1
25
9
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1146/11702/AStewardPD150814.2.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
Steward, Peter
Peter Dennis Steward
P D Steward
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Peter Steward (b. 1933, 1922441, Royal Air Force).
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-14
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Steward, P
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SB: This is Sheila Bibb interviewing Peter Steward on the 14th of August 2015 at his home in Erith. Peter, could we start off with you just telling me a little bit about yourself, your family, background detail?
PS: I was, I was born in 1933 and my father at the time was a milkman, working from, from Belvedere village, called Home County Dairies. When I was — my earliest memories are of Woolwich Road in Erith which was a two up two down terraced house, and they’re very vague apart from instances where father built Meccano models et cetera. My father was always an unskilled man insomuch as that he never had a trade and worked mostly as a labourer or a fitter’s mate. He was called up during the war and after a spell of training and — also at RAF Calshot on flying boats and Catalinas — he was posted to India so I didn’t see him again until 1946. He never rose above the rank of LAC but his brother was a sergeant in the Air Force from 1933 and my cousin also was in the RAF from 1933 cousin Vic [clears throat] was an aircraft fitter, mostly on Lysanders, my,cousin Owen was a radio operator air gunner on 75 Squadron, which was 75 New Zealand Squadron, and he was stationed at Feltwell, flew thirty missions and was killed on his last one. Been married six months, rather tragic. [background noise] Having two other uncles in the Air Force, I left school at fifteen and I went to work at Woolwich Arsenal in a factory making German tank spares but I didn’t like it very much and with a fellow worker, Bob Rowe we were, went up to London, saw the posters in the RAF building in Kingsway and decided to join the boys service, which we both did. From there we went to, for training to RAF Compton Basset to train as telegraphists, which was like for us at seventeen was like torture [laugh]. It was wooden huts, coke fires, um, lots of bull and school of course on top of this so for eighteen months it was heavy going but it was, looking back on it, it was quite fun as well. From there, I was posted to Comms Central, which was Telecommunications Central at Stanbridge and we actually lived in Bletchley. I was there almost two years and a posting came up for Germany. Well, first of all I had to report to High Wycombe which was Headquarters Bomber Command and there we formed a convoy of Gee and Oboe equipment to take to Germany so we went by convoy. I can remember going from Dover to Dunkirk, where the French wanted to have a look in the radio vehicles but of course they were sealed and so there was a bit of kerfuffle but anyway they didn’t get their way and we pressed on to RAF Wildenrath in Germany, where we set up the headquarters. After we’d been there about six months they had a small monitor unit. This consisted of a RVT, a radio vehicle, with monitoring equipment and we would chase about over Europe, checking the main Gee chain, the central European Gee chain, which was also H, HS, H2S for the blind bombing and so, for the next two years, that’s what I did, chase around Germany between Winterberg, Osnabruck, Neustadt, um, Weinstrasse [?], Spijkerboor in Holland. These were all radar units on this Gee chain and all to do with Bomber Command but the closest I ever got to aircraft was at Wildenrath which was a fighter station anyway but we did see, I had a couple of Canberras land there once and that was the closest I got to aircraft from Bomber Command [laugh]. Anyway, after two years I came back to the UK and then I was with different commanders. So, that was my total experience of Bomber Command really.
SB: What time frame was that over?
PS: 1951 to ‘3. [sound of aircraft]
SB: Okay and you say you were chasing the different—
PS: Radar units.
SB: Radar units. What exactly?
PS: We were launching them. We could trigger the H2S system from, from a vehicle carrying a transmitter, a radar transmitter, and I was the radio man ‘cause we had a radio set in there so we could communicate back to back. No telephones then [laugh] so it had to be done with Morse code over a radio.
SB: Yeah and do you know why you were attached to Bomber Command for that or —
PS: As a telegraphist we would be attached to all sorts of units, stations, so you never travelled as a squadron, you always travelled as an individual. For example, I was at Andover in Hampshire with Maintenance Command and Suez blew up and I got posted out there purely to set up a new airfield called Tymvou. I believe it’s now the Turkish airfield on Cyprus and, we arrived and it was just an airstrip, that was it, and we had to prepare this for the French paras and so there we were in a Landrover with a Very pistol waiting for their first aircraft to appear. Bang! Red light, ‘Sheep on the runway.’ Bang! Green light. ‘It’s clear. Come in.’ But that was only for, I was only there for six months in that time and that was, again that was with Signals Command rather than — well, it was Near East Signals Command, yeah, but it was always to do with Signals after that. That was my little —
SB: Okay, so do you have any other interesting stories [slight laugh] from that time or —
PS: [clears throat] We had, we had our first car in Germany. Four of us bought a, Opal Capita between the four of us, served us mightily in Germany, it did. Used to go to all the wine festivals in it. And in the end, coming back, somebody said, ‘Who’s going to drive it back to England?’ Nobody fancied taking it back so we drove it into a quarry and she died [slight laugh].
SB: What was it like being in Germany that soon after the end of the war?
PS: I was shocked. I’d seen the Blitz here in London but when I saw Cologne for the first time with the cathedral still standing but nothing [emphasis] at all around, as flat as a pancake, because by that time the debris had been cleared but it was still just one huge open space around the, the dome. And [sigh] I can’t remember the other town now I went to, that was — it changed hands two or three times during the war and it was absolute flat, very little apart from the railway station there. So, that was my first — and yet we didn’t find any, any ill feeling from the locals towards us. In fact quite the opposite. We used to get invited to wine festivals in different villages. So, you know, we got on with the locals very well. And 72 Signals Unit, they employed two Germans, one for driving and one for general duties around the station, and, but the guy, the driver used to drive Rommel [laugh], quite, quite a change. We were also then at that 72 Signals Unit, Adernau, is right on top of the Nürburg Racing Ring. So I’ve driven a three-tonner around that ring [laugh]. Never got higher than sixty but still [laugh]. Yeah, that was a good time in Germany.
SB: Yeah, so —
PS: I mean, Germany was still split it two then and we were there purely for the Cold War. So, these stations were set up to take our bombers into Eastern Europe. So, we had one or two exercises, you know, to get this thing off and on the ball but our targets, funnily enough, used to be so I understand in England. It would be a bridge or a manhole cover in Sheffield or something like that [slight laugh].
SB: Yes. So, going back to before you got that posting how did you feel when you were told you were going to Germany?
PS: Oh, I was looking forward to it. Excited. Yeah. I wanted to see it, you know. We had — as a kid you had all this hatred for this country that was, you know — well, it had killed my cousin for a start and taken my father away and close relatives, uncles, and so I suppose pretty angry at the time. I thought so, I’d see what these swines are like and it was an eye-opener and, a lesson in humanity I suppose. No, we found, as I say, all these small units we had — maybe it was because we were small units, twenty-two men at the most, that we were accepted, not as conquerors, but as guests almost.
SB: Good. So, how long did you actually stay in the Air Force?
PS: Twelve, fourteen years all told, yeah. I came out. I had to. My first wife had multiple sclerosis so I spent all my time looking after her and — but she died then. So, looking back, I thought I’d love to have stayed in, done the lot, you know, but it wasn’t to be.
SB: What did you do afterwards?
PS: I went into Fleet Street believe it or not. Communications again, you see? I, met a friend who said, ‘Go and see this chap Chambers who runs an agency in Fleet Street. He’s an ex-RAF warrant officer.’ And so I went and saw him and he said, ‘Can you still handle a keyboard?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’m sending you over to Australia and Associated Press.’ He said, ‘They want a keyboard man.’ So anyway that was an eye-opener. And, of course, most of the work, although it was a keyboard it was using punch tape and, so you were on the news desk and they were putting stories in front of you you send them all over the world. All of a sudden you’d get a flash signal in front of you, you know, about some disaster or something so you had to ring the bells and get that off. And from there I went to the New York Times, London Bureau. From there to the last six weeks of the Daily Herald. Then The Sun took over the Daily Herald and I moved to the Daily Express and I was there until Fleet Street folded as it were. Well, it were — every time I’ve had a job it’s become redundant, you know. From there I went into the print industry in general and every time I got to this company it would fold so [laugh] at, at sixty I thought I’m calling this a day. That’s it. Finish. So, I took some jobbing gardening jobs up and then official retirement, you know. Yeah. Quite eventful.
SB: So, would it be fair to say that your Air Force stint actually had quite a major impact on your life?
PS: Oh yes, definitely. It altered you, it made your life style for you. It really [background noise] did me and the joy is now we formed an ex-boy entrants union and, association and now we meet every year. It started off with five of us meeting up at the RAF Museum and that five is now two thousand, all ex-boy entrants. In fact [background noise] where is it? That’s me at just about seventeen, standing next to [unclear] Cliff. [unclear] That’s, that’s at Compton Bassett under training. And that’s — there we are two years ago.
SB: Lovely.
PS: Yeah, and, yeah, as I say, we meet up there at RAF Cosford [background noise] and that’s the only photograph I’ve got. I was on 72 Signals Unit.
SB: Okay. We’ll get a photo of that in a bit.
PS: [background noise] Yeah. As I say [background noise] I took so many photographs for some reason or other. [pause] But it was before the RAF took it over. A, youth, youth hostel with — so a big walking area. Obviously our radar units were on top of mountains but that was our domestic site.
SB: Very good. Right.
PS: No longer there I believe, so I’m told. I haven’t been back since so —
SB: [background noises] Have you actually been back to Germany or any of those places?
PS: Yeah. I went back once [loud background noise] but I didn’t, even then I didn’t get to the cemetery to my cousin’s. He’s buried in Kiel [?]. I didn’t get back there unfortunately. I went with a mate and saw my ex-brother-in-law and that was it. It was a sort of a flying visit more or less.
SB: Yeah. You said your father served in the war?
PS: Yeah. He served mainly in India. As I say he was away until 1946. My cousin was 75 Squadron [background noise] and that’s what he would have been doing on the aircraft.
SB: Very good.
PS: Feltwell is in Norfolk. This is a copy of his, his, um, log book, marked with a star. And as I say, what’s the date there? ’41 and ’42 he was killed. That squadron has the second biggest loss of life in the Bomber Command.
SB: Very sad.
PS: Oh it is. I lost several mates, lost three in Cyprus, four were killed in an air crash in Malta, two in Aden so, you know, even in so-called peacetime it still happens. But when I first went to Cyprus in ’56, of course, we had to go armed everywhere, which was quite strange, walking around with a Sten gun all of — over your shoulder all the time. But I never had to use it. We did get shot at first, first night in Cyprus. We — they took us out to the airstrip. No-one knew where it was first of all then someone said, ‘Oh I know where that is.’ Of course, there was no fencing or anything, just this airstrip with a bit of concrete runway, and they said, ‘Well, here’s your tents.’ We hadn’t got a gun between us and that first night we bivouacked, about three hundred yards from the road. A car come down there Bang! Bang! Bang! And luckily we were in these little safari beds but they didn’t come anywhere near us anyway, probably they were using shotguns. The next day the landlubbers [?] said, ‘Give us some weapons please.’ [laugh] ‘Look after us.’ As I say, we were supposed to be preparing an airstrip for the French and then we brought in the first French aircraft by Very pistol and the first thing off the aircraft that landed was a radio vehicle so they could communicate with the rest of the planes. Where was our equipment? On a ship broken down at Malta. This was for the Suez do. Complete farce it was, really.
SB: You improvised? [laugh]
PS: Yeah. We did. We had to. But they all, had all German equipment, the French, even a mini tractor comes out, a mini bulldozer comes out of one of these aircraft, smooths off a stretch of sand, plane goes over, it expands, it’s a twenty-two man tent. All German stuff. All their equipment was, was German, amazing stuff. But their field kitchen was lousy. [laugh] We didn’t know whether to eat with them and because we didn’t have any facilities at that time. And all they had was these two big cauldrons filled with slop [laugh] and a little jerry can filled with red wine which was like vinegar. So we said, ‘Oh this is enough of this.’ So we lit a fire, pulled out a big frying pan and had eggs and bacon [laugh]. Yeah, but that was interesting.
SB: So when you, you said you went to Cyprus, Aden, all the rest of it, what were you doing when you finally left?
PS: I was back at RAF Amport, which believe it or not is a RAF centre for padres and I was in the Signals section there. A really, really, horrible boring place, terrible. But that was my last posting. I couldn’t carry on after that, as I say, because of my wife. But no, I didn’t like that part at all. It was so, it was like being an office worker, you know.
SB: So, what was your favourite part of the whole experience?
PS: Undoubtedly Germany, with, with Cyprus a close second, yeah, yeah. Because I went back to Cyprus in ‘60, to Episcopi, which was Near East Headquarters. I was in the communications centre there. [clears throat] But it was a nice life on Cyprus. We had a married quarters, lived out, out of the camp, in Limassol and so, it was sunny atmosphere, the beach et cetera. Yeah, we enjoyed two years there.
SB: A far cry from Kingsway?
PS: A far cry from Kingsway, yeah.
SB: Yeah. Are there any other influences that you think that time has had on you?
PS: Well, only the ability to look after yourself, you know, compared to some some blokes. We all felt they can’t cook, they can’t clean you know et cetera, you know, so all that came second — what else?
SB: How about your family? Has it affected their lives?
PS: My wife doesn’t, I mean my second wife, doesn’t want to know anything about the Air Force at all [slight laugh]. She’s bored with it you know. She was, she was interested in ballet and things like that. She used to run a ballet school once. But, she trained, trained at the Royal Ballet School but she was, I’m afraid too big chested to make a ballet dancer. But but she loved the garden as well, so — she was a painter and decorator as well for a while, she got a City and Guilds et cetera, her and her friend, and they used to do it, you know, for a living.
SB: Different.
PS; Quite.
SB: Okay so I think that probably winds up your experiences very nicely then but thanks very much for that Peter.
PS: You’re welcome, very welcome.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Peter Steward
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sheila Bibb
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-14
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AStewardPD150814, PStewerdPD1501
Format
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00:25:30 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
Peter Steward was born in 1933 and speaks of not seeing his father during the war due to his father's service in the RAF. His uncles and cousins also served. After leaving school at fifteen, Peter worked at the Woolwich Arsenal factory and joined the RAF boys service. He trained as a telegraphist at RAF Compton Bassett and was posted to RAF Wildenwrath in Germany with 72 Signals Unit in 1951-53, working on the European Gee chain. He speaks of the welcome he received from the German people and his shock at seeing the aftermath of Allied bombardment. He remained in the Air Force for fourteen years, also serving in Cyprus before working in the newspaper industry. After retirement he formed an ex boy entrants union.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Germany--Wassenberg
Cyprus
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1951
1952
1953
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Carolyn Emery
Gee
ground personnel
H2S
military living conditions
Oboe
radar
RAF Compton Bassett
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1136/11677/PSparvellLW1501.1.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1136/11677/ASparvellLW150919.1.mp3
9007268a421127cbdc38f28ae8cbae00
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
Sparvell, Leonard William
L W Sparvell
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Leonard William (Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 153 and 166 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
2015-09-19
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.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Sparvell, LW
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SB: This is Sheila Bibb doing a re-interview with Len Sparvell on the 19th of September 2015 at his home in Bexley Heath and with his daughter Chris who may prompt at some, on some occasions. Len —
LS: Yes.
SB: Can you start off by just telling me a little bit about yourself and your family? Your childhood.
LS: Yes. Well. Yes. Hang on a minute. I’ll come to it in a second.
SB: Did you have brothers or sisters?
LS: I had one. One. I had one brother. Yes.
SB: Okay.
LS: And, and no sisters.
SB: Where, where you born?
LS: I was born in Bexley, Kent. And quite, quite nice. Not far away from where we are now really. But we, we knew quite a lot of people. Funny, I never thought I’d answer this.
SB: Where did you go to school?
LS: I went to school firstly at Bexley and then gradually run up, run up to one in Bexley Heath. And [pause]
SB: How old were you when you left school?
LS: Well, it would be right, right to the end really.
Chris: You were fourteen weren’t you dad?
LS: Yes.
Chris: Yeah. Fourteen.
LS: When you went. I think I started some sort of work at that time.
Chris: At the Co-op I think wasn’t it?
LS: At the Co-op. yes. It was. Yes.
SB: Okay. So you worked at the Co-op.
LS: Yeah.
SB: Did you enjoy doing that?
LS: Yes. It was quite, quite pleasant you know. And the people were alright. Yes.
SB: And when did you decide to join the Air Force?
LS: Air Force. That was, oh I haven’t looked over, looked at the time when I actually. The date I was there, I don’t. Is there anything there? Please.
Chris: It was in 1944.
LS: 1944 then. That would be correct anyway.
SB: So, we were well into the war at that point.
LS: Yes. Yes.
SB: Do you remember why you picked the Air Force as opposed to the other services?
LS: I think I did because I was, I already had thought for that and, and in no time at all I was doing things towards it. And of course, you know suddenly you feel you don’t know so much, you know [laughs]
Chris: I’m sure you know, dad.
LS: But it’s —
SB: Once you joined the Air Force.
LS: Yes.
SB: Can you tell me a little bit about your time there? Do you know where you were stationed?
LS: I was stationed in, the first place was at a [pause] oh crumbs. Just give me a minute will you? I’ll have to think. It’s got it there hasn’t it?
Chris: Blyton it says here.
LS: Blyton.
Chris: That’s where you trained. And then Hemswell.
LS: Hemswell.
Chris: And then, do you remember? You ended up in Kirmington didn’t you?
LS: Kirmington.
Chris: Yes.
LS: That’s right. Yes.
Chris: Okay.
LS: Kirmington.
SB: So —
LS: Funny all the [pause] not. You can’t manage to keep it all it seems to me. Right.
SB: Can you tell me anything about your time at Blyton, Hemswell or Kirmington? Any stories. Things that happened to you there.
LS: Yes. I, I when I went along to this, this is something. Quite often, when you had a chance not to be flying or anything else there was a young lady I used to meet on the telephone box. And, and we got together for quite a lot and went to see her mother who made a nice meal now and again. And have you got the name there?
Chris: I’m trying to remember it myself.
LS: Doreen wasn’t it?
Chris: No. It doesn’t matter. But, yeah. I know who you mean. I’ll think of it.
LS: Right.
Chris: My memory’s as bad as yours.
LS: I think, I think it’s Doreen. And you know now and again we went to further down the lane and had a night at some music hall. I think it was there but don’t’ t think much to it too much but there we are.
SB: Okay. When you were working.
LS: Yes. Yeah.
SB: Can you tell me a bit about the operations you flew?
LS: Yes. We were given the big one that we, we had there. We were told that, by the CO that we were going to have a very hot one. Yeah. And we were going to go very, very quiet. Right to the, almost on top of the water and we were making our way to the place that we were going to hit. We carried on. Started off, first of all in daylight and carried right down low over the sea and made our way to somewhere. And the name —
Chris: Stettin you’re talking about isn’t it? The long one. Stettin.
LS: Stettin. Yeah. Yeah. Stettin. And yeah and we, we went very close over the water until we got near to our target. Of course we’ve got to get up tight a bit when we get to a target. They can come to you very quickly. So anyway, we come out higher, higher, higher, higher, higher until we got to what we thought we were safe. We, we had a fairly good crew. And, and also we were [pause] I wish I was able to be a bit more. So anyway we got to the target and started going up and started dropping bombs occasionally. And we, we did what we were told to and eventually we, we were told to get out. You know. It was very slowly overcome, and we come to a big lot of water. Not the sea water but table water really. And we came over that and then we came near to [pause] trying to make our way out really which we suddenly came over, over water. And we were coming slowly over the water and all of a sudden we dropped our bombs. Boom. Right over the water. And that burst the water that was all ready out there for us to target on. And we, we then come lower over, overcome the water. And [unclear] had come off in to an idea of getting to our home. But that’s going to take a long time to get into our home because we’d already knocked out some water and the enemy was, lost the water. You know. All over. And, and I hope you can get some sense out of that but we came in from the sea. And we came, we had to climb a bit to get out of the way of the other side. And then turned again and then we made our way over the, towards the water. And when we got over there we dropped bombs which hit the target and the, we made a waterfall over the side which they weren’t very happy about. The other people. But we managed to think that we were going to go on over the water so we were quick, quick to go when our bombs had gone. Come down lower again. Turned in to, out the way to home and of course we’ve got to go a long time. We’d got a terrific long way to go and what, what was I, what does it say there?
Chris: You were in the air for nine hours and forty five minutes.
LS: Yeah. Well we were, we’d gone on our way to go over that, over low. Low. So then we didn’t come over. We had bombed the enemy. I think they lost about fifty or something. Fifty something.
Chris: Forty one planes missing it says here.
LS: Forty one planes missing.
Chris: Yeah.
LS: That was our planes. Our planes.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah.
LS: What about the others?
Chris: I don’t know but there was a big fire in Stettin.
LS: That’s right.
Chris: Lots of fires.
LS: Yes. And of course behind us in Stettin and there was quite quite a huge fire going on.
Chris: Yeah.
LS: And I’m certain now that later but there were, people had lost, lost more than us.
Chris: Yes. Yes.
LS: Does it give anything there?
Chris: I can’t see it here but you were, there was a lot of flak when you were flying as well, you said.
LS: That’s right.
Chris: But you were untouched. Your plane.
LS: Yeah. That’s right. And we kept getting our lower but you could see the enemy’s fire.
Chris: Yes.
LS: From about — does that give it —
Chris: Yeah. Smoke rising to twenty six thousand feet.
LS: Twenty six thousand feet. That’s right. I knew there was something like that.
Chris: Yeah.
LS: And then we started our way back. Of course you got, you were travelling all the time and, you know and we were going slowly over the water and towards our way. Which was a long time coming. And when you think the amount of, you’re going over on the water from, from that that place. We really [pause] You think, you think you might not get out. Might not get there in time you see. And apart from others of our thing I had to, to [pause] happy to keep trying to let, let the skipper know how far we were from, from our base. And whether, how we, how we hoped that we could get there in time. Which, which we did really. Quite, I think it gives to the time we got back home doesn’t it? There.
Chris: Well it says you were up in the air for nine hours and forty five minutes.
LS: Yes. That’s it.
Chris: Which is a long, long time.
SB: Yes.
LS: That, that gives you exactly how it was and, and it takes a bit of time to get that amount of range. And there we are.
SB: Can you remember how you felt during that trip?
LS: No. I was too busy to be like that [laughs] I was. I was too busy. I mean the skipper was there. I threw out the stuff that stops the enemy from seeing where we were a bit, you know. I forget what they called it now but it was thrown. No. I was too busy. Yes. I was really too busy. The a bomb aimer was sitting in his place in the front of me. And he put his legs behind mine. There. And of course the enemy was still trying. Still around at any rate. And there we are. We were gradually moving nearer to home. And it was about what? About fifty? Fifty was it? Does it, does it say the time?
Chris: No. It just says you were in the air for nine hours forty five.
LS: Yeah. About that. The one where we, what time we were getting to home?
Chris: It doesn’t say the time. No. It just says how long you were out.
LS: Oh well.
Chris: Yeah.
SB: Long enough.
Chris: Long enough. A long time.
LS: Yeah it was.
Chris: It must have seemed long.
LS: In a, in a very small time, you know. Thirty. About thirty times.
Chris: Oh how many?
LS: Thirty. About thirty times. Thirty.
Chris: Thirty sorties you did.
LS: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
LS: Thirty.
Chris: Thirty flights.
LS: I’m talking about the thirty times.
Chris: That you went out.
LS: To take on the last bit.
Chris: Oh right.
LS: Yeah.
SB: Yeah.
LS: That is. But of course we had losses as well. And —
SB: How did you feel about that?
LS: Well, when you are doing something like that you don’t think about it you see because [pause] not at the time anyway.
SB: Afterwards?
LS: Well, you say, ‘Poor Joe has gone for a burton.’ Or so and so and so and so and so and so and so but of course you did, if you lost a pal and the pal was in blazes like that you do get that. You’ve lost somebody, you know but there’s a chance of another one in time to go out there to do. So you just carried on. There was a small, a small meal when we got back. I forget what we had then but it’s some silly thing. Does it say that?
Chris: No [laughs]
LS: No. It doesn’t. Right. Well. We did. When we got there and they started seeing what we had done and what they thought we had done and all that sort of thing. But no, and then we did a lot you know. It wasn’t just one. It was one or two. I mean, we were in, you know, what the target, what it was. We [pause] wish I had a good head [laughs] [pause] Yeah. Well, we were just as likely to do another town like that another day. But we, out there but they weren’t as bad as that one which we said that they, at nine wasn’t it? Nine.
Chris: Nine hours.
LS: You don’t get those every day.
SB: So, can you tell me about some of the others that you flew?
LS: Yes. There’s, if I get up. You’ve got the names of the —
Chris: Le Havre you did. Quite —
LS: Yes.
Chris: Several attempts.
LS: That was a silly one that one.
Chris: Yeah. Okay
LS: Go on.
Chris: Falaise.
LS: Yeah.
Chris: Le [unclear]
LS: Yeah.
Chris: Rüsselsheim.
LS: Yes. Rüsselsheim.
Chris: Airfield in Holland Gilze Rijen.
LS: Gilze Rijen. Yeah.
Chris: Lots of attempts at Le Havre.
LS: I beg your pardon?
Chris: Lots of attempts at Le Havre.
LS: Yes. That’s not —
Chris: Four times.
LS: Yes.
Chris: Frankfurt on Main.
LS: Yes.
Chris: An aerodrome in Holland Steenwijk or something.
LS: Yeah.
Chris: Calais.
LS: Yes.
Chris: West Capel.
LS: Yes.
Chris: The sea wall. Saarbrücken
LS: Yes.
Chris: Marshalling yards. Emmerich which is a township. Stuttgart.
LS: Right. Well, you can see by that number, the number we were on and of course our numbers was, what was it? Twelve hundred. To us what we [pause] the 3020. Twenty. Twenty. That’s right isn’t it? Is that the —
Chris: You did your thirty flights.
LS: Thirty flights.
Chris: Yes.
LS: Yeah. That was —
Chris: What you did.
LS: What we did.
Chris: Yes.
LS: Yes. That’s right. I’m losing things actually.
SB: That’s alright.
LS: A bit. But the main factor is that lot that’s on there which shows you when your friends haven’t, or a lot of them never got that far anywhere.
SB: Yeah.
LS: We were the lucky ones really. Alright.
SB: Okay. Can you tell me a bit about some of your pals?
LS: Pals?
SB: Yeah. Some of your mates in the air force.
LS: Yes. Well they were all there. Even though we were rather [pause] when we were in a crew, like eight, eight men you know you sometimes think you’d keep to yourselves you know. You [pause] you know we went out together when you had time off. And there we are.
SB: Did you have many changes of crew?
LS: We had one because the chap fell out. Fell out the plane when we, when we landed and he fractured his leg. So we lost him. And then we got a Canadian for the last five ops. And he kept on talking Canadian all the time anyway. Making [laughs] making one hell of a row he was. But anyway he filled the last bit that the other one didn’t. And I think we never met, saw that chap again. You know. Funnily. After about the first week. And they, he was, he had a family of children in. I don’t think he really should have been in the game as we put it. And, but as I say that’s why we didn’t see him again after the first few days. And we were busy with another person, you know.
SB: Did you, sorry did you keep in touch with them after it was all over?
LS: Keep in touch with the —
SB: With any of them.
LS: Yes. To a, to a certain degree we did. After the war you’re talking about. Yeah. After the war. Yeah. I still talk to the, my pilot’s wife. What’s the time now? No, I can’t get her any more at the moment. But I can, and do, at 8 o’clock in the mornings quite often. I pressed my button. Well, at 8 o’clock and she says, ‘Is that you Len?’ [laughs] And she’s there. That’s now. That’s now. Now, that’s the pilot’s wife. But of course the pilot has been dead twelve years ago I think. Something. Quite a lot. And also the bomber chap. He was in the same similar thing. He was one who, who was in the same manner of the pilot. They were the same same type of people. The right. Did I give a name?
Chris: Both came from New Zealand didn’t they?
SB: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
LS: New Zealand. Right. That’s right. And as I say I speak to the New Zealand wife still. And we talk quite often. Quite often. Yeah.
Chris: You went to stay as well.
LS: From here. From here.
Chris: You went to stay once didn’t you? In New Zealand.
LS: I did it, twice I think it was.
Chris: Twice was it?
LS: Yeah. And that was a lovely place really.
SB: So, any other stories from your time in the RAF?
LS: It’s very old. Hard really. But [pause] funny really.
SB: Once the war —
LS: I flew with other squadrons on, sometimes. Sometimes. Not very often.
Chris: At Scampton wasn’t it?
LS: At Scampton. Yeah.
SB: When the war was over —
LS: Yeah.
SB: How long were you in the RAF then? Did you —
LS: Say it again will you?
SB: Once the war was over.
LS: Yes.
SB: How long did you stay in the RAF?
LS: No. I didn’t stay in the RAF.
SB: You left.
LS: After the war was over.
Chris: Where did you go, dad? Do you remember? India.
LS: I was just thinking. Oh, that part. Yes. I went. I’ve got a photograph. Yeah. Because what happened we, yeah we packed up with that part of it. And we [pause] oh crumbs. Yes, it should, I should have mentioned that as well. We, yeah we went out to [pause] India.
Chris: India.
LS: India.
Chris: Yeah.
LS: We went out to India. And yes and there [pause] crumbs. Yeah. Just give me second. I’m losing myself really.
SB: Yeah. I’ll just pause this for a minute.
[recording paused]
LS: And isn’t it funny?
Chris: Baroda or something.
LS: Eh?
Chris: Baroda.
LS: Baroda
Chris: Was that right? I don’t know.
LS: No. Arriving in Africa.
Chris: Oh you went to Africa first didn’t you?
LS: Yeah. Africa
SB: Now was this the same? Your squadron went out or —
LS: No. No. No. No.
SB: You changed now.
LS: We were more or less split by then, you know and [pause] Yeah. Now then. I think I can get, get the thing coming in. [pause] Yes. Yes. I went to [pause] yeah, I can tell you something in a minute. Yeah. Yes. I was posted to a place. You might, we’ll have a photograph of it. Should have.
Chris: I’m sure we’ve got one somewhere. Yeah.
LS: You’ve got photographs of this.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah
LS: It’s just come to me now.
Chris: Yeah. Okay.
LS: Then I went, I was really in charge. Well, the skipper on that base where I became said, ‘Well, you’re looking after all here,’ he said, ‘I’m not, not going to come very much to see you. You just carry on.’ And so, and, and there was one particular night when I, when I was made to believe while I was there was that there was, the Indians were shouting [pause] Oh crumbs. They were coming up the road where we were. And so I had to get my lot mounted up. And I said, ‘Now listen lads.’ I said, ‘Don’t. Don’t fire your,’ your — ‘They’re coming up the road. You are to, I will let you know what to do.’ And I was told to, and I told them that the Indians were saying, creep, dear me I’m making it worse now [pause] I was telling my chaps that they must keep, to keep up but not hurt —
Chris: Not hurt anybody.
