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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1191/11764/AWeirA180328.2.mp3
430469e505edba02b7e7aae9c4e28636
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
Weir, Archie
Archibald Weir
A Weir
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with archibald 'Archie' Weir (1922 - 2018, 1562624 Royal Air Force). He flew operations with 61 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-28
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
Weir, A
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is an interview between Harry Bartlett from International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive and Mr Archibald Weir [buzzzzzzzzzz] Linton, Derbyshire. Archie’s service number —
AW: 156 —
HB: Is 1 —
AW: 1562624.
HB: 1562624. After seventy five years that’s not a bad memory. And Archie served with 61 Squadron at some, at one point during his service.
AW: That’s right.
HB: Before we get in to the war Archie where were you born?
AW: Glenbuck in Ayrshire.
HB: Sorry?
AW: Glenbuck in Ayrshire.
HB: In Ayrshire. Oh right. Right.
Other: Glenbuck.
HB: Glenbuck. Yeah. Right. And did you go to school up there?
AW: Hmmn?
HB: Did you go to school up there before the war?
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. And how old were you when, when the war was going to start?
AW: Seventeen, I think.
HB: About seventeen.
AW: Yeah.
HB: And did you, did you join up straightaway?
AW: Yeah.
HB: So, so what when did you, when did you go to the RAF to join up? Can you remember? It doesn’t matter if you can’t. it’s —
AW: No.
HB: That’s not, that’s not really important.
Other: Yeah. He did. He did sign up at the beginning.
HB: So, so whereabouts did you go to join the RAF, Archie?
[pause]
HB: Was that, was that in Scotland somewhere?
AW: Yes.
HB: Yeah. So, so you joined up in Scotland.
AW: Yeah.
HB: And they obviously sent you somewhere. Where did you go to get trained?
[pause]
AW: For a, for a while I was trained in Ayrshire.
HB: You trained, trained in Ayrshire originally.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. And then did you, did you go abroad?
AW: Yes.
HB: Whereabouts did you go abroad for training? I bet it was hot.
AW: Yes.
HB: Somewhere in South Africa?
[pause]
HB: So, when you first went to South Africa did you go to train? What did you actually go to train as?
AW: A bomb aimer.
HB: A bomb aimer. Right. You, you didn’t start off as a pilot.
AW: No.
HB: No. You started. You went as a bomb aimer. Right. Because I’ve got your, you very kindly got out your South African, “Air Force Observer’s and Air Gunner’s Log Book.” And of course, the observers were the bomb aimers, weren’t they? Yeah, and we’ve got here 1943. November 1943.
AW: Yeah.
HB: And we’ve got you going on air experience. So, can you remember what kind of aircraft you were in there, Archie?
[pause]
HB: I’ve got a note right at the front here that says you did some practice in Oxfords and Ansons. So, so you obviously had a bit of a fly in them.
AW: Yeah.
HB: What, what, can you remember what it was like?
AW: The Air Force. The Air Force.
HB: Sorry, Archie. I didn’t quite catch that.
AW: It was the Air Force.
HB: Yeah. What was it like flying for the first time in, in these aircraft?
AW: It was in the, basically in the Command.
HB: Yeah. In Bomber Command.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. But did, I mean did you enjoy the flying?
AW: Oh aye.
HB: Yes. Very good. And can you remember how long you were in South Africa training?
AW: Say that again. Sorry.
HB: Can you remember how long you were in South Africa training?
[pause]
AW: I think it was about six months.
HB: Right. About, about six months. I’ve got you in your book. I’ve got you transferring in March 1945 to LFS Syerston. Was that, was that flying? Actually flying the aircraft at the local LFS. Flying School at RAF Syerston. Because I’ve got you down here you’re in Lancaster.
AW: Yeah.
HB: With a Flying Officer Anderson. Do you remember him at all?
[pause]
HB: I’ve got, I’ve got you going out on the 10th of March 1945 doing your familiarisation exercises. Can you remember what they were like?
AW: Circuits and landings really.
HB: Circuits and landings. Right. And then it sounds a little bit hairy this one. On March the 11th three engine flying and corkscrew. What was, what was that about Archie?
AW: [pause] I think it was part of the procedure as far as corkscrew was concerned.
HB: Right. So if, so were you flying the plane to do the corkscrew or was that the pilot?
AW: I think it was a bit of each, I think.
HB: A bit of each. Yeah. I think everybody did a bit of each didn’t they? Now, we’ve got you doing your exercises here. And then we’ve got you going to 61 Squadron at Skellingthorpe.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Skellingthrope. Skellingthorpe.
AW: Skellingthorpe.
HB: And that’s the 16th of March 1945 and we’ve got some of your operations in here. So, we’ve got you with —
AW: [Cromberg]
HB: [Cromberg.] Yeah. That’s it. Spot on. The pilot. And you are the observer. The bomb aimer. So we’ve got you doing your fighter affiliation and your cross country exercises and then we’ve got the 22nd of March 1945 with [Cromberg]
AW: Yeah.
HB: And you went to Bremen. That was your first operation. Can you remember what your first operation was like?
[pause]
HB: I’ve got, because I haven’t got anything here. You were flying for four hours and fifty minutes. Does that help? No. And that was a day time operation. And you’ve got a note in your book here, Archie. Thousand pound AMC. Can you remember what AMC was for? [pause] Would that be something to do with the bomb? The actual bomb or the bomb load because you’ve got fourteen. Fourteen thousand pound AMC. So, I don’t know what AMC is. No? It don’t matter. And then we’ve got you going to the 23rd blimey, so, you did a day operation on the 22nd of March to Bremen and then on the 23rd you did a night operation to Wessel. Yeah. Can you remember anything about them? No. Because you did, I mean you did four operations in five days, Archie. That was a lot.
Other: If you can remember anything dad if you tell him.
HB: Yeah.
Other: It would be good.
HB: Yeah.
Other: If there’s anything you can remember please tell him. It would be really, it’s really important.
HB: Yeah.
Other: People want to know what you’re saying.
HB: Yeah. You don’t —
Other: It won’t —
HB: There’s us talking. It, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you say it’s your, it’s what you want to say about it about your time.
Other: But it would be really important. It’s really good for people to understand dad.
HB: Yeah.
Other: Your, your time in a plane. How it felt. How it was for you in your plane and what you saw and how it was for you. It’s time to tell everybody. You’ve not told anyone in seventy five years anything. It’s time to tell. Please. Tell us what’s going on. Tell us how it was so people can understand how it was for you as a young man in that plane. Tell us how it was.
HB: Yeah. We weren’t there Archie. We don’t know what it was like. It must have been frightening and you must have seen some pretty nasty things.
AW: Oh aye.
HB: Did you, did you have the same crew all the way through?
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. And what, what was it like mixing with the crew?
AW: No problem.
HB: Yeah. How did you all get together Archie in the first place? As a crew.
AW: It was at [pause] oh, we were in to, what was it called?
HB: Into a —
AW: In to a school. A flying school.
HB: In the flying school. Yeah. And did you all sort of mix around until you found each other?
AW: More or less. Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Who, who [pause] Did you pal up with someone or did someone come and get you?
AW: We were all put together and there we were formed in to a squad.
HB: Right. Yeah. So you, so you became a crew at the flying school.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. And you stuck with that crew all the way through then.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Because some, some crews towards the end of the war, some crews got broken up because some went off because some had done more operations than the others but others, I mean sometimes they were wounded or killed. You know. Were, were, was your crew one of the lucky crews and you saw it right through to the end?
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Can you remember who your crew were? What their names were?
AW: Jack [Cromberg] was the pilot.
[pause]
HB: The pilot. Yeah. Can you remember your navigator?
AW: Hmmn?
HB: Can you remember your navigator?
[pause]
Other: I’ve got the, I’ve got that photo handy. It’s alright. I’ll get it. I’ve got it on my —
HB: I’ll Perhaps just have a look at this photo with you Archie and we’ll see. See who you can remember. I’m bound to knock that tea off. I’m bound to. I’ll put it there. It always happens. Right. Here we’ve got your photo Archie and we’ve got you. That’s you. Yeah?
AW: Yeah.
HB: That’s, so we know that you’re the third from the right. So, which one was Jack?
AW: Jack Cromberg.
HB: Yeah. We’ll go along the line. You just tell me when you, when I get to him.
[pause]
HB: No. Do you think Jack, do you think Jack might be the one with the officer’s cap on?
AW: Yes.
HB: In the middle there next to you.
AW: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
Other: Do you want your glasses on, dad?
HB: Do you want your glasses? Would that be easier?
Other: They’re just behind you on that. On that, on that —
HB: Got it.
Other: That’s it, mate.
HB: Here we go. Is that going to be easier?
Other: I’ll get the picture a bit bigger.
HB: How’s that?
AW: Yeah.
HB: Is that better? Oh, I can see you now [laughs] There you go. We think that’s Jack.
AW: Yeah.
HB: And that’s you. So, Jack’s fourth from the right and you’re third from the right. See, they’re all very helpful. They’ve all got their Mae West on.
AW: Yeah.
HB: So it covers up the badge on their Jacket so we don’t know who’s who. Do you recognise any of them?
[pause]
HB: It doesn’t matter if you don’t. it’s not, it’s not vital.
AW: Wasn’t that [unclear]
HB: And who?
AW: Hmmn?
HB: Who was the other one you said?
AW: Me.
HB: That’s you.
AW: Yeah.
HB: That’s Jack.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Any of the others? [pause] We’ll perhaps leave that for a minute and then we’ll just, we’ll just come back to that. Yeah. Because it looks even though it’s 1945 out of your log book it looks like you’re virtually flying, you know every other day really.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Who have we got signing this? [pause] We’ve got somebody called Fadden. Fadden. Was he the CO from 61 Squadron?
Other: Yeah?
HB: Squadron leader.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Aye. And we’ve got you going on, got you going on another day time raid to Farge. Farge. That was in the daytime.
Other: If you want to go back to that picture I’ve got one you can see.
HB: You can just scroll it along. Yeah. How’s that? Is that better? Is that clearer? Right. So, if we find. We think that’s Jack [Cromberg] Yeah.
AW: Yes.
HB: Oh, hang on. That’s you.
AW: Yes.
HB: Laughing. So, we’ve got these two lads on the end. On the right hand side. So, can you remember what, who they were?
AW: Were they gunners?
HB: Sorry?
AW: Were they, were they the gunners?
HB: That’s what I say. Really helpful. They’ve got their Mae Wests on so we can’t see what their, what their badge says. He’s a sergeant. And he’s definitely a flight sergeant. So, I don’t know. They could have been gunners. If we go the other way we’ve got these three lads. Can you see them? What’s he got on his arm? He’s, he’s got a sergeant’s chevrons on but I can’t see their [pause] No. I can’t see their arms. He might actually be an officer because he’s got nothing on his arms. But again helpful. You’ve all got your hands in your pockets [laughs] So, let’s have a look at him. We’ve got any ideas about him?
[pause]
HB: What about them two? No? [pause] It doesn’t matter Archie. It’s not, it’s not vital. It’s not. That’s not vital. Right. What have we got here? We’ve got one here. [Komotau?] [Komotau?] You flew to [Komotau?]. That’s, that’s a long one. That’s eight hours. That was a night one and you got diverted to Stoney Cross. Can you remember that one? That flight.
AW: We got diverted.
HB: You got diverted. Yeah. What would that be for do you think? Might it be weather?
AW: Maybe.
HB: Right. So, we come to the end of April and Fadden’s signed it again. And then we’ve got May 1945 you’re mainly doing training but then you’ve got an interesting one here. On the 30th of May with Jack [Cromberg]. You’re doing a Cook’s Tour. Heligoland, Bremerhaven, Bremen, Hanover, Mittelland Canal, Munster and Wessel. What was a Cook’s Tour, Archie?
AW: When we, a Cook’s Tour was basically [pause] it was when you were letting them know what you were up to.
HB: So you, what? Did you have other people in the aircraft as well? What sort of people did you have in the aircraft?
AW: All your crew.
HB: The aircrew. Any guests? [pause] You didn’t sneak a couple of WAAFs on there did you?
AW: No.
HB: Did you have any of the ground crew? Any of your ground crew go with you?
AW: No.
HB: On the Cook’s Tour.
AW: No.
HB: No.
AW: No.
Other: You can tell us. You’re not, you won’t be in trouble. You won’t get in trouble now.
HB: I’m just going to pause this for a second.
[pause]
HB: Right. We’ve just turned the tape recorder back on just while I finish my tea without spilling it. Now, we’ve got one here that’s a bit intriguing. I’ve never seen this in anybody’s log before, Archie and this is July the 3rd 1945 and it’s got Lancaster T-Tango or T-Tommy. Your pilot is Flight Lieutenant Shand and you’ve got written next to it, “post mortem.” Can you think what that would be about?
[pause]
HB: No? Were you doing some training then? In July 1945 were you doing a bit of training?
[pause]
HB: Right. I think what we’ll do Archie we’ll just pause, just pause this for a minute.
[recording paused]
If I keep talking to you. Right. I’ve just started the tape up again while we’ve just been having a look through the logbook. So, you were in Wellingtons flying out of 26 OTU on Course Number 54 and towards the end of that you’re flying in Wellingtons and that’s where you seem to have teamed up with Jack [Cromberg].
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. What, can you remember the first flight you did with Jack?
[pause]
HB: Because it looks to me, it looks to me like you got together with Jack quite early on at Wing.
AW: Yeah.
HB: At the at the OTU. Yes. It’s, and that’s pretty well all in Wellingtons with the OTU. Right. A flight and C flight. And then, ah you went, you went to Langar.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Do you remember being at Langar? What was that?
AW: That was conversion.
HB: Conversion.
AW: Yeah.
HB: So that’s the Heavy Conversion. Right. There’s [pause] Jack’s disappeared for a minute there and then you’ve got the first few flights in a Halifax. Halifax 2, Mark 2 and that’s with somebody called Thackeray. Flying Officer Thackeray. That’s right at the end of ’44. December ’44. Does that ring any bells with him? Was he, he must have been instantly forgettable [laughs] And then you do a lot, a lot of that training there with Jack [Cromberg]
AW: Yeah.
HB: And that takes you all the way through January 1945 and you’re still in Halifaxes. Ah right. Yeah. So you go, you go February the 1st you’re in Halifaxes still at Wing. At Langar, sorry. At Langar. And then you go to Number 5, LFS at Syerston and that’s in March 1945. So I would think you went on leave for a bit, didn’t you?
AW: [I wouldn’t know]
HB: No [laughs] Some of those leaves were worth forgetting weren’t they? It no good you smiling. I know. I know. Right. Yeah. And you, and you’re with Jack at Syerston. You’re then posted out March 16th to Skellingthorpe at, at 61 Squadron. Yeah. Yeah. That’s quite a, quite a lot of activity that in a short space of time, Archie. Did you, did you have much of a social life when you were in there at Skellingthorpe?
[pause]
HB: Did they have dances on the station or did you have to go off the station to go to a dance?
AW: Off the station.
HB: Yeah. And where was your favourite place to go?
[pause]
HB: Did you, did you sort of go into Lincoln a bit or did you stay? Did you stay local?
AW: We stayed local.
HB: You stayed. Yeah. Yeah. Just stayed local to the field. Yeah. Yeah. When, when you were coming towards the end of the war when the actual operations had finished where, where did you go towards the end? Did you go to demob or did you go to training?
AW: [unclear] I think we had, when I finished the tour.
HB: Yeah. When you finished your tour. Yeah. Yeah. Because you stopped flying operations. Sorry. You flew your last operation on the 18th of April 1945 to Komotau. Komotau. Komotau, I think it is. Which was a long one. Eight hours thirty five minutes that one and that was it. And then you seemed to do lots of training then but I didn’t know. Can you remember where you went to be demobbed?
[pause]
HB: The, the last, I was just looking for the last entry in here because it’s got you still, you were still with 61 Squadron Waddington in 1946.
Other: Was that when you were on Lincolns? Were you training on Lincolns, dad?
HB: No. That’s, that’s all Lancaster stuff.
Other: Or was that —
HB: And you’re still, you’re still doing lots and lots of training. Cross countries, bullseye. Do you remember bullseye? The bullseye exercise? What was, what was that one? Remind me. I can’t remember.
[pause]
HB: Right. Well, we seem to have come to the end of it. The end of the book. Yeah, I see you ended up in the decompression chamber doing your training. Do you remember that? Going in the decompression chamber? Where they lower the air pressure and you had to put your oxygen mask on because one or two have said it was a bit frightening. Well, I think that’s, that’s the back end of your, your logbook, Archie. So, what, when we come to the end of the war what did you do after the war when you finished?
[pause]
HB: Did you, did you go back up to Scotland? [pause] Yeah.
AW: Yeah.
HB: And did you, did you have a job in Scotland before you joined and did you go back to your job?
AW: Yeah.
HB: And what was, what sort of work were you doing, Archie?
[pause]
HB: It don’t, it don’t matter if you, if you can’t remember. And when, when it was all, when it was all finished and you went home what’s, what’s, what are the things that stick in your mind about your time in Bomber Command? What do you remember about Bomber Command? What do you think the best bits were?
[pause]
AW: It was a, it was a different life.
HB: A different life. Yeah. Yeah. Very different. Yeah. And, and a bit sad at times as well.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. What do you think? What do you think was your saddest time there with them?
[pause]
AW: I don’t think there was a sad day. I think it was. I don’t mean it wasn’t sad.
[pause]
HB: What, what did you think of the job that you’d done?
AW: We had very little choice.
HB: Yeah.
AW: We were down there and that was it. [We had to be there]
HB: Yeah. I think I’ll stop the interview now Archie. Thanks ever so much for that.
[recording paused]
HB: How did you get out to South Africa, Archie? Can you remember?
AW: How?
HB: How did you get to South Africa?
Other: Am I interfering? Should I get out your way?
HB: No. No. No. No. Not at all. Yeah, I was just asking Archie how he got to South Africa. If he can remember how he got to South Africa. Did you go on a boat? Were there many of you?
Other: Tell him.
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 Archie Weir
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-28
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AWeirA180328
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:40:36 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Archie was born in Ayreshire. He was about 17 when he joined, then went to South Africa to train as a bomb aimer. In February 1943 Archie worked on Halifax Mk 2 before being transferred to Lancaster finishing school at RAF Syerston. In November 1943 he also flew in Oxford and Anson aircraft. In 1944 he trained on Wellingtons and Halifax aircraft, and in March 1945 he went to the Lancaster Finishing School at RAF Syerston on familiarisation flights and circuits and landings. The crew served with 61 Squadron at RAF Skellingthorpe from 16 March 1945; on 22 March he did his first operation to Bremen. Their last one was on 18 April 1945 to Komotau in Czechoslovakia. He also flew on some Cook’s Tour trips over former targets in Germany.. Archie was posted to RAF Waddington in 1946, before returning to his job in Scotland.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Lincolnshire
South Africa
Germany
Germany--Bremen
Scotland
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-02
1943-11
1945-03-10
1945-03-16
1945-03-22
1945-04-18
1945-05-30
1945-07-03
1946
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
61 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
bomb aimer
bombing
Cook’s tour
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
observer
Oxford
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Syerston
RAF Waddington
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/774/9294/PWoolfAS1701.2.jpg
937865517e51cdac6783016788d6dbbc
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/774/9294/AWoolfAS170629.2.mp3
f7b928dc76dd339bfb8864372ebd8e47
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
Woolf, Arthur Sidney
A S Woolf
Description
An account of the resource
23 items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer Arthur Woolf (1922 - 2021, 1579552, 157533 Royal Air Force) his log book, a memoir, correspondence, documents, a newspaper cutting and photographs. He flew operations as a wireless operator with 630 Squadron and became a member of the Guinea Pig Club.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Arthur Woolf and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-06-29
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
Woolf, AS
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is a recording for the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive being carried out at Sutton Coldfield. It’s Thursday the 29th of June. It’s 12.05 and the interview is with Arthur Sidney Woolf. Flying officer with 630 Squadron who was also a Prisoner of War and a member of the Guinea Pig Club. The interviewer is Harry Bartlett. Right, Arthur. Not making too much noise standing it up. We’re on.
AW: Right.
HB: What, what I’d like to ask you first Arthur is what you were doing before the war and what led up to you joining the RAF?
AW: Well, before the war I was only a youngster. I went to ordinary elementary school. I passed with honours for secondary school as we used to call them in those days. My mother was seriously ill at the time with duodenal ulcers and wasn’t expected to live. And my opportunity went. My father couldn’t cope. So, I continued and I finally left ordinary elementary school at aged fourteen in 1936 and I applied for a job and retired in the Birmingham Despatch. There ain’t no Birmingham Despatch anymore because it was taken over by the Birmingham Mail.
HB: Right.
AW: But there used to be two separate evening papers in those days. Birmingham Despatch and the Birmingham Mail. And I saw they advertised there so I went up with my mum as we did in those days. And when I had a reply and was asked to go for an interview. And it was a little office in Colmore Row which is the business centre of Birmingham. And it was up on the third floor, and I went in and it turned out it was a local Friendly Society. Friendly Insurance Society called the British Workmen’s Friendly Society. Shift it where ever you want it. I’m telling you this by —
HB: Yeah.
AW: A matter of interest. It’s my story. Called the British Workmen’s Friendly Society and I was the office boy. There was only five of us there. I was only small and we had agents. Most of them, well a lot of them were spare time. We had an office in Tamworth and so we had part-time workers there who were in those days were mainly miners.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
AW: Because the mining industry was in Tamworth in those days. And they used to do this in their spare time to earn extra cash, you know. And so it was, it was a ruddy good training for me really. Throw that, throw that on your neck out the way.
HB: Oh. It’s alright.
AW: Ruddy good training. I was fourteen, you know. And I, and I was introduced into doing auditing of simple books. Shop keepers in Hockley and that sort of thing. One I remember particularly was we used to make biscuit, biscuit what do you call them? Biscuit what? I don’t know.
HB: Tins.
AW: Fancy like. They were very fancy.
HB: Oh. Oh.
AW: You know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Got nice wood and metal inlaid.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And so forth. And that was one of the companies down in Hockley. And I used to go and audit the books. I mean at fifteen, you know what I mean, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And then I started taking some exams which was in the insurance side of the business. Friends Society, pensions, doctors, that type of thing, you know what I mean? We had agents’ loans part time. And I took my exams and did very well in them. Although I’d only had an elementary school education. But just I’m not shooting the sherbet here but I always did pretty well at school, you know. Then the war broke out didn’t it? I was seventeen. So I, and I was fed up to the teeth with this place. By this time two of the blokes out of the office, there was only five of us, two of them had been called up. That left three of us. All youngsters, you know. Oh and I was up to here with it. You know what I mean? I mean it was a good position because it was, it was a private company as well. They did accountancy. All via Jethro Kent. Jethro. There’s a name you don’t get very often. He was the old man. I mean I called him an old man. To me he was like Methuselah. Now I’m, now I’m much older than he was at the time. You know what I mean?
HB: Yeah.
AW: He was in his sixties or seventies. Walrus white moustache. Jethro. And his son, Kenneth G Kent, they were both qualified chartered accountants so they had a private accountancy business. And I got involved in doing a bit of auditing you see, as well as having to take exams to do with insurance and the law as far as insurance is concerned. I mean life insurance. Life assurance really because it was, you know it wasn’t insurance against accidents it was life assurance. And I got cheesed off to the teeth and the war had gone on, you know, started up and I thought oh bloody hell. I was dying, I was mad about aircraft. And I used to get home and I used to cycle to Castle Bromwich which is now a big housing estate but it was Castle Bromwich Airfield which was a pre-war place. No, no runways just, you know [pause] and I used to watch them during — even before the war broke out. They’d taxi across and up they’d go. The old biplanes, you know. Always fascinated by aircraft and flying. And I used to cycle to these and by this time of course there was [unclear] restrictions, but there was railings along the Kingsbury Road and I used to park my bike there and just watch the aircraft through the railings you know. They were Fairey Battles I think at that time which was never a very good aircraft anyway but I mean that was early in the war of course.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And then I met my girl who turned out to be my wife. We were married for fifty five years.
HB: Wow.
AW: We never had children but we loved each other very very much and she was my life you know. Anyway, she worked at Castle Bromwich Aeroplane Factory which is now Jam Jar.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Which is just down the road. Two or three miles down Chester Road. And she worked there. She was what they called a Hollerith worker. Have you ever heard of Hollerith?
HB: No.
AW: It was a punch system. Little, little machines. And they used to — not all the fingers. It was two or three fingers, that’s all. Punching cards. Holes in cards and then when you draw the machine and they were all shifted and— you know what I mean? And I met her by chance. Introduced to her actually by a friend. A mutual friend. Fell head over heels. She was a good looking girl I’ll tell you and — but I was dying to fly and I wanted to fly. And I thought well, I’m going to go in the RAF. So, when my time came I volunteered for aircrew. As you know there was only aircrew, only volunteers were ever accepted by RAF. And I had to go Viceroy Close which is a big block of flats. It’s still there in Birmingham. Just outside the city, which the RAF took over completely in those days. And part of the building was occupied by aircrew medicals. So when the papers come to go for an aircrew medical, you know. Cough and all the rest of it. But in between I had trouble with my ears. I’d had boils in my ears.
HB: Oh dear.
AW: Yeah. Very painful. And I was only a youngster, you know. And I thought I shan’t say anything about that, you know. No. I don’t want to risk the chance of getting into aircrew. So, finally come around to the hearing test. We were all civilian lads, you know seventeen or eighteen and so forth. And I went into this room and there was a flight lieutenant there and, ‘Name?’ Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he looked at me and he said, ‘Now, I want you to walk to the end of this room,’ which was a long narrow room, he said, ‘And face the wall.’ He said, ‘I’m going to say words to you and I want you to repeat them to me.’ So, I’m all ready. I’m going to do this test. So, I went to the other end and, ‘Stop.’ he said, ‘Now, face the wall,’ and he started, ‘Tomato. Potato.’ You know, similar type words and whispered like that. And my ears were aching with the desire to get the bloody thing right. You know what I mean? And it went on for some little time. He said, ‘Ok. Come back and I went back and he looks at me and looked in my ears with the old what do they call them? You know, when they look in your ears.
HB: Yeah.
AW: He said, ‘You’ve had trouble with your ears, haven’t you?’ And I thought, ‘Oh shit. He knows.’ [laughs] I said, ‘Well, yes. I had a boil,’ I said. You know, I didn’t tell him it was a series of them but, ‘I had a boil.’ ‘I thought as much,’ he said. He looked at the papers again. He looked at what he’d written down. And then he said, ‘I’m going to pass you,’ he said, ‘You’re on the borderline,’ he said, ‘For your ears.’ He said, ‘But I’m going to pass you,’ he said, ‘But I want you to know that if you have trouble with your ears when you start flying, if you get that far,’ he said, ‘It’s not the RAF’s fault.’ In other words they were washing their hands of any responsibility. You know. I thought, bastard [laughs] And so eventually I had, I had my calling up papers to go to report to Padgate in Lancashire. Just a Recruiting Centre, you know.
HB: Near Blackpool.
AW: Parade around. Nothing else.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I mean no airfield. Oh God, I was up to here. I was a very, I was a home loving boy really and I’d never gone far from home. You know what I mean? There’s only my brother and I. Just the two of us. My brother was four years older than me and he was already in the RAF. He didn’t fly but he went out to Egypt and Cairo [pause] Oh God, but anyway. He went out to the Middle East in the RAF and he was out there for a number of years. You know. And then my turn came. And I thought bloody hell. You know. So, Padgate. Oh God was I homesick. I really was. I mean bloody terrible bloody place. I don’t know whether it exists anymore as an RAF camp. I doubt it.
HB: No.
AW: It was just a training. A reception centre. You know what I mean? So, half the time I was walking around with RAF trousers on and my own jacket, you know, that sort of thing, because I hadn’t got everything. Oh dear. Oh dear. And three days before Christmas I had to go. 22nd of December which has lived in my memory ever since. I thought the sods. They could have waited. And I hadn’t too long met my wife Sheila and you know I was head over heels. I thought bloody hell. The sods. They could have waited until after Christmas at least, you know. Anyway, to cut a long story short that was the start of my RAF training. And it was quite long. It was nearly two years before I finally reached the squadron and was then flying in Ansons and all sorts. Dominies we flew in you know originally yeah as a wireless op. And finally went to Upper Heyford which is in Oxfordshire. And it’s, I don’t know, I think it’s still there.
HB: It’s still operative. Yes. It’s still operative.
AW: At Upper Heyford. And there I met all sorts of blokes there. There was rear gunners, mid-upper gunners, flight engineers, wireless ops, pilots, navigators, you name it. All the categories. And they just said to us, ‘Now, you’ve got forty eight hours to get crewed up. It’s up to you. You know. Mix around. Talk. And I want you all in sevens.’ You know, seven was a crew. He said, ‘And if you haven’t found a crew at the end of the forty eight hours you will be allocated to whatever’s left.’ So, of course nobody wanted that. They didn’t want that sort of stigma.
HB: No.
AW: Did they? You know what I mean? Anyway, I was, I went to bed that night. This was down at Upper Heyford. I was a sergeant at the time and next door to a fellow and he said, ‘Have you got crewed up yet?’ I said, ‘Bloody hell. No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t had a chance to even to talk to anybody yet properly.’ ‘Oh, I have,’ he said. ‘I’ve crewed up with a Yank.’ Of course, we all knew who the Yank was. He was in RAF uniform. He’d done like you said crossed into Canada and joined the RCAF. And so he’d got his RAF uniform on. I said, ‘Oh, I’ve seen him around.’ I said, ‘I’ve heard him talking.’ ‘Aye. A good guy,’ he said. He said, ‘Are you crewed up?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Are you interested?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ So, he took me along to, to see the pilot. Bill. And chatting and of course the long and the short of it we crewed up. And actually I finished up with two Canadians, two Yanks and three Brits in my crew.
HB: Wow.
AW: And one of them was a Welshmen. It’s amazing really. Yeah. And they were a great crowd of lads. They really were. But unfortunately when we were shot down both the mid-upper and the rear gunner were killed at the time we were shot down. You know. But —
HB: What were the names of your crew? The pilot was Bill.
AW: Bill Adams.
HB: Yeah.
AW: My navigator was, he lived at Radstock near Bath and he was the most difficult to find.
HB: Oh right.
AW: I don’t know why. I just couldn’t get any leads on to him. You know what I mean? Toogood his name was. T O O G O O D. George Toogood. Rear gunner — Ross Lough. L O U G H. And mid-upper gunner — Johnny Kiesow. Polish American. Yank, you know. Yank. He’d done the same as the pilot and gone into Canada, you know and so forth. Who have I missed out?
HB: Bomb aimer.
AW: Bomb aimer. Woody. Woody. Quite a character, Woody. Quite a character. He was the only other commissioned member of the crew. So, in the end there was just the two of us so we naturally sort of teamed up together. We were in the same mess and so forth, you know. He was quite a lad was Woody. And he came from Ontario. Have I missed anybody else out?
HB: Flight engineer.
AW: Flight engineer. Yes. He was bloody difficult to find and I found him in the end. He was in Canada. He’d gone to live in Canada. Bloody amazing, you know. His name escapes me at the moment I’m ashamed to say.
HB: No. No. No. No. That’s alright.
AW: He’s in there. I’m sure.
HB: Yeah.
AW: So, I found him and then afterwards I went to stay with my bomb aimer in Ontario with my wife. Went over and stayed with them. They invited us over, you know. And I also went to stay with my flight engineer who settled in bloody — right in the west side of Canada.
HB: British Columbia.
AW: Chilliwack. Chilliwack.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
AW: A place called Chilliwack.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Which is, you know not too far from the West, West Coast. Went to stay with him as well. I found them but it took me two or three years to find all of them, you know because when I was taken Prisoner of War of course I lost touch complete with everything.
HB: Who was Dickie Richardson?
AW: He was a wonderful character. He was a Guinea Pig.
HB: He was one of the Guinea Pigs. Right. I’ve gone a bit too far ahead.
AW: A blind guinea pig. A lovely, lovely lad. A great friend of mine.
HB: Yeah. I’m just trying —
AW: He was a wireless op. He got shot down. And the last thing he remembered seeing when he was shot down was a German soldier coming towards him on the road and his sight went. And he never saw again.
HB: Oh no.
AW: A great character. And no arm. No. One arm off up to there. But a wonderful character, you know. I was in the cellar for some time which I think I mention in there. When the Germans evacuated the hospital I was in in Nancy. They left four of us in the cellar with the French army doctor who’d been captured also, to look after us. And Dickie was one of those four. It was, it was quite an experience that was. We were there I think about ten or eleven days. Just below ground level. That’s all. The fighting was starting to come closer and closer. And I was thinking about all those bloody guns going off and so forth. Frightened you to death really when you’re lying helpless. Immoveable virtually in my case with this bloody great plaster cast on.
HB: Horrendous.
AW: And —
HB: But it, but so, so that was, that was obviously later.
AW: Yes.
HB: So, you’d gone to [pause] to crew up at Heyford.
AW: Upper Heyford. Yes.
HB: Did you stay at Heyford for OCU or did you —
AW: No.
HB: No.
AW: No. I’ve got them all listed actually somewhere but —
HB: No. No. Don’t worry about it at all because, because there’s all sorts —
AW: I’m just trying to think where I did my OC — oh dear, my memory’s going as I’m getting older.
HB: Well, AF, you did your AFU at Dumfries.
AW: Dumfries. That’s right. Yes.
HB: And you went to —
AW: Up to, up to was there —
HB: OTU at Upper Heyford.
AW: Upper Heyford.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I was just going to say. Yes. Yes, it was. That’s right.
HB: That’s was, oh that was when you were flying. You were doing OTU in Wellingtons and —
AW: That’s right. Yeah.
HB: Wimpies. Yeah.
AW: We started off with Dominies. De Havilland Dominies. Something else. Ansons.
HB: Yeah.
AW: You know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And all the old. You know, and all the old —
HB: Yeah. All the old.
AW: Mind you they were a good reliable aircraft, you know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: The old Anson. I mean it could go on forever. Fly on forever those Ansons would.
HB: Yeah.
AW: But it was — oh dear.
HB: So, so you crewed up there.
AW: Yeah. And then we moved as a crew.
HB: And then you went to — ah it says in here Wigsley.
AW: That’s right.
HB: That’s not a place I’ve heard of before.
AW: No. Well, it was only a temporary wartime place. It was in [pause] dear oh dear [pause] Nottinghamshire I think it was.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I think it Nottinghamshire.
HB: Because then because obviously you did that training and then you went to Syerston.
AW: Syerston.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Yeah.
HB: And that was, that was —
AW: That was the flying. That was where we, we first went in Lancs.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: Lancs. Yeah.
HB: Oh right, because —
AW: And then —
HB: It says in here, it says in here —
AW: If it says there it’s true.
HB: That you were posted there. Yeah. Yeah. It says here you did your, you did your conversion training consisting of sixteen hours.
AW: That’s all.
HB: Wow.
AW: That’s all.
HB: In two weeks.
AW: Yeah. I mean for the pilot as well. He’d got to go and fly in bloody ops.
HB: Yeah.
AW: In the aircraft. It was true. I mean, you know I’ve got the, after the war was over I wrote to the RAF and asked for a list of my postings and so forth, you know. Trainings. And I’ve got it. It’s in here
HB: Yeah. You’re service. Yeah. Your old service record.
AW: The old service record. That’s right. Yes.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: And it’s in there somewhere. I’ve got it.
HB: Oh, that’s great.
AW: So, you know, I mean, you know. Sixteen. It was nothing really.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Nothing.
HB: Sixteen hours.
AW: But in between that we had to fly [pause] do I mention it there? Bloody. Christ, come on.
HB: Stirlings.
AW: Stirlings. Nightmare. Nightmare. Bloody great big thing. And I mean, you know you’ve got no power at all really, you know. None at all.
HB: No.
AW: Chug chug chug and trying to reach a bloody flying height, you know. Hours. Literally hours. It was a bloody awful aircraft. It really was. And it was very huge and it stood quite a height from the ground, you know to get in to it.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: And they were always having trouble with the undercart. The undercarriage was always failing. And even while we were converting on to them, that short course we had for the crew went round it. Another amendment to the bloody requirement of the undercart was going to be incorporated. It was a terrible bloody aircraft. I mean, you know it was a shocker.
HB: Yeah.
AW: God were we glad to get off those and get on to — and of course the Lanc, by comparison was, was beautiful.
HB: Yeah.
AW: It really was. There’s no other description for a Lancaster anyway.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: That’s my only description for a Lanc.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I mean Halifaxes were very very good and they were very near to it, you know. But I think, I think the Lanc just about had it. Beautiful. I’m sticking to that one. Whatever you think.
HB: Right. You can tell from my face then.
AW: And so eventually we got to the squadron which was East Kirkby. East Kirkby.
HB: That was, that was in 5 Group wasn’t it?
AW: Yes.
HB: With 630.
AW: Yeah. It was about thirty or forty miles from Lincoln. Yeah. And we did, on our sixteenth operation we got shot down on the way to Stuttgart.
HB: Yeah. You were in B Flight weren’t you there?
AW: Yes. That’s right.
HB: So you’d done — what was your first trip?
AW: First one.
HB: Your first trip. Your first op.
AW: I’ve got the —
HB: Sorry, I’ve got it here.
AW: I’ve got my notebook here.
HB: Saumur.
AW: Saumur. That’s right.
HB: In southern France.
AW: There was a big infantry —
HB: Yeah.
AW: German division there.
HB: Yeah.
AW: A crack division apparently. And we had to go and try and sort of stir them up a bit, you know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Yeah. Well, a lot of the flights I did actually were in France. To do with the battle across France.
HB: Yeah. What, what year would this be?
AW: ’44.
HB: Arthur. 1944.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Yeah. And I got shot down on the 25th of July. The night of the 24th 25th of July was the night we were shot down.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Yeah.
HB: What, what —on the lead up I’ve just noticed in here.
AW: Yeah.
HB: You were actually, you were actually involved in bombing the coastal batteries for D-Day.
AW: That’s right. And I’ve got the, I’ve got the Légion d’honneur medal from the French.
HB: Did you now?
AW: Yeah. Which I think is a lovely medal.
HB: Oh, that’s beautiful.
AW: Isn’t it.
HB: Yes. That is beautiful.
AW: Take it out if you want to.
HB: That’s absolutely superb. And that, and that’s obviously related to the D-Day.
AW: It was.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Only for the people involved in D-Day.
HB: Yeah. That’s absolutely superb.
AW: It’s a lovely medal that is, I think.
HB: What a beautiful —
AW: I’m not a medals man quite honestly. I’ve got my, my — the medals I was sent after the war, you know, that I was entitled to which was just the standard.
HB: Yeah.
AW: What do you call them?
HB: That’s a beautiful thing.
[rustling]
AW: Excuse me. These are those. That’s that. I received them in the same box. Way back at the end of the war. I mean —
HB: Absolutely.
AW: Compared with this they’re just — I didn’t even bother to mount them at all. You know, I thought well bloody hell. But that I thought was a lovely medal.
HB: So, that was —
AW: And —
HB: Yes.
AW: And if I can just show you something.
HB: Yes. Sure you can. Sure.
AW: The letter that came with it was fantastic I thought [pause] That’s, that’s the letter that came with it.
HB: I think, I think you ought to be reading that one out, don’t you?
AW: Do you?
HB: I think you ought to be reading that one out.
AW: Yeah. Well, if you think I should.
HB: Yeah. I think you should. But do you want to leave that? Do you want to leave that for a minute while we, while we just —
AW: Alright. Ok.
HB: Because that’s obviously June. That’s obviously June for D-Day and you were shot down the —
AW: 25th of July.
HB: 25th of July.
AW: ’44.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Yeah.
HB: So, not long after.
AW: Yeah.
HB: So, so what were your memories of that particular op? Where were you headed for that?
AW: Heading to Stuttgart.
HB: Right.
AW: We never got there.
HB: Right.
AW: We were just in the, just approximately over the border between France and Germany and out of the blue a fighter comes up from below [noise] and and damaged the engines. I can’t remember which or which engine it were or how many there were damaged at the time but we started to lose height. You know, lose power. And the pilot said, ‘We’ll have to turn back. We’ll have to dump the bombs and turn back.’ So, the navigator sort of plotted as best he could some open ground as best as he could and dumped the bombs and turned back. But not long after we turned we started to lose height much more seriously. Got the order to bale out. And I was at the front but I was the last one of the front members apart from the pilot of course who stays with the end, to the end. And they were all sort of up the steps waiting to get out and all the, all the jettisoned the big hatch that you got, you fall through out the bottom of the Lanc. And I was behind them and I’d been hit on the hip here when the, when the fighter attacked us. And I say [whisper] right by the arsehole, you know. Had he been an inch to the right he’d have been right up inside me and that would have been the end of me. And I lost a lot of blood. And I felt myself, you know, I thought, ‘Christ, if they don’t hurry up I’ll never make this. I’ll never make it.’ And I don’t remember going out through the, through the hatch to tell you the truth. I can’t remember and I can’t remember coming down in the parachute. But I came around with the parachute all around me and my leg giving me hell. And it was dark and I thought, ‘Christ. How long have I been lying here?’ You know. Foreign country. I’m not, I wasn’t sure whether I was in Germany or France because we were somewhere near the borderline when we were attacked. I thought to myself, ‘Christ, what do I do?’ So, I went to get up and I thought, ‘Oh Jeez.’ I almost screamed with agony. I thought, ‘Bloody hell. I’ve popped my leg.’ It wasn’t a compound fracture. It was a plain facture but of course that’s the strongest bone in your body. Your femur. And that was the one I broke [noise] Didn’t realise it at the time. Just thought well you know I’ll be alright. Lie here a few days and if I can keep going for a few days it’ll get better and I’ll be able to try and make my way back home someway or other. You know what I mean? We all had had the lectures on this sort of thing of course. And I was lying there and I heard people talking. And I thought, aye aye. I heard a man and a woman’s voice and I thought [pause] ‘Don’t shout yet. Hang on. See whether they’re German or not.’ Because I wasn’t sure whether I’d landed, you know in Germany or France. Anyway, after a while I could hear them. To my mind it was obviously French they were speaking so I shouted. They came over and in the bloody pitch black. I was out in the wilds of somewhere. And the lady, that one the photograph there hugged me as though I was a long lost cousin or something. I suppose they were glad to have found somebody alive I suppose, you know. And then they chatted to each other. The man and the woman. They were brother and sister actually as it turned out. On that photograph. And he went. I don’t know where he went. I had no idea. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. In those days anyway. And after a while he came back and he brought a step ladder with him. And they used that as a stretcher. And they lifted me on to it and I nearly yelled with agony. As they lifted you know I suppose ends of the bones you know. Jeez. Carried me, it seemed like an interminable distance. I don’t suppose it was that far but it was pretty rough terrain anyway. And then they opened the door and they put me in. It was a barn. And they gathered all the straw from the barn of the local hamlet. And they gathered all the straw together and puffed it up and they laid me on this. On this straw. And the lady there, she went away. The bloke stayed. Henri stayed with me. And she came back and she’d got some soup in a bowl. And another bowl with some water in it and cloths and she kept bathing my forehead, you know and feeding me soup. They were good to me. You know what I mean? They took a risk because they were in occupied France. It was in German occupied France. So they took a risk.
HB: Very much so.
AW: As I say, and years later I decided I’d like to try and find them and give them a proper thanks. And I’m going on holiday to Italy and we went that way when I’d found out where it was through the Red Cross. It took me ages and them ages to find out where I’d actually been. It was just a hamlet. Just two or three old old farmhouses, you know. Really old. And I wrote and told them with the aid of my colleague who spoke fluent French. He wrote it all out in French for me. And I explained that he was doing that in French so they’d understand it. And we finally went and we found it after some difficulty. Right in Eastern France. Right by the border virtually. And we had a hell of a day. I mean, I took English and French dictionaries with me, you know to try and help. And pencils and paper. Oh my God. We had some laughs, you know even though we couldn’t understand. We made each other understand mainly. But the old grandma there. Can you see her?
HB: Yeah.
AW: There. She was the grandma. She’d got, she’d got one tooth there. Just a pickled onion spear as I called it. And we had quite a day there. And we spent the whole day there. It was fabulous, you know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And so after that time I wrote to them and I sent them parcels because they were pretty tight for food.
HB: Yeah.
AW: The Germans —
HB: That was at Tramont-Lassus.
AW: That’s right.
HB: Near to Nancy.
AW: That’s right. Yes. I sent them food parcels and I kept quite a correspondence going with the aid of my colleague as I say who I worked with. But that died and faded after a while. You know, as things do, don’t they?
HB: Yeah.
AW: I’m sorry really because I would have liked to keep in touch with them. I wonder what’s happened to their family now. But when, when we went we were going on holiday to Italy and I’d routed it once I found out where it was and had to get a special map. It was a well-known map and people who sell maps. I forget their name.
HB: Michelin.
AW: Michelin.
HB: Michelin.
AW: Michelin map of that area. Just of that area. And I managed to get one. Sent for it and so forth. And I found out where it was so I routed it through this way and finally we, and I wrote and told them we were coming. It would be some time just after lunch but we couldn’t give the exact because we were coming right down from Calais you know. Right across France basically. Northern France. And drove up and came to the road leading to this little hamlet. And they were all out in the street. All out. And little tiny little toddlers who weren’t even born when I was shot down.
HB: Wonderful.
AW: And they got the bloody Tricolours and the Union Jacks. Fantastic. I felt too shy to get out the car almost. You know what I mean? They were absolutely fabulous. So, they told all the local people that I was coming, you know, ‘And this was the fellow who landed amongst us during the war.’
HB: Yeah.
AW: A fabulous time. We stayed at a hotel about ten miles away for the night. But we had a fabulous time. Although we didn’t speak each other’s language it was an enjoyable time.
HB: Yes.
AW: Because we were — you know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: They were glad to see us. So, I visited them once or twice like that.
HB: Yeah.
AW: On different holidays that I was going on.
HB: Yeah. And how long, how long did they actually look after you for, Arthur?
AW: It was only the one night really.
HB: Right.
AW: The next day when I sort of woke up or came to in the morning. There was a little dirty window up in this loft. I can see the sun’s out because it was, it was summertime.
HB: Yeah.
AW: July ’44. And I thought, ‘Oh, look at that lovely sunshine. If I can get this leg right now I’ll be off.’ You know. I was thinking I could. Two of my crew did walk all the way to Switzerland by the way and got interned. Two of the crew.
HB: Did they?
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
AW: But anyway, I thought that would be it. And then after a while, I forget what time it was. Late morning or some time before noon I heard some loud sighs and the door opened. A gendarme. The old French policeman came in who could speak a little bit of English. Not very much but a little bit. So, I suppose the rumour had got around that [pause] that I was there, you know what I mean? So, I thought, ‘Christ,’ you know, ‘If I’m not careful here he’ll tell the Germans and I’ve had it. I’ll be in a bloody Prisoner of War camp.’ And at that time the war didn’t look as though it was going to end next week. You know what I mean? I thought, oh Jeez, the thought of that. So, we got on alright and the lady came back again, you know. Rose. Bathing me and bringing me food to eat. And finally he went and I’m trying, the last thing I tried to impress on him, ‘Please don’t let the Germans know I’m here and as soon as I possibly can I’ll get off their hands,’ you know. Because they were taking a big risk. You know, by keeping me there and not telling the Germans they were taking a risk. Anyway, I mean the policeman must have realised I needed hospital treatment. I’d broken my bloody femur for Christ’s sake. You know what I mean? And after he’d gone, some time later, it was early afternoon I heard a vehicle pull up outside. A door opened. German soldier. I thought, ‘Oh no.’ I thought, ‘Oh, that’s it. Sod it.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I’ve had it.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I thought, ‘Oh bloody hell.’ Anyway, he’d got a mate with him and they’d got a little five hundred weight truck. Vehicle. Got a stretcher. Took me out. Put me in the back. Bloke got in to drive in the front and the other sat by me on a little seat at the side you know. And they took me to the hospital in Nancy. And I was the first Englishman in there. They’d got Prisoners of War but they were, a lot of them were French colonials. Frenchmen and French colonials who’d been captured in North Africa.
HB: Oh right.
AW: In Rommel’s do. You know what I mean, you know? And so I don’t remember much at all. They tell me I was delirious for nearly four days. Seven days. You know, I’d been shouting all sorts of things and I’ve, I have memories that I was in, somewhere in the Middle East going through my mind at that time during the delirium I had. You know what I mean? So it was then that I learned that I’d broken my femur, you know. So, the next thing I know I’m in traction. And they put a pin through the knee there. Right through that knee. And a weight at the end of a pulley over the end of the bed to pull the bone out so that it wouldn’t go back in the wrong position. So it would be like pulling it out to let it go back later in the correct position. Otherwise it would have been, you know, offset. And every time anybody walked by the bloody bed I was, ‘Don’t get near the bloody pulley for Christ’s sake.’ Because if they had touched it you know I felt it right up into my spine sort of thing.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And there was air raid warnings and Christ knows what while I was in this position. And they did once, when they, once they’d got me in to this plaster which they’d put on too bloody tight and it was agony they did carry me down to the cellar when the air raid warning went. And that was a nightmare because we had to go down steep stairs you know. And me inside this bloody plaster and oh Christ it was agony. I was down in this cellar and we could hear the planes going over. It was the German planes actually, I think. I’m not sure to tell you the truth. And finally they carried me back up there. And then the rumour went around, they’re leaving. ‘We’re all leaving. We’re all going. They’re taking us all into Germany.’ Well, they did. And four of us they left there. And as I say they left us in this cellar underneath the hospital. And some nuns came. I don’t know where they came from. Somewhere in Nancy. Came with food for us twice a day.
HB: But were they, were the medical staff, Arthur were they all French under German supervision?
AW: Yes. But they all went with them. They’d all, they had been captured at some time or other.
HB: Right.
AW: So, they all went back. They left one French doctor who’d been captured. I don’t know where. They left a French doctor to look after the four of us in the [pause] One was a Ginger haired fellow named Ginger who’d had his leg off to here. He’d trodden on a mine or something.
HB: Yeah.
AW: He was a soldier. Another one was a fighter pilot who flew in Mustangs or something like that. And he’d had to bale out. He’d been attacked and shot down. And as he baled out he hit the bloody tailplane with his stomach. And his stomach was a bloody mess so he couldn’t be moved. Then there was Dickie Richardson and myself. Dickie was a wireless op the same as me, in the RAF. And when he was shot down that’s when he was blinded.
HB: Yeah.
AW: The last thing he remembered seeing was a German soldier coming towards him along this road. And Dickie was in a hell of a mess. God. He had, at that time he’d had his hand off. They’d amputated his hand. Bald as a badger except that he was badly burned so it was all bandaged. And his face was a mess. They left a little hole there to feed him through a tube. And I was telling you about this chap before they moved us all into this cellar. There was four of us in this cellar. He said, This fella, he’s marvellous. He sings. He tries to sing and you know he’s got these terrible burns. He must be in agony.’ Anyway, he was there and it turns out he came from Worcester which is not too far from here.
HB: Yeah.
AW: So he knew Birmingham and he knew the Bull Ring in the city. So we, we naturally became buddies. You know what I mean?
HB: Yeah.
AW: And it was nice to talk to somebody who knew places. He knew places I knew and vice versa. We were down there for I think it was about ten or eleven days actually and we could hear the firing getting nearer and finally it was very near and it was like small arms fire. You know. And we’re only just below street level actually in this cellar. And this Ginger said, ‘Sorry. I’m going to have to find somebody to come down and help us,’ you know. We were stuck there and nobody knew we were there really except the doctor who’d been looking after and we don’t know what happened to him. Whether he went we don’t know. So he went, and I said, ‘Hey, don’t you forget us’, you know. I said, ‘We’re stuck down here and we’re relying on you to bring somebody.’ Anyway, he was away for about an hour or more and suddenly a bloody Yank appeared. A Yankee first lieutenant. Talk about John Wayne. He wasn’t as big as that but he was dressed like John Wayne would be if you imagine as he’d been in films about that.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And he was dirty looking and he just walked in. He must have come down the steps and he came along the corridor and into this, well a cell it was really. And he just went, ‘Hi fellas.’ We could have kissed him. Really. Out come the fags.
HB: Yeah.
AW: You know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: He’d got a cigarette. Bloody Yank. He was wonderful. And he said, he said, ‘I can see you are all in trouble,’ he said, ‘Does anybody need anything urgently doing?’ I said, ‘Well, yes please.’ They put this plaster on and it came from here up right around across here and across the back and they put the edge of the plaster was where the bloody wound was. They’d put a dressing on, that’s all. And of course as it dried it curled in. You know. You’ve seen plasters do that? And it curled in on the bloody wound and I was in absolute agony. I mean I couldn’t turn over or anything. It was such a, I was stuck, you know, it was up to here.
HB: So, your left, your left foot, ankle, leg.
AW: Yes.
HB: Femur. Waist.
AW: Yeah.
HB: With a half cast around on your bum.
AW: Well, it came right around.
HB: And it came right up on to your chest. So you —
AW: Right across the bloody wound. I was in agony. I tried to sort of ease myself upwards inside the cast if you understand what I mean to get the weight off this bloody edge that was cutting into the bloody wound. So, when this Yank came he said, ‘Anything special you want doing?’ He said, ‘I’ll get you some medical attention. Is there anything I can do for you now?’ I said, ‘Yes. For Christ’s sake,’ I said, ‘I need somebody to look at my ass.’ I said, ‘I’m in trouble.’ He said, ‘Well, I can’t do that on my own.’ I said, ‘No. I understand.’ He said, ‘But I’ll bring somebody,’ he said, ‘I won’t desert you. I’ll bring somebody.’ And sure enough he went and they came back. All the Yankee medics and so forth. They were fantastic.
HB: Yeah.
AW: They carried us out. They had ambulances there. And they took us to a local field hospital under canvas. You know. And then I moved back through different field, American field hospitals. Getting further and further away from the actual fighting front. And I think it was, I think it was somewhere in the middle of France. Mid-northern France. With an air strip. And I was flown back in a Yankee plane. And I was the only Englishman, I told you on board. All the rest were Yanks and nearly all of them were infantrymen who’d just come direct from the front line. Wounded. Some of them badly, you know. And they took me to a little hospital. We landed somewhere near Reading. I don’t know where it was. Somewhere near Reading. And they took me to a local hospital and I was in this ward with nothing but Yanks. It was a Yankee hospital. But the next day I was taken by ambulance and then I went through a series of various hospitals. And finally I finished up at Wroughton RAF Hospital near Swindon. RAF officers ward if you don’t mind. Going up. And they looked at me. Took this plaster off and he said — the word he used was, ‘Christ,’ as he took the plaster off and saw my foot. I couldn’t see it at that time. I was lying up you know and it was, and it was just black. Solid black all around there and the back of my heel. It was gangrene. And then there was touch and go and then they said, ‘Oh, we can’t deal with that here. You’ll probably have to go to Archibald McIndoe’s place.’ I said, ‘Who? Never heard of him.’ ‘Archibald McIndoe.’ I said ‘Who’s that?’ ‘He’s a world famous plastic surgeon at East Grinstead.’ I said, ‘Well, where’s East Grinstead?’ He said, ‘It’s Sussex.’ ‘I don’t want to go down there.’ I was thinking of Sheila, my girlfriend coming to see me, you know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And she never travelled on her own very much at all, you know. But anyway, they took me by ambulance then to East Grinstead and it was the best move I ever had really. You know. Fantastic. But it was a bit different because I’d been in a sort of orthopaedic ward. You know, broken limbs and so forth. And I moved into this ward down in East Grinstead and they got what they called the bug in. They got the bug. You know, which is very easy with burns you know. So everybody was walking around with masks on. All these nurses had masks over their faces. You now. Visitors had to wear a mask. And I thought, ‘Christ, this is serious [laughs] I don’t like this.’ Anyway, it was a wonderful wonderful wonderful place. It was really. I mean we were treated like, like sirs really, you know. We really were. Wonderful treatment. Wonderful wonderful man. And altogether I was about, I think about fourteen or fifteen months having treatment.
HB: When you first got there though and they put you in the ward. Who was in the bed next door but one?
AW: Next door but one was Dickie.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Yeah. Fantastic. But he wasn’t in the bed. He was sitting by — there was just a stove. It was a wartime sort of place. Like a temporary, added on to the local cottage hospital in East Grinstead. And this fellow was there. They put me on an end bed. There was only about ten beds in the ward. There was five each side. Only a small wartime thing. And I saw this fellow sitting by the, by the stove. He’d got a dressing gown on. And he’d got an arm off up to, up to there at the time and his, his head was bandaged but I could see part of his face which was very very badly burned. And I thought, ‘I’ve got a feeling I know you.’ I knew him by his real name while we were in the cellar. Walter. Walter Richardson. Because Richardson — Richardson. Dickie. Dick. You know. And they were all calling him Dickie so I thought, crikey. Anyway, this nurse was sort of getting me settled in to the bed and tucking me in and I said to her, ‘That fellow by the, sitting by the stove there,’ I said, ‘Is his name Walter?’ ‘No. I don’t think so,’ she said, ‘We know him as Dickie.’ So, I thought, ‘It’s him. I can tell his voice,’ and so forth, you know. But he’d got his arm off to there. When I knew him he had just his hand off you know. So, I said, ‘Well, I think I know him,’ I said, ‘Could you bring him over to me?’ She said, ‘Yes, I’ll bring him.’ She said, ‘Come on Dickie. Somebody here wants to speak to you. He thinks he knows you.’ So, she led him over to my bed. And he leaned over like blind people do, you know. He couldn’t see. And I said, ‘Hello Walter, I bet you don’t know who this is.’ And he said, ‘Christ. It’s Red.’ And he recognised my voice. And it had been three or four months since we’d seen each other. We got separated, you know in various field hospitals as we moved because he was very very ill, Dickie was and so he didn’t make the same progress as I did. So I got flown back before he did. So, we never saw each other again then. And then I recognised him but he recognised my voice as soon as I, and the fact that I called him Walter I think did it. I said, ‘Hello Walter. I bet you don’t know who this is.’ ‘Christ almighty, it’s Red.’
HB: That was your nickname? Red.
AW: Well, yeah because in the cellar there were four of us. Two Gingers. And he called me Red and the other one Ginger.
HB: Right.
AW: Because he couldn’t see either of us. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Yeah. And that’s the story really. You know.
HB: So, so you end up in East Grinstead.
AW: Yeah.
HB: With the, what was to become the Guinea Pig Club.
AW: That’s right.
HB: With Sir Arthur McIndoe.
AW: Archibald.
HB: Sorry.
AW: Archibald.
HB: Archibald McIndoe.
AW: Yeah. Wonderful wonderful man.
HB: And, and so he, they actually saved your leg.
AW: Oh, no doubt about it. No doubt about that. It was due for an amputation. But there was a wonderful sister there. Nursing sister. She was, I suppose she was late forties. A Scots girl. Had a sweet voice. And she used to come and dress my leg three or four times a day. My foot. And they tried all sorts of things, you know. Of course this was when penicillin was just, at the time penicillin was new. Oh, this is it. Shall I do it for you, you know. It made a mess of my foot. Penicillin. I’m penicillin allergic.
HB: Oh right.
AW: Didn’t know it then because it was very early days of penicillin. And they tried all and in the end she tried a mixture of, I can’t remember all of it but it had liquid paraffin and something else and something else. I don’t know what the other two were. I know liquid paraffin was. And they just soaked muslin in it you know and made a pad and put it on there and there and bandaged it. And after two or three days when they took it off there was bits of it. Bits of the shit, you know on it. And they said, ‘It’s coming away. It’s coming away.’ And they did that for weeks and weeks until they finally got it completely just and then I had plastic surgery. And what they did, they took — I don’t know whether you can see, Harry. I don’t want to bore you with it. But —
HB: No. No. I’m not bored.
AW: That’s my good leg.
HB: Oh right. So that’s where, so that’s where they took the skin from.
AW: That’s right. Yeah. Can you see that patch?
HB: Good grief.
AW: And can you see that at the back?
HB: Yeah.
AW: That there.
HB: So that came, that —
AW: What they did, they cut because that’s an S. I don’t know whether you can see. It goes around there.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Like that. They opened that flap there and that flap there. Put my foot in it like that.
HB: Pull along there.
AW: Cast around there so I couldn’t move it and I was stuck like that for about two months.
HB: So, they, they —
AW: And they, and they had me suspended over, or my legs suspended from a bar that they construct over the bed vertically.
HB: So, the living flesh from your right leg.
AW: Grew.
HB: Was connected to your left leg.
AW: That’s where that came from you see.
HB: And grew.
AW: That’s right.
HB: And then at some stage —
AW: They disconnected. And that’s it.
HB: Came along with a big pair of scissors.
AW: It took a long while.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I was there fifteen months altogether.
HB: Wow. And it’s —
AW: And unfortunately that foot, that leg’s about three quarters of an inch shorter than the other one but it doesn’t matter.
HB: Well, that’s —
AW: But you can see —
HB: Incredible.
AW: The only thing is that gets very dry. That there.
HB: Yeah.
AW: It gets very dry and it cracks sometimes and I have to wear a plaster on it, you know. It gets sore.
HB: Yeah.
AW: But I mean I had a lucky — I mean I was as near as damn it to having it amputated.
HB: Yeah. I mean, that’s that I mean.
AW: They did wonderful work.
HB: I mean, I know, I know it’s a lot of years ago but it’s just amazing really to to —
AW: Well, you can see, can’t you?
HB: To see that.
AW: You can see the patch, can’t you?
HB: Yeah.
AW: You can see that’s where it’s come from.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And around there like a letter S and that that way, that that way. Stuck my foot in it, for the want of a better word. Stitched it all up. Put some plaster around here so I couldn’t move.
HB: And that was it.
AW: And suspend it. Well, didn’t suspend me exactly but my feet and legs were up.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I lay on my back like that.
HB: Good grief.
AW: So when I wanted a pee or a shit I was in trouble.
HB: Well, yeah.
AW: You can imagine can’t you?
HB: Yeah.
AW: And that went on for two months.
HB: Yeah. Never mind nil by mouth.
AW: [laughs] Oh dear. Oh, it’s a long —
HB: That’s, that’s amazing.
AW: That’s a long story but —
HB: No. No. No. Its —
AW: And that’s why I’m a Guinea Pig.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And —
HB: And that’s, and that’s obviously the Guinea Pig Club.
AW: That’s it.
HB: That’s it.
AW: Fantastic.
HB: And you’re one of, one of the survivors.
AW: Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, yes. I mean, I’m very fortunate but most of the lads in the Guinea Pig Club were badly burned. You know. Badly burned. Like Dickie. But he lived for some years. He had twins.
HB: Did he?
AW: Yeah. A boy and a girl. Yeah.
HB: Oh lovely.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Fantastic.
HB: So, while all this was going on. Right.
AW: Yes.
HB: I’m just picturing the scene now.
AW: Yes. That’s alright, Harry. Yeah.
HB: 630 Squadron. You’re flying.
AW: Do you want a cup of coffee by the way?
HB: We’ll have a break. We’ll have a break
AW: Ok. We’ll carry on talking.
HB: We’re having a, we’re having a scene here of you’re flying on ops, you’re writing to Sheila.
AW: Yes.
HB: Right. And you’re keeping in contact.
AW: That’s right. Yes.
HB: You’ve obviously had a few leaves and what not. So, you come back from France.
AW: Yes.
HB: And you’re in East Grinstead.
AW: I went to Wroughton first.
HB: Well, yeah. To Wroughton.
AW: Orthopaedic.
HB: How, how did, how did Sheila take it?
AW: She took it bloody well and she waited for me.
HB: Good girl. Yeah.
AW: She did. I’ll just tell you this little bit. I was, when I was flown back from France I was put in some local hospital near, somewhere near Reading. But it was only for the one night. The next day by ambulance I was taken to Wroughton.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Officer’s ward. RAF officer’s ward.
HB: What rank were you when you were shot down?
AW: Flying officer.
HB: You were flying officer when you were shot down.
AW: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: Right. So you’re in the posh bit now.
AW: So I’m in the — yeah. And there were all sorts of cases. They were mostly orthopaedic cases in there. But anyway I’ve got the letter I wrote to my mum and dad from there. It’s in pencil because I was lying on my back in this plaster.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And I couldn’t. I had to write like this, you know. It was very difficult.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: The paper keeps falling. It’s all in, all in pencil. And I wrote and told them where I was and I said, “As far as I know it’s a few miles from Swindon. It’s called Wroughton.” And of course my mum and dad hadn’t heard a word about me. They didn’t know whether I was dead or not. All they were told I was missing. I’ll show you something if I may. I’m sorry to delay this.
HB: No. No. No.
AW: You may be on your way.
HB: No. No. My time is yours, Arthur.
AW: If I’ve got it. Somewhere I have, I’m sure. I’ve got all the telegrams and so forth that went backwards and forwards, you know.
HB: Right.
AW: At the time. I think that’s the one. This is a telegram in those days. Look. Post Office.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Telegram.
HB: Tiny little envelope.
AW: Yeah. [pause] Can you read it?
HB: It’s very faded now isn’t it?
AW: It is. Yes.
HB: Right.
AW: Read it.
HB: BM priority CC Mr C Woolf.
AW: That’s my father. Charles.
HB: 31 Ismere Road.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Erdington.
AW: That’s right.
HB: “Deeply regret to inform you that your son Flying Officer Arthur S Woolf is missing from operations on the night of the 24th 25th of July 1944. Please accept my profound sympathy. Letter follows pending receipt of written notification from the Air Ministry. No information should be given to the press. Officer commanding 630 Squadron.”
AW: Yeah. That was the first my mum — and I hadn’t even told them I was flying on ops.
HB: Oh.
AW: So, you can imagine. Well, I didn’t want to worry them. I knew they’d worry to death. My older brother was in the far, the Middle East and I didn’t want to worry them. They knew I was flying. I said I was. I kept telling them I was still on a different course. Which I did go on quite a lot of training courses. So, when they got that you can imagine. My God.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I perhaps should have told them I was on ops, you know. Really. So they could have been prepared.
HB: It come as a bit of a shock.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yes.
AW: A hell of a shock.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Oh dear. But there you are.
HB: So, so by then did, did Sheila, Sheila know your mum and dad quite well by then?
AW: Oh yes. She did. She did. She knew them —
HB: Had you got —
AW: And on the letters and that I sent I always put on the end, tell — “advise Sheila,” you know.
HB: Right.
AW: And they knew where she lived.
HB: So, had you and Sheila got an understanding by this stage? Or —
AW: Well —
HB: Were you still just a courting couple?
AW: Oh, we were still courting I think.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Yeah. Yeah. But we always, both of us always felt there was nobody else. You know what I mean?
HB: Yeah.
AW: So that was it. Yeah. Then this is one, “Arrived England.”
HB: This is another telegram.
AW: This is from me.
HB: This is from you.
AW: This is for mom and dad. Mr and Mrs Woolf. “Arrived England. Address RAF Hospital, Wroughton, Swindon, Wilts. Alright except for a broken leg. Please inform Sheila — Arthur.” [laughs]
HB: [laughs] All right except for a broken leg.
AW: You can’t get, you can’t get much terser than that can you? [laughs]
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: Oh dear.
HB: It’s like —
AW: This is the bit I was going to tell you. So, I was very very pale because I hadn’t been out in the open air at all. Been in the cellar and prior to that in the ward so I’d never been in the open air and sister said, ‘You could do with some fresh air. We’ll have you moved. We’ll put you out on the balcony tomorrow or something.’ ‘Ok.’ Sort of thing. And so I’m on the balcony in my bed and by this time, oh that’s right I still had the plaster on me. No. I hadn’t. I’d had the plaster off by then. So I was half sitting up in the bed. Like this, you know. And I saw my mum and dad. They were quite big grounds to the hospital at Wroughton. Gardens and so forth. And they were coming in this bloody main path with Sheila. Walking up and suddenly my dad caught sight of me and he paused and he ran.
HB: Oh bless.
AW: Oh, grand, you know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And they came up. Oh God. You can imagine the reunion. They thought I was gone and missing and dead and so forth. You know. So it was a wonderful moment that was that will live in my memory forever. Absolutely.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: So, I’ve got all sorts of letters and things here but [pause] no.
HB: Do you want, do you want to have a break for a coffee?
AW: Ok. I’ll go and make a coffee. How do you like your coffee, Harry?
HB: Let me just pause this. I’m just — it’s, the time now is —
AW: Are you alright for time?
HB: 13.05. So, I’m just going to pause while we have a comfort break.
[recording paused]
HB: Recommencing the interview. The time is 1.40 and we’re suitably refreshed.
AW: I’m taking all your day up.
HB: Well, we’ve had an interesting chat while we’ve been having a coffee. Just go back over a couple of things.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Arthur. When you, when you started off with 630.
AW: Yes.
HB: At East Kirby.
AW: It’s Kirkby.
HB: Sorry. East Kirkby.
AW: It’s got two Ks.
HB: Yeah. Your, your crew was formed and trained by then and you then did sixteen ops.
AW: Yes.
HB: So, what, what sort of areas did you go to for your ops?
AW: Mainly France.
HB: Mainly France.
AW: Because it was to back up the troops.
HB: Yeah. And in what, what year? This was in 1944.
AW: ’44. ’44.
HB: Right.
AW: When the invasion had taken place which I was involved in, on — that’s why I’ve got that medal.
HB: Yeah.
AW: On the sort of July. June. And then much of it was to do with backing up army movements.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And so forth. We did one daylight road on an aircraft factory just somewhere north of Paris. And we did one other daylight raid which was [pause] I can’t tell you, can I?
HB: You can.
AW: It’s in my log isn’t it?
HB: You can because I’ve got your logbook there.
AW: Which is quite something to see it, to actually see the bloody — where you were going.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
AW: Where am I? Where am I? Where am I? [pause] I’ll have to put my specs on.
HB: Here you are.
AW: Specs on.
HB: There you go.
AW: Sorry.
HB: I’ve got it. I’ve got it for you. Yeah. I’ll hold it.
AW: Yes. I had my eyes done. Started in January. I finished about a month ago.
HB: Right. Yeah. Well, they’re certainly working.
AW: I’m a sucker for — now where was it? [pause] Now then, I’m not sure which one of those two it was but it’s in the book. It’s in the book.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Hang on. Hang on. It’s in the book. That’s why I check this book.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Because they went on the same ops as we did virtually most of the time. You know what I mean? [pause] I’ll tell you the toughest. The toughest place we went to was a place called Wesseling in Germany.
HB: Wesseling.
AW: Yes. W E S S E L I N G. Wesseling. And I’ve never seen so many aircraft shot down. The flak as well as the night fighter interception on part of the route was absolutely enormous. We were over this place. Wesseling. It was an oil refinery or something and bloody hell the planes were going down all around us. They really were. And we never got a touch. Never got a scratch. It’s just fate isn’t it?
HB: Yeah.
AW: It’s fate.
HB: Yeah.
AW: There’s no accounting for it.
HB: Because —
AW: We lost a lot of aircraft that night.
HB: Yeah.
AW: If I remember correctly.
HB: Because I’ve had a quick look in your logbook there. You didn’t really get any damage until you were actually shot down.
AW: No. We did have. We were attacked on one other occasion but oh dear, what was it? It was used for — but oh God I’ve forgotten. We were, we really thought we’d had it.
HB: Right.
AW: It came out of nowhere, you know. Because the trouble with the Lancaster — its blind spot was below. You know, you didn’t, you know, you couldn’t, nobody could really see down below. You know. And there were all sorts of things thought about and tried in that respect but we had this bloody set to with this plane and I thought Christ we’ve had it. And in the end the mid-upper gunner who got killed — Johnny Kiesow. He got it.
HB: He shot it down.
AW: Yeah. It was never confirmed because we didn’t actually see it hit the ground.
HB: Right.
AW: But we saw. I got up in the astrodome because it was right by my station and I watched it and I saw it start smoking and then flames coming out of it and it went and it disappeared in the clouds. But never saw it actually crash and they won’t give it you, you know.
HB: No. No.
AW: They wouldn’t give it him.
HB: And that, you didn’t, you didn’t put that in your logbook did you?
AW: I can’t remember which one it was. I can’t remember which one it was now. It’s so long ago, quite honestly.
HB: Yeah. Well, it is a while ago [laughs]
AW: It was over, it was over, well yes [laughs] it was over France. I can tell you that much. Yeah.
AW: Now, where would it be?
HB: I couldn’t — I didn’t notice anything about that in your logbook when I flicked through it. No. No.
AW: I can’t remember which one it was to tell you the honest truth. I’m ashamed to say.
HB: Yeah. No. It’s, I mean you know it’s but that’s the thing about your guy’s logbooks.
AW: I mean and the next morning we went down to the flight office and see the aircraft and you could see bullet holes all through. Yet none of us were injured. None of us got hurt.
AW: Amazing, isn’t it?
HB: We were bloody close to it, you know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: It’s amazing really, you know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And —
HB: So —
AW: But that was a blind spot with the Lanc was below.
HB: Yeah.
AW: A bad blind spot really. But there you are.
HB: Because the plane that got you had got one of these —
AW: I assume it was. What did they call them? The German term isn’t there? Is there a term for it? The German. Bloody hell.
HB: Was it nacht musik or something?
AW: Something. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Not quite like that. But yeah it already fires upwards.
HB: Yeah. It’s —
AW: And its almost certainly that’s what did get us.
HB: Yeah. So, when, when you were actually on that particular raid and you were then attacked —
AW: Yeah.
HB: Did you lose your air gunners then or did you — ?
AW: No.
HB: Or did they —
AW: I can’t remember but —
HB: Right.
AW: No. I don’t remember to be honest.
HB: Yeah.
AW: But I have a feeling it was afterwards.
HB: Right. When, when —
AW: Because I don’t remember anybody saying, you know.
HB: No.
AW: Anything about them being injured. Or anything at all.
HB: And obviously with you being wounded.
AW: Yeah. Exactly.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: So, I don’t really honestly know.
HB: Yeah. So, out of your crew —
AW: I’m the only one left.
HB: You’re the only one that’s left alive now. The — it was only the two gunners that were killed.
AW: Yes. That’s right. The mid-upper gunner and the rear gunner.
HB: And the rest of your crew landed.
AW: Yes.
HB: Parachuted.
AW: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.
HB: And, and you say two of them managed to walk away and evade.
AW: Yes. Yes, that was quite an interesting story. In fact, he did write about it. George did. It’s funny. They landed by parachute of course.
HB: Yeah.
AW: They told me this afterwards. Years afterwards. Landed by parachute and —
HB: So that’s Arthur who’s known as George Toogood.
AW: Joe. Joe Toogood.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And Woody. And so Woody sort of walked down this lane. Got his parachute all collected up and so forth and buried it or did something. I don’t know what he did with it. And he thought, ‘Now, what the bloody hell do I do?’ So, he saw the milestones. You know France is full of milestones, isn’t it?
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: Kilometre stones I should say. And he was just bending down like to try and see because it was dark still. A voice said, ‘Hello Woody.’ [laughs] He said, ‘I nearly shit myself.’ [laughs] All quiet, you know. You could just imagine, can’t you?
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: Oh dear. Oh dear. So, anyway —
HB: So, that was the bomb aimer and the navigator.
AW: Anyway, and that’s quite an interesting story actually.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: The trials and tribulations. They walked in to Switzerland which is some way to walk. They walked at night when they possibly could and they hid in haystacks. They ate all sorts of bloody stuff because they were starving. They even knocked up people. Took a chance. They were so desperate for something to eat and a proper nights’ rest. You know. They knocked up French people who didn’t trust them and that sort of thing. You know what I mean? It was quite interesting.
HB: Yeah.
AW: They finally got to Switzerland. They had a bloody good time there. Food. Food. You know, fantastic.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Absolutely fantastic. So, they got away with it and they —
HB: So you’ve got, the two Canadians you’d got in your crew. Could either of them speak French?
AW: No.
HB: Oh.
AW: No.
HB: Oh right.
AW: No. Not to my knowledge. No. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t.
HB: So, then, so they got to Switzerland with no language skills whatsoever.
AW: That’s right. Whether they knew a bit of French.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Being from Ontario and around there you know. Quebec is the big place for French, isn’t it?
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
AW: I don’t know. But they had some trials and tribulations. And some near misses I think as well. But they made it anyway. But the Swiss weren’t very receptive at all. They had a hell of a job getting into Switzerland when they got there.
HB: Oh.
AW: Yeah. I’ve got that story. I don’t know if I’ve got it unfortunately. I don’t know what happened to it.
HB: So they’ve, so —
AW: They had quite a job. The bloody Swiss were most suspicious and wouldn’t —
HB: Yeah.
AW: Wouldn’t let them in and so forth. But eventually they had them in and they were in a little hotel up in the mountains overlooking the lake and God knows what else. You know. I said, ‘Some of us have got it made.’ [laughs]
HB: Yeah. Yeah. You were in —
AW: There was me suffering.
HB: And you’re in, you’re in a basement in Nancy.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So, so that was, that was being, coming to the end of those sixteen ops.
AW: Yes.
HB: Obviously they’re going through Europe. And you were just, you were telling me about how your mum and dad got to know through the pilot. Your mum got to know through the pilot.
AW: Oh yes. Yeah. Well, they hadn’t heard anything officially and my dad kept writing and that sort of thing. You know. There were no phones.
HB: I think you’ll have to explain how your pilot actually got back to England.
AW: Oh, well yes. As I say he was in Eastern France. A Yank. And of course they could hear gunfire and so forth getting nearer and nearer. And he knew what it was. It was the advance, you know. And he must have known also it was the Yanks in that part of the, France. And he got a bicycle. I don’t know whether he had use of that while he was with this farming family and he got off and he cycled and met the Yanks. And met up with the troops and so forth and they saw him safely through the lines sort of thing. The next thing he knows he’s back in England and he went back to the, to the squadron. And after a while he had a, he was granted a leave and I think it was a fairly long leave of absence. Then he was instructed to go back to the Pathfinder squadron. And that’s where and he did — I don’t think he did a full tour. He did a few ops with them with a different crew.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Which I didn’t like.
HB: No.
AW: I didn’t like that. The fact that he, you know he was going some but there you are, you know. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s stupid really.
HB: So he came, so he came back to England.
AW: Yes.
HB: And he’s heading back for this and he’s got a bit of leave and he ends up in —
AW: What’s the name of the —
HB: In Birmingham. Walking down your front path.
AW: Oh yes. With my mum. Yeah. As I say so he stayed with them two or three nights. And I told you about the tomato didn’t I?
HB: Yeah. Well, yeah.
AW: [unclear]
HB: I think, I think you probably, you know, there’s your mum.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Standing looking out the window.
AW: That’s right.
HB: And this big handsome American turns up.
AW: Yeah. She saw this big tall fellow at the gate because we had a fairly long front garden. And she thought, ‘Oh, he’s in uniform. American uniform.’ And she thought, ‘That’s Bill. It’s got to be Bill,’ because she knew he was tall and so forth. She’d never seen him. And she rushed to the front door and almost dragged him into the house she said. Just opened it. There’s some news of me. And he had news from me. Apparently, there was a grapevine somewhere when he was living with this family. He’d heard that one of the crew had got a broken leg and was taken to hospital. They thought it was in Nancy. They weren’t sure. And they were pretty sure it was me. So, he told her that I was ok but I’d got a broken leg and of course I’d worse trouble I think because of the plaster causing all my problems.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: Not the broken leg. I mean that cured. It heals anyway.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And he stayed with them and they had a good time together. He took them out drinking and God knows what else. You know what I mean?
HB: Yeah.
AW: So he enjoyed himself. And finally when he was posted back to the squadron he went to a Pathfinder squadron.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And he had another crew. So, I assume, I don’t know, he probably took the part of some other pilot who had been killed or something or lost in some way. And he took over this crew.
HB: Yeah.
AW: You know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And I’ve even seen a photograph of it. Don’t like them [laughs]
HB: Nicked your pilot [laughs] Stole your pilot.
AW: That’s right. Stole him.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s, that’s ok. So when you’ve, you were coming to the end of your time in East Grinstead and at some stage obviously you were discharged. I think you said fifteen, sixteen months or something.
AW: Yes. It was.
HB: And you were, so you were discharged from East Grinstead. From —
AW: That’s right.
HB: Archibald McIndoe’s —
AW: That’s right.
HB: Thing. And you, where did you go back to then?
AW: I went back to the original place I’d worked at as an office boy.
HB: No. Sorry. I mean did, did you go back to squadron before, before you were —
AW: No. I went afterwards.
HB: Right.
AW: I went to have a look over it to see.
HB: Yeah. So, you were demobbed from East Grinstead.
AW: Well, I had to go. I was at home. They sent me home on leave.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
AW: Pending discharge sort of thing.
HB: Right. Yeah.
AW: And then I had a letter saying I was — my, my commission had ended on such and such a date.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I can’t — well I think I’ve got it somewhere.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And then I had instruction to go to Hednesford I think it was. In the Black Country. Where they had [pause] with all the suits.
HB: Oh.
AW: What do you call it?
HB: Your demob suit. Yeah.
AW: Oh God.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I hated that. Hated it.
HB: Tell me what hat? What hat did you get, Arthur?
AW: I got —
HB: A trilby?
AW: I don’t think I did get one. I don’t think I wanted one. You know. I’ve been used to wearing of course the old officer’s cap.
HB: Yeah.
AW: But I didn’t fancy trilbies and things. I don’t think I bothered with that.
HB: Yeah.
AW: But it wasn’t very far from Birmingham. It was Hednesford or somewhere like that where they set up this discharge sort of camp, you know. And oh, it was bloody awful. All these bloody raggy suits and boots and oh gee.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Horrible. Not used to it.
HB: So, so you obviously went through there and you got your demob.
AW: Yeah.
HB: And you then, you’re looking for work.
AW: Well, my firm where I’d worked as an office boy but I left them to go to work at Castle Bromwich aeroplane factory. I told you, didn’t I?
HB: Yeah.
AW: Did I tell you about that?
HB: Yeah.
AW: Because Sheila worked there.
HB: Yeah.
AW: That’s why I went.
HB: Yeah.
AW: But the original firm I worked for as an office boy in Colmore Row someone got to know that I was home and wrote and said the position was there for me if I wanted it. So, I went back there. Biggest mistake I ever made really. Well, I felt it was bloody awful. I told you there was only about five of us on the staff anyway and so during the war while I’d been away and the others had been away they’d only had youngsters and the bloody records and things had gone to pot. You know what I mean? And an insurance company needs records.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: Like nobody’s business. Oh, and I was, oh bloody hell. I thought I’ll never stand this. I can’t stand this. This is not what I want to do. And you know, do you know Birmingham centre?
HB: I know a little bit about Birmingham.
AW: Do you know Colmore Row?
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
AW: Well, I was in Colmore Row. Near this Edward Square where the Council House is and this sort of thing.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: And right opposite they’d opened a Milk Bar which was a fairly new things in those days. A Milk Bar. So, I said, ‘Oh, sod this.’ I used to go down in the lift and go down to the Milk Bar. Middle of the day or whatever time, you know. There was nobody else around. And it was such a, such a nightmare of a task to try and sort out on my own the bloody mess that the office records there had got in to. You know what I mean? And I thought, ‘Christ, I can’t stand this.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t know what the bloody hell so I’ll go in the Milk Bar and have a milkshake and think about it.’
HB: Yeah.
AW: But in the end I stuck it out for some time. Took exams. Insurance exams. Which I passed.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And so forth. And [pause] and then I, as I say I was at, I never really settled in there after the war really.
HB: Yeah.
AW: But my brother, who’s now passed away of course, he was four years older than me he was the purchasing manager at — do you know Schrader Tyre Valves?
HB: Yeah. I’ve heard of Schrader. Yeah. Yeah.
AW: And he said, well he knew I was unsettled, he said, he said, ‘We’ve got a job going,’ he said, ‘Export manager. He said, ‘But I’ve nothing to do with it,’ he said, ‘But, you know.’ So, I applied for it and I got it. And then I travelled all over the world.
HB: Oh right.
AW: I’ve been all over the world. I was with them for a number of years ‘til I got fed up with travelling. I went to pretty well all, all parts of the world other than I never went to Australia or New Zealand but other parts — South America. You name it I travelled.
HB: Did you go back to Germany?
AW: No. I went to Germany but only for an exhibition that was on.
HB: Right.
AW: To do with driers and so forth.
HB: Yeah.
AW: You know. But I did travel all over the world and you know on a large number of visits shall we say.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Got fed up in the end with that. And I thought, ‘Well, Christ I can’t stand this for the rest of my — ‘til I retire. It’s not possible.’ And so when I was at home, you know I spent about on an average at that time six months out of the twelve abroad. Which is a lot. My wife was on her own. Well, she had a good position herself but I mean she had no family. You know what I mean? And I thought this isn’t right. So, I began to look in the papers when I was at home for something worth going, going after you know. And I saw this advert and it was in the, I think it was the Birmingham Post and it said that they had a director who was due to retire from age who was in charge of all the commercial aspects of the company. And that they were looking for a suitable replacement. To train if necessary. So I thought I’ll have a go at that. Anyway, I got a letter to go for an interview and it was in the Black Country. Bloody hell. I didn’t know the Black Country. Do you? Do you know the Black Country?
HB: Well, a little bit.
AW: It’s a land of its own isn’t it?
HB: That’s when you need your language skills.
AW: Absolutely. Anyway, to cut a long story short I had to go for a second interview and I found this company. It was called Alloy Wire Company and they draw wire nickel chrome wires cold through diamond dies to, fine as your hair.
HB: Blimey.
AW: Absolutely, you know —
HB: Yeah.
AW: Quite, quite technically good stuff. I had to go for a second interview and I was getting on for fifty by this time, you know. And I thought, Christ I, you know. I can’t stick this ‘til I’m sixty five and retirement age. So I went and I had a second interview. And I got on very well at the second interview and they seemed very pleased with me. And it was for a take charge of all the commercial aspects of the company. You know. Books. The lot. Which I was capable of doing. I went to night school.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And so forth in the earlier years and so forth. And I got the job and I spent the rest of my working life there.
HB: Oh right.
AW: Fantastic.
HB: When —
AW: So I spent about fifteen years there and what a crowd of —
HB: When did you, when did you actually marry Sheila?
AW: I married her in 1945.
HB: Brilliant.
AW: After the war. After I was out the RAF. She wanted to get married before and I said no. It wasn’t right.
HB: No.
AW: You know, I’d heard and know about young girl’s being left as widows.
HB: Yeah.
AW: You know, and it —
HB: So you were still recovering from your injuries when you got married.
AW: Well, I was. I was on a walking stick. I didn’t show you the photographs but yes I was still using the walking stick.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
AW: Yeah.
HB: That’s —
AW: We got married in Erdington which was a suburb of Birmingham.
HB: Yeah. Can I just take you back?
AW: Yes.
HB: To one, one part. Because while, while we were having our coffee you were showing me you’ve got a piece of your aircraft.
AW: Yes.
HB: And it was interesting. You touched on calling in on the family that looked after you when you first landed.
AW: That’s right. Which I did. Yes.
HB: So, so and I think you said it was the Dupre family.
AW: Dupre. That’s right.
HB: Yeah. So, just, just for the sake of the interview Arthur can you just go back over that when you go and you go with your brother.
AW: Oh yes.
HB: And the family.
AW: Well, yeah —
HB: And you go back.
AW: Well, I was in the car and we were driving. My brother and I both drove so we shared the driving. We were going in to to Italy on holiday.
HB: Yeah.
AW: We went to the West Coast of Italy and so I routed right around there. Spent the winter routing it out, you know. And finally —
HB: And had you been in contact with the family to say —
AW: That’s right. Through the letter with the help of my colleague who spoke French. And I told them I was arriving this date. Couldn’t give them an exact hour but it would probably just sometime early afternoon. And as I say I drove up in this little bloody hamlet it was and there was all the bunting out. They’d got Union Jacks and Tricolours out. And all the families, even little kiddies as I said who weren’t even born when I was shot down, they were all out. And there weren’t all that many because there was only a few houses sort of thing. A few very very old French farmhouses. And we had a hell of a time really. We really did, you know. I took a bottle of Scotch — Johnny Walker in those days was very popular. And they’d got the homemade what they called schnapps.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah.
AW: Made with the plums. Oh my God I floated.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And anyway they found us a little hotel nearby. It wasn’t too far away. We stayed the night and we saw them again the next day sort of thing, you know.
HB: And they were all there weren’t they?
AW: Yes. They were.
HB: Was it Rose? And —
AW: Rose and Henri. That’s right.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Henri was the chappie who found me with his sister Rose.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And he took me and he said, ‘Would you like to see where the aircraft crashed?’ I said I’d love to. That’s what I want to see as much as anything. So he said — and I was in this bloody Morris Minor. Bloody hell, you know. With all the stuff on the top. Overloaded and we went up this bloody, like a creek it was and I thought Christ we’re going to overturn and he seemed to be oblivious you know. Oblivious at that fact. And I was struggling with the bloody car and it was grinding and I thought, bloody hell we’ll never get up here without a fatal accident. Anyway, we finally got to the top and he showed me. There was the crash scene. A bit burned in places and that sort of thing. But they’d taken virtually everything away but there were one or two bits and pieces and that’s why I got that bit that I showed you. It was a bit bigger but I sawed a piece off for a young relative. And it brought a lump to my throat really when I saw it.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Knowing that some, two of the lads had been killed you know.
HB: Yeah. Did it, did it give you a sort of a sense of closure or anything like that?
AW: No. Not really. No. Because it was a few years afterwards so no. No.
HB: Right.
AW: It wasn’t like that but I I mean I wish, I wished afterwards but she’d have been terrified, I wished I’d have taken my wife with me up there but only Henri and I went.
HB: Right.
AW: Because he knew I think that it was going to be a bit of a rough ride and it bloody well was. I was frightened to death at the wheel. I was really. I thought we’re never going to turn this bloody, because we’d got stuff on the roof.
HB: Yeah.
AW: You know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: I know it’s only a small car. It was a bloody Morris. Bloody hell.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Anyhow —
HB: Did you, did you ever find out where your two crew that were killed? Did you ever find out where they — where they were buried?
AW: No. Oh no. Yes. Only the one.
HB: Right.
AW: That was Woody.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Not Woody. The [pause] God, it was at Tremont. In the little local village cemetery.
HB: Right. Because you had, was it —
AW: I’ve got a photograph but I don’t —
HB: Yeah. Because you had Kiesow.
AW: Somewhere.
HB: Kiesow is the mid-upper and Rob Lough. Lough.
AW: No. It was Ross actually.
HB: Ross Lough.
AW: Ross Lough.
HB: And he —
AW: He was the rear gunner. It was his grave.
HB: In, in Tremont.
AW: Tremont, that’s right.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And it was fairly newish by comparison to most because, you know I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen French cemeteries but God some of the graves are so old.
HB: Oh yeah.
AW: And the stones.
HB: Yeah.
AW: You can hardly read the —
HB: Yeah.
AW: So, he’s buried there actually and when I got there there were actually some flowers. Fresh flowers. So they may have put them on there knowing I was going to arrive that day.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Which was ok. Ok. They did it anyway. So he’s buried there but you know I don’t know where. What happened to Johnny Kiesow.
HB: Yeah. Because I think, I think some of the Americans after the war they they actually.
AW: They moved them all didn’t they?
HB: They moved them all.
AW: They did yes.
HB: Yeah.
AW: So they may have done that and I don’t know where he is.
HB: Right.
AW: You know. I never found out about him.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And the same way I had great difficulty finding out what happened to my pilot.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Who died in 1979. Apparently. I don’t know what of or anything. Very mysterious isn’t it, you know?
HB: Yeah.
AW: I’m not sure that’s, you know, I think it’s a fact but I have to believe because I was told that was so much. Somehow it doesn’t — doesn’t convince me. You know what I mean?
HB: When you, when you look back now because you you’ve got very clear memories of, of your time in Bomber Command.
AW: I have.
HB: When you look back now what, what do you feel? What do you feel about your service with Bomber Command? How do you feel about your training and what you did?
AW: Well, about the training. I was a long while in training. I think it was getting on for two years. Something like that. All together. Before I finally reached the squadron, put it that way, you know. It’s a long time really. And different courses. Morse code. You name it. Machine guns. Although I wasn’t a gunner I had to go through Browning 303 bloody training and all that sort of thing. All on different courses. So, I went on a whole series of different courses and different things and I must admit the training was pretty good. That’s my opinion. You know. And I I did pretty well in virtually every subject I went on. That’s why I got my commission.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I learned later. I was on a course at Yatesbury. Morse code, and wireless. Not just Morse code. Wireless. Yatesbury. It was a very big, you know wireless teaching camp, you know. In Wiltshire. The hills and so forth. And I was in the lecture one day and somebody gave me the message that I was to report to the adjutant. So I thought, ‘Adjutant. I’ve done nothing wrong,’ [laughs] you know. Three steps sir.
HB: Yeah.
AW: So I went to see him and he asked me all sorts of questions about myself and my family and what I did and what my interests were and was I interested in sport and all that sort of thing, you know. And he said, ‘Ok,’ he said, ‘Go back to your lecture.’ Of course I had to put my best blue on for that. So I had to go back to the hut first and get changed into my working day blue. Not that I worked. It wasn’t work. It was —
HB: Yeah.
AW: You just listened to lectures and so forth. And that was it. And then I heard nothing more until I was at OTU. So it was some time afterwards. And I had another request to go and see, well ordered to see the adjutant there. And he told me I’d got my commission. That was it. And it turned out I had, well I had, I’d finished virtually, either in the virtually in the first two or three on every course I’d been on. You know.
HB: Right.
AW: And I think that, and then I suppose, well, I don’t know. Perhaps my attitude may have helped as well but —
HB: So, by the time you actually came to crew up you were already —
AW: We’d crewed up.
HB: Flying officer.
AW: It was at that. I think it was two or three weeks difference.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I got crewed up and then I got the bloody call and got my commission.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And so I had a forty eight hour pass and with my mum went into town. We had to go to Austin Reeds and all this because they, they kept ready-made uniforms.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And they’d alter them a bit.
HB: Yeah.
AW: To suit whoever.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And they knew I was — I only had two days. I’d got to be back the next evening.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And we went all over the place. And I had a list about this bloody long. It was a foolscap sheet and it had got lists of all the things I needed. Even to a hairbrush. A comb. Everything was listed that I was required to have as an officer. You know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And you can imagine what the bloody run around was can’t you?
HB: So when, so you’re very very early on in the crew and you’re an officer.
AW: And there’s only one other. That was Woody.
HB: And Woody was —
AW: Woody was already commissioned when he came over from, from Canada.
HB: He was commissioned from Canada.
AW: Yeah.
HB: Right. So, you’ve got an American pilot.
AW: Yeah.
HB: I mean obviously the mess system in the RAF if you’re on station, on the squadron you would be eating —
AW: In the officer’s mess.
HB: In the officer’s mess.
AW: The officer’s mess.
HB: And the rest of your crew.
AW: Was in the sergeant’s mess. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Yeah.
HB: And how did you feel about that?
AW: That happened a lot. That happened a lot. That happened a lot.
HB: So how did, how did you, how did you manage to socialise then?
AW: We just went out in, when we had a night out in to Lincoln. Had a booze up [laughs] I remember the first one we went on. We were just crewed up. This at Upper Heyford. And we’d just crewed up and so we didn’t know each other. You know what I mean? So the practice was you’d book a room in this local pub which is on the cross roads, I can’t tell you the name. I don’t know the name. It was in the Oxfordshire area. And you booked, book a room and you rolled with the crates of beers you know and you sit there together and drink yourself silly sort of thing. I remember walking back across these bloody fields. Ploughed fields. We were up to here in mud and we were arm in arm. Seven of us singing to ourselves in the pitch dark and that was the first sort of booze up we had together.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Do you know what I mean?
HB: Yeah.
AW: It sort of broke the, broke the ice and that was it, you know. We got on very well together actually as a crew.
HB: Yeah.
AW: We really did.
HB: And so you kept up with the Association.
AW: That’s it.
HB: The 630 Association.
AW: That’s right.
HB: But you’re also a member of the Guinea Pig Club.
AW: Yes. That’s now finished virtually because we’re all too old. I mean too old. I mean if there was a reunion, at a pinch I could make it.
HB: Right.
AW: You know. But a lot of the lads couldn’t and I’m, the last I heard there was about thirty of us left, you know. That was a part of my life that I wouldn’t have missed if I could have helped it. In spite of what caused it.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Going to East Grinstead.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I wouldn’t have missed it because I met some wonderful guys as Guinea Pigs. Absolutely fantastic.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And some of the dos we had as reunions were disgraceful [laughs] they really were. You know. But wonderful.
HB: Absolutely.
AW: I met some lovely people in East Grinstead as well. They were wonderful people, you know. I think as you mentioned yourself earlier on McIndoe met the local people as much as he could and told them. I mean I wasn’t affected visually but a lot of the lads were very awful really to look at. Especially in the initial stages of their burns and grafting. And McIndoe put it, could put this over better than I can of course but he spoke to them and told them, you know not to stare too much but just to accept them as they were. And if they felt like inviting them into their homes for a coffee, one of the Guinea Pigs, if they met them in the town so much the better. And he showed, put the locals right in that way because initially when they’re badly burned they are a sight. You know. Especially if it’s the face. And that did the trick. Do you know what I mean? So the local people in East Grinstead, of course it’s swelled now, it’s a much bigger town than it was then but they all treated us marvellously. They really did. When we went into town for a drink which we did when we could [laughs] I was in a wheelchair for a lot of the time and they used to push me in the middle, bob up to the bar [laughs] you know.
HB: I think given the theme it was perhaps as well you were in a wheelchair.
AW: Well, perhaps it was. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
AW: Yeah. Wonderful. And there was, as I say a nursing sister there. Oh, I’ve forgotten the name now I’m ashamed to say. She was a lovely lovely nursing sister. Scottish. And she had a lovely lilt to the way she spoke, you know. And as I say she, she persevered with this bloody foot of mine. Trying to get this poison out of it, you know because she knew that until that poison they couldn’t even start thinking about doing any graft working you know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And she bloody kept changing this and changing that and then as I say one day I dressed about three times every day and she took this dressing off and she said, ‘Look. Look.’ And there on the pad was some of the, she said ‘It’s started to come away, I think. We’ve got it I think.’ And she’d thought of it. It was bloody marvellous really.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And it was liquid paraffin and two other items I think. I don’t remember. But why liquid paraffin I don’t know. Whether that was to sort to bring the stuff away and make it stick to the, to the muslin I don’t know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: But I was some weeks at that. I had to have physiotherapy every day and oh, bloody hell.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I met my dear friend Ray Brook and he became a really close Guinea Pig mate.
HB: Yeah.
AW: He used to come up and stay with Sheila and I at Christmas time.
HB: Yeah.
AW: It was him who started me smoking again. The bugger. I’d packed it up, you know. Have you ever smoked?
HB: Yes.
AW: Well, you know what it’s like then.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I’d packed it up and hadn’t smoked for some weeks anyway. I looked up Ray and I asked him if he, if he’d thought about coming up. Staying with us for Christmas. Yeah. He’d love to. So he came to stay with Sheila and I. In Erdington we were then. And he kept lighting up you know. With his mitts. His badly burned mitts. ‘Red.’ You know. ‘No. No. Don’t tempt me. Don’t tempt me.’ You know. And he’d sort of throw one over and just tempt me. And he did. And in the end I just thought, ‘Well, I can take it or leave it now. I haven’t smoked for so many weeks.’ Could I hell? Had a fag and within a fortnight I was back on to what I was before. Do you know what I mean?
HB: I don’t know.
AW: But he was a lovely lovely friend. He really is —
HB: Yeah.
AW: And I lost touch with him. He was a very close friend. He used to come and stay with Sheila and I. He came from South London. His father spoke with a cockney accent but they were lovely lovely people and being only about thirty miles from East Grinstead they used to come and see him every Sunday afternoon. So I was included in the family circle.
HB: Right.
AW: Because I was very close to Ray.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And so I used to chat with his mum and dad. They’d bring him goodies and I was part of the family as far as that was concerned. So a really close good friend. And I’ve lost touch with him. I keep ringing his phone number and there’s no reply but he was very very ill the last time I heard him so I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t passed away.
HB: Yeah.
AW: You know. Anyway —
HB: So —
AW: A great guy.
HB: Yeah.
AW: A great guy.
HB: We’ve come right through it. We’ve come to the end of the war. You’ve got, got your job. What, what do you feel? What do you feel your service with Bomber Command — what did you achieve? You know, with your service. Do you think?
AW: Achieve in what, what respect?
HB: Well, you know in the sort of in the general thing of your service during the war you’ve done your job in Bomber Command. So —
AW: Well, I’ll tell you what I did feel privately. I felt that I had achieved something in I’d got a commission and I’d only had an elementary school education. And I put that down mainly to the fact my extra activities educational wise after I left school. I went to night school and I had, I had a postal course with the Metropolitan College of St Albans. And every three days or so we used to have to send a test off like an exam and they would come back marked with red ink.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
AW: You know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And I got through those exams. Those were like, for, mainly for insurance purposes. You know what I mean? But it was normal subjects as well including algebra and all that type of thing. You know what I mean? And I got through that very well and so I pride myself I must admit. I, when I was a young, young fellow before I went in the RAF I had two cousins one of whom lived in Italy. He was ninety six. He passed away not too long. Well, three or four years ago. And we used to go out together, you know. This was before I met Sheila. So we’d have the Raglan overcoats on, you know. Young boys of the town, you know and — but I decided I was going to get somewhere as far as my education was concerned. Which I knew I’d reached a limited level at elementary school. So, I went to night school and I took some bookkeeping and that type of thing, you know which stood me in very good stead later on.
HB: Yeah.
AW: That type of subject. Commerce in other words. Later on when I was looking for a position other than travelling around the world which I did for a number of years it all stood me in good stead. You know. And I wrote for this job as I say out in the Black Country and got the job. Didn’t understand a word anybody was saying to me for about three weeks [laughs] They have a language of their own. And I finished up as a director there.
HB: Right.
AW: So, I reckon I did pretty well as considering I only had an elementary school education.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I got my commission. Which helped me later on. You know, the fact that I’d been commissioned I suppose was different positions. But I finished up in the Black Country, and a director of this company called Alloy Wire Company which was nickel chromed stuff.
HB: Yeah.
AW: That sort of thing, you know. So, I thought — I live on my own. I regret very much because I loved my wife very dearly but as I said we never had any children. She was a wonderful wife. Never, never had a day’s illness until she had the one that killed her which was a brain tumour.
HB: Oh dear.
AW: You know.
HB: Yeah.
AW: And that was in the year 2000. That’s seventeen years ago now. So, so actually I suppose I did quite well during the war . Apart from meeting Sheila which was the best thing I ever did.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I did pretty well for myself really and as I say finished up as this director in the Black Country. And travelled around the world with them.
HB: Yeah.
AW: For some years. And then retired and we were quite happy. We moved in here because my cousin I’ve already mentioned to you living in the flat just down the way here. So we used to come and visit him, you see. Him and wife who was alive at that time. And so Sheila and I used to go and visit him about every month or so, you know and have a night playing cards or something and have a cup of tea or a bit of supper. And so we knew these flats very well and we talked about one day and we both agreed that when we retired we thought we’d possibly think of coming to live here. Which I did but by this time my wife had been diagnosed with a brain tumour and only given twelve months about, to live, you know. So she never had any enjoyment of this place really you know. We only lived just around the corner.
HB: Yeah.
AW: The next road up. And that was where we lived. We were in a bungalow we had there which we saw built from scratch and it’s still there now.
HB: Well, that’s —
AW: So I — yeah the war did me no harms really except that I’m now on my own. I had a wonderful wife and girlfriend to start with.
HB: Yeah.
AW: I’m lucky I got away with my life when it was — I came very very close to losing it and after that even closer to losing my foot. I’m very fortunate really. You know. I I live on my own. I’ve a good neighbour next door and one next door but one and we go out for a drink on Tuesday nights usually.
HB: We’re back to the drink theme [laughs]
AW: Just come back from holiday in Spain with Mike, next door.
HB: Right.
AW: He has a daughter owns a house there on the coast in Spain. That’s about the fourth or fifth time I’ve been there. So I don’t do badly really do I?
HB: No. Not at all.
AW: There are times when I am on my own. You know what I mean? You’re lonely but —
HB: Well, I think Arthur that’s —
AW: All of the advantages I’ve got I’m very fortunate really.
HB: Yes.
AW: And to live to ninety five I think is actually exceptional.
HB: Yes.
AW: In the circumstance. I came very close to losing my life.
HB: Yeah.
AW: On the 24th 25th of July 1944. So, I’m lucky to be here really.
HB: Yeah.
AW: You know.
HB: Alright. I mean, I’ve got to thank you Arthur because it’s it really has been an excellent experience for me.
AW: Well, I hope I haven’t bored you, Harry.
HB: No.
AW: You know.
HB: No. I mean.
AW: That’s the last thing I want.
HB: As I said to you we’re going to bring the interview to a close because it’s just coming up for 2.30pm.
AW: My God.
HB: But and I’m getting a bit concerned you’ve not had anything to eat. So —
AW: Well, neither have you.
HB: Well, that’s —
AW: Not that I’m very good cook or anything like that. Unfortunately I’m not.
HB: I’m going, I’m going to terminate the interview now.
AW: Ok.
HB: But I do have to thank you on behalf of the Bomber Command, International Bomber Command Digital Archive for a really interesting interview.
AW: Well, thanks for coming Harry. It’s been —
HB: It’s been a pleasure.
AW: It’s been great meeting you.
HB: A pleasure. Thank you
AW: And I hope we meet up for, or talk at least on the phone. You can’t get away from me [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 Arthur Sidney Woolf
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
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
2017-06-29
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AWoolfAS170629, PWoolfAS1701
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:50:17 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
France--Nancy
Description
An account of the resource
Arthur Woolf was working in an office before he volunteered for the RAF. He was keen on flying and would cycle to Castle Bromwich airfield to watch the aircraft. He was accepted for aircrew training and became a wireless operator. After joining a crew he was posted to 630 Squadron at East Kirkby. On their sixteenth operation they were shot down by a night fighter. The two gunners were killed. Arthur was seriously injured and when he regained consciousness he heard voices which proved to be French people who took him to their farmhouse. He was eventually taken prisoner and was taken to hospital in Nancy. He and three others were left in the cellar when the hospital was evacuated and they were liberated by the Americans. On return to the UK Arthur was first sent to Wroughton RAF Hospital before being transferred to the care of Archibald McIndoe and his team and became a member of the Guinea Pig Club.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-07-24
1944-07-25
630 Squadron
aircrew
crewing up
Dominie
evading
fear
final resting place
Guinea Pig Club
Lancaster
McIndoe, Archibald (1900-1960)
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Oxford
prisoner of war
promotion
RAF Dumfries
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Wigsley
RAF Wroughton
RAF Yatesbury
shot down
Stirling
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1015/11304/PLeedhamHJL1801.2.jpg
fdabc281256a5511e83607203749a467
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1015/11304/ALeedhamHJL181212.1.mp3
eca92a44a63ba05981df7098454718ac
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
Leedham, Bob
Herbert John Lewis Leedham
H J L Leedham
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Bob Leedham (b. 1922, 1183577, 160986 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 90 and 57 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-12-12
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Leedham, HJL
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is an interview between International Bomber Command Centre volunteer Harry Bartlett with Mr Herbert, Bob, Leedham, who lives at Ashbourne in Warwickshire. He joined the RAF in 1940, but we’ll no doubt will come to that shortly. Bob, if I can just ask you what were you doing on, in the few years before the war?
BL: My family, my father was a skilled carpenter, but on my mother’s side, she had three brothers all of which were very keen engineers and one of which was exceptionally keen and he worked for a local motor company and he was involved in motor bike racing at Donnington, mainly, and it was him that inspired me with a heavy engineering interest, and consequently when I left school, I was educated in Burton on Trent, the dear old brewing place, I finished up there, I was, won a scholarship to be educated at the main system, which was the central system and the grammar school and so on in Burton and I survived that. And on leaving I decided my real choice was to follow my uncles as it were, into the motor trade, which I did. And I was trained fairly quickly as an apprentice in the motor trade and of course when the war started most of them were already on the reserve and they were the first people to be called up. So myself and a couple of my colleagues of my age, and at that time we are talking about an age of seventeen, sixteen to seventeen, I had already passed my driving test and was driving of course and we were left to run the very large garage very quickly after all the others had been called up, and so it was hands on experience with a vengeance. We were left to run the garage and carry on operations and consequently even a relatively short time I had a good engineering background. However, when I got to seventeen and a half, all my mates that I knew and went to school with and so on had all got into the air force, they’d volunteered in some way or other. In fact some of them were actually called up and I knew that sooner or later I would be called up as soon as I got to the age of I think it was eighteen or nineteen and the chances were that I would maybe put in to the Army. Well I had no interest whatsoever of going into the Army. My first choice was always the air force. Unknown to my parents, at seventeen and a half, I went over to the Assembly Rooms in Derby to the recruiting centre and signed up to join, but I had to give my age as eighteen. They probably accepted this with tongue in cheek knowing that I’d lied a little bit about my age. However, I was accepted and instructed to come for a medical a couple of days later. Very amusing and perhaps interesting thing was, that bearing in mind I had been brought up in a relatively conservative sort of area in Burton on Trent as opposed to big cities and so on, so we were living in a relatively closed environment, despite the fact we were all qualified, and highly qualified tradesmen then. So I went over to have the medical. There was about twenty of us lined up. The doctor came in, he says, ‘right, take your shirts off boys, I’m going to check your hearts.’ So he went along, checking everyone, all the way along, and when he got to the end he says, ‘Right, put your shirts on boys,’ then waited a few minutes, said, ‘drop your trousers then.’ I thought ‘drop my trousers!’, bloody hell! I’d never been exposed to anyone in my life before, you know! And I feel that at that moment I changed from being a boy to a man. That’s the way I felt about it, I couldn’t believe, having to drop my trousers and expose myself even to a doctor. That was the sort of background we were brought up in of course, in those days. It’s totally different now of course. So really from then on the next few days I was down at Cardington for the, attestation and so forth and then I was allocated for training. So initially because of my engineering background the RAF at that time were quite short of experienced engineering people, and they’d set up training units and so on but, they were very good from a theory point of view but nothing in the way of hands on. So I was immediately shuffled into training as a fitter 2E. But I wasn’t happy that, I wanted to fly. So it didn’t last long, and I managed to wiggle my way in to ITW at Blackpool, and found myself on a pilot’s course.
HB: ITW?
BL: ITW: Initial Training Wing.
HB: Right.
BL: Which was at Blackpool in those days and that’s where they carried out the tests as to whether you were suitable to fly in an aircrew capacity. So I was accepted to fly an aircrew capacity to be decided specifically by the selection board’s requirements. And the next thing was, at that time the pilot training was being geared up dramatically. The original pilots in the air force at the start of the war and going right up to probably about the end of 1941, were pre-war pilots, mostly people who’d come from quite wealthy backgrounds who could afford to train them as pilots and by the end of 1941, these were the people that the air force had to rely on in the early days. When I look back historically on some of the situations, bombing raids and that sort of thing using obsolete aircraft like Lysanders and stuff like that, it was dreadful really and by the end of ’41 most of these boys had disappeared: they’d either been shot down, been killed, they crashed or were POWs. Result was that there was a colossal demand for fully trained new aircrew. This was done from a pilot’s point of view in Canada, or America, or Southern Rhodesia as it was then, which is now Zimbabwe, of course. Those were the three, main three areas where the pilots would train from about 1941 onwards. And they set up very, very good systems. But there was a difference between Rhodesia trained and particularly American trained. The American instructors were extremely, quite different to us: they were very hard, very dedicated and they set up a system for training pilots, that if you didn’t go solo in twelve hours, you were thrown off the course. You were downgraded to either a navigator or a bomb aimer or anyone else that had any sort of background which would be useful to the air force, in my case an engineering background. And when you consider, you know, people, ex bank managers if you like, and people from a whole variety of trades in civilian life, there they were, shipped over to America to train as pilots and expected to go solo in twelve hours. Just dreadful really. However, that was the way the system worked. It wasn’t quite so severe in Canada, but nevertheless it was similar to the American system but the ones trained in Southern Rhodesia of course, it was very much more realistic, and they didn’t stick to any specific hours to go solo and things like that you see. So the result was when finely trained aircrew of any category then came back to the UK, the usual routine was Initial Training Wing and then on to type training unit and so on and find a way into things like Wellingtons and Hampdens and Lemingtons, er Wellingtons and things like that.
HB: Can I just take you back a little bit Bob? [Cough] excuse me. When you joined up, you started your initial training as a fitter.
BL: Yup.
HB: But you then went for aircrew training.
BL: Yes.
HB: Did you go to train as a flight engineer, or did you go to train as a pilot?
BL: No, I went to train as a pilot initially.
HB: Right. And where did, which you, where did you actually go train as a pilot?
BL: I went to 32 SFTS in Carbery Manitoba, Canada.
HB: Canada, right.
BL: But I didn’t make the twelve hours solo so I was downgraded, the same as three quarters of them. There were very few, at that time anyway, who were competent enough after twelve hours to go solo. So it was a very hard path really. I came back to the UK, together with many others, who’d been diverted then in to training as a navigator or a bomb aimer or a gunner – I’d forgotten that one – and, but in my particular case the fact that I had the engineering background, which they wanted, they downgraded me to co-pilot and flight engineer. So predominantly I was trained as a full flight engineer, despite the fact I was accepted that on aircraft for instance like the Stirling I had to act as co-pilot as well. So I had to take link training and all that. I was never allowed to take off and land, but I was there to relieve the main pilot and to act as co-pilot duties. And that applied pretty well throughout: Stirlings, Lancasters, Halifaxes and so on. So we were always virtually the number two so far as the mechanical operation of the aircraft was concerned. As opposed to the gunners who had their job to do, bomb aimer had his job to do and the navigator. A number of the early bomb aimers of course were also trained as type of navigators but very few of them flew as navigators, they flew mainly as usually as bomb aimer come front gunner. There was always a front turret, gun turret on the Lancs and the Stirlings and Halifaxes, so the bomb aimers were expected to man the front turret and also act as the bomb aimer so far as the targets were concerned. And the navigators of course, they did the actual navigation guidance to the pilots.
HB: So you came back to England and you went to do your flight engineer training for aircrew.
BL: Yes. At St. Athan.
HB: At, St Athan, right. So at the end of that training, where did you sort of stand in the scheme of things?
BL: I was at training, already I’d had my link training as a co-pilot as well, before I went to St Athan, when I left St Athan, fully qualified, the next thing then was to join a crew on either Lancs, Stirlings or Halifaxes. In fact in my particular case I was posted to Stradishall which was a main training base for Stirlings and then the crew of seven were created. There was nothing directed, they put us all in hangar and between ourselves we had to get to know each other and put ourselves together as a seven man crew, which is how it happened. Once that’s established as a crew then your flight training started, which we did at Stradishall of course, on the Stirlings in our particular case.
HB: Where did your, is it all in this hangar, did somebody come to you or did you think oh I like the look of him, I’ll go with him? Or? How did it work? What were the mechanics of it?
BL: It’s a variety really. Our captain, our skipper, was an ex Birmingham policeman and personally, personality was absolutely first class, but he was a strict disciplinarian being ex-police, of course, and so he was highly respected despite the fact he was definitely one of us, but very highly respected. And we got to know him, chatting away and he said well, he says ‘I’ve just come from OTU from Wellingtons,’ he says, ‘I’ve got a navigator and I probably have a bomb aimer.’ He says, ‘I’m looking for a couple of gunners and a flight engineer co-pilot to get the seven man crew together,’ and so from then on it was a question of who you knew and whether you thought they were capable, and see whether they were already in a crew or not that was how we all created seven together. It was done quite amicably, in various reasons, various forms, whether you knew each other or you say well I know old so-and-so, he’s a bloody good navigator, try and get him on our crew, you know, and that sort of thing. So we finished up as a very tight crew and it so happened, subsequently, that when we were doing our ops on the squadron, the camaraderie within the seven man crew was very tight indeed. The result was we found that we had seven first class crew members. Everyone worked together, helped each other and that was the way it went on the Stirlings. Unfortunately the Stirlings of course had a very bad reputation subsequently. The reason for this was because in its early days, [cough] it was built pre-war of course, a long way pre-war, and was a very good four engined heavy bomber when it was produced, extremely good, but unfortunately it came under the influence of the political decisions, the politicians came along and said that aircraft’s got a wingspan of a hundred and sixteen feet! We won’t get it in to the hangars at Cardington, they’re only a hundred feet, you’ll have to take sixteen feet off the wings. So, reluctantly, they put pressure on the manufacturers and the Stirling was modified to have sixteen feet, either, eight feet either side taken off the wings. Not only that by doing that they had to alter the structure quite considerably and raise the undercarriage very high in order to cope with this. Disaster so far as performance’s concerned, the result was the Stirling was always very, very much – what shall I say - the underdog as far as the heavy bombers were concerned. Result was the highest we could ever get to bomb was about twelve thousand feet. The Lancs and the Halifaxes were up above at twenty two thousand and frequently if your time was slightly out we were bombed by their bombs from above us. Frequently happened, there was a lot of aircraft were lost that way. Just one of those things. So really, although at that stage, when you think that the Lanc didn’t come in to service till towards the end of ’42, so in the early days the Stirling was the only heavy bomber and he was restricted in its performance by this political intervention and consequently it had a reputation of being something of a, I won’t use, I want to use the words death traps, but Bomber Harris had his own ideas on this and he was fully aware of it. In fact as ‘43 went on we were doing the Ruhr bombing and then of course Hamburg and then the start of the Berlin offensive which was in the autumn of ’43, and at that stage our losses were running on average seven, eight percent, we had one occasion when our losses were seventeen [emphasis] percent. And it got to the stage where Bomber Harris, he couldn’t stand it any longer, he was at war with a lot of the politicians himself of course by his insistence that Germany had to be bombed in order to minimise their war effort, and consequently it’s on record in one of, I think it was Max Hastings’ book Bomber Command I think he mentioned it in there, the extract of a meeting that Harris had with Churchill in round about October, I think, or maybe November ’43, and he was thumping the table and he said to Churchill, he says, ‘if I send my boys out [thumping] to get lost any longer in these bloody death trips, death traps called Stirlings they’ll call me a murderer.’ He says, ‘what I want is Lancasters, Lancasters and more Lancasters.’ there was a hell of a row went on and Churchill didn’t say a word. But finally he leaned across and said you’ll have your Lancasters. And it was then that the production on Lancasters was even, set up considerably higher than what it was already.
H: So when [cough] -
BL: So really, just interrupting,
HB: No, no.
BL: so going back from our training at Stradishall as a crew were posted to 90 Squadron to a little place called Ridgewell which was in Cambridgeshire, and not terribly well known and we were the first people in. A couple of farms that had been demolished and replaced with an impromptu quickly built runway. There was no, shall we say buildings, which were you might say were suitable for an operational squadron. There was mud everywhere, conditions were foul. They put a series of nissen huts up for us to live in and also for headquarters and the conditions there were not terribly good at all. However, there we were in the spring of ’41, er ’43, expected to use that as a base to operate, operationally against the various targets which were set out. We were at Ridgewell I think for no longer than about three months, four months, something like that and we moved then to a place called, it was West Wickham when we moved there but it was renamed Wratting Common, and consequently conditions there were far better. Again, it wasn’t a wartime, it wasn’t a peacetime airfield, but it was a good airfield and conditions there were far better airfield than Ridgewell. I don’t quite know what happened to Ridgewell in the end, whether it survived or not. I shouldn’t think it did: it was foul. But nevertheless we went to Wratting Common and we continued to fly our ops from Wratting Common on 90 Squadron, until, as I say, the autumn when the squadron was destined to change from Stirlings into Lancs and consequently they were moved to just outside Mildenhall at Tuddenham.
HB: How many ops did you actually fly in Stirlings for your tour?
BL: On Stirlings alone I think we did about twenty one I think it was, on the Stirlings, before we went on Lancs. As I say during that particular time conditions using the Stirling were very difficult, to make an understatement. Our losses were constant and it was amazing really, I mean for instance there was a Canadian pilot called Geordie Young. He was the senior pilot on the squadron, he’d got a lot of experience, and they went off on their last trip, their thirtieth trip, and they got blown up over Dusseldorf on their very last trip and that was, had a very, what shall I say effect on morale on the squadron, because they were regarded you know, the top boys on the squadron. One of the problems, in those days throughout Bomber Command, not just 3 Group which was a Stirling Group, but all the other groups as well, is that when Don Bennett set up the 8 Group, Pathfinder Group, he got old Hamish Mahaddie who he took on as his recruitment boss to collect all the very best crews off the different squadrons he could get hold of, to go into Pathfinders, and of course there was a colossal amount of opposition to this from all the squadrons. No squadron commander wants to lose their best crews, and consequently there was a war going on particularly on 5 Group, with Cochrane was the AOC on 5 Group in those days, based at Swinderby and he was very, very strongly opposed to it. There was open warfare going on the whole time, and despite the fact that 5 Group at that time of course, was the elite group which contained all the 617 boys and various other specialist crews for specialist bombing trips and he obviously didn’t want to lose any of those. And consequently he managed to get some political background particularly from Arthur Harris two of the Pathfinder squadrons in 8 Group would be transferred back to 5 Group. So he eventually had his own Pathfinder boys. Of course then when Gibson set up 617, that was also again from selecting top quality experienced crews. In the early days that was, but before the Dambuster raid, but not so much later on when they were really struggling to get replacement crews from the various crews they’d lost. So really Bomber Harris, Arthur Harris, he was very much supporting the 5 Group people, it was his elite group in Bomber Command and he always gave it sort of first preference on everything. There’s one, a very amusing aspect came at a conference they were having at Swinderby when at the time Princess Margaret was having this affair with Fighter Command Townsend and there was all speculation in the press about whether she’d marry him or whether she’d marry somebody else, and so on, and at this particular meeting, this conference of crews at Swinderby, it was a bit of a hilarious topic and someone was saying, ‘well it’s unknown who she’s going to marry, but it won’t have any effect on us here in 5 Group.’ And somebody stood up and said, ‘well there’s one thing for certain, whoever she marries, it’s bound to be somebody from 5 Group!’ [Laughter]
HB: Yeah. Can I just take you back a little bit Bob.
BL: Yes of course.
HB: I just noticed in some of your notes, I know this is jumping right back, it says you [cough] were posted to Coastal Command, 86 Squadron and flew on Sunderlands.
BL: Yes. That was when I was on 86. We were, we did a detachment down to Gosport actually.
HB: Oh right.
BL: And then to St, St Athan, when the two battleships Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst were at Brest and they were trying to get up the channel to get away and consequently we went down there with 86 Squadron to carry out operations against the two battleships. But for some reason or other, some of the squadron was detached to, in Coastal Command, to a flying boat squadron, which was 10 Squadron based at Mountbatten, at Plymouth. I don’t quite know why this happened, it was only a very short time, but I was one of the people that went on the flying boats for about three months.
HB: So you were there as a co-pilot engineer?
BL: Yes, on the flying boats. And again, bearing in mind our engineering background was what they wanted more than anything because we had to get involved with the maintenance schedules and so on as well. So I only had three months, I didn’t like it at all. Flying boats was not for me, and that was the main reason I thought that there must be a better way that I enjoy so I volunteered while I was there for Bomber Command. That’s where I started into Bomber Command
HB: Right. It’s all right, I was just trying to get the sequence of events into some sort of order.
BL: That was really how the sequence went through. Of course in Bomber Command, very lucky with our crew to survive a tour on 90 Squadron.
HB: What were the operations, you know, you’re flying operations into the Ruhr in the Stirling, and you’ve very clearly explained the shortcomings of the Stirling. What was it, you know, what was, what were your experiences of those, those individual sort of operations?
BL: Well it varied actually. But the Ruhr targets at that time I can remember them vividly. Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Krefeldt, Essen. And Essen was the one everyone hated [emphasis] because at that time that was the home of Daimler Benz, Krups and all the munitions factories, and they had a ring right the way round Essen, three thousand anti aircraft guns and radar controlled searchlights and when you’re flying towards Essen and you looked ahead, you think, ‘Christ you’ve got to get through that to get to the target point,’ and usually at briefing when the curtain was finally pulled back - we were never told what the target was until the very last minute of course - and when the target was pulled back you see Essen area, ‘oh Christ, not Essen,’ you know. However, going from what I say, first five trips Essen, then we went on to Gelsenkirchen, Wuperthal, Mulein, Bochum, Cologne, Munchen Gladbach. Now in my history of 90 Squadron book, there’s various aspects of the work that we did, and there’s a typical battle order printed there as an example. And that was August the 26th I think it was, on Munchen Gladbach and we were on the battle order for that particular night. I think the squadron was putting up something like thirty two aircraft or something that night. There was eight hundred and fifty on the, the full main force. And at that time the procedure on ops on the squadrons was that you didn’t do, as a pilot or co-pilot or anything like that, you didn’t go out with your own crew until you’d done a familiar flight with an experienced crew as a supernumerary and it just so happens that on that battle order I had one under supervision and there was one other crew with another one under supervision. It was on the 31st of August ’43. And these two chaps, I had one of them under supervision, and another crew had the second one. Out of curiosity, in the back of the book there’s seven pages of casualties on the squadron, and when I looked for the names down, both these boys’ names were down on the casualties, one, bear in mind, was on the 22nd of September bear in mind that was just 22nd, twenty two days after we had taken them on the supervision. One of them went on the 22nd, the next night the second went on the 23rd. So they only survived twenty three days on the squadron. And that was typical, absolutely typical. We used to live in a long nissen hut, seven beds each side, two crews in there. Three times we had a new crew come in, and three times we’d wake up after an op the night before, about midday, be woken up by the military police going through the, collecting the bits and pieces, belongings of the other crew who had got the beds on opposite. Three times we had new crews come in and three times we lost them very quickly, in two cases within the first three ops, and consequently we had, as a crew, we had a reputation of being a Jonah crew and nobody would move in with us. [Laughter] But in all seriousness that was the way it happened, you know and we lost some very quickly and didn’t even get to know them. There we were, soldiering on and finally got to the stage as I say, when the Stirlings were taken out of service and deployed on other work, mainly glider towing and things like that. Then the Lancs took over as the Lancaster production of course, got higher and higher.
HB: What do you put down to, I don’t want to use the word success, your ability to have got through those twenty something operations?
BL: A lot of people would say you must have been one of the lucky ones. Yes, to a point. But we had a very good crew; highly [emphasis] dedicated crew to the individual job they had to do and it was, there were various aspects of the operation that needed high concentration and dedication to execute that. I mean our rear gunner, Eddie, he’s still alive now in New Zealand, and he had eyes like a bloody hawk; he could spot these fighters coming in and he would control the operation immediately if he saw a fighter, to the pilot at the front, saying, ‘corkscrew, corkscrew,’ and instead of flying at straight and level from a to b to a target on our particular crew, we would fly perhaps just for a minute or so, then start weaving like that, so that there was no chance of the fighters beaming on to us in, as if we’d been flying straight and level they had a much easier job of coming in to us, and under from mid or something like that, shoot us down. But by weaving like that, was one of the things which we did continually, it was uncomfortable but it was very safe. But apart from the anti aircraft of course, it certainly kept the fighters at bay from us and I mean I think three times we were attacked by fighters and three times we got away from them. Largely due to Eddie in the rear turret. Who shot one of them down actually.
HB: Did he?
BL: Yup, He opened up, he waited till he got it in his sights, and let fly and it blew up in front of him, or behind him should I say. So really that aspect of it is the thoroughness of the type of flying and the operation which was necessary, but on the other hand of course, where anti aircraft was concerned it’s a different story. We, in the Stirling we were in the middle of it, weaving through it and if you had a direct hit or a hit which say damaged the aircraft severely you could say right you were just bloody unlucky like Geordie Young on his thirtieth trip, and that sort of thing, so. The worst night of for Bomber Command for all losses was the Nuremburg flight, you may or may not have heard of this, but it was on the Nuremburg trip when the met people made a complete balls of the forecast. They were forecasting plenty of cloud so that you could fly comfortably in and out of cloud and the fighters couldn’t detect you quite so easily. But on this occasion the weather didn’t turn out as they predicted and consequently it was a full moon clear, crystal clear night and the result was that the main force – there was eight hundred and fifty aircraft on that particular target. This was in the autumn of ’44, I think it was, and that particular night we lost ninety four aircraft on that night, and when you think there were seven men in each aircraft. Work that one out. That was the worst night ever [emphasis] for Bomber Command.
HB: And your crew were on that.
BL: No. We weren’t on that.
HB: You weren’t on that one.
BL: It just so happened that we were on leave at the time so we weren’t on it. But that was, that’s the hard statistics of it.
HB: Because I was interested in the, in the thing you were saying about the Lancasters and the Halifaxes going at twenty two and you know, the Wellingtons, obviously the Wellingtons were at eighteen thousand and the poor old Stirling’s down at twelve.
BL: Yeah.
HB: I mean that must have, that must have influenced your pilot and your crew at that point, when you were on, when you were on the bigger raids.
BL: Well, yes, to a point, but you had to admit it was one of those things. I don’t think, it was only when we got to grips with the Stirling and training and so on and realised what effect the modifications had had on the performance of the aircraft. It was not easy to get off the ground with a full load on. For one thing the inertia of the engines meant that it was, always had this sort of pull to starboard, to the right, which you had to maintain correction on, and not only that but the fact that the undercarriage had been raised quite considerably, very high up. There’s a picture here will show: that was our aircraft and the one that saw us all the way through our tour, and it was so high up it that when this sort of inertia from the engines, it was very difficult to keep it straight down the runway. In fact there was numerous occasions when the aircraft just couldn’t control it with a full bomb load on and it crashed or something and numerous messy situations like that developed. But this is why as I say, I meant occasionally that when I went from Stirlings up into 5 Group, I was posted up to the elite group. How that happened was, that at that time the Lancs were coming on stream and 5 Group at Swinderby was the training base for the Lancs, but again they needed them on the squadron so rapidly that they were pushing the crews through probably too fast, not quite enough training. And the result was that a lot of the crews had been trained on the twin engined Wellingtons and stuff like that, which didn’t give them any [emphasis] experience on four engined stuff. So in the, when we finished a tour on Stirlings, it was decided then by the powers that be as it were – Harris and co – they’d put a few Stirlings up to be based at Swinderby to get, be engaged on the Lancaster training programme so that we could give them experience on another four engine aircraft which was more difficult to handle than what a Lancaster was, and consequently I was one of the eight crews that were, instructors that went up there and that’s how I got in to 5 Group, posted up there on the Stirlings. And I always remember when we got up there about 7 or 8 o’clock in the evening. So we parked the aircraft went over to the officers mess, went in the bar straight away for a drink of course, and we were standing there and there was another group of the instructors and so on and amongst them was Dave Shannon and Mickey Martin – ex 617 – and quite a number of others who’d survived and they were curious as to who we were. And finally old Dave Shannon, who was a big Australian as you probably know from 617, came across and said, ‘who are you blokes then and what are you doing here?’ ‘Oh we’ve brought some Stirlings up to give you some help in the training programmes here.’ ‘Stirlings!’ he says,’ bloody hell!’ He said, ‘have you done a tour on Stirlings?’ I said, ‘yes’. He rubbed his hand over here, says, ‘Well where are your VCs then boys?’ [Laughter] And that was their attitude towards us.
