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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1564/43465/MCurtisA1579599-161130-02.1.pdf
6ade64adf230bddeecdea07af9f1c55d
Dublin Core
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Title
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Curtis, A
Curtis, Len
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-11-30
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Curtis, A
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. The collection concerns "Len" Curtis (1579599 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, documents and a manuscript. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 106, 630 and 617 Squadrons.
The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Cary Curtis and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
LANCASTER J B 139
[drawing]
DARK VICTOR
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[Photograph]
Don Cheney’s crew (photograph taken in London circa December 1943).
Back row (L-R): R. Pool, J. Rosher, W. N. Wait, McRostie. Front row (L-R): R. Welch, D. Cheney, A Curtis
L’équipage de Don cheney [sic] (photo prise à Londres vers décembre 1943).
Debout, de gauche à droite: R. Pool, J. Rosher, W. N. Wait, McRostie.
Assis, de gauche à droite: R. Welch, D. Cheney, A Curtis.
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617 Squadron’s campaign against the V-Sites in the Pas de Calais had concluded with the final assault on the V-1 site at Siracourt on 1st August, 1944. The Pas de Calais had been over-run by various units of the Allied Armies, positively breaking out from the consolidated beach-head area, and sending the German forces into headlong retreat along the whole front, save for the various French coastal redoubts, which the Allies initially by-passed without making any strong effort to subdue them.
617 Squadron, in company with other squadrons of Bomber Command, had pulverised the enemy’s E-Boat flotillas in the French harbours of Le Havre and Boulogne, forcing the remnants to retreat to the comparatively safer harbours of Holland, notably Ijmuiden. These units now had a much longer voyage to oppose the invasion support convoys and this, together with the short summer nights, had rendered their efforts against these convoys almost innocuous and very costly in the casualties inflicted by the convoy escorts.
With the underlying threat of the V-Sites firmly removed, 617’s efforts were re-directed against the French Biscay ports of Brest, Lorient and La Pallice. The aim was to deny these ports and their facilities to the ocean-going U-Boats and to drive them to other, and more northerly lairs. There was an additional purpose in the matter of Brest. Strong American forces had broken out of their bridgehead area and were deploying rapidly and with great purpose through the “bocage” country of Normandy and Brittany. American units had isolated the German garrison in Cherbourg, one of the planned redoubts, whilst other motorised and armoured columns were making all speed towards Brest. The Allies needed to capture a large established
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deep-water port as soon as possible. Thus, the German garrison in Brest, with their numbers greatly increased by the many other German units which had sought refuge from the American advance, needed to have demonstrated to them just exactly what the total Allied air supremacy would bring to them during any period they might resolve to hold out. “Drive out the U-Boats and intimidate the garrison” . . . these were the deadly purposes of the assaults about to be launched from the air on Brest.
Flying Officer Don Cheney eased Lancaster “KC – V“ (JB 139) into the air at 0949 hours on Saturday, 5th August, 1944, from RAF Woodhall Spa. The squadron effort was sixteen Lancasters, each armed with a Tallboy bomb, and “V – Victor” was the ninth aircraft to get airborne. Beside the pilot, Flight Sergeant Jim Rosher prepared to ease back the throttles and later set the “revs and boost” his captain would request for the climb to height, once the full take-off procedure had been fulfilled. Flight Sergeant Len Curtis prepared to take his Bomb Aimer’s position in the nose from his perch on the step immediately below the flight engineer’s position. At the navigation table Pilot Officer Roy Welch was busy “setting out his stall” . . as was the wireless operator Flight Sergeant Reg Pool at the W/T set. In the mid-upper turret Warrant Officer Ken Porter settled himself comfortably, whilst Pilot Officer William Noel Wait did likewise in the rear turret. Both gunners prepared to unlock and test their turrets when the engines were throttled back and it was safe to do so.
The aircraft circled the airfield until the navigator warned that it was almost time to set course. Don brought the Lancaster round on to the
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required heading over the airfield and commenced the long, unhurried climb to the operational height of 18,000 feet.
It was a beautiful summer’s day . . . very warm with almost cloudless skies affording continuous sunshine. The mighty Merlins lifted the heavily-laden aircraft effortlessly and without one discordant note. Don checked with each member of the crew that all systems were operational and that there were no snags. He actioned the occasional slight course correction offered by the industrious navigator. When the aircraft had reached the operational height, Don called for the necessary cruising “revs and boost” to be set on the dials, checking the readings when he had Jim Rosher’s assertion that this had been carried out.
Don felt quite elated that another operational phase was beginning for the squadron against the U-Boat pens, with formidable Brest as the first target. He had found the tasks on 617 much more self-satisfying than those long, and very demanding, hauls in the enemy darkness, to bomb Target Indicators laid by other unknown crews. In the daylight raids of 617, captains were required to identify their aiming-points visually and to aim their bombs at this point . . often able to observe the success of the squadron’s effort before the confirming reconnaissance photos were available. Even on the 617 night operations, the Lancaster crews knew that the target had been identified and marked with meticulous accuracy by the squadron’s Mosquito marking force, so that the red spot fires could be bombed with the certain knowledge that they were on the aiming point. Don’s mind slipped back to the attack on the Watten V2 site in the Pas de Calais on July 25th, when the very accurate flak defences had knocked out one engine of his aircraft and so severely damaged the hydraulic system that all turrets became inoperable: the bomb doors hung limply open and the
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availability of the undercarriage became a matter of conjecture and prayer. The fuselage was awash with hydraulic oil and filled with the acrid smell of cordite. Miraculously, the intercomm was working and Don had raised all the crew, save the mid-upper gunner, the Aussie “Mac” McRostie. Don instructed the wireless operator to investigate the silence, in case the gunner was in need of assistance. A shaken Reg Pool appeared beside him some moments later, puled Don’s right earpiece aside and yelled “Mac’s gone!”. Don banked the aircraft, to bring it round course back to the UK, at the same time surveying the area below. His eye picked up the white silk of a parachute against the background of green countryside. It was about four thousand feet below the Lancaster and drifting gently inland. Mac’s prisoner-of-war status had been reported to Allied sources within a few days by the Resistance network. Don had taken stock of the damage to the aircraft during the return flight, and was greatly relieved to discover that no fires had started and that no member of the crew was injured. Some desultory heavy flak was aimed at them as they neared the French coast, but it was inaccurate and did no damage. Jim Rosher called Don’s attention to something overhead and there, sitting some thirty feet above the Lancaster, and sliding gently across and back again, was a Spitfire. The Spit then perched just off the starboard wing, with he pilot giving “Thumbs Up”, until the English coast was reached and then, with a salute of farewell, it peeled off to starboard and was gone. There was a temptation to “drop in“ at one of the many ‘dromes en route, but dogged persistence drove them on to Woodhall Spa. Fortuitously, the emergency air bottles “blew down” and locked the undercarriage and “T for Tare” flopped in without ceremony or waste of time, on clearance from the Control Tower.
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It was this series of events that had introduced Ken Porter into the crew. Ken had finished his first tour with 619 Squadron at Coningsby and had immediately opted to join 617. By coincidence, Don Cheney had been the pilot of the Lancaster which had flown the short distance from Woodhall Spa to Coningsby to pick him up and effect his transfer to his new squadron. Don was very pleased to have a fellow Canadian in his crew, for all the other members were from the United Kingdom and . . . Len Curtis’ voice broke in on his musings. “English coast coming up, navigator . . . we look to be OK on track and I’ll give you “crossing coast” when we’re overhead”. Roy Welch duly acknowledged the message and Don alerted himself for the passage across the Channel and into enemy territory. Once over the sea, both gunners performed the ritual test of the turret guns and reported all guns serviceable. ”V – Victor” crossed the enemy coast without any opposition manifesting itself, with the promised Spitfire escort ranged above and around the assembling 617, as they marshalled at the rendezvous point. Don took his allocated position in the “gaggle”, which proceeded on its stately and irrevocable purpose. The bomb-sight data passed between the navigator and the bomb-aimer, to be re-checked once it had been fed to the bomb-sight and before the aircraft was committed to the bombing run. Then the formation swung sharply to starboard, denying confirmation to the defenders of Brest that the port was really the objective of the operation until the last possible moment., The campaign against the U-Boat bases had begun in deadly earnest.
The run-up to the target was some twenty miles in length. As always, the Stabilised Automatic Bomb-Sight demanded the closest tolerances of height, course and airspeed from the pilot and Don Cheney’s total concentration was
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on these three factors. He knew from Len Curtis’s calm voice and quiet, unhurried directions that the bomb-aimer had the target well and truly lined up in his bomb-sight. Sweat trickled into Don’s eyes and down the side of his face, soaking into the collar of his shirt . . . not much longer now, and the Tallboy would be on its lethal way and he would have the luxury of drying himself with his handkerchief . . . not much longer for that blessed relief . . . not much longer. Suddenly, the voice of the rear gunner broke into the intercomm. “Looks as if some quite heavy barrage fire is coming up, skip!”. Don did not answer, his whole being concentrated on the final crucial moments of the bombing run. Ken Porter swung his turret to check the rear gunner’s observation. A second string of black bursts appeared above the black cotton-wool of the initial salvo and his experienced eye could see that the salvos were creeping higher and nearer. Don heard the dulled explosions . . . under the nose and to each side, he surmised, but the bomb-aimer’s directions held him in thrall. Then came the memory-stirring clangs and thumps as direct hits struck the aircraft with giant hammer-blows. A gasping cry came over the intercomm but still the bomb-aimer continued his relentless commentary. The cockpit filled with cordite fumes and again fiery red bursts erupted around the aircraft. Another involuntary cry came over the intercomm, almost drowned by the triumphant cry of “Bomb Gone!” from the bomb-aimer. With the main duty now performed, Don began the task of extricating the crew from the serious situation in which they obviously were. He banked and dived the Lancaster to port to elude further predicted bursts. Jim Rosher folded his seat and moved towards the navigation table. Don was still holding the dive from the danger zone when Jim came on the intercom. “Roy and Reg are both hurt, Don” he reported. “I’m attending to Roy . . . Ken and Noel have come forward
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[inserted] 7 [/inserted]
and are attending to Reg”. “Any idea of the damage, Jim?” asked Don. “All the gauges on the Engineer’s panel are wrecked, Don” replied Jim. Ken Porter came on the intercom. “I got down from my turret after the first strike, Don, to see what the score was . . and then the second shell struck home, just aft of the main spar, I figure. I almost choked on the fumes from the explosion of that shell! The damage seems to be confined to the starboard side of the kite, in the wing-root area”. “There’s a large hole in the nav table” interjected Jim “and the radio compartment is pretty badly smashed!”. “Thanks both” replied Don. “Could Roy give me a course for Base when he’s ready?”. Jim Rosher realised that Don did not quite know the extent of the navigatgor’s [sic] wounds. Shrapnel had struck him in the face, tearing away the oxygen mask and removing his upper teeth and gums. Jim had just applied a field dressing to the area . . . despite the pain he was suffering, Ron had managed to smile crookedly when the pad was put in place. When Don’s request came over the intercomm, and to Jim’s utter amazement, Roy sat up in his chair, pored over his log and wrote some figures on a clip-board pad. He then stood up with a great effort. Aware of movement on his right, Don turned quickly. Roy was standing by the pilot’s seat, one hand grasping the high, armour-plated back and the other carrying the clip-board. His face was covered from nose to chin with a large antiseptic pad. There were large spots of blood on his shirt collar and on the side of his head. He was unable to speak but relinquished his grip on the seat-back, to hold the clip-board where Don could read it, indicating with his pencil the message he had written. “Heading 060”. . Don gave him a grateful nod and set the course on his compass repeater. Roy tottered back to his seat for Jim Rosher to continue to minister to his wounds. Len
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Curtis had switched off the SABS and all the bombing gear and brought the First Aid kit to assist the two wounded members.
Don continued the descending turn to port, aiming to bring the Lancaster on to the course so gallantly proffered by the navigator. He had noted that Ron was not on oxygen and assumed that Reg was in the same predicament, so he had increased the rate of descent in order to get down below oxygen height as quickly as possible. The compass needle was nearing a southerly heading in the continuing turn, when he felt a poke in the side. He looked to his right and saw Jim Rosher pointing to the starboard wing. Don looked along the raised wing and was appalled to see a large jagged hole between the two engines. It looked large enough for a man to crawl through! Beyond this chasm, was a number of smaller holes, from which were emerging small light blue flames and wisps of smoke. He continued the diving turn to port, to keep the possible fire hazard away from the fuselage. He mentally summed up the prospects and gave the order “Prepare to abandon aircraft! Prepare to abandon aircraft!”.
Jim Rosher checked that his ‘chute was readily to hand. He saw that Len Curtis was still busily engaged, ministering gently to the badly-wounded Wireless Operator, who had sustained wounds in the chest and legs from large jagged pieces of shrapnel. Jim lowered himself into the bombing well to prepare the escape hatch for abandonment, a duty which normally Len would have performed. He was lifting the hatch from its location when he noticed that Len Curtis’s ‘chute was lying loose on the floor. Fearing that the slipstream might suck it from the aircraft when the hatch was jettisoned, Jim let go of the hatch, which by this time was half-way out of the aircraft. The impact of the slipstream jammed the hatch across the
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escape exit. Jim crawled carefully around the partially-blocked exit and secured the rogue ‘chute in its proper stowage. He then endeavoured to deal with the recalcitrant hatch cover. He managed to budge it a few inches but that was all. He gave up and returned to his post beside the pilot.
On receipt of the captain’s order, Ken Porter and Noel Wait immediately went back to their ‘chute stowages to clamp their parachutes on their chests, leaving Len Curtis still ministering to the wireless operator. Noel Wait was having some trouble with his ‘chute pack and Ken Porter went to help him. Noel must have thought that Ken was on his way to the rear door, for he called urgently “Wait for me!” . . . which Don heard on the intercom and he sought to reassure the rear gunner that the order was only preparatory at that time. Suddenly the starboard inner engine failed and began to belch flames and black smoke. Jim Rosher quickly feathered the engine and threw the appropriate graviner switch to quell the flames in that engine. This seemed to deal effectively with the situation. “Both wings are holed, Don” reported Jim “and the fuselage is badly holed and torn in many places!”. Don could see a blue flame burning ominously in the No 2 fuel tank. It seemed to be growing even as he watched. He could feel heat building up from the starboard side of the cockpit. There was not a moment to Lose! . . “ABANDON AIRCRAFT! ABANDON AIRCRAFT!” he ordered.
At the rear of the aircraft, Noel Wait had plugged into the intercomm socket whilst Ken Porter had secured the rear door open. Ken saw that flames were streaming back from the starboard wing, almost the length of the fuselage. The flames and smoke dispersed suddenly, but hard on the heels of this Ken received a visual signal from Noel that the order to
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abandon aircraft had been given. He signed for Noel to go first, but Noel indicated for Ken to lead the way. Ken sat on the door sill with his legs dangling in the slip-stream. He leaned back and then tried to roll himself forward, as had been so easy in the practice drills. But due to the aircraft’s “starboard wing up” attitude, the roll forward took a great deal of effort and Ken found himself leaving the aircraft much closer to the fuselage than he might have expected. However, that seemed to ensure he was well clear of the tail assembly. He had no doubt that Noel would quickly follow him.
Jim Rosher slid forward into the bombing well and tried desperately to free the jammed hatch. Suddenly he was aware that Roy Welch was beside him, ‘chute clipped on and a large dressing still strapped across his face. In spite of his injuries, Roy assisted Jim to such effect that, although their efforts failed to free the hatch cover, it was moved sufficiently to allow a somewhat cramped escape route. Roy waved his hand in farewell to Jim and, with some difficulty, launched himself from the aircraft. Jim turned to see that Len Curtis was now in the bombing well. He put his mouth close to Len’s ear and said “How’s Reg?” “He’s right behind me!” replied Len “You leave now and I’ll follow you!” Immediately Jim manoeuvred himself through the restricted escape exit and was gone. Len edged his way around to his ‘chute stowage, clamped the ‘chute on to his harness and returned to the jammed hatch cover. He could see that he was not going to be able to negotiate the exit as he constituted at the moment, being, in his own words, “somewhat portly”. He tried without success to budge the jammed cover. Reg Pool was sitting dazedly on the fuselage floor, above the step leading into the bombing well. Len signalled Reg to retreat a bit, to give Len more
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room, but it was obvious that Reg just did not understand what Len was indicating. Len released the ‘chute straps from his main harness, whilst keeping the ‘chute secured in the clamps. He used both hands to raise the pack above his head and sat down at the escape exit with his feet through the narrowed opening. Gripping the pack above his head as tightly as his fingers would allow, he uttered a silent prayer and thrust himself into space. His stratagem worked and he cleared the aircraft without difficulty.