LS: Yeah. Not to kill anybody at all you see. So, anyway they came up and started coming up the road and I said [unclear] ‘Stop. Stop. Stop.’ And they didn’t stop. So, when they didn’t stop I shot over their heads you see and got all our lot to shoot over their heads. Well, they didn’t like that so they, they all turned and ran back to this, their base. They got, got back to where they came from. In the end that rather seemed to change because they didn’t, they became quite, rather like friendly you know. And I’m just trying to think of the name of it. But at any rate they came, you know, they came back friendly and they wanted to, they said, could they have a fly you know. You know. Sort of thing. So I did. I managed to get them a flight. For them to go up. And I went up with them and they were alright and they came back in the car and that’s when I found that the people from there were really happy to have us really, from there. I have, I have pictures of them.
Chris: You have. Yes.
LS: You’ve got pictures in there.
Chris: I’ll have to see if I can find some in here dad.
LS: Yes. They’re around because I’ve seen them today.
SB: When were you in India?
LS: Yeah.
SB: Do you remember —
LS: Yeah.
SB: Which years?
LS: Hmmn?
SB: Can you remember which years you were there?
Chris: It was from June ’45.
LS: Yeah.
Chris: To September ’46.
LS: Now then.
Chris: That’s one in India isn’t it?
LS: Yeah.
Chris: And that one’s in India.
LS: Yeah.
Chris: That’s one with the skeleton.
LS: That was in, in the place where I was. You see. In there. And that was the same. That was our billet there. Oops. That’s, no that’s a different part. That’s going home I think. That one. I’m not certain about it anyway.
Chris: What about the one with the skeleton, dad?
LS: The skeleton.
Chris: Yeah.
LS: Was a naughty one, yes it’s. Have you got it there?
Chris: No. You’ve got it. I think you’ve got it.
LS: Yeah. You see, that’s, that’s when the one in, in our billet there. And I’ve got others. Somewhere upstairs. Various.
Chris: So all in all was India a good posting?
LS: Yeah, I think it, I think it was. There was. I used to go into the town. The local town all right. and they were okay with me sort of thing. Where the Maharaja of Baroda used to be. But he had an, he had a stack. If we went up there.
Chris: You got quite sick didn’t you at one point? You got sick at one point. You got that, that prickly heat.
LS: Oh septic prickly heat —
Chris: Yeah.
LS: . I had to go up to the [unclear] Hills.
Chris: Yeah.
LS: To get over that. But that can be nasty but there we are. I found that being in India and other parts where I went were — seemed to be very interesting. Very interesting. You know. I seemed to eventually get on with them. Most of them you know. And sometimes I used to take them to town with the lorry we’d got there sometimes. And things like that.
SB: Your role in India was very different to your role during the war.
LS: Oh yes. Different [laughs]
SB: How did you feel?
LS: The war was different wasn’t it? Oh yes. But, but I was interested in most of the things I saw out there. I could get some more photographs that we’ve got up there. Upstairs somewhere.
SB: Perhaps when we’ve finished the interview we can look at those. Yeah.
LS: Yes. That’s it. But yes. I think I enjoyed the certain things too. As a matter of fact gosh I’ll tell you another thing because I started getting more or less quite good money I suppose. And I used to send home to, to my mother you see. And told her that, you know, ‘This is for you,’ you know. Sort of thing. Well, of course it never was you see because when I got home, on our wedding day mum had got the money and gave me all of it to give for the [unclear] over the our wedding. Yes. That’s, she said, ‘There you are. I’ve saved all the money for you.’ I said, ‘What did you want to do that for?’ ‘I did it because, because you should have it.’ And that’s what she did. And there you are. And that was past the church and that. The one that we got at home.
Chris: It’s up there isn’t it? The wedding picture. Yeah.
LS: Yeah. Yeah. And so there we are. That’s mum for you isn’t it?
SB: So after India where did you go?
LS: Now then. India. You haven’t half got a glutton [unclear] for punishment, I’d say [laughs] Where did I go after India? Yeah. Now then. I liked that. I like India. [pause] Now, do you know I’m having a bit of a job with this one because —
SB: Well, can you remember when you left the RAF?
LS: Yes. You’ve got the date there.
Chris: I think it was. Discharge. Yeah. Service and release ’46. Was that when you came home from India? Yes. You came straight back home after India.
LS: That’s it. Yeah. And —
SB: So —
LS: I don’t know what I started doing then. Oh yes I do. I think. Oh crumbs. Who did I work for?
Chris: Stock Exchange.
LS: Stock Exchange [laughs] That’s right. It was the stock exchange and I couldn’t think of it you know.
Chris: For years and years.
LS: Yeah.
SB: Okay. So, so you had this two year period basically.
LS: Yeah.
SB: ’44 to ’46 in the RAF.
LS: Yeah. RAF.
SB: How has that influenced the rest of your life?
LS: What has — ?
SB: How has it influenced your life do you think?
LS: I think it did. I think it did quite a lot because every now and again I used to talk to somebody who was similarly properly in it but takes, takes a moment. You just saw you know. That was my main. What’s the, it’s a job now really.
SB: Is there anything about that time that you regret?
LS: Well, I don’t think I did anybody bad. Really. No. I tried to be kind to everybody and that sort of thing. In the long run.
SB: So a good experience.
LS: Hmmn?
SB: A good experience.
LS: It was. It was really because yes because it’s something I’d never do in any other way.
SB: So, any other stories you’d like to share about that time?
LS: Well. I went up, up the hills and that sort of thing and you know got on well with people and things like that.
SB: Good.
LS: Yes. I, I, it was always something to do. I mean [pause] I don’t regret anything. I don’t think I’ve done anything bad you know. Anything. Anything like that at all.
SB: Was there anything you would have liked to have done that you didn’t get to do while you were in there?
LS: Well, it wasn’t, it wasn’t [pause] wait a minute. I still had a reasonable life when I, afterwards as well.
SB: Good.
LS: Yes. And I still got to see certain people afterwards you know. Like the ones there.
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 Leonard William Sparvell. Two
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sheila Bibb
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-19
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ASparvellLW150919, PSparvellLW1501
Format
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00:52:54 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
Leonard Sparvell lived in Bexley Heath until he joined the RAF in 1944. He trained as a Flight Engineer and was posted to RAF Kirmington. He speaks of a long operation to Stettin in which he was in the air for nine hours and forty five minutes. He flew thirty operations and lists some of the destinations from his log book. After the war he kept in touch with his crew and at the time of his interview still spoke to his pilot's wife in Australia. Towards the end of the war he served in India and recalls his time there.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
India
England--Lincolnshire
Poland--Szczecin
Poland
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1946
aircrew
bombing
flight engineer
Lancaster
RAF Kirmington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1136/11675/PSparvellLW1501.1.jpg
57118e5708a9ad6fb18e381df71ddf48
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1136/11675/ASparvellLW150814.2.mp3
6117b0db37b60191c456f531f8a0f26d
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
Sparvell, Leonard William
L W Sparvell
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Leonard William (Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 153 and 166 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
2015-09-19
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.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Sparvell, LW
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SB: This is Sheila Bibb interviewing Leonard Sparvell on the 14th of August, 2015, at his home in Bexley Heath. Len could you start off by telling me a little bit about yourself, your family background, and how you came to get into Bomber Command?
LS: Yes. Because got a lot of the early things about it you know and we, we were well I was waiting for another, I wasn’t with the thing for a start, I was [coughs] waiting for, wait a minute, it’s very awkward this is actually ‘cos I’ve almost forgotten it.
SB: Tell you what let’s go back to when you were a child.
LS: Yes.
SB: Where were you born?
LS: I was born in Bexley, and that’s about all I remember about that thing, you know.
SB: Did you have any brothers or sisters?
LS: I had a brother who, who died during the war after going out to [pause] he was in a different part of it than I was you know but I used to talk to him over, over the phone sometimes and other things you know. I’m still talking to a lady quite often I just dial one thing over here and she comes on, ‘Is that you Len?’ this is after I’ve dialled 8 in the morning, she’ll say, ‘Hi Len.’ And we have a long chat then sometimes she tells me she’s you know just got up and not properly dressed, [laughs]
Chris: She’s the wife of one of his--
LS: It doesn’t matter, and she’s so far away in any case, and that is in now then —
Chris: New Zealand.
LS: New Zealand. New Zealand a place I really love after going there a really nice place and there we are. The pilot of my plane he, he just died early there as I say I still, still speak to his wife and our other partner who was, oh crumbs it will come to me, Graham, Graham, Graham, oh dear.
Chris: George? George Lockwell, George ?
LS: No.
Chris: He died last year.
LS: He did yes then he died but the other plane, partner. What’s the name.
SB: It doesn’t matter we can come back to that in a minute.
LS: I can’t, I can’t think of his name at the moment, here we are [looking through book], this would be him I think that’s Graham Bell.
Chris: That’s Graham yeah, well done.
LS: That’s Graham Bell, that’s Graham Bell, very nice chap, very nice chap, but he passed away himself, and as the other one did. Er, and it’s a job, it’s really a job to keep up, keep up with it really, I probably know more about the, the people who got up the mountains you know and which I did in some places you know. But and these, these were people who came to Africa with me in the latter part you know just here particular, and but yeah it was all new to us then, by then, and then futurely later later we went up in the mountains and doing things up there you know and before I got down to the place I told you I was going to you know.
SB: Okay so let’s go back to when you joined up can you remember what happened when you joined?
LS: Yes, I think it was, the first thing I did was go to a place in Plumstead I think it was, Plumstead and they all had bits of things to say about it you know before we did anything else, that, it’s I haven’t got all the knowledge I used to have. [laughs].
SB: How old were you then?
LS: Hey?
SB: How old were you then?
LS: Crumbs, I can’t exactly remember, but look at me. [laughs] But there we are. That was my oh yes he played the, oh, I could gradually get, get quite a, a department on this but —
SB: Where was the first place you were sent to?
LS: Now then [pause] I think, I think it was the first place was for really starting the great big thing was when I was there along there, what’s the name? [pause] This seems silly because I know so much but I don’t, I can’t do it just think a minute.
SB: Well tell us a little bit about some of things you got up to when you were there?
LS: Yeah. Now where are you talking about?
SB: Anything during the —
LS: You said about?
SB: Well anything, any stories from that time when you were in Bomber Command?
LS: Oh yeah, I can remember that yeah, we sent out the person that played the [pause], it’s not coming, it’s not coming, it’s here, one minute, this’ll, this’ll be it.
Chris: You know you were telling me earlier dad about that long flight that you did and how you felt.
LS: Oh yes, oh yes.
Chris: Do you want to talk about that?
LS: Yeah I’ll talk about the long flight we left early one morning and we were told to keep our mouths shut as um, as so we flying so low that we would keeping quiet because of that and we kept, we kept our engines slow right to the near the end of the, the thing when we come to the party of the attack which I, have you got the name of it?
Chris: We couldn’t remember could we which one it was earlier on but you were saying what it felt like when you were going really low and then what you did afterwards. Do you remember that?
LS: Right. Yes okay. We, we come, came, we were coming up to our target, we didn’t want to the enemy to know we really coming so we went very, very low until we got right on the edge of the thing then up we climbed and of course Jerry started doing us as well, I think we lost fifty-five aircraft doing, doing that. And we climbed and climbed and climbed ‘til we got to our target and bombed, we dropped our bombs on there and then turned far away then came back over, over the site and got back into the and started going back to the end to our home base, which was some, like a long way away. I think I told you how long it was.
Chris: Yeah nine hours you said, you were going backwards and forwards.
LS: Nine, nine hours we were floating all in the night and eventually we got did get back with about a quarter of an hour‘s petrol, and so it was a bit of a tough one really.
SB: How did you feel during that journey?
LS: I never had any feeling about at all, we were there to do a job and we did it, that’s the way I felt you know, it didn’t bother me at all, but there we are.
SB: Were you nervous at all?
LS: No, the same applies as what I’ve just said I wasn’t nervous I just did what I was told and the other people did what they were told when I told them as well. So we did have a bit of a weak link in the place at one time but he fell out the aircraft and cracked his wrist and we had to have a new one that was near the end of it you know.
SB: And you were the flight engineer?
LS: Yeah I was the flight engineer yeah.
SB: So what did that involve you doing?
LS: It involved me, interest in, giving notes out to people what, what they would be doing and all that sort of thing in the crew but the main thing about that is that you said, what, would you repeat yourself that one you said just a minute ago.
SB: What was your, what were you doing as flight engineer?
LS: Ah yeah, well I was quite off sending out the, what the thing we called well it was flight throwing out this white stuff that would put the enemies out of they, but it didn’t, and what I used to do the, the one who was laying still making them, he was lying flat on the front that was the bomb aimer, the bomb aimer then, and then he’d throw he was looking out all the time on it and he was waiting to knock the bomb out at the right place which eventually he did and he said, ‘Right.’ He was laying out with his legs like that and eventually his legs had gone past where the bomb had [laughs] nothing happened fortunately for him but there it is and fortunately for the rest of us. So then, then it come, the big thing is coming back, coming back as well you know and so he placed it out there and ‘cos Jerry was still very active, and as I said it was about five hundred and something bombs that they’d done us for as well don’t forget that, and then we started back till we closed keeping very level usually until we got to near, near to home and then as far as I can think and that’s when, that’s when we were feeling lucky really [laughs] But all the way there was something to do, and as I said I didn’t seem to feel anything wrong or anything I always seemed to be dealing with things and I was really right on top, that’s how I felt but I know the skipper was ‘cos he was, he was that type himself you know.
SB: How did you get on with the rest of the crew?
LS: Oh yeah, I did, I did, I did, right from the start really but you know that’s it. I was just trying to get a thing about the pilot, here, yeah. We were sent out. This is before we started doing any bombs, bombs at all, trying to get what he called. We, yeah, we, we sent out, let’s go so I can see this a bit. [looking at photos]
Chris: Where’s the pilot? This is the pilot here. Bill Capper.
LS: That’s the pilot that’s Bill Capper, but the other chap [pause] I’m having a bit of a job here, anyway, wait a minute, it’ll come. [pause] We sent our pilot over to the NAAFI people to get, [pause] this is awful this is because I know this thing, we sent him over to the WAAFS quarters to get, [pause] to get, oh yeah, Christ what did he get? [laughs] This is so stupid you know really because I’m trying so hard to get these things but I’m not getting them you see. Now then let’s see, where’s his name? Where was the one we sent? [looking at photos]. Who’s this one love I can’t see?
Chris: This one, that’s you.
LS: That’s me.
Chris: Yeah, that’s Graham.
LS: Yeah.
Chris: That’s George, Tom, Tom, and Bill.
LS: Bill?
Chris: Bill Capper.
LS: Bill Capper, yeah well that’s no good, Bill Capper.
Chris: Perhaps it was a different set of people.
LS: Now anyway well we sent the one who was, um, was it this one?
Chris: Well it might have been it doesn’t matter does it?
LS: No. We, we sent him over to get some [tapping] to get these things which we wanted, ah we were getting some trouble with our, our, our [unclear] and we were getting water coming through our things you know so we thought we’d get this girl over and tell her what we wanted but we, we um, we, we told her the trouble that we were having with this department throwing the all the spare stuff into our faces and that sort of thing and so we went over, he went over with the thing, the young lady in that department and he, oh crumbs, [pause] right he got over this and she decided to give, to give him eight things to stop that thing falling onto our eyes you know. And, and she said, ‘Here’s eight of them, seven for you and the crew.’ And he said, ‘Well what’s the other one?’ ‘Oh’ she said, ‘That’s yours only, that’s yours only’ [laughs] Something like that it was and he got landed with the, the, the [unclear] and, and that’s, that’s what happened to that one. Yeah. Some girls were on the job in that and as I say and we didn’t, we didn’t go we sent so [laughs] but there we are, so that’s it come very strangely there to me actually.
SB: So what was your favourite or best experience?
LS: Best experience, I suppose getting home [laughs] and having a meal. [laughs]
Chris: Breakfast.
LS: Yeah, you see all the eggs and bacon laid on the side of the counter but people never got back again, they never got back again, you know, ‘cos they would have got their eggs and bacon if they had got back again but there we are. But it’s things you think of after really which I always keep on thinking you know what’s happening there will be a lot, lot more when I get them probably find in that other book really because it showing some of the people going up the mountain and all that sort of thing, but there we are. There’s a few in there about Christmas Day I believe.
SB: What were some of the places you went to?
LS: Went to when?
SB: When you were flying.
LS: Flying?
SB: When you were in Bomber Command what were some of the places you went to you mentioned Africa.
LS: Yes.
SB: Where else did you go?
LS: Well there was a lot of these things I mean and over there you know, different people, and then I got back to the station which was ooh it’s a job now, the Maharajah of, oh don’t know his name now.
Chris: When you were in India? You’ve got some stories--
LS: Yes. Oh yes then one night, one night we were, there wasn’t many of us left at this particular station that we were on and what happened yeah, the Indians in front of us suddenly thought they ought to have a go at us so they started saying, now what did they say? What they said, they came up from the town and they said, [pause] I’ve got things in here saying all of this at times, but they came up from the town and they shouted, [pause] and they were making an attack on us and they were coming up the road and they were saying, ‘Quit India, quit India, quit India.’ And all that sort of thing you know, and so I said, ‘Right get your guns.’ I said, ‘I don’t want anybody killed.’ ‘Cos I was running this. ‘I don’t want anybody killed I want you to fire and fire right over their heads.’ And they did very well, I said, ‘There’ll be a charge if anybody does anything to them.’ So, so I said, ‘Right okay.’ So they’re coming up the road I left it to about a hundred, and I said, ‘Quick.’ And then they come charge you know and course they just run like hell after that you know, and that was one thing that I did that was useful [laughs], but there you are but I had to take a long time to find it didn’t I really. [laughs]
Chris: Do you remember why you were there dad why you were up that mountain, do you remember what got you up there?
LS: That wasn’t a mountain.
Chris: No at that station where you were stationed?
LS: That station I got posted to it and I rather liked the place because it the old Maharajah of Baroda was used to be there, but he wasn’t there when we were there, but you come to the water at the beginning of the town then you go along there and there’s the Maharajah standing in front of you and there again there it was and all that but eventually being out there at that part I got to know a lot of the Indian people, I did get to know a lot of the people, and we got on very well with them and like them. I managed to get them a part to go up in a plane you know and that sort of thing which they probably would never have before you know, and they were quite nice and weren’t up to what some of the other places where they were having trouble with foot diseases and things like that and try to do a bit of help in your spare time as well yeah.
Chris: You were ill yourself weren’t you when you went to India?
LS: Yes.
Chris: Septic prickly heat.
LS: Yeah that was it septic prickly heat I had yes yes that was nasty, that’s what you get when you start feeling and it comes all up over you you know, and then I went up to another town then I think.
Chris: To get better didn’t you because you were ill they sent you up into the mountains.
LS: Yeah, soon got over it and got back to there, yes.
SB: How long were you actually in Bomber Command?
LS: Oh Bomber Command [pause] I’ve got to try and think, can’t think.
SB: When did you enter Bomber Command?
LS: Yes, I don’t know, Bomber Command. [pause] I’ll tell you that by the time I was entering Bomber Command I think, I’m not telling you a great big lie and that, but I used to I was getting quite good money when I was getting on there quite good money really and I used to give my mother in the post so much money a month you know and told her to have a good time you know [laughs] that sort of thing and she used to thank me and this went on for some time, some time, almost till the time when I got home and married. Well on the day we got married, my, my wife and I went and sat out at the place we were going to go to, I’ve got photograph at home where we’ve got photographs of the family and that sort of thing, and we were waiting to go into the church I think and all the other things that were going on with, and mum came up with a load of money and she said, ‘Here I never spent all that money you gave me here you are I’ve saved it for you for your wedding.’ Now that’s just like a mum, isn’t it, it is just like a mum, so that was one nice thing I did then I think I always think that, was that all right?
SB: Yes.
LS: Good. I’m having a job with the bits and pieces because my eyes are bad for a start and that sort of thing and they’re watery and that all the time but I like to do all I possibly can and when you see that blokes there and myself you know after we’d done quite a lot of ops and things like that before we, you know before we went off to something else.
SB: Can you think of any other ops that you went on?
LS: Well what is the number that I did?
Chris: Thirty.
LS: Aye?
Chris: You did thirty sorties.
LS: I did bombing [laughs].
Chris: I remember you telling me about going round and round sometimes in the plane.
LS: I didn’t know, cor dear that’s a lot isn’t it, it is I mean lots of my friends one went out one night and they were shot down and they killed probably you know and oh it’s terrible that business, I was one of the lucky ones and so was my crew you know.
SB: Once the war was over what did you do?
LS: I’m just trying to think now what I did, um, oh dear—
Chris: Well later you worked for the Stock Exchange.
LS: Stock Exchange that’s it that’s right.
Chris: Up in London.
LS: Yeah I went on I couldn’t even think of that now you see.
Chris: It’s a long time since you spoke about it.
LS: Went there and crumbs, sometimes I used to carry some thousand pounds in a bottle, a, sorry, an old bag so nobody would know it was full of money I’d got [laughs] and give it to a chap who was going to have to go to some statement for the money you know, and ‘Money’ he’d say. Sometimes I used to go with somebody else, sometimes I went on my own but not often I went on my own because it was a bit dicey really there we are [laughs] yeah that was further up the place where I went I remember that yeah.
SB: Do you think your experience in the war affected your life afterwards?
LS: Expect it did, well I think it did I think it must do, it didn’t do it in a nasty way but it did it in the fact that I was thinking about it quite often all the time and I always kept, tried to keep the thing in perspective well ‘cos I didn’t have any other crew did I really by then sort of thing they’re all gone away, but you’re a long fit lot really.
SB: You have lots of pictures, lots of photos, did you have those all the time or is that something that’s come more recently?
LS: Oh no we’ve had them quite a while haven’t we really, I mean all four, this is the latest one you see we put that up a few days ago, your, I didn’t put them up I’m too awkward [laughs].
Chris: That was a birthday present from your friend wasn’t it?
LS: That’s right yes, that’s right, of course it’s one of the Lancasters, the other with two, they’re all local places, they’re all local sort of things, yes it’s nice to have these things now I will say that you know, sitting up there and the boys that’s come along they like to be with them.
Chris: Yeah the grandkids.
LS: Yes.
SB: Can I ask you a question Chris?
Chris: Yes.
SB: How much or in what ways did your father’s involvement impact your childhood do you think?
Chris: Always used to be able to talk about it not in great depth more so as he’s got older, as a younger woman I wasn’t too keen but as I’ve got older I understood more what it meant and I think the camaraderie he shared with his team and the fact that he still kept in contact with them every year you’d go back to the reunions these men are all the same as the old pictures, yeah the loyalty, the commitment all those kind of things I think he gave me as well. I’m an extremely loyal person, hardworking, he was I think he got a lot of that from his days in the war, duty, the huge sense of duty I think and responsibility I think I grew up with that definitely, which I think are good things to have, yeah good things to have. And you know he’s told me over the years many, many stories I wish I could remember them all as well ‘cos I’m starting to forget [laughs] I knew that story that you were telling me about the WAAFS but I couldn’t remember either what it was they were going to get which is pretty infuriating. But yes I think it has and as I’ve got older I’ve learnt to empathise more and appreciate more what you went through where as a young woman I think I was more I’m a pacifist so it’s quite difficult for me, but I can understand what it was all about and what it meant for him and how important it was so yes it has affected me quite a lot, I think it has affected my siblings as well, I’ve got two sisters and a brother. We all you know, I’m the youngest, we all grew up with the stories, wonderful stories about what happened in India you know, and monkeys, monkeys do you remember the monkeys story?
LS: Yeah, which one?
Chris: Monkey story you told us about all the monkeys there were all the creatures —
LS: Oh yeah.
Chris: Yeah, all the pictures, yeah, I think it —
LS: They used to fight as well.
Chris: Lots and lots of stories, you know now as the memory is getting a bit thinner it’s more difficult to —
LS: Yes in the albums you’ve got the pictures in that local one, can you just turn it over.
Chris: This one? Oh sorry.
LS: No, no, they’ll be in there I think.
Chris: They’re the family ones in there. They’re the family ones in there.
LS: Isn’t there one underneath?
Chris: I don’t think so, is it this one?
LS: Yeah is that the one.
Chris: I think this is the one you’re talking about.
LS: Oh yeah that’s it yeah.
Chris: There’s lots of little pictures aren’t there as well floating around, that’s my mum. Going back every year you used to go to Kirmington didn’t you for reunions and now there’s only my dad left of the crew the rest have gone now, that’s really sad.
LS: Yeah I’m the only one of our crew.
Chris: And I think that’s had a huge effect on you hasn’t it, last year you realised that.
LS: Yes. I did.
Chris: Last year when you realised that. [looking through photos] They’re more recent ones. You went to New Zealand for a reunion as well, so you really did keep in contact.
LS: That’s one of our own, there is we went, I took our pilot up to the erm, London.
Chris: Hendon wasn’t it?
LS: Aye?
Chris: Hendon
LS: Hendon that’s right, see I can’t even remember that.
Chris: That’s alright, I only know it ‘cos it’s written down there —
LS: And there was we came to this one of our —
Chris: Lancasters.
LS: Lancers and they wouldn’t let us go in it you see although we’d sent a notice to them and I said ‘We sent a letter.’ He said, ‘Can’t help it, can’t help it you see.’ So we spent about two hours walking around this thing like that, because we wouldn’t be allowed into it and anyway in the end he said, he came over and he said, ‘Right I’ve got it.’ He said, he said, ‘You can go in’ he said, ‘And I’ll take photographs of it.’ [laughs] And he said ‘I’ll come right away.’ He said, ‘ Right, okay then’, he said ‘I’ll take your clothing.’ And all that sort of thing and so then he said, ‘Right you can go up through there now.’ Which we did, here we go going up, up there —
Chris: There was a picture I don’t know where it is?
LS: Aye?
Chris: There we are there we go.
LS: And then oh that’s the Auckland one.
Chris: That’s the Auckland one.
LS: There is —
Chris: There is a picture of you in the aircraft.
LS: It’s like this one, and we both went in and we climbed up through the back just about managed to get in and it was so cramped up there, but we did we got up the top you see, and I looked out and the pilot looked over the side he took photographs then of us all up there didn’t he and the other one you know and he, he was quite all right but he took a nice donation to make it so. [laughs]
Chris: Got there in the end.
LS: Yes that’s it there we are yeah. Oh this was taken down the right out of this place down what’s the station here?
Chris: Says Plymouth.
LS: Plymouth that’s right, down at Plymouth they they put that up and you know didn’t have anything to do with that I just had the photograph and put it in there that’s all, but it’s still there.
Chris: That’s always been very important lots of books, lots of memories, lots of pictures.
LS: There’ll be more, there’ll be more, if I can get down to it I will get down to it but there we are, oh, look, ‘cos they are all my crew, that was my crew, no it’s not, anyway they were nice my crew, there was the odd one but still never mind.
SB: You mentioned your brother who was killed.
LS: Yes he was.
SB: What happened with him?
LS: Yes. Hmm?
SB: What happened with him?
LS: He was, now then, he used to, he got ill, in, in the head you know, they were they said that they out in there with you know they’d been talking looking the wrong ways and that there —
Chris: [unclear] the tests.
LS: Yes, yes and I continued to talk to him every day, every so often saw him and until he really passed away and that was about it you know.
Chris: He got cancer.
LS: Yes and he’s got had two brothers is it we got?
Chris: No there’s three, three sons.
LS: Three brothers.
Chris: They’re all in Australia.
LS: Yeah, that’s it.
Chris: They came over sometimes and we met them a couple of times.
LS: Of course I had to split all the money up and send it out, out to them most of it.
Chris: When your mum and dad died wasn’t it.
LS: Mmm, yeah, when my mum died. And there we are, all these things have to be done, so there we are.
SB: Very sad.
Chris: It’s very sad.
LS: And that’s they’re laying out in the fields and all that sort of thing, yeah had it rough.
SB: Okay well thank you —
LS: I’m the lucky one.
SB: You’re the lucky one, yes.
Chris: You’re a survivor aren’t you?
LS: Yes.
SB: Well thanks very much Len for sharing those—
LS: Well I hope there’ll be more, I’m certain there will because I’m not with it like I used to be.
SB: If you think of some more write them down.
LS: Yeah.
Chris: Would that be helpful? Because he probably will.
SB: I can come back.
LS: Yes, yes.
SB: I can do another interview as well.
LS: Yes. And where do you live now?
SB: I live up in Gainsborough but I come down regularly.
LS: Do you, where it’s not long from where I —
SB: Okay the third voice on here is Len’s daughter Chris.
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 Leonard William Sparvell. One
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sheila Bibb
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-14
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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ASparvellLW150814, PSparvellLW1501
Format
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00:54:26 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Born in Bexley, Leonard Sparvell volunteered for the Air Force. He completed 30 operations in Lancasters as a flight engineer with pilot Bill Capper. He recalls a nine hour bombing operation and what his role as a Flight Engineer involved. He jokes that his best war experience was getting back to base and enjoying post-operation eggs and bacon. He also served in India and recalls an incident when he safely dispersed an attack on their station by local people who were shouting 'Quit India'. He attended post war reunions at RAF Kirmington and also describes a recent visit to see a Lancaster when staff were eventually persuaded to let him climb into the aircraft which he describes as being cramped. After the war he married and worked in London Stock Exchange.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
India
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
1946
Contributor
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Carolyn Emery
aircrew
flight engineer
RAF Kirmington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1037/11409/AMorrisM150720.2.mp3
042adcb94e32f04a3e4e4706c07f4b52
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Morris, Malcolm Francis
M F Morris
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Malcom Morris (b. 1940, 1931621 Royal Air Force). He served as ground personnel post war as an armourer at RAF Waterbeach and then in Aden.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-07-20
Rights
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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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Morris, M
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SB: This is Sheila Bibb interviewing Malcolm Morris at Cliffe in Kent on the 20th of July, I think it’s the 20th and I’m going to ask a few basic questions and then we will get into a little bit more detail. So, Mal, can you just start off by telling me a little bit about yourself, where you were born, your family, anything like that.