HB: Yes. That tells the tale.
BL: But there again, life’s about winners and losers isn’t it, you know. And what we had we had went out to do the best you can, and as I say, it’s sad really that our losses were consistently high.
HB: So when you’d done, you did, you know, when was you last operation that you did with the Stirling? Can you remember?
L: It was on, I think it was either Hannover or Stuttgart, it was not the Ruhr, north of the Ruhr, but that was my, our last op. We did two Berlins on the Stirling, surprisingly, and relatively quiet trips too, long trips but relatively quiet, for us anyway.
HB: What was your feeling on, you know, you’re going to do your thirtieth or your last tour on the Stirling? What was going through your mind then?
BL: I don’t really think there was any feeling about it. I mean on our crew there wasn’t any suggestion of any feeling of stress or concern or the fact that you might be, the crew expression was – you might get the chop. No, we were a very good competent crew. We operated very correctly and safely as far as we could and I think that had a, that was the predominant factor in the crew. I mean a lot of people today often say to me well what about all the stress and everything? I said well the simple answer was we couldn’t even spell the word. You know, I mean the stress wasn’t there, it was concern. Admittedly we had one occasion when our mid upper gunner, Mick, suddenly went down with something, tonsilitis or something and he couldn’t, he had to go sick and consequently they stopped him flying that night and we were doing an op that night, on, I’ve forgotten where it was now, somewhere in the Ruhr, so we had to have a mid upper gunner, spare mid upper gunner who apparently for some reason or other he’d lost the rest of his crew, he’d done no ops at all, but he was spare, so they said oh you’re joining Cawley’s crew tonight because the gunner’s gone sick so he came to us and was a dreadful situation. He was absolutely petrified of the thought of going on ops, and halfway towards, over the Dutch coast on the way to the target, he suddenly started firing off indiscriminately at what he thought were fighters but they were clouds. And of course it immediately was bloody dangerous because if fighters around they see tracer bullets going out they home in on us. And Charlie was absolutely crackers, he went mad. What the hell’s going on? Go back and have a look!’ And this bloke was sitting in his turret there, absolutely terrified and it happened again, at a very dangerous point, he suddenly started firing off. Anyway when we, we survived the op, we got back and we landed, the crew bus was there to take us back to the base for intelligence and debriefing and he never said a word, wouldn’t speak, he wouldn’t get on the bus, he walked back and of course when he was interviewed by the Station Commander he said, ‘what’s the problem?’ The medical people there saw the condition of him and the RAF had a very cruel aspect of dealing with situations like that. They immediately used to braid you, used to name you as Lack of Moral Fibre which was dreadful really. You were immediately stripped of your rank back to basic and sent off to a unit which was down at Brighton to deal with these people who were so called Lack of Moral Fibre and that went on your records throughout your, a very cruel way of looking at it really. But that happened to us on this particular flight and as I say amazing really, the bloke was just absolutely petrified. Couldn’t face up to what he was asked to do, despite the fact he’d gone through training and managed to survive to train to become a qualified gunner, but there we are. Just one of those things.
HB: What did you do when you got back from your last op?
BL: [Laughter] Well I normally drink a gin and tonic but I think I had something a bit stronger than that that night! No. we had a, all went down to the pub locally and had a nice evening and then we knew the next day we’d be posted out, we’d all be posted to different directions and it was a question then where everybody went. It just so happened that in my particular case I was posted, for a very short time, to a place called Wilfort Sludge which is on the A1, but from there of course this deal came up to send some Stirlings up to 5 Group, so I was then posted out of 3 Group into 5 Group. And previous to that I’d, before I finished my tour I’d been recommended for a commission so my commission had come through so I was, and that came through six months late, so I went straight in as a commissioned Flying Officer then and went to Swinderby then as an instructor and it was, the rest of the crew: Johnnie went up to, he was the captain, he went up to near High Ercall, which is up near, in Shropshire somewhere, near Whitchurch to start training Stirling crews up there to tow gliders in anticipation, of course, of the Arnhem offensives and so on, so he went up there on towing gliders. The two rear gunner, the two gears, er gunners, the mid upper gunner and the rear gunner, they were posted to somewhere on special duties. Where they thought they were going on rest they suddenly found they were on ops again, on the special duties, doing, dropping these Resistance guys in France and so on. Harry our wireless operator, the navigator by the way, suddenly when I went to Swinderby I found he was already there and I was sharing a room with him in the mess for a while. Unfortunately, he’s the son of a clergyman in Cornwall, highly religious, he used to spend all his time playing the organ in the local church where we were down the pub having a drink, but he had a heart attack right at the end of the war and died straight away. The bomb aimer, little Barry, little short bloke, he went on rest for a short time and then decided he’d go on a second tour, But got shot down on the third trip of his second tour, but he was lucky. He managed to bale out and he was a prisoner of war for about the last six months. But Harry, our wireless op, his previous job in life he was, worked in the Metropolitan Police, on the vice squad and he was absolutely obsessed on flying against the Germans on Bomber Command, absolutely [emphasis] obsessed. His one aim in life was successful bombing Germany and when we were tour expired and they say, sent out as instructors or rested and so on, and what they called screened as they said, screened from operations. He refused point blank he says, ‘No, I’m not going,’ he said, ‘I’m going to carry on.’ There’s a little bit of discussion with the commanding officer about it and the adjutant and so on, but anyway he got his way was posted on to a Special Duties squadron somewhere, and he carried on flying. He did seventy four ops in the end. And in the end he got shot down over Denmark I think, on one these special, highly secret operations on his seventy fourth. If you go back to Lincoln his name is on the, one of the what do they call it, the metal -
HB: The walls.
BL: The walls.
HB: wall 118.
BL: That’s what happened to all of us in the end. And as I say, the two gunners they survived, despite the fact they were amazed to find themselves on this resistance dropping and that sort of thing. So that was where we all finished up.
HB: So you ended up at Swinderby as the instructor on, you know, giving people experience on four engines.
BL: Yes. So, when I went to Swinderby I was instructing on Stirlings and Lancasters at the same time.
HB: Right. So how did you, how would you relate to the engineering side of the ground crew?
BL: Well, very closely indeed, in fact the whole crew did. I mean our ground crew was our survival in many respects and we respected them, we had a very good ground crew. They kept our aircraft serviceable against unprecedented odds at times. I mean there’s numerous occasions we’d come back with shrapnel holes down the fuselage and that sort of thing, and there was one occasion when there was, we had a near hit, this was Dusseldorf again funny enough, the intelligence people used to say well when the anti aircraft batteries are shooting at you, if you can’t hear on, if you can’t hear any noise you know you’re safe, but if you hear a bang you’ll know it’s very close. We heard this bloody great bang over Dusseldorf and that was very close and it finished up with Norm Minchin, the mid upper turret, with the perspex turret round his head, a piece of shrapnel came up and cut right through the back of the perspex and cut the back of his turret off, and he didn’t know it! Without touching him at all! It just cut through this Perspex and the back, and after we had left the target we were flying back home and he came on the intercom and said, ‘Christ it’s bloody cold up here, have you got some heating on?’ Didn’t even know it had happened! Of course when we got back to base not only that but there was a hole in the side of the aircraft you could damn near crawl through. So the maintenance people had a pretty big job, you know, to patch up all the holes on it. And that sort of thing, but the, yeah, the ground crew were very much part of the team, very important and we had a very good ground crew, very good.
HB: And when you got to Swinderby, you would, you would continue that relationship as you do in the training of the crews.
BL: Well not with the ground crew, not at Swinderby.
HB: Right.
BL: No, I mean we were, at Swinderby all we were concerned with was training the new crews coming through, and the ground crew was general ground crew, not to with, nothing to do with individual aircraft whereas on the squadron each aircraft had its own maintenance crew and its own flight crew and that was our particular aircraft which took us all the way through.
HB: Ah right, yeah.
BL: That finished up by the way, when we handed that over to another crew, actually I read historically in one of the books somewhere it was listed, I forget where the, I think it was the Bomber Command Diaries, every aircraft that was lost they gave indications where they were lost and where they were found and so on and our particular aircraft, the other crew that had it and it finished up in the Zuider Zee!
HB: Oh right.
BL: It was recovered eventually, by the Dutch people, who were, the Dutch people were doing the archive details and so on and there was actually some photographs of it being pulled out of the sea, they’re printed in the Daily Mail I think it was actually, so I couldn’t believe it when I saw this, when I saw the number on the side BF524, that was its serial number. WPNN and it was just being pulled out the water and you could just see the name, the number BF524 on the side of it. Couldn’t believe it. Recovered it and there’s a bloke, a very elderly gentleman, he’s a semi historian based at Alconbury and he’s very much a Stirling enthusiast and he’s got a workshop there full of all the bits and pieces of crashed Stirlings and so on and he works hand in glove with the, his counterparts in Holland and one of the major museums in Holland loan him parts of aircraft which he’s, he’s rebuilt a complete cockpit of a Stirling.
HB: Has he!
BL: At this. Yes, Andrew found this out and took me over there and we had a morning with him. I was intrigued and he’s got this bloody old shed there, old hangar I think it is, a small hangar, packed with all these bits and pieces of a Stirling and in the middle he’s got a cockpit he’s already built. And when we went over there he was sorting out an undercarriage and he was showing us that the Dutch archive people were loaning him stuff out of their museum which he photographed and copied and so on and sent it back to them. He said he had a very good rapport with them. Very interesting this guy. I can’t remember his name. Andrew knows it, but it was at Alconbury where he is based.
HB: Well I think, what we might do, Bob, is we might just have a break now because I’ve just gone to check the battery and we’ve now been talking for over an hour! So if we have a quick five minute break. I’m going to have to change the batteries anyway. So we’ll just stop the interview for the time being.
BL: Yeah. Okay, fine.
HB: Well we’ve had a comfort break and we’re just going to, we’ve had a battery change. So we’re just going to resume the interview -
BL: Oh these bloody things! I hate these!
HB: Just having a problem with a hearing aid battery at the moment. [Whistling]
BL: That’s better.
HB: So we should be go, on the run now. So we’re all settled now for our second part of our interview.
BL: Yes. What I was going to say was, when we were talking about the losses on the Stirlings, the turning point I think, was when it was decided, when Goebbels was boasting that the German fighters and defences were quite adequate against the RAF Bomber Command, he made statements saying that they’ll never touch Berlin or our second biggest city, Hamburg, they’re quite safe with our defences and so on, they’ll never touch them. And that was the challenge which Bomber Harris took up, and decided in conjunction with the naval people, who were very concerned because all these u-boats and subs were based at Hamburg and they were going out into the Atlantic to pick off the convoys and so on, and naval people said we’ve got to get rid of these u-boat pens at Hamburg. So Bomber Harris decided we’d obliterate Hamburg; it’s in July ’43. And at that time, as I was saying, particularly on the Stirlings, our losses were very high indeed and morale was very low and they introduced for the first time this metal foil thing called window. That was these patches of metal things which we discharged through the flare hatch at the back of the aircraft every twenty seconds I think it was, or every thirty seconds, something like that, and these packs, when they went out into the slipstream, developed into a big screen of metallic which completely killed the German radar defences and those, radar, the German defences were based, anti aircraft, were based on the radar picking up the aircraft or picking up the target with a blue, bright blue light, searchlight and once it picked you up, it then brought all the other normal searchlights into a cone and you were in the middle of it, and once you were coned like that, it was curtains it just picked you off then because they had you, and the whole secret of their success was this radar control and when we used this window for the first time it killed their radar. The result was, the first time it was used on Hamburg, it could have been used very early in 1943 but the politicians and defence people were so concerned they thought that if we use it early the Germans will follow this, copy it, and use it against us. So they were very reluctant, but it was only that when our losses got so high they had to introduce it. And our losses immediately on Hamburg dropped to one percent: fantastic! I we went to Hamburg, we did the four nights out of six: I did all four of ‘em. The fourth one was a disaster in that the first three were completely successful and I can remember it now, looking down, a whole wave of fire throughout, it just wiped this whole place out, just like that. The fourth night we went of course the met people again, they were predicting storms, but nothing like as severe as we found. The result was I think of, the storms were so bad, we were struck by lightning and St Elmo’s fire which is on the windscreen, and goes down the fuselage, all the compasses were knocked out and our radar and Gee box was knocked out. We hadn’t the faintest idea how we were, how to navigate back again and I think out of seven or eight hundred aircraft there’s only about twelve or fourteen actually reached the target. All the others had turned back because of the weather, and we were icing up very heavily and on the Stirlings the oil coolers were slung underneath the engines and you know what happens to diesel vehicles in cold weather, the fuel starts waxing and clogs up the carburettors, and the engines stop and that’s exactly what used to happen to us. These coolers which start icing in the middle, and what we call coring, and you had to keep hot air flow going through them in order to keep them serviceable. We suddenly found that we’d got two engines with, suffering from this icing and then there was chunks of ice coming off the wings, battering against the side of the fuselage like, dreadful we had to abandon short of the coast. We jettisoned our bombs into the sea and the only way we could navigate back to the UK was star navigation, and Cyril, our navigator, he was particularly good, he could take star shots with his, with his, my blinkin’ names, what my memory’s going.
HB: Sextant.
BL: Sextant, yes, with a sextant. And a combination of that and following the stars he managed to get us going back in the direction of the UK. When we finally hit the coast instead of being, coming over the coast over Essex or somewhere, we were in the north of Scotland, over the Hebrides and that’s where we came in and of course we immediately identified where we were and we were able to fly back down to, in fact we made an emergency landing ‘cause we were running a bit short of fuel, at Wattisham, in Suffolk. That was on the fourth trip, but the first three were so highly successful, we absolutely wiped the place out, and as I say the losses dropped right down to one percent because of using this window. The rise in morale then was just fantastic, you know after that. Of course sooner or later the Germans found that they could, they changed their system and they found that they could nullify this window by using different types of radar and so on, so it didn’t last, obviously, but we were able to use it for some months actually, and it was very good. We’re just having a new kitchen put in at the moment.
HB: Ah right. That explains the banging.
BL: And the other thing about the ops on the Stirling, in ’43 when our losses were so high, when you counted the number of ops you’re doing, the way it was calculated by Group headquarters, it was decided that because when they analysed the losses and how it was happening and so on, they came to a system of doing thirty ops in a tour and the total would depend entirely on the type of ops. For instance when 90 Squadron went to Tuddenham on Lancasters in the end of ’44, or half way through ’44, their main job - they did very, very little main force bombing – but ninety percent of the jobs of their work and I’ve got it all listed in my history book of 90 Squadron, was on either, was mainly on resistance work dropping resistance and equipment for low level intervention into Europe, dropping arms and equipment to the French and the Dutch resistance movements and so on, and consequently this was done individual very low level operations and the result was that the ops compared with ’43 were very easy and the losses were very low and consequently because, and the short ops as well, and because of this to count one trip as an op they had to do four trips to count as one on the tour, and consequently this system which was introduced before we finished, was that because of the severity of a lot of our ops on the Ruhr operation were so incredibly high losses and so very difficult that they allocated that some of the ops, because of their severity, would count, you had to do one op was counted as two on your tour, because of the severity of the operation and the high level of losses. So it wasn’t, it didn’t always follow that you did a straight forward thirty trips, you could have done say twenty five trips but they counted as thirty on your log book and the severity of the targets.
HB: Did you ever do mine-laying, gardening?
LB: Mining? Yes. Gardening as they called it. Yeah. We did two actually. One off Le Creusot and one other, I’ve forgotten what it was now. We did, our particular crew we only did two mining operations, those were, they were easy ones too.
HB: Yeah. So. You got to Swinderby. You’re doing the training there. How did you move forward from there? So that would be 1944.
BL: Well it was the end of, Christmas, yes Christmas time ’43 when I went to Swinderby, and most of ’44 and as I said earlier I was a fully qualified instructor on Lancs and Stirlings then and towards the end of ’44, I think it must have been round about September, October, something like that, some of the Lanc squadrons in 5 Group were having very heavy losses and the analysis of those losses, was in many cases put down to the fact that, to inexperience, training not sufficient for them, because they’d been rushed through very quickly because squadrons, with their losses, need quick replacements and so on. The result was that at East Kirkby 57 Squadron and 630 Squadron were both there at East Kirkby, and 57 particularly although they’d been engaged on very difficult targets their losses were astronomically high and a hell of a lot of them put down to pure inexperience. So myself and Dicky, we were both instructors at Swinderby, we were seconded to 57 Squadron for three months to set up a revised training unit there, which we did, to give the training, give the operational crews quite a bit more familiarisation and training and so on to try and cut these, some of these losses down. So I had that period there. And it was whilst I was at 57 and about to go back to Swinderby, ‘cause I was still on the strength at Swinderby despite the fact I’d been loaned to 57 at East Kirkby to do this training programme, 463 Squadron at Waddington, the Aussie squadron, had been suffering a few losses here and there, and the, one of the leaders of the squadron, the co-pilot and flight engineer leader there had been lost, so I was posted to 463 as his replacement and I was lucky to stay there until the end of the war.
HB: So that was back on to operations.
BL: So, yes, so I went back on to ops. Of course when I was at 463, because I was the boss of A flight, I was the leader, I didn’t have a crew, so I could only put myself on to do ops when there was a, somebody had gone sick or something you see, so I did them with any crew, and by extremely strange coincidence, I said to you about Essen earlier, my very first trip on my second tour here was a low level daylight on Essen. [Laugh] I couldn’t believe it! But I’ll tell you what, it was so bloody easy, it was so different to 1943. But, so I stayed there really, and at the end of the war as I said earlier, I went to Skellingthorpe, just outside Lincoln when Tiger Force was set up. I was posted on to Tiger Force.
HB: And Tiger Force was - ?
BL: That was the equivalent to 617 to go to Japan to do the [cough] vital targets into Japan, very similar to what 617 had been doing, because the adjacent to 617 Squadron was 9 Squadron. They were both based then at Woodhall Spa and Wing Commander Cheshire was the, was one of the commanding officers at 617 at that time, amongst others. But so when I went to 463 as I say, I was there till the end of the war then, and doing ops from there, and because I was the leader there the flight engineer leader on 463, I was posted to Skellingthorpe to join Tiger Force and I was promoted then at Tiger Force to be in charge of that particular section to go to Japan and we were half way through their training when the bomb was dropped of course and it all came to a halt then. Consequently I found myself in civil flying.
HB: Yeah. You did tell me before the interview started, you were, you were made an offer by the RAF before you -
BL: Yes, offered a, I was a substantive flight lieutenant then, and for a very short time I was an acting Squadron Leader but only for four weeks! [Laugh] Because it all ended then. But I was offered a extended seven year flying, extended flying committee, er, commission and given the choice. I didn’t know much about, well I didn’t know anything about civil flying. I didn’t even understand what BOAC meant until I got there.
HB: But you were originally offered Transport Command weren’t you.
BL: Yes.
HB: What was your view on that?
BL: But I turned that down. I turned that down flat. But there’s a very, there’s another, a very ironic twist that I’ll tell you about. So immediately because we were then seconded from the air force to BOAC we had to get civilian licences. We had to get civilian licences and then they decided what they were going to train us on, so we had to go through the basic theory and all that sort of stuff to get civilian licences and we were allocated I think it was about either fifty or a hundred block licence numbers in the very early days. Once we’d done type training on, at that time on Avros produced the very first post-war airliner called the Tudor and the first dozen Tudors were just being built and they were destined to go to BOAC to start up to date pressurised passenger aircraft. They were quite nice aircraft actually, very good. So since we’d just, we were the first people to be trained on the Tudors. So we did our training on the Tudors and when they were just about to start to take, BOAC to take delivery of the Tudors, for some reason there was a political change and instead of coming to BOAC, they went to British South [emphasis] American Airways, and at that time was run by the old 8 Group Pathfinder chief, Air Marshal Don Bennett, who was a real press on type. [Cough] Highly successful with Pathfinders of course and he was the boss at British South American. They’d previously been running some converted Lancasters into what they called Lancastrians before long distance flying in South America and so on, and they hadn’t got a particularly good record they’d lost three or four of them I think, for different reasons and so they took delivery of the Tudors. Tudor 1s these were, Mark 1s. And I did quite a bit of flying with the, on the Tudors on the South American routes, down to Bermuda, and the Caribbean and so on, and I was put in charge of training at BSA as well. And then, as things went on, we got as far as 1948 I think it was, ‘46’ 47’ ’48 I think it was, yes, ’47 ‘48. Suddenly the Berlin Airlift comes up, and from nowhere I suddenly found BSA, because of their Tudors, the air force was already in force on the Berlin Airlift using mainly Dakotas, the old C47s and they couldn’t cope with, couldn’t make it that economical to cope with the heavy loads that was necessary so they asked a lot of the civilian charter companies and so on, if they could provide crews and aircraft to come on to the Berlin airlift to increase the load factors, and British South American got one of the contracts to, with two Tudors, to go on the Berlin Airlift and I was one of them selected to go on the first one. So I found myself flying over to Wunstorf near Hannover where we were based, to fly on the Berlin Airlift these two Tudors between Wunstorf and Gatow, Berlin. And ironically, I think, when I think that three years before, when I did my last operational trip with 463, there we were still bombing and knocking hell out of ‘em; three years later, there I was at Wunstorf flying into Berlin to try and keep the so-and-so’s alive. Ironic really, they were three years the difference. Anyway, I stayed at Wunstorf for nearly a year, I think it was. I did nearly three hundred flights between Wunstorf and, there were only three of us on board.
HB: What sort of things were you taking in?
BL: Well when I first flew out there, we were taking huge packs of canned meat and stuff like spam and all that sort of stuff, corned beef, and all that, which was fairly easy to handle, in big cases and so on. And then the RAF were getting a bit uppity about what they were going to do and what they were carrying and bear in mind that the US air force was also on the operation with their C54s and Skymasters and so on, they were based at Schleswigland I think it is. I’ve got maps showing all the different air bases that we used over there but we always used Wunstorf and because we were larger aircraft, they decided that instead of carrying packs of food and so on, we suddenly found ourselves carrying coal, huge packs of coal, great big sealed bags of coal, about a hundredweight apiece. So we spent some months then, this coal at Berlin. Landing at Berlin was quite something. It was the ground force of people doing all the unloading and so on was predominantly very elderly German ladies, old grandmothers and mothers and so on, and it was sad to see them. They were dressed, whatever they could find to wear, and they used to come on board. They did all the work of loading and unloading, all the heavy work and they used to come on board to us carrying these lovely family heirlooms like Leica cameras and stuff like that to exchange. They were desperate for two things: cigarettes and coffee, and you could get anything for a couple of packs of coffee, in fact I got a lovely Leica camera in exchange for two bags of coffee at one stage. They used to come up, had it all laid out on the nav table there when they were unloading and they’d bring these heirlooms up and do deals with us. Anything we could, anything they wanted we could give it to them, you know. Children we gave cigret – we gave sweets and chocolate to the children. The children loved it. The Americans set up, at one stage, when they flew into Gatow, over the Frohnau beacon flying on to finals for landing, all the children used to sit round the lake underneath waving to the Americans going over and the Yanks were throwing out chocolate and sweets to them. At one stage they set up, got large handkerchiefs which they tied up sort of like a parachute, and tied these bags of sweets to them, were throwing them out and in dropping them out and the kids loved it. Absolutely fantastic.
HB: Amazing.
BL: But anyway, as I say, another aspect came up then, some time after been carrying the coal, which was a very dirty operation, dust and everything in the aircraft and they suddenly decided that what they wanted desperately in Berlin was medicinal, what do you call it? Two things they were short of, one was straight run gasoline and the other one was, oh dear me, some large amount of some sort of medicinal fluids. I’ve forgotten what they were now, what they were called. But these were in great big packs but the hospitals were desperate for them. So when it was decided that they’d fly the stuff in, it meant that the aircraft that were going to do this had to be modified with huge tanks in the back to carry it. And the air force said point blank they wouldn’t do it, they refused absolutely point blank to carry straight run gasoline in bloody great tanks down the back of the aircraft, they said its far too dangerous, so they refused point blank to do it. So the civilian contracts were asked to do it and we had then replaced our two Mark 1 Tudors with two Mark 5s which had been built and never been put into service but they were much larger and so our two Mark 5s were then equipped with these bloody great tanks for straight run gasoline and this medical stuff and so for the last few months we were flying that into Berlin.
BH: How did you feel about that?
BL: Oh dear me. Well it was just a bloody big laugh I thought, we thought. Bear in mind we’ve still got this enthusiasm from Bomber Command which we’d brought from the air force to the civilian and it was such a big change, you know, but to us it was more of a bloody big laugh than anything else. But anyway, we settled down to it and it was a good operation, it worked extremely well. When you are turning on to final approach into Gatow, Berlin, you came in over the lake on the outskirts of the city and the final beacon was at a place called Frohnau, Frohnau Beacon, you had to call over the beacon which was virtually the outer marker for final approach and the timing was so accurately it had to be done. The timing of aircraft over Frohnau was every twenty seconds between aircraft.
HB: Blimey.
BL: When you think there was a variety of aircraft, everything from small Bristol freighters to Dakotas and converted Lancs and Halifaxes and anything the charter people could lay their bloody hands on. They buy them for peanuts and take them out there to take part because the airlift they pay very big money and we were no exception with our Tudors and it’s an amazing operation really.
HB: So you went through the Berlin Airlift. Just one thing just I’m just quite curious about. You started off I think, on particular kinds of aircraft as a fitter.
BL: Yeah.
HB: What was, what was the system for re-training you when you went to different engines and different engine management systems?
BL: Well there were various training stations set up. I think the initial one for fitter 2Es, or 2As, that’s the difference between fitter rigger and fitter engines was at Kirkham, Lancashire and that was the number one training base, apart from Halton of course which is still there and still doing it today! And Halton of course was always the base of the so called Halton Brats as they call them. They go there as small, young apprentices and three year training straight away and they’re still doing that today. Yeah, they’re still churning out young lads from Halton.
HB: Right. So when you were working with the Stirling –
BL: Yeah.
HB: And then you go on Lancasters, obviously you’ve got Merlin engines, you’ve got Hercules engines, you’ve got all sorts, you’ve got air cooled, liquid cooled. You’ve got all these different engines.
BL: Yes.
HB: So was there an element of self training or was it all formalised?
BL: Well it was to us, to a point where we were fully trained and fully experienced with a lot of hours in on Stirlings when we went up to Swinderby, the 5 Group elite Group., but we hadn’t been trained on Lancs. So we had, it was virtually self-training on the Lancs there by virtue of working on them and flying on them and training every day. So that part of it, yes, was to a large extent I think we did, there were short courses laid on for us. I did one at Cosford for instance, and places like that, but generally speaking more than anything you were self taught, and as instructors you were expected to be experienced and knowledgeable on all the different aspects, so that was how it worked. But go back to the Berlin Airlift though, when that finished, I came back, by that time British South American, there was a lot of demands because they had a very poor safety record. We lost Star Tiger and we lost Star Ariel, both in the Caribbean. Those were Tudor 1s, from the first Tudors that we trained on. The first one was lost over the Bermuda Triangle as they call it, up at twenty thousand feet, no idea what happened to him; it just disappeared. And the second one was, had flown out of the Azores which at that time was a very difficult operation, flying over the south Atlantic from the Azores to South America and weather conditions and very poor nav and all rest of it was very prevalent round the Azores; very difficult route to operate.
HB: How many passengers did the Tudor 1 carry then?
BL: It varied, on whether, the Tudor 1s, I’ve just forgotten. I think up to about eighty or ninety passengers, something like that. The Tudor 5s were much larger but they didn’t actually go into passenger service after the Berlin Airlift. I don’t know what happened. They were scrapped I think, in the end. But anyway, as I say, because of the loss of the two Tudors and the BSA had lost quite a few Lancs so Don Bennett was criticised very heavily and finally he was forced to resign. So he was taken over by BSA who was then taken over by one of the old traditional north Atlantic BOAC captains, Gordon Storr his name, and it was Gordon Storr who I was with, on the, we were the first two Tudors at Wunstorf when the Airlift started and then shortly afterwards after Bennett had left, they decided BSA would be would up so what was left of it came back into, it came into BOAC. But that stage I was still being paid as a flight lieutenant substantive from the air force, seconded to BOAC so I was paid by BOAC who in turn seconded me to BSAA so I was paid by three companies, very interesting situation. But then of course, having come back to BOAC then, BOAC were operating Yorks and converted Halifaxes called Haltons, and, oh there was still a few Dakotas being used, but generally they were waiting for the next civil airliner which came from Handley Page called the Hermes and that was a very good aircraft. I liked the Hermes very much. Performance wise it hadn’t quite got good altitude performance as such, but it was a very easy aircraft to fly, very comfortable, it was designed specifically for the comfort of passengers and so on. And it was after then that the Comet 1 came in from De Havillands, the DH106, which was designed and built by DHs and was at least twenty years before its time. And then of course to us anyway, a huge attraction to get on the first jet aircraft into service. So in no time at all I was, I joined the Comet 1 fleet. We were flying, first of all flying down to Johannesburg and then it was extended to the Far East and out to even as far as Tokyo and Hong Kong and so on. Then of course you know the story that Xray Kilo blew up over Elba on its way between Rome and London. They were immediately grounded, no one could understand why it had, how it had happened. There was a huge inquiry and after ninety-odd modifications they decided that one of them must have been the reason so they put it back into service. And in no time at all they lost a second one which blew up over Naples Bay. That was flown by a South African crew who were on loan to BOAC. We’d also got French crews flying them, and it, so it was then decided that because two of them had blown up, they couldn’t leave them into service any longer. Unfortunately a third one went. The third one was out of Calcutta and that had just taken over from Calcutta and was flying through heavy cloud and they put that down to the fact that it flew into a cunim cloud and the stresses were so great the aircraft just broke up. So then they were grounded completely and when Farnborough rigged up the test rig there, and put a whole aircraft on this water test bed, and they found out exactly why it had happened. The general opinion from the public and in aviation generally was that the pressurisation caused the windows to blow out but that wasn’t true at all. The fault arose through bad engineering practice on the design of the hatches in the roof. The hatches which covered the radio communication, adf system and these two hatches were like that square like that. Engineering practice is that if you design something that’s a square and it’s put under pressure, you see that little crack there, where that join is -
HB: Showing me on the photograph frame.
BL: That little crack there.
HB: In the corner. [cough]
BL: If a crack occurs, it will always come from a corner, and find its way across and finally disintegrate and that’s precisely what happened to the Comet. It was bad engineering practice because if you round the corners those cracks wouldn’t occur. Simple [cough]. Again, in fairness to De Havillands, they produced some very fine fighter aircraft, put in their own engine, the Ghost 50 engine in them, Vampires and stuff like that but they had no experience ever of high altitude pressurised aircraft, and so they built them to what they considered would be strong enough and so on. But I’ve got a book upstairs which Andrew’s been reading, of the whole story, the whole official story of the enquiry and the way they found out all the reasons for it at Farnborough. The summing up at the end of it, when they said officially you know, that the initial fault was the adf hatches that disintegrated because of the bad engineering practice, how it was designed. The general feeling was that the aircraft was twenty years before its time but it simply wasn’t strong enough, because De Havillands, or anyone else for that matter, had experience enough to build them strong enough, when you think that at forty two thousand feet the pressurisation equivalent in the cabin was only eight thousand feet. That was the highest the cabin pressure was ever taken up to give passengers comfort without having to go on to oxygen. So the difference between eight thousand and forty two thousand across the structure of the aircraft was eight and a half pounds per square inch which is massive [emphasis] from the outside to the inside, and it has to be extremely strong, the sort of structure, in order to withstand these pressures. So you can imagine that it was not only not built strong enough, but of course the fault occurred on the hatches which caused it to blow up anyway. The first one that went, Xray Kilo, I had flown that on quite a number of occasions, got it in my log book in a number of places prior to it blowing up. I think previously I’d, we operated it from Tokyo to Hong Kong only the day before I think it was, before it blew up at Elba, but that aircraft had only done seventeen hundred hours. The second one that blew up over Naples had done just over two thousand hours and the one that disintegrated at Calcutta had done less than two thousand hours. They were all going at the, virtually the same time. That was another factor that the inquiry of course dug up, when they said that, Tom Butterworth I think it was, that because of lack of experience at DHs on high altitude stuff the aircraft simply wasn’t built strong enough. You’ve got to go back to Con Derry who was the chief test pilot at De Havillands a few years before when he was doing demonstrations at the Farnborough air show in a, I think it was a Vampire, he was doing very, very tight turns demonstrating and on one of those tight turns the bloody wings came off. He crashed into the crowd there and killed a few people, including himself. That was another example that under extreme stress conditions, that DHs aircraft wasn’t strong enough.
HB: Yes.
BL: So all those factors, you know. So result was that going back to the Comet days, I was involved very heavily with the whole Comet story because then it was decided that they’d have to, they’d build the new aircraft much stronger and up to date. The other thing was, by the way, that De Havillands had their own engines, the Ghost 50 which only produced five thousand pounds thrust, which was quite adequate for the fighters, but for a aircraft like the Comet 4 Ghost 50 engines, they insisted on putting their own engines in and all the experts said no, we needed Rolls Royce Merlin engines, or Avon engines they were, but they refused point blank, they said no, its our aircraft, we’ll put our own engines in and they simply weren’t strong enough. We couldn’t even do a safe level cruise at altitude, you had to do a five degree climb the whole time to get to top of descent, largely because by continuing to fly like that you’re reducing your fuel flow and consequently you had adequate fuel to start your descent. It was because of the consumption levels and the lack of real thrust on these DH engines, it was extremely [emphasis] critical on fuel, extremely [emphasis] critical. They devised this method of five degree climb. You had to fly, when you flight plan you fly backwards starting at top of descent instead of top of climb and things like that, you know. So anyway, when it was decided then they’d build the new Comet 4 much stronger and it would have Rolls Royce engines of much higher quality and it had Rolls Royce Conway engines. So, they’d, after the 1s, they built some Comet 2s, which were destined to go to the air force. But of course after the crashes they never even got airborne, never even delivered, they were just stuck there at Hatfield. So they decided that they’d have to carry out a two year test flying programme to make sure that everything that was being put into the Comet 4 had been well proved, correctly and properly using these two Mark 2s which were used as test beds. So they modified these two Mark 2s, strengthened them up and made sure they were adequate to do the work. They put the standard Conway engines on the inboards and then the new big 524 engines on the outboards which were destined to go into the new Comet 4. So they hadn’t got any crews to fly these at De Havilland, so they asked BOAC if BOAC could loan them I think it was six, was six crews to fly a two year test flying for De Havillands on these Comet 2s, 2Es as they called them. So I was one that went on to those, on to test flying. The first year we, every day we flew non-stop to Beirut from London and back, every day for a year. The aircraft hadn’t got a certificate of airworthiness, of course it was experimental, so there was only three of us allowed on board, no one, none of the boffins were allowed on so they got all the, all the usual test equipment and everything was loaded all the way down the fuselage and it was all fed up to the cockpit where we were and we used to have, they used to give us a list of things we had to check and write the results down, the results of this stuff as we flew, and we had to fly at thirty two thousand feet and record all this stuff for them which was really interesting. I loved it actually. It was a bloody good programme and extremely well paid as well! [Laugh]
HB: Right!
BL: So the first year we did London Beirut every day and the second year they decided we’d have to do the Arctic North Atlantic trials to make sure it was adequate for very low temperature conditions so then we started a programme going from London to Keflavik in Iceland and then across to Goose Bay and Gander in to the Maritimes and then back to London. So we did that for six months. That was a very interesting programme, I liked that part of it particularly. And then of course decided to try and get permission to fly into America. So the Americans were very keen on noise abatement and the Comet did make quite a bit of noise on take off of course, and so they said yes you can fly in to America but not land there, and not do take offs and landings. So then we had a period where we were flying out to different places around America using the new VOR navigation systems and so on, and then eventually politically we got permission to do landings over there and it was at that time then when a lot of the American airlines were looking very enviously at the jet Comet to replace traditional old fashioned piston engine aircraft and we did a series, we were doing a series of demonstration flights when, at the time when Pan American, the number one American outfit had just received, they’d just taken delivery of the first of the civilian Boeing 707s and they were pushing out a lot of typical American bullshit that they were going to be the very first pure jet passenger flight on the Atlantic, transatlantic ‘Fly American. Fly pure jet’, and all that, you know. Anyway, at the time we were down in Detroit doing some demonstration flights for United Airlines, they wanted to buy some of these Comets, so we were doing demonstration flights there. And it was there when we suddenly got a call to fly back to New York and, for some reason, and we found we got to New York we were going to do the first transatlantic flight the next day. We beat the Yanks by sixteen days! And when the Yanks had put all this, all the usual stuff in the papers, and they got the big banners out: ‘Fly Pan American the first jet flight across the Atlantic’ and so on. And after we beat them like that they had to change it all and where it said, ‘we are the first,’ they had to put in: ‘we are one of the first.’ They never bloody forgave us for it! Amazing story! [Laughter]
HB: Oh dear.
BL: But anyway, as I say I was very, very strongly involved in -
HB: How many people were on -
BL: - the whole Comet programme from start to finish.
HB: How many people were on that first trans-atlantic flight?
BL: I think we had about sixty, sixty passengers, something like that, yes. You’ve seen the menu of course.
HB: Yes, yes. Got a copy of the menu there [cough]
BL: We got back to London and it was a very historic occasion. They gave us immediate take off at New York and cleared all the flights from London to give us number one priority to land. BBC and everyone were all were there in force to welcome us, and it was headed by Eamon Andrews on BBC.
HB: Oh right. Yes.
BL: They got our wives there and so on waiting. There was two aircraft actually. We did the eastbound New York London and the other one went the other way, London New York and we crossed over at about twenty degrees west I think it was and acknowledged each other, but you know, two of them, one going one the other. And when we went through all the procedure at London old Eamon Andrews said, ‘We’ve got a coach here for you, we’re taking you up to,’ um to, I’ve forgot where the studios were now, I’ll think of it in a minute, ’taking you up to, see we want to put you on TV tonight.’ They’d decided to put us on that programme ‘What’s My Line?’ And old, the panel at that time dear old, oh my bloody memory’s going, bloke who was extremely well known on the BBC, was the chairman of the panel there. Anyway we went on TV and on this programme and all that sort of publicity and so on; it was really interesting. And then of course the following year I was picked to go to, one of the flight crew to go to Ottawa, Canada to pick up Duke of Edinburgh, Philip. We went in the Comet; he was very keen to fly in the Comet, so we went there to pick him up. He’d been there doing a series of talks and so on. The Queen was at Balmoral at the time so we were to pick him up at Ottawa and fly him back to Leuchars in Scotland, which is quite close to Balmoral, drop him off there. But anyway, we picked him up at Ottawa and we were just, hadn’t been airborne very long when a signal came through to say there’d, a big mining disaster had just occurred at Monckton in the Maritimes and would we divert to Monckton and so the Duke could just put in a quick royal visit, two hours royal visit to the disaster area. So we dropped him off at Monckton and then we flew down, further down to Gander and we waited at Gander for him to come, come back and then we brought him from Gander and flew him to Leuchars, dropped him off there. Oh it’s here somewhere I’ve got a picture of it. On board on the way back he was fascinated with the Comet 1, he loved to fly in the Comet, oh the Comet 4 I should say and on the way back he got a lot of individual special pictures of himself and he signed one each for us, and a handshake.
HB: Oh lovely.
BL: I thought she’d got it up here, it’s been on the wall here somewhere. She must have put it away. But it’s personally signed: Philip.
HB: Oh lovely.
BL: Which is, very has, carried a lot of weight, in the years to come. It’ll be worth a few bob I should think!
HB: So when did you actually stop flying Bob?
BL: Well, from then on, after the Comet programme, first BOAC decided to buy the Boeings so they ordered these new Boeing 707s from Boeing of course, from America and in January 1960 the first delivery of, or first Boeing 707 was ready for us to collect. And there was nobody trained on it or anything at that time of course, since we hadn’t got any Boeings. But in America the military version of the Boeing was the KC135 and they’d already built eight hundred of those, they’d all gone to the American air force and the American navy and so on. So having had that number built, all the bugs and problems had all been ironed out, needless to say, unlike so many of our aircraft you see. So it was a well [emphasis] tried and well proven aircraft before it even went into service. So in January ’60 I was, one of the, I was, been an instructor on Comets for some time I’d always been instructing quite a lot and so there’s four instructors, myself and three others were sent out to Seattle to get trained on the 707 and the first Boeing 707 to come off was number hundred and eleven off the line, the production line, so we were still quite a way behind other airlines. Anyway, when we got to Seattle we were trained by the Seattle test flight crew. At that time there’s no civilian aircraft, aerodromes rather, in the UK that could take the 707 except Heathrow and obviously you couldn’t use Heathrow for training but they could use it for service, not for training. Shannon hadn’t got a long enough runway at that time anyway, but they were building a new one. So there was nowhere in the UK where they could train us. So Boeings decided, got permission to use Tucson, Arizona. So Tex Johnson was there, er Tex, not Johnson, Tex Gannard, Tex Gannard was the Boeing Chief Test Pilot at that time and he decided that we’d, he’d take us down to Tucson and we’d set up a training base there and he would train us as instructors and so on, to stay on at Tucson to train the BOAC crews as they were sent out from the UK. So we stayed there to run the training unit [cough] and the crews had come from London, we trained them and they went back and then flew the aircraft in service. So we had a very nice six months so, Tucson and the trainer, super that was. But hard work. I’ll tell you what impressed me more than anything else when I went to Seattle, to Boeings: the difference between the British way of life in [coughing] workload, dedication and that sort of thing in the British aviation industry, was so different to that of the Americans. Soon found the Americans are far ahead of us in their dedication to the work they were doing. It was a bloody eye-opener, believe me. Hard work, but they knew how to do it and it was an absolute revelation to us. For instance when we were doing flight training unit details at London they’re usually about two and a half to three hours at the most, something like that, and then the time we went to Tucson the thing that surprised us was that the minimum flights times were five hours! [emphasis] Bloody long details, oh Christ, but that was typical of the Americans and the hard work they put in. They had three of the test pilots at Tucson with us and a fleet to train us and certify us as being fully trained instructors on Boeing aircraft. And I’ve got a certificate to say that.
HB: Yes. That’s grand.
BL: And anyway, BOAC then got a bit hot under the collar about the cost of running Tucson and all the British bases, so they got permission to use St Mawgan at St Athan, at Newquay. They got permission from the aircraft, from the air force for us to move from Tucson to Newquay and used St Mawgan for training from then on so I then moved, as I say, from Tucson to the Bristol Hotel in Newquay. And being a typical seaside resort, very popular, they didn’t want any weekend flying Saturdays and Sundays, there’s all sorts of objections from the local authority and so on, so it was a bit of a doddle down there.
HB: Good grief!
BL: So it was on the 707 where eventually that was my last flying for BOAC.
HB: I see. There’s a good few years in the air there Bob!
BL: Forty years.
HB: Can I just –
BL: The reason I retired in the end by the way, I was very close to retiring at that time, but I was on training at Shannon at the time on the Boeing fleet. We were doing our winter training at Shannon and one of the details we had to do was to demonstrate the capabilities of the aircraft at high, high speed characteristics of the 707. The normal cruising in the 707 was point eight one mach, but the “never exceed” was about point eight eight, which you should never exceed on a Boeing and we used to have to demonstrate though as you got somewhere near the point eight eight the flight control characteristics changed aerodynamically and you had to be aware of this to happen should you ever stray up there in flight. So we had to demonstrate this and we used to fly at forty odd thousand feet from Shannon across to five degree west in the Atlantic then back again doing these high speed runs and I was doing one of those with two students and we suddenly hit a bloody air pocket – bang! It threw us up in the air and down again, hit it really hard, couldn’t, didn’t even realise it was there just clear air turbulence, and I got thrown up on the ceiling and when I dropped down I dropped right across the arm of the co-pilot’s seat with my hip like that and it buggered up something in my hip and I couldn’t even walk off the aircraft carrying my briefcase. So I had to go sick straight away. I went through all the usual palavers of different Harley Street specialists and lord knows what and all they could tell you, ‘oh you’ve slipped a disc in your back,’ you know and all this. They threatened to send me off for a laminectomy operation, but the BOAC doctor at Heathrow who looked after the flight crews, he was ex-RAF and he was bloody good doctor, Doc civil and liked gossip here with the boys, and he really looked after us, one of us, you know.
HB: Very much so yes.
BL: He says, when finally I got to the end of my tether, I couldn’t clear this up, the bloody pain was there, could virtually, almost couldn’t walk and he says, ‘I tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’ll pull a few strings for you,’ he said, ‘you’re an ex RAF officer’ he says, ‘I’ll get you in to Hedley Court.’ So a couple of days later he says, ‘I’ve managed it, you’re going off to Hedley Court they’ll sort you out there.’ So I went off to Hedley Court which of course is very famous today because all these guys from Afghanistan are going in there for amputainees and that sort of thing you know, so I went into Hedley for three months. Within three days of being there they found out exactly what was wrong with me. What I’d done when I fell down like that over this arm, I’d stretched what they call the sacroiliac joint in my hip, it’d stretched it and bent it and that was the cause of all of the trouble.
HB: Good grief!
BL: And they found that after three days there! All these bloody Harley Street specialists I went to see kept telling me all I’d got was a bloody slipped disc. But the outcome was that I spent three months there and they cured it ninety nine percent. And when I finally got to, they wanted to discharge me I went to see the old Group Captain medical and he says, ‘Well,’ he says, ‘we’ve cleared it up for you,’ he says, ‘you’ll be all right,’ he says, ‘there might be the odd occasions when you get a recurrence but the only thing is,’ he says, ‘I’ll have to put a four hour restriction on your licence,’ and of course BOAC wouldn’t accept that because I was on a world wide contract so they said no we can’t accept that but you’re very close to retirement we’ll give you an immediate retirement on pension. So that’s really how I finished. But it didn’t end there.
HB: Oh right.
BL: Another little facet came. I’d been very interested in act, different aircraft accidents and accident investigation. I was on the accident committee for a few years before that, while I was still flying and somebody at BOAC obviously realised that I’d got experience on them and they said well we’ll keep you on but not in a flying capacity, would you like to become a CAA FIA flight accident investigator. I said yes, so they said right. So they sent me off to the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, to do the full official FIA accident inspector’s course so I had a couple of months over there, and did the course in the university and I qualified, graduated and got my little badge and everything, as an official accident investigator. So I came back to London and I went on two of the accidents actually, one of which was a Boeing which landed with a wing on fire at Heathrow after one of the engines had dropped off into the Staines reservoir. I’ve got a photograph of that landing, with the wing on fire, amongst this lot here somewhere.
HB: Good grief. Yeah.
BL: And anyway after that I found it was a bit boring and of course by that time I’d got a farm in Surrey and I’d got, we were milking a hundred and twenty five Jersey cows, and I’d got thirty thousand chickens, got five vans on the road delivering fresh eggs and cream around London and it was taking up so much time I thought well I haven’t got bloody time to go in so I finally decided I’d quit completely and carry on farming and that really was the end of it.
HB: Yeah, it does bring it to an end, doesn’t it really.
BL: So, quite a lot of various incidents in my career.
HB: Just a few, just a few. Just going back, I meant to actually ask you this ages ago. When you were on 463 Squadron -
BL: Yes.
HB: With the old, the Australians, that would be towards the end of ’45. Did you ever, when you were there on operations did you ever come across the German jet fighters?
BL: Er, no. Not, not the jets, no.
HB: No. All right.
BL: Incidentally, talking about that, of course, when Peenemunde came up, it just so happened, we didn’t, on the Stirlings by the way, the Stirlings from the squadron, I think we put about a dozen Stirlings up on the Peenemunde operation and we’d been briefed from weeks and weeks and weeks that something very special was coming up, no one knew what it was except it was something very special operation but it was tied in very closely to the right weather. It had to be absolutely perfect on weather forecast and of course it turned out it was Peenemunde. And it just so happened that when the Peenemunde trip came up we were on two weeks’ leave. So we missed it.
HB: Yeah. Right.
BL: But it was from then on of course we were very active on bombing these flying bomb sites in France and various parts of Europe. But we never came across any of the jet fighters at all. No definitely not.
HB: Right. Well I think. I think Bob, we’ve come to a natural sort of end, and I just thank you very much. Absolutely fascinating.
BL: Well I hope I haven’t bored you too much.
HB: Oh no! Well I haven’t gone to sleep! [Laughter] No absolutely fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
BL: I’ve been lucky really in a sense, that you know, had all these different variants, military and civilian, I’ve very lucky to be on you know, these special products, projects. Rather like the as I said, the two years I was test flying with De Havilland, that was really interesting.
HB: Yeah. I’m going to, one of the things I forgot to do at the beginning, I didn’t actually say at the beginning: it’s Wednesday the 12th of December 2018. I forgot about that at the beginning, I got a bit excited! So I’m going to terminate the interview Bob and get on with the paperwork. Thank you very much again.
BL: Yeah.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Bob Leedham
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-12-12
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.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ALeedhamHJL181212, PLeedhamHJL1801
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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02:16:46 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Bob Leedham was a flight engineer who carried out twenty-one operations on Stirlings. At the outbreak of war Bob was an apprentice motor mechanic, and along with other apprentices, was left to operate the garage when all the engineers were called up. In 1940 he enlisted in the RAF and following initial training, Bob was selected for pilot training but did not achieve the requirement of flying solo within twelve hours. His engineering background meant he was posted to RAF St Athan and trained as a flight engineer. A posting to RAF Stradishall followed, and conversion to Stirling aircraft. Now part of a crew and posted to 90 Squadron at RAF Ridgewell, operational flying commenced. Bob suggests political interference restricted the performance of the aircraft resulting in a higher casualty rate amongst Stirling crews, and explains how the introduction of Window anti-radar equipment improved this. In Spring 1943 the squadron moved to RAF Wratting Common and in Autumn, converted to Lancasters. With more Lancasters coming into service, there was a lack of experience on four-engined aircraft, and some Stirling’s were deployed to RAF Swinderby for crew training. This move coincided with Bob obtaining his commission and he became an instructor on both Stirling and Lancasters. Late in 1944, Bob was back flying operations with 463 Squadron at RAF Waddington, where he was senior co-pilot/flight engineer. Following peace declaration in Europe, Bob joined Tiger Force in preparation for moving to Japan, but the war ended before this materialised. Bob began a post-war career in civil aviation, initially operating the Avro Tudor, and flying approximately three-hundred operations during the Berlin airlift. He also gives an account of the development of the DH 106 Comet and details the faults which resulted in the aircraft being grounded. While undertaking demonstrations in America, Bob was recalled to New York, where his crew discovered they were to operate the first civilian jet flight eastbound across the Atlantic. In 1960, Bob was one of four certified to instruct on the new generation of aircraft, the Boeing 707. An injury sustained from clear-air turbulence curtailed Bob’s flying career, and he progressed into the investigation of aircraft accidents.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Ian Whapplington
Anne-Marie Watson
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Azores
Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
United States
Zimbabwe
Arizona--Tucson
England--Burton upon Trent
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Essex
England--Hampshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Suffolk
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Essen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Peenemünde
India--Kolkata
Italy--Elba
Mediterranean Sea--Bay of Naples
New Brunswick--Moncton
Ontario--Ottawa
Scotland--Leuchars
Wales--Glamorgan
Washington (State)--Seattle
England--Cornwall (County)
Arizona
Ontario
New Brunswick
India
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Staffordshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1943
1944
10 Squadron
463 Squadron
5 Group
57 Squadron
617 Squadron
86 Squadron
90 Squadron
aircrew
Bennett, Donald Clifford Tyndall (1910-1986)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
C-47
flight engineer
Gneisenau
Halifax
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Pathfinders
pilot
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921-2021)
radar
RAF Alconbury
RAF Halton
RAF Ridgewell
RAF St Athan
RAF St Mawgan
RAF Stradishall
RAF Swinderby
RAF Tuddenham
RAF Waddington
RAF Woodhall Spa
RAF Wratting Common
Scharnhorst
Stirling
Sunderland
Tiger force
training
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1027/11399/PMcVickersCG1701.2.jpg
e63e360b9d8c44c497cd07bf38ac604f
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1027/11399/AMcVickersCG171006.1.mp3
e70c5002647526a9e94ca6d62c386bfe
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
McVickers, Christopher George
C G McVickers
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. An oral history interview with Flight Sergeant Christopher George McVickers (1922 - 2018, 1042135 Royal Air Force), his log book identity card and disks and his decorations. He completed a tour of operations as a wireless operator with 218 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Christopher McVickers and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-06
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
McVickers, CG
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: Right. This is an interview for the International Bomber Command.
CM: Yeah.
HB: Digital Archive between Harry Bartlett, representing the Archive and Christopher George McVickers who was a member of 218 Gold Coast Squadron and served throughout the war in —
CM: Well —
HB: With 218.
CM: ’41.
HB: From 1941 through and served after the war through to 1965.
CM: ’67.
HB: Thank you. I was wrong.
CM: Well —
HB: I have.
CM: Don’t forget I wasn’t flying for the last eighteen months. I was just, I was a missile controller.
HB: Right. Right. So, Kit isn’t it?
CM: Kit.
HB: We call you Kit.
CM: That’s right.
HB: Right. Where you were born, Kit?
CM: Blackhill, County Durham.
HB: Right. And did you go to school at Blackhill?
CM: I’ve no recollection of ever going to school.
HB: No.
CM: I forgot about it. I went to school quite obviously.
HB: Obviously.
CM: Went to school at Benfieldside.
HB: Aye. And, and your first job was in —
CM: Errand boy.
HB: Yeah. In the —
CM: As you did in those days. This was, I’m talking 1935 ’36 you know.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Did up to fourteen.
HB: So you were an errand boy.
CM: I failed the eleven plus.
HB: Right.
CM: But it wasn’t — I had a broken arm during that period and also went to hospital with scarlet fever during that period.
HB: Right.
CM: When I came back to school because obviously the sickness thing. And the eleven plus was pending, I couldn’t do it at the time.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Because I couldn’t sit at the desk like that.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: So I missed all the revision and everything else. So, they all said, you’d have no chance with that.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So I took, I took it privately. By myself.
HB: Oh right.
CM: Just with my arm out of the, just like that. So consequently I didn’t know how to pick my pen up or to write.
HB: Aye.
CM: So I made a mess of it and I failed it.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So there was a lot of talk about it at the time. Jane knows all about this. And my father made such a fuss of this. ‘My son has never had a chance. He’s had no chance. No revision. Nothing at all.’ Sat down with his arm out of his sling and taking an important — so that’s, but at that time they did their very best.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But they couldn’t do anything about it.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So you just —
CM: I was going to pass the eleven plus but I didn’t due to circumstances.
HB: Yeah. So you became an errand boy.
CM: Yeah. I was. I won’t say I was a very humble errand boy but I was the best errand boy in the locality.
HB: Yes. Absolutely. And you went to the steelworks I understand.
CM: Yes. My father, my father’s brother Kit who was the, as I said was general secretary of the Iron, Steel, British Iron, Steel and Kindred Trades Association. So he had so much power he could say to me, ‘It’s your sixteenth birthday coming up Kit lad.’ Kit lad. He said Kit lad. He said, ‘Just report to the timekeeper and say you’re Uncle Kit sent you,’ he said, ‘You’ll be set on.’ So I thought, My God, this is nepotism but in a fine sort of way but that’s how I got the steelworks.
HB: And that was at, that was in Consett.
CM: Within two years of course, those were ’36 ’37 then the war broke out and instead of being, doing, on the staff of the steelworks which I was they said, ‘Ok. We’re going to need all the best men we’ve got to man, man the furnaces,’ because a lot of the people on the furnaces had been, were Territorials and they’d been called up anyway. So semi promotion was not only I was going to be boy plus beyond boy to the eighteen year old man. Man’s, man’s business. So suddenly I got promotion beyond the dreams of avarice.
HB: Oh lovely.
CM: But the only fault of it was the timekeepers thought these were boys and they’d be boy labourers. Therefore, they must pay boy labourers wages. So about three months later Kit said to me, he said, ‘How are you spending all the extra money Kit lad?’ And all I was getting was, I said, ‘Well, I’m not getting any extra money.’ I’m getting boy’s labourers wages. He said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Just stay here. Don’t move from that place for ten minutes.’ And off he went to see the, not the commanding officer —
HB: No.
CM: The general service manager. You know, the boss. Came back and said, ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘You’ll get all the backpay you get at full men’s wages. Not only that it’s all the people who’ve been doing the same thing as you. They’ll get the same thing. Well, I was the most popular chap in the steelworks. By this time it was quite a lump sum between boy’s labourers wages and men’s labourers wages.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Anyway, I did pretty well because leaving school at fourteen didn’t make much difference. I had the intelligence then in the first place. Which I would, that’s why my father said I would have been a cert for the grammar school.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So I had the grammar school brains without the grammar qualifications.
CM: That’s —
HB: So I did alright.
HB: So that was up to, that was sort of ’37 ’38.
CM: That’s right. Well —
HB: So, so, how, how did you come to join the RAF?
CM: It was 1941 before I joined the Air Force.
HB: Yeah.
CM: By that time I was nineteen.
HB: Yeah. And did you, did you volunteer Kit?
CM: Oh yeah. Yeah. They wouldn’t let you go unless you volunteered.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And you had to be, you had to volunteer for either submarines or aircrew or some other damned dangerous job.
HB: Yeah.
CM: They wouldn’t let you go otherwise. They wouldn’t let you go just to be an ordinary soldier.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: You know.
HB: Yeah.
CM: You’re more important then to be manning the furnaces.
HB: Yeah. So, so it was so you basically you were in a Reserved Occupation.
CM: Oh, that’s right. Yes, I was. Yes.
HB: And then to —
CM: Like Kit. Like Kit himself.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: The boss. And the boss of the steelworks. They were all Reserved Occupation.
HB: Yeah. So you then went from Reserved Occupation and you volunteered for aircrew.
CM: That’s right.
HB: Right.
CM: But if it had been anything other than aircrew they would said no.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Back to where you were more useful.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: Which I was by then. I was an experienced furnaceman. A fourth. There a fourth hand, third hand, second hand and first hand. You know, four men manned the furnaces. So you progressed from fourth hand to first hand but it took you about forty years to do it.
HB: Yeah. Oh yeah.
CM: The SiC turn system. [unclear] was in operation.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So —
CM: Organised by my Uncle Kit.
HB: Yeah. So you come and join the RAF. And you obviously had to go for your [pause] you obviously had to go for your training. Where did, where did you go for your training?
CM: First three months was Blackpool.
HB: That’s —
CM: General service training.
HB: Yeah.
CM: You know, square bashing.
HB: Was that at Padgate?
CM: No. That was at Blackpool.
HB: At Blackpool.
CM: Yeah. Blackpool.
HB: Right and —
CM: And from there to Yatesbury.
HB: You went to Yatesbury.
CM: Yeah. But, well say Yatesbury. In actual fact it was a branch of Compton Bassett which was the Ground Radio School. Yatesbury was the Air Radio School.
HB: Ah. Right.
CM: You went to the Ground Radio School because we weren’t going straight on to be at the air gunner’s course. There was a bit of backlog so we went in —
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
CM: Graduated as wireless operators at this station. I was supposed to get to Anglesey but there wasn’t flying there.
HB: Oh right.
CM: But they had a small station that was there to get experience of this.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Just general wireless operating which stood me in good stead because by the time we really got to the squadron, you know, I was an experienced wireless op.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Not only just getting practice but doing the real thing.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But that made me a pretty good wireless operator to start with, with the experience I had.
HB: Oh right. So that —
CM: So —
HB: So you progressed through that training.
CM: That’s right.
HB: In ’41.
CM: That’s right. And then I was doing these stints at various units and then eventually I was called back. This time to Yatesbury to do what they called the refresher course. Six weeks.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Refreshers. Getting, you know the last time that we were nineteen year old nincompoops. They said — we’d better give them a bit more of a refresher.
HB: Yeah.
CM: That was good.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Because I found that I learned more in the six week refresher course than I’d learned for the whole three months before. Getting it again. Because by that time —
HB: Yeah.
CM: I knew what I was all about.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I could take it in better. So, as I said I came and graduated as a W/op AG at [pause] we didn’t do any flying at the gunnery school. It was at a ground gunnery school only because at that time, 1943 the losses, the losses were so great they wanted people desperately at the squadrons. And that’s where I got a, I did a —
HB: Yeah.
CM: I was a w/op AG without doing the air gunnery course. But I still wore a gunner’s brevet because I’d been trained as a ground gunner. That’s, they just cut the courses short.
HB: Yeah.
CM: At that time.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So, I graduated in June, 2nd of June 1943 as a w/op ag. Wireless operator/air gunner.
HB: Air gunner. Yeah. Right. So in [pause] you end up in 1943 in, at the OTU at Ossington.
CM: That’s right.
HB: That’s obviously where you start, start your proper flying and wireless operating.
CM: That’s right. With Sergeant Topham.
HB: Yeah.
CM: As my captain. But he couldn’t, when he went to the Lancaster finishing, the Stirling OTU. What did they call it? Heavy Conversion Unit.
HB: Yeah.
CM: When we eventually got there we realised that Johnny Topham, even though he was a wonderful man. He was an ex-police, police sergeant from Newcastle he picked me because I was an ex-errand boy from Consett.
HB: From Durham. County Durham. Yeah.
CM: But he couldn’t fly a — he couldn’t land a Stirling. Stirlings are very very difficult aircraft to land because they’re high up.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I can show you a photograph of a Stirling, you know.
HB: Yeah.
CM: A hell of a, if you fell out the cockpit of a Stirling you’d kill yourself.
HB: Yeah.
CM: It’s so high.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And he couldn’t land the Stirling. Very difficult to judge the distance.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Because of this huge electrical undercarriage and everything.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Very difficult to gauge. Two or three feet as you circle, bang down with a hell of a — break the undercarriage. So you had to be really a skilful, have the feel to start with and Johnny couldn’t do it.
HB: Right.
CM: So he had to go by the board. He went to Lancaster Finishing School and got away with another crew and did a tour of operations.
HB: Right. So, so —
CM: Nevertheless, I went, we got Johnny, with Johnny Lloyd who was an ex-instructor.
HB: Ah right. So that’s, that’s the Lloyd that appears in the operational record.
CM: That’s right.
HB: With you. Oh right. So, it says in your logbook you just, perhaps you can explain it to me it says OTU satellite Bircotes.
CM: That’s right. In each of these OTUs they always had a spare. For diversions and things like that. And sometimes you’d be stationed at the satellite because it was more convenient. To take more, more aircraft in the air. More people going through. So Bircotes was a small grass field right almost just on the edge of Bircotes mining village.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
CM: So but there was a lot of juggling about there with pilots like Johnny Topham I’ve just been telling you about and other people like that. John Lloyd, the other bloke too, he went LMF as well. So it was branded as a kind of a jerky sort of tour.
HB: Yeah.
CM: You went to. You see it followed through the worst thing. I’d be a long time in the squadron with Johnny Lloyd and of course every time he took us he took us fly us he took us, he could fly a Stirling, every time he took us to it he could [unclear] with it. They thought was great. We thought was great actually to have a captain who could fling a Stirling around the sky as if he’d been born and bred to it. But of course the authorities didn’t like it. They wanted to be trained in the orthodox sort of way.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So my passes to these sort of things is varied, many and varied.
HB: Yeah. I don’t know if you can remember this, Kit as just an interesting little note in here. September the 4th 1943. You’re with Sergeant Topham as the pilot.
CM: That’s right. Johnny Topham.
HB: And you’re doing a, you’re in a Wellington.
CM: That’s right.
HB: And you’re doing a cross country test.
CM: Yes.
HB: Routine test. And it says in here that you couldn’t maintain your height.
CM: That’s right.
HB: So what happened?
CM: Crashed at, crashed at Catfoss. Doesn’t it, doesn’t it mention crashing at Catfoss?
HB: Yeah. Yeah. It does.
CM: That’s right.
HB: Yeah. So, so what? You just hit the ground and slid.
CM: Well, we were coming in to land. The communication wasn’t very good. But he had got to the air traffic control that we were coming in to land because he had lost, lost an engine. He couldn’t maintain height. But when we approached the runway there was a Beaufort, a Beaufort. At Catfoss was Beauforts. It was a Coastal Command station.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And he’s on the end of runway. So what can we do? We had to get down because the aircraft wouldn’t make it. It wouldn’t have got off the other side.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Only one engine and that engine was derated.
HB: Ah.
CM: It was derated and therefore it was not, they couldn’t put us off anyway. In spite of the fact the engine was, and we’d lost one altogether they’re going to crash anyway. So at the very end of the runway Johnny was trying to get over the Beaufort that was standing at the end of the runway who obviously wasn’t aware what was coming in behind. Just at the last minute he just kind of boosted over the Beaufort and hit the ground but then that lifted pretty well high up. Then when we landed this time hit too hard, undercarriage split and we crashed in to —
HB: Slid down.
CM: That’s it.
HB: Anybody hurt?
CM: No. Of course with the Wellington when it crashes on the ground you can’t get out.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
CM: Did you know that?
HB: Yeah.
CM: You get in through the nose.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And that goes straight against the ground. So they’d got a screened, a screened navigator basically standing beside me in the astrodome. And he undid, I wouldn’t have known about this, he undid the four screws under the astrodome and just on the approach he knew. He knew what he was doing. He was going to make an escape hatch to start with before we even got down.
HB: Right.
CM: And he put us down. He says, ‘You’re going out there.’ The only snag is that when we hit I was knocked arse over t [laughs] and I was lost. But the navigator he hung on. He was experienced. He hung on and he was the first out. And when the others would have got out the same, the pilot got through the cockpit.
HB: Aye. Aye.
CM: Which took a lot of time to take in. Of course I was hit in the back and I strolled out of the, from underneath the astrodome and I heard the navigator say, ‘The w/ops still in there. The w/ops still in there.’ Because expecting the Wellingtons are notorious burners.
HB: Aye.
CM: Experienced. And then one of the, one of the brave members of my crew got in. I’ve forgotten his name, what it was now. But he was the chap and he hooked me out. He sort of picked me up and pushed me through the astrodome.
HB: Right. That’s —
CM: And I can’t, looking back I can’t ever remember thanking that chap.
HB: No.
CM: I was so shocked that they did that. That Kit McVickers was involved in this crash. I couldn’t get over it. But I can’t ever, I may have done. I think I should have done through my background and training.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But I can’t ever remember saying. Look [pause] I can’t even remember his name.
HB: And that was just a, and that was just a routine training flight.
CM: That’s right. That’s right.
HB: At night. A night time one.
CM: I was very pleased of course that the crew were around me.
HB: Yeah.
CM: The most wonderful men. But then again all the crews I’ve ever had. They were all wonderful men.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So then you moved on to the Conversion Units at Chedburgh and Wratting Common.
CM: That’s right.
HB: And that, and was that when, that was when you moved to Stirlings was it? From the Wellingtons?
CM: That’s right.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah. Oh, I see what you mean. Yes. Yeah. Topham was, Topham was your, was your pilot nearly all the way through there. And then [pause] it’s alright. I’m just, I’ve turned two pages in your logbook here. At Stradishall is where you joined up or you occasionally flew with Lloyd. What, what was his name? What was his name?
CM: What? Whose? What was —
HB: Lloyd. The pilot. Lloyd. What was his name? His full name.
CM: Just on Stirlings.
HB: No. On, yeah, Stirlings. Yeah.
CM: Well, first of all there was Johnny Topham.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And then Johnny. Johnny Lloyd. Both Johnny’s.
HB: They were both Johnny.
CM: Yeah.
HB: Right. So you, so then you pick up with Johnny Lloyd at Stradishall.
CM: That’s right.
HB: And you, and you do your training there and then you’re posted to 218 Squadron at Woolfox Lodge.
CM: Woolfox Lodge. Yeah. The best station I’ve ever been on.
HB: Right
CM: Right on the Great North Road.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: The billet. Within one minute of leaving my billet I’d be out on the side of the road and the boys — here’s my younger daughter now and her husband are coming. You’re very popular Mr Bartlett. Fred is it? Fred or Jim? First name.
HB: Harry.
CM: Harry. God, I was going to [unclear] yeah. And of course there was always traffic going backwards and forwards.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Military traffic.
HB: Yeah.
CM: You always get that. So I was lucky in that respect. This is, this is Mr Bartlett. Harry Bartlett.
Other: I Know. We spoke on the phone.
HB: Let me just, let me just, let me just stop the tape.
CM: Fiona.
HB: For a second.
CM: Yeah.
[recording paused]
HB: It’s 12.30 and we’re going to restart.
CM: Does that mean that memorable conversation hasn’t been recorded then?
HB: No. Perhaps as well we haven’t recorded that bit of the conversation. Right.
CM: But that, that was part of my life and of course we depend on communications with the girlfriends to keep us going. We looked forward. No one was more popular than the postman at Bomber Command. Letters coming in. Really beautiful. People loved their communications.
HB: Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. Well, we’ll just go back. We’re on 218, Gold Coast Squadron now. And that’s — sorry I’ve, I’ve closed the book and lost the page.
CM: It is bewildering because it isn’t straightforward because losing these people to LMF and one way or another it became a little bit bitty through my tour.
HB: Yes. Yes. That’s [pause] sorry that’s — I’ve, I’ve somehow managed to lose the whole of the Second World War there to closing the pages. A clever thing to do.
CM: I know. It’s easily done.
HB: Right. So, so you’re on, you’re on Stirlings. We’re in 1944 and you’re flying operations then. And you’re doing all the standard.
CM: But don’t forget at that time there’s the preparation for, D-Day was coming and of course although we were on the squadron but we were the new boys. And they didn’t want, with this big invasion going to take place, new boys cluttering up the edges. So consequently we found ourselves as a crew just chucked a little bit to one side because they wanted to get the main force trained. We were just incidental. So the only chance we’d got of getting operational in those days was mine laying. But of course even mine laying went by the board. We were also trained. Trained up to do this raid on the, with 617 Squadron dropping radars. Dropping Window all along the route to indicate a big fleet going to the north of where they actually landed. And 218 and 617 were two squadrons doing that. I wasn’t even on that because we were just on the, we were the new boys.
HB: Yeah.
CM: On the edges.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But with all this activity going on but not being part of it and we were too late to join it.
HB: Yeah.
CM: They didn’t want to be cluttered up because at that time it was getting on for June wasn’t it? If you look at the date it’s getting on for June the 6th
HB: Yeah.
CM: D-Day.
HB: Because, because throughout what you’re talking about. Through, throughout June and [pause] June and July you’re flying bullseye.
CM: Yeah. The bullseye was the last thing before you actually did operations. It just kept, took in all the aspects of bombing.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Without actually being there. Bullseye. It was. There was some navigation, dropping bombs and practice bombs and flares. We did use operational techniques without being actually on operations.
HB: Right. Right.
CM: That sort of thing.
HB: Right. So, we’ve come through June. We’ve got into July. You’re still doing a lot of training flights.
CM: That’s right. Because that was the aftermath. Things were still in a bit of chaos.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I did my first operation there. Sometime around, around about. Generally, on pages you can see war operation. I didn’t even know how to report in my logbook. You never put war operations. You put operations.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Have you seen it yet? Operation. War operation. That was the only one we did in the Stirling.
HB: I’ll have a quick. I’ve got it. War operation.
CM: The one.
HB: That was the 8th of July.
CM: Yeah. So I missed getting the —
HB: Yeah. That was in a Stirling.
CM: That’s right.
HB: With the pilot, with —
CM: Lloyd.
HB: Warrant Officer Lloyd. Johnny Lloyd. Johnny. Johnny Lloyd.
CM: That’s right.
HB: And that was — Attacked FB. Flying —
CM: Flying bomb.
HB: Flying bomb depot.
CM: Yeah.
HB: In daylight.
CM: That’s right.
HB: [unclear] Capel. Yeah.
CM: That’s right.
HB: Right. So that was, that was your first was it?
CM: That’s right.
HB: That was your first op.
CM: Also shortly after that they decided they weren’t going to fly Stirlings anymore so in all the chaos their transferring to Lancasters. You see.
HB: Right [coughs] excuse me. Oh yes. Because by August you’re doing, you’re doing the training on Lancasters. And then we get to September ’44. Then it really starts doesn’t it?
CM: Well, our Johnny went LMF if you read it.
HB: Who? Who went LMF?
CM: Of course that’s not in my logbook because you couldn’t put anything. You didn’t even leave. You just didn’t leave the ground.
HB: No.
CM: You just sat on the side of the runway.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So it’s not, it’s not even listed because why, why should it be? We didn’t get airborne.
HB: No. Who? Who, who actually went LMF?
CM: That you’ll find that in the end Warrant Officer Lloyd ends. No more for him at all. And they get a new one. This one. It took a bit of, it took about three or four weeks to get a new captain who was Hill. Warrant Officer Hill.
HB: Oh yeah that was —
CM: Who was the best pilot.
HB: That was December. Yeah. In the December. Right. And well we’ll, we’ll come on to that because you’re flying with Lloyd in Lancasters. NF 955 and 56. And you’re doing operations at Le Havre. Three. Three times you went over Le Havre.
CM: That’s right.
HB: And —
CM: On the last trip there, when Glenn Miller was — we jettisoned all our bombs in the sea because the target was covered with, covered with, covered with mist.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So you couldn’t drop them because there was civilian people in Le Havre.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: So we jettisoned in the sea and that was the day that Glenn missing, Glenn missing went miller [laughs] Glenn Miller went missing.
HB: Oh right.
CM: Flying to the site of a new concert they were going to have.
HB: Oh right.
CM: He must have been, he must have been the most terrified man in the world to suddenly find you were flying over the North Sea just within a few miles of France and suddenly being bombed by, in the middle of the ocean, the middle of the North Sea by about five hundred bombers.
HB: Oh.
CM: The jettison area couldn’t, they couldn’t, they could have jettisoned by the city but civilians were there.
HB: Yeah.
CM: It was a terrible waste. And he must have thought what on earth is happening here?
HB: And that was, that was —
CM: The gunner from 90 squadron at Tuddenham he saw, he saw this little plane. Pioneer or some —
HB: Yeah.
CM: He saw it actually go in.
HB: Did he?
CM: So there’s no doubt about that.
HB: Yeah.
CM: The September. The bombing.
HB: Because that’s, that’s 5th 6th 8th of September. Yeah. And then you did an operation to Frankfurt.
CM: That’s right. A night.
HB: A night operation.
CM: We lost four aircraft on one flight on that raid. In that incident. Because it’s a city you see.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. And that was, that was Lloyd flying that. And then you did an attack. Oh, 28th of September you did an attack on Calais.
CM: That’s right.
HB: A German garrison.
CM: We could, we could actually see the airfield from where we were bombing it. And then we lost three aircraft on that raid. The Calais raid.
HB: Yeah.
CM: The fire. The 88 millimetre fire from, from Calais was so accurate that the aircraft was shot down within sight of their base.
HB: Oh no. Oh dear.
CM: So at Calais is hardly worth anyone going actually.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Just shoot the bombs from the guns from Dover.
HB: Right.
CM: But I remember that as being very very fraught because it was a small target and there were five hundred bombers on it. It was absolutely bloody dangerous.
HB: So, I mean your last — it says in here your last operation with Johnny Lloyd was Wilhelmshaven.
CM: Wilhelmshaven. That’s right.
HB: Yeah. That was 5th of October. And then you did, you did some navigational training which was abandoned.
CM: Who was flying on the navigational training?
HB: That was Lloyd. That was Johnny Lloyd.
CM: Oh that’s —
HB: That was an abandoned exercise.
CM: Yeah.
HB: And then —
CM: Now, one of those trips wouldn’t be in my logbook because we didn’t get airborne but he suddenly decided he wasn’t going to go.
HB: Right. Because then you’ve got a you see where they’ve cut the logbook to fit this folder they’ve lost the actual first day. So it’s really early on in December and you’ve got Johnny Lloyd flying on a familiarisation with a Lancaster. Circuits and landings.
CM: That’s right. So it was only, it was when I was on Lancasters that we did the aborted trip on the —
HB: Yeah.
CM: He went LMF.
HB: And then —
CM: So —
HB: And then within a couple of days you’ve got WO, Warrant Officer Hill.
CM: That’s right. Well, there you are you see. One didn’t fly and then you’ve got to get a new captain. Still, we never saw Johnny Lloyd again.
HB: Yeah.
CM: He just vanished off the face of the earth.
HB: Yeah.
CM: That’s what I say. All these things —
HB: On the time, on the date.
CM: All these things of the crew were hushed up.
HB: Yeah.
CM: You don’t hear very much about but mostly it was never put down in black and white.
HB: On the day that, on the day that as you described it he went LMF. What, what happened on that day? Can you remember?
CM: Well, taking off as I believe about 2 o’clock on the afternoon. That’s right. And as I said the 149 Squadron which was with us at Methwold were coming on to the peri track this way and we, 218 were coming around this way. So the peri track was filled with aircraft converged on the runway here. Right. Well, so when we went into the runway on the right hand side we were blocking the runway. No one could take off. Then we started to backtrack slowly. Taff in such a state by the door I can’t imagine what it was like. Silence in the crew. Turns around in front of all this other aircraft, took aim [unclear] and off he went again. Exactly the same thing. [unclear] went straight in there and of course the commanding officer in the background weren’t having that. So anyway straight in. They came in the jeep at the foot of our aircraft and straight away, barking. Couldn’t move. And then, ‘Follow me.’
HB: Yeah.
CM: Before the jeep went back to dispersal.
HB: So, he was, he was sitting in the pilot’s seat.
CM: That’s right. He was —
HB: But he just couldn’t take off.
CM: That’s right. He just wouldn’t take off.
HB: He wouldn’t take off.
CM: He said he could but he didn’t want to. He realised I think that Good God, I’m going to be ruddy be killed on this operation. I’m not sufficiently good. I’ve overstretched my capabilities. And I’m not really, I should have taken more notice of [pause] I think he was worried he was going to make a mess of things.
HB: Right.
CM: This turmoil inside for some reason. I don’t know. Presumably —
HB: So you got back. You go in. You got back to this dispersal.
CM: We got back. He stayed in his seat. He says.
HB: Yeah.
CM: One of the commanding officers came running at the aircraft. He says, ‘Stay where you are. Stay where you are.’ And then he says, ‘Don’t anyone move. Leave the captain there and come out now.’ Stop what you’re doing. Just drop it. Come out.’ So we all trooped out and they had a whatsthename, jeep waggon came out. A little bus to take us back. And one of us said, ‘What’s going to happen to Johnny?’ You know. Because he was very popular you see. We loved him. Johnny Lloyd. He said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘He’ll be taken care of. Don’t you worry about that. Johnny’ll be taken care of.’ And we found out later that he’d ditched, within twenty four hours he’d left the station.
HB: Right.
CM: And within, ooh a few weeks we found he’d been turfed out of the Air Force.
HB: Right.
CM: He then went back to his place where he lived and he became destitute. That’s the story we found out later and he was ashamed of himself. Humiliated. His status as a captain and as a solicitor, it was the damned report, it was terrible. But then we found he’d, there’s a rumour that his family had gone off and sent him to Australia and he was doing his training as a solicitor. But the booze. The booze also took part in it this time.
HB: Oh right.
CM: And nothing went in there. In the erratic, an erratic state, to doomsday if you like. Just died in Australia.
HB: Oh, that’s a shame.
CM: I’ve still got — he gave me the book of poetry I’ve got down there somewhere. With his name in the front.
HB: Right.
CM: Johnny Lloyd. He was a very clever man. During the time we were there, the time we were hanging about. I’ll tell you about it. A chap who had been sent on leave to, to Ireland was court martialled and they want someone to take the case. And so Johnny said, ‘I’ve got nothing to do. I’ll take it.’ And he’d been sent on indefinite leave on this unit [unclear] To an escort unit. And he was sent on leave and they’d forgotten about him. They just kept on sending him a renewal of his leave and his money every fortnight. So of course he thought, well, the money’s coming in I must be on, still on indefinite leave.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Well, it lasted about two years this.
HB: Oh no.
CM: So anyway Johnny was, to cut an awful long story short he was, Johnny, he was a very good solicitor. Very good [unclear] He had the gift of the gab. A Welshman but a poetic Welshman.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And a solicitor. And he got, he got the chap off. It was the talk of the command.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Of 3 Group for a long time.
HB: Obviously, a well —
CM: Eloquent and [unclear] Put on a defence that they couldn’t penetrate. What could the man do? He was living in the neutral part of the, though he wasn’t in the war. He was there getting his regular payments and money and free meals and ration cards.
HB: Oh dear. Yeah.
CM: So he said what could he do? He must have been sickened. ‘I’m not doing the right thing but what can I do? If I go back now they’ll probably court martial me.’ Which is what they did when he did get back.
HB: So, Johnny. Johnny —
CM: So there you are. That’s an incidental.
HB: Yeah. No. No. No. It’s important. Johnny. Johnny. Johnny Lloyd was a popular man.
CM: Oh yes.
HB: Did you ever see him after the war?
CM: No.
HB: At all.
CM: Shirley and I —
HB: That was it.
CM: My wife and I went to this place of birth and every time we mentioned the word Johnny Lloyd everyone clamped up.
HB: Oh right.
CM: We got, we got the one chap who was at the boozer. The boozer. [unclear]
HB: Yeah.
CM: He knew Johnny and said he was a fine man but he said he didn’t get a job and he could be found on any any day any time on the street ends, ‘Can you give me sixpence for a cup of tea?’ But that’s a big blow to me as a chap who loved him. And Shirley who didn’t know, didn’t know him but to come across that sort of situation.
HB: Sad.
CM: So he went to Australia. Drank himself to death.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I did go to his house because I think one of his relatives still lived there but they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t talk to us.
HB: No.
CM: And Shirley, my wife could charm the birds out of a tree but even her eloquence couldn’t do it.
HB: No. That’s a shame.
CM: So what I did, my duty by him. I wanted to find out what really happened but I failed. Well, I knew that what the end was.
HB: You say, you say failed. I think you probably did your best.
CM: I can take you and show you a photograph of Johnny Lloyd. My script is, my computer has been u/s but I’ve got a photograph of my crew. The crew I finished my tour with and the one that was with Hill. But this one here was done on the Stirlings when he first came to the squadron.
HB: Right.
CM: And it’s a very good photograph which was of Johnny —
HB: That’s, that’s alright. We’ll grab the, grab the photo in a minute.
CM: In a minute.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: Oh, I was going to turn the computer on. You know when it comes up —
HB: Don’t, don’t worry about that.
CM: Ok.
HB: We’ll sort that. We’ll sort that in a minute because what I wanted, what I wanted to do was was to get through. You’ve got —
CM: Operations.
HB: You’ve now got —
CM: Operations. Yeah.
HB: Another pilot —
CM: Yes.
HB: That you’re getting to know and learn. Now, you said earlier to me before we started the recording he was an experienced pilot.
CM: Johnny. Yes. He was at, oh for two years at an airfield. An Advanced Flying Unit.
HB: Right.
CM: Flying Ansons.
HB: This was Hill?
CM: That’s right. That was Johnny. But that’s, that’s appeared in the book of course, but he was a well-known pilot.
HB: Right.
CM: He was an exhibitionist through the routine. Very good at it.
HB: Oh right.
CM: But he wasn’t meant for operations. Johnny. He was poetic. He’s like that famous Dylan Thomas.
HB: Sorry. That’s Johnny. That’s Johnny Lloyd is it?
Other: We’ve moved on.
HB: Yeah.
Other: From Johnny Lloyd, dad.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: Eh?
Other: We’ve moved on from Johnny Lloyd.
CM: We’ve —
HB: Right. So, it’s Johnny. So, so Hill.
CM: Yeah. Well, Hill —
HB: We’ve now got him as the pilot.
CM: He was an experienced pilot from the Far East err the Middle East.
HB: The Middle East.
CM: He’d had a tour of operations on Wellingtons.
HB: Right.
CM: So, when we got him —
HB: What was, what was his first name, Kit?
CM: First name? Bill.
HB: Bill. So that’s Bill Hill.
CM: That’s right.
HB: And he’d come to you from the Middle East.
CM: Yeah. He’d been in this country some time actually.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But he wasn’t trained on Lancasters and when we got him he was just an ex-Wellington pilot. And then we went to, through the, he did the Lancaster finishing course there.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Change of direction with Bill Hill. Then back with, back to my old squadron again.
HB: And —
CM: 218.
HB: And really really quite quickly he’s in to an operation.
CM: That’s right. Because he was experienced.
HB: On New Year’s Eve 1944 to Vohwinkel, in the Ruhr Valley.
CM: Yeah.
HB: Wow. And you obviously, and then, and then you had to go, you did that in the daytime and then you had to go back and do it in the night time.
CM: That’s right. I remember that one.
HB: Blimey. And that, that’s yeah. You’re then really then in to doing quite a few of these operations.
CM: That’s right. That’s when, that’s when my tour really started, because —
HB: Yeah.
CM: Johnny sorry Bill Hill was determined to get through a tour. He wanted to do it as quickly as possible.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: Yeah. He was a good.
HB: Well, he’s got a good team.
CM: He was an excellent pilot. He was an ex-deputy headmaster and he was only about twenty five.
HB: Oh right.
CM: He was a clever lad.
HB: Yeah.
CM: He used to do comic turns as well on the stage.
HB: Did he?
CM: Oh yes. And in the air. He keep coming back from operations Johnny err Bill, Bill Hill was witty with us all together. And also on Dresden I remember he said to me, he said, ‘Wireless operator.’ I said, ‘Yes, captain.’ He said, ‘Do you want to see a, see a sight you’ll never ever see in your life ever again?’ I said, ‘Well, yes.’ He said, ‘Well, just get in the astrodome and have a look down. Down stairs. Dresden.
HB: Yeah.
CM: It was too. I’ve never seen anything. The first thing I saw when I was in the astrodome was smoke. Something you hadn’t even heard of. Smoke from the burning city coming past the aeroplane. But you could see the [unclear] of streets burning ferociously.
HB: What height would you be at there?
CM: Oh about twenty thousand feet.
HB: About twenty. Yeah.
CM: It varied twenty, between twenty one, twenty two, twenty three. It could be fifty feet.
HB: Yeah.
CM: It was so that you wouldn’t — to lessen the risk of collision over the target.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Because all the aircraft coming in on the markers from all directions, you know. Coming in.
HB: So you were at twenty thousand feet and you’re actually flying through the smoke.
CM: Yeah.
HB: From Dresden.
CM: So the smoke was so intense. The wooden mostly, part of the really beautiful buildings the wooden buildings were quite inflammable and they were set alight. And there it was.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Start the whole firestorm as they called it.
HB: Can you, can you remember what they told you on the briefing for Dresden?
CM: Yes. They said there were people in the town, the troops concentrating in the town. They said, not only that but not only ball bearings but some things very important mechanisms to further the war.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Radar and all sorts of things they had scattered all over Dresden. All sorts of other things. Now, our enemies are saying well it was a quiet town. It didn’t do anything at all. It wasn’t. It was very well armed but they didn’t have any, this late in the war all the guns had been taken away because the Germans thought oh they’re going to leave Dresden alone because it’s a wonderful city. They’re good that they, because that business with Churchill started off and Dresden, Chemnitz and Berlin and all these taken at this, we wrecked them all. Dresden was wrecked in one raid.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Eight hundred and fifty bombers.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Just saturation. It’s in there I think, is Dresden.
HB: Yes, yes. Yeah. I’ve got —
CM: Nine hours fifty minutes.
HB: Yeah. It’s got, it’s got marked in your book here. Dresden. Saturation raid. And Chemnitz.
CM: Yeah. Next day there wasn’t such a good raid because the weather was bad.
HB: Yeah. I’m just going to check because I think. I’m not sure about the batteries on this. Oh no, we’re alright for a minute.
Other: Dad.
HB: Alright for a minute.
Other: Would you like me to make you another cup of tea?
CM: Ask Mr, Mr Hartley. I presume you’d prefer to be called Harry.
HB: Harry.
CM: Harry.
Other: Harry would you like —
CM: In Geordieland you would be called called Harry Hartley.
Other: Daddy, would you like me to make you a cup of tea?
CM: Yes, dear. It’ll freshen up the one that.
Other: I’ll make you a fresh one.
HB: Right. So —
CM: I told you that was the thoughtful one, didn’t I?
HB: Yeah.
CM: She’s the more thoughtful one.
Other: Dad faces us off against each other as you’ve probably realised.
HB: Oh, I gathered that [laughs]
Other: Yeah.
HB: Right. So, yeah. So, we’ve got, he’s certainly rattling through the operations here because you’re, you’re talking for, this is February 1st 3rd 9th 13th 14th 18th 19th 23.
CM: That’s right. That was —
HB: And that’s operations every two or three days isn’t it?
CM: That’s right. That’s right.
HB: Right. And and that, so I mean that’s how it goes through to April ’45.
CM: Well, there you can see the tour, the tour expired citation. Can you see that? Tour expired.
HB: Hang on.
CM: It would be in the last few pages of my logbook.
HB: Yeah. First operational tour completed.
CM: That’s it.
HB: 9th of April.
CM: Just got to put a tour in before the end of the war.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Because I was still, I was very young you know Mr Hartley. I was always, I wasn’t a kind of a middle aged old bastard. [laughs]
HB: Oh no. No.
CM: I was quite youthful.
HB: Oh no [laughs] I mean, I mean you were born in ’22.
CM: Yeah.
HB: And you’ve gone in there at what? Nineteen? Twenty?
CM: That’s right. That’s right. Nineteen.
HB: Nineteen. Right. And, and —
CM: I joined —
HB: Then you finished, you finished your tour there and —
CM: Kiel. It’s on the top of the —
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Your last one was Kiel.
CM: That’s right.
HB: Naval, the naval arsenal.
CM: And on that raid there’s the battle cruiser, German pocket battleship. The last one that was [unclear]. We sank that on that raid. It was moored in the Kiel Harbour. It was moored at the side of the quay and it turned over.
HB: Oh right.
CM: As well as other members of the Bomber Command which were much more [unclear] than me. They sank the Tirpitz in Trondheim harbour. It wasn’t me that did that.
HB: No
CM: But Bomber Command sank more battleships than the Navy.
HB: Yeah.
CM: It’s incredible that when you think of it.
HB: That’s amazing that. Right. So we’ve got — we’ve now gone to 90 Squadron at Tuddenham.
CM: Tuddenham. Yeah.
HB: But before we get there. Right. We were talking about girlfriends earlier on.
CM: Girlfriends. Not Tuddenham.
HB: We were talking about entertainment and dances and all this sort of business and this carry on.
CM: Scandals.
HB: No. No. No. I’m not after, I’m not after scandals.
CM: They’re not scandals.
HB: I’m not after scandals at all but if you want to tell me any scandals I’ll talk to you.
CM: There weren’t many scandals.
HB: But did you actually, looking at the picture on the wall you obviously met your wife during the war.
CM: No.
HB: No.
CM: No. I married my wife just after the war. My first wife.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And —
HB: And did you meet, did you meet your wife during the war?
CM: No. She was a girlfriend from home.
CM: Right.
HB: Jean Smith. Unfortunately, we were married for about, only about three or four months she became pregnant.
HB: Right.
CM: And about a few months after that she had a miscarriage and she had, she contracted tuberculosis. Galloping tuberculosis and within six weeks we knew she was going to die.
HB: Oh no.
CM: Just this, this galloping thing. You couldn’t. Just a few months after that they found a cure for tuberculosis. Even this severe one that Jean had. But it was too late for her.
HB: Was that when —
CM: She went down just like I’m doing, it happened to have, no matter what I eat I can still lose weight.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Just lose weight. But that’s the same with poor Jean no matter what she ate she turned in to a shadow and just faded away.
HB: And what, when was that? What —?
CM: That was in ’46 I think, really.
HB: 1946.
CM: Because I’d, I’d left the Air Force by then but I didn’t stay left because as soon as Jean died I thought well what the hell do I do? Going back to the steelworks. Three shift system, you know. I think I’ll go back there. I was very happy in the Air Force. So my father said well Jean I’m afraid that we weren’t going to keep her long like. So I wasn’t long in the when I left the Air Force I was sent home, you know, and she just died. So she died and I wasn’t the sort of man to hang around of course and I started going out before I met Shirley. My beloved wife. My really beloved wife. Married fifty seven years. Two children. And a beauty. Look at that photograph on your right hand side.
HB: Oh yes. I’ve, I’ve already seen the photos. Yeah. Yeah.
CM: And you see that on the wedding photograph I haven’t got the common sense to hold my wife by the hand. I said why couldn’t it, to anybody that sees that now, ‘Oh, you made a mess of that Kit lad.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t the photographer say for Christ’s sake. Hold your wife by the hand.’ Not hold your belt by the hand. But they didn’t. Now, if I’d been a photographer I think I would have said, ‘Hold your wife by the hand.’ Certain things, certain trades must do that’s to make sure that the pose is right.
HB: Yeah.
CM: However, it’s nice. You see my wife. She was only eighteen then.
HB: So where did you meet Shirley?
CM: Grimsby. I was stationed at Binbrook.
HB: Right.
CM: I figured out that for over five years I was in two Bomber Command squadrons.
HB: Right.
CM: 12 and 101.
HB: Right. Right. So, so when we’re, so let’s just go back to 218. You’re in 218.
CM: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: You’re based at Woolfox Lodge.
CM: Well, when tour expired the crew left. All the crew. Leaving me behind because I had just been promoted to warrant officer. They wanted a warrant officer to take charge of the parachute section. So they left me behind. And they said also, ‘You’ve done a few trips less than your crew. Therefore, you’ll be available for a spare.’
HB: Right.
CM: So I was, so I was a new warrant officer and I was still on the squadron.
HB: Right.
CM: Which had the parachute section.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But I had to pack that in deliberately because the chap in charge of the parachute section, genuinely head of the section itself came to me. He said, ‘Mac,’ I didn’t let the fact that he’d missed out the sir because I was a warrant officer by then. And he said, ‘They’ve got fifty parachutes not on inventory.’ Right. I said, ‘Yes,’ knowing what was coming. He said, ‘Well, if they’re not on the inventory they don’t belong to anyone.’ He said, ‘We could make ourselves a little bit of money here.’ I got a cold, I remember feeling a cold feeling. I’ve gone through a tour of operations. I’ve risked my life and I never knew, knowing the McVickers luck I was going to be found out before I could say one word I was going to be found out. So, I said, ‘No. I want nothing to do with this,’ and I went straight from there to my commanding officer at the station, not the station commander the one that’s responsible, and said, ‘I have a problem sir.’ He said, ‘What is it?’ I said, ‘It’s very personal sir but it’s taken me a long time to think about this.’ He said, ‘You’ve got, I think you’ve told me this you’d better get on with it. And I said, ‘My flight sergeant, he wants me to do a, about the inventory.’ I said, ‘I want absolutely nothing to do with it.’ He said, ‘You’ve done the right thing.’
HB: Right. Yeah.
CM: ‘You’ve done the right thing.’ And all that’s happened as far as I know he was just taken off. Taken off. Was posted.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So I’ve shared this because I felt very guilty about this. He said, ‘It’s your duty to do that.’ So that was a bit of guilt in my life.
HB: Yeah.
CM: However, it is. It is. It was the right thing to do. If I’d been involved I would have lost my whole career on operations. All the medals would have [makes noise] you know.
HB: Yeah. Everything.
CM: So anyway I I don’t know whether that would figure in your synopsis but they’d say, ‘Was he a nice chap?’ ‘No, in all my years he was a bastard after all.’ You know.
HB: No. No. No. No. What, I mean what obviously what you’re now telling me is, is this is, this is at the end of the war and there’s big, obviously a big change of attitudes.
CM: That’s right.
HB: Now. So, and and you’re posted out to Conversion Units and you, and you eventually end up at Binbrook.
CM: That’s right.
HB: As a warrant officer there. And I mean there you’ve, it’s still very intensive. Even in 1947 you’re still flying. Flying an awful lot.
CM: Oh, that’s right. Flying was there. That was still a bomber squadron.
HB: Yeah.
CM: In fact I used to say to Mike Chalk my friend, he said, ‘We’re the only two buggers that, we’re the only two wireless operators left on the squadron.’ I said, ‘We can’t be operational.’ Then the Korean war came up and we had, we had not only Binbrook but all the crews there were no more than you could purpose with four or five to crew. Couldn’t make up proper crews.
HB: Oh right.
CM: So, by this time they started the new ranks. I don’t know if you know anything about this. Because this is something that should be very interesting to you. What happened immediately after the war. If you look at this photograph here.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Take a little look standing up, Harry.
HB: Oh no, I’ve seen that one.
CM: And what do you see on the arm of your favourite flight sergeant? By that time ranks had changed and I was, can you see that rank?
HB: That’s. Is that, is that the change to master.
CM: No. That was the master. That was signaller 1. Three. Three stars and a crown.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Now, that was the same as flight sergeant. I’d been reduced to flight sergeant anyway so they reduced me even further to signaller 1 which was the same as a flight sergeant. So anyway, it resulted in a mass exodus.
HB: Right.
CM: Of people. Some of the officers had been given a commission by an interview and there they were walking around. Didn’t touch them at all.
HB: Right.
CM: So people got fed up with this because there were still more NCOs than officers and of course they were leaving in droves. The next we knew that’d, just over two years and the next thing we knew was revert. Take the stripes off, take the stars off, revert back to whatsaname, whatever that indicated. And in my case it was flight sergeant so put flight sergeant stripes on. Same as there.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: So —
HB: Got one there.
CM: Not many people know about this.
HB: No. No.
CM: At the same time it’s a very important aspect of Bomber Command after the war. Not only Bomber Command but all the Commands.
HB: Yeah. Yes.
CM: All aircrew. The NCOs were given a kick in the teeth and shat on from a very great height.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: Now, they recognise that there’s been that but they promised there’d be recognised, all that they should be kept the aircrew separate from the sergeants but it was good that way but what we sort of did was the complete dislocation of all the squadrons of Bomber Command. They didn’t have, they didn’t have a Bomber Command.
HB: No.
CM: By this. Not very much talked about that but I can show you letters I’ve written there.
HB: Yeah.
CM: About this.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And I think this is relevant.
HB: It is. It’s all, it’s all relevant. It is all relevant.
CM: You didn’t know about this and yet you’re an interviewer.
HB: No.
CM: You can see it there.
HB: No.
CM: Passed the —
HB: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CM: Because it was only because I had certificate that I was married. Jean. You’ve seen Jane.
HB: Yeah.
CM: My other daughter. That’s her as a baby. That’s in —
HB: So that so that, that’s occurring as the Korean war’s —
CM: That’s right.
HB: Brewing up.
CM: Though Bomber Command wasn’t involved at all in the Korean war.
HB: No. No.
CM: Because they couldn’t be. They didn’t have enough crews. Now, you see that must have hit the people who organised this. It must have hit them with a hell of a wallop. They were responsible for the absolute the demolition of one of the most powerful weapons known to history. The Bomber Command was as you know.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Far bigger than the American Air Force in, in its numbers. And don’t forget they made big mistakes, the Americans at the beginning of the war. They thought they could fight the fighters off. They couldn’t.
HB: No.
CM: They shot a lot of fighters down but they couldn’t fight them off.
HB: No.
CM: They lost fifty aircraft, fifty each on two of the ball bearing plants at Schweinfurt.
HB: Yeah.
CM: That’s a hundred and twenty aircraft. No. A hundred aircraft. A hundred aircraft.
HB: Yeah.
CM: These B17s. There were only them that you can recognise and of course Bomber Command and I think my God and they introduced this new rank and they all kept going out in droves and asking to get premature release. We’ve destroyed a really good Air Force. That, that is never talked about.
HB: No.
CM: But I talked about it.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I wrote a letter [unclear] a student.
HB: Yeah.
CM: You’ll have to come again. I put it all down in black and white.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And I’ll show it to you. You might, you might create a, Mr Hartley what’s known as a coup.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: Because nobody else knows about it.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: And I’ll show you something and you might think after all you must have the better interviewing technique. You speak with posh language but you didn’t get this information.
HB: No. No. That’s true.
CM: You flashed a photograph of me out in my, in my James Bond days. I was auditioning for James Bond [laughs] You see.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Things are made in —
HB: Was this occurring after you’d gone to the instructor’s school? Or before?
CM: It was, it happened if you look at my logbook it says it should be ‘47.
HB: So I’ve got you going, I’ve got you going to Scampton in July ’47.
CM: That’s right. I was on detachment there.
HB: On Lincolns.
CM: That’s right. Because all the Bomber Command was on, at Binbrook.
CM: All Lincolns.
HB: Yeah.
CM: All Lincolns.
HB: And so was, so the time you’re talking about when they decimated the NCO level.
CM: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: Is that before ’47 or after?
CM: Well, it was 1948.
HB: Oh right. Right.
CM: I was married in ’48 look at the bit.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Even though I’m wearing a, what’s, look carefully a warrant officer’s uniform right. If you look carefully you can just see the badge.
HB: Yeah. With the circle.
CM: But we were allowed to wear the officer’s uniform because at that time there was a hell of a shortage of uniforms.
HB: Oh right.
CM: And just keep on wearing it until as soon as we get new uniform. So there we were parading around as warrant officers even though we weren’t. And eventually we had to have the warrant officers tapes off and put the whatsanames on, but that was very humiliating you know Harry.
HB: Yes, I can imagine.
CM: And just you remember especially the warrant officer suddenly got bumped to sergeant’s stripes. Stars instead of stripes.
HB: Yeah.
CM: It was just humiliating in the extreme. There was a tremendous amount of ill hateful feeling about it in the squadrons. They detested the officer who kept the, nobody who kept their own rank.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And at the same, they graduated as officers, they graduated as, but the same, exactly the same training. Exactly the same job.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Yet they were left alone.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And that of course that led to tremendous resentment.
HB: Yes, I can imagine.
CM: But regardless of what happens in this interview I will dig out certainly this for your own personal viewing.
HB: Yeah. Oh, I’d be, no, I’d be, I’ll be interested in that. I’ve got a — I don’t know if I’ve read this right. I’ve got you here in your book. In your, in your logbook at number 100 Torpedo Bomber Squadron, Hemswell.
CM: That’s right. That was the squadron when I came and joined the Air Force. I was posted to Hemswell. Hemswell was.
HB: Is this when you, when you rejoined?
CM: When I rejoined the Air Force.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Yeah.
HB: And that was August. I’ve got August ‘47.
CM: ’47 would be.
HB: August ‘47 for that. Yeah. And then it goes. And then it goes through. Were you instructing there?
CM: No. At Binbrook, no. I was a —
HB: No. At Hemswell.
CM: At Hemswell.
HB: With the torpedo bombers.
CM: That was a detachment, I think. No. That was at, this was what was the squadron name at the top?
HB: It just says number 100 torpedo bomber squadron.
CM: That’s right. That’s right. That’s Hemswell.
HB: At Hemswell.
CM: I was just attached to the squadron. Binbrook was being resurfaced.
HB: Ah right. Right. That — yeah. Yeah. Because then you returned to Binbrook.
CM: That’s right.
HB: Yeah. I see what you, I see what that, I see what that does. So you’ve come through to ‘47 ’48.
CM: That’s right. Yeah.
HB: And you’ve gone to 12, 12 Squadron.
CM: 12. That’s right. Famous squadron.
HB: At Binbrook.
CM: VCs. The VCs were the two men who sacrificed their lives at the bridges at the invasion. You know, they bombed the bridges and both were killed, attacking success of one of those bridges and they both got VCs. But they’re all [unclear] the Fairey Battle this was.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
CM: At the beginning of the war. But the airman that was flying with them wasn’t a sergeant. He was an LAC so the thing is this. The argument that he was an LAC. Therefore he wasn’t entitled to a DFC but as a LAC he wasn’t entitled but also quite obviously to the DFM which the two sergeants had got. The VC, sorry the two sergeants had got. He got nothing, but the LAC was doing the exactly the same job as the pilot and the navigator who got, two got VCs. They couldn’t leave him out and isolate as if he’d done nothing. God knows what acts of bravery he would have done, but they didn’t. They just a little kind of, little bit of [unclear ] but they got VCs and he got nothing at all. That was quite a bit, that was at 12 Squadron. That was a squadron to which I belonged at that time. The chap called Norris [unclear] and on Pampas and Seaweeds.
HB: Yeah.
CM: We did, did a lot of Mousetrap trips on those squadrons
HB: Yeah. I noticed. I noticed that in your —
CM: Pampas.
HB: Operation Pampas. Yeah.
CM: And on one of those trips we met the Queen Mary in 17 degrees west and Nogger said, he said to the crew, ‘This a chance I wouldn’t miss for a thousand years.’ A thousand pounds. I’m not sure which. I think it was pounds. And we said, ‘Yes, Nogger,’ because we were all in awe of him. He was a skilful pilot.
HB: Which, which was he?
CM: We did an exhibition of flying to the occupants of the Queen Mary that they’d never seen in their life. Much better than you’d ever see in the —
HB: Yeah.
CM: He did everything.
HB: Was his name Norris?
CM: Nogger Norris. Yeah.
HB: Nogger Norris.
CM: Yeah.
HB: Right. Yeah.
CM: And I took a photograph of the Queen Mary but it was taken with my father in law’s box brownie camera. So, it was, even though I was pretty close to it it looks as though it was farther away.
HB: Yes. Yeah.
CM: But when we took the photograph with one of these alongside, Giles the cartoonist was on board the Queen Mary. Right.
HB: Right.
CM: He was on board.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And he, and Giles saw this, he saw this going on. This kind of shooting up. And he drew a cartoon of it and on the cartoon you could see the Lincoln aircraft 17 degrees west shooting up very close to the Queen Mary. In caricature. In drawing.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: So, we didn’t know about that. So when we got back after all this shooting up and God knows what. I lost my trailing aerial as well. Is it in the book?
HB: There’s a thing in here. It just says trailing aerial struck by lightning.
CM: Do you see how many hours it is?
HB: Eight hours thirty five.
CM: Eight hours.
HB: Yeah.
CM: All through the Pampas you’ll see they’re all about six hours. So, the captain —
HB: Yeah.
CM: We came back late wanted to know exactly where we’d been for the two hours that’s missing. So Nogger Norris knowing this, before we landed said, ‘Don’t forget chaps. We haven’t seen the Queen Mary. Ok.’ So, when we landed we kept our buzz. A good crew. We kept it mum.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So the first thing that happened was the flight sergeant in charge of the ground staff got Nogger and [unclear] over to see the where my aerial left the aircraft. And my aerial left the aircraft, came down the, fair lead from the reel, down where we sat through the hole in the bottom of the aircraft and about three or four inches down at the fuselage it had welded itself onto the side of the fuselage about nine feet. It was nine feet along the fuselage, just up the fuselage, welded and beyond that there was a little nidge of about an inch and a half sticking up and it was beautifully rounded at the end. And the flight sergeant said to Nogger and I, he said, ‘That takes a bit of power to do that.’ To do that.
CM: Yeah.
CM: It takes a few volts to do that.’
CM: Yeah.
CM: I thought, Christ almighty all those millions of volts within two feet of my Charlie.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
CM: So, anyway it was interesting at nine o’clock the following Monday morning. This was a Friday night, Friday morning. The commanding officer [unclear] there, Nogger there and me here and the other navigator Chuck. I can’t remember his name now. It’s a terrible thing. Those names would have come easily six years ago.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CM: And just as he started I was right though about these missing two hours. And suddenly the shutters opened at the back and the adjutant popped his head through. He said, ‘Sir. Sir.’ He said, ‘Adj, I told I wasn’t to be disturbed for the next, the next hour.’ He said, ‘I think you’d like being disturbed by what I’ve got to show you.’ So, he said, ‘What is it? What is it?’ So the Adj took something in from the fellas and said give it to the commanding officer. And [unclear] remembered stern faced [pause] And I saw his face changing from stern to kind of a little smile at the edge of his face. And eventually [laughs]
HB: Yeah.
CM: He said, ‘Nogger,’ gave him the papers, ‘I know exactly what you were doing for those two hours.’ And of course it ended up with laughter. Because no harm had been done.
HB: No.
CM: And there was the, Giles with his family aboard the, the Queen Mary and on the side of the ship you see a beautiful sketch of the our aircraft. Can you believe that?
HB: I can. I can believe it.
CM: I cut it out, put it in my logbook and it rotted for the next twenty years. and just rotted away. And when we decided to put these down, these things down in print I realised that I didn’t have this. Now all my family, all my, have you seen them, have you seen them?
HB: Yeah.
CM: And others as well have tried to get copies of that. It’s not, it’s not to be got. Even the people getting back, the back, the numbers of the aircraft, of the Daily Express.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: It wasn’t there either. But Fiona looked up my career in the Air Force list as a warrant officer in the air force list she found it wasn’t listed and it said not to be released until 2022.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. It’ll be, it’ll be in the Official Secrets Act.
CM: So, so because that’s nothing to do with the Queen Mary. It also stopped me from having any contact with other things attached to that.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So that I didn’t get it. Peter particularly at the museum museum archives but they couldn’t get that.
HB: No.
CM: But somebody’s got it. So I couldn’t make a proper story about it because I didn’t have the proof. Because people would say, ‘Oh yes, I’ve seen that. Oh yes. Indeed.’
HB: Yeah.
CM: But that was it.
HB: So then.
CM: I’m listening.
HB: We get to 1949 and we’re off to shorts.
Shorts and topi and off to the sunshine in Egypt.
CM: That’s right.
HB: Was that, what was —
CM: Shallufa. Then we went there and Bomber Command went there after the war. For a month every, like six or seven months I was there. Eight or nine months.
HB: Yeah.
CM: The desert was good weather. It was good flying weather.
HB: Yeah.
CM: That’s what was good. That’s what we went for. Took off from Shallufa and we did El Shatt. I always thought that couldn’t be the proper name. El Shatt. E L S H A T T. El Shatt. I was ashamed of putting it in my logbook [laughs] Bombing range.
HB: And yeah like you say just there for a few months and then you know what what accommodation did you live in in Egypt then? For those few months.
CM: Nissen. Nissen.
HB: In the Nissen hut.
CM: Well, the Nissen was corrugated iron. They were small.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Plenty of wood there and that sort of stuff.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. And then you’re back to —
CM: Don’t forget that Shallufa in the winter was colder. It was colder in Shallufa than it was in Binbrook.
HB: Yeah. I can, oh I can believe that. Yeah.
CM: By God, I’ve experienced some cold. Literally shivered. And shivered all night.
HB: Yeah.
CB: Couldn’t get warm.
HB: And you’re back to Binbrook.
CM: That’s right. Detachment you see.
HB: Yeah.
CM: [unclear] 12 Squadron detachment and 101 Squadron detachment.
HB: And then [pause] this is where the change comes isn’t it? In 1949. Because you go to Scampton on a Conversion Unit.
CM: Scampton. That’s right.
HB: And then. And then you go to 101. Binbrook.
CM: That’s right. I went back to Scampton because that was the Lancaster Finishing School then.
HB: Right.
CM: Right. So, that led to the —
HB: Yeah. Oh. Yeah. You did say. You did say that. Sorry I just need to keep checking this. The batteries.
CM: They won’t be able to understand a word I’ve said, Harry.
HB: Well I can understand you and that’s all that’s all, that’s all that’s important.
CM: You’re nearly a, you’re nearly a Geordie yourself.
Other: Dad.
CM: Yes, dear.
Other: In ten minutes I’ve got, I’ve got an appointment.
CM: Fiona, darling, I thought you’d gone. Didn’t you think she’d gone, Harry?
Other: No. I’m sitting here but in ten minutes I’m going to have to go because I’ve got an appointment in Ashby at 2. So I’ll go on my appointment.
CM: That’s right.
Other: It’s just, it’s just the flats.
CM: Make sure Harry’s alright. A glass of whisky maybe.
Other: Can I get you anything at all, Harry?
HB: No. No. I’m fine. I’m fine.
Other: Would you like another drink?
HB: As long, as long, as long as Kit is alright.
Other: He’s got his cup of tea. Dad has his lunch at —
CM: The only thing that’s wrong with me is ninety five [unclear]
Other: Dad has his breakfast really late like, you know sort of late late so he has his meal, his lunch sort of often about 4.30. So he’s —
CM: Oh yes. That’s it.
Other: But, so I will come back, dad after I’ve done my appointment.
CM: Yeah. Ok.
Other: My son is wanting to buy a flat in Ashby.
CM: Right.
Other: And we’ve got an appointment to look around it with him.
HB: Right.
Other: Just to see what we think. And we cancelled it yesterday because we got stuck in traffic. So I’ll go.
HB: Well, what, what I’ll probably do is.
Other: I’ll come back.
HB: I’ll finish the interview and then I’ll contact you later and let you know how we’re going to come back.
CM: That’s right. I said to —
Other: You’re most welcome if you think you —
CM: Fiona said, ‘Oh he won’t, he’s not interested at all in what you did after the war. He’s not interested in,’ this and that. And I said, ‘You don’t know what he’s interested in until he comes.’ I thought about this because that is something that I think is very, that people should know about.
HB: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Other: It’s an interesting one.
CM: The dirty trick that the Bomber Command well not just bomber but the Air Force generally.
HB: But it, it’s that transition period we are also interested in.
Other: Yes.
HB: Because we’re going from a time of world war.
Other: Yeah. Conflicts.
CM: That’s right
HB: Into a peacetime and policing operations.
CM: That’s right.
HB: Of, you know Korea and all those.
CM: That’s one of the reasons why we never got the medals. Can’t you see that. We can’t demote them, treat them as S H I T and then kind of go we’ll give them medals as well.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Couldn’t do it.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So that was what the fuss was about. We didn’t. We were not even honoured in Bomber Command.
HB: Yeah. Well, it’s a quarter past one. I’m going to just stop the tape for a minute while —
CM: Ok.
HB: Your daughter goes.
HB: And then I’ll restart it in a —
Other: And if you wish —
[recording paused]
HB: Right. We’re recommencing the interview. We have had cups of tea and a comfort breaks. So we’ve moved on now to around about 1952 at RAF Watton in 192 Squadron.
CM: Central. Central Signals Establishment to use its full name.
HB: Yeah.
CM: That’s to mask what it actually did. It was a spy squadron.
HB: Right.
CM: But Central Signals Establishment gave it a kind of fancy name but [unclear] believe anything if you like. Not a hundred percent anyway.
HB: That might, that might answer the question. In your logbook you’re flying with Flight Lieutenant Neil.
CM: Yeah. Flight lieutenant. He was, that was on Super Fortresses. In other words B29s.
HB: B29s.
CM: I’m an ex, an ex-Boeing B29 wireless operator.
HB: Yeah. Were they called Washingtons?
CM: That’s right.
HB: Yeah.
CM: The Washington was an American name for an American aircraft.
HB: Right.
CM: But we called them Washingtons. American but it was also British.
HB: Right.
CM: So there was a Washington [unclear] married them both together.
HB: So in your logbook it says your duty on [pause] in at the end of 1952 was left scanner and right scanner and special operator.
CM: Spec op. That’s what you called spec ops because you did this job I was telling you about. I don’t know whether I’ll be shot at dawn about this but it’s still secret. Top secret. But it was literally finding out the frequencies of the radars and the special operations. We did that. Once we got that we could be able to jam it. To jam it. And once you knew where the frequency was on the end of the spectrum you could put a jam in there and make it impossible to operate.
HB: So who’s, who’s radars were you trying to discover?
CM: Yeah. But I don’t know how you can’t mention that without breaking the Official Secrets.
HB: You won’t break the Official Secrets Act now.
CM: Yeah. As I said in this Fiona found out that nothing’s to be divulged about me personally in the Air Force until 2022. My hundredth birthday. So you make that of what you will.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: But the B29 as I say were a joy to fly after Lincolns. We used to, we used Lincolns to Watton before that.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But the B29 was a luxurious aircraft. Do you know that it was separated by a tunnel? There’s the front end of the aircraft right the co-pilot, the captain and the engineer and all this but the back end of the aircraft was nothing else but spec ops. Right.
HB: Right.
CM: And the whole thing was connected like, like two bellows. The front bit was pressurised. There was a tunnel going over the bomb bay to the rear compartment. So to get from the front to the rear they crawled along the tunnel.
HB: Oh right.
CM: It was from here to well just beyond the window there you know.
HB: So you’re talking —
CM: No bigger. No bigger than that wide.
HB: So you’re talking a good twelve fourteen feet then of tunnel.
CM: That’s right. So getting there hurt your knees crawling up and down so people didn’t tend to go forward. Anyway, the two people at the back were about that stationed from the observer point.
HB: Yeah.
CM: That’s the back end of the tunnel. To see, to be able to see the engines, all the engines, the flaps. Right. And the undercarriage. They couldn’t see them from the front.
HB: Oh right.
CM: Even the engineer. So I was the left scanner and right scanner but the eyes for the engineer who couldn’t keep on crawling back and forwards along the tunnel.
HB: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CM: So important.
HB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
CM: So I always went for the right scanner because I felt that it was the one place to be to keep a good lookout for the —
HB: Right.
CM: And sway up and down left scanner, right scanner. Otherwise it would be, you couldn’t put spec op. You could be spec op, yes. But on transit you were just kind of sat sitting. You used to fly from Watton to Nicosia in Cyprus and then fly from there the next day with all these aerials. There was an armed guard when we landed in Nicosia and the aircraft was never ever left alone. And the next day we would take off with the full crew of course and the trip would be about, we’d be down there eleven hours, twelve hours doing nothing else but scanning all the frequencies. Picking up their radars. You had to be very lucky because they knew when there was spy aircraft around. They’d switch off. But they had to switch on to see where that spy aircraft was. So watching out all ready to go because it only took a few seconds. It was on. You recognised it. You’d press a button. The camera would take a photograph.
HB: Right.
CM: So I scanned the photograph and the recording and did this virtually the same thing as sitting at home and doing this thing with you, because as we were doing that the recording, they’d take it back to Watton and you’d see it properly. You didn’t see it.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: They had —
HB: Yeah.
CM: Yeah. Boffins.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Boffins. Whatever they are.
HB: Yeah. The boffins.
CM: Boffins.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So it was an important job and I think I was part of the Cold War as well as the hot war. So that should —
HB: Yeah.
CM: Be a footnote of that thing that I said. Mr McVickers bravely advanced for the, to be a spec op and took part in the Cold War. Which I did.
HB: Well that’s right. I mean, I mean it’s, it’s very obvious from your logbook that —
CM: I’m a lying bastard.
HB: No. Oh, no. No. No. No. Nowhere near. No. You’ve certainly, you’ve certainly done a bit. I mean there’s, there’s a section here that’s quite fascinating because in the middle of doing your spec ops and whatnot you go to the School of Marine Reconnaissance.
CM: No. No. That was when I was posted there.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So when you’re posted you’re still kind of doing whatever you were doing beforehand.
HB: Right.
CM: They sometimes overlapped a bit before you went and it’s doing middle of the road.
HB: Yeah.
CM: A flew flights, you know. That’s what it amounts to.
HB: Yeah.
CM: The School of Maritime Reconnaissance now.
HB: Yes.
CM: The Royal Air Force, St Mawgan, Newquay, Cornwall. It should be on top of the whatsthename —
HB: Yeah.
CM: That was, that was a five months course. Now within, after doing four months to start the flying phase of it the CO sent for me and said they were very very short of flyers at 224 Squadron. I said, ‘What do you mean, sir?’ He said, ‘They desperately need a signaller.’ And I said, ‘I really am not the person to pick. I’ve been off the flying for five years. I’ve done no flying on this and I’m on a course. I’m on a [unclear] aircraft radar work at all.’ ‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘You can, with all your experience could pick it up with no trouble at all.’ That wasn’t true. When I got to 224 Squadron which was down there if you looked at 224 squadron —
HB: I’ve got 22 —
CM: Not 224.
HB: I’ve got 220.
CM: That’s the one. 220 Squadron.
HB: 220 Squadron.
CM: 220 Squadron.
HB: Yeah. St Eval.
CM: St Eval.
HB: St Eval.
CM: And that’s —
HB: That was on Shackletons.
CM: Well, within, within about a fortnight they realised that I wasn’t trained on the radar and the radar was the most important thing. I wasn’t trained on it. So I thought — I was in a hell of a state. And I told the commanding officer that I’m really not trained for this work. But I’ve just been sent. I’d no idea at all why I was sent there because Cornish the commanding officer said to me, ‘We don’t need you. We don’t need any training chaps, we’re fully, fully committed.’ So I thought what the hell is going on here?
HB: Yeah.
CM: I think, now during the time I was there they sent me to to Mount Batten. Now Mount Batten was the headquarters of Coastal Command. And I was replacing a man who was doing Anson flying. Supposed to be an instructor. A very important instructor flying from station to station and everything. And the man had gone sick for something. Obviously transitory. But when I appeared on the scene he suddenly made a remarkable recovery.
HB: Right.
CM: So I was stuck there at Mount Batten [unclear] let’s get it right here because Mount Batten is the commanding. This is the most important place in Coastal Command. Why don’t you use that to do something for yourself? So I went to see the postings department which posted all the people in Coastal Command. Everything was done from there.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And I flannelled one of the, with the WAAF officers who were there. I said I’m in a bit of a dilemma here Miss, Ma’am and explained what had happened and everything, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I think we can probably do something for you. What would you like to do?’ So I said, ‘Well, there’s one Neptune station dealing with nothing else but Neptunes. Lockheed Neptunes.’ I said, ‘This is based in Topcliffe in Yorkshire and would be ideal for me for getting home and everything else and also picking up, because I’d been on a course, picking up on what had left out in being mid-course. ’I said ‘Perfect solution, She said. She said to me ‘Your next course. I’ll put your name down. I’ll put your name down now. So it’s finished. Nothing has happened. You go.’
HB: Right.
CM: So when I went back to the station. St Eval. 220 Squadron. I could say to the people I’m posted. You know. I obviously shouldn’t have been here in the first place. I’ve been reposted. So I was gash again. I was completely gash. And I just spent my time sitting in the mess and making myself a bloody nuisance where ever I went, you know. And soon enough, as soon as the [unclear] came up I got the posting off to go to Kinloss to do the Neptune course.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I was on Neptunes for two and a half years. The best aircraft I’ve ever flown in my life.
HB: And what was, what was the Neptune?
CM: Lockheed Neptune. I’ll show you what.
HB: Oh, that was, it was —
CM: Lockheed was the one before the Boeing, well after the Boeing but —
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Because obviously you’d been flying on Shackletons.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And then you go to Neptune.
CM: I’m afraid it will have to wait now for the next time you come actually.
HB: Oh, no, don’t worry about that. I’ve found. Yeah. I’ve found Topcliffe now. Yeah. With Coastal Command.
CM: That’s right. It’s all Coastal Command.
HB: Yes.
CM: That’s a Bomber Command Lincoln. That’s one of the Lincolns. If you look at the SR is the code letters.
HB: Right.
CM: The code letters for 101 Squadron.
HB: Right.
CM: We, I was on B flight there, George [ ] was the co-pilot and the bomb aimer in the astrodome. That’s me. Best photograph I’ve ever had taken. You see they get access to the photograph.
HB: Yeah.
CM: What had happened, there had been an aircraft sent to take photographs of the villages and towns actually but the photographer being a clever little bugger he said it would far better if you had an aircraft superimposed and we happened to be airborne SR 101 Squadron.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Doing bombing at Wainfleet range. So, they called us up, ‘Are you finished there?’ ‘Oh, we’re finish in a few minutes.’ They said, ‘Go through to Cleethorpes and rendezvous with this aircraft that’s taken —'
HB: Oh right.
CM: And that’s how we got it.
HB: That’s how they took the photo.
CM: It’s a good photograph of Cleethorpes. You can see the [unclear]
HB: And that’s the, that’s the Lincoln aircraft. Right. Yeah.
CM: And that’s the Lincoln, that’s right. And that’s me.
HB: And that’s you in the astro.
CM: No matter how, no matter how vague it is that’s me. It’s one of the —
HB: Well, you need, you need to put that in the pile for, to copy. And that one definitely. Right. So, right we’ve got you, got you in Topcliffe and you’ve done rocketry and all those sort of things and then —
CM: Made drops to the weather ships.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Weather trips. All that sort of thing.
HB: So, I mean you were at Topcliffe a good, a good long time weren’t you?
CM: Two and a half years. I did a full tour.
HB: Yeah.
CM: On Neptunes.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But I was the first. The first They took one, one squadron member from each squadron. At least one. One member and posted them separately just to see if it could be done. Suddenly they found themselves with all these Neptune crews. No pilot could have told us yarns, you know [laughs]
HB: Oh right.
CM: So, so the experiment they took the flight sergeant McVickers, that was me and Flight Sergeant Chalmers and another one called flight sergeant [pause] Oh I can’t remember his name. But [unclear] squadron, just us three people on a course on Neptunes.
HB: Yeah.
CM: [unclear]
HB: It’s alright. I’m just, I’m just double checking the battery. Make sure the battery’s still alright. Yeah. Yeah. That, yeah that’s an aspect that we don’t, that’s an aspect we don’t sort of come across, you know. Obviously they’re trying out different ways of putting.
CM: That’s it. Well, you see we’re flying there but tac incident said put that new chap Flight Sergeant McVickers on the —
HB: Yeah.
CM: A cold chill went down my spine. Because I hadn’t had any — I’d had exams. I’d had the exams instructions on the radars. The APS 20 and things like that.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But I didn’t have the practical. I’d never used it in the air. So I mean, to ask you to sit down and do something from scratch which I didn’t even know how to switch on, you know.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Anyway, they forgave me for all that and telling me off and I did alright for two and a half years.
HB: So, so Neptunes. The Neptune. I mean, it goes, it’s obviously a well used aircraft.
CM: I’ll show you a photograph.
HB: For that.
CM: You’ve never seen anything like it.
HB: For that.
CM: It was the most luxurious aircraft I’ve ever seen in my life. Neptune. Never. There was one of these commanding officers, ‘Oh you can’t take photographs.’ [pause] Yes. If you come again. I know now what you’re after I’ll have anything ready.
HB: No. No. No. Worry not. Worry not about that. I mean the important thing is getting your, your story.
CM: Operations.
HB: Yeah. Absolutely. So, now, we’ve gone, you’ve gone to Kinloss in [pause] you’ve been on the Shackleton course. That’s in ’56. 1956.
CM: What was that in 1956?
HB: That was, that was you were at Kinloss in ’56.
CM: Yeah.
HB: Doing a course.
CM: Yeah.
HB: A Shackleton course.
CM: Yeah. That would be the Neptune course because there was flying attached to that.
HB: Yeah.
CM: We were flying on those. On Neptunes.
HB: And then [coughs] excuse me. You’ve got [pause] ’56 you’re off to 224 at Gibraltar.
CM: Gibraltar. Yeah. 224 Squadron.
HB: And that’s on Shackletons. Where were, where were you operating then from Gibraltar?
CM: Well, once again I’ve got to show you this. The base of Gibraltar. The base of the rock there’s an open space. And you can imagine the north face, they always shows the north face in Gibraltar so that’s the face facing north. Right in front of the north face of Gibraltar they built a runway. The sea is at one end at Algecirus Bay and then extended in to the rocks so the whole thing, was not enough room for a proper runway but they kept on building it out to sea, out towards Algecirus, Spain. So there was a long enough runway. Our photographs you can see sticking out of the Bay.
HB: Yeah. So, so you were you were obviously looking at your logbook you were flying out of there regularly. Did you cover the Mediterranean and —
CM: That’s right.
HB: Western approaches or —
CM: The Med, did cover the Med but also as you say the Western Mediterranean, but we did all the trips to Malta and Corsica and Sardinia and visiting there. North Africa of course.
HB: Yes.
CM: Is on the right hand side as you go along. So a lot of trips just landing there. Anyway, I did the exercise. Managed to survive. Became quite proficient at the radar but you know I thought that’s not fair for me. I’m cast out of my course.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Which I would have joined the squadron with the crew as to be a signalman. A signalman. It would be good to replace that man as a special job and he made an immediate recovery. The best thing that ever happened to him was me appearing. So I mean, he thought, oh Christ and he recovered.
HB: Yeah.
CM: It was a cushy job.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I mean this is what sort of comes through in your logbook is you’ve got this level of consistency going through now.
CM: That’s right. I did.
HB: And, and as, as an air signaller and you were going through here [pause] sorry. What did I just notice? Yeah. That was something caught my eye. In 1957 you were doing communication trials with HM submarine Subtle.
CM: That’s right. I went to one trip to Ballykelly. We went, this chap and my number two and my signals team, we went to this submarine. HMS Subtle [unclear]
HB: Yeah.
CM: And we went for a full day in a submarine. One of the, well one of the most enlightening experiences I’ve ever had.
HB: Yeah. So you actually went in the submarine.
CM: Yes. I’ll tell you something else. I’ve lifted the periscope up. Transferred, transferred into — I’ve watched the submarine sink from, from the periscope area.
HB: Yeah.
CM: They gave us two a really wonderful experience of a submarine. [unclear]
HB: Yeah.
CM: Which was invaluable for, that’s what we were there for. Submarine killers.
HB: Yeah.
CM: In Coastal Command that’s what we did. We looked for submarines and sank them.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So we were gaining experience that was something good. And they showed us, the crew showed us the biggest pile of pornographic material, photographs I’ve ever seen in my life. It was about this big. And the [unclear] as well. God, it really embarrassed me.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I never seen. Every angle. Every possible. I thought these people are all sex maniacs. Because we were getting it regular. This was the [laughs]
HB: Yeah. The, the where — what I’m, what I’m what I’m interested in is you started your career in wireless ops and wireless operator in the ‘40s and we’re now in to the late 50s.
CM: That’s right.
HB: Coming up to the 60s.
CM: New equipment is coming up.
HB: So all of that equipment as it comes along I mean, was it every time new equipment you came out you had to go on a training course?
CM: No.
HB: Or did you a lot of on —
CM: No. If there was something radical, something completely different you’d go on a training course, because nobody could do anything about it.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And the men in the latter part were the men that got the Air Ministry details, put everything down, the whole thing. They’d learned from there. Then they’d teach the people who were going through the courses. That’s right. So the radar, the equipment on the Neptune aircraft is so far advanced that until just recently in the last ten or fifteen years it was still being used in the spy planes.
HB: Yeah.
CM: It was so accurate. The APS 20 it was called. Air Pulse Search.
HB: Air Pulse Search. Oh right. Yeah.
CM: Ever heard of that? Air Pulse Search.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And the other one in the part of the wings, took part of the wings. One had the APS 30, the APS 31 and yet that’s just the system where you could lock on to an aircraft and home on the aircraft. Or anything. A ship.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Very very accurately with the APS 31. So the APS 31 and the APS 20 made perfect for long distance. They were used for aircraft coming in. The APS 20. An aircraft designed by the Americans for their aircraft, the Neptune was the aircraft used by us for long distance search except for the big fighter stations.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Air defence of Great Britain stations. They had their own.
HB: I’m interested in a note here in your logbook, Kit for [pause] we’re talking March 1958. And it’s something I’ve not seen anywhere else. You’ve suddenly got a list of it says, this is the 6th of March — anti-submarine air offensive operations.
CM: That’s right. It’s the whole squadron.
HB: A large [unclear] of those.
