what, what happened. And another thing that has just come back to my mind thinking about that was at the beginning of the war just after my father had joined up and before we moved in with my grandparents I can remember being taken into the shelter in the garden when there was an air raid warning and looking up into the night sky and seeing searchlights over towards Sunderland and seeing what was obviously an aerial dogfight because you could even at a distance of twelve miles you could see the tracer. And that, that’s something which has just come back to me since talking about seeing the Lancaster. We shouldn’t have been out of the shelter but, you know youngsters do things that they shouldn’t do even, even in wartime. Yeah.
JS: So, did life for you as a young lad, did it more or less go on as normal? You were going to school. You were helping around the house presumably, were you? Were any of your friends lives touched in a bad way by the war? Did any of them lose close relatives.
KH: No. Not that I can say. I mean, as youngsters we didn’t sort of discuss the, we didn’t discuss the war. It was something that was going on and we had the black out and there was no possibility of after school work or sports clubs or anything like that. They were all off limits. When school was over you went. You went home and you stayed at home. You couldn’t go and play out. Which we could once the war was over. But we didn’t [pause] I can’t recall sort of discussing or talking about the war as a youngster at school. Not even when I got to Grammar School just towards the end of the war. The only thing that was noticeable when I got to Grammar School was the fact that there were quite a number of older teachers there who had obviously stayed on beyond retirement because the young teachers had gone into the forces. And I was made well aware of that because both my, my uncle and my father had gone to the same Grammar School and some of the teachers that taught them taught me. Which was sometimes a little embarrassing because on occasions, I can remember one particular occasion in the physics laboratory when I’d been assisting in dealing with some electrical experiment which had a series of plug keys connecting wires up and one thing and another. And that master was one of the masters who had taught my father. And in operating one of these plug keys I’d managed to disconnect some of the, some of the wires. And the master just looked at me and just sort of tut tutted and said, ‘Your father would never have done that.’ Which you know, it was a little embarrassing at the time but you get on with it. But it was only things like that I think which made you realise that the war had had an effect. Then of course towards the end of my Grammar School career a number of the teachers who had been away on war service were coming back and the older ones took well-earned retirement. Not something which you would tend to think about until later on when you look back and you think, oh I wonder why that happened? And then as you get older yourself you realise why these things happened. It’s not, not something that you think about a lot but when you do think about it, it all comes back. Yeah.
JS: Do you have any recollection of the atmosphere on the day the war ended and the immediate aftermath of the war ending? Can you remember, were there were celebrations in your street? Can you remember your family saying anything or general air at school of relief?
KH: Not really. Again, it was something that yes there were celebrations in the city quite clearly. But as a youngster, bearing in mind what, I’d be only ten or eleven when the war ended. It wasn’t the sort of thing that you got involved in very much. It was, you weren’t old enough in those days. A ten year old or an eleven year old was still regarded as a child. Unlike nowadays where they tend to be treated as semi-adults. But so, yes there were celebrations and yes a sense of great relief and the hopes that everybody would come home safe. Which, you know was important but not something which as a youngster really impacted on you. I think obviously it would impact on my mother and my grandparents on both sides because not only was my father in, in the Royal Air Force but one of his younger, his youngest sister was also in in the WAAF. So that you know the family I think were a case of well, great relief when they both came home safe and sound. So yes there was a sense of relief and, but as a youngster it perhaps doesn’t penetrate the consciousness in quite the same way as it does as you’re older. But as a family my, we had sort of my paternal grandfather as I say was in Mesopotamia in the First World War. My uncle, my mother’s older brother had been in the Durham Light Infantry between the wars and strangely enough very much like his father he couldn’t go back in to the Army at the beginning of the Second World War because he’d become an employee of the Ministry of Agriculture which was a Reserved Occupation and although the Durham Light Infantry wanted him back he couldn’t go back. So he took it on himself to get involved with the Army Cadet Corps and he ran the Army Cadet Corps in the city for a number of years. Even after the war. Until I think he got to an age where he was voluntarily retired. But it was something which again we, we just took on board. It was part of parcel of, of what we were doing. In much the same way as my grandfather because he had allotments and whatnot could supply friends and family with, with fresh, fresh veg and so on. And also, I think, I know we used to sell apples from the door and presumably what was raised from those went to, went to charities or went to support the, probably went to support the Army Cadet Force I would think because my uncle was so involved in it. These are odd little things which you think about if, you know if you sit down and put your thinking cap on.
JS: And you said after your father was demobbed he came home in his demob suit.
KH: Oh. Yes. Of course all Service personnel got a demob suit. And the one thing that I do remember was that it was a brown suit which was most odd because going back into the bank I don’t think he would wear a brown suit in the bank. Not in those days. Banking was very much more formal than it is now. In fact, I think if my father was still alive and was still involved in banking he’d be horrified at some of the things that happen. One of those things. But yeah. The, the demob set up is a little bit different then I think from when I came out. I mean I had to sign the Official Secrets Act of course when I, when I signed on, and again I had to sign it again at the time I was demobbed. But I spent my three years at RAF Innsworth as part of the Record Office where I was working in the Stats Section until I was seconded to the Home Command Coronation Unit which in fact happened to be based at Innsworth. And we did all our training on one of the local airfields which I believe is now a civil airfield which was RAF Staverton at that time. And we eventually, having completed our training ended up in Kensington Gardens under canvas for the actual Coronation. And of course Coronation Day was a dreadful day weather wise but we were fortunate. Our section of the route lining force were in the Haymarket. And the Haymarket in London in those days was two way traffic and it had islands down the centre. And I was on the edge of the road in the middle of one of these islands and the royal coach came past my side of the island and the outriders that are normally alongside the coach during the procession because of the narrowness of the road had to go in front and behind. And as the coach passed me Phillip must have said something to Her Majesty and she turned to speak to him and I have a photographic memory of seeing her turn towards Phillip. So I had a full face view of the Queen on the day of her Coronation. Granted, around the barrel of a 303 but still something that one never forgets. And that, that night or that afternoon after we’d got back to Kensington Gardens I think it must be the only time that the Royal Air Force had issued the men with a rum ration. It had been such a dreadful day that we were all taken to the mess tent and dished out with a tot of rum. And that evening three of us went off into, into London because up ‘til that point we hadn’t been allowed out of Kensington gardens. But we went to look at the fireworks and we went down to Buckingham palace to see the royal family and their guests going off to the ball at Hampton court. And because we’d been trained in crowd control as part of our Coronation training we were able to link up with the police to control the crowds outside Buckingham Palace that night. And again something which I didn’t discover until I was married and talking to my wife about the Coronation in London and had discovered that she had been in London with her uncle and aunt and they had been at Buckingham palace on that night. Although obviously neither of us knew the other but we were both there at the same time. Strange coincidence. But we, after we’d seen some of the fireworks on the Embankment we were looking for a drink and all the pubs of course were packed out to the doors as you could imagine. And eventually we looked through the doors of one pub and somebody seeing three RAF uniforms it was like a tidal wave. The crowd opened up to the bar and we were given straight access to the bar and I don’t think we bought a drink for ourselves the rest of that night. One of those things where you know men in uniform in those days were regarded with consideration and there wasn’t any of the problems that sadly we have now where men are told not to wear uniform when they go into towns and so on. Which is, I think very, very sad because the armed forces now and then do a remarkable job in protecting what we have in a democratic country. And it’s sad that men in uniform have got to be told to, not to go in to towns in their, in their uniforms. Although I’ve got to see we do see some uniforms in Andover which we still, it’s not the garrison town that it once was but there are still quite a lot of Service personnel around and we do see some of them in town and nobody ever I’ve never come across anybody making any adverse comment on what I’ve seen in Andover. But I know it does happen in some places. Sad. Very sad.
JS: I expect your parents were hugely proud of you serving in the RAF. Did you ever speak to your father about your time there?
KH: Not, not specifically because the only thing was talking about the Coronation obviously because that was, that was something which you know happens once in a generation. But most of, most of the work that I was doing wasn’t something that you would, you would talk about. Alright you know I mentioned the Official Secrets Act and I was based in a section which dealt with personnel for all the RAF stations throughout the world by command. So you just didn’t talk about it because, well in those days there were so many different commands and obviously a lot more RAF bases throughout the world than there are now that it would have been impossible anyway to keep in mind what happened in any particular RAF camp in the Middle East, or the Far East or in Europe or wherever. But it, it would never have occurred to me to have discussed anything to do with that. It was something which wasn’t to be discussed even, even with my father. Yes. We’d talk about inconsequential things like guard duty and having, you know things like hearing the experiments with the after burners for jet engines which took place at a company called Rotol which was just up the road from RAF Innsworth. And also seeing some of the test flights of the, the RAF Javelin. The Gloster Javelin which was in its test flights was always supported by a Meteor. And seeing those two aircraft together made you realise how big the Javelin was. Because of course it was being built at Gloucester, in the factory on the outskirts of Gloucester which was not far from where the Record Office Unit was. So things like that. Yes. You could remember and you would talk about it. I would talk about with my father, you know because he’d obviously been involved with Lancasters and Manchesters, and I think it gave him a taste for flying because when he came out of the Royal Air Force he joined the Newcastle Aero Club and got his private pilot’s licence which, so that he flew Tiger Moths and Austers. And both my wife and I flew with him in the Tiger Moth. I can remember going to the Aero Club on one of their at home days when there had been all sorts of demonstrations and one thing and another and my dad had said to my wife, ‘Come on. I’ll take you up.’ And they went. They went up and flew out over, over the border country. Over North Northumberland and so on and it was, it was a very nice night.
SH: Very cold.
KH: And it was, yes. As my wife just said, very cold. And it must have been quite light up there but it was getting quite dark on the ground and I can remember the flight engineer who was a very, very good pilot himself standing on the grass outside, outside the hangars striking matches as my dad came down. That was, that was quite amusing. Yeah. So we maintained a contact with flying although I never had the opportunity or the time to get a pilot’s licence myself. But I do remember flying with my dad on several occasions when I was at home from university. Yeah. Yeah. Strange. Strange how things have a knock on effect because although my father’s uncle was one of the early members of the Newcastle Aero Club I don’t think there had been any thought of my dad getting involved until he came out of the Royal Air Force. One of those things. But yeah.
JS: You say you kept up that connection with flying. Did he keep up any connections in terms of any Associations? Did he meet up with people he’d served with? They were quite a fluid bunch as I imagine in various parts of the country.
KH: You see, I think there was only one person that he ever sort of had contact with after he came out of the forces. See the Royal Air Force is rather different from the Army, for example where in the Army you move as a regiment or as a section of a regiment. So that you have that connection with a bunch of chaps or girls who are together as a unit. In the Royal Air Force there’s a subtle difference between the aircrew and the ground crew. The aircrew will move with the Squadron. The ground crew tend to move as individuals between units because they, they are posted. And I know this from my RAF experience myself in the Record Office. They are posted as individuals to, to a unit. To an RAF station. They’re not posted to a Squadron like they were during the war. But even during the war as exemplified by the fact that although my dad was posted to 97 Squadron and was based at Woodhall Spa when 97 Squadron moved out it was only the 97 Squadron aircraft and aircrew that moved out. The ground crew remained there. And that’s how my father came to serve with 617. Because 617s ground crew would remain at Scampton. That’s the difference. So that you don’t have that sort of ongoing connection except as aircrew. I mean, you talk, if you talked to people who have been aircrew and we’ve got a near neighbour who was in the Royal Air Force and he still goes. He was a, he flew helicopters and various things. And he still has Squadron reunions. But I think that’s the difference. Understandable when you know how the, you know sort of how the system works. I don’t know about the Navy although my niece has just retired as a naval officer. I don’t know. They, they are sort of posted to ships more or less. So I think the navy and the Royal Air Force have a similar —
JS: System.
KH: A similar sort of system. Unlike, unlike the Army and probably the Royal Marines.
JS: And he didn’t discuss the war much?
KH: No.
JS: In the years that followed it. He went back to working at the bank as you said.
KH: Yes.
JS: Because he felt he owed them that because they had released him to go.
KH: Yes.
JS: And he stayed working in Durham.
KH: He stayed in Durham. He, he for a short while he was moved to Bishop Auckland which is about twelve, twelve or fifteen miles outside the city. He moved to Lloyds Bank there for a short while but didn’t move out of the city because it was within easy travelling distance. So, yes he remained at Lloyds Bank in Durham until he, until he retired. Yes. He became a sub manager at one of the sub branches of the city but it was a sub-branch in one of the mining villages. So it was not a case of having to move. So we, as a family we remained in the city and I only left the city when I joined the Royal Air Force myself and then when I went to university and then, you know that sort of broke the, broke the connection although after, after we were married because my wife and I were married in the city in our parish church and after having lived in the East Midlands we moved back to the North East but not to the city because I was then working in Newcastle. So it was only my parents who remained in in the city and they both remained there until they died.
JS: And you lost your father at quite a young age, didn’t you?
KH: My father. Yes. He died very very suddenly when he was only fifty nine. Which was a great shock. Particularly as, or within, within the previous fortnight he’d had a full flying medical and passed. Passed his full flying medical and then had a massive heart attack within a fortnight. So it was, that was quite a, quite a shock for all of us.
JS: For all of you. Yeah.
KH: And at that time my sister was in, was living in Australia because her husband was a civil engineer and he was working out there and so, she wasn’t here when he died.
JS: And your sister’s name you told me was Ann.
KH: My sister was Ann.
JS: Ann. Yeah. And your mother’s name for the record.
KH: My mother’s name was Hilda.
JS: Hilda. That’s right.
KH: Her maiden name was Lambeth. L A M B E T H. And that is my middle name.
JS: Ok. And she stayed in the city, did she?
KH: She stayed in the city. She remained in the family home that was bought. That they bought after the war when my father was demobbed and until she eventually went into Sherman House Hospital which was a Church of England Old People’s Home which was where she died after having, having had a series of strokes unfortunately.
JS: And you did give me the address of the family home at the time.
KH: The family home that was bought after the war was 24 Church Street Head. Church Street having been split into two sections, Church Street proper which ended where, just above St Oswald’s Church which was our parish church and the parish church. The infant school which was attached to the parish church that was sort of the dividing line. Up to that point it was Church Street and from there up to the crossroads at the top it was Church Street Head. One of those peculiar things that you get in cities where one street has two sections.
JS: Yeah.
KH: Yeah. It was, in those days it was basically on the outskirts of the city and just beyond the road that ran across at the crossroads there was the university. One of the university science colleges there. But beyond, but that was quite small. And beyond that were woods that, the woods which surround the city and a lot of that land was owned by the university because the majority of the land around Durham City was owned either by the university or the Cathedral, and all that land now is occupied by new colleges. There are one, two, three, four. At least four colleges now on the south side of the city. No five. Because there was a female college opened. That was the first one to be opened just after the war and it was opened by the Queen when she was Princess Elizabeth. So there are all those colleges now are built on what were woods and fields. It’s quite, quite an alteration. And I haven’t lived in the city since 1961, and, and I’m quite certain that there have been a lot more alterations since. Well, I knew the city obviously beyond ’61. I didn’t live in the city after ’61 but obviously my mother and father did. So until we moved south in 2000 I was in and out of, in and out of the city so I know what developments went, went on up to the beginning of the current century but what’s gone on in since then is anybody’s guess from my point of view. Obviously there must have been a lot more development but —
JS: Yeah.
KH: Not that I’m aware of.
JS: Places change don’t they? Yeah. Right. Well, that’s really comprehensive. Thank you very much for all that for your time in, and your patience in talking to me about that. Is there anything else that you can think that you would like us to say for the record given that it is a Digital Archive. Was there anything that you would like to say? Anything you can think of now or any comments that you would like to make?
KH: Not really. Except, the only thing that I would say is that I feel that it is vitally important that what the likes of my parents, my wife’s parents and their generation what they did for this country should never ever be forgotten. And the generations that come up it should be made quite clear to them why we are still a free country. And they should never assume that things will just drop into their lap. Everything that is worth anything has to be fought for and cherished. Those are the things that I think are sometimes lacking in the teachings now of the youngsters coming up like, like our granddaughter. I mean our two children when they were at school were taught a certain amount of history and in fact, it’s quite amusing. They came home on one occasion and we, we discovered that they were being taught the details of the ‘39/45 war as history. So we decided as parents that we weren’t just parents we were history. But you know, that was, that’s the lighter side of it. But I think seriously the current young generation I don’t think they’re taught the history. Not just what happened in two world wars although obviously they’re getting a lot about the First World War just at the moment but I think, you know some of the so called ancient history of this country on which a lot of our civil rights are founded. A lot, a lot of that doesn’t seem to be taught anymore and I think that is very sad. And I think, you know the education system needs to be looked at in that respect because we can’t afford to lose our history because that is part of our identity. Alright. I might be pontificating a bit but I do feel fairly strongly about it and I wouldn’t want to be called a Little Englander but you know I think we need to be proud of Great Britain and ‘great’ being the important part of it.
JS: I don’t think many people will disagree with you. I think that’s absolutely a fair point. Well, again thank you very much. Thank you for your time and your patience and thank you to Sybil as well, your wife who is here with us. And I very much appreciated you taking the time
KH: I’m only too pleased to have been able to do it because I think it’s important that those of us who lived through the war should leave a record of what, what happened so as far as they’re concerned. And you know sadly the people who actually fought the war for us are becoming few and far between now so it’s only the likes of us who are now getting sort of towards the end of our active life as you might say you know we’re the only ones who perhaps have a memory of it. And if those memories disappear a bit like the, some of the memories of the First World War which have just disappeared and only been found by archaeologists and things like that. Because there was no such things as digital recordings.
JS: No. No.
KH: Which is what we’ve got now.
JS: No. We’re fortunate to have the tools now at our disposal and that’s what the Digital Archive is all about.
KH: Yeah.
JS: Which is keeping those memories alive and keeping that message alive
KH: Yeah.
JS: So that, so what you’ve done for us today is really important.
KH: I’m pleased.
JS: So thank you very much both of you.
SH: It’s ok.
KH: Pleased to help.
JS: Thank you.
KH: Really pleased to help. Thanks
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Ken Hayton
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Joyce Sharland
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
2017-10-04
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
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Sound
Identifier
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AHaytonK171004, PHaytonK1701
Format
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00:59:30 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Second generation
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Durham (County)
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Tyne and Wear
England--Yorkshire
England--Durham
England--London
England--Newcastle upon Tyne
England--Sunderland (Tyne and Wear)
Description
An account of the resource
Ken Hayton’s father, George Stanley Hayton (Stan), worked worked for Lloyds Bank. In 1940 Stan left his post to join the Royal Air Force; Ken recalled going to Durham station to see his father off, travelling to start basic training at RAF Padgate. Ken believes his father completed his training as a fitter armourer at RAF Lytham before joining 97 Squadron at RAF Woodhall Spa. When 617 Squadron replaced 97 Squadron, Ken remained and was involved in bombing up 617 Squadron aircraft ahead of the Dambuster operation. Stan was sent to help with the clear up of a Lancaster crash on land near a bomb dump and for the rest of his life he could not stand the smell of lamb being cooked. Towards the end of the war Stan was posted to RAF Riccall where he prepared redundant .303 browning aircraft guns for storage, he was finally demobbed from RAF Waddington in 1945 and returned to Lloyds Bank where he remained until retirement. After the war Stan trained for his private pilot license at Newcastle Aero Club and took both Ken and his mother flying in the club’s Tiger Moth.
Ken describes his schoolboy life in Durham, including leaving the Anderson Shelter one evening and watching searchlights scanning the sky over Sunderland. One bombing on Durham was shortly after Coventry had been bombed: the mist rose from the river and shrouded the city, with local folklore being St Cuthbert protecting the Cathedral. During his father’s service at RAF Woodhall Spa, Ken recalled travelling there with his mother from Durham by train and seeing extensive bomb damage to York railway station. Ken served three years in the RAF, posted to RAF Insworth a non-flying RAF station where the RAF Records Section was based, transferring to the Coronation Unit for training ahead of the ceremony in 1953. He recalled route lining in the Haymarket, due to the narrowing of the road he was very close to the Queen’s coach and in the evening went to Buckingham Palace and assisted the police with crowd control. Ken recalls watching The Dambusters film with his father in 1955 and his father commenting on the accuracy of the film.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1943
1943-05
1944
1945
1953
1954
1955
Contributor
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Jim Sheach
Julie Williams
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
617 Squadron
97 Squadron
bombing
childhood in wartime
crash
Eder Möhne and Sorpe operation (16–17 May 1943)
ground personnel
Lancaster
RAF Innsworth
RAF Padgate
RAF Riccall
RAF Waddington
RAF Woodhall Spa
searchlight
shelter
superstition
Tiger Moth
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/666/10071/AAkrillM-A171204.1.mp3
4daf19c66760c9cf4b943a4befded3d8
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
A name given to the resource
Akrill, William
Billy Akrill
W Akrill
Description
An account of the resource
132 items. The collection concerns Sergeant William Akrill (1922 - 1943, 1436220 Royal Air Force). He was a navigator with 115 Squadron. His Wellington was shot down by a night-fighter on an operation to Essen and crashed into the Ijsselmeer 12/13 March 1943. The collection contains his photographs, letters, and cartoons as well as an oral history interview with Michael and Ann Akrill about their uncle. There is also a subcollection of letters written as a teenage boy to his father in hospital. The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Michael and Ann Akrill and catalogued by Nigel Huckins. Additional information on William Akrill is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/200183/" title="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/akrill-we/ ">IBCC Losses Database</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-12-04
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
Akrill, M-A
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JL: Ok. Ok. I’ll just do a quick introduction.
AA: Yeah.
JL: And then we can just talk and you can go through it. Right. This is Jeremy Lodge on behalf of Collingham District Local History Society and the International Bomber Command Centre on the 4th of December 2017 talking to Ann and Nick about —
MA: Michael.
JL: Michael.
MA: Michael please.
JL: Why have I put you down as Nick?
MA: Well, I don’t know.
AA: Perhaps you put Mick.
JL: Probably. And Michael. We’re going to talk about their Uncle William.
AA: Yeah.
JL: Who was in Bomber Command during the Second World War. So, do you want to introduce yourselves for the tape and then I’ll let you talk.
MA: Yeah. Well, I’m, I’m Michael. I’m the only one of, myself and my siblings who actually saw Uncle Billy but I can’t remember him because he was lost the week after my first birthday. But the story goes that he was on leave the week before my birthday and he offered me either a penny or a florin as a birthday present and I took the florin. I suspect it was because it was shiny and the other one wasn’t but maybe I was just greedy.
AA: Probably that’s true [laughs] I’m Ann Akrill and I never knew my Uncle Billy as he was known but in the family there was always a picture of him on the wall at grandma, granny and grandad’s house and they always talked about him.
MA: And at our house.
AA: And at our house. We had a picture of him as well at our house and granny and grandad and his sister Auntie Mary always constantly talked about him in our childhood. He was a very, very big figure really, wasn’t he in our childhood. He —
MA: He was.
AA: He was always there. He was always around.
JL: Where was he born and where did he live?
AA: He was born in Billingham, Lincolnshire in 1922 and they had a farm there. They were actually tenant farmers. They farmed one of the farms that belonged to the castle and I can’t remember what their names were now. Anyway —
MA: Doesn’t matter.
AA: Doesn’t matter. But anyway, they had a farm there and, and he did go to school there for a while but then in 1931 they moved to Collingham. To Bolting Holme Farm on Swinderby Road and then in 1932 for whatever reason, I don’t know why, they, maybe they didn’t want the —
MA: Decamped.
AA: Like the farm, or they had to move but anyway they moved in 1932 to Potter Hill Farm on, well, I think it’s called Potter Hill Lane. I think it’s technically Station Road but everybody calls it Potter Hill Lane which is where I was born in the farmhouse.
MA: And where I was born in the farm cottage.
AA: Yes. That’s right. And then in nineteen, yes 1931 to 1936 he went to Collingham Boy’s School where he was taught by Mr Evans who thought he was wonderful according to all accounts. And then in 1937 he went to Newark School of Art and was taught there by Robert Kiddey.
JL: Oh right.
AA: Who is quite a well-known, well he’s a sculptor really. I think he was, but he did do some art and we have got some, a picture that he did which is a kind of a silhouette of Robert Kiddey which the Newark Town Hall Museum was rather excited about when I took it in to show them. And then in 1939 he went to Regent Street Polytechnic, in London to study commercial art because he was a very very talented artist. He did many many drawings most of which, an awful lot of them I’ve got in my possession as the only person whose got room to put them I think [laughs] But he was a really really talented artist. I mean, he, and he was also a very, he had a very inventive sense of humour and he did lots and lots and lots of cartoon type drawings which started [pause] Well, the first lot we’ve got that he did were in 1935 when his father was in hospital and he wrote letters to him which all, half the letters were drawings and cartoons of the goings on that happened at Potter Hill at the time and for, in 1935 how old would he, oh thirteen.
MA: He would have been thirteen.
AA: He was thirteen and the stuff that he did it was not only, it was not only that he was a good artist but his sense of humour was, well —
MA: I would suspect —
AA: Overdeveloped. Overdeveloped.
MA: I was going, I was going to say very well developed for a thirteen year old.
AA: For a thirteen year old.
MA: At that time. Maybe not now but —
AA: Yeah. Yeah. And his letters.
JL: Oh yes.
AA: They were all, he never wrote a letter without putting lots of drawings and silly little things in it. And then in nineteen —
MA: Well, then war broke out.
AA: Yeah. Then war broke out and at the end of the 1939 he came home and he didn’t quite know what he wanted to do. He toyed with the idea of being a conscientious objector but he didn’t quite get that far. And then in 1940 until September 1941 he was employed by Smith Woolley and Co in their drawing office at Collingham which he didn’t enjoy shall I say. He hated it actually but he still, I mean he went there and he did the job that he was supposed to be doing and they all had a really good time because there were four or five young men who were all waiting to be either, to either join up or be called up in to wherever. The Army. The Air Force. Wherever. Oh one of them went in the —
MA: Fleet, well the —
AA: The Fleet Air Arm.
MA: Fleet Air Arm. Yeah.
AA: His best friend went in to the Fleet Air Arm because he, he failed his medical because of very poor eyesight for the RAF when he went with Uncle Billy. They both went together. David got knocked back because he had very poor eyesight which he’d no idea he’d got very poor eyesight and then, so he came back home. Uncle Billy got accepted and joined up. David came back home. Thought he’d try for the Fleet Air Arm and they said there was absolutely nothing wrong with his eyes at all. So, it’s assumed that there was somebody who went to join up to the Air Force who had appalling eyesight but they’d mixed up their, you know.
MA: Records.
AA: Their records because David’s eyesight was spot on apparently according to the Fleet Air Arm. So, he joined. He went off to the Fleet Air Arm and they used to compare notes in their letters about the Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm.
MA: I think the other thing about Smith Woolleys was that it gave him a lot of fodder for his cartoons, didn’t it?
AA: It certainly did.
MA: Because there are a lot of them of well particularly the older guys that were working in the office who you can obviously make more humorous comments about as far as drawings are concerned.
AA: Yeah. He did lots of cartoons and for a long time the cartoons were actually on the wall in the Smith Woolleys office. And then I don’t quite know what happened to them in the end but we’ve got copies of all of them that he did. And you can see. I mean, the likenesses are just incredible. Because a lot of the people who were on those cartoons, we knew them in later life.
MA: In later life. Yeah.
AA: You know, there were a lot of Collingham people that we knew and they are so much like. You can see exactly who it is. You don’t have to be told who they are because you can see who they are and some of their children are still around in Collingham and you could see the likeness to them as well, you know. [laughs] Oh yeah, that’s so and so’s son. Yeah. So, I mean he did loads of really, you know all these funny little cartoons about Smith Woolley but he really didn’t like working there because he wanted to get in there and get to the Air Force.
MA: Get at them.
AA: Get at Hitler basically. That was what he was aiming for. And then he joined the RAF. So, he joined the RAF in nineteen, 15th of September 1941. He went to London, to the Oval as a lot of them did in those days. They went to the Oval and they all got sort of signed up and you know all sorts of things went on and he had all these letters that he’s written. He didn’t have a very high opinion of the powers that be in the Air Force because he thought they were all a bit, you know. It was —
MA: Above themselves.
AA: A lot. Yeah, and a lot of what they were doing really was a bit ridiculous. But anyway, and then he went through various episodes and various, he went to lots of different places. He went to, I think from London he went to Aberystwyth. And then from Aberystwyth he went to [pause] where was it he went? Oh, from Aberystwyth they went to somewhere in the Cotswolds I think it was. And that was when he went to the flying school bit which unfortunately he didn’t pass to be a pilot which is what he really wanted to do. So then he went off to Brighton. And then to —
MA: Eastbourne.
AA: Eastbourne. And started training to be a navigator which after, when he started training to be a navigator he realised that actually pilots didn’t have to be very bright at all. Anybody could fly a plane but not anybody could be a navigator. He did have a fairly high opinion of himself I think [laughs] And then he went from oh it was near Reading. That’s where he went to.
MA: Theale.
AA: Yeah.
MA: Theale, it was called.
AA: Somewhere like that. Yeah.
MA: Yeah.
AA: Near Reading. That was his, where he failed his pilot’s test. And then he went to —
MA: Well, Eastbourne.
AA: Eastbourne.
MA: And he was at Eastbourne for quite —
AA: He was at Eastbourne when his bomb, was bombed. And he had little cartoons of him hiding or having a near miss with a Heinkel or a —
MA: Whatever. Yeah.
AA: Something or other.
MA: Yeah.
AA: You know, one of those German bombers.
MA: And he got quite involved in Eastbourne, didn’t he?
AA: Yeah.
MA: Because I think a couple of times he was asked to preach at the Methodist Church and this, that and the other.
AA: Oh, no that was —
MA: No. I think he, I think he —
AA: Did he there? He might have done then. Yeah.
MA: I think he preached at Eastbourne.
AA: He spoke to the young people and things like that.
MA: Yeah.
AA: He was very involved with Collingham Methodist Chapel when he was there. And then from [pause] from there he went to —
MA: West —
AA: West Freugh.
MA: West Freugh.
AA: In [pause] Is it in Ayrshire?
MA: Whichever one.
AA: On the west coast.
MA: Yeah.
AA: Of Scotland.
MA: Near Stranraer anyway.
AA: Near Stranraer. And that was where —
MA: Well, I don’t think it was near anywhere.
AA: That was where he did his final navigation training and they, they used to go out, you know, pretend bombing and things like that and he was a navigator. And that was when he got his navigator’s —
MA: Ticket.
AA: Ticket, and his sergeant’s stripes. Because they all became sergeants once they got their navigator’s thing. And then from there —
MA: And I think they flew over Potter Hill a couple of times.
AA: Yes.
MA: On training runs.
AA: Well, yes. Well, no he did that more from —
MA: The next one.
AA: The next one.
MA: Ah yeah. Probably.
AA: He came down from, back from there and went to [pause] what was it called? Oh. What was it? No that’s West Freugh. I’ll tell you in a minute. I can’t remember. I know. I know it very well what it’s called. But I can’t remember the name of it.
MA: Was that the place that there were three RAF bases with the same name in different parts of England?
AA: No. No. That was the final one.
MA: Oh, that was the final one wasn’t it?
AA: That was the final one. Yeah.
MA: Apparently, one bloke took [laughs] took a week to get back from leave to the base because he went to all the other three first.
JL: Good excuse. Good excuse.
MA: And got away with it.
AA: Oh, what was it called? You know the place in the, it wasn’t the one in the Cotswolds.
MA: Oh yeah. Yeah.
AA: Yeah.
MA: Of course. Yeah. Upper Heyford.
AA: Upper Heyford.
MA: Upper Heyford.
AA: That’s right.
MA: Upper Heyford.
AA: Upper Heyford or Lower Heyford.
MA: Well, one —
AA: Anyway, there was an RAF base.
MA: The base was at upper Heyford which later became an American, an American base.
AA: Yeah. It is still there I think now.
MA: It is. Yeah. I took a photograph of it.
AA: Yeah.
MA: A year ago now.
AA: Yeah. And then they, that, that was when they did the final training and they got paired up with all their, you know, their crew. And from then —
MA: Well, that’s where he really became involved in the community isn’t it?
AA: Yes. That’s right. He met up with a, he was involved with a Methodist Church there and there were some very nice people who were the bakers in the village and they took in, they would, you know sort of adopt —
MA: I think they had —
AA: Airmen who were away from home and —
MA: They had one sergeant and his wife and little boy billeted with them.
AA: Billeted with them. Yeah. That’s right.
MA: And two or three other of these guys who were Methodists used to spend nearly all of their spare time —
AA: And he spent their Christmas there with them as well.
MA: With the Bates.’ Yeah.
AA: Yeah.
MA: He spent his last Christmas with these people.
AA: Yeah. And I think granny sent, sent them some things, you know. For Christmas.
MA: A pack of butter or something.
AA: Yeah, because obviously —
MA: Yeah.
AA: They were on the farm so they had, you know a bit more of the finer things in life to eat.
MA: Yeah.
AA: And they, they used to write to each other for a short time because you know she was so pleased that they were looking after him and, you know all that sort of thing. And then he went off to, well he came back off leave and got sent to this place which was, well, Honington was the main base that they were supposed to be going to which was somewhere in Suffolk. But there are lots of Honingtons.
MA: In the Brecklands sort of thing.
AA: And they all had, they were all, they all had Air Force bases. All these different Honingtons.
MA: And there was also an American base there wasn’t there?
AA: Yes. Yes. He eventually got to the American base. No. I think the Americans were there. That’s right because, and this was a little satellite place where he ended up in which was a place called East Wretham in Norfolk. In Thetford Forest really and he was there for not very long.
MA: Not very long.
AA: Was he? Not very long. I can’t remember when they actually went there. Should be able to find it in here. Yeah.
JL: Was that still a training posting?
AA: No.
MA: No. This was —
AA: That was, this was the real thing.
JL: Yeah.
AA: That was the real thing and yeah, here we are. Oh, there’s one, a letter here from him, “Somewhere in Norfolk or Suffolk. Goodness knows where. I don’t.” That was February ‘43. Yes. “Nobody had been sure which Honington to go to. My bombardier had gone all the way from London to Honington near Grantham, found it was the wrong place, gone back to Grantham where he found two more fellows on their way so they all came back to Bury St Edmunds. They’d heard my pilot and another pilot were also on their way to Honington, Lincolnshire.” So, you know it was all, but when they were there they had a good, this, they arrived at this place in Norfolk or Suffolk which was an American Air Force base, “And we had a good breakfast and a marvellous dinner. The best I’ve had in the Forces. Some wonderful American stuff which you’d thought had disappeared since the war.” And then they got sent off to East Wretham which is just near Thetford and it’s right, the Air Force base I’ve never been able to get to it because it still belongs to the MOD and you have to make an appointment or, and see if they’ll allow you on. They do, it’s where sort of Dad’s Army Country. You know, where they filmed Dad’s Army and all that. But he went, so he’s now then at the RAF station at East Wretham, Thetford in Norfolk. So, he arrived there in February ’43. Mid-February ’43 and then he went out on one raid. One, one flight the first flight he went out on they were dropping mines.
JL: Do you know which squadron it was?
AA: Yes.
JL: Which aircraft.
AA: 115 Squadron and it was a Wellington. And it was at the time when they were just, they were, they were all waiting to go and be converted to Lancasters. And he was hoping that if he was converted, going on a conversion course which they promised them they would be doing in two or three weeks time he would be at —
MA: At Swinderby.
AA: Swinderby, which was like a hop, skip and a jump from the farm where he lived so he was hoping that he would be able to spend some time with —
MA: The rest of them.
AA: The rest of them.
MA: At this stage he hadn’t let his parents know that he was operational. He was going to do three, four, five or something.
AA: Yeah.
MA: Just so as he could say, ‘Well, look —
AA: I’ve done all these.
MA: I told you it was safe. I’ve done them all. I’m right.
AA: Yeah.
MA: But —
AA: So, he did, he did the, he did the one where he went, they went out. I’m just trying to see where it says it and then on the 11th of, 11th of March it was his twenty first birthday and he had lots of lovely presents from people. People had sent him all sorts of things. And on the 12th they went off to bomb the Krupp’s factory in Essen and didn’t come back again [pause] And that was it. So —
JL: That was his first, that was his —
AA: It was his first actual bombing.
JL: Bombing run. Yes.
AA: Yeah.
MA: Yeah.
AA: That was his first one.
MA: They’d laid mines but that was —
AA: And they’d, I’m trying to see [pause] Oh yeah here we are this is, he wrote this book that I’ve got here. It’s got the letters that he wrote to his parents and it’s got the letters that he wrote to his friend David —
JL: Yeah.
AA: Who was in the Fleet Air Arm and they’re very different letters because with his parents it was all, yeah, jolly. This is great and everything’s going fine. With David he sort of laid himself bare and told him what was the same sort of things that David was going through as well. And so he’d written to David and they’d had, I think four of their, his colleagues, four of the other planes they, four of them had gone out on one night and only two came back and then in the morning all these what they called the erks who were the powers that be, you know. The minions from the —
MA: Ministry. The men from the Ministry [pause]
AA: Yeah. That’s right. Those.
MA: Not quite.
AA: They would just come in and just sweep away everybody’s belongings who hadn’t come back and come in, sweep everything up and go out again. So, he’d written about that and and they were, he said they were all a bit [pause] he said [pause] they were all very shaken up about this because and he’d, he’d written, he’d written letters to all the parents of the boys that had gone out and hadn’t come back again. So, I think he was sort of, you know the chap in the group that —
MA: Did that sort of thing.
AA: Did that sort of thing.
MA: Yeah.
AA: And, and then he did, he did write a letter saying to David, saying to him, telling him how he was feeling and said that he wasn’t, he wasn’t worried about going because he’d got to go and there was a job to be done and whatever happened that was, it was ok. He was going. But please tell them at home what I’m, you know that that’s how I feel because if I don’t come back I want them to know that. And he didn’t come back. So [pause] it was all quite [pause] Well, it was very traumatic wasn’t it?