MM: I was born, as I say, in Herefordshire, in a place called Lower Bearwood near the village of Pembridge. My, I was a single child and an actual fact, I was rather late one cause my mother was forty when I was born and I was an only child at the beginning of the war 26th of July 1940. We were basically in a farming area although my father worked for the Herefordshire County Council driving rollers, road rollers, he was actually, he was called up during the first world war and went to the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry but never went to the trenches which is probably why I’m here basically and in the Second World War of course he was too old for start and also it was a reserved occupation mending the roads. He could’ve had a farm, his father’s farm but he didn’t want it so that went from, it was not a big place, just a small [unclear] so that went away from us as such. I attended school at the local church school followed by the secondary school cause I failed the eleven plus miserably so basically as I say, I was secondary school failed. The sergeant prompted me to apply to join up, and I found I could apply as a boy entrant at fifteen just as I left school, which I did, I went to RAF Cosford for the inauguration to see if I was fit, if you might say, which was quite an easy day as far as I was concerned, I was surprised I passed it, basically it was put square rolls in round pegs and things like that and I was told, yes you can join up and go down where you want, go down to St Athans in a month or so’s time, which is what happened. I spent eighteen months at St Athans being trained as an armament mechanic then, up to senior aircraftsman standard, which I passed out as but being still young I stayed as a boy entrant so for my first couple of years in the real Royal Air Force mostly at Waterbeach I was a boy entrant until I managed, to get all my [unclear] was coming through when I was seventeen and a half so then I got luckily, fairly lucky, I got on a fitter’s course fairly quickly and also what they call a conversion course cause first off they trained us as armourers fitters guns just that side of it but then they wanted it, when they lost the other trades, things like turrets and one or two other small arms parts of the armament, it did all come into one and I did a conversion course to become a junior technician and then they posted me out to that lovely place called Aden and I thought I would be going to Khormaksar working on everything under the sun when I got there they said, get on that coach, you’re going to Steamer Point, where is that? It’s down in the harbour but it was a much better place than Khormaksar and easy, it was an MU and I actually worked on a large bomb dump, I’m talking both air force, navy and army material which mostly we were looking after destroying at times. Basic throwing everything we didn’t want in the sea because at the same time at Khormaksar 8th Squadron converted from Vampires with 20mm guns to Hunters with 30mm guns and we had lots and lots of ammunition and I’m talking thousands of rounds. I threw, threw most of it into the sea and then they found out I’d thrown one lot I shouldn’t have thrown away [laughs]. But it was one of those things that happen. I did two years in Aden getting the general service medal for Arabian Peninsula although basically I hardly had a shot fired [unclear] or twice but not much. I returned to England and went to eventually RAF Northorpe at Coastal Command headquarters just looking after the small arms weapons, there was about fifty of them we were told there was two of us to do it, it was basically boring and I couldn’t get on, I couldn’t pass me corporal tech at the time so the flight sergeant said to me, how would you fancy a post in some [unclear] flight sergeant down there another junior tech who wanted to come to Northwood so we exchanged posts and I went to St Mawgan and I ended up on 206 Squadron for the best part of six years. Funny thing was that when I got to St Mawgan I met another lad in the armament trade and his [unclear] was up in Dartford in Kent so and I had a car, so he cottoned on to me and I used to drive him off to Kent where I met his sister. She is now my wife and has been for fifty odd years. Unbelievable really because I from London to St Mawgan and then suddenly going to court a girl up in Dartford in Kent, it was unbelievable, anyway that happened. We went up to Kent last eventually when the squadrons moved up to Kinloss to chase the Russian submarines round the North Sea, it was a bit closer than St Mawgan. Basically I loved it on 206 when they said to me one day the squadron leader engineer said, Corporal Morris, we are going to send you on a torpedo course. I said, I don’t want to go on a torpedo course, I’m happy in the squadron, I want to stay here. Oh, he said, you got to go, it’s a good idea for your career. I never really believed it, anyway I went. I got to RAF Newton on a pre-course, electrical course, and met the other half dozen armourers there and they said, oh, you are Corporal Morris, are you? Yeah, why? He said, well, you are going to Changi with us. Hello, nobody told me that! So I decided I’d pass the course, which I did and eventually got posted to Changi as it happened, my wife obviously came with me etcetera and by the time she was pregnant with our first eldest son which she produced in RAF Changi hospital and eventually the second one before we left the tour as was well at RAF Changi hospital, so both of our sons were born at RAF Changi. I served in the torpedo section which was basically air-conditioned and very, very nice and clean and after we’d been there about six months the group that I was with [unclear] at that time we just about looked at every torpedo and cleaned them up and repainted them so everything was alright after that, nothing hardly to do really and I got posted back to England and the funny thing then was when my post had come through it said 26 Squadron and I looked at the other blokes, by which time I was a sergeant by the way, I looked at the other blokes and said, 26 Squadron? That’s a Squadron in Germany, you don’t go from Singapore to Germany. They said, read the rest of the title, brackets, Royal Air Force regiment. Damn it, I don’t want to go to the regiment, anyway I’ve got no choice, come back and got posted to RAF Bicester with 26 Squadron on the regiment as a sergeant armourer on Bolfords guns, the latest version of what of course they had in the war the early versions, ours were, they could be electronically controlled but we didn’t have the radar to do it. If they wanted the radar, they had to borrow it, basically ask the army if they could use theirs [laughs]. Anyway that lasted for about a year when the regiment squadron was posted to Gutersloh and as it happened I didn’t realise that but I was still immune to be posted overseas unless I asked nicely. So the adjutant called myself as a sergeant armourer and a corporal radio lad on a Friday afternoon and he said, we think you are doing well because up till then I’d been the back end of the air force as far as it goes. We’d like you so much, would you like to come to Germany with us? You can go and ask your wives you’re both married, go and ask your wives whether they want to go to Germany and I looked at this corporal and he looked at me and we looked back at the adjutant and together we said, no thank you sir. So we got posted out and I got posted to Honington when I’d become part of what was by that time Strike Command on the Buccaneers early, the early squadron, 12 squadron Buccaneers, mostly the Mark IIs. I served in most of the sections and squadrons, on that squadron at Honington, I didn’t go on a nuclear weapons site although I loaded the nuclear weapons etcetera onto the Buccaneers because we were in those days fighting the Cold War etcetera, which was quite a good thing in the end but I found, by this time I managed to get up to chief technician which was the maximum rank I got and I was put in charge of the carrier bay but ended up doing just about everything else, loading Martels, specialist Martel man, the ejection seats of course, nuclear weapons, standard bombs. If the squadron couldn’t do it which at the time they were still in the bases of [unclear] and I ended up doing it with my lads which annoyed me cause my workers backing up on the section. So anyway that happened and I went on and from there the next posting came through and again a funny one, 112 Squadron in Cyprus, what’s that? Luckily one of my junior techs had been posted out to 112 so I did know that it was Mark II Bloodhounds, surface to air missiles. So I already had a contact on the squadron which was Andy so myself and my family went out in June ’74 and if you know the history of there, the Turks walked in in July and basically buggered up everything. We were not allowed to fight them, I think it was Callaghan was the foreign secretary then and he wouldn’t allow us to fight them. Mind you we hadn’t got a lot to fight with, I think we had a regiment squadron in Akrotiri, the royal Scots up at Episkopi where I was actually based and a couple of tank companies over at the other side, the eastern SBA as it was called, we were the western, which is the Sovereign Base Area, but our radar told me, by the radar lads of course that they could watch the Turkish F100s lifting off Turkey and lock onto them and could shoot them down quite happily except they weren’t allowed to. And luckily they didn’t come and bomb us although they went over the SBA a couple of times but they didn’t drop anything and the silly thing of the air force people [unclear] they put 56 Squadron Lightnings up with the F100s to escort them across, our missiles didn’t know the difference so we couldn’t fire anyway so we were immune from, we didn’t fire at all. Things quietened down, unfortunately the families were sent home because of the problems, had to be sent back to England which didn’t help very much cause my wife by that time had three children, we had three children, two boys and a girl, which is all we we got now and she eventually ended up at the place where they make air publications and I can’t think of name off the top of me head and she was there for about six months and then the powers at bay said to 112 Squadron, so good we gotta keep you on, so your family has gotta come back whereas some went home and I was considered an essential personnel by that time [laughs] but unfortunately although I was a chief tech to get a married quarter, which you couldn’t live out by that time, you had to live on married, on the site or on the camp, they said, oh no, we are going to change the system, the people who has got the least time to do are getting the married quarters first, so basically an SAC had no points with just a wife could get a married quarter was with three children and they were still in England, took about six months, not a happy time. Eventually she came back and we got a married quarter of course in Episkopi which went on alright, was gonna be nice, the Turks had quietened down, they had got the bit in the north in Cyprus that they wanted and then someone else come along and said, oh, we’ve decided to disband the squadrons in Cyprus, that was 112, 56 and the, I think it was two Falcon squadrons they put on at Akrotiri at that time. Thank you very much, when are we going home? As it happened obviously a senior NCO in the sergeant’s mess, I was a partner of the warrant officer who posted armourers around the Mediterranean, Gibraltar, Malta, I think [unclear] had finished by that time and of course Cyprus so he said to me, he said, hey Mal, you’re a chief tech with a qualification for torpedo, I said, yes, he said, how do you fancy going to Malta to finish your tour? And I said yes please and as it happened he was going there as well as the engineering warrant officer [laughs] so we went over to Malta with the family of course which was, I thought was quite nice but my wife wasn’t very keen on Malta, I don’t really know why, we lived out in Malta so she got on alright with the local people. As it happened the lady above her was Maltese although married to an RAF serviceman of course. So she got on quite well but she didn’t like it very much. And of course that time which is ’77-’78 Malta was closing down because of the president his name [unclear] he was checking us out basically because the Libyans were giving him all the money. So we started to pack up and my wife said let’s gonna go home so basically I sent her home. She went home and she went home to her mother at the time but I was now sort of [unclear] to requirements so they just said, well, we don’t want you here anymore you might as well go as well, so it only lasted about a month and I got back home and I was then posted to Marham again the specialist qualification came up, the Martel section. I didn’t like it. Anyway we got a quarter at Marham, settled down there basically with the children [unclear] school etcetera and because I was coming towards the end of my twenty two year contract time by that time I had put in for the last postance, it was overseas Cottesmore, oh, and Wittering but I got Marham so I wasn’t too bothered, alright, anyway went to the officer in the charge, but didn’t get on with very well, but that’s another story, I said, oh, we are going to post you to Coltishall, where do you want to go? I said, I don’t want to go now, oh, he said, you got no choice, you gotta go, it’s your last tour post and you’ve only got a year eighteen months to do. So, I went over to Coltishall which turned out to be quite well actually, by this time of course the family was still in Marham, I was at Coltishall but I got a quarter at Coltishall fairly quickly because the problems with Cyprus and being on a [unclear] I got more points than normal so I was quite high on the points list by that time, so of course my wife come over to with the children to Coltishall so we lasted the last twelve months, eighteen months, I was basically 6 Squadron chief tech in charge of the bomb dump being the Jaguars they were back up for Germany if the balloon went up, if the Cold War become hotted up we were supposed to go over the Jaguars and land on the motorway [unclear] but we never did and basically was exercises to go over to Germany or Netherlands or wherever they decided to go. I think I was out on the forth [unclear] Hercules with about a half a dozen blokes and fourteen cluster bomb out on the bomb dump to look after, so that happened once or twice, which was, my daughter was about eight by that time, the trouble was they used to put the siren out when the exercise started and daddy disappeared to camp on work or come back with this gun, his [unclear] disruptive combat so [unclear] all the rest of it and she was in tears basically and eventually a day or two later once we’ve loaded the Hercules etcetera away I flew for a fortnight or so or used to be ten days on exercise, so my daughter hates this siren and I’ve got one on the car and I’ll bring it up now and again and forty years old she still hates the siren. So basically I was at Coltishall coming up to the end of my time, I applied to sign onto 55 but by that time the Air Force was starting to shrink and they didn’t want chief, high chief techs they wanted Indians so they didn’t allow me to sign on, they did offer me forty seven but I always thought, seven years and I give the government two thousand pounds a year cause I get a pension that way and I know I said I went out instead. What didn’t help and I don’t want it necessarily said was actually the [unclear] group captain on one because he did something wrong in admin put all I didn’t get nothing out of it some poor corporal in the general office that I didn’t even know got a reprimand for giving the wrong information so I left the Air Force out of a bit of a cloud, it was the time I went and the other thing that decided the two us myself and wife the school, local school send [unclear] things in how many places your children [unclear] six months well we used those up and turned the page over and put another half dozen on the back because we are going in and out of Cyprus etcetera, so basically I left the Air Force in 1980 with myself, my wife and the three children and I got the job as a refrigeration engineer. I couldn’t spell it when I left the Air Force, a month later I was one for a firm called Hobart engineering in the Ipswich area and basically I was the Kent engineer for Hobart’s [unclear] travelled for twelve years till they made me redundant. So I was quite happy [unclear] and that’s about my lifetime.
SB: Ok, so that’s given me some food for thought.
MM: It did [laughs]
SB: [laughs] So I think if we go back now to when you first joined up and you are fifteen so that’s 1955, war has been over for ten years but we’ve still got an awful lot of things going on how did that influence your decision, do you think?
SB: Not at all. I would say not at all because as I said earlier I did want to join the air force but didn’t think I would be qualified to any extent and when I was offered the boy entrant I just jumped at it, to be quite honest. Again, the headmaster of the school who, hang on, he did cane me now and again, gave me quite a good recommendation although I was considered the best athlete at the time and I’ve gone downhill since then but I was considered the best athlete at the time in the school. So I had quite a good recommendation from the headmaster which must have influenced a little but I was right at the back end of the boy entrant entry, I think with my entry I was within about the last twenty numbers.
SB: Ok, so, the war itself didn’t seem to influence you. How did you feel about the possibility of maybe getting into another war and having to?
MM: Never really gave it a thought and it was the case or you buy it, obey the orders anyway and get on with it, which is what happened with the odd places I was, with the small wars like Aden, Cyprus, I never really got influenced in Northern Ireland, I nearly did because 26 Squadron the regiment were going to be sent to Northern Ireland but this is when they went to Gutersloh instead so, phew, I didn’t get to Northern Ireland because it was still active in those days and of course the Buccaneers were back up for lots of places which could have had wars, we used to go to Norway and even took them to Singapore for a month. After, that was after the Air Forces had left of course so the Buccaneers would have been in the war if it was going to be but we never really thought about it, to be quite honest. If it happens, it happens.
SB: Let’s talk a little bit about the planes that you done, mentioned Buccaneers, you also mentioned Shackletons. Can you tell me a little bit about what you liked, didn’t like about the varying planes?
MM: Well, if you know the Shackleton, which is my longest Squadron really, I was actually on the squadron, I was actually working on the Mark IIIs, which is the one with the tricycle undercarriage as opposed to the tail draggers, the two’s and the one’s, the two’s and the one’s were still bombing up wise, were still operating as the Lancasters did in the war with the winch, that you literally had to winch up the bombs which was hard work but the Mark III they had based that similar to the Vulcan where we had hydraulic jacks to lift the large frame which had the torpedoes on them so basically the Mark III Shackleton was, as far as I was concerned, was excellent. Ah, we did a thing called the search and rescue standby for a week, we had a Shackleton on one hour standby to take off for a search and rescue anywhere over the Atlantic or wherever basically required and if the first Shackleton went, the squadron had another Shackleton virtually ready at the same time but not quite ready, they had to call people in, especially at Kinloss because I was by that time I suppose the senior corporal, because there was only a corporal armourer and a sergeant armourer went off from St Mawgan to Kinloss, so I was considered the senior corporal for that sort of thing and for an S&R, search and rescue load of, what we had on them? We had the SAR staff sonobuoys and flares but they were all on the beams, there were only four beams that we put on and but they were all already on the trolleys set up on the beams so it only had to be pulled out to the aircraft, fix up the hydraulic jacks two of them, do one at a time and up they went. In fact I could actually, actually I haven’t and I have done, I could load the Shackleton for that in twenty minutes flat as long as I had a couple of blokes to obey and they knew what they were doing, if it was armourer’s great but otherwise it could be anyone else that actually knew because we helped each other on the Shackleton’s. So many a time at Kinloss I’ve be in bed and a quarter across the road from the main gate but there’d be a knock on the door and I’d stick me head out of the window it’s marvellous SAR’s been called out, we need the next load, oh damn, out of bed, get dressed, on me bike, cross I went, loaded the Shackleton up because there was other ground crew there to look after the Shackleton as such, they just needed a specialist armourer there, in about within two hours I was back on bed [laughs] and often the second one didn’t take off so cause I had to get up again [laughs]. That was the Shackletons of course they went round the world, I luckily got a trip to Singapore with them although that was into the Borneo confrontation and of course we never saw anything really of that, we were just looking for the gun runners basically on the South China Sea. As I said, on the Shackleton, if they went on a training trip to fire the guns, they’d take up one of the armourers missile from one of the others whatever to clear the stockages that invariably happened [laughs] and they gave us a go, so that’s how I come to fire guns out of a Shackleton which was a bit unusual for a ground training, I did hit me target, mind you it was the South China Sea at the time [laughs], my sergeant it seemed when he went up, he actually hit the smokefloat that they dropped down, canister about like two [unclear] so he actually had that they say, well none of the aircrew never got near they just got the South China Sea like me, which was I suppose handy because I’d been, it was Changi that we went on a detachment and of course later I was posted to Changi as a torpedo specialist so I knew the area but nothing great about it. Mostly then I also had Buccaneers later which were of course the nuclear Buccaneer, they carried two nuclear weapons, six hundred pound 177, nuclear weapon, the English-made version by the way, because I did actually put nuclear weapons on Shackletons which a lot people don’t realise they did, but we had to borrow them off the Yanks, the Yanks had a bomb, a special weapons bomb dump at St Mawgan and Machrihanish for this but we just had to ask them, we’d like to put two on our aircraft in a month’s time. So, sign here, a sort of thing. Which was one of the funny things there, I happened to be on tour six that we were doing the test in the early days, this must have been about 64, 63, 64, we were designated to do the test with the Yanks to see that ours went up and whatever, very little we did, it was just the case of doing the checks on the switches and things, I did the switches and the chief read the book, and I turned one switch the wrong way and the Yank said, stop, stop, that’s it, start again, so half an hour back again, I’m starting the book again and then one day we’ve been putting these on and off for a month or two, not too regular, they’d all come out painted I can’t remember now maybe blue or green and then one come out a different colour, one colour or another so we got them on the aircraft flew away for an hour or so, just to do whatever they had to do, and while we were there the Yank obviously stayed with us in the crew room, who was looking after the weapon, we said, hey, why is that a different colour? He said, man, that’s the real one! [laughs] Oh, and we got taken off [laughs], we’ll do this gently [laughs] took it off and waved goodbye to it. And until I went on the Buccaneers I never saw another live one, I did see live ones on the Buccaneer, but not often and actual fact the Buccaneers as to my knowledge, in the squadron anyway, they didn’t take off with a weapon on board, they may have channelled down the runway a little bit but they just come back and we took them off. They must well have been flown sometime because the navy had them as well on their Buccaneers but as far as I know we never flew one off on Honington in the time I was there it had actually flew off or if it did it was only a training weapon, but by the time I put mine on and gone back for a cup of tea I didn’t care where the aircraft went, I just had to wait till it come back again. So that was the Buccaneers mostly. It’s interesting time on the Buccaneers cause I became a specialist, took the course on the Martel guided weapon, was a TV guided or a radar guided Martel, two versions, which is why I ended up at Marham on the Martel section and I also got a Martin Baker course for a week on the ejection seats, they were just starting to fit rocket seats, the Harrier which needed a big rocket seat cause that could be going down when it’s crashed, as opposed to be flying along, so they had to have a good boost up to get into the air at what they called 0 0 feet, they could actually pull, no that they wanted to but they could pull the ejection seat handle and when they were sitting on the ground doing nothing and they’d still come down [unclear] I don’t think they ever tested it as such and I went to Martin Baker it was really nice, couple of pints at dinnertime and a meal and all sorts and for a week was really nice, we actually met in passing the man called Benny Lynch who in the back, just after the war, back end of the war, he was one of the first ones that ejected out of a Meteor in test and done more ejections than anyone else. I think by that time he had broken just about every body in, bone in his body and basically he was, basically just about at it but he was still kept on by as an idol of Martin Baker. That was the Buccaneers so and the only other aircraft I didn’t work on a lot but just out bomb up now and again was the Jaguar, as I said, I was mostly in charge of their bomb dump so if they went on detachment I was in charge of all the bombs and got them set up and put on the carrier or whatever required and the armourers on the squadron actually did the loading as such although they used to call me in now and again if they had a problem, mostly it was a problem I had caused or my lads had because they hadn’t quite done the right thing with whatever the fusing etcetera had to be done, so there was a few problems now and again. And that’s about my main time with the aircraft.
SB: Ok. Are there any particular stories that come to mind from your time, you’ve mentioned being able to fire into the South China Sea and so on, you have already mentioned a few things but are there any other incidents at all that you’d like to share?
MM: The one that amuses me a lot, on 26 squadron of the regiment they had thirteen Bulfords guns, twelve of them were obviously on the [unclear], four on each, three four is twelve, yes, but my gun was the thirteenth. But when I went to the regiment and the lads showed me everything and said, where’s this [unclear] on my infantry, he said, oh, they’re in, it’s in that building over there in the, we were working out of an old MT, one of the old MT buildings over there, but he said, well, we don’t know, we’ve taken bits off it like it’s what the Air Force called a Christmas tree, I if we wanted a part, we took it off there before they sent us a bit and after the time we didn’t bother to put it back on the other gun, cause we probably used it on something else eventually, so eventually it came around that we were going to take the squadron was going down to Manorbier to fire the guns and of course they wanted to fire all of the guns cause they were talking of going to Germany and we had to test the barrels and all sorts of things, so I said to the lads, I said, we are gonna have to get this gun out. And they said, well, we will have to be a bit careful the ones that have been there so we went up, opened up, started to push this gun out and I don’t know if you know but the wheels of the gun are locked down [unclear] when it’s being dragged along the ground, but when the gun is going to fire they take them up and it sits on feet, unfortunately this thing fell on the ground, luckily none of the lads got injured so anyway this gun [unclear], so I told their officers in charge etcetera, this gun [unclear] it and they said oh well, went through the system and they said, send it back to Stafford, so we [unclear] rigged it so as the wheel stayed up coming down and it disappeared behind the truck and a new gun, a gun from Stafford that was being refurbished come back to us, all nice painted etcetera etcetera, ok, alright so we dragged, in fact I went on the truck, dragged my gun down to Manorbier and the regiment obviously set their guns out cause they could set all twelve onto the firing range and carried on for half a week and then they said, right, now we’ll try your gun, I said, alright, we are going to fire this, he said, no, you can’t fire it, well, I got six armourers, ah, they said, but you’ve been trained how to load it [laughs], we were servicing the bloody thing but we weren’t being trained cause they put them in from the side and all sorts so, anyway one of the sergeants in the [unclear] took my gun, put it up on the range, started off red, he had tips of five rounds, very like a 303 but bigger and they started firing it, fired about two or three rounds, bang, bang, bang, now stopped, oh shit, called us out, and what they do? Don’t know, got jammed with a mechanism going back before you can’t move it cause it’s too big but two Welshmen that had done this for years, they had a trolley about the size of that table and a big piece of lead basically that you can hardly lift up on a chain but these done it so many times they, oh, we got another jammed gun, it was pointed in safe direction by the way [laughs], and they come up and one of them lifted this and swung it round and hit it in the right place and the gun went and fired, bang, stand a couple of times, we got a bit fed up with this, one of my corporals a very nice, very good lad Scotsman, he what it was cause I hadn’t got a clue, I hadn’t been trained on the guns and this was just experience and he said, you couldn’t get ammunition was called forty seventy or forty sixty it was just slightly bigger, the one, the seventy is slightly bigger but what he reckoned Stafford had done he had bolted the slideway for the ammunition to go in, one side was forty and the other was sixty so basically it was [unclear], skewed as you went down, he sorted this out and changed the bolt etcetera etcetera by which time they finished firing so he never did find out if it fired that way, it went to Germany and I don’t know. But the other things as well that the lads said, they’d been there before to Manorbier of course they said Sarge, he said, it’s bloody horrible there, we give out all the ammunition that’s basically our job on the day unless the [unclear] stops. And come the evening we got all these empty cases back and we gotta, we box’em and put this free of explosives, he used to take us hours to, he said by the time we got back to the camp at Pembrey, starts with the P but Welsh area anyway is a small camp, army camp, small, all the food had gone more or less, I thought, what am I gonna do? Hang on, he says, that a senior NCO must certify free of explosives so he’s fired the gun and he’s got [unclear] he knows it’s free of explosives, each gun had a sergeant in charge of it, I thought, right, make out a list, you will put all the empty cases back in the boxes, seal them up, the lads were doing it of course. Not my lads but his lads, because they had time between the aircraft flying over and things like that to do this sort of thing and certify it and sign it, so all we had to do basically the armourers as such was travel down the back of the guns, at the ones they stopped firing and pick it all up on a three tonner, take it down to a building and stick it all in the building, the next day I had to certify that it was all empty and take it down to the trains at Pembroke Dock, put them on a train, seal that and send it back to Stafford or wherever it went, I don’t know, and this was right because the sergeants weren’t too keen on doing the job but my army officer, the warrant officer on the squadron so it was the case of the warrant officer says and they did it [laughs] and it worked beautifully. The lads, in fact my lads were just about the first ones back because the others, the regiment themselves had of course cleaned the gun and strip it down, [unclear] over for night time etcetera so our lads were just about the first ones back to the cook house so they thought that was great [laughs], so from the lad’s point of view I scored but from the regiment point of view I didn’t like it. I got to know how to do things cause being only a sergeant, the flight sergeants were in charge of the flights and if I wanted something done like their guns cleaned, I’m talking about their private work, I say private, their individual work which they were allocated of course, the SLR by that time, self-loading rifle, I had the armoury as well to look after, although I had a couple of lads doing that of course, every [unclear] they knocked down a barrel and if anything was dirty they said gun number 24 or whatever is dirty barrel, so I used to phone up the flight sergeant and say, so and so and so and so and so and so of your people have got dirty weapons, oh, I can’t be bothered by, warrant officer so and so says and five minutes later they were done, the armoury clean and their weapons [laughs] so it worked out alright but it took me six months to work all this lot out by which time I got the chance to leave and I did [laughs].
SB: Right, so, I think we’ve covered a fair amount of your time.
MM: Good! Crakey, yes!
SB: In there so unless there is anything else you can think that you’d like to add to it? I mean, maybe one question I can throw to you. You said the war, Second World War, didn’t influence your decision to go in but how did you feel about those people who had taken part in, in war, those people who did fly in Bomber Command, how did you feel about it?
MM: At the time I went in because there were still so many in the Air Force, for instance my old chief on 206 Squadron went through the war from an apprentice, he was I believe an apprentice at the beginning of the war and he went through the war and ended up as a warrant officer but only on a temporary rank. And I felt a bit for him because eventually he chased the Japanese back up through Burma and went into Japan with them and became forces of occupation, he was told us that as a warrant officer he sent him out with half a dozen blokes and a truck and get rid of all the Japanese war stores and the Japanese way of storing stuff is different to our way, I mean, we put ammunition in one place over there and furniture over there and food somewhere else and paperwork everywhere else, spread out all over the place, the Japanese didn’t do it that way, they put everything in smaller places, so the ammunition, food, weapons, vehicles, obviously the weapons and ammunitions was part of what the old warrant was telling me destroyed of course. But they had everything else, they had furniture, clothing, well, because, like a large barn basically they used to tell us [unclear] where it was sort of thing and the door was there, well, because of the war etcetera you were worried about booby-traps which is part of why he went of course and the armourers so they used to blow the doors open as opposed to try to open them with a pickaxe or whatever [laughs], they used to blow them open, the trouble, well good thing from this point, I can tell you now cause he’s dead but the good thing about that was when the bang went off, all the local people, we knew about these things, turned up and wanted half of what they could get so basically you sold it to them what he could but the ammunition of course or the weapons etcetera and he ended up quite a rich man basically, in Japanese money though, which was a bit hopeless. Cause he was also involved with the Shackletons earlier on in the nuclear weapons and I reckon that’s where he died of leukaemia but again shouldn’t say this I suppose but the government won’t recognize the blokes from that time and the same thing with the war, the government never recognised it till they put the memorial up in Green Park, which I went to in a couple of years ago, three years ago now, wasn’t it? Couldn’t really, Churchill was good, he was the man of the time, the man we needed, but basically I, I and others of the same thing, we blame Churchill for the devastation we caused in Germany which really didn’t need to happen, it’s the, it’s hindsight it’s easy, hindsight is the, I always say, hindsight is the biggest and best management thing in England, the only trouble is they haven’t got any foresight. And the same thing he didn’t recognise Bomber Command basically way after he was dead etcetera which I think was a, since knowing all about it, was really a thing we shouldn’t have done and we are still in the same thing now, we hardly recognise the people that come back from Afghanistan etcetera, we have trouble looking after them, we shouldn’t, the Armed Forces Covenant, which I try and [unclear] a little, and try and see about but it seems to be dead in the water to be quite honest, where they should look after everybody after they come back out of the forces not just Afghanistan but because when I left the Air Force and went to Dartford, cause my wife comes from Dartford, luckily we put our name down on the Dartford council list, they wouldn’t put my name down because I didn’t come from Dartford, my wife they could put down so we basically since we’ve been married best part of twenty years, we’d had our list down so we got a council house which was most unusual. Although of course we were at Coltishall and because I was going out and the Air Force basically sent me an eviction latest six months beforehand so I sent out to the local council Norfolk and they said, oh no, we are not interested in you, you didn’t come, you come from Herefordshire, you go back to Herefordshire basically. And then I read the small print and it said, if you have worked in the area for a year or eighteen months or so, you can qualify to go on the list and I looked at the wife and said, you work for Birdseye, in the local frozen fruit factory for the last couple of years? Yes, we’ll put your name down instead so we did and we got the letter back where you could see [unclear] put her on but we haven’t got a place for her. But luckily the Dartford council come up with a place. That’s the sort of bad things about the way the Air Force or the government run the Air Force, shall we say. And of course 12 Squadron lately, they were flying Tornadoes of course out of Lossiemouth and went to the various Iraq and Iran and things and then they were told, oh, well, that’s it, we’d had enough, we don’t want Tornadoes [unclear] or 12 Squadron disbanded so they disbanded 12 Squadron the only one left operational is 6 Squadron [unclear] I was on and all the rest have gone and they disbanded 12 Squadron and then they suddenly found out they hadn’t got enough Tornadoes to carry on, so 2 Squadron was disbanded as well, and instead of, they just added the flag over to 12 Squadron and gave them the aircraft and then went on of course to have the Typhoons so 12 Squadron are now back in operation with a first lady wing commander in charge of the squadron, I think she still is on in charge, got a backseat as opposed to a pilot as such although she’s done quite a few Afghan operations etcetera but as a backseater as I called it as opposed to a pilot. I think she’s still in charge. So that’s, the government can’t get it right, no matter what they try, talk to Cameron now and he’s trying to go and bomb’em and we don’t wanna know.
SB: Ok. Were there any other people you came across who had actually been part of Bomber Command?
MM: Well, my chief was, he was Bomber Command before he went overseas to Far East, he was in Bomber Command with the Lancasters quite a bit. And of course I met quite a few in the fifties, stroke early sixties but most of those were chief technicians or flight sergeants, warrant officers sort of thing so, basically down a corporal level, the only one I actually knew fairly well for a while was in the war was in Aden, he was an LAC there, Yorkie, yes, LAC, I don’t know he never wanted [unclear] but he actually helped arm up [unclear], Spitfire at Biggin Hill [unclear], I went through the war but as an LAC and he was talking now in his forties he was still an LAC, he just didn’t want to go any further so but he never really told us many stories of the war as such, that was one of the ones that as I say he was at Biggin Hill for a while and reckoned he helped arm up the Spitfire for, well, he’d be then I think Squadron or wing commander by that time, I think, got that a bit mixed up, have I? I don’t know.
