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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/7/13/ADerringtonAP150715-01.2.mp3
2af1448baa606754816904ab2f0786c3
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Title
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Derrington, Arnold Pearce
Arnold Pearce Derrington
Arnold P Derrington
Arnold Derrington
A P Derrington
A Derrington
Description
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Two oral history interviews with Dr Arnold Pearce Derrington DFC (- 2016, 187333 Royal Air Force), a navigator with 462 and 466 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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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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Derrington, AP
Date
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2015-07-15
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IBCC Digital Archive
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and I am conducting an interview with Doctor Arnold Pierce Derrington and we are in his house in Cornwall and we are going to talk about his experiences over the years in the RAF but starting off in his early days and then after the war with his civilian career. Today is the 14th July 2015 and I’m asking Derry to start in the early days. What was your background Derry and how did all of that progress?
DD: Well I was a child in Devon. I came to Cornwall at the age of eighteen months to live at St Erth. That’s still my model village and I was there until about 1930 and the family had grown by then and we moved to Marazion near St Michael’s Mount and I had my childhood days there. Very happy memories of Marazion and I still see friends from there and still hear from there.
I had a friend living nearby in a place called [?] and he was a navigator too. He’d been a clerk in an agricultural merchants and the, he went into the air force, and did a tour with Coastal Command and was posted to Rhodesia where he was an instructor. When he died eventually I spread his ashes from a lifeboat in Mounts Bay. But he and I were childhood friends. We were little rogues really because his father was a policeman and the father was very incensed sometimes. Some man came to him and said someone’s put water in the petrol of my motor tank in the tank the petrol tank of my motorbike and it turned out that we two boys had done it. Very embarrassing for the policemen. That boy’s sister is still alive. She visits me occasionally.
And at Marazion I was at the county school at Penzance and never dreamed I’d be flying. I saw Alan Cobham’s Air Circus. I’ve got his little notebook here. It’s in that blue container there. Do you have it? Alan Cobham’s book. That’s it. And I have a very dear friend I haven’t seen for seventy seven years. I went to that air display with his parents. And that was an air display that flew around with trailers behind the planes saying where the display was taking place and we were talking recently about that actual airfield which is between Marazion and Haile and my mother said, ‘Don’t you dare go up flying’ and I was offered a free flight and I did say no but within ten years I’d done a tour and got a DFC. It’s amazing how things go on isn’t it?
Now, where do we go from there now? I was at Marazion in the LDV or Home Guard and when I went to college at Exeter I decided to join the LDV there. And after a month or so the University Air Squadron was opening up in Exeter and I joined that and I was at St Luke’s, Exeter which was a teacher training place and until the last two or three years there were a few of us around but I’m the last one of them still going strong. One of the chaps Archie Smith from St Austell was on the county council with my wife. She was a councillor and had a very good career about it. She ended up with an MBE.
Well I went on then to University Air Squadron from this Home Guard lot there and I’ve even got a greeting telegram somewhere from a relation congratulating me on joining this University Air Squadron. I could dig that out if you want to see a picture of it I expect.
And well it was good training. We had a, a, a commanding officer called Searle who was the head of the physics department at Exeter and he had an adjutant called Crosscut and the main chap we met from an interesting flying point of view had the Croix de Guerre. He was a rear gunner. He was badly scarred.
And from the University Air Squadron I was attested in Weston Super Mare in June 1942 and that same month I joined the air force at Lords Cricket Ground. Our first payday, first money I’d earned in my life cause having been University Air Squadron I was a leading aircraftsmen and we were very superior indeed to the AC plonks. They only got a half a crown a day. And after a short time at Lords I was posted to Manchester to await overseas posting but they discovered that I needed corrective goggles so I was sent down to Brighton Aircrew Dispersal Wing, ACDW and had a very happy time there staying in a huge great hotel, sleeping on rough beds at the Hotel Metropole. And there was another one The Grand there was well and the [air?] parade still took place in those days and we saw some of the rather shaky soldiers who came back from there.
And from ACDW I was posted to grading school Ansty near Coventry. I was made into, well I did fly in a Tiger Moth but I was made into as a navigator and I’m very glad I was because it kept me going during the very horrible times that we were doing operations. I had my head down getting on with the job. I did look out a time or two but it was so horrific I got back to my base very soon and from the grading school I went to Blackpool waiting for overseas posting and from Liverpool I sailed to South Africa. It wasn’t straightforward because we were afraid of the submarines that might have damaged us so we went across the coast to America and then back again to freestone, Freetown and then from Freetown down around the Cape to Durban. We didn’t get off the boat at all. I was on gun duty on oerlikons.
When we got to Durban we went to a transit camp called Clairwood and there we were thrown an empty linen case and told to stuff it with grass because that would be our palliasse bed and the toilets, they were like huge great egg racks. I think there was accommodation for about eighty. And they fed us very well. It was very nice. The novelty of South Africa was interesting indeed. I met very interesting people there who worked in the Red Shield Club and they invited us into their homes and there was one family called Thornton who had a son same age as myself training as a doctor. I’ve heard from him right until recently when he died. And when I moved away from East London to Durban, Durban to East London we did some training in the air force work there. I went up there to do night flying at a place called Aliwal North and that was a place outside the town of Queenstown. It was a very strange volcanic rock there with a big flat top called [?] and there was [?] Association and I was a member of that for a long time and correspondence kept on.
And I met a dear man who was flying beside me called Harry Dunn. Because my name came in the alphabet first before his I was graded as first navigator he was graded as second navigator. And well I did turn out to be a better one than he did because I came top of the course. But Harry came to me when we went to our next stage up at Queenstown almost in tears. He said, “My maths is no good at all. Will you coach me?” Harry was out with the girls and drinking and didn’t bother at all really. He was good company but very happy go lucky.
And well we both got through and he came back with me on the same troopship back through Tufik (?)in the Red Sea. And the Germans were still in Italy and we had a lot of women and children on board who were being repatriated from India. They were service families. And they weren’t going to take any risks. When the Germans were clear, after a fortnight in Tufik we came back through the Mediterranean and home in time for Christmas 1943. And we were very popular because we brought back things which were normally rationed.
I bought a lovely Omega watch in East London for seven pounds ten shillings and well the same watch these days is nearly two thousand pounds. I lost that but that’s another story. I’ve bought another Omega since. I navigated on that one all the way through. They issued us with proper watches but I was delighted with my Omega. And I believe I had to hand wind it. I’d rather forgotten but recently I’ve seen the certificate when I bought the watch and apparently it had to be handed in to be oiled every year. Well mine never got any oil on it at all and I navigated on it pretty well. I was very happy with it. Delighted with my Omega.
Now where have we got? Oh yes. We were posted after Christmas leave, to West Freugh to acclimatise to British conditions and we flew up and down the Hebrides. Very fascinating indeed. I saw Iona which has a church which is the same pattern as our village church here in Pendeen - cruciform. And after going to this unit at West Freugh Harry got posted off to Transport Command and I was posted to Bomber Command. We were told, ‘write your wills. You won’t be here in six weeks time.’ I thought I’d find out how Harry’s going on. No reply. Wrote his parents – no reply. So I thought, well that’s it. I still have a lovely photo of him.
And I went on from West Freugh to, let’s see, OTU at Moreton in Marsh. Operational Training Unit. And that was on Wellingtons. In the meantime Harry had gone to Canada and became a fur merchant after the Transport Command experience as a fur merchant like his father was. And twenty or fifty years later on his conscience was pricking him because he had borrowed a book from an old aunt living near Bath and he came back to England from Canada to take this book to her. She was dead. Had an uncle ten miles away. Went to see him. He was dead too. So he thought I’m so far west I’ll go down Penzance and see old Derry. He didn’t tell me he was coming. I didn’t know where he was. I hadn’t forgotten him. And that day my wife and I were taking an old lady to hospital so we weren’t there in order to see him and Harry caught the train back to [?] to stay or he hoped to stay with a [sugar bidder[?]] there that he played rugby with before the war. When he got to the a [sugar bidder[?]] house he was out but the caretaker said, “Come on in and have a meal. He’ll be back in the morning.” and he was telling his tale of the book and going down to Penzance to see an old navigator friend. And that caretaker said was that navigator called Derry Derrington. He said, “How did you know that?” “I sat beside him on thirty one operations in bomber command. He was my navigator. I was his bomb aimer.” That dear boy has died since but his wife is still alive.
So after being at West Freugh Operational Training Unit there we crewed up, six of us, because we only had Wellingtons. We weren’t on a four engine outfit so we needed a flight engineer later and we gelled as a crew very quickly. Our pilot was an Australian called Les Evans, a dairy farmer’s son and he came from a place called Kingaroy in Queensland. And Les Evans was a very good pilot. He had been an instructor. We were all good chaps. We were never, there never was as good a crew as we are. Charlie will think so too. Charlie was friendly with another gunner called Dennis Cleaver and those two had crewed up together and they were looking for somebody to join and my pilot, Les Evans chose me for his navigator. I was delighted. Didn’t care whether he was Australian or Chinese or whatever he was. He was a dear old boy.
And after Les Evans, he and I were together, we chose the oldest wireless operator we could get and that was Tom Windsor. Tom was thirty one. We thought he was our grandfather [laughs] and Tom was a good old boy with the girls. One of the joking things which Charlie and I still talk about he used to say, “I’d like as many shillings,” and what that definitely meant we don’t quite know but we could guess all sorts of things. We were quite youngsters really in our early twenties. Tom was thirty one.
And well, we had Jonah who was in antiques with his brother. I was a trainee schoolmaster just qualified. Tom Windsor was a bookies clerk and Charlie and Dennis, the gunners, were both fitters and there were six of us. And we did OTU work at Moreton in the Marsh on Wellingtons and that was good. I saw my area where I live here from the air for the first time. I had been to see Alan Cobham’s Air Circus and did a flight - very limited indeed, but this was very wonderful to see our area from the, I suppose it was about ten thousand feet.
Well from the OTU we were posted to a Heavy Conversion Unit to get used to a four engine aircraft and we picked up an engineer who had been on the Queen Mary - Jock. Dear boy. Scotsman. A wee haggis we called him and he was good. In fact we had the most hair raising experience when we were doing a flight near the Isle Of Man because he had to change the petrol tanks over every so often in order to balance the aircraft, trim it up properly and he needed to go to the elsan and whether he was there longer then he should have done or what we don’t know but two engines cut out on us and I as navigator had to hold the escape hatch open, I did, ready for the crew to bailout and we got, Jonah, no Jock the engineer came back quickly, switched the right tanks over and she picked up and there we were again but we were very dicey indeed in those days.
Well we started our tour of operations. We were posted from our Heavy Conversion Unit to Driffield in Yorkshire just about twenty miles north of Hull. A lovely peacetime station. And the pilot did a second dickey, that is to give him experience. In the meantime we did all sorts of training to keep us well and fit. And on from there we started our own tour. And the first trip was an easy one cap griz nez. It was to do with army cooperation.
The second trip is one that was probably the most momentous in our lives. It was to a flying bomb site. Now on our back from leave we’d gone through London. We’d seen the headlines - Pilotless Aircraft over England and well those were the V1s and we didn’t know what that would mean and we were told this was a highly secret operation. We were not to talk to anybody about it at all and we were going to hit this target over, in daylight, at minute intervals. And as we were going down the country toward Beachy Head some silly bounder flying alongside us pressed the wrong button and what the crew were saying among themselves mentioned the name of the target. And that was [?] for the Germans. My pilot could see that every other aircraft was being shot down and he climbed an extra two thousand feet after Beachy Head [?] and did a shallow dive on the target. That gave us that bit more speed and we got there that split second before the minute was up but the flack came up and the Germans shot down one of their own fighters on our tail. Oh the gunners were quite screaming about it and we really felt we were getting acclimatised.
Well we got back from that we knew we’d got an aiming point. I’ve got a reconnaissance photograph of it here. It’s in my file which I’ll talk to you about later. That big fat file there is a list of all the things we did. All the, and I think it’s quite unique because the Australians were such a happy go lucky mob they didn’t collect them from us to shred them like most other people had done. I’ve got a complete unique set of operations and I know that we did well. We were good at wind finding and we did PFF support because we used to broadcast the wind that we found that was used by the master bomber.
Now where did we go from there? Well we did thirty one ops. Mainly over the Ruhr - Happy Valley, Flak Alley - all sorts of names for it and we got hit a time or two but we luckily came back and a lot of our dear chaps didn’t. I got back from a week’s leave and found seven complete crews wiped out. And they were dear boys. They were a jolly lot. They were mad as hatters. Motorbikes going around the mess, footprints on the ceiling. My speciality was doing forward rolls on the top of billiard tables or else in the fireplace. I’ve been told this later but I don’t remember it. And one chap flying with us he was the navigation leader he smoked his pipe through the side of the oxygen mask which was a little bit risky I think what do you think? Would you fancy doing that?
CB: No.
DD: No. No sensible person would I’m sure. In the middle of my tour I came home once and I thought I I’ll go up and see how my dad was getting on and I found him lying dead in the garden beside a bonfire. He’d had a stroke at the age of fifty four. That was, I was the oldest one of four children and my brother and I are the only two in our family now left but that was a great shock to me. It was the first dead person I’d seen and I was very saddened about it. I determined I wasn’t going to do any more flying when my tour was up although we were invited to be PFF people but I explained that I was the eldest of four and I couldn’t go back again and it wasn’t held against me. I was with a very fair lot.
The Aussies were a mad, happy lot. I got on wonderfully well with them. They were dears. And I never knew them do a bad, evil deed with anybody at all. They were wonderful. You’ll see pictures of some of them and some of the targets we had in my main logbook there.
Well we did get through our tour. I say the general thanksgiving every day for our creation, preservation. Preservation deeply underlined because we were preserved from all sorts of horrible things and we were able to save ourselves and our country by what we did. My Charlie, the rear gunner has a grandson I think it is who’s a Member of Parliament. There’s a photograph of him up there and I’ve got a letter of his in my general logbook here saying, ‘If I can do a much for the country as you chaps in Bomber Command then I shall feel I’ve done well.’ He’s a Doctor of Medicine as well as a Member of Parliament and I believe he had an increased majority at the last election. Charlie’s very proud of him. Charlie comes down this way on holiday occasionally. He was staying at a place called Mousehole not far from here with his, this man’s brother owns it and Charlie and his wife were down and we had some wonderful times together.
Earlier on I was talking about my friend in Canada who was, who met my bomb aimers crew over in Effingham near Goring and when this Harry came at one time he gave me my computer. Do you know it?
CB: I do.
AS: It’s a whizz wheel.
DD: A Dalton.
AS: A Dalton computer, yeah.
DD: A Dalton mark 3. While we were training as navigators this was our bible AP1234. There is an AP4567. I’ve seen it but I can’t get another copy. Anyhow, where I got this I don’t really remember but it was a precious book.
Well the tour was horrific. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world but I wouldn’t wish anyone else to have done it. And the crew were magnificent. We never had any quarrels or arguments. Les was a wonderful leader and well the mid gunner was a bit dicey sometimes but he was a jolly old boy and he loved singing too. We got on well. Talking about singing I’ve got a list of some of the ribald songs we sang.
We had lots of waiting around and because I live in the sticks down here in West Cornwall it took a long time to travel from Yorkshire to Cornwall. Twenty seven hours usually, stopping in London overnight very often, that I couldn’t come home on a forty eight hour pass. The time would be spent all with travelling and I passed my time away by doing this. This was my engagement present for my wife. This I did on an engineer’s bench in Air Force Station Driffield. The Song of Songs. In the back it says where it was done. Bound and written out by Arnold P Derrington between October and December 1944 at Driffield. I’m very proud of the title page of it. And I gave this to my wife and it will be my daughter’s eventually and this is the main title page. There.
CB: Wow.
DD: The Song of Songs. And I have bound a book before under ideal conditions but that was done on an engineer’s bench. The leatherwork as well and it’s very precious as you can imagine.
CB: What prompted you to do that?
DD: Pardon?
CB: What prompted you to do that?
DD: Well the language in it is very lovely and I felt it was a suitable engagement present for my wife.
[pause]
I’m wondering what is the next thing to talk about?
CB: Would you like to have a break?
DD: Hmmn?
CB: Would you like to have a break?
DD: No.
CB: Ok.
DD: No.
CB: So you said it was horrendous on operations so could you describe a typical operation that was hairy please?
DD: I got a diary which is totally illegal. There’s a black book over there somewhere. That’s it I think
[pause]
Yes diary of an RAF career after the 20th June ACRC etcetera. A tour of operations. An illegal document. Well its written, there’s quite a bit of detail there and I used it on one occasion for the people who are writing a history of our squadron. You see a book there, a big heavy book. That’s it. And my grandson Adam, who is going to have this stuff was so delighted he bought a copy for himself and, I was given a gratis copy and the two chaps who wrote it one is called Lax he was an ex air commodore and the other man there, a hyphenated name he was a chemistry professor very near where my daughter who lives in Australia. I’ve never met these two chaps but I’ve just had phone calls from them and with extracts from our diary and other things o sent them they got fifty references to us as a crew in that book. What’s it called again?
CB: To See the Dawn Again.
DD: To See the Dawn, yes. Well number, operation number eighteen. After much lighting, lightning the usual restless night I woke to a lovely morning. No signs of movement. Today is St Luke’s day. What happy memories it recalls. Possibly too many of us over the world - Canada, Africa, India, Gib West Indies and dear old England. Have I longed to, how I’ve longed to be on the cliffs today. Hanging around in the morning. FFI in the afternoon. Promise of pay then wait. Nothing doing. Draughts and roll call. Detailed for more, for move off tomorrow. I can’t read my own writing. Five weeks have elapsed since I heard from Helen and another five weeks will pass before I hear anything more. [?] I hadn’t done any operations that day.
CB: So this was a diary that you kept in addition to your logbook was it?
DD: Yes my logbooks are rather scruffy looking things.
CB: Yes I saw it on there.
DD: The South African one.
CB: Right.
DD: If I’d had it in England it would have had a rather nice blue cloth cover instead of a plain cover like that.
CB: Right ok. What prompted you to keep the diary?
DD: Oh just being [fussy?] and breaking regulations sort of thing.
[pause]
DD: I ought to be reading my own writing but I can’t.
CB: Well off the top of your head though what would you say was the most hair raising experience you had in a raid?
DD: Well even in the last raid we did. It was the 27th of December and we were going to the Ruhr and I’d had flu and I didn’t feel like flying at all. It wasn’t a case of LMF and it wasn’t a case of jitters it was a case of finishing near the end of the tour but I just did not feel well. My pilot Les said come on you’re alright you’ve always done well for us so far on previous occasions and off we went and I got taken sick and Jonah was sitting next to me the bomb aimer and I could tell him what to do when I couldn’t do it myself. And then I passed out and the heating failed at minus forty four. And we had to come down and I just vaguely knew what was happening. We had to come down to ten thousand feet because of the oxygen shortage. The heating had failed and the oxygen failed as well. And we had bombs being dropped by our own chaps up above and they were shooting at us down below and the fighters on our tail but I was able to work out the courses for the pilot. I’m sure you all know what the preparation is beforehand and there are estimated courses and things which one should take and as a navigator I’d worked that out in the briefing beforehand and I just read off from those and applied variation and deviation and gave the pilot those courses and we got through where we were going and whether we hit the target or not I don’t know because I handed over to Jonah, the bomb aimer. And on the way back I was feeling very unwell indeed and this was all due to the flu business I think. Anyhow, we did get back and thank God for that. That was a very hair raising situation to be in. I didn’t like feeling unable to do the job I had to do.
It was a very necessary job but a very horrible job and when I think we were trained to kill it’s a very revolting thought but if we didn’t do it we would have had much worse done to us as a nation and so I was very grateful to have got through my tour and because we were the only pommie crew amongst a lot of Australians they didn’t discriminate against us. Maybe we were favoured all the more I don’t know but they were dear fellows. We loved the lot of them and a very sad time it was when some got lost. There’s a recording of so many names of people who were lost after an operation.
That was a bit hair raising. Anything else you’d like to ask me?
CB: Yeah in practical terms was after the pilot was the navigator the most worked member of the crew?
DD: Oh yes and I was glad I was occupied like that. I didn’t see some of the horrible things that were going on but I had to record things. I had to give him new courses if need be and my main job was wind finding and I was able to do that well and our winds that we found were picked up, were broadcast so PFF could pick them up. And we were helpers of PFF we weren’t direct PFF people but PFF support was the denomination that we were given.
CB: So what is PFF?
DD: Pathfinders.
CB: Pathfinder right.
DD: Yes. They could wear a very special little golden wing.
[pause]
There’s a little map showing Elvington and such places we were talking about. You’ve got it alright?
CB: Yes thank you yeah.
CB Now on your plane.
DD: On?
CB On your Halifax did you have H2S?
DD: Oh yes.
CB: How did you use that?
DD: Yes.
CB: How did you use it?
DD: Well there was good screen to pick up the shape of towns and if a town had particular projection on one corner we could take a bearing on that and know where we were and I’ve got one chart in my, the big book which you can look at later on and I’ll show you a map which was specially adapted for H2S work. Gee was our main help and I’ve a Gee chart there. That gave us position line and we took a fix every six minutes and that was very handy because six minutes is a tenth of an hour and we could use the decimal point to move whatever our speed was. It was my job to find out what speed we were going. If we were getting to a place too early we’d have to do a dog leg beforehand. Do you know what that means?
CB: Just a weave.
DD: It was an equilateral triangle.
CB: Oh right.
DD: And you flew sides of it instead of a third and you just dodged with a piece across the bottom and you could lose two minutes or three if you would but that if you did that you were taking a colossal risk because you were crossing the main stream coming along. We were pretty close to each other sometimes.
CB: You couldn’t see them could you?
DD: No and there were times when you felt the slipstream of other aircraft almost as if the plane had hit a brick wall. She juddered because of it. Can you imagine that?
CB: How did you do your wind finding?
DD: Joining up the position on the ground to the position in the air and taking the vector that you got between the two you could work out the speed and the direction of the wind. The angle between the air position and the ground position gave you the direction of the wind. The length of the vector a quarter of the time you’d been working in the air you could work out the speed. It was done, this computer, are you aware what it was like? We had a red and green end on the pencil. It’s a laptop.
[pause]
DD: Had you seen one of these? No?
CB: No.
DD: No? Well speeds are set like that, went around that way and you put your wind on and you take a reading off against this point here and you know what angle we were working on.
CB: So this is the navigational computer mark 3, the Dalton Computer.
DD: And this was the circular slide rule converting centigrade to fahrenheit. Nautical to statute miles and so on. And my dear old friend on Transport Command brought that home from Canada for me.
CB: Oh did he? So it wasn’t standard issue in -
DD: Yes.
CB: The RAF? Was it?
DD: Oh yes.
CB: Oh it was. Right.
DD: Have a good look at it.
CB: Yes.
DD: And in that navigation manual there it tells you how to use it.
CB: Yeah.
DD: It talks about the duties of a navigator as such in that book too. The Navigator’s Bible.
CB: So back on operations a lot of it was the Ruhr. How did you actually find the target?
DD: Oh well the Pathfinders had been ahead normally and dropped flares. In daylight of course. It was a matter of the bomb aimer having taken near the target he’d then take over when we were say within ten miles of it, whateve,r and the target, when the PFF marked it, they had different methods of dropping flares. One name, I almost get nightmares about it - Wanganui. That was the name of an island near where Pathfinder Bennett lived. I’ve seen it from the air. Charlie Derby who you’ve met had been right around the south island of New Zealand and so had I. We went out at different times and stayed with Les Evans and his family. Les Evans has been here and stayed with us too. And Wanganui was the, when they dropped three different colours of flares and the master bomber would be overhead circling, looking down at the target and he’d give the bomb aimer instructions, drop your bombs to the right of the yellow flares or whatever. Yellow flares, red flares and green flares. Those were what we used.
And just to explain that Les Evans was an Australian but he emigrated to New Zealand.
DD: He married a New Zealand girl.
CB: Oh right.
DD: And he moved to Auckland.
CB: Right ok. So when you weren’t on operational flights what were you doing?
DD: Well keeping, getting as near to the right track as possible to the next turning point and we didn’t fly directly there. I can show you some little dots on little charts I’ve got there. Show you the operations we did and I’ve drawn them on straight lines but we never flew directly to the targets. This was in order to fox the Germans and we did all sorts of zigzags and shapes like that. And we also dropped window. Do you know what that is?
CB: Yeah.
DD: There’s some bits of window in my main big heavy blue book there. One of the wireless operator’s jobs used to throw out leaflets, propaganda leaflets. One thing which is rather saddening I had a lovely collection of leaflets and on one occasions when I was talking to a group somebody pinched them. I’ve got a few leaflets left but not the main lot that I did have.
CB: A collectable item.
DD: I suppose so yes.
So when you’re flying to the target you’re in a stream.
DD: Yes.
You’ve no idea where the other aircraft are. You said there were a number of issues, things that happened and you were glad you weren’t watching them because you were navigating so what sort of thing was that?
DD: Well it was up to the gunners and the bomb aimer went down into the nose. And they were keeping their eyes open for other aircraft too. We had no lights on of course as you can imagine and the pilot of course was alert to see that he was avoiding any other aircraft and you could feel the slipstream of other aircraft sometimes. It was quite a jolt at times to feel that but I still stayed at my post as navigator recording what was said by other people if it was necessary to record it and also making sure that I could easily feed the pilot with the course to steer once we’d been to the target.
I have rather an interesting business happening. Every October I go to a place called Porthleven and that’s where Guy Gibson was and I was flying at the same time as Guy Gibson but not actually on the same operations as he was and the people of Porthleven, he was there as a boy they’ve got a plaque up on a wall near the town clock which is away on a wing beside the harbour and because I’m a flying fellow I get invited over to it each year and they come and collect me for it and it’s a wonderful occasion. Very heartrending. And people reminiscent of their experiences of Guy Gibson as a child living in the town. Porthleven is about thirty miles from here I suppose. Out towards the Lizard Peninsula.
CB: As a crew, as a crew you did everything together.
DD: Oh yes.
CB: So when you weren’t flying what were doing?
DD: Writing that book you saw. Difficult to say. Ordinary sort of things. We visited local towns and did a bit of shopping. We weren’t a drinking party.
CB: Did you have many tasks to do on the airfield though?
DD: No.
CB: When you weren’t flying?
DD: Orderly Officer sometimes.
CB: Ahum.
DD: I was orderly officer on one occasion and a boy came up to the table and collected his pay, a corporal, and he’d been a boy at school with me. This was when I was at the Operational Training Unit and I got a message over the tannoy would Corporal Mitchell report to the Ordinary Officer. Got the fright of his life. Sounded terribly officious and when he saw me he just melted completely. And he was a boy with me at St Erth. His father was a carpenter and the president of the little band in the village and he was in that band.
CB: Now as you finished your operations.
DD: Oh yes.
CB: Then what happened?
DD: I got posted to Operational Training Unit as an instructor at Moreton in the Marsh and I decided then it would be a good time to get married and we lived in a village called Blockley which wasn’t far from the airfield there. It was an interesting little village. The plumber was called Mr Ledbetter.
[laughs]
The butcher was called Balhatchet. The chemist was called [Milton?] and I might think of a few more in a minute but, and the vicar was called Jasper. I was confirmed in Blockley.
CB: And what did you actually do as an instructor? Did you -
DD: Well, I didn’t fly then.
CB: Go up in the Wellingtons much
DD: I was a ground instruction.
CB: Right.
DD: And the young fellows who were going through were just needing, they were glad of my operational experience and one student who came through was a squadron leader who’d been with me in South Africa. He was a regular I think. I can’t think of his name now.
CB: And why would he be there?
DD: Oh to take a tour of operations. He hadn’t done any operations beforehand. He, he’d been a navigational pilot instructor. I can’t think of his name at all.
CB: No. So he was a pilot instructor as a pilot.
DD: Yes.
CB: But why was he getting navigation -
DD: He wanted -
CB: Training from you?
DD: To do a tour.
CB: Right.
DD: A tour was normally thirty one.
CB: Ahum.
DD: I believe Charlie who you met he had to do an extra one and he did it with a crew he had some illness or had flu or something and couldn’t go on operation with us and he said that they were a ropey lot. They were smoking. They were falling out among themselves and they were no, no sense of duty at all. But we were a very agreeable wonderful lot together and it was an experience that I can’t define. Closer than brothers. Our lives depended absolutely on each other and we relied on each other totally. Absolute trust. Absolute frankness.
CB: So what was your feelings at the end of the tour when you were all dispersed?
DD: When I was?
CB: When everybody was dispersed to other places.
DD: Well we wanted to keep in touch. We kept in touch with each other. I went to Dennis’ wedding at one time down at Llanelli and Dennis was a good old singer as I was saying. He had been a rather broad Oxford dialect beforehand. Now he’d become quite a little Welshman.
CB: So how long were you at the OTU as an instructor and what happened at the end of it?
DD: Well I was approached by someone who said, “You are an experienced navigator. Would you like to become a full time navigator?” I took the staff end course at Shawbury which was not far from Shrewsbury and right near there a place was called Church Stretton and the hill Caradoc which is the bungalow name here was overlooking where we were flying from. And the doctor who lived in this house before me came from that home district and he named this house after that hill called Caradoc which is a [?] in Shropshire.
Church Stretton has been rather precious to me because I had an aunt who lived there. She had a Breeches bible and she gave it to me which I’ve now handed to my son. My grandson Adam who will receive all my air force stuff he was married to a girl who came from there so we went back there to his wedding. And so church Stretton has been a little bit meaningful to us.
We had very good instruction there and I flew up to Reykjavik in Iceland. Went up on astro and came back on LRN Long Range Navigation.
CB: When you said you went up on astro that was because you were using the astrodome.
DD: Yes.
CB: And the sextant
DD: It wasn’t very, it wasn’t very accurate.
CB: But using a sextant.
DD: Oh yes.
CB: How often?
DD: A proper sextant.
CB: How often did you use sextants?
DD: Very rarely.
CB: On operation?
DD: I got I knew how to use one but it wasn’t used very often because it did need really precision and Gee and H2S gave us that. We could be much more precise than just map reading and well we were so high sometimes map reading wasn’t so easy and of course sometimes there was no character in what the land was below us.
CB: So how did you feel about using Gee because -
DD: Oh Gee was ideal. Yes the Gee screen gave us the position lines which we plotted and the more the angle between two position lines got nearer to a right angle the more precise it was. If it was shallow and less then say fifteen degrees it was little bit too inaccurate so we attempted to get position lines that would do that. In the book that I’ve got there the big heavy one you can look in that. Maybe you’d like to turn over a different pages in that and talk to me about that.
CB: Yes.
DD: But we, I stayed there after Shawbury, went back to Moreton in the Marsh again and I think I was offered the chance, “Would you like to come back in to the air force. Full air force.” No I didn’t wish to. I wanted to settle down to married life and family life and I did but I did ATC cadet work and that was very rewarding indeed.
CB: So -
DD: One of my cadets is still a local farmer here. He was a farmer’s boy and he was such a good cadet he was given something that in 1950 or so was a great privilege - a free flight to Singapore. I still see him and he still remembers the joy of being able to do that sort of thing. He went back to farming again.
CB: When were you demobbed and where?
DD: In September 1945. And my son David was born in that month as well. I was demobilised, where was it now? Harrogate I think. I’m not really sure. Harrogate I think.
CB: Right. I think in a moment we’ll pause for a break but just talk to me please a little more about H2S because that was sort of a mixed blessing.
DD: Well it was very good. H2S - just a code name for it, gave you on your screen a fluorescent picture of the ground below and towns stood out more so than anything else and if a town had a particular projection you could cotton on to that in order to get a bearing from it. And you’d rotate the screen [phone ringing] in order to – can you answer it please?
Tape mark 5308 the telephone begins to ring and the interview answers it for the interviewee – not transcribed.
Tape mark 5348 TAPE THEN REPEATS UNTIL MARK 1.47.20
CB: Derry we were just talking about the fact you were on 462 and then 466 squadrons
DD: Yes.
CB: At Driffield. Could you just explain how that evolved with the two squadrons?
DD: Well I started off with 466 all together but, and then 462 had been in the western desert and were posted back to England to take special duties. They were going to have a station of their own later on so we were transferred from 466 to 462 for that interim time. When 462 was built up to be a good squadron size then we were posted back to 466 and I can’t remember the name now but 462 went to not Swanton Morley
CB: Foulsham
DD: Faversham was it? That’s it so they were posted to that. They were a complete squadron on their own and you can read about it in the book by Mark Lax and the professor of chemistry. It’s possible that Mark Lax may be coming over to see me in late autumn this year. I’ve invited him. Whether he will or not I don’t know.
CB: So what’s his involvement with the squadron?
DD: He was just interested writing its history.
CB: Right.
DD: What his Australian Air Force career was I don’t know but he was an Air Commodore.
CB: And what age is he?
DD: Oh I should think middle fifties I should think.
CB: Right.
DD: They’re both younger than we are.
CB: So that covers that extremely well thank you very much and what were, oh final point. What were special operations?
DD: They might have been gardening which of course is laying mines in shipping tracks that was called gardening - code name for it. It could have been dropping food to needy people in certain areas that were damaged, overseas that is not in England. Those were their special duties.
CB: Right.
DD: They weren’t torpedo dropping but I did have a friend who was on Swordfishes dropping but that would have been a special duty but that was left to the RNAS which later was embodied in the RAF.
CB: Thank you. I’ll stop it there and pick up later.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Derry Derrington
Subject
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World War (1939-1945)
Great Britain. Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Dr Arnold Pearce Derrington grew up in Cornwall and joined the University Air Squadron at Exeter. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 and completed training at RAF Ansty, South Africa, RAF West Freugh and RAF Moreton in the Marsh, where he trained as a navigator on Wellingtons. He was posted to RAF Driffield where he served with 462 and 466 Squadrons. Most of his operations were over the Ruhr. He discusses H2S and Gee in detail. He was later an instructor at RAF Moreton in the Marsh and was demobbed in 1945. He kept a diary of his time in Bomber Command.
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-14
Format
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00:56:20 audio recording
Language
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eng
Identifier
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ADerringtonAP150715-01
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Heather Hughes
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.
Spatial Coverage
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South Africa
Great Britain
England--Gloucestershire
England--Warwickshire
England--Yorkshire
Scotland--Wigtownshire
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Type
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Sound
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1943
1944
1945
462 Squadron
466 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
Gee
H2S
Heavy Conversion Unit
love and romance
memorial
navigator
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
pilot
RAF Ansty
RAF Driffield
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Shawbury
RAF West Freugh
sanitation
training
V-1
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/105/1009/PAmbroseBG1618.2.jpg
08822ee693f7c9b8469d8499f4ed0e5b
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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Ambrose, Basil
B G Ambrose
Basil G Ambrose
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.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-29
Description
An account of the resource
18 items. The collection consists of an oral history interview with Basil George Ambrose (1923 – 2016, 1604870 Royal Air Force), his log book, a page from his service book and 15 photographs. Basil Ambrose was a flight engineer flying Lancasters with 467 Squadron Royal Australian Air Force from RAF Waddington between September 1944 and March 1945 and with 617 Squadron from RAF Woodhall Spa.
The collection was been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Basil Ambrose and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Identifier
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Ambrose, BG
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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6 March 1942: Joined RAF as a trainee turner
Posted to RAF Sealand, qualified turner
Posted to RAF St Athan, Flight Engineer training
5 July – 8 September 1944: RAF Swinderby, 1660 HBCU, flying Stirling aircraft
8 September 1944: Promoted to Sergeant
22 – 26 September 1944: RAF Syerston, Lancaster Finishing School, flying Lancaster aircraft
29 September 1944 – 23 March 1945: RAF Waddington, 467 (RAAF) Squadron, flying Lancaster aircraft
Commissioned, promoted to Pilot Officer
November 1945 Promoted to Flying Officer
22 April 1945 – 9 January 1946: RAF Woodhall Spa, 617 Squadron, flying Lancaster aircraft
11 January 1946 – 15 April 1946: Detached with 617 Sqn to Digri, India Command
28 May – 1 July 1946: 617 Squadron RAF Binbrook
October 1946: 1604870 Flying Officer B.G. Ambrose released from Service
<p>Basil George Ambrose was born on 24<sup>th</sup> June 1923 in Derby Street, Reading, the youngest of five children. He attended Wilson Road School near Reading’s football Ground. In 1937, when he was just 14 years old, he left school and took up employment as an apprentice turner at the Pulsometer. He was paid five shillings a week, half of which he had to give back to pay for his indenture training.</p>
<p>Although engineering was a reserve occupation, on 6<sup>th</sup> March 1942, he was able to join the RAF as a trainee turner. On completion of training, he passed out as a Leading Aircraftsman and was posted to RAF Sealand. Whilst there, he applied, and was accepted, for Flight Engineer training at St Athan.</p>
<p>His first ever flight was memorable in that he took the opportunity to join an old family friend (a test pilot at St Athan) who was taking a Beaufighter up for an air test. While airbourne over the Bristol Channel he witnessed a long line of merchant ships, all nose to tail as far as the eye could see, the ships were readying for the for the D Day landings.</p>
<p>On 7the June 1944, he completed his Flight Engineer training and joined the HBCU at RAF Swinderby, before moving on to the Lancaster Finishing School at RAF Syerston. In September 1944, Sergeant Ambrose and his crew, now fully trained, joined 467 Squadron (RAAF) at RAF Waddington. </p>
<p>On just his second operational flight, tasked with destroying enemy field guns in Holland, his aircraft had to drop below the cloud base at just 4000 feet. Almost immediately, the aircraft alongside them was hit by ack-ack and went down in flames. Basil’s aircraft returned safely, but the mission ended in failure.</p>
<p>Just over a fortnight later, his first ever night operation proved even more eventful, one they were all very fortunate to survive. En-route to Brunswick, a fire in the cabin set alight the blackout curtains surrounding the pilot and navigator. Basil had to use two extinguishers to put out the fire. The events caused significant delay and at their estimated time of arrival on target, they were still approximately 40 miles away. By the time they got there all the other aircraft had gone through and were on their way home. Basil’s aircraft was now completely alone over the target and although they were able to drop their bombs successfully, the aircraft was illuminated by a whole cone of search lights from the ground, plus an enemy fighter aircraft was fast coming in from the port side. The skipper took evasive action by immediately putting the aircraft into a 5000 feet dive and Basil found himself pinned to the cabin ceiling by the ‘G’ force; conversely when the aircraft pulled out of the dive, he was forced down to the cabin floor. The evasive manoeuvre was repeated one more time before they managed to lose the searchlights and the fighter. The trip home was conducted at low level without further alarm. In all, Basil and his crew went on to record thirty operations together. </p>
<p>After 467 Squadron, Basil was commissioned as a Pilot Officer and was posted to 617 Squadron in April 1945. He was never to fly operationally again although with 617 Squadron he served for a brief period in Digri, India. Basil reached the rank of Flying Officer and was demobbed in 1948.</p>
<p>Basil returned to the Pulsometer and finally qualified as a turner. After a short period working in Birmingham, he settled in Reading with his wife Jean and two children. He continued to work in engineering, eventually moving into the engineering safety field. He retired from his final position of Chief Safety Advisor for Greater London Council in 1981.<a href="https://www.getreading.co.uk/news/local-news/war-veteran-still-swing-90-4802178"></a></p>
Chris Cann
Dublin Core
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Title
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Basil Ambrose with daughter Christine Parkes
Description
An account of the resource
Three-quarter length portrait of Basil Ambrose standing on the right with his daughter Christine Parkes taken at his home. He is wearing blazer with 467 Squadron badge, and the 1939-45 Star, the 1939-45 France and Germany Star, the Defence Medal and the 1939-45 War Medal. In the background a sofa, sideboard and pictures.
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2016-06-29
Format
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One colour photograph
Identifier
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PAmbroseBG1618
Temporal Coverage
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2016-06-29
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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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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Photograph
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/128/1278/AAbbottsC151015.2.mp3
cc3222384b5959170d324f9b72e8d83f
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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Abbotts, Cyril
C Abbotts
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. The collection consists of one oral history interview and one service and release book related to Warrant Officer Cyril Abbots (b. 1924, 1583753 Royal Air Force). Cyril Abbotts volunteered for the Royal Air Force and trained as a pilot in Canada. On his return to Great Britain he flew operations as a flight engineer with 57 Squadron from RAF East Kirkby in 1945 and later converted from Lancasters to Lincolns. The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Cyril Abbot and catalogued by IBCC staff.
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.
Date
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2015-10-15
Identifier
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Abbots, C
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: So today I’m with Cyril Abbott and we are at Malvern in Worcestershire and it is the 15th of October 2015 and we’re just going to talk about his time in the RAF. Cyril, could you start off by talking please about your, family early, your earliest times you recollect?
CA: I was born in 1924 in a place called Princes’ End, Tipton. I lived with father and mother, with my grandparents. My mother was one of a large family, unfortunately she died when I was six and for the next two years we were looked after by my Grandma until Dad remarried. My mother and father were, had a house built in a village Coseley, which was about two miles away but we never moved there because of my Mum’s death. But having remarried we moved as a family, mother, or I should say step-mother, and father and my sister Doris who was four years older than myself. And we moved to a house in Bradleys Lane Coseley. I went to junior schools in Princes End, Tipton and at the age of eleven I passed scholarship and entered Dudley Grammar School where I was educated for the next five, six years. I left school in ‘39 and went out to work with W and T Avery at Smethwick as a engineering apprentice. I didn’t like work so at the first opportunity I volunteered for the Air Force, for aircrew, and having had all the two days of tests at Digbeth, Birmingham, I was accepted as a recruit and sent home and told to wait until I heard from the RAF. I was a bit of a nuisance to my father and mother because every day I used to come home from work and say ‘Has the letter arrived?’ and nothing had appeared and I really caused a bit of grief. But eventually the letter arrived ordering me to report to ACRC at Lords’ Cricket Ground, London. I travelled to, down to London with a fellow from the village who was also joining up, I think it was the first time we’d ever been away from home by ourselves in the whole of our lives but we arrived at Lords’ and the cricket ground was full of recruits, you couldn’t see a blade of grass basically. But they formed us up in groups of about forty and marched us off to Seymour Hall baths where they told us to strip off and swim a hundred yards. This rather shook us I believe ‘cause having to swim without a costume, but we did this and those who could swim the hundred yards were pushed to one side of the bath, and those who couldn’t swim went to the other side. We found out later that the non-swimmers were sent off to RAF Cosford to learn to swim, if I’d have known that I would have done the same [laughs] because Cosford was within about twenty miles of home. But still, we, we were billeted in flats around St John’s Wood, waiting for postings to ITW. Eventually I was posted to 8 Wing ITW at Newquay, Cornwall where I spent the next three to four months school work. In actual fact I can remember the flight commander was a Flight Lieutenant Paine, he was an ex solicitor and the Squadron Leader I think was a man named Fabian, who was a English international footballer amateur. But, and the two PTIs was Corporal White and Corporal Beasley, one was a Londoner, a real Cockney, and they used to take us out on cross country runs. Because one day I, I decided I didn’t want to go, so we had to get changed and set off and I drifted to the back and at the nearest public toilets I disappeared into it, little realising that Corporal White was running right at the back and he caught me [laughs] and I was taken in front of the squadron commander and given three days CB, confined to barracks, but at the end of the, I think it was about twelve weeks of school work were finished and we were waiting then to, for postings and I eventually was posted to RAF Sywell for familiarisation, twelve hours in a Tiger Moth. Again, I remember the instructor was a Flight Lieutenant Bush, I think he could have owned the flying school which had been taken over by the RAF, but we did, we did about ten to twelve hours flying around in Tiger Moths to see if whether we were compatible with flying and then at the end we were posted to Heaton Park, Manchester which was a receiving centre for people waiting basically to go overseas. I mean there were literally hundreds of UT aircrew there and we used to have to attend in the morning when they would read out lists of people with the postings and you had to answer in a certain manner to signify that you’d understood the shouted instructions. Initially I’d received a posting to South Africa, Rhodesia for flying training and we went up to Blackpool to receive the inoculations required, and having received these inoculations we were sent back to Heaton Park where we found out that we weren’t going to South Africa after all. I was sent to Canada and we, we sailed from the River Clyde, Greenock, or something similar on the Queen Elizabeth, the original Queen Elizabeth one, and I think it was about three days and four nights journey which I didn’t like, I don’t, I’m not a, I don’t like sailing, I don’t like water and it was a welcome sight to go through the harbour bar at New York to get inside the docks because as we went through the bar and they closed it the ship lit up because we’d sailed in darkness over, through the Atlantic, and as soon as we entered the, the New York dock area all the lights came on the ship. I mean New York was lit up as you see it on the films, I mean we hadn’t seen lights for three years. Eventually we, we docked in Pier 91 next to the burnt-out Normandy which had been, it had gone on fire and had capsized in the dock next to us, and it was still there. But eventually we were taken off the boat and we went under the river to New Jersey to get a train to go up to Monkton, RAF Monkton in Canada. We had to pass through the customs between America and Canada, and we stopped on the American side and one or two of us shot off because we were near to a small town and got a glass of beer, and we’d got to drink this very quickly and we didn’t realise the American beer was practically frosty, it was very, very cold. But we, eventually we arrived in Monkton, and we were there for maybe a week or so before we were sent west to the flying schools and I finished up at 32 EFTS, RAF Bowden in Alberta, I mean we could see the Rockies on the horizon, as we drove from the station, Innisfail was the station, why I know that is because I was reading a book by an ex Worcestershire cricketer, Cheston, who had trained there as well, and I picked up the name Innisfail I’d forgotten, but as we drove up from the station to the aerodrome all the training planes were lined up with their tails towards us and we all thought God, we’re all going to be fighter pilots, they looked like fighter ‘planes ‘cause they were all Fairchild Cornell which was a low wing plane. We were there for a period of time, I think we got in about seventy or eighty hours, and I soloed quite quickly after about five hours and during the training I realised that I would never become a fighter pilot because I didn’t like aerobatics. I always remember being sent up to practice spins and to do this you climbed to about three or four thousand feet and then spun down, and pulled out and climbed back and did it again. But every time I went to do it I’d get practically to the point of stall, at which point I was supposed to kick in rudder to go right or left and my nerve went so I pushed the nose down and climbed another thousand feet until I finished up at about ten thousand feet before I forced myself to spin. But having done it the first time and realised I could get out of trouble it wasn’t so bad, but aerobatics I just did not like. So I made my mind up then that I would never become a fighter pilot, I’d go for twins or multi engines. Having completed the elementary training we were posted to service flying training and I was posted to a place called RAF Estevan in Saskatchewan it was right on the American border just a few miles on the Canadian side but it was more or less in the middle of the dustpan, everything was covered with dust, there was a wind at all times and it was just blowing this dust and coating everything. The dormitories had got double-glazing with a mesh screen to try to keep this dust out, but they were flying Ansons there for training and we had to have a check to see whether our leg length was sufficient to be able to apply full rudder in the event of an engine failure. Well I didn’t like the station I thought I’m going to do my best to get away from here, so when I came to do my test I put, extending my to get full rudder and I gradually slipped down in the pilots’ seat so that I couldn’t see over the top of the board, dashboard, so that I failed the test. I didn’t realise that I could have been washed out of pilot training but I was posted away from Estevan to RAF Moose Jaw at Saskatchewan to fly Tiger Moths. The Anson hadn’t got a moveable rudder pedal whereas the Oxford had, you could wind them in to suit your leg length. The Oxford had got a bad reputation for killing people. It was a very difficult aeroplane to fly and they said that if you could fly an Oxford you could fly anything. And I took to the Oxford, I soloed after about five hours again and from then on it was just train, train, train until we eventually finished, I think we did something like about a hundred and fifty hours flying, and it came, the wings, the graduation ceremony, and I believe we were presented with our wings by Air Vice-Marshal Billy Bishop who was a Canadian fighter pilot in the First World War. I believe that it was him but we had already sewn wings on our uniforms and stripes on our arms if we were becoming sergeants, but we had to parade without, without wings or stripes on. But then having graduated, we had, we were given a posting back to Halifax, to get the boat back to England. We were allowed, I think, forty eight hours to have a leave in either Quebec or Montreal on the way back. I can’t remember now whether we were in Quebec or Montreal, but we eventually got back to Halifax and boarded the French liner, Louis Pasteur, to come back and it was a terrible journey. Since we were now supposed sergeants capable of looking after ourselves on the ship some of us were posted as assistant gunners on the anti-aircraft guns which were put about ten feet above the boat deck on a little platform with a rail around it to stop you falling off. And we had an Oerlikon cannon to look after. I mean we’d never seen a firearm but we’d got a naval man as the gunner and we were just there to help, But we always said the Louis Pasteur was a flat bottomed boat because it rolled and rocked like nobody’s business and there were literally thousands on the boat, the conditions were terrible, but every morning at about twelve o’clock if I remember rightly, we had a rendezvous with a Coastal Command aircraft so that when it came time we had to close up the guns in case it wasn’t an RAF plane, but bang on the dot it would appear out of the clouds, circle round for about half an hour, and then off it would go and we’d plough on. I mean we were not escorted it was just a, a quick dash across and I must admit I saw more U boats in the sea, that on that journey, than the German’s had got, every wave was a U boat. [laugh] But eventually we arrived at Liverpool, and we disembarked and were shipped to RAF Harrogate, the Majestic Hotel we were billeted in, and there were literally thousands of pilots, bomb aimers and navigators there. We just, we just didn’t know what was going to happen to us. I mean they came round I think twice, once asking for volunteers to change to glider pilot training. I mean those that did, that accepted it, I think most probably went in at Arnhem. But I being frightened, I decided I would stay and get an aeroplane with engines. So I was there for quite some time and eventually I was sent, we had um, because we’d been in Canada, living the life of luxury, they sent us up to Whitley Bay, Newcastle under the Army to have a month toughening up, and everything was done at the double. I was given a rifle and a band to cover my sergeant’s stripes, we used to have to wear these because the instructors were corporals and privates of the commandos and they gave us a real tough time. Route marches of about twelve miles, my feet were sore, but that was completed and we came back to Harrogate. They just didn’t know what to do with us. So we, eventually I ended up at RAF Bridgenorth, under canvas, and we always said we were draining an air commodore’s farm because we were digging ditches all the time and there were, there were Australians, and other Commonwealth aircrew with us and they used to, to show how tough they were, they’d sleep out in the open without a tent, until they got wet once or twice, [laugh] but we were there most probably two or three weeks and back again to Harrogate. And then I went on airfield control at RAF Gamston, just outside Worksop, acting as traffic control watching the Wellingtons, it was an OTU unit, and we were there [indistinct] at night on flare path duty and the control hut flashing greens or reds as required with an Aldis lamp. While I was there, I became friends with one or two of the screened pilots so I managed to get a few hours in on a Wellington. At the end of the, at the end of the time Gamston was closed down and the ‘planes moved to other OTUs so I got a few hours flying with the screen people taking these aeroplanes to the stations. The funniest part was we landed at one, we had a plane which went round all the aerodromes picking up the screened crews to take them back to Gamston, a Wellington, and it was very funny we landed one control, or pulled up at the control tower and shut the engines down waiting for the people to be picked up and out trooped from the Wellington, about eighteen people and the control officer’s jaw dropped when he saw all these people coming out [laugh] but it was quite, we stood, down the Wellington hanging onto the geo, geodetic structure, it was quite funny. From Gamston, I eventually was posted, oh yeah, I think I went back to Harrogate again and there I was volunteered to do an engineers’ course at St Athan down in South Wales. There was no chance of becoming an official pilot because they hadn’t got enough aeroplanes and there was too many people. So we were volunteered to do an engineers’ course at St Athan on the Lancaster systems, which we did about six weeks just to get the fundamentals of the system. And having completed that I was posted to sixteen 54 HCU at RAF Wigsley in Lincolnshire, where I was going to get crewed up with an ex OTU pilot and crew who wanted an Engineer, so we walked in, as engineers we walked into an office where there were pilots sitting around and the first person I saw was a man who’d been on the course immediately in front of me at Moose Jaw, a flying officer, he was a Pilot Officer Coates and we made contact and starting talking, he said ‘Well I’m looking for an engineer’ I said, ‘Well I’m an engineer but I’m also a pilot’ he said ‘Do you want to come and fly with me?’ ‘Yep’, and that’s how I joined Pilot Officer Coates’ crew because we knew each other. We completed a number of hours on the, at the heavy con unit, the conversion unit, and we were posted as a crew to 57 Squadron at East Kirkby.
CB: So when was this exactly?
CA: Well I think it was in either February ’45, because I wasn’t on the squadron long enough to be able to be awarded the Bomber Command Clasp which I thought was a bit em, bit naughty of them, I can come to that later. Well we were introduced to Wing Commander Tomes who was the Squadron Commander and I think Squadron Leader Astall although I’m not sure about that name. And we were more or less sent off to go and do some practice flying which we thought we’d done enough with the heavy con unit but it wasn’t good enough for the squadron. So we did quite a few cross countries and bombing practice at Wainfleet. And one day I was, I think most likely the last one in the engineer’s office and I was about to go for tea, and as I was walking out the engineer officer shouts, ‘Cyril, what are you doing tonight?’ I said ‘I’m going to have a beer why?’ he said ‘No you’re not, you’re flying.’ He said so and so has called in, his engineer’s gone sick, so they want an engineer so you’re flying as a spare bod on Flying Officer Jack Curran, who was an Australian pilot, he was short of an engineer so I was going with him and that night we went to Luetzkendorf which was the first operation, our rear gunner had also been made a spare bod and he went as a rear gunner with another crew. But Jack, Jack Curran had been shot down about two months previously and had got back so he was, he was a bit nervous as a pilot, he gave me a bit of jitters, because once we crossed, if I remember rightly, once we crossed over the Channel and got to the other side he proceeded to weave all the time and it made a heck of a mess of my petrol consumptions. But the thing that I always remember, was having got to the target, was the different colours or shades of red that there are, or were, I’d never seen so many different shades. Of course I mean I didn’t realise what was happening I mean I was, I’d got bags and bags of window which I was pushing [unclear] down the chute like nobody’s business thinking they were saving me but they weren’t they were saving the people coming behind me. But I pushed packets of it down, I even jammed the ‘chute once I had to get a big file from out of my kit, my tool kit and try and clear it and the file went down the ‘chute as well so that if that hit anybody downstairs they would have had a headache. But eventually we got, we came back and as we neared East Kirkby, Jack had called in to ask for landing instructions and we were told to vamoose, scatter, it was either an intruder in the circuit or something but we scattered like nobody’s business heading towards Wales, and on the way, we were told to make for RAF Bruntingthorpe which we eventually reached and Jack landed the Lanc’ alright, we parked it and were taken into a room for a bit of a debrief, given something to eat and then we were taken to beds in the dorms, in the Nissen huts. And I was, I was lying there on the bed, I couldn’t get to sleep, I suppose it was the adrenalin still coursing through the veins, but I was smoking away like nobody’s business, and I woke up the man in the bed next to where I was and he sat up and he saw I was a flight sergeant, he saw my tunic on the bed, so he said ‘What’s happened?’ so I just explained that we’d been diverted there and we were talking, he was a corporal engine fitter and he looked at me and I looked at him quite intently as if we knew each other. So eventually one or other said ‘Were you ever in Canada?’ and I said ‘Yes, you were at Moose Jaw, were you at Moose Jaw?’ ‘Yes’, he’d been an Engine Fitter out on the flights at Moose Jaw and had been posted back to, from Canada and he was working, was working at Bruntingthorpe on the Wellingtons. Well eventually we were given the all clear to go back to East Kirkby and, although it was forbidden, the squadron pilots always shot up the aerodrome having taken off. So we, we took off and joined a queue of people waiting to go down the runway and ignored it which we did. The station commander went mad and by the time we got back to East Kirkby the squadron commander was waiting for us and he proceeded to tear us off a strip. ‘They were OTU pilots being taught to fly safely and you people go down and show them what not to do’ [laugh] still it was Lancaster below zero feet going at about two hundred miles an hour is something, it’s really exhilarating, but still. Um, oh yeah, a few days later we went to Pilsen as a crew, Fred Coates the pilot and the rest of the crew, I mean he’d already done two spare bods as a pilot getting the idea of what happened, and Johnny the rear gunner had been, but the, I’d been but the others hadn’t so it was all new to them, but us old hands [laugh]. Well we went to Pilsen and our navigator was a graduate and he was a very meticulous navigator, very good, but very meticulous. I mean when we were flying you’d hear his voice come over the, the intercom, ‘What speed are we supposed to be flying at?’ ‘About two hundred and twenty, why?’ he said ‘I want two hundred and twenty five, nothing else, two twenty five is the airspeed.’ So I spent minutes trying to get the, the right speed. And he’d come through, ‘What course are you steering?’ ‘Why?’ He said ‘You’re two degrees out’, oh he was a, he was a menace [laugh]. But on the way, it’s only in latter life that I’ve realised this, but it was his first trip, it was most of us second or third and he was navigating and he said ‘We’re too early, we’re going to get to target too early’ so Fred said ‘Well what do you want to do?’ So Marsh says ‘We’ll do a dog leg, turn, and he gave us a course to turn to the left, to port, and flew out for a few minutes and then to come back into the, into the stream and go, head toward the target again, we’d lose the required minutes. And like fools Fred and I did this, but during the flight we were getting, we were getting, bumped about a bit and we couldn’t understand this because there was no flak to blow us around but we’d get jumped up and down, it would last a minute and then die down and then about a few minutes later again. We couldn’t fathom out what it was, but it’s only in latter life that I’ve realised what it was, because we got to Pilsen and back okay, and then we were put on a daylight to go to Flensburg, and I mean the RAF didn’t flew, didn’t fly in formation, they just got into a gaggle and went. So we joined the bunch and the idea was to get into the middle of the stream, so you kept lifting yourself up a bit, move over and then gradually drop down and force the man underneath to move out of the way so that you were doing this all the time. And occasionally we’d get this bump and it’s only as I say in latter life that I realised that at night when we got these bumps it was the slipstream of planes in front of us, that I never, I never saw a plane during flying at night but we must have been very, very close because it showed up during this daylight. But we went to Flensburg and it was aborted we couldn’t bomb, why we were never told but I did see a Messerschmitt 262 I think was the jet fighter, something came, went through the formation like nobody’s business but we’d got Mustang fighter escort they were most probably about ten thousand feet above us, but we did see them come down and go through the formation, on the way down to the deck whether they’d, they went down to er, hit some of these two five twos taking off, two six twos, but that was quite a sight to see these little, little bits going through the, through the formation. But my war ended with that aborted raid on Flensburg. We were thinking we should be going to Berchtesgaden but all the, the higher ups of the squadron did that, they didn’t let the lower lads do it. Then after the , after the war I flew on Lincolns, 57 Squadron were given three Lincolns initially to carry out service trials on them and by this time our pilot, Fred Coates, had departed. He’d been a police constable before the war and since they wanted the police in peace time to build up again they got Class B releases, or they were allowed to take Class B release. So Fred had just married his Canadian girlfriend who’d come over here to marry and 57 Squadron was one of the squadrons that were going out on Tiger Force to the Far East but Fred said no he wasn’t going to go, he’d get his Class B which he did. And we had another pilot, a Flight Lieutenant Strickland, who was posted into us to take over the crew. He came up I think from Mildenhall, I can’t remember which group they were, but he’d been an instructor in Canada for a number of years and he was very meticulous with his flying, everything was perfect and he kept the rest of us on top line. We flew the Lincolns, we’d got three and I think Mildenhall station they’d got three, we had lots of trouble with engine failures where as Mildenhall had airframe failures, rivets popping and things like that so it was quite, it was quite stressful flying these Lincolns. I’ve got a write up.
CB: We’ll stop there just for a moment.
CA: Yeah, I’ve got a write up actually,
CB: So we’ve stopped for a comfort break, and you were talking about Lincolns, you took on Lincolns?
CA: Oh yeah.
CB: You took on Lincolns. What happened then?
CA: Well, with the Lincolns, we as I say we’d got three and I since found that there was a Flight Lieutenant, Flight Lieutenant Jones who was one of the leading lights in the flight, I can’t recall him really, but erm.
CB: This is still war time before the Japanese surrender isn’t it?
CA: It was, yeah, but it was after the European war –
CB: Yep.
CA: And it was in the time between May and August -
CB: Right.
’45. The Lincoln was, was being produced to go overseas with the Tiger Force because the Lanc’ hadn’t got the range that was required and the Lincoln was supposed to have. But it wasn’t, in our eyes, it wasn’t as good as the Lancaster, I mean we were in love with the Lanc’ whereas the Lincoln was, was something different. I fully remember on one flight, I was sitting down on the right hand side and Pete was flying and I looked out of the starboard side and looked at the wing and I could see the skin rippling and I nearly collapsed with fear because I could see the wing moving up and down, and when it lifted up, so it rippled the skin at the join between the mid-section and the wing section, and for the rest of the flight my eyes never left that section [laugh] that part, but I found out when we got down that the wings moved five feet between the bottom and top and this was due to the weight of them and the, the fuel. And it was only after then that I noticed that when the Lincoln sat on the ground the wings appeared to be drooped and they moved up during the take off period to obtain the flying attitude. But it was a frightening sight I will admit.
CB: So it was a bigger aeroplane?
CA: It was a bigger aeroplane, it was heavier, I don’t know about the bomb load. I don’t think it was any different.
CB: But they were bigger engines and could fly higher and the span was a hundred and twenty four feet?
CA: A hundred and twenty.
CB: Hundred and twenty.
CA: About a hundred and twenty feet, yeah.
CB: Now when did you get promoted to warrant officer?
CA: Two years after I graduated. You were made, when you got your wings, you were a sergeant for about nine to twelve months and then flight sergeant for a year and then you became warrant officer. I mean a lot of the ground crew, senior NCO’s didn’t like this, I mean there were us youngsters who were up to sergeants after about eighteen months and they’d been in the Air Force for years and had just made corporal. So there was a bit of resentment between the ground crew NCO’s and the aircrews. But of course I mean we were only as aircrew given stripes, or officers in case you were ever shot down and taken prisoner, you got better treatment as a NCO, but that was the only reason.
CB: OK, so fast forward again to the Lincolns, your time in the RAF finished when, 1946?
CA: 1946 November.
CB: Right, so what did you do?
CA: What did I do afterwards?
CB: After the war, after the war finished?
CA: Well, I came back and as I said previously, I’d been an apprentice with Avery’s, and my apprenticeship had been cancelled when I joined up. So I went back to Avery’s and recommenced my apprenticeship but due to my service, instead of having to do a further length of time, because I was apprenticed for about five years and I had only done about twelve months, they reduced the remaining time by about twelve months and they concluded my apprenticeship about twelve months, having served and I’d done a four year apprenticeship instead of five, and that would have been somewhere around about 1947, ‘48 when I, they transferred me into the drawing office at Avery’s and I became a draughtsman.
CB: How long did you work as a draughtsman?
CA: Well I left Avery’s in 1951 and I was employed by the Cannon Iron Foundries for a year and then I, I went to Thompson Brothers in Bilsden for about three years and finally finished at ICI Marston Excelsior in ’56.
CB: What did you do there?
CA: I was a design draughtsman there and I, I did design, design work on, I always remember my first job was designing a heat exchanger for the Folland Gnat , just a small one, I can’t remember what it was for, I believe it was for the pilot cooling system to keep him cool. But this was on heat exchange. I finished up actually on heavy fabrication work, in aluminium work, and I became a section leader. I did various jobs, I engineered a liquid ethylene storage plant for ICI organic, organic section I think, or one of the sections at Billingham where we stored surplus liquid ethylene. And we stored it in a big container like a gasometer and I, I was given a piece of ground on the side of the river and put a storage plant there. I must admit that my initial estimate of costs was way down, [laugh] I made a hell of a bloomer, I think I estimated about a hundred and fifty thousand and it finished up at about, eight hundred thousand [laugh] we had quite a, an argument, not argument, discussion why [laugh]. But then I went onto production, onto the production side of the factory, as chief planning officer on fabrications which I, I did until the work started to peter out so I went onto development work on cold rolling of noble alloys for jet engines.
CB: This is all for ICI?
CA: All, yes, it’s all under ICI’s name, we bought in a cold rolling machine from Holland and we used to roll to very, very close tolerances. Rolls Royce were trying to reduce their costs by getting in components where they didn’t really have to do any work on, and I mean the jet engines required diameters to a thou’ in tolerance and we were supposed to try to do this by rolling them, which we did eventually, I mean we bought this machine. I went out to G, GE the American counterpart of Rolls Royce. GEC?
CB: GE yeah, General Electric.
CA: And I spent a fortnight out there getting some idea of how they tackled it but I mean they’d got a different idea I mean where here we had to justify spending sixpence, there the engineer, development engineer said ‘I want a machine it costs two hundred thousand pounds’ and he was given the money and they got the machine. Whereas we were trying to do it on one machine they’d got a battery of them, about ten. I mean this is the reason why they are the world beaters. Money is no object.
CB: When did you finally retire?
CA: I retired in March ’86 having completed thirty years.
CB: OK, thank you, I’ll stop there. So we’re restarting, we’re restarting just on a flashback. So you’re back from Canada as a qualified pilot.
CA: Yeah. I should have said then that I went up to, we were asked where we wanted postings to go to for flying. I never realised that there was a flying school at Wolverhampton otherwise I would have asked, instead I got posted up to RAF Carlisle on Tiger Moths where we did about a month flying a Tiger Moth around getting used to flying in English conditions. We used to take a navigator or a bomb aimer as a passenger for them to practice map reading while we flew it. We did a lot of flying around the Lake District, we were flying over Maryport and Workington I think is the other port, on the coast there. And we, we used to go down and count the number of ships that were in the harbour and things like this, and then having to fly back over the Lake District which was very, which could be quite treacherous with the down draughts and the winds whistling over the hills. It used to bounce the Tiger Moths around like nobody’s business. But we did that for about a month and then we were posted again hoping we were going to get posted to OTUs but it never, never, I was, you asked how I felt. I felt disappointed having made my mind up I was never going to fly single engine fighters I put down for twin engines or multis. The onus was on providing crews for four engine planes. So to get there I’d got to go to an OTU and that was never going to happen. So when I was posted to the engineers’ course I accepted it and it, I was still flying, that was what I wanted to do, I wanted to fly. So that, I made the best of a bad job. I thoroughly enjoyed it I mean, I enjoyed the, being on a squadron, being a crew, being a member of a crew and we’d got a good crew. I mean our mid upper gunner was the only one who could shoot through the aerial leading to the rudders which he did time and time again, it used to cost him half a crown a time when he pierced them, I mean this was when we were doing air to air gunnery and he was firing at a drogue and he’d traverse and ‘ping’ and Andy the wireless operator would say ‘You’ve done it again’ [laugh], but um.
CB: So, how long did you keep your pilots brevet?
CA: All the time.
CB: Oh did you, throughout the war?
CA: Yes, yes we were never forced to change them. That is why I always say I was a PFE rather than a flight engineer, I was a pilot flight engineer. And the pilots that I flew with gave me the opportunity to fly, to pilot. I mean Peter who was the ex-instructor, he was always within reach of pulling me out of the seat if necessary, but Fred he used to go and wander down to the Elsan at the back and leave me in charge. I mean I was playing about one day above the clouds and I was following the, the shape of the clouds up and down and Johnny who was sitting with his turret doors open, fore and aft, and it, it started to get a bit robust, the movement of the up and down movement and the Elsan lid which was tied down with a bungee rubber broke and the contents of the Elsan came up, [laugh], oh dear, and it covered him [laugh], he didn’t speak to me for days [laugh] because he knew it was me and not Fred [laugh].
CB: How did the crew get on together socially?
CA: Very good, very good we never went anywhere unless we went as a six. I mean, we bought our beer in the mess, we bought it by the bucket and helped ourselves with dipping the glass into the bucket rather than separate. No, it was a very good crew, very good.
CB: So in those days you could buy beer in a bucket could you?
CA: In the mess.
CB: In the mess, right.
CA: In the mess yeah.
CB: OK, and as a crew you worked well together?
CA: Oh yes, yes.
CB: And er.
CA: Well Marsh, he was working, he wanted to get onto pathfinders.
CB: Marsh being?
CA: The navigator. He was a very good navigator but, Mac, the bomb aimer, he was more of, an easy come, easy go.
CB: So.
CA: That second or the first raid as a crew to Pilsen we went through the target twice because Mac he wouldn’t drop because he couldn’t line it up properly so he said ‘I’ll send you round again’ and the rest of us shouted ‘What the hell, will you pull them’ and Fred said ‘If you don’t I shall jettison’. So he says ‘Go round again!’ So we had to make our way round and come back and get it back in the stream and fly it through but on the second time he let them go.
CB: This is a daylight raid?
CA: No, this was a night raid —
CB: This was in the night. So the reason I said that is because that sounds a particularly dangerous thing to do when you can’t see anything —
CA: It was a, well this is it, I mean what with trying to get in, slip into the stream, I mean you, I never saw another Lancaster in the stream. And I mean we went through the target we were only given somewhere maybe half an hour from the start to the end of the squadron’s time over the target so I mean God knows how close we were, but we were very close when we were getting buffeted by slipstream. But I mean a, when Marsh sent us on a dog leg when we turned out of the stream and then had to come back and join it again. We didn’t realise the stupidity of it, but Marsh being Marsh he’d got to have it down on his chart.
CB: Why would it have mattered if you had arrived early?
CA: Well a, the target may not have been indicated, or they were down below marking it, so you, I mean er.
CB: You could have bombed your own people —
CA: You could have bombed them, yeah —
CB: Right OK.
CA: And since the Lancaster was always the top flight, I mean it was Lancasters, Halifaxes, Stirlings.
CB: Right, there’s a ranking.
CA: So.
CB: And how did the crew feel, and you feel, about what you were doing as bombers?
CA: I don’t think we thought about it.
CB: OK.
CA: I don’t think we thought about it. I mean the first one — we had been bombed at home in 1940. We’d had a landmine dropped within about a hundred yards of home and our house is most probably still standing with the back, back wall bulged where the roof lifted and the walls started to move and it dropped down and it held. So I wanted to do something back but having that I don’t think you, we never talked about whether there was a right or wrong, it was a job.
CB: My wife was born in a bombing raid in Birmingham.
CA: Eh hum.
CB: What about LMF, did you know anything about that, or experience.
CA: We knew of it.
CB: Yes.
CA: We knew of it but we never met anyone who was accused of it or anything like that. But we didn’t like the idea because it wasn’t nice when you were over there. A funny tale, we had a man on the squadron, he was a dark, a Negro, and he was as black as the ace of spades, colour. And he’d got perfectly white teeth and he was known as twenty three fifty nine, that was his nickname, because twenty three fifty nine is the darkest part of the night, or supposed to be, a minute before midnight. And he was a rear gunner and when he was in his turret at night and you walked past it all you could see was these white teeth. It was really funny, but he was a good lad.
CB: What about other aspects of the work? When you boarded the aircraft what did you have with you to eat or drink?
CA: I think the only thing I can remember is boiled sweets. I mean I can’t ever remember fruit, or anything like that. I don’t think we ever took, I never took a drink at all. I mean I can tell the tale where, I mean, we used, sometimes to remember to take a bottle to use and one day Fred had forgotten his, the pilot, and he was in, he was in dire trouble. So he said ‘I’ve got to have something, I’ve got to have something’ so I was scooting round trying to, what the hell can he have? And I went and took the cover off the G George instrument, gyro, which was a pan of about eight or nine inch diameter and about three or four inches deep held on with four screws. So I took this off and gave him this to use, which he used. So he used it and said ‘Here get rid of it’ so I said ‘How?’ he says ‘Throw it out the window’ so I pulled my sliding window back —
CB: [laugh] —
CA: and threw it out, threw the contents. Of course, I mean as soon as the contents went out the slipstream took it all the way down the canopy, the Perspex, and we, I couldn’t see out of that side all the way back, and I also lost the G cover [laugh] which cost me five shillings and a telling off from the engineer officer. How, why was the G cover uncovered. ‘I can’t remember’ [laugh].
CB: Now what about the ground crew because you relied on them so, what was the relationship with them?
CA: Very good, other than the first time I went, we joined the squadron, and I don’t know whether I ought to say this, can I, can I not get up?
CB: Um.
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Interview with Cyril Abbotts
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Cyril Abbotts volunteered for the Royal Air Force while he was an engineering apprentice with W T Avery at Smethwick. After his reception at Lord’s Cricket Ground and initial training,he trained as a pilot at RAF Bowden and Moose Jaw in Canada. On his return to Great Britain, he spent some time in holding units, before being posted to retrain as a flight engineer at RAF St Athan. He flew operations with 57 Squadron from RAF East Kirkby in 1945 and later converted from Lancasters to Lincolns. Post-war he completed his apprenticeship, becoming a draughtsman for various companies including ICI. He retired after 30 years of service with them.
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Chris Brockbank
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2015-10-15
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Dawn Studd
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01:18:53 audio recording
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eng
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AAbbottsC151015
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Canada
Saskatchewan--Moose Jaw
England--London
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Great Britain
Germany
Wales
Saskatchewan
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Sound
1654 HCU
57 Squadron
African heritage
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
bomb aimer
bombing
Cornell
crewing up
demobilisation
fear
flight engineer
Flying Training School
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Lincoln
Me 262
military discipline
military living conditions
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
P-51
physical training
pilot
promotion
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Carlisle
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Gamston
RAF Heaton Park
RAF St Athan
RAF Sywell
RAF Wigsley
RCAF Bowden
RCAF Estevan
recruitment
sanitation
Tiger force
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Window
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/18/1563/ADarbyC150630.2.mp3
da9e5105946763a779ff81714d32e118
Dublin Core
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Title
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Darby, Charlie
C Darby
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-30
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.
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. The collection consists of an oral history interview with Charlie Darby (b. 1924, 1897788 Royal Air Force), his logbook, a poem and two photographs. Sergeant Charlie Darby flew 30 night time and daylight operations in Halifaxes with 466 and 462 Squadrons from RAF Driffield as a rear gunner.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Charlie Darby and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Identifier
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Darby, C
Transcribed audio recording
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CB: Right, so my name is Chris Brockbank and I'm here to interview a gentleman on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre and the interviewee is Mr Charlie Darby and we've got here his wife Barbara as well and ably assisted and interrogated by Tony Lee their son-in-law.
CB: Okay Charlie it's running now, so here's Charlie Darby and please tell us about your life, Charlie.
CD: I'm Charlie Darby, I was born on the 26th May 1924 from a family of six boys, three girls and went through normal schooling. Went to work at fourteen [pause] er and when I became seventeen I was directed labour a government scheme that you had to fall in line with. If you didn't, there were two other choices: down the mines or prison. So, I took the job on which was at Mirdam [?] Ways, High Wycombe dismantling Churchill tanks. And I stuck at that for eighteen months and I just did not want to know any more about it [laughter]. So there was only one thing to do; that was to volunteer for the forces. And that's how I became to join the Royal Air Force. Now, having joined the Royal Air Force, or rather prior to that, I had to have an attestation which I took at Houston House, Houston Square in London. Got the result, I was passed to go into aircrew. Now, I waited my call up which came the 20th of September '43. I had to report to St John's Wood, London, for two weeks initiation. The same day of joining, I had to go down to Lord's Cricket Ground to get kitted out. And from there, I went to Bridlington ITW (Initial Training Wing) for eight weeks training. From there, number 3 EADS Bridgnorth, another eight weeks, from there, that was EDA Elementary Air Gunnery School. From there, to a place in Scotland, I don't know where they got it from but I was there. [background laughter] A place called Castle Kennedy. Never did see the castle. Eight weeks there was the AGS which I successfully passed and I was made aircrew and presented with brevet and I then awaited call to my next station which was Moreton in Marsh Gloucester, 21OTU and this is where we crewed up. There was one day we were assembled on this bit of green, [cough] and three officers came and approached us NCOs and my pilot, navigator and wireless operator were the three officers. And Les, my pilot, approached, we accepted and we found out afterwards: 'How did you do this, Les?' 'I went to each section and looked at your, your pass marks' and that's how he took judgement on us. Because we had our names on our breast and he knew where to go, he knew the names he was looking for. So therefore that is the way we crewed up. But, you never had an engineer, that came at a late a stage er at Heavy Conversion Unit. Which is what we did, er, [pause] yes just after that. But prior to that even, still in Yorkshire, we went to a place called Acaster Malbis and did a battle course. That was living rough, think that was the only, the occasion arise, you got adapted to it. Anyway, we went on to Riccall, near Selby, to 1658 Heavy Conversion Unit and did our first flying on four engines. And from there, we went to my operational station of Driffield where 466 was. Did er, training from there prior to operations [pause] yeah but-
CB: Okay we'll stop there for a mo. What I'd like to ask you to do please, Charlie, is to explain so we can understand what's coming next, how you were trained, so what happened at your initial training and in your gunnery training? So, how did that go?
CD: Dis-dis-discipline and er squad marching [pause] that it?
CB: Okay.
CD: Only two weeks of it.
CB: Right, then gunnery? So you had initial gunnery and then main gunnery.
CD: Initial training wing a little bit more extra started to pick up Morse code.
CB: Right
CD: That's something we had to know as a gunner to help the navigator. We had to know Morse at a simple rate of eight words a minute which was what occults and pundits flash at the rate of. A pundit flashed two red letters which were the letters of the aerodrome but an occult flashed one letter in white, that gave a navigator a bearing. So if you saw an occult flash, you called up your navigator and told him 'occult flashing so and so'. And then I guess I've got the bearing, we're not, we're about a mile off track. That sort of talk. Right then that it?
CB: And you're gunnery, so how did the gunnery training go?
CD: Very good.
CB: So what did they do initially?
CD: They started off with -
CB: Shotguns, was it?
CD: Yeah, yeah, started off with a point two two, a little pallet of a shot. At short range, yes, did quite a lot of clay pidge shooting, er, learning deflection. And from there, we didn't, we didn't go on to the main guns until we got to um [pause] er OTU. We were there on Wellingtons, oh may I add that, at this stage we haven't got a flight engineer. That came when we met with four engines, 'cause you didn't need a flight engineer on a Wellington.
CB: No.
CD: A pilot did all his -
CB: Yeah
CD: fuel changing. So we are now at Riccall on heavy conversion work. The normal day light, night time, cross countries, air-to-sea, air-to-air, firing and er -
CB: Were you firing live or with a camera gun?
CD: If we having fighter attacks you had a cine camera twenty-five feet of camera. And they assess you on the radical [?], on the film. To see whether you were on target or not. Er -
CB: And they had towed targets, did they? They had towed targets for you to shoot at?
CD: Yes the drogues I forgot that.
CB: Drogues
CD: I forgot that, I should have come up with that and erm -
CB: So that was live ammunition?
CD: Castle Kennedy, yes, at Castle Kennedy we were on Ans- I sh [?], I can't think of it all the time -
CB: That's alright, that's okay
CD: I can now, we were on Ansons, and an Anson took six gunners up at the time. And the one that sat next to the pilot wound the wheels up. Twenty-three turns, I might add. [laughter] Anyway, the drogue was towed by a Martinet, just above you, in front of you. So all you had level with you and behind was the drogue. Now, each gunner had a colour and the tips of those bullets for the space of two-hundred rounds I would think at the time, blue, red, etcetera etcetera. So if you were blue, they knew you were blue, bad aim [?]. And if you fired at this drogue, they'd count the number of blues and cut them in half, because it's going through the drogue, it's making two blue marks so it's gotta be halved. That's how they assessed how many hits you had. [pause] er this -
CB: I'll just stop you a mo. [beep] Right, so we're restarting now, with Charlie.
CD: I was -
CB: Johannson [?] wheels.
CD: At Castle Kennedy AGS and we were six to a plane. Six to an Anson. And the last one in sat next to the pilot who and then you had to wind the wheels up for him and [pause] I er, rather premature in that respect whereby I started to wind the wheels up far too soon for the pilot, not 'No no no!' he said 'I have not trimmed it yet'. By the way, he was a Polish pilot [laughter].
TL: Now carry on.
CD: And now, I finally passed the exam to become an air gunner and I went on leave waiting for posting to 21 OTU Moreton in the Marsh. This is where we crewed up, man-to-man, assembled on the grass. People approached one another, and that's how crews were formed. [pause] er less, a flight engineer, as you didn't need them on twin engines air craft. That was selected when you went to RCU - HCU - (Heavy Conversion Unit). The one we went to was 1658 Riccall, near Selby, Yorkshire. This was where my pilot selected his engineer, from thereon, we were fully crewed. Went on to four engine training, did the right exercises, then went from there to squadron. We were put to Driffield where 462 was, 466 was rather, beg your pardon, and in the time of pre-training operations, 462 came from out of the desert and reformed at Driffield. Ah, by the time we got operational, our first operation was with 466 and then, the time we come to our second operation, 462 was formed. Australian, yes, these were Australian squadrons by the way, and when we got through our second operation, 462 were ready formed up and started and we did our second op on their inauguration on the squadron. From there on, we did our operations. We did twenty-three in all on 462. And they were then posted down to Foulsham in Norfolk, on RCM work (Radio Counter Measures) which was in 100 Group. As we had only seven to do, they put us back on the 466, it wasn't worth sending us down there to do seven operations. They switched us back to 466, and there we completed our tour, which in January 1945. Now, the nitty gritty bit is, I ended up going into hospital halfway through my tour, which put me behind my crew. So, it eventuated that I had one trip to do at the time when my crew had done the last trip which was Hanover one the 5th of January. From there, I was placed on a battle order the next night with a crew strange to me by the name of Flight Lieutenant Stewart. And it was a hair raiser, [laughter] things like we were just set course, and one shouts to the other 'Throw the cigarettes up then, I threw them up last night!' Now, our pilot’d had gone beserk if we'd have smoked on an aircraft. With hundred octane petrol about, not good is it? Not good for life. However,[background noise] I managed to get through that operation [background noise] I went on these then I had to report to ACRC Catterick (Air Crew Receiving Centre) as we were being made redundant to be put on a ground staff job. Thus, what we did to the day I was demobbed.
CB: So, just going back now, to the HCU.
CD: Yes.
CB: When you're at the HCU, how did the programme go to create a crew that was operational?
CD: We did the right designated exercises to do, so many affiliations with the fighter, at night and day, to resemble an operation. Now, coming back to my initiation at squadron, we were on a cross country, a daylight cross country, which took us the last [pause] part of the er, cross country. We took a leg up to Belfast. We turn off at Belfast down to Fleetwood, near Blackpool. Well, we got to Belfast the while, the flight engineer said 'We're going down to the Elsan, Snowy' That was the pilot's nickname, Snowy. Okay, so we get down there and all of a sudden four engines cut. [laughter] 'Jock [?], where the hell are you?' [laughter] 'Down at the Elsan], Snowy', 'For Christ's sake, get back here soon! Sooner than that' he says. [laughter] We were icing up, because there were icicles on my gun that night outside, and everybody was getting to stations of bail out [background laughter]. We are now over the Irish Sea, heading towards Fleetwood, and Jock rushed back quick as he could and changed over and all the four engines picked up, just like that. In that time, all four engines had cut and we'd lost 5000 feet, fell like a tree. Everything righted itself. The explanation was for the engineer was he thought, he thought that the dials indicators were frozen. He said he checked them before he left his post but they were showing still fuel in the tanks but it wasn't so. [laughter] However, all was fair, we managed to get back to base, and that was the start of operations for you. That was a lift that, wasn't it?
CB: Now, were you mid-upper or were you tail-gunner?
CD: Rear. I was tail.
CB: Right, so did you come to choose that yourself?
CD: Well -
CB: How did you decide which position to be in?
CD: I favoured the dr- rear to be honest, and, we don't come on to operations. We are now, our second operation, the first on 462, was the flying bomb site at a place called Waddon [?] just the side of Dunkirk. And we did that one Friday evening and daylight. Succeeded with that, got to, I think, number seven. We went, we were designated to Kiel, U-boat pens , that was a night trip, very bad weather round the target area. But coming back we somehow had a fracture of the oil pressure. We're coming back over the North Sea and the pilot realises that he's got one wheel down and one up. The whole of the distance across the North Sea, he was up and down up and down with the good wheel hoping for something to happen. After about an hour, it succeeded. It dropped the good wheel and they both went back together and that was solved, just like that. That was Kiel. Now, we're coming now into September, we went to a place called Neuss in the Ruhr - N E U double S. On leaving the target, a hazy target as well because there were plenty of fires. Dead astern of me was this 1-1-0 or 2-1-0 it didn't matter, literally identical but for a small [inaudible] unrecognisable one from the other. Oh, I butted on here because, going back to my training, the instructor would always say to you 'traverse your turret'. Now after, between there and becoming operational, I sat sometimes and thought a lot. Now, if I'm round there, he could be coming from there, I can't see him. So, I decided in my mind, I'm just gonna sit there, and look. You pick things up and you cover a bigger area than you would by doing this. Because, by doing that, he could be there, it only takes seconds. You wouldn't know anything about it. So that's what I, I kicked that one out of the window and I always sat dead astern, looking dead astern, and looking for everything that's coming from those quarters, because that's where it comes from. And coming back to this, where I sighted this 1-1-0, 2-1-0, whatever, if I'd have done what my instructor had told me, I probably wouldn't be here now. To the point that I saw him, and I kept my eyes on him, and I had already informed the pilot 'prepare to corkscrew' it's gonna be port because he was dead astern of us and they're at our height [?]. So I let him get nearer, and then I gave the order to corkscrew which was to port. Now, there's one advantage there by going to port, it helped the pilot who was sitting on the port side, as he goes down to come back up, he can see going down and he can see going back up. Didn't fire, I always held fire because on your ammunition belt, every fifth bullet was -
TL: Tracer.
CD: Tracer. And with the speed of the guns firing eight hundred rounds a minute, that tracer becomes a red line and it immediately gives your position away. And that's one thing you should not do, give yourself away. [phone rings] You, you er, you er, [background noise] [pause] yes, you must not give your position away. I'm there to defend the aircraft, I don't attack, I only attack with bombs, so therefore, you do not [phone pings] put yourself in that situation by what they call firing in anger. I didn't believe in it and I never ever would but I never did it. And I think on those, on those terms, puts us on the right side of success. You getting through?
CB: This was in the night, was it?
CD: Eh?
CB: This was in the night this 1-1-0, 2-1-0 were coming at you.
CD: Yeah, at night, yeah. But in the day light totally different. They can see you, you can see them.
CB: Exactly.
CD: You adopt a different attitude then.
CB: Do you think he'd seen you?
CD: Hum?
CB: Do you think he had seen you?
CD: Oh yes, without a doubt. He had probably honed onto us. He was going that fast, it was this [pause] a matter of seconds, eight seconds, and it was all over. He never fired, by the way. So it just shows you how things happen so quick and once we did that, to start down on the corkscrew, it went, Dennis ran right us and said 'There he goes' I said 'I know Dennis I've been following him all the way along.' As we went down on the corkscrew, he went over the top of us. Now, my pilot comes up and we're in a bubble of corkscrew, I won't, I won't say the complete statement but he said 'Let's go back up and see where he is' I says 'You stop down here'.
TL: Or words to that effect.
CD: Plus a few more syllables. [laughter] Deathly hush, deathly hush because I chewed him. [laughter] And I, I'm now saying to myself, 'What have I said?' Sat in that turret thinking ‘I'm really heading for it now’. Not a word was said and between there and getting back to base, I made up my mind, if he doesn't say anything, then I won't. Let it just calm away. That's just what happened. Nothing was said. I think, I think, in a nutshell, he knew I was right. Well, I know I was right, because we were told in training, back in training, a pilot is always the captain of the aircraft but in a situation where you're under attack, he takes orders from you. That's why I did it, that's why I said it. But, having said that, I still, I still blinkering [inaudible], what am I heading for [laughter] because I could really have been brought upon the coals about this. But no, it petered out.
BD: You dropped your bombs.
CD: Yeah.
CB: What do you think was in his mind?
CD: Well, being a naughty, I think he being a bit of a daredevil. Or, he was making a joke of it. But it was the wrong time of day to make a joke! [laughter]
CB: So what other incidents did you have that were-
BD: What about when, when erm, chap shot the mid-upper, nearly shot you?
CD: Yes, I'm going back to pre-operation training-
CB: Right.
CD: At Driffield. After a daylight operation, beg your pardon, a daylight wide cross country, we had to go out into Bridlington Bay, do some air-to-sea firing at nought feet. He's shooting the foam to get deflection. He said, my mid-upper said, 'Do you want me to fire first?' I said 'Yes, okay Dennis' so he fired his five hundred off, he said 'I've finished now' and I went to go traverse round onto the beam to start mine, and I heard this zoom, and there's an on and off oxygen dial just slightly above my head to the left that hit that and went somewhere in the turret [laughter]. What was it? It was a cooked round from one of Dennis's guns. When the guns finished firing, they should always stop in the recoil position so they're clear of a round. So every time a breechblock goes forward, it takes a round with it up the spout of the gun. Hence, what they call a cooked round. The bullets in the barrel, the heat of the barrel sets it off. That's what happened. I did not fire one shot [background laughter]. It was straight back to base, to get inquiries on it. The gun, the gun was faulty. It er, it should have stayed at the recoil position but it just did not. Hence, the cooked round.
CB: So of the thirty operations you did, how many were in the dark at night, and how many were daylight? Roughly?
CD: Twenty-three daylight and seven night, I did.
CB: Other way around?
CD: No beg your pardon, that's wrong.
BD: It's the other way round.
CD: Twenty-three on 462, seven on 466. No, I did fifteen on each. Fifteen daylights, fifteen nights. At one stretch there I did ten in nine days I think it was.
CB: And how often did you have to use your guns?
CD: I didn't. I say, I did not fire in anger. I made my mind up on that one. This is the trouble with, I think, I may be wrong, but I think that by firing away willy nilly at something they got a hold on you. You see that tracer? Why expose yourself?
CB: What was the purpose of the tracer?
CD: If you were guidance. Give you, give you a guide to what you were shooting at. And, I would never, ever fire in anger. And I think, in my mind, I think that's where we lost quite a few aircraft. Not saying I'm right, but I would think it inclinates that way.
CB: How often were the aeroplanes hit?
CD: How many?
CB: How often were the aeroplanes hit by flack or fighter?
CD: Varied. I, there was one instance at a place called Bochum this was on November the fourth, fifth, where I saw one of ours over the target. It was on fire from wingtip to wingtip and it came to pass in the aftermath and later years that it turned out to be Joe Herman and with the descriptions that I know of now, that resembles Joe Herman's aircraft. The one where he finally went out last but it was blown out. The plane then blew up. I never saw the explosion, but I saw it from wingtip to wingtip. On our course, it wasn't spiralling out of control, it was still going along you know. But I can't keep looking all, too long, you've gotta look after yourself. So it was a question of just that and concentrate on your own, you know, it's, and that's what happened. It blew up. And it blew Joe out of the aircraft without a parachute. And, he went down, down, down, grabbing at anything possible. And he finally grabbed something and it was the legs of his mid-upper gunner on his chute. They went down together and they were talking to one another on the way down but he said 'Just prior to hitting the ground, I'll release myself' which is what he did, and he broke his leg doing it. Vivash [?] came out of it alright. And, er, but the others had already bailed out, they were the last two to go and Harry Nott the flight engineer was, he he was asked, told to put the fires out, the small one in the fuselage. Well, he did that but then the whole kaboosh was alight, wing tip to wing tip. So he bailed out and he hid in the forest for five days, eating anything he could put his hand to. But he decided to cross the Rhone [?] and that's where he was caught. He was made prisoner of war and the other three, four, Vivash and Joe heard gunfire. It came to pass over latter years but quite recently in this day that the, the blokes were shot by Gestapo. That was, one bloke was Underwood he was the bomb aimer, Wilson, someone else and, how this has all come about now whereby I've got young enthusiasts of 462 and 466 that have taken me up in the last two years back to Driffield and has encouraged me to go with them and tell them all the things that I've been telling you now. And Paul Nott was the great-nephew of Harry Nott the engineer on Joe Herman's crew. Now, Paul, as an enthusiast he is, he's a private pilot himself. He had this painting done by someone in Shrewsbury. He flew up and collected it. Went over to Aces High in Wendover and had it framed. And now he's got it hung in his office at Ascot. In my plane he's put above it between two searchlights because I told him I saw that plane on fire. It could onl- the description that he gave was identical to what I saw it could be no other. And that's how it's now become we're close friends with the Australians, Tiana Adair the lady. Her father was a pilot I think he was, and all these things of years gone by have all come together with someone being a relative of someone. And this is what has happened. I went, only this April on Anzac day (April the 25th) and we went to Driffield Gardens and we had the memorial which we dedicated in 1993 and Joe, Harry Arnes and myself, he's a prominent air gunner and he was on his second tour. Incidentally at Driffield he was on his second tour and I've met him twice since and last year we laid the wreath at the Gardens memorial and he came this year again but he had to get away quickly because he was going the next day to Drongen in Belgium to another parade. So, things went well. So the point, yes, it renewed our old way of living as regard being air crew in World War Two.
CB: So what was your pattern of living? What was the pattern that you went through? You got up in the morning.
CD: Yes.
CB: What happened?
CD: You went to, you went to your section and did a DI on your, on your turn (daily inspection). You cleaned your, you cleaned the Perspex with special Perspex polish to cut out all spots from the engine you get exhaust oil splashes the like and believe you me if you got any like that you think well that's an aircraft that one and that spot of oil on the air on the Perspex. So it was down to you to keep your turret clean. It's your vision, you rely on it. So-
CB: What about the guns?
CD: Yes.
CB: What about the guns? How did you clean those?
CD: You clean those with what they call four by two.
CB: Wooding?
CD: Yes, a cloth, like a flannel. You had a pull through. We cleared the flannels. Yes.
CB: So after the DI, then what?
CD: Well, you went back to section. And then if the battle orders come out, you look up and saw upon the jar the DROs and you destined. Report to briefing at so-and-so time. From there on things worked.
CB: What's a DRO?
CD: Daily routine orders.
CB: Right.
CD: Sorry.
CB: Okay.
CD: And each section line pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, went to their respective section, did a flight plan after briefing. And the gunners, engineers just sat and wait and report to parachute rooms at such-and-such a time. From there on it was on the, the bus to the perimeter track to dispersal point got up your aircraft. In my case, set my guns to fire. There's a fire and safe on each gun so you had to put it on fire, from there on hold it there.
CB: 'Cause you got four 303s you didn't have the retro fitter point fives [?]
CD: Yes I had round a minute they fire. So you got three thousand two hundred a minute. But you'd never fire it for a minute, just short sharp bursts. Yes, so-
CB: So what time would you normally be going on a raid? Did it vary a lot?
CD: Anytime. Any time of day, yes. Daylights. When we, when the, [pause] when the [pause] erm, the army was for-, going forward in France, we were always bombing the French ports because that was the last of the resistance from the guards, the German army, and they were really dug in, they were very hard to get out, suss out. And [background noise] to do a daylight, early morning, you were up at one o'clock, two o'clock. You were called by someone in the guard room came round your billet woke you up. From there on breakfast, briefing, the [inaudible], airborne, drop your load and back you come. Now, as I say, that varied, as my log book shows. Any time of day, any time of night. And I might add, every time we came back and entered the debriefing room, there was always that man stood there by the, by the tea urn [laughter] and the biscuits. And the station padre, no matter what time of day or night, he was always there. Something I noticed, it always sticks in my mind, how dedicated that man was. Yeah.
CB: How did the crews feel about that? How did the crews feel?
CD: Well about like, about the same as me I think. Such dedication, this, this is what went through all aircrew as well. You know, you had to do that to survive.
CB: What was your crew like?
CD: Very good, very good. My, especially my navigator, he was quite exceptional. And Tom, the wireless op, yes, good man. Lost him quite young, he was, he was the daddy of the crew. We were twenties and he was thirty-one. And he died when he was forty-two, back in '54. Terry and I and the bomber, we went to his funeral in London. Yes. And pilot, Les, he came over on two occasions. He was married to a New Zealand girl. He got married, lived in Australia, and his home town of Cowgill [?] Cowgill [?], yes. And she wanted to go back home, she couldn't stand the heat. This he did, [background noise] and when we went and met him on our fiftieth wedding anniversary, my son-in-law, daughter, two sons and two grandsons put us on an air ticket and we had two weeks in Brisbane with her cousin, the other two weeks in North Island New Zealand with Les my pilot and his wife. But sadly since then, they've both passed on, and my wife's cousin. And at that stage, we're now left with one two three four five. In turn, they've all died off to the point now that where there is only two of us. That's Derry, my navigator and myself.
CB: As a crew, what did you do when you weren't flying?
CD: My first and foremost job was and I did it every day like a nut, I used to write to her, yeah.
BD: Her?
CD: Every day. Can you imagine that? I think I should put it on a rubber stamp because it's the same old things I would say [laughter].
CB: We're talking about Barbara here.
BD: Yes.
CB: And what a lucky lady she was. [laughter]
CD: Yeah, well there you go you see.
CB: We're just going to stop for a cup of tea now.
CD: Okay.
CB: And pick it up in a minute. [Beep]
[At 50:20 there is a break and the recording seems to start again on another day]
CB: Right, my name is Chris Brockbank, listeners, and we're now on the 7th of July and we're with Charlie Darby and Barbara Darby and Tony Lee their son-in-law. And we're just going to pick up on where we finished up last time really which was the end of the war. And then we'll pick up on some other items. So, Charlie, we came to the point where the operations finished, what happened next? You'd done your thirty.
CD: After leave.
CB: Okay, so how much leave did they give you?
CD: Oh, there was about six weeks.
CB: Right. Yep. And then what?
CD: We then had a telegram to report to Catterick on ACRC [background noise] (Air Crew Receiving Centre) as we were going to be made redundant, they would issue us with a ground job. And, that was it. I went in on to a course called aircraft finishing which was a coating of paints and so forth, putting on [inaudible?] on aircraft. I went on a course down to Locking in near Weston-Super-Mare for that. And along came the end of the war. And from there on I just went from pillar to post, station to station, and things were never, did never happen as regards that course. So as I've told you earlier, we were just a person not needed.
CB: How did you feel about that?
CD: Well, depressing.
CB: Was all, were all the crew members together?
CD: No, no, we all went respective ways. My pilot is now already on his way home, all’s finished with him as far as that was concerned. The re-, Derry, the navigator, went to Morton in Marsh as navigation instructor. My other gunner, he went down to Wales-
CB: What was his name?
CD: On the bombing site-
CB: What was his name?
CD: Dennis.
CB: Dennis.
CD: And in the end, he turns up marrying a Welsh girl and that's where he stayed. And that's where he died, in Wales. Don, similar aspect, but then he went on the, the er Elizabeth Line.
CB: Was he the bomb aimer?
CD: No, he was the flight engineer.
CB: Right.
CD: [background noise] He went as a steward on the Queen Elizabeth and something else. Arthur, the bomb aimer, he went on a bombing site. He was sol- a practice bombing site. He was sole charge of that, somewhere up in the Midlands, and that just about covers it.
CB: And the signaller-
CD: The wireless op-
CB: Wireless op, yeah-
CD: I never did know what he went in to. And then, as I said before, shortly after that he died, not many years after this.
CB: He was the one who died - he was the grandpa of the crew and died at forty-two?
CD: Yes that's correct, yes.
CB: Right. Now, your rank when you were flying most of the time was flight sergeant?
CD: No sergeant.
CB: Sergeant.
CD: Sergeant.
CB: When did you become flight sergeant?
CD: About, it came in about a year's time, a step up.
CB: Okay. And then you became a warrant officer, when was that?
CD: Yes. That warrant officer, that was between '46 and seven. Immediately I got it, immediately they took it away. That sort of time.
CB: And put you back to what?
CD: Sergeant, basic sergeant.
CB: And what happened to your pay?
CD: Still the same.
CB: You still get flying pay?
CD: No, no. The rank of whatever.
CB: But the flying pay stopped when you stopped flying did it?
CD: So I. Yes. I think so.
CB: How much did you get paid? Do you remember?
CD: I think it's something like fifteen shillings a day. Something like that.
CB: And then the flying pay. How much?
CD: [Pause] Tough to say.
CB: Okay, doesn't matter. Now, going back to the early days-
CD: Adding to that, mind you-
CB: Yeah?
CD: We had a donater by the name of [pause] he was, er-
BD: Nuffield?
CD: Pardon?
BD: Nuffield.
CD: That's right, Lord Nuffield. He gave money to operational aircrew and you received that every leave you went on while operating. To the, to the tune of fifty shillings, something like that, every six weeks. And that fund is a trust fund still running today. Yes. I had the pleasure of meeting him once on the golf course up here at Flackwell Heath. Yeah, anyway that's another point.
CB: After the war?
CD: After the? No. No, during the war.
CB: Oh.
CD: It was on my first leave in '43. Amazing isn't it?
CB: Yeah.
CD: Then were we? I was on a ground job, yes, but it didn't materialise as I thought it was going to do. Like Dennis, Arthur, they had a distinct job of doing something on a bombing range. Well, that didn't happen as far as I was concerned. It just didn't have an end to it. I was in the end just doing silly jobs. You can't describe really.
CB: So how did they - when did they demob you? And what was the process?
CD: They demobbed me in '47, May '47. I had to go to Lytham St Anne’s near Blackpool where I was issued with civvy clothes and came home on leave, the something about leave, and then that stopped. In other words, go and get a job.
CB: So what did you do?
CD: From there, I went into Hoovers. Hoovers Limited. It was like engineering. In the time I was there in twenty years my, my bit of fire service experience before I joined up came to light again as they had a fire crew within the works and I was able to join that. Which is what I did.
CB: That was as an extra? Or full time?
CD: That was during the work time. Any fire on the building, you went to it at the same time the local fire engine was coming up. Yes. We were paid a, extra and they used us funnily enough to collect the wages every week. Down in the town, down the bank because we were insured as firemen so that allowed them to insure - to use that same insurance for us to go down the bank and collect the money. Every Friday, I had to wear a mackintosh. Along, along, a - with weather like this or even hotter, I had to go and pedal into work with my mate 'What the hell you got that mac for?' I says 'It might rain, you know?' I dare not tell him the secret was I had to wear a poacher's jacket underneath which held all the paper money. And we used to go down to the bank, the man used to taxi us, conveniently had his business right outside the bank where he drove out of and he came out. We could see him coming, we went out the door as he pulled up by the pavement and we go on in one movement and all way. It was all done. And people working next to me never ever knew what I was doing.
BD: Did I?
CD: I think I told you whilst I shouldn't have done.
BD: Ooh God.
CD: Yeah. [background noise] The money I've carried was nobody’s business.
CB: So, you worked there twenty years?
CD: Yes.
CB: So that gets us into the later 60s. What did you-
CD: ‘67.
CB: ‘67, what did you do then?
CD: I still kept in business when back to BroomWade where I did the tank work. I did precision grinding there. And then I moved to a small business in Beaconsfield, Oppermans, did work for Martin Baker. I told him [inaudible] for he had yet to see. And then from there, I went on franchise work, from the bakery, the local bakery. And he made me redundant. From there, I decided to set up myself, then I went painting, decorating. I went on a course created by Margaret Thatcher to encourage people to do that sort of thing. And I was tax-free for a year, wasn't I? I think.
BD: Forty pound a week.
CD: Something like that. And after a year, it stopped. But then I was, I'd established a little bit of a business, enough to keep me going. And this is what I did to the end of my working days. I was working right up to seventy-five, even longer I think.
BD: And now you've stopped.
CD: Even longer. And that was it. And now we're at this stage and I'm still working.
CB: Quite right. [laughter]
CD: They say when you retire, you'll be able to play bowls, yes [laughter] no way.
CB: Let's go fast backwards to when you joined.
CD: Yes.
CB: So, when you joined, where was it, and what type of people were there who joined with you?
CD: What, people with me?
CB: Yeah. To the RAF.
CD: Well, we were only there a fortnight.
CB: Yep.
CD: At St John's Wood. So you didn't get a lot of time to get personalised. Bit more introductory, check you out on your health. You had to see the dentist, he was the other side of Hyde Park [laughter] it's true.
BD: It must have been a big job for this.
CD: And did a fortnight there at St John's Wood, then went to Bridlington, ITW (Initial Training Wing).
CB: So, what sort of people were with you, were they all Brits? Were they people from abroad?
CD: Yes, all Brits.
CB: Okay. And what sort of backgrounds? Were they technical type people or office based or what were they?
CD: I wouldn't know to be honest.
CB: Right. So when you got to -
CD: Pretty general like me.
CB: Okay.
CD: Workers in the day.
CB: Yeah. And at Bridlington, then what? What were they like there? What sort of people?
CD: Well, as I say, a bit strict on the instructional side. But they have to be, don't they, to deploy discipline? Early morning start, 06:30 parade, it was very, very civilised. We paraded down by the Spa Hotel which was our mess deck, in other words. The ball- dance hall floor ballroom was the mess. And the theatre side of it was used for Morse code and semaphore flagging, flag and signals. If the weather was fine, would they use the beach. You stood at one end, and he stood the other, about a mile away, and you did your exercises there. Small arms fire, shop frontage people that have sold up or what and they've taken it over because they took over all the, all the boarding places for holidays. That were taken over for us to be housed in. And each course was sixty strong, you kept that sixty all the way through. And that was eight weeks there, seven day leave. Next place was Bridgnorth, number three EAGS. You did a bit of squarebashing there.
CB: So EAGS was gunnery school?
CD: Elementary Air Gunnery School.
CB: Air gunnery school. And what was the elementary training? Was that with shotguns or what was it?
CD: Yes, shotguns. You didn't get to the big stuff 'til later.
CB: So shotguns and clay pigeons?
CD: Clay pigeons, yes. We did quite a lot of that, especially at the next station, AGS. That was the one in Scotland, Castle Kennedy. And that's where you went for your rigorous- The main subject to think about was aircraft recognition. Because, if you didn't know your aircraft, you could be shooting at one of your own. So you had to, you had to know the characteristics of all aircraft and when you sat in the classroom, they would put up on the screen a flash of a sighting of an aircraft no matter what distance, not close up, never close up, and, a hundredth part of a second and you had to write down on a sheet of paper what it was. And you were told afterwards so that was a vital subject. It was before, it was placed before, learning the Morse code. You had to know your aircraft. It happened so many times, people had been shooting their own. Not by me! [laughter] Success at the end, having passed, as you saw in my log book, eighty-one point five percent out of one hundred. I finished third of the sixty. The remarks were above average as you saw.
CB: Yeah. Now, did some of the course of sixty not get through?
CD: Some, well, they, I don't know what they did, they just, they're not required for aircrew.
CB: That's what I mean, they weren't all selected for aircrew because they couldn't see or shoot. Was it?
CD: No, no. You went for that and from the word go.
CB: Right.
CD: Their testing found you out.
CB: That's what I mean. Yes.
CD: Yes. Sorry.
CB: Yeah. So, what I meant was, it was a very high standard-
CD: Yes.
CB: [Background noise] And some of the people didn't pass so they went to other jobs.
CD: Yes, for whatever, ground job, it’d be anyway. But one, one day, at the AGS I was called before the gunnery leader. I thought 'What the hell does he want?' Referring back to our last interview, I mentioned about firing at drogues, didn't I?
CB: Absolutely.
CD: And they recorded your hits by the colour of the paint on the tip of the bullet. Now, I was called before him and he said 'I've called you in,' he said 'because you've got an exceedingly amount of extra bullet marks.' I said, he said, 'What's your answer to that?' I said 'Well' quick thinking, I said 'Well, it can only be one thing, I'm must be nearer the drogue than I should have been.' And I said 'I'm not in control of that, that's the pilot's job.' 'Good answer,' he says and it ended like that. Now, I get pulled up, it doesn't make sense to me, I get pulled up for having too many hits. [laughter] Does that make sense? No. But that's what happened, that's what passed. He accepted what I said, but he had to, I had no other answer.
CB: What sort of range was the drogue being towed at from the aircraft you were in?
CD: Well, about one hundred yards I suppose, maybe a little bit more. It was always above you. The martinet was the one in front of you, it was a long tow rope for obvious reasons. [laughter] I'd be shooting the martinet down! [laughter] Yes, that's how it worked and the pilot of your plane, he did that. So you got more movement to make more deflection so it made it harder to hit the drogue.
CB: So, could you just describe what is deflection shooting?
CD: Well, deflection shooting is, you have two moving targets, the object and yourself. So, you've got to lay it off in front of the actual movement of the object. You never aim straight at it for obvious reasons. It's that. So you had to be in front of it and it goes into it. Now, the most common attack on an aircraft by a fighter is the curve of pursuit, what they call the curve of pursuit attack. From, from the b- er, the quarter, it comes in like that now-
CB: In a curve.
CD: You have to lay off your aiming point in the front of it, always. That is deflection.
CB: Right.
CD: And a good idea of that registering up there is doing a lot of clay pigeon shooting. Because, when they shoot those clays out, you've got to be in front of it, although you're stood still, your arms are moving. You've got to fire in front of it. There's no good aiming dead on it. You must - that's allowing the speed of the object and the speed of your bullet to be there at the same time. And that's how you register your hits. That's my term of deflection.
CB: So after you'd been at the AGS and passed that, you then went to the OTU?
CD: Malton in Marsh, after about a month's leave was a, a little [background noise] an extra for what you've done. We reported there, and after I suppose about two weeks we were all assembled on this big piece of green, some people went in hangars, and that's [background noise] where you selected your crew. Always the pilot, he was always the one that approached because he's the leader of the aircraft. And I say, he came, Les, the pilot, Derry, and Tom they were three officers. They came and approached us fellows who were stood all as one and Les, the pilot, as I said earlier, he went to every section and checked on the pass marks and the remarks of any individual and it turned - and it came to pass, he was looking for me because I'd got my name on there, everyone got their name on there. And Dennis, [background noise] because he'd been with me from day one, and Arthur the bomb aimer and that's where I met him and we were pretty close together there and it made it easy for Les. Well, he literally asked us all three stood together, if you get what I mean? Flight engineer comes into the, into the quota when we go on to four engines. Because on one engine, you didn't need a flight engineer. So, that was made easy by him, by doing what he did.
BD: Sorry.
CB: So Les had done an initial selection of his navigator -
CD: The crew, correct.
CB: And bomb aimer.
CD: Yes.
CB: When he came to you, he was an Australian.
CD: Yes.
CB: But, when you were in the hangar, he checked on the scores, you said, but he didn't know where the people came from, or did he?
CD: Well, yes, it would be English on your papers.
CB: So-
CD: Your service number would show that anyway. An Australian Air Force number was different to us.
CB: Because at that stage, they were, were they, Royal Australian Air Force, whereas originally, they joined the RAF?
CD: No, no they still come in as R double A F.
CB: They did?
CD: Yes. Yes. They came here with their Air Force number from Australia where they trained. Yes. Dennis, my other gunner, he came in with his ATC number. That started with 301, seven figures. Mine was 189, seven figures. I used to pull his leg, I says 'With a number like that, you want to get some in' [laughter] Yes. Anyway, I couldn't run that one too long.
CB: Just expanding a bit on the OTU before we have a break.
CD: Yes?
CB: You've now got the crew.
CD: Yes.
CB: Les has. When you started training, each of you is doing something different, so what were you doing as the gunner?
CD: Doing the exercises that was required. You saw in my log book, exercise one 'till three, whatever. Yes.
CB: So did they -
CD: Air-to-air, air-to-sea firing, pretty well the same as the other stations.
CB: Yeah.
CD: We were still on learning Morse and we were getting taught the essential aim of oxygen, why it's so specially needed. We were shown the proof of that by six of us getting into an oxygen chamber, compression chamber, the instructor outside looking through the port hole. And one of you not wearing the oxygen, the other five wearing it. Now the instructor would say this is the proof of what that oxygen does or if you haven't got it, it does it the other way. And we will show you now. And the man that hadn't put the mask on is now getting a bit dreary like. He said to the one sat next to him go to his pocket, take out his pay book. He looked down, he didn't, he didn't know he had taken that that log book. Afterwards, when they put him back on oxygen, and he'd come to his senses, and the fellow said 'Did you see him take anything from your pocket?' and he said ‘no’. That's, that drove it home, so essential that oxygen was. Now, [door creaks] talking on the oxygen side, we, especially at night, we always had oxygen on from the ground and going up. Normally, you can leave oxygen off up to ten thousand feet, but rather than make the contrast high up we did it at ground level. But you were okay without oxygen up to ten thousand feet, so they told us. But especially on operations you had it on, it comes on automatic anyway on four engines. With the, with the Wellington, you had this, this situation of get putting the oxygen on yourself, i.e. before getting into the turret there was a circle in, up here on the oxygen line and that had a cotton reel pushed in to close it off when not needed. [laughter] And that cotton reel is tied on a piece of string and you pulled the cotton reel up away and it just dangled and you then got the flow of oxygen. Then in the turret, you got on off tell tale. But one night, we were on a cross country and after about quarter of an hour I'm, I'm feeling, I'm a bit, I'm a bit drunk - a drunkenness had appeared you know? Light headed. And it suddenly dawned on me I hadn't pulled that cotton reel out before I got in the turret. Honest. I'll letcha go. So when he opened the door and pulled out I came round. None of the others ever knew, I just didn't bother to tell them, would have felt ashamed to. [laughter] And one, there was one exercise we had it was called a bull's eye. It involved, it was on Bristol and Derry, we had been together now what, a week I suppose, green horns, and it came to pass we got there and it was all over Derry was about quarter of an hour late. And that worried him stiff. ‘Derry boy’, the nav leader said to him 'Go and have a good drink, Derry, don't worry about it.' And from there on, Derry used to have his half a pint because he never drank before he met us. He was a lay preacher, he'd been a lay preacher for fifty years after that [laughter] but he liked his drop of sherry. [laughter] So I bought him a bottle when we left. And yes that was it, we were too late for the bull's eye. And then from there, we're going on up into the Yorkshire area now. We had to do a f- two weeks at a place called Acaster Malbis about three miles outside York. It wasn't an aerodrome it was just a plain battle course training. They took you out in the day, live it rough. One night we went out, we had the choice, we stopped at a farm, we had the choice: sleeping in the barn or under the far wall. It was a nice hot day, like one last week, not as hot as that but it was a hot day, so we proposed, [laughter] we proposed to lay under the brick wall with our ground sheets. [unclear] in the barn, went down the pub, had a couple of drinks, came back, slept under the wall, woke up the next morning, oh that bloody great cob horse stood over the top of us [laughter], oh dear. The things that went on. Did that a fortnight, then we went down the road, not far, to a place called Riccall 1658 HCU (Heavy Conversion Unit) and that's where we picked up with our, Les had a choice of flight engineer. Which is what he did. Got together, now we're now fully at strength, seven personnel starting on four engine aircrafts. Going through all the courses again, exercises, cross countries, day and night, fighter affiliation, mock attacks. Used to do that with cine camera, twenty-five feet cine camera. And then, as I say, cross country. We did, we did one and it took us up, I told you before I think, it took us up to Belfast, and the next leg back was to Fleetwood and from Fleetwood over to base, straight across. And we got to Belfast, Jock, the engineer says 'I'm go down to the Elsan, Snowy.' Okay, we barely got down there before all four engines cut. We were at freezing alt - we were icing up, had icicles that long on my guns. Daylight, cloudless sky, yeah, eighteen thousand feet, icing up. He just about gets down to the Elsan to do his necessary and they cut. All four engine cut. 'Jock where the [pause] are you?' 'I'm down in the Elsan, Snowy.' 'Well for Christ's sake get back here quick as you can' [laughter] Back goes Jock [inaudible]. He switches his tanks over and then all four had picked up just like that. But, in the meantime, we had dropped five thousand feet. Fell like a tree. Twenty-five tonne of aircraft, won't stay there, will it? [laughter] So, we were all prepared to ditch because we were over now over the Irish Sea but it didn't have to happen. Eventually got back. [background noise] On another occasion, we did a cross country, we had to go out into Bridlington, Bridlington Bay and fire air-to-sea. From Bridlington to base it's probably about twelve miles, so, nothing, just- And Dennis fired his five hundred first, he said 'I'm finished now', I said 'Okay' and I went to swing round to, to port beam, port quarter rather, and I heard this zutt. I looked up there and there was the mark, the bullet's gone I don't know where. Left me in a state of [laughter] 'What's up?' they said, I said 'For Christ's sake, something’s gone wrong here.' And it came to pass on me that Dennis, one of his guns was faulty [background noise] it stayed in the forward position. When going forward, it takes a round on the face of the breechblock into the, into the [background noise]
TL: Barrel.
CD: Barrel [laughter] into the barrel, hence, the heat of the barrel ignited the detonator the pull it [?]. Should I have gone onto the beam a fraction earlier it could have been - we marked it on getting back to base, it could have been anyone there. It was there, you see. Because it went round with the turret, it [pause].
CB: So on that -
CD: That was the obvious conclusion of it.
CB: Right.
CD: And it was called, commonly called, a cooked round.
CB: Right. So when you landed, the ground crew then-
CD: Well, we were notified then what had happened, and little doubt had then to recti- probably the recoil spring on a rod, it was a long rod like that, and the recoil spring was over it. It's probably that that snapped at the. You see, a browning [?] gun can fire eight hundred rounds a minute, for a solid minute which you never did fire a solid minute. But that was the rate of of shot. So it [unclear] the mechanism, it's amazing how it works at that rate of knots. And well you can think of many things I suppose, it's probably more technical than what I can think it can be to suggest yes that did it. But no, no-one came back to us so we assumed its righted itself in their knowledge.
CB: I think we'll take a pause there, because you've done well and we'll start another track in a minute.
CD: Yeah my tongue tells me that.
[Beep, background noise]
CB: Right, we're restarting after our tea break. And what I'd like to ask you to do please, Charlie, is to talk about a raid. So, how did you prepare the raid and, the sortie, how did it work?
CD: Well, you were first brought up on battle order, then you knew you'd got to go and do so-and-so so-and-so, then the respect of pilots, navigators, bomb aimers. After briefing, which we all went to, after briefing, they went to their respective sections and did their flight plan. Other people like the flight engineer and gunners you just sat and waited because you had nothing to do until you get to the aircraft and then you prime your guns ready to fire in action if any. You went for operational meal, then to briefing, then to respective sections and wait for take off time. In that time, ground staff are loading up with bomb, required bomb load, to each aircraft. You go to parachute room, collect your chute, empty your pockets and wait for the liberty bus to take you to your respective aircraft. Get aboard, do your pre-flight checks, pilot so-forth, gunners, breach your guns up, put them on to fire, when you press the slot to put them on safety, you get airborne and you put them back on to fire, and you were ready for any action, if any. Some occasions, it was a straightforward flight, on other occasions completely opposite. Lone situations and situations you can see from other aircraft but you never ever know what is the problem but you saw it happen, you know what I mean? I.E. the one about the Lancaster. Coming off from the target, a gas incursion. It was flying very strangely, it was veering here and there which gave it the impression there was something wrong with the works. I.E. the rudder for instance, I don't know, it's pure guesswork. There was no smoke, no flame, this this was the foxing part of it all. Anyway, it suddenly went up and over onto its back, and went down into a dive, and in that time, four parachutes came out, unfurled. And went further down and not much further it just disintegrated [?] no explosion whatsoever. It just, just fell apart. Now on the chutes, shown so, it guess the ultimate. On another occasion, the one on Bochum, where I saw Joe Herman's plane, that was alight from wingtip to wingtip. It was still on course, still able to go, it was below us, but still with us, and I had to take my eyes off him because I've got to look after my aircraft, our aircraft, so there wasn't much chance to sit and gaze. So therefore, I never saw the explosion which happened. Three, four, four of the crew have already bailed out. This is in the aftermath, it's all in the squadron book. Harry Nott, the uncle, the fellow I know and recently Paul Nott, his great nephew, who lives in Hartford, he's one of the enthusiasts of the squadron, young enthusiasts, and it tells you what really happened when Joe went for his chute. The plane exploded. It blew him out the aircraft, and he just floating down, grabbing at anything that he could put his hands to. Suddenly, he grabbed this fella, his mid-upper I think it was, he grabbed his legs, and they both went down together on the chute. They arranged it, prior to hitting the ground, that he would release himself from his legs to lessen any dead fall. And they did that, but in that throw, he broke his leg, Joe, the pilot. Anyway, he got, he got the piece of the parachute and Vivash had got an injury to his ankle. He rips some of the parachute up, and wrapped it round his foot but then they decided they'd got to give themselves up, he couldn't try to escape with a broken - he broke a bone up here as well as one in his leg, so they were forced to give themselves up. They heard gunfire and it came to pass that, they found it out since the war, one of, one of the, it must have been a farmer, he had a horse and cart with one of the crew on it. He was injured. I think it was the bomb aimer, it wasn't the bloke called Underwood, Australian. And in the presence of I think there was an army bloke, a German army bloke, and up came a Gestapo. And he didn't mince his words whatever, he just pulled out his gun and shot Underwood. That is the glowing report from the farmer with the horse and cart. They, those two, heard gunfire so went seems the match what really happened. Yeah, there's four of them who were eventually in one cemetery from that particular instance, incident. [pause] Others, there was one after we'd finished our operations. One was coming in at Driffield one foggy morning in April '45. It was on the circuit over at Kirkburn Grange which was a farm right on the circuit of Driffield. He went round and he asked permission again because it was thick fog and they requested him to go to Carnaby just up the road, ten miles up the road, to a crash landing site. He said 'Well, I'll give it another try.' He did. At this farm, there were cops of about three hundred yards, and narrow too, about three hundred yards long, and he hit that, ploughed right through it. Right by the farm house. And the present farmer in '83 was the son then. He was five years old and he didn't know a thing. That plane exploded, what, just at, about fifty yards from the house. We went over there on the '83 reunion, in a cab [?] of cader [?] cars and the squadron leader Riverton [?] he went with us and he took the Halifax book and presented it to the farmer. He wondered what was happening I think. Coming there was [?] about six or seven car loads of us. [Laughter] Anyway, we went to the site and I took a photograph of it from memory out of the book. And I wasn't far out. I leaned over the hedge of the ploughed field and I took that photograph and it was as I say as near as I could get it. But I've loaned the book out to someone with that photograph in it and I can't think who. No, that won't have gone [?]. If he'd have taken the orders right, and accepted from the control tower go to Carnaby things would have been different. But no, he wanted to do it again. Inexperienced pilot apparently, and he got people on there with DFCs, people on their second tour no doubt. [background noise] It just blew into pieces. [pause] I told you the one -
CB: Any other trips you remember when you were doing the bombing of Northern France for the flying bombs?
CD: Yes. What?
CB: What height were you and what sort of experience did you have with those?
CD: Well, that was only our second one you see and I [laughter] erm [pause] there was - it didn't happen in our squadron, but we got to know that one of the aircraft on that raid, one of the crew, must have been the engineer I would think, he's the only one who seemed to walk about, and he lifted the, the inspection panel to look and see the bombs go. It - he unscrewed the panel, got down on his knees and looked down through and a piece of shrapnel hit him in the throat. The thing, hard luck story there to the point, you're going about two hundred miles an hour and something comes up through a hole about that big, and hits you in the throat. It, now, that was the crew, it wasn't on our squadron but we got to know about it. There's another incident you see I would never ever have known about it other than getting it from our people. And [pause] that's encouraging [?]. One of those two days that we did, went there consecutively, I forget which one it was but turning, we had to turn round onto the target. And I looked round to see where we're going and this block barrage it was like that just a solid black wall of flack. At our height, dead heights, and I said to myself 'Christ we've got to go through that?' Only we did, somehow. I have said to Les the pilot afterwards he said 'I just climbed above it.' Well I didn't know that at the time you see, still had flack going around you at various heights but this block barrage, well it was just like looking at that screen. It was a massive black wall of flack bursts. I don't know how many guns had to do that, probably about fifty rapid firing. I don't know, pure guesswork. But, that was an incident and I, I don't know whether that was the same one when I saw that Lancaster do what it did because we went there two days running, yes. Seventy years ago it's tough to remember what day it was so. That was that incident. [Pause] er.
CB: Which did you prefer, flying at night or flying in the day?
CD: Well, safety wise, well obviously day light. Because when these turning points as I was saying in that Bockholme one that Bockholme bay was seven-hundred and forty-nine aircraft. And you all, you're all converging on Aufitnez [?]. You're all coming at different angles so, I had it written down here. [pages turning] [pause] First turning point whereby all aircraft were coming in at all angles to turn off onto the next heading. [cough] Incidentally, all navigation lights are turned off so you're in a complete darkness which helps towards a hazard. Within our crew, we found an idea to help to overcome this. Derry, our navigator, would call up and notify us, the gunners in brackets, ten minutes before turning point and ten minutes after the turning point. This about covers the time it takes [cough] seven-hundred and forty-nine aircraft to pass through. We, you could do a raid of a thousand bombers in a quarter of an hour over the target. So that ten minutes each side of that turning point served a good purpose. [background noise] But there was this raid where I saw two aircraft collide at the first turning point, Orford Ness .
CB: And what happened to them?
CD: Well, they just hit one another and that was the end of the story. Just a vivid blue flash.
CB: Oh was it?
CD: And a black pall of smoke to follow.
CB: You couldn't see-
CD: Joe Her- incidentally, Joe Herman saw that same one. That happened just off the North, from Orford Ness in the North Sea. Yeah.
CB: So you didn't see them before they collided, just the explosion 'cause it was in the dark?
CD: No no no it was just above us too.
CB: Was it?
CD: So you wouldn't see it above us.
CB: No.
CD: No, you couldn't help but see it. Just a blue flash.
CB: Yeah. So if we go forward a bit, you've now completed the sortie and you've landed. What happened next?
CD: [background noise] You go to debriefing. First person you saw, and always saw every time no matter what day or night was the Padre, the Station Padre. He was stood there just inside the door with the tea urn and the biscuits. And welcomed us back. And then we went and sat in our crew at one table, crews at another table, [background noise] and you systematically interviewed and told what you saw, [cough] things happened. The navigator was always logged in so as, right that aircraft went down at so many degrees east or whatever. And the others gave their remarks and that was it. You went down to the mess had a return meal, no matter what time of the morning or night. From there to bed.
CB: Was it as standard meal, you always got something?
CD: Egg, bacon and chips. [laughter] Yeah, egg, bacon and chips.
CB: Okay.
CD: Some used to craftily get in there and get a meal and weren't on operation. They, they sussed that one out. So the WAAF behind the co- the hot plate, had a list of all the crews that were in operation and they used to ask you your name and if you weren't on there she didn't give you a meal, which is fair enough. How other way are you going to defeat it? And that's not all they did, tried to do, they did until they found it out. Yeah.
CB: So you've had your debrief, you've gone to bed, how long were you allowed to rest or sleep for before you had to do something else?
CD: We, you just got up and if it was too late a day to go and do a daily inspection then you didn't do it. You were probably on battle orders again the next night. I'll give you an instance, [background noise] they were very, the discipline to help the individual himself rather than not break his morale, they let discipline slide a bit. Whereby there was none of this saluting when you passed an officer and all that, as it was in training. I remember once in training at AGS, Dennis and I were walking up to the section and there were two officers coming down the drive. I says 'We'd better sling them one up, Dennis.' 'Oh, bugger him' he says, 'Bugger him' he says. I went up and he didn't. He got seven days [laughter]. 'That's alright for you.' I says, 'All you had to do, Dennis, was that.' Anyway, we came back to twelve noon again, and then, simple as that. That's strict discipline, that, you see and that, that didn't occur in- I'll give you the instance why. We had a billet inspection by Wing Commander Shannon, Dave Shannon, and we're all stood at the end of the bed, waiting for him and his entourage to come in and inspect, and Bob Elliott, the Canadian, he was in that far corner and he's still in his bed, he'd been on ops the night before. So immediately Shannon went straight over to him you see and he woke him up. [laughter] Elliott went like that on his poliasse, paliasse rather, 'What're you doing on that bed?' he said, 'I was on ops last night, sir', Oh well, alright, well get up and sweep this bit of bed fluff up.' [laughter] That's all that happened. Now, if he'd have done it the army way, he'd have blown the bloke to hell, wouldn't he? So they never, they never inclined to go down that road. In the army, his feet wouldn't have touched the ground. You know that. He'd have been in the glasses. But no, he just laid him back there 'I was on ops last night, sir.' 'Well alright, get on and sweep this bed fluff up.' I was stood down the other end, yeah, heard it all. That, that was the sort of discipline on the squadron.
CB: 'Cause we're talking about-
CD: We had to be at a level otherwise you'd have broke, you'd have broken up-
CB: Yep.
CD: You know what it is.
CB: Yeah.
CD: I don't have to tell you, do I?
CB: So, the accommodation is an H-Block.
CD: Yes.
CB: At Driffield.
CD: Yes.
CB: So that’s real comfort, relatively.
CD: Yes.
CB: Then you go to Foulsham, when did you get there?
CD: I remember, Nissen hut, wasn't it? I've got an old photograph of it in that other book, pimpernel book.
CB: Was that, what was the condition of that like? Comfort?
CD: Well Nissen hut, you had that all the way up in your training. [pause] I had a tortoiseshell stove and a mirror on the hut [laughter]. I always picked the bed away, yes, picked the bed away from there because they would all sit along the edge of your bed near the fire. [laughter] So I kept well away. But, oh, I had an incident at Bridgnorth. There was this farmer bloke, he was a farmer really, all Gloucestershire boy, you know. And he'd been out and had a few and he came back I was, I was half asleep I just got into bed. I hadn't been out. I never ever went out anyway, I was always religiously learning up, swotting up all the time. Plus, the letter writing, it all takes your evening up, doesn't it? So, I got into a habit. I never ever went out. Anyway, this night he comes back a bit worse for wear and I think he had a bit of encouragement from others and [background noise] he came and tipped my bed up. What does one do? I got straight up and hit him one. Only hit him once, honest to God, yeah, yeah. 'Oh uh buh' [?] he went, I thought 'Yeah.' I had every right, didn't I? And he had my left. [laughter] That was one of the incidents.
CB: What was the food like in general?
CD: Pretty good. Yes. Pretty good. Another, another incident there at Bridgnorth, you remember that advert, Chad? It was a head looking over a wall and a long nose hanging over the wall. Well, our, our instructor was a bloke called Firth, and he was, he was Jewish and he'd got just one of those conks you know [laughter] and in the ablutions up over the taps was: 'Beware, Corporal Cashew watching you' and that he was Corporal Cash, beware Corporal Cash is watching you pissing [[laughter]. Nobody was ever pulled up, what could they do about it?
CB: Banter.
CD: Another instance, going back off a weekend leave to Locking [?], Weston-Super-Mare, we always used to-
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Charlie Darby
Description
An account of the resource
Charlie Darby joined the Royal Air Force in September 1943 and recounts in great detail, his training as an air gunner/wireless operator on Wellingtons and Ansons at RAF Bridlington, RAF Bridgnorth, RAF Castle Kennedy, RAF Acaster Malbis and RAF Riccall. He explains how he crewed up at 21 Operational Training Unit, RAF Morton in the Marsh, before being posted to RAF Driffield with 466 Squadron, where he served as a rear gunner. He recounts operational experiences, including an operation to Bochum. He discusses discipline and living conditions. At the end of the war he was transferred to ground work and moved between a number of stations before being demobbed in 1947. He worked for Hoover and other companies before setting up his own engineering business. He recalls what happened to his crew after the war and his participation in the unveiling of a memorial in Driffield Gardens in 1993.
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-30
2015-07-07
Contributor
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Bethany Ellin
Heather Hughes
Format
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01:57:04 audio recording
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ADarbyC150630
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Bochum
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Atlantic Ocean--Irish Sea
England--Orford Ness
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.
100 Group
1658 HCU
21 OTU
462 Squadron
466 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
bombing
crewing up
demobilisation
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
memorial
military discipline
military ethos
military living conditions
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
RAF Acaster Malbis
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Bridlington
RAF Carnaby
RAF Castle Kennedy
RAF Driffield
RAF Foulsham
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Riccall
sanitation
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/150/1571/PBellinghamPF1602.2.jpg
249a7f80083ee604a3acfc4b9e41b2c6
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/150/1571/ABellinghamPF161121.2.mp3
927964b5233017d1c89457d142da31c4
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
Bellingham, Peter
Peter F Bellingham
Peter Bellingham
P F Bellingham
P Bellingham
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer Peter Frederick Bellingham (b. 1923, 1391638 Royal Air Force), a photograph and his log book. Peter Bellingham trained in South Africa as a bomb aimer and flew 30 Special Operations Executive operations in Halifaxes and Stirlings with 138 Squadron from RAF Tempsford.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Peter Bellingham and 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
2016-11-21
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.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bellingham, PF
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: And it’s now rolling. So my name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 21st of November 2016, and we’re in Whitfield near Brackley speaking with Peter Bellingham about his life and times before, during and after the RAF. So, what are your earliest recollections, Peter?