CM: The submarines, our submarines had taken the place of enemy submarines.
HB: Right.
CM: But about the German expression. They were enemy submarines. We had to find them. So they’d been given —
HB: Right.
CM: We had a good idea what they were using in submarines but we had to find out. In other words we had taken our submarines as being enemy submarines. We had to find out all about them.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Well, that was really good training.
HB: Yeah. Ah right. That’s explained it then because I was, I was suddenly thinking 1958.
CM: I was stationed at Kinloss then.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Wasn’t I on the, that’s when I was on [ unclear]
HB: No. No. That was you were still at Gibraltar in ’48 err ’58 sorry. ’58.
CM: I was in Gib then.
HB: Yeah. You were in Gibraltar then. That’s what caught my eye was the fact that you got offensive operations but, yeah I understand that now. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s that transition you see that you’ve gone through all of this equipment. It’s, and its, I presume not only has it become more technical.
CM: Complex.
HB: It’s become small.
CM: Complex.
HB: Yeah. Complex. It’s almost become smaller as well.
CM: That’s right.
HB: I would presume.
CM: More adaptable.
HB: Yeah.
CM: The telephone valves, valves suddenly vanished off the face of the earth and first thing in this system, they got the APS 20 which was about this size.
HB: Yeah.
CM: It suddenly became about this size but the big thing was the screen.
HB: Right. So it went from, it went from the size of a coffee table down to —
CM: Well, yeah. In the [unclear] sense.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But, but it was an interesting job. Can you imagine to a schoolboy to be with all this anti-submarine equipment?
HB: Yeah.
CM: The finder. It was very very interesting. And if you’ve got something real on the screen. Something that was enemy, you know. Not so much enemy.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Simulated enemy. You think this person diving the submarine I have got him in my sights offensively [unclear]
HB: Yeah.
CM: With depth charges which we had.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. That, well that —
CM: We’d be doing the job which we knew we’d be employed in doing if a war broke out.
HB: That was your job. That was your job wasn’t it? And then we get to 1960 and you’re back to Kinloss [pause] flying Shackletons again.
CM: Yeah. This would be the Shackleton then would be in January was it?
HB: Yeah. Shackleton 1 it’s got. Yeah. You got people like, you got numerous pilots with you. All sorts of different pilots.
CM: I think that would be on [unclear] it was [unclear] training. Must have been flying the aircraft that trained them.
HB: Right. Right.
CM: Numbers and numbers of the —
HB: Yeah because you’ve got, you’ve got exercises.
CM: That’s right.
HB: A3, A1, A4, A5.
CM: That’s right.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Not exercises for me but exercises for the pilots.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: Trained in, that was for the aircraft and I was just crew then.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Did all the dogsbody stuff. All the stuff that —
HB: Yeah. Yeah. The sweeping up. Making the tea.
CM: I did cooking as well.
HB: Cooking.
CM: Oh we had a, you could get airborne for twenty four hours in a Shackleton, you know.
HB: Right.
CM: Twenty four hours. I never did one. I did a twenty two hour trip once but it’s too long. I think a complaint. ‘I’m not having this. You’d better cut my hours down.’
HB: Yeah. I mean there’s some seven and nine and ten hour flights here.
CM: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. And then yeah as I say you carry on, you carry on at Kinloss for a good old time again.
CM: So my next posting after that was I did a [unclear] on the ground staff doing, looking after these, they called the a space stage two trainer. Looking at simulating trips in the air but not leaving the ground.
HB: Right.
CM: You could make exercises. You could make them up all the time.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So instead of wasting money on petrol you could do the same thing on the ground. Get the same experience. The same equipment and everything. So that was saving money.
HB: So was that, was that sort of classroom based or was that in some sort of simulator?
CM: No. This was actual equipment. You’d sit in these cubicles with the same stuff that you’d have in the aircraft.
HB: Right.
CM: You have use of the headquarters in these cubicles. You’d have other aircraft in these cubicles. And all the equipment.
HB: Yeah. So the cubicle would be set up exactly as if you were in the air.
CM: That’s it. But radar. Of course you couldn’t get a radar signal there so they simulated that. Simulated kind of things coming up.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: But nevertheless you could save a lot of money by just doing it on the ground.
HB: Yeah.
CM: It was all handle work. Key work.
HB: Yeah. I can see. I mean I can see in here that I’ve come to that part. Yeah. Of the sort of the sort of staff training and what not. The [pause] yeah because that I mean obviously the booths that you talk about that were set up, you know with the equipment.
CM: That’s right.
HB: They obviously became the forerunners of what we now know in the modern —
CM: Yeah.
HB: Era of the flight simulators.
CM: That’s right. That’s right. But the link trainer I mean, it’s a simulator.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But you can get, you can fly blind with. The thing is you couldn’t get airborne so got to fly blind there except for putting specs on, hoods on people which they did do. But it was too costly and too —
HB: Yeah.
CM: The link trainer fulfilled that role exactly. They couldn’t see anyway, so you had to go by the instruments.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
CM: You see people used to use the instruments and have faith in the instruments you were using. That was good. The link trainer was good for that.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: People who were poor at blind flying became excellent after a few spells on the link trainer.
HB: I have noticed throughout your logbook —
CM: Hmmn?
HB: I’ve noticed throughout your logbook there’s regular little comments signed by senior officers. Wing commanders and such of, “above average,” “high average.” That’s how they’re assessing you.
CM: That’s damning you with faint praise.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So where are we now? We’ve got to — now, yeah this is, this is the thing. 1963.
CM: Posted to Changi.
HB: You’re in — yeah.
CM: Posted to Changi.
HB: 205 Squadron, Changi.
CM: The best posting I ever had.
HB: Was it?
CM: My wife, she was a very good looking lass but by God the people there the commanding officers they wouldn’t, they would all make a beeline for Shirley whatever the occasion was.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Commanding officers, flight commanders, ordinary people in reserve couldn’t get a look in. So, I said to Shirley, ‘Who are you with, darling? The commanding officer or me?’ ‘You darling.’ ‘Good.’
HB: So a little bit of marital strife there [laughs]
CM: Shirley and I had a very good looking daughter if you see photographs of Jane when she was fifteen sixteen.
HB: Yeah.
CM: She was a very good looking girl. Just like her mother.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Well I saw that in that photograph. Yeah. But so that again that’s flying out in the Shackleton Mark 2s and that’s and I presume that’s doing much of the —
CM: Well, you should come across somewhere there at Changi that we had a wall, if you look at my medals. I’ve got a medal which very very few people have had. Fiona’s put it somewhere where you wouldn’t miss it. So Fiona’s put my medals where we’ll never miss them so the chances are I’ll never find them.
HB: Oh no. Worry not about that.
CM: This one’s particularly good.
[pause]
HB: So that would be [pause] so I’m just trying to find it actually in here. Would that be, would that be Borneo? Would that be the Indonesian Confrontation?
CM: Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.
HB: In ’63.
CM: That’s what I would show you if I could find the damned thing.
HB: Yeah.
CM: The medal I got for it.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Fiona’s, Fiona’s put it in a place —
HB: You’re a bit, you’re a bit far away from the recorder now Kit.
CM: My daughter has put my medals in a place where I can’t miss them. Therefore I know I’ll ever find them.
HB: Don’t worry about them.
CM: Ok.
HB: We’ll sort them out later. I was just trying to find —
CM: Well you’ll notice that those top of the. Something called Hawk Moths.
HB: Hawk Moths.
CM: Hawk Moths. We were fighting in the Indonesian confrontation.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But there’s one thing we weren’t allowed to do Harry. We weren’t allowed to kill them.
HB: Oh right.
CM: It wasn’t a war. It was a confrontation. Once we started killing the bastards it went to a — so what we did they supplied from Sumatra. If you can imagine Sumatra or just in the Malacca Straits. There’s Malaya one side and Indonesia on the other.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Sumatra. But they used to go across from Sumatra to Malaya and do damage. Dropped by parachutes and people and all this business so we knew that we had to get these people as they’re flying, as they’re sheering across the Malay Strait with motor, motor torpedo boats they were, I think. Big boats but vulnerable. We found that the only thing we could frighten them to death with was this. We used to get, we used to have one, it was always at night. They always came across at night. They didn’t come across in daylight. The fighters would have got them.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But they couldn’t do what we could do. We could kill them or make severely inconvenience them by a simple method of using our four engines.
HB: Right.
CM: Four Griffon engines. So much power. One thousand eight hundred and fifty horsepower and the propellers had to be contra rotating to absorb all the power. They had tremendous [unclear] Simple as a Shackleton pull you out of anything, any trouble you were in just open the throttles and get out of it. And what we used to do was to fire off these 1.5 magi flares. There was thirty six of them in banks of, packs of six. Six sixes are thirty six. Six sixes. Now, they used to burn. Burn in the air. Bang when they go up there and when they reached their zenith it would burst. It would burn with a really fantastic light for about thirty five, forty seconds. Not very long. But long enough at thirty five seconds to appear what was going on. And as they went out, bang another one would go off. And this was going out this would lit up again. So you could get maybe a minute of continuous light. A minute’s a long time.
HB: Yes. Yes.
CM: You know, you know the smart gun there, get the radar detector going towards it and just suddenly, they’re not expecting it up it would go. Bright as day. So what we could do then look at the boat going along from Sumatra to the main whatsaname Beach in Malaya.
HB: Malaya.
CM: And you’d fly towards Malaya ourselves so the boat length ways. Not that way but that way. So then —
HB: So you’re coming in on the side of the boat at ninety degrees.
CM: That’s it, but you’d go down to ten feet. Just above the waves and you opened the throttles and go over this boat. Just dead, bend down just a little bit and level off and the whole blast of this right against the, the force of it, the force against the boat and over she’d go, and all the crew as well.
HB: So it would capsize.
CM: Capsized. Yeah. That’s something else. You’ve got a scoop here.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I’ve never heard this mentioned anywhere, that was.
HB: And that, that’s in the —
CM: But you see it there as Hawk Moths.
HB: It’s Hawk Moth operations.
CM: You can see.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. I can see Hawk Moth here.
CM: That was down in the Malacca Strait.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And of course we wouldn’t then, we’d find a few people. There’s always people swimming around.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So we said after all if it doesn’t kill them they’ll probably get in to the boat anyway. You couldn’t sink these damned things.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But all the stuff had been tipped out.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And the whole operation, their operation would be cancelled.
HB: Yeah.
CM: In other words we won the war.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: That’s why it’s important to me to find where Fiona has hidden my medals. So she can, she can find them easily.
HB: Oh we’ll find them. We’ll find them at the end of the interview, Kit. Don’t you worry.
CM: She’s lovely. She’s a lovely lass but by God she doesn’t have the thoroughness of Jane.
HB: Right.
CM: Jane’s very thorough.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. There’s quite a few. Quite a few of these Hawk Moth operations in there.
CM: And of course during my time there we won the war. Sukarno gave in.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: I was chosen to be the photographer at the HMS Bulwark and HMS Centaur, the Ark Royal and the huge fleet out there just out for the Confrontation. They formed two lines of ships. The capital ships, the aircraft carriers and the battleships and destroyers and all the little ships.
HB: Oh right.
CM: That were there. And we flew down through the, we had an avenue of ships and we were taking photographs actually.
HB: You were doing the aerial photos.
CM: I was on the verge of coming back, I never saw those photographs.
HB: Oh right.
CM: But I was chosen as the photographer. Photographer, you see. But that was, so that was the end of the Confrontation. The Indonese gave us a medal and we got another General Service Medal. So that added two medals to my which nobody, not many people —
HB: No.
CM: Certainly not many people in the war, my medal rate, did you see that? The medals. You still can read it.
HB: I saw, I saw the medals on the photographs.
CM: That’s right.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But there’s two short.
HB: Ah right. Yeah. Which is —
CM: The Indonesian one and the what’s the name.
HB: Yeah.
CM: That’s right, because they show the medals, that’s extra medals because the medals then were the general service medal and the Malaysian medal is on there.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And there’s two complete rows. Well I’ve never seen anybody except me that’s got these two complete rows because I carried on after war.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I was on operational squadrons after the war. I was in a front line squadron.
HB: I was going to say it’s all operational isn’t it? Yeah.
CM: I was the last in.
HB: Yeah.
CM: That’s why I wanted to kind of make a special mention of me about the guerrilla boat because I think your word after getting this scoop. These two scoops.
HB: Yes, it does. Yes. That’s great because that takes us through to where are we? 1965.
CM: But I didn’t do any flying though at that.
HB: June ’65 you [pause] I think that was —
CM: I went, I wasn’t —
HB: Sorry. July.
CM: I was a missile, I was a missile controller at Neatishead.
HB: Yeah. Because, because we — yeah. We —
CM: That wouldn’t be in the logbook.
HB: Yeah. So we’ve done —
CM: They don’t put missiles in logbooks.
HB: I think [pause] I’ll just, I’ll just make absolutely sure about this.
CM: So, it’s a full career flying in front line squadrons all the time.
HB: Yes.
CM: So I’m quite proud of that.
HB: Yes. I mean you’re flying [pause] Let me have a look. You’ve got a Hawk Moth operation on the 16th of August 1965. And you’ve certainly flown some hours on that.
CM: Oh yes.
HB: And that —
CM: I flew a lot after the Indonesian conflict to start with.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But we did have a new flight commanding officer at that time and he took a shine to me.
HB: Oh right.
CM: Unlike some of the buggers [laughs]
HB: Yeah. So that’s where, that’s when your actual flying logbook finishes.
CM: That’s right.
HB: But then in ’65 you go — or ’66 sorry.
CM: I left in ’67.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So I was on missiles. I was the controller at Neatishead. But unfortunately —
HB: At where?
CM: Neatishead. It’s the biggest, one of the biggest air defence stations.
HB: Neatishead.
CM: Neatishead. N E A T. Neat. I S. Neatis Head. H E A D.
HB: Neatishead.
CM: Neatishead.
HB: And that’s where?
CM: That’s Norfolk, I think.
HB: Norfolk. Right, right.
CM: But unfortunately, on my wife’s instructions I’d put in for a commission when I left whatsaname, I knew I was pretty well thought of, you know.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And I knew that Commanding Officer Harvey was, he loved, he literally, he kept treating my wife at every possible occasion. This came back to me. So I knew I was well in with him but whether he was going to translate that into a good recommendation, so I just applied. Nothing. And Fiona said err my wife Shirley said, ‘Have you still applied?’ So I banged an application in. Then I was posted to Neatishead. The first thing that happened, I was posted there. I had a good long spells of leave before I went there. The commanding officer said to me, a very nice man, he said, ‘I’ve had a recommendation,’ from your whatsaname, commission he said, I can’t possibly send this on unless I know something about you.’ Right. Oh sod off. I didn’t, I was deaf as a bloody post I think. I couldn’t care less about a commission. I was nearing the end of my time.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And I thought it was just incidental. I knew I would be, I knew it would waltz through it so what happened? I fell in very very much with a girl who was a flight lieutenant. God knows what her name is now but she was the WAAF commander. She sat at the desk opposite me.
HB: Right.
CM: And she and I became quite comfortable.
HB: Yeah.
CM: For want of a better word, she did. It wasn’t long before she asked me about, ‘Can you take me home in your car tonight, my car’s u/s.’ [unclear] I realised, my God at my age of forty four, forty three this bloody woman’s is in love with me.
HB: Oh dear.
CM: This ugly bastard like me, you know. This was so amusing. So I didn’t dare to mention that I was here but being the adjutant because I’d put or commission, but she seemed to know. She said to me now and then, she said to me, ‘Everything’s ok, you know. Everything’s ok.’ So from that I assumed that she was giving the reports to the whatsaname. The commanding officer hardly saw me. She was putting in the reports about me. Right. So I thought I can’t go on here. I’m a bit of a, I’ll have to find an excuse to get out of it because I’m as deaf as a bloody post. I had to go through all the treatments, ‘Sorry Mr McVickers. You’re deaf.’ You know, that real deep deafness was starting so I knew I wouldn’t get through anyway.’ Anyway, to cut a long story short they had this sent to have a big overhaul at Neatishead, all the whole thing. It been going for years and years. The whole thing’s has to be changed. They’re going to be away for, I think it was six weeks two months, it’s going to be overhauled, all the new equipment. Everything kind of renewed. So they sent me, because there’s nobody at the station virtually at Neatishead, there’s the ground bit and there’s the top of the hole. There’s a big hole. They put me with the other spec ops doing this job and sent me to Patrington which was another Air Defence of Great Britain station. But when I got there I found that the situation was different. The man who was in charge of everything there was a [pause] what’s the word, he was less senior than me. So they said, ‘Well, you’ll have to take over.’ So I said, ‘I can’t possibly take over the job. He’s been trained to be an air traffic controller. A missile controller. How the hell can I possibly do it?’ He said, ‘Well you’ll have to go on a course,’ but I said, ‘I can’t have this. The best thing would be for me to pack the whole thing in.’
HB: Yeah.
CM: They said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well if I haven’t been properly trained I’m going to be taking a job about which I know nothing.’ I was looking after all the missiles on the ground you know. I said, ‘I’m supposed to be a controller from Neatishead.’ Signalling the targets on the whatsaname and phoning them through to Woodhall Spa or [pause] I’ve forgotten the name of the other place actually, near Grimsby. There what I’m looking for. Just to pass the target on to them. Nothing else. I was the controller. Missiles controller.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And the people there thought the best thing was I thought my god what’s going to happen suddenly coming home from Neatishead to say, ‘Report to for training for the commission.’ That’s the last thing in the world I wanted at the time.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: So I didn’t tell Shirley about that obviously but I’d certainly heard nothing about the commissions and I left the station. You know. Left the, my friend the WAAF. The flight lieutenant. The good looking WAAF, and suddenly I was unemployed. So I thought the best thing I could here is kept mum. I’m out. I’ve got a good job. A good job lined up and I thought far better to get a job at forty five then be an officer at fifty three or fifty four and find out nobody wants you.
HB: Yes.
CM: So I used my loaf and told Shirley what happened. She said, ‘Oh let’s get out. I’ll get a job as well.’ So she became, to cut a long story short, she’d been a photographer at some hotel just up the road apiece and this job came up in the Trading Standards Department saying they were starting a new section. A completely new department called Consumer Affairs. So they set out all the qualifications, sort of. ‘What a pity Shirley. You could have applied for that.’ She said, ‘I fully intend to apply. To apply for it.’ I said, ‘Well but you’ve had no training darling. You’ve got no qualifications except matriculation.’ So she said, ‘I’m going to apply.’ I said, ‘What are you going to put down for qualifications?’ She said, ‘Just that I’ve been a service wife for nineteen years. I’ve been nineteen years.’
HB: Yeah.
CM: So off she went and within a fortnight she got a letter back. She’d passed the first stage. We found out later there was seven hundred and odd applications. And that was the big weeding out.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And Shirley survived that. And I said, ‘If you survived that’s good. You must have looked good on paper.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I did. I did a good job with that’. So the next was personal interviews. They took a long time actually. But after a while I said to Shirley. ‘What’s happened at this interview? What’s going on here?’ She said [pause] So I thought that she knows something that I don’t know.
HB: The tap on the nose. Yeah.
CM: So I’d better press her, I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, I’m your husband,’ you know. Got to get a job to save the family because I was getting two thousand two hundred at that time. ’67. When the national average was seven hundred and fifty.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I was getting two thousand.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So we would be digging into our capital. And the next thing that happened was another interview with only about twenty or something like that. Shirley came home. I said, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll get the job.’ I said, ‘Shirley, darling how could you possibly get the job with all these qualifications and you haven’t got any of them? You’ve just matriculated.’ So I was really worried about it so I didn’t make a mess on the carpet. In other words Matriculation did. She said, ‘I’ll be their first choice and I’ll get the job.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s lovely you assume that but I think you’re being a little bit premature. Anyway, to cut a long story short again four, four, four left, four interviews and she was, Shirley was told and the other, presumably the other three were told that by 6 o’clock tonight one of you would have got the job. He said, ‘We’ll be visiting the one that’s got the job before 6 o’clock tonight.’ Although whatever it was I forget the timing, so I said to Shirley, ‘Aren’t you a bit nervous with it being in the last four?’ She said, ‘No. I’ll get the job.’ So, I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Oh, I’ve been their first choice all every interview I’ve had.’ I said, ‘But how can this happen?’ This job of course with all these qualifications, suddenly it was.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But anyway, at ten to six that night I’m sitting tactfully in our living room err the dining room. No. Spare room.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I could see the front and I saw these two people get out the car. Mr Butler and Mr Charlesworth. One was an ex major and the other was a Swordfish pilot.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So I realised then straight away sort of found out what they were that they’d taken a shine to Shirley because I was the sort of a warrant officer aircrew. You know.
HB: Yeah.
CM: This is the sort of men, somebody that they wanted in the background of. I’m not saying that’s true. But I just think that’s what happened.
HB: Yeah. That’s what you thought. Yeah.
CM: One of the things in her favour.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So I said to Shirley, ‘Shirley, they’re here.’ And she came in and she said, ‘Yes.’ She said go in there and I’ll call you in. I took them into our special room that we had. And I said, Shirley came with me ‘Mr Charlesworth of course, my wife, Shirley.’ ‘We know. We know your wife, Mr McVickers. We’d like to be, if you don’t mind, alone for the, with her for a —’ So I knew straight away that she got the job. She was the first choice just exactly as she’d said.
HB: Yeah. She’d known that all the way through.
CM: It was, yeah she was, first appointment. The only one thing that they said to me, Mr Charlesworth, he said, he said she was an outstanding candidate. That’s was it. She was an outstanding candidate.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Now, what that means I don’t know but an outstanding candidate gets rid of all the qualifications. Qualification this and qualifications the other. They just took her on her own merits.
HB: Absolutely. Yes.
CM: And Mr Charlesworth err Mr Butler said afterwards, many many years afterwards, she was working there about twenty years she was the obvious choice to do the job. That’s because —
HB: So so while Shirley’s getting her job and you’re —
CM: I was then worked for Anglian Water.
HB: So, so you’d, you’d then finished and you joined —
CM: Anglian Water.
HB: Anglian Water.
CM: I left the civil service. It didn’t make that much difference.
HB: Yeah.
CM: The man that told me that I was a natural, natural at the job which I wasn’t and also one of the employees there told me if you want to get on here don’t kind of send things back for verification. Just pay them anyway. You see, you’re allowed a five percent, a five percent error. He said you’ll never make any [unclear] It was so simple that there’s no errors. No possible errors. Overtake the hard ones by scores. So you never get five percent error.
HB: So what was your actual —
CM: So I held a job, Mr — he did the X, Ys and Zs and I did the As and Bs. It’s a good to contrast. He got very few applications because everything was to be handed to me. And see he did the bits that were difficult for me. He cancelled them all out.
HB: Right. So what exactly was your job.
CM: It was an easy job.
HB: Yeah.
CM: At the top of the tree.
HB: Yeah. What exactly was your job Kit?
CM: Vetting Officer. I decided how much if a person was eligible. For instance if you’d only had half the payments in you only got half the payment. Right. So if the person came in and they’d only got say, fifteen instead of the twenty six minimum application you’d cancel it altogether. Right. But he’d gone straight to the name then, assistant or something. He’d say what had happened. They’d pay him as if he was full, full stamps.
HB: Oh right I see.
CM: He gets full stamps. So I mean no matter how little you had, their people who only had fourteen they’d get for fourteen and they’d get less then the person that had got none, none at all and he get paid the full. So us vetting officers we soon cottoned on to that. This was completely and utterly unfair.
HB: So this is for the water rates.
CM: No. Not water. This was, this was, that was the next job that I came to.
HB: Oh sorry. Sorry. I’ve missed a bit out. So that, so that was in to the civil service.
CM: Yeah. That’s right. The Civil service. And he kept on saying to me, ‘Don’t worry about that.’
HB: Yeah.
CM: After one year you become a, the, become a something officer.
HB: Yeah.
CM: [unclear] officer. It was the next step up. Free. Just get it free. You’ve got that anyways, if you’d done a year.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So I thought [unclear]. Here I am stuck in a job I dislike intensely, you know, being an aircrew man all my life and suddenly I’m kind of stuck there. So Shirley said, ‘I’ll find you another job.’ This is my wife. By this time she’s working at you know, she’s the department commander.
HB: Yeah. [unclear] Consumer Affairs.
CM: I’ve got all the certificates that she’d got.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: Given to her. Not kind of worked for but given by virtue of her job.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And she said, ‘I’ve got a job here for you, working for Anglian Water as a district inspector.’
HB: Oh right.
CM: But what I got with the job wasn’t district inspector. It was area inspector. A rank higher up.
HB: Yeah.
CM: There were people who were experienced. Of course I had no experience but I did as Shirley said when I went to the interview. The first one I thought what the hell? Shirley can do it I can do it. So I was completely not bothered about it.
HB: Yeah
CM: I’ve got a good job anyway I’ve got pensions from the Air Force, I’ve got pensions from water board, I’ve got pensions from this and pensions from that.
HB: Right.
CM: So I did.
HB: It’s alright I’m just double checking the battery.
CM: Anyway, I’m terribly sorry I’ve taken over.
HB: No. No. No.
CM: But then you’re getting something about my background.
HB: No. No. No.
CM: I ‘m lucky. I’m lucky I have been, how lucky I could be.
HB: I’m interested in the length of service you’ve given.
CM: Yeah. I did thirty one operations in the hot war and there were five six, six, seven in the Cold War.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I did in the, in the, in the whatsaname for.
HB: Malaysia.
CM: Over the water to fly in the helicopters to look for where an aircraft had been. [unclear]
HB: Yeah.
CM: I had to map it out and tell them where it was and they’d come out and sort it out.
HB: The Air Sea Rescue. Yeah.
CM: So I had a particular job there and the promise to being an area officer and then another rank higher but I had to have the qualifications. They got to invent the qualifications for me. They said just get the A level in the, we’ll do the, all the chemical experiments for you. I said I’m in the base of a bloody load of corruption here. There was experienced both the civil service, they both told me first thing. They’d be a bit what’s the name. Something officer, there.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Field officer.
HB: Right. Yeah.
CM: But I wasn’t long enough, part time.
HB: So you’ve, you’ve gone all the way through the war. You’ve had your RAF career over twenty years.
CM: Twenty six years.
HB: Twenty six years. And you, you’ve gone back into civilian life. What do you think, what do you think the war, that your wartime service with Bomber Command what do you think that gave you for your later life in the RAF and —
CM: Confidence.
HB: Right.
CM: I was a, as far as I was concerned I was not only a wireless op air gunner who did his job but also I knew that I wasn’t, I wasn’t really scared. I told you I was the biggest coward and everything. I wasn’t.
HB: Right.
CM: I was apprehensive. I used to look at the, the aircraft coming in, the place where the aircraft was parked and find that there were so many bombs, if you looked at the front of the aircraft and you could see nothing else but steel all the way around from middle right at the end. Right through this. A huge bomb bay about easily from that to here in a Lancaster.
HB: Yeah. A good eighteen feet. Twenty feet.
CM: Nothing at all. And you’d look at the front and you’d find that, yes you could see it, everyone said it but you wouldn’t believe it. The wings were fitted upwards.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I thought my God it’s so bloody heavy there that the damned wings are lifting up.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And of course everyone, we were all aware of that, you know. And how the hell could this possibly get airborne? But as soon as the aircraft had gone on off the runway and got the a airflow over it the wings then start to lift, because if they [unclear] to lift and of course they reassert themselves.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And of course the Lancaster designed from the bomb bay. It was designed as a —
HB: Yeah. So so you attribute your confidence to it.
CM: And also I was a good wireless op. Morse, because I always, I never got any IMIs. IMI means de de da da dit dit — please, ‘please send that again.’ De de da da dit dit.
HB: Right. Yeah. Right. So, of, of your crews.
CM: Yeah.
HB: Because you obviously had you know a number of, you know slight changes during Bomber Command duties.
CM: Well, they didn’t know anything about ops. They didn’t tell them anything in Morse.
HB: No. No.
CM: But as something else to think about doing lectures. When I was doing my t cal, it was teaching I used to think to myself what I should really do is something that’s really interesting. And one of the interesting things about being a wireless operator was emergencies.
HB: Right.
CM: Now, you know that everyone sends SOSs when they were da da da da, so. But it used to be SOS de de dit da da da dit dit dit da da da dit dit dit. So this brilliant bastard, who it was said, ‘This is not distinguishable.’ It’s dash O S sent, sent separately. Why don’t we put it all together and make it one symbol? So what they did SOS and with SOS, SOOS and they put a bar across the whole lot which meant it ran, the whole thing bit of it, instead of it being it dit dit dit da da dit dit dit it became de de de da da dit dit dit dit dit dit da da dit dit dit Which everyone knows as SOS.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CM: So therefore it was adopted.
HB: Oh right.
CM: So we knew we had a system whereby if you had an emergency we used this system to do this. There’s a word called PATASACANDI. PATASACANDI. And if you think about that PAT is Position and Time. PAT CAS Course and Speed. A PATCAS Altitude. And then name. Name of aircraft. Intention of pilot. Right. All of this went out of your mind even and put all the things in and send it as PATACASANDI. In other words —
HB: Right.
CM: Height would be QAH fifteen, fifteen thousand. PAT, PAT in time of course you’d get your watch, plus course and speed. You ran the different course off from the, the whatsaname [unclear] and yaw thing, and speed. I didn’t get the speed but the navigator put down the speed. QTJ my speed is, my air speed is, such and such and such, my ground speed is depending which you were going to use. Then —
HB: Right.
CM: The course. And then there was the altitude. And the other one was the nature. The nature of, nature of, nature of the emergency.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Engine just, engine on fire. Bomb in, bomb in, bomb in bomb bay. Whatever the emergency was. They put that. Then intention of pilot. A PATCASANDI, Intention of Pilot. I at the end — intention of pilot. PATCASANDI. Everyone in the aircraft and the engineer knew that. How to send an emergency message was always in your head.
HB: Yeah.
CM: It was easy. You also knew the Q signals which we’d stick to them. The QAS for height. QTI for skip a course, your QEH was [unclear] of the whole thing so you could do it in your head. All the navigator had to say was, Kit.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Yeah.
CM: I was confident that if there was an emergency I could send that.
HB: Did you, did you, when you look back we obviously lost an awful lot of —
CM: Engine Yeah.
HB: Aircrew and, you know people, you know, people didn’t come back. What was your, what was your general feeling? You know. You fly out on an op. You come back and a couple of your planes are missing. What was, what was your feeling about that, Kit?
CM: What we’d do then if you knew an aircraft had been shot down. We’d got sometimes to the 500cc channel, the name of channel 500 KCs which was 500 used by everybody. Maritimes, aircraft all go to the 500cc and you could hear anyone in distress sending his distress position.
HB: Right.
CM: That was the wonderful thing about being a wireless op you could be individual, an aircraft you’d see shot down and we’d know you didn’t have any chance of sending anything.
HB: No.
CM: But others which were badly damaged the wireless operator there frantically trying to get a message through.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Because his message and don’t forget you obviously finished off the message, the SOS by pressing his key for twenty seconds which was a long time [buzz] All the time in the world for the ground staff and other people anywhere taking bearings on you so therefore they get a good picture of just exactly where you were in the North Sea.
HB: Yeah.
CM: I feel I’m taking over too much now of this. Way over things that don’t even matter.
HB: Oh no. No. No. These —
CM: Well, it gives a good background to a wireless operator’s job.
HB: Well, that’s, that’s why you’re being interviewed Kit.
CM: Is that right?
HB: Because your wireless operator experience, I mean we’re talking lots of years here has developed. But —
CM: That’s right.
HB: In Bomber, in Bomber Command.
CM: They were going to be shot down.
HB: Yeah. You, you must have experienced that, you know. With friends.
CM: Yeah.
HB: And other crews that you knew.
CM: Oh yeah.
HB: Who didn’t come back.
CM: Yeah. I won’t talk about that.
HB: No.
CM: Distressing experience I just cut it out of my mind.
HB: No. That’s, yeah that’s understandable. I mean it’s, it’s a difficult area because none of us now can even imagine how you would feel and what you would experience.
CM: That’s right but I do wish before you go and I know you’ll be thinking to yourself how can I get away with this [noise] I’ve broken your communicator.
HB: Worry not. I’ve stood it back up.
CM: I wrote, I wrote a letter once, on an old notepad, so I’ll just [pages turning] Look at this. Do you hear what Sherlock would say? You’ve got all these to read when you’ve got time. Not now.
HB: Well, we will. We will on another occasion, I think.
CM: That’s the chap that was flying that Typhoon.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Now, I won’t, I won’t keep this, but I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a description of a flight I made. Just a flight rather than the flight. The definite article rather than the indefinite article. Ah is indefinite article. The is action.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So this particular flight was in my mind and I wrote it down exactly how it was. But also I’ve mentioned something which I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere before. Are you listening carefully for it Harry? It was well known in Bomber Command that an awful lot of atrocities took place. Have you heard about this?
HB: About the —?
CM: Atrocities towards aircrew.
HB: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
CM: Some of these people who are — they went through a very very harrowing experience. Some of them went mental. Deranged in fact. And they gathered themselves during a raid and tried to collect any bombers. A lot of people, had they baled out over the target and they’d come down in the streets and they, generally speaking there were some people who would [unclear] had very bad time indeed. They were hanged from lampposts. They were kicked to death by the civilians. They were shot by platoon commanders who wouldn’t take them in. They just cut them down with that, you never hear anything about that.
HB: No.
CM: It’s up to Bomber Command did [unclear] that’s why to a lot of people like me know about this. If people knew about the really bad times that they faced if they were ever taken prisoner. If the Luftwaffe were around the area and the Luftwaffe were patrolling they were pretty safe, but if there were no, no Luftwaffe around the SS they couldn’t have cared less. They’d shoot you out of hand.
HB: Yeah.
CM: An awful lot. There’s never been any book published. Any publication about it. People know, know this went on. But if you try to find anything about it.
HB: Yeah.
CM: The only way you find out about is by looking up at this report that I put in.
HB: Right.
CM: Which I can show you.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But I can’t now because I can’t remember where it is.
HB: Well, yeah.
CM: So I thought this might be the sort of thing that you’d be looking for.
HB: Yeah.
CM: On top of. In addition to. As well as —
HB: Yes. Yes.
CM: Rather than —
HB: I mean, it’s been fascinating listening to you Kit talking about that, you know. Not just, not just the wartime but the whole of, the whole of your RAFs experience. And you know how, I mean you said that you described this period of time when NCOs were being reduced in rank and whatnot.
CM: Well —
HB: But, but how —
CM: They don’t, they, let’s put it this way they didn’t say it was a reduction of rank
HB: No. No. No. No.
CM: They were exactly the same.
HB: Yeah.
CM: But we as aircrew had been warrant officers. We’d been so used to all this you know.
HB: Yeah. Exactly.
CM: But It was just taken over, three stripes, three stars and a crown, the same as a flight sergeant.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And they wouldn’t have it —
HB: Yeah.
CM: The aircrew who served they wouldn’t have it. That’s what buggered that up.
HB: What do you, do you think? Do you, when you look back now for that time during the World War? Do you think the public really understood what you were trying to do?
CM: I didn’t think. No. I don’t think they even thought about the things I’ve been telling you about now. The murders. That’s what they were. They were murders. And the best way that they used to kill and this comes up time and time again. Butchers. Butchers actually decapitate theirs. They set them in a line and one after the butcher would take their heads off. So called ISIS.
HB: But the public. The public back home here.
CM: They never found anything about that.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Never let anything be published.
HB: But in general terms though your, your service in Bomber Command.
CM: I tried to be a bomber.
HB: There were lots and lots of you.
CM: Yeah.
HB: As you came to the end of the war the public in this country had a view about the Spitfire boys and, you know the Navy and, and what not. Did you, did you — what did you think the public thought Bomber Command had achieved in the war?
CM: Well, I think that they pretty thought, and don’t forget and I came from a steel town and I used to and meet with a brevet and my stripes, you know. I was some sort of particular to the girls, I was a hero of Bomber Command. Because a lot of that on the radio all you got was, nothing happening in the war. The war years. The war world. But Bomber Command — last night’s operations. This. There. Bombers bombed shipping.
HB: Yeah.
CM: [unclear] what at the end was always the same. Of all, out of all these operations thirty five, forty four, sixty five, ninety seven in one case —
HB: Yeah.
CM: Of our aircraft are missing.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Now, you don’t have to be an intelligent member of the community to say ninety seven. Ninety seven, down the road. That’s from here to —
HB: Yeah.
CM: But there was a town up there. [unclear]
HB: But, so, so in general times you felt that the public were with you.
CM: Oh yes, really. There were also the liberals and the communists and the whatsanames. They wouldn’t be of course.
HB: No.
CM: But we were, as far as we were concerned we were being instructed. We willingly went into Bomber Command because in Bomber Command you bombed civilians. You couldn’t go to war like that.
HB: Yeah. And what, what was your view? Did, or did you even have a view of the government’s position at the end of the war towards Bomber Command?
CM: As regards the treatment of Bomber Command. It was absolutely atrocious. I’ve just explained to you about that.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Within, within on year of the war ending we were no longer flight sergeant or warrant officers. We were signaller 2s and signaller 1s and engineer 1s and engineer 2s, and pilots even. Pilot 1 and pilot 2s and pilot 3s and pilot 4s.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Because if you had one star you’re a pilot 4. For two stars you’re a pilot 3.
HB: Yeah.
CM: If you had one star you’re a pilot. No. You’re a pilot, a signaller 2 or pilot 2 with one star. No. Three stars was sergeant. Two stars — three stars and a crown was a flight sergeant. Three stars by itself was sergeant. Two stars was corporal. And one star was lance corporal.
HB: Right.
CM: That’s how, that’s how they looked at it.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: But the lance corporal couldn’t go.
HB: But the thing.
CM: Lance corporal couldn’t go in the sergeants mess.
HB: No.
CM: So they had to have separate messes and everything else.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So it was a complete and utter — it didn’t happen to the officers like that.
HB: No.
CM: They weren’t even mentioned. But we were treated badly.
HB: Politically, what, what was, what do you think was coming across politically from —
CM: Oh I think that at that time.
HB: Churchill and people like that.
CM: Don’t forget Bomber Command was the only way we could hit the, hit the Germans at all.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: Where could we hit? Where could we hit the Germans except in their homelands.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: We destroyed their cities one by one.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Until only one was left.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Dresden. And in the last few days of the war we destroyed that as well.
HB: Yeah.
CM: So we did an incalculable addition to the winning of the war because they, whatsanames the people would be dehoused. Had no where to live. The slave labourers were living in terrible conditions in mountains. The whole system was run by slave labour.
HB: Yeah.
CM: And that was because of Bomber Command. They literally — the population were bombed out of their homes.
HB: Yeah. Well, Kit I think, I think we’ve come to a natural conclusion.
CM: That’s right. I feel as if I’ve, I feel as if I’ve monopolised the conversation.
HB: It’s not a conversation. It’s your story, Kit and it’s very very important.
CM: So you learned about the way that the way that Bomber Command were treated at the end of the war.
HB: Absolutely.
CM: You’ve seen my logbook. You know I’m a genuine person. You know that I’ve done well for myself.
HB: Yes. You certainly have. Its, it’s ten to three.
CM: Dear God have I been speaking for two or three hours?
HB: We, we started —
CM: You must have —
HB: We started before 1 o’clock.
CM: You must have put it to at least a half an hour of that Harry.
HB: I’m going to terminate the interview now. Thank you very much Kit. I really do appreciate that.
CM: But you will come back.
HB: Yes.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Christopher George McVickers
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-06
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AMcVickersCG171006, PMcVickersCG1701
Conforms To
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Pending review
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Format
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02:08:19 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Coastal Command
Description
An account of the resource
Christopher ‘Kit’ McVickers was working at the steelworks before he volunteered for aircrew. He trained as a wireless operator and was posted to 218 Squadron based at Woolfox Lodge. His pilot refused to fly and was replaced with a new pilot. The crew found the incident upsetting because they loved their pilot and worried for him. Kit went on to complete his tour and then after a short time out of the RAF he re-joined. He went on to serve overseas including the Indonesian Confrontation. He flew in various aeroplanes including Lincolns, Shackletons and Lockheed Neptunes. He ended his career as a missile controller at RAF Neatishead and Patrigton.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Gibraltar
Singapore
England--Lincolnshire
England--Rutland
Germany--Dresden
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1952
1956
1963
101 Squadron
12 Squadron
218 Squadron
90 Squadron
aircrew
B-29
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
crash
forced landing
Heavy Conversion Unit
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lincoln
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Binbrook
RAF Compton Bassett
RAF Hemswell
RAF Woolfox Lodge
RAF Yatesbury
Shackleton
Stirling
training
Wellington
wireless operator
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1288/17230/AHarrisDR190508.1.mp3
6a11b42596b674bae0164350fdeba8e7
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
Harris, Donald Raymond
D R Harris
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Flight Sergeant Donald Harris (B. 1925, 1877136 Royal Air Force) and two photographs. He served as an air gunner on 625 Squadron Lancaster at the end of the war when he flew on Operation Manna.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Donald Harris and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-05-08
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Harris, DR
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: Right. This is an interview for the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive on the 8th of May 2019 between Harry Bartlett, volunteer with the Digital Archive and Mr Donald Raymond Harris who served in Bomber Command during the Second World War. Well, thank you for agreeing to the interview Don. The interview is taking place at Earls Barton in Northamptonshire, where Mr Harris lives. Right. Don, well like all good stories we start at the beginning so where were you born?
DH: Acton, London.
HB: Right. Oh right, and did you, you went to school there did you? Yeah.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: A Common School. A Common School.
HB: A Common School. Oh right. So, you were at that school until what sort of age?
DH: Fourteen.
HB: Fourteen. Right. And so that would be, yeah we would be talking about the year war was breaking out.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. So, as you came to fourteen did you, did you leave school and go to work straightaway?
DH: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: At fourteen.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. And what sort of things did you do, Don?
DH: What? Work?
HB: Yeah.
DH: Teaboy.
HB: Right.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Well. That’s, that’s what the official title was. I was the teaboy.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And I had to travel from Acton in London to Slough to go to work. I had to catch a lorry that took me down there with all the men.
HB: Right.
DH: Digging the road up, laying gas mains.
HB: Right.
DH: That’s what my Reserved Occupation was because gas mains were being bombed. Broken. All kinds of things. So we had to go out and repair them. And there had to be a teaboy because you could not allow the men to walk off to get cigarettes or tobacco or whatever else.
HB: Oh.
DH: I had to do it. I had to go and get the men’s, whatever they wanted. They weren’t allowed to leave the job.
HB: Right.
DH: So that was the original.
HB: Yeah.
DH: It was rather amusing in as much that being totally ignorant and fourteen years old I also had to tidy up round the office. There was an office for the ganger and I had to tidy up coke because it spread you know. That kind of thing. And I found a little package about that big. Didn’t know what it was so I took it in to the boss’s office and I opened it and it was all the men’s wages. The stupid agent had hidden it amongst the coke.
HB: Oh dear.
DH: So, I locked the office, went up to see the ganger. What was his name? Dave. No. No. Anyway, the ganger. I went up to him. I just took him to one side. I said, ‘I found a package.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I found a package,’ I said, ‘And it’s got all the men’s wages.’ ‘Come with me.’
HB: Right. Yeah.
DH: So, he went there and he counted how many wages there were which was right. He said, ‘Ok.’ He wanted to make sure —
HB: Yeah.
DH: I hadn’t put one aside. But that was some of the interesting things as a very young boy.
HB: Yeah.
DH: At fourteen years old.
HB: Yeah. Who, who were you actually working for?
DH: At that time it was a company called O C Summers.
HB: Right. Right.
DH: That was the name of the company.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Eventually, I mean I got rather well known and when that job finished I came back to London, worked with another ganger in [pause] it was in Shepherd’s Bush. Which is near, well not near but reasonably near home. I could go there by bus. So that was the second one. Then [pause] when that work finished, you know we’d go to another job. And it was then that my brother was reported missing in Burma.
HB: Oh right.
DH: I did get a lot of information because a friend of mine daughter went up to London and got a lot more information about them. He was the 3rd Carabiniers, which was tanks and they did a silly thing. They drove their tank up and they saw a tank, a Japanese tank on its own. And as far as they can learn all the people, there were five, four members of that tank that were captured by the Japs. They don’t know what happened to them. Never found any remains or anything like that.
HB: So, what year would that be Don?
DH: Oh, fairly early in the war.
HB: Yeah.
DH: When they first got to Burma.
HB: Right. Right. Yeah.
DH: That’s when it was. But she got a lot of information. Although they couldn’t find the graves or anything like that they itemised the four people that were missing because that’s, they had to report them missing.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: They put up a memorial then. I think it was Calcutta. With their names on it.
HB: Right. Yeah.
DH: But that’s all.
HB: Right.
DH: I got to sixteen so it must have ‘39 or ‘40/41 time.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Then I decided then that I would want to go in to the Service and the eldest brother was in the Royal Corps of Signals.
HB: Right. Yeah.
DH: He was the eldest.
HB: So, let me just stop you there, Don. So, there’s you, two brothers.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Mum. Dad. Any other family in there? There? Sisters?
DH: No. My sister died before the war.
HB: Oh right. Right.
DH: She was twenty five.
HB: Oh dear.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. So, yeah. Sorry. So, yeah. You decided that you were going to join.
DH: Yeah.
HB: The Services.
DH: I wanted to join it. Now, there was a unit in Acton, in the school there which, what the devil was the name of the people training for the Air Force?
HB: Air Training Corps.
DH: Yeah. It was. And that was in a big school. High school. Up in there. And I went there once a week. Only to once a week and it was quite interesting because we went through lots of things. Not guns. Not guns.
HB: No.
DH: But radio. Morse Code. All that lot. You know.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So that was interesting. Then I got a letter to report to a place up where the balloons flew from. I can’t get it yet because I do forget.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But anyway —
HB: Oh, well, that’s understandable. Yeah.
DH: Where the in the balloons. We went there and we went through several tests and it came out that I’d remembered some of the Morse Code [laughs]
HB: Oh right. Right.
DH: Anyway, it was a little while later on when I got a letter to report to St John’s Wood.
HB: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Yeah. Report there. And they entered me as a wireless operator air gunner.
HB: Oh, w/op. Yeah.
DH: And once I got used to being in London the next place I moved to was Bridlington.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Just to make sure I wasn’t near home like.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But I had a sergeant. Brilliant. Blakey. Sergeant Blakey. He was absolutely brilliant. And our particular unit we got the highest recommendations. He was brilliant. Absolutely. Only a small fella but a sergeant and he really was good.
HB: So, was it, was this your, like doing your basic training —
DH: Yeah.
HB: Don.
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Right. So, so we’d be talking what now? We’d be talking, coming up 1943/44.
DH: Yeah.
HB: That sort of the time.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And we had twelve bore guns shooting out to sea.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
DH: It was great. And this was the first time in my life I’d ever run six miles. Run. And I had to run from the coast back to my camp. And I thought oh. I laid down on a bed when I got back and I was puffing and at my age I should have been fit. Anyway, that was that. Then I got sent to [pause] oh Christ. A wireless school was at [pause] isn’t it funny? I can’t remember. Big city. Big city and, you know Hartleys Jam and things.
HB: Yeah.
DH: They owned the land that we were on.
HB: Right.
DH: And they said if ever you want to work come and work in the fields with all the fruit —
HB: Lovely.
DH: Got paid.
HB: So that, so that would be [pause] was that north? Did you go north?
DH: No. Never.
HB: Or, I’m just trying to place because there were one or two wireless schools.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Knocking about.
DH: Yeah. No, that was [pause] Hereford.
HB: Hereford. Right. Yes. Yeah.
DH: Hereford.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And while I was there I got ill and of course the sick quarters was well, kind of a hospital. Kind of. But the girls who were nurses only went for the officers. And then they sent me to a hospital. Credenhill Hospital. I’ve remembered that right down to the last word. The nurses there were like lady so and so.
HB: Oh.
DH: Oh yeah. And they were really good. They were good. And I met another bloke named Don and we both could play darts.
HB: Oh, right. Yeah.
DH: And we used to go in to town, go in to a pub. That was our first shall we say attempt of them getting their beer for nothing but instead of that we both could play darts.
HB: Right.
DH: And so we didn’t buy a pint. They did. Yeah. No, this is all reacting because I was ill. I really was. How I got to the hospital I don’t know. I was out.
HB: What did you have? Did you have some sort of pleurisy? Or —
DH: Cold and chill and something else.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: It was all luck. And that, then I went back to the school. You know the —
HB: Yeah. The wireless school.
DH: Went to see the officer in charge and I said, ‘We’re not getting anywhere.’ I said, ‘Nobody is wanting wireless operators. There’s plenty of them.’ There was. I said, ‘I want to remuster. Air gunner.’ He said, ‘Yeah. If you wish to do that we could do it.’ So I remustered as an air gunner. And do you know what they stamped on my docs? Lack of moral fibre. Yeah. If you found my documents you’d find it’s got, “Lack of Moral Fibre,” on them because I remustered. I remustered to a more dangerous bloody job.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Anyway, I wanted that and they sent me to the island at the beginning of the Thames.
HB: Sheppey.
DH: Sheppey. Which was a Fighter Command. They sent me there. They were Typhoons, Tempests. That’s what they were and they used to start them with a long cartridge. They’d be turning it over with the battery and then he’d fire it which would kick the engine over and start.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Well, the engine was a Napier. Made by Napier’s anyway and oh they were powerful things. God, they were powerful. It only took a very short distance to take off.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: And it was really, talk about noisy. Christ. Totally different to the Spitfire.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Totally different, but it was good. So, from there I was sent to Bridgnorth.
HB: Were you? Yeah.
DH: Bridgnorth was a Gunnery School and there we did all the necessary flashlights and bit of this and bits of that and stripped the gun down and put it back. But it was just right. I liked it. I really did. And anybody that didn’t read the Morse Code with the lamp didn’t get in.
HB: Right.
DH: I did. I could read it easy. It didn’t make any difference. So, I finished there and sent me home. Home.
HB: Right.
DH: Until I got a summons to go to Aylesbury.
HB: Yeah.
DH: There was a main aerodrome and a sub. A little one.
HB: Yeah. Little satellite. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Yeah. And we were in Wellingtons. Lovely aircraft but a bugger to fly and even at one time the skipper, who was, who was New Zealand, he called me up from the turret, ‘Come up and help me.’ So of course, I went up there and said, ‘What’s the matter, skip?’ He says, ‘Help me push this bloody thing down.’ [laughs] Because Aylesbury is all hilly.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: And the draught coming up was coming up and lifting us instead of going down.
HB: Oh dear.
DH: So I got in to the co-pilot’s seat and shoved it and we got down.
HB: Was this, so this was an Operational Training Unit.
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Yeah. Well, we used to have to turn the engines over by hand.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. How did, how did you get in to a crew there? Did it —
DH: When we went to the main aerodrome.
HB: Yeah.
DH: There. We got all the crew sorted out. We didn’t do it.
HB: Oh right.
DH: They did it.
HB: Right.
DH: So, the pilot was New Zealander. The bomb aimer was New Zealander. The wireless operator was Irish. Irish. Not Northern Ireland. Irish. Our mid-upper gunner was Scotch. Bob. I even remember where he lived. Edinburgh. The main road. That’s where he lived. And me. So that’s six of us. We hadn’t got the engineer.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And we went oh several times. We went over, we had to fly over London to let the air people shoot at us. But they were told to shoot low [laughs] and also the searchlight.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
DH: Because the searchlights taught them and us.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: And then we flew back to Aylesbury. That’s where we were going. So we landed at the auxiliary aircraft because the other place was busy. We landed and we, you know that type of aircraft the Wellington was kind of a big aircraft. But it’s also marvellous for keeping flying even if it had got a hole in the side, you know.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And all of a sudden we got a warning and all the lights went on. Americans landed because they couldn’t land at their aerodrome so they could land at ours and of course they’d got all these big fur coats and Christ knows what else on. Oh, and they were, got their big aircraft with four engines, you know. All this. A couple of the English blokes there said, ‘Yeah. You go underneath our wings, don’t you?’ Almost caused a fight but never mind. From there we went to just north of Stamford. There was an aerodrome on the farm land that done it and they had Stirlings. Bloody great things. Seventeen foot to the bottom of the aircraft. We weren’t interested in that. We transferred from there to Lancasters and we were trained on the Lancasters. Now —
HB: Can you can you remember what that airfield was? Was it Woolfox? No.
DH: It was about three miles outside Stamford.
HB: Right. Yeah.
DH: On the main road by the way. A1.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And the airfield was on the right, and we had interlopers follow our aircraft in and they bombed the bloody girl’s place. WAAFs. Killed a lot of them.
HB: Oh dear.
DH: But anyway, that’s good. We did further training and for the skipper’s point of view nobody else. Him and me. And we practiced corkscrewing.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Do you know what that is?
HB: Yeah. Well, you. You tell me what it is.
DH: Well —
HB: I presume you were a rear gunner.
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: We took off. Got up to a height and then we were looking for fighter. And it was there was the fighter. The skipper said, ‘Can you see what it is?’ I said, ‘Yeah. A Spitfire.’ [laughs] So, he said, ‘Right,’ he said, ‘So, is he within range?’ I said, ‘No. Miles away.’ It was amazing I could recognise it. Anyway, all of a sudden I saw this Spitfire getting closer and closer and when it got to about six hundred feet I said, ‘Corkscrew port go.’ And of course, where does the tail go? Voom.
HB: Straight up in the air.
DH: Straight up [laughs]. And I had a camera.
HB: Yeah.
DH: On the guns and I followed it to the word. Down, port, up starboard oh. Got a complete film. Complete film. So the Spitfire broke away. Waggled to say good. And that was it as far as I was concerned. And then we got back, landed and that afternoon of course the cameras went in to the photography department and they, we got a call over a tannoy, ‘Warrant Officer Mitchell and crew attend the Photography Unit.’ I thought oh, I must have made a mistake. Instead of that the bloke that did it, it was an officer and he said, ‘Watch it.’ He said. It only goes for a short while because you’re down. Up. Up. Up. You know. So we did. The film was absolutely perfect.
HB: Oh right.
DH: And this officer turned around and he said, ‘You’ve got one of the best gunners that I’ve tested.’ He said, ‘That pilot was dead from the first shot.’
HB: Really?
DH: Yeah. I thought well that’s —
HB: Yeah.
DH: And then we had the other test to show that we were fit for action. It was, you know, the usual things. Aircraft recognition.
HB: Yeah.
DH: How to load your guns and all that kind of thing. And then we all had to attend a meeting with the people who were in charge of all of that and he said, ‘We’ve got some good results.’ What was he? A squadron leader, I think. And he said, ‘We’ve got some exceptionally good people.’ So, he said, ‘136.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘You’ve got nineteen and a half points.’ I said, ‘Out of how many?’ ‘Twenty.’ Nineteen and a half out of twenty. And the one thing I forgot. Where [pause] you know how the bullets go down a tray.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Into the turret. Up into the guns. Right. Now, when you stop these continue to run.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So something has got to stop them. At the bottom of the tray here there’s a hole like that which just fits the bullet. So it goes into that hole and it stops running.
HB: Right.
DH: And that’s what I missed.
HB: Oh.
DH: And my mid-upper gunner got nineteen. Just shows you doesn’t it?
HB: That’s, it’s still pretty good.
DH: To me it was of interest because I wanted to be perfect as a —
HB: Yeah.
DH: It’s a, I’m a defender.
HB: Yeah.
DH: You know. So, we did. It was good.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And then from there I went to oh I can’t remember the name. I did tell you.
HB: Was this being posted to a squadron?
DH: Yeah. 625.
HB: 625, yeah.
DH: Which was, come on. It’s six miles outside. North of Lincoln. It’s a permanent station.
HB: At Scampton.
DH: Scampton.
HB: I wasn’t supposed to help you there but —
DH: No.
HB: I thought I would.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Being as you got nineteen and a half for your gunnery I thought I’ll let you have that.
DH: Yeah. Yeah. We were Scampton. We did. We did. I’ll tell you what I liked about what we did. I’m not talking about killing people I’m talking about what I liked. We flew to Holland. Instead of bombs we had sacks of food.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Marvellous. I was so pleased to see that.
HB: Do you remember what that operation was called?
DH: Yeah. Because we had to follow the sign on the, painted on the roof of the hospital. And it was two fields beyond and we had to drop the food there. One silly pilot flew underneath another one and when [laughs] it went straight through the cockpit.
HB: Blimey. Yeah.
DH: Flew. Flour everywhere. Daft.
HB: Did you know that was called Operation Manna?
DH: No.
HB: Manna from heaven.
DH: No.
HB: Yeah.
DH: I know I liked it. We were only a hundred feet high.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And as we flew along, I mean the roads and everything else I got a clear view because as you know there was no back in the turret.
HB: Yeah.
DH: I was amazed to see this German and a machine gun but he wasn’t anywhere near it. He stood well back.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And when I looked at him I thought Christ he could only be fifteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. And we were told not to get near the guns. Good job because I mean we were all loaded.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: And we flew back over the sea at a hundred feet. I didn’t like that.
HB: No. I can imagine.
DH: No. Not really.
HB: Yeah.
DH: It was alright but I mean we trusted the skipper obviously but I just didn’t like it. It was too near the sea.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Which is going to, but no. They said we mustn’t fly.
HB: Had you actually flown any night operations before that, Don?
DH: We were on the battle order two or three times.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But we didn’t go. We went out to the aircraft. Went to the nice little café in the middle of the airfield. You know where I mean?
HB: Yeah.
DH: And it was nice because we got eggs and bacon and a few —
HB: Who was running that café? Was that —
DH: Yeah. Lovely.
HB: Was that the WAAFs running that or —
DH: No.
HB: No.
DH: No. The Air Force.
HB: Yeah.
DH: They ran that.
HB: Yeah.
DH: It was really nice. It really was. We thought we would get a call in a minute which you were liable to do. If you get one of the others calling with the breakdown of engine or whatever else then we would have gone.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But I think we, four, four times. Yeah. And that was at Scampton.
HB: Right. Right. So you were, you were like the reserve group.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Ready to fill in.
DH: We were the first reserve. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But that’s what they said when you said you were on the Battle Order. You are. You’ve got to obey whatever. Another thing we did there was when the, when the troops were advancing over in Germany and France and Belgium directly they got to this Air Force place. Well, it became an Air Force place. It was Belgian place. We were told to go there, land, switch off your engines. Switch off.
HB: Right.
DH: Yeah. Because there were still some bomb holes in the [laughs]and they were filling them in quick.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And we were bringing in prisoners of war home. And we brought them to England.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Buckinghamshire, I think somewhere. And then we flew home.
HB: Right.
DH: And we did that twice.
HB: So you, so you flew from Scampton.
DH: Yeah.
HB: You flew over to Belgium.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Parked up if you want to call it that.
DH: Yeah.
HB: And then how would the prisoners of war arrive?
DH: Oh, they were there in, this was the stupid part. They were there and they had fed them. Fed.
HB: Oh.
DH: Yeah. You can imagine. They fed them beautiful meals and when we got them on board. Oh —
HB: Yeah.
DH: It was a bit rough. But anyway, we got them home. Directly we landed in Buckinghamshire somewhere and unloaded them. Then we flew back. And then they had the job of cleaning the aircraft.
HB: Who? Who cleaned the aircraft?
DH: Ground crew. Yeah. They had power hoses and everything.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But there again at least we got some of them back home.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: We then got orders to move to [pause] I can never remember the name. I wasn’t there long. Where the bombers are? Where you went.
Other: Coningsby.
HB: Coningsby.
DH: Coningsby. We got there. We were just getting settled in and what’s the squadron? 97? [pause] And about three days later we were called into operations room. We had to fly to Italy.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And we went. There’s two areas which we could have gone to. But the one we chose was at the foot of Vesuvius. Right at the foot. We landed at Naples Airport but we couldn’t take off because the runways weren’t long enough with a load of people on board.
HB: Oh.
DH: We were —
HB: So this was all still part of Operation Exodus.
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Bringing the prisoner of war home.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Right.
DH: But those there were mainly officers.
HB: Yeah.
DH: What was it called? Lamy? Lamy camp?
HB: Could be. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Yeah. I think it was.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And they were nearly all officers. So —
HB: This is, this is still in Lancasters.
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: The dodgy bit was with a load of people on board. As the gunner it would have been my job to dash about with an oxygen mask for each one to have a puff. But I never made it. I was ill.
HB: Right.
DH: Yeah. I went into this hospital in [pause] just south of Naples. It’s a little place. And I was in there for two or three weeks. When I came out I went and saw the sergeant that was in charge of getting people home and I said, ‘Right. When can you get me home?’ I said, ‘My skipper’s gone.’ I said, ‘He’s already taken off.’ Because the Yanks came and right at the end of the runway was trees.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And I’m afraid their big load of stuff took off and they had all the trees [bulbed] out and the runway lengthened.
HB: Oh right.
DH: So that they could get off.
HB: Yeah.
DH: It’s purely luck. Not anything else. It was warm.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Naples.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Warm. Christmas time. And we had our Christmas dinner in the palace at Naples.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. What rank were you at this stage?
DH: Flight sergeant.
HB: You were a flight sergeant. Right. Yeah.
DH: Nice. Everything. Then they said, ‘You’ve got to fly.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Good.’ So, I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’
HB: ‘Act as a rear gunner.’
DH: I said, ‘Well, I won’t act at it,’ I said, ‘I am one.’ So, he said, ‘Oh. Alright.’ So, he said, ‘Well, you’ve got to look after the men on board.’ Twenty. Twenty men. Apart from the crew, you know.
HB: Yeah.
DH: We couldn’t take more than that because we had to go over the Alps.
HB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
DH: The air is different.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So, we did go over the Alps. And it was a bit of job to go amongst all the people so I got the mid-upper gunner to do the same for the other ten. So I did ten and he did ten.
HB: Right. This was with the oxygen.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Well, up there over the Alps there is no oxygen, virtually.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So —
HB: So, did they give you extra oxygen bottles for them? Or —
DH: Oh yeah. Portable ones.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Or you could plug it in where ever you had it.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Where the hospital bed was, you know.
HB: Yeah.
DH: There was one there.
HB: That’s up, so that’s up by the main spar.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Going through. Yeah.
DH: So, you’d got all kinds of things that you could use. But we did. We got over the other side of the Alps and we came down to a nice level. Twenty thousand was nice. And we suddenly got a broadcast. The skipper, we still had plug in and this skipper whoever he was, and I’ve still no idea who he was said, ‘We’re not going home.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘No.’ He said, ‘Fog in England. Covered in fog.’ So we couldn’t land. I knew we could if we’d have gone on FIDO.
HB: What, what was FIDO?
DH: Fog dispersal. They had the runway covered in a pipe with loads of holes and big huge tanks of petrol and they pumped it through and lit it and that just lifted the fog. Very dangerous if the skipper wasn’t alert because the heat from the [pause] would lift it.
HB: Lift the aircraft. Yeah.
DH: Anyway, that, we didn’t go. So we had to land in southern France. Now that was not popular. We landed. We were told to switch off the engines and sit in the aircraft. Not leave it. That was the Frenchmen. Well, didn’t like that.
HB: Yeah.
DH: We were fighting for them as well. Anyway, we sat there and it must have been about midnight I think because we took off at 9 o’clock in Italy.
HB: Yeah.
DH: When we got down in France as I said we sat there and then we got clearance from England.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So, the engineer went out, primed the engines, started them and we took off and we landed somewhere near the Wash. Well, that’s where FIDO is.
HB: Oh right.
DH: Yeah. I mean it was quite interesting actually to know that we couldn’t use FIDO. Mind you it would have used a hell of a lot of fuel.
HB: Yeah.
DH: It gets pumped through at a hell of rate.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But we knew all about it because we were told about it. We couldn’t train on it but we were told about it and it was quite interesting but then I wasn’t at my aerodrome.
HB: No. Of course not. No.
DH: The people there were looking at it. How can I get home? And suddenly this officer came and he said, ‘I’ve just been brought down here by a vehicle. He’s going to go back. Not quite to your aerodrome but he will take you there.’ I thought oh thank God for that. You know.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And we went up through Boston. Lovely.
HB: Yeah.
DH: What was that? Bloody hell. What was that station? Dogdyke.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: What a name for a station. Dogdyke.
HB: Yeah.
DH: That’s the station’s name. So, we went back there. I said, well I’ll need a bed.
HB: Just bear with me a second, Don. I’ll just pause this a second just while the tea —
[recording paused]
HB: Right. We just turned the tape back on after we’ve been provided with tea and biscuits. So, we’ve got these officers from Italy. We’ve come back and we’ve landed.
DH: The van.
HB: At Dogdyke.
DH: It was a van.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Took me right back.
HB: Took you all the way up to Dogdyke.
DH: Yeah. They took me to the entrance.
HB: Right.
DH: Yeah. Yeah. I walked in. Well, I didn’t walk in. They, I got stopped at the gate but when I said who I was and what I was. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yeah. The adjutant wants to see you.’ So, I thought how did he know I was. I thought to myself they must have told him in Italy. Anyway, I said, ‘Well, it’s a bit late now. I doubt very much if he’s there.’ So, I said, ‘Is he still there?’ ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll need a bed for tonight.’ The bloke said. ‘We’ve allocated you one already.’ So I went there and evidently it was a new crew that had just, there was a spare bed.
HB: So, I bet you were popular.
DH: Well no. There was a spare bed. I don’t know why. But anyway. I went to bed and I did sleep. I really did sleep. I didn’t know what was going on. The next bed to me the bloke said, ‘You were dreaming.’ I said, ‘Was I?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘And it sounded pretty bloody awful.’ ‘Oh.’ I felt alright you know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Anyway, I got up. Got dressed. Went to see the adjutant. What’s going on. I didn’t know then so I said, ‘You wanted to see me sir.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Alright. What’s going to happen because my crew’s not here.’ He said, ‘No. They’re on your way to New Zealand.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘Yeah. Two have gone to New Zealand, one’s gone to Edinburgh, one’s gone to Ireland, the other one to London.’ I thought, ‘Oh.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘And you are on your way to Uxbridge. Do you know where it is?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah [laughs] Do I know where it is?’ So, I said, ‘Why am I going now for?’ ‘Demob.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘You sound surprised.’ I said, ‘Well, I am. I like the Air Force.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘You can’t.’ Just like that. He said, ‘You’re going. In front of me are all your train passes. All your leave passes. And you will be going to Dogdyke Station.’ That’s why I remembered it.
HB: Right.
DH: So that I had to go from there to Boston. Train to London. Get another train from there to Uxbridge. You get out at Uxbridge and there would be a vehicle waiting for you. It was well organised. It really was well organised. I mean that. Everything was like he said. Got to Uxbridge. Looked. There was a vehicle. I said, ‘Where are we going now?’ ‘Oh, Wembley.’ ‘What for?’ He said, ‘Demob.’ I thought, Christ. They’ve done that all in the time that the phone message going from Italy. Now, that is some organisation.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Bloody well is. Really is.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And of course, when I got to Wembley they were ready for me. Gave them my paper. I got my shoes [laughs] blue suit, shirt, tie. All complete. Everything was there.
HB: What did you have? Did you have a cap or a trilby hat?
DH: Trilby.
HB: I thought. Yeah. Trilby.
DH: And that was it.
HB: Yeah. After those years that you’d spent just finished.
DH: Yeah. No, they, once he said, ‘You’re going back,’ I knew what he meant because obviously the amount of damage created by the bombs was tremendous in London and that’s where we worked.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Oh Christ. We even laid a main on top of the pavement. On top of it. To pump water because water mains down below were broke.
HB: So how quick did you go back to doing your job from being demobbed?
DH: Straightaway.
HB: You didn’t have any leave or anything or —
DH: Oh no.
HB: No.
DH: No.
HB: Right.
DH: Straightaway.
HB: And did you go back to, was it OC Summers, was it?
DH: Yeah.
HB: You went straight back to them.
DH: Yeah.
HB: And they, had they kept your job for you?
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: They had to.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So then —
HB: So, what job did you go back to, Don?
DH: As a joint maker.
HB: Right.
DH: A joint maker. It’s one that the sockets and spigots enter one another and then you put yarn in and then you run hot lead in. And then you set it up.
HB: Yeah. Ok.
DH: Good. It was very very complicated. I used to go with a ganger and then they’d come and get me to take me to another ganger to run his joints for him.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And then go back to it.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Like that.
HB: So, what, what year would this be then, Don?
DH: The end of the war.
HB: ‘45/46.
DH: Yeah ’46.
HB: ’46. Yeah.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Can I just take you back a little bit, Don?
DH: Yes. Yes. Yes.
HB: You know, before you joined you were in Acton. You would have gone through the Blitz.
DH: Oh yes.
HB: And your family. You had bombing around Acton.
DH: Yeah. We had a bomb in the bottom of the garden [laughs].
HB: In the bottom of the garden.
DH: Well, I had a big garden.
HB: Oh right. Well, yeah.
DH: We had a long garden.
HB: Yeah.
DH: It must have been about a hundred feet long. Something like that.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And the bomb was at the bottom. It did kill a boy. Sixteen year old in the house opposite [unclear]
HB: Yeah.
DH: He got caught, you know.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Terrible. Yeah. I was there when the fires were roaring like hell. A big red glow in the docks.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Yeah.
HB: And so, so obviously you’ve come through that. Did you actually ever fly a live, I’ll call it a live operation to actually drop bombs?
DH: No.
HB: Right. Right. So, you come towards the end of the war. You’re what by now? You’re nineteenish. Twentyish. What about girlfriends?
DH: No.
HB: Social life.
DH: Not interested.
HB: Did you not have a social life in the RAF?
DH: No. The only social life was in a pub in Lincoln.
HB: Right. Right. Right. Yeah.
DH: And it was in the cattle market. There used to be a cattle market.
HB: Yeah.
DH: There was a cattle market in Lincoln and there was a pub in the cattle market.
HB: So, yeah, so you come to the end of the war. You’ve gone back to OC Summers and you’re now doing a jointer, a jointer’s job and did you, did you just carry on with them then?
DH: Them. Yeah. For forty years.
HB: Forty years.
DH: Yeah. Because they count service as working for them.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: That was, oh before, before the forty years I was made a ganger and I went in to a gas works which I never expected.
HB: Oh right.
DH: Because that was a vastly different type of job. You do all kinds of heavy lifting. Crane work and everything else.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Now, I was the ganger there. The original ganger was ill and died and I took over.
HB: Right.
DH: Directly I took over they started to do big work. I ended up with, you know twenty five men doing different jobs.
HB: Yeah.
DH: I couldn’t cope because I couldn’t be everywhere at once.
HB: No. No.
DH: So, I asked the governor who I knew personally, I asked him if he could get me some men with knowledge. And one of the men he sent in was a ganger that I worked for.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And he came, he came in and he says, ‘Hello Don.’ I said, ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘Christ, I haven’t seen you — ’ because he was very experienced. And he said, ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘Don’t let it worry you.’ He said, ‘You’ve got the responsibility. Not me.’
HB: Yes.
DH: See. And he was a very nice bloke.
HB: Yeah.
DH: He really was.
HB: Yeah.
DH: I mean, we used to go fishing together. We went, particularly when we worked night work I drove him home in the morning and then we’d drive out. —
HB: Oh right.
DH: And go fishing.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Anyway, Sammy Jefferies his name was. A really, a nice bloke. And he was [pause] amazed at the work I was doing. We had a forty eight inch main, gas main which gathered all the gas out the tanks into pumps, in to a main and so forth. And I had to cut a bit out of the gas main. We used to cut. Put a collar on and then put another bit of pipe in and draw the cord up. And that’s the first forty eight inch joint I’d run.
HB: Right.
DH: And what we had to do was we had a twelve inch ladle. Twelve inch. Quite deep. We filled that up first and then one bloke stood there, one bloke stood there with another nine inch ladle to top me up if I said so. Because if I couldn’t see that we were going to run it we could run out of lead so we pulled it in to my ladle and then I ran it.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So we did it. And the senior engineer in the gas works he had done a bit of district work, what we called district work and he stood there the whole time that I got it apart. Because we put gas bags up the main.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: To stop gas coming through. Well, we shut the valves but I mean —
HB: Yeah.
DH: If they leaked.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And that was me. I came. They took me out of the works, Summers and put me in charge of a gang that’s going on holiday. A gang of men. So, I did that. Then they sent me to another one by St Pancras Station where there was a T-junction. And the lid was around but it was leaking bad. So the main there was eighteen. Eighteen. Eighteen inch. What I had to do was shut it off. So I ordered twenty four inch bags to put in there so that a twenty four inch bag would fill it.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Up.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Take the lid off. Re-drill it. Put new bolts in. Whip it out. And put it in. You’d be surprised. It’s really quite a technical job.
HB: I wouldn’t be surprised. I’d be terrified.
DH: Bloody hell. But after I’d been there for forty years John Laing —
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Bought Summers because we were making money. So, they bought OC Summers. I lost [pause] well, twenty one years pension because Summer’s pension wasn’t as active to buy me equipment.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. I see what you mean. Yeah.
DH: So this posh speaking man from Laing came down to one of Summer’s depots which I was then responsible for all depots and he came down and he said, ‘Well, I’m afraid this is what is going to be.’ I said, ‘No. It isn’t.’ I said, ‘You’ve knocked twenty one years off my pension,’ I said. ‘And that’s not on,’ I said, ‘And I’ve got with me several agents who have got over twenty years on sites and I want twenty years pension.’ He said, ‘Are they the agents that’s running the area?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’ll have to see what I can do.’ And if they all packed up the jobs would stop.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: And eventually he came back and he said, ‘We’ve made arrangements that when you do get to retirement we will give you a gift of money to go in to your pension. Not to you. To the pension.’
HB: Right.
DH: No.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Actually, they did. I did do well in a way. The firm because the old managing director came with the job, got six thousand pound.
HB: Right. Right.
DH: When you put it in the figures to get six thousand pound like that meant a little bit each month. Only a little bit.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: But there you go.
HB: Yeah. So, so you’ve, we’ve gone up to retirement. But you must have got married at some stage.
DH: Oh yes. I did. Oh yes. She was a typist in the gas works.
HB: So that would be, what? Nineteen —
DH: Oh God.
HB: Fifty something.
DH: A bit later than that I think. Well, you can work it out if you like. I didn’t get married until I was thirty eight.
HB: Oh right. Right. So you were thirty eight. Right. Well, yeah. Yeah. That’s, yeah, yeah so you —
DH: My wife.
HB: You were well on. Yeah.
DH: Yeah. And because I’d lived in a house all my life I could not live a flat.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And she had three boys.
HB: Oh right. Right.
DH: Eighteen, sixteen and fifteen. And I said to her, I said, ‘I can’t live in a flat.’ She said, ‘What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘We’re going to buy a house.’ She said, ‘We haven’t got any money.’ I said, ‘I know we haven’t.’ I said, ‘But I know what I’m doing. We’ll go and find a house first. Then we’ll go to Lambeth Borough Council and because this is a flat owned by Lambeth Borough Council they’ll willingly give us the money so that we get out.’
HB: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: It’s true. That is what they did.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And then the first house we bought was in Mitcham, Surrey and it was six thousand pound [laugh] And don’t laugh but that six thousand pound.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But that was a hell of a drain on the money.
HB: Oh, it would have been yeah in those days. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: So, yeah and then the firm decided to make me the depot manager of Watford.
HB: At Watford. Right.
DH: Yeah. But on condition I moved.
HB: Right.
DH: Because I had to be near it because we were on duty day and night. Still mending gas mains.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: So, the pleasant surprise was that it was the firm’s solicitor that dealt with the sale. That means that they paid.
HB: That saved you a few pounds that way. Yeah.
DH: Oh yes. Yes.
HB: Right.
DH: So, we lived in Bushey Mill Lane, Bushey. We lived in there for quite a long time.
HB: Right.
DH: I don’t know how long. Graham would probably tell you.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And we bought a house in Slip End which is near Luton.
HB: Right.
DH: Lovely house. Beautiful house. It was ideal. The first job we did was have double glazing.
HB: Because of the airfield. The airport. Yeah.
DH: Yeah. That was the first job. And unfortunately, she didn’t like it.
HB: Oh dear.
DH: It was a lovely house. You remember it. You liked it didn’t you?
Other: What I remember of it. Yeah.
DH: It was a really nice house. Four bedrooms. About two garages. Lovely. Anyway, she didn’t like it. Move. So we had to find somewhere to move to. So we moved to Sawbridgeworth.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So that is three miles north of [pause] Oh God. Shopped there long enough. Harlow.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Yeah. So, it wasn’t far from Harlow. Three miles. But it was a lovely little village.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Beautiful little village. And it had a direct train line to London.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Which of course is a benefit.
HB: Absolutely. Yeah.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. So you, so we’ve got we’re sort of coming to the end of that part. Just take you right back. Right back. Just something that’s sitting in my mind. When you went, when you did your training and you ended up at the Radio School at Hereford.
DH: Yeah.
HB: You, you were actually doing wireless operator training.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Operator training.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Did you do any air gun training at all there?
DH: No.
HB: No. So you were doing your wireless operator with a view eventually like a lot of them did you would go wireless operator and then you’d do an air gunner course and then you’d be wireless operator air gunner. Right. So I’m about right thinking like that. When they, when you said it’s not, you know it’s not working for me. I’m, you know I’m not happy with it. Did they ever give you a reason why they put it down as lack of moral fibre?
DH: No.
HB: They never gave you a reason.
DH: Never. I didn’t know they did it.
HB: Right.
DH: Until somebody found out for me.
HB: Right. Because were you keeping a logbook or a diary at the time?
DH: No.
HB: No? How strange.
DH: Yeah.
HB: How strange.
DH: No. It’s, it’s stamped across my documents. Where every they are or whatever they are.
HB: Right. That’s [pause] yeah I’ve, it’s just it suddenly, suddenly came to me. I’ve just never heard of that before. Ever. But then to become a rear gunner on a Lancaster. It’s a little bit contradictive to some extent.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Well, look I think we’ve come to a sort of a, bit of a natural conclusion, Don and thanks ever so much for tell me that to consider, considering that before we turned the tape recorder you said you thought that you wouldn’t be able to remember anything I think you’ve done really well. I really do. I think you’ve done well. And it’s, and it’s interesting that you’ve done Operation Manna feeding the Dutch, you’ve done Operation Exodus bringing the prisoners of war back because people only ever think of the Lancasters steaming off in to the night dropping bombs and like you say they were the humanitarian side of it.
DH: Yeah.
HB: As well. Yeah.
DH: I think that’s important.
HB: It is. It’s very important.
DH: And when you look at it the ones we picked up in Belgium some of them were ex-RAF.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: It’s inevitable isn’t it really when you think about it because the planes came down.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And they were put in the prison camps.
HB: Yeah. You were bringing your own home. Well, Don thank you ever so much and we are going to stop the recording because it is nine minutes past four and I think you’ve done an exceptional job, Don and thank you very much. Very useful.
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 Donald Raymond Harris
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
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
2019-05-08
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AHarrisDR190508
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
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01:20:56 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Donald was born in Acton, London. He stayed at school until he was fourteen and then worked as a tea boy/general help for O. C. Summers, a firm that laid gas mains in Slough. When that job ended, he worked for another ganger in Shepherds Bush. Soon after he heard that one of his brothers was missing in Burma.
When Donald was sixteen, he joined the local Air Training Corps and later went to St. John’s Wood, where he was entered as a wireless operator / air gunner. He did his basic training at RAF Bridlington and was then posted to a wireless school in Hereford. While there he was taken ill and sent to hospital. On his recovery he asked to be re-mustered as an air gunner and was sent to the Isle of Sheppey to be trained on a Napier. He was then posted to RAF Bridgnorth gunnery school. After finishing the course, he was sent home until he was summoned to form a crew. The crew was posted to RAF Halton where they flew on Wellingtons. Their next posting was to RAF Wittering where they transferred to Lancasters. Donald was then posted to 625 Squadron at RAF Scampton. The squadron flew to Belgium and later to Italy to bring prisoners of war home. They also took part in Operation Manna over Holland. On returning to England the crew were split and Donald was posted to RAF Uxbridge and then demobbed. He went back to work at O. C. Summers until his retirement. At the age of 38 Donald married a typist who also worked for O. C. Summers.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Belgium
Italy
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Shropshire
England--Yorkshire
England--London
Netherlands
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Northamptonshire
England--London
England--Kent
England--Kent
Contributor
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Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
625 Squadron
97 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
crewing up
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Bridlington
RAF Eastchurch
RAF Halton
RAF Scampton
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/313/3470/AParkerF171130.1.mp3
635e5f3d0ac87161b2c09a1fa702809b
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
Parker, Frederick
F Parker
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Frederick Parker (1922 - 2017, 1106402 Royal Air Force).
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-30
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Parker, F
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is an interview between Harry Bartlett, on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre, and Mr Frederick Parker, who was a member of 1 Group in the RAF during the war. Fred Parker was born 15th of July 1922, his serial number was 1106402. The interview is taking place at [redacted] Loughborough. The time now is 10.50 and Mr Parker has just been telling me about his younger life. It’s the, sorry, it’s the 30th of November. Right Mr Parker, so you were born in Skegness.
FP: Yes. Cavendish Road, Skegness.
HB: At Cavendish Road, and you went to primary school there.
FP: That’s right.
HB: Just tell me again what you were doing, ‘cause you left school at how old?
FP: About twelve.
HB: And what were you doing, before you, before the war?
FP: We were, I was always working either with the lifeboats or looking after them.
HB: Right. And did you do some work on the fish quays?
FP: On the?
HB: On the fish quays?
FP: Oh no, never, none of that.
HB: With the fishing boats? No?
FP: No. I know nearly all of the people, Jack Barron, he was the one that covered everything.
HB: Right. And then you became part of a sort of a group of volunteers building pill boxes.
FP: That’s right.
HB: And where was that?
FP: That was, they were actually building them at Mablethorpe, and the cement and the gravel and the stuff like that, that was transported from Chapel St Leonards. My sister, my sister’s boy, he was only about, what would he be, thirteen, and he was younger than I.
HB: Right. And how old was he?
FP: He was only about thirteen.
HB: [Laugh] Different times, yeah. And you did that up until - when did you actually join up to the RAF?
FP: I went to Lincoln to join up, when I joined up, any record of the date there when I joined up?
HB: I haven’t got a date when you joined up, I’ve got very little information Fred.
FP: Oh.
HB: How old were you when you joined up?
FP: Well to tell you the truth I can’t give you that information because I don’t know it myself. What, I was sent from Skegness to Lincoln, the main RAF station at Lincoln and then from there we were despatched to Blackpool to get our uniforms.
HB: Yeah. Did you do some training at Blackpool?
FP: On the beach, yeah, not the beach, on the Promenade. Learned how to use a rifle and all that.
HB: Yeah. So you did your basic training at Blackpool and then where did you go for your next lot of training?
FP: I went to RAF Silloth, in Cumberland, and there I took over the tow target section.
HB: Right. So you were in the tow target section, at Silloth. And what was your actual job there, Fred?
FP: Putting the targets on, picking them up.
HB: Where were the targets Fred?
FP: The target actually was, when, when the drogue was stopped, it came down, we’d pick it up and we’d count the different colours on it, the different colour and then the tracer, armour piercing, all that, to know, what they’d been, fired at you.
HB: And were these drogues dropped from the air or were they in the sea?
FP: Into the, the tow targets, they were, when I say dropped from the air, [pause] say that again to me.
HB: Were, were the drogues, the targets -
FP: They dropped from the air with a special device called a naseby air gun and what happened was, it was a cushion effect, it had a tube and running through that tube there was a slanted cut and then another two pieces then and when the disk went down the wire to, it hit the drogue and did a cushion effect, like I said, coming forwards, backwards and cut the cable.
HB: Ah, right. So it was towed behind an aircraft, and after, who was shooting at it?
FP: Who was shooting?
HB: Who was shooting at the target?
FP: They were, who were, [pause] it’s got to be, it’s got to be batches of crews isn’t it.
HB: Yeah. So other aircraft would come along and they would fire at the target?
FP: That’s right. They would, no, not fire at it. We would go along and fire at a target similar to the one that I told you about and then, so that we could get the best result, know how far away to start firing.
HB: Right. Ah, right. Yes, I understand. So, what were you doing in the aircraft when that was being towed?
FP: Well, keeping my bloody head down! [Laughter] Because you could see the trace – have you ever seen tracers being fired? Well when tracers are being fired they’re red hot, they’re a rich browny colour and the idea was that, we -
HB: So you just kept your head down in the aircraft? So did you sort of launch the target when you were up in the air or -
FP: Oh no, you got out, you got that far down in the cockpit as possible.
HB: Right. So what kind of aircraft were they?
FP: Martinet.
HB: Martinets, right. So you were up in the cockpit area.
FP: That’s right, just behind the pilot.
HB: Just behind the pilot, right.
FP: Giving him all the messages with a long pencil.
HB: A long pencil.
FP: Anything you want to tell him, you use a pencil. I know it seems silly.
HB: So you’re sort of making it look as if you’re poking him with the pencil, is that what you did?
FP: Yes.
HB: Oh right, what, a sort of morse code in pencil, jabbing him with the pencil. So were you receiving messages in the aircraft?
FP: The idea of tow targets was that we should be prepared for when the Germans came over and then what we did, we tried to make it so that our fellows knew what was happening. Like, we would take them up in the, this is when you’re in the flight, you’d take ‘em up, blind, in cloud and all that kind of stuff, and get this guy or guys to come along and try to shoot you down, but he couldn’t shoot us down because they were terrible! [Laugh]
HB: So did you do that all through the war?
FP: Yes.
HB: From, so how many years do you think you did that?
FP: Oh, I lived in, what would it be, I can’t exactly remember how many years, a good few. About six? Between four and six.
HB: Right. So you must have joined around about 1941 then, round about there.
FP: Yes.
HB: So all your time, spent, initially, you know, in the first part of the war, was up at Silloth, up to, did you say Maryport earlier on?
FP: Maryport, that was near London, that was another one of [unclear]. These bases were kept so that the crew if they were shot down, we could get an air sea rescue job on to them as quick as possible.
HB: So you would go out and search for downed aircrew.
FP: Oh yes.
HB: Right. And yeah, so you were stationed up there. Did you then get moved south ready for D-Day?
FP: No. Lossiemouth.
HB: You went to Lossiemouth, yeah. And what were you doing at Lossiemouth?
FP: Not very much, the, the, just after the Japanese surrender.
HB: Right. So that would be ’40 -
FP: So everybody was making whoopee because the war was going to be over.
HB: So when did you go to France, Fred?
FP: When?
HB: Yes.
FP: I was sent to France. I was sent to France by our country and I went to France but when I came home and finished, you know, in the Army, I went back as a civilian because I knew all the answers and how to get hold of the gear and everything, then they took me on.
HB: So that was for the construction site.
FP: Yes.
HB: So did you end up, you ended up in France in 1945, just after D-Day?
FP: Yes. I was at [indecipherable] La Visinet.
HB: La Visinet.
FP: That’s a name you can’t forget.
HB: And what were you doing at La Visinet?
FP: Hiding from the German people and then we were, one of the many things is back and forwards, back to all aircraft too.
HB: Right. La Visinet, right. So you were hiding from them.
FP: Pardon?
HB: You were hiding from them.
FP: Not hiding from them, just keeping out of the way of them because there were still German people on the main land in France.
HB: Right. So how long after D-Day did you get into France, Fred?
FP: I was sent to France.
HB: Yeah, what, on D-Day, or just after D-Day.
FP: Yeah, D-Day.
HB: Right. So you stayed in, you stayed over, you came back to England, to Lossiemouth, is that where you got demobbed?
FP: I was posted to Lossiemouth.
HB: From France.
FP: From France.
HB: So in that bit, after D-Day, and before you came back to Lossiemouth, what were you doing in France at that point?
FP: What were we doing? Well we, I was with a, this French woman and I spent most of my time with her.
HB: Yeah, did, what were you doing in the RAF, between?
FP: By that time the RAF in La Visinet it was just a few people. The signs of battle by aeroplanes and things like that that, they were long since gone. We had a job feeding our own, the troops on the land and shoeing them, stuff like that you go out and get them and [pause].
HB: So, right, so you came back to Lossiemouth and then you were sent to Blackpool to be demobbed.
FP: That’s right.
HB: And where did you go from demob, when you were demobbed? Can you remember what year that was?
FP: When I was demobbed er, no I can’t remember.
HB: Did you go, you went to demob did you go on leave and go home or did you?
FP: Went on leave, from Blackpool Distribution Centre, where they give you the clothes and all that.
HB: So where did you go after you were demobbed?
FP: I went to Bridge Motor Bodies in London and got a job as a welder.
HB: Right, so you worked down in London for a while.
FP: Pardon?
HB: You worked in London for a while.
FP: Yes.
HB: Can you remember when you went back, what date, what sort of year you went back to France then, after that?
FP: Well it would be, [pause] it was, seven was in there somewhere.
HB: What, 1947 do you think.
FP: Yes. I think so, ’47.
HB: Obviously I’ll look some of this up, if I can, on the record. [Cough] When, what rank were you when you were demobbed, Fred?
FP: I was, I was a Corporal.
HB: Corporal?
FP: The other men were, I had were, was, what was it, [pause] I suppose AC2.
HB: AC2, right. And that was the rank when you were demobbed?
FP: Yes. No, LAC. LAC.
HB: Right, well thanks, that’s really interesting Fred.
FP: It’s not, because I’ve got nothing permanent, haven’t got a good picture for you.
HB: No, no, no, it’s your story, Fred, it’s your story, it’s what you can remember. We all get a little bit.
FP: I certainly am. I certainly am.
HB: Did you actually go into any of the bombers? The Lancasters and the Halifaxes?
FP: Yes. I used to lay on the tail of a Martinet, or a Spitfire, to stop it from -
HB: To stop it lifting, yeah, when they were winding the engine up.
FP: Lifting. When they were revving it up.
HB: And that was all up at Silloth and Maryport, places like that.
FP: We had, we had oh, Hurricanes, Spitfires, Martinets, Oxfords, and all that.
HB: Hmm. So, right.
FP: I’m making hard work of this for you.
HB: No, no. It’s your story Fred. It’s your story, it’s how you want to tell me, and what you can remember. Did you do any training as an air gunner?
FP: No.
HB: You didn’t, right.
FP: No, but believe me I have seen more tracer bullets in flight at close range, [laughter] and I’ve had no training for that.
HB: I mean, can I take you back a bit Fred, I’m intrigued with this long pencil business with the pilot. Just tell me how that worked.
FP: Well, you got a sliding cabin and that’s the canopy as he enter to tell the guy that he want in, you can’t do it when you’re firing bullets, but you can do it by giving him a poke with a pencil.
HB: And then you can tell him what, which way to turn?
FP: You know, you would, couple of sharp pokes and then try and you know, you’ve had enough of it, you’ve got to get out of it, because some of these young guys, they weren’t looking to make, they weren’t looking to do the job properly, they just want to go up there and fire as many bloody rounds off as they can.
HB: Right, and did you do any firing from the Martinets or were they, was that just towing the target?
FP: That’s just towing the target.
HB: Well that’s really interesting Fred. What I’ll do, I’ll end the [cough].
FP: We had a, flight written book, should be around somewhere, every time you took off, you signed the register and you went and did your tow targeting, see, and then come back, and then got the tables ready to do some more. You had to pack the parachute and all that.
HB: Well you’d need a parachute in that job! Did you lose any planes when you were there?
FP: Martinet.
HB: Did you lose any Martinets?
FP: Quite a lot, and nice, good friends. Quite a lot of them.
HB: And the pilots of the Martinets, were they always the same or did they then go on to fly other aircraft?
FP: Well, the pilots were usually officers, but I outranked them. I think they were put on rest, given a light job and then most probably put them back on afterwards.
HB: So they’ve come away from being shot at and they’re flying a plane that’s being shot at! And that was light duties!
FP: Believe me, when I say shot at, you could say that. I don’t know whether you’ve ever, if you’ve ever seen tracers being fired at night time – it’s frightening.
HB: Yeah. So, [cough] you must have, you must have seen a lot of people come through.
FP: And not come back.
HB: Yeah, and get, so they were going from there -
FP: We had a lot of our own, ‘cause we had these Polish aircraft, and they were training and of course we only wanted a bit more of that because they were going up and flying over there and helping us [emphasis] out.
HB: Hmm. Yeah.
FP: But they were mad, they were, the Poles, they were mad. Screaming and bawling and shouting, firing anywhere.
HB: Oh dear, right, yeah. So, you’re flying up and down off the west coast, off Cumberland and I presume you did most of this over the sea did you?
FP: That’s right.
HB: And then you moved south, to go to France.
FP: Yes.
HB: So did you move down before D-Day, or did you go down after [emphasis] D-Day?
FP: Before.
HB: Right, and what were you doing, were you still towing targets down there?
FP: Was I still? Oh yes.
HB: And can you remember where you were based down there?
FP: RAF Silloth.
HB: Right, now, that’s really interesting Fred. If it’s all right with you, I’m going to take a photograph of your medals, ‘cause we don’t take anything away, we, everything stays here, going to take a photograph of your medals, and if I can, if you’ll let me, I’ll take a photograph of you as well. How’s that?
FP: Oh, yeah.
HB: Good man. Right, let me get a, let me just finish.
FP: I’m sorry it’s not been a rapid response.
HB: No! Fred, Fred, you don’t need to worry about that. You don’t need to worry about that. It’s your story and it’s what you can remember.
FP: I don’t want to be down here on what they call a goose chase. Everything I’ve put on there, it really happened.
HB: Yeah. That’s not a problem. That’s not a problem Fred. I’m just gonna finish the interview, it’s 11.20, I’ll just turn the tape recorder off.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AParkerF171130
Title
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Interview with Frederick Parker
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:28:51 audio recording
Creator
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Harry Bartlett
Date
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2017-11-30
Description
An account of the resource
Fred Parker was born in Skegness and worked with boats and built pillboxes before the war. He later joined the Royal Air Force and served as ground personnel, where he worked at an air gunnery training unit at RAF Silloth with target tugs. Fred spent time in Cumberland, Scotland and France and he talks about some of the people he came across and the loss of friends. Fred went to work in France and London after the war.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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France
Great Britain
England--Cumbria
England--Lincolnshire
Scotland--Moray
Temporal Coverage
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1941
1944
1945
Contributor
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Anne-Marie Watson
Carolyn Emery
1 Group
air gunner
aircrew
ground personnel
Martinet
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Silloth
Spitfire
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1222/12028/PSpencerGC1901.2.jpg
8083fea68b27ab2d47336859883af7a0
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1222/12028/ASpencerGC190123.2.mp3
836491e6db78df25fa3408cce2d0955e
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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Spencer, Geoffrey Charles
G C Spencer
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Leading aircraftsman Geoffrey Spencer (b.1925, 1735606 Royal Air Force). He served as a flight mechanic and fitter with 49 Squadron at RAF Fiskerton and 189 Squadron at RAF Fulbeck.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2019-01-23
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Spencer, GC
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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HB: This is an interview for International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive between Harry Bartlett and Geoffrey Charles,
GS: Spencer.
HB: Spencer. We’re at Sutton Coldfield. It’s the 23rd of January 2019. Right Geoff, the floor’s yours, so I understand you come from this sort of area anyway, before the war.
GB: Well I were born in Birmingham and I lived in Erdington before I moved to Sutton Coalfield.
HB: Right.
GS: But I joined the RAF from when I lived in Erdington and the first place I went to was Cardington for eight weeks’ square bashing and then they moved me to Cosford, RAF Cosford and I did a flight mechanic’s course.
HB: You know before you joined, did you actually go to school in Erdington?
GS: Oh yeah, when I was in Erdington, from when I was fifteen, I joined the Air Training Corps and I did three years with the Air Training Corp prior to going in to the RAF.
HB: So did you get called up or did you volunteer?
GS: I volunteered.
HB: Why did you volunteer?
GS: I don’t know, because they called me, one day after me eighteenth birthday, which I thought was a bit naughty! But that’s it, they sent me there. But anyway -
HB: Sorry, where was your ATC unit?
GS: At Dunlop, Erdington, Dunlop, the big Dunlop factory there, which is still there, part of it and we did all our Air Training Corp training which was a Sunday parade and whatever we did in the week, taking exams and things to get what they call PNB status which was pilot, bomb aimer and bomb aimer and you had to take various exams to pass that exam and you were given a proficiency badge then, when you’ve acquired that, and then you had to wait around and we went to various squadrons, RAF squadrons, Swinderby was one, you know Swinderby, don’t you.
HB: I do, I do.
GS: And we also, oh where else, oh, Fradley, RAF Fradley.
HB: Don’t know Fradley, no.
GS: Litchfield.
HB: Oh right!
GS: 27 OTU that was. I went to that one.
HB: Ah, right! So when you did the ATC training, did you get to fly?
GS: Yes, we did fly. Actually we flew from, in Wellington Bombers when we were at Fradley, time expired Wellington bombers, the wings flapped, they were terrible things, and we went up without chutes. we used to just go down to the airfield at night and cadge flights. And then after that I flew a lot when I was on the squadron at Fiskerton, and I also flew in York aircraft. When, when we flew out to, to Singapore, we flew out by York aircraft from Lyneham, which is still going apparently, but it took five days.
HB: Yeah, I can imagine. So you did your ATC training, you got called up, what were mum and dad doing at the time?
GS: My father was a toolmaker and I worked for him as an apprentice.
HB: Ah right. Had he got his own business?
GS: He’d got his own business, yeah. Not a very big business, but it was a business, then in 1950 he sold it all and moved down to Cornwall, farming.
HB: So your mum and dad are there, you’ve been called up a day after your eighteenth birthday.
Nicola: He’d volunteered to go. Wasn’t called up.
GS: I volunteered for the RAF, yes. I’ve got a sister but she was in the ATS.
HB: Right. Is she older than you, is she older than you?
GS: Yes, three years older than me.
HB: That would explain it. So you go and report, and they say here’s your travel warrant.
GS: Yep, I volunteered at Dale End in Birmingham, right in the centre, that’s it. Then, I say, went to Cardington, eight weeks square bashing and then I went to Cosford and did a flight mechanics course. I don’t know whether you know, but in the RAF there were five trades starting with Group One which was the expert and Group Two which my lot, flight mechanics. Three, four and five you finished up with the bog cleaners, you know, yeah, that was group five, they didn’t do anything. Well from Cosford I went to Fiskerton, 49 Squadron. And I was put into the hangars there servicing the Lancasters, I did a fifty hour service. And from there I was sent out on the flights, B Flight I was on, servicing the Lancasters before they flew on ops. You’re okay, getting all this down are you?
HB: Yep, it’s, I just have to keep an eye on the batteries, that’s all, Geoff.
GS: At Fiskerton. And I used to fly there, used to fly at night time. You had to sign a form, Form 700, to say that you’d serviced the aircraft and you were satisfied. And the pilots invariably said have you signed the 700, yes I have to, said right go and get a parachute, you’re flying with me, if you’ve serviced the aircraft, I want to make quite sure.
HB: His guarantee then!
GS: That was the guarantee. I used to fly that was it. Anyway I used to watch them go out every night. Count how many came back and there was always a few missing.
HB: How did you feel about that?
GS: Not very happy. And then, from Fiskerton, they had FIDO. Do you remember that? You remember FIDO?
HB: Well, I remember it, but some people don’t, what was FIDO.
GS: FIDO was two pipelines joining along the runway which they set alight, which cleared the fog.
Nicola: With fuel dad, was it? Did it, was it fuel?
GS: Hundred octane fuel they used, I don’t know how many thousand gallons every time. One time we went to nearby Waddington, you know that don’t you, doing engine change on a Lancaster and then the pilot said well I’m on ops tomorrow so I’ll fly you back, and during the time from Waddington to Fiskerton, which was only about ten mile, the fog came down and the pilot said - he phoned down the ops tower - and they said well we’ll light FIDO for you, which they did. But the thing is when the fog clears it creates a heat haze, and the pilot said it’s gonna be a bumpy landing.
HB: Oh no!
GS: So we made the approach and he said the alternative, he said, I shall have to crash land it. And the sergeant that was with me at the time, he said, if you do that, we’ve just done an engine change, he said you’ll have to change the bloody lot! [Laughter] Which was quite true. Anyway, he made a very bumpy landing, the brakes failed, so we turned off the runway at about fifty mile an hour and he says hold on we might not be able to stop, but he stopped right in front of the watch tower. And at that time, back at Fiskerton the squadron split up. 49 Squadron went to Syerston, you know Syerston, and 189 Squadron which I was seconded to went to Fulbeck, which was south of Waddington. That’s where you’ve got that bit mixed up I think. [Sounds of paper rustling]
HB: And that was with 189 Squadron.
GS: Yeah. Who were also at Bardney.
HB: Yeah, that’s sort of, answered that sort of little hiccup there.
GS: Well from there they sent me on a Fitter One course at Henlow, which puts it in the right order.
HB: I’m just interested in that Geoff. When you went to RAF Cosford, they would train you as a flight mechanic on all the various engines, the Merlins, the Hercules, you know, all those engines. So when you actually got posted out, you were working on, what sort of engines were you working on then, with the Lancs?
GS: Merlins.
HB: You were working on the Merlins.
GS: Merlin 20s.
HB: So what was the difference between doing your training as a flight mechanic and your training as a fitter?
GS: I don’t know, it was just more sophisticated, more intricate details on the Merlin engine. For instance, I can remember doing a block change on the Merlin engine, which if you’d been a flight mechanic was unheard of. We were in, one of the aircraft came into the main hangar and we did a, and a V12, and we did a block change, which is quite intricate.
HB: So the block is the bit where the pistons go up and down.
GS: That’s right, that’s it, six on each, which was quite a big job doing that. Which we managed okay and that’s when after Fulbeck they sent me to Henlow on that Fitter One’s course. Where did I go from there?
HB: Did you have, obviously you passed the course.
GS: Yeah, I did, I passed with honours on that actually, I did quite well.
HB: Did you get promoted and more money?
GS: I got promoted; I got my props. I was an LAC, so I was quite chuffed with that. And then I went to Holmsley South, now that’s a place in the New Forest, right down the south. I was only there a month, then I went to Duxford for about a month, which was on Spitfires.
HB: Was this all the while working on the engines?
GS: Yes.
HB: For just like a month.
GS: I was a Group one Tradesman then see, I was more useful to them. And then, now where did I go, oh, I went to a place called Hinton in the Hedges which is in Oxfordshire. And when I go there - no aircraft - and the whole airfield was full of airc – of lorries and all the maintenance stuff and what they were doing, they were, all the airfield’s completely covered in all sorts of lorries and all sorts, aircraft carriers and all this sort of business and they’d bring them round into the main hangar, which was still there, service them and put them out back into the airfield and eventually they were dispersed to the place that they wanted them. But, I was wasting my time there, of course.
HB: I was going to say what were they using you for then Geoff?
GS: Well they were using me for, to going out on my bicycle to any of the lorries that were, various types of lorries, bring them into hangars, spray them, blokes spraying, and going out again.
HB: Group One tradesman doing that.
GS: I was a Group One tradesman.
HB: Just slightly moving that cause it’s just making a bit of a noise.
GS: That’s better. Absolutely fine. Yes.
HB: I’m just. So you’re only there a short time then, I presume.
GS: Yep, and then from there, I went to Lyneham and they posted me out to Singapore.
HB: How much, how much notice did you get of that?
GS: Well I don’t know really, I never took time of notice.
HB: So what year do you think that was about?
GS: That was late ’44, because, or late, that’s right, because at that time I as posted out there, went to Lyneham, they dropped the bomb; the atomic bomb.
HB: So that would be ‘45 then.
GS:’ 45. That’s it, that’s it. They dropped the bomb and I flew out to Singapore.
HB: Just take you back to you know, Cosford, Fiskerton and all them. What sort of leave did you get?
GS: Well the usual leave thirty six hour pass, forty eight hour leave. I think I had exp, expo leave before I flew out to Singapore. I think I had fourteen days.
HB: Expo?
GS: Yeah. What do they call it?
HB: Debark? De, Debarkation?
GS: Embarkation!
HB: Embarkation leave. Oh right. So what did you do with your leave, did you come home?
GS: Oh yeah.
HB: Came home. You go to the local dance hall.
GS: Local dance hall and all that.
HB: In your uniform.
GS: I met my wife there, at the local masonic, you know. I had an incident when I were flying out to Singapore. There were two York aircraft went out and there were twenty blokes in each aircraft and we knew each other, forty odd blokes, and we tossed up which aircraft we’d go in. We went to Malta, Habbaniya, what’s, I forget the one in northern India, and then Calcutta. Dumdum, Dumdum airfield, and I elected to go on the first aircraft, on the York that was going to Singapore and the second aircraft didn’t get there: it flew into the Indian Ocean. So that was why, sheer luck, is why I’m still here. And then I did twelve months in Singapore. I had to remuster again then because they didn’t want aircraft fitters then, so I had to remuster as a Fitter Marine and I was on high speed launches wandering around the East Indies, which was quite a good time.
HB: So you went from Lyneham, you flew down through Malta, Middle East, into,
GS: Singapore.
HB: The northern India one and then Singapore. You’re based at Singapore. So you were in what, were you in tents or in quarters?
GS: In quarters, I’ve got some pictures of them actually. We were initially sent out, when we’d gone from Lyneham they told me I was on what they called Tiger Force, which was going to Okinawa which was the nearest point for bombing Tokyo, but because I was in Singapore I didn’t want that because the war had finished with Japan then.
HB: So they just literally took you off aircraft fitting and said -
GS: Fitter marine!
HB: Fitter marine. That’s, what was the big difference with the engines then?
GS: Phew, terrible. There were three Peregrine engines inside the high speed launches, one either side and one at the back of you and it was a hundred and forty degrees in there, so you could only spend ten minutes at a time. When they were going at full throttle, which was thirty knots, you hadn’t got much chance, so you had to come up after ten minutes. It was horrible.
Nicola: What about it, do you remember when you fell in the water dad.
HB: You went overboard did you?
Nicola: You were on, someone backed in to you. Go on.
GS: Well what happened, I was on the quayside, there was a drop in the water of about thirty foot. Some western oriental gentleman I called them, didn’t call them that, backing a lorry up to me he must have seen me, I was looking out to sea and the next minute [slap sound] it hit me and I was in the sea and fortunately there was an officer standing there and he galloped down into the water and dragged me out. Cause it was only about eighteen inches of water.
HB: You were lucky.
GS: It knocked me out virtually. I came round and he said you had a bit of luck there, didn’t you airman. I said yeah, did, I’m glad you got me out. He said look down there, you see all those snakes, he said, they’re all bloody poisonous. [Chuckle] So, sick quarters, and I was okay.
Nicola: You never saw the guy, did you from the truck.
GS: No, the bloke took off, never saw him again.
Nicola: He knew he was in trouble, didn’t he.
HB: So you’re working round, all round Singapore, so you must have had a few trips out to the islands.
GS: Oh yes. Up into Malaya, Penang and Java, Sumatra of course they’ve all changed their names now, haven’t they. So I had twelve months. When I was demobbed, they, I came back by sea. I had to go to a transit camp in Malaya and then came back by sea and it took a month! [Paper shuffling]
Nicola: A month’s cruise then.
GS: I came back on that!
HB: So that’s the, I’ve done it again, I’ve take them off.
GS: Can you spell that?
HB: The Johan van Barneveld.
GS: That’s it.
HB: Looks like bit like an ocean going cruise ship, doesn’t it!
GS: It was only about sixteen thousand ton!
HB: Oh, small!
Nicola: Dad, didn’t you see one of the little boats that you’d serviced, didn’t you see somewhere recently.
GS: Oh yes, I went to Henlow, you know, to the museum there. As you went in, to go in to the museum, on the front was an air sea rescue and the actual [emphasis] one that I sailed in when I was at Singapore.
HB: The same boat?
GS: The same boat, same number: 2528.
Nicola: You didn’t tell them though did you.
GS: No. I knew.
HB: Wow! That’s, so there was a group of you there, you obviously got on well, you know, and so you’d have had to take your leave while you were in Singapore, if you had leave.
GS: I don’t think we did. I was at Seletar, in Singapore. There’s the -
HB: Of course it’s got the flying boats, hasn’t it.
GS: Oh yes. There was a Sunderland. That’s a high speed launch, those sort of things.
HB: So these, this photograph album, we’re going to need to copy all this.
GS: Are you?
HB: There’s one you’d broken.
GS: Yeah, that’s a spit that crash landed. There I am again.
HB: Yes. We’re going to need to copy these I think, Geoff.
GS: These are the -
HB: They are the quarters.
GS: They are the quarters. The Japs had them before we, after, before we got there, first thing they do took all the doors off the bogs so you had no privacy at all. [Laugh]
HB: Ah, right. So, we’ve got you to Singapore, you’ve been on your high speed launches, I think what we’ll do, we’ll just have two minutes pause, right, in the interview, just while get our breath back and then we’ll come back to them. Right, we’ve switched back on, we’ve had a little bit of a break and Nicola, Geoff’s daughter’s just gone off to work, so we’ll just recommence the interview and so we’ve got to the demob in Singapore and all that business, but can we just take you back, back to your airfields, because at one point you did something a bit.
GS: When I was at Fulbeck, we moved from Fiskerton to Fulbeck and I was on duty crew and we had a Stirling bomber come in to be refuelled, and me, being completely new to Stirling bombers, went up in the cockpit, turned the fuel line which I thought was the one, an elephant’s trunk came down and deposit about a hundred gallon of fuel on to the tarmac. [Sigh] And we had a bomb happy, as we used to call them, flak happy, sergeant flight engineer, saw what I’d done, he came up, he said don’t worry about it, so I shoved this fuel line back up into the aircraft and screwed the cock on. I said what about all the fuel on the deck and he said don’t worry about it, so he started the engine up, which in itself was bad enough, it blew the fuel away cause we were way [emphasis] out on dispersal, miles from anywhere you could say, but when Stirling bombers with Hercules engines start up, flames come out, and if it, that bloody aircraft had gone up in bloody flames, so would I!
HB: Blimey! You’d have still been paying for it! Good grief Geoff!
GS: We were on dispersal which was about as far side of the airfield from the Headquarters from about a mile and a half away, this was near Newark, Fulbeck is quite near Newark, and that’s what happened and that was an incident. I told my daughter about it and she was amazed, and I got away with it.
HB: You must have had a few close shaves though.
GS: Oh yeah, I did. Flying the aircraft, we did land with one Lancaster, when we were, where were we? I think it was at Fiskerton, and the undercart folded up and it broke the Lanc up actually, broke the imagine what it did to the props and that.
HB: Was that landing on the main runway or did you get on the grass?
GS: On the main runway, we were going along the runway and the undercart, hydraulics, it just collapsed, and that was dead dodgy. I remember that., but apart from that.
HB: So where would you have been, when that happened, in the Lanc, where would you have been sat?
GS: Usually on the flight engineer’s place because, usually, the flight engineer nearly always went with the pilot on, what do they call it? Air test or fighter affiliation and [cough] that’s when that happened, the undercart folded up, just the one wheel. It did a lot of damage. Props of course went on the port side and that was it.
HB: You got away with that one as well.
GS: I got away with that one as well. But then, from that one as well. And then from then on I made sure I picked the time I went, flew, went on the air test. [Chuckle]
HB: Why was that?
GS: I was getting scared to be quite honest. Yeah. There was another incident we had, I’ve forgotten what it was now. Something to do with Lancasters, but normally was a wonderful aircraft, you know. We had several crews that did a full tour of ops at Fiskerton.
HB: Yeah. Did you, when you were at Fiskerton, did you always maintain the same aircraft or was it just parade in the morning and get one allocated?
GS: When I was servicing them in the hangar, which was called the maintenance hangar. Different aircraft came in to be serviced. Fifty hour service, hundred hour service, hundred and fifty and then a major, major, but when I was on the flight, when you’re on the B Flight, which I went out on, I had to do the flight and, and sign the Form 700 which was meant that you, they didn’t all [emphasis] say you come, you can come fly with me, that was preservation by the pilot, if I’m going to die you’re going to die with me sort of business!
HB: Good incentive to keep you up to speed.
GS: Up to scratch. Cause I can remember quite well, I serviced one Lancaster, I remember it even now, I was on the port engine which you had to get a, you had a big service ladder to get up to it, and I had to fill it, the Lancaster engine got an oil at the back, thirty six gallon, and I went up to check the height of it, put the cap on as I thought and came down, thought nothing of it. And then the regular B Flight mechanic, he said, “everything all right?” I said yeah, he said, “I put that filler cap on properly for you.”
HB: Ooh.
GS: And there’s another incident. I thanked him profusely, I obviously hadn’t locked it properly.
HB: Oh wow!
GS: That could have been trouble. If he’d gone up, flight, and the filler cap had come off -
HB: Difficult.
GS: And I didn’t go on flight affiliation as they called it. They’d have a Lanc going up on air test and they’d have a Spitfire or Hurricane doing aerobatics, simulating getting at the rear gunner. Well I went, I only went up once on that because for the only time, I was sick, sick as a dog and I thought bugger flight affiliation from now on!
HB: So fighter affiliation wasn’t one of your favourites!
GS: No it wasn’t!
HB: So this is when they practiced doing, did they call it corkscrew?
GS: That’s right.
HB: And you were in there when they did that.
GS: I was in the back, I was in the rear turret at the time. It was horrible.
HB: Right, so we’ve gone through, we’ve gone through the squadrons and you’ve gone to Singapore and you’re going to be demobbed and they’ve put you on the troop ship, in Malaya, how long did it take you to get home?
GS: One month. I can remember it ever so well. We went from Singapore to Ceylon as it was then, I’ve forgotten the name of the town, and from then on we flew, we sailed from Ceylon up the Red Sea to Port Said and then across the Med and it was four weeks, and of course all the, everybody’s being demobbed on board that ship, so I can’t remember any details.
HB: Was it, so it wasn’t like one big long, month long party then?
GS: Oh no, oh no. I slept on deck, everybody else was, well most of them, slept in hammocks. And I couldn’t get on in a hammock, so I slept on deck and that was it and I went to East Kirkby and was demobbed.
HB: So you landed back in England.
GS: Southampton.
HB: At Southampton, bunged you on a train.
GS: Train. Up to East Kirkby. Demobbed and I was a civilian.
HB: Did you get your suit?
GS: Yes. Got me suit, and a yellow tie. [Laugh] I remember that ever so well.
HB: Were you still a single man at this time, Geoff?
GS: Yes, oh yes. I was twenty one going on twenty two.
HB: But you’d met your wife before you went out to Singapore. Sorry, what was your wife called?
GS: Hazel.
HB: Hazel, right. So you met Hazel when you were in your uniform looking smart in the dance hall. So you’d obviously been writing, in the force.
GS: Yes. I was running two women at the time! [Laugh]
HB: Were you! Were you now!
GS: I got rid of the one.
HB: Ah right. Was that, that was another one back here was it?
GS: Yeah. They were both back here. I remember I had the two photographs on the side of me bed, on the side of me billet in Singapore, and I used to say to the bloke which do you think’s the best out of those two and they always pointed to Hazel, she’s the homely type they used to say.
HB: Oooh!
GS: And that was it, I married her. We were married sixty three years.
HB: That’s good.
GS: Good going isn’t it.
HB: It is, it is. So you came back to East Kirkby, you’ve been demobbed, back home to?
GS: Back with my father in engineering.
HB: Yep. That’s still in Erdington.
GS: Yeah, and then, that’s right, my dad sold his business moved down to Falmouth as a farmer which didn’t work out: you’ve got to be born into farming and he did ten years before he came back north again.
HB: So what did you do. I mean he went down there in 1950 did he, did you say?
GS: Yes.
HB: You’d stayed in till 47, hadn’t you?
GS: Yes.
HB: So, once he went down there what did you do, did you?
GS: I went. We’d got another, one of dad’s younger [emphasis] brothers, he was in the shoe trade, and I had the option then and I went into the shoe trade for three years. It wasn’t very pleasant because he wasn’t a very pleasant man to work for, so I stayed with him for three years then I went back into toolmaking. I worked for Cincinnati, the big American company, making milling machines and all that.
HB: You obviously enjoyed that.
GS: Yeah. Better it was, yeah.
HB: And that was you till, what, through to retirement I suppose.
GS: Yes, I suppose it was. No! I stayed in the tool making trade, I worked for a company just down there on the estate for twenty seven years.
HB: Wow!
GS: Tool making.
HB: So out of your, you know, I mean it was a difficult time, I mean the war had been running for three, nearly four years when you went in, when you actually got called up, and you’re living in Birmingham which was a big target.
GS: Oh, it was!
HB: So what was it, what, before you joined the RAF what it like living under this threat, really?
GS: Before I went into the RAF, well Birmingham was bombed quite badly, like Coventry. If they missed Coventry it was Birmingham, because all the car industry as you know, is in this area and we were a real target because at that time dad worked for Castle Bromwich Aircraft Factory, which is just down there, making Spitfires, building Spitfires and he worked in the tool room there before he started on his own. That was quite a job.
HB: So where you were living at Erdington, I mean they had bombing in that area, didn’t they.
GS: Oh yes, quite a bit of bombing yeah. We were actually, there was only bombs locally, but none actually where I lived in Hollandy Road, there wan’t much. You’re going back seventy years now you know.
HB: That’s right.
GS: Trying to remember all these things.
HB: Yeah, I mean mum and dad obviously, you know, you’ve got your sister, yourself, you know, there’d be that worry wouldn’t there. What did you do in the evening? Did you ever do fire watching or anything like that?
GS: Yeah. When I was fourteen, when I left school, I was fire watching in the centre of Birmingham. I’d got a job, just a normal job in the, in tool making, er in the shoe industry and they got me fire watching. They gave me a stirrup pump and a bucket of water and go up on the top floor of this building and if they drop incendiaries: put ‘em out. Fourteen years old.
HB: Good grief!
GS: I remember that quite clearly.
HB: Did you leave school, cause obviously you’re at work then, at fourteen, did you leave school with any certificates?
GS: No, I didn’t get School Certificate. I left, I elected not to go to secondary school, which was from fourteen to sixteen, so I left at fourteen from the ordinary council school. I lived at Yardley then, on the south side of Birmingham.
HB: Right, right. Of all your time in the RAF, in Bomber Command Geoff, what do you think was your best time, what was your best bit of being in the RAF?
GS: Well, the activity when I was at Fiskerton. Oh yes, definitely. The fitter’s courses and flight mechanics courses was a chore. Just hard work it was really, but when I get, when I was at Fiskerton and also Fulbeck, and Waddington, which I was there. Waddington was the place to get to because it was an peace, it was an established squadron none of this nissen hut business or anything of that, and that was the place to go. But I wasn’t there long enough to appreciate it. It’s still there, isn’t it. I noticed that when I went to – yeah.
HB: So what, we’ve said that was something you enjoyed, was being busy, and you’ve got all your mates and whatnot, so what did you do, when you weren’t on leave, what did you do for entertainment when you were on the squadron?
GS: We used to go to the camp cinema and, thing I noticed mostly [emphasis] about the camp cinema, you went in there and you couldn’t see the screen for the smoke, cause everybody smoked at that time and I didn’t smoke and me eyes come out and they were watering permanently after that.
HB: Oh right. So that moves us on. What was, what do you think was the worst bit of your service?
GS: When I was at Holmesly South in the New Forest it was my twenty first birthday and I wanted a forty eight hour pass because me wife, me mother had got a big party organised for me. So I went to the SWO, Station Warrant Officer, and asked for a forty hour pass and he refused it. And I remember then I thought, when I get back into civvie street I’ll have you. [Laugh] Never did of course, but I remember it ever so well. He refused me a forty eight hour pass. He knew what it was for but didn’t show any compassion whatsoever.
HB: And what did you think after the war, when the war ended, what did you think the sort of feeling was about Bomber Command?
GS: [Sigh] Well, they lost so many men, in ’42 onwards to the, till D-Day, fifty five thousand men were killed, weren’t they. I, I thought that was absolutely terrible. All the aircrew, I got to knew them, when I was at Fiskerton, by name and they’d go on ops and didn’t come back. It was a horrible feeling all the while. Because at the time, when I was, now where was I, oh yes, at the end of my fitter’s course, yeah, you fixed for time, at, on the fitter’s course at Hen, Hendon, that’s right, near Bedford it is.
HB: Halford?
GS: Henlow, not Hendon, Henlow, near Bedford. I applied to go on a flight engineer’s course, which was accepted, at St Athan. I was posted and I got there: what have you come for? I said I’ve come to do an FE’s course. They said we don’t want any more, so they sent me back. Which was just as well because if I’d have done a flight engineer’s course, I’d have been there and gone on ops, I wouldn’t be here now, would I? There were so many casualties. I can remember one time we lost ninety eight aircraft one night, on ops. Lancasters, mostly.
HB: Hmm. That’s a lot of men.
GS: Well Lancaster aircraft, they’d only got, they’d got four guns in the rear turret, two on the upper turret and two in the front, but they were pathetic compared with German aircraft which had got canons. Twice the fire power. So that was the thing about Lancasters. But apart from that they had the biggest bombload, they could fly at twenty two thousand feet and none of the others couldn’t. If you had a relative that was on Halifaxes, they weren’t a patch on Lancasters, during the war. And Stirlings, they were a joke they were. The rear gunner in a Stirling his expectation of life was about a fortnight. [Whistle] It was awful, wasn’t it.
HB: Hmm. Yeah. So the, when, did you ever do any sort of like Cook’s Tours when you came back? You did?
GS: Yes, I did the one, over Germany. It was a revelation that was. When you flew at about ten thousand feet, something like that, and the debris, there was nothing left, of any of the towns. We didn’t fly over Berlin, but we did all the other ones.
HB: How did you feel about that?
GS: Terrible. You know, you thought why was this, all this necessary? That’s the way you looked at it, you know, because Nazis were the pigs, but an ordinary German, he was just another bloke to me. And that’s the way I feel about that.
HB: Difficult.
GS: Was difficult wan’t there. Is there anything I’ve missed on this?
HB: I was going to say do you want to have a look at your list Geoff, is there, see if we’ve covered what you want to talk about.
GS: [Pause] Karachi was the place I went to in India, on the west coast and then Calcutta on the east coast. Yes. I enjoyed me time when I was in the Air Training Corps 1940 to ’43. Fradley, Cosford. I did a week at Cosford in the Air Training Corps. Swinderby and Bovington. Bovington were, I’ve forgotten what aircraft they were. Twin engined, and I know that you had to wind the undercart up, ninety eight turns, I remember that because they hadn’t got hydraulic, retracting. Hinton in the Hedges was the place that really was a waste of time, with all those aircraft, all those, all those lorries and things. I can remember once, I had to go out on dispersal to bring, bring a lorry in for servicing and I got in it and started it up. I noticed it was in front wheel drive, so I moved out and it dropped on the deck – there was no back wheels on it! [laughter] I just got out and left it. So that’s another place I’d have, could have been a naughty boy! [cough]
HB: Perhaps you were as well you didn’t stay there that long!
GS: It was. Only there about a month. I got promotion while I was there. I remember ever so well. The sergeant, I was after me props, I’d got me one and I was after me LAC, and he asked a question. He said, “What do you know about errors of articulation?” Tell you, I remember this, and I said yes it was there, the Hercules, aircraft where the con rods were in a different position every stroke of the engine. “Good,” he said,” you’ve got that.” And that got me me props.
HB: Did it?
GS: Yes!
HB: So that made you a Leading Aircraftsman.
GS: Group One Leading Aircraftsman, which was quite good. But I should have got me tapes when I was doing the flight engineer’s course. But that was it.
HB: Well I think, it’s quarter past twelve, and I think we’ve sort of come to bit of a natural conclusion Geoff.
GS: Yes.
HB: So, I’m going to terminate the interview now while we just sort your photographs out and how we’re gonna handle them. I want to thank you, honestly, it’s been a really [emphasis] enjoyable interview. You said to me in the break, oh we’ve been all over the place. It doesn’t matter.
GS: It’s very disjointed.
HB: What you’ve told us is important, and it’s also interesting. And we’ll forget quietly about pushing the wrong button for the fuel for the Stirling! So thank you very much.
GS: Well, I wonder about that flight engineer, he was flak happy as they called it during the war. And the fact that we got away with it, I said to him afterwards, I said, what about if, we’d have had flames out the Hercules, we must have had some, but didn’t see them, well that would have been curtains, I said bloody will and I’ll have been with you!
HB: Oh dear! Right, well thanks ever so much Geoff.
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 Geoffrey Charles Spencer
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
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
2019-01-23
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
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ASpencerGC190123, PSpencerGC1901
Description
An account of the resource
Geoffrey Spencer grew up in Birmingham and worked with his father in tool making, carrying out fire watching as a youngster. He joined the Air Force aged 18 in August 1943. After training he served as a flight mechanic and fitter with 49 Squadron at RAF Fiskerton and 189 Squadron at RAF Fulbeck. He worked in the maintenance hanger and on the flights and describes a crash landing in a Lancaster after an air test and an accident while refuelling a Stirling. He was posted to Singapore in 1945 serviced engines on high speed launches. He was de-mobbed in July 1947 and worked in the tool making industry in the UK until he retired.after the war.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Singapore
England--Bedfordshire
England--Birmingham
England--Lincolnshire
England--Shropshire
England--Warwickshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
Format
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00:53:04 audio recording
Contributor
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Anne-Marie Watson
189 Squadron
49 Squadron
bombing
civil defence
Cook’s tour
crash
demobilisation
entertainment
FIDO
fitter engine
flight mechanic
fuelling
ground crew
ground personnel
home front
Lancaster
love and romance
RAF Cardington
RAF Cosford
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Fulbeck
RAF Henlow
RAF Swinderby
Spitfire
Stirling
training
York
-
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2103/34735/PMercierCG2102.2.jpg
b622b7155acd89d066aa0e556c65e3d1
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2103/34735/AMercierCG211021.1.mp3
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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
Mercier, Gordon
Cyril Gordon Mercier
C G Mercier
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Gordon Mercier (1924 -2024). He flew operations as a mid-upper gunner with 171 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2021-10-21
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Mercier, CG
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: It’s Harry Bartlett interviewing Gordon Cyril Mercier on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre at Lincoln. It’s the 21st of October 2021. Gordon is ninety six and three quarters old, and he served from 1943 through to 1947 in Bomber Command and Gordon was a mid-upper gunner. Now, Gordon, now we can make a start? Can you, can you tell me a little bit about your early life please?
GM: Yeah. I was born in Jersey in 1925 and I had a very bad childhood. I was always ill. Always ill. I spent so much time in hospital it was unbelievable. My mother used to say when I was born, the doctor said, ‘You won’t have him long mother but he, but treasure him while you’ve got him.’ And here I am [laughs] ninety six. I came, I went to school in Birmingham, High Street Harborne in Birmingham and I was fourteen at the start of the war. And the moment the war started I helped the ARP people. I used to carry the stirrup pumps for them when I was fourteen. When Mr Churchill came on the phone, on the radio in 1940 to ask for volunteers to join the LDV which was the Local Defence Volunteers sixteen and over. I was fifteen and I went and joined the Home Guard. And I was in the Home Guard until I joined the RAF in 1943. My nickname in the Home Guard was Sealevel, and I spent all those years, and I was a very very good shot. It was amazing. I just, it didn’t matter. I could hit anything. Not with a revolver but with a rifle I could hit anything.
HB: I think just, just to explain your nickname. Do you want, do you want to tell us how tall you are?
GM: [laughs] I’m only about [laughs] I’ve shrunk. I was only about five foot two.
HB: Right.
GM: And I was —
HB: That explains Sealevel.
GM: I was eight stone. I used to, I was eight stone. I boxed at eight stone in the RAF. Anyway, I joined the Home Guard. And then I was in a Protected Occupation so I couldn’t join the forces. The only forces you could join in those days was the submarines or aircrew.
HB: What was your Protected Occupation, Gordon?
GM: I was, I worked in a factory making munitions.
HB: Was that, was that in Birmingham?
GM: In Birmingham. Yes. I worked in factory. From fourteen, I worked in, I was a fitter in the factory.
HB: Do you know the name of the factory?
GM: Belliss and Morcom.
HB: Ah right. Yeah.
GM: Belliss and Morcom. The factory. And I, I decided that I wanted to join the Air Force. I’d always been interested in the Air Force from the very, I’d always had the comics and everything all about the Air Force. I had, “Flight,” every week and all this sort of thing but, so I went to Cardington in March 1943 to take the exam to join the Air Force. I believe there was two hundred of us who came through and fifty two of us finished. And, and as we’d gone, as we’d gone through all the exams, exams, medicals and psychology and you had written exams, and all this sort of thing and you passed at the end. You passed and there was fifty two of us. We took the King’s Shilling on that day, and on that day I joined the Air Force in 1943 at seventeen and a quarter. I was called up very shortly afterwards and I started in the RAF in London. We, it was my first posting to London where we got kitted out and all this sort of thing. Three weeks in London. I did some boxing, got knocked out and decided I didn’t want to do any more boxing after that [laughs] So, and then I was posted to 14 OTU at Bridlington which was the Operational Training Unit at Bridlington, as an aircrew cadet. I believe we had about sixteen weeks there and you passed out [pause] You passed out and I was posted to Bridgnorth for a fortnight. Because it was Bridgnorth I used to come home at nights, at the weekends, and I got seven days jankers for being back late. But I never did the seven days jankers because I was posted the next day to Stormy Down in South Wales. And I’d been there a fortnight when they called me in to the adjutant’s office and said, ‘You were on jankers and you never did it. You start now.’ [laughs]
HB: Oh no.
HB: So, I had —
HB: A long memory.
GM: Yes. I did that, and I don’t know how many trips we did but we flew in Ansons and there were three of us in training. One sat in with the pilot and winded the undercarriage up, one sat in the rest position, and one sat in the turret and you fired two hundred shots. You had collected your two hundred bullets and you painted the bullets a colour. Red, blue and green. And you put your bullets in, and the plane would fly out and you’d shoot the drogue. And you all had a go and you swapped over until you all three had fired and then they dropped the drogue and you had to collect it on the, on the airfield and count your shots, because the, how many red bullets holes, and blue bullet holes, and green bullet holes there were.
HB: Right.
GM: And you got a, you got a score from those bullet holes and we did a lot of flights. They didn’t stint of the training. We did an awful lot of flights. I don’t know. It’s in my logbook but I did an awful lot of flights.
HB: Yeah. Your logbook does list a lot of training flights.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Right, right through.
GM: Right through.
HB: All through the —
GM: Yeah. And after training you passed out as a sergeant, and I passed out and I had passed out at Christmas. Christmas ’43. I came home on leave as a sergeant.
HB: Right.
GM: And then I had a week, a fortnights’ leave, and I was posted to 14 OTU, Bridlington. No. Not Bridlington. Abingdon. 14 Operational Training Unit where you got crewed up. The system for crewing up was very strange. All the officers and men shared the same dining room. You were given a fortnight to form a crew. It was the pilot’s job to find a crew, and I met a fellow called Ken Adams who said, ‘Shall we go and find a pilot?’ And we walked round, and we met Warrant Officer Digby. He was the pilot, and said to Mr Digby, ‘Would you like a pair of gunners?’ He said, ‘Certainly.’ And when you’d finished, after the three weeks they had a crewing up meeting in the hangar. Seven seats. Rows of seven seats all the way along. All the way through the hangar. Pilot, bomb aimer, navigator, wireless operator, flight engineer, mid-upper gunner, rear gunner, and those were the, and you sat in those seats as a crew. But not all the seats were full. All the people who were standing at the back that hadn’t crewed up had to fill in the places.