Don Cheney had ceased turning the aircraft to port on issuing the order to abandon and held it at height on a southerly course whilst his crew got out. He could see that the aircraft was just out to sea and felt that his crew would have a better chance of escaping capture in the area south of Brest, if the surge of the German retreat had been pell-mell northwards towards Brest once Wehrmacht units had been appraised of the American “break-out in great strength” some days previously. One of Jim Rosher’s last acts before leaving the aircraft had been to lay a ‘chute pack under Don’s seat, to expedite Don’s own departure from the Lancaster. Don had been fully informed of the situation with the jammed hatch cover. He was aware of the departure of the navigator, flight engineer and then his bomb-aimer. He knew that the two gunners had left by the rear door and appreciated that the badly-wounded wireless operator and himself were the sole remaining aircrew. He climbed down from his seat and, holding the aircraft as steady as possible by keeping his left hand on the control column, he strove with his right arm to help Reg to his feet. Slowly he managed to raise Reg and used both hands to steady the weakened aircrew. As soon as he had taken his hand from the control column, the aircraft began to wallow ominously from side to
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side. Don was forced to regain his seat and settle the aircraft again. Reg clung precariously to the side of the seat whilst this was happening. When he was satisfied that the aircraft was on even keel again, Don left his seat and clipped his wireless operator’s ‘chute on to Reg’s harness. Reg had been holding the pack, but was obviously too weak to do this task for himself. The Lancaster insisted on nosing into a steep dive each time Don took his hand from the controls and repeatedly Don had to regain his seat to bring the aircraft out of the dive. Eventually, Reg had been prepared for abandoning the aircraft. In one of the Lancaster’s “behaviour lulls”, Don was able to lead him down to the escape exit. Reg dangled his feet through the escape exit and, with Don’s help and guidance, was able to grasp the silver D-ring. Again, Don had to leave him to “recover” the aircraft from a dive. As soon as he could, he returned to Reg’s side. Don had some misgivings about Reg’s capacity to act correctly once he had left the aircraft and sought to reassure himself, although there really was no alternative to what had to happen. Don removed Reg’s helmet and, putting his mouth close to Reg’s ear, he said urgently “You will be OK, Reg, won’t you? . . . once you’ve left the aircraft?” The injured man nodded a couple of times. Somewhat reassured, Don continued “Keep hold of the ring, Reg and don’t pull it until you are well clear . . . understand?” Again he was answered with nods of the head. Don put his hands under Reg’s armpits, lifted him and eased him gently through the exit. Suddenly, Reg was gone without any further hurt or hindrance. Don peered through the exit but failed to pick up any sign of a parachute. He became aware that the aircraft was diving again and hurried back to regain control and to prepare for his own departure.
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Don had scarcely retrieved the situation when there was a surge of heat from the starboard side of the fuselage. Instinctively he turned to the engineer’s panel and was aghast to see bubbles appearing in the yellow paint of the panel. He climbed down from his seat and stooped to retrieve his ‘chute pack and clipped it to his chest. He had to remove his hand from the controls to effect this and immediately the Lancaster went into a steep dive. A noise like a roaring tornado developed as the slipstream tore in through the escape hatch and ravaged through the battered fuselage to escape at the open rear door. The engine noise was rising to a crescendo! . . . he fought his way back into his seat and with a superhuman effort, brought the nose up . . up . . up . . and then pushed the column forward until a semblance of “straight and level” flight was assumed. His mind had been racing ahead . . . no way was he going to be able to get down into the bombing-well and launch himself into space before the stricken Lancaster went into its final death-dive . . . no way could he reach the rear door exit, either! No, it HAD to be through the ditching hatch above his head! He turned in his seat, so that he was able to kneel on the seat cushion and jam his rump against the control column. He gave the release handle a firm twist and the hatch cover windmilled off into the slip-stream. The wind-noise increased ten-fold! Don removed his helmet and sun-glasses and tossed them towards the floor, but they were immediately whisked off down the fuselage. With his feet now on the seat, he forced his head and shoulders through the hatch opening but found he was unable to clear it. Urgently, he sought to get first one foot and then the other on the seat armrests . . . and then was shattered to find that the ‘chute pack prevented him from getting through the hatch! He crouched back again inside the cockpit. The
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aircraft was in a steep dive and his best efforts could only bring the nose up slightly. He knew he HAD to get out NOW! He resumed his attempt to get through the dinghy hatch, but this time was able to flip the pack upwards and clear of the hatch before beginning to wrestle the rest of his body through the opening. He stood on the armrests again and managed to get his right knee on the edge of the hatch. His left foot groped frantically for additional purchase below. Miraculously, he made contact with the back of the seat . . . felt his way upwards until his foot was at the top of his seat which provided a promise of firm leverage. He paused to gather all his reserves of strength and then gave a tremendous push on his left foot. He bulleted out into a roaring cacophony of sound. The blurred hump of the mid-upper turret flashed past and, with that peculiar human sense that allows one to observe the innocuous in moments of great personal stress, he gave mental thanks that Ken had remembered to depress the turret guns. The two large tail fins loomed and went safely by and with them the W/T aerials that could have cut through him like a wire through cheese . . . and then he was tumbling in space, with his knees drawn up to his chest. In his gyrations he saw blue sky and white clouds framed between his flying boots . . . then water . . . then land . . . then the sky and clouds again to complete the cycle. His consciousness was no longer dominated by the roar of the aircraft. Instead, there was a rushing of air past his ears. He felt around the pack for the release handle and seized it thankfully. He waited a further five seconds and gave it a very firm pull. It gave with incredible ease and he was conscious of holding the D-ring in his hand, with a two-feet length of wire attached to it and not the slightest slackening of his speed of fall! “Hell!” he thought “I’ve pulled it too
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hard and the “chute just isn’t going to work! What an ending after all I’ve escaped!”. A definite “whumpf” halted these thoughts in their tracks . . . his headlong fall was arrested . . . he assumed an upright position . . . no more rushing air in his ears. He was floating gently aloft, with only the gentle flapping of the beautiful white canopy above him to break the silence of that lovely summer afternoon. He heard the drone of an aircraft and looked around to see “V for Victor” in its death throes. It had reared from its downward plunge, with its nose rising until the Lancaster toppled over. For one frightening moment Don felt that there was a distinct possibility of the aircraft banking round and perhaps striking him, but then it went into a gentle spin towards the sea. An eternity seemed to pass before it finally struck the surface with one final roar. A great burst of red flames and thick black smoke was followed by a boiling circle of churning sea. The Don saw a series of smaller splashes as lesser debris hit the water, but finally nothing remained to mark the grave of “V for Victor” but a column of spiralling smoke which the sea breeze quickly dispersed.
A dull, muted droning of aircraft engines became faintly audible. Peering into the distance, Don could make out the specks of other 617 aircraft which, having delivered their bomb-loads, were now haring back to Woodhall Spa. Soon they were gone and an unbroken silence descended. Don could see no other ‘chutes in the sky around him. To all intents and purposes he was completely alone.
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Len Curtis was greatly relieved when the billowing silk canopy of his parachute arrested his headlong fall through space. He became aware that, whilst he had been wrestling his way through the narrowed escape hatch, the racing slip-stream had torn off his right flying boot, and for a few moments he was non-plussed . . . why hadn’t his left flying boots joined its companion? But he was swiftly dragged back to reality when he saw the Lancaster turning towards him in a shallow dive. For a few agonising moments, he was sure that it would hit him, but suddenly it resumed straight and level flight and the danger passed, but too close for real comfort. Len examined the area around and below him but failed to pick up the ‘chutes of Roy Welch and Jim Rosher. He began to assess his own situation and estimated that he would enter the waters of the bay some two miles from land. The sensation of rapid descent increased as he neared the water. He prepared himself for the plunge by unlocking the quick-release unit of the ‘chute. When he judged himself to be about fifteen feet above the surface of the sea, he struck the unit with his clenched fist, at the same time operating the automatic inflation lever on his Mae West. He fell out of his ‘chute and harness, which drifted away, clear of the spot where Len eventually hit the water. He went down only a few feet before rising buoyantly to the surface. He surveyed the geography of the bay and found himself in the broad base of its sweep. Undaunted, he commenced to swim towards the shore, deflating his Mae West slightly to allow himself to assume a comfortable swimming posture. He was glad to find that the water was quite warm and felt that, under less intimidating circumstances, it would have been quite a pleasant way to spend a summer afternoon. He glanced at his watch . . it had stopped at 1220 pm.
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He made steady progress towards an outcrop of rock and estimated that he had been in the sea for about two hours, when a burst of automatic fire split the silence. He heard the hiss of the bullets as they passed overhead and he turned to face the direction from which they had come. He made out a knot of German troops on the beach. About half-dozen had their weapons trained threateningly on him, whilst one beckoned him imperiously to change his direction towards them, making it plain what would happen if he refused. Cursing his luck, Len swam towards them and soon he was standing on the beach, dripping wet, surrounded by Germans. They expertly removed all his valuables and possessions, which they pocketed with great satisfaction, but the reception was generally cordial. Obviously, they remarked between themselves on his missing boot. Len discarded his Mae West, and it was immediately examined by the interested troops. Len was disgusted to find that they were armed with Sten guns . . . the guns that the supply squadrons regularly dropped to the Resistance! His captors were obviously a platoon under the command of a Corporal, but quite soon a car appeared from which emerged a Wehrmacht officer. He strode across to Len, who stood to attention, as military etiquette demanded. The German studies Len for a few moments. “Ah, Feldwebel” he said and motioned Len into the car. With Len flanked in the rear by two “Sten-armed” soldiers, and the officer in the front passenger seat, the car moved off. It sped through a town which Len was to learn later was Douarnenez and on for some way until it reached a small military camp. Len was escorted to a cell and a meal of German field rations and hot black erzatz coffee was provided, again with the same cordiality that had reigned on the beach. He rested for an hour or so, when the door was unlocked and a Feldwebel beckoned him out. He was taken to an office block and escorted into a room where a different
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Wehrmacht officer sat at a table. Len saluted as he entered and the officer indicated the chair which faced him across the table. Len sat down and prepared himself for the interrogation. “Number . . . rank and name” he was asked, in quite reasonable English and Len provided this information, which was entered on the form in front of his interrogator. “Unit?”, came the next question. Len shook his head “I am afraid I cannot give you that, sir” he replied. The officer looked at him quizzically and after a few moments, pushed himself back from the table and left the room through a door behind his desk . . . Len heard a muffled conversation between perhaps three or four voices and then the officer returned. “Sergeant, you will be taken to Quimper airport tomorrow and handed over to the Luftwaffe. The information you have given us will be forwarded, as required, but we have more important things to do at this moment than to interrogate RAF prisoners.” He called for the Feldwebel and soon Len found himself back in his cell. Relief allowed him to sleep quite soundly that night.
In the morning he was given a meal and transported under guard to Quimper airfield. Before he left the camp, he was handed a pair of German Army issue boots. Len took a grip on the leg and boot of his flying boot with a few swift jerks, separated them by breaking the stitching, as provided by their design. He tore out the silk linings of the legging, folded them into small packs, and put them in the back pockets of his battle-dress trousers. He managed to have some conversation with his guards on the drive to Quimper and discovered that the majority of the troops holding this part of France were Austrian and Czech formations. There was an awareness of the American break-out from the invasion beaches and Len was left with the distinct impression that his guards wanted nothing more
[Page break]
than to be captured in one piece and get out of this war! This cheered him no end, and went a long way in explaining the cordiality with which he had been received.
At Quimper airfield, he was placed in the custody of a Luftwaffe corporal, who seemed to be the only Luftwaffe representative left. His Wehrmacht guards and driver insisted on shaking hands with him before they left, and Len was becoming more and more at ease with his situation. The Luftwaffe corporal turned out to be a conscripted Czech who had a few similar Czech troopers under his command. He was quite amenable and spoke some English. Len gathered that the corporal was hourly expecting orders to evacuate the airfield and this would mean moving a band of about two hundred French Algerian prisoners-of-war . . and Len! He spent a not unpleasant day at Quimper and could see that morale amongst the German “mercenaries” was plunging.
The following day, Monday 7th August, the Luftwaffe corporal informed Len that orders had come through to evacuate the airfield and move all prisoners into the Crozon Peninsular. It was estimated that a march of some 45 kilometres lay ahead, which Len interpolated as around 28 miles. The corporal added that the march would be accomplished at night, since the Allied Air Forces had made the roads in Brittany very dangerous for the movement of large formations in daylight hours. Len rested most of the day in preparation for what lay ahead. At about 1700 hrs, the corporal and his troop began the thankless task of assembling their French-Algerian prisoners, many of whom had so many large packages draped about them that they looked like pack-mules! Just before 1800 hrs the party, in some fifty
[Page break]
files of four abreast, trudged out of the camp, en route for the Crozon Peninsular, with the corporal pushing his beloved bike. It was a warm clear evening, with the guards anxiously scanning the skies and straining their ears for the first possible warning of an air attack. Fortune favoured the column in this respect and dusk fell with no interference from marauding Allied fighters. Dusk turned to night, with bright moonlight effectively lighting the road. The party, which had had a degree of compactness at the outset, was now strung out over a distance of some four hundred yards. Consequently, the escort became ever more thinly spread along the length of the column. They passed through what appeared to be sleeping French villages, although Len was certain that curtains were raised in darkened upstairs windows to observe their progress. He wondered if “underground” radios were passing the information on to Maquis squads and fervently hoped that no clandestine ambush would be laid against the party before its identity had been checked.
Occasionally a halt was called for a short break, generally in the area of a village pump, or public water supply. The dispersal of the marchers had one advantage, in that it made for less crowding around the drinking area. It also allowed the mass to coagulate somewhat, although the more lightly-weighted elements were soon ahead of the “beasts of burden” once the march was resumed. Len’s feet became blistered, and so he sat down on a grassy bank, removed his German field boots and put his feet in the cool water of the brook that ran past. He soaked some of the linings from his flying-boot and carefully bound up his blistered feet, revelling in the relief that the silk pads immediately afforded. He became aware that many of the Algerians now passing him were limping badly. Ignoring the guards, Len called to them, indicating for them to sit on the bank and bathe their feet as he had
[Page break]
done. They did this gratefully. Len set to work to minister to as many as he could until his lining stock was exhausted, but he still signalled to others to bathe their feet. The guards shrugged their shoulders . . . some even joined their charges in their ministrations.
Still the trek dragged on its weary way. Fruit trees and occasional root crops gave sustenance to the prisoners, for no ration provision had been made for them when the march was ordered. Len quite understood when he saw them stuffing items into their baggage after each “windfall” . . . they were providing against what might lie beyond their next camp.
Len was padding along beside the bike-pushing corporal, who was becoming quite concerned about the spread of the column, now that their destination was about two hours walk ahead. The corporal called a halt for the prisoners at the head of his party and indicated to Len that he would be going back to “chivvy along” the stragglers. He left his bike in Len’s charge and strode back down the road. When he was out of sight, Len mounted the cycle and pedalled off towards the squad of prisoners ahead. Some of the Algerians thought he was escaping and gave him encouraging cheers, but Len felt his best bet in the obvious chaotic battle situation was to accept his present captivity until a genuine opportunity presented itself to make contact with Allied troops. In the meantime, using the corporal’s bike would take the weight off his blistered feet! When he was almost upon the leading batch, he dismounted and rested by the roadside. When the first file of the laggards hove into hearing and view, he remounted the bike and caught up with the leaders once more. He continued this routine of “riding and resting” for an hour or so before actually riding through the ranks of the pace-setters and finally making the guards understand that their batch should wait for the remainder of the prisoners
[Page break]
to catch up, so that the party could arrive as a whole unit at their destination, which could not be all that far ahead. The prospect of a break appealed to the guards and the prisoners and they were quite content to rest for the hour it took the whole of the rear party to catch up. The corporal was pleased with Len’s arrangements but took the precaution of reclaiming his bike, so that Len finished the trek on his own two well-rested feet.
It was just after 1100 hours on Tuesday, 8th August that the whole party arrived at their destination in the Crozon Peninsular, some eighteen hours after leaving Quimper airfield. The Algerians were marched on to a makeshift camp, but Len was taken by the Czech corporal to a house that had been commandeered by the Wehrmacht. Len was accommodated in a bedroom converted into a cell and was asleep almost as soon as his head touched the rough pillow.
[Page break]
Len was kept in this location for two days, with very little restriction on his movements. His corporal “friend” accompanied him on exercise walks in the immediate areas and Len was “on the ration strength” of the guard-room staff, eating the same food as they did. Len observed that the Wehrmacht were just as opportunist at supplementing rations as any other army in the field and included him in the share of the “extras”.
On the evening of the third day, a small Wehrmacht lorry stopped outside the guard-room. The driver produced orders for Len’s transfer to Brest and Len was duly handed over, after hand-shakes all round, much to the amazement of the lorry driver who proved to be a genuine ”German” German! Two Wehrmacht soldiers with fixed bayonets watched over him in the body of the truck, but they also showed great concern about the almost-continuous aircraft engine noise that accompanied that nocturnal journey to what proved to be Brest, but, to the great relief of all, they made the journey without incident. Len was initially kept in a small school, barricaded with barbed wire, along with mainly American Army prisoners, although he did come across two more RAF aircrew during his stay.
Yet again the Germans decided to move him and he was transplanted within the Brest boundaries to a castle which housed some one hundred and fifty American soldiers. He was occasionally included in the fatigue parties that were roughly assembled and marched down into the dock area to help clear the rubble-strewn streets, the legacy of the many bombing raids that the port was enduring. Low-flying and dive-bombing American fighter-bombers strafed and bombed the port’s defences continually throughout the daylight hours, with great effect. Len was crossing a street when he heard a bomb coming down that he knew was going to be very close. He dived into the
[Page break]
gutter, with his face turned in towards the kerb and his hands clasped behind his neck. He sensed more than heard the explosion but felt the blast on his hands. He leapt to his feet and headed for a shelter like a scalded cat. He literally dived into the shelter which was mainly filled with German personnel but they made room for him and no-one objected to his presence.