MA: Yeah. Yeah, it was.
AA: Granny and grandad never recovered from it. We can’t, none of the three of us can remember seeing them smiling which is a bit sad really isn’t it? and that was I mean granny lived till nineteen ninety something didn’t she?
MA: Ninety three.
AA: No. Ninety. No.
MA: No, sorry eighty.
AA: Nineteen seventy something.
MA: Nineteen seventy. Yeah.
AA: That’s right. Yeah. Grandad died in the 1960s.
MA: She was ninety three when she died.
AA: We can’t remember them smiling and you know she just, he was their world really even though they had two other children as well but, you know. He’d gone.
MA: Who they loved dearly but —
AA: Yeah. That’s right.
MA: But he was, well, A) He was —
AA: The youngest.
MA: Six years younger than dad.
JL: Right.
MA: So, he was —
AA: The baby.
MA: He was considered the baby of the family and I guess you look after the baby.
AA: Yeah. But he was, he appeared to have a very, he was a special sort of person. You know, there are some people that are just like, there’s something about them that everybody loves. Well, he was that sort of person or so it would appear. We don’t know because we [pause] but everybody said how lovely he was. You know, everybody we’ve met who knew him said what a wonderful person he was. So, yeah.
JL: It's shocking how sudden it is.
AA: I know.
JL: I was watching you leafing through—
AA: Yeah.
JL: The letters. Thinking oh, there’s only two or three pages left.
AA: I know. Yeah. And well, that’s what everybody said when they read it. They’ve really enjoyed reading it but they all know that they’ve got to get to the end.
JL: Yes.
AA: And they know what the end is because it says so on here. You know. Yeah.
JL: What happened to David? Do you know?
AA: David survived.
JL: Right.
AA: And he used to come and see Auntie Mary and, and my grandparents as well I suppose.
MA: Yeah.
AA: But I never met him. We’d never met him.
MA: I never did meet him.
AA: You never met him. I, when my auntie died we found a letter from him and both my other brother and I, my other brother lives in Cardiff. I was working in Newport at the time and this letter from David [Iliffe] was, had the address was from them somewhere Carleon, which is about what ten miles ten miles from Newport. And I thought —
MA: Oh.
AA: Oh. And we got all these things that we’d found because all, all the stuff, all the letters, all his paintings and drawings. Nobody knew that they existed until Auntie Mary died. We had to clear the house out. Went in, up in to the attic and there were just, there was all this stuff. There were suitcases full of all these letters and things which nobody knew. My mum didn’t know they were there. Nobody had ever said anything about them and there was all the artwork and there was all, all these letters. They were all in the envelopes still. All put together in a suitcase. And nobody had ever seen them so I thought hmm I think I’d better find out about this.
MA: This chap.
AA: David Iliffe. So, I looked in the phone book, the Newport phonebook and I found somebody called D [Iliffe] but he didn’t, he wasn’t living in Caerleon he was living somewhere not far away but he was, he was in that phone book. So, I rang him up and I said, ‘Hello. I’m trying to find a Mr David [Iliffe] who used to live in Caerleon.’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s my father.’ And I said, ‘Oh, well, my name’s Ann Akrill.’ He said, ‘Oh, you must be Akey’s family,’ or nephew, niece or anyway to do with because they always called him Akey. David always called him Akey and he had always talked throughout his whole life, he’d talked to his family about Akey as if, almost as if he was still alive. You know, he told them all about him because they were such close friends. So, he was living in, still living in Caerleon so I went to visit him and he was just, well he was so, he was so thrilled that we got in touch. And that’s where half of these letters came from because he had kept all of Uncle Billy’s letters as well and he’d transcribed them all himself and had a file of all these letters which he let me have. So they all went in here, in this book as well. And we kept in touch with him and I kept, I went to see him several times when I was down there but all his family knew all about Uncle Billy because he’d constantly talked about him really. And there was a lovely drawing that Uncle Billy had done of David as well in his, in his Navy uniform which was really nice. But you know he died, it must be probably about —
MA: I don’t know. Don’t look at me.
AA: About ten years ago probably David died. Now I don’t whether his wife is still alive. We have over the past year, we always used to get a Christmas card from her or mum always got a Christmas card from her. But I don’t think we got one last year. But he’s got, he had three sons and I could get in touch with, with one of, with those sons to see if he was still alive which I ought to do really to let him know that —
MA: Yeah.
AA: Mum died. Yeah. But yeah, I mean it was lovely to see him because he obviously was so fond of Billy you know and Uncle Billy was also, also always used to go and visit his family. His parents and his —
MA: Sister.
AA: David [Iliffe’s] brother in law had been lost previous to that and he’s on the Collingham War Memorial as well. His name was Jack Chell. C H E L L. And his daughter, if you are of an age or maybe you have children of an age who used to watch —
MA: Blue Peter.
AA: No. No.
MA: No. Not Blue Peter.
AA: Not Blue Peter. Jackanory. Was Carol Chell —
JL: Oh right.
AA: And she used to be on Jackanory and that was David [Iliffe’s] niece.
JL: So, David was from Collingham as well.
AA: Well, he lived in Collingham. Yes.
MA: Not originally.
AA: They weren’t originally from Collingham.
MA: I don’t know where they came from originally.
AA: No. I don’t. They weren’t originally from Collingham.
MA: But where —
AA: But his father worked for Smith Woolleys.
MA: Yeah.
AA: And so David worked at —
MA: Mr Chell was at Smith Woolleys too.
AA: No. No.
MA: Mr, Mr [Iliffe]
AA: Mr [Iliffe] Yeah. They lived in the corner house in Collingham which is, I think is it the corner of Church Lane or, as you’re going into Collingham you go past the [pause] and you go past the Low Street turn. I think it’s the next one.
MA: It’s the next one which isn’t Church Lane.
AA: It’s the big house on the corner with a wall around it which is called the Corner House. They lived there. But then after a while they moved to a house because they were renting it from Smith Woolleys probably, you know. They moved to a house which is either on Low Street, right at the far, near the office anyway. It was oh. It’s [pause] I can’t remember what it’s called now. But there’s a farm and there’s a house that have both got the same name and I can’t remember what they’re called. Just around the, if you —
MA: [Manor?]
AA: No. No. it’s What’s it called?
MA: [unclear]
AA: No. It’s right near Smith Woolley’s office. You know. On that corner. By the —
MA: By the tree. By the Stocks.
AA: By the tree.
MA: Yeah.
AA: By Stocks Hill there. I can’t remember. I can’t remember now what it’s called. But that’s where David’s family lived in latter years. They moved there. They moved from the Corner House to I think it was a slightly smaller place.
MA: Yeah. I can’t remember ever having met them. Whether —
AA: No.
MA: How long they stayed in Collingham, I don’t know.
AA: I don’t think they, because I don’t think David lived in Collingham after.
MA: After the war.
AA: After the war. Because he met, he met his wife, she was in the Air Force as well, I think doing, well they weren’t in the Air Force as such were they? They were —
MA: Fleet Air Arm.
AA: No.
MA: Oh.
AA: Yeah.
MA: Oh, the WAAFs.
AA: I think she might have been in the Air Force but they weren’t called [pause] They was, they had another name.
MA: The WAAFs.
AA: They weren’t officially in the Air Force then. It was the Women’s Voluntary Auxiliary. Women’s Auxiliary or something. Anyway, I can’t remember what they were called and he met her during the war and then they got married and I’m, I can’t, I’m not sure where they lived because David carried on as a surveyor and all the stuff that they were doing at Smith Woolleys. He carried on in that profession because I think that’s what his father did.
JL: Yeah. Smith Woolleys, for the tape are land agents in Collingham.
AA: Yeah. And they became more than that didn’t they? They were more than just land agents after.
MA: I don’t know.
AA: Yeah. They were.
MA: Yeah.
AA: Yeah. They were surveyors and all sorts of things.
MA: Well, I mean —
AA: I suppose that’s probably —
MA: And before that they were still a very important family wasn’t it because —
AA: Yeah.
MA: Smith Woolleys was —
AA: Yeah. Smith Woolleys have been around for years, haven’t they? Yeah.
MA: Yeah.
AA: Yeah. So, and really that’s, that’s our story of Uncle Billy.
JL: Ok. That’s great.
AA: Although we’ve got loads of photographs. We’ve got loads of artifacts and bits and pieces, haven’t we? Which —
MA: But I haven’t still got the florin that he gave me.
AA: No.
MA: I suspect mum took that and put it straight in my piggy bank.
AA: Or in your bank account even.
MA: Well, in my bank account maybe.
AA: Well, no. You probably didn’t have one in those days.
MA: I probably didn’t have one when I was one.
AA: Yeah. Yeah.
JL: Shall I switch it off?
AA: I think that would be —
JL: Ok. That’s brilliant.
AA: That will be alright. Yeah
JL: Thank you.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Michael and Ann Akrill
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jeremy Lodge
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
2017-12-04
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
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Sound
Identifier
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AAkrillM-A171204
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Language
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eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
Michael and Ann Akrill talk about their uncle, William Akrill. He grew up in Lincolnshire, and studied art in London and under the tutelage of Robert Kiddey. He considered becoming a contentious objector, but volunteered for the RAF and after training, he served as a navigator with 115 Squadron. He wrote many letter home which focused on the more light hearted episodes of training but the letters to his friend in the Fleet Air Arm reflected his concerns. He wrote about how upsetting it was as crews who did not return had their belongings swept away before a new crew took their place. William celebrated his 21st birthday on 11th March 1943 and on the 12th March set off on his first operation. He did not return. His family stored all his artwork and letters and kept his memory alive with constant reminiscences of the time he had been with them. They discuss the likenesses to real people in his cartoons and his training, his brief operational service and the impact his loss had on their family.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Suffolk
Germany--Essen
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-09-15
1942
1943-02
1943-03-12
Format
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00:34:06 audio recording
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
115 Squadron
aircrew
arts and crafts
bombing
home front
killed in action
navigator
RAF East Wretham
RAF Honington
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1800/31331/ADennyPJ170223.1.mp3
39ed0effcaabb0dfc505eebcdbd89466
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
A name given to the resource
Denny, Janet
Patricia Janet Denny
P J Denney
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Janet Denny.
The collection was 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
2017-02-27
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.
Identifier
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Denny, PJ
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[Other]: All yours.
JD: That means start.
DE: Yes!
JD: My name is Janet Denny and my father was in Bomber Command, but he had quite an unusual story because he began the war as a committed pacifist. [Interference] I never knew him because he was shot down and lost on the very day that I was born and so he was always just a [\interference] photograph on the mantlepiece of my childhood home and I always knew he was a hero, but I didn’t ask very much about him because I didn’t want to upset my mother and my grandparents, and it wasn’t until my mother remarried after she had been a widow for twenty seven years, that I discovered some really interesting books and these were the diaries that my father had written in World War Two. And at the time I had small children, I was busy, so I put them away and thought I’d read them again later. And in fact I didn’t read them until forty years later, when I was myself by then a widow and I’d lost my eldest son, so I was feeling a bit bereft and I thought maybe this man in these diaries, my father, could help me through this horrible period in my life. It turned out he did, very much, because I read the diaries and I quite enjoy writing and I’d been on various writing holidays, and courses and so on, and anyway the top and bottom of it is, I decided to write a book about him. This is the book, which is called ‘The Man on the Mantelpiece’, because that’s what he was to me; he was just a photograph on a mantelpiece. And I needed to find out why he changed from being a pacifist into volunteering for Bomber Command. Now he was a very, he had very left wing political ideals as an eighteen year old. He was very intelligent, well read, but he came from a working class family. His parents had very little education, well, practically illiterate, but he won a scholarship to a grammar school and I think that wass where he was inspired to expand his range of thinking and reading, and he adopted these pacifist ideas. Anyway, this diary, which he keeps for the first month of the war, when he’s expounding his ideals and his beliefs and then it stops. And then two years later he starts another diary and he has volunteered for Bomber Command, and he’s married my mother, a childhood sweetheart in the meantime. So I had a mystery to solve: why did he change his mind? I was very lucky when I was reading this book in that my mother and my uncle, my father’s younger brother, were still alive and very interested and helpful. My mother actually couldn’t really tell me why he changed his mind. She said, well dear we didn’t really talk about things like that, which I found very irritating. Mum, why didn’t you, you’re an intelligent woman, why didn’t you talk about things like that, but then I had to remember that this was the 1940s when women held a very different situation in society: she was the little woman, really, at home. But my uncle was more helpful, I think he realised why, it was partly the Blitz, they lived in South East London, they lived through the Blitz, and my mother, my father found this very affecting, but it wasn’t only that: I think it was also because Hitler turned his face towards Russia and was going to invade Russia. Now Russia, to left leaning young men in the 1930s, was an icon of a good society. I do often wonder how my father’s views might have changed, had he lived, but at the time, yes, Russia was the ideal and the thought that Hitler was to going to invade Russia I think was the thing that really sparked my father into fighting. Well, I was able to follow him through his, all his training, eighteen months of training for Bomber Command. First he thought he was going to be a pilot and then for health reasons he wasn’t, he was demoted to a bomb aimer. Now, this was extra hard for my father because just before the war, the summer of 1939, he’d been visiting his dear pen friend in the Ruhr Valley in Germany, and he had promised his German friends that he would do nothing [emphasis] to harm them, or their country, and here he was as a bomb aimer and likely to be dropping his bombs on the very area where his friends lived. That must have been very tough. I follow him right through, following his diaries, and then I visited the places where he trained and compared life now and then. It was absolutely fascinating for me and I felt all the time that I was gradually discovering my father – very exciting! And anyway, I decided that I really wanted to write about this. First of all I was just going to write a few pages, and transcribe the diaries, add a few comments of my own, staple the pages together for my family. But then on a writing course I was encouraged by a tutor to take it more seriously and I went off and I did an MA in Creative Writing and they, very kindly, the markers gave me a Distinction and said I really must publish this. So that is how the book came about. Now in his diaries, my father says, there’s one section, where he’s, before he’s joined up, when he’s a clerk in a sugar factory, and he says, “Oh, I must be creative, I must write a book, build a house, do something creative,” and he says: “oh Lord help me! Cause I am a clerk,” and then another section when he says he really wants to live his whole span of life so that he can see his children – he’s talking about me – so that he can see his children, see if they are men or women, see if they are great or little and see if they are artists, and he says: “Let there be artists!” Well, I am doing my best to carry on the tradition. He himself was a writer and I have scraps of his writing, but not many unfortunately. Then another section in his diary he says, that, he said, “I really want to live my whole span of life, and I must survive, I will [emphasis] survive,” he says, “but if I don’t, well maybe those who are dear to me will like to keep this diary and find me still living in these pages.” Well, I feel quite jubilant that I have [emphasis] found him in those pages, and I hope others may find him in the pages of this book I’ve written, so, and I feel, at the end of the book I talk about, I talk to my father and I tell him how life is today and how his sacrifice and the sacrifice of all those other lives that were laid down, not only in Bomber Command, but throughout the world, actually on both sides of the conflict, how they have really benefited me and my generation, and future generations, because I have been able enjoy the benefits of post-war Britain. I had a very good free education, I had the benefits of a free National Health Service and I feel that really my generation is a very blessed one, thanks to his [emphasis] generation. Enough?
DE: Absolutely wonderful! Thank you very much. Is it okay if I just ask you a couple of questions?
JD: Of course.
DE: How do you feel about the way Bomber Command has been remembered?
JD: Well, I think it’s very sad that Bomber Command has not [emphasis] been at the forefront of our remembrances since the end of World War Two. I do understand the reasons, you know, the carpet bombing was very controversial and still is, I suppose, and within Bomber Command itself people had different views. In his diary my father talks about a conversation that he has with a veteran of World War One who tells him and his colleague when you get over Berlin, you know, just annihilate it and his colleague says yes of course we will, whereas my father says I couldn’t agree and he’s drawing back from that, it’s his pacifist conscience coming through. But, in recent years of course we’ve had the Memorial in London, which is lovely, but it is just a memorial with wonderful statues, but it doesn’t tell the story of Bomber Command and that’s why this project here is so exciting, because it does tell the story of exactly what happened and how these young men, and they were such young men, such young men, and the losses were so [emphasis] great, but it made such an enormous contribution to that victory, that we really must celebrate it.
DE: Smashing, thank you. Listen, I think we’ve got exactly what we need, thank you. I’m just, probably not able to, it fascinates me that the motive he had for leaving his first job was because he didn’t want to be part of a total war, and then the motive for joining the RAF was because he wanted to be part of the total war.
JD: Yes, I know. It was a complete turnaround, but so many people must have had that struggle, I think, you know, and I think it, that’s why I’m quite pleased, and people have said to me that this is an important book, because it does show that people had that struggle, okay some, like a lot of my father’s friends, who were pacifists, remained pacifists, but as he says, he admires them terrifically for standing out for their beliefs and of course they did their part. They were down the mines as Bevan Boys, or they driving ambulances, or you know, they were doing their bit for the war effort without actually [emphasis] fighting, so they were just as important.
DE: The struggle, it comes across in the book and now you’ve drawn a portrait of your father as a rounded character who has his flaws and his good points and I think it’s absolutely smashing.
JD: Well thank you, I’m really pleased to have written the book and I hope that lots of people are able to read it and gain something from it.
DE: Smashing, thank you.
JD: Good. Right.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Janet Denny
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-02-23
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.
Format
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00:13:52 Audio Recording
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ADennyPJ170223
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Janet Denny
Dan Ellin
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Description
An account of the resource
Talks about her father and her research into his life for her book 'The Man on the Mantelpiece'. Originally a pacifist, he later volunteered and served as a bomb aimer in Bomber Command. Janet talks bout her journey discovering her father’s time in the RAF and his feelings about bombing, including his friends in Germany.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Second generation
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Anne-Marie Watson
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
memorial
perception of bombing war
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1356/22525/PCoombesHS2043.2.jpg
eea433f2d4d40119b197388673169478
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1356/22525/ACoombesDC200306.2.mp3
a287977d72c3f7937dae30d1a2487d18
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
A name given to the resource
Coombes, Horace
Horace S Coombes
H S Coombes
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Group Captain Claive Coombes about his father Squadron Leader Horace 'Ken' Coombes (1921, 148799 Royal Air Force).
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Clive Coombes and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-01-13
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
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Coombes, HS
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JS: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jim Sheach. The interviewee is Clive Coombs. The interview is taking place at Clive’s home in Edinburgh, Scotland on the 6th of March 2020. Clive, maybe we could start if you could tell us a little about your father’s life before the war.
CC: My father was born in Birkenhead in 1921. Went to, went to the local school which was the same one that John Lennon ended up going to a few weeks afterwards. They, the family lived in Garston in Liverpool, and my grandfather was a merchant seaman. My grandmother was obviously what’s the official term now, a homemaker? She had six kids that survived, and a couple that didn’t. My father was the eldest and he, following his secondary education joined the Mersey Dock Board with his brother, Alf. And in 1942, if my memory serves he decided that notwithstanding being in a protected employment that he would join up and he joined the RAF as a pilot, and went to training in America. Did all his training at, in Alabama and Florida as a sergeant pilot. Returned to the United Kingdom in ’43. Was immediately commissioned on a VRT commission as a flight lieutenant and joined 582 Squadron Pathfinder Force straight away.
JS: Ok. So —
CC: So that’s his career prior to, you know that takes him up to his first operational mission with 582.
JS: Ok. Spinning a bit in time your, your uncle also has a connection with Bomber Command. Can you, can you tell us a little about him?
CC: Yeah. This is, this is on the maternal side and my Uncle Jack, Jack Hanne or John Henry Hanne was from Llandrindod Wells in, in Mid-Wales but interestingly of German extraction. And he was the husband of my mother’s sister Nancy Vera Morgan as she eventually died, but it was actually Nancy Vera Guildford then. She married Jack and Jack was in the Air Force when they married. He’d actually joined very early. ’34 ’35. Served in Iraq, and was originally a mechanic. I’m not sure if it, I’m not sure exactly what his official trade was but he was a mechanic and having been a boy entrant, so he really was, you know a very young joiner and then was, then converted to pilot and ended up flying in Iraq on 13 Squadron if again memory serves. Came back to UK prior to the war. Still flying. Converted to Blenheims, flew some very early missions in the war and was killed on the 10th of January 1940 flying a 109 Squadron Blenheim from Wattisham on an air raid over Germany. And he was shot down by a Messerschmitt and crashed in the, in the North Sea. So one of the very early casualties and interestingly the first casualty of World War Two from Radnorshire, in Wales. He’s commemorated both at Runnymede, at the IBCC and on his family, sorry, and on the War Memorial in Llandrindod Wells and a couple of months ago on the 10th of January 2020 my wife and I went down and laid a wreath. Sorry.
JS: No. You’re ok. You’re ok —
CC: So, clearly I never knew Jack but I’ve got his medals, I’ve got a lot of his history and I’m quite proud of him.
JS: As you would be. As you would be.
CC: Yeah. Holder of the, he’s got his, probably one of the few of Aircrew Europe Crosses so he’s got the Star. He gave a lot to the Air Force, you know. Joined in ’35 and trained right through and I’ve got some wonderful photographs of his time as a trainer. As an airman. You know. Some wonderful pictures of air crashes and things like that. And then his time in Iraq as well. What I don’t have sadly is any details of his, of his flying time. I don’t have his logbook. I’ve no idea where that went. And strangely, you know Jack is, I mean he died what twenty years before I was born. I think the sad part is that Nancy, my aunt was pregnant when he was killed, and she gave birth to Jacqueline who, who survived for two days. And that was ultimately the only child that Nancy ever had. She remarried a stoker from HMS Belfast interestingly, and I obviously knew him as my uncle. Predominantly not Jack. And he died very suddenly many, many years ago. Strangely at a funeral for one of his friends. He died in the church at the funeral which was a bit tragic.
JS: Yeah.
CC: But Nancy was always I think actually very much in love with Jack and I’ve got some wonderful poetry written by Jack to Nancy and it’s, it’s quite evocative the memories that go with that. So I probably have a strangely close relationship with Jack albeit that he’d been dead for twenty years before, before I was born but I followed it up and, yeah he did some very good things. He did some very good things and sadly lost his life very early in the war.
JS: Early on.
CC: I hope he would have probably gone on to do a few more things but you know it’s, it’s life and death in that environment. But it was a privilege to do the [unclear] which garnered quite a lot of publicity in Wales. It made the front page of three local papers which I was quite surprised about, but, but quite nice. Quite nice. So his legacy lives on and, you know strangely Runnymede and IBCC, it’s nice to have his name on both and I’ve seen both and I’ve visited both and paid my respects there as well. So, no it’s good. Very good.
JS: The memorialisation thing obviously means a lot to you.
CC: Yeah. I think [pause] I guess it’s probably because, you know I’m very proud of what I did. I did thirty seven years in the Air Force. Got to a pretty senior rank. Been decorated. But there’s no legacy because I have no children. I was an only child and when I die my family name dies and so memorialisation as you get older has become slightly more, slightly more relevant I think and I don’t know what to do to commemorate that. I think, you know one of the things I am going to do is contribute to the ribbon at IBCC. And probably ultimately I would be very surprised if the IBCC didn’t benefit from a considerable legacy from the Coombes family. If there’s only some way of the Coombes family, when I say Coombes family, me and my wife of, of memorialising my father, my uncle, and you know in a, could I say entirely altruistic way myself as well because you know I believe that you know over thirty seven years I’ve, I had a pretty good career. I broke a few, a few glass ceilings in what I ended up doing and it would be nice if that was remembered. But there’s, there’s very little legacy in terms of human kind that will remember that because you know I have a half-brother and a half sister who were dad’s kids but they have they have, they have no kids and they’re much older than me. I have no kids. My wife’s sister has one child and they’ve gone different, different, different line. And so there’s nothing, you know. When Coombes, Coombes, this one dies, Coombes name dies which is really sad. So I just feel as I’ve, you know just hit sixty I think I need to do something about it. And this is probably a way of doing it so also —
JS: But, but there is a, the interesting part in this is, if you like long, very long ribbon of service through the RAF from, from your uncle through your father, through yourself.
CC: Yeah. I mean, I think if we, if we look at it between 1942 and 2014 there was only fifteen months that either my father or I were not serving because at the end of the war dad was demobbed. Went back to the Mersey Dock Board, and albeit that I never actually got around to asking him I’m not sure whether it was him who got fed up with the Mersey Dock Board or whether it was the RAF needed QFIs, but he was, he was dragged back in after about fifteen months on a, on a full term normal commission, and re-joined the Air Force as a flight lieutenant and was posted immediately as a qualified flying instructor. And then when he retired it was only a matter of months between him retiring and me joining. So, I think, you know we could probably stretch it to maybe eighteen, twenty months between early 1942 and late 2014 that there wasn’t either my dad or me in the Air Force which, which is interesting. If you then stretch it further back you know with Jack as a family connection, you know it goes back to sort of 1934, 1935. That, that is, you know that is quite a long time serving for three people alone and bearing in mind that Jack’s service was brought, brought to a very sharp end after only five years.
JS: Yeah.
CC: Having been killed. But dad did a full career. Retired at fifty five as a squadron leader. And I did a full career, thirty seven and a half years retiring in 2014 as a group captain. So, you know it’s, it’s something that we’ve given to blue suits. Yeah.
JS: Yeah. Yeah.
CC: I’m proud of —
JS: Yeah. Absolutely. You, you spoke earlier about your, your dad doing the training in the US which was very common.
CC: Yeah.
JS: And then coming back and going on a squadron. So, with the [pause] how, what sort of operations was he doing then?
CC: Well, it’s, it’s strange that I mean looking in his logbooks which I’m still privileged to have he, he went, his first operational squadron was a Pathfinder Squadron which I think was probably quite unusual because obviously they, they, you know Don Bennett indicated that what he wanted was the best of the best for the Pathfinder Force and 8 Group. But I’ve no idea why dad went on to that. I’m looking at his logbook, looking at his flight assessments from Gunther Field and various bits and pieces. And interestingly I used to serve in the States and I actually went to Gunther Field fifty years virtually to the day that he graduated from there. Which was purely serendipity but I was, I actually visited the base on duty that, very close to fifty years. But I didn’t know that until I checked it. So he was assessed as above the average in pretty much everything so one would assume that he went back and was sent straight to 582. I go through his, his logbooks and they are standard bombing missions, you know, full time. Dusseldorf on the Ruhr. And they were, you know genuine front line Pathfinder operations. Subsequent to that 582 at Little Staughton, he then transferred to 626 Squadron at Wickenby. Still Pathfinder Force, with the same crew which I have no idea why they, why they transferred squadrons. I know that they used to do that and you know maybe 582’s losses were not high whereas 626’s were and they just transferred crews to 626. But he had the same crew throughout pretty much. One Brit, a couple of Aussies and a Canadian. I don’t know where the others were from. I could check, I think. But, but he flew through. He did twenty four, twenty five missions. I only ever once asked him why he didn’t do the thirty or how he felt not having got to thirty and to get his automatic DFC, and his quote to me was, ‘Had I son, you may not be, you may not have been here.’ But I look at what happened after that, and you know now things come out. You don’t know what, you don’t know the true meaning of it all but he went off to be a test pilot and whether that was because he was suffering from what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder or whether they needed highly skilled pilots to be test pilots I have no idea. But you look at some of the stuff that he did and it’s quite remarkable, you know. I mean, one day in his logbook he’s got I think Lancaster, Spitfire, Hurricane, Wellington, Mosquito. Pretty much on the same day. If not the same day sort of three days. And you go wow. Hang on a minute. What aircraft am I in today? You know it’s quite remarkable to do that. And yet you talk to friends of mine who I’ve served with over thirty seven years and, you know they have gone through careers commanding squadrons only ever having flown a Bulldog, a Jet Provost and a Tornado. Or a Hawk and a Tornado so you had four types of aircraft. He had five in two days. So, remarkable different world. I guess, I suppose when again I haven’t checked the dates entirely it could well have been that operations had pretty much finished. Formal operations had finished. I know, having checked his logbook very recently that he flew on Op Manna.
JS: Yeah.
CC: So that probably would indicate that formal operations over Germany had ceased by that time. Hence the reason he didn’t do the thirty. But quite surprising Manna didn’t count as an operational sortie. So, you know, that’s, that’s probably why. I don’t know but —
JS: Although, it wasn’t, it wasn’t without it’s dangers either you know.
CC: Correct. Absolutely right.
JS: Many, many aircrew I’ve spoken to flew on Operation Manna and they all talk about that doubt in their minds as to whether they were likely to be shot at.
JS: Yeah. Yeah.
CC: You know.
JS: So, you know he went off and did that and then he did, he flew Mosquitoes in the PRU role before he was demobbed. And then when he re-joined QFI flying Vampires and Meteors from Shawbury, where he met my mum having divorced from his first wife. So yeah, an interesting career and then ended up for the [unclear] he converted to, to what we now call, is it aircrew spine or something like that? But he was spec aircrew but in those days you had to be dual qualified, so he was an air traffic controller as well and on his down, on his ground tours he was deputy SATCO at Wildenrath in the late ‘50s. And then in the early 70s was SATCO at Lyneham. So, you know that must have been an interesting time when you’ve got a SATCO with, with two wings. And then he went back to flying and finished as ops officer on, his last flying tour was ops officer on 10 Squadron. VC10s. So, you know, he had a pretty varied career in, in what he actually did. So it was, there’s lots of flying hours. There’s forty seven different types of aircraft in his logbook which is quite remarkable really when you think about it.
JS: And a very thick logbook I’m sure.
CC: Five of them.
JS: Five [laughs]
CC: Yeah. Five of them. Five different ones. Yeah. So, yeah pretty much ranging from sort of link trainer through to Harvard, through to Spitfire, Hurricane, Lancaster, Wellington, Mosquito.
JS: Yeah.
CC: A Varsity. VC10.
JS: Yeah. That’s not a logbook. That’s a library.
CC: Yes. It is a library. That’s what it is actually.
JS: Very much. Very much.
CC: It’s a very, you know they are quite important documents to me to see what he did. So, yeah. It’s very interesting.
JS: Yeah. Very good. There’s, there’s quite a lot of discussion about how Bomber Command were viewed after the war. Let’s say, sort of just after the war and that part after that. Did, did you dad ever, ever talk about that or give a view about it or —
CC: Not, not to me. And it’s, I think it might be indicative that it probably happened quite a lot that these guys didn’t actually talk about it. Sadly, my dad passed away in 1990 at the age of sixty eight which you think is not necessarily fair given what, what he went through during the war. You know, by that stage I had joined and strangely I was told what must have been two weeks after my dad died that I’d just been promoted to squadron leader and that would have been nice for him to know.
JS: Yeah.
CC: But, you know c’est la vie. Time is everything. So he never really spoke to me about, about that. I did ask him once when I was younger. I was doing a bit of research and clearly, you know his career influenced me quite markedly having, you know literally joined months after he, he retired. I realised at that stage that the Pathfinders were entitled to wear the albatross on their, on their number one jacket, left breast pocket and I asked dad why he didn’t wear his Pathfinder brevet because my understanding was that, you know once a Pathfinder always a Pathfinder and you could continue to wear it for the rest of your career. And he sort of passed it off saying that ‘Well, you know it’s not de rigueur anymore, and nobody wears it.’ And, ‘Well, probably they don’t wear it any more dad is because there aren’t many Pathfinders left.’ And he never really made comment about that. He always wore his medals with pride but it was just the standard four, you know ‘39/45 Star, France and Germany and the other two. The War and Victory or War and Defence. And sadly, stupidly I’ve never as yet applied for his Bomber Command clasp which I frankly should do I must confess. But he never really commented on it. I think he was amongst a crowd of people who were obviously Bomber Command pilots themselves in his QFI days at CFS but I still think he was quite proud of what he did albeit with the fact that he knew that, that flying over Germany however high dropping bombs was going to kill people. But no. He never really spoke about it. I think from my own personal perspective I, I do wish Bomber Command had had more recognition but it goes down to what we, what we as military guys and girls do. You know. We, we do what we’re told to do. It’s not, it’s not for us to question the policies. It’s for us to deliver what’s required. And, you know, you can extrapolate that argument straight up you know to the Falklands and the Gulf War One, Gulf War Two, the whole lot. You know. Was it the right thing to do? Did Saddam Hussain have WMD we don’t know. Still think there’s no proof but the government made the call. You go do it. Ours is not to reason why but ours just get on with it because that’s our job and I think that’s the way dad would have looked at it as well. He, I sense but only sense, I’ve no evidence that he found it quite strange in 1958/59 to be serving in Germany and living in Dusseldorf which is where we did live knowing that only a matter of years previous to that he’d been over it at thirty five thousand feet dropping two thousand pound bombs. That I think was slighty odd as far as he was concerned. And I honestly don’t think they particularly enjoyed their tour, my mum and dad particularly enjoyed their tour in Germany and I think they were quite keen to get home. And when I look at it they only did eighteen months in Germany and during the period I was born there but, but still not the happiest days of dad’s career probably because there was the subliminal issue of, you know, I’ve been here before but at a different height and with a different mission. So, but no he never formally said. I think what is sad, that he never saw the recognition that has now finally come to Bomber Command in terms of the Memorial and in terms of the IBCC. I think he would have been quite proud of that, and I think he would have been very pleased to have attended either the opening of the Bomber Command Memorial or the IBCC had he still been alive. Again, c’est la vie. The way things go.
JS: Yeah.
CC: As for Jack I can’t answer the question. I have no idea.
JS: Yeah.
CC: My aunt kept many, many clippings of, you know what he did because he was on one of the very early raids where a squadron commander got a DSO. They were presented to the King as a result of that because it really was one of the, it was a late 1939, very early air raid. And, and I think that’s in the days where you know before we were dropping, carpet bombing. And, and I think Nancy was very proud of Jack as well but again you know clearly I don’t know what he would have felt about it. Probably slightly stranger given that his extraction was German, you know. One generation German. So, I mean his father was a hotelier in Germany. So, you know, came over prior to the war so I think he would have felt quite strange about it.
JS: Yeah.
CC: But he was staunchly British. I understand that. And staunchly Welsh as well, strangely. So yeah, a different world. I don’t know. I can’t answer all the questions.
JS: That’s alright.
CC: Haven’t talked about it for a long time.
JS: That’s interesting. That’s interesting [pause] Because your dad served in the RAF for —
CC: Thirty five.
JS: That period after —
CC: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: And to a certain extent as you’ve mentioned earlier that you were born abroad when your dad was in service. Then, then at the end of the day, that thing, you’d been embedded for the, within the RAF a lot longer than you served in the RAF.
CC: Oh yeah.
JS: I suppose that was the, the thing is do you think it was always likely that you would join?
CC: Yeah. I think it probably, I think it probably was. I mean, I guess I vividly remember at school I mean I was fortunate I got a, I won an academic scholarship to an English Public School and it was a case of, ‘Well, Coombes, what are you going to do?’ And I think, that’s from my careers master and I said, ‘Well, I probably will join the Air Force, sir.’ And he said, ‘Right.’ and that was a tick. That’s one solved. That’s one less issue to worry about.
JS: Conversation over.
CC: Yes. You know, so I didn’t trouble my careers master for very long and I remember I, I went for a university scholarship or a university cadetship and didn’t get it, but was offered an immediate place straight from school and which I accepted. So literally after finishing school in the July I joined in the September of 1978. And clearly knowing I had a job I didn’t do particularly well at A level, and very much enjoyed my last year at school and then joined up straight away and actually have no regrets about that because subsequent to that the training I’ve done, you know I’ve got my, I’ve got my masters level education through the Australian Air Force having served out there on exchange. And yeah it was probably the easy option for me but I have absolutely no regrets. I mean, I think if I do have one regret it’s that my eyesight wasn’t good enough to, to allow me to be aircrew so I became a personnel support officer. But in so doing have had a very, very varied career. Done an awful lot of jobs, served pretty much all over the world and, and enjoyed my time. I guess if I were to be held down and pinned to the wall saying, ‘Do you regret not being a pilot?’ The answer is, ‘Hell yes.’ Because I know I had the aptitude and I proved, you know I went through Aircrew Selection Centre, and had pilot aptitude but sadly couldn’t see, and and that’s probably a regret. But not withstanding that I served in some great places. Had I been air crew I don’t think I would have been as good as my dad. I probably would have been a journeyman pilot flying maybe Hercs or VC10s around the world. Which would have been a great time. I don’t think I would have been good enough to go fast jet albeit that in my career I have fortunately managed to log about three hundred hours on fast jets because I’ve got some very good friends and I had a wonderful time. But I have no regrets being ground branch officer because you know what I did in the end of my career particularly, the last five years I did jobs that were aircrew jobs previously and ended up managing to convince those that needed convincing that actually a ground branch officer could undertake these jobs satisfactory. And I think, you know irony of ironies I ended up, my penultimate tour was in Germany as the deputy commander of the Rhine and European Support Group based at Rheindahlen, and part of my area of command was the former RAF Wegberg site where I was born. And so I ended up actually being the garrison commander of the garrison on which the hospital that I was born in resided. So it was a bit, that was a bit spooky but, but also quite oh wow you know how the wheel turns. So, you know no regrets about that. And I know full well had I been aircrew I’d never have done that so that little thing sort of comes, comes to pass. So yeah. Interesting. An interesting career for me but very much influenced by what dad did and sadly, you know I’d only been serving for twelve years when dad passed away so it would have been nice if he’d still been around to see me go, you know a couple of ranks above what he did, doing things that he never did. But, but there you go. That’s life. You make, you make your career choices as he did.
JS: Well. Yes. But I’m, I’m sure he knew that your career was on the right track.
CC: Well, one would hope so.
JS: You know. I think in —
CC: I do remember my second, third tour was I was the ADC to the air officer commanding in Cyprus and mum and dad came out to, to Cyprus for, for a holiday and they were invited kindly by the, by the AOC to come and have dinner and dad said to me afterwards, he said, ‘Oh, you know, the boss thinks you’re ok. He thinks you’ll probably make wing commander.’ I thought that wasn’t bad given I was a flying officer so that was, that’s ok. And, and to achieve one more than that was a great, was a great privilege, so that, that was interesting. He, he was quite good. I do remember that quite vividly. He thinks you might make wing commander. Well, thanks. That’s great.