SB: Ok, thanks very much Mal.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Malcolm Francis Morris
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Sheila Bibb
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-20
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
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AMorrisM150720
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Pending review
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00:46:26 audio recording
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Second generation
Description
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Malcolm Francis Morris, who was a child when war broke out, remembers joining the RAF as a boy entrant and then serving as an armament technician during the Cold War. Describes his training at St Athans and being then posted to Aden, where he was in charge of a bomb dump and occasionally disposed of the ammunition. Remembers various episodes: serving on 112 Squadron in Cyprus in 1974; being awarded the General Service Medal for the Arabian Peninsula; taking a specialist course on ejection seats and one on torpedoes; his posting back to England on various stations; handling different kinds of weapons. Talks about his experience with the Buccaneers and Shackletons and gives technical details about the nuclear armament of the aircraft. Expresses his critical views on Churchill regarding the destruction of the German cities during the war and the neglecting of veterans.
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Peter Schulze
Spatial Coverage
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Cyprus
Germany
Great Britain
Singapore
Yemen (Republic)
South China Sea
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
bomb dump
ground personnel
perception of bombing war
RAF St Athan
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/658/8931/AWrightJDFC150608.1.mp3
2c2065e5f04be44ec28cab39fdb0646c
Dublin Core
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Title
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Wright, James
Albert James Wright DFC
A J Wright
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Wright, JDFC
Description
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An oral history interview with Jim Wright DFC (- 2022, 134563, 1503927 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as navigator with 61, 97 and 630 Squadrons.
Date
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2015-06-08
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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SB: This is Sheila Bibb interviewing Jim Wright at his home in Abingdon on the 8th of June 2015. Jim, you say you were born in Creswell in Nottinghamshire. Could you tell me a little about your childhood? Your family.
JW: Yes. I can. I was born in Creswell Model Village which is a mining village in Nottinghamshire quite close to Worksop. My father had been a miner before the war. He and my mother were born in the Victorian age. My father was born in 1894. My mother 1896. They met whilst my father was a private soldier having volunteered like Kitchener in the First World War. And in the process of that with all his mates, mostly miners, in the Sherwood Foresters and the battalion known as the Notts and Derby’s and they went for training in Northumberland to Tynemouth, just north of the River Tyne. I remember my, my father’s headquarters was based in the Grand Hotel, a rather nice hotel in Tynemouth beach and here his mates would do their training along the beaches of Tynemouth and Whitley Bay and they would use the firing ranges alongside St Marys Lighthouse in Whitley Bay. A very prominent feature all together. During that training he met, as was quite normal in war with a young man aged twenty one, twenty two, a couple of Tyneside lasses down for the weekend or something like that. And my mother came from a little village on the River Tyne called Point Pleasant. Her father was an engine man at a port. I think he handled trains and fork lift trucks and things like that on the quayside in a shipbuilding area. But it was no trouble for young ladies in those days to travel to the seafront at Tynemouth or Whitley Bay. It was a day out, I suppose. It weren’t very far away, a few miles, and there she met my father. This would be about 1915 I think just before they went to the trenches for the first time. In 1916 my father had already had several Blighty wounds as they called it. Had been brought back to the UK, patched up and sent back again but in 1916 and I think it was on Boxing Day 1916 he and his, my mother decided to get married by special licence and they did this on the coast. Somewhere near Redcar I think. In Yorkshire is it? Or Durham? I’m not sure. They got married and off he went to the trenches without any honeymoon or anything. That was the way in those days. The next time she saw him he was only a year older but he had a military medal for gallantry and he had no left arm. What a difference that left arm made. Anyway, they eventually finished the war and they had five children. A boy, my eldest brother. A girl, my eldest sister. I was the third member and then two younger sisters. The boy and the eldest girl have passed away now. I’m still alive and so are my two younger sisters but they’re getting on. I think they’re eighty eight, eighty nine. In fact I’m not sure. And one of them is ninety now and another close by eighty seven, eighty eight. We lived initially in Creswell Model Village in Nottinghamshire but my mother never ever got used to being a miners wife and of course when my father came back to live in Creswell Model Village where I was born [pause] he could not because he had no left arm. He couldn’t work at the coal face as they used to call it and he had disappointing jobs to start with in the Creswell Colliery which was very close by the model village. And then of course they had the Great Strike didn’t they in 1926 and I can remember vividly my father with his one arm tucking me up on a cushion on the [Boss farthing bicycle?] and going out in to the woods and so forth to find branches of wood that he could carry back on a bicycle because in those days the miners stopped delivering their free coal and they were unemployed and they were out for many months. I’ve never forgotten the sight of my father when I was about three years old I suppose going out to get fuel because we had no coal. I’ve never forgotten that. My mother was a Tynesider. She came from Scottish parents up in Aberdeen somewhere but she had married in to this Tyneside family and she said, ‘I will never accept that my sons will become miners or that my daughters will become perhaps married to miners.’ There were too many accidents in the coalmining business. It was a very hazardous occupation. And sure enough she took the smaller children with her for a holiday to Whitley Bay, Tynemouth area about 1928/29 and she came back and she persuaded her husband, who was unemployed, ‘Why don’t we move to the north? We can always make a living doing bed and breakfast at the seaside.’ ‘Ok,’ says dad. My mother was the brains behind the family. Anyway, when I was about eight years old, seven maybe, we moved first of all to Cullercoats. A lovely little fishing village, a marvellous little holiday place just temporarily while they looked for somewhere better and then they ended up renting a house in Whitley Bay and then eventually they, with great courage in those days I think since they were literally destitute people they managed to buy a house in what we call North Parade very close to the seafront in Whitley Bay and my mother started with her dream of making a home for her family using bed and breakfast for holidaymakers mostly from the Glasgow area, in Whitley bay. The five children developed there. They were educated. At that time of course I was the only one, in the middle of the family, to gain entrance to the high school. A grammar school type in Whitley. Monkseaton High School. It had been built in ’14, 1914 as a grammar school and they were very proud of it in Whitley Bay but my brother and my sisters all ended up leaving school at fourteen and their main object was to get a living anywhere, butcher’s boys, dress shops, whatever. I was lucky. I managed to get a scholarship to the grammar school, the high school as they called it. And when I was sixteen I suppose, late 1938, I matriculated. I was very fortunate. I had a classics master there who gave me a [Latin?] in that year, 1938. And he said to my parents quietly, ‘Your son could do worse than go to Durham University with the intent to get a Classics degree like mine.’ He was a Northumbrian and he spoke their language. Tyneside. My parents looked at each other and they said, ‘Sorry. The two older ones are leaving the nest but the two younger ones have yet to finish, they have yet to go to school and I’m afraid we need income rather than the possibilities for the future.’ So I never did get the Classics education. I would have liked to have tried.
SB: Yes.
Instead of that, after matriculation I went for the civil service examination. A quite common thing to do with young people who were seventeen, eighteen, and I ended up, in 1939 by being a house captain, a prefect, and the school were very kind. They let me stay on in the sixth form whilst I completed these exams in January ‘39 and I ended up in April as a young civil servant, as an employment clerk. In the, what do they call it, Ministry of Labour and National Service. It’s a long time ago. And I spent, I think it was three months, at a school in Newcastle in New Bridge Street which was the headquarters of a very large employment exchange and we had a special teacher. They used to call them Third Class Officers I remember and we had about ten or twelve people from throughout Durham, Tyneside who had joined up in this Ministry of Labour and National Service as young employment clerks like me. We went to school every day. We found out what we had to do and eventually we passed our course and we started work and I remember we found out how to do it at New Bridge Street, how to do our work. And then I was posted to Ashington, a mining village and I used to commute from Whitley Bay and Monkseaton to Ashington via a little proper steam railway and then I was posted from there to Walker on Tyne and I carried on my job until, after a series of incidents, I joined the Royal Air Force. I had tried to join the Fleet Air Arm first, when I was eighteen and I had failed on eyesight tests because I wanted to be a pilot. Like all the young men in 1940. I was so impressed with Spitfires and Hurricanes but I failed in the medical test for pilot and the Board of Admiralty in London sent me away for three months and said, ‘Your eyesight is not good but it may be something that will recover. Come back.’ And in December ‘40 I went back to London and I met a lot of very impressive medical officers with lots of gold braid and things and they said, ‘Jim, I’m sorry to say that your eyesight still remains below par for pilot training but,’ they said, ‘You know you are educationally qualified to become an officer as an observer in the Navy and we need observers. Pilots are ten a penny. You can train them, you know, you just have to run around. The observer is the brains in the outfit. Would you like to be commissioned and join us?’ ‘No.’ I didn’t think I would. I was still full of aspirations to be a Spitfire pilot so I went back to my job as an employment clerk but in May ‘41 in company with two of my old schoolmates we decided we would all join the Royal Air Force and we went back to Newcastle upon Tyne to the recruiting office there and the sergeant who looked at us and said, ‘Are you interested in applying?’ ‘Yes.’ We were. ‘Ok. Well this is what you do. First of all the medical.’ I passed my medical but the other two didn’t. One whom I’d grown up with and he was my close schoolmate was a diabetic and didn’t think about it. Eventually he became the best man at my marriage later, two years later. And he died. He became blind and then died. The other one had flat feet and was called up eventually by the army and within six weeks of being posted to York I think, he died during a route march. Some mysterious heart complaint. I went to see him when I happened to be on holiday after being sick for a while. I had ten days sick leave. I went back to Whitley Bay. Still was an airman under training. I met his parents and his body was lying in there in their, in the sitting room and his mother said, ‘Would you like to see Duncan?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I’d never seen a dead person before. Anyway, that was my introduction. By this time I was, although I was fit for pilot training in the RAF, where my eyes suddenly seemed to have mysteriously got better or something but by this time the RAF said, ‘Well I’m sorry but we’ve got thousands of pilots but we’re desperately short of navigators. If you like you can do a tour on navigation and when you’re finished you can convert to pilot training.’ So I said, ‘Ok.’ That’s my early life. Should I carry on from there?
SB: Why not?
Why not.
SB: Yes.
Well from May 1941 we had to wait. We had been accepted for training as a navigator but it wasn’t until September that year that we were called up and we went to Regents Park in London and we spent a fortnight there getting uniform, learning how to march, going for medicals of all sorts. I remember everyone laughed about at the time but I remember being in a long line of young men and they were tall, fat, thin, short. All kinds of people. But they were generally speaking physically fit. Generally speaking. They needed putting into shape but medically they were fit. A long line of them and a young medical officer would come with a stick and, ‘Drop your trousers, the whole lot.’ Free from infection they called it. Everyone remembers this. It was the same for them all. Anyway, after a fortnight we were posted to Catterick in Yorkshire for what they called initial training wing. Catterick was interesting because it was also the home of army training at a very big army depot at Catterick but sixty of us ended up at RAF Catterick in a special little, what do they call it, unit of its own with its own squadron leader, education officer and flight sergeant who was a disciplinarian and maybe a couple of teachers to teach the basics of flying and so on but we got to a separate unit. We were sent to live in a country house which had been specially requisitioned for the purpose and we slept there and our flight sergeant would march us every morning four miles there. Good for you those were the terms. Smarten up. And then four miles back again. We did everything on the camp. We just slept there. But of course it was that time of year. Wintertime. And apart from an army Lysander unit, that’s an army air corp, they had a Beaufighter unit, night fighters, there and one day the station commander said to the station warrant officer, ‘I want you to organise snow clearance tonight.’ Big forecast. Snow. ‘I want the airfield swept so that the Beaufighters can operate.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ But the station warrant officer was a busy man. In RAF terms he was a very important man. He commanded all the people in the manpower department of the station. He was the boss. The station commander knew it, the station warrant officer knew it, everybody else knew it and the station warrant officer came to my squadron leader in the Initial Training Wing Department and he said, ‘Sir, with great respect, my chaps work night and day doing their ordinary work on the airfield. I can’t really expect them all to turn out to do snow clearing initially until I have to.’ But, ‘Sir, with respect your chaps are just [?]. They are, to some extent, surplus at the moment for the next few days so I’m going to ask you if you wouldn’t mind I want your fifty trainees to start the snow clearing tonight.’ So we did. So we all got our brooms and our shuttles and of course it snowed and snowed and we got soaking wet but we still had to march because we had nowhere else to sleep. After two or three days of this I got a cold. It was a nasty cold. I was used to getting colds in the northeast but this was a bad one because we were literally walking with wet clothes, no heat, no nothing and one of my mates in the morning time said to me, ‘Jim, you don’t look very good.’ I said, ‘No, I feel awful.’ He said, ‘I’ll go and have a word with the flight sergeant.’ He went to the flight sergeant who had a little room all of his own and we used to sleep up and down in great big rooms and things and he said to the flight sergeant, ‘Jim Wright’s not very well.’ ‘So what,’ said the flight sergeant? ‘Well, could you fix transport or something for him?’ ‘I aint got any transport.’ he said. ‘We walk. I’m sorry. If he can walk he will.’ And we marched four miles back. Of course I reported to sick quarters and the Doc took one look at me and he said, ‘You’ve got a temperature of a hundred and four young man.’ ‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Awful.’ He said, ‘I’m sending you to Catterick army camp hospital immediately. I think you’ve got bronchial pneumonia.’ ‘Thank you, sir.’ So I ended up in the army hospital. I never saw anything but the hospital beds. And after ten days I think they used to have something called [metacreme?] but nothing like penicillin or anything antibiotics. It was some awful thing that turns you yellow I think. But in the end I got better and they said, ‘We’re going to send you off on ten days sick leave. Get all railway warrants and rations and things.’ Well I’d only been in the air force for two or three months and I didn’t really know anything about anything but I was so pleased with the railway warrant to go home in comfort rather than hitching or anything like that and my mother was so grateful to get the rations. Butter and things like that. Not important to me but important to her. Anyway, I recovered, finished our ITW training and we went off to Eastbourne College on the south coast at Eastbourne and we, we stayed at this famous Grand Hotel. I’d heard radio programmes, I knew, on Sunday afternoons I think but for the first time I was introduced to what it was like to actually live in a great big hotel on the seafront at Eastbourne. It was very interesting. Can we just stop? Stop for a minute.
[pause]
JW: Can we just have the last sentence about Eastbourne? Eastbourne College we were going to.
SB: Hang on. Ok.
JW: We were accommodated.
SB: Yeah you were accommodated.
JW: Yeah.
SB: It’s alright
JW: Ok.
SB: That’s it.
JW: Ready. When you are
SB: Yeah. Ok.
JW: Eastbourne was very interesting. I’d never been to the south coast before. It would seem that at this time in 1941 a lot of the holiday areas on the south coast within ten miles had been more or less taken over by the government. The hotels had been taken over for army, navy, air force units quite often. The basic residents could stay. But it was, it had an awful lot of armed forces in it. Anyway, in Eastbourne, Eastbourne College was a recognised independent school and the government had taken it over. It had moved somewhere else. And they used it for what we call elementary air navigation school training. This was a three month course. Longer than the ITW one. And I remember some of my mates being desperate for cigarettes. People, I don’t think people today realise the extent to which smoking cigarettes, pipe smoking had taken over the nation. People In films were smoking. Everybody thought it was normal to smoke but if they were addicts as some of our young men were this was a very sad thing for them because they couldn’t get cigarettes that they used to be able to buy twenty whenever they wanted. At this time one of my young friends he was desperate for cigarettes and so I used to join the queue with him when he went hunting for cigarette shops, for rations and things and I said to Nobby, ‘Why don’t you just give up?’ ‘Can’t,’ he said. So I would go and buy the ration that was there. It may be ten cigarettes sometimes. They were just goose woodbines in a house and I’d hand them to Nobby and that would keep him happy for a while until the next lot. Cigarette smoking became a problem in the world. It still is. Anyway, we would do, the fifty of us, we would do our training within the Eastbourne College. Tailor made for the job really. Just like school. It was just like school. And they taught us the basics of navigation from the air. They gave us sextants and we said, ‘What do we do with these?’ ‘Ah well,’ they said, ‘When you go home tonight we would like you to practice taking shots of the moon if it’s there. The stars if you can find them.’ This was later on in the course when it developed and we found out what a sextant was, how to use it, air almanacs and things like that all concerned with navigation when you were high up, couldn’t see the ground and your only means of navigation were astro-navigation. Anyway, we used at night time to take our sextants home to the Grand Hotel with us and then operate in pairs in a backstreet just off the seafront and we would, one of us would take notes while the other one actually located the star and took a shot and if you were within a hundred miles of Eastbourne you were doing very well [laughs]. It was a very good training which you had to fall on later but whilst we were there it was beginning spring and the weather was improving and on Wednesday afternoons we were told to go and get fit. Cross country runs, play football, play tennis or skive as they used to call it if you wanted to by saying, ‘I’m a golfer. I’ll go on the golf course.’ ‘Well yes that’s a sport. Yes. Yes you can do that.’ And this man for whom I used to get cigarettes, Nobby, we borrowed, from the professional at the club, some old clubs and a few old balls and we enjoyed the fresh air at the top of the cliff on Eastbourne Golf Course. And while we were pottering about on the very first day I remember it was a lovely summer day. Nice to be alive. It was lovely. Sunshine and blue sky. I remember Nobby saying, ‘Jim, look.’ And there were a pair of ME109s. We knew they were ME109s because we’d done aircraft recognition and we knew. What’s more you could see the Nazi cross on the side of the aeroplane and they were carefree, the pair of them. You could see them. They were only fifteen minutes away from France at the most. From their airfields. And they came over our heads. We said, ‘That won’t bother us. They’re not going to shoot us. They’re wasting their time.’ Well, they turned around and they headed for Eastbourne Railway Station and with their rockets, machine gun fire, cannon fire raked the station and having done a fair bit of damage they disappeared. Nobody came from anywhere to help them or shoot them down or anything. They quite calmly trundled off back to their base in France. That was our very first introduction to ME109s. I’ve never forgotten it. At the end of the course the fifty of us were all posted to Heaton Park in Manchester I think it was. It was a kind of a settling in place for trainee pilots, navigators and so on whilst they waited for the next step in their training. All these people at Heaton Park were going overseas. They could go, some to Rhodesia, they could go to Canada. Some of them even went to Florida to fly with Pan America airfield, Pan America Airways. Anyway, we used to, we used to report every morning at 8 o’clock to see if any of us were wanted to go on convoys or anything like that and every day no news for us so we just idled away again and we got fed up with this. We got tired of waiting and hanging around and one of my friend’s, a chap called Mike Ward said, ‘Jim, would you like to nip into York to see my folks?’ So I said, ‘What’s the plan?’ He said, ‘Well we’ll check up on the Friday morning and if there’s no call out for anywhere we could quietly nip in and get a ticket to York on the railway and we’ll be back by Sunday, by Sunday night ready for Monday morning.’ ‘Sounds good to me.’ I said. So we stuck our necks out and we did this and we got to York and I met Spike’s family. His father owned a garage and Mike was one of these chaps who knew about motorcars. How to drive them. And he also had farmer relatives with farms and he was also familiar too with 22 rifles and shotguns and things. He was way ahead of me. I enjoyed meeting his family. It was nice. But on the way back we got to Crewe Station I think it was. I think we had to change at Crewe and a couple of innocent looking young RAF special police, corporals. Corporal was a powerful man in the RAF when you were just an airman. They sauntered up to us looked us up and down. They always work in pairs these people. But Mike and I were, were happy. We said, ‘Yes, I’m afraid, yeah s we are travelling. We’re going back to base.’ ‘Where’s that?’ They said. ‘Oh Heaton Park.’ ‘Oh. What are you doing now then?’ ‘Oh well we’ve just been to see.’ ‘I see. Have you got your pass?’ ‘Well no.’ ‘Well I’m sorry,’ they said, ‘But that means you’re absent without leave.’ AWL. Mike and I have always had in our service record absent without leave. One day’s pay forfeit. We’ve never forgotten it. Never forgotten it. Anyway, we eventually were sent off. Some of us, we didn’t all go to Canada. Several of us were sent to Pan American Airways in Florida. And we envied them. Oh that must be nice. Florida. Lovely. We’d heard of Florida and we had visions of summer holidays on the beach. Anyway, we didn’t hear any more about those chaps. They disappeared. And we went in turn, I think about twenty five of us, I’m not sure we were posted to Number 13 Air Navigation School at a place called Port Albert near Goderich near on the coast of Lake Huron in Ontario. We sailed in a convoy. I remember the name of the boat it was the SS Letitia. Other people met Letitia at different times during the war as a troopship but for seven days we went up and down and we were seasick just like everybody else because we were not sailors but we made it. We made it to Halifax in Nova Scotia and from there we went on by train and it seemed to be forever. I don’t know how long it was. Two or three days I think. But we ended up anyway at this navigation training school. I think it lasted from about May or June or July I’m not sure until November so there was a time when we were there when we were taken away from our RAF blue as we called the field dress and we were put into the tropical khaki uniform. Shorts and things like that. To cut a long story short I became top of the course and Mike my friend became second. And we had a young Scotsman friend called Scotty Turner who came third and a much more mature chap called Williamson with a moustache. A family man. He must have been in his thirties. You have to remember that most of us were just twenty, twenty one. Which was the about the average age for, for the time. Anyway we also had a group of free French on our course attached. They spoke English when they had to but they spoke their own natural language French when they were off duty. But I don’t know whatever happened to those six free French. Two of them were commissioned. One was a captain and the other one was I think a sub lieutenant. I’m not sure what. Whether they were air force or navy I can’t remember now and the other four were non-commissioned people. Petty officers or something like that. I never saw or heard of them again. Anyway, we had a party at the end of the course and we were given sergeant’s stripes and we pinned them on using our little machinery. We all had our needles and threads and things so we could pin them on and we had a party at the hotel and the next day we were put on a train and all the way up through Ontario, through Quebec, through New Brunswick and we should have gone to Nova Scotia to Halifax but when we got to Moncton on the railway line, it was a stop of some sort there anyway, and we had a couple of Royal Canadian Air Force sergeants approach our party and they said, ‘Are you just coming from, from your training at Goderich?’ ‘Yes,’ we said. ‘What do you want to know for?’ We thought we might have done something wrong. ‘Oh, it’s nothing wrong,’ they said, ‘But, I need these four people. I need these four. Wright, Ward, Williamson, Turner.’ ‘What do you want them for?’ ‘You lucky chaps are going to be commissioned. You can throw away your sergeant’s stripes.’ ‘Oh yeah, that’s very interesting.’ ‘You will be taken by transport to the Royal Canadian Air Force station at Moncton,’ which is just on the outskirts, ‘And there you will go through commissioning procedure. The rest of them are on the way to Halifax. And home.’ We were very pleased about this of course but we had to hang about a bit. I think it was, this was sometime, somewhere in early November and I think it was in early December when we finally were kitted out, uniforms, and were sent on our way to Halifax. For starters of course we were commissioned and that made a tremendous difference. Life as an airman whether you’re UT aircrew or just newly promoted to sergeant was an entirely different matter than if you were pilot officer. Life changed. And so we found that we had better facilities on the train. And when we got to Halifax they said, ‘Oh yes. You’ve got to report to the troop ship and it happens to be the Queen Elizabeth.’ We were overjoyed. We’ll never forget, well I will never forget that four day journey at top speed, without convoys, too fast for the submarines and we got back home to the UK in four days. It was a marvellous experience. I’ve still got copies of the ship’s newspaper, “The Convoy,” now but I’ve had them in an old scrapbook for seventy five years or something. They used to print a daily account in the, in this marvellous liner the Queen Elizabeth which carried thousands of people of course and they would give a daily account of what was happening in the world in the desert, and the Atlantic and the wherever and of course it was important because if I’ve got it right America had just had Pearl Harbour in December ‘41 and this was a year later so the fact that the Americans were in the war made a great difference and this would be reported in those newspapers. Anyway, we had disembarkation leave. I think we all went home for ten days or seven days leave I think. And we were sent to Harrogate in Yorkshire. All of us were sent to Harrogate. It’s a big resettlement unit in a lovely market town miles from London and we were very lucky because not only was it a relatively peaceful place Harrogate but it had it had swimming pools, dance halls, it had beautiful music halls and excellent gardens and a lovely location for walking in the countryside. We were so lucky. The important thing of course for most young twenty one, twenty two year olds was that there were a lot of girls there. The girls came because the government had decided, just before the war, to send a lot of their civil servants from London to a more peaceful place where they could get on with the work in Harrogate and a lot of these girls were civil servants just like I used to be and the same kind of age group. Clerks in the air ministry, contract farms was where I met them and Mike Ward and I were I think on our first day. We were staying in the Queen Hotel just off the Stray in Harrogate. A lovely hotel. The sergeants were in a different hotels, Imperial and places like that but we had an invitation from reception of the Queen Hotel with the Women’s Voluntary Service accept some of you to come and have a cup and a bit of cake, that sort of thing, in a local church hall and we said, ‘Well, why not.’ And the first girl I met was the one I married over two years later. A blond, blue eyed girl who was a little older than I was. Just a little. Her landlady, ‘cause by this time a lot of the girls had moved from being residents in a lady’s college to being shipped out into the local community where they were divided into local houses and looked after themselves in ordinary houses and my future wife’s landlady was also a member of the WVS Women’s Voluntary Service and they were forever giving me cups of tea and cakes and things to soldiers, sailors and airmen. Whoever they were. On this occasion she had taken my future wife with her to this church hall and when, when David Mike Ward and I arrived this WVS lady said, ‘I’d like you to meet a couple of young ladies.’ You’ll do. And Mike and I met these two young ladies. I don’t know if Mike was that interested but I was and I stayed interested for two years. But of course I was a very straightforward young, naïve young man. I believed in marriage. I also believed that it was a sheer waste of time to contemplate marriage in a Lancaster or a Wellington and that was firmly understood. So we’d keep in touch by letter wherever I was and when the adjutant of the squadron, my last squadron called me in and said, ‘Jim. You’re finished.’ And I said [laughs], ‘What do you mean finished?’ He said, ‘Your days of operational flying are over young man.’ I communicated this to my girlfriend. I went to see her, sought her hand in marriage and she agreed. So that was the picture. Now my friend Mike Ward had been lucky enough to meet a charming young lady during our three months in Canada. We had, we had been allowed to hitch to Detroit at weekends. And on our very first visit we met some people of Scottish origin who had friends. They were all concerned with motoring I think because Detroit was a fabulous manufacturing of cars place. They had problems of course because black people were not allowed to mix in transport or accommodation. And you had to be very careful of this in Detroit in 1942. Anyway, one of their Scottish friends would put up Mike and I. They lived in a great big apartment block and the man involved was the manager of this block. He and his wife supervised all the arrangements for car parking and renting apartments and so on and their family lived in quite a spacious apartment and we met a girl there called Jeanette McDonald. A familiar name because Jeanette McDonald happened to be the name of a singing star at the time. Nelson Eddie was her partner. I remember her very well. The young Jeanette McDonald, the American girl was some kind of a Scottish dancing champion. You know used to twiddle about in the way that people with these Scottish views people do. In America they were very keen on this and would have state championships and things like that and young Jeanette was one of these. They were a very charming family and we got to know them very well during our three months there. But some of their American friends that we also would stay with and have breakfast with introduced us to pancakes and syrup and things like that. They had another young lass and she was rather like the American Doris Day. The girl next door. Bubbly. Mike fell for this girl in a big way and I often wonder, wondered because we got split up eventually and I, I lost touch with Mike and I often used to wonder whether he was going to go back to America for this girl. She was a lovely lass. Very much like Doris Day. Bubbly. Anyway, Jeanette McDonald was not for me but Mike I thought might have been very interested in this young lass who lived at some address in Bueno Vista Drive, Detroit. I’ve never forgotten the name. It was an interesting one. An enormous number like eleven hundred and twenty two. When we, when we finished our course we were presented with our observer badge. That was like a little O observer badge. They don’t use them anymore. It was replaced eventually by a bomb aimer or a navigator. When, when we were trained in Canada we did both jobs. We could choose either. I always stayed with the navigation side and so did Mike. Unfortunately, Mike and his crew were killed in 1944. He had started off doing navigation training. We’d flown in little Tiger Moths really just to get acclimatised to British weather really. I think in January ‘43 that was our first course. A month at Scone in Scotland where pilots just with their fresh pilot wings up would sit in the front cockpit and the navigators would sit in the back cockpit. The pilots of course would say, ‘If you want to play with this thing you’re welcome. Off you go.’ And so we would play [?] and we got a lot of fun. And at the end I remember, after about half an hour I would say to my pilot on this little Gosport tube communication system they had there. I’d say, ‘I think we ought to go back home now don’t you?’ ‘Oh I suppose so. Where are we?’ And I’d say, ‘Don’t you know?’ ‘Well, no. I thought you were the navigator, you’d know where we were.’ I thought he must be joking. I’d been playing with the aeroplane for half an hour and I thoroughly enjoyed it but I’d no idea where we are and it was a bit late to find out. It was quite amusing. I remember he, this particular pilot, made an emergency landing at an airfield. Not ours. Got some fuel in it and then we flew it back and this time I made sure I knew where I was. But having done that month on Tiger Moths in January we then went back to Harrogate where we met with old girlfriends or whatever and we waited for the next course. And then we’d go, have a month, at Skegness I think it was. Butlin’s holiday camp on the Yorkshire coast. They had accommodation of course. It was a holiday camp area. There were golf courses. And we wore army uniform and big boots and we had 303 rifles and they would take us out at night and throw thunder flashers at us to get us used to being possibly escape and evasion on the continent. It was all carefully planned. They knew what they were doing. Anyway, a month in army uniform made us fit and after that we went and did some Anson flying at Barrow in Furness. Very useful because the weather in the Irish Sea was notorious. Thunder storms, rain, snow, so we did more flying and a bit more navigation training and got used to flying in Ansons. Not in blue sky conditions but in United Kingdom weather conditions and that was different. But eventually our navigation training was finished and we were all posted to our, what we called an Operational Training Unit. In my case Mike and I went to Upper Heyford just not far north of Oxford. And when we arrived because we were commissioned we went to the officers mess and we met a bunch of fairly fresh flying officer ranked commissioned pilots who had also arrived for the their Operational Training Unit and for the first time they stopped being individual pilots and individual navigators, wireless operators, gunners and their purpose at Upper Heyford was to learn to fly as a Wellington bomber crew and that took ten weeks. It was a different way of life. We stopped being under training as navigators and we learned to become an operational bomber crew. Five of us, pilot, navigator no we didn’t have a flight engineer and we didn’t have a, ah pilot, navigator, wireless operator and bomb aimer and rear gunner. We didn’t need a mid-upper gunner and we didn’t need a flight engineer to fly the Wellington. But we certainly learned the rudiments of how to operate a bomber crew. For the first time in our lives we lived as a crew. Relaxed together. We tried, we tried as far as we could to live together. With the pilot and navigator both commissioned we could do that and the others were all sergeants. The bomb aimer, the wireless operator and the gunner but they, they gelled together. The NCOs stuck together. They ate together, they went to the same billet, sergeant’s mess. Ken Ames and I became firm friends. It was the way that it was in those days. There was a loyalty between individual crew members. It was a most unusual way to become a bomber crew because what happened was I teamed up with my pilot Ken Ames in the officer’s mess the night before. We all met in a big hangar. Mike did exactly the same. He met a northern Irishman called Derek [Wray] I remember. The following morning we were all there at 8 o’clock in the morning and wing commander flying said, ‘Gentlemen,’ there were hundreds of people in this hangar. He said, ‘You are going to find your own crews. I want every pilot to come back to me at the end of the day and tell me the names, ranks and numbers of his crew. That’s a job for all the pilots but how you sort yourselves out is a matter for you.’ We got some surprise because we’d never seen this before. This was quite new. Ok. So we got our brief, we got our marching orders, go away, ‘Find yourselves crew members. We don’t care how you do it. All I want by 4 o’clock today is a crew with a pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator and rear gunner.’ Ken, Ken Ames said, ‘Well you and I are the core.’ ‘Yeah. That’s right.’ ‘I will go and find a rear gunner. You go and find a bomb aimer.’ And I did that. I found an old man aged thirty two with ruddy cheeks and grey hair and I liked the look of him and I chatted him up and said, ‘Well I’ve got a pilot. I’m a navigator,’ and I said, ‘Would you like to be our bomb aimer?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’d like to meet the pilot of course but otherwise that’s fine.’ And Ken went and he found a rear gunner and he found he was an ex Irish Guardsman. As a soldier used to guns, used to being told what to do and so on but this man had been asked by the army if they would volunteer to become a gunner in the air force. And they jumped at it because it was much better pay. They would become sergeants straight away instead of privates in the army and they would get flying [fame] There was an element of flying [fame] when you were a sergeant in the flying business. So Paddy became our rear gunner. Paddy Paul. My, my selection as bomb aimer had been an insurance agent for many years and was married and had two children. He was ten years older than we were but he was also a crossword fiend which I found out and he was also a very keen rock climber using fingers and toes. He was also a very keen bird watcher. And he had patience and a lovely smile. We were sold. We were very happy. We found, we found a wireless operator but I think for some reason we had to change him. We did start flying with him and I remember saying, this man was called Jim, I said, well, no he was called Albert and I said, ‘Well I’m called Albert as well but if you like I will change my name to Jim.’ I never really liked being Albert really. It was my old man’s best man in the, in the trenches that had made me called Albert but I’ve got James and I’m quite happy to be Jim. And so I settled to Jim. And we ended up with an Australian wireless operator from Toowoomba in Queensland who had been around a long time because he was already a flight sergeant. That made a lot of difference of a year. He’d been around somewhere. Tex we called him because his first name was called Harvey. And we said, ‘We can’t call you Harvey.’ ‘Ok,’ he said, ‘Tex.’ But when you’re on intercom you don’t want fancy names, you want short, sharp ones and we, we soon learned of course that this idea that some people in the photography film world had that you would say on intercom, ‘Pilot from mid-upper gunner,’ or ‘wireless operator from navigator.’ You haven’t got time for all that. It’s Ken, Jim, Paddy. That’s it. You soon got to know the names and you soon knew who was who ‘cause all the names were different. So Ken was the pilot, Jim was the navigator, Tom was the bomb aimer, Paddy was the rear gunner and Tex was the wireless operator. Five people. We were very lucky I suppose because four of those five people survived till the end. Tex unfortunately, our wireless operator from Toowoomba, decided after getting a DFC and having done a whole first tour decided on our last squadron, 97, the Pathfinders, that on a particular day when a daylight operation was scheduled and our crew were not on it, not on the ops order, he said, ‘Oh I’d like to go. I’ll go with a skipper called Baker, Flight Lieutenant Baker. One of my Australian mates as a squadron leader he’d want to go as well,’ so on that aircraft there were nine people instead of seven which seemed to happen sometimes and because it was a daylight trip Tex decided that this was a bit of war that he would like to have a look at. Doing it in daylight. When he was not a wireless operator he was going to man a gun. And of course on that particular aircraft was shot down and I think some of the people escaped and became prisoners of war but Tex was killed and that was in July ‘44. I never did find out whether Tex had got a pathfinder badge. Didn’t make any difference anyway. He was dead. He’s buried in Bayeux War Cemetery. But Paddy the rear gunner did all the trips. Completed a second tour. Was commissioned. He had a DFM. He was commissioned at the end of it all and he went to the Far East to take part in what they called Tiger Force. I never saw him again. Tom Savage the bomb aimer had a DFM at the end of the first tour. When it was all over he was commissioned as well but stayed on at Coningsby to help the station armaments officer with the problems that they had at that time and he stayed until demob. I saw him again later. He met my wife. He was a cricket man as well and we used to meet up in the years after the war, many years, when I was stationed somewhere in the north like Middleton St George or Ouston in Northumberland, we would contact Tom and his family. By that time we had three [more families. Three more.] and his family and we would walk on Hadrian’s Wall. We would meet halfway and meet and have a, have a party. The last time I saw Tom would be about 1990 I think. It was a day when he was watching the cricket in the kitchen and the England test team were playing Australia and the English captain, what was his name? I can’t remember for the moment. The English captain scored three hundred and thirty three not out. I remember. And Tom was listening with delight to all this on the radio or the television I can’t remember now and he died. He was a lovely man. Yes. So, Tex had died. The young engineer and the young mid upper gunner who came to us especially when we became a Lancaster crew for the first time they, they both disappeared. I don’t know what happened to them. I think, one I know was invalided out in to civvy street and I met or contacted his widow eventually many years later and I discovered that yes the head wounds that he had got during a trip to [Castellon] on 61 squadron which kept me in hospital for two months brought home the results that he was found unfit to fly and he went back to civvy street and when he was in civvy street during the war he used to work on aircraft engines at some, nearby. We never did find where he came from. He’d been a garage mechanic you see. He was only eighteen. Ans he was only eighteen when he joined us but he was only with us for a few weeks and we never saw him again but I, I tracked him down long, long after the war and his widow told me that yes they’d got married, he’d earned a living as a ground engineer during the war and after the war he managed to get his medical back again and had a job, taken a job at Stansted flying Yorks all over the world. Thousands of miles of flying, fitting new aircraft engines to Yorks and Lancastrians wherever they needed them and he had three children I think it was but I never found any more about him. I have no idea what happened to the mid-upper gunner. I know he never flew with us again so presumably he had disappeared from active service. I’ve no idea. Now what else was I going to tell you?