On another occasion in the dock area he took shelter when the Air Raid sirens screamed their warning and an ominous silence descended on the port for a few minutes, until the heavy flak began to spit in anger. Instinct told Len this was a “heavies job” but he didn’t stand in the open to decide whether it was the RAF or the Eighth Army Air Force. A few minutes later the walls of the shelter trembled as salvos of bombs plummeted into the harbour area, although Len was pretty sure they were not Tallboys!
The Germans decided to move the prisoners from Brest. The military situation was becoming extreme for them and they could no longer spare the considerable number of front-line personnel needed to maintain the prisoner-of-war organisation. These guards were now needed as replacements for the defenders killed by the Allied Air Forces. The column of prisoners was moved out at night and marched, via the town of Le Fret, to the small seaside resort of Rostellec, in the Crozon Peninsular.
The days passed, with the food stocks dwindling. All French civilians had long been cleared out of Rostellec and Len and his immediate companions began to scavenge for food to supplement their meagre fare. It was a great find to discover onions in the overgrown wilderness of what had once been a lovingly tended vegetable garden of one of the village houses. The military population of the Crozon Peninsular grew each day, as the German troops
[Page break]
retreated before the American mobile forces. Rostellec provided Len and the other Allied prisoners with a grand-stand view of the bombing of Brest by RAF and American aircraft. Soon the concentrations on the Peninsular were bombed heavily and regularly by light bombers and fighters, inevitably causing casualties among the American prisoners and some of the members of the French Resistance confined with them. Over fifty were wiped out in one raid alone.
Eventually, on Monday, 18th September, six weeks after he had been shot down, liberating forces of the American Army rolled into the Crozon Peninsular. The bottled-up Germans had had enough and the surrender was swift and unanimous. With magnificent perception, among the early arrivals with the US Army were large lorries liberally laden with “PX supplies” and soon field-kitchens were providing almost “peace-time” meals for the hungry hordes of prisoners. Len ate and drank his fill before slipping off to find a comfortable billet for the night. He found himself in a house that had been an impromptu Mess for Wehrmacht officers. The beds were clean and comfortable. He lowered himself thankfully into the depths of the most inviting of them and was soon sleeping that sound and deeply refreshing sleep which was known in the Air Force as “a short course of Death”.
The sun was well up when he surfaced again. He lay luxuriating in the bed, gathering his thoughts and making plans for the day. He would have to make contact with some US officer who could arrange transport . . or offer help . . to get him back to England and Woodhall Spa. Eventually he sat up and began to dress, when suddenly he became curious to know what might be contained in the furniture with which the room was furnished. The chest of drawers
[Page break]
revealed nothing of interest but the wardrobe yielded a pair of German officer’s field boots! The leather was beautifully soft and shiny. Len drew them on, scarcely daring to breathe, and he almost shouted with delight at their perfect fit. He drew his battledress trouser-legs down over them which served to make it appear that he was wearing normal shoes. He finished dressing and made his way to the nearest field-kitchen where he was supplied with food by the American cooks without demur. When he was finished, he approached a huge sergeant-cook and asked where he could find a US officer. The sergeant stared at him for a moment “A god-dammed Limey!” he said “Jeez, they had one of everything in this place!” “Officers? Boy, they’re as thick as flies around here” he continued “Just walk around and you’re sure to find one!”. Len took his advice and soon saw a jeep with an American officer and two sergeants aboard. He approached the jeep, threw up a smart salute and said “Excuse me, sir!”. The dust-covered American looked quite startled but Len pressed on. “I am a bomb-aimer in the RAF. I was shot down six weeks ago and am anxious to get back to my unit in England. Can you help me?”. “Not personally, sergeant” replied the officer. “You see, there’s this war on and we’ve got to gather in all the Kraut prisoners and ship out all our own captured personnel for assessment and re-allocation . . and that’s quite a job in any man’s army!” He paused for a moment and then went on “Just down there, on the right, they’ve established an MT compound and Mess. Your best bet is to speak to one of the quartermasters. The lorries are running supplies from the dump at Rennes and the boys from up in the wild blue yonder have a makeshift airfield at Rennes . . chances are you can thumb an aerial lift there”. “Thank you, sir . . very helpful” replied Len, saluted and turned away. He heard one
[Page break]
of the sergeants say “These Limeys! Always correct and military, even when they’ve been six weeks adrift!”.
Len found the compound and watch [sic] the activity for a while. He saw that the drivers of lorries arriving with stores vacated their seats to the Camp personnel and hurried off to the large marquee which was obviously a temporary Mess. German prisoners-of-wat supplemented the American Army personnel in the unloading of the vehicles. Once a vehicle was unloaded, it was driven off the site and parked in a lager where it was refuelled and checked. After some ten minutes or so, drivers came to reclaim their vehicles which were driven off westwards at a fair rate of knots. Len wandered over to where the top-sergeant was standing and occasionally bawling. “Excuse me, sergeant . . . how can I get a lift to Rennes?” The sergeant wheeled at the sound of Len’s voice and in a voice heavy with amazement said “A god-damn Limey! I heard you were all still stuck on the beaches!” “No, I’ve been here six weeks, sergeant” replied Len innocently. “Six weeks, eh?” rejoined the sergeant “Guess you want to get back to Limeyland real quick. Best you can do is go over to the chow tent and ask around . . . most of the trucks are running from Rennes”. Len thanked him and turned towards the marquee. “Limey” called the sergeant “Make sure you take some of the hard-tack for the journey. There are no roadside cafes along that road now!”.
Len sauntered into the marquee and marvelled at the quality of the food that was being offered to the drivers. He approached one driver who seemed to be almost finished eating. “Excuse me . . any chance of a lift back to Rennes?”. The American surveyed him for a few moments and said “Who are you?”. “RAF aircrew, shot down over Brest six weeks ago. I want to get back
[Page break]
to England and an officer out there said the best way was to hitch a lift back to Rennes, with a chance of getting an air trip from the airfield there”. “Your luck’s in, fellah” smiled the American “My orders take me to Rennes airfield, to load up and return to this Base. I’ll be glad of the company!”. Len waited until the driver had finished his coffee and followed him out of the marquee. From a table close to the entrance, the American grabbed two bags and tossed one to Len. “Hard tack for the journey” he explained, at the same time lifting a large Thermos flask from the side of the table. The lorry was quickly located and soon they were heading westwards, on the 150 miles journey to Rennes. The driver was most anxious to hear about Len’s previous six weeks in France and that conversation, together with the “chow break”, made the five hours journey pass reasonably quickly. It was getting quite dark when they pulled into Rennes airfield. “No night-flying from this field, Limey” said the American. “Best plan is to find yourself somewhere to sleep for the night and try your luck in the morning”. Len thanked his for his help and descended from the truck near a group of airfield buildings. He found a camp bed and a blanket in one of the rooms and settled down for the night.
Len awoke around 7 am on what promised to be another fine day. There was no sound of flying activity from the airfield as he dressed. He found a stand-pipe tap between the buildings and had a refreshing cold-water wash which revived him no end. He looked across the airfield and saw what appeared to be Dakota aircraft on the farther side and began to walk around the grass perimeter towards this dispersal. Suddenly a wonderful small of cooking assailed his nostrils and reminded him that he was quite hungry. He followed his nose, somewhat like the kids in the “Bisto” advert, and came
[Page break]
upon an underground air-raid shelter from which the aroma was issuing. He called down “Anyone there?” which immediately struck his as trite, since obviously some-one had to be cooking the food! His call brought the head and shoulders of an American sergeant into view. He looked questioningly at Len, without saying a word. “Any chance of some grub, sarge?” queried Len hopefully. “What’s a Limey doing here at this time of the morning?” countered the American. Len gave him a rapid potted history of the past six weeks, which seemed to satisfy the soldier. “Anything to trade?” queried the sergeant. Len offered him the choice of the few German badges and insignia he had gathered during his sojourn in France and the satisfied sergeant withdrew into the shelter. He appeared some minutes later with a huge sandwich, which Len found to contain a large portion of beautifully cooked Texas longhorn steak, topped with two eggs, to be washed down with as much coffee as he wished. Len did not rush this meal . . . such a feast needed to be savoured and appreciated to the last crumb! Finally he took his leave of his benefactor and made his way to the dispersals, which were now a hive of activity.
A study of the area revealed to Len what appeared to be the Administrative centre. He made his way over to this hut and explained his position to the top-sergeant seated in a smaller office inside. “Yeah” said the sergeant “Plenty of flights to England! Where are you heading?”. Len explained that he needed to get to London. “Fine!” came the rejoinder “Got one flight for London due to leave in about thirty minutes! Come with me, Limey”. He escorted Len across the tarmac and introduced him to two fur-jacketed American officers. “One returning Limey prisoner-of-war to be added to your manifest, sir” said the sergeant to one of the officers and sauntered off. Len found himself outlining the last six weeks to the two very interested
[Page break]
Americans. Before long, the Dakota was taxying to the take-off point with Len comfortably settled in the fuselage.
The flight took a little over three hours and the aircraft landed at what is now Heath Row [sic]. Len thanked his hosts for the lift and made his way to a cluster of huts, to locate some RAF authority to report to and from whom to obtain instructions. He explained his circumstances to a sergeant who said “Follow me, Chiefie! There’s been quite a trickle of aircrew through here this past fortnight. I’ll take you to the officer who has the “drill” off pat now!”. Soon Len was on his way to the Central Hotel in London, where returning former P.O.W. aircrew were required to report for debriefing. He arrives at the nearest station to this Central Hotel and was walking the final stage when he heard behind him “Excuse me, Flight Sergeant”. He turned round, to find himself confronted by two Service MPs, beautifully turned out and burnished. He had time to note that one was of Warrant Officer rank, while the other, a flight sergeant, began to berate him for his appearance and threatening a charge for being improperly dressed. Mentally, Len could only agree with him, for his wardrobe consisted simply of his battledress blouse and trousers, the legs of the trousers still covering the German officer field boots . . . no socks, shirt, tie, pants or vest. However, his resentment welled up within him and he explained forcefully, with many epithets thrown in, just how he had come to this pass, and advised the SPs to allow him to continue on his journey to report his return to Higher Authority. Speechless, and suitably chastened, the SPs stood mute as Len turned his back on them and arrived at his destination.
[Page break]
Once his identity had been checked and proved, Len was allowed to have a bath and provided with a shaving kit to make himself presentable for the programme which followed. First, he was given the full stringent aircrew medical, which he passed without any trouble. He was then given the items of clothing he needed to assume a “smart, airmanlike appearance”, although he retained the field boots as a souvenir of his exploits. He was given a meal and then subjected to a thorough debriefing, covering the period from the moment the Lancaster was hit until his arrival at “Heath Row”. He was required to stretch and search his mind for any detail that he had observed that might prove of value to Intelligence sources. Special interest was shown in his report that the Czech and Austrian elements he had encountered appeared to be looking for the opportunity to surrender and get out of the war whole. Eventually, when he had run the full course of the Central Hotel, he was again fed, given six weeks leave, with free warrant home and the appropriate ration cards, and two pounds in cash for subsistence on the journey home . . . most of which disappeared “down the hatch” by the time his train left London.
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
Lancaster JB139 Dark Victor
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
France--Pas-de-Calais
France--Le Havre
France--Boulogne-sur-Mer
Netherlands
Netherlands--Ijmuiden
France--Brest
France--Lorient
France--La Pallice
France--Brittany
France--Normandy
France--Cherbourg
France--Watten
France--Douarnenez
France--Quimper
France--Crozon Peninsula
France--Rennes
Great Britain
Heathrow Airport (London, England)
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
United States Army Air Force
Wehrmacht
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
33 printed sheets
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MCurtisA1579599-161130-02
Description
An account of the resource
A memoir of an operation involving Len Curtis and his crew members. During the operation his aircraft was shot down and Len was captured. However, he was liberated by American soldiers and returned to London six weeks later.
This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form. No better quality copies are available.
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.
1944
1944-08-05
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Anne-Marie Watson
617 Squadron
619 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bale out
bomb aimer
bombing of the Boulogne E-boats (15/16 June 1944)
bombing of the Le Havre E-boat pens (14/15 June 1944)
C-47
flight engineer
Lancaster
mess
Mosquito
navigator
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
pilot
prisoner of war
RAF Coningsby
RAF Woodhall Spa
Resistance
Spitfire
Tallboy
target indicator
target photograph
V-1
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/934/36536/MLovattP1821369-190903-75.2.pdf
51c3fbced3b1e3bd9c7237f2cb79c94a
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
Lovatt, Peter
Dr Peter Lovatt
P Lovatt
Description
An account of the resource
117 items. An oral history interview with Peter Lovatt (b.1924, 1821369 Royal Air Force), his log book, documents, and photographs. The collection also contains two photograph albums. He flew 42 operations as an air gunner on 223 Squadron flying B-24s. <br /><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1338">Album One</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2135">Album Two</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Nina and Peter Lovatt 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
2017-09-27
2019-09-03
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
Lovatt, P
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
A Reminiscence of the Flying Characteristics of Many Old Type Aircraft
Description
An account of the resource
A detailed analysis of very early aircraft and their flying characteristics.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Air Marshall Sir Ralph Sorley
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Felixstowe
England--Eastbourne (East Sussex)
England--Calshot
England--Bembridge
Atlantic Ocean--Spithead Channel
England--Cowes
England--Stroud
Scotland--Montrose
England--Sunbury
England--London
Monaco
Egypt--Cairo
Iraq--Baghdad
England--Felixstowe
England--Aldeburgh
Iraq
Middle East--Kurdistan
Middle East--Palestine
Jordan
Iran
Middle East--Euphrates River
Syria
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
Singapore
Australia
Borneo
China--Hong Kong
England--Kent
United States
New York (State)--New York
France--Paris
Nigeria
South Africa--Cape Town
Yugoslavia
Norway
Portugal
Spain
Denmark
Japan
Belgium
Argentina
Austria
Brazil
Canada
Chile
Greece
China
Lithuania
Estonia
England--Weybridge
Scotland--Island of Arran
England--Kingston upon Thames
France--Dunkerque
England--Hatfield (Hertfordshire)
Newfoundland and Labrador
New Brunswick
Maine
Maine--Presque Isle
Washington (D.C.)
Massachusetts--Boston
Pennsylvania--Philadelphia
Maryland--Baltimore
Washington (D.C.)--Anacostia
Tennessee--Nashville
Arkansas--Little Rock
Texas--Dallas
Texas--Fort Worth
Texas--Midland
Arizona--Tucson
California--Burbank (Los Angeles County)
California--Palm Springs
California--Los Angeles
California--Beverly Hills
California--San Diego
Arizona--Winslow
New Mexico--Albuquerque
Kansas--Wichita
Missouri--Saint Louis
Ohio--Dayton
New York (State)--Buffalo
Ontario--Toronto
Québec--Montréal
Newfoundland and Labrador--Gander
Netherlands--Eindhoven
Germany--Rheine
Germany--Osnabrück
India
Switzerland--Zurich
Lebanon--Beirut
Pakistan--Karachi
India--Kolkata
Singapore
Indonesia--Jakarta
Australia
Northern Territory--Darwin
New South Wales--Sydney
South Australia--Woomera
South Australia--Adelaide
Victoria--Melbourne
Sri Lanka--Colombo
Spain--Madrid
South Africa--Johannesburg
Kenya--Nairobi
Sudan--Khartoum
Greece--Athens
Italy--Rome
Zambia--Lusaka
Zambia--Ndola
Zambia--Mbala
Heathrow Airport (London, England)
Turkey--Istanbul
France--Nice
Utah--Salt Lake City
Italy--Genoa
Atlantic Ocean--Firth of Clyde
Italy
France
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Kansas
Maryland
Massachusetts
Missouri
New Mexico
New York (State)
Ohio
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
New South Wales
South Australia
Victoria
Northern Territory
Egypt
Sudan
North Africa
Ontario
Québec
Germany
Indonesia
Iraq
Kenya
Lebanon
Netherlands
South Africa
Switzerland
Pakistan
Sri Lanka
Turkey
Yemen (Republic)
Czech Republic
Slovakia
England--Gloucestershire
England--Hampshire
England--Herefordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Suffolk
England--Surrey
England--Sussex
England--Great Yarmouth
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 Navy
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
82 typewritten sheets
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1971-08-16
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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MLovattP1821369-190903-75
Conforms To
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Pending text-based transcription
aircrew
Anson
B-17
B-24
Battle
Blenheim
C-47
Chadwick, Roy (1893-1947)
Defiant
Dominie
Fw 190
ground crew
Halifax
Harvard
Hudson
Hurricane
Lancaster
Lincoln
Lysander
Magister
Manchester
Me 109
Mosquito
Oxford
Photographic Reconnaissance Unit
pilot
Proctor
RAF Boscombe Down
RAF Eastchurch
RAF Hendon
RAF Henlow
RAF Martlesham Heath
RAF North Killingholme
RAF Pembrey
RAF Prestwick
RAF West Freugh
Spitfire
Stirling
Swordfish
Tiger Moth
training
Wallis, Barnes Neville (1887-1979)
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/236/31386/BCooperFACooperFAv2.1.pdf
d99f4a71a81ce421d47cf16020499e43
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
Cooper, Frances Anne
Frances Anne Cooper
Frances A Cooper
Frances Cooper
F A Cooper
F Cooper
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. An oral history interview with Frances Anne Cooper (b. 1931), a memoir, family history and a photograph.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Cooper and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-08-10
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Cooper, FA
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
March 2005
[underlined] For the grand children. [/underlined]
This is a brief outline of your family history. I have tried to make sure that any suppositions are clearly distinguishable from the truth. Obviously judgements about character are either hear-say or subjective; I hope you can tell which are which. Please excuse the repetitions from previous notes and press-cuttings.