PB: Well, I was born in Charlton in London, SC18, at three – believe it or not I can remember, 3 Kinveachy Gardens [CB laughs], and I left when I was three years old. My parents bought a house in Welling in Kent. In those days it was in Kent, I believe it’s part of Greater London now, and it was very, very agricultural. We were part of a large estate, but our house actually overlooked a farm and you could not, not see another house at the rear. My father was at Siemens [emphasis] the electrical company, and he unfortunately died when he was fifty, just before when he was going to be made a director of Siemens. He had a very – he was in the First World War in the artillery, in the Territorials, and he stopped in the Territorials and was commissioned, and then he joined the Home Guard and ended up as a Lieutenant Colonel, Honorary Lieutenant Colonel after the war. In fact he led the parade of the Home Guard at the march past of the Victory Parade in London. Unfortunately he developed a brain tumour, they don’t know why, but it killed him in 1947 when he was fifty. That’s really enough about my parents. My mother carried on, she never married again, and she died when she was about eighty, I can’t honestly remember off hand. I went to school in Welling in Kent, which was in Kent then, and I spent the last two years at a Iris [?] technical college. I was destined to be an engineer because [laughs] I was good with my hands, and that, in my father’s view made me an engineer. But unfortunately, I left school in July of 1939, sixteen years old, and war broke out on the September. It wasn’t my fault incidentally [GG laughs] and I really, I was going to be a student of engineer, but all of those things stopped in the war, and I never got round to doing it, but I went into the Post Office Engineers for a short while. And I remember the Blitz very well, from the outskirts, and I remember walking home one afternoon, late afternoon, and watching the first daylight raid on London, and seeing all the fires from, on a wide arc, ooh something like about forty-five degrees I expect, and then making a resolution that I was going to be a Spitfire pilot. I didn’t as I say, I joined the Post Office Engineers as a makeshift job really, and in 1941, I’m not sure exactly when, but the government or the Air Ministry decided that they would recruit pilots and observers who had reached the age of seventeen and a quarter [CB laughs] and then they would attest them and then send them back in civvy street and call them up when they were ready for them. I was a bit over the seventeen and a quarter mark, but I did volunteer and went to Adastal House I think it was, in London, where I was – I didn’t have to move to London, I travelled to London each day for three days, and I did my attestation there. That was very simple for anyone just left school, mathematic test, intelligence test, and an essay on a choice of subjects, which I chose the importance of Gibraltar, a medical and I was duly accepted into the RAFVR, RAFVR [emphasis], as a pilot under training. Was given a little lapel badge RAFVR and a number 1391635AC2, pilot under training and sent home to be called up [emphasis] when necessary, when ready. In the beginning year, I’m not sure as, I think it was January of forty-two I was called up and went to Aircrew Receiving Centre, I think it was Number 1 Aircrew Receiving Centre, headquarters was at Lourdes Cricket Ground, and we were there for just short of three weeks. We ate and dined in the zoo [emphasis] [GG laughs] and we lived in the high class hotels [CB laughs, clears throat] overlooking, or near St Johns, in St Johnswood, very near the Lourdes Cricket Ground. But of course, instead of one bedroom for one person or two, there was about ten or twenty in it [laughs] but we slopped around there for nearly three weeks, and we were in flights of thirty, and then on the Thursday of the third week we were paraded out, and we were assigned to ITW, initial training wings. There was about ten or twelve of us that was left standing with nowhere to go and Corporal Speller, I remember his name [CB laughs], Corporal Speller, probably even an acting corporal [laughs] and he said ‘look,’ he said, ‘I’m not allowed to tell you this,’ but he said ‘you’re going to Southern Rhodesia, but don’t tell anyone I’ve told you.’ So sure enough, we were sent home to report to Blackpool on the Monday at the beginning of the fourth week in the Air Force. We did a bit of square bashing and getting inoculated and one thing and another at Blackpool, and then after a little while we were shifted up to Liverpool and kitted out – I can’t remember whether we were kitted out at Liverpool or whether we were kitted out at Blackpool, but we kitted out with tropical kit and had ATT and TAB injections and blood tests and whatnot, and then we were told by a very, very gnarled group captain that just because we’d got our tropical kit ‘means that you’re going to the tropics, it’s all done to fool the enemy’ [emphasis] [CB laughs]. So eventually after a week or two of medicals and one thing and another, we went off to Liverpool where we were stuffed almost into a boat, and we wallowed around for a week [emphasis]. After a week we sailed up to Scotland [emphasis], I’m not sure where, where we formed a huge convoy, and we left after about a week, and we headed north-west, more north I think than west, and it got very, very cold, and we began to think the group captain was right and we were going off to America or Iceland or somewhere [laughs] but we gradually turned south and we ended up after a while at Freetown. Incidentally, the convoy I counted I think it was over seventy ships, it was a huge [emphasis] convoy. In the middle were the troop ships, so there were all the Empress boats, the Empress of India, the Empress of Australia. I was in a uni, a Union Castle liner, the Arundel Castle, and that was pretty grim. We had a mess room, which I suppose there must have been about thirty people in, and then above the tables we had our hammocks which we strung. Well, as I say, we arrived – I could, I counted, did I say I counted about seventy ships [emphasis] I think it was. Huge [emphasis] convoy, the aircraft carriers and all sort of things, and lots of crumps [?] in the night and various rumours that floated around, and we arrived at Freetown. I can’t remember whether it was Sierra Leone but its Freetown [emphasis] and we were there for a week. It was jolly hot, and then we went off again south, and we ended up at Cape Town after about six weeks [emphasis]. And we spent a couple of nights at, days, nights, at Cape Town, and then we took a wonderful [emphasis] train journey up through the Hex River Mountains, to Southern Rhodesia in Bulawayo. We went to ITW I think it was, Initial Training Wing, which was completely different from other ones in Canada and England, in that you did six months at Bulawayo just on the ground course and went up to the wings exams, and I graduated from there. Had a wonderful holiday at Victoria Falls and then went up to EFTS, Elementary Flying Training School which was at Belvedere, which I think is now Harare [?] Airport. But it was the main airport in Salisbury in those days. But unfortunately I didn’t make the grade as a pilot – the old story you know, that they either had to ban everyone else from the air or ban me [CB laughs] so they banned me, but I, I did, I was very disappointed when I failed my, my flying. And then I was called in front of somebody and they said ‘but we have a marvellous new category. They’re splitting the observers into navigators and air bombers, and as an air bomber, you will continue your flying lessons and you will end up with a double wings brevy with a B in instead of RAF, and you will be the second pilot.’ So I thought that sounded good so I said ‘yes.’ So I went down to South Africa and went to East London, I can’t remember the name of the school. It was groundwork, very, very simple because I’d done it all before it was very simple stuff. And then went to Port Elizabeth, that was 42 Air Squadron, it’s all in here [bangs hand on something, presumably his book]. And then graduated as an air bomber [emphasis]. It was a bit early in those days for air bombers, and we were presented with the old O [emphasis] brevy, and we didn’t get that changed until we got back to England. Well we messed about in Cape Town which was a wonderful holiday, and then we sailed for England in the Moritania [?], and whereas coming out we took about six weeks, I think we took about ten days to get back to England. Very, very wonderful. I will say that when I was at East London I think it was – Port Elizabeth I think it was, I’m not sure where it was – anyway we, it was very much like a peacetime. We never did any work at weekends and we used to spend a lot of time at the sea. Beautiful surfing, without a surf board, we didn’t have a surf board in those days, and they had a boom [?] across the bay, a shark boom, which was supported by a big steel metal cable, and we used to, flew out to this cable and have a rest and then swim back. And this was I think for me the most scariest time for me in the war. I’d swam out once to this cable, by myself, and I was sort of hanging on resting and there was three fins, so I thought ‘oh my God I’ll get back inside.’ So I swam back inside and to my horror I found these three fins were circling me [laughs]. Course they were dolphins, but to me they weren’t dolphins [CB laughs] they were sharks [laughs]. And I swam like hell and clambered up the beach, and that was I think that was one of the most, if not the [emphasis] most scary time in the war believe, believe it or not. So anyway, we graduated, came back to England, went to Harrogate to wait for our kit, the CO of the unit there was Squadron Leader Legames [?], the English and Kent wicket keeper, and then we went off to Millom AFU. I don’t remember the number. The AFU is Advanced Flying Unit I think, I don’t remember what it was called. Millom is just opposite Coniston, and we had a lovely month or six months there, but we could get into Coniston in the Lake District there, beautiful. And it was there that unfortunately I found out that my brother was shot down, eventually became a prisoner of war. But then from three we went to Number 11 OTU, operational training unit at Westcott, with a satellite at Oakley. And I will just mention, you probably are aware but I’ll just mention, that’s where the individual aircrew, apart from the engineer, were pushed into big hangar or room, and told to sort yourself out and become air, a, a crew. And someone came up to me and said ‘are you crewed up yet?’ and I said ‘no,’ and they said ‘well come and meet who we’ve got.’ And there was a pilot, who was ancient [emphasis], he was about thirty-two [both laugh] and he seemed a very decent chap, and the others, so we were crewed up with a pilot, navigator, air-bomber, wireless operator, and two gunners. Six is that? Is that six?
CB: Mhm.
PB: Should be anyway. And, so we bombed around there, and did our flying training. We had several episodes. We had one particular episode where as we came into land, the Wellington, the radial Wellington was subject to pushing out flames from the engines – it was a radial engine. And this time we decided that it was more than usual and that the engine was on fire. So he called, the pilot called up and we were told to land on the runway and come to a halt and switch everything off and we’ll be sorted out. Well we were sitting there thinking ‘oh thank god we’ve made a nice safe landing on one engine,’ and there was a great war [emphasis], roar, and [laughs] Wellington [?] took off and sailed overhead. We found out afterwards that it was an instructor pilot thank God and we dived out of the aircraft but before we could get very far away the blooming Spitfire took off [laughs]. The wing commander and the squadron leader ops [?] whatever he was called, they came flying [emphasis] out and they, they blew their top and they said ‘you knew very well that it pushes out flame,’ and we said ‘well no it was more than that, it was the engine was on fire, and you press the gravendor [?] switches and you know, that kills the engine and ruins it.’ So anyway he said, more or less, ‘I’ll have your guts for garters [laughs] if you, you’re wrong’ and we weren’t wrong, but I should imagine someone really got called over the coals for it, because obviously the caravan that they have at the end of the runway which gives you a green light to takeoff, and the flying control weren’t in control [emphasis], and we never heard anything so we presumed it was on fire. Well we’re convicted it was on fire. Another little episode we had – we had many a sort of scrape with single engine landings and what thing or another. It was notorious [emphasis], the Wellington at an OTU, officers, operation training unit, for accidents. But one of them which was damned nearly my demise, was that some boffin at Air Ministry decided that it would be a good idea for air crew to have a sort of maintenance exercise, so if they were shot down in the middle of Berlin they could patch up their aircraft and takeoff. It’s a wonderful idea but absolutely useless I think [CB laughs]. Anyway, one very, very foggy day, we were sent out to, what do they call them now, the dispersal units, and there was this Wellington and we went round and did our job. I finished mine, and I went round to the rear gunner, and of course the Wellington rear turret was right on the ground, I mean the aircraft in those days did three point landings, they didn’t have tricycle things. And the two guns were sticking out, and I was leaning against this machine gun, a Browning, right into my ribs, and I suddenly thought ‘well that’s not a very bright thing to do.’ So I moved across and because it’s all open at the back, and I had the two guns either side of my ribs, and I was just about to speak to the rear gunner and the damn thing went off [both laugh]. There was a huge whine [emphasis] as the bullet travelled and we knew we were somewhere around the houses, and we thought ‘my God.’ And the mechanic saw the machine gun is if there’s one up the spout, if the breech goes forward it goes off bang and that’s it, and someone had obviously left one up the spout, which is a thing you shouldn’t do. But we kept very quiet and no one was reported killed [laughs] so we thought we were alright [CB laughs]. Eventually we were messed around a bit, I won’t say where we went, I can’t honestly remember, but we ended up at 17 HCU, a higher conversion unit at Stradishall, and there we converted to Stirlings [emphasis] which was a great thrill, wonderful aircraft to me. And the very, very remarkable, not remarkable, memorable [emphasis] thing of that place was we were, took off once on some night trip, and – I can’t remember now, perhaps it wasn’t night. But anyway, took off and one of the wheels, the tyres burst, and the distance on the ground to the cabin was about twenty-six feet I think on a Stirling. You’re nodding, I think, I think that’s right. Anyway, we were fortune with the squadron leader, the flight commander and instructor, and he said ‘well that’s it,’ he said ‘we’ve got to do a belly landing’ he said, ‘we can’t land because if you try to land on one wheel, you’ll just, as your speed decreases to about eighty you would just drop a wing and you’d cartwheel and that would be the end of that.’ So we went to Woodbridge –
CB: Mm.
PB: Have you heard of Woodbridge? Woodbridge was a particularly designed aerodrome. I think, I think [emphasis] it was about a quarter of a mile wide and about four miles long. Now that’s probably an exaggeration but it was a huge [emphasis] airstrip basically, and it was designed for shot up aircrafts to come and land on it, you know if they got people who were injured, or the aircraft. So we were told to go and land at Woodbridge and go get rid of our fuel. So we bummed [?] around and dropped our load of fuel and then we went in. And I say, fortunately we were with a, with a squadron leader and he did a wonderful belly landing, and of course the danger is that if the props are milling around, or even the sparks, and ‘poof,’ you know, you go up like anything. But I can remember seeing a blood wagon one side and a fire engine on the other. Whether or not they operated the fire engine I can’t remember, but anyway we came out and we were okay, it was wonderful [emphasis]. So eventually, we were to be sent to a squadron. Now, as I said my, my pilot was a, I think he was a journalist but his father was the equivalent of an MP, and he had a lot of clout and he was a great mate of the High Commissioner, would his name be Fraser? Memory’s – but anyway, he came back from, from a leave once, a weekend or something, and he said ‘ooh’ he said ‘I’ve met an old friend of mine that’s just finished a tour of operations with a special duty squadron.’ Now he said ‘I can’t, he won’t tell me what it’s all about but,’ he said ‘for God’s sake try and get on that squadron. It’s 138 Squadron.’ So as I say, this chap had a certain clout and he came back and he said ‘how do you feel?’ And we said ‘oh yes, anything’s better than the bluming’ old coffin run or whatever you’d call it,’ so sure enough we got posted to 138 Squadron [emphasis]. Well we had a wonderful welcome, Wing Commander Burnett, he was a Canadian, and there was another crew with us, and he paraded us, well we went into his room and he said ‘well,’ he said ‘I’ll be honest with you’ he said ‘the sooner I can send you back the better, because’ he said [laughs] ‘I don’t want Stirling pilots, we operate Halifaxes,’ but he said ‘don’t mose around or anything and keep your head on the ground.’ And he called us in the next day and said ‘well I’ve been told that I’ve got to accept you because we’re going to transfer to Stirlings’ [CB laughs]. So that was [laughs] quite a start but we did. And we had to do a certain amount of training obviously because it was a different type of operation. The air, mid upper gunner was made a dispatcher. He didn’t get a different brevy but he was called a dispatcher, they did away with the mid upper turret on the Halifax and later on the Stirling, and he was sent on a parachuting course, and I had to go on a map reading course for about a month [emphasis] I think it was. And the pilot had to transfer onto Halifax, which was quite easy really. And we, that’s what we did. Oh, to go back [emphasis], it was quite true to start with that I did do a lot of pilot training, a lot of link [emphasis] work, you know, the link trainer, and on a, on a Halifax I was a second pilot, and on a Stirling that was wonderful – I liked the Stirling that was wonderful. We had great armour plating seats and there was dual control it was really lovely. But later on, the Lancasters of course the engineer was the second pilot, so we started off on ops. I, my first op, the navigator, the bomb aimer and the pilot had to do an op with an experienced crew for the first op so we did those and then we started doing our normal ops. And a very strange thing happened to me, and it was after somewhere around five ops. We used to get bacon and eggs, we were very privileged, we got bacon and eggs before we took off, and I went down after several ops and I began to feel awful. My head felt it was imploding [emphasis]. I can’t describe it but I just couldn’t, I couldn’t, couldn’t do anything. And so I got up and paced around, and then we went out to the aircraft and believe it or not when we got in the aircraft I was perfectly alright. And it happened for two or three ops, and I really don’t know what it was but I think it must have been an anticlimax. My father being in the Great War, and sometimes unbeknown to him I sometimes used to hear some of his stories with his friends, and I had a great worry that I would not be able to make it, and I think it was all to do with that, I don’t know. Unfortunately it only happened a couple, three times and I was alright ever since then, perfectly alright. We had more or less a trouble free, more or less a trouble free tour of operations, and I finished, but I tell you that the squadron, in fact the whole, whole, both squadrons, 161 was the sister squadron, we were very lax in our discipline. We, we didn’t have parades and our type of mission was the fact that there was very rarely more than one aircraft on a target. I think there was sometimes two but I don’t think there were more than that. And believe it or not – well we couldn’t have a general [emphasis] briefing like they do on the films and things, we had individual briefings, and the pilot, navigator and air bomber, they went in and we discussed our route, and we chose our own route [emphasis]. I mean it doesn’t sound possible but we did. We used to say ‘right, well from experience from both us and other crews, we don’t want to go over that place, and we don’t want to go there,’ and we used to choose [emphasis] our own route to the target. And we used to fly low, I mean how low to give you an example was that once the rear gunner said to the pilot, ‘oh skipper, can you please go up a bit, I’m getting absolutely soaked with the slipstream.’ And I can remember going across Denmark once and seeing, I think it was a bungalow I can’t remember exactly, but seeing a house or a bungalow lit and the woman cross over and then the lights went out. That’s, I mean that’s how low we were. And I think that’s really what saved our bacon, being so low, because we were unexpected and too low for the radar and various things. We used to navigate mainly by map reading. Very, very difficult to get fixes whether they were radio or G-fixes, but the ideal thing was bends in rivers of course and woods [emphasis], and the woods on the continent were absolutely perfect [emphasis] on the maps and we used to plop from a corner of a wood to a bend in a river and – so we would arrive and the targets were invariably lights, three lots of lights a hundred metres apart, obviously, you know, downwind. And we would approach and they would signal up and we would – obviously each, each target had a different signal, an A, a B or something, and we used to go in and we used to drop our load and the dispatcher would push the parcels out, whatever they were, at four hundred feet, and if we had any what we called Joes [emphasis], agents onboard, that was six hundred feet, and they jumped with a static line, and the dispatcher used to make sure they went – I don’t know if they used to kick them out the back door or not [GG laughs]. I don’t think they had to they were wonderful people. And that was it. We got shot at once or twice but nothing to worry about. One day we were told that we couldn’t make base, and we’d have to go to Woodbridge, and that was quite an experience because the whole place was covered in fog and they’d brought out a new thing called FIDO, have you heard of FIDO? Basically I think it was cans of fuel [emphasis], kerosene, diesel, something, each side of the runway, and they’d generate so much heat that the fog would lift. Well I think we must have been one of the first crews to do it, because when we went in we were on a Stirling and we had dual control, and when we went in, we went in and obviously we couldn’t see the land but, at that stage, but we were tossed around like a cork in the ocean. I mean one minute there was nothing on the clock and the next minute there was eighty and – anyway we got down and we were okay and that was at Woodbridge and then came back. Erm, we had, as I say, no real discipline [emphasis], no parades, nothing like that, and one day we, we were stood down – I mean the fortune [emphasis] thing as regards us was we only operated I think it was about ten days, ten days either side of full moon for obvious reasons, and this was during the operational period, but we used to do two nights on ops and then one off, and on our night off and the next day we weren’t flying, we took our ground crew out for drinks which we did regularly, and we got a little bit too much to drink. We were all NCOs at the time, the crew, and we went to sleep and then someone came rushing in and said ‘God you’re in trouble, they been tannoying [?] for you from the flights, you’ve got to report to the flights,’ which was almost unheard of. Anyway we, we went down and the Squadron Leader Rothwell, he was as mad [emphasis] as hell, and he said, you know ‘I’ve been looking for you, you’re in front of the wing co.’ And we went in front of the wing commander, who gave us a bit of a ribbing, and said ‘right’ he said, ‘I’m sending you to Sheffield,’ and that was a discipline course of three weeks, and it was where Spitfire, well [emphasis] where fighter pilots who landed with their wheels up – I mean we were far too valuable [emphasis] to get court martialled but we had to be punished [emphasis]. But after about three or four days, we got returned to base, and there we learnt that the whole trouble was that our flight commander, Squadron Leader Rothwell, he was about twenty-two I think, or twenty-three, and he was like a, you know, like a big school boy. And he thought it would be a brilliant idea to post the, we were A flight, B flight commander to the Far East, but unfortunately the Squadron Leader Brogan, he was married and got a little baby and they lived out, probably unofficially, but he was very, very upset, and he did it officially through the Orderly Room. I mean you don’t argue with a squadron leader, or you shouldn’t do [CB laughs] and a lot of friends, and probably the same rank as him said ‘look, you just coming [?] yourself too long, it’s no good it’s gone beyond a joke,’ and they told this Squadron Leader Brogan and they almost, I hear, they almost came to fisticuffs. We didn’t learn this until we got back. Now the reason we got back after three days was [laughs] because Rothwell, he went on an op – now it’s conjecture that he might have taken the op that we should have taken because the squadron leader was only allowed to do so many ops a month and a wing commander so many, and it’s conjecture that he might have taken our place. But anyway he, he went down on his, I think it was about seventy ops he did, seventy, seventy-two, and he went down by hitting the cables of balloons just off the coast of Holland, and he was taken a prisoner of war. And of course he gets to a PW camp, POW camp, and it’s [?] the flight commander [laughs]. My brother [emphasis] was under him but he never, isn’t it coincidence [emphasis], he never –
CB: Phshhh –
PB: Admitted to my brother that I was, you know, on his squadron. But anyway, perhaps it would have been best if wing command, if Squadron Leader Brogan had gone to the Far East because he was appointed CO [phone rings]. Oh, would you excuse me?
CB: I’ll stop it for now. [Tape is paused]. Brogan should have gone to the Far East.
PB: Pardon?
CB: Brogan should have gone to the Far East.
PB: Yes, I think he should have gone to the Far East, because he became wing commander of 161 Squadron and was shot down and killed shortly afterwards. So – and we had a habit of that. We had a – Watson, Squadron Leader Watson was a flight commander, I think it was, he took over from Rothwell, and he was made wing commander of 161 and he was shot down and killed so, it seemed to be a death warrant, going to wing commander 161. So anyway, what happened. So we were commissioned. In fact, our pilot, his commission came through before he actually went to Sheffield and he went to Sheffield as an officer, which was a bit better. My commission came through a couple of months later. What else happened – well we – it was a wonderful squadron, wonderful squadron, and I went through and finished my ops, did thirty ops. Went to France, Denmark, oh we did a trip to Germany, that was a bit out of the ordinary. That was in the Battle of the Bulge, you know, the Ardennes campaign. And our squadron and 161 Squadron were sent off to a just inside Germany to do a spoof attack, and we dropped dummies and fireworks and things to, you know, spoof attacks. So that was, that was, yes, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, went to Norway several times. I think the longest trip I did was ten hours fifty-five minutes. We, we used to take off and go to the target if we could find it, and then we’d come back to Lossiemouth or Kinloss and come back from there. Well them, then in, right at the end of the war, it was March – oh we did about the last op, with others, different [emphasis] targets, to Norway. No I think I must have – my last op was Denmark [emphasis], but anyway in March, I was finished my thirty ops, and the squad – 138 Squadron was, went to onto Lancs, and they retrained on Lancs, but they didn’t, I don’t think they ever did much after that because it was the end of the war. And I came to, up here Turweston. That was 17 OTU. And, well Turweston was the satellite of Silverstone, and I came as in instructor. I took an instructors course, a group instructors course, a Bomber Command’s instructor course and then a bombing leaders course, and saw out my time up here and then at Silverstone. They shut this place down and then I went to Silverstone and I was demobbed in 1946. I had a chance of a short service commission but by that time I’d got engaged to my present wife and I wouldn’t take the risk, I thought ‘do you know, there’s not the huge future for me,’ and I left the Air Force. I went back for a short while into the Post Office but I wasn’t at all happy and I came farming. My father-in-law had quite a large farm in those days, here in Whitfield, Manor Farm, and we got married and I, I worked on the farm. Do you want to know anything more of what I did?
CB: Yeah sure.
PB: Erm –
CB: Because farming’s a pretty varied experience in itself.
PB: Well that was, I thoroughly enjoyed farming – in fact of my son till carries on farming, and his son. I became chairman of the parish, I think mainly because no one else wanted to do it. I became church warden and we, the rector, he retired, and me being church warden, I had to take over the duties of – and I, they, we were priests in charge of Mr Payne at Sareshom [?] and he didn’t want to be, he said ‘I’m not going to be the chairman of the parochial church council’ so I had to be the chairman of the parochial church council, and eventually I, I left being church warden, and I went into Rotary, I became president of Rotary, Brackley, and I’m a [coughs] I’m an honorary member of Brackley Rotary, and I took up golf [emphasis] and I was a member for many years at Buckingham, and then a member at Silverstone, and I’m actually [coughs] an honorary member of Silverstone, and I got two sons. One’s coming up sixty-seven and one’s coming up, what would he be, about sixty-five in October I think. Got four grandchildren, one grandson and three granddaughters, and five great-grandchildren – what have I got? Three, three great-granddaughters and two great-grandsons. And my son, my eldest son still carries on the farm. But unfortunately the HS2 is going to go straight through his house. And my wife unfortunately, about four years ago, she got Alzheimer’s and she’s in a home now. She’s, she’s struggling, put it like that. I’ve got erm [pause] authro, no – what do you call it?
CB: Osteoarthritis?
PB: Arthri - that’s right [pause] osteo – one of bones. Anyway, arthritis in the knees, I’ve had a cataracts operation in the left eye, I've got material, material degeneration in the left eye and bleeding, bleeding in the right eye, and bleeding in the right eye, which I have injects for so [laughs]. You know [laughs] I’m struggling –
CB: And you’re only ninety-three.
PB: Pardon?
CB: And you’re ninety-three.
PB: I’m ninety-three.
CB: Yes [laughs].
PB: I’m ninety-four next birthday, yep. And I think that’s, that’s all –
CB: What kind, what kind of farming was it, arable?
PB: No, no it –
CB: It’s livestock is it?
PB: I had a mixed farm, but my son’s turned it into a very large dairy farm. He’s got five hundred head of cattle and he’s got a milking herd of two hundred cows, but it’s all going to stop I think in a few months time. I don’t know what’s going to happen [coughs]. Which is rather a shame really. My in-laws came here in 1914 [CB laughs] and [wrapper rustles] it was a big farm then, it was about five hundred acres [continued rustling]. But that’s, that’s, I think about it – would you like a sweet?
CB: Thank you.
[Tape paused and restarted. Rustling continues]
PB: Shortly [?] I was –
CB: So where, where did you meet your wife?
PB: Well that’s what I was saying –
CB: Yes –
PB: My wife, Stella –
CB: Yeah –
PB: I, I met her at an officers mess party up at Turweston here, in about April of forty-five, and erm, we hit it off straight away [zipping noise] and we got married in 1947. [Puts something, presumably a sweet, into his mouth.] Sixty-nine years ago, isn’t it?
GG: Mm.
CB: Quite a while.
PB: Pardon?
CB: Quite a while.
PB: Quite a while.
[Tape paused and restarted.]
CB: That’s very useful because it’s covered right through your working life, but going back to 138 Squadron, what were the crew members like, individually?
PB: Erm –
CB: So the pilot was quite old.
PB: What, what my crew –
CB: Yeah, yeah.
PB: - In particular? Well there was one [emphasis] one, erm, odd one, and as I said before – I didn’t mention actually, what I didn’t mention was that when we went to Stradishall [emphasis] to pick up a, to train on a Stirling bomber, we picked up a flight engineer. And he was always [emphasis] the odd one out. He was married, but we know that he had a girl in the village [CB laughs] and he was the odd one out. Otherwise all the other crew we were very close, we used to – right from our Westcott days, our OTU days we used to go out to out to the pub to drinking together and – we did drink too much in the war, there’s no question at all. But another very interesting thing which I might add, was I had a friend there who was a, a Lysander pilot on 161 Squadron, Bob Large. I don’t know whether that name’s cropped up at all.
CB: No.
PB: But Bob Large was an ex-one squadron [?], fighter of, erm, what – Battle of Britain pilot. And his wing commander was a chap called Boxer, who ended up air marshal or very high rank indeed. He’s dead now but he’s very high rank. And he wasn’t terribly popular this Box, Boxer, but Bob Large, he was a very popular chap. Flight Lieutenant Battle of Britain pilot, and he was, erm, what’s the word – framed [emphasis] if you might like to put it, by Boxer because one night when birds were grounded there was no flying at all, Boxer knew that Bob Large had gone off to the pub, local pub, and he put out a tannoy for him, and of course he didn’t turn up, so he court martialed him. And the rules of court martial are the court can’t have people that are on the same squadron on same unit, so the way they got over it, they posted the court, several of the senior officers, to other stations for the court martial. But he was found guilty and the facts were there and he was sentenced to be cashiered [emphasis]. And he told me afterwards – I’ll tell you why, he told me afterwards that he, he told me afterwards that he was the only one as far as he knew that was reprieved [emphasis] by the king, and the king stepped in and said ‘no.’ So he was, he lost two years seniority which was, didn’t mean much at all to him, but I didn’t learn this until after the war, and the reason I learnt this, going back to Peter Westcoombe [?], he invited me to, to Bletchley when they opened an SOE section, and he introduced me to the director who was a woman, I didn’t catch her name, but afterwards I was chatting to her. ‘Oh, my father-in-law was at Tempsford,’ I said ‘oh yes, when was he there?’ such and such. ‘Oh I was there then, what was his name?’ ‘Large.’ I said ‘good gracious me,’ I said ‘I know Bob Large very well, I knew him very well,’ and he gave me his, she gave me her telephone number and I rang him and we had a long conversation and he told me that he, he said ‘I’m sorry,’ but he said ‘I did deserve to be cashiered,’ you know, ‘I knew I was wanted for, I should be available,’ but of course as I said the birds weren’t flying. But anyway, he, he went back and lost his seniority for two years and ended up flying commercially for different people [CB laughs]. But, and he bought back that, what was her name? Violet, Violette Szabo?
CB: Szabo.
PB: He bought her back once –
CB: Mm.
PB: From France. And in this book – you should, I’m not going to let you have this unfortunately, I don’t want this to leave my – but if you, if you want [emphasis] you should be able to get it from the library –
CB: This is “By Moonlight” –
PB: And, erm –
CB: - Is the name of the book.
PB: In there it said that, which is unbelievable [emphasis] but I’ve read it and it said that only two Lysanders were missing on ops in the war. Incredible [emphasis] isn’t it?
CB: Extraordinary.
PB: And one [emphasis] of them was almost certainly shot down by a Mosquito [CB laughs] in mistake for a Fieseler Storch. And you remember, course the last pin point of it, well they knew when it was shot down, but when the Mosquito reported that it had shot down a Fieseler Storch at such and such a place, there was no doubt the Mosquito shot it down. You can’t really blame the Mosquito I suppose, but, yeah.
CB: And it was in the night.
PB: Well there are – if you look at the history of 138 and 161 – 138 in particular, the, the heroes, illustrious people that were associated, it was, they were, the chap that did the Amiens prison break out –
CB: Mm, Pickard.
PB: What was his name?
CB: Pickard. Pickard [emphasis].
PB: Yeah Wing Commander Pickard. He was on, I think it was 138 Squadron.
CB: Mm.
PB: ‘Cause 138 Squadron were started as a flight, and it was the King’s Flight. The group captain, who was still a group captain when I was at Tempsford, was chap called Fielding, Mouse Fielding. And he was the King’s Pilot, and there was all the different squadron officers and people. They were all on, they all wore, they all wore scarlet [laughs] lining to their jackets. And as I say, it started as a flight, it, it really – you really, I’m not going to lend you this because things go astray –
GG: Mm.
PB: But if you can get a copy, then it’s quite interesting reading.
CB: Hmm, mm.
PB: But, erm. It started off as a flight and they flew these two engine things to Poland and places and then gradually they got more sophisticated and they were landing Hudsons as well in the war. That was 138 Squadron, one, one, 161 Squadron I mean. But, and then they split one, 138 and 161 they made, and all the landing people like the Lysanders and the Hudsons were 161, and the heavies were 138.
CB: Now when you arrived at Tempsford, you didn’t know what you were in for –
PB: No –
CB: You said earlier –
PB: No.
CB: But 138 and 131 had a specific –
PB: 161.
CB: 161, sorry – had a specific requirement to re-affirm [emphasis] their –
PB: Well as Churchill said ‘set, set’ er –
CB: Official –
PB: ‘Set France alight.’
CB: Yes but Official Secrets Act you had to go through that again, so what was that? Tell us what that was.
PB: The Official Secrets Act?
CB: No, no. You had to reaffirm it because of what you were doing.
PB: You know I don’t remember that.
CB: Okay.
PB: I don’t remember, but we were, as I say it was very, very laid back, and when the wing commander Burnett said ‘well I’m afraid I’ve got to accept you, I, we’re going to re-master with Stirlings soon,’ so –
CB: Mm, [laughs].
PB: ‘I’ve been told that, you know, I’ve got to accept you.’ And he didn’t say, you know, ‘keep your head down’ or anything, he just said ‘welcome to the squadron.’
CB: Yeah.
PB: And we went our separate ways, we, as I say I had to go on an intensive map reading, low level map reading round England [CB clears throat]. The mid upper gunner was, lost his guns, lost his turret, and he went on a parachute course to Ringwood I think it was. And [pause] it was, looking back it was amazing really how informal [emphasis] it was.
CB: Mm.
PB: And I mean it was unbelievable when you hear about it and when you see these big briefings where, you know, ‘your target for the night is Berlin, urghhhh,’ [CB laughs], I mean we had nothing [emphasis] like that at all. We, we just used to go into a room, pilot, navigator and air bomber [CB clears throat], and they’d say ‘your tar’ – and there again [emphasis] I don’t know whether you realise this, I haven’t mentioned it, but your target was given a code name, and all of France was part of a horse, have you heard that?
CB: No.
PB: Yeah, the – it was Saddle One or Girth Two or Stirrup One or Denmark, I don’t remember what Denmark or Norway were, but they were never anywhere [emphasis], not in my logbook, it’s just Operation France or Operation Denmark, there’s never any mention – there must be some records in the Ministry somewhere of where these targets were.
CB: Mm.
PB: I remember we were in the South of France and that was no problem at all [emphasis]. There was a great big bonfire and we had a thing called S-Phones, which was new to us, and it was a walkie-talkie thing from about fifteen miles, and also it had red and green direction finding onto the target. So we went and dropped our goods, and then this voice said, oh it said ‘when you go back to England, will you look my sister up?’ [CB laughs.] ‘She lives at such and such a place,’ and we said ‘there’s no way we’re gonna look his sister up’ ‘cause if that got out we really would [emphasis] be for it, you know. So I’m afraid his sister never got the message, but erm, it was – I mean we used to drop our, we used to fly [emphasis] and then ascertain with the signal that it was the target and then we’d continue and drop our load and we’d go [emphasis], not because we were frightened but because it would give the enemy a clue if an aircraft was circling around.
CB: Sure.
PB: Erm –
CB: So if you missed a target what did you do?
PB: I’m afraid you just came back.
CB: Right.
PB: I didn’t, I didn’t lose many, I think of the thirty I did I probably didn’t, didn’t make six or something like that.
CB: Mm, so –
PB: I mean several of them were in Norway. I don’t know whether you’ve been to Norway but it’s a lot of snow [emphasis] in Norway –
CB: Mm.
PB: And if you’re given a target in Norway believe you me, it’s very [laughs] it’s very difficult to find.
CB: Identification points are very difficult aren’t they?
PB: Pardon?
CB: Identification points –
PB: Yes.
CB: Are very difficult.
PB: Yes.
CB: So could you just, can we just look at the briefing and how the sortie went? So at the briefing, how would that go?
PB: The debriefing?
CB: No, at the briefing itself, beforehand, so –
PB: Well as I say it was the pilot, navigator and air bomber and the others weren’t really concerned, they were just concerned with their job.
CB: Mm.
PB: And if there was any new things with gunnery or new things with signalling they would be told, but the actual trip, we sometimes had an agent [emphasis] who’d come back and he’d tell you what the business was like, but no, we were told that ‘this is your target, there it is, here’s your maps and which way do you intend to go?’ so you know, we’d say ‘well from past experience and what other crew have told us, it’s no good crossing the coast there, we think we should cross here,’ ‘yes,’ you know, ‘we agree with you,’ ‘and then we’ll go to this bend in the river, or this edge of a forest, road junction, avoid towns of course,’ and we’d get there.
CB: What – how would you plan the heights that you were flying at?
PB: Just low [laughs]. Damn low, as low as you could.
CB: Mm.
PB: And I think that’s what saved us a lot.
CB: Mm.
PB: That’s not on is it?
CB: It is, yeah.
PB: Pardon?
CB: It is now [emphasis], yes.
PB: Oh –
CB: Yeah.
PB: Oh, I won’t say anything more –
CB: What? Well I can stop for a moment.
PB: Well I just mentioned that we had a shortage of crews once –
CB: Yeah.
PB: And you can check it up, but erm, we had a shortage of crews before I got to the squadron, not sure when it was, it was something like, could have been June or something 1944, but they said ‘well obviously the best squadron is to have three aircraft from the Dambusters Squadron,’ and they sent three aircraft that promptly shot [?] the place up, marvellous flying marvellous pilots and everything, and everyone stared in awe, and they parked their aircraft and our ground crew went and said ‘oh no you can’t go in here we’ve got secret equipment,’ great fuss you know, so they said ‘alright, we’ll refuel and here’s your, what you’ve got to do.’ But unfortunately for them out of the three only one got back. And – is that on?
CB: Yeah.
PB: I got my theories and I’ll probably be court martialed [laughs] or something for this –
CB: Not now you won’t [laughs].
PB: [Laughing] I’ve got my theories that the reason that the 617 Squadron lost so many planes on the dam raid and also for a short while afterwards they, they really come, came unstuck was because low level to them was not low level what I call –
CB: Mm.
PB: And I mean the most vulnerable [emphasis] place to be is about three-thousand feet. I’m not saying they flew at three-thousand feet but I think that if they’d have flown a bit lower – I don’t know about this I’m talking a load of rubbish I know, but I think if they’d have flown a bit lower they might have got away with it, you know, but that’s – but they certainly came to us and, and out of the three only one got back.
CB: And what were they doing when they were with you?
PB: Pardon?
CB: What were they doing when they came to you?
PB: Well they’d just done the dam raid –
CB: Yeah but those three [emphasis], what did they, what, what were they doing?
PB: [Pause] what when they came to us?
CB: Yes.
PB: Well they were doing just the normal job that we did, because we were so short of crews we wanted, you know –
CB: So they were dropping supplies as well?
PB: Yes, yes.
CB: Right.
PB: Dropping agents, I don’t know about agents, I don’t think they dropped agents, there’s no mention of agents being killed, but they certainly were dropping supplies –
CB: Mm.
PB: And two of them, whether they were shot down or not I don’t know, but it said that only one returned to base, which, I think Cheshire was the wing commander and he wasn’t very pleased about it, but erm, yeah.
CB: So when you were on your ops then, what was the division of labour? Because you were right out, right out at the front, you were – were you feeding stuff back to the navigator or were you telling the pilot directly where to go?
PB: Erm, I was mainly in the second pilot’s seat, I did my map reading from the second pilot’s seat. And then when we were over the target obviously I was in the nose, but I didn’t have a bomb site, we just flew down the, the lights, bonfires or torches or whatever they were, and dropped, as I say, it was four hundred feet for parcels and the canisters and six hundred feet for agents.
CB: So at what stage from the target would you be moving to the bomb aimers position? How many miles out?
PB: Well when we were probably on the circuit. Just before we went, just before we, we – I made sure if possible that we were at the target and check that I was sure we were on the target I think we got the signal, then I would go into the bomb aimer’s position.
CB: Mm.
PB: But it wasn’t a question of getting anything fixed up. All you did was select the bomb switches and then press the button when the pilot flew down the –
CB: So the stores are all in the bomb bay –
PB: Pardon?
CB: The supplies are all in the bomb bay, and –
PB: Yes, and in the fuselage –
CB: Right.
PB: Packages.
CB: And could you drop the lot at the same time or did you have to have a sequence?
PB: Well there was a sequence which was automatic on the, on the –
CB: On the release.
PB: On the release –
CB: Mhm.
PB: I mean, I think it was almost instantaneous you know, one one one one, wasn’t a question of the whole [emphasis] lot together and it wasn’t a question of many seconds in between. It was a question sort of one two three four five, like that.
CB: Were they just dropped as they were or did they have parachutes?
PB: [Pause] they had parachutes [emphasis].
CB: Right.
PB: Yeah [laughing] yeah. For a minute [laughs, GG laughs] I couldn’t remember, but no I do remember they had parachutes, yeah, yes.
CB: Including the ones that were pushed out by the dispatcher?
PB: Oh do you know – I would imagine so but I don’t know [emphasis].
CB: With a static line? [?]
PB: I think if they’d have landed [coughs] without, they’d have smashed when they hit the ground.
CB: Mm.
PB: [Coughs]. But [pause] but –
CB: So you’re going over the target and you’ve dropped your supplies. How did you proceed back from there?
PB: Well the navigator had already worked out a course for home, and I don’t think I took much of a part. I, I think I’d checked obviously on what was going on –
CB: Mm.
PB: But I think the navigator gave the courses and we got back home [emphasis]. But the unfortunate thing was that after the V1s started we were ordered, all aircraft were ordered to come back into England over ten-thousand feet, and that was a damn nuisance. I had a friend that was shot up with the Royal Navy, and he was flying at a nice comfortable ten-thousand feet and the – that’s, that’s the story – is that on?
CB: Yeah, yeah.
PB: Well this is the story – I can’t remember the pilot’s name now. He was a New Zealander and he got shot up by the Royal Navy and he said ‘fire [?] the colours of the day [emphasis].’ Well the colours of the day were in a varied [?] pistol above the signaller’s head, in the roof. And he didn’t know what to do, and when they landed, the pilot was absolutely mad [emphasis] and he said ‘you stupid idiot,’ or words to this effect, probably more tastier than that [CB laughs], but he said ‘look,’ he said, ‘here’s a pistol, you just press it.’ [Laughs, GG laughs]. And he pressed it and set fire to the aircraft [all laugh]. And I don’t know whether it was a – I think it was probably superficial damage but, erm, yeah.
CB: So, the point, am I right in saying, of flying above ten-thousand feet was so that the people on the ground would not be shooting at higher level aircraft? Because they were shooting at the V1s.
PB: Yes, yeah. But, erm, we were, we were shot up by the Americans once as we, as we were going into the tar – well not going into the target but crossing our lines, and I suppose you can’t blame them really if they hear or see any aircraft they’re going to take evasive action, but – there were lots of instances. I remember a friend of mine he became a roommate of mine when I was first commissioned, and they couldn’t make the, the height [emphasis] above the clouds, the cumulonimbus, and the pilot went underneath and they got struck by lightning, and he was blind for a week. He walked around with the dark glasses, but he got his sight back. But he ended up with a DFC, he shot down two one-nineties [emphasis] which was very unusual.
CB: Was he mid upper or rear gunner?
PB: He was a rear gunner. He – and there again, coincidence and everything, he, he was my roommate, we were both commissioned together and he finished his tour just before me, and he went away, I lost touch with him. And years later my brother had returned from being a prisoner of war, and he was made CO of a, of an aircrew reclassification unit in Hereford I think it was, where the, all the redundant aircrew were put other jobs, you know, administrative jobs and various things, and who should be one of his pupils but this flying officer Dunning? Very strange.
CB: Hmm.
PB: But a story about him which is perfectly true and a modern person wouldn’t believe it I don’t think, but we used to go, about a flight of thirty, and have our different injections, TAB and ATT and blood tests, and he was a Liverpudlian, or near, near Liverpool, and he lined up and he had his injection, I don’t know which one it was, and within milliseconds [emphasis] he collapsed, and they said ‘oh my God,’ you know, ‘another wimp.’ Put him on the couch and then someone happened to look and said ‘my God he’s gone the colour of crimson’ [emphasis]. So they called, you know, the hospital, and called his mother [emphasis] actually, his father was in the army. But he was touch and go, and what had happened was, you, I don’t know about in your time, but in those days the doctors just used a needle until it was blunt. I mean there was no question of use once and throw away, but unfortunately for him the doctor had changed shift and put his syringe down with the serum in it and the next doctor picked it up and gave this friend of mine the lot, and this previous doctor had put about five doses in the syringe [emphasis].
CB: Jeez.
PB: And the doctor that took over didn’t realise this and he gave this friend of mine the whole [emphasis] lot.
CB: Jeez.
PB: And it damn nearly killed him.
CB: Mm.
PB: I mean, I know that’s true because he told me, but.
CB: Mm. Hm.
PB: We had another crew that – if they were right down in the South of France, I never did have the luxury of doing it, but if they were right down in the South of France, very often they would fly through to Northern Africa, Algeria I think it was, Blida [emphasis], is Blida North Africa?
CB: Mm.
PB: And they would refuel and everything and then come back, and I think probably drop some more supplies on the way back, but this crew, they started back and they’d got all the goodies which you’d never see, oranges and things [CB laughs], and they started losing height, and I think that part of Africa, I think was a thousand feet above sea level, but they gradually lost height until throwing everything that was movable [emphasis] over board, they said ‘it’s no good’ and they’d seen a, a ship which was lights on and they landed by it. And it turned out to be a, a Portuguese ship, neutral ship, and in the ditching, this friend of mine who’s an air gunner, he got a DFM for it, he rescued someone, but one of them was killed. I can’t remember who it was, and they came back to England and they, they were landed somewhere in Portugal and they flew back. But talking of that sort of thing, is this on?
CB: Mm.
PB: There’s a friend of mine who’s well tabulated, he’s, he’s in Max Hastings’ “Bomber Command” book – did I say a friend? He was a brother-in-law actually, my [CB laughs] wife’s sister’s husband, chap called Bill McGrath. Have you heard of him?
CB: Nope.
PB: Well he’s in the official history and everything. And he was a pre-war observer, and he was on the Blenheim Squadron, eighty-seven I think it was. Anyway, he was on the squadron and the Battle of France, before the Battle of Britain, Battle of France, and they used to go out in formation in Blenheims at about ten-thousand feet, and really get messed up, and he went out one trip and he was the only crew to return, and the next trip he went out the whole lot were shot down. And this is absolutely true, it’s, you know, it’s in the official recordings, and he was, he ditched [emphasis] and he was badly injured. He lost the sight of one eye but he never lost the eye, and he was injured but he was made a prisoner of war. He escaped [emphasis] three times [CB laughs]. And the first time, or second time he was recaptured, and the second time he gave himself up, the two of them because they were so cold and hungry, and the third time they made it from Paris, all the way down through France, over the Pyrenees and he got a [pause], what do you call it, erm, a military medal for it. But he carried on flying [CB laughs]. He was instructing [emphasis] and carried on flying, but he hadn’t got sight in one eye, he’d lost it. But he used to memorise the sight chart, and one day he, they changed the sight chart and they said ‘my God you’re blind’ [CB laughs] and he said ‘yes,’ so they says ‘right,’ and he was Irish, Northern Irish actually, or Southern Irish, Irish, and they said ‘right, you’re –’ he was a warrant, I think he was a warrant officer, sure he was a warrant officer. Anyway, he was, erm, reduced to a ground duty job and lost his seniority, and so, being Irish he wrote to his mother [emphasis]. He said, knowing that the letter would be, you know, scrutinised –
CB: Mm.
PB: And he said ‘I’m seriously thinking of leaving. I’m, I’m, I’m Irish so I can [emphasis] leave,’ said ‘it’s disgusting treatment,’ and the CO got to hear, course, course it was –
CB: The censor read it.
PB: Pardon?
CB: The censor [emphasis] read it.
PB: Censored, yeah. And he went in front and he said ‘what’s this McGrath,’ and he said what had happened, and he said ‘oh well don’t do anything,’ he said ‘we’ll see you’re okay.’ And he got commissioned in the [coughs] what was called Flying Control. But that’s the way they treated them. If he’d not been Irish he would have lost all his flying pay and his rank and he was, it was, yes he was – and he’s quoted in I think it’s Max Hastings’ book “Bomber Command,” Bill McGrath [emphasis]. We used to call him Mac but he’d referred to as Bill McGrath. My brother, they [laughs], they say that all air crew are volunteers. I don’t think that was strictly [emphasis] true to be perfectly honest, probably ninety-nine percent, but my brother did the same as me and he was older, and he was attested and they said ‘yes okay,’ you know, ‘pilot under training. Now do you want to come in the Air Force or do you want to wait to be called up?’ ‘Oh no’ he says ‘I want to come in the Air Force,’ so they called him up and put him on a wireless operator course at Yatesbury, Wiltshire, and then when he passed his wireless operator course he said ‘well,’ you know ‘what about my pilots course?’ And they said ‘oh God no,’ they said ‘you’re a wireless operator flying, and you’ve got to do fifteen ops’ or something so he was I think an LAC when he came out of the radio school, and he went on about a six week air gunners course [laughs] and came in as a sergeant, wireless operator air gunner, and then eventually he was told that he’s got to do fifteen ops and unfortunately I think he was shot down on his fifteenth op, but he was a POW, but, yeah.
CB: How did he get on with that?
PB: Not at all well [emphasis]. He’s, he’s one that just didn’t – he was, he was I suppose only [emphasis] sounds awful, but he was about two years as a POW from August forty-three until about May of forty-five, and he stopped on the Air Force for a little while, for about three or four years, and he left the Air Force and got quite a nice job in the city and then he was, they used to go and have a ploughman’s lunch and he suddenly got up and he was vomiting blood in the gutter, and he got a burst ulcer, but he recovered from that. But the POW business really [emphasis] upset him and he couldn’t go on the top flight of a bus [emphasis] and all sorts of silly things. He held a job, but lived on drugs and then eventually they killed him, you know, the drugs were just too much, and –
CB: Mm.
PB: And, he was in his sixties when he died, but [pause] he was just one that didn’t take to being shut up.
CB: Mm.
PB: Incidentally, he said that they were, erm, what’s the word [pause], released [emphasis], that’s the wrong word. I can’t think of words nowadays, by the Russians [emphasis].
CB: Mm.
PB: And they all started to go out of camp and the Russians were really [emphasis] nasty, and the senior camp officer went to the Russian colonel and said, you know, ‘we’re on your side,’ so he said ‘oh yes of course’ and so he said ‘okay, now is there anything you want?’ and he said ‘well we’re very short of food,’ and my brother said they were terrible [emphasis], they were barbarians [emphasis], they used to go round to the farms and places, and they said ‘oh we want that pig, we want that,’ and if they said ‘oh no,’ bang [?] they’d shoot them, and when he came back, and he wasn’t the only one, he said to me ‘we should go straight [emphasis] into Russia now,’ and he was convinced [emphasis] that there would be trouble with Russia. He wasn’t far wrong but it didn’t develop into anything, but he, he was convinced [emphasis] that Russia wanted tackling straight away –
CB: Mm.
PB: But, erm, yes. I’ve been prattling on – I don’t know what you, probably –
CB: When you –
PB: Edit a lot of this [laughs].
CB: Well, you –
PB: [Laughing] cut it out.
CB: When, when you were on, on an operation [clears throat], what were you actually doing most in the – how were – what was your task during the flight?
PB: Map reading. Very intensive, I mean it’s, it’s like if, it, well it’s a bit more intensive obviously, but if you go from here to Scotland all with a sat-nav. They call them sat-navs?
CB: Mhm.
PB: You know, you sort of concentrate, ‘oh you turn right here, you turn left here, go over the roundabout,’ well I mean that was my job, I never had time to – unless they said ‘there’s an enemy aircraft’ or ‘there’s an aircraft’ or something I never, I never left the map, I was, you know, concentrating on the map, making sure that we were on track.
CB: And you could do that perfectly well from the co-pilot’s seat could you?
PB: Yes, yes. You could see pretty well. Yes I didn’t, I didn’t very often get down in the bomb bay until as I say, until we’d got right near the target, and identified the target. And the target was, each target had its code name, which sometimes was a lovely audislamp [?] and sometimes seemed to be a candle [laughs] yeah.
CB: And, er, it was only in the later part of the war that you had the walkie-talkie link?
PB: Yes we only used it once and that was getting on for the end of the war in the South of France.
CB: Yeah, so apart from that, how were you identifying your target when, say, the outside visual, immediate visual distance, so at twenty miles how would you be getting close to be sure that you were on target?
PB: Well you, you, you got as near as you could until you saw the fires or the lights, and erm –
CB: ‘Cause we’re in the dark aren’t we?
PB: Pardon?
CB: We’re in the dark all the time.
PB: Oh, well [emphasis] it was moonlight –
CB: Moonlight.
PB: And believe you me, flying sometimes like ten days each side of the moon, full moon, it was almost like daylight.
CB: Oh, right.
PB: And once they could hear you coming, and it didn’t take much to set fire to these bonfires –
CB: Mm.
PB: Or to have a light and flash the light –
CB: Mm.
PB: And they were always, you know, downwind, upwind, wind was – and there would be three of them, a hundred metres apart, and at the downwind end there was someone would be there, with a bit of luck it would be a nice audislamp [?] and if you were a bit unlucky it would be a dodgy flashlight [emphasis] which would [pause]. But it was remarkably [emphasis] efficient actually. I don’t know – I suppose somewhere along the lines someone could find out what the percentage of successful drops were, but I think they were fairly high.
CB: Mm.
PB: I’m not sure but I think I missed – I could do it now if counted them, but I think out of thirty I think I missed the target about six times.
CB: Mm.
PB: And as I said, two or three of those were in Norway, and that was, that was –
CB: Mm. Very difficult.
PB: Really horrendous [emphasis]. Flying over that snow, it was very difficult indeed.
CB: Erm, how often was the aircraft attacked [emphasis] during your operations?
PB: We were very lucky, we were hardly attacked at all. Very [emphasis] lucky indeed, I mean – in fact I think, I think you’ll find that if you were attacked you’d usually had it, because there’s no way of bailing out at that height.
CB: Mm.
PB: So I mean you’d – and if you’d crashed you’d – like this squadron leader chap, flight commander, I mean he hit a balloon cable the story is there –
CB: Mm.
PB: And he was, I think all the crew was safe [emphasis], but erm. If you were actually shot down at that height there was very little chance of [pause], yeah.
CB: But it was quite difficult for the night fighters to get down to you because their radar wouldn’t work against you close to the ground.
PB: No, no that’s [coughs] their radar?
CB: Yeah.
PB: No, no their – and of course unfortunately our radar [laughing] didn’t work when we were close to the ground.
CB: Mm.
PB: But –
CB: And did you have Monica?
PB: Hmm?
CB: Did you have Monica to test, to check if anything was following you?
PB: Did we have –
CB: Did you have the Monica receiver?
PB: No. No, we never had them. No, all we had was G.
CB: Yeah.
PB: And, and just on the one trip we had these things called S-Phones.
CB: Mm.
PB: But they only operated about something like fifteen miles away from the target –
CB: Mm.
PB: And it was a walkie-talkie thing, and then it had red and green and you could home in on the red and green [pause]. Yeah I personally don’t think there’s enough credit given to the resistance, I mean when you read of – you see that, what was his name, the armaments boss of Germany?
CB: Oh, Speer [emphasis].
PB: Speer.
CB: Mm.
PB: And he said that, erm, many more attacks and Germany were finished.
CB: Mm.
PB: And yet –
CB: Particularly after Hamburg.
PB: Yes, but you see I never – I, I, I’m a great admirer of Churchill, but he was a politician, and I’ll never [emphasis] forgive him for what he, his action [emphasis] he took after the Dresden raid.
CB: Mm.
PB: Now, I’ve got the official history of the RAF, three or four volumes of it, and it’s all [emphasis] tabulated there, letters and memos and things, and Russia wanted Dresden bombed [emphasis on last four words]. And they told Churchill and Roosevelt they wanted Dresden bombed. And Churchill said ‘yes, yes, okay.’ And the chief of the air staff did as he was told, and they said to Harris, Bomber Command chief, ‘we want you to bomb Dresden.’ Now it’s documented [emphasis] that Harris said ‘there’s no point [emphasis], absolutely no point, it’s civilian [emphasis] sort of population and it’s a lot of rubbish to say that’s it’s a complication of troops coming,’ and for two weeks he stalled, and then – I’ve got all this in print [emphasis]. And Churchill said ‘look, if you don’t do as you’re told you’re out.’ So he was an officer, he did as he was told and bombed Dresden. Within a short while, I don’t know whether it was days or weeks, days I think, Churchill was up in parliament condemning the raids on unnecessary civil populations. And of course, another thing which I won’t forgive him for which is all the same thing, was that he never gave Bomber Command a campaign medal.
CB: Mm.
PB: I mean, there was the Italian campaign, there was the Burma campaign, but never [emphasis] Bomber – I got a clasp, I got a Bomber Command clasp [coughs] a nice fibre [?] campaign [laughs] clasp.
CB: Did you get your French Legion of Honour?
PB: No, no, never got that. I never said I deserved it, I don’t think I did anything more than what hundreds of other people did. But I do think that the French should, perhaps they have done, honour the French Resistance more, I think they – and I think our government should have recognised the French Resistance, definitely. I mean there’s a story, one of the stories I remember – I used to read a lot of war books after the war, and there was a great big unit, regiment or something, from the south, and because of the French harassment, the resistance, Maquis Resistance. They took not days but weeks [emphasis] to get up to Normandy, and they, these things aren’t recognised [emphasis], you know, there’s –
CB: Mm. When you got to the end of your tour of thirty, how did you feel?
PB: [Pause, laughs]. Believe it or not, I applied to carry on with the squadron that were due to go out in the Far East [laughs]. I must have been mad [laughs] I think, I must [laughing] have been mad. But, my, my pilot as I say, he had a bit of clout, and he stopped on, on the squadron when it changed to Lancasters, and he got a job as an instructor, or a coordinating chap, but my, the present, the flight commander at that time, he asked people that were in the know, our bosses, if I could go as his bomb aimer but they wouldn’t let him, they said ‘no, he’s done his thirty ops and that’s it, he’s finished.’
CB: Mm.
PB: Tony Darsefton [?], and I read after the war that he was killed in a civil air crash. He became a civil airline pilot and was – I saw in “The Telegraph” obituary that he was killed.
CB: Mm.
PB: But, oh life is full of ifs.
CB: What would you say was your most memorable point about your RAF service?
PB: Most memorable [emphasis] point [pause]. I can’t answer that, you know, I, I’d have to have an hour to think about that I think. I suppose it must be when I did my last op. I suppose it must [emphasis] be really, to think that I’ve – and then again you see ,the war when I finished was nearly over, so I’d got every chance of surviving the war. Sounds melodramatic but, erm. But one never, one never actually thought about dying or getting shot down or anything, or, if you – I mean one or two friends [emphasis] were killed, but a lot of them were ships [?] in the night, ‘oh hasn’t that one returned tonight?’ and that sort of thing, you didn’t, you didn’t know too many people intimately.
CB: And after the war, did the crew keep together, in touch?
PB: Well [coughs] the short answer to that is no [emphasis], but, erm, I did have one of my, the mid upper gunner, dispatcher [coughs] he came to my wedding, and the rear gunner, he came and brought his little daughter, but it didn’t last long, just the one visit.
CB: Mm.
PB: And there were two squadron reunions I went to, but I’d grown so away from that sort of life and the majority of people that I’d met from the squadron were sort of used car salesmen [both laugh], and I just, I just lost touch with them really. And I lost touch with my actual crew members, even the one that came to my wedding, and the one that came and visited us when we were both married and had children.
CB: When you were commissioned just after the pilot, what effect did that have on the social events of the crew?
PB: None at all. No, I mean, I was still a Christian name and we were Christian names, and – in fact, erm [laughs] to get commissioned I was called into the, well not called [emphasis] in that sounds a bit haughty, but I was, called, well called, I can’t think of any other word, to the orderly room and they said ‘oh your commission’s through’ [CB laughs]. I said ‘oh, okay, what do I do?’ They said ‘oh just report to the, the officer, the mess officer’ or something, so I went up to the officers mess and said ‘oh, commission,’ ‘oh yes,’ they said, ‘this is your room now,’ and [pause], I don’t know, but I mean, I just took my, I was a flight sergeant, I just took my stripes off my battle dress and put the ring on my shoulder [laughs]. And I was fortunate that my brother [emphasis] his uniform was at home, and I was easily, it was easier to go home for me from Tempsford in Welling, to Welling, and I used his uniform, and I went to my tailor in London, and I had my uniform made by my tailor, you know, who made my suits and things.
CB: Mm.
PB: An, but that was being commissioned [emphasis]. I mean the, I think the naval and the army people will be horrified [emphasis, laughs]. As I say, one minute I was a flight sergeant and the next minute [laughing] I was an officer.
CB: Mm. And was the navigator also commissioned?
PB: Eventually yes.
CB: But not then.
PB: No he was, he was [pause] – he must have been commissioned when were on the squadron. Oh I – he was about three months after me, that’s right, ‘cause I was commissioned probably in about the August [emphasis] of forty-four.
CB: And the engineer?
PB: No, none of the others were commissioned.
CB: Right.
PB: And again [emphasis] I don’t – you see, as a pilot, navigator and air bomber, you were automatically a flight sergeant after twelve months. But I don’t know whether the air gunners were or whether they have to do – I think they had a bit of a hard task, you know, they probably had to wait a couple of years.
CB: Mm.
PB: I don’t know how long you were between flight sergeant and warrant officer. Might be twelve months, or – but I was never a warrant officer, I was, I went from flight sergeant to –
CB: Rigjhy.
PB: And my pilot [emphasis] of course one day he was a flight sergeant, on the next day he was a flight lieutenant [emphasis].
CB: Oh.
PB: Acting flight lieutenant. Well, not on the next day but within a month certainly.
CB: Mm.
PB: But he was never a pilot officer. I think he was a flying officer from flight sergeant and then a, then an acting flight lieutenant.
CB: Why would that be do you think?
PB: Pardon?
CB: Why would that be?
PB: It was a pilot’s Air Force [laughs].
CB: Now, Tempsford was a wartime constructed airfield. What were the facilities like?
PB: Very good really, very good. I mean, as a, as a flight sergeant I think there was just our crew in the Nissan hut, there might have been a couple of crews. But when I was an officer, I was given a room with this chap I mentioned before, who had the injection and – in a house called Hassles. And it was a country house which the group captain lived in, and he entertained a lot of these important agents, and we had a room, ooh I think it was bigger than this room, with twin beds, above the stable block. And the group captains batman [?], we shared a batman [?] and we shared him part time, and he used to give us the odd gooses egg from the group captains [laughs] flock of geese. But it was very comfortable, it was a bit bigger than this room I think, very, very comfortable.
CB: Hmm. This is about eighteen square.
PB: I think this is [emphasis] about sixteen square, yes, I’m not sure but yeah, it was bigger than this room. Bit, bit bigger than this room and it was very comfortable, and we had – it was about a mile away from the ‘drome, and the, erm, this – he was made the flight commander after Rosswell [?], no after Watson moved onto to – Watson followed Rosswell, and Watson was 161 Wing Commander and got killed, but the chap that followed Watson was Tony Darsefton [?], and he used to live out at Hassles, he had a separate room, and he used to give us lifts in and it was, we’d always be able to get RAF transport if we had to go into the, well we had to go in. But it was, the discipline [emphasis] was almost non-existent, it really was. It was very laid back, but we did our job.
CB: The aircraft went of individually presumably, rather than in pairs or more?
PB: Well, well you couldn’t [emphasis] – I mean you couldn’t, obviously [emphasis] you couldn’t have a mass briefing because you’d have on the squadron alone you might have twenty different targets. I mean each flight consisted of about twelve aircraft I think, and twelve crews, but of course they weren’t all on the same night, but erm, but it was a very [emphasis] exciting time, and of course we got a lot [emphasis] of leave, we got a terrific amount of leave. We used to get I think it was something like ten days one months and six days the next. I was always [emphasis] home. And you used to get, as an officer, as a pilot officer, you used to get a first class travel warrant. In fact it didn’t apply to me, but most [emphasis] of the people [coughs] lived [coughed] up north, they used to put an aircraft on for what’s called a night flying test [CB laughs]. And they’d take them off to York or Scotland for their leave, and then lay on an aircraft to pick them up [emphasis]. Bloody selfish I suppose really [CB laughs], but it was done, I mean they –
CB: Mm. And they could have flown you to Biggin Hill.
PB: Hmm?
CB: And they could have flown you [emphasis] to Biggin Hill.
PB: Yes [laughing], yes I’d have more job to get from Biggin Hill to Welling [both laugh] than from Tempsford. The train was very good from there, yes. Very –
CB: Final –
PB: Very exciting times and –
CB: Right. So what was the most exciting thing do you think?
PB: The most what?
CB: The most exciting [emphasis] event that you had.
PB: In the Air Force? [Pause.] I don’t know.
CB: ‘Cause they were all exciting.
PB: Erm, some of them were boring. I mean the, the trips to Norway, I mean they were five hours there or so and five hours back, they were very [emphasis] boring. And we didn’t have any television or – I suppose we could have got the radio, I don’t know, never tried, but – they used to give us wakey-wakey tablets.
CB: Mm.
PB: I don’t know whether they worked or not –
CB: Benzedrine.
PB: Hmm?
CB: Benzedrine tablets.
PB: Was it?
CB: Mm.
PB: I don’t know whether they worked – I never, never gave them a chance to work. We used to do as we were told a lot. Not always, as I say I got into trouble for oversleeping. You see, going – is this on?
CB: Mm.
PB: Oh perhaps I –
CB: Go on.
PB: Well you can cut it out if you don’t want it –
CB: Yeah.
PB: This, this engineer, flight engineer, he wasn’t [emphasis], he’d gone to flights, and he wasn’t affected by our absence from flights when we went up to Sheffield, and yet you’d have thought he’d have said ‘ooh my God that’s my crew, I’d better go and wake them up and tell them that’ – I don’t know, very strange. But he was a real loner [?][emphasis] sort of chap, you do get them I suppose –
CB: He was the only one married, was he?
PB: He was married.
CB: He was the only one of the crew?
PB: No [emphasis], no, no the wireless operator, wireless operator air gunner was getting on a bit, he might have been twenty-eight or something [CB laughs], he was married with a child, yes.
CB: So you returned from an operation, and had a debrief.
PB: Yes.
CB: How did the debrief go?
PB: Erm, very simple really. I mean you’d – we had to fill out air bomber – one of my jobs to fill out a weather report. Mostly, obviously, the only thing you could report was well, fog I suppose, but was the cloud formations and different heights, and in those days I, I knew what the cloud formations was. I can’t say I do now. And what interference we had, erm, whether, whether it was easy to find, whether there was a good reception or whether it was a terrible reception. There were lots of stories – one story that floated around, I don’t know how true it was, but I think there might have been two crews, but there was one crew that went to this target, and they flashed their identification but it wasn’t quite perfect [emphasis] for some reason, and they thought that they’d best to not drop their load. I thought ‘this is a bit suspicious,’ and after several attempts this signal didn’t come through clear, I mean if it was dot dash dash dot they’d get the dot dash and then they might not get the dash dot. So they decided to bring this stuff back, and – this is rumour [emphasis] as I say I don’t know how true it was, but the story was that these resistance were surrounded by Germans, and every time they went up to, you know, press the signal, they were shot and killed, and if they’d have dropped the containers they would have stood a good chance of putting up a resistance. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, you got all sorts of things.
CB: Mm. Could have worked all ways.
PB: But the stories that are true and I’ve read in a couple of these resistance books – I used to get a lot of books after the war. And it was terribly [emphasis] laid back, gosh [emphasis]. In some cases there was a chap that was dropped, and he went to his safe place and the thing is you don’t walk in and rap on the door and say ‘hello, I’m here,’ you sort of observe the place and, and sure enough he kept an eye on it and it looked safe. So he went in and they said ‘oh come in’ in English you know, ‘come in,’ and they were talking in English [laughs] and he was absolutely flabbergasted [emphasis] at the lax security, but –
CB: Did you ever get to talk to the agents, you were dropping?
PB: Yes, yes. We had – on several of the drops we had an agent that had just come back, and he would give you a few tips, I can’t remember what they were but he could have told you that so many miles south west of the drop there was a German fighter unit or an AK-AK battery or something, which you know, did prove very useful.
CB: Mm.
PB: We did – yeah we had quite a lot of – and sometimes they were a bit of an organised talk by an agent who to tell you what was going on, but of course the tragedy was, I think it was the Dutch [emphasis] – don’t know whether you’ve heard of this, but the Dutch resistance was penetrated [emphasis] –
CB: Mm.
PB: Did you know this?
CB: Yep.
PB: So I’m, I, if I tell you –
CB: Go on, keep going.
PB: I’m only repeating –
CB: No keep going, keep going.
PB: Well as far as I know, they have a call which if they don’t use it, the signallers, then they know that they’re captured. And this signaller, he didn’t use his call sign, and the chap the other end he said ‘oh he’s just forgotten, don’t take any notice,’ and there was one chap at Baker Street which was SOE headquarters, who said ‘I don’t like this at all’ but he was more junior, and they said ‘no,’ you know, ‘everything’s alright don’t worry.’ And unfortunately they were just pitching agents right left and centre into the hands of the Nazis.
CB: Mm.
PB: And it wasn’t until sometime afterwards that they closed the whole circuit down.
CB: Mm.
PB: I, I never did do a trip to Holland.
CB: Mm, tragic.
PB: It was, it was infiltrated.
CB: Now you talked earlier about your later contact with Bletchley Park. To what extent were you aware of any contact while you were in 138?
PB: Was I [coughs], sorry, was I –
CB: Aware of contact with Bletchley Park?
PB: None, none at all. Well, funnily enough, the only contact which we had, and I didn’t realise the significance of course, but when I met my wife up here at this officers mess which would have been about April 1945, they’d imported a lot of Bletchley Park girls, and these two girls were standing by the fireplace there, and a friend of mine said ‘they fancy you,’ and I said ‘oh don’t talk such nonsense,’ you know, I said ‘go on’ I said ‘you’re a lady-killer, you go and ask them for a dance.’ [Laughs] so he went over and he came back and said ‘no they want to dance with you.’ I said ‘oh well you don’t know to treat women.’ So I went and it happened to be my future wife, and erm, I said, you know ‘would you like to dance?’ And they said ‘well, we’ve got the tip that the food’s coming up,’ course my brother-in-law’s, you know, here, the chap that was escaped from POW. So, but that’s how I met Stella. But what, who I thought [emphasis] was a girl, civil servant from Bletchley Park was actually Stella. But that’s the contact I had with Bletchley Park but I didn’t know exactly, I just thought they were evacuated civil servants, but, we didn’t, we didn’t know an awful lot to be perfectly honest. I mean, I met a chap in Rotary, I went to a, what do you call it, a district do, and this chap said he lived at Sandy, I said [CB laughs], ‘oh’ I said ‘I was stationed at Tempsford,’ he said ‘ooh were you?’ I said ‘yes,’ he said ‘well,’ he said ‘do you know, when your aircraft flew out they used to come found and padlock all the telephone boxes.’ I couldn’t really see the point of that but he assured me it was true. But it’s – they never, the Germans never attacked Tempsford. I’m sure they must have had some clue about it, they must [emphasis] have done. But, they, they never attacked Tempsford. They did have one huge raid in about March I think it was, in forty-five, and it was really like, like picking cherries off a tree for them. Because they sent a whole lot of fighters and they followed the bombers in as they landed and they were absolutely sitting ducks and they did do a lot of damage that particular time.
CB: Mm.
PB: But they never actually singled – as far as I know they never singled out Tempsford at all.
CB: Mm.
PB: You never know what dealings went on in war. There’s so much going on. I mean it’s a well known fact that we were dealing with Sweden and Germany were dealing with Sweden, and [laughs] you know it was sort of like this.
CB: After you’d finished your tour you went to the OTU, so how did that –
PB: Up here?
CB: Yes. So how did that work? What did you do there?
PB: I didn’t like it to start with, I didn’t like it a bit. But of course I met Stella shortly afterwards, my wife, and that made life very agreeable. I spent most [laughing] of the time playing tennis down here. But far as the work was concerned it was very good because I did a lot of flying instructing, I didn’t do much ground instructing. To be perfectly honest I didn’t know much [laughs] about the ground. I couldn’t very well say ‘when you get over the target you do this’ [laughs] because I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about main force bombing.
CB: So you went up with the trainee crews in the Wellingtons?
PB: Erm, only with an instructor pilot. I never went up with just a trainee crew. I went up – sometimes on the cross countries where there was a bombing attack afterwards or a, what do you, a bullseye [emphasis] they used to call – where you went to London and you took an infrared photograph of the target. But I don’t think I ever flew with, with a trainee crew there was always an instructor pilot with me.
CB: So what were you doing as an instructor at the OTU?
PB: I often wonder [laughs] ‘cause I couldn’t tell ‘em how to operate the bomb site. Erm, I don’t know, it’s just one of these things that, you know, you’ve got to have an instructor. Well I can understand having a pilot instructor. To a certain degree I can understand having a, a navigator instructor, but why you need an instructor to, to – ‘cause you should know how to use the bomb site on the ground before you fly up. They had, I forget what it was called now, but the bomb site that I trained on was called a setting bomb site. A very, very primitive thing which you set the course, the air speed, and told the pilot to fly on a certain course, and a certain speed, and you dropped the bombs and they were miles [emphasis] away [CB laughs]. They really were miles away. Well I don’t know about miles but – the story, there’s one story which was round, going around, and this Polish [emphasis] crew, and you did a – last trip you did was a cross country, and you ended up from an OTU, a training point of view, you ended up in the Severn or one of these bombing ranges and you dropped a couple of five-hundred pound bombs [emphasis], and the story is that this Polish crew went up and they said ‘to blazes with this, we’re not wasting this on the sea’ [CB laughs] ‘we’re going to take this off to France.’ Have you heard?
CB: No.
PB: And the – I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but the story is that they went off and they dropped their bombs over in occupied Europe. And I think they got told off a bit but they were Poles, and I met several Poles and they were great people, really great people, really were. And good pilots come to that.
CB: I think we’ve had a good run, thank you very much.
PB: Well I told you a lot of –
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 Peter Bellingham
Identifier
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ABellinghamPF161121
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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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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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2016-11-21
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02:05:02 audio recording
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Pending review
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eng
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Sound
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Peter Bellingham worked as a post office engineer before volunteering for the Royal Air Force. He trained in Rhodesia and South Africa and completed a tour of operations as a bomb aimer, dropping supplies with 138 Squadron from RAF Tempsford. He describes the different roles each crew member was given, the briefing, the lights which signalled the target, the release of the parcels, supplies and agents, and the debrief. He then became an instructor and after demobilisation in 1946 he worked in agriculture.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
South Africa
Zambia
England--Bedfordshire
England--Cumbria
England--Suffolk
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
11 OTU
138 Squadron
17 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
briefing
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
crash
crewing up
FIDO
Flying Training School
Initial Training Wing
military living conditions
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
RAF Millom
RAF Silverstone
RAF Tempsford
RAF Turweston
RAF Woodbridge
Special Operations Executive
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/148/1576/AHaighG150902.1.mp3
4279994cd0836781eab4bc56fe8c1e90
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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Haigh, George
G Haigh
Description
An account of the resource
12 items. The collections covers the career of Sergeant George Haigh (1915 - 2019) in the Royal Air Force. It consists of 11 group photographs including two official ones taken at the School of Physical Training in March 1942 and September 1944, and one oral history interview. The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by George Haigh and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
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2015-09-02
Conforms To
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Pending transcription
Identifier
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Haig, G
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.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: I’m here today, my name is Chris Brockbank and I’m here today with George Haigh accompanied by his daughter Rosemary Herrine and also his grandson Josh and we’re going to talk about his life on the ground in the RAF because he trained people many of whom worked on the ground but many worked in the air, flew in the air and we’re in Middleton Cheney and it Is the 2nd of September 2015. So George could you start please by telling me how you started as a youth, a bit about your family and then what you’ve done in your life, please.
GH: Yeah. Well I was born in Reddish in what is now Greater Manchester and I was there, I lived there until I was about eight years old and then from there my father got a job in Stockport and I went to Stockport and lived in Stockport for quite a number of years. Went to school there, a church school and, and then at fourteen had to get out and do, do some work as you had to do in those days and at fourteen I went to a dyeing and bleaching firm and then lived in, in Stockport at a, at a Working Men’s Club and, from eight years old until I was twenty, twenty three and during that time I went into professional football and signed for Stockport County which I did for three seasons prior to the war and then when war broke out all contracts were cancelled for professional footballers so I was back on the streets. The football wages in those days was ten pound a week and two pound for a draw, two pound for a win rather and a pound for a draw and that was your lot as far as, as far as that was concerned and then the first thing I thought of, being physically fit at that period I decided to join the air force and join up as a physical training instructor. Get into physical training instructing. What now?
CB: Ok. We can stop there for a mo.
[Recording paused]
CB: Right. We’re restarting now and just recapping on those early days. So what happened to the family when you were young?
GH: Well, at, at thirteen I, my mother died and the, the Working Men’s Club had to have a steward and a stewardess so when I, when I was growing up I found myself doing all the work when my mother died that she used to do in the club so I was, I was more or less the stewardess until I was about twenty to twenty two. Something like that. So even when I was a professional footballer I was still working in the, in the club. So that was what was happening early on, you know.
CB: Right. Ok.
GH: Yeah.
CB: So after your father retired then you had to move out of the club.
GH: Yeah. Well, when, when I moved out of the club and went to move in with my in-laws, future in-laws and then I got married and managed to get a house, a rented house and then came the time when I was due to go in the forces and I went –
[Phone ringing. Recording paused]
CB: We can go on now. It’s disrupting isn’t it? Do you want to wait a mo?
GH: Yeah. Wait a minute. Yeah.
[Recording paused]
GH: He went out and went into the police force.
CB: That was [Stanley?]. Yeah.
GH: Yeah and he was still in the reserve so that when war broke out they whipped him in to the Grenadiers again.
CB: Oh right.
GH: And he was, yeah, he had a, he was quite intelligent and they whipped him into India and he became a captain in the Indian army and was training Sikhs and Ghurkhas for the remainder of the war
CB: Oh right.
GH: And then they wanted him to stay to, to look after the police in India.
CB: Yeah.
GH: And he asked, he asked me actually what he should do kind of style you know. I said, there was so much trouble going on in India at the time that I told him, I said, ‘Get out.’
CB: Yeah.
GH: ‘And get back in the police.’
CB: Yeah.
GH: And that’s what he did.
CB: Yeah. So when you joined the RAF what happened? So you joined at Warrington. What, could you just take us through –
GH: That’s right.
CB: The process of what happened.
GH: At Warrington and then I went to –
CB: Bridgnorth.
GH: Bridgnorth. Yes. And then from Bridgenorth I was posted to this place in London for, on a PT course. The PT courses was all done at this headquarters of the RAF training in London. As I say I can’t remember the name of the place but we was, we was there during the actual, the actual bombing of London and we, we was training during the day and at night it was down in the shelters and that made it very difficult but I I joined up with a, with a football international, Scottish International, Jock Dodds, and we, we went through the training situation you know. But there was a centre staircase in the barracks there and there were the barrack rooms on either side of this, the staircase and we got a bed right at the very end of this barrack room, halfway up the building. And when we went in the air raid shelter Jock said to me, he said, ‘We’re not having any more of this. I can’t stand it.’ Getting no sleep at all and yet doing the PT course during the day so he said, ‘You stay with me when the, when the thing goes off, if there’s a raid on,’ so he said, ‘We’ll get under the bed.’ So the orderly sergeant that come up the steps would look in the barrack room and see all the beds were empty and just leave it at that. So we never went in the, in the shelters from then on so but it was, it was very difficult to have these air raids over London you know, all the time, you know while we were doing our training. So, and there was, there was only one bomb dropped on the, on the camp and that was a, a landmine. They were dropping land mines at that time and they dropped it on the, on the WAAF course in the, within the camp, you know but being as it was at the time, you know that we weren’t allowed to speak even to one another about what was happening around us you know. So what happened, whether any WAAFs were killed because of that I don’t know. But er –
CB: The landmine came down by parachute and then when it exploded there was a big blast. What was the –
GH: And that was –
CB: Devastation. How bad was the devastation?
GH: Well it was just the WAAF depot.
CB: Oh just that.
GH: We never saw anything.
CB: Oh right.
GH: It was a big camp.
CB: Yeah.
GH: A great big camp
CB: Right.
GH: So it must be well known. I can’t, I don’t know why I can’t remember the name of the place.
CB: Well we’ll pick it up later George.
GH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
GH: Yeah.
CB: Ok.
GH: That’s fine.
CB: So how long were you there?
GH: I don’t know whether it was four or five weeks. I can’t remember. But the, the training went on there and I remember we went, we had to pair, the pair of us had to go in, in to a trench on the perimeter of the camp and obviously there was other pairs all around the camp during that period and we, it was like four hours on and two hours off or something like that and the two hours off we were right at the side of the, of the PT gymnasium and the, our barracks was right at the other end of the camp so we decided to go into the gymnasium and and sleep there rather than go to the other end of the camp and I remember it, I don’t know, that was when the land mine was dropped but we was on top of the training mats and we, we took all our gear off and helmet and everything and went, went to sleep there and when this bomb dropped the pair of us jumped up and put our helmets on and then fell back, back to sleep again [laughs]. The next day, ‘Why did we do that?’ You know? Absolutely ridiculous but that’s that was one of the incidents during the, during that period in the physical training and then Jock Dobbs was posted to Blackpool and played for Blackpool for the remainder of the war and I was posted to Morecambe. And then the first game I had with Morecambe was a friendly game against Blackpool. So Jock Dodds were playing at centre half, centre forward for Blackpool and I was playing at centre half for Morecambe so we were up against each other like, you know. It was, it was, that was great fun. It was great fun.
CB: So you were sent from London to Morecambe.
GH: Sent from London to Morecambe. Yes.
CB: And what was your job there?
GH: Well when I got to Morecambe I didn’t realised that we’d got to do the foot training and the rifle training and do everything. All the training that had to be done and I hadn’t had the training for any of this but eventually I read up about everything, you know and eventually got into it and did the job for two and a half years. So it was quite, quite an experience really.
CB: What sort of people were coming in as recruits at that time?
GH: Well they were very mixed. Very mixed. And being in Morecambe they were in, in billets like hotels and boarding houses and that sort of thing. That’s where they were billeted.
CB: Yeah.
GH: And they had a billeting officer. A warrant officer. Warrant Officer Smith. Yeah. And they used to come in on the train. A train load of them you know and he used to split them up into, into thirties and send them off with their instructor and, and, and give them the information as to where they were going to be billeted within Morecambe and sometimes you got, they were able to get into a hotel or a boarding house that was big enough to take the whole thirty. Other than that they used to split them up into, into different billets but you had to have a system of parading outside these billets every morning at a certain time and, and then to take them off to, to the syllabus that was going on. The only thing was as far as PT was concerned I had an hour PT every day to the recruits but other than that it was for other purposes you know. Foot drill first and then later on it got to rifle drill and then to being able to deal with, with your gun. Being able to strip it down and put it back together and all that business and we went, they did five weeks training before they were sent off, posted to wherever they were supposed to be going. And then when the, it was a five weeks course and then later the, it went down to, when they needed more men it went down to four weeks and it finished up three weeks. We’d got to fit the whole training of three weeks, of five weeks training into three weeks and that was a terrible time but it only went on for a couple of courses, you know. A couple of three weeks and then it went back to four and then back to five again and then eventually back to when they don’t want any more.
CB: But how well did the recruits handle the shorter course at three weeks?
GH: Oh it was, it was very difficult for them you know because the, the timing you know. I mean, say you hadn’t got time to do anything. You’d no time to go and have a cup of coffee and a, a coffee and a bun kind of style you know which we was able to do in the five week system you know. We had to just keep working all the time. It was very difficult. Difficult for the instructor. Very difficult for the recruit.
CB: Yeah.
GH: And there was one, I remember the first lot of recruits that came in. I’ve got a picture of them now and they, they’d run out of forage caps [laughs]. They had no forage caps so they had to put their scarf inside out on, on the head you know and that was how they was being trained. The first lot, you know. But that was only one incident that that happened during the, during the training.
CB: And how was everybody fed? Did they have big mess halls?
GH: No. No. They were fed. The people where they were staying fed them. They had the, they had their breakfast in the morning and, and the meal, meal at night and I think they, they were allowed to go in a café or something like that and buy the, the lunch. It was a real, real mixed, mixed effort but it, it worked quite well really.
CB: So your specialty really was physical education.
GH: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: How, physical training, how well did they stand up to that?
GH: Well it was, some of them were, it was very hard. Occasionally you’d have a crew of thirty men to train and they were very difficult but then again you’d get occasional cases where you’d get one that was in the squad that belonged to a military family and you was able to pick, pick one out and make them the senior man kind of style for the, for the squad. That made it a lot easier but generally speaking you know you’ve got to, you’ve got to work very hard in the early stages and you could tell, the recruits, in the early stages, they hated your guts. They hated the instructor you know but towards the end they used to be coming up to you and thanking, thanking me you know for, for what I’d done for them you know. So, yes, it was a very, very good system really.
CB: So what was it that made the PT so difficult for them?
GH: Well, I don’t think they’d had, they’d, some of them hadn’t had any training at all. They were just raw as far as physical training was concerned. Biggest majority of them was absolutely raw.
CB: Yeah. So they were, they’d come straight from school to you.
GH: Well some –
CB: Well not necessarily.
GH: Some of them had come straight from school you know.
CB: Yeah.
GH: But a lot of them had come from working and working families.
CB: Yeah.
GH: You know.
CB: Because the school leaving age in those day was fourteen.
GH: Fourteen. That’s right.
CB: So they’d, most of them would have had jobs unless they’d gone to further education. Is that right?
GH: That’s right. They’d have, they’d have a job for a short while and then and then they’d be whipped into the, into the forces you know.
CB: Yeah. So when they’d finished with you did they know what they were going to do as a trade in the RAF?
GH: They knew what they were going in to and they knew that when the training had finished that that’s where they’d go. They’d go to different camps around the country doing different things to –
CB: Right.
GH: Mechanics. Mechanics were –
CB: How many were air crew that you trained?
GH: Oh I can’t remember.
CB: But there were people who became, were becoming –
GH: There were, there were quite a number that became aircrew you know.
CB: Yeah.
GH: And I look, look back at some of the photographs that I’ve got of the recruits you know and wonder where, where, where they got to you know and –
CB: Yeah.
GH: And whether they survived really because I reckoned a lot of them went as rear gunners and that sort of thing you know.
CB: And did the air crew people stand out in the training any more from the others?
GH: No. No. They were all more or less the same and they all mucked in really you know and, and most of them you know especially towards the end of the training they were very much together in, in the thirty, thirty men kind of style. They were a team and helped each other you know.
CB: Yeah.
GH: They were very very good.
CB: Yeah. So you did that for how long?
GH: Well for the two and a half a years I was at Morecambe. Or the two years I was at Morecambe and then the half year that I was there was when they’d had enough RAF recruits and they went to change over to the WAAF and they asked me to go over to stay with the WAAF you know and train the WAAF and I wasn’t liking it at all. I I fought against it quite a lot but there were two other professional footballers at Morecambe with me who, who had moved over to the WAAF depot and it was then them that decided me to, to have a go at it you know and then I found out when I started training then that they were far easier to train than the men were.
CB: Why was that?
GH: I don’t know.
CB: What was, what was it that made it difficult for you to start training them?
GH: Well they trained.
CB: In the first place.
GH: They weren’t, they weren’t fit for one thing. They’d had no, the biggest majority of them never had any physical training.
CB: Not even at school.
GH: And, and then the, I found that the WAAF, when I was training the WAAF, they were, they were more supple than the men were and that made it far easier to train them and I got on well with the, with the WAAF after a time when I got, got over the shock.
CB: What was your wife’s reaction to that?
GH: No. She wasn’t very happy I can tell you although she did, she did come and we lived out for quite a while in Morecambe. My wife got herself a job with some insurance people who had moved out of London in to, in to Morecambe and she was working as a secretary there for quite a while.
CB: And what was the syllabus for the WAAFs? Was it the same as for the ground, the men?
GH: Very similar. Very similar yeah.
CB: Even with the rifles?
GH: Actually, no rifle. No. It was just the, and we didn’t bother with the foot drill. They had their own instructors. The WAAF, the WAAF had their own PT instructors but they needed a man when the, was training in bulk. They hadn’t got the voice to do the training in bulk so they always, they always called on the RAF PTI to do the training in bulk.
CB: So when, here you as a PTI as a specialty.
GH: Yeah.
CB: What were, was the process you went through in training them? What exercises effectively did they do?
GH: Well there was only the exercises. I don’t, I don’t realise really what they were really you know it was just a matter of running on the spot, arm movements, body movements and that sort of thing.
CB: Circuit training? Did you do circuit training with them? So you go around the gym doing different tasks.
GH: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, they had quite a, quite a system and they had a series of games and they topped up the score of each team in each section. It was quite a difficult system, you know.
CB: And did you use wall bars and dumbbells?
GH: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: Press ups.
GH: Dumbbells. Yeah.
CB: All those things.
GH: Wall bars, dumbbells, the horse.
CB: Oh yeah. So jumping the horse.
GH: Jumping the horse.
CB: Yeah.
GH: And that sort of thing within the gym you know. Morecambe we took over a cinema actually to, as a gymnasium. The Alhambra Cinema. [laughs] Took all the seats out and we used it as a gymnasium.
CB: Yeah. So in the winter what was the temperature like?
GH: Terrible. Terrible. At Morecambe especially you know. It was, it was very bleak there you know and there was one, one or two incidents you know when the sea was so rough and coming over on to the Promenade that we couldn’t do any training. You look along the Promenade at Morecambe during the training and you wouldn’t see anything but blue uniforms, you know. Training somewhere or other. Marching. It was, it looked to an outsider a complete mess but it was very very well controlled. Very well.
CB: So after they’d finished their five week course what did they get for PT? Did they get some kind of certificate to show –?
GH: No. No. No. No. They just, they’d been trained and that was that. Just sent off to the next stage of their training. They went, they went on to the, on to the station and on to the train and was taken wherever they were needed to go.
CB: So you trained men mainly but six months were women. The WAAFs.
GH: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Where did you go from Morecambe?
GH: To Wilmslow.
CB: And what did you do there?
GH: RAF Wilmslow. I was training recruits, WAAF recruits, in the same way that I’d been training them at Morecambe.
CB: Right. So that was -
GH: Just, just for mass purposes you know.
CB: Yeah.
GH: They had their own NCO’s you know to deal with them as a squad at a time you know.
CB: Did you also do drill when they were all together?
GH: When they were all together we did drill.
CB: Yeah.
GH: Passing out, passing out parades and that sort of thing.
CB: Right.
GH: Yeah.
CB: So how long were you at Wilmslow?
GH: I was at Wilmslow about two and a half years there.
CB: Ok. And –
GH: And we were right at the side of Ringway at the time and Ringway was one of the main parachute instructor where the parachute, the army was, was being trained there and they had RAF instructors there then at that time.
CB: So when did you get into training parachutists?
GH: Well it was only a short period when, while I was at Wilmslow. I had the opportunity to go across to Ringway and do this training.
CB: So you did the parachute instructor’s course did you?
GH: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: And then what?
GH: Well I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t continue with it you know. I went back to the WAAF depot and –
CB: Right.
GH: Training the WAAF.
CB: Yes. Any incidents in the parachute training that are –?
GH: Yeah. There was, there was one incident there where Molotov was, came over from Russia to see what, what was happening with the, with the parachutists, you know, to take back to Russia. To find out, you know, to deal with the parachute training in Russia. I remember Molotov being there and it was a, the wind was far too fast for, for real flying for the training so there was a half a dozen instructors went up and the, I remember that the pilots weren’t, weren’t going to take them up. They said it’s you know, the wind’s too, too strong for it and anyway the CO said Molotov was there and this had got to be done. But I remember what, what happened to Bert Wooding, I think, was the first one out and they were extending at Ringway, expanding the runway and he was, he was the first one out. We didn’t do the drops at Ringway. We did them at Tatton Park but because Molotov was there it all had got to be done at, at Ringway. So I remember Bert Wooding was the first one out with the drop and he landed on the edge of this where they were building the runway and he broke both his ankles. And then there was another one. There was a warrant officer. An Irish, an Irish guy. I forget his name now but he broke his back during that fall. So it was, it was a dangerous thing to have happened, you know.
CB: Yeah.
GH: Just because Molotov was there.
CB: Yeah.
GH: That was the only incident I remember.
CB: So for the parachute training some of it was from flying aeroplanes. Some of it was from balloons was it?
GH: Yes. You went, you did the training in the gym first, you know. Jumping off the horses and that sort of thing, you know and then you went on, eventually went up on the balloon you know and did the jumps from the balloon. And then, and then they went, and the early ones was in the old Whitley.
CB: Bomber.
GH: Bomber with the hole, hole in the bottom and that’s how they did the jumps first and then of course they get the, managed to get the Dakotas then you know and that was entirely different situation you know.
CB: So in the aircraft they had a static line that was attached –
GH: That’s right.
CB: To a rail.
GH: Used to just stick the ring on the rail you know and they’d all be in a line ready you know and the RAF instructor, you know was at the entrance, and, and the, when it came to the actual jump at Tatton Park they used to get them moving you know. And I remember one of them said to me, you know, that he, he’d had one that chickened out you know and he had to send him to the back of the plane you know to take his ring off and take him to the back of the plane while, while he finished the jump, you know.
CB: And then clipped him on again.
GH: And then clipped him on and pushed him out [laughs]. Yeah. It was very interesting for some of them you know.
CB: What experience or knowledge did you have ‘cause this is early in training so it’s less likely, people with LMF which was the people who were a bit worried about what was going on. Lacking moral fibre.
GH: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Did you experience any of that?
GH: No. No.
CB: See any I mean?
GH: No. The only, the only bad do that I had of that was at Wilmslow. At Morecambe rather when they were in the gas chambers training them with the gas masks training and he, there was one in during my instance there and he came running out on to the main road and was off down the main road. I was a sergeant at the time and I got the corporal to go and fetch him back you know but he had claustrophobia of course. Couldn’t stand the, it was only like a hut, probably about as big as this room and you packed probably about a whole thirty into this, you know and put the masks on and got the smell of the stuff you know and, and then take the masks off and then and then bring in another, another thirty kind of style, you know. But there was only that one incident that I ever knew, you know that –
CB: Ok. Just clarifying that. So they start off with the mask on.
GH: Yeah.
CB: With oxygen.
GH: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Then the mask is taken off.
GH: That’s right. To get –
CB: But there’s smoke –
GH: That was to get –
CB: In the shed.
GH: Yeah.
CB: Ok. And it’s just smoke is it?
GH: Yeah. That’s right. It’s when, when it, the whole thing had settled like you know. There was no danger, no danger to them at all.
CB: No.
GH: But they just, they just got the smell of it before –
CB: Yeah.
GH: Before it was –
CB: Yeah. And how long did they have to have the mask off?
GH: Oh I can’t remember.
CB: Before they put it on again.
GH: I can’t remember [laughs].
CB: Right. Ok.
GH: I can’t remember.
GH: Good.
CB: They had, they had an instructor within the hut, you know.
GH: Yes.
CB: We weren’t. We just took them there and pushed them in the hut kind of style and told them what was going to happen you know and there was an instructor inside there you know to, to deal with all that business.
GH: And throughout the war did everybody carry a gas mask?
CB: Yes. They always had to have their gas mask with them.
GH: Yeah. Ok. We’ll pause there for a mo.
CB: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
GH: The welterweight champion of the world.
CB: So if you could just, I gather that you -
GH: He was the one who –
CB: Met some important people.
GH: That was coming in.
CB: Yeah. Ok. And Peter Kane.
GH: Jack. Jack London.
CB: These are boxers.
GH: Jack London, the heavyweight champion.
CB: Yeah.
GH: And quite a number more but I can’t remember the name of them but -
CB: Ok.
GH: As I say I’d got to get, I managed to get one to get against, against Peter Kane and that was Teddy O’Neill, Scottish bantamweight champion. I got, I got him to fight –
CB: This was a boxing match.
GH: Peter Kane.
CB: Yes.
GH: Yeah and he eventually beat him too. It was only like a three, three round effort like of course to have.
CB: Right.
GH: You know.
CB: These are people from another camp you’re talking about.
GH: From another camp yeah.
CB: Yeah. So there was competition between the camps.
GH: And the top brass for instance were in the front seats around the ring you know and, and I remember Teddy O’Neill knocked Peter Kane out in, in the second round and he finished up in the CO’s lap. [laughs] Oh dear me. Yeah. All good fun.
CB: So the CO was a bit surprised.
GH: He was a bit surprised. Yeah. [laughs]
CB: Yeah. And what about other famous people? In the, when you were doing square bashing.
GH: No. I don’t.
CB: Churchill’s daughter.
GH: Churchill’s daughter. That was the only one that I remember but I often, I often wonder you see whether, I’ve got recruit’s photographs of nearly all the squads that I trained in that, in that box you know and I I will look at them from time to time and think, you know, what happened to him? You know. What happened to him? You know.
CB: Did you ever follow up with anybody?
GH: No. No I didn’t. No.
CB: Right. So you’ve idea what happened to them?
GH: I’ve no idea what happened to any of them but –
CB: Ok. We’ll stop there again.
GH: Yes.
[recording paused]
GH: And I it turned out that there was a goal keeper playing for the prisoner of war. It turned out to be Bert Trautmann and he turned out to be the goal keeper for Manchester City after the war and he played for Manchester City for more or less all his life, you know. All his footballing life.
CB: This was the prisoner of war camp. Where was that?
GH: That was outside Wilmslow somewhere. I don’t know. Altrincham or somewhere very close. I can’t remember exactly where but it was in that area and as I say, you know the, the mostly there was the wardens were playing but, but they had one or two of the prisoners that were any good like, you know would play in the team and Bert Trautmann was one of them. I always remember him very well.
CB: Right.
GH: Because I met him later in the football, in the football when he was at Manchester City and we had chat about it, you know when he, while he was there, a prisoner of war.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
GH: Yeah.
CB: Good. Thank you.
[Recording paused]
CB: So we’re talking about Jack Brymer.
GH: He was at Morecambe actually.
CB: Jack Brymer was.
GH: Jack Brymer was. Yeah.
CB: And what was he?
GH: He was a clarionetist with the London Philharmonic or something like that, I think. And yeah, he –
CB: He was on one of your courses.
GH: No. He was, he was stationed in Morecambe with me, you know and I I started the Morecambe and Heysham Rhythm Club and we used to meet in the, on Central Pier every Sunday morning and there was always a lot of musicians coming into Morecambe playing and they always used to come there and Jack Brymer was one of the leaders of, for me anyway, you know of running things in the Morecambe and Heysham Rhythm Club. I don’t know whether it’s still going or not. [laughs]
CB: So how did they keep or you keep the recruits entertained outside training hours?
GH: Well that was one thing you know but there was always somebody doing something or other you know. You know. Running, running a dance, dance something like that you know. A ball, running a ball or something you know and yeah there was always something going on at Morecambe you know because there was, I think there was two or three theatres there.
CB: Yeah.
GH: Where these entertainers used to come to entertain the troops.
CB: But at Altrincham that was all WAAFs and it wasn’t a seaside place. So –
GH: No. No. That was –
CB: What did they do for entertainment there?
GH: No idea really. I left, I didn’t interfere with, with the WAAF after, after training. My wife was living out as well you know.
CB: Right.
GH: I had my own things to deal with you know.
CB: I was thinking -
GH: In the evenings.
CB: I was thinking of some band or orchestra or whatever.
CB: Yeah. Well –
GB: You talked about to entertain them.
GH: There was, there was one that was stationed at Wilmslow for a time and that was a couple of RAF who played the piano. They both played the same piano. I can’t remember who the name was though but they were very well known and they were playing all over the country really, were those two.
CB: Right. Thank you. We’ll stop for a mo.
[Recording paused]
GH: Morecambe and Wilmslow. When we went on courses and one course we went on to was at Cosford and one of the things that we trained there, or learned to train was the dinghies for aircraft. The fighter, the fighter dinghy, the small one and the large Q-Type big one for the aircrews and we had to learn how, how to deal with them for the, those pilots and crew and the worst one was the Q-Type. The big one.
CB: That took seven.
GH: Yeah. And that was automatically inflamed when they were ditched but quite often it was upside down and we had to train, train the crews to, how to right these dinghies. They’d a loop right in the centre underneath and the, the rope that ran around the outside. You used to get your hand in that rope and the loop and you used to bring it upright and get it to a certain level and then you used to have to twist it and throw it.
CB: Yeah. I remember doing that.
GH: Do you?
CB: Yeah.
GH: Well that’s how we were trained to train the aircrews you know whenever we came across the situation you know. Yeah. I remember that well.
CB: We’re now stopping for coffee.
GH: Right.
[recording paused]
CB: And tea.
GH: Yeah. There was -
JH: Do you take milk and sugar yeah.
CB: Just one.
GH: They used to train you how to get them out of the water and how to be able to push them under and then lift them out to get them back into the dinghies and we were doing this in the swimming pool at Cosford and there was one of the officers there in, in, full, full dress. He was going out somewhere and he thought he’d have a bit of a laugh with me like, you know. Get me to the side like, you know and dip me under and keep me under longer that he should have done kind of style, you know. Laughing all the time with the instructors as well like, you know. The instructor’s didn’t like it of course ‘cause I was an instructor of course and I came, came out you know and I, I was so bloody blazing mad like you know that I skimmed the water you know right at him on the side of the pool and in full regalia like, he was absolutely soaked from that. The, the officer couldn’t do anything about it. He’d asked for it and got it kind of style so anyway he had to go back to the billet and change. He was going to meet the CO or something. [laughs] Oh yes that’s one of the funny incidents that happened. When they’d finished the training and we –
CB: In Morecambe?
GH: In Morecambe yeah and we got the squad there to take them to the station to, to away, to take them away to where ever they were going to go and whatever courses they were going to go on and there was one, one lad there. He was a bit, he was an only, an only boy and he was, he was a money man I think you know, of the, of the family.
[Telephone ringtone in background]
GH: You carry on. He was the, the mother came with him to the, to the training and she used to be there at the side like, you know with a fur coat on like you know and seeing how her boy, boy, her only boy was doing kind of style and this, this went on for five weeks like, you know and I couldn’t do very much about it you know. She was staying in a hotel in Morecambe looking after and seeing that her boy was alright and fortunately the lads took to him and looked after him kind of style you know and he, he was and he got, he was a damned sight fitter when I’d finished with him of course and when they were marching away and along the Promenade towards the station I noticed that he’d got something on, on his pack. They were in full pack like, you know. Ready, ready to go away and there was a chamber pot on his, on his gear. I said, ‘What the bloody hell have you got there?’ He said, ‘The landlady charged me for it because it was cracked.’ And he said, ‘I wasn’t going to leave it there and get somebody else caught with this trick like, you know, of having to pay for the chamber pot.’ I said, ‘Well bloody well get it rid of it quick.’ He said, ‘What do I do?’ I said, ‘Get over to the sea,’ where the sea was in there. I said, ‘Sling it over the top and into the sea.’ I said, ‘Get back in to, in to line quick.’ I always remember that.
CB: The significance, I think that’s interesting because the significance of that is that we didn’t have the accommodation that you know nowadays.
GH: No. No. That’s right. Yeah.
CB: So what was the accommodation like? How was it set out?
GH: Well the, it was, it was quite good. Most of it was good but occasionally you found a landlady like, you know that was looking after them who was a bit wrong you know but we used to get in touch with Warrant Officer Smith and he used to deal with it. He used to say, ‘Well you either mend your ways, you know or we’ll take you off the list and you don’t get any more recruits.’
CB: So under each bed there was a chamber pot.
GH: There was a chamber pot. Yeah. [laughs] And that, that was in the local billets you know that –
CB: In the hotels.
GH: The landlady -
CB: Yeah.
GH: In the hotels and that –
CB: Yeah.
GH: Sort of thing.
GH: So in the morning people went and emptied their chamber pots.
CB: Yeah.
GH: And washed them out.
CB: That’s right. Yeah. But this, this was cracked you see and the, and this landlady had charged him for it you know so he said, ‘I’m, I’m taking it with me,’ he said, ‘I’m not, nobody else is going to be caught with this.’ Oh aye, I got, I made him chuck the chamber pot over the wall into the sea [laughs].
RH: Killed a few whales.
CB: In Reddish.
GH: When I lived in Reddish, I lived there ‘till I was eight years old and there was no electricity. It was all gas. There was a little gas mantle and we had to be very careful because they were very fragile you know to get them to work and when I was eight years old we went to this club in Stockport and it was electric lights all over the place and of course at eight years old like I was switching them off all over the place. Yeah. [laughs] Having a real good time with them but and also it had been a well-known house. It was a four, four storey property and it would, it were owned by a well-known doctor, surgeon and he had two daughters, I remember and they had, at the side of the fireplaces there was like a lever that went down into the servant’s quarters like, you know, and when they wanted the servants they just rang this damned bell thing you know. It was all hooked up to that you know.
CB: Yeah. Mod cons of the day.
GH: And the, and the electricity, you know that was, that was something else. At eight years old I thought oh dear me.
CB: So in Reddish -
GH: No gas lights to bother about like. Switch the light on and off.
CB: Yeah. In Reddish what were the heating arrangements?
GH: The heating. Nil. Absolutely nil.
CB: Open fires.
GH: You had a fire, an open fire. Yeah. That was the only heating you had.
CB: And the toilet and washing?
GH: Well the toilet was outside in the, in the shed outside.
CB: Was it a flush toilet or a thunder box?
GH: No. It was a thunder box. [laughs] And er –
CB: Which meant that a horse and cart came around regularly and –
GH: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: And then they –
GH: Dealt with it. You know.
CB: Then the thing was tipped in -
GH: Yeah.
CB: To the cart and put back again.
GH: That’s right. And I remember the doctors for instance you know. I remember my mother paying a penny a week. Hospital fund as she called it. A penny a week you paid. But we had, we had a family doctor that used to come around and deal with things and I suppose he got paid with this penny a week thing you know.
CB: Yeah. Well the NHS didn’t start until 1948.
GH: No, that’s right. Yeah. This was from 1915 to when I was eight. It would be thirteen, 1913 when I left Reddish.
[Recording paused]
CB: Just tell us a bit about “walls have ears” George.
GH: Well you weren’t, you weren’t allowed to talk about anything appertaining to the, to the war. Like where I was you know, in London. These bombs that dropped on the camp where I was. We weren’t allowed to talk about it at all so I never found out what happened to these people that were bombed on the camp. I know it wasn’t me that was bombed but it was on the WAAF depot but there must have been some casualties within that WAAF camp you know to, to have happened to them. Fatal happenings.
CB: Yeah.
GH: And you just, you just weren’t allowed to talk about these things.
CB: Yeah.
GH: And that stuck a lot after the war and that’s why the serviceman didn’t talk to their children or their wife about what happened because that’s how they’d been brought up. Just keep your mouth shut. Walls have ears. [laughs]
CB: Now bearing in mind that aircrew went on operations, normally thirty and then did something else did you get any people who were effectively being rested coming to help out on your training?
GH: No. No. No. I never came across anybody but I remember taking, the recruits sometimes had to be taken in batches to wherever they were going and I remember I had to take about twelve recruits and that meant that a sergeant had to go with them as well as a corporal and we went to a, a big air force place on the east coast of Scotland. Can you think of anywhere there?
CB: Montrose there was one.
GH: No. No.
CB: No.
GH: No. It wasn’t there. And there was a single track railway there and I remember we got –
CB: Leuchars. Leuchars was it?
GH: No.
CB: Ok.
GH: It’s still going. The air force -
CB: Oh Kinloss.
GH: Kinloss.
CB: Yeah.
GH: That’s the one. And they had a single line railway there and we’re off the train and we handed them over to one of these guys with a truck like to take them to the camp and I managed to get him to sign the docket that I had for, for these recruits. Otherwise I would have to wait for the next day to catch a train back. It was a train due to go back and unless we got rid of these recruits to this driver and get him to sign, sign the docket for them you know I’d have to stay the night. And what they used to do when you were taking recruits like that it was when your leave was starting so it was part of your leave that, you know, as far as I was concerned.
CB: Yeah.
GH: So I thought no I’m getting rid of this lot, so anyway I got, I got him to sign the docket for them you know. He said, ‘I’ll get, I’ll get, I’ll get in trouble when I get back,’ he said. In my mind I said, ‘I’ve got to get back to, back home.’ I said, ‘I’m on leave now.’
CB: What rank was he?
GH: He was an LAC.
CB: Right. And that was quite a long journey then.
GH: LAC driver.
CB: Yeah. Leading Air Craft man.
GH: Oh yeah. It was, it was a long way that you know and -
CB: What provisions –
GH: And I’d got to get back to Stockport.
CB: Yeah.
GH: To start my leave.
CB: Yeah. So what provisions did they give you on the, like, the recruits for that journey?
GH: Did you say it was Lossiemouth?
CB: No. Well it could be Lossiemouth. Yeah.
GH: Lossiemouth.
CB: Ok. Well it’s close.
GH: Lossiemouth. It was. Yeah.
CB: Is not far from Kinloss.
GH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
GH: Lossiemouth.
CB: Right.
GH: That was where we were.
CB: Yeah.
GH: They’re still active aren’t they?
CB: They are. Yeah.
GH: Yeah.
CB: So what provisions were they given for the journey because it was a long trip?
GH: Well, they had, they had a pack, a food pack made up for them you know but on the camp you know.
CB: Yeah.
GH: And you always –
CB: What would that be?
GH: You always got something enroute you know at a station. You know, where they could get a cup of tea and a bun.
CB: Because you had to change trains.
GH: You changed trains yeah. Yeah.
CB: How long did that journey take, roughly?
GH: I don’t know. About I think it was about six hours or something like that I think.
CB: And when they got to Lossiemouth what were they going to do? Was that where they were to be stationed?
GH: That’s where they were going to be stationed but what they was going to be doing there I just don’t know. I don’t know what the individual was going to do. Whether they were going to be pilots or gunners or whatever I don’t know. Flight mechanics or whatever.
CB: Because at that point -
GH: I don’t know.
CB: They wouldn’t have any trade would they?
GH: No. No. No.
CB: Right.
GH: No they would be just fit [laughs]. As best I could get them anyway.
CB: Amazing. And they were all be good at football after you were doing it.
GH: Oh yeah football was, yeah, I loved that. You see Morecambe had a, we had a team of professional footballers from somewhere or other. Arthur Chester, the goal keeper, he came from Queen’s Palace. He played for Queen’s Palace and QPR and Bill [Byrom?] he played for Blackburn. Arthur Lancaster He was another goalkeeper. He played for Huddersfield. Oh we had, goalkeepers we were alright. We had three, three professional goalkeepers. [laughs]
CB: Completely blocked the goal.
GH: That’s right. Yeah. But we were only, only playing one of course but yes we, and we won quite a lot of trophies during that period with Morecambe, you know. Yeah.
CB: So just going then to Wilmslow. When you finished there was that because of the end of the war or you were posted somewhere different.
GH: No. I was, I left the air force in, it would be ‘45 I think.
CB: What time of the year?
GH: I can’t remember.
CB: And where did you go from there?
GH: I went to Lancaster. I, that was when I had to get myself a job. Being about twenty nine, thirty at the time. I had to get myself a trade. Lancaster City came and wanted to sign me for their team and I said, ‘Well I’ll sign for you if you get, give me a trade,’ so that’s when I went in to engineering and I finished up in engineering all my life.
CB: What type of engineering?
GH: Well it was a craft really. It was metal spinning. We used to spin parts for aircraft and all that sort of thing, you know. Spin, spin on a lathe, you know, Used to give you a block of wood and, and a drawing for what, what you were going to shape it to and then you’d put it on, on the lathe, get it drilled and on the lathe, turn it to the shape that was necessary and then spin it. Spin metal on to that to give you a shape and that’s, that’s what I did for the rest of my life but when I finished when I was sixty five they were starting, they were starting to finish with the spinning and they were doing nearly everything by press. By pressing. They increased the method of dealing with these things. They used to make a press and they used to press it. Everything was pressed and did away with the metal spinning then so I got out at the right time you know when I retired.
CB: So you went to Lancaster City.
GH: That’s right.
CB: And you played with them for how long?
GH: I played for them just for one season and then there was another team of, that came to me you know to play for them and I became an FA coach. I went on an FA coaching course and I became a coach and I became a coach and manager of this team, non-league team. In the same league as what Lancaster City was. So –
CB: Which one was that?
GH: I was with them for three years.
RH: Rossendale
GH: Rossendale. Rossendale United.
[paused
GH: And they –
CB: And you –
GH: Had quite a good team but I got out of it for one reason and that was because money was beginning to talk in the game and I was getting players that I knew to come to play for Rossendale and the directors said, ‘Oh we can’t afford him. Too much. He needs too much money,’ and I wasn’t able to get the players that I needed at the time because they hadn’t got sufficient money so that was that.
CB: So how long did you actually continue as a coach and manager?
GH: About three years. That was, I think I was thirty three -
CB: Because you were juggling -
GH: By that time.
CB: Two things weren’t you? You were -
GH: Oh yeah.
CB: Juggling the sport.
GH: That’s right.
CB: And the trade.
GH: That’s right. And I found that I could, I could make a living, a better living by playing part time football and and working as an engineer so that I got two wages coming in then you know and that, that was well worthwhile then because the amount of money that was being, you see Rochdale when I was playing for them at the end of the, the war they wanted me to play for them but they, they offered me absolute rubbish as a wage you know and that’s where I realised that I’d got to do something about this after, after playing finished.
CB: When did the children come along? During the war?
GH: No. After the war. My son, my son was born just at the end when I, when I finished in the air force. He was born right at the end.
RH: ‘47/48 I think.
GH: Was it?
RH: Yeah. And I’m –
GH: 1947/48 yeah.
RH: I was ’54.
GH: Yeah
GH: 1954.
GH: Yeah.
RH: Tell them about when you were at the conflict you were telling me the other day about when you were playing for Lancaster and doing your metal spinning at the same time and you had an accident.
GH: Yeah. Oh that’s right. Yeah. The, it was a bit, the engineering was a bit on the dangerous side you know. The metal spinning. You get cuts very very easily you know and there was one, it was, we were working Saturday mornings then and I cut the end of my finger off and I went across this room towards the nurses place, you know, at the other end of this room. I was halfway across and I fainted and that’s the only time I’ve ever fainted in my life and I’d lost so much blood that it must have affected me you know. I was only out for a minute or so like you know and then they, they managed to get me up and take me to the hospital in, in Lancaster to get it seen to and we were playing in a Cup tie that day and I said, ‘Well I can’t, can’t play today.’ ‘Oh we can’t do without you. It’s a Cup tie. You’ll have to. You’ll have to play today.’ And we was, we had to go to a team called Bacup in Lancashire to, to play this Cup tie and and they’d strapped it all up you know and bandaged and everything and I played this Cup tie. I had to go off before half time because the ball had hit this. I tried to keep it out of the way and it all started to bleed again so I was covered in blood and the trainer, trainer took me off like, you know and bandaged it all up again you know. The second half I was pushed out again. [laughs]
CB: Never looked back then.
GH: That was my experience.
RH: I mean the –
[Recording paused]
CB: So we’re just going to get a question from grandson Josh
GH: Yeah.
CB: And see what the reaction is. So Josh what’s the question?
JH: So I want to know if you resent the war at all?
GH: No. I don’t, don’t resent it at all. I think what was, what was done had to be done and I hate to think what would have happened if we didn’t win the war. What would have happened then?
JH: But asides from, you know, the war happened, yeah and you had, you did your bit and that’s very honourable the, the politics involved in it. I mean does that, does that make you angry or –
GH: Well the politics –
JH: I mean just the very, the fact of war and the nature of it.
GH: I never went in to politics at all, you know. I just did what I thought was right and and I thought that the war was right. It needed, it needed to be done and that’s what we did and did it successfully.
CB: What do you say was the general public attitude?
GH: The general public attitude didn’t, the, I don’t think they liked the war. I mean to say you get the Londoners who had been in these raids on London all through the war you can’t expect them to say, ‘Well I enjoyed it.’ They, they, they wouldn’t enjoy it. No way. But I think that it was something that had to be done and the forces, whatever they were, navy, army, air force they’ve all done their job and done a good job and the people today should be very thankful for what happened.
CB: Any more? Ok. Thank you. So we’re now winding up at five to one and many thanks to George, to Josh and to Rosemary. We are in Middleton Cheney having been talking with George Haigh.
[Recording paused]
GH: It was two –
CB: Arriving in Morecambe. Yeah.
GH: Two, two physical training instructors like that posted to Morecambe. There was two of us and I was given the travel warrant so I was in charge kind of style and we went through Stockport. The train pulled up at Stockport on its way to Manchester and then on to Morecambe and I I said to this bloke with me, I said, ‘I’ve got the warrant.’ I said, ‘I’m, I’m going home to see my wife.’ So I got off the train there and went and saw and saw my wife. Got back to the station at midnight kind of style you know and we were going off to Morecambe. We eventually arrived in Morecambe at midnight and they didn’t expect us at that time of course and the, one of the police, SP, he, he took me into the headquarters and it was a hotel that they’d taken over in Morecambe and they’d got cells in the basement for any wrong doers and they said, ‘The only thing we can give you is one of these cells.’ I said, ‘Well how do, how do you go on about when you have an air raid like?’ You know. Because coming from London like you know we thought everybody had the air raids. They said, ‘We never have an air raid here at Morecambe. Never.’ Anyway, we got, got to bed in this, in this, in one of the cells and they were going to billet us next morning and the air raid warning went and it was the only time that Morecambe ever had an air raid warning and I went outside and it were like the illuminations. Everybody put their lights on, you know [laughs]. Morecambe was flooded with lights and we found out like, you know, that this, this plane had obviously got lost and was in its way to [Barrow] and -
CB: Across Morecambe Bay.
GH: Across Morecambe Bay.
CB: Right.
GH: And that was the only raid that Morecambe ever had in their, in their life. [laughs]
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 George Haig
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AHaighG150902
Format
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01:20:27 audio recording
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.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Description
An account of the resource
George Haigh was already a keen footballer when he volunteered for the Royal Air Force and became a physical training instructor. He was posted to RAF Morecambe where he provided basic training to new recruits. He discusses the mixed level of fitness amongst the recruits and how a five week course was sometimes shortened. He also undertook parachute training. After the war, he continued with his love of football while also working in engineering.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Conforms To
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Pending review
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Cheshire
England--Lancashire
Date
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2015-09-02
Contributor
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Julie Williams
ground personnel
physical training
RAF Morecambe
RAF Ringway
RAF Wilmslow
sanitation
sport
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/157/1962/PWilcoxF1603.2.jpg
165cb8362309afeee767107453014094
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/157/1962/AWilcoxF161201.1.mp3
326870f7ef28784b3cf9b2aad8561484
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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Wilcox, Frank
Frank Wilcox
Description
An account of the resource
The collection consists of an oral history interview with Frank Wilcox and one photograph. Frank Wilcox was an infantryman in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and became a prisoner of war during the Italian campaign.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Frank Wilcox and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-12-01
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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Wilcox, F
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: This particular interview is different from the others because it’s based on the fact that in the RAF all aircrew were at least a sergeant.
FW: Yeah.
CB: Whereas in the other forces people started and fought in various other ranks as well.
FW: Other levels there were. Other levels there were.
CB: So today, my name is Chris Brockbank and today we are in Oxford and it’s the 1st of December 2016 and we’re with Frank Wilcox who was in the army and then became a prisoner of war. And it’s the prisoner of war part that is particularly important.
FW: Yeah.
CB: In this interview. So Frank what are your — where were you born and what are the original, what are the earliest recollections of life?
FW: I was born. I was born at Blaengarw in, I’ve said the date well I went to school, you know. Dad wanted the bigger school because we moved when I was ten years of age like to Oxford. 1930s. 1935. Yeah. I’d say 1935 to Oxford. What it was like — my two brothers, older than me, they came to Oxford. Got a job in the pressed steel and lived with my auntie in Florence Park. And so they said, ‘Why don’t we come up?’ So my, so my dad said. ‘May as well.’ So we all just moved up there. Later on my two other brother who had left there. They moved up as well. In the October. So the whole family moved up to Oxford in the end. There was nobody left down there.
CB: But where did you go to school?
FW: Well, went in Blaengarw boys. It was the infants school in Blaengarw till I was ten. Then of course the other one, Oxford we went to Temple Cowley School in Oxford until I was fourteen.
CB: Right.
FW: Then of course I went to work then. Pressed steel.
CB: And what did you do in pressed steel?
FW: Well, when the war came they were building fuselages for aircraft and I was underneath. They put the rivets in. I had to make sure the dolly thing was in the hole so when they put the rivets down on to it. It was a cushy little job really for a while. And then was a damned fool. My mate was working in the paint shop persuaded me to go down with him. If I hadn’t gone there I wouldn’t have gone in the army at all you know. But the bloke that was with me. Same age as me. He was still never went in to the army. If I’d have stayed there I would never have gone then in the flipping army.
CB: Because it was a reserved occupation.
FW: Yeah. Aircraft see. And of course a big mistake.
CB: So how did you like that job?
FW: It was alright. Yeah. Ok yeah. I was fourteen then. Only had about eighteen months and then a colleague persuaded me to go down with him and of course that was a big mistake wasn’t it? In the paint shop. Had to go and see what that was. Nothing there. So when I was eighteen I was called up. 18th of March 1943. Started out at Colchester. Yeah.
CB: So you were, you were called up in Oxford.
FW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And what did they do when they called you up?
FW: Well I mean you had to go down and get a physical you know, down in the town hall and all that and they said they’d let me know. And of course that was in the February I should imagine because then by the March they called me up. 18th of March I was at Colchester.
CB: They sent you to Colchester.
FW: Then six weeks in one part of the barrack what you called, you know light training and all that. And they were with the what’s-the regiment. What do you call them? Heavy, heavy, the slow, the slower ones you know. Marching.
CB: The ones that do slow marching.
FW: Marching slower [unclear] Then after six weeks, yeah that’s where I started. [unclear] was on about the Oxford Bucks they were about a hundred and forty eight a minute, they were.
CB: Yeah.
FW: They were what they called the light infantry.
CB: Yeah. Well the infantry always marched faster.
FW: Marvel. Ooh.
CB: Yeah —
FW: Then another ten weeks there. Then we moved to near Aylesbury where the Oxford Bucks. Second Bucks battalion was there. Stayed there, and then after — probably about October time we moved to Dover. Of course bloody Dover you find the Germans were firing almost the big guns over every so often weren’t they? Landing In Dover they were. Had to be careful what you were doing down there.
CB: So when the shells came over?
FW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: What did, what were —
FW: Well you didn’t know where they’d land anyway see. There was no specific place for them to land. They didn’t land on our barrack mind you. I admit that. We were right, right at the back. Right at the back of the town you know.
CB: What were the barracks called?
FW: Old Park. Funny thing was they were new barracks but Old Park Barracks they were called but they were very new barracks actually. Yeah.
CB: They were on the reverse side of the hill were they?
FW: On the top. They were out of the tunnel they were over the top like. They were out sight. You couldn’t see them from the road. Not from the sea side.
CB: And what did you do there? What was your, what was your —?
FW: We just training we were doing more or less.
CB: What sort of training were you doing?
FW: Well. Like marching most of the bloody time. But anyway I was there for about — just before Christmas ‘43 and then I was I don’t know a few of us had to be transferred to, I don’t know — a half a dozen or more. A dozen probably. So many people out of each battalion. You know. Out of a company like. Happen to be the worst of the. So you had to go from there to Liverpool and we sailed right then from Liverpool to Italy. Naples.
CB: This was with the Bucks regiment was it?
FW: No. No. No. I wasn’t with them. No. No. No. Not there. I’d left them.
CB: So when you went to Aylesbury. You were in the —
FW: Yeah. I was with the Bucks then.
CB: You were in the Bucks regiment.
FW: And then we went to Dover still with them. But when I went abroad I weren’t with them then. I just [unclear] it was back Oxford Bucks again.
CB: Right. But you were still in the infantry.
FW: Infantry. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Ok. Oxford and Bucks.
FW: Ox and Bucks.
CB: So when you went to Liverpool then what?
FW: Well we sailed then from I don’t know started about, January, June, January to Italy. I mean we never knew where we were going. No one told us where we were going like, you know. We didn’t know where we were going.
CB: Right.
FW: We had to land up in Naples.
CB: Oh right.
FW: The harbour had been bombed badly like, you know. And then we had to walk about three kilometres or more to Mount Vesuvius you know, the [unclear], where the volcano was. And we unpacked near the ruddy slope. And we had tents then, you know them bell tent things you know. The round ones.
CB: Yeah.
FW: We had loads of them there in there, for about a month. Six, five weeks and then of course they couldn’t get through. You see, what it was they couldn’t get through Casino.
CB: Yeah.
FW: Monte Casino. They couldn’t get through so all of a sudden Anzio was there, they landed at Anzio. With the Americans, you know, we were with Americans attached to the American 5th Army we were. Montgomery was on the Adriatic side like you know. At the right hand side of Italy. We were on the left hand side with the American 5th Army. ‘Course we didn’t see Americans then. We were mostly British troops we were with. But we landed in Anzio and took over from the regiment. But later. At ten o’clock at night, I know it was late. 15th of June, February. That was nineteen forty —
CB: ‘44.
FW: ’44. Yeah. Then of course the next day, a Wednesday it was quiet. We were on a slope like that you know. Big slope.
CB: Steep slope.
FW: And we had the machine on a tripod like you know. Had the shakes. Anyway, nothing happened. The next morning about up to Thursday, that would be the 16th 17th probably and something was coming. I looked around. There was a load of troops on the top. Looked dressed like American helmets, looked like the German helmets from the distance in the dawn you know. They were. They were German paratroopers weren’t they? And of course before we could turn around he said to me ‘I’ve got the machine gun,’ the Bren, he said, ‘I’ll take over now,’ he said. I said, ‘Ok.’ You know, less than five minutes later that man was dead. Shot. Landed on top of me. I’d never seen anybody dead before. He landed on top of me. I’m covered in blood and before I could turn around there was a bloody German with a bloody Schmeisser and there’s me with a Tommy gun. I thought Christ. This is it. ‘Raus. Raus.’ So what he meant by bloody, ‘Raus.’ I got up anyway. And from then for four hours we carried German wounded back and forth. Behind their lines we were. Four ruddy hours doing that. I’ve never seen so many dead bodies in all my life. They were piled up like bricks they were. They weren’t ours. They were German troops they were. Not ours. [unclear] not behind their lines obviously. I’d never seen so many dead people. I’d never seen anybody dead before.
CB: So how did they pile them up then? Just —
FW: I don’t know. They were just —
CB: Literally.
FW: Yeah. Like you were lying on the floor like that, like that, like that. And they would put another one on top of the other.
CB: And they did.
FW: One on top of the others you, like, you got four high.
CB: Then what did they do with them?
FW: Oh I don’t know. I don’t know. Then after that we were there for four hours. We went back down into a, down to a gully somewhere, you know. We stayed there for a while and they moved us on. We landed up in Rome then. In a film studio of all bloody places. There was a film studio but of course they had to clear out a big place like that and the toilets were [laughs] the toilets were outside and doing anything — and at night time they had big fifty gallon drums in there. Two had to go in there and do what they had to do, you know. You had a platform for going in there like you know. Standing there, going to have a wee or whatever you had to do. And then from then on we —
CB: This is in Rome is it?
FW: In Rome that was. Yeah.
CB: Right.
FW: In Rome that was. Yeah. That was all Roman. Didn’t see much of it, I admit and we’d been there a couple of weeks I think and then they moved us on to some lorry. On to a railway station. They moved us up higher into Italy. A place called — I can’t remember the name it was called. And it was a prisoner of war camp for British prisoners who were captured in the desert. I think they were. And we were there, you know, for about a month. And we had no bed at all. We lay on straw. We didn’t have a bed. We were inside you know. We weren’t outside. We were inside lying on bloody straw really we were. Then we were there a while and then we [pause] what did we do after that? Yeah and then after that we were on the train again. We were right through Italy. Through the Brenner Pass into Austria. Merseburg. Into a camp called Stalag something. I remember the one at the end but I can’t remember the first name of it. It was a biggish camp. And we were there for a month. And they moved us back then to where we were now. Stalag Luft 3. Next to the RAF place, you know. Next to us. Then of course then we —
CB: That’s in, that’s in Poland.
FW: Yeah. That was in Poland now.
CB: Stalag Luft 3.
FW: Yeah. It is Poland now but it was Germany then. East Germany then. Yeah. Yeah. And then what did I do. Well then I went to a working camp. They called it a 40 30 working camp. It was —
CB: So you came out of Stalag Luft 3.
FW: Yeah. Into a working camp.
CB: Into — what was the other one called?
FW: Stalag. 4030. That’s all I knew. 4030. And it was three different factories. One had four hundred. One had three hundred working with you. And the fifty with you in the factory making drainage pipes. Orderly came in. He came in. You know the old, you know the coal, [unclear] kind of thing, you know. We had to empty them out for the — do their kilns like you know, and then when they done the kilns we used to drop them down, brick it up for about thirty six hours and then knock it down and then they bring all the pipes up. We had to stack the pipes in these, in these, they caught it in the railway track that the coal had been in, in the first place. Put straw on the floor, you know and pipes on top. Line them all up. Till the carriage was filled right up. And that was it then.
CB: What were the pipes made of?
FW: Well the drainage pipes were ordinary drainage pipes. Yeah.
CB: Were they?
FW: They were like done up the top you know with the, how they done them. They dropped them down into the kiln and then line all one side and then the other side and down the middle. And then they’d brick it all up and light it for about thirty six hours or two days you know to warm it all up. Then it was cooled down for twelve hours. Enough to thin down for four or five of the kilns inside there. So you wouldn’t light just one. But we didn’t do that. We just, we were just unloading the thing and putting them back. We were putting the pipes in the railway carriage like, we were. Then but that was on till like about, that was November time. Could be December maybe. I don’t. For some reason I had a poisoned leg or something. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what. They couldn’t treat me there so they sent me back to the main camp.
CB: A poisoned?
FW: Stalag Luft 3 again.
CB: What? Sorry. A poisoned what did you say?
FW: I had a sort of poisoned leg or something.
CB: Oh a poisoned leg. Right ok.
FW: Swollen up like, you know.
CB: Ok.
FW: And they sent me back to the main camp again. Of course I never saw any of the blokes again. Because time, time came through and the Russians broke through in the January. We were still in that camp you see. Our lot had to march back to West Germany, they did. I did see one of my mates then after the war. He came from Birmingham. I met him afterwards. We met. A lot of them died of cold. It was cold see in 1944/45. It was very cold I can tell you.
CB: It was a very cold winter.
FW: And then anyway we moved. I met up with an Irishman, naturally. We got bloody lost. We were going, there was two roads like that. We went messing about. They, when we looked they vanished. So we went up that road. We were on the wrong road weren’t we? They went the other road. So we landed up back with the Russian soldiers. They didn’t know what to make of us to be honest. Not really. The only way we got away with it was one of the coloured blokes there in the army you know, Indian I think he was. He more or less realised them that we weren’t bloody Germans. So he sort of passed us off like you know. Anyway, and for two weeks we were out on our own we found a horse and cart, bed cart. And we met up with two, other RAF blokes which weren’t, they weren’t officers. I don’t know what they were. How they got to be, how they got there I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. They weren’t, they weren’t like officers. Not like that. They were only —
CB: NCOs. Were they NCOs?
FW: One was a sergeants. And one a private or something. Sergeants I think, or something like that.
CB: Yes.
FW: And we were only there for a couple of weeks all everything was empty. You go over and over. Nobody in them. The only thing we find was whether they were booby traps or not, you know, like. But other than that you could do what you liked. Picked anything. Shops. Take what you like. No one would stop you. Anyway, we picked out where we should have gone in the first place with this big, it wasn’t a castle but some very big place you know. And we got there eventually. Then we was there a little while, then we transported like. This is as very far as we got the train, cattle wagons you know. And the only fire is it’s a long train aye. We didn’t realise they were bloody coal wagons behind us. We didn’t know that. And any way we was in here, and all of a sudden after we’d been gone awhile because it’s winter time now. Snow’s on the ground like that. All of a sudden I looked out and the bloody carts were all piled on top of one another. So what had happened someone had uncoupled the train. The train went forward. The train went down the grade slightly. That was going down. They were coming back. Of course we didn’t know that wasn’t it? We hadn’t jumped out we would all have been bloody caught there in that train, the carriage. They followed me out. The five of us. And three or four were killed in that accident. And then we had to wait then.
CB: What sort, what sort of speeds were the trains going then?
FW: Well they can’t. I don’t know. I mean they were backing back and he was running down gently like, you know.
CB: Oh right.
FW: Of course obviously they rolled on top of each other didn’t they?
CB: Right. Yeah.
FW: About four or five carriages were all crushed weren’t they? All the other blokes were lucky to get out. About four of them were killed I think.
CB: So were you in a carriage or in a wagon?
FW: Oh in the wagon. Oh Yeah. Yeah. Like a railway wagon. You know. But we had to wait then for the next train to go to Krakov then. We waited the next train to come through. Course when it came through it were bloody full up weren’t it? With thirty to a carriage weren’t it. And then of course that went on for, right across. I mean then we just went on to, to where we supposed to go to. To, I don’t know Ukraine or whatever you know. But the trouble is, you had to. The toilet, you know the toilet you had to do it on the railway line. And believe me that wasn’t pleasant.
CB: But this is all in an area under Russian control is it?
FW: Oh that was. Yeah. Oh that was. Bloody Russians had already passed us. They’d gone all the way in Germany already they were. That was going for a couple of weeks later that was. And then we were in a place and luckily for me I was really bad by then. And luckily for us a hospital ship came. The Duchess of Richmond hospital ship. We landed on, we passed on there, we went through the Black Sea and through the Dardanelles and into the Mediterranean and stopped in Gibraltar.
CB: But how did you get on to the boat that took you that way?
FW: Well, I was bored up to a point. I was in a hospital bed all the time I was on that boat I was. A hospital bed. And then in Gibraltar somebody came on giving us stuff. You know piling different things from Gibraltar I don’t know. We landed in Greenock, Scotland in the end anyway.
CB: Oh.
FW: So.
CB: So when?
FW: I was there about six weeks.
CB: When did you get back?
FW: That was. What would it be now? That must be now ’44. I don’t know. The war was nearly over by then I think, I’m not sure. About August time I should think. Mid July, August time something like that, 45.
CB: Oh the war was over by then.
FW: The European. Yeah.
CB: in Europe. Yeah.
FW: I think by then. Near enough over then. No. The Japanese war wasn’t over.
CB: Right.
FW: But it still out there mind you.
CB: Right.
FW: Anyway, I came home for a week and then I had to go up to London. Richmond Park. For about six weeks I suppose. And then you transfer down to Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.
CB: What did, what did you do in Richmond Park?
FW: Nothing. Just doing training like. Physical training and different things. Didn’t do much at all really. Went down to Aylesbury. That part of me didn’t realised it was, what do they call it, moving camp for getting out of the army like. Then we had about a week and we went up to London. I was disarmed you know. Given civvy clothes and that was the end of it.
CB: Were you carrying a rifle all this time?
FW: No. No. No.
CB: Right.
FW: No. Never had a rifle after that. I never had a rifle after that. I lost my rifle out there. But no it was alright in the end I suppose. But I wasn’t well, I was bad from when I got here. I was still bad mind you.
CB: What was this infection in your —
FW: Stomach. When I think about when I was in that hospital in Glasgow, Greenock there was a bloke next, next to bloke and me he had an ulcer and it burst you know, and all of a sudden I’ve never seen such a [unclear] bloke in all my life. I thought Christ. I thought, I’d be in trouble. I couldn’t have had an ulcer. Couldn’t have been an ulcer. It was something. It wasn’t an ulcer. It couldn’t have been.
CB: What happened to him, when it, when it burst?
FW: I don’t think he died. It burst. But he didn’t die, I don’t think.
CB: No.
FW: No, no, no. I don’t know.
CB: How could you tell it had burst?
FW: Well all this in the corner of his mouth. It was everywhere, you know. So I didn’t, I don’t really know what happened. I don’t think he died. I don’t think so anyway. I’m not sure but I mean don’t know. But I didn’t know him anyway. I didn’t really know him. Then and after a couple of weeks had passed went home for a week and then up to Richmond Park then. Then there about six weeks there and then up to Aylesbury. Demobbed sort of by the October ’45. And that was it. Nothing special.
CB: Then what did you do?