SB: Do you want to tell me a little about some of your operations?
JW: About the operations. Yes.
SB: Yes.
JW: Well after we’d finished at Upper Heyford on the Wellingtons we had become a very efficient bomber crew. It was the little things like taking a little racing pigeon in a little cardboard box and we would sometimes do what we called nickel flights. That’s when we went very close to the French coast where we could get shot down by Germans but you were still on your training flight and you’d note the actual position that you had worked out where you were and you would write it down on a little bit of special paper which you’d put on to the pigeon’s leg. Elastic held there a little capsule and you would take the pigeon gingerly down to the back end of the Wellington and you’d get Paddy to turn his guns away and you would throw the pigeon out and the pigeon in the dark would sort itself out and by a miracle of bird navigation would get back to Upper Heyford long before we did [laughs]. And the purpose of that was to make sure that if the aircraft was shot down the pigeon would get back and that would be the last known position of that Wellington before it disappeared. That was the whole point. Of course we never did it in Lancasters. I never saw that again. But we did, we did manage to gel as a crew because we could talk to each other. We developed our own technique of how we could fly this crew together. I would tell the pilot that in certain circumstances if anything went wrong he should always bear in mind that if he could see the sky he could see the Great Bear and he’d say, ‘What’s the Great Bear?’ And I would explain. And I’d say find Polaris the Pole star. The Great Bear will wonder around different regions at different time but the Pole star once you found it it was a very good thing. It was north. And I’d explain to the pilot that wherever you were in Germany you had to come back on a westerly heading to get back to the UK and the best way you could do that was to keep the pole star on the right. He never faltered and there was one occasion when we went to Castle when he found it very useful ‘cause he remembered it. Pilots quite often leave it to the navigator completely but I used to talk to Ken. We were the same age. We liked the same things. And I used to say that there were some things that were important and I used to talk to him about the necessity for every pair of eyes in the aircraft to come back to where it all happened on the navigators brief on his board. I used to explain to everyone how important it was that if they saw a coastline, a bridge, an important navigation feature on the ground they should tell me. They should tell me in time for me to make use of it exactly when it happened so I could check. Crossing a beach, crossing a railway line, a bridge, whatever you could see. I said, ‘I know I’ve Gee and I’ve got H2S, I’ve got radar. Yes I’ve got all these things but they don’t always work and they are sometimes out of range,’ and so I used to explain. I used to explain to our wireless operator how important it was that when I wanted bearings from the radio why I wanted them, when I wanted them and I wanted them at a precise time. I wanted, I explained why these things were important to the navigator. And everyone in the crew, my crew anyway because every crew was different. I wanted everyone to know that every bit of information that they could see was vital as far as I was concerned if it had anything to do with the navigation of the aircraft, the Lancaster, the Wellington, whatever it was. We got on fine. I remember one occasion when we were doing a long ten hour cross country in a Wellington from Upper Heyford and the weather was filthy. It was nothing like what had been forecast. I remember half way through the trip, about four or five hours I said to them on the intercom chaps you might be interested to know that we should be turning from Carlisle onto another heading but I said I can’t tell you why but right now we’re over Bristol. You could hear a penny drop in all the ears. ‘What’s Jim talking about?’ I said, ‘The weather forecast was rubbish. I now want Tex to give me a QDM for Upper Heyford and we’re going to fly back to base. We’re going to forget the rest of the trip because the weather is so bad and the winds are so hard to find that that’s the only thing we can do.’ I think my crew discovered that they had a navigator who was honest and was telling them what the truth of the matter was. A lot of other aircraft that night would have ended up in being diverted, got, they’d got just as lost as we were. This sort of thing used to happen but I think that that crew as a Wellington crew decided that Jim Wright was the man that they wanted to stay with and that’s why later on in life when we were a Lancaster crew they decided that if Jim Wright was needing hospital treatment but if it was possible they would wait for him to come back. Being what happened. Not every navigator was as lucky as that. I was lucky. And in the end so were they. We finished. We managed to finish. We lost a few of ours but you see navigation to me was a puzzle like a crossword puzzle. You had the clues but you needed to make use of everything you could to solve problems and that’s what navigation was. I also remember one occasion when we went to Nuremberg. Now, Nuremberg is famous for being one operation in which we lost a hundred aircraft and the reason for it was straightforward. The Jetstream that people talk about in the weather forecast today as a casual thing that means something and they explain the weather forecast, tries to explain what a Jetstream is but in 1943/44 no one had heard about a Jetstream. They didn’t know what it was. But as a wind finder on 630 squadron when we went to Nuremberg my job was to find the winds and send them back through the wireless operator to Group so that they could marshal the latest thing that they’d found Instead of guessing what the winds were they would find what the real winds were and I was finding winds at one stage that I couldn’t believe but I had enough faith in my ability to say to my wireless operator, ‘I know that these are astonishing winds. Don’t be surprised but they’re right.’ The winds were from the northeast at about a hundred and forty five knots at twenty thousand feet and I sent these winds back and the boys back at base and at Group, the weather chaps, they looked at all the winds that were coming. Now, half of the wind finders, these are all specially chosen navigators would look at the winds they were finding and said, ‘I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. I’ll halve it. I’ll go as far as eighty.’ They didn’t have enough courage to tell the truth but we lost a hundred aeroplanes. Quite often the four engine ones because at that time most of the guys were in four engined guys, Halifax’s. I think we’d already thrown away the Stirlings so all, all four engined guys on Nuremberg were in the same boat. When the winds were sorted out at base and they sent back a revised lot of winds they were nowhere near the real ones and so not only did the searchlights, the ackack and the night fighters do their normal thirty or forty aircraft shot down but the other sixty aircraft found that because they’d run out of fuel they ditched in the North Sea, they ditched in the Baltic, they ditched everywhere. Quite often these were the people whose names ended up on Runnymede Memorial, missing, but their aircraft were never heard of again. Navigation was so important and the scientists did their best but the German scientists were also very clever. So I’m afraid quite often the Germans made use of the navigational equipment that we did have and they took it. They found out how it worked and they used it to their advantage to warn their night fighters. So that some of the equipment that we thought were being useful to RAF bombers turned out in fact to be more useful to the enemy. They used to track, using our equipment in our aircraft, so that their night fighters could latch on to us. We didn’t know about that at the time and I don’t think Butch Harris was initially aware about it but when he did find out he had to do some serious thinking. How much risk can you take with your bomber force? It was a very difficult world. The men who flew in bombers in Bomber Command trusted Bomber Harris. They knew he had a difficult job to do. They knew that their chances of survival were less than one in two. They knew that. But they also knew that if you had to win the war you had to do it. You had to do what he wanted to do and I don’t remember anyone in any of the squadrons I flew with who argued with Bomber Harris. They knew. They knew that the only way to win was to win the war. It was them or us. It was all out war. Anyway, that was the end of my operational flying on three squadrons and when it was over and the adjutant said, ‘You’re finished.’ He sent me to a place called Brackla in Scotland and I was there with Paddy the rear gunner. It was the Redistributional Resettlement Unit. Ken Ames was sent to be an instructor on a Lancaster Finishing School at Wickenby. Tom, the bomb aimer ended up at, on the ground but commissioned and quite happy and he survived the war. Paddy ended up commissioned as a gunner and went to the Far East and he survived that. He died later on, in Nottingham I think. I never saw him again. Tex, the wireless operator had been killed in ‘44. But I, I remember being in the 97 squadron adjutant’s office when he said I was finished with operational flying and there was a little card on his desk and it said if you are tired and would like a rest why don’t you come and have a week or ten days in a [Lastrian?] house in Scotland. It’s peaceful and it’s quiet. And I made a note of the telephone number [Talland 35?]. Miles from anywhere, he said. And I said to the adjutant, ‘How do you think this place is?’ ‘Don’t know.’ he said. ‘All the information I’ve got’s on the card. It’s for chaps who need a rest from operations.’ And I remember looking up this man. He was a retired air commodore and I said, ‘I’ve just been told that I’m finished with operational flying.’ ‘Oh well done,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of getting married.’ ‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Come back and talk to me when you’ve made the arrangements. You can have the honeymoon up there.’ ‘Good thinking,’ I said. So I talked to my wife about it about this. I talked to her before she were married. And we agreed. Family friends said, ‘But Jim, Aberdeenshire is a hell of a long way away from Whitley Bay which is because your wife’s in a V1, V2 area she can’t get married down there. You’re going to have to get married in Whitley Bay. And when you get married by the time it’s all over you won’t be able to get to [?]. So, we happen to know of a little hotel in Edinburgh that we met years ago and I’m sure you’ll be alright there for your first night and then you could carry on to Aberdeenshire afterwards for your honeymoon.’ And that’s what we did. That’s what we did. Later on I met up with Ken Ames and his wife after the war and we had a holiday together up there. The four of us. The war was over and poor Ken he’d married three times in the end and he died at the age of fifty five. Fifty five. I’m ninety, nearly ninety three now. What a waste. He was a nice man. Eight years later I’d lost touch with him completely. I’d finished my, my war, I’d finished my post-war service and I was interested in a campaign medal for Bomber Command. And in 2008 the Editor of the Sunday Express was running a series of articles about Bomber Command and he called them heroes. And he got ten thousand letters from people into his office as Editor saying, ‘We agree with you.’ And he sent this parcels of letters and things to 10 Downing Street, to Gordon Brown, on the 2nd of July 2008. They took photographs of people. I remember having my own photograph taken next to the policeman at Number 10. I’d never been anywhere near Downing Street. I didn’t know anything about it but I went to attend this petition. And there were, there was another Bomber Command man there who had been a prisoner of war in Stalag III. The one where fifty chaps had been shot. He was interested in a campaign medal as well. I wonder what happened to him. I’ve no idea. But some of the other people who were photographed there as a party not only the, Townsend, I think the name of the editor was but there were some members of parliament particularly a member of parliament who has just left us. Austin. Austin - I can’t remember his name. Anyway, this particular MP, his name will come to me, on the 13th of November 2007 before the petition, Mitchell, Austin Mitchell, that was his name, he was the MP for North Grimsby I think it was and he with a friend of mine Douglas Hudson DFC had done a programme on the Look North programme I remember in which they had been advocating the award of a campaign medal for Bomber Command. Doug Hudson had been a, had been a prisoner of war in Africa. His pilot had been shot down on the beaches heading for Malta I think in a Blenheim and he’d been captured by, I think, the Vichy French and put in to a prisoner of war camp somewhere in [Libya?] or somewhere like that. And they had been rescued when they had, when the Americans invaded and he’d been repatriated. This is Douglas Hurd and he’d done a conversion back on to navigation and he’d been serving with a Lancaster squadron and he had said to all the members of his Lancaster crew he said, ‘Now, look. I don’t intend to become another prisoner of war in Germany. I’ve had enough. So my position is quite clear.’ Anyway, he survived the tour and he wrote a book and he called it, “A Navigator’s Story: There and Back Again.” And he contacted, he lived somewhere near Lincoln, on the outskirts of Lincoln with his family, and he met Austin Mitchell and he persuaded him to do this Look North programme looking for a campaign medal. He died of course. His wife died first. I still, I’m still in touch with his daughter who still lives there and I keep her in touch with my puny efforts to get a campaign medal. This girl, Yvonne, Yvonne [Puncher?] married another navigator but a Canberra navigator after the war and they lived just around the corner from where Douglas and his wife lived. And she joined the air force to become an air traffic control officer and that’s where we, we joined up again in a different way and I was able to talk to her about life in the air traffic control world.
SB: What did you do after you left the air force?
JW: I’m sorry?
SB: What did you do after you left the air force?
Well that’s a very interesting story because after I went to the resettlement unit at Brackla with Paddy he went off to the Tiger Force and they said, ‘Now Jim. What are we going to do with you? You’ve done a double tour. You deserve a rest. Would you like to be RTO at Euston Station?’ And I said, ‘What does that mean? What’s RTO?’ ‘Rail Travel Officer,’ they said. ‘What did he do?’ ‘Ah well you see it’s nothing to do with flying. I’m afraid you’re now a flight lieutenant and as such you can do a lot of work. You might be very helpful as an RTO because an RTO at Euston station is a busy job you know and we need people with wartime experience used to handling men, army, navy, air force and we move them around in hundreds every day of the week. Moving them from this camp to that camp and so.’ And I said, ‘Well ok. It sound a little bit boring but, and I don’t really like London as a place to live. What else can you think of?’ ‘Well,’ they said, ‘What about a job with BOAC?’ And I said, ‘What is BOAC?’ ‘British Overseas Airways Corporation.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Civil flying?’ ‘Yes, that’s right.’ They said. ‘I’ll buy that one,’ I said. ‘I’ll try that. Can’t do any harm.’ ‘You’re on,’ he said. ‘We’ll send you warrants and things like that to Bristol and you can talk to the people down there’. Ostensibly of course it was to fly so I said, ‘Yeah, but civil flying.’ ‘That’s right,’ they said. ‘It won’t be in a war zone.’ So, we got married and we went to, it was nearly Christmas time I remember and I think by the time I got down to Bristol to make an appointment they said, ‘Jim, we would be delighted for you to fly but we’re snowed under with navigators. What we really want in BOAC at the moment are ground operations officers to make the whole system work better.’ ‘Ok,’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know much about it but where would it be?’ ‘Ah well we’d like you to go Hurn, near Bournemouth.’ Now, an operations officer down there would handle Dakotas, Lancastrians and things like that and it’s an important job.’ So I said, ‘Ok. My flying days are over, I’m married. I’m free and I survived and the war’s still on. I’ll do it.’ So I told my wife on our honeymoon. I said, ‘I’m not going to fly anymore. I’m going to be an operations officer.’ ‘Oh, well Bournemouth sounds very interesting,’ she said. So I stayed for another eighteen months at Hurn doing this operation officer’s job and of course the Royal Air Force were still paying me. I was still in flight lieutenant’s uniform and I could wear a flight lieutenant’s uniform any time I liked but during the day BOAC would give me an operations officer uniform. It was a different kind of uniform. But it was quite interesting work and I found I met a lot of interesting people. I met a lot of ex Bomber Command people who were also seconded. The war was still on but they were seconded to BOAC to help them fly Lancastrians because they were familiar with the Lancaster and a lot of the people that I used to work with as an operations officer would be flying Dakotas. Now they were just the same as the military Charlie 47 that a lot of our people flew during the war on Transport Command. And very interesting, I used to meet, I used to meet the skippers and I met people like O. P. Jones at Hurn. He was a very well-known civil aviation pilot. [? ] And of course the same station manager for BOAC in Bournemouth was also responsible for the flying boat operation at Poole Harbour, just down the road from the other side from the land airfield at Hurn to the seaplane base at Poole. It was all very interesting stuff and whilst the war was still on. But in nineteen forty, when would it be, I couldn’t get demobbed until October ‘46 and sometime in early ‘46 whilst I was still an operations officer Mr Horton, I remember his name, the station manager, he came and he said, ‘Jim I know you’re in the air force but,’ he said, ‘But I’m about to become station manager in London for BOAC because we’re opening up at Heathrow.’ And I said, ‘Fine.’ He said, ‘Mr Carter,’ I think that was his name, who was a senior operations man at Hurn, ‘Is nearly at retirement age and he doesn’t want to go to Heathrow. Would you like the job of station operations officer at Heathrow?’ I said, ‘Yes. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m quite happy. It’s a challenge. I’d like to do it.’, ‘Ok,’ he says, ‘So, it means living a bit rough for a while because we’ve got a house at the end of the runway and we’ve got to literally build SECO huts alongside the A4 road, the Bath Road. We’ve got to do all this sort of stuff and it takes time to organise it. It will be tough for a time.’ I said, ‘Fine. I’m quite happy to do that.’ So I became the station operations officer for London Airport for BOAC but they had Pan America and they had [Lufthansa] they had other people but as far as BOAC were concerned they wanted me to do this job. He said, Mr Horton says, ‘Incidentally, we also would also like you to do an air traffic control course. I know it’s a joint military civil service job at Watchfield.’ I said, ‘Fine. I don’t mind doing that and I’ll meet lots of interesting people there.’ So I went to Watchfield and I did the course and I passed it and I went back to Heathrow and then I took some of my other operations officers and sent them off to do air traffic control officer’s job as well. There was meaning for this of course because when the war ended in ’45, on May, on May the 8th the civil flying business took off in a big way. A lot of the seconded RAF officers both flying and ground would carry on doing civil contracts with BOAC and I was one of them. I was demobbed in October ‘46 and on the 20th of October I went to Gambia in British West Africa as an operations officer but this time I think they’d regraded me as an operations officer grade one. It was a better kind of job and paid a bit better than the routine BOAC operations officer grade 2 did. Anyway, my wife and I were quite happy and she, by this time was living with her parents in Ilford. The war was over. We were married. We had no children. She was looking forward to being a wife overseas and eventually after six months she followed me out to Bathurst and we lived in married quarters there. Lived in nissen huts accommodation but Fujara was the place where we lived and worked and I used to operate by transport by car to the airfield at [Yangden?], would go down to the flying boat base in Bathurst. That became Banthul. I think B A N T H U L, was the new name that they invented for Bathurst. Now, there had been Royal Air Force during the war at Bathurst at [Yangden?] and the flying boat base at Bathurst. They had used air sea rescue and things like that but all the people that were wartime at Bathurst and similar places overseas had to be brought back for demob and that’s where the air traffic control came in because the ministry of civil aviation were quite interested to get BOAC to organise this on their behalf because they wanted the routes to be kept up without, without halt whilst the transfer from wartime to civil took place. I quite enjoyed doing the job in Gambia. I quite enjoyed it but whilst we were there BOAC contacted all the air traffic control officers they had overseas and they said, ‘Would you like to become a flight operations officer? If you do and if you have the qualification and if you are willing we will train you at Aldermaston in England for three months course and you will cease to be operations officer grade 1 and if you succeed as part of the course you will be posted as flight operations officers.’ Now they don’t wear uniform. It’s not a uniform job. It was a very important job because you’d got to do all the flight planning for the civil airliners at Heathrow, at Prestwick and all these places and you’re going to save time, effort and money by shift working, in your case at Prestwick because in 19, what would it be? 1946 we left, ’48, December we came back. In ’49. In ‘49 I became a flight operations officer working for BOAC as a civilian. Nothing to do with the air force. I worked at er, as a flight operations officer for BOAC at Prestwick and I was posted then from Prestwick to Heathrow. But in September ’50, in September ’50, I remember very well all the flight operations officers throughout BOAC would become redundant and they had three months’ pay which lasted until December of that year. And the reason for it was that in the previous financial year in spring of ‘50 BOAC made an eight million pound loss which upset them. And they found that the new chairman, who was a city man, didn’t know anything about flying and he said to his board of directors, ‘Right. I’m your new boss. Tell me what the facts are. I suppose we need air crew. We couldn’t fly without them.’ ‘That’s right,’ they said. ‘And they’re very expensive.’ ‘Ok,’ he said, ‘Well, who are the next expensive people?’ ‘Well, we think the flight operations officers are.’ ‘Tell me what they do,’ he said. ‘Oh the flight operations officers throughout the world take the incoming air crew and in advance they do meteorological analysis of the future flights and when the incoming crew arrive they can just have a meal, accept what the flight operations officers has decided is the best time track for the next stage. Sign and off they go.’ ‘I see,’ said the new chairman. ‘Well, the answer simply, really to save money is to stop paying all these flight operations officers and let the air crew do their own flight planning. There’s a captain, a navigator a wireless operator why can’t they do it themselves. They’re qualified to do it.’
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 James Wright
Creator
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Sheila Bibb
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-08
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AWrightJDFC150608
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Description
An account of the resource
James Wright was born in Nottinghamshire and worked as a civil servant before he joined the Air Force. After training in Canada he flew on operations as a navigator with 61, 97 and 630 Squadrons. He recalls the occasion when Eastbourne Railway Station was attacked by Me 109s. He discusses the difficulties and importance of navigation by describing events at Nuremberg. After the war he became a flight operations manager at Heathrow and in Gambia an air traffic controller.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Germany
Great Britain
England--Eastbourne (East Sussex)
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Shropshire
Germany--Nuremberg
Heathrow Airport (London, England)
England--Sussex
Temporal Coverage
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1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
Format
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02:15:12 audio recording
61 Squadron
630 Squadron
97 Squadron
Absent Without Leave
aircrew
animal
bombing
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
crewing up
final resting place
ground personnel
Lancaster
Me 109
medical officer
memorial
military discipline
military living conditions
military service conditions
navigator
Pathfinders
RAF Heaton Park
RAF Upper Heyford
strafing
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/624/8894/APearsonL150531.1.mp3
2e81594e171226151401afeeccd944e1
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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Pearson, Leslie Robert
L R Pearson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Pearson, LP
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. An oral history interview with Leslie Pearson (d. 2018, 1397838 Royal Air Force), a photograph and service material. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 153 Squadron from RAF Scampton.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Leslie Pearson and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-05-31
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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SB: This is Shelia Bibb, interviewing Les Pearson on the thirtieth of May 2015 at his home at Lowestoft. Les –
LP: Yep.
SB: Before we start talking too much about this, can you give me a little bit of background about yourself. Where you were born, something about your family?
LP: Yes, I was an only child, I was born in East London, I have, my father was a chief shaftsman [?] master engineer. I went to Westham Grammar School, I started an apprenticeship in general mechanical engineering and then I joined the Air Force. This will be what, about 1942 when I joined them, having been through the London bombing and getting some sort of feeling about wars [emphasis] and things in general, and felt that I had to do something about it.
SB: Okay, so, when you decided to join, did you go straight to the Air Force?
LP: Oh yes, yes.
SB: Okay.
LP: Yes, I, as I say, I started an apprenticeship as a general mechanical engineer and as such I was in a reserved occupation. After the three years was up, because they concentrated at wartime, I joined the Air Force in London. I went along and joined in London, and volunteered for aircrew [emphasis], ‘cause that was the [laughs] only branch that would accept me as a reserved occupation.
SB: So where did you report?
LP: Oh my lord [pause]. I don’t, do you know I don’t really remember the name and address of where I went. It was head, sort of a head office in London, a recruit, a definite recruiting centre in London. I don’t recall [laughs] its address as such though, don’t recall it.
SB: Where did they send you?
LP: Initially to St John’s Wood, which was Air ACRC, Air Crew Receiving Centre, and they sort of prepared us for life in the Air Force. We had loads of injections and things like that, but basically they set us up, started our life in the Air Force.
SB: And what sort of training did you get?
LP: First class [laughs]. Let’s try and think this one through [pause]. I think the first one I can recall was being sent to Ludlow [emphasis], on a general toughening up course, sorting out and, you know, yes from Ludlow that was the start, right, yep.
SB: And how long did your training last?
LP: The – oh the whole training was over a year [emphasis]. I’m trying, I’m trying, you know, I’m trying to recall the early parts of this. Erm, we did, what was it, a trip to Brough in East Yorkshire on Tiger Moths, where we were given a day to learn to fly, and those of us who qualified managed to get solo in a day. We then went on to ITW, Initial Training Wing, did mine at Scarborough, which, I’m having to rack my brains on this one a little bit, could of done with notice I bet [SB laughs] but there you are, from ITW, that’s right yes, we went on a holding course in Manchester, and then from Manchester we went to Canada, Canada where we carried on with the pilots course which I’d joined in on. We were flying Cornells there, and then the information came back that there was a surplus [emphasis] of pilots, that the system was working too well [emphasis], so quickly we were [unclear] at something else and we went “ooh, let’s go as a bomb aimer, that’s as good as anything.” Did the bomb aimer’s course no trouble at all. Back to the UK. They had us at, just outside Ludlow, I think it was Clanberick [?] where there were, there was an aerodrome there, and they put us there and they said “well look, you’re a mixed bag but you’ve done an awful lot of the training, we’re going to finish off your navigation course,” which they duly completed. From there, now then, I can’t recall the actual or can’t remember [emphasis] the names of the actual stations, but went initially to I think it was an AFU, Advanced Flying Unit, where we were crewed up. The system there was that the pilot had a wander round and looked at various people and said “you look alright, come and join my crew.” It was very informal, very casual but it worked very [emphasis] well. As a crew we then went on to operational training – I think I skipped something there but it doesn’t really matter. Operational training unit, initially on Wellingtons and then on I think it was Stirlings, and finally on Lancasters. At this stage we were doing various trips – it was an operational training unit as such and we were expected to do various operational training exercises [emphasis] which we did. Eventually we went on to RAF Scampton to 153, where we joined 153 Squadron, which was operational, fully [emphasis] operational. At the end of the war we were then posted to Special Duties. They decided that the squadron as such was of a high standard and we were given the flying test trials on H2S mark four. They gave us six months to do it in and that was done at twenty-thousand feet. Along the line, half way through this exercise, 153 Squadron was disbanded [emphasis] and so they kept us together and transferred us over to Binbrook to do, to be attached [emphasis] to 12 Squadron. I stayed with 12 Squadron right until the end, we finished the exercise we were on there, that was a success and then we would do various bits and pieces afterwards. They didn’t know what to do with us really, disposing of certain bombs out into the North Sea and that sort of nature. I think that just about sums up my life in the Air Force. There’s probably quite a few bits missing but [laughs] I don’t recall [emphasis] it all at this stages now.