There are photographs of family members back to the late 1800's in a separate album. I have arranged the branches of the family tree and put various personal items in groups according to lineage.
(This paper has been rescued from a Braine photograph album, circa 1914 – the historic touch!)
[page break]
2
[underlined] Recent History. [/underlined]
John Cooper and Frances Braine met at R.A.F. Feltwell and married in 1953. Apart from nearly two years living in a caravan, their married life has been spent, as you know in Sandhurst where Anne & Clare were born.
John's civilian career was as an Air Traffic Controller near London Airport; Frances stayed at home with the family until the early 1970's when she trained as a Primary School Teacher and worked mainly Owlsmoor for twelve years. In his spare time John became an R.A.F.V.R. Officer with the Air Training Corps in Camberley, and then transferred to an Air Experience Flight to fly Chipmunks. He spent any other spare time as an avid butterfly collector.
After retirement he became interested in railway trains, and then, aged nearly 80, became a leading light in the local Big Band Society.
Frances trained as a caseworker for SSAFA.
[page break]
3
[underlined] The Coopers [/underlined]
John (known as Jack) Cooper married Anne Maud Anderson in 1922. They had two sons, John (b 1924) and David (b 1928). David married Patricia Jesty by whom he had three daughters. Nicola, Philippa and Jackie. David and Pat divorced and he later married a much younger divorcee, Dee Duncan and went with her to live in Spain. That marriage failed too. David worked as an Air Traffic Controller for Vickers and suffered from a serious lung complaint, bronchiectasis, which he contracted while doing National Service with the R.A.F. He died aged 69 after many years of ill health which he bore most bravely.
I have not been able to discover much about Annie’s background. She was born in Royston where her mother, Rebecca, lived. Rebecca’s father Reuben worked as a labourer in the area. We believe that Annie may have been illegitimate. [words missing]
[page break]
4
maternal grand-parents but thinks his grand-mother may have been a Mrs Oliver who lived in Bradford. This seems to be confirmed by the entry for 11 th April in Annie’s birthday book and the Death Certificate for June 1962. (Solar was a childish version of Oliver).
Annie, to my knowledge, was very close to a Florence Ward who was married to a market trader in the Barking/Plaistow area. Flo and Annie looked alike but we have been unable to prove any family connection.
Jack was one of four sons and one daughter of Levi Cooper and Susannah Sayer. The family lived in Sheringham and their antecedents came from the surrounding area. Jack’s brother Walter was killed in World War One on the Somme in 1916. Charlie and Albert moved away in adulthood. His sister Susan married a local policeman (surname Sayer. but no relation) and lived with him in Norfolk all her life. She became a very enthusiastic member of the British Legion, having been greatly [indecipherable words]
5
Levi was, so I believe, a hard drinking [underlined] and [/underlined] hard working builder in the North Norfolk area. Previous members of the Cooper and Sayer family seem to have been casual workers and have proved hard to trace. Jack Cooper was adamant that none was a fisherman although there were many Sheringham Coopers who worked at sea. Jack served as a signaller in the R.F.C. In Mesopotamia in world war one, then joined the General Post Office, was a clerk at Sheringham & head post master in Aylsham. He was recalled to the R.A.F. In world war two and later became post master in Farnborough where he finally settled. He was a keen gardener (chrysanthemum expert) Free Mason and bowls player. Annie was a traditional housewife. Both Jack and Annie were very kind in-laws and grandparents. Annie, in particular was a devoted grandmother.
[page break]
6
[underlined] The Braines. [/underlined]
T.G. Braine (know as George) married Cicely Jones in 1931. They had met on a blind date organised by Elliott (Braine) who had gone to kindergarten in Leytonstone with Cicely and her Sister Gwenfair. The idea was to make up a foursome; Elliott and Gwenfair did not continue the relationship but the other two married in less than six months.
George was on leave from his job as an Ordnance Surveyor in Uganda; Cicely was working unhappily in Barclay's Bank in Lombard Street. Cicely's father Frederick was so shocked that he offered to fund a return fare if she changed her mind, but she didn't.
George and Cicely lived mostly on safari; Cicely quickly became pregnant with Frances and had a very difficult time before and after giving birth. George's terms of service involved two and a half year tours in Uganda and six months home leave. During the [missing words]
[page break]
7
together spent in [indecipherable word], George contracted pneumonia which deteriorated with an abcess on the lung and nearly died. (All this was a result of getting soaked to the skin while sailing, and before penicillin).
After the next tour in Uganda George and Cicely decided to buy a house for Cicely and Frances to live in while he did the last tour on his own. It was considered unhealthy for European children to live for too long in the tropic. As it turned out, World War 2 broke out and owning the cottage in Brent Eleigh was a massive stroke of luck. However, it must have been a very difficult time in the marriage, George on his own in Uganda and Cicely with a small child in a remote village in Suffolk in the middle of a war.
My memories of Brent Eleigh are vague. We kept Dalmatian dogs, a cat call Timmy and, I think rabbits. Cicely had help in the large garden from a man called Fred Orbell. I used to fetch the milk every morning from [words missing].
[page break]
8
exciting, with troop convoys an influx of American airmen, and evacuees (awful). Gwenfair used to come and stay and the Braines visited from time to time. Mother became the telephone contact (number Lavenham 279) for Sergeant Poulson of the Home Guard; occasionally she had to wake him up in the middle of the night. In the early years of the war I went to school in Lavenham and Acton, but after George finally returned in 1941, I went to Fleet House, first in Long Melford and then in Felixstowe.
George was unable to find war work, apart from the Royal Observer Corps, and devoted his time to intensive gardening. We had lovely fruit and vegetables & kept ducks, geese and bees. He worked really hard and so did Cicely, in the house and picking fruit and making jam and filing Kilner jars with the soft fruit. Gradually the labour (although of love) and worries about house maintenance, drove George to leave Brent Eleigh, much to Cicely’s [indecipherable word]
9
and buy a house in Sudbury.
After 1941, family life from my point of view at least deteriorated considerably. Cicely , many years later said that George had changed after his last tour, and had become quite bad tempered. I believe that their marriage was very happy all the same, but I must have felt jealous, I suppose, of the competition for Cicely's attention. George felt that he had been badly treated financially by the Colonial Service, and also by the Inland Revenue. He seemed to spend hours writing furious letters, and fulminating.
They first moved to a Thirties' house in Stanley Road, Sudbury, divided it into two flats and rented out the lower on to generate some income. This was a very unsuccessful arrangement, so eventually they moved to a new bungalow in Weeting. Very soon after the move, George died aged 63 and Cicely was left isolated in a insalubrious [words missing]
[page break]
10
American service families from R.A.F. Lakenheath.
Meanwhile, I had left school in Felixstowe and then gone to the High School in Sudbury. From there, after a year's Commercial Course in Ipswich I joined the W.R.A.F., married and settled in Sandhurst.
We tried to see as much of Cicely as possible but it was difficult with small children and shift work. She used to come to stay but did not like leaving the garden for too long. Eventually she managed to move to her flat in Beech Hill House and for a few years really enjoyed life. She was greatly saddened by her younger sister Gwenfair's early death, and gradually her own health started to fail. She endured a long and painful physical decline before moving to a Residential home in Sandhurst. She died aged 89.
[page break]
11
[underlined] The Braines / Hudsons / McCalls. [/underlined]
T. (George) was born in 1898 to Thomas Elliott Braine and Janet (Hudson). He was the oldest of five children, Beatrice, twins Elliott & Janet, who was killed as a child in a road accident, and Margaret. Tom was a Trinity House Pilot, a well-paid and prestigious job; the family moved from the East End of London to more respectable Leytonstone. Unfortunately, because his job was dependent on tides and weather, Tom spent much of his time hanging about in the docks; he eventually died comparatively young of complication from syphilis. Before then the family lived comfortably – George and Elliott boarded at Chigwell School and Beatrice and Margaret went to a Masonic School, in North London, I think George enlisted in the R.F.C. But by the end of World War I, his father had died and he felt responsible for his mother and siblings who were very hard-up. His father had wanted him to become a Trinity House Pilot – the profession seemed to pass from father to eldest son -
[page break]
[page missing]
13
cared for her during a series of strokes. After their husbands died, Beatrice and Margaret lived next door to each other in flats in Chalk. Margaret inherited Beatrices' personal treasures and some from their mother, all of which finally came to me, the only grand-child, and hence to my children and, I hope, to you all!
The eldest sons in the Braine family seem to have been Thames Watermen back to the early 1800's. T-George had a cousin, George Duncan Braine who was a Trinity House Pilot and his grand-father George Matthew was one as well; he died of cirrhosis of the liver! There was also a cousin, Robertson, who tried to be an actor, and after a career as a gigolo, according to Margaret, married an older woman who was very rich with money from Cyclax, a cosmetic company. They lived together on the Riviera.
Janet Hudson’s father was a marine engineer, chief, I believe, to the Hudson shipping line; he retired to a very grand looking house in Pewsey. Janet had a brother Willy, and sister Edie, neither of whom married; they lived
14
near her in Leytonstone. Janet's mother, also Janet (McCall) came from Strone on the Holy Loch. This explains the silver flat ware with the initial M. The McCalls had some connection with the Tennant family which I cannot trace. Janet and Catherine Tennant are mentioned in a poem by Robert Burns and Margaret says Catherine is the lady in the enamel and diamond mourning locket. Although Burns died in 1796 I suppose it is possible as she looks very old in the photograph. Janet Braine (nee Hudson) was inordinately proud of the 'aristocratic' connection.
[underlined] The McCall Silver [/underlined] of Tennant Family on Google.
Towards the end of the 1700's William Tennant was a farmer in Argyle. He had a large family, about ten, one of whom must have been Catherine, in the locket, and one of whom invented a chemical bleach for textiles, which was successful she had a factory in Glasgow, and made a fortune. One of Catherine's children, Margaret, married John McCall and no doubt used some of the family money to buy the silver. Q.E.D.!
[page break]
15
*See his separate memoir.
[underlined] The Jones/Hornsbys. [/underlined]
Cicely, born 1907, was the daughter of Edith Hornsby and Frederick Jones. She had an older brother Hugh and a younger sister Gwenfair. Hugh was clumsy (which annoyed his father) but clever, good looking and a womaniser; he joined the Merchant Navy became a very young captain, and, at the beginning of World War II, was Harbour Master in Rangoon, he escaped to [deleted] Australia [/deleted] India just as the Japanese were arriving*. He left his wife and they were eventually divorced. After a hard war, partly on North Atlantic convoys, and various amorous entanglements he settled in New Zealand with a much younger woman and became a T.V. Presenter. Gwenfair had caught measles as a child and was quite deaf. She became a hairdresser with her own shop in Loughton. During World War II she was conscripted to work in a munitions factory and eventually married (according to Cicely) a ne-er-do-well Irishman; he died young leaving her with two children Brigid and Hugh, whom she supported [missing words]
[page break]
16
very young of Multiple Sclerosis and Hugh emigrated to New Zealand and, I believe, converted to Serious Christianity.
Edith (nee Hornsby) died of throat cancer when her children were adolescents and Frederick soon married again, this made Cicely and Gwenfair very unhappy and they left home.
The Hornsbys lived near Saltburn in Yorkshire. Cicely's grandfather Michael was a farmer and she and her family spent happy summer holidays harvesting. Her cousins seemed to have been very bright and became lawyers and top civil servants. Her uncle Harold died on the Somme; her aunt Nancy was in Russia at the time of the Revolution and escaped with the Russian tea-spoons (with Clare). An other aunt Gertrude was married to an engineer in India called Selby, she died young and Selby became engaged for a short time to Cicely before she met George Braine!
Edith was a student at the Royal College of Music and living in Hampstead when she met Frederick Jones who was [missing words]
[page break]
17
his brother Robert.
Their father Thomas (perhaps nee Johns, not Jones) married to Anne Hildred from Boston, Lincolnshire (but no other details) was a school master in Bury St Edmunds: they had a very large, mostly clever family. Marian, known as Daisy, read Mathematics at Bangor. I believe before women were awarded degrees. She taught at the Welsh Girls' School (now St. David's, Ashford) where her sister Anne became an influential head mistress. Another sister Elsie was a nurse and a brother, Harold, taught English at the University in Uruguay. Frederick worked as an accountant at the head office of Barclay's Bank but hated it. He was called up in World War I, was gassed and lost an eye.
The story goes that Thomas was descended from a Johns family from Cardigan whose ancestor had helped repel the French invasion c1797 and as a reward had been made a Governor of Cardigan gaol. This is unconfirmed, but the Joneses were upright and honest to a degree so seem unlikely [missing words]
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
Cooper family history
For the grandchildren
Description
An account of the resource
A brief family history. Recent history. Describes meeting John Cooper at Feltwell in 1953 and early life together. John was a civilian air traffic controller at Heathrow and became an RAFVR officer with the air training corps. Provides a family history of the Coopers followed by one for the Braines and their time in Uganda and then back in UK including description of events during the war. Follows family history of the Braines/Hudsons/McCalls followed by the Jones and Herusbys.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Sixteen page handwritten document
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BCooperFACooperFAv2
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Uganda
Great Britain
Heathrow Airport (London, England)
Heathrow Airport (London, England)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Jan Waller
-
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.
Heathrow Airport (London, England)
Title
A name given to the resource
Heathrow Airport [place]
London Airport, London Heathrow
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/1401/27313/LMooreD1603117v3.1.pdf
d8d6cf6ce43996cae19c8d76e4db597b
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
Moore, Dennis
D Moore
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
2015-05-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Moore, D
Description
An account of the resource
37 items and two albums.
The collection concerns (1923 - 2010, 1603117, 153623 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, documents, photographs and two albums. He flew operations as a navigator with 218 and 15 Squadrons.
Album one contains photographs of his family and his training in Canada.
Album Two contains photographs of his service in the Far East.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Terrence D Moore and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Dennis Moore's personal flying book, Thrre
Description
An account of the resource
Ministry of Civil Aviation personal flying log book for D Moore, covering the period from 8 November 1946 to 10 July 1949. He flew with Silver City airways from London Heathrow and Blackbushe, with Flota Area Mercante Argentina from Beunos Aires, Flight Refuelling Ltd from Tarrant Rushton Airport. Aircraft flown in were Lancastrian, Dakota, Sandringham, DC4, Mosquito, Lodestar, Constellation, DC3, Wayfarer, Freighter and York.
Creator
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Dennis Moore
Format
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One booklet
Language
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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
LMooreD1603117v3
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Argentina
Great Britain
Argentina--Buenos Aires
England--Dorset
England--Hampshire
England--London
Heathrow Airport (London, England)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1946
1947
1948
1949
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
aircrew
C-47
fuelling
Lancastrian
Mosquito
navigator
RAF Tarrant Rushton
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1297/20291/LBoltonJD67631v2.2.pdf
a19c307060396699cb9db03d948c59ba
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
Bolton, J D
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. The collection concerns John Derek Bolton (915543, 67631) and contains two Log books and squadron maintenance log containing a memoir. He flew 80 operations as a pilot with 455, 571, 608 and 162 squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by David Bolton and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bolton, JD
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 Derek Bolton’s pilots log book. Two
Description
An account of the resource
Pilots log book for John Derek Bolton, covering the period from 17 March 1946 to 14 June 1947. Detailing his civilian flying duties. He was based at Heathrow, Kenley and Redhill. Aircraft flown were, Cambridge Sailplane, Kite 1 Sailplane, Lancaster, Lancastrian, Tiger Moth, York, Auster and Olympia. Flights were carried out to Lisbon, Bathurst, Natal, Rio de Janero, Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
John Derek Bolton
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
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
LBoltonJD67631v2
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Argentina
Brazil
Canada
Great Britain
Portugal
Uruguay
South America
Argentina--Buenos Aires
Brazil--Natal
Brazil--Rio de Janeiro
England--Kenley
England--London
England--Surrey
New Brunswick--Bathurst
Portugal--Lisbon
Uruguay--Montevideo
New Brunswick
Heathrow Airport (London, England)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1946
1947
aircrew
Lancaster
Lancastrian
pilot
RAF Kenley
Tiger Moth
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/658/8931/AWrightJDFC150608.1.mp3
2c2065e5f04be44ec28cab39fdb0646c
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
Wright, James
Albert James Wright DFC
A J Wright
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Wright, JDFC
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Jim Wright DFC (- 2022, 134563, 1503927 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as navigator with 61, 97 and 630 Squadrons.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-08
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SB: This is Sheila Bibb interviewing Jim Wright at his home in Abingdon on the 8th of June 2015. Jim, you say you were born in Creswell in Nottinghamshire. Could you tell me a little about your childhood? Your family.
