1
25
6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2324/45256/LBanksJF1578295v1.2.pdf
8a9519e5298c51d95489441454014056
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
Camlin, Alan Edwin
Description
An account of the resource
7 items. The collection concerns Alan Edwin Camlin DFM (196717 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, correspondence, documents, and objects. He flew operations as an air gunner with 7 Squadron.
The collection also contains John Francis Bank's log book and other papers. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 192 Squadron.
The collection was donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Janet Camlin and catalogued by Lynn Corrigan.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-20
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Camlin, AE
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
John Francis Bank's observer's and air gunner's flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
The observer's and air gunner's flying log book for Flight Lieutenant John Francis Banks, born I July 1922, (1578295 Royal Air Force) from 28 March 1943 to 9 April 1946. Detailing his training and operations flown. Served at 41 Air School South Africa, Advanced Flying Unit RAF Wigtown, 84 Operational Training Unit RAF Desborough, 192 Squadron RAF Foulsham, 221 Group and 47 Squadron South East Asia Air Force. Aircraft flown were Oxford, Anson, Wellington, Tiger Moth, Dakota, Expeditor and Mosquito. He carried out 40 operations, 32 night time and 8 day time as bomb aimer. All operations were flown in Wellington aircraft with Flying Officer Clarkson as pilot. The operations were to the coasts of Belgium, Denmark, France Germany and Netherlands, the Bay of Biscay and Western Approaches, Channel Islands, Brest, Calais, Cherbourg and the Frisian Islands.
This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form. No better quality copies are available.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-04-21
1944-03-22
1944-04-27
1944-04-28
1944-04-29
1944-04-30
1944-05-10
1944-05-11
1944-05-27
1944-05-28
1944-05-31
1944-06-01
1944-06-02
1944-06-02
1944-06-03
1944-06-04
1944-06-05
1944-06-09
1944-06-10
1944-06-11
1944-06-12
1944-06-13
1944-06-14
1944-06-15
1944-06-16
1944-06-17
1944-06-18
1944-06-19
1944-06-23
1944-06-24
1944-07-07
1944-07-08
1944-07-10
1944-07-11
1944-07-14
1944-07-15
1944-07-16
1944-07-17
1944-07-18
1944-07-19
1944-07-20
1944-07-21
1944-07-23
1944-07-24
1944-07-26
1944-07-27
1944-07-28
1944-07-29
1944-08-06
1944-08-08
1944-08-10
1944-08-12
1944-08-13
1944-08-25
1944-08-26
1944-08-27
1944-08-29
1944-08-30
1944-09-01
1944-09-05
1944-09-06
1944-09-09
1944-09-11
1944-09-13
1944-09-14
1944-09-15
1944-09-16
1944-09-17
1944-09-21
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Bangladesh
Bangladesh--Comilla
Belgium
Burma
Burma--Moʻ pī
Burma--Magwe
Burma--Meiktila
Burma--Rangoon
Burma--Toungoo
Europe--Frisian Islands
France
France--Brest
France--Calais
France--Cherbourg
Germany
Germany--Helgoland
Great Britain
England--Leicestershire
England--Norfolk
England--Northamptonshire
Scotland--Dumfries and Galloway
Great Britain Miscellaneous Island Dependencies--Channel Islands
Malaysia
Malaysia--Butterworth (Pulau Pinang)
Netherlands
Singapore
South Africa
South Africa--East London
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LBanksJF1578295v1
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Lynn Corrigan
192 Squadron
47 Squadron
84 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bomb aimer
C-47
Mosquito
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Desborough
RAF Foulsham
RAF Wigtown
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2099/34705/SWeirG19660703v100018.1.jpg
7bc5f0bcd6cc731f88786fc1bbad4604
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Weir, Greg. Wilson, Paul Dean
Description
An account of the resource
Thirty-four items. Collection concerns Flying Officer Paul Wilson RAAF, a Halifax pilot he flew operations with 466 and 462 Squadrons from June to October 1944. Collection contains his log books, photographs, newspaper cutting and documents.
The collection was catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-04-26
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Weir, G
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[inserted] 32 [/inserted]
REINFORCEMENT MANIFEST. Serial No. 265
25 Reinforcement Camp. [inserted] 387 [/inserted]
Dated 26.5.45. Aircraft No. . . . Destination Meiktila.
[a] No. [b] Rank [c] Name [d] Destination [e] Weight [f] No.
[a] 330484 [b] Lieut. [c] Mines. P.L. [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 1.
[a] 14815621 [b] Pte [c] Addleton S. [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 2.
[a] 14987015 [b] Pte [c] Austin D. [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 3
[a] 14731315 [b] Pte [c] Barnwell A [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 4
[a] 14805734 [b] Pte [c] Barnes J [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 5
[a] 14815631 [b] Pte [c] Broadfield J [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 6
[a] 14763197 [b] Pte [c] Beard S [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 7
[a] 14988775 [b] Pte [c] Baker R [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 8
[a] 14988592 [b] Pte [c] Bird H [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 9
[a] 14815244 [b] Pte [c] Bunce P. [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 10
[a] 14816927 [b] Pte [c] Charlton G. [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 11
[a] 14811863 [b] Pte [c] Cutts D [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 12
[a] 14986217 [b] Pte [c] Dunn C [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 13
[a] 14987007 [b] Pte [c] Evans D [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 14
[a] 14989464 [b] Pte [c] Frewin A [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 15
[a] 14711050 [b] Pte [c] Forthrope W [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 16
[a] 14807825 [b] Pte [c] Gabriel A [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 17
[a] 14990775 [b] Pte [c] Cofton K [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 18
[a] 14986759 [b] Pte [c] Haigh L [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 19
[a] 14805802 [b] Pte [c] Hopkins K [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 20
[a] 14805827 [b] Pte [c] Hunt C [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 21
[a] 14807945 [b] Pte [c] Lander H [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 22
[a] 14990027 [b] Pte [c] Mansfield L [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 23
[a] 14732303 [b] Pte [c] Midgley L [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 24
[a] 14815619 [b] Pte [c] Aidney L. [d] Meiktila [e] 220 lbs [f] 25
Signed . . . [signature] . . . Capt & Adjt. 25 Reinforement Camp.
Total 5500 lbs.
Emplaning Officer . . . Rec. Officer [signature]
Unit . . . Unit . . .
Capt of Aircraft [signature]
[underlined] 5th Plane [/underlined]
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
Reinforcement manifest
Description
An account of the resource
Gives list of personnel bound for Meiktila.
This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form. No better quality copies are available.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-05-26
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-05-26
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Burma
Burma--Meiktila
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
British Army
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One page typewritten document
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SWeirG19660703v100018
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/299/31513/LMcCredieJ418236v1.2.pdf
9d93c26625abaa1bf0df875d6eaf4a54
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
McCredie, John
John McCredie
J McCredie
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. An oral history interview with John McCredie (1921 - 2016, 418236 Royal Australian Air Force), his log book and documents. He flew two operations as a pilot over France during training and was later posted to India.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by John McCredie and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-12
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McCredie, J
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
John McCredie's Air Forces India pilot's flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Air Forces in India pilots flying log book for J D McCredie, covering the period from 12 August 1942 to 24 December 1945. Detailing his flying training, operations flown and post war flying. He was stationed at RAAF Temora, RAAF Point Cook, RAF South Cerney, RAF Harwell, RAF Kolar, RAF Salbani, RAF Jessore, RAF Dhubalia and RAF Palam. Aircraft flown were, DH82, Oxford, Wellington and Liberator. He flew a total of total of 29 operations with 99 Squadron. Targets were, Hnonpladuk, PrangKazi, Kyaikkatha, Taungup, Kalgauk, Burma-Siam Railway, Bankok-Cheng Mai Railway, Mandalay, Meiktila, Kyauktalon, Amarapura, Jumbhorn, Rangoon, Myinmu, Kunlon, Taunggyi, Martaban and Na-Nien. They included air sea rescue operations, 'bridge busting' and 'train busting'.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LMcCredieJ418236v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
New South Wales
Victoria--Point Cook
India--Kolār
India--West Bengal
Bangladesh--Jessore
India--Punjab
Thailand
Bangladesh--Jessore District
Burma--Amarapura
Burma--Bhamo (District)
Burma--Kyaikto
Burma--Mandalay
Burma--Meiktila
Burma--Myinmu (District)
Burma--Rakhine State
Burma--Rangoon
Burma--Siam Railroad
Burma--Taunggyi
Burma--Thaton
Great Britain
England--Berkshire
England--Gloucestershire
Thailand--Chiang Mai
Thailand--Chumphon
Thailand--Ratchaburi (Province)
Victoria
Bangladesh
Burma
India
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1944-11-03
1944-11-04
1944-11-30
1944-12-03
1944-12-10
1944-12-13
1944-12-21
1945-01-01
1945-01-09
1945-01-11
1945-01-13
1945-01-18
1945-01-21
1945-01-25
1945-02-03
1945-02-08
1945-02-11
1945-02-12
1945-02-17
1945-02-18
1945-02-25
1945-03-03
1945-03-04
1945-03-05
1945-03-07
1945-03-11
1945-03-19
1945-03-22
1945-03-23
1945-03-29
1945-04-05
1945-04-06
1945-04-23
1945-04-24
15 OTU
99 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
air sea rescue
aircrew
B-24
bombing
Heavy Conversion Unit
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Harwell
RAF South Cerney
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
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/.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Burma--Meiktila
Title
A name given to the resource
Meiktila [place]
Mitthīlā; Thīlā
Description
An account of the resource
This page is an entry point for a place. Please use the links below to see all relevant documents available in the Archive.
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/512/8743/PFranklinJB1616.1.jpg
795421ad1dfce4657298441a0a2fd3a6
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/512/8743/AFranklinJB160331.2.mp3
f6e3050fce261c63a251a84f549d2b34
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
Franklin, John Brown
Jack Brown Franklin
John B Franklin
John Franklin
J B Franklin
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Franklin, JB
Description
An account of the resource
15 items. An oral history interview with John "Jack" Brown Franklin (1921 - 2018 1484256 Royal Air Force)and fourteen photographs of people and aircraft. He served in the Liverpool Home Guard before enlisting in the Air Force. He served as ground crew with 109 Squadron between late 1942 and 1944 before being posted to Burma with 28 Squadron in 1945.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by XXX and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-31
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
BW: This is Brian Wright interviewing mechanic John Brown Franklin of 109 and 28 squadrons RAF at his home in Walton, Liverpool on Thursday 31st March 2016 and the time is 1.45. Also, with me is his nephew Neil Hayes and if you would like to start us off please Jack. You’ve asked me to call you Jack as -
JBF: Yes that’s right. Yeah.
BW: That’s how you’re referred to.
JBF: Yeah.
BW: Would you give us your service number and date of birth please?
JBF: Yes. Ok. Service number is 1484256. Date of birth 28 6 1921.
BW: And have you always lived in Liverpool?
JBF: Yes.
BW: And do you, you mentioned you had, I think, a brother. Do you have brothers and sisters or did you have brothers and sisters?
JBF: I’ve got a brother and sister. My brother was world famous as a ballet dancer.
BW: What was his name?
JBF: Frederick Franklin. And if you want to get his history I believe it’s all on the –
NH: All over the web.
JBF: In the computer. And here’s Neil with his CBE presented by the queen to him at Buckingham palace.
BW: Right.
JBF: And unfortunately -
BW: Wow.
JBF: He died just a couple of years ago aged ninety eight.
BW: And whereabouts in Liverpool were you living at the time?
JBF: Oh at birth. Over a café on the corner of Wavertree Road and Durning Road. We were all three born over the café and my father ran it with his mother and it lasted ‘til about 1923 and then we went to live higher up Wavertree Road in Janet Street and then about ten years after that, it would be about 1933 we moved to Gordon Drive, Pilch Lane, Huyton and that’s where I married from and lived here. I’ve lived here since 1957.
BW: Wow.
JBF: We bought the house then with my wife Dorothea.
BW: And so what was your home life like? Was it -
JBF: Well it was great. We were, they were musical people. My mother was very musical and my sister and they were in to all sorts of shows like the Maid of the Mountains and The Chocolate Soldier and Rosemarie. That kind of show. They loved it. And when my brother decided he wanted to be on the stage they were over the moon simply because he wanted to be on stage and so -
BW: And did he get a scholarship for his dancing or anything like that?
JBF: Oh no what he did was he went with the Jackson Boys to, his first job was he joined the Jackson Boys, a troupe of people dancing and they finished up in Paris at the, I think it was the Casino de Paris and he was there ‘til the Germans, the war started in ‘39 and they were either threatening to overrun France or they had actually started but my mother lost touch and was worried stiff and then the next thing we heard about him was that he was in Holland with the company, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo run by a fellow called Leonide Massine. He’s also a world famous performer if you care to go through the, and the next minute we heard he was in America so of course he was delighted that he’d got out of it ‘cause there was no way he would ever have made a servicemen of any kind. He was just, he was a piano player, played the piano, singing and dancing you know. One of the times he was playing the piano and Miss [Stangette?] whom you no doubt have never heard of, she used to sit on the piano and she was the toast of Paris and she used to come out in this café, Casino de Paris or whatever it was, a nightclub and do the singing while Fred played. My sister was also a pianist so we –
BW: And were you musical yourself?
JBF: Oh yes. I, I was the only one that didn’t get the lessons because the money ran out. My father had a stroke. My father was a veteran of the Boer war complete with medal.
BW: And you’ve got his medal here.
JBF: And -
BW: Which has got to be a rare item in itself.
JBF: Yes well its solid silver, unlike the tin ones we got from the last war.
BW: Yeah.
JBF: With bars and -
BW: Yeah.
JBF: And he was shot off his horse somewhere in South Africa and he said the worst thing about it was the two hundred mile trip in a cart, [bullock?] cart to get to the boat to come home. Well he came home and survived and they invalided him out of the army in 1900 and he was never called up for the ‘14 war. He was unfit for further service and that’s, and he had a stroke about, what, 1931 sometime in the early 30s. I never knew him as a man really. He was, like all Victorians he was here and you were over there, you know. That’s just how it was. He was a nice guy you know, it just -
BW: Yeah. More of a father figure.
JBF: A father figure.
BW: A strict father figure in a sense.
JBF: Exactly. Yeah. Mother did all the slogging, you know. Kept us all together.
BW: And what was school like for you?
JBF: Oh a bit disastrous because I just didn’t get on somehow or other. I just didn’t get on. I left at sixteen and a half and I was really contemplating. I thought well I’d better do something about it so I just started to do the school certificate rerun at night school and the war started.
BW: And what subjects were you studying in your certificate at night school?
JBF: I got credits in history, English, and geography and I failed in chemistry and math er French and chemistry. That was it. And as a matter of interest I had my French book stolen for the last nine months before the exam and so there was no way I was going to pass it anyway you know. I just. Anyway I got out of school. Got this job with paper merchants LS Dixon and Co Limited. Very old fashioned, very conservative Liverpool Company.
BW: And what were you doing in the paper merchants?
JBF: Clerking. Booking orders, arranging for the orders to get out to the warehouse, seeing that they were all packed up properly and delivered to whoever, you know.
BW: And so presumably you had this job for about year eighteen months.
JBF: That’s right.
BW: Until war broke out.
JBF: Well, the story about the war thing is sitting opposite us was a veteran of the war. He said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘It’ll be over by Christmas,’ you know. It was exactly the same as the pre-war people. It will be over by Christmas and ‘course it wasn’t and then it got around to Dunkirk you know when the three hundred and thirty three thousand were being picked up in France and Eric, sitting opposite me, Eric [McKim?] he said, ‘You know, Jack. We should do something about it really. I know we’re underage.’ We was, I was eighteen I think or something like that and we went to the police station in Derby Lane and signed on and then from Derby Lane I got the call to report to the abattoir in Prescot Road and I was given that.
BW: And this is a card that says you’re joining the Local Defence Volunteers.
JBF: That’s right, yes.
BW: G division.
JBF: Yeah
BW: Dated 13th of June 1940. So this is right after the evacuation of Dunkirk. Right at the height of -
JBF: Well it was Dunkirk that, Dunkirk was the end of May.
BW: Yeah.
JBF: 1940 and we finished up in this abattoir with that and we had instructions when the church bells landed er sounded you know we were told to destroy our identity you know, and so we joined the Home Guard and, or the LDV as it was. We had neither uniforms nor rifles or anything you know and we used to do marching about and guard and such like and the one terrifying moment in the, as an LDV was that the church bells had rung. A corporal came around, 2 o’clock in the morning, ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘It’s on,’ so we get up to the orphanage and we’re stood in two lines at the back of the orphanage facing Speke in front of trenches full of water that we’d dug, you know in the 1914 style.
BW: Yeah. Zigzag.
JBF: And everybody was mystified but we were all looking from Speke for the parachutists you know and we were there for a couple of hours and then suddenly, you know, we, it all vanished. The whole thing fell apart. There was nothing. Nobody landed. And we, we’d been given twenty four hours rations which was hard tack and corned beef. Well we ate those in about half an hour. Just sat around and ate it all. By 3 o’clock we’d eaten the day’s rations you know and that’s how the, it’s perfectly right, I’m Pike in the Dad’s Army because I was that age and everybody else who carefully avoided guard duties and all the nasty bits were bank managers or foremen and something else or assistant managers in bread shops or whatever it was, you know and Mr Mainwaring is a dead ringer for the CO you know.
BW: Of your unit.
JBF: Ex, in the, ex in, he was a bank manager you know and he got the atmosphere you know. It was typical and that went on for fifteen months until I was called up and then finally I got the call up papers and joined the RAF on the 15th of September 1941.
BW: And did you see, during your time as an LDV volunteer did you see any raids over Liverpool because -
JBF: Oh yes.
BW: There were quite a few raids by the Luftwaffe on the -
JBF: That’s a separate chapter. We were formed by the company which was in town, Cable Street, into parties of three and we did night duty on the premises during the blitz and the most graphic one of the blitz was we were playing table tennis as something to do while it was all going crash bang wallop ‘cause we were near the docks and they were really and then this hell of an explosion. It shook the place absolutely, we thought and we were in the cellar so we managed, we decided we’d better go around and see everything was intact. Nothing. So we went outside. Went up Thomas Street into South John Street and at the junction of North John Street and Lord Street was a huge pile of debris, masonry and out of it was sticking arms and legs and so we went up like this, you know the real -
BW: Yeah. Sort of -
JBF: John Wayne, sort, you know.
BW: Covering your eyes. Yeah.
JBF: And on the, on the traffic light was a sailor trying to knock out the lights with a brick so we get up there looking and thinking oh my God what are we going to see and they were all tailors dummies. There wasn’t a person in it. The shops around that area were tailors shops and the bomb had hit Church House, blown that to pieces and the blast had blown all these dummies out of the shop windows and somehow or other they all arrived together in the middle. So we got over that. That was the most graphic of the, and then the next one was during the May we had, I don’t know if you know about the blitz but Liverpool, before Hitler invaded Russia he blitzed Liverpool as a good start to stopping the shipping in the May. The May blitz it’s called and that week we had a floating land mine drift over the house and blew up on the Swanside estate. Blew all those houses up and the blast took the windows out of the back of our house and holes in the roof, hole in the roof and all the celings had holes in where the draft had came down but the most awful thing was the soot because we all had chimneys and everywhere was covered in soot you know so on the Sunday my mother and I we started clearing up and I said, ‘I’ve got to go to work,’ you know so I got the bike out and we started down for the, for the town and I got to [Clatton] Street and the place was covered in glass. I thought well this is the end of the bike if I ride so I picked the bike up, put it on my shoulder and walked down to Lewis’ which was just a hollow wreck. There was nothing visible at all. It had been on fire and they’d put it out and there was just and they ground that down to Boots on the corner, round the corner and I got as far as the bottom of Lord Street, Whitechapel and Paradise Street and there was a tape across so I got to there and the strange thing was where what we could see of Cable Street which was right at the back of Lord Street you could see daylight you know. I thought well that’s funny, it doesn’t look too good so I said to the man, ‘My job’s around the corner.’ He said, ‘No it isn’t,’ he said, ‘It’s finished. You can’t go around there.’ And two four storey buildings that was the office, the warehouse, the factory and the second warehouse were about this high. It had just burned. The whole thing had gone because it was a paper warehouse. Couldn’t be better, you know, once, and it was fire that, on that particular blitz.
BW: Raised the building to about two foot high.