HB: Right. Yeah.
GM: To fill in the places. But we were. We had formed a crew.
HB: So, you’d got the full seven.
GM: We’d got the full seven. Yes. My skipper’s name was Warrant Officer Digby, the bomb aimer was named [Wamm] and he was a southern Rhodesian, white. The navigator was Johnny Dibbs. The wireless operator was Brown. I can’t remember his first name. The flight engineer was [pause] oh dear.
HB: Robertson?
GM: Robertson. Yes. Robertson, and he was quite, he was forty so he was quite old. The rear gunner was Ken Adams and, have I missed anybody out?
HB: Well, there’s one missing. Yeah.
GM: The bomb aimer.
HB: He’s a bloke who used to stay in the middle of the aircraft and man a gun there.
GM: No. The mid-upper. Me.
HB: Exactly [laughs]
GM: Yes. And then there was me.
HB: You remembered everybody bar yourself.
GM: That was me.
HB: [unclear]
GB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Then we started flying in Ansons, in err Whitleys, and on our second trip in the Whitley, I think it was our second trip we went, we bombed the, the hill in the middle of the Irish Sea. What’s that mountain called? Rockall.
HB: Rockall. Yeah.
GM: We bombed it with, with nine pound bombs, and on the way back an engine packed up so we landed in the Isle of Man.
HB: Oh right.
GM: At Jurby.
HB: Yeah.
GM: We landed in Jurby. So that was the first time that we didn’t get back to camp. This happened a lot of times, and we were known as, ‘Land away Digby and his crew.’ We finished our training at 14 OTU, and we were posted to Riccall for conversion to Halifaxes. And, so you went from two engines to four engines and you all flew together. And we weren’t at Riccall very long, and we passed out at Riccall, and we were sent to 51 Squadron, Snaith, and we started our bombing career on the 9th of June. And our first trip was Amiens. Is it there?
HB: Yes. Yes, it’s there.
GM: And our second trip was a disaster.
HB: Oh, no. Sorry. You’ve, on your logbook you’ve got Massy Palaiseau.
GM: Massy Palaiseau, oh that’s, sorry.
HB: That was your first one. Yeah.
GM: That’s right. That was Paris.
HB: And it was Amiens.
GM: Paris.
HB: Amiens. That was your second.
GB: Paris.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Amiens was the second.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And on my second trip, Amiens, we were flying over, towards the target and I said to the skipper, ‘There’s a plane being attacked below us,’ because I could see tracer, and that plane that was attacking the plane below us, as he broke away, he must have seen us and he managed to get one shot in to our nose. The bomb aimer was sitting in the nose, and it blew his behind off. And the plane was flying like this [pause] because it was gulping air in.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Due to its form.
HB: So, the nose.
GM: Yeah.
HB: The nose having disappeared.
GM: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: It was sucking air in.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
GM: We got back to England and that was the first time I’d ever heard of Darkie. The pilot used Darkie. ‘Hello Darkie. Hello Darkie.’ And all the amateur radio operators in the country was, were called Darkie, and they had to listen out every night, and if you got a bomber you were fifteen miles away from him.
HB: Right.
GM: Because he couldn’t hear more than fifteen miles. And he had all the aerodromes in his book. ‘Hello Darkie. Hello Darkie. Can you find us an aerodrome please?’ And an aerodrome lit up over there, and it was called Dunsfold, and we landed at Dunsfold. They didn’t bother about us. I had to run to the control tower to ask for a doctor and an ambulance and the bomb aimer was very badly injured and the navigator had got a bit of shrapnel. A bit of stuff, metal in his leg but he, no not the bomb aimer. The navigator had got a bit of stuff in his leg. They were seen to. So, we had to go back by train.
HB: Right.
GM: Which was quite an experience in those days.
HB: Yeah.
GM: We got to London and we got in the Tube with all our gear, and they had a collection for us on the train and they gave us about a hundred fags. They’d been all the way down the train collecting for a crew that had crashed and they gave us the hundred fags we got. Packets of fags.
HB: Blimey.
GM: And then we got back to Snaith.
HB: Yeah, that was in [pause] that was C6 E-Easy. Yeah. What happened to the, what happened to the aircraft?
GM: Oh, I don’t know what happened to the aircraft.
HB: So, you never, that never —
GM: No. No.
HB: You never saw that back again.
GM: No.
HB: No.
GM: He put the wheel in, he put the wheel in a trench so, but the plane was fine.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Except for this one hole.
HB: Yeah.
GM: You know.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And the bomb aimer went to McIndoe’s hospital.
HB: Right. Yeah.
GM: Had sixty skin graft operations and he lived. He came back to visit us. We went for a drink in the pub. Put him on a, put him on a bike. Took the pedals off, put him on a bike, his crutch went through the wheel and he fell off and broke his arm. His name was [Wamm].
HB: Yeah.
GM: And he was the bomb aimer. We had a new bomb aimer. Eventually we got a new bomb aimer called Smith. Ted Smith. Oh no, I can’t remember his first name. Smith he was, and he flew all the rest of the trips with us. I flew spare. That’s why I did more than the rest of the crew.
HB: Right. Yeah.
GM: I flew with a Flight Lieutenant Gilchrist, I think.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Like that. Yeah. I flew a couple of spare trips because we hadn’t got a crew and then when we got a crew we, because in those days you get a weeks’ leave every month you know because there was, two crews to every plane.
HB: Oh, right. Yeah.
GM: But only if you lost a crew. You didn’t get your leave. If you lost a crew, you didn’t get your leave.
HB: Yes. So that’s, that’s around June. You’ve got Gilchrist as your pilot.
GM: Yeah.
HB: That’s, that’s towards the end of June.
GM: Yeah.
HB: That one. But, blimey. Yeah. Right.
GM: What? What happened?
HB: It’s alright. You just have that and then at the end of June you fly a daylight operation to the Maquis at Mimoyecques.
GM: Mimoyecques. Mimoyecques.
HB: Yeah. And you’re hit by flak again.
GM: Yes. We got hit by flak but only hit. Nobody was hurt. Just holes. There was, always holes in our plane. And then we came to the fateful day of our last trip. No. Something nasty happened. We were due to fly to Kiel. We were due to fly to Kiel and there was something wrong with the plane and we turned back. The CO was very, very angry about us turning back and we went to bed and they woke us up at half past six in the morning. We’d only just, we didn’t get to bed ‘til about two. They woke us up at half past six and said, ‘You’re flying.’ And we were briefed to go and attack the Gneisenau ship in Brest Harbour. As we took off, we hit the bump on the end of the runway. The plane wouldn’t come off the runway, we went through the trees. An engine, engine went rogue. It wouldn’t stop. Got faster and faster. The plane was shaking to bits. We asked for an emergency landing. We dropped the bombs in a reservoir and we came down to land on the runway. Because we were, the plane slewed off the runway and we were heading for the petrol dump and so the skipper opened up another engine and turned the, slewed the plane around and we hit the bomb dump, the side of the bomb dump. Right there. The big, they’d got a big [pause] We hit the side of the bomb dump. The CO came out in his, in his [pause] ‘You’re all posted. Get off my ‘drome.’ That was his exact words, and there were three people injured. Only slightly. Only slightly. They all went to the, they were taken to the, but they all came back with no problem. The only time a clearance chit got signed in one hour. It used to take two days to get a clearance chit signed because you had to sign. It had to be signed.
HB: Yeah.
GM: You had to hand your bike in. You had to do this and do that and you had to find everything and our, our clearance was and we were at, by 2 o’clock in the afternoon we were at the bus stop waiting for a bus to take us somewhere.
HB: And the whole crew.
GM: The whole crew. Yes. Because the ones that were, they were only slightly injured. We were all in the rest position when we crashed. We were all in the rest position, you know. Ruined the aeroplane anyway.
HB: Do you know that in your logbook?
GM: Yeah.
HB: This is purely for the purposes of the tape.
GM: Yeah.
HB: For people listening to this. In your logbook on the 17th of August 1944.
GM: Yeah.
HB: You did an operation to Brest. DNCO.
GM: Not carried out.
HB: And it says, “One engine u/s [pranged].”
GM: That’s all.
HB: That’s all it says in your logbook.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And that is the story you just told me.
GM: Yeah. Anyway, he sent us back to Riccall again.
HB: Right.
GM: To the Conversion Unit, and the skipper said, the CO said, ‘Oh, it’s nice to have a crew that have got experience. Do a couple of trips for us.’ And we, we flew a couple of trips, I think it was, at Riccall. I don’t know. They were only training trips.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And the pilot, the CO said, ‘You’re fully trained. There’s nothing wrong with you. You can go back on ops. Where do you want to go to?’ ‘51 Squadron,’ we all said because we’d got friends. He picks the phone up [laughs] speaks to the wing commander. No. Group captain he was. Speaks to the group captain, ‘I’ve got a fully trained crew that want to come back to you.’ ‘What’s the pilot’s name?’ ‘Digby.’ ‘Don’t send him here. Send him somewhere else.’
HB: No.
GM: He said, ‘You can’t go there.’ So, he sent us to Breighton. 78 Squadron, Breighton.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And our first trip at Breighton, believe it or not was Kiel. It’s almost, it’s almost poetic.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And I can remember the skipper saying, ‘We’re going. We’re not turning back.’ And we went to Kiel, and we were the last wave and you could see the, you could see the fires for miles. You could see the fires from two hundred miles back, on the way back, because the whole place was, the whole of Kiel was ablaze. We got, we, the Master Bomber told us to bomb on the edges. ‘Bomb on the edges. Bomb on the edges. Don’t bomb in the middle. Bomb on the edges.’ And we went to Kiel. We did five trips at Snaith. I think it was five, and the CO called us in the office and sat us down and said, ‘You’re posted.’ And the skip, I can remember the skipper saying, ‘What have we done wrong?’ He said, ‘You’ve done nothing wrong but you’re the, you’re the, most experienced crew and we’ve been told to choose the most experienced crew to send them to a new squadron being formed called 171 Squadron in Norfolk.
HB: Can I just ask you —
GM: Special duties.
HB: Can I just ask you something Gordon?
GM: Yes.
HB: In your logbook.
GM: Yeah.
HB: I’m, I’m just curious really. You’ve done the Kiel operation on the 15th of September.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Which was a night op.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And then on the 17th of September you do a daytime op to Boulogne.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And you’ve got a little note in your book saying —
GM: We saw a dinghy.
HB: Gun positions which are obviously Boulogne.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And then you’ve got dinghy sighted and reported.
GM: That’s right. We found, we sighted a dinghy. We went around and around it. Got it and sent a message back.
HB: And did you know, did you ever find out what happened?
GM: No. No. We never found out.
HB: No.
GM: But we did report it. We found a dinghy.
HB: Right.
GM: You know.
HB: Yeah, you, yeah you were at, you were at Breighton ‘til the end of September. You’re right, you only flew —
GM: Yeah.
HB: Five ops.
GM: Can I tell, tell you a very special story now?
HB: Of course, you can. Yeah.
GM: This is absolutely, I used to live with my aunt. I did not live with my father. I used to live with my aunt and she had a brother. His name was Jack [Elson], and he flew in Lancasters as a gunner and I had a weeks’ leave while we were at Breighton, and he had a weeks’ leave, and he came to his aunt’s and I went to my aunt’s and we had a weeks’ leave together. On the first day we went to the pictures and the girl that took us to the seat, her name was Mona, he chatted her up and they were friends. And by the end of the week, they were in love. We both went back to camp on the Friday. Both. He left on that platform and I left on that platform. We were both flying on Tuesday and he was killed. He was killed on the Tuesday and he’s buried in Lyons, in France.
HB: Oh, sad.
GM: Yeah. But that’s just by the by.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Yeah.
HB: But that’s there, you know.
GM: There but by the Grace of God go me, you know. Yeah. Anyway, then we were sent to special duties, 171 Squadron and all brand new aircraft. Never been flown other than their delivery with this very special wireless equipment in the, in the, in the middle. Two great big things, and we had a new wireless operator. A special wireless operator and his name was [pause]
HB: A Scottish name.
GM: A Scottish name. Yes. Yes. He lived in —
HB: MacDonald.
GM: MacDonald. That’s right.
HB: Can I just say for the purposes of this interview —
GM: Yeah.
HB: You have written some brilliant notes and I’ve abandoned doing notes. I’m following yours because they are far better than mine. Yes. Sergeant Macdonald who operated the —
GM: Well, I did that a long time ago.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Because I thought I might forget.
HB: Yeah. Well, you’ve got him down as he operated the secret wireless jamming equipment.
GM: That’s right. And the operations we did were the strangest operations you ever flew because you flew out in to the North Sea and you flew around an oblong course for two hours. And there would be two planes, two planes, two planes, two planes, two planes, two planes, and we always flew at eighteen thousand feet and the other plane flew at eighteen thousand five hundred feet so that you didn’t, and you were both in the same place going up and down while he operated the Mandrel. I know the name of the one equipment was called Mandrel, and he operated these jamming, and while these formed on the screen that the Germans could not see the planes lifting off from England. The first time they’d see them was when they went through the screen. So, all, all the people were told not to fly at eighteen thousand or eighteen thousand five hundred feet. And then when our stint was finished, we used to go and bomb a place. We had a, we had a small bombing. Some, a few bombs to take and we used to go and bomb. I think a lot of them were holiday places on the coast although we went to Monchengladbach once I think. And the, we did thirteen trips and our last trip, which was our worst trip was Leipzig. Why we were sent to Leipzig I do not know.
HB: It’s alright. I’m just having a quick look to see if I can find that [pause] Leipzig. Leipzig. Oh sorry. Was that your last trip with 171?
GM: That was my last trip altogether. As we approached the target at Leipzig, we were coned by about fifty searchlights and all hell broke loose. The skipper chose one searchlight and we went straight down it. Straight down the searchlight. When we were at about three thousand feet from the ground I started firing my guns at the searchlight, and believe it or not it went out. There was no side of the plane left. All the side, the whole side of, the whole side of the plane was missing. It was draughty and the skipper said to the navigator, ‘Give us a trip home, and we don’t want to go near any mountains.’ He said, ‘I don’t even know where we are.’ And we got back. Got back to camp and we landed and the CO came out and he looked at the plane. He said, ‘You’ve ruined another one.’ He said, ‘Digby, you’ve finished.’ He said, ‘You’re finished. Don’t do any more.’ And so that was —
HB: That was your stand down.
GM: That was our stand down and we finished.
HB: And that was, sorry that was the whole crew stood down then.
GM: Yes. No. Except for, except for the flight, the special wireless operator.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
GM: Because he had to carry on.
HB: MacDonald. Yeah. Yeah.
GM: He got another crew. He died. He died at Christmas.
HB: Oh.
GM: This Christmas just gone. Last Christmas. Yeah.
HB: And did you, did you keep in touch with him?
GM: No. No. But my flight engineer’s son did.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah.
GM: Kept in touch with him. I kept in touch with my skipper’s daughter, and I know his granddaughter and his grandson. They kept in touch with me.
HB: Did the whole crew survive the war?
GM: Oh yes. We all survived.
HB: Right.
GB: We all finished. I got a cracking job. I was posted to Number 1 Squadron. Spitfire squadron at Hutton Cranswick as a flying controller assistant.
HB: Well.
GM: I did that for about a year and then one day, I became a flight sergeant and one day they called me in to the office. They said, ‘You’re posted.’ And I said, ‘I’m posted?’ He said, ‘Yes. To Llanbedr.’ I said, ‘Where’s Llanbedr?’ He said, ‘In North Wales. They have, they want a controller.’ I said, ‘I can’t be a controller. I’m a near beginner.’ He said, ‘They’ve got nobody else to send.’ So, I went home for the weekend and got arrested when I got there because I should have been there two days earlier. And the CO, the CO he was only a, he was only a wing commander and you won’t believe this [pause] he’d, he’d been, he’d disgraced himself fighting or something and he’d been brought down from group captain to wing commander and he was in charge at Llanbedr. And it was being closed. And they used to fly Martinets.
HB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
GM: And they used to fly Martinets. They used to have a drogue a mile away. A mile away. And these drogues used to fly over to a place called Tonfanau in Wales where there was an Anti-Aircraft Gun School and the anti-aircraft used to fire at the drogues. I flew a couple of times. I had a couple of rides just for fun and that. Martinets they were.
HB: Oh no.
GM: Yeah. Anyway, there is one or two little, little stories in between that I’ve missed out. When I was stationed at Snaith one of the officers came from Birmingham and he said to me one day, ‘Gordon, do you want to go to Birmingham?’ ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘We can go for the weekend, you know.’ I said, ‘Can we?’ He said, ‘Yes. I’ll fly you there and I’ll fly myself there.’ So, he flew us to Castle Bromwich.
HB: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
GM: He flew us in a, in a Tiger Moth. I was supposed to be the navigator [laughs]
HB: Yeah.
GM: We got lost the one day. In the end he said, ‘I’ll fly down and see if you can see the name of the station.’ [laughs] So I looked at it, and they’d started putting the station names back because they were all obliterated in the war but they started putting them back and I said, ‘Oh yes.’ I gave him the name of the station. He said, ‘Ok. We’re going this way,’ and we got, we got to Castle Bromwich.
HB: No. Yeah. Because, yeah Castle Bromwich there was a factory there wasn’t there?
GM: Yeah. There was a factory at Castle Bromwich.
HB: That made the, made aircraft, didn’t they? They constructed them.
GM: Yeah. Did parts of them.
HB: Yeah. Well —
GM: My mother, my mother made Spitfire parts at Fisher and Ludlow at Castle Bromwich.
HB: Right.
GM: And she was a lathe operator.
HB: Oh right.
GM: In the war.
HB: Yeah. That’s good. So, just, just going back because, because we’ve got you, you know getting in trouble.
GM: Yeah.
HB: When, you said to me before we started the interview about you somewhere down the line you went from flight sergeant to sergeant.
GM: No. I went from sergeant to flight sergeant, and then I became a warrant officer.
HB: Oh.
GM: Yeah.
HB: I wondered if you’d got busted down you see.
GM: No. No. No.
HB: Ah, no. I misunderstood what you said.
GM: No. No. I made a mistake there.
HB: No. I was going to say. No. That’s fine. That’s fine.
GM: Yes.
HB: Yeah.
GM: No. I got to warrant officer.
HB: Oh great. Yeah.
GM: I was the actual controller at Llanbedr and —
HB: When would that have been Gordon? That was —
GM: After I’d left Hutton Cranswick but of course I’d got, I’d got no dates for those.
HB: Yeah. So that, so that, we’re now in to late ’45.
GM: ’45.
HB: Yeah. Late ’45.
GM: About ’46. Probably ’46.
HB: Yeah. So, so how long, so you, you said to me earlier that you stayed in ‘til ’47.
GM: That’s right.
HB: So, what, so did you just carry on as a controller?
GM: Yeah. At Llanbedr.
HB: All the way through.
GM: All the way through. Yes.
HB: Til ’47.
GM: Yeah. And it was being closed. I can remember the, I walked in to the office and the CO said to me, threw me a folder, ‘Mr Mercier, here’s your first job.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘I want an inventory of the WAAFs quarters. Everything in the WAAFs quarters. I want to know exactly what’s there in the WAAFs quarters because it’s all being shipped away and we want to know what we’re going to ship. So, here’s all the, you go around. Five hairdryers. There was a half a one. Eighteen barrels. None.
HB: Barrels?
GM: Barrels. Yes. Eighteen barrels. None. I don’t know what the barrels were for or where they came about but there were all these sort of things on the list. Sort of bedding for, I think the bedding was about thirty three sets of bedding and thirty three beds. Those were all there, you know. Pillow cases. None [laughs] Because the WAAFs had gone and they left shortly after. They all left after I got there, and I gave him the list back. He said, ‘We can put it in a van.’ He could practically, he said, ‘I thought we’d have to hire a pantechnicon to take it all away.’
HB: Good grief.
GM: Anyway —
HB: Good grief.
GM: He was, he was a smashing bloke. He used to say, ‘Don’t forget to come on my parade on Sunday unless you’ve got something better to do.’
HB: It sounds as if it was starting to get a little bit relaxed in 1947.
GM: Oh, it was more than relaxed.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And he was, he was, he’d been brought down in rank.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
GM: Because he’d disgraced himself. When I came back to work I worked at Triplex. When I came back to work.
HB: Yeah.
GM: I worked at Triplex making aircraft windows and the first, my first boss, no, my second boss was Wing Commander Duncan Smith. He was a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain.
HB: Was he?
GM: And his son is the MP. His son’s the MP. Duncan Smith. And when he was sixteen, he had a mini on our car park when he was sixteen, and he used to drive it around like a mad thing. Around and around the car park at night.
HB: Yeah.
GM: That was Duncan Smith.
HB: Wow.
GM: And his dad was a wing commander. Duncan Smith.
HB: Can I, can I just you know if you’re happy to carry on for a while.
GM: No, it’s alright.
HB: Can I just take you back to, you did your training.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And your OTU, your Operational Training Unit.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And you get posted to your first squadron. 51 Squadron.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And it’s a question I always like to ask. What was the social life like?
GM: Oh, it was great. Marvellous. We used to have a dance every week and the girls used to come from factories all around and they’d bus the girls in. The girls used to come from factories all round. There would be about six or seven buses full of girls coming from factories and you used to have a great big dance in the big hangar. We used to have great, absolutely great time, and you made friends with the ground crew and all that sort of thing.
HB: Yeah.
GM: It was, it was a grand time. I’ve got to admit that on my second trip I was terrified. I really was. I was really, really terrified. But I must say that I was never frightened again. Never. It didn’t frighten me at all, and I don’t know why that was but it didn’t because I gave, got to the point where if it happens it happens.
HB: Yeah. I can understand that. So is, you’re lucky enough to do all of your ops —
GM: Yes.
HB: As one crew apart from losing Sergeant [Wamm].
GM: That’s right.
HB: You’re lucky enough to do all your ops with the same guys all the way through.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And you come, you come to the stage when you’re flying your last few operations and you’re going to end up at Llanbedr. How, how did, how did you cope? Well, not cope that’s not the right word. How did you see the crew reacting as you come off to finish?
GM: You didn’t. You didn’t because we finished. We finished on that day. The next day we were posted to Kirby and at Kirby we were reassigned our posts. The next day we were reassigned our posts and we were given a weeks’ leave. We were given a weeks’ leave and a chit, and then you’d be told where you were going. They’d send you a message. Send you a letter.
HB: So, literally within three days the guys —
GM: Within three days we were split up.
HB: The guys you had spent —
GM: All that time with.
HB: Two years with.
GM: Were gone. All different places.
HB: All gone to different places.
GM: Yes.
HB: Right.
GM: I don’t know where any of them went.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Not one.
HB: That’s, yeah. Did you, did you meet your wife while you were still in the services?
GM: No.
HB: Or was that when you came out to work?
GM: We met after that.
HB: Right. So, what, so you’ve, you’ve been told you’re finished. You’ve gone to Llanbedr.
GM: Yeah.
HB: You’ve tried to resolve where all the stuff from the WAAFs quarters have gone, and the place is closing and you’re going to be demobbed. What, was what was your feeling at that time?
GM: Well, you didn’t. You were given a number right at the beginning, and all the people that were in the Air Force before the war were number one. They were released. All the people. The ones that had been in the Air Force longer were number one. The ones that were, and number two and number three and I was about number 178. And your number, your number came up. You heard what number it was each, sometimes it says number 111. Oh. I’ve only got another sixty eight.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Until your number came up and the CO had got a big parade, and he called me into the office and he gave me this slip of paper. He said, ‘Are you coming to my parade on Sunday?’ I said, ‘Yes. Yes, of course I am.’ He said, ‘No, you’re not. Read your piece of paper. You’ve been posted to demob.’
HB: Wow, where did you actually demob? Do you remember?
GM: I think it was West Kirby.
HB: Right. And what, what was that process like?
GM: Very strange. You handed your uniform in. I wish I’d, you could have kept it and I wish I’d have kept it but it was a lot of stuff and I didn’t want to carry it but I’ve regretted it ever since that I didn’t bring some of it back with me. And you were given a suit. You were given shirts, underpants and a suit. Shoes. Socks. Everything. And it was all in a, it was all put in the box, and you were given a ticket home. And you went through the gate with your box in your arm and there was about fifty spivs outside the, outside the airfield. ‘Buy your box.’ ‘Buy your box.’ ‘I’ll buy your box for you.’ ‘I’ll buy your box off you.’ ‘I’ll buy your box off you.’ And they were sending, I think they were getting five pound for a box. And some of them, you know, ‘Here you are. Here you are. I don’t want it. I don’t want it.’ I said, ‘No. I’ve got nothing else.’ But a lot of them sold them to these spivs.
HB: Oh right.
GM: I think it was a fiver they were getting for them. And they were white fivers in those days.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
GM: And on D-Day we were all given a white fiver, a fiver and sent home. Only kept a, kept a skeleton staff on the aerodromes on D-Day. On VE Day.
HB: VE day. Yeah. Right.
GM: VE Day.
HB: Yeah.
GM: I got home just in time for the evening festivities.
HB: And what was that like?
GM: Well, the whole, the whole country was mad.
HB: Where were you living then? Had you gone back to your —
GM: In Harborne. I was living in Harborne and I was on my way to my auntie’s but I got dragged into a party on the way.
HB: Dragged in.
GM: Yes. I, I was never a drinker.
HB: No.
GM: But I used to drink but I was, I couldn’t hold my liquor very well but there was a lot of booze that night. And they kept stuff. They’d taken food out that they’d been saving for years. You know, tins of these, tins of that. I went into this one house in Harborne. I knew the people and they said, ‘Come in, Gordon. Come in Gordon. Lovely to see you.’ Put my box down. And then when I went I took my box with me to my auntie’s.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Just up the road.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And how, how long did it take you to sort of come to, because it’s obviously we all know that was, that two years or so was very very intense.
GM: Yeah.
HB: You know, and you know like you say you, you just reached the stage where you thought, well if it happens it happens.
GM: Yeah.
HB: But how sort of long or what sort of, what sort of period of time do you think it took —
GM: Well —
HB: To get yourself back to Civvy Street.
GM: Well, you went back to Civvy Street straight away because your firm was obliged by law to take you back.
HB: Right.
GM: They made a law that every firm had to take back for six months. They had to guarantee you six months work or six months wages and I went back to Belliss and Morcom’s. But I didn’t like it in the factory and I, I left to be, I became a milkman. I became a milkman with a horse and cart delivering milk.
HB: Did you enjoy that?
GM: Well, I’ve got a story. I don’t know whether you, are you still taping this?
HB: Absolutely. Yes. This is, it’s important we know.
GM: Well —
HB: How your feet came back down to earth basically.
GM: I got, I got a job at [pause] that’s Alexa telling me to take my tablets.
HB: Do you want to have a break to take your tablets?
GM: No.
HB: No. Crack on then. Crack on.
GM: Yes. I I got a job as a milkman and had a horse called Ginger, and Ginger didn’t like nuns, GPO huts in the road, shadows. He didn’t like them. He used to shy at shadows. I’d been delivering. I’d been working for them about three months and we’d, he knew the round better than me. He used to stop at everywhere and we used to do, we used to do Knowle, and then Dorridge and then back to Knowle which is near Solihull. And we used to have to go, after we’d finished Knowle we’d turn around the corner from the pub and we’d go up a hill. Up a great big hill to the other half of the route and this one day [laughs], one day we turned the corner there was an elephant [pause] The horse took one look at this elephant and he went berserk. I had a girl with me because she used to deliver. There was two of us delivering milk. He, he galloped and I got the reins and I got my feet and I said to her, ‘Jump off. Save yourself. Save yourself.’ And the crates of milk were falling off the back all the way down, up this hill and of course by the time he got to the top he was absolutely shattered and I managed to stop him and I tied him to a tree and I lit a fag. I can remember lighting a fag. And the woman came out. ‘Shall I ring the Dairy for you.’ ‘Yes, please.’ I’m smoking this fag and the Dairy bloke, and he looked at all the milk in the road and he kicked the horse.
HB: Oh no.
GM: So, so sorry. He really, he kicked the horse and he shouldn’t. He was the, he was the, the boss of the Dairy and the farm and all the horses and everything. It was most unkind.
HB: You’ve got a visitor.
GM: Oh, it’s my paper coming.
Other: Paper boy.
GM: Come in John. I’ve got the interviewer here.
Other: Oh, sorry.
HB: Do you want me to, do you want me to, no it’s alright. I’ll just pause the interview. Bear with me.
[recording paused]
HB: Resuming the interview that was paused so that Gordon could take his tablets and speak to his, his visitor. Right. So, we’ve got the elephant frightening a horse. Frightened horse. Blimey. So, you went to work as a milkman, and then obviously you started to get right back into civilian life.
GM: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: And what not.
GM: Then I went to work. Decided I wanted to go to work, and I went to, I applied for, my uncle worked at Triplex and he said, ‘There’s some jobs going at Triplex. Do you fancy doing that?’ And so, he got me an interview.
HB: Right.
GM: And they took me on at Triplex.
HB: You know, when we go right back to the beginning.
GM: Yeah.
HB: I’m just a little bit intrigued. You were born in Jersey.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And obviously your mum and dad were in Jersey. Did they [pause] Oh right. Obviously.
GM: There’s a very strange thing I’ve got to tell you. My father was a Francophile. He loved France. And when he was a lad in Jersey, when they were eighteen, they had to join the Jersey militia. It was an army. Because of the unruly going on with the eighteen year olds. But he and his friends decided to join the French Foreign Legion. He was stationed in Aleppo in the French Foreign Legion, and he went, and when war was declared on the Monday morning, he had a letter from the French Foreign Legion calling him back to France and he went.
HB: Right. So, when did you leave Jersey to come to England?
GM: I was about three, I think. They brought me back here.
HB: So that would be like the ‘30s.
GM: Yes. It was the ‘30s.
HB: Mid ‘30s.
GM: Early ‘30s. Yeah.
HB: Right. So, so your mum and dad were separated then.
GM: No. No. No.
HB: Sorry.
GM: Then he went. When he went on the 3rd of January err the 3rd of September he went back into the French Army.
HB: Right.
GM: Yeah.
HB: But by that time, you were obviously living over here.
GM: Yes.
HB: Yeah.
GM: We didn’t hear from him at all for, ‘til 1942. And in 1942 a man came to the door. He said, ‘I’m from Special Branch. You’ve got a husband named Jack Mercier.’ She said, ‘Yes. He’s dead.’ He said, ‘No. He’s not dead. He’s alive and he wants to come back to England.’ She said, ‘Well, I hadn’t heard anything so I assumed he was dead.’ In 1942, by then you see. And he said, ‘No. He’s alive and he wants to come back to England.’ We had a lot of interviews. Wanted to know all about him and everything, and then we had to give him forty five pounds which was a lot of money in those days for his fare back from Spain. And he’d got to get to Spain on his own so he walked about six hundred miles from France down to Spain and then he got a ship from Spain to England. And they came from Special Branch again and said, ‘We want seven pounds please.’ ‘What do you want seven pounds for?’ ‘For his fare.’ ‘His fare from where?’ She said, ‘Oh, he’s been in Scotland six weeks. He’s been interrogated as a spy.’
HB: Right.
GB: But they decided that he’s not a spy and he can come home.’ So, we had to give the seven pounds for his fare to bring him home. I never got on with my father. The moment he came home I left. My auntie took me straight away and she said, ‘Come and live with us.’ Never got on with him.
HB: That’s a shame. Yeah.
GM: He was quite brutal.
HB: So, he’d been, so he’d obviously been a prisoner of war.
GM: No, he got, he was in unoccupied France.
HB: Oh, he was in Vichy. Right.
GM: He was in Vichy France.
HB: Yeah. Right.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Oh yeah. Of course. ’42.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. That explains it.
GM: Yeah. I think he was somewhere, somewhere in the middle of France somewhere.
HB: What, just going back to your time, you know.
GM: Yeah.
HB: If you could just put your mind back to when you did your training and what not.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And you became part of Bomber Command. What do you think? It’s quite, it’s almost a bit too specific but what do you think was the best part? If there was a best part of your time.
GM: Well, you felt as though you were hitting Germany. And because I came from Jersey which was occupied by the Germans and badly treated by the Germans and, and I wanted to, I wanted to fight, and we really did. I mean we, Bomber Command, Hitler should have packed it in. I mean we just kept on destroying. I mean all these cities were destroyed totally. In this country we lost six hundred and fifty thousand houses to the bombing. In this country. They must have lost six million.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. And how, when you look back now do you, do you have any strong feelings about when you look back? Or —
GM: No. No. It had got to be done. It had got to be stopped.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And you, you really felt as though you were really taking the war to them because we were, I mean London was bombed sixty seven nights in a row. So, you, you really felt as though you were doing your bit.
HB: Yeah. It’s, it’s something that a lot of people are interested in because, you know in some cases a lot of people think it’s so long ago.
GM: Yeah.
HB: But all of the people who were involved they, they do have very different views when they look back as, as to what they contributed. How they, how they, how they —
GM: Well, of course.
HB: Were involved.
GM: Dunkirk. Dunkirk was the pivotal point. We were beaten. There’s no doubt about it. If he’d, if he’d have attacked then we couldn’t have defended ourselves at all. But as I say when I joined the Home Guard I had a, we had a stick. A broomstick and a knife on the end. That was our first weapon. We used to practice arms drill with the stick until we got, finally we got one rifle, and we all were allowed to touch it [laughs] And then we got we all had a rifle and every night we went out we took our rifle out with us every night.
HB: And then you then went back to work the following day.
GM: Went to work the following day. Yes.
HB: Yeah.
GM: I was on, I was on duty, Home Guard duty when Coventry was bombed and we were taken by, by a lorry that would be shovels to, to Coventry and our job was to clear the roads. Make the roads passable. And we spent three days in Coventry where we had, we had tents. We were just tidying up. That was the first time I’d ever seen a dead body. The very first time. Probably the only time I’d ever seen a dead body.
HB: Yeah. Yeah that’s, yeah —
GM: That was Coventry.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And we all our job was to make the roads passable for transport. Shifting great big pieces of, you know six of us moving great big pieces of concrete out of the way.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Yeah.
HB: What [pause] what we’ve talked about that side of it. What, what do you think was your, your sort of happiest memories of, of that time? If, you know, I mean because there must have been some fun.
GM: Yes.
HB: You must have had fun.
GM: I was always happy in the Air Force. I loved it. Couldn’t cope with it sometimes. They made me take a parade once which was [laughs] which was horrible because my voice isn’t that loud. I could shout a bit but because you’re a sergeant you had to take a parade, and I got them marching up against the wall of the hangar and that. Hit the wall of the hangar in front of them. I couldn’t say turn around or anything. That, that was one moment that I remember where I regretted being a sergeant. I also made the cook do another dinner because the dinner they’d put out that day was vile and I was on what do you call it? Mess duty.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And my job to go around the mess for any remarks about the food and anything. The whole place was, ‘This food’s rubbish.’ ‘It’s rubbish.’ ‘It’s rubbish.’ I made the chef prepare something else.
HB: I bet you checked your food after that for a while, didn’t you?
GM: I had to be careful where I went, I must admit. I didn’t go anywhere near the cookhouse I’ll tell you. But that was when I was flying control at Llanbedr.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
GM: But with 21 Squadron they flew Spitfire 21s at Fifty, at One Squadron. There was one squadron and there was another squadron called the Baroda Squadron. All Spitfire 21s, contra rotating props and they used to take off like that. Go straight up. They were a fantastic plane.
HB: Did you ever get to go in one?
GM: Four hundred and fifty mile an hour.
HB: Did you ever get to sit in one?
GM: No. No. No. I don’t think. Never sat in one. But I was there a sizeable length of time.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. It was —
GM: I was there a long time.
HB: Well, well ’45 through to ’47.
GM: I’d never done any office work and I walked in to the office and they said, ‘Your first job is to do the Wilmotts.’ I said, ‘What on earth is a Wilmott?’ ‘A Wilmott is the station, the readiness of all the aircraft stations in the country,’ he said,’ And if there’s anything wrong with the aircraft, with the aerodrome, they issue a Wilmott and that Wilmott has to be plotted so that every station knows if there is anything wrong with any other station.’ So, I’d got this pile of, little pile of Wilmotts they’re called and I’d had to look and find the aircraft and put number one runway is out of action because they’re resurfacing the [unclear]. Put it back and then take the next one. Leuchars. Leuchars. Flying control is not operating today so no planes in or out of Leuchars, and write it down so that if anybody was sent to that they’d put out a Wilmott to see —
HB: Right.
GM: What the status of the station was.
HB: Status was.
GM: And I remember it took me all day. The whole day, I think. Morning, sort of morning, dinnertime, afternoon and evening you know, I was still doing these Wilmotts. Putting it in.
HB: I’ve never heard of a Wilmott.
GM: No. Wilmott it was called and, and then a job I did like doing was on the waggon at the end of the runway.
HB: Oh yes. Yes. I’m with you. Yeah.
GM: Yeah. And you used to have two aldis lamps, and two verey pistols. A green and a red. A green and a red. And you had to, and I can remember watching the planes landing and watching them and then all of a sudden, this Spitfire came and he’d got his wheels up. He hadn’t got his wheels down. Prang, I fired off, moved and it went off.
HB: Blimey.
GM: And he was only a few feet from the ground by the time I’d fired it. I thought to myself I’d nearly blotted my copybook there.
HB: Yeah.
GM: He hadn’t put his wheels down.
HB: That, that would have been expensive.
GM: Yeah. Another thing that happened which was most amazing was I was on the waggon this one day and it had been raining very heavy and the sun came out and a flock of swans, about six swans flew over and they thought it was water and they all flew down to land on the runway and of course they crashed. Every one of these swans. Because they thought it was water and I’m watching these swans and all of a sudden, they crashed. All these swans rolling around. They got up and they waddled around and then they started running and took off again.
HB: Blimey.
GM: A load of swans.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Yeah. About five or six swans crashed on the runway.
HB: You know if, if you go back to 171 Squadron.
GM: Yes.
HB: And you were, you were flying these special operations.
GM: Yes.
HB: With this special jamming thing did they, did they use the aluminium strips?
GM: Yes.
HB: At the time.
GM: Yes.
HB: Was your aircraft doing that as well?
GM: We, we had special ones. When we’d finished our flight we didn’t put any of the aluminium strips out until we’d finished our flights, and then we’d go, some of the targets. I can’t remember the targets. We did go to Monchengladbach once I think while we were at [pause] I don’t know, give me a target from 50, 171 squadron. Give me.
HB: Right. That would be [pause] Liege.
GM: Liege. Yes. So, so, we were not far from France that day. Going round and round. Then as soon as your stint had finished we bombed Liege.
HB: Right.
GM: And as we went out we had very special strips of foil. Ours were fifteen feet long. The ones that the bomber, the main force took were, were only strips like that.
HB: What was that?
GM: Ours were fifteen feet long.
HB: What’s that? About three feet long.
GM: Something like that.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And they stayed in the air longer.
HB: Right.
GM: They didn’t fall so flat. They stayed in the air longer so, so our, our two planes would look like thirty planes heading for Liege.
HB: Right. Right. Yeah, that, that sort of makes sense now to me. Yeah. It’s alright. I was just looking back because you were on 51 Squadron when it was D-Day weren’t you?
GM: Yeah. We just arrived at 51 Squadron just before D-Day.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. [coughs] excuse me. Oh yeah, because that’s when, that’s when Sergeant [Wamm] got injured, weren’t it?
GM: On our second trip he got wounded.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Gordon, I can only thank you really. It’s, it’s, you know, I’m not just saying this it really is interesting. It’s really interesting you know and to know that it wasn’t all deadly serious all the time.
GM: No. Oh no.
HB: That’s —
GB: No. I can, I’ll tell you something. You’re not recording this now?
HB: Yeah. Yeah, we are recording you. Yeah. Yeah.
GM: Oh right. Well, when I was stationed at Stormy Down as a cadet with a white flag in my hat, we had a visit from Anna Neagle, a film star.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
GM: And she did a show for us. It was a show and she came in to the airmen’s mess and she said, ‘I will dance around with the youngest airman in the room.’ And it was me.
HB: Oh lovely.
GM: So, I [laughs] danced with Anna Neagle. I don’t know whether, she was in, who wants to sing in Barclay Square film.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
GM: Yeah. And that —
HB: Oh yeah. She was a big star.
GM: Yeah.
HB: She was a big star.
GM: Anna Neagle. Yeah. So, I danced with Anna Neagle.
HB: Ooh, now, there’s a memory for you.
GM: Yes. Yes, it is.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Funny things happen.
HB: Yeah. Oh, that’s great. Right. So obviously you got your job at Triplex.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And life moved on and you got married.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And you got your family.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And eventually you ended up here in Alvechurch.
GM: Yes. It was all fields. This was all fields.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And there was a hut at the end of the road and we were given a number. We got there at 7 o’clock and were given a number. The hut opened at ten, and I think we got in for an interview at about 12 o’clock and as we walked through the door he said, ‘There’s only one property left. It’s a bungalow, a two bedroom bungalow at the beginning of the site. Do you want it?’ And my wife said, ‘Yes, please.’
HB: Wow.
GM: And that was number 2, Rise Way.
HB: Brilliant. Right. Well, I think we’ve sort of come to a bit of a conclusion for the interview Gordon.
GM: Yes. Thank you.
HB: And I really do appreciate, and thank you very much on behalf of the IBCC.
GM: I hope it —
HB: But more on behalf of myself.
GM: [Unclear}
HB: Oh, yes. I think it’s great for you to do this. I’m going to end the interview bit now.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Because obviously we need to have a break and get something to eat, but as I say I do thank you for that.
GM: Do you want to come down the pub for a pint?
HB: The time is now coming up to half past twelve.
[recording paused]
HB: This is recommencing the interview at twenty to two in the afternoon, having had our lunch, a very nice lunch and still interviewing Gordon Mercier. In a chat over lunch, we’ve had two or three things, little things have cropped up, but I think Gordon it would be nice to tell us about it, Gordon.
GM: Yes.
HB: You were telling me about a training flight where you shouldn’t have been over the sea but —
GM: That’s right. We, we were doing, we were going a compass swing and —
HB: Who’s, oh that’s right because you had somebody in the aircraft with you, didn’t you?
GM: We had a WAAF. We didn’t have a WAAF this time. We had one of the air, one of the ground crew.
HB: Right.
GM: But we were out for a compass swing and an engine, engine test but my skipper decided to do some low flying and we went over a field full of German prisoners of war putting hay, taking hay, and they made a lot of rude signs at us and so the skipper turned the plane around. We flew towards the prisoners of war again and as we got there we went straight up in the air and blew them all over. But by then we were facing out to sea and there was a ship, a ship down and we hit a flock of birds and one engine went out. Immediately went back to base and asked permission to land, emergency landing, three engines. We landed and we were called in to the office to explain ourselves and the skipper said, well, we were doing this, ‘We went out for an engine test and a compass swing and we hit a flock of, a flock of starlings,’ he said, and just a flock of starlings. And the CO said, ‘Why is my engineering officer holding two, two seagulls?’ And another story, we were going to bomb Dunkirk Castle, and there were about two hundred planes and we took off as normal but the wheels wouldn’t come up and the skipper asked the flight engineer if we’d have enough petrol to go and get back. He said, well we could get back but we couldn’t get back to camp. We’d have to land somewhere in the south of England. So, we, we went on but we were very slow so that by the time we got to the target all the other planes had finished bombing and we crossed the target on our own and the German, Germans occupying the Castle were firing rifles and pistols at us. But our bombs went straight through the middle of the courtyard and broke down one of the walls. And then we got back and we had to land at Manston because we hadn’t got, and Manston was the most amazing sight. It was the first time I saw a jet plane take off. They’d got them at Manston. I’d never seen, didn’t know we’d got any jet planes. That was at Manston.
HB: Were you on the ground or in the air at this time?
GM: We were on the ground.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And we, we heard this noise and we saw this Gloster Meteor take off. We didn’t know what it was. It was a jet plane.
HB: That’s just [pause] I don’t know.
GM: They used to use them for catching the flying bombs.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
GM: Because they were faster.
HB: Yeah. And was it, was it, was it Manston you were telling me about where you had FIDO?
GM: No.
HB: Or was that —
GM: That was at Carnaby.
HB: Right.
GM: There was a very severe fog one night when we were coming back, and all the, all the ‘dromes were fogged out and so we had to land with FIDO at Carnaby. Carnaby aerodrome. And I believe they landed ninety six planes at that aerodrome using FIDO.
HB: And what was it like coming in to land then with FIDO?
GM: It was like going into hell because all you could see was flames.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Flames. Just, it was just flames. You couldn’t see the ground until you were about twenty feet from the ground.
HB: Well, yeah.
GM: But you could land the plane.
HB: Just, just mentioning jet aircraft towards the end of your operations in ’45.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Did you ever come across German jet fighters?
GM: No.
HB: Didn’t. You never saw them.
GM: Never saw them. No. Never saw any.
HB: Because you did quite a few daylight operations, didn’t you?
GM: Yeah.
HB: Before, you know by then. No. I was just curious because obviously at that time they were flying the Messerschmitt jets, weren’t they?
GM: I will mention one other target we attacked. We attacked an airfield called [unclear]. But on that day, it was a Sunday morning and on that day, there were four thousand five hundred allied planes over Germany. All bombing and fighters. Fighters and bombers. There were four thousand five hundred planes in the air over Germany.
HB: That’s the allies. Yeah.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
GM: We saw two lots of Boeings in, in convoy, you know.
HB: Wow.
GM: And we, we bombed [unclear] airport and our bombs went straight down the runway. You couldn’t miss.
HB: Yeah.
GB: It was one of those.
HB: Yeah. That’s, yeah that’s interesting. When we were chatting over lunch you were saying about the jobs the WAAFs used to do.
GM: Oh yes. They used to do. We used to have a WAAF come with us sometimes when we did a compass swing.
HB: Could you, can you explain what a compass swing is please Gordon?
GM: Well, the compass had to be checked that it was doing its job properly, and there were compass operators and they were nearly all WAAFs and they used to come with us when you’d fly straight line, straight line, straight line, straight line and she would make sure that the compass was working properly.
HB: Right. Right.
GM: It was called a compass swing.
HB: Yeah. So, you obviously that was something you really did appreciate once you were in the air.
GM: Oh yes. Got the compass for just in front of the pilot, wasn’t it?
HB: Yeah.
GM: She was fiddling with the —
HB: Yeah.
GM: Set, set, calibrate it I think it was called. They used to calibrate the compass.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
GM: And the WAAFs did that job. One of the jobs that they did.
HB: Yeah. Well, that’s, that’s lovely. That’s lovely. Well, Gordon thanks. Thanks for that extra bit. I’m pleased we had lunch and we had a chat.
GM: Yes. Thank you.
HB: That was really nice and I’ll, I’ll finish the interview now because I just need to work through some of the paperwork.
GM: Yeah.
HB: So, the time is coming up to ten to two. So, we’ll terminate the interview now.
[recording paused]
HB: This is a further interview with Gordon Mercier. It’s Tuesday the 23rd of November.
GM: Yes.
HB: And we’re at Gordon’s house near Birmingham and we just wanted to go back over a few things, Gordon. We’ve just been chatting because obviously as an air gunner you were in that small group of people who, an awful lot of air gunners were lost and you survived. So, we thought we’d like to know what the life of an air gunner was like from, you did your training and that was fairly arduous but, but you know we just wondered what it was like day by day to be an air gunner on a, on a Halifax.
GM: I found it very satisfying. I, I had the best view of anybody in the aircraft. I was sitting on the top. I never flew, I only flew once as rear gunner and I hated it and all the other times I flew mid-upper gunner. The only trouble with being a mid-upper gunner was when you were facing forward the wind came through the holes where the guns are and you absolutely froze. So, if you turned forward it was uncomfortable. Other than that, it was a very comfortable seat and it was easy to get in. Up a little ladder and hung your parachute on the hook just by the seat where you get in and it was very comfortable and the view was fantastic because in daylight you could see for miles and miles and miles.
HB: Did you, did you have any extra duties when you were in there? To, to tell the pilot about things.
GM: No. But I, I told, you had to keep your eyes open. Especially for other aircraft in the, in the stream. That was the most important job actually because all of a sudden you’d realise there was a bomber sitting just on top of you and you’d got to get out of that without hitting him. And we had that several times, and that was the important job that you did that wasn’t written in to the contract [laughs]
HB: Yeah.
GM: And also, when we went, we went to Villers Bocage we’d been told to bomb at ten thousand feet and if you couldn’t see the target you were to come down to five thousand feet. Some went down. We went down. And some didn’t go down. So, the bombs were coming down from above us which was a very, very tricky moment and I can remember one bomb being very close to us as it went past. A stream of bombs. And that was when we bombed the panzer division in Villers Bocage and —
HB: It’s nice you used to word tricky.
GM: Pardon?
HB: It’s nice you used the word tricky.
GM: Oh yes.
HB: For that situation.
GM: Yes. Yes.
HB: I can think of other words.
GM: Yeah. I must, I’ve got to admit very humbly that I was terrified on our second trip. I was really, really terrified. The bang when they hit the nose of the plane, and the getting the bomb aimer out. I heard all about it and I was terrified but I’ve got to admit that I was never frightened again ever and we had some very tricky situations.
HB: Yeah.
GM: But it was very satisfying being a gunner. You felt as though you were doing a good job.
HB: Yeah.
GM: You just had to keep awake and keep warm.
HB: How did you keep warm, Gordon?
GM: The Halifax had a good heating system in the fuselage. It was, it was quite good and we had electric boots which you plugged in. You plugged into the aircraft and it warmed your feet. And you had fleecy boots of course and you were as warm as toast except when you went forward. And I can remember my eyebrows froze. Eyelids froze because of the cold when it was minus fifty, and that was the coldest day I flew in and the engines, the oil went into lumps and you could hear the engine rumbling.
HB: Oh.
GM: With these lumps of oil.
HB: Blimey.
GM: It was, it was minus fifty degrees it was.
HB: So, what height would you be when that was happening?
GM: Twenty two thousand feet.
HB: Yeah.
GM: At twenty two thousand feet we could get to twenty two easily but the Lancaster could get further.
HB: Yeah.
GM: It was lighter than us but it could carry more. We, we carried a lot of bombs. I think twelve five hundreds’ we could get in. Or two four thousand and some smaller bombs and mines. They were, they were big. The mines were big.
HB: Yeah.
GM: I hadn’t, I had to, on two occasions I had to get out of my turret and close the door which had come open.
HB: The side door.
GM: The door you went in to the aircraft. And it was up in the air and me being small I could hardly reach and the skipper said, ‘Don’t forget to put your parachute on in case you fall out.’ [laughs] The wind coming through from that door. And I closed the door for him. And twice that happened.
HB: How had it come open?
GM: Well, just vibration, I think.
HB: Oh yeah. Yeah. I suppose.
GM: Just vibration. Yeah.
HB: So, what, what sort of clothing did you used to have to put on, Gordon?
GM: Well, we had fleecy boots, four pairs of gloves, a gauntlet, a mitten, a woollen mitten. No. A gauntlet, a glove, a woolly mitten and next to your skin surgical, like a surgical glove. Silk. Silk glove. So that if you had to do anything with the guns you took the three pair off and just left the silk glove.
HB: Right.
GM: Because if you touched the guns your fingers stuck to the guns.
HB: Right.
GM: Because it was so cold it would fetch your fingers, the skin off your fingers.
HB: So when, so after you’d, after you’d taken off for an operation obviously everybody talks about as you’re flying towards.
GM: Where ever.
HB: Perhaps the Dutch coast.
GM: Yes.
HB: Or whatever, you used to test fire your guns.
GM: Yes. We used to test.
HB: How did everyone look on that? How did they do it safely when you were taking off in a bunch.
GM: Well, we used to fire down. Fire down at the sea. And the rear gunner used to fire down at the sea. We [laughs] went on a, we went on a trip when we were converting into Halifaxes, and we had to go and bomb Rockall. That little mountain in the middle and we had to go and bomb Rockall and on the way we’d to test our guns. That was in the exercise. The skipper said, ‘Are we ok navigator to test the guns?’ And the navigator said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘What do you mean, Titch?’ I said, ‘I can see land in front of me. Down there. I can see land.’ He said, ‘No. The navigator said we’re over the sea.’ I said, ‘We’re not over the sea. It’s land.’ And he’d missed a leg out on his plan [laughs] He’d missed a leg out on his plan, so his plan showed us over the sea and we were still over the land.
HB: Oh dear.
GM: And Liverpool. Nearly fired my guns at Liverpool.
HB: Blimey.
GM: Yeah.
HB: I suppose he got in trouble for that did he?
GM: Who?
HB: No?
GB: No. No. No. No. The only time we got in trouble was when we went to North Creake. Our first trip at North Creake. Familiarisation they called it. New planes, and we flew, flew anywhere. We just flew round swinging the compass and one thing and another. We went out to sea to fire my guns and there was a trawler and there was a crowd of birds around it and I was firing my guns and we hit this crowd of birds. One engine packed up so we asked permission to land immediately and we landed and we went in front of the CO. ‘What happened? How did you come to hit a flight of birds?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘We were flying over the coast and we just hit this flight of birds.’ He said, ‘Oh yes. Really birds.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ The skipper said, ‘Yes. Just birds. Just a flight of ordinary birds’ He said, ‘How come [laughs] the engineering officer has got five seagulls in his office.’ How come he’d got five seagulls in his office.
HB: You shouldn’t have been there.
GM: No. We shouldn’t have been there.
HB: I don’t know.
GM: Yeah.
HB: I don’t know.
GM: But they used to, the clothing was adequate. Really good clothing we had.
HB: Yeah.
GM: We had a bomber jacket and extra long johns.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And very modern vests. Very warm.
HB: Yeah.
GM: They came up to your neck and everything. But you used to get cold here and here, under your chin and your eyes used to get cold. Especially if you were looking forward, which you had to rotate the turret.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And —
HB: So, so on a normal, so how would it work then? How would you be told as an air gunner that you’re going to be flying on operations?
GM: Oh, we, in the morning the skipper would tell us, ‘We’re flying tonight, lads.’
HB: Right.
GM: And he, they used to go to the, the navigator and the flight engineer and the pilot used to go to a briefing. And then before the op the whole crew went to a briefing and the chair, there were seven, seven seats and seven seats and everybody and then there was a big map of Europe on the wall and the CO would come out with a big stick and say, ‘Your target for tonight is Monchengladbach, and your route is this way — ‘’ This way. ‘Be careful of this area here because there’s a lot of flak there. Do a dog leg here.’ The navigator had got all the details and they told us, and then the weapons officer used to come in and say you’re carrying so many bombs, and so many of this, and we used to carry Window which was strips of silver paper and the strips of silver paper were about a foot and a half long. But when we were flying with 100 Group our, our silver paper was fifteen feet long. We didn’t have so many of them.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And you used to, before you hit the coast the [pause] I’m sure. I think the wireless operator had to put the, the silver paper in in through the —
HB: And that went down a chute.
GM: A chute. Yeah. It went down a chute and, so that fifty planes would look like five hundred planes on the radar.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Because each piece of silver paper would have been lit as a blip.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And, and when, when we used to fly with 100 Group our fifteen feet long stayed in the air longer, but it didn’t say there was that many.
HB: Yeah.
GM: But and they were all a distraction. Used to usually drop the silver paper just before you changed course.
HB: What was it? As a sort of a deception sort of thing?
GM: Well, yes. That’s right.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So, you’ve been in. You’ve had your briefing.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Did you have, did you do anything separate as an air gunner?
GM: No.
HB: Or was that it?
GM: No. No.
HB: That was just it.
GM: You were altogether.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And then after briefing you used to go for a flying meal.
HB: Yes.
GM: Bacon. Eggs. Bacon and eggs. Sometimes there was chips but we always had bacon and eggs. And big portions as well.
HB: Right.
GM: We used to collect our escape kit and our parachute and an orange and a block of chocolate which you distributed in your pockets.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And you’d wait for the, the bus, the waggon to take you out to the aeroplane about an hour before you took off. You used to go the, and sit on the grass or play football or something like that altogether.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And the ground crew were just finishing off.
HB: What was, can you remember what you had in your escape kit, Gordon?
GM: Oh yes. There was a map. It was only a small box. There was a map. There was a compass. There was some nutritious bar of stuff. I don’t know what it was but they invented this bar of stuff to eat. And there was a whistle, I think. No. We used to carry the whistle. We used to have the whistle always with us. We always had the whistle in case you fell in the sea. [unclear] a compass. Pipe smokers had a pipe and the pipe converted to a compass. Just broke it open and the compass was inside the barrel of the pipe. But the main thing was the map. It was a big map of Europe and all on silk. A silk map. Very posh.
HB: Yeah.
GM: We, it was just a small box which you just slipped in to your pocket. Into your breast pocket as it were.
HB: Did you, did you carry, did you carry photographs of yourself with you?
GM: No. No. Oh, that was one thing you did before you took off and before you collected your parachute. You collected your parachute. You had to empty your pockets so that you’d got nothing to identify yourself with at all.
HB: The reason I ask was I did interview somebody once who showed me some photographs they took. They had. And they took them with them in case they were shot down so they could be used on false papers.
GM: Oh. Well, I hadn’t heard of that.
HB: No.
GM: We, we were, we were told to clear everything out. Especially bus tickets.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And all that sort of stuff. Anything that could identify you or your squadron.
HB: Yeah.
GM: You know, like postcards from the family with your address on. You don’t. All that had to be taken out and put on the —
HB: So, you’ve had your briefing. You’ve been to dispersal.
GM: No. We’ve had our briefing. We’ve had our dinner.
HB: You’ve had your dinner.
GM: We go and collect the parachutes
HB: Yeah. And then you’re waiting at dispersal and the truck comes.
GM: The truck comes, and they’ve usually got two or three crews, and it takes you all the way around the perimeter and drops them off at each plane.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And usually the CO comes around. Just a little chat. And then at a certain time the skipper says, ‘Time to get aboard lads.’ And you just get in and of course I, I only sat in the rest position. I didn’t get in to my turret until we’d taken off.
HB: So that was sort of in the middle of the aircraft.
GM: Yes.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And there was a lot of room in the Halifax.
HB: Yeah.
GM: There was room for eight of us to sit in. Or seven of us to sit in.
HB: Yeah. Yeah, so you, you’ve gone into the plane. You’ve gone to the rest position.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Did you have, did you have any duties at all for take - off? Or was it just —
GM: Just I’d cock my guns
HB: Yeah.
GM: No. I couldn’t cock my guns until we were over the sea in case there was a mistake. We used to cock the guns. We were soon over the sea anyway.
HB: Yeah.
GM: So, that’s the only thing I had to do was make sure that my gunsight was working. Cocked the guns. Make sure that all four were all cocked.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And ready to fire.
HB: Did you, did you always have the same turret? I think you said to me in the last interview that you were comfortable in the Boulton Paul turret.
GM: Yes.
HB: Because it was big and you, you know you fitted in. You had plenty of room.
GM: Yeah.
HB: But did, did you always have the same turret or did you have to change?
GM: It was all, I only flew in the Boulton Paul turret.
HB: Right.
GM: When I did the one in the rear it was a Frazer Nash turret.
HB: Yeah.
GM: The rear gun had a Frazer Nash turret.
HB: So how, so when you were in that turret, what, what guns had you got?
GM: Four. Four 303 Browning machine guns.
HB: Right. And I presume they were calibrated to, to converge, were they?
GM: It was one of our jobs on the ground to calibrate the guns so that it didn’t hit any part of the aircraft.
HB: Right.
GM: That was one of our jobs. We had to calibrate the guns.
HB: Because that’s one of the questions a lot of people ask is how did you manage to not shoot your own tail off?
GM: No. They’d been calibrated so that you used to turn your gun round at the plane and press the, I think we used to press a button. I think it was a button, and so that when, when it was revolving, and when you’re firing, when it hit the, looked at that, the bullets didn’t fire. It stopped the guns from firing.
HB: Right. Right. Yeah. Ah that, that’s, that explains it then.
GM: Yeah. Because you could hit the front of the aircraft quite easily.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And you could hit the tail quite easily as well.
HB: Yeah. I can believe it. Yeah.
GM: But you, you calibrated. That was one of your jobs. To calibrate it. When you did a, if you did a pre-flight flight, used to do that.
HB: So, when obviously, when you’re flying at night your vision is, is, is absolutely essential. Your, you know, your skills at looking out into the night. How did you protect your eyes when you were flying at night?
GM: One thing we used to do was we used to have a pair of goggles which we used to put on while we were waiting if it was daylights or, and we were going to be flying at night we used to wear these goggles. A pair of like sunglasses.
HB: Yeah.
GM: So that when you, you took them off and put them in the plane you’d stopped your eyes from going.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Suddenly in to dark when you wouldn’t be able to see anything.
HB: Yeah.
GM: But wearing these glasses, which you were given they, they were very useful.
HB: Yeah. So once you, once you were up and you’re flying. You were flying towards the target.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Would you get much of, much information from the pilot or the navigator or anybody else to tell you what was happening? Where you were going or —
GM: There was always conversation going on. The skipper was asking the flight engineer if all the engines were ok. He was asking the wireless operator if he still had contact with his wireless. And the bomb aimer used to sit next to him and he only used to go in to his position when we were getting, getting close to the target.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And the navigator had his little, he had a curtain all round him and he was, he was giving the skipper instructions of a course to fly. Every, all, every, all the time he was chatting.
HB: Yeah.
GM: The flight engineer and the navigator were doing most of the talking and the skipper was asking questions and everybody else was in their own thoughts as it were.
HB: Yes. Yeah. So as, as you come in you’re coming in towards the target. Obviously, we know the risks were flak and night fighters.
GM: Yeah.
HB: And that sort of thing.
GM: And other planes.
HB: Yeah. And the other planes are all around you. Your own side.
GM: Yeah.
HB: What, can you, is it possible to describe or to tell me what it was like to fly towards a target through the flak?
GM: Well, one of our trips we went was Hazebrouck it was called, and it was a railway. A railway marshalling yard in France. And that was the worse flak I ever saw and the flak was just coming up before. The flak was firing when the planes weren’t there and we were flying along this flak and then we had to go in to it and that was a bit scary, you know. You couldn’t help it. Suddenly you had to go through it because the target was there and if you didn’t turn in to the target you wouldn’t. The flak was, was enormous, the amount of flak there was. Hundreds of flak bursts.
HB: So, sitting in your position in the, you know.
GM: You could see it all.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. So, and, and so that that would be like I suppose flying through a giant firework display.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Almost. But with quite nastier consequences.
GM: Well, you could smell the smoke from the, as you flew through it. The ones that exploded you didn’t worry about because they missed you. It was the one that you didn’t see that hit you.
HB: Yeah.
GM: But it was the amount of flak they threw up, the Germans was enormous. Absolutely hundreds, hundreds of bursts of flak.
HB: Yes.
GM: And nearly always at the right height as well. They’d, they’d got good range finders.
HB: Yeah. What, what were the, what were the searchlights like?
GM: Well, on our last trip we were coned.
HB: Yeah.
GM: By searchlights. About fifty on us. This last trip was our worst trip ever and we were coned and the only thing you could do was to dive down one of the, one of the searchlights which is what the skipper did because they couldn’t change the, where the shells were bursting quick enough because we were going down. And in actual fact I fired my guns at a searchlight. The one we were flying down. It went out.
HB: Oh right.
GM: And that saved us.
HB: Yeah. Was the —
GM: The moment it went out the skipper said to navigator, ‘Which way?’ He said, ‘How the hell do I know?’
HB: So, was that what, was that something you trained for or just something you did?
GM: Something happened. It was —
HB: Yeah.
GM: It had never happened before.
HB: Yeah.
GM: We’d never been hit by searchlights before.
HB: Yeah, because when I’ve talked to others they always talk about the corkscrew.
GM: Yeah. The corkscrew is for fighter.
HB: Yeah. What was, what was the corkscrew manoeuvre then?
GM: It was depending which, where the plane was. You, I, the gunner or the rear gunner had to tell the skipper, ‘Corkscrew right.’ ‘Corkscrew left.’ And if you said, ‘Corkscrew right,’ he turned the plane that way, that way, that way, and that way, and raised, went up and down while he was corkscrewing.
HB: So, he was constantly changing left to right.
GM: Left to right.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
GM: So that the pilot, if the plane was behind you he’d have to readjust every time.
HB: Yeah. What was that like to experience?
GM: Ah, it was like being in a merry go round. You were thrown this way and that way but it only happened to us twice and I don’t think it was necessary actually but the rear gunner called it the two times we did it. And corkscrew right or corkscrew left. Down. Right. Down. Right. Up. Down. Right.
HB: So, so this was —
GM: With, with the Halifax you could do it like. It would behave like, like a merry go round.
HB: Yeah.
GM: It was a marvellous plane for that.
HB: So, so the tail gunner had called it. Were you ever actually attacked by night fighters?
GM: No. The only time we were attacked was on our second trip and that’s when we lost our bomb aimer. I’d, I reported to the skipper there was a plane below us being attacked. He said, ‘Keep your eyes open.’ And I could see the tracer going and I couldn’t see the other plane that he was firing at. And then the tracer stopped and at that moment the one shell hit us right in the nose. Blew the nose off.
HB: Right.
GM: And the bomb aimer was sitting with his legs like that and it exploded under his bum. And the plane was, was doing this all the time then because it was filling with air and then it couldn’t take any more air, so the plane was going like that all the time. It was really uncomfortable. That’s was the only time I was really terrified.
HB: Yeah. Did, I don’t suppose you ever saw the aircraft that —
GM: No.
HB: That did the attack.
GM: No. Never saw the aircraft.
HB: No.
GM: I thought it was a Fokke Wulf 190 that I saw a shape going away but I reported it as a Fokke Wulf 190.
HB: Did you lose, did the other plane, did we lose the other plane? The other aircraft. The first one that was attacked. Did we lose that one?
GM: I don’t know.
HB: Oh right.
GM: I mean he was way below us.
HB: Oh right.
GM: He was way below us.
HB: Right. Right. Yeah.
GM: And I saw the tracer but it didn’t see the plane he was firing at.
HB: Yeah. So, so you’ve been out there and you’ve gone through the flak and the searchlights.
GM: Yeah.
HB: You’ve done, or you’re doing your run to the target.
GM: The bomb run. It was called the bomb run at that time.
HB: What, did you have a job to do while that was going on? While the bomb run was going on?
GM: No. The only job we had to do was keep our eyes open.
HB: Yeah.
GM: For everything. At that moment the bomb aimer, the bomb aimer took over the plane.
HB: Right.
GM: ’Steady. Steady. Steady. Left. Steady. Right. Steady. Steady. Left. Right. Bombs gone,’ and the plane would go wumph.
HB: Yeah. It would jump up in the air.
GM: It would be up in the air.
HB: Yeah. And what would, because obviously you used to take photographs as well. Was that done automatically?
GM: It was done automatically.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
GM: When the bombs were released, it was done automatically. We had some very good photographs of our bombs.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Especially in the daylight ones.
HB: Yeah. So, you’ve, you’ve dropped your bombs. You’ve turned away. You’re heading back.
GM: Yeah.
HB: You’re heading back home. So, what, what are you, what are you sort of experiencing now? What are you feeling now?
GM: Elated actually.
HB: Yeah.
GM: To think you’ve gone over the target, and you’re on the way home but you’ve still got to keep your eyes open.
HB: Yeah. Was that a bit, a bit risky?
GM: Well, believe it or not I think it was when we went to Monchengladbach, we [pause] we went over the coast and there was a flak ship firing at us. All of a sudden, the flak started out of nowhere. Flak in the night, and of course they were a burst of colours. They were sort of glowing, and this flak ship was firing at us, and you didn’t know that it was there until it happened.
HB: Right.
GM: So —
HB: And obviously they moved them about.
GM: Yeah.
HB: So, yeah you could never really predict where they were.
GM: No. No.
HB: Yeah. So then —
GM: Then —
HB: Yes. So, so you’re on the way back.
GM: Yeah.
HB: You’re feeling elated and you come in. You know you’re coming back to your airfield.
GM: Yeah.
HB: What was, what was your procedures for landing then as, as an air gunner?
GM: No procedure for me other than to keep, keep my eyes open because there were intruders at that time. There were intruders. You could be fired on as you were landing by the German, especially they used these JU88s as intruder aircraft and you had to keep your eye open right until, right until the moment you landed. But we didn’t. We were fortunate. We didn’t have it.
HB: Yeah.
GM: We did land on the FIDO twice which was a very, very strange and frightening procedure. I think Carnaby took in ninety six planes in about half an hour.
HB: Blimey.
GM: Because everybody was running out of petrol.
HB: Yeah. And of course, Carnaby was FIDO fitted, wasn’t it?
GM: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
GM: There was three.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Woodbridge, Carnaby and Manston were the three aerodromes that were fitted with FIDO.
HB: Yeah. Blimey. Yeah.
GM: It was like diving into hell.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Because you couldn’t see a thing because of the fog. You couldn’t. Until you were fifteen feet from the ground you couldn’t see anything. The pilot just dived in to the, you could see the lights under the fog. And then when you got to fifteen feet you could see the ground.
HB: That’s low, isn’t it?
GM: It is low. Especially if the ground’s not your runway.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Yeah, but —
HB: So, just going back a little bit when, when you did all your training and, and all that sort of thing one of the things you would have probably have been trained to do was the procedure for ditching.
GM: Oh yes that was, we did that.
HB: Ditching over water and that sort of thing.
GM: We did that at 14 OTU which was at Bridlington.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And it was November. It was cold. It was snowing. And we went, got in the bus for dinghy training. We were taken to the harbour and there was a pile of Mae Wests on the floor. They said, ‘Right. Put your Mae Wests on. What we want you to do is to jump into the sea. Swim to the dinghy. Get in the dinghy. Turn it. Get out of the dinghy and turn it over.’ The next crew was, next ones would jump in to the sea. Turn the dinghy right way up. Get into the dinghy. Turn it over and come back. And I’m sitting there. I’m standing there thinking I’m going to be first. So, I grabbed the Mae West and I put it on. He said, ‘Who’s first?’ I said, ‘I am.’ And I realised that they’d got to put the wet, wet Mae Wests on when they came out. The people after us had to put the wet Mae Wests on and it was freezing cold. Of course, the Mae West was dry and I was a good swimmer, so jumping in and swimming out to the dinghy was no problem. One of the fellas with me doing it wasn’t a very good swimmer but he managed it, you know.
HB: Yes.
GM: He, he couldn’t help turn the dinghy over. Tricky to turn the dinghy over in the water, and it was cold.
HB: So, at what, if you were in an operations or doing this training.
GM: Yeah.
HB: At what stage would you actually inflate your Mae West? How would you do that? Or when?
GM: Oh, not until you were out of the plane.
HB: Right.
GM: You couldn’t, if you inflated your Mae West I wouldn’t have been able to get out of your turret.
HB: Yeah.
GM: No.
HB: So how would you inflate it?
GM: Pull a toggle. It had got a little lever. A little button like a, like a Boy Scout’s toggle.
HB: Yeah.
GM: It was on the Mae West and you just pulled it, whoosh.
HB: So, was it gas filled then?
GM: Gas filled. Yes.
HB: Yeah. Because so the Mae West must have changed because I think early on they must have blown them up didn’t they? With a tube.
GM: Well, you could blow it up yourself. It had got a tube on it so that if you were in the water any length of time you could top up the air in the Mae West. It was sticking out on the side.
HB: Yeah.
GM: You just grabbed it and blew in to it.
HB: Right.
GM: It was —
HB: So, I mean I mean you’ve got a crew of seven. Did, could everybody swim?
GM: I don’t know whether everybody could swim. Everybody was taken for swimming lessons to make sure.
HB: Oh right.
GM: One of the things we did at OTU we did was the swimming baths. We had, but I think most people in our days in school you all went to swimming every week at school.
HB: Yeah.
GM: You know, when you were nine, ten you all went swimming.
HB: Oh right.
GM: I was a good swimmer.
HB: Right. Ah. So on, so on operations on the Halifax.
GM: Yeah.
HB: I presume the pilot, the skipper would actually call for, you know warn you that you were going to ditch.
GM: That’s right.
HB: What would, what would then follow? Who would do what? Do you know?
GM: We would, everybody would, I would get into the rest position and the rear gunner used to get in the rest position and we used to brace ourselves. You had to put your arms, your arms, your head used to close your fingers and put it behind your head and sit like this in the rest position.
HB: You were crouched over. Yeah.
GM: Crouched. Well, sitting down.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And you would tightly hold your head. I can’t put my arm up there now.
HB: Yeah [laughs]
GM: Used to put my head down and hold it. When we, when we pranged, that’s one thing we had to do, because you was careering across the runway and then you stopped dead.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
GM: You know.
HB: So that, so if you were going to ditch then you would be in the rest area.
GM: That’s right.
HB: I presume the bomb aimer and navigator would then obviously have to come back away from the nose.
GM: Yes. Everybody would come back away from the nose or as many, and I think there was about six of us [pause] No. Five because I think the bomb aimer used to stay with the pilot to help the pilot on the crash landing.
HB: Yeah.
GM: But everybody else came to the rest position in the middle of the aircraft.
HB: Yeah. And you would have come out obviously if everything went right. You’d try and come out the door I presume.
GM: Yes. The door and then you’d have to swim.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Because the door was away. Was the nearest the tail.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
GM: And the idea is you got on to the wing and the [pause] the dinghy used to throw itself out.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
GM: The dinghy used to self-eject with the smash and the dinghy would, and it was tied and it was, we’d all got knives, and you had to, you had to make sure you’d got the dinghy tight, but you had to free it from the aircraft in case the aircraft went down.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
GM: And then you’d pile into the dinghy. All of you.
HB: Is that something you wanted to avoid?
GM: Definitely. We, we never got, we never, never, never got near to ditching in the sea at all. Never.
HB: Yeah. So, yeah, I was, I was interested in that because a lot of people have talked about ditching, but how you actually got to that level of training and expertise is of interest.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Because some guys I’ve spoken to have talked about doing what they called dry dinghy training.
GM: That’s right. Dry.
HB: On the airfield.
GM: Dry dinghy training. We did that. That was at Conversion Unit.
HB: Right
GM: You did. It was one of the things you did when you converted from, we flew in Whitleys believe it or not. Whitleys [laughs] and changed to Halifax.
HB: Yeah. So, as, as the war, you know you came into the war sort of ’44/45. That time.
GM: Yeah.
HB: What, what changes, what were the biggest changes you saw, Gordon happen, happen?
GM: Master bomber.
HB: Yeah.
GB: That was the biggest change. The master bomber orchestrating the raid. He would bomb to the left of the green indicators. Bomb to the right. Take the bombs forward. And he did the instructions. ‘Don’t bomb in the middle two. Waste of bombs. Bomb on the edges. Bomb on the edges.’
HB: Yeah.
GM: Which spread the target area.
HB: Yeah.
GM: They used to put target indicators down as well which was marvellous. They would tell you what the target indicator colour was every day. Every time you went, ‘The colour of the day is green,’ so that the Germans would light up fake targets.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah.
GB: But if the, they used to change the colour of the target indicator. Sometimes green, sometimes red, sometimes yellow.
GM: And —
HB: And they were and the master bomber would call the height as well I presume.
GM: No. No. We were all the height we were given. We were told to fly at such and such a height which was between eighteen and twenty two thousand feet usually, at night. The master bomber, if the target indicator wasn’t on target he’d called up the backers up would obliterate that target indicator and they’d put another target indicator down and he’d say, ‘The new colour is — ’
HB: Right.
GM: Made up a different colour for the next target.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. That’s, yeah. Yeah that’s —
GM: The whole time you were on the bombing run the master bomber was talking to you.
HB: Right.
GM: Every minute.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
GM: ‘Bomb to the left of indicator.’ ‘Bomb to the right of indicator.’ ‘Bomb forward.’ ‘Bomb forward.’ ‘Take it more forward.’
HB: Yeah.
GB: In fact, on one of our trips we had to go round again because he moved the target and we’d already passed it.
HB: Oh right. Right.
GM: So, the skipper said, ‘We’re going around again.’ We only did it once, and that was a bit hairy because you had to go around and join the bomber stream again and come back in again.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. That’s doesn’t sound nice.
GM: No. It wasn’t.
HB: No. So, so obviously the majority of the bombing that you did was at night but on daylight you must have done some daylight operations, well I know you have because there’s a couple in your logbook.
GM: Yeah. I did a lot of daylights.
HB: Yeah. What, what was your feeling? This might sound a bit strange, but what was your feeling about being able to see clearly what you were bombing?
GM: Well, there was, you could see the target. Especially if it was marshalling yards like Hazebrouck. It was, the target was very plain, you could see it entirely but the master bomber was there as well. He’d say, ‘Bomb to the right. Bomb to the left again.’
HB: Yeah.
GM: But —
HB: And what did, what was you, what was your overall feeling then as you’re seeing this target clear as day and the bombs are going down? What, what was your overall feeling on that?
GM: Well, the minute the bombs were going down you felt as though you had done your job.
HB: Yeah.
GM: You’d actually done your job so it was all you had to worry about was getting home. From the moment you dropped your bombs you already knew your course you had to take. The skipper and the navigator had all, had got that, were told that so that you immediately went on to that course, and then did a couple of dog legs before you crossed the coast again.
HB: And when you got, when you got, you obviously you, you end up with your end of tour, you know. You’re told that you’ve, you’ve come to the end of your tour.
GM: Yes. That was our last trip.
HB: Yeah.
GM: That was the worst trip we ever did. There was no side left of the plane, on the one side. All gone. I was just looking at looking at, just looking at metal. Bits of metal, and —
HB: So, so you had a bit of an escape there then.
GM: Well, yes because my, I hadn’t fired my guns so that the bullets saved me from damaging. It saved me from my leg getting damaged without a doubt because there was damage to the bullets itself because it took the whole, took the whole lot of the left-hand side of the plane out, from the front nose and there was a great big hole all the way to the tail and they, they hit us a lot of times. But the searchlight went out. We were still flying. I think if a Lancaster had had what we’d had it wouldn’t have made it, but the Halifax was, was so rugged, and it really was.
HB: Yeah.
GM: A very strong aircraft.
HB: Yeah. So how, when you say the ammunition saved you.
GM: Well —
HB: I hadn’t thought of this.
GM: Ammunition.
HB: How did, how did the ammunition get to the gun?
GM: The ammunition was here and here.
HB: Either side of your legs.
GM: Like four. And you used to feed the ammunition into the four guns. There were four panniers of bullets. You feed it into the guns, cock it and so you’ve got the first gun done. Then do the second gun, do the third gun, do the fourth gun. And these, these troughs as it were where the bullets were coiled up, and they were all here. Right here. And all the damage was there and the —
HB: So, yeah. So, from your thigh down you’ve got the bullet panniers.
GM: Yes. When, when we got home it was obvious that the bullets had saved my legs because I never had a scratch. Never had a scratch.
HB: So, the shrapnel obviously that ripped through the side of the aircraft was bouncing off the, it’s amazing they didn’t go off.
GM: Yes. Well, no because they were facing that way.
HB: Oh, of course.
GM: So yeah.
HB: Yeah.
GM: They were facing the point.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
GM: They then made, the bullets were facing outwards.
HB: I see what you mean. So, that the angle of the bullet —
GM: Yeah.
HB: The shrapnel didn’t hit the explosive bit. It hit the nose.
GM: It hit the nose.
HB: Wow.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Well, that was a lucky escape surely.
GM: Yes. It was.
HB: Yeah.
GM: The CO came. Came out in his car. He took one look at the plane and he said, he said to [unclear] and Digby, ‘Well, Digby you’ve had enough. Call it a day. You’ve finished your tour.’
HB: Just like that.
GM: He said, ‘Because you’ve ruined another plane.’ [laughs] He said, I can remember him saying that.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And the next day we were, we were posted.
HB: But did you, did you actually get to go out for a last end of tour drink?
GM: No. Not really because we went to briefing and next morning we handed our, all our stuff in. The bicycles had to be handed in and everything. I think it took two days to get to, you had a, a leaving chit to fill in.
HB: Yeah.
GM: And you had to go to the MO. You had to go to the, all sorts. You had to go to all of these actions handing in this, that and the other thing.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. And that was it.
GM: That was it.
HB: That was it. Finished.
GM: We went to Kirby.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Never saw each other again.
HB: Yeah.
GM: We just, ‘Cheerio chaps. Have a good — ’and I was very lucky. I was posted to 1 Squadron. Spitfires.
HB: Yeah.
GM: Flying control.
HB: Yeah. Well, Gordon, I’ve got to say I could sit here all day. You know.
GM: Yeah.
HB: We’ve had a, we’ve had, you know well over an hour.
GM: We haven’t.
HB: And I really do thank you for that, because —
GM: I haven’t bored you to tears.
HB: No. You could never bore me, Gordon. But I’ve really appreciated it. It’s been a really good interview. I mean we’re coming, we’re coming up towards quarter to twelve so I think we’ll perhaps finish the interview there.
GM: Ok. One thing I would say to you, on our training there was one part of our training that we did when we were posted to Driffield and we were taught how to escape.
HB: Oh right.
GM: We were arrested at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. We were searched. We were given dungarees. Only dungarees. We were given a meal, and at 8 o’clock at night when it was dark, we were taken out in a truck and we were dropped two at a time in the countryside. This was on the Thursday and we’d got to get back to camp on Friday on Saturday. Get back to camp and Sunday was the day we should have been back by. And we were in Yorkshire. In the Dales. And you had to get, you had to fend yourself. You’d got no money. You’d got nothing to eat. Get back to camp. Teach you how to escape. We got on the bus and said to the bus driver, ‘I’m ever so sorry. We’ve got no money. Can we have a lift?’ He said, ‘Of course you can, lads.’ He took us. He took us to Scarborough. Took us to Scarborough. We slept under the, slept under the, slept on the beach. It was warm. It was summer.
HB: Yeah.
GM: We slept on the beach. We went to a, we went to a café and said, ‘Have you got any scraps that you want to throw away because we’ve got, we’re in the Air Force and we’re, we’re trying to escape and they’ve given us no money. And have you got any — ’ ‘Of course, you can. Come in’ We had a meal. A proper meal. We did that twice. Did that twice, and we got back on the Saturday. So, we got back. We had a, got on the bus again.
HB: You must have had some very caring bus drivers.
GM: We went to the bus driver and said, ‘Look, I’m ever so sorry. We’re in the RAF and we’ve been told that we’ve got to, got to get back to camp without any money. Is there any chance you can let us on the bus?’ He said, ‘Course, you can.’ And he dropped us at the gate.
HB: Oh no.
GM: And that was our experience of learning how to escape.
HB: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder how many buses there were in Germany and Belgium. Yeah. Yeah.
GM: Oh, well, you couldn’t ask for a ticket [laughs]
HB: No.
GM: Yeah. The only, only German I knew at that time was, ‘Hände hoch.’ ‘Put your hands up.’
HB: Yeah. That would come in handy I suppose. Yeah.
GM: That was the only German I knew.
HB: Yeah. I tell you that’s lovely. A lovely bit to finish on that Gordon.
GM: Yeah.
HB: Thanks ever so much. I really do appreciate it.
GM: Now, are we going to the pub?
HB: Well, the tape’s still running. Do I have to admit I’m taking you to the pub? [laughs]
GM: No. No.
HB: On the tape [laughs]
GM: We can close the interview if you like.
HB: I’m closing the interview now.
GM: Yeah.
HB: It’s a quarter to twelve.
GM: I wouldn’t mind —
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 Gordon Mercier
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2021-10-21
2021-11-23
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Format
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02:15:42 Audio Recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AMercierCG211021
PMercierCG2101
PMercierCG2102
Description
An account of the resource
Cyril Mercier was born in Jersey in 1925. He joined the Home Guard in 1940 and the RAF in 1943. After initial training, and training on gunnery at Bridgnorth he joined 14 Operational training Unit at Abingdon, where he crewed up. He trained on Halifax, eventually joining 51 Squadron at RAF Snaith. On his second operation to Amiens his aircraft was damaged and the bomb aimer was injured. The pilot made a Darkie call and landed the damaged aircraft at RAF Dunsfold. On their journey across London on the Underground dressed in their flying gear, the passengers had a collection for them of 100 cigarettes. He and his crew joined 171 Special Duties Squadron which operated Lancasters using Mandrel jamming equipment. His last operation was to Leipzig. The aircraft was coned by searchlights and badly damaged. He was posted to RAF Hutton Cranswick as a controller’s assistant with 1 Spitfire Squadron. After being posted to RAF Llanbedr he was demobbed from the RAF.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944-08-17
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
England--Surrey
England--Norfolk
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Leipzig
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
Civilian
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
100 Group
14 OTU
171 Squadron
51 Squadron
78 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
animal
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
civil defence
crash
crewing up
demobilisation
FIDO
Halifax
Home Guard
Lancaster
Master Bomber
military discipline
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Abingdon
RAF Breighton
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Bridlington
RAF Dunsfold
RAF North Creake
RAF Riccall
RAF Snaith
RAF Stormy Down
searchlight
tactical support for Normandy troops
take-off crash
training
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/133/2507/ABeechH170317.1.mp3
d02ef7ab6635b07d0aac2e73f7b10c4f
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
Beech, Harold
Harold Beech
H Beech
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. The collection consists of three oral history interviews, three photographs and one artwork related to Harold Beech (b.1933). He was a schoolboy in Market Rasen, Lincolnshire during the war and experienced an aircraft crash.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Harold Beech and catalogued by IBCC staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-03-17
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.
One item in this collection has not been published in order to comply with intellectual property law.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound. Oral history
Still image. Photograph
Still image. Artwork
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Beech, H
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is a third interview with Mr Harold Beech. Date of birth 20th of June 1933 who lives at *** Kettering, Northamptonshire. This is further to the previous two interviews Mr Beech has done. It’s Harry Bartlett carrying out the interview. It’s the 17th of March 2017 and over to you Mr Beech.
HB2: Well I’ve already made reference to grandma’s little shop.
HB: Yes.
HB2: Now she sold non-rationable goods such as bottles of lemonade and she used to sell the big bottles of which there was a deposit of threepence on. You got it back when you returned the bottle empty. Now grandma had got all her empties stashed up outside her back, her front door and, ready for collection and all of a sudden she realised they weren’t there. So the air crew that frequented was questioned. ‘Now lads. What do you know about my bottles?’ and they all began to laugh and one chap piped up and said gran er, ‘Ma, you won’t need your bottles anymore. You haven’t got them.’ So she said, ‘I know I haven’t got them. Where are they?’ He said, ‘Well we dropped them over Germany,’ he said, ‘they don’t half whistle.’ And he said, ‘With a bit of luck there will be a lot of Germans looking for unexploded bombs.’ She said, ‘Oh really. Oh right. Thank you for telling me.’ And by that they’d had a whip around and reimbursed her for what she’d lost.
HB: For the deposits yeah.
HB2: So she wasn’t out of pocket but we laughed about that and thought how the devil does that crew, going on a dangerous mission like they are, might not come back, think about a prank like that?
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But that’s the way it was and they did it.
HB: Yeah. So this was the crew that used to visit ma and —
HB2: Yes. Yes.
HB: Have a, have a cup of tea and a cake.
HB2: It was their little oasis. Yes.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Oh that’s interesting.
HB2: But -
HB: ‘Cause I know they used to write on the bombs but —
HB2: Yes.
HB: Dropping lemonade bottles, that’s something different.
HB2: It is isn’t it?
HB: Yeah, it’s, that’s different. You know when we spoke before I can’t remember if I did ask you this because you were right next to Wickenby.
HB2: Wickenby. Faldingworth. Faldingworth.
HB: Faldingworth.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: And Wickenby. Did, was the airfield in your time ever bombed or attacked?
HB2: The only time Faldingworth was attacked was when a German aircraft followed one of our lads home.
HB: Right. Right.
HB2: And that was when he dropped the bomb on the spinney at the bottom of the road.
HB: Yes. Sorry yes I do recall that. But that was the only time you can recollect, yeah.
HB2: That was the only time I knew of any action against them.
HB: Yeah. But because obviously what crossed my mind was if that airfield is working the way it was working at Wickenby you’d got this civilian workforce repairing the aircraft.
HB2: Yes.
HB: Can you recall what aircraft they were repairing? Were they Lancasters?
HB2: Lancasters.
HB: They were —
HB2: Lancasters.
HB: Lancasters.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: And a complete civilian crew.
HB2: Yes.
HB: ‘Cause we’ve got the photograph of —
HB2: Yes.
HB: Then.
HB2: They were complete civilians.
HB: Right.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: So who would they report to?
HB2: They used to have, as far as I can remember, they used to have what we called the inspectors coming around.
HB: Right.
HB2: From the firm.
HB: Yeah. Which was a, the name of the firm they worked for.
HB2: AV Roe.
HB: AV Roe.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Right.
HB2: And they had people coming to check up on them from civilian organisations but were attached no doubt to the ministry.
HB2: Right.
HB: Some ministry or other.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: But they were supervised.
HB2: So the aircraft they were working on. Were they being returned to active service, operational service or were they just sort of stripping them down for parts and —
HB: No. No.
HB2: Things like that.
HB: If Ben said he could three aircraft on the runway by half past three he had to have three aircraft there at half past three.
HB2: Right. Right. Right. That’s —
HB: So —
HB2: Clarified that.
HB: Yeah. He, him and his crew were repairing Lancaster bombers.
HB2: Right. And where would they be coming from. Would they be coming from just Wickenby or would they be coming from all around.
HB: No. They was at Wickenby.
HB2: They were the ones that were based at Wickenby.
HB: Based at Wickenby.
HB2: Right. Right. That’s interesting. Well thanks ever so much for that Harold. That’s clarified a couple of things. I’m still intrigued with the lemonade bottles. Blimey. To think of that in the middle of a war.
HB: Well this is it. And what were they? Nineteen year olds. Twenty year olds.
HB2: Yeah. Thereabouts.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Thereabouts. They wouldn’t be much. Well the time now is quarter to one so I’m going to terminate the interview and we’ll record that for our purposes.
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 Harold Beech. Three
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ABeechH170317
Description
An account of the resource
Harold Beech was born in 1933 in Middle Rasen and grew up on a farm. During his youth he lived near several airfields. His grandmother befriended an aircrew and in this interview Harold recounts another encounter with the crew involving lemonade bottles. He also explains more about the civilians who serviced the Lancasters at RAF Wickenby.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
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
2017-03-17
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
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.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:05:32 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
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
aircrew
RAF Faldingworth
RAF Wickenby
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/133/2508/ABeechH170302.2.mp3
ff294bf160397061e4a277da67f292c3
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
Beech, Harold
Harold Beech
H Beech
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. The collection consists of three oral history interviews, three photographs and one artwork related to Harold Beech (b.1933). He was a schoolboy in Market Rasen, Lincolnshire during the war and experienced an aircraft crash.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Harold Beech and catalogued by IBCC staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-03-17
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.
One item in this collection has not been published in order to comply with intellectual property law.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound. Oral history
Still image. Photograph
Still image. Artwork
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Beech, H
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is an interview for International Bomber Command Digital Archive with Mr Harold Beech. The interview is taking place at ****
HB: Correction H. The, Mr Beech, his birth, his date of birth is the 20th June 1933. Right, Mr Beech.
HB2: Right.
HB: Over to you.
HB2: Well as already stated my name’s Harold Beech and I lived in a village in Lincolnshire called Middle Rasen. It sat on the River Rase and a mile and a half to the east was Market Rasen and two miles to the west was West Rasen. Hence the River Rase gave them three places their name. We also sat astride the A46. It split, the village was split by, from east to west by the road, by the River Rase and by the [Bremmer Brook.] I lived on a farm. My father was a small farmer. He was one of the thirty two farms in the village. It was a mixed farm. We had arable which we grew vegetables and stuff for the house as well as the field er for the animals and we had cows that provided us with milk, cream. Mother made butter. We had poultry that provided us with birds for the table and eggs and we killed a pig for the house. So, [pause] I’ve gone blank.
HB: Don’t worry about that.
HB2: I’ve gone blank.
HB: Don’t worry about that. Sorry, just, what was the name of the village you actually lived in?
HB2: Middle Rasen.
HB: Middle Rasen.
HB2: Middle Rasen.
HB: Right. So we’re at Middle Rasen.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: And we’ve just killed the pig for the -
HB2: We’ve just killed a pig [laughs] right. Yeah. We lived in a rented farmhouse plus outbuildings, large garden, two paddocks and a farm building complex. This was in the High Street of Middle Rasen and that was my home for some time.
HB: And can you remember what the farm was actually called?
HB2: The Vines.
HB: The Vines.
HB2: The Vines.
HB: Right.
HB2: My father’s farm was under fifty acres but the complex consisted of a barn, a granary, biers for the cattle, biers for horses and smaller barns for keeping pigs and calves in and an implement hole.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And we lived off the land and we lived well. In 1938 I started school and I’d been at school for a year and was settling in nicely when 1939 war broke out and upset everything.
HB: Was that, was the school in Middle Rasen?
HB2: Yes. Middle Rasen Primary.
HB: Right.
HB2: And for some, I can remember for some time before war was declared when my gran came to the house or when my father met other people in the village it was occasionally, ‘Things are not looking too good. Things are looking black,’ and I kept asking what these things were and didn’t get an answer.
HB: Right.
HB2: So when war was declared I remember, well a gang of us asked the teacher what these things were and she just said, ‘Unfortunately Germany, people in Germany are now fighting people in England.’ Well we went home for my dinner and as I went back to school I sat on a grassy bank and I thought now where the devil are they going to get a boxing ring big enough for all these people to box, to fight in, because my, my idea of fighting was cowboys and Indians, keystone cops and robbers. And that was it.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Or boxing on the television, on the radio. So that was my idea if I, I just couldn’t understand how this fighting was going on. So anyway I do remember at a time a man called Chamberlain came back and there was pictures in the paper of him waving a piece of paper. What he, what he’d done or what he’d said went right over my head. I’d no idea. Not until many years later. When, when we got settled in the school with the teacher she did, did say again and that’s all she would say about the two countries fighting each other, people in the two countries were fighting each other but we were subdued because we didn’t understand. Now, I was a six year old and I was confused ‘cause when war was declared the government shortly afterwards put out a statement to say they’d taken some powers and I remember my dad and all the adults getting in a bit of a confused state because the powers they’d taken were like dictator powers. They could, they were going to control anything and everything, anybody and everybody and they could send a person anywhere at any time to do any job if it boosted the war effort. Well a lot of people didn’t want, didn’t think much to being shoved about the countryside and living away. Then they said that there would be rationing and that blackout would be imposed and that if you disobeyed the government orders you could get fourteen years hard labour or be locked up without a trial. Well that frit me to death ‘cause I used to look at the bobby and go around the other side of him.
HB: Right. You know at, sorry to interrupt Harold. You know at the time you started school. When you went into school -
HB2: Yeah.
HB: And the war’s been declared. The teacher’s explained it. Did you, did you have any training? Any air raid precautions training? Or was there, were there things that the teacher had to teach you about what to do?
HB2: Not that I can remember. The only thing -
HB: No.
HB2: That happened at school was the strips of brown paper stuck on the windows to stop flying glass.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: We were issued with gas masks and we were issued with ear plugs.
HB: Right.
HB2: And we, of course you had to take oh and you had to wear a luggage label with your name and address on because the ID cards hadn’t come out.
HB: Right.
HB2: So I remember going to school and watching, seeing this paper go on but there was a siren was put on the police station tower a mile and a half away and whilst we were at school we had one or two warnings but that was all and I remember one day we were all, it was a wet day and of course we all crammed in to the cloakroom and so teacher kept us in the cloakroom while the all clear sounded. Well of course there was panic then because half of us hadn’t have our gas masks with us. So anyway when we went home and told mum what had happened the parents said, ‘For goodness sake never crowd them in one place again. Let them go into the classrooms where they would have a bit better chance of survival.’ There was a big ditch between us and the farm and the next door and they said, ‘Put them in the ditch.’ Well I can imagine a gang of kids in a wet day in a ditch but that was, they weren’t very well suited but after that I’m afraid our gas masks hung on an internal door for the rest of the war and the earplugs went in a drawer and stayed there and the luggage label well it disappeared along with the identity cards and it wasn’t because of bravado but my dad said when I’m ploughing and I put the gas mask on the hedge I’m at the other end of the field and [laughs] I’m in the soup.
HB: Right.
HB2: So -
HB: Right.
HB2: That’s, that’s how they went on at the beginning of the war. It, we had preparations for the war. Now we had a big house called Willoughby house. It had got a paddock at the front and a paddock in the back and that was commandeered by a troop of cavalry and the men were in the house and outbuildings and the horses were in portable stables. Well that was an attraction for us kids. That was a magnet. We wanted to go and look at the horses in the stables but the flaming army was better at it than we were and they kept us out. We didn’t like that at all but when they went for an exercise, all these chestnut horses, they were a lovely sight. They really were but looking back we thought ruddy hell, charge of the cavalry again and on the, on the gateway they built a pillbox and it was two circles of galvanised metal. One circle bigger than the other fitted inside and the gap between the two bits was filled with concrete and one, one shell from a tank would have sent it into kingdom come. We also lost all our signposts. And as well as the tape on the windows and that was just about it. Then the blacksmith’s shop was taken over and was being turned in to an ARP cleansing station. Well us kids were nosy parkers, kept saying, ‘What are you going to do in here? What’s going to do in here.’ Anyway, nearly completion this man must have been fed up with us ‘cause he said, ‘Come in and I’ll show you.’ So he took us into this room. He said, ‘This is where if you’d been gassed this is where you come. We take all your clothes off you and then we put you through there and we hose you down with some cold water and a big scrubbing brush,’ and he’d got this ruddy great scrubbing brush and carbolic soap. He said, ‘You’re scrubbed clean and then,’ he said, ‘We get some very smelly ointment and smear it all over you, wrap you in a blanket and send you home.’
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: Well after that we weren’t interested in the ruddy cleansing station.
HB: Absolutely. Absolutely.
HB2: But that, that was, that was oh and we had an ARP warden appointed and the school teacher was in the Observer Corps. Now, he was a lovely head man, headmaster but oh dear he used to go to, go home, have his tea and at 7 o’clock he’d go and observe, he’d come back in the morning, have breakfast and a lie down and then start teaching school again. Well the first thing he did was open his desk and take out Rupert the cane and lay it on the bench. Silence reigned I’ll tell you. But he was, he was soon known as Ratty Plowright.
HB: Right.
HB2: ‘Cause he got very short tempered and we, we as kids we noticed that and we didn’t like it, you know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. I think he had reason didn’t he?
HB2: Oh he did. He did and you know the, the, this is something which you had to experience because the change in that man over a few weeks was terrific. And then of course what upset my father and the farmers was there was going to be a War Agriculture Committee in every county that was going to advise but the farmers said no, tell us to what to do and he said they resented being told by broken down farmers who couldn’t make a go of farming and shiny assed clerks [laughs]. Oh there was, there was some opposition but again if they didn’t do as they was told they could have their land taken over by the Agricultural Committee and that would be it and one or two did unfortunately. But another thing that put panic amongst them was there was a sudden stop on all slaughtering of animals. Well that meant that everything we produced like our pig for the house and the eggs and whatever was going to be confiscated and we’d get the scrapings. So harvest was finishing, the corn harvest, the root harvest was quickly dug in and everything was put in clamps or pies or whatever you call it and stored and the corn that was, the corn was thrashed out of the stacks quick. That what was needed for feeding animals was stored well away from the stacks and the rest of it that was surplus they sold and the old pigs got killed and I mean when you got say ten or a dozen people in the village that’s killing a pig around about the same time there’s a bit of a glut but they was determined that what was produced was going to be eaten in the village so friends, relations and close relatives and friends got not only the customary fry or good plate of good cheer they also got a pork pie or some sausages or something else. The offal was quickly disposed of and then when it was time to take the bacon out of curing that was started on straightaway and they weren’t, they were intending on not letting much be confiscated but when the time come there was the biggest sigh of relief because not only was it back to normal it was better than normal because they were encouraging everybody to keep chickens, produce their own food, dig every bit of ground up there was and they even advised us where these, oh they advised us to set up pig clubs and poultry clubs, rabbit clubs and get allotment associations and they would advise us how to get the seed, the food, the coupons for the food and how to house and what have you. How to look after them. They were a real help. That’s, that’s about the only good thing they could say about the war agg. But there was, there was a glut in our village. We didn’t have a selling system. We had a barter system ‘cause somebody would have something. I mean we used to separate the milk to get the cream for the butter and we had a lot of milk spare. Well people would come up with a jar of pickled onions or something like that and say. ‘I’ll swap you. Can you let me have some - ’. ‘Yes. Go on.’ You know. And at times when the cows calved there was three days when you couldn’t use the milk. It was full of cholesterol and it used to make lovely custards so of course again a lot of swapping going on.
HB: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And my father was out one night. It must have been winter time and the policeman met him. He said, ‘Evening George,’ he says, ‘Do you know I’ve come to the conclusion that we must have the healthiest babies in the country.’ So my dad said, ‘How do you make out?’ He said, ‘Well they don’t half like the night air.’ So my dad says, ‘Why don’t you have a look in the pram to see how rosy their cheeks are?’ He said, ‘No George, I’ve got to live like the rest of them.’ And we all knew what everybody was doing, even the policeman so why the hell they had to hide it in prams ‘cause the policeman got his goodies in a bag. A brace of pheasants here, a rabbit or whatever it was hung on his gate. He was included. I mean it was all open but so secretive. But that’s how we lived. We swapped.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And funnily enough a common vegetable like the onion soon became pretty scarce and it was, it was said in the newspaper one day that The Times had an onion a pound and a half in weight and raffled it and it raised over four quid.
HB: Oh blimey. That’s not bad.
HB2: It wasn’t was it? But yes people were very careful. I mean there was plenty of onions in the village but people were very careful. They didn’t let them go too quickly and I mean eggs, when rationing come in were, well they were like gold. You got one egg a week. I mean, we, we used to sit there and my mum used to cook me a piece of bacon or a piece of ham and an egg. Sometimes I used to get a goose egg fried.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: And I used to say, ‘How many folks are eating ham and eggs like I am mum?’ She said, ‘Not many. Not many.’
HB: Amazing.
HB2: And another thing that upset the females, the women of the village was the warden could not only go into the house and switch your lights off if there was an infringement of the blackout regulation he could check your larder to see if you’d got more than a week’s supply of food in it. Well the women went up in arms and said, ‘Well that means he’s going to summons the lot of us ‘cause we’ve all got more and when you think of it to kill a pig we had to send our ration books up to have our bacon coupons cancelled. Now, my mum, dad and me could get, on them coupons, thirty nine pounds in weight of bacon per year.
HB: Right.
HB2: And they were all cancelled. We were then supplied with a licence to kill the pig and we’d get a twenty stone, thirty stone pig killed that would produce summat like three or four hundred pounds worth of meat. We swapped it for thirty nine so we didn’t think we’d done too badly.
HB: No. No. Not a bad outcome.
HB2: No. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. But then the old pig, it was, it was a Godsend it really was and I remember many years later I attended a illustrated lecture on the home front and in fact the lecturer didn’t give us the lecture. He listened to us on the floor telling him and we went for a meal and two ladies and a gentleman were sitting at this table, ‘Come on. Sit down here my duck. Sit down here.’ And I said, ‘Oh you sound as though you come from London.’ She said, ‘Yes. We come from the East End. What was your war like?’ So I said, ‘Oh East End,’ I said, ‘I daren’t tell you.’ So she said, ‘Come on. We want to know.’ So I told her and she nudged her sister and she said, ‘This bleeding bloke’s living in bleeding paradise isn’t he?’ I said, ‘Compared to you I was,’ I said, ‘Because we never saw a bomb. Not to explode anyway.’ I said, ‘It was tranquil. We went to bed and we slept.’ So she said, ‘Well we didn’t.’ I said, ‘No. I’ve read about you and,’ I said, ‘I’ve learned about it since the war, come across people like yourself,’ and I said, ‘What the hell of a life did you lead?’ She said, ‘Well that’s true. That’s true.’ And by golly.
[pause]
HB2: Right. Now, the blackout. It was imposed very quickly and it caused the blackout material that was for sale to dry up quick so people then had to make do and mend and they made wooden frames, covered it with old cardboard cartons and then pasted wallpaper over the top of it to start with until they could get curtains and what have you properly and that the way it was imposed quickly we thought, right, bombs are soon going to rain down on us. The, the government said you should paint all the outside rim, perimeters of your panes, your glass with black paint and so we said we ain’t going to do that ‘cause we only had one window in the kitchen and if we had cut off out any more daylight off we wouldn’t have seen. So we that was that wasn’t done. That was ignored but they painted the edges the curbs black and white sections, the bottom of poles with black and white rings but as we said in the village we never had street lighting so we could find our way around quite easily. What did cause a lot of trouble there was a lot of reports of accidents going up because of the blackout. You could have, you had to block out your headlights with a circle of concrete, er concrete [laughs], with a circle of cardboard with a two inch slit in one lamp only. Well you couldn’t see where you were going and they was hitting fences and hitting everything. Even people.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: So they had to relax the thing in the end. The restrictions on lamps on vehicles. Now I’ve done, I’ve done the farmer’s harvesting.
HB: Did you, did you find at that time as, you know, with the involvement of the restrictions or, you know the change in how you were providing your food did you find that people, it drew people together or did you find the odd individuals that really didn’t want to play the game if you, if you know what I mean?
HB2: Our village turned into just one family.
HB: Right.
HB2: As I said if we were out playing as kids and we injured ourselves, skinned our knees or anything we didn’t run home we ran to the nearest house and they would bandage us up, give us a glass of lemonade and a cake and we were off you’d again or if we were misbehaving we got a clip around the ear.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Pretty sharp so yeah it was they blended well. They really blended well.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And if anybody was sick there was always, well we had a district nurse, she was always coming around but everybody did anything and the old folk they were looked after. If an old, we had several old people who’d got large gardens well they said to somebody else come and, if you want an extra garden come and do it and they would dig their, dig that garden, grow vegetables on it and keep the old folks supplied as well.
HB: Right.
HB2: So -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: We were doing very well and the only thing that hit us really was the imported stuff. The dried fruit. We knew jolly well that would be tight but they also rationed coal and you could have a pound a month. A ton a month.
HB: That’s not much.
HB2: It wasn’t. It wasn’t. So thankfully again living in the village with trees and there wasn’t much dead wood laying about I’ll tell you. Even at sales. Farm sales or house sales all the old trash wood would be put on a heap and they’d sell that as, you know for a few bob. Yeah
HB: Amazing.
HB2: Yeah. You’d get old, at a farm sale you’d get implements, old farm implements, chicken hut, hen huts, anything and they’d sell it to you for a few bob.
HB: Amazing.
HB2: Nothing was wasted.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Nothing was wasted. Now the effects on my family. Well, my sister she was directed into munitions. My brother, like a lot of other chaps in the village was called up so from about 1940 the family was split up and I was, I was brought up as an only child. My sister never did come back home. She got married and went to live away and then my brother when he came back was only home a brief time before he too got married so as a family in the early years we never lived as a family. Now, my brother was sent abroad in ‘41 and from that day that he boarded the ship my mother started suffering from asthma, asthma attacks, and they lasted right up to the day he come back and stepped over the threshold. And some of these attacks were, well they used to scare me. And me. I had a recurring nightmare. My father had two fields on a slope. One was arable, the other was grass divided by a big high hedge. The top was full of Germans. The bottom was full of English and we, when it occurred, this dream, this nightmare there was one hell of a battle and nobody got beyond the hedge but this battle raged like hell in my mind and I always ended up in the same, doing the same thing. Running through some streets of a town, I don’t know where, chased by ruddy Germans soldiers with fixed bayonets and rifles. They never caught me but I used to wake up crying my eyes out, shaking like a leaf, probably having wet the bed and wouldn’t go to sleep again. I had, it was regular. I wouldn’t say it was nightly but it was regular and I didn’t’ get much sleep but that thing lived with me for many well if I can still if I set my mind to it I can still recall every action now but it doesn’t have the same affect.
HB: Amazing.
HB2: Now, my father, he was advised or told by the War Agricultural Committee that he’d got to plough a grass field up and he’d be paid two pound an acre to do it but he must grow sugar beet on it. Well, he, he jumped up and down and he didn’t swear but he cursed a bit under his breath because he always maintained that this damned sugar beet crop wanted attention from early spring to late autumn winter and he didn’t think much to it. Anyway, he had to grow it which he did and come November time he used to have to take it up and top it and then wait for a permit to come to tell him which factory to take it to, when he could take it so then he could organise a lorry to come and pick it up and take it off there. I used to love that because I used to go with the lorry driver when we used to get to the factory and before we got anywhere a man come with a scuttle and took a sample off. Now the result of that sample depended on how much my dad got paid because there was a deduction for dirty beet, too much soil on it, too much top or low sugar content.
HB: Right.
HB2: But he was allowed to buy a by-product which was beet pulp for the cattle. Now that come in very coarsely woven sacks and these sacks were snapped up to make snip rugs.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah. What do you call the kind of rug?
HB2: Snip.
HB: Snip rugs.
HB2: Snip. Peg rugs.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Snip rugs.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And I spent many a time in front in front of the fire snipping these, this ruddy, well we had one the size of this mat here and at the end of the winter mother put it on the line to beat and she said, ‘I’m not bothering with that, there’s more holes than a colander.’ Sparks had come from the fire and -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Burnt a hole in it.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But they very useful were them sacks but as soon as dad could he got, didn’t grow sugar beet. And another thing that upset him was he was advised to feed the tops to his cattle. It was very good forage. Well he did and it tainted the milk.
HB: [Ringtone] Oh I do apologise.
HB2: That’s alright.
HB: I should have turned that off. Now. Turn that off. Just make sure this is completely off. I made the same mistake yesterday. I do apologise. So. So, so the forage, the forage was good for the cattle.
HB2: Providing you didn’t sell milk.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: But it tainted obviously.
HB2: It tainted the milk.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: You could still use it but you had to realise that it wasn’t sour, bitter or anything else it was just the flavour of the tops and it wasn’t dangerous so again we had people coming with cans and, you know, carting it off.
HB: Right
HB2: So but oh no he wasn’t he wasn’t too pleased about that. Oh, we couldn’t make butter either.
HB: No. Right.
HB2: He did swear at that. Well, and then we had, another crop that farmers had to grow was flax and we had billeted on us a man who had a tractor and a special machine for pulling the flax. It had to be pulled up by the roots and then dried and it went for, I think the roots went for webbing, something like that so we’d got this chap billeted on us. He didn’t last long because he was making his way around the farms in his area doing his job so he went and that man was replaced by an Irishman who was in a gang working on the airfields laying the runways.
HB: Right.
HB2: And he stayed for quite some time ‘till the, well I think he came for a couple of years.
HB: So when you say he was billeted with you he was given a, he rented a room in the house.
HB2: No.
HB: Farmhouse.
HB2: Well he got a bed in a bedroom.
HB: Right.
HB2: And he got his food at the table.
HB: Right.
HB2: And he did, mum did his washing.
HB: Right.
HB2: So he didn’t have a room.
HB: Right.
HB2: He was one of a family.
HB: Right.
HB2: And then the third man was an engineer, an aircraft engineer in charge of fifteen other men who repaired aircraft and he went, he was working at RAF Wickenby and he was with us for some time. Well ‘till the end of the war from about ’43 so, but he, one day said to me, ‘Would you like to come to work with me?’ And I said, ‘I can’t. I’m not allowed.’ And mum said, ‘No. He’s not going if he’s going to get you and everybody into trouble.’ He said, ‘He’ll be alright. He’ll be alright.’ So after a lot of persuasion mum allowed me to go and he had a motorbike and sidecar and just before we got to the camp I had to snuggle down and he put a coat over me and in we went into the hangar and in the hangar was a Lancaster that was being stripped for bits, spares. Now, he said, ‘You go in there. Don’t show yourself. Don’t start peering out of windows and moving levers that waggle the tail or anything like that,’ but he said, ‘If we shout “hide” you go in the canopy under there and pull these old blankets over,’ well they were all stinky with oil and what have you. Anyway, yes I would. Do you know from about 8 o’clock in the morning till 5 o’clock at night I had one hell of a time in there. I flew everywhere, bombed everywhere, shot everything down but there was one thing, I said, it’s a bit crowded in here for when they run around with their, with their parachutes on and I tried getting in the rear turret but I didn’t like that. I thought my God sitting in a glass bubble here all over, nothing under you, nothing around you and then I struggled to get out. That was me. I didn’t want to go in there. So anyway I said to him, ‘Look. Where do I go if I want the loo? What do they use for the loo when they’re on the flight?’ Well I suppose they’d made arrangements for me ‘cause they’d screwed a five gallon drum with a lid off to the floor and I said, ‘Is that it then?’ So he said, ‘Yeah. Use that. That’s the loo.’ So I said, ‘Well I hope to God they don’t fly upside down very often then,’ [laughs] but I could look out, there was holes in the fuselage and I could look out and see what the men were doing and in the distance I could see trollies with bombs on them being moved about. I never saw them being loaded on to aircraft but they was there and then I were watching them repair these holes. Now a hole about the size of a tea plate this chap had some, looked like shiny paper and he did this with a spray and then he stuck it over the thing and then he got something else and sprayed it, I suppose that was the paint and then he went inside and did something else inside and I heard an airman come in and he said to this chap, ‘That’s it Ben,’ he said, ‘Put plenty of paper on it,’ he said, ‘The bullets don’t ricochet so bad.’ And I thought egads you’re running about in this confined space and there’s bullets coming through. Well of course they would be wouldn’t there? Could be.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And I thought oh my God I don’t want to fly. I’m not going to fly. I want to join the air force but I don’t want to fly. Anyway, I as I said I had this whale of a time in there and when I got home I was really dinged into me you don’t speak to anybody, dire consequences. Well by the time I could tell anybody nobody was interested.
HB: Yeah. So the chap who took you in there was, he was a civilian.
HB2: He was a civilian charge hand in charge of this gang of men that repaired the aircraft and if he said, ‘I could have three on the runway for next afternoon,’ he had to have three there. I didn’t know it until after he’d gone home but mum said he used to worry. He used to worry about sending the aircraft out and hoping to God everything worked and if they didn’t come back was it his fault. What had they done right? I said oh I didn’t know, you know. He didn’t show it because he never talked about his work.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But you know everybody was affected differently.
HB: Yeah. That was, that was at RAF Wickenby.
HB2: Wickenby.
HB: Right. Right.
HB2: Wickenby. Nobody could, I might have said had to make radio silence but nobody could tell anybody but nobody could take the joy of that day from me.
HB: Oh no. No.
HB2: Oh and another thing that was started was the V for victory sign.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Churchill was encouraging people in occupied countries to go out and chalk up victory signs. Well we kids took that literally here and I remember somebody said that they expected it to take off in this country. Well we did our best. We sprayed everywhere. In fact the poor old police constable used to come to school and say, ‘Enough’s enough boys, you know. Don’t do it anymore.’
HB: Oh right.
HB2: So we had to limit it to the pavement [laughs] but we, we did our best.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Now, again, in the fields, in my dad’s fields if I went to the highest point I could see aircraft leaving. They used to come up from one direction like flies, get to a certain point and then all turn and fly off and in the morning if I got up early enough I could watch aircraft come back limping and I remember getting up there one summer morning and this aircraft come in and there was a whacking great hole between the front end and the back end in the fuselage and I thought oh God that’s going to crash and I listened and listened and listened. No. There was no bump so I assumed it got down alright but to see them come back with bits hanging off and short tail, short wings.
HB: Which airfield was that that you could see?
HB2: If I went and looked in the east I could see Ludford and Binbrook. If I went we’ll say at 11 o’clock or 10 o’clock I could see Wickenby. If I come a little bit further it was Faldingworth and Waddington, Lincoln things. A bit further around to the right Hemswell and we’d got one right on the doorstep, Faldingworth and Dunholme Lodge so there were, in actual fact I think there was about I think there about were eight airfields within about ten miles of the, of my house.
HB: Right. Right.
HB2: But oh you know I used to sit there and think good God how they, where have they been and how long has it taken them to come back?
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Then we had the military movements in the village to start with was, well it was regular. We would have lorrys loads of convoys of men, with men in towing guns and God knows what and then we’d have men march, troops of soldiers marching through the village. We couldn’t understand where the hell they’d come from ‘cause Lincoln was fifteen miles one away and there wasn’t a camp in between us and them and where they going? There was no camps between Market Rasen and Grimsby so we just wondered what the hell they were doing ‘cause if they’d got to Lincoln they could get on a train and come to Market Rasen. Anyway, we loved it because they used to have the Irish Innisskillens used to have a pipe band and of course the Scots with all their kilts and things oh man they had pipes and bands as well. We loved it and we used to we could hear them coming down Lincoln Lane and we used to rush to the junction and then march through the village with them.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. It was great but that, that didn’t last too long.
HB: Did you ever find out where they were or why they were coming?
HB2: No. No. It was a mystery. We, my mum assumed that when they went to town they marched through town to the racecourse where there was plenty for them to shelter but, well nobody camped there. There was never any official camp.
HB: Right.
HB2: So we just didn’t know where the hell, so whether it was just training. Route marching. I don’t know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But we didn’t think much to that if they’d walked from Lincoln.
HB: Yeah. I can see that.
HB2: Any shorter numbers like you’d probably get two or three vehicles come through. They’d pull up for a smoke or you’d get a half a dozen vehicles and they’d do the same thing. Wherever they stopped in the main street people would come out with pots of tea and sandwiches and give them a feed and if if them in the front giving their stuff away was backed up by other people in the village giving them -
HB: Right.
HB2: Stuff.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: It was, this is how they pulled together. I mean we used to, off the main road there used to be a ford where they used to sit and watch the tanks and Bren gun carriers and we used to love that because they used to let us get in to the Bren gun carriers and play around.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: The tank, the tank commanders were a bit different. They didn’t want us anywhere near.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But yeah oh yes we used to have some fun and as I say that’s how they went on. There was, there was always something to drink and something to eat.
HB: Right.
HB2: And it’s marvellous how you can supply that when you are on ration.
HB: Yes.
HB2: But these housewives were masters in the art of making something out of nothing and stretching things. They were all damned good cooks.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And their main aim in life was to cook a meal that was tasty. Whatever else it was it had to be tasty and oh I’ve been to, I’d go to my mate’s house sometimes and go oh mum can we have some of that and Columbus discovered America at one old boy’s house. His mum said to me one Saturday morning, she said to me, ‘I’m making some potato scallops. Would you like them?’ Well, not knowing what a scallop was and not wanting to miss anything I said, ‘Yes please.’ Well they’re slices of potato dipped in batter and fried. They were lovely. They were lovely. I even do it now for my two grandsons. ‘Can we have some scallops dad, grandad.
HB: Yeah. Lovely.
HB2: Yeah. Oh it was so simple.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Mother never made chips. She always, whatever the size the potato was she sliced it and fried it.
HB: Right. Yeah.
HB2: And oh it used to go brown and crisp and oh you put your salt and vinegar on and they were heaven.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: They were heaven.
HB: Yeah. I can imagine.
HB2: Then, oh our Market Rasen station lost its roof.
HB: Right.
HB2: It was taken down to go to King’s Cross to repair the damaged roof there. Well the locals were up in arms about that.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. Yes they robbed Peter to pay Paul and the thing is Market Rasen station never got another roof back and now the signal box has gone. It’s virtually a dead station.
HB: I would, I mean I presume it was pretty busy and you know quite a busy little place.
HB2: Oh yes it was. It was. Because to start with they’d got a coal, the coal yard, the coal operators were in there and you used to have to go, you could go in there with your pram and get a bag of coke or bag of something like that. Oh there was always, always a trek. There was always people going in and out and as you say, it was easy to get on there and go to Lincoln. I think it was about a penny. One and a penny return or something like that and so you got the traffic. It was a convenience. Easy to go and easy to get there.
HB: Yeah. And did that supply the military as well? Did the military, did the military use that -
HB2: Well -
HB: Route?
HB2: Wickenby had got a station of its own.
HB: Right.
HB2: Snelland was next door to it. Langworth was Fiskerton and, yes you could. You would get them supplied by the rail but not at Market Rasen.
HB: Right.
HB2: I wouldn’t say never at Market Rasen because they would. Ludford. The Ludford and Binbrook people would come down to the station. That sort of thing but as you went up the branch the other side to Grimsby, the stations would do the local, the local stations so yes there was access there. It was busy. It was busy.
[pause].
HB2: Oh now from, from the outbreak of the war we were bombarded with information to be on guard against strangers. Now, we kids were going to do our bit because we’d, it had been dinged into us not to speak to anybody so we didn’t know anything, we didn’t know anybody, we didn’t know where anybody lived and we didn’t know which way you went to anywhere [laughs]. And if we saw one of these house to house salesman we used to go running to the post office to tell the warden. Now whilst he was very polite and we often think you lot are a pain in the bum [laughs] but he never said so.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Now, one day, I lived up a surfaced lane, a road surfaced lane but I lived off a little ash track and up above us about a half a mile was the big farmer had bought a farm so he was making use of the buildings but the house was empty. Now in the garden there was some lovely fruit trees so this particular day we decided we’d go and rescue some of this fruit. So pushed our bikes up, going down the side of the house, around the corner, we got to an open door and there was voices coming out of this door so we listened and couldn’t understand what was going on and one of, one of my mates said, ‘Ruddy Gerries,’ and we’d gone, zoom, gone on our bikes pedalled like hell back home shouting ‘Mum. Mum. Mum.’ She said, ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ ‘Oh Mrs Beech. Mrs Beech,’ he said, ‘There’s Gerries in the Naylor’s house.’ So, ‘Get off with you.’ So we said, ‘There is.’ She said, ‘What do you mean there’s Germans?’ We said, ‘Well they don’t speak our language. We can’t understand what they’re saying.’ So she said, ‘Well that’s strange.’ Now, I didn’t know it at the time but about a mile the other side of Market Rasen on the eastern side they’d commandeered a big house and used it as a prisoner of war camp. So it was the thinking then that they’d escaped. So of course she went down to the warden, post general and said to him, ‘Look this is it.’ So he got the policeman and he went to investigate and he came back. He said, ‘Now rest assured Mrs Beech the Germans haven’t invaded. These Germans are prisoners. They’re released to work on the farm and the big farmer who owns the house has let them go in there on wet days and meal times to light a fire and make a drink and what have you. So,’ he said, ‘It’s all above board.’ Well when we saw these devils come out I mean they got big yellow diamonds on their back, they’d got round patches on their hearts and legs what the hell’s all that for. Well that was if they did escape that was where to shoot at. We didn’t think much to that at all. Germans. Oh dear. No way. Well then when I got to the secondary modern school we were released from school on a blue card system to help with the harvest or help with the crops so it was potato picking time and I got time off to go potato picking so I went to pick on this big farm and lo and behold sitting in the ruddy heap of straw was three Germans. So if they come on that side we went that side, me and this other lad. We weren’t going near them.
HB: How old would you be then Harold do you think?
HB2: Eleven. Twelve. Twelve.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Twelve.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And I wasn’t going there.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Anyway come dinner time, I used to take my dinner and I sat having it there and I looked at these Germans and they were tearing a loaf of bread to pieces and I said, ‘What are they eating?’ So one of the foremen I think it was said, ‘Oh they’re having a bit of bread.’ ‘What. Dry bread?’ ‘Yeah. They’re washing it down with cold tea.’ So I said, ‘Oh all right.’ So never thought any more about it. I went home and told mum. I was full of this having to work with Germans and I said for dinner they only had this, whatever they had. Well the next morning when I went there was a pack. ‘Take that to the Germans.’ I said, ‘I’m not taking them to the Gerries.’ So I said, ‘What are they?’ She said, ‘Sandwiches.’ There was one apiece. So I said, ‘I’m not taking them.’ She said, ‘You jolly well are.’ So of course I took it up there and my mate, his mum had done the same thing. So I said, ‘Well are you going near them?’ ‘No I’m not. Get Mr Fawcett to take them. He’s the foreman.’ Well he wasn’t going to take them. You had to take them yourself. Well we wouldn’t go. In the end he got between us hand on each shoulder and said, ‘Come on I’ll take you.’ So we took them and when one lad opened his thing he wept. So it didn’t, it didn’t endear me at all that didn’t, you know, he could weep his eyes out as far as I was concerned but I went home and told mother and I said, ‘Why do you send them?’ She said, ‘Look. Your brother’s in the army and I would like to think that if he was in the same condition somebody would do the same for him.’ Well I couldn’t understand all that. Giving them. No way. But anyway I took it you know and in the end she was right. That was somebody’s son and after, after the war there was a lot of these prisoners had worked on farms, were still working on the farms and they never went back. We couldn’t understand it but we realised then they were in the Russian platoon, the Russian sector and they weren’t going back.
HB: Right. Yeah.
HB2: And they, they stayed and they married local girls. Some of them married local girls which didn’t go down to well with the lad that were coming back. On one occasion, prisoners used to walk into town and stroll in the streets. It was a regular occurrence as far as we were concerned. They didn’t do any harm you know. Well six load of Belgian soldiers come and they parked on the market square. Gordon Bennett there was riots. They were out them trucks. They were beating them up, they were chasing them back to camp. There was hell on until we could get a lot of our army lads in to quell it down but by, didn’t them lads, a spokesman give our residents a right pasting. They were disgusted that they should allow them there. ‘You want some occupation,’ he said, ‘before you allow them to do things like that.’ God they didn’t half wipe the floor with them. And the newsagent, poor chap, he could speak, what is it, Flemish or whatever it was and he had to be acting as interpreter. Well he didn’t know where to put himself because the language was a bit, a bit rough.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But he said they got the message across and it was ages and ages before the prisoners would come out again. No way.
HB: And that was just after the war.
HB2: No. That was during the war.
HB: That was during the war.
HB2: During. Right to the latter part. But they weren’t having that. Oh dear. We were educated in warfare.
[pause]
HB2: Now, as we know rationing began in 1940 and gran was heard, when she come to visit mum one say she said, ‘Oh dear I hope it’s not as bad as last time.’ Well she wasn’t really saying about the rationing because rationing started in June and finished in November in the First World War. She was talking about the fighting but anyway I took it that she thought rationing but it wasn’t that because rationing started immediately more or less and lasted fourteen years and got worse so but she we first of all we got four ounces of butter and twelve ounces of sugar and four ounces of bacon. If it was cooked you got three and a half ounces. Why the difference I don’t know but that was it. Tea and meat come in later and meat was rationed by price. You could have one and ten pence worth per person so me, mum and dad could have five and six penny worth of meat a week which when you come to think of prices in them days you could live pretty well. I mean it topped up. We could top it up with a chicken or something like that but in them days you could get decent meat. You could get three pounds a neck of lamb and that sort of thing. Offal wasn’t rationed but it was rationed by availability.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Because you could only get so much offal off an animal and the cheap cuts but the things you never hear of now such as brains and feet, calf’s head, calf feet, cow heel, well it’s not allowed to be sold and but as I said it was, it was rationed by availability. Now, I know we used to get orders put in. Mum used to put an order in when she got one week supply she’d order another. She didn’t always get it but she got something and we used to often have bullock’s heart for Sunday dinner because that was always good meat, plenty of it and Monday washday cold meat and sliced potatoes or bubble and squeak but it was all, it was all good stuff and then I remember when we killed the pig and made sausages mum and I would have a day out at Hull market. We used to buy, she used to buy while she was there fresh marjoram to put in the sausage meat to season it and I was in, we were coming back one day down this street and we were passing a butchers shop and I went by and then I went back again and there was thrushes, starlings blackbirds and sparrows hanging on the butcher’s rail and it was hanging over this dish with something green on it, greenish, and I was shouting to mum, ‘Come and look here mum. What’s this then? What’s this?’ And another lady was coming up the street she stood to me and she said, ‘Don’t you know what it is?’ I said, ‘No. What is it?’ She said, ‘Its whale meat.’ Oh dear. It looked ghastly.
HB: Yeah. I bet.
HB2: It looked ghastly. Well after that it was being pushed as, you know, meat to eat. Well it was described as a lump of cod liver oil.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: It took ages to get the smell out the house.
HB: Did you ever eat it?
HB2: Never. Never. No.
HB: Your mother never cooked it.
HB2: Oh no there was none. I don’t think the butchers were allowed to bring any in the village. They got enough aggro.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Sausages. We used to make our own sausages when it was pig killing time and I have never seen anything like these in the war. They were salmon pink were some of them.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: And the ladies in the things, ‘What’s in these today then butcher?’ So he said, ‘What’s that?’ She said, ‘What do we call them now? We can’t call them sausages.’ So some of them would call them bread in battle dress.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: Or the butcher’s dustbins.
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: It got, it got really rich.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And I remember gran giving a basting to the butcher. She said, ‘Where the devil did you get that last bit of meat from that I had last Sunday?’ So he said, ‘What did you have?’ She said, ‘Ruddy jump dike. It had jumped every damned ditch in the country. God it was tough,’ she said.
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: That was, that was your bit of mutton. But this is it. You had to eat what you got and everything went in.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I mean I don’t ever think, you know a cow’s stomach it’s covered by a thin bit of flesh and skin. Well that used to be cut off and they used to sell, make meat pies out of that. Oh stews and mind you it got put on the old pan on the hob from about 6 o’clock in the morning till 6 o’clock at night -
HB: Right. Yeah.
HB2: To cook it but it was cooked.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yes. You turned it out. That was the thing about having it on the hob or put it in a stew jar in the oven. It was long and slow and it was cooked and it was tasty ‘cause I must have eaten some things, you know [laughs]. The only, the only head mum ever used was the pig’s head.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And she used to, they used to cut in to half. Top half and bottom half. Bottom half was cut in half again and that was called bathchap. They used to cure it with the salt and then cook it as bathchap and the head you just put that in a pan and boiled it until all the meat fell off. The ears you could leave in as well, chop them up, mince them up or you could cut them off having been boiled you could then slice them and fry them until they were crisp and eat them like scratchings.
HB: Right.
HB2: Oh aye. I mean you offer somebody a pig’s ear now [laughs]
HB: Well yeah.
HB2: Well.
HB: You’d get a different reaction I suppose.
HB2: Yes. I was I was in this supermarket and they’d got pig’s trotters and this well he wasn’t an old chap but he was mature and he said to his wife, ‘What they hell are they selling them for? What can you do with them?’ So I said, ‘Well if you’re like me you’d eat them and enjoy them.’ ‘Enjoy them?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well what would you do with them?’ I said, ‘Well you’d boil them, leave them till they were cold, sprinkle them with vinegar and then eat them.’ ‘Well there’s no meat on them.’ I said, ‘No it’s all gelatine.’ ‘Oh my God,’ he said [laughs]. I said, ‘I’ve had no end of them in wintertime.’