FW: Well I went home for a while and then back to pressed steel then. On the fridges.
CB: So you came back to Oxford? Yeah.
FW: Making refrigerators they were then.
CB: Oh. Right.
FW: Back there then. Yeah. Then after a while I got fed up with that. I wasn’t very. I couldn’t settle like you know. Then I went down. I could drive up to a point and then I went down. At the time they, all petrol companies all pooled petrol they used to call it. It was in all the lorries then. It was a sort of a grey colour like you know. It said pool on it. But then after the war they all went back to their like. I worked for the Anglo American Oil Company. Esso. Anyway, a different company. They all went back to their original company. Well I could drive up to a point. My. When I was with the old boy, he said, have a go. Have a go on a lorry boy. I passed my test anyway and it was alright so had a lorry of my own then. And had a bit of a dust up with the manager and I went on British Road Services for about six years. Then landed back in pressed steel again. That’s where I met my wife.
CB: In pressed steel or on the lorries.
FW: After five years I went and left them, British Road, national you know left them. Went back to the pressed steel crimp shop.
CB: Right.
FW: She was making the thing and I was putting them the cars. So that’s where we met. Up there.
CB: What was Doris doing?
FW: She was doing the things that should have gone on the cars, know them, down the back fenders, you know the fenders? Behind them you usually put a cover on them like you know, like that, she was making them. But we were putting them on. On the little trolley we were sitting on there. Putting the screws in and going on, line was still going. We were sat on a little trolley rolling around. Yeah. And then of course the next year, we got married the next year.
CB: So that was forty —
FW: 1955 that was. ‘55/56.
CB: ‘56
FW: ’56 when we got.
CB: Right.
FW: Yeah.
CB: So you met her in ’55.
FW: Yeah. Yeah
CB: And married her —
FW: Well hadn’t gone out together by then. Not till ’56 really. You were about a year old —
PC: That’s right. I was born in.
FW: When we went up to. Lived in Worcester then. Eddie lived, lived in Worcester. Been up there in the first time we met her didn’t we. Paula was about a year old. Yeah. And then, anyway, worst part of it was my mum, she’d been bad for a while actually. She was in the hospital. She had pernicious anaemia you know. And she had to be taken to have some [unclear] injection for quite a long time. Anyway, visiting time was from half seven till eight. I was a bit late then. I was a quarter to eight I went in there. My two brothers were there. Do you know my mother must have waited for me to come back. She died right in front of me.
CB: And you were the last of ten children?
FW: Yeah. Yeah. And she died right in front of me.
CB: Good Heavens.
FW: And all the lines on her face disappeared you know.
CB: Did they really.
FW: I couldn’t believe it, and my two brothers. The oldest brother were Jack, then my other brother Tommy were there. ‘She must have waited for you, they said.
CB: Yeah.
FW: She must have, must have. And she really. My mother had a hard life because, she was, she was the oldest of her family you know. And she had shoes at thirteen in a farm. Of course all them children you know. Ten bloody children after that you know. Too much really. The only thing I can say my father worked, and had no handouts. You know he were never on the dole or anything like that. There was never a lot of money. We didn’t have a lot of money in those day. If you had a pound you were lucky. Thirty bob you were lucky. So we never had no, never had any help from anybody. Only what anybody earned. And of course as the boys got older they wanted to go to work in the mines with him like you know. All of them. But of course they all got fed up with the mines. They ran away and that’s how we landed up in Oxford. And the best thing we ever done that were. They said to my mother, ‘Would you like it up there, mother?’ ‘Anyplace is better than this. This is like hell,’ she said. You had four coal mines. Three in the, where we live, and just below where we lived we had another bloody coal mine. And on the back we had a big mountain all around us you know. You couldn’t get out. You was back all the way around you know. You couldn’t get out. And on the top of the mountain you had a big area. You come from there. They’re tipping all this on top of the mountains, bloody stuff. They were just tipping this stuff behind our house in the end, you were right around the back of our house. It was over thirty foot high it was.
CB: Is this the. Is that the —
FW: And all the dust. You couldn’t wash her washing it was, the wind was blowing this way.
CB: Yeah.
FW: Couldn’t do any washing, the coal was blown off the, off damned tips.
CB: And was this storing the coal or was that the spoil?
FW: No that was the rubbish that was.
CB: That was the spoil?
FW: Bits of coal in amongst it like you know obviously.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
FW: But that was just the earth.
CB: Just the rubbish.
FW: Supposed to be. Had lots of little bits. The kids used to go round with a little bag picking all the bits of coal up like you know, and sell that if you could. But if the wind was blowing that way you couldn’t do any washing. Any coal dust was blowing off see. Oh she had a hard life my mother but you never hear her complain.
CB: Right.
FW: No. No.
CB: But Oxford came to the rescue?
FW: Did yeah. She said anything’s got to be better where we live here. Because she came from the country you see.
CB: Yeah.
FW: Place they call Kerry near Newtown. In Montgomery. Well it’s not Montgomery, now they changed. They changed the county from twelve to about seven I think they did. And then they amalgamated two counties into one like you know. Give it a different name. It’s now just called Montgomery. The town of Montgomery is still there but not the county.
CB: Right.
FW: Funny part of it. The Irish name Kerry. Where she lives. A village called Kerry. I went up there once. Nice little place up there.
CB: So in Oxford you settled down. Where did, where did you live when you were married?
FW: Oh yeah. Yeah. Well we were that was a problem. I say my mother died. And Dot and I moved in with my father like you know. I mean it was really going well. The trouble my brother. Older than me. He was living with Mary’s brother, and he had no children, and Mary was expecting a baby and they said we’ll have no children here. So they had to get out, and craftily he worked, he worked around. Made trouble for us didn’t he? He got us out and he got in. So in the end then we had to buy a place of our own didn’t we. In Kidlington.
CB: In Kidlington was it?
FW: In Kidlington. Yeah.
CB: How long did you stay there?
FW: About two years, and then we moved down here and we’ve been in this place here nearly fifty seven years.
CB: Have you really.
FW: 1959 we moved in here. Yeah. Weren’t it. Hard to believe the bloke next door he’s, I think he’s Chinese I think. He was on about how much did you pay for the house. What do you think? They’re going for around three hundred thousand now you see around here. And he said, ‘Oh a hundred thousand?’ No. No. No. ‘Fifty.’ No. No. No. Forty? No, No. Going down and down. In the end. ‘How much did you pay then?’ Two thousand five hundred and fifty. This one, this one here was fifty pound dearer than there because we had got two rooms. There next door’s they’re rooms right through like you know.
CB: Right. Right.
FW: He said, yeah. I said what everybody’s got to realise the wages was only about eight or nine pounds a week sometimes. So it really worked out exactly the same like you know.
PC: Same. Yeah.
FW: The wages weren’t like heavy big wages. I’m telling you. I was lucky really in the in the end when I went back to pressed steel. And I recall the P6 Rover. It was a lovely car though. And we worked on them I was pretty good. Gave me forty odd pound a week I was earning. They were only getting about sixteen if you were lucky. Everybody other. So I done pretty well really for about. I was on there for about eleven years on there.
CB: So when you went back to pressed steel what were you doing then?
FW: Well that was the first time as I told you we was on the trim shop were there. Then the Suez crisis came up in 1956.
CB: Yeah.
FW: And then we had we had to move. I had to move from there back into Morris’s.
CB: Right.
FW: So in the end, when it cleared up I went back to the pressed steel again then. So that’s how I ended up on that Rover side pretty well. Pretty lucky really.
CB: So what age did you retire?
FW: When I finished I was on forklift driving on the end. In the end I was sixty three and a half then. And I worked out if I stayed until I was sixty five it wouldn’t have been any more anyway. I might as well go now. So that was 1988. 1988. I was about sixty three then. And that was it. I had a little joy. I had a spare job up there. And the cars, the pressed, the pressed steel side for a couple of years and I packed that in and I haven’t worked since. Yeah. We’ve done alright because do a lot of caravanning. We had three different caravans different times. Remember the first one and then the bit bigger one and then the really big one we had in the end. A big one. That’s why the hedge is so high. To put the caravan behind that way so you couldn’t see the caravan from the hedge. It was a lot higher back then but still higher now than the hedges.
CB: But the children liked the caravan?
FW: Oh yeah, yeah. Sue. Oh how old was she?
CB: How many children did you have?
FW: Two. Two. And she was only about a year and a half old wasn’t she when we had our caravan?
PC: Something like that.
FW: Oh they all loved the caravan. Oh Yeah.
PC: I don’t remember to be honest. It’s been a little while.
FW: We had her for, had them for ten or twelve years all the different caravans, more than that. Went around different places. All around. I went to Blackpool once with it but most of the time I went down the south of England like, you know. Bournemouth and down that area mostly. Weymouth. That type of place. Yeah.
CB: Going back to your time in the prison camp. How big was the camp? How many people were there?
FW: Do you mean the working camp?
CB: Yeah. The working camp.
FW: I would say there were four hundred in one factory. Three hundred in another. That was seven hundred. And we were a hundred and fifty. We were fifty. We were a small factory. We were small. And at night time you know what they done? You had to take your shoes off and your belt. So you couldn’t bloody escape, run with no shoes and no belt. But other than that I got to be honest as the German soldier themselves I had no problem. They weren’t like, like doing any harm to us. Weren’t doing any harm to us. I can’t say they did.
CB: What — what —?
FW: The only ones you’d got to watch were every so often these blokes that came round with these black suits, you know. Gestapo. Anyway they were the ones to watch, I’ll tell you.
CB: So did the, did the Gestapo in to come in to the camp?
FW: Yeah.
CB: Much?
FW: They used to roam around yeah. But they. You know, I mean the ground weren’t all that big. There were seven hundred of us there you see. Seven hundred and fifty people there altogether. Four and three and fifty. Wasn’t a lot of room around then, move around. And we had the Red Cross parcels, you know, coming in and all the names were different where they’ve come from, like you know. Bristol, Brighton or could be London or anywhere like you know, and each one more or less the same ever time like, you know So all we done me and my mate we shared the two together you know. He had his and I had mine. But we had them for every fortnight then. But then it got to every month. And in the end we never got them at all in the end. And at the end of the war you didn’t get any.
CB: What was, what was the, what were the components of the Red Cross parcel.
FW: Little bits of tea, packets of tea, and cocoa, and biscuits and different things like that. Packets of cigarettes. Cigarettes didn’t they. You see people who didn’t to smoke used to sell it. Sell the cigarettes to get more food like, you know. I smoked a little. I wasn’t a heavy smoker. I used to smoke a bit but not a lot. But no, I was going to say I didn’t have any problem with the German soldiers themselves. No. I didn’t.
CB: What were the Gestapo looking for?
FW: You had to be careful like that. You didn’t know what they were up to half the time. They were always tall, you know, and black. Bloody black suits they had on. But the Germans soldiers themselves were no [unclear], same as we were. They didn’t bother. They were alright. Yeah.
CB: So what was a working day? What time did you get up?
FW: Normally I got up early. Was up 7 o’clock in the morning. Oh yeah. Got back about four or five. Quite a few hours. You had a break like you know, like at dinnertime.
CB: In the factory?
FW: Yeah. In the factory. They had a little room in there. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So what did you —?
FW: They didn’t give us any food. What we took with us like. You know. A sandwich or something if we had any bloody bread left ever.
CB: How were you fed in the prison camp? You started off with breakfast. Did you get breakfast?
FW: Well a lot of it was food I didn’t like much anyway. If it wasn’t for the Red Cross parcels I think we would have been in big trouble. You would have been. Sure we would have been.
CB: What did you have for breakfast?
FW: Well whatever it was if you were bloody lucky. Maybe a cup of tea. Maybe. That was about all. A bit of a slice of bread perhaps. That was about all. Nothing else. You had, they gave you like a lot of sauerkraut and all that sort of thing you know. That sauerkraut. I could eat it. I had to eat it up to a point but I didn’t like it. I had to eat something. But basically it wasn’t too bad. At the end of November, December we went back to the main camp and that was the end of it. Only the one I saw again when he came to Oxford to visit. Old Bert. Yeah, he came. Last time he came. He came from Birmingham. Solihull he came from somewhere. He came down and stayed for a couple of nights. And then a lot was happening and we lost contact from there then.
CB: Had you met him in the prison camp or did you know him before?
FW: No. No. No. Never met him before. He was in a different regiment from me. He wasn’t in our battalion. He wasn’t in the Oxford and Bucks. He was, you know [pause] I don’t know what he was. British army somewhere but I don’t know what. The point was the blokes that went to Anzio, if he had done what he should have done we would never have had half this trouble. He went there. There was hardly anybody there. No opposition at all.
CB: When you landed.
FW: Landed. No opposition. But he stood there a fortnight see. Messing about. Instead of moving in. Bringing troops in of course by the time he waited the Germans reinforcements come in didn’t they? If he’d have bloody done what he should have done what he should have done probably none of this would have happened. See Rome was only about [pause] well in kilometres about thirty kilometres away. Rome was. From where we were at Anzio.
PC: I think.
FW: But of course I mean. How do you get there is the problem.
CB: So who was carrying the machine gun when you landed?
FW: What it actually —
CB: It was a Bren gun was it?
FW: A Bren gun. Yeah.
CB: Right.
FW: Actually the Bren gun was there when we. They dug the dug out and the bloody gun was still there on the tripod like you know. All I had was a rifle really. And it was lucky for me really when he said you take over. No, no, not joking. That man. Less than five minutes he was dead. Whether they shot him from behind or what. Must have been cause he was in this side, then this side, so couldn’t have been from the bloody front. With all these troops. A big man. He looked like Americans like from the distance. It was dawn like you know. We couldn’t see properly. And I thought bloody queer all that lot over there.
CB: Were the British firing much or did they not. Were they not firing?
FW: No. We were firing. They were down. We were firing down, down a, down a slope like that see. They were up there on top of us this lot. We realised where they were. Because we realised where they were. This one came up from behind and when we turned around — I thought Christ this is it. He said, Raus, Raus. I don’t know how many Raus man I don’t know , rise I suppose, I think. And that was it. Now I told you we for four of five hours we were carrying German wounded from there back and forth. Quite a lot of our lads were killed with our shells firing over, see. They were firing over the Americans The American flag I suppose. Britain was Montgomery was up there in the Adriatic side got him. So it was the American troops or British was firing the bloody guns.
CB: So the artillery were firing over you?
FW: The artillery were firing over the German lines. Well we were in the German lines we were.
CB: Oh you were in the German lines were you?
FW: Of course we were, right. Of course we were.
CB: Right.
FW: ‘Cause a lot of the lads got. Three of these I know got killed there with shells. Yeah. In a way I was lucky all the way around. In a way I was lucky.
CB: Yeah.
FW: Because if he hadn’t said to me change that, change around it would have been me not him. He was older, he was older. Thirty five, thirty six I imagine like. He should never have been there really cause he come out of the pay corps or something. He shouldn’t have been there. But if it wasn’t for him saying turn around, change around it would have been me not him, poor bugger.
CB: So did you have any chance to fire against the Germans at all yourself?
FW: We were firing down on them. Because you couldn’t see, trouble was it was getting, it was still dark sort of like of you know. Up till then we hadn’t seen anybody up till the day before, the Wednesday. It could have been anybody, nothing. No call. No, nothing. Nothing at the back. They must have come in the early hours of Wen, Thursday morning. But they have crept up somehow or other without us realising it, in the dark and we couldn’t see anything. And this lot behind I thought they were Americans to be sure. There was masses of them like you know. They were German paratroopers they were. They didn’t land, they must have been. They didn’t land with the parachutes they were. That’s where they were you know, the paratroopers. We didn’t stand a dog’s chance did we?
CB: So were you firing yourself, were you using a rifle or were you using a Bren gun.
FW: A Bren gunner.
CB: You were a Bren gunner were you?
FW: A Bren gun we were firing. Yeah. We fired yeah. But at the moment you couldn’t see anything in the dark obviously. So close. I mean, you were more or less in the dark they caught us in the dark didn’t they?
CB: How many magazines did you carry with you for the Bren gun?
FW: Oh I don’t know really. It didn’t hold that many you know, not really. More like it was on a belt nothing like that. A magazine they were. Not that very many. You got to keep filling them up all the time. Worse, oh I don’t know. I was lucky in a way. Well I was lucky. Well If it had have been me I would have been bloody dead if it wasn’t for him moving, saying change over, would have been me. So it was the luck. I hadn’t seen anybody dead before.
CB: Right.
FW: To think he died although I was carrying back and forth. The ones we carried they weren’t dead they were wounded like you know, but they were all piled at the back behind the aid post. I couldn’t believe it. They were all like piled on top of each other. I wouldn’t have thought it was that, how they got that many there.
CB: You didn’t see what they did with them after that?
FW: Oh No. No. We moved off. In later in the afternoon we sort of moved down in some gully out there. Inside Hills, big cave thing, I was in there and then we were moved out into the Rome then. Empty film studio. Well they apparently said they were film studios. It was a big place anyway. And there were bloody loads in there, must have been more American than British. But we were with the American 5th Army we were attached to them see. There were more American than British in there. Of course from then on we went to another camp higher up the road. I think British soldiers from the Middle East, Far East — not the Far East. Middle East. Were captured by the Italians you know. I’d been there for a while. Katrine I think it was. Something like that it was called. I know we were on a railway and a walk down into this camp but that was very primitive that one. I tell you. Plenty of Americans there as well.
CB: So did you have anything to do with Americans or you just knew —?
FW: Oh mixed with them. Yeah. We were all in the same bloody combat. Combat. Yeah. They were alright. All blokes.
CB: In in the prisoner of war camp they were just British were there? Where you were?
FW: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well when we were in Stalag Luft 3 there was a compound. There was like a French compound with all the wire all the way around it, you know like you know. The British compound. Three or four other nationalities like. You didn’t sort of mix with them much like. The British kept to themselves and they kept to their selves. Yeah.
CB: So in your part of the camp were there any NCOs or were you all privates?
FW: Oh there were NCOs. Corporals and that were with them.
CB: Corporals right.
FW: Mostly but —
CB: Ok so —
FW: And Sergeants — they didn’t have to work.
CB: No. Right.
FW: No.
CB: No. So that.
FW: We did have a sergeant in the camp where we were. Patterson his name was. Oh no, I remember Jock Patterson. And he was. He was really good. He was. There was only fifty of us where we were with him, so it was alright. So there weren’t too many of us like, you know.
CB: I know. And what was the camp made of? Were they?
FW: Well a big building.
CB: Big. Were they sheds or were they brick?
FW: By the time you got a record there, don’t know where they hell they got a gramophone came from. One record. I’ll always remember if I had a dime for every time it missed you. I played it over and over and bloody over. Day after day after day after day. The only record I had. I played the bloody heart out of that thing. I tell you about it didn’t I? That’s the only record I had was that one. Long, long time in Texas, if I had a dime. I thought yeah. If I had a dime and all.
CB: So in the camp you’re — is this a wooden building or is it a stone or brick.
FW: No. No. Not brick. It was semi brick.
CB: Right. Yeah
FW: It was on three storeys you know because there were seven hundred and fifty of us in there.
CB: And what did you sleep on? Were they beds or?
FW: No.
CB: You were on straw .
FW: Yeah.
CB: But were they bunks.
FW: No. No. We did have bunks.
CB: Ok.
FW: Two bunk beds they were.
CB: Right.
FW: Yeah.
CB: Just in twos.
FW: But the one in. When we first went to we had three bunk beds they were.
CB: Right.
FW: Christ. Higher than the ceiling they were. You would bloody break your neck falling out of there.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And what about the ablutions Was there, for each area did they have the proper washing facilities or what?
FW: Do you know I can’t bloody think to be honest. You know. Must have. Yeah. They must have had toilets up there. We all went there anyway I must say. I myself found a place for washing. There was for like swilling down and washing down. But it was very primitive you know. It wasn’t very clever I can tell you.
CB: Hot and cold water?
FW: Cold water. Yeah.
CB: Only cold.
FW: Eh?
CB: Was there hot water as well?
FW: No. Just cold water. No. No. No hot water.
CB: And then there was a cleaning detail was there? So you had, did you have a rota for cleaning?
FW: No. No. I didn’t —
CB: How was it cleaned?
FW: I didn’t do any cleaning. I didn’t do any cleaning.
CB: You didn’t have to clean it?
FW: I didn’t anyway. Somebody must have, I probably. I don’t know. I mean what you’ve got to think about. So many people there, you see. It might be three storeys see. One on the ground floor. One on the middle and one on top.
CB: And what about eating. Where did you eat? Did they have a large canteen that you ate in?
FW: No. No. No. You ate by the bed.
CB: How did they distribute the food?
FW: With a table. Sorry. A bed with a table.
CB: Right.
FW: No.no. no.
CB: How did they distribute the food?
FW: The cookhouse. You had to go. You queued up and got your food from there and go back in.
CB: So you walked to the cookhouse?
FW: You walked there. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And that meant it was a hot, hot meal was it?
FW: Well [laughs] yeah but a lot of it was bloody sauerkraut, which I didn’t really like very much. I had to eat it. I didn’t like it though. I’ll tell you. I had to eat something. But as I say wasn’t for the Red Cross parcels we’d have in big trouble. At the end of the war see, well that ended that year I mean. ’44. It wasn’t in to ’45, coming through then you see.
CB: Well the Germans themselves were short of food weren’t they?
FW: I suppose they were. They weren’t much better off than we were really. We never mixed with any of the civilians living around in the, village, the little villages, around there but of course we were wired off. You couldn’t get out anywhere. We never actually mixed with them. No.
CB: So you were out from seven ‘til five.
FW: Yeah.
CB: Working in the pipe factory.
FW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: These pipes are earthenware pipes. Not steel.
FW: Oh no.
CB: Not metal are they?
FW: No. No. Earthenware. No. No. No. No.
CB: Yeah.
FW: Up at the top. They done them. On the top. They done them up there in the kiln, up the top. Then dropped them into the kiln. Filled one side up that way. Then the other side. Then through the middle you know. Then they’d brick it all up. Light it up. Fire it up. Forty eight hours probably, something like that now. We didn’t have anything to do with it. We were just unloading the wagon we were like. From the coal as I say —
CB: So the coal came in?
FW: And they put back in.
CB: Yeah.
FW: Where the coal came out of we put the pipes back in.
CB: Right.
FW: Put straw on the floor, pipes on top, straw on top, and take them, then down the other side, then went down through the middle the same aye. We didn’t bother if we were dropping them they bloody broke we didn’t really bother too much.
CB: What about safety there. How many?
FW: Oh. No. No. No.
CB: Were there any accidents?
FW: Not really. Not that I can recall. Only one thing. One bloke. He didn’t do it deliberately when he, when he pulled one of them kilns you know, when they cooled down apparently he messed on it, pulled half the bloody bricks, pipes fell down. And they took him away you know. We never see him again. I don’t know what happened to him now. Never know what happened to him. You can’t encourage that you know. Messing about. And I don’t know what happened to him. Nobody did. Never seen him again. Yeah. Never came back again. So what happened to him I’ve no idea. And that RAF bloke base was right next to us right next to us. Luft 3.
CB: Yeah.
FW: It was.
CB: Yes.
FW: Like not right not adjoining but it was there you know, the gap was there. But it was there.
CB: What were they doing? Could you see what they were doing?
FW: No. Couldn’t see. No.
CB: Right.
FW: Not really. No. Not really. But beyond there was another compound. Other prisoners in there like you know. You weren’t in the end part of it.
CB: So you’ve got seven hundred and fifty people in the building.
FW: Yeah.
CB: In this camp.
FW: Yeah.
CB: How did the organisation, authority work? There was a sergeant running the whole thing or was there somebody. In each room was it?
FW: Oh well we had. More or less sergeant. Somebody in charge of each group like you know.
CB: In each room was there.
FW: There was only fifty of us so we weren’t too bad like you know. What factory they worked in is different factory than was the bigger factory than we were obviously. We were only a small place actually.
CB: What were they making?
FW: I’ve no idea you know.
CB: Right.
FW: No idea now. No idea, never went there. I’ll always remember the old, old boy I met who owned the place. Mr Schutler his name was. And if you spoke a bit of German — ‘Yah yah gudt, gudt.’
CB: So the factory was run by Germans.
FW: Oh yeah. Yeah.
CB: How many of those would there be running the factory?
FW: Only the ones I see other than the ones on the top doing the, doing the. Whether they were German I don’t know, doing the actual pipe round the top, like you know. There was only the two of you more or less. The three of them on the outside. They were German outside with us. But they never, they never bothered us much. Not really.
CB: So the camp has got accommodation which is substantial buildings?
FW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: How was the security operated. There was a fence all the way around was there?
FW: Well I suppose so. At night time they took your boots and your belt.
CB: Yeah.
FW: And locked the place up then.
CB: Right.
FW: You couldn’t get out anyway.
CB: But there was a barbed wire fence was there. All the way around?
FW: Oh all the way around yes.
CB: How tall was that?
FW: Oh it might be bloody fifteen, twenty foot high I should imagine. Right high one. Quite high. And nobody ever escaped. I don’t think anybody ever bothered I don’t think, you know. Whether they tried I don’t know.
CB: And how —
FW: Nowhere to go to anyway.
CB: No. What about the German staffing. What were the guards. How many guards?
FW: Oh there must have been — well there was a sergeant. If they called him a feldwebel usually called him a sergeant instead, and it was him. He was a cocky little sod he was. Wear a hair net. Used to wear a hairnet. In his hair, and was one of them was he like that. There were about half dozen of them, more than that I suppose. What you’ve got to watch is the black shirts. Gestapo, come around and mooch around. That’s what you’d got to watch. They were always tall. Mind you they mainly looked tall but they were all in black you know, uniforms they were. They were crafty buggers they were. But other than that the German troops we never had no problem at all. Because they were the same as we were, I mean there was nothing we were doing to them than they were doing to us. Couldn’t do anything. Course as I say in the latter end of December I moved from there into the main camp. Never saw any. The only one I saw Bert Weston, when he came to our house in Oxford after the war. But the rest I never met them again. Quite a lot died going on the long. It was cold see. Marching back from bloody East Germany to where they went to .
CB: How long did that take?
FW: I don’t know. Took days and days I think. Three days. How they stopped at night I don’t know really.
CB: How did you get food?
FW: Who?
CB: When you were on the march. How did you get food?
FW: Oh we didn’t. I didn’t go with them. No, I. The Russians released us. Come out through Poland we did. We went East and they went west.
CB: Yeah But how were you controlled and —
FW: We were on our own then.
CB: Right.
FW: Yeah.
CB: Entirely.
FW: Yeah. Entirely on our own yeah. They Russians would have bypassed us by then. When we first saw them you know we couldn’t believe it. There would be a little horse, little horse and cart. Can’t be anybody surely. I was hiding behind a massive great bloody tank I think. I thought the Tiger tank was big, this bugger was bigger than that. I tell you. And they came in, in masses then they did, came bloody well right through you know. But they really you know. But they overrun Berlin the Russians did. Right to Western Germany they were really. But they being the four, the American British French and Russian. They parted in four sections but really and truly they were right into West Germany really the Russians were you know. They could have stayed there. There was no one to stop them. They didn’t. They moved back into East Germany you know. Because then again see, America was crafty see. They were a rich country. They pumped money into East Germany, West Germany. The Russians couldn’t put money into east Germany because they were poor themselves see. Because that made them look worse you know. That they’d been treated badly. You couldn’t be. Not that they were treated badly. They had no money to give them. It’s a ruddy cheek when you’ve got when there was a problem. There was a French part, British part, Russian part and a American part.
CB: After the war.
FW: After the war yeah. Berlin. Split into four.
CB: Sure. Now back in the camp how often did you have to parade?
FW: Oh our numbers were counted our number every night. Oh yeah counted.
CB: Outside they counted you inside did they or in? In your —
FW: They had to break them down to count how many were still there like. You made sure every bugger was still there. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But then to be honest, I never had any trouble with German troops at all. Not, not the ones I met anyway. To be honest. Not at all.
CB: Did anybody try to do trading with the Germans, To give them something?
FW: No. I don’t think so. We had nothing anyway did we?
CB: Did you have chocolate?
FW: Well we had chocolate. I don’t know. I didn’t enter in to it with them anyway. Don’t know. Because once. Red Cross Parcels, that’s right. I don’t know. Because when they came in with the Red Cross. Nothing to do with the Germans. Nothing to do with the Germans the Red Cross parcels.
CB: What was the best thing in the Red Cross parcel?
FW: Well it was different. On the box was the names of the city. It could be Leicester, Birmingham, Bradford. Different places and they all more or less. Always put the same thing in that they you know, that they would put in each, every time. So people used to say, ‘Well, we’ll swap the box for this one or that one,’ you know. What we wanted. But we just stuck it with what we got. Bloody lucky to get that. Didn’t bother too much. Some had cigarettes in them and all. I’ve seen the packets in the tins like you know.
CB: What would the tins have? What would the tins have inside them?
FW: I don’t know I couldn’t tell you. We never had any. Well ones that didn’t smoke done alright see. They could Park Lane cigarettes for food see. They done alright they did.
CB: So when you were in the camp did you feel hungry? Or were you satisfied?
FW: Well we weren’t really hungry. I didn’t say we wouldn’t have shovelled a bit more, you know but still we managed. Got away with it. Yeah. It wasn’t pleasant, I can tell you. We didn’t know what was going to happen see. That was the problem. But the thing was we never knew what was going to happen. That was the problem. We knew in the end what happened but we didn’t know in the beginning. It could have been anything.
CB: Did you get, what sort of news did you get in. Had someone got a pirate radio?
FW: No. Not really. I did find out eventually. They started a second front for what’s the name.
CB: D-day.
FW: There was something on the move.
CB: For D-day.
FW: But this bloke with me was captured at Arnhem. That was September.
CB: Right.
FW: He was captured there, and so we knew they were doing something yeah. And they was warned there you know. Apparently the German panzer division were in there in Arnhem. They were. Apparently the Dutch underground told them not to come and they wouldn’t listen. They shouldn’t have come because all them blokes were captured see most of them. A lot of them were killed or captured. In Para. In Arnhem, a lot of them. My mate, well my brother’s mate he was a sergeant in the paratroopers and he did escape. He didn’t give up. He didn’t. Glen didn’t get captured, but a lot of them did. Yeah. At Arnhem. A lot of them were bloody killed and all, I tell you. They were warned really not to come really. There were two panzer divisions there.
CB: Yeah.
FW: In Arnhem. From that area.
CB: So some of those came to your camp, In the camp?
FW: No. No. They didn’t come to our camp. I met them afterwards. After we —
CB: Oh right.
FW: Got out of the Stalags. When the Russians released us. I got and met them then. These two RAF blokes.
CB: Right.
FW: They weren’t officers or nothing. I don’t know how they got there to be honest. You know. They weren’t all sergeants in the planes. Were they?
CB: Well it was a mixture.
FW: Maybe. It could have been that then.
CB: In the, In the camp. What did they do about medical care and pastoral care, So were there chaplains in the camp?
FW: No. No. No. There wasn’t much medical care then if anything in the camp. Not in our camp anyway.
CB: If somebody became ill what happened?
FW: Well as I said with me they sent me back to main camp. That’s what they’d do.
CB: And in the main camp there was a —
FW: There was, there was a bit of a surgery there. Yeah.
CB: Right.
FW: Yeah.
CB: And dentists?
FW: Oh I don’t know about dentist. I don’t know, never knew a dentist there. I don’t know.
CB: No. But the people looking after you. Were they German medical people or British?
FW: German. Most of them. Yeah.
CB: And the doctors.
FW: I should imagine they were German. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Right. So what was the thing that you remember most about the war?
FW: Well, to be honest it was a bloody escape I had I reckon. That was the main thing really. I don’t think they were like the same people like we were. The German soldiers. You know. It seemed so useless like you know. It was just had a regime that was corrupt. That was the problem. And of course, they were caught on the nap see. They were caught. The Italian front was still there. The Russian front was still there, and then of course we landed in France. They were on three fronts see. So that’s where you got caught. But in Stalingrad, they reckon, the Russian camp, eight hundred thousand German troops. In Stalingrad. They were caught in the winter see. They didn’t realise how bad the winters were in Russia see. They were caught there. They had a hell of a mess in Russia.
CB: So how did you get news in the prison camp of what was going on elsewhere?
FW: Not a lot. No. Not a great deal. No. No. We did nothing. And more or less when I got to main camp when I told you I got back there.
CB: Yeah.
FW: That had a bit more information. We got nothing back in the working camp. No. Nothing there.
CB: Did you find out how they got information?
FW: No. Not really. There was a bloody rumour I know. But they said the second front had started. So, but we knew that because after when we got to know each other this bloke landed at Arnhem so I knew the second front had started. But other than that.
CB: Right.
FW: But not a great deal
CB: Well I think we’ve done really well. We’ll pause there. Thank you very much.
FW: Righto.
[recording paused]
FW: Really to prove I’ve been there I think.
CB: This is the British Legion people.
FW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Because they were mainly First World War were they?
FW: First World War veterans see. Yeah. You see.
CB: Right.
FW: And they knew all the — ‘cause then they were mostly in their sixties or seventies you see probably. It didn’t really [pause] down Oxford at one time it was very stuffy down there you know. So we did go down quite a few times and I said to Trevor, ‘What do you reckon?’ He said, ‘They don’t even want us here do they don’t look like it, so we didn’t bother then?’
CB: What was it about them do you think that they want to keep apart?
FW: I don’t know. I think they’d been on their own so long, you know. They thought it their place and not for us to be there I think. Young people. We were only in our twenties. At twenty two you. We were quite young compared to them. And they probably thought we don’t want none of them young ones in here.
CB: What sort of ages.
FW: They were running it see.
CB: Yeah.
FW: They were older. Then were in their sixties mostly.
CB: Right.
FW: First World War. Other than that. And they didn’t ever give you any encouragement to stay anyway. Not really. Never actually said anything in particular, but you got the atmosphere. You could feel that it was there. It was not — you weren’t really welcome there.
CB: What did you think there. Were they. To what extent were they comparing what they did with what had happened with you?
FW: No. They didn’t say nothing much at all actually. Seemed more like wanting to keep to themselves you know. That’s the impression we got like, you know.
CB: Yeah.
FW: They didn’t seem to want us there like, you know. They didn’t actually say they didn’t want us there. The didn’t say that but the impression we got that you were sort of given the cold shoulder like, you know. We went in four or five times but it never seemed to change much so we didn’t really bother to go back.
CB: So down at The Legion was there much military talk or did they avoid talking about their experiences?
FW: They didn’t say much at all of anything. Didn’t seem to. No.
CB: Right.
FW: They seemed to be such a long time being there they seemed to run the place. It was theirs like. Not ours. Sort of thing. So we left them to it. Fair enough. I was about twenty. Well I was about twenty one then probably, or twenty. Twenty one. The other chap was a bit older than me twenty three probably.
CB: But you’d been in the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry.
FW: Yeah.
CB: And was there an Association for that as well?
FW: There should have been really. In Oxford. Wouldn’t it. Should have been. Yeah.
CB: But there wasn’t?
FW: As I said, wasn’t there long. We didn’t find out. Maybe four or five times we went there.
CB: Yeah.
FW: They didn’t seem to alter much so we sort of felt sort of shut out sort of thing, so we didn’t bother again.
CB: Yeah.
FW: And they had been there such a long time they had, you know, they more or less thought it was theirs like. You know. Probably was. I don’t know.
CB: Yeah.
FW: That’s why we didn’t bother too much. But other than that I never bothered after that. Never went anywhere after that. The only good thing when I was in Colchester was the Salvation Army. Always having a cup of tea in there. Always had a one there. They were good they were. I always give something to the Salvation Army. Even now.
CB: How did you take to being in the army? You were called up and this was a completely new experience, so how did you take to that?
FW: Well I got used to it in the end I mean. I was eighteen in the January and this was March. Well I had no option really. I was in there you know. And you got used to it in the end. But you know. The Hampshires. The Hampshires were go slow walking you know. When you got the Oxford Bucks thump thump thump.
CB: Yeah.
FW: And you got the second Oxford Bucks they were even bloody faster they were.
CB: Yeah.
FW: And we always had, always had black. Heavy black buttons. Everything. All black coats with black buttons and black blossoms on the head you know, on the hat.
CB: You said there was a lot of marching.
FW: Yeah.
CB: So how did you take to that?
FW: I always remember when we were in New Barracks in Dover. A big barrack. There was, always remember. There was artillery blokes there and they were sat around the bloody thing one of them said what a lot of clowns they were. [Clapping]. I said yeah. Bloody hell Yeah. They got you marching up and down. My. [makes sound] you couldn’t bloody, you couldn’t meet the others, you were so fast with walking. A hundred and forty five steps to the minute.
CB: Yeah.
FW: Cor. Bloody hell.
CB: But the idea was to keep you fit.
FW: Yeah probably was.
CB: And to move you quickly.
FW: The quicker you marched the quicker you got there.
CB: So what physical training did you have to do in those days? As well as marching?
FW: Well you did PT and all that.
CB: Where was the PT held, was it?
FW: There was no gym I don’t think, or anything like that. Outside mostly. When it was dry that was. We had these little anti-tank guns in the end. There was something, a carrier. It had no steering wheel. It had two, two handles. And tracks you know. You know, one tracks left on you know. Pull it left, one to the right. We tried to drive them. Very queer they were. Cardinal hoist or something they called them. They’re supposed to pull a gun behind them or something. Well little, small gun you like you know.
CB: What sort of gun was there in there?
FW: Well that would be behind, whether it was used or not.
CB: Because these became Bren gun carriers. They were called Bren gun carriers weren’t they?
FW: Maybe they were yeah. They were queer things to drive. I’ll tell you that. They had no steering. They had handles you know.
CB: Yeah. But they could go over any kind of ground.
FW: Yeah. It was on tracks. Oh yeah. Tracks they were on.
CB: How many people could be in that?
FW: I don’t know. Well in the front, You could get three in the front easy. How many you could get behind I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you?
CB: And the gunner. Were there two on the gun as the gunners?
FW: Yeah.
CB: How many people?
FW: Never actually used one. Not really. They bought it in to show us what it was like you know.
CB: Oh I see.
FW: Nothing, nothing in them when we had it. Show how it worked more or less. It was queer. Because somebody could drive probably. I couldn’t drive then, and so it was twice as hard for me. Somebody who could drive could probably have got the hang of it like you know.
CB: Yeah.
FW: Small artillery guns. They were. They weren’t very big. You could move them around. On two wheels like you know. You could pull them around like that.
CB: And these were infantry?
FW: That was in Dover that was.
CB: These were for the infantry.
FW: Infantry. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Anti-tank.
FW: Infantry. Yeah.
CB: And how often did you?
FW: We had the PIAT mortar.
CB: Oh the PIAT mortar. Yeah. Yeah
FW: The damage they could do. They could do some bloody damage I tell you.
CB: Yeah.
FW: Yeah.
CB: So how much live firing did you get?
FW: Oh I we done a bit yeah of what’s the name. On the ranges with a rifle, and make a Bren gun.
CB: And if you achieved a certain level you’d get a marksman’s badge.
FW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Did you get that?
FW: No. I wasn’t very good. The trouble with me I couldn’t. If I closed one eye the other buggers would close up as well partly. You couldn’t see properly. No. I wasn’t very happy in the army I can assure you. Navy I wanted to go in. not the bloody army. All my mates were in the navy.
CB: Were they? Yeah.
FW: I wanted to go in the navy. Didn’t want to go in the army.
CB: How many of those survived the war?
FW: All of them three did. Yeah. My brother. He was my brother’s wife’s brother. Joe. He wasn’t a cousin. He was on the Russian convoys. It was really bad on the Russian convoys in the winter. Snow and ice.
CB: So you were in the army. What did your brothers do?
FW: The oldest one, not next to me the older one. They reckon he couldn’t do it, but he wouldn’t have passed the army anyway. Tom was. He was in for six months. He was. He used to work on the presses with all the sheet metal. And I think they wanted people back in the factory like you know. We were getting very short. So he came back, a limited time. He never did go back to the army. In the army about six months and he never went, never need to go back. He stayed in the pressed steel all the time.
CB: Because it was?
FW: If I’d stayed where we were that aircraft thing. I’d never have gone in the —
CB: No.
FW: Because like a mug I went with all that lot. Course the other two went in the navy and I went in the army.
CB: Now when you came to the end did they give the option to staying on in the army?
FW: No. No.
CB: They didn’t.
FW: They didn’t do anything like that. I didn’t want to stay in anyway. I wasn’t keen on the army I can assure you. It wasn’t my first priority.
CB: What was it that you didn’t like about the army?
FW: I don’t know. The comradeship was pretty good like you know. But I don’t know, not really.
CB: And you came, you had a number of friends. How many of those became firm friends?
FW: Well the ones, well when I left Dover none of my friends come with me.
CB: Right.
FW: The bloody problem was still there. And one of them I found I didn’t know actually he lived out in Woodstock not far from Oxford, and I was going to visit him I didn’t go. Luckily I didn’t because apparently he got killed in France. He was twenty he was, probably. Nineteen, twenty. So I would have been. If I’d have gone to his house it would have been bit bad wouldn’t it. I didn’t know that. Because when I was on his Rover line his foreman told me he was from Woodstock. I come from Woodstock he said. And did he know a bloke call Bill Brooke. Oh yeah he was my mate he said. How is he now. He got killed in France he said. Twenty he was. Dispatch rider note delivered telegrams on a little motorbike around he did there before the war like you know.
CB: Oh did he.
FW: But he apparently got killed in a. That was the only one. Me and him was only two together more or less, the only two together more or less.
CB: And when the war finished to what extent did you discuss what you’d done in the war with other people?
FW: No. never. Never much with anybody about it. Actually I was for about eighteen months I was very how do I put it. Very, very quiet. Never said anything to anybody. I don’t know I just I got [unclear] I couldn’t believe what happened to be honest. Not really.
CB: What do you think caused you to be so quiet?
FW: I got a bit depressed. And all that you know and all that.
CB: What caused the depression?
FW: I don’t know what it was. I don’t know. I just didn’t. Couldn’t seem to cope somehow. I was all right after a while, fortunately. I was alright working in the old pressed steel. We were making fridges then.
CB: To what extent do you think that being in a prison camp made you depressed?
FW: Well it didn’t bloody help much I don’t think. Not really. But what I mean we’re all the same together. I mean there’s not much you can do about it. We were there and that was it. But the answer was the real problem, we didn’t know what was going to happen next. You know what I mean? If. Sort of thing. We didn’t know what was going to happen.
CB: No.
FW: Do you know what I mean?
CB: Yeah.
FW: I was always if they could have killed the bloody lot of us. They could have. One thing I’ve got to be honest. The Germans I met, there can’t be that many, but we had no problem with. There was no animosity. You know charge, or ordering you about or anything like that.
CB: What sort of ages were the guards?
FW: Well some of them were older. They weren’t young. They weren’t young. They were all forties and all more than you know, fifties. They weren’t young. No. no. I think they’d probably had the senior service or something like that.
CB: Too old for front line service.
FW: Oh yeah. Yeah. Only the sergeant was. He was a cocky one he was. Always wearing a hairnet and all.
CB: He got very long hair had he, what?
FW: FW: They called them a feldwebel used to call him if they were a sergeant. Feldwebel or something like that, and he wasn’t very big either. He wasn’t like a German or anything. He was quite small actually, fair haired bloke. Always the one with the hair net on that bugger was. Why have you got that on for. He went to bed with a hairnet on I expect. He was a bit of a cocky one.
CB: Yeah.
FW: But there were rest were alright. They never bothered you.
CB: What about the commanding officer of the camp. Did you ever see him?
FW: Never see him.[ unclear] They more or less left us to ourselves, more or less, I think more or less. Normally we didn’t bother them, they didn’t bother us.
CB: You see in films the complete, what shall I say? Were all the prisoners would be put on a parade together. The full contingent.
FW: Oh we were all counted.
CB: did you have to do that?
FW: Oh yeah. We all got counted at night time. make sure we were still there.
CB: No. no. but did they have everybody together in the parade square?
FW: More or less. Yeah.
CB: They did. Right.
FW: Oh yeah. But they didn’t order you about, nothing like that. No. no. What we do what we like then. wander around where you like. I mean it weren’t a big, big. It wasn’t a big compound. Not that big anyway. It was a fair size, but not for that amount of people. Not really. All being together. No.
CB: Well there were ten thousand in Stalag Luft 3.
FW: Right. Thank you. When we were released, you know. When we were released we wandered and I could see where, you know like when you walk in file. Troops walk one behind. It was row of about eight of them. Germans all dead on the grass. They’d all been shot. One behind the other. And there was a Russian soldier there, and a German soldier as close as I am now there, next to each other. I’ve never seen so many dead people.
CB: And he shot him.
FW: They must have shot each other. Probably. Most probably. Yeah. I’d never seen anybody dead before. Till like all these were shot. Never seen that many after all that lot behind me at that aid post honestly we were, I’m not joking. They were like bricks you know. One like that. On top of the other. They were that bloody high. They were about four high, they were.
CB: This is at Anzio you’re talking about?
FW: Four high they were. Yet I can’t understand where because the amount I saw a lot of the bloody dead. I Didn’t see anybody get killed.
CB: Yeah.
FW: See a lot of wounded there so I don’t know.
CB: Did you have to carry the wounded as well?
FW: Oh yes. We had to carry two of us. One in front, one behind carried the German wounded on a stretcher.
CB: On a stretcher?
FW: Oh yeah. Yeah. A lot of our lads. Two of. Two I know two of them got killed. By our shells landed on top of them around that area or what’s the name.
CB: Oh while they were carrying the stretchers.
FW: While they were carrying the wounded yeah. We were lucky then.
CB: What was the reaction of your comrades to see that your own comrades were being hit by their own artillery?
FW: Well we didn’t know till afterwards. Really. See. We couldn’t see them because, I mean we were here and they were lower down like you know. We couldn’t see anybody. As I told you we were on our slope all the time. Couldn’t see anybody. But I mean the guns were Americans or British I don’t know whose guns they were, and we were attached to the American fifth army we were. Yeah. So I mean they could have been our guns. Could have been American guns. I don’t know.
CB: Yeah.
FW: I couldn’t tell you who they were. Artillery.
CB: Before you got captured what was the food like?
FW: Oh it was alright, yeah.
CB: In the army. It was British food rather than American food?
FW: Oh we didn’t get American bloody food. Oh No. I’ll tell you something when we got landed, before. LCI they called these little boats. I’ve never seen so much waste in all my life. Americans came in in tins you know. All the tins stuff. They were throwing them in the bloody. Into water there were. Cigarettes in some, food in the other. I’d never seen so much waste. Honest. I thought Christ Almighty why don’t you open them first. See what’s in there. They were throwing them in you know bloody not just in one thing. In boxes they were they were throwing them in. Anyway, so wasteful they were, you know the yanks were. Yeah. LCI’s or something. Something landing craft you’d called it. Something like that. Course. As I said If that Yanks hadn’t moved when he should have two weeks earlier. It could have been different position .
CB: Of course. Yeah.
FW: Different.
CB: Yes.
FW: Reinforcements would have come in then. he stayed there for two weeks that was it. Too late then. Then came. German reinforcements came in. yeah. We didn’t know what was happening see.
CB: Now the hold up just nearby was Casino. so how did you?
FW: They couldn’t get through to Casino you see so.
CB: Yeah.
FW: They bombed it. Everything with it. It was all hilly you see. Like a mountain. There was a river round the bottom and everything had to climb up. It was all rocky. Trouble was done all the bombing made it worse. Because the Germans got in amongst them with the rubble then see, apparently. They did get through eventually apparently. Must have. Yanks wanted to get to Rome see. They were on the Mediterranean side. But Montgomery was on the Adriatic side. On the top of that mountain we call the Appian way.
CB: Yeah.
FW: Bigger road. Bigger road from Northern Italy down to Southern Italy. Appian way we called it. Or we called it the Appian way. What the Italians called I don’t know. Appian way. But it’s a very narrow country Italy you know. It’s like sort of the Adriatic one, the Mediterranean the other side. It starts to widen up as you pass beyond Rome and beyond and it starts to widens out a bit up there. Turin and Genoa, and all that. But this end in southern Italy. It’s quite narrow actually. I did see Pompei though. One day marching down there. This sergeant down there. Saw Pompeii. Yeah went there. And the little village far from we were, We had Lire and different things. Walk along there. And it was alright yeah. Yeah. Yeah Ok. I was there for a month I was, but we were there for. After that it was a bloody problem. But, oh yeah. Charlie didn’t like the Germans anyway. No. He didn’t like the Germans Charlie didn’t.
CB: When you were on the landing craft before you landed at Anzio. What was the sea like. You were out at sea for quite some time were you before you?
FW: Well not too far, because like we left the, what’s the name. We were on the corner, well I say around the corner, about three or four mile I should imagine.
CB: Oh right.
FW: It wasn’t too far. Close to the shore we were most of time there, yeah. It wasn’t that far out to the sea there, and of the course the Germans must have realised. There was no barrages of guns going.
CB: They didn’t know you were coming?
FW: They didn’t know we were coming I suppose. Not really.
CB: And on the landing craft were you all standing up or?
FW: More or less.
CB: Could you see out. Or did it have tall sides?
FW: No. It was more or less standing up in there. More or less. Yeah. Yeah. No sitting down. No, no, no. Quite a few like you know. You know what I mean. You could get a bloody lot in the one, one anyway.
CB: How many people on each landing?
FW: I couldn’t tell you. Quite a lot. Forty, fifty you know. More than that probably. They weren’t very big boats. They weren’t that big ,you know. LCI’s.
CB: No.
FW: They were American. They weren’t British. All that food they were wasting. I couldn’t believe it. Everything was in cans you know. Canned. In cardboard boxes but it were all in cans. And you’d take pot luck what was in what bloody can. But they were throwing in. The can in right left and centre. It was sacrilege really. I don’t understand them. I said for Christ sake don’t throw them. Give me some of them cans. They wouldn’t give me one though. I don’t know. Very wasteful the army were. Because they weren’t with like us when we were in the front there where they were, you know. Never see anybody down the bloody road. Captured. See them then. Never seen them before. So where they were they were I don’t know. Probably the British part had their own part of their line I suppose, and they had theirs.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
FW: They weren’t with us anyway.
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 Frank Wilcox
Format
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01:21:31 audio recording
Language
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eng
Identifier
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AWilcoxF161201
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2016-12-01
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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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.
Conforms To
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Pending review
Type
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Sound
Coverage
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British Army
Description
An account of the resource
Frank Wilcox was born in Wales and worked in aircraft manufacturing. He was later called up and served in the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry. He was taken prisoner at Anzio and became a prisoner of war. When he was released and returned to the UK via Ukraine he returned to work for the same factory – this time making refrigerators.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Italy
Italy--Anzio
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Claire Campbell
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-01-18
1944
1945-01
prisoner of war
Red Cross
sanitation
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/131/2141/ABascombeEJ151001.2.mp3
1461f89e68398058e259d4c8f8b41ac5
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
Jones, Ron and Bascombe, Betty
E J Bascombe
Ron Jones
R Jones
Description
An account of the resource
Nine items. An oral history interview and a series of photographs and documents detailing the lives of Ron Jones (646212 Royal Air Force) and his wife Elizabeth J Bascombe (now). A document she wrote describes how she met Ron, their short marriage and his disappearance. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Elizabeth Bascombe and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff. <br /><br />Additional information on Ron Jones is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/112508/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
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. 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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Bascombe, EJ
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-01-01
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: Right, my name is Chris Brockbank and er, I’m interviewing Betty Bascombe, at the home of Gaynor McKay, and we’re in Sedgebrook near Grantham, and we’re going to talk about er, two things really, one is where Betty is a widow of a flight engineer and then her time in the Army. So, and the date is the first of October and we’re going to be running for probably an hour and a half. Betty, would you like to start off please by explaining er, your early life, where you come from, the family and how you met erm, your late husband, first husband Ron, Ron Jones?
EB: Yes, well, I come from Cardiff, and I was born in Cardiff of Welsh parents and we lived in, well, first of all with my Grandmother, she had a fish and chip shop, and then we moved to a place called Ely which was quite countrified, and I had a sister and two brothers. We were all very, very happy family altogether and it wasn’t a very big place, Ely was just being built up at the time, and my two brothers died when they were very young, they had heart problems, so it was just my sister and I left. When I first left school, well, first of all the school I went to, we didn’t have one there, we had to go to, I had to go to another village, but eventually we got one in the village, but when I left school, I went to work erm, in confectionery, I wanted to learn the trade there, then afterwards when the war was on, decided I had better go and get a job elsewhere that was more suiting to help out with the country, so I got permission to go, from the confectionery, because that was also important, for people to have bread and hey what have you, and, I managed to get a job at Llantrisant, in, that was further up in Cardiff, outside Cardiff, the ROF factory, Royal Ordnance factory, they’d been bombed out in London and had moved to Llantrisant, and they were opening a new shop as they called it, [unclear] shop and from there we still had to go on special buses because it wasn’t on the door step, it was quite a little way to travel, and I worked there and on guns, on six pounder guns, six or seven pounders, whatever, I can’t remember, on beech blocks and that was very, very interesting work. You had to get them just complete, so that when they were fitted in the guns, there was no burr or anything on them that would cause a problem for them to put everything in for it to go perfect, you know, when they fired it. Anyway, after I was still working there when I met Ron. Now, I was friendly, my friend Winnie, she was courting somebody called Sid, and on a Saturday night she worked late and I would walk with her down to Sid’s parents’ house, so that they would then walk me all the way back to Ely, which was quite a few miles away, and that happened on, every Saturday night sort of thing and then a few Saturday nights when I had gone, Ron, who I hadn’t met earlier on, he was home on leave, I’d seen him around, but not you know, not bothered about him and er, he’d been home a few times on weekend leaves and this weekend, that we went, he was there sitting in his Dad’s armchair reading, and then he said, ‘Are you going out with anybody at the moment?’, and I said, ‘No, not now’, so I finished with that date [laughs] anyway, he said, ‘ well, I’ve got an invite to a party, so, I’ve got to take somebody, so how about coming with me?’, so I said, ‘oh, yes, ok’, and that was the start of us going out together. So, that was like the early forties, the beginning of the forties, so, and consequently, it went on from there and every time he came home we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves going out, but we were more for theatre and that sort of thing, we went to the pictures. He also liked walking, and he played rugby for Penarth when he was younger, so he used to slip down there and see them, while I, because you couldn’t stay off work then you see, you had to go to work, my shifts then, we used to do twelve hour shifts, fortnight days, fortnight nights, and used to just have just a Sunday off between, but you didn’t mind, you felt you were helping the boys and hopefully win the war, the war like, you know [pause] can we stop?
CB: yeh, ok, we can stop just for a moment
EB: Then, eventually, [background noise] we had to work to a very fine, er, to [unclear] an inch, to make sure the clearance was there, and eventually I was made a blue girl, and, that meant, when we first went in we wore green overalls, you see, when you became a blue girl, which you were in charge of just so many but you had a boss over you like a man did, but they were all older men that most likely had retired and come back to work, and we had one called Charlie over us, that was lovely, and erm, so, I worked with them, and it was only, while I was there, that Ron, I got the information about Ron, because when I was obviously starting working there I was seeing him and then I got married in the January while I was still there, and of course consequently in the April, it wasn’t very long at all, Ron went missing, erm
CB: Its taking you back a bit?
EB: Yes
CB: So, you [coughs] excuse me, you, you walked out with Ron, and you went walking [emphasis] and you went to the theatre, how did that progress, before, to getting engaged and married, how?
EB: Oh, that’s, we went out for quite a while, I can’t remember dates off hand
CB: Okay
EB: We went out together for quite a while, but we decided, that er, we wouldn’t get married until the war was over, which a lot of them done, we all said the same thing, save, and when the war was over we would be able to enjoy it, and then all of a sudden we got this big [unclear] a big air raid warden there then, that was terrible the air raid then, and all of the country was bad, and then we still thought er, no, we’ll be okay. And then, Ron he went on a trip to America, they used to go back and forth then, America wasn’t in the war, and I think they used to help out, with planes, but the men used to have to go to Canada to pick them up and fly them home from there. And, on one trip that they went, there were about five crews aboard this one, if I remember rightly, I think he said about forty odd, and they came down in the Atlantic. He only remembers coming too, he was told he was hitched on by his shoulder blade, on the edge of the plane and, they got him off of there, and next time he came to, he was in a dinghy, and he said there were men, you know, on the side of the boat, then when he come to again, he didn’t, he didn’t know what was going on. Somebody gave him a drink of something, and then the next time he remembered he was in hospital in Hollywood and they told them there that there had been a crash. But, I believe there was only so many, six I think he said, that had survived from all that had gone on. There was obviously an inquest into what happened, afterwards, but I couldn’t tell you what the results were, that was I don’t know
CB: Okay
EB: Erm
CB: So, he came back and saw you?
EB: Oh, gosh, yes, and we wouldn’t have known about it but it was his twenty-first birthday, so that was a big date, twenty-first birthday at the [unclear] at Christmas time and it was only that his young cousin went to jump on his back that he said, ‘don’t do that’, I said, ‘why what’s wrong?’, he said, ‘tell you after’, and then he told me, but he said, ‘don’t tell my Mum I’m flying, I don’t want my mother to know she will worry’. And, that was the first time I knew that he was actually flying around as well, I thought when he said he was going away up to Scotland, [unclear] I thought he was going up there to, you know, to do more training or something like that. Anyway, that’s how he came to tell me about it, and he had quite a scar under his shoulder blade from it. Then I think it, it was then, that I think that he came down to, after that, that he came down to, I knew it was around Lincoln, but I think that’s where he started coming down, to the last one that they went to [pause]
CB: Right, well, we will stop there again just for a minute
EB: Its, I get
CB: Restarting now, we’re talking about how you communicated with Ron
EB: Yes
CB: Because clearly, he was some way, away from you, and you were still in the ammunitions factory, so how did you do that?
EB: That’s right, well, we didn’t get much leave at all there, obviously because we were all so busy, and, but Ron when he could come home, it would be an odd weekend and a surprise time. You didn’t very often get the full eight or ten days then, but he was stationed down in, erm
CB: Cosford
EB: Cosford, yes, and erm, [pause] and erm, this is where he was going out then on all the different trips that I didn’t know fully about, but we wrote, each day wrote a bit, they wouldn’t be posted every day but we would get the letters sent through so that was lovely. And then, one day he said, he came home on leave, and he said, ‘I don’t think we’ll wait until the end of the war’, he said, ‘I think we should take our chances, let’s get married now’. So, that was in forty-three and we were waiting then to try and get a decent leave so we could arrange it, but also you had to think about trying to get your wedding dress in, get the clothes, get the food, because everything was rationed. You had good neighbours, everybody was trying to save up their fruit, for a decent fruit cake, instead of a little sponge and erm, things like that, everybody was saving their coupons so you could get the wedding clothes, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. His Mum and Dad had said we could go and live with them, because they had quite a big house there, and the people that had been in [unclear] were going, so the idea was that Ron and I would have the top of the house, and because they were older they were going to make theirs into the bottom half, as another flat, that was what we arranged. And then, all of a sudden, he said, I can get a few days off at the beginning of January, so it was arranged for, we’d get married in January on the twenty-sixth, that was nineteen, ninety-four, forty-four
CB: Good
EB: And that was we, we got married on the second, of a four day leave and then he went back on the four-day leave, at the end of the fourth day. And the next leave he got we could only keep writing to each other after that, and just wishing and praying that the war would soon be over, he could come home for good. Anyway, he next came home, and we had a fort, a weekend, and that was just a quickie weekend, and then the next time, he came home on an eight-day leave. That was lovely because we said we weren’t going to talk war, and we were talking and planning, all we wanted to do, what we would do, where we would go. He would have made the RAF his career, that was definite, he loved the career, he liked going in the air force, because it was his life, and how did I feel about it? I suppose that where ever he went I was willing to go, so that was quite happy about it, and erm, then he came home, he’d got this leave and he came home in the January, and we got married, on the twenty-sixth and then that was the second day of his leave, and then he went back, he had to go back on the fourth day, so he went back
CB: So, at this time, he was flying in bombers, in Lincolnshire, was he?
EB: Oh yes, he was flying, I knew he was flying
CB: At Skellingthorpe?
EB: I knew he was out a lot but he never talked about his work, he would never talk about where he was going or anything like that what so ever and he still kept the letters going, but sometimes it was a little bit, ‘sorry this isn’t very long tonight, it’s only a little bit, and but just to let you know I’m thinking about you and waiting for the day when I can come back to home again’, all that, it was lovely. He’d send his love, and also remembering his Mum, he was writing to his Mum and everybody but just didn’t have the chance to write to everybody at the time, they were very busy, and then of course he said he was trying to get home for my birthday, and my birthday was the thirtieth of April, so I thought well, this night his step brother was there and he was doing a bit of tormenting, you know, how’s the old married woman, going on, this sort of thing, when the door went and he went, and when he came back and he said I’ve got a telegram. I said, ‘that’s Ron coming home to deal with you, he said he’d get home for my birthday’, and he just shook his head because he knew, it was the cyclist that had bought it and the colour of the envelope. And he said, ‘no, I’m afraid not, he’s missing’. We were just absolutely stunned, his Mum and I had been stood up laughing and talking with him, and we just sat at the table. We said, he can’t be, he can’t be, and it was just absolute silence, but I think we were all just so stunned about it, and Sid just passed over the, what’s the name, Tom I should say. Tom just passed it over and his Mum was looking at it, and well, it was just another night I can’t tell you much about it, you just felt you were in another world, you couldn’t believe it. And then, of course, you got to pick up the traces, haven’t you and carry on. I didn’t go back to work, I just felt I couldn’t cope with work, stayed put and erm, and tried to deal with finding out what I could because it just said he was missing, Ron was missing, and that’s how it was like that, for quite a long time. I kept going down to the Red Cross and er, down at the bottom of Lewis Road in Cardiff and trying to find out from them everything, but actually it was the Geneva Red Cross that I got the information from, eventually, of where Ron was. But it was a temporary grave that he was, that they had put him in, but that then was, I think that was er, oh gosh, I’m trying to think how long ago it was afterwards
CB: It was still during the war?
EB: Oh gosh, yes, yes it was still the war going on
CB: But there were plenty of people around who were trying to help?
EB: Oh, gosh, everybody was trying to help and I mean, you know, friends were doing all they could, they were trying to find out, they were trying to help you. And then, of course, this was forty-four, April forty-four, and of course you got [unclear] with all the big, well that was another big air raid and everything wasn’t it, it was terrible that year. And when they had the one with all them going over, and it was one night and, well the planes they were just like big black birds in the sky, all night long it went, and I’ve forgot how many there is now, that went all together but windows were rattling and as you sat on the window sill, this was going on and it had started early evening and it went on all night. And, then when I went out, I had gone back into work then because when I went back to work the next morning erm, the planes were still going over, and then we found out that there had been big raids and that
CB: This is the fifth and sixth of June nineteen forty-four
EB: Yes, it was, and this was, I can’t think at the moment the dates
CB: So, what was your employer’s reaction, they were happy to give you time off for bereavement or, what did they do?
EB: Well actually, well, the doctor just put me on sick
CB: Right
EB: I had to be because I was, I just couldn’t cope with anything, and there’s no way I could have gone, filing the measuring gauges or going near machines or anything like that, so, consequently, I didn’t go back to work at all. They told me then of course, the end of the war came, and erm, they wrote and said that a lot of servicemen were coming back, but they would still give me, offer me a job, but I would be going on, most likely one of the machines, like drilling machines and erm, I wrote back and said no. I don’t think I could have worked watching other men, working there, thinking my Ron has never come back. You know, it wasn’t, I was so glad for all of them and the that night we had when they announced that it was peace and war was over, I was at my Mother’s house, the other side of Cardiff, and when I came to go back home that night, I thought I’d get back to be with his Mum and Dad, they’ll be on their own and I went to go back, no buses were running, everybody was happy, going mad, and I walked through Cardiff town, oh, and that was alive, all round the City Hall, everything, and as I went back, back home, I passed the corner of where the, there’s a little hospital on the corner of one of the roads, this end of Richmond Road, and erm, it was a little Welsh one, and there were wounded soldiers in there, and one large, at one of the bathroom windows, he said, ‘what is it like up town?’ and he hadn’t let his parents know he was back home, he said, ‘I haven’t told them yet I’m back home’, because he’d lost a limb and he didn’t want his girlfriend to know. And I said, ‘look, you just let them know because if you’ve got no arms and no legs don’t worry about it’, I said, ‘they’ll just be glad to have you home’, I said. I wish I could. Well, I got home with his Mum and Dad, and we just sat there talking about Ron and drinking a cup of tea round the table, and saying if only, and I still believed that he could still be alive, I could not believe that he wasn’t going to come home. I was convinced he was in hiding and I would find him, and that is what I’d done when I was in the ATS, in the ATS, I’d gone out to Germany, and I was convinced that I would [emphasis] find him and my Army officer was also trying to work a leave that would suit him with friends.
CB: If I just take, if I just take you back a bit, what was the erm, role of the Swiss Red Cross, to what extent were they able to give you details about Ron?
EB: Well, they sent it down through to the one, all they said was that, er, [pause] Oh how was it worded? I’m trying to think how it was worded. It just said that, erm, it was sorry that the plane had come down, and erm, and that one of the people had got back
CB: So, one person had survived, but only one?
EB: One person, yes, but that was all and they were sorry to say, you know, that Ron wasn’t alive
CB: Yes
EB: So, that was, that was, I can’t remember the exact words of the telegram, it just er, you know, to let us know, confirm, that definitely that was him, and it was somewhere in France in a temporary grave, and they gave the name of the grave, that Ron’s Mother had, there all those at her house and somehow some of those got lost there, because it was put in a, there was a little secret drawer in this set of drawers that they’d given us, it was like, do you remember the old fashioned bookcases and writing set? And it would open and there was always a little drawer, well I put stuff in there, well they let somebody else have it afterwards and ‘cos I said no, I won’t take it you’ve got other sons as well, somebody else had, had it in the family, but what had happened to the things in the drawer, they’ve all just been got rid of, nobody knew where they were, and the ones that I had, copies and, the one, the main one of all I had with me, and I’d left that with somebody, with a lot of things in a bag, nice big, you know, safe bag with other things to do with my family and all that was lost. So, when the bombing was on, somehow or another it had just gone missing out of the house. Somebody had taken it to put it in a safe place, but we never found out where, but whether Mum had passed it on to one of her brothers or something, it had sellers, I don’t know, a lot of the family big photographs, that had belonged to her Father. He was in the navy and so we had all, well everybody on the wall, you know, Battle of Waterloo, everything was all around the wall [laughs] and all those, they were given to somebody to put in store, we never found out where they were, never found out ever, so whether they had them at their house and it might have been bombed or anything, we don’t know
CB: Where, where was the bombing in Cardiff?
EB: Pardon?
CB: What areas of Cardiff were bombed?
EB: Oh, there was some parts, Llandaff Cathedral that was hit, that was a mile from us and it was beautiful there, but it was damaged pretty badly and they have rebuilt it but they’ve not done the spire, same as what it used to be. What was beautiful, was all the glass windows were broken, all the way around, it was all into the paths and the surround, and when the moon shone it was really pretty to see it all, but as far as the poor cathedral went, that really was a state, but that’s afterwards, everybody went through Llandaff Cathedral because, you had lovely walks all the way around there, so you walked up through the fields and right, it was a proper lover’s walk, everybody went up through Llandaff fields and walked on up into the old Llandaff, you know, and came back around the other way. So, it was very nice to go up there and walk around, with the river and everything running, it was lovely. You could sort of, you could forget the war for half an hour because of the situation and that, that you were in
CB: And you were outside the town?
EB: Oh, yes, this is it
CB: Did they, did they, erm, munitions work, works at Llantrisant, did that get bombed?
EB: A part did, yes, and I was lucky, funny enough that night, that had happened before because I was, this time was cycling on our bikes to work, me and a friend, and just as we got to the end of the road, I heard somebody shout my name, and it was Ron come home. I was going on night shift, Ron had come home on an unexpected weekend and so I said to Joyce, tell them that I’ll try and come in at eleven o’clock, but if I can’t, will you just tell them what’s happened, Ron’s come home, but of course you couldn’t have time off, so I knew I’d get away with a one night but I’d have to go in the next night. And, he came home and it was only for two days and was all he managed to get away, and that night, well, I would have been on shift there, one of it, it was one of our own guns actually, they were firing at them going over, when a shell, came back and went through our own roof and there was six of the people killed, and all of the vices, I used to have six girls along there, because I wasn’t there, they had to go over, like a group and of course he was managing both of them, Charlie, so he moved them over there, but all along there was shrapnel and everything else, so was er, when you think about it, him coming home on leave, he really saved all of us that were along there
CB: Saved your life
EB: Yes, yes, there were one or two that were, well, there, I think there was six killed altogether that night, and one was sad because the father had come over from A shop to see if his daughter was alright in B shop and while he was talking to her, him and the daughter were both killed, but she was on the barrels of the guns, yes, and they were six killed, there was six there altogether killed, so that was, when you think about it, him coming home had saved all that lot there, we would have all got it
CB: Amazing
EB: Yes
CB: Where else, where else in Cardiff was there bombing?
EB: Oh, there was at Canton and all around where we were, into Roath, and as we say into Llandaff, all the way round, there were odd roads and one on the way down to Grangetown and that was very bad, we used to cycle down towards [unclear] which was the cake place where I worked, and there they had one, and it sort of wiped the street out there, and I can remember going down and saying to one of the men that was working there, the ARP men, and I said can we help, and he said no go to work and get the bread on, we all need bread [unclear] but you could see where people were trying to get out of shelters and they were getting them out, I’ve never forgot that. I could see one lady’s hand and she had rings on her hand, I’ve never forgot that, I always picture that one hand, gripping on over the top, so she was trying to get out and people were trying to clear all from around her
CB: What about the docks, were they bombed as well?
EB: Cardiff docks got quite a few lots around, as Ron explained to me because there was so many bombs that had gone around the outside, and he said that Cardiff was like a basin because its surrounded with mountains and that, and here at the counties, and he said, what happens when a bomb is dropped, it drops down but gets lifted again as its going and consequently, because of the way we work, the draw would be, a lot of them went into the country and that around, you know, well, a lot of people’s houses and that, but not a lot of the very big important businesses, railways and things like that we had trouble on, villages outside, but we didn’t suffer half as bad as across the water, Swansea and all that way. Of course, at Port Talbot we had the oil works as well, they, they kept them blazing for about a fortnight, every night, and we were the other side of the channel and yet we could see the whole of the thing. Well, that gave them lights to keep trying to bomb the docks with the ships in, you see, and a lot of ships did get affected, but more outside with all the food things and that one
CB: Erm, how much did you know about what Ron did in the aeroplane?
EB: Not really very much except because we were told we couldn’t talk about our jobs, we were told, obviously because it was a government job, and he didn’t talk much about his. He used to say, you know, mainly, well, we are just glad to be home, we don’t want to talk about what’s gone on, just wait and see when it’s over, but he never, ever, discussed what his, I knew that he was an engineer because we laughed about it. Our wedding lines we were both down as fitters, on the wedding lines, [laughs] on the marriage lines, so I said we would be able to open up a trade afterwards [laughs] so I knew he was a flight engineer, we’d be able to take up cars together, because he used to work in a garage before he joined up, when at first, he joined, so, he just decided he’d go in there. So, it would have been something to look forward to, to see who could do the best bit of filing, wouldn’t it, you know
CB: So, he joined up, first of June nineteen forty, was it?
EB: First of June first of June nineteen thirty-nine
CB: Right
EB: Joined up, joined up before the war
CB: Yeh, okay, right, so, how well did you know any of the crew of his aircraft?
EB: I didn’t, I didn’t know any of the crew whatsoever, I never met any of them and never talked about them either. He used to say when he came home, let’s just talk about the life we want together afterwards, I want to forget a little bit of what I’ve seen
CB: Yeh, okay
EB: The only thing he used to say was, one thing he always said about coming home and this is what I like about the monumental building, I think a lot of the soldiers or sailors, oh, airmen, they would say the same thing, but he used to say, when he went out on the trip, you’d be up high and the clouds would be white, when you got up there those times, which wasn’t often, he said, you’d see the white clouds and you’d think how peaceful it was and how lovely it would be to get out when you think about what was going on down below. But, he said, when you were coming back home, you’d be looking for a break in the clouds with a bit of green grass and the minute you saw the green grass, you’d see the river and the channel and then you would see the white cliffs, if it was light enough, but if not, he said, it was the green grass that was important to you, and you knew when you’d seen the grass you were home. And he said, then [emphasis] you would look for the cathedral because if it was a dull night or something, you knew from there what position, there were so many airfields around, you knew where you were going from there. So, I did have a painting done and this lady in France got it, and it was painted by someone whose father, he wasn’t an artist, his father was also in the air force, and erm, he painted it and he called it, ‘coming home’, but he asked me all what Ron thought and he painted it exactly like that, and he put the number of the plane, so the plane was facing coming in and it was done with the clouds and a little bit of green grass and that, it was lovely, but that lady’s got that now, you know
CB: Lovely
EB: It was lovely
CB: Now, you weren’t, neither of you was allowed to talk about your job
EB: No
CB: But, did, never the less did the conversation turn to what it was like for the people at the other end experiencing the bombing?
EB: Well, the only thing that he ever said was, that you thought about the people that you were going out to do a job and you could not think too far, you knew you had to do it because of him, Hitler, but you often wondered, yes, they’re over here and they’re killing ours, but he said, you always had to keep your mind above the fact, I hope I don’t kill innocent people, but he said, you knew you couldn’t say where it was going, he said, all he knew was he had to do it because Hitler had to be stopped, and that was, he’d never talk about the people with him, they only time he would say, ‘I wonder if so and so got home from leave on time, because I think there was one, who must have come from further away, he would miss his train or something, but he never talked, I hope he got home, and I can’t think what his name was now, I think it was Robert or Bob or Robert, but something like that, but I don’t know, I think he was from London way and he was always worried about his folk, because of being so much nearer to the big ones. But when we used to hear it like in Swansea, Liverpool, they had it so bad that you felt you were thankful that you were not getting it as bad as it was, we were not as bad as other people, you know, you had to be thankful that way
CB: Your talking about the bombing raids by the Germans?
EB: Yes, yes, that right, so we were thankful that way, but apart from that, you know, you couldn’t do anything other than carry on everyday doing the job that you were doing and trying to keep safe. Clothes were another problem because everything was on coupons, food was another one, but we were lucky, Dad kept chickens, we grew a lot of veg, we had quite a big garden, so we were, and then he got an allotment as well at Llandaff fields. So, he would grow the food, but my mother was one, she’d go up with a basket and we would get things, and by the time she got home there wasn’t enough left for us and we’d have to go back. She’s given it away to everybody [laughs] who didn’t have any on the way [laughs] Dad used to say I’m not going to tell her when I get the next allotment because every time I go up there, there’s never anything left, your Mother’s been up and picked it all [laughs]but, erm, it was lovely
CB: So, what was the effects on your parents and Ron’s parents of the war?
EB: Oh, well, it was devastating, because obviously Ron was there, that was his Dad, Tom Jones, his Dad, Emma Jones was his Mother, and his Mother had been married before and had family, but there was only a daughter that had been born besides, but she had died when she was about twenty-one, she’d been ill from a child I believe, so she had died from when she was, you know, about twenty-one and there was only Ron, so obviously, he was the light of their eyes. The others were a lot older and they had families that were married. But, erm, well you couldn’t say, we were just all tried to live every day, but we really just existed. We just kept wishing and hoping and thinking, they’re wrong, they’re wrong, I know you’re wrong and that’s it, and you tried to get by with this. What I did then, Ron’s, ‘cos, when I went into the ATS, I was stationed at Ilfracombe first of all, and from Ilfracombe I got moved over to North Mimms, but while I was there, Ron’s step brother had, he had been demobbed, but he was working in Exeter, so of course when I was going to Ilfracombe, I would see him, I had to change trains there, and at the time, his wife was living with her sister and they’d just had their first baby, Janice, who I keep in touch with now, in fact she went to Cardiff castle because they’d given Ron a patch in Cardiff castle and that was lovely. I couldn’t go, so Janice went down for me, I have got photographs of that as well. And, erm, so consequently, I said well, if they wanted I would move out and go home to my parents, and perhaps, you know, leave Sid and Win go there, so that’s what we done. And, then, eventually Ron’s dad died, well I was out in Germany, so I lost, I wasn’t visiting or anything then, I obviously couldn’t, I kept in touch though. Then, Sid and Win managed to get a house elsewhere and took Ron’s mum with them
CB: Right
EB: But they funnily enough went out to live in Llantrisant
CB: Oh, right
EB: Because the war then of course
CB: Was over
EB: Come down towards the end as well, so she went out to live with them there, but when I used to go home I used to go down and visit her, you know
CB: Can I just go back please to when Ron was posted missing?
EB: Yes
CB: Because, casualties were effecting all manner of society
EB: That’s right
CB: So, I just wondered, after you got the telegram, I wonder if you could just talk us through, what happened after that, how you felt about it and whether you linked with other people who had a loss?
EB: Well, I think you become so numb, you are in a world of your own, and, all we did, could do is just sit there and saying it can’t have happened. I’d be sat this side of the table; his Mum would be sat there and his Dad would be sat by the fire and sat in the armchair. He used to smoke a pipe and he would just sit there and he would say, ‘that lad’ll do it, I know my lad’ll do it, he’ll get home’, and we were convinced he would, there would be a way that he would get home, because he promised he’d come home, and I think that’s what kept us going. But it altered our lives completely, there was no funny laughter, nothing like that, you know joking, you sort of just existed every day, you couldn’t do anything else about it and that’s just how you went on every day. His Dad went to work and he used to work down, where sailors would come in, ‘cos they’d been, where their ship had been hit and would want all re-kitting out and that’s where he worked down, down Cardiff docks where all that where the sailors got kitted out. So, we used to hear more news about what had happened through his Dad than anything else because newspapers and that, they were regular, you’d get so much news, not that much, but as far as us our lives as went, we just existed, that’s all I can say. It was sort of, well its shopping day today, or it was something else day today, but there was no laughter or anything. You just felt you couldn’t pick up the pieces and go on, you just sort of lived day for day and hope for the best
CB: Was, was there a, in a way an acceptance of his death, or was there always the hope, expectation that he’d come back?
EB: There was always the hope, you always hoped, we always hoped until we got that news from Geneva saying that the plane had come down, but they said it was down in the south of France and they were in a temporary grave but they could not tell us any more than that
CB: And, did they name the survivor, did they give you the name of the survivor?
EB: No, they didn’t give us the name
CB: So, you never knew?
EB: yes, we found out eventually
CB: Oh, you did?
EB: But not until, when did we first find out about that now? No, it was a French man, when I found out and where they, where the graves were, went over to er, I’m trying to think how I first got a, [unclear] my minds gone now
CB: We’ll have a break now shall we just for a moment?
EB: Yes, that would be good
CB: Thank you very much, because what I’d like to do is go ahead to where you joined the army
EB: Yes, yes
CB: But, let’s just have a breather
EB: Yes, that’s fair enough, yes
CB: Thank you [inaudible]
[recording paused]
CB: So, we’re restarting now and the question really is, er, we’re going fast forward many years
EB: Yes
CB: Before you actually knew anything about Ron’s fate
EB: That’s right
CB: So, he died in April forty four
EB: Hmm
CB: How many years ahead before you knew, and how did you find out?
EB: Not until nineteen eighty-eight
CB: Forty-four years later?
[clock chiming]
EB: Yes, forty-four years later that erm, in the, I had remarried in forty eight and had gone to live then in Cheshire and my sister was coming up, I had, I’d had four children, unfortunately I lost my one son, he was in a [unclear] car, got killed, and my sister came up one holiday and she said, this is in now eighty eight, and she said I’ve bought a paper up Bet, Ray said, Ray was her husband, Ray said I shouldn’t do it. Well, my second husband had also died, he died in nineteen eighty four, and so she said, I said, yes you’d like to know, and I’m convinced it is Ron, and she’d found in the paper, of the Cardiff post, and it was erm, saying that they were looking for the crew, looking for relatives of the crew and they put the names down and she knew, ‘cos loads of Joneses, that his number started six one six, he was six one six two one two, and or, six four six, I should say, and she remembered the first bit, so she said, I am going to tell Bet, and Ray said not to bother, because he thought at first it was opening up old wounds. But she said, I want to know if I was you, so she bought it. And, it was asking, a gentleman Mr Gardiner, and his brother, was also a member of the crew, and he had, the year before, found out where it was and gone over, and he’d met a lady, who I believe she was really an Irish girl, but I don’t know whether she was with the RAF or what, but she was over in France and she’d married a French man, eventually, but her name was Madame [unclear] and she had asked him to try and find this crew, because she knew all about it and where the graves were and everything, and she was doing it with quite a few of the crews. Anyway, I got in touch with him, he put this piece in, please get in touch with me if you know anybody at all, so, I got in touch with him and arranged with him, he got in touch with me and Madame [unclear] and we made arrangements for the following year, we would go over, and he was trying to find the other crews. Well, of course, I found where a lot of them lived, so I told him, and he said, actually, through one of the papers he found a few as well, but erm, eventually, in the following year there was about four of us from different families but we hadn’t all met, but different ones had come, so some were too old they couldn’t, their parents were too old, so they didn’t come, but we went over and met Madame [unclear] and it was through her that we found out that they had been in this temporary grave, and they had been moved to the big, when they moved it with the French military, that they were buried near, they moved them to a big cemetery at [unclear] and erm, they moved thirty, there were thirty airmen altogether, are buried there and it is really a beautiful spot, they really look after them well. We have a spot with these thirty, there’s another lot, there’s Jews in, there’s another lot, there’s others in, and there’s quite a lot of history in the whole of the cemetery. But this lady arranged it, booked up our hotel for us, we paid obviously, couldn’t expect her, but she booked up for all of us, actually, I’ve got a photograph of her where we got up out of the taxi’s and she was waiting there with other people, and there was a gentleman from Birmingham, Mr Reid, and because I used to go on my own then, there was nobody else then, the first year I took my granddaughter with me, young Debbie and she was about sixteen I think, sixteen, seventeen, she came the first year with me. And, erm, after that, I always, I never was one for going anywhere on my tod, so I used to go but I used to meet Mr Reid, either in London or [unclear] husband used to take me down, Sandra’s husband would take me when I was up their way, and I’d get to London or I’d get down to going on the boat over, I’d go different ways, and Mr Reid would meet me either London, or he would meet me when I got off the boat and take me down to Lyon where everybody met them. And, consequently, I met this lovely lady and she was working her socks off, if I can put it that way, to get every crew that they could together, and so, we all went for this meal, oh, it was a lovely restaurant, it was at the top of a mountain somewhere, and erm, from there on I kept in touch with her and went every year. Some of the families managed to come for the odd years, and Gwen did, Olsen’s wife, she came regularly until she couldn’t cope, she was older than me, I think she was six or seven years older than me, and she couldn’t travel after a while. Her son came once or twice, but then he had a heart attack on the plane going home one time, so, he didn’t come anymore. So, I don’t know what’s happened down the line there at all
CB: So, just going back to nineteen ninety-eight, eighty-eight when this process started, how did you feel about what had happened then, ‘cos you waited forty-four years, so, how did you feel then?
EB: Well, it was the sensation of thinking I was going to have some contact and I would hear more about what had happened and that was wonderful. And, of course, as I say, they arranged for us to go to the cemetery as well, so we went up to the cemetery and that was very, very moving, and we managed to get some flowers, we didn’t have any crosses or anything then, erm, so we got some flowers [unclear] six of the crew are buried, and there’s just one in front and then there’s four and then there’s one behind, they are buried that way, the six of them. And, we go regularly every year, but when we first went it was very, very emotional, well both my granddaughters were, but the headstones and that was all kept beautiful, but just to read that
CB: Did you feel some, have some feeling of closure?
[pause]
[interview paused]
CB: So, we are restarting now talking about people who have been so kind
EB: Yes
CB: In terms of the links abroad, and you’ve talked about the RAFA in both the Swiss part and Lyon
EB: Yes, yes, Mr Reid, he used to come from, he lived outside Birmingham and he used to come every year as well and he always
CB: This is visiting in France?
EB: Make sure I was back on the train or whatever, or whichever
CB: Yes
EB: Way I travelled, whether it was by bus or what it was, or if it was on the boat, but also the people there, and then, there was another couple, Mr and Mrs [unclear] and Peter Cobb they have a chateau there, and in the end, they said, don’t book up in a hotel come and stay with us
CB: Right
EB: And go and stay, they would meet me in the airport, take me back, and I still keep in touch with her
[inaudible]
CB: Right, yes
EB: I still keep in touch with her and she’s, she’s living now in Gloucester way, because her daughter brought her back to England, but Mr Jean [unclear] he found out all about the one that got out
CB: Yes, yes, oh he did?
EB: Yes, got all his letters
CB: And his name and everything?
EB: Yes, he found out
CB: But, you’ve never met him?
EB: A letter that he sent him, he sent me part of that, so I’ve heard what his idea was, and the way he spoke, he said in the letter that Jean [unclear] sent me a copy of, but he had said about the plane, he said they had a few complications when they left, but he didn’t mean that they hit the ground they could work it out, and they worked it out between the pilots, the erm, engineer and somebody else on the plane, don’t know who else it was. But, three of them had decided yes, they could work the system out whatever it was on
CB: Wireless operator
EB: The plane that wasn’t working properly, and so, he said all about the raid, what had happened, he said that all of a sudden, they had been hit, and it was on fire, and he saw all the curtain where Ron, the pilot, and is it the bomb aimer? Or somebody else?
CB: The curtain, the navigator would have been behind the curtain
EB: Yes, the navigator, sitting in the front, he saw the curtain was on fire between them, and he reached, he can remember reaching down for his parachute, he said, they all wore their straps automatically, he can remember doing up one strap, he don’t remember doing up the other, but he remembered, he knew he’d been hit in his arm, and he thought his arm was off in his sleeve, erm, the next thing he thought he must be out in fresh air, the air was different, he doesn’t know how he’s got out of the plane, but he eventually landed and he knew he’d landed when he felt this thump, he got, he managed to get his shoe bits off, you know they take the tops of their long boots off, but he couldn’t bury it, he tried to bury his parachute the best he could. And then, somebody came along, a man came along on a bike and he said he spoke to him in the best French he could, erm, he needed help and he was an Englishman so, prefer to have a doctor that would help him, and the man just said, ‘oui, oui’, and drove off, and he walked down further and he could see a cottage lit up and he went to that cottage. And, the lady there was Mrs [unclear], I think her name was, and it, the whole story is down in there, you can always have that, but I’m cutting bits down, but they got a doctor to him, and erm, he said, you will have to go to hospital, but what the story was further down, while he was in there, a nurse was going to try and get him out afterwards. But, apparently, while he was having the operation he spoke English and he had a German [laughs] specialist, what’s the name, doing him, so he was made prisoner of war, and he was moved from one hospital then, to another one and further up to Paris, and from there he was supposed to be getting moved to be a prisoner, but while they were there, information had come in that the Americans and the British were getting near, and so the Germans just took off and left them in there, and it was on the, I say, you know the ones that are local helping
CB: The Maquis
EB: Yeh, they all came in and they looked after them and moved them to somewhere else for safety until the Americans had come, and that was how er, John, er [pause]
CB: You’ve forgotten his name, it doesn’t matter we’ll look it up
EB: The other one, the one that got out the plane, he escaped, that’s how he got out, so that was his story of what had happened with the plane. He said he thought, he’d heard a thud and thought a big bang, but erm, the farmer was telling us that all the fishpond was all alight because the petrol had gone everywhere, but the gun, that had gone through the roof of another couple, her parents, and you can see, it’s only a little place down there, there’s just two little farm things there, another one that was the granny’s, they used that, but that was all that’s down there, and he said the machine gun went through the kitchen roof and it was still going. Well, he went out to the [unclear] [laughs] speak English, he went out to the barn and he came in and he got this sash of bullets around him, and we said to him, they are live, take it off, and he goes ‘oui’, and the man that was with us said, ‘they really will, it’s not safe, they are live, not dead, go boom, go boom’, and he was still walking around with this on, anyway, he took it off [laughs] after and hung it up afterwards, but he’d kept it all those years
CB: Amazing
EB: The farm, where it had come down, of Maurice and his sister Odile, she was only four at the time, he was fifteen and actually found out years later that when the pilot, as the plane came down, apparently, two of them did manage to get out, but the big bomb was still on board because they were on their way to Munich, that is another story, and there were thirteen planes on their way to Munich, but only twelve got there, so the other one was the one that Ron was in, and he said that [pause] er, the one that Ron was in, he said that, the farmer said that when the plane came down, er, these people had got out when the big bomb that was on it, it was very, very big, it exploded, and he said, they weren’t hit by that, they were forced into the ground. The front part of the plane went in a field way up that way and the rear one went that way, and they were all still sitting in their seats, although obviously injured and they were, they were, he said, already dead, so he said, they weren’t suffering that way
CB: No
EB: He could tell us that much about it, and then they tried to get, they got them out, tried to get them out, the Germans didn’t want to leave them, touch them in anyway, they told them to leave them, not to bother with them. But, found out years later that Maurice, his parents were hiding in him in a barn because the Germans were taking all the young ones away to Germany to do slave labour for them, so his parents used to hide him by day in the barn, and at night they’d take him in, give him a good meal, wash and clean clothes again. And, this night, he said, that he was out, he thought his Dad was going with, going around with a horse, and around like the farm, and he’d gone over to help with his Dad as well, but he said, that the pilot, he had his head in his arms when he died, he’d gone to try and help him. Now, he never told anybody that, it was only a few years before he died, that he mentioned it. So, we’re hearing stories all the time still of what went on, but another lady approached me, I think she said her name was Sylvie and her daughter was getting married the next day, it happened on a Friday, and her daughter was getting married the next day, and she said they had been to the woods to pick flowers, and they got a lot of white flowers, but they had taken the men and put them in the village hall and they had put the flowers all around the men, and the Germans came the next day and took them, that was the story this lady said. I believe, I’ve got two books, one that John [unclear] wrote all in French, one that Sylvie has wrote, it’s in French and English, but her accounts are slightly different to John [unclear] and its different to what, she thought the plane had got, went to bomb Paris, why she thought that I don’t know?, in her book, but I think she’s got confused with the fact they might have got hit going over Paris, you know, that why she has heard other stories from other people, but all the time you keep meeting people. This year fifty-three came over from France down to our place there and erm, some of them have never been to England before and they were still telling you bits of stories that they could remember or what their parents had told them, it’s fantastic isn’t it? But, they really do think the world and they look after the graves, they’re beautiful and our men are real heroes, and as they said, but for them, the Germans would have been with us and we will always respect and care for all your airmen that are here, the soldiers, everybody, that but for them we would not be freed. And, it is lovely to be there amongst them, they make, you’d think that when you go they are so excited, and I only wish there were more people here that could go or make the effort to go, I’ve spoken to some people and they go, well no, I’ve been and visited once and I can’t see any sense in going again, but to me that’s wrong, erm, I mean, if you can go, you go because its contact isn’t it, and I said, well I was just so sad I couldn’t go last year, it was seventy five years, but I’m determined next year, I hope my daughters listening there, I am going to get there next year, by hook or crook even if I am in my wheelchair [laughs]
CB: I’m going to stop you there just for a moment
[unknown inaudible]
CB: So, Betty we had the situation where after the war people were coming back, and erm, how did you feel about that and how did you then come to join the army?
EB: Well
CB: And what did you do?
EB: When people were coming back I was so glad for them because they were going to make a new life, it was going to be a hard life because there was still rations and everything, children didn’t know their Dads, they were terrified of them, I had one friend who had a little boy obviously he had been born after his Dad, his Dad had been sent abroad, he’d never seen him, and she naturally had the baby in bed with her at night and the little girl, but the little girl she was alright and she got older and went into her bed, but the little boy was screaming, he didn’t want to know that man, he wasn’t his daddy, his daddy was a picture and that was all he knew, his daddy was a picture, and the man that came home at the end of the war was nothing like it, and so they did have terrible trouble and there was a lot of children like that but they had been used to having no Dad the year round and they couldn’t get used to the fact that somebody else was in my Mummy’s bed, and that was one of the main things that went on. And then, I just couldn’t settle, I was watching all these people coming in, and I thought, I just can’t stay here and watch anymore, I’ve just got to do something, I’ve got to move and I want to find out where Ron is. I was convinced I would find, still find somebody, that he’d lost his senses, his brain wasn’t working properly, that anything could have happened, he could have had a blow, I was sure I’d see him one day, every time I’d seem somebody in uniform walking around, I would, it was ridiculous really because you knew it couldn’t be, but you still tried to find them. But, erm, then I went into town one day to see a friend that had come to visit me, get her bus back home which I did to anybody that came, so we went into Cardiff town, and as we erm, her bus was late coming, so consequently, I lost my bus to take me back to Roath where I was then living, the other side of Cardiff, because her bus being late, mine had come on time and I’d missed it. While I was stood there I just wondered what I was going to do with my life, I had to do something but I did not want to make, could not make my mind up about what I did want, and as I turned round, I was stood by a shop that was advertising,’ your country needs you, we need you’, and it was obviously a statue of a soldier in the window with just a big notice saying you know, ‘Join the Army’, so I went in and joined the ATS, and that was the start of a new life for me. I then went and after having medicals and that at Cardiff Barracks, I was then posted down to, I’ve forgotten, down to Ilfracombe and I was down there for quite a while and eventually went up to North Mimms. I was with the Royal Armoury Pay Corps, or as we called ourselves, ‘the rubber and pencil company’, and er, went up to North Mimms, while I was waiting to be posted, I’d been told I was going to Germany, and I thought of all the places to go, all I wanted to do was to get to France, for at least I might be a bit nearer to Ron and so that’s what I did, went off to join the army and I went with the, erm, in the forces there, in the offices, well, it was all, it was an old German hospital that had been bombed and they’d taken that over
CB: Whereabouts was that?
EB: That was just outside of Hamburg. Hamburg was our main depot and we were in a village way outside [pause]
CB: And, what were you doing there?
EB: There, I was on clerical, I had been with the office, it was all to do with people’s money, Pay Corp, er, at one time I was dealing with people at the stations in another country so I was changing different money sometimes, forget what they were now
[Unknown inaudible]
CB: Okay
EB: You had to change the money over from one thing to another, so, it was one and six, I remember, it was worth one and six against the pound, Rupees and Annas, that was it, Rupees and Annas and we used to have to change their money for the troops that were in this other country. And then, I got moved up to another department that was to do with officers postings, this and that sort of thing, and I stayed there for, I came out the Army in, I think it was erm, forty-seven, forty-seven and my father was very ill at home, and they sent for me in the middle of the night to go back home, so consequently that’s what I did, I had nearly two years out there and consequently, I came back home and Dad was very ill, and because of Mum’s situation, she used to have a lot of strokes, erm, the air force, the army let me off. I didn’t go back because they said I could stay in the country, I would have had to travel back which used to take three days then because you went down from London and you had to go over to Belgium or Holland, one of those, on a boat, and then you went down further and then travelled right the way up through to Hamburg and from Hamburg there, it’s the best part of three days by the time you’d finished going to one lot of things or the other, as one was on the boat, you sailed at night, and anyway they said, I could go to Cardiff Barracks and er, just finish there. Well, I went there and they sent me on to another station in England, and said I had a week to go and they just said, well, [laughs] find yourself something to do and then report back in here and you can get [unclear] you know, just get off from here, which I did do but, the funny thing is that in nineteen fifty two, not long after I’d had my second baby, I got a letter from them, all of which is down the way, I haven’t got much of my stuff on me here, all I, it just said, from nineteen fifty two you are now free, my time was up with the army, so I didn’t know what had happened, I had no proof of saying that I had gone to Aldershot and got to be [unclear]
CB: Discharged
EB: Yeh
CB: Where did you meet Bert?
EB: When did I, ooh
CB: When and where?
EB: When and where, well while I was stationed in Germany, the first time, to be honest, the first time I set eyes on him, we were on the train from, going to Hamburg, when the train was stopped by some erm, what’s them soldiers? What do you call them?
CB: The military police
EB: Yes, the military police, and erm, they wanted to put these four soldiers on the train with us all, so apparently it was all agreed in the end, they would in another compartment further down, and then one of them came around saying had we got anything to eat. It turned out, they’d gone for a holiday up the mountains and when they come to go down, the trains had been stopped because of the weather, so they were reported missing from camp, and as they got off the train, when they did get down, they were put under guard and they were put on our train. Well, we’d been given these, ooh horrible sandwiches, sardines and cheese, I don’t know how many years old, so we said, [laughs] ‘we’ve got some food if you’d like it’, you know, so we just passed all the food over to them, [laughs] he took it back to the other coach for them, well, that was the first time that I had set eyes on him, of course then, they were put on jankers, and er, they were in camp I think for ten days. Well, the only times I ever saw him after that was, we had to have somebody with us if we were going out, well, we only went on a bus down to the main part in Hamburg, which was a very big place, you could go and sit and write letters, you could go and play games in different rooms and things like that. And, dancing, well apparently, he used to, he, there’d be about three men in charge of all of us on the bus, they used to send a bus up and there’d be about three men they were responsible for those same ones to get back on the bus at night. But, you were all inside of this big club, and erm, just got back on the buses and they had to make sure everybody on, and I think about three or four times I saw him on duty doing that, and then the next time was, I think everybody was going off on a boat trip up the Rhine and he was on that one, and I was sat talking to him then for a while, but after that I never see much of him, I didn’t even know that he was demobbed because I worked in officers department and he worked in other ranks, so didn’t see them very often at all and it was only a girl on the camp, Win Jones, she came up and she said, ‘I’m supposed to be picking up Bert Bascombe’s photograph them [unclear] hand, because they weren’t ready when he was demobbed’, so she said, ‘but I’ve been moved over now and I’ve got to go from here and I’m being transported off elsewhere, so will you get them?’ I said, ‘not really, I don’t really want to be bothered’, so she said, she couldn’t find anybody who would do it, so I said, ‘oh okay then I’ll do it’. So, of course, I did it, I got these photographs sent to him, told him all about his other friends in other ranks and that, and erm, then he wrote back and thanked me very much, and was so and so there, and who else was there, and eventually I wrote back again, and of course I then got sent to go on because of Dad. So, when I was home after all the worry of Dad was over, I thought I had better write and tell that lad that he’s not going to get anymore letters from there, because I’m not there, so I can’t give him any more information, and I did that and he wrote back about a fortnight, two weeks later saying that he was very sorry that he’d not wrote before, what have you, and then later on, erm, I just wrote back and said, yes Dad’s okay now but I’ve got myself demobbed and still at home with my parents so I won’t be able to give you any more information. He wrote back and said, well, can I still go on writing to you? So, yes, if you want to, and then he wrote again and asked if he could come down to Cardiff, and er, because he'd got time off work, he’d gone back to his old job which was clerical in Liverpool, and he’d gone back there, so my Mother said, ‘well, you may as well, we’ve got another room here if he wants to come down for the odd day’, so he did and came down for that, and then, I think that was back in the August, don’t ask me exactly when, and then his parents invited me back up there at the Christmas time, and I went up, and that was sort of the start of then getting a bit serious sort of thing, but I explained to him, I said, ‘well, Ron’s been my love always’, and, because he wanted to go serious, I said, I hadn’t intended going serious, but when you think we’ve never even had a date [laughs] when you think about it, just writing letters and erm, I said, well, I only know about you, what you’ve told me but I‘ve got to tell you I said, ‘Ron’s been the love of my life, he always will be’, and I said, ‘if I did marry somebody else I could never put you in front of him ever’, you never forget your first love
CB: No, exactly
EB: But you can make another life. Anyway, he said, no, he could understand because he’d been on the beaches which we didn’t know then, it was Gold Beach, and believe me there were problems from that, which we didn’t know what it was back then, but erm
CB: On D-Day?
EB: Yes, but anyway he, what’s a name, he said yes that it would be great that he would like for us to get married, so, we did, we went ahead on the understanding I said, that you’ve got to understand I really cannot, I love you but in an entirely different way it’s a grown-up way and I am a different person. I am not the person who used to be in any way, I’m entirely different, and I suppose you got older as well
CB: Yeh
EB: But, erm, I said, it’s not the romantic, stars in the sky, sort of thing, it’s a down to earth know that we can get on well together. You can make another life and make another life, we were happy, but it was with your feet on the ground
CB: Yeh. I can believe it
EB: You know, it was one of those and we had four lovely children, which was great. We had a wonderful life together and then he never wanted to do things though, or anything because we found this was all to do with him being on Gold Beach afterwards, that was another story, yes, erm, and then he got emphysema very badly, he lost one of his lungs, smoking, and because a man had started him off in the trenches, they were stuck in the trenches, and he [unclear] smoking, and I said, effected his lungs, he was more in and out of hospital all the time, and eventually, he was bedridden altogether, he walked around with a big bottle of oxygen, didn’t he Gay? They remember as children, he didn’t have a life, their Dad couldn’t play with them or anything like that, but he was good, wasn’t he?
GM: Yes, yes
EB: He was a good Dad
GM: We had a, we were happy
EB: We were a happy family, we did, it was a down to earth, there was no roses round the doors, we both thought the world of each other, but it was plain talking, it was lovely and erm, so of course, that was our life together and eventually he died in nineteen forty-eight, I get the dates mixed up
CB: Eighty-four
EB: Nineteen eighty-four, I get it the wrong way around, eighty-four not forty-eight
CB: I think at that stage, we’ll have a break and thank you very much indeed for what you have done
EB: Okay, well, I hope it, you might have to cut a lot of it out.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Betty Bascombe
Format
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01:20:11 audio recording
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABascombeEJ151001
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-01-01
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Pending review
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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.
Description
An account of the resource
Betty grew up in Cardiff and worked in the Royal Ordinance factory. Her first husband, Ron joined the Royal Air Force as a flight engineer. She talks about receiving the telegram, stating that Ron was missing and later finding out that he had been killed and was buried in France. She joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and worked in Hamburg, where she met her second husband Bert. She talks in detail about how she found out details of her first husband’s death, forty-four years later and her journeys to his burial place in Lyon and the kindness of people who helped her.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
British Army
Spatial Coverage
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France
Germany
Great Britain
France--Lyon
Germany--Hamburg
Contributor
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Cathie Hewitt
aircrew
bombing
final resting place
flight engineer
home front
killed in action
memorial
missing in action
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/144/2209/AOConnellDA160809.2.mp3
7b47ee9f459cf922016141194f66e9a4
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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O'Connell, Desmond
D A O'Connell
Des O'Connell
Description
An account of the resource
32 items. The collection relates to Flying Officer Desmond Anthony O’Connell (b. 1919, 754811 199137). He was badly burned when his 502 Squadron Whitley crashed in Northern Ireland and he became a patient of Archibald McIndoe and a member of the Guinea Pig club. The collection contains an oral history interview, two telegrams, four religious cards and Royal Canadian Air Force photographs taken at a formal the inaugural Guinea Pig Club dinner. Guests at the dinner include Charles Portal, Archibald McIndoe, Harold Whittingham, Alec Coryton and Albert Ross Tilley. The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Desmond O'Connell and catalogued by IBCC staff.
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.
Date
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2016-08-09
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 9th of August 2016. I’m in Sunbury on Thames with Desmond O’Connell and he flew in Whitleys and we’re going to hear the story of his experiences in life and the RAF. Desmond what do you remember in the earliest days?
DO: I was born in 1919. One of eight children. My father had been in the First World War, in the infantry and he came home with a very, very strict outlook on life and he brought us up there in the East End. We weren’t very poor. We were poor, we were poor. We lived like you see on television these days when they try to depict the East End in the early days. I say I was one of eight children. Two of them died to leave six of us and we were all brought up. My father, coming from the army was very, very, very, very conscious of strict, of strictness and that is why he, he wore a thick leather belt which he used on us reason, on the boys, which we thought unjustly but rightly or wrongly it, it brought us up thinking what a fine job my father did bringing me up like this. I’ll bring up my children the same ways. So I was overly strict but fortunately the boys are still sticking around with us. But when I started school at St Francis Catholic School in Stratford where I was born and there and there until I was eleven and then I got a scholarship to the local secondary school. My two brothers had also been at St Francis School and both won scholarships and went, my eldest brother went to the West Ham Secondary School. My next brother went to St Bonaventures at Forest Gate Grammar School and my, although we were Catholics, my father, I know, felt very, he really put education before Catholicism and my eldest brother that had gone to the West Ham Secondary School passed all the exams, even the final exams, two years early. He was so clever. I went to the same school and they found that brains didn’t necessarily run in the family so I didn’t quite accomplish what he did. But, after, after that I left school. I went to work in London, in the City and I was on fifteen shillings and two pence a week out of which I paid a little bit towards my upkeep and my train fares and pastimes. Then after a while I left there. It was the, it was an Australian, Australian agents for stuff to, merchandise to be sent to Australia and after that I went to, I got a wee bit ambitious and I went to the Teachers Provident Society at Hamilton House near King’s Cross and that was for two pounds a week which was quite a lift for, financially but it allowed me to, to expand, expand a bit more. To go on to join the tennis club and then I played cricket for the West Ham Secondary School Old Boys and I played soccer for St Francis Old Boys. So all in all I spent quite an active youth. My elder, my next brother up who went to the grammar school at St Bonaventures eventually came home one day and said he was joining the RAF VR which I’d never heard of but he, but I saw him in uniform and immediately the uniform was attractive and I joined the VR in 1939 and I was called up on the 1st, the 1st of December. I’ve got the telegram here. I was called up on the 1st of December and we went to Cambridge and went and we did a, I was at St John’s College, Cambridge and the other colleges were taken over for accommodation for doing the rudiments of service life, square bashing and learning RAF law and all and after that I went to Marshall’s Flying School at Cambridge to train as a pilot on Tiger Moths. My brother had also joined the VR, was also there but much more advanced of course having gone solo earlier and I was going quite well there and I was up for going solo on Tiger Moths and we were called up one Monday morning, which I remember well. We were all called on parade and the CO said, ‘I’ve,’ ‘I’ve had orders from Air Ministry. We’ve got too many training as pilots so we’ve got to cut down and go into other, other air crew jobs. ‘So,’ he said, ‘A’s to N’s will continue with their training as pilots and O’s and otherwise, well Z’ds will either, as you’re volunteer reserves either get out of the service and be called up or you can revert.’ My brother, who had gone solo got out and within a very short time he was a lieutenant in the navy and I was training as an observer. I trained. I went down to the, I forget what they call it now. The school at, at Hastings for doing square bashing. It was quite, there we used to do the square bashing on the sands at St Leonards on Sea and the sergeant, ‘I want to hear your footsteps.’ He didn’t, not realise, having been one of his, one of his favourite expressions he didn’t realise that we were on sand but after a while I was taken off to train as an observer and I went to Yatesbury to the Bristol Flying School at Yatesbury next to the RAF Wireless School and there we flew on Ansons doing navigation. We did navigation. An observer was pushed. He did navigation, bomb aiming, gunnery, meteorology and another subject which were quite difficult. Quite difficult to absorb because they, all of them were very, all of them were very deep subjects and eventually I passed. That’s the navigation side of it of the, of the training as an observer and we went then, we were posted up to Dumfries and we went under canvas at, I think, I think it was called Tinwald Downs. Something Downs. We went under canvas there while we did our bombing. Bombing instruction. And it was, it was a most enjoyable time under canvas there and eating out and the weather was quite nice but there we did our bomb aiming training at Annan on the coast there. We were flying Fairey Battles. Well we were a passenger in Fairey Battles while we were training for bomb aiming and also we were trained on, on Harrows. Handley Page Harrows, a big old aircraft for gunnery where we had the front turret had 303s painted blue and the front turret had 303s painted red and they had an aircraft go towing a drogue and we fired at that. When he, when we came down the drogue was taken off and the number of holes, colours was counted. Not allowing for one day, I mustn’t say whether it happened more than once, that the same colour 303s were used at the front and the back turret but they still got the, still got the result that there was so many blues and so many reds. When, when we qualified from there I and somebody else was sent to Belfast, to east, to Aldergrove to 502 squadron on Whitley 5s which, which I believe had been, had been withdrawn before but they were brought back. They were withdrawn as Whitley 3s had radial engine and they were brought back as Whitley 5s on Rolls Royce and we flew to Belfast, we flew to Aldergrove and there we did, we did tours flying to the Atlantic [coughs] excuse me. Flying to the Atlantic escorting convoys across. We had on these aircraft, what was then new, the ASV that was Air Sea V, I don’t, it was, it was radar for spotting any, any metal object in the water so really it was looking for , looking for submarine U-boats, looking for U-boat conning towers and we were on that doing eight hours, eight hours and right at the very beginning we took homing pigeons and to do eight hours flying and these darned pigeons cooing at you for eight hours it nearly sent you bonkers but eventually they were withdrawn but we did some, some very good, I’m going to pat myself on the back now, we didn’t, we didn’t do astro navigation. We had to keep, we had to keep RT silence, wireless silence so all in all it was dead navigation. Dead reckoning navigation and, as I say, patting myself on the back we always picked up our objects and we always got home without any trouble each time and I always, the more I think about it the more, the more proud I am really that say without all these modern aids we did achieve that. Then it was decided after a while that we would open up a new airfield at Limavady, which is just to the north, in Northern Ireland. It was an unprepared airfield. There was no runways. It was all mud. It really was mud. And we had, there was no accommodation. We lived in an old, a big old house with no amenities at all. We lived, lived on cold water for washing and everything and then one day on, on this, on this day after we’d flown from Limavady for a few times there was another Sergeant O’Connell. He was from, from Roscrea, in Southern Ireland. He and I were in the Alexandra Hotel at, at Limavady having a few drinks before we were going to Derry as neither of us had been there and while we were there Bill O’Connell’s two wireless operators came in and said, ‘We’re flying tonight.’ So I said, ‘Oh’ and Bill had had a few so I took him back to the airfield. It was all very new there so the, when sergeant, when I, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m Sergeant O’Connell.’ I took Bill’s briefing for him and I I plotted his courses, his course and I was quite proud really but whilst I was there the CO, or one of the senior officers said, ‘You’re, you’re flying tonight.’ So, so if so we are. Now we’re on a Whitley 5. We’re after the Bismarck. The German Bismarck. Heavy, heavy warship was just outside our range and causing havoc amongst the, amongst the convoys so our aircraft we had was given extra fuel tanks, extra bombs, extra depth charges and off we, we were due to take off at 3 o’clock ish in the morning and duly took off but all those extra bombs, extra fuel and everything was too much for the aircraft and it didn’t make the high ground a couple of, three miles away from the airfield and hit. The, the pilot, first pilot and the wireless operator, second wireless operator got out the front. Now, the second pilot Chris Carmichael you see and me and the wireless operator Stan Dawney and the rear gunner, I’ve forgotten his name, nice chap, were going to get out of the back of the aircraft and I was crawling down to the escape through that door and the extra fuel tanks were strapped, fractured and covered me with petrol which again wasn’t bad because just before then we’d been issued with flying jackets and leather flying boots. I was crawling out and it fractured, these tanks fractured, covered me with petrol which was still not bad. We got out and unfortunately the grass was alight and consequently I was set alight and fortunately, as I say our flying jackets and flying boots saved my, my, saved me quite a bit but the rest of me from the waist downwards to the back of the shins suffered badly and I got out and my, the, my wireless operator Stan Dawney put me out as much as he could but there was so much petrol on board that it was quite a difficult job and we were there and somebody, one of us said, ‘Careful of the bombs,’ and we ran, including me, we ran to the brow of the [cough] excuse me, the brow of the hill and just got over the top when the whole lot blew up and you heard about it for miles away. So much so that the, we were, we were all, all registered as killed in action but we’d all got away with it and we started walking down there, down the hill and unfortunately it had been a hill for peat. Where they dug about six foot trenches to get it and of course it was not visible so there was a second to get Chris Carmichael, Stan Dawney, the rear gunner and myself walked and we kept falling down these pits, these trenches but eventually we came to a farmhouse. I think it was McGuiness. We came to this farmhouse and we knocked at the door and the explosion must have warned them that something had gone wrong because they opened the door quite readily and these three, the other three said, ‘We’ve got a bloke here who wants a bit of help. Can we put him in your cowshed,’ which was, it was attached to the house, to the, so says ‘Yes.’ So they put me in there with sacks and sticks. Sacks and things like that and the three of them went off to try and find some help and after a while I was there by myself. The cow, or cows came over and started sniffing so I opted out. I got back to the front door of the farmhouse, knocked on it and they opened the door and I said, ‘Can I come in? The cows are getting too, too friendly.’ But it was then about five o’clockish in the morning and the sun was rising behind me. They opened the door. It was a very catholic area and there was a big picture of Jesus Christ facing me on the wall in the, and as I say the sun was behind me. I thought, whatever they said I’ve arrived. It was worth it. But they took me in and they sat down. A big peat fire. They sat down, sat me down beside it and although my face and hands were quite severely hurt they put a cigarette, they put, gave a cigarette, they held it to my lips, helped me smoke it and they were very, very, McGuiness but what was, I thought my gloves were, there were strips hanging off my hands and I thought it was my gloves but I knew I hadn’t put my gloves on because when you get in the aircraft by the time you’ve put your maps out and done this you can’t do it with gloves you have to do it with bare hands. I didn’t have them but I saw the skin of my hands was hanging, hanging loose but eventually they, somebody got, and got through to the airfield, to Limavady and they sent transport out there and I think it was Flight Lieutenant Storer I think came out, picked me up and took me to Roe Valley Hospital which was a little hospital, mainly, mainly for maternity, and put, put me in there and I was in there for quite some time. My mother and father were sent for and they came over. The, our, not being critical or being nasty but our medical officer was a big Irishman who was a bit fond, bit fond of the bottle and he, he said, in my hearing, I didn’t, I don’t remember losing consciousness, I may have done. But he said to my mother in my hearing, ‘You can either have him buried here with medical, with er marshall, a marshall funeral or we can send his body home. With the CO, with the MO was a little fresh, fresh medical officer. He was a flying officer but he had just joined the medical service and I’m sure he was a foreigner, non-British and he said to my mother, ‘If you don’t do something he’s going to die.’ And my mother kicked up a, kicked up a stink and I was flown back to England to, but whilst I was in there, in hospital there, the chaps had, there was nothing else to do up there on this and they used to come in to the hospital, really for something to do and I remember them saying, ‘The Bismarck had been sunk. The Bismarck’s been sunk.’ And apparently the navy had, which I haven’t checked but I think it must be right, but I was flown back to this country in a hospital aircraft. I’m pretty sure it was an Oxford with a, with a doctor Aitchison. I’m sure it was Dr Aitchison was my bod and we were coming back, flying back to Halton, the RAF hospital at Halton, and about the Midlands the pilot had been warned that there was enemy, there was enemy activity in the area and I was being escorted by two fighters and when we landed at Halton they did a victory roll over the airfield and disappeared. When they got me off the aircraft on the, they got me to the hospital someone took the, uncovered my, my, my details and said, ‘Oh he’s only a bloody sergeant.’ So that, that was my greeting to Halton Hospital. But while I was there I was treated very much so. But I think he was, I think it was a Squadron Leader George Morley, again I wouldn’t mind that being checked but he did some very, very, some very essential first aid, first aid to burns treatment and it was, it was through him that my hands got away with a lot, they could have easily been bandaged as clumps but it was he, George Morley I’m sure but one day Archibald McIndoe appeared and, at Halton Hospital and he took all of our, all the burns patients back to East Grinstead much, much to the annoyance of George Morley. And there, the Halton Hospital was very good but even the nurses, although they were good nurses, they were still disciplined. Disciplined. RAF discipline. And you weren’t, you almost had to lie to attention when the CO came around on his weekly, on his weekly inspection. He seemed to be more interested in whether there was dust on the window sill. I think the sights, I think the patients there were he wasn’t used to it, he just wasn’t used to it. He just wasn’t used to it and he seemed to think well I I can’t do it and George Morley can and he didn’t, he didn’t really inspect us. But any rate, at Halton, at East Grinstead we were put in to Ward Three and we, it was a great leveller. A great leveller, Ward Three. There were quite a few Battle of Britain pilots in there and there was, there was no, nobody was rank conscious there. We all, they looked at, the commissioned people looked at us wondering and we looked at them wondering but the way Archibald McIndoe treated us all it soon, it soon cancelled out any, any rank consciousness and I think that made, made it a lot for, for the success but I had about, all in all I had about twenty nine operations. And there, I always remember there was a flying, flying officer, I think it was a Flying Officer Burton. He did a pinch graft on me. That’s where they took a little piece of skin from the unburnt part of my legs and planted them on the backs of my thighs which had been badly burned. A pinch graft. But that was his first operation and I believe he went on, well I mentioned his name since they, and people said he became quite a big name in plastic surgery. But as I say I had twenty five, twenty six, twenty nine operations and, but the big, the thing about it is Archibald McIndoe did not like, did not like authority poking its nose in and he was very much, he was very much for the saying, making you not feel conscious, self-conscious and he railed, ranted at people of East Grinstead to treat them normally which they did do. Then after a while they, when they were getting fairly active we went out to industry to mix, to mix with other people. I went to Kelvin Bottomley and Bairds who were instrument makers down at Basingstoke for three months. Then I went to, then you go back to hospital then for three months and then another three months I went to Carter, I don’t know, at Wembley and we did that just to get us acclimatised to meeting and we did work too. Acclimatised to meeting people and getting, getting, stopping from being self-conscious. But of course at these places people rather looked upon you as heroes kind of thing and it made you feel not, because they did it, it made you not conscious of what you looked like to them and from there on I came out. I went back to my old job as, well I do know, a big thing Archibald McIndoe did, while I was in East Grinstead, while I was in East Grinstead hospital the chaps came down from, as it was a, came down from ministry, air ministry to try and convince, I don’t know whether it was convince, whether we should go out under a pension or stay in. They tried to encourage some people to go out so they didn’t have to pay. One always thinks nasty thoughts about but it was as if they were wanting you to go out to save money but Archibald McIndoe heard about it and stopped it there and then. How could he carry on his, his healing if people weren’t there, back doing their old jobs and from there on I I was, I had an airfield as an airfield controller where I used to be in a caravan at the end of the runway telling aircraft, signalling aircraft a green light whether it was alright for them to take off or land or a red light if it was caution. Not, not to. And there, in, I don’t know now but there again this airfield, airfield I was at was Ossington, Ossington in Nottinghamshire was taken over for British Overseas Airways to train their pilots on their aircraft and it had been an OTU before that and it was going too well until the boss of British Overseas Airways started to be a bit, a bit bossy and, kind of thing, you know. He was a civilian and we were all air crew, air force and after a while we started answering him back and there was always a feud, a feud going on. And then once, one Friday or Saturday he went away as an airline pilot and came back on Monday as a squadron leader which changed, which changed things a lot. We always seemed to fall out with him and I got a wee bit fed up and I went to the orderly room and in charge of the orderly room was a Flight Sergeant Williamson. He had been in the RAF, or rightly had been in the Royal Flying Corps in the Great War and I said to him, ‘Willy, get me a posting please.’ And he said, ‘I can’t.’ He said, ‘The only way you’ll get away is to apply for a commission,’ So I applied for a commission and somehow I got it and I went to various places and I finished up at Cosford but I got this commission and I went to various places overseas. I was at Blackbushe Airport and I went overseas to El Adem and I was on my way to the Far East and I got, we got to Cairo and while we were there the atomic bomb was dropped so my posting to the Far East was scrubbed and I was posted up to, to Italy and I was at Poppiano, just by Vesuvius and Pompeii there and while I was there my padre took me up to Rome and we had a, he was a Czechoslovakian, Australian Czechoslovakian and he was going back to Australia and he still had a friend up in Rome I think, who later became Cardinal Knox who went to Perth in Australia and they got us , they got us an audience with the pope there. And another funny thing is we were out in Cairo. We had one night. We thought that we were going to be posted. One of us went down to Wadi al Far, one went to Malta and I was going to Italy.
Other: Do you want a refill or anything? More tea or coffee.
CB: I was –
Other: Yes? No? Sure.
CB: Yes please.
DO: I was going to Italy and we had a wee bit of a silly night on the junior officer’s club on on the Nile. One chap who I shouldn’t have said it but he did get on my nerves. He was always talk. Talk. Talk. Full of. He went out of Wadi Hal Far, one of them went to, the accounting officer went to Malta and I went to El Adem on my way back to, on my way to Poppiano and when I was demobbed I was flown back to Cosford to be, and I was, it was a bit foggy in the morning and when I woke up there was the, the fellow who I’d been drinking with on the, in the officer’s club, the fellow who annoyed me. I heard his voice and of course he had been demobbed at the same time. He came back and I even, I later joined the ministry of aircraft, Ministry of Civil Aviation as a controller and I went to various airfields. I went to Glasgow, Shetland, Wick, Inverness and then I came back down south and that’s where I flew. Roughly what happened.
CB: In what year did you retire then Desmond?
DO: ‘47.
CB: 1947. From the ministry.
DO: No.
CB: Or demob was ‘47.
DO: From the air force.
CB: Yeah.
DO: To the ministry.
CB: Ok. We’ll stop there a mo. Thank you.
[machine pause]
DO: They’d heard, everybody’s was blown, the aircraft was blown up.
CB: When you were pranged they thought it -
DO: Yeah. They thought -
CB: Yeah.
DO: As always your kit was rifled.
CB: Oh.
DO: By your colleagues.
CB: Oh right.
DO: And -
CB: Because they thought you were all, all dead.
DO: But everything was so disorganised there. I’ve got the thing, I’ve got somewhere, I wrote to the RAF, RAF records and they wrote that back and they gave me the obvious when I joined but then they said after that there’s nothing. Everything just terribly disorganised. In fact Limavady was a disaster. It really was.
CB: Did you keep in touch later with the other members of your crew?
DO: No. I attempted to. Stan Dawney the first wireless operator, he tried to, he tried to pat me out and he burned, he singed his hands but he was a nice chap. My rear gunner. I don’t know. I’ve forgotten his name. I’ve got his photograph somewhere. But my pilot, my first pilot was a very much an [stress] officer in the auxiliary air force. And he was very very rich. His father was a big potato man. And I’ve got, in fact he wrote, he had his -
Other: Is that the man that sent an account of your accident and you thought hmmn that’s a funny viewpoint? Dad.
CB: Ay?
Other: Is that the man that sent you an account of the accident that was in some journal and you thought, hmmn [laughs]. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know where it is.
CB: We’re just pausing for a mo.
[machine pause]
CB: The pilot was Pilot Officer John Dickson of 502 squadron. There’s a, an article here.
DO: He was a -
CB: On a wing and a prayer.
Other: Oh if it’s -
DO: The thing about his, he never came to briefing and -
VT: Handy.
DO: He always, he always turned up, he always turned up in, his WAAF always drove him in a low car, drove him up to the aircraft when we, just before we took off. And -
CB: He was relying on the second pilot for the briefing was he?
DO: Chris Carmichael. Nice fella. I can’t think where it is now but his, his biography was written by somebody in Belfast and he sent me a copy of it and asked me to, asked me to write my autobiography and he -
CB: Oh yes.
DO: But that is the stories are -
CB: Other?
[pause]
CB: I’m just stopping again.
[machine pause]
DO: My squadron.
CB: Oh you haven’t been in contact with any of the squadron.
DO: We didn’t know each other. We didn’t have a sergeant’s mess so the only ones, the only things to do in Limavady was go to the Alexandra Hotel or go to, they had one cinema and the pictures used to change every, every Wednesday there and that’s all there was to do.
CB: ‘Cause it was in the middle of nowhere.
DO: No. Nothing to do. Terrible. Terrible.
CB: So did you try to do things as a crew?
DO: No. No. No.
CB: Why was that do you think?
DO: Well it seemed to, certainly we wouldn’t have done anything with the commissioned type but we were all, I don’t know but they would say there was absolutely nothing to do. It was a little village. A little village.
Other: Who was Mr Redhead?
DO: Ay?
Other: Who was Mr Redhead?
DO: He was the, he was the second wireless operator.
Other: You kept in contact with him for a bit though.
DO: No. He kept in contact with me.
Other: Oh you enjoyed hearing from him I’m sure.
[pause]
CB: We’re just stopping again because you deserve a slurp of your coffee.
[machine paused]
CB: So we’re restarting now and I’m asking Desmond about what happened. So the aircraft’s down, the grass is on fire, the ground is on fire.
DO: Yeah.
CB: How did you feel then?
DO: Well you felt a bit numb really. All you wanted to do, you wanted to get to safety, to help but I don’t think, I don’t think I thought anything, anything dramatic or - [pause]. I don’t know. All I wanted to do was to get somewhere to get er, because it was, it was very cold so all my, were all frozen so I didn’t, I don’t think I once ever felt sorry for myself. I don’t think -
CB: So this was, when was this exactly? What date?
DO: What? The crash?
CB: Yeah. February ‘42. Because it was very cold.
DO: Yeah. I should know it shouldn’t I?
CB: Yeah. Ok. We’ll come back to that. What were the extent of your burns?
DO: Well. Just before, we, we were issued with these American flying jackets. They were leather from there to there.
CB: From the waist right up.
DO: Yeah. And leather flying boots which were from there to there. Other than that I was burnt. Burnt. But in fact I was very lucky actually that if I hadn’t had those I would have, I think they helped me. Even when I went, as far as I was concerned, well I know as a fact that I walked. I walked down the side of this hill to the farmhouse and they didn’t carry me, they didn’t lift me. I walked. As I said there were peat, peat trenches dug. We kept falling down those and going ha ha kind of thing but I think the shock was, was, numbed any feeling at all.
CB: At what stage did you begin to feel the pain?
DO: I don’t know because once, once I was bandaged you didn’t feel the pain I’m sure. I’m sure.
CB: But you were bandaged. When? -
DO: Well, as soon as I got to the hospital I just -
CB: So that was quite a while.
DO: It was three to four hours I should think but the, I still think I had a lot to thank the weather for. That it -
[pause]
CB: So your hands, arms and your head were badly burned.
DO: Yeah.
CB: Where was the worst burn and pain?
DO: Oh the hand, the worst of the lot on, on operations is when they bandage your hands. They put tight bandages on to force the join, force the, I mean all these are, all these are force. Are all -
CB: All the joints.
DO: Yeah, and they, I mean once it starts moving it’s broken the seal so they put these very, very, very, and your fingers swell a bit too.
CB: Is this gauze that they are -
DO: Yes.
CB: Do they use gauze to, to bind the hand?
DO: Sorry?
CB: What sort of material. Is it gauze or - ?
DO: What do they call those -
CB: Elastic bandages.
DO: Yes.
CB: Right.
DO: And they put them on.
CB: Surgical dressings.
DO: Yeah. No. That was the, that any part and on the legs too where they put on and it was yeah having to be careful for a fortnight to three weeks. I had, I had three chins but there again it’s one of those things. Once you have food you start moving the, and I mean I was warned that give up eating for three weeks.
CB: What were they feeding you with? Soup?
DO: Yeah. Yeah. You didn’t like that because it made you feel an invalid. It was the same with the ears and these ears are plastic surgery. They become part, there was skin put on and there was bandaged behind and a very, very tight bandage put. The thing about it is this was early on plastic surgery and they were finding out what not to do later. No. We were, we were very early on in, in Archibald McIndoe’s success quite frankly because he was, I’m sure he was making lots of, inverted commas, lots of mistakes which he remedied later.
CB: Yes. The date was the 27th of April 1941. I was a year too late. So -
DO: That’s when I pranged.
CB: Yes. So that means it was the really early days of -
DO: Yeah.
CB: His activities.
DO: Oh very. Plastic surgery. Very early.
CB: And how did you feed yourself or did they feed you to begin with?
DO: No. Again I don’t know if it was done purposely but all our nurses were very, very attractive and you wanted to show them, show off to them how tough you were. We don’t need your help. It was very, I was [?] you know one who, so I was [she?] spooned soup with a toothpick you know. Some wonderful characters. Wonderful characters.
CB: So you were in a ward. How many people in the ward?
DO: There was, when we started Ward Three at East Grinstead. There was there and there was a dozen beds there on that ward but that ward was knocked down and, because it was all the sergeants were getting in there, all the, and overseas pilots and McIndoe didn’t like it, he had the ward, and he purposely, he purposely made sure that, ‘cause he was, he was a bit of, I don’t know if he ever had any trouble with other people but he was very conscious about mixing. Mixing. And he was very successful. Very successful.
CB: And so how about in your recuperation because your legs are burned as well as your hands and your face? How did you manage to get yourself comfortable?
DO: That was one of the actually, actually I think it was possibly that I did myself quite a bit of no good but it was only if I asked that person for assistance they’d think I’m a cissy. I can’t do it. So you’d want to show how tough you were and no, a lot of it quite frankly, quite frankly the patients there at East Grinstead did a lot for themselves psychologically and physically by not giving in. Did not give in.
CB: And how did they entertain you? Because some people like you couldn’t move for a bit.
DO: We had, we had various people used to come down on the Sundays but there were two, there were two cinemas in East Grinstead and they both changed their films on Wednesday so you had four films a week, kind of thing. And the one hindsight, the one bad thing was if you went to a pub for a drink you’d never have to buy it yourself which was a bad thing because it it tempted you to drink more and the big thing in the RAF hospitals, in service hospitals they used to have a blue uniform. Well, I don’t know if it’s a uniform but blue trousers and a blue, blue jacket. A white shirt. And if you were, if you were not a bit brains or something a red tie then you was in and of course no publican was allowed to serve anybody in a blue uniform. Now, McIndoe found this out and he kept all of us in uniform. He kept one blue suit for punishment and it was only one bloke, old Jonah, great fella. He was, he had to wear it for a while but that’s -
CB: What had he done to deserve that?
DO: I don’t know. He could have done anything. He was, he was bonkers. Great fella. Great fella.
CB: So you’ve got all these people with different experiences. To what extent did you share your experiences?
DO: Nobody.
CB: That’s what I thought.
DO: Nobody talked about what happened.
CB: Right.
DO: Nobody. Because you were always afraid that they’d outdone you.
CB: Sure.
DO: So you could let yourself down rather.
CB: Yeah. So what was the main topic of conversation if there was one?
DO: There really wasn’t one. Usually talked about funny incidents and Archibald McIndoe, I presume it was him got, got work for us to do in the, I mean there was a mix. Little handy jobs that you used to do to keep you. One thing was to keep the fingers going and the other thing for to keep your brain, brain ticking over but actually we were, we were very lucky because it was quite easy for, quite easy for not thinking at all.
CB: The danger I suppose was, was it, that the mind and was not exercised?
DO: Well just stagnate.
CB: Yeah.
DO: You got up. You had, you had meals given to you. You had people to come in, nurses to fuss over you and it was very tempting just to lie back and let them do everything.
CB: And as part of the activities did you have singsongs and somebody on the piano or what happened?
DO: No. There was, there was a piano in Ward Three for a while and Archibald McIndoe used to come and play it but that was all that -
CB: And what about beer on the ward?
DO: It was said and I don’t, I did not notice it, I did not experience it that they had beer on the ward. Now, I didn’t see but I can imagine for one occasion but it’s always that that was remembered.
CB: Yes.
DO: I can’t believe it but –
CB: They didn’t want you rolling out of bed.
DO: No. No. No. It wasn’t much. I used to have lunch and then half a dozen of you used to walk down to the cinema and you’d come back just in, just in time for tea, you see. It was a shocking life. In hindsight it was a shocking life.
CB: The, the cinema was on the camp was it or was it in -
DO: No. No. There was two. The Whitehall theatre and where, we had, we had our, we had our original, where we had our, our foundation of the Guinea Pig Club dinner there at the Whitehall Cinema and the radio centre. So there were two cinemas, two shows a week, different films. So just went. We, we had one pilot learning German and the young lady, a very, very attractive lady sat on a bed and crossed her legs and, and she had quite a class going. I remember the haben sie? Est is gut. Est is se gut but she, she gave us, she was running quite a popular, very popular class so suddenly she gave up and oh dear we got an old hausfrau came in and took her place and the class disintegrated.
CB: I wonder what signal that was?
DO: Terrible.
CB: What did you have to do to qualify to go out to the pub?
DO: Nothing at all but you didn’t, you didn’t risk being gated. No. Because the thing about is if you went down to the pub everybody wanted to buy you a drink and after a while it used to be embarrassing actually to refuse it.
CB: Did you have an escort with you?
DO: No.
CB: No.
DO: No.
CB: So what was the reaction of the local population?
DO: The, as I say McIndoe somehow, I don’t know, he did it, he got it broadcast in this little town, do not stare, and people were very, no, people in East Grinstead helped an awful lot because they didn’t, they didn’t cringe or anything at all like that.
CB: You said you had twenty nine operations.
DO: Yeah.
CB: How did that work as a sequence?
DO: I think, I think, I think that time available was it. If, if he had an hour to spare, ‘Who wants, who wants that slot?’ And if you were, he’d look at what’s got to be done in an hour and he said, ‘Right. I’ll take him down and do his hands and do his,’ I think, I think it was a lot like that.
CB: So we’re talking about ‘41 is when the crash took place. When did you eventually leave hospital?
DO: [pause] It was three and a bit years.
CB: So it’s nearly the end of the war.
DO: When did I crash?
CB: ’41.
[pause]
CB: April ’41.
DO: I suppose early ‘43 I presume because I came out of the service in ‘46. Was it? And, and I don’t know. I wouldn’t hazard a guess.
CB: Well let’s say it was ‘43. What did you do in the rest of the war in the RAF?
DO: Well I was on airfield control where you were at the caravan at the end of the runway and you had a red light and a green light and if you saw a, you gave, if an aircraft was waiting to take off, if it was all clear out there you gave them a green light. If there was an aircraft coming in you gave a green light. If something suddenly happened, a lorry, you’d give them a red light and that was your job and at the airfield at Ossington they were doing, it was an OTU, Operational Training Unit prior to going on operations you were fairly well up all night doing, doing it.
CB: And what vehicle are you in because it’s a mobile unit?
DO: Yeah.
CB: You’re at the end of the runway.
DO: A caravan.
CB: Right.
DO: A caravan.
CB: Which is black and white boxes.
DO: Black and white squares.
CB: Yeah. Squares. Yeah.
DO: And you used to have a meal brought out to you in a, in a hay box at night.
CB: So a lot of the time you were a sergeant. Did you go to flight sergeant before you were commissioned?
DO: Yeah. I was, I was a flight sergeant.
CB: And what prompted the commissioning?
DO: Well, as I say it was British Overseas Airways. Their fellow in charge was a, we suddenly realised he wasn’t in the service so we could say [?]. So when he was given a temporary squadron leader it was then we started, instead I went to Flight Sergeant Williamson and said, ‘Get me a posting,’ and all he could do he said, and it showed you how hard up they were. ‘All you can do is apply for a commission,’ so I applied and got it.
CB: And what training did you get to become an officer?