JBF: It was just about two foot high and I was standing there dumb. I thought, ‘Well ok the house has gone up now the jobs gone up. What do we do now for an encore?’ Sort of thing. And I got a tap on the shoulder. I looked around and it was the manager Mr Lloyd. He said, ‘John,’ he said, ‘We’re all around at the Allied Paper.’ So I hot footed it around to the Allied Paper in Hood Street and the entire office collection was sitting there looking at each other you know. So they didn’t know what to, ‘cause there was not even a place to go to. The place had vanished. Literally. Four storey buildings just vanished and Mr Packer was the export manager, he said, ‘Well John, if you need something to do come with me and we’ll see what’s happened to the shipping.’ So I was delighted, so, ‘Certainly Mr Packer.’ So off we set down to the pier head and we went around people like James Dowie, Gracie Beasley the whole line, that kind of thing, JT Fletcher’s and made enquiries to find out what was missing and what wasn’t you know and we made a list of everything because he had cargo on boats you know. He used to do business with the West Indies and the unfortunate thing for him was that Mr Woodley who was about, there was no pension scheme in this particular company and Mr Woodley the export manager was about seventy three and he was still coming to work because there was no pension and he got knocked down and killed in the blackout so that was the end of the, of the export information so they just had to start from scratch you know ‘cause even Sid Woodley had disappeared, you know, and then there was, I can’t really remember because it was the in-between but we ended up in the banana rooms in Fitzpatrick’s in Queens Square. That’s where I left to join the air force. The Banana Rooms, of course there were no bananas coming in during the war and there were just these big spaces and they started the firm from that that the lucky thing was they had a government quota for paper and that didn’t alter despite all that had gone on so they started with the quota that they had and they stocked these Banana Rooms with paper and started to carry on the business and the other intriguing thing was the books had been in the cellar in Cable Street and they were in fireproof safes which was great except they were cooked. They weren’t burned. They were just cooked. So the senior members of the accounts department were transported every day to Mr Dixon’s house on the Wirral and they each had an egg, an egg slice you know and they would lift each page up and turn it over and find out how much ‘cause the books were handwritten. It was just antediluvian but it was part of the course.
NH: The time. Yeah.
JBF: Antediluvian, you know, everything was by hand. We wrote orders in books by hand. The books were sent to the forwarding man and he’d organise the stuff you know and finally I got my call up papers and Mr Cook said, ‘Ok,’ he says, ‘Well as things stand, Jack,’ he said, ‘Your job will be open when you come back,’ and that’s exactly how it was. The job was open when I came back five years later.
BW: And during the time and this was all through 1940. The bombing raids and things.
JBF: Up to September the 15th 1941.
BW: Did you happen to see anything of the Battle of Britain? I know that was concentrated over the south east but there were raids and intercepts from squadrons up here. Did you see anything of that?
JBF: In Liverpool during the lunch hour when we were out there was a couple of times when German aircraft were over and everybody was out looking at them you know and there was a bit of fighting as far as I can remember but I don’t think there was too much this end.
BW: No.
JBF: It was the blitz for Liverpool. That was the thing.
BW: And were you on duty during the night time and sort of working during the day?
JBF: Oh yes.
BW: Did you alternate your civilian job with your LDV duties?
JBF: The big plus factor was that after your night’s duty you went in to Brown’s, the café in Cable Street, and had a bacon and egg breakfast and then you went home you know from the day ‘cause there, there wasn’t really that much happening at that stage of the war. Everybody was non-plussed. Nobody knew whatever was happening. You know. It hadn’t settled down to anything. And -
BW: And what drew you to join the RAF? Did you apply to join or
JBF: Well –
BW: Were you offered a choice of which service?
JBF: When I went for the call up interview I said, ‘Well I’d like to join the RAF.’ They said, ‘What would you like to be?’ So I quickly said, ‘Oh I’d like to be a mechanic,’ you know. They said, ‘’Ok.’ Then the next minute I was sent to, what’s the local RAF place there?
BW: Woodvale.
NH: Woodvale.
JBF: No. Not Woodvale. Closer.
NH: Closer?
JBF: Yeah. Where, where were the Yanks locally?
NH: Oh Burton Wood.
BW: Yeah.
JBF: Burton Wood. It was in that area as far as I can remember and sat an exam.
BW: There was a recruiting centre or an RAF station at Padgate. Does that, that was near Warrington.
JBF: Well it might have been.
BW: Sort of Burton Wood area.
NH: Yeah.
BW: Ok.
JBF: I went in the Warrington area.
BW: Yeah.
JBF: And took, and sat an exam and I passed that and so I was down to be a mechanic.
BW: And when you say mechanic were there different types of mechanic that you could apply to be? Did you have a choice in that or were you directed simply as -
JBF: I’ve no idea. I didn’t even know what a mechanic was -
BW: Right.
JBF: I just said I’d like to be a mechanic because if I played with anything it was with Meccano before the war and I think I had some sort of mechanical ability you know and so I thought well I’m going to be an office for the rest of my life. I’d just like to do something different never realising I’d be doing it for the next five years but there you are.
BW: Did, did the thought of being aircrew ever appeal to you at all?
JBF: Yeah. I volunteered for aircrew and got halfway through the medical until the eyesight test and that was the end of that.
BW: What would you have liked to have done as a member of aircrew? What do you -
JBF: Well -
BW: Think your preference would have been?
JBF: In the talk I was at Wyton at the time and the flight engineers were in vogue at the time. I thought well with the basic knowledge I’ve already got I think I could have passed the rest of it to become a flight engineer so when they asked me at the medical lark I said, ‘Flight engineer.’
BW: Ok. And instead once, once they’d done the assessment and found your eyesight wasn’t up to scratch you were then posted to another base for -
JBF: No.
BW: Mechanical training.
JBF: I just went back to being where I was in Wyton.
BW: I see. So while you were still working as a mechanic you then volunteered for aircrew.
JBF: That’s right. For aircrew yes.
BW: They said you couldn’t be selected for aircrew and you returned to your trade.
JBF: I went back to the trades and being a mechanic. Yeah.
BW: And what squadron were you at there?
JBF: At Wyton it was 109.
BW: And you say this was a Pathfinder squadron.
JBF: Yeah. This was a Pathfinder squadron, yeah. The sister squadron was 83 squadron. They were Lancasters.
BW: And they were on the same base were they?
JBF: Same base yeah.
BW: And –
JBF: We were there for about nine months at Wyton and it was at Wyton that the first Oboe raid by Mosquitoes took place which was my squadron and my aircraft was the first aircraft to do something with the Oboe. The pilot was Squadron Leader Bufton and the navigator was, I think it was a Flight Lieutenant Ifould, an Australian.
BW: So this was Squadron Leader Buckton. Is that -
JBF: Bufton. B U F yeah.
BW: B U F T O N.
JBF: They’re famous in the air force because he had a brother also in the air force and he had a son er another brother rather, a sergeant in the mechanical line.
BW: And his navigator was a flight lieutenant.
JBF: Ifould. I F O U L D.
BW: And so servicing this particular aircraft do you remember anything specific about it? Possibly even the registration or the -
JBF: Well it was -
BW: Code.
JBF: DK33, I think it’s four. The three three’s right but the fours and it was -
BW: Ok.
JBF: D-Donald.
BW: D-Donald.
JBF: Yeah it was D Donald. It was changed to L-Leather later on but it was D-Donald when it was flying when it flew to this, I found out later it was a power station in Holland right on the edge of the German border and that was the first time, I can confirm all this, these books, I’m in these books and pictures you know. This is Tim, you know, he just, ‘Look dad,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen this,’ so -
BW: And did you know Squadron Leader Bufton and Flight Lieutenant Ifould very well? Did they stay with that aircraft for -
JBF: Oh yeah they stayed for -
BW: For a period?
JBF: Quite some time. I mean Bufton became a group captain. I’m sure Ifould did because they were, they were dyed in the wool, I think, pre-war airmen if you know what I mean. They were really the real McCoy you know. This is how the air force won the Battle of Britain. With people like them really because they knew what they were doing.
BW: And I’m assuming that they had already done a tour on bombers prior to becoming -
JBF: They must.
BW: A Pathfinder.
JBF: I should say so. The squadron from Wyton came from Boscombe Down were all the experiments were done.
BW: And what kind of guys were they. These, these two?
JBF: Very nice. Very nice men. Excellent blokes.
BW: Did you have a good rapport with them?
JBF: All the time yes.
BW: And so this remained your aircraft, D Donald for –
JBF: If you want -
BW: Some months.
JBF: If you want a little anecdote with it being the very first raid with Oboe it was the very first Oboe raid for 109 Mosquitos and they decided that nothing should happen to the aircraft so we, they did the MFTs, they did the flying and then they carried the tractors, you know, hooked up the tractors and put the three of them in a hangar. This is, it’s dark at this stage and they’re busy doing and I’m on one wing and I’m bawling, ‘You’re too close. You’re too close,’ and the next minute we’d cracked the [?] on this wing. Pandemonium and, ‘Who’s,’ I said, ‘Look I’ve been bawling my head off.’ And the corporal who was doing the manoeuvring were all too excited to listen, you know. Anyway, it was superficial and in no time they’d got it put right but the interesting thing about this particular time was that the squadron was paraded in a hangar and addressed by the CO and he just simply said, ‘You are engaged in a very special operation and if I hear the word Oboe mentioned in any pub around this district,’ he said, ‘Your feet won’t touch the ground.’ And out of nowhere we were surrounded by plain clothes which I suppose were detectives and everybody was suitably terrified of course and I didn’t mention Oboe till about 1960 [laughs]. There was three types of bomb aiming equipment. There was Oboe, Gee and H2S and they were, they followed on, you know and I think by the time we got too Little Staughton we were in to the H2S or Gee.
BW: And did you work on these bits of kit or were you -
JBF: No. All the -
BW: You still on the airframe?
JBF: All the, the advanced kit, it was Canadians, they all, it was a Canadian unit. They were all Canadians. They all got drunk together, they went out together. It was just like that you know. They were told not to speak to anybody and they were all nice guys it’s just they’d been frightened like us, you know.
BW: So you never worked on these sets but you knew they were on the aircraft.
JBF: Oh yes. We, what we used to do, they did the NFT.
BW: What’s the NFT?
JBF: Night Flying Test. The -
BW: Right.
JBF: In the afternoon. We’d fill them up with oil, petrol and coolant and look at the engines. The big problem with the mark 4 Mosquito was because they were flying a lot higher than the bombers, thirty, twenty eight, thirty thousand feet they were prone to oil leaks so we got quite adept. What we used to do was they’d say that, a bit of a mess coming down and you’d see it everywhere and so they used to take the cowlings off and start the engine up and we’d all, before they started the engines up we’d crawl up the back of the aircraft and hang on and look in to the engine and see if we could spot the oil leaks because there was a million nuts there you know and quite, we did spot -
BW: And so were you, were you on top of the wing at this point?
JBF: You were on top of the wing with about, what, a foot off, well three foot off the propeller.
BW: I was going to say ‘cause you’re having to look over in to the cowling and the blade is spinning.
JBF: The blades are going around full pelt ‘cause they went up high they were at full throttle you know but it worked. It was primitive but there was no other way. The thing was leaking but when they got up that high and with the thing going and we just thought we used to see dribbles coming down. The carburettor was on the back and we used to see dribbles coming down and then we’d work it back. Well it was those nuts and Stan, the corporal, Corporal Wright when it stopped he’d, I said, ‘We’ll check this section,’ and he did do and they were loose you know. We got quite good at that really.
BW: And these, this is clearly in the days before any sort of protective safety equipment and goggles.
JBF: Oh no there’s -
BW: Ear defenders and things.
JBF: Well to give you an idea, when they, have you ever been close to a Mosquito? It’s quite tall you know.
BW: I’ve been to one in a museum, yes, but -
JBF: It’s quite, the end -
NH: Not with engines running [laughs]
JBF: The, we had ladders to get on the back, you know. Well of course within no time the ladders had disappeared because we’d no fuel in the huts so everybody chopped up the ladders and we used to use, when they, as you know you get in a Mosquito in the centre underneath and there’s a metal stair thing.
BW: Yeah.
JBF: Well we used to use those to get on the back and my souvenir was this finger.
BW: And this is on your left hand.
JBF: Yeah. There’s a stich here and a stich there, a stich there and a stich there because -
BW: On your little finger.
JBF: It was wet and being tall you know I was able to go it. I mean Handley, he was about five foot three, couldn’t even get near the thing you know ‘cause I could reach and put the ladder on and it was wet and the ladder slipped and my hand went around the engine nacelle and there’s, I went to the Chiefy, you know, Lendrum and he said, ‘You’d better go and get that fixed,’ so I went to the sick bay and they said, ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘Yes.’ They cleaned it up and I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was that, you know. And they said, ‘Oh yes. We need a few stitches. Right. Stand by.’ So when I’d got over that he said, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Two hours excused duties for bawling.
BW: And so they’d done the stitching in your hands without anaesthetic.
JBF: Well I did two hours excused duties. Well I didn’t do.
BW: That was it.
JBF: I went back to the unit and said to the chief, I said, ‘Sorry I’m on excused duties.’ ‘Oh, well, just before you go have a look at this’ [laughs]. So -
NH: Oh dear. Yeah
JBF: That was that.
BW: And the Mosquito clearly used Merlin engines. Do you know what -
JBF: That’s right. Merlin 20s.
BW: And how did you rate those?
JBF: Oh they were smashing. I never worked on anything else other than the, in Burma we had Hurricane, Hurricane 2Cs cannon and they were Merlin engines and then when they converted after the war to Spit 9s they were a very posh but we had to have training for these they were so posh. You know the latest Merlin engine that was in the Spitfire 9 which was of course was five years after the original Spitfires and we just, we knew how to fill them up with the oil and coolant and so on -
BW: And did you specialise in engine maintenance or were you working on the airframe of the Mosquito as well?
JBF: Oh no the air frame was a rigger called Alan Fraser, the rigger. Each aircraft had a fitter and a rigger as we were called. The airframe was a man who’d been trained as an air frame mechanic and I was on the engines as the engine mechanic.
BW: And so who was the air frame mechanic?
JBF: Alan. Alan Fraser.
BW: He was the rigger.
JBF: The rigger. That’s right.
BW: And is that the same.
JBF: That’s right.
BW: Same name as an air frame engineer.
JBF: Air frame mechanic, it was the rigger.
BW: Ok.
JBF: Yeah.
BW: And you had a corporal in charge of the team.
JBF: Yeah.
BW: Stan Wright.
JBF: Stan Wright was the corporal.
BW: And did you mention an LAC Handley?
JBF: Oh he was my pal in Burma.
BW: Ok so he was -
JBF: LAC Handley.
BW: Not part of this particular -
JBF: Yeah.
BW: Team.
JBF: He wasn’t part of this set up.
BW: And your chief tech, is that right, was, who was your chief tech -
JBF: Oh Chiefy Lendrum.
BW: Lendrum.
JBF: Yeah. Lendrum was the -
BW: Is that one, one word L E N D R U M.
JBF: I think so yeah.
NH: It wasn’t Len Drum.
JBF: He was the flight sergeant, you know. He was in charge. In fact I think without, off the record as you might say he was responsible for the ladders. [laughs]
BW: He was the one, he was the one who took them away to use as firewood.
JBF: And they were all, we’d burned them all. I mean there was quite, it wasn’t hilarious, you were working until you, you know feel asleep sort of thing and it was a real band of blokes you know. It was, I think that’s really what won the war was the fact that everybody just got stuck in. Churchill was marvellous. And everybody got stuck in, you know. I don’t think Hitler could have realised what he’d awakened in the British when he was busy refusing Chamberlain’s piece of paper, you know. He didn’t realise exactly because Goering said, ‘Oh you know we’ll subjugate the British. The air force will do this,’ that and the other you know and of course he didn’t. Battle of Britain. And they turned to Russia.
BW: And so just thinking about the maintenance unit or the mechanics involved on the base here.
JBF: Yeah.
BW: So there’s, there’s the two guys there’s yourself and the rigger responsible for the aircraft and a corporal. Was he over more than one aircraft or just -
JBF: No. Just the one.
BW: Ok. So there was the three of you assigned to the one aircraft.
JBF: That’s right.
BW: And the chief tech presumably looked after -
JBF: He was over the flight.
BW: The whole lot.
JBF: A flight yeah.
BW: Ok.
JBF: Yeah. The six aircraft.
BW: Did you know the other crews at all? The other flying -
JBF: Well we knew them but –
BW: Crews on the Mossies?
JBF: We stuck together really, you know. Yes we knew all of them really, by name but -
BW: And you you didn’t have cause to work on any of the other aircraft. Say if one riggers went down.
JBF: Oh sometimes. It depends. One of the features of the Rolls Royce engine was I think it was to do with the carburettor and there was this cup and it used to accumulate water so what we had to do was we had to take off the locking wire, unscrew the cup, drain the water out, put the cup back and put the locking wire on and the finished article had to be supervised by the corporal, you know, that you’d actually done what you were supposed to do and -
BW: And the paperwork that they use nowadays certainly was a form 700. Was that still in place then?
JBF: Yes. Form 700. Yeah.
BW: So that’s been right the way through the service.
JBF: That you signed to say that, yes, you’d done the -
BW: And you obviously knew the crew well in terms of the ground crew who you worked with. Did you socialise together and live together in the barracks?
JBF: We lived together in the barracks. The ground crew. Yes. We didn’t socialise, and it was discouraged, any of the air crew. The air crew were under strict instructions to say nothing when they got out of the aeroplane and in the five years the only time two aircrew ever got out and said something was when they were steaming along at three or four hundred miles an hour in a Mosquito and an aircraft went around them like this.
BW: In a circular motion.
JBF: And they got out of the Mosquito, ‘We’ve seen it. We’ve seen it.’ We said, ‘What?’ And it was the first type of German jet fighter.
NH: Yeah.
JBF: And it was doing five hundred miles an hour or something and it just went around them while they were busy coming home or whatever they were doing, you know.
BW: And so the aircrew never talked to the ground crew.
JBF: Never.
BW: About the mission that they’d done.
JBF: Oh no. No. You didn’t get anything off them. No.
BW: But they must presumably have told you about anything to you like oil problems in the engine.
JBF: Oh yes.
BW: Or anything they’d seen.
JBF: There was a report you see. What used to happen was the air crew would come in and they’d get out the aircraft. Then they’d go and see the adjutant or whoever was in charge. They had to write a report on the raid and a report on the kite and that was relayed through Chiefy Lendrum to Stan Wright and Stan Wright would get it and say, ‘There appears to be a leak on this,’ and, ‘That’s not happening,’ or, you know. They were very reliable aircraft I must say. The only fault with them when the first Mosquitos came the cowling section of the construction hadn’t been talking to the body and so the cowling went up past the intake on the front so when you were getting, you could get it off but you couldn’t get it back in, you know so they very quickly instead of having the cowling to go that way they just had it below the intake because the two intakes are either side of the cockpit and the problem with that was they were having birds in them as they were flying. They used to get birds wedged in these.
BW: So they had regular bird strikes. Is what you’re saying?
JBF: Oh regular, bird strikes were fairly common.
BW: And did that happen during the raid or normal flying testing or was it mainly around the airfield?
JBF: Oh it was around the airfield. I don’t think it was in -
BW: No.
JBF: While they were bombing, you know.
BW: Yeah.
JBF: ‘Cause they went up at least, I think it was, twenty eight thousand feet and the Lancasters were all getting shot down and they were about what about, what, twenty six, twenty four thousand feet. What happened to the Mosquitoes was they’d come back with tiny little holes in and it was the, where the anti-aircraft shell had exploded as they were wooden they took everything. Nothing bounced off and when the chippies came, if there were holes they used to get to this and look through and see the other hole where it had gone straight through, you know. The marvellous thing about the Mossie was despite it being wood it was almost indestructible. It was marvellous, you know. Just a marvellous aircraft.
BW: Because it could take so much battle damage -
JBF: Yeah.
BW: Without being lost if you like. It wasn’t going to -
JBF: That’s right, without it being. What, the chippies had this technique if it was a biggish hole they’d cut a kind of the top layer of the plywood or whatever it was off and fit.
BW: Yes.
JBF: A new piece of plywood in and put the tape, you know, around and that would and do it all up with the dope and it would, you wouldn’t know it was there, you know.
BW: So they’d sort of cut a square patch out around the -
JBF: Cut a square patch out around the hole, yeah.
BW: Around the hole and -
JBF: Yeah.
BW: Replace that.
JBF: And if it was small enough they’d just cover it over and do the same thing. They wouldn’t take any wood out. They’d just cover it over.
BW: And the air crew found that quite satisfactory.
JBF: Oh yes.
BW: There were no difference in handling or anything like that?
JBF: It didn’t detract from the performances.
BW: So, I guess the most complex part of the Mosquito for you was actually the engine that you were working on.
JBF: That’s right. Yeah.
BW: You found them pretty reliable.
JBF: Oh yes. Yeah.
BW: Did you find them easy to work on or were they particularly complex in their own right?
JBF: Oh no once we’d learned the basics, funnily, the lucky thing for me was at Cosford we trained on Merlin engines and so when I was posted to a Merlin, I was first of all posted to an air gunners school with Blenheims and I’d never seen a radial engine because there were no radial engines in, we’d worked on Merlins you know. So I got out of there, I didn’t like it. I put in for a posting which is how I got to Wyton and the big thing about South Wales was the rugby. I was playing rugby for the station because it’s, you know it’s a, you know a big rugby area you know, miles away from the war. It was an air gunners school and the air gunners were carefully separated from the crew, the ground crew, and they were trained and passed out with all the pomp and ceremony and they went on to whichever squadron the were allocated to and lasted about ten minutes, you know, because the technique of downing a Lancaster was to get after the guns to start with so there was the one sticking out of the front, nothing underneath and the upper. The -
BW: Mid upper gunner.