SB: Okay let’s –
LP: It was a long time ago.
SB: It was indeed and that was a very good overview. Can we now go back to the war itself, and can you tell me a little bit about your experiences there, some of the operations you took part in?
LP: Mm, they weren’t very exciting really. It was just a job –
SB: Mhm.
LP: We were, I wouldn’t know where to start – whether we were going to Keele and bombing a battleship there, went to Berchtesgaden, which was Hitler’s home, bombing that one, or a little place called Paulson [?] which made ball bearings. That I suppose would sum it up generally, yes, yeah, yeah.
SB: So you can you remember how many operations you flew?
LP: Oh yes. We did six out of Scampton, yes. There was another thirteen variables on training command where they prepared us for full operation duty.
SB: So, can you tell me a little bit about that it was like when you were on one of these operations? What was it like beforehand, during the flight? How did you feel?
LP: To start off with, we were a crew, that was the whole set up of the Air Force, that we went around in crews [emphasis]. We worked together, we played together and we had confidence in each other. We knew exactly [emphasis] what we were doing and if somebody wasn’t well or up to it we knew exactly and that was taken care of. Once we knew we were on operations that day, then everything else stood down and we got prepared for it. There was the briefing, preparation, navigation side of it was drawing up the various routes and things, the bombing side of it was checking the bomb load at the bombers, that the ground staff, who we had every confidence in incidentally, had done a good job, it was a matter of preparations for the actual operation itself. We had, I think it was a late flying supper, that’s a bit hairy that one, I’m sure we had something to eat [emphasis] before we went. Once we were on route well that was it. Everybody had got a job to do. We worked as a team [emphasis] once again, we had a straight navigator in the crew as well as myself, and I assisted him. I spent my time out in the nose map reading, highlighting various pieces, information back to the navigator. That more or less sums up the operation. I mean once we were on target I took over control of the plane, gave instructions to the pilot, “left-left, right-right steady, hold it, bomb’s gone. That’s it, let’s go home.” And the navigator would take over, give the pilot the course to fly and off we went. It – we were pretty well occupied. Your Lancaster was a cold [emphasis] aeroplane, a noisy [emphasis] aeroplane, but one we had every confidence in, so you know. It was just a job and we just did it [emphasis], you know.
SB: Mm.
LP: When we got back, we landed, debriefing, and then after debriefing there was night flying supper, usually eggs and bacon and things like that, and off we went.
SB: As a bomb aimer did you need any particular preparation before you went on one of these?
LP: The only preparation I would have would be to check the bomb load, which was the ground crew had attached to the aeroplane, that it was the correct load, because weight was of paramount importance, for the engineers to be able to maintain the aircraft to its height and it wouldn’t run out of petrol and things like that.
SB: Yep. So did you ever have any problems with the Germans?
LP: No, no.
SB: No, clean run.
LP: No, everything was, as far as we were concerned went according to plan. The loading was correct, the aircraft was fully serviceable and that was it. It got a, once we were over Germany it got a bit hectic from time to time, but we took various evasive action [emphasis] and things of that nature and we got there and back alright.
SB: Good. So you had those operational runs during the war. Once the war was over I gather you stayed on –
LP: Oh yes.
SB: Still doing other tasks.
LP: Yes.
SB: When did you finally come out of the Air Force?
LP: E [pause] forty-six, forty-six, yeah –
SB: Okay.
LP: Forty-six yeah, yep. Yep.
SB: Did you miss it?
LP: Initially yes [emphasis], because it was a family. As I said, you live together, you play together, that was it, your life was as a crew [emphasis], and you each had got every confidence in the other. So yes, initially I did miss it, yes.
SB: Okay. Did you keep in touch with these members of your family? [Laughs]
LP: Yes. I forget, what was the date of the first one, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-six, year. 1946 we had a sort of farewell party in Grimsby and we decided that it was all over and we got to make a fresh start, and we’d met once a year ever since. Last one was what, about a fortnight ago.
SB: And are you all still there [emphasis]?
LP: Yes [emphasis], yes. There was only a handful of us left fully active, one, two, three, I can give you four names of them that are fully active, the rest have fallen, either fallen by the wayside, or they’re not very well.
SB: Mm. Good record though [both laugh]. Okay so, let’s get back to thinking about your experiences. Would you change anything?
LP: I don’t think [emphasis] so. As far as we were concerned it was a success definitely.
SB: Hmm.
LP: The initial training scheme PNB, that was pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, was a hundred-and-one success. It was Canada, America, Africa, I think they were the main three areas where trainee, cadet aircrew were sent to learn to either fly or navigate or bomb. That was the pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, PNB system. That was a hundred – that worked almost too well. As I say, there was a, at one stage there was a success, an excess of pilots.
SB: Okay. So are there any other personal details, things that you were involved in?
LP: [Pause] not that I can think of.
SB: Set any records at all?
LP: We broke the station height record with a Wellington when we were on training command. We got a bit high there, I think we got up to about twenty-six-thousand feet and everything froze up [SB laughs], but apart from that [laughs] not really. We worked hard, we played hard. We got attacked a couple of time whilst on ops. But, took various evasive actions, but the gunners worked more than well but. No, no. I wouldn’t say much about it really.
SB: Okay. Now you mentioned Berchtesgaden –
LP: Yep.
SB: Which is an interesting target. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
LP: That was a long one. Oh lord, from memory I think it took about fourteen hours. I think we had – the bomb load had to be reduced slightly to account for excess fluid, petrol to normal. We went out with pathfinder. As you know, in the Air Force we all flew in what was known as a gaggle [emphasis]. In other words we all [emphasis] made our own [emphasis] way there, regardless of who was flying alongside you. The Americans flew in formation with a master navigator, master this, master that, and they just kept in formation. We didn’t, we flew individually [emphasis]. We were, actually we were running parallel to pathfinder. They were about ten miles off track, but still parallel to us. Consequently, there was a bit of confusion on the target and we went round again so that we had the correct heading to bomb on. Think that was about the only confusion there, but it all, it sorted itself out. We all knew exactly [emphasis] what to do, we did it. Coming back [emphasis] we were well on the way home by this time, and I said to the skipper, “can I give Dave a break?” and he said “yes of course.” Dave being our rear gunner who’d been sat out in the turret, miles from anybody for quite a few hours, so we brought him back to life [SB laughs] and I sat out in the turret for a couple of hours to see he we was alright until we were nearly home, and we all resumed normal flying positions. We landed safely and that was it.
SB: So you accomplished it alright?
LP: Oh yeah. Yes, yeah.
SB: Good, okay. Were you married when you joined up?
LP: Not in the Air Force no.
SB: Right.
LP: That was just one thing, my wife – we were associates together but not married, and the thought was “we don’t get married until the war’s over because it would be wrong.”
SB: Mhm.
LP: Really, so. When the war finished, well then we were able to get married, and we were living out in the village of Binbrook. We had a little cottage there, and we lived in Binbrook [emphasis].
SB: And during the war, where was your wife to be? Was she –
LP: Ah.
SB: In London, or?
LP: She was in East [emphasis] London yes, Plaistow again –
SB: Mhm.
LP: And they were bombed, and they lost their house and everything that went with it. It’s remotely [emphasis] possible that I helped to evacuate them, because at that stage I was working with the local ARP, air raid precaution thing, and I was one of the few people who could drive [emphasis] and we, we was just evacuating people out, driving the three tonne [unclear] flat-packed truck of all things [SB laughs]. Just pile these people onboard and got them, got them out of London, into Epping Forest. So it’s possible [emphasis], it’s not, we can never prove this one that I actually evacuated my wife and her family –
SB: Mhm.
LP: From Plaistow, but well they lost everything.
SB: Hmm. Okay, so let’s move onto after the war –
LP: Mhm.
SB: For a little while. You left the RAF in forty-six –
LP: Mhm.
SB: What did you do at that point?
LP: Purely as a stop cap [?], we were living down in the village and we were thinking “oh, what do we do now?” I didn’t really [emphasis] want to go back into London and mechanical engineering, so we ran the village taxi [emphasis]. The garage had got a licence for a taxi and I, initially I worked with him, and after about a year or so, I bought the licence off him and I ran the thing, I [unclear] on my own. My wife was assistant, she took all the phone calls, and that was our life.
SB: Do you think you would have done something like that if you hadn’t had the RAF experience?
LP: Ooh no [emphasis], no. I never even thought about that. This was purely an extension of our life in the Air Force, because by this time, living out in the village, my wife had got to know a load of my colleagues in the Air Force, we were still one big family [emphasis] and the silly sort of thing which would happen, was when they were on a PT run or something like that, they would run down into the village, through the back door of our house [laughs] and sit in there and say “can you make us a cup of tea?” Or “can you boil us an egg?” It was part of our life extended. Is that – there you go.
SB: Do you think the war impacted your life in any other way?
LP: [Deep breath followed by long pause.] That’s a, that’s a difficult question to answer. I just took life as it was [emphasis] in those days. I mean, I hadn’t gone into life with any fixed ideas of what I wanted to do [emphasis], where I wanted to go, be [pause]. I think the Royal Air Force completed my education [emphasis], no doubts on that. But other than that there’s not a lot I can say in that respect I don’t – no, ‘cause I never really thought about it.
SB: Okay. I’m now going to ask another question, which I don’t know what it means, but too many carrots.
LP: [Laughs.] Oh dear me [SB laughs]. How right you are there [laughs], yes. For many moons after leaving the Air Force, I couldn’t look a carrot in the eye [SB laughs]. It was purely a story which was put out to cover our radar system which were working very well and we didn’t want the Germans to know about it, so they said they said that they discovered that by feeding us up with an excess of carrots [emphasis], as such, it gave us extra eyesight [emphasis] which enabled us to see those [?] things which they couldn’t see. It was purely a story [laughs], it wasn’t fact. But as I say, we were dosed up with carrots left, right and centre, even though we didn’t believe it ourselves. But there you are.
SB: Right, let’s move back again to after the war. Are you the only two daughters?
LP: No –
Other: No there’s five of us.
LP: There were five children altogether.
SB: Mhm.
LP: We, when we were in Binbrook, my wife became pregnant there, and we thought “now, we’ve got to, we’re not going to live in a little village for the rest of our lives, we’ve got to do [emphasis] something,” you know. We had friends who were living down in Torquay at the time, and he, we made contact with them and he said “look, I can get hold of you a taxi licence down here to start with,” but he said “there’s bags of scope you can tow a caravan and things like that, bags of scope. Come down here and we’ll sort you out” which we did, and we developed quite a good caravan towing business [emphasis] believe it or not. I managed to get established with a company there who got the rights for just about every caravan manufacturer [laughs] in the world, and everything which was sold in Devon and Cornwall went through his books, and I was involved in [laughs] delivering an awful lot of these caravans. That took quite a few years that. His company changed hands and a company which had got offices, well offices, a garage and business in North London, they took over there, and after a time, I forget the number of years, wasn’t very long, a year or so, the London office contacted me and said “look, there’s a job for you here, we want someone as a garage manager, we’re doing car and caravan sales and maintenance and all the rest of it, you got all the appearance, all the qualifications, come up here and see what we can do,” which we did. So we sold up down in Devon, moved up to Waltham Cross [emphasis] in North London. [Pause] and –
SB: At what point did you come to Lowestoft?
LP: Sorry?
SB: What point did you come to Lowestoft?
LP: Oooh, now then, we stayed, worked at that garage, I think for about three years, could have been longer, time’s difficult to work, I’d have to research that now. During that time I learned to be a driving instructor as part of the set up of the garage, it was an asset to the garage, so I qualified as a driving instructor. Did that for a spell purely as a break, and then Rumbellows is a company you may have heard of, formally owned by Thornley Electrical [?] were just setting up a business, they got lots of people who were in debt to the Thorn Organisation, and they didn’t just want to close it down and just lose it, they took over the various businesses [?] and ran them, and I joined Rumbellows then, and I finished up as senior buyer for them, we got over five-hundred branches. We were the biggest company, business in the country and I actually took an early retirement from them. But this time we’d been down to the Isle of Wight a couple of times, really [emphasis] liked it down there and decided we were going to move down to the Isle of Wight while I was still young enough to do something about it. And we were negotiating to buy a bed and breakfast house [emphasis], quite a large house, with a couple of taxis and a bus, a minibus, so I took my PSP licence as a bus driver, and somebody had to, and we were on the points of moving down there when problems developed with the roof of the property. We couldn’t negotiate with the owner, he was adamant there was nothing wrong with the roof. Our surveyor had said “don’t touch it with a barge pole” [laughs] “you won’t get a mortgage or anything on it.” So we’d already sold our house in North London, so my wife’s sister was living here in Lowestoft, said “why don’t you come here, it’s a nice place to live and it’s cheap,” which we did.
SB: Hmm. So you certainly took off in a different direction after the war.
LP: Oh lord yes.
SB: Hmm.
LP: Yes.
SB: Yeah.
LP: Yes.
SB: Okay, so, I’d like to throw in a quick question to you two now, if I can. You’ve mentioned your association with 153 Squadron. Have you always been involved with your dad’s role in the war, or has it affected you –
Other 1:No –
Other 2: I think he’s always had acquaintances –
O1: Yeah –
O2: He’s always – his friends have been friends that you’ve had since you were in the RAF.
O1: Hmm. Always been aware of it.
O2: Hmm.
O1: It’s been something that has been a constant particularly with the –
LP It’s sort of –
O1: The annual reunion made it a –
LP: It gradually built up along the line, I mean, this has gone on for seventy years [laughs] now, which is a long time. Initially we used to meet up at the Grand Hotel in Lincoln, that went on. As time went by, I think it was with Bill, your husband, where it was a matter of getting somebody who would come up with me, and drive and things like that, I think that possibly started it.
O2: But you’ve never spoken of your emotions during the war, you’ve just seen it as a [emphasis] job, you went out and you did it and –
LP: Oh it was a job to do, I mean, we – don’t forget I was in London during the bombing, rescuing, or, not rescuing [emphasis], recovering my wife’s family and many [emphasis] other families, simply driving them out Epping Forest and getting them somewhere safe [emphasis]. I saw the damage, I remember one time I cycled from Eastham, East London where we living to Euston Road in North London to tell them that I couldn’t get into work today because the place had been bombed. I just thought I had to do [emphasis] something specific [emphasis], and although we were doing specialist work where we in the engineering side, we were on research of plastics and all that sort of thing, but I wanted to do something more. Hence basically I wanted to be a pilot [emphasis] and shoot them down. But it developed from I didn’t get into Fighter Command I got in Bomber Command instead, which I never regretted [emphasis], because that was a different life altogether.
SB: And did you feel better by doing [emphasis] something –
LP: Oh yes, yes. Yes I –
SB: How did you feel about the Germans?
LP: Quite bitter, because I saw the wanton [?] damage they did to London in the early stages, where there was no reason [emphasis] for what they bombed. It was just random bombing of London as such, and I think I got a bit cross over that, I didn’t like it.
SB: Hmm. [Pause.] Did you ever meet up with any of the flyers from the German [unclear]?
LP: Yes, oddly enough, yes. Many years ago when I was a member of the local Aircrew Association, with a colleague who lived just outside Norwich, we attended one meeting there, and a German pilot came and gave us a talk [emphasis]. He was welcomed, and we got on very [emphasis] well with him, because basically he was part of the family [emphasis]. We were just doing a job and that was it. It wasn’t, I don’t think there was anything personal about it whatsoever.
SB: Do you have any idea how your parents felt about you joining up?
LP: Oooh [pause]. I don’t think – well my mother was obviously very worried [emphasis] about it. My father accepted it, I think they just accepted it. Because it was the sort of thing that went on, families did that sort of in those days, it wasn’t pleasant [emphasis], they didn’t like [emphasis] it for one minute, but I think they accepted it.
SB: Had your father been in the First World War?
LP: No.
SB: No.
LP: No, he was, he was slightly disabled, and as such he wouldn’t have been in the service at all.
SB: Okay, so, any other thoughts at all about that period and how it might have affected your life later on?
LP: [Pause.] All I can think of is that it completed my education, gave me a different outlook on life, which initially might have been quite restricted [pause]. And I suppose really it gave me a wider outlook on life [emphasis], not just do one thing and that’s it, but try other things as well, you know.
SB: And you say you’ve just had your annual reunion?
LP: Yes, yes.
SB: Where was that one held?
LP: That was at the Bentley [emphasis] Hotel. Wonderful story there, we stayed at the Grand Hotel in Lincoln for many, many [emphasis] years, quick guess, fifty years, round figures. And we got to know the staff and the owners there, it, they became part of the personal family because it was Lincoln [emphasis] and they were used to aircrew, and eventually the Grand Hotel as such got involved with health and safety because they were two, originally two hotels side by side, adjoining, and they became one, but they were on slightly different levels, and, well it got involved and they decided that they, it couldn’t run as a hotel anymore and it would have cost too much to bring it up to the necessary standard. So they moved out to the Bentley, they moved out to, they had a place built at the Bentley just outside Lincoln, and we stayed with them. Because mainly the family connections, they’d known us for many years, it was our second home [emphasis] you know almost, to go back there every year, so. Yeah, we recently, couple of weeks ago we had a reunion where we went to the Bentley Hotel, we were due to go to RAF Conningsby on the Saturday morning but the Lancaster had a problem and she caught fire on the starboard outer, not it was port outer, but got home safely, but covered in foam, so it’s, so she’s not flying at the moment. So we had to quickly reassemble [?] what we were going to do, had a chat with the bus driver, who the coaches have always done us proud for many years, and we went to RAF Scampton [emphasis], to the museum where they welcomed us and people came in on days off because it was a Saturday [emphasis] and these places only run five day week now. And from there we went to Scampton Church and met up with the vicar, she was more than pleased to see us I think. We had an organ recital there by one of our members, because by this time we acquired, I think that’s the best way of putting it, lots of honorary members who were part of the family in other words, fathers and sons and daughters, as Valerie is to me, a member of the family. We got something like thirty odd people at the Scampton Church. We’d already been to RAF Scampton, to the museum as I said, yeah we had a dinner there at the pub in Scampton village and then our bus driver took us for a tour round Lincoln, showed us the site of the new Bomber Command Memorial, where it was to be built and all the rest of it, and also the Cathedral to see the grounds, which the people from Holland [emphasis] had set up to commemorate, commemorate Operation Manna, where there, all the flowers were there, that was very nice. Incidentally, that one, the Operation Manna, that was one of those trips that you did that you felt you’d achieved something [emphasis], when instead of dropping bombs and killing people, you dropped food and fed [emphasis] people. That felt good, that was an achievement definitely. Not a lot more I can say really, you need time to rehearse these things and look them all out.
SB: I think you’ve done fairly well so far.
O2: The Bentley Hotel still has the photos of the original 153 Squadron on display in one of their meeting rooms don’t they?
LP: Oh yeah, several bits and pieces, yeah.
SB: Well thank you very much, I’ll stop it at this point.
LP: Mhm.
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 Leslie Robert Pearson
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Sheila Bibb
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-05-31
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00:47:02 audio recording
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Sound
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APearsonL150531
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Pending review
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Germany
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
Germany--Berchtesgaden
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
Description
An account of the resource
Les Pearson was in reserved occupation as an apprentice in general mechanical engineering, but he volunteered as aircrew. He initially trained as a pilot but was remustered as a bomb aimer. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 153 Squadron from RAF Scampton. He describes the crewing up process, the preparations of the crew before an operation and his duties during the flight. He was posted to Special Duties after the war, and describes his family life after the war.
12 Squadron
153 Squadron
aircrew
bomb aimer
crewing up
Lancaster
military living conditions
RAF Binbrook
RAF Scampton
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/611/8880/PMonkR1501.2.jpg
413d4984e94782d3708a052b2b738bd0
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/611/8880/AMonkR150813.1.mp3
517e31f7bc3841949e046be8e43a1596
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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Monk, Roy
R Monk
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Monk, R
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Roy Monk (1923810, Royal Air Force). He served as a mechanic in Kenya during his national service in the 1950s.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SB: This is Sheila Bibb interviewing Roy Monk on the 13th August 2015 at his home in Dartford in Kent. Roy, could you start off by just telling me a little bit about your background? Where you were born.
RM: Yeah.
SB: Your family etcetera. And then how you came to get in to the RAF.
RM: I was born at Crayford which is the next one up to London. Come straight back to Dartford. I went to school at Dartford. Secondary Modern. And of course, part of my schooling was in air raid shelters because they were bombing us. Then, I wanted to go in the police force. I couldn’t go because of National Service so the police recommended I do a solicitor’s course. Or go on a solicitor’s office. Which I did but it was no good. I was going to and fro past the Air Ministry in lunch hour. Saw all these boy entrants and that working on aircraft. I thought, well that’d suit me. I don’t want to be a sailor and I don’t want to be a soldier. So I applied to join the boy entrants which I had problems with my mother because being an only child but eventually she gave in and I joined the boy entrants on my sixteenth birthday. At RAF Cosford. And then I did an eighteen months course as an engine mechanic with a rank ended up SAC. And then when we passed out after training I was posted to RAF Upwood near Peterborough. I was posted to aircraft servicing flight where we, I worked on propellers and bomb bay and then I worked on power plants. Building up the Merlin engines in to a power plant to fit to Lincolns. And then I got a posting to 214 Squadron. That was off to Kenya. We were bombing the Mau Mau terrorists in the Aberdares. So I was off to Kenya for — we had six months there. We had pretty bad accommodation. We were, we were living in a hangar and we had no hot water. No toilets. I mean we had to sort ourselves out which we — we got used to it in the end. And then we were continually bombing day and night the Aberdare Mountains. I went on two or three trips with them. And the squadron then was disbanding. Packing up. That was December ’54. So, we all went. Come back to Blighty. I got posted to 49 Squadron who had taken over 214s operations. Went back to Kenya and there was, I was dropping leaflets. Not bombs. And then they said I might have to go to Aden and I ended up in Aden. And not for long because I had an accident and I hurt my ankle like. I was in hospital there at Steamer Point and then I went back to Khormaksar and our CO there, I think we weren’t a squadron then. I think we were a flight. Twelve. Twelve something flight. He said you’d better go home in the next aircraft so I came home from Aden to Upwood in a Lincoln. And then most of us were hanging around. There were a lot of corporals there — which I was then. We was put on station flight. The communication aircraft. We had a Meteor, a Canberra. What else was it there? Two or three other little aircraft. Oxford I believe. And I was there till we got called — well, posted at various V Bomber stations. I got posted to Marham where I stayed. I went there in January ‘56 and I stayed on 214 the rest of my service where we did all the different trips. Well I did all detachments. My first detachment was Suez. 1956. We were bombing Egypt because Nasser had blocked, blocked the Suez Canal. We were in an airfield one minute and getting aboard a Mark 1 Shackleton to fly to Malta. But over Paris we got hit by lightning. A bad storm. And all of us were being sick and treading on each other. I think they poured us out. We had an emergency landing at Marseilles Airport and then we had to go on to [unclear] The [RFT?] staging post. Then the next morning we went down to Malta. That’s when they started bombing. Started bombing Egypt. And we came back. And my next — what was my next? Oh I went to Cyprus. I’d just got married. I got married and got sent to Cyprus on an exercise with the American 6th Fleet but there was a trouble brewing. A load of suspect aircraft had been blown up at Akrotiri. There wasn’t nothing at Akrotiri at that time. It was, it was bare. And four Valiants turned up out of the blue and we wondered what it was. And we had the exercises with the American 6th Fleet. An engine went down. We had to change an engine and when the pilot came out he came over to me and said, ‘Have you just changed this engine?’ I said, ‘Well I have, sir. Yes sir.’ He said, ‘Well get in. I’m a crew man missing. You’re coming with us.’ So, I did a tour of Cyprus in a V bomber. And when we came back they sent us home because of trouble. They expected something to be blown up. They did blow an aircraft up. I think it was a Canberra. But when we come home in say, ’58, we — some of us were picked to go to America with Strategic Air Command bombing competition in California. I, we were, separated from the rest of Marham. A little detachment in the far corner of Marham. And one day I was lucky because I was de-fueling one of the Valiants and when you defuel you don’t have the power cables, or power on. You just, we had the cables out over the undercarriage. Well, I was going to and fro from the cockpit. It was a stormy day. Thunder and lightning and things like that and bits of pieces of rain and things. And I heard an almighty bang as I came out the cockpit of this aircraft and I smelled dodgem cars. And when I looked what had happened the lightning had hit the tail plane of the Valiant which was thirty odd foot up, come down through the aircraft, through the fuselage, it had shot across the undercarriage where we had our cables and it split the cables right open. Right the way down to the generating set. Now, if we’d have been refuelling we would have had power on and it would have blown the aircraft up. Because we heard screaming and shouting — I went around the other side of the aircraft. There was this poor policeman. He’d got studs in his boots. It’d gone through his feet. Yeah. And it didn’t help. He didn’t like that very much. And then we went off to America. A mixture of us. Detached. And I think we did about — we were up against B52s. We got about seventh I think. We didn’t do too bad. It was quite [pause] and the accommodation there was rough. Wooden shacks it was. And the toilet was just six toilets in one room. You sat knee to knee. I thought we were going to have luxury. Luxury accommodation in America, hooray but we didn’t. We got one of the worst accommodations I think because they said if the place had caught fire it would have been burned down in a couple of minutes. And the tumbleweed things were balling up outside the door [laughs] no. And then we came back. And what was my next one? Oh ‘59. ‘59 was the only time I didn’t go abroad. And that was a bit of a disaster ‘59 was. The aircraft that I’d been working on quite a lot, XTH69, which I went flying with in Cyprus — I was the engineering NCO on a primary two inspection prior to flight. Engine runs. Passed the aeroplane to fly engine wise. I got woke up in the morning. Said a crash had killed everybody. Oh, that was terrible ‘cause I thought we had National Servicemen that weren’t very keen and they should never have been put on aircraft I don’t think. They say bring National Service back but on a limited basis I always thought. Well it crashed. We’d had a tailplane actuator in the, in the climb. We had one that couldn’t get out the climb ‘cause balance all electric. All electric motors and this one was taking off non-stop from Marham to Nairobi. Flight refuelling over, over the Med and I think one of the other stations down — Khartoum or something like that and what had happened the tailplane actuator decided to go in to a dive. Sent it straight in to the ground and killed all. Our best crew chief was killed. Bob Shaw. Lovely man. But it was tailplane actuator that and ’60, my last trip, I was, I went out with two Valiants to Karachi. Mauripur. Pakistan Air Force. And we sent a Valiant from Marham to Singapore in fifteen hours. And that was just about it. I came out then. I had — because and I wanted a married quarter and I couldn’t get one. I got a council house instead. So that’s why I came out the air force. January ‘61.
SB: Ok. That’s a very good summary of your service.
RM: Yeah. It’s all in there actually.
SB: Yeah, and I will have a look through that chapter again in a minute.
RM: I’ve got stacks of photographs here.
SB: Can I ask you a few questions now about some other aspects? When you joined up the war itself was over but many of the people you were working with had seen active duty. Can you remember any of them? Any of their experiences.
RM: I remember one crew chief, Jack Prior. He was a Japanese prisoner of war and he’d had his shin all bashed with a rifle butt. And he was a most, he hated the Japs. He reckoned every Japanese should have been killed at birth. He really was — well as I say what he’d been treated. That’s one of the vivid ones I remember. He was a lovely man but he was a bit around the bend. He had big bushy eyebrows I remember. But he was a little bit mental. To be a crew chief on a Valiant [laughs] I thought that was a bit much. He did his job. No problems. Anybody else that I remember? Not really. I can’t remember.
SB: Ok. If you think of them while we’re talking —
RM: Yeah. Yeah.
SB: Let me know.
RM: No I —
SB: How did the war and the things you had heard about as a child affect your decision to join?
RM: Well it didn’t. Not really. I said, only because I wanted to go in the police force and I was sent to, went to a solicitors office in London and I was going to and forth past the Air Ministry every day and looking at the boy entrants in these — I knew I had to do two years in the forces. And I never really dreamed about going in the forces. Being a serviceman. And then I thought when I saw these boy entrants I thought, I thought well if I’ve got to go in the army or the navy I need to learn a trade. So, I thought, well the air force looks good. Engines. Become an engine fitter and that would help me in Civvy Street. ‘Cause, boy — when we finished the training or started the training, you could either go liquid cooled engines which was a Merlin, Hercules which was the air, big air cooled engine, or you could go jets. But I thought, well, you know, I think liquid cooled is best. It’s the nearest to a car engine and the workings of a car engine. Radiator or the cooling. So — so I specialised in the Merlin. But no. We just didn’t think of it. I just thought I’d sooner be in the air force than anywhere else.
SB: Ok.
RM: Yeah.
SB: Yeah. You say your mother wasn’t happy about it.
RM: No.
SB: Any particular reason?
RM: Well I was an only child.
SB: Just that you were an only child.
RM: Just that I was an only child.
SB: Yeah.
RM: And she pampered me you know. Done my boots. Cleaned them. ‘Cause when I got in the boy’s service I spent a month crying. People shouting at me. Telling me to do this. Line that up. Oh crikey. I thought, I thought it was another world. Really. Another world. Marching everywhere. Being shouted at. Oh crikey. I couldn’t go through it again. Not again. But then when you come to the end and you were senior entry and you had your passing out parade that really was something. I regret now I didn’t get a photograph of mine and I can’t find any. Well most of my entry, 12th entry engines, most of them are dying off. Three have died off since I’ve known them. And I’d have like to have a photograph of it because it was something. When you were junior entry because it was food rationing during junior entry when I was, and senior entry would run up the queue in the cookhouse get their food and meal. Bread. Butter. By the time you got there there was nothing left. A bit of crust. I mean it was all part of the time and if you moaned and groaned about it they’d beat you up in the evening. No, did me the world of good. Yeah. I don’t regret it now. I suppose if it boiled down to it again I’d do it again. Yeah. Still had to do it. But as I say every era is changing. I mean the air force now. I’ve just seen here “Tornados combat reprieve.” Their scrapping aircraft and they’ve got to get it and put it back. When we was at Cosford last year we were taken around the workshops and they’ve got a whole, well some of our blokes worked on them, a whole squadron virtually of Jaguars. Aircraft from Coltishall. My mate worked on most of them. Mel, who you spoke to. And they’re teaching apprentices or the trainees on obsolete aircraft and I couldn’t believe it. I thought, I suppose when I [pause] we didn’t have any aircraft in the hangars when I was — because it like Lancasters and — no. I don’t know what. These were all because all the hangars and workshops had been customised to computerisation. They’ve got a Jaguar there. It’s up on a stand and you get in the cockpit and it shows you it on the wall. And whenever you do your throttle and that and it shows what’s going on. You know. You’d never dreamt you’d see anything like that. No.