DO: You had the Officers’ Training School. It was mainly physical. A little bit learning about RAF law but not really much. It was really conditioning you to be in charge of men. As you’ve never, you’ve always been in charge, you’ve always been in charge of and cut out any slovenly habits you’ve got and things like that.
CB: Can I just go back to the operations? How did you feel about this sequence because there’s an awful lot of them so where, of operations, twenty nine. Were you looking forward to them? In dread of it? Or what were you feeling?
DO: Oh no. No. No. No. Not at all. I don’t think I ever, was ever apprehensive about what was done. I don’t think so. Maybe. You always thought, you always thought what they had to do was for you. It was for your betterment.
CB: Ok. Finally changing the subject. When did you meet your wife and where.
DO: She’s my second wife. My first wife I was at Glasgow, I was at Inverness. I was in charge of Inverness airport and she, my first wife worked in teleprinters [?] and up there she was from Elgin which was thirty miles up the road. She was a catholic. I was a catholic. We met going to mass and we got married there and we had five children. And she died of cancer.
CB: Oh.
DO: Then I got around, I finished up at London airport and my present wife was was an air, an air traffic assistant there and we had nothing to do so we got married. We had two children. Well we, we’ve been very unlucky. Two of our girls were killed in accidents.
CB: Dreadful. What was your first wife’s name?
DO: Renee. Renee Patterson. A great Scottish dancer.
CB: Oh. And your current wife. What was her -
DO: She was Winifred.
CB: Last name.
DO: Freaks. F R E A K E S.
CB: Ok. Right. Thank you very much indeed.
[machine pause]
CB: That was really interesting. So your accident -
DO: Did I tell you about the accident? We were after the [pause] Bismarck. We were after the Bismarck.
CB: Yes. You did. How much flying had you done at that point?
DO: It must have been over a hundred hours. I was, I was, I was very conceited about that flying because I flew with no aids, you had to keep WT silence and I wasn’t astro navigation conscious and -
CB: Did you use a sextant?
DO: No. As I say we didn’t, hadn’t, no, you used to take, used to use a bomb sight and take your drift on air waves, on wave tops. I thought I was very good and -
CB: Before the accident did you engage any German submarines or surface ships?
DO: Well, in fact the Germans had a great big old aircraft also out on patrol.
CB: The Condor.
DO: I don’t. But if you, if you saw one there was a race. He, if you saw you there was a race to get in to the clouds so you didn’t see each other.
CB: Oh right.
DO: I think it was the Condor.
CB: Yeah. The Focke Wulf Condor.
DO: Yeah.
CB: But you didn’t do any attacks on surface vessels or submarines then?
DO: On suspect. Yeah. You didn’t, wasn’t conscious of anything.
CB: Who was running the air to surface radar? On the aircraft? On the Whitley?
DO: It was installed in the aircraft but there was an awful lot of guesswork in it.
CB: Yes. But who operated the system?
DO: It was installed in the aircraft. It, I think the system was installed as a box.
CB: But somebody was operating the system and looking at the screen.
DO: Oh we were.
CB: You were or the wireless operator.
DO: Well anybody but somebody was.
CB: Right. Ok. Anything else?
VT: No. That’s fine.
[machine paused]
DO: Not long, not long after I crashed.
VT: Yeah.
DO: As I say the fellas had nothing to do. They came to the hospital and told us that the Bismarck had been sunk.
VT: Yeah.
DO: But the navy were after it anyway.
VT: Yeah. And you know the story of that do you?
DO: No.
VT: Oh right.
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Interview with Desmond O'Connell
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AOConnellDA160809
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Pending review
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Desmond O’Connell was born in London in 1919. He followed in his brother’s footsteps by joining the Royal Air Force Voluntary Reserve in 1939. He went to Cambridge to commence pilot training but half the contingent were transferred to become Observers. He was posted to 502 squadron to Aldergrove and then to Limavady in Northern Ireland. One night the squadron were detailed to attack the Bismarck and were loaded with extra petrol tanks, bombs and depth charges. However the plane could not take the extra weight and crashed three miles from base. On making his way out of the plane, one of the extra fuel tanks ruptured and Desmond was dowsed with petrol. When Desmond did make the escape, the plane was on fire and he suffered catastrophic burns. When he was in hospital, his parents were called for by the doctor, who asked his mother where she would like him to be buried. She wouldn’t accept this and Desmond was transferred by hospital plane to RAF Halton Hospital. His plane was escorted by two fighters who did a victory roll over the airfield as his plane landed. Desmond then began years of recuperation and endured twenty nine operations as a member of Archibald McIndoe’s Guinea Pig Club.
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2016-08-09
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Julie Williams
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01:37:21 audio recording
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eng
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Sound
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Royal Air Force
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Great Britain
Northern Ireland--Londonderry (County)
England--Sussex
Great Britain
aircrew
animal
crash
entertainment
ground personnel
Guinea Pig Club
McIndoe, Archibald (1900-1960)
medical officer
navigator
RAF Halton
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/105/2223/PAmbroseBG1618.2.jpg
08822ee693f7c9b8469d8499f4ed0e5b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/105/2223/AAmbroseBG160629.1.mp3
1a62c9696c9bb6097db0beeb806bb242
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Ambrose, Basil
B G Ambrose
Basil G Ambrose
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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.
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2016-06-29
Description
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18 items. The collection consists of an oral history interview with Basil George Ambrose (1923 – 2016, 1604870 Royal Air Force), his log book, a page from his service book and 15 photographs. Basil Ambrose was a flight engineer flying Lancasters with 467 Squadron Royal Australian Air Force from RAF Waddington between September 1944 and March 1945 and with 617 Squadron from RAF Woodhall Spa.
The collection was been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Basil Ambrose and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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Ambrose, BG
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6 March 1942: Joined RAF as a trainee turner
Posted to RAF Sealand, qualified turner
Posted to RAF St Athan, Flight Engineer training
5 July – 8 September 1944: RAF Swinderby, 1660 HBCU, flying Stirling aircraft
8 September 1944: Promoted to Sergeant
22 – 26 September 1944: RAF Syerston, Lancaster Finishing School, flying Lancaster aircraft
29 September 1944 – 23 March 1945: RAF Waddington, 467 (RAAF) Squadron, flying Lancaster aircraft
Commissioned, promoted to Pilot Officer
November 1945 Promoted to Flying Officer
22 April 1945 – 9 January 1946: RAF Woodhall Spa, 617 Squadron, flying Lancaster aircraft
11 January 1946 – 15 April 1946: Detached with 617 Sqn to Digri, India Command
28 May – 1 July 1946: 617 Squadron RAF Binbrook
October 1946: 1604870 Flying Officer B.G. Ambrose released from Service
<p>Basil George Ambrose was born on 24<sup>th</sup> June 1923 in Derby Street, Reading, the youngest of five children. He attended Wilson Road School near Reading’s football Ground. In 1937, when he was just 14 years old, he left school and took up employment as an apprentice turner at the Pulsometer. He was paid five shillings a week, half of which he had to give back to pay for his indenture training.</p>
<p>Although engineering was a reserve occupation, on 6<sup>th</sup> March 1942, he was able to join the RAF as a trainee turner. On completion of training, he passed out as a Leading Aircraftsman and was posted to RAF Sealand. Whilst there, he applied, and was accepted, for Flight Engineer training at St Athan.</p>
<p>His first ever flight was memorable in that he took the opportunity to join an old family friend (a test pilot at St Athan) who was taking a Beaufighter up for an air test. While airbourne over the Bristol Channel he witnessed a long line of merchant ships, all nose to tail as far as the eye could see, the ships were readying for the for the D Day landings.</p>
<p>On 7the June 1944, he completed his Flight Engineer training and joined the HBCU at RAF Swinderby, before moving on to the Lancaster Finishing School at RAF Syerston. In September 1944, Sergeant Ambrose and his crew, now fully trained, joined 467 Squadron (RAAF) at RAF Waddington. </p>
<p>On just his second operational flight, tasked with destroying enemy field guns in Holland, his aircraft had to drop below the cloud base at just 4000 feet. Almost immediately, the aircraft alongside them was hit by ack-ack and went down in flames. Basil’s aircraft returned safely, but the mission ended in failure.</p>
<p>Just over a fortnight later, his first ever night operation proved even more eventful, one they were all very fortunate to survive. En-route to Brunswick, a fire in the cabin set alight the blackout curtains surrounding the pilot and navigator. Basil had to use two extinguishers to put out the fire. The events caused significant delay and at their estimated time of arrival on target, they were still approximately 40 miles away. By the time they got there all the other aircraft had gone through and were on their way home. Basil’s aircraft was now completely alone over the target and although they were able to drop their bombs successfully, the aircraft was illuminated by a whole cone of search lights from the ground, plus an enemy fighter aircraft was fast coming in from the port side. The skipper took evasive action by immediately putting the aircraft into a 5000 feet dive and Basil found himself pinned to the cabin ceiling by the ‘G’ force; conversely when the aircraft pulled out of the dive, he was forced down to the cabin floor. The evasive manoeuvre was repeated one more time before they managed to lose the searchlights and the fighter. The trip home was conducted at low level without further alarm. In all, Basil and his crew went on to record thirty operations together. </p>
<p>After 467 Squadron, Basil was commissioned as a Pilot Officer and was posted to 617 Squadron in April 1945. He was never to fly operationally again although with 617 Squadron he served for a brief period in Digri, India. Basil reached the rank of Flying Officer and was demobbed in 1948.</p>
<p>Basil returned to the Pulsometer and finally qualified as a turner. After a short period working in Birmingham, he settled in Reading with his wife Jean and two children. He continued to work in engineering, eventually moving into the engineering safety field. He retired from his final position of Chief Safety Advisor for Greater London Council in 1981.<a href="https://www.getreading.co.uk/news/local-news/war-veteran-still-swing-90-4802178"></a></p>
Chris Cann
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today we are in Tilehurst, near Reading, and the date is 29th of June 2016 and we are talking to Basil George Ambrose of 267 Squadron about his experiences in the war and we’ve also got here together with us Christine Parkes, his daughter. So Basil, what are the earliest recollections you have on life and tell us from there?
BA: First may I correct you?
CB: Yes—
BA: 617 Squadron —
CB: oh 617 Squadron —
CP: And 467, and 467.
BA: I was in — I’ll carry on then —
CB: Yes. OK. 617. Fire.
BA: We‘ll start with my birth—
CB: Yes, yeah, yeah —
BA: in Derby Street, Reading,
CB: Yes —
BA: on 24th of the sixth 1923. Well, you’ve got all that haven’t you? Sorry. And I was fifth, if you like, but my father was married twice. He had, he was a fine man who’d seen the war and had a wife that became [unclear]. She had four children with him. Horace was the eldest, no beg pardon, Doris was the eldest, Horace was next and they were both born in 1910, one at the beginning and one at the end. And Graham was next. She was, er, no — anyway Bernard was the last and it was 1915. But my father was brought back from the trenches [unclear]. He was in the Royal Ordinance, no, Royal Army Service Corps. So he was surprised in other words and he was sent home to put his family together when his wife left the children. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, I suppose. But anyway, he did a very, very good job of putting them together. He left them in charge of his mother, who was a very strict disciplinarian, and they saw the war through. But of course, he had to find somebody [unclear] to love and look after his children, which was my mum, and I was born in 1923. And the first memories I have in Waverley Road is of a doctor calling for, I don’t know for what reason. And we had seven Alsatians in a very nice wooden kennel, if you like, big, big kennel, and you could go in there and I grabbed the Doctor following me (Doctor Milne was our doctor for many, many, years) and diving in there was seven Alsatian puppies and they were all over me. So that was one of my best memories. And my other memory is, the garden was surrounded with cages of rabbits, rats, chickens [unclear]. It was, what you’d call it? A menagerie and most of them liked by the older children. I was too young to appreciate it. I suppose I can think, I was about, I must have been about the age of four when we moved to Waverley Road, in West Reading. In a big five-bedroom house, which was very, very suitable for a lot of jokes and pranks. I can even remember climbing on the roof out of the attic ‘cause my younger brother Gerald, who was the only other child of my mother, he was about four years younger than me and, can we stop for a second? And yes we had lots of fun there. I remember we were in an attic, Gerald and I, and we shared the same bed. I had an uncle who was looked after by my mother, her brother in fact, her eldest brother, and he used to work at the AEC in Southall and caught a very early train. So he used to get up very early and go to bed when he came home to ‒ and always had his curry [laugh]. [background noises] The er — Yes, so, I’m lost.
CB: Caught his train.
BA: Yes, yes. Very early train up to [Ealing]. The story is, my brother Gerald came running along the passageway to the end bedroom where I was, I suppose, and Uncle Harry came out, because he, having woken up having worked all night, and slapped Gerald across the face, which was not very good really. But anyway, these are snippets of memories, I suppose. And the other thing that is my brother Horace was a real prankster. We had a, my mother had a, er, Mongol, Mongolian, do you’d call it?
CP: Mongol.
BA: Mongol sister. She was a very, very, nice person. She used to nurse me and look after me but Horace took advantage of her. He used to invite friends in and then go and get a kitchen knife and give it to her and say ‘go and fight them’ you see and she knew exactly. She would be going in the room saying ‘Nicky, nicky, nicky’ [slight laugh] and mainly they were his friends of course and they would jump out of the window, on the ground floor of course. The memories come flooding back. The other thing is, my eldest brother had a very, very nice bicycle, a racing bike, which he gave to me when he went in the Navy. ‘Cause my Dad decided that it was going to be too much for my Mum to look after four of them, me and when Gerald was coming along I think that was the trigger that caused the break-up of the family. So, where are we now? Yes, the garden was walled all the way round. There was a greenhouse at the bottom with a storage room next door to it. There was an alleyway that went right round the back of the houses in Beecham Road. We could get over that wall into this alleyway, although we didn’t have a right of way. Everybody else did. Because we were at the end, we were not on the right of way. And I used to hop over and go into Beecham Road that way. The other thing I remember are the things that Dad made for me. He made me a beautiful pedal car and other things like that, he was very good. He was the stage manager at The Palace Theatre, Reading, by the way, and was there from 1906, away from the war of course, the Great War, and he used to get complimentary tickets which he could swap with people like the Reading Football Ground. They had given him a season ticket which I could use on occasions.
CB: So, where did you go to school?
BA: Wilson Road, Wilson Road School, which was right by the football ground. The top of Wilson Road came out by the football ground and then it was up Wantage Hill to the top of Waverley Road, left to Prospect Park and right to our house, 137.
CB: What age did you leave school?
BA: Fourteen. Fourteen. I wasn’t very good. A sickly boy, I think. I had, what do you call it? Bronchial catarrh. I suppose I was kept at home on more than one occasion. And the other thing I remember is having a friend, Dick Chandler, whose father had a post office at the bottom of Norcot Road and the Oxford Road. Quite a busy post office and grocery shop as well, and he was able to tell me what to do for [laugh] getting out (well I didn’t get the buckshee) to go in and tell the lady, Miss Bacon (a nice little lady with a tiny little shop opposite the school), ‘Tell her you put a penny in the chewing gum machine and you couldn’t get anything out’. So she used to give you — she gave me [emphasis] this chewing gum, but of course it was found out, obviously I got caught, and I had to pay for it, go and apologise. Fair enough. I don’t think it crossed my mind [laugh] the way I misled her, I suppose. And the other occasion was my brother Horace had a very, very good catapult which he allowed me to borrow one day so I take it to school and I was showing off, I suppose I was boasting really. Dick said ‘let me have a go with it’. Just coming out of school. I said ‘No, no. We’ll get into trouble’. Sure enough he managed to persuade me. He got himself a stone and fired it over towards the [unclear] back gardens and I heard a crash, and obviously a window being broken. Probably it wouldn’t have been found out but for the fact the caretaker’s house was right by the playground and he’d seen us do it. We were — So we had six each, six strokes of the cane. We had the catapult confiscated. I paid for the window. It was any amount of punishment. My dad was a bit furious about this, thought it had gone over the top. I should have been punished but within reason, which was justifiable, I suppose.
CB: You left school at fourteen. What did you do then?
BA: I went to the Pulsometer. I got a job, an apprenticeship, as a turner. That was 1937 and you had to pay, pay for this, these indentures, and the only thing I could do was pay half crown a week. I got five shillings a week pay and I paid half a crown a week for the indentures. It was a good training, very good training. I went — And it was very beneficial to me in the finish because when I was called up (and this is jumping the gun, sorry, let me go back). I did try to get in to the ‒ I went to get into the Navy and they said ‘You’re too young.’ then I was told by the firm I was in a reserved occupation. I was quite useful to them really because I’d already got about, how many years’ experience? Two and a half years’, three years’ probably experience, in training. It was good training. [Pause] Oh yes, yes, yes, when you had the call up everybody had to do it, at the age of eighteen? And they saw I was in a reserve occupation and wouldn’t be able to go and the officer, he was an RAF officer, who was interviewing, he said ‘Well you can,’ he said, ‘come in in your own trade and then remuster when you’re there to what you want to do’. Which was a great benefit to me because I went in May ’42? (I can’t read it.) Yes, it was May ’42 when I went in. I’m jumping a bit like a frog.
CB: It’s OK.
BA: One of the first persons I met at Cardigan, Cardigan [coughs] where new recruits had to go first of all and get the uniforms [unclear]
CB: Was it Cardington?
BA: Cardington. Yep.
CB: Right
BA: Well, the first person I should meet, because you had to go and get your hair cut, was Johnny Good, my barber —
CB: [laugh] —
BA: from Tilehurst and, er, [slight laugh] ‘cause you get sent back immediately on the next parade by the sergeant ‘go and get your hair cut’. Well this would go on several times but Johnny just said ‘Don’t take any notice of him, you’re alright’ he said to me and I didn’t, and it was perfectly all right. But anyway, [pause] so where am I?
CB: So, you’re at Cardington and you’re getting kitted out and getting your hair cut.
BA: Yes, I suppose yes, and then going on to do the square bashing at Skegness was the first place and then to Weeton, in-between Preston and Blackpool, and there as a turner, a trainee turner, and I took a trade test and passed out with flying colours and the only person who did it like that was another man from the Pulsometer. Which made me feel it was one of the best training schemes there was and although he wasn’t an apprentice like I was, he was a, what they call a shop boy, much the same, he did exactly the same as I did really. But it was good training. Started off very small, drilling, and working your way up to big machines, and then, as I say, when war was declared I became an instructor for the dilutees [emphasis] that came in. People were needed for the trades during the war. Pulsometer made a lot of pumps. Still going by the way, still there, Sigmund Pulsometer Pumps. Still around. [pause]
CB: So, you’ve just done your trade training —
BA: Oh yes —
CB: and that’s all on the ground, so then what?
BA: I passed out as a LAC [emphasis].
CB: Ah!
BA: Ah! And so instead of getting two shillings a day I was getting six and six a day. I always allowed my mum a shilling a day allowance —
CB: Yep.
BA: always right the way through. I can’t remember when I stopped it. I think when I got my commission she said I would need it, all my money. I think she turned it down. Anyway, so now I’m trained as a turner. Oh yes, I was posted to Sealand. Because you have to then, of course, have to apply for aircrew and I can’t quite remember quite how I did that but I did it and I had to, I think I did work one machine at Sealand (which was near Chester by the way). It was a very, very pleasant time there, very, very pleasant. Nice river, salmon leap all those sort of things.
CB: So from Sealand, having applied for aircrew, where did they send you?
BA: Well I, first of all, went back ‒ oh I’m missing the other bit out. I first of all went back to ACRC in Regents Park from Sealand, and this is the only time I’d be wearing a white flash. I can’t really remember that bit. Anyway, I must have done and there were, of course, all these people coming in, new recruits, and I was an experienced airman by then. Er — what happened? Oh yes, square bashing again, that was Bridlington [unclear]. So, Bridlington.
CB: Yep. It was an ITW? Initial Training Wing, was it?
BA: Well, I suppose so, but they wouldn’t know that I’d already been —
CB: No, obviously —
BA: trained at Skegness and done square bashing, but there of course was a Sergeant Steele, Flight Sergeant Steele. Blond hair, blond moustache, oh a fine looking chap he was. Not all that tall but a real first class airman. And I was fairly tall myself, not curved like I am now, and I was always their marker? Right marker?
CB: Right marker. Yeah.
BA. So everybody dressed on me. And our squad was right at the back. I don’t know how many squads there were, quite a lot, and I, we were doing the guard march, which you have to do right a bit, then left a bit, always face the front. And the girls were on the pavement right by where we were marching and everyone was far away from us, so I was chatting to the girls and forgot to turn right instead of left a bit [laughs] and so my squad was the only squad going that way and everybody else ‒[laughs]. He called me out to the front. Never, never get called to the front because once they know your name you are for it [laugh]. And every demonstration he wanted, he always called my name. I always had to go out and do it. I was not bad, I couldn’t have been that bad otherwise he wouldn’t have used me as an example. But it was a big, big error, a big mistake. What else? And of course, from there, as I say, to Weeton. At that time they took off the reserved occupation of the police force and the policemen poured into there. I remember these wooden huts, quite nice huts there were really, quite comfortable. I’d be lying awake at night listening to these policemen tell their stories and they were pretty vivid. A lot of them were Metropolitan policemen. And all sorts of things I’d never heard before in my life I heard there. And then from there down to St Athan I suppose. I can’t think of anything else. I went all the way down there [sound of shuffling papers].
CB: Do you want to stop for a mo’?
BA: Thank you.
CB: Now, we were just talking about St Athan. You went to St Athan for your flight engineer training?
BA: Yes.
CB: So what did you do there?
BA: All manner, hydraulics, pneumatics, all of the things I was a bit weak on I suppose, but yes general maintenance of the engines, and we went all over the engines. In fact I went to Woodford in, er, Manchester?
CB: Yep, where they built the Lancasters —
BA: And I had a week there I think. Yes
CB: That’s alright. So how long were you doing your training at St Athan?
AB: Until, until about D Day because the thing that makes me recall this is the fact that a friend of the family’s, Stan Abbot. Stan Abbot. He’d been in the RAF for many, many years. He was a, flight engineer, not a flight engineer, flying officer, no, no, that’s not right —
CP: Don’t worry, we’ll come back.
BA: Tut, terrible, terrible. Anyway he was a test pilot at St Athan, because they maintained aircraft as well there. He was going to take a Beaufighter up to test it and said would I like to go up with him, which I did [laugh], much to my chagrin, because I was stood behind his seat and he would throw this Beaufighter all over the sky. I could feel the G forces forcing me down on the seat. And then whilst we were doing this it was over the Bristol Channel, I had a chance to see, there was a line of ships, merchant ships [cough] nose to tail, all the way as far as you could see towards the Bristol Channel, right up — [unclear] it was the Bristol Channel. And right up as far as you could see the other way as well. So I realised that something was on but didn’t know what. [Pause]. Anyway, that was my first experience of flight, realising that something was going to go on soon, and what happened then? I was posted to ‒
CB: Is that when you went to the HCU at Swinderby, straight after that, or did they send you somewhere else?
BA: Somewhere else. Did I go somewhere else? That was right. Yes, that’s right. You go in as a second engineer. And you spent some time ‒ it’s in the log book, isn’t it? Spend some time, with different crews and that’s when I say that Shirley [?] asked me if I’d join them [unclear] can’t see it, and then yes 5 LFS Syerston yes, the next one, and that’s when I got ‒ still not got a pilot’s licence. That’s the squadron. I thought we had a few weeks. That is [emphasis] it. Does that look familiar? LFS? Lancaster —
CB: Lancaster Finishing School. Right, so you went to Syerston, to the Lancaster Finishing School before you—
BA: Where did I go for the —
CB: HCU? Did you go to the HCU first?
BA: Swinderby. Yep, Syerston and Swinderby. Yep. Ok, 1660 HCU.
CB: OK.
BA: OK [unclear]
CB: Right, so you are now part of the crew because of the HCU. What happened at the HCU? What did you tend to do when you were at the HCU Basil?
BA: This was the, did I say Stirlings?
CB: Yeah.
BA: Did I say Stirlings [papers shuffling]
CP: Do you want a break?
CB: We’ll have a break while you’re following that.
BA: Fred Ward in the bed next to me.
CB: This is the HCU.
BA: Yes HCU, and he was already an engineer so he had been there some time and I was the second engineer. And, they’d obviously, they’d obviously got some trouble with the undercarriage and he was winding it down and there was a pilot error so I understand, and he was killed. He was killed. As I say, he was in the bed next to me and we used to chat together. I remember that he’d told me he’d been up to Lincoln to get some photographs taken. I’ve got one in the album somewhere ‒
CP: Here, don’t worry now —
Ba: Anyway, yes, so his name was Fred —
CB: Fred Ward. This is Stirlings, we’re talking about.
BA: Yes, yes, That’s right. So he was killed at Swinderby and —
CB: Because the pilot made a mistake.
BA: Yes, I think so. I’m not sure that anyone else got killed. It was only because he was winding up the undercarriage I think. Not sure. Anyway, I go into Lincoln and find the photographer who’d taken these pictures. So, I collected them. I get his address, home address, and take them to his family, which I did and they were extremely grateful. They gave me one of the pictures. It’s in the album somewhere. Yes, so very sad that was. Made me hate the Stirling, hated it, but it was supposed to have been one of the best aircraft going except in fact, so they say, is that the wingspan was reduced by a hundred feet to get it in the hangar.
CB: Not a hundred feet but reduced yes, reduced to a hundred feet.
BA: And it spoilt it, I think.
CB: Yes, it couldn’t get any height.
BA: It was good at towing gliders, I think.
CB: Absolutely.
BA: So where am I?
CB: We’re at the HCU.
BA: Did we go somewhere else? No? Yes, we had to pick up the Lancasters didn’t we?
CB: That’s when you went to the Lancaster Conversion Unit. No, Lancaster ‒
BA: LFS.
CB: The Lancaster Flying School.
BA: Yes, OK. That was at Syerston. The first thing I saw there was a Lancaster in the Trent with the engines [unclear]. Must have overshot or didn’t take off properly. Yes, so then we go to Waddington as a crew. Yeah, and I was pleased [emphasis] that the first operation we had was in support of the British Army, which was going up towards Brussels and were being held up by guns on the, by the Walcheren. We were sent to breach the dykes and very successfully. There’s a book by Paul Crooks. Which I’ve got two, I’ve got two of his books. He was a Dutchman. They are Dutch, aren’t they? And he said that they never blamed the crews, never blamed the crews. But we flooded these islands successfully, but it didn’t put the guns out of action because all the guns were on high ground —
CB: Yeah, right —
BA: and so we were sent the following day to go for the guns. So that was our first two raids and both daylight raids and that made me realise that daylight raids were not going to be a sinecure. The pilot was — we flew in formation, I believe. Don’t know why, I’m sure. But the pilot said it was hard work. We got there and the cloud base was lower than forecast. We were supposed not to go below four thousand feet but we dropped down. The cloud base under four thousand feet and almost immediately the plane alongside us was hit by ack-ack and went down in flames. I can’t remember the name of the engineer but I did know him. Anyway, we lost a plane almost immediately it came in sight. But we did have a go at the guns, I think it was unsuccessfully. We could have done [unclear], much better, much easier but the pilots wouldn’t have it. [Cough] We’d not done a very successful job. We didn’t go back there again. The next one was of course was our first night raid, Brunswick, and that one is, as I say, the one we should never [emphasis] ever have survived. First night raid, Brunswick. We had a fire in the G circuit, which caught all the curtains around the navigator and round the plot. The blackout curtains, it caught those alight and I had a go at it with the first, nearest extinguisher and that didn’t put it out. [Cough] Started to get it under control but the bomb aimer was stood by with his extinguisher and gave it to me and we successfully — he had another one eventually but I managed to get it out, before it got any worse. But anyway, it was a very useful aid to the navigator. We lost the G circuit. It was, well, a fairly quiet ride from there on [coughs] excuse me.
CB: Why, why was it a raid you shouldn’t have gone on?
BA: Well, [unclear] at the estimated time of arrival, or estimated time at the target, ETA, [coughs] the navigator said ‘Can anybody see any green TIs?’ And I said — I’m the only one probably looking to the port side because the pilot was looking ahead like this and I was looking across in front of him. And I could see these TIs going down some forty odd miles way and I could see them going down. So he said, ‘That’s it, that’s it, go for it!’ and the pilot immediately turned round and headed for it and of course by the time we’d got there the whole force had gone through —
CB: Oh.
BA: and we were over target, totally on our own. Wonderful picture we got, the bomb aimer got because simultaneously ‒ oh, before that, the skipper said ‘No ack-ack, watch out for fighters’. He thought they wouldn’t fire ack-ack if their own fighters were there. And simultaneously the bomb aimer said ‘Bombs away. Bombs gone. Bombs gone’. The gunner at the rear, rear gunner reported a fighter coming in from the port side to the rear. And the searchlights. The major searchlight. What do you call it? Anyway, the main searchlight came on and immediately picked us up. No two ways about it. Bang, straight on to us and then there was an absolute cone of searchlights all around, all on us and the skipper puts the nose down and I understand this is the only, and the classical, way of getting rid of searchlights is to dive. But he said ‘no’ he said ‘I lost control’ (laughs). Sense of humour. Anyway, we dive about five thousand feet, I suppose, and I’m pinned to the roof. I am supposed to help if he is in trouble. If he can’t manage it on his own I’m supposed to try and assist him in some way or other and I can’t. I’m pinned to the ceiling, pinned to the roof of the cabin. And then when he managed, he manages to pull it out and start going, climbing again I’m pinned to the floor [laughs]. Can’t get off the floor. Absolutely pinned —
CB: because it pulls out the G, yeah.
I never felt so useless in all my life. Anyway, we do this a second time, and by that time I think we’d lost the searchlights, and the fighter. We did another, dropped about three thousand feet, and then we went back home at about a thousand, five-hundred feet thereabouts, I’m not sure. Quite on our own. Then on the way, quite clearly we were flying alongside an autobahn and there was, the gunner spots, what he thinks, is an official car, big car with outriders, outside outriders, and they wanted the skipper to let him have a go at him and he said ‘No, no, we’re going home’ and sure enough we did. We were a bit late, but not too late.
CB: T I is target indicator.
BA: Yes.
CB: Yes.
BA: That’s the green ones. Well, you could have reds, greens, and yellows.
CB: Right.
On this occasion they were supposed to be green for bombing. But I understand that the bomb aimer was commended for his photographs. They really saw what happened over Brunswick, which I believe was very, very successful. The only time I ever felt sorry for the Germans was the fact that you could see everything, everything was clearly picked up, close to you. You could see the firemen up the ladders using their hoses. I thought ‘Poor devils’. What did they do to cop this? Whether they did or not I don’t know. Don’t know what side it was. If you were bombing a particular part of town because of railway, or the sidings, whatever. I don’t think it’s in the book, is it? But it was the one raid I think we should never, ever, have come home. If anyone was going to get shot down, it should have been us. No two ways about it. From there on we had a good mixture of raids. We did thirty altogether.
CB: Right. And this is with 467 Squadron? Yeah. Ok. So, thirty ops took you to when? The end of the war?
BA: No, no —
CB: No.
BA: No, no, because we went over to 617 Squadron by the end of the war —
CB: After that. OK, well we’ll pick up on that in a minute. So, then what? After you’d finished the ops, what did you do?
BA: Well the navigator wanted to go with them. No, that’s right, the skipper stopped me — I don’t know when — he stopped me and said ‘Do you want to go to 617 Squadron?’ So I said ‘Yes. If you’re going, yes I’ll go with you’. But the only ones who could go were the rear gunner, (they didn’t curry with the upper gunners nor wireless ops because you had your VHF so, there was the rear gunner, the bomb aimer, navigator, pilot, engineer. Six.
CB: Right.
BA: Anyway. So we go fairly quickly to Woodhall Spa. Was it Woodhall Spa? Yes. Straight away. I go in, I got a commission before that, didn’t I? ‘Cause the pilot got awarded the DFC and I think, yeah, I did instruction. I had to go and do some instruction, things like that, they watchedg me do it, lecture I suppose you’d call it. It was rather convenient because at that time and it was looking like the end of the war was there and people were looking to go as far as they could. [unclear] The Australian Squadron was no better place to go but Australia. [Unclear] I’m dreading the telegraph about this. [Unclear] I used it to advise some of them about getting to Australia, migrating to Australia, which some of them did I think successfully.
CB: When did you come out of the RAF?
BA: October ’46.
CB: Right.
BA: I had to be on reserve for 6 months I think, to April I think it was. So April ’47 I was clear of the RAF. They could call me back any time, day or night within 6 months.
CB: So what rank had you reached as an officer. Were you still a pilot officer or had you got to flight lieutenant?
BA: I was a flying officer by then because that was an automatic promotion I would think, from PO to FO.
CB: Yes, because you were experienced. Ok. So the war ends, you were demobbed. Then what?
BA: Yeah, the war ends. No, when we finished the operations the only ones in the crew of the Aussies were the bomb aimer, the skipper, not the navigator because he’d had a baby at home he’d never seen. So, he wanted to go straight home, which he did. Yes so we go to ‒ how we did it I don’t know. You had to be — you had to have had a tour of operations before you could be accepted by 617 Squadron and we’d done that. So then when we go there, in March, no before that. Anyway, we go to Woodhall Spa and you had to get your bomb aimers exam. Get down to a hundred, a hundred yards before you’re put on ops. Well then of course the end of the war came. No, no, before that we were put on ops twice, but both were cancelled. I suppose because, er, timings were getting short, over run. So they were cancelled. We never flew, much to my disappointment. I’m sure we were going to carry a 10 ton bomb on the same aircraft on both occasions. [cough] It didn’t happen. So I was a bit disappointed. But then the end of the war. The pilots, all the Aussies go and I’m left. The rear gunner’s in a different place to me. I’m in Petwood Hotel, Room 110. That was great. With the little cinema in the woods. Golf course all round. I wasn’t able to play golf at that time. [cough] Yes, so, I’m a spare engineer. I’m [unclear] and then this pilot, this New Zealand pilot, came to the station, Squadron Leader Saxeby, Saxelby. New Zealander. Very experienced I think, especially in digging the tunnel. He was waiting to get in the tunnel when it was discovered. This is at Stalagluft 3B?
CB: Yes, 3B
BA: He never told us anything about this. It was a friend of his that told one of the crew and then, of course, we all began to know about it. Anyway, he never told us that but this chap, Castagnola (it’s in the book), he was a real character, he had a harelip, but he was a good pilot, flying officer. He was on some on the last raids of 617 Squadron. He was on the Berchtesgaden one. Anyway, he asked me if I’d go up as a flight engineer with him and Squadron Leader Saxelby. So I said ‘Yes, I would, and pleased to do it’ and we did a couple of circuits and bumps. He got us to go to the offices, what do you call them, yes offices, flights, flight rooms. Anyway, alongside the hangar there were these rooms.
CB: The crew rooms.
BA: The what?
CB: The crew rooms.
BA: Yes, so I drop in there and Squadron Leader Saxelby said ‘Are you sure you want to go with me?’ I said ‘Yes, of course’ and I think that endeared me to him and so I was the first member of his crew at 617 Squadron. And he, Saxelby, he was B Flight Commander. He actually commanded the aircraft, the Squadron, and I think he flew in Canberras and all sorts of things. In fact, he flew many, many, aircraft (not with me). We went to ‒The Tiger Force was being formed to go to the Far East. Kuala Lumpur we were due to go to, and presumably support the British army there against the Japanese but then of course, the atomic bomb was dropped before we even left. So, we still went but we still went to Digri in India instead. And, as I say, Saxelby was in charge of B Flight and Squadron Leader Ward [?] and Somerby [?], the Canadian Fauquier was the Wing Commander. Fauquier, French Canadian I think he was. He was the Commander of the Squadron. I was following Tait, and then Fauquier, I think. [unclear]
CB: So, that was the end of the war.
BA: Yes, so we go to India. We did a fly past, a victory fly past, because VJ day was over there. As I say, the war had stopped before we got there with the atomic bombs and — sorry [unclear]
CB: It’s OK, we’ve got good background there. So when you left the RAF what did you do?
BA: Oh, I went straight back to getting my indentures at the Pulsometer. I hadn’t completed them and the Government had introduced a scheme where, you could get them if you did four and a half years, not the seven years that the indentures required ‒. So, in any case, I’d had some good experience in the RAF at that time and they did promise to give me a better job than just a turner. Mind you, I was on one of the best lathes. Strangely enough [laughs], I was making parts for aircraft. Turning in parts for aircraft but it was mainly a spindle machine and that was a very skilled job, if you like.
CB: So how did you progress in the —
BA: So then, I’d asked them ‘If I could I do something better?’ because I didn’t want to stay in the workshop, working on the machine, and they said ‘yes, yes, they would’ but when the time came when I finished my apprenticeship I asked them again and they said ‘oh yes, we’ll do something’ but I thought yes this’ll go on and on and on so I just walked out, gave my notice to leave, and I went to Cooks in Reading, who installed milking machines in barns and things like that. Quite an experience but very, very useful. Alfa Laval, I think. Yeah, Alfa Laval Milking Machines. Oh yes, my Dad had a friend called Hughie Graham, whose brother had the land on Silverstone Racecourse. He was farming that and he wanted, oh yeah, he had also this firm, Modern Conveyors at Adderbury. [unclear] Yes, it was Adderbury, and they wanted somebody to erect their dryers which were dual [?] combustion dryers but they were making them. So I had, first of all, down here at Percier-Pratt [?], one drier up there, [unclear] anyway, so next one was Birmingham, Birmingham Industrial Plastics. They wanted four and then another five, so I was there some long time actually, building these industrial driers, big things. In fact they probably caused me to stop smoking [unclear] ‘cause I’d already stopped. I couldn’t get cigarettes so I was trying a pipe. Anyway, somebody caught me [slight laugh] so the pipe goes [unclear] so I smashed two or three pipes so it wasn’t worth it, wasn’t worth doing.
CB: How long did you stay there?
BA: Birmingham? A long time.
CB: No, how long did you stay with Modern Conveyors?
BA: Ah, David was born. We were in a caravan on Colt’s farm.
CP: 1950.
BA: Yes, 1950 and it was when Jean was pregnant with Christine and she said ‘I want to go home, I want to go home’ so we came back to Reading. We were able to bring all we owned. The caravan was parked on the bottom of ‒ Langley side, Langley Hill area, at the bottom of my Dad’s garden. The electricity board had a plot next to us so I could get right down and put the caravan at the bottom.
CB: So, what did you do as your next job?
CP: It was AWRE.
BA: [unclear] Not immediately. That’s right. What happened then? British Estates Services. I think it was the mayor of Reading had this business down here on the Bath Road. Still there, I think, opposite [unclear] somewhere there, or maybe the garage there. Anyway, I went there as a machinist.
CB: What was that called?
BA: British Industrial Estates.
CB: Right OK and then eventually you went to AWRE.
BA: Well, what happened: We were coming up to Christmas and one of the men working in the shop —you were repairing machines, engines, and things like that for earth moving equipment, yes earth moving equipment — and he went to the store and said he was short of a long, long or short, pole I don’t know what. And they accused him of cutting one to fit and then coming to get another and they sacked him and he had four kids, and he was sacked. [unclear] before Christmas. They wouldn’t give him any Christmas pay so they asked me if I’d go and speak to the management and I did. But they were hard nuts. They just said ‘You can all go, if you like’ so we did, we did. And much to my pride, everybody did exactly what they said they would and supported me.
CB: And left.
BA: They all left. And nicest thing I could see was advertisements in the papers for weeks and weeks and weeks from British Industrial Estates trying to get mechanics. Anyway, oh yes, I came home and Mum was crestfallen. ‘It’s Christmas’, she said ‘It’s Christmas’ [unclear]. And then Denis Baldwin [?} he was the postmaster or something or other down here in Reading where they sorted all the parcels at Christmas time, and of course they wanted extra people at Christmas time, and he asked me if I’d go there for a week or so and it was very interesting that. There were these big chutes coming into the station and all the parcels being brought out to be sorted. Anyway, yes, so that was an experience, if you like. What then, oh yes, knowing I was coming back to Reading, Aldermaston was just beginning and I’d written sometime before, made an application, and I think they did a security check, a very, very vigorous one, you could say. It it was going on and on and I thought ‘probably nothing will come out of this’ but just as I finished the post office job, I had a letter from AWRE to go for an interview so I was taken on as an RE mechanic. And what did I do first of all? Industrial Chemistry Group, which was dealing ‒ no that wasn’t the first, was it?
CB: Don’t worry. I think we’ve done really well. So, thank you very much. I don’t want to wear you out.
BA: And I got an extremely good pension.
CB: Chief Safety Adviser for Greater London Council?
BA: Yes. It was there I got into safety, first of all at Aldermaston. A friend of mine was in electrical and strangely enough his name was the same as the ex-factory inspector who came to Aldermaston as their safety advisor. They called them officers in those days. He was electrical advisor and I’d already worked with him and he said would if I’d like to go over and join them as their mechanical safety advisor. Which I said ‘yeah, I would’ I think I got promotion to that. I never, ever got Tech one grade and I wanted to go ‒ there was a job advertised down here in, Winforth [?], Whitworth [?] in the West Country? A Tech one there and I applied for it but didn’t get it.
CB: What year did you retire?
BA: ’81. February ’81. That’s right ‘cause Dad died a year later. Yes, I was fifty-seven, but it was stupid, really stupid. This is Maggie Thatcher’s fault, well I suppose. The Conservative Party wanted to get in the Council, lead the Council for their next election and they said they would cut down three thousand staff and they couldn’t get three thousand staff to go so they asked if anyone wanted to retire. And when I saw what I could get — I was in a department that dealt with all these things — and they told me I’d get around sixty to sixty-two thousand lump sum and all sorts of things. It was a real golden handshake, if you like, so I applied for it and my boss, who was controller of manpower, [unclear] he said ‘Why do you want to leave me?’ I said ‘I don’t want to leave you but I can’t, cannot refuse to take this.’ So, it was left at that and then it was about eleven months later and he asked me to stop behind after a meeting and said ‘Do you still want to go?’ and I said ‘of course if I can’. ‘Well’ he said ‘You can because I’m going as well!’
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AAmbroseBG160629
Title
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Interview with Basil Ambrose
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.
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Description
An account of the resource
Basil Ambrose was born in Reading. He left school at fourteen and became an apprentice turner. He joined the Royal Air Force in May 1942 and trained as a turner before transferring to aircrew as a flight engineer. He trained at RAF St Athan, and completed thirty operations on Lancasters with 467 Squadron at RAF Waddington. In 1945 he was posted to 617 Squadron at RAF Woodhall Spa. He left the RAF in October 1946, and returned to his apprenticeship. He retired as Chief Safety Adviser for Greater London Council in 1981.
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1945
1946
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Braunschweig
Netherlands--Walcheren
Germany
Netherlands
Format
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01:11:15 audio recording
Date
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2016-06-29
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
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Christine Kavanagh
Chris Cann
1660 HCU
467 Squadron
617 Squadron
aerial photograph
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
Beaufighter
bombing
flight engineer
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
promotion
RAF Bridlington
RAF St Athan
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Waddington
RAF Woodhall Spa
Stirling
target indicator
target photograph
training
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/178/2341/PBriggsR1613.2.jpg
21d447364bbb0c33d44abf36914a71a4
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/178/2341/ABriggsR160128.1.mp3
03beb9ecd0a2c80b649bf4291792a9a5
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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Briggs, Roy
R Briggs
Description
An account of the resource
24 items. One oral history interview with Roy Briggs (1893726 Royal Air Force), his logbook, service material, training material, official documents and 12 photographs. Roy Briggs trained as a wireless operator and flew four operations with 576 Squadron from RAF Fiskerton. He also took took part in Operation Manna and Operation Exodus as well as Cook’s tours over Germany.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Roy Briggs 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
2016-01-28
Identifier
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Briggs, R
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. 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.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and I am in Hemel Hempstead with Roy Briggs who was a wireless operator in the war and we’re going to start talking about his earliest days and right through to his working life as a civilian. So, Roy, where did it all start?
RB: In Battersea. I was lucky but we lived in a London terrace which was by the side of Clapham Junction Station, and Mac in number 3, my dad in number 5 married two girls from 17. There was still a girl and a boy left there. One, one aunt was married and one of the sons was married but they only lived locally so when I was born we moved to Balmoral [?] Street opposite Price’s Candle Factory alongside the Thames. We lived in a downstairs flat. This, what I’m saying now I’ve got vague remembrance but it’s mainly from the family talking. When the Thames got high the water come up the manholes and come down in the basement where we were and the police knocked us up and we, we went upstairs. We weren’t there long. My grandmother on my father’s side had diabetes and lost both her legs so mum, dad and me moved back to help grandad with nan so from then on I saw my two grandfathers and my grandmother every day. My grandad, who had come from the country, had rabbits, chickens and racing pigeons and I was very involved with him with the racing pigeons from an early age. He died by the time I was ten and I used to put rings on the, on the young birds. They used, he also got fairly bed ridden and he instructed me from the bed on what to do. I matched them up, pairing them up for mating and so I rung them. I took them up to Clapham Common and released them. We had a friend who used to race our pigeons so I was down there most days. My aunts, on Saturday afternoon, used to go to Battersea High Street and Northrop Road shopping and they used to come in to see grandad and grandad so on a Saturday afternoon it was, in the summer, it was the men playing darts in the garden and the girls chatting with nan and drinking tea indoors. [mild laughter] The only time that I went away I think I went to Westward Ho! I think it was only for a week, what they called in those days school journeys. We had an undertaker’s opposite us on the corner and horses. The Chapel of Rest was opposite us and the horses used to be there in those days when they went I went and picked up the manure and put it in buckets of water for grandad for watering his flowers and stuff. And in Battersea in those days that was sort of the life. My father worked at South Kensington Museum. The highlights in the summer used to be when he used to cycle home and come in to Battersea Park and mum used to take us down and we met in the park and had a picnic and played games before we came home. When I got bigger we used to go as far as Clapham Common and Wandsworth Common during the summer holidays but that was about it. I went to Shillington Street School at first until I was, till I was ten and then I went to Latchmere, Latchmere Road. I broke me thigh when I was ten, I didn’t realise it, playing football. On a Sunday morning going down to get the chicken food and the pigeon food I took the dog with me and on the way home I collapsed and got up and didn’t realise at the time but when I got up I shot the bones up. Somebody come to help me and that they hopped home and told me dad and he came down and got an ambulance and took me in to Battersea General Hospital where I was, where I was put on traction for weeks, for some weeks to pull me leg down and then when they took me down to plaster me they measured both my legs and the one that they hadn’t pulled down had grown so they put me up again to pull the other, the leg that had broken down to get it to the same length. My uncle worked for Battersea Borough Council, driving. Used to come and look over the wall, get on the back of the van and wave to me [laughs]. My grandad looked after the horses for Battersea Borough Council and he used to go in early of a morning and feed them and clean them, get them ready to take the dustcarts and that out so he used to come home about half past nine to have his breakfast. So, he, he was around during the day. He used to then go back in the evening to feed them and look after them in the evening. [pause] Yeah. That —
CB: What about school?
RB: Pardon?
CB: What about school? So, when did you leave school?
RB: 1939. I was, I’d put in for going to the, be a telegraph boy but went and had tests and that but there was people at sixteen who’d left Grammar School going for the same job because it was thought to be a fairly good job [laughs] in those days and I did not get accepted so I then started at Quickflows [?] it was supposed to be a good little engineering firm. So the Labour Exchange told me. They did Spitfire cockpits and also the sliding windows on London Transport buses. I got the job of cleaning the Bostik off round the glass that went in the frames to slide and as there was somebody there about nineteen and had been there since he was fourteen and he was still cleaning Bostik off the glass I did not [laughs] think it was a very good job. Luckily my mum had worked with somebody in the 14/18 war and her son worked for Benham and Sons, a catering company, and she had a word and he’d just finished his apprenticeship and he had a word and got me a job there. I think, I think it was somewhere about May ’45, er ‘39 I started there. They were starting to expand because they were getting contracts for the Ministry for cooking equipment and that because they’d started re-arming with cooking equipment if not the aircraft [laughs]. They were in, in Garratt Lane and they went over the River Wandle and they were having an extension built. They, they dug down and took half the Wandle up and built an air raid shelter in level with, in the Wandle [laughs] really and then built on top of it more workshops which were finished probably late, late ’39. Yeah. ‘39/’40. Yeah. I, first of all, started building dish washers and then I got in with Jimmy Thurgood who was a good all-rounder in his, in his thirties and he was the odd job man and with him I got a lot of experience and when I did sinks and drainers and boiling pans with him but, yeah he, if there was maintenance trouble quite often he used to get involved in it. Getting on in to, in to 1940 and Dunkirk our first Ministry contract was for hold fasts. It was one about half inch six steel plate and one about three quarters and they were somewhere about four foot square and they had, I believe, thirteen holes in them with thirteen tie rods about three foot long I believe. We made the tie rods and the nuts and one went either side. Being a catering firm we didn’t really have big lifting gear and somehow or other we got permission to use the Wandsworth Greyhound Stadium car park and Jimmy Thurgood and me went down there and we met a low loader with sixteen foot by eight foot sheets of steel. We took some crowbars with us and we crowbarred these sheets off the low loader on to the ground and at the same time, all very organised the [laughs] British Oxygen Lead [?] came with Oxy Acetylene boards which they unloaded there for us. We went back I suppose about a quarter of a mile away to the works and we picked up gauges and hoses and cutting equipment and went back down there and connected up and we cut these sheets into eight pieces, four foot square which was still not really handable [?] but a lot better. We, we put these on a trolley and pulled them along Garratt Lane to the works. They went in and they, they flame cut them to the shapes on the outside and then they went to the machine shop where there was only one machine. It cut, it drilled the thirteen holes which I think were somewhere about three quarters. As soon as they were done they were assembled and taken to Clapham Junction Railway Station and put on, in the guards van and they went straight down to the south coast but they were set in concrete for coastal guns to be connected to. The first contract was done in about seventeen days. A manager or director of the firm afterwards said to me said to me when I said about this ‘oh it didn’t matter what it cost’, but cost wasn’t in it. People just worked on it. They drilled the holes. If somebody went for a break then somebody else stepped in. The drills. There was a stock of them. When they needed re-sharpening they went to the tool room and re-sharpened and it it it just kept going all the time. After the first contract we got lots more and then we started, which was something very new, rocket [emphasis] launchers and Jimmy Thurgood and me were on, on the first of the rocket launchers. They, we had the sheets come in and there was lots of holes punched in them so that the heat could go through and, but they were made in to a half round with rolled edges either side and the rockets were just placed on them and fired. Fired. There was the back of it rested on the ground and there was two, like a tripod, fixed half way up. After the first ones other people started getting involved and Jimmy Thurgood and me we got involved in the firing gear, because the heat that came out of the end of the rocket melted [emphasis] the first firing gears [laughs] and [background laugh] we, we devised a, a nose which we did an [abrasion?] at the end which touched the contacts and it went back down on to a spindle with a, with a, a spring on it, and, I worked or we worked till about 1 o’clock the first time we were on this and there was a despatch rider waiting there and he took it down, I believe, to Aldershot where the rest was already down there and they fixed it on to try it out. The night superintendent came along and said, ‘What are doing here?’ We said, ‘We’ve been working here.’ Well he said, ‘Are you Roy Briggs?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Your dad’s been on wanting to know if you were still working and I told him no.’ Of course there’d been an air raid and I wasn’t home [laughs]. So he said, ‘You’d better go.’ So, [laughing] as we’d finished I went home and dad was on the doorstep waiting for me. Yeah. We went in about 10 o’clock in the morning and by then we’d found out that it had been partly successful but not successful. We made a little bit of alteration to the shape but the main trouble was the springs. Anyway, we got, we’d, they’d got on to the spring manufacturers and we, we made two of these contacts during the day with the U shaped and in the evening the springs came and we fitted them and once again it went down to Aldershot. I think this lasted three or four days, three or four nights by which time we had a successful job and it went in to mass production. Yeah. But in ‘39 in the summer they had started calling people up and, to do I think it was six months National Service but because the war started before they got out and they were still in the services but after Dunkirk these people came back out of the forces because as they’d all sort of finished their apprenticeships it was easier to train soldiers to fire a gun than it did to make engineers which took much longer. Yeah, what, in fact one of them he come out and he got the chief, he was the chief Ministry inspector. A couple of others. We then started building rocket, anti-aircraft rocket launchers. I don’t know whether they have a name. When they were, they went into parks they were known as Z batteries. There was, they started off as singles and then there was four, doubles. The doubles were long tubes with about five holes drilled in them which had studs go through them and they were welded and cleaned off on the top and those studs held them on the framework. The base was, was round and went down and then these went on and we, we took over a printing works at Colliers Wood and they were made, all made over there. They went into the parks. Wormwood Scrubs there was no and I think, I think it was about sixty odd in a battery which fired about a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty rockets. They weren’t very accurate but they put a barrage up [background ‘Hmm’]. They carried on until 1943, when the army was getting short of people they took the people off these guns and ATS went on there and the Home Guard which were not really needed, they thought, then. There wasn’t much chance of invasion. They, they took over at nights as well. I do know one or two of the Home Guards who, who fired them. This, this time probably because I could, I could make simple tool jobs and we had half a dozen fly presses with ladies on them and I was more or less looking after them. It was, it was of a range. We had everybody from an actress to a lady whose father was a doctor and had never been out to work. Quite a shock for her to see what life was like. We had a prostitute. We had Kath whose husband had been killed at Dunkirk and yeah I more or less looked after them. Made sure the parts that they were putting through the fly presses were there and cleared away afterwards and if anything went wrong sorted it out. When I went to, yeah, the same time we’d taken over cheaper garages at northside, Wandsworth Common which we were, we were producing cooking equipment in. At Clapham Junction the milk depot closed down just before the war and we took over the milk depot at Clapham Junction and there ovens and stuff was made. There was, round Wandsworth High Street there was a dump or you could call it [laughs] you had a bit of a shelter, and not much but people worked in there doing sinks and drainers and by that time we were involved with the City and Guilds and their training rooms and that, professors and that were actually producing for us mass produced parts and that. Well there was one of the theatres. They took that over and that. It was a general office for getting war work done and we had gone from somewhere about five hundred people to, I think, about sixteen hundred people in that time. Colin. Colin Benham was quite well educated in engineering. His cousin, who was a commander in the navy, came out to help with us in the war work. There again, thought he had, with his, he had an engineering background I think, but, it was more useful. Miss Benham came and she, she looked after people who, who’d been bombed out and that and did things what she could for them and generally did work for them. Yeah. They had, they did their own ventilation stuff and sterilising. Big sterilisers. When it come to register I can’t remember which it was now. If you registered as a sheet metal worker you weren’t, you weren’t reserved occupation. If you were registered as a sheet arm worker you were. Or it was the other way around. Anyway, as I wanted to go in the air force, I’d been in the ATC, I registered as the one that went. I didn’t tell them that I’d put it down. And yeah while I was in the ATC we were attached to the Home Guard. We went down to Bisley throwing hand grenades and firing. We actually, in the ATC we actually had 1914/18 Lewis guns which they’d got out the dungeons from somewhere. I started off as number three but by the time I was going in the air force I got up to number one. Number three was, as they fired up to six hundred rounds or more a minute you know, you had to have a supply going. One fired and the other one fed it through I think and I, I got it up and then gradually we went up. Yeah. There was talk at the time that if we were invaded there was holes in the ground on Wimbledon common and that and some of us would go up there and come out to try and kill Germans. I thought afterwards that when, after Dunkirk, a little while afterwards there used to be reports come in that in villages in France somebody had come out and killed a German and they had killed all the, all the men and that over fourteen and things like that and then there were reports that they’d killed everybody in the villages, you know, I thought if I’d have come out and killed somebody how many of English and Londoners might have been wiped out by it. I had that in my mind all my life and glad it never happened. Yeah. We, we, we had a stick of bombs dropped around our road in October ’45. We’d had brick air raid shelters built in our back gardens. We had one and next door had one and there was just a three foot square hole which we could have got in to them or them in to us. I think there was about nine bombs came down. One of them had blown up and dad and me ran out and we went down the road and as I passed the house with somebody I used to go to school with he said, ‘Roy we’ve got a great big hole in our passage’ and I said, possibly a bomb by the side of it, probably a bomb had gone down so I said, ‘You’d better, better grab some clothes and get out in case it goes up.’ Before the war I used to help a green grocer setting up his stall before, before I went to school and on the way back home to get washed I used to take the vegetables into the fire station, Este [?] Road fire station which was in the next road to us. It was only half a dozen houses down so I did know the firemen in there. The fire engine from there came, came around and somebody I knew said, ‘Roy we’re here now. You go back home.’ So dad and me went back home, I was in the shelter and dad was in the doorway. We were talking to mum and there was a big bang and the bomb which was in this house had gone off. Dad and me raced down there. The fire engine was more or less wrecked and I couldn’t see the firemen I knew but anyway the other, other people were coming then. As we walked back home the moon was out and we saw a hole in the Flatt’s house. Jean, my sister was friendly with Jean, the daughter, and dad and me went and started banging on the door and couldn’t get any reply and next door come and said, ‘What are you banging on there for?’ We said, ‘The Flatt’s have got a hole in it, in their roof. Probably a bomb’s gone through it.’ So she said, ‘Oh. We’ll, we’ll go and tell them.’ They were in the shelter at the back and they went and told them and they came out and they grabbed some stuff and we helped them take it over outside in the car park at Clapham Station. They’d built an air raid shelter and we took it over but they went in the shelter and then we went back home. The, what we didn’t know that one of the bombs was on the shelter at the other end and later on it went off and killed, I think it killed two people in the shelter but [unclear] Jean and that. Yeah this must have been on the Friday night. On the Saturday morning I cycled over to the Beverly at North Cheam and my mum had had a friend over there who she’d worked with during the war and I said, said to ‘em, ‘Any chance of mum and my sister and me coming over?’ And they said, ‘Yeah come over.’ Her son was in the marines. ‘We got a four foot bed.’ So mum, me and my sister went over there and we slept together in the four foot bed [mild laughter] but dad stopped at home more or less. Dad patched up the windows and that that had gone, to look after the house really during the night. We had some old [unclear] but they didn’t bother to put, they didn’t bother to replace the windows. They put like a muslin over it, there was just the downstairs in the front that had a window in because people could have broken the, got through the muslin quite easy. The glass was a bit more difficult. Yeah and I cycled from North Cheam to Wandsworth in the morning. The raids were still on sometimes and the guns on Cannon Common were blazing away, shrapnel was coming down and when we went home of a night it was still, they were still firing and the shrapnel was still coming down. I’ve got a feeling that I did that for three or four months before we went back home. Yeah. March ‘43 I went for the first medical at North Cheam. I think some, early April, went to Euston House for the aircrew medical and selection board which I passed and got me number and the, and the King’s shillin’ and got deferred for two or three months but there was a great demand to get in as pilots but I think some of them were deferred for about a year there was, they had that many. Yeah. And in fact I was called up for going to Lord’s Cricket Ground on the 21st of June 1943. As I, as I went there I met Len Spratt who I spent the day with at, at Euston House and we went in and we, we got our injections at the same time in the long room. We dropped our trousers in the long room. W G Grace was on the, a picture of him was on the wall. [phone rings in background] I don’t remember but they, they said that they used to turn W G Grace’s around.
[phone ringing and then phone conversation]
CB: So we —
RB: It’s a bit —
CB: We’re just on W G Grace and when you were at um when —
RB: Yeah.
CB: You went to Lords and he was looking down on you.
RB: Yeah but they do say that they used to, used to turn him around when we dropped our trousers but in all of it I don’t remember that [laughs]. Yeah. We, we were in flats opposite Regents Park Zoo. Len and me were in the same room and, in fact, I can cut it short, we were always in the same room or the same hut for the next year. We, we went in to the zoo four times a day to eat. In the restaurants not in, not in the cages. Along by our flats were Stockleigh Hall and another posh one. I must be getting old I can’t remember their names. Yeah, and they had a garage underneath and they did put a canteen in there but we still we were talking to people afterwards who were at Lords they that they were still using the zoo for quite some time. We went to Seymour Hall for lectures and swimming. You could march down there and have a lecture in the morning and go in the afternoon and they’d removed the flooring and you were in, in for swimming. There was a garage at the roundabout at St Johns Wood and they took that over and that’s where we got kitted out. In, in the park was [pause] anyway I can’t remember at the moment. They used that as the hospital. The normal run was to stop at Lords for nineteen days. Some, some things were, activities took place in Lords. They had the gas mask room built there and you went in and tested your gas mask. You got paid there, sat on the seats in Lords till you got called out for your pay. We did our first marching in Regents Park and in the back streets there. First four, three nights were spent putting your names on all your clothes and that. After that you were allowed out where most of the Londoners took their civvy kit home and sort of saw their parents. Unless you were on guard most evenings were free. Yeah, after the nineteen days we went to the railway at Olympia. I think it was called Olympia and there was another name for it where there was a troop train in there and it was just the one train and all the different trades went on and they dropped off a couple of carriages every, every here and there going along. We used to then, got taken to, either pilots or navigators, where they were going. We went to Bridgenorth which was up on the high level. There was a lift to go down to get on the street level down by the river. Yeah. Yeah. We went out to, there was 18 and 19 ITWs which was mainly wireless operators and air gunners. I, I had actually gone in as wireless operator/air gunner and at that stage I was still a wireless operator/air gunner. Probably jumping the gun a bit. Early in oh probably the decision had already been made and hadn’t got through that to stop training wireless operators as WOPAGS for Bomber Command. The, the thought was that if your gunner got killed or anything and you had to go back, by the time you got back, operated the dead man’s handle which lined the turret up with the fuselage, opened the doors at the back, disconnected his oxygen, his intercom and got that out of the way. Got hold of him and pulled him in and if he needed first aid badly to stop it and then we’d have got in to the turret we would probably have been shot down anyway so after that ruling come out we stopped doing the full air gunner’s course although we did enough that we could have got in and fired them. If the wireless operators were going to Coastal Command they then went on and did the air gunner’s course because all the gunners I believe and wireless operators operated air gunners and they did a swap around on sixteen hour flights that they all had a break from whatever they were doing. Yeah. I, I stopped with Len for all that time and then they said he had webbed feet and got to go to Coastal Command. We don’t believe it [laughs] and I’ve still kept in touch till today. Yeah. We, at, at Madley after ITW we went to Madley where we flew on Dominies where you could have an instructor and a number of you went in there and you had the one set and went through it, after that you went into Percival Proctors which is just well, [?] you and the pilot in the main although there were some three seaters if anybody was having trouble and they needed an instructor up with them. Most of the, most of the flights were about fifty five minutes but the most dangerous part was coming back to land because they used to see the NAAFI van leaving the site and they had Lyons fruit pies which were delicious but there was a very limited number and they all wanted to get in to get their pies. There were one or two collisions when the airfield controller fired Very cartridges to tell people not to land. They always thought he was firing at somebody else I think. Yeah. It was, it was pretty hard work on, on training. You, we had Morse. At the same time we did things which health and safety and things because I suppose they thought we were all going to end up as officers and NCOs. We did things like setting up camps by a river and taking the water for cooking from the top and washing and using the ablutions down the way the water was lying. [laughs] Yes. We had to do fault finding on, on the radios, coding and things and you used to get a test on these. Some were about every fortnight or so. If you did not do very well then you went to evening classes and I believe a week was eight days so that the schools were used every day. You had a different day off every week. If you went on evening school and then on the next time you hadn’t picked up or perhaps it was a couple of times you then went to FT which was Further Training and you didn’t want to do that ‘cause you lost all your mates. You went back a few courses. I, I was nearly always on extra training but I never went to FT. The people who went to FT if they went back a few courses and then didn’t succeed they were then ceased training and well the only place for them really was to go as air gunners. We had people who, who joined us at Madley who had been to America and failed as pilots and then go on the training as navigators and had failed at, failed as navigators. I believe some of them after that went, went as bomb aimers. Yeah, in fact we had one chap who reckoned he’d worked it that he’d fail his pilot’s and failed as a navigator. I don’t know whether the air force had caught, caught on to him but when he took his wireless operator’s exams he just scraped through and I don’t know whether the air force had done that deliberately and he was the first one that had to bale out [laughs]. Yes, well I got me, got my sergeant’s stripes about a fortnight before I was nineteen, went on leave and then we went back and then we still did another about three months wireless operator’s training. After that we went to Llandwrog, North Wales. Number 9 OAFU I think it was. They were flying Ansons and we got bearings for the navigators who were really having more, more experience of flying and training where they were going but I believe sometimes we used to fly two or three times a day with different crews. I think we were only there about a month. After that we went to 30 OTU at Hixon and we got crewed up. We, we got Reg, Reg Featherstone as a pilot, Johnny Smale as the navigator, Roy Briggs as wireless operator, Benny Benson as a rear gunner and me and the navigator disagreed afterwards about whether we got Taffy Jones as a mid-upper. He seems to think that we didn’t get a mid-upper until we went to Heavy Conversion Unit but I’m sure he’s wrong. Oh and we got a bomb aimer. This is bad [laughs]. He was an Indian civil servant. I can’t, I can’t believe I can’t remember his name. [laughs].
[pause]
Right. We’ll have to come back to that. After doing ground training we started flying. Reg was struggling rather and he, we soon sort of always had another pilot in with us and I think it was probably only after a couple of weeks we had the chief flying instructor in with us for a couple of times and Reg got grounded. Unfit for heavy aircraft. So, we become a headless crew. Robbie Roberts had, had joined the air force before the war. He had been seconded to the Royal Navy and had spent some time on the Ark Royal. He then re-mustered for pilot training and went to South Africa, and I believe South Africa and Rhodesia for pilot training and ended up, I can’t remember what the, what aircraft he flew but he did a tour in the Middle East before coming back to England. He was then at Hixon as a headless crew and we got together and luckily because he’d got this mass experience it didn’t lose us too much time because he had twin engine experience. So we, we swapped between Hixon and Seighford. Spent some of the time over at Seighford for OTU. When we were at Hixon they were a rotten lot. They said as we got in the plane, we were on circuits and bumps at Seighford and they said, ‘Roy take us back to Hixon will you?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ full of confidence and I got in and we took off and I worked like mad to get Hixon to recognise my call sign amongst the other three hundred who were trying to get it. Eventually I got through and I got a bearing and all proud I said fly so, so and so and so and they were all looking at me and laughing and they went like that and we were about two foot off the ground [laughs]. Yeah talking about like that when we were on Lancs the navigator used to call the sign out for the, to get the speed out for the pilot. Of course the pilots didn’t do anything. Only drive. I mean the engineer used to push the throttles up with him. He used to do what I told him. He used to do what the navigator told him and the gunners if they wanted him to do something he had to do what they told him. Yeah and Johnny was calling out the speeds and I, it was getting slower and slower and I was looking at him and he looked at me with panic in his eyes because we shouldn’t be up in the air and we weren’t. Rob had made that good a landing we were on the ground. We were all looking at the, on the other hand Rob did a rotten landing and we bounced and Len said, ‘Oxygen going on skipper.’ [laughs, including background laugh] They were a few of the, yeah, from, we were, we were actually in a field at Hixon by the side of the railway. I don’t know whether you remember but in the, in the ‘40s after Hixon packed up English Electrics took over the hangers and they were taking one of their big transformers and it got stuck on the level crossing and a train hit it. There was a loss of life but that was actually at that level crossing in the field that we used to stop in. Yeah.
[pause]
Yes. We then went on to a holding unit I think, for a couple of weeks before going to Swinderby. We started heavy conversion on, on Stirlings. After Stirlings and when you were used to four engines you used to then go to Lancaster Finishing School if you were going on Lancasters but a couple of weeks into our course there was enough Lancs available and they phased, the courses in front of us carried on on the Stirlings but we were the first at Lancaster course to go right through on, on Lancasters. Yeah, we picked up Len Piddington as the, he was a pilot flight engineer. In 1944 they had trained that many pilots they didn’t know what to do with them so they sent a complete courses of flight engineers from St Athans to the army ‘cause the army was shorter, short of people and these pilots went to St Athans and did an engineer’s course on the promise that if they completed a tour on Lancs on Bomber Command they could then go back and re-muster and finish and carry on as a pilot for Lancs then but of course the war finished and none of them had finished a course by the time, I don’t think, a tour by then. I have met one person who carried on flying on Lancasters and finished his tour and went back and then trained as a pilot and he went into Lancs. We then, I think we went to a holding unit, Balderton I believe, because there wasn’t all that much flying. There was a lot of snow around in Lincolnshire but it wasn’t, it wasn’t too long because we went to Fiskerton. The pilot and I think the navigator, some of the crews went second [?] dicky on tour with an experienced crew, they never entrusted me with anybody [laughs]. They, on the day after me twentieth, yeah my twentieth birthday because I was the only teenager in the crew by this time, Benny who was a teenager when we first crewed up had had his twentieth birthday. I, [pause] we, I don’t think I went out drinking because we were on an air test of N-Nan which had completed a hundred ops so we flew around N for Nan. I think it was an air test. Afterwards we flew, N-Nan did a hundred and thirteen ops and we took it on its hundred and tenth and the hundred and eleventh. Yeah. We then had a week’s leave to, which they used to say to go and say goodbye to your family and before starting ops and went back. We got called for an op which I think they called us about midnight which got cancelled and then we, we got called back to the briefing room for an attack at Plauen on the German Czech border. This was one of the targets that the, Churchill and Stalin had agreed needed bombing. It was er, we took off just after 6 o’clock and got back something like I think it was nine hours. Nine hours trip, which seeing we’d been up for an op the day before and we then had to go in for the debriefing and a meal. Carried on for quite a while and I think it was four days later we got called to do a daylight on Potsdam on the outskirts of Berlin. We were all briefed and ready to go and the Met Flight said that the weather was too bad over there so it got cancelled. We got called back to the briefing room later on and the stream was told us it was still Potsdam but there was still one going around Germany. They told us that the Potsdam raid was still on. This was the first time Berlin had been bombed for about a year. The last time by Lancasters. The last time they’d lost about forty two I think. Mosquitos had carried on bombing Berlin of the night, light night bomber force. They used to bomb regular with their one four thousand pounder. In fact in the darkest days Mosquitos used to do two flights a night. A crew would take off in light over here, bomb Berlin, come back, a new crew, new bomb and another crew would take off and it would be light by the time they got back. Anyway, we were told we weren’t going to Potsdam. We were going on a daylight training aircraft were going to have OTUs and heavy conversions were going to fly towards Germany to pick up the fighters like this was just going to be our squadron. I’m not sure if we had one or two Mosquitos and we were going to fly around Germany and bomb Cuxhaven on the way back and I don’t know whether it was because we had an experienced captain we could then go back in and see what we could see on fires and that and then I could send a message which I didn’t want to do because the German fighters could pick up on your radio. But they, we felt that they were risking our lives unnecessarily because if there had have been fires we were going to be home in an hour and a half. We could have told them. [laughs] Anyway, we went back in, didn’t really see anything. I mean we didn’t have enough aircraft really to get any fires going and I did code a message up and send it, send it back. Oh yes and on the nine hours to Plauen it was an extra long night because somebody had a puncture in front of us and we couldn’t get back to, to our dispersal and had to stop and wait there until they organised somebody to come and pick us up and a ground crew to come and take over the aircraft because we had to sign to say that any faults and that was on it. Yeah so yes so that was it. After that we had, yeah on the 18th of April we, we were briefed to bomb Heligoland. The main reason for this was that the Royal Navy were going along the North German coast supporting the army and Heligoland had U-boats and E-boats and submarines which they felt could come back and attack the navy by the rear. Yeah. There was approximately eight hundred Lancasters and two hundred Halifaxes on the raid. We, I think we bombed Sylt. It was an island by the side of, with a little airfield on it or an airfield on it. I don’t think they’d been using the aircraft from there for some time. Somebody hit the oil storage tanks and the master bomber didn’t have much, a chance of directing bomber. I think he said, ‘Bomb the smoke, under bomb the smoke as you get in and then over bomb the centre of the smoke and port and starboard of the smoke’ you know so yeah there was only a couple of Halifaxes lost I think. It’s probably the only time I saw the thousand aircraft ‘cause we bombed and we went over we turned around to come back and we either saw the aircraft that bombed in front of us or those that were still going in to bomb you know because normally on nights you didn’t see them anyway and on other daylights if they went and bombed and carried on you didn’t see them. After that we started, mixed up with a briefing for the 20th for Hitler’s birthday to bomb Berchtesgaden, we were also being briefed and I believe we had something like twenty briefings for Bremen. Bremen, the army was having trouble in some places to advance and in other places were going easy and we kept going back to the briefing room and eventually we got, we got briefed for Berchtesgaden and we, I think we got out to the aircraft and the Met Flight said the weather over the Alps was too bad so it got cancelled. I’m not sure if the next day or the day after, yeah, the 22nd I think we went to Bremen. Yeah, in the end we went to the briefing room and they said that they were gonna withdraw troops to a certain line for, in the evening and they were ordered to come back to that line and we were going to bomb in front of it. As it was I think when we got there and we were going in as we got along there, there was some cloud and the master bomber said, ‘Apple Tart,’ which was don’t bomb. So we went there and we didn’t bomb. I think whether some aircraft earlier or after went and bombed but we didn’t bomb. The, a couple of days afterwards I think it was about eleven thousand garrison surrendered. [pause] And, oh yeah and then the squadron, we didn’t go, I think about the 25th they bombed Berchtesgaden but as we bombed, as we’d done four or five we were on a stand down and the Berchtesgaden one, that was the last one on the squadron. We, we somewhere amongst then we got a cross country looking for [pause] windmills [laughs] sorry. Sorry I had a job to remember the word. Yeah. We went around Norfolk looking for windmills not knowing what it was but on the 29th we got called to the briefing room to say that we weren’t going to drop bombs. We were going to drop food over Holland. And that was the first of our six trips over, over Holland. When we come they said that we, they hadn’t got permission for us to drop the food and they weren’t sure how the Germans were going to take it. They were going to tell them we were going to go and were hoping they were going to get away with it. Nobody got fired on although there were reports that some of the Germans were still with their guns and that but so we, so we came back and we got called to the briefing room on the 30th and were told that as we had got away with it the day before they were going to do it again and send some more aircraft in the hopes that the Germans wouldn’t think that we would do that and then they would open fire. We did it on the second and then the next, the next, the next day we got called and were more or less told the same although I believe later on that day that the, they did agree that we could go over and do it so, yeah. So we did another three we did six drops to I think, the Hague, Rotterdam, Delft and Valkenburg airfield. Amongst the children there was a girl who now works in our charity shop up the shops and we’ve got chatting and I’ve, I’ve taken her to an aircrew buffet and told her that I was feeding her sixty nine years ago. I didn’t still think I’d be feeding her sixty nine years afterwards. We’re great, we’re great friends.
CB: What height were you flying when you dropped —
RB: Oh I should think about two fifty foot or something like that wasn’t it? About two hundred miles an hour I think.
CB: And was the food in the bomb bay or how was it released?
RB: It was in the bomb bay. It was in nets. Yeah.
CB: So how did they, how were they released?
RB: By the bomb aimer on, as though he was dropping —
CB: In a sequence was it?
RB: He just dropped the lot you know and they, but they, you know, you could see the targets anyway but they had pathfinders had put targets, targets down. Yeah,
CB: Could you see the locals?
RB: Pardon?
CB: Could you see the local?
RB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah you could see, you were close enough to see them. Yeah.
CB: What were they doing?
RB: Pardon?
CB: What were they doing?
RB: Waving and, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah and they by the end they had put in flowers “Thank you RAF” Yeah. Because they, it was about nineteen thousand extra people died during that winter which they take it was you know the starvation and that. They were eating bulbs and things. The, the Germans weren’t really feeding them and the Dutch had gone on strike to help for their bit for the war effort. Yeah. I think this lady I talked to I think she was fairly well off and they had a maid and they, they, they took some of their valuables. They got her to take them in a pram out in to the country where people were a bit well off to try and sell it, you know.
CB: What’s her name?
RB: Ellen, Ellen.
[pause]
CB: I think we’ll take a break there.
RB: Right.
CB: Thank you.
[pause]
CB: We’ve just had a break for one or two things. By the way this is the 28th of January and we’re now going to carry on with Roy. We’re close to the end of the war, right at the end of the war but we’re talking about Operation Manna. So Roy how did you get briefed about this and what were your reactions as a crew?
RB: Well we went to the briefing room and were told that we weren’t going to drop bombs we were going to drop food. I don’t, I think it was a shock really that there was, they’d said that they’d tried to get permission from the Germans but they weren’t playing you know and that the Dutch were in such a state that they’d offered to let a ship go in but the, I believe but the Germans had said no. Yeah, it was a bit of shock yeah that I, I know that I’ve read that a CO wasn’t pleased that he was telling his crews to go in at about two hundred miles an hour and two hundred and fifty feet or something like that and there was no, no agreement and that they were going to tell the Germans that we were coming, you know, over the radio yeah. But as, I mean I could never really have imagined myself dropping bombs over Germany. In fact, as a little titbit, you know when we got, I think it was over Bremen or somewhere. I thought, is this me? A boy from Battersea doing this, you know. There wasn’t much flying before the war. It was a different world. And everything it’s just when it all starts it’s all far away and it just goes one step at a time, you know and then all of a sudden you’re on a squadron and then all of a sudden your skipper goes on a second dicky and that and it’s getting nearer and you’ve been trained for it for twenty one months you know and it’s, it is all, it is all a case of doing one step and somehow thinking that what, if anything bad is going to happen it’s going to happen to somebody else. Not you. Yeah. No. I mean even the second day there was a thought of oh when they said they were going to send more we thought are they going to let us build up you know, to, before they fired at us. They just, I think when we got over there glad that those in front of us if they, well if they’d have been firing on them we’d have no doubt turned around and come back. Yeah. Because you know I mean they could have virtually fired at you with rifles couldn’t they, I mean. Because the Dutch people had been good to aircrew that had come down over their land. They were good ‘cause the Manna Association went over there for years after the war and took part in their, I think it’s their Freedom Day or something isn’t it?
CB: And when you got back from the sorties what discussions did you have as a crew?
RB: Well, we, we’d got away, you know. They hadn’t fired on us, you know and we sort of accepted it. That we had got away with it. But there was, there was that thought that the next day was, was going to be a build up but no. That was—
CB: So you’d done two. Now you get to number three. What are you feeling now?
RB: Yeah well after that we did, I think it was after the third that we were told when we come back from our third that they had agreed that we could —
CB: No.
RB: Go on dropping there. Yeah.
CB: So you stopped at six.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So what was the reason for that?
RB: VE day I think.
CB: Right. OK
RB: Yeah.
CB: Ok. So in the beginning you’ got the apprehension. What was the briefing about? If the Germans did fire on any of the aircraft ahead what were you going to do?
RB: I don’t know that there was much, you know, that they were just hoping that they wouldn’t.
CB: Just go in —
RB: I think we were about the third squadron in you know so we were in the early stages of it.
CB: Right.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Ok. So fast forward now to the last raid and we’ve got the end of the war. So can we carry on the narrative there? What happened then?
RB: We, Bomber Command brought, I think, something like seventy two thousand released prisoners of war back in twenty seven days. We took Uncle over to B58 at Rotterdam. No. Was it Rotter?
CB: Melsbroek?
RB: What?
CB: Melsboek?
RB: No, B58 at, Holland anyway. We took a service aircraft over. We had a spare wheel and a ground crew and we went over and landed there. It was no air traffic control. I think from, from, from H hour to twenty five past aircraft landed. From H30 to 55, aircraft took off and that’s how it was. You know, there was discipline and it went, and they they came in and they landed and loaded them up with troops and away they went.
CB: So this was Operation Exodus. Where did you fly into with these POWs?
[pause]
CB: Because Westcott here —
RB: Pardon?
CB: Westcott up the road here?
RB: No. No, we didn’t bring any back. Although they say we did we didn’t bring anybody back, in my actual log I’ve got them asking me whether flight sergeant somebody of, did we have him on board.
CB: Ah.
RB: He was on compassionate leave.
CB: Oh right.
RB: And we brought him home but the squadron records say that we didn’t bring anybody home.
CB: Right.
RB: We one of the other aircraft brought some Red Cross.
CB: So as such you weren’t part of Operation Exodus.
RB: Pardon?
CB: As such —
RB: No. No.
CB: The squadron wasn’t part of Operation Exodus.
RB: No. No. No.
CB: Ok. Well don’t worry about that. So we’ve got to the end of the war. Then what?
RB: We took, I think we took some people around Germany. Some ground crew. To see. And then we went to Bari and Naples bringing troops home.
CB: Oh you did.
RB: Yeah. We, yeah.
CB: So just on the round robins, the Cooks tours they called them. What height did you fly over the cities? Cause that’s what you were doing.
RB: Not very high so people could see. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And what was your relationship with your ground crew during the, during hostilities anyway.
RB: Yeah we got on alright with them all but seeing as we flew a number of different aircraft you know you didn’t get the same ground crew all the time.
CB: Oh right.
RB: I mean some, some people seemed to do twenty, twenty trips in the same aircraft.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and more.
RB: No. All I got here is Exodus. Service aircraft to B58
CB: Right. Anyway, on the Cooks tours where did you fly then?
RB: Essen, Cologne, Aachen and Antwerp.
CB: Right.
RB: I think that might have been the only one we did. Yeah ‘cause in, in May ‘45 by the end of the month all Australians, Canadians and foreign people had gone out of the, out the crews, you know.
CB: Oh right.
CB: They went home immediately.
RB: Yeah they yeah they got out. So, I mean, I know a pilot, he was the only Englishman. He was on leave and went back and they’d all gone. [laughs]
CB: Didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.
RB: No. No. No. No.
CB: I bet he, yeah, what was the relationship in your crew like?
RB: Yeah alright there was only one snag was the mid upper gunner.
CB: Oh go on. What about him.
RB: He had a girlfriend in Leicester.
CB: Taffy Jones.
RB: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So he went there a lot.
RB: Yeah and you know we covered for him when we were more or less in briefings and he didn’t get back till the last minute and things. Yeah.
CB: So what, so did the crew socialise a lot.
RB: Yeah well you really had to because other crews were doing things at the time.
CB: Yeah.
RB: We basically knew our crew and then I knew wireless operators, the navigator knew navigators because they had —
CB: Yeah.
RB: Sessions together, you know. I might, if you got friendly with another wireless operator there was a, chances are that you might get sort of a bit friendly with the other crew but they would be flying other times so you know other than being in the mess —
CB: So how did the crew feel about Taffy Jones going off all the time?
RB: Yeah [laughs] We’d know that there was, there was —
CB: What did the crew say to him?
RB: Well at times we felt as we should dump him, you know.
CB: Did you?
RB: Yeah. Yeah. The rest of us were, were alright you know.
CB: Commonly known as pee’d off.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Because the flight engineers didn’t join till after OTU how was Len Piddington selected? Or did he just appear?
RB: I think, I think he just appeared. I can’t remember now, you know but yeah.
CB: Yeah and how, how did he get on?
RB: Yeah he was a Londoner you know and we had, yeah.
CB: So now we are at the end of the war what happened then?
RB: We went down to Wyton. No we went down to Upwood. Upwood was due for a clean up after the war so we went, we got transferred to Wyton. By the end of August 576 and 156 were being disbanded. Alan Craig was CO of 35 err 156. He was ex- Halton he’d done a number of master bomber trips and they, they did six Lancasters with Lincoln engines in to try them out and he did master bomber trips on them trying them out. I suppose because he had an engineering background because of Halton.
CB: What was his name?
RB: Alan Craig.
CB: Oh Alan Craig. Ok.
RB: He was well known and he got picked to take 35 Squadron around America in 1946. He, as the squadron was being disbanded he went over there to Graveley. He grounded some of their crews and they not very, they weren’t very pleased with him and he sent over to 156. My skipper was in line for going but he, his, he got married in ‘44. Joan who lived in Stratford on Avon and I take it there were a lot pilots around there she had been engaged twice and both got killed and when they got married she thought flying was dangerous and when the war finished he was to give up flying. As he’d been in before the war he was due for demob by the time they were going to America so he would have had to sign on and he wouldn’t sign on so that wiped our crew out. Flight Lieutenant Jenkinson DFM he, I don’t know how, he didn’t have a wireless operator and I’d kept me nose clean. Nothing special but you know just did as I should do. The signals officer, we got on alright but he got on alright with lots of them you know and him and Jenkinson asked whether I would like to go with them so I said yes because my crew had well I think a couple of them had already been posted to other places. Me navigator was on his way out to the Middle East. He was an accountant and he was going on ground crew in the accounts somewhere. The bomb aimer’s going. Len they sent over to, to another squadron. I mean why they, why they took him and put on another squadron. Benny, the rear gunner he went to another squadron. Yeah. So I went over to Graveley. We got our white Lancs and started flying and we were going to be Alan Craig’s crew. We spent hours in the crew room waiting for him to take us up to fly but he never did because he had other things to do and then a signal came through from High Wycombe that it was all pathfinder crews and it had got, been remade with crews from each of the bomber groups so you’ve heard of Sir Mike Beetham have you?
CB: Absolutely.
RB: He come from East Kirkby down to Graveley and swapped with a crew. We swapped with a crew from 138 at Tuddenham and, I was, I was torn. When he come he didn’t have a wireless operator and I said did I [?] want to stop with him and you know I didn’t want to lose my crew so I said no. It was the worst thing I ever did really because when they got us over there to Tuddenham we were a new crew and they were grounding crews left, right and centre. They sent. They us on leave. I got recalled the next day and got posted so I never saw any of Jenks crew. The day after I left the two gunners come back and got posted. So I found out. By the time the pilot come back he didn’t have a crew. They’d all gone, you know [laughs]. So yeah at Tuddenham we were doing photographic work for town and country planning. We didn’t do much because we were making maps over bombed areas but quite often you know with cloud and that we didn’t get all that much photographic work done. And anyway I don’t know whether I would have gone because Flight Lieutenant Koreen [?] had a mid-air crash. He had a nose and he went into somebody’s tail and the wireless operator had frostbite and I never did find out whether he went around America.
CB: So they took their Lancasters with them did they?
RB: Yeah they did.
CB: To America.
RB: Yeah they went around. Sixteen —
CB: Good Lord.
RB: Sixteen went around America. Yeah. Yeah. I did, I did have all the cuttings and that.
CB: Yeah.
RB: And um —
CB: But you never went.
RB: No. I didn’t go but I knew the people, a lot of the people, and I thought of, and when I saw Mark Beetham up at Hendon once I said ‘I got them’ and he said ‘I didn’t ‘ave it cause I was there’ so I handed over to him all the photos and that that I had. Yeah. Yeah it’s like. How far are we going to go on?
CB: No, we’re just, it’s just a question of what you did at the end of the war.
RB: Yeah.
CB: ‘Cause you came out in ’47.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So what did you do between the end of the war and when you were demobbed?
RB: I went to Cranwell on a, on a course for VHF Homer. Do you know?
CB: Yeah.
RB: VHF Homers? I operated a VHF Homer at Wyton. Only for a day or two. I was on air traffic control as an RT operator giving aircraft permission to take off and land. I, I was on duty now, now, now I’m going to do a bit of a shine [?] I was on darkie watch. Darkie watch. Anybody know darkie watch?
CB: That’s, no. No
Other: No. No.
RB: It was on channel 4. The transmission was I think was ten to twelve miles maximum so if you were in trouble during the war you could use plain language.
CB: Yeah.
RB: And you could say —
CB: Oh it could only go twelve miles.
RB: Eh?
CB: Yeah.
RB: You could say Lancaster of 576 squadron I’m lost.
CB: Right.
RB: They could put searchlights up and things like that.
CB: Oh right.
RB: If you had trouble they could get somebody to talk if he was injured or in trouble and things like that. Anyway, I was the only one, there was no flying so I was the only one on air traffic control for the night. I took a —
[pause]
CB: We’re just pausing to look at documents.
RB: I took a call from Group in the night that the Americans had lost a Dakota in the Alps. Oh I’ve already told you every, every three weeks we were duty Air Sea Rescue [?] Squadron and had to have an aircraft standing by all the time. I think we had airborne life boats which had come in. We had one of those. We never used it as far as I know and I switched on the tannoy and said, ‘Emergency air sea rescue. Emergency air sea rescue. Emergency air sea rescue. All air and ground crews report immediately. All duty air and ground crew should report immediately.’ I rung up the crash crew to make sure they’d heard me. The Met girl had come up before she’d gone off. I knew the winds. I’d put the runway lights on, I’d put the perimeter lights on and by the time the, I can’t believe it now but I believe it only took somewhere, something about just over a quarter of an hour for a crew to come ready to take off and by that time ‘cause I wasn’t supposed to give the aircraft permission the flying control officer was supposed to be there. I mean when I was on an airfield by meself overnight I wondered whether if it had ever happened you know if someone had said, ‘I’m in trouble.’ I had to [?] switch the lights on for them to land. What would have happened —
CB: Yeah.
RB: You know, but officially?
CB: What rank —
RB: So —
CB: What rank are you now for authority?
RB: I’m warrant officer.
CB: You are. Right.
RB: Yeah. Yeah the, anyway we got them off and they went to the Alps and they did find the Lanc but I think they —
CB: The Dakota.
RB: Pardon?
CB: The Dakota.
RB: Yeah, they found the Dakota. They saw it a number of times. In fact I can probably tell you how many times they found it. [pause] Anyway, in the Alps, flying, they’d saw it a number of times and there was a crash crew from Milan sent to find them and I think they went across to Castel Benito for the night and then went back the next day.
CB: Right.
RB: I suppose being the nearest —
CB: Yeah.
RB: Anyway they went over and —
CB: This was a daylight operation?
RB: This is looking for daylight in the Alps, yeah. I have got the cuttings here.
CB: So why didn’t the Americans send a plane to search?
RB: I don’t know. I don’t know. In fact, in fact I think afterwards they did sort of say that —
CB: Can we look at those in a minute?
RB: Yeah. Yeah well yeah well that —
CB: Yeah.
RB: That is the paper reports.
CB: Yeah.
RB: And it’s in focus and we diverted the Lanc to what is now London Airport to be interviewed by the BBC.
CB: Right. Amazing.
RB: And I’ve here got the signal from the American air force. Message received as follows from the USA Air Force in Europe, ‘Please convey our deep appreciation for the efforts in finding our aircraft and the hard work put in.’
CB: Brilliant.
RB: And when we were clearing up they said, ‘Roy you did most of it. You’d better take that with you.’
CB: Very gratifying.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So when are we talking about? 1946 is this?
RB: This is ‘46.
CB: Ok. And you were at Cranwell.
RB: No. No, I’d come from Cranwell. I’d done the course at Cranwell.
CB: Oh right.
RB: I’m back at Upwood.
CB: Back at Upwood. Ok.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So you’ve done, you’re still flying intermittently.
RB: No. No.
CB: Not at all.
RB: No. No.
CB: Ok so how did you come so we’re in ‘46 but you didn’t leave till ‘47 so what did you do in the rest of the time?
RB: RT at Upwood.
CB: Ok and how did your demob come about?
RB: You got a demob number. Your age and when you went in and mine was 45 and that was due out but it varied on trades because believe it or not in some trades they were short. Trades which had been built up at the beginning of the war were due for demobbing and if they hadn’t, if they didn’t need more along the line yeah and I did while I was at Upwood the only other highlight was I went over to Wyton because they were short of an RT operator over there and somebody on the VHF Homer and I did, I did a day or two on the VHF Homer over there. Yeah.
CB: So your demob date was actually 1945 but you didn’t take it till ’46?
RB: No, no, no that was 45 was the number.
CB: Oh sorry.
RB: But it came up —
CB: Beg your pardon.
RB: It came up. Wireless operators. It was due March ’47.
CB: Right.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Ok so then you knew that in advance.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Where did you go for demob?
RB: Lytham St Anne’s at Blackpool.
CB: Ok and what happened then?
RB: They said did I want to go back in? [laughs]
CB: Yeah. And you said —
RB: No. Well those, at that time well pre-war the air force spent a lot of time overseas. In actual fact about that time squadrons of Lancs used to go to the Middle East and that for a month and come back, you know so it would have been a whole different ball game then if, from the —
CB: So when did you meet your wife Joyce? What was she doing?
RB: 1943.
CB: Right. Where was she?
RB: Um she was in Battersea. Yeah, she worked for the Red Cross and St Johns Joint Organisation [?]
CB: And so you saw her intermittently or how did you —
RB: It was intermittently, yeah. Yeah, yeah I mean I was only coming home once every three months for leave sort of thing or —
CB: Yeah.
RB: An odd weekend.
CB: So that was another motivation for leaving the RAF was it?
RB: Yeah and to really I suppose to start doing something for, for me life you know.
CB: Yeah. So what had you chosen to do when leaving the RAF?
RB: I didn’t choose it. I got a job in engineering didn’t I?
CB: And you went back to it.
RB: I went back to it yeah.
CB: Ok. And they had to, it was a reserved —
RB: Pardon?
CB: Place? They had to take you back.
RB: Well yeah when I went back in there he said, ‘I’m not taking you back. I didn’t want you to go and you went.’ He was joking he was. [laughs]
CB: Oh right.
RB: Yeah. I I didn’t really have any young life, you know, even social life ‘cause I went to evening school for three years and evening school was evening school. There was no day release in those days you know. I used to work till 6 o’clock and race home and drink a cup of tea and race to be at Wandsworth Tech by quarter to seven, you know.
CB: And what was the course?
RB: Sheet metal plate work.
CB: Right.
RB: And after I passed it I went back in to work and said I passed my course and they said, ‘Right, Roy, we will give you a rise. We will put you up from one and seven pence farthing to one and seven pence three [emphasis] farthings.’
CB: Fantastic.
RB: And a little while later they said we’ve got a contract for Kirkup [?] Oil Pipeline and their cooking equipment as they’ve got so much oil they want it oil [?] fired so the boiling pans if we give you a half a dozen people to work with you you control it [laughs] ‘cause you’re getting the extra money. I’m getting the extra ha’penny an hour. So you know thinking back on it that probably they’d charge on [?] it got ten bob a week extra so you know yeah so I I organised it that the iron framework had to be, go and be hot dipped and galvanised so I sort of got that organised. The outer panels were going to be vitreous enamelled but we didn’t have a plant in those days we had to send it out to get it vitreoused [?] so the bits that had to go you got done in the hopes that when they come back all the in-house bits, the pans in stainless steel and the tops and that and the bits and pieces you were making you kept it going and it all ended up, yeah.
CB: So you spent the rest of your working life with that company did you?
RB: No. No I well we couldn’t get a house, you know. We were, we were in the mother in laws front room and then we managed to get two rooms and there was no chance of getting a place in London, I mean and Bartlett’s were in the same line but they, they were moving from Bell Steet because they thought they were going to be pulled down for the Harrow Road Flyover and they were having a place built out here so I applied for a job there and got it.
CB: In Aylesbury.
RB: No Hemel.
CB: In Hemel.
RB: Hemel, yeah, yeah and in fact we got a house and were down here before the factory. We had to travel up every day you know to, the next job I got when I was at Benham’s they got the contract for the ventilation for the House of Lords and the Commons what had been bombed during the war and they were used to galvanised and aluminium but underneath the fancy plasterwork they wanted stainless steel because they didn’t want it to rot and after all the cost of all the plasterwork so I got the job of the stainless steel because it all had to be welded and I could weld stainless steel when it was all curves and that. Yeah.
CB: So you know the House of Commons backwards.
RB: No. No, I didn’t, I didn’t go up there at all. I just made it and it all fitted so I didn’t have to go up there. Yeah. I got, I got in with the, the gang that places in London, the restaurants and that hadn’t been, hadn’t had any building work done on them during the war and we went to places like Derry and Toms to, to update their service counters. We used to, at this time we were working eight to eight because we were busy and we used to go up there Friday dinnertime and the counters were red hot. The counters in the pre-war used to be galvanised pipes going back with steam going through them and they would be red hot and we’d start stripping down from as soon as they’d finished serving dinnertime and we’d carry on stripping down and the stainless steel tops and that in the early days there wasn’t welding on stainless steel. It was riveting and various means and er but we used to put that on the lorry which used to go back to the works. We used to go home and then go in at 8 o’clock on Saturday morning. Our outside fitters used to be pulling out the pipes because at this time copper pipes were going in to replace the galvanised which were some had like rusted and that you know so we used to go in to the works and replace the tops and anything that needed to be. Sometime during Saturday night we’d load it on to the wagon and we’d go back and we’d go straight in and we’d start putting it up but there was no break because you didn’t know what snags you were going to come. Until it was finished you just kept so you worked from Saturday morning all the way through Saturday night round and it usually used to be sometime Sunday afternoon that used to get finished and you’d say ‘right we think we’re there’ you know, we ‘ave to, we used to have to make sure there were no leaks or nothing so there wasn’t too many of them but there was one. Barclays bank had a terrific long counter and it was decided that it was hopeless to try and do it all in one weekend so we did it in three weekends all running on so for four weekends I didn’t have a weekend off. I was out working eight till eight. Luckily it was, it was during the summer so I wasn’t at evening school. My son was born and I daren’t, my wife went into hospital. I daren’t say I’m not going because you were in that gang and if you didn’t go you were frightened that they wouldn’t have you next time you know but er
CB: When were you married?
RB: 1950.
CB: And how old are, well who are your children?
RB: Roger.
CB: Yeah and how old is he?
RB: He’s about sixty —
CB: No. He was born when?
RB: Er ’52.
CB: 19, and the next one?
RB: Peter ’53.
CB: Yep.
RB: Trevor ’56.
CB: Yeah.
RB: Andrew about ’59, I think.
CB: And then you adopted.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Who? What’s her name?
RB: Elizabeth.
CB: And how old is she? When was she born?
RB: About ‘69 I think.
CB: Right. So you needed to get over the others a bit before you took her on [laughs]
RB: Yeah. Well [laughs] Roger was working, you know.
CB: Oh was he?
RB: Bringing money in.
CB: Yeah. Right. Ok. We’ve done amazingly well. Thank you.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Roy Briggs
Description
An account of the resource
Roy Briggs was born in Battersea, London. After leaving school he undertook an engineering apprenticeship with Benham and Sons, producing equipment for the war. He describes his life during the Blitz. When he joined the Royal Air Force he trained as a wireless operator and served at RAF Fiskerton. He was on operations to Plauen, Cuxhaven and Potsdam. He also took part in Operation Manna and Operation Exodus as well as Cook’s tours over Germany. Until he was demobilised in 1947, he served at RAF Upwood. After the war he returned to a career in engineering.
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2016-01-28
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Janet McGreevy
Format
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01:58:03 audio recording
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABriggsR160128
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Germany
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Cambridgeshire
Germany--Plauen
Germany--Cuxhaven
Germany--Berlin
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
30 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
air sea rescue
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
Cook’s tour
demobilisation
Dominie
Goodwill tour of the United States (1946)
Initial Training Wing
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Proctor
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Hixon
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Madley
RAF Swinderby
RAF Upwood
training
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/89/2342/ACalvertR151124.2.mp3
94d73ffc9db8c40dca7c8216a827bb55
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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Calvert, Roger
R A Calvert
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. The collection consists of an oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Roger Alfred Calvert (b. 1923, 1488619; 152814), his logbook, navigators training course class book and 3 photographs. Roger Calvert was a navigator with 141 Squadron at RAF West Raynham flying Mosquitos on night intruder operations. For most of his operational career his pilot was Flight Lieutenant John Thatcher.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Roger Calvert and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Creator
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-04-24
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. 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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Calvert, R
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: So, my name's Chris Brockbank and I am in Leeds with Roger Calvert a Mosquito navigator and we're going to talk about his early life, what he did in the RAF and then afterwards. So what's the earliest you remember in your life?
RC: Well I was born in Ripon Yorkshire, I’ve got three brothers and two sisters. I remember very little about the beginning of the war except I remember the war being announced. Um, I was at school then Ripon Grammar School and I was in the sixth form then, more or less ready to, to leave. I'd no idea what I was going to do after I left school. Well I did quite well with High School Certificate and so on and then I was tested and, in [background noises] April 1942 I joined and went down to Padgate. Um I enjoyed being at school one or two of my friends are good footballers and cricketers and I enjoyed those being in the first team. But, it was a bit of a shock going into the forces of course, I hardly left Ripon [laugh] at that age so it was a bit of a- amazing to eventually go to Canada to train and go to Egypt and places like that. So I remember very little about London and Padgate except there was a murderer down there floating about. I don't know if you remember that chap, that murdered several women, and, then I seemed to get lost in the, the movement and the training really. Um, so eventually I went to Canada which is by boat on the Queen Mary. I got on this boat one afternoon, on this ship, sorry the Queen Mary one afternoon I thought oh we'll be off in a couple of hours it looks full to me. They were going on, coming on board all through the night 'till the next day. I think there was about eighteen or twenty thousand on board the Queen Mary. Anyway it was quite safe because evidently it, once it got out into the Atlantic, it used to, only go so long and then turn onto a new course, and then I landed at Moncton and travelled by train across Canada to London Ontario, which was a beautiful city, and there trained as a navigator on Ansons, in the middle of the Great Lakes. And I eventually qualified as a navigator and was commissioned then, I don't know, that presumably due to the results I don’t know and then came home again. Eh, and more or less after I got back to England they wanted navigators to train on two-engined aircraft, with a, lot of systems why [unclear] you picked up incoming German flights into the bomber, eh the bomber stream. So I went on this training, and with the pilot who was training also, which took quite a long time. Eventually I went to OTU [background noises] where, I was lucky because there were very few, very few navigators there, in fact a lot of pilots so it was a bit boastful to say I got the pick of the pilots [laughs] but, that’s where I met John Thatcher who was a wonderful pilot, he'd been on Training Command, he'd done a lot of hours so I got on very well with him. He was ten years older than me but he was a really wonderful chap, wasn't he Margaret. Eh, I used to see him after the war, but we just had confidence in each other somehow and got on very well, so it was a very nice association, I was very lucky to be with him and eventually we transferred to Mosquitos. And [background noise] we did this first trip to France, they give you an easy trip the first one. When I got back I was a sick in the [laughs] in the cockpit and they were a bit frightened that it was this lack of moral fibre, but what had happened was my oxygen mask had come, come off and I hadn’t noticed it and that's why I, why I was taken ill really, the last part of the trip [pause]. I can’t really say much more about John, he was a grand man, you met him Margaret didn’t you several times, he lived at Tring. Whenever we could we always called in to see him and, I remember he was rather funny once. He said 'do you remember that fourteenth trip we did?' You gave me a wrong, you gave me a wrong direction over Hamburg and he'd never forgotten this [laughs]. I'd given him a wrong, a wrong, [background noise] so we had a good laugh about that. That was about the only thing we quarrelled about really [laughs]. Yes it was nice to meet him after the war, but em. Anyway we were very pleased to get on the Mosquitos it would be shortly before the time of the invasion I think. And em we'd done thirty one flights, thirty one operations, eh when I was taken ill on leave and went to the hospital in Bath and eh when I came back to the squadron after a month or so the war was nearly over, and I only did one more flight with a Flying Officer Rhymer [?] we eh, we intruded some airfield in Denmark. I've often wondered why, whether there was some high class Nazis there. Anyway the squadron attacked this aerodrome that was my last trip, that was the thirty second and that was the tour finished I suppose well the war finished, so [pause] I had a very quiet time on operations really although, fortunately John was a very good pilot, I remember the worst trip we had was to a place called Zeiss [?]. I think it was near Leipzig, and we were over the target and one of the engines went and, he blocked it off or whatever the word is and he flew me all the way back to, to England on this one engine, how he did it I don’t know but, we came into this aerodrome in Essex, it had got about a four mile long runway so there's plenty of room there. So I've very little so say about the operations really, we were intruding once or twice aerodromes and so but mostly we were escorting the bomber, the bomber stream and trying to pick up German fighters coming into it. We only met one once [laugh] which was an ME110 which we shot down. That’s about the only thing I remember about picking some — we picked one or two up but we lost them again, so that was a bit of a failure really.
CB: So just picking up on what the activity was, you were trained to intercept other planes, German aircraft in the bomber stream, were you therefore technically night fighters yourselves or were you interdictors so you would do bombing as well. What was the actual role that you had?
RC: We were escort really, yes, only once or twice we did these intruding into enemy aerodromes. I think the last but one flight was Dresden, never forgotten that.
CB: Ok tell us more.
RC: Well the whole city had been bombed by the US and ourselves and, we could see the Russian, the Russian, flashes from the Russian forces quite near Dresden at the time [background noises] so we thought the war must be nearly over but eh, it was a shame to bomb that place but it was, that was the RAF was ordered and we, I think Churchill let us down quite frankly then after his war speech, he never mentioned the RAF, I mean they had to go and they did what they had to do.
CB: What was it about the Dresden raid that really stuck in your mind?
RC: Well it was the firestorm afterwards really, yes.
CB: What was your role then, escorting the bombers?
RC: Um, yes there, yes [pause] and that was about the end of the war wasn't it, just about.
CB: Yes, yeah ok, so what was your feeling about the bombing of Dresden?
RC: Well, we were told — they were told to do it weren’t they?
CB: But at the time, what did you think about it at the time?
RC: I didn’t think about it any more than the normal trips, you know. I mean a friend of mine went to Nuremberg on that awful trip, ninety seven were shot down, and he told me he went there and back without any trouble, which is unbelievable isn’t it? It was a moonlight night and they got in an awful mess they shouldn’t have gone really, but that was Jeff Ward, do you remember Margaret? Mm.
CB: Was he a Mosquito man as well?
RC: No he was on, Lancasters.
CB: Right, going back to the — if we just go to the training bit -
RC: Training yes
CB: So you're trained to use the equipment for detecting, were they to detect other night fighters? So just talk us through, what was the training and what was the equipment, you were on Beaufighters. So what was the equipment supposed to do, how did it work?
RC: Well there was Gee, I can’t remember a lot about it, there was Gee, you could navigate on these pulses coming from, the middle of England.
CB: It was a lattice navigation system.
RC: Erm, yes, and then there was one that would pick up the coast beautifully, I forget what that was called.
CB: You didn’t have H2S on your....
RC: H2S that's it.
CB: Did you have that, you didn’t have that on the Mosquito?
RC: Yes.
CB: Oh you did, right, in the nose?
RC: Yes.
CB: Right okay.
RC: Yes the nose was altered.
CB: Right. What else did you have [pause] how did you detect?
RC: Well I had — I was looking in this box most of the time.
CB: Right.
RC: What were they called, AI I think.
CB: So airborne interception radar, AI yeah, okay.
RC: That’s what I was trained to pick up these aircraft.
CB: So this was a scanning radar was it?
RC: Um yes I suppose so, yes.
CB: So what were you looking for?
RC: Looking for aircraft coming in.
CB: Right, how could you detect them in a way that differentiated them from the bomber stream?
RC: I can’t remember.
CB: Okay, presumably the bombers had IFF so identification friend or foe so that meant that you would know from a signal from those what you were hitting. But where were you in the bomber stream, in relation to the bomber stream, above it, beside it, below it, where were you?
RC: Well we flew out after them because we were a lot faster of course, so um well we had our own — we were given our own routes. Our own plans which tied up with the bomber stream presumably [pause].
CB: So whereabouts did you catch up with them? 'Cos you had — did you fly around a lot or, because you'd have to throttle back to be in line with them?
RC: No we just went there, um.
CB: You just wandered around did you?
RC: No we just went there to the, to the -
CB: Over the target?
RC: Operation, yes.
CB: But you didn’t drop anything.
RC: No, no.
CB: So when you got close to the target did you go above the Lancasters and Halifaxes?
RC: Yes I think so, it's a — I can’t really remember quite honestly.
CB: Or to the side is really what I meant.
RC: Mm. Yes I think we would have been above them [background noises].
CB: But over the target, was it likely that fighters would operate there because of the flak?
RC: Well I think they would try to pick them up before they, before they -
CB: [Interrupted] and after?
RC: Yes.
CB: So you had gone over the target, the bombers are turning, they are in a stream, how are you going back with them, because the fighters are trying to get them then?
RC: No we are not going back with them we are just going back, yes.
CB: Oh you didn’t go back with them?
RC: No, no I think that was impossible really.
CB: So really you're operating on the basis of trying to defend them on the way there but on the way back you're not with them.
RC: No, no.
CB: Is that partly a fuel consideration was it, or?
RC: No I don’t know it was just the way it was done.
CB: Did others come out and take over for the return trip?
RC: No I don’t think so, no.
CB: Right okay, so the one you shot down, what happened there?
RC: I wasn’t shot down, no.
CB: No, no the ME110 that you shot down.
RC: Oh right yes, well we picked this aircraft up over France and um and got right behind it as near as we could and John said 'what do you think it is?' So I thought, ‘well looks like a 110 to me', he said, 'yes so did I' and eh, so anyway we, it wasn’t, it wasn’t weaving at all it was just flying, so anyway I gave it a couple of bursts and again and it went down and that was the last saw of that. But, whether it crashed or not we don’t know.
CB: So your armament was what, so you had four 20 millimetre cannon?
RC: Yes.
CB: And how many machine guns, another four of those?
RC: I’ve forgotten, it was either four or eight, it wouldn’t be eight would it?
CB: I wouldn’t think so.
RC: No four.
CB: It might have been but fairly potent when you got going?
RC: Yes, yes.
CB: What was the effect on the plane when you fired?
RC: [sigh] Well, certainly hit it, it was a big, big, big blow up, big blow up, yes.
CB: Oh it blew up, the 110?
RC: Well it was a conflagration or whatever.
CB: Conflagration.
RC: Conflagration right.
CB: Did you fire, on other occasions did you fire at other planes?
RC: No, no that's why I've been so lucky all my life. I’m lucky as far as we didn’t shoot more down. I mean one of our chaps did about — shot, killed about — he knocked about twelve German aircraft out.
CB: Did he.
RC: I was talking to Margaret the other day, I was just reading a book, this pair shot down about twelve I think it was and eh he got the DFC and two bars. And after the war he, was killed by a lorry running over him and they thought it was suicide because this poor [indistinct] chap, his wife had left him. It was very sad, he was such a nice bloke although he had more or less gone when I — he was going, he was leaving the squadron to some other higher post I think after I joined it, it’s sad isn’t it the war?
CB: It is, yeah. So going to the end of hostilities, in Europe, you’d been in hospital, you had one more trip to Denmark, that was escorting rather than doing any ground attacks?
RC: No, it wasn’t escorting, it was just intruding on this aerodrome.
CB: Which meant what, so when you say intruder what does that mean?
RC: Well we just bombed, actually we used that stuff napalm on the place and um. [pause]
CB: What did you drop that on?
RC: On the, on the aerodrome on the build — hangers and, yes, and I suppose the ancillary buildings as well. I think I had a feeling at the time, it was a queer place to go, I was just wondering whether some high flown Germans were there at the time. I mean why pick on that place? Anyway we did that and eh [interrupt].
CB: Had you done any of those before?
RC: We had one or two, we had one in Holland [?] airfield.
CB: With the same ordnance or the same, material in other words napalm or did you use bombs?
RC: No it wasn’t napalm, no napalm had only come in later on in the war I think.
CB: So you were bombing as well?
RC: Yes.
CB: And what else did you do?
RC: I remember one of them said he hit, there was a fellow going across the aerodrome in a steam roller, one of the Huns, he gave that a quick burst, I said, 'oh well that’s rotten isn't it really' [laughs], oh dear [pause]. No I just had this one flight with another pilot in the end.
CB: So the war came to an end but you still were flying, what did you do after the end of hostilities?
RC: Well I went on various courses and things, I went to a place called Rattlesden and there was a bit of a revolt there, a revolution there by the, by the air force. I think I was, I was the station adjutant to, I was a bit worried at the time, this recruit centre. There some under eh, I think the staff had been treated badly but I, anyway fortunately it was cleared up, you know.
CB: In what way, what was that to do with?
RC: Shall I show you something?
CB: Yeah, but this place was not flying this was not a flying station?
RC: No it was a recruit centre.
CB: So who was misbehaving?
RC: Well it must have been the staff I suppose, I don’t think it would be the recruits.
CB: What were they trying to do, put them through the mill?
RC: Trying to get better, better conditions. Then they went out to [background noise] Egypt I was supposed to be in charge of the base personnel office there [indistinct] in Cairo [hesitation]. Where's my paper?
CB: I'll pause there just for a moment.
CB: Ok we are restarting now, so the war is over and Roger is doing courses, so what was the first course you did after flying?
RC: After the war you mean, yes, well my brother was a chartered accountant and he lent me some books about it. And eh, I got this book on auditing and I found it quite interesting, including the legal cases that had, taken, taken place and eh. So I went on this three year training eh to be a chartered accountant [pause].
CB: And you were an articled clerk were you, so you got paid in that time?
RC: Yes, well I got a grant yes, £170 a year I remember it very well, lived quite nicely on it, £170 a year you wouldn’t believe it would you, so I was pleased to get through that examination or the intermediate and the final, especially the taxation. I don’t know how I got through it but still I did somehow. So, then I was looking for my first position. I think that was at um a job with the National Gas and Oil Engine Company in Lancashire, Ashton-under-Lyme it was the Bush Group, do you remember the Bush Group?
CB: Yeah.
RC: And eh, I was very happy there but eventually we ran into financial troubles with the Group and I managed to get a post in Leeds with a motor distributor, through my brother and I was with them till about 1974, then they ran into financial trouble as well. Not my fault I hope [laughs] no it was, the company was with the, British Leyland and, they had, they had the troubles, that was leading to our redundancy really, very sad. But I suppose their range of motor cars wasn’t as good as some of the Japanese and so on. Then I had a multitude of funny jobs.
CB: Such as?
RC: Well I was really, sort of, I was working through an agency you know, they would find the jobs for me and, eventually I got a post at Castle Howard in Yorkshire as accountant there for, which was very interesting because of the people involved, of course the Howards were the [pause] in charge of the Castle and its various commercial opportunities.
CB: Including TV, didn’t they use it for Brideshead Revisited?
RC: Yes they did, yes, yes that’s right that was after my time though, or was it before, oh it would be before wouldn’t it.
CB: So in the end you decided to hang up your tax book and retire.
MC: Yes.
RC: Yes, yes that’s right yes.
CB: You were an FCA I take it?
RC: Yes.
CB: And when did you have the delightful pleasure of meeting Margaret, how was that?
RC: Well that was at a film at, Moortown Golf Club, I jokingly [laughs] funnily enough I had a speech about a month ago didn’t I, I jokingly said I met Margaret on the 27th of September 1953 at 7 o’clock, they used to have a film about the professional competition at Wentworth didn't they Margaret, that was it, at the club and that’s how I met Margaret at this.
CB: Never looked back.
MC: [laughs]
RC: [laughs] No, no we've had a lot of fun certainly.
CB: And you continued with golf have you, all your life?
RC: Yes, yes.
CB: Did you take it up in the RAF?
RC: Golf?
CB: Yeah.
RC: Well I played at Newcastle, when we were up there but it was just a fun weekend, day off you know, sort of business, excuse me a minute [background noises].
CB: Yes, we are just doing a retake because, Roger found that there was surplus, a, shortage of navigators and he ended up making a choice himself, tell us how that came about and what — what happened?
RC: Well I had met John Thatcher at the OTU and, we got on very well really he was, he was, senior to me he had done a lot of hours flying and eh obviously very competent and eh there were two other prospective, one was a Squadron Leader Morley, I remember him who I could have flown with and this chap Banbury was his navigator and the navigator said to me, having a meal before we went on this trip, he said 'I won’t be coming back tonight, I feel, I feel awful' and I am afraid he didn’t you know, he must have been shot down.
CB: Did he have a premonition, is that what it was?
RC: Yes that’s it, yes.
CB: So there was a choice of three pilots.
RC: Em Yes.
CB: And
RC: Well it seems a bit bombastic to say that doesn't it, but I mean, I didn’t really approach the other two anyhow, they were looking for somebody.
CB: Was John Thatcher a creamy? Is that why he had been on training earlier?
RC: A creamy?
CB: Creamies were the people who were so good at flying they were immediately put onto training new pilots.
RC: Yes, yes.
CB: Was that his route?
RC: It must have been really, I don’t, he never talked about it.
CB: And after, so you were on the raid with this chap who had the premonition, what was your reaction when you got back?
RC: Well I suppose I was only twenty wasn't I, nineteen, hits you very hard doesn’t it?
CB: What was the loss rate like on Mosquitos compared with the heavy bombers?
RC: Oh it wasn't anything like, no [indistinct] was terrible, the chances they had wasn't it in the Lancaster really. I think they only did twenty five if they got through that it was a miracle really. They had one chance in three of getting, was it, I don’t know.
CB: Well they did a, the tour was thirty.
RC: Thirty was it?
CB: What em, what experience did you have of flak because the Lancasters were the main recipients of the flak but you're in the stream so to what extent did you get flak?
RC: No, no, no we could avoid that alright [laughs]. When we were — if we were, like that Danish trip, the flak from the airport [?], choomp, choomp, choomp, it went past you, it was amazing really. You couldn’t believe you got away with it [laughs].
CB: The German Air Force, airfield defence was 20, 20, quadruple 20 millimetre canon wasn’t it, so that’s what you were up against was it? But you didn’t get hit at all.
RC: No we didn’t, no.
CB: Were you in the lead or where were you in the um?
RC: We wouldn’t be in the lead, no. But I remember I went round two or three times and Pilot Officer Rhymer[?] said 'the bombs have gone, what shall we do, shall we go back home?' I said 'yes please' [laughs].
CB: Why did you have to go round three times?
RC: Well I suppose [interrupted]
CB: Before you dropped the canisters was it?
RC: I don’t remember whether it was the first run or the second one he dropped them. One bloke came back with his bombs, he wasn’t very welcome when he got to the station [interruption]. He had some technical failure with the, with the bombing.
CB: They wouldn’t release, did you do a strafing job against the ground, guns?
RC: Yes as far as I remember yes, yes.
CB: Because your fire power was fairly devastating in itself was it?
RC: Wonderful aircraft.
CB: Ok we're stopping again for a moment [background noises].
RC: [indistinct] Line-shooting.
CB: Now we are just going back to one of Roger's experiences when he was ill in the aeroplane because his oxygen mask became detached and it leads to what?
RC: It says here 'spoken by F/O Calvert'.
CB: What's the heading of this?
RC: About line-shooting, on the squadron [?].
CB: Line-shooting, right.
RC: 'Spoken by F/O Calvert' in brackets, ‘having failed to connect his oxygen tube on ops', the only time I get to sleep is when I am on ops witness [?] Flight Lieutenant Bates [laughs], oh dear.
CB: What other ones have you got, so you were branded for life, what others have you got there, line-shoots?
RC: Jock Barriman [?], wonder if there are any other pilots of my vintage still flying [laugh ]. It’s funny here, Willy Rhymer[?], that’s the chap I was flying with, the last one. You could almost hear the tracer sizzling as it went past [laughs].
CB: This is the ground attack job.
RC: Yes, they are listed there [background noises].
CB: Thanks, and just going back again um we are in a situation where operations have finished because the war in Europe has finished, you are then put on some training courses, what were those. Nothing to do with flying?
RC: No, well one was an admin course at eh, Hereford, Credenhill. Then I went on one of them on moral leadership in the Isle of Wight of all places. Then I went on another admin course, I think they were just waiting 'till they were able to get, get, get us moved on out of the forces really. One was at some HQ, I don’t remember that but.
CB: And then you went out to Cairo, why was that and what did you do?
RC: Oh, we went out by rail over France and then across the Mediterranean, in a ship. And I was in Cairo and I was in charge of the base personnel office, which was a bit much at my age, 21 or whatever it was. Anyway we were in charge of moving the RAF personnel round Africa, if they were short of cooks or something like that, we moved a cook across from Cairo when they came in, down there you see.
CB: Whereabouts in Africa would you send people?
RC: Well they were more or less in Kenya and places like that [pause].
CB: So it was a, you were doing postings?
RC: Postings, yes.
CB: What else?
RC: That’s about it really, it was a funny job because you were only working about four or five hours a day.
CB: So did you start early in the morning or how did that work?
RC: Well you worked about eight until two, something like that and then the day was free which was very good because you could go down to Gazera [?] Sporting Club and....
CB: Play golf?
RC: Well you could play golf if you had any clubs but used to, nice to watch the cricket and that sort of thing. It was a lovely place.
CB: Swimming?
RC: Yes um, um.
CB: How long were you there [pause] roughly?
RC: I should think about a couple of months [pause] April to July.
CB: ‘40?
RC: ‘46 [indistinct] year before I left, yes.
CB: So how did you know that you were going to be demobbed?
RC: Well um, I think there was a circular around about it and, [pause] I can’t really remember to be honest.
CB: That’s ok, so where, you were demobbed as soon as you got back to the UK.
RC: Yes.
CB: And that's when you took up your accountancy training?
RC: Well my parents lived in Bath and I was demobbed to Bath and then when the, eh that period was over I had a week or two to find some work. I came up to Leeds, to work with my brother in Leeds, articled.
CB: What had he done in the war?
RC: He was in the Royal Ordnance Company.
CB: He got out quicker, he got out of the army quicker than you.
RC: He was in the south of England and he got about fifteen embarkation leaves before he went on the invasion. And, he was in charge of a beach detachment in — in France, he was lucky too.
CB: OK. We're going to pause for a moment [background noises].
CB: We're talking about LMF because jokingly people had referred to it earlier. Roger what was your understanding and experience of people in that category?
RC: Well I think there was only one fellow as far as I remember who got to such a stage he just couldn’t carry on and um it was difficult for the forces to have sympathy with him in a way but you know he just broke down and, and I don’t know what happened to him, he left the force I think, for medical treatment, but that’s very rare really.
CB: What was his role and rank?
RC: Oh I don’t know, I think he'd be a, I think he'd be a navigator but I'm not sure.
CB: Was he commissioned or was he?
RC: I think he was a sergeant.
CB: Right, and do you know how they dealt with it?
RC: No I don’t, no.
CB: But there was a perception of how it was dealt with what was that?
RC: Well they were probably a bit hard at the time I suppose, I suppose they had to be really, hadn’t they? No, they more or less um nothing [background noises] like being in a Lancaster is it, that must have been awful.
CB: So you got on extremely well with your pilot.
RC: Yes.
CB: John Thatcher, in the squadron what was the general, what was the general [background noises] em attitude?
RC: Can we -
CB: I'll stop. We're restarting now because we've been talking about a lot of things and in this case we're just going back to the kill that Roger did with John, his pilot, um on that particular evening. So is it a summer time event.
RC: Well, I've got the minutes.
CB: Oh ok.
RC: I’ve got the, turn it off.
CB: So what we're talking about is how this particular combat mission worked, so you're in the bomber stream and then what?
RC: I just picked up this AI —
CB: On your radar —
RC: Yes and we turned and followed, followed it behind, underneath, for a while until we'd identified the aircraft, John said it was an M110 and I thought it was too, so he gave it a burst or two bursts —
CB: At what range would you normally expect to be opening fire?
RC: I don’t know but it'd be a few hundred, couple of hundred yards was it, I don’t know, I can’t remember, probably says in the record there.
CB: Yeah, ok, and um so, why were there two bursts were they fairly quick succession or was it that the first one didn’t work.
RC: No I, I think they both worked yes, yes.
CB: And what happened to the aircraft?
RC: It just went down, it disappeared, we didn’t see it crash so we couldn’t really claim it as a, had to claim it as, damaged, yes.
CB: Did it blow up?
RC: No not that I, no it was just burning as it went down.
CB: Right, and then what did you do, keep going or turn away, or what did you do?
RC: We turned away presumably, yes. It’s so long ago I can’t remember.
CB: Yeah, of course, that’s okay, now going back to your original training, how did the training work when you were in Canada? So you come out as a raw navigator, trainee. What did they do there was ground school and flying so how did that work?
RC: Well we were in the middle of the big lakes and we went out on these daily trips as far as I remember, probably two of us went, two trainees but we gave the more or less directions obviously in training for the round trip and we would [voice fades away] [interrupted].
CB: So you would have ground school before you started flying would you?
RC: Yes, yes.
CB: What did that entail?
RC: Sigh [long pause] I suppose we had to plan the trip [laugh] and, now I am lost.
CB: What I meant was that they teach you how to navigate so how do they teach you how to navigate, because it's more than just drawing a line isn’t it?
RC: Em, well of course I picked up a lot at Torquay at the initial training wing at Torquay really about navigation [interruption].
CB: OK, so how did that work?
RC: It was just putting it into action wasn’t it.
CB: Oh I see right.
RC: You know, in flight mm, mm.
CB: So how often did you, 'cause you were there for several months, so there must have been a lot to do?
RC: Yes, daily, it'd be daily I suppose.
CB: How long were the flights?
RC: [long pause] Looks as if it was about three hours, up to three hours.
CB: Would they, yeah?
RC: Yes, yes.
CB: Shared between the two of you on the same aeroplane?
RC: Pin pointing, astro-compass fixes and WV’s, what’s that? [pause]
CB: That’s using the sextant.
RC: Yes.
CB: How did you get on with that?
RC: We never used it with Gee [interruption].
CB: Ah.
RC: Never used it. Familiarisation flights, then we got onto nights eventually after a couple of months we started flying at night, [long pause].
CB: Ok, so shall we just go back to when you did the initial training so the ground school is what you were saying was at Torquay is that right?
RC: Yes, yes.
CB: So that's where you learned the rudiments of navigation.
RC: That’s right, yes.
CB: How did they do that?
RC: [long pause] I can’t remember, I know it’s terrible isn’t it.
CB: That’s okay, it doesn’t matter.
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Title
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Interview with Roger Calvert
Description
An account of the resource
Roger Calvert grew up in Ripon. He joined the Royal Air Force in April 1942 and completed navigation training in Canada. On return to Great Britain, he met up with his pilot, John Thatcher and they completed 31 operations in Mosquitos with 141 Squadron. He discusses use of Gee and H2S, operations including Dresden, escorting the bomber stream, shooting down a Messerschmitt Bf 110 and lack of moral fibre. He became the adjutant at RAF Rattlesden and served briefly in Cairo before being demobilised. After the war, he became an accountant.
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2015-11-24
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Hugh Donnelly
Janet McGreevy
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00:52:06 audio recording
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ACalvertR151124
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Canada
Germany
England--Suffolk
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.
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IBCC Digital Archive
141 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
Gee
H2S
lack of moral fibre
Me 110
Mosquito
navigator
Pathfinders
training
-
Dublin Core
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Title
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Green, Langford W
Bill Green
Joe Green
L W Green
Description
An account of the resource
Eight items. An oral history interview with Flight Sergeant Langford William Green (1923 - 2022, 2236292 Royal Air Force), his logbook, service documents and photographs. After training, Langford Green served as an air gunner with 218 Squadron at RAF Chedburgh. He flew 18 operations and several Operation Manna supply drops to Dutch civilians.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Langford Green and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
In accordance with the conditions stipulated by the donor, these items are available only at the International Bomber Command Centre / University of Lincoln.
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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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Green, LW
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IBCC Digital Archive
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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 Langford William Green
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2016-04-28
Contributor
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Julie Williams
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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01:23:26 audio recording
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AGreenLW160428
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Description
An account of the resource
Langford "Joe" Green was born in Wales but moved to Marlow, Buckinghamshire with his family when he was still a child. He worked in a factory from the age of 14 until he joined the Royal Air Force. After training he flew operations as an air gunner with 218 Squadron RAF Chedburgh. On a cross country training exercise, his aircraft suffered engine failure and the crew were told to bale out. Only the bomb aimer managed to exit the aircraft and the pilot landed with the rest of the crew on board. He also discusses the corkscrew manoeuvre.
In accordance with the conditions stipulated by the donor, this item is available only at the University of Lincoln.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Netherlands
England--Suffolk
Germany--Dresden
Germany
Temporal Coverage
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1945
Requires
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CB: Right. My name is Chris Brockbank and today we’re in Marlow and the date is the 28th of April 2016. We’re interviewing Langford Green known as Joe and we’re going to talk about his experiences as a wireless operator/air gunner particularly in 218 squadron. So, Joe, what was the earliest recollection you had of life and what did your parents do?
LJG: Well, we were poor. I remember that. It was just an ordinary life really. Yeah. I mean I had two brothers and a sister older than me and we lived in Wales and then when the job finished when I was four I think, we moved to Marlow. My father was working in [?] in Pontypridd working and the job was finishing so he got on his pushbike, cycled all the way to Marlow because I had an uncle living here on, he was a signalman on Great Western Railway and he put my father up for the night. He got a job and a house and cycled back again and we came back on the train ‘cause dad was only allowed one ticket a year. The posh people on the railway could get have than one but because he was a labourer we only had the one. And we moved to Marlow in 1927. I went to school at the Church of England school. Infant school in Oxford Road and then the big school and at fourteen I left school. Went to work in High Wycombe in a factory. Just an ordinary, everyday, like everyone else did. There wasn’t, there was very little employment in Marlow. I mean we had a brewery. And we had a few independent builders but they only employed a few people. They didn’t do many apprenticeships so my father got me a job as an apprentice in to marquetry and then of course in ‘39 the war started so that was the end of my working career. The war started when I was just over sixteen you see. The company went on to war work. They were doing the parts for aeroplanes I think. They were doing big bases anyway so and then I got fed up with that. I got away with it and joined the air force. Another experience.
CB: Why did you join the RAF and not the other?
LG: Well I thought it was the best one to do. I wanted to fly actually but I’m afraid my education wasn’t good enough to be a pilot or a navigator or anything like that but I went to Wycombe to try and join up and they said you’ve to go to Reading. I’d never been to Reading in my life. Didn’t even know how to get there. Then luckily I the sergeant who looked after, the police sergeant who looked after me when we was couriers he said, ‘Well get on a bus to Reading and ask the conductor where Broad Street is,’ and that’s where I went. I joined up that particular day. I had all my checks, exams and I come away with the kings shilling and I’d signed up for the air force as an air gunner. They said go home and we’ll send you a letter or a telegram to tell you where to go and that happened about two or three days later and there again I got this telegram report to Lords Cricket Ground. I mean I’d heard Lords Cricket Ground on the wireless but I didn’t, had no idea where it was. Hadn’t got the faintest. So back I went to see my police sergeant. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘No problem Joe,’ he said, ‘Get on the train at Marlow, you get off at Paddington and you’ll find a big red sign that says RTO, Rail Transport Officer. Go and ask him and he’ll tell you exactly how to get there. In fact,’ he said, ‘He might even send someone with you.’ So goes to Paddington, saw this officer and he put a squaddie with me. He said, ‘Take this gentleman down, show him how to get on, which train to get on to and where to get off.’ I finished up at Swiss Cottage which was the station nearest to Lords and I was there for about three weeks having all the injections, got my uniform. I lived in one of those big flats just outside Lords Cricket Ground. We had a room about three times the size of this, two of us. Lap of luxury. I thought this is great [laughs] but it soon changed. Yeah. Yeah I was there in London for about three weeks. Yes. Quite enjoyable. And then we were put on a train at Euston to Brignorth to have initial training. Then I, I was there for like five or six weeks I suppose. Waiting to come home and they said you’ll get a telegram report to gunnery school and there again had the same problem. You’ve got to go to Northern Ireland. How do I get to Northern Ireland? So when I got up to, I got the travel warrant. I went and saw this officer again. He said, ‘Oh that’s no problem. Euston station,’ he said, ‘And the train will be there.’ he said, ‘It takes you to Stranraer so you see, goes to Glasgow first and then goes back again,’ and off I went. Quite enjoyable it was too. I was a bit frightened at first. It was a long way away from home. Of course it wasn’t all that exciting but you do whatever they ask you, muck in and make the best of it. I quite enjoyed it in the end. I was there a few weeks and then I qualified, got my three stripes and my wing, came home and got another telegram to report to OTU at Peplow. That was a great bit that because you get there and you’ve got masses of people walking about. Pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, wireless ops, air gunners trying to, joined up to make a crew. They weren’t getting at you, just try and find yourself people you like. I, I met one of the air gunners that I trained with in Northern Ireland. We walked around together and finished up with the crew that we got. It was great. Found it a bit strange because the navigator was a pilot officer. All the rest were sergeants. The pilot, skipper Alfie Kemp was a sergeant, the bomb aimer was a sergeant but Dickie. Dickie Ball, the navigator, was a flying officer, a pilot officer but we got on well. He was alright. And as I say we done our training there and we were posted to Sandtoft to convert from Wellingtons. Twin engines in to four engines. We started on Halifaxes actually. They were, you know, clapped out old planes that weren’t fit for service but were good enough for training but as I say we did have one hair raising experience if you want to hear about that. We were doing a cross county on a Halifax and we were diverted because of fog. It really was, really foggy and we were diverted to Stradishall, or Mildenhall, I can’t remember, and we were losing height. Two engines. One engine had gone and then another engine went and we got on to traffic control and said put it in [George] head for the North Sea and bale out. Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a Halifax, there is an escape hatch in the front by the, between the, in front of the pilot, behind the bomb aimer and of course everything in the air force is done in routine. Bomb aimer goes out first cause he’s in the front and he goes out first and he goes head first, and the navigator goes out but unfortunately to get open this hatch you have to lift up the navigators seat ‘cause he’s facing crossways and Dicky Ball goes out feet first but his harness catches on the seat so there he is hanging outside on his harness and the door shut and of course luckily the skipper called us up the two gunners have an escape hatch at the back. He says, ‘Don’t go. We’ve got a problem.’ So we managed to get Dickie back in alright and by that time we were down less than a thousand feet which is far too low to bailout and with a bit of luck we saw a Lancaster with the wheels down so we followed him in. Got told off mind you but we got down on the ground safe and sound but the bomb aimer was in the police station at Peterborough [laughs] trying to convince them that he wasn’t a spy, he’d baled out. ‘Where’s the rest of them?’ ‘Don’t know,’ he said. Quite exciting isn’t it? But there again we got through it. And then we converted on to Lancs which was a blessing as far as I was concerned ‘cause I didn’t like the Halifax at all. I didn’t like a Lanc with the radial engines but I did like the Lanc. Yeah. It was such a beautiful aeroplane to be in. It flew like a fighter, like a fighter plane. We enjoyed it. And we gradually graduated. We were posted to 218 squadron which had moved from Downham Market to Methwold and when we got there they had moved to Chedburgh and that was where we spent the rest of our, the war. I’d done my first op. Munchen Gladbach I think, 1st of May, 1st of February 1945. Done a few more till the war finished. We were a distinctive squadron because we were one of the first squadrons to do Operation Manna. That was on the 29th April. The week before the war was officially finished. Dropping food on Holland. That was quite cheering. The war was still on officially. The High Command gave us permission to fly. We had to fly a direct route. They told us which way to come in and I think it was Rotterdam the first one. We’d done quite a few. Three I think because we were due to go on leave but because of this we, it was postponed and so we did have our leave in the end. They call it a week’s leave but you travel on a Thursday and go back on a Wednesday which is seven days really but it’s only five days at home isn’t it? Even from Bury St Edmunds it was a long, a long day to get there, get home to Marlow. Get in to London, across to Paddington and hopefully you’d get a faster train but that wasn’t always the case and when we went back off leave we done what was called Operation Exodus bringing POWs back. Twenty four in the base of a Lanc, Sat on the floor with their legs apart. Two rows of twelve. Yeah. And that’s where I finished my flying career. Chedburgh.