JBF: W/Op AG you know, so the Germans shot underneath behind the tail so that the fellow, nobody could get at them, straight into the cockpit. I mean people go on about the Lancaster. How marvellous it was. It was a death trap and these books will illustrate how because the number, you know they lost fifty or sixty thousand men and they were sitting ducks once a night fighter, and they would never dream of, where you see on all the films where they’re all coming down this way they just went underneath and it was the same with the Flying Fortress. They had to stop flying daylight raids despite all the under guns. They had, they had a fella sitting in a thing with guns underneath. It didn’t matter. The first one that lost his lives was the gunner and then it was a sitting duck. They could do what they liked. I believe one German ace shot a hundred and seventy three Flying Fortresses down. Just one bloke.
BW: The sister squadron on the base you mentioned was 83 squadron.
JBF: That’s right, yeah.
BW: So did you hear back from ground crews and, and talk in the barracks let’s say or the mess about what was happening on their side.
JBF: No. Nothing. They was billeted in separate, 109 was billeted here, say. The other side of the aerodrome was 83.
BW: So completely separate squadrons
JBF: Completely.
BW: With own messes.
JBF: Yes. Well, with us being, they were Pathfinder bombers and it was secret at that stage, this Oboe thing so they wanted the least person that knew you know and they had you suitably terrified. You felt you had private men, you know under the bed sort of thing. As kids, we were only kids. I mean I was about twenty two or something, Twenty three.
BW: Thinking back then to repairing a Merlin what would you say was the most complex thing to repair? What was the most difficult -
JBF: Well -
BW: Sort of repair or work you had to do on it?
JBF: We didn’t do repairs. What happened was they went in after a number of hours for scheduled maintenance and they got the plugs changed and the oil completely changed and the coolant and they did tests on the engine itself to see that it was still workable because they were work horses you know, they was. I mean we never ever had an engine change in the Mosquito. I don’t ever remember one having to go in for an engine change. They all went in for repairs because of damage or wear or whatever. But just a marvellous piece of equipment, you know.
BW: And when they were brought back or once you’d finished the repair did you have to do engine run ups to verify that it was working alright?
JBF: Oh every day, part of the night, you had to run, you had to DI the engine to see it was, you know, add the coolant in and the oil and all the rest of it. Then it had a test run on the ground. The engines were test run on the ground and to start off only the corporal did the testing and then finally we did that, I did, you know I’d been there a couple of years finally and we did the test runs if they were on leave or anything. So you get to, you’ve got to run, a Mosquito is quite, you know, terrifying to start with. The corporal had someone sitting with you and that.
BW: And so this was done on, on a test bed presumably on -
JBF: No. No. Just where it was in the grass.
BW: Ok.
JBF: They didn’t go anywhere.
BW: Ok. And -
JBF: It was part of the night flying test to run the aircraft before it went up.
BW: And although you mentioned previously that when you were looking for a leak you got on the top of the wing to look in.
JBF: On top of the wing, yeah.
BW: Did you have to do the same once you’d repaired, once you’d serviced the engine?
JBF: It was only for oil leaks.
BW: Ok.
JBF: If they came back and mentioned any kind of leak we used to do this on the back of the aircraft and look in just to see if we could see, you know.
BW: Did you ever get to go in the cockpit to start the engines?
JBF: Yes. I’ve actually flown in a Mosquito. Wing Commander Green was going up for an NFT and Stan Wright fixed it for me to go with him and the problem was at twenty thousand feet there was a juddering. It was very slight, he said, but at twenty thousand feet down and it started to do this you know and it turned out a mixture problem. Something was going wrong at that particular height with the mixture and they fixed it up and it was ok. I only did the, I had one trip in a Mosquito.
BW: How long was that? How long did it last?
JBF: Well, basically the NFT about half an hour, three quarters of an hour.
BW: And what, what did you experience during a flight? What was it like?
JBF: Well I was just gobsmacked. I was absolutely, you know, like this, sort of thing.
BW: And he didn’t, did he let you have a go at the controls or not?
JBF: Oh no. No. They wouldn’t let you do anything. God. Strewth. That would have been it.
BW: But you got to sit next to the pilot while he’s –
JBF: You’ve got to, well the -
BW: Was doing the test.
JBF: The navigator’s here and the pilot’s here you know and –
BW: Yeah.
JBF: The throttles were in between.
BW: It was exhilarating I’m assuming.
JBF: Oh absolutely. Yeah. I was, I felt, you know, Group Captain Franklin, here we go, you know. Real Mr Mainwaring job you know. There’s one, I don’t know whether you want any story out of it but there was one graphic story that, that happened. I think it was at Marham and I was on the main plane waiting for the bowser to fill up and suddenly there were screams underneath the aircraft, ‘Help. Help.’ So I got off the main plane and got down and the armourer had primed a five hundred pound bomb and then he couldn’t hook it in so he was standing there so I got the bomb on my back and slowly, I was, you know strong in those days and I lifted it up.
BW: So you crouched underneath it, took the weight on your back.
JBF: I took the weight on my back and while he hooked it in. He said, ‘We’re alright now.’ I said, ‘Well we’re not being blown up at least,’ and the aftermath was I think the op was over because they were filling, we used to have to fill them up immediately they came back you know in case and Stan Wright came to me. He said, ‘You know, Jack,’ he said ‘Were you on the starboard wing?’ I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I got this scream from underneath and I went down and helped the armourer. We managed to get over the problem.’ When I came out everybody had vanished and the aircraft as far as we could make out had been to France or Germany and back with no petrol caps on the right side. So, he said, ‘You know,’ he said, ‘This is a court martial offence.’ I said, ‘Hang on.’ So I thought about it. So I got on the bike, went, cycled around into the hangar, all the lights were on and there were Mossies being maintained you know so I couldn’t see anybody so I climbed up on the back of this Mosquito, took off the two petrol caps, and the tops, put them in my jacket and got down. Nobody, didn’t see me so I, so I went to Stan. I said, ‘You’re alright, Stan. You won’t be court martialled.’ I said, ‘Here they are.’ [laughs] Gave him the two tops and the petrol. He was absolutely, you know, he was gobsmacked [caught the phrase locally?] and so hurriedly because the people that would have been up for the trouble were the mechanic that was on the other side of the Mosquito ‘cause he’d signed the 700 to say it was full and how the aircraft got to Germany and back with no petrol caps on we never knew and nobody else did because they didn’t know they were off.
BW: And the air crew normally do checks before they -
JBF: Oh yes.
BW: Take off as well.
JBF: Well they start the engines up and all that you know you had to. The method of starting was you had the trolley acc and you primed the engine. There was a little flap on the side and you primed the engine and then you give the signal up to the bloke on the trolley acc, he presses the -
BW: Thumbs up.
JBF: Electrics and it starts up, you know and he, if there was any worry it was when we hadn’t enough ground crew to go around. You had to do the two engines so you had to prime the one on the port side shall we say and then you had to come and prime the one on the starboard side and then you give the, and fortunately despite you know, I think it’s the quality of the workmanship really because we never ever had a failure. You know. Overheating. They both started each time even when there was only one man doing it because we’d no people to do it.
BW: And in all weathers too.
JBF: Oh well it was, you know, Norfolk in the winter is quite something else. The thing they used to do when it was a long raid we knew it was a long raid because they’d come out with urns of cocoa and corned beef sandwiches about that thick.
BW: About two inch thick.
JBF: And you could get, there was an unlimited supply. You could do, if you felt like running around a lot as we were during the night and so we got stuck into these. You know it was fine. Didn’t mind. The, really you have to be the age we were at. Anybody else, it must have been, you know if you were thirty five or forty or whatever it was it must have been awful, just, and with a family you know. Well one corporal developed shingles and it was the family. He was on the phone to the wife and the kid had measles or whatever it was you know and he was beside himself. I was exactly -
BW: And yet -
JBF: The right age for the war. It couldn’t have been better.
NH: Yeah.
BW: And as a single man you were quite happily sharing a barracks with your mates.
JBF: Oh yes. I hadn’t got a girlfriend. I was just a single man, you know. In fact, one Christmas I gave up my leave for one of the married men who had kids you know. Which was nothing heroic. It was just common, you know.
BW: Did, did you feel that your efforts were appreciated by the crews and the -
JBF: Oh yeah.
BW: Officers on the base?
JBF: Oh everybody. It was a together thing. I mean working that close and their lives were involved. It was a very close knit, all the squadrons were the same. A very close knit unit. There was no Captain Mainwaring standing around, you know. I mean there was no saluting.
BW: Really.
JBF: You just got on with it and first names, you know they called you.
BW: So -
JBF: You always called them whatever they were like squadron leader, you know, Bufton and you gave them their rank but we were just Jack and Alan and Stan.
BW: Were there any, you mentioned an error in someone leaving petrol caps off? Were there any incidents that you knew of elsewhere in the squadron perhaps?
JBF: Well -
BW: Where there was something that had been missed that resulted, for example, in an accident or the loss of an aircraft.
JBF: Oh the only thing that we watched from start to finish was U-Uncle and two lads, they could have been more than twenty five, navigator and the pilot, you know and they were very excited. It was their first trip and we got them in and watched them and they took off and went straight, straight in.
BW: So the nose pitched up and they went straight down.
JBF: They went straight down and burned to death, the two of them. Big explosion. Bang. And I said that, there was this old sergeant and I said, he said they probably didn’t lock the throttles. They were that excited about getting up because they had to do a lot of homework in while they were in the aircraft to find out what they were going to do, you know. They just went straight in.
BW: And that was close to or over the base.
JBF: Well we just watched the whole thing. Yeah. And the ,our aircraft finally, when I say our aircraft this DK number 334 I think it was or 335 it crash landed and it was that old the aircrew hated it because it was absolutely on its tips you know. Did a hundred and eleven ops and it landed and the undercarriage went up into the -
NH: The wing.
JBF: Into the engine nacelle and just they weren’t hurt and that was it. They took us around and we were photographed, the three of us Alan, Stan and myself in front of this wreck.
BW: So moving on from Wyton and Marham.
JBF: Yes.
BW: You mentioned that later in your service you transferred to 28 squadron.
JBF: Yeah.
BW: So what happened in the period between -
JBF: Little Staughton -
BW: This would be -
JBF: Was the next thing after Marham.
BW: And did you request a transfer to another squadron?
JBF: What happened was I put in for overseas and said I’d serve anywhere because I I thought, well, realised, that we would never go anywhere else. We were, the war was well on from D Day. They were going into Germany, the armies, France and there was less, and it was rather backing up troops rather than bombing anywhere so I put in for overseas and said I’d serve anywhere and that’s how I came to go to 28 squadron. Next minute I was on a troop ship and then I was in North Western India at a place called Ranchi.
BW: How do you spell that?
JBF: I joined 28 squadron.
BW: How do you spell Ranchi?
JBF: R A N C H I.
BW: And this was in North West India.
JBF: North West India. Yeah.
BW: And so the attraction of going was really because you felt there wasn’t going to be that much more -
JBF: I was -
BW: To do on the squadron.
JBF: The age I was. Twenty four you know.
BW: And you fancied the opportunity of going abroad.
JBF: At least, I thought, yeah. The next minute the CO said, ‘Don’t unpack your kit you’re going to Burma.’ So I thought well this will be a change. So we gave in our blue, all the winter clothing and put in a kit bag and the marvellous thing was when it came back to us in Malaya it was intact for those two years. So with 28 squadron they were on rest and then they suddenly said, ‘We’re off. We’re starting off,’ and we went to Burma by road and rail and we got on the train. It went right up into the North West provinces of India you know, up to, by rail a change to the narrow gauge railway, Assam. That’s it. All that through I think it’s around the top of what is now Bangladesh you know and you go well India’s what you might call semi-primitive to absolutely basics. When you get up there the Naga tribesmen are still in the outfits, you know. I thought gee whiz if these fellas were in the Olympics they’d win everything. Their leg muscles were like this because they were hill men. Apparently, the English had civilised them and they were no longer head hunters. But they chased the Japanese. But what used to happen was you’d be standing there and they’d come down from the mountain and do what we called the shopping which was trying to get food, I think was the main thing. Then on the way back they had conical baskets which they put their provisions in and they each held the bottom of the conical basket and then they started a rhythm of steps and they went straight up the mountain like that. None of this we’ll climb here and all the movement was about fifteen of them all holding on. Nothing was out of place. Nothing. Must have been doing it all their lives. It was great.
BW: Just out of interest how did you get shipped out to India? Did you fly out there or were you -
JBF: No. It was the Cameronia.
BW: Troop shipped.
NH: Tell them about your Suez Canal.
BW: Well the Suez Canal was -
NH: I’ll make some tea while you -
JBF: The reason I’ve told it is on the boxes of dates before the war you always had an Arab pulling two camels and I’m just lounging on the side of the Cameronia and suddenly an Arab pulling two camels appeared on the side of the Suez Canal. So I’ve seen it. You know. Right off the box. So, we, we finally landed in Bombay. Worli was the transit camp and then we were on the trains going to our different placements.
BW: And this is Worli.
JBF: Worli that’s the transit camp outside Bombay.
BW: How do you spell Worli?
JBF: I should imagine it’s something like W R O R L and L I somewhere on the end of it. And the thing to watch out for on the Indian trains are the hookers because they are going that slow when they go up hill the hookers jump on to the train with hooks and hook all the equipment out of the windows which are always open and Handley, my pal gets out in his underwear with just shorts and he gets out with an officer in a dressing gown.
NH: All the gear had gone.
JBF: We’d lost it all with the hookers. And well a real introduction to India, on the floor on the station was this old man covered in flies. He was just covered in flies and I said to one of the Anglos, I said, ‘Well what’s that?’ He said, ‘He’s just dying.’ And that, that sums India up for me you know. That was it. Another time I saw a man, he was quite a big man, he was on a piece of corrugated and four men were holding him you know and I said, ‘He looks dead.’ ‘He is dead. They’re just carting him off. He’s just died.’ It was just like Fu Manchu you know. Flares and this one had been. And we finally we were taken by truck to Burma and it was along the Manipur Road and then it’s, it’s a flat road in between mountains where Kohima and Imphal where they did the fighting and then the road goes like this and suddenly it turns right and starts to go up called The Chocolate Staircase when the monsoon was on because it was, and we were in these trucks, you know, and just went up one side and the other side and these trucks were just and Tamu, that was the first airstrip. Jungle. It was thick jungle you know. Thick jungle airstrip and the first casualty of 28 squadron happened at Tamu. One of the, flight lieutenant [Hewlis?] an Australian, he’d forgotten, they said, to lock, you had to, because the trees, it didn’t taper off the airstrip it came straight up so you had to bounce along the runway and suddenly do this.
BW: Lurch in to the air.
JBF: Well his undercarriage caught on the trees, tipped him over and he was hanging upside down burned to death. You know. And we just, that was the first introduction. Watching him burn to death in Tamu.
BW: And 28 squadron, what did they fly? Were they [?]
JBF: Hurricane 2Cs they were. Clapped out Hurricanes that, I mean, by that stage of the war the government, I should imagine was penniless and you name it and they hadn’t the wherewithal to replace them and it was a reconnaissance unit and the issue, the side sort of activity, shall we say, was shooting up the Japanese on the ground and that’s where we lost most of the aircraft because they were, the Japanese were very good shots and they used to shoot them down when they were doing the ground strafing and we were in the jungle from January, February and we went down the Kobor Valley in a truck which was thick jungle full of malaria and you name it and one thing we learned at that particular, you can’t pee out of a moving truck. It was in a convoy so he couldn’t stop so we each went to the back of the, we had a competition, we each went to the, got off our toolbox, went to the back, hanged up, everything organised and nothing came out and everybody was the same. You can’t pee out of a moving truck.
BW: And what time of the war was this? This was after -
JBF: This was -
BW: D Day wasn’t it so was it late ‘44 when you transferred out there?
JBF: This was ’44. Yeah.
BW: Going in to early ‘45
JBF: Well forty, it was the end of ‘44 ’45.
BW: So this was after the Battle of Kohima when you’d gone through the -
JBF: Oh that was all.
BW: Towns yeah, yeah.
JBF: Oh all that would have been the ‘43 yes. All those, oh yes that was absolutely, the people that did that they should have been, what was left of them, they should be pensioned for life. They were fighting, they were fighting over a tennis court in one of the places.
BW: And so you say 28 squadron was a reconnaissance squadron.
JBF: That’s it. Reconnaissance and two cannon.
BW: Yeah.
JBF: That why they’re called 2Cs, two cannon, heavy, heavy machine gun, you know. What is it? Five?
BW: Twenty millimetre.
JBF: That’s it. Yeah. Twenty five millimetre. Quite heavy shells you know and when we got down to this Kalaymyo and it was just bush and we didn’t see an aircraft because the war was moving that quick. The next thing we were, by truck to a place called [Yau] which was an airstrip in the paddy fields.
NH: Do you want another cup Brian?
BW: Yes please. Thank you, Neil. And this is further into Burma.
JBF: This is further into Northern Burma. Tamu’s up here and you come across like this to Mandalay. Well we went down the Kobor Valley and across to [Yau?] and [Yau?] we went to Sadong.
BW: Thank you.
JBF: Sadong was the airstrip outside Mandalay. The Japanese were still in Mandalay and this is where we lost the aircraft. The aircrew. We lost two or three aircrew here because the Japanese could shoot them as they come over the fort. They were in the fort, you know. They lost them there.
BW: And even that was just down to small arms fire.
JBF: I think it was small arms, I never saw ackack guns or even, we heard all the row that was going on but I don’t ever recollect, I think it was small arms fire. The Japanese rifle is 256 the, the calibre. You know, ours are 303. Their rifles were 256. Smaller bullets but just as lethal but of course they’re all five foot three so carrying something lighter was part of the course for them. So we were in Sadong and we were there quite some time and they used to have the mule trains going up to supply the troops. Like Sadong’s here and Mandalay is there and thirteen miles I think was the difference and they came one day and said, ‘You’re not going to bed. You’re going to fly down to Meiktila.’ And so we didn’t go to bed that particular night, struck the tents, got in the Dakotas. All the Dakotas had no doors on. If you want to be frightened go on a Dakota with no doors. And we landed in Meiktila and they hadn’t cleaned up the airstrip. All the Japanese they’d killed were everywhere which was the first time really I’d seen what you might call a battlefield and well we just got stuck in from there with the aeroplanes.
BW: You mentioned that you’d struck tents.
JBF: Oh yes.
BW: Were all your accommodation presumably out in the Far East was in tents was it?
JBF: While the campaigning was on it was tents. You had a piece of coconut matting with two sort of slide holes and through that went two pieces of bamboo. Now I pinched two full sets of runway grating. I’d call them nails. They were pieces of metal and they were driven into the ground so that when it was the monsoon they had the metal over and the aircraft didn’t sink so I got hold of four -
BW: Pierced steel planking.
JBF: Of these and I drove those in the ground put the bamboo on, tied on and my bed was off ‘cause you couldn’t, they wouldn’t let you sleep on the ground because there were scorpions, you know. All the stuff that’s there. Scorpion. If you left your tent flap open you couldn’t get in because of the bugs. Somebody did to see what would happen and it was an absolute carpet of every conceivable type of flying bug you’ve ever heard of. So we never did that again.
NH: No.
JBF: We got down to Meiktila. It all went very well and we knew the war was going well because the Arakan forces who had taken Meiktila our, our army was General Slim coming this way. The Yanks were on the outside coming that way and the Indian army was coming this way along the Arakan and it was the –
BW: The opposite end.
JBF: Arakan that had captured Meiktila and so we got on to Meiktila and, you know, set up and they were doing everything as usual. It was exactly the same. Seven hundred. Oil, so on and then see them off, bring them in and run them and so on. Keep them -
BW: So even though you were working on different aircraft you were still working on the same engine to all -
JBF: That’s right.
BW: Intents and purposes.
JBF: Merlin 20s. That’s why I was posted to the Hurricane squadron, because it was home from home. We knew what to do and could do it right away.
BW: Even in those adverse conditions and presumably not as well supplied.
JBF: Well -
BW: Did you, did you have trouble with supplies?
JBF: Well we had nothing to eat. That was the trouble with supplies. But I mean hens eggs in Burmese is [ju ug?] [koplar?] is cloths. So you had a pair of underpants and you’d go [ju ug] like that [koplar] and so you’d get the hens egg and they’d get the underpants. So the net result it -
BW: So you’d trade.
JBF: We had nothing to wear either. [laughs]
BW: So you traded your under -
JBF: Not that it mattered ‘cause you never had a shirt on anyway. It was just a pair of shorts, socks and boots you know that’s the and with your boots you had to knock your boots out every day because the scorpions loved, it must have been the smell of your feet, they loved getting in the boots so we had to be, and tool boxes. If you, when you opened your toolbox the first thing to do is wait and see if anything moves. Then you’d know there was something in there that shouldn’t be in there you know. So we’re getting on with it and I think the most distressing part of Meiktila was a trench full of Japanese who’d been, they’d used the flame thrower on them. There was about anywhere between fifty and a hundred Japanese who’d been fried.
BW: All in a trench.
JBF: All in the trench. ‘Cause they, they were facing either this way or that way and the flame thrower had come this way and just fried the lot.
BW: And was this at the edge of an airstrip or near the airstrip -
JBF: Yeah. It was Meiktila airstrip.
BW: Where you were working.
JBF: There were shell holes with Japanese in. The first time we saw, there was one Japanese well over six feet. He was dead of course, in the shell hole. It was the first time I’d seen a big, they were all about this big but, anyway -
BW: And this, this was obviously all after the battle but you never came into a closer contact with the Japanese at any time.