SB: No. So what was your favourite aircraft to work on?
RM: Well, I suppose the Valiant. Yeah. It’s clean. Hard work though. With the Valiant you had the big doors like about as big as this ceiling and they had all these like Allen key bolts in and you had to do them all by hand. You know you had to undo them all and you were up a ladder. And that was the only part of the Valiant that I didn’t like. But we had no air guns. In fact when we started in ‘56 we only had two pair of steps. A modern V bomber force and all that all ready. And we had — one day we had a message to say all the generators had got to be changed. All the generators were faulty. So on my flight we had four aircraft per flight and I was on A flight and we had to change sixteen generators and the only way they did it was another corporal and a sergeant and they put it on my shoulders and I went out and brought them down on my shoulders — aged sixteen. Yeah sixteen generators on a shoulder and none of the equipment would do it. I mean in them days they’d got all the hydraulic gear. No. No. Well with the Lincoln I suppose, well it was dirty. Engine oil and all that. A totally different aircraft kind of thing. Especially when you were flying. Well, you didn’t get much chance to fly in the V bombers. You had to be decompressed. Go in a decompression chamber because they fly in altitude. Luckily enough we had the one down at Malta. In the naval air station and took some of us up there and because we had a flight sergeant and he had ear trouble. Oh did he scream. When he went up it was affecting his ears. Otherwise, you know. Oh no. One of the things I did I had to fly up from Nairobi. They wanted heavy bombing in Aden. They’d been using rockets and machine guns wrapped around so they wanted a Lincoln to go up with a thousand pounder I think it was. I flew all the way up to Aden — a full bomb load and had to land sitting on a full bomb load. That was a bit worrying that. Well, I mean there would have been nothing left of Khormaksar if it had blown up. Oh dear. Yeah. And I was sent up with one bloke. Four Lincolns and myself and one, well he was a fitter. He was a junior technician. We were supposed to work up to 1 o’clock. I was working all day. I had a problem with one of the magnetos on one of the engines and we couldn’t clear it. But the pilot wanted it cleared and wanted the aircraft. But we never did. Yeah. Seems — seems a long time ago that does.
SB: Yeah. With your experiences in Kenya and Aden and the bombing how — how did you feel about that at the time?
RM: Well not brilliant. It just felt it was just a job, you know. A job I chose to do and it was part of it. I mean dropping those bombs on them men. They were terrible people they were. The Mau Mau. They chopped people up in bits. I know one day a flight lieutenant, officer’s wife and child went out and he was chopped up around the garden. They were terrible people. We had to get rid. Well they’re still, they’ve got a Mau Mau club out there still. They still exist but because of the cost in money — and the amount of money it must have cost. You know. The amount of bombs we dropped. We’ve got a record of the bombs. Dropping bombs through [unclear] over a period of time it’s impossible. And .5 ammunition. Like fifty thousand rounds. Things like that. Which, I mean, you don’t realise the cost of these things. Well, I suppose in them days it was as bad as like it is today, well [laughs it’s a radar beam today or something isn’t it? Yeah. No. We had Wing Commander Beetham come in in 1959 to do flight refuelling. He ended up marshall of the Royal Air Force, Sir Michael Beetham who I did see regular and he started to call me Roy. A marshall of the Royal Air Force, you know shaking hands like. Bomber Command Association. And the squadron, 214 Squadron Association. But poor old boy now he’s bent right over. Going blind. We don’t see nothing of him now. But he he got his AFC through flying from Marham to South Africa. But I think it was all planned. You could see it was planned. He only came on the squadron a short while. I don’t remember seeing him on the squadron. I think they’d got him in on the squadron. He had to do the V bomber, the Valiant, course and then he did the run to South Africa and got his AFC. But I reckon it was all planned because I knew he was going to go up higher. He was going to end up one of the top man. Because the rest of the aircrew didn’t get anything. It was just the pilot. I never did see him. I can’t remember seeing him. Get him in the aircraft. Get him back out. Yeah.
SB: After you left in ‘61 what Association have you kept with the RAF since?
RM: Well, I joined the Bomber Command Association. I’m one of the original members. As soon as it came that they were going to have an Association. And then 214 Squadron Association. There’s RAFA. RAFA. I belong to RAFA. I’ve been with 214 now, I was on the committee at one stage. We’re now trying to recruit some people but — I did recruit a few but they all, now don’t get anybody. Don’t get any younger members at all. We’re all crotchety old men at nineties and eighties now down the club. But we have had one or two come but gone. Well the navy’s taken over our club now. We couldn’t, we couldn’t run it. There wasn’t enough of us. And the navy have taken over and made a good job of it as well but they got a grant from Dartford Council. Six thousand pound which we couldn’t get. We tried but there was only, you know, about seven of us. I don’t know how many will be down there tonight. Old George is the one. Our top man. The Lancaster wireless operator. Of course he’s deaf and blind now, you know. A bit of a stoic. You can speak to him, you know, he does, if you go right up to him. And then there’s not many had been on Bomber Command. Oh got one there — Barry was an armourer on Bomber Command. He was out in Singapore most of the time I think. He was at Marham but only for a short while. And Mel, who did twenty five years, he never was in Bomber Command. When he joined, he was a boy entrant, it was changed to Strike Command. I mean who else was down there. Who else have we got? No. John, the barman he wasn’t. He was Transport office. Bill Starkey was in China on Sunderlands. In fact he was on the Sunderland that went up the Yangtze River with the Yangtze incident. It was his flying boat. Then there’s our secretary. Was. Gordon. He was. He was university. Rod our mainstay he was. He was on Jaguars quite a bit at Coltishall. But I don’t think he — oh he must have been in Bomber Command because he worked on the Valiants and he had one job on a Victor. Yeah. So we haven’t got many. Oh and we’ve got one Yugoslavian. He’s ex — well he comes from Yugoslavia. He did but he got out before the Germans got into Yugoslavia. He was working on Spitfires he was. But he’s now going blind. He can’t see anybody. And he’s ninety. But as I’m saying not too many. We’ve got nobody left. You know. It’s all gone. And as I say there’s no young people coming up to wanting to know about Bomber Command. No.
SB: Well as someone who wanted to be a policeman you’ve got a great deal of aircraft memorabilia around.
RM: Oh yeah. Yeah.
SB: So you did choose the right course.
RM: I did get into the police force eventually.
SB: Oh you did.
RM: As a special. I did eighteen years. Yes. Got my sergeant as well. Yeah. I’ve got it written down there. A sergeant just came up to me one day, ‘Sign this form.’ And that was it. On the first night on duty ‘cause we didn’t [unclear] in those days. Truncheons or things like that. I went down to Dartford nick and they sent me out on patrol. I hadn’t got a clue. Not a — I went out with another special but I got separated. I made a — [pause] that’s why the regulars didn’t like us. Called us hobby bobbies you know. But eventually when they needed help and he was there they changed their mind. Yeah. I see a couple now. An ex inspector and all the other, they’re all now in senior ranks virtually. That was in the eighties that was. Long time ago. I’ve got a few tales to tell there as well. Yeah.
SB: Well are there any other incidents that you’ve thought of?
RM: Well, there was one I went up to — from Marham from the 214 dispersal to go to the hangar to [pause] with an armament sergeant. We had to look at something in the loading — the hose drum unit. The flight refuelling pack. And we went down the hangar and we went in the hangar and we dodged down under the bomb bay and this pack — we had a thing called a dinosaur. It was a big hydraulic ramp. Because most of the stuff was — all the bombs were drawn up through the fuselage on a Valiant. A big hydraulic tube went down, picked them up. And we went in there. I picked the hose drum unit up with this thing and it snapped and it came down. I stood there and it went past. It just touched me. If it had been a few feet more it would have killed me. And the sergeant that was with us, he had to dive out of the way. Yeah. That was, that was a shocker that was. It just went bang and dropped. Dropped to the ground.
SB: So what was your favourite part of your service?
RM: Whilst I was working on the Valiants. You know, you knew it. I can’t say the training was — it was hard the training was. Being shouted at and having to do PT and things like that. I was fit though. Really fit. No. I suppose working on the Valiant. Especially when there was something on. Rushing out to Egypt and bombing Egypt from there. That kind of thing. Not many people do that in Civvy Street but [pause] no. I suppose that I was lucky. I had quite a mixture of different things. But some people you talk to they were in Transport Command and they didn’t get off a transport aircraft. And I thought that would have killed me. And others say they never went anywhere. Never. They stayed in Blighty all their service. A lot of them bought themselves out I know. A couple had bought themselves out. In fact there’s one. He bought himself out and joined the Canadian air force. He come from Wolverhampton and he ended up warrant officer. He’s now got himself like a penthouse in Winnipeg. I phoned him up the other day. ‘I’ve just come back from Florida.’ Or ‘I’ve just come back from Alaska.’ He’s got himself a brand new motorbike. A new car. And their pension’s far superior to what we get. I’d have had to do fifty five to do a pension in my days. You could even get a pension, I think, about five years now but I had to do the full whack. Well Mel gets a pension. He did twenty five years. But as I say it’s entirely different now. I can’t think of anything else. I probably will eventually think of something else.
SB: Yeah. Ok. Well I’ll pause this for now then. If you think of anything else we can start again.
[recording paused]
SB: Right. I see from the chapter in the book that you always kept a diary. Do you still have those? Do you still keep them?
RM: Yeah. Keep them. I do a daily diary. Mostly [unclear] but in the air force I used to keep a daily diary on what aircraft I worked on. Where I was. And I kept that up continuous. All my service.
SB: So do you ever refer back to it at all?
RM: Oh yes. Yeah. Quite a lot. Yeah. What dates I, the date I joined. Two or three other things that I’d done. When I want to check on different aircraft. Like aircraft numbers. I wanted an aircraft number the other day. I couldn’t think. Well, I wouldn’t have remembered it but it was always in the diary and I helped the book I was in, “The Valiant Boys” so you got a lot of information out of it. Off the diaries for the book. Yeah. So it was well worth keeping it. I didn’t keep it up very good because I’m not a very good writer or that but I got the basic bits down. I could have done more. It’s like I’ve got a flying log. I made a flying log up but I could have made it a lot better. Well it does, I suppose, with not being air crew kind of thing. The aircrew have got their logs but I should have done it better. Like aircraft numbers and times and that I didn’t get but no, it’s all useful to look back on. Not many people do. You know. I’ve got it. Yeah.
SB: Well thanks very much for that. Let’s have a quick look at this logbook.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Roy Monk
Creator
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Sheila Bibb
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-08-13
Type
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Sound
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AMonkR150813
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Pending review
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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00:33:37 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Roy Monk remembers days spent in the air raid shelters as a schoolboy during the war. After the war he wanted to be a policeman before he was called to National Service. After training to be a mechanic he was posted to RAF Upwood. Then he was posted to Kenya. When he looks back over his National Service he particularly enjoyed the time he worked on Valiants. When he came back to the UK from his service abroad he completed his National Service at RAF Marham. He recalls a number of accidents and the difficulties of the conditions in which he worked during his time with the RAF. His memories feature in a book entitled, “The Valiant Boys.” By Tony Blackman.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Language
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eng
Spatial Coverage
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Egypt
Kenya
214 Squadron
49 Squadron
childhood in wartime
fitter engine
ground crew
Lincoln
military living conditions
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/293/3448/PManningL1501.1.jpg
a932014196985b7e102fd8d9c5f40876
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/293/3448/AManningL150402.1.mp3
e116fe794ee51b51bca07a58e1108044
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Manning, Len
Leonard Manning
Len Manning
L Manning
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. One oral history interview with Sergeant Leonard "Len" Manning (1892872 Royal Air Force) and his log book. He flew operations as an air gunner with 57 squadron before being shot down.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Len Manning and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-04-02
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Manning
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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SB: Okay, so, let’s start off with a, a very brief introduction, for my own benefit, it’s, um, it’s the 2nd of April, 2015, and this is Sheila Bib speaking with Leonard Manning. [Pause] So, I understand from our talk yesterday, be it a brief one, you were born in Paddington -
LM: Yes
SB: But basically brought up in Walthamstow.
LM: Yeah, yeah.
SB: Okay, perhaps to start off then, could you just tell me a little bit about your family, and living in Walthamstow and life before the war?
LM: Um, we had [? unclear] pretty standard life, I mean w- there was nothing special the family [?] my dad was an engineer, and um, mum used to do odd jobs around, and I went to one of the local schools [pause] didn’t get very far there because I failed the eleven plus, and then didn’t get a chance to do any more because the war started and [pause] I went to school until I was fifteen but some of that was up in Norfolk ‘cause we were evacuated - in 1938 I think it was, just before the war - up to Windham in Norfolk, and we stayed up there, as a number of people did, while it was – they thought things were gonna happen and they didn’t so [laughing] we all came back, and then later on it started again so [laughing] we went back up to Norfolk and I stayed up there until we came back. After I left school and started working uh, at, at a wood woodwork factory. I was a wood machinist, all like wood turning [? Unclear] that sort of thing, until I was called up, and I was called up at seventeen and a half, and always having wanted to get into the RAF I joined the Air Cadets in 1938 - which was the Air Defence Cadet Core in those days, it changed after the RAF took it over it became the ATC, and then you had to belong to that if you wanted to be into Air Crew, so obviously I joined that, and, um, when we moved up to [pause] Windham in Norfolk I, I did work up there for a time in a woodworking factory, but I did start a squadron of the ATC up there, because they hadn’t got one, and we started that, and, as I say, we came back and I worked for a time until I, I was eventually called up, and, [laughing] they said, asked the usual questions ‘what would you like to do?’ and like all the other lads ‘I wanna be a fighter pilot’ [laughs]. So he said ‘well, if you want to be a fighter pilot we’ll send you home on two years deferred service and then we’ll call you up and send you to Canada’, so I said ‘I don’t want that’ [laughing] so he said ‘why not?’ I said ‘all my friends are gone, I’ve got no one around me at the moment so I want to go, what can I do?’ so they said ‘well if you volunteer for air gunner we’ll take you in in a fortnight’s time’ so, that’s what I did, idiot [laughs]. And, it went off there – couple a weeks’ time I was called up and sent to Regent’s Park, in the blocks of flats opposite the zoo, where we were kitted out, and did a lot of drill and inducted into the rules and regulations of the Air Force, and then having got that sorted out they then sent me up to Bridlington, which was initial training area, where we did lots [emphasis] more drill, lots more aircraft recognition, which we did all the way through – you never, never missed aircraft recognition [laughing] no matter what else you had, you always had that. And we did clay pigeon shooting on the beach up there which was quite something – the weekends all the locals used to come out and watch us and cheer and clap if we hit anything, if [emphasis] [laughs]. And they said one day ‘right, it w- today will be the day you’ll fire a machine gun’, so we said ‘ooh that’s a good’ – so they took us up onto Flamborough Head, and sitting up on the cliff was, um, a Browning machine gun on a tripod, pointing out to sea, and an amourer sitting there with a box of ammunition, and we lined up, and, as we- when it was our turn, the armourer gave us a, a belt of am- ammunition, five round [laughs], which we had to put into the breach – far in, ‘cause didn’t last a second did it [laughing] it was a real waste of space. And that was that, so, having got all the initial training over was then sent to [pause] Bridgenorth, which was elementary gunnery school, was there for six weeks, doing all the normal gunnery things and hydraulics and what have you, and then having finished the course there we sent to number one gunnery school, which was in Pembrey in South Wales, and, um – where we started flying, that was where we first started, and the pilots, who were piloting the planes for us, were all ex Battle of Britain [pause] pilots so that, that, they were a bit, bit lunatic [laughing]. They tried, I think they, they were trying to frighten the daylights out of us, which they did [laughs].
SB: What year was this?
LM: That, um, that would have been forty [pause] forty-three I think [pause] yeah. And we did all sorts of things there, dingy drill, firing machine guns into the see at, at targets and firing on drogues that were towed by aircraft [pause] and all the other stuff that air gunner had to do. And having passed out there, was another six weeks training, we got our wings and became sergeant straight away, and they sent us off to [pause] OTU, which was Operational Training Unit, which I think was Silverstone, where we flew Wellingtons. We picked up our crew there and it’s true what they say, they put us all in a hangar, mixed us all up, ‘sort your crew out yourself’ and you went, just went round them [laughing] it was, it was hit and miss really ‘cause you, you didn’t know them from Adam and yet you saying to somebody, you know, ‘do you want an air gunner’ or [laughs] ‘I want a pilot’ and that was it, and you picked your crew, and that was it, you stuck it. The only one you didn’t have was the flight engineer because the Wellingtons were, weren’t four-engine so they didn’t have e- enough instruments there for a flight engineer. So we flew cross countries there and did fighter affiliation battles with Spitfires, and [pause] having done that – um, where did we go to from there? [pause] – yes went to Swinderby which was where we transferred to four engines – they had Stirlings up there, terrible old things they were, and got used to flying four engines, and we were flying out, doing circuits and bumps [?] one night at Coningsby – when they were out on operations we used to do, do circuits and bumps while they were on ops – and we landed on the main runway and our, our [laughing] undercarriage collapsed [laughs] right in the middle of the intersection of the main runway so they couldn’t use any of the runways, so they weren’t very happy with us because they hadn’t got the equipment to move it because the Stirling is a lot bigger aircraft than the Lancaster so they obviously hadn’t got the equipment to shift it so they had to wait until the next day to move it. And from there we went to, what they called? Lanc conversion unit where they converted some to Lancasters, and we had a few weeks there, that was at Silestone [pause] and that wasn’t very long but we got used to the, we picked up the, our flight engineer when we started flying Stirlings so we’d now got a full crew. And from there we were sent to a squadron, which was East Kirby, and we were there for a few weeks doing circuits and bumps and the usual cross countries and gunnery exercises until our first operation, which was [unclear, possibly Rouergue] in the South of France. Well, we, flew that one and [pause] it was quite spectacular because we hadn’t seen anything like this before and we flew over- flew into the target and it was all lit up, flares were being dropped and bombs were going down and it was all, all happening down there, but nothing was happening above [emphasis] it so we had quite a, an, an easy flight so we thought ‘if this is gonna be it [laughing] it’s a piece of cake’, how wrong we were [laughing]. And the next flight we did was daylight raid on Cannes when they were having problems getting the Canadians out of there so they sent a thousand bombers over in daylight, and that was unusual, and you know, it was quite unusual to fly along and see all of the other aircraft because at night you didn’t see them. It made you think [laughing] how close they were [emphasis] to you and how many there were there. And we flew in there and, um, dropped our bombs, and we, when we turned ‘round I had a good view of the target because it was smoke and debris flying out to about five hun- five thousand feet – was quite spectacular. But when we got back, we were told we were on again that night! So we thought [laughing] ‘we don’t like this’. So, anyway, we had a sleep, and some food, and [pause] then we were briefed for a raid on [pause] [unclear] in Northern France which was a railway goods yard, and we took off for that [pause] I suppose that would have been about [pause] ten o clock, and as we crossed the Dutch coast we got coned by searchlights, which isn’t very good. And having dived and turned and done all the evasion bits we were fortunate that we managed to get out. But having done that we got out of the bomber stream, which was our defence against the German radar, because if you got out of the bomber stream they could pick you up individually on radar which they couldn’t do when you were in the bomber stream. So, anyway, we altered course for the target again, and a little, little while later there was a massive explosion in the, our port wing, and immediately flames started coming past the tu- my rear turret which stopped to wo- stopped working immediately, because the hydraulic motors that drove the turret were operated from, from the port engine. So that was that. So I had to wind the turret round by hand to get the doors lined up with the fuselage, and climb out into the fuselage, which was really burning then, it w- when I looked up the fuselage it was just like looking up the mouth of a blow lamp. It was frightening it really was. And my s- parachute, which was stowed in the fuselage, was smouldering, that was already going, so I went and got it and tried to get it on my, the two hooks on my [pause, laughs] parachute harness, but as the plane was going down I could only get it on one, couldn’t get it on the other. And my rear g- my mid upper gunner, he got out of his turret, I saw him get out, he came down towards me and went out the door which was down towards the turret, and he went, and, um, I didn’t struggle any more with the parachute because I thought ‘if I hang about here I’m not, I’m not gonna make it’ so, I just jumped out and into the night, just jumped [emphasis]. Hit my head on the tail plane [laughs] which wasn’t very good. You weren’t supposed to do that, you were supposed to roll out you see? You got time to do all this, you take your helmet off and you sit down and you roll out – no way [laughs]. So, anyway, I’m counting down and I thought, I don’t know, I looked up and I saw the thing was smouldering away there and I thought ‘I hope I get down before this thing catches fire and drops me off’. But anyway, on the way down I felt s- I was leaning to one side and I felt something brush my face, I put my hand up and it was the intercom cord on my helmet which was caught up in the parachute which was fortunate because I hung on that, and that probably took some of the weight off the para- off the harness that was burning, and [coughs] being that it was night I was thinking well we- where am I gonna land, am I gonna land in a tree or [laughing] in a pond or somewhere nasty. In fact I landed in the middle of a field flat on my back, and as soon as the parachute dropped around me it, it burst into flame, so I jumped on that and put it out and stuffed it in a hedge. And by this time I was badly burned on my face and all down my arms, and I thought ‘well let’s see if I can find a lane’, which I did, came out on a lane and I thought ‘if I head South, I might meet up with some troops eventually’ and that’s what I did. And I walked for about, I suppose eight miles, and I was really [emphasis] in pain then and I could feel this running down my face, I thought I was bleeding to death – of course it wasn’t, it was the burns, and as I say I collapsed on this farmer’s doorstep and they must have heard me moaning and came out, took me in, and I was fortunate because they were members of the resistance. So they took me in and put me to bed, and, um, the following day they got a doctor to me - uh, a, one of the resistance people – came and sorted my burns out, and moved me to another house in the same village. And because of course the Germans started looking for me then, they were hunting all over the place, so they, they moved me from one house to the other, and eventually they decided that enough was enough and that, they moved me out of that village and they sent, sent a resistance bloke to take me to the next house, and [pause] he came and his code name was Lulu [laughs]. And off we went through the woods and we got to a stage where he suddenly said to me ‘I’m lost’ [laughing] [unclear] good thing for a guide. So anyway he said ‘I’m going, I’m going to that house to s- see if I can find directions’, and he stuffed a Luger pistol in my hand, sat me in the hedge and said ‘If, if I get into trouble don’t ask any questions just shoot’. Well he came back and he, he, he hadn’t had any trouble, and off we went, and we finished up in a tiny little village called Latretoise, and um, to a little café. Well when I say café all it was, was a room in a house although they had, not only had the café they also had a small hotel on the other side of the courtyard which the Germans used to use when they came into the village, and it was run by two elderly ladies. I think the youngest one was, when I was there I think she was fifty-seven then, how old her mum was I don’t know. But I mean for two old ladies to, you know, take in somebody like me and risk their lives, if they, if they’d have been caught they’d of shot me and them no, no argument. So, anyway, they – oh they, in the meantime, before they moved me up there, they, they sent um, a resistance man to interrogate me to make sure I wasn’t a German because Germans were dropping people over there to get in with the resistance to find out what was going on. So anyway I’d got all over that and [pause] anyway these these two old ladies they couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak French so there was a lot of arm waving and shouting. And [pause] they gave me a bed in the hotel across the yard and I used to have my meals in the- behind the café, in the room there, and [pause] I lived with the family, you know, as w- as one of the family. But there were three other people there, men there, who were hiding from the Germans, the Germans wanted them for forced labour in Germany and they weren’t gonna go so they went into hiding, and we used to all have our meals together, and there was also a young lady that used to come in to see us, brought us cigarettes and money, and she was about the same age as me ‘cause I was nineteen then, and she was a forger, she used to forge papers, she was brilliant she really was. And, um, anyway we had one or two nasty scrapes there [pause] they came, somebody came into the café one day and said that [pause] German tanks were coming towards the village so that, when anything happened like that I, they used to put me upstairs in the ladies’ bedroom, and I’d stay there until the Germans went, and anyway the following morning I got up and looked out the bedroom window and there’s all these German tanks [laughing] lined up in the courtyard, Germans strutting around I thought ‘here we go’, and um [pause] that was quite nerve wracking because we didn’t know when they, if they were gonna come into the café and come up stairs and you know find me, but they didn’t, and the following day they moved out so things got back to normal. There was a big orchard behind the hotel where I used to be able to go in and walk about, play about, and, um- but I wasn’t allowed in the café itself, because you know, you never know when the Germans were going to be in there. And another time we were sitting in the back room – I think there were five of us, having our evening meal – and the Germans were in the village and they came into the café and that that was alright because normally they didn’t used to come into the back of the café so we thought we’d be alright, and anyway, Madame Beaugart [?] came back to get some change, and this German followed her out, followed her back, [laughs] stood in the doorway, and he looked all round and I thought ‘this is it, we been caught’, but um she gave him his money, just turned round and walked out and that was that so that was a bit of a relief. But I could wander about, I could get out into the village, not very far but I was told not be about when the postman was about because he was suspected of being a collaborator. So we carried on like that, and [pause] one day, not thinking, I thought the Germans had gone and I walked into the café and there were two German stranglers sitting there having drinks. Anyway, Madame Beaugart [?] she, she realised what had happened she started beating me about the head with a, with a dish cloth ‘get back to work!’ [laughs]. And beat me out and I went out and we got away with that one. But I think that was the last time we saw the Germans because the next day I think, the, a couple of resistance lads came into the village on a German motorcycle and sidecar which they’d taken off the Germans [laughs] somewhere, and they said that the Americans were on their way to the village and were setting up a field hospital in one of the fields outside the village. So the next day I went down and found an officer who said he’d take me into Paris [pause] in a couple of days’ time, where they’d set up a reception centre for people like myself ‘cause there was thousands of us, floating about in France. So they set up this hotel in Paris, a Hotel Maurice, which had been the headquarters of the Gestapo, and he said he’d take me there in a couple of days’ time so I went back, they gave me lots of tinned fruit and coffee and stuff as, as they always did, for my friends in the village who were very grateful for that, and the following night there was a massive [emphasis] party, there really was. And all the good wines came out and it went on nearly all night, and the following day I said goodbye to them, went back to the Americans, and he took me into Paris in a jeep to the Hotel Maurice where we stayed, I think, for a couple of days, and um, we did roam about Paris a little bit but it was quite dangerous because the resistance were rounding up all the people that had been collaborating and- were shootings going on in cafés it wasn’t very safe. And, the- they then flew me back to Hendon, where I was interviewed by MI5 and they took any guns or knives you had on y- they took them off you and interviewed you to make sure you were, you were who you said you were [laughing]. And having got over MI5 they then took me to Hotel Maurice, um, in London, where I was interrogated by bomber intelligence, who wanted to know what I’d done with their Lancaster [laughs]. Having got over that, they- we sent telegrams home, and they said ‘right, you can go home on leave’, and the only identification was a piece of paper, a scrap of paper about three inches by two inches, type written, ‘this is to certify this is Len Manning’ and that was it, nothing else. So anyway, having sent the telegram, I went home, and of course living in London I got home before the telegram obviously, and I always remember I walked into our road, and one of the neighbours was coming down pushing a wheelbarrow, he was going over to his allotment, and he looked up and he saw me [background noises] and he thought he’d seen a, seen a ghost, and he ran back up the road to my parents, and then all hell let loose, they all came out because they hadn’t heard from me for three months. So, that was that. I went backwards and forwards to the RAF hospital, I think it was at the Middlesex Hospital, for medicals and eventually I was given [unclear – perhaps ‘no on sick leave’] and medically discharged, and that was that.
SB: What a fascinating story.
LM: I’m glad you enjoyed it.
SB: Yeah, yeah. Can I just go back over a few –
LM: Yeah [emphasis] sure.
SB: a few bits and perhaps, clarify – um [pause] going back before you said you were in the A- ATC because you wanted to [pause] fly and -
LM: Yeah
SB: So on, um, [pause] what were your feelings, you know, you said you were sent up to Norfolk in thirty-eight because you said they thought something was gonna happen, how did you feel were you eager for this, or –
LM: Oh yeah, I was keen for it, yeah. Always been interested in aeroplanes and things like that so obviously I was keen to get in the ATC and do some of the training.
SB: And then when nothing happened in thirty-eight and you were all sent back again
LM: [laughs] yeah
SB: Frustrated, or-?
LM: Yeah I was frustrated, yeah, yeah.
SB: Um, did you have any brothers or sisters who fought.
LM: I had a brother, yes, he eventually joined the RAF. He was [pause] an aircraft fitter. He used to repair the fuselages, do repairs and stuff like that. He finished up down in Saigon I think it was [pause] and eventually he was discharged and, but while he was in, there, East there, he contracted TB. And you know what they used to do then was then they carve half your ribs out, so he didn’t have a very good time, and [pause] dad was in the, at that time when I came out he was in, that time he was in the control commission in Germany. He had the equivalent rank of a major, and he was looking after again the transport going in Hamburg. Mum was in the Land Army, so we all did our bit [laughs].
SB: Yeah, yeah. And had your dad fought in the First World War?
LM: Yeah he was in the First World War yeah and he wasn’t in the Second World War obviously, he was too old and I think he was in a reserved occupation anyway, being an engineer. [coughs]
SB: So [pause] y- your parents, well, your dad had been in the Army, your mum was Land Army, how did they feel about you boys going to the Air Force?
LM: Um, I can’t remember them ever, ever saying anything about it really, I can’t remember their, their attitude to it, not really, no.
SB: Ok. So, after the war, what happened then?
LM: I was registered disabled for a time, which meant that I could – most companies had to take a certain number of disabled people so it meant that I could get a job fairly easily, and a light job anyway. And I found a job in a plastics company, looking after their duplicating and printing office, which was quite good, and being nosey I used to get down into the factory and find out what was going on and what how they did this, that and the other, and eventually I got out onto the technical side, and spent the rest of my life playing about with plastics, in various stages. And I didn’t have any qualifications, because at that time while I should have been studying I couldn’t, and all my knowledge was picked up, actually on the shop floor, practically. And I finished up as a Works Manager of plastics company Wood Green, which eventually went bust,
SB: So, how do you think your experience during the war affected life afterwards?
LM: [pause] I don’t think it did really. [pause] No really no. But when I came out of the war – not when I came out, a long time afterwards, when I got to a stage where – and I had two daughters, by the way – and, when they were off hand and we wanted something to do and I joined the RAF Association and became their Welfare Officer, and their Chairman. I was Welfare Officer in London for fifteen years I think [clears throat], ‘cause when I moved up here, I joined the RAF Association again and straight away the had me awarded a Welfare Officer so that was it.
SB: So, it has impacted you in some ways, but just, what you, doing for hobby or [unclear]
LM: Yeah, that’s right.
SB: Yeah, um, can I just, o- over some of the place names, obviously this is going to be typed up, could you just clarify the spelling of some of them, so that –
LM: Um
SB: The village you stayed at in France
LM: Latretiose, which is capital L-a-t-r-e-t-i-o-s-e. Latretoise.
SB: Right, okay, and then the hotel in Paris –
LM: Hotel Maurice
SB: Is that -
LM: M-a-u
SB: r-i-c-e?