JS: That’s good. You, you spoke earlier about Memorials.
CC: Yeah.
JS: Which was interesting. How, how important do you think memorialisation is to the RAF as a whole and also to yourself personally? I think we touched on that sort of personal thing earlier —
CC: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: But it would be interesting to hear your thoughts as a, as a recent serving officer. What, what you think the view in the RAF is on that?
CC: Well, its again interesting. I mean, I joined the Air Force in ‘78 when there were a hundred and [unclear] thousand, a hundred and twenty something thousand people in the Air Force. I, I left in 2014 when there were just a smidge over thirty thousand. Ok. Roles change. Technology changes and you don’t, you know you don’t have eight man crews on Shackletons, and six man crews on Hercules and you know it comes down to single crew aircraft. But I think sadly, you know this sounds like a really crusty old boy talking the Air Force was not, not the same when I left it as it was when I joined it, and clearly that’s, that’s obvious. But I still, I think that that when I joined it in 1978 it was a career. I think sadly now for most people who join the Air Force it’s a job. And that’s why I hope that, that memorialisation of some kind in whatever form is is continued and indeed improved because these, these things can’t be forgotten. I think, you know the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park is very special. I think the IBCC is a wonderful set up, and having visited it very recently for the first time I am hugely impressed. I’d like to see other things go in there. I’d like to be able to help with that. It’s a long way from Edinburgh to there and you know that but things like the RAF Club remain very special, you know. The memories that are in the RAF Club are absolutely amazing. And Runnymede still takes my breath away. We can’t forget.
JS: Yeah.
CC: You know, we did very well at RAF 100. And I was, I re-joined for a year for RAF 100 as a reservist and did, did a job up here, predominantly with the Tattoo. And it was nice to come back in. I think, I think to come back in when you’re fifty nine years old is quite strange and you know you’re dealing with a lot of young people who have a different ethos to you. And bearing in mind that I spent my last eight years of service, three of them in Germany commanding, effectively commanding an army garrison and five years, my last five years working for the Foreign Office overseas in South East Asia where you know you’re just going home when, when the Ministry of Defence comes to work. I really did notice a sea change when I actually re-joined the Royal Air Force having been out of it effectively for a decade and it wasn’t the same. There was a lot of self-interest, and I know that what we tried to achieve in RAF 100 was, was would have been impossible had it not been for reservists and volunteer reserves and part time reserve service people. Which is quite sad given that you would expect to be able to do what you needed to do with the regular people. Those who were actually serving. So, you know we had a big success with RAF 100 but by jingo if it hadn’t have been for the people who’d, you know served before and come back in as reservist there’s absolutely no way we would have achieved it. I do remember the words of the then Chief of the Air Staff Steve Hillier saying that, you know, ‘It’s a privilege to be the CAS at the RAF 100 but all I’m doing is laying a future for my successors, successors successor,’ blah blah blah, ‘Who will be CAS at RAF 200.’ I just wonder how big the RAF at two hundred will be. Not very big I don’t think. And whilst I won’t be here and none of my progeny will be here I do wonder what it will be like. I’ve got a horrible feeling being probably glass half empty on this one that it will be the Defence Forces of The United Kingdom all wearing green uniform. I don’t know. We’ll see. But you can’t take away what’s there. IBCC is there. Runnymede is there. Other memorials are there. Long may it continue as far as I’m concerned and anything I can do to assist with the memorialisation of that then I will continue to do that, and this is a first step for me. And I’m pleased to be able to contribute. And hopefully sometime in, you know RAF 200 somebody might listen to this and say, ‘Jeez, who was that old boy talking?’ We shall see.
JS: Clive, thank you very much.
CC: My great pleasure.
JS: That’s been fascinating. Thank you.
CC: Thanks very much indeed, Jim. I hope it gets somewhere.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Clive Coombes
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
James Sheach
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-03-06
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
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Sound
Identifier
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ACoombesDC200306, PCoombesHS2043
Conforms To
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Pending review
Format
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00:37:09 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
Clive Coombes grew up on Royal Air Force stations, eventually joining and serving for 37 years before retiring in 2014. During this time, he served across the globe, including in Australia and Germany, as a ground branch officer. Clive outlines his father’s and uncle’s service, as well as his own. His uncle, was born in Llandrindod, Wales and joined the Royal Air Force in either 1934 or 1935, becoming a pilot and serving in Iraq before returning to Great Britain and serving in the Second World War. Originally flying Blenheims, Jack was shot down and killed on the 10 January 1940 flying an operation for 109 Squadron. Whilst Jack did not serve long within the Second World War, Clive retains a large amount of information pertaining to his service, including his logbook and a number of poems sent to Clive’s Aunt. Born in Burking Head, his father Horace 'Ken' Coombes joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 as a pilot, training in Alabama and Florida, before returning in 1943. His first posting was to the 582 Squadron at RAF Little Staughton, flying Pathfinder operations over Dusseldorf and the Ruhr, amongst others. He was eventually moved to 626 Squadron at RAF Wickemby. Throughout his service, Clive’s father flew Lancasters, Spitfires, Hurricanes, Mosquitoes and Wellingtons. After flying on Operation Manna, he was decommissioned and reenlisted soon after as instructor, later becoming an air traffic controller and a reconnaissance flyer, flying Meteors and Vampires at RAF Shawbury. Following his retirement in 1977, Clive recalls his father refusing to mention his opinion on the view of Bomber Command following the war. Clive wishes that Bomber Command would receive more recognition, especially through the efforts of the IBCC and Runnymede Air Forces Memorial.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Shropshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Cambridgeshire
Germany
Alabama
Australia
Florida
Germany
Germany--Düsseldorf
Netherlands
United States
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sam Harper-Coulson
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940-01-10
1942
1943
1977
109 Squadron
582 Squadron
626 Squadron
aircrew
Blenheim
Hurricane
killed in action
Lancaster
Meteor
Mosquito
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
RAF Little Staughton
RAF Shawbury
RAF Wickenby
Spitfire
Wellington
-
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bbd2b4ee4289cffaef960ac3558dcda5
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2027/32391/ACarbyHV210315-01.2.mp3
adca178c51cd72709158dd9ae6dd55e7
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
A name given to the resource
Carby, Hazel
Hazel V Carby
H V Carby
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Professor Hazel Carby. Her father Carl Carby was born in Jamaica and served as a navigator in RAF Coastal Command and later RAF Bomber Command.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2021-03-15
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
Carby, HV
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HH: Ok. So, today’s the 15th of March 2021. I’m Heather Hughes sitting in Lincolnshire and I’m talking to Professor Hazel Carby who’s agreed to be interviewed for the IBCC Digital Archive because her father, Carl Carby served first of all in RAF Coastal Command, and then in RAF Bomber Command. So, Hazel, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. I discovered about your dad through having read your incredibly moving and wonderful memoir, “Imperial Intimacies,” and I’m sure that there will be a lot of times that you want to refer to, to the, to the book and that’s absolutely fine. Maybe it’s going to encourage listeners to, to pick up that book and read it as well because it is indeed a very wonderful and moving account. If we could start off this is an interview partly about your dad and partly about you and, and your, your experience of growing up knowing in the knowledge that he had come all the way from Jamaica to serve in the Second World War, which is partly what brought him to Britain and gave him a basis on which to, to stay in this country for the rest of his, for the rest of his life. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit first about him and then we’re going to talk about you and your family. But tell us a little bit about where your dad was born and brought up.
HC: Yeah. My father was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1921. He was raised by his, by his grandmother and you know, Kingston, well Jamaica in general was although it was a source of wealth for the UK, the population living there at the time were incredibly poorly paid. Starvation wages they used to, they used to call it. So, you know he had a very, like other Jamaicans in the city it was, he lived in a very poor area. Then in fact during, you know, during the ‘30s there were the starvation wages marches where people were actually begging to be sent into the penitentiary because there at least they would have been fed. They were starving and so because of the starvation there was, there were a lot of health problems. Jamaica was being run directly by, it was a Crown colony it was being run directly by the Colonial Office, by the UK Government, but it didn’t have you know the emerging health system that was being put in place in the UK in Jamaica. And companies like, you know Tate and Lyle who were reaping enormous profits did not put any of that money into, into wages. In fact, there was a big strike in the ‘30s. They wanted a dollar a day [laughs] they thought they’d been promised and they couldn’t even get that. So, you know, people talk about emancipation after enslavement but it was, it was another form of sort of, you know of, of indenture really, actually if you, if you want to call it that. So when my father was quite, quite young he had to, he actually had to leave school. His father, his father deserted the family. My father actually grew up with his grandmother but the fact the rest of the family weren’t far away. My grandmother was very young when she had him but anyway his father left, and my father had to leave school and, and go and earn money to take care of school fees and other sorts of things for the rest of the family. And of course healthcare wasn’t free or whatever so he was, he really became the financial provider for the rest. For the rest of the family. He worked in, as a, as a clerk in, in the back room of a of a store. I think he had originally started by cleaning up and then worked to evening, went to evening classes. And it was clear that he must have received the patronage of, of the owner of the, of the store because I’m pretty sure that he must have put in a word for my father to get him into, you know the college and to do some, well he ended up becoming a book keeper so he was doing math and English and things like that. He was clearly, my father was clearly very bright so he did well from that point of view. So —
HH: But he also, obviously he, he somehow perceived education and qualifications as, as very important in terms of improving himself.
HC: They were key. They were absolutely key for him. Education. He would tell me that he was, he was very very upset when he’d had to leave school to go and earn money to support the rest of the, of the family and he had clearly had encouragement, you know from, in particular one of, one of his uncles who was a sort of, I don’t know a sort of a self-educated polymath really. He had taught himself various languages or whatever and so and I think you know my, I think my grandmother had been a very ambitious woman but her, you know her husband had died in the Jamaica earthquake of 1907 so they, you know they lost their, their wage earner then. And the British government was very paternalistic in terms of the quote unquote their support. They were quite eager to support [pause] well, white survivors. But you know the white, sort of plantation class if you like from the earthquake but they had some very, very stringent requirements about support after the earthquake and you know operated on terms like the worthy. The worthy people. I mean who was worthy depended a lot on class and skin colour and, and the usual, you know divisions that imperial governance imposed. So it was a very, very hard life. When the war began the RAF was not actually accepting black recruits, and the recruits, the white recruits from Jamaica who did join up I think actually had to travel to England. So they, they, you know you had to be, you had to have money to do that. But in 1942 when those policies changed actually there was a training scheme that started up and my father had to take exams to enter this training scheme and pass, and it clearly was, it’s a terrible thing to say about war actually but I think my father looked at it as an opportunity, you know to, to earn money. And during the war there were very very strict embargoes on, on trade and imports. Things like clothes and food —
HH: Yeah.
HC: Had become, you know very, very expensive. And he got, you know he would tell me that he, he was given two suits of uniform and things. That actually it’s that’s not actually not a petty thing.
HH: No.
HC: When, when you can’t afford clothes. Do you see what I’m trying to say?
HH: Yeah.
HC: So and it was also an opportunity I think for him to, to use his education and he’d always believed in the British sort of education, you know, system. The courses he was doing at college were from the Royal Society for the Arts and stuff they were, and those were the examinations he’d taken. So he was very proud of that sort of success. So anyway so he was, he was among the first recruits from Jamaica to aircrew.
HH: Amazing.
HC: He passed the exams for aircrew and they were transported from Jamaica to, by boat to New York where actually they were, they were given a long lecture on the sort of racial, racialised codes of the US and how they should behave. And then they were transported to Canada by rail and in those days actually Canadian Railways did have a, did have a line down to New York. So after, after a very long journey he ended up in Moncton in Canada which was a very, very large Commonwealth air training unit and so there were people there from all over the world. From South Africa, Australia, New Zealand. One of the things I discovered in terms of the absences in RAF history is that you look at all these histories that you can obtain of the Commonwealth Air Training Scheme, the Commonwealth Air Training Plan and you can’t find any reference to those being recruited from what I think of as the black colonies. You know there are records of the South Africans, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Canadians and in fact even the US volunteers who, who went up there. But you try and find the sort of Trinidadians and those from Barbados and those from Jamaica like my father, and they are not part of the official history at all.
HH: No.
HC: And in the, in the National Archives at Kew it took a long, long time to figure out that actually they did the various, I’m trying to think of the name. The various sort of squadron leaders. I don’t think they were called a squadron but the various leaders of the different units. Moncton was huge. I mean this, this was like enormous. So I could actually sort of eventually figure out which of those units he was part of, and I also realised that they kept daily logs. There was someone on each unit who kept daily logs. And it was only by going through and scrutinising these daily logs that I was actually able to actually find his arrival with others from the Caribbean, because the ship had been going to various islands and picking up RAF volunteers because it was all volunteers.
HH: Yeah.
HC: It wasn’t a conscription. And in fact, Canada is a, is a lot better with its records actually and very, very helpful. I actually went to Moncton and the librarians there were extraordinarily helpful. I mean they really were, you know incredible. So Canada has a very different attitude towards these histories it seems to me than even the British government do now. And the Canadian people, I mean my father always told me that the Canadian people were extremely generous. I mean, they would invite, you know, crew to their homes and he would be sent food even, they obviously kept in touch with him because they would send him hampers of food from Canada.
HH: Oh, is that when he arrived in the UK?
HC: From Canada.
HH: Oh gosh.
HC: From Canada. Yeah. So, and the other thing you know my father told me about being there at Moncton, and I have sort of maps of the whole way that the, you know the various units were laid out. It’s quite an extraordinary thing. But the other thing that he remembered. I mean the first one was, he was very proud of being in the RAF obviously and there was this story of clothes. But he was also totally amazed at the food. I mean you’re talking about someone where food had, had not, you know been easy to come by their entire life.
HH: Yeah.
HC: And there was just all this. I remember him telling me stories. As much as you could eat. He couldn’t believe that there was food as much as, as much as you could eat.
HH: Yeah.
HC: So, so as I say it’s a terrible thing to say about war but coming from the poverty that he did come from I think he did think that this was an opportunity. He didn’t hesitate. He believed in [pause] I’m not sure that he believed in imperial rule but he, you know he believed in British education system, whatever and he was prepared. He was loyal. He absolutely thought he was, you know, he was very loyal to the sort of British ideals of fair play and things he’d actually grown up in. Well, he’d been educated into. Even though he hadn’t been the recipient —
HH: Yeah.
HC: Of this fair play and this justice. He did believe.
HH: Well, it was a sort of ideal that he thought probably like so many other people who served from the colonies that it was an ideal that the, and what the war was being fought for.
HC: Yes. And I think also for his generation because in the 1930s the protests, and the rebellions had been so powerful that in fact if it hadn’t been for the war breaking out in ’39 there was already a huge influential movement for independence actually.
HH: Interesting.
HC: For the, for the realisation of these ideals by really achieving emancipation at last.
HH: Yeah.
HC: And a sort of freedom. And I think my father did think, you know and I heard him, you know tell stories about this. That they really were fighting for these ideals against, you know a tyranny represented by the forces of, of Nazism and fascism. So, he had, you know those motivations were propelling a young man to be prepared to risk his life.
HH: Yeah.
HC: So —
HH: So he, he’s trained in Canada. In Moncton. Does he go anywhere else in Canada?
HC: He actually starts training in Jamaica.
HH: Oh, he started training in Jamaica. Ok.
HC: In the camps they set up. They had a training thing there and that continued in Moncton while he was waiting for the convoy. That’s really why he was there. It was a huge transportation hub. So in addition to, you know training pilots and doing was they also actually were transporting people to the UK in these massive convoys. And when the convoy that he was going to be on was ready he was transferred with everybody who was going to be on that convoy to New Brunswick. And that convoy, I think he must have been in Moncton I think I worked out for maybe six to eight weeks.
HH: Ah huh.
HC: I forget the exact dates now. I’m pretty sure they’re in the book but anyway. Yeah. So then he was, they were then transported by convoy. And also in the British archives I’ve put together some of my father’s stories about the convoy being attacked. With information I actually found how to look up all the history of all the convoys.
HH: Gosh.
HC: Going across the North Atlantic. It was quite an extraordinary. It was, I don’t know, working through these military records is interesting. You have to sort of figure out. It takes a long time to figure out exactly how they work and I had to actually learn all the different coding systems which, which I did. But I put together my father’s memories of being attacked. The convoy being attacked, and which ships had actually been. He would tell me stories about, you know as he, as he said the crew that, that were lost. Not in his ship but in the, in the ships around it. Anyway, I put together his stories about remembering this torpedo attack and ships being destroyed with convoy records.
HH: Interesting.
HC: And that’s when I discovered that actually his convoy was being used as a, as a decoy because they had actually discovered how the German coding system was working, but they didn’t want the Germans to knew that they knew about the coding system. So they basically, you know they divided the convoy up and they sent them directly to, you know to a, you know to a submarine group, toward a submarine group and when the submarine group attacked they destroyed the submarine group. But some of the convoy actually also was destroyed. But I was, I also became very interested in, I don’t know, what it must have been like in the bows of those ships, you know, and how sound travels underwater faster than in the air and trying to imagine what it was, what it was like. And I found some record in, in Jamaica —
HH: Gosh.
HC: Of people who had you know they’d been interviewed about being in convoys and those quarters and what it was like so I assembled various records from from various archives trying to sort of re-imagine that because my father did not provide those sorts of details. He never talked about being scared.
HH: No. Interesting.
HC: Or what it was really like in the bow of those ships. Do you see what I mean? And he said that it wasn’t actually until they, they arrived in the UK that they realised what ships had been and it was always like, these people had been lost. I mean they weren’t, you know the language of, of avoidance was quite profound. I think you, you know, you managed to survive being part of a war machine by also a sort of language that really didn’t acknowledge that people were dying around you.
HH: Yeah.
HC: I suppose.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Quite horrible deaths. So it was just, it was, it was trying to sort of discover the details of these stories that my father didn’t want to tell me if you like. To really start to understand how, how you actually have to survive as part of a war machine. Although he did tell me that when they arrived at RAF Bridgenorth, he and the other recruits, there were a couple, there were other recruits with him from the Caribbean. You know, how those sort of black volunteers were treated really very, very badly you know. There was, there’s an example I include in the book of the racism that they suffered when they were introduced in excruciating detail to what a toilet was, and what a shower was and how you washed yourself and kept yourself clean. I mean extremely, extremely sort of demeaning.
HH: Yeah. Yeah.
HC: So, he never, he never explicitly said and he never really sort of said oh they were a racist bunch of whatevers. He wasn’t that sort of person. He was very, very reserved. But he did, and he in fact he actually wrote that in the letter about in, in detail, because he knew I was working on the book. That was something, you know —
HH: Fascinating
HC: He chose to, he chose to tell me just as an indication of basically how they were regarded by, you know by the UK.
HH: Yeah. Which was which they wouldn’t have dreamed of telling white recruits.
HC: No. No.
HH: So, yeah. So, yeah, I mean I think that there are probably, when one stands back from some of this there are two kinds of racism to deal with here. One is what is now called but wasn’t then I guess structural racism, and the other was casual. You know, it just depended who you came in to contact with, you know. And, and you know it seems as if there are both of these kinds kind of, there are interplays and interactions and some people get, get really caught up in, in terrible situations and others tend to sort of escape the worst of it, it seems to me in terms of the, the memoirs that I’ve read and the interviews that we’ve, that we’ve done and but, but there are definitely these two different sorts of, of discrimination going on at the time I think. Even though the RAF was officially had lost its colour bar by then it wasn’t quite like that.
HC: You know, I think there’s a way in which the racism is deeply entrenched. It is, it is institutionalised in that.
HH: Yeah.
HC: You know, because they actually needed more person power because of the exigencies of, of war I don’t think it meant that they actually really respected these volunteers from India, from the, from what came to be known, you know the black Commonwealth if you like. [laughs] You know, needing, needing fodder for war doesn’t necessarily mean that you regard everyone who’s volunteering with any sort of, you know equity.
HH: Yeah.
HC: So —
HH: Yeah.
HC: I mean I think you know he did he really, he went into Coastal Command. He was a navigator and radio operator he’d been trained as. And he really clearly felt that was an important role. I mean they, they were also looking for wolf, they were looking for the wolfpacks of the sort that actually had attacked his convoy.
HH: Yeah. Yeah.
HC: You know. They were also doing a lot of which actually my father found very interesting. The sort of scientific study of weather patterns and things, you know.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Various other operations and he clearly, he clearly really liked that. I think he felt he was learning a lot as well as actually playing an important —
HH: Indeed. Yeah.
HC: Role. My son actually found in a museum I think in Edinburgh in a display case, because he sent me photographs of the suits that they wore in Coastal Command because it was unbelievably cold. It wasn’t like these planes were heated but the suits were. And so my son sent me that it was it was really very interesting in these like bulky seats I was trying to sort of, you know imagine.
HH: Yeah.
HC: What it must have been like in Coastal Command. But the other thing I would say is that it was clear that I think there’s a, you know there’s a, there’s also a vulnerability being in these planes. Whether actually it’s in Coastal Command or later in Bomber Command that is shared and that the, because of what they’re going through aircrew become extremely dependant on each other. And it was clear that he felt the bonds that he was forming with other people as crew not as black, not as white, you know, not as brown were forming bonds that he hadn’t ever experienced before in Jamaica.
HH: Interesting.
HC: You know, where the class skin colour system was extremely rigid, and no one would ever have experienced any, any sort of, any equality between the various —
HH: Yeah.
HC: Skin class demarcations and separations. It was clear there was something over and above that happening between aircrew. I mean this is not something I can experience for myself.
HH: No.
HC: But it was clear in his, in his language that there was a real closeness —
HH: Yeah.
HC: And interdependency among this various aircrews in, in spite of, and I suppose also because of the dangers they —
HH: Yeah.
HC: They were facing together.
HH: In that sense, I mean it’s an interesting point that it would probably have been novel for all of them to experience that kind of closeness across various colour bars at that time in history in those crews.
HC: Yes. And I think, you know it was also clearly very, you know, fraternal. Just something happening between and among men. It was also I think what started me thinking about this was because I had an uncle. The next, my father’s next brother down who was also in the RAF.
HH: Oh right.
HC: Yeah. But he was in, he was ground crew and this was not something that my Uncle Dudley experienced.
HH: No.
HC: He was, he was far more vocal about the daily insults.
HH: Interesting.
HC: You know and the racism that they all faced, and my uncle was, he was the one who used to tell the stories about how, although my father was clearly involved in this sometimes but he, he, my uncle was the one who would actually come out with the stories about how often they had had to fight. Get involved in fights in alliance with black Americans.
HH: Oh wow.
HC: Against the white military police, US military police who would invade dance halls. Who would attack and, and arrest, you know black Americans if they were seen with white British women and that sort of thing. And there was, it was clear that there was a lot of alliances and resistances.
HH: That’s, that’s so fascinating. It’s —
HC: Among the sort of the black British and the black US forces.
HH: That’s really fascinating.
HC: In the policing, the policing of social places.
HH: That’s really —
HC: You know, all these contestations that would happen in pubs or dance halls were a real —
HH: Huge things dance halls.
HC: Right. Yeah. So but it was but yes it was basically a unified front against the US military police.
HH: That’s really fascinating, Hazel. Do you know where your Uncle Dudley served?
HC: No. He died when I was a child.
HH: It’s probably, it’s probably would have been somewhere in East Anglia which is where most of the African American airmen were based. Yes. That’s very fascinating.
HC: Yes. It wasn’t, it wasn’t just airmen.
HH: Oh, so it was, yeah —
HC: It was —
HH: No, it was, it was GIs as well.
HC: Oh yeah. It was GIs too.
HH: Yeah. Ok.
HC: Yeah. And, and because the, you know, because the various parts of the country practiced this, you know this social segregation.
HH: Yeah.
HC: The, the days where, you know white Americans had leave as opposed to black Americans and that sort of thing. It was happening all over the country.
HH: Ok.
HC: There were, I think it was a hundred and thirty thousand.
HH: Oh, it was huge.
HC: Black US sort of maintenance forces.
HH: Yes.
HC: Just in the West Country alone.
HH: Yeah. I mean it was huge.
HC: I mean these places were huge.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Yeah.
HH: What’s interesting, you know it’s an interesting point just that your, your uncle was also in the RAF like your father because —
HC: So was my grandfather.
HH: Oh really. Amazing. Gosh. So, that’s quite a history. Family history. Yeah. So, your, your father as far as I can work out from —
HC: That I should also my father’s father.
HH: Yeah. Your father’s father.
HC: He was brought from Jamaica.
HH: So your father’s father was Wilfred. Is that right?
HC: Yeah. And he also served.
HH: Amazing. Gosh. Incredible. So your father served for most of the war as far as I can tell from, from your account in the book, in Coastal Command and then quite late in the war he joins Bomber Command. Is that right?
HC: Well, he, he must, no he must have left. I’m not sure how long he was in Coastal Command actually.
HH: Ok.
HC: Because when he met my mother that was at a dance in Worcestershire, and they were married by 1944.
HH: Ok.
HC: So I think after Coastal Command he was actually based from what I can remember, he would talk about Herefordshire.
HH: Ok.
HC: Before then he was, before he was then transferred to RAF Waddington in, in Lincolnshire.
HH: Ok.
HC: And you see I would need the actual official RAF records.
HH: Yeah, well we can get that.
HC: To confirm those dates.
HH: Because it’s going to be really fascinating to see that.
HC: Yeah.
HH: But he, I mean he clearly sort of comes to Waddington. Your mother lives in Lincoln, and he flies a number of operations from Waddington. And he mentioned to you I think that he had flown on an operation to bomb Essen.
HC: Essen. There were two operations he would talk about. One, one was Essen. That was because I was really, really pushing him because I was, you know I was a very [pause] I was, you know, I spent a lot of my college life protesting outside of the American Embassy against the Vietnam War. So, we had conversations about war where we were very much on, sort of opposite sides, I think. My father trying to argue that, not that always but sometimes it was necessary and it was because of, it was because of the bombing, it was because of the atrocities basically that the US forces were perpetrating from the air in Vietnam that prompted me as a student. So you’re talking about, you know ’67/68 to attempt to confront my father about aerial warfare.
HH: So interesting.
HC: And I also had learned enough by then as a student and remember as someone who was fighting their own battles at that time to be recognised as black and British which is a whole other story. But I had by that time also read enough to understand that actually aerial warfare and bombing was, you know was started, it was practiced first against the colonies by the British. This is the history of the aerial warfare so, you know I was trying to push him to talk about the contradictions as someone who had grown up in a British colony about them participating in, you know the British war machine. And that’s, that’s when Essen came out but the only stories, the only things he would talk about in relation to Essen was that their targets were, you know industrial. This was part of fighting against the German war machine. He wouldn’t talk about civilian casualties.
HH: No.
HC: And I don’t know in some ways that he could really afford —
HH: No.
HC: To, to sort of revisit all of that.
HH: No.
HC: The only other operation that he talked about that he was actually extremely proud of that was I think also launched from RAF Waddington was a rescue mission to Italy. I think, if I’m remembering correctly it was actually perhaps a bomber. I’m not sure but anyway, a crew had had to bale out, or a plane had crashed or something in Northern Italy and they went and they actually did manage to rescue the crew.
HH: Gosh.
HC: But that, you know those were the, he wanted to talk about what he did in Coastal Command. He wanted to talk about rescuing people.
HH: Interesting.
HC: He didn’t want to talk about what he left. What he left behind him in Essen.
HH: Yeah.
HC: He did talk about the terrible losses of rear gunners.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Because they were the most vulnerable.
HH: Vulnerable.
HC: He would, he would talk about how terrible that was actually, and he would tell me. He told me one story about a rear gunner when they got back. They must have landed in RAF Waddington at some point and, and left to go in the barracks but the rear gunner must have been asleep or something because he woke up. The plane was silent and he leapt out of the plane and pulled his parachute because he thought the plane was going down because [laughs] I don’t know. There was some, he would tell amusing stories and he would tell stories about I don’t know the officers serving them at Christmas and that sort of thing. He would tell stories about his promotions as he became a non-commissioned officer, but he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t talk about Essen other than —
HH: Yeah.
HC: Those targets were purely —
HH: Yeah.
HC: Industrial.
HH: I mean, I think that that’s quite —
HC: I knew better.
HH: Yeah. I think it’s quite a common form of defence really in, in a way for those aircrew partly because they were facing such enormous dangers themselves in the air.
HC: Yeah. Yeah.
HH: But I think what’s so strikingly unusual about your particular story is that it’s very very rare for a daughter to have had these conversations with her father. It’s usually sons and the fathers have never really spoken to daughters. So, I mean, I find that really an interesting part of your story is that it is just so unusual that it was because of your own, because of your own sort of political involvement as a student that sort in a way created a bridge to talk about these things with your father.
HC: Yes. I think that’s true.
HH: Yeah. So I mean your, your at the, at the end of the war your father applied to undertake further training ostensibly as a preparation for returning to Jamaica.
HC: Yeah. Well, the British, ok the Colonial Office and the Foreign Office were playing very different roles actually in relation to all the people they had recruited from the colonies. Not talking about just RAF people. Even just military people but the Honduran foresters working in Scotland. All the people working in the factories in Liverpool producing armaments etcetera. And this goes back to the sort of racism that we were talking about. The institutionalised racism. The Foreign Office and the Home Office were extremely keen on getting everyone to commit to returning to their home colonies at the end of the war. The Home Office was terrified of having a black population after the war. They were terrified of the threat to Britishness particularly. I mean this is not unrelated to the fear of, of black men and white women having children but anyway they had to make, people had to sign these forms. Make these promises that they were all going back. The Colonial Office, and I’ve been through all these minutes it’s quite strange. The Colonial Office were much more wary. What they didn’t do, they didn’t, the Colonial Office really understood how close for example the Caribbean had come to outright rebellion before the war. They also, the Colonial Office also understood that there were generations now of people who had become educated and who were committed to movements for independence. For decolonisation. The Colonial Office understood that there were political, political consequences for how black recruits of all sorts, all the different peoples and this is brown too. I mean this is, you talk about India, you’re talking about all of the colonial world. They were very concerned that this idea of having to be repatriated was in fact not made public and they had to be, they had to be there to be very cautious of doing this because they were very, very wary of, as they used to say all the time of causing unrest in the colonies. So you have the sort of Home Office and the Foreign Office, the sort of protect Britishness, protect whiteness. Protect Britain as a sort of ongoing white nation, right and the sort of interests of the Colonial Office which was actually just keeping everything peaceful and not firing up those sorts of people who were in fact serving in the military who were going to go back and become leaders of their colonies and lead these movements. So, they were always aware of that, of that tension. But anyway, so because my father had served, like other people who had served he did qualify if his education had been interrupted, he did qualify for actually taking courses. So my mother had, when they married my mother had had to leave the Civil Service because she couldn’t be a married woman in the Civil Service. So yes she had moved to Lincoln, but my father’s courses were going to be in London so he was still serving in the RAF but he was on secondment. And these are all the records that you can find in the Colonial Office papers in, in Kew because the Colonial Office were, had all these people under constant surveillance actually, and it was very interesting when you see all these records, you know together. In fact, there are a lot of these records are of people who went. Who returned to their, to their countries and led, you know resistance movements and decolonised or whatever.
HH: Fascinating.
HC: So the Colonial Office were not wrong about, about that. So, so he was still serving in the RAF but he was on secondment and he wanted to do an accountancy course. He wanted to become an accountant. Yeah. So then I looked up all those, you know records and then you come across I suppose rather a different form of sort of racism. A more sort of paternalistic form of racism because the Colonial Office were, you know very aware of what people were, people were facing when it came to sort of finding jobs and they were also aware that you know my father had married a white woman and all this sort of thing and then was having a child. So they kept scrupulous, scrupulous records. But yes, he was supposed to return back like all the others. He was supposed to go back to his home country. There wasn’t anything to go back to of course, like, you know, my father would tell me this. So —
HH: But he applied for a, he applied to leave the RAF and to stay in the UK then.
HC: No. He, he was in, he was in the RAF all the time he was taking the courses.
HH: Yeah.
HC: He was in the RAF until I think 1947.
HH: Ok.
HC: Yeah. And then he was discharged. I mean, I can double check those dates but I think it’s —
HH: No. But the thing is that he, he somehow, he was able to make a case for staying here.
HC: Yeah.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Yeah. He did actually have to go. He was, one of his, after he’d finished with the courses he was sent to Jamaica actually.
HH: Oh, really?
HC: So, yes he was. Ok. So they had, they had a way of sort of demobbing people in fazes and so he went back with a ship full of people who had been demobbed. In charge of them really, you know. So yeah he was and then, and then he, he came back. I was already [pause] I’m just trying to think. I was already on the way when he did that.
HH: Ok.
HC: Because that was the summer of ’47 and he was, so he was still serving in the RAF, and I was born January ’48 and he returned that Fall so he must have been discharged in the Fall of —
HH: Ok.
HC: Or the Autumn, sorry of ’47.
HH: Ok.
HC: After he, after he’d taken the returning servicemen back to Jamaica.
HH: Ok. That’s interesting. Most veterans in the post-war period found that it was a badge of pride and it helped them to get on in the world to, to be able to say that they had served in the war. Particularly I think that was the case for the RAF. Did that work in that way for your father?
HC: No. No. The opposite actually. I mean my parents couldn’t, you know they found it hard to find anywhere to live together. Actually, they couldn’t for a long time so no [pause] There’s a lot of stories during the war, you know of how all people from across the empire were welcomed. You know, when they were in uniform and fighting. Once the war stopped the country didn’t want those, those brown bodies at all. At all. They did not. The racism was extraordinary. Wouldn’t rent houses to them. Wouldn’t rent any sort of accommodation. So it wasn’t until they could, my, my mother had some savings, it wasn’t until they could actually put down a small deposit on actually what was a bomb damaged house. We could, we could only live on the ground floor, that they could, and that was in Streatham that they could actually be, you know together.
HH: Together.
HC: My mother was completely vilified. And I was. You know, half cast children. It was, it was, it was a racist nightmare actually.
HH: Yeah. I mean, I think —
HC: What they lived through. Both. All of us. All three of us.
HH: Yeah.
HC: And there was immediate historic amnesia actually about any of these, of any of these people from across the empire from India, from Africa, from the Caribbean, fighting.
HH: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you talk so movingly or you write, sorry so movingly in your book about that question sort of which kind of framed your early life. This question where are you from? Yes, but where are you from? Yes, but where are you from? Did your father have that as well after the war?
HC: Oh yeah. All the time. My father. Ok. My father had that all the time. I mean I didn’t realise he was going through the same thing when I was a young child. When my parents retired and moved from London they moved up to York. My brother lived up there. He’d been up there for years. He’d, he’d gone. Moved up there for, for a job. And it started all over again. My father used to tell me how, and he used to try and put it in the politest terms that the neighbours as he was saying trying to be polite would ask him all these questions about Jamaica. He had not been to Jamaica since 1947 and he’d lived in, in the UK since 1943. But it wouldn’t occur to them to ask him anything about the UK. They thought he must [pause] you know. So, this sort of sense of being totally other haunted him his entire life.
HH: Yeah.
HC: And it was actually as a, you know the racism takes different forms at different moments, and after sort of Margaret Thatcher’s encouragement of the extreme right in the UK. The formation. The British National Party, the sort of real rise of fascism that my father was actually attacked. You know, as an, as an older person by fourteen year olds who, who had swastikas carved into their skin. I mean they stoned him at a bus stop when he got off coming back from work one night. So the, ‘Where are you from?’ that I was experiencing initially was part of that post-World War Two reaction against black migration in to the UK. I mean the UK was on its knees right after the war.
HH: Yeah.
HC: It needed, it needed people to run the National Health System.
HH: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
HC: It needed a workforce but that didn’t mean that it was, that it was welcoming.
HH: Welcoming.
HC: And in fact, you know, people from the European, what they called European displaced people were actually offered all sorts of support with accommodations and encouragement that actually people from the Caribbean didn’t get.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Because it was imagined that people from Europe displaced by the war who were regarded as white could integrate and become British. It was never imagined that people from the black colonies could become integrated. Could really become British.
HH: Yeah.
HC: They were seen as a threat to British character and, and values. So then, you know when I was being asked, you know, ‘Where are you from?’ It was, it was a denial that I could have possibly have been born in Britain.
HH: Or belonged here in any way.
HC: I was actually quite upset, you know.
HH: Yeah. Tell me there’s, there’s an incident that you describe in your book about, in school when you were at school and you stood up in front of your class to tell your class about how your father had been in RAF.
HC: It was, it took a long time as a child to understand that the stories I was being told at home about family history which is also, you know history were very different from the stories I was being told at school under that label. Quote unquote, history. So, yes in Primary School we were all asked to stand up and describe what our fathers had done during the war. And I remember vividly the boy who stood up before me, you know talking about Egypt and sand and dust and flies. I mean his, I think, you know his father was driving tanks across the desert. And so then I was next and, and stood up and said, ‘Well, my father was in the RAF,’ and was immediately shut up by the teacher and told that I had to sit down. And then we were all given a lecture about the consequences of lying. It was terrifying actually. It was terrifying. I mean I grew up, there was a photograph on our piano of my father in his RAF uniform and so it’s this, along with this question of, ‘Where are you from?’ Which I realised, it took a long time to realise, really wasn’t actually a question of geography. It was actually a sort of racial fiction. I was asked to account for myself in ways that a child cannot possibly account of myself. And if I said I was born in Britain that was even worse frankly because then I was this aberration. The story of being as thought of as a liar by my teacher was, as I say in the book my first introduction actually to, to British history, and so that’s that sense of Britain actually mobilising a global war machine was completely replaced by the Churchillian, ‘We stood on our own. We were entirely on our own.’
HH: Yeah.
HC: The other thing I learned about this that the teachers said, was not only that there were no black people fighting during the war they could not possibly have been in the RAF. The crème de la crème she said of the British fighting machine. So there was also, it came when I had to say, what I was trying to say my history, what my father did completely contradicted in some people’s minds the sort of mythology of the RAF as this incredibly prestigious elite fighting force.