JW: Yes. I can. I was born in Creswell Model Village which is a mining village in Nottinghamshire quite close to Worksop. My father had been a miner before the war. He and my mother were born in the Victorian age. My father was born in 1894. My mother 1896. They met whilst my father was a private soldier having volunteered like Kitchener in the First World War. And in the process of that with all his mates, mostly miners, in the Sherwood Foresters and the battalion known as the Notts and Derby’s and they went for training in Northumberland to Tynemouth, just north of the River Tyne. I remember my, my father’s headquarters was based in the Grand Hotel, a rather nice hotel in Tynemouth beach and here his mates would do their training along the beaches of Tynemouth and Whitley Bay and they would use the firing ranges alongside St Marys Lighthouse in Whitley Bay. A very prominent feature all together. During that training he met, as was quite normal in war with a young man aged twenty one, twenty two, a couple of Tyneside lasses down for the weekend or something like that. And my mother came from a little village on the River Tyne called Point Pleasant. Her father was an engine man at a port. I think he handled trains and fork lift trucks and things like that on the quayside in a shipbuilding area. But it was no trouble for young ladies in those days to travel to the seafront at Tynemouth or Whitley Bay. It was a day out, I suppose. It weren’t very far away, a few miles, and there she met my father. This would be about 1915 I think just before they went to the trenches for the first time. In 1916 my father had already had several Blighty wounds as they called it. Had been brought back to the UK, patched up and sent back again but in 1916 and I think it was on Boxing Day 1916 he and his, my mother decided to get married by special licence and they did this on the coast. Somewhere near Redcar I think. In Yorkshire is it? Or Durham? I’m not sure. They got married and off he went to the trenches without any honeymoon or anything. That was the way in those days. The next time she saw him he was only a year older but he had a military medal for gallantry and he had no left arm. What a difference that left arm made. Anyway, they eventually finished the war and they had five children. A boy, my eldest brother. A girl, my eldest sister. I was the third member and then two younger sisters. The boy and the eldest girl have passed away now. I’m still alive and so are my two younger sisters but they’re getting on. I think they’re eighty eight, eighty nine. In fact I’m not sure. And one of them is ninety now and another close by eighty seven, eighty eight. We lived initially in Creswell Model Village in Nottinghamshire but my mother never ever got used to being a miners wife and of course when my father came back to live in Creswell Model Village where I was born [pause] he could not because he had no left arm. He couldn’t work at the coal face as they used to call it and he had disappointing jobs to start with in the Creswell Colliery which was very close by the model village. And then of course they had the Great Strike didn’t they in 1926 and I can remember vividly my father with his one arm tucking me up on a cushion on the [Boss farthing bicycle?] and going out in to the woods and so forth to find branches of wood that he could carry back on a bicycle because in those days the miners stopped delivering their free coal and they were unemployed and they were out for many months. I’ve never forgotten the sight of my father when I was about three years old I suppose going out to get fuel because we had no coal. I’ve never forgotten that. My mother was a Tynesider. She came from Scottish parents up in Aberdeen somewhere but she had married in to this Tyneside family and she said, ‘I will never accept that my sons will become miners or that my daughters will become perhaps married to miners.’ There were too many accidents in the coalmining business. It was a very hazardous occupation. And sure enough she took the smaller children with her for a holiday to Whitley Bay, Tynemouth area about 1928/29 and she came back and she persuaded her husband, who was unemployed, ‘Why don’t we move to the north? We can always make a living doing bed and breakfast at the seaside.’ ‘Ok,’ says dad. My mother was the brains behind the family. Anyway, when I was about eight years old, seven maybe, we moved first of all to Cullercoats. A lovely little fishing village, a marvellous little holiday place just temporarily while they looked for somewhere better and then they ended up renting a house in Whitley Bay and then eventually they, with great courage in those days I think since they were literally destitute people they managed to buy a house in what we call North Parade very close to the seafront in Whitley Bay and my mother started with her dream of making a home for her family using bed and breakfast for holidaymakers mostly from the Glasgow area, in Whitley bay. The five children developed there. They were educated. At that time of course I was the only one, in the middle of the family, to gain entrance to the high school. A grammar school type in Whitley. Monkseaton High School. It had been built in ’14, 1914 as a grammar school and they were very proud of it in Whitley Bay but my brother and my sisters all ended up leaving school at fourteen and their main object was to get a living anywhere, butcher’s boys, dress shops, whatever. I was lucky. I managed to get a scholarship to the grammar school, the high school as they called it. And when I was sixteen I suppose, late 1938, I matriculated. I was very fortunate. I had a classics master there who gave me a [Latin?] in that year, 1938. And he said to my parents quietly, ‘Your son could do worse than go to Durham University with the intent to get a Classics degree like mine.’ He was a Northumbrian and he spoke their language. Tyneside. My parents looked at each other and they said, ‘Sorry. The two older ones are leaving the nest but the two younger ones have yet to finish, they have yet to go to school and I’m afraid we need income rather than the possibilities for the future.’ So I never did get the Classics education. I would have liked to have tried.
SB: Yes.
Instead of that, after matriculation I went for the civil service examination. A quite common thing to do with young people who were seventeen, eighteen, and I ended up, in 1939 by being a house captain, a prefect, and the school were very kind. They let me stay on in the sixth form whilst I completed these exams in January ‘39 and I ended up in April as a young civil servant, as an employment clerk. In the, what do they call it, Ministry of Labour and National Service. It’s a long time ago. And I spent, I think it was three months, at a school in Newcastle in New Bridge Street which was the headquarters of a very large employment exchange and we had a special teacher. They used to call them Third Class Officers I remember and we had about ten or twelve people from throughout Durham, Tyneside who had joined up in this Ministry of Labour and National Service as young employment clerks like me. We went to school every day. We found out what we had to do and eventually we passed our course and we started work and I remember we found out how to do it at New Bridge Street, how to do our work. And then I was posted to Ashington, a mining village and I used to commute from Whitley Bay and Monkseaton to Ashington via a little proper steam railway and then I was posted from there to Walker on Tyne and I carried on my job until, after a series of incidents, I joined the Royal Air Force. I had tried to join the Fleet Air Arm first, when I was eighteen and I had failed on eyesight tests because I wanted to be a pilot. Like all the young men in 1940. I was so impressed with Spitfires and Hurricanes but I failed in the medical test for pilot and the Board of Admiralty in London sent me away for three months and said, ‘Your eyesight is not good but it may be something that will recover. Come back.’ And in December ‘40 I went back to London and I met a lot of very impressive medical officers with lots of gold braid and things and they said, ‘Jim, I’m sorry to say that your eyesight still remains below par for pilot training but,’ they said, ‘You know you are educationally qualified to become an officer as an observer in the Navy and we need observers. Pilots are ten a penny. You can train them, you know, you just have to run around. The observer is the brains in the outfit. Would you like to be commissioned and join us?’ ‘No.’ I didn’t think I would. I was still full of aspirations to be a Spitfire pilot so I went back to my job as an employment clerk but in May ‘41 in company with two of my old schoolmates we decided we would all join the Royal Air Force and we went back to Newcastle upon Tyne to the recruiting office there and the sergeant who looked at us and said, ‘Are you interested in applying?’ ‘Yes.’ We were. ‘Ok. Well this is what you do. First of all the medical.’ I passed my medical but the other two didn’t. One whom I’d grown up with and he was my close schoolmate was a diabetic and didn’t think about it. Eventually he became the best man at my marriage later, two years later. And he died. He became blind and then died. The other one had flat feet and was called up eventually by the army and within six weeks of being posted to York I think, he died during a route march. Some mysterious heart complaint. I went to see him when I happened to be on holiday after being sick for a while. I had ten days sick leave. I went back to Whitley Bay. Still was an airman under training. I met his parents and his body was lying in there in their, in the sitting room and his mother said, ‘Would you like to see Duncan?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I’d never seen a dead person before. Anyway, that was my introduction. By this time I was, although I was fit for pilot training in the RAF, where my eyes suddenly seemed to have mysteriously got better or something but by this time the RAF said, ‘Well I’m sorry but we’ve got thousands of pilots but we’re desperately short of navigators. If you like you can do a tour on navigation and when you’re finished you can convert to pilot training.’ So I said, ‘Ok.’ That’s my early life. Should I carry on from there?
SB: Why not?
Why not.
SB: Yes.
Well from May 1941 we had to wait. We had been accepted for training as a navigator but it wasn’t until September that year that we were called up and we went to Regents Park in London and we spent a fortnight there getting uniform, learning how to march, going for medicals of all sorts. I remember everyone laughed about at the time but I remember being in a long line of young men and they were tall, fat, thin, short. All kinds of people. But they were generally speaking physically fit. Generally speaking. They needed putting into shape but medically they were fit. A long line of them and a young medical officer would come with a stick and, ‘Drop your trousers, the whole lot.’ Free from infection they called it. Everyone remembers this. It was the same for them all. Anyway, after a fortnight we were posted to Catterick in Yorkshire for what they called initial training wing. Catterick was interesting because it was also the home of army training at a very big army depot at Catterick but sixty of us ended up at RAF Catterick in a special little, what do they call it, unit of its own with its own squadron leader, education officer and flight sergeant who was a disciplinarian and maybe a couple of teachers to teach the basics of flying and so on but we got to a separate unit. We were sent to live in a country house which had been specially requisitioned for the purpose and we slept there and our flight sergeant would march us every morning four miles there. Good for you those were the terms. Smarten up. And then four miles back again. We did everything on the camp. We just slept there. But of course it was that time of year. Wintertime. And apart from an army Lysander unit, that’s an army air corp, they had a Beaufighter unit, night fighters, there and one day the station commander said to the station warrant officer, ‘I want you to organise snow clearance tonight.’ Big forecast. Snow. ‘I want the airfield swept so that the Beaufighters can operate.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ But the station warrant officer was a busy man. In RAF terms he was a very important man. He commanded all the people in the manpower department of the station. He was the boss. The station commander knew it, the station warrant officer knew it, everybody else knew it and the station warrant officer came to my squadron leader in the Initial Training Wing Department and he said, ‘Sir, with great respect, my chaps work night and day doing their ordinary work on the airfield. I can’t really expect them all to turn out to do snow clearing initially until I have to.’ But, ‘Sir, with respect your chaps are just [?]. They are, to some extent, surplus at the moment for the next few days so I’m going to ask you if you wouldn’t mind I want your fifty trainees to start the snow clearing tonight.’ So we did. So we all got our brooms and our shuttles and of course it snowed and snowed and we got soaking wet but we still had to march because we had nowhere else to sleep. After two or three days of this I got a cold. It was a nasty cold. I was used to getting colds in the northeast but this was a bad one because we were literally walking with wet clothes, no heat, no nothing and one of my mates in the morning time said to me, ‘Jim, you don’t look very good.’ I said, ‘No, I feel awful.’ He said, ‘I’ll go and have a word with the flight sergeant.’ He went to the flight sergeant who had a little room all of his own and we used to sleep up and down in great big rooms and things and he said to the flight sergeant, ‘Jim Wright’s not very well.’ ‘So what,’ said the flight sergeant? ‘Well, could you fix transport or something for him?’ ‘I aint got any transport.’ he said. ‘We walk. I’m sorry. If he can walk he will.’ And we marched four miles back. Of course I reported to sick quarters and the Doc took one look at me and he said, ‘You’ve got a temperature of a hundred and four young man.’ ‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Awful.’ He said, ‘I’m sending you to Catterick army camp hospital immediately. I think you’ve got bronchial pneumonia.’ ‘Thank you, sir.’ So I ended up in the army hospital. I never saw anything but the hospital beds. And after ten days I think they used to have something called [metacreme?] but nothing like penicillin or anything antibiotics. It was some awful thing that turns you yellow I think. But in the end I got better and they said, ‘We’re going to send you off on ten days sick leave. Get all railway warrants and rations and things.’ Well I’d only been in the air force for two or three months and I didn’t really know anything about anything but I was so pleased with the railway warrant to go home in comfort rather than hitching or anything like that and my mother was so grateful to get the rations. Butter and things like that. Not important to me but important to her. Anyway, I recovered, finished our ITW training and we went off to Eastbourne College on the south coast at Eastbourne and we, we stayed at this famous Grand Hotel. I’d heard radio programmes, I knew, on Sunday afternoons I think but for the first time I was introduced to what it was like to actually live in a great big hotel on the seafront at Eastbourne. It was very interesting. Can we just stop? Stop for a minute.
[pause]
JW: Can we just have the last sentence about Eastbourne? Eastbourne College we were going to.
SB: Hang on. Ok.
JW: We were accommodated.
SB: Yeah you were accommodated.
JW: Yeah.
SB: It’s alright
JW: Ok.
SB: That’s it.
JW: Ready. When you are
SB: Yeah. Ok.