JBF: No. Only as prisoners, not as - the next thing that happened with Meiktila he said, ‘Nine of you are being flown into the [Tongu] Box.’ Well I was picked as one of the nine so we were flown into the [Tongu] Box and I know when it was simply because we, over the radio that we heard that the Germans had packed up so it’s got to be the 8th of May. And we were in the [Tongu] Box and the laugh about that was we’d got two tents, we only had two tents. There was nine of us and suddenly the ants started, up and they had a procession going in no time. There was millions you know. Ants, you name it. They’ve got it. They were going up the guide ropes up to the top right up to the fourteen foot EPI down the other side so we thought we’ll have a bit of fun here so we got the lighted taper thing and we started chasing the ants off the, the next minute they was, your feet, being bitten and the fighter ants were biting, they were all over us, on the feet, biting. Some bad. So we’re in this in this Box thing and I could see the sergeant was getting a bit frustrated you know. The aeroplanes didn’t appear by the way. It was monsoon so they couldn’t land and take off anyway. The Dakotas had a job doing it and he said, ‘Right. We’re going to make a dash for Rangoon.’ So we thought ok, you know, ‘Rangoon. Great.’ So, so he got two West African trucks and we started off and it got to about 11 o’clock in the morning and we stopped and made a brew up. Put it on the tree and we got the fire going and the stuff out, the tea out and everything and as we were doing all this and thoroughly enjoying it out of the jungle came a patrol of British. So we just sort of, ‘Hello.’ He said, ‘What the f’ing are you,’ you know, he said, ‘Don’t you know where you are?’ We said, ‘Yes. We’re on route to Rangoon.’ He said, ‘Of course you are.’ The place was full of Japanese. He said, ‘Get the hell out of it now.’ So we never even got a cup of tea. It was like the keystone cops. The two trucks and drove off and we kept driving and it got, you know it goes dark at 6 o’clock at night there so we’d got to half past five, quarter to six and even the sergeant was getting a bit worried you know. Finally we hit an army emplacement. I don’t know how we managed to do it but they must, the sergeant must have known and he said, ‘Thank God for that,’ so we drove and he asked the officer could we bunk in for the night so we got on the floor there and at least we were surrounded by the military, you know. And so we started off the next morning and finally around about midday, 2 o’clock or something we arrived in Rangoon and they were living in a bombed out hospital at the time. The squadron. There were no buildings. Everywhere was flat, you know and the only question that was asked was, ‘Where the ‘FH’ have you been?’ They thought we’d already died. And so we arrived there and I think the most graphic thing that happened to me then, we still had Hurricanes and they used to do the cooking fires in front of this building that had no roof, no windows, no doors, nothing but at least it was, you were on the flat and it was not, it wasn’t raining you know. Marvellous and a jeep, a jeep drew up. The adjutant and two sergeants, ‘Who’s Franklin?’ So I said, ‘I am.’ ‘Get in.’ So no breakfast. Get in with the cup and the plate, you know. Driven to the flight and there’s a Hurricane standing there and the CO said, ‘Right,’ he said, ‘Start that machine.’ So I knew it was tricky because the, it wasn’t one where you just, they press the trolley acc and you had to do clever stuff with the accelerator. You know.
NH: Throttle. Yeah.
JBF: And so I got in and just eased it and it was making funny [ch ch ch], the engine you know and then I just eased it on ‘cause I’d done it before, it wasn’t and it started and I did the, you had to go up to two thousand seven hundred revs to test the engine and then you test the magnetos. You switch one off and it works and you switch the other off and it works so I went through the procedures, came down and got out. So I was utterly relieved. You know, at least the thing had worked and this, Blackie his name was, he was the sergeant. He said, ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘You’ve just made me look the biggest f’ing fool in Burma.’ I said, ‘How’s that?’ He said. ‘I’ve been half an hour trying to get this thing started. You come down and it starts first time.’ First time. So I was driven back. They said, ‘Get out.’ Back to the squadron. No breakfast. That’s the only thing that happened to me out of that lot.
BW: So much for their thanks. And within a few weeks or months the squadron transferred to Spitfire 9s you said.
JBF: That’s right. What happened was from Rangoon we were suddenly changed over to Spit 9s it was. The Hurricanes, by the way the aircraft were just thrown in the bushes. Hurricane aircraft I mean. You know. When you went to dig a hole for the lavatory you went behind one of these because at least you had some sort of privacy. They were just there upended and that’s the other joke about Burma is that there were no toilets of course and when you had to go you had to go so the first, to start with you think oh that’s a nice piece of grass, at least it looked like and everybody in the Japanese army had already been there before. It was black. You were waist deep in it you know. That was one of the Burma experiences that you can forget about. That and the bread full of ants. I thought they were currants to start with. I thought that’s unusual, you know currant bread for breakfast and you handled, it was all ants, dead bodies of ants, they couldn’t get them out of the flour so they cooked them.
NH: Oh right.
JBF: And finally we went, the most graphic thing that happened in Rangoon was we were sitting there and the adjutant came through and he just looked at the four of us and he said, ‘The war’s over.’ [long pause] Seventy years late.
[machine pause]
JBF: And I said, ‘Where are we going?’ He said, ‘You’re going to Malaya,’ So, it was a terrible camp. It was a transit camp and we got in these kites and suddenly the kite I was in developed engine trouble and so we locked in to Siam and we spent oh at least three weeks, four weeks in Siam, at the, waiting for replacements or whatever it was you know and then we were flown in and became garrison squadron on Penang island. That was the next RAF station.
BW: So this is obviously -
JBF: This is after the war now.
BW: August. August ’45, September ’45.
JBF: This is ‘45, yeah -
BW: Were you getting news of being demobbed at anytime?
JBF: Oh nothing. What happened was we were, we were supposed to be, it was an army pre-war barracks beautifully built. Nothing, nothing there. The Malayans had pinched everything you know which was what happened to the cockpit covers. They came down with the new aircraft and all the cockpit covers disappeared overnight. So these Chinese detectives appeared out the woodwork you know and all the kids in the surrounding villages had got new clothes which was our cockpits covers [laughs]. And so we were there six months on rest and then we were transported by train along with thirty million cockroaches. The cockroaches are everywhere on the trains and the way to get them out is not to have a light so there’s no lights and you hear this [tapping noise] and the place is covered in cockroaches about so big. Cockroaches. So once they got the petrol mix and the lights they all went back and hung underneath. Fantastic. Even the loo which was a hole in the ground you know, shoulder to shoulder around the hole where you’re supposed to form are cockroaches waiting.
BW: Strange.
JBF: And we went down to Kuala Lumpur and we were in tents and it was, the thing was there was no aeroplanes and then some aeroplanes arrived and then they started educational vocational courses. We thought we’ve got to be on one of these, you know, sort of thing.
BW: This was preparing you for civilian life presumably.
JBF: This was, yeah. I had, I had an interview and I said, ‘Well I left a job and the man promised me I’d have it when I came back,’ So I didn’t need, really need the interview I felt. And there was a football team and I played in that. And things went on and suddenly the demob, the demob numbers started appearing. Well I was number forty and just one day right out of the blue six years, five years later you know they said, ‘Your number’s up.’ Forty. So within a week I was on the train going to Singapore and stayed at that, what is it, Changi is it?
NH: Changi. The airport. Yeah. Well and the Japanese camp of course.
BW: [I was there?] last year.
NH: Yeah.
JBF: And we handed the weapons in to the armoury. All Japanese. Japanese took the weapons.
BW: That must have felt quite strange.
JBF: Well it was ridiculous you know. Well it was ordered but what I’ve forgotten, I’ve just remember was the armistice in Rangoon. The rumour went around that the Japanese were coming for the armistice for Southern Asia. That bit. So they, a Japanese, they got a Japanese bunker and whereas when they captured Singapore they had all the military, the troops lined the Streets and the Japanese commander standing up in a motor car commanding, you know. All the poor squaddies were just stood there you know. We did, they had officers on the runway but everybody, it was like a football crowd so we all crowded around. I tell you what it’s like. General MacArthur on the boat where he accepts the surrender of Japan. It was like that, like a football. Well I sidled around the side and they had a desk a bit bigger than this and two of our generals were standing there and the aircraft, they were like Dakotas only much smaller pulled up and into this compound thing and this general said, ‘Do we salute?’ He said, ‘We don’t f’ing well salute them.’ So they pulled the, and there was the Japanese generals, the Japanese in full evening dress. They climbed out, marched over to the table and they just nodded and pointed to the trucks and they were put in trucks for Rangoon for the surrender and that was the surrender in Rangoon. It was just like a football match.
NH: Yeah.
JBF: There was no ceremony at all. It just -
BW: And that was it.
JBF: As it was, you know.
NH: Yeah.
JBF: Then finally the final news was the boats arrived so of course we couldn’t wait so that’s the only time I saw Raffles Hotel was in the truck going past to the troop ship.
BW: I was there myself in November.
JBF: And came home to Liverpool.
NH: What? You docked in Liverpool.
JBF: Docked in Liverpool.
NH: Marvellous. Yeah.
JBF: Then we got on the train and went to [Worley?].
NH: Back to the beginning.
JBF: Just outside Blackpool and were demobbed from there and so we had the kitbag with your uniform in and bits and pieces. You were in your RAF and your, the bag was your civilian, you know. They kitted me out with a suit, a shirt, a tie, socks, underpants, vest and shoes and it came in a series of boxes it seemed to me, just holding. We were all the same, holding up these boxes and then they just said, ‘Ok, your train’s arrived,’ and we got on the train to Liverpool and I caught the tram home.
NH: They found shoes to fit you did they?
JBF: Yeah. Got, got to Gordon Drive. Nobody’s in. Nobody in the house so [Winn Roth?] called over, ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘Come in for a cup of tea.’ So I sat in there until my sister came back from work and when I got in the house was full of mice because nobody had lived in it you see and all the scratches were on the sideboard and the various places. The meat safe thing. So I started and I caught mice every night for seven days and the technique was we, we, we had a ewbank cleaner and we chased them out of the dining room and I realised they all went in this ewbank cleaner. Every time. No change. So I said to my sister, ‘Fill up the sink.’ So she fills the sink up and takes the bowl out. I lift up the ewbank cleaner and depress and of course the doors open and out drop the mice. I killed eight in one night. The final night. So that was the trick. You know you see these pictures where there’s a party and -
NH: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.
JBF: All the relatives. I never even got a party. My mother was in America seeing my brother.
BW: Who must have been in a show in America presumably.
JBF: Oh well he was –
NH: He was touring with his -
JBF: At that stage -
BW: Right.
JBF: He was with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and they, Agnes de Mille, you know the, what is she? A sister of de Mille himself you know.
BW: Cecil B.
JBF: You know.
NH: Yeah.
JBF: She was a choreographer and she choreographed Rodeo, was the name of the ballet and my brother was the champion roper in Rodeo and that was, and it was, well it was you know he was famous and it wasn’t in England.
NH: He was famous over there.
BW: Quite a showman.
JBF: Yeah.
NH: Never over here but he was in America, you know. Well known in the ballet world.
JBF: Yes. So basically I think and oh just one nice touch. I hadn’t been paid. Nobody had been paid you know all the way through from India I can’t remember. We got nothing in India.
NH: I suppose you couldn’t do anything with it anyway.
JBF: And these cheques started to appear. I thought, the five years I’ve worked so I didn’t go to work. I didn’t tell them. So the cheque came through and I said to my pal Tom, who was also demobbed, I said, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘Let’s go to London. Just to see what it’s like.’ So we get the cheque and off we go to London. He was the same. And it went on ‘til the week before Christmas when the cheques stopped. I said, ‘I’ve got to go to work Tom,’ I said. ‘There’s no more cheques.’ So I started work about the 15th of December that year having had off September, October, November and part of December. I thought well that’s all the leave.
NH: Yeah. That’s it. Well you’d earned it hadn’t you by that stage?
BW: And were you able to go back to the job that you’d been -
JBF: Oh yes I went back.
BW: Left.
JBF: I was the last in ‘cause I was, I was the last out the youngest and I was the last in and they’d taken, I went back to the Banana Rooms but they’d already taken a building in Sir Thomas Street and built and extension to it so we went back to reasonable offices and started to build up the business from that moment and that’s how it was. I finally retired forty seven years from Dixons.
BW: So you stayed at the same firm -
JBF: Yeah.
BW: For forty seven years.
JBF: Yeah. Well what did I know? I was twenty six you know. I had to learn to play tennis and badminton and in fact be normal. It was something I’d never experienced you know actually coming home at night and sitting down to a meal. We thought it was wonderful, Tom and I, you know. Marvellous.
BW: And subsequent to that there have been in recent years a bit more prominence and commemoration given to Bomber Command.
JBF: There has been hasn’t there? Yes.
BW: How do you feel about that?
JBF: ‘Cause they, well you’ve only got to read those books to know the price paid by the people who actually did it. When they say there’s fifty five, fifty seven thousand aircrew killed in those books that I’ve got.
NH: They’re on the chair there.
JBF: They’re talking about. There they are. Seven or eight Lancasters disappearing in the night. That was fifty six blokes. And it was every night. It wasn’t just [next?] and then there’s a month’s delay. I mean the Mosquitos, we lost about three. One received a direct hit of an anti-aircraft shell and blew up and the others were just shot down. But the rest of them, I mean, our kite did a hundred and eleven ops –
NH: Yeah good.
BW: Not with the same crew though presumably -
JBF: Oh no we had all kinds of crews.
BW: Just thinking back to your time in the Far East did you get to know the pilots on the squadron, 28 squadron at all well?
JBF: Oh yes very much so. They were very, one pilot wouldn’t let you touch his aircraft. He used to, Eddie Hunter was a Canadian. He said, it was my turn to DI his kite he said, ‘Look Lofty,’ he says, ‘I know about aircraft.’ he says, ‘I’ll do the necessary,’ and he filled up the, I filled up the juice and he checked the engine and did the oil and the coolant and that and he got shot down that day. What happened was he, from his, they used to go in twos you know. The second man, the report was, Eddie went down strafing the Japanese and as he was coming up he hit a tree, just caught the tree coming up and he crashed and killed him.
BW: Just clarify a couple of expressions if you don’t mind. DI what does that stand for?
JBF: Daily inspection.
BW: Daily inspection.
JBF: Each aircraft has a daily inspection and it was very important because it’s always after a raid, you know or a flying test or whatever and you have to sign the form 700 to say it’s, your bit’s ok.
BW: And trolley acc. That’s a trolley accumulator is that right?
JBF: Accumulator. There’s twenty four volt is it?
NH: Yeah. It’s like a –
BW: Yeah.
JBF: And they’re on two wheels.
NH: Generator thing isn’t it that they charge the engine with instead of having a starter motor.
JBF: Plug it into the aeroplane.
BW: Yeah.
JBF: You’ve primed with the pump, there’s a little hatch and you open that. Prime and screw up and then press the trolley acc. It starts. And the Merlin 20 was like that all the time.
BW: How did you rate the Spit 9s that you worked on?
JBF: Sorry?
BW: How did you rate the Spitfire 9s that you worked on?
JBF: Well they were very interesting. Not that we knew anything about them but there was nobody to tell you anything. They were just dumped on us you know and we just sort of –
BW: Were they Merlins 66s in the 9 mark 9.
JBF: They were much, they were engines we’d never seen or we knew where the oil was and we knew where the coolant was but the rest of it was just totally different.
BW: Did you feel that they were more reliable then the Mark 20 engines?
JBF: Oh yes. Well it was the, what you might call the essence of all the experience because the Lancasters had, you know, starting with Spitfires, Lancasters, Mosquitos all had Merlins in.
NH: So yeah.
JBF: I mean they were all, the Merlins underpinned the whole shooting match you know.
NH: Right. Yeah.
BW: And you still found the 66s to be pretty reliable.
JBF: Oh yes. Yeah.
BW: And they had a supercharger on them.
JBF: Yeah.
BW: Didn’t they?
JBF: That’s right yeah.
BW: Did you know much about those or work on those?
JBF: Oh no. They were just stood there you know. One thing I haven’t mention was watching a B17 fly into the ground if that’s of any interest. Is it? At Little Staughton which was very close to a lot of American bases I was DI’ing this kite and I looked up and I saw this aircraft low flying. I thought God strewth and they did a lot of low flying and it kept on flying and then it dipped and I just watched it coming towards me and it dipped into the ground and suddenly everything started to fly off it and it finished about eighty yards from me. It finally disintegrated and blew up and I’m mesmerised. You can’t, I don’t know what it is, you can’t run away and then I heard a voice, ‘Lofty’ he said, ‘Come here,’ he said, ‘Get under this,’ and so we hid under a Mosquito with six hundred and forty gallons of petrol [laughs] and we’re under the engine, you know, because it was the most protection but what I remember of the, of that was one of the cylinders complete, when the explosion of the engine it blew the cylinders out and you recognise it mid-air, ‘Oh yes there’s the’, and it just came out and dropped just short of where the Mosquito we were under you know.
BW: And so you watched this bomber coming towards you -
JBF: Yeah just watched it and -
BW: Disintegrate as it hit the ground.
JBF: Into the ground. Nothing. Not one of those.
BW: Yeah not going straight in. Going in at a sharp angle.
JBF: There was nobody in it. It was on glide, you know. It was on pilot. The Yanks came around, ‘Oh is this where it fell?’ You know.
NH: Autopilot.
JBF: All our aircraft were full of holes but -.
BW: So they must presumably have baled out.
JBF: They’d baled out. Yeah.
BW: And left it to fly on.
JBF: Well I wouldn’t say it was common baling out but we could look in, we watched the Liberator on fire in the air and suddenly five or six of the crew jumped out in parachutes and you know it was all part of the course if you know what I mean. It wasn’t, and the flying bomb was the same, we were walking into, at Staughton walking into the cookhouse, 4 o’clock in the morning. We’d done the op. It was all buttoned up and ready and there was an erk leaning on the side of the door smoking a cigarette. He said, ‘Do you want to see a flying bomb?’ So we said, ‘Ok,’ you know so he said, ‘Just turn around and watch that,’ and there was a light and a putt putt putt putt putt putt putt and then suddenly it stopped. The only flying bomb I saw was just that one.
BW: So thinking back to your experience of Bomber Command and looking back at it how do you feel the service has been commemorated? Is it, it is getting better or -
JBF: I was disappointed to start with because I did hear that somehow or other Bomber Command was pegged out, you know. Pushed around the back because it wasn’t right bombing Germans you know. Bombing civilians and all that. And I was delighted to see that they’d got this commemoration up to the air crew in London and of course Eric Brown, my cousin, he was killed and my friend Eric [McKim?], he was killed. Both aircrew. Both on these.
NH: Missions.
BW: And so from the Green Park Memorial to the Centre that’s going to be at Canwick Hill did you get to the unveiling of the Memorial -
JBF: Oh no.
BW: Last year.
JBF: I’ve never been in any kind of Association like, you know, old comrades and all that. I’ve been to two or three reunions but you were only friends in that, once you’ve, you were all looking at each other. Perfect strangers.
NH: Yeah.
JBF: You know, solicitors were looking at accountants and accountants were looking at clerks and clerks were looking at petrol attendants or –
NH: Yeah.
JBF: Garages.
NH: Had nothing in common by then did you?
JBF: I remember two.
NH: Who was the guy that you, there was the fella with a ‘tache wasn’t there that sort of set himself up as a, as a leading light in that thing and you said he was, you knew him anyway, there was a guy that sort of ran it or tried to get -
JBF: Oh yes. Yeah. Well -
NH: That organised the reunions.
JBF: Organised the reunions. Yeah, well.
NH: Who was that fella?
JBF: To be honest except for Handley and Dom and Clive and Bill Gill, that was our little gang, and we all went to the reunions, we went to two reunions but there was nothing in common.
BW: Right.
JBF: We had nothing in common. Pat Handley was a big lorry driver on the motorways. Dom worked in a garage. I don’t know what Clive did. And I went back to office work.
BW: Yeah.
JBF: And the friendship was just at the time you know. In Meiktila for instance Handley had the brilliant idea. Japanese built the bunkers for their aircraft and of course there’s a trench around where they got the air to make the bunker so Handley has this brilliant idea he won’t bother with pegs and that he’ll just put the tent over one of these bunkers which is great except for the monsoon started. He’s standing in two foot of water and instead of rushing to help him we all died laughing, you know.
NH: Yeah.
BW: And so you’ve yet to see the memorial spire to Bomber Command crew at Canwick Hill at Lincoln where -
JBF: Is it really?
BW: So you’ve yet to go and see that.
JBF: Do I?
NH: Well he can’t get around much these days.
BW: Yeah.
NH: That’s the problem.
BW: Yeah.
NH: He’s not very mobile.
BW: Yeah.
NH: Are you? So you -
JBF: Oh no. I’m housebound you know.
BW: Yeah.
JBF: I can’t go out.
NH: Yeah.
BW: Yeah.
NH: He gets to his art.
BW: That’s a shame.
NH: He painted all these.
BW: These pictures on the wall.
NH: Yeah.
JBF: There’s, there’s -
BW: [?]
JBF: The one that’s see the latest underneath that see that one.
BW: Yeah.
JBF: Of the skyscrapers, right at the bottom, beside the little girl.