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I said, ‘They’re lovely.’ ‘Oh hell,’ he said, ‘It’s fat.’ I said, ‘No. It’s gelatine.’ They weren’t having that. Oh yes the government come out with a thing. Lemons had gone, you’d missed all the lemons and they said that by sprinkling, by sprinkling it with vinegar and adding some sugar it was quite, quite tasty [laughs] I mean, now, my mum had been in service from school leaving in the big houses. She said, ‘We never had vinegar and sugar on pancakes before,’ she said, ‘We’re not having it now.’ ‘Course we had homemade butter didn’t we?
HB: Oh sorry. I’m with you. So that was like come Shrove Tuesday or whatever.
HB2: Yes. Yes.
HB: You’re doing pancakes.
HB2: That’s right.
HB: Instead of your lemon juice.
HB2: Vinegar and sugar.
HB: Right. And was that, did your mum get these sort of leaflets that the Ministry of Food put out and you know like they used to distribute them through the Women’s Institute or something like that.
HB2: Well I was going to say they were available.
HB: Right.
HB2: I don’t think she had many.
HB: Right.
HB2: I don’t think she had many. I don’t think many of the housewives in the village did.
HB: Right.
HB2: Because they’d been brought up on the old recipes. The stodge. Oh my mother used to make, you know how you make dumplings with suet and what have you.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Well she used to make a pudding, put it on the tea plate, put it in the steamer, and let it steam and she’d have half we’ll say with liver and onions and the other half sprinkled with jam or treacle and she used to call it her dual purpose pudding [laughs] When I was visiting my aunt once a lady across the road, a very refined lady, she came across and she said, ‘Harold, something smells very good. What is it?’ I said, ‘It’s liver and onion.’ ‘Can I have a look?’ ‘Of course you can.’ So she looked in the frying pan that was sizzling away there and then she said, ‘What’s in that pan?’ I said, ‘Oh madam that’s a secret that is. That’s my dual purpose pudding.’ And she looked at me. She said, ‘You’re kidding. What are you, what are you doing?’ I said, ‘Have a look.’ So she had a look. So she said, ‘Well it looks like a suet pudding to me.’ I said, ‘That’s what it is but it’s dual purpose.’ ‘What on earth you do you mean by that?’ So I told her. Savoury and, oh she went out giggling, ‘I must tell my husband. Dual purpose pudding.’
HB: Lovely. Lovely. I like that.
HB2: Yeah the old rations were going up and down. Milk used to be a terrible thing. At its maximum it was three and half pints a week. Well it used to go down to two pints or two and a half pints. It was always like a yoyo that was. How the hell some of them managed I don’t know. There we are having a mug for our supper and going to bed on. A mug of milk and all the milk we wanted.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. It’s fantastic really when you think back as to just how some people did live.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. You can imagine yeah. It’s difficult.
HB2: And then when they brought out dried egg. Oh dear. You could get a tin. One tin a month plus your one egg a week. Well mum tried it. Mum and gran tried it for baking. Well the Yorkshire puddings wouldn’t rise and the cakes were useless. They used to, sponge cakes were useless so they used to use that in the dishes that you could mix it in with that didn’t -
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Didn’t show too much.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh no and dried milk was more of a favour than than the dried egg but one thing we did like and that was now what did they call it? It’s spam. Supply Pressed American Meat. Spam. And we used to love that dipped in batter or just plain fried. That went down a treat.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: The old spam fritters. Even in the air force we had spam fritters.
HB: Wow. Did, did you, did any of the small farms around you did they actually supply any of the airfields direct?
HB2: Not that I know of.
HB: Or it all went through the ministry I suppose.
HB2: Well I think it all went through the ministry because there was bacon factories, egg factories, potato marketing board, apple marketing board. Everything had to go through a board but I think a lot of it might have ended up there because, but it didn’t go direct from the farmer.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: Prices were fixed at what a farmer could buy and sell at.
HB: Right.
HB2: So it would be possible for them to sell it if they got sort of permission but I just don’t think many did.
HB: No. No.
HB2: Fish was never, fish was never rationed but that again was availability because the poor old trawlers used to get sunk and whilst we, whilst we got a supply of fish, the fish and chip shops were never open regularly. Only when it was available and the wet fish man on the market sometimes he was there and sometimes for weeks he wasn’t ‘cause he just couldn’t get the -
HB: Yeah
HB2: He just couldn’t get the fish but oh and we had, we had a fish in a tin called snook.
HB: Right.
HB2: Barracuda.
HB: Was it?
HB2: Now funnily enough it had got a rotten name but it didn’t taste too bad.
HB: Right.
HB2: No. We only, we had very little of it but what I had I wouldn’t turn up my nose at it again. I do remember that but we didn’t eat, we didn’t have much tinned fish. We didn’t. Mum used to, when it was available, get a bit of fresh fish, batter it and fry it herself but no, we didn’t have a lot of fish.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: As I say we stuck to the stodge which was sometimes repetitious but it was still good.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: You know if it was a case of having a dry crust and a plate of meat and potato we’d have a plate of meat and potato. You know, it was stodge.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And we ate what we had. If we’d had it yesterday it didn’t matter.
HB: Yeah. Did you ever, did you ever have evacuees in the village?
HB2: Yes. We did. We had nine.
HB: Right.
HB2: From Lower Wortley, Leeds and these were dumped at the school one dark evening and as one lady described it dished out like prizes at a whist drive ‘cause you couldn’t refuse to have a evacuee. If you did you got fined fifty quid.
HB: Blimey.
HB2: Now the nine kids that come to our village were in that school looking very bewildered, very frightened with a ruddy label attached to their coat collar and the gas mask hanging around the back of their bum. Poor little sods. And they were doled out to these people in the village who never should have had them. They were all houses that had got toilets, running water, mains water but the people that lived in them were, two of them in particular were old couples, house proud, never had any children. Now, one lived, two of them lived in a bungalow at the bottom of our lane and they crossed the road from our lane end. Now, the girl, she wasn’t too badly treated but we couldn’t go, we could go and call for her to play with but we couldn’t play in their yard, their garden. No you had to go out. The other lad, he was a saddler, this bloke that had him. He was house proud and no children and he was a sod. I remember one night we’d gone to Scouts and we was a bit late coming out and he’d come to meet him and he started going at this old boy because he was late and I said, ‘We were doing things. That’s why we were late.’ Anyway, it was none of my business and as I ran off I heard Bob shout, ‘Ouch that hurt.’ Well I run into an RAF sergeant. He said, ‘Where are you going in a hurry?’ I said, ‘I’m going home.’ He said, ‘Is somebody chasing you?’ I said, ‘No.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Who just shouted “ouch that hurt?” ’ I said, ‘Oh that’s Bob.’ So he said, ‘Well what’s Bob got to do with it?’ So I told him. He said, ‘I’d better go and see.’ Well I earwigged in a woman’s gateway in the garden and crept along the side of this hedge to listen and I heard this sergeant say, ‘I’ve a bloody good mind to give you a thrashing with that.’ What he’d done was he’d hit Bob on the back of the legs with a plaited riding crop, a leather plaited riding crop. Anyway, I run home and told mum and oh didn’t the villagers let rip but the authorities didn’t, didn’t contact mum to fetch him back again. He was there for quite some time after this incident. I mean we could go and call for him but he had to come away and he didn’t have to get dirty, he didn’t have to get dishevelled. I mean mum’s used to spruce him up. Would clean his hair, wash his face, his hands, clean his shoes before they sent him back and if he, if we’d been fishing or anything he had to leave everything with other kids. Oh this bloke. Well he was a wrong one.
HB: What sort of age would Bob have been?
HB2: He’d have been the same age as me. Ten. Twelve. But as luck would have it if and when his mum found out they fetched him back.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But it must have been, it must have been towards the end of the ‘43 ‘44 type because the evacuees, as soon as things started to get easier I mean Leeds, Leeds was getting bombed but it was nothing like London so mum’s were fetching them back except for one lad. He came in the village with his two sisters. Now, funnily enough they got put with a family of three boys. The two sisters. They’d got a big family already what did they want, but they had a good time, they were alright. The brother, he got billeted with a farmer and his wife and he was, the three of them were brothers and sisters of Ernie Wise.
HB: Really.
HB2: And the brother, he went through agricultural college and went into farm management. So -
HB: Wow.
HB2: He did alright. Another girl called Mary she was stationed with the traction engine man. The contractor, who was an old couple. No children. But she landed on her feet. They were good to her and she, she did exceptionally well. She won a scholarship to the grammar school but for some unknown reason she finished up with me at the secondary modern and people couldn’t understand that. If she’d got a scholarship she should be there. So anyway things began to boil and they used to get on to the big farmer who’d got a finger in every pie there was, you know. He was one of these sat on every committee and got a say on everything that went on. ‘Why is it that your daughter’s gone to grammar school and she never passed a test? Why doesn’t she go?’ Anyway eventually she went to grammar school did Mary and she did well. She even stayed back with the couple until she finished her schooling.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: And then, I think she finished up in Canada.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: So she did alright and as I said the other, the two twins, well, that came they they sort of hit the chair and bounced off again ‘cause their mum couldn’t bear them being parted and came and fetched them so they’d gone but no poor old Bob got the short straw.
HB: Yeah. Sounds like it. Sounds like it.
HB2: But we had, we had a teacher come with them. Thank God we did. She was a lovely teacher. She was a granny type teacher. You know. Loved by all us kids and she acted as interpreter.
HB: Right.
HB2: And we were out in the field one day, village kids playing football this two or three lads lined up and, what do they want? So we said, ‘What do you want?’ [Can we [lay it with the casey?] ‘You what?’ [laughs]. Can we [lay it with casey]. So by using sign language they got the message across so we said, ‘Yeah come on in,’ and then when we started playing at marbles [can we lay it with the cars]. Oh my God. So again sign language, ‘Yeah come on.’ We fitted them up with marbles and away with them and they taught us a little ditty –
“we’re right down at cellars oil, with muck slats at windows, we’ve used all our coil up, we’ve started on cinders and when the bum bailiff comes he’ll never find us, ‘cause we’ve got mud splats on windows.”
HB: Oh right [laughs]
HB2: And when you’re confronted with that type of talking.
HB: Yeah and the teacher was the interpreter.
HB2: And the teacher was the interpreter oh and would they hell as get used to getting milk out of a cow? There was two of them with me one day. Dad was milking. ‘What’s he doing?’ I said, ‘Milking his cow.’ No he’s not. That’s not milk.’ ‘It is. Do you want a cup full?’ We got a cup. No way were they going to drink that. If you put it in a jug on the table they’d have it out the jug on the table yes, but not that so it took us ages before they accepted it. Once they did I mean once they were drinking milk till it was coming out of their ears.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But it took them ages to that and then one day they would go around and collect the eggs and one hen had just squatted and dropped her egg. They wouldn’t touch it. It had come from the chickens bum. It was dirty.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Course we don’t think of that do we?
HB2: No. And then and what they did like was we used to get a slice of bread, mother used to spread it pretty thick with butter and then we’d go out in the spring and pick the hawthorn shoots, the green buds of and stick it in there. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Its bread and cheese.’ ‘You can’t eat the hedge.’ ‘Yeah you can. Come on.’ Well when they got used to that, I mean every time they come they wanted a slice of bread and butter.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And goosegogs.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Used to top and tail the goosegogs and if they got golden drops which were sweet oh they loved that. They’d pick them up and stick them in and eat them.
HB: Brilliant.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But we used to, they balked at eating carrots pulled out the ground. I mean we used to pull the carrot out of the ground, go to a bit of grass and wipe it on the grass and then rub it in your hands and [click click].
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Nothing. Or swede. We taught them how to peel a swede with your teeth. Well they thought we were absolutely filthy.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. But of course that’s, I mean their experience was totally different.
HB2: Oh God.
HB: Coming from Leeds.
HB2: I mean, the first thing we asked them was, ‘What were the Germans doing in Leeds. Have you got Germans up there?’ ‘No.’ And then we used to say, ‘Why don’t you eat that?’ Because they were amazed at the food that was presented to them. What the hell they’d eaten I don’t know. It couldn’t have been varied much but we used to say to them, ‘Well it’s food. This is what we eat.’
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: I mean bread and jam. They’d have eaten that till it come out their ears.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And cakes. I don’t think they’d ever seen a cake or pastry and because we’d got plenty of fat, I mean the old fat bacon used to get rendered down for lard and we, mum used to cook pastries as she did before but all you know they used to like the egg custards. Oh they loved them and the curd tarts.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. But in the end I mean they used to tuck in. None of them went home any lighter than they were before they come. They all went home pretty well stuffed.
HB: Yeah. And did you ever see them after the war?
HB2: No.
HB: Did any of them ever come back?
HB2: Never saw, except Gordon. The farmer. He used to be in town, he used to play cricket for the town.
HB: So that was that was Ernie, one of the Ernie Wises brothers?
HB2: That was Gordon Wise. Gordon Wiseman -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Was his name. Ernie Wise.
[pause]
HB2: We had, just after the evacuees arrived we started school dinners and we used, at the infants, at the primary school and we used to get a third of a pint of milk a day and I think it was more or less compulsory and I used to say, ‘Mum why do I have to drink milk at school? Don’t I get enough at home?’ She said well at halfpenny a time it was tuppence halfpenny a week for the five days and then they started doing school dinners. They converted the church hut into a kitchen and that was sixpence a day. Half a crown a week. Well of course when it started I had to be in to start, you know, it was something new so I had to be in there and they were, they were nice but before they got the canteen they tried serving them up in the cloakroom and they’d got these ruddy great big oval steamers and pans on a cooker next to a Belfast sink and they used to cook nothing but parsnips and mutton and I, oh I got to the state where mum couldn’t, couldn’t have a joint of mutton because I couldn’t eat it. I used to be sick. And that lasted, that lasted until I joined the air force at seventeen and a half. Now I enjoy mutton like the rest of them.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But oh dear. When I used to go to church on a Sunday, evensong and as the vicar was coming down the aisle to go to the pulput to sermon I was going to the vestry to be heaving. In fact mother thought I was up to something. She come out and found me there and when she saw I wasn’t she was a bit surprised.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. I was allergic to mutton. Now whilst we were at my grans one day -
HB: Sorry. That was one thing I did want to ask you. Where did your gran live?
HB2: Newton.
HB: She lived in the village of Newton.
HB2: Newton. Right next to the church near the village pond and if you went across the road through like going from here to the other side the road there, across his garden you were on the airfield.
HB: Right. Right. It was as close as that.
HB2: On the peri. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. And one day we’d gone to see gran and we heard these, these aeroplanes in a bit of a hurry and then we heard a burst of gunfire so of course we were out and stood under a big elm tree that gran had in her garden and a chap shouted, ‘Get in your shelter.’ ‘We aint got one.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘In that case I’d better join you,’ so we stood there and the road and the ground slipped away in a dip so it was panoramic and obviously a German plane had followed one of our lads home and he got to the bottom of the valley and he’d got a bomb he didn’t want so he dropped it and demolished a little spinney. If he’d gone to the left a bit he’d have hit the searchlight unit.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: But anyway he disappeared in the distance, the next minute the pair of them came roaring back. The English plane was chasing him across and back and when this old chap who’d said get in your shelter shouted, ‘Send for the bloody Poles,’ he said, ‘They’d get the bleeder down.’ Anyway, they did get him apparently towards the east coast.
[pause]
HB2: We had, in our little cottage, we had, it faced more or less east to west and in one end was the bedroom window which overlooked Immingham and Grimsby and we could see Immingham docks getting bombed or if we looked out the other time we could witness poor old Coventry going up in smoke. It was an eerie sight. ‘Course I used to say to my mum, ‘Coventry? That’s a long way away from there.’ ‘Yeah and that’s how big the blaze is.
HB: So that was the night Coventry was bombed.
HB2: Yeah. Oh yeah. But -
HB: Well actually that is a very, yeah I suppose you would see it that far away yeah.
HB2: Well there was a glow in the sky.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: A very vivid glow in the sky and that’s what it was put down to.
HB: Ahum.
HB2: But we thought, we thought that we would be getting bombed because not only of the airfields but there was Scunthorpe Iron Company and things like that. Immingham docks and around that way but you know we didn’t really know. It was all in the distance. We never got anything locally and then we, enterprising youngsters that we were, we decided we’d do waste paper collection so we found a ruddy great big old wooden crate and I’d got some cast iron wheels off a [hen hut].
HB: Oh right.
HB2: We were only little and we put this on a piece of a wood, made, got axles on it and then we put two handles and we had to put two ropes on the front for someone to pull it ‘cause it was too heavy when we got anything in it to manipulate and we used to go around the village collecting waste paper and scrap metal and rags and anything like that and take it to the local carpenter whose yard, he’d got several little sheds and he used to have waste paper in one shed and rags in the other. Anyway, we used to go in there and we used to spend a lot of time in the waste paper sorting out comics and colour magazines like Illustrated News and Post and comics. Cor blimey. And paper that had only been written on one side ‘cause we were short of paper to draw on and the carpenter’s wife come out on many occasions. She said, ‘I’m sure you take home more than you bring in.’
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Then on another occasion we had to collect, we was asked to collect conkers to use them as a dye.
HB: Right.
HB2: And of course we, we loved that ‘cause we used to keep the big ones out for conker fights.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And that -
HB: So where did the conkers go? Did they just go to some central collection point?
HB2: Well yeah. Carpenter’s shop.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: He put them in a, in a sack in the shed. Somebody used to come and collect them. And we used to go around collecting rosehips and oh that used to give us an excuse to go on the farmer’s fields and they tolerated us. They tolerated us. Telling us not to climb on gates and makes holes in hedges but they, they tolerated and for our sins we got, we got once got a free bottle of rosehip.
HB: Wow.
HB2: We thought we’d done great guns there. Then we had news of a complaint made by the banker’s wife in town against the airmen going home from the pub singing bawdy songs. So she reported it to the sergeant, the police sergeant who said, ‘Yes Madam. I’ll come around and see you.’ So he went around there, ‘Now madam what did you say they were singing?’ ‘Bawdy songs.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘But I can’t stand up in front of the magistrates and say these men were singing bawdy songs because he’d turn around and say, “What were they singing?’’ Anyway she stuttered out about the first verse but when she got to the chorus and they had to whip certain garments away she kicked him out and reported him to the inspector who then went around and said to the sergeant, ‘You did it all wrong. I’ll do it right this time.’ So the first thing he said was, ‘Yes madam. Before I can stand in front of the magistrate giving evidence against these brave men who risk their lives nightly,’ he said, ‘I want to know what they were singing.’ ‘Well there’s the door. Get out.’ Now for some unknown reason and we don’t think it was the fault of the sergeant or the inspector but this tale got out.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: And for many many lengths of times afterwards the locals when they left the pub serenaded the lady.
HB: Oh.
HB2: She wished she hadn’t mentioned anything.
HB: I’m just going to check the battery on this -
HB2: Right.
HB: Harold, ‘cause I’m just getting. No. No. We can keep going for a while. Keep going for a while.
HB2: Right. As I said my sister worked in munitions but she was relieved because she suffered badly from dermatitis.
HB: Right.
HB2: And she went into, into a job in a hotel, the Oxford Hotel in Lincoln as a general dogsbody and in the same hotel was a man who had a haulage business and he was managing his lorries going from local quarries to the airfields carting materials and they met and got engaged and got married in 1943 and it was, we were all determined, the village and the family were determined that she should have a proper wedding. So coupons were pooled to buy the dress for her and the bridesmaid and mum would cater for the reception. Well muggins here had to go in the washhouse and scrub the copper till it shone so that we could boil the ham.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: The whole ham.
HB: Ok.
HB2: In there. Well first of all I had to spend a week turning it, soaking it, getting the salt out. Then we put it in the copper and it had to be gently boiling so we got that done and then we lumbered it out, put it in a dish and put it in the pantry ready for the day. The next thing was I had to scrub the cart out, the old horse and cart, line it with newspaper, put sheets on it and then put the food in there to take it the half mile down the road to the church hut.
HB: Right.
HB2: Anyway, we got it all there and laid out, the wedding went off alright and then these people I think there was over twenty came into the reception. Now, all his side come from Leeds and, ‘cause I remember the best man turned up in his lorry piled with gear so I said, ‘What have you brought the gear for?’ He said, ‘Your dad wants it.’ I said, ‘Does he?’ So he said, ‘Yeah.’ Anyway, left it at that but what he’d done was he’d loaded it up with this with what dad wanted because he had to have his petrol, he had to have an excuse to do the journey.
HB: Oh right. Yes. Of course with petrol rationing.
HB2: Anyway, he come and he took his overalls off and there he was in his best suit with a button hole. And he said, ‘Have I come wedding boy?’
HB: Yeah. Oh dear.
HB2: Anyway, the wedding went off and the reception went in and when they got in and saw what was laid out ‘cause the villagers again had come with cakes, pastries, bread, butchers with potted meat and what have you, mother with her ham and the people with salads. It was April so we got salad stuff and these people from Leeds just couldn’t, just couldn’t understand how mother had put the spread on that she did. So she said, ‘Well it would take a long while to explain but just sit down and enjoy it.’ Well enjoy it they did. I mean a whole ham for twenty odd people and it went.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: What they didn’t eat they took home in doggie bags.
HB: Well yeah. Yeah.
HB2: There was, there was the cold ham, there was the salad, there was cakes, fancy cakes, there was trifles, there was jellies, there was blancmanges and there was wine. Oh and I fell out with the best man because he wouldn’t give me any, any wine.
HB: How old were you then?
HB2: I were ten. I said, ‘It’s my sister’s wedding and I can have some wine.’ Anyway, I went crying to mum and she said, ‘Oh for God’s sake give him a drop.’ Well when I tasted it I wished I hadn’t. [laughs]
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But being a good lad and what was in my glass I had to drink.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: So I tipped it back, swallowed it back. Well I thought I was going to burn the back of my throat out.
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: Yeah. But that was, that was, that was the wedding.
HB: So boiling up the ham, the copper that’s, that’s the laundry copper that the washing used to be done in.
HB2: Oh yeah. Washday copper.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Make sure there’s no soap in it.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Lovely job.
HB2: Laxative.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But that, that’s the sort of thing that went on you know. For occasions like that the people in the village turned up trumps, you know. They did. They really did and you know to us the spread wasn’t, well normal run of the, it was a bit exceptional but it was things that we always had. We hadn’t given them up because of the war. I mean you could still buy jelly and we had enough milk to make custards. You could get custard powder.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: So that was a jolly good, a jolly good spread out because everybody thoroughly enjoyed it and absolutely amazed at what went on. Now gran as I said lived at Newton and she had a little cottage in which she sold, she had a bit of a shop. Sold the essentials like firelighters and plasters. The baker left his bread there, orders of bread there and she sold lemonade and one day an airman came in for a box of matches just as gran had made a pot of tea. So she said, ‘Do you want a drink of tea?’ ‘Oh yes please.’ ‘Well, here, have a cake as well,’ and they had quite a chat and she said, ‘That’s it old lad. Cheerio. Come back again when you like. Bring your mates.’ ‘Do you mean that ma?’ So she said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve got six more.’ So she said, ‘Well it’s not a very big cottage but bring them,’ and that’s when this crew turned up and made her, they didn’t come every night or every weekend but they come regular. Turned it in to a little oasis. They would come and first of all they wouldn’t eat or drink what gran offered them and she was a bit annoyed and she said, ‘What’s wrong with my food?’ ‘Nothing’s wrong with it.’ Ma they called her right from the start. ‘Nothing’s wrong with it ma.’ She said, ‘Yes there is and if you can’t find room to eat it then don’t bother to come.’ ‘Oh don’t be like that ma. You can’t do it. You just can’t do it. It’s rationing.’ ‘Look,’ she said, ‘if I couldn’t do it I wouldn’t offer.’ So anyway after a lot of arguing and umming and erring she won the day and she brought out the fat bacon sandwiches and whatever. Well these old boys they were amazed to think and each time they come there was tea and something to eat. Again the people in the hamlet used to come with a twist of paper with some tea in it. A twist of paper with some sugar in it or gran would put some sugar to one side and she said, ‘This is why we can give you the meat. Because we kills pigs.’ Oh right well that was alright. Well then they started coming with bags of sugar and bags of tea they’d nicked out the mess and gran got really worried. She said, ‘Don’t you lads get into bother,’ she said, ‘Because we can manage.’ No gran. ‘No ma you’re alright. You’re alright.’ And they, sometimes they’d come and have a chat, sometimes they would go in the front room and just sit around the fire on the floor leaning up against the chair going to sleep. Gran often said, ‘Look at them poor devils. Tired out.’ Anyway, when they found out she’d got a piano oh didn’t they used to have some singsongs there. Then one night gran put her foot in it. She turned around and she said, ‘Where’s Taff Lloyd tonight?’ Pregnant pause. Shoulder went around, arm went around her shoulders, ushered her outside, come back tears streaming down her face. He hadn’t made it back and they’d said, ‘Look ma if there’s a face missing don’t ask. Just don’t ask.’
HB: Yeah.
HB2: After that it was plain sailing until like I said the time come when they just didn’t appear and it was the hope and praying of the village that they’d been posted and not -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Lost in battle but that was the one thing that -
HB: And this was just the one crew.
HB2: Just the one crew.
HB: Just the one crew.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. And so they’d lost a crew mate.
HB2: Yes. Yes they had.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Oh and I was dinged, I hadn’t to question them as what they did.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I was not to question them what they did.
HB: What sort of time would this have been 44ish?
HB2: Well, it was, it was must have been 44ish and I think it was after Christmas because the nights were still dark and I can’t think that we were leading up to Christmas so it must have been after Christmas.
HB: Right.
HB2: But I know, I know the nights, the nights were dark when they arrived. I mean they didn’t stop till midnight. 10 o’clock and they’d gone.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And they would always say, ‘Ma see you on such and such a night. We might be a bit busy.’ So once she knew what night it was then the villagers used to drop off. The butcher used to drop off potted meat. The baker used to drop off some cakes or scones or a loaf of bread.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Looking back it was, nobody asked. It was done.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. And that, and that sort of follows this supportive trend through the village -
HB2: Yes.
HB: With everything else.
HB2: Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh God yes I know gran used to benefit no end by it. The farmers used to drop her off a bag of logs or a -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Few spuds.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: You know. She was well taken care of.
HB: And they, so they were obviously flying operationally.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: They were all English crew I presume.
HB2: Except for the Welshman.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah but they were all English.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yes.
HB: Yeah that -
HB2: And I know, I know one was a gunner ‘cause he got air gunner, AG is it? The other was a navigator because he got N and the other had got two wings so I presumed he was the pilot.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But we didn’t, I didn’t dared ask.
HB: No. No. I understand that. I understand that.
HB2: Oh and they used to dress me in their coats, put their coats on my shoulders and their hats on. I thought I was the bee’s knees you know. My God. ‘Look at me mum. Look at me.’
HB: Yeah. Yeah I mean ten eleven year old would be.
HB2: Yeah. Oh God yes.
HB: You’d be all over that.
HB2: And in them days, yes because I was more of a child at that age then what kids are today.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Absolutely delightful that. And then just one day.
HB2: They went home at night. Never seen again. Never seen again. Not even a word. Just gone.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh, that, that did grate with the villagers not knowing what had happened to them.
HB: Can you remember roughly when that would have been? Would that have been, you know what period of time they would have been visiting do you think?
HB2: Well I think, I think it must have been January to March because as I said I don’t recollect getting excited about going up to Christmas so it must have been after.
HB: Right.
HB2: And -
HB: So just two or three months then.
HB2: It was only two or three months. Three months would have been the most. But in that time they’d made several visits, regular visits, you know. Sudden bursts and there they were happy and singing and jumping about and then next minute just gone.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Another thing in the village the teenage girls. Makeup was scarce.
HB: Right.
HB2: And so were stockings. There was all sorts of substitutes sort of made up such as olive oil and bees wax for skin softener, bird cork for mascara and a mixture of soot and something else for an eyeshadow and they used to, we could get a liquorice sweet. It was a piece of liquorice soaked in like an icing that used to turn red and they used to use the red for the lipstick. Or beetroot juice.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: And we used to shout out after them, ‘sugar lips.’
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: And the best of it was we used to have to run because some of these girls could run and when they caught you they could thump and all. ‘Sugar lips’ or beetroot, ‘beetroot lips’ and then they, my sister was one of them. She used to paint her legs with gravy browning.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: And then her mate used to have to put a seam down with a big leaded pencil and we used to shout, ‘Your gravy’s gone lumpy, your gravy’s lumpy,’ or ‘Your seam’s slipping.’
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: That was it but then, then they brought out a thing, some liquid called silk toner. Liquid stockings. And there was enough in the bottle for twenty four applications. I mean. Can you imagine just painting your ruddy legs with it?
HB: Right.
HB2: And another thing is if they got the start of a ladder they nearly always carried nail varnish and they’d put a blob of nail varnish at the top of the ladder and at the bottom to stop it running.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Stockings were treated like gold. Some of these poor women used to be darned heals and sewn up ladders. I mean patches were worn with honour.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I mean men used to have patched knees and elbows. Oh God yes.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Now they don’t bother to patch them now do they?
HB: No. That’s true.
HB2: Yeah, poor, yeah, that was it, gravy legs. ‘You’ll be in a mess when it rains.’ [laughs] ‘Look there’s a dog following you.’ [laughs]
HB: Cruel.
HB2: And I went to school in short trousers made out of mum’s old great coats or men’s greatcoats, shirts out of her dresses. Things like that. You see these housewives were masters at needlework and cooking and what have you.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh yes. The old jumble sales did a roaring trade. Knitted, knitted garments were soon picked up and pulled down and recycled.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: They used to, they used to wear little woollen bibs instead of collars the men working in the fields.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Instead of scarves in the winter.
HB: Right.
HB2: Oh used to fit down front in the V of the jackets.
HB: Oh that’s, yeah.
HB2: Then then they started, the ladies started making coats out of candlewick bedspreads and out of black out material for other things because blackout material wasn’t rationed.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Oh God and if you could get hold of a blanket, an army blanket, a coloured one oh you’d have a coat out of that as quick as lightning.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And hats weren’t rationed and there was no end of tips how to make felt hats into a pair of slippers.
HB: Yes.
HB2: Yes. And how to titivate it up to make it look more expensive.
HB: How did they find this out? Was this through newspapers or -
HB2: It was the -
HB: Leaflets?
HB2: Greatest tip provider was “Home Chat.”
HB: “Home Chat”?
HB2: A woman’s magazine. “Home Chat.”
HB: Right.
HB2: I mean nearly every magazine covered tips of some kind or other. If it wasn’t recipes for food it was how to revitalise a drab dress or something like that.
HB: Yeah. That’s, yeah, I’ve not heard of “Home Chat” before but, yeah.
HB2: It was 1940 ’41.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: When that was on. Now food on the table. I can’t recollect eating less in the war than other time.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: It remained the same. As I said my mother’s generation and grandma’s generation were masters in the art of making something out of nothing and they could cook and it was tasty.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: They used to make dumplings. Now, the variety of dumplings. There was parsley dumplings. There was dumplings with, we called green dumpling. Now these green dumpling could have little juicy spouts off the hedge, some bits of growing corn or dandelion leaves chopped up in them.
HB: Oh right. You’d pay a fortune in a posh restaurant for that now.
HB2: Yeah. You would. You would. But most of the food was provided locally. You know. It was grown locally.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And we, my father had a house with, we moved in to a house with two large gardens so that was providing us with veg of all sorts, shapes and sizes and extra potatoes and stuff like that were grown in the fields.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: So we got plenty of that sort of thing and around two fields we had ten apple trees, crab-apple trees, all of different varieties.
HB: Right.
HB2: And in the middle hedge was Bullace trees. Little, little blue plums. So we’d plenty of fruit in season in the hedgerows.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And a big pear tree stood in the bottom field. And a Coxs. Not a Cox. An apple tree stood in the garden.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: So we, and again the apple used to be floated around. Nobody wasted an apple. It was swapped then or turned into jam or something like that.
HB: You know just taking you back a bit Harold you know you mentioned about going with the girl who stayed, the evacuee girl who stayed to go to the secondary modern school.
HB2: Yes.
HB: Obviously the war was still going on
HB2: Oh yes.
HB: When you went to the higher school.
HB2: ‘44 yes. Yes.
HB: Where was the secondary modern school?
HB2: Market Rasen.
HB: That was in Market Rasen.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: So how did you get -
HB2: Oh we had a bus.
HB: Did you?
HB2: Oh yes we had a bus.
HB: So you got from this, from Middle Rasen.
HB2: Yes. Yes.
HB: To Market Rasen.
HB2: Yes.
HB: By bus to go to school.
HB2: Yes.
HB: Right.
HB2: Mind you I think it went our as far as West Rasen.
HB: Yes. Yes.
HB2: To a catchment there but yes we went by bus.
HB: Yeah. So obviously as you move in to the secondary modern school and you meet some of the older pupils and kids obviously some of your attitudes must have to change do they?
HB2: Oh yes. Yes they did. We were a bit more grown up.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: You know. But we were governed then by female teachers when I first arrived there up till ’45. Then when the male teachers came back they didn’t mess about. They weren’t harsh but they’d got the military discipline hadn’t they?
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And when we say jump you jump. I remember a kid at the back wasn’t paying attention and he got a board rubber thrown at him and he threw the rubber board rubber back at the teacher. Oh God.
HB: By the shirt scruff and -
HB2: He give him a dressing down in front of the class and made him stand at the side of him, at the side of his table until he said he could go and sit down. No. They weren’t, they weren’t cruel.
HB: No.
HB2: But by God they were, you know, you’ll do as you’re told and I don’t think any of them gave them the stick.
HB: No.
HB2: No. They just I mean they wouldn’t allowed it today physically yanking them out or grabbing them by the ear and pulling them out of the front. That was sufficient.
HB: Yeah. So by, by that time when you were at the secondary modern the Polish squadron would have moved into the air base, the air field. Did, did you because I think you said to me on the phone there wasn’t an awful lot of contact between the Poles and the village.
HB2: No. There wasn’t. There wasn’t.
HB: But I mean at any time did you ever go to any sort of social dos or you know invitation dos at the airfield.
HB2: Oh yeah. We had a tea party.
HB: Right.
HB2: We had a tea party. It, all the, all the scouts, local scouts, guides, brownies, cubs were invited to a tea party there and oh what a day that was. We were shown some aeroplanes and then we were taken into this long room where the table was set and we were sat down to tea. Now, on my plate in front of me was some ham cured by Polish methods, some chicken seasoned by Polish methods and then there would be if I said a spoonful, a tablespoon full of chopped tomato and cucumber with a dressing on it. There was something like curds or cheese with bits of fruit in it. There was grated carrot and grated cheese with a dressing on it. Everything had got a dressing on it. There was what we call now today potato salad and there was coleslaw and all these were on a dressing and I mean nearly everything was a first to me and my eyes used to look a bit suspicious at it and think, what’s that? What’s that? But oh and the lettuce was chopped up, sliced up thinly with a dressing on it and we ate, it was neither a biscuit nor bread but it was soft so it must have been a type of bread or bread cake to eat with it. Well we didn’t have anything on it but by gum it was good and so of course with my fork I’m there tasting this and tasting that and thinking this is not too bad and my plate was clean like the rest of, the rest of the other kids.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: It really was and then when they come out with the cookies oh our faces must have been a picture. I mean we’d never seen anything like that and as most of the kids had been told to eat what was put on their plate there wasn’t much left.
HB: No. No.
HB2: And it was all washed down with a fruit cordial.
HB: Right.
HB2: Oh that was memorable was that tea party. That was memorable.
HB: So who was serving the food? Was this the -
HB2: The WAAFs and the men.
HB: The WAAFs and the men.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: And they were English.
HB2: No. They were Polish.
HB: They were all Polish.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Right. Right. And they, so how did, I mean obviously they could communicate.
HB2: Oh they could speak better English than we could speak Polish.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: No problem. I mean kids could speak naturally don’t they?
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And they had no difficulty. Maybe with the dialect but no, they understood what we said ‘cause we said, this was dinged in to me and dinged into the others, ‘You remember your manners. Please and thank you costs nothing,’ so it was, ‘Please’ and, ‘thank you,’ a thousand times over.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How many, did that only happen the once or -?
HB2: Just the once.
HB: Right.
HB2: Just the once.
HB: Was that early when the Poles came or was that after they’d been there a little while? Do you remember?
HB2: Oh I think they must have been a bit established a little bit there because I think it was even quieter. The war was going better than ever.
HB: Right.
HB2: You know.
HB: Right.
HB2: They was in there.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But oh yes. But that was a day to remember that was.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I mean I can, well it must have been for me to remember the details today.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. It’s obviously stuck in your mind.
HB2: It has and I mean even today we’ll try, you know, the Poles did it this way so we’ll chop up our tomatoes and cucumbers different. What the dressings were I don’t know. Didn’t get them out but they tasted good.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: That was the first time I’d had slices of apple, raw apple and raw pear on a salad
HB: Right. Yeah.
HB2: I thought.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I thought oh God. Apple? With a salad. It went down.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: It went down.
[pause]
HB2: Now then we had, we got bombarded with make do and mend and waste not want not.
HB: Right.
HB2: Now, clothing, as I said, second hand clothing was turned into all sorts of things from snip rugs to short trousers. And the food. Well, nothing was wasted. It was not wasted at all.
HB: No.
HB2: And some of the things would make them stare today because, take for instance growing broad beans. The tops are nipped out.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: They weren’t thrown away. They were cooked as a vegetable.
HB: Oh right. Right.
HB2: Pea vines were nipped out and tender shoots took out and boiled out as vegetables. The tops of Brussels sprouts was always cut out and used as a veg and the tops of them newly spouted tops on swedes was done the same way and when we grew spring onions, when we grew the normal onions from a bulb or when we grew celery the tops were cut and chopped up to put in stews and soups as seasoning.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: We had, always had a row of chives to put seasoning in so there was plenty of seasoning going on and when we, when we had a leek we took the leek up out of the ground, cleaned it off, cut the mushy root off, took the pair of scissors and snipped the brown tips of the leaves off. Then we cut the blue from the white but we chopped the blue up, put it in a pan and cooked it five or ten minutes before we put the white in.
HB: Right. Yeah.
HB2: So that wasn’t wasted.
HB: No.
HB2: And when we, when we cut, cut a cabbage we used to cut it within the tops of the first set of leaves, trimmed the leaves off to about this much stalk, split the stem into a cross and then a new shoot would come out where the leaves joined the -
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: The thing. And the cauliflower, we’d always cut that off and use all the leaves around it. We’d strip all the leaves off to get the bare flower first of all and put them in to cook first.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And then we’d cut the florets off the stalk and chop that up finely and put that in.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And the top half of the Brussel plant or a cow plant, something like broccoli plant we used to cut that off ‘cause it was soft and chop that up and put it in a stew or the thing.
HB: Right. Yeah.
HB2: And I remember getting in to awful bother in the supermarket when the broad beans come in ‘cause I was picking them up about as thick as my little finger and this old boy with his wife come to me and said, ‘Why are you doing that for boy?’ ‘Because I want them.’ ‘Well they’re no damned good,’ he said. I said, ‘They’re exactly what I want.’ ‘What do you mean? What are you going to do with them?’ I said, ‘I’m going to top and tail them and cook them in the coshes.’ ‘Come on misses,’ he said, ‘This bloke’s gone mad here.’ And off he went. But we did. We used to cook the beans. Now field beans are tough old things aren’t they?
HB: Oh yes. Yeah.
HB2: Well there were so self sets up the top here. I went up there one day and they were there were just forming, the beans, I pulled them off, topped and tailed them and cooked them and I went up there one day and as they were just forming I pulled them off, topped and tailed them and cooked them and you couldn’t have better tasting beans in all my life.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And my wife’s grandfather kept a shop and he had one lady used to go in and ask for the broad bean coshes and she used to trim the edges up with the scissors and then cook the rest.
HB: Yeah but it’s a skill learned -
HB2: Oh my God, yes.
HB: In adversity.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: And it’s seen you through the rest of your life.
HB2: That’s right. And we used to cook bacon. Slice of bacon in the frying pan or a joint. Well the skin used to come off. The rind used to come off and it used to be minced up and put in a stew.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: Or a soup.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Oh yeah. And when, when we had a carcass of a chicken or some big marrowbones when they went out and got thrown away they were white. They’d been boiled and boiled.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So as you come, as you’re coming through now you’re sort of eleven, twelve year old, you’re heading towards the end of the war really. What, did you as a boy then, as a young boy did you notice a change in people in the village and around, in the fact that you know we’d had, I presume by then we’d had D-Day and were starting to, you know, make inroads did you notice a change in attitudes with people or were they still pretty well set, you know we haven’t done the job yet. That sort of mentality?
HB2: Yes I did because rationing hit them. Rationing in peacetime was worse than rationing in the war.
HB: Right.
HB2: I mean for instance bread was rationed in peacetime. It was never rationed in the war. And the cheese ration went down to an ounce and milk went down to two and a half pints a week or two pints a week sometimes. We had first of all there was the end of lend lease and so the food that was available had to be eaten then and it wasn’t plentiful. Then they had a world shortage of dollars and that was a thing, another thing that we had to pull our belts in, tighten our belts up and then there was, we had to, now then, meat went scarce or something because we had to feed the Germans which didn’t go down at all well so there was reasons. Oh there was a world financial crisis and that caused us again to cut down on rations. So in, all in all the feeling was that the war was over but we’re still on rationing.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: We were still paying.
HB: Did you, did you have, did, I mean you lived in a relatively small village compared to Market Rasen, did you have, did you have your own VE celebrations or -
HB2: Oh yes we had our street parties.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: We had a bigger celebration for VE day than we had for VJ day.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Because that was I’m afraid a long way away. When we was at school and Germany, Dunkirk had occurred mother met one local lad whose family she knew well and he’d just escaped with them and I remember her coming home and crying her eyes out. She said, ‘that poor devil escaped with what he stood up in,’ so that’s how it hit her and then having, having the Dunkirk thing happened that, that, that had a very gloomy effect on the village and there was little things like that that sort of reminded them that they hadn’t finished with it yet.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: They, they, they did relax at the end of the war when we had our celebrations but not completely because we had a reminder. Two lads come back having been prisoners of war of the Japs and one of them had suffered very badly. He lived in a row of little, four little cottages where we used to play marbles outside his house. Well when he went for a rest oh he used to scream his head off and he used to frighten us kids to death. How long it took him to get over it, if he ever did get over it, I don’t know.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But he had a rough time and as I said then there was the lad from Dunkirk who presented that side of it and so we knew what was, we knew what was going on.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I mean the gloom on the village when Dunkirk happened was, was noticeably, even me as a kid noticed what it was like.
HB: So as you come into the end of ‘45 and into 1946 what were your, what were you looking forward to? Can you remember what you were looking forward to? ‘Cause the war’s, the wars almost over but it’s not quite over. You’re heading towards, you know there must have been a point when you realised there must be some kind of peace coming. What were you, what were your expectations?
HB2: I, my one thing I was thinking about was my brother coming back.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: What he’d be like because I hadn’t seen him for five years.
HB: And I mean very early on in the interview you just said that your brother went abroad. I mean -
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Where did he go? Do you know?
HB2: He went to India to start with and then picked his way over into Egypt and up the toe of Italy to the German border.
HB: Right.
HB2: Then they sent him all the way around by sea home again to send him across the sea to finish off his service in Germany.
HB: Right. Right.
HB2: So yes and I didn’t know until I’d started my job, left school and started my job we had a relief signalman and he said to me, he says, ‘Are you the brother to Jack Beech?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘How do you know him?’ ‘In the army.’ He said, ‘I was long range desert patrol and,’ he said, ‘I come across him and a bunch of his buddies just standing in the desert.’ So I said, ‘What do you mean standing in the desert? He was a driver.’ So he said, ‘Yeah the front line had moved up and down and where it was safe before for them to go the Italians had been stood waiting for them,’ and he said, ‘They just took their vehicles and left them what they stood up in.’ He said, ‘And as luck would have it we come across them.’ I said, ‘Oh is that why he doesn’t like Itys?’ It was always those damned Itys. I could understand it but he never spoke about it. We never got to know about that.
HB: No.
HB2: No.
HB: What age were you when you actually left school Harold?
HB2: Fifteen.
HB: So, so you were there at the secondary modern through to fifteen.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: From ’44 to -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: ’48.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. And so, as, as the war is ended and you’ve touched on the rationing. All the guys who had been away who had survived and been away they’re come back what was happening on the airfield? Was that, did you notice that winding down or -?
HB2: When I got my job I did.
HB: Right.
HB2: I left school at fifteen in ’48 and got a job as a lad porter at Snelland Station and Snelland Station serviced Wickenby airfield.
HB: Right.
HB2: And Wickenby airfield was getting rid of all the old ordinance and scrap vehicles so they were constantly coming down to the railway station to dispatch vehicles and these ruddy great bombs and didn’t [Sabu] the crane driver get me going ‘cause there he is swinging five of these ruddy great bombs and putting them down on, in the wagons saying, ‘Be very careful when you’re nailing the chock don’t make a spark because you’ll be going up in smoke.’ [laughs]
HB: What were these? Were these like the big oil drum type bombs or -?
HB2: Yeah. We had an open wagon, railway wagon and five would get in nicely that we could scotch them.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Five in a truck and they were the width of -
HB: Scotching obviously being putting the wooden wedges in. Yeah.
HB2: It was a wooden wedge.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And don’t you cause a spark. Well me and my mate were frit to death. I remember us sitting on these bombs one day when we’d scotched them and we said how the hell could a spark set this lot off? And then we came to the conclusion they weren’t live, well live enough but you know.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: They were pretty safe.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Egads we used to have to spend so much time building a wooden frame so they wouldn’t roll because I mean if them five had hit the end of the truck they’d have been gone.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But touch wood we never had a complaint about them being littered up on the line but they were going up to Stranraer to be dumped in the sea.
HB: Were they now?
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Right.
HB2: I think the vehicles were going to a depot to be to be scrapped and -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Broken down as scrap.
HB: So that, so that would have been the bombs that would have been all the way to Stranraer that would be all on the railway then.
HB2: Oh yes.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh yes. Boxed wagons had got the smaller ammunition.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And the low, the low wagons had got the vehicles.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh for a fifteen year old I were busy. I was really busy.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Me and my mate from the next station.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: We really were and I mean we were both young and inexperienced and yet we’d got a responsible job of making sure nothing fell off.
HB: Absolutely. Absolutely. You wouldn’t want one of them rolling off anyway.
HB2: You wouldn’t. No.
HB: No.
HB2: And it was a, it was a real experience being working as a lad porter ‘cause as I said at fifteen I was responsible for keeping all the lights in the signals and the other little things on the line alight.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: ‘Cause when they put, well they had dollies that used to turn and I mean they had to have a light in there. They had to have lights on the gates, lights on the platform, lights in the signals.
HB: And what was, what was the source of light?
HB2: Paraffin.
HB: All paraffin lamps.
HB2: Paraffin. Oh and what did stop, when you got, I don’t know, three quarters of a mile away from the station to the distant signal and the ruddy lamp blew out and you were trying, down the bank trying to shelter it with your coat to light it again and you’d get up to the top and the damned thing had gone out again.
HB: So you’d have go up the ladder and put it in the, in the signal.
HB2: Yeah you had a lamp that was stuck on a spike -
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And put it in and sometimes I’d go back the next morning and get down to that signal. The light’s out.
HB: Yeah
HB2: Oh dear. Primitive.
HB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Primitive.
HB: But did it work?
HB2: Oh it worked. Yes it worked.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. And we had a pony delivered by passenger train. It come on the end of passenger. Well if you’d seen the rigmarole of that. The signaller pulled the line so the lines went over and I had to run over with a G clamp and clamp the ends so they didn’t open again.
HB: Sorry what’s a pony?
HB2: Riding pony.
HB: Oh. Riding pony. I’m with you. I’m with you.
HB2: Come in a horse box. Behind the -
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And I had to shunt it across the line. I had to put this G clamp on the end of every section that opened.
HB: Oh right. Blimey.
HB2: There was a delay of the passenger train I’ll tell you.
HB: Yeah. I would, yeah they wouldn’t be very happy would they?
HB2: No.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh and you had to shout out the name of the station.
HB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
HB2: One day I was in an impish mood and I said, ‘Anyone for here. This is it.’
HB: You’d get away with that?
HB2: Yes.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. How long were you there at the, sorry what was the station I’ve forgotten?
HB2: Snelland.
HB: Snelland. That’s it.
HB2: Fifteen to seventeen and a half. Two and a half years.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: To ‘51. ‘48 to ‘51 because I’d made up my mind bringing bringing the ordinance down the RAF police would come down -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: To supervise and I used to talk to them and they said, I used to say I want to join the air force and they said oh you go in the police [you’re big and awkward?] you go in the police which I did. I got the police and I got the air force.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: So -
HB: Right.
HB2: Seventeen and a half when I was taken into the air force in 19’, February ’51. Whilst I was in the air force I got in to awful trouble at RAF Benson with this messing sergeant. I’d gone up as you usually do with your plates and they dished out the spud, the veg, the meat, pudding and the custard and I, the pomp ‘No thanks.’ The cabbage. ‘No thanks. The custard. ‘No thanks.’ And the sergeant said to me, ‘When you’re finished your meal I want to see you in my office.’ So I said, ‘Right.’ So I went in her office and there was the WAAF catering officer there who had just taken over and so catering officer there who’d just taken over and so the catering sergeant said, ‘Oh hello corporal. What do you want?’ I said, ‘I’ve been asked to attend here by the sergeant.’ ‘What’s he done wrong sergeant?’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘He refused the potato, he refused the cabbage and he refused the custard.’ So she was a wily old cuss was this sergeant, she was lovely. She turned to me and she said, ‘Well what’s your answer?’ So I said, ‘Well first of all I was told and brought up that if I didn’t want anything and I wouldn’t eat it I didn’t have it on my plate.’ ‘Right,’ she said, ‘So what was wrong with the potato?’ I said, ‘It was pomp.’ ‘What was wrong with the cabbage?’ I said, ‘It was dehydrated.’ ‘What was wrong with the custard?’ I said, ‘It was made with water.’ Well the sergeant’s face was a picture so the sergeant stepped in, she said, ‘How do you know it was made with water?’ ‘Because it was blackish. It’s very dark and blackish.’ So the old WAAF officer she turned her head away. I think she’d had a quiet smile. So the sergeant then said, ‘Alright corporal, are you some sort of a chef? Are you in the food trade?’ I said, ‘No. I’m just a farmer’s son living on a small farm.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Well explain yourself.’ I said, ‘Well I live on a small farm that produces milk, plenty lot of it and the custard that they make is nowhere near what you’re making there so I assumed it was made of water.’ Well she didn’t say it was and didn’t say -
HB: No.
HB2: It wasn’t and I said, ‘I don’t like, I’ve tasted and don’t like the pomp and the dehydrated cabbage. So the old WAAF sergeant said, ‘Fair enough corporal. Fair enough.’ She said, ‘I can see you’re a man that’s had an upbringing that’s different to others.’ I said –
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I said, ‘Well’ –
HB: Yeah.
HB2: ‘It might be simple but,’ I said, ‘It’s good.’
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And she said, ‘Well alright. Off you go.’ Well then we used to take the swill of the messes and feed pigs ‘cause they’d got a pig farm on there and send them off to be processed for bacon and the general public. She said, ‘Stop that. They’re coming in the mess.’
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh we used to have some lovely dishes. Yeah.
HB: Right.
HB2: ’Cause she did say after that she used to come around, both of them used to come around the mess and say, ‘Is anything alright?’ And mean it.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: If you’d got a complain you said so and I know I said to them one day I said, Look, I do patrols through the night and I come in to the mess for a sandwich,’ I said, ‘And it’s usually the time when the joints of meat come out of the oven I said and they don’t taste anything like what we get at 1 o’clock.’ ‘Oh?’ I said, ‘Well let’s face it you’ve got a thousand odd men. How do you keep slices of meat warm from 2 o’clock in the morning till middle of the day?’ She said, ‘Well there’s the snag. What’s wrong with them?’ she said. I said, ‘Well they’re like cigarette papers aren’t they?’ I said, ‘It’s tasteless.’ Anyway, she did something about that.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And I said, and she said, ‘What about the eggs?’ I said, ‘Well they’re like rubber. They hit the wall and bounce around the camp.’
HB: Oh right.
HB2: She said -
HB: Right.
HB2: She said. ‘Well again unless we have somebody frying them and dishing them out, then we’ve got a bit of a problem there.’
HB: Yeah.
HB2: So I said, ‘I understand,’ I said, ‘It doesn’t stop me eating them.’
HB: Yeah. But it’s different.
HB2: But it’s different. So, she, she it was a, it was an ex-naval man that was the thing before, messing officer before and he just got what was easy. Of course -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: When she took over we had to eat what was in the stores.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: To clean up but after that she got it going.
HB: So what, you know as obviously we’re coming towards the end what do you think, it’s not an abiding memory that’s, that’s the wrong phrase but what, what do you think your experience of being a boy in the countryside and on a farm and near an airfield, what do you think your experience has given you for the rest of, you know, for your adult life.
HB2: It’s, I had the opportunity on occasion to see the rough side of war. I was messing about at home one day when I heard an aircraft that was making a funny noise and I saw it hit the ground. It crashed on the other side of the village and I jumped on my bike and got over there and I was going up the yard and in the implement hole was a mate of mine, Bob and I said, ‘Are you alright, Bob? What’s going on here?’ And he never answered and when I went up to him he never moved. So I said, ‘Are you alright?’ And he never answered again. Anyway, an ambulance man was going up the yard and what are you two doing in here and I said, ‘It’s my mate. I can’t get him to talk,’ so he come in and he said, ‘Oh has he been hit?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ So he picked him up and carried him out to the ambulance and he, I stood waiting and he said, ‘It’s alright. He’s suffering from shock but what he’s done I don’t know.’ So he says, ‘I’ll take him home.’ So they took him home and I wended my way into the field. Where the crater, you couldn’t get anywhere near it. There were people busying about so I went up the other side to the hedge and watched them and there was men on the corner of a blanket, four on a corner, on each corner of the blanket metal things picking and I thought what on earth are they doing? Well as they came around the outskirts of the crater it was remnants of bodies, flesh. And then I started wandering around the outskirts and I found a boot with a foot in it and I thought oh God yes they’ve been blown to bits haven’t they? Well by the time more police had arrived, more ministry people, more air force people had arrived and there was keeping us further and further away from the wreck so I went through the hedge and damn me if there wasn’t bits of body in there so I came back and the chap’s coming near me I said, You’ve got some more out here.’ ‘Oh come on then show us where.’ And I spent some time showing them where in the other field. Eventually I went home and the next day I went to school, come back home and my mother said, ‘I want a word with you.’ So I said, ‘What for?’ ‘Well what have you been up to? Where did you go yesterday?’ I said, ‘I went down to Hankins farm.’ So she said, ‘What did you do there?’ I said, ‘Walked around a field.’ So she said, ‘I’ve just had a policeman and the district nurse here.’ So I said, ‘What for?’ ‘Well they told me you were interfering.’ So I said, ‘I wasn’t. I kept out of the way.’ Course she’d suspected I’d done something wrong and they weren’t telling her the truth so I said, ‘No. I hadn’t done anything wrong.’ So she said, ‘What did they mean by asking questions of me if you’d slept alright and did you eat your breakfast this morning?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what they’re talking about.’ Anyway, it come out that Bob had been in the field at the top when the aeroplane crashed at the bottom and he saw this thing coming for him wherever he went and he just froze but eventually managed to get in to the hovel and hide. Me? I’d witnessed too much.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Which was gruesome so they wanted to know if I was fit and well. Now me and the two lads from across the road who were there as well never had any effect on us at all.
HB: No.
HB2: No. It was strange that.
HB: Never came back to visit you.
HB2: No. No. It was something that was being done and I couldn’t visualise the bodies with that in the blanket.
HB: No.
HB2: I knew what it was but I just couldn’t visualise that that’s what had happened so I saw that side of that. I saw the German prisoners of war. I saw the rationing so I, oh and I saw the Lancaster. I was in the Lancaster and saw what they had to put up with so I got a good insight, only briefly, but a good insight on the other side of the war.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And you know watching the aircraft coming back and going out.
HB: Yeah that’s yeah I mean that obviously came through your character. Helped, you know well I wouldn’t say helped, it didn’t help but it came through your character after the war then.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh yes.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I mean when we went, when we went to secondary modern school we were still collecting paper there. We had a baler in the girl’s things and we used to bale it up and send it off and we got something like eighty five tons in five years and we were, there was reports and letters saying how essential it was for us to do this and what was doing so I got another side of what was helping on because paper was important.
HB: Yes.
HB2: And the war effort could be made. I mean I couldn’t associate with making a shell about a piece of paper or anything like that but this is what it taught us.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And we we had a memorial service ‘cause we lost three, three old pupils. One lad come from our village and he was nineteen, an air gunner in a Lancaster and he got shot down and never returned. And another lad was a sailor and he never returned. So we lost two in the village.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And then we had the two men troubled by the Japs.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. A significant time.
HB2: Oh yes. Yes. We, I can understand there was hardship but ours wasn’t hardship it was an inconvenience.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. I see where you’re going. Yes. Yes.
HB2: I mean when, after I got out especially when I joined the air force and saw some of these lads that had come through the war and were still in the air force oh you got a different story out of that altogether.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And I mean as I said before I just used to sit back and think what sort of men were they to do that? How could they do it?
HB: Yeah.
HB2: You know and here they are as happy as sand boys.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: They’ve weathered the storm and this is it. I mean we had one chap, a flight lieutenant and they used to say to him oh he’s a surly so and so yet he wasn’t. He’d spent six months in the jungle and survived and was now an expert in lecturing others on how to survive in the air force. He’d been shot down and survived and I used to sit there and watch him marching up and down, walking up and down and think what a chap you are. You know. God. Could I have done that?
HB: Yeah. Again towards that time you know you’ve come to the end of the war and the sort of year at the end of the war ’46 ‘47 can you have you got a memory of how your mum and dad sort of reacted when it was as it, well it was finished then. The war was finished.
HB2: Well mums best reaction with my brother.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: My father’s reaction was getting rid of the war agg.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And being able to do what he wanted to do.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But dad never said much about anything.
HB: No.
HB2: He, a grandfather and four uncles one of which didn’t returned had all served through the First World War. Now you couldn’t get an old soldier in the village to even mention anything.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: They wouldn’t talk to you. Especially to us kids.
HB: Yeah. So, yeah I mean your dad very pragmatic then, you know, he can get back to his normal farming as he would phrase it and mum has had chronic asthma.
HB2: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: Like you say your brother walks through the door.
HB2: That’s it. Everything was -
HB: Everything was fine.
HB2: Just like waving a magic wand.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Oh I know she used to walk to town, a mile and a half. She’d come back she could hardly breathe sometimes.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Used to frighten me to death.
HB: Was your family much of a church going family?
HB2: Oh mother was.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I was a choir boy.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Dad didn’t.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: He was too busy milking cows at church time.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But he would go on special occasions.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Like harvest festival or something like that but no he wasn’t a church or a chapel goer.
HB: No.
HB2: But as I say I was a choir boy and mum was a cleaner and stoker of the stoves in winter.
HB: Yeah. Do you think your mum got some sort of comfort?
HB2: Satisfaction out of it.
HB: Comfort from the church?
HB2: Oh yeah. I think so. Yes I think so.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: She wasn’t deeply religious.
HB: No. No.
HB2: But you know that’s she had, she had her feelings.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But oh God how, how many times did we urge these Christian soldiers onwards and sing for them that was in peril on the sea. Oh dear.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Well that’s just coming up to quarter to two Harold and I think that’s absolutely brilliant. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed listening to that. It puts, it puts a context on it.
HB: Yeah. So I think what we’ll do unless there’s something else you want to tell me about, something you’ve been hiding you know I would close the interview down now I think and thank you very much for what you’ve, what you’ve given us.
HB2: I don’t think I’ve missed much out. No. I think I’ve covered it pretty much.
HB: Yeah. And you’ve got the bits out that you wanted to -
HB2: Yeah.
HB: To bring out.
HB2: Oh yeah.
HB: That’s good. That’s good.
HB2: It’s, it was not all milk and honey but as a kid it was an experience.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: At times it was frightening but at other times it was pretty interesting.
HB: Well I’m going to turn the tape off now.
HB2: Yeah right.
HB: Harold.
HB2: Right.
HB: It’s, so it’s quarter to two. Thats lovely. Thank you very much.
[machine paused]
HB: This is a continuation of the interview that we terminated at quarter to two. Mr Beech was just telling me a little bit about his experiences with the Home Guard and what was going on in the villages so I’ll let him carry this on so we’ll have this as the second part of the file for this particular interview. Right, Mr Beech, it’s running.
HB2: At the beginning of the outbreak of war there was a home, there was a look, duck and vanish brigade which was commonly known as the Local Defence Volunteers but which was later were renamed the Home Guard now, made up of locals, usually the farm labourers and these farm labourers used to meet at the pub and exercise in the two paddocks, and train in the two paddocks but they were always eager to go on night manoeuvres. Now night manoeuvres covered a multitude of sins because the biggest part of them were poachers and they used to have, used to have great coats which was usually a World War One great coat that had a big, a skirt inside that used to get sewn up into two pockets. Ferrets in one and nets in the other and off they’d go across the fields and do a bit of rabbiting and some clever devil could also get a pheasant or two but no one seemed to tumble the reason why they wanted so many night manoeuvres but it was pretty obvious. Many a good dinner was obtained through the night. But another they used to train was camouflage and they held an exercise in this farmer’s field who’d got big bushy hedges and big chestnut trees and they were hiding. Well us kids used to go around and say, ‘What are you doing down there Mr Caps?’ Or he’d start to climb a tree and somebody would tell you in no uncertain terms to clear off. ‘What are you doing up there?’ So, in one, in one instance we were ushered out the field.
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: So, [laughs], as kids I think some times in the war we were very much a pain in the backside.
HB: Right. Well, yeah thanks for that. I do think that’s worth, worth just recording particularly getting the old rabbits and pheasants for the pot so we’ll just terminate this particular one at 1.55. Thanks again Mr Beech that was really interesting.
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 Harold Beech. Two
Creator
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Harry Bartlett
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ABeechH170302
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2017-03-02
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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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02:37:39 audio recording
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Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Pending review
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
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eng
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Sound
Description
An account of the resource
Harold Beech could see the activity of several airfields and witnessed stricken aircraft flying back to stations near his home. He also witnessed a crash and describes how he hid in a Lancaster, with the help of the engineer who was billeted with his family and was able to watch the activity of a Bomber Command station closely. His grandmother adopted an aircrew from RAF Faldingworth, but one day they did not come for their usual visit and were never seen again. He describes how the village always pulled together and he described the make do and mend plus the effect of rationing. He also recollects the arrival of evacuees in the village.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1943
childhood in wartime
crash
evacuation
home front
Lancaster
military living conditions
prisoner of war
RAF Faldingworth
RAF Wickenby
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/201/8347/PBaileyJD1607.1.jpg
d2e2e272e830d018ca52ba02b0e5dcc4
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/201/8347/ABaileyJD161207.2.mp3
3d78aa3a379aecd3a869c35e82fac2d1
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
Bailey, John Derek
John Derek Bailey
Bill Bailey
John D Bailey
John Bailey
J D Bailey
J Bailey
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. Two oral history interviews with John Derek "Bill" Bailey (b. 1924, 1583184 and 198592 Royal Air Force) service material, nine photographs, a memoir and his log book. He flew a tour of operations as a bomb aimer with 103 and 166 Squadrons from RAF Elsham Wolds and RAF Kirmington.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by John Bailey 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
2016-12-07
2017-01-13
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bailey, JD
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is an interview for the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive between Harry Bartlett, volunteer interviewer and Mr John Derek Bailey who is normally known as Derek and in the RAF was known as Bill. Pilot officer. And his service number was 198592 and Derek was born on the 2nd of February 1924. Right, Derek. Obviously, we’re interested in what you did before the war as well. So, you know, what, what, where did you actually live before the war?
JDB: I lived on Railway Farm and Shackerdale Farm at Wigston.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: You’ll know where Shackerdale Farm was.
HB: Yes.
JDB: Because it’s near to where you now live.
HB: Yes. Yes.
JDB: But it’s now gone of course.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Their farm is a housing estate.
HB: Yes, absolutely.
JDB: On both, both sites actually.
HB: Did you, did you go to school in the Wigston area, Derek?
JDB: Yes I did. I went to, I went to school on the Saffron Lane Estate at a junior school and I did the, them days eleven plus exam which I passed and I got accepted to go to the Gateway School in Leicester and then the authorities found or discovered that where we lived on the farm which was then Railway Farm at the time which is up alongside the cemetery.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Was actually in the county of Leicester and not in the city. So they wouldn’t let me go to the Gateway School.
HB: Oh dear.
JDB: So, so I therefore ended up going to South Wigston Intermediate School and there I remained until I passed the, there was a school leaving examination. It was called the EMEU, the East Midland Education Union and I passed that and I was then fourteen and a half and I was supposed to stay at school ‘til I was fifteen but because I’d passed this exam and finished they let me leave school in August and I went to work as a trainee draughtsman which is what I wanted to do, at Constone, in South Wigston and then the war started of course. I left school in 1938 and then I was still working there at Constone and the building materials, the reconstructed stonework that Constone manufactured became a sort of luxury building side, side stream thing and they finished up building air raid shelters mainly which minimised the need for a draughtsman so I, I got a bit fed up and I decided I’d like to leave and you had to go to the Labour Exchange. You couldn’t just do what you wanted in those days and so I went and they allowed me to leave Constone and I was sent to Fred Edling at Blaby to work there and I got on very well with Fred. I did a bit of draughtsmanshiping for him and -
HB: What did he do? What was that firm doing?
JDB: He was road transport.
HB: Right.
JDB: And he was the first, first haulier in Leicester, Leicestershire, to have a low loader and doing what you might call heavy haulage and I got on alright there. Very well. And so on my eighteenth birthday, I’d already made my mind up about this because I was in the Air Training Corps when it was formed in 1941 and I decided I wanted to go into the air force. You had to be eighteen. And on my eighteenth birthday I got on my bike and went down to Ulverscroft Road in Leicester and enlisted in the Royal Air Force and I went home and told my mum I’d just joined the Air Force and she burst in to tears of course.
HB: Yeah. Well you would wouldn’t you?
JDB: Yeah. And anyway so it was now I did the various acceptance tests and all that sort of thing and then they said, ‘Ok, you’re in,’ and I was given, I got a letter actually from Sir Archibald Sinclair who was the secretary of state for something or other, air I suppose and I was given what was called deferred service and so I was sent, I was, I was given a number and everything, sent home to carry on doing what I was doing until they sent for me and so -
HB: So when, when would that be, Derek?
JDB: Well I joined on the 2nd of February of course and they gave me this deferred service to wait until I was called so I was working for Fred and he, he said to me, he had an office in London as well, in Deptford and he said, the manager down there was, got called up, so he said to me, ‘Would you go down and run London office for the time being ‘til you go?’ And I was only eighteen mind.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Anyway, I said, ‘Yes.’ So one Monday morning on to one of his lorries, as a passenger of course and off we went to London and I’d been down there for, I can’t remember a time, a few weeks anyway and I said I’d like to come home for the weekend so he said ok so on one of the lorries again, back home and when I got home there was a letter waiting for me from the air ministry and it was to give me joining instructions to report to Air Crew Reception Centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: On the 27th of July 1942. You can never forget some of these dates can you?
HB: No. No. No. I wouldn’t have thought. Yeah.
JDB: Yeah. The 27th of July.
HB: They’re important.
JDB: I reported, reported to Lord’s Cricket Ground and that started my RAF career then. So do you want me to just go on?
HB: Derek, whatever you want to tell me. I’m, I’m enthralled now. I mean when you went to the, to Lord’s Cricket Ground.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Did you do tests to decide what branch you were going to go in or –
JDB: Oh no.
HB: Did you just get brought in?
JDB: No. I should have told you that. When I joined and I went over to Birmingham for attestation as they called it and medicals and God knows what and I had the medical. They said, I wanted to be a pilot you see and they said, they did the medicals and said, ‘Sorry. You can’t be a pilot but you can be a navigator.’ I said, ‘Well why can’t I be a pilot then?’ He said, ‘Because you’ve got a defect in your eyesight. You -
HB: Oh.
JDB: It’s a convergency problem and you would probably try to land an aircraft about twelve or fifteen feet off the deck.’
HB: Right.
JDB: And so –
HB: Not something you want to do.
JDB: No. No. That’s right. ‘So you, so you’ll have to be, you’ll be a UT navigator.’ So that’s what I went to be. Now then. We got to Lord’s Cricket Ground. There, we were there for I think it was either two or three weeks. It wasn’t long and you got all your jabs for this, that and every other bloody thing and oh this one, I remember one morning we were on parade. Now, I was among those who were one up because we’d already done the drill.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: We could do that.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: We didn’t have to be taught and so on and one morning we were on parade and some sadistic bloody corporal calls out names, ‘Right. One pace forward the following. Bailey JD.’ I went, ‘Yes,’ and that was me and about another two guys and he said, ‘You’ve volunteered to give a pint of blood.’ I said, ‘Oh. Oh thank you very much corporal.’ Oh no. No. That’s alright. You know so, I said ‘What do you want a pint of my blood for?’ He said, ‘Well you’ve got an unusual blood group and they need your blood to group other people’s blood.’ But, now I don’t understand that. But -
HB: No. No but -
JDB: Anyway, that’s -
HB: Yeah.
JDB: What was said.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And that was just one of the things.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
JDB: Then we were marched off to the cinema to watch gory VD films and -
HB: Yeah.
JDB: You know, keep clear.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And all that sort of thing and then after I think it was about three weeks, they said, ‘Right you’re being posted now to await your next posting. You’re going to Ludlow to a camp until you’re posted to Initial Training Wing,’ and we went to Ludlow which, there were three wings there of all UT aircrew.
HB: UT’s under training.
JDB: Under training.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: UT air crew and there were so many airmen in Ludlow that they only let one wing out on the town each night. Not that that prevented us doing so but anyway that was, that was Ludlow. So it was three weeks at Ludlow and then the posting came through and I was lucky. I got a nice posting to, I’ve forgotten the number of the ITW now but it’s in, it’s in, I’ve got a record of it somewhere and off we went by train to Ludlow and we got, yeah we got off the train, ‘Fall in, pick up your kit,’ kitbag on your back. March down to, I was billeted in the Torbay Hotel on the seafront.
HB: Oh.
JDB: On the harbour. It’s not called the Torbay Hotel now but it, you can still see where it was written on the wall and there we were and we were at Torbay in Paignton until New Year’s Day would you believe and in that time we did various subjects like, well all sorts of subjects. Meteorology, air navigation, armoury, gunnery. The Browning 303 machine gun, the mainstay of nearly everything.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: I remember a corporal armourer giving a lecture on the Browning 303 machine gun. He’d got one on the desk in front of him and he said, it was his party piece, he starts off saying, ‘This is the Browning 303 machine gun. It works by recoil action. When the gun is fired the bullet nips smartly up the barrel hotly pursued by the gasses.’ [laughs]
HB: I like it. It was a good description.
JDB: I always remember that Harry.
HB: Yeah. Good description. Yeah.
JDB: It was a party piece that was.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Anyway -
HB: So this, this was New Year’s Day. 19 -
JDB: New Year’s Day 1943.
HB: ‘43 right.
JDB: Yeah and I hadn’t my great coat on up till that day.
HB: Oh.
JDB: And we were posted from there to Brighton and it was like going to the bloody North Pole.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Compared with Paignton and then we were, and Brighton was a holding unit. You’ll hear that word a lot actually.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Holding units while waiting to go somewhere else and we got there and we marched up and down and roundabout and all that and, and one day whoever it was, I can’t remember, probably a sergeant or flight sergeant got us on parade and said, ‘Right, now then, the air ministry have invented a new trade in the air crew trades and it’s called an air bomber.’ Instead of a navigator dropping the bombs as well he hadn’t got time to do that so we now have got a trade called air bomber and the air bomber will be the second pilot, he will be the radar navigator, he will drop the bombs and various other things. The Daily Sketch had a full front page and it said, “This guy’s job is no joke” and it listed our full list of jobs. [laughs]
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Anyway, this guy who had gone on parade said, ‘The air ministry have invented this new trade. Now, anybody who would like to volunteer to move from UT navigator to air bomber we will guarantee a quick posting instead of being sat here for weeks on end,’ And so, so of course Derek Bailey was one of those who stepped forward.
HB: Right.
JDB: Very quickly and within a week we were on our way to Heaton Park, Manchester ready for embarkation to Canada.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: And -
HB: So, how did you, so you went to Heaton Park.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Got booked in there, and then from there you went to Canada.
JDB: Went up to go to Glasgow to board ship.
HB: Oh right. So you went from Glasgow. Right.
JDB: Yeah from Port Glasgow. It was on a ship called the Andes and the minute it left the Clyde I was seasick and I was seasick till I got off in Halifax.
HB: Oh no.
JDB: Nova Scotia.
HB: Oh dear.
JDB: Yeah. Anyway, so then we were in Canada. We went from Halifax, Nova Scotia on the train to Monkton.
HB: Right.
JDB: New Brunswick. Which was a massive camp for all air crew who went to Canada for training. Went through Monkton and came back through Monkton.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: It was a massive place.
HB: So, what, what was its purpose? Just a –
JDB: Just a transit camp.
HB: Just a transit to get you in, get you sorted.
JDB: That’s it, get you with some extra bits of kit.
HB: Right.
JDB: Like, we got there in the winter of course and it was bloody cold you know and if you were to walk around without your ears covered up they’d be frozen.
HB: Oh dear.
JDB: Anyway. So that was it the. Eventually they got us on a train and sent us out to Carberry in Manitoba to another, which was an, which was a training station. Pilot training. And they just sent us there to be housed until they were ready for us where we were supposed to be and we got to Carberry and we, and every so often on the way over through Ottawa and Montreal and where else did we go? Where the train stopped and they took some bodies off with scarlet fever.
HB: Oh dear.
JDB: And we got to Carberry and we’d been there about a day and I got my sore throat and whatever and I’d got it, scarlet fever, along with others and I spent five weeks in hospital just feeling alright and doing nothing but you know. I went from, they took me, took us from Carberry to a place called Brandon in Saskatchewan in an isolation hospital. You know scarlet fever is highly, what’s the word I want?
HB: Contagious.
JDB: That’s it. And, and there we were. Then we got two weeks leave, sick leave, after the five weeks. Myself and another bloke from Manchester we got five weeks, no, two weeks sick leave and all the pay for the five weeks as well had accrued and off we went on the train to Winnipeg and had a holiday in Winnipeg.
HB: Oh dear.
JDB: Yeah. Lovely.
HB: I bet you enjoyed that.
JDB: Oh we did.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: We did. I learned to skate among other things. Anyway, and then eventually we got posted off to Picton, Ontario which was number 31 Bombing And Gunnery School and that’s where we did our first bomb dropping and air firing of, not a Browning, it was Vickers gas operated -
HB: So -
JDB: Machine.
HB: When you got to Picton -
JDB: Yeah.
HB: The, were, were you actually going up in aircraft?
JDB: Oh yeah. When we got to Picton that was the start of the serious business of training.
HB: Right.
JDB: And we were, you were learning bomb aiming and air gunnery.
HB: Right.
JDB: We used to do, the air firing was shooting at drogues towed by Lysanders. I don’t know if you were aware of what they are.
HB: The, the, yeah. Yeah.
JDB: A Lyssie.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. High wing and over the top.
JDB: That’s it. Yeah. That’s it. Yeah. And -
HB: So where were you firing from? What sort of, were you flying from an aircraft?
JDB: From a, from a Bolingbroke which is a Canadian built Blenheim.
HB: Right. A Bolingbroke.
JDB: Bolingbroke. Yeah. It was the same, same aircraft.
HB: Right.
JDB: But Canadian built as a Blenheim.
HB: Right.
JDB: Oh and the bombing we did from Ansons.
HB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Ansons. With ten pound practice bombs.
HB: Right.
JDB: We did eight in an exercise normally.
HB: And how often, how often would you expect to sort of go up and do that in your time there? Would that be every couple of days?
JDB: I count them in my logbook.
HB: Right. It would be sort of every few days would it?
JDB: Oh yeah. Yeah. And then when we finished at Picton, that part of the training, we were moved to Mount Hope which is at the end side of lake, what lake is that one? No, not Erie. Lake Ontario.
HB: Lake Ontario. Yeah.
JDB: Yeah. Of course it is. So Picton is sort of one side of Toronto, in the, Picton [island in the lake].
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And Mount Hope was the other end at Hamilton. Mount Hope is now Hamilton Airport.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
JDB: And they have, they have, I’ve been there in the last few years. They have there the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum I think they call it and they’ve got a load of aircraft there including one Lancaster.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: Which are all flying examples. They haven’t got any statics. They don’t have, don’t want static aeroplanes. They want aeroplanes that can fly and so that’s at Mount Hope and we did our navigation part of the training there and having completed that we then got our wing, our single wing. It, it was what used to be called a flying arsehole. The old brevvy was. You know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: And then having got that presented on wings parade I think, I think we were back in England, we got back to England and the air ministry decided that that was going to be abolished, that wing, and we were going to have a single wing like other trades and it would say, it would have a B in it so that’s what I’ve got and -
HB: So when, so you finished your training.
JDB: At Mount Hope.
HB: At Mount Hope.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And then you came back through Monkton.
JDB: Back through Monkton.
HB: And you got back to England.
JDB: Well we got back to, yeah. There were about a dozen of us put on to the ship, the Mauretania, when we came back and we were put on and we were sergeants now. We got promoted to sergeant at the same time as getting the wing.
HB: Right.
JDB: And, yeah that’s right and we were put on the ship and we were sent, well there were, I think about a dozen of us. The OC troops was a squadron leader and we were his crew and we said, ‘What are we here for?’ He said, ‘Well tomorrow we’re embarking a load of American,’ you know, their Pioneer Corps type.
HB: Right.
JDB: You know, engineers or whatever you call them and these Americans all came on board and that was a joke if ever you’ve seen one. We got them all. They didn’t know where they were going. They thought they were going to Iceland and then they said, they were saying to us, ‘Well, where do we pick up the convoy then?’ We should have said, ‘What convoy.’ [laughs]
HB: Oh dear, oh dear.
JDB: Oh dear. ‘Well we just go and nip off smartly and keep out the way of bloody U-boats if any.’ And so that was that.
HB: So was the Mauretania. Was that a liner?
JDB: It was. Yeah. It was quite a -
HB: A big.
JDB: Modern liner.
HB: Right. Yeah.
JDB: That was. Funnily enough a pal of mine who lived in Hinckley and he died recently but he, I told him I’d been on the Mauretania he was an avid cruiser and he produced a photograph of the Mauretania for me.
HB: Lovely. Lovely.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Oh that’s very -
JDB: Yeah
JB: So where, what sort of dates are we talking about you getting back to England then?
JDB: It was not long before Christmas 1943.
HB: Right. Well that’s a good long time then.
JDB: We were there, we were over there nearly a year.
HB: Blimey.
JDB: Within a year.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And I came home. We landed in Liverpool and we went to Harrogate which was a holding unit, another holding unit. Holding unit for air crew returning from abroad.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: After training. Pending posting to the next training unit so there we were at Harrogate, over Christmas actually. But just before Christmas as I say we went home on leave in December and we got, I got, I think we got about a week’s leave so went home in December and I went home and saw my grandad in Wigston in Bushloe End.
HB: Oh right, yeah.
JDB: And, I think he was in Bushloe End still. No they weren’t. They were in Manor Street, they lived in Manor Street then and my grandad he was eighty five and he said to me, ‘Hello boy,’ he said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to come home.’ And within a week he’d passed away.
HB: Oh.
JDB: And I went to the funeral while I was home.
HB: Oh.
JDB: Amazing. And then we went back, back to Harrogate and we were billeted in the Grand Hotel overlooking Valley Gardens in Harrogate and waiting where to go and then we, we, we got moved to another little holding unit as part of the, I’m trying to think of the name of the place between Preston and Blackpool.
HB: Padgate?
JDB: Who?
HB: Padgate?
JDB: No.
HB: No that was further up wasn’t it?
JDB: No the -
HB: That was Blackpool.
JDB: No that was further down. There was -
HB: Preston. Blackpool.
JDB: There’s a prison there now. I think it might be an open prison.
HB: Oh.
JDB: On the camp where we were and I’ve forgotten the name of it. It begins with K. Oh never mind anyway it doesn’t matter very much. I could easily find out. It’s about half way between Preston and Blackpool.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: And we were stuck there for a few weeks and then got posted to North Wales to near Pwllheli and Ansons. It was a, it was an Advanced Flying Unit and it was equipped with Ansons and we did the bombing in, in the cove off, off the, just off the coast by Pwllheli.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And that was only a few weeks, you know. Went and did a bit of infra-red bombing and one thing or another.
HB: I was just going, I was just going to ask you Derek about the bomb sights because the time you went in for the training they must –
JDB: They were Mark 9 bomb sights up till now.
HB: Yeah. Right.
JDB: Ok.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: If you want to know more about that I can tell you but –
HB: Yeah.
JDB: But they were Mark 9 bomb sights up to that, up to this point.
HB: Right.
JDB: Then when we’d done the bombing bit we went to the 9, number 9 OAFU Observer Advanced Flying Unit. We were split into two parts. The bombing bit was at, just outside Pwllheli at, I forgot what it was called now. Aber some bloody thing. It would be in Wales wouldn’t it?
HB: Abersoch.
JDB: No, not quite as far -
HB: No.
JDB: As that. Anyway, we got moved then to Llandwrog which is Caernarfon Airport as such now and we’d got Ansons again but in the navigation role and we just roamed around the Irish Sea. They had an infra-red target on the end of the pier at Douglas on the Isle of Man and various other places and -
HB: So an infra-red target. What, what would that have been?
JDB: Infra-red, well a camera with, an infra-red camera pointing upwards and if you flew over it with an open shutter camera you get a trace.
HB: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: You know, you could work out where your bombs would have fallen.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: And various other types of funny targets they used as well and anyway that was at Llandwrog and then they put, one morning we went in and they’d put a list up of various OTU’s, that’s Operational Training Units that you could express a preference for which you went to.
HB: Very nice.
JDB: Would you believe?
HB: Yeah, very nice.
JDB: And so you’d got found, on this list one was Desborough and I thought that’ll do me. That’s not far from home. So I put down for Desborough. When, when we came to be formed up to go and they said, ‘Righto. This group here, you’re going to Peplow aren’t you?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I thought we were going to Desborough.’ ‘Well. Well, it’s Peplow.’ Anyway, off we went to Peplow and I still thought we were going to bloody Desborough. Anyway, we ended at Peplow which happens to be over by Newport, Salop.
HB: Yeah
JDB: Shropshire.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Where my daughter now lives. She lives just by there. Anyway, we got to, we got, finally got to Peplow. There we were. The next day there was a load of aircrew there just arrived. Pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, engineers, oh no we didn’t have a flight engineer at that stage. Gunners and so on and we were all, all were put in to a hangar, a big hangar and wandering around like bloody lost sheep and he said, ‘Right sort yourselves out, get yourself into crews of seven.’ And that’s how we -
HB: And that was it.
JDB: Formed a crew.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Somebody came to me and said, ‘I’m in George Knott’s crew. Can you join us as a bomb aimer?’ I said, ‘Yeah, ok.’ And that was it. Just so. Just like that.
HB: And these were blokes, you’d not, obviously not met any of these other guys other than the bomb aimers.
JDB: Well no.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: We just met for the first time.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: All of us. So we did and then we had, then we did our training there.
HB: So, so in that hangar from that day.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: You came, all came together as a group of seven.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: So that’s your pilot.
JDB: I think we had seven at that stage but we only had one gunner on Wellingtons you see. So that -
HB: So you were crewing up for Wellingtons.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Right.
JDB: Oh that’s what we were crewing up for.
HB: Right.
JDB: I think we only had one gunner. We picked a second gunner up somewhere else and then when we got to Heavy Conversion Unit. Yeah. That was our next move. We went to a Heavy Conversion Unit at Sandtoft up near Doncaster.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
JDB: Which is, which was, a Halifax, equipped with Halifax 2s and 5s. Merlin engined Halifaxes and the bloody accident record there was so bad that it was named Prangtoft.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Instead of Sandtoft. Yeah.
HB: Because, because it was a while before they changed the engines wasn’t it?
JDB: Well yeah.
HB: In the Halifax.
JDB: Yes and 4 Group which was the only group to operate Halifaxes. They, they got Halifax 3s which were radial engined.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And they were a superb aeroplane but they were useless at the others. Bloody terrible things. They were nice and comfortable for the crew.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: But the performance was, left a bit to be desired.
HB: So when you went to the Heavy Conversion Unit -
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Did you carry on with Wellingtons or did you move to the Halifaxes?
JDB: No. Moved straight to the Halifaxes.
HB: You went into the Halifaxes. Right.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Halifaxes and then when we’d finished on conversion to Halifaxes we then got posted to Lanc Finishing School to do only a week for the pilot to convert from Halifax to Lancaster. And -
HB: Right.
JDB: The Lancaster was a superb aeroplane. Still is.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Superb. We got, went on this and they gave you, gave us a familiarisation flight and, for the skipper and I can always remember going on this flight. We did a ninety degree turn in to two dead engines you know, them down.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Without losing any height.
HB: Blimey.
JDB: Superb aeroplane it was and that was at, and I’ve been trying to think of the name of the bloody place and I can’t at the moment, where we did that but it was about halfway between Lincoln and the Humber.
HB: Would it be in your logbook?
JDB: Yes. It would.
HB: Here you are. Let me have a look and I’ll see if I can find that. So what date are we talking about roughly there?
JDB: I can’t remember.
HB: Oh. This is, yeah this is it this is marked air bomber. Air bomber, navigation. Wow.
JDB: Yeah [laughs]
HB: Yeah.
JDB: We never used the term air bomber really. It was a bomb aimer.
HB: It was, I was going to say it was something I hadn’t come across until I started doing this.
JDB: Well it was a B on the brevvy for starters.
HB: Yeah. Right. Hang on a minute. Where are we? That’s obviously Canada that is. ’43.
JDB: Yeah it would be on a bit Harry.
HB: ‘43 and we’ve got 83 OTU at Peplow.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. That’s all on the Wellington and then we’ve got Sandtoft at Doncaster.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: You did a bit of night flying at Sandoft then.
JDB: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah. Where are we now? C flight. Hemswell.
JDB: Hemswell. That’s it.
HB: Hemswell. Familiarisation. Yeah.
JDB: Number 1 Lanc Finishing School.
HB: Yeah. Yes. Yes. I found that now.
JDB: Yeah. And from there we went to 103.
HB: Right. Because you had a pilot there, that was your Lancaster there was SCF2 and BCX.
JDB: There was the one that we got shot up. That was the second trip.
HB: Right. Yeah so that, so that takes you through, that takes you through to August ’44.
JDB: That’s right. Yeah. It was after D-Day.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Just after D-Day.
HB: Yeah. Blimey. Oh right yeah now it really starts doesn’t it?
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Elsham Wolds.
JDB: Yeah. Look at that first operation at Elsham.
HB: Yeah. 11th of August 1944. I’m reading this obviously Derek because, because, you know, your eyes aren’t so clever now.
JDB: I can’t even see it.
HB: And the pilot officer was Knott. Pilot Officer Knott. Air bomber. Cross country. That was, so that was your training flights.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Cross country air-sea firing and then, what? There’s one here. I’ve seen this before and I’ve never thought to ask about it Derek. It’s got the 24th of August 1944 and it’s got Knott and your duties as air bomber and it’s got Y cross country. What does the Y mean?
JDB: Y. Oh it was, Y cross country. It was, it was a radar.
HB: Ah.
JDB: Now what were we using ‘cause we were using Gee and -
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Y. I think it might have been the start of H2S.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve heard of H2S so -
JDB: Yeah.
HB: That would be like the forerunner then. Yeah.
JDB: Yeah. I think so. Something, something like that.
HB: Blimey and then yeah, you’re right. Then it’s your first operation and you’re straight in to Stettin.
JDB: Yeah. Just look at that -
HB: Stettin.
JDB: First operation. The time.
HB: Nine hours twenty five.
JDB: Nine hours twenty five minutes airborne.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: In a bloody Lancaster.
HB: At night. Yeah.
JDB: At night.
HB: Blimey, that, that is a, is a long -
JDB: That’s a long drag.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Believe me.
HB: Mind you, Stettin, Stettin was always a good -
JDB: Stettin. Yeah we went up over Sweden to get there. That’s why it took so long.
HB: Did the Swedes not complain?
JDB: Yeah they did.
HB: Did they?
JDB: They fired. They opened fire but they’re flak was at about ten thousand feet and we were at eighteen.
HB: Oh right so they did, so the Swedes -
JDB: They were very -
HB: The Swedes actually opened fire on you.
JDB: Oh yeah they were very accomo, they had to you see
HB: Yeah.
JDB: They were very accommodating.
HB: Yeah. What are, now what are you trying to say Derek [laughs] are you trying to say they were either bad gunners or they perhaps the -
JDB: No. I’m saying that they were very accurate gunners.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: And made sure the flak didn’t go up near us.
HB: [laughs] I understand that. Blimey. So that, and that and that was with a five hundred pound LD, seven cans thirty pounds and seven cans four pound incendiaries.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: That’s a good load, that’s a good load. It’s still -
JDB: It is on that maximum range.
HB: Yeah. I was going to say that is on a long one like that.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And then your next one is [Argonville?].
JDB: Yeah. We got shot to pieces.
HB: Yeah and you say it’s shot to pieces right.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: You tell me what you, what you remember of being shot to pieces and I’ll tell you what you’ve written in your logbook.
JDB: Damaged by flak haven’t I?
HB: Yeah. That’s all it says.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: What happened there then?
JDB: Well at [Argonville] it was a flying bomb sight and we, that first trip when we went to Stettin it was, it was a doddle apart from weariness. We didn’t have any opposition apart from anti-aircraft fire which was sporadic to say the least and then we thought oh [Argonville] it’s only in France bloody hell piece of [?] it was. We got, we were briefed to bomb as I remember I think about seven thousand feet and we got over there and the target was cloud obscured. Couldn’t see it at all so the, and it was a master bomber raid so the master bomber called us up and said that, ‘Target obscured by cloud,’ called main force you know.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Descend to, descend to, I can’t remember exactly but say four thousand feet or five thousand feet, descend to five thousand feet or whatever it was. ‘No opposition.’ That was the master bomber who turned out to be, I understand the master bomber was Mr VC himself as a wing commander. What’s his name?
HB: Guy Gibson.
JDB: No.
HB: Cheshire.
JDB: Cheshire.
HB: Len Cheshire.
JDB: Correct.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Wing Commander Cheshire. So anyway we descended, we broke cloud and there were bloody shells bursting around us.
HB: Crikey.
JDB: I was looking out the front of the aircraft and there were two shell bursts right in front of me. And so I was down the front, down the nose, ready to drop the bombs and Paddy the rear gunner shouts, ‘We’re on fire skip,’ and we weren’t on fire. It was all the hydraulic fluid buggering off and we, we sort of over flew the target. I pressed the tit and nothing happened and so we did a circuit and I changed the main fuse and I pressed the tit again and nothing happened again so we couldn’t drop the bombs so we, we left the target area and started to make our way home. We were going to come up the North Sea and drop the bombs so, this was all my job you see. My responsibility. So I got the wireless op to help me and we, once we got over the dropping zone in the North Sea I got with me my piece of wire and dropped all the bombs manually.
HB: Oh.
JDB: Into the North Sea.
HB: Yeah
JDB: And then we then we realised we’d got no hydraulics so we couldn’t, we couldn’t do anything with the undercarriage or the flaps but you could, you could blow the undercarriage down by compressed air.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
JDB: But you could only do it once and once you’d done it you’d done it, you know and then -
HB: Yeah.
JDB: They were down –
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And they had to stay down so we made our way back to, towards Elsham and we were flying with, I think we put the wheels down at some point. I can’t remember, and we were going to do a flapless landing and, you know, which we did actually.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And we did, we did a bit of a hairy landing, rolled down the runway and hoped we could stop because we’d got no brakes either. No brakes and whatever and eventually we got the aircraft to the end of the runway and rolled it on to dispersal and a shell had burst just under the bloody bomb bay. God, we were near to it you know and all the wiring had gone and the hydraulic pipes had, were fractured and that’s where all the hydraulic fluid had gone and –
HB: That was -
JDB: Well that was that.
HB: Somebody was sitting on your shoulders that day weren’t they?
JDB: Well yeah that’s right. And then George went into briefing and got a right bollocking. He said, ‘You only just missed the bloody sergeant’s mess when you came in to land, Knott.’
HB: That’s George, that’s George. Is that Pilot Officer Knott? The pilot. George
JDB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: Blimey.
JDB: He was not a happy chappy.
HB: I’m not surprised. So who, who were, what were the names of your crew on that one Derek?
JDB: The crew, there was my, there was George Knott was the skipper.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: I was the bomb aimer of course. Ron Archer was the nav.
HB: The navigator.
JDB: Yes.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
JDB: Wally Williams was the flight engineer. Gus Leigh, I sent him a card today and I hope he’s still alive. He lives, he lives in Ripon.
HB: Right.
JDB: And where was I?
HB: Gus.
JDB: Gus. His name’s not Gus it’s Wilf.
HB: Wilf.
JDB: But we always called him, he was always known as Gus.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: In the air force. Anyway. Wilf Leigh, he was the wireless operator. He was the old man of the crew as well as it happened.
HB: How old was he then?
JDB: Well I was twenty one, I think. No I wasn’t. I was twenty -
HB: Yeah.
JDB: When I did my operations. He was about well I’m not quite sure. I think he was about six years older than me.
HB: Oh a real old fella then.
JDB: Well, yeah. I mean I can account for all of my crew except the gunners.
HB: Right.
JDB: I’ve never been able to find them. Anyway, I’ll tell you about him later.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: But where, where was I? Yeah. That’s it.
HB: So you have Gus Leigh
JDB: Is the wireless op.
HB: Which gunner? He was the wireless op.
JDB: Jock Gregg, John Gregg was the mid upper and a little, little guy called, was the youngest member of the crew actually was Paddy Anderson was the rear gunner. He was only a small chap. Fitted in to the rear turret quite nicely. Yeah.
HB: [laughs] Right. And this was, that, that was, the Lancaster designation for that one was PM Papa Mike.
JDB: Yeah. PM was the -
HB: And then it was.
JDB: Designation letters -
HB: Yeah.
JDB: for 103.
HB: For 103 yeah.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: So that, and that was N. The letter N for that. Would that be for Nan in those days?
JDB: Nan, yes. N.
HB: N-Nan. Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause I’d forgotten ‘cause you’d gone into that and by now.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: You were then posted obviously to Elsham Wolds.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Into 103 squadron then.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: So at some stage George Knott between Hemswell and Elsham Wolds he got promoted to pilot officer.
JDB: Yes. That’s right.
HB: So that was, that was another party then was it?
JDB: No. He was, he, it was automatic promotion up to flight lieutenant.
HB: Right.
JDB: George was a, what happened was while we were at Sandtoft George was then a flight sergeant. We were an all NCO crew.
HB: Right. Yeah.
JDB: And George got sent for while we were at Sandtoft to see the station commander and he went in to see him and he said to him, ‘Right. Flight sergeant, you are, you are to apply for a commission. The air ministry have decided that captains of four-engined aircraft shall be commissioned.’ So George said to the station commander, ‘But I don’t want to be commissioned sir. I have an all NCO crew and I’d like to stay with them.’ And he said, ‘It is air ministry policy Knott. You will do as you’re told.’
HB: Blimey. Yeah. I mean that’s, that’s not exactly, that’s not an argument you’re going to win is it?
JDB: No. Are you alright?
HB: Yeah. I’m just, I’m just making sure that we’re on track with the recorder ‘cause it did let me down once so I’m very very cautious of it. Making sure it’s working right. Yeah. It’s working fine.
JDB: And there we are.
HB: Yeah so then, I mean looking at this you’ve got quite a few daylight operations.
JDB: Yes.
HB: And there was one here caught my eye which was Cap Gris Nez.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: The only Gris Nez I know is sort of the Channel Islands.
JDB: No. Cap Gris Nez is near Calais.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Right
[Door opens.]
JDB: Hello Henry.
Other: Hello grandad.
JDB: Hello George.
HB: Here’s the boys. I tell you what we can do. We, ‘cause you sound like you need a drink.
JDB: You’re alright Harry.
HB: We’ll just pause it a minute.
[machine paused]
HB: Right. Resuming, resuming the interview.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And we’re looking at, its now round about twenty to four.
JDB: Blimey.
HB: And today is the 7th I forgot to say that at the beginning. It’s the 7th of December.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: 2016
JDB: Yeah.
HB: You see I was getting excited ‘cause you got your logbook out. So, right, so you did obviously things like Le Havre and Calais.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Were all in, all in support of the drive forward in to Europe.
JDB: Yeah. All in support of the troops on the ground.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: ‘Cause if you recall all of those things the channel ports were sort of all bypassed by the ground forces and surrounded.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And sort of tidied up afterwards.
HB: Right.
JDB: And not, not a pretty sight at times, I can tell you.
HB: No. No they must have been quite difficult on that one. So, yeah, so there was, so we’re going through from August the 11th ‘44 when you start with 103 and we get to the 28th, yeah 28th of September ‘44 and that’s, and you summarise that. You’ve done, blimey, one two, three, four. You’ve done well over ten daylight, thirteen, fourteen, fourteen daylight ops there and then we come to the 19th of October and you’re joining 166 squadron now.
JDB: Yes. That’s right.
HB: At Kirmington.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: So -
JDB: Well -
HB: What was Kirmington like at that time?
JDB: What do you mean?
HB: Well what was it like as an airfield then? ‘Cause it’s -
JDB: Oh it was a perfectly functional airfield. They had got rid of all of their Wellingtons and were fully equipped with, with Lancs and the reason we went there was because they had to form a new A flight at Kirmington and they pinched two crews from 103 and we were one of the two.
HB: Oh right. So you didn’t volunteer for it obviously you were just -
JDB: Oh no. No. We just were told just do it.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: You know.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And Kirmington was a more pleasant place to be than Elsham because Elsham was up on top of the Wolds you know going towards the Humber and the road from Barnetby up to the Humber Bridge goes through the middle of the airfield.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Yeah. And there’s a water works up there where there’s a big memorial to 103 and 576 squadron. They shared that airfield.
HB: Yeah. ‘Cause I mean here you’re doing, you’re back on doing, well you’ve got a six hour night operation there to Essen. That’s what, that’s October ‘44 and you’ve got, oh you got hit again then on an operation to Cologne.
JDB: Where?
HB: Cologne.
JDB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Again another one of those little simple statements. “Aircraft damaged by flak,” you know.
JDB: Well yeah. Not badly though.
HB: Oh that was a bit better was it that time?
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. But what’s intriguing me here is -
JDB: Sorry.
HB: What’s intriguing me Derek is there’s another one to Cologne the following night and you’re taking off at twenty seven minutes past five and it’s got, you’ve written in your logbook. “Aborted. Rear gunner unconscious.”
JDB: Yeah. He was. We did a crew check. A crew check. No response from Paddy. Went down to him and he was out cold and I think it turned out to be a trapped pipe, oxygen pipe or some bloody thing.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: I can’t remember exactly.
HB: So that, so obviously that that was abortive. I mean, how far you were in to it? Can you remember?
JDB: No. Not far.
HB: No far. Oh right.
JDB: Didn’t count.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Didn’t count for the count up, you know.
HB: Oh right. Oh dear. Oh right yeah ‘cause yeah that’s I see what you mean two hours fifteen minutes and it was five hours forty for the previous one. So, so then, I mean, blimey you still did some fairly lengthy ops didn’t you?
JDB: Oh yeah once we got over to Leipzig area doing [Moritzburg? Loren?] and things like that.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: They were all a pretty long way.
HB: Got Freiburg, seven, seven hours fifteen.
JDB: Freiburg.
HB: Freiburg. Yeah.
JDB: Yeah. That’s in, down in the south of France. Down near the Swiss border.
HB: Right. Yeah. But you still, I see even you have still got these gardening operations dropping mines.
JDB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
HB: What, ‘cause did they not count?
JDB: Oh yes they counted.
HB: They counted then did they?
JDB: Oh yeah. One of them was a long distance. We went up to Oslo Fjord with one.
HB: I’ve got one here marked it just says operation, ops gardening Norwegian waters. Six one thousand eight hundred pound mines.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And that was six hours forty five, that one.
JDB: Yeah that would be the one up Oslo Fjord.
HB: So, what, what was the threat there, Derek? Do you know?
JDB: What do you mean?
HB: Well you were mining off Norway.
JDB: Well we were mining in the Kattegat and the Skagerrak. We were mining channels, shipping channels which were taking troops and goods from Germany to Norway.
HB: Ah.
JDB: That was the thing. The danger to us there was flak ships mainly.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. [pause] Yeah, Yeah.
JDB: Say nothing Sue. Thanks.
HB: You’re very kind. Thank you. We’ve just had out refreshments delivered. Absolutely superb. Thank you. There’s just one little thing in here just caught my eye and that’s, where are we now? [coughs] Excuse me. November 1944. The 28th. You’re flying AS G-George and you’ve got flying officer Knott, George Knott. And then you’ve got a Flying Officer Yates.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And you’ve got written in there fighter affiliation Y bombing, practice bombing Alkborough.
JDB: Yeah. That was a non-operational. It’s blue.
HB: Yeah. Oh right.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: ‘Cause it just said -
JDB: A training flight.
HB: It just says six bombs and then it says sixty five yards dash twenty thousand.
JDB: Sixty five yards area at twenty thousand feet.
HB: [cough] Excuse me.
JDB: He was George’s buddy.
HB: So what would he just have been?
JDB: He was another pilot.
HB: Yeah. Just for the hell of it or -
JDB: I don’t know why.
HB: Would he be observing?
JDB: I can’t remember why they were both together. I’m sure.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: I don’t even know what we were doing. I can’t remember that.
HB: Right. And then the following, the following day you go to Dortmund and again one of those, “Aircraft damaged by flak again.”
JDB: Oh that was a gaggle flying day.
HB: A gaggle flying day [laughs]. Go on then. You’re all flying in a V formation? No?
JDB: Well, we went in to briefing. I remember this one, we went to briefing and the CO stands up there and says, ‘Right gentlemen today you will be gaggle flying as an experiment.’ We said, ‘Yes. Alright. What’s gaggle flying then?’ He said, ‘Well what you do you all take off as normal then we want one of the squadron aircraft to formate on another one of the squadron aircraft. Say you got two and all form up in twos like that and then all the twos, when you’re all ready, sort of close in together carefully and that’s called gaggle flying and the reason you’re doing that is because we’re having a bit of a charmed life at the moment but we’re going to get bounced if we’re not careful.’
HB: Right.
JDB: So we’ve got to be, we’re practicing some defensive formations.
HB: Ah right.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Right. That, that makes, that makes sense a bit now.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: So this was a way of bringing you together.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: To increase your fire.
JDB: That’s it.
HB: Your fire power as a defensive thing.
JDB: Yeah. And it was a bloody disaster I might say.
HB: Was it?
JDB: Yeah. It was on that day.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Because, if I remember, was the, was the target Dortmund?
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Well we got into this gaggle flying thing and we had the lead aircraft had got three, I think, flight commanders probably but they painted the tail fins all bright yellow on the three leaders and they formed up into a Vic.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: To lead the formation. Everybody then packed in behind them you see.
HB: Oh blimey.
JDB: That was the theory.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: So we start off and it was daylight of course. We went over the Rhine and, no we didn’t, before we got to the Rhine we detected that we were I think it was three minutes early, going to be three minutes early on target so the lead navigator ‘cause being in this bloody gaggle we had to follow the leaders you see and the, the leader decided that to lose the three minutes we were going to do a dog leg. A three minute dog leg. You do, if you’re flying there you do a forty five degrees three minutes, forty five degrees back and join up where you were and then you’ve lost two minutes or three minutes whatever it was.
HB: Right.
JDB: So, so we’re doing this dog leg and where does the apex of the dog leg take us do you think?
HB: Oh no.
JDB: Straight over Dusseldorf.
HB: Oh my.
JDB: Bang. Bang. Bang. You know.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And there were bloody aircraft going everywhere you know. I saw, I saw a Lanc go across and take a tail off another one.
HB: Oh no.
JDB: Oh yeah. It was, it was dreadful. You wouldn’t do gaggle flying at night anyway you see would you?
HB: No. Well, it sounds dangerous enough in the daytime.
JDB: So I don’t know whether they did any more gaggle flying. I didn’t.
HB: Yeah. So was that, was that, so that would be your squadron plus -?
JDB: It was probably the whole of 1 Group I should think. At least.
HB: Right.
JDB: I could find out. It’s in the diaries.
HB: Oh no. No. Worry not. Worry not. Yeah. Yeah. Oh right ‘cause -
JDB: While I think about it.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Can I just tell you Harry?
HB: Yeah.
JDB: The “Bomber Command Diaries” which I’ve got.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: I’ve told you about.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: It was out of print when we looked. Now the other week Sue and I went to East Kirkby.
HB: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Right.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And they’ve got a good bookshop in there.
HB: Yes they have.
JDB: As you know I’m sure.
HB: Yes they have. Yes.
JDB: And blow me what did they have there a soft back “Bomber Command Diaries” so it’s in print again.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: But in soft back.
HB: Yeah. Like we, like we were saying earlier on what I’ll do, what I’ll do is I’ll check with Dr Dan Ellin who runs the oral history.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And the digital project. I’ll check with his office and with Peter Jones who you spoke to on the phone.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: But I’m fairly confident that that’s been mentioned before.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: So I’m fairly confident they’ll have a copy.
JDB: Sure to have been –
HB: Yeah but if they haven’t then obviously -
JDB: Yeah but they’ve got, they’ve got it in soft back at East Kirkby.
HB: And that’s, yeah, oh right well I’ll point him at that if we’re missing one of them
JDB: Yeah. Anyway -
HB: Yeah ‘cause we’re leading up here we’ve come to December ‘44 and we’re leading up to this business at St Vith.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: For the Battle of the Bulge. I mean, I’m looking at this and you’ve gone what one two three four, you’ve gone four night ops, not too many days apart and I think your last, your last one in your book, in your logbook on that one is -
JDB: [Sights?]
HB: C mining off Kattegat. That was a night flight.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: But you got diverted to Lossiemouth.
JDB: Wait a minute. Oh no that was the, that was the Oslo Fjord one when we got diverted Lossiemouth.
HB: Right.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Right. ‘Cause that again, I mean that’s damn near six hours.
JDB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: That one and then you had, you had one that you had because you had to fly out of Lossiemouth base obviously.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: But then you had one which was abortive on the 21st of December. You only got an hour in the air on that one.
JDB: Oh that was, that was sea mining.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Yeah it was, the H2S was U/S.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: So we couldn’t do it.
HB: I mean just, the H2S is the, in the aircraft what purpose does the H2S have?
JDB: Well it’s ground mapping radar.
HB: Right. Right.
JDB: It was essential for sea mining because we used to use a identifiable spot on the coast or whatever which was a good return on H2S on screen. You get a good return and you can identify and that’s a datum to start from where to drop your mines.
HB: Right.
JDB: Normally. As it happens that one on Oslo Fjord it was a visual because it was in a channel. An island in the mainland that we were mining. We did it visually.
HB: Right. And then on the 26th we’ve got the Battle of the Bulge going on.
JDB: Yeah St Vith.
HB: Yeah and that’s four hours ten minutes.
JDB: Yeah. Well it was a fairish way you know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Nearly in the Ruhr isn’t it? Not far from the Ruhr valley.
HB: And this is, this is the, this is the op we were talking about earlier where you’re at Kirmington.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And just take me through it again because this is, this is intriguing to me. You’re actually still lining up and the airfield is covered in fog.
JDB: Yeah. The whole of Lincolnshire was under a blanket of sea fog which had rolled in and it was there for a day or two.
HB: Right.
JDB: And you know we got up on, got out of bed early, very early, like 3 o’clock on Boxing Day being, still being under the influence a bit and I remember George -
HB: You’d had a good Christmas, you’d had a good Christmas.
JDB: Climbing up the ladder to get in to the aircraft. It wasn’t our aircraft actually. It was Alan Yates’ aircraft. Ours, ours was already got some mines loaded on it and once they were loaded on to an aircraft they were not taken off.
HB: Right.
JDB: Until they were dropped. So old George climbed up the ladder to get in and it slipped and he fell and it sobered him up.
HB: So you’d all been on the beer the night before then.
JDB: Well it was Christmas Day.
HB: For Christmas. Yeah.
JDB: We’d got a truce supposedly.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: And then there we were hurtling over frozen France.
HB: So, so you go out first thing in the morning, get the aircraft ready.
JDB: No. Well, it was ready. No -
HB: Yeah.
JDB: We went straight to briefing.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: When you got up, you get a bloke come in, at that time in the morning a corporal come around the hut saying, ‘Wakey wakey get your feet on the deck,’ you know.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Briefing at so and so. And everybody did, you know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Went and sat in the aeroplane and waited to hear some verey cartridges go off which were white ones. Scrub.
HB: What, what could you on that one, the first one on that day then what could you see from the aircraft?
JDB: Nothing.
HB: Absolutely nothing.
JDB: No, could just, you couldn’t see anything. It was absolutely dense and, but it was only about two hundred feet off the deck you see.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: It was like a blanket had been rolled down.
HB: Yeah. So that one got knocked on the head. That was -
JDB: Well it just scrubbed.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And you go back to the buses would take you back to the, we went back to the mess, I think, not even to the briefing room.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And then they’d say briefing again, re-briefing or, I can’t remember we had a re-brief or we went straight to the aircraft.
HB: Yeah and the second time obviously the aircraft is still bombed up and ready.
JDB: Yeah. All ready to go.
HB: And was that AS B Baker?
JDB: Well it wasn’t our aircraft.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: It was Alan Yates.
HB: Yeah sorry it’s in your book here AS B Baker. Yeah.
JDB: Baker. We considered to be ours was AS Charlie.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve noticed there’s a lot of AS Charlie in there.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Definitely. Yeah. So, so you’ve gone back to the aircraft and it, and it’s still covered in fog.
JDB: Yeah and we sit there and think are we going to get another scrub? We did have another scrub. We had two scrubs as I remember and then eventually we got there. Eventually we were waiting for the scrub and it came time to start engines and this time there was no scrub so we started the engines and then we see a marshaller with two bloody lamps doing this in front of him, ‘follow me,’ sort of thing
HB: So he was circling his lamps telling you to get in behind.
JDB: Yeah. Telling us to get going and we followed him to the end of the runway.
HB: Oh blimey.
JDB: And set the gyro up to the heading and let it go.
HB: So you’re actually taking off on a compass bearing as opposed to -
JDB: Yeah. That’s right. Absolutely.
HB: Visual.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Blimey. I bet that was a bit -
JDB: Yeah. It all worked alright as it happened. Yeah.
HB: I like that phrase. It all worked alright and there were, there were, I mean obviously no problems for yourself but I presume everybody else got off as well did they?
JDB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
HB: And you say it was only up to about two hundred feet.
JDB: Yeah. You know. Sort of, we got off the deck and started climbing out and we were still on full boost and we were out in clear sky.
HB: Oh lovely.
JDB: Absolutely clear. Wonderful.
HB: So when you looked down all you can see is –
JDB: A blanket of fog.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And then, and then obviously the op starts. You’re off to St Vith.
JDB: Went down over the south coast somewhere. I think we crossed over the coast somewhere round about Brighton I should say.
HB: Yeah. And then what would you do? You’d sort of turn up a bit wouldn’t you?
JDB: Yeah. Yeah we did, we sort of -
HB: Go up to it.
JDB: Yeah. Went across the channel and then sort of turned left and headed towards Belgium I suppose.
HB: Yeah, because you had quite a, quite a good old bomb load on there.
JDB: Yeah. Well it was a short range, you see you used to measure it. If, if we went to the aircraft and we said, we would say to the armourers or the ground crew, say ‘How much petrol have we got on boys?’ They’d say, ‘You’ve got a full load skip.’ And say, oh in that case we’ve not got many bombs and we’re going a long way.
HB: Right.
JDB: If we’d got a full bomb load like seven tons it was a full bomb load and the minimum fuel. You wouldn’t be going very far.
HB: So you, you always had a rough idea.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: What you might expect before you even got to the briefing.
JDB: Well if we’d been out to the aircraft.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: And checked. Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: In fact the last one, our last raid was to Zeitz, which was right over by Leipzig and you know being your last trip we thought oh bloody hell but then again we were getting well on over that way then.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was going to say because it’s pushed on now I mean, I mean St Vith I’ve given you that photograph of the Lancaster actually -
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Involved in bombing St Vith. I mean it looked, it looked fairly clear as a target.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: So I’m presuming, it’s like you said, I think you said to me on the phone that it was frosty and bright.
JDB: Oh yes it was.
HB: All the way.
JDB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: All the way but you still managed to get yourself damaged by flak again.
JDB: Well we didn’t. No.
HB: Which is becoming a bit of a habit Derek.
JDB: We didn’t. No. I’ll tell you what there weren’t much flak at all because any flak that was coming up was a bit sporadic and it would be from their, you know their ATH which could be used as ground artillery or anti-aircraft.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: But, no there wasn’t much at all. It was when we got back we were in the circuit at Binbrook and we were going around and I was looking out of the window and it was on the starboard side and I was looking out the window I said.
HB: On the what side?
JDB: Starboard.
HB: On the starboard side.
JDB: Yeah
HB: Right.
JDB: I said, ‘Hey Skip, there’s a bloody hole in the wing.’ So he said, ‘Where?’ I said, ‘Well, between the two engines.’ And he said, ‘How big is it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. About six inch across I suppose.’ He said, ‘Oh we’ll have a look when we get down.’ So when we landed we parked on the bloody grass somewhere. They had Lancasters parked everywhere at Binbrook.
HB: And that was because -?
JDB: It was the fog still.
HB: This is the business where Binbrook was sticking up out of the fog.
JDB: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.
HB: The only one you could get in.
JDB: That’s right.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: So we got out and had a look at this bloody hole in the wing and it was a nice neat hole on top and underneath it was a jagged metal hanging down so obviously a shell had gone up and come down and gone through the wing coming down.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: And it didn’t explode.
HB: Oh that was lucky.
JDB: So we were dead lucky again.
HB: So how far away would that hole be from the fuel tanks then?
JDB: Right between them. It might have been clip on.
HB: Blimey. That’s another -
JDB: I’ve got a model of a Lanc somewhere with the fuel tanks in.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: So –
HB: Yeah.
JDB: I could show you a bit.
HB: Yeah I mean it’s, I mean that’s that’s another one like the other one goes off right next to the bomb bay and that one goes through right through.
JDB: Right.
HB: Right through the fuel tank. Do you want to grab your tea Derek because it will be getting cold?
JDB: Oh yeah. That’s alright. I let it get cold.
HB: Can you reach it? Do you want me to grab it?
JDB: No. It’s alright I can reach it.
HB: Right.
JDB: No problem.
HB: Yeah. ‘Cause that, I mean as I say the bits and bobs I’ve read about the St Vith raid was it, was it was, it was very accurate and it -
JDB: Well it should have been. It was in broad daylight.
HB: [It didn’t stop?]
JDB: At about I think we bombed from about ten thousand feet which was only about half our normal operational bombing height.
HB: Yeah. That’s, yeah that’s, that’s pretty, pretty tight there. And then we’re in to 1945.
JDB: I’ve got some battle orders. I don’t think I’ve got one for that. It tells you. Have you got any battle orders?
HB: I’ve seen them. I’ve seen them and they’ve got, they’ve got quite a few but I mean that’s that’s something, you know like I said we’ll come on to after we’ve -
JDB: Oh some people have got a load of them.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. When we’ve had a bit of a chat I’ll explain to you in more detail what we do about copying stuff and that.
JDB: Fair enough.
HB: But yeah I mean I mean we get to January and it says here this is to certify that Flight Sergeant Bailey JD has completed his first tour of operations.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: At 103 squadron Elsham Wolds and 166 squadron at Kirmington.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Blimey. So that’s what 44.35 hours with 103 and 130 hours 10 minutes with 166. One hundred and seventy four hours.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Which is a fair old time in the air that, Derek.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: What of that, of that as you obviously, you know you’ve come to the end of your tour. What, what was you feeling at that time about how Bomber Command were doing or how things were going?
JDB: Well I don’t know. I didn’t have any particularly hard feelings as far as I recall. I went home on leave and I had my twenty first birthday.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: No. I’ll rephrase that. I went home on leave, indefinite leave pending a posting.
HB: Right.
JDB: Somewhere else and eventually I got a gram, report 90, I think 90 OTU isn’t it at Lossiemouth?
HB: 20.
JDB: 20 OTU.
HB: Yeah two zero OTU.
JDB: Yeah, that’s it.
HB: It says Wellington.
JDB: That’s right.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Report Lossiemouth forthwith and so I spent then my twenty first birthday, all of it, travelling from South Wigston to bloody Lossiemouth.
HB: Oh dear. Well it’s, you know, I mean everybody else has a party. You were on a train. I suppose -
JDB: Well we all did it and I -
HB: Yeah.
JDB: You know, you wonder, well if I’d taken another day nobody would have even known.
HB: No. I was curious Derek because obviously we’ve got to, you know, early 1945.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And D-Day has happened and -
JDB: That’s right while well we -
HB: Heading for the Rhine and everything else. I just wondered how, you’ve done, you’ve done your tour, you know, you, you’ve spent that time in the air, and I was just was wondering how, what your reaction was. Like, you know your tour’s finished and how did you feel in yourself that things were going to go?
JDB: Well a bit of relief I suppose.
HB: Yeah. And what did you think the future held for you at that point? ‘Cause obviously the war’s still going on but -
JDB: Well, well what happened was I went to Lossiemouth as I would say and I was teaching. I was a bombing instructor. I did various courses and all the rest of it and I became commissioned and I was in the bomb plotting office one day and in, one of the flight commanders walked in and said, ‘I’m going back on ops, who’s coming? I want a bomb aimer.’ You know. And I said to him, I stepped forward and joined him and we got a crew together and we went off to Swinderby to join Tiger Force and we were going to Okinawa. That was what I thought at the time.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And then, I must have been bloody mad.
HB: Well I was just going to ask you the question Derek. You know when this, this sorry I’ve forgotten, I’ve forgotten the name your said that came in and said, ‘I need a bomb aimer.’
JDB: Oh you won’t know that. It was one of the flight commanders.
HB: Oh right. So, so nobody actually sort of -
JDB: Well he’s in there actually, as a pilot then when I was at Swinderby.
HB: Right. We’ve got Yates, Lomas, Kennedy, Richards. Oh no. That’s, you’re still instructing there I think.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: I think you’re still instructing there, Derek. Where are we? Hang on. Yeah. Circuits and landings. Ah 1660 Conversion Unit Swinderby.
JDB: That’s it.
HB: Johnson.
JDB: That’s him. Johnson.
HB: Flight lieutenant Johnson. Yeah.
JDB: Johnson.
HB: Because the question I was going to ask Derek was I mean I’ve heard of Tiger Force and I’ve done a little bit of reading about it but this guy comes in and says, ‘I’m looking for a bomb aimer,’ and did you actually, anybody, sort of think to sit people down and say, ‘Look. We’re forming Tiger Force and we’re going to go out to the Far East,’ or was it all just you know well sort of word of mouth. A rumour or something.
JDB: Well I don’t know. I mean it got whispered around I suppose. I mean Tiger Force was basically number 9 squadron.
HB: Right.
JDB: Well, it was, no, start again 5 Group.
HB: Right 5 Group. Yeah.
JDB: 5 Group became Tiger Force and this guy knew. He got to know somehow or other and he decided he wanted to go back on ops.
HB: Right.
JDB: And he was a squadron leader and to go back on ops he had to duck a, duck a rank. He went back to flight lieutenant.
HB: Flight Lieutenant. Oh right so ah that explains it then because it threw me. So he’s, he’s a wing commander.
JDB: No. No.
HB: Sorry a -
JDB: A squadron leader.
HB: A squadron leader but because he wants to carry on operationally.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Right. He then comes down to flight lieutenant -
JDB: Yes.
HB: While you’re at 1660 Conversion Unit at Swinderby.
JDB: Yes.
HB: Blimey because I mean, I’m looking, just looking in your logbook here so it’s all you know back to the trade.
JDB: That was Flight Lieutenant Johnson.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Oh that that makes sense now. That makes sense now. Lots and lots of cross country training and night, and a lot of night flying there.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: On that one.
JDB: We had to do that conversion because he did his first tour on Halifaxes.
HB: Yeah. Ah right. Yeah. That explains it then.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: That explains it. Yeah. And that takes you up to the 5th of September 1945 and then we’ve got 7th of September 1945 you’re signing, you’re signing that off and that’s your summary for number 1 course.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: I don’t know. It’s quite a lot of, there’s quite a lot of stuff in there Derek. It’s, I mean, we’re, I’m sort of skating over it a bit because I know, you know, you’ve written various things about your time there. I mean one of the things I’m interested in and the archive is interested in is you come, you come to, you come to the end of your time operationally.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: You’re sitting at, where were you? I’ve forgotten where you were now? You’re still at Swinderby.
JDB: No. Operationally?
HB: Yeah.
JDB: No. I was at Kirmington.
HB: So you went, so, yeah. You finished at Kirmington on your tour of operations.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: You then go to Swinderby to do the conversion.
JDB: No.
HB: ‘Cause -
JDB: After, after Kirmington I went to Lossiemouth as an instructor.
HB: Ah right. Right. Yes. Sorry. Yes I’ve turned, I’ve turned two pages over in your book, in your logbook Derek. Unforgiveable really. Yes. That explains it and then from Lossiemouth you end up at Swinderby. So you come, you come to the end of that time and the war in Europe’s finished.
JDB: Yeah and the Japanese war.
HB: The Japanese, the Far East has finished. What did you, what was your feeling then? You’ve come to the end of it all. You’ve survived.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: How did you feel about all that?
JDB: Well, I wanted, at that point I wanted to stay in the Royal Air Force.
HB: Yeah.
IJDB: I didn’t want to come back to Civvy Street and I applied for a extended service commission.
HB: Yeah. Sorry -
JDB: So -
HB: That’s me knocking the table. Sorry mate.
JDB: It’s alright.
HB: Yeah, you, so you applied for -
JDB: An extended service commission.
HB: Right.
JDB: I was, at the time, when I, when I got to this I was, I became an equipment officer, made redundant aircrew and became an equipment officer. So I applied for an extended service commission and I couldn’t get an answer from air ministry despite being at a command headquarters and having access to the [peace tap?] that I still couldn’t get an answer so I had to make up my mind if I was going back to civvy street or not at that point and I was under threat from my employer who would have been, or my potential employer again, about, you know, saying, ‘You either come now, don’t you dare sign on for any longer. Either you come back now or there will be no job.’
HB: Right.
JDB: So I had to make my mind up and in the end I opted to come out. Yeah.
HB: So that would have been mixed feelings really then wouldn’t it?
JDB: I was, like so many other people Harry, I was confused.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: I must say. I was confused.
HB: You know from other people I’ve spoken to it was the majority of people found it a difficult time. I mean in the wider context, I mean you’ve taken part with Bomber Command in, you know, a major part of the European war, and the theatre of war so what was, what were your feelings, what were your feelings about your part in all that?
JDB: I don’t know. I didn’t really consider it.
HB: Right.
JDB: I didn’t feel, are you talking about the guilt?
HB: What, however you felt about it.
JDB: No.
HB: You know, I’ve heard so many different -
JDB: No. I never felt any guilt whatsoever.
HB: Right.
JDB: Because I thought we were doing what was demanded of us to do and what we needed to be done.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And no more than that.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: But I know that some people did have reservations and, I don’t know. It’s a very very difficult question that, Harry.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: It really is.
HB: What, what did you think about any sort of support or the government’s view, after, afterwards?
JDB: Hereafter. Well there was a bit of cheating went on wasn’t there? I mean you’ve not mentioned the dreaded word have you?
HB: No. Go on. You carry on Derek.
JDB: And the dreaded word is, clever of me isn’t it? I can’t even remember the dreaded bloody word. What raised all the Cain about bombing? Where was it? In Eastern Germany.
HB: The target.
JDB: Yeah. The target. Yeah.
HB: Dresden.
JDB: Dresden. Thank you. That’s what caused all the trouble at the end was Dresden. I never bombed Dresden. I finished long before that. But if I’d been given orders to bomb Dresden I would have bloody bombed Dresden. End of story.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: To be honest I didn’t know enough about Dresden at the time.
HB: No.
JDB: I didn’t know enough, much about a lot of the places that I –
HB: No.
JDB: Plastered. But I mean the talk about Dresden and all the rest of it you could equally pick on places like Freiburg, or Freiburg which is in my book.
HB: Yes.
JDB: There was, the casualties in Freiburg were nearly as horrendous as, as Dresden and that was not for the type of place it was but they got it wrong. Somebody got it very very wrong on an intelligence basis because Freiburg was meant to be packed full of troops defending the Rhine.
HB: Right.
JDB: At it’s southern end.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And it proved not to be the case but it was very lightly defended. It was, it was, as far as Bomber Command was concerned it was an easy target really.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: And I do think that some people, including me had certain misgivings about that when we knew but we didn’t know at the time. We didn’t know. It was just another target but it was afterwards when they released information that you thought well that really, really wasn’t quite right you know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: But what can you do? You can’t put the clock back.
HB: No. That’s, that’s true. That’s true.
JDB: And whether any other places came up like that I really don’t know.
HB: No. I mean it obviously you’ve come to the end of your RAF and you’ve made that difficult decision to -
JDB: Yeah.
HB: To pick up your civilian life again.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: So, what, you come back to Leicestershire to start working for, was it Edling?
JDB: Edling
HB: Yeah
JDB: And then we had nationalisation of the transport industry if you recall.
HB: No. I’m still a bit slightly a bit young for that Derek.
JDB: Yes.
HB: But yes I have read about it.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: And so -
HB: So by now you’re twenty, twenty two.
JDB: What? When I came out?
HB: No. Yeah twenty, just trying to work it out. Twenty -
JDB: I was twenty three.
HB: You were, yeah twenty three.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Sorry. So you’re twenty three. Footloose and fancy free. You’ve got your demob suit and your RAF half a wing.
JDB: [laughs] Yeah.
HB: And what’s, what’s Bill Bailey doing, doing now? What’s he, what were you -
JDB: What? Now, Bill
HB: What were you looking forward to then? You’ve picked up your civilian life again.
JDB: Well I was working in the transport industry. I moved on to another company. I spent forty years with Star Roadways. Over forty years actually and that’s it. What one might call a normal life I suppose.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: I spent twenty years in the Air Training Corps.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: After I’d, after a spell. I retired when I was fifty six so, and I did twenty years so I must have been thirty six when I got talked into doing the Air Training Corps.
HB: Because you, ‘cause you got, you got a rank through the Air Training Corps didn’t you?
JDB: Oh yeah. I retired as squadron leader.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: I got a letter from the air ministry. Well it’s not the air ministry is it? But thanking me for my service.
HB: Just, just stepping back now into the war just two quick sort of questions for, just for you to have a think about. Tell me. What was, what was the silliest daftest thing you can remember?
JDB: The daftest?
HB: Yeah. In your, in your service, in your operations.
JDB: That I did.
HB: Well whoever, whatever.
JDB: Oh.
HB: As long as it’s clean mind.
JDB: I think, I think [laughs] I require notice of that one.
HB: Well that’s why I don’t tell people.
[pause]
JDB: Oh dear. I don’t know. The daftest thing. There must have been some.
HB: Yeah. Did you, did you all go out as a crew to the pub when you were on stand down?
JDB: Well, we did in, especially up at Kirmington yeah.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Because there was nowhere else to go other than the pub in the village.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Which was called the Marrowbone and Cleaver. Commonly known as The Chopper. And -
HB: How did you get down there? Bike. Bus.
JDB: Well no it was only -
HB: Anything with wheels.
JDB: [a bit?] away from where we, where the huts were. We were in Brocklesby Wood in nissen huts. It was a, what did I, I don’t know.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: I can’t think off-hand of any particularly wild thing.
HB: We’ll perhaps, we’ll perhaps leave that one and -
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Let you come back to that.
JDB: Except when I gave a girl a lift from Barnetby station back to camp on the cross bar of my bloody bike. I got talking to her on the train coming from Lincoln.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And apparently she was going to Kirmington.
HB: Was she a WAAF then or –
JDB: Yeah she was a WAAF.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: She became a good friend and I mean that. Only.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Only that. Wouldn’t have anything else I think.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: The WAAFs were very cagey actually you know.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And rightly so.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And I think it was that you put yourself in the position of a WAAF if you started getting to a very serious situation she’d probably think well Christ I might get pregnant and he might get killed next week.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: You know.
HB: Yeah. What was, when you, I mean you moved off Wellingtons and you moved on to lancs?
JDB: Yeah.
HB: What was your relationship with your ground crew like?
JDB: Very very good.
HB: Did you always have the same ground crew?
JDB: Well, when we were at Peplow on Wellingtons no I don’t think we got to know the ground crew hardly at all. Really.
HB: Right. Right.
JDB: On the squadron it was different.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: You were more a team there, there and one of our ground crew was on leave when we did our last operation but he came, he came back from leave to meet us, to see us when we arrived back from our last trip -
HB: Wow.
JDB: That’s the sort of guys they were and funnily enough, where was it I got posted to? Bloody hell.
HB: Was that - ?
JDB: Oh I know. When we got posted to Lossiemouth. That’s right. I and my skipper both got posted to Lossiemouth. When I went up there to be an instructor George went as well and when I got there after that long trip I went down, down the road in the morning and there was an officer coming towards me so I slung one up as you do and then I realised it was my skipper. Yeah.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: And then I met a bloke, a bloke did the opposite to me later on and, an airman, and he turned out to be our bloody engine mechanic.
HB: Oh right he’s air mech.
JDB: And I couldn’t believe it. Ginge we called him.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And he turned out he’d been posted somewhere and he was the bloody camp postman. He’d been made redundant.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Wow yeah.
JDB: I can’t remember where that happened now.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Oh dear.
HB: Did you, did you manage to keep in touch with your crew after the war?
JDB: Now, that is a very very, what’s the word I want? I don’t know? A funny question because we didn’t.
HB: Right.
JDB: For a, for a long time, no. George, George the skipper he died quite young. He got a DFC by the way, he did.
HB: Did he? Right. Yeah.
JDB: When he’d finished a tour of ops a captain gets a DFC.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And apparently, I didn’t meet him but George died quite young. He was a rugby player rugby league. Played at Wakefield. And he died. I kept in touch with my navigator for quite a number of years. He, ‘cause he emigrated to Canada and he worked in a hospital in Ottawa.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: And I did meet up with him. He used to come over to the UK every year and I did used to meet with him and we used to have squadron reunions up at Hull and I met up with. I’ve got some photographs actually.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: About, how many of us were there? There was myself, Wally, Wally Williams we located and he was my, the flight engineer. He had a bloody hip replacement operation and it killed him.
HB: Oh dear.