HH: Yeah. Yeah.
HC: So —
HH: Your, your, did, did you ever get to visit Jamaica with your father?
HC: No.
HH: So when was your first visit to Jamaica?
HC: My first visit to Jamaica was in the early ‘70s actually. I went with my mother. So, my father was the eldest in his family actually, which was why he was raised by his grandmother and looked after the rest of the family. But after the war, now his next brother down was already also in England because he’d been in the RAF and did some training and stayed and married. They felt a real responsibility for the rest of their family. The next brother down, my Uncle Duston was in, migrated to the United States without papers after the war, and he volunteered to fight in Korea, because if you agreed to fight in Korea you got US citizenship. Now, together what they basically did was to pool their money and to get everybody out of Jamaica one by one. I told you that life in Jamaica was extremely hard and the poverty, you know, the poverty was intense. I don’t. Our family wasn’t part of the Jamaican elite.
HH: No.
HC: My uncle told me actually, he said the phrase to describe our family was no shoes poor. That’s what you said if you went to school without, without shoes. But anyway, so that their response, their basic responsibility was to the rest of the family and one by one in fact everybody did then move to the US.
HH: Gosh.
HC: Because, well the UK, you know became completely antagonistic.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Any further migration from the Caribbean.
HH: So there wasn’t, so, so by the 70s perhaps there wasn’t the same sort of family connection to go back to if, if —
HC: No. There wasn’t.
HH: Yeah.
HC: They were out by then.
HH: Yeah.
HC: They were out. No. They were out by the —
HH: Yeah.
HC: They were out by the early 60s.
HH: Yeah.
HC: You know, including my grandmother. Now, so when I came to the United States in 1969 I met them all.
HH: Ok.
HC: So, and there was, there was a large, you know family over here. I met my Uncle Duston who was then still in the, well he had visited. I mean some people had visited the UK.
HH: Ok.
HC: Before that. But I met them all. I met all my cousins. So, yeah and we are in fact it’s, extremely close.
HH: Ok, so I mean —
HC: The whole [unclear] generation so.
HH: That’s, that’s, that’s incredible.
HC: But we’re all very close to each other but not sort of like in Jamaica.
HH: Yeah, so, so — but —
HC: Jamaica’s a very, Jamaica’s a very difficult place actually. It was a very difficult place to visit.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Because if you were slotted in to the tourist label, the inequalities were extremely difficult to face. So most of the visits that I’ve been since, since then they’ve all been all sort of basic research visits.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Yeah. To the, you know the University of Jamaica or to archives or, you know whatever.
HH: Yeah.
HC: We have done some family visits but not to the hot tourist spots. There’s a, there’s a sort of Jamaica run, you know eco place that we stay at in Portland but we keep very very, we keep a very big distance from the European run and US run tourist economies because basically they are just a gigantic sucking sound of money out of Jamaica.
HH: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HC: They’re all there tax free. They built these huge hotels tax free.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Various European countries and the US.
HH: Yeah.
HC: So it’s a very, you have to make sure that when you go you only stay in, in Jamaican run places.
HH: Yeah. So I mean, I imagine that, that, that many of your research trips to Jamaica were connected to your own exploration of your family history and roots in this incredible reflection that is in your book. Your latest book. I think it’s your latest. Have you published another one since? So I’m talking about, “Imperial Intimacies.”
HC: No. I’m working on it.
HH: So it’s about, “Imperial Intimacies,” that we, that we’re chatting here and you talked, you mentioned Portland there, so it seems an appropriate moment to raise that and the burning question I have is to what extent your father was aware of how close to his ancestors origins he really was when he was at Waddington.
HC: He wasn’t aware at all.
HH: I mean, I just find that, I find, I find the geographic connection completely overwhelming.
HC: So, my father used to tell me stories of how his grandmother every summer took him from Kingston over to the north coast to Portland, to a place called Swift River and everyone there was called Carby. So you grow up with these stories. You know, you grow up with the photographs. With all these sorts of things. As a child I don’t know that I made an awful lot of sense of it but in the National Archives at Kew it started to make sense. I actually did find the slave register for this particular Jamaican plantation run by a Carby. So, in 1815 actually the British government decided it was going to count every enslaved person in its entire empire. It actually instituted it in 1816 and then the first one is 1817 and this is all preparatory to emancipation that happened gradually between 1834 and 1838. So I imagined it was when I found this register of these enslaved people which is actually a very difficult and painful moment. I imagine that what I was going to be doing was to track from the people on this plantation through anyone else I could find in Swift River through all sorts of parish records which is actually extremely painstaking and difficult. I imagined I was going to track all the way up there to my father and that was, that was the street that I was following. But I did become increasingly interested in this person called Lilly Carby who actually ran the plantation. For a while I was trying to look for a woman because of the name Lilly which was a mistake. But after a lot of digging and a lot of time I actually tracked Lilly Carby to Coleby In Lincolnshire and to, you know these, these hand written parish records, Lincolnshire parish records and found the entire family. And what was bizarre about it actually, I realised that this was absolutely exactly the right family not just because of the Carby name and the Lilly name, but because everybody in Lilly Carby’s family in Coleby, he took all their names and he, he gave them to his enslaved quote unquote property, so there were these two sets of records of the same name and it took me a long time to get my head around that. Why he would do that. He also called the plantation Lincoln, and it was a coffee plantation. So, anyway, so then I, you know did a lot of research about Lincolnshire history to track his entire history, and to track the history, I came across this record in the Lincolnshire archives about how, you know Lincoln, Lincolnshire emptied out of young, of young men and I realised in fact what had happened of course it was actually all about the sort of the militia they established because they worried about fighting the French on the coasts and then in fact scooping everybody up into the British Army, the revolutionary, the Napoleonic wars, the huge shipping of all these people to, to Jamaica. So, you know I sort of went off on this huge tangent in terms of British military history and it took a while for the penny to drop actually that the story that my father used to tell me about RAF Waddington was that this is really the same place and as a navigator you know he was using the lights on the, you know that’s, that’s what they would use.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Flying back via [unclear]
HH: I mean it is extraordinary that I mean because Lilly Carby himself I mean, think goes to Jamaica in sort of 1788/89 you —
HC: With his cousins.
HH: With his cousins. And then you know he either gets a discharge for which there’s no record or he deserts. He sort of finds his way into ownership as you’ve traced so incredibly in your book. He finds his way in to the ownership of this plantation up on the North coast at Portland. He calls it Lincoln. He names these enslaved people after members of his family. He has three children. Two of them by a freed person of colour, woman of colour Mary Ivy, and one by an enslaved woman called Bridget which was his mother’s name. And that child is called Matthew and that is a direct descendant of yours and your father’s.
HC: Ok. No. Yeah, the mother wasn’t Bridget. Matthew actually, so Lilly Carby before becoming a plantation owner served on other plantations.
HH: Yeah. Ok.
HC: That’s the track. And so, the Matthew Carby was actually from another plantation.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Which was one of the sugar plantations. I mean those are, those are sort of three that I know of. But I mean —
HH: There might have been others.
HC: White men raped at will.
HH: Yeah. Yeah.
HC: So who knows how many.
HH: Yeah. So they were the three you were able to trace.
HC: To trace. Yes. And the problem about military records, British military records is they keep meticulous records of officers but if you’re, if you’re not an officer its very very difficult to find records.
HH: Ok.
HC: So I found records of the cousins who returned to the UK because, through the Chelsea Pension Records.
HH: Ah huh.
HC: Because he qualified for a pension.
HH: Ok.
HC: So, but clearly that’s what happened. He either and you can look at the history of the people who deserted or were discharged because of illnesses. He could have been discharged because he was ill.
HH: Yeah. Ok. Yeah.
HC: But there was massive, I mean because the death rate.
HH: I know.
HC: In the West Indies was absolutely huge.
HH: Huge.
HC: The desertion rate was huge. And the discharge because of ill health was very big. So I mean, so it’s you know it’s, it’s speculation but it’s clearly, that’s clearly what happened and he must have, the unit he was part of went and was based around the other side of the island. I mean they were there. Yes. There was the revolutionary Napoleonic Wars but the British Army was primarily there to put down to stop rebellion and put down rebellions on, on the plantations.
HH: Yeah. To safeguard planter interests basically.
HC: Yeah. So, he met, he met planters. He went to work on sugar plantations there and then he started himself off. You know, I found the wool. I found land records and he was actually, purchased some land from one of the people he had originally been working for on their plantation. So it was, you know it was adjacent to one of the sugar plantations but it was a further up, you know in the hills and he started a coffee plantation and bought people.
HH: And, and, and the sort of detective work that you undertook to trace back is really just a remarkable story of its own.
HC: Well, it took a long time and this is the thing about my father never really knowing. So, you know, late in his eighties my father he had a number of, of illnesses including a sort of motor neurone disease but he also started to get sort of dementia. So by the time I was, and I would, I would visit him every time before I went came down to visit Coleby or do anything in the Lincolnshire Archives, but it was actually really sort of difficult and explain to him about these connections that I’d made. So I would try and start to talk about it and then he would talk about RAF Waddington. I mean, to the very end he could recite his RAF number and he would start to talk about it but he couldn’t really understand the connections I was, I was making. But it was, it was clear that it was the best decision I ever made to try and track the slave owner down.
HH: Yeah. I mean it is.
HC: It was clear that it was. I mean, it was an unbelievable amount of work and that’s why it did take so many years.
HH: Yeah.
HC: And my father was deteriorating during all those years so it was, it was tragic.
HH: I mean there is just something so incredible that, that he should end up his, this war service coming to the UK to serve the allied sort of, in the allied war effort and he was that close to his origins. There is something just so extraordinary about that and I know it’s to some extent —
HC: Well, these stories are connected by war.
HH: Yeah. Yeah.
HC: Because the person who becomes the slave owner.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Goes out there because of war and the other reason for telling it is because I really wanted it to be about ordinary stories and ordinary people. You know people in, in Britain think that these stories about enslavement somehow only involved aristocrats.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Bu, you know, this there were ordinary white men all over the Caribbean.
HH: Yeah.
HC: Who became slave owners.
HH: Can I, I’m sorry to do this to you Hazel but I want to quote one sentence from your book which is just, you know it should cause us to stop and think a lot about our practice and I think it is causing us to stop and think a lot, “Links to colonial exploitation and oppression to Atlantic slavery and imperial wars are not the exception. They are, they are our quotidian past.”
HC: Yeah.
HH: And the thing about that statement is that why has it all been forgotten then?
HC: Indeed. That’s the question the book, you know, poses. This historical amnesia. I mean, if you think about it Lilly’s parents in Coleby, in Lincolnshire Bridget and William had grandchildren. Black grandchildren in Jamaica. As did many ordinary people in Britain but we don’t call them family stories do we? See, this is the point of the book, “The Imperial Intimacies.” These are extremely intimate entangled relationships, but somehow the history of the colonies are somehow seen as other. You know what I mean? That’s a completely separate history. So when black people were serving in Britain or were living in Britain were sort of like, ‘Well, where have you come from?’ As if there were actually no relationships between the metropole and the colonies. When I was, you know when I became politically active in the UK in my late teenage years and as a student you know we used to say, ‘We’re here because you were there.’ But the you were there part of the story is the sort of the sense of responsibility. The sense of how these histories are intricately tied to each other is the one that we have to recover. That’s the stories we have to recover. We’re not alien. We haven’t come from somewhere other or completely different. My father thought, you know, my father was raised as British. He had a British education. He went to [unclear] He wasn’t an other. He wasn’t an alien. So if we don’t, if we erase these histories we will never understand how closely tied we all are to each other.
HH: Hazel, you know that seems to be a very profound point to make and one on which perhaps we should conclude this interview because it has been, just so, such an incredible privilege to hear you recounting these stories and I know some of them remain painful but we are just so grateful that. That you’ve been able to do this for our Archive. Thank you so much.
HC: You’re very welcome.
HH: And I’ve stopped recording.
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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Interview with Hazel Carby
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Heather Hughes
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
2021-03-15
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.
Format
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01:21:41 Audio Recording
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ACarbyHV210315-01
PCarbyHV2101
Conforms To
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Pending review
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Second generation
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Coastal Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Jamaica
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Essen
New Brunswick--Moncton
New Brunswick
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1947
Description
An account of the resource
Hazel Carby discusses her father Carl's early life in Jamaica, his experiences training in Canada and serving as aircrew in the RAF, and how he and his family were treated in London in the post war period.
She also discusses her research into her family's history and the connections between the Carby family, Coleby in Lincolnshire and slavery in the Caribbean, for her book, Imperial Intimacies.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Language
A language of the resource
eng
African heritage
aircrew
bombing
demobilisation
navigator
perception of bombing war
RAF Waddington
recruitment
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2026/32293/PMcAllisterJC1801.1.jpg
f2f5e644d1393a024d6b6313f2b2d2bb
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2026/32293/AMcAllisterJC180212.1.mp3
655189d7bfb5fa2ac40c15cd57ad31a8
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
A name given to the resource
McAllister, John Charles
J C McAllister
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with John McAllister (b.1949) about his uncle Flying Officer John Christopher Patrick Doyle who was killed 31 March 1944. He discusses the album he recorded in memory of him and his crew.<br /><br />The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.<br /><br /><span data-contrast="none" xml:lang="EN-GB" lang="EN-GB" class="TextRun SCXW74794190 BCX0"><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW74794190 BCX0">Additional information on<span> John Christopher Patrick Doyle</span></span><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW74794190 BCX0"><span> </span>is available via the</span></span><span class="EOP SCXW74794190 BCX0" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559739":200,"335559740":276}"> </span><a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/106472/">IBCC Losses Database</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-12
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
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McAllister, JC
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HH: Okay, it’s the 12th of February 2018 and I’m Heather Hughes for the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive and I’m sitting, talking at Riseholme Hall to John McAllister who’s kindly agreed to be interviewed for the project. Welcome John and thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed.
JM: Okay.
HH: I wonder if we could start off by asking you just to talk about your own life and upbringing, and then we’ll get around to discussing why the story of your uncle has meant so much to you.
JM: Okay. Well, I was born in London in ’49. My mother married my father after the war, they were both here during the war, my mother worked for British Celanese, as did her brother John, the younger brother, who was killed in the Lancaster. They were children of my grandparents who were dispensary doctors in Dublin and they both died in 1918 in the flu epidemic so John Doyle was one year old when his parents died. My mother was four, and they were brought up by my great grandmother Byrne in Ireland. Now with the Irish troubles of the War of Independence which ended in ‘21 then the ’22 Civil War, there was an economic war between Ireland and England which meant that an awful lot of Irish people emigrated looking for work. My mother and two of her brothers came to England and lived in Pinner and worked at various things, like my Uncle Jim was a quantity surveyor. He did his qualifications in the Polytechnic in Central London, and funnily enough when the war broke out he was conscripted to build prisoner of war camps around England, [laugh] which he didn’t like doing and he skedaddled back to Ireland because his brother Paddy, who was working for the power company, had found him a job. After the war, the same brother, Paddy, found a job for my father in the power station in Country Kildare, so we moved from Lambeth in London, to County Kildare, Naas, Country Kildare, into a works estate and that’s where I was brought up. Now, as I grew up my mother, who was deeply [emphasis] devoted to her brother, had kept all the letters that he had written to her and [pause] yeah, it was very emotional, because my parents warred a lot, they, he would be out down the pub or something and she would be reading the letters to us kids. So from that, you get a sense of what a funny guy he was.
HH: Where are those letters now?
JM: My dad destroyed them. When my mother died of cancer in ’76 he threw everything out. I managed to save the telegram that my mum had, sent to her, which is on the back of the album, I’ve got his cigarette case which I’m going to donate to the museum, and they had his buttons from his uniform and stuff and they all got thrown out because my dad, ah, [pause] he was a man of, yes, he was pretty violent man at times, in his illness: he was a manic depressive, and I’m a manic hypomanic, so lots of emotions in the family and stuff, which gives me my creative urge.
HH: Yeah. Gives you your talent.
JM: Yeah, it does, but anyway, digressing here, but when I grew up listening to my mum reading these letters it was good for her to read them out, but she was trying to recreate something she’d lost and deeply felt, and in Ireland it wasn’t politically correct to remember people who fought for Crown Services, to so it was -
HH: Did your father feel a bit like that?
JM: Yeah. He resented, in a way, my mother bringing up the memory of her brother, in ways, yeah, not, anyway it sort of, it makes you mix what you grow up in, you take what you need, you leave the rest sort of thing, you take what means something to you. But anyway, how this whole album started was, some friends of mine, their marriage broke up and I was in a pub with Alan, and saying he had just had twins but his wife had run off with his best friend, and you think ooh, what can you do about that. So I wrote a song called ‘True Believers’, and I cried when I wrote it, and it was very, very personal, but it got a lot of my feeling about the whole thing out of the way, and then I wrote another song for her side of it – ‘Free Now Its Over’, so I liked both of them. But anyway I was standing playing blue grass in a pub in South Essex, in Ingatestone, which I used to do on a Monday night, get drunk and play music, or play music and get drunk at the same time, whatever, and one night there was this woman standing by the piano and she had really big glasses, with like bottle stop glass in them, you know, really, really thick lenses, and I didn’t realise she was blind, cause she’s asking me who wrote that song, and I said well I did, and she’s not looking at me, she’s looking into the distance and I said well I did. Do you like it? Ah, I like it a lot, do you want to record it? Record, yeah, you can have my arm back, you know. So she was round to my house the next week and she said have you got any more songs, oh lots of songs you know, which I didn’t have, I had snippets of songs, so I had this snippet and only the chorus – ‘I Guess About Half a Million’ – and so we spent the afternoon drinking Jamieson’s and talking music and talking various things, and she said well, I want a song by you by tomorrow, with this ‘I Guess About Half a Million’. I liked the chord structure but, and I liked the air, can I have a song? So I thought okay, put it up to me and she left and because I was a bit maudlin and stuff it suddenly came to me that I could see this whole story, which I didn’t realise that my uncle, I thought he was shot down by a German flyer, which is what my mother had told me, but in fact he was brought down by radar guided ack-ack, and the first plane to be shot down. Now there’s a whole ream about them in Middlebrook’s book, ‘The Nuremburg Raid’, which I then got, after I’d written the song, I got the book and found out the true story, but I wrote the song first. So there was me with a telephone stuck in my earhole, trying to play the guitar down the telephone, bit drunk, to this woman saying, with my wife saying the children are trying to sleep, it’s late at night, will you shut up! And Annabel at the other end saying I like that, that’s good, we’ll record that. Now in the meantime I was working as a programmer in Maldon, in Essex, for a print works, and a type setter there called Rod Sandys, that I got friendly with and I told him was playing music down in this pub, and he said well I used to play he said, and he was ten years older than me, and he was a scoutmaster and stuff and his wife had always had him doing scouts for years and he really wanted to play music again. He used to play with a sixties band, oh, ‘Shivers Down my Backbone’, er, Johnny Kid and the Pirates, he was briefly with that band, but he got married so he had to give it up and conformed and everything. He loved scouting, but he was a scout master for forty years for goodness’ sake but he always wanted to play music, so he ended up coming down to the sessions in Ingatestone and I played him this John Doyle song and he said I like that, we can arrange that. So when we went and did a recording session Rod had it all in his head how to arrange this song and how to play accordion in it and how to put a hum in it and whatever: he was an arranger. And that’s how the song became what it was, because of him, because of Annabel and because of a song about other friends.
HH: How long ago did this all happen, John?
JM: That happened in 1996. Now, in 2015, I was making another album, a rock and roll one called ‘Harwich Sound’, it was going to be a rock and roll record and I had one song done, so it was going to be a rock and roll record because I’d written a rock and roll song, and suddenly I got a hit on my web site, because I’ve got a web site www.jcmcallister.com and I got a hit from a guy called Mike Barber who says, “John I’ve seen your song ‘Ballad of John Doyle’, my name is Mike Barber, I’m the nephew of Sergeant Frank Fealey, the sole survivor of your uncle’s aircraft, please contact me.” Well, hairs down the back of your neck. So, got in touch with him, and he said, I’ve got, I’m making a DVD and I’ve got all these letters and all these photographs of the crew, which I hadn’t seen before. So he sent me the DVD and of course I went through it like a dose of salts, and looked at the letters, looked at the photographs, read the stories, about everybody, and I suddenly had this sort of flash and in an afternoon I sketched out seven songs, one after the other, five of which are on the album, two of which my best mate Paul said were crap he said they’re really ridiculous songs and you could write much better than that. So I did, and I did and the songs I wrote were ‘Gwynne’s Song’ and ‘Radio Op’. Now, for the next year then, my time was taken up making this album. So I wrote the songs in November, had them sketched out, started playing them in folk sessions that I go to, to try them out and then I had a gig in Colchester playing Labour’s Got Talent, for the Labour Party fundraiser and there I saw Nancy Hughes playing her autoharp and she was singing ‘Brothers in Arms’ and I was sitting in the audience and thought wow! I want that voice, I need that woman to be on my album, and so then I contacted the guy who organised the concert and said can you give me her phone number or address? Nope, we can’t do that. I said well okay, can you tell her I’ve got a project in mind and here are some of the songs that I want her to do, would she be interested in doing it? Oh, I’m not sure I can do that. I said well, could you just, just do it? So he did and she came back and said yeah, she was interested in this, so she arranged, she came round to our house and I ran through a few things with her, and she was at the start only going to do ‘Ducharme’s Lost Love’, that’s the one I wanted her to do, and then I said well, while you’re here, there’s another one called, um, ‘Honey Don’t Make Me Cry’, which is a rag tune and would you like to do that, and she liked that, so we arranged and then we had practices and then we went backwards and forward, because she lives in Withenhoe and I live in Ramsay so it’s about twenty miles between the two, so I was over at her house and she was over at my house, and then I introduced her to this studio just down the street from me, The Early Bird, and we recorded a track and then I showed her ones I’d already recorded and then for the year after then she got involved with more tracks and she had ideas about ‘Radio Op’ when we were doing that she said if I go fade in, fade out and come behind you, then that will sound like a radio transmission that’s like an accordion going in and out and that was a good idea and on that one we, I said I want to put some Morse signal at the end of the track and she said what are you going to do? And I said I’m going to put the motto of the squadron which is Noli Me Tangere, Touch Me Not. So that’s in Morse, at the end of that track as it fades out, that Morse comes out and it works, you know, as a track.
HH: It does.
JM: So the other tracks then were evolving, and I was in contact with some of the relatives, my relatives in Ireland, my cousin Paddy Doyle, and I looked him up on the internet cause he used to be a karate teacher, and eventually it turns out he’s in a home in County Carlow with Alzheimer’s. I didn’t realise this, but I managed to get the number for him and rang him up on a Sunday morning, had a conversation with him, and the next minute I’m being contacted by his daughter, Evelyn, who said well dad’s not very well but you’ve been in contact with him and all this, and she became my main contact then, and I said Mike Barber wants a picture of the medals cause you’ve got them in your house, or Paddy did, and she said sure I can send him those pictures of the medals and so that went off to Mike Barber and, in the meantime, I was sending drafts to Mike of what I was doing, and then I got in touch, through him, with his cousin Brenda Fealey. She had been married but she got divorced so she went back to being Fealey and, in Leeds, and sent her rushes of what I was going to write about her dad and then I would have to wait a few days wondering, she hasn’t replied. Does she like it? Doesn’t she like it? And then she comes back and says I really like it though – great! That’s okay, it’s a result, so then I, when I would record them I would send them to people, to say Mike Barber, my relatives and my brother and sister, the Doyles in Ireland and in the middle of all this a lady contacted me from Scotland saying I was looking on Bomber Command Centre for my uncle, Sergeant William Gwynne, and I understand you’re doing an album about his crew. And I said yeah, you know I am, and I sent her a copy of ‘Gwynne’, one that I’d done and I was making little videos of all of these as I did them and put them up on youtube, which had the letters and had his picture and stuff, and she said that I wept because we had no picture of him. We’d lost all photographs and It was so good to see my grandparents’ letters to the Fealey family. Because Sergeant Fealey survived, and everybody knew he’d survived, all [emphasis] the other relatives wrote to his parents looking for information and the Fealey’s kept all the letters. So that was one of the things Mike had told me about in Jean Andre Ducharme, who was twenty five when he was killed, he was a French Canadian navigator and he had an Irish girlfriend, she went back to County Mayo after he was killed, married, had a family, 1969 she died of cancer and then her daughter found all these love letters to this guy she’d never known [emphasis] about, so I mean for a songwriter that became ‘Ducharme’s Lost Love’, you know, gold mine! Well it took me about thirty two times to get the lyric right and of course when we did that we were discussing how we would record it, so I thought I will sing a verse, you’ll sing a verse, we’ll sing a verse together, we’ll tell the story and I’ve got to get the surprise into it, where’s the letter about her finding the poems, realising her mother had a life before her, and you have to get that into the song, life before me [emphasis] you know, sort of to get that inflection in the song which is sort of telling the story songwriter, storyteller you get this stuff out and I was, cause I’d written the song about my uncle all those years ago, I always felt I hadn’t known anything about the rest of the crew. So finding out about the rest of the crew, then you think, well they all deserve a song, so to write a song for each one of them and one of the things was, the radio op, which was in the lyric of the song, that he was orphaned, he was an orphan like my uncle was an orphan, so they had that in common, and he was from Belton Bowland and there was a sort of mis-match of whether that was in Yorkshire or not in Yorkshire, you know, well a sort of border dispute, so I have in the song saying that he’s Yorkshire and really proud of it. In the [indecipherable] I’m from Yorkshire and I’m a proud Yorkshireman! So, that’s gonna stick, and we had him, he was twenty two, so we thought maybe he was getting married, maybe not, but we’ll put it in the story, cause it’s telling a story that he’s got a girl and to make him more human, that he’s got things besides flying, and he’s listening to the beam and he’s dedicated to doing the thing. And the other Irish connections, the captain, Captain Johnston, was originally from Derry, from County, or Londonderry, depending on, probably his family was County Londonderry, to me it would be Derry, but he, Elginton, which where the airport is, he must have learnt his flying as a young man, now his father was a police inspector and they had moved to Dunbar in Edinburgh, so letters from his father, asking for information and saying he could stick it if his boy was dead, but he was hoping for the best, but by that stage they were, whatever, giving up hope, but they’re all heart wrenching letters, so I had him. He’s the captain so he’s got to address his crew so I thought of him as doing a name call on all the guys, with function, so it’s look after your turret, look after your guns, keep on the beam, check if there’s a noise, take the controls just to feel that she’s okay, and the reason as I say, were taking her up for a test, they had bombed Dusseldorf, or tried to bomb Dusseldorf on the previous operation, had been damaged and came back, just limped home, so they’d had turrets replaced and their aeroplane was a really old aeroplane for a long history, over two hundred hours, flying hours, so it was an old style one which is why when it got hit it had fuel lines that burst into flames so when Sergeant Fealey who was the mid turret gunner got out, he came out through a ball of flame and was badly burnt as he came out as it disintegrated and that’s all in the book, in Middlebrook’s book about how he escaped, but his boots flew off in the airstream, he was wearing civvies under his uniform because he was so cold. I got that in one of the songs as well, I like to move about a bit for Gwynne because it’s really cold, twenty thousand feet with no heating: they were freezing.
HH: Indeed.
JM: So, sort of little strands that came from the archive, that all went into making the songs You want to get bits and pieces from what you glean, and as a songwriter try to distil it in to two or three minutes, to make a picture. Now Nancy couldn’t see the whole sense to all this as we were doing it, because we did them out of step as to how they are on the album, so some songs got recorded before others and whatever, and then I, I said I can see it in my head. Then the only song I’m really disappointed with is the first track, I wanted that to be more tub-thumping, like a NAAFI song, people being a bit rowdy, we’re going to do this and whatever, it sort of sets the scene it works up to a point, but it didn’t work as well as I hoped it would. That one I would like to re-record that and make it more memorable, you know, sort of a jingoistic tubthumping, we’re the boys from the Fens, we’re going to do you in, we’ll fly around, we’ll show you, Hitler and that type of thing but the rest of them do work as, they’re like chapters in the story. It starts off they’re taking off, they’re doing a test and because they wanted to test the plane was airworthy, they got bombed up, fuelled up and they took off first, so they can’t land again, so as a result they led the eight hundred people so that comes out in the song, ‘Head of the Armada’, and of course then the head of the flying the first one to get knocked out. But the next song then is ‘Gwynne the Engineer’, now he was, he worked for Rolls Royce in Glasgow and was a skilled engineer which is why he became the flight engineer on the plane, and like the guys he was a volunteer, so his parents were really cross with him for joining up – as all the parents were – they didn’t want him to join up, they knew how dangerous it was, but he went down doing his bit, so I have him talking about listening to the engine and marking in his book because that’s what they did. So they had a little log so if they heard a murmur or a piston misfiring or whatever they would make a note so they have to do this next time round, or if a turret wasn’t moving freely enough or whatever, he had to keep a record of these. And it turns out I had him ‘I like to move about a bit’ but apparently he didn’t have much chance to move about in real life, but in the song he moves about and gets to talk to the guys. And then the radio op one, as I said, we had that fading in and out a bit to make like a radio transmission and it’s a very simple song, but it works, as it had the feel for what I wanted from that. Also on ‘Captain Johnston’, when, I had various things in my head: so when he’s testing out the guns I wanted a machine gun fire which comes out on the soundtrack, briefly, and I wanted, when he calls them up they say roger skipper so the roger skipper is actually me saying roger skipper, and then it’s double tracked and it’s reverb put on it, so it sounds like an intercom. And when I did that Nancy said I can’t understand what you’re doing that for and I said it’ll work, believe me. So when we did it and she heard it and said oh it does work! I said of course it works! I can hear it in my head woman. It's a story so you have to put your audio cues in to make it work. Funnily enough when I was making that album, I was also doing a course on the history of the RAF. There was an Open University course called ‘From White Heat Technology to the end of the Cold War’, so after the war and all this, so I was interacting with a lot of people about the RAF and I happened to mention I’m making this album in just saying I’m making the album, this is what I’m doing, and I got contacted by a guy, Mike Lui, Chinese man from Singapore and I had been talking about being in the Irish Reserve Army and fighting these old World War Two ordnance, 303 rifles, bren guns, twenty five pounders guns and stuff we did and he said he had the same experience in Singapore with the Police Reserve, and then we found out we had a love of blue grass music so he sent me a video of Chinese musicians playing traditional Chinese musical instruments playing blue grass and that was great. So I sent him of a video of what I was doing on the album, so he thought that was really good, and he really liked ‘Tail Gunner Blues’. He likes sort of country and that one is in three different keys, I sort of switch keys doing it, and I had, so when I was doing it I had to double take to record it, I had to do it in several segments otherwise the voice would sound too shrill or too low, whatever, we got that in the end, and he liked that one. Then he says I’ve got a model Lancaster in my flat and I said yeah, he said yeah, I’ll send you a picture of it, so he sent me a picture of his Lancaster and I gave it to my son Colin who turned it into a graphic and that became the centre of the -
HH: How did he have a Lancaster, a model Lancaster?
JM: He just did. He was interested in, and he happened to have this model Lancaster and as soon as I saw it I thought well, that’s the centrepiece for the CD; it’ll fit in. And Colin can do something with it and Colin did. So that’s how that got on there. And Mike was so busy, he got the first, he got the first copy of the album, paid for it and was autographed for everybody. So he’s got that. He paid me fifty dollars or something for it, fifty quid or something for it I thought wow. I wasn’t doing it for the money because it’s one of these silly things and one of the silly things on this, things I’m so impetuous, I left off all the, the final draft to the repro people was the previous wrong one so the back cover has missed off the folk people who sang on the first track and they were really annoyed about that so, and also it says 206 instead of 2016, so deliberate mistake, collector’s items for anybody who’s got that, cause future ones will have the correct detail. So that was that, and then we had the John Doyle song. So if you think with, you’ve got them sitting in the NAAFI thinking about going off on a mission and if we don’t come back remember who we are, which is the whole thing about it: remember them. The captain, doing his name check taking off, the engineer doing his checks, the radio op doing his bit, then we have the tail gunner and he’s worried about being in the tail gunner that he’s not going to get out if something happens, which he didn’t, as it happened. But he was nineteen, from South Carolyn, in Australia, Brian Boyle, Sergeant Brian Boyle and he was friendly, best mates, with the other nineteen year old who escaped, who was Sergeant Fealey, so there’re pictures of them in the archive, best of mates, cause my uncle was the oldest, he was twenty nine when he was killed, the captain was twenty five, and so was the flight engineer, the radio op was twenty two. So I mean, what a waste. But anyway, also when I was making this I showed Mike old photographs I had, So I’ve got the reconnaissance photo of where the plane came down, so it’s like Lockerbie, it came down behind a farmhouse. So it must have been a huge shock for the people in that farmhouse: suddenly this great big bomber comes and explodes in their back garden! And also on the reconnaissance thing it has ‘rock’ where the nose of the plane is, and that’s where my uncle was. He was the bomb aimer, so he didn’t stand a chance, you know. So where we are, we’re up now, we then have ‘Ballad of John Doyle’. So John Doyle song says I’ve been killed in that one so and I wished I could have said goodbye, and then we have the song from Aunt Eileen where she doesn’t believe that he’s dead, which it comes from the letters, and we’re hoping for everything only don’t make me cry. And then we have the story that Mike told me about his uncle refusing to talk about his experiences and he was, as a young kid, was really, [emphasis] really interested in what was happening, can’t you tell me, you know, I’m really interested, let me know. Guy says sorry son, I don’t want to talk about it and so we have that in the song. Now when we do that song now, live, I do it in two voices so I have a gruff voice for the uncle and I’ve got a high pitched voice for the kid asking the questions, and Nancy suggested that, that would work and that works really well. And recently we did a concert in Colchester for an old peoples’ home and this old vet came up to me after and said that song ‘Sergeant Fealey’s Fear of Flying’, that’s a brilliant, really brilliant song my grandfather was First World War vet and after the war he refused to talk to my dad about it, but he said I was National Service in the ‘50s and was in Cyprus, the EOKA thing, and I came back in uniform then my grandfather opened up to me about the whole thing and he said it’s true, I couldn’t talk to other people about what I’d experienced, old servicemen will talk to each other, but he says you’ve got that in the song and that makes it a good song. I though ah, pretty cool. So the last song then is ‘Back in the Air’ because thirty years after he had been shot down and he didn’t want to fly again. He was flown back from Germany after the war and he became a Squadron leader, for a time, in the RAF, but then he refused to fly until 1974, and he was a salesman and [indecipherable] TV did a documentary on him, saying gunner takes his team to a raid on Germany again. So they went to Dusseldorf as a sales team and it’s the first time he’d flown again and then and after he’d flown he flew to Canada and places and looked up for the relatives of Duscharme to meet the family and talk to them. He was also instrumental in getting the two Irish guys’ names put on the memorial in Edinburgh Castle so he had Gwynne’s name put on that, Johnston was on it but Gwynne’s wasn’t. And they were recorded as Scots, in fact they were Irish, Irish extraction. So my uncle was from Dublin. We had Sergeant Gwynne was from Omagh, County Tyrone. Johnston was from Elginton, County Londonderry or Derry, take your choice.
HH: All on the same crew.
JM: On the same crew, and Fealey was of Irish extraction. I’m not sure about Thomson who was the radio op, where he came in, but Jean Andre Ducharme would have been a Catholic French Canadian, with an Irish girlfriend, so he was allowed on the crew [laugh] so I was talking with a friend of mine.
HH: Unusual.
JM: And he said that was what they did, he said, they grouped people by nationality because they were more likely to fight for each other, or bond together, whether that’s true or not I don’t know, but that’s what his theory was. Set up a few funny things, I had a boss gave me a big, big break back in the early eighties in programming, I doubled my salary by taking the job, and when I went for my interview I said well I don’t know about this system you’re talking about, he says well I think, he says, you’re the type of man who would learn very quickly and I’m impressed with you, so I’ll give you the job, so he did. Now Brian Sherwin contacted me last year, and how are things going? I’ve got four grandchildren now and how many have you got? And all this and haven’t seen you for a long, long time, so I said I’m in the middle of making, I made this album, so I sent him the album and he came back with a whole ream of letters saying I didn’t know your uncle was in the RAF, he says my uncle was in the RAF and didn’t come back, and this made me cry.
HH: Was his uncle also in Bomber Command?
JM: Yes.
HH: Goodness me!
JM: It was very cathartic, he said, to get this off my chest. He said I didn’t realise how bottled up I was, in the family, until I had that album and he said it let it all out.
HH: Amazing, yeah. Have you, what, have you had quite a lot of responses like that to the album? I mean a lot of people probably feel quite similar.
JM: Yeah. Well the relatives that I’ve been in contact with have been. for Sergeant Gwynne, some, some of the relatives are in, no, for Sergeant Fealey some of the relatives are, now live in Holland and they came back and said yeah, they really enjoyed it and it brought back stuff and because I’d sent them a copy of the archive, they said it was funny to see our grandparents’ writing, and to see all these letters that went to our grandparents. The people in Scotland, Gwynne’s relatives, are all touched by it and they were at the Elsham Wolds reunion last August when it was there, we met them, Nancy and I and we’re Facebook friends now, since. They’re, yeah, it was one of those really silly things. And of course your daughter is [laughter] involved with my son and then suddenly you download the album and I thought well, that’s the only person who’s done that off it and that’s why I immediately responded. That is really cool!
HH: The connections and the coincidences are really truly amazing about this, because I mean Christina sent me, she hadn’t known Colin very long I don’t think, and she sent me this card saying Colin’s dad has something to do with Bomber Command, you might want to get in touch with him, here’s his details. Which is when I contacted you and it, although I don’t have any, well I thought I had no personal connection with Bomber Command but I’ve subsequently discovered I do have a connection with Bomber Command in my great uncle, who was Scottish, was killed, on an op, but we didn’t know that side of the family very well. But the, the coincidences that you were talking about just happen so often in this project and the most amazing [emphasis] people sort of, and the most incredible connections have been made between families and people who thought that they had nothing to do with each other, and I’ve just watched it so often and when it happened to me, through you, and Christina and Colin, I thought [bang on table] this had to happen on this project, it had to happen through this project because it’s happened to so many other people who’ve been involved in it.