CB: What did you do after the war? When were you demobbed?
LJG: 1947. May 1947
CB: So what did you do?
LJG: Pardon?
CB: Between, what did you do between the end of hostilities and being demobbed?
LJG: We were given an option what we could train and I decided I’d be a storekeeper. Nice quiet job. So I went to Blackpool. Done about a three month course I suppose and graduated from that I suppose they call it and went home and said report to North Weald and I flew out to Singapore via Karachi and I spent the rest of my service career in Singapore. RAF Seletar till May the 9th. I got home and was demobbed. Went to Blackpool to be demobbed. Yeah. Great.
CB: Then what?
LJG: Well then I had a job to settle down. It’s such a different world, you know, coming back in to the real world. You had everything done for you in the air force. In Singapore I was a flight sergeant then. Got reasonably well paid. Everything found. Come home. Tried to find a job anything like it but couldn’t you know. Eight or nine pound a week was a lot you could get. Then you had to travel to get it. I had loads of jobs but none of them, I went into Parker Knolls in Wycombe being a store keeper but it didn’t last long. I used to cycle to Slough and I got a job in [Citroen?] cars being a storekeeper there and I moved from there into repair work in the factory all the small [?] I used to have. Used to repair them. Odd jobs. Then 1960 and I was getting fed up with it anyway. It was a long cycle ride and it was, the bus fare took a lot out of the pay packet. So my wife was working at [Broomways?] in High Wycombe then when it was a big factory and she said there’s plenty of jobs going over there. Go and try and get a job there which I did and I was there sixteen, seventeen years. Then I found I was getting on in years and I worked in a heavy division in [Broomway?] big compressors. Twenty six, twenty seven inch pistons. Had a job to lift them in and I got a job, oh I went to a company in Cressex called [?] Spark as a fitter, a general fitter but I was only there three years and it was taken over by an American company and most of them were made redundant. Fortunately, my luck was with me again. My brother was a union man. He got me a job at Harrison’s which used to be the sand factory in Wycombe and that’s where I stayed until I retired in 1948. Yeah. And that is my career as such and since then I’ve done nothing really exciting.
CB: So what age did you retire?
LJG: 65.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: So not 1948.
LJG: Hmmn?
CB: Not 1948.
LJG: [laughs] No, 1988 sorry.
CB: ‘88.
LJG: Yeah sorry I apologise. Yeah 1988.
CB: Ok. What was your most memorable experience of flying in the war?
LJG: [laughs] well the most frightening was Dresden I think. It was such a long way. It was over nine hours and when you think flying don’t start until the wheels are off the ground. When the skipper says, ‘Undercarriage up.’ That’s when you start flying. That’s when the time starts but you could have been in the plane a half an hour. I mean you get in, make sure everything alright, taxi around, you could, that could take you ten minutes and the same coming back you know as soon as the navigator feels the wheels hit the ground then you stop flying but you’ve got a long way to go back to dispersal and sort things out.
CB: Right.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: So what was frightening about Dresden?
LJG: Well I think it was just tiredness you know and –
CB: What do you remember about the raid itself?
LJG: Well, that was, that seemed to be quite easy but we did have a scare. I suppose you know that the actions of a pilot if you’re attacked by a fighter is dive and corkscrew.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Right. Well, George, the rear gunner thought he saw a Messerschmitt so he said dive port so down we go but nobody’s ready for it you know so all the papers the navigator’s got – all over the place. And he brought us back by the stars which was great but other than that we had quite an uneventful, just a job really. Just get in, go over there, drop the bombs, and come home again, you know. Go and have a drink.
CB: On how many occasions did you shoot at another aircraft?
LJG: Never. I never fired my guns once.
CB: Why was that?
LJG: No need. We only have to defend. Not to attack. Try to get out of trouble if you could rather than look in to it you know.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: My skipper was married and he wanted to get home to his wife [laughs]. No chances. No.
CB: No.
LJG: No it really was –
CB: Did you get attacked and hit on any occasion?
LJG: We did have one which only affected me. I suppose other people will tell you towards the end of the war the Germans didn’t attack individual aircraft they had a barrage of anti-aircraft guns and they decided to lose, let the bullets explode at a certain height so you had to go through it. That’s why we staggered at different bombing heights. Halifaxes went in lower because they couldn’t manage the height and we went in higher but they’d alternate it. Hopefully we could get away with it you know and that and so the explosion on hitting you, an explosion at a certain height. Well I had one. An 88 and through the fuselage at the floor, between my legs, between the guns, out the top and never went off.
CB: Oh a complete shell.
LJG: A complete shell.
CB: Yeah. And how did you know it was an 88?
LJG: By the size of the hole.
CB: Right.
LJG: Well that’s what, I’m only going with what the ground staff said.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. So this is the flak box -
LJG: Yeah. Oh yeah.
CB: That you’re talking about.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: And their detonation is based on a time.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: At height.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: To hit the height. Yeah. So it went wrong.
LJG: Yeah I mean when you get a raid of six or seven hundred aeroplanes you probably have four or five different heights. The first one would go in at say twenty thousand feet. The next hundred would go in at eighteen thousand feet and I think we were one of the lucky ones. It went straight through and out the other end.
CB: Did the, you were in the dark so it’s difficult to see but could you see effectively when you were approaching a flak box?
LJG: No. No. Only if it was I mean because me as mid upper I was always circulating.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: You know. George the rear gunner done ahead and below. Not so much above because he had a job to see above so I had the bits above and then I could, sometimes you could see it but often or not it was below you.
CB: Did you ever get attacked by a fighter from underneath?
LJG: No. No this one that George saw coming back from Dresden it was way up, you know. And he seemed to think it was coming towards us and then it veered away but we got away with it.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Unfortunately a lot of them didn’t but we did.
CB: Yeah. And as a crew how did you get on?
LJG: Great. We had a great time ‘cause funnily enough George, the rear gunner, lived at Clare and if you know that area at all in Suffolk Clare’s only about seven miles from Chedburgh.
CB: Right.
LJG: And the skipper had an old Austin 7.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: And the bomb aimer, the er flight engineer didn’t drink. He’d have a half a shandy last him all night. So he would buy his half a shandy, sit in the mess near the phone and near the phone was where battle orders went up the following day for the following either morning or night so we was off, we’d go down to Clare. Six of us in an Austin Ruby. If the weather was bad you stood on the running board if it was foggy and go down to George’s local and then when battle orders went up if we were on Don would give us, give us a ring. We’d say we’ll be in The Globe tonight or be in The Cock in Clare so he’d ring up, ‘Oh you’re not on tonight,’ so we’d stay there till one or 2 o’clock in the morning but we did get caught out once. I can’t think where it was we were going but it was we had a phone call at 7 o’clock to say, ‘You’re not on, there’s a raid, a daylight raid, take-off is at 6 o’clock but you’re not on it, we’re not on it.’ He rings up at 11 o’clock to say, ‘We are on it,’ so we had to get back, try and have a shower, sober yourself up and do a trip at about 6 o’clock the following morning. But that was life you know.
CB: When the battle orders went up how did the briefing work?
LJG: Hmmn?
CB: When the battle orders went up how did your briefing work?
LJG: Well -
CB: Because some of the crew were briefed differently -
LJG: Yeah.
CB: From the others. So how did that work?
LJG: Oh you were woken up by one of the people on guard, you signed a book to say you had, you’d been woken up. You had your breakfast. Then go to briefing. Then you get dressed afterwards. I mean the, it was only the two gunners really that had to get dressed as such. We wore a kapok suit with electric wires down it, and slippers with electric wires in it and gloves, the same. All connected up in your boots and, but the others they just wore the uniform.
CB: So the, how did the electric system work? You plugged it in how? ‘Cause you’re the mid upper. How did you plug that in?
LJG: Well each engine done something. I can’t remember which one was which.
CB: Right.
LJG: One done the electrics. One done the hydraulics but it was great because it wasn’t very comfortable in the mid upper turret. It wasn’t a very big comfortable seat. I mean George was alright in the rear turret. He had quite a cushy, and all this but my seat it reminded me of a child’s swing and that’s about what it was. A piece about so big. Fifteen by eighteen by six padded and you dropped it down off the hook to get in and you stood up and you hooked it back up again and got on it but it wasn’t very comfortable. Especially a trip like Dresden. Nine hours or something. No. But there we go. We got it.
CB: Just going back to the briefing. The pilot and the navigator would be briefed together would they? And how -
LJG: We’d all be briefed together.
CB: All briefed together.
LJG: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Right.
LJG: Well in my day anyway.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: So you come out, you go into a large room.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Where the initial briefing is carried out. Is that right?
LJG: Yeah. The -
CB: All the crews go in.
LJG: At the end of the hall it would be a big map.
CB: Right.
LJG: With the route.
CB: The route marked on it.
LJG: The route from Chedburgh to where we’re going to bomb.
CB: Right.
LJG: And then, I mean the squadron commander which in my case was warrant officer er Wing Commander Smith. He would tell you which way you were going and which way you were coming back and he’d ask then for questions from experienced pilots that was it, was anything going to be made better or easier. All we do is get there. I mean some places flak was quite heavy. Some it was quite light you know so it was, and then of course the weather man would get up and have a chat but he was never very good [laughs]. Our weather was more predictable from George’s parents. They had a small holding in Clare and he would tell you, you know what it was going to be tomorrow. Over here anyway and he was never wrong but sometimes the weather man got it wrong but you just accepted it didn’t you?
CB: What sort of mistakes would he make?
LJG: Well I mean he would tell you you were going to have clear skies and no cloud at all and when you got there you couldn’t see a thing but of course you must remember that in ‘45 a lot of bombing was done on flares and bombs with colours.
CB: Markers. The markers.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Yes.
LJG: So it didn’t really matter much about the weather being bad. You could, you could see a yellow marker at twenty thousand feet even if it was foggy you know so you had a good idea and of course towards the middle of April, February, March and April H2S was coming in which was another godsend. That was the, helpful for the bomb aimer wasn’t it? Yeah.
CB: Ok. Now you said you did three sorties in Operation Manna which was supplying food to the Dutch civilians. Yeah.
LJG: That’s right.
CB: Because they were starving.
LJG: I’m sure -
CB: So what, what how did that work? Initially, as you said there was no agreement with the Germans so how did it work over here? In other words what was the briefing for that because there was no agreement?
LJG: Well the, it was packed in sacks in the bomb bay and we were given a special route and a height and a speed so, we, it was quite an easy route really. I think the first one -
CB: I wonder, I wonder what you expected because if the Germans hadn’t given the ok at that point what was the crew’s reaction to the lack of authority to do it?
LJG: Well, they were, I think most of them were concerned because as I say never trust a German anyway but I think one or two did shoot at us but it never affected us. No. But we were only at about five hundred feet I think or probably a bit lower. It was quite low and I know the Lanc is quite good but it wasn’t designed for low level bombing. I mean, I know they done the Dambusters but that was exceptional. You couldn’t do that all the time.
CB: No.
LJG: I don’t think. They were really a high level bombing aircraft. Yeah.
CB: Now. What sort of height were you dropping?
LJG: Where?
CB: When you were dropping the food.
LJG: Manna. Manna.
CB: Manna. What sort of height were you flying?
LJG: Anything under five hundred feet.
CB: And do you know what speed you were flying at?
LJG: Speed?
CB: Ahum.
LJG: Just above stalling speed. About a hundred miles an hour.
CB: Oh really.
LJG: Yeah. Well we weren’t sure whether, what damage we could do ‘cause most of it was loose stuff you know. Flour and things like that. Potatoes. I think there was some canned stuff but they were concerned about it. Yeah. That was my first one. May the, April 29th I’m sure it was.
CB: So you did three of those? To different places were they or -
LJG: Yeah.
CB: The same place?
LJG: Yeah well I have got them down here somewhere. Here we are. Two to The Hague and one to Rotterdam. The first one was Rotterdam. It’s only just over three hours there and back.
CB: Ok. Now you then talked about Exodus which was the repatriation of prisoners of war.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Where did you pick those prisoners up?
LJG: Juvincourt.
CB: Where’s that?
LJG: In France.
CB: Right.
LJG: That’s the only airport or aerodrome capable of taking the Lanc.
CB: Whereabouts is that in France?
LJG: I’ve no idea. No idea.
CB: No.
LJG: But I’m sure it was Juvincourt.
[pause]
CB: I’ll just stop the tape a mo and we can take a look.
[machine paused]
CB: Right.
LJG: Westcott.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Dunsfold.
CB: Yeah. So can we just, go over that? When you were doing the Exodus you you flew each time into Juvincourt.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: In France.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: And then you flew where? What were the places you flew to?
LJG: That was it.
CB: So -
LJG: Tangmere was the first one.
CB: Ok.
LJG: Ford.
CB: Which was -
LJG: On the south coast.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: As well, well they were all on the south coast weren’t they? Ford was the third one. Westcott was the fourth one.
CB: Near Aylesbury.
LJG: Dunsfold.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: And Oakley.
CB: Yeah. Ok. North of Oxford. Yes.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: And how many, how many prisoners were they and what type of prisoners did you take each time?
LJG: Well they were all in fairly good condition. Well they had to be, you know, fit. Really. Well not really fit but they had to be reasonable to take the flight you know.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: We didn’t have oxygen masks for everybody so we had to keep under eight thousand feet anyway so we used to come back at about three or four thousand feet.
CB: Would there be several aircraft together doing that or –
LJG: Pardon?
CB: Would you be with several other aircraft?
LJG: Oh yeah.
CB: At the same time.
LJG: Yeah there would be -
CB: So you’d fly a stream would you?
LJG: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Right.
LJG: Quiet a stream of them actually. You had to be careful though because they were so keen, these POWs, to get home which was understandable and they used to wander about a bit and you know you can wander about too far in a Lancaster because we didn’t stop the engines.
CB: Right.
LJG: They were just ticking over but you could walk in to the prop and not know it you know and because it was my responsibility as, because I was the last one in you know.
CB: So what was your responsibility in that case?
LJG: Well, yeah.
CB: Was it, you’re responsible for loading up?
LJG: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Ok. How many in the aircraft?
LJG: Twenty four.
CB: Ok.
LJG: Two rows of twelve
CB: Yeah. Just sitting on what?
LJG: They sat on the floor, legs apart so they got two rows together. Yeah.
CB: And how long were the flights?
LJG: Well -
CB: Roughly.
LJG: An hour and a half.
CB: Right. Ok.
LJG: Two hours.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Nothing much. That was getting there and coming back was that much.
CB: So when you got in did you get up in to your turret or where did you go?
LJG: I was stood by the door.
CB: Right.
LJG: You know, to stop them, to stop them well walking about really. Had to be there. An aeroplane can be dangerous.
CB: LJG: Yeah.
So, yeah Ford and Tangmere. Tangmere was four hours there and back. Well from base to Juvincourt
CB: So the engines were running and you just, they climbed in while you were stationery.
LJG: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: With the engines running.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: I was the only one that got out.
CB: Were there any cases of accidents in that?
LJG: Not to my knowledge. No. No.
CB: Right.
LJG: As I say all the rest of the crew just stayed where they were you know. The marshall who was organising it used to bring them over in twenty fours and hand them over to me, you know.
CB: Right. Ok. We’ll stop there for a bit.
[machine pause]
CB: Right my witness today is Vic Truesdale and I’m just going to ask him whether he has any questions to put to Joe. Vic -
VT: I was just wondering what it was like, what difference there might have been for you between the daylight raids and the night time raids? I mean was it very routine and just the same more or less or -
LJG: Well I think we just took it in our stride you know. We looked on it mostly as a job. Yeah. A job that we wanted to do but I mean we were all volunteers and I didn’t mind daylights actually although we done as many nights as we did daylights although it was a daylight squadron. It was formed for that reason really. Well moved down to Suffolk because it had been all over the place hadn’t it? I think Woolford Lodge was a place it went to.
CB: Woolfox Lodge.
LJG: And -
CB: In Rutland.
LJG: Hmmn?
CB: Woolfox Lodge.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: In Rutland. Yeah.
LJG: Downham Market. They found Methwold a bit small I think.
CB: Did they?
LJG: Well even Chedburgh, I mean one of the runway was quite short really and it, you had to get really get back on the fence at the end of the runway to make sure you got off alright.
CB: Did you?
LJG: Yeah. There’s a lot weight. Especially if you’re going to the Ruhr. Happy Valley everybody called it. I mean probably have fourteen thousand pounds of bombs. A cookie. Four thousand pounder and ten one thousand pounders. I mean you couldn’t bring them back. You had to drop them somewhere. But I didn’t mind daylights actually.
VT: Forgive my ignorance but did you have an escort on the daylight raids?
LJG: No.
VT: No.
LJG: No. No. Only had each other.
VT: Yeah. And how much time you were actually up in the mid gun position when you were on a typical trip shall we say?
LJG: Well er-
VT: When did you go up and come down and things like that?
LJG: When did I get in?
VT: Yeah.
LJG: I was always the last one in the aeroplane. You got in an aeroplane in order. The bomb aimer went in first because his position was right in the front. Then the skipper. Then the flight engineer. Navigator. And wireless operator and he closed the bulkhead doors. That’s why they could wear their uniforms. That was the bit that was heated.
VT: Right.
LJG: Then George got in. Then I got in and then they would shut the door and take the ladder away but I always had to make sure the door was shut. Well I did anyway.
VT: The last one in.
LJG: And then you’d be sat in there and as I say well you’d be in there before the doors shut, the flight sergeant in charge of the aeroplane, to make sure it was alright had to sign the 600.
CB: Form 600.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: To say that everything was ok and the skipper was pleased with it and then, then you had to wait for permission to taxi although the engine was still going but they weren’t revving they were just ticking over. You were told to taxi around and the same coming back. I was always the first out then [laughs], it was, yeah.
CB: So when you were taxiing there would normally be a plane in front and another behind would there?
LJG: Oh yeah.
CB: And how long would it take to get from your dispersal to the end of the runway?
LJG: Well depends which runway you were using.
CB: Right, but on balance -
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Did you always park at the same place?
LJG: Oh yeah. Yeah.
CB: So -
LJG: Each aircraft had its own dispersal.
CB: Right.
LJG: You might not fly in the same aircraft as you can see by that it is R-Roger was our favourite but you had others as well and you took them back where you got them from. Then you’d wait then for the crew bus to take you back to debriefing.
CB: Afterwards.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Just quickly. That’s an interesting point. Why would one plane be more popular, your favourite, R-Roger than the others?
LJG: It was just one of those things I think. You know. You just felt, just felt good with it. I mean nobody like flying Q-Queenie and I don’t think it ever done a full op. There was always trouble with it but nobody could find out why. It was weird you know. You get used to an aeroplane. Plus we had it quite new anyway which was a blessing. R-Roger was very good. So -
VT: And would you like to say a bit more about the, I think you mentioned two targets including the mercy missions. Three or four targets. I just thought you might like to mention a few more.
LJG: I’m sorry I’ve got a problem with my hearing.
CB: Ok. Ok.
VT: Chris will relay -
CB: You did, when went on raids you went to different places so what were the targets that you hit? What are, what are the ones you’ve got there?
LJG: Oh yes.
[pause]
CB: Just looking in the logbook.
LJG: Yes.
[pause]
CB: That’s it.
LJG: As I said Munchen Gladbach was the first one.
CB: Yes.
LJG: That was a daylight. Then operation two was at Wiesbaden, a night drop. Operation three was Dortmund. That was a night drop. Then we done Dresden. Oh no we done one before. It was a daylight. [?]. Then we done Dresden which was nine and a half hours and the following night we done Chemnitz.
CB: Oh did you. Along the road.
LJG: That was nine hours.
CB: Nine hours as well.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Right. They were the two -
LJG: And then we done Dortmund. Another night one. Then we done Geilenkirchen. The next op we didn’t do because we got halfway there and we had engine trouble so we came back. Then the next one was a daylight to Dortmund on the sixth, in February. Datteln was another daylight raid. Geilenkirchen again. Dortmund again. Datteln again. Geilenkirchen again. [?] and that was the end of my bombing career. Oh no. Kirsburg and Kiel. Kiel was our last one. That was a day er a night trip.
CB: Kiel. Kiel was a major one at the end wasn’t it?
LJG: Yeah. Yeah that’s when they sunk the Gneisenau.
CB: Yeah. You mentioned Chemnitz. So that’s the same distance as going to -
LJG: Dresden.
CB: Dresden and they’re relatively close.
LJG: Well it’s in the same area.
CB: Exactly.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: So what was that one, how different was that from going to Dresden? Was it any different? Or -
LJG: No actually I think it was a better raid. We didn’t have any problems at all. Quite a nice raid actually. If you can call a bombing raid great.
CB: Well there were some experiences easier than others weren’t they?
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Why were some of the operations in daylight?
LJG: Well I think that’s what the war command wanted you know. I mean the Ruhr was very popular wasn’t it?
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Yeah. I mean which was the -
CB: Major place.
LJG: Major -
CB: Of military production.
LJG: Yeah. Yeah. We stopped that.
CB: Ok.
LJG: Kiel was a nice one.
CB: Yeah. But when you were in your daylight raids were there many fighters around?
LJG: We never ever saw one.
CB: No.
LJG: No. It wasn’t until almost at the end of the war we did, we saw a 262.
CB: Jet yes.
LJG: That was, I think that was in April.
CB: That was in daylight.
LJG: In daylight.
CB: LJG: Yeah.
LJG: But he was going the other way.
CB: Oh.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: And did he, did you see him shoot at anybody?
LJG: No. No. He was, he was above us actually but he was quite a long way away. As a matter of fact I wasn’t sure what it was and then George said, ‘Well that’s a, funny,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know they had a twin engine,’ he said, ‘But they got no propellers on it.’ He said, ‘It’s weird.’ And when we got back we reported it, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘That’s a jet engine.’ But no.
CB: What were the levels of losses like in your time? What was the rate of loss of aircraft in your time?
LJG: Very good. Very good. In my, as I say we got there, we got there on January 1st actually but we didn’t start bombing until February the 1st and our last raid was in April. We had three losses I think. That was all.
CB: Right.
LJG: Yeah. Unfortunately, it was one that we’d done towards the end of the war experienced pilots and experienced crews which we were considered to be after we’d done a dozen ops or so if a new crew came onto the squadron we’d often take the pilot with us and we took this new pilot –
CB: Just the pilot.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Just to give them some experience you know and the following day we was on a daylight and we lost him.
CB: Oh.
LJG: That was his only op but we don’t know what happened to him ‘cause one minute he’s there, the next minute, ‘cause once you’re on the bombing run you’re interested in yourself, not anyone else and as I say my job is to scan the sky above us.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Or in front of us and when we got back he was reported missing. And we had one which was lucky in one respect. He had an engine cut out, port inner, course he veered over and he landed in a field between the WAAF quarters and the airmen’s mess. Well he crashed in a field but only the rear gunner got out.
CB: Oh.
LJG: When it blew up it shattered off the rear turret and he was found a few yards away. He had a lot of broken bones but he was still alive and I think he was still alive when I left the squadron but that’s the only two I can remember.
CB: Right.
[machine pause]
CB: Now we haven’t talked much about your wife so where did you meet your wife? Under what circumstances and when?
LJG: I walked her home from the pictures when I was on leave one day. But I didn’t see her then until after the war.
CB: Oh.
LJG: No. I had, well I don’t know, I had lots of girlfriends but I didn’t think it was wise, being in the job I was on, you know, survival rate was very bad wasn’t it? So I didn’t want to put her through -. It was after the war, one of the jobs I tried to do I worked for the War Graves Commission and she worked there in the office and we met from then, you know. That was in 1947 ‘48. I didn’t stay there long because although it was civil service it had lots of perks but didn’t have a very high salary.
CB: Now you mentioned very briefly about the police so when you left school then you worked in the daytime but you also did another job for the police. What was that?
LJG: Yeah. We was, well sort of couriers they were in case the phones broke down and they wanted to contact other people in the area we would cycle along with the messages.
CB: Right.
LJG: So we stayed in the police station two nights a week. There was quite a few of us.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: And we stayed there overnight in case. This was, well, the beginning of the war of course. Yeah. It was alright. Yeah.
CB: It gave you something to do that was useful.
LJG: Slept in the cells.
CB: I was just going to ask you that. Yeah.
LJG: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Good. Just tell us about please about air gunnery. So when you were learning air gunnery how did that work? So from the beginning of being at Bishop’s Court what did you do. When you arrived, then what did you do?
LJG: Well our first training was with a twelve bore shotgun and -
CB: Yeah.
LJG: What do they call them?
VT: Clay -
CB: Clay pigeon.
LJG: Yeah. We had a few days of that and we had, I was very good at this, I could strip a Browning machine gun with my eyes shut and put it back together. Not everybody could do that and it was, I’d been there oh two or three weeks before we started flying you know and they flew, we had all Ansons to fly in, you know with a mid upper turret.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: And another aircraft would fly a drogue and there was usually four of us in there with, and we’d have a couple of hundred bullets all painted different colours so if you hit the drogue your colour would show up. Blue, yellow, greens and clear you’d all fire a couple of hundred rounds and come back, come back down again.
CB: Ok.
LJG: And they had, we also had cinecameras with, for fighter affiliation. Instead of -
CB: Ok.
LJG: Bullets you had a cinecamera.
CB: How did the fighter affiliation work? Who did what?
LJG: Well you had, you went into the turret with this special gun with adapted, with a film in it and it was usually an old Hurricane they had at Bishop’s Court attack you and you’d film it as if you were shooting it, you know.
CB: How did you get on with that?
LJG: Reasonable. It wasn’t until Peplow I think that I really got used to guns ‘cause we had Wellingtons there and George and I, the other gunner would take turns to be in the turret and then we had fighter affiliation, fighter affiliation there and I got better as the day went on, you know.
CB: In the fighter affiliation what exactly did the fighter do?
LJG: Well he would try and shoot you down. He would attack you as if he was going to shoot you down and you had to -
CB: So what angles would he come in at?
LJG: Hmmn?
CB: At what angles would he come in at?
LJG: All angles. All angles. Usually he’d try and get you in the sun but if you had a good skipper it didn’t matter but of course that was the most dangerous place isn’t it? In the sun.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: You don’t see them. Although we had sun, sun goggles you could put down it wasn’t the same.
CB: Did you have sun glasses or just sun goggles?
LJG: Well they were tinted goggles.
CB: Right.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Ok. Now when you’re flying as a gunner then you talked earlier about corkscrew which was getting the aircraft out of a jam, who would be calling the corkscrew normally?
LJG: Well, whichever gunner saw, saw something, you know.
CB: You said everybody was caught unawares by the rear gunner would they, would normally there would there be some kind of warning would they when it was far away?
LJG: Well -
CB: How would that work?
LJG: Well, it all depends on what you saw and when you saw it, you know. As I say we didn’t go looking for trouble. We tried to avoid it -
CB: Yeah.
LJG: If we could you know. I think that’s what George. I think he saw something and he wasn’t sure what it was and although he seemed to be going towards you from, but at an angle he decided he would corkscrew.
CB: Right.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: And how did the corkscrew work?
LJG: Well you turned in, you dived in to the direction that he was coming.
CB: Oh did you?
LJG: So if he was coming from the port quarter you would corkscrew port, roll, corkscrew starboard roll climb port climb starboard.
CB: Back on to where you were.
LJG: Back on to there. Hopefully you get back on the same course you know but we were fortunate we had a good navigator. He always got us there on time, always got us back on time.
VT: Did the Germans know that the corkscrew was a manoeuvre? A standard manoeuvre.
LJG: Oh yeah. Yeah. It was for a Lancaster. Yeah. I don’t know whether it would apply to a Halifax ‘cause they’re so different to fly. In fact my skipper reckoned the Lanc acted like a fighter pilot it was that easy to fly. Had lovely lines didn’t it?
CB: Brilliant. What was the combination of crew? Were they all British or –
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Where? Did you have a mixture?
LJG: Alfie Kemp was the skipper. He came from Bradford. Vic [Giles?] was the bomb aimer. He was an East Ender. Don Pryor was the flight engineer. He came from Peterborough. Dicky Ball, navigator. He came from Newton Abbott. Len Garnett, the wireless operator, he came from Leeds. I came from Marlow and George came from Clare. George Green, the rear gunner, came from Clare. As I say the six of us got on well. Well we got on alright with Don but he just –
CB: George Green did you say?
LJG: George Green. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: No relation [laughs].
CB: No. What was the engineer’s name?
LJG: Engineer?
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Donald Pryor.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Donald Pryor.
CB: Yeah. Ok. On the social side Joe the crew all gelled together very well professionally.
LJG: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And on the social side but one of the crew was an officer so -
LJG: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: How did he fit in with all the sergeants?
LJG: Yeah. He fitted in quite well. Yeah. Well I think he realised he had to rough it like the rest of us if he wanted to get on. And he did. He was great. Dickie. Yeah.
CB: Were you all sergeants or flight sergeants or what were you?
LJG: We were all sergeants, the six of us, when we joined 218. Now Alfie got his flight sergeant [pause] Yes. When we joined Sandtoft Heavy Conversion Unit.
CB: Yeah he became -
LJG: He became a flight sergeant.
CB: A flight sergeant. That’s the pilot.
LJG: And he got his commission -
CB: Yeah. Oh.
LJG: Towards the end of the war. April I think or March. March I think.
CB: Ok. Now after the war Joe how did, did they crew keep in contact or what happened?
LJG: Richard, or Dickie as we always called him, we kept in touch for a few years. He was the best man at my wedding actually.
CB: Was he?
LJG: But in the end they all married and gone to different places. George moved to Lincoln, Vic moved to Ipswich. I don’t know what happened to the skipper. I think I’m the only one alive. It’s, it’s only Dickie, the navigator.
CB: Navigator.
LJG: I’m not sure of -
CB: Yeah. Ok.
LJG: But the skipper is gone.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: The bomb aimer is gone. The bomb aimer went quite young. The wireless op’s gone. Don’s gone, Don Pryor went when he was in his forties. George died last year.
CB: Right. Ok. What was the greatest achievement do you think when you were in the RAF? What made you feel really proud?
LJG: Just thinking that we won. Yeah. And being part of it. Yeah. I enjoyed it. I think I went in with the right attitude that it’s a job I wanted to do. I wanted to fly and I think that that was my achievement you know.
CB: How do you feel about the, not having the opportunity of shooting down anything?
LJG: Well, not really. No. I didn’t think it mattered. As long as we’d done what we had to do.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Which was get there, drop the bombs, come home again ready for the next lot. I don’t think it mattered. Chasing after them wouldn’t have made any difference. The risks were too great. I mean that was their job wasn’t it?
CB: Yeah.
LJG: We had, we had an aeroplane full of bombs and we were told to take it somewhere drop them.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: And that’s what we done.
CB: Your job was to defend the aircraft. Not to shoot down other -
LJG: Well yeah.
CB: Planes. Yeah.
LJG: Avoid it if possible. I mean if you shoot down a Messerschmitt you’ve only killed one man in an aeroplane. If a Messerschmitt shoots down a Lancaster he’s killed seven people. You know. I think the odds were too great to go looking after trouble.
CB: Yeah.
VT: Did some crew go and look for trouble?
LJG: Yeah.
VT: Yeah.
LJG: Oh yeah.
VT: Can you tell us a bit about that?
LJG: Well I mean it’s only hearsay.
VT: Alright. What’s the hearsay then?
LJG: That they would look for trouble.
VT: So what would they do?
LJG: If they saw an aeroplane which they thought was a German they’d go after it or fly in that direction but I mean it was too dangerous for the rest of the crew because we went in a stream. I mean we weren’t like the Yanks. The Yanks made a formed a squadron pattern here in England and they all went out together. We would form a stream on the way out -
VT: Right.
LJG: You wouldn’t catch up in an aeroplane until you got to Brighton. So we didn’t look for trouble. If you stayed where you were supposed to be -
VT: Yeah.
LJG: You would bomb at the height you were supposed to be and there was always the risk that if you were on the lower tier someone up above would drop one on you but that’s the risk you had to take and that was my job you know. If there was one above me, dead above me, I would tell the skipper, you know. ‘There’s a Lanc above us skipper.’ ‘Which way do you want to go?’ He’d decide. I would tell him where it was and he was the skipper. He was the governor. You done what you were told. You tell him what’s happening and he, he’d solve the problem. Either move port or move starboard you know. It depends on where the stream was and what position you were in the stream. I mean we weren’t wing tip to wing tip. I mean we could be a mile wide and gradually move in to the target as we got closer to it. I mean it was, you were an individual really although you were part of a stream.
VT: Yeah.
CB: How much of the time could you see other bombers?
LJG: Hmmn?
CB: How much of the time could you see other bombers?
LJG: At night. Never see one at all.
CB: Right.
LJG: Very very rare unless it was a good moon but of course in daylight you would see them quite a lot.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Because you could be, depends on where you are in the stream they could be all around you.
CB: So just as a, why was it that Bomber Command flew in a stream and not in formation?
LJG: I’ve no idea.
CB: I would suggest it’s because it’s impossible to fly and it’s dangerous to try and fly in formation.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: In the dark.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: So the bomber stream is simply everybody’s going the same way.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: But the danger is as you just said ‘cause you can’t see anybody else -
LJG: The secret of that was you had to be at the right place at the right time.
CB: Right.
LJG: I mean if we went to the Ruhr from Chedburgh it would be base, Reading, Brighton and across the channel from there and then the course would be variable depending on hot spots.
CB: Why did, why did, why did the bomber stream not go straight out across from Chedburgh across Holland?
LJG: Well -
CB: In to Germany.
LJG: There were hot spots that were heavily defended. Very heavily defended. Others not so heavily defended.
CB: With anti-aircraft guns.
LJG: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Right.
LJG: So we, they tried to pick the safest route for us and the same the way back so you if you all went the same way and turned at the same time everything would be in the right place and you, the chance of having a collision were remote but you had to do what you were told to do.
CB: Yeah. Now on the bombing run the aircraft has to be stabilised.
LJG: Yeah. Yeah. Two minutes.
CB: So how, two minutes before was it?
LJG: Two minutes yeah.
CB: And then how many minutes after bombs gone did you keep straight and level?
LJG: As soon as you could. Get back in to the stream.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: ‘Cause you had, you to had to hold on for a while to do the photoflash.
LJG: Do the photograph.
CB: Right.
LJG: Yeah. It was only a few seconds really. About fifteen, twenty seconds. As soon as the skipper said, ‘Bomb doors closed,’ that was the sign to get moving.
CB: Right.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: You mentioned earlier about H2S radar system. Was that used very much?
LJG: Well, it was, it was used more at night than it was at daylight. You only used it at daylight I think if the weather was bad but we did use it once or twice yeah and got quite good results apparently. I mean I don’t know. I’m not a technician. The briefers, debriefers would sort that out, you know.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Another question. You carried a bomb load of how much normally? What sort of weight of bombs?
LJG: Depends where you went. I mean the aircraft was only safe with a certain weight in it so the more petrol you had the less bombs you had. At Dresden I don’t think was only six or seven thousand. I don’t, I don’t really know about the bomb load but it was a long way.
CB: Right.
LJG: So you had, I think you had twenty two, fifty gallons of petrol so that means the bomb load is displaced but Happy Valley say, you’d have fourteen thousand, fifteen thousand pounds of bombs and less tanks.
CB: So you talked about the cookie so could you describe what was the cookie?
LJG: Pardon?
CB: CB: What was -
LJG: Cookie.
CB: A cookie. Can you describe it?
LJG: A four thousand pounder.
CB: Yeah well what was in it?
LJG: Well that would depend on what the target was and what they wanted to do. There were devising one that exploded a thousand feet above the ground full of incendiaries and you only dropped high explosives, splatter it all over and a cookie would set fire to it. It was like an oil drum really.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: It was. Not a very attractive looking bomb but there again it mattered it was only going down. It wasn’t going anywhere else.
CB: It didn’t have any fins on it did it?
LJG: No. No. No.
CB: It was just like a big barrel.
LJG: Just like a forty gallon oil drum or a bit longer than that actually. Yeah.
CB: Ok.
[machine pause]
LJG: I think it was about four pound a week on the squadron.
CB: So the pay was in two parts was it? There was a basic pay and then a flying pay.
LJG: No. They just -
CB: Or just a basic -
LJG: Just a single pay.
CB: Ok and how much was that?
LJG: I think it was about four pound a week.
CB: And what was that in relation to what other people were getting?
LJG: Well I think we were reasonably well paid considering. I don’t know what other people were getting. No idea.
CB: In civilian life I mean. In civilian life -
LJG: Well –
CB: Was it better than or worse?
LJG: Well I don’t think there was much in it really. I know my elder brother he was an apprentice cabinet maker and he finished his apprenticeship as the war started but you see he was a lot older than me and I remember him coming home he had four pound and sixpence and he gave me the sixpence. Yeah.
CB: Because it bought a lot in those days.
LJG: Well yeah I mean three pounds was a good wage.
CB: Yeah that’s what I meant you see.
LJG: But then again things were that cheap anyway weren’t they you know. I mean I remember Tesco opening in Wycombe when it was a small shop then and my wife and I were both working at [minimum wage?] and if she spent three pounds on groceries in a week she’d had a bad week [laughs] but now -
CB: This is a company called [Broomway] making compressors.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: We were just talking about when we, when you in the latter days you were in Singapore.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: And then you were ready for demob so what happened?
LJG: They just told us to pack up our clothes and they put us on a boat. Actually I was on the boat the day before because I was mess deck sergeant on the way home and when we got to Southampton unfortunately, well fortunately we were the first ones off because we had the farthest to go. We had to go from Southampton to Blackpool and we got in to Southampton quite early in the morning. Seven or 8 o’clock. Got on the train, got to Blackpool and we got out civvy kit. I got home at midnight that night. Yeah.
CB: All day travelling.
LJG: All day travelling yeah. I’d been travelling for three weeks.
CB: Amazing.
LJG: Well we, at that particular time they were, India was getting independence and we were evacuating in troops and we had a load of band boys we had to divert from Singapore to Bombay to pick up these band boys and they stuck them right down at the front. The lowest deck of all. And as we come out of Bombay a day out hit a typhoon and we had to heave to for a day and the boat was doing this.
VT: Yeah.
CB: Frightening.
LJG: They was, they was sick and sick and sick terrible but as I say we got out of it.
CB: How many people on the boat?
LJG: A couple of hundred I suppose.
CB: And what was the liner called?
LJG: HMS Otranto. Otranto yeah. I think it rocked when it was in port, in dock. Not very exciting.
CB: So then you had your demob. What was the most, you said it was difficult to settle. What was the thing that made it so difficult -
LJG: Well it’s such a change -
CB: To settle?
LJG: Wasn’t it? Such a change you know. I mean in Singapore it was the lap of luxury. I mean, fortunately I didn’t do any work. It was in ‘45 when the Singapore RAF were on strike.
CB: Oh.
LJG: All junior ranks it was. Senior ranks weren’t allowed to go on strike. And although I had a double rank you see I was flight sergeant AC2.
CB: Yeah
LJG: Anyway the -
CB: Because you were reserve?
LJG: Yeah
CB: Volunteer reserve.
LJG: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
LJG: And well Air Chief Marshall Sir Keith Park was in charge and Singapore was a pre-war station. We had lovely barrack blocks. Of course the Japs had used them so they were using.
CB: Right.
LJG: The swimming pool they used as an oil dump and everybody else, well [they had been?] on strike and this Mr Park he went to Australia I think and Group Captain Beamish became CO and he was sport mad. If you could play sport you were alright so I decided that I would play sport.
CB: What was your specialty then?
LJG: I was goalkeeper. I played for 389 MU. I played for the station once but if you were on guard duty and you were playing for the station you came off guard duty and went and played football.
CB: Oh right. Yeah.
LJG: And he got things going you know. He had football pitches marked out, he had a cinema cleaned out and working order. It was great.
CB: Right.
218 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bale out
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
briefing
crewing up
demobilisation
Halifax
Lancaster
military service conditions
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Chedburgh
RAF Sandtoft
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/121/2446/AEadyIET160628.2.mp3
a58a49784c2c048a7529917535777d5a
Dublin Core
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Title
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Eady, Liz
Liz Eady
I E T Eady
Description
An account of the resource
The collection consists of one oral history interview with Aircraftswoman Second Class Idina Elizabeth Tolley Eady (2131607 Royal Air Force), her service and pay book and three photographs. Liz Eady served as a telephonist at RAF Waddington.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Liz Eady and catalogued by Terry Hancock.
Identifier
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Eady, IET
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-06-28
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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.
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 28th of June 2016. I’m in Woking with Elizabeth Eady and we’re going to talk about what she was doing on the airfields in, during the war. So, Liz what are your earliest recollections of life?
IE: Do you mean life in the RAF?
CB: No at home.
IE: At home?
CB: Yes, and then leading to the RAF.
IE: Well we, we lived in a village and I was, I had a brother and a sister which – and there were also some other relations in the village. And then eventually – oh my father was, he grew tomatoes, cucumbers, he had about forty greenhouses. And then later on he was able to buy what was my grandfather’s house which had been divided into two. So, we had one half of it which was nearer to the town of Market Harborough. And we had a huge garden and we used to have lots of friends playing tennis and all that sort of thing. And then I went to a small private school, when I was what five would it be? Until I was eleven. And that was really very good. There was about ten of us altogether, boys and girls. And our classroom was in, what had been the stables of this house where the owner of the school lived. So, it was all quite sort of casual. And then, oh gosh I can’t remember. Oh, that’s right, then I had to come and I then went to – my Mother and Father thought because my, one of my Mother’s relations, their daughter had gone to Kettering High School, so that was my next place. Which really was a bit out of my depth. It was – so I did struggle for quite a while although I was very happy there because I made some very good friends. And I was keen on the sport. I represented them for tennis and all that sort. Gin, gin, it wasn’t gin [Laughs] and I was there for a little while and then my parents decided that probably it would be better if I went to boarding school. And I went to a private boarding school which was just outside Chorley Wood in Hertfordshire, was it called, Heronsgate, was the name of the village, which was run by two elderly sisters. Unfortunately, there was another girl there who had been at Kettering and she was very jealous of me if I had any friends there, so I wasn’t very happy. But I had some outdoor friends who were quite wealthy actually. But, and I used to go and stay with them sometimes at weekends because two of the children came to our school and I had to look after them, the little girl. And that was until – oh, I’ve got this wrong. That was before I went to Kettering High School. Kettering High School was my last one. Yes, they decided for some reason, I don’t know why, that they wanted me out of boarding school to be at home. Maybe because war was, you know, the way things were, it hadn’t actually started then. And I had to go home. And then I went to Kettering High School, that’s right. What did I do after that? Oh, that’s right. I very much wanted to be a dress designer. And I’d, there was, I started to go to Leicester College of Art. And it was a three-year course. And I’d got half way through when – I used to have to catch a train to Leicester, so I was having my breakfast early before anybody else to get the train. And then one day my Mother came in when I was having my breakfast and said ‘This is your last day, last week at college, you’ve got to go and get a job.’ And I thought ‘Gosh, what am I going to do?’ So, but there was no alternative. And I was just going down on the Monday morning. I thought ‘Well I must go in the town and see what, what sort of jobs there are going.’ And I happened to meet two people I knew and we got talking. And they said ‘Why don’t you come and join us? We’re at the corset factory but we’re working on parachutes and we need some more help.’ So, I thought ‘Oh, Father’ll go mad if he thinks I’m working at the corset factory, but still.’ So, I got an interview and I was working for AID, Aeronautical Inspection [department?]. And I was a leading viewer. I had five women under me. But because I wasn’t twenty-one I got half the pay. So, I was earning about two pounds fifty to their five pounds. Which was very difficult. And then my parents decided to move down to Buckinghamshire, Iver Heath. And where they had a village grocery store. And I was still at Market Harborough. But as I say I really hadn’t got enough money. I was dipping into my savings. So, I thought ‘Well I’ve got no alternative’. And I’d wanted to join the WAAF so I went home and I told them I was going home and I was going to join the WAAF. Which I did, I went for an interview at Northolt. And I got everything, they said they’d let me know. And that was about June I think, we got to September and I kept saying ‘I can’t think why I haven’t heard.’ Then it got to about October. I was doing the newspapers one morning, big headlines, ‘More women needed in the Armed Services,’ and I said to my Mother ‘Can’t understand this and I’m still waiting’ so she said ‘Oh no you won’t because your Father’s written up and said we can’t spare you.’ So big row, packed my bags and I was gone in a week. [Chuckling] And that’s when I went to, where did I go to? Oh gosh, I can’t remember. Might have been – oh Uxbridge I think it was, yes. And looking at the things, and I thought I’ll – I thought well I’d already done parachutes and so I said I’d like to go into that. But there were no vacancies for that and I really wasn’t sure. Then, I don’t know why, I just suddenly said telephonist. I thought ‘Well, it’ll give me a job after the war.’ And so I went to Harrogate first waiting for vacancy, I think I was there about a month, enjoyed Harrogate, had a wonderful time. Then they sent me to Bradford where I trained at the Bradford Telephone Exchange. And there were six of us and we were in civilian accommodation at night. And lovely lady she was, and she gave us too much food. [Laughs] I think she thought we were starving. And so really most of the mornings were taken up with our training and then we were sort of off duty quite early in the afternoon. And I discovered there was a wonderful lake up the road so we used to go and row, rowing. [Laughs] As I say there was about six of us. And there was one girl who had been a telephonist in civvie street. And anyway, we did the exam, and I had my paper and scribbled away at it. She kept going up for more paper, never seen anyone use so much paper, you know for an exam thing. I thought, ‘Well I’ve had it’ you know. And the next, well a week later when we had the, to go for the results, and the tutor said, when she came in, she said ‘I never thought I would have’ she said ‘It’s a tutor’s dream to have the perfect paper handed in’ and of course this girl was you know, it was hers.
CB: Yes.
IE: And it wasn’t, it was mine. A hundred per cent, and, first time in my life. [Laughs] And that’s when I was then sent to, I think it was Skellingthorpe. Oh no, no it wasn’t. It was Compton Bassett for training before I went onto telephonist job I think. Or did I go there first? I think I’m not sure.
CB: It’s alright.
IE: Anyway, I definitely went to Skellingthorpe. And there was already enough. I was a bit, you know, an extra bod there. And then they – I think it was the Rhodesians were at Waddington, and they were leaving to go elsewhere, so there was a vacancy for a telephonist at Waddington and nobody else was going to move, so I went. And that was wonderful. And the Rhodesians left and then we got the Australian squadron, two squadrons. 463 and 467. And I can’t remember. You’ll probably be able to tell me. I can’t remember, it wasn’t intelligence I don’t think. In the room I was in we had a switchboard there. And on the wall was the three, Waddington was the main base and then there was Skellingthorpe, Bardney and those. And then we had listed all the squadrons, what would that be?
CB: The operations board?
IE: Ah yes. But it wasn’t, was it operations? I don’t think so.
CB: It showed the availability of aircraft did it?
IE: Well, it was all listed up who was going where.
CB: Yes.
IE: And we had, quite, well they were mainly sort of Group Captains and such in there. I might tell you, when I knocked on, there was one. Oh, he loved his cups of tea. And I knocked, you know, go in salute smartly, ‘Good morning’ ‘Oh my God,’ he said ‘LACW Edey. Essence of pussy today chaps.’ I was the worst teamaker on the camp. Essence of pussy. [Laughter] He liked his tea, good and strong, plenty of sugar so his spoon stood up in the middle of it. [Chuckles] And I didn’t like tea anyway. But er, must have been operations was it?
CB: Well.
IE: No couldn’t have been.
CB: The other stations were satellites weren’t they?
IE: Waddington was the main base.
CB: Yes.
IE: And then the others were Bardney, Skellingthorpe what was the other one? Can’t think what I, what it was called now.
CB: But you were linking it all together were you?
IE: Um?
CB: You were linking the communications together?
IE: Oh yes. We were the main base, so I had a switchboard but I was also in touch with all the other, yes all the other –
CB: So, what was the task you were undertaking there?
IE: Um?
CB: What were you doing?
IE: Just on the switchboard, just answering whatever came in. And passing them onto whoever really. Just like an ordinary telephonist.
CB: Right.
IE: But mainly the calls were ones that didn’t go through the general switchboard and that.
CB: Because they were secure lines?
IE: Um. Yeah.
CB: That was the idea was it?
IE: Yeah, yes. Yes, so I did outside calls but the main ones inside were purely to the heads of the various departments. Like flying control and operations and that sort of thing.
CB: So what sort of shifts did you work?
IE: Um. Eight ‘til one, one to six. No, wait a minute, eight to one, one to six, oh yeah eight ‘til one, one to six. I’ve got it written down somewhere. Then to eleven and then eleven round ‘til eight o’clock in the morning. Is that four?
CB: Um, yeah.
IE: Yeah.
CB: So, a longer shift in the night?
IE: You had a long one at night, yes.
CB: Um.
IE: It was pretty quiet usually.
CB: Um. So, when the raids –
IE: Eleven ‘til eight.
CB: Yes.
IE: Yes.
CB: Um. How many switchboard operators, telephonists would there be on duty at any one time?
IE: In the main switchboard, they’d be three or four. I was on the main one to start with and then they transferred me to this other switchboard.
CB: All WAAF’s? No, no men on the exchange?
IE: Oh, we did yes. Yes, we did. I didn’t have one on that section, but on the main one yes, there were men. And there were you know in other stations in the group as well.
CB: So how many days did you work in a run?
IE: Yeah, there would be six days and then the seventh –
CB: Because Sunday was a working day like everything else?
IE: Oh yes, yes, yes. Yeah.
CB: So, six days on. How many off?
IE: Then there would be just the one. One whole day off as far as I remember.
CB: So, you’re on the airfield at Waddington. Where are you staying? What accommodation have you got?
IE: Oh, there were, what had been pre-war airmans’ married quarters. And that was the one in the photograph, we had a big room downstairs and then there was like the kitchen bit at the back. And upstairs, there was the main bedroom and a small room. Usually the small room was the sergeant or a corporal. And there was – it was just quite basic, you didn’t really. You went up to, you had to go out for your meals.
CB: Yes.
IE: You could, you know, boil a kettle and that sort of thing.
CB: But you ate in the Airmans’ mess?
IE: Yeah.
CB: How far away was that?
IE: Oh, only a few minutes’ walk. Yes, it wasn’t very far.
CB: ‘Cause the domestic site is near the technical site is it?
IE: Do you know I can’t remember. When I came, went down. No, ‘cause Waddington was a huge complex.
CB: Yeah.
IE: ‘Cause when you went down, and then there was like station headquarters and those. And a few, then further on were these billets like what were airmans’ married quarters, so they were away from the –
CB: They weren’t on the airfield were they?
IE: Yeah, the main headquarters.
CB: Um.
IE: And then just almost opposite us were the hangars. You know, right down the airfield.
CB: So, the airmans’ houses, were standard layout?
IE: Sorry?
CB: They were a standard layout, design?
IE: Yes. Yeah.
CB: How many WAAF’s in each one?
IE: Two, three. About six and a sergeant or corporal.
CB: Right, so.
IE: There were about three downstairs, three upstairs. Yes.
CB: So how many people to a room normally, a bedroom?
IE: Well yeah. Well the downstairs would be like, in the living quarters, that would be their sitting room but we had it as a bedroom.
CB: Yes.
IE: So, there was one there, there would be three.
CB: Right.
IE: And the same upstairs which would have been the bedroom. And then the corporal or sergeant would have a small, a small room.
CB: Um.
IE: I can’t remember what that was originally but yeah.
CB: So, you went to the Airmans’ mess for food? What was the food like?
IE: It wasn’t too bad actually. Yes, it was a big, huge, great room there. Yes, it wasn’t bad.
CB: Um. So, you’re working on shifts?
IE: Yes.
CB: How did the menu accommodate that?
IE: How many?
CB: How? You were working shifts?
IE: Yeah.
CB: So, people were wanting lunch at different times of the day, how did they organise that, the food?
IE: Oh, that I don’t know. Um, I don’t ever remember being told I’d got to be on a certain shift but it was just depending on you know my job.
CB: Um.
IE: What shift I was on.
CB: But they were serving food twenty-four hours a day?
IE: More or less I think, yeah I think so.
CB: Um, right.
IE: ‘Cause I sort of vaguely remember, you know, lines of people waiting to go in.
CB: Um.
IE: But it was quite big. It was on a separate – away from where we were. We had to go to this big building.
CB: Um.
IE: I can’t remember what else there was. But it was certainly – yes of course there would be. There was the Airmans’ Mess which we were in and then there would be an Officers’ Mess and um.
CB: A Sergeants’ Mess?
IE: I’m just trying to think, were we just WAAF in there? No, I think, I think it was a general mess.
CB: Yeah. What about the NAAFI?
IE: Never, never really went. There was NAAFI but I never really went to that. Don’t remember it anyway.
CB: So, when you’re working on shift?
IE: Yeah.
CB: Then how were you fed? Were you given a break or did you take food with you to eat during the shift?
IE: Well, we could take stuff with us. Yes, that would be more, rather than – no well part of our mealtime came out while we were on the shift wouldn’t it? Yeah.
CB: So, what I meant –
IE: So, you’d go for about, have about half an hour’s break.
CB: Yeah.
IE: For your meal.
CB: Um.
IE: And come back.
CB: Going to the Airmans’ Mess? OK.
IE: Yeah, yeah.
CB: And how did the WAAF’s get on together in these houses?
IE: Oh fine. Yes, well certainly there, there was no problem.
CB: So, you joined the RAF in 1940 was it? Did you join in 1940 or was it earlier? Or ’42?
IE: Wrote it down.
CB: ‘Cause you were born in ’23 weren’t you?
IE: Yeah. Because I didn’t go straight away because –
CB: You joined when you were nineteen?
IE: I did write it down. Oh, it must be there.
CB: OK.
JS: There’s something on here.
IE: I think I’ve got it written down over here.
CB: I’ll just pause then for a mo’.
IE: Pardon?
CB: I’ll just pause this.
IE: 1942.
CB: So, you joined the RAF 29th of October 1942?
IE: Yeah, I was enlisted. And then I was a telephonist 13th of June 1943.
CB: Right. When you qualified?
IE: Yeah. This is absolutely disgusting.
CB: OK.
IE: Alright.
CB: So that was just after you were twenty?
IE: Yes.
CB: And at Compton Bassett.
IE: Yeah.
CB: What did they teach you there? About the RAF or what were they teaching you? How to use the system?
IE: Oh, no it was drilling that sort of thing.
CB: Um.
IE: I don’t think we learnt too well –
CB: The –
IE: We had – ‘cause every time we were – the whole camp turned out. ‘Cause we were the only WAAF’s there, and they all turned out to watch us. And you can imagine the jeering that when on. I enlisted at Acton, June 1942, but Father wrote to have me deferred and I didn’t find out until October. So, I kept wondering then I found out. I’ve put in here, ‘Big row’. And I qualified as a telephonist, oh no it doesn’t say.
CB: OK.
IE: Until 4th of May 1946.
CB: Right. When you, what were you thinking you might do in 1946. Had you?
IE: Well this was when my Father had got me out.
CB: Yes.
IE: I didn’t really get a choice, I just had to –
CB: No.
IE: I just had to go home. But then just after that, once I got home the air force, or WAAF I suppose, got me a job as an – in a factory at er. By then we were in London, Brixton I think it was, where they were making blouses and that sort of thing. And I wasn’t very happy with that. I had a, the lady that I was working with, for, was very difficult at that time. And I thought well I’ve got to do something, you know carry on. And um, what happened? Something happened. I got to the point where I thought ‘This is no good, I’m not learning anything.’ ‘Cause they did it because I’d been learning to be a dress designer you see before I joined up. And then I was, my parents had this tobacconists/confectionery shop in West Norwood and so every now and again when I was off I used to help a bit. And this lady came in, we were talking and she said ‘Why don’t you,’ she said ‘I know it’s not the same sort of thing’ she said ‘But why don’t you go and work in a department store?’ She said ‘I can – there’s a very good – I know they’re looking for somebody in Gorringes in Buckingham Palace Road.’ So, I tootled along there and I was the sixth assistant in the hosiery department. I couldn’t serve anybody until the other five had got it. And when you’re on commission you don’t get much at the end of the week in those circumstances. But I enjoyed it, worked there for about five years I think.
CB: Um. What made you leave?
IE: Oh, I got offered something I’d been dying to do. It was something new and we’d had a girl who was working for [Unclear] and she was travelling round to different shops on sales promotions. I thought, ‘I’d like to do that.’ And I’d said to her, you know, ‘If you hear of any vacancies let me know.’ And I went back after lunch one day and there were two very smartly dressed gentlemen by our counter. I thought, ’They’ve come, they must be reps come to see the buyer.’ So, I went over and spoke to them. ‘Cause by then I was an under-buyer. And I said ‘Buyers are at lunch at the moment.’ So, they said ‘Yes, we know they are, she is, ‘cause it’s you we’ve come to see.’ I [Unclear] something. They were from I & R Morley, hosiery and knitwear, and they were just starting up this putting somebody into different department stores to promote their goods. And they said ‘Would I be interested?’ I said ‘Oh yes, I certainly am.’ And so I went for an interview, oh I could have dropped when I found where I was going to work. Arding & Hobbes in Clapham Junction it was the most awful place. [Chuckles] So, anyway I was there for, that was about September to Christmas. And just before that my boss came in and said ‘They need somebody up in Glasgow for two weeks’ and that was before Christmas. ‘Are you prepared to go?’ So, I said ‘Yes, go do anything.’ Better than sticking in Arding & Hobbes. And so, they sent me up to Glasgow. Which I thoroughly enjoyed that and then I went to Edinburgh the second week. And, of course no wonder this chap had gone sick. ‘Cause I didn’t get home until about two o’clock in the morning on Christmas Day, I had to come back by train you know. And, I mean it didn’t matter. So, after Christmas when I got back they called me back to the head office and said ‘Would you like the job of sales promotions all over the UK?’ I said ‘Yes please.’ So, I went for training and that’s what I was doing in different towns. Anywhere from Cornwall, South of England to Edinburgh, Glasgow. I think that was the furthest north I went. But it was, oh I really enjoyed that.
CB: Um. How long did you do that for?
IE: Oh, about three or four years yeah.
CB: Got tired of it?
IE: What did I do after that? Do you know I can’t remember. Oh yes, the buyer that I’d worked with when I was at Gorringes, ‘phoned me up and said she’d been, now been promoted to being a group buyer. And she said ‘I need somebody in the Camberley store in the hosiery department, would I be prepared to do that?’ Well, I was looking, you know, sort of vaguely looking for something to do. So, I went along for the interview to the director in charge of Camberley. And it was a new store, belonged to the Guildford Army and Navy Stores. And anyway at my interview he said ‘You’re too, you’ve got too much experience for that job. What I need is a floor manager for the ground floor’. So, I thought ‘Well that sounds more interesting,’ so I accepted. And they were the best years of store life that I ever had, it was wonderful. So, I had all the departments of the ground floor. The staff were fantastic, the only people that I couldn’t get on with were the buyers, the heads of department. And it was some months before I realised that it was the, and it was my fault in a way, because I hadn’t warned her that I was going to be the new floor manager. And so she was undermining me all the time.
CB: No.
IE: Yeah. Fortunately, she wasn’t there all the time ‘cause she went to all the different stores in her – that she had under her wing. And I did that for about six, five – right until retirement actually.
CB: So, you enjoyed that?
IE: Yeah and um. No, no it wasn’t. I did it for several years and then I heard that one of the directors from Army and Navy were coming. He was going to be in, based in Camberley. And I knew he didn’t like me, he hadn’t got any time for me. And so, I thought ‘I’ll do something else.’ And what did I do? Oh yeah, I applied for a job, something completely different. It was just sort of office work really.
CB: In a different?
IE: Yeah.
CB: Not in retail?
IE: No, no, no. It was, oh can’t think of the name of the people. Atlas Express Carriers.
CB: Oh.
IE: So, I went just as clerical and then I ended up in charge of the staff there. I got quite a big job there. And [emphatic] I got a pension which you don’t get in the retail, in department stores.
CB: Um.
IE: So that was, that was good.
CB: So, you were managing the whole place, were you?
IE: Yeah. Um, it was good. It was very – and I stayed there until I retired.
CB: What age did you retire?
IE: Um?
CB: What age did you retire?
IE: Sixty.
CB: Right.
IE: Yeah, you had to.
CB: Yeah, right. We’ll take a little break there.
IE: Yeah, OK.
CB: So, picking up on the story again now. We were talking about being at Waddington.
IE: Yes.
CB: And linking in with the other airfields at Skellingthorpe and Bardney.
IE: Yes.
CB: And you’re tying together the communications that are on the camp rather than outside.
IE: Yes.
CB: You’re talking to people on the ‘phone. To what extent were you dealing with other people on the station?
IE: Well really not a lot unless you went to a dance or that sort of thing. Or down at the local pub.
CB: Right.
IE: You know, but other than that because, you were in this sort of office with a switchboard and you didn’t really see anybody else much. But this one particular time there was an Australian. I think I’d met him at dance. And coming, I think when they were over the target, something like that. There was an aircraft, the aircraft, another aircraft had dropped their incendiaries. And it had, they’d hit Bill, I’ll call him Bill, hit Bill’s aircraft –
CB: Which was flying underneath?
IE: Bill’s aircraft which was flying below.
CB: Yes.
IE: And hit the, oh what was it? Anyway, one of the crew and badly injured him in his head and that and he died before they could get him back to England.
CB: Um.
IE: And I was on duty when they came back and Bill came into the switchboard, into the telephone exchange to tell me, you know, what had happened. He was in a real state. He just sat there, and, sort of trying to collect himself, until I’d finished duty and then we went and sat outside whilst he was talking about. And it was, you know, very sad ‘cause there was nothing they could do. If it had been a German it would have been different.
CB: Yes.
IE: But it wasn’t. It was one of ours. Yeah.
CB: And the crew is the family.
IE: Um?
CB: The crew is the family.
IE: Yes, of course, yes.
CB: So, it’s a very intense relationship.
IE: Yes.
CB: Um.
IE: Yeah, he was a nice chap. ‘Cause they had to go on and then ‘cause they were almost over the target.
CB: Was it? Do you know if the ‘plane was hit in other areas or just in that particular?
IE: No, just in that particular one. ‘Cause he managed to get it back.
CB: Um.
IE: Back to Waddington.
CB: You mentioned the activities, the social activities, where were those held on the station?
IE: Ah, in the dining, in the dining hall.
CB: Of the Airmans’ Mess?
IE: We had dances and that sort of thing.
CB: Yes.
IE: Mostly there, yeah.
CB: And how often did they take place?
IE: Oh, well certainly once a month. Sometimes if we got anybody else came in we might get something. Or we’d go down, ‘cause we were so near to Lincoln anyway so quite a lot of it we would go down into Lincoln.
CB: Um. And if there were dances organised off the station where would they?
IE: Oh, in Lincoln.
CB: They would?
IE: Mostly. Or sometimes at one of the other airbases.
CB: Um.
IE: Like Skellingthorpe or Bardney or somewhere like that.
CB: And how did you get around because there was less transport in those days?
IE: [Chuckles] Hitch-hiked.
CB: Yes.
IE: I was the worst person to hitch-hike anyway. I’d leave it to the others and then I’d hop on board. I hated doing that.
CB: Did you?
IE: Sometimes they did organise transport to fetch, fetch you.
CB: Fetch you back?
IE: Um.
CB: So, on your day off, which is only one in seven.
IE: Yeah.
CB: What did you do?
IE: Well mostly go out in Lincoln or one of the other places. I, even before I joined up, I used to love exploring into other places and see how people lived and that so.
IB: So, on an airfield there are a lot more people on the ground than aircrew but did the girls tend to gravitate more in one direction or another and which one was that?
IE: I don’t think so. I don’t – not really we – I think we tended to go off, apart from when there was a dance or something. I think we tended to go off to the village and go and explore. And there was quite a lot of places to go to on the outskirts, that we used to go walking and doing.
CB: So, you started at the bottom and got to LACW, what opportunity was there for advancement above that? To SACW for instance?
IE: No, well perhaps because I didn’t really bother. You know I was quite happy doing what I was doing. And apart from that you see by then I’d got my Father on my back wanting me out.
CB: Yeah.
IE: And as soon as the war had finished, that’s right it was just – ‘cause I missed all the V celebrations. I had to go, I was home on leave. And when I got back to camp he’d already done –
CB: Done the dirty on you.
IE: Done the dirty on me and I had to go straight back home. I was furious, absolutely furious. ‘Cause I really wanted to go on, you know, and further my career in the air force.
CB: Yes.
IE: I would have liked to have done that.
CB: Um. What sort of job were you hoping for next?
IE: Well I don’t know.
CB: In the RAF.
IE: Hadn’t really thought about, got into that. But, no he’d – when I got back to camp they said ‘Don’t know what you’ve been up to, but you’ve got to go and see the WAAF CO as soon as you’re back.’ Which I did and she said ‘Your release is through, go home.’
CB: So, you got leave, how much leave did you have in a year?
IE: In a year?
CB: Yes.
IE: I think you got, was it three?
CB: Three weeks was it?
IE: Seven days.
CB: And where did you go when you were on leave?
IE: I went home mostly. I think there was only about one when I didn’t and I been invited to um – yeah, ‘cause when I was at Lincoln I had my Mother’s sister lived at Doncaster so I could go, nip up there sometimes and stay with them.
CB: Um.
IE: And also I had her other sister was married to, oh what was he? Boston, he was um, oh what did they call them? He had a shop where they stocked all the things for the boats, barges and that sort of thing.
CB: Oh right.
IE: So, I used to go there sometimes.
CB: A quartermaster type job?
IE: Yes, and there was this shop.
CB: Um.
IE: And mostly I went to Doncaster, yeah.
CB: Right.
IE: My Mother’s elder sister.
CB: So how would you travel there on the train or hitch-hiking?
IE: I wasn’t very good hitch-hiking on my own. So, if I went with, if there were other people which I –
CB: Um.
IE: But I didn’t, I wasn’t very good at it.
CB: No.
IE: Because we’d have so many free passes for – I can’t remember how many. And you could travel, have a return journey for your leave which was quite good.
CB: Now as a telephonist you’re at the hub.
IE: Um?
CB: As a telephonist you’re at the hub of the communication.
IE: Yeah.
CB: On the station. Were you alert to what was going on or did you just plug in and you couldn’t hear what was happening?
IE: Um.
CB: On the conversations.
IE: Of course, most of the time you see I was on, I wasn’t on the general switchboard.
CB: No.
IE: See I was on the ones in operations and that.
CB: Um.
IE: So, I didn’t get to know a lot of the other things. But sometimes you know we’d get together and hear various things that were going on.
CB: Um.
IE: Not a lot really. I think really ‘cause you – they were pretty busy you know.
CB: Yeah.
IE: You didn’t get much time to find out anything.
CB: No. Now the loss rate amongst aircrew.
IE: There was?
CB: The rate of loss of aircrew.
IE: Oh yes.
CB: Was very high.
EE: Yeah.
CB: What reaction was there on the ground to that situation?
IE: I don’t think, I don’t remember having – I mean you really rather took it as, you know, accepted what was happening. People were there one day and then they weren’t there anymore.
CB: Um.
IE: I think if you took it too much to heart you wouldn’t survive, which sounds a bit cruel but –
CB: It’s the reality.
IE: The aircrew were the same.
CB: Of course.
IE: You know. What was it, they’d probably come in ‘Oh by the way did you hear so-and-so bought it last night?’ And that was it. Sounds a bit hard but.
CB: Well it is the reality isn’t it of the time?
IE: Um.
CB: It’s a defensive mechanism in many ways.
EE: Yeah.
CB: Of the horror of it I suppose.
IE: Just –
CB: What about?
IE: We used to get – I used to [Unclear] after the war when we got all about Dresden and all those sort of things. And you get this backlash of how dreadful it, you know, and what were we doing and that. And I used to get cross. ‘What do you think they were doing to us for goodness sake?’ You know what about Coventry?
CB: Um.
IE: And all those other things. I mean war is horrible.
CB: Um.
IE: But, so didn’t really talk about it after.
CB: No. Some of the girls will have had relationships with the aircrew.
IE: That’s very true.
CB: So how did that work?
IE: I do remember one or two were in a right bad state because their fella had not returned. But I really think you got – because it was happening all the time, it sounds a bit hard but you just were sorry at that moment and it was a shock, and then you just had to carry on. There was nothing else you could do, not really. But I think that’s why we had so many dances and that sort of thing to take your minds off it.
CB: Yeah. So how was the music supplied at the dances?
IE: Oh, there was a small band from local bands and that sort of thing. Yeah, from Lincoln.
CB: Yeah.
IE: Or round about.
CB: What about security? How tight was that on the station?
IE: I don’t really think it was. Looking back it seemed to be pretty lax. I mean you just wandered around. I mean you couldn’t go out or come back in again. You know, there was a sentry there which would charge you for coming in and out. But I must admit you did find a gap in the hedge sometimes, nip out.
CB: Yeah, yeah.
IE: But, um –
CB: Was the airfield surrounded with barbed wire or a fence of some kind, what was it?
IE: Oh, I don’t know, I can’t remember. I think it was fences and hedges.
CB: Um.
IE: Yeah.
CB: And what about anti-aircraft guns on the airfield?
IE: Yeah, they were around. They were circling right round the thing, but they weren’t that near to us.
CB: No.
IE: No.
CB: OK. Just going to pause again. Are you OK or do you need a glass of water? Jan, anything that comes out of the conversation, that perhaps ‘cause you’ve talked to Mary a good deal.
Unknown: No I don’t think so. ‘Cause she didn’t marry did she? Did she marry? Well that has –
CB: No, no, the lady we were talking about. Her fiancé was killed three months after she met him.
IE: Oh.
CB: So that was the same. I mean that was what you said earlier.
IE: Yeah.
CB: They don’t actually get, she didn’t get over it but she put it to one side.
IE: Um.
CB: But always remembered.
IE: Um.
CB: Yes.
IE: That’s true.
CB: So that’s what I’m just wondering you see.
IE: Yes, that it true. But –
CB: Oh, wait a minute. Right, we’re just talking about relationships a bit more.
IE: Um.
CB: Yes.
IE: Yes, it is true. I did know of one or two people who their fellas had been killed.
CB: Um.
IE: And they really went to pieces. But mostly, either that or quite often they got posted elsewhere so –
CB: What to non-operational airfields?
IE: Um, yeah. Yes probably, yes to pick up. But I do remember one or two very sad cases where they, the girl had really gone to pieces. And they had to, you know, go home or they ended up in hospital.
CB: Oh really, yeah.
IE: It’s very sad.
CB: ‘Cause on the air traffic front where they’re listening in to communication, that perhaps created a bit of an extra challenge did it?
IE: Um, what do you mean?
CB: So, the girls are in air traffic.
IE: Oh yeah.
CB: And so, they’re in touch with the bombers.
IE: That’s right. And you would hear them, I know where I was working you could hear them talking.
CB: Oh, could you?
IE: Yes, yes. I wish I could remember what it was called.
CB: So, your office was in the tower, was a room in the tower was it?
IE: No, no. No, I was on the station.
CB: Yes, but on [controlled?] area, on the technical site.
IE: Yes, there was intelligence and all those. I can’t remember what they were called. As I said on one wall there was the, all the stations in our group.
CB: Yes.
IE: Like Waddington, Bardney, Skellingthorpe.
CB: Yeah. Everything was listed up.
CB: Um.
IE: And as, and the names of the crew, the names on the crew. And it was awful once or twice that there were people I knew. Like for instance, I was very friendly, we had the Bomber Command film crew unit at Waddington and I was home on leave, one – Oh it was just as I was going to, I was on my way to Waddington, I’d finished my training so I was going to Waddington. And I was in our shop and I’d got my uniform on. This lady came in and she said ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were in the WAAF.’ So, Mother said ‘She’s just finished telephone training, and she’s posted she’s going off to Lincolnshire.’ So, this lady said ‘Where are you going to?’ I said ‘Waddington.’ She said ‘Oh, my husband’s at Waddington, do make yourself known to him, he’s in the film unit.’ And of course when I get there he’s only a squadron leader. [Laughs] So I didn’t, but he found me. He came and found me on the switchboard.
CB: Yeah.
IE: And so there were three camera men. And a friend of mine who was the corporal she and I used to go out, you know down to the pub, or somewhere. And so we used to meet up with the Crown film unit at the pub at Harmston, which was down the road. Used to borrow camp bikes and cycle off down there. It was great, used to enjoy that. So, there were three camera men and then sadly I was on duty one evening and the – in the ops room, and on the board, and I saw – oh, it was the, it was that raid on Dresden and John who was from Pinewood, the film studio, he wasn’t listed to go on the Dresden raid, the other camera man was going. But he thought it was going to be an interesting raid. So, he tried to beg a lift from someone somewhere and he tried other places in the group. And he managed to get on a flight so he could go and see this raid at Dresden. There was one Lancaster lost over Dresden wasn’t there?
CB: Yes.
IE: And he was on it.
CB: Good heavens.
IE: And gosh I thought ‘What do I do?’ I can’t ‘phone his wife.
CB: Yes.
IE: I can’t do anything. That was awful.
CB: Um.
IE: I found. You couldn’t contact anybody.
CB: No.
IE: To say, you know, this awful thing had happened. It happened to me again another time. A friend of mine that I’d worked with when I was in parachutes before I’d joined up. And she married aircrew at Market Harborough. And she said to him. Oh, he was then posted, I don’t know where it was, I can’t remember. Somewhere near Waddington and he was posted. And so she told him to come and look me up. And he rang me up so I met him in Lincoln, we went and had a cup of tea. A week later he was missing. It was just like that.
CB: Um.
IE: And you know nothing you could do.
CB: No.
IE: You couldn’t ‘phone up and say ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry,’ yeah. I found that difficult.
CB: Um.
IE: But the silly thing was that John in the film unit, he didn’t have to go. And he picked the wrong aircraft.
CB: Um.
IE: To go on.
CB: Extraordinary. So, what was this film unit doing most of the time?
IE: Oh, they went out on ops and would be filming wherever, you know.
CB: Um.
IE: That was mostly what they were doing.
CB: So, the WAAF’s were in quite good accommodation, but then the men had barrack blocks so they were quite comfortable as well were they?
IE: I don’t know. ‘Cause some of them, even at Waddington, some of the WAAF’s were in – I don’t know if I ever got into one of those blocks. Oh yeah, I did once somewhere. Can’t remember where it was now. Wasn’t too bad, no.
CB: No. A topic that is discussed a lot now is what is otherwise called battle fatigue. But in the war was called LMF, lacking moral fibre.
IE: Lack of moral.
CB: What do you remember about that?
IE: I remember one chap and he was in a very sad state. He was, he didn’t know what he was doing. And people were being a bit horrible about him, and said ‘Oh, he’s just putting it on.’ I don’t know whether he was or not but, but I don’t remember anything, anybody else particularly. But I think quite often they just moved them on.
CB: Um.
IE: You know.
CB: But he was aircrew was he?
IE: Mostly yeah. You couldn’t blame him could you? You know it’s pretty awful.
CB: Um.
IE: Yeah.
CB: And did you, were you aware of aircrew talking to the girls about their experiences? Or did they tend to keep it much to themselves?
IE: I think mostly they kept it to themselves, yeah. They didn’t – I mean apart from that one incident with Bill you see, because that had happened with this chap had been killed by friendly incendiaries.
CB: Yes.
IE: But he didn’t normally say. I think it was ‘cause he was so shocked he needed to talk to somebody.
CB: Um.
IE: but I wasn’t aware of. I think they probably amongst themselves rather than to us.
CB: Yes. Good, thank you very much indeed Liz. When the war ended, you went your own ways.
IE: Um.
CB: To what extent did you keep in touch with each other?
IE: Yes, well I did. There was, which one is it? Yes, the one in the middle at the back.
CB: In your picture, yes.
IE: Florence, and that’s her daughter.
CB: Oh yes.
IE: So, she’s my god-daughter.
CB: Yes.
IE: There on that little group.
CB: Um.
IE: Yes, I kept in touch with her, you know, we were good friends.
CB: Um.
IE: I’d go and stay with them right up until she died. And as I say, Trish she annoys me really in a way. She will treat me like a real old lady. [Laughter] I know I’m an old lady!
CB: You’re very sprightly.
IE: But I remember when Florence my friend, she was, oh I can’t remember where they lived, her husband died. And Trisha took me over to see her Mother in this home. And we went off into this room where she was, and there were other people there as well. And there she was sitting, with a shawl over her, and she was sitting like this. And I thought ‘That’s not my friend.’ She’s never been like that. And I was so shocked at the state that she was in. And anyway she said to Trish, ‘Would you go down to the shop round the corner’ and get me so and so, whatever. So, she went off, before that girl was out of the building off went the shawl. Mother in the kitchen buzzing around and that was a good lesson I learnt. You know it was really, it was amazing. But she does it to me. When she comes and visits, I’ve got a visit due sometime soon, and I dread it. And the first time, where was I? I wasn’t here, I was oh in another flat, further in Woking. And she came to visit me and she was helping me across the road. I was so cross. I said ‘Trisha, what do you think I do when you’re not here?’ You know?
CB: Yes.
IE: But she does you see?
CB: Yes.
IE: I’ve got a visit due soon and I really dread it. Bless her heart she’s a lovely person.
CB: Yes.
EE: But if only she’d just treat you normally.
CB: Yes.
EE: But [saying that?] but that was a good lesson to learn. That, um what happens when people sort of mother you when you’re really quite capable of carrying on.
CB: Yeah, yeah.
IE: Nobody does it to me here. [Laughs]
CB: Many of the aircrew didn’t get married in the war because they were nervous about leaving.
IE: That’s true, I believe so.
CB: Yes.
IE: Yes, yes.
CB: And were you aware of what happened afterwards, people?
IE: Not really, no I don’t.
CB: Because they married people who were clearly not in the RAF but I was.
IE: Yes.
CB: But I was interested in aspects where they had relationships.
IE: Ah, with other people.
CB: Relationships with WAAF’s and didn’t marry in the war.
IE: Yeah. I’m just trying to think if I know of anybody. Um, no. It was really only that one particular one.
CB: Um.
IE: And in that photograph I think two of them went to Australia.
CB: Did they really?
IE: And because there was quite an exodus of people going to Australia.
CB: Um. They weren’t following some of 463 and 467 Squadron?
IE: Um.
CB: Were they? They weren’t following the Australian aircrew back to Australia?
IE: Oh yes.
CB: Oh, they were?
IE: Oh, they were yes. Yeah, yes, they were. Nearly got there myself, I didn’t want to go and leave England.
CB: Did you? What was the attraction of Australia?
IE: Pardon?
CB: What was the attraction of Australia?
IE: Oh well it was my boyfriend went over there.
CB: Oh, did he?
IE: No, I made it quite clear I would never go.
CB: Oh right.
IE: Funnily enough of my sister’s children, two of them went to Australia.
CB: Did they?
IE: And one of them he did come back. He said he’d never worked so hard in all of his life. He was fruit picking, a fruit farm.
CB: Oh yes.
IE: The other one, I thought he was mad going. Because he was mad on animals and he was working at Chester Zoo. And then suddenly decides to go to Australia on this –
CB: Ten pound?
IE: Was it five years or whatever?
CB: Yeah.
IE: And I thought, I couldn’t understand that. But anyway, they arrived in Australia and he was workin up the west coast and what does he come across? A zoo. So, he got a job there in an Aussie zoo and then he came back and put in for another few years, he’s working in a zoo in Australia now.
CB: Oh really?
IE: Yeah, loving it. But the other one came back, he’s in England.
CB: Um.
IE: They were cousins, they weren’t –
CB: Final question. We’ve talked about the squadron associations, are mainly aircrew and mainly men.
IE: Yeah.
CB: So, to what extent did you feel linked to a squadron and then follow up with associations afterwards?
IE: Not, not really. I did join the WAAF Association.
CB: Um.
IE: And the trouble was that they met at Putney. And I was down here and it was such a job getting there and then crossing London.
CB: Um.
IE: Getting to there. And it was a bit boring. But I do belong to the RAF Association. I’m thoroughly disgusted with them. It’s about a year now. I used to join in everything when I was, belonged to it.
CB: Um.
IE: And we first used to meet in the town and it was, what’s his name? Pip. He’s RAF Association at Fareham. Pip, Pip something or other. And he used to be at the one here.
CB: At Woking, yeah?
IE: Yeah, Woking. And when I first joined, and I’d been doing some fundraising at the department stores I’d worked at and I managed to raise a really good sum. And he said ‘Would I do the Wings appeal?’
CB: Oh.
IE: So, I said ‘Yes, sure I would.’ Of course, I go to do it and of course I’m up against English RAF aren’t I? With all due respect to them, and nobody would help me.
CB: Really?
IE: ‘Cause I, first of all I –
CB: How strange.
IE: I said, you know, can you tell me if you’ve got any particular place you’d like to stand, you know, with your tin and the rest of it. No, they weren’t going to tell me anything. In fact, they weren’t going to co-operate with me at all.
CB: How strange.
IE: So, I thought ‘What am I going to do?’ And across the road, the house straight across the road, number twelve, a cousin of mine used to live there. And when I came, I used to during the war – I mean this was a lovely house. Oh no it was after the war. Anyway, I got, when I came to live in Woking, can’t remember how but I got friendly with them. And so, I was over there one day and I said ‘I’ve got this problem about collecting and nobody’s going to co-operate with me, where can I raise money?’ They said ‘Car wash.’ I said ‘Car wash, where am I going to do that?’ They said ‘You could do it there but people like having it done at home.’ And I don’t know where it is now, it might be there. I got photographs of these youngsters from across the road, and their friends all busy doing car washing. And I raised over two thousand pounds.
CB: Fantastic.
IE: And I never told the RAF Association what I’d been doing, doing it quietly. [Laughter]
CB: How funny.
IE: Yeah. And Pip, ‘cause in that time he’d already been sent over to Fareham.
CB: Um.
IE: But he’s still in touch, he still contacts me every now and again.
CB: Does he? Um.
IE: Yes, him and his wife, Betty.
CB: Yeah.
EE: But um the Woking RAF Association they don’t, didn’t like the WAAF at all. There were ten ex-WAAF at one time and now there’s one.
CB: Extraordinary.
IE: ‘Cause everybody got fed up with it and they just left, they didn’t.
CB: Yeah.
IE: Which is a shame really.
CB: Yes. What was the most memorable part of your RAF service?
IE: Oh gosh, well I think the days with the Australians in Waddington really were. I suppose that’s the time, and with the film unit. I think because that was the time when most things happened.
CB: Um.
IE: Really.
CB: So, did you get yourself on the film?
IE: On film? No, I ducked out. No, not that I know of anyway.
CB: No.
IE: never seen any –
CB: So, do we detect a bias here towards Australians? ‘Cause you had an Australian boyfriend.
IE: Not really, no, no. No I did, but unfortunately he also had a girlfriend in London where he went on leave.
CB: Oh.
IE: I was quite well aware of it.
CB: Oh, you were?
IE: And –
CB: Two-timer, right.
IE: Well he didn’t say and I wasn’t letting on I knew but his crew they didn’t like her.
CB: Oh right.
IE: They liked me. [Laughter]
CB: So, you didn’t swap him for an English version?
IE: No, no. Not really, I really wasn’t bothered. I, one way or another. After was it um, no, much to my Father’s disgust. I um, I got to within ten days of my, the date of my marriage and I chucked it in.
CB: Did you?
IE: It wasn’t RAF.
CB: Oh, right.
IE: It was very silly but. No, it was to do with money.
CB: Um.
IE: And it was so silly. But thank goodness I knew, I found out in time.
CB: Um.
IE: My Father wouldn’t speak to me for a long time and I never told him what, you know, exactly what had happened, so he didn’t know.
CB: No.
IE: All I got was a curt letter. ‘How very foolish, just like Aunt Lucy.’ Apparently, this was what one of his sisters did.
CB: Oh really.
IE: And that’s all I got. Sympathy, didn’t get any.
CB: Yes. So, you forged a good career instead?
IE: Yes. no, I had good friends so I was alright.
CB: Yes. Well, thanks very much Liz, it’s been fascinating.
IE: Oh well. I can’t think there’s anything else but –
CB: We’ve just been talking about the winter snow in this picture. And tell us what you had to do then.
IE: Yes.
CB: How deep was the snow?
IE: Oh, it would be up to your – more than knee deep.
CB: Yes, right up your thighs?
IE: Yes. And it would come down and we had to clear the runways. Of course, there was a mechanical thing.
CB: Yeah.
IE: But everybody that was off duty was given a spade.
CB: Oh.
IE: And shovel. Shovel the snow away.
CB: Yeah.
IE: And I found this, it was a Christmas card. I thought it was wonderful. That’s exactly what it was like.
CB: A picture of a Lancaster.
IE: Yeah.
CB: And ground crew shovelling the snow away. Yeah, so it would take some time to clear the runway ‘cause it’s long.
IE: Oh yes. Yeah, I mean there was people just shovelling, yeah.
CB: How long would it take to clear?
IE: Oh I don’t know –
CB: The runway.
IE: I mean most, part of it would be mechanical. You know, they’re have this whatever. I don’t know what it was but it would go down.
CB: Um.
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 Elizabeth Eady
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AEadyIET160628
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.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Description
An account of the resource
Before the war, Liz worked in aeronautical inspection at a factory which made parachutes. She had an interview in Northolt and enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in October 1942. She went to Uxbridge and chose to be a telephonist. After a month in Harrogate, she was trained at the Bradford Telephone Exchange. Liz was sent to RAF Compton Bassett for further training and then on to RAF Skellingthorpe. She took up a vacancy at RAF Waddington where there were two Australian squadrons (463 and 467 Squadrons).
Liz describes her work on the switchboard, the shifts and accommodation, as well as her social life. Her highlights were the Australians at RAF Waddington and the film unit operating from there.
After pressure from her father, Liz had to leave in May 1946, and went on to have a successful and varied career.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-28
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Dawn Studd
Cathie Hewitt
Sally Coulter
Format
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01:24:01 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
463 Squadron
467 Squadron
entertainment
ground personnel
operations room
RAF Bardney
RAF Compton Bassett
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Waddington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/196/3329/AAn01134-170717.2.mp3
aec7073168ada9cb3517eca4b855dca9
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
A Survivor of the bombing of Berlin
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with a survivor of the bombing of Berlin, who wishes to remain anonymous.
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
2017-07-17
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
An01134
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 17th of July 2017 and I’m in Great Horwood in Buckinghamshire [deleted] who normally lives in Berlin and I’m going to talk to her about her experiences as a child in Germany, particularly in Berlin, during the war. So [deleted] what is the earliest thing you remember in your life?
ANON: [laughs] Switch off that. I can’t think.
CB: Ok. So where did you live?
ANON: Where did I live? I lived in Berlin. I was born in Berlin and I’m back there.
CB: You said, in a small flat.
ANON: Yeah. My grandparents lived not far away and we would go there most days and play cards or family games. My father died when I was nine. My mother had to go to work then in order to keep her and me. It was hard. It was hard for her.
CB: How did your father die? Did he have an accident or was he ill?
ANON: It was an accident. Yeah.
CB: Pardon?
[pause]
CB: Right. We’ll stop there for a mo.
ANON: You’ve been telling —
[Recording paused]
CB: You lived in a block of flats. Which floor?
ANON: Fourth.
CB: Ok.
ANON: No lift.
CB: No lift. Right.
ANON: So, everything had, even fuel, had to be carried upstairs.
CB: What did you burn as fuel?
ANON: Pressed coals they called them. Black. Black.
CB: Sort of nuggets.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: I had a happy childhood. We were poor but I was happy. My parents could not afford a bike. I can’t —
CB: So, when you went your grandparents you played cards. What else did you do? Did you have meals there?
ANON: On the opposite side was a big sports place. In winter you could skate on there.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And in the summer we would kick a ball or have one of those —
Other: Skipping rope.
ANON: Skipping ropes. Yeah.
CB: Yes. And was there plenty of food when you were very young?
ANON: Yeah. Yeah. We had. We weren’t hungry. Yeah.
CB: What was your favourite food? Children tend to have favourites.
ANON: Yeah. I can’t remember. My mother would do eintopft.
Other: Thick soups.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Thick soups.
ANON: What?
CB: Thick soup was it?
ANON: Thick soup? Well everything in one pot. Cabbage and meat.
CB: Yes. Yeah.
ANON: And potatoes. You know.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And I was very very blonde and by looks typical German. What’s the name?
CB: Aryan.
ANON: Yeah. But I didn’t do anything. I just looked that way. My blonde hair. And two, two steps below. Oh my English.
CB: Two floors. Yeah.
ANON: My English.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: I’ve been back so long.
CB: That’s alright. Two floors below.
ANON: Yeah. There was a lady and she always called me in and gave me pudding.
Other: Blancmange.
ANON: What?
Other: Blancmange.
ANON: And she would ask my mother could she take me along because she thought I was a gorgeous little girl. I didn’t think so but she did.
CB: Right.
ANON: [unclear]
CB: What about — what about schoolfriends?
ANON: Schoolfriends. Yeah well. I remember one and her hair was jet black and we were the best singers in class. Her and me. And whenever we had biology, which we didn’t like, we persuaded to let us sing the latest song or something. Henie her name was. She was a Jew. We were the best of friends in those days.
CB: So you were born in 1930.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: And the war started in September 1939.
ANON: That’s right.
CB: What do you remember about that, aged nine?
ANON: I don’t remember much. I went to school and in those days they weren’t bombing Berlin.
CB: But did the school explain that the war had started?
ANON: I bet they did. I can’t remember though. I bet they did. Yeah. It was an ordinary school. It wasn’t a gymnasium. It was an ordinary school. You should, you should go there from six to fourteen.
CB: Right.
ANON: Eight years.
CB: Berlin is a big place so which part of Berlin did you live in?
ANON: Right in the middle.
CB: Right in the middle.
ANON: [unclear]
CB: Right. And then when you, the war had started. As time went on then bombing started did it?
ANON: No. Hitler, HItler said collect all the children. Or as many children as you can and they sent them off to Austria. Near Osterreich. Is it?
Other: You said Austria.
ANON: It might have been southern Germany. And I was there nine or ten months. My mother came to see me and when I go back to Berlin, back to, yeah Berlin, they started bombing us. That day or the next day. I can’t remember.
CB: Oh really. Yes.
ANON: They sent us away and nothing happened and then when we got back it did.
CB: Yes. Well the evacuees had the same experience in Britain. Some of them. Yes. So, when you got back to Berlin then what? Did you stay there?
ANON: I went back to Berlin. Yeah. Had to. Nowhere else to go. And I remember it’s said and, they started bombing us. The British and French would come at night and the Americans during the daytime. And they used to say on the radio schwer kampf bringer.
Other: Heavy party.
ANON: Meaning, meaning bombers are coming.
CB: Yes.
ANON: Flying in over Hanover, Braunsweig. That meant we would be bombed in seven minutes from now. And we grabbed everything we could and took it with us in the cellar. Can we listen to it for a minute?
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[recording paused]
CB: Her father died from an accident at work when she was aged nine.
[recording paused]
ANON: Anybody who, who didn’t have running water in Germany. I can’t —
CB: No.
ANON: And we all had electricity.
CB: Yes.
ANON: And we all, we would cook on this. It was made of tiles. This machine. Machine. It’s not a bloody machine.
CB: Cooker.
ANON: It’s an oven.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: It’s an oven.
CB: An oven. Right.
ANON: And put your pots on there and I’m totally out of — its not like me stuttering about like this here but —
CB: No.
ANON: I wasn’t prepared for this.
CB: No. But you see where I live. A village near here. It wasn’t until 1946, after the war, that they had piped water.
ANON: You’re joking.
CB: Or electricity. No.
ANON: What?
CB: No. And the mains drains didn’t come until we joined. We came to the village thirty eight years ago. So, 1979 was when they put the mains drains in so the point that I’m making is in Britain lots of people didn’t have these things and it’s interesting to know what it was like in Germany in the war. How were you getting on? So, you’ve just talked about the cooking. So, it was coal fired cooking.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And heating.
CB: Yeah.
Other: Momma, say things like —
CB: I’ll stop for a mo.
ANON: Sorry, I didn’t realise.
[Recording paused]
ANON: We would share the toilet with our neighbours.
CB: Oh right.
ANON: But it was, it was a proper water toilet with window and water and and God knows what. They had a key. We had a key. No problem. We never met them. We never saw them.
CB: Right.
ANON: On the toilet I mean.
CB: So, this was on the landing.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: A shared toilet.
ANON: Yeah. Where we lived on the fourth floor it was between. It was three and a half.
CB: What about the bath? Where was that?
ANON: Oh, we would bath in our flats.
CB: It was in the flat. Right.
ANON: My mother would bring a big sink runner.
Other: Tin. Tin.
CB: Tin bath.
ANON: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So the water was heated separately and then poured into the bath.
ANON: And this Kochmachine.
Other: For boiling. Kettle.
ANON: No. She had — oh God how can I explain this? The oven.
CB: Yes. The oven.
ANON: The stove. It was about as big as this. Half a table.
CB: Yes.
ANON: And there were some rings here.
CB: Four foot square.
ANON: And you could hang the cooking pot in. And if you had a cooking bigger pot you could take out the other ring. The next ring. You know what I mean?
CB: Yes.
ANON: There were about four or five rings. And also here we had [pause] sugar.
CB: Did you have a hot plate?
ANON: Yeah. Two.
CB: Two hot plates.
ANON: They were gas and it was near an open fire and it was gas.
CB: Right. And it had an oven. Was the oven powered by the gas or —
ANON: No, the oven was powered by —
CB: The coal.
ANON: By — yeah. Coal.
CB: Right.
ANON: We fetched from the cellar. Up the stairs.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: It was lovely.
CB: And you had electricity.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: But did you have power all the time?
ANON: All the time.
CB: Or did you have power cuts?
ANON: All the time. We had power all the time. Oh, during the war?
CB: Yes.
ANON: Oh, well, I can’t remember but I know that before the war we always, well as far as I remember we always had.
CB: You always had supplies.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: So, in the war when the raids came you had a quarter of an hour or something notice.
ANON: Less.
CB: Less than that. Then you went in to the cellar.
ANON: We went into the cellar.
CB: Everybody was there.
ANON: Yeah. Except two ladies. They weren’t allowed in any more. And my mother asked, ‘Why not?’ And they said, ‘They’re Jews.’
CB: Oh.
ANON: And my mother said, ‘They’re human beings like you and me. They want protection. Let them come down.’ Nein. Nein. Had she been reported she would have been taken away.
CB: Right.
ANON: Anyway, this fellow wasn’t all bad. He let them come down but apart from other people so other people wouldn’t be offended. A load of rubbish.
CB: And how did you know that the danger had passed when you were in there?
ANON: Oh, there would be a siren going.
CB: Right. So, there would have been a siren to begin with. To warn you.
ANON: Yes. Sure. Yeah.
CB: And then —
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Another one to say the all clear.
ANON: And I remember if it happened three times in a night which it did sometimes then we didn’t have to go to school the next morning.
CB: Right.
ANON: Meanwhile they bombed our school and I remember at one time at one time we had sixty two children in one class. I also remember one thing. I told you I went to see my grandma almost every day. All of us. And we were coming back towards our flat and on the other side of the street there was this terrible noise. They were breaking shop windows. And it was a jeweller and he had a big star on his shop window. Jew. The word “Jew” written in it and this night they came and demolished shop, pinched, took all the, well I should imagine SS men. My father saw that and he wanted to go across and help those people and my mother knew if he goes across there he’s going to be dead in two minutes. I’ve never before or since seen a woman fight as hard. My father couldn’t make it across the street. She was too strong for him. I’ve never seen anything like it. She was stronger than him and he was a strong man. It was she was frightened. So, we went home but it was a terrible experience. Switch that off.
CB: So, it said on the window, “Juden.”
ANON: Yeah. “Jude.”
CB: “Jude.” Right.
ANON: They all had to wear, they had to wear it here or here.
CB: Yeah. So, what happened to them?
ANON: No idea. We know that sometimes a car would go by, a van would go by and there was people on it but we thought they were sent to work camps. You know. When they had to work for the Nazis. But we had no — people weren’t, we had no idea. We had no idea. The first time I saw or heard about the concentration camp was when the war was over and the allies were showing us a film. And I said, ‘Yeah. Now we’ve lost the war they can tell us anything.’ It took weeks and month ‘til we could, ‘til we could believe that they killed those people. But nobody believes it today — that we didn’t know. Well we didn’t know. We did not know.
CB: Well the camps weren’t near Berlin were they?
ANON: No. They were out in the wilds somewhere. [unclear] There were several in Germany but I thought they were just sending them to work.
CB: How did you get that impression?
ANON: How did I get—?
CB: How did you get that impression? Was it put on the radio or in the ‘paper? Or —
ANON: No. They sent us, they showed us films.
CB: No. no. I’m talking about in the war you thought they were going to work camps.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: How did you get that idea?
ANON: I didn’t get any idea. I saw those vans going by with people on it.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And I thought they’d taken them to camps. That’s all.
CB: Yeah. Right.
ANON: Today everybody says that. We didn’t know. We did not know.
CB: And the radio was working all the time. What sort of messages were coming out on that that you, as a child, would appreciate?
ANON: I can’t remember that. I can’t remember that.
CB: Did the — did the German radio have children’s programmes that you remember?
ANON: I can’t remember.
CB: Right.
ANON: We would, we would mostly have listened to news to find out where the allies were. We wanted them to get to Berlin before the Russians [pause] but they had an agreement with Stalin. And he said he lost the most men and he wanted the right to take Berlin and so the French and the British waited. Waited and waited and let them come. Oh, it was, that was when I was frightened most.
CB: Were you? Yeah.
ANON: During the war I wasn’t so frightened. When the Russians came that frightened me.
CB: So, the Battle of Berlin was the middle of April 1945 to the 2nd of May.
ANON: They fought for every house. They fought for every house. They fought for every street. Hitler — Hitler destroyed most bridges. Berlin, I found out since, had more bridges than Venice and he destroyed most bridges. And I remember going somewhere and there were this bridge was gone but there was a big pipe like this and people would walk across it. I forced myself. In the middle of it, I couldn’t, I couldn’t go forwards or backwards. They had to come from both sides and guide me because if your feet had fell down it would have gone in to the water you’d have been — because the bridge were [expedien?] destroyed. All the iron pieces were sticking up. You know.
CB: Oh right.
ANON: So if you had fallen you would have been a dead one.
CB: You’d be impaled on it.
ANON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember I went to work. I left school when I was thirteen and a half and I got a job straightaway in an office.
CB: So that’s 1943.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Yes.
ANON: No. The war was finished.
CB: Ah.
ANON: The war was finished. And that’s when we got hungry. We had nothing to eat. Bloody hell. It was terrible. Hunger is terrible.
CB: How did you get food?
ANON: How did we get food? We got cards, tickets and it says five hundred grams of something and something else. I remember once my mother sending me to the baker and fetch our last bread or whatever it was and I ate it all the way coming home. A whole loaf. And there was nothing left for my mother. Oh I felt — but the hunger was bigger than the — God.
CB: So, who was distributing the food. Was it the Russians? Or was it done —
ANON: Yeah.
CB: By the German authorities.
ANON: It must have been the Russians at first. Some were even so kind they — it didn’t happen very often but some would killed a horse so people could eat. And others were not so nice. You know. But I remember as a child we’d go finding splitter.
Other: Shrapnel.
ANON: Pardon?
Other: Shrapnel.
ANON: Yeah. Shrapnel.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And we could distinguish whether it was from a bomb, from a roof.
CB: A shell.
ANON: Flak.
CB: Anti-aircraft. Yeah.
ANON: Or wherever.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And we did know that you mustn’t touch the greenish ones. That’s phosphor. It burns your skin through the bone you know.
CB: Yes. Yeah.
ANON: We survived. We survived. Kids. We made a game of that somehow.
CB: So, you collected the scrap metal. What did you do with that?
ANON: Exchanged it. Give me two of those and you get one of these.
CB: Yeah. Exchange it for what? Food or for —
ANON: No. We exchanged it for another shrapnel amongst the children.
CB: Yeah. ‘Cause you were getting a collection together.
ANON: Sort of. Yeah. And then when we were so hungry and the war had finished we’d [unclear] On a train outside. It would take us in to Brandenburg. To a farmer. And I’d have our best. Our best silver. Knives and forks. Give to the farmer. We got a few potatoes. Walk back to the station and the police would take the potatoes off us.
CB: The police took the potatoes off you. Right.
ANON: And back we went to the train. Hung out. And you were so tired. You were so tired and you couldn’t let go. You’ d have been dead. Those farmers. The people used to see all they need is carpet for the cow shed. They got everything else. Yeah. The hunger was terrible. And then bit by bit it got better and better. Oh, and in the meanwhile we had the luftbrucke.
Other: What’s the luftbrucke?
ANON: Can you remember when the —
CB: Well there was the Berlin Airlift in 1948.
ANON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Is that what you mean? Luftflight. Yes.
ANON: Yeah. Can’t remember what I was going to say about it.
CB: Ok. So the Berlin Airlift.
ANON: Why was I mentioning that? Why.
CB: You were talking about food. Is that what you were thinking of?
ANON: Well anyway I saw this article in the paper where they wanted German girls to come to Berlin er to England they could either go as a nurse, in a textile factory or child minding. Child minding was not for me. Nursing was not for me. So, I went in the factory. I’m not telling you — what’s the reason? Oh, I was going to say that the day, the day I left Berlin for England the what’s the name was stopped. It was open for — luftbrucke had finished.
CB: The Berlin Airlift had finished.
ANON: Yeah. Yeah. And I went to England and here, here they’d got, they’re doing this you know like we used to have to buy bread.
Other: Ration card.
ANON: Yeah. Rations. Yes.
CB: Yes. Where did you land in England? You came by ship.
ANON: Yeah. Yes.
Yes. [unclear] Not Preston.
Other: Harwich.
ANON: Not Harwich. No.
CB: It wasn’t Dover.
ANON: No.
CB: Anyway, you came across.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Yes. And then what did you do? You knew where you were going to go did you?
ANON: Well.
CB: In advance?
ANON: It was, it was governmental, you know. So, we got there and they gave us one pound a week. I think it was a week. And I still smoked in those days and I went to buy some cigarettes and came back. No idea about the money. Couldn’t speak English. Not a single word. And somebody was counting my money and said, ‘You’ve been diddled. You’ve been done.’ And I thought right, I’m going to learn this.
CB: Learn English.
ANON: The very first day in English I learned the English money.
CB: Right.
ANON: I thought nobody else is going to. But on the whole the British were — to me they were good.
CB: So where was your first job?
ANON: My first job. I don’t know but I remember the first landlord. We did three turns around the bed and then, yeah. And my —
Other: You were in Derby.
ANON: What?
Other: Were you in Derby? Derby.
ANON: Yeah, I know. I worked in Derby but when this landlord was turning funny we went to the Labour Exchange, my friend and I. She spoke English. And they sort of viewed us a bit funny but then they decided they believed us. He’d been there previously saying he wants us out because we’re so filthy. That’s why they viewed us the way they did, you know. That was in Derby. So I got away from that job and I finished up at Midland Dyers. Midland Dyers, Derby. And I was there for two years earning quite a bit of money because it was a special job.
CB: Dyeing clothes.
ANON: No.
CB: Dyeing.
ANON: No.
CB: Oh.
ANON: Warping. Warping. A new fibre had just come out. It could have been nylon. I can’t remember. And it went through, it was on a reel and it had to go through some — you see the thing was that two threads had to be like this. Side by side.
Yes.
ANON: It was a fine silky thread. If it was like this it was no good. If it was like this it was no good. It had to be side by side. If we could manage that one of those things were worth about two thousand pounds in those days. So, it was a qualified job, you know. What was your question?
CB: No. Where, what — what was the —
ANON: Midland Dyers.
CB: It was dyeing. Midland Dyers. Dyeing fabric.
ANON: No.
CB: Material.
ANON: No.
CB: Right.
ANON: Warping is it? Warping?
Other: I don’t know.
ANON: What do you call it? What do you call it?
CB: But they were, they were producing this thread.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Which was a man-made fibre.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Right.
ANON: We got that.
CB: And then you had to dye the colour into it.
ANON: You put it on to a beam.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: Beam. God. If I’d have known.
CB: But you were putting a colour on it were you?
ANON: No. We weren’t putting a colour on to it. We were putting it on to a beam.
CB: Right.
ANON: On to a beam. It had to be side by side.
CB: Yes. Ok. And when it was on the beam what did they do with it?
ANON: God knows. They took it away then.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And we got another new creel and then through the combs. And then on to the —
CB: On to the reel.
ANON: Hmmn.
CB: Right. How much did they pay you for that?
ANON: I can’t remember but it was well, it was well paid. Very well paid. They were saying only as good as miners in those days, you know.
CB: Oh really. Right. And where did you live then? You changed your accommodation.
ANON: I lived with, I can’t remember what she, what her name was but she was ever such a nice lady and she was frightened to let me out at night. She was ever so frightened to let me out. Oh [deleted] no. You mustn’t go out. No. It’s dark. But anyway I lived with her for — I don’t know how long. I can’t remember after that what happened.
CB: Did you come over with your friend from Germany?
ANON: Yeah.
CB: And then how long did you stay together?
ANON: We became friends on the —
CB: On the ship.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Right.
ANON: Yeah. She went off to see her boyfriend. She met this English soldier in Berlin and she came across to see him and she didn’t know he was married with children. Yeah.
CB: So that didn’t work.
ANON: She didn’t like that. He didn’t like that.
CB: What was the attitude of the British people to you as a German, after the war, in England?
ANON: I would, I would say to them, ‘I’ll let you know I’m German.’ One said, ‘Oh well. I speak to everybody.’ And others would sort of turn away but to me I can’t complain. I couldn’t speak English as I said. It came, you know, by and by. And I ask her to write down my name and address. My address. It was [deleted] Chester Green. And she write that down and she sent me for chicken food. The performance I gave in that shop was A1 [laughs] making noises and flapping the wings and all sorts. They fetched out everything they had in this bloody shop. Live chickens. Dead chickens. Cut up chickens. All sorts. No. That wasn’t right. In the end I got what I wanted. Chicken food. We often laughed about that.
CB: So, did you take classes in English to help you?
ANON: No. No. No, I didn’t. My English used to be pretty good. I’ve been back in Germany now for forty years. No. ’77. That’s twenty three.
CB: Yeah. Forty years.
ANON: Forty years. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And Sharon. I usually speak fifty fifty and now it’s gone to mostly German. So, she will have lost it.
CB: A bit of practice. You’re ok. So, after the dyers then where did you go?
ANON: Home.
CB: The next job?
ANON: Back to Germany.
CB: Oh, did you? Right.
ANON: I stayed there. The, the not the boss but he was the meistergrade — he would he would be the fellow going around the machines. Oiling them and making sure they were all in order and what have you.
CB: The maintenance man.
ANON: Yeah. And my friend and I, she was a keen cyclist. Bike. Not motorcyclist.
CB: Cyclist. Yeah.
ANON: And my landlady was going to Cornwall on holiday and we said, ‘We’ll come and see you.’ [laughs] ‘You can’t. You can’t.’ I couldn’t even, I’d never even ridden a bike before ‘cause I hadn’t got one. My parents couldn’t afford one. Anyway, we went to buy this bike and she says, ‘Have a go.’ And a bus came towards me and I panicked and the wheel was buckled. The front wheel. So, we had to have that repaired or bought a new one. I don’t know. And we managed to get to Devonshire. My landlady couldn’t believe it. She could not believe it. On the way back we accepted lorries that would take us, you know. But going down we didn’t. We slept on the side of the bloody road.
CB: This was summertime was it?
ANON: Yeah. ‘Cause my landlady went on holiday down there. Yeah.
CB: It was.
ANON: Yeah. When I think about that today. When I went home to Germany I had two suitcases. After these two years went back home. I had two suitcases and one was packed with coffee. Pounds and pounds. And we had to sit on the suitcase to close it, you know. Pounds of coffee. And the other one was just clothing. When we got to the Customs they said, ‘Open your suitcase.’ I said, ‘Oh please don’t make me open my suitcase. Three girls sat on it for me to close it, you know.’ We can’t get. Anyway, I talked them into opening just one. ‘Ok then. Which one should I open?’ Which one has the coffee got? This is the one with the coffee. ‘Open that one.’ He says, ‘And what’s in that one? My clothing?’ I said, ‘That’s the one with the coffee.’ I was telling him the bloody truth and he didn’t believe me and he let me go through. He opened the other one because I pointed to the coffee one. They could have had me. I said the truth all the time but the way I did it they get the — yeah.
CB: Was coffee a banned substance?
ANON: Yeah. We could swap that for other foods you know.
CB: It was worth a lot of money.
ANON: We didn’t sell it. We swapped it for other foods.
CB: Oh I see. Right.
ANON: God knows what. I remember. As I say when I was thirteen I started work. Thirteen and three quarters. My mother sending me to the [unclear] for two slices of bread and a little bit of salt. Two slices of bread all day. Hunger is terrible.
CB: Did the food supply, during the war, did the food supply get worse as time went on?
ANON: I should imagine. I can’t remember. But we were never so hungry as just after the war.
CB: After the war.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: In Britain there was rationing throughout the war and until 1954.
ANON: Yeah. I came in ’53. I tell you.
CB: Right.
ANON: That day — Germany — we upped it all and came to Britain.
CB: Came abroad.
ANON: Yeah
CB: Yeah. I remember my parents had a German girl working for them for a while. In Germany though, in the war there was food rationing was there?
ANON: Yeah. But it was sort of, you could get by. You wouldn’t be awake nights because you were so hungry. They did supply us with food. Yeah.
CB: Now, what happened to the family flat during the war? Were you, was your mother in there with you all the time or did it get damaged?
ANON: Yeah, we went to the cellar, down to the cellar in the siren.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: We went to the cellar and in winter or anytime at all we would put on two jackets and two of everything. Except shoes. We put on everything. Two. Carried it all four and half, five, four and a half stairs in to the cellar. Siren. Up again. Second time. The things people can stick to when —
CB: To what extent was the block of flats damaged in the bombing?
ANON: Full of every, you could see the holes where it had been hit. I lived at number 19 and number 18 was burned down and it came through the — in the, [pause] in the cellar the builders have to leave a wall that’s called the fire wall. And that’s easily to break through. That’s where they came from number 18. They came into our cellar. It was so full. It was so crowded and overloaded. I don’t know where the other people finished up but —
CB: But your mother was there with you throughout the war, was she?
ANON: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Right. So, what was the general attitude of the population to the bombing? Being bombed. What was their reaction?
ANON: We used to say not very nice words but we couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t do anything. We didn’t want the war. We couldn’t stop it. So, you know.
CB: What did the authorities keep telling you about being bombed?
ANON: At first, they swore blind that no bomb would ever touch Berlin. Yeah. He swallowed his words then. Goering.
CB: You mentioned earlier about picking up the debris some of which was flak.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Some of which was bombs.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: What was the reaction to the incendiaries because a large amount of the ordnance dropped was incendiary so —
ANON: What is that?
CB: Fire bombs.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: You said they were the green ones.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: The shrapnel was green.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: So how did the population react to the firebombing?
ANON: Oh. They didn’t do to us like they did, Berlin never stood in — where was it? In Dresden or somewhere.
CB: Dresden. Yeah.
ANON: They created something specially.
CB: A fire.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Fire storms. Yes. And Hamburg.
ANON: We didn’t have that. We just got bombs and ordinary fires. And, God, when I see pictures today of how Berlin looked in ‘45 I still, to this day, drive through Berlin and think how come, how come they could rebuild it so quickly. It looks as if nothing’s ever happened. I can’t understand that. The first thing that happened after the war women would make themselves a little table of something and find a hammer or something and knock all, grab the bricks and knock all the cement off so the brick could be re-used.
CB: That was their job.
ANON: Yeah. Well that’s, that’s what everybody did. There was nobody to give you a job.
CB: To rebuild.
ANON: Yeah. It was better than sitting about.
CB: How tall was your block of flats? How many floors?
ANON: Four.
CB: You were at the top floor.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Right.
ANON: As I said, no lift. Sugar. And then every night, sometimes three times carrying everything you were able to. Down the cellar and up again. Bloody hell.
CB: So, there was huge destruction. Your block of flats survived.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: What was the view around there? Were there other flats still standing or were they demolished?
ANON: No. They were just, just [pause] no — only number 18 was totally demolished. The others, the others I don’t know. They just had big holes from, from shrapnel, you know. And the Americans — the cheeky devils. They would fly in ever so low during the day and take pictures because they did area bombing, you know. One day they do it from twelve to fifteen or the next day they do it from sixteen to twenty one. They were making sure everybody gets some.
CB: Which areas had the greatest destruction in Berlin?
ANON: I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know. I only know when I looked around there was nothing. There was nothing. How? I don’t know where people went. It was terrible.
CB: You talked about, in the beginning of the war, children being evacuated. Were they evacuated later or did they just leave families with their children in Berlin?
ANON: Were they what?
CB: Did they evacuate children again later?
ANON: No.
CB: They didn’t.
ANON: There was nothing. No. No. Only this once but I was gone nine months. My mother came to see me.
CB: Yes.
ANON: And when I came back they started bombing Berlin so, you know, they were going to get me somehow.
CB: Yeah. So, you were back after the war. You returned to Berlin. How did you come to meet your husband?
ANON: I met him about six weeks before I went home.
CB: In England.
ANON: In England.
CB: Oh right.
ANON: I didn’t like him all that much.
CB: Why not?
ANON: I didn’t like him all that much at all. As a friend, ok but not as a boyfriend and then I went back to Berlin. God knows when it happened. I don’t know. I was engaged to an American and I said to him, ‘I’ll just go England and say goodbye. It will be ages before I get back to Europe.’ And I saw him again at a dance and six days later we were married. Six or seven days.
CB: So, he had a pretty convincing patter to give to you did he?
ANON: There was nothing. We just saw each other and that was it.
CB: Oh.
ANON: He was engaged. I was engaged. And we met at this dance and that was it.
CB: Where was that?
ANON: Derby. There was live music Rita Rosa and Ted Heath.
CB: Oh.
ANON: Derby, Paris. I can’t remember the name.
CB: Was he in the army? Or was —
ANON: No.
CB: What did he do?
ANON: He went down the mine that year because my father in law had an ice cream business and he needed one at home so he said, ‘Go down the mine and then you can stay at home,’ which he did.
CB: So, what did he do in the mine?
ANON: Coal mining. He didn’t, he didn’t [pause] God my English. Let me explain [unclear]
Other: Dynamite.
ANON: What?
Other: He used dynamite.
CB: He used to do the blasting.
ANON: No. He didn’t. No. He didn’t do the blasting.
CB: But he put in the dynamite did he?
ANON: God knows. I don’t know. I don’t know but I do know he didn’t do blasting.
CB: Right. So how long did he work there when you were married?
ANON: I can’t remember. He should have had to work the two years but he stayed longer because the pay was so good but he did, he did come out and he took over — he had the ice cream in the summer. In the winter they were delivering coal. The miners are entitled to, you know. So, you see there’s nothing, nothing thrilling to tell you.
CB: But then you had your children.
ANON: Yeah. ’55, ’58,’ 65.
CB: By which time your husband was running the ice cream business was he?
ANON: As well as the coal job in the winter. Yeah.
CB: He was still working in the coal mine.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Right.
ANON: No. Just delivering.
CB: Just delivering. Right.
ANON: Just delivering it to miners.
CB: Right.
ANON: And one day, God knows, he had flu or something and he said, ‘Go and take Mr Jenkins’ and, ‘What do you mean, am I taking him?’ He wanted me to drive the lorry with the coal on. I only did about five customers. Then I went home shaking.
CB: No power steering.
ANON: Power steering in those days. You must be joking. No power steering and a heavy lorry. God. When we got back we got a real rollicking for only doing five customers. Yes. Mr Jenkins said I couldn’t work any faster.
CB: So, when you got back when did you go back to Germany?
ANON: After the two years. I went over in ‘49. I went back in ‘51.
CB: Yes.
ANON: Stayed in Germany for two and a half years.
CB: Yes.
ANON: Never heard from my husband. Never saw him. I wrote him twice. And then his sister wrote and said he’s engaged. And I thought yeah. Ok. So why not? And then I still came to England in ’53 and as I say within six days, special licence, we were married.
CB: Yeah. What was the reaction of German people in Germany to your marrying an Englishman?
ANON: No idea. I was in England.
CB: The family. The extended family.
ANON: The family. I have no idea. I know my mother. My mother. She was all by herself. No sister, no brother, no husband. She had a sister but God knows what they said. I don’t know. I know my mother was heartbroken for a while.
CB: Why was she heartbroken?
ANON: My mother? Because I wasn’t coming back.
CB: Right.
ANON: And she was all by herself.
CB: Right. We’ll stop there for a mo.
[Recording paused]
CB: When the war ended [deleted] you had only Russians immediately but then you were in the British zone were you? In the British Zone?
ANON: It wasn’t then in the British zone.
CB: No. Right. So, what was the reaction to the Russians and how did they treat you?
ANON: Everybody was scared and wished the British and the French would come. The Americans. But as I say they had this agreement with Stalin with Churchill.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: To let the Russians in first.
CB: Well it was the result of the Yalta conference that they knew that Berlin was going to be in the eastern zone.
ANON: Have you ever [pause], have you got schnipsel papier.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: [unclear]
CB: A piece of paper yeah.
ANON: I can’t draw.
CB: Oh right.
ANON: Imagine. Imagine this is Germany.
CB: Yes.
ANON: Berlin is here.
CB: Yes.
ANON: That is the east.
CB: Yes.
ANON: And these three are French.
CB: In the west.
ANON: The west. Yeah.
CB: The British, French and American.
ANON: English and — yeah.
CB: American.
ANON: Isn’t that brilliant.
CB: Yes.
ANON: And I, and I live in the British part.
CB: Right. Ok.
ANON: The British part is in the middle. The top is French. Then English and Americans are the south west. [unclear].
CB: Right.
ANON: So, what was the public reaction—
CB: Tell him about the what?
CB: The fear.
Other: The fear.
ANON: [unclear]
CB: Your fear of the Russians.
ANON: I know. I don’t like, I don’t like doing that. I think, it think it’s dangerous talk. [Unclear]
Other: She doesn’t want to.
CB: That’s Ok. But in the general population was concerned about the Russians.
ANON: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Because of what they did. Yeah. I mean they flattened Berlin in taking it didn’t they?
ANON: That’s not the worst. The worst thing was that the women were all scared to death.
CB: So how did you, how did your mother defend you against —
ANON: My mother said, ‘Stop shaking.’ She said, ‘I will go for you if they come and fetch you.’ And the Polish woman, she nearly had the [unclear], ‘They don’t take a forty year old if they can have a fifteen year old. Or a thirteen.’ So the, this Polish woman had a big korbsessel.
Other: Whicker chair.
ANON: Yeah. And she said, ‘Now crouch down under this and she put a blanket over me and she sort of sat on it. She didn’t sit but it looked as if she did so the Russians didn’t see me.
CB: Right.
ANON: But as I say another one would kill a horse and, you know, give it to the people so —
Ok. Thank you.
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Interview with a survivor of the bombing of Berlin
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00:55:36 audio recording
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Pending review
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2017-07-17
Description
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She tells of her life in Berlin before, during and after the war. She lived with her mother in a block of flats close to the home of her grandparents. Her father died when she was nine years old. During the war she collected shrapnel as souvenirs to swap with her school friends. During the allied bombing she sheltered in the cellar of her block. After the war she suffered the pangs of hunger, and she describes taking silverware to farmers in exchange for a few potatoes. As part of a government scheme, she travelled to the UK to work at a textile factory. She then returned to Germany. She came back to the UK for what she thought would be a final visit but she met and married her husband.
Coverage
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Civilian
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Germany
Germany--Berlin
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1943
1945
Contributor
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Julie Williams
anti-Semitism
bombing
childhood in wartime
civil defence
fear
home front
incendiary device
round-up
shelter
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/197/3332/AAtkinsG160929.2.mp3
9b38cd43b07e35b6cca1c08e2d9ec8d9
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Title
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Atkins, Glenn
Glenn Atkins
G Atkins
Description
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One oral history interview with Glenn Atkins (3131148 Royal Air Force). He completed his national service in the RAF during the Cold War.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-09-29
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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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Atkins, G
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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GA: Although I should have gone because I was in the ATC.
CB: Good. Right. This is the first of two interviews for people who joined and served in the RAF after the war but this is essentially the legacy of the war and we are now talking about the beginning of the Cold War. So today we’re with Glenn Atkins in Buckingham and he has done a variety of tasks as a National Serviceman and, Glenn, what do you remember, oh it’s the 29th of September 2016. What do you remember Glenn from your, what are your earliest recollections of family life?