BW: Yes. This one.
JBF: That’s, Tim’s got that one. That was the last one I painted.
NH: So that’s, that’s as far as he gets these days.
JBF: You know they’re sort of this size.
BW: They’re wonderful paintings.
NH: Yeah.
BW: Ok.
NH: They’re his.
BW: Ok. I think that is all the questions that I have for you Jack unless there is anything else that you want to add.
NH: The only other thing is you mentioned my mum. Didn’t you used to meet up? She was at Bletchley and you used to meet up.
JBF: She was at Bletchley Park and I was at Little Staughton and we arranged to meet and I used to go to Bedford I think it was, catch the train and we’d meet. She’d bring a WAAF friend and invariably we went to the pictures and I never ever saw the film. I fell asleep immediately because I’d come off duty to get there so I’d got myself washed and dressed and in my best blue and out and we used to go to the pictures and I never saw a film because I just fell asleep.
NH: Did you ever know what she was doing at Bletchley? I mean.
JBF: No. I only knew what she was doing about 1960.
NH: You knew she was there though.
JBF: Yeah.
NH: Yeah.
JBF: It was very very -
NH: Oh absolutely.
JBF: Yeah.
NH: That’s right.
JBF: It was like the Oboe. The start was very, you know.
BW: And they were told not to speak about it and many of them didn’t for you know sixty years -
JBF: Well 1960.
BW: Let alone thirty.
JBF: The first time I even mentioned the word you know. I don’t even like to say it now to be honest.
BW: Different times.
NH: Absolutely.
BW: Right. Ok. I think that is everything for the interview so on behalf of the Bomber Command Centre thank you very much your time Jack. It’s been a pleasure.
JBF: Here’s the, do you want to have a look at some of the pictures?
BW: I’ll have a look at some of the -
JBF: Let’s see what’s in here.
BW: Items.
NH: So what is this centre?
BW: It’s going to be a digital archive for the audio and any documents that -
NH: Yeah.
BW: People hand over.
JBF: That’s the kind of terrain in Burma.
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 Jack Brown Franklin
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Brian Wright
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-31
Format
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01:51:22 Audio recording
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AFranklinJB160331
PFranklinJB1616
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Description
An account of the resource
Jack Brown Franklin grew up in Liverpool and worked in a paper merchants. He discusses Liverpool being bombed and his service in the Local Defence Volunteers. He joined the Air Force in 1941 and trained as an engine mechanic. He served with 109 Squadron, Pathfinders before being posted to 28 Squadron in Burma.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Burma
Great Britain
Burma--Meiktila
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Liverpool
England--Norfolk
England--Lancashire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
109 Squadron
bombing
civil defence
crash
demobilisation
fitter engine
flight mechanic
ground crew
ground personnel
home front
Home Guard
Hurricane
Lancaster
military living conditions
military service conditions
Mosquito
Oboe
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
RAF Little Staughton
RAF Marham
RAF Wyton
Spitfire
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/233/3376/AColensoF170522.1.mp3
62f276f7578995b81676e568202f437e
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
Colenso, Frank
Frank Colenso
F Colenso
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Frank Colenso.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-05-22
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Colenso, F
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PL: Hello and, and first of all an enormous thank you. My name is Pam Locker I’m in the home of Mr Frank Colenso of [redacted]. Frank it’s wonderful that you have agreed to talk to us today and so a big thank you on behalf of the Bomber Command digital archive.
FC: Thank you for inviting me.
PL: It’s a pleasure.
FC: To do that.
PL: So, I guess what I, where I’d like to start Frank is to ask you a little bit about your family and, you know, a little bit about your childhood.
FC: Oh yeah, yeah. Well, I come from a very old Cornish family. There’s a lot of names with ‘o’ on the end but we’re not Italian. My, I was brought up in Falmouth in Cornwall. My dad was a boiler maker in the Falmouth docks. So, I was a young lad at school, in the scouts, a choir boy in the Parish church. A boy scout for many years and then when I started work at fourteen it was as a recovery porter on the Falmouth Packet weekly newspaper. So, the, the reporter there was Alan, doesn’t matter, he was, I, I started the job in February 1939, when I was fourteen and a half and left school. So, on the newspaper, Alan the reporter was showing me the ropes and he was in the territorial associate, the territorial army so as we went through 1939 and the war was imminent in the UK and Alan was off to war so for, for the next two years I was on my own as a, but it was a wartime rationing of paper we had not a lot of space for much news mostly it was funerals and whist drives and things like this, council meetings and such. So, then when the war broke out that year and Dunkirk happened with all the rescue allied forces from the Dunkirk area, scores of ships came into Falmouth Bay and they off loaded and the soldiers, and they were processed and given some clean clothes I guess and put on the train. So constant trains going up country from Falmouth. And my mother was a red cross nurse at the time and she was nursing these survivors from that awful time. Very much a, upset by the soldiers especially those who had swallowed fuel oil in sea water, in a bad way. So, here we are 1940 and Falmouth was bombed. The town was bombed, people killed and because the Germans were on our doorstep almost the reaction the day afterwards for hundreds and hundreds of men to join the local defence volunteers along with us young lads. Not quite sixteen some of us, so but they took us all on into the local defence volunteers and started to give us something to do. In the initial few days we were cycle patrol with an old vicar with his automatic from World War 1 which only had about eight rounds. He was our leader, so we drove, rode around the high ground round Falmouth at night, especially at night. Watching out for people setting up lights to align a bomber with say Falmouth harbour or the town or whatever. But I think the Germans wouldn’t possibly not wrecked Falmouth all the dock and repair facilities so they aimed for the town. Because they wanted a deep-water harbour and that Falmouth is the only one down that way. So that was background. We were well trained. We immediately had the sergeants all had tommy guns. The officers had side arms, the revolvers or automatics. We had American Springfield 300 calibre rifles with fifty rounds of ammunition in, in a cloth round our ear and we were well trained. We were always at the range shooting regularly and when we were kitted out gradually with uniform, boots and everything a soldier has. Well almost everything. We were well trained we was parade nights twice a week. Firing on a range Saturday afternoon. They formed us into platoons and they started at night guards around six different parts around the town from the looking across the bay to the high ground and along the low ground on the little Penryn river. So that was a pattern of my Home Guard thing was every six nights night guard. Along with that we would do with the Army exercises with the Army which got us used to the whole area around Falmouth because we drove to all the little paths and by ways and short cuts and where the high hedges were. So, you could form an ambush then. Throw all the stuff you had on with a few little turnips from the field and then just disappear because that’s the point about you really you don’t stand and fight. You get them worried that wherever they go there’s a shadow that might be us or somebody else. So that was the pattern of it. But we were well armed, we had, we had grenades and [unclear] bombs. We had mortars, spigot mortars that could fire twelve pound or eighteen pound bomb. We had what we called Vickers machine guns. The newest guns which was like an aircraft type gun, 300 calibre. We had something like phosphorus bombs. One of the bombs had five-pound weight of gelignite in it in a glass sphere. There was sticky bombs which you threw and if you threw them hard enough you took the covering off to stick on things and explode. We’d have done ourselves no favours using these things, but this was desperate times. The Germans had come right through across into France, all up as far as Norway and down towards the whole French Coast. And we were next, they were unstoppable except they had to defeat the Air Force before they could think of crossing the Chanel. So that was the pattern of the first bombing of Falmouth started the Battle of Britain, early July 1940. So that was the bombing in Falmouth. We got used to it. You were, took notice of the, the air raid warning the warbly siren and you dressed, undressed very tidily because we only had candles in the bedrooms and of course in air raid you don’t light up candles you’d got to be able to put your clothes on in the dark. So, you took your clothes off and laid them out in the right order and you were the worse and we got dressed. We had a little attaché case with odds and things in case you were blown out of your house and we took shelter next door in Cliff Roberts’ house. We were a terrace house, he’d built a huge air raid shelter in his garden. Being a deep-sea diver from the docks he’d brought a great lorry load of wood home, dug a big hole in the garden, lined it and covered it over with massive beams and that’s — Dad sawed through the fence to make a little gate. So, air raid meant we dressed, took our little attaché cases, went downstairs, through the gate into the shelter and the next-door below us was a tug boat skipper, one of the Falmouth harbour tugs. He dug a big hole, helped by his two sons and cleverly when they got a bit tired, I suppose, Mr White would find a half crown, so that made the boys do a bit more digging. And I realised, I didn’t think about it, I thought that was real treasure they were finding but I think the crafty Dad he wanted to [laughs] keep them shovelling. So, he was — that was the pattern of bombing. We weren’t allowed to write up about things like that in the newspaper but inevitably wrote about the funerals. One occasion which I didn’t put in my diary, if you imagine a stick of bombs, a stick of four bombs, one landing, I think on the boards, boarding house school. Anyway, it wrecked that school. One was in the quarry. The next one was, we were exactly in line, the next one was a hundred yards away which flattened a house and killed the occupants. So that was a narrow escape. In the early bombing as well in Falmouth my pal who was in the scouts with me and at school, Jeff Maynard. He was in Lister Street with, along with two relations who had come down from London to escape the bombing and that particular raid, parts of the town, his house was completely blown apart and collapsed on them. They were under the stairs which was a strong point, recommended to be and the gas main had been fractured. The water system pipes were broken, so they were faced with the water and gas leaking. They were dug out by the rescue, volunteer rescue parties and luckily not requiring hospital treatment. They were found a house in the, in the country about three or four miles away in Constantine and now Jeff was due to start work in — where my brother worked in Burts the electricians which was only three hundred yards from his house, so when this happened, he had to get the bike out. But we were all cyclists. We cycled patrol. Only lasted a few, a few weeks to give us something to do. But we were well trained. We had Army instructors, we had all these weapons that we learnt. We did grenade throwing and mortar usage, using mortar. So then and along with this night exercises perhaps which meant we’d just come off night guard because of six nights, each day was different and there was an exercise that started Saturday afternoon with the Army and ran all through the night until Sunday morning when they hoped to finish it, so we could get home for our Sunday dinner. That was the pattern of it. So, you were very tired at times but that was it, that’s normal to be quite — and you were cold sometimes on guard because, it was before we had greatcoats, we would have a blanket round our shoulders, patrolling along the cliffs. With these little glow worms sometimes but for the first bit of a town boy your night sky is just a few stars here and there but when you are out in the country and there is no other light from anything else that big ball in the sky is something you’ve never seen before. So, this was the pattern. Along with this was all the newspaper work, meetings, council meetings all sorts of evening affairs. I had to write about court cases and I was getting half a crown a week. I, I started as an apprentice you see, and I was bringing myself up really. Well I was on my own. So, this was six pence a day but I was never broke. I think I gave my money, my mother something as well and we were lucky. The Cornish Echo was the paper that operated from Falmouth and I was very friendly with Bill Ward their reporter and of course typically we worked together. We always met at court cases and things. In fact, for court cases, if I sent my copy up to the Western Morning News by putting it on the train I was paid a penny a line and I was often getting more with my, whatever you call it, sending my material up to them than I was [laughing] but then that was [unclear] no [unclear] really. So, with the, with the shooting I became quite expert. I was a sniper, we were snipers in the, in my platoon, and so that when — later on it was time to decide what I wanted to do because conscription was looming and if you could volunteer before then you went where you chose to go. So, my pal Bill had — older than I, he was a grammar school boy, so better suited to be training as a reporter really, than a young lad with me like I was. Now, he was a bomb aimer on 50 Squadron later on. My other pal, Nick, whose father was in the Bristol Aeroplane Company a roaming repair and modifications man, he was down on — working on [unclear]. On a Beaufighter. And he said if you come down to the Lizard Peninsular where the big scanners are now, you come down and I’ll show you round the Beaufighter. And whatever else is there so. These, these places weren’t fenced. So, you just came across and of course it’s a treat for young lads of fifteen or sixteen to get inside an aircraft like the Beaufighter for instance. Anyway, he showed us around the, also Vulcan and Hurricane which was another fleet. So, later on Nick’s dad said I’m going to take you up to London, he said I’ll ensure you get on the train I shall meet you at Exeter where you change, and we’ll go to the Windmill Theatre, there’s something to somebody, somewhere we can stay so that then this happened. We went to the Windmill Theatre which was a, we never close was the motto. And the attraction there was the nude, the nudes on the stage. So [laughs] but they weren’t moving, they weren’t allowed to move just graceful poses. So, you can imagine that with the gauzy screens, I suppose, in front. I can’t remember quite but no doubt a clever way of screening the fine detail of them and then when there was a little interval and people were leaving in the rows of seats. If there was an empty seat in front of you the men would clamber over to get into it because when they had a few intervals they got nearer and nearer the action [laughs] or the inaction [laughs]. So that was one episode and my memory I took away of all things, not about the nudes but about Vic Oliver, who’s the son in law of Churchill who was a comedian and played a violin and he could do most marvellous things with that violin. He could make it laugh [laughs] which had us in hysterics really to hear himself. This was the world of darkness it was then during the war. So back home again it wasn’t long before Mick’s dad said you get a job in the, in the Bristol Aeroplane Company because with all you do your in work, you’re in your workshop all the time making things. Because I made a half scale tommy gun for Nick’s nephew and in fact, because I could copy the detail in, I was obviously capable of making it from scraps of things. I made myself early on a practice rifle. The right weight of ten or eleven pounds to strengthen up my old muscles because I was a little weedy eight and a half stone when the, in 1939. Later on, when I went to join the Air Force I was well over, well about ten stone plus. So, I did volunteer, no I did go to Weston-super-Mare for an interview and of all things to show how nimble and clever I was with my fingers I brought a cigarette lighter that I’d made, not really knowing that this was a joke. Everybody around the country would say all they do is make cigarette lighters in the factories so anyway the, then I had a letter to take me on and then I had another letter. The, all our recruiting has been taken over by the government so that agreement is not valid now. So that’s when I joined, I volunteered to be an air gunner. Went to the normal medical at Plymouth and then later on went to Oxford for an aircrew medical when they discovered that my left eye was below standard and my right ear. So, thinking back all these seventy odd years later really, that, that saved my life, that bad eye saved my life really because as we know half of the Bomber Command people never came back. So that was, so as I was unfit for aircrew and so stamped on my document, I believe, then I could have a choice of what I wanted to do. What trade for instance. And I chose to be airframe. Airframe mechanic to start with because Nick’s dad said if you’re an airframe fitter, it’s a use, such a useful thing to know and after the war you can turn your hand to anything. And, in fact, it proved right really. So that was my time when I was called up go to Padgate up around Manchester way, I believe, as a recruit to be kitted out and do a bit of marching about, I guess and, so that was the first time that I was in a hut with about twenty odd others. But really as I had been in the Home Guard with sleeping in a guard room every six nights with the noise that goes on and the bustle that happens at times, it’s no big deal. Same as being shouted at on the parade ground, that was nothing new. Whereas it was bit of a great culture shock for a lot of chaps first coming into it. So, I took all that in my stride. So, the recruits then, new recruits were off to Blackpool, billeted in the landladies houses, you would first of all when you arrived and got, got into a situation where you marched down these streets. They would halt and right fourteen of you in here. That’s how they set you off in the different houses and the landladies were I’m sure occupied all through the war. Which is why they were after the war able to have so many marvellous changes, I would guess that happened. So that was it, but you see Blackpool was marvellous it was the only place, one of the seaside places that civilians could come to. The aircrew chose Torquay as their initial training and Torquay itself was barred from anybody coming, the beaches were all mined, mined here and there. Well a lot of mines and they had big obstacles to prevent ships landing, landing ships coming in. So, but Blackpool with all its electric trams going up and down the long, long coast sparkling away at night, must have been a great giveaway. But often the Germans didn’t get across that far. So that was a marvellous place, four shillings a day was our pay, I think, but beer was I think, maybe went up to nearly a shilling a pint. Anyway, imagine the tower, Blackpool Tower, now inside the marvellous ballroom and we couldn’t dance but there were nine bars there and they were so busy, if you, when you wanted to get a drink you were, there was two deep in front of you at least and close packed, trying to catch a barmaid’s eye. Anyway,but it was such a friendly place and when Christmas came and New Year this was a great place where a lot of kissing went on and hugging and kissing so good for us young lads it was a real eye opener really ‘cause we weren’t into girls before then, we had boys’ things to do. We had the Home Guard to keep us busy. So, this was an adventure then. So, one of these girls was from Bury in Lancashire, an ATS girl. Yes, we palled up and I saw her a few times. Only kissing and cuddling, nothing beyond that. And then later on, a year later on in Burma when I found this tower, Blackpool Tower beer label and on the back, she’d written her address. So, I started corresponding and we had lovely exchange of letters and she was a great poet. She would write marvellous poetry. And then another girl that I was also friendly with later on, in Wellington, I wrote her, and that was a nice little friendly exchange of letters but that’s digressing really. This early recruit training, stamping of feet around the [unclear] whereas out on the parade ground there was a lot of swearing went on. In Blackpool ‘cause you’d march around the streets and did your square bashing there the, the one in command had to watch his, watch his language. But he often marched us to a particular café for the break time, so that meant he would have his free, free [unclear] and we paid a tuppenny of course. We had to have a bath Fridays, Fridays and Mondays because they would march us to the big communal baths there with a swimming pool of course, that was a great attraction. Derby Baths, I think. So, we did our training there, the assault courses. We were shooting, we were running around, which was making us fit. Basically, it was keeping us fit. And also, when you think, stop to think about it on a parade ground when you respond to every order immediately that sets you up for the pattern of the future when you do, you respond to what your asked to do without question. That’s the point of it I think. And then from there I went to Western-super-Mare where Locking is the training, one of the schools of technical training. So that was in the summer of forty-three I suppose. Yes, it was. And we were in huts there and in the mornings when we woke up and had breakfast we marched to the, where the school was with a band in front of us. So, this was a great place for being a seaside place, a lot of people there. It was in the summer especially but we spent a lot of money on the dodgem cars. It eats up your money really when you don’t get much a day [laughs]. Cuts down your money for beer or cider and then one time coming from a local village, walking back west to Locking I kept wanting to take my greatcoat off, lay it on the white line on the road and lie down on it. So that was, I had to be dissuaded of that was not a good idea. Because all the vehicles headlights were havoc, were completely masked except for a narrow slit which was guarded from going upwards by a, like a peak of a cap.
PL: Um.
FC: So, they didn’t produce much light so that was I’ll explain why it’s there, I would do as I was told. But the cider was a powerful drink [laughs]. So, from there a group of us, we were all airframe mechanics, we went, we were sent up to, to, to Shropshire, to Peplow. An airfield which was half way between Wellington and Market Drayton. Wellington is now Telford. The big city of Telford since we were there. And this was, we were, we went there as part of 83 Operation Training Unit, because Wellington twin engine bombers but we hadn’t got any. So those early weeks we were, I suppose, the advance, in advance of the advanced party, really, ‘cause they were recycling themselves from Wales where they were based to there so we were getting things ready. Did meet my old friend who, when I got, I can see his face now, the morning after I got the worse for wear I can see that disgust on his face now. So that’s a reminder that I shouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t drink too much [laughs]. So that was a, a waiting time, working and waiting. We only had one Wellington there in a hangar with both wings off so and that wasn’t anything to learn from. Anyway, they did come and we settled in to some work then with the flying, daily inspections before flight, before flight the inspections turn round inspections and after flight inspections. Flying night time as well because they were doing navigation and working the crew up to a, to work together as part of it. So, but we only had a few other visiting aircraft come so it was only the Wellingtons and about time when they came back, we had all the engines had to be covered every night with a big, like an aluminium cover, balloon fabric with asbestos patches where it would come over the hot exhaust pipes. So that was a task at night in the wind trying to get these covers on.
PL: What was that for Frank?
FC: The reason for covering them over was to keep the moisture out of the engine otherwise the electrics, I think that was a good reason and they wouldn’t — the oil wouldn’t be, wouldn’t be as cold because turning over, if the oil is thick and cold it takes more effort to turn it over by the starter motor so there’s a reason for it. So really, we didn’t have real contact with the crew. We just helped, just supported the ladder as they climbed in, I guess and normal conversation I expect but no, not much memory of any detail of them. But once starting, once started and the signal for chocks away we pulled the chocks away, waved it off and did our salute as they moved, as they gathered speed, so and this main runway, though I think it was newly, newly made because it was completely tarred with, tarred with a black pitch and then covered with oak chips, oak wood chips which were then rolled in. Now, what that was for, thinking back afterwards, partly it could be to camouflage a new runway ‘cause it sticks out like a sore thumb when its new concrete. Might have been that. But certainly, it proved to be a good thing to save tyre wear. You imagine with our training lots of circuits and bumps around the take-off, circle round and landing, you know scores, scores of landings went on that wouldn’t otherwise have gone on with a flight, a flight of Wellingtons. So then, from there I went to Blackpool again to upgrade to a fitter 2A, fitter 2A airframe, so that was more time at Blackpool and that covered Christmas as well so a bit of a repeat, but in the meantime, we decided we must learn dancing. So, at Blackpool, over one of the shops was Madam somebodies dancing academy, so there we were learning the quickstep and the waltz and the foxtrot whatever and I have wrote, written in my diary that I am getting quite good at the waltz, but I haven’t tried it with a girl yet. So, but you can imagine the tower, the marvellous ballroom there, same as the Winter Gardens, sort of a up market place that had all those facilities and a huge dance floor and stage for the band. The whole place was crowded. The bars were crowded sometimes two or three deep waiting, trying to get a drink and no wonder sometimes we drunk these bars dry. So that was where our money went and then in my diary, I realised that I would occasionally draw ten shillings out of my Post Office account to keep my appetite for the old John Barleycorn [laughs]
PL: So, what were you doing at Blackpool when you returned to Blackpool?