JM: Yep. That’s really cool.
HH: It is cool!
JM: Nancy and I are really chuffed to have been asked to play at this thing. We’re nervous about it, but it’s just.
HH: I am absolutely over the moon that this is going to happen, and I’m so pleased that you’re going to be able to see the Centre tomorrow, before you come to play cause I think it is going to be quite an emotional experience for you to see the Centre because there are memorial walls and your uncle’s name is on there.
JM: Right.
HH: So you’ll be able to go and see his name on the Memorial Walls, and the other crew.
JM: That’s cool.
HH: So you’ll be able to do that tomorrow.
JM: Thank you.
HH: Before we finish this John, it would be quite useful, for the purposes of the interview, if you just recall for us the actual operation and the squadron details of the crash and what the crew were involved in, that you have worked so hard to kind of commemorate. So they took off from Elsham Wolds.
JM: 30th of March 1944. They were going to bomb Nuremburg, because, as I said, they took off first, they led the eight hundred plane armada, flying. They went down an alley of radar controlled ack-ack, so it was like the Charge of the Light Brigade, they were going into the teeth of the guns. Whether they knew it or not, that’s actually what happened. So, they’re buried in Germany, I’ve never been there, to visit the grave, some of the relatives in Ireland have, my mum always wanted to got here, but I will some time. But you know, it’s, I don’t have to go there to remember him, do you know what I mean, but I would like to, at some stage; I’d like to go with my brother. But you know, it’s one of those silly things.
HH: For the future.
JM: For the future, yeah, for the future. But on that bombing raid ninety six aircraft were lost: it was the biggest [emphasis] single operational loss in the whole war, and some people have said that perhaps details of the raid were leaked to the Germans to divert from another raid that was happening on the same night. That comes out in Middlebrook’s book as a theory, that may not have happened, but the but the upshot was that nearly seven hundred people were lost or killed.
HH: It was a huge loss that night.
JM: A huge loss. And speaking about Bomber Command, [pause] sticking my pennysworth here, some people see Bomber Command now in black and white, and they bring up Dresden, and they say oh they were all murderers, they were war criminals, they were this. They weren’t: they were volunteers who were doing a particularly dangerous, dangerous job, day after day, without flinching and they were, they had the dirt pulled on them after the war. Churchill disowned them because it was politically expedient for him to do that, and not remember them and just recently they’ve had the War Memorial in Green Park for Bomber Command which is just brilliant. And I will say the Royal Family have supported that and they all went and turned out for the opening of that Memorial. You know, it’s one of those, see this, when I sent copy of the album to Her Majesty and I got a really, really nice reply back about it, I sent a picture of her parents, presenting my mum with the DFC!
HH: How interesting. Have you got that photograph?
JM: Yep. It’s now in the Fealey archive I think, cause I sent it, well copied it to Mike, but I’ve got it. I can send you a copy of it if you. it’s one of the silly things that happen in war.
HH: I mean I think that the, the current thinking about Bomber Command, I mean I think that the Green Park Memorial, to some extent, acknowledges the role that the aircrew played and brings them into the kind of main narrative if you like. I think the feeling, generally, at the moment, is that the, it’s the high command of Bomber Command who still have quite a lot to answer for, not the aircrew who were doing what they were asked to do, under extreme difficulties, and yeah doing something which they probably themselves didn’t realise the extent of the dangers, I mean I think they had a fairly good idea that this was really dangerous even during wartime they themselves had no idea what the loss rate was, because it was hushed up, it was hushed up. So yeah, I think the aircrew who flew in Bomber Command on all those operations have been very poorly treated.
JM: Yeah, I’d go along with that.
HH: And, in a way, that’s the message that we’ve tried to convey in the exhibition that you’ll see tomorrow.
JM: Ah, so one more thing, that last song on the thing, ‘Back in the Air Again’, where it has him back flying and saying things, I sent these tracks to a pirate DJ in Ireland, friend of mine, and he was playing them on the radio in Ireland and when I did that one he had a young German girl who was in his studio at the time playing fiddle, playing Irish or playing German traditional music for Christmas, and he played that track and he asked her what did she make of that, and she said well I really liked the words our children can be friends and that really got me, that’s really cool, which was what it was meant to do, in the writing of the thing, because I also say, in that song, thing that he learnt, being a prisoner of war, that the other people felt the pain of war as well. He learnt a bit of German, could speak with them, not saying he fraternised with them, but he understood a bit more about the whole thing and how it transpired, but it’s trying to get images in without being jingoist about it, and making, without making statements about it, but making real people come to life again. I’ve got a novelist friend, Lisa Oliver, who writes racing novels, and she liked the album, she says you know what John, she says you can put in three minutes what takes me ages to put into a whole chapter! [laugh] You’ve got the whole story in three minutes! Which is good, which is cool. I was really pleased.
HH: I think it’s, I mean I think it’s a great album.
JM: Thank you.
HH: I enjoy playing it at home.
JM: I’ll give you a hard copy and I’ll also give one to Dan and your man upstairs, can’t think of his name now.
HH: Peter.
JM: Peter. Cause I’ve got a load of them in the boot of the car.
HH: Well we can, I’m sure that they’ll like them up at the Centre. Thank you John, for that interview. We’ll call it a day now, but I’m sure that there’s a lot more talking we still can do, but for the purposes of this interview, that’s it for the moment.
JM: Okay.
HH: Thank you so much.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with John Charles McAllister
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Heather Hughes
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
2018-02-12
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.
Format
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00:45:42 Audio Recording
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AMcAllisterJC180212, PMcAllisterJC1801
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
John McAllister tells the story of his family connection with Bomber Command through his uncle who was killed on operations. John is a musician and movingly explains how, through writing songs and putting them on the internet about his uncle and the crew, he made many connections with other families of this crew all around the world. The interview talks of the many connections Bomber Command has with people in so many places and how they are not always discussed, but are of such interest to a wide audience.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Anne-Marie Watson
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Ireland
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Nuremberg
Ireland--Kildare (County)
Ireland--Dublin
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-03-30
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bomb aimer
killed in action
Lancaster
perception of bombing war
RAF Elsham Wolds
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/545/11672/PSmytheE1701.1.jpg
742a20ab96dbb7a32a4f6a88b5935e69
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/545/11672/ASmytheE170802-02-AV.1.mp3
564622d6738bc4ef131d52efeaf58930
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
A name given to the resource
Smythe, Eddy
Eddy Smythe
E Smythe
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. A photograph and two oral history interviews with Eddy Smythe about his father, John Henry Smythe (1915-1996, 144608 Royal Air Force) who served as a navigator in Bomber Command.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-08-02
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
Smythe, E
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Good afternoon. My name is Eddy Smythe. My father was John Smythe. He was a Sierra Leonian who came over from Sierra Leone to join the RAF in 1941. At that time Sierra Leone was part of the British Commonwealth and he had absolutely no hesitation in volunteering to join the war effort to fight for his country and to fight for his Queen. He saw service for two and a half years. He was shot down and was a prisoner of war for two years. When he was finally released he went back to London and he studied to become a barrister. He qualified and went back to Sierra Leone and set up a legal practice there. He went on to act for most of the embassies in Freetown at that time being as his firm was one of the largest practises at that particular time and he quite often attended cocktail parties and various other functions held by these embassies, most notably the British Embassy. And there was one particular occasion when he was at a party and ended up chatting to the German Ambassador. They both established that they were in their respective Air Forces during the war. My father was in Bomber Command and the German Ambassador was in Fighter Command. So they chatted for quite a while and they shared various stories and my father said his flying came to an end when his plane was shot down over Germany on a particular day, a particular month and a particular year. And the German Ambassador went silent and he said, ‘Can you tell me the exact date again and the exact time?’ Which my father did, and he said, ‘Can you tell me exactly where the plane was shot down? Are you able to tell me the coordinates?’ And of course, my father did. You know, he’d never forget those sort of details. And at this point there was silence and the German Ambassador paled visibly and he said, ‘You’re not going to believe this but at that exact time I was flying in that location and I shot down a British bomber and it is logged as a kill to me.’ And my dad said they both looked at each other. They were both speechless for a few seconds and they threw their arms around each other, hugged each other, went off and had a drink and celebrated the event. When he told me this story I was much younger and of course and I thought, ‘Well, how could you react like that? Surely you were cross being shot down.’ He said, ‘No. Not at all. He did what he had to do. I did what I had to do.’ He said, ‘We actually celebrated the circumstance.’ So, as I said I could have told you a few stories but that’s one which I think is quite a nice story to tell and I am really pleased to have the opportunity to tell the story. Its not very often that I can do and I think it is important that the story is told because it helps to demonstrate the significant effort that was made by people like me dad from all over the Commonwealth towards the war effort. So thank you very much.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Eddy Smythe. Two
Description
An account of the resource
Eddy Smyth’s father was John Smythe. John left Sierra Leone to join the RAF during the Second World War. He was shot down over Germany and spent two years as a prisoner of war. After the war he trained as a barrister and returned to Sierra Leone where he established a law firm. At a function at the British Embassy he conversed with the German Ambassador and to the shock of both of them they realised that it may have been the German Ambassador who had shot him down. They hugged each other and went for a drink to celebrate the event and talk more. Audio Track from video interview
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Heather Hughes
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-08-02
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
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ASmytheE170802-02-AV, PSmytheE1701
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:03:55 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Sierra Leone
Germany--Barth
Sierra Leone--Freetown
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Second generation
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
African heritage
aircrew
bombing
navigator
perception of bombing war
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 1
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/545/11671/PSmytheE1701.1.jpg
742a20ab96dbb7a32a4f6a88b5935e69
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/545/11671/ASmytheE170802-01.2.mp3
b6694953c10b54673114646859a36227
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
A name given to the resource
Smythe, Eddy
Eddy Smythe
E Smythe
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. A photograph and two oral history interviews with Eddy Smythe about his father, John Henry Smythe (1915-1996, 144608 Royal Air Force) who served as a navigator in Bomber Command.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-08-02
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
Smythe, E
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HH: Ok. We are sitting in the living room of the home of Eddy Smythe in Chinnor near Oxford and this is an interview for the International Bomber Command Centre. It is the 2nd of August 2017. I’m Heather Hughes. Also with me today are Eddy Smyth himself, Iyamide Thomas, Sidney Macfarlane and Alex Passaro. Thank you very much Eddy for agreeing to do this interview and also for Iyamide to come, for coming up by train from London.
IT: That’s ok.
ES: You’re very welcome.
HH: Eddy, I wonder if we could start this interview by talking a little bit about you and your, your memories of your dad because I think one of the things that you were surprised by was that he didn’t really talk very much about his war experiences until quite late on. So could we start off just by talking about what it was like for you growing up with him, not really knowing his background in the war?
ES: Yeah. I mean that, that’s very true. I knew very little of the detail of what he did during the war. I obviously knew that he was in Bomber Command and I knew that he was a navigator. I also knew that he’d been shot down over Germany and he’d spent a couple years in the prisoner of war camp. But in terms of actual detail, how he felt, what the experiences were like, I mean he just, he just never discussed them. It was impossible to get it out of him. I mean this was at a time when, you know as a little boy, or as little boys my brother and I used to buy the little war comics and were always reading about the English fighting the Germans. It was all really exciting and I knew my dad had played a part in it but quite frustrating that he never, he never talked to us about it. He, I always remember him throwing out his uniform. His actual RAF uniform. And I remember thinking even though at the time I was probably ten years old but I thought this is sad. And I went and cut his wings out of the jacket and kept the wings. I also remember him going to throw out the logbook which he kept when he was a prisoner of war. It sounds amazing now. I think why would anyone want to do it but he didn’t want to discuss the war. He was happy to talk to you all day about him being a lawyer and the cases that he tried and you know he was, he was happy. You’d sit and he’d talk to you literally all day and all night but as soon as you mentioned the war he just went silent. He’d never talk about it. He threw out his uniform. He wanted to get rid of his logbook and he didn’t want to talk to about it. You know, that’s, that’s kind of how it of was for us growing up. I mean thinking back about it you know there were some signs that he was, he was affected by the war. Because one of the things that we used to have to draw straws about was who would, who would wake him if he needed to be woken up. As children. So my mum would say, ‘Right, someone go and wake daddy.’ And we’d look at each other and go, ‘No. It’s your turn.’ ‘No. It’s your turn.’ Because no matter how gently you tried to wake him up, no matter how gently. you could tiptoe in and you could whisper but the moment he woke up he woke up with a scream. Every time. And leapt out of the bed. He literally used to be like a foot out of bed. No matter how gently you tried to wake him. And as children it was quite frightening. So we used to always go on and on. I’d say, ‘John it’s your turn to wake him.’ ‘No. No, you’ve got to wake him up.’ And, and I suppose as a child you don’t really understand why. You just kind of think it’s something that might have to do with experiences in the past. But later on as you get older and you get a bit wiser you start to realise what it was about. And I think I did, I did find out what it was about probably about three years before he died. You know, when I got to talk to him in some detail. But no, the war didn’t really form much of a, much, didn’t take much [pause] it didn’t play much of a part in our lives growing up other than the fact that we knew that we had this father who had been in the RAF. That was it. It was not discussed till much much later.
HH: And when it was discussed?
ES: Now, you’re talking about when he was much older. There were two occasions that I specifically remember. One was probably, I would say something like twelve years before he died. I was living in England. He was still in Sierra Leone. He came over on holiday. And I’ve always had an interest in flying and I remember talking to him about navigation and it was incredible because at that stage of his life he struggled to remember things that happened the previous week but he could remember in incredible detail and with enormous clarity how he used to navigate from Britain over to whatever target it was. Whether it was in Germany or in France. And all the techniques they used at that time which, you know were incredibly basic but you know they allowed them to. I mean that’s why the RAF brought in navigators. He started off, he trained as a pilot, he got his wings and then anyone who had a decent pass mark in maths was converted to a navigator which he was disappointed with. But they realised that the bombers, they’d fly over, they’d get to Germany, drop, or France, wherever, they dropped their bombs and I think it was one bomb out of every payload that fell within five miles of the target. They just weren’t hitting the target. So they got navigators. They trained navigators to do that and he was one of those. And I remember him explaining to me in a lot of detail about how they got the aircraft there, how they found the target and how they got back because they flew at night, you know. So that, I remember that, that incident but I think two or three years before he died he needed a lot of care and my mother effectively was looking after him. He had an injury from the war where he was shot and he lost a couple of ribs. And when you were a young, fit and healthy person you know, you don’t notice the effects but as you get older these things all catch up with you. And it ended up causing him back problems and then problems with walking. So he needed a lot of care. And I remember my mother went over to visit her parents in Grenada and I went over and spent a lot of time with him. And I remember sitting there. We got a chance to really, really talk. My dad wasn’t one for going into a lot of detail. He just wasn’t. But we got a chance to talk and I said to him, ‘So tell me about how you, what it was like when you got shot down.’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, one of our engines got knocked out by anti-aircraft fire and we got over Germany and a night fighter shot us down and I parachuted out.’ I said, ‘Yes, but tell me what it was like.’ He said, ‘Well, we got shot down.’ I said, ‘Yeah. Well, even in your memoirs you’ve just written, “We got shot down,” you know. I know how terrified I am when I’m, when we hit air pockets in a plane. You were shot. One engine wasn’t working. You had a night fighter circling you, shooting. How did you feel? Talk to me about it.’ And then he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was already wounded,’ because when they were hit by anti-aircraft fire he was wounded. He had shrapnel which went up between his leg and through his side but they had morphine which they took and they continued to the target. And as the aircraft was being riddled with bullets, you know a couple of people died straightway and there was screaming. I said, ‘Right. So what, was there smoke? Was it dark?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, it was really smoky and the plane caught on fire.’ ‘And then what?’ You know. Trying to get him to talk because he never talked about his emotions. Never ever talked about his emotions. And he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘One of the crew members was badly wounded. I managed to get him to the door and push him out so that he could actually get out and pull his parachute,’ and he said, ‘By which time the plane was started to spiral and he jumped out.’ So, but he took, I mean this was, you know right at the end of his life and even then he still never discussed his emotions. He didn’t say, which is what I would say is, I was absolutely terrified. You know. It was just something he said. So I got him to talk about physically what happened in the plane and the smoke and the confusion and the shouting and the flames etcetera. And then he, he parachuted. And he landed, he was bleeding and he stole a bicycle. He remembered stealing a bicycle and he cycled so trying to get away from villages and find somewhere secluded and he hid in a barn. But with the loss of blood I think he got a bit delirious and he, he lit a cigarette and it was spotted. And he was, he was then captured and he was handed over to the SS for interrogation. They made him walk in the snow without shoes. And, and this is, this is another bit which he told me which I would have loved to have heard this as a child, you know. Bearing in mind he’d written his memoirs and he didn’t mention this detail but I actually said to him, ‘So what happened when they interrogated you?’ He said, well, they were hitting him, you know, punching him. And there was an officer. The officer in charge of this little group of SS men. He said he was a little guy and he kept coming up and smashing him in the stomach with the butt of his rifle and he kept falling and getting up. He decided, ‘I’m going to be killed. I know I’m going to be killed.’ Now, you’ve got to remember that at this stage of his life my dad was six foot five, you know and he was fourteen and half, fifteen stone. Absolutely, you know, in his prime. Very strong. Very muscular. And he said to me because I said to him, ‘Come on. So what did you do? How did you react?’ He said, ‘Well at this stage,’ he said, ‘I decided that the next time he came to hit me I worked out that,’ [pause] I’m sorry to be so graphic but this is what he said. He said, ‘As long as I can get him within reach I can snap his neck before they kill me.’ Because that was his mindset. He thought, last bit of, you know — payback he said and he was determined. He thought, ‘All I need to do is get my hands on him because I know I can snap his neck before I’m killed.’ He said, ‘But as it happened he never came within reach.’ And he would, all he would say, he would give his name and his rank, you know. I’m an officer in the RAF. They couldn’t understand what he was doing in the RAF because he was a black man. And he said, ‘But you’re from Africa. Why are you in an RAF uniform?’ And he said, ‘Well, Sierra Leone is a, is a British colony and I’m fighting for my queen.’ And after this interrogation, brutal as it was, he was then sent to a German hospital where he was treated and then ended up going into a prisoner of war camp for officers. So that was all new. And then it went on because I didn’t let him off then because I wanted to find out what it was like being in, in the camp. I said to him, ‘Well, how did you feel? There were no black people there.’ He said, ‘To be honest with you,’ he said, ‘I only remembered I was black when I looked in the mirror.’ And he always said being in the RAF was his happiest times. He said there was no, no one, the issue of colour never came up. You were just one band of people fighting for the same cause. And, you know, do you want me to go on? Talk about his experiences. Because I wanted to know what life was like in the camp because this was all new to me. You know, I was sitting there thinking, this is my father who I’ve known all my life and I’m hearing these stories as though they’re from a stranger. Because, you know but he seemed willing to open up. You know it was the first time he was willing to open and also I think he perhaps saw me in a different light as well. I was no longer the little boy who just wanted to hear war stories. Now I was interested in my father. I wanted to know what happened. You know. And as you grow old as well and you mature your thought processes change and you start to be a lot more aware of things that may have happened. Which, as a child, well he was in a prisoner of war camp for two years. And I said, ‘Did you know what was going on outside the camp?’ And he said, ‘Yeah,’ he said, they had one chap who was a sort of electronics expert and he was able to put together a little transistor radio just with bits of wire and bits and pieces. So they could monitor what was happening but equally if the guards came they could dismantle it in a second. You know. Someone could take one bit there and some bit so that the guards never knew. But they could follow the progress of the war so they knew the Germans were losing. They knew the Russians were making their way in. They knew the allies were making their way in. So they could follow it. And he said the, your, your obligation as a military person in a prisoner of war camp is always to escape. So he was in a lot of escape committees but of course he could never ever be a person that could escape. Not a chance because the point of escaping was you got out there and you put on civilian clothes.
IT: [unclear] a black man.
HH: He wouldn’t have been —
ES: No.
HH: Exactly invisible.
ES: No. No. So there was no prospect. No prospect of him ever trying to escape but, you know he told me about lots of attempts that they made. And I asked him if the guards were brutal. He said, ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘You know the Germans were like any other types of people. You had some really nice guys. You had some really vicious ones and, and some of them were, were pretty bad.’ He said, he always recalls one incident where one of their guys was, he was throwing up, it wasn’t a ball but something he was, he was just throwing and catching. He threw it and it fell close to the perimeter wall and when he went over to retrieve it he was shot and killed outright by the guard. He said, and that’s the closest they came to rioting, you know. But they just knew that you know the senior officers had to say, ‘Look you just can’t because we will be wiped out. We will just be shot.’ You know. So they clearly saw some pretty horrendous things whilst, whilst they were there. But I think that officers did get treated a little bit better than other people in the, in the, who were in the prisoner of war camp. But because they could monitor the war they, they sort of knew what was happening. They knew that the allies were very, very close. And he said one day they woke up and normally you get, you know a call from the loudspeaker etcetera. There was nothing. There was silence. And they walked out and they thought — the guards are gone.
IT: No guards [laughs]
ES: The guards had just gone. Disappeared. They were on their own. So they all wandered around thinking, well this must be because the allies are close. So for two days they just had to organise themselves. Trying to source food. That was the biggest problem was getting food. They just had to survive and he said, I think it was on the, either the end of the second day or the third day he said the Russians turned up which would account for the guards disappearing. Because had it been the other allies, had it been the western allies — the British and the Americans — slightly different. You know, the Germans would have been, would they themselves would have become prisoners of war. But with the Russians they tended to slaughter.
HH: Yeah.
ES: You know. And, and the Germans knew this.
IT: Wow.
ES: So they just disappeared. And my dad said his first thoughts when he saw them was should we be scared or should we be happy?
HH: Yeah.
ES: He said, because they were like wild men.
IT: Wow.
ES: He said, you know discipline was poor etcetera he said, but actually he said they were really wonderful people. He said this Russian chap, they could give them weapons but what they couldn’t give them was food and this Russian soldier actually put his hand in his pocket and brought out a bit of dried fish and gave it to him. You know. And in his logbook which he kept, although it was very sparse what he had in the logbook, in there were two pages with Russian writing in it and I’d always asked him what it was.
IT: What it was.
ES: And he said, ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said, ‘A couple of Russians wrote in the, in the logbook. I said, ‘Have you not tried to find out?’ and he said, ‘No. No. You know. I wasn’t really interested.’ But I’ll just jump to something else now before I carry on with that story because I had his logbook and I thought, suddenly thought one day I should find out what’s there. So I took a copy of the two pages and at the time I was working with a company in London and I knew that the floor above us, in the offices were, was a Russian company. And this was in the days before, there weren’t a lot of Russians. I mean there are a lot of Russians in England now but in those days there weren’t many. So I took copies of these, these two, two sheets and I went upstairs to this company and initially I was treated with great suspicion as I walked in and said, ‘Can I speak to anyone here who might speak Russian?’ And he said, ‘Why?’ And I explained what it was and of course his attitude just changed totally and he was fascinated. He said, ‘Well I can’t translate this but if you leave it with me there is someone in the office who will be able to translate it.’ He said, ‘Come back tomorrow,’ and I did. And they were fairly simple inscriptions. One of them was just saying, “It was very nice to meet Officer Smythe.” “It was wonderful to meet someone who was fighting against the Germans,” etcetera. But the more interesting one was from a female lieutenant. Officer. Russian officer. And she said, again, “It’s lovely to meet Officer Smythe. We partied and made merry all night.” So needless to say I never gave that particular translation to my mother [laughs] but that was actually what was in this translation. And I remember, I remember coming, he was staying me in Thame at the time. And I actually remember coming back and I said, ‘Dad, I’ve got something to show you,’ and I just gave him these bits of paper and he read them and he said, ‘What’s this?’ I said, ‘Does it, does it ring any bells? Can you not think —' And he looked at it and he said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘How about this bit?’ You know, the bit about Officer Smythe. He said, ‘What’s this from?’ I said, ‘That’s a translation from your logbook,’ and this big smile just broke on his face. And he, but he never ever knew, what, what it was.
IT: What it was.
HH: Amazing.
ES: But again that was just something else I had to know. I was very interested in. But going back to the prisoner of war camp they gave them weapons but no food. So they thought right you have to go and find food. So he took a group of men and then went into the villages. Because of course now power has shifted, you know. And again this is a story he told me. Everything he was telling me on this day I had never heard before. But he said he went, he had about four or five men with him and they knocked on this door for — just a house in the village and this German man came to the door. And he said, ‘We want food.’ You know, ‘We haven’t eaten. We need food.’ And this guy said, ‘You’re not coming in here. I’m sorry. We have got nothing for you.’ He said he just put his pistol against his leg and fired and he said, to this day he remembers the smell of burning flesh at short distance. He said but at the time he had no remorse. Didn’t think twice about it and just went in and helped themselves to food. And I didn’t ask him anymore. And he didn’t tell me anymore. You know. And perhaps there was no more to be told but it’s almost you get to the point when you think I won’t ask him. You know. It’s time to leave that particular story alone.
HH: Yeah. I mean those must have been desperate times for them though, you know.
ES: Desperate.
IT: Hungry. Yeah.
HH: I don’t think any of us who have lived through so many decades of social peace can remotely appreciate what it must have been like.
ES: No.
HH: Just coming out of a prisoner of war camp.
IT: Camp.
ES: After two years.
HH: After two years.
IT: It’s interesting though that you said that he didn’t talk about it because you’d probably hear that same story from —
HH: Yeah. It’s quite common.
IT: [unclear] dad because they told me that as well. That their dad hardly spoke about it.
HH: In fact a lot of the interviews that we do with veterans themselves they are in their mid to late nineties and their families report, if they’ve sat in on the interview, ‘This is the first time we’ve ever heard any of this.’ So yeah.
SM: I just wonder whether this has anything to do with the survival training that aircrew, not only aircrew but ground crew, were all taught that if you were caught and you became a prisoner of war the only thing you divulge is your service number. You do not say anything else at all that benefits —
ES: Right.
SM: And whether that is so embedded that even after the war when they can tell the story they still have reluctance.
HH: Still have that.
SM: To share it.
HH: It may be.
SM: Yeah. I also, another point I’d just like to pick up is this question of in todays air force that would be a demotion really. Going on from pilot to navigator. But in fact that was the introduction of the navigator because the air force has gone full circles now and you go in as a navigator and then if you are good enough you could later on train as a pilot.
ES: Right.
IT: Ok. That’s —
SM: Now, with the invention of the GPS system.
ES: Yes.
SM: Complication, we’ve abandoned navigators now. We don’t need them any more.
ES: Yeah. Correct.
SM: Yeah. So it started but it’s gone first circle.
ES: Is it? How interesting.
SM: Yes. And its intriguing for me to know how the navigator really started. You can imagine the wasteful. The waste of the ammunitions.
HH: Yeah.
SM: Not being able to pinpoint your target.
HH: Target. Yeah.
ES: Terrible.
SM: Now we’ve got technical stuff —
ES: Laser guided.
SM: Doing it now and laser guided stuff now.
ES: Yeah.
SM: There are bombs now which you can just fire and forget about it and still hit the target. And the drones.
HH: Yeah.
SM: So now we’ve abolished navigators altogether.
HH: Indeed. And pilots.
ES: Yes. And pilots.
SM: And pilots.
ES: He said —
HH: Yeah.
ES: That when they called them all out when they were, they had finished training camp and they explained the background to the necessity of a navigator. And they said, ‘We are now going to call, to read out a list of names of pilots who will be trained for navigators.’ And he said when he called out his name he just shouted out, ‘Oh damn.’ Because he wanted to fly.
HH: To fly. No.
ES: He didn’t want to navigate.
SM: And the navigators, to be quite honest, had to, were more skilful than a pilot because you were quite right they had to be good at maths because they were the people had to work out time and distance and speed. And feed information to the pilot really. So they were the key people.
IT: Yeah.
HH: Yeah.
SM: Setting targets for people like bomb aimers and the guy who was sat at the back of the aircraft.
ES: Yes.
SM: There were, they were in trouble. They were the first to be hit.
ES: The rear tail gunner.
SM: The rear tail gunner.
ES: His life span was not long.
SM: Yeah.
HH: No.
SM: No. No.
HH: That was the most dangerous position.
IT: One thing I want, I want you to explain is ‘cause I think you found out why, when you woke him up he —
ES: I did.
IT: The reason.
ES: Yes.
IT: That would be an interesting thing.
ES: Well the reason for that and I believe this to be the reason is that he was, when they were being trained they were in a camp in Hastings. That’s where they were being trained to become pilots. And of course the Germans had their, their spies and they knew where these training camps were and it was in their interests to try and kill as many trainees as possible because they were going to become the pilots who were going to bomb them.
SM: Oh yes.
ES: And they actually sent, had a bombing raid on the camp whilst they were there. And they did, they did strike the camp and they killed a number of the trainees and friends and colleagues that he had. And he said it was just devastating, you know. And they got up in the morning and they had to help clear up body parts etcetera. But he said he was woken by the scream, screaming of the planes and the bombs coming down. And I firmly believe, when he told me that story I thought to myself that is why. That is embedded in, embedded in his mind. His mindset for life.
SM: And I think, I think you’re right because that, in fact part of the officer training, that’s a scenario that’s fed into the training system. You go to camp for a week. Ground defence training they call it and part of the scenario is that the camp is being bombed. You’ve got to wake up and sort, you all had pre-determined jobs that you do but you have to react to this imaginary bombing of the camp being attacked. And I’m sure that must have come from way back and embedded as part of the training procedure.
HH: Yeah. Yeah. So he must have been transported back to the UK. Your dad.
ES: Yes.
HH: At the end of the war. Did he go straight back to Sierra Leone?
ES: No. No. In fact he was one of the very few released prisoners who signed up immediately to go back and do another stint. I mean he, you would have thought he’d have had enough by then.
HH: Enough.
ES: But he, he wanted to go. He went back in and then they were, they were being trained to bomb in Japan.
HH: Tiger Force.
SM: Right.
ES: Yeah. And of course before they actually became active the atom bombs were dropped. So he was based in London and he, he ended up, as you know he became a lawyer and a barrister and he went to, he trained as a barrister in Middle Temple in, in London. But as a, as an officer in the RAF he was called upon purely because he was fairly articulate, he was called upon to defend an airman who had committed some crime. So it was a court martial which didn’t require formal legal representation.
IT: Yeah.
ES: But you needed representation. And he was called upon to do it and he did. And he obviously did it quite successfully and he realised that he had a talent. And it was that that persuaded him to go into law because up to that stage he didn’t really know what he was going to do. And that’s one of the reasons he went back in to the RAF. Because he didn’t know what he was going to do, so he was going to stay in the RAF but he knew the war had come to an end. And that’s why he ended up going to law school and he trained and he qualified as a barrister and then he went, well he met my mum while he was in London.
HH: How did he meet your mum? Do you know?
ES: Yes. Do you know, well she was a nurse and, and they met at some sort of function. She’d come over from Grenada. But as a child I remember saying to my dad, ‘How did you meet? How did you meet my mum?’ And he said, ‘Oh I met her, I met her as a dancer in a nightclub.’ Obviously joking and he kind of laughed. But of course I thought this was true. And for years after people used to say to me, ‘How did your dad meet your mum?’ ‘Oh she was a dancer in a club.’ And my mum heard me say this one time. She said, ‘What are you talking about? I was not a dancer. I was a nurse.’ I said, ‘Well that’s what dad said,’ you know. But they met at a function.
IT: Oh my God. Yeah that was [unclear]
ES: And they got married and then he went back and he worked for the government for a while in various forms.
HH: So your mum was from Grenada.
ES: She was from Grenada.
HH: How did she take to Sierra Leone?
ES: Quite difficult initially. It was quite, quite tough, you know. Iyamide will, will know.
IT: Well that’s interesting. Well, I don’t know how it is because my dad’s brother also married a Grenadian and they met here. But that I, well that’s because I was young then so I don’t know even what happened. You know, how —
ES: Well, the thing is my mum’s a white Grenadian.
IT: Well actually Alice was. She was white.
ES: Right. And that carries all sorts of connotations when you get out there and when my —
IT: [unclear] in fact.
ES: Yeah.
IT: Yeah, because obviously two foreign wives being in Sierra Leone and from the same place, you know.
HH: They became friends.
ES: They became friends.
IT: You sort of bond.
HH: Yeah.
IT: And share your, your, you know.
SM: There would have been some cultural differences as well.
ES: There were cultural differences.
SM: Caribbean people in Africa.
ES: Yeah. Yeah. But also when my dad went back to Sierra Leone I mean he was lionised because he came back the war hero, you know.
HH: Instant celebrity.
ES: Exactly. And I think. Now, he was coming back with this woman that he’d married and we’ve kind of lost one of our own dare I say.
IT: Ok.
ES: So you, you know the Bertha Compton’s of this world.
IT: That’s right.
ES: These are, these are people from, from Sierra Leone and my mum had a little bit of difficulty with that but, you know she was a woman of God and she didn’t let things put her off too much. But she was never ever, ever really accepted into the inner sanctum. I mean it’s just how it is, you know, back there. But she had a happy time, you know she grew to love Sierra Leone and she was disappointed when they eventually left.
HH: Now where were you and your siblings born?
ES: In Sierra Leone. All were.
HH: But what was it like growing up with a celebrity father?
ES: You’re not really aware of it.
HH: Or were you not aware of it?
ES: You know. No, you’re not. You’re not really aware of it because it’s like anything else it’s, it’s if you grow up with it it’s the norm you know and it’s just how it is. And to be perfectly honest I never knew how special his life was whilst I was a child at home.
HH: When did that first, when did that first realisation first dawn?
ES: I think it first dawned when [pause] when there were the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the end of, of the war. Suddenly, you know “The Times” were taking a journalist to my father’s house to talk to him. All of a sudden people were ringing up from all the world trying to contact him. And, and also I suppose I was influenced by, by him, you know. I thought his achievements was getting an MBE and an OBE and being a Queen’s Council. Those were his achievements. The war thing was just an aside. He never talked about it. He wasn’t interested in it, you know. And I guess that sort of influenced my thinking but it’s only later on when you start to develop your own thinking that you start to think well hang on a second. What’s actually more important here.
HH: Yeah.
ES: And if you look he wrote, he wrote some memoirs and the war element of it is very short and succinct. Very succinct. But if you go into the legal side of it.
HH: Of course.
ES: Oh there’s lots of information about cases he fought.
IT: [unclear] Wow.
ES: You know. And that’s how he thought and I suspect that’s how we were brought up so —
HH: Have those memoirs been published?
ES: No. No. We’ve got them there.
HH: But you have got them.
ES: Yes we have got them. So, so growing up — not really. I mean in in Sierra Leone you do tend to have a bit of the haves and the have nots. You know, that’s, that’s how it is. And we were fortunate to be in the position where we did have something, you know. But, but no I don’t, I don’t think it was a really, really big thing in shaping us.
SM: And you didn’t, you didn’t sort of get much out of him with his early training. His early RAF training. Prior to actually going on operations at all.
ES: No. No.
SM: No.
ES: And again, you know I think back now and I wish that I had talked to him about all the early days to understand how he, how his training went. I mean as it so happens —
SM: Well it was obviously very successful.
ES: Yeah. And —
SM: Especially being creamed off as a pilot.
IT: Officer. Ok.
SM: To a navigator which was going to save the air ministry or whatever then, a great deal of money not wasting ammunition. Someone spotted it and only the elites would have been given that task.
ES: Yeah.
ES: Yeah. And the other thing is there was —
HH: But he had his initial training in Sierra Leone didn’t he?
ES: Oh he was in the Sierra Leone Defence Force but —
HH: Yeah.
SM: Right. Ok.
ES: But that would have only been just basic military training.
HH: Yeah.
SM: Military stuff.
HH: Yeah.
ES: But there was, I think there was sixty five trainees in the, in the camp and he was one of six that came out as officers. So when he came out he came out as an officer. But I always wish now as I know a lot more about, particularly flying as I subsequently went on to fly myself and I’m a pilot although I fly helicopters as opposed to planes but I have a lot more interest, you know in the training and particularly the navigation which I wasn’t any good at.
SM: Yes. Yes.
ES: You know. And I would love to talk, talk to him more.
SM: Yeah
ES: About all of those details and you know I often sit down and think I wish. I wish. I wish. You know
IT: You wish. Yeah.
ES: You know.
SM: I’ve been —
ES: I only, I only knew a fraction
HH: Yeah
ES: Of the story.
IT: What there was. Yeah.
ES: And even that was hard work.
HH: But it’s wonderful that you have
SM: He would have been an officer because NCOs or airmen just couldn’t become navigators. They were all the officer branch.
HH: Ok.
SM: Yeah. They were all officer branch. So he would have been spotted and so the commission was going to be there as navigator. There could be air gunners and there could be under anything else but they weren’t pilots or navigators until much later on in the war initially.
HH: Right.
SM: So obviously they spotted his talent which was very special.
IT: Uncle [unclear], he was a navigator as well.
HH: How did you come to be in the UK having grown up in Sierra Leone?
ES: Sierra Leone. Well, basically if you, if you could afford it most parents sent their children to either the UK or America. To study.
HH: For education.
ES: For education. And I came over with the rest of my siblings really at different stages to the UK to study. With the intention of going back. It had always been the intention was to go back but of course Sierra Leone did spiral down, downwards with the war and everything etcetera. And of course, you know I came here and I studied and I met someone. And I basically put my roots down. And —
HH: As one does when one meets someone.
SM: Yes.
IT: Yes.
ES: Absolutely. So —
HH: Yeah.
ES: So my life, very much was here.
SM: Yes.
HH: Yeah.
ES: And whilst I still enjoy going back to Sierra Leone.