JW: Eastbourne was very interesting. I’d never been to the south coast before. It would seem that at this time in 1941 a lot of the holiday areas on the south coast within ten miles had been more or less taken over by the government. The hotels had been taken over for army, navy, air force units quite often. The basic residents could stay. But it was, it had an awful lot of armed forces in it. Anyway, in Eastbourne, Eastbourne College was a recognised independent school and the government had taken it over. It had moved somewhere else. And they used it for what we call elementary air navigation school training. This was a three month course. Longer than the ITW one. And I remember some of my mates being desperate for cigarettes. People, I don’t think people today realise the extent to which smoking cigarettes, pipe smoking had taken over the nation. People In films were smoking. Everybody thought it was normal to smoke but if they were addicts as some of our young men were this was a very sad thing for them because they couldn’t get cigarettes that they used to be able to buy twenty whenever they wanted. At this time one of my young friends he was desperate for cigarettes and so I used to join the queue with him when he went hunting for cigarette shops, for rations and things and I said to Nobby, ‘Why don’t you just give up?’ ‘Can’t,’ he said. So I would go and buy the ration that was there. It may be ten cigarettes sometimes. They were just goose woodbines in a house and I’d hand them to Nobby and that would keep him happy for a while until the next lot. Cigarette smoking became a problem in the world. It still is. Anyway, we would do, the fifty of us, we would do our training within the Eastbourne College. Tailor made for the job really. Just like school. It was just like school. And they taught us the basics of navigation from the air. They gave us sextants and we said, ‘What do we do with these?’ ‘Ah well,’ they said, ‘When you go home tonight we would like you to practice taking shots of the moon if it’s there. The stars if you can find them.’ This was later on in the course when it developed and we found out what a sextant was, how to use it, air almanacs and things like that all concerned with navigation when you were high up, couldn’t see the ground and your only means of navigation were astro-navigation. Anyway, we used at night time to take our sextants home to the Grand Hotel with us and then operate in pairs in a backstreet just off the seafront and we would, one of us would take notes while the other one actually located the star and took a shot and if you were within a hundred miles of Eastbourne you were doing very well [laughs]. It was a very good training which you had to fall on later but whilst we were there it was beginning spring and the weather was improving and on Wednesday afternoons we were told to go and get fit. Cross country runs, play football, play tennis or skive as they used to call it if you wanted to by saying, ‘I’m a golfer. I’ll go on the golf course.’ ‘Well yes that’s a sport. Yes. Yes you can do that.’ And this man for whom I used to get cigarettes, Nobby, we borrowed, from the professional at the club, some old clubs and a few old balls and we enjoyed the fresh air at the top of the cliff on Eastbourne Golf Course. And while we were pottering about on the very first day I remember it was a lovely summer day. Nice to be alive. It was lovely. Sunshine and blue sky. I remember Nobby saying, ‘Jim, look.’ And there were a pair of ME109s. We knew they were ME109s because we’d done aircraft recognition and we knew. What’s more you could see the Nazi cross on the side of the aeroplane and they were carefree, the pair of them. You could see them. They were only fifteen minutes away from France at the most. From their airfields. And they came over our heads. We said, ‘That won’t bother us. They’re not going to shoot us. They’re wasting their time.’ Well, they turned around and they headed for Eastbourne Railway Station and with their rockets, machine gun fire, cannon fire raked the station and having done a fair bit of damage they disappeared. Nobody came from anywhere to help them or shoot them down or anything. They quite calmly trundled off back to their base in France. That was our very first introduction to ME109s. I’ve never forgotten it. At the end of the course the fifty of us were all posted to Heaton Park in Manchester I think it was. It was a kind of a settling in place for trainee pilots, navigators and so on whilst they waited for the next step in their training. All these people at Heaton Park were going overseas. They could go, some to Rhodesia, they could go to Canada. Some of them even went to Florida to fly with Pan America airfield, Pan America Airways. Anyway, we used to, we used to report every morning at 8 o’clock to see if any of us were wanted to go on convoys or anything like that and every day no news for us so we just idled away again and we got fed up with this. We got tired of waiting and hanging around and one of my friend’s, a chap called Mike Ward said, ‘Jim, would you like to nip into York to see my folks?’ So I said, ‘What’s the plan?’ He said, ‘Well we’ll check up on the Friday morning and if there’s no call out for anywhere we could quietly nip in and get a ticket to York on the railway and we’ll be back by Sunday, by Sunday night ready for Monday morning.’ ‘Sounds good to me.’ I said. So we stuck our necks out and we did this and we got to York and I met Spike’s family. His father owned a garage and Mike was one of these chaps who knew about motorcars. How to drive them. And he also had farmer relatives with farms and he was also familiar too with 22 rifles and shotguns and things. He was way ahead of me. I enjoyed meeting his family. It was nice. But on the way back we got to Crewe Station I think it was. I think we had to change at Crewe and a couple of innocent looking young RAF special police, corporals. Corporal was a powerful man in the RAF when you were just an airman. They sauntered up to us looked us up and down. They always work in pairs these people. But Mike and I were, were happy. We said, ‘Yes, I’m afraid, yeah s we are travelling. We’re going back to base.’ ‘Where’s that?’ They said. ‘Oh Heaton Park.’ ‘Oh. What are you doing now then?’ ‘Oh well we’ve just been to see.’ ‘I see. Have you got your pass?’ ‘Well no.’ ‘Well I’m sorry,’ they said, ‘But that means you’re absent without leave.’ AWL. Mike and I have always had in our service record absent without leave. One day’s pay forfeit. We’ve never forgotten it. Never forgotten it. Anyway, we eventually were sent off. Some of us, we didn’t all go to Canada. Several of us were sent to Pan American Airways in Florida. And we envied them. Oh that must be nice. Florida. Lovely. We’d heard of Florida and we had visions of summer holidays on the beach. Anyway, we didn’t hear any more about those chaps. They disappeared. And we went in turn, I think about twenty five of us, I’m not sure we were posted to Number 13 Air Navigation School at a place called Port Albert near Goderich near on the coast of Lake Huron in Ontario. We sailed in a convoy. I remember the name of the boat it was the SS Letitia. Other people met Letitia at different times during the war as a troopship but for seven days we went up and down and we were seasick just like everybody else because we were not sailors but we made it. We made it to Halifax in Nova Scotia and from there we went on by train and it seemed to be forever. I don’t know how long it was. Two or three days I think. But we ended up anyway at this navigation training school. I think it lasted from about May or June or July I’m not sure until November so there was a time when we were there when we were taken away from our RAF blue as we called the field dress and we were put into the tropical khaki uniform. Shorts and things like that. To cut a long story short I became top of the course and Mike my friend became second. And we had a young Scotsman friend called Scotty Turner who came third and a much more mature chap called Williamson with a moustache. A family man. He must have been in his thirties. You have to remember that most of us were just twenty, twenty one. Which was the about the average age for, for the time. Anyway we also had a group of free French on our course attached. They spoke English when they had to but they spoke their own natural language French when they were off duty. But I don’t know whatever happened to those six free French. Two of them were commissioned. One was a captain and the other one was I think a sub lieutenant. I’m not sure what. Whether they were air force or navy I can’t remember now and the other four were non-commissioned people. Petty officers or something like that. I never saw or heard of them again. Anyway, we had a party at the end of the course and we were given sergeant’s stripes and we pinned them on using our little machinery. We all had our needles and threads and things so we could pin them on and we had a party at the hotel and the next day we were put on a train and all the way up through Ontario, through Quebec, through New Brunswick and we should have gone to Nova Scotia to Halifax but when we got to Moncton on the railway line, it was a stop of some sort there anyway, and we had a couple of Royal Canadian Air Force sergeants approach our party and they said, ‘Are you just coming from, from your training at Goderich?’ ‘Yes,’ we said. ‘What do you want to know for?’ We thought we might have done something wrong. ‘Oh, it’s nothing wrong,’ they said, ‘But, I need these four people. I need these four. Wright, Ward, Williamson, Turner.’ ‘What do you want them for?’ ‘You lucky chaps are going to be commissioned. You can throw away your sergeant’s stripes.’ ‘Oh yeah, that’s very interesting.’ ‘You will be taken by transport to the Royal Canadian Air Force station at Moncton,’ which is just on the outskirts, ‘And there you will go through commissioning procedure. The rest of them are on the way to Halifax. And home.’ We were very pleased about this of course but we had to hang about a bit. I think it was, this was sometime, somewhere in early November and I think it was in early December when we finally were kitted out, uniforms, and were sent on our way to Halifax. For starters of course we were commissioned and that made a tremendous difference. Life as an airman whether you’re UT aircrew or just newly promoted to sergeant was an entirely different matter than if you were pilot officer. Life changed. And so we found that we had better facilities on the train. And when we got to Halifax they said, ‘Oh yes. You’ve got to report to the troop ship and it happens to be the Queen Elizabeth.’ We were overjoyed. We’ll never forget, well I will never forget that four day journey at top speed, without convoys, too fast for the submarines and we got back home to the UK in four days. It was a marvellous experience. I’ve still got copies of the ship’s newspaper, “The Convoy,” now but I’ve had them in an old scrapbook for seventy five years or something. They used to print a daily account in the, in this marvellous liner the Queen Elizabeth which carried thousands of people of course and they would give a daily account of what was happening in the world in the desert, and the Atlantic and the wherever and of course it was important because if I’ve got it right America had just had Pearl Harbour in December ‘41 and this was a year later so the fact that the Americans were in the war made a great difference and this would be reported in those newspapers. Anyway, we had disembarkation leave. I think we all went home for ten days or seven days leave I think. And we were sent to Harrogate in Yorkshire. All of us were sent to Harrogate. It’s a big resettlement unit in a lovely market town miles from London and we were very lucky because not only was it a relatively peaceful place Harrogate but it had it had swimming pools, dance halls, it had beautiful music halls and excellent gardens and a lovely location for walking in the countryside. We were so lucky. The important thing of course for most young twenty one, twenty two year olds was that there were a lot of girls there. The girls came because the government had decided, just before the war, to send a lot of their civil servants from London to a more peaceful place where they could get on with the work in Harrogate and a lot of these girls were civil servants just like I used to be and the same kind of age group. Clerks in the air ministry, contract farms was where I met them and Mike Ward and I were I think on our first day. We were staying in the Queen Hotel just off the Stray in Harrogate. A lovely hotel. The sergeants were in a different hotels, Imperial and places like that but we had an invitation from reception of the Queen Hotel with the Women’s Voluntary Service accept some of you to come and have a cup and a bit of cake, that sort of thing, in a local church hall and we said, ‘Well, why not.’ And the first girl I met was the one I married over two years later. A blond, blue eyed girl who was a little older than I was. Just a little. Her landlady, ‘cause by this time a lot of the girls had moved from being residents in a lady’s college to being shipped out into the local community where they were divided into local houses and looked after themselves in ordinary houses and my future wife’s landlady was also a member of the WVS Women’s Voluntary Service and they were forever giving me cups of tea and cakes and things to soldiers, sailors and airmen. Whoever they were. On this occasion she had taken my future wife with her to this church hall and when, when David Mike Ward and I arrived this WVS lady said, ‘I’d like you to meet a couple of young ladies.’ You’ll do. And Mike and I met these two young ladies. I don’t know if Mike was that interested but I was and I stayed interested for two years. But of course I was a very straightforward young, naïve young man. I believed in marriage. I also believed that it was a sheer waste of time to contemplate marriage in a Lancaster or a Wellington and that was firmly understood. So we’d keep in touch by letter wherever I was and when the adjutant of the squadron, my last squadron called me in and said, ‘Jim. You’re finished.’ And I said [laughs], ‘What do you mean finished?’ He said, ‘Your days of operational flying are over young man.’ I communicated this to my girlfriend. I went to see her, sought her hand in marriage and she agreed. So that was the picture. Now my friend Mike Ward had been lucky enough to meet a charming young lady during our three months in Canada. We had, we had been allowed to hitch to Detroit at weekends. And on our very first visit we met some people of Scottish origin who had friends. They were all concerned with motoring I think because Detroit was a fabulous manufacturing of cars place. They had problems of course because black people were not allowed to mix in transport or accommodation. And you had to be very careful of this in Detroit in 1942. Anyway, one of their Scottish friends would put up Mike and I. They lived in a great big apartment block and the man involved was the manager of this block. He and his wife supervised all the arrangements for car parking and renting apartments and so on and their family lived in quite a spacious apartment and we met a girl there called Jeanette McDonald. A familiar name because Jeanette McDonald happened to be the name of a singing star at the time. Nelson Eddie was her partner. I remember her very well. The young Jeanette McDonald, the American girl was some kind of a Scottish dancing champion. You know used to twiddle about in the way that people with these Scottish views people do. In America they were very keen on this and would have state championships and things like that and young Jeanette was one of these. They were a very charming family and we got to know them very well during our three months there. But some of their American friends that we also would stay with and have breakfast with introduced us to pancakes and syrup and things like that. They had another young lass and she was rather like the American Doris Day. The girl next door. Bubbly. Mike fell for this girl in a big way and I often wonder, wondered because we got split up eventually and I, I lost touch with Mike and I often used to wonder whether he was going to go back to America for this girl. She was a lovely lass. Very much like Doris Day. Bubbly. Anyway, Jeanette McDonald was not for me but Mike I thought might have been very interested in this young lass who lived at some address in Bueno Vista Drive, Detroit. I’ve never forgotten the name. It was an interesting one. An enormous number like eleven hundred and twenty two. When we, when we finished our course we were presented with our observer badge. That was like a little O observer badge. They don’t use them anymore. It was replaced eventually by a bomb aimer or a navigator. When, when we were trained in Canada we did both jobs. We could choose either. I always stayed with the navigation side and so did Mike. Unfortunately, Mike and his crew were killed in 1944. He had started off doing navigation training. We’d flown in little Tiger Moths really just to get acclimatised to British weather really. I think in January ‘43 that was our first course. A month at Scone in Scotland where pilots just with their fresh pilot wings up would sit in the front cockpit and the navigators would sit in the back cockpit. The pilots of course would say, ‘If you want to play with this thing you’re welcome. Off you go.’ And so we would play [?] and we got a lot of fun. And at the end I remember, after about half an hour I would say to my pilot on this little Gosport tube communication system they had there. I’d say, ‘I think we ought to go back home now don’t you?’ ‘Oh I suppose so. Where are we?’ And I’d say, ‘Don’t you know?’ ‘Well, no. I thought you were the navigator, you’d know where we were.’ I thought he must be joking. I’d been playing with the aeroplane for half an hour and I thoroughly enjoyed it but I’d no idea where we are and it was a bit late to find out. It was quite amusing. I remember he, this particular pilot, made an emergency landing at an airfield. Not ours. Got some fuel in it and then we flew it back and this time I made sure I knew where I was. But having done that month on Tiger Moths in January we then went back to Harrogate where we met with old girlfriends or whatever and we waited for the next course. And then we’d go, have a month, at Skegness I think it was. Butlin’s holiday camp on the Yorkshire coast. They had accommodation of course. It was a holiday camp area. There were golf courses. And we wore army uniform and big boots and we had 303 rifles and they would take us out at night and throw thunder flashers at us to get us used to being possibly escape and evasion on the continent. It was all carefully planned. They knew what they were doing. Anyway, a month in army uniform made us fit and after that we went and did some Anson flying at Barrow in Furness. Very useful because the weather in the Irish Sea was notorious. Thunder storms, rain, snow, so we did more flying and a bit more navigation training and got used to flying in Ansons. Not in blue sky conditions but in United Kingdom weather conditions and that was different. But eventually our navigation training was finished and we were all posted to our, what we called an Operational Training Unit. In my case Mike and I went to Upper Heyford just not far north of Oxford. And when we arrived because we were commissioned we went to the officers mess and we met a bunch of fairly fresh flying officer ranked commissioned pilots who had also arrived for the their Operational Training Unit and for the first time they stopped being individual pilots and individual navigators, wireless operators, gunners and their purpose at Upper Heyford was to learn to fly as a Wellington bomber crew and that took ten weeks. It was a different way of life. We stopped being under training as navigators and we learned to become an operational bomber crew. Five of us, pilot, navigator no we didn’t have a flight engineer and we didn’t have a, ah pilot, navigator, wireless operator and bomb aimer and rear gunner. We didn’t need a mid-upper gunner and we didn’t need a flight engineer to fly the Wellington. But we certainly learned the rudiments of how to operate a bomber crew. For the first time in our lives we lived as a crew. Relaxed together. We tried, we tried as far as we could to live together. With the pilot and navigator both commissioned we could do that and the others were all sergeants. The bomb aimer, the wireless operator and the gunner but they, they gelled together. The NCOs stuck together. They ate together, they went to the same billet, sergeant’s mess. Ken Ames and I became firm friends. It was the way that it was in those days. There was a loyalty between individual crew members. It was a most unusual way to become a bomber crew because what happened was I teamed up with my pilot Ken Ames in the officer’s mess the night before. We all met in a big hangar. Mike did exactly the same. He met a northern Irishman called Derek [Wray] I remember. The following morning we were all there at 8 o’clock in the morning and wing commander flying said, ‘Gentlemen,’ there were hundreds of people in this hangar. He said, ‘You are going to find your own crews. I want every pilot to come back to me at the end of the day and tell me the names, ranks and numbers of his crew. That’s a job for all the pilots but how you sort yourselves out is a matter for you.’ We got some surprise because we’d never seen this before. This was quite new. Ok. So we got our brief, we got our marching orders, go away, ‘Find yourselves crew members. We don’t care how you do it. All I want by 4 o’clock today is a crew with a pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator and rear gunner.’ Ken, Ken Ames said, ‘Well you and I are the core.’ ‘Yeah. That’s right.’ ‘I will go and find a rear gunner. You go and find a bomb aimer.’ And I did that. I found an old man aged thirty two with ruddy cheeks and grey hair and I liked the look of him and I chatted him up and said, ‘Well I’ve got a pilot. I’m a navigator,’ and I said, ‘Would you like to be our bomb aimer?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’d like to meet the pilot of course but otherwise that’s fine.’ And Ken went and he found a rear gunner and he found he was an ex Irish Guardsman. As a soldier used to guns, used to being told what to do and so on but this man had been asked by the army if they would volunteer to become a gunner in the air force. And they jumped at it because it was much better pay. They would become sergeants straight away instead of privates in the army and they would get flying [fame] There was an element of flying [fame] when you were a sergeant in the flying business. So Paddy became our rear gunner. Paddy Paul. My, my selection as bomb aimer had been an insurance agent for many years and was married and had two children. He was ten years older than we were but he was also a crossword fiend which I found out and he was also a very keen rock climber using fingers and toes. He was also a very keen bird watcher. And he had patience and a lovely smile. We were sold. We were very happy. We found, we found a wireless operator but I think for some reason we had to change him. We did start flying with him and I remember saying, this man was called Jim, I said, well, no he was called Albert and I said, ‘Well I’m called Albert as well but if you like I will change my name to Jim.’ I never really liked being Albert really. It was my old man’s best man in the, in the trenches that had made me called Albert but I’ve got James and I’m quite happy to be Jim. And so I settled to Jim. And we ended up with an Australian wireless operator from Toowoomba in Queensland who had been around a long time because he was already a flight sergeant. That made a lot of difference of a year. He’d been around somewhere. Tex we called him because his first name was called Harvey. And we said, ‘We can’t call you Harvey.’ ‘Ok,’ he said, ‘Tex.’ But when you’re on intercom you don’t want fancy names, you want short, sharp ones and we, we soon learned of course that this idea that some people in the photography film world had that you would say on intercom, ‘Pilot from mid-upper gunner,’ or ‘wireless operator from navigator.’ You haven’t got time for all that. It’s Ken, Jim, Paddy. That’s it. You soon got to know the names and you soon knew who was who ‘cause all the names were different. So Ken was the pilot, Jim was the navigator, Tom was the bomb aimer, Paddy was the rear gunner and Tex was the wireless operator. Five people. We were very lucky I suppose because four of those five people survived till the end. Tex unfortunately, our wireless operator from Toowoomba, decided after getting a DFC and having done a whole first tour decided on our last squadron, 97, the Pathfinders, that on a particular day when a daylight operation was scheduled and our crew were not on it, not on the ops order, he said, ‘Oh I’d like to go. I’ll go with a skipper called Baker, Flight Lieutenant Baker. One of my Australian mates as a squadron leader he’d want to go as well,’ so on that aircraft there were nine people instead of seven which seemed to happen sometimes and because it was a daylight trip Tex decided that this was a bit of war that he would like to have a look at. Doing it in daylight. When he was not a wireless operator he was going to man a gun. And of course on that particular aircraft was shot down and I think some of the people escaped and became prisoners of war but Tex was killed and that was in July ‘44. I never did find out whether Tex had got a pathfinder badge. Didn’t make any difference anyway. He was dead. He’s buried in Bayeux War Cemetery. But Paddy the rear gunner did all the trips. Completed a second tour. Was commissioned. He had a DFM. He was commissioned at the end of it all and he went to the Far East to take part in what they called Tiger Force. I never saw him again. Tom Savage the bomb aimer had a DFM at the end of the first tour. When it was all over he was commissioned as well but stayed on at Coningsby to help the station armaments officer with the problems that they had at that time and he stayed until demob. I saw him again later. He met my wife. He was a cricket man as well and we used to meet up in the years after the war, many years, when I was stationed somewhere in the north like Middleton St George or Ouston in Northumberland, we would contact Tom and his family. By that time we had three [more families. Three more.] and his family and we would walk on Hadrian’s Wall. We would meet halfway and meet and have a, have a party. The last time I saw Tom would be about 1990 I think. It was a day when he was watching the cricket in the kitchen and the England test team were playing Australia and the English captain, what was his name? I can’t remember for the moment. The English captain scored three hundred and thirty three not out. I remember. And Tom was listening with delight to all this on the radio or the television I can’t remember now and he died. He was a lovely man. Yes. So, Tex had died. The young engineer and the young mid upper gunner who came to us especially when we became a Lancaster crew for the first time they, they both disappeared. I don’t know what happened to them. I think, one I know was invalided out in to civvy street and I met or contacted his widow eventually many years later and I discovered that yes the head wounds that he had got during a trip to [Castellon] on 61 squadron which kept me in hospital for two months brought home the results that he was found unfit to fly and he went back to civvy street and when he was in civvy street during the war he used to work on aircraft engines at some, nearby. We never did find where he came from. He’d been a garage mechanic you see. He was only eighteen. Ans he was only eighteen when he joined us but he was only with us for a few weeks and we never saw him again but I, I tracked him down long, long after the war and his widow told me that yes they’d got married, he’d earned a living as a ground engineer during the war and after the war he managed to get his medical back again and had a job, taken a job at Stansted flying Yorks all over the world. Thousands of miles of flying, fitting new aircraft engines to Yorks and Lancastrians wherever they needed them and he had three children I think it was but I never found any more about him. I have no idea what happened to the mid-upper gunner. I know he never flew with us again so presumably he had disappeared from active service. I’ve no idea. Now what else was I going to tell you?