FC: When I returned, we went to Wharpton[?] on buses and there, there was another school of technical training. I think it was Wharpton[?] but since called Warton, and so we were doing benchwork and my diary reminds me that I was nearly top of the class for different things like this because I had always been making and mending things as a boy, even when I was a reporter I spent a lot of time in my workshop making this tommy gun, half size tommy gun and making myself an automatic pistol, but it wouldn’t have been automatic but to fire, point two-two ammunition, but prior to that with my little cap gun, made of a steel castings probably put together for a roll of caps. I modified this pistol by drilling a hole where the hammer struck, just the size of a point two-two blank cartridge and then the hammer I drilled it so that I provided it with a spike which, when you, when you discharged, when you pulled the trigger that set the round off but I made a mistake really. I should have had it in the vice when I first fired it but I was holding it like you would and when I fired it really when you think about it there was no where particular for the, for the, blast to go, all it could do was to throw the side, pivoted side part of it off and crack, crack it off to my finger, so I thought I won’t, I won’t use that again.
PL: So, what were you making at the technical school?
FC: We were doing, we were doing filing. We had to file within a few thousands of an inch or even less. You were drilling, you were making brackets shapes, folding metal, drilling the holes, riveting, getting the, the idea of the rivet clearance hole and so on and riveting up and you were judged on the final product. So that’s where I got top marks again. So, I graduated, if that’s the word, we never used that, came away with a, with the upgrade which I think it gave me six pence a day more which was well worth it. So then back to the, back to Peplow, carrying on with the and then I was in modifications section and the diary reminds me that we’d start picking dual control on a Wellington on one morning we’d work all day, all evening, right through the night until six o’clock or so in the morning when we’d finished the job. We made provisionally an extra seat in that position because normally the pilot sits on the left with easy access for the crew down to the bomb aimers section and up to the front turret, but once the seat was in it was a bit of a squeeze to get by so we fitted an extra control column linked with the first pilots’ and another job we did in the modifications thing was strengthen up the under-carriage attachment structure. Where the under carriage pivoted from to, to be trapped that had to be reinforced. The radius rod which braces the length once it’s locked down, that structure was cracking. There was a, actually there was a heavy landing or any landing that was the, the main attachment pivot point and the radius rod attachment rod were trying to spread themselves. So, we, the modification was to strap a diagonal strut to strap between the two fittings which had I think three quarter bolts on it and my diary records that we did this Wellington in, on one side in eight and a half hours. So typically, with modifications seems to take time to do the first one but once you get the swing of it. And then because, because once we did that the aircraft had to have a test flight which meant all the crew positions had to be occupied, not just the pilot and his engineer. So, I was in the tail turret for this first flight I’d ever done, proudly stroking the, the gun butts, for the, the machine guns in there. So, we took off happily and we circled, climbed, circled and did different manoeuvres and looking over the fields for the first time from above it’s a real eye opener. Then there was an aircraft coming from behind, a single engine aircraft, I can’t remember what on earth it was but it was overhauling us from the star, from our starboard side and I knew, I knew you, you must never point guns unless you really mean, from the Home Guard you never pointed guns but in this case I was the hero with a wicked German and I was following him in the gun sights, I mean there was no ammunition, following him in the gun sights until he came along side by which time the turret was at right angles and there was an enormous bang behind me. And a rush of wind, a terrific rush of wind and what it was I hadn’t latched the doors, two doors together properly, which I mean it must have happened with lots and lots of other people at the time, so I nursed the turret back in line and scrambled, round to try and shut the doors because when it flew open and I looked over my shoulder at the green fields farm, you know, I only had a three or four inch strap around my waist and the chute, parachutes is clipped inside the aircraft in a bracket, so you’re a bit on your own there if you want to jump out. Not a happy place for anyone to be when things are happening for real. So, this is one of those things that the story must, must have been told endlessly if the doors flying open [long pause]. So, the pattern —
PL: So, so the point, what was the, what was the purpose of the test flight?
FC: Well the test flight was to, to operate the controls. We did other —
PL: Dual controls?
FC: We did other things regarding the rigging as well.
PL: Right.
FC: The, now, the undercarriage knock down selection [pause] it pulled the flaps, I think, partly down it was all through the aircraft, with all its trim somehow with its undercarriage dangling down, so it was linked up with the flaps but the, the, the point was if the — yeah, if they were flying and with the, with the trim controls, that was the other edges wasn’t it? Anyway, if you were flying and you operated the tail trimmer and then [emphasis] selected the undercarriage down, if you operated the tail trim too much and the flap and the undercarriage came down it would pull on the cable to do what it thought it had to do and it meant the cable snapping so it finished up with a spring strut being put in the cable somewhere I believe. But the Wellington was very touchy when you jacked it up in the hangar you had to, you had to know what you were doing. The jacking point typically you would think is on the point of balance but then that’s not a happy thing to do. You need weight on the tail when you’re jacking so because of this reason it depends, if you’ve got your engines in, it’s different to when you have got no engines in, but you had to watch jacking that you didn’t let it, let it tip so. It was a case of securing the tail wheel down till you were safely jacked and then the retraction we did, adjustments we had to make, the hydraulics all new to us we were learning how everything worked. We — when you fly the Wellington and if you think of a, perhaps a better with a low light coming across the wings you realise then what, how an aeroplane works, you get reduced pressure on the top side and increased pressure underneath. You realise then that being a fabric covered wing and geometric construction which is like a lattice work you looking across the wing, it’s like looking across a quilt on your bed, it’s all in squares, little square humps and you think it’s, that’s holding the blessed aircraft up that fabric. So, it’s well laced on.
PL: Um, um.
FC: It’s well secured, and the Wimpey could take a lot of damage. We didn’t have any damaged aircraft coming back to our patch because but, the, this design proved itself. If you had a big hole blown in it, it destroyed these, this lattice work then it wasn’t terminal for the aircraft. The strains could be shared up with whatever was there.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: And then they went — the ones that had an engine fire and maybe burnt the fabric off, burnt the fuselage fabric off right into the tail plane they would still get back.
PL: Good gracious. There’s sometimes you’d have aircraft coming back, and it was really a skeleton.
FC: Yes, I know. Maybe just one, one tail plane and a bit of an elevator to control. But they were sort of an all laid back aircraft in the air. They were moving a bit, when you’d, a lot of aircraft when you look back towards the tail, it’s like a, a ship at sea. They describe a little square pattern, repeated pattern, on a ship. I mean later on a troop ship, sleeping on deck the mast and the stars they would be making little squares in the sky. But certainly, as I said the, the, the low sun across the wing made you realise that you been,the aircraft had been supported by it.
PL: Um, um. So, can you take a guess at how many Wellingtons you converted to dual control?
FC: No, I didn’t record it you see I didn’t have room for recording things like that. It was all about the, the drinking and the dancing and the meeting of different ones.
PL: [laughing]
FC: Now one night, I’d forgotten about this. On one diary entry I’d drawn a picture of a brooch with a nice letter ‘M’ with wings. That was for one of the good girls that I was with and then, Marjorie, and then when I’d finished it, I mean in the diary it gives me away what type of chap I am. I, it came up so good, the words are in the diary, but that it’s too good to give to Marjorie. I’ll wait till I find another girl with a letter ‘M’ [laughs]. But in fact, I gave it to my mother.
PL: Oh
FC: Her second name was May but I said this is ‘M’, ‘M’ for mother.
PL: Oh, how lovely.
FC: [laughs]
PL: So how long, how long were you a flight engineer?
FC: I wasn’t a flight engineer, ground engineer.
PL: Ground engineer, sorry.
FC: Well this was once I was a classed as airframe fitter, fitter to airframe then, then I said farewell to my pal I joined up with, Jeff Grinden, of all things had taken his tenor saxophone with him, like musicians do.
PL: Um.
FC: Because he had a marvellous life, like pancake. We had a mountain of spuds to peel, Jeff would be tootling away on his saxophone. He’d go to the bands that were playing music for the, for the Officers’ Mess or whatever and of course abroad he had it all the time he was abroad. When, when we parted company at Bombay he went with others to the Cocos Islands on a Liberator Squadron in fact. But on the, when we were, the draft that I was in to go to Blackpool again, the ready crew, the ship from the Clyde at Gourock I think. That was at Blackpool again. So that’s where I said farewell to Jeff. Who was at the next town up from Blackpool. I went there, I shouldn’t have left the area really, strictly but said my farewells. Then my train to Gourock, or Gradock or whatever, whichever it was. There I was lumbered up with all my webbing packed up with backpack, haversack, kit bag on my shoulder trying to find G deck and A deck, A deck’s the lifeboat deck, a long way down. Coming down this wide, quite wide stairways, there was a chap coming towards me and I moved to the side and he moved to the side and we stopped. And I looked up and it was Jeff, so he was on the same troop ship [laughs]. Oh yes, G deck was a long way down.
PL: So how, just trying to clarify how you moved from working on Wellingtons. So, did that work come to an end?
FC: Oh no, we just —
PL: So, so how did you get to be on a —
FC: Well in my case, I didn’t know it at the time, they needed well over two hundred upgraded fitters 2A.
PL: Right.
FC: Airframe people. They did over two hundred airframe people to put them on a 9613B, now why did I think of that. Well our kit bags had it on. And on the troop ship we had instructions from the CG-4A Waco glider, a small glider.
PL: Right.
FC: Because we going, this was for Burma, for the going into Burma. So, we had all the instruction on it and then we got to Worli, to Bombay, Worli is a huge transit camp for people leaving and coming in. And when the dhobi wallahs came around in the huts asking for our clothes to be washed we innocently, naively gave them all our sweaty old clothing and when we — later on, we saw about four acres of khaki spread out to dry in the sun. So, but they had a clever code, they’d invented their own sort of barcode amongst themselves. Just a pattern of dots inside the collar perhaps and then on the, from the outside troops, I mean it was a four-year tour when I went, a four-year tour. They were, they wanted to raise some sterling, so they were selling things off and one, I bought a topi, a pith helmet, flat, sort of thick with a flattish top with a RAF [unclear] with an RAF flash on it. I don’t know how many — how much that was. Another one was Irish linen, a stone coloured suit in the RAF pattern which is starched. Very smart. So I bought that off him. I can’t just think what else. But I was proud to wear that suit, I’ve got pictures of it. So, in India, that’s right, that’s right, about eight or so of us airframe fitters went up to, to, to 144 repair and salvage unit which was based at the time at Risalpur, North West Frontier Province as we used to know it. Right by Afghan border where the, where the Khyber Pass starts.
PL: Um.
FC: Nowshera is a town across the Kabul river. So that was our first of the Indian town we went in, and I remember the cinemas there with Indian films and then there was a big pre-war army, army station with, with lots of facilities there, marvellous billiards rooms. We had our barrack blocks had a wide veranda, a covered veranda and a big rack to put your rifles in to lock them up and pegs over each bed to put your harness or whatever these cavalry people needed to have with them and we had our own bearer there we paid about six annas a week, of course clubbed together with a dozen of us. We had the young lad guarding our possessions and keeping the, keeping it clean. And then we got used to the Indian char wallah coming around with — on his shoulder was a harness arrangement, he carried an urn with a, with a heated, heated urn to, to serve up hot tea and egg, egg sandwiches [laughs]. So that was a good place and then Christmas came again celebrated with the officers coming round serving up the grub I suppose and 35MU was also based there. The maintenance unit. While we were there on the Frontier we were, we were, our particular party, working on the Hurricane doing a major inspection and completely recovering the fuselage with fabric, that was our task. And that had flown all the way from Burma. What they did, the aircraft in Burma that came to, need repair or whatever stage of air worthiness it was, if they had the, the time left on the major inspection date and could do it, they could fly as far as they could. They wouldn’t want to put all the aircraft into the first repair unit, so that distributed all across India. It went on, there was a three and a half year campaign, so you imagine it was a lot of work for the set up for the, right across India and of course that then was a good start when they started their own airlines later on. They had a lot of, a lot of experience in aircraft. So that was a, a memory that, and that aircraft turned up in Burma later when I was told to, when I was told to do something on this Hurricane when I was in central, lower Burma [pause] yes it, as you approach it you see how it settles, just checking the whole thing you walk around the aircraft checking things and typically you’d give it a slap underneath the fabric areas to check whether there was any water in there. So when I came to this Hurricane which had on its [unclear] a long piece of cord on the trailing edge on top of the trailing edge [unclear] and I said to myself ‘I was right after all, somebody else has done it’ and when I turned round to just look at and realise what number it was, it was the one that where, on the North West Frontier when it flew after we did all of the rigging checks, after the major,it was I think left wing low so having rigged it all with a, a positive droop or something the answer was to put I think eight inches of cord on top of the trailing edge of the rear, of the rear part of it. Bolt that on, which put a slight down pressure on. Just a gentle thing, but left wing low again and that’s why I put this quite long piece of stuff on [laughs]. So, the chaps were glad that it’s doing the, still going strong.
PL: Um, um.
FC: But, but when I first went, three of us got posted to Burma.
PL: Right.
FC: For a few weeks.
PL: So why did that happen? Was there just need in Burma?
FC: Well with, with the Air Force, no with the Army if you were in the regiment and down to a platoon, it’s like keeping an aircrew together in the war. These platoons have got to, have got to train together, whereas and they would, they would keep keeping that platoon together. But the Air Force it was all numbers, it was like if they wanted two hundred airframe fitters by that time, they went through their books and we met up with those we’d been training with as recruits. So, the time comes when they needed three chaps in Burma like they would happen. With the units, I mean they, this was another repair and salvage unit so three of us got our rations and I don’t know how long the railway journey took on these hard old wooden seats, where you had your mess tin and you had your loose tea and you went up on the, when the train stopped, you went up to the locomotive, asked the driver for some boiling water for your tea, he would blast this, you want to get out of the way, blast this super-heated steam which is well above boiling point, you know, it’s a super-heated stuff, down a pipe and then run water through it. By the time it came out it was boiling so that was our provision. And then on different stations the Indian fruit sellers were there and cakes and things you could get. So that was at Delhi. We didn’t get to the Taj Mahal we only had a day or two stop there. By the time we reached Calcutta in a big, in a transit camp there where, that’s where we was ventured in to Calcutta find where Thurpos[?] restaurant is and have a lovely meals there. [pause] So, then the, the journey on to where, whereby new unit 131 repair and salvage unit was. We had to go by train and boat and, and truck, across the Brahmaputra that’s right because the — oh the, with the Burma medal, the Burma star it was, it was for people who served East of the Brahmaputra, that was the line, so by the time we — when we got to Dhoapalong, not far from Cox’s Bazar on the Arakan Coast of Burma, the Bay of Bengal Coast. It was an airfield, we were in a lovely area which had bashas, lots of bashas which are huts made of — thatched huts with bamboo, woven bamboo side panels and things like that with, with beds in there. So that was — and then the airfields were Cox’s Bazar and Chittagong and so on. And we were repair and salvage so our task was to be in that position to, to be covering aircraft perhaps, and if you think of that coast, there’s a long beach, seventy miles long on one stretch of that coast, so a great safe landing for the pilot, not all that good for the airplane though, when you had to get there quickly, before the tide came in [laughs] so that was a — and if it was a belly landing job you had to try and lift it to get the undercarriage down and that was a task really and a half. So, but then they were desperate for any aircraft parts to be sent back to, to the big repair depots, that’s where they got their spare parts from. Now when we moved when Akiabyron[?] was taken, just by the Danba[?] Coast, we had an advanced party go down to get our new camp prepared and — oh and then I was tasked to be an escort for spares, going from Chittagong to Akyab and I wore my lovely stone walking out suit that I’d paid a few pounds for when I first landed at Bombay. I wore that and when I had to find somewhere to sleep I think because I was so well dressed, they said the CO is away you can use his tent and his bed. Clean sheets, imagine, this is, we shouldn’t keep the sheets on in case we made them dirty [laughs] now, so typically in the morning, no, there’s no, there’s no aircraft seat for you to return, they’re all jammed up with the wounded but while you’re here if you roll your sleeve up, to see, the [unclear] I think shows your, I was going to say postcode, your blood group.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, there was me in this MASH type forward hospital, laid alongside this soldier, for the first time giving a donation. Well its quite moving in a way and I remember thinking you could, you’ve got your religion here, I said, I’m C of E I wonder if my blood’s alright for him [laughs] thinking that, it set you up to do blood donation. For fifty or more times while I was at Farnborough later on. So that was my, the time when I —
PL: So, they just asked you if you would do a blood donation?
FC: Yes, anybody, any visitor wanted, any visitor they would —
PL: Right. Any visitor came along, and they would ask.
FC: Well, they were desperate days, weren’t they?
PL: Yes.
FC: And the wounded that were carried away in the daks[?], there were so many that were too, too bad to move.
PL: Um, um.
FC: And yet these forward hospitals had a lot, a lot on their plate.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, the only aircraft to come back was a Tiger Moth, a little biplane, a trainer biplane a very old design. So here I was with my, a, a thunderbolt propeller spanners and kit for a Hamilton propeller with that in the rear seat and sitting on the pilot’s parachute because he only had some blankets to sit on. And we were flying a lovely flight really up, just on, just inland of the coast, a nice area to fly in and this big, this big telescopic spanner with a tommy bar, I thought if any Japs come I should point this other weapon [laughs] like a —
PL: So, they’d think it would look like —
FC: Like a forty millimetre gun.
PL: Excellent.
FC: [laughs] So that was the only time I ever wore that suit once I was in Burma because I just put it away and went with a jungle green. So that was when we moved to Akyab that was, we were quite, it was a camp we were in, a flat area, if you — you only had to dig a hole, I mean, not knee deep and it would fill with water. So, you were alright for washing water and [pause] and Thunderbolts, Squadrons. New Thunderbolt Squadrons had moved in so I think the first day I frightened them, four or six of them were, had come from the airfield up the perimeter track around to, to where the runway was and one had got rather to the side of the, of the good ground and it sunk its wheel right up until the wing tip was on the ground so and that was all armed up you see, so we had to, that was our first salvage job to get that back on its, back on its wheels on its feet again but then nothing was damaged so that’s another Christmas tree to us we could take bits off as spares. I remember one chap there with his — he’d got a, I think it was a hydraulic tank all blanked off with a — he was putting air into it to check for bubbles so the only liquid around at the time was an open top had been cut open off a forty five gallon drum, it was a couple of feet of petrol in it so you submerge the tank in it to check for bubbles and somehow, I don’t know, it was stupid really cause you can blow with your mouth, you can blow a pressure of two pounds a square inch, but goodness knows what pressure he put on the tank because it expanded up almost to a ball and so he’d wrecked the tank but it was great for us it was like, it was like a kettle, once we’d left a few blanks on and a spout that was for boiling up our hot water for Crow the engine pit, the engine mechanic who was the butt of everybody’s humour. He would be grinding, grinding up this K rationed chocolate into little crumbs to make cocoa with, so that was a good use for that little tank. But another time, oh, we moved to a better area on a bit higher ground. And then the, the toilets had to be dug. About three barrels deep, a long way down and set up that for a latrine and the, the, they made beds out of telephone wire, bamboo poles and telephone wire, like a, like a grid, no springs but we were off the ground. So, when we moved — but when we were in Dhoapalong before we moved there to Akyab I’d made myself a camp bed. I went into the jungley bit where there was an old, one of our ground tanks abandoned and I used that to do the metal work for the legs of the, of the camp bed. I found an old tarpaulin off a lorry that I took to the [unclear] he was a tailor in the nearest village where he sewed up the canvas for the camp bed which cost me eight annas I think. So that was all it cost me. So that was good to have my own camp bed. And then I had a bed roll, a bed roll where you made your bed to sleep in and then you left it like that and you rolled it all up so you could easily unroll it and hop into it. Like a modern way of doing it I suppose. So Akyab —
PL: So what sort, what sort of date are we talking at now when you were in Burma? What sort of date was it?
FC: It’s in the diary, it’s in, just into forty-five, just into 1945. I got, it’s all in my diary somewhere. In fact, when I put in a claim for this shoulder that had gone wrong after they took, I had lots of cancer operations, they took a big one away from here which attached itself to my shoulder and neck muscles. So, once they took about three hours operation, anyway once that was radiotherapy on it.
PL: Um.
FC: To kill off the cancer, I describe it as a friendly fire that came. It was a risk with anything but certainly to kill the cancer. The fact that my shoulder dropped. This shoulder, the right shoulder has always been two inches lower than the left. Because the neighbour, who sadly died, he was a tailor, registered tailor, one of the top tailors in that line. Do all the Mess kits with their elaborate frogging and gold braid and he was — and he got me to try on the Sultan of Brunei’s Mess kit and Prince Charles’s Mess kit, in fact Len had made the Queen’s scarlet jacket she wore on early parades in London. Horse Guards Parade. He said your right shoulder is two inches lower. Well I didn’t know it. Didn’t realise it.
PL: Um, um.