HH: So how long have you been living here now then, Eddy?
ES: I’m going to have to work this out now very carefully. Because I am fifty eight and I came over when I was seventeen.
HH: Wow.
ES: So, thirty one —
HH: Almost long enough to be considered British actually.
ES: Well I’ve got —
[laughter]
IT: Finally.
SM: Finally.
ES: I’m not going to be making any comment on that one [laughs] that’s going to take us in a totally different direction so [laughs]. So I won’t comment on that. But yeah, you know my wife is British and my children are British. So —
HH: Yeah. Yeah.
ES: You know.
HH: Let’s talk a little bit because I want to talk to both of you now. You and Iyamide about the importance of making some of these incredible contributions from people like your father more public. And sort of, do you [pause] making people more aware or, or encouraging people to take more interest in these kinds of stories. And perhaps, perhaps you can talk a little bit about why you were moved to, to write about this and to publicise these stories Iyamide.
IT: Well, first of all you know we have a black history month in England where they focus on various aspects of black history only in October. That’s when some of these stories or achievements by black people or their, their contribution to, to the United Kingdom comes up. But I think it should be much wider than that, you know. I mean black history month is one month. I think it’s important for our young people especially young black boys who need a lot of encouragement and mentoring and they need to know that there were war heroes and people from way back who contributed to this country. So that has always kind of been my, my aim. To get these stories out. Especially since I was privileged enough growing up to know Eddy’s dad as well as another RAF navigator who I was neighbours with. So, and I only heard these stories, I mean growing up I knew that they’d been in the army or whatever. But it was only much later that I, I, I actually knew about what Eddy’s dad had achieved. I knew more about uncle [unclear] because he actually showed me his bullet wound. You know, when I was growing up. But I’ve been corrected. It’s not a bullet. It’s shrapnel.
ES: Shrapnel.
IT: Yes.
ES: Yes.
IT: This is the only time I’m hearing that your dad was actually shot as well. I knew they shot the plane but I couldn’t remember that he was wounded as well. So you know —
ES: He was very much wounded. Yes.
IT: These are two I know. Never mind Uncle [unclear] . But it’s really important because I think it helps the young people know that they can achieve. I know somebody in the RAF whose probably, I’m talking about Ronald Carew.
ES: Yes.
IT: Who joined the RAF because he’d heard the stories about Johnny Smythe so it’s always encouraging I think to tell these, these stories because they don’t get told. You see all the commemorations they do for World War One, World War Two. All the poppies on Poppy Day and all this sort of thing and you hardly see any black people in the audience or in the congregation. Because I was looking at the church service they had. They might, they might invite the odd, you know, ambassador or high commissioner but really these stories have to go wider than that. Which is why because I have a lot of media connections we did, Eddy and I actually went on one of the TV stations and spoke about his dad and I spoke about [unclear] This was during the Japanese, was it about two years ago?
ES: Yes.
IT: There were commemorating something in Japan. I can’t even remember, you know. And we needed to get those stories out there really. And I’m so glad that the advert went into “The Voice” which is how I got in contact with you. I saw the advert in “The Voice” newspaper and thought — right.
HH: That was you.
IT: Yeah.
SM: I got that in “The Voice”.
IT: And I saw it. That’s when I phoned up.
SM: My second son is a production agent for a couple of financial magazines.
IT: Ok.
SM: And he knows the sub-editor of “The Voice”.
IT: Of “The Voice”. Yeah.
SM: And I also met Roddick at a Jamaica diaspora conference.
IT: Ok.
SM: I actually introduced myself and managed to get it. I’d love to do another story. Get somebody else in “The Voice” but we need a story around it for them to —
IT: That’s what, you know, I happened to buy by that copy of “The Voice” because I could very well have missed it, you know and I read it and thought, in fact that picture was there and I thought oh they used the same picture I used in the —
SM: Yes. Yeah.
IT: In the, you know the “Black History Month” magazine. And I thought ok let me phone, you know, let me phone up and tell them there are two RAF people I know and you should get their story. And here we are today really. So that’s really it. And I do a lot of heritage stuff as well around Sierra Leonean heritage and the history between Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom because it has a very unique history.
SM: I’m pleased you talked about that because I think the MOD in general have missed a trick in not doing what you’ve done because over the years I’ve, certainly since my retirement from the air force I’ve gone to London and Birmingham and talked to youngsters about my career, about the service and about what things were like in the early days. And how we had to sort of actually develop strategies to survive. [unclear] of National Service. Went in kicking and screaming. The rules that were then that if you were domiciled in a colony that had not yet achieved independence once you are living in the UK for two years you’re deemed to be eligible as someone born in the UK. A lot of my countrymen, ‘cause four of us came up together as single guys, kept changing addresses because National Service was due to be abolished.
IT: Oh.
SM: And I said to my wife who was my girlfriend then Gwen had been over a year before me that I’ll just go home again because the whole idea of coming to England was to work, save some money and go back.
IT: And then go back home.
SM: Not to live permanently.
IT: Just stay here.
SM: And she says, ‘Well if it’s going to be abolished let’s get married. And if you tell them you’re getting married they’ll probably forget about you.’
IT: Won’t call you.
SM: So we did this sort of trick. So I postponed, we postponed the wedding twice. And on the third occasion they said sorry, you’ve had two postponements.
[laughter]
IT: You had to marry her or ditch her [laughs]
SM: That was it. And went in kicking and screaming and signed on and on and on. But I’ve identified over the years the number of mentoring work that I did through my RAF service. When I came out there was a lot of ignorance about it. And I was part of a contingent, a tri-service trying to recruit more black and ethnic minorities into the service. And I continued that work when I came out just giving and giving motivational chats. But I’ve never looked at it about helping the MOD to recruit but in fact that’s what was happening. And the Jamaican government recognised it and they put a different spin on it and thought I was just helping the Jamaican diaspora. Which I attended conferences and I’m on a database. And in 2011 the high commissioner had written to Jamaica and I was invited by the Jamaican government and awarded a badge of honour for meritorious service for my community work with Jamaican diaspora.
HH: Ok. Wow.
SM: To the UK. So you’re doing these things sometimes, without. I didn’t fully really appreciate it until just looking back that it was helping the MOD because feedback I used to get from youngsters with email and so on saying thank you for, you know, what you did. I don’t know how far they’ve taken it but I did this quite a lot. I retired in ’87. And part of my voluntary work was to talk about various community activities.
HH: [unclear]
SM: As we were telling this morning, in 2014 which was the hundred years of the First World War I gave a series of lectures about the contributions made by Indians and Caribbeans.
IT: Yes.
SM: During the First World War to the University of the Third Age and various people. But I’ve, because once you do one people tell you about it.
IT: Anything. Yes. Yes.
SM: I just raise funds and donate it to whatever charity I fancy. And I am still involved. My focus is now more on Bomber Command internationals so I’m booked up to give two or three talks on that. Promoting that.
IT: I mean, one of the interesting things, even though you said, you know within the RAF that people were like brothers you know. Or they didn’t know about colour and all that. It’s interesting that I’ve heard stories of a lot of discrimination that happened once some of them went back, you know, in the colonies. That, you know and there was a particular case this was from the First World War where he went he was commissioned as an officer, a medical officer he was one of these ones and when he went back they wanted him to remove his, all his commissioning, you know the regalia because they didn’t want white officers to salute him, you know. But he refused. I mean this was another article I wrote in one of the oh I got a commission, I don’t know who commissioned that article. But there was still a lot of discrimination from the colonies.
SM: Oh yes.
IT: To people who had served Britain. You know. Yeah.
HH: Yeah.
IT: Yeah. You know. They, never mind you’d gone and laid your life.
HH: I think it, I mean we’ve also picked up variable stories of experiences within RAF Bomber Command at the time. You know, some, some people were accepted like your dad and just treated as, I mean crew were like family quite often. You know.
SM: Yes. Yeah.
HH: And accepted because they all depended so much on each other.
IT: On each other.
SM: On each other.
IT: Yes. Yes.
HH: And others you know did report stories of, of discrimination.
IT: Discrimination.
HH: So I think it was again, like you said earlier, there were good and bad in every context and —
ES: So you had the sort of stories in the RAF. Right. Interesting.
SM: Oh yes. And of course, even coming up to the current time. I was giving one or two examples earlier this morning of my personal experiences of what went on. And I tried to and, and right across the rank structure. There were good [unclear] you had the odd guy and some of it is a lack of education. Because part of the recruiting because I did recruiting for a while, recruiting officer.
HH: Ok.
SM: Is that two things stood out. You try to elicit from people when you’re interviewing how do they relate to the services? So, for example, when I was recruiting was at the height of the IRA troubles. And I remember interviewing someone who had been living in England for about eighteen months. Ex-northern Ireland. And I said, ‘Do you realise if you come into the Royal Air Force you can be stationed anywhere,’ you know, and the trouble spots because in peacetime we’re training for war. So you could be sent to the Falklands, you could be sent to Northern Ireland or the troubles. And this guy with a gleam in his eye saying, ‘I wouldn’t mind Northern Ireland because I’ve grown up seeing all the war and it will give me my opportunity to fight.’ Needless to say I didn’t recruit him. He was so bigoted and so set.
IT: Yeah.
SM: On taking revenge.
IT: Yeah. Yeah.
SM: You know. So it starts from there and I was, there was a story we got this Royal Marine [unclear] and I’m thinking what sort of recruitment happened? Why did they not spot that this guy still had a grievance?
IT: A grievance. Yes.
SM: He was joining the Marines just to make sure he can exploit weapons. And he did this for all this period of time and they didn’t spot it.
IT: [unclear]
SM: With all the services it starts with initial recruitment. The extent to which, how deep you wanted it go to make sure. You fail from time to time because we are all human beings. We are flawed. You are never going to get it right but it should be robust enough to weed out people who you think come at you with a completely different agenda.
ES: You know how my dad telling me in the RAF they’re quite superstitious.
IT: Are they?
ES: And they, they whenever he was assigned to this, you know the crews change. You didn’t always fly with the exact same crew. And they loved flying with him. And the reason they loved flying with him is because he always came back. Because as you know, I mean in Bomber Command in those day if you did thirty missions. If you survived thirty missions you were out.
SM: You were exempt unless you wanted to carry on.
ES: Exactly.
SM: Yes. Yeah.
ES: Because very very few people —
HH: Did.
ES: Made thirty.
SM: Survived, yeah.
ES: And of course there he was coming back every single time.
IT: Time. Fly with him.
ES: You know, got twenty seven. We’ve got to fly with this guy because he’s got some sort of, you know there’s something about him.
HH: So, in a way he became a sort of lucky mascot.
SM: Yes.
ES: He was a lucky mascot. They loved flying with him because he kept coming back. And he said —
HH: How interesting.
ES: You know he’d fly with someone today. That person would go and fly a different plane tomorrow and be shot down. And he’d started to think I’m going to get to thirty. You know, and of course he got to twenty eight.
SM: To go to thirty he would have got there very quickly.
ES: Yes. Got to twenty eight.
HH: And the amazing thing is that even though he didn’t complete that tour he still survived.
ES: Yeah. He survived.
SM: Yes. Amazing.
HH: You know, I mean he was able to parachute out.
IT: I know.
HH: Under all those terrible conditions.
ES: Yes. Well, you know —
HH: And survived.
ES: You know he said he didn’t realise he was shot. In the late eighties he had a lot of problems, bowel problems and he came over to England for some investigations and they did a lot of x-rays etcetera and they said, ‘This is very strange.’ And he said, ‘What’s the problem?’ They said, ‘You’ve got a bit of metal in the lining of your gut.’ And he had shrapnel.
SM: Shrapnel. Lodged.
ES: Still lodged in his gut.
SM: Good lord.
ES: And they fed him a barium meal with magnets and he ate this and then the magnets pulled the metal into the inside so he could pass it.
IT: Wow.
ES: So he was very much shot.
HH: Shrapnel.
SM: What a story.
HH: Gosh. What a story.
ES: And he, when he was in Sierra Leone he, his practice, his legal practice used to represent most of the embassies out there and whenever the British embassy, they used to have their cocktail parties and they’d invite all the [pause] all the diplomats he always got invited as the lawyer. And he was telling me this fantastic incident at one of the cocktail parties. He ended up talking to the German ambassador and they were chatting and he said, you know they soon established that they were both in the air force during the war. And he thought, ‘Were you really?’ And he was in fighter. He was in the Luftwaffe. He was a fighter pilot. And my Dad said, ‘Incredible,’ you know, ‘I was in the RAF.’ And they chatted and then he said I got shot down. He gave him the date he got shot down. This bloke paled. He said, ‘Tell me the date again.’ And he told him the date. He said, ‘And where exactly was it?’ And he told him where it was.
IT: I remember you saying.
ES: And he said, ‘I can’t believe this.’ He was, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘On that day I shot down a bomber and it is, it was a kill that was credited to me.’ And I said to my dad, ‘What did you do?’ He said, ‘We looked at each stunned, went and got a drink, and celebrated.’
SM: Yes.
ES: And patted each other around the back. They couldn’t believe it.
IT: I remember you saying.
ES: And they were trying to pinpoint, he was trying to establish, he said, ‘Was the bomber damaged?’ Which of course they had a smoking engine and he couldn’t remember that. He said, ‘Well, I can’t remember that. What I do know is I got a kill on that night.’ So there was a reasonable prospect that he shot him down.
SM: Yes.
IT: It could have been the same plane.
HH: Imagine. The coincidence.
IT: I remember you saying that. That is just —
ES: The coincidence. And the feeling of almost bonding. Because I said, ‘Well didn’t you, how did you feel about it?’ He said it was just a wonderful experience. So I had to think about that a bit.
HH: It kind of reminds you though that, that under those sort of wartime conditions it wasn’t anything personal.
ES: Personal.
SM: No.
ES: Yeah. Yeah. It wasn’t personal.
SM: Never is.
HH: Yeah. Eddy that was a wonderful story to end with because I think what we will do now is end the audio recording.
ES: Ok.
HH: And thank you so much because you’ve given us so many stories we haven’t heard before.
IT: I know. Even I haven’t heard them before.
HH: It was so extraordinary.
ES: You’re very welcome.
HH: And we’re just so grateful to you for, for sharing them all with us.
IT: Fantastic.
HH: And so if we, if we stop the audio recording now.
SM: Just before we go.
ES: Just, yes.
SM: Just a point before you go. Was he a religious man? Many of us from the Caribbean was such a place your faith tended to be central to your life in a way.
ES: I, I would say he wasn’t terribly religious. My mother was so he did attend church etcetera but latterly, in fairness he did become more religious which did surprise me. He did surprise me. And thank you very much for listening to the stories and thank you for getting the stories out there. That’s just wonderful thank you.
HH: Well thank you.
IT: Doing it I said to myself I know I did the checks to make sure that that thing is on because I didn’t want to, you know —
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Eddy Smythe. One
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Heather Hughes
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
2017-08-02
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.
Identifier
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ASmytheE170802-01, PSmythE1701
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Type
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Sound
Format
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00:54:45 audio recording
Language
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eng
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
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
Eddy Smythe’s father, Johnny Smythe was a navigator on a Lancaster. He was originally from Sierra Leonne. On one operation he was injured when anti-aircraft fire damaged the aircraft but they continued to target. One engine had been damaged and so was easy prey for the night fighter that shot them down. Johnny parachuted out of the aircraft over Germany and became a prisoner of war. After the war he did not talk about his experiences despite his son’s evident curiosity. It was only much later on in life that Johnny started to talk about what happened during his interrogation and during his time as a prisoner of war. Eddy relates the information that was told to him and how it felt to have missed the chance to talk more about these experiences.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Sierra Leone
Great Britain
Germany
African heritage
aircrew
bale out
Lancaster
navigator
perception of bombing war
prisoner of war
shot down
superstition
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/893/11133/AHydeON170830-02.1.mp3
e0c9daed8543abb8cdd8a9cbdb50d5db
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
A name given to the resource
Hyde, Oluwole
Oluwole N Hyde
O N Hyde
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Oluwole Hyde (b. 1958) about his father, Adesanya Hyde Hyde DFC (188146 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a navigator with 640 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-08-30
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.
Identifier
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Hyde, ON
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
OH: Who fought during the Second World War as an RAF officer in Bomber Command. He was a navigator and he was attached to 52 Squadron. Now, I’m going to talk a bit about how being the son of my father, growing up in Sierra Leone affected me. And as I grew up I became aware that my father had fought in the war and had medals. Won medals. Not really from him telling me about it but more from people who recognised who I was and asking me whether I was going to be a pilot like my father. In effect my father was not a pilot. He was a navigator. But they would ask me if I was going to be a pilot and if I was as brave as my father was. And it was interesting that I learned about my father’s war, war career from outside and not from inside. And when I spoke to him about it he told me yes, he was in the war. And then things around the house started to make sense. Like the beret where he kept all the keys, you know [laughs] They all started to make sense and so then I knew that yes he was in the war and he corrected some of the — he corrected some of the false information I had heard, yeah. It, it was really good to have a father who was popular but at times it became embarrassing having to, to listen about, listen to it or talk about it and it also laid an expectation on me to be, to do something very important. You know, to do something very — to achieve great heights like my father did. And, but now, as an adult I really appreciate having this father. It’s really good because it’s been important to talk to my children who have grown up in England about the fact that their father, their grandfather who came from Sierra Leone also took a part in the Second World War. And, and to show them his pictures and his medals and talk about his achievements. It’s also interesting that when I talk to English people, my friends and my family and tell them about my father and his experience coming to the RAF and they find that very very interesting. And didn’t, a lot of them weren’t aware that there were black personnel within the fighting in the RAF as officers and as navigators and pilots. And so that has been good and [pause] Can I stop there for a moment?
HH: That’s fine.
OH: Yeah
HH: Let me just make sure that we’re still going.
[pause]
HH: Come on. Okay. I think I’m going to be running out of battery very shortly so we’re going to just do a bit more and then you can finish off.
OH: Okay.
HH: Okay. Keep going.
OH: Yes. And it’s, it’s, it’s really a story I would like to help promote more in England. To make people more aware of the contribution of people from the Colonies who fought in the Second World War. And he fought and he was decorated with the, the DFC. I don’t think I will ever get that decoration and, but one thing my father did impart to me which was very important was that after experiencing war he did not like war at all and he was very much a pacifist and very much against violence and aggression. And that’s one thing I believe I’ve, I have experienced, you know. And I had no interest in joining the Army or joining the RAF or becoming a pilot. I think I’ll finish there.
HH: That’s good. Thank you so much.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Oluwole Hyde. Two
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Heather Hughes
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-08-30
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
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Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHydeON170830-02
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:05:43 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
Olu Hyde continues his interview by describing his experience as the son of a Bomber Command veteran.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Sierra Leone
African heritage
aircrew
navigator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/893/11132/AHydeON170830-01.1.mp3
a437c43ccde923c395ec60cc089515ba
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
A name given to the resource
Hyde, Oluwole
Oluwole N Hyde
O N Hyde
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Oluwole Hyde (b. 1958) about his father, Adesanya Hyde Hyde DFC (188146 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a navigator with 640 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-08-30
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
Hyde, ON
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HH: Okay. This is the 30th of August 2017 and it’s Heather Hughes for the International Bomber Command Centre chatting to Oluwole Hyde at his home in Malvern. Thank you Olu, so much for agreeing to be interviewed this morning for the project.
OH: Thank you for asking me for an interview, Heather. It’s a pleasure.
HH: Olu, what would be lovely would be obviously to talk about your dad but before that to talk a little bit about you and where you were born and brought up.
OH: I was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone and I was brought up in Freetown, Sierra Leone also with a short while in America with my father whilst he worked there. And I did all my education in Sierra Leone and my university education before leaving Sierra Leone to come to Britain and Southern Africa.
HH: What made you want to come to Britain?
OH: I came to Britain to study. To do a second degree which was in agricultural engineering at the University of Cranfield. And once I got here it was very much the consumer wonderland and very beautiful place. But I did leave after my, after my studies. And I left and went to work in Zimbabwe which was newly Independent.
HH: And you were teaching agriculture in Zimbabwe.
OH: I was teaching agriculture in Zimbabwe. Yes. I taught in what was called a [unclear] school which was a school for agriculture with production. And I taught mainly to ex-combatants and children from the refugee camp.
HH: And how long were you doing that for?
OH: I did that for four years and that was very very interesting and very satisfying work.
HH: How different was Southern Africa to the part of the world that you knew better which was Sierra Leone and West Africa?
OH: It was very very different. And I remember flying over. I started to write a letter in my head to my uncle who I used to work with at the Research Station in Rokupr in Sierra Leone. And one thing I noted was that there was so much agriculture. Big pieces of agricultural land that you could see. And you could go in to the supermarkets in Zimbabwe in, in 1980 and ‘81 and you could find almost all the products within the supermarket were made in Zimbabwe. Dairy products. Meat products.
HH: Yeah.
OH: Cakes, et cetera which was so different to Sierra Leone where if you went in to a supermarket almost everything was imported.
HH: Yeah.
OH: The other differences was the language of course was totally different and just the social interaction was also quite different. And I had to learn how to behave in a manner that was suitable to, to the Zimbabwean public.
HH: Of course, both Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe when it was formerly Southern Rhodesia had been part of the British Empire. Did that give any commonality to your experience at all? Apart from, I suppose English would have been one legacy so that you could at least communicate but — yeah.
OH: No, the common, yes, you’re quite right the commonality was in English but I can’t say I can remember much more.
HH: Yeah.
OH: Yeah.
HH: Yeah. Interesting. Tell me about your family, Olu. A little bit about your parents and siblings and they were Sierra Leonian of course.
OH: They were. Yes. My father, Ade Hyde is, was, what shall I say? He identified with the Kru ethnic group. And my mother was a Fulani. But she grew up in Makeni which is one of the towns in the interior. And he grew up in Freetown within the Creole community. And that’s the capital city of course. Yes. And I think in the days when they did get married it wasn’t so, wasn’t so common for those two ethnic groups.
HH: Did it cause them problems?
OH: It must have caused them some problems but they didn’t tell me much about it. Yes. Probably caused a few raised eyebrows. From the Creole community in particular. But nowadays that’s, that’s not the case anymore.
HH: No. They were just ahead of their time.
OH: They were just ahead of their time. Yes.
HH: Yeah.
OH: So, I’ve got three other siblings. Two sisters and one brother. I’m the third within the family. Family of four.
HH: Okay.
OH: Yeah.
HH: So you, are you the, you the third of four.
OH: I’m the third of four.
HH: Okay.
OH: Yes.
HH: And the others? Your brothers and sisters. Where are they?
OH: They’re all in America at present.
HH: Okay.
OH: And they’re all within the district of Columbia area. They live in, two of them live in Virginia and the third lives in Maryland but really they’re just very, quite close together.
HH: Okay.
OH: And they all tend to work in the district of Columbia. In Washington, DC. Yeah.
HH: Yeah. Are any of the others in education or —
OH: No. My elder brother who is now retired was a computer, computer analyst or computer specialist. And my sister was in education at one time. I think she worked for one of the universities. I think it was Georgetown University. But she’s an accountant. And the youngest sister is an agricultural economist. Yeah. And she works for the government. Yeah.
HH: And your parents? Tell me a bit about their lives. I mean what was it like growing up? Because, obviously, you know we’re leading to talking a little bit about what prompted your dad to join up at the beginning of the, of the Second World War. What was, what was home life like when you were little?
OH: When I was little. Home life varied and when I was very little I remember my earliest memories were that my father worked away from home. And he worked in the interior and we lived in the capital city. And, and there were times where his work [pause] and we used to go up to him on holidays and visits.
HH: What did he do? Just tell us what he did.
OH: He was a district, he was a district commissioner and he was actually the first black district commissioner in Sierra Leone. Yeah. And so those, those are my earliest memories. Apparently we actually did live, I did live in the interior with him at one time but I don’t remember that.
HH: Okay.
OH: Yeah. The memories carry on to when he stopped being a district commissioner and started work in the secretariat as they called it. But he was working in the government and he was secretary to the president. And then he lived within, within the city. And I remember that very well because we lived in, in various government houses. And the locations were, were particularly nice.
HH: Yeah.
OH: Yes.
HH: Well, that’s what the British left behind.
OH: They did [laughs]
HH: Yeah.
OH: Yes.
HH: Did your dad ever talk, when you were growing up did he ever talk about his war experiences?
OH: He spoke very little about his war experiences to us. I now know that he spoke a lot more about them to a cousin of mine. Tywell. Tywell [unclear] who, who he had quite a good relationship with. And Tywell used to visit him after we left. We left home. And Tywell found this, made this rapport with him. And he used to visit him at home and they used to sit down and talk about lots of different things.
HH: Was your dad retired by then?
OH: He was retired by then. Yes.
HH: And that’s probably part of the reason.
OH: That’s probably part of the reason. And he was, I guess he was lonely and Tywell was a very interesting and lively character. And so he spoke a lot to Tywell about it. So sometimes Tywell would tell me things and I’d think, oh I didn’t know about that at all.
HH: Well, it’s lovely that you’ve got that source. That somebody got the story direct and can pass it on to other members of the family.
OH: Yes. That’s true.
HH: Yes.
OH: Yes. But no, he didn’t talk about the war very much. He didn’t like loud noises. He didn’t like bangers. So when it was Halloween or Christmas and we were out with our fireworks and things like that he, he stayed.
HH: He struggled with that.
OH: He struggled with that. Yeah.
HH: And that’s probably a direct consequence.
OH: Yes. Apparently —
HH: Of his experiences.
OH: Yes. It is. Yes.
HH: So, I mean, how much do you know about, one way or another from, from other family members or direct from your dad about his war experiences?
OH: I know about his, this little, the major part where he was injured. I think he was on a bombing raid over France and, or Germany I’m not sure which one but I think it was France and he was injured by a shell. So, there’s a shell explosion outside the plane but the shrapnel went through the plane, through the fuselage and hit him on the shoulder. And he was, he was badly injured but he was the navigator and he knew that they needed his help to get back. To get back to, to base. So he refused the morphine which was the standard practice. You know. He’d have, because if he was injured like that he’d have the morphine injection. And that would put him to sleep. But he refused that and navigated all the way back.
HH: Extraordinary.
OH: And when they saw the White Cliffs of Dover he said, ‘Okay chaps. I’m sure you know how to get home now from here.’ And then he took the morphine injection. Yeah.
HH: That’s an extraordinary story.
OH: It is. Yes.
HH: His bravery was rewarded, wasn’t it?
OH: It was. Yes. He was. He got the DFC for gallantry. Distinguished Flying Cross.
HH: Yeah.
OH: Yeah.
HH: Do you know which squadron he served with, or — because, I mean it’s not, it’s not important now it’s probably something we could look up anyway at some point so I don’t think, I don’t think it’s necessary right now. We can, those are details we can fill in a little bit later on.
OH: Right.
HH: Yes. He was only one. Well, let me put it this way he was one of only six Sierra Leonians who actually participated or who had volunteered for the RAF. Who got to serve in RAF Bomber Command as I understand it.
OH: That’s correct. Yes.
HH: So, he was one of a very tiny, sort of sort of select minority of those who applied, I think and were accepted. Which, which is extraordinary. That there was such a small number.
OH: Yes. He flew in 51 Squadron.
HH: Okay.
OH: Yeah. Before being demobilised.
HH: Thank you for that.
OH: Yes.
HH: That’s quite, they were based quite close to Lincoln.
OH: Yes. I think he was flying Handley Page Lincoln bombers I think. Something like that. Yeah.
HH: So, yeah. You’ll have to take a visit up and we can show you the places where he served.
OH: I see, yes.
HH: Yeah.
OH: Yes. Now, sorry your question was it was a small —
HH: No. No. No. It was just, it was just that there was, you know one of the things that fascinates me in this project, I mean it throws up all sorts of fascinating things all the time, is the willingness of of of of black people in various parts of what was then the British Empire to serve in the war effort.
OH: I think there was for willingness but also there was another motive I believe. And the other motive was that from my father’s story to me was that they had finished their, what would be the A levels now but there’s the senior Cambridge exams and they’d done well. And it was the Great Depression around the world. And there wasn’t much work around. Much prospects of work and they saw this advert and I think he said they were sitting together drinking or having coffee and they decided they would, would apply for it.
HH: To volunteer.
OH: Volunteer. Yes. Apply for it. Yeah.
HH: Yeah.
OH: And although it was a voluntary I believe they had to pay them, pay for their fares to get to England, to actually —
HH: I think they probably did.
OH: Yeah. Achieve this volunteer thing. Yeah.
HH: Yeah.
OH: But on the other hand they came across the first employer, probably the first employer, employer in Britain who was equal opportunities to some extent.
HH: Yeah.
OH: Yes.
HH: Yeah. I mean I don’t think that the RAF was without racism at the time.
OH: Oh definitely not. Yeah.
HH: But they did, they did have a policy as the war went on, the policy was that there should not be any discrimination with regard to colour in among those that were serving in the different commands of the RAF.
OH: Yes. That’s true. Yes.
HH: Yeah.
OH: And the other, the other aspect was the RAF actually needed — they needed particularly navigators because they were struggling to find navigators within the British population.
HH: Yeah.
OH: And they found out the students from abroad were taught maths in a better — were more proficient at maths. The students from the colonies.
HH: Yeah.
OH: Yes. And that was one of the things they were looking for.
HH: Interesting. So I mean a good education was really what stood them in good stead in terms of being accepted.
OH: It was. Yes. It was. Yeah. He tells me stories about being accepted. And when they, when they were was recruited his first posting was at RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland. And he spoke about how cold it was there.
HH: It must have been a very very memorable aspect of his stay. The weather at that time of year.
OH: The weather. Yes.
HH: Yes. Coming from West Africa.
OH: Yeah.
HH: But he survived.
OH: He survived. Yes. And he enjoyed it. And so most of the stories he tells me that I know of seem to be pleasurable stories. Yeah.
HH: Were they to do, the stories that he told you were they to do mostly with experiences within the RAF or with local people? Meeting British people or —
OH: They were within the RAF and with meeting local British people. And I think there’s a picture I have here of, of him in a home in Bridgnorth playing cards with some boys. And this is a family setting. He’s playing cards —
HH: Great.
OH: With little boys and their mothers or sisters around and he’s in uniform and obviously been welcomed in to the house. And —
HH: Yeah. There is a chance I mean I don’t know about your dad’s case but I spoke to the son of, as far as I can tell the only Nigerian who served in RAF Bomber Command.
OH: Oh really.
HH: Whose name was Akin Shenbanjo. And his son, Neville has a story which, which we’ve been able to verify in other sources that black, black servicemen were so unusual in Bomber Command that they were often treated as very lucky charms. They were very lucky as mascots.
OH: I see.
HH: And Akin was, he, his crew felt that they’d all survived the war because he was, he was the one who made them lucky.
OH: That’s interesting.
HH: Interesting story. Yeah.
OH: It is. Yeah.
HH: Yeah. And in fact they called it, in that case Akin’s crew named their Lancaster bomber the Black Prince.
OH: I see. That was very good.
HH: Yeah.
OH: Yes.
HH: Yeah.
OH: No, he never, he never mentioned that to me.
HH: Yeah.
OH: I know his pilot was, was an Australian and —
HH: So truly international crew.
OH: It was quite an international crew. Yes. Yeah. And his name was Fred Papple and he wrote this. He wrote this book.
HH: Okay. “Seventy Five Percent Luck.”
OH: “Seventy Five Percent Luck.”
HH: So you see they were lucky.
OH: They were lucky. Yes. Yeah.
HH: Yeah. How long after, your dad, your dad what did he do after the war?
OH: After the war he, well after being injured —
HH: Did he go straight back to Sierra Leone?
OH: No he didn’t. He was in hospital here for quite a while. And he said he was very lucky because penicillin had just been discovered. And he believed the Health Services spent a lot of money on him by using penicillin to help heal his wounds. But after that I think he went to active service but the war had pretty much finished by then.
HH: So he stayed on in the RAF for a while did he?
OH: Just, just for a short while.
HH: Okay.
OH: Yes. And then he, he joined the — what’s it called now? The Colonial Administration. And he was sent to Cambridge and he did a course in Cambridge on Colonial Administration. And, and then he went to Sierra Leone. And that’s where he became the first black, what did I call it now? The first black commissioner.
HH: Commissioner.
OH: Yes.
HH: Yeah.
OH: Yeah.
HH: Very interesting.
OH: It was. Yeah. So, from then on he was in, he was in the Colonial Administration until there was Independence.
HH: And for Sierra Leone that was which year?
OH: That was —
HH: ’60.
OH: 1960. 1961.
HH: I think it.
OH: Yeah.
HH: Yeah. It was one of the first after Ghana.
OH: Yes. Yes, it was. Yeah. And, yes and it was whilst he was working in a region, in the northern region that he met my mother and they got married. Yeah. And my mother was, went to school and formed a link with some missionaries, an English missionary. And so she did well at school and when she finished, finished her school she became a teacher in the school and she taught the younger, the younger, the younger students. And the missionaries later sent her to Scotland.
HH: Gosh.
OH: Yes. To do, it was to study, basically it was studying home economics. And I can’t remember what the school was called. It’s got a, it’s Glasgow School of Home Economics of some sort but in Glasgow it was referred to as the Dough School. So she has quite interesting stories about arriving at the airport and taking a taxi and giving this long official name for this place and the taxi driver didn’t know what she was talking about until he finally clicked that, ‘Oh, you want to go to the Dough School.’ Yeah.
HH: I see.
OH: But, but she, she seemed to have a good time in Scotland. Varied experiences. But also during some of the holidays, the first few holidays she, she lived in the Hebrides because —
HH: Gosh.
OH: She went to live with other missionaries. And so she lived in the Outer Hebrides.
HH: That’s quite an unusual story.
OH: That’s quite unusual. Yeah.
HH: Wow.
OH: Yeah.
HH: Wow. When would that have been?
OH: Well, she was born in 1930s. So she must have been about the late 40’s early ‘50s. It would be. Yeah.
HH: So gosh it was — yeah.
OH: Yeah. It must have been in her early twenties. Yes. So she was born in 1930 so early ‘50s.
HH: So it would have just been post-war.
OH: Post-war. Yes.
HH: How fascinating. And she returned to Sierra Leone and taught home economics or —
OH: Yes. She returned to Sierra Leone and taught home economics. Yeah. And taught at the school.
HH: With a Scottish accent.
OH: I don’t think so [laughs]
HH: Did she enjoy her time in Scotland?
OH: She did. Yes. She did. Yes.
HH: Wonderful story.
OH: Yeah.
HH: Gosh.
OH: I think she enjoyed her time in Scotland.
HH: So in, in, in completely, for completely different reasons both of your parents had time in Scotland. Spent time.
OH: Yes.
HH: Time of their lives in Scotland.
OH: In Scotland. Yeah.
HH: Yeah.
OH: Yeah. I think what’s interesting is the amount of travel there was between Sierra Leone and the colonial power. Because lots of other people travelled for other things like education and training.
HH: We tend to forget that now.
OH: Yes.
HH: We tend to think that these things are so much recent but there was a lot of coming and going wasn’t there.
OH: There was coming and going. There was a lot more going back home because there were jobs and things to do. Places to take and — yeah.
HH: And especially straight after Independence. There would have been a lot of work.
OH: There was. Yes.
HH: Yeah.
OH: There was.
HH: Taking over the Administration.
OH: That’s correct. Yeah.
HH: Yeah. Really interesting.
OH: But yes. I don’t know. What else would you like to ask?
HH: Well, would, one of the things that, that I’m interested in talking to the next generation of, of you know sort of, if you like the second generation of those who who, who served in in Bomber Command is what — I mean it was quite, I know your father had a very long and distinguished career and though his participation in Bomber Command was a was a quite short period but it was it must have been very formative for him in terms of the experiences that it represented for him. And by the way it is quite common we’ve discovered that often veterans don’t talk about their experiences until they’re very very elderly.
OH: I see. Yes.
HH: But nevertheless that doesn’t mean that these things weren’t formative for them. They were probably, you know, life changing experiences that they had in that, in that period when they served in RAF Bomber Command and what it means to you now.
OH: What it means to me now. What it meant to me growing up was that my father was well known in, in the, in the city. And quite often people thought, actually told me he was a pilot in the war and, but he wasn’t. He was, he was a navigator and and people would ask me if I wanted to be a pilot. If I was going to follow his, in his footsteps and things like that you know. But yes so, so it was a small community and he was well known and —
HH: He was regarded no doubt as a hero.
OH: Yes. Yes. Yes. He was regarded —
HH: As a war hero.
OH: As a war hero. Definitely. Yes. And someone very brave to do something like that. Yeah. And so were the other, the other five who went with him were regarded in that way.
HH: And you were able to bask in a bit of that glory.
OH: I’m not sure it was basking in glory. It was sometimes slightly embarrassing.
HH: Okay. So you were more embarrassed than proud at time.
OH: Yes.
HH: Yes.
OH: Definitely proud but embarrassed.
HH: At the same time.
OH: That it was brought up and I had to [pause] And the fact was I didn’t know much about it because he didn’t say much about it. So that was, that was difficult and we always thought he never wanted people to know much about it. Yeah. So, yeah. But what it is for me now is that [pause] I don’t know. It’s, it’s just great to be able to I suppose tell my children that this is your dad, this is your grandad and this is what he did. And also possibly to sometimes when I talk to English people and they talk about their father and what he did and they’re quite surprised. They find the whole background and history very interesting and unusual. Yeah. It’s something that they’re not aware of. About black people being in the RAF and being officers, et cetera. Also, growing up I think one of the things he he [pause] that struck him in the RAF was that because he was an officer he came very close to quite cultured middle class, upper class British people who were, who were also officers. And I think he, he, I wouldn’t say I think — I know very clearly. He took very much to their etiquette and was very particular about us being, having the right etiquette. And so our table manners were very important. And the, our table manners and how we sat and ate for for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And having, using the right cutlery, the right glasses, the right dishes. And I think he, I think some of that was learned at home in, when he was a child. Because the, in, in those days the Sierra Leonians or the Creoles lived very much a western style of life and would have sort of copied, you know an aristocratic style of living but I think that was sharpened and honed when he was living with these, with these officers.