SB: Do you want to tell me a little about some of your operations?
JW: About the operations. Yes.
SB: Yes.
JW: Well after we’d finished at Upper Heyford on the Wellingtons we had become a very efficient bomber crew. It was the little things like taking a little racing pigeon in a little cardboard box and we would sometimes do what we called nickel flights. That’s when we went very close to the French coast where we could get shot down by Germans but you were still on your training flight and you’d note the actual position that you had worked out where you were and you would write it down on a little bit of special paper which you’d put on to the pigeon’s leg. Elastic held there a little capsule and you would take the pigeon gingerly down to the back end of the Wellington and you’d get Paddy to turn his guns away and you would throw the pigeon out and the pigeon in the dark would sort itself out and by a miracle of bird navigation would get back to Upper Heyford long before we did [laughs]. And the purpose of that was to make sure that if the aircraft was shot down the pigeon would get back and that would be the last known position of that Wellington before it disappeared. That was the whole point. Of course we never did it in Lancasters. I never saw that again. But we did, we did manage to gel as a crew because we could talk to each other. We developed our own technique of how we could fly this crew together. I would tell the pilot that in certain circumstances if anything went wrong he should always bear in mind that if he could see the sky he could see the Great Bear and he’d say, ‘What’s the Great Bear?’ And I would explain. And I’d say find Polaris the Pole star. The Great Bear will wonder around different regions at different time but the Pole star once you found it it was a very good thing. It was north. And I’d explain to the pilot that wherever you were in Germany you had to come back on a westerly heading to get back to the UK and the best way you could do that was to keep the pole star on the right. He never faltered and there was one occasion when we went to Castle when he found it very useful ‘cause he remembered it. Pilots quite often leave it to the navigator completely but I used to talk to Ken. We were the same age. We liked the same things. And I used to say that there were some things that were important and I used to talk to him about the necessity for every pair of eyes in the aircraft to come back to where it all happened on the navigators brief on his board. I used to explain to everyone how important it was that if they saw a coastline, a bridge, an important navigation feature on the ground they should tell me. They should tell me in time for me to make use of it exactly when it happened so I could check. Crossing a beach, crossing a railway line, a bridge, whatever you could see. I said, ‘I know I’ve Gee and I’ve got H2S, I’ve got radar. Yes I’ve got all these things but they don’t always work and they are sometimes out of range,’ and so I used to explain. I used to explain to our wireless operator how important it was that when I wanted bearings from the radio why I wanted them, when I wanted them and I wanted them at a precise time. I wanted, I explained why these things were important to the navigator. And everyone in the crew, my crew anyway because every crew was different. I wanted everyone to know that every bit of information that they could see was vital as far as I was concerned if it had anything to do with the navigation of the aircraft, the Lancaster, the Wellington, whatever it was. We got on fine. I remember one occasion when we were doing a long ten hour cross country in a Wellington from Upper Heyford and the weather was filthy. It was nothing like what had been forecast. I remember half way through the trip, about four or five hours I said to them on the intercom chaps you might be interested to know that we should be turning from Carlisle onto another heading but I said I can’t tell you why but right now we’re over Bristol. You could hear a penny drop in all the ears. ‘What’s Jim talking about?’ I said, ‘The weather forecast was rubbish. I now want Tex to give me a QDM for Upper Heyford and we’re going to fly back to base. We’re going to forget the rest of the trip because the weather is so bad and the winds are so hard to find that that’s the only thing we can do.’ I think my crew discovered that they had a navigator who was honest and was telling them what the truth of the matter was. A lot of other aircraft that night would have ended up in being diverted, got, they’d got just as lost as we were. This sort of thing used to happen but I think that that crew as a Wellington crew decided that Jim Wright was the man that they wanted to stay with and that’s why later on in life when we were a Lancaster crew they decided that if Jim Wright was needing hospital treatment but if it was possible they would wait for him to come back. Being what happened. Not every navigator was as lucky as that. I was lucky. And in the end so were they. We finished. We managed to finish. We lost a few of ours but you see navigation to me was a puzzle like a crossword puzzle. You had the clues but you needed to make use of everything you could to solve problems and that’s what navigation was. I also remember one occasion when we went to Nuremberg. Now, Nuremberg is famous for being one operation in which we lost a hundred aircraft and the reason for it was straightforward. The Jetstream that people talk about in the weather forecast today as a casual thing that means something and they explain the weather forecast, tries to explain what a Jetstream is but in 1943/44 no one had heard about a Jetstream. They didn’t know what it was. But as a wind finder on 630 squadron when we went to Nuremberg my job was to find the winds and send them back through the wireless operator to Group so that they could marshal the latest thing that they’d found Instead of guessing what the winds were they would find what the real winds were and I was finding winds at one stage that I couldn’t believe but I had enough faith in my ability to say to my wireless operator, ‘I know that these are astonishing winds. Don’t be surprised but they’re right.’ The winds were from the northeast at about a hundred and forty five knots at twenty thousand feet and I sent these winds back and the boys back at base and at Group, the weather chaps, they looked at all the winds that were coming. Now, half of the wind finders, these are all specially chosen navigators would look at the winds they were finding and said, ‘I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. I’ll halve it. I’ll go as far as eighty.’ They didn’t have enough courage to tell the truth but we lost a hundred aeroplanes. Quite often the four engine ones because at that time most of the guys were in four engined guys, Halifax’s. I think we’d already thrown away the Stirlings so all, all four engined guys on Nuremberg were in the same boat. When the winds were sorted out at base and they sent back a revised lot of winds they were nowhere near the real ones and so not only did the searchlights, the ackack and the night fighters do their normal thirty or forty aircraft shot down but the other sixty aircraft found that because they’d run out of fuel they ditched in the North Sea, they ditched in the Baltic, they ditched everywhere. Quite often these were the people whose names ended up on Runnymede Memorial, missing, but their aircraft were never heard of again. Navigation was so important and the scientists did their best but the German scientists were also very clever. So I’m afraid quite often the Germans made use of the navigational equipment that we did have and they took it. They found out how it worked and they used it to their advantage to warn their night fighters. So that some of the equipment that we thought were being useful to RAF bombers turned out in fact to be more useful to the enemy. They used to track, using our equipment in our aircraft, so that their night fighters could latch on to us. We didn’t know about that at the time and I don’t think Butch Harris was initially aware about it but when he did find out he had to do some serious thinking. How much risk can you take with your bomber force? It was a very difficult world. The men who flew in bombers in Bomber Command trusted Bomber Harris. They knew he had a difficult job to do. They knew that their chances of survival were less than one in two. They knew that. But they also knew that if you had to win the war you had to do it. You had to do what he wanted to do and I don’t remember anyone in any of the squadrons I flew with who argued with Bomber Harris. They knew. They knew that the only way to win was to win the war. It was them or us. It was all out war. Anyway, that was the end of my operational flying on three squadrons and when it was over and the adjutant said, ‘You’re finished.’ He sent me to a place called Brackla in Scotland and I was there with Paddy the rear gunner. It was the Redistributional Resettlement Unit. Ken Ames was sent to be an instructor on a Lancaster Finishing School at Wickenby. Tom, the bomb aimer ended up at, on the ground but commissioned and quite happy and he survived the war. Paddy ended up commissioned as a gunner and went to the Far East and he survived that. He died later on, in Nottingham I think. I never saw him again. Tex, the wireless operator had been killed in ‘44. But I, I remember being in the 97 squadron adjutant’s office when he said I was finished with operational flying and there was a little card on his desk and it said if you are tired and would like a rest why don’t you come and have a week or ten days in a [Lastrian?] house in Scotland. It’s peaceful and it’s quiet. And I made a note of the telephone number [Talland 35?]. Miles from anywhere, he said. And I said to the adjutant, ‘How do you think this place is?’ ‘Don’t know.’ he said. ‘All the information I’ve got’s on the card. It’s for chaps who need a rest from operations.’ And I remember looking up this man. He was a retired air commodore and I said, ‘I’ve just been told that I’m finished with operational flying.’ ‘Oh well done,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of getting married.’ ‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Come back and talk to me when you’ve made the arrangements. You can have the honeymoon up there.’ ‘Good thinking,’ I said. So I talked to my wife about it about this. I talked to her before she were married. And we agreed. Family friends said, ‘But Jim, Aberdeenshire is a hell of a long way away from Whitley Bay which is because your wife’s in a V1, V2 area she can’t get married down there. You’re going to have to get married in Whitley Bay. And when you get married by the time it’s all over you won’t be able to get to [?]. So, we happen to know of a little hotel in Edinburgh that we met years ago and I’m sure you’ll be alright there for your first night and then you could carry on to Aberdeenshire afterwards for your honeymoon.’ And that’s what we did. That’s what we did. Later on I met up with Ken Ames and his wife after the war and we had a holiday together up there. The four of us. The war was over and poor Ken he’d married three times in the end and he died at the age of fifty five. Fifty five. I’m ninety, nearly ninety three now. What a waste. He was a nice man. Eight years later I’d lost touch with him completely. I’d finished my, my war, I’d finished my post-war service and I was interested in a campaign medal for Bomber Command. And in 2008 the Editor of the Sunday Express was running a series of articles about Bomber Command and he called them heroes. And he got ten thousand letters from people into his office as Editor saying, ‘We agree with you.’ And he sent this parcels of letters and things to 10 Downing Street, to Gordon Brown, on the 2nd of July 2008. They took photographs of people. I remember having my own photograph taken next to the policeman at Number 10. I’d never been anywhere near Downing Street. I didn’t know anything about it but I went to attend this petition. And there were, there was another Bomber Command man there who had been a prisoner of war in Stalag III. The one where fifty chaps had been shot. He was interested in a campaign medal as well. I wonder what happened to him. I’ve no idea. But some of the other people who were photographed there as a party not only the, Townsend, I think the name of the editor was but there were some members of parliament particularly a member of parliament who has just left us. Austin. Austin - I can’t remember his name. Anyway, this particular MP, his name will come to me, on the 13th of November 2007 before the petition, Mitchell, Austin Mitchell, that was his name, he was the MP for North Grimsby I think it was and he with a friend of mine Douglas Hudson DFC had done a programme on the Look North programme I remember in which they had been advocating the award of a campaign medal for Bomber Command. Doug Hudson had been a, had been a prisoner of war in Africa. His pilot had been shot down on the beaches heading for Malta I think in a Blenheim and he’d been captured by, I think, the Vichy French and put in to a prisoner of war camp somewhere in [Libya?] or somewhere like that. And they had been rescued when they had, when the Americans invaded and he’d been repatriated. This is Douglas Hurd and he’d done a conversion back on to navigation and he’d been serving with a Lancaster squadron and he had said to all the members of his Lancaster crew he said, ‘Now, look. I don’t intend to become another prisoner of war in Germany. I’ve had enough. So my position is quite clear.’ Anyway, he survived the tour and he wrote a book and he called it, “A Navigator’s Story: There and Back Again.” And he contacted, he lived somewhere near Lincoln, on the outskirts of Lincoln with his family, and he met Austin Mitchell and he persuaded him to do this Look North programme looking for a campaign medal. He died of course. His wife died first. I still, I’m still in touch with his daughter who still lives there and I keep her in touch with my puny efforts to get a campaign medal. This girl, Yvonne, Yvonne [Puncher?] married another navigator but a Canberra navigator after the war and they lived just around the corner from where Douglas and his wife lived. And she joined the air force to become an air traffic control officer and that’s where we, we joined up again in a different way and I was able to talk to her about life in the air traffic control world.
SB: What did you do after you left the air force?
JW: I’m sorry?
SB: What did you do after you left the air force?
Well that’s a very interesting story because after I went to the resettlement unit at Brackla with Paddy he went off to the Tiger Force and they said, ‘Now Jim. What are we going to do with you? You’ve done a double tour. You deserve a rest. Would you like to be RTO at Euston Station?’ And I said, ‘What does that mean? What’s RTO?’ ‘Rail Travel Officer,’ they said. ‘What did he do?’ ‘Ah well you see it’s nothing to do with flying. I’m afraid you’re now a flight lieutenant and as such you can do a lot of work. You might be very helpful as an RTO because an RTO at Euston station is a busy job you know and we need people with wartime experience used to handling men, army, navy, air force and we move them around in hundreds every day of the week. Moving them from this camp to that camp and so.’ And I said, ‘Well ok. It sound a little bit boring but, and I don’t really like London as a place to live. What else can you think of?’ ‘Well,’ they said, ‘What about a job with BOAC?’ And I said, ‘What is BOAC?’ ‘British Overseas Airways Corporation.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Civil flying?’ ‘Yes, that’s right.’ They said. ‘I’ll buy that one,’ I said. ‘I’ll try that. Can’t do any harm.’ ‘You’re on,’ he said. ‘We’ll send you warrants and things like that to Bristol and you can talk to the people down there’. Ostensibly of course it was to fly so I said, ‘Yeah, but civil flying.’ ‘That’s right,’ they said. ‘It won’t be in a war zone.’ So, we got married and we went to, it was nearly Christmas time I remember and I think by the time I got down to Bristol to make an appointment they said, ‘Jim, we would be delighted for you to fly but we’re snowed under with navigators. What we really want in BOAC at the moment are ground operations officers to make the whole system work better.’ ‘Ok,’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know much about it but where would it be?’ ‘Ah well we’d like you to go Hurn, near Bournemouth.’ Now, an operations officer down there would handle Dakotas, Lancastrians and things like that and it’s an important job.’ So I said, ‘Ok. My flying days are over, I’m married. I’m free and I survived and the war’s still on. I’ll do it.’ So I told my wife on our honeymoon. I said, ‘I’m not going to fly anymore. I’m going to be an operations officer.’ ‘Oh, well Bournemouth sounds very interesting,’ she said. So I stayed for another eighteen months at Hurn doing this operation officer’s job and of course the Royal Air Force were still paying me. I was still in flight lieutenant’s uniform and I could wear a flight lieutenant’s uniform any time I liked but during the day BOAC would give me an operations officer uniform. It was a different kind of uniform. But it was quite interesting work and I found I met a lot of interesting people. I met a lot of ex Bomber Command people who were also seconded. The war was still on but they were seconded to BOAC to help them fly Lancastrians because they were familiar with the Lancaster and a lot of the people that I used to work with as an operations officer would be flying Dakotas. Now they were just the same as the military Charlie 47 that a lot of our people flew during the war on Transport Command. And very interesting, I used to meet, I used to meet the skippers and I met people like O. P. Jones at Hurn. He was a very well-known civil aviation pilot. [? ] And of course the same station manager for BOAC in Bournemouth was also responsible for the flying boat operation at Poole Harbour, just down the road from the other side from the land airfield at Hurn to the seaplane base at Poole. It was all very interesting stuff and whilst the war was still on. But in nineteen forty, when would it be, I couldn’t get demobbed until October ‘46 and sometime in early ‘46 whilst I was still an operations officer Mr Horton, I remember his name, the station manager, he came and he said, ‘Jim I know you’re in the air force but,’ he said, ‘But I’m about to become station manager in London for BOAC because we’re opening up at Heathrow.’ And I said, ‘Fine.’ He said, ‘Mr Carter,’ I think that was his name, who was a senior operations man at Hurn, ‘Is nearly at retirement age and he doesn’t want to go to Heathrow. Would you like the job of station operations officer at Heathrow?’ I said, ‘Yes. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m quite happy. It’s a challenge. I’d like to do it.’, ‘Ok,’ he says, ‘So, it means living a bit rough for a while because we’ve got a house at the end of the runway and we’ve got to literally build SECO huts alongside the A4 road, the Bath Road. We’ve got to do all this sort of stuff and it takes time to organise it. It will be tough for a time.’ I said, ‘Fine. I’m quite happy to do that.’ So I became the station operations officer for London Airport for BOAC but they had Pan America and they had [Lufthansa] they had other people but as far as BOAC were concerned they wanted me to do this job. He said, Mr Horton says, ‘Incidentally, we also would also like you to do an air traffic control course. I know it’s a joint military civil service job at Watchfield.’ I said, ‘Fine. I don’t mind doing that and I’ll meet lots of interesting people there.’ So I went to Watchfield and I did the course and I passed it and I went back to Heathrow and then I took some of my other operations officers and sent them off to do air traffic control officer’s job as well. There was meaning for this of course because when the war ended in ’45, on May, on May the 8th the civil flying business took off in a big way. A lot of the seconded RAF officers both flying and ground would carry on doing civil contracts with BOAC and I was one of them. I was demobbed in October ‘46 and on the 20th of October I went to Gambia in British West Africa as an operations officer but this time I think they’d regraded me as an operations officer grade one. It was a better kind of job and paid a bit better than the routine BOAC operations officer grade 2 did. Anyway, my wife and I were quite happy and she, by this time was living with her parents in Ilford. The war was over. We were married. We had no children. She was looking forward to being a wife overseas and eventually after six months she followed me out to Bathurst and we lived in married quarters there. Lived in nissen huts accommodation but Fujara was the place where we lived and worked and I used to operate by transport by car to the airfield at [Yangden?], would go down to the flying boat base in Bathurst. That became Banthul. I think B A N T H U L, was the new name that they invented for Bathurst. Now, there had been Royal Air Force during the war at Bathurst at [Yangden?] and the flying boat base at Bathurst. They had used air sea rescue and things like that but all the people that were wartime at Bathurst and similar places overseas had to be brought back for demob and that’s where the air traffic control came in because the ministry of civil aviation were quite interested to get BOAC to organise this on their behalf because they wanted the routes to be kept up without, without halt whilst the transfer from wartime to civil took place. I quite enjoyed doing the job in Gambia. I quite enjoyed it but whilst we were there BOAC contacted all the air traffic control officers they had overseas and they said, ‘Would you like to become a flight operations officer? If you do and if you have the qualification and if you are willing we will train you at Aldermaston in England for three months course and you will cease to be operations officer grade 1 and if you succeed as part of the course you will be posted as flight operations officers.’ Now they don’t wear uniform. It’s not a uniform job. It was a very important job because you’d got to do all the flight planning for the civil airliners at Heathrow, at Prestwick and all these places and you’re going to save time, effort and money by shift working, in your case at Prestwick because in 19, what would it be? 1946 we left, ’48, December we came back. In ’49. In ‘49 I became a flight operations officer working for BOAC as a civilian. Nothing to do with the air force. I worked at er, as a flight operations officer for BOAC at Prestwick and I was posted then from Prestwick to Heathrow. But in September ’50, in September ’50, I remember very well all the flight operations officers throughout BOAC would become redundant and they had three months’ pay which lasted until December of that year. And the reason for it was that in the previous financial year in spring of ‘50 BOAC made an eight million pound loss which upset them. And they found that the new chairman, who was a city man, didn’t know anything about flying and he said to his board of directors, ‘Right. I’m your new boss. Tell me what the facts are. I suppose we need air crew. We couldn’t fly without them.’ ‘That’s right,’ they said. ‘And they’re very expensive.’ ‘Ok,’ he said, ‘Well, who are the next expensive people?’ ‘Well, we think the flight operations officers are.’ ‘Tell me what they do,’ he said. ‘Oh the flight operations officers throughout the world take the incoming air crew and in advance they do meteorological analysis of the future flights and when the incoming crew arrive they can just have a meal, accept what the flight operations officers has decided is the best time track for the next stage. Sign and off they go.’ ‘I see,’ said the new chairman. ‘Well, the answer simply, really to save money is to stop paying all these flight operations officers and let the air crew do their own flight planning. There’s a captain, a navigator a wireless operator why can’t they do it themselves. They’re qualified to do it.’