GA: Well I was born at Newport Pagnell. I went to Newport Elementary School, passed my eleven plus in 1941 and I went to Wolverton Grammar School which is now combined as a comprehensive but, and it’s interesting I went to school on a train from Newport Pagnell to Wolverton. It was a four mile train journey and, well I went to the grammar school but after two years I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the languages. The French and the Latin. I think there was a French master that used to take the mickey out of me because I couldn’t follow it. He always used to ask me the questions so I had to stand up and make a fool of myself but that could have been something but I had in the last term at the school before the eleven plus one, one period of, one term of engineering drawing which I presumed it was because we were drawing things out of Wolverton Works and stuff like that you know so I got the idea of being a draughtsman and that’s why I wanted to leave the grammar school and go to the technical college in Wolverton which was one of the best technical colleges around because it had Wolverton Carriage Works as its base that did every, everything you could do such as all forms of engineering. In fact we used to have teachers from the technical college for engineering drawing, for woodwork and metal work. Anyway, I had a job to leave the grammar school because the headmaster didn’t want me to go. He thought it was a slur on him that I wanted to leave to go to a technical college and I can’t understand how I was twelve years old and I used to have to sit at this desk. He’d come in after everybody had gone and try to talk me out of it. I can remember him saying, ‘Well we do art.’ So I said, ‘Well that’s not engineering drawing.’ Anyway, my father went to see the headmaster at the technical college and he was anxious to receive me, you know. Well three of us did it. He wasn’t worried about the other two but I went to the technical college and all I can say is that in the first term because it was a two year course when I went at the technical school at thirteen, in the first term we’d covered all the maths we’d done in two years at the grammar school. It’s a bit like this university here. They cover everything in two years don’t they? Anyway, I came about third in the class, had a bit of an advantage though just coming in but, and I was, ended up as, can I say the star pupil at the end of my year. Now then in 1945 the new Education Act said that everybody should stop at school until they were sixteen and the technical college got a new school certificate out and the headmaster who had changed then from the one who accepted me but he wanted me to stop on the extra eighteen months to start the period over with a few others. Well, a friend, a boy that I was in class with who was always top of the class he got a privileged apprentice at Vauxhall Motors. He lived at Leighton Buzzard and it sounded so interesting to me that I wanted to leave school and go on this apprenticeship scheme. I went to Luton on my bike and a bus which I did ‘cause I lived at Newport Pagnell. I went there. I found my way on this Saturday morning with everybody’s not there. Big buildings big rooms. In the end I found my way to the interview and there were four or five guys sat in a circle and me in the middle like you are sitting there firing the questions at me. It was quite an interview really. Anyway, I did that and then I found my way home and I went in Monday morning and we used to have an assembly at 9 o’clock, main assembly and when you left there you had to file past the headmaster’s office and he was standing there and anybody that had done something wrong he would point and, get in his office. Nobody got that except me. ‘In there.’ So I went in there and he said, ‘How did you get on?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Your interview at Luton.’ I says, ‘How did you know? I never told anybody.’ ‘I have a way of knowing these things,’ he said. He said, ‘Did you get the job?’ I says, ‘No. They didn’t, they didn’t want me.’ He said, ‘I knew they wouldn’t.’ I said, ‘How did you know?’ ‘Because I wrote them a letter asking them not to take you for the reasons I’m going to tell you’. I said, ‘I went through all of that, that interview you know and all that hassle for nothing.’ He said, ‘It’ll do you good for the rest of your life.’ Anyway, he was good of his word because when I came the top of the class in the end and he always said he would find me the best job outside Wolverton Works which was where everybody seemed to go and of course it was Wipac and they’d just started in Bletchley during the war. They came down from London and they’d just bought the company from the Americans because the Americans were convinced in 1942 that we were going to lose the war so they were going to sell the factory you see. Well he bought the factory and, well John’s father knows about this, he was the carpenter but anyway again I cycled in to Bletchley, had my interview and I was a trainee design draughtsman. That was my title at sixteen. 1946. And I carried on then doing night school and day release education to get my, first of all my ordinary national after two years and then another two years for my higher national which I got by the age of twenty and then I thought they’d forgotten about me ‘cause I got deferred from when I was eighteen to get, to do this education. Then Christmas came no buff envelope you know and I really thought they’d forgotten me and then on bloody New Year’s Day it came. Report at Padgate on the 15th of January 1951. I can remember getting my ticket from that little old railway station at Newport Pagnell which they stamped in it and it would take you all the way to Padgate you know and caught the train there early in the morning and Audrey, my wife, I was, we were courting then by about a year. That was my biggest regret was leaving here because I didn’t want to leave her. Anyway, I caught the train to Padgate. Well it wasn’t Padgate. What was it? The station near there anyway and when I got there there was a bunch of chaps like me with a little case all going to do their National Service and everybody was so polite. Even the bus driver. He was an air force man. Until we went through the gates at Padgate and then it all changed. Everybody shouting at you. All the rest. Anyway, we went to this little hut which had twenty two beds in it and we were told to find ourselves a bed space each and I picked one next to the chap in the corner who was from Derbyshire. We hadn’t been there long and the warrant officer came in. Typical you know, loud. ‘Gather around,’ he says. He said, ‘Anybody been in the ATC?’ Well I had. I’d been in the ATC for twelve months. I stuck my hand up didn’t I? He said, ‘Right you’re in charge of this lot,’ he said. ‘You have to march them down to the cookhouse, march them back, everywhere they go they march in order and you’re in charge. You’ve got to get them up by 6 o’clock in the morning to be on parade at seven’. And this went on. First of all we marched in our civvies and then we gradually got kitted out with our uniform and we got half a uniform while the trousers were being altered and that sort of thing. And one incident was marching them down to the cookhouse and we were doing it quite smart actually. I was on the outside and then I could see two officers about a hundred, well I thought, fifty yards away. Out of sight I thought. So we carried on. Suddenly I thought, ‘Airman.’ I knew that was me. I stood and saluted, Went over there and they said, ‘Do you realise you salute officers whenever you meet them?’ I said, ‘Yes but I thought you were too far away.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘You just remember that for the future,’ he said. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘You’d better take charge of your squad. They’ve just marched outside the main gate.’ The buggers were all walking out of Lincoln so I had to run after then and turn them around and come back again and they were all laughing like mad you know. And, but all I can remember about that cookhouse was they were the lowest of the low the chaps in charge there and they all shared an attitude as if they were small children, you know. I would have loved to go back and tell them what I thought of them there afterwards. Anyway, we’d only been there two weeks and we had a recruitment call at this camp cinema and we went down there and the officer commanding, Bomber Command was doing the speech from the platform and he said we’d run the armed forces down to below, down to Dunkirk level and the Cold War was coming on. So anybody, they wanted so many air force so anybody that had a school certificate or equivalent could volunteer to go down to Hornchurch and get selected. There were seventy of us actually but I was the first one to put my name down but not to do with flying. I just wanted more money because I started at Wipac at twenty eight, thirty bob a week so when I went in the, when I got called up for National Service I went to twenty eight bob a week. A shilling a day. Anyway, we went down to Hornchurch. We had all the tests over three days like spin you around and walk in a white line afterwards. Oh the decompression chamber was one where they lowered the compression until they gave you a writing pad with a pen until you went doing all this business. You were just about to pass out and then finish it off but went through all that which was a bit of a surprise. I had got a cold at the time and I was frightened to death I was going to fail ear nose and throat and go back to Padgate for another two or three weeks. Anyway, I got through it and the one thing I remember is that I was fast asleep. I went to bed early before 10 o’clock with aspirins to try and get rid of the cold. I’d just about got off to sleep and somebody came and shook me on the shoulder and it was him. He said, ‘Hey, hey George’. I said, ‘I’m not George.’ ‘Oh sorry.’ he said, ‘I thought you were somebody else.’ That was our first meeting. Anyway, after all the tests, on the Monday we were going back to Padgate and a squadron leader air gunner asked me up in his office and he spoke to me like a father and he said, ‘You see my badge?’ You know it was an emblem and I thought squadron leader air gunner, they were pre, he must be administration afterwards, after the war. He says, ‘If you go back to Padgate with your qualifications you’ll get an LAC electrician. Boring,’ he said. ‘Take my advice. We need three air gunners. He said, ‘In actual fact we need twelve aircrew anyway out of seventy but you were very close to being a pilot which is what you put down for.’ I said, ‘Well I didn’t want anything else.’ He said, ‘Well you take air gunner and you’ll have the time of your life.’ So I did what he said and that’s when I met these three. Those three. That was who I ended up with. We lost him. He was a Scotsman. Anyway, we get back to Padgate and they gave us the filthiest jobs they could find because they knew we were going to go to aircrew. In fact he got conjunctivitis. We were shovelling coal or something you know. Anyway, we went off to, we got posted to Leconfield after only about two or three weeks square bashing. At Leconfield they’d got Wellingtons and that was our air gunnery training where we used to go up in a Wellington and five air gunners would go up with it with a Polish pilot and we would have turns in the rear turret for about a quarter of an hour each with Mark 10 Spitfires attacking us with camera guns and we used to be, our cameras were taken to the crew room afterwards and shown what we scored and they did the same at their base which was further up the road and we got marked. Well I think I got sixty three percent which was very high for an air gunner. Anyway, we did the the course which took us to about May. Incidentally, in the war they trained air gunners within two weeks but in National Service we didn’t only have to learn how to fire the guns we had to know all the mechanism of it. A lot of theory and all that business just to give us something to do I think and then we got posted to Scampton to get crewed up to an aircraft which was the Lincoln. So we went down to Scampton and we had three months conversion to this aircraft. We got through air gunnery quite quickly but we, oh I must say this, when we got to Scampton we all went to this big room and everybody’s conversion about from any age, down from thirty five down to national servicemen. All aircrew trying to get a crew. Well that’s where my Yorkshire friend who was three years younger than me took charge and said, ‘Let’s go for the oldest pilot. He’ll look after us.’ It seemed like a good idea to me so I said, ‘Yeah ok.’ So I went and I sorted him out. ‘Yeah we need two air gunners,’ so we went with him and then we did the conversion and he was an old pilot at thirty four. Ernie Howard. He’d been flying Hurricanes before that. He was out in Japan. Not on Hurricanes but on other aircraft and of course having a Lincoln or a Lancaster was a bit heavy for him so he had to do more circuits and bumps than anybody else landing and taking off and my mate got unconscious hitting his head the roof with the tail coming down too heavy and actually after that they stopped air gunners being in the rear turret. Only the mid-upper could stop while they were doing circuits and bumps. Well we got through in the end and then we got posted. Now they needed one crew with 617 squadron which was the number one squadron you see and because he was the oldest and most experienced in years we went with him and that’s why we were the only two National Servicemen ever flew with 617 because there was nobody else and the aircrew just started for National Servicemen. Well I had the six months up till Christmas ’51 with 617 where I did about a hundred hours. We did various operations, you know, to test all the fighter bases in Europe. We always used to fly up close to the Iron Curtain to show our strength to the Russians but the thing was if we strayed over the border you were shot down. In fact one did get shot down but we didn’t. Anyway, it was all good fun to us. Anyway, we used to come back [pause] but one exercise I remember once we took off from Scampton, we got posted to Scampton from Leconfield from Scampton to Leconfield no to Binbrook. Binbrook in North Lincolnshire and I can always remember taking off from there in this big exercise with about twenty Lincolns taxiing around to take off and all the villagers were there waving and that and we went off, we flew off in the daylight because it was August. We flew out to the North Sea. Ten we flew and attacked Paris. Then we attacked Copenhagen. Then we flew down to Southern Germany, I forget the name and that finished it. We flew up the Iron Curtain and flew up in to the North Sea and we got in to formation then and we attacked London which was to drop these twenty five pounders on a practice bombs on a practice range beyond London. Well when we came over the North Sea every fighter plane in the British air force and the Americans was attacking us. It was full of aircraft. We would have been shot out before we reached the coast. I mean the Americans like I say a proper formal attack which they did, which the British air force did but the American used to come straight at you like that. Never had a hell of hitting you except colliding with you or something. Anyway, we flew past London. When we went over Clacton I think they must have thought war had been declared but we never heard anything about it. I suppose things were still going on after the war that they expected all these exercises. When we got down to Larkhill, that was it, the bombing range and we dropped our bombs and we called back to base. We were supposed to carry on down to Cornwall and we got called back to base because of thunderstorms and was I glad because I’d had nine hours sitting in a mid-upper turret which was like a bicycle seat. Was I sore, you know? And of course we were on oxygen in those things. We didn’t get air conditioning whatever so that was that experience. And then at Christmas they converted to Canberras, 617. I stopped on for a month on number 9 squadron. They needed an air gunner. John, my friend had already been posted to another base on Lincolns again and then I got posted down to Coningsby on B29 Fortresses. Whereas a crew of seven was on the Lincoln a crew of eleven was on the B29 and I was a side gunner. There were five air gunners on a B29. One on each side. On the top he was the master gunner, one in the tail and one in the front. Oh and there was a belly gunner as well but we didn’t usually use him because that was a bit uncomfortable laying down there but the master gunner could control all the three at the back with a switch. Talk about computers. This is 1952. It was all done mechanically and so if there was an aircraft attacking me on my side he could swing his guns around and take over my guns. Now if it swung over to the other side my gun would swing around, no, he would take over that one but the rear one he could do either way. That was good fun on a B29 because it was pressurised at ten thousand feet so we didn’t have oxygen masks. In fact we even had ashtrays there. Typical Americans. Whereas in a Lincoln of course it was bare and very uncomfortable. All the spars were showing and all the rest and you couldn’t smoke, you could set alight. Having said that the pilot often used to smoke. I was a non-smoker but the lovely smell of Player’s cigarettes coming down the fuselage was lovely but I never did it. Anyway, where were we? Oh at Coningsby we had an escape and evasion exercise that I remember quite well. We were taken out in a lorry, enclosed, dumped about forty miles away from the base anywhere when it was fully dark and given a rough map to find our way back to the base at Coningsby so I picked our navigator because I thought he would know the way with the stars which was a good idea because he did and it was a lovely moonlit night. We went straight across the fields but he was scared to death of animals. He’d come from London. Cows, horses he couldn’t stand them. We had to go all the way around the field just to avoid cows. Anyway, we went, we gradually got nearly halfway home. Daylight had come and we got a sugar beet out of the field to carve up to eat it because we were hungry and we decided to make for his married quarters in Coningsby, on the outskirts of Coningsby which backed on to the railway line. He said, ‘If we get to the railway line and follow the railway line in,’ and we got there about Saturday afternoon. His wife cooked us ham and eggs which was not allowed and then we went to bed for a couple of hours and then we said. ‘Look we’ve got to find our way to this base, the base camp,’ because the second exercise was to attack Coningsby camp which was three or four miles away. We’d got to find this base camp which we knew was on the outskirts of Coningsby so we told his wife to [form] ahead and we would follow behind and if, of course the army and police were looking for us with cars going everywhere if ever you saw an army guy just give a whistle which she did and we jumped over the nearest fence and hid. Well we escaped everybody in to there without being noticed by anybody and I said, ‘Well we’d better crawl over this field.’ It was getting a bit light. In the end I said, ‘This is bloody ridiculous,’ I said, ‘because we’ll have to get up to walk in.’ So we got up to walk in when we were only about a hundred yards away and we frightened them to death. They thought we were attacking them. Anyway, we got in there. There had a fire burning and we got a cup of coffee and at a certain hour, I think it was 5 o’clock we had to attack the camp. Again my friend said, he paved the way and we went together and we got in this field, went across it and there was a hedge and a ditch. Oh and that was it. Going across this if we got across there there was horses. Well he was frightened to death of these horses so he burst through the fence and there were two army guys sat on the other side having a fag and they chased after him and he got caught. Well they came back having another fag. I waited against this ditch and burst through the fence and ran like mad and thirty yards before they woke up to what happened and I was like a scared rabbit with people chasing me across this field. I scampered down this alleyway behind the married patch, found an outside loo with a door on it so I jumped in there, shut the door and I hear, they were coming along opening all the doors. In the end they opened the door and I give up. Now the interesting thing was I got very close. There was only two blokes out of God knows how many got into the camp and what they did they flagged a car down, a private individual and said, ‘Give us a lift to the camp and we’ll hide in the back seat,’ and when they were challenged by the police they opened the back door and ran and jumped through the fence. They had somebody standing every twenty yards along that perimeter. You could never get through normally but they were the only two who did it. Now my mother was always a means to this because egg and bacon was my standard meal actually and when they caught you they shoved you in this hangar with nothing in there except a keg of water and a cup but at the end they were frying egg and bacon and they were interrogating people to find out where the base camps were. Well I never told them but I must say the egg and bacon smelt very good but it’s amazing they found every base, all far, except ours. We were the fifth. And people actually said because they wanted to eat. And that was peacetime. Anyway, that’s, that’s a story I remember about Coningsby and also we was flying over the North Sea. We’d been Air Sea firing and as we flew over the Skegness they were playing, a band, a band was playing. We were so low we blew all the music off the people playing the music off. Well the pilot got severely reprimanded I can tell you. The one thing I remember about on the Lincoln was our pilot he did a stupid thing. We were going out on Air Sea firing and we were coming back. Flying low. So low that we levelled out with the slipstream the waves really and suddenly one of the outboard engines went and I thought that’s funny and then another one went and he said, ‘Crew prepare for ditching.’ I thought bloody hell I’m sitting in the mid upper turret, John’s down the back end but he came up. I don’t know, he was up there in about two seconds and he tapped me on the shoulder ‘cause I had a habit of going to sleep you know and I was off intercom and he, the only way he could converse, with cupping his hands in my ears and I said, ‘Is he serious?’ And he said, ‘Bloody well get down here,’ ‘cause we had to go and sit by the main spar, with our back to it and intercom and our head between our legs. We sat there and the engines was droning on, just two engines and then suddenly one burst in to life and the other one. Oh we’re ok. Then the captain said, ‘Sorry crew,’ he said, ‘Only practicing.’ He got really, he got really hauled over the coals because the rear gunner could have jumped out of the rear end with his life jacket. Anyway, that was one experience. Well when it came to the end of our period sure enough I went in on the 15th of January. I came out on the 15th of January. They tried hard to persuade us to go down to Hornchurch again to go as pilots but, one of our friends he did and the one I, he wished he had have done because he said that was the best. He loved it all. I thought, I was thinking of Audrey all the blooming time, trying to get home there and I thought it’s not going to be my life. A married patch, never knowing where you were going to live so I turned it down and I got demobbed on the 15th of Jan and started back at Wipac soon after because they had to give you your job back everywhere you know, if you did your National Service so I was in the air force, well I was at Wipac until ‘46 to 1951 and I was at Wipac from when I came out in 1953 to when I retired in 1994. Forty eight years. Eventually I became very quickly chief design on electrics which is quite interesting because Wipac came over from America and they only made magnetos for stationery engines but Jarman could see what was going to happen, that magnetos was going to die out so he started to go into lighting. The first thing we did was cycle dynamo set and I drew the lamp up for that which was copying a Swiss one you know. To get some idea of it. Then we went on to the first Bantam. We did the lighting for that in 1948 so I’d only been back two years by then. I can honestly say I drew up the headlight for the first Bantam and the rear light and really Wipac progressed from there until lighting took over from the magnetos but with Wipac the BSA Bantam we had to, we did do the magneto which the magneto generator ‘cause while it had a coil to get the energy for the spark, the ignition it also had two coils to produce lighting for the lights which were a bit dud because if your engine went down your lights went down with AC lighting. Anyway, they went, we then progressed into better lighting all the while I was at Bletchley. That was right up until 1960. By then we were on most of the motorcycle in one way or the other doing the full equipment and our biggest competitor of course was Lucas. But I was, I was destined to have the key job outside directorship was the sales manager for contracts with Ford and Austin Rover and places like that. Well I used to go out with this guy often because I was then technical liaison. I was in charge of the design office but also going out to meet the customers. Well that was a great help to him because I, because I was a designer I could understand the problems. Well I always hit it off with the buyers and the engineers because I was technical so when he retired and he was sixty seven and Jarman kept all his old buddies on there until they were sixty seven because he wanted to stop until he was eighty which he did. Anyway, he, he took three weeks holiday and Jarman said, ‘If he can have three weeks holiday he’s no good to me,’ he said. ‘He’s only allowed two weeks,’ he said. So he called me up in the office and told me this and said, ‘You can have his job.’ So, oh no I must tell you this when I was technical liaison I used to go up to the motor show and motor cycle show as technical liaison I was on the stand with customers coming aboard and we had two young ladies come up from Wipac the offices and one of the sales people, he was a lot older than me he’d invited them up to give them a day out. Well the night before they were we were on the stand, a guy named Chubb Dyer, just us two and at about 6 o’clock Michael Jarman had gone home because he was always on the stand and this little chap came there with a handlebar moustache and he was the advertising manager for the Daily Telegraph. He was a little air force man. He was only about five foot two tall and he said, ‘Is Michael here?’ ‘No he always goes at half past 5.’ ‘Oh dear.’ I said, ‘Can I help? Can I offer you a drink?’ ‘Oh yes,’ he said. That’s what he came for really. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘We don’t have drinks on the stand but the bar is down there. I can, you can have what you like.’ So I went down there. Well I tried to keep up with his whiskies to start with. That was enough but when he’d gone we went back to the stand, shut it up, Chubb and I at 9 o’clock and then walked back to the hotel in Earl’s Court and we passed this Australian pub. All sort of noises were going on in there. I said, ‘Let’s go in there Chubb,’ because I’d had a few anyway. Soon as I walked through the door, ‘Here you are [cobber], first on the house,’ and it was a hell of a party, you know. I had to get home and Chubb left long before me and I could hardly walk and I staggered back to the hotel. How I got there I don’t know. Course I went to bed and I felt terrible in the morning. Consequently never get back on the stand till about 10 o’clock, half past ten and the sales manager then who actually Audrey used to work for as his secretary. He’d become sales manager. My boss. Well he didn’t like me. He liked Audrey of course. Anyway, he, he went back to Wipac and he told Jarman that I hadn’t behaved very well on the stand and was a disgrace to the company and all the rest so when I got back to work on a Monday I was hauled up to the office. Jarman sat there, having promised me this job, the big job, ‘I hear you’ve misbehaved yourself at the motor show I believe you’re not fit to represent the company.’ I told him the story. He’d made up his mind because at one time the reason he wanted me to go from Bletchley to Buckingham was to take charge of half the factory. The lighting side. So he said, ‘You’re not having that job I promised. You’re going in the factory and you’re going to be the manager of the lighting side.’ Well I was downcast. When I got back to my office they’d taken all my office, all my equipment out, dumped it out in the factory in an office out on the outskirts and anyway it took me three days to get over it and I thought well if this is going to be it I’m going to be it I’m going to make a go of this you know and I arranged the office and it was a big office. The foremen had their desks, you know, three foremen you know, There was two women on doing the processing, the paperwork and I had big charts on the wall of every, every employee. What they were getting, what they were building that week you know and what line they was on. It was all in control and I used to stop there until half past seven at night to fill it all in every week after Thursday. We used to plan the next week positive what we’d build and the next week tentative. And the guy that was in the meeting he used to make all the notes ‘cause the main thing you’d got to supply to everything was a reflector which was pressed, lacquered and aluminised. That was the key factor and, well I made a real success of it. In fact I was lucky again, I’ve always been lucky. Our biggest contract was Ford. The first one was the front turn signal lamp for the Cortina and we were building up to two thousand five hundred pairs a day but we gradually built up to that because when I took over they’d just started. I had forty people under me to start with and I had a hundred and thirty when I finished. In the year. Tha’s how we progressed so the bonus was very good because of the increase in production and I’d come to about August again. I was called up to the office and there was Jarman. He said, ‘Sit down.’ He said, ‘You’ve done a pretty good job,’ he said. He said it very reluctantly. I want you to take Barry’s job, that’s when he said, ‘He’s had three weeks holiday. I don’t need him.’ So he said you can have that again. Now I didn’t say, ‘Thank you very much Mr Jarman,’ as everybody used to almost get on their knees with Jarman. He ran it like a ship you know. I said, ‘I’m not so sure.’ He said. ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well you told me that was a great job out there. It was like running a factory without having the finance,’ and I said, ‘I built it up until there’s what a hundred and thirty people and it’s all going so smoothly.’ He said, ‘Are you telling me you don’t want the job?’ I said, ‘I didn’t say that,’ I said. ‘You’ve been like a father to me,’ I said. I was creeping then. I said, ‘Is it more money?’ He said, ‘Of course it is.’ I said, ‘Is it a company car?’ He said, ‘Of course it is.’ ‘I’ll take the job.’ I got more credentials by that interview from him, with being like that. Anyway that job went equally as well because I made sure I saw every engineer, every buyer, every inspector every visit I made. I was out three or four days a week. In fact that same sales director that put the black on me for a job he wrote me a memo once, I’ve still got it, about, I don’t know how many days in the month I’d spent out entertaining, you know, lunches and that and I wrote back and I said, ‘Well look at the contracts we’ve got.’ And believe me in those days and I still think it goes at least with my daughter’s business which she’s in events you wouldn’t get a contract with Ford Motor Company unless a buyer got to know you personally and got a trust in you first and trust in the company. Well I used to, I gave them a game of golf. I was always, I was known as Mr Lunch Atkins because I never went anywhere without lunch ‘cause I soon found out if I wanted to go to Austin Rover and wanted to see the chief buyer he’d give me an interview at say 11 o’clock or twenty past ten. That would be in the interview room but if I said, ‘What about 12 o’clock and have some lunch?’ ‘Oh yes,’ he said. Well I’d get two hours then and then he’d get, with a drink or two he’d take me to meet the engineers and everybody and it all worked and I actually got the first contract out of Austin Rover had only ever been given on lighting to anybody other than Lucas because, that’s interesting, Lucas had a contract with them from before the war when there was depression when Lucas supplied their goods to Austin without payment to keep them going and they said they’d never buy any electrical good except from Lucas and that was carried on until the 60s or 70s. So there you are. We got, we gradually got contracts all the way through until the big one at Ford was three thousand pairs a day and it was the transit wheel on the transit van. Now, you can imagine they got damaged very often because they were very vulnerable to collision and the spares business was bigger than the oe. We were supplying Southampton and Ghent in Belgium so we were a hundred percent sourced but we only just saved that twice by me going over to Germany with the new director of, because Wipac was sold in 1987 and the new director there twice I took him over there and we talked our way into keeping the business ‘cause I said we designed the thing in keeping with Ford and what they wanted to do was to take the business over to Poland which they did eventually and well then Wipac got sold again in 1992 having built the factory that you see now where Tesco’s was. You remember the old Tesco factory don’t you? What it was like? And I didn’t know it but it was a five year contract, his, him and his directors and they sold to [?]. Now, the new, that was a new forty year old director, managing director. I, of course was sixty four but he still let me do the job the same way for these eighteen months I was with him but I liked the job. Of course I did. I was out most days and it was easy but the thing was our biggest contract on this rear lamp was in Ford spares in Spain. Now I’d been over there twice and made great friends with these buyers. Took them out to lunch and had my photograph taken with them you know. They took a photograph and my arms around them but saying it’s all good but if anything ever went wrong on supplies they didn’t phone the factory they phoned me at home and I had to go and sort it out but that was it and then when the new guy was going to take over from me I said, ‘We’ve got to go and see these people in Spain.’ He thought oh no Atkins wants a freebie, you know, over in Spain and the MD I think thought the same. I said, ‘If we don’t go we’ll lose it.’ Anyway, I left. I went to see the MD and I said, ‘I don’t want to leave.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you let me look after your big contracts. Come in two or three days a week because the people outside don’t know you and your directors because you’ve only been here eighteen months but they know me. I’ve been here forty years or more.’ He said, ‘Yes Glenn,’ he said, ‘You’ve done a wonderful job but you’re way of doing business is not the modern way.’ And I said, ‘What is the modern way?’ He said, ‘Well the modern way they’ve got a telephone on the desk and they’ve got a computer.’ We’d just gone on to computers. ‘They don’t need to go anywhere.’ I said, ‘You’ll never get business with the Ford and people like that unless they build a trust up. They know me but they don’t know you people at all.’ So he said, ‘No. That’s all they need. The telephone and the computer.’ Within eighteen months of him telling, of me leaving they lost that big contract with Spain which was a fifth of the company’s turnover. Fifteen million a year we were doing and he lost his job. I’d have loved to have met him to say about the way you should do a job. What’s that got to do with the air force? Nothing. If I’ve bored you I’m sorry.
CB: No. No. It’s absolutely fascinating and there is a link with these things on the relationships you formed in crews.
GA: Yeah.
CB: Tell us about the crewing up. So you went to the oldest man.
GA: Yes.
CB: What was his reaction?
GA: He just needed two air gunners and two of the young likely lads he got. We lost, on our conversion we lost the younger navigator because we were bombing practice and he made a mistake and bombed the quadrant and we were summoned back to base because they thought they were going to hit the caravan which where the people were spotting and he got, and we got, replaced the navigator by the oldest navigator who was Jock Graham and he used to treat us National Servicemen as though he was our father. I know when we passed out he took us all down to Lincoln for a booze up you know but it was all interim you see then the Lanc, the Lincoln because like I said by the Christmas they were going over to Canberras and I suppose the air pilot and the navigator were two oldest they probably went, you know. They never converted.
CB: So why did some crews go to Canberras and some of them on to - ?
GA: Well it was a different kettle of fish weren’t it ‘cause they only had a pilot and a navigator on a Canberra so no gunners, no engineers, no signallers.
CB: So you changed squadron to go to -
GA: No, it stopped.
CB: The B29s.
GA: Yeah. They stopped at 617.
CB: Yeah.
GA: The Canberras until the V bombers came in.
CB: Yeah. 0k. So, tell us about the B29 Washington. What was that like?
GA: Well -
CB: When you got into that?
GA: It was lovely. Like a civil aircraft really. Beautifully equipped and there was a pressurised and there was a tunnel about that diameter between, went over the bomb bays that linked the pilot area with the air gunner area at the back and we had a navigator, a radar operator sat with us. He was in the middle, a gunner each side and one up there and we had a little cooking stove at the back for boiling water so we used to boil beans and ham and egg in this thing. We weren’t allowed to go through that tunnel because if we got stuck and the air pressure went forward or back you’d go out there like a bullet out of a gun you see so we used to throw these hot tins of soup whatever it was at least the length of this house and he used to catch it in a sack. I remember that.
CB: So whose job was it to do the cooking?
GA: Oh one of us gunners. Yeah. All we did was drop a can in this hot water tank. But the worst job I had to do, well we took it in turns, was in the unpressurised area. That was the very back. There was a door in to there but when we came in to land there was a stationery engine in there, a V8 engine which was covered in frost because it was and we had to take it in turns to go and start it after we were taxiing, flying around to land because that was to keep the batteries up for when we landed and the engines went down in power. Now getting in there, freezing cold, being bumped about I used to feel sick I must admit but you just had to do it. You got covered in hoar frost. You just had to pray it would go and it did. That was another thing.
CB: So the rear gunner was in his own, was he pressurised after ten thousand feet?
GA: I’m not sure.
CB: Because you are saying that there is an envelope which is the only reason, only way pressurisation can work.
GA: Yeah.
CB: You can’t have people coming in and out.
GA: Do you know I can’t remember? We never flew with a gunner in the rear anyway.
CB: Why was that?
GA: I don’t know why. We never did.
CB: So you talked about the master gunner controlling all the guns.
GA: Yeah.
CB: How did that work exactly because the people who were manning those guns, the forward and the rear -?
GA: Well we had a control for air guns but he had a control that would override that one and take it over. His own special one.
CB: So these guns were what calibre? They were .5s. They weren’t cannon were they?
GA: No.
CB: Point 5 machine guns.
GA: The Lincoln had got two cannons.
CB: Oh had you?
GA: In the turret. Yeah well that was the difference between the Lincoln and the Lancaster.
CB: Yeah.
GA: Was the mid-upper turret and the radar dome and about six feet on the wing span but the, those two twenty millimetre cannons on the Lancaster we had four 505s in the rear and when we went on air sea firing the whole aircraft used to shake with these twenty millimetres and I can remember it was at Scampton and we were being tested to see how good we were but I used a full magazine of these 20mm cannons. The only one. A complete magazine. That was sheer luck because it was the armourer that loaded it not me and they made a particular note of that because one thing you couldn’t do was if you got a shell stuck in the breech you weren’t allowed to take it out because they’d had a case or two cases of gunners trying to do that and it exploded in their face so we just, the reason they were pleased that I’d shot the whole lot was because I never had a breech block. I didn’t have a breach block. Yeah.
CB: So the .5 machine guns were belt fed.
GA: Yeah.
CB: The 20 millimetre was with -
GA: No. They were belt fed.
CB: They were belt as well.
GA: Yeah.
CB: You said a magazine you see so I wondered whether -
GA: Well they called it a magazine.
CB: It was a clip on magazine was it?
GA: Yeah. No. No, it was a belt.
CB: And then the belt came out of a tray at the bottom? How was it, how was it fed?
GA: Well at least they retrieved the cases which in the old days they used to file them away didn’t they? I can’t remember.
CB: That’s ok.
GA: You know I went back to, with a friend of mine about five years ago to Duxford and there’s a B29 there and we found it and I had a photograph taken somewhere.
CB: And they let you get in it did they?
GA: Me standing behind it.
CB: Well we can have a bit of a look at that a bit later can’t we?
[pause]
GA: I don’t know.
CB: Let me just ask you about the OTU.
GA: All I can say is when I went back to see.
CB: Yes.
GA: The B29 after all those years.
CB: Yeah.
GA: I couldn’t find my way in because we used to have an entrance near the blisters.
CB: Oh did you?
GA: A side entrance.
CB: Yeah.
GA: A trap door on the side as the rest of the crew got up the front. What they’d done they’d sealed the door up.
CB: Oh.
GA: In the museum.
CB: Yeah. So people didn’t get in.
Other: Some water. He’s made you a coffee has he?
CB: Yes thank you. Won’t be long.
Other: Or did you make it?
GA: Of course I remembered.
CB: I’m stopping just -
[machine paused]
CB: Back at the OTU you described earlier about the training, the crewing up but what were the tasks you had to do because different members of the crew had to do different things but everybody worked together?
GA: Oh used to go on different operations bombing, bombing places and targets. We did certain air sea firing. We never did air to air firing.
[conversation in the background]
GA: We only had camera guns for air to air.
CB: Yes. I see.
GA: We did that for three months I think.
CB: Yes.
GA: But we was always with the crews when they were being tested for signalling or pilot or navigator. Not always together.
CB: Right. Yeah.
GA: So what they did I don’t know except the circuits and bumps.
CB: But you did cross countries.
GA: Oh yeah. A lot.
CB: What about fighter affiliation? Tell us about that.
GA: Oh we took off and we had Mark 10 Spitfires attacking us from the station further up but at Scampton we didn’t do any of that. We did it all at Leconfield.
CB: Yes. Yeah.
GA: Air to air.
CB: At Leconfield, yeah.
GA: And when we were at Scampton, you were talking about OTU well we just used to fly really. We always used to have to, I was the main lookout for the rear end being in the mid-upper and that was, thankfully the rear gunner used to wake me up occasionally.
CB: But just to get a grip of how did the fighter affiliation work? Because the British technique and the American techniques were different. Could you just describe those? So with these Spitfires what was their technique?
GA: They used to fly alongside at a range over six hundred metres and we had a sight that had, what used to have like four balls on a screen in a circle and that by your feet used to adjust the range because you used to get the Spitfire attacking aircraft wingspan, put on the thing and that you adjusted it for that distance with this there. That was done by your feet back that way and then you were steering the turret that way aiming it at the Spitfire with the centre being at the attacking aircraft and you would follow it all the way down keeping the wingspan between you and he had the same thing on the Spitfire actually to attack me but they used to fly alongside, set the speed of your aircraft and you set the speed of their aircraft and then you’d do that one and double back and come up that way.
CB: Come in from behind.
GA: Yeah. So that by the time they levelled out they were shooting straight at the fuselage which you see is far more easier than if you’re going that way and trying to hit that way. That was it.
CB: So, so at the end of the sortie then what happened?
GA: We’d go back to our crew room with a screen and they could fit, your film would go on and they’d show the attack of the fighter attacking and what you’d achieved.
CB: So how soon would they have the film processed and ready to view?
GA: It seemed to be within the day.
CB: It wasn’t within an hour or two.
GA: It could have been. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
GA: I think it was. Now the same thing happened to the Spitfire pilot. He was at the one up the road. About ten miles up the road.
CB: Right.
GA: Can’t remember the name. Began with D.
CB: Dishforth. Dishforth.
GA: Yes.
CB: Right on the A1.
GA: Yeah.
CB: Right. So they, what, when you looked at the camera gun film who was with you to make the assessment?
GA: Oh the training officer. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
GA: Oh yeah they, two blokes had to be beside you while they studied your film.
CB: And how did they make an assessment and feedback of that?
GA: I don’t know.
CB: What did they say?
GA: I can’t remember them saying anything except they gave me sixty three percent. I suppose whether you wandered off and that sort of thing but you see that’s where that air gunner that told me to go for gunnery down at Hornchurch he said the next best thing to being the pilot was to be the rear gunner because you’re using your feet and you’re using your hands and you’re supposed to give a commentary to the pilot about on you’re doing. I mean when the attacking aircraft was coming in you had to be constantly telling the pilot where he was and all that.
CB: So it was a running commentary was it?
GA: Yeah.
CB: And that was your job. Not the rear gunner.
GA: Well we both had to do it.
CB: Right.
GA: Yeah.
CB: Ok. And we’re now in the early 50s so as fighter evasion what would be the tactic?
GA: We never did any. We never trained for that.
CB: Did you do corkscrews?
GA: No. You see I was told they had more fatalities through accidents than they ever did through enemy action. Did you know that?
CB: Well they lost a lot.
GA: Yeah.
CB: And in the B29 what was the manoeuvrability of that like compared with the Lancaster?
GA: I don’t know. We didn’t have to evade much, you see. We just flew dead steady. We did a bit of twisting and turning with the Lincoln.
CB: The Lincoln I meant to say. Yeah. Ok. Stop there.
[machine paused]
GA: It was just like wartime.
CB: So when you’d come back from a sortie -
GA: Yeah but before -
CB: You’d land the aircraft -
GA: Before we went out -
CB: Yes.
GA: We all used to go out in the big assembly room.
CB: Right.
GA: And then they would describe what was going to happen and then we would have to go. Particularly I remember the one at Binbrook because on the Lincoln we didn’t know when we were going to take off and we didn’t know where we were going. Only the pilot knew that so his briefing was separate. We just had the general picture but we didn’t know what time we were taking off or what targets we were going towards but we’d all be debriefed afterwards when we got back. I know it was peacetime but they still did it.
CB: So what was the process, the format of the debriefing because you’d got seven crew? How did they deal with that?
GA: Well they’d ask what aircraft attacked you, incidentally we had, and I don’t know if it’s there.
[pause]
CB: The aircraft recognition.
GA: We had to know all of those.
CB: Yes.
GA: To know what their wingspan was.
CB: Right. That’s interesting. Yeah. So part of your ground school was aircraft recognition.
GA: Yeah.
CB: Particularly, it’s got folded there, particularly for you as gunners.
GA: Yes. Most definitely. Yeah.
CB: So -
GA: 1951 that [laughs].
CB: So here you are at the debrief. Was there a sequence or was everybody speaking ad hoc? In other words did the pilots start the debrief? How did that work on the, when you were debriefed after the sortie?
GA: I can’t remember.
CB: Ok.
GA: What I was going to say was -
[machine pause]
CB: So looking at your logbook your flying was roughly two hundred hours daylight and two hundred hours.
GA: Yeah.
CB: In the night.
GA: Or put it another way. A hundred hours daylight and a hundred hours at night on Lincolns and then the same on B29s.
CB: Which did you prefer? Day or night?
GA: Day. We always wanted to fly at about five thousand feet where it didn’t matter about being pressurised.
CB: Was pressurised uncomfortable?
GA: Yes you had the mask on all the time and I remember getting the Lincoln pilot to fly over Newport Pagnell where my house was, as low as he could. My mother swears she heard it go over the house ‘cause she was hanging the clothes out. This noisy aircraft.
[machine paused]
CB: So you started on the Lincoln and then you went to the Washington.
GA: Yeah.
CB: The B29.
GA: Yeah.
CB: How did you find that? Did you think that that was a better aircraft in terms of what it could do or -
GA: I think it was. Yes, definitely. It could fly higher. A lot higher.
CB: Because it was pressurised.
GA: Yeah. I mean twenty two thousand feet was about it for the Lincoln. Incidentally the Lincoln would maintain height on two engines. It could land on one engine. I don’t think you’d be able to do that with a B29.
CB: Oh really. And in -
GA: But you know they lost more aircraft through take-off and landing than people thought. The nearest we came we was taking, in fact how the Lincoln got in the air with a ten ton, ten ton bomb I don’t know because we used to limp off the tarmac and we were once, one engine went and the wing dipped just as we were clearing the hedge at the bottom of the runway and we took a bit of the hedge out with the wing tip. We could go like that. It hadn’t got the power with twenty pound practice bombs to get up quickly whereas the B29 like the modern aircraft of today was in the air quite quickly. Incidentally, I went to, I talk about crashing I mean we lost one aircraft while we were training at Leconfield. One of our aircraft got shot down by the Russians because it wandered over the Iron Curtain but it never got in the newspapers.
CB: Didn’t it?
GA: No.
CB: No. How did they shoot it down?
GA: We don’t know.
CB: Was it a fighter or was it ground fire is what I meant?
GA: I don’t know. All we were told, so and so had crashed and the same thing with the B29. A plane coming in you know how flat Lincoln is but there are hills and a B29 of our squadron was coming in in fog and he misread the altimeter and he ploughed into the hillside and the worst thing I ever did was with my friend, another air gunner, I said, ‘Let’s go on my motorbike and see the crash,’ and I wish I I’d never gone because all that was left was charred metal from the middle and the rear turret had gone and it had bounced along and hit, ended up in the hedge and you still had the meat in there where they’d cut the pilot, the air gunner out and the smell of that octane fuel. I could still smell it for years.
CB: What happened to the crew that was shot down over East Germany? Were they killed or -
GA: We never heard any more about it.
CB: You don’t know if they got back or not.
GA: No. Because everything were so secret in those days. I know that you know because of my draughting experience.
CB: Yeah.
GA: In that interim period of about December January the officers got to know about it and they were doing, there was a plan for navigation. I couldn’t understand it but I was converting these drawings to engineering drawings and I got special relief to go and work on that instead of flying on the aircraft for about two or three weeks.
CB: What was the, what was the purpose of the task?
GA: It was navigation. Something to do with navigation. Obviously an instrument or something.
CB: Right.
GA: It was quite complicated.
CB: Ok. Thank you. Well that’s been really interesting Glenn.
GA: Are you sure?
CB: A real insight into what happened after the war and how some of the things continued, were perpetuated but others were quite different and the more cautious approach to flying.
GA: Well I think it fills the spot particularly with 617 between the Cold War period until the V bomber came in. So all through the 50s until 1960 when National Service ended. Well we were only needed weren’t we, until that period.
CB: Yeah. Was 617 employed on special tasks for precision bombing in your time or just general bombing?
GA: The Lawrence Minot trophy which was a Bomber Command trophy every year and 617 squadron won it every year. That’s all I can say.
CB: Right. Thank you.
[machine paused]
CB: In terms of ranks. In your training you were an LAC were you? And then you became what?
GA: As soon as we went to, we got a special badge when we were on training and then we got this after our training.
CB: Your brevvy.
GA: Yeah.
CB: And what rank were you when you got your brevvy?
GA: And that, that was -
CB: Right A wing. Yeah. That went on your sleeve.
GA: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So what rank were you when you qualified as an air gunner?
GA: Sergeant. A signaller, the two air gunner and the engineer were sergeants. Sergeant air crew which meant we get extra money for flying pay you see. In fact that’s interesting. As I say I got twenty eight bob a week like everybody did when they went in. As soon as I volunteered and got accepted to go for training I got two pound fifty a week and then after you got selected for a squadron, 617, I got about four pound a week and the last six months I got seven pound a week which was beyond my wildest dreams. In fact when I went for my job back at Wipac I went to see the chief, the chief engineer and we talked about everything and I said, ‘Well what am I going to earn then?’ He said, ‘What do you want then mate?’ And I suddenly thought I’d been getting seven pound a week. I said, ‘Eight pound a week.’ He said, ‘Yes alright.’ Within three months, when I got in the drawing office I found I’d joined the union because we were at eight pound a week we were about two pound under the union rate. So I actually joined a union for a short period and when Jarman who had all these ideas for me right from the start because did I tell you that’s how we bought the house.
CB: No. Tell us.
GA: Well, I was, I’d just got married and we got half a house in Fenny Stratford at eighteen shillings a week rent and rates. It was subletted by Wipac from a landlady and I made it into quite habitable. Mind you there was an outside toilet, tin bath in the, hanging in the shed, it had a little garden at the back that I made into something special because the chap who had the upstairs he didn’t want the garden. He worked at Wipac as well but anyway having had this period of my first married life from 1954 he called me up to the office one day in 1957 and said, ‘You know I’m building a new factory at Buckingham?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well it should be open by 1960.’ He said, ‘I want you to go over there. Be one of the first to go over there to eventually charge, be in charge of one side of the factory.’ Not straightaway but you know. So he said to me, ‘Have you ever thought about buying a house?’ I thought, I didn’t say, ‘Not on your salaries,’ you know. Actually I think we’d moved with the union up to about fifteen pound a week but anyway, he sent me over, he said, ‘I’ve fixed it up. You can go over to Buckingham, see the builder Lewis Pollard, you can see the town clerk which was Tony [?],’ he’s still around, retired of course, he’ll be in his 90s. His own legal guy Martin Athay. ‘Go and see all those and they’ll sort you out with a house,’ and he was, he would put me onto eighteen pound a week in the Autumn. Buy it because a house on Highlands Road was two thousand five hundred plus three hundred pounds if you had a garage built separately. Well I came over to Buckingham and Lewis Pollard took me to Highlands Road and I don’t know whether you know it but until 1957 they never built any private houses after the war. It was all council houses. Government decree. So Highlands Road was the first housing, private housing estate built here after the war. He took me up here and there was the one next near finished the one after that was this one and was finished and lived in and the next one whose funeral I went to yesterday that was there, the one that Lewis offered me for two thousand five hundred but if I had a garage three hundred. Well in the meantime I was taking Practical Householder magazine and there was a plan for this house before the kitchen extension, before the conservatory and before the front porch extension but the rest of it, this was the kitchen, that was the lounge diner and there was an outside porch there but with the dormer windows it was my dream. It looked something beautiful. So I went in to see Lewis the following week and I said, ‘Look you can build that for two thousand five, nine hundred with the garage. This house has got the garage built in. How much can you do that for if I do all the outside decorating and all the inside decorating and you leave all the kitchen bare.’ He came up with three thousand pounds. Anyway, so I went to Wipac on the Monday and he said, ‘How did you get on?’ I told him the story I’ve told you. He said, ‘What is this house like then?’ I spread the plans out. Incidentally and the plans were three pounds fifty and he looked at it and he said –
[Phone starts ringing. Recording stops]
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Interview with Glenn Atkins
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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01:25:42 audio recording
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Pending review
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Chris Brockbank
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2016-09-29
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Glenn Atkins was born in Newport Pagnell and was called up for National Service in 1951. He was involved in exercises to test the defences of Europe during the Cold War. When he was released from National Service he returned to his former company where he remained until he retired.
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Royal Air Force
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Julie Williams
44 Squadron
617 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
B-29
Lincoln
RAF Binbrook
RAF Coningsby
RAF Scampton
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/225/3370/AChaplinSR170407.2.mp3
a95468a013bf06283db41402714c4f41
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Title
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Chaplin, Susan Rose
Susan Chaplin
Susan R Chaplin
S R Chaplin
Sue Chaplin
S Chaplin
Description
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One oral history interview with Susan Chaplin (b. 1954) about her research into the crash of Wellington HE740 on 4 January 1945.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-04-07
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Chaplin, SR
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is Thursday, 7th April, 2017, and I am here in Thornton with Sue Chaplin who arranged for details to be made much more public and memorable about an air crash at North Marston nearby. So Sue what are your earliest recollections of life?
SC: I was born in North Marston where my mother and her brothers and sisters, and grandparents, great grandparents were all born, and my mother was always very very interested herself in local history and the stories of everyone so I was brought up surrounded by stories of village people and family and one of her stories was always about how she had witnessed this Wellington plane crashing in the war when she was twenty seven years old and she used to show me on our country walks the field where it came down and she always used said to me ‘there’s an engine deep down in that field you know may be one day it will be dug up’, so that’s how I grew up really with an interest in local history and the family and I’ve always had a very strong connection with North Marston where all of my family seem to take up most of the churchyard and so although I don’t live in the village anymore I have very strong connections there and my mother herself died nine years ago and my cousin still lives there so I’m going back there all the time and it’s really what led me to write back in 2014 to write the history of North Marston “The North Marston Story” which really I was prompted to do because I wanted to put down in writing all of those things that my mother had told me when I was a child, and then of course the book expanded in to far more than that in the end. I went to school in I went to Aylesbury High School er and after that I went to Teachers Training College at Wall Hall Aldenham for three years where I trained to be a teacher and then I went to the University of East Anglia after that and did a degree in history and education, so history has always been a great interest anyway and when I qualified I got a job at a school called Akeley Wood School which was a private school near Buckingham, er I got the job in 1976 and I thought it would be a stop gap for a few years until I got a different job. I had never been to a private school so it was nothing that I knew about so I thought well it would be a nice job just for a year or two but I actually stayed for my whole career and I was there for over thirty years ,and er I became head of the junior school there, and I retired in 2006 I took an early retirement in 2006.
CB: Okay we’ll stop there for a minute.
SC: In er about 2008 a gentleman came to live in North Marston who was a local historian, John Spargo, and in conversation with him one day he mentioned to me that he was surprised there was no written history of the village of North Marston as it was so rich in history, and I said to him ‘well I would absolutely love to help you put that down’ because as I mentioned just now it was something I’d always thought would be a good idea. So we decided to see if there would be um an interest in the village for a written history and we sent round a questionnaire and yes people would love it, so we started off by recording I offered to do all recordings of all the elderly people in the village and actually the not so elderly as well some of them were my old friends from school, and I did twenty three recordings including my mother, one of the recordings was also a chap called Chris Holden and Chris had been a little boy when the Wellington came and crashed and during his recording he was recollecting that night and he said ‘you know’ he said ‘I think it’s tragic there’s never been a memorial to those boys’ so I thought about this and coupled with my mother’s story of that night and finally by the fact the nearby village to me Thornborough erected a memorial in 2014 to the Wellington Bomber that crashed there all of those three things combined, so I went to the North Marston History Club which we had founded by then and said ‘how about it why not do a project the anniversary of the North Marston Wellington crash is coming up on 4th January 2015, that will be the seventieth anniversary, Thornborough had just put up one, Chris Holden had said in his interview what a shame so why don’t we go for it?’, it was agreed that we would then start to investigate the possibility of doing it this would have been the summer of 2014 when we started to think about it so we had about six months before the seventieth anniversary in January 2015 came up, obviously we had we wanted to put a memorial in the church so the first thing we had to do was approach the Vicar and the Faculty at Oxford to see if they would give permission, so the er church Parochial Church Council applied to Oxford for the Faculty that took quite a long time to come through, but we decided that we would go ahead with the memorial even if it couldn’t be put in the church because we would find somewhere for it in the village and obviously the next thing to do was to get going on finding out more and more and more about these boys. In our North Marston Story that we had written the big book about the village we had actually mentioned this crash, we knew the names of the six boys who’d died, we knew where they had come from, three were from New Zealand, one from Sussex, and two from Kent, so our next project was to try and trace any relatives that we could and my colleague in the history club Jane Springer started off by emailing the Otago Daily Times in New Zealand because we knew that two of the boys came from there, she had an instant response that day from the journalist from the Otago Daily Times and within a few days he had published our story, I sent him all the details we knew he published our story and that same day we had a response from Michael Reece who was the nephew of our pilot Michael Reece he had seen this in the paper, and we had a response from Chas Forsyth who had been a friend of the Reece’s he had seen this article in the paper, we had a response from dear Neville Selwood who was a Lancaster navigator who had been stationed at Westcott who knew Alex Bulger our bomb aimer, and we had a response from Alex Bulger’s family and that all took place within a few days. The biggest surprise at the time to us was that the Reece family and the Bulger family who had both lived all their lives in Otago knew each other but until we got in touch they hadn’t realised that their uncles had died in the same plane so that was just the most amazing thing and that was the first of many coincidences that were to happen, er so then they started to inundate us with photographs, letters that they’d had from their boys, photographs, photographs of the funerals in Oxford because five of the boys who died in the Wellington were buried at Botley in Oxford, the other one went home to Maidstone, but the Reece family in New Zealand had photographs of the burial and so they sent us photographs of the family of the boys, I mean to suddenly seeing photographs of these boys who my mother knew died that night, she by then had passed away, and it was of great sadness to me that my mother couldn’t see these photographs that suddenly came to us because she would have just loved to have seen the pictures of the boys who died. So we were suddenly starting to get information and we, Jane my colleague, went on to Ancestory.com and she was contacted by somebody who said I am a relative of Don McClellan the wireless operator, Don McClellan came from New Zealand but much further north, so she put us in touch with Don McClellan’s family so then we suddenly had photographs and information from the McClellan’s so we thought wow we’ve got enough stuff here to put out a little publication throughout the village let us put all these pictures into a little pamphlet and let’s send this round the village and tell everybody that this is our project and ask if we could have any contributions towards it. Well whilst we were doing this we then er decided that we would write to the Kent Messenger newspaper and the Brighton Argos and we had an immediate response from the Brighton Argos, somebody knew of our Reginald Price his name was in the memorial book in the St. Peters Church Brighton, we had a response from two people who read the Brighton Argos called Jackie and Nick Carter who were interested in tracing people they offered to help trace the other three British boys, they came up first of all with a relative that they had found from a free electoral um site of Mormon a family search Mormon site and free birth, marriage and death site, they came up with an address of a Christopher Colbeck who they believed was a nephew of John Wenham, I wrote to him actually wrote to him and yes he was John Wenham’s nephew and his mother John Wenham’s sister was still alive down the road in Luton, so suddenly we got John Wenham’s photographs, letters, documentation, that left us with Reginald Price and it left us with Ian Smith, then Reginald Price um suddenly started to appear because again from the Brighton Argos somebody who had read the Brighton Argos who again loved investigating went on to Ancestry.com and located a Catherine Cook who was a marine biologist in Scotland who was distantly related step step family distantly related to Reginald Price she put us in touch with her mother who had um you know was a step daughter of of a relative and we then had pictures from them that was Reginald Price ticked off. The only by now our doc out leaflet had gone round North Marston village and we had put in it that we didn’t actually have any pictures of er Ian Smith we couldn’t trace Ian Smith’s family, so the doc the leaflet went round North Marston we immediately started getting money in but the leaflet went in North Marston to a gentleman called Mike Fillamore, who again is a local historian, he saw the name Ian Smith he telephoned me and said ‘Sue a few years ago I was in North Marston Church and a gentleman was in the church looking to see if there was a memorial to a relative of his called Ian Smith and I happened to take down his name and address’ and so I telephoned I found on the internet his telephone number and I phoned him that night and he said ‘yes this is amazing’ um and so we then were put in touch with Ian Smith’s more immediate family and again the photographs started rolling in. So we had by well by November we had got pictures of all of the boys, documents, letters and we were in touch with their families and the money had started to roll in and in the end we er I had approached Brett and Sons the stonemasons in Norfolk who did a lot of the village churchyard gravestones, they um gave us a quote for um the actual plaque would have been um was going to be about fifteen hundred pounds in the church but in total our donations from the village people and from the families of the crew came to three thousand pounds so that enabled us to put up the plaque, Oxford Diocese said absolutely fine no problem, and so then we had money left over for a lovely reception and things like that. But um if I can just go back for a moment the er anniversary of the crash was 4th January, and the seventieth anniversary would have been 4th January 2015, but we didn’t have time to get together the Faculty permission to get the plaque done and to get a big service organised for 4th January, we also asked all the New Zealand relatives what they felt about it and all of them said they would absolutely love to come to the service but really January is too soon for us and we would rather come to England when the weather was a bit warmer, so we decided to have a remembrance service on 4th January 2015, which happened to be a Sunday, we put together a lovely service, we as history club wrote some of our own poems, the niece of Michael Reece the pilot, great niece of Michael Reece the pilot happened to live in Wales she said ‘I will come to this January service to represent the families’ and she read a poem at the service, we had the Last Post and it was a wonderful anniversary service followed by a lunch in the church so village people and a few RAF people who we knew and Tina Reece as the relative, and of course she wasn’t the only relative to come to our January service because all the Luton people, John Wenham the young air gunner his sister Joy in her nineties and her family all attended the January service so we had a lovely representation from families there, but we decided then that we needed to find a date to have the big plaque unveiling and the bigger service the New Zealand families suggested if it were possible what about having it on Anzac Day 25th April, it was a very special Anzac Day in 2015 and so we all you know went to the powers that be the church and everybody and it was decided to hold the big memorial on 25th April 2015, by which time the plaque in church would have been completed and we would have time to organise a big big celebration so that is where we’ve got to at the moment. We then decided that er obviously we would like some more representation at this service than we had at the other so I contacted the New Zealand Embassy in London and asked if we could possibly have any New Zealand er RAF people they said being Anzac Day they were a bit short on the ground, but as it happened a week before our service they phoned me and said we are sending six RA New Zealand Air Force, we also had very very honoured to have Air Marshall Sir Colin Terry who agreed to I wrote to him and he agreed to unveil the plaque, we had um members of the er cadets, we had from Maidstone in Kent where young John Wenham had been a boy and had attended the Scouts the Tovil Scouts came up and represented the Scouts they came, we had some local RAF reserve people, and we had our Church Warden um an ex RAF wing commander so he took a big part in the service, um the Royal British Legion of course were desperately keen to be involved and so we ended up with a procession involving um a lot of people all in uniform we had the Last Post we had um eight relatives from New Zealand that day at the service, and a huge coincidence again was that one of the New Zealand relatives was talking to one of the RAF New Zealand RAF and er she said ‘well my er son is a photographer in the RAF’ he said ‘what’s his name, ooh I know him’ so that’s amazing this lady had come from New Zealand and one of our New Zealand RAF boys knew knew her son so that was another little coincidence. So er we had well I say the most wonderful service the church was packed we had wonderful hymns we started off with “God is our Strength and Refuge” sung to the Dambusters tune and it was um a really really lovely service members of the history club all read poems and did readings, I introduced the whole service I set the scene and gave the whole background to it and er then afterwards we went down to the village hall where some local groups had set up memorabilia war time memorabilia, and er a local lady had set up a huge huge refreshments we had a cake with “Lest We Forget” and Joy Colbeck the ninety ninety two year old sister of the young air gunner er she cut the cake and all her family were there so I mean it was really absolutely marvellous, but we had decided before the er big celebration that really with all the photographs that we’d got and the documents er we really need to needed to write a proper book so John Spargo the chairman of the history club and I and two other people from the village, John Newby who was very interested in aircraft he had been er flying with the RAF in the RAF Volunteer Reserves and had had twenty five years in management per to the aviation industry he helped write all of the technical stuff about the plane, and Martin Bromelly who was a current airline pilot and again very very interested in airline history he investigated an awful lot for us, he found out the weather conditions that night, he wrote his own version of what he thought happened that night, so all of these us four basically put together this book with photographs all the photographs that we’d got plus um our interpretation of what actually happened that night and we sold over a hundred copies of the book and we put all the photographs from the day onto a DVD and sold I think about seventy or eighty of those.
CB: Having a break having a breather. So continuing from there.
SC: Um so following the service it it certainly wasn’t the end to everything because although it was coming up now for two years ago we are still in very close contact with the New Zealand families and the families of the British people we are getting emails from them every now and then with best wishes we have Christmas cards we have letters, Jane Springer my colleague who did a lot of the initial investigation with Ancestry.com, she and I have visited dear Joy Colbeck er the sister of the young air gunner John Wenham we visited her several times we visit her on her birthday she has been back to North Marston on several occasions so she has become very much a family friend, er we have been given gifts er um we’ve been given lovely pictures of Wellington aircraft and things like that, and not only have we learned about the six boys themselves but of course we’ve learned very much about their families and these New Zealand boys who had also had brothers in the air force, and Don McClellan whose brother was killed very tragically just before he died his he had also lost a brother on a POW ship that had been sunk by er um mistakenly by a British torpedo, so we learnt about all the tragedies in the families and how sad they’d been and we learnt how much it had meant to them all to lose these boys some of their descendants are named after their uncles and great uncles who died in the crash and the wireless operator Don McClellan his sister is still alive in New Zealand and she has had a picture of him on her wall ever since he died, Michael Reece the pilot his brother Jim is still alive in New Zealand, and of course Joy Colbeck is still alive and Ian Smith’s sister only died a couple of months before we started to do our investigation, so in fact it’s amazing that there are still siblings of these boys still around, it has brought the Colbeck family um John Wenham’s family who are called the Colbeck’s they had had a bit of a rift in the family and because of our investigation about John and they all came together for the service they have all been reunited. Also um dear Ed Andrews from Westcott showed me a photograph one day of a Wellington crew and he said ‘we don’t know who these people are in this picture’ but he gave me the photograph, well Neville Selwood the Lancaster pilot from the Lancaster navigator from New Zealand who was a friend of Alex Bulger who had been to Westcott also sent me a photograph of himself at Westcott and it was exactly the same photograph that Ed had given me so I could then contact Ed and say ‘I now know who this crew is’ and dear Neville Selwood he’s still going strong he writes to me frequently he sends me copies of all his log books, he is the honorary chaplain of the Royal New the New Zealand Bomber Command Association he’s the honorary chaplain and I get their magazines every quarter or every six months they send me their magazine and I believe Ed Andrews from Westcott writes in this magazine because um I’ve seen his articles, so having having um this contact with these people has been wonderful and I myself have found it really heart-warming, I spoke to Captain Jack Charley again who was a Lancaster navigator I believe had a long conversation with him so to to talk to these people is absolutely wonderful, and er as I say you know we’ve brought closure to the families and we have explained a lot to them that they didn’t actually know before they now know that it was North Marston not Long Marston, they’ve seen the site, they’ve seen the field and the actual spot where the plane came down, um one thing that Joy Colbeck er John Wenham’s sister was very very concerned about which is interesting is that she had the official report sent to her of the crash and many many years ago and in it it mentioned that the pilot it was the pilot’s fault because he was inexperienced she was desperately worried when she met the Reece family that this shouldn’t come out, she didn’t want it put in our book she didn’t want them to know because she felt that if they thought that that they wouldn’t be able to live with that, er and so of course we never mentioned it anywhere but I think you know we have discussed this and um basically if he didn’t have enough experience to go up that night then he shouldn’t have been allowed to go up so one can hardly blame the pilot we feel, but we did keep it quiet from the Reece family ah but it has been the most amazingly heart-warming experience since the service in April 2015, we have had three more sets of relatives from New Zealand who have visited they couldn’t make the service themselves but they have been over to England and I have taken them to the memorial, to the crash site, shown them round Westcott airfield which I am now getting very familiar with, and have taken them to Botley to the cemetery, and I expect there’ll soon be some more coming [laughs].
CB: Is there a crucial question here or matter I think which helped closure for families and that is um what was the um what was the operation that they were on because some people don’t recognise how many crashes were in training and there they attributed the loss to a wartime operation, so how did that come out with the different families?
SC: Um the fact that they were just on a on a training mission um I believe John Wenham’s sister knew that anyway um the New Zealand families were happy to know the facts.
CB: Which were?
SC: Which were that they had taken off from Westcott at about seven o’clock on a snowy evening to go on a training mission we’re not quite sure we haven’t been able to find out exactly where they were heading but they took off from Westcott at about seven seven ten and fifteen minutes fifteen minutes later the plane came down in North Marston, so it said on the official report that it came down in from five thousand feet, my mother who was in the back garden at the time heard the plane coming very low over and she knew that it sounded wrong there were Wellington planes all around the airfields around North Marston and she knew it sounded wrong, and Chris Holden with his friend up the road heard the explosion heard the bang, er Clifford Cheshire who was a young boy was out delivering bread with his father he came upon this crash scene within minutes, and er so that is why these people have such vivid memories but they we do not know we haven’t been able to find out what they were doing but it was a training flight the pilot was alone there wasn’t any other train there wasn’t um anybody training them they were on their own, um the New Zealand families were surprised to hear that it wasn’t a mission but they accepted it and er I don’t think they were anything other than pleased to know the facts.
CB: So just to clarify that so some of the families that were there were under some misapprehension that this was actually a bomber sortie.
SC: Yes they hadn’t ever been told that it was a training flight so they assumed that it was a bomber sortie in the in the New Zealand the New Zealand yes yes we have the letters in our book we have the letters that were written to them after the death to announce you know the deaths um from Captain Stevens who was the Group Captain at Westcott um and it basically says ‘your son lost his life as a result of a flying accident the aircraft in which he was flying took off from the station on a normal exercise at nineteen thirty five hours the aircraft crashed’ it doesn’t say what time it took off it just says it crashed at nineteen thirty five hours and it says it was a normal exercise and I think that they just assumed in New Zealand that it was actually a bombing mission, their boys had trained in Canada before they’d come over here and so they had these boys had arrived at Westcott in October around about October and this was January they were due to go off to another base very shortly where they would be going on to Lancasters and things um but I don’t think that er the families probably comprehended that they were just still training I think they probably thought having trained in Canada and come over to England that they had finished their training and no more training was involved er and the letter from Captain Stevens goes on to say ‘no details as to how the accident occurred are available’.
CB: So just to clarify that they’d done their initial training in Canada?
SC: They have.
CB: They’ve come to an operational conversion unit on a twin engine Wellington?
SC: Yes.
CB: There next move probably would have been to heavy bombers because of where the Westcott stream went.
SC: Yes.
CB: So they would have gone to a heavy conversion unit.
SC: Yes.
CB: After that they would have gone to an operational squadron.
SC: Yes yes and I believe that the New Zealand er contingent often went to the same place it was um you might know which one they went to.
CB: Seventy Five Squadron.
SC: Seventy Five Squadron yes yes, one of the letters that we have from one of the boys when he wrote home said that er you know he was sort of suggesting that very soon they would be on their way to somewhere else yes er you know um and they never got there and of course it was only a few months before the war finished
CB: Yes.
SC: Which is very very tragic.
CB: Yes because this was January 45 and the war finished on 8th May in Europe
SC: That’s right yes.
CB: 1945.
SC: Yes.
CB: What would you say was the reaction of the families to the event you put on in memory of the crew?
SC: Huge gratitude and overwhelming surprise that we had decided to honour their family members seventy years after the event that’s that those six lads were still being remembered and were in somebodies memory and I think they were honoured they felt honoured to um think that we had done this, that their boys names are now in the church on a plaque forever and er yes great surprise, but as I have said already several of them said what wonderful closure the actual siblings of the crew who died it brought real closure to these elderly people all in their nineties of course that now they felt it was it had come a full circle and this had been remembered, and of course they were so grateful that they now knew more details about everything and that they had managed to find out about the other crew members that were in the plane with their relatives that night and they have become firm friends the New Zealanders now are all in contact with each other and they write to the old lady in Luton so they’re emailing her she is in her nineties but she still emails she’s very lucid so its brought great friendship and a sense of togetherness and very heart-warming to us at the history club that we managed to do this for these people.
CB: Yes, and in the village what was the reaction to the publication of the book but actually the event itself also?
SC: Well we had the most amazing response to the book because the money just starting pouring in I think the fact that we showed the photograph the photographs we got by then that the photographs the story of this plane crash in this little booklet made it very personal and very poignant um and the village people showed great interest in fact I think we could have filled the church twice over er that day of the big service but obviously with all the RAF personnel and relatives you know and people close to it we er we couldn’t fit we wouldn’t have fitted everybody in um [laughs] but er yes um great interest great interest.
CB: I remember it was a very good event.
SC: You see a lot of people in the village er had no idea that a plane had crashed you know in the village and they didn’t know that and so I think yes it was an event very well worth doing all round for everybody concerned.
CB: Two supplementary questions associated with this what was the reaction of the Church of England to this?
SC: Er there was no opposition whatsoever to putting a memorial in the church the Faculty although they took a long time to give us permission but I think faculties always take a long time to come through and the er Vicar the village Vicar was very very happy to do that.
CB: And afterwards did you get anything from them?
SC: From the church?
CB: Yes.
SC: Yes um in fact er we we because we had some money er left over from our collection we actually gave the church a substan quite a nice amount of money as er the collection at the church that day was about five hundred pounds that day and so er I think we actually handed that over to the church so they were very grateful for that as well.
CB: Right brilliant, the second question is to do with your speciality education so how did the Local Education Authority but particularly the school in the village react?
SC: The school in the village? Er they had very little to do with it the village school yes yes.
CB: It’s not surprising in a way that so many people don’t even know when the war was.
SC: Mmm mmm.
CB: Let alone anything that came out of it.
SC: Absolutely, I think to be honest with you we were so busy, and I was particularly busy because I I organised it all, so I wrote all the letters, I wrote all the invitations, I did all of the organising absolutely everything, I wrote the service and everything, I think I was so probably taken up with the organisation of it all that I didn’t actually involve to be fair the village school children at that time because um we we just had so much else to do, we have the North Marston History Club we do go into the school I have gone into the school and given talks on various things like the history of the school but we haven’t actually talked to them about this particular event but we we might because I think it it’s something that we can we can do but at the time the village school children weren’t really involved, the children who were at the service were not the village school children they were air cadets local air cadets and the young scouts from Maidstone, er quite another nice coincidence was that John Wenham the young air gunner was a scout in Maidstone in the Tovil Scouts and there is a memorial to him on their Scout memorial but also his name is just alongside Guy Gibson’s because Guy Gibson was an honorary Tovil Scout, so John Wenham and Guy Gibson are on the same memorial down in Maidstone which is rather rather lovely, and those scouts our Tovil Scouts from Maidstone have forged a relationship with old dear Joy Colbeck now and they um have looked after they have now gone round to look after her brother’s grave in Maidstone and in fact the war grave the War Grave Commission have renovated er his stone and so that’s another nice outcome, I think the she wrote to it and I think it all brought it to the fore that the stone was getting in very poor condition and so that’s another result of this is that his stone has now been renovated at and the Tovil Scouts tend it and have shown an interest in him so it’s been educational for those young boys as well, and I think also what has been again so amazing is the response from the newspapers the Kent Messenger they have run big they wrote ran a big article for and to find to try and help us trace relatives they reported our service afterwards, The Best of British Magazine had it in , in er you know the Bucks Herald, er and the Brigton Argos if they hadn’t have published our story that time, and then since then the Kent Messenger the journalist there who was so interested in our story that he has contacted Joy Colbeck and has got a lot of stories about her family and her her family grew up in Maidstone, her family ran I’ll say a well known shop in Maidstone and I think he’s just suddenly she’s become a local celebrity in Maidstone although she lives in Luton she’s become a local celebrity in Maidstone and he’s been writing stories about her so that’s another offshoot really from it yes yes.
CB: You mentioned the Military Cemetery at Botley on the west side of Oxford.
SC: Yes yes.
CB: How well is that maintained and by who?
SC: It’s maintained beautifully um I’m not sure whether it’s the Oxford Council who do it or whether it’s the War Graves Commission but I’ve visited it on many occasions occasions and there’s always somebody mowing it’s beautifully kept and the three New Zealand boys are buried side by side and then the two British are just a few yards away in a different place, and all of the relatives who have visited this country have all obviously been over to Botley, and on the morning of our service on 25th April, we organised a little minibus and er a little minibus load of people went over there before they came back for our afternoon service and they took poppies and flowers over there to lay on the graves that day, yes very very beautifully maintained.
CB: Finally you’ve done a huge amount of work on this which worked extremely well and gave great closure for the families what would you say was the most memorable aspect of your task in arranging and er closing this operation?
SC: I think the most memorable aspect was our initial contact with the families we had no idea we would actually contact anybody and I think to receive photographs but receiving the photographs um I think every time I had a photograph I burst into tears when I saw it, there was only one of the crew who we couldn’t get a photograph of as an adult we only had one of the child, but to see photographs of those boys who died that night that’s my most I think one of the most poignant things, and I think to looking back to think how we have brought the families together and have given them so much information and honoured them, I think they felt honoured that we had remembered their boys and I think it’s the overwhelming sense of thanks and gratitude that we have had from the families I think that has been the the the personal aspect of it has been the most the thing that will live with me forever, I think it really well and er its been er yes a very very very worthy thing and I shall never regret doing it, my only regret is that my dear mother who saw the plane come down that night and who gave me the first early stories of this plane er had died before we managed to do this she would have just loved to have met everybody so that was my regret but yes that’s it I think really to say the everlasting legacy of it I think.
CB: In view of what you said I think it’s worth recording that er to do with the New Zealanders that of all the Commonwealth Countries New Zealand contributed the highest proportion of it’s population towards the war effort in Britain.
SC: Really, that’s amazing.
CB: So Sue we’ve spoken about people who are effectively are not in this locality in terms of the crew and their families and their descendants but in the locality first of all what was the reactions of schools and secondly the press because that links together really in an awareness but first the school so what was their reaction?
SC: Er the local village school er didn’t actually show any interest in it really, that said we didn’t approach the school at the time because we were so very very busy involved in the organisation and all of you can imagine how busy we were, er but some of the people who had given us money er and were helping us in the project had children had links with the village school but somehow it didn’t filter through to the village school or the headmistress there er that this might be a worthy project for her children to do, I don’t think that the headmistress of North Marston Village School had a great interest in history herself, in fact the only thing that the village school has done in North Marston in any way to do with history is that they have called their four houses after some important names linked with the village history, like Shaw and Camden and things like that because of its their names that go back in North Marston history back to twelve hundreds they have called their children’s houses by those names, misspelt I might say they haven’t spelt them properly, but that’s the only real thing that they’ve done towards village history, and they did er I asked them if I could go in and give them a history talk and I talked about the history of the village school er so that is really the only link that they have they have had with history, oh and I believe our Chairman of the History Club did take them on a guided walk around the village but certainly with where we go back to the bomber they didn’t show any interest at the time but that said we were so busy and exhausted with it all actually that we probably didn’t approach the school ourselves so we might have engendered so interest if we had gone in, um but the local newspapers were very disinterested the Buckingham Advertiser didn’t even publish a story about it and the Bucks Herald did publish something many weeks after after we had cajoled and that was a complete contrast to the reactions that we had from the Kent Messenger newspaper and the Brigton Argos newspaper who were thrilled to publish pictures of our big service and the stories behind them so it’s interesting that the editorial in the Bucks papers is disinterested in that sort of thing, er I will probably give a talk to the school at some stage actually I’m sure that they will um yes they they will let me go in and talk to them but I think um it didn’t engender their interest at the time.
CB: And your secondary school is in Waddesdon so what was the reaction there?
SC: No well we haven’t heard anything from them but again they might not have known anything about it because the local papers didn’t publicise it.
CB: Okay right I’ll stop there.
SC: Keep thinking of things but
CB: There are occasionally other things that come to mind afterwards and one is that there are stories about things that happened like what your mother’s perception was so shall we just cover that and also the other one so what did your mother say about it?
SC: Well my mother who happened to be in the outside privy in the garden at the time age twenty seven heard the Wellington bomber coming over and knew that it was in trouble because it didn’t sound like the other Wellington bombers that were always going over, she always said to me that it was on fire and she heard those poor boys screaming, but thinking about it with the noise of a Wellington bomber just a hundred feet above your head she probably didn’t hear screams and although it exploded in a field about quarter of a mile away er and obviously there was fire all around them, er we’ve all discussed since that possibly it wasn’t on fire when my mother saw it but it’s something that she thought it probably would have been but she didn’t actually see it but she’s dead now so we won’t ever know but that was her perception of it at the time.
CB: Well it could have been an engine fire of course as the crash was undetermined, what was the other story?
SC: Well this isn’t in our book at all and we haven’t mentioned it to some of the relatives but a local person in North Marston, Mike Fillamore, who is still alive, said that he was told by another local villager that the morning after the crash when they were down there a body was found hanging in a tree an ash tree just on the edge of the road, this was news to me I’ve never heard this story certainly my mother had never mentioned it, but the person who told this story was somebody called Jeff Ayres who has now passed away, but Mike Fillamore who heard this story from him said that was what he told him but Mike Fillamore could still tell you that, but we didn’t mention this to er the Joy Colbeck, the sister of John Wenham who was an air gunner, because we thought that it would upset her if she thought that it was her young brother who might have been in that tree and possibly in the dark might not have been noticed that night and could possibly have been saved, so we thought it was best not to tell her this because it’s not substantiated but I think I don’t know where the story comes from but this was what was said.
CB: So it is quite possible of course that somebody tried to get out like the rear gunner rotating his turret.
SC: Yes, so it could have been John Wenham or the young Reg Price the two nineteen year olds.
CB: Yes. Thank you.
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AChaplinSR170407
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Interview with Sue Chaplin
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Sound
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eng
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00:52:23 audio recording
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Pending review
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Chris Brockbank
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2017-04-07
Description
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Susan Chaplin was born in North Marston and was a local teacher. She recounts the story her mother told her as a young girl, about Wellington HE740 which crashed near the village. With her local history group she researched and wrote a book “The North Marston Story”, about the crash and erected a memorial in the village church. Flight Sergeant Michael Reece, Flight Sergeant Donald McLennan, Flight Sergeant Alexander Bolger, Sergeant Ian Smith, Sergeant John Wenham and Sergeant Reginald Price were killed in the crash.
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Civilian
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Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
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1945-01-04
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Jackie Simpson
crash
final resting place
memorial
Operational Training Unit
RAF Westcott
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/236/3380/ACooperFA170810.2.mp3
654e9d538c89f433d64a0478a6f31ed1
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Cooper, Frances Anne
Frances Anne Cooper
Frances A Cooper
Frances Cooper
F A Cooper
F Cooper
Description
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Four items. An oral history interview with Frances Anne Cooper (b. 1931), a memoir, family history and a photograph.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Cooper and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2017-08-10
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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.
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Cooper, FA
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank, and today is the 10th of August 2017, and we’re in Sandhurst talking with Frances Cooper about her experiences in the war, and after the war, and in life in general. But what is your first recollection of life?
FC: Well, I was brought up, I was born and brought up in Uganda and my parents lived on safari, and I think [emphasis] the first serious memory I have is of the – we called them the natives - killing a goat. And I think they must have cut its throat and then it sort of danced around with its head hanging off, and the natives thought it was hysterical and they were all dancing about too and I went back to my mother splattered with blood and she was quite shocked and upset about it, she thought perhaps she shouldn’t have let me go, I think that’s the first thing I can remember. Little smatterings of life in Uganda: the smell of zinnias, I think, flowers, coming home on the boat when I was about two and a half, having a real tantrum being put on a lavatory and the water came up and wet my behind, because previously I had always been on a potty, and having a real go at my poor mother. Also as a great treat from my father being taken down to the engine room of the ship to see all these very noisy bits of machinery, you know; he thought it was interesting. My parents decided, because in those days it was thought better for European children not to stay in the tropics too long, to stay at home when I got to be about six. My father had one more two and a half year tour to go, on his contract, and so they bought what, in those days, was a cheap house in Suffolk for me and my mother to live in while he went back to Uganda to do his last tour. As it happened, war broke out and he was stuck in Africa and poor mother was stuck at home with a small child in Suffolk, and it was a very [emphasis] remote part of Suffolk, still is, and in those days it really was, but because she’d lived on safari, you know, she could cope with it. I went to a local sort of dame school, kindergarten I supposed it was called, and then somebody who was the wife of a parson in a local village near Sudbury had a little prep school, I went to that, and after my father came home in 1941, because a, I was an only child in a very isolated village, the only education was elementary school which my mother, who was a bit of a snob, didn’t really approve of, I went away to boarding school in a village called Long Melford, which was not very far away. It had been based in Felixstowe, but it was evacuated because it was dangerous on the coast, to an old rectory [cough] in Long Melford, and then when the war was nearly over everybody moved back to Felixstowe. It was quite a small, not very good school and didn’t teach children over about fifteen or sixteen, so then I left that school, went to girls’ grammar school, High School, in Sudbury, for two years, or may have been three and then I did a year’s commercial course in Ipswich, after which I joined the Air Force. All right?
CB: I’ll stop there for a mo. Thank you. That’s really intriguing, so what was your father doing in Uganda?
FC: He’d come out of the RFC. He wanted to stay on and be a pilot. His mother had recently been widowed with four younger children. She wanted him not to be in a nasty dangerous occupation. He would have very much liked to have been a river pilot, a Thames pilot which his father had been, but his father unfortunately went to the dogs. He got syphilis and um, because he was never at home, and so my grandmother didn’t want that [emphasis] for her precious son, so he had to find a job and the Ordnance Survey I think were offering to train people, they went, he went down to Southampton for a year, trained as an ordnance surveyor and then he was employed by the Colonial Office, in Uganda. [Throat clear] And my mother met him when he was on home leave, probably after about three or four tours that he did. They did two and a half years out there, six months’ home leave and so on and so on, and he was engaged for twenty years.
CB: Engaged in the job for twenty years.
FC: Yes. By the Colonial Office, and then he was finished. Because again, it was considered the white man’s grave, you know. And that’s why they ended up in Suffolk.
CB: Sure. So what sort of education did your parents prepare you with in Uganda?
FC: Well, I don’t remember being educated. I just do remember doing letters in a notebook and I just think my mother talked to me, um, just chatted. I can’t remember being educated, you know.
CB: So when you got back here you had to start school, so how did that work aged six?
FC: Yes, started at school. But it was a very small school and I suppose we did lettering and learning to write. Don’t remember much else. My mother was a great reader so I suppose I just accepted that I would learn to read and I suppose we did sums but I can’t remember. Haha.
CB: What about sport at school? Games?
FC: No. Well there was none in the dame school, I don’t remember much at the prep school, of course this was in a war, a lot of the teachers had disappeared. We did have games at boarding school, netball mainly, what laughingly called athletics in the summer – high jump, running races things like that - nothing at all, nothing like nowadays, you know. You were sent outside in very few clothes and told to run up and down, you know. It was horrible! [Laugh]
CB: So when the war started you were about eight, coming up to eight.
FC: Yes. Eight or nine. I do remember the famous broadcast, I’m pretty sure I do [emphasis] remember, and my mother being terribly upset because she was stuck in, you know, in one place and my father was in Africa. But she’d been very worried before, because she could remember the First World War, and there’d been preparations in the village, things like you had to black out your house, the Home Guard was beginning, and we had a telephone, one of the few in the village, and the sergeant of the Home Guard lived just near us and, so he of course didn’t have a telephone so mother was delegated, if the Germans came, she had to go and get him up, or out, or whatever. And she did have to go a couple of times, in her nightie, across the road, you know, she’s not happy. Fortunately the Germans didn’t come, so you know, but she was sort of nearest point of contact.
CB: Quite sophisticated really! [Laughter]
FC: Later on in the war, an awful lot of men obviously were conscripted, but farm labourers were considered to be, it was called a reserved occupation and so they stayed at home to do the harvest and they had their rations topped up by meat pies, which were sort of like meals on wheels I suppose. You had to have a ticket, an entitlement to a meat pie, and my mother – who was a very fierce woman - was in charge of the meat pies. [Chuckle] So presumably a lorry delivered them to the local school, which was unused, and she was on duty to dish out these pies to people, and you know, [telephone] it was from ten to twelve, a very strict routine, ten till twelve, she was on pie duty. If they didn’t turn up in that time the pie went back to the factory, you know. She was very fierce! So I think they were all a bit frightened of her. But anyhow, she was in charge of the pies, that was her war work.
CB: And the telephone. And the telephone!
FC: Yeah.
CB: So what do you remember specifically about the first days of the war, apart from that?
FC: Well I do remember, because in this village there was a sharp right angled turn, great convoys of troops used to come through, I don’t quite know where they were going, I think we thought they were going to the coast, but I really don’t know, and a soldier was posted on this corner to direct the traffic round the corner ‘cause otherwise they would have shot off down a little back road. So he was there on duty and I used to go and talk to him and it was a huge coincidence was his name was Frances too, so for a child, I thought that was miraculous and I don’t know, we just used to chat. And eventually the convoys stopped and he went away, but that was in the early days of the war. Otherwise all I can remember is my mother being very anxious, worried about food, although in the country you didn’t starve by any stretch of the imagination. We had a big garden and you got eggs, and we had milk from the farm and then I think milk must have been rationed ‘cause we ended up having goat‘s milk and goat’s butter from a farmer who kept goats a bit down the road, sort of top up our nourishment, and I’ve never been able to eat goat’s cheese ever since, haha, but at the time it was nice. Don’t you like goat’s cheese? No. [Laugh] Then in 1941, after a lot of hoo-ha, my father came home from Africa having had to go round the Cape instead of through the Mediterranean, on the boat back from Mombasa. Mother knew he was leaving Africa, and she knew he wouldn’t be able to come the short way so she didn’t expect him to come as quickly, I think he took six weeks, she didn’t expect to hear from him for some time. Then she got a cable from Freetown to say he was still on his way, much later than she expected and she didn’t know where Freetown was, she said ‘it must be Ireland, it must be Ireland’ – wishful thinking I suppose - and looking at in my school atlas and finding it was West Africa which was a terrible disappointment, and then, we didn’t know, but the convoy, not his boat, but one of the boats, was torpedoed coming up across the bottom of the north Atlantic, I think two ships were damaged so then they had to go to Halifax in Canada, when she heard from him again, for the ships to be repaired and then they had to come across the north Atlantic, you know, in the middle of the war. So it was, it must have been an awful time for my poor mother and he ended up in Greenock or somewhere up there, then he came home on the train and I can remember going to Lavenham station to meet him and he just said hello, there were, nothing, I suppose we were both shy of each other and really after that my family life rather deteriorated because I’d had my mother to myself for three years and suddenly this strange man turned up, you know, and before very long I went off to boarding school and really that was the end of my childhood I think. I’m making it sound very, very soppy, and it wasn’t, and they did the best they possibly could, but from a child’s point of view, looking back, it was unfortunate to say the least. They were very hard up because my father’s pension had been set in 1921 and by 1940 something money had you know, gone down the drain, so they were on edge about money I think. He tried to get a job but he was too old, tried to be an admin officer at Wattisham: too old or too awkward. He worked for some man in the Works and Bricks of the Army in Sudbury and he didn’t get on with him and he ended up in the Observer Corps. I don’t know if they got paid or not, the Observer Corps, but not much if they did. He did that for the war. We had a very big garden, so it was a bit like “The Good Life”. Grew things, kept bees, ducks and geese, mother bottled fruit, made jam. It sounds idyllic but it was bloomin’ hard work for them both there, because they were worried about money all the time. Anyhow, that’s really why I ended up joining a service, because there was nothing in Brent Eleigh. I had done quite well at school, in Geography, and I rather fancied doing meteorology which they did in the WRNS. I applied to join the WRNS but didn’t get in. It was quite a, it was a snobby thing; the WRNS was better women’s service. My father thought that joining the RFC had done him the world of good and I think he thought it would set me up, you know, so really I went from boarding school to the Air Force. It was a continuation of what I was doing, you know; it wasn’t any particular vocation. When I joined the Air Force, well you had to go and have tests and interviews, and at the time Russian, learning Russian, was the thing and I had been quite good at languages, so I said, well, you know, I suppose they asked what do you want to do and I said ‘well, anything but sums, I’ll do Russian or whatever’, and guess what, I was put on an accounts course. [Laughter] Which is, I think they might have been trying to tell me something but I didn’t realise, you know, and so that’s what I, did the OCTU and then went on an accounts course.
CB: So when you applied for the RAF did you know that you were going in as an officer?
FC: I think so, I don’t think my mother would have tolerated anything else. I think I was, it was just expected that I would go in on a Short Service Direct Commission it was called. I think that’s why, I had to go to the Air Ministry or somewhere in London; in the Strand or The Aldwych, for interviews, and doing what now they call telemetric tests or something I remember, you know, what shapes fit boxes and that sort of thing.
CB: And how long was the engagement?
FC: Three years.
CB: Okay. So you didn’t feel too happy with being put on to accounts, or did you just become resigned?
FC: No, I was horrified! But I don’t think I knew that when I went on the original Officer Training Course, you know. You were accepted, you went to OCTU and then you waited to be told what you were going to do after that, by which time you were in the Air Force, you know.
CB: No choice.
FC: I don’t remember there being, no, any choice, no. [Laugh]
CB: They were probably short of accountants at the time.
FC: Well they must have been desperate, yes, I was terrible, terrible [chuckle].
CB: Just pause there for a mo. So near where you were living with your mother and then father, what was being constructed nearby?
Fc: Well, there was a village called Waldingfield on the way to Sudbury which is where we used to do our shopping every week. We used, there was no petrol so we used to have to cycle to Sudbury through Waldingfield and the main road ran parallel with what I suppose was the peri track of a big, big American airfield and the whole place was, even our village which was four or five miles away, overrun with very glamourous American soldiers in jeeps, with their feet hanging, legs hanging out of the side, you know, whizzing about, annoying all the men, the British men, including my father. Who do they think they are, the Yanks? You know. Any woman, or female I suppose, over fourteen or so or was considered fair game by the Americans, or was thought to be, thought to be fair game. My mother, who I say was pretty fiery, was cycling home from Lavenham one day and she was stopped by an American in a jeep, I think who, well propositioned her somehow, and when she said certainly not, he gave her a tin of peaches and some other kind of gift, because they had everything and we hadn’t, you know, so she came home with a tin of peaches. And they were just so glamorous I can’t tell you. They had lovely uniforms, beautiful barathea instead of hairy old things that the Home Guard had, they were young, they had American accents like film stars. There were all kinds of terrible rumours about women going, or being no better than they should be, et cetera, you know. When I was at boarding school, one of the girl’s mothers, I think was having affairs with an American, I don’t know what had happened to her father, and she had records and shoes and nylons – that was the thing, nylons, you know. And as a child it was just so [emphasis] exciting because I wasn’t worried about people being killed or anything like that. We did have a Liberator crashed at the end of our village and all the kids went running up to look at it. It was just a big hole in the ground with bits of metal and a lot of mud, but I don’t remember being the slightest bit moved by it. When my father was looking for a job he, I think he thought he might drive an ambulance, thought that might be useful, but he went out with an ambulance and they, the people in it, said that they’d been to collect somebody who’d been a, an American in a crash, and was burnt and this man was shrieking all the time, so my father thought well he didn’t think he could stand that so he didn’t pursue that any more. They just took over the countryside, you know, and we used to cycle past all these aircraft and dispersals.
CB: They had an image that they were over paid, over sexed and over here.
FC: Well that’s what the locals thought, you know, that was just the perception. Because I was a child I didn’t really appreciate that. We did also have prisoners of war in camps, who got, if they were German they got taken out to the farms, under guard, to help with the harvest, things like that. If they were Italian they very often lived at the farm because the Italians were thought not to be interested in escaping. And I mean a lot of the Italians, particularly, were peasants, they loved working, you know, it was like being at home, they stayed, married the farmer’s daughter and you know, lived happily ever after. And we also had a Polish camp, I suppose it was a Polish Army camp at a village, can’t remember its name, called Groton I think, which was on the way to Sudbury. The big house in our village was volunteered, well, I mean they were commandeering big houses and these people jumped first and were taken over as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers, who all wore blue uniforms, with red ties, do you remember? White shirts, in case they escaped from the hospital I suppose, you know. And they were all walking about the village smoking cigarettes, thoroughly miserable, annoyed my father. Um, and they sort of, well they were more interesting than cattle, and farm labourers as far as I was concerned. And then I went away to school and very few competent teachers, [microphone banging] because even the women were conscripted, so there were all kinds of sort of fairly useless has beens who were teaching. And that’s all I can really think of at the moment. Sorry!
CB: We’ll stop there if that’s all right.
FC: And the Germans were feared, and my mother, at the beginning of the war, told me, you know, if you see a nun with boots, it’s probably a German parachutist, they really believed [emphasis] it, especially if he offered you sweeties, you know. And they, it sounds ridiculous but we all believed it in those days. They took signs off the signposts in case they help the Germans go from one small village to the next, you know, because they were [emphasis] afraid of invasion, really, seriously. We all had gas masks, which again my mother insisted on me practically taking to bed with me, where other people’s mothers were much more free and easy. I can’t really think of any more, just at the moment.
CB: So we’re talking really, you were born in 1931, so you were ten when your father came back.
FC: I suppose, yes.
CB: 1941. So at the end of the war you were fifteen, sixteen, er, fourteen, fourteen, weren’t you.
FC: Yes.
CB: So your interest was changing as time went on. How did you feel about that?
FC: Yes. But, because I suppose I’d led quite a sheltered, isolated life, being away to girls’ boarding school, then came back home to go to this, the grammar school, on a coach, and then you just came back again and did your homework, and so on and so on. Then I went, lived in Ipswich, in digs, when I was on a commercial course. I didn’t really have a life, you know, it just a case of doing courses and getting through the time. I mean I never, didn’t have a social life, went to the pictures occasionally, but always with my parents, or my mother, and because we were poor and isolated, nothing happened, compared with nowadays. It just didn’t. I don’t remember feeling deprived, but it just, nothing happened.
CB: And the catering was quite good because although there was rationing, the garden was providing what you needed. Is that right?
FC: Yes. And as I say, the farmers were generous with eggs and things like that, and when it was just mother and me we didn’t eat an awful lot of meat or anything like that. We had been established in the area before the war broke out and in those days you had a butcher who came and a grocer who came, so we were part of the system. And again, as a child, I didn’t really worry about food, it was mother who worried about nourishment and such things. When my father came home he was a very big man and he worked very hard in the garden, and I think he probably felt hungry. But every, I mean things like eggs which were rationed were always distributed fairly, he didn’t have more than his share I don’t think. He just had to fill up on bread and potatoes, things like that.
CB: What age was he at this time?
FC: He was, er 1941, he would have been forty three; he was born in 1898. [Throat clear] A different era.
CB: Yes. So this airfield was constructed and the American Air Force, Army Air Force, moved in and they’re big aeroplanes, and noisy, so how did the local population get on with this disturbance?
FC: I don’t remember any particular feeling at all, I think really they were just sexually jealous of the American airmen. We never came across any socially, at all, because we didn’t have a social life, we didn’t belong to anything, or get invited, so I don’t know. I mean they were noisy but you just got used to them I suppose, like the aircraft from Heathrow going over, you just sort of take them. And you know as a child you just accept it all, don’t you. There’s no question of querying it, it just happens.
CB: And as a girl you weren’t old enough to be going out in the evenings in any case.
FC: No, no. And because it was such a long way away from anywhere there was no social, I think the farmers’ sons went to the occasional Young Farmer’s thing, Hunt Ball, I don’t remember Hunt Balls. They did have an occasional Young Farmers’ Dance but I never, never went to them. My mother was, as I say, snobbish, she thought she was a bit, a cut above rather. But I don’t remember feeling deprived. It’s only looking back I think golly, what a funny old life.
CB: You talked about your father and yourself having a slightly distant relationship.
FC: Yes.
CB: That was something that a lot of people, after the war, found with their parents. Did this improve or did you always have this slight distance?
FC: Yes. Well of course you see I then went away to school and he remained a stranger.
CB: Away from you. Yes. And when he returned, he, you returned home and went to grammar school. Did you have a different relationship with your father?
FC: I don’t think so. I think if anything, I was a bit frightened of him. He was a very big, physical, physical man. And I think it was really because he was hard up all the time. He was always anxious and edgy and if something broke or went wrong it was a really serious problem, and it, you know, it makes people crotchety because they’re worried all the time about how they’re going to cope. They had a dreadful struggle paying my school fees but they thought it was worth it, because people did in those days. My children can’t understand it, but that’s what people did.
CB: Yeah. So the war ended on the 8th of May 1945. What do you remember about that?
FC: Yes. I remember, it was probably half term at school, and it was extended a bit because of VE Day and I, again, can remember my father being cross because he said the school was swinging the lead a bit giving us a few more days off, you know, when they should have been educating us [laugh]. But we were back at Felixstowe by then.
CB: The school was. Yes.
FC: Yeah. Big anti-climax as far as I was concerned, I mean nothing happened in Suffolk for VE Day.
CB: Nothing happened in the village.
FC: No, as far as I remember, no.
CB: What about the Americans? What did they do?
FC: Well I don’t know what they did, I’ve no idea, ‘cause I was just home on holiday, from school, and I mean it was a good thing, but I don’t, there was no celebration and you, know.
CB: And when you got back to school, then what was the school’s approach to that?
FC: I don’t remember anything.
CB: Just carried on as usual.
FC: Just carried on as usual, as far as I remember. Nothing.
CB: And VJ day was in August so that was holiday time. What do you remember about that?
FC: I just remember, I think probably general relief, but although a lot of Suffolk men were in the Far East, I suppose a lot of them didn’t come back but I’m not aware of that, and I just think was just general exhaustion and relief and then when the General Election came and Labour got in, you know – horror! [Laughter] Because it was accepted that Churchill would carry on, and he didn’t.
CB: Yes. Well the Tories got out, got caught out the same way as they did with Corbyn this time.
FC: Yes, amazing, absolutely amazing. This time last year we were joking about Trump and Corbyn, and now haha!
CB: What did your father do when the war ended?
FC: Well he tried to get various jobs and then he ended up in the Observer Corps and then when that stopped he didn’t do anything.
CB: Because he had his Colonial Pension, which wasn’t big.
FC: Minute yes, I think it was four hundred and eighty pounds a year, which wasn’t very much in 1940 something. Because of the Depression, although you were supposed to get an increment every so often, some time in the late twenties or thirties they decided that you would miss out on one, one increment, which meant that his final income was less than it should have been so then halve that, pretty pathetic by the time he got it. Just hard luck, but not enjoyable. And he had no family money.
CB: Right. So it was hard altogether after the war as well.
FC: Yup. And mother had no money, so you know, it was, I think they had a hard time.
CB: We’ll pause there for a mo. So we’ve covered the wartime. So you, we touched a bit earlier on you joining OCTU, the Officer Training Unit, so where did you sign up and get your initial training?
FC: Well I can never remember taking the King’s Shilling. I can’t remember sort of a ceremony at all. I can remember going for interviews, being told I’d passed and being told to report to RAF Hawkinge, which is in Kent, on a particular day, which I did. Was like going back to school actually. And then, as far as I remember, we were put in probably rooms of four people, in huts, that was like school. Tailors came down from London to fit us up in our uniforms – our best blues. We were issued with battle dress, you know, everyday stuff. We did drill on the airfield, marching up and down, some poor flight sergeant [chortle] who was very polite, but you know, pick up your feet ma’am, and you know how women march, putting their arms wrong, he must have nearly gone mad, but you know, we did manage to learn. We had to learn all the um, when you give the order, you know, by the left, one two, halt, all that kind of thing, because he knew we were going to be telling people who had to do it on the right thing. We learned how to salute and march up and down and yeah, mostly it was the sort of giving of the orders, you know, how to do it at the right time, because you couldn’t just say stop, it all had to be according to protocol. We must have had lessons about Air Force life. How you mustn’t put the port on the table at dining-in-nights. I suppose how to behave socially, but I think most of us knew that.
CB: Which way round the table do you pass the port? Which way round?
FC: Left to right, but they don’t do it, don’t take any notice now!
CB: Don’t they?
FC: No! We used to go to, because John was with the AEFs, we used to go to dining in nights [banging sound] thumping the port all the way round, my hair standing on end, anyhow, it was pretty trivial isn’t it, things like that. I remember we were taken to Manston to look at a Mosquito. The local Member of Parliament took us round the Houses of Parliament. Just I suppose, general, after school education. And then we had a passing out day when our parents came and then we were all sent off on leave and then on courses.
CB: How long was your initial training anyway?
FC: I think it was twelve weeks, but it might have been a bit longer. I know I went in in July and I ended up on the accounts course in January, so it was.
CB: Where was the accounts course?
FC: Bircham Newton, in Norfolk. Coldest place on earth, really awful in January. We lived in one place, we ate in another mess and we were on the accounts course in another place. We spent all the time marching backwards and forwards, one place to the other, in January, in Norfolk and it was hell, hell. [Laugh]
CB: How long was the accounts course?
FC: Well I think it was three four months, something like that, I can’t remember.
CB: Then did you get a choice of posting? Or how did that work?
GC: No, I don’t remember. I was posted to Stafford, 16 MU, which was an enormous [emphasis] Maintenance Unit on the edge of the Potteries, so it was dirty, hanging our shirts out to dry and all covered with smuts. And if you’ve lived in Suffolk and Africa, that was a bit of a shock. It was a very big, soulless place, full of all these remustered aircrew, and I was hopeless at accounts; I didn’t enjoy it at all. I don’t know, do you remember having a form called a 1369?
CB: Absolutely.
FC: Well on mine, at the end of the first year at Stafford, at the bottom of it you have to say what you want, you know, how do you see your future or something, and I put ‘a small unit in the country’. Which amused the Adjutant, very much. But I was posted to Feltwell, so they did do what I asked. [Laugh] Still as accounts, but then I managed to get transferred to P3, which was airmen’s careers, which I really enjoyed. When I’d been at Stafford I had been seconded, I suppose you would say, to the P3 department there, which was run by an elderly schoolmaster so efficiently, and so when I went to Feltwell the place was, the P3 department was a bit of a shambles but I managed to rejig it how this man had done his, and it was well thought of actually, when we had a Group inspection, I think they were quite impressed, but by that time I was on my way out so I never hit the high spots.
CB: So, what rank did you reach in the end?
FC: Flying Officer, and that was just time.
CB: Yeah. Time served.
FC: Yes. You didn’t have to do exams or anything, it was just, you know.
CB: Not for that promotion.
FC: No, no it wasn’t really promotion, it was just.
CB: Same for Flight Lieutenant, yes. But did, you were on a three year engagement but were you obliged to be in the Reserve for a while afterwards?
FC: Yes, I think so.
CB: How long was that?
FC: I think it was two or three years, but I really can’t remember. And it was all fairly theoretical, being a woman, I think the men got called up to go to Korea or somewhere, but the women didn’t.
CB: No. So while you were in, what sort of experiences did you have, with other people there?
CB: Well nothing really, well I mean yeah, he was there as well.
CB: Who was that?
FC: John was there, yeah. There were two messes, two officers messes, there was the mess that belonged to the admin part of the station and there was Number Two Mess where, it was a Flying Training School, where all the cadets messed and some of the instructors lived as well. I lived in the main, Number One Mess, and John lived in the Number Two. But I think we all ate together, as far as I remember. And you know, we just went backwards and forwards. I don’t think Number One people went to Number Two, but Number Two people came in and the WAAFs had a wing of the Number One Mess, just at one end, [cough] in a wing and I just lived in the mess. Again it was really quite like school, you know, you went to work, came back for lunch, went back again, so on. Orderly Officer, which I always thought was a bit ridiculous: there was I, nineteen years old, supposed to go round guarding the station in the middle of the night, especially at Stafford, which had lots of outposts. And you were driven round with a couple of very, or probably only one, National Serviceman who hadn’t much more clue than I had, you know. if anything had cropped up I don’t know quite what we would have done but it was what one did, you know.
CB: What was the attitude of the National Servicemen in the RAF would you say?
FC: Um, I think they just accepted it. I don’t think they were terribly pleased to be there, but I think they put their heads down; most of the ones that I came across just got on with it. They did keep applying for postings to get nearer home if they happened to be sent off into the wilds, but they went on courses, I think they just decided that they’d just get on with it, not make waves. I did feel very sorry for quite a lot of the air women who, when they joined up, all wanted to be drivers or dog handlers, and they were inveigled really. They were told well join up and then once you’re in we’ll see about you being a driver or a dog handler, and they wanted to be drivers ‘cause they wanted to learn to drive a nice big, were they Humber Hawks, with the little flag, you know?
CB: My driver.
FC: Yes, you know the feeling. But you haven’t got a flag, have you!
CB: Not yet [laughter].
FC: And that’s what they hoped, but they ended up.
CB: Driving staff cars.
FC: Yeah. But they ended up as batwomen and in the kitchens and things. And they were always coming and saying can I, what about this course, can’t I be in, hugely [emphasis] over-subscribed, even more so with dog handlers, but they were in by then, you know.
CB: So with dog handling what was the attraction, particularly?
FC: Well I suppose they just liked dogs, thought they’d like to be looking after a dog. I mean they probably lived in a slum somewhere or very poor background and they thought it would be lovely.
CB: These were not National Service. These were people who’d signed on.
FC: These were women, yes.
CB: How long would their engagement be?
FC: Well I suppose two or three years, I really don’t know. And of course because it was quite soon after the war it was almost, it was an option to join one of the services because a lot of their sisters and people had done it, had been conscripted, but it wasn’t quite such a strange thing to do in those days.
CB: So we’re talking there about what was commonly in the Air Force called the erks, but there were National Service Officers. So what was their approach?
FC: Yes. Well I think they were a bit peeved, but again I think they got on with it. I do remember being very [emphasis] impressed with the, what did they call the sub-adjutants, the ones that worked in the Adjutant’s Office, under, he was called the under Adj or something anyhow, and he was Jewish and one of, an educational process was going to a court martial. In the Maintenance Unit, people were very light fingered, they were stealing platinum points off the sparking plugs hugely. Anyhow there was a, there were court martials and we had to go to a court martial to see what happened and this Jewish person wouldn’t wear a hat, you know, for the oath, and wouldn’t take the oath, the normal oath.
CB: On the bible.
FC: On the bible, yeah. And I can remember, I’ve never ever, as far as I knew, met a Jewish person before, you know, and I admired him for sticking up for his, um, his religion I suppose, you know. I mean nobody made a fuss about it, but it was, I didn’t even know it happened, you know, I was so wet behind the ears. And another fairly funny thing that happened, when I was at Feltwell, very junior, people were given jobs to do apart from their work and one of which was being I/C badminton. Well, I have never [emphasis] picked up a badminton racket in my life and I was made I/C Badminton! And had to go to Halton for a meeting about badminton I can remember. Talk about a farce, you know! I can’t remember what happened there. It was a very nice mess, it was a Rothschild place.
CB: It’s still in use.
FC: Yes, still is. It was all terribly grand, and we all presumably talked about badminton and then I came back again, you know. It’s ridiculous wasn’t it.
CB: Everybody else was keen on it, but not you.
FC: I presume, and were fit! You know. [Laugh] And I also represented Group, I think, in the relay race. ‘Cause I was tall, could run reasonably fast and didn’t drop the baton, you know, and I got a medal [chuckle] but it was pretty pathetic really.
CB: So when you met your husband to be, John Cooper, what was his role at the time and how did you come to meet him?
FC: Well we lived in, more or less, in the same mess, he was an instructor and we just came across each other and he asked me out and you know, one thing led to another.
CB: So you kept in touch, ‘ cause he stayed in the RAF and you left.
FC: No, oh yes, he was, I left, but he was still in the Air Force. He was posted to Ternhill and we went to Ternhill together, but I was out of the Air Force by then, I was just a wife, you know.
CB: Oh, you got married while he was, you were both still in the RAF did you?
FC: Yes. But you weren’t allowed to be married, a married officer in those days. Somebody had to go and it was always the woman. And also he had more of a career than I had.
CB: Sure.
FC: And we lived in a caravan because there were no quarters for junior officers, lived in the caravan on an airfield, which eventually became the deposit for our house. [Laugh]
CB: So when you came out?
FC: Yes.
CB: So when did John leave the RAF?
FC: Well, we went to Felt, er we went to Ternhill.
CB: Ternhill. That’s in Shropshire, yes.
FC: Yeah. And then he came back to run the Communications Flight at um, somewhere near Croydon, I can’t remember the name of the airfield.
CB: Kenley was it?
FC: That’s right, Kenley. We came back down in our caravan and by that time I was pregnant with our first child. [Cough] He dearly wanted to stay in the Air Force, but there were no jobs for pilots, you know, they were just so many pilots, not enough pilot’s jobs, so he just had to come out and eventually became an air traffic controller [throat clear] and then he got mixed up with the Air Cadets and became a, what they were called, an Air Experience pilot, for the cadets which he absolutely enjoyed because he could go off to camp, fly aeroplanes at the Air Force’s expense, you know, so and I was completely out of it. [Background sneeze]
CB: So he was in the Volunteer Reserve for that.
FC: Yes, yes. But by then I’d got children so my life took a different turn.
CB: We’ll stop there, thank you. [Beep] We ran out of time with this interview, so we didn’t cover certain things to do with the war which we’ll pick up with later, and her career after she left the RAF when she became a teacher and came across a head who’d been a SWO. [Beep] Incidentally the significance of this interview is that Mrs Cooper, as a child in the countryside, had experienced living next to an airfield which the Americans operated from, and also came up against evacuees and prisoners of war, both Italian and German, and at the end of the war she was still a mid teenager, but later married an RAF bomber pilot when she was serving in the RAF herself.
Dublin Core
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ACooperFA170810
Title
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Interview with Frances Anne Cooper
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:54:45 audio recording
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2017-08-10
Description
An account of the resource
Frances Cooper spent her early life in Uganda before settling with her parents in England for her schooling, then joining the WAAF. She speaks about the small village she lived in during the war, the arrival of Americans and prisoners of war, as well as the effect this had on the local population. Frances recalls the end of the war, then her time in the service before marrying a pilot and leaving to raise her children.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Uganda
England--Suffolk
Temporal Coverage
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1941
Contributor
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Anne-Marie Watson
Carolyn Emery
childhood in wartime
civil defence
ground personnel
home front
Home Guard
military service conditions
prisoner of war
RAF Bircham Newton
Royal Observer Corps
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/250/3398/PEllisMW1701.1.jpg
fe0a9e98f23972969b5aa03159b3c69e
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/250/3398/AEllisMW170703.1.mp3
9a9db74325a0256a11c8b95b9a2f864e
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
Ellis, Mary Wilkins
Mary Wilkins Ellis
Mary W Ellis
Mary Ellis
M W Ellis
M Ellis
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Mary Wilkins Ellis (1917 - 2018). Mary Ellis was an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-07-03
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.
Identifier
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Ellis, MW
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 3rd of July 2017 and I’m in Sandown with Mary Wilkins Ellis who was a delivery pilot during the war and has a variety of tales associated with that. So, starting off then Mary what were your earliest recollections of life.
ME: Well I come from a farm in Oxfordshire. My father was a farmer and I had three brothers. And I can remember looking at aeroplanes when I was eight, six, eight and thinking how lovely. And then Alan Cobham came along with one of his circus planes to Witney Airfield which is in Oxfordshire. Which is quite close to Brize Norton actually. And so, I had the urge to be more interested in aeroplanes more and more. And then I went for a flight with Alan Cobham’s Circus and this set me off even more. And then I talked with my Pa who also liked flying and he thought it was a good idea that I was interested in flying. And when I was at school in Burford I wasn’t very good at playing hockey so, I was allowed that hockey time to go to Witney Airfield and have a flight and that’s how I started flying aeroplanes.
CB: What age are we talking about here?
ME: We’re talking about [pause] I suppose twelve when I started flying. Well, I don’t know but it was very early on.
CB: What was the reaction of the school to your giving up hockey and going to flying?
ME: Each one was allowed to do their own thing so it didn’t register that I was flying. Other girls were doing probably far more important things but we didn’t talk about it. We just went on with our lessons during the other time.
CB: What did the other girls think about your flying? What did the other girls think about your flying?
ME: We didn’t talk about it. So I don’t know.
CB: No. Interesting. Yeah.
ME: But I learned to fly at Witney and, as I’ve just said and I was flying and I got my licence just in 1938. And then the war came and so all civil flying was stopped and I thought that’s the end of my flying life. So, I went home and I was at home doing precious little [laughs] as girls do, you know. Play tennis and all that sort of thing. And then one day I heard on the radio that girls who had licence, flight licence and were able to fly aeroplanes would they please contact the Air Transport Auxiliary because girls were badly needed to fly aeroplanes. So, I applied and I was taken on almost immediately. And I joined Air Transport Auxiliary on the 1st of October. Now, there’s another car coming. I think this is —
CB: We’ll stop there a mo.
[recording paused]
ME: To fly aeroplanes you have to be trained.
CB: Yes. So, when the radio announcement came looking for girls who had got flying experience then there was a process you went through. So you said you joined the 1st of October 1941. Then what happened?
ME: I went to Hatfield. And I was at Hatfield with three other girls who also joined at the same time and we had to — none of us had very much experience so we had to learn to be able to fly aeroplanes without any radio or any help whatsoever. And so, we were, each day we went off on cross country’s from Hatfield to learn the countryside as it was. You know. Woods here, rivers there, churches there. Something else. Like that. And then I was posted to, I was posted to cross country flight at White Waltham in December.
[pause]
CB: Yeah.
ME: And that was at White Waltham which was — White Waltham was the HQ. Did you know that?
CB: Of the ATA. Yes.
ME: And so there I had to go through all the procedures of finding out how an aeroplane works. How the undercarriages works. And what to do in emergencies. It went on and on and I had to learn about the weather conditions. Had to learn Morse code. And it really was fantastic — the amount of learning that one had to do before starting ferrying. And I was flying in the flying training. All the single aeroplanes and I was ferrying these around. And [pause] what happened next?
CB: So, at White Waltham they had a number of different aeroplanes to fly.
ME: Yes. They had a Harvard something or other. And I flew all these light aeroplanes including Hurricanes and I flew fifteen Hurricanes. And then one day I had a little chitty which said I must fly a Spitfire. Just like that. And I thought, ‘Oh my goodness. How can I do that?’ I haven’t been near one because they didn’t have any spare Spitfires at White Waltham for one to look at. And so, I was taken by taxi aircraft to Swindon. South Marston. And there —
CB: The factory.
ME: Yes. And there I — a Spitfire was, came out of the hangar and it was the one that was on my little chitty. So this, I had to fly this aeroplane. The first ferry Spitfire I’d ever flown. And in uniform, you know, when you’re very young one can look quite attractive [laughs] which is rather different today. And so, the hangar doors were opened and out came this Spitfire and I eventually climbed in. Someone put my parachute in because we always wore parachutes and then I got in myself and I thought, ‘Oh gracious me. How lovely.’ And then a chappy that was fastening my parachute and all the other things inside, he said, ‘How many of these have you flown? You look like a schoolgirl.’ And I said, ‘I haven’t flown one before. This is the very first one.’ And he simply could not believe it. And the people around, they were staggered to see this schoolgirl about to fly a Spitfire. However, I managed very well and I taxied out and took off and I got up in the air and I thought I must play with this aeroplane just a little to find out how it flies. What it can do. What I can do with it. And so I did. I flew around for quite some time and I was only going to Lyneham but it took me a long time because I was flying around in this beautiful Spitfire. I landed it at Lyneham. All was well. My taxi aeroplane was waiting for me so I got out of this Spitfire into the taxi aeroplane which took me straight back to Swindon for the second Spitfire in the same day. And they couldn’t believe it when I got there and they said, ‘Oh you’re back again.’ [laughs] I went through all this paraphernalia you do. As one does. At this time I had to do some cross country to fly to Little Rissington — which I did. And I was almost killed at that time because they were flying Oxfords and as I was going in to land I just landed and an Oxford came and landed just in front of me. I still have the letter of apology [laughs] It nearly killed me.
LS: That’s incredible.
ME: But I’m still here. So, that was the beginning of the Spitfire. As you know I flew four hundred and one Spitfires on ferry flights. So —
CB: Were they consecutive or they tended to be interspersed with others?
ME: Interspersed. I’ll show you if you want to know.
CB: Yes. I’d be interested.
ME: Are you a pilot?
CB: Yes.
[Pause. Packet rustling]
ME: These are very precious so I have to keep them.
CB: Of course.
ME: This is D-day. If you’d like to look at my book.
CB: Thank you. Just while I’m just looking at this, going back to your comment about going to South Marston, the factory, to pick up the Spitfire you then did a handling trial. How much would you throw the aeroplane around?
ME: For ten minutes I was, probably, yes, getting used to it. Marvellous.
CB: So you were doing aerobatics in it.
ME: No. We were told never to do aerobatics or fly at night.
CB: Steep turns. Were you, to what extent were you able to —
ME: Everything else.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Well you can see there were all sorts of different aeroplanes in the same day. I could fly a bomber or a Spitfire. All on the same day.
CB: I’ll stop this for a mo.
[recording paused]
CB: We’re talking about the variety of planes you flew, Mary, but in the early training —
ME: No.
CB: At White Waltham they had Hurricanes there. Did you deliver many Hurricanes later?
ME: Well, it’s all in the logbook.
CB: You’ve got a variety here but the Hurricanes aren’t a major item. I’m just curious to know whether you —
ME: Well, if you give me I’ll tell you.
CB: Yeah. Because you’ve got Albacores, you’ve got Spitfire, you’ve got Wellingtons. All sorts of things in there.
ME: There you are.
CB: Oh, there we are.
ME: Those are the ones I flew.
CB: Yeah. At the back. Thank you. So, you’ve got a Tiger Moth as a starter. How did you like the Tiger Moth after what you’d been training on?
ME: I didn’t fly Tiger Moths after I’d been doing my training.
CB: Right.
ME: Silly questions.
CB: Yeah. So, we’ll stop there just for a mo.
[recording paused]
ME: Different types in fourteen days.
CB: Right.
ME: It’s all down there.
CB: Yes. So, did you end up with a preference for certain aircraft and ones that you’d like to avoid. If you had the choice.
ME: We were not given a choice.
CB: No.
ME: We were told each day which aeroplane to fly and where from and to.
CB: Yes.
ME: We had no choice.
CB: No.
ME: But we had a choice as to whether we were flying or not. We had no radio. If we chose not to fly because the weather wasn’t what we wanted then we didn’t. I didn’t. And another thing is there are two or three different aeroplanes all in the same day, different places.
CB: Yes. And what’s it like switching from one plane to another when they are different in the way they handle?
ME: [laughs] Well I don’t know. We had a little book with ferrying pilot’s notes. Read the book. Get in the aeroplane and fly.
CB: And what are the most significant points in the ferry pilot’s notes that they’re making you aware of? Some of them had flaps and some didn’t I presume for instance. Did they?
ME: Oh, I don’t want to go into the technical pieces of —
CB: Ok. Doesn’t matter. I’ll stop just for a mo.
[recording paused]
ME: Garlands or whatever it was.
CB: Right. So I suppose —
ME: It was all, it was all different.
CB: Yes.
ME: But you had to know this.
CB: Yes. That’s what I was getting at really because —
ME: Have you seen the ferry pilot’s notes?
CB: I haven’t. No.
ME: You haven’t.
CB: No.
[recording paused]
CB: So, what you have there is a book of pilot’s notes. Ferry pilot’s notes. Could you just do what you did just then? Tell me what variety have you got in there of planes because it’s just significant in terms of how you had to handle this extraordinary change of aeroplane.
ME: It wasn’t, it wasn’t only the aeroplanes. We had no radio whatsoever. We had nothing except our own thing. And to go from one place to another and when one gets to an airfield that is flying Oxfords and then you have to go around and sit in somewhere. Or another place. I’d go to Shawbury and take a Wellington. And I go around and I have to fit in with all the others because they are talking with the RAF. But I have no radio and they don’t know really I’m there except by looking and I have to choose when to go in and land. And it wasn’t easy.
CB: So, you’re talking about fitting into the circuit.
ME: I’m flying a Wellington all by myself, with nobody else there. So I couldn’t ask. They’re all there.
CB: Yeah. So a huge range in there and the number, the notes are simply on a single sheet. Yeah. So, in here we’ve got Catalina. Buckmaster. Blenheim. Huge variety. Albacore. Tutor.
ME: They’re in alphabetical order.
CB: Yes. And Firefly. Did you do any four engine bombers?
ME: Yes. As a second pilot.
CB: What was that?
ME: In a Stirling. And a Halifax. And a Lancaster.
CB: Right. So, in those four-engined planes were there just the two of you or would there be another person as well.
ME: No. There was also an engineer.
CB: Right. Right. And the engineer was there because of them being multi-engined. Right.
ME: That’s right.
CB: So, in the circumstances of this navigation challenge it’s amazing that you managed to find places. What was the way that you planned a route to get there with no radio.
ME: We just had a map.
CB: Yeah.
ME: And don’t forget all these places were — what’s the word?
Other: Camouflaged.
ME: Camouflaged. And they were not easy to find.
CB: No.
ME: And some of them were secret and so they were very difficult to find but we did it. Didn’t we?
CB: Extraordinary. Yeah. What about the night flying? You said you weren’t normally going to do that.
ME: No.
CB: Were some people —
ME: The whole idea of the Air Transport Auxiliary was to get the aeroplane safely from the factory to where they were needed in the RAF and the RNAS. It was no good breaking them because the country at one time was almost without aeroplanes. And so we had to be very careful.
CB: Yeah.
ME: But we were very much on our own. We could fly or if we didn’t like the weather or we didn’t like the aeroplane then we were not pressurised at all.
CB: Which sort of aeroplane would you not like, really?
ME: Which what?
CB: Which sort of aeroplane would you not like?
ME: I didn’t like the Walrus. I know it was a very useful aeroplane.
CB: Seaplane.
ME: But it had a mind of its own and once it clattered about like a lot of bags of old things and something and it made a terrible noise on the ground [laughs] and in the air it just did what it wanted to do no matter what. It was terrible [laughs] but I flew quite a lot of them.
CB: Did you land them all on land? Or did you land some on water?
ME: Yes. They were made at Cowes and I took them from Cowes and landed them wherever I had to.
CB: Yeah. If the weather deteriorated what would you do while you were flying?
ME: Either put down at some aerodrome. It didn’t matter where. Or turn around and go back. Just depended on what weather was coming.
CB: And the people on the [pause] your destination were all expecting you.
ME: No. They didn’t know.
CB: Sounds interestingly challenging.
ME: Very challenging.
CB: Yeah. So, when you landed in your Wellington and got out — what happened next?
ME: Well [laughs] I can tell you the story which everybody already knows. You can tell the story couldn’t you Frank?
CB: Well it’s just we can’t hear it on there. Yes. Could you tell it please?
ME: This, yes, this Wellington I delivered. I can’t remember where it was but I delivered it to some station and I taxied to dispersal and switched off and then opened the door and let the ladder down. I went down with my parachute and the crowd of people on the ground who were there they were amazed. This schoolgirl, you know, flying these big aeroplanes. And they just stood there. And I said, ‘Can we go to control. I must have my chitty signed.’ And they said, ‘We’re waiting for the pilot.’ I said, ‘I am the pilot.’ There I was, you know, young and lovely uniform and they wouldn’t believe me so two men went inside to search the aeroplane to find the pilot. And they came out and they said, ‘No.’ There was no sign of anybody else so they accepted that I was the pilot. And I was. But I was unusual for one small girl to be flying these bombers. Hampdens and things like that.
CB: The fact a girl was doing it or just on her own?
ME: Without any radio. Without anything else at all.
CB: So was there a rule that if it was a bomber there would normally be two pilots?
ME: In the RAF they would have five.
CB: Yes, but —
ME: I think.
CB: In delivery. On delivery, when you were doing, delivering bombers was there a rule that normally there would be two for bombers or just one pilot.
ME: No. There was only two when they were four-engined ones.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Or if I flew an aeroplane like a Mitchell, I think, if you couldn’t get to the emergency you had to carry an engineer but not another pilot.
CB: You mentioned uniform. So how did you feel about your uniform?
ME: Well we were so used to having a uniform we were so pleased when we had two days off because we worked for two weeks and then had two days off and it was nice to get into civilian clothes and rush off all around one’s friends and go home.
CB: Were you based, yourself, always at White Waltham or did you move elsewhere?
ME: I wasn’t based at White Waltham. I was based at Ferrypool 15 which is Hamble.
CB: Right. And what sort of accommodation did you get there?
ME: It was very good. Everywhere I went was very very good because the ATA sorted it all out and we were just taken from one place to another to another. And I was stationed at Basildon and lived with a family in this big, big house, you know, and they looked after me frightfully well. And each girl had some other place. So, we were all well looked after. We had to be ‘cause we were flying each day and all day.
CB: So, when you got to your destination for the delivery you were picked up by the taxi were you?
ME: Usually. But sometimes I had to fly an aeroplane up to Prestwick and maybe it took two or three days to get there depending on the weather and something. And then I had to come back by night train to London. Back to White Waltham and there they would give me another aeroplane to fly back to Hamble.
CB: Right.
ME: A delivery flight. So, very complicated but it was marvellously operated.
CB: Well, very well organised. What were the taxi planes? Predominantly.
ME: The Anson or the Fairchild.
CB: And they went to various places. They picked up pilots from various places did they? On the way back.
ME: Yes. It’s usually a junior would fly the empty aeroplane and whoever got in the other aeroplane the senior pilot would take over.
CB: On the way back.
ME: So if someone went to pick me up then I would have to fly the aeroplane back or wherever it was going. Probably to another delivery place.
CB: We talked about your initial training at White Waltham which was single-engine. Was it? Where did you do your twin engine training?
ME: Pardon?
CB: Where did you do your twin engine training?
ME: I went to Thame for two hours. And that was on light twins. I flew an Oxford for several hours. And when I’d flown lots and lots of different aeroplanes like twins I then went back to White Waltham and I was given a few hours training on a Wellington which put me in the league of all these bombers. And so it was. And from having training on five different aeroplanes I was able to fly a hundred and seventy six aeroplanes.
CB: Right. What was the most daunting thing about switching to a thing like the Wellington because it’s quite a big aeroplane.
ME: I know but [laughs] you don’t need strength really to fly the big aeroplanes, do you?
Other: Not these days you don’t.
CB: No.
Other: It was a bit more difficult in those days.
ME: I’ll tell you one thing that happened in the Spitfire. Two of us girls were going from Southampton one morning. Quite short. And it was quite hazy. Very thick hazy. You couldn’t see. You could see straight down like that and my friend went off in her aeroplane and I thought yes, I’ll go off in mine and took off and it was, I went above the haze as much as I could and I never saw another aeroplane. But we were both going to Wroughton which is Swindon and the thick haze was so great that I managed to look down because I’d judged on the time and what have you that it was — Wroughton was there. And I looked down and it was there. And I didn’t see any other aeroplane. I couldn’t see anyway. Only straight down. So, I did a circuit and came in to land and she must have done exactly the same. I don’t know. But she did a circuit the other way and we actually passed on the runway. We were actually wheels on the runway. She was going one way and I was going the other. We must have missed by inches [pause] and we didn’t see each other. Not even, not even at the end, coming in to land.
CB: Amazing.
ME: We only saw each other as she was going that way or I was going that way and suddenly there was another aeroplane and then I discovered later it was her and she discovered it was me. So we decided we mustn’t tell anybody.
CB: What conversation did you have about that?
ME: Oh, it frightens me. Lots of lovely stories like that.
CB: Yes.
ME: But we can’t go on forever.
CB: Well. Finding the airfields, I thought, was an interesting point because your navigation clearly was very good but in certain circumstances it must be difficult. So how did you? When you got near to an airfield that you weren’t right on course how did you deal with that? You weren’t quite sure where it was. Did you do a square search or what would you do?
ME: Well we just had the maps.
CB: Yes.
ME: And hoped to get there. Whether we went straight or went that way and like that but we got there and then the map said this is the one. So then you had to operate in between the other aeroplanes which were being driven, piloted by the RAF. And the RAF didn’t know that we were coming.
CB: So, what was the technique? Would you fly overhead and then they would communicate with you by —
ME: How could they? We had no radio.
CB: By — no, no. By lamp. They would signal.
ME: No.
CB: They wouldn’t do anything.
ME: They were doing what they had to do and I would —
CB: You just joined the circuit.
ME: Well I couldn’t really join it because probably it was a different sort of aeroplane. Mine might be a Spitfire and somebody else’s might be an Anson or something.
CB: As time went on the planes became more powerful and sophisticated. How did you feel about that? Did you enjoy that?
ME: I loved the fast and furious ones [laughs]
CB: Tempest.
ME: The Tempest. The Typhoon. What was it? All those fast ones. The American one. What’s that?
Other: Mustang.
CB: Mustang.
ME: Pardon?
CB: The Mustang.
ME: Mustang. That was it. I did, I loved those. But then if you’re flying every day then it’s not as difficult as if you’re flying once a week.
CB: No.
ME: But it is difficult when you have three or four different types.
CB: In a day.
ME: In a day.
CB: Let alone in a week.
ME: And then being taken to somewhere else. [pause] Here you are. A Hudson. A Barracuda. A Boston. A Fairchild and a Spitfire.
CB: Three twins and two singles. Yeah.
ME: [laughs] I find it’s, it’s difficult to talk to anyone unless they are a pilot because they don’t appreciate the dangers we were in all the time. It’s amazing really that we did so well.
CB: Yes. What did you regard as your biggest danger when you were doing deliveries?
ME: Weather. Because the weather could clamp down at any time and the amount of meteorology that we knew was very little. It’s not much better today anyway [laughs]
CB: No. So you talked about going above the haze but would you sometimes put them really low in order to be able to see where you were going?
ME: Would I what?
CB: Would you fly really low sometimes in order to —
ME: Yes.
CB: Under the cloud.
ME: I liked to fly in a fast machine. I liked to fly so that I could see the church steeples and go from one to the other and I knew the country so well that I could do that on a flight. That was lovely [laughs]
CB: So where —
ME: I was still working of course.
CB: So, you did a bit of beating up occasionally.
ME: Yes.
CB: Airfields as well?
ME: Not, not airfields but if you were on track and you thought, ‘Oh my friend lives down there,’ I’d go [whoop] you know. Why not? As long as we kept the aeroplanes safe that was the thing.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Because a broken aeroplane was no good to anybody.
CB: No. How did you feel about when you were picked up by the taxies? How did you feel about being flown up by somebody else?
ME: In the Anson. There were sometimes five of us in the Anson. That was perfectly alright because we would go — whose duty it was that day to pick up. The Anson would go around and pick up until there were five or six of us in the aeroplane and then back to base probably.
CB: If the weather was bad you would have to stay at an airfield I presume. Would you?
ME: We did. Yes. We were well looked after if we had to stay.
CB: Because you had effectively an officer rank so they put you in the officer’s mess did they?
ME: Oh yes, we were. Yes. We were.
CB: And what happened in the social side of the officer’s mess activities? Off duty.
ME: Off duty. I wouldn’t know. If we stayed overnight we would have an evening meal and then obviously one was tired and I used to go to bed in the officer’s — wherever it was. I don’t know. They allowed us a very special officer’s place. What do you call them? In the officer’s mess or somewhere.
Other: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Anyway, we were well looked after.
CB: Well looked after.
ME: I was well looked after. Yes.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
ME: But what I didn’t like. I landed somewhere, I remember, and I had to stay the night and I stayed and ate in the evening with a lot of these RAF officers and then went to bed. And the next morning I got up and went to have breakfast and there were only one or two officers there. So, I said to one of them, ‘What has happened to everybody this morning?’ And they said, ‘They didn’t come back last night.’ And that really hurt. That was terrible. I couldn’t bear that. But I had to get in my aeroplane and go off.
CB: Are we talking about a bomber delivery here?
ME: So [pause] it wasn’t all fun.
CB: No. And did —
ME: Because I lost several friends, you know. The girls. They were there and then the next day at Hamble, when we went, they weren’t there. And we had to carry on. There was a war on.
CB: And what sort of things would cause the girls not to be there?
ME: Because they’d been killed.
CB: But flying in bad weather would it be, or aircraft breaking down?
ME: It was usually bad weather. As ATA.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Yes. It wasn’t, that wasn’t very nice.
CB: Did you strike up some really strong friendships with other ATA people?
ME: Yes. We were all fifteen, twenty girls together. We were all great pals. Some were high rank and some were low but it didn’t make any difference socially. We were quite happy to be together.
CB: And what rank did you start at?
ME: I started as a cadet. And then I skipped third officer and I became a second officer and I was a second officer for about a year and then I became a first officer. And after that, if one went higher, it meant you had to have a job on a desk as well as flying. I didn’t particularly want that.
CB: No.
ME: So, I tried to keep as a first officer.
CB: So that’s equivalent to flight lieutenant.
ME: No. It’s equivalent to squadron leader.
CB: Right.
ME: Isn’t that right?
Other: [unclear]
ME: Well I was told it was.
CB: So your real interest was to fly all the time. Were you marking?
ME: Rather than sit.
CB: Yes. Were you marking up your score of the number of different planes.
ME: No. No.
CB: Or was it just coincidence that it —?
ME: No. Each day one had to put in the log book.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
ME: Because they all had numbers and so you had to put them in the logbook.
CB: Yeah. Apart from the meeting on the runway in opposite directions what other scary moments did you have?
ME: [Laughs] Too numerous to say.
CB: Give us a sample.
ME: I — no I’m not going to say that. [pause] Yes. There were always little incidents rather. Especially with Spitfires when the tail wheel wouldn’t either go up or go down. I can’t remember. Do you remember?
Other: You’re probably thinking about the main wheels because the tail wheel, first, the very early ones had a skid and then they got the tail wheel very early on but it was not retractable. I think they did have some on the PR aeroplanes that were retractable. I’m not sure.
ME: I’ve got a lot of things in one or two of my books.
CB: Was the Spitfire rather temperamental or was it just you needed to drive with caution?
ME: Here’s a Headquarters, Finding Accidents Committee. “The aircraft landed at its destination with the tail wheel retracted.”
CB: Right. The later model.
ME: “The pilot is held not responsible for this incident.”
CB: Right. Right.
ME: Or accident.
CB: Right. So, which aircraft was that?
ME: This? What?
CB: Which aircraft was that?
ME: It was a Spitfire.
CB: Right.
Other: Interesting.
ME: I don’t know where it was. I’ve got [unclear] [pause] yes, I had [laughs] I was flying over the New Forest one day. I was going to pick someone up from Stoney Cross. I was flying a taxi aeroplane and the engine clipped so, as you know, you can’t stay up there too long when you’ve got no engine. Fortunately, I found a space and I managed to get down in this space which was very very small and I didn’t damage the aeroplane. But there I was. Stranded. And from out of all the trees and bushes came a herd of cows and I’m terrified of cows. And so I had to be rescued [laughs] myself. Somebody passing by or doing something saw an aeroplane and so they came and rescued me from these cows which is extraordinary. To land an aeroplane quite safely and then have to be rescued from the cows [laughs]
CB: And as a farming girl that was quite interesting.
ME: [laughs] yes. There was a reason why I was not very [laughs] intimate with the cows.
CB: In the early days of farming was it?
ME: [laughs]
CB: So, what was that plane you were flying that day? A single engine was it?
ME: There you are. Eleven types in fourteen days. Did I tell you that?
CB: No. That’s good.
ME: I did.
CB: You did.
ME: That was that one. Well, there was ten types in fifteen days.
CB: Right. What’s the predominant one there?
ME: On July the 6th I flew a Wellington.
CB: Yeah.
ME: A Defiant, a Wellington, a Spitfire and a Swordfish. All in the same day.
CB: Quite a bit of variety. What was the Swordfish like to fly?
ME: It was lovely.
CB: Draughty.
ME: I liked being out in the open for a change. It was. It really was lovely. It was like a ginormous Tiger Moth.
Other: It was big.
CB: Apart from the Walrus which you didn’t like what other plane would you rather have avoided?
ME: I think I told you. The Walrus.
CB: No. Apart from the Walrus.
ME: There isn’t one I disliked but several I found rather more difficult to handle than others.
CB: Would that be twin engines more difficult to handle or some of the very fast?
ME: Some of the bigger ones.
CB: Yes.
ME: Like a Hampden. And you know when you fly a Hampden you have to put a special thing on to get the undercarriage down. If you forget to press this little knob —
CB: Pneumatic.
ME: Then the undercarriage won’t go down and so you circle around and think why can’t I get the undercarriage down? Eventually you just remember to poke this thing [laughs]
Other: Yeah.
CB: Did you ever have a wheels-up landing?
ME: Yes. I did [laughs] I hesitate because I don’t really like answering it but Chattis Hill was a secret place for making Spitfires.
CB: Oh.
ME: And it was in [pause] what’s it near? Chattis Hill. What’s it near?
Other: [unclear]
CB: I don’t know where that is.
ME: Anyway, it was a secret and it was on a side of a hill. And I took this Spitfire off down to where they’d been training horses. So I went down to get a good look and I took off quite happily and one day I forgot that it was a different engine and [laughs] I hadn’t changed the trim the right way and I took off and I went zoom. Like that [laughs] and missed the trees by that much. ‘Cause you know there’s a Merlin engine and a Griffon engine. Now, I forgot so that was my fault. But shortly before or after that I took off from Chattis Hill, this secret place and I went up and I couldn’t get my green lights. In fact, I couldn’t get any lights at all and so I didn’t know what was happening with this Spitfire. And then it started getting warm and I thought I can’t stay up here so I flew around this place and these people in this secret place, I saw them bring out the fire engine and I saw them bring out the ambulance and I thought, oh. And I then went back around and I knew I had to land somehow and so I did. I came in to land and I switched an engine off as I crossed into the field.
CB: On the boundary.
ME: And then sat it down without any, without the undercarriage, without more ado.
Other: [unclear]
ME: It, because I’d switched off everything I could it wasn’t too bad. I got a few bruises myself. But they soon mended the aeroplane I think. A couple of weeks afterwards.
CB: Yeah.
ME: It was flying again.
CB: So, did you come in at a lower speed in order to make sure that you stuck well or how did you do it?
ME: When?
CB: When you were on finals did you actually come in slower than you would have done with the undercarriage down?
ME: What do you mean finals?
CB: Final approach.
ME: Are you talking about this aeroplane?
CB: Yes. As you came in.
ME: It wasn’t [laughs] There was no case of finals. It was just a racecourse.
CB: Right.
ME: [laughs] And I knew if something — obviously I would come in as slowly and safely as I could.
CB: Yeah.
ME: All my learnings came into my head in a fraction of a second and that’s why I didn’t break it very much.
CB: Just bent the propeller.
ME: So all my learning was very good [laughs]
CB: You clearly had a huge number of experiences. What would you say was your proudest event?
ME: Oh, I don’t know [laughs]
CB: I should think that was one of them. Getting it down undamaged.
ME: Pardon?
CB: I should think that was one. Getting it down undamaged.
ME: Ahum.
[pause]
CB: Now, there were men in the ATA as pilots as well as women. So how did that fit?
ME: We were all girls at Hamble.
CB: Right.
ME: We didn’t have any men.
CB: Right.
ME: Just one engineer man. That’s right.
CB: So, at Hamble you were picking up brand new aeroplanes.
ME: We were not always picking up brand new aeroplanes. Quite often we were picking up aeroplanes that had been damaged that had to be flown to the MUs to be fixed again to carry on flying. Quite often we did that. It wasn’t always new ones.
CB: So were you delivering the damaged ones as well as picking up the ones that had been mended?
ME: Yes.
CB: Right. And when you landed at the airfields there was a simple — they weren’t expecting you but there was a simple procedure that you went through was there? To hand over the aircraft.
ME: No. We went and put the aeroplane where they asked us to put it. And then we had this little chitty which we took back with us to Hamble and put it in so they knew that we had delivered that particular aeroplane safely.
CB: Yeah. I’m going to stop there for a mo.
[recording paused]
ME: Meteor flight.
CB: No. So tell us. The first jet.
[pause]
ME: This —
CB: So, this was —
ME: That’s what you wanted.
CB: Thank you.
[pause]
CB: This is a letter from November 1945 saying, “Dear Miss Wilkins, I’d like to add to the expressions conveyed to you by my commanding officer my own appreciation of your good work you’ve done for the Air Transport Auxiliary as a ferry pilot. I wish you every happiness in the future and success in any work you may undertake. Yours sincerely, Senior Commander, Director of Women Personnel, Air Transport Association.” Amazing.
ME: Thank you.
CB: So, the Meteor. Where was that being collected from?
ME: Yes. When ATA really closed in ’45 I was seconded with a few other men to fly in 41 Group. The RAF.
CB: Yes.
ME: So, I was posted to White Waltham and during that time I was asked — given a Meteor to fly. [pause] And so I flew it [laughs]
CB: So where did you take off from?
ME: I was flown to Gloucester. Where we were the other day.
CB: Yeah. Staverton.
ME: I flew it from Gloucester to Exeter. I’d never seen one before and I remember saying to the pilot, ‘I can’t fly it because it doesn’t have any propellers.’ [laughs] And so, I said, ‘Can you tell me any of its characteristics or something.’ And he said, ‘All I can tell you is that you must watch the fuel gauges because they go from full to empty in thirty,’ something, ‘Minutes so you’d better be on the ground in that. Before that.’ And that’s all the instructions I had on a Meteor [laughs]
CB: So, what did they explain about the engines and how they operated?
ME: I’ve no idea.
[pause]
CB: Extraordinary. Because one of the interesting —
ME: I just had to fly it and I had my book.
CB: Yeah.
ME: I looked in the book.
CB: Pilot’s handbook.
ME: What it said.
CB: Yeah.
ME: This, that and the other and I just flew it.
CB: Did it tell you you had to keep the revs above a certain level?
ME: No. It didn’t [laughs]
CB: ‘Cause one of the interesting —
ME: How would I know? Because it was entirely different from an ordinary aeroplane.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
ME: So, I just looked in the book and there it told me and so I did what it said.
CB: What height did you fly on that?
ME: Oh. I can’t remember but I remember going off and I thought oh I’m up here. Where am I? I’m lost [laughs] but I soon found myself. Oh and the pilot had told me it would drop like a stone when I took the power off but I didn’t find that at all. I did, it could be a perfect landing and all the people at Exeter were there to greet it and they couldn’t believe this female [laughs] this young female driving this. And the CO said, ‘Oh that’s wonderful. We’ll have a party,’ [laughs] and he said he would keep it for his own because they were changing from Spitfires to Meteors or the other way around. I don’t know which. Anyway, that was my experience which was fantastic. I thought it was wonderful.
CB: And how did you feel the acceleration and speed on that compared with a Spitfire?
ME: Well it was nothing like a Spitfire. A Meteor’s got two engines. A Spitfire’s only got one. So [laughs]
Other: Very fast.
ME: Oh, dear.
CB: Yes.
ME: I’ll tell you what.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Someone said you wanted to know how many Wellingtons I’d flown.
CB: Yes.
ME: And so, I put it out at one, two, three, four to be continued. I got tired of doing it so I —
CB: Right. That’s very good.
ME: And there it is. I copied from my logbook.
CB: That’s lots of Wellingtons. Yeah.
ME: Hard work that was.
CB: Thank you.
ME: Four engines were Lancaster, Lancaster, Liberator, Stirling and Halifax.
CB: Did you fly as first pilot in any of those?
ME: Not the four engine ones.
CB: Right.
ME: No.
CB: And were they also flown by women?
ME: There were secret places.
CB: Yeah. Were they flown by women?
ME: Yes.
CB: As well. They were.
ME: Yes. Of course. Women did everything.
CB: They did. Marvellous. Yeah. So was it only one Meteor you flew or did you go on to fly others?
ME: Pardon?
CB: Did you fly other Meteors?
ME: No. Because I was only there for three months.
CB: Right.
ME: And they were just making these Meteors then. No other girl alive has flown a Meteor.
CB: No. I can imagine. So, then the war ends. Well, what happened at the end of the war?
ME: Well, flying ceased so I went home. I went home. Played tennis with my mother.
Other: [unclear]
CB: And when did you meet your husband to be?
ME: I met him, oh I don’t know. I was running the airfield up here for about ten years before I met him. And then suddenly he appeared and he was a commercial pilot then. So. He was very handsome and so I thought [pause] he talked me into it. I may as well agree [laughs]
CB: So, after the war then you went home and played tennis but after that you went back in to flying.
ME: Well, I just said I came to the Isle of Wight as a, I was a personal pilot to a man that had an aeroplane but no pilot.
CB: Oh. Who was based in the Isle of Wight. Right.
ME: That’s why I’m on the Isle of Wight.
CB: And how often did he use his plane? Well you flew it but —
ME: Very often because he went to various places in, he had to go to committee meetings every so often to here, there and all over the country. So, it was rather fun.
CB: What plane did he use?
ME: A Gemini.
CB: But it had a radio [laughs]
ME: Pardon?
CB: But it had a radio now.
ME: No.
CB: Oh. it didn’t.
ME: No.
CB: Oh right.
ME: No. It didn’t.
CB: What about going abroad? Did he go abroad in it?
ME: I can’t hear now because my hearing aid has just run out.
CB: Ok. I’ll stop.
[recording paused]
ME: I became a personal pilot to this farmer man.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Then he bought a small airfield.
CB: Oh.
ME: And he had several managers which he wasn’t happy with and then one day he suggested that I could manage it for him. And I thought, well it’s a challenge and I like a challenge. So after a while instead of going home I decided to become an airport airfield manager so I was made manager and a few weeks afterwards when I started to build it up and I built the place up and up and I became airport commandant [laughs] because I’d now fixed in a CRDF and all sorts of things which had to be in order for the airline to come in and I did so desperately want the airlines to come in to the Isle of Wight. And so, I had to have all this CRDF and everything else. So, I did that.
CB: This is at Sandown.
ME: And the airlines came in. In the summer it brought people from Leeds and Manchester and Birmingham and Exeter and London. Every day in the summer. Which was — people can’t remember here that this ever happened but it did and it was wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. And then of course I was married by this time and my husband was working for the — what was it?
Other: The Hovercraft.
ME: Hovercraft
LS: Yes. Yes.
Other: Hovercraft.
ME: Yes. The British Hovercraft. Whatever it was called.
CB: The British Hovercraft Association. At Cowes. Yes
ME: And he was posted out to various places around the world and then he didn’t like that very much so he came back. And he was asked again, please would he go to various places and he said he wouldn’t go unless I went with him. So it was a case of he giving up his job or me giving up mine. And unfortunately for me I had to give up. So, I said I can’t stay here any longer and so I went abroad with my husband but because I left the field gradually went downhill and it closed shortly afterwards and went for sale. And I didn’t know anything about it then because I was abroad. Had I stayed I would have gone on. Without my husband [laughs]
CB: Yes. We’re talking about Sandown aren’t we? Yes. Which still has a grass runway. So, you went around the world with him. Then eventually he returned to the UK. You did. Together.
ME: Yes.
CB: Then what?
ME: But that, that would take, that took about four or five years because I was in the airfield here from ‘50 to ‘70. ‘70 I took off with my husband. So that was twenty years.
Other: Mary. You did the pleasure flying. Mary. Pleasure flying.
ME: Pleasure flights.
Other: Yeah.
CB: You did pleasure flights.
ME: Donald did afterwards.
Other: Yeah.
ME: But — yes because Donald bought an aeroplane. My husband. And together we did pleasure flights. Yes. That’s right. Which was very interesting because quite a lot of people that went for a pleasure flight decided that they would learn to fly afterwards because they enjoyed it. It was going around the Isle of Wight. So that was some good. And then, for some reason, Donald left and said, ‘I don’t want to do that anymore.’ So he didn’t. And I just went. We sold the aeroplane and I more or less went with the aeroplane just selling tickets. And that’s how people know me. Selling pleasure flight tickets. They don’t know anything about my previous life.
CB: Extraordinary. Yeah.
ME: It’s extraordinary.
CB: Yes. Eventually you gave up selling the tickets.
ME: [laughs] Yes.
CB: And settled down to a bit of retirement.
ME: I’m trying to grow old gracefully with my great help.
CB: Yes. Lorraine.
ME: My great friend.
LS: We try to inspire each other. You’re still inspiring me anyway, Mary.
CB: And finally as far as the air, the association was concerned, the organisation continued.
ME: Which?
CB: In the background. Your [pause] your girl, the girls who were in the —
ME: That stopped at the end of the war.
CB: Right.
ME: That finished in ‘45 and so I had three months in’ 46 when I was with 41 Group.
CB: Right.
ME: Which is part of the RAF isn’t it?
CB: Yeah.
Other: I’m not sure, Mary. I don’t know.
CB: Yeah. But the Air Transport Auxiliary had an Association afterwards did it? Where people kept together and so you kept in touch with the girls you’d flown with for all those years. Did you? At annual events?
ME: There weren’t very many because most of the girls had been married and so they stayed at home.
CB: Right.
ME: But we did have one reunion. Yes. And that was all. And gradually they have all gone to heaven. Or somewhere.
CB: Yeah. Well Mary Wilkins Ellis thank you very much for a most interesting conversation and we wish you many more years.
ME: You can’t do that because I’m a hundred and a half already.