JDB: Ron died a few years ago in Ottawa. The mystery is I’ve never, I’ve not been able to find any trace by any means of the gunners. The two gunners. And quite recently I’ve come to a conclusion that it’s possible because during our tour they, I know that Paddy missed a couple of flights with us and we had to take a spare bod and I think it might have applied to both of them. Now if it did when we finished our tour of operations they would have to stay there on the squadron and finish their thirty operations.
HB: Oh right. Yes.
JDB: Spare bodding with somebody else.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And it may be that they did that and were lost.
HB: Right.
JDB: I don’t, I really don’t know and it’s, I’ve tried all manner of ways of trying to find them and I can’t.
HB: You know, I mean there are one or two bits and bobs now on the internet. We can, we can perhaps have a little look into but well that’s, I thank you for that Derek. Yeah.
JDB: Oh and you know and otherwise, oh Wally Williams we found late on and then he had this hip replacement and died and then his wife lived in Chichester and I’ve not heard from them for a few years so I think she must have passed away as well.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Who else was there?
HB: You got -
JDB: Oh Gus I think is still alive. Up in Ripon I think.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. That’s the one you just sent the card to.
JDB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: What was his name? Wilf?
JDB: Leigh. Wilf Leigh.
HB: Wilf Leigh. Yeah.
JDB: L E I G H.
HB: Right. Wow. That’s made. What, what I want to do Derek is I’m going to finish the actual interview now.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: But obviously there’s some other bits and bobs and I’d like if possible to come back.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: In the future to speak to you again.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And we’ll record that and we’re just going to have a look through your bag of goodies today. So it’s now twenty to five. It’s, we’re fortunately we’re still on the 7th of December 2016. We haven’t gone around the clock so I’m just going to terminate the interview at this, at this time and then there will obviously be a phase two.
JDB: Yeah. Ok
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 John Derek "Bill" Bailey. One
Creator
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Harry Bartlett
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
2016-12-07
Format
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01:57:37 audio recording
Identifier
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ABaileyJD161207
PBaileyJD1607
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Type
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Sound
Description
An account of the resource
John Derek ‘Bill’ Bailey volunteered for the Air Force when he was 18 and trained as a bomb aimer in Canada. When he arrived he caught scarlet fever and spent five weeks in an isolation hospital. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 103 and 166 Squadrons from RAF Elsham Wolds and RAF Kirmington.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
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
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
103 Squadron
166 Squadron
83 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
Bolingbroke
bomb aimer
bombing
Bombing and Gunnery School
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
crash
crewing up
H2S
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lysander
Master Bomber
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Hemswell
RAF Kirmington
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Sandtoft
RAF Swinderby
RAF Torquay
Tiger force
training
V-1
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/201/3336/PBaileyJD1607.1.jpg
d2e2e272e830d018ca52ba02b0e5dcc4
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/201/3336/ABaileyJD170113.2.mp3
9586bf522a95037287e44517f779c934
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
Bailey, John Derek
John Derek Bailey
Bill Bailey
John D Bailey
John Bailey
J D Bailey
J Bailey
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. Two oral history interviews with John Derek "Bill" Bailey (b. 1924, 1583184 and 198592 Royal Air Force) service material, nine photographs, a memoir and his log book. He flew a tour of operations as a bomb aimer with 103 and 166 Squadrons from RAF Elsham Wolds and RAF Kirmington.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by John Bailey 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
2016-12-07
2017-01-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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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Bailey, JD
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is a further recording with Derek Bailey who was a bomb aimer with 166 squadron. It’s Friday the 13th of January 2017. Interview taking place in Blenheim Close, Hinckley. During the course of it there may be some sounds in the background as I’m in the process of copying a number of documents from Derek but we’re just talking about the fact that Derek was only twenty years old when he first signed up. That’s right isn’t it Derek?
JDB: No. Eighteen when I first signed up.
HB: Yeah. And that was, that was when you went to, where did you go to sign up?
JDB: Leicester.
HB: You went to Leicester.
JDB: On my eighteenth birthday I got on my bike and went down to Leicester to Ulverscroft Road and signed up.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Went home and told my mother and she burst in to tears.
HB: Oh that’s right. Yes. Yeah. ‘Cause where we finished, where we finished the interview last time we’d just got to sort of the end of the war and we talked a little bit about the guy coming and asking you if you would go and join his crew.
JDB: That’s right.
HB: And we never got on to, never got quite into that. That was, that was something to do with the Far East wasn’t it Derek?
JDB: Yes it was.
HB: Right.
JDB: We got, do you want me to go into it?
HB: Yeah, please. Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Well, the guy who came. At the time I was a bombing instructor up at Lossiemouth and one of the flight commanders came into our office and said, ‘I’m going back on ops. I need a bomb aimer. Who’s coming?’
HB: Right.
JDB: And so I volunteered myself and I joined his crew.
HB: What aircraft was, was that in?
JDB: Sorry?
HB: What aircraft was that in, Derek?
JDB: It was Lancasters.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: But at Lossiemouth -
HB: Yeah.
JDB: We were flying Wellingtons.
HB: Right.
JDB: Being an OTU and we, he came and enlisted me into his crew and then we got posted down to Swinderby to join Tiger, Tiger Force. The reason we went to Swinderby was that it was a conversion unit, a Heavy Conversion Unit and my new skipper had to do a conversion because he’d done his first tour on Halifaxes and needed to convert to Lancs.
HB: Right.
JDB: So that’s where we were and we got to Swinderby, we did the course and were in Tiger Force and then the war ended.
HB: So, so what was Swinderby like?
JDB: What was it –
HB: At that time of the war.
JDB: Well it was a Heavy Conversion Unit with Lancasters and it was just like any other Heavy Conversion Unit where people from OTU went to Heavy Conversion Unit and converted from Wellingtons to Lancasters.
HB: Yeah. How long had you been, just going back a little bit because you obviously finished your operational tour with -
JDB: 166.
HB: 166 and from there, I presume you had a bit of leave, that’s when you went to, after you’d finished your operational tour -
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Where did you go then?
JDB: Lossiemouth.
HB: And that so it was straight to Lossiemouth to the OTU.
JDB: Yeah. That’s right.
HB: And what were you doing at the OTU?
JDB: I was an instructor.
HB: Right.
JDB: A bombing instructor.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: I did several courses. I was an expert on the mark, oh Christ, where are we going now, saying I remember things. Mark 14 bomb sight and what other course did I do? I did the Mark 14 bomb sight, I did the actual bombing instructor’s course and there was something else which I can’t remember at the moment.
HB: Was it, would you have done, would you have done any special training to go, before that, to go to the HCU?
JDB: No. No. Not, for Swinderby you mean?
HB: Yeah.
JDB: No. No. That was just out of the blue.
HB: So you were, you were instructing at the OTU at Lossiemouth.
JDB: That’s right.
HB: Who was, who was the chap that came and asked you? Can you remember his name?
JDB: Yes. His name was, oh Christ, his name’s in my logbook actually.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: If you look in my logbook under Swinderby when you get to there and his name will be there. He took a duck in in seniority. He actually went from squadron leader back to flight lieutenant to take off his -
HB: Right.
JDB: The course at Swinderby.
HB: Was that Johnson?
JDB: Johnson. That’s it.
HB: Flight Lieutenant Johnson.
JDB: That’s him.
HB: Right. Yeah. Got him. Yeah. And it’s, and you’re shown all the way through to ‘45 your duty is air bomber.
JDB: That’s right.
HB: Yeah. Yeah so was it, what was, what was he? Was he a bit a character was he?
JDB: Who?
HB: Johnson.
JDB: Well, no not really. He’s just, just another Lanc pilot.
HB: Yeah. No. I just wondered how, sort of out of the blue he’d come.
JDB: Well, he -
HB: You know.
JDB: We’d got quite a few bomb aimers up at Lossiemouth and he got about, I don’t know, five or six to choose from.
HB: Yeah. I just wondered how he’d, he’d obviously, he’d obviously put his name up to go on Tiger Force.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And it’s just it’s always intrigued me this business of how they got crews together. You sort of get the impression he suddenly thinks right I’ll go to Tiger Force and, oh I need a crew.
JDB: Yeah. That’s right.
HB: I’ll go and have a walk around and get a crew.
JDB: Yeah. Well he did.
HB: That’s pretty well what happened.
JDB: That’s exactly what he did. That’s what he did. He went around each section.
HB: Right.
JDB: The navigation section and sorted himself out a navigator, he sorted me out as a bomb aimer.
HB: Right.
JDB: Now. Oh I know, yes he got the gunners there and the wireless op. They were all sorted out up there and then we had to wait till we got to Swinderby before he got a flight engineer.
HB: Right.
JDB: And then, the input flight engineer we got, would you believe was a youngish, in fact he was a bloke I knew, I went to school with.
HB: Never.
JDB: He was recruited as our flight engineer and he was a pilot.
HB: Right.
JDB: Yeah because they were now getting a surplus of pilots you see and so this guy, I can’t remember his name but he was recruited as our flight engineer and he was, like I say he was a, he was a trained pilot.
HB: And you’d been to school with him.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Where would that, which school would that have been?
JDB: South Wigston Intermediate.
HB: Wow.
JDB: I can’t remember his bloody name.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: He was in the ATC with me at Wigston.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah ‘cause that’s right because yeah I remember you telling me now. You joined the ATC.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. And then when it, when it came the chance to, to join up, yeah. So you’ve all got together at, or the majority are together. You got to Swinderby. You’ve got a flight engineer. So, was there, like special training for Tiger Force at that point? I mean what was -
JDB: Yeah. Well the only bit of special training that I remember was, for Tiger Force, was that we were using a different navigational radar system. Instead of Gee which we used -
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Over Europe we were using, I think it was Lucan? Locan? No. It was a long range Gee if you like.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Radar system and that was the only bit of training we got. We needed that to get to the bloody Far East in the first place.
HB: Yeah. So, so, where, where would you, where would you have been based had you actually got out with Tiger Force. Where would you gone to?
JDB: We were going to Okinawa.
HB: Oh right. Right. Yeah. Because obviously the Yanks had -
JDB: Well the Yanks were making Okinawa base ready for us
HB: Right.
JDB: And that’s where we were going.
HB: Right. It makes, it makes sense to do that. Yeah. And how, so how far did you get into that training before you were all stood down then?
JDB: Well we finished our course and then coincidentally the war ended as we were about to be posted to a squadron.
HB: Oh right. So oh of course you’re still on an HCU aren’t you?
JDB: Yes. Yeah.
HB: Yeah. So when you finished with 166.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Went to Lossiemouth. Instructor. But you were instructing on Wellingtons.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Did you not have to do any sort of conversion back for that? To go back on Wellingtons?
JDB: Well I did, I did a specialist course as an instructor you know because what we used to do as an instructor apart from delivering the odd lecture was to fly as a screened, a screened bomb aimer, fly with them to check that they were going through the procedures correctly and doing what they should be doing and they were all Free Frenchmen. We were training Free Frenchmen up at Lossiemouth.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Oh right. ‘Cause, ‘cause there weren’t that many French bomber squadrons were there?
JDB: No. Well they were in 4 Group.
HB: Yeah. I think the French, one of the French squadrons I know about was based at Elvington.
JDB: That’s right
HB: Yeah.
JDB: They were. They were. Have you been to Elvington?
HB: I have.
JDB: Yes.
HB: I have. Very interesting.
JDB: Interesting isn’t it?
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: That’s, so, right. So the Free French came to you for the training and then you get hijacked for Tiger Force and then as you say the war ends.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: So how did, what was the process of you dispersing then back -
JDB: Well -
HB: From that?
JDB: Well, before I left Lossiemouth, before I actually left there to go to Swinderby we started flying the Wimps down to Hawarden which is near Chester.
HB: The Wimps being?
JDB: Wellingtons.
HB: The Wellingtons. Yeah.
JDB: Yeah. And we, we took three down and brought one back with other crews in. Well not the entire crews.
HB: Right.
JDB: And so we ferried the aircraft. They were, I must say they were all disbursed with almost, almost undue haste.
HB: Right.
JDB: Really.
HB: Oh right. ‘Cause, yeah, so you, you flew out and flew these lot back.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Did you, did you ever do any of these Cook’s Tours?
JDB: No. I didn’t. No. Of course I wasn’t on a squadron then you see.
HB: Oh so. Right. I thought it was just something that happened, you know.
JDB: No. The squadron aircraft did the Cook’s Tours.
HB: Right.
JDB: Lancs. I don’t think they used any Wimps or anything.
HB: Yeah. ‘Cause I did speak to a guy who he was ground crew with Halifaxes and he did a Cook’s Tour in a Halifax.
JDB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: All down around the Ruhr and -
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Around there. Oh right. So where did you actually, where were you stationed when you were actually demobbed then Derek?
JDB: When I was what?
HB: When you were demobbed. When you were, when you were -
JDB: When I, ah, I was stationed at Headquarters Tech Training Command.
HB: Oh right. Oh right. And what, and what rank did you have then?
JDB: Flight lieutenant.
HB: You were flight lieutenant then. Right. Right. And where was that at? Where was that based?
JDB: Brampton.
HB: At Brampton.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Right. Interesting. So the demob comes -
JDB: Yeah, well the demob. What happened was we were posted from, oh it was a ring around but we were posted from Swinderby. Went to, where did we go? Blyton I think. And they said, ‘What do you want to do?’ Well on the list of what do you want to do was Bomb Disposal Western Europe and that was getting rid of stocks of bombs so I thought well that, that suits my trade. I’ll put myself down for that and I did and I found myself sent to, I found myself being designated an equipment officer and I was sent to Bicester to do the course.
HB: Oh right. So yeah. Right. I suppose yeah so you’re going to go, you’re going to go to Europe.
JDB: No. I didn’t.
HB: Or wherever to get rid of bomb stores.
JDB: Oh yeah. I think they were dumped at sea.
HB: Yeah. But you never actually got to do it.
JDB: No.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: No. Well that’s sod’s law isn’t it? You know.
HB: Always the way.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Always the way. Yeah. So, so that doesn’t happen.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And you’re going to leave the RAF. What, what –
JDB: Well no. No. I’m not going to leave the RAF.
HB: Right.
JDB: What I’d done I had actually signed on for six months past my demob date. My number.
HB: Right.
JDB: And in the meantime I’d applied for an extended service commission with a view to staying in the Royal Air Force.
HB: Right.
JDB: But in fact I didn’t hear anything and I was talking to the peace staff guys at command headquarters and they were saying, ‘Well you know we can’t rush things. We must, you know.’ I said, ‘Well I’ve got to make my mind up. I have got to make my mind up whether to leave the service or there won’t be a job for me where I, where I had a job before the war,’ sort of thing and and the day came when I had, I had to make a decision because my employer or potential employer had said, ‘Well look Derek if you’re going to sign on for any more time in the service we can’t keep your job for you.’ You know. ‘You, either you come back now or you don’t come back,’ and so I had, for various reasons, I decided that I would leave the, leave the air force. Which I did.
HB: Yeah. And how did you feel about doing that? Was that -?
JDB: Well I tried to go back again.
HB: Did you?
JDB: Yeah.
HB: When was that?
JDB: And I failed. Shortly afterwards. Not too long afterwards. I applied, I applied to start again sort of thing and I went for an interview to London to to air ministry as it then was and one of the questions the guy asked me was, ‘Well you’ve applied for a commission as an equipment officer.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well, why?’ I said, ‘Well because you don’t want any more bomb aimers now and I would have liked to have been a pilot but right in the early days I was told I couldn’t be a pilot for an eyesight defect.’
HB: Right.
JDB: And so this guy persisted and said, ‘Well, why didn’t you apply when you re-applied? Why didn’t you apply again for a pilot?’ I said, ‘Because I thought it was a waste of time.’ Anyway I didn’t get it so -
HB: Oh right.
JDB: And by then, by then I’d come to the conclusion that I’d be better where I was anyway so that was the end of that.
HB: So we’re back to Civvy Street and -
JDB: Back to Civvy Street.
HB: And if I remember rightly you were working in the transport industry -
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Weren’t you?
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. So what was that like?
JDB: Well, it was, it was right in the middle of nationalisation.
HB: Right.
JDB: The company was being nationalised and blah blah blah and you know, eventually I ended up with a private company. I applied for and got a job with them and within about six months I was made a director of that company and that’s what I did for my entire working life then. I was a company director in road transport and, until I retired.
HB: Yeah. When did you actually retire Derek, from that?
JDB: When did I?
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Oh I was in my seventies.
HB: Blimey.
JDB: I’d already taken my pension. I was taking the pension and I was still working.
HB: Right. Right. So you’ve gone back to the transport industry but you do come back to the, was it, it was the ATC wasn’t it you came back to?
JDB: The what?
HB: The ATC.
JDB: No. Oh yeah. Do you mean as far as the uniform is concerned?
HB: Yeah because -
JDB: Yeah.
HB: At some stage you went back in to –
JDB: Yes I did. Yeah. After. It was a few years afterwards. There was a gap and a bloke came to me and said, ‘I’m with 1F founder squadron of the ATC in Leicester.’ It was a bloke I knew.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And he said, ‘I need someone to teach our air cadets air navigation. How are you fixed?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. Tell me more.’ Anyway, to cut a long story short I said ‘Ok I’d give it a go,’ so I did and I went to 1F and then a little while later I went to see a bloke on business and I was wearing an ATC tie and this guy said to me, Des Starbuck his name and he said to me, ‘Are you in the ATC?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well I run the Coalville squadron and I’m desperately short of adults. How, do you feel like helping me out?’ So, so I, I sort of said, ‘Well I wouldn’t mind.’ And so the CO of 1F, he wasn’t very chuffed when I told him I wanted to leave his squadron but Coalville suited me better.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Anyway I, so I went to Coalville and when I’d been there a few weeks old Des Starbuck said to me, he said, ‘Hey look, Derek, come on,’ he said, ‘You might as well get back into uniform and do the job properly.’ And I said, ‘Well alright. I’ll give it a go.’ So I did.
HB: Right.
JDB: And as I’d been commissioned before it was a very quick process. All a matter of filling a form in really.
HB: Oh right. Right. Yeah.
JDB: So -
HB: So, what year, what year, what year would this be Derek?
JDB: Well, it would be, I retired when I was fifty six and I did twenty years so it was nineteen, no, fifty six, and fifty do a bit of working out here.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: I retired when I was fifty six.
HB: Right.
JDB: So that means, and I was born, born in ’24.
HB: Yeah. So that’s 1980. Yeah.
JDB: I’ve lost myself.
HB: 1924. Plus -
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Plus fifty six.
JDB: Yeah. Well that’s when I retired.
HB: In 1980.
JDB: 1980. That’s when I retired.
HB: Right.
JDB: Twenty years I served so it was 1960.
HB: About 1960.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: All through the interesting years then.
JDB: Yes.
HB: All the youngsters with nothing to do and wanting to do things.
JDB: Yeah. That’s it.
HB: Brilliant. Right. And now, and were you able to bring your wartime experiences to the ATC?
JDB: Oh yeah. To some extent. The experience of the Royal Air Force was, was very helpful.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: So I was teaching them. I was teaching them air navigation because that was a subject for the ATC and some various other ones as well. I’ve got one of the textbooks still.
HB: Yeah. Did you actually fly with the ATC?
JDB: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah. What sort of flying did they do?
JDB: Chipmunks.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Gliding and if you went to an RAF base for camp probably get a flight in whatever aircraft they were operating at the time.
HB: Oh right. Right.
JDB: I had, I had trips to Malta, Germany and I took the first ATC camp to Cyprus. I was camp commandant.
HB: Oh right. When would that be Derek do you think?
JDB: It was Cyprus.
HB: Yeah. That would still be in the 60s.
JDB: I can’t remember exactly now. It, I must have some record somewhere. What happened was we used to have annual summer camps for selected cadets in Malta.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And then when we withdrew from Malta we weren’t able to have the summer camps there and so they decided they’d try Cyprus but it was bit of a problem because of the cost.
HB: Right.
JDB: But anyway we did Cyprus and as I say I took the first camp there and it was very good, very successful and it’s a plum, I don’t know whether they’re still using it at the moment because of the, there must be a lot of actual operational flying going on from there at the present time with the conflicts in the Middle East.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: So -
HB: Yeah.
JDB: I don’t know.
HB: I just, one of the things that I thought of after we spoke last time Derek, because, because of the way you trained.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: And we went through quite a few of the operations that you flew on but I don’t think we actually talked about when you were flying operations.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: What a, what a sort of a typical, your job typically running up to and then going on the operation. I mean you’d obviously get called for briefing.
JDB: Yes.
HB: So having been called for or given a time for briefing what would your job do then until such time as you took off on an op? What would, what would you actually be doing?
JDB: Well the first thing to do, you’d go to the mess and have a meal.
HB: Oh right [laughs] yeah. Don’t forget to -
JDB: And then we go down to the flight, down to the briefing room at the prescribed time and go through the briefing.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Until time to go out to the aircraft and then carry on from there.
HB: So what would your relationship be with the armourers?
JDB: Well I’d see the armourers earlier in the day.
HB: Right.
JDB: I used to go and see how many, how many bombs we’d got on board and how much petrol. Then I could guess where we were going. [laughs]
HB: Oh right. Right.
JDB: Roughly. If you’ve got a full load of juice.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And a minimum load of bombs we’d be going on a short range one.
HB: Right.
JDB: And conversely of course. And then we would sometimes sit out on the, on the dispersal in a little shed they’d got there and having a chat with the armourers while waiting for take-off time.
HB: Did you, was part of your job actually checking the bomb load and checking the actual bombs?
JDB: No. It wasn’t. Nothing. Just checking they were on board. They were on. What was said were on. That’s all really.
HB: So how would you do that? Would you actually go to the bomb bay?
JDB: Just count them. Have a look.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: I mean sometimes the bomb bay was full and sometimes it wasn’t.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: The only, the only exception to the general run of things was when we were doing a bit of mine laying.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And then they would put the mines on board. The naval petty officer was in charge of that and they’d load the mines on to the aircraft. Usually six of them. Six two thousand pounders. And then they would close the bomb doors and they were on for, until release where they were meant to be.
HB: Right.
JDB: They were never taken off and taken back to the bomb dump. Bloody things were magnetic and acoustic mines.
HB: Oh right. So how, how, I mean I suppose obviously there’s safety measures within the aircraft.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Particularly if they’re magnetic so once, once, once you’ve got them on the aircraft and you’re ready to take off you just, your job then is just to –
JDB: Drop them where they’ve got to be dropped.
HB: Drop them where they’ve got to be dropped.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: So you know, there’s no, you don’t go back during the flight and check everything and all of that.
JDB: Oh no. No. No.
HB: No. So –
JDB: I can’t get at them.
HB: No. No. So when you’ve taken off. You’re flying across to the target. Just can you just explain to me, say you’re about a mile, two miles out from the target and you’re going to start lining up for your bomb run. What, what’s the process then that you’re going through?
JDB: Well, when we’re approaching the target you would, the navigator had control and then when we were sort of whatever distance we decided we were away from the target he’d hand over to me and I’d be down the nose and start a visual, you’d have to have visual approach. We start the approach up in the cabin, on the H2S which is a radar system.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: It’s a ground mapping radar.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And I would get, we’d locate, locate the point on the coast or whatever datum we were given and we would have to do an approach on that point and when we were directly overhead that started the countdown and from there I would be telling the pilot to steer a certain course from that point and I would have the bomb doors open and then we’d, after the sort of ten minutes or whatever time we’d got we’d, I would say after ten minutes, ‘Change course onto -’ whatever it was, if he needed to change course that was. Change course and start counting again to the, how many seconds and then I would release the weapon.
HB: Right. Right.
JDB: Or weapons. As the case -
HB: Yeah.
JDB: May be.
HB: Right. And that’s, don’t forget your tea Derek.
JDB: Oh I hadn’t forgotten it. Thank you.
SB (Wife of John): I’ll just make a cold drink.
HB: So, right, so you and this all the, all the systems obviously when you’re on the bomb run coming in.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Are you physically, are you physically controlling the aircraft or are you telling the pilot what to do?
JDB: Telling the pilot.
HB: Right. So at no time do you actually take over control of the aircraft for the actual bombing.
JDB: No. No. I could do. I could have done if needed to but generally speaking if I was going to do the drop on radar and not visually then I would probably control the aircraft then.
HB: Right. Right. And you’d, had you got sort of electronic controls in your position?
JDB: Well some aircraft did and some didn’t because there weren’t, everybody didn’t drop mines, didn’t do mine laying. So, yeah, usually I would tell the pilot when to, when to do turns and whatever. That’s all.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: The actual release of the weapons I would have control of at all times.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Oh that’s, yeah, sorry. I just, I thought after the last interview I suddenly thought we’d talked about various bits and bobs.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: But we never actually went through the process of -
JDB: Yeah.
HB: How, how you actually did your job. So you’ve pushed the button or flipped the switch or whatever and the bombs have gone.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: What’s your job then on on the flight home?
JDB: On the flight home. Well, close the bomb doors and secure the aircraft and that’s it. That’s me done unless I need to use the H2s for navigational purposes.
HB: Right. So, what would be that, that would be an assistance to the navigator.
JDB: Yeah. That’s right, yeah, give him bearings or whatever.
HB: Right. Right. And then it’s home for tea and another meal.
JDB: Yes. That’s right.
HB: Right.
JDB: Egg, bacon and chips.
HB: The staple diet.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Brilliant. Brilliant. Right. Well I think probably that’s covered the bits I wanted to try and cover Derek.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: If that’s alright with you.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: What, I think when we spoke last time you said you’d have a bit of a think about it for me. Sort of things, things where you got a bit of a fright or something that was really really silly that happened.
JDB: I told you about, about [Abbeyville] didn’t I? When we bombed the flying bomb site. The second operation with 103 squadron.
HB: I can’t remember that one, I don’t think.
JDB: Well, we, our first operation, very first was against Stettin up on the Baltic. Nine and a half hours airborne in a Lanc which is not funny.
HB: No. No.
JDB: And anyway that’s the first operation but we, but as far as attacking defences was concerned it was a doddle you know. Nothing to it really. Anyway, second operation we go in for briefing and it’s a flying bomb sight and it’s only just in France which is obvious for a flying bomb site to be. It’s the right place. And it wasn’t far and we thought, oh this is a piece of cake. Anyway, we get briefed and I think, I’m guessing now Harry but I think we were briefed to bomb at something like six thousand feet which is pretty low.
HB: Oh yeah.
JDB: And we went over, we got over there and we were over, nearly over the target area and there was ten tenths cloud so it was a question of well we can’t see the bloody ground let alone the target and then we get the master bomber on the blower saying, ‘Main force. Ground not visible. Descend to three thousand feet.’
HB: Oh.
JDB: ‘Descend to three thousand feet. No opposition.’ And that were his very words and do you know who that was?
HB: Go on.
JDB: Then wing commander. Later a group captain, VC man.
HB: Oh is this the Leonard Cheshire?
JDB: Yeah. Cheshire.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Leonard Cheshire, who was the master bomber.
HB: Ah
JDB: Amazing isn’t it?
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Anyway, there we were. Anyway, we said ok and we broke cloud and as luck would have it well it wasn’t luck it was a bit of skill in fact we broke cloud heading straight for the target and suddenly bang bang bang and I was looking out of the front at the time and two shells burst right in front of us and so so we were on the bombing run then.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: So I pressed, I pressed the tit and nothing happened so we peeled away and I I told skip, ‘Nothing’s happened. I’m going to change the fuse.’ So he did an orbit left and I changed the fuse, nothing happened again so we decided to bugger off and then suddenly the rear gunner says, ‘We’re on fire skip,’ he said. Looked out the back and said, ‘We’re not on bloody fire at all. That’s something else.’ And anyway we got away and it transpired that what he’d thought we were on fire and smoke was pouring backwards was vaporising bloody hydraulic oil.
HB: Oh right.
JDB: Yeah so from that point on we’d got no hydraulics. The bomb doors were open and we had no hydraulics. Anyway, we climbed away and started heading back for the, back to the North Sea and we flew into cloud of cunim and we lost, the skip lost his, lost some of his instruments. He had no altimeter.
[phone starts ringing]
HB: That’s alright
JDB: Alright.
HB: That’s alright. I’ll just pause.
JDB: Alright.
HB: I’ll just pause. I’ll pause it while.
[machine paused]
HB: Right. Just recommencing after that.
JDB: Doing that.
HB: Yeah. So, so is this the one where you came through the cloud to Wolds?
JDB: Through the cloud?
HB: To, was it to the Wolds.
JDB: Yeah. We came. No. No. No. No.
HB: That was a different one wasn’t it?
JDB: No. No.
HB: So you’ve -
JDB: We went into this cloud and skip said, skipper said, ‘Christ I don’t know whether we’re inside out or upside down or what,’ you know. ‘Prepare to abandon’. That was the only time I heard that said during my career. ‘Get your parachutes on and prepare to abandon.’ So we carried on and we came out of the cloud and de-iced and the instruments reappeared and we were all right so we ploughed on up the North Sea to the dropping zone and there I got the wireless op to help me and we, I had two pieces of wire about eighteen inches, two foot long with a hook on the end to trip the release mechanisms and drop the bombs manually. Which we did. Dropped them all in the bloody sea and got back late and then it’s a question of well we’ve got no hydraulics. What about the undercart? Well you can actually blow the undercart down with compressed air but you can only do it once and you can’t get them back up again.
HB: Oh no.
JDB: So we blew the wheels down and we’d got no brakes of course so we, we did a circuit, landed and rolled and couldn’t stop, you know and just rolled just to the end of the runway and then got it away and it was full of bloody holes the thing was.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: But that was that. A bit of a come back to earth lads.
HB: Yeah and was anybody hurt on that?
JDB: Sorry?
HB: Was anybody of the crew injured on that?
JDB: No. Would you believe? No. Nobody. The shell must have been just below the shrapnel to knock out wiring and pipes and things and leave the vitals intact.
HB: Blimey.
JDB: So it was quite a, quite a thing.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: But we didn’t have any other major scares.
HB: So basically, so basically, Leonard Cheshire brought you down and you got bracketed pretty well straight away.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Right. I bet you didn’t buy him a drink in the bar.
JDB: He wasn’t on our bloody squadron.
HB: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: Yeah. Well I suppose he’d flown, he’d flown over the target and those German gunners were not stupid. They didn’t shoot at one aeroplane. They just waited till they got several of us there.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: And, you know.
HB: What, what was, I mean it’s something that we always ask and I didn’t really go in, much into it in the last interview.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: What, when you were actually on the squadron, you were on 103 and then predominantly you were with 166.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: What, what was your social life like? What, how, what did you do for a social life?
JDB: Well when we first went to the squadron it was just after, not long after D-Day and we were confined to camp. We weren’t allowed off camp for a while because of short notice calls.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: And then after that we used to get, you were allowed off, you had [limited bus], let you go into Scunthorpe for the night or whatever and that was about it but the main social life was around the village pub.
HB: Right.
JDB: Which is still there. The Marrowbone and Cleaver.
HB: Oh yeah.
JDB: The Chopper.
HB: Yeah. I think you mentioned that last time.
JDB: Yeah. I did.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: Did you ever have any socialising on the actual airfield or was that just not allowed?
JDB: Sorry not with you.
HB: Did you have any sort of like dances or anything like that on the airfield itself.
JDB: Oh they had occasional things like that in the, in the WAAF mess once in a while yeah but generally speaking there wasn’t much social life. Mind I had my problem with my, my face as well didn’t I? I think I told you about that. No?
HB: Oh was this when, did you have, you had like a rash or something didn’t you?
JDB: Yeah. That’s right
HB: Yes.
JDB: Yeah
HB: You did. Yeah we went, we covered that in our first interview.
JDB: I think I told you about that. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
JDB: Oxygen mask dermatitis.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah.
JDB: It -
HB: A bit of a risk that one.
JDB: Yeah.
HB: But right, right. [coughs] Excuse me. Well, I’ll tell you what Derek I think we’ll just finish it there ‘cause it’s what time is it? Nearly 12 o’clock.
JDB: Don’t worry about it.
HB: I’ll just -
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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ABaileyJD170113
PBaileyJD1607
Title
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Interview with John Derek "Bill" Bailey. Two
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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00:49:33 audio recording
Creator
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Harry Bartlett
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-01-13
Description
An account of the resource
Part two of the interview with Derek Bailey, a bomb aimer with 103 and 166 Squadrons.
Towards the end of the war, Derek did various bomber instructor courses and became a bombing instructor at RAF Lossiemouth on Wellingtons for Free French aircrew in 4 Group. He was an expert on the Mark XIV bombsights. He would deliver some lectures and fly as a screened bomb aimer to check they were following the correct procedures.
On the invitation from a flight commander, Derek volunteered to join Tiger Force at RAF Swinderby, a Heavy Conversion Unit onto Lancasters. They trained on a different navigational radar system, Loran, to get to Okinawa in the Far East. However, war then ended.
Derek was posted to RAF Blyton where he was designated as an equipment officer for bomb disposal in western Europe. He went on a course at RAF Bicester. Derek was demobilised when stationed at Technical Training Command headquarters at RAF Brampton. He had wanted to stay on in the RAF but did not want to lose his job with his employer.
Derek describes a typical day on operations and his role as bomb aimer, as well as a difficult operation to Abbeville in which Leonard Cheshire was the master bomber.
After the war, Derek was a company director in road transport and was very much involved with the Air Training Corps.
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
Oxfordshire
Scotland--Moray
France
France--Abbeville
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Sally Coulter
103 Squadron
166 Squadron
aircrew
bomb aimer
bomb disposal
bombing
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
H2S
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Master Bomber
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bicester
RAF Blyton
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Kirmington
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Swinderby
Tiger force
training
V-1
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/983/10255/PShipmanJ1802.1.jpg
402fd5eda76ea65c8120e45c6e9d4f82
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/983/10255/AShipmanJ181010.2.mp3
49a1d1a3464d7f42257b53fde785f7f2
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
Shipman, John
J Shipman
Description
An account of the resource
43 items. An oral history interview with John Shipman (1923 - 2020, 1694683 Royal Air Force) his diary, documents and a photograph album. He served as ground personnel in India and the Middle east
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by John Shipman and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-10-10
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
Shipman, J
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: It’s the 10th October 2018. This is an interview with Mr John Shipman who was in Transport Command and served in India. It’s being recorded in the village of Croxton Kerrial in, which is still in Leicestershire.
Other: Just.
HB: Ish. John, thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed.
JS: Pleasure.
HB: Now, when were you born, John?
JS: When? 26 12 ’23
HB: Right. And where were you born?
JS: Stathern.
HB: Stathern. Right. And what, what did you, what school did you go to? What schooling did you get?
JS: Stathern School until I was eleven and then the Modern School for Boys in Melton until I was nearly fifteen, I think.
HB: Yeah. That’s in Melton Mowbray. Yeah. So, what, what were your sort of interests at the time, John?
JS: Well, not a lot of anything because in those days at my age we were looking forward to getting into the forces. We were going to be called up at eighteen. We knew that. So, what I did with a lad, a very big friend of mine out in the village we joined Melton ATC. 1279 Squadron. I think we’d be about the openers of that squadron in those days.
Other: Yeah.
JS: That took up a lot of our time, spare time because there was no transport. Only pushbikes. We had to bike from Stathern to Melton for various classes. Filing and engineering and all sorts of things like that. Parachute packing. Oh, no. Sorry we had to go and bike to Spitalgate Aerodrome for parachute packing.
HB: Spitalgate.
JS: And Morse Code. Yes. That’s near Grantham.
HB: Yeah.
JS: We had to bike there because there was no other transport so, this took up several days of the week and nights especially. And then we joined the ATC because we’d got a good chance then of getting into the RAF at the trade we selected.
HB: Right.
JS: So, it was up to the authorities whether you got it or not. But anyway we, I can’t [pause] I’ve got my medical thing. We got a medical at Leicester. After we’d turned eighteen we had to go to Leicester. Of course, the medicals in those days they just counted your arms and legs and they made you A1 [laughs]
HB: [laughs] Yeah.
JS: Waiting for the big call up. Well, I got my call up papers. I can’t think what day we had to go. I had to report to RAF Padgate which was the place where you got kitted out. That was near Warrington. So, of course, by train. In those days, there was a station at Stathern and we got on the train from there and got to Padgate and found, oh it was an awful place. Terrible for living. You had to get kitted out or you got your number, rank and name and everything there. You got kitted out with your uniform. They gave you brown paper and string to pack your civvies up, send home. And then from then on it was all queue for this, queue for that. We used to have to queue for our breakfast in a great big shed place and of course one or two of the lads were that hungry they were passing out.
HB: Blimey.
JS: And we got kitted out from there anyway. I can’t remember —
HB: What year was this, John?
JS: The nineteen [pause] 1942.
HB: Right. Right.
JS: August 1942.
HB: Yeah.
JS: And —
HB: So, you’d actually got people so hungry they were, they were —
JS: Oh, it were terrible.
HB: They were fainting.
JS: Yes. And it was everything there was [pause] everything. The kitting out was measuring and throwing things at you [laughs] Kit bags and two uniforms and, and everything like that.
HB: Yeah.
JS: They were all mess. Knife, fork and spoon and a mug and you got all this trailing behind you.
HB: Good grief. Yeah.
JS: Anyway, from there we got sent for square bashing to Blackpool. I can’t think how long we were there. That was, I know it was getting on towards the back end of the year because the winds at Blackpool was pretty terrible then. You couldn’t keep your hat on. But very much, there was a lot of bull at Blackpool. You’d got to keep your buttons absolutely shiny and that was wonderful in the sea air and you’d got to have creases in your trousers. So, what we used to do, we’d got no press we used to soak the inside and lay on them to get the creases in. But we were in like boarding houses there. Of course, they took Blackpool over in the war. It was an RAF station. We were in boarding houses there. About four to a bedroom and about three bedrooms was taken with the lads and there was one bathroom. And well, that was Blackpool life and I don’t, I can’t think how long we were there. Several months.
HB: Had they, had they decided what your trade was then or —
JS: Yes. Sorry. They decided our trade at Padgate.
HB: Right.
JS: I wanted engines and we got engines and I joined up with a lad from, from Padgate and I kept with him all the while I was in the Air Force. Al Staley he was. He lived at Burton on Trent. I kept with him all the way until we got back from India and then he got posted elsewhere. But anyway, after Blackpool we were going on technical training. We were sent, we were trained at technical training at RAF Locking near Weston Super Mare.
HB: Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah.
JS: And we did all the necessary technical work there. Engines and we were stripping engines. Engine runs and everything like that.
HB: So, all, all the engines that the RAF were using at the time.
JS: Yes. Well —
HB: You’d be learning about them.
JS: Well, the Rolls Royce. In those days we were trained on the Kestrel and the Pegasus in America were radials. Bristols they were, weren’t they? And then engine running and starting. Tiger Moths and hand starting, and Tiger Moths. Everything like that. Anyway, from there we decided, they decided from there we were going for a posting. We’d got to go overseas which was rather a shock at our age.
HB: Blimey. Yeah.
JS: So —
HB: So how, how long did your trade training take do you think, John.
JS: I should think seven. Seven or eight months, I think.
HB: Right. And did, did you keep any of your notes?
JS: Oh yes. I’ve got them.
HB: Yeah.
JS: In that tin trunk in the—
HB: Yeah.
JS: In the shed [laughs] yeah, and various training books and things like that. They’re all in there somewhere. I forgot about that. Anyway, we, they decided we were going to be posted overseas which was rather a shock. So, the first leave we got was embarkation leave. I think we got a month.
HB: Right.
JS: Then of course in those days you’d no idea where you were going to be sent. So, went home and I think what happened then? I think we had a month embarkation leave at home.
HB: Who was at home, John?
JS: Well, I lived on a farm.
HB: Right. With?
JS: Mum and dad and brothers and sisters.
HB: Right. How many?
JS: I’d already got a brother in the Army.
HB: Right.
JS: And they extended, I’ll always remember they extended the embarkation leave for another month. I think they couldn’t make out what they were going to do with us. Anyway, we got, we had to report back to Locking.
HB: Yeah.
JS: Off leave. And then of course you’d no idea where you were going to go. We got sent back from there back to Blackpool because Blackpool was the, as I say was an RAF station in those days. A big posh hotel on the front was our station headquarters. And we were kitted out at Marks and Spencer’s in Blackpool for KDs. Tropical kit. That was the clothing store. And another kit bag. So we had two sets of, and a blooming great Bombay bowler.
HB: A Bombay bowler —
JS: [unclear]
HB: Oh.
JS: There and then we got a bit of an idea we were going somewhere hot. So I think we were there for, I can’t remember how long we were there. It must be in my book somewhere. So, then we got drafted from there to West Kirby near Liverpool. We had an idea then wherever we’d be going we would be sailing from Liverpool which we were. And we got moved from there, West Kirby to Liverpool to get on the boat and we got on the P&O liner troopship Otranto. And we, I think my berthing thing in there E4 deck. And that’s below the water line. We had a boat stations one morning. The first morning and squadron leader somebody, I don’t remember what his name was told us we were the nucleus, I’ll always remember it, the nucleus of a new force and where we were going it would take us seven weeks. That was a comforting thought, wasn’t it?
HB: So, this is 1943.
JS: Oh yeah.
HB: You’re in a boat and you still, you still don’t know where you’re going.
JS: No. Hadn’t a clue. Oh no. No. It was all top secret. You didn’t know anything then, did you? Anyway, we had to put up with it. I’ve got all my trips there. In there. But we, I think we were averaging about three hundred mile a day on this damned boat [pause] I thought we put down how many more. Anyway, we had, they used to have a, I was so seasick and I always remember when we were getting on the boat every twentieth person was handed a thing to say that you was mess deck orderly for the next twenty, nineteen people. I got one and couldn’t think of anyone better because I damned well couldn’t keep anything down because I was so seasick.
HB: Oh no.
JS: But I had to.
HB: Yeah.
JS: And I was responsible for anybody who wanted to go sick. Or cigarette ration, chocolate ration. Food. Sorting the food and everything. Of course, I got, I was only ever having ship’s biscuits because I were so sick.
HB: Oh dear.
JS: But anyway, that passed over and we used, we were issued with a hammock. Well, how the devil could we sleep in a hammock? I used to, we used to sleep on the deck every night. Take the hammock up and everybody was issued with a life thing like two cotton pads so you could use that as a pillow. Of course, we were getting very hot then and when we got into the tropical kit well it wasn’t too bad really.
HB: How many, how many were you on the boat? Can you remember?
JS: Pardon?
HB: How many people were on the boat?
JS: Oh, God. Thousands I should think. Army as well.
HB: Right. So it was a real big mixed.
JS: Oh yes it was.
HB: Yeah.
JS: You see we were only allowed on certain dates. Officers were allowed on the deck.
HB: So, what did you, how did you keep yourselves entertained for seven weeks?
JS: Well, I was saying we, I don’t know. We used to play cards on the deck, I think and there was no entertainment arranged or anything like that.
HB: No.
JS: I don’t know. There was no radio or anything. I don’t know what we did [laughs] There was nought to look at. Only sea.
HB: Yeah. But it improved a bit when you got to wear your tropical kit then.
JS: Well, they, when we got to South Africa we found out where, we anchored off Cape Town. Oh, I’ll tell you what we anchored off West Africa. The Gold Coast.
HB: Yeah.
JS: They called it White Man’s Grave then, didn’t they? We anchored off there. I think to take water on I don’t know but anyway we were there for about two days. My God it was hot. And it was the first sight of bananas we got there. Of course, there were no bananas here.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: And from there we sailed on to, we saw Cape Town. We stopped there for something. Of course, and then we went in to Durban and we found out we were getting off the boat in Durban to change boats. That wasn’t too bad. But in the meantime on the boat I got this great big abscess come up on the back of my neck so I got transferred straight in to hospital there. Springfield Military Hospital which was very good and I was very lucky [laughs] because the other lads were on the Clairwood Race Course which had been rapidly converted to a camp and there was not a bed or anything. They just lay on a blanket under this open shed. So they didn’t fare so well. The only thing that they got there was white bread and apricot jam. They reckoned that was marvellous [laughs] because old Alfie used to come and see me in hospital. He used to tell me all this you see. Anyway, I was in hospital for, I think I were there for about three weeks but while we was there people, the white population of Durban used to come and fetch us out. Take us out. So I did very well. I went, took me two or three times to the coast. Isipingo Beach and Manzanita Beach and Valley of a Thousand Hills. They took us everywhere. Mrs Anderson it was used to take us out and of course she had to take us back at night. And then we got drafted again. All good things came to an end. We got put on another boat. The P&O Strathnaver.
HB: Right.
JS: And I’ve got the berthing thing there but we weren’t quite so low deck on that one but of course we’d crossed, already crossed the Equator getting down to Cape Town. So, we still didn’t know where we were going. So we set sail again and we crossed the Equator again going up the other side of Africa and we finally arrived in Bombay.
HB: Seven weeks.
JS: Seven weeks later. When you think about it can you imagine what today if they told some of these youngsters they were going to be seven weeks on a damned boat? They’d have a fit, would they? But anyway, we were put in camp at Bombay. Worli. I always remember going through a Gateway to India at Bombay, isn’t there? A big arch. We went through there. We got motor of the transport to this transit camp at Worli and then we were there for a day or two. We still didn’t know the destination and from there we were put on a troop train and we were told it would take two and a half days on a damned troop train. Can you imagine it? I think all we lived on was boiled eggs because I think they used to boil them in the engine. And there was hardly any toilets or anything and imagine the heat. It was awful. About eight to a carriage. We had to sleep there with one place to wash. Anyway, we were towards the end of this terrible journey we crossed, oh, I don’t know. We could look out. Paddy fields and all this carry on in India. We finally arrived at Karachi. So we were told that this was our destination and we would be stationed at RAF Mauripur which was just a new station just outside Karachi. So we got on the, we used to call them garreys, didn’t they? The back of the garrey and delivered to RAF Mauripur in the middle of the, on the edge of the Sindh Desert. Passed through Karachi. The other side of Karachi.
HB: Yeah.
JS: Fortunately, we was only about three or four miles off the Arabian Sea. To the beach. So we weren’t too bad there. A bit of a [unclear] So we were billeted there. They were only building, only building this blooming place. The billets, we’d got no electricity. They give us these hurricane lamps and the old Indian bed. The charpoy we called it. We got to know all that. It was just a strange knotted thing and a, a mosquito net. Ten to a block. There was like double blocks. There were ten this side and ten this side. And then work started.
HB: So, during —
JS: I was an AC2 flight mechanic in those days.
HB: Yeah. During all of this travelling and getting there did you ever have any refresher training? Or —
JS: No.
HB: They just relied on the fact you’d been and trained. Been trained and that was it. You were going to remember it all.
JS: We got pat, there was one or two of the older lads there I’ll tell you because a lot of these lads that were there was one or two lads there had escaped from the Japs at Singapore. Do you remember that?
HB: Yeah.
JS: When the Japs, a lot of the lads had got out. Quite a few of the older lads had been out there before Singapore and places. So we got posted with a fitter. I was only a AC2 flight mech then. We got posted. We each had a fitter and we just did the jobs. Got all my details. I’ve got details of every aircraft.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: At that, in those days it was more fighter stuff coming in. We had Spitfires and Hurricanes and Beaufighters and Blenheims and —
HB: So how did they arrive John? Were they, were they being flown in on by —
JS: They’d be flown in.
HB: Ferry pilots.
JS: Yes. Flown through —
HB: So, where had they come from?
JS: Well, they’d come through, they’d come from the various airfields in the, in the through the Middle East which wasn’t at war. At Sharjah and Habbaniya and places like that. And then we had a satellite strip I think. What was the name of it? Jawami. They had to land there.
HB: So, had they all come from England?
JS: Yes.
HB: Had they actually flown from England?
JS: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: Or had they been, had they been on ships.
JS: Yeah. That’s what we were doing. We were doing minor inspections on them you see so they went through to the different squadrons in India. But quite a lot of Spitfires were assembled at another place near Drigh Road. They used to come in crates to there. They assembled there and then they came to us for putting into squadron use you see.
HB: So what, so what would, what would you got a new Spitfire or you got a Hurricane or whatever.
JS: Yeah.
HB: What would, what would you actually do? You’ve got it sort of come to you —
JS: Well, we had to make sure that everything was [pause] we had sort of an acceptance check.
HB: Right.
JS: And Mosquitoes we had as well. And gradually things got bigger. We got Dakotas and Liberators and oh, I don’t know. You’d not got Yorks in those days. Hellcats. A lot of American stuff as well. Hellcats, Corsairs, we were doing just, just doing well, a detailed inspection on whatever they wanted. I think every forty hours they had these minor inspections. Minor star inspections and things like that. We worked to a schedule.
HB: The —
JS: The fitter did so much and the flight mech did so much, you see.
HB: So how, how did you, I mean like the Hellcat or the —
JS: We’d no training.
HB: The Liberator, how did you actually learn about the engines?
JS: We didn’t. We didn’t. We just had to do it.
HB: So, it was —
JS: If there was a mag drop we had to change the plugs. I’ve got quite a set [unclear] I was saying there were no training on American. The Pratt and Whitley twin wasps on the Dakotas. We’d no training on them.
HB: So —
JS: We just did it.
HB: So, nobody actually said, ‘Right. Sit down. This is what this is.’
JS: Not a thing. No. We had to do it because we were a fitter and we had to do a fitting. No. No. There was nothing like that.
HB: Right.
JS: Gradually, after several, I don’t know about a year or so I had the chance to have a re-mustering board to, to become a fitter 2E from flight mech. Which would be quite a bit more money.
HB: Yeah. Important.
JS: I had to go down to this Drigh Road. The other side of town for that. I can’t, I always remember the bloke that took it with me. A Flight Lieutenant Schultz, his name was. Oh yes. We had to do all sorts of things. Draw oil systems, fuel systems, cooler systems. Answer no end of questions and gradually ok. I found, found out I’d become a fitter 2E.
HB: Right. So, the, so and that’s, and that was —
JS: More money that was.
HB: Yeah.
JS: We were only on two shillings a day you know.
HB: Oh right. Right. Well, yeah I suppose AC2. Yeah.
JS: Yeah.
HB: You would be.
JS: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
JS: I think the, of course we were on Rupees there. I think the average, I think the exchange rate was for thirteen, I don’t know if it was thirteen Rupees to the pound.
HB: Right. So that was, that was quite a significant pay rise then.
JS: And then, and then we got into the bigger stuff like all that. That’s just a year’s work in there.
HB: Yeah.
JS: We had Corsairs, Yorks, no end of Yorks. Liberators there.
HB: And that would, that would the York would be what towards the end of ’45.
JS: That was in ’45.
HB: ’45. Yeah.
JS: Getting towards the end of the war years.
HB: Yeah.
JS: And of course, with us being Transport Command everything that came in to India came through us you see. Landed with us. We had flight, we used to have Lord Louis. Not in those days. I think the Viceroy in those days when we first got there, I think it was General Wavell. And then he changed to Lord Louis Mountbatten and he used to come through regular and being six foot tall I got lumbered with being on the guard of honour. So, we, if there had been an accident unfortunately we had to go and bury everybody and we used to have to stand guard of honour for Lord Louis and Edwina and people, all the VIPs used to come then because people started to show a bit of interest in us.
HB: So, RAF Mauripur must have gone, it must have expanded really.
JS: We went from 317 MU to 48 Terminal Staging Post.
HB: Right.
JS: That’s how we, and then everything came through us like. In fact, they built quite a nice hotel on the airfield to entertain these people as they were coming through.
HB: So —
JS: And then quite a lot of dissatisfaction in those days because every, South East Asia was neglected terrible. I mean, for a start we’d got nothing to use. We had to use a split pin twice. There was nothing. They gave us the most basic tool kit. And things did improve eventually and then of course we had this strike didn’t we?
HB: Did you?
JS: Oh aye. All the, all the, the whole line went out on strike because the treatment we got wasn’t very good. I can’t remember what date the strike was.
HB: This was serviceman.
JS: Oh yes. it was very serious. Frightened us all to death because it was, well I mean the whole line was out on strike.
HB: When you say the line.
JS: Right through from all the Middle East and everywhere. They were all, it all stopped.
HB: What? Just stopped work?
JS: Yeah.
[pause]
JS: I mean —
HB: I can pause this while you have a quick look in your diary. John. That’s not a problem.
[recording paused]
JS: Tuesday the 22nd of January everything stopped.
HB: Nineteen forty —
JS: 1946.
HB: Right.
JS: “On strike from eight in the morning until certain promises are made as regards demob etcetera. Whole station went out. Afternoon lecture by the padre. Still keeping out until satisfaction obtained. Meeting at 8 o’clock.” You had to meet when it was dark you see because no one would dare. Had to put the lights out.
HB: And that’s all in your diary.
JS: Yes. Meeting. Cairo West was out, Jiwani was out, Jodhpur was out. And they all came out. Sharjah. And all they came out on strike as well.
HB: And what was, what was, what was the reason for the strike, John?
JS: Well, we got the war was over here then in ’46 and we were getting nowhere out there and when, when the lads that had been out there for four years should have been sent home, repatriated they sent all the blooming Indian Army in place over for that damned great Victory Parade in London.
HB: Right.
JS: It caused quite a bit of dissention.
HB: Yeah.
JS: But anyway, the results of the strike came out quite well really because they reduced the tour from my tour. I should have been there four years to three years. So, I was already over my time.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: So after, actually it affected me as well and all the lads that went out with me because we had to wait while all these troops came over here for their Victory Parade. Anyway, we did eventually get notice we were going to be repatriated so —
HB: So what were the, so you mentioned earlier about the conditions as well. What were the conditions like in ’46 then?
JS: They had improved but we was forgotten.
HB: Yeah.
JS: Living quarters had improved considerably and we’d got cinemas and tennis courts and things like that. The food was much better and working conditions. They built us some beautiful big hangars. Open like big half-moon hangars and about that much either side and they were cool. No doors on them and much better working conditions. We got better tooling and equipment. Instead of having to stand on oil drums we were getting proper, proper equipment.
HB: I was going to ask you to go back a bit on that John from earlier on. When you got there you were saying about you got a basic tool kit and you had to use split pins twice. So —
JS: Well, it was —
HB: So —
JS: There was no electricity then.
HB: Yeah. How did you, did you have to make pieces yourself.
JS: Well, we had to. We had to, we had these basic, we had to do the best as we could. There was no electricity. For the runways they used to light those, Nitrolights, was it?
HB: Yeah. Nitrolights. Yeah. So —
JS: Never had any water.
HB: Yeah.
JS: We couldn’t drink the water anyway but there were hardly any water to wash. I think they used to have to pipe it from the Indus. And all the drains was open. We used to have to jump across the drain to get to the mess.
HB: Blimey.
JS: The showers was, of course there was no hot water of course. We had to have cold showers but there was hardly any water. It used to be a big occasion. Somebody used to shout, ‘The showers are on.’ And every, of course, we never used to wear much. We only used to wear a towel when we were in the billets. We didn’t take a lot of dressing. It didn’t take long to get to the shower.
HB: Right. So, they, so that was really basic.
JS: Basic.
HB: Living and working.
JS: Terrible.
HB: At that time. When did that improve? Was that sort of towards ’45 then?
JS: Yes. Towards ’45 it did improve slowly. Yeah. As the war gradually finished this side we were getting more attention.
HB: Right.
JS: But the food, it was, I don’t know, I’m sure. One day a week we had to live on K-rations. Those American packs.
HB: Yeah.
JS: We got a pack for breakfast and pack for lunch and a pack for dinner. A tin of something and a few biscuits. Three cigarettes and a box of matches. These matches. About sixty sheets of toilet paper. And we had, I think there used to be egg and bacon in a tin for breakfast or something like that. Stew for dinner. Maconochie’s, I think it was.
HB: Yeah. So that sees you through to ’46 so because over here they were they were preparing in Bomber Command they were doing a thing called Operation Tiger. Did you ever hear anything about Operation Tiger over there?
JS: No.
HB: Because that was where they were gathering up experienced crews.
JS: No. We wouldn’t hear anything you see.
HB: Yeah.
JS: Because everything was top secret, wasn’t it?
HB: Yeah, because the plan was for Tiger was for them to go out to India and then move on through Burma to bomb Japan.
JS: We wouldn’t have any radios or anything, you see.
HB: No.
JS: Never heard a thing.
HB: So, how, how did you get to know what was going on in the war then?
JS: Well, we used to, I used to buy a newspaper. the Daily Gazette and pay [unclear] a day it was.
HB: Right.
JS: We had the paper come.
HB: Yeah.
JS: I’ve got one in there actually.
HB: Yeah.
JS: Of when the war finished.
HB: Yeah. So and that was your only source of information.
JS: Yeah.
HB: You, didn’t, you didn’t —
JS: Rumours.
HB: Yeah. I was going to say you didn’t get drawn in every month.
JS: No. No. No. Nothing like that.
HB: So, so, if anybody started a rumour it would be believed.
JS: Oh yeah. It would go like mad.
[clock chiming]
HB: What sort, hey up. That will go well on there. It’s recording it nicely. So what sort of rumours did you get John? Can you remember any of them?
JS: Not really. No. I can’t remember really what there were.
HB: Yeah.
JS: As I say we used to say we used to get this paper every day. That’s about, and we use to get information probably from the front. And past Calcutta wasn’t it? And it was east of the Brahmaputra.
HB: Right. Right.
JS: You used to get a bit of it when the lads used to come because some of the lad used to come back posted to us you see and we used to [pause] any lads that was injured or anything like that we would ferry them back here.
HB: Yeah.
JS: Some of the troops. In fact, after the war we [pause] they built a big trooping camp at Mauripur and most of the lads that were coming back from Burma came through us. We used to get about forty take-offs a day. Dakotas out.
HB: Yeah. And they were flying —
JS: We used to have to service about three aircraft on a shift in them days.
HB: Did you?
JS: Stirlings or Yorks or Dakotas, Liberators. They made everything into a transport.
HB: Yeah.
JS: They even made up a Lancaster. They made a Lancastrians didn’t they? It only held about fifteen people but —
HB: Yeah. Well, if got them back. Yeah. it’s important. So, you’re working your backside off. What about mail from home. Letters from home.
JS: Plenty of mail. We got —
HB: Yeah.
JS: Mail was pretty good actually.
HB: You’re still a single man at this stage, are you?
JS: Yes. Yeah. We used to, we used to get quite a, quite, in fact when I was twenty one my mum sent me a cake.
HB: Oh lovely.
JS: I used to send no end of stuff home because the Yorks especially when we, when we got the Yorks coming through full blast we used to go downtown and buy say boxes of tea and [pause] put, in fact I bought mine with a watch and put it inside the tea because you had to be a bit careful [laughs] And we used to sew these parcels up and the York crews used to post them for us here. They were very good at that for us.
HB: Right.
JS: So I used to get shoes for my sister and mum and I used to send mum dress lengths and things like that. We’d got quite a good thing going actually. But you used to have to parcel them up and then you had to put a declaration on the front. What was in it? You know. For customs this end.
HB: What? Like box of, box of tea containing watch. Yeah.
JS: For this end, you see.
HB: Yeah.
JS: It had to go through customs.
HB: Yeah.
JS: So —
HB: Did you ever have any bother with that?
JS: No. No. No. Well, these aircrew we used to at the back of the outboard engine on the York nacelle there was a big empty space and these lads used to put mats in there, carpets, Indian carpets. We used to take this damned thing down and they used to — [laughs]
HB: This sounds like, this sounds a bit interesting this though.
JS: Well, one thing led to another. It was alright. It was all very legal [laughs]
HB: Yeah.
JS: Well, we got this thing going and then eventually you see we got our turn to come home. So, I went around. We waited. I know was on, off, on, off repatriating for ages. We were getting a bit cheesed off. Eventually we got into a group where our group was coming on. So we got cleared of Mauripur and we had to, we were going to be flown to, this was another thing. We were flying everybody home and we had to come home by boat [laughs] Anyway, we, we got clear of Mauripur and we got we were going down to Bombay. We got in to Dakotas and flown down to Worli at Bombay. While we were down there it was the monsoon season. It just chucked it down with rain about every second. Anyway, we eventually got on to another troop ship. What was that? Strathnaver, was it? Something like that. We weren’t too bad on that one. We weren’t on deck below the water line. But it was the monsoon season and I was sick about every day for a week I should think. I’ve got in there somewhere.
HB: Oh dear.
JS: It was that rough.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: But coming back you see we could come back through Suez because the Middle East was open you see. The war had finished.
HB: Oh, of course. Yes.
JS: So once we got clear of this nice smooth seas it wasn’t too bad. We came through the Suez Canal.
HB: Did you stop on the way through?
JS: No.
HB: At Cairo or anywhere.
JS: Only to take water in at was it Port Said. Port Said, isn’t it?
HB: Yeah.
JS: And it was nice through the Suez. There’s a big statue isn’t there? Ferdinand de Lesseps pointing at Port Said. I think he was something to do with the building of it or something. We passed Aden and Malta and finally got back here.
HB: Where did you land when you came back?
JS: We landed at Liverpool.
HB: You left at Liverpool and you come back there.
JS: Yeah. And what happened then? We got, from Liverpool we went back to a place I think it was West Kirby again. Of course, we were back in our blues then. We got rid of, we threw all the blooming tropical kit overboard into the Arabian, into whatever sea it was we were crossing.
HB: Did you?
JS: Yeah. Bombay bowler and all that went. Anyway —
HB: Was that official or was that just something you did?
JS: We didn’t want the stuff, did we? We’d got to carry it. Anyway, we were back in blues then and it was, oh it was hot when we got back here. It was a beautiful summer. I think it was around about July or August. Got sent home on this embarkation leave for about a month. Then what happened? Oh, I know. I got posted. Waiting for a posting this end I got posted to RAF Silverstone. I think it was 70 OTU, on Wellingtons which was quite nice really. It wasn’t too good for getting home though at weekends. But anyway, I did do. We weren’t there long before they closed Silverstone and we went to, from there to North Luffenham. North Luffenham was, well Silverstone Aerodrome we were, anyway it was a wartime station. We were posted everywhere. Everybody was issued with a bike to get to the technical site.
HB: Oh yeah. And of course that’s Silverstone in Northamptonshire. Where the —
JS: That’s right. Yeah.
HB: Where the Grand Prix circuit is now.
JS: We were all issued with a bike. You had to watch your bike though because if somebody broke the chain they’d pinch yours [unclear] puncture. You had to take your bike to bed with you more or less. Tie it to the side of the bed. Anyway, they closed Silverstone and we got sent from there, the same unit to North Luffenham. That was near Oakham, wasn’t it?
HB: What, was that an OTU?
JS: Terrible that was. Pardon?
HB: Was that an OTU?
JS: Yeah. The same one. The same unit.
HB: Oh right. The whole kit and caboodle moved. Yeah.
JS: They moved out and we moved in.
HB: Right.
JS: But the bull there was terrible. No matter what time you would hear the bugle would go at night we had to stand and salute the blooming direction of the flag. It was terrible there. Anyway, they closed that. Well, they didn’t close it. We got moved from there to Swinderby. The same unit again. There had been Lancasters I think at Swinderby but we took the old Wellingtons there. And from there I got demobbed.
HB: Right.
JS: I got demobbed in [pause] it was that bad winter. Was it ’46? ’47?
HB: ’46/47. Yeah.
JS: Just right coming back from the tropics, wasn’t it? Anyway, I got a job at Avro’s which was only just down from that. Four or five miles wouldn’t it be.
HB: Can I just stop you there, John. You’ve come back. You’ve gone to these OTUs. What was, what were the OTUs doing with the Wellingtons?
JS: Training crews.
HB: They were training crews.
JS: Operational training units.
HB: Right. Right
JS: Training crews I should think. Yeah. On an OTU.
HB: Right.
JS: And then —
HB: So you, so you came back. You get demobbed at Swinderby.
JS: I got demobbed from Swinderby. We had to go back up to West Kirby to get demobbed.
HB: Oh blimey.
JS: And you got, of course, you got a suit and everything didn’t you and a bowler hat [laughs] or a shirt and tie.
HB: Yeah.
JS: And you had to, you were supposed to keep your uniform because you weren’t officially demobbed fully. You were only put on hold for the duration of the present emergency.
HB: Right.
JS: You see, so they could send you back anytime they wanted you.
HB: Right. So, yeah.
JS: If war broke out again.
HB: So, it wasn’t like —
JS: It didn’t.
HB: It wasn’t like the Reserve. It was —
JS: I got a job at Avro’s.
HB: Yeah.
JS: And strangely enough they got a big contract for York refurbishments. I was working on the same aircraft that I had been on in the Air Force.
HB: Yeah.
JS: [unclear]
HB: So where was Avro’s at the time?
JS: Langar.
HB: Yeah.
JS: It was only about four miles from home.
HB: Yeah.
JS: Probably not that.
HB: You were still a single man.
JS: Yeah.
HB: Right.
JS: And I think I was there, I was there about twenty one years actually at Avro’s but I was on engines just the same. Well, I did all systems of engines. I specialised on engine controls at Avro’s and to be on them you had to be, you had to have a [AID] approval. Air Ministry inspected approval. So, I got quite an interesting job there actually.
HB: Did you have to take exams to get that?
JS: No. No. No.
HB: That was, yeah.
JS: It was just something you got. You just got inspected for. You got your job inspected, you know. And I was on engines there. We had a Lanc. We had a York contract and we had a Lancaster contract. We had Lincolns, Shackletons, Vulcans.
HB: The Vulcan.
JS: Yeah. We did experimental jobs on Vulcans. We changed the, we did an experimental fitting of the conway on the Vulcan. And then another one we did we fitted a very high-powered Olympus engine on another one. It was so high powered it was sucking the skin off the intake. But anyway and then another Vulcan when we did the Blue Steel rocket. That was very very secret. They even screened our parents for that.
HB: Did they?
JS: And I got married then in, when [pause] in ’56. I was still at Avro’s. And then of course in ’68 they closed it down. The runways weren’t, it wasn’t worth doing or something. I don’t know.
HB: Yeah. Wow.
JS: I can still quote you the firing order of a Merlin engine.
HB: Quote me the firing order.
JS: A1, B6, A4, B3, A2, B5, A6, B1, A3, B4, A5, B2.
HB: Never forget it.
JS: No.
HB: So overall, you know considering you went in in ’42, you know and you’re well in to ‘46 coming up ’47 when you finished what, what’s your, what’s your biggest, your longest memory? Your best memory of your time during the war.
JS: Comradeship. Miss it a lot. I must tell you this. When, after I’d been at Avro’s some time about the first month or two I just couldn’t settle. I missed the, I seemed to miss the lads and the comradeship, you know. I mean, when you’ve been living with say twenty lads for three years nearly it was like a family wasn’t it? You used to share each other’s joys and sorrows. But I missed, oh I did miss the lads. There came a scheme because that cold war was starting and they bought a bounty scheme out where you could get, they would pay you three hundred pound to go back and you’d keep the same, everything the same as when you left. So, I thought oh I considered doing that and I sent for the papers but as it happened my dad had a, like a stroke, didn’t he? And I thought I just couldn’t leave mother again so I scrubbed around it. But while we were at Langar on the Yorks the Berlin Airlift was on and we worked, we could work for twenty four hours a day because if we wanted because the Yorks were ferrying everything in weren’t they? The Yorks and Dakotas and that and they were all coming back to us in a terrible state.
HB: Yeah. Yeah, and you were doing the maintenance.
JS: Yeah.
HB: On the engines for that. Yeah. Yeah.
JS: Yeah.
HB: So, it was the comradeship that kept you.
JS: Oh yeah.
HB: Going.
JS: I missed it terrible.
HB: When, when you were out in India you were almost isolated.
JS: Yeah.
HB: This RAF camp. What did you do? I mean how did you work for leave?
JS: Oh yes.
HB: Because you were there for what? Three years.
JS: Yes. well, on leave I was. Yes, I must you that. We had a month’s leave each year and I used to go with Alf who I was with all the time. Alf and I we used to go to Simla in the Himalayas. It’s Shimla now. They’ve put an H in it now, haven’t they? We used to go there for a month. I’ve got some nice photographs of that and it used to take us, it used to be a day and a half to cross the Sindh desert by train.
HB: Yeah.
JS: And then another it would take us two days to get to Simla anyway and two days back but it was lovely up there. Seven thousand five hundred feet up, isn’t it?
HB: Yeah.
JS: We did that and then what else? We were so near the, as I say the Arabian Sea. We were at the edge of the desert and there was absolutely nothing there whatsoever. Only desert. We built a, like a little camp there with packing cases of whatever the glider, oh, we had a glider assembly place at Mauripur. We weren’t on that but they came in packing cases and we built this, like a rest camp right on the edge of the sea and we used to go over. We could go there for a weekend or if we got, you know slack time we used to go. We used to bike there across the desert. Yeah. It was smashing there because we never used to wear a stitch [laughs] Not a stitch.
HB: I was starting to wonder they gave you a uniform [laughs]
JS: You were in and out of the sea. There was nobody at all. Only us.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: We were in and out the sea. I’ve got photographs of it but they did put some shorts on for —
HB: Yeah. So —
JS: Oh, it was, it was smashing there.
HB: Yeah.
JS: You know, it was different. You can’t imagine. I can’t imagine it now, you know and how it was, how relaxed it was there. There used to be, you used to go for long walks right along the beach at night. Of course, there were no mosquitoes there you see at the edge of the sea. So, of course, in the camp we had to sleep under a mossie net and the only big thing about the beds were we used to get blooming bed bugs terrible. And they were only like threaded string along the wooden frame so what we used to do we used to bring a can full of [unclear] petrol back from the tech site, take your bed outside into the middle of the square where there was nothing. Only sand. Louse it with petrol to kill them.
HB: Ah, I thought you were going to say you were —
JS: Bang the blooming bed down and out came the bugs.
HB: I thought you were going to say you set fire to it. Yeah. Yeah, that’s, that would it. That would do it.
JS: Aye. And in the corner of the mosquito net and the damned bed bugs were terrible. And I’ll tell you what else we used to get a lot of. Scorpions. You used to have to tip your shoes upside down at night before you got in to bed because they used to get inside them. What else? Well, there was Praying Mantis and [unclear] cobras under the chocs we used to get. Quite a lot of them.
HB: What, what, what were they?
JS: They were like a big lizard only very poisonous like. Big things. They used to go under the chocs. We’d pull the chocs away probably one of those things would run out.
HB: Sounds a bit —
JS: You got used to it didn’t you?
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You’d have to. That’s where you were working. Yeah.
JS: Well, the scorpions, if you got a scorpion you used to kick it outside and put a ring of petrol around it and light it and it used to commit suicide, don’t they?
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So, so did you, you’d got this massive airfield at Mauripur. You’ve got all these planes coming in. You’ve got all different aircraft types coming in. You’ve got people going, passing through. I mean you must have had, you must have had some accidents.
JS: Oh, we did. We had. We had terrible accidents. We had a Liberator crash one night and of course right around the airfield there was this massive ditch built. Monsoon ditch. Ditch Like a big dry riverbed to protect the airfield in the monsoons but it never did. But anyway, that’s what it was for and this Liberator must have, I don’t know how it managed to crash but it crashed into one of these monsoon ditches, ditches and there was eight Army sergeants in that. Killed them all. Burned out. And you see in those days we had to bury the same day in that climate. We had to, we used to, me being on guard we used to have to fire over the grave and they used to take photos of the grave to send back to the, of course some of these lads were all different religions as well. They had to have different burials [unclear]
HB: And that was, and that was there was a cemetery on the airfield was there? Right.
JS: There was a cemetery in town.
HB: In town.
JS: In Karachi. Yeah. RAF cemetery.
HB: Right.
JS: Well, a troop cemetery because there was a big army barracks there as well. Napier Barracks.
HB: Oh right. So, we’ve been out there, that your best memory is the comradeship. What’s your worst memory? What was the thing that you hated the most?
JS: Heat.
HB: The heat.
JS: Ahum. You got used to it and I tell you what, you used to get awful prickly heat. That was awful. You used to get it around your waist and that. Anywhere where your clothes fitted tight.
HB: What, what was the treatment for that?
JS: None. Eventually, right towards the back end of while we were there they organised hot baths and it was a crude affair. They used to do boil the water outside in this mass tub and the old ones used to come and fill the hot baths for you and you used to get as much hot water over you as you could because it opened your pores and you got rid of, it was the salt in your pores that causes prickly heats and the heat and the water opened your pours and cleaned it all out. So it was quite a good cure for it. But there was no other cure.
HB: Right. So, we’ve come out. Come back. We’re back in England. We’ve gone to work at Avro’s at Langar. So how did you meet your wife?
JS: A dance.
Other: A dance in [Woolsthorpe]
JS: Well, my brother is married to the wife’s oldest cousin.
HB: Right.
JS: Well, we I think we were at a ball at [Woolsthorpe] weren’t we?
Other: [Woolsthorpe] yeah.
HB: Yeah. And that was it.
JS: There’s one other thing I forgot to mention was the monsoons. About [pause] well prevailing wind used to mostly come from the sea which wasn’t too bad but when the monsoons was coming, about June it would change around completely and come from the land. And then we had the most awful sandstorms. Terrible. With having no doors or windows in the barracks, in the billet, it used to fill everything with darned sand.
HB: It must have made maintenance difficult.
JS: And they had to close the airfield.
HB: Yeah. It must have made maintenance on the engines difficult.
JS: Oh well, they had to shut everything down and wrap everything up. Put the engine covers on and everything. It used to like come in drifts but we were issued with special spectacles for that. They had guards on the side because it affected your eyes and used to wrap around your legs. It was terrible. And then when the monsoons came well it was, we only had, it used to last about a week. It used to flood the complete blooming airfield. We’d got no work again and it used to, like I say this monsoon ditch which was supposed to drain it away but it never did but originally the old, well the old it used to wash the top off the blooming billet because it was only like mud. Eventually they proper roofing on. But we used to have to put your ground sheets across the top of your bed just to —
HB: I see. Make do and mend.
JS: I’ll tell you what else it used to be good before. It used to cure the prickly heat. As soon as it used to rain everybody used to strip off completely and run out in it.
HB: So, you didn’t have many female staff on the station then.
JS: None. Oh well, they didn’t bother. These Indian women used to do all the work, didn’t they? The builders and everything.
HB: Yeah.
JS: They didn’t bother. We didn’t bother about them but we did have a, each have a, each billet had a bearer which was an Indian sort of coolie. We used to pay them a Roopee each a week and he used to, we had a water bottle [unclear] we had a bottle. He used to fill that for us, make our beds and sweep the floor and do that for us. Paid him a rupee a week.
HB: Yeah.
JS: He lived on that as well. That would be ten rupees a week which used to be about a pound wouldn’t it?
HB: Yeah.
JS: Not quite a pound.
HB: Yeah. Well, it’s fascinating John. I can see, I can see why we wanted your interview.
JS: Well, that was life in India.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. And what, after Avro finished in the 60s what did you do then?
JS: Went up to [pet foods] in Melton.
HB: Oh right. Right.
JS: Got a job in the maintenance there.
HB: Yeah. Well, I think that brings us neatly to the end of the interview, you know. And if you’re happy.
JS: Yeah. Are you happy?
HB: I’m always happy. I’ll stop the interview now.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with John Shipman
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-10-10
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
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AShipmanJ181010, PShipmanJ1802
Conforms To
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Pending review
Format
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01:05:31 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
John Shipman was born in Stathern, Leicester and as a teenager would cycle to Melton Mowbray to attend ATC meetings. He joined the RAF and started training as a flight mechanic. He joined a troop ship to start his posting and the journey took a very long six weeks before he finally arrived in India. Conditions on base were rudimentary and their tools were basic and there was a make do and mend mentality. John worked on a wide range of aircraft. He was promoted to the role of fitter. After the war, in 1946 there was a strike among the Servicemen who were frustrated at the delays in sending them home for demob.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1946-01-22
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
India
Pakistan
Pakistan--Karachi
B-24
C-47
demobilisation
ground crew
ground personnel
military discipline
military living conditions
military service conditions
Raf Mauripur
training
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/234/3377/PColleyJ1701.2.jpg
94ec91085dc95338680dd17fbde097d3
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/234/3377/AColleyJ170927.1.mp3
274a0d8500796c546178e8a862d959de
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
Colley, Joyce
Joyce Colley née Orton
Joyce Colley
J Colley
Joyce Orton
J Orton
J Colley née Orton
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Mrs Joyce Colley née Orton (b. 1925, 2127558 Royal Air Force).
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
2017-09-27
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
Colley, J
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is an interview for the International Bomber Command Centre at Lincoln. Taking place between myself Harry Bartlett, the interviewer and Mrs Joyce Colley.
JC: Colley [spells out surname]
HB: Who is an ex acting sergeant in the women’s auxiliary air force.
JC: That’s right.
HB: And served during er the Second World War.
JC: Second World War, that’s right.
HB: The interview’s taking place on the 27th of September 2017 [background noise] in Rugby [background noise].
Carer: Do you want a cup of tea or anything?
HB: No thank you. Right Joyce, we’ve been introduced.
JC: Let battle commence.
HB: We know that you’re over 21 for definite.
JC: That’s true, yeah.
HB: You were born 27th May 1925. Where were you born Joyce?
JC: Here, well not literally.
HB: In Rugby?
JC: No I was born in Nuneaton.
HB: In Nuneaton, right.
JC: Yeah.
HB: Right, and is that where you went to school?
JC: Partly, until I was eleven.
HB: Right.
JC: And then my dad got a, this job took him down South to Somerset.
HB: Right.
JC: So we all trooped off down to Somerset and we were there a few years until my dad died and then my mum wanted to, we all came trooping back up and erm I don’t know where we went then I’ve forgotten, it’s all a bit hazy. And I was here then until I was about fifteen.
HB: Right.
JC: And back we went down again. I met Ted you see in this job was down in Portsmouth, would you like to [unclear].
HB: And Ted is?
JC: My husband.
HB: Right.
JC: Only he wasn’t my husband then.
HB: No, were you working at this time Joyce?
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: What were you doing as a job? [laughs]
JC: Well I started, I can only remember from when I was in the Air Force.
HB: Right.
JC: And I was a tele printer operator.
HB: Ah right, so, so were you married to Ted before the war?
JC: Yes.
HB: Right, when did you marry Ted?
JC: Do you know I can’t remember.
HB: How far before the war?
JC: Ooh, [laughs] no I think it was ’44, do you know I can’t remember.
HB: That’s alright.
JC: I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember.
HB: That’s not a problem, that’s not a problem. So where were you when you actually signed up, when you went, did you volunteer or were you actually called up?
JC: Er, no well it was as bit of each actually.
HB: Right.
JC: They were going, they said if you don’t go you’ll be took.
HB: [laughs] Right. [laughs]
JC: So it was an either or situation.
HB: Yes.
JC: So I had to leave my job and went into the Air Force.
HB: And what was, where was.
JC: I was a trainee hairdresser at that point.
HB: Right.
JC: Yeah.
HB: And where were you when you were called up, can you remember?
JC: I was here.
HB: You were here in Nuneaton
JC: Yeah, Yeah.
HB: Oh right, right. So you got called up, well called up volunteered.
JC: That’s right, pressganged.
HB: Yeah, and did they just send you straight for training or did they send you home again?
JC: No, [makes whistle sound] up to Lancashire, just outside Liverpool, Wigan.
HB: Wigan.
JC: Wigan believe it or not.
HB: Right.
JC: Between Wigan, yeah, under a slag heap.
HB: Oh right.
JC: Literally under a slag heap.
HB: And was that an RAF station or was it just a training depot?
JC: It was a secret centre.
HB: Right.
JC: Coding Centre.
HB: Ah right.
JC: So I was there you see.
HB: Yeah, and is that where you did your training?
JC: Yeah.
HB: And when you finished your training can you remember.
JC: I went to Cranwell to do my training.
HB: Ah right.
JC: All me sir no, madam yeah, three bags full and then we did our training and then we were posted.
HB: Right.
JC: And I was posted to erm up North.
HB: Right.
JC: And my home was down South, typical Air Force, typical services.
HB: Yeah.
JC: So it took me three days to get from when I went on leave, three days travelling from my home to the station and backwards and forwards up and down the country.
HB: Oh dear, right.
JC: Three days one way, because of all the raids.
HB: Yes, oh yes.
JC: They were shooting from the sidings you see, troop’s raids going past.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: I’m sorry this must be ever so boring for you.
LM: [unclear] [laughs]
HB: No, no. [laughs]
JC: She bares with it bravely.
HB: Yes. Erm, sorry I did forget to mention at the beginning of the interview that there, we have got a carer present who is, what is your name?
Carer: Agneshka.
HB: Agneshka.
Carer: [laughs]
HB: Right.
JC: It gets them every time doesn’t it?
HB: [laughs] Right so what, can you remember what year you actually joined?
JC: ‘44.
HB: You went in ‘44.
JC: ‘44 to ‘48 I served.
HB: Yeah, was it early on in ’44 that you went?
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: Right, so you went to Cranwell and did your initial training.
JC: Did my initial training.
HB: Marching about and saluting.
JC: That’s right.
HB: And you then got posted to Wigan?
JC: Yeah.
HB: And did Wigan have a name or did it, or was it just a number?
JC: No, it did have a name but it was the station name.
HB: Right.
JC: Blackbrook, RAF Blackbrook.
HB: Right.
JC: It comes eventually.
HB: Yeah, like I say there’s no rush Joyce at all.
JC: RAF Blackbrook, yeah.
HB: So you go to RAF Blackbrook.
JC: Hmm.
HB: And your job, you get sent to do, what was your job?
JC: Tele printing.
HB: Right.
JC: Secret bomber, sending out bombers and bringing them back in erm and missing reports and death reports. That was awful.
HB: Hmm.
JC: I remember once being on duty one night duty and they’d been on a bomber raid over Berlin and I put five reels of paper in my machine every line there was a missing man or a killed man.
HB: Oh no.
JC: I thought there’d be nobody left I swear, we were all in tears.
HB: Do you know what squadron that was with?
JC: Erm, no I don’t, I don’t remember.
HB: Right.
JC: But it was bomber command they went on bombing raids.
HB: Yeah. And that was from Blackpool.
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: So you working on the tele printer, where were you living?
JC: On camp.
HB: You lived on camp?
JC: Under a slag heap.
HB: [laughs]
JC: On the Liverpool Lancashire Road.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Buried under a slag heap and that’s where we lived and where we worked and we never saw light of day or breathe fresh air.
HB: So you were underground?
JC: We were underground, we were under a slag heap.
HB: Oh right, oh right, underneath the slag heap?
JC: Underneath the slag heap, it was air raid precaution you see.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: Terrible, no fresh air.
HB: So how, when you were billeted on the airfield, where you in a?
JC: No air field.
HB: Sorry?
JC: No air field.
HB: There was no air field?
JC: We weren’t on an air field, we were on a secret, it was a secret.
HB: Communication centre.
JC: Yeah, communication centre, as I say we were buried under the slag heap and we were moved by coach/bus, erm RAF bus from our billets which were in Wigan.
HB: Right.
JC: Backwards and forwards to, to RAF Blackbrook.
HB: So the actual billet you were in was in Wigan?
JC: Yeah.
HB: Were they private houses?
JC: Some were, yes.
HB: Where you.
JC: Then we all got moved back into camp.
HB: At Blackbrook?
JC: Yeah.
HB: Right, so when you first got there you were in a private house somewhere?
JC: To start off yeah, a private billet.
HB: Right. And how many of you were there?
JC: There was only me billeted with a family.
HB: Right.
JC: Oh no two of us.
HB: Right:
JC: Two of us that’s right, yeah.
HB: And were you, and was that your pal or just someone you served with?
JC: Well somebody we served with.
HB: Right.
JC: Really.
HB: And did you keep in touch with the family?
JC: No, no, not once we’d left, no.
HB: So how long do you think you were in the civilian billet before you moved into the camp?
JC: Oh about a year.
HB: Right.
JC: About a year, I don’t know why they kept us all in there but we were all, I think it was until they got it built to be honest.
HB: Oh right.
JC: Because you know it was all new, all, I tell you it was all crash, bang wallop you know, all done in a rush. This must be ever so boring for you I’m ever so sorry.
Carer: No, [laughs] I just listen.
HB: Er. so, so you, you get picked up in buses and taken backwards and forwards.
JC: From the camp.
HB: Yeah, and you go down underground, how many would be working in your section?
JC: Oh, there’s a tele printer section in one room and a telephone exchange in the other.
HB: Hmm.
JC: And it was, oh there’d be about forty or fifty girls there, quite a big camp, and the bus would come and take us back to the camp, yeah.
HB: Yeah. So when you were operating the tele printer and doing the secret coding.
JC: Secret coding, yeah.
HB: Where were your messages going to and where were they coming from?
JC: Well they’d be going to bomber command.
HB: Right.
JC: Various stations. That’s why it was secret you see.
HB: Yeah, yeah. So you were doing that.
JC: Hmm.
HB: Erm, what sort of stuff were you getting coming into your?
JC: It was all coded.
HB: Right, so.
JC: Six letter codes, in blocks of six.
HB: Right, six of six. And then you would hand that to somebody or?
JC: And they’d be de-coded, yeah yeah.
HB: Did you do any of the de-coding?
JC: No, no that was a separate, that was a secret section, within a secret section.
HB: Ah, yeah that’s interesting. So then eventually they built you some accommodation on the camp did they?
JC: No there was no camp as such.
HB: No, no, no, but there, so when you moved out of your civilian camp.
JC: We moved camp.
HB: Ahh.
JC: I was transferred from that camp to where I ended up RAF Blackbrook.
HB: At RAF Blackbrook, right.
JC: Blackbrook, yeah, yeah where I ended up.
HB: Right, so at Blackbrook where they flying aircraft from Blackbrook?
JC: No it was a secret coding.
HB: That was still a er
JC: A secret coding centre.
HB: Right.
JC: And we were coding for the North East of England.
HB: Oh right, right. So you went to Blackbrook.
JC: Hmm.
HB: And is that where you went into accommodation on the camp?
JC: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Accommodation underground.
HB: So how did that work?
JC: Badly [laughs] we never saw daylight hardly ever.
HB: Oh right.
JC: And eventually we started getting bombed.
HB: Did you?
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: Oh right.
JC: They went as far up country as that and Germany.
HB: Right.
JC: So we were getting bombed. We had several girls lost through bombing.
HB: Did you.
JC: Yeah, and we had to go underground.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Into the bunkers, yeah, and the sirens started going.
HB: Yeah. So how long were you there at Blackbrook?
JC: Oh goodness, I don’t remember. I left from there so I was there for the rest of, for a long time.
HB: So you were there from about ’45 to 48?
JC: Something like that yeah.
HB: Wow.
JC: That’s when I began to get my sergeant’s stripes.
HB: Yeah, I was going to say so, so.
JC: Because I’m an old hand you see.
HB: Yeah. When did you become a corporal then Joyce?
JC: Oh, I think it must’ve been serving what eighteen months. Then I became a corporal and then I was upgraded to sergeant, yeah.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: Sergeant [laughs] air woman.
HB: [laughs] Were you in charge of a section then?
JC: Pretty much yeah.
HB: And how many were in your section?
JC: About twenty.
HB: Oh right, so a big, a big group.
JC: Yeah, yeah big sections, there was a lot of us there.
HB: And what was your responsibility for them?
JC: Everything, made sure they were on parade on time and ‘air woman get your seams straight.’
HB: [laughs]
JC: We weren’t allowed stockings with seams in.
HB: Oh right.
JC: And if we did, and I was one of them, I must admit, I own up, I was one of them. You can never wear your stockings straight, you turned your stockings inside out because that made the seams show.
HB: Ahh.
JC: Or if you couldn’t get stockings you painted a line down the back of your leg.
HB: [laughs]
JC: We must [unclear] to you, we did yeah.
Carer: [laughs]
HB: So when you, after you’d been posted to the station, obviously your husband’s still living.
JC: I don’t know where he lived, he was in the navy.
HB: Oh he was in the navy, so, oh right so that was.
JC: I hadn’t met him then, no.
HB: Oh right, right.
JC: No.
HB: So how did you, what did you do for entertainment when you were off duty?
JC: Not a lot.
HB: No.
JC: Well we were on a secret camp.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: And there was nothing there you see because it was secret.
HB: Right.
JC: Yes it was grim.
HB: Yeah. What did you do to alleviate the boredom then?
JC: Not a lot.
HB: [laughs]
JC: It was almost like what we do here to be honest.
HB: [laugh]
JC: Not a lot no.
HB: So what did you do a bit of reading and a bit of.
JC: That’s all we could do.
HB: A bit of chatting?
JC: Yeah the book. But of course in the war time all the books were taken for the pulping to ammunition and that sort of thing.
HB: Right.
JC: And that sort of thing, so you couldn’t get books really.
HB: Right.
JC: You just sat and chatted.
HB: Did you ever leave the camp to go to dances or anything outside?
JC: Sometimes, but not very often, we were bussed out and bussed back.
HB: Yeah. Did you have to, did you have to go in uniform when you went?
JC: We usually did yeah.
HB: Did you ever sneak out?
JC: What do you mean under the wire, literally under the wire? Yeah a couple of times.
HB: [laughs] I thought you might have.
JC: You’re not supposed to know that.
HB: I thought you might have.
JC: We found a hole in the hedge in the wire mesh.
HB: Yeah. And where would you go when you sneaked out?
JC: Well into the nearest town. We hitched.
HB: Oh right.
JC: No money to spend to buy a ticket to go on the bus.
HB: No.
JC: So we hitched [laughs] literally, yeah.
Carer: [laughs]
HB: [laughs] showing a bit of knee.
JC: That’s right yeah. And of course they were ever so kind, people were very kind, seeing us in uniform they let us into cinemas without paying, they smuggled us into erm theatres through the chorus girl’s entrance and one day we went to a theatre and we were standing and er ‘where are you going girls’ and we said ‘we’re trying to get a seat’ [whistles] and he beckoned us in and he took us round the side entrance and we all went in with all the chorus girls and we ended up across the stage, the curtains were drawn back with all the girls, it was hilarious, hilarious.
HB: [laughs] did you join in?
JC: No because they, no we couldn’t really, but they sneaked us across from one side of the stage to the other, the audience was there, the audience was there.
HB: What town was that then?
JC: This was in Liverpool, yeah Liverpool.
HB: Oh right.
JC: Hmm.
HB: I bet that was fun.
JC: It was, it was hilarious.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Well I still remember it.
HB: Well yeah it must’ve been good fun.
JC: It was a good laugh yeah. People were ever so kind to us, the doormen would sneak us in for free to the cinemas and they were really kind, really lovely.
HB: What did you do for rations then if you went under the wire, did you take a chocolate bar with you?
JC: No, no, chocolate bar, what are you talking about.
Carer: [laughs]
JC: What are they, no there was no such thing, no we just went without.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: That’s all you could do.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: Chocolate bar.
HB: Right, so now we get to the difficult bit.
JC: Oh, I thought that was the difficult bit.
[laughter]
HB: We get to the difficult bit now right.
JC: Yeah.
HB: So how often did they send you on leave?
JC: Once every three months if we were lucky.
HB: Right.
JC: It depended on bomber raids, if we could get transport, because the trains, it used to take me three days to go from Liverpool to get home, three days on my leave there and three days to get back to camp.
HB: So you really only had.
JC: A few days, yeah, yeah. And that was once every three months.
HB: Yeah, so.
JC: If we were lucky, mostly six months depended on bomber commands, the pressure of traffic at the time, whether we’d get rail transport, personnel everything. There was a war on dear.
HB: Yes, absolutely. So you’re sitting at your tele printer and you keep going off on leave so the big question is how did you meet Ted?
JC: At a dance in, we were back, because I was out of the service by then. Back in civilian life.
HB: Oh you were back in civilian life, oh right.
JC: Yeah.
HB: So you didn’t meet Ted during the war?
JC: No, no, no, no, I met him here in Rugby.
HB: Ah right. So you’ve been invited to all these theatres and cinemas and.
JC: Not invited dear, smuggled in.
HB: [laughs]
JC: Invited in inverted commas.
HB: Yeah. So what about boyfriends then?
JC: It depends they were all in the forces, so you’d make a date to meet somebody and they didn’t turn up and then you’d find that they were sent on a bombing raid but of course they couldn’t tell you.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: And sometimes they came back, most times they didn’t.
HB: Yeah.
JC: It was very, very sad, very sad.
HB: Did that happen to you?
JC: Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, a special mate. And you’d stand in the Nafi que waiting for a cup of tea and you’d turn round and there’d be a chap standing behind you with no face.
HB: Oh right.
JC: That was, and the trick was to say ‘do you want a cup of tea mate’ you know without blinking without showing any emotion, that was the trick.
HB: Right.
JC: Never once did you ever let go and if a man like that asked you to dance you always danced, you never refused EVER.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Just wasn’t done. Broke the code.
HB: Absolutely, absolutely.
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: So when you were up at Liverpool did they have dances on the camp.
JC: No, no.
HB: That was that all excluded.
JC: Yes because it was a secret camp.
HB: Yeah because it was secret, yeah. So.
JC: No we went into the town.
HB: So you went into the town. Yeah, oh right that’s interesting,
JC: We didn’t get buses we got trucks.
HB: Yeah.
JC: And when you were going, and you asked if they could get, and what they did they threw you into, literally threw us into the backs of the trucks. Hands under your bottom and shoved and that’s how we arrived at the trucks.
HB: Ah, that was a good excuse [laughs].
JC: It was.
HB: Yeah, so just going back to 1945 ’46 erm, you’re doing the tele printing work, what sort of things were you sending out?
JC: Well they were secret codes.
HB: So,so.
JC: Blocks of six, lines of five.
HB: Right, so.
JC: They were just letters which didn’t mean a thing or numbers.
HB: Right.
JC: It was secret you see as you know.
HB: Yeah. And you mentioned earlier on that you did the missing list.
JC: Yes.
HB: You did the missing list and that sort of thing.
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: So did you send them out?
JC: They were in plain code.
HB: They were in plain language.
JC: In plain language, yeah.
HB: Er for the losses.
JC: Yeah yeah, oh it was dreadful, kin formed, that means they their families had been informed, kin not formed means they didn’t know who they were or where they were, they just didn’t come back to camp.
HB: Hmm.
JC: It was really terrible.
HB: And you, I suppose really sometimes you’d recognise names would you?
JC: Hmm.
HB: That would be sad.
JC: It was terrible, really was, terrible. Bored her off look, [laughs] she has to go to her job.
HB: Yeah. Yes it’s difficult to sort of put that into words isn’t it?
JC: It is actually.
HB: Yeah.
JC: It went too deep and I’ve never forgotten it never.
HB: No.
JC: No never, all those lovely men and they were and then we started getting them back you know how the, was it John West is it, started getting back bomber command [unclear].
HB: Oh the er,
JC: Terrible injuries.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Faces burnt to a frazzle, dreadful.
HB: Yeah.
JC: And we had an aircraft landed on our where we were the site we were on and to see the, oh god I can’t tell you, dreadful, dreadful, falling out of the aircraft all in flames.
HB: Were they prisoners of war coming back?
JC: No, no they were bomber crew.
HB: They were just crew who had managed to get back.
JC: Get back that’s right.
HB: Badly burned.
JC: That’s right, shocking, shocking it was.
HB: Yeah that’s the, that’s the side that people don’t know about.
JC: No don’t know about.
HB: They don’t really know much about do they?
JC: No, no. But I thought of their, some of them were married with young children and they said that their wives loved having them [unclear] and the children went screaming from their daddies, it was awful, terrible, terrible.
HB: Very, very hard to imagine isn’t it.
JC: Oh terrible. Anyway.
HB: I mean at that, that’s an aspect you know we don’t very often get to talk about.
JC: Hmm.
HB: So you’ve got to 1944 or ’45 ’46, you’re still up at Liverpool?
JC: No I was back home then.
HB: Back in.
JC: No ’48.
HB: So you were up at Liverpool all the while up until ’48?
JC: Yes then I came back down to Somerset.
HB: Right.
JC: Back home.
HB: Which was where mum and dad were?
JC: That’s right.
HB: Right, so you, if you can remember it, 1948, the war’s been over a couple of years, erm, what were things like in the country and living?
JC: It wasn’t bad actually I think the country recovered pretty well really and because I was in Somerset and so it was cider country.
HB: Oh yes.
JC: Yes it was nice there.
HB: What did you do when you were de-mobbed did you just de-mob straight away from there or did you have to go anywhere?
JC: Well I’d been a hairdresser, oh no, no you were just chucked out of the camp and [whistles] and that was it you know.
HB: Did you go and get a smart dress and a hat and a handbag?
JC: Oh you [unclear]
HB: [laughs]
JC: No you came out in uniform and you sent the uniform back.
HB: Right.
JC: They had them back.
HB: Because a lot of the men went to erm, when they were de-mobbed they sent them to er a place and they were given a ticket for er for clothing.
JC: No we weren’t.
HB: You weren’t?
JC: No, no nothing like that.
HB: Right.
JC: No, nothing you just went home that was it, they gave you a rail ticket home, goodbye thanks but no thanks and that was it.
HB: Right.
JC: You’re gone.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Just like that. Oh no, no clothing ticket or anything.
HB: Was, when about in ’48 would that be would that be sort of in the middle or towards the end of ’48?
JC: I don’t know, I can’t remember, no I can’t remember.
HB: That’s alright. So you’ve come, you’ve come to the end of your time in the WAF, you’ve served all the way through with bomber command.
JC: Yeah.
HB: And you’ve seen what you’ve seen. What did you think about how the Government were about bomber command?
JC: What the government thought about bombing?
HB: Yeah.
JC: I don’t know I couldn’t know really.
HB: No, no.
JC: What the Government thought. I knew what the civilians thought, which was respect.
HB: Right.
JC: Total respect. What the Government thought I wouldn’t know.
HB: Right. So you didn’t read much about it in the newspapers what it was about?
JC: No, no I don’t remember if I did.
HB: Ok.
JC: I don’t think there was a lot in about the war, I think it was all about getting back, back into work and getting the country moving again really you know.
HB: Yeah, so you went down to Somerset.
JC: Yeah.
HB: Whereabouts in Somerset were you?
JC: Oh dear, Bridgwater.
HB: Oh right, yes, yes.
JC: Bridgwater, yeah.
HB: Well that’s not too far from Bristol and places like that.
JC: No, no, no that’s true.
HB: So is that how, when you went back to Somerset you were still hairdressing, is that how you, did you go back to hairdressing?
JC: No, no I had to give that up, my training. It was sad really because I’d done all my training and I was coming up for my last year, my finishing year, when the war came and then of course ‘you can’t do this’ ‘it’s a luxury trade’ and I was given the choice make ammunitions or going in the forces so I was advised to go in the forces.
HB: Right.
JC: Because you were filling shells.
HB: Right.
JC: Your skin went yellow, your teeth fell out, dreadful.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: So they said if I were you I’d go in the forces so that’s what I did. But of course I came out with a trade.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Prior to, not one that I was joined in the first instance so I went into, I worked at the GEC.
HB: Oh right, yeah, yeah.
JC: And, erm I was doing tele printing there.
HB: So GEC, that was General Electric Company.
JC: That’s right, yeah.
HB: The big electrical company.
JC: That’s right yeah.
HB: And you carried on tele printing?
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: And how long.
JC: Only in those days I was doing, I wasn’t sending out bombers, I was doing erm, how many bits of this you wanted and oh boring stuff you know.
HB: Right, and how long did you do that for Joyce.
JC: Oh I can’t remember exactly, till I met Ted I think, no I don’t remember. I met Ted in Coventry.
HB: Right.
JC: At a dance.
HB: Was he a Coventry lad?
JC: Yeah, no he comes from Rugby here.
HB: Oh he came from Rugby, yeah, yeah.
JC: Yeah, that’s why I’m here now, my brother-in-law brought me back. I was in a lovely care home down the south.
HB: Oh right.
JC: Very nice indeed [pause] but when my brother-in-law came to visit he used to stay with us you see.
HB: Right.
JC: And we couldn’t get rid of the man, he would stay, he lives in France.
HB: [laughs]
JC: And he wanted to come back, he married a French woman and she wouldn’t come from France, she wouldn’t come back to England and she wouldn’t let David come back either.
HB: Oh right.
JC: So he was stuck in France and he said you can come and visit me here, because his son lives in Rugby that’s how I’ve come to be in Rugby.
HB: Ah right.
JC: [unclear] I didn’t choose to I liked it where I was.
HB: So you got a job with GEC and did you work all through to retirement or?
JC: Oh no I left when l was fifty.
HB: Oh right.
JC: I didn’t retire until I was fifty then I retired.
HB: Right.
JC: And Ted worked another two years and then he retired.
HB: Yeah, and did Ted worked for GEC as well?
JC: As well yes.
HB: Ah right. It wasn’t a GEC dance that you met at was it?
JC: Do you know it might have done.
HB: Because they used to have big dances didn’t they?
JC: They did, and it was in Coventry yes it could well have been.
HB: Yeah.
JC: I was leaving, he’d been to the pub with his mates and he was rolling up for the last dance you know and I was leaving with my mates to go home and he touched me on the arm and said ‘can I have the last dance’ and I said ‘I’m sorry but I’m just leaving I’m going home’, ’I’ll take you home’ he said. Now I’ve never seen that man before in my life and I immediately trusted him, I said he’s ok.
HB: Right.
JC: So he took me back home and we were never apart from that day.
HB: Lovely.
JC: We were married Fifty-four years.
HB: Ah that’s nice.
JC: Yeah, quite romantic really.
HB: It is.
JC: Yes, yes.
HB: And you’ve got no other family now?
JC: Nobody apart from my brother-in-law and David my brother-in-law brought me from a lovely care home in the south of England which I knew.
HB: Yeah.
JC: And he brought me up here. You see when he came to visit me down in Hampshire he used to stay at my house.
HB: Ah so you ended up living in Hampshire.
JC: Yeah we bought a house in fact that’s it there on the wall that photograph up there.
HB: Oh lovely.
JC: Yeah that was it.
HB: Oh that’s a big place, that’s pretty good, that’s pretty good. So.
Carer: Can I just ask.
HB: Yes.
Carer: Do you want me here?
JC: Not if you don’t want to be love no.
Carer: No because it’s taking so long I can’t sit here.
JC: No, no you’re alright.
HB: That’s fine, thank you. Erm [pause]
JC: You’re being recorded.
HB: And quite right too, quite right too.
JC: [laughs]
HB: That’s how it should be, erm, right so you were, ah right, I understand now, so who, were you working down in Hampshire as well.
JC: Yeah.
HB: And was that with GEC?
JC: No I wasn’t no, I can’t remember what I was doing, no I honestly can’t, it wasn’t the GEC I know.
HB: Right.
JC: I think I was hairdressing.
HB: Oh right.
JC: I was a hairdresser.
HB: Oh right you managed to get back to that.
JC: Yeah, yeah
JC: And I met Ted at a dance and we never separated after that.
HB: That’s lovely.
JC: Fifty four years till he died then David he bought me back here, back from everything I knew, everybody I knew, I was at a lovely care home there, back here where I didn’t know anybody so I had to learn everything all over again, broke my heart really because I didn’t want to leave.
HB: Yeah.
JC: It was lovely, they were really nice ladies there. Well they are here but.
HB: That’s sad.
JC: It was, it was, it upset me, still does.
HB: Yeah. What, if you can cast your mind back to the war years and your time in the, in the er RAF, what would you think was the best bit?
JC: The companionship I think. The comradeship and if you made a friend they stood by you, they was loyal, and then they were, well they stood by you whatever you know. I think that’s the best bit I remember the most.
HB: And what do you think was the worst bit?
JC: The death, the sadness losing bomber command friends. That was the worst bit.
HB: Hmm.
JC: Yeah, because I never saw the bombing you see while they were having dreadful bombings in Coventry I never saw that because I was in the, I was down in.
HB: Down in the bunker.
JC: In the air force yeah.
HB: Erm just let me write, I’m going to forget this if I don’t write it down [pause]. So how would, how, how do you feel about what the WAFs did in the war, what, what’s your feelings about the WAFs?
JC: I think they were invaluable.
HB: Hmm.
JC: Because they took the place of the men you see leaving the men free to go and do their bombing and what not you see.
HB: Hmm.
JC: And they were doing the telecommunications well the telecommunications for the whole North East of England where I was so all the signals were going back across the country. Oh no I don’t think they could have managed without the women’s services not really.
HB: And do you think they got the credit they deserved at the end of the war?
JC: In a way yes, although yeah, I think so but I’m not sure.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Certainly from the civilians yes but the Government hmm.
HB: Did you actually did you get your medals?
JC: No, no, not even a thank you ‘ok that’s it’ [whistles] shove off.
HB: Oh right.
JC: Literally.
HB: Because I think from your service ’44 to ’48 I think you probably qualified for a couple of medals.
JC: I should think so [laughs].
HB: Yeah, yeah. But you never thought to get your medals.
JC: I didn’t think we were entitled to one.
HB: Yeah. Certainly two I would think.
JC: Would you.
HB: Yeah, I would have thought so. You’ve got the defence medal. I could get you some details of that if you need it to be able to get your medals.
JC: I wouldn’t mind having a go, although I’m ninety-three I mean, you know it would’ve been nice, recognition at last.
HB: [laughs] Yes, yes, I mean you’re not alone.
JC: Oh I’m sure.
HB: A lot of people didn’t bother applying for medals
JC: No.
HB: And in fact you’re not the first to say that you never really thought about medals.
JC: No I didn’t no.
HB: You’d done your bit.
JC: And that was it, helped save the country di dah di dah you know and that was it. Yeah. You done your bit.
HB: So back in civilian life at the end of the war, that, that those early years, erm everybody you know the history books they talk about the erm restrictions and you know the austerity, how difficult it was, how did you fit into that when you came back from?
JC: Well it was very difficult because you’d gone from having companionship and erm whatever daft thing you wanted to do there was always somebody who’d do it with you, you know.
HB: Yeah.
JC: But in Civilian Street there isn’t.
HB: No.
JC: You’re on your own and that’s it.
HB: Yeah.
JC: So you miss the companionship more than anything, yeah.
HB: One thing I did miss and I forgot to ask you right early on, when you actually went into the coding centres, the place where you were working.
JC: Signal centre.
HB: Signal centre sorry, what was the hierarchy, how did it work say you were the corporal you would report to Sergeant I presume?
JC: Sergeant yeah.
HB: And how would that then work?
JC: Well they’d go up another scale go up another command I don’t know where it went after that.
HB: So who would have actually been really in charge of you there?
JC: A Sergeant.
HB: Just a Sergeant?
JC: Female sergeant a WAF.
HB: A WAF sergeant? And that sergeant would report to what a male officer?
JC: I’ve no idea to be honest.
HB: Oh right.
JC: No idea. There weren’t many males about.
HB: It was secret, that really was secret then.
JC: There weren’t many males about it was a female officer we had.
HB: Oh right.
JC: The CO was female, the whole camp was female.
HB: Ah, that explains it.
JC: Yeah
HB: That’s what, I was trying to think earlier on how it went. Oh so it was a female camp.
JC: All female camp.
HB: Right.
JC: The CO was female right the way through.
HB: Can you remember the CO’s name?
JC: No.
HB: [laughs]
JC: I’m glad to say [laughs]
HB: [laughs] never had to go and stand on the carpet.
JC: Oh I did.
HB: Oh dear, what was that for [laughs].
JC: Oh I can’t remember, I really can’t remember.
HB: [laughs] I bet that’s what you say.
JC: I really can’t remember.
HB: No, you didn’t get caught going under the wire then?
JC: No, certainly not.
HB: [laughs]
JC: Or coming back.
HB: [laughs] I don’t know, I don’t know.
JC: We used to go to the theatres and to and do you know the civilians were marvellous. If we went in, and we, we, perhaps there’d be six to eight of us would go as a crew you know.
HB: Yeah.
JC: And we all went in or out together and if we went to a picture place you know, we were ushered in and they’d move people, civilians out from the front seats, we went to a theatre, the most, so they moved the civilians out and moved us in so we could sit down and if we went to a theatre they’d move civilians out from the front and moved us in and that’s the sort of treatment we were given, top notch.
HB: Wow, yeah.
JC: It really was, top notch. They were brilliant.
HB: Have you got any, did you stay close to any of the people you served with.
JC: I did for a five years.
HB: Yeah.
JC: But of course we all went our separate ways and we ran out of things to say.
HB: Yeah.
JC: You know, they got married and had family and I hadn’t got married at that point you know.
HB: Yeah [pause] It’s alright it’s just a little bit noisy with people shouting in the corridor. Erm, hmm that’s interesting Joyce and I don’t think we’ve spoken to many people who worked in the signal sections.
JC: No, of course you wouldn’t talk about it it’s all coded.
HB: Yeah.
JC: And you didn’t know what you were doing what what it normally was.
,
HB: They just gave it you and you.
JC: Yeah, yeah, we had five letters and five down and they were squares and they had to be spaced so much apart for the machines to pick them up and they’re all on what do you call it tikatape now.
HB: Yeah
JC: No holes, no three above and two below. The small holes were fed and picked up by the teeth in the machine and fed through you know.
HB: Yeah. Did you keep a diary with you or anything like that during the war?
JC: No, you didn’t keep a diary because it was all secret so I don’t think you’d be allowed.
HB: Right. Ah well as you’ve already admitted Joyce sometimes things you were allowed and some things that you weren’t allowed.
JC: It did get a bit mixed a bit blurred shall we say.
HB: [laughs] Did you have any photographs of your time in the WAF?
JC: I did yes, but I moved places, but I’ve been moved about so much I’ve lost them all.
HB: Ahh.
JC: Which is very sad and saddens me because there were lots of my dear, dear friends.
HB: Yeah.
JC: They really were, really were friends.
HB: That’s such a shame.
JC: They’d stick, they’d lie for you they really would. They’d lie for you if they had to.
HB: Yeah.
JC: It was that sort of friendship you know.
HB: Yeah.
JC: You got you’re a day [unclear] a day.
HB: Yeah, so you.
JC: I think that’s what the war did to be honest.
HB: Yeah. And what do you think, what do you think your own contribution was to the?
JC: I think I made some kind of a dent you know. Doing the tele printing and everything else, certainly making a contribution doing the job that a man would have to do otherwise.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: So I took the place of a man to let him free to go and bomb Germany [laughs]
HB: Yeah, yeah. Did you ever get the chance, at the end of the war people have told me about things called cooks tours where they take ground staff up in the aircraft and fly them over Germany and back.
JC: No, no I never got chance to do that.
HB: You never got chance to do that?
JC: No, no, it never came my way at all, no.
HB: Ah right. Well Joyce I’m not going to keep you any longer because you’ve got your party to go to.
JC: That’s true, that’s true.
HB: And I don’t know how long that is, about five minutes I think. So what I’ll do is finish.
JC: It’s only to celebrate this place being opened.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Yeah.
HB: We’ll terminate the interview there, we started at five past ten and it’s er ten to eleven.
JC: Not bad, I hope I’ve given you something to work on.
HB: You certainly have Joyce and what I’d like to do is thank you very much because people like yourself are getting a bit few and far between now.
JC: Well I suppose we are really, well I’m ninety-three.
HB: And the things that you can tell us, you may not think they’re important but when you look at the whole thing and how they all fit together, it shows.
JC: Well I hope it makes some sort of a sense anyway.
HB: Yes it will do.
JC: Good.
HB: I’m going to switch the machine off now Joyce.
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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AColleyJ170927
PColleyJ1701
Title
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Interview with Joyce Colley
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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00:44:52 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
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Harry Bartlett
Date
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2017-09-27
Description
An account of the resource
Joyce Colley grew up in Leicestershire and Somerset. She was working as a trainee hairdresser before she was conscripted into the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in 1944. After training she worked as a teleprinter operator in an underground bunker. She remained in the Royal Air Force until 1948.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lancashire
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
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Carron Moss
entertainment
ground personnel
military living conditions
military service conditions
missing in action
RAF Cranwell
training
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/258/3405/PGanneyK1714.2.jpg
6fb1840bce686f93c05487b2d52af5e7
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/258/3405/AGanneyK170301.2.mp3
36f95d68dd3df62895cef4b33b9aef33
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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Ganney, Keith
Keith Ganney
K Ganney
Description
An account of the resource
23 items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer Keith Ganney (b. 1922, 1324929 Royal Air Force), his log books, documents and photographs. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 57 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Keith Ganney and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2017-03-01
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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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Ganney, K
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HB: This is an interview with Keith Ganney, flying officer with 57 squadron whose date of birth is 10th of November 1922. His service number was 1324929. Interview is taking place at ****. Interviewer is Harry Bartlett, a volunteer with the International Bomber Command Centre. Good morning Mr Ganney.
KG: Good morning.
HB: Perhaps you could just give us an idea of what you were doing prior to the war starting.
KG: Yes, well, are we recording now?
HB: Yes. Yes. We are on recording.
KG: Do what Max Bygraves used to say, ‘I’m going to tell you a story.’
HB: You carry on.
KG: I’m going to start at the beginning. I met my wife when she was not quite seventeen in 19, early 1942. Her birthday is the 6th of February 1942 and I’d met her through going on a fairly regular basis to a bank on behalf of the company I worked for and I then decided I ought to take her out to lunch because I really fancied her. Is this all right?
HB: Yeah. This is your interview.
KG: I really fancied her so I took her out to lunch and it cost me a small fortune in so far as she said she wasn’t hungry and she had a bowl of soup which would cost about one and a half pence in today’s money. I don’t know what I had. And then a week or so after that I took her to the pictures and we saw a film called, “Ships with Wings,” and she was most impressed with me because I had been given a nice wallet by my parents when I was nineteen in the previous November, November 1941 and I pulled out a shiny, five, a pound note and that seemed to impress her. So obviously at that time she was after my money.
HB: [laughs] A man of substance.
KG: Yeah. Anyhow, we dated then for a few weeks until I joined and I’d already enlisted in the December 1941, the RAF and I was called up in, I think it was February ’42 and we went to St John ’s Wood and crossed Abbey Road long before the Beatles were even born. So we we went there for kitting out and whatever. Make sure we were still alive I guess. From there we went down to Brighton for marching and learning how to salute which is obviously a pre-requisite if you’re flying on Lancasters. So we stayed at Brighton for about a few weeks at the Metropole Hotel in Brighton and from there we moved to Scarborough and at Scarborough, in Scarborough one afternoon I was called out with about four others, my name was first on the list, to be guard commander for the officer, officer inspecting because we were guarding the Grand Hotel in Scarborough which is a grand hotel or was and I said, ‘Well I know nothing about rifles or anything like that,’ and this sergeant, I should think he was the 1914/18 sergeant, he said, ‘Weren’t you in the ATC?’ So I said, ‘No.’ ‘Or the air training corps or cadet corps?’ So I said, ‘No. I don’t even know which side of the shoulder you put your rifle on.’ So he said, ‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘Well in that case, number two you’d better be guard commander. You’d better be guard commander until the inspection and then you can take over as guard commander,’ which is what we did. I think there were about four or five of us. There wasn’t a bullet amongst us. If a German had come up we would have surrendered Scarborough plus the Grand Hotel without any trouble at all. So that was a little escapade in Scarborough. From Scarborough we moved to Brough just outside Hull for initial training on flying Tiger Moths and I qualified for flying Tiger Moths after, I think about ten hours and from then on we got shuttled off to Canada. We went out on the Queen Mary, the old Queen Mary and eventually when we came back we came back on the old Queen Elizabeth. And then we went to New York. From New York we went by train to New Brunswick to a town called Moncton where, I don’t know what we did there, we just festered around I think until such time as we were allotted to various places around Canada. It so happened that myself together with I think three or four other blokes were sent to Saskatchewan. A little place called Davidson of about five hundred people right in the middle of the prairies. Nice flat area for flying in and it was lovely going from Moncton out to Saskatchewan by train, one of these big Canadian type trains. I think it took us about two or three nights to get there. Am I doing to much?
HB: Absolutely spot on.
KG: Is it?
HB: Yeah. Absolutely super.
KG: We then went, got to Davidson. There were only about five hundred people, as far as I can remember, in this town, inverted commas and the girls there had never seen an English person because it was way out in the, in the sticks. The thing was, ‘Say something. We think you’re cute.’ So we, I started to fly Cornells there. A two seater aeroplane. A little bit up from a Tiger Moth. A single, single plane and during one of those escapades I was sitting in the parachute room and an instructor came in, I didn’t know who he was, and he said, ‘Where’s your instructor?’ I said, ‘He’s got the day off.’ So he said, ‘Have you, have you done aerobatics?’ So I said, ‘No.’ ‘Well get your chute on. We’ll do some aerobatics.’ Well it so happened that I’d been gorging myself on peanuts so you can imagine what happened when I, when we were doing loops and God knows what and he said when I coughed up, he said ‘Tastes better the first time doesn’t it?’ So anyhow I spent Christmas of 1942 it would be because at this time of year it was around about December and the Christmas 1942 with some people who had asked to take on a couple of RAF people and eventually I went solo on Cornells and did quite a lot of trips on them as my logbook will show you. From there we went to a place called Dauphin, D A U P H I N. Dauphin in Manitoba to fly on Cessna Cranes, twin engines Cessna Cranes. Like a downmarket version of an Anson. So I flew those and, sorry, my train of thought’s going. So after, after that they tested me after I’d done a lot of flying. My log book will tell you how many hours I did there but did a lot of flying, they tested me and found me wanting.
HB: Oh dear.
KG: Which I was, on hindsight I was very, very pleased about. I was kicked off the pilot’s course and because they didn’t think I’d make a very good pilot although I’d done a lot of cross countries by myself and if if they hadn’t had kicked me, if they had kept me going it’s almost certain I would be dead because I would have entered flying a lot earlier than I ultimately did. So I then had to re-muster and I decided well the quickest way to get back home was a short course as opposed to navigation which was a bit of a longer course, I enrolled as a bomb aimer and I went to a place called Paulsen I think it was. Paulsen. And qualified as a bomb aimer there in about 19, early 1943. Perhaps you can tell.
HB: I’ve just come to, in your Canadian logbook.
KG: Yeah.
HB: April 1943 you’re flying a Crane and it’s a progress check.
KG: Yeah.
HB: And then this -
KG: That was in April.
HB: Yeah. And this, this logbook then finishes. I’m sure. Yes. There’s no other entries in there and we move to your smaller A5 size Canadian logbook and that starts May 29th 1943 and you’re on an Anson.
KG: Yes, that’s right.
HB: 8603
KG: We -
HB: With Sergeant Sagar.
KG: We came, we came back, as I say on the Queen Elizabeth and we were posted to Penrhos in North Wales where we did further training at AFU, Advanced Flying Unit practicing bomb aiming with twenty two pound smoke bombs and things like that and the pilots were also practicing. From there we went, from there where did we go?
HB: Well that was, that was, the AFU was number 9 AFU at Penrhos.
KG: Penrhos that’s right.
HB: Penrhos. And so you then went to the 17 OTU at Silverstone.
KG: OTU.
HB: March.
KG: Operational Training Unit and we -
HB: March 1944.
KG: I think it was before that. We flew on, we got allocated to the various crews and there again your life depended on who chose you. It was just like picking up a football team in the playground when you were about ten years old. I’ll have him, I’ll have him and there was no question of what were your abilities or anything. It was just by chance.
HB: Where did you do that Keith? Was that in a sort of like a big hangar or -
KG: I can’t remember where we actually did the selection but it was just a very much of a random selection of a whole swarm of people saying, ‘Well I’ll have him and I’ll have him,’ until you’ve got the seven bods that you need. Then we flew there. I think it, wasn’t it the Advanced Flying Unit? AFU, as I say.
HB: I’m just looking at your logbook here and it’s got you, you’re at the AFU until mid-February
KG: Yeah.
HB: ‘43, sorry ’44.
KG: Yeah on the AFU we, we were flying Wellingtons, this was for the pilot’s benefit, Wellingtons and Stirlings.
HB: Oh right.
KG: Until we, from there we graduated on flying the bigger stuff until we went to the OTU and Operational Training Unit and eventually we went on to what they called the LFS. Lancaster Finishing School.
HB: Yeah.
KG: So by that time I think we were in 1944, early 1944 maybe the end of ‘43.
HB: I’ve got, I’ve got in your logbook here if it helps June the 16th 1944. Conversion Unit Wigsley.
KG: Wigsley yeah.
HB: And it starts, that starts off with Stirlings.
KG: Yeah. That was June ’44 was it?
HB: That was in June ’44.
KG: Then you go on to the LFS I think.
HB: Yeah and then we’ve the LFS up the road at Nottingham at Syerston there.
KG: Syerston, yeah.
HB: July 28th
KG: So that’s where we went first on to Lancasters. Then we got posted. Then we got posted to East Kirkby, to the squadron.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And the skipper was a Geordie lad from around the Houghton le Spring area of Durham and he seemed very keen to get on to operations. I wasn’t all that keen ’cause I thought you could be killed.
HB: Yeah.
KG: So eventually he kept on going to the squadron leader and the squadron leader, ‘No. You can’t go on this one. You haven’t done any daylight trips yet. You can’t go on that one because it’s too far. And it was typical RAF one of the first two trips that we went on Konigsberg.
HB: Yeah.
KG: Which was about eleven.
HB: Eleven hours.
KG: Eleven hours, eleven and a quarter hours and we got caught in the searchlights there. We weaved our way out of them and we had to divert when we got back to the UK. I think we landed somewhere up in Scotland somewhere and had to stay there the night because of bad weather and the next day which was a Sunday we took off to go back to our own base and he was determined to fly over his house because he was more or less enroute so he flew over his house and revved up these four Lancaster engines vroom vroom so you can imagine the noise.
HB: Yeah.
KG: They make and eventually of course his family came out and he did some sneak turns and he could see his family house and his parents apparently. So that was Konigsberg. First trip. Then the following Saturday we went to Konigsberg again.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
KG: We obviously hadn’t done a very good job.
HB: Oh dear.
KG: Not done a very good job. So that was two very long trips.
HB: Can I just ask you something Keith? I’m just looking at your logbook here and you’ve got two night time operations 16th and 18th of August. One is called bullseye.
KG: Oh well those are -
HB: The Hague.
KG: Yeah.
HB: And bullseye. What were the bullseye operations?
KG: Bullseye was a sort of a training flight.
HB: Right.
KG: A pseudo operation. And sometimes when you went on a bullseye you’d, you know, a crowd of you, various aircraft from other squadrons or other parts of 5 group would go out in to the North Sea and whatever as if it was going to be a raid so that was a bullseye.
HB: Right.
KG: But it wasn’t an operation as such.
HB: Yeah.
KG: I think, I think after that what have we got as the next one?
HB: Yeah. You’ve done the two Konigsberg and then you do a daytime raid.
KG: Yeah. That’s right.
HB: To Burgainsville.
KG: Yeah. That was for, that was for these flying bomb sites.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
KG: All the night flights are in red.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And the green flights are day flights. We then carried on. I don’t think there was anything particularly exciting.
HB: Well you did, well you did Boulogne. That, that could be a bit hairy I think.
KG: Yeah.
HB: I’ve been told.
KG: Boulogne. I don’t remember -
HB: Bremerhaven.
KG: Bremerhaven. Yeah, we went to Bremerhaven. I mean we got shot at obviously and, just turn off the tape a minute will you.
HB: Yeah. No problem.
KG: Please. Just a second.
[machine paused]
HB: Interview recommenced just while Mr Ganney had a little cough. Well you had number 6 operation was Bremerhaven.
KG: Yeah.
HB: But then number twelve which would make you fairly experienced then because you’d done quite a few daytime ops, that was Bremen.
KG: I think it was probably Bremen.
HB: Yeah.
KG: Anyhow, when, shall I repeat - ?
HB: Yes. Yes please. Yeah.
KG: We were instructed bomb Bremen docks I suppose and the town and we were told to run up on a single marker on the ground laid by the master bomber and each aircraft was given a different angle to come in at and a different time delay. So the thing was that you do saturate the bombing and because we were an experienced crew at that time we had, I think it was a twenty eight seconds delay and as bomb aimer I lined everything up and I had to shout out, ‘Now,’ when we got exactly on the marker and the navigator was supposed to count twenty eight seconds and tell me when effectively to release the bombs. So after flying through loads of flak and God knows what, the fighters as well I suppose he, I said, ‘Isn’t it that time?’ ‘Oh my God,’ he said, ‘I’ve forgotten to count.’ So immediately I let the bombs go. Where they finished up I don’t know and the, when I went for a commission this matter was raised with the commanding officer as to why my picture, ‘cause you always took photographs, why my picture was so far away from the centre so I had to tell him what had happened. So that was a silly situation. So -
HB: It obviously didn’t affect the, the inevitable promotion.
KG: Well no. I mean getting a commission in those days was like going up for a NAAFI ration.
HB: Oh
KG: You know.
HB: Yeah.
KG: If your face fitted you’d be in.
HB: Yeah.
KG: So that was Bremen I think.
HB: You’ve got an entry in here for November. November the 1st, daytime operation against Homberg which was oil.
KG: That was oil.
HB: And all you’ve written in your log, this is what amazes me about these log books, you’ve just written flak hold and then brackets sixteen.
KG: I can’t remember that.
HB: Yeah.
KG: I can’t remember.
HB: But the next one was a night one at Dusseldorf.
KG: Dusseldorf is, is a story in itself.
HB: Yeah.
KG: We went out to bomb Dusseldorf on an absolutely perfect moonlight night. Not a cloud in the sky. We bombed Dusseldorf as an experienced crew for a fairly low level. That was thirteen thousand feet if I remember rightly and we went through the target area, bombed and immediately we came out of the target area we were attacked by an ME109 and with his first burst he wounded, severely wounded the rear gunner so we hadn’t got him firing back and then the mid-upper gunner’s guns weren’t operating correctly and all we had was the mid-upper gunner on the top of the aircraft telling us where this fighter was. Now when you are being attacked by a fighter the thing is to do is what they call corkscrews and it’s up to the mid-upper gunner to tell the pilot when to corkscrew because you know he comes in the rear and you turn and he turns and he’s got to turn a lot more and then you roll and then he comes back in again and this went on. I think it’s somewhere in the archives it was about fifteen minutes ‘cause this bloke obviously knew he wasn’t going to get anybody firing back at him and I couldn’t fire anything from the front turret because I never even saw the chap ‘cause he came in, dived away, came around again and eventually this, according to the mid-upper gunner and I’ve got no support for this thing, he said the ME109 came in quite close, he said, ‘I could see the bloke and he waggled his wings and dived away.’ That was the end of the attack. Possibly he was out of range for operations or he’d run out of ammunition. I don’t know. So we flew on and I think by this time we were down to about five thousand feet and the mid-upper gunner called out, ‘Somebody had better come back and see if Vic’s alright because we can’t get him on the intercom.’ So being the most useless person in the aircraft I was told to go back and climb over everything, over the main spar and whatever. Go back and see what was happening and the mid-upper gunner also gave me great confidence because he said, ‘You’d better put your parachute on because there’s a bloody great hole in the side of this aircraft somewhere,’ and so I said, ‘Well perhaps somebody had better come with me.’ So the flight engineer, all he does really is sit alongside the pilot and look at the instruments so he came with me and he was a nineteen year old lad and he came back with me ‘cause I was, what shall we say, a coward. Right. I didn’t want to go back by myself in case anything happened and when we got back over the main spar there was the rear gunner lying in what I thought was a load of blood. It turned out it was sort of a pinky oil but you know, in the light there you can’t tell which was which. So we tried to give him some morphia which I don’t think we succeeded in doing because I don’t think we did it properly and we actually gave him a cigarette and I was told to stay with him all the way back to base so I sat there and of course when I’m sitting there you could look out the side of the aircraft. There was a big big hole. You could practically walk through it.
HB: Right.
KG: And you could see the tail fins waving a bit in the breeze and so we flew back. We flew back to Woodbridge. American. Do you know Woodbridge?
HB: I’ve heard of Woodbridge. Yeah.
KG: Well Woodbridge was an American base basically and just had one very long runway and all these flying fortress and it they had trouble they just came in depended which way the wind was blown they just came in and landed so we came in to Woodbridge and we’d obviously radioed ahead and the, my memory’s going, so when we landed, just were running down the runway the starboard tyre burst and we tipped over a bit on to one wing. Anyhow, the blood wagon and the fire engine and the doctor and God knows who came out and took us into the medical bay and gave us tots of rum. Well I don’t drink and I can’t stand the taste of rum and I just took one sip of this rum and I said, ‘Oh God I can’t drink that,’ and the wireless operator was a nineteen, twenty year old, again a Geordie who liked his booze. He said, ‘Wahay man,’ he said, ‘I’ll have it.’ So he he took this thing and we were obviously there for the night. The next morning, the next morning we went out to have a look at the aircraft which was semi riddled with holes. Why it hadn’t burst into flames God only knows and there was the tail fin all flapping in the breeze. Just walking around there and I said to the mid-upper gunner, ‘Have you seen your whistle George?’ Well there’s a picture of it in there. There was a big indent in this whistle where I imagine it was the shape of a bullet.
HB: Right.
KG: And of course you wear it around your throat.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And George Hillier realised what that meant. That if it hadn’t hit the whistle he would have been a goner even if it was only a piece of shrapnel it was certainly you could see the picture in there and when he eventually came to leave the RAF at the end of his flying career they had to hand in all their gear, boots and everything they charged him threepence for his whistle ‘cause he kept it. Charged him threepence for his whistle. So that was, that was Dusseldorf and we went a week, or two or three weeks later to the hospital where the chap was and saw him there but if, the thing is, if he, if the mid-upper gunner had been killed and if that whistle hadn’t, shall we say, effectively saved his life then we would never have known where this fighter was and we would have been dead as mutton.
HB: Oh dear.
KG: Anyhow, the skipper, he got the DFC and the mid-upper gunner, because of his commentary he got the DFM and people say to me, ‘What did you get?’ I said I got the screaming abdabs. Yeah so –
HB: Absolutely. Your rear gunner. Did you say his name was Vic?
KG: Vic. Vic Lewell.
HB: Yeah. And did he, did he recover?
KG: He recovered and he died some, oh many years later really but he showed us all the shrapnel they’d taken out of him. There was the nose of a canon shell in amongst his souvenirs.
HB: Blimey.
KG: Yeah.
HB: So, but obviously to carry on you would have had another rear gunner join you.
KG: No. Yes. We did. We had another rear, rear gunner. The other, the other thing is it comes on to the next story. Am I doing too much?
HB: No. No. You’re doing great.
KG: The next story. We went to Trondheim. You’ll see it in there.
HB: I’ve got, I’ve got one marked Trondheim abortive.
KG: That’s right.
HB: That’s 22nd of November.
KG: 22nd of November. Anyhow, we went to Trondheim to bomb the U-boat pens and docks and God knows what and we were then told to abort the raid because the master bomber couldn’t mark the target accurately enough to avoid killing a load of Norwegians so we were instructed to fly back home. I don’t know how many aircraft, we often used to have a hundred, two hundred from 5 Group. So, as I said in that thing there, coming back over the North Sea at the end of November there aint a lot to see. You don’t see any lights. You’re not going to get any fighters around there. There was no flak. So I don’t know whether I dozed off or not, I don’t know but we were flying quite steadily and all of a sudden George Hillier who was the mid-upper gunner called out, ‘For Christ’s sake pull up Jack. We’re hitting the sea,’ and we were literally hitting the sea. You know how when you’re a kid you skim a stone -
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
KG: Over the sea. Well we must have been doing that without, without knowing it so we must have been flying a couple of inches I should think.