HH: Yeah.
OH: Yeah. Yeah.
HH: That’s really interesting. I mean, you know because moving in those what were quite elite circles gave him a particular perspective on British life.
OH: Yes. It did. Yes.
HH: Yeah.
OH: That was, that was, and so I have to my children’s sort of [laughs] I don’t know they’re quite happy I did that now but whilst we were doing it I also passed on this sort of etiquette and good manners. No elbows on top of the table and things like that. And I’ve actually calmed down now.
HH: You’re more relaxed about whether they have their elbows on the table.
OH: And they’re actually picking me up on it [laughs] on the various things, ‘You taught us that.’
HH: These things, you know at one time were just so important because they were a mark of your status.
OH: Yes. They were. Yes. That’s true. Yeah.
HH: Yeah. That’s a lovely story about table manners.
OH: Table manners. Yes.
HH: A wonderful story.
OH: It’s not only table manners. How you brush your teeth.
HH: Just the way in which you conduct yourself.
OH: Conduct yourself. Yes.
HH: And probably the way you dressed.
OH: Yes.
HH: Everything.
OH: Yes.
HH: And spoke.
OH: And spoke. He became very, he was a very loyal colonial and he would always stand when the national anthem was played which for us, us children you know, would say, ‘Come on, papa. Why are you doing that?’ You know. ‘That’s a, that’s an imperial colonial power, you know. I’m not standing up for that.’ But he would stand.
HH: Probably because of those experiences that he’d had.
OH: Yes.
HH: During the war.
OH: Yeah.
HH: Yeah. Fighting for the empire.
OH: Fighting for the empire. Yes. Yeah.
HH: Interesting. I mean, I have spoken to one family member of a Caribbean veteran whose perspective on why they did it and why they wanted to assist Britain in the war was the fear that if Hitler won what would happen to black people then? So, I mean, I think that could also possibly have been a motive. That even though this wasn’t, you know even though they had maybe slightly mixed feelings about the empire there was something far worse that might happen depending on the outcome of the war.
OH: Yes. That’s true. Yeah.
HH: Yeah, interesting. It’s so complex though.
OH: It is complex. Yeah. And I think to some extent they were, they were very much colonised and they believed in the empire.
HH: Yes.
OH: Yes.
HH: I think that you’re right. I mean you find that in, in the work that I’ve been doing for example on early nationalism, African nationalism in Southern Africa. People who were, who had issues with the way in which British colonialism functioned nevertheless felt that there was a lot about the sort of British way of life in terms of fairness, fair play, the rule of law, which was to be admired. So you get that kind of quite complex mix of rejecting part of it but really accepting and completely internalising a lot of it as well.
OH: Yes. That’s true.
HH: Yeah.
OH: Yeah.
HH: Yeah. Thank you so much for that interview, Olu.
OH: Oh, thank you.
HH: It’s been wonderful to hear those stories. And I do hope that you do come and see the Centre when it opens next year.
OH: Yeah. I must say that there are lots of other things about him that I didn’t say. And what one, another very important part of his life was that he was an ambassador for Sierra Leone.
HH: Very important.
OH: Yes. To the United States of America. And that was a very formative part of my life too although only there for about two years.
HH: Is that when you went with him?
OH: That’s when I went with him. Yes.
HH: So you were based in New York.
OH: No. We were based in Washington, DC.
HH: Oh, Washington, DC.
OH: Yes. To some extent that’s why, that’s a draw to my other siblings back to Washington, DC.
HH: That was a world they knew.
OH: That’s a world they knew. Yes. When Sierra Leone became not very comfortable to live in. Yes.
HH: Yeah. Yeah. That was I mean he he he had a very distinguished career.
OH: He did. He did have a very — he was awarded the CBE and the DFC also and lots of other little medals he’s got. I’ve got here. War medals.
HH: Yeah. We’ll have a look at those in a moment. Yeah.
OH: Yeah.
HH: Yeah. I suppose it’s, it’s an imponderable question as to how his career really was shaped by his war experiences. But there must have been some connection in terms of, in terms of creating a network of contacts. In terms of those experiences of camaraderie and discipline and all the things that would have happened during the war really.
OH: Yes.
HH: In terms of what he subsequently made of his life which was a lot.
OH: Yes. Yes. Indeed. He did. Okay. Well, thank you very much.
HH: Well, thank you.
OH: Yes.
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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Interview with Oluwole Hyde
Creator
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Heather Hughes
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
2017-08-30
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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
Identifier
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AHydeON170830-01
Format
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00:36:52 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Second generation
Description
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Oluwole Hyde’s father was Adesanya Hyde who served as a navigator with 640 Squadron. He was badly injured but continued to navigate the aeroplane on operation. It was only when they were over the UK that he accepted the morphine for the pain. After the war he returned to Sierra Leone and later became the Ambassador to the US. He spoke little about his experiences of the war to his family.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Sierra Leone
Zimbabwe
Scotland--Moray
Contributor
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Carolyn Emery
640 Squadron
African heritage
aircrew
bombing
Distinguished Flying Cross
navigator
RAF Lossiemouth
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/933/10728/ABurleyE-BennettL180618.2.mp3
8758e6a5b208de4a52be129c1cd954e6
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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Lord, Billy
W C J Lord
Description
An account of the resource
50 items. An oral history interview with Eunice Burley and Leonard Bennett, about Eunice Burley's uncle, Billy Lord (137385, Royal Air Force), an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2010">album</a>, correspondence and photographs. He flew operations as a wireless operator with 619 Squadron until he was killed 3 January 1944. <br /><br />Additional information on William Charles John is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/114242/">IBCC Losses Database.</a> <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Eunice Burley and Len Bennett and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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
2018-06-18
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
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Lord, WCJ
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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HH: Its the 18th of June 2018 and my name is Heather Hughes for the IBCC Digital Archive, and we’re sitting at Riseholme Hall with Eunice Burley and Leonard Bennett who are the niece and nephew of Billy Lord. And Eunice and Leonard have kindly brought in Billy Lord’s papers this morning for us to digitise. Thank you so much for coming all this way from Surrey and it’s wonderful finally to have this collection and thanks also for giving us this opportunity to record your stories. I wonder if we could start by talking about you yourselves and where you grew up and what kind of home you grew up in and something about your parents.
EB: Right. Well, we were born in Shirley which is just outside Croydon to Lilian and Stan Bennet. I was born in 1950.
LB: I was born in 1947.
EB: We had a very happy childhood. A lovely home. It was a sort of a brand new estate that was built just before the war so it was, everything was lovely. We had a very happy childhood, didn’t we?
LB: Yeah.
EB: So —
HH: What did your dad do?
EB: Well, do you want to say?
LB: Well, we had a horticultural wholesale business. We were, they started off in 1772 as broom makers for the Royal Gardens. Birch brooms or Besom brooms as they were known as and then we diversed in to coach business and we had two coach businesses.
EB: Yeah.
LB: Shirley Coaches and one called John Bennett’s in Croydon. And eventually it was all sold and where we had our premises is now housing isn’t it?
EB: It was the oldest firm in Croydon.
LB: In Croydon at the time.
EB: At the time but it was sold. It had two, over two hundred years. So that was quite sad really wasn’t it?
LB: Yeah. I’ve lived in Shirley all my life. I was born in Shirley.
EB: Yes.
LB: I still live in Shirley so —
HH: Gosh.
EB: And we moved to Warlingham which is nearer to Redhill in 2008 from Shirley so but yes we were all born and bred in Shirley.
HH: And did you go to the same school the two of you?
LB: Yes. We went to Benson Junior School.
EB: Yes, we went to Benson Junior School. Well, yeah, and then you went to –
LB: Shirley —
EB: Shirley High School and I went to Lady Edridge which was a Grammar School in Thornton Heath. Very near Crystal Palace football ground so [laughs] which isn’t there anymore.
LB: And when you come to read the letters in quite a few of them Billy says, “Send my regards to all those in Sandpits.” Well, Sandpits was where we had our business and I had, or we had two uncles living there and the other nan.
EB: Yes. Yeah.
LB: All lived in this little Sandpits Road which is a cul de sac. And our premises were at the bottom of it and he often wrote in his letters —
EB: Yes.
LB: “Send my regards to all at Sandpits.”
EB: And there’s also, I don’t know if you want to know this but there’s also one bit in the letter, one of the letters that says, “Can we have some petrol?” So, because my dad, well my dad was in the war but his family had lorries and coaches. They had petrol. So, he could get down from Woodhall Spa to Shirley but they had to have petrol to go back again so he often used to get some petrol from them.
HH: From the —
EB: But that’s in the letters. Yeah.
HH: From the family. Yeah.
EB: Yes.
HH: So, let’s, let’s talk then about your Uncle Billy because you wouldn’t have had a personal —
EB: No.
HH: Connection with him in terms of having known him personally.
LB: No.
HH: How did you know about your uncle, Billy Lord?
LB: Well, from my nan. Our nan at the time and from our mother. That was the only way we ever, nan used to tell us stories about her son and mum used to tell us stories about her brother.
EB: Yeah.
LB: As I’ve said before the only thing I think sometimes mum used to get a bit confused with her stories.
EB: And also, when I look back I think mum was quite [pause] a bit jealous because my dad’s family had, he had brothers and sisters and uncles, aunts and nans and grandads and the firm had been going for so long and she had no one. Only her mum and dad. And I do think she used to get quite upset about —
EB: That the —
HH: She’d lost her brother.
EB: That she had lost her only brother. Yes. Yeah.
HH: So, I think this is probably a good moment to give us a little bit of detail, just basic detail about what happened to your Uncle Billy.
EB: You mean just about how he died or —
HH: Well, a little bit about the squadron he was in.
EB: Right.
HH: And, and —
EB: Ok. Well, he was, well you know a bit more about him wanting to be a pilot. I mean I didn’t know any of that.
LB: Yeah. He wanted to be a pilot. As I say he was a pilot officer and then for some reason he never, it didn’t materialise.
EB: Yes.
LB: And the story I’ve always been told by my mother was because, or nan, he had one leg slightly shorter than the other one. That’s why I was hoping Peter might be able to tell us when that photograph was taken. I’d like to know where that was and when it was. But apart from that that’s the only thing I remember about the squadron.
EB: He was in —
LB: There might be, but he went all through training for it and then got turned down or ejected right at the last.
EB: So, he was in 619 Squadron which was based at Woodhall Spa and he was a wireless operator. I think he became a wireless operator because he —
LB: Worked at Cable and Wireless.
EB: Worked at Cable and Wireless which was all —
HH: Before the war.
EB: Yes. Which was all to do with things like that wasn’t it? I don’t really know about and, yeah I mean its awkward because I was much younger and I didn’t really know much. I just used to know that there was a photo of him on the piano and he was always there and it was, ‘Oh that’s Uncle Billy,’ and, you know.
HH: What did he mean to your mum?
EB: Oh, he, they were very close. Very close. And it’s only now that I get, as I’m getting older I realise how terrible it must have been for her because also at the time my dad was a prisoner of war for five years. So, although she was married she never saw him for five years. My mum, my nan and grandad had lost their son and she was sort of caught in the middle trying to be a good daughter and give them support but no one was there to support her. And I only realise that now as I’m older what she must have gone through really. Not having anyone apart from her very best friend.
LB: Yeah. Auntie Peggy.
EB: Auntie Peggy. But, because she worked at, Billy got her a job when he went off to work at Cable and Wireless as well. So they, her and Peggy both worked at Cable and Wireless so, so yeah I think she was very attached to him and very, I think they were very close as children growing up from what I can, she said. Although, he, he did get married earlier on so he must have been very young when he got married and obviously I don’t know where he lived.
LB: No. No idea.
EB: I’ve got no idea where he lived when they were —
LB: They used to go to the Lyceum, dancing.
EB: Yeah. And they used to go to, when he worked for Cable and Wireless they used to go to, up to London and do all things like that and they were very, he was quite a Jack the lad I think and liked dancing but then my mum did so, and Peggy used to go with her to these places with her and join in with them. So, but yes. So —
HH: Now, there’s a particular connection that I think it would be worthwhile mentioning and that is your name and how you came to have it.
EB: Oh yes [laughs] Well, after he, he got divorced from his first wife. I don’t know her name. I don’t know anything about her. None of the family liked her. That’s all I can say. That my mum thought she was awful and then he met a girl called Eunice and they got engaged while he was training at Andover and her name was Eunice and I’m named after her. I do know that after the war when obviously he had died she met, she married an American but whether he was in the Air Force, Army I’ve got no idea and went to live in America so we’ve never seen her since. I did try and look up her name on Ancestry.co but I didn’t find it.
LB: You didn’t know her surname or something.
EB: Well, mum did tell me it was something but again this is the, that’s the trouble. You don’t ask these questions when your parents are young. You only wait until they’re in their nineties and then their memories are going anyway.
HH: So, as you were both growing up what sorts of stories did your mum tell you about your Uncle Billy?
LB: Well, she told me but I don’t know. We don’t know again if it’s true to not. She told me that he was shot down and crash landed on the Yorkshire Moors but, and he was missing for two days and they had a telegram to say that he had been, he was, we put assumed missing in action but then he turned up. So, I don’t know. You never know when the truth ends and fancy starts but I’m not sure if that was true or not.
EB: I don’t know.
LB: No.
EB: You see I’ve never heard that.
LB: No. And it —
EB: Because, yeah.
LB: And the other one was she said, well nan told me this so it must be true.
EB: Oh, so it must be true.
LB: Yeah.
EB: Yeah.
LB: That someone who he was very close to in the Bomber Command came down to see my nan after he was shot down but there was, and he said he was in the next plane to him and he said he wouldn’t have suffered. He said, an almighty explosion and the plane just disappeared. I don’t know who it was but I remember nan telling me all this at the time. Well, not at the time but when I was old enough to understand what had happened. And it’s only sort of stories that I’ve —
EB: Yes.
HH: But, but she obviously must have spoken quite a bit about, about him. Did she? And there was that presence of the photograph.
EB: Yes. Well, my nan was very Spiritualist. She was a Spiritualist and she used to go to —
LB: Spiritualist Church.
EB: Spiritualist meetings and Spiritualist Church. Yeah, so they didn’t have a séance they, it was a proper church in West Wycombe in Kent.
LB: I took her to a thing up in London once.
EB: Yes. Yeah. And, and I do know that my mum went once. Mum wasn’t. She was more just a normal Church of England but nan was very in to it. Now, whether that was because she’d lost her only son, you know. You don’t know what you would do would you in the circumstances. And she was very that way inclined and she used to say that Billy often used to come through to her and tell her to be all, you know, everything was fine, he was happy and, but I do know that my mum went once and I was doing my O levels at the time and the lady said, the spiritualist lady said that she wasn’t to worry. That I would do ok and, because Billy was watching over me from the photo. Because I used to do my homework in the same room as the photo. But nan never, nan never spoke to me much about Billy. Did she speak?
LB: She spoke to me more about it I suppose.
EB: Yeah.
LB: I remember taking —
EB: And Grandad, he never said anything.
LB: He never spoke about it at all.
EB: No. Never said anything about it.
LB: That was his father.
EB: Yeah.
LB: He, he didn’t speak [unclear]
EB: No. No.
LB: I remember taking her up to somewhere up in London. There was hundreds of people there for this —
EB: Spiritualist.
LB: Spiritualist meeting. And the guy who was doing it said, ‘I’ve got a pilot here.’ And asked people to put up their hand up if anybody lost somebody in the war. And nan put her hand up and then this person whittled it right down and actually came up with the name. I’ve never been to one before or since but it’s quite scary. The fact that she, it was a woman I think, she actually knew. I was about nineteen at the time. Just driving wasn’t I?
EB: Yeah.
LB: When I took her up there. Whether or not it was true.
EB: Well, you don’t know do you?
LB: Or whether it was insider information from the Spiritualist Church she went to that tipped someone off but as I say there were literally hundreds of people and —
EB: But then you don’t know because I mean nobody knew that we had a picture on the piano.
LB: No.
EB: Of Uncle Billy. So why would you suddenly say that? I can understand people saying, ‘Oh, I’ve got a pilot.’ Let’s face it.
LB: Well, an airman, wasn’t it?
EB: An airman. Yeah. Lots of people died in the, in the war so that’s a pretty safe bet isn’t it? But [pause] but anyway, so but grandad never used to say anything. I never heard him speak of Billy at all. Nan used to and my mum used to and it was always happy. They were always doing things and going out together and being a very close, her and Billy were very close. I could imagine, you know and that’s why now I realise that how she came to be quite bitter knowing that my dad still had all his family. They, she didn’t, and I think now when I look back and think well yeah, I can understand.
HH: Yeah.
EB: How she must have felt.
HH: Sorry about the background noise. It’s —
EB: That’s ok.
LB: Our family lost two people in the war. We lost Billy and we lost my dad’s cousin whose name was Leonard.
EB: Yeah.
HH: And I’m named after both of them.
EB: Named. Yeah.
HH: Ok.
LB: Leonard William Bennett.
HH: Gosh.
LB: Yeah. Leonard after —
HH: So, you’ve both got names that —
EB: Yes. Yeah.
HH: That are quite meaningful in that sense.
LB: Leonard was in the Navy. He got —
EB: He was on a Destroyer that got sunk outside —
LB: When it was invaded.
EB: Normandy. Yeah.
LB: Yeah. Normandy Landings. He got sunk that day.
EB: Yeah.
LB: And Billy got shot down. So —
EB: Yeah.
LB: That’s how I got my two names, Leonard William.
EB: Yeah. Leonard William.
HH: Now, Eunice, you particularly and maybe Leonard as well have, you’ve done a bit of research about your Uncle Billy, in, in recent years.
EB: Yes. Yeah.
HH: Explain to me why you wanted to do that or needed to do that.
EB: Well, it all started, I started doing just research on the Bennett family because we’d known that went back a long long way and then I thought we’d do mum’s family which we didn’t know so much about because also they came from Bermondsey up in London and then moved to Shirley. So, we were the only people from my mum’s family living in that area whereas —
LB: Well, they went to Dagenham first.
EB: Yeah. Well, whereas the Bennett’s were always in Shirley. So, and so I just started looking it up. I looked. I went as far back as I could which was about, to about eighteen hundred, wasn’t it? They came from Cambridgeshire. And, and then I sort of got to mum and dad and nan and my mum and Uncle Billy and we sort of, I found out when he was shot down and I thought oh I’d like to find out a bit more about that and I found out the date he died and everything because I never actually knew the actual date he died and, and then I was very lucky. I went, because you can go into the Armed Forces Records but unless you pay extra you can’t see their record. It only tells you their rank and number and when they died. And I don’t know why I did it but I went on to Facebook and I just put in about 619 Squadron. I just put, typed in 619 Squadron and this very nice man came back and said yes, he’d got all lots of records and if I wanted to find out a bit more and I put, told him who my uncle was and what have you and he told me all the crew, where he was shot down and everything and then, well —
LB: You’ve got those details haven’t you?
EB: Yes. You’ve got all the details that he sent us and, and since then he’s also told us how they died and what have you and all his flight operations. And where they were stationed and that’s sort of what started it really. But that was only two or three years ago and then we decided to come up here and look for more of it and what have you. So, yeah.
LB: I did go to the grave when I was in Hamburg.
EB: Yes. You’ve been.
LB: Yeah.
EB: To Billy’s grave. Yeah.
LB: At the time it was only a village apparently outside of Hamburg but as Hamburg grew it became consumed by outer Hamburg and I actually got an underground train to it.
HH: Gosh.
LB: Yeah. Well, overground underground. And the actual War Graves is a massive place. I went through the gates and you go in to the room, information desk looking for this grave and there was about two foot of snow on the ground. It was terribly cold. It was in January wasn’t it? And they, they said, ‘Well, you’ve got to go right up there until you come to British one.’ I walked and walked and walked and I got there, got to the chapel. I mean, the graves, you’ll see in the photo there’s only about that much of the tops of the gravestone above the stone level.
EB: Through the snow.
LB: So, I couldn’t see which was his grave.
EB: Oh, right.
LB: So I went to the chapel and left the flowers I brought in the chapel but —
EB: My nan went.
LB: She went, yeah.
EB: Yes. With the Red Cross. They took them but it wasn’t until 1970s, was it?
LB: No. No.
EB: Because grandad had died by then so it was just her. She went with the British Red Cross to see the grave where her son had died. Well, you know. Which was quite nice for her. I haven’t been yet so —
HH: Do you hope to?
EB: Yes. Yes, Roger and I hope to go out there one day and have a look. It’s sort of combining it perhaps with our —
HH: And when you came to the IBCC last year there wasn’t the building there but you were able to find his name.
EB: Yes, his name was there.
HH: On the Memorial Wall.
EB: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Which, I mean, we were so lucky that day. It was, I mean I was telling Len about it. I mean we, I didn’t know it existed. That’s, you know, we were coming up to Lincoln just to go to Woodhall Spa. I knew he was stationed there and I just thought, oh well and we’d seen a documentary about that East Kirkby Lancaster and we thought well we’ll go to that.
I didn’t even know the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight was stationed up here either. So, we, that’s what we were going to do and we went to the East Kirkby place and got some pamphlets like you do when you’re there and it happened to mention about the IBCC. And I thought oh and I happened to phone up and I spoke to —
HH: Sue or Nicky probably.
EB: Yes. Yeah. And she said, ‘Oh, well, we’re not open.’ And I said, ‘Oh well, never mind.’ And she said, ‘Can you, its not opening —’ and I said, ‘Oh no, we live the other side of London.’ And she said, ‘Well, why don’t you come along? We’ve got some other people that are coming.’ So if it hadn’t been that I, you know it was all —
LB: Meant to be.
EB: Meant to be. Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, so —
HH: And that’s how we met.
EB: Yes.
HB: And got to talked about the letters.
EB: That’s right. Yes.
HH: Yeah.
LB: Yes. Yeah. You said to me, ‘Have you got anything?’
HH: It’s so wonderful to have them.
LB: Yes.
EB: Yes.
HH: And to be able to digitise them.
EB: But we didn’t, I don’t know, we didn’t notice, know we had any letters did we until mum went.
HH: How did you discover those?
EB: Well, because mum went into a nursing home about three, three years ago.
LB: Five years ago.
EB: Yeah. Three or four years ago and obviously we had to clean out the bungalow that they’d lived in and we sort of came across them then, didn’t we?
HH: And you didn’t know of their existence until then.
LB: No.
EB: No. No.
LB: But lots of things went missing because I did know that nan had a telegram about Billy being shot down.
EB: Yeah. We haven’t got that. No.
LB: So I don’t know what mum’s done with that.
EB: No. No.
LB: I never, we never found it.
EB: No. No.
HH: Where had she kept these papers? These last few.
LB: Just in a drawer in a cupboard, wasn’t it?
EB: I think they were in the drawer in her bedroom. Yeah. And it wasn’t until I was going through it systematically, sitting on the floor like you do and I thought what’s all this and yeah, I think it was in a metal box, weren’t they? Weren’t they in that funny little cranky metal box that had a dent in a middle? And it looked really and I just said, ‘Oh,’ you know, ‘What one earth are these?’ And started reading them and realised.
HH: What they were.
EB: But the funny thing was I never found any letters from my dad to my mum and he obviously sent her loads. I’ve got letters from her, him to his mum and dad that he sent when he was a prisoner of war but we never found any to mum, did we?
LB: Well, I did see some.
EB: But where are they then?
LB: I don’t know.
EB: I haven’t got them.
LB: She probably, because there was a lot of censorship in it.
EB: Yes. Yes.
LB: Where they’d gone through with a black line.
EB: Yeah.
HH: It’s so interesting what people choose to discard when they move on through life and what they choose to keep.
EB: Yes. Yeah.
HH: And these clearly were very precious to her. These —
EB: I think also a lot of the time she was quite cross with my dad to think that he’d gone off for four or five years and was a prisoner. I know it sounds stupid but in her mind she’d lost her brother and my dad wasn’t even there to help her. And he was a prisoner of war the whole time. So —
HH: Yeah.
EB: Because, I mean he was captured in 1940 and spent the —
HH: Spent the rest of the war in —
EB: Yeah. Didn’t come back
HH: As a prisoner of war.
EB: He escaped from Italy and then was picked up again and taken to Germany so, yes. He didn’t —
LB: Finished up in Czechoslovakia.
EB: Yeah.
LB: That’s another story anyway. So —
EB: Yes. That’s another story. So —
LB: But the impact on her would have been quite profound.
EB: Yes. And also having your own firm, when he came back he had to knuckle down and make the business, well he was the brains behind it.
LB: His brother was —
HH: What happened with, how did it tick over when he was away?
EB: Well —
LB: Well, his father was still alive.
EB: Yeah.
LB: And he had two brothers who didn’t go in to the war. I bet they were too old.
EB: They were old. Too old I suppose.
LB: A bit too old.
HH: So, they kept the business going. The family business.
LB: They kept the business going, yeah. Because dad was the youngest.
EB: It was only ticking over. Dad was the cleverest one of the family and it was his brains that made it. Took over.
LB: Yes. He was a [unclear]
EB: Bennetts Coaches which were very big in South London at the time and, and diversified from just making, we used to make John Innes Compost and then, and do the brooms and he —
LB: One of the biggest manufacturers in the country at one time.
EB: Yes. Yes.
LB: In compost.
EB: Yeah. And then it obviously got bigger and obviously he was very busy, never there, you know and I think that’s why she was even crosser with him at times. Although they stayed together for sixty odd years, didn’t they? So, yeah.
HH: Amazing. Yeah. Yeah.
EB: Yeah. So —
HH: So, what is the story knowing what you now know. I mean what does the story of Billy Lord mean to you now?
EB: Well, I just wish I’d known him because —
LB: We’d have loved to have met him.
EB: Yes. I think we would have got on really well.
LB: He was also a good rower apparently.
EB: Oh, I didn’t know that.
HH: A rower.
LB: Yes.
EB: I didn’t know that.
LB: He used to row on the Thames in this club. Well, his father, grandad did as well.
EB: Yeah.
LB: And Billy did that as well.
EB: I didn’t know any of that.
LB: Yeah. And at Andover.
EB: And he was a boxer, you said.
LB: And he was a boxer.
EB: Yes.
LB: In that box we brought up there’s some medals. Is there a box of medals in there as well?
EB: No.
LB: Oh ok. He won some.
EB: No. We didn’t bring that.
LB: He won some belts. I don’t know where.
HH: Well, Bomber Command squadrons had boxing teams.
EB: Yes. So, he might have done it in —
LB: It might have been there. I don’t know. Never said —
The medals he’s got at home were before that because we looked a couple of days —
LB: Yes. I think you’re right. Yeah.
EB: Before we came up. They were nineteen, like ‘36 so he obviously did box so he might have well boxed up here as well. So, but yes, I just, I just wish he’d been alive and I think my mum wishes he’d stayed alive obviously and I think she would have been happier and I think it wouldn’t have been such a one-sided family. We grew up with —
LB: I’d have like to have sat down and talked to him about his wartime experiences.
EB: Yes. Yeah.
LB: We learned lots from my own dad about his war experiences but everything else we get is second hand, sort of.
EB: Yes. Yeah.
LB: All the time.
EB: Yeah.
LB: Which is a shame.
EB: And, of course now it’s too late because mum’s gone as well. So —
HH: But the important thing is that you have carried on telling the stories that you learned long, from long ago and you supplemented those stories with research that you have done.
EB: Yes. Yes.
HH: So that in a sense your family can pass those on for the future.
EB: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
LB: Oh yes.
EB: Well, it’s funny actually because my daughter, my youngest daughter who’s got two little boys, seven and six, they’ve been sent homework home this week actually saying they would like, they are doing the Armed Forces Day on the 29th of June and could they bring in all information from their, any relatives that were in the Second World at War. First or Second World War. So, we’ve got lots to do with my dad but they’ve also got lots, they’re going to take out everything I’ve got about Uncle Billy as well so it’s going to be passed on to the next generation which is, I think is lovely.
HH: Yeah.
EB: And Michael, the seven year old, he knows that he’s had a great uncle who was a pilot and he said he was in the war and he, he gets quite proud of it. The fact that,, I think it’s that fact he was in a plane and what have you but they don’t realise that the consequence of war do they at that age? So —
HH: No. But that’s how you pass the stories.
EB: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
HH: From generation to generation.
EB: Yeah. Yeah.
HH: Isn’t it?
EB: And my daughter actually, Helen, my dad, I know it’s nothing to do with Billy but dad wrote all his memoirs down of being in the Prisoner of War camp and she got it all and put it in a book.
HH: Wonderful.
EB: And she had, gave one to everybody, didn’t she? And its called, “My [Gas] in the War.” by Stanley Bennett. And yeah, so his, that will be remembered forever. So it’s all what he wrote down and how, what have you and we got him on tape as well haven’t we? Talking.
LB: Yes. Somebody came down and interviewed him.
EB: Yeah.
LB: I don’t know who it was.
EB: I don’t know.
LB: I’ve got the tape at home.
EB: Yes. And well, we put it on to a CD and it’s so funny because he said he was driving this truck in the Libyan desert and they don’t know where they’re going. They just were told to take some bombs to some other depot.
LB: [unclear]
EB: And travelling along and lo and behold seven tanks were coming along the same road and they just, he said, ‘I got off there pretty quick.’ But he didn’t, they didn’t, they just went and they were fine so —
HH: There are some weird situations.
EB: I know.
HH: In the middle of a war.
EB: Yeah.
HH: Yes.
EB: Yeah. But so, yes it will be all remembered and I’m pleased that Billy will be remembered and I’m, I think that’s why I wanted to do it. because I’m sorry that I never thought to ask lots and lots of questions but —
LB: Well, there’s more you could have asked but you have got to be careful as well, haven’t you? Because —
EB: Well —
LB: You start digging too deep and they get upset.
HH: I think the other thing is that when people are traumatised and that upset often they don’t want to talk.
EB: No.
HH: And that would have been much more the prevailing way of dealing with things. To bottle it up.
EB: Yes.
HH: Nowadays, I think we’ve changed how we deal with these things.
EB: Yes. Yes.
HH: And we tend to be encouraged to talk it out.
EB: To talk about it. Yes.
HH: Whereas in those days I think people were told that, you know the sense of the situation was that you just kept it to yourself and you just carried on and, yeah.
EB: And I suppose people, there were so many people that had lost people.
HH: Yeah.
EB: You know.
HH: It would have been very different.
EB: Difficult yes.
HH: Yeah.
EB: You can’t —
HH: Yeah.
EB: Yeah, so but —
HH: Well, thank you very much —
LB: So, what I can’t, sorry I was just going to say —
HH: You carry on.
LB: One of the things that we still can’t understand is he had, at the end of the war an Canadian or an American pilot.
EB: There was, he was an Amer, Canadian. He was an American.
LB: He was an American flying for the Canadian Air Force.
EB: Yeah. Because he couldn’t, yeah.
LB: Yeah, but before that as far as I can ascertain he only became the pilot for that last flight. Is that right?
EB: I don’t think so.
LB: Well, in one of the letters it said that whoever was the pilot got moved to another plane for some reason and they got this new guy come in.
EB: Oh, Heffernan.
HH: Yeah.
EB: I don’t know.
LB: I thought he —
EB: I thought he was with him the whole time.
HH: In fact, what happened during the war was that because America stayed out for so long Americans who wanted to volunteer for the RAF or where ever else presumably crossed into Canada.
EB: Yeah.
HH: And they served with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
EB: Yes.
HH: And then when America did enter the war they were given a choice to join American squadrons or to stay with the Canadian ones.
EB: Yeah.
HH: And many of them elected to stay.
EB: Yes.
HH: Because the thing about Bomber crew was that the crew themselves formed incredible tight bonds.
EB: Yes. Yes.
HH: Incredibly tight bonds.
LB: But he decided to stay obviously.
EB: And I didn’t realise that man that I spoke to, David Young on the 619 Squadron Facebook he said that they all went to, after they did their basic training they eventually went on to two bomber, two engine bombers to train with those and then they went on to the really heavy Lancasters and they sort of were practically sort of put in a big room together and they made their own crews that —
HH: That’s right.
EB: People they got on well with. You know, obviously, you had to have a pilot but they sort of, a lot of them —
HH: It was a deliberate —
EB: Yes.
HH: It was a deliberate strategy to, to try to ensure that crews got on with each other.
EB: Got on with each other.
HH: It was their responsibility to get on.
EB: Yes. Yes.
HH: It was nobody else’s responsibility.
EB: No. Yes. Yeah.
HH: They had to —
EB: Yeah.
HH: Make a go of it because they were so dependent on each other.
EB: Yes. Yeah. Now, whether he was with another person in the Wellington crew before they got on to the heavy Lancasters but he was with Heffernan the whole time.
LB: That’s what I don’t understand because in 1942 he was at Andover. Then he went to Scotland and he wasn’t killed until nineteen—
EB: ‘44.
LB: ’44.
EB: January 1944.
LB: And yet if that thing is correct he only did about twelve flights.
EB: Well, twelve or thirteen flights before.
LB: Yeah. But according to that he was on a second tour.
EB: Well, I don’t know.
LB: Yeah.
EB: Perhaps, he did a tour with Wellingtons. I don’t know, love.
HH: Well, it’s, yeah you could probably, you could probably find the Service History from the Operational Record Books in the National Archives.
EB: Yeah.
HH: At Kew.
EB: Yeah.
HH: That’s where you would go to find.
EB: Ok.
HH: That detail.
LB: Yeah, I know.
HH: Unfortunately, what most people would be able to have is the logbook. Each person’s logbook but quite often when somebody was killed —
EB: That was, yes.
HH: The logbooks —
EB: Didn’t survive.
HH: Sometimes didn’t be, they weren’t reunited with families.
EB: Yes. Yeah.
HH: So, but you would be able to piece together quite a lot of the story.
EB: Yeah. Well, perhaps we’ll go to there then and ask because also don’t forget the man I was speaking to or on Facebook David whoever. He was from 619 Squadron. So presumably before they were in Wellingtons, when they were training on Wellingtons that wouldn’t have been 619 Squadron would it?
HH: That would have been the final after the Heavy Conversion Unit.
EB: Yes. Yes.
HH: He would have been posted to 619 Squadron.
EB: So, what he did in the others I don’t know, Len. This man was only —
HH: You know, it was very, it was [pause] no two peoples training was identical.
EB: No.
HH: I mean, some were taken across to Canada for training, some were sent to Southern Africa for training.
EB: Oh crikey.
HH: Some were sent to various points in this country. Wales, Scotland, for training and sometimes training could last for a few months and sometimes it went on and on and on. It all depended on circumstances.
EB: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
HH: And so it can be —
EB: Yes.
HH: Quite a confusing picture to piece together.
EB: So, we have to go to the National Archives at Kew. Ok. We’ll do that then, Len.
HH: That’s another day’s outing.
EB: Yes, it is, isn’t it? That’s not far from us. Well not that far. Yeah.
HH: Well, thank you so much both of you for sharing these memories and these stories and it will be wonderful to be able to put these stories that you’ve told us in to the collection in the Archive. Thank you so much.
EB: Well, thank you for having us, Heather.
LB: It’s been a pleasure.
HH: Thank you.
LB: Most enlightening.
EB: Yeah.
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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Interview with Eunice Burley and Leonard Bennett
Creator
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Heather Hughes
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-06-10
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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
Identifier
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ABurleyE-BennettL180618
Conforms To
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Pending review
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Format
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00:35:54 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
William [Billy] Lord volunteered for the RAF and having worked for Cable and Wireless before the war he served as a wireless operator with 619 Squadron based at RAF Woodhall Spa. He had one sister with whom he was very close and who was the mother of Eunice and Leonard. Billy’s aircraft was shot down by a night fighter over Berlin. In this interview Eunice and Leonard recall the effect of the grief on the immediate family and on their own growing up years.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-01
619 Squadron
aircrew
faith
RAF Woodhall Spa
superstition
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/326/3485/PShenbanjoA1701.1.jpg
28672247ff8d13752e2c93c8a8e5f8fc
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/326/3485/AShenbanjoN170727.2.mp3
5eacf3be349c6c8c6109ab5cfc456dff
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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Shenbanjo, Akin
A Shenbanjo
Description
An account of the resource
13 items. An oral history interview with Neville Shenbanjo (b. 1945), the son of Flying Officer Akin Shenbanjo DFC, and 12 photographs.
Akin Shenbanjo attempted to volunteer for service with Bomber Command whilst in Nigeria. He was told they were not recruiting there so he made his own way to the UK to enlist. After training he flew operations as a wireless operator / air gunner with 76 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Neville Shenbanjo and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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
2017-07-27
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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Shenbanjo, A
Access Rights
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Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HH: Neville, it’s lovely to be with you here this morning. Just for the record at the start of this interview let me say that I’m Heather Hughes and I’m here in Neville Shenbanjo’s flat in Leeds and it is Thursday the 27th of July 2017. And its lovely also to have Keeley here with us who is going to hear some of her dad’s stories about the family. Thank you so much for agreeing to, to be interviewed for our project.
NS: No problem.
HH: It’s been wonderful to meet you. Let’s start by talking a little bit about you and then we’ll get on to all the wonderful stories that you have collected, that you heard from your dad and you are hopefully going to pass on to the rest of your family and a lots of other people besides. So I wonder if we could talk about you first Neville and where you were born and when.