LM: Yeah
SB: Okay, and then in South Wales you were at Pembrey?
LM: Pembrey yup.
SB: Which is P-e-m
LM: P-e-m-b-r-e-y I think it was.
SB: b-r-e-y. Okay, yeah, I think that was it. Just ones which could be slightly confusing when we’re writing it up.
LM: We know [unclear] – we know it’s [laughs]
SB: Yeah, yeah, but those I know so that’s not, that’s not a problem, but those were just three which I thought ‘I’d better check that spelling’. Right, so [pause] let’s get back to the time when you were actually in France. How frustrating was it to be [pause]
LM: Stuck there? It was, it was frustrating because at that time, um, obviously it was after D-Day and the Germans were on the retreat, which meant that they were guarding all the bridges and main roads so they could get back easily which meant that it was difficult for us to move around so that’s the reason I, I stayed in the café for three months. Because they wouldn’t move me any further away. Although I did get taken out one, one time, a chap turned up in a car [emphasis] I couldn’t believe it, and he took me to a ch- a big chateaux, somewhere, don’t know where it was, and they obviously didn’t like giving you names, but he had a big library there and he had a lot of English books and he lent me some English books which I took back with me, but when I came back he wrote to me because he was, evidently, he was the Chief of the, one of the segments of the resistance, and he came over to be interviewed by the BBC and I went up to Bush House to see him when he was being interviewed, which was quite interesting. But [pause] I didn’t go back to – you see there’s two places involved here I don’t think I told you this, where the bomber crashed was Basvelle [?] and that is not a ‘ville’ it’s ‘velle’ – I have this argument with [unclear] ‘it must be ‘I’!’ [laughs].
SB: Bas-
LM: -velle.
SB: Ok, yup.
LM: And the other place was Latretoise so there’s the two different things. And [pause] fifty years afterwards I hadn’t heard a- um, mum used to write to [pause] the, the girl that [pause] used to bring us cigarettes and stuff – Madeline her name was, and [pause] so, they kept in touch for a while but then it all petered out. And then fifty years afterwards, I was reading the Air Mail, which was RAF Association’s magazine, and one of the adverts was for anybody that flew in a certain Lancaster get in touch with these people in Basvelle. So I wrote to them, I didn’t know what they were after, and they wrote back and said they wanted to have a memorial service over there, and they’d like me and any others, members of the crew to [pause] attend, which I did. But they went to an awful lot of trouble to find that the rest of the crew – because amazingly I had some addresses, of the [pause] relatives of the crew members, which I was able to give them, and amazingly, quite a number of them had moved on, the, I think it was the Bomb Aimer, he had an address up in Blackpool, and he, they were still [emphasis] there. Couldn’t believe it. Fifty years after the war and they were still there. Unbelievable.
SB: Quite incredible.
LM: Anyway, his parents were still there but he wasn’t, he’d been, ‘cause he, um, I didn’t, I didn’t tell you this, when the bomber crashed, four of the crew went down with the plane, and three of us got out, the Gunner who I said I saw jump out before me, he had a very similar experience to me, he got in touch with, eventually with – funnily enough the first house he went to they wouldn’t have anything to do with him, the woman said ‘no I’m sorry, I can’t take you, I daren’t do it’, and she gave him another address, I the next village, and he went there and they, they took him in. But the amazing thing is the house that he went to at first was the house that the actual Mayor, there now, lives [laughs]. And the navigator, who also got out, which I can’t make out why, I never could, because all the others around him was killed, but he got out somehow or other, but anyway he landed and he was the only one in the crew who really knew who we were, being a navigator. Hopefully [emphasis] he knew where he was [laughs]. Anyway, he wandered off, and I think he spent a couple of days [pause] rummaging around and keeping out of the way, and begging food from various farms, but funnily enough he didn’t get taken in, and he came to a river, which he knew would eventually lead him into Paris, and he started wandering along there and walked into a German [unclear] battery [laughs] he got caught. So he spent the rest of the war as a Prisoner of War. And the [pause] what a, oh yeah the Flight Engineer, he was found some way away from the others with his parachute unopen beside him, so whether he was blown out or panicked and didn’t pull the red cord we don’t know, but he was found quite some way away. But it was his relations that were still living in the same house, fifty years on. And by the side of him they found a silver Florin which they gave to his, I think it was his, his sister, who I’d met, Joan, who I’d met up with – I’d met up with him several times, but eventually they died, well they’ve all died now, I’m the only one left. [Pause] and I think that’s about it. The four of them are buried at, in, in Basvelle, and that’s where we go every five years, in fact we were there last year, and, for a small village, I mean the, the, the Basvelle was a village, I should, I should think that it’s probably fifteen, twenty houses. But thousands [emphasis] of people turn out, it’s unbelievable. I can show you [gets up].
SB: Please.
[Background noises]
LM: [unclear] that’s the Len book. [laughs] Now how often do you get a book specially for you? And what she’s done she’s put together the whole story of our visits over there, and [pause] she’s really thorough, she’s really good, a real good organiser.
SB: That’s fascinating.
LM: Are you still recording?
SB: That alright? [laughs]
LM: [laughs] yeah, I gotta watch what I say [laughs].
SB: This is lovely.
LM: It must have cost them a fortune.
SB: Yeah
LM: Because she, I think she had six of those – she had one done for each member of the crew, with just their story, and there you are, there’s some of the crowds. And I mean, look at the standards. I turned up outside the Town Hall one, one day and there were fifty standards, lined up outside there, couldn’t believe it.
SB: Did they manage, well, when they, located you were any of the others still alive at that point and able to go to Basvelle?
LM: Yeah the Navigator, he was still around, but he was the only one, but he didn’t turn up at the first couple anyway. And I don’t know why. Yes they, they spent an awful lot of money, that village, on things like this, I mean they have a, a meal there for probably two hundred people. Guests and Mayors from all the villages around. You know they did one for each of my daughters, and my granddaughter.
SB: ‘Tis a beautiful record.
LM: ‘Tis int’it.
SB: I’ve never seen one like this.
LM: No. And the other thing is that they’re always giving me medals. Can’t get any medals over here but over there you can get medals every time I turn up [laughing]. The latest one, is that one in the frame there. [background noises] It’s very heavy. It’s like the old desk thing. But that’s a silhouette of my face, as I am now, and then w- as I w- was, and then the Lancaster. I mean that’s a one-off, must have cost a fortune.
SB: Yeah! Absolutely. Heavens. Well [unclear]
LM: Yeah I did that because I thought ‘well what do I do with it’, you can’t leave it lying about and you don’t want to stick it in a drawer, so.
SB: You make the point there, can’t get medals over here nut you get them there. How did you feel about that?
LM: Very annoyed. Because I did two or three campaigns for the Bomber Command, medal, which we didn’t get, we got a bar, to our other medals, but we didn’t get the, didn’t get a medal anyway. But they’re still fighting for it, I mean I, I, I got an award for what I did.
[background noises]
SB: [unclear] try and get the medals?
LM: Yeah, for that and the things I do with the school kids as well.
SB: Yeah. Yeah some recognition but –
LM: Yeah when I got, when we got, I’ve actually got the bar, they refused me three times [laughs], when I eventually got it, I rang Radio Suffolk to tell them that I’d got it because they’d been helping me with it, and somebody came on and said that ‘well how did you get your bar? Was it presented?’ I said ‘no, it came through the post’ they said that’s disgusting [emphasis]’. The next thing I knew the Mayor of Sudbury rang up and said, ‘Len, be ready tomorrow at ten o clock, I’m taking you up to Ipswich Town Hall where the Mayor or Ipswich will present you with your bar’ [laughs] we got it. But so anyway he picked me up and we went up to Ipswich, and there was the Mayor of Ipswich there, and the, um, Mark Murphy from Radio Suffolk was there, the press was there, and we were in the Mayor’s parlour, we had tea and they got all the silver out [laughs] you know, it was quite something, and so that was presented there. But that, that was presented by the, that award was presented by Mark Murphy from Radio Suffolk, but there was some, some people there and it was, you know, it was really something to be there w- in among that award. I mean that was a special award, I, I, the others, there were three of each, for each type of award they were, they were doing, there were firemen there, there were the police there, there was a little girl there that been in a fire and got, all her face was burnt away, terrible. And it was a real honour to be there it really was, but they really laid it, laid it on.
SB: So, so you personally have had recognition but a lot of them presumably haven’t.
LM: Yeah, that’s right they haven’t. But the other thing is that every year, and in fact I’m off at the end of this month to Holland, they invite Air Gunner, ex-Air Gunners over there, to, they been doing it for years, it’s only Air Gunners, funnily enough, and, to a town called Dronton, which is one of the towns that was built on reclaimed land from the Zuiderzee [?], and they tell you when you standing in the square, beautiful square, if you’d have been there fifty years ago you’d be six foot under water [laughs]. I mean it’s as new as that, it’s amazing, it really is. But I’ve had I think, four medals from Holland.
SB: At least your efforts aren’t totally unrecognised [laughs]
LM: [Laughs] no it’s amazing.
SB: Well I’m glad something came out of it, but this is a remarkable piece –
LM: That’s something else, isn’t it?
SB: That, that is, yeah, really remarkable. Ok, I think that probably covers –
LM: Yeah well if you think of anything else you can always give me a ring.
SB: Yeah, yeah, exactly, so I’ll stop recording.
LM: Oh sorry would you like a cup of tea or coffee?
SB: I’m fine, thank you very much.
LM: Sure?
SB: Yeah, absolutely. [background noises] I’ll stop recording, at this point.
LM: It was my ninetieth birthday in, in January, hence all these planes. Planes on cakes, I finished up near three birthday cakes [laughs].
SB: And lots of planes [laughs].
LM: There’s even that orange one from my great-granddaughter.
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AManningL150402
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Interview with Len Manning
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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00:51:15 audio recording
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Pending review
Creator
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Sheila Bibb
Date
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2015-04-02
Description
An account of the resource
Len Manning grew up in London and worked in a factory before he volunteered for the Royal Air Force. He flew operations with 57 Squadron before being shot down over France. He spent three months living with supporters of the Resistance in a small French village and hiding from the Germans while he recovered from his injuries.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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France
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
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Christina Brown
57 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bale out
bombing
crewing up
evading
fear
final resting place
Lancaster
Operational Training Unit
prisoner of war
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Silverstone
RAF Swinderby
Resistance
shot down
Stirling
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/254/3401/AFisherLS150814.1.mp3
92f6b8ab71b7b2ca626a670b285dd0e0
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Title
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Fisher, Laurence Sidney
Laurence Sidney Fisher
Laurence S Fisher
Laurence Fisher
L S Fisher
L Fisher
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Laurence Sidney Fisher (1091186 Royal Air Force).
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-08-14
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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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Fisher, LS
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SB: This is Sheila Bibb interviewing Laurence Fisher on 14th of August 2015 at his home in Canterbury. Laurence, to start off with can you just give me some general background to family life, where you were born, and how you came to join the RAF?
LF: I was born in Peterborough which was then the Soke of Peterborough and a friend of ours was a pilot in the RAF in France and came to stay overnight when he was travelling and I was in the Home Guard as a lance corporal and he advised us to volunteer for the air force so my friends and I went over to Northampton where we volunteered in advance of being called up. One of the options open to me was armourer. I wanted to be air crew but I was colour blind and as an armourer I needed some colour vision but not sufficient to bar me. When I was posted to the Middle East to Number 4 Re-Arming And Refuelling Unit but that in fact was left at 235 Wing which was at Sidi Barrani where I volunteered for air crew because I knew that they wouldn’t have the colour book and my colour test was map colours which I’d learned at school, the colour of a royal sovereign pencil which was bright scarlet and the colour of the orderly’s hair which was bright ginger so I was sent back to South Africa and trained there for about a year when we were required for first priority in the Middle East. So we were flown up the middle of Africa and stopped at Ndola in Northern Rhodesia as it was then where I was able to call in on friends who came back in their little car with the golf clubs in the back. Seeing me on their veranda said, ‘Whatever you do don’t tell daddy we’ve been golfing on a Sunday.’ So we flew on. Landed at Kisumu. Then on to Cairo where we were divided into two halves and our half was sent straight to the squadrons. I flew via El Adem to Naples where we had the pleasure of staying in a marble hotel and sleeping on marble isn’t ideal. Then on to Foggia. Now, 167 squadron was an elite squadron. The day after we left them they dropped arms to the insurgent Poles in Warsaw but to return to my story we didn’t like the idea of being sent back without doing any operations so I was deputed to go to the flight commander and, but I persuaded him to let us have the COs aircraft. The first op we did went well and we attacked Verona martialling yards. The second night we were sent out in bright moonlight to attack the Weibersbrunn German fighter station and they didn’t like it much but on our return we were jumped by a radar guided ME109 and its cannon fire and other armaments soon killed half of the crew but fortunately the aircraft was flying on George and so there was an opportunity to get out. Now of course I hadn’t been fitted into my parachute harness so I folded my arms across my chest and just hoped for the best and of course as the chute opened my arms were flung to one side. As I went down I was rotating in the air and could see the aircraft on fire gliding into a, a clearing between two stands of trees which stripped the burning wings off and put out the fire but by that time I was rather close to the ground because jumping from two thousand feet is not ideal and I guided myself in to the middle of a potato patch but a strong wind at ground level coming up the mountain blew me into a pine tree where I fell horizontally, breaking a branch with my shoulder and my head so that my flying helmet was full of blood. I had a look in my evasion kit but felt that the odds were too much against me particularly as I’d got rather loose flying boots on so I made the decision to go to the farmhouse and on my knocking at the door they opened a little flap and offered me seeded bread and some milk. I accepted these but I showed them the blood on my hand from my bleeding head and they let me in and sent for the landmacht so I met up with two other members of my crew in the police station the following morning. And then from Graz we were taken to Vienna by rail in a very crowded train and then on to the lens factory which was next door to the prisoner of war reception centre and there we were kitted out and sent off to Bankau in Upper Silesia by train. Cattle trucks of course. That was fine as far as it went but the Russian advance meant that we had to be moved so we were marched two hundred and fifty miles via the outskirts of Breslau to Cottbus just outside Berlin and there the camp contained Southern Irishmen who were all Welsh Guards. Naturally being Irish they’d be in the Welsh Guards and they were very good to us indeed. Gave us free, things that normally they would have charged cigarettes for. In the end we were liberated by the Russians and on the Americans giving the Russians the lorries we were transported to the River Elbe where we walked over a narrow footbridge with rather itching backs out of the Russian zone into the American zone where Lancaster bombers were used to fly us back to Oxford.
SB: Very good. What were your feelings when, when you were handed over to the police etcetera?
LF: When I was handed over to the police I had injured my foot slightly and was limping so I was left in the police station guarded by a landmacht and the other two members of the crew were taken off to the site of the crash where they saw the flight engineer lying on the ground. He had landed with the aircraft, probably in his seat and the impact had broken his neck. He didn’t know this, climbed out of the aircraft, walked a few paces and then fell dead and that was, that was a very sad thing really. My South African navigator, bomb aimer didn’t want the Germans to know that he could speak German so my school boy German came in to recover the pencil his wife had given him that the Germans had taken away with all the rest of our possessions. Then we were put into a German air, air force camp where we were all confined to one room and anything remaining of our aircrew equipment was taken away from us. We were rather afraid of not having sufficient clothing because we were in tropical kit but we were well equipped at Breslau by the, by the Red Cross. Yeah.
SB: It’s interesting there you mention the Red Cross. Had you had any other dealings with them earlier in the war or not?
LF: No.
SB: That was the first time.
LF: We had had no dealings with them earlier in the war but of course when we were prisoners of war we subsisted on Red Cross parcels and they arrived regularly until the RAF bombed the rail system so much that it broke down and we didn’t get any more. That lasted for about the last two months or three months of our captivity. We were fed as troops in barracks which meant a pint of so-called soup a day which was mainly cabbage and a slice of bread. That, that was the entire ration the consequence of which was I, a normal eight stone came back home weighing only five stone. During that time, during the march I was turned out of a straw field barn at gunpoint because it was too full according to the German regulations and had to sleep on an upper floor in chaff. Now, if you bury yourself in chaff it can kill you and I knew this so I was careful but during the night the temperature fell very low and I received what I think is called frost nip so that a certain disability exists but apart from that I, being young of course, survived far better than some of the older members.
SB: Did you, you say you had schoolboy German. Did you have any problems with communicating at all? Or -
LF: We were not allowed to learn German during our captivity. Although some people learned Italian. Learning German was considered a collaboration with the enemy but most of our goons who walked about among us spoke quite good English and I asked one what he was going to do after the war to which he replied, ‘Watch you rebuilding Berlin.’ That never happened fortunately.
SB: Did you have any idea how things were going?
LF: Ah. As among air crew there are wireless operators who could also make wireless sets in our camps we had several wireless sets and we got daily bulletins broadcast by the BBC which were read out to us. During one of these sessions a German officer came into the barrack to find about three hundred men standing stock still and silent which must have surprised him but of course the newsreader was warned of his coming and we soon began a normal buzz of conversation until he had gone when we listened to the rest of the news bulletin which included the American capture of Iwo Jima I remember.
SB: How did that affect you?
LF: Well we were certain. Well, our morale was high. Bear in mind this was 1944/45 and we received orders from London that we were not to try to escape because that would simply clutter things up unnecessarily but our morale was high because we could see that it was obvious that we were winning the war. We were lucky that we did. [laughs]
SB: Were there times that you wondered how long you’d be there?
LF: Well in those circumstances you live one day at a time because the need to know is one of the things that stops you learning a great deal about your fellows and telling them anything much about yourself so we had card schools. I myself taught English composition in the camp school. One of my friends took banking exams through the Red Cross until that was cut off but every day of course we always did a certain routine amount of walking in order to keep fit and that was an essential part of it and one thing, it passed the time and another thing it enabled us to remain fit enough to survive.
SB: Were there many outbreaks of illness at all?
LF: No. There were very few. We had a medical officer and his sole medical kit consisted of aspirin. The Germans themselves were very short of medications and their people fared no better than we did but I think our limited diet was a very healthy one and of course Breslau was in Southern Poland so that it was a fairly isolated camp on sandy soil which is obviously well drained. Chosen by the Germans because it was difficult to tunnel in and so mostly being young men we were very healthy.
SB: Going back to your time before you were actually captured, when you, first of all you said you were in Egypt. How long were you there for?
LF: I was there for a matter of a few weeks really. About two or three months because it was the time Rommel was approaching El Alamein and so although we were at Sidi Barrani which is 05 which is five kilometres from Alexandria I think we weren’t very far into the blue. We were moved back to a holding camp at Kasfareet and our unit, Number 5 Re-Arming and Refuelling Party was disbanded as being no longer needed. My experience of Kasfareet was of a padre wanting to involve me in Christmas celebrations upon which I told him that by Christmas I should be in South Africa of which he was rather envious.
SB: And when you got to Foggia what did you think of that as a place? At that time?
LF: Foggia was an enormous, ancient crater the whole of which had been turned into an airfield as far as I could tell. There were American squadrons as well as British squadrons there. As our stay there was so brief and as our tents were on the outskirts of the occupied zone I really know very little about it because when I arrived back I arrived back in the middle of the night of course so if you miss the [Garry?] taking you back to quarters you just didn’t know which way to walk. [laughs]
SB: So how long were you in Foggia before the fateful mission?
LF: I think we were there about a fortnight in all. Yes. [laughs]
SB: A short sweet stay then.
LF: Yes, that’s right.
SB: Right. If we think then to once you were brought back to Oxford what happened at that stage?
LF: Well, we were, when we were brought back to Oxford we were kept hanging about until it was getting dark at night when we were directed to our billets but the director had a sense of humour because in common with other flights we were directed to the WAAF billets and disturbed those poor girls in the middle of the night. They were able to direct us to our proper billets in no uncertain terms. So having, we were then disbursed to re-arming, to rehabilitation camp and I was there until I gained weight and until they were reasonably sure that there was nothing physically wrong with me. The whole experience took about two months and it was a really excellently run and excellently organised piece of work. After that we were taken around various firms which might lead to employing us but none of that was of any use to me as it happened.
SB: So when you were finally given the all clear where did you go and what did you do?
LF: Ah. After, after rehabilitation I was sent on ninety days leave and fortunately while I’d been a prisoner of war I’d still been paid so I had ninety pounds which was a lot of money in those days and I was able to go home and then think about what a future career might hold. I had the opportunity of remaining in the RAF but as a peace loving person I didn’t see I had a role in a fighting force in peacetime.
SB: So what career did you take up in the end?
LF: Ah I trained as, in emergency training in teaching and ended up at Christchurch College in Canterbury training teachers. Fortunately, I was able to take early retirement three or four years before I was sixty five and before I was quite outdated as far as the students were concerned.
SB: During your time in Italy and then in Germany and so on were you still able to get news from home at all from the family?
LF: I can’t recall having more than one or two letters from home but I wrote regularly. That I became quite used to. Nor did I receive any parcels from home as longer term prisoners did. Some prisoners had been in the cage for five years so the lines of communication had become established but as we were a newly formed camp just for air crew no lines of communication got established for us and we were lucky to get the Red Cross parcels that came. They were, you know, a valuable communication themselves although of course they received, they had no messages in them but the fact that they were the sorts of food we were used to was very important.
SB: So what did those parcels contain? Can you remember?
LF: Mostly, they were, the ones we received were American so we had a tin of Klim which is perhaps an anagram for milk, a tin of meat, a bar of chocolate which the Germans removed because they said it might be used in an attempt to escape. I don’t know whether the chocolate escaped eating but there was a pack, a pack of tea and very valuable to the Polish among us [vitaminski pilioul?] which were quite palatable but not very high food value and of course butter or margarine and the margarine was called Oleomargarine and I think oleo stands for oil. Tasted rather like that too. We used to trade with the Germans because cigarettes were also contained in the parcels and so was soap. Now those were very valuable commodities and we traded soap with the goons and once we’d traded with them we could report them and this would have led to dire consequences for them so that enabled us to build up trade and we got a certain amount of loaves of bread. The well organised among the escape committee got other things that would be useful in escape and one man even got a camera with some film but that cost a lot of cigarettes but we had a good supply of cigarettes and they were a powerful tool in trading with the Germans.
SB: So you’ve talked about the physical aspects of this. The injuries and the weight loss etcetera. How did you feel emotionally and mentally?
LF: When you’re on such a low diet you tend just to exist. Emotionally you kept on a very even keel because to be emotional cost effort. One of the things I did was to get hold of some Red Cross wool and needles and to re-finger a pair of gloves which were very useful in the German winter. But we had, we organised regular discussions and one of those I contributed to was to do with space travel in which I happened to be very interested. Of course our knowledge of space travel in those days was very limited indeed and one of the things I remember saying was that astronauts would have to have magnetic boots which I don’t think is the case. We also got the medical officer to talk about sex and his briefing was that he should tell us about the birds and the bees but he didn’t spend long on that fortunately [laughs]. But the school also occupied time and cooking for ourselves on the stoves in each barrack room with the potatoes from our soup was another occupation and also keeping the fire going with pieces of wood from our bed rolls but the time didn’t pass too slowly because there were card games and other games supplied by the Red Cross which were available.
SB: You mention the school. Who were you teaching there?
LF: Well, many of the men hadn’t taken more than elementary education and they wanted to keep their standards up in order to take exams either through the Red Cross if there was time or when they got back into England again so as a time passer the school was really very popular and it covered quite a wide range of subjects according to the qualifications of fellow prisoners of war but I, again, in the need to know, I only knew about the English section and a friend of mine took English grammar but he didn’t want to do English composition but I got sufficient paper from the man of confidence to enable those of my class which consisted of about fifteen men to write essays which I then criticised.
SB: Taking that on a bit further did the men actually write about their experiences or did they just write about things in general?
LF: Of course we were limited in to the subjects of composition and we stuck to the sort of compositions that would have been set in an English school. Nothing about their war service. Nothing about camp conditions. Nothing that could have been of possible use to the Germans had they seen it so that the compositions were rather literary really.
SB: Did they appreciate it?
LF: Oh the school was very popular. Very popular indeed and of course in those circumstances the authority of the teacher doesn’t always count for much. It was very much a matter of cooperation so that you can’t give orders as you can in an ordinary school. [laughs]This experience came, became quite valuable later in life when I taught adults.
SB: So, what, for you, was the highlight of your war experience?
LF: I think the highlight was knowing that the raid in which I had been involved had helped the Americans to reduce the output of the Ploiesti oilfields by about a third and the constant raids kept the oil down to that figure and while we were on the march from Breslau to Cottbus we passed a German tank of the latest mark stuck in a village, run out of a fuel and that again was heartening although we were careful not to show our appreciation to our German guards who were a bit touchy and didn’t like the idea of the march very much. The farms that we were quartered in were very limited in the amount of stock they had and they had to account for everything of course but we made sure they were a few chickens short by the time we left and they were very fed up because they knew they’d be paid for any damage we did in deutschmarks which wouldn’t hold their value very long.
SB: How long did the march take?
LF: The march was about two hundred and fifty miles and took three weeks. We had at the rear of the column, pulled along by those of us who were fitter than others a flat, a flat wheeled vehicle for those who just couldn’t walk any further and among those was the rear gunner of one of my opos who had hurt his back on coming down by parachute and he went into a German hospital because he could no longer stand the conditions. I wonder what happened to him?
SB: How many actually survived your crash?
LF: Half my crew were killed. Yes. The pilot I think was killed outright and so was the upper gunner. And the rear gunner, the navigator, bomb aimer and myself came down by parachute. The flight engineer I’ve already described. Probably broke his neck, got out of the aircraft and fell down dead as soon as he tried to turn his head which is what can happen apparently.
SB: You said two of them were sent on ahead of you because you’d hurt your feet, your foot when you -
LF: Yes.
SB: Were taken so did you catch up with them at all later?
LF: Yes. They were returned to the police station and of course the rear gunner and myself went to one camp but the navigator, being an officer went to an offlag and we saw no more of him.
SB: Did you have any contact with them after it was all over?
LF: I wrote to him because he was a South African mining engineer but I never got a letter back again.
SB: And thinking back now to your family when you finally got back how much had they been aware of what was happening?
LF: They’d received my letters but none of theirs had got through to me and I think they were very relieved to see me back especially as I was placed on double rations and had two ration books. When I got married, before rationing ended that didn’t allow me two wives. [laughs]
SB: Good try [laughs]. So if you think back over the whole, the war and your time afterwards how did your involvement in the war affect your later life? Or didn’t it?
LF: Well I think having seen so much of the world and such a variety of people with whom I had to get on when I was sitting the examination in armament for air crew having been an armourer I knew the Browning machine gun very well and in my examination answer mentioned a part that the examiner didn’t know of but he found it and as a consequence I was put to lecturing to other members of the flight who hadn’t done so well on the Browning gun by the armament officer and also to taking a group of Polish airmen who needed help in learning about armament and I think this led to my promotion from sergeant to flight sergeant within twenty two days which made me senior man which isn’t always uncomfortable, which isn’t always comfortable in the groups I was in but the Polish airmen when it came to the exam said they just couldn’t understand the questions which was very sensible of them. My experience of lecturing to the other members of my flight had followed my promotion in the Home Guard because I lectured to those who didn’t know, from a First World War army manual which I was given on armament. Ok.
SB: Yeah. So it seems to me that throughout your career at some point you ended up lecturing.
LF: [laughs] Yes.
SB: So it was perhaps natural that you went on -
LF: That’s right.
SB: To take that as a career.
LF: Yes. Yes I think that’s very likely. Yes. Always have had the gift of the gab I think.
SB: And do you think it had any impact on your family life when you married and had your own family?
LF: Well I think when you’ve been through near death experiences it concentrates the mind on the essentials of life and in bringing up my own children I’ve tried to look ahead to taking account what their qualities were, what they would be likely to be fitted for and my second son, he became a computer expert and my daughter became a social worker so that I think they followed in keeping to the basics of life as well.
SB: And you say your, one son was an MOD worker.
LF: Yes. Yes he was an electronics engineer in the Ministry of Defence. My daughter was first of all involved in Southwark, which isn’t the easiest place to work in, in adoptions and then in supervising adoptions in Southwark and has recently retired. She deserves a medal too I think. [laughs]
SB: Ok well thank you very much for that it’s been very interesting.
LF: [laughs] I love shooting a line. [laughs]
[machine paused]
LF: No I don’t think so. It’s too general to be -
SB: Well just explain -
LF: Really of interest.
SB: Just explain a little bit about it to me then.
LF: Right. Hang on a moment.
[pause]
LF: Upon arrival in prisoner of war camp one of the early things that one should do is to have a private conversation with the man of confidence. The man of confidence is a prisoner of war in whom his fellow prisoners of war have absolute confidence that he will not betray what they say and it’s a way of ensuring that all prisoners of war are in fact genuine ex-service men, prisoners of war and not German stooges. To the man of confidence you’re allowed to say things that you mustn’t say to fellow prisoners of war. In fact all the detail of your training and whatever and any observations you had about being shot down which might be useful to people who are still fighting. Now this was really quite important and I think it also gave people a sense of the cohesion of all being prisoners together on the same level. Now, I’ve spoken of wireless sets. The man of confidence was in communication with the Air Ministry. So we were told. And I think this was born out because through him came the message that we were no longer to attempt to escape and daily orders could come through which were quite secret from the Germans. How this was done of course I don’t know because I didn’t need to know but the Germans constantly searched of course for wireless sets but because these could be made up, for example, using the solder from the sealings on tins of food using wire and crystals supplied quite openly by the Red Cross which the Germans didn’t bar. Wireless sets would not appear to the uninitiated to be anything at all because they were dismembered and hidden as soon as the broadcast was finished. No prisoners, apart from those actually operating the wireless sets knew where they were except by misadventure and that’s the way it was kept so that interrogation by the Germans would not have been likely to have broken the secrecy.
SB: So the man of confidence, who put him in that position?
LF: The man of confidence was put in that position by the early members starting the new prisoner of war camp and they, there was a camp leader elected as well. In our case it was an Australian airman but, but because during his captivity he was promoted to officer rank he was removed by the Germans and we needed to elect another one which we did by an open ballot. There was also an office run by three or four senior prisoners who were responsible for all contacts with the Germans and some of those were selected because they were able to speak German. Of course we had daily parades and counting and it was against our interests to try and trick the Germans into miscounting and we didn’t do so because we had no need in our camp to conceal the fact that anybody had escaped. Yeah. I think that’s the lot.
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AFisherLS150814
Title
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Interview with Laurence Sidney Fisher
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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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00:50:01 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Creator
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Sheila Bibb
Date
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2015-08-14
Description
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Laurence Fisher grew up in Peterborough and served in the Home Guard before joining the Royal Air Force. He served as ground personnel before remustering as aircrew. He flew operations from Italy before his aircraft was shot down and he became a prisoner of 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
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Egypt
Italy
South Africa
North Africa
Egypt--Sidi Barrani
Temporal Coverage
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1945
Contributor
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Julie Williams
bale out
civil defence
Home Guard
Me 109
prisoner of war
shot down
Stalag Luft 7
the long march
training