HB: Blimey.
KG: So he immediately pulls up and flew up to about five thousand feet and as the bomb aimer I said to the skipper, ‘You ought to jettison these bombs.’ You know you don’t normally want to land with a load of bombs on board or it might not be loads. So he said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘At the briefing we were told that if we didn’t bomb we were to bring them back ‘cause they were getting scarce,’ and I said to him at the time, ‘And so are people like me getting scarce.’ So we, we flew back, we flew back and I said, ‘I bet you’ve lost your tail wheel’. I don’t know what he said to that and so we flew, flew back and as we landed of course, with a Lanc you, or with a lot of aircraft you land on the front two wheels and slow down and the back drops down doesn’t it?
HB: Yes. Yeah.
KG: Well, we slowed down on the runway and of course the rear turret gets dragged along the runway. We had a Canadian rear gunner at that time because, because -
HB: Do you want me, do you want me to just give you a break a minute?
[machine paused]
HB: Right. We’ve all had a cough and we’ve ordered our coffees.
KG: We’ve got the new rear gunner because ours had been wounded a few weeks previously and we had a Canadian at the time and I remember this Canadian calling out, ‘What the hell goes on here? My goddamn ass is on fire,’ because his rear turret was being dragged along the runway, the fins of the aircraft had been cut down to ground level I suppose.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And he’d got all these sparks coming up the aircraft. So we pulled on to the grass and stepped out of the aircraft ‘cause you didn’t have to get the ladder out. You were on the, practically on the ground already.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And the skipper calls down to his drinking partner from the Durham area, George called, ‘Is there much damage George?’ ‘Away man,’ he said, ‘You’ll hardly notice it.’ And of course the instrument bulge underneath, that had gone. The fins had cut down to sort of ground level, the rear turret was a bit of a mess and he said you’d hardly notice it. Well a few days, two or three days later he was told to report to the CO with his logbook and he thought he was going to get a brownie point.
HB: This was the pilot.
KG: The pilot. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
KG: He thought he was going to get a brownie point for bringing the aircraft back after hitting the sea. Instead of that he got a red endorsement. It’s in there, in that folder somewhere, the actual endorsement.
HB: Blimey.
KG: You can, you can have those.
HB: Yeah.
KG: If you’d like to take them with you you can.
HB: Yeah.
KG: Have a look through them if you want to. So where was I?
HB: He’d just had his red endorsement.
KG: Yeah, he -
HB: He was -
KG: He’d got this red endorsement and he got a red endorsement for not flying at the correct height, disobeying, was it disobeying instruction? Not flying at the correct height. Hitting, allowing his aircraft to hit the sea. So it’s not me making up my mind or making a story.
HB: No.
KG: It’s there in sort of, I was going to say black and white, it’s in red and white.
HB: Yeah.
KG: So that was, that was a bit hair raising.
HB: I can imagine. I can imagine. But that, but that, that pilot what was his name? Vasey.
KG: Vasey.
HB: That, that pilot at that time he’s already got the DFC, he’s on his, you’re on your twenty first, twenty second -
KG: Yeah.
HB: Mission. Operation, sorry and he’s got a red endorsement.
KG: Yeah, doesn’t affect him. Didn’t sort of say, in that case you can’t fly.
HB: No. No.
KG: Not like a driving licence if you get a red endorsement they might ban you from driving. They can’t ban you from flying really.
HB: Yeah.
KG: So -
HB: I notice in here you’ve got one of the operations, Keith is December the 8th and it’s Heimbach Dam.
KG: Yeah. I don’t remember much about it. It was -
HB: Oh right.
KG: A standard raid as far as I can remember.
HB: Oh right it’s nothing, nothing special.
KG: Nothing exciting.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
KG: The next thing that happened I think was on our last trip which was to a place called Siegen I think you’ll find.
HB: Yes. I’ve got Siegen that was February the 1st 1945.
KG: That’s right. And we were flying across something like Holland or somewhere like that and this, the navigator, he was pretty old, he was twenty eight. The rest of us were all twenty two and under and we, he said, ‘We’ll have to go back to base because my navigation things have gone haywire,’ so Jack Vasey said, ‘I’m not bloody going back to base,’ he said, ‘We haven’t returned to base yet on any trip,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to do this on our last trip,’ and he said -
HB: Just pausing the tape.
[machine paused]
HB: Right. Coffee having arrived we can restart.
KG: I think it was what they called the Gee and something else, the H2S, I’m not quite sure and he said, ‘Well give it a kick.’ Whether he did give it a kick or not I don’t know but anyhow he said, ‘Keith can map read us from the front turret, from the front nose. Keith can map read us until the, until it gets dark and then we’ll follow the searchlights.’ That just shows you how navigation has changed.
HB: Yeah. Just a bit.
KG: Well today you could put a bomb up a bloke’s exhaust pipe practically.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And blow him up. Yeah. So, we we bombed [Seagan?] and that was our last trip.
HB: Yeah. I’ve just noticed, I’ve just noticed on this one, that’s six hours twenty minutes to [Seagan?].
KG: Yeah.
HB: But you had, you had some very long flights didn’t you? Eleven hours, ten hours.
KG: Yeah.
HB: Munich was ten and a half hours.
KG: Munich. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
KG: We bombed, we did bomb Munich. It was lovely going over the mountains just inside Switzerland.
HB: Yeah.
KG: Really. They didn’t fire at us.
HB: Didn’t they?
KG: No. I don’t suppose they have a gun in Switzerland did they? So we bombed bombed Munich. It was very awe inspiring to see the Alps. I mean we were flying at about seventeen thousand I suppose, the Alps were about eighteen thousand.
HB: Yeah.
KG: Or thereabouts.
HB: Yeah. Not something you want to bump into. So that’s, you’ve got in your book here, finished first tour February 1st 1944. Sorry 1945.
KG: Yeah.
HB: And you’d flown -
KG: I don’t know that.
HB: Two hundred and fifty eighty hours and forty minutes daytime flying.
KG: Yeah.
HB: And two hundred and sixty six hours fifteen minutes night flying.
KG: Oh right. I didn’t know that.
HB: That’s quite a few, quite a few hours that is and then you only get, you must have only, I suppose you had a little bit of leave and then you went off to Swinderby.
KG: That’s right. I went as a so called bombing instructor at Swinderby.
HB: Right.
KG: And that was fine because I got my commission so I was in the posh mess and I festered around Swinderby for some little while I guess and then it all finished and they more or less said, ‘Well where would you like to go?’ So I thought to myself Australia. I think I’ll go to Australia. It’s a nice long way away and I’m not likely to go there again so of course typical RAF where did I finish up? In the Sudan. Khartoum. But that was -
HB: That’s when you left Swinderby.
KG: That’s when I left Swinderby.
HB: Just looking in your logbook here Keith you’ve got one 24th of March 1945 you’ve got an entry here X VX 9 which I presume is exercise and it’s got France X C T Y and H L B I presume that’s -
KG: High level bombing.
HB: That’s high level bombing yeah.
KG: High level bombing.
HB: Yeah.
KG: That would be practice.
HB: Oh right. Right. And then on the next page in July this is just something I don’t know if you can remember about it, the 24th of July 1945 you got yourself with, the pilot is somebody called Daggett, you’re in a Lancaster and you’re going on a Cook’s Tour.
KG: Oh yeah. A Cook’s Tour. At the end of the war they took you around to show you what damage you’d done, you know. Have a look at the mess you made. So we flew around the Ruhr just having a look, a Cook’s Tour of -
HB: Yeah.
KG: Of the damage.
HB: You’ve even written down what you flew over. You flew over [Valkerin?].
KG: [Valkerin?] Yeah.
HB: Krefeld, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Essen, Dortmund, Ham and then etcetera. Blimey. Oh that’s a bit cutting. [laughs].
KG: What’s that?
HB: You’ve got August 23rd with a pilot called Enoch.
KG: Oh yeah.
HB: And you’ve got your duties as air bomber and it just says, Eric brackets waste of time.
KG: Most likely a code name for a practice flight I should think. I don’t know what Eric -
HB: Yeah. Yeah. I just wondered, just wondered if you could remember what X C T Y meant? Is that -
KG: Cross country.
HB: Oh right. Cross country. Right. That makes sense now.
KG: We often did that.
HB: Yeah.
KG: When we got nothing better to do we often do a cross country.
HB: So, so when did you go to the Sudan?
KG: Oh hell. Latish 1945 I suppose.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And I was out there for about six months swimming and playing tennis and I was supposed to be the air traffic officer.
HB: Right.
KG: But it was a little bit of a relaxation and a bit of a jolly really.
HB: Right. So that -
KG: A good experience to go somewhere like the Sudan.
HB: Yeah. So you sort of came to the Sudan and then you’re obviously on the down slope.
KG: Yeah.
HB: Heading towards -
KG: Demob.
HB: Demob. What, what was that sort of process like Keith?
KG: I don’t remember much about the demob process. I must have come back here and reported somewhere. They give you a suit and that’s you out of the air force so to speak and I went back to my old job which was, you see when I enlisted I was nineteen.
HB: Yeah.
KG: Nineteen. Well I wasn’t frightfully academic at the best of times but I did quite well with what nouse that I’d got and sorry my train of thoughts gone, and so I went back and having been a somebody -
HB: Yeah.
KG: I went back to this company where I was, in the eyes of the managing director, a nobody and I stayed with them until such time as the company was taken over by Plessey. Remember Plessey.
HB: Yes. Yes I do.
KG: They took us over and the, instead of us taking them over they took us over and they wanted me to go to Nottingham and offered me more money to go to Nottingham and I didn’t want to go because the kids were in grammar school in Enfield at the time so I then decided to make myself redundant and I was paid redundancy money because they were moving the company.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And I had already been invited by some people that I knew in STC to go and join them.
HB: Right. This is, this is all in the electronics industry.
KG: Well the telephone industry.
HB: Telephone industry. Yeah.
KG: I wasn’t a telephone engineer. I mean I wouldn’t, I know how to pick up a telephone and that’s about all but I became sales manager of a division where they sold the earpieces and mouthpieces, the microphone and the ear piece you know and I did quite well at that and I then retired from there in 1984. Yeah, about ‘84 on the grounds that I didn’t like the set up. It had all changed because people had been coming in and taking over this, taking over that and I thought to myself I don’t really want to stay here so I’ll take redundancy money and I left them.
HB: When did, when did you actually get married then Keith?
KG: 1947
HB: Right.
KG: So -
HB: And that was to your wife obviously.
KG: Peggy.
HB: Peggy
KG: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
KG: So but if you asked her now who she married she most likely wouldn’t know.
HB: No.
KG: Wouldn’t know when she was married. As I say she’s upstairs in bed I imagine.
HB: So how, and how many children did you have?
KG: Two. Jane.
HB: Yeah.
KG: Who’s around here somewhere.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And Ian who was a solicitor and then he set up his own business in the holiday world. Timeshare. Made a lot of money and he now plays a lot of golf.
HB: Right.
KG: Does odd jobs up in London for a company but hasn’t got to work.
HB: No.
KG: He come up here last Wednesday and he said, ‘Oh I’ve told you I’m going to America haven’t I?’ So I said, ‘No.’ I mean he’s like that. ‘I told you.’ ‘No.’ I said, ‘What are you going to America for? Because I can afford it,’ he said.
HB: Lovely.
KG: And for the last –
HB: Lovely.
KG: And for the last three years he’s been with his wife, who’s a West Indian girl, pleasant girl and they go, they fly to Florida, get on a ship, one of these bloody great ships.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And they do a seven days, ten days or whatever it is. I said, ‘Which islands are you going to?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘They’re all the bloody same these islands.’ He said, ‘They’re all full of people trying to flog you things,’ you know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine. I can imagine. Keith can I just, can I just ask you, can I just something that’s comes to my mind while we’ve been, you know we’ve been chatting and what not I don’t think, I’m just going back over your log. I don’t think we actually know who your crew were. We know the pilot was Vasey.
KG: Oh yeah. I can tell you who the crew were. I’ve got a, I’ve got a lovely big photo, painting and you’ve, if you’d like to take those papers with you -
HB: Well we, what I’m, what I’m thinking we’ll do because there’s some in there, yes I can but what I just wanted to make some enquiries about some of the bits and pieces ‘cause I mean like you’ve got the usual things we all do. You’ve got some photographs but there’s nothing written on the back.
KG: Yeah.
HB: So we don’t quite know who’s who.
KG: Yeah.
HB: But having said that that’s that’s something we can address but no it was just, it was just the names of the crew.
KG: I’ll go through them for you if you’d like to jot them down.
HB: Yeah.
KG: Jack Vasey.
HB: That’s the pilot.
KG: V A S E Y.
HB: Ray Miller, flight engineer.
KG: So he’s the FE. Ray Miller.
HB: Oh dear. I’ll have to think a bit.
KG: That’s alright.
HB: George. George, God, George Hillier, mid-upper gunner.
KG: George Hillier.
HB: Vic Lewell L E W E L L.
KG: Hang on he was rear gunner. Sorry Vic Lewell.
HB: L E W E L L.
KG: Who haven’t, we haven’t got the –
HB: Navigator.
KG: I always remember he said, ‘It’s Edward to my better class friends.’
HB: Yeah.
KG: I’ll have to, I’ll have to look in there.
HB: That’s alright. That’s alright. That’s Edward.
KG: Crowley. I think he name was Crowley. Ted Crowley. C R O W L E Y.
HB: That’s brilliant. So that’s the pilot, the flight engineer, the navigator and can you remember who your wireless op was?
KG: George Hardy.
HB: George Hardy.
KG: From, from Houghton le Spring.
HB: Right. George Hardy, wireless op. That’s great. Yeah. It’s, it’s, did you after, after the war did you keep in contact with your crew.
KG: Well that’s something I’ve forgotten to tell you. We didn’t keep in touch with each other but about -, This is my daughter.
JT: Hello Harry, you must be Harry. Hi I’m Jane.
KG: Right. Just bear with me a second.
[machine pause]
HB: Right. Just turned the tape back on.
KG: About twenty five years after we had been demobbed I don’t know the exact date my wife had a phone call and the person said, ‘Is that Mrs Ganney?’ ‘Yes.’ Was your husband in 57 squadron?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘My name is George Hillier,’ the chap I was telling you about here, he said, ‘We’ve found out that the skipper, Jack Vasey is seriously ill,’ and George Hillier and Vic Lewell were going up to Newcastle or in that area to see him. Would we like to go as well? So we all trooped off to Newcastle or wherever it was and went in to see Jack Vasey and he was so thin. So he was in his dressing gown. It was one Sunday lunchtime and he was so thin and I was talking to him and I said to him, ‘What were you doing the night we hit the sea Jack?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know man but not many people have done it.’
HB: Yeah. That’s true.
KG: Yeah. And he died. He died a week later.
HB: Oh.
KG: With cancer.
HB: Yeah.
KG: But his family were so thrilled that we’d gone up there.
HB: Yeah.
KG: But other than that we haven’t been in touch with each other.
HB: So had you, had you, had you been in contact through perhaps associations reunions or -
KG: No. We hadn’t.
HB: You didn’t do much of that.
KG: No. We weren’t, we didn’t get involved in reunions at that time.
HB: Yeah.
KG: But then I joined the 57/630 Squadron Association because 57 squadron and 630 squadron shared East Kirkby.
HB: Yeah.
KG: They were both on the, on the aerodrome and we joined the Association. We did attend one or two dinners and reunions. We may manage to get to the next one which is something like the 3rd of July at East Kirkby.
HB: Yeah.
KG: Have you ever been there?
HB: I’ve been to Kirkby, East Kirkby, yeah.
KG: And have you seen the aircraft there haven’t you?
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
KG: Because it’s called Just Jane.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And so we may try and make it there depending on how I feel and how everybody else feels.
HB: Yeah.
KG: You know, just to go over there for the, for the day.
HB: Yeah.
KG: With my wife, as you see getting her up in the morning is difficult.
HB: Yeah.
KG: You know, she’ll be alright -
HB: What was, what was, I mean I’ve spoken to one or two people who were at east Kirby but what was your abiding memory of being at East Kirby cause there’s -
KG: East Kirkby.
HB: Sorry yeah.
KG: East Kirkby.
HB: Yeah.
KG: Abiding memory. Well let me just explain it. We joined the squadron and started flying August.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And we’d finished by February.
HB: Yeah.
KG: So we weren’t there for very, I wouldn’t be able to tell you the name of any member of East Kirkby at that time because people regrettably used to come and go. They would come in one day and two or three days later on a trip they’ve been shot down or whatever so you didn’t, you didn’t have any friends in other crews.
[ringtone]
HB: Sorry about this. I thought I’d turned it off. I have now. That’s it. Sorry I do apologise for that.
KG: That’s all right.
Jane: Nice bit of music though.
KG: You didn’t, you didn’t make friends outside of your own crew because you know, it was a bit without being over dramatic it was here today gone tomorrow.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
KG: So the, we were in nissen huts with a stove in the middle and a pipe going up through the roof but it wasn’t the most ideal place to stay.
HB: I’ve heard it, I’ve heard it described as cold and windy and draughty.
KG: That’s it. That’s it. Yeah.
HB: It seems to be a recurring theme.
KG: But as I say we weren’t there all that long.
HB: Yeah.
KG: Came in something like July. We’d be gone by February.
HB: Yeah. The, at the end of the war obviously a lot of people have got views on how Bomber Command were treated or viewed at the end of the war.
KG: Yeah.
HB: I just wondered if you’d got a view on that yourself.
KG: Yes. I have really. I can to a degree understand it in so far as fighter planes were there to shoot down the enemy planes and it was very flamboyant and they were quite rightly famous for what they, what they did whereas we were there to bomb them into submission effectively.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And I think at the end of the war Montgomery, Alexander, various other people in charge were all made lords and what’s the name was not offered a peerage.
HB: Harris.
KG: Butch. What’s his name? Butch Harris. So I think Bomber Command got treated very badly but of course they, as it was then we were at peace they didn’t want to upset the Germans any more.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And say, you know well we came and bombed all your places.
HB: Yeah.
KG: But I’m sure in my own mind that Bomber Command were, it was very significant of bombing Germany into submission.
HB: Yeah.
KG: I’m not saying the army wouldn’t, they would have to have done it eventually but no I think they got the thin edge of the wedge.
HB: Yeah.
KG: The only medals I got and I couldn’t care less about bloody medals, they’re surplus and stuck indoors. If I’d have stabbed myself with a pen in Whitehall I would have got the same medals.
HB: Yeah.
KG: As I got on Bomber Command.
HB: Yeah. What medals did you get Keith? Do you know?
KG: Oh. The usual Naafi lot. I think it was the victory medal you’d get.
HB: Yeah.
KG: They defence medal.
HB: Yeah.
KG: I honestly -
HB: Aircrew?
KG: No. No. We didn’t get aircrew medals. I mean I wouldn’t have minded an aircrew medal. If you’d flown before D-Day you would have got the air crew Europe.
HB: Yeah.
KG: After D-Day you all had the same medal which was, I don’t know, was it called the European star? I don’t know.
HB: Yeah.
KG: So all all they gave us eventually after kicking up a stink and of course the person who kicked up a lot of the stink was one of the Bee Gees.
HB: Oh right.
KG: Did you know that?
HB: No. No, I didn’t know that.
KG: You look it up. The Bee Gees. He’s died now. He was instrumental in putting the muck up. I’m not on tape am I? For putting the muck in the fan and stirring it all up.
HB: Yeah.
KG: And got that lovely memorial down at Piccadilly.
HB: Yeah. At Green Park. Yeah.
KG: Yeah. You’ve you seen it have you?
HB: Yes. I’ve been there.
KG: Yeah. It’s a good memorial.
HB: Yeah.
KG: So he was one of the main people getting involved with with that. But all we got was the soppy little clasp.
HB: Yeah.
KG: They call it the air crew clasp or something.
HB: Yeah.
KG: Well, I mean it’s like somebody’s put a little mark on your arm thing.
HB: Yeah.
KG: It’s a pretty pathetic sort of a gesture.
HB: Well I think, I think what we’ll do Keith is, I thank you for very much for that. It’s really, really interesting history of what you did. If we can I’ll turn the tape off. It’s a quarter to twelve now.
KG: Yeah.
HB: So you, I think, I think you’ve done marvellously to get, to get through all that. What we’ll do if you like I’ll turn the tape off. We’ll go through some of this paperwork and I’ll just make a few notes about some of the photographs.
KG: Yeah. If you go through -
HB: And then I’m just down the road so what I can I’ll I can do the copying so I’m going to terminate the interview at 11.45.
KG: Ok. We’re going into South Lodge.
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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AGanneyK170301
PGanneyK1714
Title
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Interview with Keith Ganney
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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01:05:18 audio recording
Creator
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Harry Bartlett
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-03-01
Description
An account of the resource
Keith was called up in February 1942 and after basic training learned to fly in the Tiger Moth and then sent to Davidson in Canada for further training in Cornells and Cranes. He failed a flying test and was remustered as a bomb aimer and sent back to England to 9 AFU at RAF Penrhos and then to RAF Silverstone to carry out crew training on Wellington and Stirling aircraft.
After attending the Lancaster finishing school at RAF Syerston, Keith and his crew were posted to RAF East Kirby. Their first operation was to Konigsberg, an eleven-hour trip but had to divert to Scotland because of bad weather. Several ‘bullseye’ feint operations were next before a raid on Bremen Docks was a failure due to navigator error.
Another operation was to Dusseldorf, carried out on a perfect moonlit night. An attack by a Me109, left the rear gunner severely wounded and the mid upper turret out of action. After fifteen minutes of corkscrew evasive action, the enemy fighter flew alongside, waggled his wings and flew off. Keith comforted the rear gunner until they made an emergency landing in England. Examination of the damaged aircraft revealed the emergency whistle of the mid upper gunner had deflected a bullet and saved his life. On an operation to Trondheim, the crew were unable to bomb so returned but had a lucky escape when they flew too low and hit the sea, tearing off the tail wheel and causing a crash landing for which the pilot received a red endorsement
Their last operation was to Siegen and in mid flight the navigator wanted to turn back so the pilot ordered Keith to map read the route from the nose of the aircraft and so he finished his first tour on 1st February 1945.
After time as a bombing instructor at RAF Swinderby, Keith was posted to Sudan as an air traffic controller from where he was demobbed.
He worked as a salesman until 1984, during which time he joined 57/630 Squadron association.
Keith feels angry at the treatment of Arthur Harris and considers the aircrew clasp as a pathetic gesture.
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
England--Lincolnshire
England--Newark (Nottinghamshire)
England--Yorkshire
Wales--Gwynedd
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Siegen
Norway--Trondheim
Russia (Federation)--Kaliningrad (Kaliningradskai︠a︡ oblastʹ)
Canada
Saskatchewan
Sudan
Germany
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1945-02-01
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Terry Holmes
17 OTU
57 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
crewing up
entertainment
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Lancaster
love and romance
Me 109
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Penrhos
RAF Silverstone
Tiger Moth
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/255/3402/PLairdCraig1701.1.jpg
dd35678b5dd714fa6ca7f93d8b04d077
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/255/3402/AFoisterMS171010.1.mp3
42bc4842674a2bca0286d57de31c3599
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
Foister, Mary Stanley
Alan Laird Crag and Mary Stanley Foister
Alan Laird Craig
A Laird Craig
Mary Stanley Foister
Mary S Foister
Mary Foister
M S Foister
M Foister
Mary Stanley-Smith
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Mary Stanley Foister (nee Stanley Smith, formerly Laird Craig )(1921 - 2017, 2028611 Woman's Auxiliary Air Force).
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-10
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
LairdCraig
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is an interview between Harry Bartlett from the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive and Mary Foister. Mary was, formerly, the wife of Wing Commander Alan John Laird Craig, but Mary, in her own right, was an RAF officer. The interview is taking place at [redacted] Hoby, Leicestershire. It’s Tuesday the 10th of October 2017, and the time is 10.05am. Mary, thank you for doing this interview, for agreeing to this interview. Could you just tell me a little about your background before you joined the RAF?
MF: Yes. Well I was born in Buckinghamshire and we moved to Pound Farm in a little village in Buckinghamshire, near Princes Risborough. I was the eldest grandchild on my father’s side so I was very spoilt because of all the uncles and aunts, and the youngest one on my mother’s side so I was spoilt because I was the youngest. So I had a very happy childhood. And then my father came into some property in a place called Walters Ash, a village, Walters Ash and Knaphill, up on the hill, about five miles away from where we were and his home was there, his original home from the farm, and then suddenly, we had a boy next door called Alan Oakcroft, who lived next door to us, was in the Air Force, and he was constantly, stationed at Abingdon, constantly flying over the house and we thought oh he was just being friendly, you know. But eventually he said to my father, ‘Ernest I must come and see you officially, we’re going to take over your’ - daddy had the lease on Bradenham Manor and the land and the farming you see – ‘we are going to take over your Bradenham Manor land for Bomber Command Headquarters.’ This is why he’d been flying over, taking all the things you see, all the photographs.
HB: What year was that, Mary? Can you remember?
MF: That would be about, er, I think about ’36 ’37, yes, about then, and so well, it was absolutely amazing. He’d been chosen to do it because he’s a local boy and they thought he would know the. So they took over Walters Ash Farm, which was my father’s home, and, well it changed the whole village of course, and built Bomber Command Headquarters there. I mean we were very much a farming family, nothing to do with the services at all, but we used to go to the mess and I said to my father ‘I want to join the WAAF’ and he said ‘whatever for, you’ve got your own bedroom, you’ve got your own pony’ [laughter]. I said I want to join the WAAF, so I joined the WAAF. And I was sent to, and he had friends in the Headquarters, he said I don’t want her to go too far away so I was sent to Bicester, which was an Officer’s Training Unit for bombers and I had, well he used to come down and see me every weekend, you know, check up on me. He said ‘you’re not going to stay in are you?’ I said yes, I loved it, ‘cause I loved boarding school and so that was that. And I was at Bicester as a corporal, I got my commission, went to Windermere for the officer training thing and then the only thing I’d done after leaving school was done an admin course in London, shorthand typing, and so I was sent to Newcastle on Tyne for an admin course, and I had about three months there and that was fun because it was near Edinburgh, we used to pop up and you know, then my posting came through. By this time of course I’d got a commission.
HB: What rank were you then Mary? When you got your commission, what rank would you be then?
MF: Oh, Assistant Section Officer, ASO, [laugh] the lowest of the low. So, you see my father obviously wanted me back at Bomber Command under his control, nice control, and I didn’t want to go back to Bomber Command because it was Headquarters and they were all old all me! I was about eighteen at the time you see, so I had this friend there and he said there’s a good posting going at Exning near Newmarket, at a Bomber Group Headquarters.
HB: Exning?
MF: Number 3 Group Headquarters. So I was posted there as ASO, Assistant Section Officer, to Air Vice Marshal Richard Harrison, who had been left at the altar so he didn’t like women, so he wasn’t very receptive. [Laughter]
HB: Oh dear!
MF: But we tamed him [laughter] anyway, yes, we became great friends in the end, so that was, as I say, my first posting and I was his PA for, oh goodness I can’t think, and I avoided Bomber Command like the plague because I didn’t want to go home, you know, but eventually I got posted to up Bomber Command right at the end of the war, as the war ended, to Bomber Harris, a little bit, about six weeks of him, and that was quite enough, and then to, my last posting was Air Vice Marshal, Air Marshal Sir Norman Bottomley, who was an absolute dear, lovely to work for. In the meantime Alan had, he was the youngest Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force at twenty one, he had a spectacular career, very well decorated and he was chosen, his squadron was chosen to go to the Far East and then that war stopped, so what do we do.
HB: The Japanese war.
MF: So he trained Lancasters to do formation flying which had never been done with Lancasters, been done with fighters but never done with bomber aircraft you see, and this impressed Bomber Harris, and Bomber Harris’s PA came from Rio de Janeiro, can’t think of his name now, anyway, and he said ‘I want three white Lancasters to take my PA back to Rio.’ So he had three white Lancasters, and Alan was the chief pilot, back to Rio and they were gone for six weeks. Of course you know they made so much a fuss after the war, and they gave them a wonderful time, so I thought well that’ll be the end of that, I shall never see him again, but I did and came back and Alan was stationed at Gravely in Huntingdonshire then, RAF Gravely, which was Pathfinder Squadron, under Don Bennett, and so I was at, I was on leave, in the south of France with my mother and I said ‘I have to go back on duty’ because I thought I’m going to see that squadron come in. So I came back all the way from France, to Gravely, to see 35 Squadron come in, back from Rio de Janeiro. But Alan never spoke to me, I mean we’d been quite friendly, but I thought well that’s the end of that. A week later he phoned up and said ‘hello, how are you’, and I said ‘I’m all right’ [laugh] and he said ‘well shall we meet in London’. So I said ‘yes, fine, where?’ he said ‘oh meet at the Dorchester’. So we met at the Dorchester and he said ‘oh, I’ve been posted’, I said ‘oh goodness, really, where?’ And he said Buenos Aires. He said will you marry me? I said yes! [Laughter]
HB: As quick as that!
MF: Anyway, because of this trip to Rio, they more or less said to him what would you like to do and he said I’d like to go back to Rio, but he went to Buenos Aires and so in a month, my mother was very sort of formal person, you know in dress and everything, we had to have a white wedding in London and one thing and the other and we were married at St Peter’s, Vere Street, and then the reception at the Dorchester, and well, then within a fortnight we sailed for BA, I got out of the WAAF and.
HB: What year was that, Mary?
MF: ’40 - when did the war end?
HB: ‘45.
MF: ’46. November ’46. I got married on November the 9th ‘46. And we sailed from Tilbury on the Highland Chieftain, had a wonderful three week trip across to BA, and that was that, you know, so then I found I was pregnant with that one – straight away! [Laugh] So Gavin was born out there.
HB: So you had to resign your commission when you got married?
MF: Oh yes. Yes, yes.
HB: Can I just take you back Mary, a little bit, just a little bit, because I was intrigued, you actually started, once you were qualified at Bicester, you went out to Ixney. Ixney? How have I written it down? You qualified at Bicester, but you, for a period of time you ended, you were with Harris.
MF: Oh! At the end, that was when I was commissioned, right at the end you see.
HB: Ah right! So prior to working for Harris, what would your job entail being the PA, before Harris, because you were PA to, um, at 3 Group.
MF: Harris was before BA you see.
HB: Yep. Sorry, PA, you were personal assistant to?
MF: Bomber Harris.
HB: Before Harris.
MF: Um, well to the man at Newmarket, at Exning.
HB: At Exning, Exning, right. It’s all right, I’d just lost, I lost a little bit of the continuity there, I thought we’d.
MF: No, I didn’t want to go back to Bomber Command so that’s when I got posted to Exning, near Newmarket in Suffolk, and I was PA to Air Vice Marshal Harrison.
HB: Yup. Harrison! That’s what caused me the confusion. It’s Harrison and then Harris!
MF: Harris. Ah yes, As I say he was left at the altar so he was anti women!
HB: Yes, but you talked him round. Wonderful. So you went out to BA, as a new bride, you’re then expecting Gavin. How long were you out in Buenos Aires?
MF: How long?
HB: How long were you in Buenos Aires?
MF: I think about two years, yes.
HB: So Gavin was born.
MF: Born out there.
HB: Out there. So what was Alan doing at the time?
MF: Well he was Assistant Air Attaché.
HB: Ah, right.
MF: To a man called Beisegel. B E I S E G E L. So they, we had Paraguay, Uruguay and the Argentine. We never got into Paraguay ‘cause they were always having a war [laugh], we got into Uruguay a lot, which was nice, and Buenos Aires of course which was enormous, so we went right down the south and travelled all over the Argentine.
HB: Right. So you were down in South America for two years.
MF: Two years, yes.
HB: What happened then? How did you?
MF: Then we came back, then we came back to earth a bit because they’d caught up with, Alan had been, way, way back, back in Coastal Command, earlier on in his career and they wanted a Chief Flying Instructor at Kinloss, in Scotland, so we went from Buenos Aries to Kinloss.
HB: Hmm. So that would be 1948, ’49 [phone tone] I’ll just have to pause the interview a minute. I’m just going to resume the interview that we temporarily paused. So, you’ve arrived at RAF Kinloss, what was Alan doing there? What was his job there?
MF: He was Chief Flying Instructor.
HB: Right. And what kind of aircraft, what kind of aircraft would he be flying there?
MF: Good heavens, I ought to know. I can’t remember at the moment.
HB: Shackletons perhaps?
MF: No, I don’t think so. Huh.
HB: It doesn’t matter, it’s not a major. So you were in quarters, living in.
MF: Well no, there weren’t any quarters; we lived in these little cottages. This one used to slide along on his bottom because he couldn’t, on lino you know, they were very barely furnished and suddenly one day he stood up and walked and I rang Alan and said: ‘Gavin’s walking!’ [Laugh]
HB: Lovely! That was in Findhorn village, in the village.
MF: Yes.
HB: So how long were you at Kinloss?
MF: [Sigh] Well, I, my daughter was born when I was up there, but I went south to my mother to have my daughter. I was away for a month because she said you can’t have that baby up here, so I went south and had my daughter. We were there about two and a half years, I think. Such a long time ago now, to remember all these things.
HB: Well you’re doing very well [much laughter]. I have to say, extremely well! So what was, when you first came back, from Buenos Aires, what was the biggest change you noticed in this country, having been living abroad for two years? You would have come back in 1948.
MF: Hmm. Well, I don’t know, you see my mother and sister came out to Buenos Aires for three months with us, to stay out there, and then they came home well, I don’t, well what biggest change, I don’t know. Can’t really think of anything.
HB: You found everything fairly settled.
MF: Well, much the same really. I mean obviously, I mean there was still food rationing when we came back. Course, when we went to Scotland that didn’t apply, I mean there was no rationing up there.
HB: Oh! No!
MF: No. Well not literally no, ‘cause you could get anything you wanted.
HB: Yeah. So, in Buenos Aires you lived, where did you live in Buenos Aires?
MF: We lived in a flat in the town to begin with, and then we moved out because we had Gavin, when we said we need a garden, and we moved out to a little house in San Isidro, up the river, and we had a Chinese cook who lived in a little hut at the bottom of the garden, Chinese cook called Georgie, and he was marvellous, and he, you know, Gavin was in his pram and he was in the sun, he would go out and move Gavin out of the sun.
HB: Lovely, oh that’s delightful. So you left the sunshine of Buenos Aires and you moved to Kinloss.
MF: Kinloss! That side of Scotland was, is very good, I mean it’s better than the west side, as you know. Oh yes, it was very good.
HB: And that’s your family’s developing now, your daughter, you came south and you had your daughter.
MF: Had her in the Radcliffe, came back and went back to Kinloss and that was that. And then we got posted back to Bomber Command, er no, got posted back to Air Ministry, but my mother said ‘you can’t live in one of those awful little quarters’, [chuckle] ‘you must have your own house’, so we bought a house in the village of Walters Ash, where Bomber Command is, and we had our own house there, and Alan used to go to Air Ministry every day and then he met our MP, called John Hall, and Alan said ‘well I’m a bit fed up of this’, because he was a Wing Commander at twenty one as I said, at thirty two he’d reverted to a Squadron Leader because well, you know, that was the thing, so he said bit tired to John Hall and John Hall said ‘come and see my Chairman’, he didn’t know him. He was a man called Sir Lindsay Finn and we didn’t know what on earth he did, apart from sit in Parliament. It turned out he was Chairman of Gossard Corsets! [Laugh]
HB: Oh right, right.
MF: So when Alan came home I said ‘well, what does he do apart from siting in Parliament?’ he said ‘he’s chairmen of Gossard Corsets!’ I said ‘well you can’t do that!’ But you see, by this time I’d got three children, I’d got my daughter and another son, Adrian, and we were in our house in this village, in Bomber Command village, and well, he was very tempted to come out because as I say, and my parents, of course, didn’t want us to move away again, so they were very influential. It was awful that we came out of the Air Force, I was so sad, it was wrong really, ‘cause Alan would have I think gone a long way. Anyway, we came out and, but they then, they had, Gossard, had this factory up here in Syston and they sent him up here!
HB: Oh right!
HF: So he was up here for three months and I was alone in Bucks and said oh goodness so they said well you’d better buy yourself a house, to Alan, and move your family up there. This was in 1954 I think ’55 I think, and so then we bought Gadsby Hall, and, they bought it for us, and we had, we lived there. The house had had twenty seven bedrooms, but they knocked the top off and the sides off and made it into a reasonable house, but it had seven acres of garden, which it still has. So anyway we did that and he was, my father was ill and in hospital and I was down south visiting him and I thought Alan had gone to France. By this time he, as I say, joined this, when I say they made the corsets, they made the machinery up here, this was the, so he was due to go to France on the Friday morning, on the Monday morning, I thought well I’ll go and see my father because he’s in hospital in High Wycombe and so I went off after Alan went but Alan didn’t feel well so he didn’t go. And the next thing was, on Tuesday, I got a message, we had a houseboy living in the house at Gadsby, called John Griss and he rang me up and said ‘oh the Wing Commander’s not too well, I thought you should know’ I said, ‘he went to France!’ He said ‘no he didn’t go because he didn’t feel well.’ So he said the doctor, our doctor lived in Gadsby village, so he sent him straight to, which hospital in Leicester?
[Other]: Royal Infirmary.
MF: Did he go to the Royal Infirmary?
[Other]: Glenfield? No.
HB: Not then, Glenfield not. Be the Leicester General?
MF: No, it was a nursing home.
[Other]: No, it wasn’t a nursing home, it was a full blown hospital.
MF: Oh was it, it was, yes. [Pause] Anyway, but Gavin and I got into a car straight away, rushed up here and this boy in the house said ‘he’s been taken to the hospital in Leicester’, and we walked in and Dr Ward, who lived in Gadsby was our doctor, was struggling, said ‘I’m afraid he’s dead’, so, like that. [Paper shuffling]
HB: What year was that?
[Other]: 1971.
HB: ’71 Oh dear. Oh right, I think, I thought I’d read somewhere that he’d been taken ill, and he was being treated for the illness and had the heart attack. Yes.
MF: Yes he was. Yes. As I say, he should have gone to France, but he didn’t go. But he didn’t let me know that he wasn’t going to France, so course I thought he’d gone, there you are.
HB: Can I just take you right back, very simple question: can you remember what your service number was?
MF: Ha! Something 0 double 1. Can’t remember. 20286 double 1. 20286 double 1. Maybe.
HB: 202 86
MF: Double 1. Maybe.
HB: Double 1.
[Other]: Sorry Harry. Can I just interrupt, just one second?
HB: Can I just pause the tape. Restart this, it’s 10.38, we’re just restarting the interview. Mary’s son Gavin has just had to leave, so we’ll just carry on. Right, so we’ve got to Alan actually dying in 1971. Can I just again, just go back a little bit, very, very disreputable question to ask a lady, but can you tell me what your date of birth is?
MF: 25 11 21.
HB: That’s lovely, thank you. What was your original maiden name?
MF: Stanley-Smith
HB: Stanley-Smith hyphenated. And has the Stanley got an e in it?
MF: Yes.
HB: Stanley-Smith. That’s lovely. [Cough] ‘Scuse me. Yes, just going back now, just try and pick up on one or two things we may have skated over a little bit. You said you went to boarding school. Where did you go to boarding school?
MF: Cliftonville, in Kent.
HB: Cliftonville, right. And you finished boarding school in time to join the RAF.
MF: Yes. I became head girl at boarding school. [Chuckle]
HB: Ooh!
MF: And well then, as I say, left. I did a little job in London for a bit, for a month or two, then I joined the WAAF.
HB: Yes. And as you say, you did your training in Windermere.
MF: Yes.
HB: How, what was your training like? Was it austere or was it very relaxed?
MF: No, quite happy, quite easy going year, yes.
HB: But you had to learn to look after your uniform.
MF: That sort of thing, yes. Yes, we marched about, as I say so long ago now, I can’t remember.
HB: And then you became a personal assistant to Sir Norman Bottomley.
MF: Ah, not, no, to Air Vice Marshal Harrison to begin with.
HB: Ah. Sorry, Harrison was the one that was left at the altar.
MF: Yes, yes.
HB: So you went to Air Vice Marshal Harrison and then a short time.
MF: At Exning, yes.
HB: At Exning. And then a short time with Harris. Where were you based with Harris?
MF: Bomber Command, Headquarters.
HB: At?
MF: Well, Walters Ash.
HB: High Wycombe, Walters Ash.
MF: Back in my home village you see.
HB: Yeah. And then you went to Sir Norman Bottomley.
MF: Yep. He took over from Harris, so I, and he was lovely to work for, and they had a house, the official house there was called Springfields, up at Prestwood, a mile or two away and we used to go up there. If there was nothing to do he’d say ‘oh let’s go and have a game of tennis’, he was lovely.
HB: Oh, right.
MF: But then you probably had to work till midnight if something happened, but you didn’t mind.
HB: And did you, when you worked for Harrison and Harris and Bottomley, did you notice, or did you, were you conscious of the pressure they were under?
MF: Well not really, no, I think you just accepted it, you know.
HB: Because I mean at that stage of the war, in ’43 ’44 things were very pressured.
MF: Yes, yes. Well I mean, that was when I was at Newmarket you see, at Exning, during the war, yes, I suppose you did, but I mean he, Harrison, the man at Newmarket, the Air Vice Marshal, was, as I say, very difficult to get on with to begin with as he didn’t like women because he’d been left at the altar, but he, I mean we tamed him, he became quite human, but he wasn’t easy. I mean if we went to a party, we had Corporal Wynn, the driver, and a Humber car, and we’d go out to this party, you know, and he didn’t drink, he’d have that much beer and then he’d come up to me and say ‘well I’m going home now, if you can get a lift you can stay.’ [Laugh] He was terribly non-party so that was when I invariably got a lift with Alan you see, went home with Alan because he was then stationed at 3 Group where I was, having a rest from operations and so he used to take me home, so that’s how we met really.
HB: Ah, right. That falls into line now. [Cough] When you worked for Sir Norman Bottomley, you got a Mentioned in Despatches.
MF: Yes.
HB: What was that for? Being very good?
MF: [Laughter] Well, I must have been quite good I suppose at something!
HB: Can you remember what year that would be?
MF: 40, what 50? When did I work for him, 50?
HB: Well you finished with the RAF when you were married, which was er, 1946.
MF: Yes well that was when I got my MiD, when I left him, you know.
HB: Right, so that’s. Right. And do you know if that was published in the Gazette, the London Gazette?
MF: Well I suppose it was. Yes they would be.
HB: Oh, right, so, social life, in the RAF, you’ve joined the RAF, you’ve done your training, what was your social life like?
MF: Oh marvellous! [Laughter]
HB: It was, it was good was it?
MF: Absolutely! Yes, I mean even uncommissioned we had great fun, good parties and things and I’m a party girl, you know, like people. Oh, we had great time and then when I was commissioned we had marvellous parties at Newmarket and Exning. [Chuckle]
HB: Oh right. Were the parties in private houses and places or did you have them on station?
MF: Oh, on the station mainly. Yes, yes.
HB: Did you go to any of the parties out at say somewhere like Lakenheath, or?
MF: Oh yes, oh we went everywhere, yes, all round because 3 Group covered Lakenheath and all those things in Suffolk you see, stations in Suffolk so we never stopped. But as I say my boss then, Harrison, didn’t like parties, so that’s why I had such a good time. [Laugh]
HB: So you were left to your own devices. Oh, that’s wonderful, that’s wonderful. So you met Alan when you were at 3 Group.
MF: Yes, ‘cause he came in for a rest from his operations.
HB: He would have been, ‘cause he was in four squadrons as far as I can find out. He was in 7 Squadron, 35 Squadron, 156 and 161.
MF: 161. All Pathfinders.
HB: Yeah. And he, at the time you [emphasis] met him, in 3 Group, what rank was he then?
MF: He was Squadron Leader.
HB: He was Squadron Leader. Right. So, there’s this dashing Squadron Leader, having a rest from operations.
MF: Operations, in Newmarket, Exning. Yes.
HB: And he swept off your feet!
MF: Yes, sort of. [Laughter]
HB: Or you were just great friends and gradually got swept off your feet. So just going on with the theme of Alan, Alan had joined the RAF quite early.
MF: Yes, he joined at sixteen, said he was seventeen.
HB: Did he? Right.
MF: But he was very tall, so he looked seventeen you know, so he got away with it.
HB: Initially where did he start his training, can you remember?
MF: Of course I didn’t know him in those days. He lived in Gloucestershire. I can’t remember.
HB: ‘Cause he would have joined as, what, something like a Leading Aircraftsman I would think. If he was going to.
MF: Yes.
HB: And can you remember where he did his flying training?
MF: Where he started? No I can’t.
HB: So actually, thinking back, if he joined in, when he was sixteen.
MF: He said he was seventeen.
HB: That would be, that would be just about 1939?
MF: Yes.
HB: Right at the beginning of the war.
MF: Yes, right at the beginning.
HB: Yeah. So it’s possible he learnt his flying in this country.
MF: Oh yes, oh definitely.
HB: Before they started sending them to South Africa and Canada.
MF: Oh yes.
HB: So he did his pilot training and went to squadron. He flew an awful lot of operations, didn’t he.
MF: Oh yes, yes. Whole lot. I couldn’t, I should have looked out the books for you.
HB: Oh no, no. It’s what you [emphasis] can remember of it because obviously that’s a little bit closer. If think if memory serves, he certainly flew seventy or more operations.
MF: Oh yes.
HB: And eventually became a Master Bomber?
MF: Yes, he was a Master Bomber.
HB: With Pathfinders, so, while he was doing that, you’ve had the party time and you’ve now moved on, so you’re serving at the level of Sir Norman Bottomley, and you’re seeing the strategy and everything, but you must also have seen the returns coming in of the losses.
MF: Oh yes.
HB: And Alan was still flying then, obviously. So how did, did you just accept that, or did it concern you?
MF: Well you did it was going on all the time, wasn’t it, I mean you know, it was all part of the war so you just accepted it. You were sad for twenty four hours when somebody you knew lost their life, but that was it. I mean there we are.
HB: Sad time. Lot of good people went.
MF: Mm hm.
HB: Yeah. The, so as you’ve come, as Alan was coming towards the end of the war, before you went, before you were married, did you sit down and talk about what you thought you might do after the war or was it just accepted?
MF: Oh, I mean we didn’t think we’d ever come out of the Air Force, I didn’t. I didn’t want to. But he thought it was better for him, I mean the money was better and we had three children to educate, so that was one reason, you know, when he came out, but it was the worst thing we ever did because I think he would have made a very good high rank officer. I didn’t want to come out, but there we are, what do you do.
HB: Am I right, were there rules about whether or not you could stay if you were married to a serving RAF officer?
MF: You could stay.
HB: Could you stay if you were married?
MF: Oh yes. Well.
HB: If you, sorry, a woman officer, could a woman officer stay in the RAF if she married another RAF officer?
MF: Oh no! Well I don’t think so. I suppose so, I don’t know. I mean I got out, I gave up because of having children.
HB: Yeah, I see what you mean, right, so Alan’s flown all these tours, you’ve eventually come back to Bomber Command, what was Alan doing in Bomber Command before you went to Buenos Aires, can you remember?
MF: Goodness, I ought to. What was he doing? I can’t remember now. No.
HB: I mean obviously he was working on things at a higher level.
MF: Yes, yes. That’s right.
HB: To become an Assistant ADC, sorry, Air Attaché, is quite, obviously quite demanding. So, I think what we’ll do is, I’ll terminate the interview now because I think there’s so much of Alan’s memorabilia that we need to look in to, we need to research properly, it’s unfair to ask you all the questions without the documents in front of you, so I think what we’ll do is, we’ll terminate the interview now, and I thank you on behalf of the Digital Archive for what you’ve told us.
MF: It’s silly, the things I’ve forgotten, but you do after all these years, you know.
HB: Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure, it’s er, I haven’t got a clock, I’ll have to just have a quick check, it’s quarter to eleven, sorry, I do have it wrong.
MF: Five to eleven.
HB: It’s five to eleven, and we’re just going to just stop the interview there and I’ve photographs to take, so thank you very much, I’ll just stop that. Supplementary to the interview, it’s 11.38, we’ve been chatting and Mary has just been telling me about an incident which I think is relevant. So just tell me what happened when you came back from France to see Alan.
MF: Well I saw them land in, from Brazil, and then a week later he rang me up and said would you like to come on this flypast?
HB: And the date of the flypast? 6th. 6th of June?
MF: 6th of June, yes.
HB: 6th of June 1946.
MF: And I said yes please, so I flew with Michael Beetham who was on Alan’s right, Alan was the commander and so I flew with him and it was absolutely marvellous, and then went back to Gravely where they were stationed, had a marvellous lunch and very late because I mean they were so good to the Air Force, you know, didn’t mind, and that was when he said, somebody said ‘Mary, what are you going to do when you leave the WAAF’, and I said ‘I don’t know’, and before I could say anything he said ‘she’s going to marry me.’ Just like that! [Laughter]
HB: Right! So the flypast was over London.
MF: Over London, yes.
HB: Over Buckingham Palace.
MF: Yes, over Buckingham Palace.
HB: [Cough] And it was a flight of Lancasters.
MF: Whoops. Come and see.
HB: Steady, steady!
MF: Whoops. I’ve got this.
HB: Got it. Just going to pause the interview. We just paused the interview there.
MF: Can I offer you anything drink? Would you like a sherry or something, dear?
HB: No I’m fine thank you, I’m fine. We’ve just paused the interview to pop out into the hall and take some photographs of the various pictures that Mary has of her late husband Alan’s career, the most important being the 8th of June Flypast in the white Lancasters, with Mary sat in the right hand plane with, what was his name? Bentham?
MF: It was amazing!
HB: You obviously thoroughly enjoyed that.
MF: Oh absolutely! I mean I was young enough then to enjoy all these things and I sat on this little bit, you know, about that big, all the way over London!
HB: About the size of a footstool. Oh dear. Could you actually see out of the aircraft?
MF: Oh yes, a bit. Yes.
HB: Exciting!
MF: It was exciting. I was the only girl on the, in all this. Amazing.
HB: Wow, wow! So how, I notice in Alan’s medals he has the DSO. What did he get the DSO for?
MF: Oh goodness, [sigh] I can’t remember, some bombing, you know, thing. I don’t know.
HB: Oh right, ‘cause I know he got a DFC early on for bringing a very badly damaged aircraft back.
MF: Yes. DSO, DFC, AFC. Well the AFC was in peacetime I think, wasn’t it.
HB: Yeah. The Air Force Cross. Yes, but they aren’t, they’re not a common medal. He must have done something Mary!
MF: You what?
HB: He must have done something to earn it! [Laughter] I notice in the photograph of the medals there’s one there that has the look of an Argentinian medal, was that a gratitude medal from Argentina, for his service there? Buenos Aires.
MF: Oh yes. Yes, that’s right.
HB: That’s great.
MF: Yes, we, it’s rather nice, wasn’t it.
HB: Yes it is, very nice medal that one. So in, having gone through all of that time, he’s flown all the aircraft he flew during the Second World War and he’s ended up, he ended up flying Canberras. And where were they stationed?
MF: At Kinloss.
HB: At Kinloss. The photo reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft.
MF: Yes.
HB: So did he ever comment on the change from, the change in technology and aircraft.
MF: Not really, no. We had one tragedy there. There was a dining in night and a message came through that the ‘Truculent’ had gone down in the Thames and Kinloss had the only lifting gear, so Alan asked for a volunteer crew to, would they pick up this lifting gear, take it down to the Thames to get the ‘Truculent’ out.
HB: This was the submarine.
MF: Yes. And he got a volunteer crew. They went and crashed into an aircraft, into a mountain about five miles from Kinloss, just on take off: they were all killed. It was the most dreadful [emphasis] night, awful thing. And of course, well the ‘Truculent’, everybody drowned in the ‘Truculent’. So dreadful night. Always remember that.
HB: That must have affected Alan, quite.
MF: Oh yes, I mean, well it’s so depressing. I had all, we didn’t have any quarters at Kinloss, but we had a very nice flat in a big house in Forres and I had the wives in for supper because it was a dining in night, you know, and next thing was we knew, all the husbands coming up, well Alan and lots of his members, coming up the stairs, to tell these wives that their husbands had been killed.
HB: Oh no!
MF: Awful. Dreadful night, you know. Never forget it.
HB: That was.
MF: Yes. Think, as I say, he asked for a volunteer crew and, well there we are, they all crashed into this. So that was a very sad night at Kinloss.
HB: Yes, yes, it’s, it’s the sort of incident that hits you very personally, it’s so involved.
MF: Oh yes, hm. Yes, I mean we all knew, well we all knew each other so well; I’m very gregarious and so was Alan, we all got on with everybody, you know.
HB: Yes, difficult time.
MF: Yes, very difficult.
HB: Difficult to remember as well, it’s an emotional thing to remember, it’s yes, difficult to talk about, yes. So we’ll come to the end of our supplementary interview, [laughing] that’s very, very kind of you Mary, thank you for letting me record that.
MF: Oh not a bit, I hope you’ll come back!
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AFoisterMS171010, PLairdCraig1701
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Mary Stanley Foister
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
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:49:11 audio recording
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-10
Description
An account of the resource
Mary Stanley Foister grew up in Buckinghamshire, where her father's farm was taken over as Bomber Command Headquarters. She served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force after she left school. Following training, she had a number of administrative posts as PA to high ranking RAF officers. Mary married Alan Craig, a Pathfinder pilot, and had three children. She was posted to several different locations during her service and in her married life before they settled down in Leicestershire. Mary tells of her various experiences during her life associated with the RAF, including flying on the Victory Flypast in London.
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.
Argentina
Brazil
France
Great Britain
Argentina--Buenos Aires
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Cambridgeshire
England--London
Brazil--Rio de Janeiro
Scotland--Moray
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1946
1948
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Anne-Marie Watson
Carolyn Emery
35 Squadron
ground personnel
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Lancaster
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RAF Graveley
RAF High Wycombe
RAF Kinloss
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
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Title
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Roberts, Maurice
M Roberts
Description
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An oral history interview with Pilot Officer Maurice Roberts (1920 - 2020, 1095576 Royal Air Force), who flew with 51 Squadron.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2020-02-19
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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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Roberts, M-2
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Transcription
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HB: This is an interview with Maurice Roberts whose service number is 1095576, who was a sergeant pilot and later a pilot officer during the Second World War with, he did his operational tour with 51 Squadron. The interview is being conducted by me, Harry Bartlett on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre at Mr Robert’s home address on Wednesday the 19th of February and the time now is 11:15. Mr Roberts, or can I call you Maurice?
MR: Yeah. Maurice.
HB: Thanks ever so much for agreeing to this interview. It’s, it’s a pleasure to be here to do this with you. We’ve had a bit of a chat before the interview so I’ve got a fair idea and I’ve obviously got your logbook but before we get to the actual war can you just, would you mind just telling us just a bit about yourself Maurice?
MR: Yeah.
HB: Where were you born?
MR: I was born in Manchester actually. And when I was twenty years of age I joined the RAF. That was in 1940.
HB: Yeah.
MR: When I joined the RAF. I never went back to Manchester because I met my, we used to, I was flying at which is now an industrial estate, was a flying field at Braunstone and I was flying Tiger Moths there. Met my wife and we got married in ’45 after I finished my tour and I, you know I’d known her for many years, but I decided that I wouldn’t marry. We wouldn’t get married until I finished my tour. So we married in ’45. So we’ve been married seventy five years now.
HB: Wow.
MR: And I went to South Africa. After I, after I’d met her and we became friends I went to South Africa and did my EFTS and SFTS there.
HB: Can I, can I just stop there Maurice?
MR: Yeah.
HB: When you, when you were in Manchester.
MR: Yes.
HB: Obviously you, obviously you were part of a family.
MR: Yes.
HB: What, how big a family did you come from?
MR: Well, there were five children. I was the latest one out of the five. They’re all dead now. And my eldest sister who was the first was twenty years older than me.
HB: Wow.
MR: And I have a niece now who’s over ninety, still living in Manchester. I’m in touch with her by telephone and I’ve been to see her, and we get on well together. We have a big family out there.
HB: Yeah.
MR: But I’ve no family here in Leicester.
HB: Yeah. What about schooling Maurice?
MR: Well, I went to Manchester Central High School, a grammar school and I was, I was a scholarship boy.
HB: Right.
HB: I was a bit out of my depth really socially because they were all fee paying members of this school and I was a scholarship boy.
HB: Right.
HB: And there was two of us actually who’d got to school, eleven plus. And, I presume I did very well in the eleven plus and I went to this school. But I didn’t go to university. I left at fifteen and got a job and started work really.
HB: What, what did you do for a job before the war then Maurice?
MR: Well, before the war I was, I was in, I worked for a firm called Salford Electrical Instruments. They were part of GEC.
HB: Right.
MR: It was a reserved occupation, but because I volunteered for aircrew I could get out of this, this you know being a reserved occupation. So I, and I left. Left the firm.
HB: So, yeah what was your process then for, because obviously you’re in a reserved occupation and you’ve decided you want to do your bit, or you want to join the Air Force, I presume? So what was your process for joining?
MR: Process? Well, I —
HB: How did you come to join?
MR: Well, I just wanted to, you know. Young men did.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And I went to the Recruiting Office and said I wanted to join. I wanted to go into aircrew and they accepted me.
HB: Right. Right.
MR: Twenty years old and I was only a clerk actually in this firm of Salford Electrical Instruments.
HB: So, so you’ve gone down and you’ve joined the RAF.
MR: Yes.
HB: Right. And you’ve, you’ve got to do some training somewhere.
MR: Right. And my first training was at Babbacombe. Well, I joined up. Seven days I spent at Warrington.
HB: Right.
MR: Where you got a uniform and all that but what they call Initial Training Wing, ITW, I went to Babbacombe near, near Bournemouth.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And I was about, there about six weeks, I think.
HB: Is that, was that you all square bashing?
MR: That’s right.
HB: And marching and all that sort of thing.
MR: Yeah, and getting our, yes there was no flying. It was just —
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: It was just as you say square bashing.
HB: Yeah. And then you went from Babbacombe. Did you do an assessment for flying or —
MR: No. I, no I had a medical exam.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And I had an interview by several men. About five I think. I was interviewed for aircrew and they asked me questions like, ‘What is seventeen multiplied by thirteen?’ And I had to think about it in my head, what the, what the answer was, you know. Mentally.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And then they found, obviously they found out I was pretty, my mental ability was quite good and they, I, I passed the exam.
HB: Right.
MR: I had a medical exam apart from that. That was sort of to see that you were quick mentally I suppose.
HB: Yeah. So, so where, where did you, where did you progress from there after your interview? You’ve obviously been accepted for aircrew training.
MR: Yeah.
HB: At what stage did it become apparent you were going to be training as a pilot?
MR: Well [pause] well, at ITW. They were all potential pilots at ITW. Had the little flashes in your beret.
HB: Right.
MR: A little, little white flash in your beret so that you were, you were potential aircrew people.
HB: Right. And you went from the initial training wing, the ITW —
MR: Yes. I went to Canada first of all. To Canada.
HB: How did you get to Canada?
MR: Well, we went by ship.
HB: Wow, from, from —
MR: From, well the Gourock in Scotland. Gourock, I think.
HB: Right. Right. So you go off to Canada.
MR: Yeah. And then from Canada down to Florida.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And I had some training with a civilian because they weren’t at war then. The Americans weren’t. And I had, and I spent some time flying with the Americans. Didn’t go very well though and we came back via Canada. Had to go back to Canada and then I came back to this country.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And I had this Braunstone Aerodrome where I met my wife. My potential wife.
HB: Yeah. So when, when, when you first went to Canada did you go to one of the flying schools there?
MR: No.
HB: Before you went to Florida.
MR: No, no no. I went to just outside of Toronto.
HB: So you went to Toronto first.
MR: Yes. And then, and then from there to America.
HB: So just within a matter of weeks.
HB: That’s right. Yeah.
HB: You were off down to America. Yeah.
MR: And they were all civilian. Civilian pilots.
HB: Yeah.
MR: The instructors were civilians. And nobody was in, it was an American Air Force base but they were civilians who were, who were instructing you to fly.
HB: Right. What sort of aircraft were you flying Maurice?
MR: Well, the PT17s they were. They were like a Tiger Moth. Overgrown Tiger Moths they were.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So you were down there learning your flying skills.
MR: Yes.
HB: And you said it didn’t go all that well.
MR: Well, they used to curse and swear and things like that, you know. So some of us went, went, some, I have a friend who was an air commodore. He died only last year actually. Lived in Glenfield, and we used to play golf together and he, he was there too and he went on the Empire training. He went to Canada to train. He went from Canada to Florida. Then from Florida went back to Canada and was trained in Canada flying. Real, real flying in Canada where I went, I came home and went to South Africa.
HB: Yeah. So, so when you did your basic flying training in America.
MR: Yes.
HB: Whereabouts in America was that?
MR: In Lakeland. A place called Lakeland in Florida.
HB: In Florida.
MR: Lakeland. Yeah.
HB: Right. And that was all in civilian clothes.
MR: They were. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
MR: They hadn’t gone to war then.
HB: Yeah. And then you went back to Canada. Did you do any flying training in Canada?
MR: No. No. I didn’t. No.
HB: None at all.
MR: No. No. I went to a place called Moncton.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Under canvas.
HB: Oh blimey.
MR: Below, under forty degrees. Ten degree temperatures. Terrible. And then I came back to England and I did some more flying in, as I say Braunstone Aerodrome which is now an industrial estate. Braunstone isn’t, is no longer an aerodrome. But in 19 — I forget what year it was I met my wife in a tea dance.
HB: Right. I’m just curious. When you went [coughs] you went to Moncton and Trenton.
MR: Yeah.
HB: From, well according to your book —
MR: Well, Trenton —
HB: You were only there [pause] you were only there for two months.
MR: I forget what Trenton was really.
HB: Yeah.
MR: The name sounds familiar but it’s a long time ago. I don’t know why I was at, I remember Moncton but Trenton I don’t.
HB: In, in your, in your logbook it says something like if I’m looking at this right Riccall. R I C C A L L.
MR: R I C P?
HB: Ah. Could be P. Yes. Could be P.
MR: I don’t know.
HB: And that’s, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It just, it just sort of, just for two months.
MR: Yeah.
BW: There. And then you came back and you went to, you went to Bournemouth.
MR: Yeah. That wasn’t near Bournemouth.
HB: Right. Because so when you first came back. Is that when you went to Braunstone?
MR: Yeah. Probably. You know, I can’t remember really very well.
HB: No. No. That’s fine.
MR: It’s a long time ago. It’s seventy years ago.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And I remember being at Braunstone Aerodrome and meeting my wife.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And then from there we went to [pause] Where did we go? I went to South Africa. To Clairwood where we were under canvas there. We had about three months there doing nothing. Not doing anything really. Then went to Potchefstroom for EFTS. From Potchefstroom to Vereeniging for SFTS. And I got my wings when I, at Vereeniging.
HB: What was, what was the SFTS?
MR: SFPS?
HB: Yeah. SFP?
MR: In what context was that?
HB: Sorry. Oh sorry. I thought that was just initials. I do apologise. I thought that was just some initials you’ve given me and I hadn’t heard them before. Yeah. I’ve got Clairwood, Lyttelton, Potchefstroom.
MR: Vereeniging.
HB: Vereeniging.
MR: Then I came home.
HB: Yeah. Came back via Cape Town.
MR: Came back with my wings.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Got my wings there. Came back. Then I went on to, well, we went to Airspeed, to Chipping Norton flying Airspeed Oxfords.
HB: Right.
MR: Twin engine aircraft. And Wellingtons. And later on Wellingtons. Then Lossiemouth four engine aircraft. From Lossiemouth I went to the squadron when I picked up my crew. And then went to Lossiemouth trained up there on four engine aircraft, on Halifaxes. Then I was posted to a squadron. 51 Squadron.
HB: So your crew formed up at the Operational —
MR: No, before.
HB: Conversion Unit.
MR: Before I went to Lossiemouth.
HB: Right.
MR: I, I, you formed a crew. You went into a room with navigators and gunners and pilots all in this room and you chatted to people and eventually you got a navigator and a couple of gunners and a bomb aimer.
HB: Right.
MR: And then you went up to Lossiemouth and we all trained together on these, in Lossiemouth on these four engine, four engine Halifaxes.
HB: Yeah. So, so the crew that you ended up doing your tour with was that same crew that you formed up with?
MR: Well, apart from one young chap who came. He was, now what was he now? A flight engineer. That was it. And he was only about eighteen and we were only twenty, in early twenties but he was eighteen but somehow he seemed much younger. And he put me, on the Halifaxes, the first Halifaxes you had to go back and change the engines. You had four, four, four fuel tanks, you know in your wings and when one was empty it had to be changed to a full one on your trip. And this chap had to go and you used to say, ‘Right,’ Well, I told him to go back and change. Well, we’re on our way back from a raid and he put me on empty tanks and all engines cut out. We dived down. And he was too nervous. Ever so nervous this chap was. So, I said to him, he went back and I said, ‘This chap is no good. This flight engineer.’ And he went back to training school, this lad. But other than that I had the same crew.
HB: Right.
MR: Other than that one.
HB: Yeah.
HB: I got another flight engineer.
HB: So you went to the Conversion Unit and then you were posted to —
MR: 51 Squadron in Snaith, South Yorkshire.
HB: Yeah. I just had a quick look in your logbook and the, we are starting in —
MR: Well, I go. The first trip was I went with another crew as a pilot to see what it was like on a trip to Germany. That was the very first thing. I went with another crew to see. The very first thing and then I came back and then I flew an aircraft with my own crew.
HB: So I’ve got, I’ve got you down as 25th of October 1944 and that was with a Flight Lieutenant Ripper.
MR: Right.
HB: And you went that, well it’s in black, it’s in black ink so it looks like a daytime thing to Essen.
MR: Yeah. Well, I think —
HB: And you were second pilot as you say.
MR: Yeah. That was it. Well, I went —
HB: Yeah.
MR: Just to see what it was like, you know.
HB: Yeah.
HB: It was part of the training really.
HB: Yeah. Because, because I was interested in this. It’s one thing and again it’s something I’ve not seen before. On the 30th of October you’ve got yourself as the pilot. And then where it says second pilot or passenger you’ve got six people in there.
MR: Well, the bomb aimer used to act as second pilot. The bomb aimer.
HB: Yeah.
MR: He was a Canadian actually. And he acted, when you took off he acted as second pilot when you took off.
HB: Yeah.
MR: When you opened, when you open the four throttles he put his hand behind them to hold them firm.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Not to slide back when you took off. But —
HB: Because that was —
MR: But he wasn’t a second pilot. He was a bomb aimer. That was his job was bomb aimer.
HB: Because that was an operation.
MR: That was an operation.
HB: To Cologne. And it just says landed away.
MR: Landed away.
HB: Yeah. It says landed away.
MR: One, there was one thing where a lot of fog was on when we came back and we landed at Manston where they had a, they had three in the country, great long, a hundred, a hundred yards wide flare path. Yeah. You know, where you took off on the, on the flare path.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And a hundred yards wide, it was great and about a mile long and they had, when you had the fog they had a long on the edge of each side of the flare path. They had burners with the heat so the fog would rise you know with the heat.
HB: Right. Yeah.
MR: And that’s when you couldn’t land at your own airport.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And there was one time when I landed at Manston which was south of, I forget where it was. In Kent somewhere, I think.
HB: Yeah.
MR: At Manston. They had three around the coast for people coming back where you couldn’t land on, or if the aircraft was damaged so badly you could, you could land on this thing because it was so, it was so big. The flare path was so big. It was a hundred yards wide.
HB: Because you got I mean you’ve, you are really in to, you know November.
MR: Yeah.
HB: 1944. You’re really into a lot of operations there.
MR: Yeah.
HB: And on the 2nd of December you, you did an operation to Hagen.
MR: Yes.
HB: And all you’ve got in your logbook is mid-upper injured.
MR: Well, we got back from a raid and we’d been, we’d been hit several times but this chap was a mid-upper gunner sitting in the thing, and the hydraulic behind exploded because —
HB: Right.
MR: It had been hit you see. It exploded. This, the hydraulic thing. Cylinders of hydraulics.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Where the crew sat on your landing because we all left our stations and sat in the body of the aircraft. The crew did when we landed. And it blew the top of his head off.
HB: Oh blimey.
MR: The mid-upper gunner. And he never came, he went to, he was in hospital for twelve months but he survived. They put a plate in his head and he lived ‘til he was about seventy. I met him again two or three times after the war in 51 Squadron reunions. Yeah.
HB: What, can you remember what his name was?
[pause]
MR: He was from Manchester actually.
HB: Oh right.
MR: No. I can’t. I can’t think of his name now.
HB: No. I understand. So, and yeah and then you, as I say you really did do an awful lot of operations then. You’re going through what six, seven, eight. And you’ve got January the 2nd 1945. You’re going to Ludwigshafen.
MR: Ludwigshafen. Yeah.
HB: And you’ve got in your plane you’ve got Sergeant Brown, Warrant Officer Stone, Flight Sergeant Swan, Sergeant Haywood, Sergeant Tovey and Sergeant Smith.
MR: Say them. The last three. Sergeant —
HB: The last three. Sergeant Haywood.
MR: Yes.
HB: Sergeant Tovey.
MR: Yeah.
HB: And Sergeant Smith.
MR: Well, Smith was the rear gunner. The mid-upper gunner must have been Haywood, I think.
HB: He’s the one that replaced the guy who was injured.
MR: No. The flight engineer was replaced. Not a gunner. A flight engineer.
HB: Right.
MR: Oh yes. Sorry.
HB: Yeah.
MR: You’re quite right.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: He replaced the gunner. Yeah.
HB: So I’m, you see that, that one gives the list of the names. And then from then on again we’re back to just saying crew. So —
MR: Right.
HB: So would that have been your crew then for the next —
MR: Yeah.
HB: Set of operations.
MR: That would be. Yes. Yes.
HB: Right.
HB: That would be until the end of my tour. Yes.
HB: Right. Sorry about this. The pages are a little bit on the sticky side.
MR: Yeah.
HB: And you get through to February and you’ve, you’ve again you’ve landed away after you’ve done operation in March to Chemnitz [coughs] excuse me.
MR: There’s one —
HB: In your crew here you’ve got a Flight Sergeant Brewitt.
MR: Who?
HB: Brewitt. Brewiss.
MR: He was the, must have been the flight engineer I think.
HB: Right. Right. But, but as I say you then you really do a lot of operations in a very short space of time.
MR: Yeah. Well, there was one time when we came back from a raid, had a meal and went off again.
HB: Blimey.
MR: And we slept for, the rear gunner slept for thirty six hours after we got back. And they gave me wakey wakey pills when we, yeah we went off again. We did two trips.
HB: Blimey. So —
MR: A meal in between that’s all.
HB: Tell me about the wakey wakey pills then.
MR: Well, every time you went. Before a raid you had a good meal. Egg and bacon and chips or something like that.
HB: Yeah.
MR: We had good food. I know that the country as a whole didn’t do very well for food but they fed us very well and before we walked in they always gave us a wakey wakey. I think they were benecon or I forget the name. Benedrine. But the wakey wakey pills were so when you went on a trip you were wide awake you know.
HB: Yeah.
HB: They kept you going. The wakey wakey pills we called them. And as you went in for your meal before the trip there was a girl there used to give you these two tablets.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And we called them wakey wakey pills.
HB: Did you always take them Maurice?
MR: Oh yes. You had to.
HB: Yeah.
MR: You had to have them. Keep you, I mean one time I went to Chemnitz which was near Dresden. It was an eight hour trip.
HB: Yes. Yes. A long trip that one. Eight hours thirty five.
MR: Yeah. Eight hours.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And the funny thing is coming back from one of those trips we went between Ludwigshafen and Mannheim and Ludwigshafen was full of searchlights and Mannheim was full of searchlights but if you went in between them going to Chemnitz the searchlights couldn’t catch you. On the way back I was, my navigator was, my navigator was a good one and we were on track in between these two. But on the left hand side I saw a bomber, another bomber, this was in the dark but I just saw him and he was going over Mannheim and all of the searchlights swung through and caught him. This chap.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And you couldn’t get out of this. There were about thirty or forty searchlights and they were harnessed to the ack ack and we, they used to have then what they called flaming onions. Not your normal ack ack gun. These flaming onions were like five things that rose up briefly and they were harnessed to the, the searchlights. But this chap, I saw these bombs explode on his height about thirty yards behind him and I saw another about fifteen yards and a third lot caught him and the aircraft was just blown sky high. And when, everyone inside it. Seven. There were seven, they were off track. And you were talking about the Germans. You know, they got their technical, Dresden and that. These the technical thing. They were just as good as we were in their technical ability.
HB: Yeah.
MR: The Germans were.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And they didn’t, if they could, they got the height speed and direction of the aircraft from the searchlights attached to the end, and the bombs you know the flaming onions caught you, you know they were sent up to catch you. And I was caught in searchlights over one target but fortunately the, after the bombs went there was some cloud and I went over the cloud and the searchlight lost me. I was fortunate to get away.
HB: Yeah. So in, as I say you flew an awful lot of operations in a relatively tight sort of time.
MR: Yeah.
HB: What, what, what would you think when you, when you think back, what do you think was your worst, your worst operation?
MR: Well, the one that really stuck in my mind I was, I had several bad ones but the one that really stuck in my mind I got back to the base, to Snaith in Yorkshire after a raid, and they said we’re, the fog, ‘You are diverted to Lincolnshire.’ To RAF so and so. I said to the navigator, ‘Give me course for this air base.’ And there was a bit of silence. Then he said, ‘I haven’t got the maps for it.’ So, oh dear. We’re in trouble now. So I thought, well we, I went due east towards Lincolnshire from Yorkshire and towards the North Sea and when I felt, and it was all black down below you know with the blackout and I thought now what’s going to happen now? I called up, ‘Hello Darkie. Hello Darkie.’ And somebody answered down below but that didn’t help me [laughs] And I thought now what am I going to do? Am I going to get the crew to bale out and then I’ll bale out and I’ll set the aircraft for the North Sea and when all the fuel runs out it’ll drop out in the North Sea. And as I, as I was thinking this I was, you know I was in a bit of a state really and I saw a light. One light. So I went, I flew towards this one light and as I got near it there was three lights and what it was I don’t know if you know but during the war all the aircraft, the aerodromes they had hooded, they were all hooded so you had to be in the right position to see the lights.
HB: Yeah.
MR: If you came the other way it was black because they were, there were all these lights around the aerodrome were hooded, hooded lights. And anyway, when I got to this one light I was telling you about I saw two others, and what it was it was a ring of light around the aerodrome. They put their lights on for me, this aerodrome. It wasn’t the one I was supposed to be [laughs] but it was one near there. So I followed the lights around the aerodrome and they took me down to the flare path and I landed and we were okay.
HB: Yeah.
MR: But it was, it was a terrible, because you’re in a situation where you don’t know what to, you don’t know what to do really. I mean the obvious thing was to bale out and send the aircraft in the North Sea.
HB: Yeah.
MR: But it was a bit drastic. But I happened to see this one light and having seen this one light I saw the others and then I saw the, the circle of lights around the aerodrome and they took me onto the flare path.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And we landed.
HB: So you obviously, you obviously as you say you’d had a bit of a rough going over on that one and, and —
MR: Well, you know I had one trip when I had a two thousand bomb wouldn’t, wouldn’t release in the body, or the incendiary and the wheel went off but this this two thousand pound bomb wouldn’t go. So I was a bit worried about it because I tried to shake it off over the North Sea coming back but it wouldn’t go. So I had to land with it. And I thought now landing it might set it off. I told them when I, but fortunately we had a very good, good, in fact the crew said it’s the best landing I’d ever done [laughs]
HB: I think there was an incentive there.
MR: A two thousand pound bomb on board on landing. It didn’t go off.
HB: So so you’d got that bomb hung up and you said you tried to shake it off.
HB: Yeah.
HB: How did, how would you have done that Maurice?
MR: Well, just shake the aircraft. You know. With the wheel. Just shake it. You know, shake the aircraft and let it go. But it didn’t go.
HB: So whose job was it to take the bomb off?
MR: The armoury when we got back. The armoury took it off. The ground staff. Armourers.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And it, it must have got tied up somehow. I don’t know. I don’t. I didn’t ask.
HB: I’ll tell you one of the things you mentioned earlier on Maurice was you said about coming in to land.
MR: Yes.
HB: When the crew gathered in —
MR: In the centre of the aircraft.
HB: In the centre of the aircraft.
MR: Yes.
HB: Would that be where the main spar went through on the Halifax?
MR: Well, the main spar was just behind the pilot.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And the two pilot’s seats. Then, then the spar, the main spar. Then there was a seat on, a seat for three or four on this side and a seat for three or four on that side. And then the door to get out of it was a bit farther down and a chemical toilet somewhere.
HB: Yeah.
MR: You know.
HB: So, so obviously I’m presuming that at some stage you’re fully in position in the aircraft. Everybody is in the right place.
MR: Yeah. Yes.
HB: And at some stage you’ve got to decide that it’s safe for the rear gunner and the mid-upper gunner to leave their positions. When would you —
MR: We were home. We’re home now. We’re going around the, around the perimeter.
HB: So it’s, so it’s as you were doing your circuit to land that you would do that. Yeah.
MR: Something like that, yeah. I’d tell them, alright we’ll be landing in about ten minutes or five minutes or something like that.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Will you, now you can go. I’d instruct the crew to go and sit down.
HB: Right.
MR: As we landed. Yeah.
HB: And that was a safety thing I presume.
MR: Well, it was a thing we had to do. We were told that’s what and, yes.
HB: Yeah. Yeah, so —
MR: You wouldn’t want the rear gunner sitting in the rear, when you landed, would you?
HB: No. No. No. So you, you’re doing your operations. You’re based out at Snaith.
MR: Yeah.
HB: In Yorkshire.
MR: Yeah.
HB: Because you weren’t far from Goole.
MR: Well, Goole had got the lake. That was, Goole was the, that was a big lake there near Goole and that was a very good spot to follow you to get back to.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. As a obviously as a sighting thing.
MR: Yes.
HB: Yeah. So, what, I mean you’d met your wife or your future wife some time ago so, what was your social life like when you were on, on at Snaith? Did you have much a social life?
MR: No. We had, we had what they called a stand down, and you had to leave. You could, when you had a stand down you could leave the aerodrome until midnight.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And you would probably get a lorry or something to take you in to Pontefract which was nearest big town. We used to go and I think we had two. Two stand downs in my nine months I was operating. Only two. Other than those two we were stuck in and when there was a raid on, because my wife used to, she was in Maidstone in Kent. She used to ring up actually. She wasn’t my wife then but she used to ring. Yes, was she? I don’t know. Anyway. She used to ring up and to see if I was alright you know. And if, if she couldn’t get through she knew there was a raid on because when there was a raid on they, they stopped all the communication with the outside world. The station did.
HB: Right.
MR: The bomber station. And then she’d ring the next day and when we’d, to see if I was alright. If I’d got back alright. You know.
HB: So, it was quite a bit of a long distance relationship then.
MR: Oh, yeah. Well in —
HB: Yeah.
MR: Mind you she was in the ATS for two years.
HB: Yeah.
MR: She was called up actually. She had a choice of either munitions or the ATS because the WAAF and the WRNS were full and so she only had the ATS to go in.
HB: Right.
MR: So she went in the ATS.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Rather than go in munitions. Yeah.
HB: Yeah. So you, so you’re coming towards the end of your tour.
MR: Yes.
HB: We know you’d lost a flight engineer.
MR: Yes.
HB: Which is probably understandable from what you’ve described. You’ve lost a mid-upper gunner.
MR: Yes.
HB: So the bulk of the crew were still there towards the end of your tour.
MR: Oh yes.
HB: So how, how close had you become by then?
MR: Well, fairly close but then of course like many things in the RAF you, I go to 10 Squadron on my own and I pick up another crew.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Of four.
HB: Yeah.
HB: Different people, you know. And the RAF is like that. You don’t, it’s not like the Army where you’re with them all the time and you’ve lost them. They’ve gone. Although strangely enough I went out to, I think it was India. I met my navigator. He’d been posted to a place in, in India too as a navigator. Teaching you know. Something like that.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Yeah.
HB: So that was, that was obviously that was the follow on question Maurice.
MR: Yes.
HB: Was did you manage to keep in contact with all of them?
MR: Well, after the war the navigator was a member of the 51 Squadron Association.
HB: Yeah.
MR: And I and I joined it too so we met there two or three times with our wives. We came to dances and all that but now of course when, I three or four years ago I resigned from it because all the people were new. I didn’t know. They were all young people.
HB: Yeah.
MR: All the, all the old people that started this Association in 1944, this 51 Squadron Association you know for ex-people and they were all wartime people and we used to chat and all that. But now, later on, they’d all, they’d all died and — [laughs]
HB: Yeah.
HB: There was no point so I resigned from it.
HB: Yeah. It’s sad. So, so you’ve had your contact with your navigator. You’ve just mentioned there you then moved from 51 Squadron to 10 Squadron.
MR: Yes.
HB: But before you actually went there and this intrigues me because again it’s something I’ve not seen before. In May 1945 you flew two, four, six, eight, ten. You flew twelve operations in May from the 13th to the 21st and all it says is bomb disposal.
MR: Yes. Well, what happened we used, we went out and dropped bombs, the bombs that we had in the North Sea. The war had finished so we spent a lot of time carrying bombs out to the North Sea and dropping them in the water. In the North Sea. Bombs that they didn’t want.
HB: Right. And that was, was that just from where you were or did you have to go and sort of pick them up?
MR: No. Driffield or somewhere like that.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: I was posted to, I think it was Driffield.
HB: Yeah. And then as I say you moved, you moved across to 10 squadron at Melbourne in Yorkshire.
MR: Yeah.
HB: And you were still, you were then flying. You changed in the June ’45.
MR: Yeah.
HB: To the Dakota.
MR: Yeah.
HB: Did you have, did you have to do a conversion course?
MR: No. I—
HB: Or was it just a case —
MR: Well, I went down to Witney. No. I didn’t have a conversion course. Only the fact that this itself was a conversion course flying these Dakotas. We just got in the aircraft and flew them. Twin engines aircraft. They were ever so easy to fly and out of the four engine bombers they were very easy, the Dakotas were to fly. Twin engine little, they weren’t very powerful but they were a very, very good aircraft and the brakes were much better. Brakes, than on the old four engine bombers.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: And we were, we were flying paratroops, and towing gliders. We were training, we were all training, both the paratroopers and we were training for going out to the Far East, you know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned that to me before we started the interview about going out to the Far East because you know it’s, we’ve got to September.
MR: Well, the war finished I think very soon after.
HB: Yeah.
MR: The Far East war.
HB: Yeah. But you did actually get out to —
MR: I went out there because, we went there because it was all laid on to help the 14th Army but they’d driven the Japs out and we spent most of our time, well first of all we carrying troops back home to Karachi where they we were picked home and taken home on demob. Then we, then we all went to [unclear] where we dropped rice. Free drops. We dived down. They made a dropping zone with the aircraft and we dived down on a free drop. Couldn’t put them in parachutes because they might go into the ravines you see. So we had to, down to about fifty feet. The crew threw the half-filled bags of rice out of the aircraft then we, when they’d gone we had to climb. I had to climb like mad to avoid the peaks around. And we lost three aircraft actually the squadron did on that.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Because, you know it could be a bit dangerous really.
HB: So you went down to how, how low?
MR: To where?
HB: How low were you when you were dropping them? Fifty feet?
MR: Yeah. Well, they had, the crew had to drop them on a DZ. Dropping zone.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: Throw them out. Yeah. Throw them out because we couldn’t, they couldn’t go in parachutes because there was ravines, deep ravines and they’d never get them.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: So we had what we called a free drop. We had to dive down, the crew threw out the bags of rice and then we’d, when they’d thrown them all out we’d climb like mad to avoid, and go back.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Turn around and climb. But you couldn’t, couldn’t turn around because of the peaks on either side. We had to go over the top and turn. They were sixteen thousand feet high these peaks.
HB: Yeah.
MR: In the Himalayas.
HB: And as a pilot was it, was it a difficult flying experience?
MR: Well, that was but that was only six weeks dropping that rice. But other than that it was quite an easy job. It was just taking troops back to, well, we picked them up from the east, Madras and at an aerodrome called Arkonham. Flew across to Poona and then took them up to Karachi in the north and they were picked up in Karachi by some other aircraft and taken home.
HB: Yeah. And you, and you were doing that all the way through until you ended up in Burma.
MR: Well, yes and when I got back. When we finished in Burma I went back to Poona [pause] and what happened then? Oh, I was on a troop ship. My demob came up fairly soon but they, I had to fly an aircraft back. A lease lend. On a lease lend the Americans in Munich. So, a little twin, a lovely little aircraft. They were used as like taxies for the important people in India and that you know. They didn’t, they didn’t go by rail and that. These marshals and generals and people like that. So they had these aircraft the Americans supplied. Then they had to go back to the Americans after the war in Munich. And I flew an aircraft across India, across the Indian Ocean, up the Persian Gulf and then across, across the Med and across to Marseilles and then to Paris. Then Paris to London to Munich. And I got in there, I think I’ve got it somewhere, one Dakota one aircraft, you know signed for by an American staff sergeant. One aircraft delivered.
HB: So, then that would have been, that would have been May 1946.
MR: Yes.
HB: Was that the Beechcraft?
MR: That’s right. Beech.
HB: It was a Beechcraft.
MR: I can remember the aircraft.
HB: Yeah.
MR: It was a Beechcraft.
HB: Yeah.
MR: A little twin engine, twin engine Beechcraft. A lovely aircraft.
HB: I can just, just about read it. It’s the one, it’s the last page.
MR: All electric. The undercarriage, you just put a switch up and the undercarriage came up. You didn’t have to put a lever down or anything like you did in the old Halifaxes.
HB: Yeah.
MR: You just switched up. Knocked this switch up and the undercarriage came up.
HB: Yeah. Because it, because it’s on this page here and it’s the only page you’ve done in pencil and it’s just starting to fade a little bit.
MR: Yeah. When I, and it’s not in the logbook but this trip I made from, from, I went up to north west India and flew this Beechcraft home. Well, I didn’t fly it home. I flew it to Munich. Not in. It’s not in there.
HB: Oh no. It’s in here.
MR: What? All the trip?
HB: It went, you went from Chopta.
MR: Where?
HB: Chopta to Bahrain. Bahrain to Kuwait. Kuwait to Haifa. Haifa to Cairo. Cairo to Tel Aviv.
MR: That’s it. Yeah. That’s it.
HB: Tel Aviv to Castel something.
MR: Castel Benito.
HB: Castel Benito. Then you went to —
MR: Marseilles.
HB: Marseilles.
MR: It’s there is it? Oh.
HB: Paris, Munich.
MR: That’s it. Yeah.
HB: And you finished at Bovington [laughs]
MR: Well, my mate flew me back home to Bovington for —
HB: Yeah.
HB: I had my demob there. I got a suit from them.
HB: From the Americans?
MR: No. it was in this country.
HB: Oh [laughs] Yeah. I was joking Maurice.
MR: When I was, when I was demobbed.
HB: Yeah. It’s, no it’s, now that’s interesting because it’s, a Beechcraft is quite a small aircraft.
MR: Oh yes. Well, it was I say it was used as a taxi.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Flying backwards and forwards in that.
MR: There were only about four seats in it. Behind the pilot was a, there was no dividing thing you know. Just four seats behind you when you flew it.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Four or six. I forget now whether it was four or six seats for people to sit there.
HB: Yeah.
MR: It was a tad silly really but the Americans it was on a lease lend and they had to go back to the Americans when the war finished.
HB: Now, when I spoke to you to arrange the interview and having spoken to your son.
MR: Yes.
HB: You’ve sort of skated over something that happened to you involving being torpedoed.
MR: Oh, that was, that was in, yes, when I left Canada to come back I came back, it was in January. When I came back there was, there was three troopships and two destroyers in the North Atlantic, and I think there was someone in the Canadian customs who was a German sympathiser and he was in touch with the U-boats. So when we left this Halifax place to come with these troopships with these two destroyers the U-boats waited for us. And the first night out we had I don’t know how many alarms we had with U-boats. And then we, a bit later on apparently one of the torpedoes was heading straight for a troop ship, I’m talking about five thousand troops on board, heading for this troop ship and a Dutch destroyer sailed in the way of it. The captain, he arranged for the destroyer to sail in the path and the torpedo blew up the destroyer and they had two survivors. And then the one, the one destroyer was circling round and round and round. And when they had [pause] when we got back to Liverpool they had a collection for the crew which is most unusual in wartime. Having a collection because they were so grateful to this destroyer. You know looked after them so well.
HB: Yeah.
MR: The crew.
HB: It’s sad. It’s sad losing all those guys.
MR: You don’t hear about these things do you really? Generally.
HB: Well, it’s because people like you Maurice don’t talk about them.
MR: Yes.
HB: Or haven’t talked about them until now.
MR: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. I mean you’re right, you know a collection for a crew of a destroyer, you know.
MR: And, and that, it could be quite a bit of money. All these troops. They weren’t just troopships. There were important people on board too you know.
HB: Yeah.
MR: People who were going home to England. Important people who travelled. I don’t know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So, we’ve, we’ve got you back to Bovington.
MR: Yes.
HB: You got married in 1945.
MR: Oh yes.
HB: So that would have been before you went out to India.
MR: Before I went to India. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Yeah. I had one week’s leave [laughs] I got married. One week’s leave and then I was away for nearly twelve months in India and Burma.
HB: That’s, now, that is a long distance relationship.
MR: [laughs] Yeah. The only communication we had were by, I used to write her letters and I think there’s still some that’s upstairs.
HB: Yes.
MR: I must, I must get rid of those too. Those letters. I don’t want other people reading them.
HB: Well [laughs] but so you’ve, you’ve come back. You’ve gone to Bovington.
MR: Yeah.
HB: To be demobbed.
MR: Right.
HB: And ⸻
MR: I’ve got to get myself a job after.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Had a fortnight’s leave and then I’d got to find a job. I went to Jones and Shipman.
HB: Which is an engineering company.
MR: Yes. It is.
HB: In Leicester.
MR: It was.
HB: Or was.
MR: It’s gone now.
HB: Yeah. And what did, what sort of engineering did you do there, Maurice?
MR: I wasn’t an engineer. I was on the commercial side and I only had three years with Jones and Shipman. Then I went to Perry Parkers, and they were [laughs] they were a family firm. I was on exports there. Commercial again. Then I went to Richard’s and I spent thirty years with Richard’s and I retired from Richard’s.
HB: And what did Richard’s do?
MR: Well, they were structural. They were structural engineers. They used to have these structures with, you know RSJs and beams and things, and also they had a foundry too. What they called meehanite foundry. It was like a superior cast iron. Cast iron thing they made in the foundry.
HB: Yeah. And you were there for thirty years.
MR: Yeah. I was commercial manager actually.
HB: Yeah. So —
MR: All the buying and all the commercial side.
HB: Yeah. When, when, when you look back now you know not having really talked much about the war but you’re looking back now from being one hundred years old.
MR: Yeah.
HB: What, what do you think you took into your life from your wartime experience?
MR: Oh well, it made a man of me actually I think. I was only a boy when I went in and I had led a fairly sheltered, although not a, we weren’t, we weren’t particularly wealthy. We were, well we were poor really in Manchester but it, it made me a leader. It did me a lot of good really being in the RAF. In the fact, that it built my character I think to not worry about, it doesn’t bother me about people or anything really. I wasn’t, I wasn’t afraid of dying. I didn’t want to get wounded but I was never afraid of dying, not even on trips. I wasn’t scared of going on trips.
HB: Right.
MR: I don’t know why that was. I never felt frightened at all because I didn’t, it didn’t worry me if I got killed really before, that was before I was married of course.
HB: Yes. Yes. Of course. And, and, and that experience obviously took you through. You mention leadership.
MR: Yeah.
HB: And, and that sort of brings you back to how close you worked with your crew.
MR: Yeah.
HB: And you led them and you took that forward but with your crew as a group of men together do you think that worked for them as well? Having you as the pilot.
MR: Well, it could do but you were the boss actually. There was no question. Whatever you said went. If you said, ‘Bale out.’ They’d bale out. Or anything, you know. You, you were like a captain of a ship really, I suppose. Your word was law and there was no, they never questioned it. I remember coming back from a raid once and the rear gunner said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I think there’s a fighter. I can’t, can’t quite see it.’ So he said, ‘I’m not sure.’ So I did a corkscrew you see and he said, ‘Oh you’re alright. No. Don’t worry. Don’t get bloody mad.’ Something like that. I said, ‘Who the bloody hell are you talking to?’ [laughs] And of course he shut up then.
HB: Yeah.
MR: But that’s just an instance of your life you know.
HB: Yeah. I can, yeah I can understand that. I can understand that. So you marry.
MR: When I finished my tour I got married.
HB: You married Sylvia.
MR: Had a week’s leave and then to —
HB: Yeah.
MR: I went to India.
HB: And you set up home here in Leicester.
MR: Well, yeah. I lived in Braunstone actually for, when my, there was houses being built. Twelve hundred pound they were. Houses being built, two up and two down and I had one of those in, just off Braunstone Lane and I lived there for about two years. And then I, in this area, this is in 1952 I think I bought this plot where the house is built. I had an architect and we built the house. We built this house and I’ve lived here for sixty odd years. My wife and I have had sixty years in this house. She’s now in Kirby House.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Care home. But we had sixty, and I’ve lived here for sixty eight, excuse me sixty eight years. And the house was built with the architect and I mean things like the picture window there and the hatch was ours. You know. We wanted that.
HB: Yes.
MR: Sylvia and I. And he, you know was a good architect. All his, every window in the house looks out on the back garden. Three bedrooms. Three bedroom windows. And the architect was very good.
HB: Yeah. That’s lovely.
MR: And we’ve liked this house. We’ve always been very happy in it.
HB: Yeah. Well, we’ve sort of naturally come to an end —
MR: Right.
HB: Of the interview, Maurice and I thank you.
MR: Well, thank you for coming any way.
HB: Well, it’s, and I don’t say this lightly it’s, it’s a privilege really to be able to get you to tell your story and to have your story recorded.
MR: Yeah.
HB: And I thank you for that and I’m sure in the future when people look in to what Bomber Command did in years to come somewhere in there, there will be this little comment from —
MR: Yeah.
HB: From Maurice Roberts.
MR: Well that’s nice to know, you know.
HB: Yes.
MR: And I’ve got this this thing. This aircrew medal plus.
HB: Yeah.
MR: That David Cameron, well it would be, and bar that’s it.
HB: The clasp. Yeah.
MR: The aircrew. And I’ve also got the medal from the French government. The Legion d’Honneur.
HB: Yeah.
MR: Have you seen that?
HB: No. What, what I’ll do now is I will terminate the interview if I may —
MR: Yes.
HB: And we’ll go on to the other bits, because there’s bits of paperwork.
MR: Right.
HB: So, thank you again Maurice.
MR: Ok.
HB: And we’ll just stop the interview.
MR: Right.
HB: I normally say the time but I can’t see the time. So, it’s twelve something I think. Oh dear.
MR: That’s not going that clock. The time. Look at my watch. That’s the correct time.
HB: It’s ten minutes past twelve.
MR: Right.
HB: Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Maurice Roberts
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-02-19
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ARobertsM200219, PRobertsM2001
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:54:47 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Born in Manchester, he was 20 years old in 1940 when he joined up and volunteered for aircrew. He trained in South Africa, Canada (Moncton and Trenton), the Unites States (Lakeland), and was torpedoed in the Atlantic on his way back. Maurice flew Tiger Moths, Oxfords, Wellingtons, and Halifaxes. After being stationed at a Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Lossiemouth, he was posted to 51 Squadron at RAF Snaith. He recollects operations to Essen, Cologne, Ludwigshafen and Chemnitz, mentioning 8-hour trips made possible by amphetamines ('Wakey-wakey' pills), heavy anti-aircraft fire, FIDO, and bomb-struck aircraft. On another occasion they were diverted to a Lincolnshire airfield for which they had not got the maps and couldn’t locate it. Having resigned to the fact that they would have to set a course out over the North Sea and then bale out, at the last moment Maurice spotted a light on the airfield and was able to land safely. They once had to land with a 2000 lb bomb still on board, which his crew considered the best landing he had ever done. In May 1945, he did 12 operations for bomb disposal in the North Sea, taking off from RAF Driffield. In June, with 10 Squadron and a new crew at RAF Melbourne, he flew C-47s training for operations on Japan, then was posted to the Far East. While stationed in Karachi, Maurice dropped supplies in the jungle. Demobilised in 1946, he pursued a career in engineering retiring as a manager – Maurice maintains that wartime service helped built his character. He stayed in touch with other 51 Squadron veterans through their association. In addition to his decorations, he was awarded the Legion of Honour.
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
Scotland--Moray
England--Yorkshire
Canada
Ontario
Ontario--Trenton
New Brunswick
New Brunswick--Moncton
United States
Florida
Florida--Lakeland
South Africa
Germany
Germany--Essen
Germany--Cologne
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Pakistan
Pakistan--Karachi
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
South Africa--Vereeniging
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-10-25
1944-12-02
1945-01-02
1945-05
1945-06
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Graham Emmet
Steve Baldwin
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
10 Squadron
51 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bomb disposal
bomb struck
bombing
C-47
FIDO
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Driffield
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Snaith
searchlight
submarine
Tiger force
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/712/9286/PBlakeMMD1801.1.jpg
9e2b7e400848014af7301ef833337514
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/712/9286/ABlakeMMD180711.1.mp3
37e7de00f292211ac03458c3996c36e1
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
Blake, Muriel Mary Doris
M M D Blake
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. An oral history interview with Leading Aircraftswoman Muriel Blake (b.1922, 489709 Women's Auxiliary Air Force), her identity card and four photographs. She served as a parachute and dinghy packer at RAF Mepal.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Muriel Blake and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-07-11
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
Blake, MMD
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is an interview with Muriel Blake [buzz] Harry Bartlett on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive carrying out the interview. It’s [pause] looking at the clock —
MB: Oh no. Don’t look at that. No. No.
HB: Which is broken.
MB: It’s not [laughs] It’s so old I daren’t let it go.
Other: Five to eleven.
HB: Right. Five, its five to eleven now in the morning. Right. Muriel. Your chance to tell us your story. Can you just start off where, where where you were born?
MB: I was born at Oakham in Rutland. My parents came from Lincolnshire. Mother from Market Deeping. My father from Stamford. And they were married there and there’s lots of photographs. I’ve got the wedding photograph and everything there. But then my father went in the war, the First World War and when he came back they moved to Oakham. Father started up a business there and I was born there. My sister was born in Stamford during the First World War.
HB: Right.
MB: Because she was six years older than me and I was born in Oakham. Educated at Oakham Central School which was a very good school. The, took the eleven plus in those days but there was only one, one girl and one boy that passed every year to go to Oakham School which was the school.
HB: Yeah. Yeah
MB: And the Girls School at Stamford. So you didn’t get a chance and we were not Oakham people. My sister passed but they made some excuse because she’d made a mistake because we’re Catholics. And they said, my father said they said she’d passed you know and she was a clever girl and then they let my father know that she hadn’t passed. That [Monica Clark] had which was a very old Oakham very classy, you see the Oakham ones. And as I say Father wanted the investigation and they said she’d, her mistake was that she said who was the head of the church and my sister said the pope [laughs]
HB: Oh, right. Right.
MB: That was their excuse.
HB: So, did, did you what what year would that be as you were coming up towards leaving the Central School.
MB: About 1922. And I was eleven in 1933.
HB: About ’33.
MB: When I, when I took the —
HB: And were you, were you expected to go out to work? Did you look for work or what happened?
MB: I left school when I was fifteen wasn’t I? I was, what’s that? I was eleven when I was, ’33 wasn’t I? So how many years was that? Four years wasn’t it? No. I started off, I wanted to be a children's nurse. A nanny. My mother had been a nanny and my one ambition was to be a nanny with a posh family because they were all posh families round Oakham. Well, only for the winter. They came for the hunting season and all the big houses. Big estates. I wanted to be a nanny you see but I wanted to travel abroad with the children.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
MB: And I was going to, I was hoping to go to a very posh nanny college to train you see. But then the war came out didn’t it and that spoiled a lot of us didn’t it? Then that’s how I went in to, my father was a plumber and decorator [squeaking] I think it’s my feet.
HB: Ah.
MB: And he got his workshops you know and then he got a front shop and he was about do it yourself wallpapers and all that and I went to work there to start with. And then unbeknown to me, you didn’t have a life of your own, well I mean I had a lovely life but we didn’t do what the kids do these days. I mean the man up the road came up and said to my father, ‘They’ve got a vacancy. They’d like to have your daughter.’ So dad said that was alright. Then when I went home at lunchtime he said, ‘You’re now working at Peasgood’s.’ [laughs]
HB: Right. Oh. As simple as that.
MB: There was nothing nasty about it [laughs] but, you know.
HB: Yeah.
MB: That’s how life was.
HB: Yeah.
MB: You did as you were told.
HB: Yeah.
MB: But I was still hoping to go and of course then the war broke out so there was no chance of ever going to a posh, to be a nanny, you know.
HB: No.
MB: All that sort of thing was going by the board and, and then my sister, Pete’s mum she was married and they lived in Leicester and they had a restaurant and they were really working at war work because they had a three rest, café rooms but when the war broke out all round East Park Road and as I say there’s [unclear] all around there and they were all factories in those days.
HB: Yeah.
MB: But they lived down the East Park Road. A big house on East Park Road and they cooked their dinners. They had the lower stairs rooms were for the females and two more rooms downstairs for the workmen and they, they were on rations. I mean, my mother never went without. I found a letter the other day, ‘Could you please bring, if Muriel comes home for the weekend could she please bring some butter. I’m running out.’
HB: Right. So, she was, so they were feeding the factory workers.
MB: Yes. Feeding the factory workers but not only were they —
HB: Right.
MB: Feeding them at lunchtime. And it was a hot dinner and maybe it wasn’t —
HB: Yeah.
MB: It was a hot dinner, and a pudding and a drink. And do you know how much it was?
HB: No.
MB: A shilling. That’s all it cost in those days and, and she had her rations of meat and of course they all came because they were getting these good dinners, you know off the ration and one day she had, they had to have rabbits. You used to get, the butcher used to deliver all these rabbits. I mean, I love rabbit but they used to do rabbit pies and steamed puddings and all that sort of thing.
HB: Right.
MB: But then and so I went to, by this time Pete, Peter wasn’t born then. His elder brother was who spent his life in the Air Force. He’d done his career as an airman. Pete’s dad had gone. I mean he was the chef but he went in the Air Force, you see.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And so I went to help her out. She’d got waitresses and all that sort of thing. People doing the cleaning and everything. So, I got [unclear] you know, I didn’t get called up for quite a while because of that you see.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And then —
HB: So, so how many were in your family then, Muriel?
MB: In my family?
HB: Yeah.
MB: Just my sister and I.
HB: Just you and your sister.
MB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. And your sister was called —?
MB: Frances.
HB: Frances. Yeah.
MB: Frances Johnson.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And then Pete came along like so that made an extra one. And then, eventually I went in to the now, we’re getting desperate I think. It was a case of, ‘Do you want to be in a factory?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘Do you want to be on the land?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘I want to go — [laughs] I always wanted to go in the WAAF because while I was young they built Cottesmore you see.
HB: Right.
MB: So, I always associated with them.
HB: Yeah.
MB: The Air Force sort of thing. And one of my cousins —
HB: Yeah.
MB: He was, he became a wing commander in the Air Force.
HB: Right.
MB: And then he went out to Canada with the, after the war he transferred to the Canadian Air Force.
HB: Right.
MB: And spent the rest of his time out there.
HB: So, so you actually you were working in, in the restaurant but then as as the war was declared were you obviously you carried on in the war. Roughly when were you called up then Muriel?
MB: About, what’s it say on that mug, Peter. No this —
Other: This one here?
MB: Yeah. Tony did that for me.
Other: What would you say? The glasses. I haven’t got my glasses.
MB: Oh, you haven’t got your glasses on. My nephew has done this for me. Oh, that is the right number. You can have a look at that if you like.
HB: So, this is, this is a lovely —
MB: Tony had that done at the museum at —
HB: Cup for a WAAF.
MB: Where was it at. What’s that museum called down in Shropshire? They have got —
Other: Near Telford.
MB: Yeah. Near —
HB: And you were right with your service number because this mug is, has got the crest.
MB: Yeah.
HB: With WAAF in the middle and it’s got 489709.
MB: I’ve got that.
HB: ACW1 Muriel Blake. Safety equipment worker. RAF Mepal.
MB: Yeah.
HB: January 1944 to February 1946.
MB: Yeah. Because then I came out sick.
HB: So it was the beginning of 1944.
MB: Oh, yeah.
HB: That you went in. So what was your, what was your, how, what was your process for joining?
MB: Well, as I say I’d always, when I was young I wanted to be in the Fleet Air Arm. Don’t ask me why because it fascinated me [laughs] Planes fascinated me and so I wanted to be in the WAAFs so I said I’d volunteer, to choose and go in the WAAF. So that’s where I went and that was when I down here I went down to Ulverscroft Road. Do ad they still do that there? We did all the recruiting. All these girls [laughs] all these girls.
HB: That’s Ulverscroft Road in Leicester. Yeah.
MB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
MB: I had a quiet life really and all these girls were all out of the country and that. I didn’t know Leicester people. I thought, well, a lot of Leicester people were awful you know. All these women used to walk about with their rollers in their hair. I used to say to my mother. ‘Do you know they go in to town on a Saturday afternoon. They’ve still got their rollers in their hair.’
HB: Oh dear.
MB: She said, ‘Yeah. But they’ll all be dressed up tonight in the pub.’
HB: Yeah. So, you went to Ulverscroft Road to sign up.
MB: Signed up there.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And —
HB: And what, what was that process like there?
MB: Well, it was alright to start with but we were all sitting there. There was two girls from Coalville and we, we all went for a medical and then the girl next to me they called her back and when she came back she was crying. So I said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ So, she said, ‘They’ve just found out I’ve got TB,’ she said. So, I mean living in Coalville you could understand that really. All that dust. Can’t you? So, she said. Coalville. So, the next thing you know they called my name out. Muriel Blake. So, they said, ‘You’ve got to go back. The doctors want to see you again.’ I thought, ‘TB. I can’t have TB. I’ve lived in Oakham all my life. Nothing’s fresher than Oakham air.’ I was that indignant [laughs] I thought —
HB: Yeah.
MB: How can they call me back? There’s nothing wrong with me. I used to have rosy cheeks. So, I got back on the bed and I said, ‘Why have you called me back?’ He said, ‘It’s your hammer toe.’ [laughs] So I said, ‘It’s a family trait this is.’
HB: Oh right.
MB: It come from my mother and you know, goes through the family. I said, ‘I’ve always had a hammer toe ever since I was a child.’ So, he said, ‘Yes. But you can’t have a hammer toe. You can’t go in the forces with a hammer toe.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ‘Well, you won’t be able to do the square bashing.’ So, she said, ‘You won’t be able to wear the shoes.’ I said, ‘I hope I’m not going to be square bashing all the time.’ [laughs] Anyway, all these doctors stood around me. They said, ‘No. You definitely won’t be able to go.’ So I said, ‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’ I said [laughs] ‘I’ve got through school and everything else. They aren’t painful.’ So, anyway, they let me go.
HB: Oh right.
MB: So then we went for interview for what job you were going to, wanting to do. So I wanted to be a driver and my father had taught me to drive through fields around, all around Luffenham and that. I mean they didn’t have to get licenses in those —
HB: No.
MB: In those days. So, I said, ‘I want to be, I’m going to be a driver. I would like to be a driver please.’ So he said, ‘No. You can’t be a driver.’ So I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘You’re not tall enough.’ [laughs] I’m five two.
HB: Right.
MB: So, he said, ‘Anyway, you don’t weigh enough.’ I only weighed six and a half stone but I was as healthy as anything.
HB: Yeah.
MB: There was nothing wrong with me. So, I said, ‘Now, what am I going to do?’ I said, ‘Why can’t I drive? My dad’s taught me to drive.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘You wouldn’t be able to pull the crew buses. They’ll be to big for you, you see.’ Well, that’s what I wanted to do, wasn’t it?
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
MB: So I said, ‘Well, what other trade can I do?’ He said, ‘We’ll put you down as a mechanic.’ So I said, ‘You’ve got to be joking.’ I said, ‘If I knock a nail in the plane the plane will fall to pieces.’ I said, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea how to do anything like that.’ Still haven’t. So, he said, ‘Well, I don’t know. What can you do?’ he said, ‘You could be set, we’ll try safety equipment.’ So they put me down. I’d no idea what safety equipment was but that’s what they put me down for. So offer came back, waited for the papers which eventually came and my dad, I went from Leicester and my dad, my mum and dad came over to see me off on the train. Very, we were all tearful and that you know like you would be. And I went to near, [pause] where’s the big training camp place. I’ve forgotten that now. Oh hell.
HB: There was quite a few.
MB: Yeah. Where they, where we all went.
HB: Was it up near Blackpool?
MB: Yeah. No, it wasn’t Blackpool. No. It wasn’t Blackpool.
HB: Yorkshire.
MB: Wilmslow. At Wilmslow.
HB: Wilmslow.
MB: Yeah.
HB: Right.
MB: We went to Wilmslow. And they sat, they all got on the train. There were a lot of girls on the station and we all got on the train and I thought coming from the country you see I thought all these city girls, they were born wiser than me and I thought well I’m not going to cry on the train. I wouldn’t let anybody know that I’m upset. So I sat in the carriage you know, I’m full of myself and all the rest. I looked at the rest of these Leicester girls and they were all crying [laughs]
HB: Dear.
MB: And we gets to the hut and they said, [unclear] to have something to eat. And we sat at these long tables. We’d always, you know done everything right because we was at nanny, you know. I mean at teatime we had an embroidered cloth and at lunchtime we had a proper, you know we used to have a dinner at dinner time. Everything was always very proper. And somebody said, ‘Pass the jam.’ And there was a big dish like that with all this horrible jam in it and they went whoosh like that and shot it [laughs] And I thought oh my mother would die.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Not at home anymore.
MB: No. No. And they, they gave us all this stuff for carrying. You know, your uniform and your blankets and that and took us to this hut and just as we were going to bed all these girls were crying again [laughs] I thought they’re not as tough as they look, you know. They all looked as if they knew it all.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And that was it. We did they square bashing which I wasn’t very keen about really. I don’t think anybody was in those days. And then I got sent to [pause] Where? The one near Cambridge.
HB: Mepal.
MB: No.
HB: Mepal.
MB: No. The one at Waterbeach.
HB: Oh.
MB: Waterbeach, because Waterbeach was the —
HB: Waterbeach. Right.
MB: That was near Cambridge. That, that was the main one and Mepal and Witchford were new ones that had been built.
HB: Right.
MB: During the war, you know. Quickly.
HB: Yeah.
MB: They were the satellite ones but we went to the, I went to the Waterbeach one. I mean that was another thing. I mean people don’t understand in those days I mean it wasn’t that you didn’t have perhaps the money but people didn’t dash around on holiday and, I mean, we used to go out for days you know. Dad would take us to Hunstanton and things like that and I think I’d been to London a couple of times and he’d taken us round. But you hadn’t done things on your own so much. And there you were with a kit bag [laughs]
HB: Yeah.
MB: And a big paper telling you where you were going. And we got off the train at Cambridge and thought how the devil am I going to get to Waterbeach?
HB: Right.
MB: And then you see somebody in uniform, you know. They tell you what to do. And, and then of course I went in to the safety equipment section and they’d heard nothing about it. And there was mostly men in there in the parachute section and I was fairly new I suppose. A bit young and inexperienced. And there was one little fella and he, he was a lot older you know. He was a bloke in his fifties or forties I should think perhaps, been in the Air Force before but he was lovely and he taught, he was teaching me how to do them. A parachute. And I always used to forget the rip cord handle. The last bit you put on is the most important bit which pulls the parachute out and I always used to forget to fasten it, you know and me being anxious like. And I wasn’t there very long before I got posted to Hereford there, and Credenhill and he, and he brought me a little present, and inside the present, now that’s upstairs, I think, a scruffy little bit of paper like that, and it said, “Don’t forget the ripcord.” [laughs]
HB: I like it. I like it.
MB: And so then I went to, we went to Credenhill which was terrible. Horrible. Half way up a mountain.
HB: Where was that? Grand hill?
MB: Credenhill.
HB: Credenhill.
MB: Is it still there?
HB: I don’t know.
MB: No. It’s outside Hereford. It was halfway up [laughs] halfway up a mountain somewhere.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MB: And it was absolutely isolated and it was freezing cold and they, that’s where we did the training, you know for the, it was, there was, it was a big place.
HB: Did the, did they fly from there or—
MB: No. No. No.
HB: No. That was purely —
MB: That was just pure training.
HB: A training place. Yeah.
MB: It was a mixed. There wasn’t just parachutes and dinghies and, you know it wasn’t just safety equipment. I tell you who were there, not that you saw them because it was so big except if you happened to be in the same section, you know, training on, on the same things was the paratroopers. They’d never let anybody pack their parachutes. They packed their own.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And of course, they used to have to have them for you know all the materials and that that they dropped.
HB: Yeah.
MB: I mean their parachutes were much bigger and much more complicated than ours were. And so we went on and of course we went from one section to another and we marched all the time. We had this awful [laughs] awful sergeant. Auburn haired she was. And she marched us. Marched us there and she marched us there and because we were all new you know and a bit rebellious so when she wasn’t looking we used to nip between the different buildings and come out the other side and so she used to lose us. In the end she bought, got herself a bike.
HB: Just so she could check if you were.
MB: She got track.
MB: Yeah.
MB: Cycling round these buildings. ‘There you are. What are you doing?’ ‘Oh, well we just went around that way. We thought it would be quicker.’
HB: Dear me. So, so you learned you, what you’re learning then is, is packing the parachutes and getting them ready.
MB: Yeah. And the dinghies. And the dinghies.
HB: For the crews to use.
MB: And the big dinghies.
HB: I was curious about the dinghies because I don’t think people really think much about the dinghies but —
MB: Well, they were, that was what did my back in. That’s why I had to come out you see.
HB: Right.
MB: Because I slipped my disc. They were the hardest and especially if you got new. You see, when a plane crashed you lost everything so it all had to be replaced.
HB: Right.
MB: And the dinghies you’d get the rubber so they were really hard but we used to have to go every so often. The parachutes we kept you know. They came and collected, as they were going off on the ops they’d come and collect their parachute. But the dinghies were always in the plane and then we did this big one in the wing as well.
HB: Yeah.
MB: We used to climb out on the wing. But they, we used to have to fetch them out every so often and replace them and bring them back in to the, there was, there was a parachute section and a dinghy section. They were separate. They weren’t —
HB: Yeah.
MB: They weren’t all in the same building. And the dinghy section it was you had to wear, well they were made I suppose, blanket slippers over your shoes. You weren’t allowed to go without anything on your shoes and everything was absolutely perfect because when you blew them up you blew seven parachute err dinghies up. You know the least little bit of petrol or anything would make a hole in it.
HB: Yeah.
MB: So —
HB: Yeah.
MB: We used to have to, and we’d blow them up for so many hours and then we used to have to repack them again and then we used to have to let them down again. But they went in a pack, like a parachute pack so and we used to have to, used to, we used to get literally there was three, three girls in our section. The rest were men and we used to literally have to kneel on the table you know to get our balance to get them done.
HB: Right.
MB: And you’d get to the last bit, you know and you’d be bounding away. And then we used to have to take them back. And we used to ride all round the perimeter tracks, me and another girl and there used to be a fella used to go with us and we used to have one across the handlebars and one on each handlebar cycling round the perimeter track because all the planes were all the way around.
HB: Yeah.
MB: So you’d go from one bay to another.
HB: On bikes.
MB: Yeah. On bikes. So, you’d have, I’d have three, Vi would have three and the other, the fella, I can’t think what his name was. A Londoner, he was lame. And he, I think he had two. He were in charge I think.
HB: Yeah.
MB: Or he probably only had one knowing him. And then we would have to replace them. But then we would have to bring the others back you see as well.
HB: Did you, did you actually go in to the aircraft and go out on the wings to do it?
MB: Yeah. Yeah. Yes, so then we used to go in the, used to go and get in the planes you see and sometimes you used to be, they used to be revving them up. The engineers did and that.
HB: Yeah.
MB: The mechanics. And Vi and I used to hide you see. We used to put them in, put one in and then you think how manys going off any minute now. They never did. And we’ll hide and perhaps we will get a ride. And they used to be, ‘Come on you two.’ ‘Oh, I thought we were going to get to do, you know circuit and bumps around the camp.’ But no such thing.
HB: Yeah. Right.
MB: And we used to come. Yeah. We used to put the big ones —
HB: So that was at, that was at Mepal.
MB: That was at Mepal on the way back. Yeah.
HB: After you’d done your training at Hereford. Yeah. Yeah.
MB: Yeah. Yes. As I say I didn’t go back to Waterbeach. I went back to Mepal. And there was Mepal. Witchford was three miles from Ely and Mepal was six miles from Ely.
HB: Right.
MB: So, we used to —
HB: So, what, what sort of aircraft were they, were they flying out in your particular —
MB: Lancasters. When I first went, when I went to Waterbeach they were Stirlings.
HB: Right.
MB: But by the time I got back, we got back, well I got back, I don’t know where the others went. I expect they were spread all over. They were Lancasters.
HB: Right.
MB: They’d got Lancasters. It just, you know. They were just becoming very popular like everywhere.
HB: Yeah.
MB: Yeah.
HB: So you, so you would go out. So you, although you were doing the dinghies you, were you still doing the parachutes as well?
MB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
MB: We used to swap over.
HB: So you’d swap over.
MB: You see. Yeah. We used to fetch the, we always used to have to hang the parachutes every so often. You had to unpack the parachutes and in a parachute section they had what they called a well, like that. They had this huge table and then there was, they called it a well and then there was like, like pulleys like you had for washing lines really.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And we used to have to take the parachutes out and hang them and hang them for so long so to get the creases out and that. And then we used to have to take them down and repack them but the tables were, well the length of the whole parachute really.
HB: Right.
MB: And you had to get the top of it and hook it on the top end and then spread it all out. There was all the silks, you know all on panels like that. Then there was all the cords and then a pack at the bottom and you were at the bottom with this length and you had to shake, shake all your cords out like that and then separate them and separate all the folds and then get them all perfectly straight. And then in the pack it was all zipped like that and you had a big hook and he had to say you had to start with the cords and hook that way in, out, in, out. Well, if you didn’t get it in out right the parachute wouldn’t come out. You’d got to get it —
HB: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
MB: You’d got to get it perfect. So then you’d do that, you’d do that and then you’d pull up again and you’d keep doing it. I mean, it wasn’t just a little length it was, well, you can imagine. It was quite long and you’d got all these cords that you had to have in the right place. Well, that was alright when you got that. But being small and the table was high we used to sit with our bottom on the side, the side of our bottom on the table.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And when Tony’s brother went for the same thing which was completely different, you know. With ejector seats and everything else in his day. I, he, he took me one day to one of the, he said we’ve got, we’ve got another section with the old stuff in. I’ll take you. Well, some of the fellas because he was a sergeant, some of the fellas that were working in the section when they came to look and I couldn’t even get up on the table.
HB: No. No. No.
MB: They said, ‘Oh, you’re rubbish.
HB: Yeah.
MB: But then when you’d got all the cords all in perfect then you started bringing in the silks you see. But you had to, you had to have two hands for the silks. You got them parted like that. They were narrow at the top like that sort of thing.
HB: Yeah.
MB: Like that curtain. Then you took the one panel over, then you took the other panel over, and then you took them over until you got it down to about as narrow as, like that.
HB: To, to about what? Just over a foot wide.
MB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And then you’ve got to start bringing the silks in on top of the cords.
HB: Ah right.
MB: But you’d got those in at the certain way, you know.
HB: Yeah.
MB: Wave them in a certain way and then you got those all in and then you’d got side panels and you brought the side panels up and, like that and then you brought the second lot of panels up and then you’d got this little pack at the back with the rip cord in you see [laughs] That was the one I always forgot.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MB: Because after you’d got that hold of you used to have these like concertina elasticy things with hooks on you know put over and then you had to do this little pocket thing for last with the ripcord handle and make sure you’d got the rip cord handle in right. So that when they ripped it open they just got the handle and as they pulled so they pulled it, pulled it all out sort of thing.
HB: Right. Yeah.
MB: And if they did it and if they, you know well landed in the, in the Channel like or they landed on this side because a lot of them did, got shot down you know.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And managed to just get here before they crashed and parachuted out. And then we used to have to sign for them all and when they carried them, because they came back to work they’d come to the girl and they’d look in the book to see who had done it and they’d give us a pound [laughs]
HB: Would they?
MB: Yeah. The crew would give you a pound. And a pound was a lot because we only got —
HB: Wow. Yes.
MB: Two pound fifty a fortnight [laughs]
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MB: And they’d say, ‘Thank you very much,’ you know, ‘For packing my parachute and here’s a pound for you.’
HB: Yeah.
MB: It wasn’t on all camps but it was on ours you know. We used to be chuffed to death. Not we weren’t chuffed to death. The poor bloke got shot up.
HB: Yeah. That’s right, but a pound for a life isn’t a bad price, is it?
MB: No. Not for a life is it?
HB: Yeah. So, so yeah so, so that was I mean that was quite well it wasn’t just a responsible job, that was very obvious it was a responsible job.
MB: It was a very responsible job but I don’t think it was ever recognised. The funny thing is that Tony I say is at, where is he now? Shropshire, isn’t it? What’s the, what’s the name of his camp?
Other: Cosford.
MB: Yeah. Cosford, he ended up at, he was, he’d been in ever since he left school. Well not quite as soon as he left school.
Other: Yeah.
MB: But when he was old enough. He was the last of the conscripts Tony was. Not just him but his [whole] crew.
HB: Yeah.
MB: But he, as he said they, when he went to Germany, Malta and Cyprus and I think he went to Iran with the, either Iran or Iraq with the crews, you know. His wife didn’t go there. I should think she’s stayed in Cyprus. But it, as he said the thing is that everything was so different now isn’t it? I mean there’s the ejector seats and the, they had to be in charge of them. And, and —
HB: Well, if somebody, somebody had probably still got to pack the parachute and —
MB: Yeah. Yes. Oh, yes.
HB: And that, and that wouldn’t and that still wouldn’t be a lot different to what you used to do.
MB: They used to sit on the parachutes, the parachutes. They used to sit —
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MB: No, they didn’t. They sat on the dinghies. That’s it. They had the dinghies round the bottom. They sat, because we used to have to take them over when we took the dinghies in and out. We had to go to each section. We used to have to go to the rear bomber you know at the end and the rear gunner and put in his. I mean he had a very isolated job really. I mean, it was right at the other end and he was completely shut off. We had one lad, he got shot up and the, the plane got back but he’d been shot in the eye. You know, the plane had been shot and he’d got shot in the eye and we had to go and fetch the parachutes and it was absolutely covered in blood you know because basically it was on his front. And he lost his eye. He was only nineteen but he came back and he came back to you know to see us all it was. That was rather nice but I never liked this. It hung up for ages this bloody parachute. You know. With all his blood on it.
HB: Yeah.
MB: I suppose it was all [unclear] but it —
HB: So what would, what would happen with that then? Would you, would you have, would your team have cleaned it and —
MB: Well —
HB: Got it ready again or —
MB: No. No. No. They wouldn’t have used that one again, no.
HB: No.
MB: But it was, I suppose it was all a bit, you know they had these consultations and God knows what because I mean when they come back from bombing raids we, my friend and I she was a tailoress and of course she was very popular because if a crew went missing they had to keep up the, you know sergeant’s and officer’s —
HB: Yeah.
MB: And that sort of thing. They’d got to keep the compliment up all the time.
HB: Oh yeah.
MB: How many at each camp. So, if a crew, two or three crews went missing then there would be an officer, sergeant and corporal and they’d all want their flashes altered on their uniforms.
HB: Oh, right. Yeah.
MB: So, they’d be all, I used to go in to the tailoring jobs. She wasn’t the only one. There was a man in charge. He was a tailor as well. And they’d all be in there with the uniforms and, ‘Oh look, can you put my sergeant’s on.’ Can you do this? Can you do that?
HB: Oh right. Right.
MB: She was always very popular.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And as for going out on leave we used to get, I used to get heading out the gates it would be [laughs] —
HB: Yeah.
MB: She was so popular and I was. We used to go out at night. We never used to sign out. They used to say, ‘All right, girls you can come in.’ Us two.
HB: Yeah. Oh.
MB: Everybody else used to have to go around the other side.
HB: I see.
MB: Oh, she was a very popular girl she was.
HB: Yeah.
MB: But, yes —
HB: So, so you were, you were at Mepal. That would be what? 1944 through to ’45.
MB: Yeah.
HB: And you didn’t go, you didn’t go anywhere else other than Mepal until —
MB: As I say I came out then because I slipped my disc doing the parachutes.
HB: Right.
MB: And I get a pension actually.
HB: Oh right.
MB: And I was ill for about two years. Not ill ill but I —
HB: No.
MB: I couldn’t walk you know. I was in a terrible state really.
HB: Yeah.
MB: But —
HB: Well, put that to one side and we’ll go back a little bit to the happier times. So, what was the social life like?
MB: Well, it was good. I mean that was the, everybody was friendly and that. We used to go to the sergeant’s mess and as I say we used to go to the dances at the sergeant’s mess but you see we were on, I was on a New Zealand squadron and it was, I didn’t realise that, I think I read it somewhere a little while ago. That the New Zealand squadron was already here before the war. Whether they’d come like when Tony went to Iraq and Iran, one of those countries he went to and he went with the crews to, you know kind of a practicing for good,, you know fellas appearing, and when the New Zealanders belonged to or were part of us anyway weren’t they —
HB: Yeah.
MB: New Zealand and the Australians. And they apparently, they were already over here. They’d already set up a base here and —
HB: Right.
MB: But how they got up to Mepal I suppose they moved them there when they’d come.
HB: And that was 75 Squadron.
MB: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.
HB: Yeah. The New Zealanders.
MB: But they were, they were nice. They were very nice. Nice, the new Zealanders were but we also had Australians and South Africans as well. So but, because one of the girls in our hut where I was they sort of all the trades were in huts you know. Were together in huts. I mean, the cook, the cook, cooks oh, it’s awful really but I mean the girls were probably ever so nice but the cooks were in completely different huts to what we were because, well they had to get up at the crack of dawn, didn’t they? You know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MB: Get the breakfasts and that.
HB: Disturb everybody if they didn’t.
MB: The awful breakfast that we used to get but and so if you, and us girls used to have to be on, used to have to do duty you see in the office, in the what do you call it by the guard gate there and if you did, if you were on the night there you had to wake the [laughs] you had to wake the cooks up and you used to get a list like this of the huts in the dark with the flashlight. You daren’t make too much light, you know. And hut so and so. We had to find that to start with. It was quite a big camp and then, and then you had to go in and it was the third bed on the left. On the left. At 4.30. Right. 4.30. Off you’d go creeping, frightened to death of frightening anybody. Go one, two, three. ‘It’s 4.30.’ ‘What?’ ‘It’s 4.30. 4.30. You’ve got to get up at 4.30.’ ‘It’s not me. It’s her over there.’
HB: Oh no.
MB: By this time they’d got the whole hut up and they could swear those girls I can tell you.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine.
MB: ‘It’s not me. It’s not me. It’s her over there. Why did you wake me up for?’ So, I used to, used to go and ask the others and I used to creep out and used to look. There was six there. Oh God, it’s the same hut.
HB: Oh no.
MB: I used to hate that. When we used to be on guard duty. That was the worst bit when and then when you used to go for breakfast you know we used to have to go down for, used to go down for breakfast.
HB: You said, now you said something earlier there. You said about the horrible breakfast. What did you used to have for your breakfast then?
MB: Constipated egg.
HB: Oh right.
MB: Dried egg.
HB: Yeah.
MB: You see and that was the other thing that when the aircrews were you know they had an idea when they were going off and they and they’d get, they’d get a meal you see. They always had egg and chips. Egg and chips. I mean, that was a luxury for us.
HB: Yeah.
MB: Egg and chips. So they got egg and chips when they got bacon or whatever they got but they’d go in the sergeant’s mess and they’d have all this lovely meal. I mean they were entitled to all this lovely meal but we girls, us girls in the parachute section when they used to go we used to say, ‘Why do you get egg and chips every time?’
HB: Yeah.
MB: ‘It’s not fair.’ ‘Well, we’re, we’re entitled to it.’ ‘No. You’re not. We never get fresh eggs.’
HB: Oh dear.
MB: Makes me laugh really. And then perhaps it would be scrubbed and, you know they were going later so they would probably get another meal before they went.
HB: Yeah.
MB: They’d probably get two lots. And we used to cycle six miles to Ely just to stand in a queue, now you won’t believe this down the street at this little café that used, where she got her eggs from I don’t know but she used to serve egg and chips and there’d be a great long queue of people and you’d probably stand there an hour because the place is only tiny and it would be full. You had to wait until they’d ate their egg and chips and then you’d move forward.
HB: Wow. Yeah. I can believe that.
MB: Just to get [laughs] get a fresh egg.
HB: Yeah. So, you used, you used to, you used to cycle to Ely.
MB: Yes.
HB: Did you used to go to Ely for dances and things like that?
MB: Yeah. No. No, because we used to have the dances on the camp. We had enough dances on camp. We were allowed in the, we didn’t go in the officers we were allowed in the sergeant’s mess, you see. We used to go to the sergeant’s mess to the dances. But we used to go to the pictures at Ely. We used to go to the pub and we used to go to the pub at Mepal and Sutton. The nearest village was Sutton and if, if a crew had finished a tour of ops which was thirty then they would, it would go around the camp such and such you know they’d only got their own markings. K for Kiddy or whatever they were. They’d finished their tour of ops and having a do at the pub at Sutton they’d say and off we’d go.
HB: Right.
MB: Someone would get on the piano you know and they used to drink. They used to have this, I didn’t do it but they used to have this, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, they used to have pints of beer and they used to sing this song. And I can’t remember that now but it was all about a good old fella and so and so and every time they said something they all, they had to drink, you know.
HB: Right.
MB: I think they were about sloshed by the time they’d finished.
HB: Yeah.
MB: But that used to be good because they’d be finished then. They’d be going off the camp, you know. Another crew would be coming.
HB: Yeah.
MB: But when they, we, I used to have to go. We used to have to go, well I used to go down to the office, the main office to pick up the dead list in the mornings to see, you know it was to find out how many parachutes and dinghies we’d lost you see. So that used to be —
HB: Of course. Yeah.
MB: Used to get down and pick up the, pick up the list but it used to be when I think about it now I mean of all the computers and that well they used to have a kind of a machine with the photographs because they always had cameras on their planes and they’d, they’d spot it, you know. One would be on and I’d be waiting to sort, and I would be looking and somebody goes. ‘What are you doing? Leave that. You’re not looking at that.’ You know.