NS: I was born on the 22nd of February 1945. I was born at number 22 Crawford Street, Leeds 2. Childhood was extreme. I can remember my childhood. I can remember being a baby. We was brought up by my grandmother and grandfather. We lived with my grandmother and grandfather and it was wonderful. My father was away. I were born in ’45 but my father was still an officer in the Air Force and I think at that time he was in Palestine but he used to come home regular on leave. And it was really surprising because most children at that time had somebody in the armed forces, somebody in the family but when my father came home they used to love it because he was in an officer’s uniform and that felt really special, you know. For me, a little boy that felt really good. My mother and father split up when I was around about three, four years old and I stayed, I stayed with my grandparents. We moved to Seacroft when I was around about five years old. Moved to Seacroft in Leeds when I was about five years old and that was, that was a change because we moved out of the inner city to open fields but it was wonderful. It was absolutely marvellous and there were times when I thought things aren’t right you know because I was with my grandmother and grandfather. My mother used to live around the corner but I was happy living with my grandmother and grandfather. My father still came and visited. And then again in his officer’s uniform and all this. Kids used to come out in the street. Anyway, my father moved back then. He moved to London and I didn’t see him for quite a while. He used to write. I didn’t see him for quite a while. I think the last time I saw him when I was around about nine. He came up visiting. When I was twelve he asked me to go to London to visit him. I can remember my grandmother and grandfather putting me on a train to London. Twelve years old. I thought how exciting this is. Went to London. Stayed with my father but oddly enough after a week I was homesick [laughs] I missed, I missed my grandparents so I came home. But I used to go and visit regular. I had a friend who lived around the corner and his grandmother, he’d come and visit his grandmother but he came from Twickenham. I’ll never forget him. Tom Courtenay, they called him and I’m still in touch with him now and he came from Twickenham and he used to, he used to stay at his grandmother’s during the school holidays and I used to go and visit him. And then we used to go and visit my father. Now, I never saw my father again. I would write him but we lost all contact and I thought what’s happened? And I was eighteen and I had a letter from my father saying, “I’m remarrying. Would you come down and visit me?” So I did. And he remarried again and I thought marvellous. He’s happy. He had another boy. That was good and I kept on visiting. But it wasn’t right, you know. I didn’t feel comfortable in his house with this strange woman. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I didn’t get on with her but there was something about her. But anyway, everything turned out ok. Now, about my father’s stories —
HH: Before we go onto your father’s stories how, just tell me a little bit about how, how your mum because you said she had been a WAAF?
NS: My mum was a WAAF, yeah.
HH: So tell us a little bit about your mum.
NS: My mum, she always said she couldn’t wait to be eighteen so she could join up. She always wanted to join up and she liked, well she wanted to join the Wrens because she liked the uniform better [laughs] but she joined the RAF. Now, she used to pack the parachutes and hand the parachutes out and that’s how she met my father because James Watt who was my father’s pilot who, Jimmy Watt but his real name was Reginald but he liked to be called Jimmy and he was going to, she told me tell this story that they were going to get their parachute and they had to give their name. So, she said, ‘Name?’ So Jimmy said, ‘Watt.’ So she said, ‘Name?’ So he said, ‘Watt.’ So she said, ‘What is your name?’ So he said he had to get his card and say, ‘Look, that is my name.’ And that, my father was behind and that’s how she met, that’s how she met my father, you know. So it’s just a funny story like that.
HH: And what happened to your mum after the war? What did she do?
NS: My mother. She, well, well she was pregnant during the war.
HH: Yeah.
NS: And so she was asked to leave. You had to leave the Air Force.
HH: Yeah. They had to didn’t they? Yeah.
NS: So, she left the Air Force and just carried on with life, you know. Well, left the Air Force, got married. They got married at Leeds Registry Office. They were supposed to get married in a church. I shouldn’t tell you this. They were supposed to get married in a church but my dad kept, there were going to be press there and my father didn’t want any press to be there and he changed, he changed it twice and they finally got married in Leeds Registry Office. Just so that there weren’t any press about. That’s how my father was. And my mother remarried. I’ve got six, six siblings on my mother’s side and they all live close as well.
HH: And you stay in touch with most of them?
NS: Oh yeah. Yeah. I’m going on holiday with them next month. With one of my sister’s. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Carole. Yeah. They’ve all got families now. Well, everybody has, you know. Grandparents and grandchildren. Yeah. We get on really great. All of them.
HH: Great.
NS: Yeah.
HH: So, let’s talk a little bit then I want to, I want to come back to the the way in which you have remembered your dad and the little, the shrine that you’ve created to your dad here. But I think, lets go back and look at some, look at your dad’s time in the RAF and tell me how he came to be in Britain because he was Nigerian wasn’t he?
NS: My father was Nigerian. Yeah. He had two pals in Nigeria. They called them the [Coss], the [Coss] brothers —
HH: And you’ve got a picture there of them.
NS: [Aberwello], yeah. [Aberwella Ollawalli], Akin Shenbanjo and Eddie [Cambo]. Not a very Nigerian name that Ede Cambo but only two arrived. My father and [Olliwello].
HH: Now, your father had tried to enlist in Nigeria and he was told that —
NS: Well, he didn’t try to enlist in Nigeria. He wrote to the War Office.
HH: Oh ok.
NS: He wrote to the War Office asking to join the RAF but I think this was 1941. The Battle of Britain. Everybody wanted to be a fighter pilot but the office, the War Office wrote back to him and said, “We aren’t recruiting from Nigeria at the moment.” So that’s it. My father wrote back insisting, ‘but I want to join.’ So, the War Office wrote back and said if you want to join you can make your way over to England and just go to the nearest recruiting office and join. You can take this letter with you and join. So my father had a scholarship to go to university. So he used the money that his father gave him to come over to England. That’s why my father could not go back. He was the oldest child. So he could never go back. He give, he give his right up and he’s never been back to Nigeria. He never went back to Nigeria. They came over. They got the boat. They got to the Recruiting Office at Southampton, they both went in to the Recruiting Office and said, ‘We’ve come to join the RAF.’ And they had, I don’t know whether he said they laughed at him but they just said, ‘Well, you can’t.’ But my father pulled this envelope out and said, ‘Oh.’ So the man said, ‘Well, alright. You’re in the RAF.’ That was it. Then they both joined together and my father’s friend during training he discovered he was scared of flying and so he had to go on ground crew. My father lost touch with him and that was that. My father was, I don’t know He finished up at Holme on Spalding Moor. But that’s where he was and that’s where he met his pilot. Now, I was talking to Jimmy Watt. I said, ‘How did you meet my father?’ So, he said, ‘Well, I was walking around. I was walking around the base and I saw your dad sat on this wall so I approached him. I went over to him. I said, look, I can see all your ribbons,’ you know wireless operator, navigator. He said, ‘Have you not done all this training?’ So my father replied, ‘I’ve done so much training I could fight this war on my own.’ Well, Jimmy said to him, ‘Right, come with me,’ and that was it. They were settled from that moment on and I’m still in touch with Jimmy’s son. We phone regularly. Once a fortnight we’ll phone. There was a time, it was around about six years ago. I had a phone call to say that they was a disbanding 76 Squadron. Well, it was only I used to go visit Spalding Moor. I used to go to all the reunions and everything. In fact, the school, a primary school there and the 76 Squadron has done so much for that school the children absolutely love it and they know all about the war and all that 76 Squadron did because they are teaching children about the war now. They never taught them about the war when I was a kid. We never got taught about the war. In fact, my grand, my grandson, Keeley’s son there was, they asked if there was anybody had got any grandparents, any old pictures? So I sent the are pictures and my dad’s medals. They were flabbergasted. They were over the moon with that. Yeah. Anyway, go back to where were we?
HH: We were talking about your dad having got together with the pilot Jimmy Watt.
NS: Oh, he got, yeah he got together with pilot, Jimmy Watt.
HH: They flew in 76 Squadron obviously and they flew Halifaxes.
NS: They flew Halifaxes. Halifax. They named my father’s Halifax, “The Black Prince.” They didn’t like naming the planes at that time because they said, ‘Don’t name a plane because if a fighter gets the name of that plane or it shoots down something they’ll come looking for you.’ So my father said, ‘As long as I’m flying this plane nothing will happen.’ And nothing ever did. Now, my father flew so many missions because it was practically every night there was somebody goes ill or something like. Most like they just get scared. This is it. It’s our time. And they don’t refuse to fly but my father would always volunteer to go. My father flew in most of the planes at that base. He told me about it because they thought, nobody would pick my father as crew, they thought he might be bad luck. I don’t know why. But when Jimmy Watt picked him up everybody thought he was good luck and so they were getting him to fly. I don’t know how my father got his DFC. I never found out. He never told me and I’d like to find out how my father was awarded the DFC.
HH: It would be possible to find out.
NS: Yeah.
HH: We can do something about that.
NS: I’d like to find that out. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I can’t think now. I’m stuck.
HH: No. Not at all. So [pause] your dad would have flown with quite international crews because —
NS: Yes.
HH: There were Canadians —
NS: Yes. My father was, well the pilot was Canadian. Two Australians. A New Zealander. Two Australians, two New Zealanders and an Englishman. That was it. Nigerian.
HH: A really international crew.
NS: Nigerian, two New Zealanders, two Australians and a Dutchman. That was it. Yeah.
HH: And they became like family didn’t they?
NS: Oh, well they were family because they never, they were always together. You know, they all used to eat together and do everything together.
HH: Well, they had to look after each other.
NS: They had to look after each other.
HH: To come home safely I would think.
NS: They had to look after, they had to look after each other and they never made friends, never made close friends with any other, any other bombers because they were losing too many friends. They said they used to go in to the mess hall for breakfast on a morning there used to be two tables empty. You know. So —
HH: And did your dad’s entire crew survive the war?
NS: All of them survived the war.
HH: Remarkable.
NS: They all survived the war.
HH: That’s remarkable.
NS: They all survived the war. The plane was never, I heard a story when they finally had to leave the plane and the plane went up again it never came back. You know. So, and that’s, that’s supposed to be a true story. Yeah.
HH: And what happened to your dad after the war? Did he stay in the RAF for a while?
NS: He was in the RAF until 1953.
HH: Gosh.
NS: ’53 or ‘54 because I know he was, he told me his story and I shouldn’t really say this but I’ll tell you the story anyway. It’s coming out now. He was in where did I say he was? Not Israel. Palestine.
HH: Ah huh.
NS: He was in Palestine and he had this secretary. Now, she had relations in Leeds and she knew that my father came from Leeds and she asked him if she could send him some letters but my father, he read the letters first because he wasn’t to send them, but he did post them for her. One day he was in the mess hall. He said, ‘We were just having a sing song round a piano and this secretary banged on the window and he said, ‘What do you want?’ ‘Will you come out with us for a drink?’ So he said, ‘I’m with my pal here.’ They said, ‘Well, bring him us. We’ll go out for a drink.’ And they left the base and they got a hundred yards down the road when the mess hall blew up. There was a bomb in the piano. Now, this, she must have known about it but she got my father out and I don’t, I know you shouldn’t have wrote, read those letters.
HH: Don’t worry.
NS: But if he hadn’t have done he might have gone up in that.
HH: Yeah.
NS: Anyway, that’s another story.
HH: He was clearly a very lucky person.
NS: He was. Yeah. And a well liked person. It’s amazing. People have met him and they said, ‘You’re father’s amazing.’ And I said, ‘Well why? He’s just a normal man.’ ‘No. He’s amazing.’ Even my friends you know, ‘Oh, your father’s so different.’ I said, ‘What do you mean so different? He’s just like your father.’ He said, ‘No. there’s something about him.’
HH: What do you think it was that people saw?
NS: I don’t know. I don’t know. But my grandparents. They loved him. I mean imagine 1945. Your daughter comes home with a black man.
HH: There was a lot more prejudice then then there is now yeah.
NS: Oh yeah. No. Well, no but my grandfather had seen my father. He used to be a boxer in the RAF and he’d seen him boxing.
HH: So was your dad a boxer as well?
NS: Yeah. Yeah. He was lightweight boxing. I think it was from all the Army, Navy and Air Force champion. Yeah. Yeah. And my father had seen him box you see. My grandfather. He must have boxed at Leeds Town Hall or something like that. That’s anyway they really liked my father. My grandparents.
HH: How do you remember your father? What was he like as a person? What was his personality like?
NS: It’s hard to say by me because he was strict but he wasn’t strict with me. Probably because we were distant or I don’t know. The distance between us part but he was very strict but he was very moral. I know that. But he was very fair as well. A marvellous man. A really marvellous man.
HH: Did he ever wish, did he ever voice a wish to return to Nigeria or was he quite happy to stay here after the war?
NS: He was happy to stay here. He’d never been back to Nigeria. His son and his second wife they went to Nigeria. But my father never went.
HH: Did he maintain contact with his family there?
NS: Yes. Now, he had a sister. She was a nurse and I can remember her coming to visit us when we were living in, I was only four years old. Grace, they called her. I named that statue after her. Auntie Grace. She was marvellous. She was a nurse and she used to come to England. She used to go to St James Teaching Hospital. That’s in Leeds. And she used to learn things there and then go back. She used to come regular. And he had a brother who used to come over and he brought me my first pair of football boots. I never get it in London. You go out of Woolworths in London. I’ll never forget that. Yeah. Marvellous man. And he’s got there are so many Shenbanjo’s in England now it’s unbelievable.
HH: Oh, really. Well, there you are.
NS: If you go on facebook —
HH: Ok.
NS: You find so many Shenbanjo’s in America, Australia. There are Shenbanjo’s all over the world now. Yeah.
HH: All over. Yeah.
NS: Yeah. You know, so he spread the word my father did.
HH: Yeah.
NS: Yes.
HH: So, but you it was after the war when, when you presumably, you know you’d finished school and you were becoming an adult. You, you, did you, you helped your dad quite a lot to stay in touch with squadron and so on and Squadron Associations —
NS: Oh yeah.
HH: And so on. Tell us about that.
NS: Well, I was, I used to go and visit. I worked in Peterborough and I used to go visit my father because London, Peterborough an hours’ drive. I would drive. So, he’d be North London. Kingsbury. So just an hour’s drive down the A1. One day I was there and my father said to me, ‘I want you to do something for me son.’ So I said, ‘Yeah. Whatever you want dad. I’ll do it.’ He said, ‘I want you to get the crew together that I flew with during the war.’ So, I said, ‘Ok dad.’ Just said it like that. I went out. I got in to the car and I’m driving up the A1 and all of a sudden I was thinking how can I do this? And I thought fifty years from now. That’s what they said, ‘We’ll meet fifty years from now.’ I drove up the A1, got back to Peterborough. The next day I’ve come up to Leeds. I’ve called at my mother’s because my mother was WAAF at 76 Squadron. And I said to her, ‘Look, he's asked me to do something.’ She said, ‘What?’ ‘He’s asked me to get the crew together he flew with during the war.’ Well, my mother looked at me stupid and she said, ‘Well, there was Jimmy Watt. He was a Canadian.’ I thought, ‘Well, I know that mum.’ She said, ‘But there was something on the television last night. It was about bombers flying from Holme on Spalding Moor.’ So the next day I went down to the studios., Leeds Studios. Television studios. I went to the reception desk and I told the receptionist what I was looking for. She said, ‘Look, I don’t think I can help you but just hang on.’ She went upstairs and she brought down the producer with her. Well, this producer said, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I, I aren’t supposed to do this but I’m going to give you this video and you can watch it and if you find anything that’s ok but you must bring it back.’ So I said, ‘No problem. I’ll bring it back.’ I took the video, I watched it I couldn’t see anything on it. So I went back to this television studio the next week and I went to see the man. Look,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. Thank you but I couldn’t find anything.’ So he said, ‘I want you to ring this number.’ He said, ‘It’s a lady. Patricia —' I’ve forgotten her second name.
HH: Was it Welbourne or something?
NS: Welbourne.
HH: Yeah.
NS: Patricia Welbourne. They used to call her Paddy. Oh, she used to work [pause] She used to be she was there and she was something to do with 76 Squadron. So I rang this lady in York and I said, ‘Mrs Welbourne?’ She said, ‘Yeah.’ Oh, I said, ‘You won’t know me. My name is Neville Shenbanjo.’ Well, she said, ‘I haven’t heard your voice in forty eight years.’ And I was said, ‘No. No, that’s my father. That’s my father.’ She said, ‘We’ve been looking for your father,’ you know, to get [pause] Anyway, that’s when it all started. She gave me the number of Jimmy Watt and I rang Jimmy Watt up in Canada. And that’s when it all started. I got three of them together. And I think five, five of them we all met once at one reunion. One guy had died and he lived just near my father. We got the rest together and marvellous. I’ve met Jimmy Watt three or four times.
HH: So you, so you made your dad’s wish come true.
NS: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He was over the moon about that. Yeah.
HH: Was he, was he really thrilled?
NS: Oh well, when he met Jimmy Watt after those years, there’s a picture on the wall there. Arms around each other.
HH: And where was that reunion? Was it —
NS: It was at Holme on Spalding Moor. At the —
HH: Ok.
NS: At the base. We, they still have reunions there that there’s not many people to go now.
HH: No.
NS: You know so its —
HH: But what, what about the next generation like you?
NS: Oh yeah.
HH: Do they still participate?
NS: They still go but it’s done mostly like everything else internet now and over the phone. You know. That’s how, that’s how, that’s how they communicate. But I haven’t been there for a while but I still like to go back every, what am I going to do this Sunday? I’m going to go visit there. There’s a funny story. We was there one day and I don’t know whether this is true or not but there one day there must have been thirty of us all there and this guy came. The place is an industrial estate now and this guy came up to, up to the crew and he says, he were the head of the security and he said, ‘I’ve got to tell you guys something.’ They said, ‘What?’ He said, well he was, one of his men was just going around the perimeter and security and he said he saw these kids playing football. So he thought that’s odd because it’s in the middle of nowhere this place. So the security man went up and there were kids playing football and he said they all had uniforms on. He said they had RAF uniforms on he said. And that man, he just ran back to the office and he said, ‘I’m not going back there.’ So they said it was the ghost of the —
HH: Yeah.
NS: But I never believed it but the man never went back to work.
HH: He was convinced.
NS: He never went back to work.
HH: Yeah.
NS: So, I’ll tell you stories about my father. What did he do? You know, it’s hard to say. It’s hard to —
HH: What did he do when he came out of the RAF?
NS: He, he went to work at the Post Office. Then he finished up as a chartered surveyor. I don’t know. I know he worked at the Post Office for a while and he went as a chartered surveyor.
HH: And all the time he was living in London was he?
NS: All the time he was living in London. Yeah. All the time he lived in London because I can remember when I was a kid my father used to send money up for me because my mum and father were divorced. And now and then this money didn’t arrive. My mother used to get angry about it. Anyway, the sad thing is we had a guy that lived around the corner and he was our postman and he was stealing the money.
HH: So your dad was sending the money.
NS: He was sending money but this post, anyway this postman finished up in jail for it. Then my father was forgiven for that. Yeah.
HH: How did you discover —
NS: Well, my father said, my father worked at the Post Office and he was sending it up registered. So, they just had to, I think they just —
HH: Yeah.
NS: They tricked this guy.
HH: Yeah. And sadly he went blind in his later years.
NS: My father went blind in his later years, yeah.
HH: And when did he pass away?
NS: Twenty five, twenty five years ago, I think.
HH: Gosh.
NS: Twenty five years.
HH: So it was in the ninety, late 1990s.
NS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s when he passed away.
HH: And where is he buried?
NS: He’s, he was cremated.
HH: He was cremated.
NS: And it’s, and it’s, there was a plaque on the wall. It said, oh it’s in a crematorium in North London. I can’t remember.
HH: Ok. So, it’s in North London.
NS: It’s in North London.
HH: Yeah.
NS: Not far from Kingsbury.
HH: Ok.
NS: So, the crematorium there.
HH: And you were just telling me earlier that your mum survived a very long time and only passed away quite recently.
NS: Yeah. She was ninety one, my mother. Yeah. She passed.
HH: And she’d always lived, continued living in Leeds.
NS: Continued living in Leeds, yeah. She lived just up the road.
HH: And how come you found your way back to Leeds after you’d been in Peterborough? Where else did you travel and work?
NS: Well, I just happened to work in Peterborough. I just wanted a job and I’ve been an optical technician all my life. Since I was fifteen. And they were asking for somebody in Peterborough. So I went. I used to travel back to Leeds every weekend you know.
HH: So your home has always been in Leeds.
NS: My home has always, I’ve always had a home in Leeds. Yeah. Yeah.
HH: One of the things I wanted to, to ask you was how you, I mean obviously you have a very personal interest in how Bomber Command, RAF Bomber Command is remembered today. Do you think that, that Bomber Command is remembered adequately? Do you think that they’ve been given the respect or the recognition they deserve?
NS: They are now. At one time they was not. Not at all. My father regretted. My father made a lot of German friends. He used to visit Germany a lot. He felt so guilty, you know. I remember my father bombed Dresden and places like this and after the war he used to feel, he felt so sad you know. He told me this. But what could he do? He had to do it and that were, that was the end of it. I was very proud of him naturally. And everybody else. I had friends and they say to me, ‘Oh, your father. Oh yeah, he was an officer.’ And some still don’t believe me and I’d say, ‘Yes, he was an officer in the RAF.’ I can remember one guy once said to me, ‘No black men flew in the RAF.’ And this guy was in, this guy had been in the RAF, you know [laughs] I just laughed.
HH: Because I think, I mean don’t you think that that is an issue? That Bomber Command, you said earlier you know they didn’t have recognition for a long time but within, within that lack of recognition the, the black airmen and, and others who served in Bomber Command got even less recognition.
NS: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Probably. Probably. But I can’t see it though because my father was made an officer. So no. I don’t, I don’t think there was any prejudice in.
HH: No. But afterwards. The way in which Bomber Command has been remembered afterwards.
NS: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s sad because nobody realises. All they think about is bombing children and things like this. Nobody understands that it had to be done. It was something that just had to be done and that was the end of it. You know, I understood. I understood this for a long time. Yeah. When they say about [pause] some of the things he did he told me and I just, everything just went out of my head. Ah. I made some notes. [pause] In training. Him and Jimmy Watt. There was one time I was in Peterborough and I was in the pub and somebody came around, they put, ‘Anybody want to do a parachute jump.’ Well, you know it happens doesn’t it, in a pub? No. I was over forty then so I said, ‘No way.’ And I think I was forty. Anyway, they came back an hour later. That would be another three pints later [laughs] and the hand was up straight away. ‘Yeah. I’ll do it.’ So, then I thought, ‘What can I do now? How do I get out of it?’ So, I was going to visit my father the next day. So I went to my father and I said, ‘Dad, I’ve done something stupid.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I volunteered to do a parachute jump.’ He says, ‘You’ll love it.’ I said, ‘Dad, you never did one.’ He said, ‘I did.’ I said, ‘Why? Your plane was never shot down.’ He said, ‘We were test, test flying a Lancaster over the Humber Estuary and the rudder got stuck so it was just going around in a big circle all around the Humber Estuary. Well, we had to get in touch with base and they had to get in touch with Bomber Command and the only thing to do was bale out and, ‘Bale out while it’s over land and then we’ll send some fighters to shoot it down.’ That’s the only thing they could do. So they all baled out. My father landed in this church yard in [pause] Oh where? Anyway, in this village churchyard. I remember the name of the village. And he said, ‘I landed.’ Well, they had overalls over their uniforms then. He said, ‘I landed in this churchyard and this vicar’s wife came out with a shotgun. And she had a shotgun over me.’ So he said, ‘Look, I’m British.’ ‘So she looked at me and said, ‘Oh no you’re not.’ [laughs] Anyway, then the vicar came out and the local, local police sergeant. They let my dad, and then they realised. Well, the policeman did anyway. They realised he was British. And that woman used to send my father Christmas cards and birthday cards for twenty years before she died. That’s how, that’s how friendly he was. That’s how people took to my father. You know, it was just like that.
HH: That’s a wonderful story.
NS: Anyway, I did the parachute jump [laughs]
HH: And how did you find it?
NS: Marvellous. I wanted to do another one. I’d do one tomorrow. Yeah.
HH: Yeah.
NS: Yeah. That’s a good story about my dad. [unclear] Parachute. Oh, and Jimmy. Jimmy Watt, I were talking to him and he said, ‘You know once we had, we couldn’t land at our base. There was something up with the plane. We had to land at this other base.’ And there there was American bomber planes. Well, they landed. ‘They took us in to the mess and this one crew member said to Jimmy Watt, he said, ‘Does he fly with you?’ So, he said, ‘Yeah.’ So he said, ‘Well, aren’t you segregated?’ He said, ‘What do you mean segregrated?’ so he said, he said, ‘We fly together, we eat together and,’ he said, ‘We’ll probably die together.’ And that’s what Jimmy Watt told this Yank.
HH: And he was right.
NS: He was right.
HH: Tell us that story Neville about how your dad recognised his, his ground crew from, from his voice all those years later at a reunion.
NS: Oh yeah. We went to a reunion. My father was blind by this time and we were, we was walking to the church and it’s a hill to go up the church. My dad was blind and I had my dad on my arm. Well, this old guy came up and he says, stood in front of my father and he says. ‘You won’t remember me Able 1, will you?’ My father was blind. My father said, ‘Remember you?’ He says, ‘You saved our lives.’ He said, ‘You were the ground crew. We relied on you.’ And he remembered his voice and it was unbelievable. It was unbelievable. I can remember one time. This is a silly thing. I had to go to London. I had to go to get to the other side of London which is south London so I asked my father for directions. He said, ‘Come on. I’ll take you.’ I said, ‘Dad, you’re blind.’ He said, ‘I was a navigator wasn’t I?’ [laughs] So I said, ‘Yeah.’ So I’d got him in the car beside me and don’t forget he were blind but he directed me to exactly the place I wanted to be. ‘You take the next left.’ And it, and it was about a ten mile journey but I don’t know how he did it.
HH: He got you there.
NS: I don’t know how he did it. Another time [unclear] [pause] Oh yeah. Another time his pilot told me, he said, ‘We were coming in to land and they knocked a chimney pot off a farmhouse.’ But the next day the farmer came screaming, he said, ‘But we blamed somebody else.’ [laughs] But my father wanted to admit it. He said, ‘No. You don’t admit it. We blame somebody else.’ And he told me another other time as well it must be forty years after the war. Yeah, and he’d visited York because they used to go to York and he said, ‘I was sat in this café —' and this lady came up to him and she said, ‘Did you serve in the RAF?’ So, he said, ‘Yes.’ ‘I used to dance with you. Do you remember doing?’ And she used to dance with him at one of the dances in York. You know, he said, he said it’s forty years ago and she still remembered. I said, ‘Dad, you’re an unforgettable person.’ You know.
HH: Was he a good dancer?
NS: Oh yeah. Supposed to have been, yeah. Yeah. I think that’s where I got it from.
HH: Are you a good dancer too?
NS: What are you laughing at [laughs] No. I can’t, I can’t even walk.
HH: Does dancing run in your family?
NS: I can’t even walk. Palestine. Jimmy Watt. I did this. Brenda Bernell. What’s Brenda Bernell? Oh. This is another story about my father in uniform. I was six years old and I was very ill. The doctor didn’t know what was wrong with me. He thought I had measles. But then he thought it was a bad case of flu because I came out in blotches and everything. Anyway, there was a girl that lived around the corner. I’ll never forget her name. Brenda Bernell. And she was in the same class as me so my grandmother had sent her a note to say, “Neville won’t be in school because he’s got measles.” That’s what they thought I had. When I finally got back to school teacher said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ It turned out it were just a bad dose of flu. I said, ‘Well, I’ve had flu.’ And I had to stand outside the headmistress’s office for lying. Well, you know [laughs] So my father had come to visit me. And he said, he was at home so when I got home he was there. So, he said, ‘Why are you late?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve been outside the headmistress’s office for lying.’ He was angry with me. He said, ‘You’ve been lying?’ So I said, ‘Yeah. I just told them I’d got flu.’ And grandma said, ‘Well, that’s what it was but we sent a note saying he’d got —’[pause] My father marched me to school the next day in full uniform. I thought, but the respect he got when he went through those school gates. The headmistress, she was all over him. You know. She couldn’t do enough for him. And I thought well she was a right cow anyway. Mrs [unclear] we called her Bumblebee.
HH: Did you get an apology?
NS: Oh, I got an apology, yeah. But when my father had gone I got, you know I still got picked on and what have you.
HH: So which, which schools did you go to in Leeds, Neville?
NS: Went to [unclear] Primary School and then to Foxwood Comprehensive School because Foxwood, it was the first comprehensive school in England and I had to write to my father because I had passed my Eleven Plus and had a choice of going to Roundhay School, or Coborn High School or another school. But I had to write to my father to say what, so he suggested Foxwood School. That will be the best in the future. That’s the only mistake he ever made I think [laughs] No. I did alright. I did alright. I did alright. But I can’t tell you about, I can’t tell you his missions that he did because I don’t know. I know there was a lot. I know he did more than anybody else.
HH: What happened to his logbook?
NS: His son’s got that in London.
HH: It does, it does survive though, does it?
NS: It might survive. I know, I know he’s got little things because he’s an hoarder and he’s, he’s not interested in any of this because when, when we was going to the fiftieth reunion to meet all his old, his son was there and I said, ‘Akin, do you want to come with us?’ ‘No. I’ll stay with mum.’ You know, he’s one of them type of things. I think he’s got, I know he’s got his ration book, things like that so he might have his logbook. But my father would have given it to me if he’d have known, you know, that he was going to die. He made sure.
HH: But that would probably have the fullest record of all his ops.
NS: Yeah. Yeah. But I don’t talk to the man. I don’t want to talk to him.
HH: No. There is another way of getting the information. Look, looking at operational record books.
NS: Yeah.
HH: Which is, which is possible but we can talk about that another time.
NS: Yeah. That’s fine.
HH: Maybe get some information from that.
NS: I just want, I just want to know how he was awarded his DFC. That’s all I’m interested in.
HH: And we’ll get, we’ll try.
NS: Yeah.
HH: And look for ways of —
NS: Yeah.
HH: Finding that information for you.
NS: I thought they might have let me know when I applied for his medals because my dad’s medals. Oh, the medals that’s another story.
HH: Tell us that story.
NS: Well, my father, when mother and father split up he got lodgings in this house not far and he had to go to London. So he asked this guy would he look after his medals until he comes back. He said, ‘Oh yeah. They’ll be safe with me.’ My dad was gone for God knows how long and he went but the guy had moved and the medals had gone. Now, this guy had been seen at the Cenotaph in Leeds wearing my father’s medals. But we never, I had to get some copies made but my father, you know he said, ‘No. He wouldn’t have stolen them.’ I said, ‘Dad, he did. There are people like that, you know.’ My dad didn’t think there were people were like that. You know, why would anybody steal somebody else’s medals?
HH: Yeah.
NS: The guy had been in the RAF himself. But I think he was only ground crew but you know he was marching up and down with my dad’s medals on.
HH: So, did you, have you had those medals, the replacements? Did you get those for your dad or did you get those after he had passed away already?
NS: I got them for my dad but he said, ‘No, you keep them. You keep them there and then I’ll know you’ve got them then,’ you see.
HH: Yeah.
NS: So, I kept them up here.
HH: So, he knew that he had the replacements.
NS: Oh yeah. He, yeah I said, ‘I got your replacements. Don’t you worry about that.’
HH: Yeah.
NS: Anything else? I don’t [pause] it seems I have loads to tell you but I can’t think.
HH: Well, you have told us loads.
NS: Have I?
HH: You have. And I suppose it would be a good, a good way to end off really by talking about how the rest of your family feels about these stories because I know you’ve got children and grandchildren of your own.
NS: Oh yeah.
HH: Are they interested in these stories?
NS: Oh yeah.
HH: Do you tell them the stories?
NS: I do tell them now and then. Yeah. Like I said he’s —
Other: Yeah. My brother who lives in Spain. He’s got, he’s got all the photos up at his bar.
NS: Oh, he’s got a bar in Spain.
Other: He’s got all the photos of my granddad.
NS: They called the bar, “Banjos.” They call the bar, “Banjos.”
HH: Have you been out there?
Other: Yeah.
NS: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Other: Of course.
NS: We go out there. I go out regular and he has, well he’s got some more pictures now.
HH: So, you do keep this memory alive.
NS: Oh yeah. Yeah.
HH: Of your dad in the family. That’s wonderful.
NS: And its amazing how many people are interested in Spain because he’s got these pictures and he’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s my grandfather.’ But there’s so many. When I go now people want to talk, want talk to me about it you know. And there’s one guy, one guy especially he runs a radio show in Malaga. And I think he’s mentioned it on the show in Malaga. You know. That’s another thing.
HH: So he should.
NS: Yeah.
HH: It’s important that these people do remember.
NS: It is. Yeah. It is. Yeah.
HH: Yeah.
NS: Yeah. So I’ve got to get some more pictures now and take them over when I go to fill his wall up you know. I’ve got, well, I’ve got plenty on my phone anyway, you know so—
HH: That’s great. Thank you so much for sharing all of these stories.
NS: It’s ok [unclear]
HH: If you think of anymore which is doubtless going to happen take a note and we’ll come back and do some more chatting.
NS: Well, I’ll come and meet you. It’s not —
HH: It would be wonderful to welcome you in Lincoln.
NS: Yeah.
HH: It would be wonderful to take you around the new International Bomber Command Centre when it opens which will be next year.
NS: Yeah. I’d love to do it because there’s a guy I used to work with in Peterborough, an optician. And he’s really interested in this because his father was in the RAF. He was a —
HH: Do you stay in touch with him?
NS: Oh yeah. Gilbert. Yeah.
HH: Well, Lincoln is a good place for you to meet halfway.
NS: He lives in Boston.
HH: Oh, there you are. Boston and Leeds. You can meet in Lincoln.
NS: Yeah. He used, he used to have an optician shop in Boston. A Specsaver shop in Boston, this guy.
HH: One of the things that I just wanted to ask you before we close everything up is would you mind if we took some pictures of your photographs?
NS: No, not at all.
HH: Because if, if you are willing for us to be able to do that we would love to have copies put in to our archive as well.
NS: Yeah.
HH: For other people to have a look —
NS: Yeah.
HH: In future. So that would be really good. So, thank you Neville.
NS: Yeah.
HH: Perhaps the thing to do now would be to take some images and we also want a nice portrait of you.
NS: Oh, that’s ok.
HH: And we’ll take a portrait of Keeley too. Thank you so much.
NS: You’re welcome.
HH: Let’s stop all the equipment and take some still photographs and some other photographs. Is that ok, Alex?
[recording paused]
HH: Ok. Tell me about your dad’s love of jazz.
NS: Love of jazz. He loved jazz. He wanted to play it for his funeral, it was “Blue Indigo,” by oh I’ve got, I’ve got the CD down there.
HH: It’s, “Mood Indigo.”
NS: Mood. Well, it was, “Mood Indigo” It was “Blue Indigo,” because there’s, there’s so many different versions.
HH: Versions. Yeah.
NS: Because when I tried to get it afterwards because I’ve got a friend that has a record shop and he said, ‘There’s twenty different versions of this,’ but I’ve I’ve got the right one.
HH: And that’s what was played at his funeral.
NS: That was played at his funeral. Yeah.
HH: Lovely touch.
NS: It was so, the music. It just [pause] that’s it. You might not have heard of him Terry Gallagher the jazz singer. He’s great. That’s him there and that’s me just where I used to live in the centre of Leeds but he’d done a show there. How do you want to do these pictures then? Do you want to —?
[recording paused]
HH: Now, Neville, tell me the story about the brother you discovered much later.
NS: Well, about ten years ago my daughter, Keeley she rang me, she said, ‘Dad, you’ve got a brother.’ I said, ‘I know I’ve got a brother. I don’t talk to him.’ She said, ‘No. This is another one. He’s looking for you and he lives in America.’ So I finally, I phoned him and then he came over, didn’t he? He came over to see me and it took him three weeks. Now, we can’t stand the one down there. I can’t tell you what he calls him over the phone. But he, but he’s a marvellous kid and he was brought up in care. His mother gave him up when he was three years old and he went to Durham. Now, this lady she just looked after half caste children. She fostered them. And what do you call the dressmaker? Bruce —
HH: I can picture him.
NS: The gay guy. Bruce.
Other: Bruce Oldfield.
NS: Bruce Oldfield.
HH: Oldfield.
NS: He was there in the same one. I used to have a picture. I used to have that book. A picture of Bruce Oldfield. But, now this guy they’re like brothers. Well, they are brothers. They were brought up as brothers and Bruce Oldfield lives in Italy now. He has a place in Italy. I think it’s Lake Como or somewhere, but he goes over and visits him regular. You know he’s a smashing guy is Barry.
Other: They were in a band together.
NS: Oh he was in a band together, yeah.
Other: London Cowboys.
HH: Did you? Wow.
Other: London Cowboys he was in.
NS: No, he wasn’t in a band, what do you —
HH: But it was through this brother that you heard about us.
NS: Yeah. He, he phoned me and says I want you to do something about it. I said, ‘Look, I can’t send emails. I’m useless at that, you know.’ But luckily I had this guy next to me who used to live next door to me. He said, ‘I’ll do it for you.’ It’s why, just Dave emailing, I was telling him what to write. Anyway, I finally did and I told Barry. He said, ‘I want you to do it before he does it down there because he knows nothing.’ You know, that brother in London. He’d just do it for he’d make sure he got his name in print somewhere along the line. See if I can find out.
HH: Well. You must keep Barry informed and get him to come over when the, when the centre opens.
NS: Oh, we will do yeah.
HH: Come down and visit together. It would be wonderful.
Other: Yeah. Barry works in all the studios. Universal studios.
NS: Yeah.
Other: Works on all the sets.
HH: Wow
NS: Find him —
Other: I’ll just click on the top of that.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AShenbanjoN170727, PShenbanjoA1701
Title
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Interview with Neville Shenbanjo
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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.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:54:36 audio recording
Creator
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Heather Hughes
Date
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2017-07-27
Coverage
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Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Second generation
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Nigeria
England--Yorkshire
England--London
England--Leeds
Description
An account of the resource
Neville Shenbanjo was born in 1945, the son of Akin Shenbanjo. Flying Officer Akin Shenbanjo DFC was born in Nigeria and served as a wireless operator / air gunner with 76 Squadron. His crew named their Halifax 'Achtung! The Black Prince' after him.
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Pending OH summary. Allocated T Holmes
Contributor
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Julie Williams
76 Squadron
African heritage
aircrew
Halifax
perception of bombing war
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
wireless operator / air gunner