FC: But in the bathroom with a mirror which shows the tiles behind you, he was right. But now this shoulder has dropped, now this shoulder is lower than this and you’ve gone out a bit out of kilter. And I have constant pain with it.
PL: Oh dear.
FC: My neck, tilts movement and I only got a sixty degree arc to travel through. So, but I, I tolerate pain really quite happily. I got peripheral myopathy in the legs which, which makes my leg burn. I can’t lay down in the day they just burn.
PL: Oh dear.
FC: But I can stand all day.
PL: Um, um.
FC: In fact, when they, when I’m trying to get to sleep and they burn, I’ve only got to lift the leg up, off the weight of the leg even if it’s soft or hard. Lift it up. Oh, it’s marvellous, I wish I could levitate my legs when I sleep. It’s not much to ask, I suppose. But that’s one of the things I’m , so I’m very stoical about that. But anyway, going back to Akyab.
PL: So how long were you there for?
FC: Well it’s —
PL: How did it all draw to a close? I mean it sounds like you became very clever at making something out of —
FC: Out of scraps.
PL: Out of scraps.
FC: Well this was our motto really, there was no job we can’t do was my corporal’s motto. So, you, there was great improvisation really.
PL: Did you have a workshop there? Did you have all the other kit that you —
FC: Well we didn’t have a workshop as such. I don’t, don’t remember much in the way of workshop situation. There’s a marvellous book called “The Bamboo Workshop” and I knew the bloke, the author of it, because in the early get togethers at, at the Albert Hall in London, this is in the early days, 1947 they had already had got together earlier than that, so each year we went to — for a reunion. Oh, anybody in South East Asia was there, you know Burma or beyond. Getting together because we want, we had [emphasis] to be together. You had all that time like, all unified in that in Burma and with all the, I mean it was a million soldiers in, in the fourteenth army, we were part of the fourteenth army. In fact, in, yeah, in General Slim’s book “Defeat into Victory” which tells the story of the defeat and so on. Just in the last chapter there’s a paragraph that stood out to me talking about 221 Fighter Group that, oh no, 224 Group was bombers, we were Fighter Group and then there’s 221, no we were 221, it was 224 on the [unclear]. Anyway it, he talks about the such close working together with the Air Force that we, we considered 221 Group to be, to be part of the fourteenth army.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: So that’s a good feeling really.
PL: Um.
FC: I’ve got newspapers of, we had a daily newspaper in Burma that came up with the rations when they flew rations, dropped rations, or flew them in anywhere. They tried to make a daily paper available which put you in the background of the what the rest of the world was doing as well.
PL: Um. So how long were you there for Frank?
FC: I had, when I joined, well when I was at Akyab, that’s right, that was maybe a couple of months later. I’ve got the dates, but then about a dozen or more of us were transferred to a number three repair and salvage unit, mobile unit which was formed in the Middle East, worked through the Middle East, come through India and then to the Arakan, to, to actually, took you up to Chapalong[?], this nicely set up with the bashas and things. In the book that was written that he wrote, Ranson, Samson, Reg, and he was always asking people in the Albert Hall ‘tell us about your units’. A lot of history and I regretted I didn’t tell him about 131 or number, well number three in the book was in the early chapter. But there were about twenty or more repair and salvage units that worked all across India.
PL: Right.
FC: And all into Burma. We were the number one —
PL: So, was it a sort of lorry, was all the kit, was it in the back, or how did it work?
FC: We were mobile, we had vehicles, we had three tonner lorries. We had high, high load up RAF trailer.
PL: Um, um.
FC: We had mobile workshops with a lathe, its own, it generated its own power a, lathe, a [unclear] I guess, a, but “The Bamboo Workshop” is a book that’s well worth reading.
PL: So, was that about — so, so did you work on the mobile, on, on the mobile unit?
FC: Yes. That was number three, when I was two years then with that unit.
PL: Right. Right.
FC: With the mobile unit. And so, they, when we joined the unit from the other unit, flew in, flew in across the mountains, the Arakan to Magwe I think, to — before they came down. We landed at Segore[?] it’s a Japanese built airfield just on the Mandalay Road up from Meiktila, only a few miles up there and we landed taxied around and the CO met us. Of course, you’re in a litter of damaged, Japanese aircraft and bodies around but the first thing he did because he was keen, ‘Are any of you footballers?’ And of course a lot, a lot put their hands up like they would because later on he formed — how many of us were there. Must have been a dozen football teams.
PL: Good gracious.
FC: And we played on the dirt runway. Not a happy place to come to grief on.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: But he — and then later on Kendrick, Squadron Leader Kendrick, he organised a, a bullet cart race down the runway. He got the locals to [laughs] bring their bullet carts on and the, the CO, Kendrick, he’d had a grass skirt, he’d got a proper grass skirt, but it wasn’t grass it was nylon towrope, glider towrope about as big as your finger I suppose but so strong, but, so the electricians jeep he had a, this for towing because a chain is a typical thing they issue or a cable but that’s solid whereas using, towing a vehicle out of the dirt, or the mud typically.
PL: Um.
FC: The tow vehicle could go forward and gather its strength up, pull on it without a jerk which could stall the engine.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: So that’s what he kept in the back of his jeep, but that disappeared and reappeared as the grass skirt. [laughs] And then he, he thief proofed his jeep, this electrician, so nobody could steal it. And what he, all he did, clever in my terms but simple. He had a change over switch, so what he did he interrupted the cable running down to the horn, horn, cause that’s just thin cable and then the starter one, button on the floor, that’s a, a small cable to trip in the relay to put the power in from the battery.
PL: Right.
FC: It doesn’t take a vast load but he, he got these side by side to the two-way switch. He could start the engine, nobody could start the engine because he’d cleverly moved the two-way switch. So, starting the engine was pressing the horn button, which nobody would have thought about. A thief especially. And the, the button on the floor, he — I think it you easily found with your foot. He put a little top hat shaped bracket over it with a hole in the middle to guard it, as a guard really.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: But it meant that he could casually go down and press that button to, to plug the hole.
PL: Goodness, gracious me. So, what happened next Frank? So, you —
FC: Well this was, we, we got, the unit, number three had just got there the day before and put up their old tents and all the place, the only place we could sleep was on the, in the cookhouse tent. That big hundred and eighty pounder tent, tent. So, we soon got fixed up with a tent and settled in. What were we up to there? Oh yeah. Meiktila in lower central Burma on top of the plains. There were eight airfields the Japanese had built. Pre-war there was one at Toungoo a bit further on the Rangoon Road, off the Rangoon Road but the one we were on had a marvellous runway, cambered enough to keep the water off.
PL: Um.
FC: And stop any pools developing whereas the perimeter tracks being flat, there were pools that, puddles and pools on that but they, but they’d excavated massive monsoon ditches and big storage ditches. Plus, they’d got the locals doing it all.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, it was, it was operable and they had their control tower up on, on poles on the, the, the trees. Well, well designed that was. And also, where the standing trees were, they got earth embankments to make a huge shaped pen to put the aircraft in.
PL: Right.
FC: So that on one occasion I was working on a Spitfire in this, in this pen. There was standing trees they’d left which was good for shade, you see. I was working on this Spitfire, sometimes if you had to put another tail unit on, you had to crawl down, you would support the aircraft prop, crawl down to uncouple the cables, trim the cables and the rudder and elevator cables and then the transport bolts on the, that took the, the front half, forward half to the rear half, a row of transport bolts to take out. That was rather a hot job. But this particular time I wasn’t there doing that when I was working on something on a little bench, it was a metal one, when, and I’d noticed this Hurricane with its forty-millimetre cannon parked outside and suddenly these cannons were firing right through the trees bringing branches down.
PL: [gasps]
FC: And I ducked under this little tiny bench and it went on and on and on. It seemed to go on forever but in fact I think their magazine holds about fifteen rounds. But if you think of [clapping] going on for — it seemed forever. We went around to see who’d, who’d fired this and standing in the cockpit a bit shame faced was the instrument man. He had put a new film in the cine camera which you matched up to the firing, put a new film in it, put the camera in, he [laughs] the Spitfire control column has a spade, spade shape, well that’s it. Suitable for your right thumb and the gun button has a guard around it.
PL: Right.
FC: So, if you’re working in the cockpit and pull it towards you and if you surround it you won’t set it off. But you’ve got the guard, you move it to a test position and then press it, that’s what he should’ve done, test. What he did was put it on full fire listening for this little whir of the camera and he’d got, fired this lot off and I think he, he was paralysed, he must of thought who’s doing that when it suddenly happened.
PL: Oh dear.
FC: But he kept his thumb on the button obviously.
PL: [gasps]
FC: And luckily, goodness knows where the shells were finishing up, a mile or two or more away. Because it fires about a two pound in effect a bullet.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: And they can be explosive ones as well.
PL: Um, um, um. That’s amazing.
FC: So that was — and we came around and everybody in the unit came round and the cooks as well and the CO come up in his jeep. So that he had to explain by Mr Neal who we called guns, called him guns after that.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: But particularly with the Spitfire, I mean the Hurricanes are totally big high aircraft on the ground a Spitfire is lower down so with the muzzles of the cannons.
PL: So luckily.
FC: You can be like a labourer leans on his spade, you drape your arm over that and it’s happened to people — those have been fired.
PL: [gasps]
FC: Been fired accidentally.
PL: Oh, my goodness.
FC: Maybe twenty millimetres [unclear] there. So, you see tail wheeled aircraft like the Hurricane and aircraft of that day, if they accidentally fire, they’re, they’re set up to about ten or fifteen degrees.
PL: Um.
FC: With a modern aircraft, tricycle undercarriage nose wheel, they’re parallel to the ground and if they fire any of those things of course, it’s just the height.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: To be aware of. So, you wouldn’t walk in front of an aircraft. [laughs]
PL: So, were there many accidents?
FC: I don’t remember many luckily, no, but it’s a warning when there were, to those around and you work safely.
PL: Um, um.
FC: Yeah, I’ve got all my fingers and thumbs. We had to — the one Spitfire that had a damaged wing we got the wing off another of our Christmas tree wrecks and fitted it. Now the pneumatics were connected up, the pneumatic pipes on the route end of the wing. And, now Rolls Royce can put the whole shape into the pipe on a, on a piece of paper but in those days the pipe was just lazily bent to a sort of “S” shape which is kind to the pipe you see but when you’ve got a whole group of them coming up like this from one wing and you take it off and you’ve got to put on another you see, easy to — so when the — right, when I went to test it, right, clutch down, hiss of the flaps. One flap went down and it copped, cropped the cannons in the wing so I thought to myself, that’s a problem with no labelling you see.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, this is a lesson that —
PL: Um, um.
FC: You label everything. But if you got the one wing off another aircraft without thoughts [pause] anyway that’s a lesson.
PL: Um.
FC: And then the — yes, we were detached. They had, typically the unit had the main, main base somewhere and with up to six or eight mobile repair sections, MRS’s and for instance, the one that I was on, number four, we had a crane, a Coles crane, a typical RAF one of the day. We had three tonners, jeeps and [pause] and what else did we have? I don’t know. I forget now. But at one stage — when we moved to Toungoo, that’s it, that was a pre-war airfield, a grass one but it had a big hangar and that hangar the Japs used as a warehouse for rice ‘cause it was — rice was in a huge heap like they pile up road salt nowadays, don’t they. In this hangar, great pile of it, goodness knows how many tons were there, but when we were — I was at Toungoo when the war finished and it was ceasefire and before the ceasefire, I think for eleven in the morning, the noise that morning they were, all these squadrons giving the Japs a good hammering and the, beside the airfield these big guns were firing up into the hills where the Japanese were, but suddenly you were, I don’t know, over awed by the silence because you’d never had, even the little chirpy insects seemed to be stopped. And then you realise the war is over, except the Japs were — they were waiting out Japs for a year after, they kept the West Africans back to, to flush out these Japanese. So, the — luckily the unit had, number three, had followed the, they were at Imphal, on the Imphal Plain with, which has got about eight airfields. The one there was Tollihull[?]. American built, because the American equipment made the road into China across those mountains.
PL: Um.
FC: So, when they were given the length of the runway as, whatever it was, five thousand feet or something, no, five thousand feet, that can’t be right, they must mean yards. Whatever it was it, it was the hugest longest runway but marvellous really because if you had an aircraft come to grief on it there’s plenty more of it.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: Whereas on a shortish run you’d have to clear the wreck off to make room.
PL: Um, um.
FC: For the newcomers.
PL: So, after the end of the war, what was your experience between the war ending and coming back? I mean were you involved with the decommission of aircraft or — ?
FC: Well in Burma we were — my unit was, was chosen to be part of the British Commonwealth occupation force to occupy demilitarising the Japanese.
PL: Right.
FC: So, our unit was chosen, being the top one with experience, but we, we, we will go there, we backed up the three Spitfire squadrons. There was a number four Indian squadron and number four and, no number eleven and seventeen squadrons, well, they operate the top aircraft. Now they have had an almost uninterrupted history from world war one. I mean they stand them down sometimes when they have got to get a new aircraft and when they stand up again the unit with the new aircraft. That’s the way they work. But that was a marvellous unit.
PL: So, you stayed on for a while?
FC: Well we were — yes, you could, you could opt out of going to Japan so in fact we were volunteers and there were two thousand RAF volunteers to go there with us, my unit as support and the Spitfires were rounded up from where ever the war left them and put on an aircraft carrier because we were going off in December forty-five but the, they loaded up this carrier with it, all these aircraft and they were on that carrier for six months. We couldn’t get the shipping we couldn’t get the three ships. We needed three ships with all the squadrons and equipment and stuff of ours.
PL: Um.
FC: Well the small ships of the day, so when we did — while we were there in Burma a hugest hole in the world that I have ever seen was made by the Indian engineers to dump all the aircraft in. A huge trench, if you like, ramping down each, up and down each side. So, we [clears throat] had a like fun which you would think of as fun putting all the Japanese wrecks in there.
PL: Um.
FC: And then our Spitfire useless parts.
PL: Um.
FC: So that occupied our time and they were tidying up Burma in fact when we, and Meiktila is quite near Upping Lake for swimming and typically we had the Spitfire overload tank as an actual raft and then drop tanks and we had the blow up you know plate of all assault dinghies to swim from and that pal of mine who was, er, he was, he was a Geordie but he spent all his time in another part of the country until he came into the air force and he had a camera, as I had, so we took a few pictures between us but when it came to develop and print and the fixer, the, sadly some of the photos have faded away.
PL: Ummm.
FC: Actually, faded away. But I am digressing there. But, that’s right we went to, to Toungoo in the — we were there when, when the war finished. So that was a tidying up time.
PL: Um, um.
FC: Then the, the, the jeeps were modified with rail wheels ‘cause the, it’s the same railway, it’s an old, the old pictures, the old carts of the old days the ruts they make you’ve got to stay in the rut and this is what the blessed trains are. Brunel had the right idea, what’s it, eight foot broad not four foot —
PL: The Western, the Western Railway.
FC: Yes, not the four foot eight and a half inch silly things but then that’s, that’s what’s happened all round the world they kept to that silly measurement.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, we tidied up Burma into this big hole and then we went swimming and then the order came the Burmese want all the scrap metal they can get hold of. Especially aluminium.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, we had to winch and drag and hoick these things out of the trench.
PL: Out of the hole.
FC: Onto tank transporters [laughs] lash them down to take them, go onwards to the scrap yard.
PL: So, having filled the hole you then had to empty the hole [laughs]
FC: That’s why stories go back people have seen the aircraft in the hole they know it’s real.
PL: Um.
FC: As people left, they’d tell the tale
PL: Um, um.
FC: And this business of crates being buried, well [pause], crates weren’t sent to Burma they were sent to India, Bombay maybe and shipped across. The aircraft had to be erected, test flown and, and it, you didn’t have facilities to do that in Burma.
PL: When you said crates?
FC: Crates, big boxes.
PL: What does that mean?
FC: Well big boxes.
PL: Big boxes of parts and things?
FC: The whole thing is in a box.
PL: Right.
FC: For instance, in Japan we had I think six or was it four, Harvards that came all boxed up.
PL: Right.
FC: So —
PL: Like giant Meccano?
FC: Well, no, no, no they were complete aircraft.
PL: Complete aircraft?
FC: No, no well as complete as they could be. Their wings were off.
PL: Right, ok.
FC: And the engines and the tail.
PL: Right, but everything else came in the box?
FC: To get it in the crate, yes.
PL: Good gracious.
FC: Now this, when we were erecting and testing these, test flying these Harvards, they’d been in that packing box for about three years and then Jim, my good friend, the engine fitter he built up the — got the engine on and built, coupled it all up and did everything like that. He wanted to do the engine run, he was desperate to do an engine run you see.
PL: Um.
FC: Now the Aussies had Mustangs, new Mustangs. We had old Spitfires. The Kiwis had their Corsair a big American goal wing thing.
PL: Um.
FC: We had the Spitfires so there was a bit of leg pulling between us and but once we got this Harvard outside, Sergeant Robinson our Sergeant said to Jim I shall run this, you know, pulling rank on him [laughs]. Although Jim had done all the work. Anyway, as we started up, I think Jim was standing, standing just by the cockpit I think, just started up the engine, just started up and there was a, there was a bit of a bang from the cockpit and this instrument glass had blown out and hit him.
PL: [gasps]
FC: And what it was, two pipes had crossed you see. The suction pipe and the pressure pipe, this little pipe across there — the pump should have been, the instrument was driven by suction.
PL: So, was he all right?
FC: And then Sergeant Robinson didn’t want to do any more engine running he let Jim do it [laughs] so Jim’s doing all the others making lots — the Harvards makes a wicked noise the propellers make an awful noise.
PL: Um.
FC: As you know. But —
PL: So how did it all end for you Frank? How did you sort of — what was the beginning of the end and heading home?
FC: Well that was once we were in Japan you see, we —
PL: What was it like being in Japan?
FC: Well it was, thinking back it must have been what Japan was like about twenty years before
PL: Um
FC: ‘Cause the Japanese were, until 1945 when the Japanese surrendered in China, ten years that war was. I mean at one time they had all the South East area right up to the North side but when you think about forty million Chinese was killed, what sort of a cope, what do they all the greater cope prosperity sphere or something, fancy name, they made old friends wherever they went.
PL: Um.
FC: With all the murder, I don’t know, same as Germany when all these countries making no friends at all. What sort of empire were they aiming at? You see it’s the few people at the top having it all done for them. They make decisions but in Japan we had earthquakes we were on, I was on guard on the bomb dump which was an area where there were underground aircraft factories. They were stacked up with materials as well.
PL: Goodness me.
FC: But we had a bomb dump there and we were there on guard one night when in the deepest winter. Bad winter of 1947, which happened here, Europe, but also in Japan, roads completely thick with ice. We were sitting, two of us huddled in this little sentry box when we felt it move, ‘somebody out there, you go that way and I’ll go that way’ so we grabbed our rifles but there was nobody there, ‘now what was that all about?’, but it was the earthquake, just tremors just starting. Now just across the road from us there was a big lagoon but it was thick with ice, you see, because we were trying to break it by finding, throwing big rocks on it but when the earthquake started it made this ice crack up. So, we had our little bit of fun there with an earthquake and then once, once the three tonner came changing the guard taking us back. In the guard room a big demijohn full of rum, but you were only supposed, not to have any before you went on guard, just after you came out so I, my pint mug, I had a couple of fingers of it in there I suppose and of course when you’re on guard room you only take your boots off and get in bed, which doesn’t warm the bed up properly because you were [unclear] anyway I had this rum, finished it off and was then, I was in a dream that I was on a sailing ship because of all the creaking and movement, I was in a sailing ship in my dream and I opened one eye and the, the light was swinging and moving like this, I realised what it was so I — there was a Sikh chap with his turban on just sitting up in bed he said ‘I think it’s an earthquake’ and I don’t think he took his boots, and he slide the window open, they were sliding windows not fitting very well.
PL: Um, um.
FC: And jumped down onto the ice and the snow, well, frozen snow, and a lot of thundering of boots [noise of footsteps] coming down the stairs of the upstairs and it was dangerous too because it was, the lights fused, the lights went out and then there was some scaffolding along inside the building so it restricted the — but they all went out and I thought, I’ve had four, four hours guard out there so I’ll stay here.
PL: [laughs]
FC: But was dangerous really.
PL: Oh goodness.
FC: But the buildings are made, I realised when there was not a lot of damage by the American bombing naturally and not uninhabitable in fact we were in tents when we went to Japan. Now when we had left Burma the big transit camp down in Rangoon was so cold that they found a new area to put the tents up in. The Japanese prisoners put those up, like they would.
PL: Um.
FC: So I had my camp bed, everything else was on a vehicle for loading, so happily in the camp bed when was awoken by the tent having collapsed inward, almost collapsed down inward, because, well it was new tent that, which we’d never seen before, ours were awful old tents, this was a new one but you can imagine new rope and the tent pegs weren’t hammered in very much, very deep because the ground was so hard. But nobody had put tents there before it was in the area that flooded.
PL: Oh.
FC: So, we had a good two inches of water around our feet, so that was — I, when I wrote it up later, I thought, yeah, suppose the boot was on the other foot, think if the British were prisoners, the Japanese were going to their homeland and we put their tents up which had fallen down, it wouldn’t have been any laughing matter. We could laugh with the Japanese in the morning.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: When it came, but not if it had been a different tale wouldn’t it?