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AEllisMW170703
PEllisMW1701
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Interview with Mary Ellis
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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eng
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01:17:14 audio recording
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Pending review
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Chris Brockbank
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2017-07-03
Description
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Mary Wilkins Ellis was born in Oxfordshire and became interested in aviation at a very early age. She experienced her first flight with Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus. Mary learned to fly while still at school and obtained her licence in 1938. When the war began all civil flying was stopped and she thought her flying life was over until she heard a request on the radio for ladies who had a flying licence to join the Air Transport Auxiliary. She applied and was accepted immediately. She began her training at Hatfield and then at White Waltham, where she learnt the rudiments of flying various different kinds of aircraft as well as emergency training, meteorology and morse code. As with all ATA pilots, she began ferrying planes to airfields without the benefit of a radio and landing without any assistance. This led to a number of close calls. One day she ferried two Wellingtons, a Spitfire, a Defiant and a Swordfish. Towards the end of the war she also flew a Meteor.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Temporal Coverage
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1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
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Julie Williams
Air Transport Auxiliary
aircrew
Anson
B-25
Blenheim
Catalina
Defiant
Halifax
Hampden
Hudson
Hurricane
Lancaster
Meteor
Oxford
P-51
pilot
RAF Hatfield
Spitfire
Stirling
Swordfish
Tiger Moth
Typhoon
Walrus
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/262/3410/AGouldAG160708.2.mp3
73437c87dfac06a7e6749cfe5ed84141
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Title
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Gould, Allen
Allen G Gould
Allen Gould
A G Gould
A Gould
Description
An account of the resource
Twenty-seven items. Concerns Allen Geoffrey Gould (b. 1923, 1605203 Royal Air Force). He completed a tour of operations as a flight engineer with 620 Squadron and the Special Operations Executive. Collection consists of an oral history interview, his log book, flight engineer course notebooks, pilot's and engineers handling notes, mention in London Gazette, official documents and photographs.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Allen Geoffrey Gould and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-07-08
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.
Identifier
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Gould, AG
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Sgt. Allen G. Gould – 1605203, was born in 1923, after leaving school in Bournemouth at 13, he worked for the Danish Bacon Company until being called up in 1943. Choosing to join the RAF, initially wanting to be a Navigator, he ended up as a Flight Engineer, flying in the Short Stirling Mk. I, II, III and IV variants. Training at RAF St. Alban, then the Heavy Conversion Unit. Allen joined No. 620 Squadron, flying from various bases, RAF Chedburgh, RAF Leicester East and then RAF Fairford. The roles for this squadron were not just bombing missions but Minelaying, Supply drops, Glider Towing and Paratrooper drops. He took part in D-Day, dropping paratroopers from the 6th Airborne Division over Caen, France on the night of 5th June 1944, returning on the 6th towing a glider of heavy equipment. He was also a part of Market Garden, towing a glider on 17th September 1944 and returning on the 19th and 21st on supply drops. There were also numerous drops on behalf of Special Operations Executive (SOE) as well as Special Air Service (SAS) dropping supplies and paratroopers.
Andrew St.Denis
Allen Gould was born on 16 June 1923 in Bournemouth. He left school at fourteen and worked for the Danish Bacon company until he was called up. His father having spent four years in the trenches, in WW1, advised him against joining the Army, so he volunteered for the Royal Air Force.
He joined the RAF on in October 1942 and following basic training he attended the first-ever direct entry, Flight Engineers’ Course at RAF St Athan.
On completion of flight engineering training, he joined up with his crew on 1657 Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Stradishall, then moved with them onto 620 Squadron at RAF Chedburgh and later RAF Leicester East.
The squadron later relocated to RAF Fairford where they trained to tow gliders. He was billeted with 12 others in a Nissan hut, conveniently close to a trout stream. They often caught trout, away from the watchful eye of the bailiff and cooked them in a tin on the large coke stove that heated the hut. The illicit bounty was a most welcome supplement to the barely adequate daily rations they received.
Direct out of training with no aircraft experience he had to earn the trust of his crew who up until then had only come across experienced flight engineers. On only his second operational trip and flying with an inexperienced crew, they arrived late over Ludwigshafen, where they found themselves alone and under concentrated anti-aircraft fire. The aircraft was being peppered and was full of holes while the pilot was executing extreme manoeuvres trying to avoid further damage. A fuel tank was hit and Allen had to work hard to ensure the engines received sufficient fuel to keep running. At the same time he had to make sure there would be enough fuel remaining to get back to the south coast of England for an emergency landing. As the aircraft approached the runway, the airfield lights went out and the pilot announced he was going to do another circuit. Allen told him, bluntly, he couldn’t as he didn’t have enough fuel, so the pilot made a steep turn and conducted a blind landing with no fuel to spare. Allen bonded well with his crew and in their free time they would often all go out to the pub together.
Throughout his tour his squadron undertook a variety of roles, much of was it in support of the Special Operations Executive personnel, operating covertly in occupied Europe. They also trained to tow gliders and dropped parachuting troops on D Day.
Allen completed 32 operations as a flight engineer with 620 Squadron and he totalled over 460 flying hours on Stirlings. PGouldAG1610.2.jpg (1600×2310) (lincoln.ac.uk)
For his services to 620 Squadron, he was ‘Mentioned in Despatches’ for distinguished service. MGouldAG1605203-160708-13.2.pdf (lincoln.ac.uk)
Post war, he married his wife, Norma, who was training as a mechanic at St Athan when he met her. PGouldAG1601.2.jpg (1600×2412) (lincoln.ac.uk)
Allen was discharged in October 1946 having attained the rank of Warrant Officer. PGouldAG1604.1.jpg (1600×2330) (lincoln.ac.uk)
He returned to the Danish Bacon company where he worked for another 40 years.
Chriss Cann
October 1942: Volunteered for the RAF
January 1943 - July 1943: RAF St Athan, Flight Engineer Training
July 1943 - September 1943: RAF Stradishall, 1657 HCU, flying Stirling aircraft
September 1943 - December 1943: RAF Chedburgh, 620 Squadron, flying Stirling aircraft
January 1944 - March 1944: RAF Leicester East, 620 Squadron, flying Stirling aircraft
March 1944 - April 1945: RAF Fairford,620 Squadron, flying Stirling aircraft
8 October 1946: Released from service having attained the rank of Warrant Officer
Chris Cann
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the eighth of July two thousand and sixteen, we’re in Oxford talking to Allen Gould about his experiences flying Stirling’s in the war. Allen what are your first recollections of life with the family?
AG: Well I went to school at Winton and Moordown council boys school in Bournemouth, erm, left when I was fourteen, which irritated my father, ‘cos he hadn’t got the money to pay for me to go to grammar school, there were only two seats allocated to our school, after the erm, eleven plus, and, erm, everybody there failed except for the doctor’s son and the councillor’s son, who both got a grammar school seat, which I would have loved but there you are, because in those days that was the only way you could get to university, grammar school first and then go, [pause] and I left school at fourteen, got a job with the Danish Bacon Company, [pause] a shit house firm right from the start, I was there for, getting on for forty years, after the war I came back there and erm, and then I, my nerves got back to normal when I was, after I had been away from the air force for, ten or twelve years, and erm, I got another job, which I was quite pleased about but they wouldn’t let me take my pension with me which my new firm offered to do and treat it as though I had been there all that time, but they didn’t, they made me take the whole thing out, not the part they paid in, all I’d been paid in, they made me take that out as part of my last week’s wages there, ‘cos the income tax that week would frighten anybody, [laughs] and that was it, and I was there until I got called up, with erm, three other fellas, I was the only one that came back without any damage, two of ‘em got killed, one of them finished up with one leg about three inches shorter than the other, I was the only one that was alright when I came back, and then went on the road and did commercial travelling, up and down the country, and I did that with a new firm I joined, Patrick Grainger and Hutleys, nice firm based in Fordingbridge, [pause] so I was up at half past five in the morning going to work, driving up to Fordingbridge, and picking up one of my drivers along the way [pause]
CB: Ok, so, you started with the bacon company, how did you come to join the RAF?
AG: Well, I rather fancied it you know I mean when I was called up my father had done four years in the trenches and he said ‘no way are you going into the army, my cocker’ so I said ‘ Oh alright I’ll take your advice on that’, so I put my name down for the RAF, and when it came to a choice between this and that and I thought flying, oh wow, let’s have a go at that.So, er, I, finished up in Blackpool getting my uniform and one thing and another, and then erm, posted from there down to St Athans, on this first directory, first direct [emphasis], flight engineers course, because they were losing so many flight engineers who’d taken a long time, a really [emphasis] long time in training and they couldn’t afford it any longer. So we were pushed through, erm, six months and I was out on the squadron, at erm, Stradishall and then in the finish we wound up at Fairford and we were there for years, [pause] the only other aerodrome we flew from during that time was from Hurn, just outside Bournemouth
CB: So, you did your training at St Athan, what was the training that you did there?
AG: Direct entry flight engineer
CB: Yeh, but, what was involved in that?
AG: Well, really all it boiled down to was, looking at pictures of engines and exploring the airframes, and one thing and another, so when we were flying I was always on the move, bouncing up and down on me toes for up to twelve hours if we went down as far as Switzerland, ‘cos flight engineers don’t have a seat [pause]
CB: Ok, so on the training though there’s a lot of aspects of the aircraft?
AG: Yeh
CB: So, what aspects were you dealing with, you talked briefly about airframe, but what else were they focussing on?
AG: Oh, erm, the engines and erm, more particularly the amount of fuel they would be using and heights we were going to, how it objected on the fuel take up and er all that sort of thing
CB: So, on an aircraft the size of the four engine planes, how many tanks would there be on those planes?
AG: Err
CB: Fuel tanks
AG: Numbers two and four, and one, two and three in each wing
CB: So, what was the flight engineer’s job in that?
AG: Well. I had to control that, when the pilot was fiddling about with the controls, I was watching the dials and making sure that everything was as it should be, erm, we only got into real trouble on one flight, erm, when we were still sort of, an inexperienced crew, we had to, erm, join bombers going to Mannheim Ludwigshafen and we were bombing the Ludwigshafen, and being a sprog crew, ‘cos we got there ten minutes late all the others had gone through, so we were going over on our own and we were really getting bashed. Our pilot was doing mad dives and turns to get us out of it, the only thing that we lost was the number four tank in the starboard wing, so I had to run all the engines off that to make sure we used everything we possibly could, and, we did, just save enough to get back to an emergency aerodrome on the south coast, whose name I’ve forgotten to be honest, and we were just going into land and they turned all the lights off, and the pilot said ‘I’ll do another circuit’ and I said ‘ you can’t, you haven’t got enough fuel’, I’m afraid that became a funny word to them because every time he saw me in future he said ‘We can’t, we haven’t got enough fuel!’. So, he did a sweep to the left up on one wing and came straight back in and landed, lights or no lights, he was going in, and we did, I said to the bomb aimer, who was also the second pilot afterwards ‘how did you, er, cope with that ‘? He said ‘well’, he said ‘you know when the undercarriage is down you get a green light’ he said, ‘and if it’s not you get a red light’ So, he said ‘we were as bouncing down the runway and it was going red, green, red, green, red, green, red, green’, [laughs] I said, ‘Oh, thanks very much, cheered me up no end that has’
CB: But, it stayed down?
AG: Oh, yeh, we got down no bother, we just got enough. The pilot came out the following morning and said ‘Look, if we’ve got any fuel left, I’m gonna kick your arse all round this aerodrome’, so I dipped every tank, he and I walked across the wings and I dipped every tank, and it was just enough left in one of them to damp the end of the dipstick, so he shut up after that [laughs]
CB: So, it was reassuring that the gauges were accurate
AG: Well, I wondered if that was what finished up with that MiD of mine, ‘cos they must have made a note of it because we had to abandon the aircraft there and get a lift back to our aerodrome at Fairford, we just left them on this, at this other aerodrome, whose name I don’t remember unfortunately
CB: So, MiD is, mentioned in despatches?
AG: Yeh
CB: Right
AG: Yeh, so somebody must have made a note of it, I expect my pilot went back and said, ‘he was right you know, we didn’t have any fuel’ [laughs]
CB: Saved the crew, effectively
AG: Well, there you are, yeh, so, perhaps that’s what I got it for
CB: So, the reason I asked you about the training is, because clearly, it was focussed on, what in those days was state of the art aircraft, the first of the heavy bombers was the Stirling,
AG: Hmm
CB: but it was different from the other bombers, in that it had electrical circuits for so many things where others would use hydraulics
AG: Oh, yes
CB: In your basic training, what emphasis, was there, on hydraulics and electrics, in the training at St Athan?
AG: Well, skimming over it, as it was a direct entry course they didn’t waste a lot of time, I’ll tell you
CB: How did you come to do flight engineering, because you, had you, when you were working for the bacon company, had you been involved in technical matters then?
AG: No, no
CB: So, how did you come to be selected to train as a flight engineer?
AG: Well, I think they wanted when we were in Blackpool, they wanted flight engineers more than anything because they’d lost so many, and erm, I was automatically put onto that, you know, I’d erm, I think I put my name down to start with for navigation, but never got to that [pause]
CB: So, you finished the training after six months and how did you feel at the end of the training about your knowledge of engineering and aircraft?
AG: Well, I thought at the time that it wasn’t up to scratch, really, I mean, when I thought of the work that previous flight engineers had, had to do, different courses and out on a squadron for six months and then come back and do another course, I mean what we, what they went through to get us out was quick and easy, you know, and that sort of thing.
CB: So, the process for crewing up aircrew, was that at the operational training unit the crew got together, the flight engineer didn’t join until the heavy conversion unit?
AG: That’s right
CB: So, what was the crew like when you, how did you come to join an existing crew that had been on Wellingtons?
AG: Well, they were a bit iffy about having a direct entry flight engineer
CB: Were they?
AG: Because they were told I was one, and they’d never heard of anybody like that, you know, and they thought they were going to get somebody who had been out working on aircraft, on the flights, on the aerodromes, but they didn’t they got me and er, until this second trip, when I got away with this fuel business, after that we were, they relied on me, really, and er, were extremely friendly
CB: As a crew, what were the ranks, was the pilot always commissioned or was he only
AG: Oh yes
CB: Commissioned later?
AG: Yes, the pilot and the navigator and the rear gunner were all commissioned, [pause] and the wireless operator was a sergeant like me when we started flying together [pause]
CB: Ok, so you joined at the heavy conversion unit, where was that?
AG: Stradishall
CB: Right
AG: I do remember that name
CB: And how long where you at Stradishall?
AG: Oh, only about a week [pause], then we went up to Fairford and started ops
CB: Right
AG: Our first one was erm, minelaying, off erm, [unclear] Byrum [?] I think I got the name right, other side of Denmark, going down towards where the Germans were
CB: The far side of Denmark?
AG: Yeh
CB: The Swedish side?
AG: That’s right, yeh, yes, I remember coming back from there, we were flying along and you could see all the Swedish coast, all lit up, the pears, the piers and everything, all the lights
CB: Didn’t do you any good from a silhouette point of view, did it?
AG: No, it didn’t, no that’s true, yes, the only other place, that er, we were worried about the silhouette was erm, we did erm, three or four trips to Norway, supplying free Norwegians, who were up in the mountains, we had to look out for them and then drop stuff to them, funny enough, I see in the paper, that it was only last year, that they found some of the stuff that had been dropped for these people, that they never found and it was still in the snow, but when we were flying over there, we only went up there on a really full moon at night, and we could see our shadow going across the snow, well if anybody had been up, all they had to do was to look at the, moon and our shadow and they knew exactly where we were, and of course the only thing we had to worry about there, was the right up in the north of Denmark was this big German fighter unit, they used to cover the North Sea and out in the Atlantic and all over
CB: So, you were supplying the SOE, the Special Operations Executive in that case, weren’t you?
AG: Yeh, that’s right
CB: So, are you saying that the squadron, 620, had a variety of roles?
AG: Oh yes, we erm, D Day, we dropped parachutes on Caen bridge, and then we had to go back and come over again in the afternoon with gliders, with heavier equipment, down in the same place
CB: So, on gliders, where did you train for towing gliders?
AG: At Fairford
CB: What was the main activity at Fairford then?
AG: Well, the main activity there, was putting us out on raids or supply trips, which went on for years
CB: Rather than bombing you were supplying agents
AG: Yeh, oh yeh
CB: Right
AG: We did bombing raids as well, because I remember we, that, our troops on the ground had got this, surrounded this wood which had got the Germans in it, and we had to go over and bomb these German troops in this wood, and we had a plane going over there about every ten minutes so they wouldn’t get any rest or peace and we just had to keep on bombing this wood
CB: And the effect?
AG: Well, it seemed to work alright, but erm, [pause]
CB: And what about the bombing then, other bombing, what other tasks were there? So, you talked about mine laying
AG: Yeh
CB: Well, let’s just cover minelaying for a bit, mine laying was at a low level wasn’t it
AG: Oh yes
CB: What height were you doing the mine laying?
AG: About five hundred feet
CB: Right
AG: And erm, after that I think, we were mainly doing supplies, down over France, to anyone who needed it, and we did take some paratroops over there, Occasionally we had some odd characters, there was a bloke arrived there, put his parachute on, and he’d got a very smart suit on and a bowler hat, and he was, we were dropping him outside some village, where he had to get in by himself after he landed, and pretend to be the mayor, which is why he was so smartly dressed [laughs]
CB: This was after D Day, was it?
AG: Oh, yeh, yeh, well after, yeh, and then we were sent down, a little while after that, we were sent down to Italy, ‘cos I think they had some idea of us towing gliders from Italy with heavy equipment across to Greece, but it didn’t come to anything, we been there about four or five days, and the whole thing in Greece, came to a grinding halt, so they just said, no we don’t need you and we came back to England. That picture there, is erm, when we were in Italy, Pomigliano, I think it’s a little aerodrome, not far outside Naples, [pause]. Not that we were looking forward to trying to get off there with gliders, because they’ve got these great big heavy power lines right across the end of the runways, we couldn’t see how the hell we were going to get high enough to get the glider over those
CB: Well, it’s the wrong side
AG: Fortunately, we never had to try
CB: Right, it was the
AG: We were a bit worried about that [laughs]
CB: It was the wrong side of Italy to go to Greece anyway wasn’t it?
AG: Oh yeh, yeh
CB: But, the gliders were on this airfield as, well, were they?
AG: Well, no, we didn’t get as far as that
CB: Right
AG: They would have been coming from somewhere else
CB: Yeh
AG: But they stopped it in the end, said it wasn’t necessary, Greece was in a hell of a mess at the time anyway and our troops were in there, so they didn’t need the gliders, so, go on home, so we went, back to England
CB: What was the balance between supplying, agents, in activity and doing bombing raids?
AG: Very few bombing raids, it was mainly, either supply, or erm, taking people over there. I remember we had to go to an American aerodrome and pick up some American paratroops, I was very sorry for them, ‘cos the sergeant in charge said ‘have you got a gun’ I said ‘well yes, of course I’ve got my usual forty five issue’. He said ‘right, well if the first bloke refuses to jump shoot him, I shall be pushing from the back and you go out anyway’ and I thought well that’s a fine way, and I didn’t even unholster the gun ‘cos I had no intention of doing it, but erm, I’m afraid with some of these Americans I was very sorry for them, they were shit scared and badly trained, still
CB: In what way were they badly trained?
AG: Well, they’d never done a jump before, this is why he thought the bloke in front might stick his toes in and refuse to jump out, ‘cos in the Stirling, it was a big hole in the floor and you went out that way, you didn’t go out the door, ‘cos there was always the danger of being caught by the wing, by the tail, plane as it came by, so, the Stirling had a hole in the floor, and erm, these people hadn’t done any jumps at all
CB: How extraordinary
AG: Yeh well this is it, you know, they got in and clipped on
CB: They had a static line to clip on?
AG: Yeh, that’s right, yeh
CB: But, they all went?
AG: Oh yes, they all went out, no bother at all, but erm, I won’t going to shoot anybody anyway, I was very sorry for them
CB: Now, on the supply raids and when your’e dropping, trips, when your’e dropping material and people, this is largely low level is it?
AG: Oh yeh, yeh,
CB: What sort of height?
AC: Particularly with people because you had to drop them from a reasonable low height, it’s no good chucking a parachute out you know, at eighteen thousand or something like that, and hoping he’s gonna get down to where he should, because if there’s any wind blowing he would land miles away
CB: So, what height were they being dropped?
AG: Oh, between five and six hundred most of them I think, as far as I remember
CB: And most of this is in the dark, is it?
AG: Oh yes, yeh of course
CB: How did the navigator find the target for this, because you’re on your own when you do this?
AG: Oh yes, yes, oh yeh. Well, he was told, you know, where to go and miles from wherever, and er, we just had to find it, or he did
CB: Were there electronic devices used to help?
AG: No, no, we didn’t have anything like that, we had an, erm, sort of a semi radar thing, in the plane which was the start of that sort of thing, but erm
CB: Was that H2S or different?
AG: I have no idea
CB: Or other words, a mapping radar, was it?
AG: Yeh, well, it showed up, you know, things like mountains and things like that, but that was all, I mean it was fairly beginning things
CB: So, when did you start, flying with 620 Squadron?
AG: Erm, [pause], oh dear, [pause], well, it was after I’d done my six months at St Athans, so that would be
CB: So, when did you go to St Athan?
AG: Erm, so that would be erm, [pause] when I were called up, I went to Blackpool, so it would be, erm, [pause] beginning of forty-three, I suppose
CB: For six months?
AG: Yeh [pause], or was it forty-two for six months? and then on, [pause] difficult to remember because
CB: So, when in forty-one did you join, what time of year?
AG: Oh, in the September
CB: Ok, so then you went to Blackpool?
AG: When I was called up, yeh
CB: Yeh
AG: I developed scarlet fever, the week I was called up, so the doctor said I’d got to stay there, I was in bed, with a blanket over the door, which had been sprayed by my mother, to keep the germs in the bedroom [laughs] and then so when I got to Blackpool, I had to report sick with scarlet fever, and the bloke said, ‘how long have you had it’? and I told him, and he said ‘no, that’s alright, you can carry on’ [laughs.] Yes, I remember that, I was sitting there and the nurse came round and said ‘why have you come’ and I said ‘’cos, I’ve got scarlet fever’ and I could see these two blokes, either side, go like that [laughter]
CB: Amazing, [pause] so, how long were you at Blackpool?
AG: Erm, oh, must have been about, I was there quite a long time
CB: You did your square bashing there, did you?
AG: Yeh, must have been, what, three months, oh, we were not only square bashing, I was, out digging in some place where they were putting in, erm, assault courses for people to practice on, we were out digging that, while I was there, they didn’t waste us.
CB: So, that would take you to Christmas?
AG: Yeh
CB: So, you went from Blackpool to St Athan?
AG: Yeh, well, I couldn’t tell you when
CB: So, that sounds like the beginning of forty-two, we’ll check it out anyway
AG: Yeh
CB: And you were there six months, so you would have joined the squadron
AG: Yeh
CB: When?
AG: I went from there, straight to Stradishall and joined up with the crew and then we finished up in Fairford
CB: But, you were involved in operations in D Day?
AG: Oh yeh, yeh
CB: How many tours did you do?
AG: Only the one
CB: Right, and how many ops did you do?
AG: Oh, thirty-two, something like that, just over thirty, a fraction over thirty
CB: I’m going to stop just for a mo.
AG: Yeh, right
CB: We are just going to talk a little bit about the crew, we’ve talked earlier about, when Allen sorted out the fuel distribution arrangements and how they were short of fuel, and that got him accepted, but how did the crew gel?
AG: Oh, very well, erm, our pilot had a car, I don’t know where he got it from, but he had a car at Fairford, and erm, we used to go out at night, to one of the local pubs, all of us
CB: All seven of you?
AG: Yeh, oh yeh, I think we meshed very well actually
CB: Right, and how well equipped were the pubs for supplying thirsty air crew?
AG: Oh, very well, particularly the one we used to go to which had a lot of really nice-looking girls serving there, which always started my pilot, [laughs] away [laughs] if he got half the chance [laughs]
CB: Yeh, and did they ever run out of beer?
AG: No, never, never, yeh
CB: So, part of the crew was commissioned, and part of it was NCO?
AG: Yeh
CB: So, what were your quarters like as an NCO?
AG: What were my what?
CB: Quarters, where were you?
AG: Oh, I was just in a billet with, twelve other people
CB: Right, so, what was the billet, a Nissan hut?
AG: Yeh, a Nissan hut, yeh, and at Fairford, we were right down the bottom of the hill, by the stream, where we could go fishing for trout, very naughty, and we knew what time the bailiff used to come round, and make sure there was nobody fishing in this trout stream, and so, we always used to make sure we weren’t down there when he came by [laughs]. No, I used to like trout, done on a coke stove
CB: Is that the coke stove in the Nissan hut?
AG: Yeh, yeh, that’s all the heat we had in there, was just one of these big coke stoves
CB: So, what was the recipe then, how did you deal with it, so you got the trout?
AG: Oh, put it in a tin on the top, after gutting it and chopping it, putting it on, and just standing it on the stove until it was cooked, knowing what the food was like, you know, we was always trying to add to it [laughs], one way or the other
CB: Were you normally hungry or was the normal amount adequate?
AG: Well, it was for me but I don’t think it was for some of them, but er, no, I always, I always, seemed to get on fairly well. The only funny thing that happened down at that Nissan hut that we were in, eh, one of the blokes had gone into town on his bicycle, when he came back, he’d thrown the bicycle over the fence, not realising, that he’d thrown it into a sewerage pit, so he climbed up and jumped in after it he turned up at the back door of the hut covered in green muck, and we threw things at him until he went away and got in the shower with all his clothes on [laughs] we weren’t going to let him in [laughs] Yeh, I can see that bloke standing there now
CB: How many uniforms did you have? He had to dry it out, first did he?
AG: Er, well, you really had one and a spare which you kept, you kept one, you know, for parades and one thing and another, and a spare, and of course when I became a warrant officer, then I was never short of clothes and it was all extremely smart, and I had more spares than I could cope with
CB: At what stage did you become a warrant officer?
AG: Oh, in my third year, because you went up one rank every year, this is why we had flight lieutenant rear gunner, he’d gone [laughs] gradually up [laughs] anyway
CB: So, you, worked well as a crew?
AG: Oh, yeh, really well
CB: And, erm, how did the food come, if you were flying at night, before you
AG: Well, we had to eat before we went
CB: Right, so what was that
AG: If it was a night flight
CB: Ok, what did you get?
AG: Well, anything that was going, you know, I seem to remember a lot of sausages in those days, I suppose they were easy to come by and easy to make so, they were alright, yeh
CB: Did they keep pigs on the station?
AG: No, not that I ever saw
CB: And, when you landed after an op, what did you get for food?
AG: Eh, well roughly the same thing again, whatever was available, you know, but erm,
CB: Bacon and egg?
AG: Oh yes, yes, we always had that, the only thing that I remember about coming back late one night, before we’d taken off, I’d gone out to the aircraft with a bicycle and had a look round like, as I usually did, and er, when we landed I got on the bike and whizzed off back, and, in the meantime they’d put a barbed wire fence across the bloody path and I rode straight into that and went flying, pitch down, and I got barbed wire cuts all up one arm, and of course, we hadn’t been debriefed or anything, so in between take off and being debriefed, I’d been wounded, I was entitled to a wound stripe, and I thought I shall never have the cheek to wear it, so I didn’t, ‘cos it wasn’t my fault they’d put a barbed wire fence up there
CB: Now, you’ve raised an interesting point there, the wound stripe, how was that allocated and then shown on the uniform?
AG: Well, you had an upside down v, a little red v on the bottom of your left-hand sleeve, I mean I’ve seen
CB: On the wrist?
AG: I saw a bloke once, he’d got fifteen of these all up this arm, so I thought, he must be ruddy unlucky [laughs]
CB: So, this will come as a result of aerial combat of some kind, would it?
AG: Oh yeh, oh yeh
CB: So, how often were you hit and by what?
AG: Well, the only time we were hit, hit badly, was when we were so short of fuel, because they’d absolutely peppered the aircraft, it was full of holes all over, up in, down, and underneath, under the tanks in the wings and everywhere. It was our own fault because we’d arrived ten minutes too late, we blamed the navigator, the rest of the bomber crews had gone on by, so we were flying over Ludwigshafen on our own, we were getting pasted
CB: No fire?
AG: No, fortunately
CB: And er, so that’s flak, so what about fighter attack, how often did you have those?
AG: No, we were lucky, we never had one, ever, [emphasis] although our gunners were ready, but we were lucky to get away with it, particularly when we were doing those Norway trips, ‘cos we’d got no cover there at all, and everything was wide open, you could see our shadow moving across the snow, and this German fighter place up in the north of Denmark, was huge, God knows how many fighters they had there, but we were lucky, we got away with it every time we went to Norway we got away with it without seeing one. The only time we got shot at in Norway, going up the creek to Oslo, and we had to go over Oslo and up into the mountains, to drop this stuff, and in the creek was three islands, one there, one there and one there, and they all had German flak guns on, fortunately, we came in so low that we were leaving a wake up this creek, I looked out and I could see it
CB: On the water?
AG: On the water, and this island was firing at us and hitting the other island, which we thought was quite good [laughs] but when we got to the third one of course, we were just taking a chance, round and round and out quick and after that it was just up over Oslo and into the mountains [pause] interesting, it was only last year that it was in the paper that they found some of this stuff up there that had been dropped, and the people up there never found it
CB: Where they able to find out who had, which aircraft had dropped it?
AG: No, no, they couldn’t find out anything about it at all
CB: So, you said, earlier, that the, Stirling was grossly under-rated, and you thought it was a brilliant aeroplane, what was so special about the Stirling in your perception?
AG: Well, the fact that it was solid metal, you know, it would stand up to practically anything, and only get minor damage, and of course the engines were superb, far better than anything on any of the other aircraft
CB: So, what engines were on the Stirling?
AG: Oh, those Bristol Radials
CB: Hercules
AG: Yeh, I know that we started off with two, two banks of pots and finished up with three, and erm, they were really good, far better than these Merlin engines, ‘cos these would take punishment, the others wouldn’t
CB: Going back to your training, looking at your training manuals, books you filled in, erm, exercise books, when you were training, there, there’s a section on everything but, the significance of the Stirling was it was, it had so much electrics on it, so how well were you prepared at St Athan, for going onto an aircraft that had such a large amount of electrics?
AG: Oh, pretty well, I think I never had any trouble with any of it, the only thing I nearly did one night, was to cook the pigeon, they gave us, in case we came down in the North Sea, and we were sat in a dinghy, there you know, waiting to be rescued, they gave us a pigeon that we could put on out last position and send it off, and I put this pigeon on the floor and I didn’t realise until I got back, that I’d stood it up against this heating pipe that was coming through from one of the engines, I thought the bloody thing will be cooked, but it was perfectly alright, thank goodness [laughs]
CB: Just gone deaf
AG: Well, it must have been warm, which was more than the rest of us were on some of these flights
CB: Where was the warmest part on the aircraft?
AG: At the end of this pipe that was coming through from the inner starboard engine
CB: That was the heater for the fuselage, was it?
AG: Yeh, that’s right, yeh
CB: So, what were the things that were electric, driven electrically, on the Stirling?
AG: Well, practically everything, I mean, I’d got a bank of dials in front of me where I was, which were, erm, you know, gave you an indication of how much fuel was in each tank, ‘cos you had one for each tank, starboard and port, and that was all run by electrics, I mean, if you lost your electrics, you’d got no guides at all, that sort of thing, but we never did, fortunately
CB: And, were any of the flying controls electric?
AG: Ah, the only thing that I knew about, that was my job, was the undercarriage, which was electric, down and up, but, erm, if that had failed I could do that by hand take me about half an hour I should think [laughs] ‘cos it was really hard work, but er, that you could do
CB: And, what about the trimmer? so, in the flying controls, were the trimmers electric?
AG: Erm, yes, but that was done either by the co-pilot, the bomb aimer or the pilot, I never had anything to do with that
CB: You said earlier that you had to stand up all the time, but did you have a seat for take-off and landing?
AG: Well, I had to sit on the parachute
CB: Where?
AG: The type of the parachute was the cushion type, with the two, rings at the back, which you just clicked onto your harness, which was there at the front, you just clicked on, yeh that’s right, on the front, [pause] and as it was that sort of thick, and that big, we used to sit on it
CB: Now, thinking now, about the take-off and landing, as the engineer, to what extent, were you involved in helping with the take-off with the throttles?
AG: Not at all, the pilot did it all and I used to watch the dials and make sure that there was nothing I had to tell him
CB: So, were you sitting next to him at that point, or
AG: No, no I was
CB: You were standing?
AG: No, I was either standing, bouncing up and down on me toes or, sat on the parachute looking at all this, wall of dials in front of me
CB: And erm, with most flight engineer tasks, positions, er, logs had to be taken, so,
AG: Oh yeh
CB: What logging did you do and how often?
AG: Well, you had to do one for every flight
CB: But, during the flight, what did you have to record?
AG: Well, if anything went wrong or, we needed something that wasn’t there or whatever, you had to put it in the log, you know, but erm, I never seemed to have any trouble with that, we were lucky really, we really were lucky
CB: From what you have said, fuel management is a key matter, so, of the tanks, in what sequence did you, use for fuel, you’d have one for take-off and then how did you distribute the fuel?
AG: Well, there was two big tanks, number two and number four, in each wing, and you used those for take-off particularly if you were towing a glider because you used a lot of it, and er, once you were up and on a long, fairly longish flight, because we did, we had to go twelve hours sometimes, which took us nearly down to the Swiss border, to supply, Free French that were in the hills there, in the foothills, and erm, as I said, it was, by the time we got back to base again, we’d been out twelve hours
CB: And erm, in terms of the next range of tanks, how did you switch, in what sequence did you use the fuel?
[background noise]
AG: Well, you used the little ones, number one and number two
CB: Which are on the wing tips?
AG: Number one and number three, out, at the far end, you use those first, on both wings, and you tried to keep them going to the engines, you got [pause] like two engines there, and two engines there and you had to keep them going, from the same tanks, pretty well for the same length of time, so you’d know exactly what type of tank was going to be empty, you didn’t have to look at your dial until it went empty, I mean, you had to do it by time, and er, whatever revs were on the engines
CB: And, setting the revs on the engines, and the pitch of the screws, who dealt, did that?
AG: Oh, that was the pilot, did that
CB: Right
AG: And if you didn’t like what he was doing, you had to tell him and he had to alter it
CB: And to what extent was it necessary to synchronise the engines in flight?
AG: Er, not a lot really, we had an extremely good ground crew and normally we found that they’d adjust, perfectly, [pause] because we really relied on our ground crew a lot and we had four really good blokes
CB: And did they come out with you, in the evenings sometimes or did they?
AG: Oh yeh, yeh, oh yeh, we thought a lot of those fellas, in fact I gave one of them my bike, when I left, when I was posted away from the squadron, erm, I gave him my bicycle, which I was sad about, but, he deserved it
CB: So, you come to the end of your tour, and you did thirty, thirty-two operations, what did you do after that?
AG: Well, we only had one flight after that because the officer’s mess had run out of beer, we had to fly over to Northern Ireland and bring back a load of beer for them [laughs]
CB: Must have been an arduous trip!
AG: Oh yeh, [laughs] because we’d have liked to have gone on over there and done something, really naughty, because at that time the IRA were building bonfires in the shape of arrows, pointing, to where the aerodrome was
CB: Oh, for German bombers?
AG: That’s right, yeh, bastards [emphasis]
CB: And, how long had they been doing that for?
AG: Practically, since the war started
CB: And how were they dealt with?
AG: Well, they should have been bloody shot, but we never got around to it! It’s like that bloke McGuiness, I mean he’s in the Irish government now, he was the one that started that Bloody Sunday, he was the one on top with the rifle, firing at our troops what did they think, that we weren’t going to fire back? I don’t know, that bastard should have been shot, and you can write that down and put my name on it [laughs]
CB: So, the arrows bit is interesting, how long did that go on for?
AG: Oh, quite a long time during the war, [pause] yeh, swines
CB: And, what did the beer taste like when you got it back
AG: Oh, that weren’t for us, that was for the officer’s mess, we weren’t allowed to touch it
CB: Didn’t you sample it to make sure it was ok?
AG: No
CB: So, your last flight was keeping them topped up, then what did you do? So, you’ve left the squadron now
AG: Oh, well, I was erm, posted away then, and er, [pause] and finished up at a place called Burnham Beeches
CB: In Buckinghamshire?
AG: Yeh, and erm
CB: What happened there?
AG: Well, nothing really, I don’t think they knew what to do with us, I mean that was where I learnt how to play tennis, one of the blokes there, he’d been champion of Yorkshire for two or three years, and he gave me one of his racquets, and I’ve still got it, I’d still use it, if I played tennis, which I thought was very nice of him, and er, we went rowing on the river there and all sorts of things. As I said they didn’t know what to do with us, we were just keeping out the way
CB: So, we’re after Arnhem now aren’t we, so
AG: Oh yeh
CB: So, what sort of time are we talking about? In the autumn or are we later?
AG: Oh erm, [pause] now, I think I went there if I remember rightly, I went there in er, January, February somewhere like that, fairly early
CB: Forty-five
AG: At Burnham Beeches and we were erm, we’d taken over this big country house that was there, and erm, they just kept the top floor, to live in, and we had the offices all down below, and er, working in there
CB: Doing what?
AG: Well, I was sat in the office there, and it was a most peculiar effort, if they, had a man posted from Edinburgh to Glasgow, an RAF policeman, he had to come all the way down to us, be booked into my office and booked out again, and given travel warrants and away he went, most peculiar efforts, still there you are, you wondered who was running these things sometimes
CB: And then after, how long did that go on for?
AG: Oh, I think I was there for about erm, three or four months [background noise] and then I was posted to Leicester
CB: Leicester East? The airfield, Leicester East?
AG: Oh no, no, no, no, just somewhere in Leicester, erm, and erm, I was there for about a fortnight or so I think, and then I went back to Burnham Beeches and got discharged, and went to London and picked up my civvies
CB: Then what? So, you’re discharged, demobbed, what did you do then?
AG: Well, I went home and had a week off and then I went back to work for the Danish Bacon company, shit house firm
[background laughter]
CB: Would you like to explain why they were like that? What was it that was so upsetting about the Danish Bacon
AG: Well, because I’d
CB: Company
AG: Been here for nearly forty years, until I got another job and I wanted to take my pension and money, put it into this new firm and they were going to treat it as though I’d been there all the time, so I’d have had a really good pension when I did eventually retire, but they wouldn’t do it, they made me take all the money out and it was only what I’d paid in, nothing of theirs, and I had to take it out as my last week’s wages and the income tax was unbelievable, not a nice firm, fortunately, they went out of business after that
CB: Right, so
AG: It went broke
CB: When did you leave them?
AG: Ah, [pause] I’m scratching for the year, [pause] I can’t remember to be honest
CB: So, you left the RAF in forty-five
AG: Yeh
CB: How long did you stay with the Danish Bacon people?
AG: Er, oh another [pause] eight or nine years
CB: Then what?
AG: Then I got this offer of this new job
CB: At?
AG: Patrick Grainger and Hutley’s, at Fordingbridge
CB: What were you doing there?
AG: I was assistant manager and I was also travelling round, seeing some of their customers, and building up trade of course
CB: Ok, we’ll just have a break there, thank you
CB: So, you kept staying, kept with Patrick Grainger, who’d then been taken over by Danish Bacon until you retired after forty years. We are now going back to flying, so when you were flying Allen, as the engineer, you had to log various things because it was important to see how the plane was performing. What were you logging?
AG: Well, if you have a look at this, its erm, oil pressure, oil temperatures and cylinder temperatures
CB: Right, ok, and how often were you doing that? Did you have to do it at a particular time? Every hour?
AG: Yeh, well, this, if you look at the times down the left-hand side, its roughly about every fifteen minutes, I think
CB: Right
AG: But, I had another line, right the way across
CB: Yeh, so, when you got back, you, the aircraft lands, we didn’t get on to debrief, but, you’re the engineer, when you get out of the aircraft, who’s the first person you speak to, is that the Chiefy?
AG: Erm
CB: Your ground engineer?
AG: No, I wouldn’t see anybody until I got back into the debriefing hut
CB: Ok, so at debriefing, what would you be doing?
AG: Well, I had to hand my log in
CB: Right
AG: And erm,
CB: That you’d been completing in the flight?
AG: That’s right, yeh this one
CB: Yeh, ok, and then what, who was the person that looked at that?
AG: Well, they used to take them all away, and erm, if I remember rightly, it was the chap who was in charge of all the, erm, maintenance and all that stuff, he’d go through it, and any anomalies he’d then probably come, and ask you what happened then and [unclear]
CB: This would be the station engineering officer?
AG: Yeh
CB: Who would be dealing with all of that or one of his erm, people?
AG: Well, it was a bloke in charge of erm, all the ground crews
CB: Yeh, yeh
AG: He’d want to see that
CB: Now, would you then join the rest of the crew for the crew debriefing, what would happen?
AG: Oh yeh, yeh, we would all go and sit down together
CB: Where would that be and who would you see?
AG: Well, the CO would be there and a couple of his underlings and erm, they’d just go through the whole thing, right from the take off and erm, and talk to the pilot about what happened here and what happened there, and did he have any trouble, and went right through and made sure that we’d put either the bombs in the right place or erm, or supplied the people that were in the exact same spot that they were supposed to be in, because sometimes all you would get was one bloke flashing a morse letter on his torchP particularly if we were on one of those Norway trips, we used to go miles over the snow, and there would be some poor bugger right up in the mountains, with his torch, and then we would drop all these containers down there, so, what they did with them after that I don’t know, whether they towed them away or what
CB: So, the debrief, covers all the aspects of the flight?
AG: Yeh, oh yeh
CB: And, bearing in mind in many cases, your, you were a special duties squadron, so you were supplying SOE, to what extent were there SOE people there, during the debrief?
AG: Well, we assumed that, you know, there would be one or two officers there that we didn’t know where they come from, so it would have been them
CB: They were the air force officers?
AG: Yeh, it was either SOE or SAS
CB: Right
AG: Yeh
CB: What was the most memorable thing about your operational career, on operations?
AG: Oh, that one when we just got back with hardly any fuel, [laughs] the only thing that stands out in my mind
CB: Now, the aircraft had been peppered, pretty badly, why was it, it didn’t catch fire?
AG: Well, it was the way they were built, this is why we like the Stirling’s, there was nothing there to catch fire
CB: Did you have self-sealing fuel tanks?
AG: Well, up to a certain point but, that time we got caught with it, I mean, it had blown a hole about that big and of course that self-sealing didn’t work, over that size
CB: But the tank was empty anyway?
AG: Well, yeh, I ran all four engines on it, until I could see there was nothing left, and just went switching from one to another, then eking it out as well as I could, until we got back, right [hand clap] good
CB: Finally, where did you meet your wife?
AG: Ah, when I was at St Athans
CB: And what was she doing there?
AG: Well, she was doing this erm, mechanics training course, which she finished up doing, erm, I don’t think she was ever on, erm, an operating squadron, er, she was at this aerodrome down by Exeter, I went down there to see her once or twice, and erm, you know, that was it
CB: Was she on the flight line looking after the aircraft, or in the hangar?
AG: Oh, both, because erm, the only thing she ever moaned about it was the fact that they were working out in the rain, with no cover and erm, the only way they could get dry was to go in and stand with all their clothes on by this coke stove, get it red hot and stand there and hope their clothes dried, which is why she finished up with really bad arthritis in her legs, I reckon, because of that
CB: So, when did you meet her, oh you met her when you were at St Athan
AG: Yeh
CB: When did you marry?
AG: Oh, about er, about ten years later [pause] I can’t remember what year it was that we got married, no idea
CB: Sounds like about nineteen fifty-three?
AG: Hmm, probably, somewhere around there [background talking] yeh, one thing I should remember and I don’t
CB: Thank you very much
AG: Oh, it’s alright sir
CB: On the minelaying, you were talking about, so this is, the other side, having to fly the other side of Denmark
AG: Yeh
CB: How did that raid go, were you high up and then went down or, and how did you do the mining run
AG: Well, it was our first op that was, erm, well it was just a question of relying on the navigator, ‘cos I didn’t know where we were going, and erm, anyway, we had to come down really low, off this island I think it was called [unclear] Byrum [?] and er, drop these mines right across the erm, entrance to the harbour. If anything had come in there, they would have gone off, so, and then we came back, and flew up between the other side of Denmark and Sweden, and watched all Sweden being lit up, lights on the piers and all the way along the sea front, looked beautiful, we ain’t seen anything like that for years
CB: And then you were, we’ve got a picture here, of your, aircraft, on the flight line ready for take-off for Arnhem, so, could you talk us through that one?
AG: Well, erm
CB: What were you carrying?
AG: Well, the first day was alright, we were just carrying supplies, the only thing that buggered up Arnhem was the Americans, again, as usual. Erm, our troops took the first bridge, the Americans were supposed to take the second one, and we dropped our troops on the third one, and they’re the ones we were supplying, and erm, of course the Americans made a cock of it and couldn’t take theirs, which left our blokes on the third bridge sticking out on their own, and unfortunately, the intelligence was so bad, that nobody realised that, just a little way, away from there, there was, a big mass of Germans, who had taken back for a rest from the Russian front, and they had got their tanks and everything there, and our blokes on the third bridge didn’t stand a chance. They were gradually surrounded, erm, we went over there again and dropped more supplies, but the third day when we went over there, we didn’t realise but we were dropping to the Germans, and that we were sitting ducks at that height, fortunately, our pilot decided not to climb away and leave us vulnerable, he went down even further, and went in between the two milk factory chimneys and came out over the sea, clever bloke
CB: At what height were you dropping?
AG: Oh, about five hundred feet
CB: And how much stuff did you drop, it was in containers with parachutes, was it?
AG: No, it was all in, yeh, it was all in containers with parachutes, because we were, the first and second time actually dropping to our troops, it was the third time when we weren’t and didn’t realise it
CB: What was in the containers?
AG: Oh, small arms and food and supplies, and all that sort of thing
CB: Right, anything else? Good, thank you
AG: And we were erm, the planes were being loaded up, for supplies to the French, in some area, and er, we were walking out and one of the containers fell out the plane, and hit the ground, so we all went flat, so we thought knowing what was likely to be in them. Anyway, when the dust had settled and they hadn’t gone off, we walked over and had a look in this container, half of it was full of socks and the other half was full of durex, and I thought the French don’t need those [laughter] and they don’t use them anyway, [laughter] and I thought well, that’s a bloody fine thing, we are risking our necks taking over socks [emphasis] and anyway [laughter] that’s what wars all about I suppose
CB: They’d say that’s what they put in them before they chucked it
AG: Yeh, I’d forgotten, yeh, I’d forgotten about that, and I suddenly thought about this thing dropping down, and we all dived flat, because we reckoned it was going to blow up, but it didn’t, and we walked over to have a look, and that what was in it, socks and durex [laughs]
[Other] That’s the first time I’d heard Dad be angry about the Americans
AG: They were normally shit scared and badly trained
CB: The Americans?
AG: Yeh
CB: Right, erm, thank you.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AGouldAG160708
Title
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Interview with Allen Geoffrey Gould
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.
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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01:10:32 audio recording
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2016-07-08
Description
An account of the resource
Allen Gould grew up in Bournemouth and worked for the Danish Bacon company until volunteering for the Royal Air Force. He completed 32 operations as a flight engineer with 620 Squadron from RAF Fairford. Post war, he married his wife, who was training as a mechanic at St Athan when he met her. He returned to the Danish Bacon company and worked there for another forty years.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Norway
Wales
England--Gloucestershire
England--Suffolk
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Italy
Italy--Pomigliano d'Arco
Temporal Coverage
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1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
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Cathie Hewitt
Chris Cann
620 Squadron
aircrew
animal
bombing
flight engineer
mine laying
RAF Fairford
RAF St Athan
RAF Stradishall
Special Operations Executive
Stirling
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/279/3432/PJamesHGW1705.2.jpg
71d2ab07fe058905a10dc98b67cb30c5
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/279/3432/AJamesHGW170412.1.mp3
9d1d8c09fc266f63e0a189b1e0d8ad09
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
James, Harry George William
Harry George William James
Harry G W James
Harry James
H G W James
H James
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Harry George William James (b. 1923, 133759 Royal Air Force) and two photographs. Harry James served as a rear gunner with 166 Squadron at RAF Kirmington.
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
2017-04-12
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.
Identifier
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James, HGW
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 12th of April 2017 and I am in Newbury with Harold George William James who was a rear gunner and we’re going to talk about his life. What are your earliest memories, Harry?
HJ: My first memory is, I was born in a two bedroomed thatched cottage, at West Street, Burghclere, and my first memory is sitting on a step there when we moved about fifty yards further down West Street into a three bedroomed house. Now the people that moved out of the three bedroomed house, their names were Ball, Mr and Mrs Ball, and they, Mr Ball was a retired as a farm worker, my father was a farm worker and retired as a farm worker, and I was sitting on the steps at this house we were moving from to ‘cause I thought they was still living there, and my first memory is sitting on the step crying! And then moving on into the three bedroomed cottage, which incidentally at one time or another was a workhouse! [Laughter]. It dated back quite a long way. Yup, and then my next really clear memory is when I was five years old, I started school and I was dragged to school by my eldest sister. I was kicking her, sitting in the ditch, [laughter] that is my clear, clear memory and then of course, then of course it was schooling, then. My mother was born in Herefordshire and her father, funnily enough her father lived into his eighties, early eighties, my mother died at eighty nine. But I was a bad traveller, now, funnily enough, apart from flying, I’ve always been a bad traveller. I can travel quite comfortably in a car while I’m driving, but as, I haven’t held a licence now for twenty years. When I was seventy three I had a, something go wrong in my eye and it sort of threw a curtain up in front of me and I, retinue [sic] of the eye, and I decided then had I been driving and not walking, could have caused an accident, so those days – I don’t know what they do nowadays – but those days you renewed your licence every three years, so when the three years was up on me seventy third birthday, I haven’t held a licence since.
CB: So where did you go to school, Harry?
HJ: Hmm?
CB: Where did you go to school?
HJ: Where did I go to school? Primary, from five until eleven, Burghclere Infants School, [pause] eleven ‘till fourteen, Newbury Modern. That school’s not there now, it got bombed during the war. [Laughter] It was up, it was up by St John’s Road, or near St John’s Road, in Station Road actually, overlooking the railway.
CB: Oh right.
HJ: But it got bombed during the war. Sold it to the church, which is now St John’s Church, that was further up New Town Road, the old one. But I suppose, where’d I get to?
CB: You say left school at fourteen.
HJ: I left school at fourteen, yep. Now, getting away from that for a moment, there was a funny thing about when I was at school. When I was at school, eleven to fourteen, I sat next to a lad named Brookes, and he is still alive – he’s ninety two – his birthday is in June, he’ll be ninety three in June, and he lives, [laugh] I don’t know the exact number but I know where he lives, in that block!
CB: In the other block?
HJ: Downstairs.
CB: Is he really. Amazing.
HJ: But we’ve knocked into one another on and off for all our lives, but I’ve lived here for what, I think I’m in my twenty ninth year, you know – it was brand new when I come in. He’s lived there, from June ’89, I came, no, he’s lived there, I came here in May ’89, and he’s lived there about six months after me.
CB: Extraordinary, yes. Just in another block, nearby.
HJ: Another block, yeah. And he’s the only tenant there. We’re the two oldest tenants here [laughs]. Well I left school at fourteen and immediately moved to an uncle and aunt living in Hinckley, Leicestershire. My fourteenth birthday was of course on the 27th of December that year and I started work in the January, as a mate to a plumber. The idea was, if I was suitable, I would get an apprenticeship six months after, but that never worked out quite because the war turned up, or was a racing certainty, but the reason I didn’t get the apprenticeship, was I was on ten shillings week as a plumber’s mate, but I was called an improver after six months and I went on to eight pee an hour which was over, over two pounds a week [laughter] whereas I would have still been on ten shillings, plus the fact, plus the fact that if you were working away from home you never knew what time you could get back home! Actually when I was fifteen I appeared as a witness at Leicester Assizes, purely through work.
CB: Leicester Assizes?
HJ: Yeah. It, I worked for, my original employer was “Ewan H, Jones, 182 Coventry Road, Hinckley, Leicester for Dependability, Service and Satisfaction.” [Laugh] Well he was a comparatively young bloke in his middle twenties. He had a Diamond T wagon that was done out in red and gold and this is where the slogan came. But we, the plumber I was mate to, we were working at Chocolate Box, the Oadby Road, in Leicestershire, doing a bathroom conversion and er, we were taken there by the guv’nor in his car and then we were collected whatever time he had in the evening. This was on a Monday and it was really cold, it was January, and it was really cold, and we were still working, you just carried on work ‘till you were picked up and the woman we were doing the conversion for, she came upstairs and said, told us to pack up and come down by the fire. And that’s when there was a programme on the wireless “Monday Night at Eight O’clock” I think it was called, something like that. I know that, I was at Leicester Assizes, I was asked which came first, which came second and which came third on a programme. The bloke had a, the QC that was asking me, had a Radio Times in front of him, I hadn’t a clue which came, but the reason for this was on this particular Monday night we didn’t get picked up ‘till after eight o’clock and we then stopped at a place called the Red Cow on the way home and we didn’t get home ‘till ten o’clock, but the guv’nor had recently completed a job at Foldsworth Mill, in Leicestershire, about six miles out of Hinckley and there was some lovely timber there as didn’t belong to him and he set back that Monday night and picked the timber up. So he got accused of stealing the timber by the owner of the mill and he cross-sued the owner of the mill for defamation of character, so we had three days at Leicester Assizes on that and he finished up getting awarded five hundred pounds against the mill owner in the end, and had the timber as well, and that’s as true as I’m sat in this chair! [Laughter]
CB: No wonder he was successful.
HJ: So, then as I say, things, it was a racing certainty in ‘38 that we were going to war, it was a racing certainty, it was only a matter of, it was only a matter of time. So, as you well know war broke out in the September wasn’t it, 3rd of September ’39 wasn’t it, yeah, hmm. So, not long after my seventeenth birthday, well about the April after my seventeenth birthday, I knew I was going to have to sign up on the dotted line and I decided that a I didn’t want to carry a pack on me back, b I couldn’t swim so I didn’t want to go in the Navy. I saw an advert for gunners in Bomber Command so I took a day off work and went to the Recruiting Office which was then in the London Road, Reading and signed on the dotted line and then, then I got, a while after that, I think in the Oct, I got notification from recruitment that I had to go to Uxbridge for three days for medicals and educational purposes and that, and I was selected for aircrew duties there and eventually I joined the Air Force and got sent to South Africa for training. And then I became a gunner, and I always favoured the rear turret, I never flew in anything else bar the rear. I did thirty three trips for 166 Squadron off Kirmington in Lincolnshire. We had our ups and downs, we wrote off three aircraft, that was [indecipherable] and when I was screened after thirty three, you could be compelled to do two tours, one of thirty and one of twenty but I went into, when I, the screening period, you had six months screening definitely, I went into drogue towing at a place called Aberporth in South Wales. I could write a book about that, if I was capable of writing a book, oh dear, but that was a hilarious time [much laughter]. Oh dear. I came off like with a bit of ear trouble, and the, mind you by then I had the old Tate and Lyle on the sleeve [laughter].
CB: Warrant Officer you mean. Yes.
HJ: But, there was a, Aberporth was just a grass ‘drome. I believe it has a runway on it now, but the catering officer was a warrant officer and he’d been called back, he’d just retired when the war started, he’d been called back, they wanted, he, he was naturally first one out, and as I was a warrant officer, by then, I got told to do catering officer, [laughter] that was an hilarious time, I’d sit trying to get the books up to date in a [indecipherable] with a couple of dozen bottles of Guinness by the side of me. Once a month I would have two girls come up from [indecipherable] Swansea, and sort the bloody books out. Until the, all the unit transferred to Fairwood Common, I was the catering officer, what knew I do about catering [much laughter] was only [indecipherable]. It was hilarious. You could only get it in the Air Force.
CB: Yes, yes.
HJ: Yeah, but every Monday I used to get a, have to get the necessary paperwork and get a three ton harry, driven by a corporal WAAF, to take me to get bread for the week and then to have a request to get booze for the two messes, Roberts Brewery and Hancock’s Warehouse; [laugh] it was hilarious like, down there. I eventually got demobbed, again at Uxbridge, in October 1946, and then owing to the fact that you had to get a green card to get a job immediately after the war, and then into the fifties, I had a job lined up and they wouldn’t give me a green card for it. They said I had to take a six month course so I took a six month course and then became a plumber, a government course on plumbing, and I went to work for, and travel with, cor blimey, I’ve forgot the name of it [pause].
CB: Was it a big plumbing company, was it? He’s just looking up his notes.
HJ: Oh, I’ve forgotten the name.
CB: Well we’ll put it in in a bit. What were you doing for that company?
HJ: Hmm?
CB: What were you doing?
HJ: What was I doing?
CB: With this company?
HJ: As a plumber?
CB: Yes.
HJ: Just working on the tools, normal plumbing work, you know, lead work, and lead piping, and rolled joints, and then, then I got invited into the local government, to run the works section for water. In other words I was Water Foreman to start with, and I had so many men under me that did the mains and up to the stop cock, put in new connections, run new mains round housing estates and that sort of thing. Then I became, in 1960 I became the first Area Superintendent for the Thames Valley Water Board, at Newbury and took on first Lambourne, then Hungerford. I had, I had the Newbury area which included Thatcham and Bucklebury Common, and I worked at that for a number of years and then 1960, my wife was seriously ill, and before they could do, she had a heart operation before they could do open surgery, so she was operated on through the rib cage and she had a cut right round, a hundred and eighty stitches inside and a hundred and eighty outside! So I gave up, er I don’t know, about ’62 I suppose I come out of the public water supply and went in to, partly looking after me wife and partly doing some work, more or less self employed. And then, of all things, I got divorced. Twenty nine years ago this November [laughs]. So I’ve been here twenty nine years, I came here when I was sixty five, sixty five and about four months I think and I’ve been here ever since. And I was a very fortunate man as far as illness is concerned. I went virtually sixty years without an illness. Well I had one illness, in sixty years, I had flu once and believe you me, I’ve only ever had flu once in my life and it put me in bed for a fortnight with doctor the first three days the doctor came in twice a day.
CB: Amazing!
HJ: But, um, I haven’t worked since I’ve been here. Well, I say I haven’t worked, I did a bit part time work, you know, what you do. I am on income support by the way.
CB: Right.
HJ: But two to three years ago, my luck ran out as far as illness is concerned. I forget what, I was in hospital for two weeks about three years ago, I forget what that was about, but since then I’ve had three mini strokes, the last one was last July, that’s why I’m a bit on a, the, I can’t walk very well since the third one, it affected me knees and I, if I’m not careful, I get a bit of a [indecipherable]. I am not, I am not registered as alcoholic but I am registered as a very heavy drinker.
CB: What kind of lemonade do you like best? What type of lemonade do you like best?
HJ: Whisky! [Laugh]
CB: Oh, there’s a bottle down beside the chair. That’s nearly empty.
HJ: I’ve got another two! [Laugh]
CB: It’s always good to have a supply, isn’t it, yes.
HJ: Mind you, I don’t drink a bottle a day now, [chuckle] a litre will keep me going for three to four days!
CB: Right. Well you’ve got to have some, you’ve got to do something in your life, haven’t you. Shall we just take a break there for a moment, stop just for a moment. So after joining and medical at Uxbridge, what did you do?
HJ: When I was called up, forget the exact date of that now, but it would be in ’41, late ’41 I think, the first place I went to was flats in London that’d been taken over by the Air Force. Viceroy Court was where I was first at, that was Regent’s Park, and you walk from, across from Regent’s Park Canal up to the zoo and you fed at the zoo [laugh]. The Air Force took over the bottom part of the, it was the catering side of the zoo, but, as their kitchen, so you, if you wanted breakfast you had about half a mile to go: so you didn’t have breakfast. But and then I had a bit of eye trouble – lazy eye they called it those days – in the right eye, I think it was the right eye, and I had to have some eye training. This eye training was you’d look in to, you’d have two lenses to look in to and in one would be a cage and in the other a lion, you had to put the lion in the cage. And there was a girl sat opposite you looking at the, the, oh, anyway she’d take notes and once your eyes were back to normal then you, and then it was out to South Africa.
CB: Before you went to South Africa, you must have gone to Initial Training Wing.
HJ: Hmm?
CB: Before you went to South Africa, you went to an Initial Training Wing, where was that?
HJ: The initial training was six weeks at Viceroy Court.
CB: Oh.
HJ: That was, after that, being as you were going to be trained into aircrew, you went from AC2 to LAC, and I was only an AC2 for six weeks, I was then LAC until I passed out as a gunner.
CB: Where did you go?
HJ: To, it was known as Rhodesia those days, buggered if I know what it’s called now, but still, Southern Rhodesia, I was originally at a place called Hillside, which is just outside Bulawayo, and I actually trained at a place just outside Gwelo, which is half way to Salisbury, which is Zimbabwe now i’n it, or something like that named after the bloody [telephone ringing] ruins.
CB: So what training were you doing there, what training were you doing?
HJ: I was, originally I had to try and train as a pilot but I wasn’t, hmm, and then they wanted me to go as a navigator but I failed the, but I wouldn’t, I wanted to get back to England before the war ended, so I took a shorter course of training as a gunner and I became a rear gunner and back, back to this country and then you, in this country, when you come back to this country you had to go through further training and then OTU and all that.
CB: Where did you do your gunnery training?
HJ: In this country? Er, let’s see, when I came back to this country, first I went to Hixon, oh, then from Hixon, up to, to Seighford in Staffordshire [coughing] [pause].
CB: So you went to Hixon.
HJ: That was on Wimpeys.
CB: Yup. Where was the OTU?
HJ: Hmm?
CB: Where was the OTU?
HJ: What was?
CB: Where was the OTU? [Throat clearing]
HJ: OTU. [Pause] In Staffordshire, I know it was.
CB: Okay.
HJ: Partly, probably partly at Seighford. The, and then Heavy Conversion, two to four engines.
CB: Where was that?
HJ: Somewhere in that area, I don’t know. And then it was to 166 Squadron in Lincolnshire – oh the Heavy Conversion was somewhere in Lincolnshire too. Mm. I forget where that was. But er.
CB: On to Lancasters.
HJ: Hmm?
CB: On to Lancasters.
HJ: Oh, from the Wellingtons onto Lancasters. We did one papering trip on, dropping leaflets on Paris, in the old Wellington [coughing] [laugh]. Five of us went and four of us came back [cough], one got shot down, fortunately all the crew baled out, buggered if they weren’t back. They were picked up by the French Underground and took out through Spain and they were back in England in about six weeks.
CB: Were they really?
HJ: But as I say that was a, dropping leaflets on Paris.
CB: Crazy.
HJ: But I did drop a leaflet, [laugh] through the back of the turret. You know what a clear vision panel is, fuck all there [laugh] in the rear turret. When on point threes, you had two point threes on your right hand side, two point threes on your left hand side and then you had two more at your feet with your clear vision panel you could bale out, provided you remembered to open the door and get the parachute from behind you, you could have baled out.
CB: Because you weren’t wearing the parachute were you?
HJ: But, that’s where you had to dress up. Do you know what the normal dress was?
CB: So what were you wearing?
HJ: Hmm?
CB: So, what were you wearing – clothes – what clothes did you wear?
HJ: I was just going to tell you: on your feet you had silk, woollen socks and then flying boots. On your gloves you had silk woollen gauntlet, three gloves, and then you had silk vest and whatever you wanted put on in between and then your battle dress blouse and then you had a kapok suit, a waterproof suit and then your Mae West and then your parachute harness: and that was your dress. So you could sweat like hell or freeze like hell in the air [laugh]. But, ‘cause, almost always, from briefing you had quite a period before you actually, you went directly from briefing to your own aircraft but you waited at your aircraft until you got the signal to get on, get into the aircraft and then the signal to taxi out and you taxied out in, let’s see, most of the time I was on P, so O P, O P Q was three dispersal with their own ground crew doing the three kites. Well, you start off A B C, C, D, E and that, and that was P it was P – Peter those days, it’s er, I don’t think it’s that now, God knows what it is now, but it was O -Orange and that sort of thing.
CB: P – Papa, it’s now P-Papa.
HJ: But yeah, so as I say, that’s more or less.
CB: So when you went, you did thirty three ops, you did thirty three ops but you haven’t got your log books so, tell us about the ops you went on. The ops, you did thirty three, you did thirty three ops
HJ: I did thirty three, yup. The reason for the odd three was that, I was, funnily enough I flew mostly with colonials. When I was at 166 for instance, the skipper, the navigator and the bomb aimer were Canadians; the wireless op, Frank Perkins, was Australian; the mid upper gunner was Newfoundland, rear gunner was me of course, and then when we took on with Lancs, and we took on a flight engineer and he was English. So that was the seven of us. Three Canadians, one Newfoundland and one Australian and two English, I think that adds up to seven. Actually, mind you, all this time I was single, I didn’t get married until, well, after I was demobbed. But I shouldn’t ever have got married, but there again I wouldn’t have the family I have got now [laughs]. I’ve got one daughter, she’ll be seventy in December, I’ve got two grandsons, the youngest is forty, he was forty a week ago, the oldest is forty three I think, and then I’ve got three great grandsons and one great granddaughter, the granddaughter is the oldest at eleven. The eldest of the grandsons was eight last week, the second grandson, which is that one, he’ll be eight next month, and the youngest grandson is five. Great-grandsons I mean, great grandsons.
CB: Stopping just for a moment. So crewing up.
HJ: To get together as a crew [microphone thumps] you’re just a given number of each each trade in a crew were just thrown together and you walked round and round chatting, and you gradually made a crew, yeah. First and foremost you, first and foremost you, when you were walking around there could have been, for the sake of argument twenty pilots, now they would start making their crew, they’d pick navigator, you just kept walking round and chatting and gradually discovered you’re in a crew! But hmm, as I say, my skipper that I did most of the trips with, was a Canadian, Shorty Blake, he was a short-arsed bugger [laughter] when we were on Wimpeys he had to have blocks put on the pedals [laughter].
CB: On the rudder bar, he means, yes, blocks on the rudder bar.
HJ: He was a, when I first knew him he was a sergeant and we got on quite well, and then they decided that all pilots would have to be commissioned. So, when you were flying you used to get five days leave every six weeks, not necessarily in that order, you could go ten weeks, but you always [emphasis] got the, provided you lived of course, you always got the equivalent of five days every six weeks. Believe this or not but it’s absolutely true, when Shorty Blake was getting his commission, his wages automatically stopped until he actually was commissioned and then his commission dated back to when his wages were stopped, and we had five days leave coming up and we’d already agreed that he and I would go and have leave together and we were going to stop with his great aunt and his uncle at Wood Green, and he had, he had no money so I drew every penny I could get, and I finished up with ninety eight pounds something, for five days. After three days we were broke, [laugh] we were coming home from the West End, of London, when his uncle was going to work in the morning, having about four hours in bed, and that was supposed to be five days rent [laugh]. Mind you, you always worked it so you got a weekend in and made it seven. So he decides to go to Canadian Pay Accounts. We totalled up how much money we had between us, and we had enough for a pint of bitter, so I sat in the pub with a pint of beer [laughs] while he was at Canadian Pay Accounts, and he managed to draw a hundred pounds. We still had, still had a few days, three days of our leave. We got back to camp and we had about two or three buttons between us, we’d worked our way through nearly two hundreds pounds! Oh dear!
CB: Huge amount of money in those days!
HJ: Mind you, a lot of that went on women. [Laugh] It was bloody hilarious. What you’ve got to bear in mind is, you didn’t know how long you’d got – if I’d have known I was gonna live ‘till ninety three! [Laugh] I doubt it though. I remember on that particular leave I remember we picked up a couple of bloody girls one evening and we went home with them and they opened up a bloody shop and sub post office [laughs] we walked in the back, behind, and we’d only met them what, a couple or hours or so before or three hours before we could have hit ‘em over the head with a bloody [indecipherable] for all they knew!
CB: It was their shop was it? It was their shop?
HJ: Yes, well it was one of their shop, yes, one was, sub post, what they call a sub post office, yes, she opened it, but this bloody, yeah, you wouldn’t believe it really, we could, it was a, they were probably.
CB: What ages were they?
HJ: Twenty eight to thirty and we were down around twenty one! [Laughs]
CB: Tales of the unexpected!
HJ: But I say, you didn’t know whether you were going to be alive the following bloody week or not, so you didn’t kid. I was going to say you just didn’t care, but naturally you did care to a certain extent, but you took your enjoyment as and when you’d get it. Oh dear. It was crazy, life those days.
CB: Where did you meet the women? Where? Where did you meet them?
HJ: We used to go, it could have been anywhere, Baker Street or Oxford Street, or somewhere that. We spent the evenings -
CB: In pubs.
HJ: In pubs, yes, by and large. Well, it was blackout and all that, you know; there was no street lighting, if there was a lamp post on the pavement it was likely to walk into one, ‘cause it was full blackout, during the war. So, by and large if you wanted go to pictures, they turned out by about half nine, so from that on it was pub, but I’ve never, to be quite honest with you, I’ve, the last time I went to the pictures, my daughter was about seven years old and I took her to see “The Dambusters”, and my daughter in December will be seventy, [laugh] so I say about sixty three years ago! I’ve got a television in the corner, and the only reason I, don’t worry it doesn’t work. I had it converted, but I had so many worries running, so I just use it to put me fruit on! But I’ve never been one for watching telly and I haven’t got a wireless, but I have got books; I do quite a lot of reading. I enjoy reading, but I don’t do much now because I’ve got double vision, and when you’ve got double vision there’s no cure for it.
CB: No. Just stopping for a mo. Where did you go on the ops?
HJ: Well, first and foremost, the majority, the majority of bombing ops were to the Ruhr Valley [paper turning] – Happy Valley – that includes what, Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Cologne, is it Cologne? Yeah, I think, Bochum, those sort of places, but as far as we were concerned it was the Happy Valley, well depending where you were bombing there you could get fired at half hour in, and half hour out. In other words, a good hour [laugh]. Mind you, of course, anti-aircraft fire wasn’t particularly accurate. It’s fired visually, but the shell has to be set at a given height to go off, at a given height or else it’d explode back there, and to get the given heights which wasn’t all that accurate, particularly at night, because Bomber Command never flew in formation, they always streamed. You do, either do a three flight raid or a five flight raid. You, most of the time they always called it a thousand bomber raid on the BBC and that. But I’m not saying the very first one because they checked, the very first thousand bomber was probably a thousand bombers because they put everything they could get into the air on that one, but after that so-called thousand bomber raid was no more than about seven hundred, thereabouts. When you consider a two flight squadron could only put twenty aircraft into the air, so for a hundred aircraft you’d want five squadrons, for a thousand you’d want fifty and I’m bloody sure there wasn’t fifty in the RAF, but a three flight squadron you could put thirty into the air. 166 was a three flight squadron, A, B, and C. I was in B flight, which included three on our dispersals, O P Q, and we were P. I can still remember the names of most of the crew.
CB: Who were, who were they?
HJ: Skipper – Shorty Blake.
CB: Nav?
HJ: Do you know, do you know, I don’t think I ever called him anything other than Shorty. But the navigator, Canadian, Frank Fish. His father was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Canadian Army, doing this medical effort, you know, when putting masks on, that was his job in Canada, the navigator’s father.
CB: Gas masks.
HJ: But let’s see, I’ve got to the navigator. Frank Russell was the bomb aimer, Canadian. [Pause] Er, Frank Perkins, Australian, was wireless op. Johnny Cole was mid upper gunner – a Newfoundland. [Pause] No, the flight engineer, his surname was Stewart, for the life of me I can’t think of his first name now, but his surname was Stewart. And then of course there was me, in the tail turret. I think that’s seven, isn’t it.
CB: How often did you shoot at aircraft?
HJ: How often did you fly?
CB: How often did you use your guns?
HJ: Now what you’ve got to bear in mind is, a rear gunner’s job was not to shoot down enemy aircraft, it was to bring your own aircraft back home if humanly possible. One of the reasons for it is a Browning 303 would fire one thousand one hundred rounds a minute and you only had a thousand rounds to each gun. So you only had a, if you fired you had to be more or less certain that you’ll, there was no other way. Normally, you’d, when you were on Lancs, normally you would pick up a fighter and watch him. If he knew you were watching him, they rarely ever, they’d look for something bit easier. But almost always you’d, the fighter would be either on your starboard or port wing at approximately five hundred yards perhaps, and you, it was as safe as houses until he turned and looked at you and then went over and they’d skid behind you. But with the Lanc, as soon as he started to go into his firing position you automatically ordered the pilot to go into a corkscrew. Well it was originally a dive towards the aircraft. If the aircraft was on the starboard side the corkscrew was dive starboard, roll, dive port, roll, climb port, climb, you know starboard, climb port, roll, and climb and theoretically you’re more or less back on the course you set off on. [Pause] But once you ordered the pilot to corkscrew, he immediately threw the aircraft into the original dive, whether it was port or starboard, and then of course the pilot was in complete control. Up until that point - when you’d spotted a fighter - the gunner was more or less in control, the pilot obeyed whatever the pilot, gunner wanted him to do, but the second you said ‘Go!’ then he was in full control and naturally he was in control when he levelled off which theoretically on the old course and he’d consult the navigator and that was it, so it was an adjustment of course, navigator would give him alter course three or four degrees port or couple of degrees starboard and between then the gunner only, to all intents and purposes, the rear gunner’d gone to sleep, [chuckle] but he didn’t.
CB: Why did you always want to be a rear gunner? Why did you always want to be the rear gunner?
HJ: I never, ever had a fancy for the mid upper, I’ve only ever stood in the mid upper position when the kite’s been on the ground. I never, ever, the mid upper gunner was virtually surplus. ‘Cause as I say you never, well it would be once in a blue moon that you had somebody diving on you, ‘cause they prefer to be more or less on a level with you. But, it wasn’t a bad life.
CB: How often did the plane get damaged?
HJ: Ah, now, you were lucky not to pick up a hole or two each time you flew. Probably we, out of the thirty three, possibly about three with no damage at all. The second you landed and taxied to your dispersal, the second you were in dispersal and switched off, the ground crew were there and they would go over and if you didn’t have a hole or two in you they reckoned you’d only gone as far as the North Sea!
CB: Never been to the target.
HJ: And if you had quite a bit of damage they’d moan like hell ‘cause they had to repair it! But provided you treated your ground crew right, the ground crew were exceptional. I wouldn’t be at all surprised that if you got the back of the ground crew up, you didn’t last. I’m not saying they did, they, I’m not saying they did it deliberate but I’m convinced that there was more than one kite went down because they skimped on the maintenance and they’d do it deliberate if you were bloody minded to them. They’d do the maintenance, but they wouldn’t do it as thorough as they’d do it normal. But that’s something which is impossible to prove one way or the other. But it wouldn’t surprise me. But if you looked after ‘em, in other words when you got a bit of spare time, take them out for an evening out, all expenses paid by the crew. No more, if you did the complete tour, which was minimum of thirty from the first, you wouldn’t take them out more than about four times during the third, you know, three or four times, but providing you give them a good night out now and again, they’d look after you. But if, if you were a bit toffee-nosed with ‘em, whether they would be as thorough, I don’t think so. Of course you know the Air Force suffered more losses than any other, such as Army battalion or Navy.
CB: In relation to the numbers, yes.
HJ: Somewhere around about fifty odd thousand I think, aircrew were lost, every man a volunteer, aircrew rules, every man was always a volunteer: there was no conscription, but there was never any shortage.
CB: What about the morale of the crew? How was that?
HJ: Morale was, now morale was top class, there’s no doubt about that. Even when we became, when I was on 166, we became what was known as a crack squad, a crack crew and we did quite a lot of sea mining at Skattegat and Stettin Bay. Stettin Bay was a bloody long haul: ten hours thirty. But when you were on, only five crews used to go on the mining effort but by and large they would try and give you top cover. For instance, if you were mine laying, well if I say we were one of five on mine laying, you always took off half an hour before the main force. If you were going to do, if you were going to the Baltic, they put on a thousand bomber raid to Stettin, well, they called it, well it was called, as I told you, about seven hundred made up the so called thousand, but it was always announced as a thousand bomber raid by the BBC, but, but er, [sigh] only once did I ever know somebody that nerve broke, and the way they get treated, or the way he got treated, you wouldn’t do it. He was, because his nerve broke and he wouldn’t, wouldn’t fly again he was cashiered and drummed out of the service. If it, if it was a sergeant his tapes were taken off and just one stitch back and then gets dropped, and that was before the whole of the squadron. All of the squadron was paraded to see it. I only ever saw one. There was no excuse for that sort of thing, because it’s just human nature broke him, not everyone had the temperament to – you had to be miserable bloody fool like me, see.
CB: So that was in 166 was it? That was in 166. In 166, in your squadron. The LMF man was in your squadron was he? [Rumbling sounds]
HJ: Yup.
CB: And what was he? Just thinking.
HJ: I think he was a bomb aimer to be quite honest with you, he was in the front. Certainly he wasn’t the skipper and certainly it wasn’t the navigator, I think it was the bomb aimer. But by and large you only, you were only really close to the three, three crews that was on your dispersal. ‘Cause you were dispersed into woods and all sorts of things. It was nothing to have half, three quarter of a mile to walk to the mess. So by and large, you were only on nodding terms to quite a lot of the actual squadron, but to the three on dispersal, you were all good friends, ‘cause the next dispersal site might be half a mile from you. So you, you only stuck and once you finished you weren’t kept on the squadron, you were within forty eight hours you were moved to a dispersal or a permanent posting dispersal. I went drogue towing, down in Aberporth.
CB: Just going back to this experience of the man. What was the reaction of the squadron in the parade?
HJ: What was the?
CB: What was the reaction of the members of the squadron?
HJ: What was the reaction? [Pause] I’m really not, you only knew the reaction of more or less the ones that you were close to on dispersal. Course what you’ve got to bear in mind is, like when I was at 166 originally, there was, of the original crew, when it crewed, before any operation there was only two commissioned. That was, they were both Canadian, the bomb aimer and the navigator, the skipper was Canadian, he was only a sergeant, and then the rest of us were non-commissioned. [Tearing sound] But then they commissioned all pilots so we actually had three commissioned and four non-commissioned. There was talk at one time, which was silly really, that they would commission all aircrew. That never worked out, never, it wouldn’t have worked, I mean it would have put too many in the officers mess. Well by and large they would have had to enlarge the officers mess. If you were a three flight you would have a minimum of about three hundred and thirty crew members ‘cause you always had a couple of spare, but if we were all commissioned, with seven man crew, you take seven times, for the sake of argument, seven times thirty two. Plus there would be the ground officers. It worked the way it worked.
CB: What sort of damage did you see of other aircraft?
HJ: You could have, now, I’ll give you two incidences on the aircraft I flew. In one instance we had a starboard, whatever, engine taken out by a bomb, in the second instance we had a five hundred pound delay come into the cabin, from an aircraft above!
CB: Whereabouts? Where?
HJ: It came in behind the navigator, between the navigator and the mid upper, but all it needed -
CB: By the main spar.
HJ: Mind you, it was a five hour delay anyway, you could have, if the old propeller had wound out, but the propeller was on a spindle like that, and the little propeller and it didn’t come live until that was completely out. So all you did was you wind the bugger back in! [Laughs] There was hopes that [indecipherable]. But, er, no, we brought that bugger back, ground crew well. [Laugh] But when you were on sea mining, once the mines were on the aircraft they’d never take ‘em back off, they, the ground crew, wouldn’t have that. So if something wasn’t quite right where you were gonna mine, you could wait about two or three weeks to do a trip. But you usually dropped a mine from about eight thousand feet, check so as that the parachute opened immediately and it’d go down and as I say most of the mining we did was into the bloody Baltic, Stettin Bay. But course there, the, Stettin was only just inside the Baltic so the travelling was, wasn’t like the Atlantic or something like that, it was comparatively narrow, perhaps no more than, well most of the mining was done probably no more than three four hundred feet. But the mines that were dropped on parachute, the first ship over activated them over, the second ship over – bang! [Laughs] That was a bit dodgy, the ship [indecipherable]. ‘Cause if they were in, following one another, sees the first ship goes in no trouble at all, everything’s all right, the second one goes bang!
CB: These were acoustic mines, yeah.
HJ: But on a bombing raid we always carried a four thousand pounder, and mostly [emphasis] all the rest was incendiary, four pound incendiary, incendiary containers and they would, the incendiary containers were rigged so that they’d open about a thousand foot up and scatter so that they covered a, and then you had the, but from a bombing point of view, the, when you had markers put down, they were TIs, either red, green or various coloured.
CB: Target Indicators.
HJ: And the Master Bomber or his deputy or Master Bomber on the second would, you’d pick him up on the radio when you were nearing there and bomb the reds and yellows or bomb the yellows or he’d tell you what colour to bomb. But the object of bombing was not to bomb a particular place, but do as much damage as could be.
CB: To the whole area.
HJ: Yeah. In other words if you could blow the whole of the town up while you’re there, various bombs [indecipherable]. It was, but of course poor old Bomber Harris, he, course Bomber Command got blamed for everything immediately after the war and it’s only comparatively recent that they’ve come out of the dog house. It’s only comparatively recent that they’ve built the Bomber’s Memorial, Green Park I think it is.
CB: Yes. You’ve got your Bomber Clasp, haven’t you, you’ve got your Clasp. You’ve got that.
HJ: When that came. Yeah. I’ve got a Clasp. The Clasp is, where the medals are, it’s on the right one up there.
CB: So your crew was a mixture of commissioned and non-commissioned.
HJ: Well, all, all went together, not a problem, no problem. To be quite honest with you, towards the end, the Australian wireless op, Frank Perkins, he bought a clapped out bloody car! Mind you, that was run on Air Force petrol [laugh]. But they could trace that, ‘cause the, it was the colour, but it was a clapped out old car going on a hundred octane.
CB: So that blew the engine.
HJ: So prior to that, we could go a bit further afield but aircrew had to walk, ground crew had bicycles! [Laugh] Aircrew weren’t trusted with a bicycle [indecipherable] [laugh]. That’s the, the Clasp.
CB: The campaign medal, yes.
HJ: But no, aircrew weren’t, we had a sergeant who was in charge of the ground crew for the three aircraft. He used to go out on the tiddly most nights. He used to ride a bike out and ride the bike back and where he come off the bike he spent the night, the rest of the night, and it was nothing to see him coming cycling in about eight o’clock in the morning. [Laugh] He come off, he come off where he was, bit of a strong thing there coming up, but they had Special Police as much as ordinary Police Forces and this was, the Special in that particular area was a small bloke, and he, partly deformed, he come across this ground crew sergeant passed out in the middle of the road and he told him after, he could only roll him onto the side of the road. He said if he could have carried him he would have carried him to the Police Station! If he could’ve got him to ride, brought him around and but he said for safety’s sake he rolled him to the kerb, well to the grass verge.
CB: Now there were always a lot of WAAFs on the airfield.
HJ: Hmm?
CB: There were always a lot of WAAFs on the airfield. How did you liaise with them?
HJ: Now, we had a, [pause] the, as far as squadron life was concerned, the WAAFs you really came into contact with was in the Parachute Section and they had the job of packing chutes. Mind you, at least once during the tour you had to pull your parachute and pack it yourself, but I’ve never seen a man that didn’t pull it twice after they’d packed their own chute, pull the bugger [indecipherable] they didn’t trust their own packing, that’s for sure! I know I never did! But it worked where they had these little sandbags, you know, they fetch ‘em out and hauled them over but when you consider how much silk there is, well they weren’t a hundred percent silk, they were only a part silk, you know, a mixture of cotton and silk I suppose, but when you consider how much there was and it finished up as no more than what. But when I was at Aberporth, that’s when you really came into contact with the WAAFs. Now in the sergeant’s Mess at Aberporth there was a particular WAAF girl, cook, she was about, no more than twenty, I know I took her out once or twice, she had the biggest breasts I’ve ever seen – they were colossal! Whoar! She had, you know these white foldover doings cooks had, she’d have nothing else on and every now and again when she was bending down, one or the other of these colossal tits would pop out. [Laugh] I stood behind her time to tuck it back in! [Laugh]
CB: So not only did you get two black eyes but you couldn’t hear anything either!
HJ: Oh gawd, you know she loved this [indecipherable]. Mind you, [pause] I must admit that to my certain knowledge, I put at least one WAAF into the family way, because the son by me has seen both my daughter and my late wife, but I was always out.
CB: Where did you meet your wife? Where did you meet your wife?
HJ: Where did I?
CB: Where did you meet your wife?
HJ: One I got pregnant in Aberporth, she was a corporal, Joyce Humphries her name was, she lived at Ystradygnlais, six miles out of Swansea. She was at Aberporth and she drove the Monday delivery wagon that I used when I joined in the catering office, I’d take to get the bread and get the booze, so we’d spend more or less all day Monday together, either in the summer sat out on the hills or on the way back having a swig out of a, out of a glass of stout. Wife.
CB: Where did you meet her, your wife?
HJ: Probably, in Newbury, yes. Got tired, I got tired running I think, just, I’d known her quite some time, on and off, and I suppose after, I suppose really speaking, I eventually got her pregnant and decided to make an honest woman of her. Hmm, yes. My daughter was born in December and we were married in June. [Laugh] But in 1960 she had her operation, but had this valve put in her heart and she lived another forty years after that. She died, I think she’s been dead somewhere in the region of sixteen years. Mind you, we divorced twenty nine years ago this November. I don’t know why, I don’t know why she divorced me, probably get me money, cost me a fair bit.
CB: After the assessment.
HJ: If the war had continued, I would almost certainly have gone back for a second tour. You could be forced on to your second tour by them just calling you in, from whatever you were doing. For instance, when your tour was finished, I went to, oh, near Aviemore, in Scotland, yes, near Nairn I think, and from there you chose what you wanted to do, on what was available. So they, If you wanted to go into office work, you could go and if office work was available and you were suitable for it then, but I decided to go on to drogue towing and I got posted, originally for a short time, to Valley and I was only at Valley for no more than three weeks, and from there I went to a little place also on Anglesey, called Bodorgan I think it was. And from Bodorgan I went, I was only at Bodorgan about a month and then I went direct to Aberporth, and I was at Aberporth to within a couple of months of getting demobbed. From Aberporth I went to somewhere in Worcestershire. I got demobbed from, I got demobbed at Uxbridge but I went from this place in Worcestershire to Uxbridge, to get demobbed, that’s when me number came up. I was on a, aircrew were on special release, they were on G Reserve, not paid Reserve. But I was on G Reserve, possible that, if necessary they could call you up, but if, if a war had broken out, serious war broke out, anything up to perhaps ten years after I was demobbed, they could call me up on this G Reserve without me having to, without waiting for the number to come up.
CB: Okay. When you got to Aberporth –
HJ: Well, now it was a lazy life: you didn’t start ‘till nine in the morning. You just go to flight and by half past nine, ten o’clock you knew whether the, either the Army or the Navy wanted a drogue towing. Nine times out of ten they didn’t so you had the rest of the day off. You just caught bus and go into town [laughs].
CB: But what was your job?
HJ: What was? [Bumping on microphone]
CB: You were in a Martinet there?
HJ: Was a Naval aircraft, single engine –
CB: It was a Martinet.
HJ: Martinet, that’s it. Your position was immediately behind the pilot and you had a square out the bottom and you just threw the drogue out through the square and it had sufficient cable on it to clear the tail by a few feet before it, and it drove itself, probably about ten foot long, when it was fully adrift, and then you just let out a thousand foot of cable, and then you had a little propeller outside to bring it back in and you wound the propeller down into wind so it, and that would bring it back in and you’d wait ‘till the connection and that, it had a cord connection from the cable to the drogue cable, and then you cut that with a knife when you flew over where they, skipper’d take it down to about forty, fifty feet perhaps bit lower, and then you’d cut it right in front of the arrow doors and it dropped on the apron.
CB: Of the airfield.
HJ: But the only part that was damaged was this bit of cord, and of course that’s no problem at all, probably no more than six inches when it was, of cord, and that’s no problem, not that way, but it was sort of doubled for when you would, pull it. But oh, at Aberporth there was an Army camp - Artillery I suppose - and also a private, not private, a government development attached to the Army camp, and I expect you’ve heard of this, they were doing a nose instantaneous job to go with Blue Streak, I expect you’ve heard about Blue Streak.
CB: The rocket.
HJ: Well I actually dropped fifty of these nose instantaneous efforts; they were about this high.
CB: Couple of feet.
HJ: ‘Bout so big round.
CB: Four inches.
HJ: The skipper’d line the wing of the aircraft up against the headland, put his thumb up and I had let it go through the [indecipherable] these scientists were watching, [laugh] taking photos of it and nine times out of ten the bugger went straight into the sea [laugh] and didn’t explode. And we did fifty of those, about twenty five drops, ten, but you should have seen it. They were brought by armoured personnel and they jumped out of the back of the wagon and stood, rifles on guard, just handed them over to me and we just sort of sort of walk off, no guard at all! It was, but it never come of anything, Blue Streak, I don’t think.
CB: No.
HJ: Instantaneous. The pressure built up on the nose as it fell, that was the idea of it. Pressure building on the nose.
CB: And explode above the water.
HJ: And the pressure, nine times out of ten they went straight in. [Indecipherable] probably eight out of ten the people were [indecipherable]. They could, they could explode almost as soon as you dropped on the water. And you were dropping them off, I, probably from six thousand feet.
CB: Oh, as high as that!
HJ: Yes, ‘cause theoretically you’re not allowed to fly under six thousand feet, so could have been, didn’t matter the height you dropped ‘em from, could have been eight thousand, ‘cause as I say they were only supposed to go off hundred feet above the water.
CB: Right. In 166 three aircraft were written off. What was that?
HJ: One was written off, let’s see, one was written off because we lost a bit of the wing, and the wing was, a bomb caught the outer side of the wing, took about six foot off and put the wing as a whole out of alignment, so that became a write off. Then there was excessive damage between the rear turret and mid upper turret on another one, bloody great hole in the side of the kite, so that caused, well, as far as we were concerned it was written off, whether they got round to repairing it, was a major repair based on that, but as far as the squadron was concerned it was written off. And the other was a tailplane, aileron damage. That was, it was written off as far as the squadron was concerned, it could have been taken but a lot of these, a lot of the Lancs were made in Canada, women used to fly them, via Iceland, no, yeah, Iceland wasn’t it, and they’d refuel there and fly them into wherever they were needed in England. Whats’er name lost her life on that, didn’t she. Before the war she did long distance.
CB: Amy Johnson.
HJ: Amy somebody.
CB: Johnson.
HJ: Johnson. She lost her life and they never did find what happened to her.
CB: No.
HJ: I don’t know whether it was a Lanc, could have been anything she was flying it from north to south.
CB: What caused this aileron damage? What caused the aileron damage?
HJ: Usually aircraft fire, anti-aircraft usually ground fire.
CB: Flak?
HJ: Yeah, but if it caused enough damage that it couldn’t be repaired by, immediately by the ground crew, it was virtually, as far as the squadron was concerned it was taken out of action and transported wherever they wanted it, going for scrap, transported for scrap.
CB: Okay, what was the most memorable thing about being in the Air Force in the war?
HJ: What a nice lazy life it was, I suppose! It was a lazy life, I tell you that. You could only commit one crime, well, oh, I don’t think you’d get away with murder, but I think you’d have got away with almost anything else. The major crime was if you refused to fly and then of course you got court martialled and out of the service. But [pause] I think, I think really, the camaraderie of the crew. You see every man in the crew trusted all the others. There was no, you were all convinced each crew member could do its own job. You didn’t, certainly was no criticism of anything, you were just, just admired one another I suppose, as whatever their job was. God help, God help anybody that said, said that your, for the sake of argument, wireless operator was no good, ‘cause as far as you were concerned he were the best, I say wireless operator but we had a lazy bugger! He’d often go to sleep. [laugh] He kept, course as far as the wireless operator was concerned, he was supposed to take both, two broadcasts an hour, Group broadcast and some other broadcast, but this Australian we had, Frank Perkins, he’d put his feet up and go to sleep and crib off another fellow after landing, [laughter] you could see him writing up his log at the debriefing!
CB: How many, did you keep in touch with your crew after the end?
HJ: By and large you, I only kept in touch with the wireless op. By and large, once you’d finished, you preferred to let it go – you knew you wouldn’t be seeing them again. Oh God. As I say, I was always with colonials, I mean except, as I say, when we took on a flight engineer, he was the only other Englishman. So you knew full well, by and large, that you wouldn’t see them again, so there was no point really, plus the fact you didn’t know how long the war was going to go on, what you’d be doing. But whereas English could be forced to a second tour, a second tour was always a minimum of twenty, the first was a minimum of thirty. And as I say, I got three extra in, simply because on three occasions I was there and it was required. The reason I got spares often was because we was sea mining and quite often, as I say, anything up to three weeks were standing, I think three weeks was the longest we went between actually having the mines put on the aircraft and going on a mining job, but it, it wasn’t really. But as I say, you had the utmost of respect for all your crew members and God help anybody who criticised them. But oh, Frank Fish, who was the navigator, never ever flew without being airsick. He always carried a little bucket with him, and he was always airsick.
CB: Do you know why?
HJ: Hmm?
CB: Do you know why? Was it nerves?
HJ: He wasn’t continuously sick, you know, he just, but almost always, even if you only went cross country, he was just as likely to be sick, but once he’d been sick he was all right again. As I say he had his little bucket.
CB: Amazing.
HJ: Which he kept down by the side of him.
CB: The HCU was in Lincolnshire. The HCU.
HJ: The heavy conversion, that was done in Lincolnshire, just prior to joining the squadron.
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Identifier
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AJamesHGW170412
Title
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Interview with Harry James
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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02:09:38 audio recording
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2017-04-12
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
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Harry James grew up in Berkshire and after school began training as a plumber. He joined the RAF and carried out thirty three operations as a rear gunner with 166 squadron. He discusses his crew, who were of different nationalities, of how the majority of their bombing operations were to the Ruhr Valley and his duties as a rear gunner. He tells of his family, early life, his many escapades at various places in the RAF, as well as his crew and the relationship between aircrew and ground crew, and the WAAFs he worked with during the war. After the war Harry returned to plumbing in Berkshire.
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
Poland
Zimbabwe
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
Poland--Szczecin
Zimbabwe--Gweru
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1941
Contributor
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Anne-Marie Watson
Carolyn Emery
166 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
dispersal
ground crew
ground personnel
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
love and romance
Martinet
RAF Kirmington
RAF Uxbridge
training
Wellington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/3439/AJonesPWA171207.2.mp3
b1161008fdc7ccbc2058d73a7d2e684d
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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Jones, Thomas John
Tom Jones
T Jones
Description
An account of the resource
62 items. An oral history interview with Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs, correspondence, service documents, aircraft recognition manuals, medals and a memoir. He flew operations as a flight engineer on 622 Squadron Stirling and 7 Squadron on Lancaster. <br /><br />The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2566">Album</a> of 129 types of aircraft. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Jones and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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
2014-12-04
2017-12-07
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.
Identifier
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Jones, PW
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 7th of December 2017 and we’re in Lincoln talking with Peter Jones about the career and life of his father Thomas John Jones DFC. I think just first of all it’s interesting to reflect that in this case Peter didn’t elicit much information from his father, which is exactly the same with my father, and also Jan’s, in that they might have touched on trivialities, but they didn’t talk about what actually happened.
PJ: That’s very true.
CB: So Peter, how does that fit with your feeling of the background?
PJ: [Sigh] I feel very sad, that he, that he didn’t talk to me about it, about what he actually did and had to put up with, and when I did find out, I was immensely proud.
CB: I can imagine.
PJ: But also, as I only found out twenty four hours after he had died, it was an absolute maelstrom of emotions, of reading the memoir that he’d written fifty years after the war, secretly late at night, when my mother had gone to bed - I wasn’t living there at the time - and he’d put all his memories in a WH Smith notebook.
CB: Had he, really.
PJ: And when he’d finished them, he just hid them with all his personal papers I guess knowing I would eventually find it, after his death.
CB: What do you think prompted him to write it? What age was he when he wrote it?
PJ: He was in his eighties when he wrote that; he died in 2004. I don’t know, was he trying to exorcise his demons? Was he conscious that he hadn’t been able to tell me what he’d done and how he actually felt about what he’d done? I really don’t know.
CB: He was awarded the DFC.
PJ: He was.
CB: So clearly he’d had some really horrendous experiences which were rewarded. Do you think that it, to some extent, he felt he didn’t want to look as though he was in any way building on the background?
PJ: Yes, I think he did. He was a very modest man; he was a very modest, self-effacing gentleman. He was a lovely dad.
CB: But never got on to anything to do with wartime.
PJ: Only the very light-hearted stuff. [Microphone noise] He would talk about that, I mean he relates various stories of some of the capers the crew got up to, but when it went to operational, no. No details.
CB: What were the most dramatic capers they got up to would you say?
PJ: Um, I’ve got a lovely photograph taken at Mildenhall when he was flying with 622 Squadron and it shows my dad and three or four of the other crewmen dangling one of their colleagues out of a first floor window. By his legs. [Much laughter] I think that would probably be one of many stunts like that in the day, you know, it, obviously it would be quite a safety valve, and they would thrive on the black humour, but it was a lovely photograph.
CB: This is out of context in the sequence, but I think it’s worth just talking about – how do you think they dealt with the stress?
PJ: Certainly black humour. I think everyone deals with stress differently. So, I don’t know. My father was a smoker. When you, I’ve noticed that a lot, so many photographs of airmen back in the day, and airwomen, of course, they’re nearly all smoking. I think they enjoyed going down the pub as well.
CB: I mean we’ll get on to your father in a minute, but you, as the archivist here, are covering a huge range of different situations and they, there are two things that come out of that in a way, one is the release from the stress, and the other is, we’ll touch on later, is the LMF, the lacking moral fibre bit, which comes up but is largely buried, but the release of the stress is a broad one and in practical terms, what was the main safety valve would you say?
PJ: High jinks. I think that it was the high jinks. We at the archive have got so many photographs of, wonderful photographs of crew, both aircrew, ground crew, WAAFs, having a really good time, it was an adventure. They were young people. And when you look at the photographs of them having a good time, and then just look at the, look at the face, and then look at the rank, they really don’t go together. You’ve got a very, very young man or woman, with a very senior rank and again that must have, must have really weighed heavy on their shoulders.
CB: There was a notion, there is still I suppose a notion, that what the war did to people in the RAF, but particularly Bomber Command, was make them grow up really quickly. Do you reckon you see that in some of the pictures that have been submitted?
PJ: Definitely. Yeah. Certainly some of the more senior officers, you can see it in their faces: they’ve aged. They’ve aged. I mean my father when he, in 1944, he was twenty three. He looks older. And I think they did go through the mill, and I think it did age them, certainly mentally and probably physically as well with some, particularly the rear gunners who had to endure such cold. It must have been pretty dreadful.
CB: And constant flight, fright.
PJ: Yes. Of which they never spoke.
CB: No. I mean my CO in the Reserve had a mental breakdown after being chased by a Ju88 and then shot down, and so the stress there was huge. But what would you put down to the fact that almost, very largely, people in all of the Forces failed to talk about their experiences in the war? What do you think was the background of that?
PJ: We’re looking at a different decade, aren’t we. It was the stiff upper lip decade. It was the decade where men feared to shed tears, other than in private. I think that’s got a lot to do with it. I don’t, would they share it with the rest of the crew? I don’t know whether they would. In fact I don’t think they would, share their fears with the rest of the crew.
CB: No. I just get a feeling, having talked to people, that the LMF bit actually destabilised the crew so there was a very good reason for getting rid of them quickly, but if, and if they spoke about it, the crew was destabilised.
PJ: Yup. I think it was a fear of letting the crew down.
CB: That’s it.
PJ: Definitely.
CB: And that’s bombers, so we’ve got wider scopes than that, which is difficult to fathom.
PJ: [Pause] Mm. One of the things that my dad talks about, is a particular incident where, I can’t quite remember the details of it now, the nearest he actually came to being killed, and he actually quotes - this is in a, in his notes that he wrote fifty years after the event - he actually writes in there and describes this event and he describes himself saying, saying aloud, ‘don’t cry when you get the letter, mum’, and then he suddenly realises that he may be on an open mike, and thinks oh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that, but he wasn’t. You know, so I think that’s an example of again, fear of letting the crew down.
CB: Well I think we know, don’t we, that it’s clear from the four engined bombers but also from the, [throat clear] excuse me, two engined bombers, that the crew was the family.
PJ: They were. My dad describes them as being like brothers, rank didn’t matter.
CB: And they superseded all other relationships.
PJ: Indeed. Yeah, yeah. And because of the nature of the role that they were dealing with, they never made friends with other crews. They felt unable to, because they didn’t know how long they would know them for, and no thought was given to who had been in your bunk before you got in it. That must have been quite difficult to deal with.
CB: So in the Nissen huts there were two or three crews, and when one was lost then everything was picked up quickly, for replacement with another crew. Who they didn’t know either.
PJ: No. It must have been a terrible time for the ground crew, who saw so many come and go.
CB: Yes, and on ground crew, there are two aspects to that. One is losing their crew and their aeroplane, the other one is when the aeroplanes come back bent, or with horrors in. So what’s your perception of the ground crew reaction to that?
PJ: Well of course the ground crew always thought that the aircraft was theirs [emphasis], and they loaned it nightly to the aircrew and lo, you know, god help anyone that bent it, you know. But there was a lovely relationship between the flight crew and the ground crew, and I would imagine there was great banter. I know that my father thought the world of the ground crew. I mean they worked on his aircraft in the most appalling [emphasis] conditions sometimes, to keep it in tiptop condition and to keep the aircrew as safe as possible, or as safe as they could possibly be. But the ground crew must have gone through such terrible times, when their aircraft didn’t come back, you know. And it must have been there in the back of their mind that was it something that we missed? It’s terrible times.
CB: And the link between the aircrew and the ground crew would be the pilot and the engineer would it? Or what would be the main link – just the engineer?
PJ: I think pilot and engineer, yeah, but there would be camaraderie with the whole crew. I don’t know whether the ground crew actually were involved with trying to install the rear gunner in his turret because of course they struggled to get in there on their own.
CB: Yes, ‘cause moving on from there is the aftermath of an attack and removing crew who were injured, or dead. What was your perception of that?
PJ: Pretty grisly business. Very often it, I mean the rear gunners’ odds of survival were so few, so low, and it was quite common that the rear turret just had to be hosed out. Pretty unpleasant job.
CB: And the bits taken out as well.
PJ: Yes. One of the early things that my father talks about in his notes was when they first went to Mildenhall and they saw their first operational aircraft, and it was a, if I remember rightly, it was a Stirling, outside the Flying Control and it was absolutely riddled with holes. And as they walked round, round this aircraft, they got to the rear gunner’s turret and it was just a shattered mess of just shattered Perspex and bent metal, with lots of blood in it, and uniform, bits of uniform and hair, it was at this point my father actually quotes in his notes, ‘it was this point we realised we’d got to pay back the cost of our training,’ and it all became very real.
CB: Yes. Let’s just. That’s a good phrase, I think, that’s appeared in many cases, probably, which is the payback, so how did you perceive the crews’ attitude to that?
PJ: They were professionals: they were dedicated. They were airmen, trained. They were young men, it was an adventure, it was a job and they were young men under orders and they would obey those orders.
CB: Hm. And in a way they were completely detached, if they were at twenty thousand feet, that’s four miles above [throat clearing] where the effect of their ammunition, their bombs, is felt.
PJ: Yes, they’re kind of divorced from it.
CB: Detached.
PJ: Yes, all they see is fires, and explosions and then of course the flak, the searchlights, et cetera and the ever-present fear of fighters.
CB: On a slightly lighter note then, there’s if they make a mess inside the aeroplane, there’s a fine attached to this.
PJ: There was. My father actually flew three hundred hours, three hundred flying hours, before he got rid of his air sickness and squadron lore had it, that if you threw up in the aircraft you had to pay a fine to the ground crew and clear it up yourself. He actually, he mentions that his bank account was saved by a member of the ground crew who gave him any empty biscuit tin. [Chortle] I think that’s another reason why he liked ground crew!
CB: Then there’s the other aspect which is the filling of the Elsan, [clears throat] or not. [Laughter]
PJ: Exactly, or not! Yes, I would think so, or not. A filthy piece of kit, back of the aircraft, just near the rear turret which must have been pretty unpleasant for the gunner. They’d use anything rather than have to use the Elsan, including milk bottles or peeing down the flare chute or even into the bomb bay. But you know, it was desperate measures to have to go and use the Elsan.
CB: See how long it was before it froze!
PJ: Not long, at eighteen thousand feet! [Laughter]
CB: Now [throat clear] what about the interpersonal relationships of the crew? How did that work?
PJ: They were, as I’ve said, they were like brothers; rank didn’t matter. However, once they were operational, on an operational flight, it came into play. The rank did matter then and the skipper’s order was to be acted on, there was no messing about, when they were on ops, there was no, there was no overuse of the communications at all. Everything was spot on. They were professionals.
CB: I think one of the interesting things, looking at the log book and your details of the crew, is that they, the pilot was Royal Australian Air Force.
PJ: He was.
CB: And you also had a wireless operator who was the same, but you had two, he had two Royal New Zealand Air Force and two RAF, three RAF Reserve, RAF Volunteer Reserve. So how did that interaction go?
PJ: It seemed, looking at my dad’s notes, it seemed to work really well. There was no, they were a crew and it didn’t matter where they were from or what their backgrounds were. They were a crew.
CB: I’m going to stop just a mo. Now your father did a lot of ops, but we’ve talked about the aircrew, what about the hierarchy? So, there was a Flight Commander and a Squadron Commander, did you get much out of the notes on that, the relationships?
PJ: No, he does, it’s humour, in some of it. He doesn’t talk much about the squadron commanders although he does talk about when he joined 7 Squadron, that they’d just lost their CO on operational flying. He was replaced and within a fortnight the replacement had gone; had been killed as well.
CB: This is a Pathfinder Squadron.
PJ: This is 7 Squadron at RAF Oakington, yeah. Thinking that, looking back you think was the policy of the squadron CO flying ops a good one? You have to question it really, don’t you. It can’t have done the morale any good, when the boss cops it.
CB: Well presumably the Flight Commanders were Squadron Leaders and the Squadron Commander, ‘cause there’d be thirty aircraft, would be a Wing Commander, would that be right?
PJ: Yes. The quote that my father gives it was three Wing Commanders that were lost.
CB: Oh was it? Oh, I see. In sequence.
PJ: In sequence, yes.
CB: Any indication of whether the Station Commander flew with them occasionally, because Group Captains did sometimes.
PJ: Um, in his logbook there is one: Lockhart. He was, he flew, my father was Lockhart’s flight engineer for one op, other than that it was Fred Philips, DFC and Bar, who was my father’s pilot.
CB: I mentioned earlier the topic of LMF – the lacking moral fibre - did he, in his notes in any way refer to that, either by experience or hearsay?
PJ: He did. And he speaks, and he speaks with warmth about those that just had reached the end of their tether and couldn’t do it any more, and he says he felt sorry for them, but they were still airmen; they weren’t to be ridiculed.
CB: Any indication of their fate, fates?
PJ: Nope. No.
CB: Just stop a mo. I think, in restarting, it’s worth just exploring a couple of things and putting it into context. A lot of these things are written up and in this case there’s a lot from Thomas’ recollections, but the key is the being able to listen to the narrative that you’re delivering. And there are two topics: one’s LMF and the other is the Guinea Pigs. So on LMF, what’s he say there in his report? Notes.
PJ: In his notes he writes a paragraph about LMF in it and he writes: ‘some unfortunates, through no fault of their own, reach the point where they can no longer carry on. Irrespective of how many ops they’d completed, they were deemed lacking in moral fibre. I never knew or heard of any member of aircrew that had anything but sympathy for them.’ And I think, I would like to hope that was a general feeling amongst the airmen, they had reached a point where they couldn’t go on.
CB: Yeah. For whatever reason.
PJ: For whatever reason, yeah.
CB: What do you know about their fate, after they were removed?
PJ: He doesn’t mention a fate at all, he doesn’t mention it.
CB: Okay. And then the people who were badly injured, burned or amputees, what’s he got on that?
PJ: He says, ‘I remember some of the lads who had a tough time: the empty sleeves and trouser legs of the amputees, there were lads with no faces, noses and ears no more than shrivelled buttons, and heavy, newly grafted eyelids, their mouths were little more than slits in a face rebuilt with shining tightly stretched skin grafts, some had hands shrivelled and clawed like eagles talons. They sought no sympathy or favours, but carried on doing a job they could manage. When they went drinking with us, their laughter was as hearty as ever, their spirits unbroken,’ I’m sorry.
CB: It’s all right, we’ll stop. They carried on doing the job they were trained to do.
PJ: Yeah. And he goes on to say when they went drinking with us, their laughter was as hearty as ever, their spirits unbroken and no sign of bitterness. I do find it very difficult to read some of my father’s notes. Even though it’s now, what, thirteen years since he died.
CB: But it’s intensely personal for you.
PJ: Very.
CB: Which it was for all these individuals.
PJ: The notes that he wrote, he wrote in the first person, so it is as though he’s actually speaking to me from the page. Which he is.
CB: Of course, yes.
PJ: That was his idea.
CB: Well the Guinea Pigs, we’re talking about partly there, of course, we’ve interviewed as a group of people, I’m sure we’ve interviewed a number of those, and seen the effects of them and even these years later, some of them brilliantly mended shall we say, but always obvious that they’ve been injured in one way or the other, and McIndoe did an amazing job.
PJ: Fabulous man. And his team.
CB: And of course, there is now, indeed, not just him. There is actually a museum, isn’t there, down in East Grinstead now.
PJ: Yes, I really must go.
CB: In the County Museum, in the Town Museum, and there’s a memorial as well of course. There aren’t many left, but there were six hundred and fifty, in total.
PJ: Yes, it’s sad that we are losing so many of our ladies and gents now.
CB: Shall we now go specifically on to your father’s situation. Here, if we start with earliest information about him. So, he was born in 1921.
PJ: He was.
CB: In Birmingham, is that right?
PJ: Yeah. He was born on the 19th of April, 1921, at 35 Wrentham Street in Birmingham 1, right in the very city centre of Birmingham. The house that he was born in was a back-to-back property on three floors, and a cellar. I think now we would class these properties as slums; they were dreadful places. On the ground floor was a living room and a small scullery, the bedroom above was where his parents slept and then the bedroom above that was where the children were. My dad was one of three. They were, Edna was his, his older sister, and she had a bed of her own, whereas Dad and Ron, his brother, shared a bed. He would talk to me about these sort of things, and he always said that it was cold, bitterly cold, in winter, and they would snuggle up together and there were times when they actually had to sleep under coats. Another thing he would talk about was the fact that it was shared facilities for houses and I think it was six families shared two toilets, which would have made mornings rather interesting, I think.
CB: Out in the garden this is.
PJ: Out in the yard. Yes.
CB: In the yard.
PJ: My father’s parents were William Jones, and Amy Jones, neé Roberts. His father had served with, in the trenches in the First World War, but after the war he became a metal presser. His mother, obviously my grandmother, was a housewife. The family before my dad was of school age, thankfully moved south to Hall Green, which is quite a nice, leafy suburb, and certainly things got better for them down there and he went to, I think it was Pitmaston Road School, and he actually says in his notes that he rather liked school and, but I don’t know what age he was when he left school. I know certainly that he, when he left school he started an apprenticeship with the BSA, in Small Heath, in Birmingham.
CB: Well school leaving age in those days was fourteen wasn’t it, so apprenticeships tended to pick up from there.
PJ: Yeah. When war broke out he was too young to enlist, really. He joined the Home Guard, but I don’t know a lot about that, and I think he was determined to serve, because he was just fed up with sitting at night in the air raid shelter and watching his city burn. He describes in his notes how Edna would sob in, at the very back end of the shelter, frightened as, frightened stiff, as the bombs whistled down. But he was always the boy in the doorway, watching what was going on. Eventually he applied for service, and he applied for service in the Royal Air Force. Why he chose the Royal Air Force I don’t know. Was it the nice uniform? Was it the chance of flying? Why didn’t he choose the army? I think possibly why he didn’t fancy the army was because his father and his grandfather had both served in the army. His dad had served in the trenches and Walter, his, my father’s grandfather, had been out in the Boer War so maybe he’d heard grisly stories about life in the army, on the front line. One memory that I have of my dad when I was growing up, was that he wasn’t a good sailor. In the 1950s and 60s we would go on holiday to the East Yorkshire coast, or the East Riding coast as it was then, and we’d go to Bridlington, and during the holiday it would always, there would always be a cruise on the Yorkshire Bell or whatever the other ones were called, in Flamborough Bay, and I remember my father was always very quiet and rather green around the gills, [chuckle] so I think that was probably the reason he didn’t volunteer for naval duties. Um, I think, I need to go through his log book, but I’m pretty sure he went to Cardington first, in September ‘42 for aircrew selection. And interestingly, when I got hold of his service record, he was turned down - for aircrew - and I think he must have been pretty, pretty brassed off about that. What changed their mind, I really don’t know, because he ended up as aircrew and successfully carried out sixty four ops with main force and Pathfinder Force, so something must have impressed them. I think I have a very vague memory of my dad talking about the flight engineer’s position on Stirlings, which is the aircraft that he started on, as being very poky. My dad was five foot one, so maybe they changed their mind because they wanted small flight engineers! I’d rather think that they saw his potential rather than his size [laughter]. But I guess, like all of the trades, they needed engineers and here was an enthusiastic young feller who wanted to fly. Anyway, from Cardington he was posted to Padgate for his induction and that’s where he was issued with his service number, and like all servicemen it was a number he would never, ever forget. From Padgate he went to the Initial Training Wing, 42 ITW, at Redcar up on Teesside, and there he was billeted with Mrs Thatcher on Richmond Road, Redcar for six weeks and he talks about the capers he got up to with Ken Battersby and Chaz Curle, but most of all he remembers how icy cold it was doing drill on the sea front with the howling north, north wind and the spray from the North Sea. Must be pretty unpleasant. But anyway, he got through that. In December ’42 he then went to RAF Cosford, and there he, a quote from RAF Cosford, he actually said, ‘everything involved muck and mud down there.’ He says that in the first week of every entry it was spent on fatigues, peeling four foot high piles of vegetables and after every meal the floors and tables of the huge dining hall had to be cleared and polished. There was also guard duty but they didn’t mind it because everybody else had to do it. I suppose they’d all gripe but it had to be done, it’s just how it was. From there he went to start his engineering course at St Athan, by this time he was what, twenty two. I’ve got a lovely photograph of him at the age of twenty two, taken at St Athan, where he looks like a very, very young sergeant. He was a natural engineer. It never left him, he was a perfectionist in everything he did in later life. He drove my mother batty because he was plan, plan and then do, whereas my mother wanted plan – do, or just do. [Laughter] But he was a great planner. He was a perfectionist in everything he did. I think that comes from his RAF training and it was instilled in him how important it was. A lot of the people that he’d been at Redcar with were also at St Athan and he writes, most of the lads that had been on the ITW were at St Athan. He records in his memoir lots of names, Tommy Meehan, MacMeehan, John Mullins, Jimmy Cruickshank, Albert Stocker, Arnold Hurn, Jack Walker and John Gartland. And that they would be killed. Taffy Lightfoot and Roy Eames would go down over Bremen and that Billy Currie was shot down whilst still training. It was pretty terrible, and it was a relatively small group to start with, at the ITW, that so many would be killed, and so quickly. From there he went to 1657 Heavy Conversion Unit at Stradishall, and it was here that he experienced his first flight in a Stirling. He’d never been higher than a first floor window in his life and he really didn’t know how he was going to cope with it. And his description, I think, of his first flight is fabulous. It’s just something that you don’t think about unless you’ve done it yourself, in an aircraft of that generation, which sadly I haven’t but would love to. And he describes taxying to the runway and, ‘hesitating for a few seconds before beginning the mad dash to the other end and how the aircraft’s thirty tons lifted off the runway and it promptly began to sway from side to side and up and down. Looking back down the fuse, the wings actually flapped, the huge engine appeared to be nodding in unison, looking back down the fuselage the whole structure was twisting back and forth,’ and he says that the height didn’t bother him but after ten minutes the motion caused him to be sick and here he says it took three hundred flying hours before the airsickness settled down. Quite remarkable. I can’t imagine flying in an aircraft that’s doing that, but. It was at Stradishall that he was crewed up, and it was the same process that they all went through: all met up bumbling around in a hangar and sort of someone would come up and say fancy being my flight engineer or I need a rear gunner, and it’s a kind of odd way of doing things; but it worked! You know. I think it’s quite remarkable that a skipper could have, I don’t know, almost a special sense of who he’s choosing and certainly with Fred Philips’ crew, they gelled straight away. I mean the crew was Fred Philips who would become, was awarded DFC before he was twenty one and was awarded Bar before he was twenty two. He was an insurance clerk from Punchbowl, Sydney. Dave Goodwin was a New Zealander, he was the navigator, another Kiwi was Clive Thurstan who was initially bomb aimer, and he had an interesting nickname: he was known as Thirsty Thurston - I wonder why! The wireless operator was an Australian, called Stan Williamson. Ron Wynn who was RAFVR was the mid upper gunner, he was from Stockport. Joe Naylor, again RAFVR was the rear gunner, and interesting he was known by everyone, sorry, it was John Naylor, and he was known by everyone as Joe, or maybe I’ve got that the wrong way round and they did their first flight together on the 29th of September 1943. I can’t imagine what it was, what it would feel like, I really can’t. But having read the memoir, they became instantly, a crew, and gelled as a crew, immediately. And it was after thirty four flying hours at Stradishall that they were declared fit for operations and as I said earlier, that was when it suddenly became very real. On the 2nd of September ’43 they joined 622 Squadron at Mildenhall. They were flying Stirlings. The squadron converted to Lancasters in November ‘43. That’s where his log book starts to get very interesting. Whereas he’d logged his operations in quite detail with additional information added after the op, I think later on. He’s quite detailed, he notes targets and also notes the, sometimes notes, tonnage of bombs and the aircraft that took place and the losses. Having looked through a lot of log books they are all very different. They’re all of the same format, but every airman had his own way of putting things in. I love the fact that you rarely, rarely see a scrappy log book: the writing is almost identical in them all. Whether it was something that was taught at school, or whether it was something that was taught during their training, that they all seemed to have the same handwriting. They’re beautifully readable and they are fascinating books to look through. His first op was a gardening op, a minelaying op, on Skaggerat and he mentions that they had an extra man, for gardening ops, they had a naval, a member of the Royal Navy that would arm the mines before they were dropped and then it just goes on with I think, next we’ve got two ops to Hanover, the first of which they had to turn back due to engine failure, and then it was gardening again, but this time at Kattegat. And just, it’s not intense, the flying, really, right, having said that, I’ve just turned the page, [paper shuffling] and I’ve gone the wrong way round. Er, yup. He’s going to Ludwigshafen, Berlin, Berlin, Stuttgart, Schweinfurt, Stuttgart again. His last op with 622 was on the 1st of March, the Stuttgart. And it was there that they, went, after that they went to Warboys and this is where they each learned a little bit of each other’s role so that should anything happen someone else would be able to carry out your role and not let the crew down and hopefully get home.
CB: Now Warboys was the night flying unit, so what were they there to do?
PJ: A lot of it was circuits and landings, obviously like the initial training but they were learning night navigation I believe as well, using a bubble sextant and things like that and that was the second sort of hat that my father wore. That he, he learned to do the, now what is it called, the navigating via the stars?
CB: The star shots.
PJ: Star shots, thank you. Yes. It was after that, that on the 4th of April 1944 they transferred to 7 Squadron, Pathfinder Force, at RAF Oakington in Cambridgeshire. Their ops started on the 9th of April with an attack on the railway yards in Lisle. This was ’44, so a lot of the ops here are French. This was running up to D-Day, and interspersed with German ops as well, but there’s an awful lot of operational flying on Normandy. [Paper shuffling]. Get these the right way round. On the 1st of July they start doing day ops, or daylight operations again it’s all French and they’re hitting communications, flying bomb sites, railway yards, oil plants and then he goes night flying again, over Germany, and then it’s back to France. Interestingly some of these ops they were flying two ops a day. On the 18th of July ’44 they did a French op, a flying bomb site, flying three hours fifteen minutes in the morning, then at night they were up again for three hours thirty five minutes attacking an oil plant in France. A lot of these French ops now in July, Fred Philips had been promoted to Master Bomber with 7 Squadron, so I guess it would have been even more intense with the crew than it had been in the past because I guess they weren’t dropping bombs and markers then scarpering: they had to hang around. Must have been pretty stressful. Going on to again, July. On the 30th of July, my dad’s log book shows that they were bombing the Normandy battle area. That’s followed by more flying bomb sites. On the 6th of August they were observing the artillery firing, 7th of August it was the Normandy battle area again, and it was the enemy strong points were being bombed, back to oil depots and then fuel dumps. The 12th of August 1944 there were two ops: in the day it was a fuel dump, four hours five minutes, and then in the evening they were stemming the enemy retreat. Then it’s back to flying bomb sites on a daytime raid. 29th of August 1944 was the longest flight that they ever did, and that was to Stettin in Poland, a total of nine hours and ten minutes, and my dad refers to this op in his notes by saying that it was the coldest he had ever been on an op and he felt so sorry for the rear gunner, because my father was in a heated cockpit and of course there was little heating for the rear gunner and of course many of them had a clear vision panel although they punched the panel out to see, so he must have been incredibly [emphasis] cold on that raid.
CB: Just before you go on from there, in his notes, what does he say about the bombing of the V1 and V2 sites, because they were difficult a to find and b to actually hit?
PJ: He doesn’t actually mention them, he doesn’t say much about them. It’s all in his log book with just a little note, he doesn’t actually describe physically attacking the V1 and V2 sites, and most of his descriptions are of Berlin and the Ruhr, which were of course the bread and butter targets, and nasty targets as well.
CB: Yes, so how did he feel, in his notes, about Berlin?
PJ: Like them all, he hated it. It was the big city. It was the place that Hitler did not [emphasis] want hit, but.
CB: So what was the significance of them being an unpleasant place to go? Was it more flak, was it fighters or combination of both?
PJ: It was a combination of both. I mean Berlin had massive, massive flak towers didn’t they, and the flak was intense. Um, he describes the noise when the curtain went back, in the briefing, when they followed the red line and at the end of the red line was Berlin and he just describes it was a loud groan. Really, no one wanted to go to the big city.
CB: So as the Pathfinder, now on 7 Squadron, the most accomplished ones would drop the reds, the newer ones would drop the greens, if Fred Phillips became the Master Bomber did that mean they ended up dropping reds?
PJ: Er, I don’t know, he doesn’t describe that. He does remember graphically being extremely uncomfortable circling the target for so long, on an open radio, you know, and he was very aware that they were the sitting duck, the aircraft that had to be shot down.
CB: And what height would they be flying then? Does he give any indication of that?
PJ: He talks about eighteen thousand feet. Whether they dropped for the target, I don’t know. He does describe flying over enemy territory at ten thousand feet, when they were, they’d been severely shot up over the target and they experienced severe [emphasis] airframe icing and the only way that they could gain height was to make the, was to jettison anything and they ended up throwing out all of the ammunition and the guns and they flew back to the UK at ten thousand feet, over enemy territory. Eventually, there was no way they were going to get back to Cambridgeshire, so they diverted to the first airfield available which was West Malling in Kent, fighter station, and ran out of fuel and piled into the runway. They wrote the aircraft off completely. And he describes having to get back to Oakington, from Kent to Cambridgeshire, on the train, in flying gear. [Laughter] There was no taxi in those days. No, but that was just one of the dodgy moments he had.
CB: Did the aircraft become unserviceable or a write off because he landed without undercarriage, or what happened exactly?
PJ: He doesn’t go into great detail, but it was written off, completely written off. I don’t know at the time whether West Malling had a concrete runway or whether it was still grass, I don’t know. But I can’t imagine the CO of West Malling being impressed as a Lancaster drops in very heavily. But they got away with it. They were, at Oakington, Fred Philips’ crew were known as the lucky crew. They’d been flying on a lot of ops by then and they were probably seen as one of the more senior crews on station and they were invariably late back, and usually peppered with holes and my dad describes in his notes, once, the fact that they were so late back that he later discovered they’d been written off and marked up as missing and he describes how they eventually landed and they were debriefed and then they went into the dining hall for their post-operational bacon and eggs and he said there was one of the, there was a WAAF in there and soon as they walked there in she burst into tears.
CB: And the relationship with the WAAFs, was that regular or how did it pan out?
PJ: I think it was, yeah, again, they had great respect for the WAAFs and many a young amorous airman could be put down by just one stare from them [chuckle].
CB: Does he make any comment, it’s an interesting point though I think, about the experience of the WAAFS who had relationships with the aircrew and constantly losing that person?
PJ: He doesn’t mention it, but I’m aware that it must have been very difficult. And I mean some of the poor girls got the reputation as being the chop girl because they’d lost so many boyfriends, or well, airmen who they’d had relationships with, and they got this dreadful reputation and that must have been really hard to live with.
CB: Absolutely.
PJ: And yet there are so many lovely stories about the relationship between the aircrew and the WAAFs. Stevie Stevens’ story is absolutely fantastic, in that, I can’t remember where he was flying from, he, he really enjoyed, loved the sound of the WAAF controller’s voice and then she suddenly just disappeared off the radio and she was never heard of again at that station. I think it was Scampton that he moved to and lo and behold, there it was, the same voice as he was requesting permission to land and he was so intrigued by this WAAF’s voice that he actually went to the Control Tower to see who she was and of course the upshot of that was that they married!
CB: Never looked back.
PJ: Never looked back and are still happily married to this day. Yeah. Some lovely stories.
CB: I think one of the interesting ones that emerged from interviews is the occasions where the WAAFs lined up at the end of the runway to wave off. Does he refer to that in any way?
PJ: He does. Yeah, he does, he said there would be a row of them, or a row of people on the Control Tower balcony and there would be, and he said invariably there would be, I think he calls it a gaggle of WAAFs, that would wave their handkerchiefs to them, but another person that he talks about was a little girl and he talks about this, a family that lived next to the perimeter track in a farm cottage, and he describes how the squadron would taxi round the perimeter tracks from their various dispersals, describing, and he described the aircraft as being like a row of ducks and he said just this roar and spit and hiss of brakes and he said there was this little blonde girl would appear at the back, at the garden gate, every time there was an aircraft on the perimeter track and she would wave to them, every evening. And he said without fail each aircraft that passed this little girl, the crew would wave back and the gunners would dip their guns at this little girl and he said he would love to know who she was, and after my father died I was researching his notes and I found out who she was.
CB: Did you?
PJ: Her name was Clara Doggert, if my memory serves me right, but sadly she died, but it would have been so nice to have met this lady.
CB: Yes. On a lighter note, looking at the log book, [bump on microphone] I think it’s quite interesting to see the entry that says NFT – Night Flying Test - and the timing. What do you know about the choice of timing?
PJ: Um, I hadn’t spotted that one.
CB: So the idea is that you take off at twenty three hundred hours, and you do your night flying test which takes an hour and ten minutes and why is that?
PJ: I think it would be because they would get their breakfast?
CB: They would get their fry up! [Laughter]
PJ: Good for them!
CB: After midnight! And I think this is one of the intriguing things there. I mean on ops obviously they were coming back because they were flying at night, but to do the night flying test.
PJ: They had a cunning plan!
CB: Yeah! Some of them had to be in the day so that didn’t work. Same title, but different time.
PJ: Yes. I think they’d become a pretty savvy crew by then, knew how things worked.
CB: So how many ops had they done when the crew left 7 Squadron?
PJ: Sixty four.
CB: Oh, right.
PJ: They had, by then they had an extra crew member because Fred was Master Bomber so they had a specialist map reader, of course H2S had come along by then so they were an eight man crew. The eighth man was a guy called Steve Harper who hadn’t done as many ops as the rest of them, so when the crew split up he wasn’t tour expired, and Steve kept on flying with 7 Squadron for a bit longer and he was very, very seriously injured by flak on an op. He survived, but he was seriously injured. Their favourite aircraft was PA964 and in less than a month after them, the crew splitting up, the aircraft was shot down and the entire crew were held then, as POWs. So the name ‘Lucky Crew’ was pretty apt. They got away with it. They never saw each other again.
CB: Didn’t they?
PJ: A couple of the Australians and the New Zealanders did, but the RAFVR chaps didn’t. And in my dad’s notes he does actually mention that and he asks the question, would I want to meet them again, and he actually makes the point of saying no. And the reason he wouldn’t want to meet them again, because he wants to remember them as being young men. He doesn’t want to see a load of old men, he wants to remember them as, how they were.
CB: I think that’s a really telling sentiment, as to why some people don’t want to open up about what they’ve done: it’s a memory that’s hurtful, in some ways, it’s pleasurable in others. But there’s a mixture of emotions, isn’t there.
PJ: But there is, and again in his notes, he hints [emphasis] at the, the difficulty he had with the number of civilians and children that were killed. I think he took comfort from being, with his role as a Pathfinder, that he was marking targets as accurately as possible to cut down on the losses, but he was, I think one of the reasons he couldn’t talk about it, were the civilian losses.
CB: Any reflection on the British civilian losses being on the opposite, receiving end?
PJ: No. The only thing he mentions in his notes is the, when he was a teenager in the air raid shelter and he also mentions walking from Hall Green to Small Heath one morning after an op the night before, after a raid the night before on Birmingham, and he actually mentions being fascinated by the effect of the bombing: that one house was a shell and yet the house next door was perfectly okay. One had no windows, the other one was intact, with an alarm clock still ticking in the window, and he describes a double decker bus, sitting on its nose, in the middle of the road. And he just describes this as being absolutely fascinating in an horrific way, and he couldn’t, just couldn’t work out why it wasn’t all flat and yet why would one building remain intact, as though it’d not been touched at all and yet the one next door was completely devastated.
CB: Just on that tack, what do we know about the composition of the German bomb load, in dropping bombs on Britain.
PJ: Well they were using twin-engined aircraft and certainly the bomb load that was dropped on this country was far less than was delivered to Germany.
CB: I was thinking of the composition of the load itself. So they’ve got high explosive and they’ve got incendiary. Because the RAF learned from that.
PJ: Yes, um, it was the incendiary that would cause the, the devastating fires, then you had also, certainly from an RAF perspective, specialist bombs for, that were used on specific targets. Like the Grand Slams, et cetera.
CB: Had father got to the stage of dropping those as well?
PJ: No. No, by the end, by the time he was on Pathfinders he was mostly dropping markers with a basic payload as well.
CB: ‘Cause his job was to make a mark, marking.
PJ: Yes. Primary job was to mark, mark turning points and targets for main force.
CB: So at the end of the tour, tours, two tours, effectively.
PJ: Two tours.
CB: What did he do then?
PJ: When he left, when he left Oakington, I think, I’m sure he went to Northern Ireland to, er, looking at.
CB: To Nutts Corner.
PJ: To Nutts Corner, 1332 Heavy Conversion Unit, and he was there from the 28th of December ’44 to April ’45. One of the things that he talks about is the warmth of the people of Northern Ireland. And he describes that when he arrived in Belfast he was kind of adopted by a family and given a late Christmas lunch by this family because he was a young lad; you know, sort of, he wasn’t that young by then, but he was so far from home, from his, from Birmingham. 1332 Heavy Conversion Unit moved to Riccall in the East Riding of Yorkshire. It was an airfield to the south of York and just sort of north of Selby, and as a teenager I used to cycle out there and it was all still there, which was wonderful, knowing that my dad had served there, but that’s, I digress, and it was whilst he was serving at Riccall – he was the adjutant of the Engineering School there - he went to a dance in Selby, which was a little market town, and the dance was at Christy’s Ballroom, above a shirt factory, of all things, which I think was how they were in the day, and he met the girl who would become my mother. And she was a farm worker’s daughter, who was at the time working in service, as a maid for a quite a wealthy timber family that ran a wealthy timber business and actually where she was living at the time, working, was on the perimeter track of RAF Burn and later my mother would tell me how, as a young working maid, she would also go to the bottom of the garden, in the evenings. But anyway, my dad would cycle to Burn or to Hamilton, where my mother’s home was, and that’s four miles south of Selby, on his service bicycle. That wasn’t too bad, but then 1332 HCU moved to Dishforth and his weekly trips then were a hundred and twelve miles, on a service bicycle, in all weathers. I guess he was in love! [Laugh] Mad fool!
CB: Amazing what motivation there can be in that! What were they flying, 1332, that was a Heavy Conversion Unit, but.
PJ: Initially, they were on, at the time they had a mixture, I think, of Lancasters B24s, certainly the last aircraft my father flew in was B24.
CB: But what was their role? It wasn’t bombing.
PJ: I think, I think they’d gone over to transport by then, or certainly they were heading that way. But when his time was up at Riccall he went to Bramcoats, and there he was the Station Armaments Officer, and this is where his RAF career is kind of taking a spiral because he’s not flying, he hates it. He really [emphasis] wanted to stay in the RAF and pursue a flying career but my mother wasn’t having any of it, so that was the end of his dream of serving round the world and spending his days flying. From Bramcoats he ended up going to Uxbridge and after a medical and signing lots of papers he was given a cardboard box with a suit and hat in it. And he was demobbed.
CB: When was that?
PJ: Oh, I think ’46, I think. I’d need to look at the log book. But my parents married in February ‘46.
CB: And he was still in the RAF then.
PJ: Yes. His wedding photograph is in uniform.
CB: How did he feel about moving from operations, which were very intense and specific, in terms of being a Pathfinder Force, to an OC, to an HCU? What did he feel about that in his notes?
PJ: Um, I wouldn’t say he was bored. But -
CB: Frustrated?
PJ: Yes, frustrated probably. He did have the odd bit of excitement. I mean he talks about [bumps on microphone] one particular incident at Nutts Corner where he was a flight engineer for a young Canadian pilot. He said that this young Canadian was a flying boat pilot and he said lovely chap, really eager, and loved it, he said they were on final approach to Nutts Corner and my father kept looking at this pilot and the pilot kept nodding excitedly much as ‘I’m doing all right aren’t I’, and my father looked at him again and then looked down at the switch gear and looked at him again, and my father just gently leaned over and pushed the full throttles wide open to force an overshoot because he’d forgotten to put the undercarriage down! So the eager Canadian airman was having too much of a good time. Apparently his expression was one of hang dog!
CB: This was on a Stirling?
PJ: Yes, er no, it was a Lancaster actually. Because of course he wouldn’t have been on flight deck for a, with a Stirling. Yes, I can imagine the poor Canadian’s face. He thought he was doing really, really well.
CB: Amazing!
PJ: But I think he was disillusioned, my father was disillusioned: he didn’t want to be on the ground, he wanted to be in the air.
CB: So when he left the RAF, what did he do?