HB: Yeah. Of course, you don’t, you know people like us we don’t, we don’t relate that, you know. Obviously, planes had been shot down. Crews had been lost.
MB: Yeah.
HB: And as you say you need to know.
MB: Yeah, because we’d got to know because I mean and it’s, I mean it, I think people that made the Lancasters, the bombers during the war, they were fantastic because I mean as soon, you weren’t, again you’d got to keep the number up all the time and the thing is that as soon as you’d lost a plane or two or three planes overnight. Whichever. They’d have to be replaced. You’d get a new crew in.
HB: Yeah.
MB: You see. That was the thing because you’d got to keep the number up of the squadron. You’d got to keep the squadron number up all the time.
HB: Yeah.
MB: Apart from the sergeants wanting to be promoted.
HB: Yeah.
MB: I mean those that were left you had to get new crews in. When you think of all these young girls that were making all these Lancaster bombers. I mean you see pictures of them now hammering these great big bolts in. Well, now it’s all done by electricity, isn’t it?
HB: Yes. Yes. Yes.
MB: I mean, I think they, you know they should have had medals as well.
HB: So, you’ve got, you’ve got 75 Squadron and, and you know, you’re coming towards obviously 1945. You’re coming towards the end of the war.
MB: Well, that’s why we were so busy, I think. You know.
HB: Yeah.
MB: You see, that’s when the Lancasters first came in to themselves, didn’t they then?
HB: Yeah.
MB: It was the Lancasters that really helped to finish off the war, wasn’t they?
HB: Yeah. And you had other squadrons at Mepal then towards the end of the war.
MB: Well, not on our camp where I was.
HB: Did you not, did you not have the Rhodesia Squadron? 44. 44 Rhodesia Squadron because weren’t they going out to the Far East or something.
MB: I don’t know. Don’t know. Not while I was there. It was still —
HB: Right.
MB: But they were, they were, it was a mix. They weren’t all New Zealanders, you know. I mean they were, I say they were from South Africa, Australia and all over the place.
HB: Yeah.
MB: But in our hut we had the Met girls. They were very posh you know. They were really posh well you know I suppose but they were all college girls. Clever girls you know.
HB: Yeah.
MB: The Met sort of thing. I couldn’t have done it. But they were, they were smashing girls. They were all very well educated. I mean again everything is done on computers now, isn’t it?
HB: It is. Yes. Yeah.
MB: It was all the weather and that you know but they were ever so, they really were friendly. And I I used to go home. We used to go home at weekends and without a pass and they used to put the, they used to put all sorts of things. Your kit bag in your bed you know and make it look like you were asleep when the sergeant came.
HB: So, you went absent without leave were you?
MB: Yeah. Well, we had the Armstrong Siddeley men came to mend the planes. They didn’t mend all of them because I mean they all had the —
HB: Oh the civilian contractors.
MB: Yeah.
HB: Yes.
MB: They were in the next group to us and they came from Coventry. Well, they knew that I came this way so if they went home, they used to go home on a Friday so they used to say they’d give you a lift you see. So there used to give me a lift. So there used to be two of them. One used to give me a lift and the other one used to take me a weekend case so I didn’t have to go out with a weekend case.
HB: Right. Were you in uniform?
MB: Yeah. Of course, I was. Yeah. They used to, they used to drop me off at, before Market Harborough for some reason. And that was it. That’s where they dropped me and I used to stand there, you know, thumbing it.
HB: Did you?
MB: And I used to get I thumbed down to Leicester to my sister or if I was lucky I got further on to Oakham. That was on a Friday and I used to come back on a Sunday. I used to get the last train from, from Oakham to Stamford and Peterborough and then from Peterborough to Ely. I used to have to change and I mean they grumble now but Peterborough Station was down there and the station that was going to take me to Ely was right the other side of Peterborough town. So in the pitch dark you used to have to walk there to get this last train which was about ten, half past ten at night and I used to get on this train and get off at Ely. But now that’s what the other fella used to do. He used to take my bike and he used to put it in the pub. There was a pub right on the station at Ely.
HB: You got it all sorted, hadn’t you?
MB: And no, not me, not just me. I mean all the airmen used to do it. It used to be full of bikes and they never charged us. So you used to get off. You’d see, this was Sunday night. You’d get off about 11 o’clock at night and in the pitch dark. You’d have a little torch and you’d go around until you found your bike. You’d get your bike and you’d creep out of the station. Get on the road and there were no lights and it was all fenland, you know.
HB: Yeah.
MB: There were no trees or anything and you’d be cycling all along all on your own and then suddenly an airmen would catch you up and he’d say, ‘Hello. Are you alright?’ So, ‘Yes, thank you.’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Mepal.’ ‘Oh, I’m just going to Witchford. Do you, shall I ride at the side of you?’ ‘Oh, thank you very much.’ So they’d ride along you see chatting away and he’d say, ‘I turn off here for Witchford.’ Because as I say we were all groups. Off he’d go and then I’d be cycling along again and you couldn’t go in the main gate so you used to have to go around and creep through a hedge. And I just got in. Got in through the, there was a hedge between the WAAF site and one of the bays. And I just got in one night and I heard this woman say, ‘Airwoman,’ in the dark. ‘Yes. Yes.’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’m just going in.’ ‘Where have you been?’ ‘Oh, I’ve just had a little ride around.’ [laughs] ‘Come and see me in the morning,’ she said. So of course, I went in.
HB: Was that one of the officers?
MB: Yeah. And I woke up. I woke my, I think I must have woke the hut up, you know and got, ‘Serves you right. You’ve been doing it for ages.’ [laughs] I got no sympathy.
HB: So, you got caught.
MB: And I got caught.
HB: Basically.
MB: I can’t remember what happened. I got away with it I think in the end.
HB: I don’t know. I don’t know.
MB: But we, where the WAAF site was we weren’t on the main camp. That’s another thing you see. They kept the women away from the men.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MB: I mean it’s, it’s so different now isn’t it? I mean we were only sort of outside but they were big these camps were, you know so we, there was a hedge there where our hut was and we used to creep through the hole on the hedge and we were on the perimeter track and we used to watch the planes take off at night. So, it was a fantastic sight really because all these Lancasters would be coming round and as they got to each bay they felt they’d got in to the queue.
HB: Followed on.
MB: Until they got to where they took off you know. And I mean when you see the, when we used to fetch take the dinghies and that I mean when you see the amount of armoury that went in you’d wondered how they ever got off the ground because they were big enough without all the bombs that went in.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And the girls, two of the girls in the armoury in our hut and I mean more female girls you’d never know but they used to ride on the bomb trains. They used to sit astride the bomb trains going around from one. They used to be ever so long you know.
HB: Yeah.
MB: Sort of, they went all the way around and that.
HB: Yeah.
MB: But its as I say you know nobody, nobody took any notice really. But one night there was one night we got bombed. One of the German planes had followed our planes in.
HB: Right. Yeah.
MB: And started firing and I think they got rid of them in the end. But then one night I was fast asleep and everybody was screaming my name. ‘Wake up. Wake up.’ So, I said, and they kept saying, ‘Wake up. Wake up.’ And there was this terrific bang and I opened my eyes and being a good catholic I thought I was dead and I’d gone to hell. Now —
HB: Right. Right. Yeah.
MB: I really thought I was on my way to hell. It was everywhere in this camp, in the hut was bright red and they, they, it was before the invasion really. They they’d taken, it got there was going to be a raid, there wasn’t going to be a raid. There was going to be a raid. They kept on and on and they kept taking the bombs off, putting them back, feeding the what do you call it’s with their egg and chips.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And that. And then this one particular night they decided that they weren’t going to take the bombs off so they left this time the bomb on and it was the plane in the bay. I say it was just a matter of over there and through the, through the hedge and this one, the time itwent off and we went over to see the next day and it was just a hole in the ground and nothing left of the plane or anything else. There was a wonder there was anything left of us.
HB: So, that just, the bomb just went off.
MB: The bomb on it
HB: It wasn’t a raid or anything.
MB: The timed bomb went off on the plane and it just blew the plane to pieces. But the funny part of it was which it was funny I mean the fact we all got when we realised what had happened you know eventually. Nobody dare move to start with but we all got outside in our striped pyjamas you know shivering like but not one person came to see if the WAAFs were alright.
HB: Right. Oh, I bet that didn’t go down well.
MB: No [laughs] Pitch dark, freezing cold, in your pyjamas. Everywhere was red.
HB: Right. Yeah.
MB: Yeah. They never came to say, ‘Are the WAAFs alright?’ Perhaps —
HB: So did you, so actually so Mepal got attacked then. It was actually attacked by the Germans. The airfield.
MB: No. Only that once.
HB: Oh, just the once.
MB: This one fighter, German fighter. When the raid was on his way, I think he was on his way back from bombing, you know. Coming over here and he got caught up with ours coming back. I think that’s what they said.
HB: Right.
MB: So he thought he’d make himself followed them in and get himself a bit of glory but what happened I don’t know.
HB: Right. Yeah.
MB: But, but then we had an American got bombed up when they landed on our camp so great excitement. ‘It’s a Flying Fortress. Goy a Flying Fortress got bombed up last night.’ The crews have landed here. So we all went to see it. This Flying Fortress. A lot of us anyway. And the airmen were coming out. So we were counting them. They’d got, was it eight or nine. I said to one of them, I said ‘How many, how many crew have you got in your van?’ ‘Nine. We only have seven in our Lancasters.’
HB: Yeah.
MB: And right next to them they had their own feeding waggon. They didn’t eat our horrible food. Never once did they come in. And they used to have all these hot dogs and all this lovely food.
HB: Yeah.
MB: Being fried. And then the crew because obviously the crew went away and the mechanics came to repair the plane and they had this. It was right next them, this waggon that they were serving all this food to them [laughs] They never gave us any of it.
HB: That would be a popular job that would. Yeah. So so you got to you got to 1945 and you’ve got to around about May, June, July time and war’s coming to an end and finishing. So, what did you, what were your feelings then?
MB: Well, I came home at Christmas. That’s what I did I, as I say it was through the dinghies that I had my, I got this bad back but I came home at Christmas. Yeah. Because Pete and [Bar?] I brought them some toys because they, some of the mechanic ground crew used to make, make toys. They made lovely toys. I’ve got some pictures of Pete with one horse and cart thing they used to make and I came home with them because I went to Oakham first and then came back. Came around to Leicester because my sister had got all the Christmas dos to do, you know and I thought I’ll help her. I’d only come on leave but I could hardly walk and then I got said I couldn’t go back and that was it. I I went on the sick and then I had my, I ended up going to one of them, I can’t think where that was. Went to a big RAF hospital to start with and, and then they put me on sick leave again and then I ended up at the Royal here. Mr Morrissey. He was a wonderful orthopaedic surgeon at Leicester and he sent me to Oxford. To the Radcliffe Hospital there. That was the leading hospital for orthopaedics and that was when they decided that I’d got this. I’d slipped this disc. You know. I’d pulled a disc out. Of course, it comes out as a big nerve that it sits on but then that nerve split so that was split all the way in.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
MB: You know, this leg. It’s funny now now I’ve got an ulcer on it but it was, I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t feel it, you know. They were sticking needles in and all sorts of things.
HB: So that would have been what? Christmas 1945?
MB: Yeah.
HB: Right. So, what happened? What happened in camp when, when you know they said, ‘Right. That’s it. The war’s over.’
MB: I don’t know because I wasn’t there was I?
HB: You weren’t there.
MB: I was still at home.
HB: Right. Right.
MB: It, so I don’t know. It was quite a, when I when I did go on leave I went back to say, and I went back in the were there [unclear] and went back in a civilian coat and to say that I was, you know I was on this permanent sick. They made such a fuss of me because I was in, in civilian clothes. You know, they hadn’t seen a girl in civilian clothes for years. I bought these clothes from Adley’s shop was in those days. My mum went with me, bought this tweed coat. It were very posh that was.
HB: Right.
MB: I thought it was. But as I say I don’t know. I don’t know what happened on the, on the camp but I think eventually where, next to our bay there was another bay that never had its doors open. But one day I was outside doing something and the doors were open and so being nosy I went, I said to one of the airmen that was there. I said, ‘What’s in this? They never open the doors at this. I’ve never seen anybody in here.’ ‘Oh, you can’t see what this is,’ he said and it was all those strips of silver that they, they [pause] for the radar wasn’t it?
HB: Window.
MB: Yeah. The Windows, yeah.
HB: Yeah.
MB: That’s where they kept it. Next door. I didn’t realise that.
HB: Oh right.
MB: I never realised that. It was all full but they used to drop them to —
HB: Yeah.
MB: Do something to the radar according to a woman I worked with after the war. She, she was in the WAAF and she was on the radar section and she went blind and it was through the job that caused her eyes to, she lost her eyesight.
HB: Oh dear.
MB: Not during the war. It was after the war.
HB: Yeah.
MB: Her eyes got so bad but that’s what they put it down to.
HB: Yeah. So, we’ve got to, we’ve got to what? 1946.
MB: I think so. I don’t know. Don’t ask me.
HB: Around about 1946 and you’ve been invalided out. You’re coming out.
MB: Well, that was ages before when I was invalided out. I mean —
HB: Yeah. So you, so obviously all your kit had to go back. What did you do? Did you —
MB: No. Yeah. Well, that’s why I went back eventually. To take my kit back. What did I do then? I stayed at my sister’s until Dave,‘til their dad came back and then I went to, eventually when I could walk I was still lame but I went to the Post Office to train as a telephonist. They were advertising for ex-Service girls and because they were on war work. The telephonists were, you know. They couldn’t leave but when, that was funny it was the other day they was on about that. Yesterday. That even then they were civil servants. When you got married at the GPO you had to leave because you might one day have a baby.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And so you know if you got engaged well you know it was pretty short when you got married. You’d have to leave the job and so of course all the girls during the war, or a lot of them had got married to Forces and things like that and so their husbands were coming back and I suppose they wanted to set up home.
HB: So where did you do your training then, Muriel?
MB: Free Lane.
HB: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
MB: You remember Free Lane.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. The big, the big exchange. Yeah.
MB: Yeah, and yeah, we did. That’s where I was but we did our training on London Road. They had, down London Road they had like big offices there and that, that’s all gone now. we did a lot —
HB: Yeah.
MB: Of training down there. They had a big training section and so we did all the writing down there and then we used to come up on to the Exchange and used to sit behind the telephonist, you know and listen in and then they’d let you up on the board and somebody would be used to be sitting at the side you know in case you made a mistake and oh it was ever so strict that was and there was it was quite nice because there were all these girls, ex, I had some good friends. I had a girl, well one girl she’d been in the Army and she’d been down Bournemouth way and she was all involved in the invasion.
HB: Right.
MB: She was a telephonist on that.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And she was saying while before the invasion she said all along the roads there was all the Army and the Americans all camped, you know. Sort of in fields and that all waiting to go abroad you know.
HB: Yeah.
MB: All the ships were all waiting and that.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MB: And another one, another friend of mine she, she was in the Wrens. She was in the Wrens. She was in the sea, at the sea and I was, there was me from the Air Force and. There was crowds of us and it was good really.
HB: Yeah.
MB: It was funny I was saying the other day you didn’t, you didn’t talk about your experiences like they say men don’t talk about it but my dad never talked about the First World War although you know he was out there all that time but I suppose this sort of thing, you sort of want to forget really.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
MB: But it —
HB: So just go back a bit. D-Day. June’44. What, how did you get the message that they’d actually landed or did you know it was going to happen?
MB: Well, I don’t know. Like everybody else I suppose. I don’t know. I know [pause] I was at my sisters I know because I know mum and dad, my dad went out for. I remember my dad going out for a drink at Oakham and my mother’s next door neighbour said, ‘Has Mr Blake gone out for a drink?’ So mum said, ‘Yes. It’s the usual thing. Left the women at home.’ So he said, ‘Come on then.’ So they went down the George which is the, was a good hotel down there and they walked in and my dad was there and he nearly fell on the floor when he saw my mother walking in, you know. It wasn’t the sort of thing ladies did in those days on their own.
HB: Yeah. I like it.
MB: But then they were, I can’t remember really. I can remember the, we had a big party and was Dave, Dave was born then and Dave was only a baby. That was another one of his brothers.
HB: Yeah.
MB: But show them the picture, Peter.
Other: Which one?
MB: You and Dave, you and Tony but we used to have a neighbourhood, we used to have neighbourhood league teams you know.
HB: Yeah.
MB: In the streets.
HB: Yeah.
MB: They all used to look after each other. They were good. We used to do all their apart from, well my sister did. She used to do weddings.
HB: Yeah.
MB: She used to do no end of weddings. She used to make beautiful wedding cakes. Her brother in law did because he was a chef because but then of course he came home so it was better but yeah, it suited them doing the catering for the weddings.
HB: [It would be] yeah.
MB: You see, it was good to get a wedding to get all the, you know nice food sort of thing.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I mean it’s a really really impertinent question to ask a lady but, so you never married.
MB: No.
HB: But did you have any near misses?
MB: [laughs] I’m not talking about them.
HB: You have then, right
MB: I laugh at that little book. It says something about, “I don’t know where Ron is tonight. I think he’s gone off me.” I said, who the devil Ron was I’ve no idea.
HB: That’s your little diary.
MB: That was at Hereford.
HB: Yeah. That was your little diary. Yeah. Yeah. So, right. Well, we seem to have come to a sort of a bit of a natural conclusion Muriel. When you, when you look back at your time in the WAAF what what do you think your best memory is of it?
MB: Well, I don’t know. The companionship. I mean my one regret is I mean I would have gone back if it hadn’t have been that I was no use to them because I just couldn’t.
HB: Yeah.
MB: I couldn’t. You know, I was, I was absolutely lame. I was in terrible agony. Firstly, they were going to operate and my niece who lives in South Africa she has had the operation. I think it’s a family trait and she can’t walk now.
HB: No.
MB: At Oxford they said that no way. They said, ‘She’s much too young to have a, have the operation.’ Have you know the disc put back. What they did they put me in plaster from here to here. Pulled me up on like, on ropes so that just my toes were on the ground and slapped all this plaster of Paris around me.
HB: Yeah.
MB: I was in that for months with just my head sticking out.
HB: Right.
MB: And my legs sticking out and that actually cured me and I know when I went again a few years later and I went back in to them again and it cured it again but that’s gone.
HB: Yeah.
MB: They don’t do that.
HB: No.
MB: They do this operation and my niece has had a steel rung cut up in to her spine and she’s in such agony now and they can’t even x-ray her because of this steel rod —
HB: Yeah.
MB: That she’s got in. So the old ways were [pause] better.
HB: Yeah. So obviously you’ve had this fantastic companionship and what not. What, what do you think was probably your worst memory? What was —
MB: The food.
HB: The food. Yeah.
MB: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. That’s a bit of a theme.
MB: Yeah. I suppose being away from home. I mean, you know although you had, I suppose it was so stark. I mean the hooks were cold and you had these old blankets and and we weren’t I mean when we got up in the morning everything had to be folded up you know and put in a heap on top and we were in the middle of fields and your windows were open and when you went back at night you used to pick your pillow up and it would be full of black beetles. You used to have to knock all them off. You know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MB: And the toilets and the bath things you know I mean they were so stark.
HB: Yeah.
MB: There was no comfort whatsoever. I mean it’s the, it’s the thought. You made the best of it, the fun of it and they used to have these little round fires you know. Little stoves. I mean that was all that kept you. Kept you warm. And I remember at Hereford at Credenhill a friend of mine we decided, we thought I mean people you were innocent in those days. I don’t care what anybody says. I mean even though you were in the Forces. We decided that if we put two beds together and then we’d have a double layer of all these blankets and we’d be really warm. She’d been in her bed, I’d be in my bed but we’d have all these. So we carefully did it during the during the day one day. We put the beds together and put all these blankets in and we were just about to get in and suddenly this, there used to be a sergeant at the end. She had a little room at the end of the huts and they were always a bit [unclear] so she came out, ‘Airwomen, what do you think you’re doing?’ ‘Oh, we thought it would be a good idea because we’re so cold that we could share the blankets.’ ‘Get those beds put apart,’ she said. Well, I’d no idea. I’d never heard of homosexuals or, or whatever they called women. It really never entered my head [laughs].
HB: Oh dear.
MB: And I don’t think the rest of the girls had. They just laughed because they thought we’d gone to so much trouble. And then I met another girl at another camp and she was the hairdresser. She was doing my hair and she was moaning and groaning about a friend who’d been posted. Well, you never got posted, you always got posted on your own and I mean you always had to pick up your stuff and go from one end of the country to the other and make your own way and find out, you know how you were doing it. And they, she kept on about her friend who had gone to Oxford and Oxford way and she so missed her and she was going to like, meet her halfway and if she’d got a day’s leave. And I thought what’s she making such a fuss about, you know, because you moved and you, you made new friends. Everybody immediately made friends, you know.
HB: Yeah.
MB: You weren’t isolated unless you were pretty horrible and, and that never failed. And then these two girls that worked in the armoury now they, they were ever such nice girls and they, they were very good friends but the sergeant she was a real mannish, very good looking blonde but she was like that apparently. She took one of these girls it was just like well I can’t explain what it was like. I couldn’t believe it and I still didn’t know what was going on [laughs]
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MB: I mean you can’t believe in your early twenties you’d no idea what was going on.
HB: No. No. That’s very true.
MB: Now they’re flaunting it in front of you all the time.
HB: Yeah.
MB: But then when I, when I was at the Exchange the police wanted, the police advertised because they wanted some, they were going to have girls in their switchboards. So we all applied because we were all, you see there was, a lot of girls it was a big place Free Lane was, you know, it went all around the room, and of course we all worked shifts and but we always had you were on the board and then behind you was a supervisor for so many girls. Behind her was a Class 1, and then behind her was Miss Huddlestone who was in charge and she sat there in the middle of the room watching everything. She never missed a thing. And if you put your head like that to talk to the girl next to you, a hand would come out, take up a peg and plug it, and of course there were lights everywhere. Plug it in. You weren’t allowed to talk to anybody and if your wanted to go to the toilet you had to put your hand up and if there was anybody else had gone you didn’t go. You had to wait. It was ever so regimental. It had been like that since before the war, you see.
HB: Yeah.
MB: And I think they didn’t, they’d never met girls from the Forces before.
HB: Right. Yeah. So you didn’t get a job with the police then.
MB: Well, there was seventy tow when I went for the, Mr Cole it was when I went to the interview he said to me, ‘You talk to me,’ he said, ‘He says Now, I’m fed up.’ He says, ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘I’ve had seventy two interviews from the girls from the Exchange.’ He said, ‘What’s the matter with the Exchange?’ So, I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, I said, ‘Most, a lot of them are ex-forces now.’ I said, ‘They’ll, you know they’ve got to get settled down I think.’ ‘Hmmph,’ he said. Anyway, the next thing you know I’ve got a notice to say to go for a second interview and there were six of us out of the seventy two and I was one of the six. And they, the four, they wanted four and then the four that got it had all been telephonists in the Forces. They’d all, and I’d not done PBX telephony.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
MB: I’d done the GPO ones and that was, but I hadn’t done the private work and she said they didn’t think that we were experts and me and another girl there was. So we went back the next morning and she said, ‘No. She hasn’t got it.’ And I hadn’t got it. And within a week we had a letter from the Fire Service to say that they’d got two vacancies in their control room and we’d both got the job if we wanted it. We’d been recommended by Mr Cole.
HB: Wow. Yeah.
MB: So we were back in uniform then.
HB: Oh, right. Yeah. Of course, you would be. Yeah.
MB: Back in to the [unclear] uniform and stayed there until they brought the men back. Then of course —
HB: Yeah.
MB: Eventually they brought the men back. There used to be eight girls and then it got down to there was two of us eventually because the other girls spread out you know eventually but yes it was a good job that was. I cried my eyes out when I had to leave there.
HB: Oh, right.
MB: I had to leave because the men were coming back, you know.
HB: Yeah.
MB: Eventually. But —
HB: Well, I’ll tell you what Muriel you’ve got a good memory.
MB: Have I?
HB: Yes, you have. You have. Yeah.
MB: I’ve got a good tongue as well.
HB: It’s a shame we skated over a couple of bits I think but never mind. [laughs] We’ll, we’ll not go back to that.
MB: Oh right.
HB: Muriel can I thank you ever so much for that. It’s been really interesting. It’s a whole different aspect to what, you know to the normal sort of interviews you get and, and I really have enjoyed it. It’s been really good.
MB: Personal life.
HB: Yeah. So, if I thank you for that, Muriel.
MB: I’ve got a New Zealand button there.
HB: Sorry?
MB: I’ve got a New Zealand button there.
HB: Oh yeah.
MB: I cut it off his uniform. He wouldn’t give me his badge, cap badge so —
HB: Oh right. Ok. Well, we’ll draw a veil over that as well then. We’ve got stolen property, absent without leave.
MB: He said he wanted to take it back to New Zealand and I said, ‘Well, I want one.’ But, anyway he gave me a button in the end. He cut a button off his shirt.
HB: We’ll just have to check up on the regulations about whether or not you’re still wanted for being absent without leave. I’m going to stop the interview now. It’s, what time is it? I can’t see the time.
MB: No. No.
HB: Quarter past twelve.
MB: Is it? I don’t know. None of my clocks, oh it is. Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Quarter past two so I’m going to terminate the interview and thank you very much Muriel.
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 Muriel Blake
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-07-11
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
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ABlakeMMD180711, PBlakeMMD1801
Format
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01:18:54 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Muriel Blake was born in 1922 in Oakham, Rutland. Being interested in flying and aeroplanes from an early age, Muriel volunteered when her job prospects ended. Called up in 1944, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Being too short for driver, and turned down the job of mechanics, she became a safety officer. Throughout her service, she was posted to RAF Waterbeach, RAF Credenhill and RAF Mepal. Muriel recalls her time service stressing unpalatable food. She elaborates on different aspects such as service relationships, parties, celebrations, guard duty and having to wake people up, and finally packing parachutes and dinghies whilst working with 75 Squadron. One of her tasks was also to collect the list of crashed and missing aircraft to know how many parachutes and dinghies had been lost on operations and had to be replaced. It was tradition on her base that aircrew who had survived baling out would return, find out who had packed their parachute and along with their thanks paid the worker a pound. A slipped a disc ended her service in 1945. Following the war, Muriel moved around to several jobs, becoming a telephonist at the post office first, before eventually moving to a fire station
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sam Harper-Coulson
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Herefordshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
75 Squadron
ground personnel
military living conditions
military service conditions
perception of bombing war
RAF Credenhill
RAF Mepal
RAF Waterbeach
training
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2258/40606/PZoltySP2201.2.jpg
f6c0d58c6584b9e158ebadab445286aa
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2258/40606/AZoltySP220804.2.mp3
d723f8bd89964b7a42f51931b288e357
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
Zolty, Peter
Solomon Peter Zolty
S P Zolty
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Solomon Peter Zolty (1922 - 2022). He flew operations as a navigator with 106 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2022-08-04
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Zolty, SP
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: Right. This is an interview between Harry Bartlett and Peter Zolty. Peter was a navigator with 106 Squadron in Bomber Command, 5 Group and the interview is taking place at his residence, current residence and it’s the 4th of August and it’s, I wonder what the time is?
Other: 10.47.
HB: It’s 10.45.
PZ: That’s the day, the day when the war broke out didn’t it? 4th of August it was.
HB: Something like that. Yeah.
PZ: I think. Or something like that anyway.
HB: So, can I first —
PZ: Ask me —
HB: Can I first of all thank you Peter for agreeing to be interviewed. It’s important we get your story recorded. What I’d like to do if possible is to start with where you were born and where you sort of went to school and got your first job.
PZ: I was born in, well in Birmingham. In Erdington actually. Lindridge Road, Erdington and we lived then in Speedwell Road and that’s where, that’s where I grew up. I went, there was a Jewish School there in Birmingham. There still is actually but it’s not in the same place and I went there. And I also went to Five Ways School which was at Five Ways in Birmingham but I was removed from there because of misbehaviour [laughs] So that’s all I can really say about that. After that I went to Handsworth Junior Technical School and I never, I never went to university. I never got to that standard.
HB: Did you get any qualifications at the Technical School?
PZ: No. I didn’t. I don’t have any qualifications at all.
HB: Right.
PZ: Other than TBE. Taught By Experience.
HB: I like that. So what, what age were you when you left school, Peter?
PZ: Pardon?
HB: What age were you when you left school?
PZ: When I left school? I must have been about fifteen.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Handsworth Junior Technical School that was.
HB: And did you get, did you get work straight away?
PZ: Yeah. I got a job as a laboratory assistant at, I think it was at Birmingham University in the Chemistry, in the Chemistry Department as far as I can remember. Nothing, nothing very special. You know, first jobs were always fifteen shillings a week in those days.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So, but you obviously moved on from, from the University.
PZ: Pardon?
HB: You moved on from the University.
PZ: Only, I was only a lab assistant anyway.
HB: Yeah. Where did you, where were you in the ‘30s? 1930s. When it was coming up to the war.
PZ: Oh, I lived at home in Speedwell Road, Birmingham.
HB: Yeah. And were you, were you working somewhere else then as you were coming up to the war starting?
PZ: I’m trying, I’m just trying to think. I can’t remember if I had a job before that.
HB: Was it, would you have got a job at Lucas?
PZ: No. No. Not straight away.
HB: No.
PZ: I was a laboratory assistant. Oh, I was a laboratory assistant to some —
HB: Yeah.
PZ: To some bloke. I can’t remember his name now but he said I was, he said I was useless. I didn’t turn up to time on [laughs] mostly but anyway —
HB: But you managed to move on.
PZ: I managed that —
HB: And eventually —
PZ: Well, my father was at Lucas and he got me a job at Lucas.
HB: Right. What were you doing at Lucas?
PZ: I was, I was in the tool drawing office first.
HB: Oh.
PZ: I later graduated to machine tools.
HB: Right.
PZ: And I worked my way through various levels of machine tool design and various complicated machine tools. I used to, I used to design them.
HB: Right. Right. Very important work then.
PZ: Hmmn?
HB: Important work.
PZ: Yeah. I did try training as a pilot but I think God, God decided I wasn’t a pilot.
HB: Did, how did you, how did you come to join the RAF?
PZ: Well, I always wanted to fly so I, I went along to the Recruiting Office and signed on and things just seemed to hang about so I went and asked my immediate boss if anything had been done to prevent me from going on to do other things. And he said no it hadn’t. Well, I said, ‘Well, if I’m worth keeping on I’m worth another five shillings a week.’ But he said I wasn’t [laughs] and so I, I joined the Air Force and said I wanted to be a pilot. I went over to Canada on the Empire, Empire Air Training School. I got so far but they decided that I wasn’t a pilot so I remustered as a navigator. I remember sending a cable to my mother at home what had happened and I trained as a navigator then.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: And —
HB: Which, which school? Can you remember which school you went to in Canada?
PZ: Handsworth Junior Technical —
HB: No, sorry the —
PZ: I went to Five Ways first of all. A grammar school.
HB: Yeah. No, the, the —
PZ: And then I got in a bit of trouble there.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Because I pinched another boy’s, I pinched another boy’s book.
HB: Right. No. I was thinking, I was thinking of the RAF training school in Canada.
PZ: Oh.
HB: Can you —
PZ: The Empire Air Training Scheme. That was at [pause] I think it was, yes I think it was London, Ontario as far as I can remember.
HB: Yeah. Yeah, that yeah that’s great. So you started off as a pilot.
PZ: No. I started off with the intention of being a pilot.
HB: Oh, right. Yeah.
PZ: And they decided eventually that there I was washed out. I wasn’t good enough.
HB: Right.
PZ: And I wouldn’t argue with that. I made a, made a bit of a mess of one or two landings which I shouldn’t do and lost height on turns which I shouldn’t do so I remustered as a navigator.
HB: Right.
PZ: And that I was perfectly capable of doing. I mean modern airliners the pilots don’t navigate they’re just told which direction to fly in.
HB: So you’re the most important man in the aircraft then.
PZ: Eh?
HB: You’re the most important man in the aircraft.
PZ: In a sense I suppose so. Yes.
HB: Yeah. So —
PZ: But the flights used to last up to about thirteen hours sometimes with the same pilot. Nowadays I gather they have to change pilots after about eight hours or something like that.
HB: Yeah. So you went to Canada.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: Did you finish your navigation training in Canada?
PZ: Yes. Yes.
HB: You did.
PZ: And then came back here to [pause] what was the name of the place? I can’t remember the name —
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Of the station we were at and and crewing up was a scrappy sort of business. You just, we were, we used to do cross country runs which meant running around the perimeter of the aeroplane, of the airfield. And as we were running around one bloke said he was a pilot and so I said, ‘Well, I’m a navigator’ and that way we crewed up.
HB: Oh right. So you were just sort of a bit of a runaround.
PZ: It’s a bit of an ad hoc.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Yes, being —
HB: So they didn’t put you all in a big hangar and say, ‘Go and sort yourselves out.’
PZ: Oh no. No. They —
HB: No.
PZ: We did more or less sort ourselves out.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. What was the name of your pilot? Can you remember?
PZ: Yes, it was Daniel. Maurice Daniel. He went on to become a group captain and the air attaché in Washington but I don’t know whether he’s still alive.
HB: Right.
PZ: He finished up with the DFC because any crew which finished a tour of operations the captain got the DFC.
HB: Yeah. You see I’ve got it down until I saw your logbook I’ve got it down that you were with 106 Squadron.
PZ: That’s right.
HB: But you actually started —
PZ: I started with 49 Squadron.
HB: With 49 Squadron. Yeah.
PZ: But that was a 49.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
PZ: Yeah, that was just one of those things that happened. I was only with 49 Squadron for a short time and then went to 106 Squadron which I served a complete tour of operations.
HB: Yeah. You flew, you flew your first, it looks like you flew your first proper night time operation in August ’44 with Flying Officer Daniel to Kӧnigsberg.
PZ: Where?
HB: Kӧnigsberg. That was your first operation.
PZ: We went there two nights in a row actually where I was thinking of casually about it sometimes and the flight to Kӧnigsberg was thirteen hours each way. Nowadays pilots are only allowed to do eight hours.
HB: Yeah. That was, so that was a very long, a very long operation.
PZ: It was a long operation. We did it two nights in succession actually.
HB: Yeah. And that was your first one.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: How did you feel after you’d done your first operation and landed?
PZ: Relieved.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: There was always, because, because first of all there was always before going there was an operational meal in the Mess which was always bacon and eggs and on coming back there was another operational meal which was all bacon and eggs. And I remember the, we wore soft leather flying helmets in those days and you took it off and the relief in getting a good scratch [laughs] You can’t imagine it.
HB: So [laughs] Yeah. So the helmet was an interference with you.
PZ: Yes, soft leather.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Not the bone domes that they are now.
HB: Yeah. So obviously your religion is Jewish.
PZ: Yes.
HB: How did you, how did you go on about eating?
PZ: About what?
HB: About eating your operational —
PZ: Yes.
HB: Eggs and bacon?
PZ: Oh, the local minister was a Dr Cohen. A Jewish minister who was a giant among British Jewry and he said, ‘If we found that we were unable to follow the dietary laws we would not be committing any sort of a sin’ and he gave, he gave us the all clear really. Because more often than not the operational meal would be egg and bacon.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. And just, that just sort of begs the question, Peter. A lot, a lot of Jewish aircrew were given the opportunity to fly under a different name and have a different religion put on their dog tags.
PZ: I never came across that funnily enough.
HB: No.
PZ: No. Never.
HB: So nobody actually suggested it to you. You just carried on as you were.
PZ: No, I just carried on.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: And crewing up we used to go for, just to keep fit to run the circuit around the outskirts of the airfield and it was a casual attitude. I was running around once and one bloke said he was a pilot and I said, ‘Well, I’m a navigator.’ Boom we were a crew.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Can you remember any of your other crew that flew with you?
PZ: Yeah. There was, there was Danny. Maurice Daniel who went on to become a group captain. There was Fred Berry. Nicknamed. Already had a child so we nicknamed him Logan. Ken King was from Gloucester was the flight engineer. Peter Whaight, W H A I G H T, was the mid-upper gunner and John Keating from Ireland was the rear gunner. He went back home to Ireland. Pete Whaight went home to Middlesex and Johnny Keating went to Ireland and went to jail we heard. And that’s it.
HB: Did you, did you keep in touch with them after the war?
PZ: No. I didn’t actually.
HB: Right. Right. I just sort of while you were talking I was just having a quick look through your logbook which obviously you started in August ’44 and you’re flying. You’re flying operations virtually every three or four days.
PZ: Yes. Usually two days in a row and then odd nights it was night bombing.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Mostly night time and it was two nights in a row and then one night off. That would raise it roughly.
HB: Yeah. Because I noticed. I noticed in here you did a couple of, you did a couple of daytime operations.
PZ: Yes. We did.
HB: One to Boulogne and one to Le Havre.
PZ: Yeah, they were. I thought there was one to an island in Holland called Westkapelle. There may have been which I remember putting in the logbook.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: In brackets — very dicey [laughs] because there was, you know there was no danger in it at all. Usually, thought it wasn’t only my name. It wasn’t only bombing. We did minelaying in the Kattegat as well. The island between Denmark and Sweden.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Can you remember?
PZ: The actual water there. The sea.
HB: Yeah. What, can you remember what that was called in your book? In your logbook.
PZ: My what?
HB: Can you remember what those operations were called in your logbook?
PZ: They are. They were recorded in my logbook.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Yes.
HB: Yeah. So —
PZ: You’ve got my logbook there haven’t you?
HB: I just noted —
PZ: That is my logbook isn’t it?
HB: Yes, it is.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: It is and it’s quite interesting. You got an operation [pause] it’s just —
PZ: We did some mine laying once.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: I remember that.
HB: It says on in November 1944 you were attached to BDU.
PZ: Sorry?
HB: BDU for —
PZ: BDU.
HB: For LORAN training.
PZ: Sorry?
HB: For LORAN training.
PZ: LORAN.
HB: Yeah.
[recording paused]
HB: We just had a member of staff just step in for a minute. That’s all.
[personal talk about shower gel]
HB: Okay. Yes, it’s got, it’s got in your book attached to BDU for LORAN training in November ’44 and it’s got your pilot was a Flight Lieutenant French.
PZ: Flight lieutenant?
HB: French. And it says you went to Lyon. You flew to Lyon but you had an early return because the PI died.
PZ: I can’t remember that.
HB: No. I’m just, I’ve not seen PI died so I mean I presume that was probably a bit of kit. Something, some equipment in the aircraft. But it —
PZ: I don’t know.
HB: Yeah. It just says, “Early return. PI died.” So —
PZ: Oh, it’s something instrument that is.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So what was the other one? Sorry.
PZ: The wireless operator was a Fred Berry.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: We called him Logan.
HB: Yeah. That’s a good one that one. You went, you then went back obviously you were only there for a, for a month. You went back to 106.
PZ: Yeah. And once we, once we’d completed a set of operations like that I become an instructor.
HB: Yeah. Yeah, I noticed that. I was going to ask you actually because you did a daylight raid which has, which has been recorded quite a lot in January ’45 against the Dortmund Ems Canal.
PZ: That’s right. Yes.
HB: Can you, can you remember much about that one? That operation.
PZ: Not really. We were probably trying to burst the banks of the canals or something like that but I don’t really remember it now.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: I served in two squadrons as I said. 49 and 106.
HB: Yeah. I think that was when you were flying with 106 and you did, that was your twentieth operation. How would, how would you be feeling then about twenty operations in.
PZ: Oh they were then said to be thirty operations was one tour. But when we got to twenty six we found we’d got another four on top of that. Thirty four. Because we were a very mixed squadron. We had Australian, South African who were, they were, they were army rather than Air Force and the Australians wore the dark blue uniform. Not the dark RAF blue. But yeah, we all mixed together perfectly well.
HB: Yeah. So was everybody in your crew from the United Kingdom or did you —
PZ: No. The bomb aimer was from Canada.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: The wireless operator was from England somewhere. The rear gunner was from Ireland. When he went back home afterwards he got sent to jail we heard. And the mid-upper gunner was from somewhere in Middlesex.
HB: Right. So you’d got a Canadian in the crew.
PZ: Oh yeah. Joe [Howey] was a Canadian.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: He went back home and married his childhood sweetheart.
HB: Oh right. Did you go to the wedding?
PZ: No. It was in Canada.
HB: Right. Yeah. So, so you’re doing, you’re back to doing operations sort of every two or three days into 1945.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: What did, did you have any involvement in the D-Day?
PZ: No, but we —
HB: Sorry, the crossing the Rhine going into Germany.
PZ: Not particularly. No.
HB: No.
PZ: Not that I remember anyway.
HB: Right. Right. Where are we? Yeah. You got one, you’ve got one here where you flew to Czechoslovakia.
PZ: To where?
HB: To Czechoslovakia. A place called [Bruckes]
PZ: Called?
HB: Bruckes.
PZ: I don’t remember the name to be perfectly honest.
HB: No.
PZ: But if it’s there we must have done it.
HB: Yeah. That’s alright. That’s not a problem. So just tell me a little bit about what you, once you’ve got an operation and you’ve been called in to be briefed. You know, that you’re going to go and fly that night.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: Or whatever.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: What was, what was the process Peter that you went through?
PZ: Well, the navigators were briefed with forecasts about the weather and talk about the target and all the rest of it and that was it. But then we did a, we had a talk from the Met man telling us what the weather was expected to be like and that was the extent of briefing quite frankly.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: But as I say we flew operations of up to thirteen or fourteen hours which they don’t do today.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: As civilian pilots.
HB: Yeah. Did you, what equipment did you have to help you do your navigation?
PZ: There was something called Gee. G E E, which relied, it was passive in that it relied on joining up two, two timed signals on the ground and it relied on the difference between them and that told you exactly. It gave you a point on where you were. And there was something we called H2S which didn’t mean anything at all other than the fact that it was a signal generated from the nose of the aircraft. But it was never used because the Germans could hold, could home in on that and just pick you off as it were.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: But we, we finished a whole chain of tours. A whole chain of trips. About thirty four roughly and with one tiny little hole in the side of the, inside of the, on the side of the aircraft. ZNU-Uncle it was.
HB: ZN.
PZ: ZNU-Uncle.
HB: Yeah. You’ve, yeah you’ve —
PZ: [PB] 284.
HB: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I’ve got that one.
PZ: Yes. And H2S relied on us, a signal sent out from the aircraft which was not, which was not done very much because the Germans could home in on it.
HB: Yeah. Did, did when you had a hole in the aircraft was that from flak or was it from some other —
PZ: We think it might have been an odd bit of flak.
HB: Yeah. So —
PZ: Only a little triangular hole. No real damage.
HB: So when you set off from —
PZ: It was Metheringham.
HB: Metheringham.
PZ: And Fiskerton previously. I think it was.
HB: Yeah. When you set off from Metherington [sic]
PZ: Yeah.
HB: You were sort of —
PZ: Yeah.
HB: Your pilot would climb you up.
PZ: We all cornered in. We all hove to over Reading so that we then, that we then flew together as a complete, as a block. As a bunch giving some mutual defence.
HB: Yeah. Yeah, and that, so that was so you sort of gathered up at Metheringham and then made your way gradually to Reading.
PZ: Reading. And then we all flew together.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: It made you know allowing for instrument error and so on but it was one big bunch of aircraft flying at the same time then.
HB: Yeah. Did you, did you ever, did you get attacked by night fighters or anything like that?
PZ: No. The only time I was frightened it was a psychological thing and that was when there was another Lancaster flying directly above us with his bomb doors open and I was truly frightened by that until he moved away apparently from us.
HB: I think you were right to be frightened.
PZ: What might have happened.
HB: Yeah. So, so that would be on the bomb run coming in to your target.
PZ: Yeah. We did one or two easy ones I’d say like some over Holland and the Zuiderzee and that sort of thing which were, which were a doddle. And we did mine laying as well on the coast on the sea between Denmark and Sweden.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Did you have, I didn’t notice in here if you ever did a operation to Wessel [pause] Wessel.
PZ: Zeebrugge?
HB: Wessel.
PZ: Sorry?
HB: Wessel.
PZ: Doesn’t ring a bell. I’m sorry.
HB: No. It’s, it’s alright it’s just one. I haven’t noticed it in your book but it’s one that the squadron was in. One that the squadron was involved in. That was, that was getting across the Rhine into Germany.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: That was the bombing just in advance —
PZ: Yeah.
HB: Of that.
PZ: I remember because we had South African members of the squadron as well. They were, they were part of the army. The South African army. It wasn’t the Air Force at all.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: And they used to put [unclear] about bigger and better operations and so on. Captain [Pecci] was the officer that particular one. And that was it.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: We had a feeling that other people get shot down we don’t. That was, and that was how you protected yourself in a way.
HB: And so obviously you had a lot of faith in your pilot as well.
PZ: Absolutely. He was very good. I say he, he was flying he was promoted to group captain and he went to, he went off to Washington DC to be the air attaché. I don’t think he’s still alive now.
HB: No. No. The, one of the things we mentioned Metheringham when you were stationed at Metheringham.
PZ: Yes.
HB: Metheringham is quite famous.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: Because they they did some experimental stuff there didn’t they for when you were coming back?
PZ: Yeah. We were at Metheringham and Fiskerton.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Two stages we flew from.
HB: Yeah. Metheringham. Didn’t that have these the thing for when when it got foggy?
PZ: Sorry.
HB: When it got foggy. When you were coming back in fog didn’t Metheringham have that experimental system?
PZ: Oh, FIDO. Fog Intense Dispersal Of. If it was on —
HB: Yeah.
PZ: If there was any fog they were along across. One alongside and one along each side of the runway and they got fuel burning in those and it generated enough local heat to lift the, to lift the fog so you could just see down. And we had a special arrangement of, for 5 Group aircraft who would get into what they called the funnels. That’s coming in towards where you were landing and the pilot just, I used to call out to the pilot you know first of all height and direction and then later on funnels as we got down on the ground.
HB: So you were still involved in the, in the landing process.
PZ: In that. In that sense, yes.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
PZ: We had, there were the, an instrument called Gee. G E E. Never ever knew what it stood for but it was a means. It was an aid to navigation.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: And you could, you could use that to guide the aircraft.
HB: Did you ever land using, when they were using FIDO?
PZ: I think we were, we were once. We were diverted. Diverted to Croft up in Yorkshire just once.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: That was presumably because of the landing conditions at Metheringham.
HB: Yeah. And you said at, you said a little while ago that when you came to the end of your tour and yeah you did thirty four, thirty five ops, when you came to the end of your tour you went to operational training.
PZ: Yeah. Just to become an instructor. That was all that it was.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: And we, when we and that was what it was. We instructed future navigators or future crews.
HB: Can you remember where? Where you went to?
PZ: I’m not absolutely sure but it might have been a place called Fiskerton but I’m not certain.
HB: Well, I’ve got in your book here it says 6th of April ’45. On the 6th of April 1945 you were posted to Number 29 Operational Training Unit at Bruntingthorpe.
PZ: Oh yeah.
HB: In Leicestershire.
PZ: That was in north, that’s in East Anglia as well.
HB: Yeah. Leicestershire. South Leicestershire.
PZ: Yes. I can’t really. I can’t really remember that. I remember when there were supposed to be thirty tours in an operational life.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: And we were sitting in the Mess one night after having done twenty six and I said, ‘Only four to go.’ And one, then they suddenly announced over the tannoy another four operations to go on top of that. And I remember one of the South Africans guys saying what we want is bigger and better tours.
HB: Which I don’t think you wanted did you? By then.
PZ: No. No way.
HB: Yeah. So what, the whole experience of flying on operations. What sort of effect did it have on you Peter?
PZ: I I can remember at the time, I mean we used to get leave fairly regularly and we were at some relation’s house in Birmingham somewhere and I remember sitting at a table like this. That was the only visible evidence ever.
HB: Drumming your fingers.
PZ: Yes. Yes.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: And when we stopped flying that stopped as well.
HB: So, so that was something you.
PZ: It was a bit of nerves I suppose.
HB: Yeah. Where you just drummed your fingers on on your hand on the table.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. So what, what do you think? What do you think your contribution was in Bomber Command then?
PZ: My contribution?
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Well, we tried to be as accurate as we could. Can’t do more. We weren’t the Dambusters and, but we did, we did, well we dropped quite large bombs in to one or two canals which threw them out of action and flooded the countryside underneath at the same time.
HB: Do you think what you did had a, had a big effect on the war itself?
PZ: I suppose it must have done. We liked to think it did anyway.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. And so coming up to the end of the war you’re in 1945 coming up in to ‘46.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: When did you leave the RAF? Can you remember Peter?
PZ: Yeah. Well, I remember going for [pause] the crew split up and that was that and I remember going for a training course on photography and then I became photographic officer in Italy for about a year. Then I came out after that.
HB: Did you? And what, what was your process for finishing? How did they manage your coming out?
PZ: Oh, it was just being photographic officer in Italy was just a piece of cake really.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Just decided go out. And I was very disappointed that they didn’t fly us home. We came home by train. Called Medloc Mediterranean location overseas. It was. It was —
HB: Yeah.
PZ: We came out and that was that.
HB: Can you remember where you went to be demobbed? Where you got your suit and your trilby hat?
PZ: I can’t actually.
HB: No. That’s fine. That’s fine. I know most of the guys I speak to talk about the demob being a little bit of a, almost a bit of a joke.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: Well, I was demobbed. I went back to work with Lucas’ where I’d been before.
PZ: Yeah. Had they kept your job open for you?
HB: Oh yes. They were, they were under obligation in those days from the government to give people back their jobs once they came back from military service.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: And you were still a single man then.
PZ: I’d, I had a pretty good job in Lucas then. I was, and you know I served out my time and then I opted for early retirement.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just going back to when you were at Metheringham when you were flying operations what did you do for entertainment?
PZ: We used to go to the local pub and have a sing song. That was the main thing.
HB: Did you ever have any shows at the, at the airfield.
PZ: No. No. No. It was self-provided so to speak.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Usually the singing of dirty songs.
HB: Yeah. And, and did you go to the local dances?
PZ: Yes. I couldn’t dance.
HB: Oh, so you didn’t get the opportunity to mix with the young ladies then.
PZ: No. Not really. No.
HB: Oh dear. Right. So, when you look back on your time now, you know you’re a hundred years old now, Peter. You don’t look it I have to say but you’re a hundred years old. You look back on that time of your life. What, what do you think it contributed to your later life?
PZ: Well, it made me thankful to be alive I suppose. That’s the main thing.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Yeah. And I’ve got a, and I have a family now as well. I lost my wife about ten years ago.
HB: Oh right.
PZ: We were married for what, fifty two years. But you know the Jewish community everybody knows everybody and that and, and my wife came from that community and we had Natalie.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. That’s lovely. Well, I think Peter we’ve sort of come towards a bit of a natural end to the interview and I just want to say thank you very much.
PZ: Oh, you’re welcome.
HB: You know, your contribution is there now forever.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: You know, and people can look into and listen to your interview and they can look into your logbooks and they can do it all on the computer nowadays.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: You know, but it is looked after by Lincoln University.
PZ: It’s only recently I gave my grandson my logbook. That’s a fact.
HB: Yeah. Well, I’m going to stop the interview now Peter. It’s [pause] well we’re nearly on forty minutes so we’ve done quite well and can I thank you on behalf of the Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive.
PZ: Yes.
HB: And thank you personally.
PZ: Yeah.
HB: I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s really been interesting.
PZ: Eventually I did go to the Memorial. The Memorial at Erewash in North Midlands. In Staffordshire I think it is.
HB: Yeah.
PZ: Where there was a, there was a Memorial specifically mentioned Bomber Command and I remember going there. And I remember also a group of four of us were in, in London by Marble Arch.
HB: Green Park.
PZ: The arch.
HB: Green Park.
PZ: Green Park. There was a Memorial there and we had, we had the photograph taken there.
HB: Yeah. That’s, that’s the one that the Bomber Command veterans helped to get off the ground. It was —
PZ: I remember standing there while a photograph was taken.
HB: Yeah. That’s lovely. Well thank you, Peter.
PZ: Oh, you’re welcome.
HB: Thank you for that.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Peter Zolty
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2022-08-04
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:39:07 Audio Recording
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AZoltySP220804, PZoltySP2201
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Description
An account of the resource
Peter was born in Erdington, Birmingham. He joined the RAF and was trained at the Empire Air Training School in Canada. He re-mustered as a navigator and was with 49 Squadron for a short time. Peter then joined 106 Squadron and did a tour of 34 operations. Members of his crew included: Maurice Daniel (pilot), Fred Berry, Ken King (flight engineer), Peter Whaight (mid upper gunner) and John Keating (rear gunner). Flights could be 13 hours each way. It was a mixed squadron with different nationalities. Dr Cohen, the local Jewish minister, gave him a dispensation from following Jewish dietary laws. Apart from bombing operations, Peter also did some mine laying on the sea between Denmark and Sweden. As a navigator, he received relatively scant briefings on the weather forecast and targets. Peter describes his navigation aids, and aircraft gathering at RAF Metheringham before flying as a group to Reading. Peter benefited from the Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation (FIDO) at RAF Metheringham. In 1945 he was posted to an Operational Training Unit and became an instructor. Towards the end of the war, he was a photographic officer in Italy for a year and then left the RAF. He returned to his job at Lucas.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sally Coulter
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Leicestershire
Canada
Italy
106 Squadron
29 OTU
49 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
briefing
crewing up
faith
fear
FIDO
military living conditions
military service conditions
mine laying
navigator
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Metheringham
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/891/11130/PHuntleyR1702.2.jpg
772e2bac2b4cb78c68eccb91e1b6af99
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/891/11130/AHuntleyR171005.1.mp3
6ec0e5fd9579328c0aa13a76e4afa137
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
Huntley, Ronald
R Huntley
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. An oral history interview with Ronald Huntley (b. 1922, 1436327 Royal Air Force), an account of the shooting down and rescue by one of the Liberator crew, and photographs of RAF high speed launches and personnel. After service as a flight mechanic on fighter aircraft, he applied to join the Air Sea Rescue service as a engine engineer on high speed launches. He was involved in the rescue of the crew of a United States Navy PB4Y-1 Liberator shot down in the Bay of Biscay in February 1944.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Ronald Huntley and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-05
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
Huntley, R
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is an interview for the International Bomber Command Digital Archive on the 5th of October 2017 at 3:15 PM between Harry Bartlett, the interviewer from the International Bomber Command Centre Archive and Mr Ronald Huntley who was a member of the RAF and eventually became a member of the Air Sea Rescue Service of the RAF and all I’d like to do first Ronald is to ask you where were you actually born originally?
RH: I was born in London.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Edmonton in London.
HB: Right. And you went, did you go to school there?
RH: Yes. I went to Crowland Road School.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Not a particularly good pupil. We moved. My parents moved from a flat. Is this on?
HB: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, it’s —
RH: Moved from a flat in, in Ferndale Road in, just off, just off Stamford Hill.
HB: Yeah.
RH: In London. We moved to Thornton Heath in the Croydon area in 1929 and we moved to Foxley Road, Thornton Heath. I went to school at Winterbourne School in Winterbourne Road in Thornton Heath.
HB: Right.
RH: And then when I was eleven I went on to the Norbury Manor School in Norbury which is just in South London. I ran for the school in 1934 at the Crystal Palace and I was fourth in the hundred yards and I was in the winning relay team. I was at the Streatham ice rink in 1936 and that night in November the Crystal Palace burned down and I was with three of my pals. We raced up the Common, got to the top of Gipsy Hill and tried to get on and the police stopped us and that was the end of, of course Crystal Palace that time.
HB: Yeah. What, what did you, did you study anything particular at, at Secondary School, Ron?
RH: No. I didn’t. I failed to get a scholarship. I left school at fourteen. I, my, if you will my first job was with a wholesaler in the Crescent which was right opposite St. Paul's Cathedral.
HB: Oh right.
RH: Right opposite.
HB: Yeah.
RH: I worked on the third floor in gent’s material lengths for suitings. Customers used to come up there. Unfortunately, I had a habit of whistling and I was told off many times for whistling and in the finish, believe it or not after three months I got the sack for whistling. You couldn't do that today of course but there you are. I did. That’s it.
HB: So, so you so from —
RH: This was, this would be 1937.
HB: Yes. Working in, working in a gent’s suit.
RH: I went to an advertising agency in Queen Anne‘s Gate run by a one man business. Very good customers. Overlooking St James’s Park.
HB: Yeah.
RH: I think he was an engineer. I did some engineering work with him because he, he’d in fact started the business on a thousand pounds he’d won for making a bomb release for the Bristol Bulldog in the First World War.
HB: He made a —?
RH: A bomb release.
HB: Oh right.
RH: For the Bristol Bulldog.
HB: Yeah.
RH: His name was Morgan. Anyway, come the, come the start of the war of course advertising went down the drain and that’s when I went in and I did one or two odd jobs then because I hadn’t, I was obviously [unclear] and then I took a Government Training Centre course at [Whaddon]. I think it lasted nine months. And then from there I was posted to Chobham. This is Fairoaks Aerodrome in Chobham as an improver I suppose you’d say. I learned various things there about the Tiger Moth. How to swing a prop without getting your fingers chopped off. But mainly it was concerned with Blenheims that were coming in and landing flat. Undercarriages giving way and that and they we were doing body repairs. I was then put on nights and that really destroyed me because you were working six days a week in those days and I only had one day at home which was Saturday night. So I left on Friday morning as it were or Saturday morning when it finished I’d go home and you’d have to have a kip and then you’d, and then you’d got to go back for Sunday. Well, this lasted about three months before I said to myself, ‘I've had enough of this. I’m going.’ I said to the foreman, a fellow called Tommy [Glynn] and he came from Limerick. This shows you how the memory plays you. I said, ‘Tommy, I'm going to pack up this job. I’m fed up with this. I'm not going to keep working nights.’ And that’s when he told me, ‘Well, you’ve taken a Government Training Centre course. They will dictate where you go. You may finish up even worse off. The only way you’ve got out is to join the Services.’ The next morning I put my suit on, went back into Croydon, into George Street where the Recruitment Centre was and joined the RAF and that was in February I actually went there. But I failed believe it or not to go in there for the course. I failed to get as a mechanic. I could get in the Air Force but I couldn’t get as a flight mechanic. I failed on the bloody fractions and decimals. So I spent the time learning fractions and decimals and in July I went back and funnily enough saw the same flight sergeant at the desk. He didn’t know it was the same, he asked me. I said I’d been before. He said, ‘Who saw you?’ I said, ‘You did.’ Anyway, I passed all the exams that day and he said, ‘You’re in.’ And you know and I went in and that was almost within a week.
HB: That’s good.
RH: And that’s, that’s when I, from there I went to Cardington. Four days. Kitted out. Short cut. Short back and sides. I then went to, then was posted to Skegness and there was about three hundred or so of us on the train going to Skegness. We came off on what was a wooden station platform with all the, with all the PTI, you know the PT blokes all in their white jumpers looking as fit as a fiddle and I remember one was standing there about six foot two. He had a crooked nose and I thought, I just thought to myself I hope to God I don't get him and sods law being what it is who did I get but this fellow. A fellow called Tommy Rellington. Turned out to be a professional boxer.
HB: Oh right.
RH: And he was the nicest chap you could wish to meet.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And he fought Freddie Mills while I was there.
HB: Oh, did he?
RH: Yeah.
HB: Right.
RH: I was there six weeks. [unclear] then. And that's when I was, I was then posted to Cosford. I was at Cosford for sixteen weeks on a, on a flight mechanics course and then I was posted to Northern Ireland. Eglinton Station, Northern Ireland on a Spitfire squadron that was doing Western Approaches patrols for the shipping coming in. I don't know how quite I was there but one morning the squadron was told, ‘You’re moving. Lock stock and barrel.’
HB: Was that a temporary base that one?
RH: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: Eglinton.
RH: Yeah. I’ve got a friend who goes to Limavady who, and he knew of Eglinton straight away.
HB: Yeah. Right. Yeah.
RH: Yeah. It’s quite close to Limavady there but it was also RAF.
HB: Right.
RH: Moved. The whole squadron was posted down to Baginton. It took us fourteen hours on the train to get down. The whole station came down. The planes came in after we were there. Nobody really seemed to know why we were there but we were there. And then it turned out that we were all going to be kitted out and we were going overseas. We were given a fortnight’s leave, overseas leave before we went and funnily enough I was told along with a few others, ‘You’re surplus to requirements for the station. You’re new to the station anyway. You’re surplus to it. Don’t need it. You're going to be posted.’ And then I was posted. From there I was posted to Larkhill which is Army coop and the aircraft there were Tiger Moths, Taylorcraft, Piper Cubs and a couple of Lysanders and that was flying normally dawn ‘til dusk. The idea was that they were taking flight lieutenant second, second lieutenants up to do a twelve week course and they were flying all these to learn for gunnery so that the gunners could spot for gunners. The flying actually had to be done at four hundred feet and they were good. The practicing was done above that but that was the ultimate when they were out actually on the field was supposed to be four hundred feet which was in, within rifle range now, wasn’t it? Anyhow, a dangerous job in the long run. Those fellows were learning to fly so it was dawn to dusk. And from there not only did I do the servicing in that outside as it were doing normal daily inspections but I was also put in the workshops to do complete overhauls as well.
HB: Oh right.
RH: So I was doing both at that stage and then the squadron did a total move from what was a made up station down to Old Sarum which was a permanent base at that stage.
HB: Yeah.
RH: They flew from there for, I can’t remember the dates but we flew from there and then I was posted from there out of the blue. ‘You’re posted again. You’re going to Duxford.’ And I was posted to Duxford for one simple reason that I found out afterwards that these, the Typhoons that were there at the time had been made a permanent squadron, operational squadron and then it was dropped from operational level because of the number of mods it needed. So a number of reps were sent there. Not a number of reps, a number of fitters were sent there with the sole idea of doing these modifications.
HB: And that was modifications to the Typhoons.
RH: Yeah. Modifications on the Typhoons.
HB: Yeah.
RH: There was a book full of them and they were in sandbag bays dispersed, tied down and everything but they had, because of the weather and the coldness they had to be run up every four hours. So you’d work a day and may have to work four hours in to the night every four hours, something like. And you had to do, you had to do about five or six of these and get, if you wanted a cup of tea you’d got to them fairly quickly because you were going to stand up to a level in the oil, then strap it all back and then run the service to get it to the next dispersal point and do them and if you wanted a cup of tea you got to do it in three and a half hours roughly. Go back to the hut, get a cup of tea and start all over again.
HB: Right.
RH: I came off one, off one Saturday night or a Sunday morning and I went over to the DROs to look for the daily, daily report, orders to see what was on before I went to breakfast. Not a thing I normally did funnily enough. But on this it was got that they wanted fitters for air sea rescue launches. And somehow or other I suppose because I was fed up with the nights again all going I just said I’m going to have a go at that with my pal and we both volunteered. We went in to the chiefy and said we wanted to go and within a week I was posted to Locking, Super Mare. Down at Super Mare on a course on diesel for, because some of the boats had diesel on.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: I was posted there.
HB: That was at Locking. Weston.
RH: Locking. At Weston Super Mare.
HB: Weston Super Mare. Yeah.
RH: And I did a nine week course there and then I was posted to Padstow in Cornwall to take over.
HB: Were you with your pal all that time while you were doing your training —
RH: No. My pal went somewhere else.
HB: He went somewhere else.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
RH: No. I did my own [pupilship]. I then went, I then went from there to Padstow. The first launch I was on was a sixty foot Pinus. It had three Perkins diesels. P6 Perkins diesels in. The boat number was 12341234 it was called. It also had a long mast on it which was like the leigh, leigh lights on a plane. From St Eval they went out and on this, this tall light that was standard that we had on the boat they were coming in and locking on it and dropping lights on it or dropping their bombs on it for doing bombing submarines when they were sufficient.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
RH: And this thing ran for twelve weeks continually, twenty three and a half hours a day every day outside Padstow on about a six seven mile run each way at about a twelve knot speed for twelve weeks while they practiced.
HB: Which aircraft? What aircraft were they then there Ron?
RH: Well, anything that they always sent out. Anything they sent out. Yeah. Anybody that was learning to bomb. They would be Liberators. They would be Whitleys or anything like that you know. All sorts of aircraft they sent out. I know that. And this boat went up and down, came in, refuelled, got a couple aboard and out it went again with another crew of course.
HB: Right.
RH: And that —
HB: So that, so that would, twenty three and a half hours that would be daylight, night.
RH: Yeah, oh yeah.
HB: What? All weather conditions.
RH: Yeah. All weather conditions. Mines out there. Many times we sunk mines out there. Get the rifles out and sink the mines. I’ve been within fifteen feet of a mine on a boat when, and you know, you know. But that’s a risk you take.
HB: Yeah.
RH: From there we picked up, we picked up quite a few and then I had another launcher after that. 2641 which is that launcher up in the photograph. That was, that’s a Thornycroft. It had two RY12 Thornycroft six hundred and fifty horsepower engines in that. Top speed of only about twenty seven knots but it was a different kind of boat altogether. It was faster and shaped better. Could shine better. On that we picked up a lot of people.
HB: Yeah.
RH: The Warwick went down. The Warwick cruiser, the Warwick went down and there were fifty, reported, fifty five on one boat extras. Liberty ships go down there.
HB: Did you, did you go out to the Warwick?
RH: Yeah. Well, it was only about six mile out. It was torpedoed.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Yeah.
HB: And you brought survivors back did you?
RH: In boats. Yes. Yeah. Exactly.
HB: Yeah.
RH: They had to beach one of the boats. They couldn’t get out to the, on to buoy. They had to beach it to get it up and they jumped off it. Yeah. And then a Liberty ship went down. On that we picked up six, five cartons of all sealed and everything. Turned out it had all their cigarettes in it.
HB: Oh right.
RH: There was ten thousand cigarettes in each pack. Fifty thousand fags and the skipper wouldn’t let us pick them any more but the Navy were running around picking them up as fast as they could.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Anyway, the skipper sold them at a penny a packet to the base. You know, on the base.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And for the money we invited some WAAFs down from St Eval for a party one Saturday night. That was when they went. The incident that really sent us out there was in February, February the 15th, the day after [pause] what’s the 14th? Yeah. Somebody’s day, isn’t it? Anyway, the 15th of February 1944 and we picked up the crew and nine men in three dinghies and they turned out it was an American crew. Flight Wing 7 of the American flew out of Dunkeswell near Honiton, had done Biscay patrol, got shot down about fifty miles off Brest by two JU88s a line astern coming at them. Remember all aircraft had, the aircraft, on a Liberator only had .3s. The Germans on their 88s had 5s and [unclear] So you had to get within a thousand yards to even be able to hit them never mind see them and they could fire from far away. The story which is in that book, the fella who tells the story they were sure they’d hit the first plane. Right. But they were hit themselves and eventually of course outer engine went, another engine went. They were throwing everything over the side that they could to keep it afloat. Eventually we had to ditch and luckily of course the two wireless operators aboard were giving out SOSs and the Americans made a big effort to get them. Sent out a lot of their own planes, their own stuff to get them. Right.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: And we, we’d been out the night before knowing that there was, there was a call but we couldn’t find them and it went dark and you had to pack it in. And we waited all the following morning. Everybody was on edge because we knew they were going to get called. And we were called out to it and this time with aircraft support you were bound to hit it. On your own you’re doing mile, square mile searches and there’s every chance you could sit out, you could be within a hundred yards of them and because of the swell you wouldn’t see them. You’d have everyone aboard looking but there’s no guarantee. And with wind and drift there’s no certainty that you were even going to get to it.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Because the position you were told would probably come out an hour or two before. Could be three or four hours before. You don’t know. If you’ve got aircraft that’s it. An aircraft would come over. We’ve had it. I’ve had it where we’re going one way and an aircraft comes over, dips over the top of it, goes away, dips again, comes back and does the same thing. And the skipper would just say, ‘Sod where we’re going. Go there.’ And there’s where the bloke is. He could see him. We couldn’t.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: Well, on this particular day we went out and of course we went to the place because the aircraft were there. Picked up nine people and when they’ve been in the water twenty four hours I’ll tell you it’s, they’re heavy and they are absolutely dead from the stomach down because they’d been sitting in water all night. It’s a hard job and everybody is involved fitters or not, you’re all involved in trying to pull them on board and you’ve got to hang on because if you let go you’re both going to go. And you’re both going to finish up in the —[laughs]
HB: Yeah.
RH: Anyway, we got them all on board. Found out one was dead and they knew he was dead. But the medical officer didn’t know that they knew because he left him showing and I actually, I said to George, George Hardy who was the medic aboard, I said, ‘What about him George?’ And he said to me, ‘He’s dead. I’ve left him like that deliberately not to upset the rest of the crew.’ But the rest of the crew in fact they kept him aboard knowing he was dead so that he would be buried at home.
HB: Right.
RH: It was eight we picked up. Put them on the, on the, when we went to Padstow. Four of them walked off believe it or not. After all that time they just walked off. One or two had bad injuries or injuries to legs and so and then two were met by the senior medical officer from St Merryn at that stage. St Merryn which was a Naval base. And they went and that was the end of that and I knew no more about that until well into the ‘80s and I, I’d got another photograph of another job and I said to them, I got in touch with a detective inspector called Derek Fowkes who was very keen on aircraft and knew pretty well every action that had happened in Cornwall. But he was walking around the lifeboat station at Newquay one day and he saw their things. All their different rescues and so forth they’d been on and he looked at this particular one in 1944 and he said, ‘What’s that?’ And a bloke called Henwood, who was, who was the engineer aboard that said, ‘Well, that’s what, that’s the “Gold Plane.”’ And if you listen to his talk on the BBC he says, “Gold Plane.” That had a, that had a [unclear] there must be a story there somewhere.’ And for the next sixteen years he followed it up.
HB: Can I just stop you there a minute Ron?
RH: Yeah.
HB: You know the American plane that crashed?
RH: Yeah.
HB: They were —
RH: Yeah.
HB: They’d done, they’d done, the Liberator had done the Biscay run. They [pause] now you, you caught up with them again didn’t you to get the article?
RH: Yeah.
HB: Did you actually go to America to visit them?
RH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Well, if I can.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So, so the booklet that we’re going to copy was the, the fact that they all got home. Did they actually ditch in the sea?
RH: Yeah.
HB: They actually ditched the plane.
RH: The plane. Yeah.
HB: And they all managed to get out.
RH: In fact, I’ve got a letter. A letter of commendation from their own people.
HB: Yes. Yes.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Yes.
RH: The way they ditched it tells you how they ditched.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Yes. Vertical to the, to the wave.
HB: Yeah.
RH: It’s, it’s a very difficult thing to ditch a plane properly and you could ditch it properly and it come wrong. That plane, the reason there was only nine is that there was eleven on board. The two that died never got out with the two operators and if you know a Liberator at all they’re underneath the bottom they’re underneath the pilot and everything else and the thing split.
HB: Oh right.
RH: And of course they would either be drowned or they wouldn’t get out.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
RH: So out of the eleven two were drowned.
HB: That’s a shame. That’s a shame.
RH: Yeah. One died.
HB: Yeah.
RH: From injuries. Then they kept on. They got him in the dinghy, kept him in the dinghy and he died in the dinghy. Eight got out.
HB: Yeah. So you’re, on you’re the boat that you were on that time which was two —
RH: The Thornycroft.
HB: The Thornycroft.
RH: 2641.
HB: Yeah. What, what was the crew on, on that boat that you were on? How many were there of you?
RH: Ten, I think. The skipper. There would be First Class Coxswain, Second Class Coxswain, three MBCs, a radio operator, a medic and two fitters.
HB: Right. MBCs?
RH: Motorboat crew.
HB: Motorboat crew. Right.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Right. So that’s so, so you’re fetching nine back albeit one of them has unfortunately died.
RH: Yeah.
HB: But you’ve got eight guys in there.
RH: Yeah.
HB: You’re bringing them back from six miles away.
RH: Yeah.
HB: And then —
RH: It was more than six.
HB: Yeah. Oh, sorry. Oh.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Sorry, I thought —
RH: Yeah.
HB: It was about six miles.
RH: No. No.
HB: But further than that.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Right. Right.
RH: Yeah. It took us an hour to get back I think.
HB: Yeah.
RH: So at twenty seven knots we wouldn’t have been doing full whack. It would be twenty five miles. Twenty mile anyway.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Right. So moving on to the “Gold Plane.”
RH: Well, this, this Derek Fowkes found anomalies in it. I mean the first —
HB: As in the report of the crash.
RH: Yes. That’s right.
HB: Yeah.
RH: The anomalies starts with the fact that St Eval told him to bugger off as it were.
HB: Right.
RH: Three times he rang St Eval and they only logged it once and they didn’t do anything with the logging. That’s the point. It was reported the following morning as I said to you earlier by, by a manager of one of the hotels ringing the lifeboat station and saying, ‘There’s wreckage out there.’
HB: Yeah. This was from somebody seeing —
RH: Wreckage.
HB: An explosion at 1 o’clock in the morning.
RH: Yes, that’s what, he was a sergeant in the Home Guard [the secretary] was.
HB: Yeah.
RH: He was on the film as a matter of fact.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Yeah.
HB: And that and that and he he rang in three times and it was only on the third one they actually recorded it.
RH: Recorded it but they didn’t do anything about it.
HB: Right.
RH: Didn’t report it anybody.
HB: No.
RH: So the first time anybody saw anything was when this manager saw it from the hotel and he rang the lifeboat and the lifeboat went out at twenty to ten.
HB: Yeah.
RH: I couldn’t tell you what time ours was but ours was something about 12 o’clock I suppose because the lifeboat had already picked up, I think eleven when we got there.
HB: Yeah.
RH: It looked like an abattoir.
HB: Yeah.
RH: I mean it was, they’d dropped the sides so the bodies the blood and everything was about. It really looked —
HB: Yeah.
RH: A real mess. And then we found the skipper dived to try and get the fellow over the side that was attached to a wheel which was floating. Couldn’t get him out and the lifeboat eventually towed that in.
HB: Yeah.
RH: They put a rope on it and tied it in. We left it. We couldn’t do anything and we were in touch with the Walrus. The Walrus told us to go further out and that was when we found two bodies. Both of course dead. A couple of under arm briefcases, jackets, a couple of jackets. You know, officer’s jackets and suitcases and on opening them up we found out that the officer’s one was going to Alexandria over with penicillin we reported in the thing and that was new in those days. And the other one was going to Yugoslavia as far as we could see. Certainly, he was he was Yugoslavian. He was going there. Everything pointed to that. And they were both senior officers.
HB: So, so the one that was going to Yugoslavia. Is he the one that had some money on him? Had the suitcase of money.
RH: No. No. No, that was the suit, no the suitcases were picked up and nobody knew where they came from.
HB: Right.
RH: The money that was picked up there was a body belt picked up by the motorboat, by the lifeboat which had seventy thousand dollars in.
HB: Right.
RH: In hundred dollar bills and as you know it was four dollars to the pound in those days.
HB: Yeah.
RH: So it was about eighteen thousand quid roughly. We opened ours. We opened up the suitcases on the way back and found that we’d got forty five at a rough quick count. We’d got the old five pound notes in the white in fifties.
HB: Wow.
RH: And somebody added them up and said, ‘There’s about forty five thousand quid there.’ We had, remember the harbour master was still aboard from the Navy, and the petty officer and five of us. I swear to this day if the harbour master had been in charge of the boat instead of our fellow nobody would have seen that money but us. But the skipper we had was a regular in the Air Force. He was only a second lieutenant. No. A pilot [pause] what’s the —
HB: Pilot officer.
RH: Pilot officer. Up from a pilot, pilot, a flight lieutenant. First, first rank up from that in the rank in the RAF.
HB: Flight lieutenant.
RH: Flight lieutenant. But he was a regular.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And he was as honest as the day is long and then he thought that was out of it altogether and we took it back, put it in, put it to the senior medical officer I think it was for St Merryn that came to meet the crew. Of course there was no use picking them up in the early days. Gave all the stuff over to them. Four of them walked off the boat. The rest were taken off and from that point on although that was the talking point of the base for a couple of days because of the money.
HB: Yeah.
RH: It died a death.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Because there were other things going on.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: And other boats picking up other people. And I didn’t hear anything about it. I rang Fowkes over something or other and I can’t think what but something else turned up and I rang him and said, ‘I understand you know about this.’ And he said yes, yes and he starts to talk about the “Gold Plane.” And I said, ‘What is the “Gold Plane” you’re talking about?’ And he said, ‘Well, this was a plane that went down. This was, I think it was on 27th of April 1944’ and I said ‘The one, the one that they had the armament at the back?’ He said, ‘That’s right.’ I said, ‘Well, I was on the rescue boat. I was on 2641 when it went.’ ‘Were you?’ He said, ‘I didn’t know anybody that, other than the Navy bloke.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ So, of course, I then got in touch with then his story comes up he spent sixteen years of his life that’s, that was put down by the Air Force as an explosion from the engine. He said, ‘I think that was an explosion. I think that boat was sabotaged.’ The story runs that the air commodore in charge of St Merryn, no, St Mawgan told his wife that was by sabotage but not by the enemy. That plane went out —
[pause]
And he looked then to say, ‘Who was on that boat? Who was, who was on the plane? And on the plane were twelve people that he can write off. Right. In itself. Two were people that were suspicious but two were French and one was, it turned out he found out had been in touch with the Cagoule which was a Nazi operation in France and he was suspicious of both of them and he followed those up. He also found that they’d put twelve people down and fifteen of them down. Sixteen people. Twelve of the crew. Twelve visitors, four in the crew. Sixteen altogether on that plane that went down. They got fifteen of them and one was listed, put down as, “An unknown seaman for 1944 found at sea.” And he said, ‘That fella’s the pilot.’ Now, how the hell anybody argues about it I don’t know because first he had a Canadian uniform on. Secondly there was a watch on with the time of 1.30 on it. But they put him down as a seaman. So he said, ‘I want him exhumed.’ And of course being, he was told he couldn’t do it. He said, ‘Well, being a police officer I know there are ways to do things you know that you know isn’t being out of the law.’ And he got permission to do it on the strength of it. If it was wrong he would have to pay. If it was right they would pay and he brought two group captains down and authorities to the blah blah you know the different names they use for these to test it and they took his bones, put it together and said that’s him. That is the fella. I forget his name now but he, anyway, he was the pilot and the pilot was Canadian and he’d been to Canada, fortunately been to Canada. Seen the parents, seen the, seen his brother, seen the only Canadian left that had been on the report that they put through the inquest that they had. Saw him as well and both of these were very well you know I didn’t put anything down there that I wasn’t told to put down. I put down what I thought. Only what they somebody wanted me to put down. This was an RAF captain. They put all that down and as far as he was concerned he said that was sabotage. And then he made I think what was a lot of people said was a mistake he said that that it was easy enough to put something through the, under the pilot to blow it up because the pilot took a package up on that was only from the pilot. That could only have been put on by the pilot alone. If you listen to anything else they’ll tell you everything that was on the plane was logged.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Before they went on. Everything.
HB: Yeah.
RH: This wasn’t about me.
HB: Yeah. Right.
RH: So this put the suspicion and he’s relying really not on the legal law but on civil law possibilities. Probabilities. You know. And he never knew what I found out afterwards unfortunately for him but after it was all over I said to my son in law especially when I’d got the film and seen it all I said to my son in law, ‘You go. I’ve been to Kew. You go down. You go through your Archives. See whether you can find anything.’ He’s a great one for doing. He didn’t start with the RAF which is where you’d expect him to start. He started with the BBC programme. I don’t remember but in the late ‘90s the BBC said, ‘Anybody that’s got a story tell us. We’re looking out for —’ And he went there and he found a short letter which I have from a woman called Hazeldene, [unclear] Hazeldene, which said that her father going down he was he was a major in the Army. He was, he was evacuated before Dunkirk back home with an injury. He finished up at Baker Street in MI6 and she said he went down to Cornwall to put some gold on the plane. Nothing more than that. But that letter. Who’s the fellow’s name? So now I’ve got a four page note now of the whole fellas, he was, he went down. He said he went down in May. That’s just when the only bit’s that’s wrong, he went down in April. He went down in April. He got the date wrong. That’s all. He went, the gold was put on the plane. This was all that was in that. He went to the plane. He actually said, ‘I got to the plane and as I got there I was told, ‘You’re not going tonight. Taking off to go another night.’ He said, ‘They took the gold off.’ And that plane crashed. The following night he goes down he goes right around and that gold finished up at Foggio in Italy on an American station and he came back from there. Now, Fowkes never knew that, that there was gold but every bloody, every fisherman in Cornwall near enough certainly along that coast went out trying to find gold.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And to this day they believe there is gold there.
HB: Yeah.
RH: The other thing is a salvage vessel, the RAF salvage vessel is too large for anywhere else but Ilfracombe. If a plane went down in the war nobody ever bothered to go down and look for it but that boat was brought down for four days down, run out to find out, put out to sea at exactly the same spot. A diver went down. When that diver came up he was searched. And that went on for four days. They never found anything to do with the plane. They found other, other planes. They found a B27 or something that had gone down there before but they never found anything else and that lasted for four days and that’s suspicious in itself. What was there that they thought. This, of course, only made the fishermen think there has got to be gold there.
HB: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, look, just remind me Ron when you were telling me earlier on what squadron was that? That plane from? The “Gold Plane.”
RH: 525.
HB: 525 Squadron.
RH: 525. Yeah.
HB: And then what kind of plane was it?
RH: It was a Warwick.
HB: A Warwick.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. The Warwick. Yeah. A transport plane.
RH: Which wasn’t a particularly well thought of plane.
HB: No. No.
RH: Twin engine.
HB: Yeah. And that was, that was from a, was that a Canadian squadron? Or a —
RH: It was a Canadian squadron, Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Yeah and it was —
RH: 525.
HB: The bulk of the crew would be Canadian.
RH: It was RAF transport.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Transport Command.
RH: Yeah.
HB: And there was sixteen.
RH: April 17th 1944.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And one Warwick. 525 Squadron based at Lyneham.
HB: Yeah. And that was one of the stories the BBC did a film on.
RH: Yeah. They were, they called it the “Gold Plane.”
HB: The “Gold Plane.” Yeah.
RH: It was shown in late, late ‘49 err late ‘99 and in 2002.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And I’ve got a copy of the film. Well, I had two copies. One of them is with Leach.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Who is down there. That fella.
HB: Yeah. So that, yeah that’s interesting that. If you, so the two bodies you brought back were part of the group that the lifeboat had got.
RH: No. We were, they brought back eleven. Two more were found. We found two.
HB: Oh right, sorry. Yeah. I missed that bit. Sorry.
RH: Yeah.
HB: I do apologise.
RH: That’s alright. The lifeboat had got eleven when we go there and twelve of course with the chap that they towed in. Two more were picked up. Out of the sixteen only two were left and we picked up those two.
HB: Right. Yeah.
RH: One was put down as an unknown seaman.
HB: And it’s only after I presume well that would be well after the war wouldn’t it?
RH: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: But he was, he was buried with honours.
HB: Yeah.
RH: After they’d exhumed him and they knew who he was. He was buried with honours and his brother came over from Canada to it and they had the old guns out and everything.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Oh yeah.
HB: So that and that was the work of this, this —
RH: Derek Fowkes. Yeah.
HB: Yeah. This Derek Fowkes.
RH: This detective inspector. Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Oh that’s —
RH: If nothing else he did that.
HB: Yeah. That’s absolutely brilliant.
RH: Yeah. But there was a report by a fellow called Nesbitt.
HB: Right.
RH: Who’s fairly well known apparently in the historical circles and he ridicules the story totally.
HB: Oh right.
RH: Nesbitt. Yeah.
HB: So we’ve got an American crew that you’ve rescued. They’ve lost two. They’ve lost three guys. You’ve got the “Gold Plane.” It sounds like Padstow was a bit of a, a bit of a centre of activity Ron.
RH: Well, in itself it was but of course compared with some stations it wasn’t.
HB: Yeah.
RH: You know, compared with the east coast.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Or Dover you know.
HB: So the, so the bulk of your work from Padstow was Coastal Command, Western Approaches.
RH: Yeah. Well bearing in mind there’s another station at Newlyn.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Okay. And there’s also a station further north up the coast. Where would it be? Before Fleetwood. Somewhere there. Up the coast a bit. Altogether there was three hundred rescue bases over the whole world when we finished.
HB: Yeah.
RH: There was about forty, about forty odd around England.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: Well, we were forty four.
HB: Yeah, and, and so in the main, in the main you really did turn your hand to anything then.
RH: Yeah. We picked up civilians sometimes.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Some silly bugger on holiday goes out in trouble.
HB: During the war.
RH: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: No.
RH: Well, of course it’s a, it’s a holiday spot. Cornwall.
HB: Well —
RH: The beaches are beautiful, you know.
HB: Yeah.
RH: I mean, you imagine, not now if you go, of course, there’s always something but in those days you’d walk across that beach, beautiful sand and nobody about.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Beautiful.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Rather like South Africa. My son’s out there and I’ve been out there. Rather like that.
HB: Oh lovely.
RH: Yeah.
HB: So you so this is all I mean this would be around about 1944ish.
RH: ’44.
HB: ’44. So did you see your time out there, Ron? Or did you —
RH: No.
HB: Did you move on?
RH: Well, this was [pause] when the war was over, 1945 say, you know, late ’45 and they decided that the rescue boat base they only needed one rescue boat base at the most. In fact, they were going to close it. It closed in ’46. But at that time they wanted, they wanted to get rid of everybody. They were, you know basically —
HB: Yeah.
RH: And I was posted to Castle Archdale in Northern Ireland because they needed a [unclear] to take the crews out and service the aircraft that was in the loch, which was Sunderlands.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. And that’s Loch —?
RH: Lough Erne.
HB: Lough Erne.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: The incident there was the dinghy. The little dinghy. We used to go out and pick up, take the [unclear], out to the pilots and the crews, you know, there were fitters and so on, to the boats and then bring them back and the dinghy was only supposed to take about ten or eight or something like that you know. You’d go out two or three times to it. And one night it comes in about half past four, 5 o’clock in to this jetty where it was and the jetty sort of stopped there and all this was long reeds floating out of the water.
HB: Oh right.
RH: You know.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And this boat came around and too many had jumped on it and it did the turn and they kept buggering about. Turned the boat over and nine were dead before and they never got back to base.
HB: Oh dear.
RH: And then you’re talking of something that’s no more than two hundred yards away from you. Coming around there coming in to the [pause], yeah.
HB: Oh well. That’s nasty.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
RH: I had a funny incident there as well. They took a boat down to Killadeas which is at the bottom end of the loch, also a RAF station. They’d taken a boat down there sometime in the fog. It couldn’t get back. They had an overnight crew there like everywhere, you know and I was on crew that night. This was at, I don’t know, 7 o’clock. Something like that. I can’t. I can’t tell the time because I can’t place the, where it was in the, in the January to December but we went down there and as a fitter, you know its nothing to do with you, you know. That’s about crew stuff. And one of the fellas said, ‘Well, I’ll take it down.’ He said. He was going down. I said, ‘Well, I’ll come with you if you like.’ You know, it was something to do. ‘Yeah. Okay.’ What I didn’t know is that he didn’t know that there were buoys put out deliberately to show the boats where to go because of the rocks.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
RH: We’re going out there as large as bloody life. Been going, I don’t know how long. Bang it goes. We hit a bloody rock. Of course, the boat’s shuddering. Water is coming in at the back. Of course, the props had been pushed through the bottom of the boat, you know. The rudder, you know. Propeller. I get out, I get the floorboard up to examine it and I can say in the mist we could see an island. ‘Make for there.’ And we came across a little buoy. You know a little buoy.
BH: Yeah.
RH: Not a big thing but a little. Bob wanted to stop there. I said, ‘Not on your bloody life, mate.’ You know, because you don’t know how long. I mean it is going dark and you think —
HB: Yeah.
RH: You couldn’t stay there all night. You’d drown. Make for that. And we’d seen this island just and made for it. We got there. Got about from here to that door away from it, two feet and the boat went up like that and it hit a rock and it split the nose up. You could see the bottom, you could see the land. I mean you could walk to it if you wanted to walk through six feet of water. But we decided if we got there and, when we thought it was an island if we get down and we’re soaking wet. You know.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Gotta stop there all bloody night. We’ll stay here where we are and we sat in that top of that boat all night. At half past six the following morning the tannoy went. I realised that it wasn’t an island it was the bloody main base. I could have walked back to my base in ten minutes from there.
HB: Oh no.
RH: And got a night in bed. What else happened though they woke up at the, at the base where we were, at the main base. He gets out. Says, ‘Where’s the —’ this fella was supposed to make breakfast apparently in the morning, ‘Where is he and where’s Huntley?’ They both went out and neither bed had been slept in. Gets a retender which is a forty foot boat there, comes racing out, sees us, turns and he goes over the rock.
HB: Oh no.
RH: Stays on top of the bloody rocks.
HB: No. Two boats written off.
RH: Two boats. The third boat comes out for us and picked everybody up and I’m thinking, I’m not going to be in this at all because I wasn’t supposed to be there as a fitter, you know.
HB: Oh, no. No.
RH: So I had it all right. I don’t know what happened to them. I just went around to the sort of things that came up from Coastal Command when you put boats out of action —
HB: Yeah.
RH: Was nobody’s business, you know.
HB: I can imagine.
RH: Yeah.
HB: I can imagine.
RH: We went, coming back a bit we went to a rescue of of Australians. This is also ’44 sometime. A fellow called [Rossythe] I found out afterwards but there were eight of them in a crew and they were in a Liberator and they were doing some sort of exercises. I think he went out and he went too bloody low and he went in.
HB: Right.
RH: We went out to it and the Walrus had gone out to it and the Walrus actually had picked them up but on the way out on an engine there’s a bloody great filter which of course you clean and do but there’s also a gauge on top. Green and red. And this thing we were just turning up the top if it went. If you were going on a crash call above all things. This thing kept going in red red red and I thought if that blows it’ll kill us and ruin the bloody engine. In the finish I had to close. You could close down the engine of them as well as at the front. I’ll close. That’s when this Canadian fella that I speak to now, the other week, he was with me, I said, ‘Titch, keep those down. Don’t [unclear] I’ll go and see the skipper. I walked up to skipper, I said, ‘I’ll have to close it down that engine. We’ve got someone gone wrong.’ The skipper went bloody mad. Crash call of course, you know. I said, ‘The filter’s gone. I shall have to, I’ve got to take it out.’ ‘How long will it take?’ I said, ‘I’ll do as quick as I can.’ I go back, took the bloody filter out which is about like that. All full of glass mesh all enclosed, you know like —
HB: So about the size of a soup bowl then.
RH: That’s right.
HB: Yeah.
RH: That’s right. The pressure on it. Took it out. Couldn’t get a replacement. Put it back. Ran the engine for three months without it before we got the replacement. Yeah.
HB: And it still worked obviously.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
RH: But when we got there the Walrus had taken them, couldn’t get off because the number of people on. So the, a fellow called George Riley was our medic.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And he got in a Carley float. You know, a Carley float? Well, it was on the back of a boat. There was like a little thing. It’s all, all made of cork and it’s just another, it was actually for the crew but he got this put a rope up. Put a rope over there and brought another one from there.
HB: Oh, right. On the Carley float.
RH: I know —
HB: Right.
RH: They were doing it by rope.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And you can’t get too close because that’s an aircraft.
HB: Oh yeah.
RH: You know. And he must have sailed over and hour or so. I mean, he must have been knackered by that time but we got him aboard but one medic said, ‘That bloke, if that bloke broke his back. If his back isn’t broken now it bloody will be by the time we get him out of there.’ Of course, a Walrus was going to, in the back [unclear] it’s turning in, turning out with a bad back. You couldn’t understand why they took him.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And of course he can’t get off.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: So we got those back.
HB: Yeah.
RH: You know.
HB: Oh right.
RH: There are various incidents that happen to you.
HB: So, so how many people do you think, it’s a bit of an unfair question, I suppose, Ron but how many people do you think your crew saved?
RH: I should say out of the boat, that boat particularly —
HB: Which was —
RH: 2641.
HB: Right.
RH: I would, close to a hundred and fifty.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Yeah. And there was a lot more satisfaction in picking up a hundred, one person than putting an aircraft in the air that’s going to kill some bugger, I’ll tell you that now.
HB: Yeah.
RH: But I can say that now because the war is over.
HB: Yes. Yes.
RH: You know.
HB: Yes.
RH: During the war I wouldn’t have cared if they killed a dozen bloody Germans you know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Well yeah.
RH: Yeah
HB: So that so you’ve gone to Lough Erne and it’s what by now? It’s what? 1946.
RH: 1946. Yeah. I was demobbed July 1946.
HB: July ’46.
RH: I went to Uxbridge from, from —
HB: Yeah.
HB: From there.
RH: From Lough Erne. Yeah.
HB: And that is, what’s that? That’s trilby hat.
RH: Yeah.
HB: And mac and suit.
RH: Yeah. So, there and I think fifty quid or something like that in my pocket. Yeah.
HB: Right. And what, what did you do then?
RH: Well actually I couldn’t get. I wanted to go and I wanted to be a rep but I couldn’t get a job as a rep so I actually went to work in a garage.
HB: Oh right.
RH: And I worked on cars and re-cylindering both engines and all that because more cars then were coming back on the road. Old cars being made up. Boring bloody the cylinders out, sleeving them and all that caper.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: Until I wrote, I kept writing to firms. I then took a correspondence course in sales to let somebody know that I was interested and I spent some of my own bloody money and I tried to do it.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And I got a job with a firm called [Kerry, Bowan and Witcher?] I didn’t ever want to do it really because it sold typewriters and carbon paper and all that bloody stuff.
HB: Oh right.
RH: And it wasn’t my cup of tea if you know what I mean. Actually I spent two years with them and I earned good money but I wanted a job in London. Well obviously you get more bloody money in London than walking around Croydon and all that bloody area. Firms were there that are using that kind of stuff and they wouldn’t give me one and they called me up one day. They had a contract they wanted me to sign and I thought he was going to give me a London area. I had to go to Leyton way where he was. A little fella. Came from Lancashire. Twinkly blue eyes. Could lift you up in the stars with one visit. The second visit he was as dead as a dodo. But he could lift you to the stars in one. And I went there. Curiosity. I want to speak to this fella you know. That sort of attitude.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And he, he slides across up to you he [unclear] and he pushed, ‘Just sigh that.’ And I twigged that’s what he’d brought me for and I said, ‘Well, I’ll sign that when I know what you’ve got under there.’ I said, ‘Prove you’ve got nothing under there.’
HB: Yeah.
RH: I said, ‘Well, I’ve been asking for a London territory,’ I said. He said, ‘Well you won’t get one.’ I said, ‘Mr,’ I said, ‘We’ve finished our interview. Thank you very much.’ Off we go.
HB: Yeah.
RH: What do you want?
HB: It’s alright. It’s just that noise had started and I couldn’t, I thought there was a door there to shut. Oh so did you, did you because you mentioned your, was it your first wife. Did you meet your first wife in, during the war.
RH: No.
HB: Or was that after?
RH: Afterward.
HB: Right.
RH: I worked for them ‘til I worked there for another two years. So something like ‘48 sometime I got a job with [Johnsons Wax]. Selling.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah.
RH: No. Yeah, I did from there. [Johnsons Wax] And I went over to see the boss one night and he said, well these are the areas. And I just said, ‘Which is the best area?’ And he pointed to Worcester as it turned out. ‘Worcester. Hereford. Gloucester,’ he said. So I said, ‘I’ll have that.’ So that’s when I moved. November 1949 I moved up to Worcester. I was put in a hotel for a fortnight then I was going on an area I didn’t know. I had no car. It was train and bus. Had to go back at night and make the bloody forms out and catch the post, you know and all that caper. And he said, ‘You’ve got to find digs.’ Well, I mean you try and find digs when you’re, I mean over the weekend you’ve not a bloody chance.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Really. Or late at night and people don’t want to open their doors do they? Anyway, I found a place over at the cricket ground.
HB: Oh right.
RH: [unclear] I got in there on my own. An old couple with one room sort of thing and I thought oh well, this would suit me for a bit. Out on the Malvern Road it was going out of Worcester and I, I’d no sooner got there, I don’t suppose I’d been there a fortnight and this area manager, ‘I want you to move in to Birmingham. The Birmingham rep’s [unclear] So I want you to move in to Birmingham.’ Christ almighty. I’ve got to move again. So I go in to [unclear] Road near the cricket ground to a hotel. Again, the same thing you know. Give me a fortnight. I’ve got to find digs and I didn’t know Birmingham and you’re walking it and I’m a Londoner and they don’t particularly like southerners [laugh] I found out to my cost. Sort of a Cockney bastard coming up here and taking our [laughs]
HB: Yeah.
RH: You know what it is. Anyway, I got on alright. I mean I could sell. I found out I could sell with the first firm. I knew it didn’t bother me going and seeing people and getting no’s. That didn’t bother me but a lot of people, I saw blokes pack it up in two days by getting too many no’s. I worked a long long time before I ever had a blank day. I always did something in the day and I could usually reckon to get five, six, seven, eight, nine orders in a day you know whether you’d get to [unclear] and you’d want to do it because you know you’ve got to want to do it.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And I got this from there. I went in to Birmingham and I then found out, well to tell you the honest truth the area manager was a real pig really. Cheat you for a bloody halfpenny never mind anything else. I mean you were working bloody hard at digs as well. I met my wife there while I was there.
HB: Right.
RH: At a dance one night. I went to the dances and then went [pause] and then I had an interim bonus out for Christmas and I get letters saying how well I’d done and all this from the firm, from the boss. This was AC Thompson, you know. They were big people and they were at West Drayton at that stage. And I get the bonus the day before Christmas which I think is going to be well, we’ve got a bonus. Four quid it turned out to be. And so I said, I was with my wife then, I said I was disgusted. Four pound didn’t even half a week’s bloody wages never mind any, sod it. I’ll get another job. I went straightaway went to get another job. That’s when I went to County Laboratories which was Silvikrin in those days. Silvikrin were bought out by Brylcreem. So I had Silvikrin, Brylcreem, Bristows blah blah blah. I had a big firm.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And I spent seven years there. If you want to be any good at a firm they had about forty or fifty reps I suppose all told. If you want to be any good you got to be in the first three or four. And I made bloody sure I was there, you know.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And Birmingham was a good area.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: I mean, the bloke in Cornwall couldn’t hope to be in the first four could he? It wasn’t a big enough area really.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Not his fault.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And then I know I was, I’m a bit of a, I want a challenge in life. You know what I mean?
HB: Yeah.
RH: I’d been seven years doing this and I was well organised. I had postal orders. I then sometimes go out for them but I used to go out anyway.
HB: Yeah.
RH: You know, some of those going to the pictures. I wouldn’t go to the pictures. I refused the pictures many a time. Pouring with rain I refused the pictures. You know. That’s my job to go and do the job. Go out and speak to customers. It’s just an attitude I had I suppose from my father really.
HB: Yeah.
RH: After seven years I was walking in to a shop and I could tell you exactly when it was and all of a sudden it hit me. I’m sick of this bloody job. Doing the same. You know.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Another job and I got another job. That wasn’t all that good. Twelve months later I packed it up and went to another job. That wasn’t all that much good. I packed that up and went to another job which was great but I knew the firm were going to go bust the way it was acting.
HB: Oh right.
RH: I was there about five years and I decided now was the time to get out and I got out and I went to Flymo.
HB: Oh yes.
RH: When it was starting.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
RH: And that probably was, that really was a job and a half.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Of course, I took that from about a hundred and sixty eight thousand to nine million.
HB: Oh yeah.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Really good.
RH: But they unfortunately I was what fifty four and they decided they were going to sell it and he sold it because the patents run out after fifteen years. He knew there was competition coming. He sold it back to Electrolux. He was an Electrolux bloke actually. Sold it to Electrolux, made his money and we were out.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Because Electrolux didn’t want us. They’d got their own reps.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Out you go.
HB: Oh dear. Yeah.
RH: And I finished up with an American firm selling a [plating] process. A hand plating process. I’d been used to going in on advertise goods you know commercially.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: Easy enough. This was a different story. You had to demonstrate it. You had to, they had to grind it back and prove the point.
HB: Yeah.
RH: You know, you put a cylinder in and filled it. They had to prove that it would stop in and all that kind of thing.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And then you’ve got to put that if they’re going to buy the equipment before the board so you’d got months to go, you know before the board meeting.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Once every two months or something like that and I went from the January to the May without an order and having to phone the American boss every bloody week and he was saying, ‘You’ve got to keep at it.’ Blah blah. He was having a go at me all the time pushing me on and then one day I turned to him and I said, ‘Well, look here I’ve been doing this job now for three bloody months or four months. I’ve got promises in the bag. Yes. I’ve done the demonstrations’. I said, ‘and I’m getting, I’m getting just a bit cheesed off and I’m getting disappointed with all this.’ And he turned. ‘Don’t. No. No. No. No. No.’ He said, ‘These are long gestation period orders. Keep on. No, no don’t get disappointed. You’re working hard.’ And I knew then where I stood.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: And it just so happened that May brought me five bloody orders and the equipment was from five to fifteen thousand quid.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And then I got a ten percent commission on it. So you can imagine my —
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Everybody would be happy.
RH: Yeah. I would say now I know I can make some bloody money. Of course, as long as you, you had to keep filling the pot but once you get going —
HB: Yeah.
RH: The world was your oyster.
HB: Yeah.
RH: I was working half the bloody country.
HB: Brilliant.
RH: So I only —
HB: So, when you, when you cast your mind back Ron to your war time service you know.
RH: Yeah.
HB: You’ve, you’ve come from a sort of a modest background, a very modest education, you’ve come in to the RAF. What do you think the RAF gave you that helped you in your later life?
RH: Well —
HB: Your wartime service.
RH: I seem to have said this before and I think it’s right. It turns you from a boy to a man.
HB: Yeah.
RH: You start mixing with all sorts of people. It alters your whole attitude you know.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And you realise that, you know there are people there that are really bad and you also realise there is an awful lot of goodness there.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: Yeah. People that would help you out. People who would back you. You always felt secure.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Yeah.
HB: And now and obviously from the time you went to Padstow you are in a very sort of tight, a tight crew.
RH: Fifty people. That’s all the base was all the time.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s a very small tight group.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Was, was that part of, was that part of seeing you through the whole thing that? Having that small group to rely on?
RH: No. I mean I don’t think so really. I think I liked being you see when you go on a boat that is your crew.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Ther’s nothing to say you can’t go on another boat but basically a crew stays together and mine happened to be the CO‘s boat.
HB: Oh right.
RH: You see.
HB: Oh right.
RH: It didn’t matter who’s it was you’re in that group.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And you rely on that skipper. He’s, he’s after all he’s, he’s in charge of the boat.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
RH: You know.
HB: Yeah.
RH: Yeah. I mean I enjoyed that. But you don’t necessarily like everybody on the crew.
HB: No. No. Did you stay close to many of them of your crew?
RH: Well, one I still ring now.
HB: Right.
RH: Titch. We crewed.
HB: Oh right.
RH: He’s a fitter. We crewed together. He’s on one of the stories I’m telling you. He was on.
HB: Oh right.
RH: Except he wasn’t on the one where —
HB: The Americans.
RH: Yeah. No. He wasn’t on that one.
HB: Yeah.
RH: We were on standby.
HB: Yeah.
RH: He was in bed probably.
HB: Yeah.
RH: But I rang him a fortnight ago. A week ago.
HB: Yeah.
RH: He’s in, he’s in a place called Kenilworth, would you believe. In Canada.
HB: Oh right.
RH: In Ontario.
HB: Oh right.
RH: His wife picked up the phone. He came on the phone and I said, ‘George, you’re too close to the phone. I can’t understand you.’ And she picked up the phone and she said a fortnight ago we thought we’d lost him. He’s got heart trouble. She’d had a horrible time. She said can I take a —
HB: Oh, that’s a shame.
RH: Yeah.
HB: Well, yeah.
RH: He’s ninety three so —
HB: So, silly question. Was it all worth it?
RH: Yeah. I mean I’ve got a party coming in in nineteen days time. I’ve got thirty eight people coming here family and friends and I thought you know I’m bound to be asked something. and I think to myself yeah I can’t look forward because of this really. You know, I’ve got to balance problem.
HB: With your, with your mobility.
RH: So you tend to say today tomorrow and back.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And looking back over life and looking and comparing it with other people to me and my brother who died at sixty six. Better off than I was. Had a much better job than I ever did but still died at sixty six. I look back over life and at people I’ve met and I think well I’ve met more good people than bad people.
HB: Yeah.
RH: And I look back and I think, well I’ve had a good life.
HB: Well, I think that’s a point for us to perhaps—
RH: Close up. Yeah.
HB: I’m just, I haven’t even looked at the clock.
RH: It’s up there. Twenty past four.
HB: Yeah. Twenty past four. What I’d like to do is thank you, Ron. I mean that really has been very interesting.
RH: Good.
HB: And, and I mean that. It’s an aspect I haven’t seen much of so I’m going to terminate the interview now.
RH: Yeah.
HB: At twenty past four. So I’m going to switch the machine off.
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 Ronald Huntley
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-05
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
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AHuntleyR171005, PHuntleyR1702
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Format
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01:04:51 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Ronald Huntley enlisted in the Royal Air Force as a flight mechanic before volunteering to join Air Sea Rescue. Born in Edmonton, London, he represented his school in athletics at Crystal Palace and witnessed its destruction by fire in 1936. After leaving school in 1937, several different employment roles preceded his enlistment in the Royal Air Force. Initial training was followed by a 16-week flight mechanic course at RAF Cosford. After several postings on various aircraft, he was at RAF Duxford employed on a modification programme of Typhoon aircraft when he volunteered for the Air Sea Rescue launches. Following a course on diesel engines at RAF Locking, Ron was posted to Padstow and became part of a rescue launch crew where he was responsible for the engine. All kinds of rescues involving both aircraft and shipping covering the Western Approaches were undertaken. Occasionally, they also attended incidents involving holidaymakers around Cornwall. On the 17th April 1944, a Warwick transport aircraft from 525 Royal Canadian Squadron crashed and Ron’s crew were involved in the retrieval of the bodies along with a lifeboat. They also retrieved large sums of money, and Ron recalls what he experienced and the “hearsay evidence” that evolved. It has also been suggested there was a large amount of gold on board the aircraft. When the war finished, Ron was posted to Northern Ireland where he maintained boats used to shuttle crews out to Sunderland flying boats on Lough Erne.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1936
1944-02-15
1944-04-17
1944-04-27
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Atlantic Ocean--Irish Sea
England--Cornwall (County)
England--London
Northern Ireland--Fermanagh
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
air sea rescue
crash
ditching
ground crew
ground personnel
RAF St Eval
Sunderland
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/281/3434/PJeffreyS1604.1.jpg
f8f06ac3c4f2638cbf3035d20977df0f
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/281/3434/AJeffreySE160613.1.mp3
b1e7a38c64e687b9a1f552904a6bb1df
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
Jeffrey, Stanley Ernest
Stanley Ernest Jeffrey
Stanley E Jeffrey
Stanley Jeffrey
S E Jeffrey
S Jeffrey
Description
An account of the resource
24 Items concerning Stanley Ernest Jeffrey (1139581 Royal Air Force) who served as a mechanic engineer groundcrew with 102 Squadron at RAF Topcliffe and RAF Pocklington. Collection contains air force documents, engineering course training notebooks, photographs of aircraft and people and includes two oral history interviews.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Stanley Jeffrey and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-05-18
2016-06-13
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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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Jeffrey, SE
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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HB: This is an interview between Harry Bartlett on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre and Mr Stanley Ernest Jeffrey, a former Flight Mechanic in the Royal Air Force, 102 Ceylon Squadron from 1941 to — 1946. Interview is taking place on the 13th of June at xxxxx Oadby.
HB: That’s the introduction, Stan.
IJ: Yeah. That’s the introduction.
HJ: Yeah.
HB: One of the things we’re interested in Stan, is before the war, I mean obviously you were born somewhere, where — you know, what was your family life before the war?
SJ: Well, I lived in King Street in Oadby and Cross Street in Oadby and I worked at the Imperial Typewriter Company from the last day of the old year 1940 —
IJ: No. 1930 something. Would it’ve been 1934?
SJ: 1934. I left school 1934 of course. Sorry.
HB: Which school was that Stan?
SJ: Oadby School, there was only two schools in Oadby then, the Senior and the Junior. So in the Junior School, in the — when I started school at Junior School in Oadby and then moved to the Senior School in nineteen, [laughs] I get mixed up with the dates — [laughter].
HB: Thirties.
IJ: Thirty-four.
HB: That would be about in the thirties, yeah. What did you do at school? What were your main interests at school?
SJ: Well we did — more or less all schools — the usual school, you know, nothing in particular, that was, what can I say, well we just started school at four, started school in the Junior School at four, from the Junior School we went to the Senior School, that’s on the Leicester Road, Oadby.
IJ: Did you have any interests at school?
SJ: Well not really. We just —
HB: What, what did you enjoy most at school Stan?
SJ: I think I had the schooling really, the teachers were very good to us you know ‘cause we weren’t well off you know, all the kids at school the majority of the time. Yes it was quite nice at school, I enjoyed my schooling really.
HB: So what, what family did you come from Stan?
SJ: There was my mum, dad, I had a brother Aubrey, he died recently.
HB: Oh.
IJ: Ten years ago.
SJ: Ten years ago he died.
IJ: And Aub wanted to go in the Air Force but he had to go down the mines.
SJ: Yes, my brother was very disappointed because he had to go down the mines instead of being in, what he called ‘being in the war’.
HB: What did mum and dad do, what did dad do?
SJ: Dad was — worked in shoes, pressman in shoes.
HB: Was that local or in Leicester?
SJ: Er, it — he was local for a start and he was also at Leicester and mum, she was in the hosiery, and the boots and shoes. [laughter] They both had different jobs, they got work where they could you see.
HB: Yes. So as we get to your leaving school, how did you come to work for Imperial Typewriters?
SJ: Oh, there was a fella, he was the printer at, at the cartwrighter’s, he were a printer and he got me the job.
HB: Oh right.
SJ: He got me the job. He knew me. Me mum went to see him and he got me the job. So I did start school at the last of the old year, 1934 at the Imperial. I worked there until I got called up in — yes, I worked there ‘till I got called up in nine — when were it? I’m getting mixed up with —
IJ: Nineteen forty-one, was it?
SJ: Yeah, in nineteen thirty-four until I got called up in nineteen — oh God.
HB: I think it says on your Service Record early, something like, February 1941, something like that. About February 1941.
SJ: Ah. Yes I think it was about 1941.
HB: Where was, where was Imperial Typewriters at that time?
SJ: At the East Park Road.
IJ: In Leicester.
SJ: In Leicester, East Park Road in Leicester, yeah.
HB: And did er, and did you just go into it or did you go into some sort of apprenticeship?
SJ: I went in as a runabout, I, I were fourteen you see. You started as a runabout and you worked your way through various jobs til I become a foreman.
IJ: Well you did later on,
SJ: Manager yeah,
IJ: Not long before you went into the Air Force.
SJ: That’s right I worked up myself to be a manager at the Imperial —
IJ: But that were after you come out the Forces Stan.
HB: I was just, yeah, I was gonna say, so Imperial Typewriters was an important
SJ: Yes
HB: part of your life before the war.
SJ: Yes
HB: Um, what interests, what interests did you have outside of school before the war Stan?
SJ: Well I didn’t have very little interests.
IJ: Did you go night school Stan?
SJ: I went night school, night school but apart from that there well, there was nothing much in the village then. We had the picture house built, I remember that being built you see and that livened us up a bit, [laughter] somewhere to go at night time. Ahh, but that even closed down, that didn’t last, it lasted a while.
IJ: It were going when the war were on weren’t it?
SJ: Oh yes, yeah.
IJ: So it was after the war when it closed.
SJ: Yes it closed in about, ooh, well after I’d met you and that.
IJ: Oh yeah, yeah, because I mean it was till open when Jan were little, cos we used to take her pictures. So I mean, I think it might have been the sixties when it closed.
SJ: Yeah, as I say it was there for a short while really because as I said, it closed down and it were a shame really because we had do nothing else in the village, there were nothing until the pictures were built in Oadby.
HB: You were doing a bit, you were doing a bit with the Scouts weren’t you?
SJ: You what?
HB: You were in the Scouts weren’t you?
SJ: Yes, yes for a short time. That’s where I met that fella again, who got err, who crashed.
IJ: Hmm —
HB: Yeah, yeah in the, in the, in the accident.
SJ: Yes I met him again. That were funny that was meeting him because you see well when err, when you were detailed to a certain aeroplane and that, perhaps sometimes it had to go in the hangar for a major inspection and perhaps you used to have to follow it in and work on it in there and that’s where I met this fella who, you know, who got shot down yeah.
HB: Yeah, yeah the crash at the um, where the memorial is now yeah. The,so that, that you know, you’ve obviously been called up, when you’ve done, when you’ve done all your training, and you were you know, what was the process, what was, how did they sort of send you out? Did they just —?
SJ: No, well you see, you went to what were called to the school do you see? You went there from errr, I know I come away from there September 1941,
HB: Aha
SJ: yeah September. You had about seventeen, seventeen or eighteen weeks training and then you moved out to a squadron and that’s when I was posted to 102 Squadron in September 1941, I do remember that yeah. And I was with them all through the war years.
HB: So when, when you were posted out, how, how did you feel, how did you feel about going to, you know being posted to 102 Squadron?
SJ: Well it was great really because you felt as though you were doing something towards the war you see? You looked after the engines from you know, and you were, it were nice when we was made, in the latter, that latter part of the war, they made the Ground Crews the same as the Air Crew. The Ground Crew was to a certain aircraft, I was on EEs then, in the latter part of the war.
HB: And from that you formed friendships —
SJ: That’s right
HB: Through that?
SJ: That’s right yes, you went, you were posted to any aircraft to look at in A Flight, I was in A Flight. There was A, B and C Flights with about eight aircraft in each, in each Flight and I was posted to A Flight and I was with A Flight all the while.
HB: Yes. When, when you were working on the aircraft you obviously, you know, you’ve, you’ve done the work, you’ve got to get them ready for the operation. What was that process, getting them ready for the operation?
SJ: Well for a start the aircraft was always out on the dispersal point and you, you were detailed to this one aircraft, EEs towards the latter part of the war, so you went, you went out 8 o’clock in the morning you’re out there doing your inspection. It really [unclear] and sometimes it was about perhaps a 16 hour inspection, a 32 hour inspection [unclear] so the bigger the inspection were the aircraft.
HB: Yes.
SJ: You see, so you had a detailed inspection to do every day and err that, well then sometimes the Air Crew used to come out and they used to have a look over the aircraft and you know, have a chat with us and such like. That were quite nice, quite interesting really that were.
HB: And that, and this is where the bond, the friendship grew?
SJ: That’s right yeah yes, yes we formed quite a lot of friendships with the air air, you didn’t call them sergeants and such like, they were mates of yours really yeah, on our Squadron anyway. I mean you used to come out, perhaps have a fag with them, and a chat, and when they went on operations you always used to have to sign the form 700 which was my work form to, to say I’d done the engines you see and you’d go in when all the Air Crew were ready for Ops, they’d run the engines up, the pilot would, they’d sign to say they were satisfied with the engines and then I’d come out and shut the door and then you’d see, see ‘em off on the Ops. You used to have to sit there at night waiting for ‘em coming back which was quite, it were nice, all the EEs and them in the circuit you know they’re OK, we’d know we’d got ours back you see. And as each one come in we saw each aircraft in.
HB: So did you actually manage the aircraft as they left and as they came back, when they came down onto the ground?
SJ: Yes, seen, seen, seen ‘em off and seen ‘em back, oh yeah. And sometimes, well, well I used to stick a bit of chewing gum on the undercarriage for ‘em, it got a habit, yes I used to [unclear] , that were the good luck charm for ‘em.
IJ: Oh crikey.
HB: On the EEs?
SJ: Yeah on the EEs, yeah and I used to get a bit of chocolate for that [laughter] , from the aircrew and that yeah.
HB: And did, obviously you were there for a long time you know, from 41 through to 46 um.
Doorbell
SJ: That’s all right, it’s only —
HB: It’s all right I can pause —
HB: That’s just a short break in the interview ahh while a friendly neighbour delivers one or two bits and bobs to Stan. Um, we’ll just go back Stan to obviously the length of time you were at Pocklington and er what not. You you had the same aircraft?
SJ: Yeah.
HB: Umm, what was —
SJ: We didn’t from the start we didn’t from the start. You see, what at one time the the Flight Sergeant used to ‘right so and so Stan, Jack you’re on E today, you’re on A ’ he said. And then suddenly it got to it that the same aircraft, the same aircraft and the same ground crew which was, it were more interesting, better for you, you felt as though you were part and parcel of the —
HB: It, it strikes me, from the way you’ve spoken previously that it must have been, quite, umm I won’t say emotional, I would say difficult, to —. You’re looking after the aircraft, you’ve formed these friendships with some of the Air Crew and you’re watching them disappear,
SJ: Hmm.
HB: and obviously there was a possibility that they weren’t going to come back?
SJ: Yeah, yeah. Well we never thought about that, we always thought about them coming back. I never lost an E, in all my, no I never lost an E, not err, not in the latter part. For a start I’d say when you were on any aircraft you see, I did, one aircraft, E, I did lose one aircraft that, he come down shot up with a hundred, hundred holes in.
HB: Phew.
SJ: Yes, he managed to land it. I forget his name now, but he rose in the ranks to Squadron Leader, I forget his name you see. And er, and er of course you saw a lot of that really, you know, crashes and. You used to be fetched out to crashes you know. I mean one crash I did [unclear] , there were seventeen on it, they took the ground crew up and they crashed you see. So we had to sort that out and I didn’t know at the time, it were night time, I didn’t know at the time but the pilot was still in there. When they come in the morning they had to report the pilot still sitting there you see. Yeah, they’d missed him yeah. But anyway, yes we and we also, it was one time perhaps we were stationed in the farmhouse and the farmers and that and the family looked after us through the, oh yeah, perhaps had breakfast with him or something. Oh yes, they were big on breakfasts and that with the, on crash duty yeah.
HB: Hmm. Difficult.
SJ: It were nice, I enjoyed the time there. You see I’d been there all the while with the same fellas and it were quite nice ‘cos you, you formed a bond with them you see and also the Air Crew, and as soon as they’d finished operations of thirty ops they’d take the Ground, they’d take us out for a meal.
HB: Mmm.
SJ: Yeah, I’ve been on one or two [laughter]. As I said I never lost an aircraft in my time. So, yes, before, yes they’d take us out, take us down in the car to Pocklington to the pub and have a meal, come back and sitting on top of the car roof coming back, [laughter] had a good time, all singing and shouting the ground crew and that, we were all one yeah. I think I had about four, four meals. Yeah yeah, I didn’t lose a ground crew, it were quite nice up there for me
HB: Hmm.
SJ: thinking back. It was, it were Hank and Tom and all this lot. One were a tailor, one were a tailor in, err somewhere you know. One were You got to know what they did you know.
HB: 102 Squadron had a range of nationalities in the air crews. Um, was that reflected in the Ground Crew as well, or just —
SJ: No there were some, we did have a group that’d come one time come, perhaps about half a dozen engine and aircraftmen, yeah. We did have that at one time, but normally we had, it were just the lads, you know, the lads who‘d been there on the same aircraft and that and you see you formed this er loyalty and that to the aircrew you see.
HB: So you had, you had four dinners, that’s four crews,
SJ: Yes we had four —
HB: How long, how long would it have, would the aircraft —?
SJ: We had thirty ops
HB: taken the aircraft have taken to do thirty ops?
SJ: They’d done the thirty ops, they’d done the thirty ops and they took us to the local pub yeah. They didn’t err, as I say I never lost a ground crew in the latter part, which was quite chuff really. We all got er, we formed that bond [unclear] for thirty ops and that and seeing them off and back, yeah.
HB: So as you’re coming to the end of your time at Pocklington and then you moved to um err, where did you go after Pocklington?
SJ: Bassingbourn.
HB: Bassingbourn. So you’re coming up to the end of the war, what did you, how did you feel about, at what point did you think this, this ain’t going to last much longer?
HB: Well when the war were over, we were only too pleased it were over and it weren’t the same, it weren’t the same in the Air Force after the, after the war had finished. Well we’ve done it, let’s get out, you know. That’s kind of how it was yeah. Because it, as I say, you formed a bondship with the Air Crew, each Air Crew you see after their first two or three ops you know and that, yeah.
HB: Hmmm. Cos, I mean, in what, about the early part of 1945 you know they were moving towards D Day and all that sort of thing you know. Did you know much about that on the airfield?
SJ: No, no we just carried on you know, every day you did, did the same thing,
HB: Yeah.
SJ: look at the aircraft, see it’s OK but it wasn’t the same as before. You’d think it’s finished, it’s over and done with.
HB: And when when did you and your Ground Crew sort of think to yourselves, or find out. that you were coming towards the end of it?
SJ: Well I think in the latter part, you see and they took, they took us about the second, the second week after the war finished, they took, they took us for a trip over Germany to look at all the bomb damage so we had, we had a quite a good trip out to show us all the bomb damage, yeah. What we’d done. That’s when you started knowing it were over, you know, you’d done your bit, let’s get out.
HB: Hmm, yeah.
SJ: You understand what I mean.
HB: So they, so you were actually in an aircraft, was that your own aircraft?
SJ: Yeah, that’s right it were your aircraft. EEs were our aircraft, we looked after that.
HB: And they, the pilot flew you out over Germany. What was you, what was you f —That must have been a bit of a strange feeling Stan?
SJ: It were nice though.
HB: You see —
SJ: It were nice the way, ‘cos they flew low. Matter of fact I looked up at wotsit Cathedral, cos it were that low going on and all the people were waving to you, you could see all that.
HB: How did, how did you feel when you actually saw what they’d done, the effect of the bombing?
SJ: Yeah, I thought, well I mean when I went out I were in the rear turret, so I had a good view I did. Cos it, it weren’t you know, they were all in their positions, some were sitting in the wotsit, but they gave me the rear turret seat so I was first off and last on ha ha.
HB: [laughter] Was that because of the chewing gum on the aeroplane?
SJ: [laughter] Yeah, I had a good view you see of what happened. All the bomb damage you see.
HB: Hmmm. When, when when you came to actually coming out of the RAF um how did you feel about the sort of attitudes towards Bomber Command, that sort of thing?
SJ: Well, it was, to me, to me I never bothered with me medals because I was that disappointed with how we were treated, you know, Bomber Command, I never bothered. I didn’t get a medal and that. I were in five and a half years and I never got a medal.
HB: And yeah, did you? You say you were disappointed, um what?
SJ: With the attitude of the higher ups, how Churchill treated us, you know. He done nothing, he done nothing really. They did too much damage. What, what killed Churchill was when the last bombing raid on Essen, is it Essen? Where, where they killed, they killed a lot of people and they said it weren’t defended, but it was, it was. Because, err how was it, [pause] they said it, they hadn’t ought to bomb that because it wasn’t a proper bombing raid or something like that.
HB: Hmm right.
SJ: Yeah. They shouldn’t have bombed it, like that. But it was, ‘cos there was, there was a, err they were still using, they were still bombing err us as well as them you see. I won’t say it were tit for tat but we we thought we did a good job you know, to end the war, really.
HB: And that and that feeling towards, you know, as you said, Churchill and the higher ups, um did that affect, did that affect how you looked at the country after, when you came out of the RAF, did that did that affect how you looked at things?
SJ: I don’t think I gave that a thought you know, I’d been, I’d done my bit and I was satisfied what we’d done and that was that.HB: Hmm.
SJ: Yeah.
HB: Hmm. At what point in this, in this time at what point did you meet Iris?
SJ: Did?
HB: Did you meet Iris?
IJ: Yes.
SJ: That was nineteen forty —
IJ: I was sixteen weren’t I,
SJ: Yeah [laughter]
IJ: When you met me and?
SJ: Yes. I met Iris about, oh after I’d been in the Air Force
IJ: Yes.
SJ: for a couple of years or more.
IJ: Yeah that’s right.
SJ: Came home on leave once and I was introduced to Iris at the De Montfort, the De Montfort Hall.
HB: Aaahh.
IJ: Yeah, so that’s when we got together, we had a dance and that were it weren’t it?
SJ: Yeah, yeah. We got married two years after. But it weren’t —
IJ: 1944 we were married.
SJ: 1944 we got married, 1944 yeah.
HB: So you’ve met Iris, you’ve got married, you’ve come to the end of it, you’re coming out of the RAF. Um I think you said earlier that you went back to back to —
SJ: Imperial.
HB: Imperial Typewriters?
SJ: Yes because your jobs, your jobs was er spoken for, you were reserved yes. If you went back, you went back to the same job and everything yes and that’s when we err
IJ: What?
SJ: I had about six weeks leave. I didn’t want to go back to work for six weeks, I thought, well you know, and then I went back, went back after six weeks leave and err I think was it, weren’t it Iris?
HB: Did you, did you just pick up where you left off or did you —? Was your engineering stuff in the RAF useful?
SJ: Yes it seemed a bit tame after, seemed a bit tame after being with the lads.
HB: Hmm.
SJ: I missed the lads when they come out of the forces, yeah. Well you’re bound to after all them years, ain’t you with them?
IJ: Well It’s like the college lads and girls, I’ll bet when they come out they miss all their mates unless they keep in touch with them.
HB: So your, when you actually got back to Imperial Typewriters, um you’ve got your job that’s been reserved for you, you know you sort of start work, the lads that you’ve been with, particularly the ground crew, um how did you, how did you feel about keeping in contact with them?
SJ: Well we kept in touch with one, Eric.
IJ: Yes Eric.
SJ: I kept in touch with him ‘cos he lived near, where were it? Where did he live?
HB: Kettering?
IJ: No.
SJ: About er twenty five mile away.
IJ: I forget where.
HB: I kept in touch with him for quite some time.
IJ: We used to go and see them, haven’t we?
SJ: Yes we used to go and see them, yeah.
HB: Was he the one from Northampton?
SJ: That’s it Northampton.
HB:Right yes I think we mentioned him last time.
SJ: Yes from Northampton, kept in touch with him but he died didn’t he, he died.
IJ: He died yeah.
SJ: I went to see his wife afterwards didn’t I but that’s — when he died —
Iris: She kept in touch for a bit, she sent us Christmas cards and that didn’t she? Then the daughter rang to say that she’d died.
SJ: Yeah.
HB: Did you ever, did you ever get any messages you know about reunions or getting back together or anything like that?
SJ: No, no there was nothing, I’ve never heard of a 102 Squadron reunion at all. Since I’ve been in touch with them they’ve been talking about them now but you see I can’t get up to them at the present time. I’d love to get to one, you know. I mean I’ve been invited ain’t I to —?
IJ: Yeah, oh yes you’ve —
SJ: I’ve been invited, they’ve been in touch, they say I can go to the home at Pocklington.
HB: Hmm yeah.
IJ: We’ll perhaps be able to do that if it —
SJ: I hope to be able to do that one of these days, I might see if I can get back there.
IJ: Well if we can get that wet room done, I mean hopefully if we can get in, we can go there while they’re doing it, you know for at least a week.
SJ: That’s what we’re thinking because they’re going to do the wet room for us you see. They say there’s going to be a bit of a noise for a week and I’m hoping to try, if possible to go for a week whenever they start. It could be six months or more.
Iris: That’s if we can get in.
SJ: Yeah.
HB: That would be really nice.
SJ: They tell me I can because I was on that Squadron for a long while.
HB: Well, yeah I mean, 1941 to ’46 it’s —.
IJ: You were there.
SJ: Yeah.
HB: That’s why, I mean I’m, I come from an era where you know we didn’t have that situation, so it’s hard to think that guys who were together as a team, as a group working every day, you know in war time conditions, um it comes to an end and there doesn’t seem to be much happening afterwards.
SJ: No there was nothing, you think, it were funny really. It took a little while to get used to being back in Civvy Street, as they say, it took a while yeah really. I mean yeah [laughter] you felt like, at one time that I’d like to get back to the lads you know, no disrespect, no disrespect to the wife of course but you miss the lads.
HB: How long, how long before that sort of faded away?
SJ: [pause] Oh I think it took a year or two before it finally, you know because well, you were back in Civvy Street then, which is entirely different to being in the Forces really.
HB: What did you think were the biggest differences at the end of the war when you when you came back to work?
SJ: Well there were the lads and you were, you were all together you know even when you were bombed and that you know.
HB: You got bombed did you?
EJ: Oh yeah, yeah we all went running down the shelter, it were that full of water and we got wet through.
IJ: Where were that Stan?
SJ: Pocklington.
IJ: Was it in Pocklington?
HB: Three foot, three foot deep in water?
SJ: Yeah, yeah [unclear] were full of water yeah. We got err once or twice, as a matter of fact when we got married, that were 1942 when we got married, 1944 sorry, when we got married, and err one aircraft bombed and it took err it damaged another aircraft right at Barnby Moor yeah right at — oh yes, it it bombed this aircraft, I were on leave at the time, come back yeah.
HB: So, so you were [cough] excuse me, actually on the airfield when you got, when it was bombed?
SJ: Yeah, yeah.
HB: Err obviously by the enemy, [laughter] um, so yeah that, hmm yeah so that’s, is that when they were out on operations or had they followed them back or was it just an opportunity?
SJ: Ah well, sometimes they followed ‘em back you know.
HB: Hmm.
SJ: Sometimes they followed them back and one time there were quite a bit of damage done because all the lights were lit up and the aircraft were bombing the airfield.
HB: How many times do you reckon that happened to you?
SJ: Not many times.
HB: Right.
SJ: No not many times it were only about once or twice that were but we had plenty of air raid warnings you know as they were after all airfields you see.
HB: Hmm. Well bearing in mind the time and you need to get something to eat Stan, I think we’ll call it a day and I’ll, I’ll pass this over to the guys at Lincoln but thanks ever so much you know for what you’ve said before and all the photos, it’s absolutely brilliant really because as I say —
SJ: Even so I don’t feel as though I’ve done much.
IJ: Stan can’t quite remember, it’s changed a little bit this last month or two, he can’t he can’t remember quite so much now.
HB: Stan what you can remember is is remarkable and as I say it’s an aspect, that you know the Ground Crews and the way the air stations worked,
SJ: Oh yeah,
HB: And all that. These are things that —
SJ: We did appreciate the grounds crews and they appreciated us.
HB: Yeah.
SJ: They appreciated —
HB: I’m going to turn the tape off now, or the recording, it’s not a tape any more.
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AJeffreySE160613
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Interview with Stanley Ernest Jeffrey. One
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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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00:40:43 audio recording
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Pending review
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Harry Bartlett
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2016-06-13
Description
An account of the resource
Stan Jeffrey was a flight mechanic at RAF Pocklington. He discusses the camaraderie between the ground and air crews. He would stick chewing gum to the undercarriage as a good luck charm. Shortly after the end of the war, the ground crew were taken on a flight over Germany to see the bomb damage. He worked for Imperial Typewriters before and after the war.
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--Yorkshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tina James
102 Squadron
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
Cook’s tour
flight mechanic
ground crew
ground personnel
Halifax
military service conditions
RAF Pocklington
superstition