PL: Um.
FC: So, our welcome in Japan was to be in tents again. Cherry blossom time I think later on. They were coolie, it was a flying boat station as well as an airfield with a big crane so when the aircraft carriers eventually came with their cargo of Spitfires there was this massive dock side crane. And then they were, we were divided up into working parties. There was some on the aircraft carriers and then some on the lighters, the big barges that they brought in, I don’t know three or four at a time and a big hook of this crane dwarfed, you know, dwarfing everybody and they’re dangling, when I wrote it up being a bit poetic.
PL: Um.
FC: And, about their first landing in Japan from the crane. And we had no tractors, we had no tow bars, don’t know if we had steering arms. They had to be pushed to the airfield about two, two miles away.
PL: Gracious.
FC: One at a time. Now, Bas, my corporal, when there was — jumped down into the lighter that had come in the barge to a hooker, he said ‘we, we got more help here’ and I can’t remember them introducing me to him properly, might have been Peter, but anyway he was stripped off. He was a moon man, you know, one with, with, a pasty chap who’d not been out in the sunshine much, but very willing and we worked together. I was telling him all about the unit, telling him about all the wheezes we could get for a, if you flogged your cigarettes down in the town you had a, each cigarette would more or less buy you a bottle of beer in the canteen you know, things like this.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: Like you would [emphasis] tell a newcomer.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: So, when the, when the last Spitfire got moved off and went back into this little workshop by the hangar where, where tops, and when I reached up from my NAC jacket, when he brought it, he was the new group captain. [laughs]. Telling him all the fiddles we could get up to.
PL: [gasps]
FC: But I mean, he, he and he said something like, it was a marvellous introduction to my new station. When I didn’t realise what he meant new station until that’s what he was.
PL: Oh no.
FC: [laughs] But then —
PL: So, did you get into trouble?
FC: Oh no. No, no. I mean he’d have been flannelled. If, if an officer or any — he’d have had a lot of flannel wouldn’t he. Well, this was honest, he knew we wanted to get the aircraft, wanted to have the aircraft, our aircaft flying again.
PL: Um, um.
FC: Not what I did at the time. He had the right spirit of us.
PL: Um. So, when you had to take these Spitfires for two miles, was it a question of ropes round everything and people pulling, pushing?
FC: People pulling, people pushing.
PL: Literally, so it was manpower? Were the locals sort of drafted in to help?
FC: They had, they had Japanese labourers. I think there was a requirement for the Japanese to work for the occupation force for so many days a month at least. Because when you think about it, we were getting them the idea that it’s a democratic situation.
PL: Um.
FC: Not rule, what they did as well, all the lords, think of our lords of the manor in our country with all the hard workers, like serfs doing their stuff. All the ground divided up between all these [unclear] a similar thing in Japan. They deposed all these characters, I think they went off to Tokyo for a ticket. But I didn’t know at the time but Air Vice Marshall Bouchier who’s a, our overall commanding officer, officer commanding. He took over this manor house to live in, just a few miles up the river where the Kintai bridge is, it’s a five arch wooden bridge with granite piers its often in photographs and pictures. The Kintai bridge. Now before we went there, we were, we had a pocket book telling you the custom of the country and so on and all sorts of helpful things and we were not supposed to fraternise. No fraternisation, so like you would going down by the river and meeting these Japanese girls we were like sitting on a little beach where the, alongside the river. It was, must have been a nice feeling just be sitting with a girl when you’ve got your book trying to say things and then laughing, you imagine they’re laughing and then they’re trying to read English.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: To know what — but it was only bit of harmless fun really but a good job we didn’t get him outdoors up the river seeing us. So, then the jeep, you see, it’s — we all got around with jeeps at the time. Well think of this five arch bridge taking a jeep over it, well it weighed a couple of tons or something and it’s a wooden bridge meant for foot traffic
PL: Um.
FC: I mean its arched like that and you’ve got very shallow steps and then it curves and so, so it’s a bumpy thing for a vehicle so it was pointed out that the Japanese had been complaining that we should take more care of their old things. Beside it only led you to a park. The Japanese are a great one for parks. That’s to their credit. But Japanese we could, we could walk around at night without any fears around Hiroshima. We didn’t have any fears. We were, felt safer there than we did in parts of India.
PL: So, you, you were at Hiroshima?
FC: Well we were based on the Inland Sea where Hiroshima is based about sixty miles west but that was our nearest place to do some shopping in. And of course, we climbed up the —
PL: What was that like?
FC: Well it was — I was just going to say we climbed I think about an eight-storey building but all that was left was the concrete shell of it, you know, everything else was gone but when you got up there about, perhaps eight floors up and you looked across the city the roads had been cleared. Which showed the grid the patterns of the roads, but it wasn’t long before people went back and claimed their patch and put a little shed thing on it and the shops grew then. There was a dance hall and in fact I got tickets, dance tickets for the hostesses, I’ve still got them, so —
PL: Um.
FC: Whether I was hoping to go back and spend them I don’t know.
PL: [laughs] Goodness me. So, what, what, when would that have been? What year would that have been?
FC: That was 1946.
PL: Right.
FC: Yeah. We were due to go December forty-five, that was delayed right till April I think, forty-six when we landed.
PL: Um, um.
FC: But we needed three ships. Now before, while we were tidying up Burma because what was a good trade for the locals, if you wanted chicken or eggs.
PL: Um.
FC: Was some of your canteen things.
PL: Right, right.
FC: So the word went up that the Japanese were desperate for soap of all sorts.
PL: Right, okay.
FC: And you thought well yes, that’s it. That will be a good trade, so our test pilots one took the Harvard across over the mountains to Chittagong bought up all the soaps he could all sorts of soap and then the other test pilot took it to Cox’s Bazar and along that coast, and other places, getting all the soap he could. Thinking that would be good a trade for the impress money from the unit when we get there to build that up so this was loaded on our trucks. Boxed up and loaded on the trucks and though we had about fifty vehicles I think, they had a job to find drivers for them all. Anyway, everything was aboard and that and I travelled down as a passenger in a very comfortable situation laid on top of the bed rolls in the three tonner and I had, we each had a crate of American beer. Little bottles, little lager type things. And of course, in Burma they were always desperate for bottles because they make their, you know their wines and spirits, using, they need bottles. You had a, if you had a bottle to dispose of and you saw some Burmese there by the roadside you could drop the bottle out into the dust ‘cause there was either six inches of dust or six inches of mud.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So that was the way we travelled. When we, we didn’t go half way to Rangoon and stop and spend the night there because the water, the doctor with us said no that water’s all right that water’s all green. When it’s all green like that its healthy water its only growing good water so, but mostly we drunk it as tea. I think we seemed to get by during the day without a lot of water. We never had water bottles, well we had a little enamel one to hook on your webbing belt, but —
PL: So, what happened with the soap in Japan? Did you manage to sell all the soap?
FC: The mistake was after we loaded the vehicles into this particular ship there was no escort for this, for the truck with the spares and all the equipment no escort on the ship and the dacoits who were the bandits and thieves of Burma lifted all the soap. Now when we got to Japan, we found the boxes had been opened and we, we, we deliberately made a shortage of soap around that area and then the robbers had the soap to sell. So, they must have done, done a lot of, done themselves a lot of good.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: Because I said later whether CID or whatever they were, were trying to investigate the thieves showed a clean pair of heels [laughs] with all that soap.
PL: [laughs] I see.
FC: So, we had — this, oh this earthquake that I was saying about when I was on guard. I went back and that upset the runway. The aircraft in the hangars were damaged.
PL: Right.
FC: They were crashing together, moving together.
PL: Right. Oh no.
FC: So briefly I stayed in bed. But when they were repairing these buildings, I thought those joints, those joints are too loose because they were making the uprights a tenon going into it. A great big slot for it, just with a big peg.
PL: Um. That’s what it was for.
FC: Meant for it.
PL: Right, right.
FC: When you pointed it out to the Japanese. And then one morning [clears throat] oh, we found the Japanese labourers with two big shell cases about six inches, a couple of feet long, I think they were off the cruisers, sunken cruisers in our harbour possibly, they were polishing them. So that evening when we went to, to do our drinking decided what mischief we could do, we thought we’ll get those big, big shell cases, we’ll take those and they were a bit of a heavy weight to carry when you’re a bit tiddly but by the time we were approaching barrack block, ‘H’ shaped barrack block, we were upstairs on the first floor. We didn’t know what to do with them, so the New Zealanders were billeted right below us and we crept, we slowly came in, put one each side of their doorway and crept upstairs to bed, like you would and like you would, I think possibly a weekend, well Saturday, I suppose it was Saturday or Sunday, came down, came out to go to breakfast [clears throat] looked over the balcony and down below it was a static water pool that was meant for, you to supply water for a fire, the Japanese were making a little arrangement of the garden in it. But below they were gathered around these Kiwis, gathered around these, these chaps who were, who had got their Brasso and cleaning them up so in my little write up as we went to breakfast, I said to Jim ‘by now all our fingerprints have gone they have only got Kiwi prints’.
PL: [laughs] Oh dear.
FC: So, they got in trouble, like they would. But that was when we got one over on them you see.
PL: [laughs]
FC: So how do you explain it that we found them there?
PL: Um, um.
FC: We found them there sir.
PL: So, were they engineers as well?
FC: Oh yes.
PL: So, you were all engineers together?
FC: Yeah. Well different trades of course.
PL: Yes, yes, yes.
FC: But they had their own Corsair aircraft.
PL: Right, right. So what sort of things—
FC: Patrolling around the, we, we had a Southwest, South side of the island, main island, the main occupation force was the Americans of course. We were under General MacArthur then.
PL: So, were the Spitfires really just for sort of, you know, keeping an eye on things, reconnaissance and things?
FC: Well they were patrolling around.
PL: Right.
FC: They were watching out that nobody was travelling from Korea, to and fro to Korea, I think.
PL: Right.
FC: But it was to show a presence there.
PL: Um, um.
FC: And then four [pause] 4 Squadron put up, well about four aircraft once and then 11 Squadron put up, 11 Squadron, eleven aircraft. Then what about you 17 Squadron blokes, how many have you got serviceable? I got a panoramic view from the control tower at Miho, this is on the North Coast where you count, I don’t know, how many Spitfires, thirty or something. One is taking off, I took it when one was taking off another one had just fired its Coffman starter cartridge to start the engine at, with a great puff of white smoke so that’s obviously in action, two things in action, and then by the time I’d moved around here to overlap the pictures, there was a view of other Spits and a, one was in the, in the flying position, the armourers were aligning the, synchronising the guns, but the Japanese armourer helping them like you would have to do.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, but then Japanese were pushing, like you were saying pushing, pushing behind the trailing edge. Once there’s enough of you, it was a strong enough area to push. But when, a trick was with the Spitfire, the flaps were taken down by the pneumatic rams and then flaps up, all it did was to let the air out because there was a spring recovery, so when people are pushing like this and you are in the cockpit on the brakes, ready to put the brakes on, pneumatic brakes so it traps up and can trap a few thumbs.
PL: [gasps] Ouch.
FC: Well it was, despite this. On the carriers. The Spitfires on the carriers to get lift for taking off on that short thing, they would have the flaps partly down. Well, in no way you could do that, they were either up or down but what they did, they had blocks of wood, put blocks of wood, let the flaps came up by a spring onto a block of wood. They’d be in the best position to get lift for take off and once they were happily airborne, just flick the flap switch down and up again and they could put the wood before that. So, I’ve got this panoramic view, I thought I must —
PL: And that was taking off from aircraft carriers?
FC: No, no that was taken in a time when they did like in Malta.
PL: Right,
FC: They had to do this didn’t they?
PL: Um.
FC: You know, we had a, one time when the squadron was all worked up, back to working pitch at that time. The operation firepower or something like that. They were bombing up and loading up and doing their firing, live firing. So that was good for the pilots to get that, to get together like that. Do your turn round inspections and arm and rearm.
PL: Absolutely.
FC: So, it was this, these underground aircraft factories, they yielded off some metal and things and we made great — and I made a nice cabinet, wardrobe thing and the bottom shelf had a beer, crown beer bottle opener on with a cigarette tin underneath at the bottom, because it just took a crate a beer. I could lazily reach out, knock the top off you see.
PL: Um, um.
FC: And then they decided because we had to have somewhere to put our kit to make a long wardrobe, the full length of the barrack room out of aluminium and things and so of course you had to be about thoughtful and you had to be careful shutting the doors when people were asleep because of the noise.
PL: [laughs] So when did you get sent home?
FC: This was, demobilisation, you were given a number, a group number, so when group forty was ready, was ready to — that batch of people would be demobilised. When it got to fifty which was mine, we were on a long way up in Japan and [unclear] troop ships every Thursday or something and anyway [clears throat] and then ‘cause was when, oh Jim, that’s right. There was a Sir Geoffrey Depretes[?], an MP of the day came out to talk like a politician would have to do. At this big assembly of us [unclear] Kiwis and the Aussies and us and the Indians so afterwards any questions, so Jim next to me, when I’m, I’m, I’ve not got away in my group, my group, in my group I’m in so the top man boy Boucher, he said see me afterwards and I, I can guarantee you’re on, you’re on the next troop ship so we had a little farewell drink with Jim and we waited on and on and on and the troop ship never came until finally Jim went away on the same ship as we did.
PL: Oh my goodness. So, when was that?
FC: That was 1947.
PL: Gosh that’s a long-time getting home.
FC: So, from 1942 they hung onto me. Well if you think of it in April forty-seven the war over in Germany was over a couple of years nearly.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, we did a long stint. We didn’t do a four-year tour because prior to that they brought the four year down to three and a half and then three and then two and a half which was what I did.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, tour expiry came as same as that. On the North West frontier when it was on the cooler times a lot of the old ones still had a dog collar RAF uniform, they didn’t want to part with it. They didn’t want a blessed collar and tie they wanted to show that they were old stages.
PL: Um.
FC: So, my tunic is upstairs. I’m letting out the seams. So, I’m looking forward to wearing it when the centenary of the RAF is in April coming.
PL: Fantastic.
FC: So, I came out you see of Japan back to Blackpool again because we were based, we were in Nissen huts at Kirkham in the tail end of that 1947 winter. When the first thing they did when we got to Kirkham there was a stove in the middle of the Nissen hut you kept burning hopefully. They took our greatcoats away.
PL: Oh.
FC: First thing they did.
PL: Why?
FC: So, we wouldn’t flog them.
PL: Oh, for goodness sake.
FC: But we wouldn’t have flogged them. We wouldn’t have, would we?
PL: You’d have worn them.
FC: Would happily take them back in the summer.
PL: [laughs]
FC: [laughs] That would be a different tale.
PL: Goodness me.
FC: So that was Blackpool again.
PL: Um.
FC: So, we had a, had a fair bit of time at Blackpool in between other things. Yes, sorry, then I had three months leave to take paid leave. Well, you didn’t have to take it. I had three months paid leave. So, I had no leave when I was aboard. I had the old rest camp in Japan at Kobe, above Kobe at the, on the hill was a nice maiko it means Japanese dancer, I think. Where we had Japanese food and when the rice came, I wanted some jam on the rice because I had never had rice at home unless it had -
PL: Oh, jam on, oh, wonderful.
FC: We were squatting on low, I’ve got pictures on the low tables of girls, all nicely made up and dressed. So that was Japan.
PL: So, what, so when you got home what was your career after the war? Just very briefly because you’ve been so generous with your time.
FC: Well I didn’t want to — I had so much time using, working repairing things and making and mending things. I didn’t want to go back to reporting because really quite honestly I mean for a fourteen-year-old boy to come as to be reporting, it would be better for a grammar school boy to start because he’s got, his mind is trained and he’s got a lot of advantages. So, I — there was a job, I took all my three months and hadn’t done anything about — I knew I didn’t want to go back but the RAF newspaper, I was in the RAF Association magazine, advertising for trade engine and airplane, air people for Boscombe Down and Farnborough. So, I came to Boscombe Down when they wanted — and they had just taken on, if you can imagine, like a queue in a way, they had just taken the last one on when I arrived, so I went on to Farnborough to the Royal Aircraft Establishment as it was, who needed sixty, or it needed quite a lot of staff. So that was where I —
PL: So that’s how you ended up here?
FC: Yes, that’s it, that’s what brought me to Farnborough and the experimental flying squadron with all the different aircraft from Lincolns and Yorks, the, the Hudsons. We had the, had the sea fliers the Spitfires. The naval flight was there so it was exciting times when they were launching and arresting. Quite exciting times. Because at the end of the hangar was a big assembly that was the sort fitted on a ship to, to catapult them off and the Spitfire with four big rockets attached like under its armpits. The engine fitter had to go up there and run the engine, all engines had to be run every morning, typical wartime thing, so Farnborough must’ve been a noisy place.
PL: Um.
FC: With the Halifax’s and everything.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: But anyway, the engine man hated having to go up there. It was perched in the middle of the sky it —
PL: Yes, yes.
FC: And then another time a bit later when the Korean war was on, I think, we had a Sea Fury on the, on our radio flight operating that one. That had to be put in the twenty-four-foot wind tunnel. They must have had trouble in Korea with the certain stores they were carrying or something, I don’t know what it was. Then my good friend who joined up the same day as me in Oxford, now, he was the engine man and he didn’t like being in the wind tunnel where they got a full bore and in with, sitting in with the engine going full bore.
PL: Um, um, um, um.
FC: But that was the typical thing they did.
PL: Um. So that must have been a very interesting life. How long, how long did you?
FC: Well I was there forty years.
PL: Wow. Gosh.
FC: Till 1988. And then of course it’s, it’s about a hundred years ago since I retired now because it’s, it will be thirty years next year won’t it? Three and four.
PL: It feels a little like we need to come back and speak to you again Frank about your, your experience testing, in Farnborough.
FC: Oh yeah.
PL: And your career doing that.
FC: Oh yeah. We did fly, did fly the Lincoln up to Valley, RAF Valley and they were, the Window, you know they drop Window these aircraft. Because various sorts, sizes of it. The worst one comes in packs which you daren’t disturb in a, in a dispenser thing on the wing tips of a, of a Canberra and if you drop one the pack all busted open because they were only about ten millimetres long, a little tiny bit of aluminium, ‘V’ shaped that way and then ‘V’ shaped that way.
PL: Was this for the —
FC: They spun.
PL: Right and this was to confuse the —
FC: This was to put something that looked like an aircraft.
PL: Oh right, right.
FC: And in fact, on ‘D’ Day, teams of RAF aircraft were flying in a pattern like this.
PL: Um.
FC: And dropping Window.
PL: Um, dropping them
FC: So that to their screens it looked like there was an armada of things coming. Well they knew how to confuse. But the one that went to, I was dumping this stuff out of the, the chute and there were ack-ack firing behind, firing at us behind. I thought, I hope they keep firing at that — and when we’d circled and landed at Valley the last bundles that must have been hooked up or something littered the airfield because I remember they were black and gold, or black and yellow, long. So, we were there for the weekend. We came on the Saturday, Sunday they had all the RAF out in a long line.
PL: Picking them up.
FC: [laughs] Doing the foot plod, picking them up. Nothing to do with me [laughs]
PL: Oh Frank, thank you so much that has been an absolutely fascinating interview.
FC: I’ve been linked up with FAST Farnborough Air Sciences Trust Museum to keep the heritage of Farnborough’s flying alive.
PL: Fantastic.
FC: We’ve built a replica of the first aircraft to fly. Fifty-two-foot span. Quite an impressive thing. So that draws a lot of people to see and learn about Cody, Sam Cody.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: So, there’s another story in that.
PL: Um. Well I’d just like to end by saying a huge thank you on behalf of the Bomber Command Digital Archive because it’s been such a valuable, valuable interview. So, thank you very much indeed.
FC: Thank you. Well you’re welcome to my diaries as well.
PL: Thank you very much.
FC: Couple of years there, ok?
PL: I’ll pass that on.
FC: Thank you, yeah.
PL: Thank you.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AColensoF170522
Title
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Interview with Frank Colenso
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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02:36:39 audio recording
Creator
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Pam Locker
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-05-22
Description
An account of the resource
Frank Colenso grew up in Cornwall and worked for a local newspaper at the outbreak of the war. He recalls the return of injured survivors from Dunkirk into Falmouth Bay. He joined the local defence volunteers following the bombing of Falmouth and describes training and weaponry within the Home Guard and civil defence precautions. He volunteered to serve with the RAF and trained as an fitter airframe and served with 83 Operational Training Unit. He discusses modifying Wellington aircraft, prior to being posted to Burma to serve with repair and salvage units. He speaks of the living conditions in Burma and of his work there which included repairing Spitfires and Hurricanes. After the war ended he remained in Burma as his unit was part of the Commonwealth occupation force prior to his demobilisation in 1946.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Burma
Great Britain
England--Cornwall (County)
England--Lancashire
England--Blackpool
Burma--Akyab (District)
Burma--Meiktila
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940
1943
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Carolyn Emery
83 OTU
bomb dump
bombing
civil defence
demobilisation
entertainment
fitter airframe
ground crew
ground personnel
home front
Home Guard
Hurricane
love and romance
military living conditions
Operational Training Unit
runway
Spitfire
training
Wellington
Window