PJ: I really don’t know. As I say, my parents married in February ‘46 and initially they moved to Birmingham and also to Bath because my grandparents, my maternal grandparents lived in Bath for a very short time and then moved back to Birmingham, and then my parents ended up settling down in Selby and my father started working for John Roster and Son which was a paper mill. They were a Manchester based paper company and they had a satellite factory in Selby, and he worked there for years [emphasis]. I came along in 1954 and as I was growing up I remember that my dad was hardly ever at home. He, for years and years and years he worked six and a half days a week and he would always cycle to work and he cycled to work in all weathers, and I can still see him in winter with his RAF greatcoat with plastic buttons on it, he’d taken the brass buttons off, and he used his old gas mask, service gas mask bag, for his backup and there’s a really endearing image I have of him, cycling off in his greatcoat. Um, having said that he was never there, when he was there, he was a great dad. He always had time to read stories to me, and we would read things like the usual 1960s classics that every little boy read: Moby Dick and Treasure Island et cetera, and I have lovely memories of him reading those. Again, going back to his practicality, he used to build me all sorts. He made stations and tunnels. He made the tunnels out of paper pulp, from the paper factory, from the paper mill. So I always had a really good train set.
CB: A type of papier maché.
PJ: An early type of papier maché. Yes. It was very smelly as well!
CB: He worked as an engineer, presumably, at the paper mill.
PJ: He did, he did. Yeah, and he was there until I was in my teens and of course I changed from junior school. He was brilliantly supportive with my homework and he would spend hours helping me with homework and I remember one for some reason I was struggling with the coffee trade in Kenya and I now can’t forget it and he just sat down and we just went over it. He was an incredibly skilled artist - self taught - and sadly I never inherited those genes, although my daughter has. He produced some fabulous sketches.
CB: Amazing!
PJ: And watercolour paintings. [Paper shuffling]
CB: [Indecipherable] in 1979. Amazing, yes.
PJ: He started from nothing with his art, you know. He just used to doodle and then he just got better and better and better. An example I’ve got here today is the, this, his lionesses head and it’s incredibly [emphasis] detailed isn’t it, you can almost see every hair.
CB: Yes. As an engineer did he go into design engineering as well do you think?
PJ: I don’t think so, I don’t think so. I think he was possibly a bit of an innovator, when problems arose, which of course he would have had to have been back in the war, he would have had to have been very self reliant and that carried on with him. He became a model maker as well, and he produced a model that I still have at home that sits in my sitting room and it’s a twin engined compound engine. Stationary steam engine.
CB: Oh really!
PJ: And it works. It probably, well it worked. It probably doesn’t any more because I haven’t kept it serviced. But it has pride of place.
CB: Brilliant.
PJ: Yeah, it’s a lovely thing.
CB: So, you were a teenager when he left the paper mill. What did he do then?
PJ: He got a job as a maintenance fitter at Danepak Bacon, in Selby, and it was then that he actually started to only work five days a week, which you know, I suppose was luxury, really, but sadly he didn’t work there for a very long time because he was, the company got into difficulties and he was eventually made redundant. I think that [emphasis] had a big effect on him [pause] and after his redundancy he never had a job again, and he was made redundant before [emphasis] retirement age.
CB: So what messages did you get from his [emphasis] experiences and advice as to what career you would follow?
PJ: He wanted me to go in the RAF, and follow his footsteps, but I didn’t. [Laugh] My mother didn’t want me to. So I headed off in a different direction altogether.
CB: What did you do?
PJ: I went into acute healthcare. Well after a while, I went into acute healthcare. I had numerous, numerous sort of jobs first. Nothing too serious.
CB: Did you have some kind of vision of what your career was to be?
PJ: Initially no, not at all and then I met up with a few people who were working in healthcare and I thought yeah, that sounds interesting.
CB: So what did that involve?
PJ: It involved a thirty four year career working with anaesthetics and airway management.
CB: Tell us more.
PJ: I trained as an operating department practitioner and specialised in anaesthetic support and ended up working mostly with emergency patients. I specialised in emergency work in the end.
CB: Doing what exactly?
PJ: It was airway management. I used to work in, I was based in operating theatres but I worked in Intensive Care Units and then the resus rooms in A and E departments. It was the A and E work that I really did love. I worked all over the country. I started in Kettering and from Kettering I went to, um, where did I go from Kettering? To East Surrey Hospital in Redhill, then I went up to London and worked at Moorfields Eye Hospital, the Western Ophthalmic Hospital, Great Ormond Street. Then I worked in the St Mary’s Group, which was St Mary’s in Paddington, Mary’s West 2, St Giles West 10, Samaritan Hospital for Women, and then I got a little bit disillusioned with living in London, or maybe it was my then girlfriend who got disillusioned and wanted to move. So I got a job in Lincoln and a month later my then girlfriend who would be my wife and now my ex-wife [laugh] followed and I moved up here to Lincoln in 1987 and I’ve been here ever since. I took early retirement in June, July 2012 because I was just so disillusioned with how the NHS management worked, messing things up, and I really didn’t want to be part of it any more. I had two years where I didn’t do anything, really, and I saw a post, I think it was on the internet or something like that, about the International Bomber Command Centre and I read this post and thought that sounds really interesting. And lo and behold it was based in Lincolnshire, and so they were looking out for volunteers. So I thought well, I spent two years sitting on my bottom doing next to nothing, or once a week walking up the pub and I could be doing something a little bit more worthwhile and something that would reflect what my late father had been doing and I started on the project as a data checker. I was working with the, with Dave Gilbert who was doing a fabulous job recording at the losses and it was one of my jobs to check the accuracy of the information against the data and make sure that what was going to be put on the IBCC records was accurate. And it was fascinating but shocking, as well, going through the losses and looking at the ages of those that had been lost and also looking at the fact that an awful lot of those aircrew that had been lost were lost in training before they’d even got on the squadrons, and I was really shocked because I was, at the time, I’d been given a whole load of Canadian names, I’d been given about a hundred and fifty Canadian names, and the losses in training were higher that the loss, operational losses, for this particular group of airmen, and I thought, and I’m thinking where are these poor sods remembered. They’re not. Not really. There’s the odd little memorial in a hedge bottom, somewhere, which I think are wonderful, but there were so many lost in training that aren’t recorded. They’re not in Chorley. Mind you, Chorley was the record of the aircraft not the crew, wasn’t it.
CB: Absolutely.
PJ: And this is one of the reasons why I got so hooked on the project, and I think it was in January 2015 I had a phone call from the Bourne office asking me if I’d like to come on board as a paid member of staff, to work on the archive, and I bit their hand off. We were based initially at Witham House on the University of Lincoln’s campus. We were in a portacabin which I think my colleague describes as the nearest thing the university had to a Nissen hut, at the time.
CB: We remember.
PJ: You remember it well, [laugh] with the flexi floor, but in August 2015 we moved off the main university campus out to University of Lincoln’s Riseholme Campus, which is where we are today, and we work in the most beautiful country house and I think it just lends itself so, so nicely to the project. It looks, I [emphasis] think it looks like a Group Headquarters and when I first saw it I thought, yeah, I want to work there. But there are two things missing on that house: it doesn’t have a flagpole and it doesn’t have an RAF Ensign fluttering from the top of it. But um, beautiful house. Beautiful grounds and I am very fortunate that I’m now working with a fabulous group of people. Working with some amazing [emphasis] facts, figures, and dealing with amazing stories and artefacts and literally every day is like Christmas Day, when I open the post I have no idea what’s going to come through the door. But it’s also every day is an emotional rollercoaster, you go from the Christmas Day of opening a parcel and seeing these amazing artefacts and these wonderful memories that are sent in, or I’m listening to other recordings of fabulous stories, or heartbreaking stories that come through and it’s those stories and reading the letters, that a young airman wrote, hoping that no one would ever have to read it and of course I’m reading it because his parents did. And I remember reading one of those, it was from a young Canadian airman from Vancouver who had just started operational flying and he’d written the [emphasis] most beautiful letter. I found it remarkable that a nineteen year old could write such a mature letter. I was, I read this letter late on a Friday afternoon and I couldn’t get rid of it, and it haunted me all weekend. I mean, those letters were wonderful. But also we deal with the other side of it, in that I got into the archive about two hundred letters from a young airman who, before he joined up, had worked at Park Royal, in a printing works, and the letters that he was writing weren’t to his family, they were to his workmates, and so they weren’t sanitised and they were laugh out loud funny. My colleagues here will tell you that I was laughing, out loud, at some of these letters, and this particular airman was the Eric Morecombe of his day and I got inside his head and I got to know this man and reading these letters and he’s describing one where there’d been an influx of two hundred WAAFs on station and he actually says ‘the chaps are getting choosy’, with the WAAFs [chuckles] and you know, these were lovely letters and then I got to the last letter in this pile and I rang this chap up and the donor, the owner of this collection was from Bridgewater in Somerset, and I rang him up and said ‘I’ve just read the last of Peter’s letters’ [banging] and I said ‘what happened to him? Have you got any more letters?’ [Steps] And he just says, ‘well you’ve read his last letter.’ He didn’t come back. And that really hurt, because having read all his letters I thought you know, I’d got to know this man, he was a very funny man, and he must have been fabulous to serve with. But the project’s going really well. I’m in receipt of some amazing [emphasis] stuff and I do it in my dad’s honour.
[Other]: Yes.
PJ: Well, I hope he’s smiling down on me.
[Other]: I’m sure he is. You’ve given us a fantastic insight into your father’s experiences. Absolutely.
PJ: He was a remarkable man. He was a lovely man.
[Other]: Yes.
PJ: As I say, it’s been thirteen years since he died and, [pause] I still miss him.
[Other]: Course you do. I’m going to the loo. [Whisper] [Laughter] I’ll turn this off.
CB: It’s running. So Peter, thank you for what you’ve done so far. I think, in summing up we could cover a few other things, but what was your parents’ reactions to your career choices after the experiences of their parents, and your father in particular, in the war?
PJ: As I said, my father, I think, rather fancied the idea of me joining the RAF, as I did, but my mother put me off that. I don’t think my father was disappointed at all, in fact he was quite proud of the career path I chose, but interestingly, another career path that my mother put me off: I gained a Deck Officer Scholarship with Shell and my mother put the kybosh on that as well. [Laughter] She was quite, quite, um, she tended to get her own way.,
CB: What worried her about going to sea?
PJ: It was being away from home I think. Actually she was probably right because of course the British Merchant Fleet has gone. So I’d probably be redundant.
CB: As a Captain! [Laugh]
PJ: I doubt it! [Laughter] More like Pugwash! But no, my dad was proud of where I ended up.
CB: Of course. Well I mean it’s a very good thing to do.
PJ: And I really think he would be very proud of what I’m doing now.
CB: I bet, yes.
PJ: It’s a great project. I think that we are trying to turn back history, because Bomber Command and particularly those that flew were demonised and we want to tell the story of the whole of the bombing war, not just from British perspective, but we were an umbrella over the whole of the war. We want to hear the experiences of people on all sides and we are getting remarkable stories: we’ve got fabulous inroads into Italy with amazing stories from there. And, you know, going back to Bomber Command, I can’t, I really can’t imagine what it was like in 1945 when everyone was huddled around the wireless, waiting for Churchill’s victory speech and everybody was mentioned. Except Bomber Command. And I think that must have been a terrible blow to everyone that served with Bomber Command; a body blow. So many had been killed and what recognition had the government given them? None. What is a life worth? What was a life worth to them? You know, I think it was a terrible thing to miss them out.
CB: Did your father ever mention this matter?
PJ: I think he did once. I can’t, I wasn’t that old, and I’m pretty sure it was a conversation he was having with someone else, but he was pretty hacked off about it, he’s, I think his opinion of Churchill had gone from being very high to being very low. He was hurt by it, very hurt. Because he’d lost so many, many friends.
CB: Yes, you mentioned them.
PJ: Well that was just a few I think.
CB: Yes, that was just from his early days.
PJ: Exactly, it wasn’t from the later days.
CB: What was do you think his overriding memory was, of his service during the war?
PJ: I can tell you – it’s in his memoir, if you -
CB: I’ll pause while you look it up. Right, we’re re-starting now.
PJ: I can quote from my father, I remember him saying that all in all he felt he’d had a good war, he’d had a relatively easy war, he’d come out unscathed and that in a way I think he felt guilty because he had survived and so many hadn’t, but he then, in his notes, he reflects and he reflects asking what made them do it? What made them go on ops, over and over and over again, and he says was it the patriotism, was it the pride of volunteering being greater than the butterflies in the stomach, was it the fear of letting down the crew, or of the lifelong stigma of lack of moral fibre? And he says perhaps it was one or all of them, who knows? And then he follows that with what I think a lovely sentence.: ‘And what do I have to show for it? My discharge papers and identity discs, my flying log book and a few medal ribbons – and a thousand memories.’
CB: I think that’s extremely touching, it, it in a way, glosses over an important point which is not unusual for him, people like him to miss, which is: he got a DFC and nobody crowed about that but why did he get a DFC, what was the origin of the award?
PJ: I’ve never found the citation. I think possibly, of course, he was on a crew that carried out a lot of ops. I’ve found Fred Philips’ citations for both of his DFCs, for his DFC and his Bar.
CB: Which were earlier.
PJ: Which were earlier. Of course by 1945 they were dishing out quite a lot by then, weren’t they.
CB: What was the date of your father’s DFC?
PJ: I can’t remember.
CB: But it, was it a similar time to his pilot, his second one?
PJ: No, it was later.
CB: Later, exactly.
PJ: Which makes me think possibly the number of ops, or -
CB: Nothing specific. Could have been the end of the tour, the second tour.
PJ: Yes. That’s what I think.
CB: Would be nice to be able to get the citation though.
PJ: It would. I would like to see that.
CB: Right, we’ll pause there for a mo. Now we’ve already talked about the DFC and also the crew gelling together, but what sort of conversations did they have, in these circumstances?
PJ: One of the conversations that my dad did tell me about, and that was a conversation he would have with the mid upper gunner, Ron Wynn, when they were coming back, leaving the target on every op as flight engineer it was my dad’s role to walk the length of the fuselage doing a damage control walk, to see how badly damaged, or if [emphasis] they were damaged. And my dad would always use a shielded torch and Ron Wynn would always say, ‘Oi, you’re lighting me up like a bloody lightbulb up here, turn that torch out!’ And my dad would always reply, ‘If there’s a hole in this bloody fuselage I’m not falling out of it for you!’ [Laughter] And it would be the same conversation, every op, but there must have been more, there must have been more. Even in the, even in the sort of, the terrible times of the operations the humour was still there. Like in the breakfast before the op there was always somebody who’d say if you don’t come back, can I have your breakfast, wasn’t there, you know. There was always that, that lovely, lovely dark humour.
CB: Yes, it’s a trait where you deal with the danger, at the threat, and the horror of it, with humour.
PJ: Yes, but since my father’s death, I’ve spent over eleven years researching his notes and of researching his crew, or the crew that he served with, and I was fortunate enough to have made contact with Fred Philips in, who was living, still living in Sydney, and interestingly, when his flying career with the Royal Australian Aircraft, Air Force came to an end he joined Qantas and he eventually became the Chief, the Senior Training Captain, with Qantas and he was the first Qantas pilot to fly a 747 to Heathrow. Now sadly Fred died in October last year. The other one I managed to get in touch with was the mid upper gunner, Ron Wynn, still living in Stockport. After the war he’d been an instructor at Cranwell and I managed to speak to him on the phone and it was quite an emotional encounter I think, for him, talking to the son of someone he hadn’t seen for so long, but after the initial emotion he was very chatty. And after the conversation I had an email from one of his sons, saying how much his dad had enjoyed talking to me and hearing what my father had gone on to do, but then he said that the conversation had brought back a lot of memories and he wouldn’t want to talk again. I do hope that wasn’t too upsetting for him. But you know, I’ve gone through the crew and I now know what all but two of them did, after the war.
CB: One of the reasons was it, the link between the mid upper and the flight engineer was both were acting as lookouts, during this, but what was father actually doing as a flight engineer in his role?
PJ: In his role?
CB: So, start with take off.
PJ: At take off he would take over throttles so that the pilot could use both hands on the stick, for take off. During flight he would be constantly making fuel calculations et cetera, trimming the engines, shifting fuel between tanks et cetera, just to keep the stability and also keeping records, and as I say doing calculations because they didn’t rely on instrumentation for fuel, it was the engineer’s calculations, and woe betide if he got them wrong. My father could, could fly, he, it was again, going back to the Warboys experience where they did a bit of each other but I think it would have been straight and level flying, it wouldn’t have been landing, take off and landing, that sort of thing. Looking back at his, reading his memoirs, I think he did have a good time. I once went to the 7 Squadron reunion in Longstanton and when my, when his tour was up and they were going their separate ways they took their ground crew out, to the pub, The Hoops, in Longstanton, where they wouldn’t let the ground crew spend a penny. In his notes, my dad said it was worth the twenty four hours of hangover. And I dearly wanted to go and have a pint in The Hoops but it’s been knocked down.
CB: Oh dear.
PJ: But I did walk the streets of Longstanton, in the rain. One of the things that he talks about as well, is once on an aborted op they were returning to Oakington in a really vicious side wind and they had a sudden gust of wind and bounced badly on touchdown and went round again, and as they were roaring off, off the runway, the wind had sent them across the village at very low height and he can vividly remember seeing people staring up and people running away and he can clearly remember a lady running out of a house and grabbing a little girl, or her child, and pulling her into the house, out of the way. My father describes how they, they very narrowly missed All Saints Church in Longstanton and that when they touched down, got out of the aircraft, the rear gunner came, wandered around, and said to Fred Phillips, ‘if you’d have told me you were going to pull that stunt I could have taken that weather vane off as a souvenir!’ [laughter] But thinking as I was driving into Longstanton, it’s a long straight road into the village, the hair almost stood up on the back of my neck when I saw that, the spire of the church and realised that’s it! That’s it.
CB: In conclusion, because this is fascinating and it’s covered so many aspects of your experiences, and your father’s experiences. But thinking of father’s experiences with the research that you’ve been doing, and what he had written, what’s your overriding feeling about the story?
PJ: My father’s story or the story of Bomber Command.
CB: Your father’s story.
PJ: My father’s story. [Sigh] The little lad from, [pause] from the slums of Birmingham did all right.
CB: Can I translate that into a feeling of great pride?
PJ: Indeed.
CB: Thank you, Peter Jones.
PJ: You’re 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/.
Identifier
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AJonesPWA171207
Title
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Interview with Peter Jones
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.
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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01:49:58 audio recording
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2017-12-07
Description
An account of the resource
Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) speaks about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force). Peter Jones discovered a memoir written by his father, Thomas Jones, a flight engineer, just after he passed away. Peter talks about his father’s life and service during and post-war, some of the details in the memoir and memories of their time as a family after the war. There is much discussion about operations and post-flight details, how emotions, injuries and fears are dealt with, including non-flying personnel as well as those who flew. Peter’s own life and work, particularly on the IBCC Digital Archive is also talked about, and the way the stories of others are so emotive.
Temporal Coverage
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1943-09-23
1944-04-04
1944-08-12
1944-08-29
1945
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
England--Birmingham
England--Cambridgeshire
Germany--Berlin
Northern Ireland--Antrim (County)
Wales--Glamorgan
England--Warwickshire
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Second generation
Contributor
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Anne-Marie Watson
Carolyn Emery
1657 HCU
622 Squadron
7 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
Heavy Conversion Unit
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
McIndoe, Archibald (1900-1960)
Pathfinders
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Nutts Corner
RAF Oakington
RAF St Athan
RAF Warboys
Stirling
training
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/303/3460/AMcPhersonWhiteR150901.1.mp3
0e5df7f42951c97fd20e9aa7362cf89e
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
White, Roy
Roy McPherson White
Roy M White
Roy White
R M White
R White
Description
An account of the resource
Eight items. An oral history interview with Roy McPherson White (1925 - 2018, 3006061 Royal Air Force), his log book, Service and Release Book, and five photographs. He joined the RAF in 1943 and after training, served as a wireless operator until 1947.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Roy White 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
2015-09-01
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
White, RM
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
Stationed at RAF Yatesbury (No.2 Radio School),
RAF Aqir (No. 76 Operational Training Unit and No. 26 Anti-Aircraft Cooperation Unit), RAF Abu Sueir (1675 Heavy Conversion Unit),
RAF Khormaksar (Aden Communication Flight).
Aircraft in which flown: Proctor, Dominie, Wellington X, Liberator VI, Baltimore, Ventura, Albacore, Beechcraft, Mosquito, Anson.
Roy White was born in Perth, Scotland in 1925. He lived in Scotland until the age of nine, before moving to London, after he received a scholarship to the London Choir. Roy performed with the choir at the 1937 Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
Roy left school at fifteen and went to work in the fabric trade at 16, he joined the ATC as a Volunteer Reserve, before joining the RAF in 1943 at the age of 18.
Roy recalls going to Lords Cricket Ground on the “Hallowed Turf” to join up. Roy was accommodated in some near by flats by the RAF. Roy’s brother was also in the RAF, in Costal Command and was a Navigator.
Roy was stationed at RAF Yatesbury (No.2 Radio School), RAF Aqir (No. 76 Operational Training Unit and No. 26 Anti-Aircraft Cooperation Unit), RAF Abu Sueir (1675 Heavy Conversion Unit), RAF Khormaksar (Aden Communication Flight).
Aircraft in which he flew: Proctor, Dominie, Wellington X, Liberator VI, Baltimore, Ventura, Albacore, Beechcraft, Mosquito, Anson.
At RAF Yatesbury Roy could easily do the required twelve words per minute in Morse code, and had an excellent American trainer who could do forty words per minute, along as sending and receiving the messages. At certain times, Roy was allowed to teach the class, but was mocked by his fellow classmates. Roy also learnt about the different parts of the radio, how to take them apart and fix them, along with how to fault find on the radio. The signaller would receive a message every thirty minutes, on the mission flight. This message could be about the target, or the weather condition, or even to return to base. The radio waves could also be used to help the Navigator find the correct location. As the Signaller was listening out constantly for messages, he wasn’t on the main crew radio.
Roy also learnt how to take a gun apart blindfolded, which he struggled with but found useful. Roy and his best friend Billy failed the initial training exams, and had to resit them, wit the next unit that arrived. While waiting to complete his exams, Roy worked as a porter at the local hospital, moving the wounded solider sent over from France.
Once Roy had passed all his exams and training, on his passing out parade, he borrowed a uniform for the parade. His uniform was having his brevets sown on by a WAAF on the base.
As part of the Air Crew training for a Signaller to correctly use the radio on board. Roy had to learn about the theory of radio waves, and learn to complete different sounds tests, along with the PNB system test.
When training as an Air Gunner, Roy learnt about the different parts of a .303 riffle and did some clay pigeon shooting. He didn’t receive much Air Gunnery training, as he was to fly on B24 Liberators (the main bombers used in the Middle east) and they used .5 guns, which he didn’t train on until he was in the Liberators.
Roy sailed to Egypt via Gibraltar, as he was a trained Air Gunner, the ships Captain on the merchant convoy, appointed him Ships Gunner and told him to expect to fire the guns. Roy did daily four-hour shift, U-Boat watches on the journey.
When Roy finally arrived RAF Abu Sueir, along with all the other crews. They were locked in a hanger for twenty minutes and told to crew up for the Vickers Wellington that they were to fly. Roy joined a crew with four South Africans and two other Scotsman. The South African crew mostly spoke to one another in Afrikaans.
When Roy was training on Wellingtons, due to a fuel tank problem. The Wellington crashed on landing. Roy banged his head on the radio set and was in hospital for a few days. After the crash, they were assigned a new pilot. The rear gunner got stuck in the Wellington, due to the mechanism being broken.
Roy and the crew then converted to B24 Liberators, which he flew until he left the RAF in 1947. After the war he returned back to his pre-war job in fabric, before running a Antiques shop with his wife before retiring.
Daniel Richards
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today I am doing an interview with Roy White and we’re at [redacted] Haunton near Banbury and we are going to talk about his days in the RAF, about how he got to that position and what he did afterwards. So, over to you Roy, if you’d like to gives us your history please.
RW: Right, I was born in Perth, Scotland 1925. I lived there till I was nine years old, then I came to take a recital in London to join a London choir in Margaret Street in London. So I did join the choir at the age of nine and I continued there until I was fifteen. I managed to get into the coronation choir during my experiences there and it was a marvellous experience in actual fact then. When I left the choir I went to the Mercers’ school for a couple of years but I left there and joined a firm that was making fabrics and I was there until I joined up in 1943. I joined up and went to St John’s Wood, Lord’s Cricket Ground on the hallowed turf, we were actually allowed to go across there and we were billeted out in the flats at St John’s Wood from there and kitted out and all the rest. After we’d done all our initial pieces we then went on to Bridgnorth for our initial training wing, which was drill, which didn’t come as a great surprise ‘cause I’ve been in the ATC and we’d done it all before, you know, but the Morse code was alright because we were supposed to do twelve words a minute when we left there but in actual fact I could do twelve when I started, ‘cause I done there, but I found it more difficult with the, with the gunnery in actual fact taking 303s to pieces and what not there because used to have, undo the breechblock with a blindfold on and put it back together which sounds stupid but in actual fact the lighting was very poor on aircraft so in actual fact if something goes wrong it was quite difficult to see so, in actual fact it made quite a lot of sense. So we were there till about the end of the year 1943 and then went to the radio school at Yatesbury and we were supposed to get up from twelve to eighteen words a minute on there and we also did training in arms, we rifles, Sten guns, we did hand grenades as well, what not there to, general training, what not there and my best pal, Billy Wilson and I, when it came to the exams we both failed the same thing on [unclear] and so we had to drop back a week and join the next unit, which came as a big surprise for us because that unit had been marked down for overseas unit, they sent us home on leave again for a fortnight but we joined the unit there. During our period waiting for embarkation we spent a couple of nights at [unclear] hospital, portering the wounded coming back from France, the convoys and we worked all night during operations helping out which was quite an experience ‘cause it really brought it home to you what it was all about when you saw the condition of some of these people who were there, you know, quite difficult, but it was a good experience and we embarked on the ship and we, I’ve never been sailing before, I’ve been across the Isle of Wight, that was my total knowledge of sailing, we thought, oh, lovely, easy trip on there and we saw the sailors loading up shells and wondered what on earth they were for, the first officer came on board, was just walking past us and he said, ‘you gunners?’ And we said, ‘well, air gunners’, and he said, ‘oh good, you can be the [unclear] gunners for this ship.’ And we all looked at each other as if to say what’s he talking about? He said, ‘let me explain, we are classified as an armed merchant cruiser’, he said, ‘that destroyer over there will be looking after one side of the convoy and we should be looking after the other side.’ He said, ‘we’ve got two 4.6 guns on the end of this ship’, he said, ‘you will be firing them at some time’ and whatnot [laughs] ‘but in the meantime you’ll be submarine watching as well on four hour shifts’ [laughs]. So we started our voyage doing submarine watching shifts from midnight till four in the morning on the, dead man’s watch I think, we called it in actual fact [laughs]. So we did that there and we did actually fire the guns so [laughs] much to the amusement of the rest of the people on board the ship but so, yes so that was the voyage. Then we went to Aqir we were from Cairo, we were based there for about a week or so and then went through Aqir just started our training there and from there we went to the gunnery school at Ballah, then came back and did our OTU at Aqir and then finishing that we went down to a Heavy Conversion Unit down Abu Suweir onto Liberators after that, we were flying Wellingtons at Aqir but Liberators down to [unclear] and then after that we, came the end of the war in the Far East ‘cause we were due to go out there on our next trip but the atom bomb dropping, we then faced with nothing to do so, we got posted out to Aden then, to a communications unit there where we flew all over the Middle East, all over the Arabian continent what not, did quite a lot of flying there and did a year there and from there we went to 26 ACU army operation, cooperation unit and that was helping the army in Egypt, we were target towing to, for there so we did that for about nine months. And then we came home in 1947, and I got demobbed up in, on the coast, up north. And came back to my job in London after that.
CB: Ok, so when you returned to your job in London, what did you actually do?
RW: Oh, we were inspecting, we used to make rolls of cloth, and when we, they came back to London we used to inspect them all to make sure that the quality was good and what not, and then
CB: Then what?
RW: And then the firm split up, I went with one director and went with another and I eventually became the director of the firm on, you know, in London.
CB: So what were you supplying? You -
RW: We were supplying the wholesale trade, dress making trade, the fashion trade in other words.
CB: And so becoming a director, what were your responsibilities when you were the director?
RW: Well, re the stock and travelling as well, I used to go and see customers and we used to do the buying and what not you know for each year, ‘cause you are working six months in advance all the time, picking the next seasons, materials, fabrics and all the rest of it, you know, so.
CB: Sounds good.
RW: Quite a good job. Very interesting.
CB: When did that come to an end?
RW: About 1973 or 4 I think, something like that.
CB: Ok, so you were only fifty then, so what did you do next?
RW: Yes. We went into antiques then, you know. My wife had a hat shop and when she left that, we started doing antiques.
CB: Ok. And you did that till when?
RW: We were still doing antiques I mean we came here so till about, I suppose, twenty five years ago, something like that, you know.
CB: Then what?
RW: So we retired then [laughs]. We’d had enough [laughs].
CB: Ok. And did your wife keep busy after that?
RW: Yes, she, she enjoyed her hat shop and she was an extremely good French polisher, which very handy in antiques trade.
CB: For antiques.
RW: And she was very clever, extremely good needle woman, ‘cause her grandmother had been a court dressmaker, you know, so.
CB: Ok. Thank you very much, so now going back to the early days. How did you come to join the RAF rather than the army or the navy?
RW: Well, I’d been in the ACC [sic], my idea was to join, ‘cause my brother was in the RAF as well, he was in Coastal Command.
CB: What did he do?
RW: He was navigator.
CB: Ok. And is he still about, is he?
RW: No, he died unfortunately when he was about fifty odd. He had a heart condition and those days unfortunately there was nothing they could do for them, you know. Today could probably just put a stent on again.
[Other]: It was a different matter.
CB: Quite different.
RW: Unfortunately then he died but he was also very lucky because he was in a crash as well, in a Mosquito went up with a strange pilot because the aircraft had been in for an electrical fault and then this pilot said, would you come up with me because you weren’t allowed to go out without a wireless operator so they went up and after about twenty minutes or so went totally out of control and wouldn’t recognize any of the signals and what not and they just crashed on the runway and while I saw the pictures of it, all you could see was the radio, that was all that was left there and luckily, say luckily, he broke his thigh quite badly. And so reduced him to grade three and so he had to give up flying, you know, after that but the pilot was lucky, he just got nick out of his ear, that was all [unclear].
CB: Right. What happened, what was, did they find out what was wrong with it?
RW: No, as I say, it had been, I think, for an electrical fault so whether it was still there or what not, you know, is hard to know.
CB: We are going back to your situation.
RW: Yeah.
CB: So you’ve been in the Air Training Corps at school.
RW: Yeah.
CB: And you left school at fifteen.
RW: Yeah.
CB: So you stayed with the Air Training Corps throughout that period.
RW: That’s right.
CB: When you were doing what? You were at -
RW: Well, I joined the textiles when I was about sixteen, you know, so I’ve been with them about a couple of years.
CB: That was a company.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Ok. So, you volunteered, you were being called up at eighteen.
RW: Yeah, I was in the RAF for, you know, [unclear]
CB: Yeah, ok, so how did that go? So, they called you up or you just said, I am joining, I want to join up?
RW: No, they called me up when I was eight, after eighteen, you know, because as conscription after you were eighteen.
CB: Yeah. Ok, so what happened then? ‘Cause you talked earlier about grading, so at what point did you undertake the grading system for aircrew, because they could have put you on the ground you see?
RW: Oh, when I went to Cardington.
CB: Right.
RW: That was it, I just got the notice to stay and we were there two days, most of the first day was medicals and what not and then the second day was all the various testing and then we had a board interview with the wing commander I think who went through all our details and said, yes or no, you were suitable.
CB: And what sort of testing did they do to decide whether first of all you’d be aircrew rather than ground crew and secondly which type of aircrew?
RW: They’d give you some educational test and for wireless operators they’d just give the difference between different sounds, you know, to pick it out as to say whether you could tell the difference [unclear]
CB: Yeah, sure.
RW: But that was the basics of it.
CB: Right, because they had the PNB system, pilot, navigator, bomb aimer
RW: That’s right, yes, and I think they had different things for each of them, you know
CB: Yeah. And had you volunteered to be a wireless operator air gunner?
RW: Yeah, because they said, why do you want to be a wireless operator? I said, well, I’ve been in the ATC, I enjoyed [unclear] I want to be a wireless operator, you know [laughs].
CB: Ok, good. So then you went on to do gunnery.
RW: Yeah.
CB: And how did that go? So,
RW: It was quite good, the training was quite good but it was fairly short course ‘cause they knew we were going onto Liberators and because different guns, instead of the 303s you’re on the point five, so there wasn’t a lot of training for that because they knew you’d be going over to the other ones afterwards.
CB: But how did they train people to be an air gunner? What was the first thing they did, because you hadn’t been in the air before so what was the process that you went through?
RW: Well, just mainly the basics of the 303 machine gun, you know, to learn all the bits and pieces of it, that took the most of the time.
CB: And when you start, when did you start shooting with an aerial?
RW: Well, we only did a little bit of shooting there.
CB: Was that, clay pigeon or initially, or how did they do it?
RW: Yeah, we did clay pigeon shooting and what not at Yatesbury as well as Ross rifles, what not, we did all that sort of thing.
CB: What rifles?
RW: Ross rifles, Canadian rifles they were.
CB: Oh, right, that was shooting at targets.
RW: Yeah, that’s right.
CB: Ok. So they didn’t put you in any turret at that stage.
RW: No, not at that stage, no.
CB: Ok. Good. So the point you were making earlier about the Liberator is that it is an American aircraft so it’s got different guns and they are .5 machine guns
RW: That’s right.
CB: And a completely different setup.
RW: Yeah.
CB: But when you got to the end of the course they recoursed you because you and Billy Wilson didn’t get through, what caused you to fail?
RW: It was a radio test, what you did, you tuned up the transmitter to get the maximum aerial, and you had, you were supposed to retest it, to make sure that you were on the right one and not on the reverse signal there and it was one of the few tests that if you failed that was it, you had to, the other things you could fail but it didn’t matter quite so much.
CB: Ok.
RW: But this particular one we both failed on the same thing so all we did was just retrain for a week and retake it all again, you know.
CB: Ok. The reason why we’re asking the questions is of course people have absolutely no concept of what is involved in the individual trade specialities.
RW: Yeah.
CB: So when you came to do radio training how did that work? They started you said earlier with the Morse code.
RW: Yeah.
CB: But then you got on to using radio, so could you describe please what was the process of training to be a wireless operator?
RW: Well, you had to learn all the innards of the various sets, all the various valves and what they did and they went through all the theories of what radios waves were and how they worked, all of the rest of it, you know, it was, quite involved learning all of that you know, something new completely to me at the time and of course in those days with the big old valves and what not not like the modern things now, and it was quite a complicated business fault finding ‘cause they used to do testing, putting faults in the system and find out where they were, all that sort of thing, and it was quite complicated you know to do it all but -
CB: So there was a lot of theory?
RW: Yeah, a lot of theory.
CB: And then there was practical, so how did that work?
RW: Practical. Very good in actual fact I enjoyed you know Morse code for my sins the instructor used to let me take the class when he was getting tired, usually [unclear], used to start a bit of a riot with all the class, they said, don’t you go too fast now! [laughs] Oh no, so, I used to take the class occasionally [unclear] but I enjoyed Morse code.
CB: So, Morse code you needed to know because of the signals coming in.
RW: Yes, that’s right.
CB: And going out but what was actually the job of the air signaller, the radio operator?
RW: Well, on half hour used to get the messages from coming in, I mean it might say return to base or weather bad or whatever, the rest of the time you could use the radio compass to find out the way back to base and stuff like that you know and you could find your position by contacting two different stations and asking them to verify what your position was [unclear]
CB: So in practical terms you were helping the navigator, were you, in position and indication?
RW: Yes, in an actual fact, you could pass it over to him, say what it was [unclear]
CB: And did the navigator ask you to do that?
RW: Not that, not that I remember.
CB: Later on.
RW: But I used to pass it on to him anyway, you know, see whether there was any commonality [laughs]
CB: So you were teacher’s pet in this business of the training for being a wireless operator?
RW: I don’t know about that! [laughs]
CB: But -
RW: No, he was, mainly, he was on an American, he worked for Wells Fargo, he was absolutely fabulous operator, quite incredible.
CB: And he had operational experience, had he?
RW: Yeah, I think he could do about forty words a minute actually on there which was absolutely incredible and he could send messages and receive them at the same time, you know.
CB: But had he got aircrew experience?
RW: No.
CB: Oh, he hadn’t. Oh, ok. So what about the other people who were on the course, so they were barracking you not to go too fast, so what were the people and what were they like? What sort of people?
RW: Oh, they were great bunch of fellows, as in actual fact you know, wonderful sense of humour, all pulling the leg if they had to [laughs] but oh yeah, great bunch of blokes in actual fact.
CB: And presumably they had some kind of aptitude, did they, to do this work because.
RW: Oh yes, they did, in actual fact, you know, we all [unclear] in different ways, they all come from different backgrounds, all sorts of things.
CB: Had any of them got radio experience before?
RW: I don’t think so, oh yeah, one chap had, I think he worked for Marconi or something like that but most of the others never had, you know so [unclear]
CB: So you and Billy Wilson were recoursed.
RW: Yeah.
CB: What happened to the other members of the course? I mean, where did they go?
RW: Oh, I think they must have gone straight on over here to OTU gunnery school and probably onto a squadron you know [unclear] left behind, you know.
CB: So you kept in touch did you, with some of the people so -
RW: No, I didn’t, actually, in actual fact, you know [unclear], so I don’t know quite where they all finished up, but I have no doubt they finished up in a squadron somewhere round about.
CB: It’s interesting that you then being recoursed, you went to a different unit.
RW: Yeah.
CB: That meant you had to go in the convoy system.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Out to the Middle East.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Did you go around the Cape, did you?
RW: No, went straight, went straight through Gibraltar, a long way to Port Said [unclear]
CB: Right. Ok. So when you then got to Egypt, what was the routine then because you’d done your basic training including gunnery but you hadn’t done .5 machine guns, so what did you do as soon as you got to Port Said?
RW: I think we went to Cairo, as I say, for about a week or ten days, something like that and then straight to Aqir, to the base I think there, and then from there to Ballah, you know, to the gunnery school after that, they did that first to get that out of the way before the OTU, you know.
CB: So how was the training, how did they do the training in those two places, at Aqir and Ballah?
RW: It was mostly paper work, you know for the biggest part of the time, you know, in actual fact, fill in all the different bits and pieces that were there.
CB: And the gunnery, how did they do that?
RW: I’m not sure we did a lot of that because I think what they were thinking, we were going on to Liberators anyway so wasn’t gonna make a lot of difference to do that, you know, so in actual fact I think we curtailed it.
CB: So at what stage did you crew up and where?
RW: Well, what they did when we went to Aqir, they marched us all up into a big hangar, said, ‘right, we are going now, we are locking the doors, we’ll come back in twenty minutes, sort yourself out a crew’ and that was it [laughs], that’s exactly what you did, you all talked to each other and finished up going on to a crew.
CB: So this is crewing up for Wellingtons?
RW: Yeah.
CB: So you don’t have an air engineer, you don’t have a flight engineer.
RW: No.
CB: So, how did you -
RW: We had a second pilot.
CB: Oh did you? Who took the initiative in making the crew up?
RW: Well, you just sort of walked into people and said, ‘well, can I be with you’ [laughs] and they said, ‘oh yes, why not?’ You know, my name is Roy, you know [unclear]
CB: ‘Cause you all got brevet so you knew what your specialities were.
RW: Of course, some of them I knew but others most of them I didn’t know at all you know so because our crew was, there were four South Africans in it, you know, it’s unusual, you know [unclear]
CB: So tell us about who were the people there then, in the, individual, the pilot, who was the captain, the pilot, who was he?
RW: The pilot was a Lieutenant Van Sale.
CB: South African.
RW: And there was Lieutenant Erasmus was the co-pilot and there was a front gunner and a rear gunner, they were both South Africans.
CB: Right. The navigator?
RW: Two Scots, and then one Englishman, [laughs] that made up -
CB: So, did you class yourself as a Scotsman or an Englishman in that?
RW: Well, as a Scotsman, you know.
CBN: Right, ok. So, how did the others go then? Who was the navigator?
RW: Navigator was the Englishman. Yeah, he was an officer as well [unclear]
CB: And what was his experience?
RW: I don’t know really, in actual fact where he’d come from, in fact. I think like everybody else he just arrived at Aqir you know, [laughs] sorry I don’t know where from in actual fact but -
CB: The reason -
RW: We were all a great bunch anyway.
CB: Yes. And so you crewed up and you did your, you did then gunnery training when you were in the Wellington, did you?
RW: No, I did radio, just radio, that’s all.
CB: Ok, right. So you didn’t do gunnery normally, it was just a secondary -
RW: No, no, I was just filling in.
CB: Right. Ok. And then how long were you there at the OTU?
RW: A sheet somewhere.
CB: Because it took a little while to do all the training on the Wellington presumably.
RW: Yes, it did, in actual fact.
CB: Just looking at the form.
RW: We finished in June ’45 at Aqir OTU and then we went to Abu Suweyr and finished up in September ’45 there, just one day after they dropped the atom bomb, you know, so.
CB: Yeah, but by then you went to Abu Suweyr because of the Liberator?
RW: Yeah.
CB: So, that took more crew, so how did that work?
RW: Yeah, we made up, because, I don’t think I said but [unclear] the aircraft, as far as we know, a bomb exploded on board, I think it got caught up in the release mechanism and they were all killed.
CB: On the ground or in the air?
RW: In the air, you know and about three days later our pilot was told to switch over tanks, he switched over to an empty one, cut both the engines and -
CB: This is in the Wellington?
RW: In the Wellington, that’s right.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And so we finished up in a field on that, how he managed to control it I don’t know but -
CB: This was without an instructor?
RW: We had an instructor with us, thank God.
CB: Oh you did?
RW: So, yeah, so we finished up in the field and the laugh was I didn’t know anything about it because I’ve been on my radio ‘cause I cut myself off from the rest and the first thing I knew was my going straight into the radio thing front there and I was livid because I thought, what kind of a landing is that? [laughs] but it was a fantastic piece of work, in actual fact, how he did it, and I mean, we were just lucky to be over some fields, if we’d been over a built up area we, you know, there’d be no way out, but just lucky that was a field there.
CB: What did they do with the pilot?
RW: I think, he left us after that, yes, that’s right, got a new pilot as a matter of fact, so.
CB: As a captain.
RW: Yeah, captain.
CB: Another South African.
RW: Another South African, yeah, that’s right, slightly older so, so we got a different instructor, we had a squadron leader, the chief instructor then so.
CB: Interesting, so how did the crew gel together?
RW: Oh, very well really, considering they come from all different backgrounds, you know.
CB: Did they South Africans, because of their names, it sound as if they were Afrikaans? Did they?
RW: Yeah, they spoke to each other in Afrikaans because it was better for them, I mean they speak English very well but they tended to speak to each other in Afrikaans some of the time.
CB: But you didn’t mind.
RW: No.
CB: But you knew a bit of it after a bit.
RW: Not really [laughs], I had enough trouble trying to learn Arabic! [laughs]
CB: Did they give you courses in Arabic?
RW: No, just picked it up, you know, from bits and pieces during the day.
CB: Right, right. So you finish on the OTU,
RW: Yeah.
CB: You go to the HCU,
RW: Yeah.
CB: To go to change to heavies and you’re going onto Liberators.
RW: Yeah.
CB: So what was the process there?
RW: Going on to Liberators, just getting used to, ‘cause they were quite complicated the American sets, they were very good, the Bendicks was a marvellous transmitter, they used to ask us not to transmit over the station because it used to drown all [laughs] communications in actual fact but it was very good, in actual fact.
CB: So now, you were just allocated other aircrew because for instance there was no engineer on the -
RW: Yes, I think one of them was off, Billy my friend’s crew that got killed ‘cause unfortunately they had to drop one out when the instructor was with them so there was one crew member left, one poor gunner left on his own so we took him on as one of our spare ones, on there.
CB: How many crew were there on a Liberator?
RW: Eight on there.
CB: Ok. Where did the engineer come from? Was he a South African as well?
RW: Well, he was second pilot, you know, Lieutenant Erasmus [unclear]
CB: Ah right. Ok. Good. Now some of the difficult things in the circumstances were obvious in Britain but in some cases they were also abroad. One of them is LMF, lacking moral fibre.
RW: Yeah.
CB: So, did you come across that at all?
RW: No, there was a slight bit of it because when we had our crash, the rear gunner got stuck in his and couldn’t get the turret to move, you know, I think he was scared [laughs] it was gonna go up, you know, without him, so there was some talk at the time that he was going to give it up but in actual fact he didn’t, he went back again but I think there were odd cases of people who did give up.
CB: And what did they do with them?
RW: I don’t know what they did, I presume they put them down in the ground staff job, but I don’t really know.
CB: ‘Cause in Britain they had a very firm way of dealing with them.
RW: Yeah, they didn’t like it you know ‘cause obviously it wasn’t good for morale.
CB: No.
RW: No.
CB: The other is the STDs, the sexually transmitted diseases. So how did that get dealt with?
RW: I remember that they had somewhat horrific films they showed you at St John’s Wood when we first went there [laughs] but I think that was their method of dealing with it mainly you know, in actual fact, but it was really all the confrontation we had with it, you know.
CB: Ok. Good, I’m gonna stop there for a mo. We are restarting now just to talk about some extra items.
RW: Yeah.
CB: So what about accommodation?
RW: Accommodation was quite good, you had your own space and locker where you keep all your own private bits and pieces, you know, photographs and letters from home all the rest of it you know and the food generally was very good, you know, we enjoyed it and what not, nothing really to complain about, it was really, really quite good.
CB: Did you get better food because you were aircrew?
RW: Yes, I think so.
CB: Even in training?
RW: Yeah, I think so, yes, on there. ‘Cause at a sergeant’s mess you know and what not there, so used on your own, quite decent but we reckoned it was better than the officer’s mess [laughs] so we didn’t know.
CB: So you had lockable lockers but were you in Nissen huts or what sort of accommodation did you have?
RW: Yes, sort of Nissen huts, you know, there, and yes in Aqir.
CB: So, were they insulated?
RW: Not really, because it was very hot, you know, all the rest of it, the climate was quite hot out there so, don’t really [unclear] much from there,
CB: No.
RW: But they were quite comfortable, I must say.
CB: Right. And in the UK, what about the accommodation there?
RW: No, fairly basic there, I remember polishing the floor [laughs] so corporal used to come and dump a great load of polish on the floor and say, ‘polish that’ and it took about an hour to get it [laughs]
CB: With a bumper and a liner.
RW: That’s right, a bumper up and down and one sitting on it and going up and down but yes [unclear]
CB: Now you started as an AC2.
RW: Yeah.
CB: How did the promotion system work?
RW: Well, when you finished your course at Yatesbury, you got your promotion to sergeant, used to be quite funny actually because what we used to do is borrow somebody else’s uniform for the parade that day and get the WAAFs to sew all our stuff on there so the minute we came out for our parade we could put our new jackets on with all the rest of us so we were all in borrowed, borrowed gear [laughs] when we went on parade then.
CB: And your brevet was what?
RW: Pardon?
CB: What was the brevet?
RW: The brevet, that originally it was air gunner and then it went to signaller later on they changed after about a year to signaller.
CB: And so you are now a sergeant, how long were you a sergeant?
RW: Till, till I was down in Aden when we took a board from there, got flight sergeant.
CB: And how did the pay change?
RW: It was more, I can’t remember what it was [laughs] wasn’t a fortune but it was better than it was before, you know.
CB: You knew where you were going to go when you left the RAF. Were you waiting to get out waiting for demob or did you just say, I want to be demobbed now? [emphasis]
RW: No, we just got sent home, that was all afterwards, no sort of forecast or anything, we just, we were 26 AACU, they just said, right, you are posted home you know and that was it, little or no warning [unclear]
CB: And where did they send you?
RW: To Lytham St Annes.
CB: And what was the process there?
RW: Just got all your civvies which we hadn’t seen for donkey’s years [laughs], you know and all the bits and pieces, got your vouchers and your travel warrants and all those [unclear] and I was due about six or seven weeks leave I think something like that, you know, so I didn’t take it up [unclear] but yes that was the end of that you know.
CB: So, the war’s ended, you’ve been demobbed two years later.
RW: Yeah.
CB: You then go into civilian life, having been in the ATC and joined as a volunteer reserve person, what was your commitment for future years?
RW: Well, I quite liked the job that I went to, you know, so I decided I’ve been toying with the idea I might stop in the RAF but I decided, no, I’d sooner go back to the textiles so, in a way I’m glad you know that I did, because I enjoyed textiles so it’s very good you know.
CB: But you were required, as a VR man, you were required to remain in the VR,
RW: Yes.
CB: That’s what I meant. Till what age?
RW: I got my release, release thing, I think all the dates and what not are back there, how many years I’m on reserve ‘cause they said [unclear], you might be eligible for call up in an emergency and what not.
CB: And did you join any air force associations afterwards?
RW: I was in the RAFA for a while not long after, played cricket for them, while, I enjoyed that in actual fact [laughs]
CB: Did you do much cricket when you were in the RAF?
RW: When we were down at Aden I played cricket down there you know, we’d to play the officer’s mess, we used to like beating them [laughs]
CB: Good, Ok, thank you very much, I’m going to stop there for a mo. Right, you mentioned earlier about the aircraft that was downed because of a hang-up.
RW: Yeah.
CB: And the bomb, were you in formation with that or was it a separate and what happened?
RW: No, we weren’t flying that day, we were between lectures and I just came back at lunchtime and as I say next door were just empty bedsprings, nothing on the locker nothing I said you know, where’s Billy’s stuff, and he said, haven’t you heard? No, and he said, oh, you know he’s gone and got killed, you know, I was shattered you know.
CB: This is your friend Billy Wilson.
RW: Yeah, that’s right, so as I say, we never got an official report, you never did with these things, but that was what we heard, and it sort of ties up with the fact that nobody got out, it was an experienced pilot on board, an instructor, you know, there were no survivors, nobody parachuted out or what not there so must have been something disastrous that happened you know, so that was it.
CB: So how did you all feel as a crew after that?
RW: Oh, a bit shattered, especially when we had our own one a couple of days after [laughs], wasn’t a very good week in actual fact.
CB: So when you had your own engine failure because of fuel starvation, that was, what height was that?
RW: I’m not really sure but all I can think was that the pilot had to keep the nose down because they daren’t let the nose go up, go out of control so if we were flying, say six thousand feet, take what, two, three minutes with the nose down, something like that so he had to find somewhere in about two or three minutes.
CB: And he wasn’t able to switch, he wasn’t able to switch the fuel correctly and restart.
RW: No, there wasn’t time because I mean he had more than his job, ‘cause it was a heavy aircraft the Wellington but to keep control of it with no engines it must have been a heck of a job, you know, to do that, just to try and keep it level and what not there and at the same time try and find somewhere you could put it down, you know, so.
CB: What did he say to the crew on the intercom?
RW: I don’t really know ‘cause I wasn’t on it, you see, I didn’t know anything about it, you know.
CB: You were listening out, were you, on the radio?
RW: I was listening out, ‘cause it was more than your life’s worth, to miss the messages on the half hour, then, you know, if you came back and your logbook had got no messages, so, what goes on, you know,
CB: So that’s an important point as you’re, now you’re flying, your role is to listen out to signals.
RW: Yeah.
CB: What did you actually have to do? You were listening to signals but how did that work?
RW: Well, as I say, it might be just trial messages that you think on there but as I say occasionally would be something like return to base, weather bad or something else like that which you of course you would then pass on them back to them on there so that was why they absolutely insisted that you got the half hour messages, you know, didn’t miss them.
CB: Because they would send particular messages on the half hour.
RW: Yes, they did on Bomber Command I think, if they had anything there had a registered time to send the messages and you had to make sure you got them.
CB: So we are talking about this crash, how, who else was hurt in the crash?
RW: The front gunner broke his ankle but that was the worst of the injuries, which is absolutely incredible really.
CB: And was the bomb aimer also a gunner?
RW: No. No.
CB: He simply was the air bomber.
RW: Yeah, yeah.
CB: Ok. So, thinking of your flying experiences in total, what would you say were the best times and what were the worst?
RW: I think, flying in the communications unit down at Aden was the best time in actual fact ‘cause it was so varied, you know, all sorts of things, we actually took an air vice marshal round on a tour of the thing, the CO called us up one day and he got a letter in front of him and said, ‘I’ve just had a note from the Air Ministry to say that they are sending Air Vice Marshal Sir Charles’ - I can’t remember what his surname was – ‘on a tour of inspection and we’ve been given the job of taking him round, so I don’t want anything to go wrong understood?’ [laughs] So he says [unclear] so we’ve, I’ve never seen so much top brass in my life ‘cause they all appeared, the Governor’s car turned up, his Rolls Royce and they were all involved.
CB: This is in the Liberator?
RW: No, so, no, it was a Wellington converted on [unclear] so, yes so, and a very nice lady officer with him as well there, which cheered everybody up but yes so we took him round, we actually had dinner together the evening which surprised me [unclear]
CB: He was a flying man, I take it?
RW: Yes, I think he was one of the top handful of people in the end, the chief of technical training command I think he was something like that you know, so.
CB: What was the worst experience you had?
RW: Let me think now, I should think probably the day Billy’s crash I think it was probably about the worst day of it all really, rest of it, you know, was bad, that was the sort of low point from the time but get over it, you know.
CB: Had you known his parents, before you went out?
RW: No, unfortunately not, no, and the worst thing was I wanted to go on his funeral parade but we were all on sick leave you know, they wouldn’t let us go on parade you know so I didn’t get the chance to, well you know, say goodbye.
CB: You were on sick leave. What sort of sickness did you get?
RW: Ah, well, I had a sore head [laughs] for about a week afterwards but you know apart from that it wasn’t bad you know.
CB: Yeah. From the crash. Yeah.
RW: Yeah, but they obviously decided, you know, to give us some days off.
CB: Yeah. Right. We’ve had a good interview now so we are looking at pictures and various things and we’ll wrap things up.
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AMcPhersonWhiteR150901
Title
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Interview with Roy White
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
Format
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00:53:22 audio recording
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2015-09-01
Description
An account of the resource
Roy White was born in Perth, Scotland but grew up in London. He joined the Air Training Corps, went on as a volunteer reserve and then served as an air gunner in the RAF. Tells of his brother serving in Coastal Command and surviving an aircraft crash. Gives some insight in aircrew roles such as radio operator and air gunner. Mentions various episodes of his service life: training in England and Egypt; an aircraft crash in which a friend got killed; flying with a South African crew; being assigned to submarine watching and manning the guns on his journey to Egypt; towards the end of the war, being posted to the communications unit at Aden. He served as a wireless operator in Egypt post war.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Egypt
Great Britain
Middle East
Egypt--Ismailia (Province)
Egypt--Alexandria
Contributor
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Peter Schulze
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
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1943
1944
1945
aircrew
B-24
crash
crewing up
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
RAF Aqir
RAF Yatesbury
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/315/3472/APayneAJ150811.2.mp3
ee6769cc020c59ef42f4867ae1c03636
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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Payne, Alan
Alan John Payne
Alan J Payne
Alan Payne
A J Payne
A Payne
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Alan John Payne DFC (1315369 and 173299 Royal Air Force) and his log book. He completed 18 operations as a bomb aimer with 630 Squadron.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-11
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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Payne, AJ
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: Right. My name is Chris Brockbank and I’m conducting an interview with Alan Payne in Wendover, Buckinghamshire along with his grandson, Aaron Payne. And we’re going to talk about his life and keep the tape running until we need to have a break. So, Alan could I ask you to talk about your life from the earliest days please and then your childhood and how you came to join the RAF and then your experiences. And then after the RAF what you did. So over to you —
AP: Well, I was born here in Wendover. My father was a coal merchant. He had his own business. He even had, he even had his own coal trucks. Coal trucks. And I attended a local junior school until I passed to go to the Wycombe Technical Institute where I did technical studies. I had quite a happy childhood. I had one brother who unfortunately now has dementia. He’s younger than me but he does suffer with dementia. But then as I say, I had a childhood in Wendover. Local school. Then went to High Wycombe Technical College. The war was on then. I didn’t want to join the army or the navy so I volunteered for the Royal Air Force. I was seventeen when I volunteered. So, volunteering for the air force meant I was safe from being recruited in to the army which I did not want. And I had about a year to wait until I was called up and I got notice to report to Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. That was the recruiting place. Lord’s Cricket Ground. Just basic stuff there. Lots of inoculations. We were put up at Abbey Wood and then from there we were sent out to Torquay first of all for basic training. Drill. Law. This type of thing. Then from there I went to Brighton for a time. There again it was basic training. They were, they housed us in the hotels along the front. One thing I do remember about that time was Richard Tauber who was appearing in the, in The Pier Concert Hall and I saw him and thought what a wonderful chap he was. He was an Austrian Jew of course and he got out of Germany before the trouble started. But that’s one thing I do remember about that time there. This is all basic stuff.
[pause]
CB: So, after Brighton what did you do?
AP: After Brighton.
CB: What did you do in Brighton?
AP: Well, after Brighton — I did mention Torquay didn’t I?
CB: Yes.
AP: And then Brighton. Then from Brighton we were sent, we were sent out to South Africa. I was quite lucky really because I was sent to train with the South African Air Force and we were — we had to transport up to Liverpool. Got on a boat called the Volendam. A Dutch boat. The Volendam. And we departed for South Africa in convoy and that journey took, I think, four or five weeks. We stopped at Freetown on the way to refuel and then into Durban. And from — Durban was just a holding centre. And then from Durban we were posted to East London. East London. Where we started our training in flying and I hadn’t really flown before then. But we started flying then on Avro Ansons and that was basic navigation. And at Queenstown — that was navigation and then, and then from there we were posted to the gunnery school where we did bomb aiming and air gunnery. Pause it just a minute Chris while I just make reference?
CB: Ok. So, your logbook will remind you.
AP: Port Alfred.
CB: Yeah.
AP: It was Port Alfred where we went to for gunnery.
CB: Ok.
AP: A very nice little seaside town not far from Queenstown. Went to Port Alfred. There we were on Airspeed Oxfords. And then whilst there for [pause] to get us used to the night time flying we were sent to a little place called Aliwal North. And the runways there were lit by flares. So there was no lighting there. Just these flares that we had to land on but that gave us our basic training for night flying. And it was at Port Alfred that we passed out and had a, we had a passing out parade in Queenstown. We had a very good do there and I do have the, a copy of the menu.
[pause]
So, having, having finished our training we, we were sent down to Cape Town and we sailed back from Cape Town in the old Queen Mary with no escort at all because she relied on speed to get us through. I think she did about thirty three, thirty five knots. So we sailed back in good time and on the way back too we were taking a whole load of Italian prisoners of war and we escorted them back to — Liverpool that we went in to. And then to finish our training I was posted to Dumfries in Scotland where we did basic training. Bombing, map reading, this type of thing. And from Dumfries we were sent to a holding station at Harrogate. And I always remember the CO there was Leslie Ames, the old Kent cricketer. He was the CO at this hotel. Had a very cushy job really, in the war, didn’t he? But we were there for a few weeks and then we were posted to Turweston — an Operational Training Unit where we were on Wellington bombers. And it was at Turweston and this, and this other station, Silverstone that we were crewed up. And it was rather strange — we were all let loose in a big hangar and we had to sort of had to find our pilot and navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator. We just got together and sorted ourselves out. That was the way it went in those days. I was lucky because my pilot, Geoff Probert, was an ex-guardsman. We called him grandfather because he was, he was thirty odd. He’d volunteered as a pilot and we were all in our early twenties so he looked after us really. And he was a jolly good captain. Anyway, we did our OTU training and we were all, we were all crewed up and ready to go and at Silverstone we also did some cross-country stuff. And then the next move was to Winthorpe. A Conversion Unit. And we converted then to Lancasters and that’s when the training really started. And I was there in October, November ‘43. And then at the end of November we were posted to East Kirkby. That was, that was the operational station. We were posted to 630 Squadron which was a wing of 57 Squadron. I always remember that part of my service well really because it was just like a builder’s site. There was mud everywhere. There was just basic, basic accommodation in Nissen huts. A central stove. Everything was running with condensation. The clothes were damp. Everything was damp. And it was a very cold winter then. In fact, we did our first op on the 2nd of December to Berlin. And everything was centred on getting the aircraft operational. The fact of our comfort didn’t really enter into things but we managed and, but as I say it was pretty rough at that time. There was no basic comforts. There was no basic comforts at all and the weather was so cold too. We started off with six trips to Berlin and the weather was so bad we hardly saw the target at all. We were bombing on Wanganui flares through cloud cover. During that time, we did Berlin, Stettin, Brunswick, Berlin, Magdeburg. As I say, six Berlin trips. But, at the same time although the weather was bad we did find time to get out to the Red Lion at Revesby which was our local pub. And we had a bit of relief there.
[pause]
The worst trip I had really was the one to Nuremberg. That was at the end of March. It was March 30th. We were attacked then by an ME109 but luckily, he missed us but he did fly pretty close. But we were lucky really. As I said we had some near squeaks. And one of the things that did, that I always found amazing was the fact that you’d be flying along in the dark and all of a sudden you got over the target and there were planes everywhere. And we had two, we had two narrow go’s where we nearly collided with another Lancaster. But as I say we were very lucky in many respects. Another op we did was the one to Mailly-le-Camp. That was, that was a military camp and that was a bit, that was being marked by Group Captain Cheshire. And everything went wrong that night. Everything was late. We had to circle and circle until we could get in to bomb on the flares that had been set by Cheshire. And then following on then, on the run up to D-Day we were more or less doing trips on marshalling yards, bridges, anything that would hamper the movement of the Germans. When D-Day approached [pause] when we finished our tour, just before D-Day in fact, although our last trip, the end of March 1944 was mine laying in Kiel Bay. And there we were hit by a — attacked and hit by a JU88. We caught fire but luckily the fire, for some good reason went out. We were jolly lucky then. But as I say we’d done twenty nine trips then and the CO came to us. He said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘You’ve had it now. You can finish.’ But on the social side there I did know a young WAAF girl called Pat who more or less adopted the crew. No. We adopted her. And she took a liking to me and we spent a lot of time together. I’ve got a little picture of her here. We used to go cycling together and went to the pub at Revesby. I got very fond of Pat but of course when it came to [unclear] to go to see her. I don’t know whether he has or not. As I say by the end, by the time we’d finished, the end of May, the weather was, the weather was better but it had been a pretty dreadful winter. Anyway, at the end of our tour we all broke up and we all went our different ways. First of all, I went out to Moreton Valence where we were doing instructing and doing compass swings and basic stuff. And from there to Llandwrog in North Wales. And then I was quite lucky then because we were sort of messing about doing not much in particular and then a posting came through. They wanted, they wanted a navigator to go out to Palestine. So, I was, in the first instance I was sent out to Saltby, a Conversion Unit. And then to Matching and I crewed-up then with a guy called Flying Officer Nichols. And we were, as I say on Halifaxes which was a better aircraft for transport work than the Lancaster. The Lanc had a very narrow fuselage whereas with a Halifax you could get two lines of chaps down either side of the aircraft. And we did container dropping, glider towing. Anything which would help the 6th Airborne. We were attached to the 6th Airborne Division then and we went out with them to Palestine which, in 1946, wasn’t very healthy really. Because the Irgum Zvai Leumi were — and Begin, they weren’t very happy with us then. They blew up the King David Hotel. They shot two of our sergeants in [unclear]. You may remember that. We always had to look at, mind our backs because the — at that time, I shouldn’t say this but the Jewish weren’t very friendly towards us. And we used to go out to, they used to, they were bringing their migrants in by boat and part of our duty was to fly over the Med to report boats coming in. At the same time we did exercises down to Bagdad with the Airborne division. We did quite a bit of flying up through, up through Italy and we helped then to bring some of the migrants back to Palestine. It was quite an interesting time really although we had to watch what we were doing. But as I say we used to fly to Bagdad.
CB: What were you doing when you flew to Bagdad? What was the main reason for that?
AP: It was an exercise for the 6th Airborne Division.
CB: So, you were moving troops.
AP: It was a very good camp at Bagdad actually. They had a, they had a very nice camp outside and we went there two or three times. There were lakes there and the flying boats used to come in there, you know. I quite enjoyed the time out there in a way had it not been for the fact that we were liable to be sort of potted at. We also went down to Khartoum which was one of the hottest places I’ve ever known. In fact, it was so hot there that we couldn’t run the engines up. We had to be towed to the end of the runway, start the engines and take off so they did not overheat, you see. That again was an exercise with the Airborne division and they would do, they would do parachute drops. That type of thing.
[pause]
AP: We did quite a few trips up too, from Aqir airbase in Palestine. We did quite a few trips up to Udine. Udine. By stopping at Malta to refuel and then flying up to the coast of Italy in to Udine. And there again, it was a case of exercising with the 6th Airborne Division.
CB: So, you weren’t doing any doing bombing. You were —
AP: Oh no. No bombing at all. No. It was all —
CB: Not even practice. It was moving people.
AP: Moving people about. Troops. Migrants. And then, come the end of August it was time for me to be demobbed and that’s the only time I’ve flown in a Dakota. I was flown down to Cairo with some other guys. Then we were flown back by Dakota to London via Malta into Heathrow. And Heathrow then, of course, was just a series of huts. There was nothing like there is today. But that’s the only time I’ve flown in a Dakota. Although, a few weeks ago, when I was up at East Kirkby I sat down at a bench with a colleague of mine. Got chatting. And the guy I spoke to owned the Dakota at East Kirkby. Maybe you know him. Do you know him?
CB: I don’t. No.
AP: Well, anyway, he happened to be there and it was his aircraft and we chatted away and he’s very fond of the Dakota. But that more or less tied up my time in, with the Royal Air Force and I didn’t know quite what to do for a time. But I had always wanted to go into building so I applied to become an architect and I was lucky enough to be accepted at the School of Architecture at Oxford. I had to wait a few months before there was a vacancy and our course at that time only consisted of thirty people. There were two girls and the rest of us were men and half of them were ex-service people. In fact Oxford in those days was full of ex-servicemen and we had to compete with the youngsters. But after five years I passed. That must have been in [pause] ’46 ’47 I went to Oxford. It must have been the early ‘50s. And in those days jobs were hard to find and luckily I had some contact in North Wales and I was found a position there to start my architectural career. And from there things just moved on. Do you want — is that?
CB: Married?
AP: Pardon?
CB: When you got married.
AP: Oh yeah. Well, back in, back at the end of the war.
CB: Ok.
AP: Sorry. I left that out.
CB: How did you come to meet your wife?
AP: Oh, at the ‘drome in Llandwrog in North Wales.
CB: That was an OTU was it? Training place.
AP: Yeah. It wasn’t an OTU. No. It was a training place. Actually, I was there on — it would be — not D-Day. VE day. VE day in Caernarfon and the whole town turned out. Do you know Caernarfon? Very nice little town.
CB: Yeah.
AP: We went into Carnarvon and I’d met Gwen then and we went out together and celebrated around the castle.
CB: Yeah.
AP: And that was before, before I went to Oxford of course.
CB: So were you able to earn money while you were at Oxford?
AP: Well, I’ll say one thing for the Labour government then they paid for our fees and gave us a living allowance. So that was one, that was one credit that we had, we had to bear. Not bear. To put up with.
CB: And Gwen was working as well.
AP: She was. Yes. Yes, she was working for a time. Then the children came along and that was it.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Housewives didn’t work in those days did they?
CB: They didn’t.
AP: They stayed home and stayed put.
CB: No. No. Going back to your early days. How were you actually selected first of all? How were you selected for aircrew because you might have done a ground job? So at what point —
AP: Well I remember going to Oxford. There was a recruiting centre there and I’d put down for, I’d passed as pilot, navigator, bomb aimer.
CB: Yeah.
AP: That was the categories. I passed for that and I had a medical at the same time there. That was in Oxford back in, when I was only seventeen. And then they selected you for aircrew training. Everybody wanted to be a pilot of course but it was a matter of luck when you, when the time came. If they wanted navigators you were a navigator. You know. Or pilot. As things turned out it’s just as well I did go as a navigator I suppose.
CB: In what way?
AP: Well, I survived.
CB: Right. Going then on to the training in South Africa. You wore the brevet of an observer. So how was the course structured and how did you have that brevet rather than a navigator brevet?
AP: We were the last course to do the observer. We were the last people to do the observer course. And after that it became NavB and bomb aimers. But we did the whole lot. We did the three. Bomb aiming, navigation, air gunnery. We did the lot. After that the NavB’s just did navigation.
Yeah.
But for that reason, when we got back to the UK the Lancs were coming in. They wanted bomb aimers. And having done the observer course we were, of course, selected to take on that job you see.
CB: But you did navigation. Oh you didn’t.
AP: I didn’t — well I did map reading of course in Bomber Command.
CB: Yeah. Right.
AP: Which was quite important in the run up to D-day because a lot of our targets then were marshalling yards, bridges, that type of thing and we had to do map reading and pin point bombing.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Because we daren’t drop the bombs on the French domestic.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Sites.
CB: Which was the problem with that Cheshire raid. Identifying the military camp which was close to a village.
AP: Mailly-le-Camp. Yeah. That was quite a tricky raid that was. In fact, that picture you’ve seen was done a day or two before or a day or two after.
CB: So, what was, what actually caused the holdup and why were so many planes circling? Waiting.
AP: There was a hold up. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. We never did find out but everything — we were late getting there. I mean, we got there too early or Cheshire was too — he was in a Mosquito and he went in after we did and marked the target. But it was a very successful raid. Although we did lose quite a few aircraft in collisions. We had to circle around waiting for these markers to go down.
CB: Yeah.
AP: And Nuremberg has been well documented by John Nicholl of course but that was a complete disaster because it was a beautiful moonlight night. A beautiful night and you could see for miles but the winds were, the winds were behind us and we got there far too early.
CB: Right.
AP: I believe Rusty was on that raid, wasn’t he?
CB: He was. Yes.
AP: Well he would tell you that. I suppose.
CB: Yes. So, in terms of bomb aiming you’ve got the markers sent down. What colour were they and how did you respond?
AP: Either red or green.
CB: Right.
AP: Well we were told, we were told by the Pathfinders which to bomb on, you see. I didn’t, I didn’t like that aspect of flying really because you didn’t know quite what you were going to hit. It could be a hospital, a school. You didn’t know. Whereas with the runup to D-day you had specified military targets and you knew that you weren’t affecting the civilian population. Because I wasn’t at all happy with bombing. I didn’t do the Dresden raid thank goodness but wearing my other cap it seemed so unnecessary to me to have bombed Dresden. It was a beautiful city. I have been back since and they’ve rebuilt it and even so it did seem a great shame to do that at that point in time.
CB: So, in the Nuremberg raid did you get any damage to your aircraft?
AP: No. Luckily, we had a very good run but all around us we saw aircraft going down. Ninety six went down that night. As you know.
CB: Yes.
AP: And we were told, you know, that the Germans were using scarecrows just to frighten us. They weren’t scarecrows they were Lancs blowing up. It’s a horrifying sight to see a Lancaster, you know, completely burning out.
CB: Did you know about Schrage Musik then?
AP: Hmm?
CB: Did you know about the German upward firing Schrage Musik?
AP: Oh yes. Yeah.
CB: At that time?
AP: Well, yes. We had H2S you know. H2S. And we were convinced that they were homing in on that. As soon as we got over the coast. Because that used to give us a picture of the ground on the, on the radar screen —
CB: Yes.
AP: But we were, we were convinced that the Germans were homing in on this. It may not have been the case but it was, it was one constant battle between the fighters and us, you know.
CB: Yes.
AP: We had Window as you know which was metallic strips. That used to help. No. In a way we were very lucky and of course having Geoff Probert, a very senior chap, he was thirty two. In fact, we called him grandad because we were all in our early twenties, you know and he used to keep us in order.
CB: He did.
AP: Yes. He was very good like that.
CB: Yes. What about other members of the crew? What were they like? So, navigator. Who was he?
AP: Tom Mackie. Tom Mackie was the navigator. He did the same sort of training that I did but he just missed out on the observer course and did the NavB and do you know after the war he set up a firm called [pause] and he became a millionaire with his own aircraft. I’ve forgotten the name now.
Other: City Electric.
AP: What?
Other: City Electric.
AP: City Electrical. Which is worldwide. He died about a year ago. Because I was very friendly with Tom. But he had, he had his own aircraft. In fact we flew — I did one or two flights with him after the war. He and it all started with his gratuity. He got in, he got into the motor trade just at the right time and sort of built, sort of built an empire.
CB: So, he was the navigator.
AP: Yeah.
CB: What about your wireless operator signal? Who was that?
AP: He was the one chap — we do know the others have passed on but our wireless operator was [pause] well we just lost, lost track of him. We tried to locate him. Tom, our navigator, used to go to Canada where we thought he was but he could never find him.
CB: What was his name?
AP: Lawrence. Vic Lawrence. He was the wireless operator. Nice guy but we just lost track of him so whether he’s alive or not we just do not know.
CB: What about the flight engineer? Who was that?
AP: Eric. Eric. [pause] the name’s gone. It’ll come back to me.
CB: Was he a busy man in the sorties?
AP: Oh yes. He was nearly a second pilot in a sense. He sat next to the pilot and he adjusted the, he sort of adjusted some of the instruments and on take-off he would hold the throttles open. How stupid, the names gone. When he, when he left the RAF he moved down to the coast near Bournemouth. I saw him a few times after. And he, I’ve got a picture of him up there. His wife was an ATA pilot.
CB: Oh.
AP: She flew aircraft from the factories to the squadrons. Mainly Spitfires of course.
CB: Yeah.
AP: I don’t think women ever flew Lancasters. Not to my knowledge.
CB: A couple of them did.
AP: Pardon?
CB: A couple of them did.
AP: Did they?
CB: Yeah.
AP: Well I don’t know. I was told that it was most unlikely but you say they did.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: It was a big, complicated aircraft to fly — the old Lanc.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. And then your mid-upper. Who was that?
AP: A guy called Bradd. B R A D D. Bradd. What happened was after two raids our original mid-upper gunner went LMF. He couldn’t take it any more after two raids. And I was sent to pick him up. It’s mentioned in this book by John Nicholl. The names are — I’m sorry I should have done more research before you turned up shouldn’t I?
CB: It’s ok. We can look it up. So, what exactly happened to him?
AP: He just didn’t like it. He thought, he thought he wouldn’t survive. Well we all thought we wouldn’t survive really but there we go. We pressed on.
CB: Was he the only one person you met who was an LMF victim as it were?
AP: Yeah. The only one. The only one I met. And then when he left we had a guy come along called Bradd. Dennis Bradd. B R A D D. And when I’d done, when we’d done the tour he hadn’t quite finished his. He had to do some more ops to make up his thirty and unfortunately, he went down two or three trips after which was most unfortunate because he was a nice guy.
CB: And what about the rear gunner?
AP: Yes. He was, he was a bit older than most of us. He was in his late twenties. He survived but he’s passed on now of course.
CB: What was his name?
AP: [pause] Dear me. It’ll come back to me. It’ll come back to me. I just cannot remember at the moment.
CB: Ok. When you were doing your training what sort of people were there in South Africa? Did they tend to be only British people or did people come from other of the Commonwealth countries?
AP: No. The people that trained us were mainly South Africans. South African Air Force
CB: Trained you.
AP: Trained us. And they were very good. I always say that. I think we had a good training in South Africa and of course the weather was good. There was no hold ups with the weather. You could get on with things whereas the guys that trained in this country and Canada had problems with the weather sometimes.
CB: Yeah.
AP: But you see the air gunners joined us on the squadrons. They didn’t have any training really. They were mainly basic. Perhaps with a low education rate — without being unkind. As you know.
CB: Well their role was to run the guns.
AP: Run the guns. Yes.
CB: What do you see their role as being in the aircraft as a crew member? What was their main role?
AP: Well mainly to look out for fighters coming in at us.
CB: So, because they had guns their job was to defend the aircraft. Was that right? How often, in your experience, did they use their guns?
AP: Very seldom. Very seldom.
CB: Why was that?
AP: Well maybe we were lucky. I don’t know. But I think the rear gunner used his guns once and the same with the mid-upper chap that came along.
CB: The one who went LMF, it wasn’t a bad experience of a fighter attack that caused him —
AP: Not at all. No. Not at all. I always remember I had to, I had to go along to a — I was trying to think — it was in the Midlands somewhere. He was being, he was being held at a police station. I can’t remember why. But I had to sign for a live body and I’d never done that before. A live body of the gunner. He was quite a nice guy. He just couldn’t take it. in fact, on the way back we went in to Nottingham to a dance hall and I had a few beers with him, you know and then brought him back to camp and of course as soon as he got back to camp he was whisked, whisked into the guardroom and then they used to tear off the brevets and the sergeant’s stripes and they really went through it you know.
CB: Did they do that in public? On a parade?
AP: Yeah, I did see it happen. There was a place at Coventry where they did that. It was done on parade. It was very dreadful really what they did. In my opinion.
CB: So why did they do that?
AP: Just to set an example really. I mean, in the First World War of course they used to shoot them didn’t they?
CB: Yeah.
AP: Anybody that —
CB: Yeah
AP: At least they didn’t do that. No. You were pretty tough after that training. Well the gunners never had much of a training. I don’t know why he ever became an aircrew member really.
CB: How did he fit? Before he went LMF how did he fit in the crew? Was it fairly obvious that he was —
AP: Well we never had him. You see we never had the gunners for long. We did the basic training with Con Unit, OTUs and then the gunners only came along later on.
CB: So normally the gunners would join at the OTU on the Wellington. Wouldn’t they?
AP: Not they didn’t in the case with myself. No.
CB: Right. Ok.
AP: They joined us later.
CB: Right. At the —
AP: It was just the basic members.
CB: At the Heavy Conversion Unit.
AP: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AP: They joined at the Conversion Unit. Yes.
CB: Yeah. Right.
AP: Yes.
CB: And so, the engineer joined you though at the OTU. Oh no there was no engineer at the OTU because they didn’t —
AP: No. There was no engineer then. No.
CB: The Wellington didn’t have them.
AP: No. They came along at Con Unit. It was just pilot, navigator, bomb aimer. They were the main ones. And the wireless. They were the main ones who joined. Who were there.
CB: Right.
AP: From the word go.
CB: Now, you started off as an AC2. How did your promotion go and why?
AP: Well it was the time. You become a sergeant after, when you pass out. Then after a year you became a flight sergeant.
CB: After a year.
AP: After a year.
CB: Right.
AP: Then you got recommended. Certain of us got recommended for commissions, you see.
AP: Do you know what the basis — what was the basis of the decision for making people —
AP: I don’t know exactly. The CO. The group captain in charge really. No. I never quite know. I got one and the navigator got one and the rear gunner got one. We all got commissions.
CB: So, what was the rear gunner’s strengths that made him suitable?
AP: Do you know I don’t quite know. It was just the fact that he was over thirty by that time I suppose and he was a fairly senior bod and they decided to give him a commission. I can’t think of his name, you know. And I saw him a few times after the war because he lived up in North London somewhere. We had a few meetings together. It’s stupid the way names go isn’t it?
CB: It’ll come back to you later.
AP: It will.
CB: But did you, did you do many things together as a complete crew when you were on 630?
AP: Oh yes. We went out a lot together.
CB: What did you do?
AP: Our favourite pub was the Red Lion at Revesby which was about a five mile cycle ride which we did no trouble at all. And I told you we had this little lady, Pat, who took a shine to me. And she used to sing you know. She used to get up in the pub and sing. She was good like that.
CB: She was the WAAF?
AP: She was a WAAF.
CB: What did she do in the RAF?
AP: Well she was on the reception committees. When you came back she would help make you comfortable. Bring you cups of tea and things. Plenty of cigarettes everywhere which was crazy really but they did. And that’s what she did. They sort of picked the ones who were outgoing types of girls, you know. She was quite outgoing in that respect.
CB: So at the end of a raid how did you feel?
AP: Relieved. Relieved.
CB: So you got down. What was the process? The plane lands. Then what?
AP: Well we had the —
CB: You taxied,
AP: Debriefing of course.
CB: You taxied to dispersal.
AP: Oh yeah.
CB: And then —?
AP: Emptied the, emptied the aircraft out and then we had to be debriefed.
CB: Each one individually?
AP: No. We all sat as a crew with the debriefing officer and one of the girls would be with us. Give us tea and things like that. That’s how I met up with Pat really. Because she used to be doing that sort of work you see. And then we went out together to places like Revesby. It’s not far from — do you know Revesby?
CB: Yeah.
AP: The Red Lion there. It’s still there you know.
CB: Yes.
AP: Just the same.
CB: Yes.
AP: I often called in there when going that way to renew acquaintances. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Yeah. I used to think nothing of cycling five miles then for a drink
CB: And how —
AP: Beer wasn’t easy to get hold up. Decent beer.
CB: Did it run out regularly?
AP: Yeah. And there was one pub we went to they were so short of glasses we drank out of jam jars. I forget which pub it was but I think that was The Plough at East Kirkby. No. The Red Lion at East Kirkby. We did use that very often. That got so crowded. It was so near the ‘drome. We preferred to go out to Revesby.
CB: Right.
AP: We went to Mareham too. That wasn’t too far away.
CB: Now, we’ve talked about the aircrew. We’ve talked about your debriefing. How did the link go with the ground crew? How? Did you liaise with them much or —?
AP: Oh yes, we went out to drinks together but on the whole not too much. No. They didn’t seem to want to be too involved but we did have one or two nights out with them certainly. And during the moon spells you could afford to have drinks. You knew you wouldn’t be called on. The exception being Nuremberg when they did call us out with a full moon but apart from that normally the moon was a quiet period.
CB: Right. And the crew chief. What would he be? Rank.
AP: Corporal or sergeant.
CB: And what was their attitude to the aircraft?
AP: Oh, they looked after their own aircraft. My word they did. They were very proud of it. You know. Keep it serviceable. There were so many, you know, became [pause] not de-serviceable. What’s the word?
CB: A wreck.
AP: Not a wreck exactly but, you know, they had to do a lot of work on them. They kept ours — they kept us flying all the time. That was one good thing. I feel sorry for this present Lanc. They’ve had this engine fire, haven’t they?
CB: Yeah.
AP: And it seems it’s quite a major problem. The air frame’s been affected around the engine mounting.
CB: Oh, has it? Yes.
AP: Yes. So, I’m told. So how long it will before it flies again I do not know. At the same time the Panton is hoping to get Just Jane flying but whether they will or not I don’t know. They say it’s going to cost a lot of money to get the airframe right and to get a certificate of air worthiness. That’s the problem.
CB: Going back to the war experience what was your worst experience on a raid?
AP: Well I wouldn’t say Nuremberg although Nuremberg was bad. I wouldn’t say it was the worst one. I think the worst one was Mailly-le-Camp where we seemed to be buzzing around for ages waiting for things to happen.
CB: This is the Cheshire raid.
AP: Yeah. I don’t blame Cheshire at all. He was a good, he was a good chap. In fact, we did a Munich raid some time afterwards where he took off about two, he took off two hours after we did [laughs] and we flew down to North Italy and then we headed north for Munich and bombed Munich and Cheshire had moved in in the meantime and dropped his flares with a Mosquito. Yes. He was good like that and of course [pause] the Dambuster fellow. He went down in a Mosquito didn’t he?
CB: Gibson. Yes.
AP: Guy Gibson. Couldn’t think of the name for a minute. I hope you’ll pardon me forgetting names.
CB: That’s ok.
AP: As I say these things are affecting me a bit. These.
CB: Could you talk us through your situation as an air bomber because you’re the person looking at the flak coming up. So, at what — so could you talk us through the point the pilot hands over to you. Could you just talk us through what you did? What it was like. How you dealt with it.
AP: Well the air bomber, the air bomber or bomb aimer as some say — the official title is air bomber by the way. His job really was to take over when the bombing site was coming up and to guide the pilot to the markers. And we were told what marker. It was either red or green normally. And of course, we had to, we had to man the guns. I never fired the front guns but they were there if necessary. But we always used to say, ‘Left. Left. Right.’ ‘Left. Left,’ you had to say. You didn’t say left or right. It had to be, ‘Left left.’ Or right. That was one — so that sort of did away with any sort of errors you see. But as I say the bomb aimer saw everything going on more than anybody else. The poor old navigator — he didn’t see a thing. He was behind closed curtains. Probably just as well. He didn’t see a thing. The wireless operator too. But the bomb aimer was there to see everything.
CB: So, what were you actually seeing? Because the run in takes how long?
AP: Oh, it could take anything from thirty minutes to two or three minutes. We were flying, I’ll say one thing about the old Lanc you could get up to about twenty three, twenty four thousand feet and it seemed like ages going in, you know. With flak all around you. It always seemed you could never get through the flak. It always seemed there was a hole in the flak and you were in that hole, you know. Just marching along. We got hit once or twice but only minor stuff.
CB: So, when you’re on the run in the pilot is effectively saying, ‘Over to you.’ Is he?
AP: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: You’re not actually controlling anything yourself but you’re telling him what to do.
AP: Oh no. He’s got the controls to guide the thing. We’re just saying either, ‘Left. Left,’ ‘Right,’ or so on. You know.
CB: And then —
AP: We had, of course, control of all the switch gear. You know, the bomb selector.
CB: Ok. So just talk us through the bomb selection because you had a wide range of ordnance on board so how did that work? There was a sequence.
AP: Well it was pretty much automatic really, you know. Our main bomb load used to be a four thousand pound cookie with incendiaries. And it was all automatic. Once you, once you got over the target you pressed the button and everything worked automatically. And the camera which was in the back of the aircraft which we didn’t like. That was phosphor bomb.
CB: So, there was a sequence that the bombs left.
AP: Yeah.
CB: What was the sequence?
AP: Well the cookie normally went first. The four thousand pounder. Followed by the incendiaries. We did have raids where we had fourteen one thousand pound bombs but normally on the mass bombing it was to cause fires which I didn’t go much on to be quite frank. But there again it was a, that was the way it was directed we should fight the war.
CB: Right. So, the cookie was non, it wasn’t aerodynamic. It was just a cylinder so —
AP: Like a big dustbin. Yeah.
CB: What did it do? It was a blast bomb.
AP: A blast bomb. Yeah. That blasted everything so the incendiaries would come along and set fire to the blasting but there were so many bombs being dropped I don’t think they made much difference really. And we were given a time to, we were given, different squadrons had different times to approach the target you see.
CB: Right.
AP: And the Pathfinders [pause] they would, you know, they would direct the bombers to what they thought was relevant at the time. Yeah.
CB: So, the Pathfinders were circling. Or the master bomber was circling. Giving instruction was he?
AP: They — I wouldn’t say they would. They used to go in first and mark the target but I don’t think they hung about. It wasn’t healthy to hang about.
CB: I meant the master bomber would stay and watch. Would he?
AP: In the mass raids — no. In the more selective raids like Munich and some of the other raids he’d be there all the time. But on the mass raids early on, the Berlins, it was just a question of the Pathfinders coming in, marking the target and then getting the hell out of it.
CB: So what heights were you normally, normally delivering your load?
AP: Twenty one, twenty three thousand. Yeah. Pretty high really. We were above the Halifaxes and Stirlings. I always felt sorry for the Stirlings. That’s why I quite liked meeting that friend of yours.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Because how he survived I do not know but he did didn’t he?
CB: Extraordinary.
AP: Did he do a full raid?
CB: He did. So I’ll cover that with you later. But the air bomber bit is interesting because we don’t necessarily have much detail on that and so that’s why I’m just asking you a bit more about it. And —
AP: Yeah. Well, as I say, it varied over the course of my time you see. First of all it was mass bombing, then more selective bombing and then pinpoint bombing as we approached D-day you see. The whole character of the thing was changing actually.
CB: So, when, when you did the pinpoint bombing. Was that with markers?
AP: No.
CB: ‘Cause a lot of it’s daylight isn’t it?
AP: No. No. Not daylight at all. No. No. We had to do it by map reading and —
CB: Ok.
AP: There were no markers then. No.
CB: No. ‘Cause we’re talking, for you we’re talking we’re talking pre-D-Day.
AP: On some day there were only two squadrons. Only twenty or thirty aircraft, you see.
CB: Yeah.
AP: That was, they were the interesting raids really. They were the raids I preferred because we knew then that we were bombing specific targets to the, for the good of the army. And we were trying to upset the German transport movements.
CB: Yeah. So, going back to you’ve released your bombs. You’ve got a camera and then there’s a flash that goes down.
AP: There’s a flash. Yeah.
CB: Does that, how does the timing work for that? Do you set it as the bomber aimer?
AP: That, again, is all automatic.
CB: So —
AP: We didn’t, we didn’t like the phosphor bombs because I mean, if they hang up they were deadly you know.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Did you have them at all?
CB: I know what you mean. Yeah.
AP: They were at the back of the aircraft.
CB: Yeah.
AP: By the toilet.
CB: Right.
AP: But as I say they would drop automatically and then they were timed to go off to take the photos as the bomb, as the bomb exploded.
CB: Because the time of their firing would depend on how high you were.
AP: Yes. It was all, it was all done automatically you know by the, by the experts shall we say.
CB: So, what was the purpose of the camera?
AP: I frankly don’t know. It seemed to me to be a bit unnecessary but at least it proved you’d been there. There was a danger you see, I suppose that some crews may not have even have bombed the target. And that was proof you’d been there. Oh, I got some good aiming point photographs. I think that’s why they awarded me the old DFC. We got some good aiming point photographs.
CB: At what point did you receive the award of DFC?
AP: After the, after the tour. They analysed things you know and we’d had a good record of aiming point photographs.
CB: Who else in the crew?
AP: The pilot did. And myself. I thought Tom MacKay, the navigator should have had one because he was very good chap. In fact, he flew, when Gwen was ill he flew her out to Switzerland twice you know to try and get her better treatment but it didn’t work. She had Parkinson’s. But he knew somebody in Switzerland, in Geneva who he thought might help her because he lived out there for a time. And he arranged, he had his own, as I say he had his own aircraft and we flew her out there a couple of times but it wasn’t to be.
CB: When you came off operations you now went on to training other people you said.
AP: Yeah.
CB: What was that like in contrast?
AP: A jaywalk really. There wasn’t a lot to do really, you know. We had to find, we had to find time. We had to sort of find jobs to do really because although we were helping to train other people we were doing compass swings and things like that. We were back on Ansons and it all seemed a bit airy fairy after Lancasters but it had to be. You know, we were training. We were sending out the new crews coming along.
CB: Was there a sense of relief doing it or was it just boring?
AP: A bit of both. A bit of both.
CB: So, when you came to be demobbed how did you feel about that?
AP: Well I was demobbed, of course, from Palestine. And that’s when I mentioned I was flown in a Dakota back to Heathrow which was just a series of huts in those days. We had a good long run. They paid us for a good long holiday. Two or three months I think. Then I went on to Oxford, you see.
CB: How did you come to meet your future wife, Gwen?
AP: I was in the Royal Air Force then.
CB: What was she?
AP: She wasn’t in the air force. No. She wasn’t Royal Air Force. The other girl I had, that I knew, was Pat. She was with me at the Operational Training Unit but I’d finished by the time I went to North Wales.
CB: By the time you finished your tour did you feel short changed for not doing thirty or was there a sense of relief?
AP: Well it was a sense of relief I think. We were quite badly quite shot up on that. We were mine laying you see in [pause] we were mine laying in — what’s the name of the port.
CB: Brest.
AP: We were attacked by a JU88.
CB: And what height would you be flying for mine laying?
AP: Oh we were quite low. We were quite low. I’m trying to think what [pause] what was the first question you asked me?
CB: What? The sense of relief? I asked you earlier what your worst experience was.
AP: Well that was one of the worst. Yes. [pause] Kiel Bay. I couldn’t think of the word. Kiel Bay.
CB: Where’s that.
AP: We were laying mines in Kiel Bay.
CB: Where’s that? Oh, outside Kiel.
AP: Kiel. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: Kiel Bay. I couldn’t think of the words for a minute. You see, I mean, despite the ops we had one or two occasions where we boomeranged. You know, something went wrong with the aircraft and we had to return. It happened to the guy who died a few weeks ago. The New Zealand, the New Zealand Dambuster fellow.
CB: Yeah.
AP: He had to, he had come back because he had a hit and his compass was put out of action. And we had one or two cases like that.
CB: Les Munro.
AP: Yes, I couldn’t think. Len Munro. Yeah.
CB: Les. Yeah.
AP: Les Munro I meant. I met him a few times.
CB: Did you?
AP: A nice guy he was.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Did you ever meet him?
CB: He was over recently. I never met him but he was.
AP: I met him at Aces High two or three times. He had his girlfriend with him. He’d lost his wife but he had a lady companion who was very pleasant. She used to help him but he was pretty active right to the end. Well, I didn’t see him at the end of course. As I say there was cases too when you would get all ready to go. All the build-up and everything and then it would be cancelled. All that sort of getting ready. Nearly all, not all day but you had to do a night flying test before where everybody went up and flew for about half an hour and tested everything and then you’d come back and then go to briefing. So that was all part of the game but those didn’t count.
CB: Was that a frustration?
AP: Frustration really. Yes. Having spent the whole afternoon or a bit longer getting ready and then to find it was cancelled. That happened a few times and that didn’t count.
CB: So, what was the atmosphere before you went on the raid amongst the crew?
AP: The atmosphere. It’s a job to pinpoint it really Chris. We were all a bit apprehensive I suppose really. A bit apprehensive. Is it recording? But some of the crews used to have a pee on to the — on to — what was it now? There were different ways people had to let off steam. We all had our little [pause] I had a little St Christopher I always took with me. Geoff, the pilot, had a scarf. And I remember one raid, we were ready to take off and he’d forgotten his scarf. Luckily, he had his motorbike with him and he shot off to the billets, got his scarf and came back. It made us a bit late but he was determined he wouldn’t fly without his scarf. We all had these little [pause] what’s the word? Keepsakes.
CB: Did everybody do that?
AP: Lucky charms.
CB: Yeah. Lucky charms. Did everybody?
AP: Yeah most had. I had a little St Christopher which I’ve lost now but I did have one and I always made sure I had it.
CB: And when the tour was over was there a feeling that you would get together at some stage afterwards or was there just an acceptance that you were being disbursed?
AP: There was just an acceptance. That’s the problem really. You were sort of lived together for six months. You were living together, you know and then you suddenly break up and everybody goes their own way. And we didn’t all get together afterwards. We tried. Geoff Probert, my skipper, he went to Hatfield and I never did see him. We tried to meet up once or twice and we never did. Then he went up to Sheffield and he died fairly young. ‘Cause he was older than the rest of us. So getting together was a problem. I did reach some of the guys afterwards but you see after the war you really had to forget all about it and I did for about five or six years. Going to Oxford you had to get your head down and get down to studies and you more or less forgot all about the war. It’s only now, in latter years, that we begin to think about it again.
CB: But did, what did you feel the general public’s attitude was to people who had been effectively on the front line? After the war.
AP: Well, as I say I didn’t really think too much about it then. I think people were quite sympathetic to what we had done. Some people thought we were having, having it too cushy. At least one thing — we came back to white sheets. We didn’t sleep in dirty, muddy trenches which I would have hated. We came back to a decent bed after a raid and we were looked after.
CB: Yeah.
AP: With our eggs and bacon.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Which no one else could get.
CB: No.
AP: That was a great relief to have eggs and bacon and that type of thing. So some people thought that aircrew and submarine people had been molly coddled but we had a fairly dangerous job to do.
CB: A final question then. You’ve touched on it already. How did you feel about what you were doing in actually aiming — effectively aiming the aircraft and dropping the bombs?
AP: How did I feel?
CB: Each time.
AP: I didn’t like the area bombing because you never quite knew where your bombs were landing. I was always a bit perturbed about that. I had that in my mind you know but we had a job to do. And they started the bombing first so we had to sort of — they bombed Coventry and London didn’t they? But as I say towards the end of the war with the bombing — the run up to D-day it was a different cup of tea really.
CB: Yeah. And was your bomb sight — what was that like?
AP: The Mk 14.
CB: Yeah. Were you happy with that or —?
AP: Oh yes. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Of course they’ve improved no end now. In fact, if you when you’ve got time I’ll take you to the Trenchard Museum at Halton where they’ve got some of the old Mk 14 bomb sights. You want to go to go there, you know.
CB: We will. The Americans claimed that their bomb sights were so much better for accuracy. That’s why I ask the question.
AP: I think ours was pretty good. We got some good aiming point photographs. The Americans may have been better because they did their daylight stuff didn’t they? Mark you they did catch a pasting didn’t they? On some of these daylight raids. Didn’t they?
CB: Absolutely.
AP: Yeah.
CB: Well, we’ve done really well Alan. Thank you so much. I’m going to stop the tape now and we’ll have —
AP: I’m sorry. I should have done genned up with this. There are things I forgot didn’t I?
[Recording paused]
CB: Hang on. Just as an extra then Alan. We talked about Pat and I wonder first of all when you went on a raid what was the reaction of the WAAFs as you set off?
AP: Well there was a great deal of cooperation. I think they felt that, you know, most of the crews knew a WAAF somewhere down the line and they were invariably at the end of the runway to wave us as we went off. Without them we’d have missed it. They weren’t there when we came back of course. They were all in the debriefing huts waiting for us to come back. But no, they cooperated. I think they realised what we were doing and I felt that their presence helped a heck of a lot.
CB: So, in terms of Pat she clearly was a major factor in your life then.
AP: During that time. Yes. During that time, she was. Helped to take off the stress off the bombing ‘cause we used to go for cycle rides and things together, you know and she’d come out drinking with us. And she used to sing. She had quite a good voice. I don’t know where she learned to sing but she used to get up and sing. She was a bit, sort of outgoing in that respect. There aren’t many girls who would get up in the pub and sing are there?
CB: Probably not. But how did this break up in time?
AP: What?
CB: This relationship you had with her.
AP: Well we didn’t — when I got posted away of course, I mean, I couldn’t keep up with meeting all the time and I suppose we did write for a time of course and gradually I suppose the letters got less and less and it just faded away but I often wonder what happened. Even now I often wonder if she’s alive still.
CB: In your experience with 630 Squadron Association are there any people who were ground crew personnel who have been members or did it tend only to be aircrew?
AP: It’s funny that you should say that. I met a, we had a meeting at Aces High with Bomber Command and there was a WAAF there who was a driver at East Kirkby. She lives now in Bournemouth and she was there with her son. I didn’t know her at the time but she told me she was on transport. You know they used to drive the crews out to the aircraft and she was doing that. Well, she’s older than me. She was ninety three I think she told me. So that’s one case but there aren’t many of the old WAAFs turn up.
CB: No.
AP: We do see — now who was, who was the inventor of the bouncing bomb, now.
CB: Barnes Wallis.
AP: Her —
CB: His daughter.
AP: His daughter comes along. You’ve met her have you? She often comes along with — oh [pause] the last remaining bomb aimer. I saw him the other day. His name is gone now. He was up at East Kirkby. Johnny Johnson. He’s written a book. The farmer’s boy he was, wasn’t he? Have you read the book?
CB: I haven’t. no. But he —
AP: Oh, I’ve got it. I haven’t read it. I gave it to my other son because he was a farmer. Johnny Johnson.
CB: Ok. That’s really good. Thank you very much.
[recording paused]
CB: One more question now, Alan. People tend to have an affection not just for lucky charms but for aircraft so were you normally with the same plane? Or what was the situation?
AP: We were normally with the same plane. Yes. There were occasions of course when we didn’t have the same plane. But it was always nice to have the same plane. And LEY was ours. LEY.
CB: And if you flew in another one how did you feel?
AP: Oh, it didn’t really bother me too much but it was just nice to know you had your own aircraft.
CB: Because they tend to have specific characteristics.
AP: I suppose they do, really. Yes. Yeah.
CB: Ok. Thank you.
[recording paused]
CB: Ok.
AP: Well there was a survey party had got lost in the Sahara and they asked for volunteers to go and find it. Well, they had a sort of point where they thought he was and we had to make for that and then we started to do a square search based on the visibility. And we found it and they waved to us and we radio’d back where they were. But that’s just one little thing we did and we had to volunteer for that. We had this note that these people were lost in the desert.
CB: Yeah. A practical humanitarian task.
AP: Well yeah. Yeah.
CB: Let me just take you back to that JU88 encounter because that could have been fatal.
AP: Oh easy. So easy.
CB: So what happened? What height were you etcetera and how did he find you? And —
AP: Well it just happened. We were sailing along and all of a sudden these bursts burst of cannon fire all around us. I mean the rear gunner should have seen him really but he never saw him and I think he was — he wasn’t underneath us. He was behind us. Normally the idea was to come up from the underside.
CB: Yeah.
AP: And fire in to the petrol tanks.
CB: Yes. Yeah. So the, so the gunner — he was coming from behind and the gunner didn’t see.
AP: Didn’t see him. No.
CB: What was the — in the dark this was.
AP: In the dark, oh yes.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, he starts firing so the shells are exploding is that right?
AP: Yeah.
CB: Then — then what happened?
AP: Well there weren’t many shells actually. In fact, you know, we thought he would come back because the plane had caught fire. Luckily it went out. And we honestly thought he would come back for another go but he didn’t. I think he thought he’d got us and that was it. And old Geoff, the pilot put it into a steep dive and started to corkscrew and we lost the JU88.
CB: So, the corkscrew might have been the solution.
AP: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: But what happened to the strikes? Where were the strikes on the aircraft? On your plane.
AP: Well, as I say one was on the rear turret and the other side and one in the wing but apart from, it didn’t really do any sort of damage structurally. Although one caused a fire, you see. And one —
CB: Where was the fire?
AP: I’ve got a picture of this machine gun. The machine gun is all bent over where the shell hit it. And the rear gunner — he was jolly lucky to be alive. He really was.
CB: So, let me get this straight the shell hits the rear turret. In the gun.
AP: It hit the end of the gun. It was remarkable. It really was.
CB: And the gunner wasn’t injured.
AP: No. He wasn’t hurt. He was sort of knocked out, you know. He was semi, he was sort of, you know, the blast sort of knocked him out temporarily. He was sort of muttering away, you know, half in and half out but he came around and we still had the mines on board, you know. That was another thing. We didn’t jettison. We went on and dropped them afterwards ‘cause when he attacked we were still going in on to the target, you see. In to the bay, Kiel bay. And that was our twenty ninth raid. And I think the CO, Wing Commander [Dee?] saw we’d had enough. ‘Oh, you can stand down now,’ he said.
CB: After. After that. Yes. So, you dropped your mines successfully.
AP: Yeah, we dropped the mines.
CB: What height would you drop a mines from? ‘Cause you can’t do it from height ‘cause it’ll break.
AP: No. You can’t do it from height. No.
CB: So what height were you dropping?
AP: I think we must have been about twelve thousand feet. Something like that. Yeah. A long time ago now. You tend to forget these things don’t you?
CB: Sure. Yeah. Thanks.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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APayneAJ150811
Title
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Interview with Alan Payne
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:21:03 audio recording
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Pending review
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2015-08-11
Description
An account of the resource
Alan Payne was born in Wendover, Buckinghamshire. He volunteered for aircrew with the Royal Air Force and after initial training was sent to South Africa where he trained as an observer. When he returned to the UK, he was allocated the role of bomb aimer and after joining a crew he was posted to 630 Squadron at RAF East Kirkby. His first operation was to Berlin. He describes the operation to Mailly-le-Camp as one of his worst experiences with Bomber Command. Returning from an operation on Nuremberg his aircraft was attacked by an Me 109 and on their last operation mine laying off Kiel they were attacked by a Ju 88. After his tour Alan became an instructor before being posted to Palestine. When he was demobbed he undertook training at Oxford University to become an architect.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
South African Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
South Africa
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Kiel
Temporal Coverage
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1944-05-03
1944-05-04
Contributor
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Julie Williams
630 Squadron
aerial photograph
aircrew
Anson
bomb aimer
bombing
Bombing of Mailly-le-Camp (3/4 May 1944)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
coping mechanism
crewing up
debriefing
Distinguished Flying Cross
ground crew
ground personnel
H2S
Halifax
Ju 88
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Me 109
military living conditions
mine laying
Nissen hut
observer
RAF Dumfries
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Silverstone
RAF Torquay
RAF Turweston
RAF Winthorpe
Scarecrow
superstition
target photograph
training
Wellington
Window
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/325/3484/ASaundersAC170201.2.mp3
1fb4c24cc9bd7c60d04ffe2634fa1ca5
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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Saunders, Sandy
Arthur Courtenay Saunders
Arthur C Saunders
Arthur Saunders
A C Saunders
A Saunders
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. The collection consists of a log book, an oral history interview and extensive medical records as well as photographs and a report. Dr Arthur Courtenay "Sandy" Saunders (1922-2017, 295329 Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) received extensive burns after an aircraft crash in September 1945 and underwent experimental maxillo-facial surgery, as a member of the Guinea-pig Club.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Sandy Saunders 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
2017-02-01
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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Saunders, AC
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today I’m in Burton Lazars talking with Doctor Arthur Saunders, Sandy Saunders, about his experiences in the Forces and in later life. Sandy, what do you remember in your earliest days?
AS: Not much, er, I was born in Bootle, Liverpool, and the third of four children and I had a quite a contented childhood. I went to a church school in the — in Bootle and, er, that was Christ Church School and then I got a scholarship at eleven to Bootle Secondary School, which was in fact a grammar school. It’s still going strong as Bootle Grammar School and, er, I managed to get a, a scholarship to do a science degree. I, I had had early feelings that I wanted to do, to do medicine but I didn’t get sufficient grades in my scholarship to, to get the five year grant. Anyway I got a sixty pounds a year scholarship and I did a — I started a, a science degree. It was a physics department run by a Professor Rotblat (R O T B L A T) who later became a — he went to Cambridge and was one of the developers of the atom bomb. He was a nuclear, nuclear physicist and, er, in 1941 I heard of a, er, a short service commission in REME for radar, radar officers so I applied for that and I, er, went into the Army and did my usual boots training and I was commissioned as a lieutenant in REME in, in 1940, ’40, ‘43, and I did two years as a radar officer, lieutenant in REME, and, er, it was straightforward work. It was working on various gun sites round the country and, er, calibrating the gun laying radar and — but it was very remote from enemy action and I suppose I was quite excited by the operations that were going on in Europe. 1941 there was the Pegasus Bridge Operation and that seemed really exciting and then there was Arnhem in 1943 and, and, er, I had a yearning to join the Glider Pilot Regiment. I applied for a transfer to the Glider Pilot Regiment in early 1945 and after the various medical checks and interviews and psychological checking and all the, the rest of the palaver I, I went off to, er, the battle course at Fargo camp in Sal— Salisbury and, er, did that and it was quite exciting, this kind of commando course, because of course glider pilots were soldiers and once the landed they were operational fighting troops. And then I went off to Booker Airfield near High Wycombe and did my ETFS, Elementary Flying Training School, and I did about seventy-five hours on flying Tiger Moths and I was — I passed out as a pilot of average ability. I'd done all sorts of exciting things. I did solo night flying and aerobatics, and recovery from stalls and all sorts of things. And it was great and I loved the flying and then I was sent off to a, to a conversion course to gliders, with the intention of becoming a pilot of, of — the war as over by this time by the way and I went off to, um, an airfield in, in Warwickshire and, er, I did some training on the gliders. They were — the gliders they used were, were Hotspurs. It was a smaller version of the, of the, er, troop carrying gliders, towed off by DC3s and, er, as part of the training I had to do I was sent off on a navigation exercise. We had the Link trainer and that gave us our basic navigation skills and, er, I was sent off, on a training triangular flight. I hadn’t flown a Tiger Moth since I was at Booker a month or two before and, er, the — I was instructed to take off on the grass runway. At, at this airfield there was only one runway and that, that was occupied by gliders and tower aircraft so I was asked to take off on the outer wind strip which was ninety degrees out of wind. So I took off with a, a corporal in the front cockpit to do the navigation and, er, there was no problem taking off and I did the triangular flight and it took about probably twenty-five or thirty minutes. I returned to the airfield and, er, I had to land on this grass strip. There were no, no other aircraft in sight and I attempted to land and I had to side slip in because the wind was obviously increased and, er, I had to side slip but coming out it seemed like an angle of about thirty degrees. I thought it was unsafe to put the wheels down and so decided to go round again and I made a circuit, same thing, and I went — I opened the throttle and went round again, did another circuit of the airfield, circuit and bumps they used to say, and on the third attempt, er, I don’t know, probably the lack of experience, I, er, made a late decision to, to go round again and by this time feeling rather fraught. In charge of an aircraft, you’ve got no contact with the control tower and there’s no radio because it’s an open cockpit two-seater plane and, er, I opened the throttle, went to go round again, and found I was going towards some trees and I pulled the stick back to get over the trees and I overcooked it and went into a stall and, of course, then everything goes floppy. You’re, you’re out of control and, er, I — the plane just dropped in a stall, hit the ground rather hard and I was knocked out. I, I presumed that my head had hit the control panel, the instrument panel and, er, by some miracle I, I was wakened by the flames all round. I was obviously on fire and, er, the survival instinct kicked in. Shut my eyes tightly. I think my goggles had been knocked off in the, in the crash and, er, I managed to undo my harness, again instinctive, and climbed out over the starboard side of the aircraft and dropped to the ground and next thing I knew I was in hospital. The, er, the corporal in the front seat must have been killed instantly. I flew in a Tiger Moth last month. The BBC arranged it. They were doing a documentary. I think the film was last Monday, Monday of last week and, er, I was in the front cockpit during that flight and I must say that I had a momentary flash of grief. I get, I get nightmares even now, flashback nightmares, fortunately not so often nowadays but it, it always contained this grief about the navigator in the front seat. What he must have felt when the plane stalled God knows. You’ve only fractions of a second to think about it before you die. So anyway, it’s, er, a rather pathetic story of, of crashing a plane but, you know, there’s no drama to it. I ended, I ended up in the Guinea Pig Club. You know there were thirty-four Spitfire and Hurricane pilots who’d taken part in the Battle of Britain. They, they’d sustained their burns in act—action and, er, I just got mine from a training accident. It’s a — yeah but it was wonderful when I got to East Grinstead eventually. That was in 19— the end of 1946. I was in hospital in Birmingham for, for a year and they did my, my resuscitation and the initial grafting and, er, I had really horrific disfigurement and, anyway, I was under a general surgeon there. He’d done a course in — at East Grinstead and he did my initial facial reconstruction. He gave me four new eye lids and, er, at the end of a year I was back on duty, light duties, non-combatant duties, in REME. I was — they were mainly in central workshops and then I was, I was posted as second in command of a prisoner of war camp in Derbyshire. And it was there that the medical officer checked me over. I, I couldn’t close my eyes properly and I got recurrent infections and, and it was he who suggested that I see the national expert in burns surgery at East Grinstead and, er, I went there in late 1946 and, er, McIndoe looked at me and he offered, he offered further help. He said, ‘You need four new eyelids and reconstruction of your nose and some work around face and,’ he said, ‘Come in tomorrow and check into Ward 3 and I’ll do some work on your eyelids in the morning.’ [slight laugh] And from then on it was just a matter of recurrent operations and recovery time, and I applied to get in to Liverpool Medical School and was successful, and I started at Medical School in, in September 1947. I was still having operations at that time and, er, I did, I did the five years training, qualified in 1952. So that was five years at Medical School which were pretty wonderful. I, I was living at home. My parents, they’d been bombed out twice during the war. Do you know, in 1941 I was at — I’d been evacuated to Southport and I went home for the weekend, May 1941, and that, that weekend Liverpool was heavily bombed, particularly Bootle with its docks and I was a Rover Scout and I’d, I’d been given the privilege of working in a rescue squad and I went out on duty and, er, had — we went over to houses near the, the South Park, digging people out of bombed houses. I went back to the bunker and there was another call out so I was first, first out of the bunker and there was a scream of bombs, you know, the usual [whistle]. I threw myself flat and there was huge explosions and I was picked up between two bomb craters and I had bomb, er, splinter wounds across my buttocks, and my — one in my leg, and one in my foot and I was sent off to Ormskirk Hospital in a pick-up truck. I spent only ten days there for — while the lacerations healed up. But I thought then — I was, I was eighteen and I, er, I was thinking then deep thoughts about mortality. You know, I, I went camping one, one night in a pop tent [background noise], a camouflaged pop tent, in Lancashire. And I remember lying with my head out up through the, through the flaps of the tent, looking up at the Milky Way and thinking about eternity, and I thought, ‘God in — I’m eighteen. In fifty-two years’ time I’ll be sixty.’ Did I get the calculation right? ‘Well, I’ll be sixty and probably dead.’ And [slight laugh] started thinking about philosophical thoughts of mortality. Anyway, it was wonderful to recover and qualify — I think I got the dates wrong about Medical School. 1941 was the bomb— bombings and I was still at school then. It was 1943 I went to, to the, er, science department in Liverpool. Yeah, my parents had a bad time, you know, with moving house and my, my father pulling out what remained of the carpets and then refitting them in, in the next house and he was wonderful. He’d been, he’d been in the Army in the First World War and he was posted to the North West Frontier of India and, er, he became an interpreter. He could speak Hindi and Pashto and Urdu and, er, I suppose that was my, my inspiration towards a, an Army career. Yes, he survived the — his three years in the, in the Army but he was on quinine for three years and that made him profoundly deaf so he had difficulty getting a job. He was — he got a job as a grocer’s assistant but he was a wonderful chap. He, he was very good on DIY, you know, he used to mend our shoes and he made my Christmas presents. He made me a boat and an aeroplane and all sorts of things. Wonderful, wonderful people in the 1940s. It was — talk about resilience. What my mother must have gone through, you know, with the being bombed out and my injuries. And my daughter, my sister, was in the Army. She, she was, er, posted to Italy with the invasion there. And my brother, my younger brother, he was in the merchant navy at sixteen. He was a, he was a wireless operator on a merchant ship. He was at the beaches on D-Day delivering troops. Yeah, very exciting times. Anyway my, my story is really the Guinea Pig Club. It’s a — the Guinea Pig Club was really the making of me because, you know, there were six, six hundred and forty-nine members who’d, who’d been burned, some of them horrendously. Some of them had — I had twenty-eight operations in my — at the two hospitals but some of them had sixty operations or more and they, they were all cheerful, resilient people and, you know, these were the bravest of the brave and, and being a fellow member was really such a privilege and that’s what, that’s probably what drove me, as I was getting on in life, to propose this memorial to the Club. There’s a big memorial to McIndoe at East Grinstead. It’s an eight foot statue with — which, er, the town had erected and — but that was to McIndoe, the medical services, but I wanted one to the Guinea Pig Club, the Club, its six hundred and forty-nine members to — as a memorial to, to what they went through and the stone mason, the stone mason designed a quite a moving tribute. I was going to pay for it myself but my wife, Maggie, started a campaign, a fund raising campaign and, er, she managed to raise enough money to pay for it. But, er, my — I said in my speech to the Duke of Edinburgh that my intention in, in [pause] arranging the memorial was that as a [pause] it was repayment of a debt of honour really for the, er, medical expertise that had brought me back to health and for the enormous psychological support I got from the other members of the Club, who really altered, altered my attitude and personality and, er, really gave me the ambition to get well again. So, er, that’s my story.
CB: Thank you. Did, um, you, as part of the treatment at East Grinstead, did they have psychiatrists there?
AS: No psychiatrists. There, there was no psychological support at all except from the encouragement of McIndoe who said, ‘I can help you to get back to a normal, normal life, physically.’ And — but it was, it was the members of the Club really. Their attitude was so optimistic and there was black humour, you know, but everyone was cheerful and up — uplifting. You know, I, while I was having my eyes, eyelids grafted you had to lie in bed for, for a couple of weeks with your face covered so you couldn’t see. To one side I had Dinty Moore, who was a bomber pilot, and his story was amazing. He, he took off in a, in a new Halifax and — with a full load of fuel and a full load of bombs bound for Germany and he, er, he found after take-off that he was having difficulty climbing and the flaps had, had stayed down and, and, er, the undercarriage wouldn’t wind up and then the right starboard engine, the starboard outer engine, wouldn’t feather and, and he had to cut, cut the engine, so he had managed to get to two thousand feet and then he had that awful decision, what to do next? So he decided to fly on and ditch in the North Sea. He’d taken off from South Yorkshire somewhere [background noise] but I’ve got this story in print and the, er, outer port engine caught fire and he had very great difficulty maintaining height so he decided that he had to do — he had to land, you know, at night over the fields of Norfolk and in the dark. He had a full load of bombs and fuel. Anyway he landed and the right wing hit a farmhouse and the right side of the fuselage was torn out and the plane was on fire but he managed to get out somehow. And he became a Guinea Pig and went back to a normal life. Christ! All the decisions, all the decisions you have to make. What could be more horrifying than that? Did you see the film about the landing on the, on the river in New York? That —
CB: I’m due to see it soon.
AS: I’ve seen it and, you know, the pilot had a fraction of a second to make a decision whether to go back to the airfield or carry on to the river. Christ! It’s such an enormous responsibility. Anyway it was meeting people like that that, er, really gave me my destiny. I’ve had a wonderful life.
CB: So after medical school what did you do?
AS: I went into, into general practice. I was in hospitals in Liverpool for a year or so as house, house, surgeon, house physician and, er, one of the — the chap who was the — he was a physician at Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital in Birmingham who, who befriended me and he telephoned me to say there was a General Practice job going in Nottingham, was I interested? Well I was quite open minded about what career I should take at that stage. And I went to Nottingham and had an interview with the Practice and they took me on as an assistant with a view — and from there I went on to another — I didn’t get that Practice so through the, er, through the Family Practitioner Committee I, I got a chance of another Practice and I was there for forty years. Amazing. But it was a career that I thoroughly enjoyed. Of course, I had to practice for the sense of dedication and, er, it was a great advantage to me because I really enjoyed doing, doing the work. God, it was hard work. It was like “Call the Midwife” stuff, you know. We booked a hundred women a year for home confinement. I did all the work, you know. If a patient needed a blood test you just got out a syringe and did it on the spot. And, er, if they needed any other examinations you felt you had to do it yourself. It was really — I didn’t have any staff. It was me and my fountain pen. It was a partnership of three with an elderly, elderly man at the head and he eventually retired and he offered me the sale of his house and I — then I went through various life crises, you know, the mid-life crisis and the marriage folded up and — but I battled on and [pause] yes, it’s amazing how life experience affects your person— personality and attitudes. And here I am at ninety-four, quite content with life, wonderful wife.
CB: Where did you meet Maggie?
AS: Over a bridge table. My second marriage folded up, er, in 2000. I, I’d been living apart from my wife in the same house but she was playing up with other men and I eventually divorced and, and I settled here, next door actually. I got it, I got it through a house agency in Melton Mowbray. I was living there with my dog for the next ten years and then I used to have a, a bridge group on Wednesday evenings. They were all women and, er, Maggie was one of them. She was married and had children and I’d, I’d already decided never to have anything to do with women again after my second marriage experience. And I was living there quite happily and Maggie’s husband died about nine years ago and I realised that I was living apart, she was living apart and we kind of chummed up and the — it became quite intense and we married seven, seven years ago, and then the lady here died and I bought this house and this, this is the ultimate in down-sizing [slight laugh]. You know, doctors usually have big houses and I had a farm house with my second wife, with big farm house and a few acres, and we ran horses for her children. We were quite happy there until she started playing up and — but I’ve been happy here. It’s a tiny, tiny bungalow but it’s just, just idyllic.
CB: You don’t need a lot of space do you?
AS: Well it’s ideal for elderly people to have very little. You can only sit in one chair at a time and [slight laugh] three meals a day and wonderful entertainment from TV and —
CB: How many children have you got?
AS: I’ve got — I had three. I’ve got two, two now. Angela, my younger daughter, she studied medicine at Southampton and she, she was a GP and she was a medical officer of a hospice in Somerset, Yeovil, and she developed a, a sarcoma in her pelvis and in four weeks, five weeks she was dead.
CB: Was she?
AS: Yeah, and she was nursed in her own hospice. That was a dreadful time to go through.
CB: How old was she?
AS: Fifty-two. Yeah, and I suppose it was her death that, um, prompted Maggie and I to decide on marriage. So, er, we’ve been very very happy. My dog died and — yeah, me and my dog next door, I thought that was wonderful and, you know, when I was eighty I thought, ‘I’m getting on in my life and I’m alone with my dog.’ And [cough] I decided — sailing was my hobby. I had a boat [cough] and I sailed it round from its base at Woolverstone on the River Orwell and I sailed it round to Falmouth and I used to go off cruising, um, with a friend and we sailed down it down to the Marbella [?] and Bay of Biscay and [cough] all over the place and I sailed all the North Sea, you know, Germany and Holland and Belgium and all over the place for years and, er, when I was in my late seventies I decided that my ambition was to do the Atlantic crossing so I got a crew job on a, on a Westerly Ocean, Ocean Wanderer and I got into the North Sea Race in November 2002. Yes, I was eighty. I had my eightieth birthday halfway across. We went across from Gran Canaria over to St Lucia and I flew back and continued my life with my dog. And then, do you know, when I was eighty-four I thought, ‘God I’m really old now. I’d better make arrangement for my funeral.’ So I bought, bought a grave at the — in a churchyard a hundred yards up the hill there and made arrangements and then, er, Maggie came along.
CB: Your salvation.
AS: Yes?
CB: Your salvation.
AS: My salvation. I’ve had an incredible, incredible happy life. It’s been wonderful.
CB: What about your other two children?
AS: My, my son became a doctor. He was a GP but he fell foul of, er, drugs. He went onto opiates while he still a doctor and I think he’d some experience with a dying patient, you know, and I think he had some mental aberration. He went onto morphia himself and eventually ended up in a court case and then after an interval I got him a job in — with one of my ex-trainees in Nottingham. And from drugs he went onto drink and he became a, an alcoholic and he also lost his job and had court cases and driving offences and all sorts and, er, the day before we married I rang him to see if he could get to the funeral. I’d, I’d paid for therapy for him on several occasions but he always relapsed and he — the turning point for him was my daughter’s death. He, er, he came down to — by train to Somerset to the funeral and he was living in a hostel at that time, a hostel where they did a breathalyser test every evening and, er, if you, if you didn’t pass the breathalyser you were chucked out. Anyway he came down and Maggie and I took him to the station in, in Somerset to get him back to Derby and, er, he must, he must have, with his daughter’s, his sister’s death it must have affected him, and so he had a drink and when he got the hostel he was over the limit and they chucked him out. So he was on the streets and eventually he got a flat in Nottingham and was living rock bottom and the day before the funeral I visited him and he was damn near dead, you know. He’d had a couple of bottles of vodka that morning and he was living in dis— disgusting disorder and I got him into the alcoholic unit at Nottingham the next day which was, which was the day of our wedding. And, er, they took him in and he hasn’t had a drink ever since.
CB: That’s good.
AS: That was the turning point. He was rock bottom and he had a few weeks of cold turkey and therapy and, er, he’s been improving ever since. He’s given up smoking and last year we went to his wedding and — he hasn’t worked. He’s a house husband but he’s much, much better.
CB: And, er, number three?
AS: Number three. My, my daughter. My elder, she, she was born in 1952, the year I qualified and, er, she’s been more or less an invalid all her life. She had, she had bilateral CDH and she had some horrendous operations during her childhood and, er, up to the age of twenty-one, when she had a [unclear] osteoplasty and she’s had both hips replaced, replaced in her fifties. She’s OK. She has a degree in art. Never worked. She married and — to a chap who had a teaching diploma but he, he’s never had a settled job and they live in very poor circumstances in Nottingham. They had one boy, who’s my grandson, and I now have two great grandchildren. They came here on Saturday and — because I’m not well and I’m in close contact with them. My son rings me every day or every other day and we’re all attuned. They — I, with my, with my huge divorce settlements I’ve never been able to accumulate enough money but I had enough to buy this place and Maggie’s got her pension and so she’ll be alright.
CB: What did Maggie do when she was working?
AS: She was a head teacher and she was a senior magistrate. She was chairman of the Melton Mowbray and Rutland bench. And she retired at seventy. She’s seventy-five now and so this place is ideal, ideal for her. It’s easily run. It’s got a modest garden and she likes the gardening. She’s been doing the lawn mowing for the last year. I haven’t been able to do much.
CB: You mentioned the extraordinary inspiration, er, from your bedfellow and, er, I just wonder what it is that — we’re talking about Dinty —
AS: Dinty Moore.
CB: Yes. What it is it that gives people the extraordinary positive focus in times of desperate straits?
AS: I don’t know but it does wash over you. You have these extraordinary cheerful men. Some of them were horrendously disfigured. They’d walk about the town with pitiful grafts, you know, between their arm and their, and their face and, and, er, they’d be jokey and upbeat all the time. They, they enjoyed laughing and there was a barrel of beer on the ward encouraged by McIndoe. He said, ‘It’s a very good idea to keep the men hydrated.’ [laugh]
CB: And in most cases in the early days of surgery then the view of the people must have been fairly challenging. What was the reaction of women particularly to men with this disfigurement?
AS: That’s extraordinary. Some of the, um, Guinea Pigs have written books and in, in one the reaction of his wife when, when he came back from East Grinstead was that she couldn’t stand to be touched by him because his hands were knobbly, you know, and — but when I got back to Liverpool I had been engaged to a girl and — but that folded up. Yes and, er, I think reactions were variable and yet many Guinea Pigs married their nurses.
CB: Did they?
AS: And quite recently, as recently as November, December, during the course of this documentary I was doing for the BBC, they took me down to East Grinstead and we met a present-day patient on — an Army, um, plastic surgeon and he was very very badly disfigured. He had very serious burns and he still had a lot of facial scaring and unevenness and he had a wife who’d met him as a patient and, and she’d fallen for him. Isn’t that extraordinary? But on one hand women couldn’t tol— tolerate the disfigurement but this girl had actually been attracted to a man who was disfigured. I think, I think the personality of the injured person comes over somehow and it’s the personality that matters to a sincere woman.
CB: Is there any history of how people progressed after they finished their treatment in terms of settling down with a family? In other words, did they all marry or —
AS: Yes, well I haven’t got the statistics but most, most of the Guinea Pigs became happy married family men.
CB: And from a medical perspective we have these, for some people, horrific views of the immediate aftermath of the initial surgery and then a progression but how does the body assimilate these extraordinary changes with some of the fabric of the skin coming from areas that aren’t normally exposed to the light?
AS: Well my legs were grafted and they — I regained full function really accept that I can’t squat, I can’t bend my knee back fully. I, I think the, er, treatment I got at the first hospital — I had a years’ treatment there — it wasn’t really, er, up to modern standards. The, the tightening of the grafts over these stopped me bending my knees but I had physiotherapy but it was only for a, er, a few weeks I think and I’ve never been able to regain my full, full flection, um, but that’s no handicap and I’ve been able to leap about the deck of a boat and I’ve been able to ski. I was skiing until I was eighty-two and, er, I’ve never been a runner but I’ve been a walker. I used to go trekking in the Himalayas and for years I carried on with a trekking group. I went as trek doctor and, and it was a wonderful time of my life. That was in my seven— sixties and seventies. And I’ve been trekking with Maggie in Italy, er, on the Amalfi coast and that involved quite a lot of energetic walk— hill walking.
CB: So what’s the secret to your long and active life?
AS: The secret? I think its attitude really, um, you get on with things [laugh] doing your best. Do you know, I used to march in the, in the, er, Armistice Day parade? And, er, I once went to the, to the Horse Guards Parade. I was — I’d travelled, travelled down the night before and I got to the parade ground quite early about 9 o’clock and I went to the, um, the van where they had the, the, signs where you’re supposed to stand and I got a — my stick with a label on it and I went over to the parade ground to my spot, in a row of seats, 3 of something, and I was standing there and a few Guinea Pigs joined me, and then two or three and then — oh, there were five of us. I was standing there and a chap with a bowler hat came along and, er, he was obviously ex – RSM and he said, ‘Now Sir, I want you to place your stick on that sycamore leaf and stand there and line up in rows of six.’ So I said, ‘But there’s only five of us.’ He said, ‘Well do you best Sir.’ [laugh] I think that’s, that’s a good maxim to go by, do your best, yeah. Well —
CB: In your perception, your experience and perception, you have a number of people who all have had a disability because of fire, for various reasons, to what extent did they compare notes as to how they got them?
AS: Well we didn’t really talk about it very much. I think we — my conversation with Dinty Moore in the next bed kind of thing. But we, we heard about things and of course all the books written by Guinea Pigs, the — Richard Hillary was the first, wasn’t he? And, er, he described things very well.
CB: Geoffrey Page, various people.
AS: Geoffrey Page. Yes, yes but just knowing these people, sitting in the same room, you know, sitting at the same table at dinner, was wonderful inspiration.
CB: Do you think that somehow this personality and jovial approach was developed by the difficult situation?
AS: I think it was. Yes, making the best of things seemed to be the order of the day. And of course these, these were men of twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two and, you know, they were all full of hormones and, er, they had a drink ethic and very parlast [?]
CB: Supported by attractive nurses were they?
AS: Yes, well McIndoe’s policy was to, to, er, encourage a social intercourse with other people and of course talking to young women was far easier for young men.
CB: You talked about one of your early relationships going wrong. How had you met in the first place there?
AS: Well that probably went wrong because, er, I was at, at Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital in Birmingham and one of the nurses who was looking after me in quite an intimate way, you know, ‘cause I was quite helpless. My hands were in bandages, my legs were in bandages, my head was in bandages so you had to be looked after, for hygiene and all the rest of it, and I suppose I developed a, an emotional connection with my first wife. She became my first wife.
CB: She was a nurse? Right.
AS: She was a nurse and yes —
CB: She knew —
AS: She, er, had a nice family. Her mother and father were teachers in Bourneville and she used to take me there for meals and she used to wheel me, wheel me to the cinema in Selly Oak in a wheel chair and look after me generally so, er, there was an emotional development and —
CB: And was there a second wife?
AS: We eventually married in 1949.
CB: Right.
AS: Yeah.
CB: Was your second wife a nurse?
AS: Oh, my second wife was following several life crises.
CB: In the medical sense you are all, one way or another, severely injured by fire. But you talked about your legs being burnt so you’re affected because your skin was taken from your legs, is it? So that’s why —
AS: I had skin taken from the upper legs and buttocks and, er, my eyelids came from the inner upper arm, yeah, the hairless part, and the nose came from my chest, yeah.
CB: So was the nose completely rebuilt underneath as well, from a bone point of view?
AS: No the cartilages were alright, yes.
CB: OK. So there are certain parts of the anatomy that give up the skin for particular spots more commonly, do they? In other words the upper arm for eyelids.
AS: Yes, that’s right. It’s chosen to be appropriate. I don’t grow a beard which is unconscious really.
CB: So what was the damage initially? You hadn’t got goggles on?
AS: No. They must have been knocked off, yeah.
CB: Did it affect your ears as well?
AS: No, no, I had a helmet. Yes, that saved my scalp and I’ve still got hair.
CB: Yeah. And then —
AS: Some of the Guinea Pigs did lose their ears and scalp.
CB: And arms, hands, were hands. Were they affected?
AS: I was wearing gloves but I had first and second degree burns to my hands and wrists but they were back to normal function within six months. Yes, first and second degree burns survived without grafting. You get blistering and so on but it was —
CB: What was the reaction of people at medical school to your circumstances?
AS: Yes that’s rather curious because it was twenty years after I, after I qualified that we had a reunion and one of the, one of the, er, my ex-student colleagues, a lady, came to me and said, ‘Sandy, I just want to apologise to you because it’s been something that’s been on my mind, ever since doing second MB. We were in the dissection room and Professor Wood had allocated us to do head and neck.’ And, er, I had my lower eyelids, er, grafted about two weeks before and I still looked pretty hideous, you know. Anyway she said, ‘In the dissection room you were, you were lifting the skin from the malar area and I looked at you and looked at the corpse and I had to go out to the ladies and actually physically vomit. I was so, so deeply affected.’ She said, ‘I just want to apologise to you now.’ Isn’t that strange? It’s — I can understand her feelings. I shouldn’t have been there really.
CB: You should have been resting.
AS: Until I was presentable. But reactions in people to disfigurement is quite extraordinary. It’s much better nowadays I think. There’s a lady appears on TV now doing the weather report with, with part of an arm. Quite openly she’s had an amputation and it’s marvellous that people are now — and through, through the armed forces amputations and things they, they’ve become — they have a much better attitude but at one time people were revulsed [emphasis] by physical disfigurement, particularly facial, and I used to try and hide my face in the first year or two.
CB: Did that mean that you didn’t get involved socially very much?
AS: Well, well, um, I was rather defensive about it. I remember when I, when I had my eyelids done I had to travel back to Liverpool from Sussex and I arranged a felt mask [laugh] like the Phantom of the Opera, you know, which I stuck round my glasses to hide the scars. Yeah, the Phantom of the Opera is a comparison.
CB: Yes, well, inspired by these sorts of things.
AS: Yes, well that was written in, in the days before acceptance of disfigurement.
CB: Did you get the feeling that a lot of people stared?
AB: Yes, yes. In fact, East Grinstead, through McIndoe’s influence, became known as the town that didn’t stare.
CB: Because they’d been programmed by the hospital—
AB: Yes, they’d been programmed. McIndoe used to go round the bars and the dance hall and the cinemas and say to people, ‘Please accept these patients as normal. It’s very important to be able to talk to people without feeling embarrassed.’
CB: And in medical school one has a huge curiosity for medicine and everything associated with it so did your experience come up as a student with other students?
AS: I never, never really noticed. I didn’t think about it. I developed a great friendship with Sid Watkins. He was a brilliant student, got a First in everything, and, and he became, um, the Professor of Neurosurgery at the London Hospital and, er, Bernie Ecclestone picked him up and appointed him as the
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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ASaundersAC170201
Title
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Interview with Sandy Saunders
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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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01:04:03 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2017-02-01
Description
An account of the resource
Sandy Saunders recalls Liverpool being bombed in 1941 and while on a rescue squad he sustained splinter injuries from a blast requiring hospital treatment. After taking a science degree he served in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers as a radar officer, working on gun sights and gun laying radar. He later remustered as a glider pilot. He describes his crash in a Tiger Moth during training. He was burned and consequently became a member of the Guinea Pig Club. He had twenty-eight operations including re-shaping his nose and skin grafts to his eyelids. He became a general practitioner in Nottingham and was in general practice for forty years until retirement.
Coverage
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British Army
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Liverpool
England--Sussex
England--Lancashire
Contributor
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Christine Kavanagh
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
aircrew
bombing
C-47
crash
grief
Guinea Pig Club
McIndoe, Archibald (1900-1960)
memorial
pilot
Tiger Moth
training