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with James Wright
Creator
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Sheila Bibb
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-08
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AWrightJDFC150608
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Description
An account of the resource
James Wright was born in Nottinghamshire and worked as a civil servant before he joined the Air Force. After training in Canada he flew on operations as a navigator with 61, 97 and 630 Squadrons. He recalls the occasion when Eastbourne Railway Station was attacked by Me 109s. He discusses the difficulties and importance of navigation by describing events at Nuremberg. After the war he became a flight operations manager at Heathrow and in Gambia an air traffic controller.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Germany
Great Britain
England--Eastbourne (East Sussex)
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Shropshire
Germany--Nuremberg
Heathrow Airport (London, England)
England--Sussex
Temporal Coverage
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1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
Format
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02:15:12 audio recording
61 Squadron
630 Squadron
97 Squadron
Absent Without Leave
aircrew
animal
bombing
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
crewing up
final resting place
ground personnel
Lancaster
Me 109
medical officer
memorial
military discipline
military living conditions
military service conditions
navigator
Pathfinders
RAF Heaton Park
RAF Upper Heyford
strafing
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/365/8925/WardM [Pesaro].jpg
d9a2d9c693790af82307dda6f15eb90a
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/365/8925/AWardEM160424.1.mp3
ec3474ac270a998bd385dc21d7ddedec
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Ward, Mary
Mary Ward
Elsie Mary Ward
E M Ward
Mary Brown
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. Three oral history interviews with Elizabeth Mary Ward (893293, Women's Auxiliary Air Force), her dog tags, an aeroplane broach and a photograph album. Mary Ward was a cook but re-mustered and was promoted becoming a map officer. She served with Bomber Command at RAF Driffield between 1940 and 1944 before being posted to Coastal Command.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Mary ward and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-04-24
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
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Ward, EM
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is Tuesday the 26th of April 2016 and we’re having our third meeting with Mary Ward but the topic is her husband — Roy Ward. And the reason that Mary’s doing it is because he is suffering from dementia and is in hospital and so this is a proxy interview with Mary. Right. So, we’re starting with Roy’s earliest time. So, he was born near Halifax and his father was a wool mill manager so they —what do you know about the family?
MW: Well, they lived —his father had been in the war. The First World War. He’d had malaria and he wasn’t in a terribly good health but they lived there until Roy was roughly five or six, I would say, when they moved to Ardsley. His father died when he was five —
CB: Yeah.
MW: Or six. Something like that age and their circumstances changed and they had to move. They moved to Ardsley. His father, his father had become — I’m getting this wrong. I’m not going to be able [unclear]
CB: It’s alright. Don’t worry about it.
MW: His father had an upset with the owners of the mill and he left the wool industry and bought a house in Ardsley with a sub-Post Office which he managed. He then, he died when Roy was eight and his mother continued to operate the post, the sub post office with his older brother Nory.
[Pause]
CB: So where did he go to school?
MW: He went to school at the local primary school. Let’s see. Yes. Until he was ten when he passed a scholarship to go to boarding school. Crossley and Porter’s in Halifax. This was, this was a boarding school. Very similar to Wellington College. Which was provided by the local woollen manufacturers for boys, boys only, who had lost their fathers in circumstances to do with the First World War. He stayed there until he was in the sixth form. Only six of them in the sixth form and he was heading for university with maths and science. And then the war came. He decided he would skip university and join the RAF. This wasn’t possible at the time and he then decided to go into the Met Office. He got a job in the Met Office as an assistant and was sent, after a few months, he was sent to Ismailia. He went all around the Cape in a convoy. He got lost in the convoy at one stage and got left behind but they did catch up and they ended in Durban and then went to Ismailia. And this was for a course with the Met Office which, I understand, lasted about three months and then they sent him back home because there was no need. They didn’t need them there apparently. So, he came home a more direct route than the Suez Canal. You know. That way around. And when he arrived back in this country the Met Office said that he’d, he’d been accepted for the RAF. And the RAF told him to go and buy himself an officer’s uniform and report to — I’m not sure where he had to report but he, from then on he was in the RAF as a flying officer and doing — I’m not sure exactly where he was stationed until he came to Brawdy where I met him at Brawdy.
CB: Which is South Wales.
MW: South Wales. Pembrokeshire. Yes. Yes. Then I, after that we went Brawdy. He was attached to 517 Squadron and flew with Steve Hughes in a Halifax. Steve being the pilot. And Roy was known as, what was known as the Met observer. Now, all this other information regarding what he did is down here. In 1939 this was where, when he joined the Met Office and he was stationed at 4 Group at Linton on Ouse. [unclear] This was when he was in Linton on Ouse. And then in 1940 he was at Headquarters, RAF Linton on Ouse at Heslington Hall. Which is where we’re going to see George Smith. George is at Heslington Manor.
CB: Yes.
MW: This is Heslington Hall. The manor house where George lives in. He then went to Pocklington. Headquarters at Pocklington. He was then posted to Queenstown, South Africa. And RAF [pause] Ismailia in Egypt.
CB: Yeah.
MW: Then from RAF Ismailia, he went to training school at Kilburn in London when he came back. And then from Kilburn to Marston Moor. That was back up north again, you see. And then from — in ‘44 he went from Milham to Aldergrove and then to Brawdy.
CB: Right.
MW: And then from Brawdy to Chivenor. From RAF Chivenor — a detachment to Mountbatten. And then from RAF Mountbatten to Shawbury and his last station was Waddington.
CB: Right.
MW: In the RAF.
CB: Right.
MW: Then he got transferred back to the Met Office and we were [pause] we were in Dunstable.
CB: Ah, so —
MW: From Dunstable he came here to actually open the — Bracknell. Bracknell was built —the Met Office was built in 1960. We came in. He came, in charge of the computer at Bracknell in 1961. Well he came actually in ‘60 but we didn’t move until ‘61. From Bracknell he went to Gan. For a year in Gan.
CB: The island in the Pacific.
MW: The island. Yes.
CB: Yeah. Well Indian Ocean.
MW: The Indian Ocean. That’s right. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. When was that? When was that?
MW: That would be in about 1968 or ‘69. It doesn’t say here. This is what I’ve to use.
CB: Ok.
MW: ‘Cause we moved here by then you see. He was away a year in Gan and he came back to Heathrow. And from, on and off, until he retired he was Heathrow or Bracknell.
CB: So, he was moving up the ladder all the time was he?
MW: Yeah. He, he was forecasting at Heathrow, of course. Not doing computer work.
CB: Right.
MW: And he was forecasting again at Bracknell when he came back. He came off the computer. Of course it was as big as this bungalow.
CB: Yes.
MW: I don’t know if you want this in here.
CB: No. No. That’s fine.
MW: It was all, it was all big. The valves. And now it’s reduced to this size of course.
CB: Extraordinary isn’t it?
MW: But in the latter years he was forecasting. He was a senior forecaster.
CB: What did he do in Gan? When he was in Gan what was he doing there?
MW: He was the forecaster.
CB: Oh. That was the same.
MW: Yes. It’s a main, it was mainly a dropping off station for refuelling on the way to Singapore.
CB: Right.
MW: But no women were allowed there. Hence, we didn’t go.
CB: No. And where was he working when he eventually retired?
MW: In Heathrow.
CB: Oh, was he? And after he’d retired — what age did he retire?
MW: He was retired quite early. Well a couple of years before normal because he’d done overseas duties.
CB: Oh.
MW: You could do if you’d done overseas duties, you know. You got a special concession to do.
CB: Right. So what age was he?
MW: Hmmn?
CB: What age was he when he retired?
MW: He would be — is sixty the age for retiring? I think it was. So he would have been about fifty eight then.
CB: Ok. Ok. Now, casting your mind back when you first met him under what circumstances were those?
MW: That was at Brawdy. Yes. We were, Brawdy was quite an isolated place on the coast in Pembrokeshire. And he was flying with 517 Squadron doing reconnaissance flights and this is when he was attached to Epicure. These were doing the high level, taking readings for the weather. I should have a map somewhere.
CB: So, what was Epicure?
MW: Epicure was the name given to that.
CB: It was specifically –
MW: Here we are. This is all in here.
CB: Right.
MW: And RAF Brawdy. Now this is all listed. The people with whom he flew and for what purpose. But you wouldn’t want all that. It’s — Epicure’s were all normal except for — remarks 44. 30th of November. Normal track 215 to position 9, 450.
CB: So, these are the sorties you’re reading about.
MW: Yes.
CB: In the book.
[pause]
MW: I think you’d better have this Chris because there’s some — you may –
CB: Ok. Well, we’ll look at that. Yes.
MW: Yes.
CB: Thank you very much.
MW: These are, these are the other squadrons. There’s one called –
CB: This is where they flew.
MW: Yes.
CB: So, we’re looking at a map that’s the Atlantic.
MW: This is — this is from Brawdy and this is where Roy flew out of.
CB: Oh. I see.
MW: And Epicure. These are the other squadrons that did different — had different names you see.
CB: Right.
MW: And went to different places on here.
CB: So, this map is showing the areas in which certain squadrons operated.
MW: That’s right. Yes.
CB: According to these. So, we’ve got Bismuth, Mercer, Ella, Sharon.
MW: Yes.
CB: Epicure and Rhombus.
MW: Yes.
CB: And also, Nocturnal down, out of –
MW: Yes. These are all the details. These are the details of what he —
CB: Ok.
MW: Who he flew with. This is all with Epicure.
CB: Yes.
MW: All down.
CB: Yeah.
MW: And the flight. The pilots that he was with.
CB: Who he flew with. Yeah. Right. That’s really good. And then out of Iceland is Magnum.
MW: Sorry?
CB: So he —the aircraft were always Halifaxes.
MW: Halifaxes. Yes.
CB: Right.
MW: Yeah. Do you want to —
CB: If we can borrow those. We’ll have a look at them. May I look in just a moment. Thank you. So, the practicality of this really is that we’ve been talking [coughs] excuse me, to people. Bomber Command very largely but in order to go on the operations they needed to know what the weather was.
MW: That’s right.
CB: So, the reason that we want to know about Roy and what he did —
MW: Well they started off from zero and I think they moved up to five thousand feet. Took the readings. He took the readings. The Met readings then. And then they’d come down a bit and then they went up a bit higher and in those days the Halifax could only do eighteen thousand feet. That’s the height they went to. And then took these, and then these readings were [terms]. They could send them from a Halifax. I can’t remember that bit but anyway they were used then for — to forecast the weather for the flying.
CB: So, in practical terms they had a crew in the normal way but they had one extra person who was the meteorological observer.
MW: That’s right. Yes.
CB: Is that right?
MW: Yes. The Met observer.
CB: Yeah. The Met observer.
MW: Yes
CB: Right. So that made eight people.
MW: In the crew.
CB: In the crew. Yes. Do you happen to know where his station was in the bomber?
MW: In?
CB: In the aircraft. In the Halifax. Where was the Met observer? Do you know?
MW: Oh. I’ve never thought of that. No.
CB: No.
MW: He would, he would probably tell me on a good day.
CB: Yes.
MW: Yes. He would have done yesterday.
CB: Well we can pick up with that later.
MW: And then of course we became very friendly and I was moved from Chivenor. He was at Chivenor with me. 517 moved from Brawdy to Chivenor.
CB: Right.
MW: And then I was –
CB: In Cornwall.
MW: Ah. Yes. Devon isn’t it?
CB: Cornwall. Oh well it might be Devon on the north. Yes.
MW: No. No. No. It’s Devon.
CB: Devon. You’re right. Ok. Yeah. I take it back.
MW: Getting my maps wrong.
CB: No. You’re right. You’re right. Yes.
MW: And we, we became friendly and he was at Waddington and I was at, still at Chivenor and then I moved to Northwood. To headquarters. Coastal Command. To try and tidy up their map office. And we met frequently up and down in London. Concerts and things. And then we, we were married in ’47 in Lincoln because he was then at Waddington and I was working at the Post Office. I managed to get a job in the Post Office and —
CB: Because you had left the RAF by then.
MW: Hmmn?
CB: You had left the RAF by then.
MW: Yes. I was demobbed in 1947.
CB: Yeah.
MW: Because I did an extra year, you see. I could have come out earlier but I did an extra year because I didn’t really know what I needed. What I wanted to do. From being a nursery governess on civvy street the RAF didn’t really want me. So I re-mustered to being, and was promoted to acting sergeant to become a telephonist and I was training as a telephonist and then decided that I would do an extra year but after that I came out. And then we lived in Lincoln — Navenby, for a while and then we moved. Roy was moved to Abingdon. And to Upper Heyford and we moved in to Oxford and I was working for the Post Office then. And after then [pause] he was posted to Aden. That must have been 1948. We were married in ‘47. In ‘48 he was posted. He was posted to Aden for two years. I didn’t go immediately because the RAF were very difficult [pause] fussy about where you, where you lived. There wasn’t really much European accommodation in Aden at that time and you had to find somewhere that was vetted by the RAF if you had a wife or somebody going out there. So I went later and we were out there in Aden for two years. Came back to Abingdon and he, and we managed, we bought a house in Radley.
CB: How long were you in, was he in Abingdon? RAF Abingdon.
MW: Quite a while actually. Until he went to Dunstable and then he went to Dunstable and we moved to Aylesbury.
CB: Now what was the significance of Dunstable because this is, he’s now out of the RAF?
MW: The Met officer at that time had various little places. There was Harrow and Dunstable and somewhere else but no, no proper headquarters as such. And then they built the Met Office headquarters at Bracknell and he moved with everybody else from Dunstable and Harrow. Everybody went. Came to Bracknell.
CB: So —
MW: Yes, well he then, after being at Aylesbury we came to Bracknell and he then, we all, we moved here in 1960.
CB: ‘61.
MW: And we’ve been here since and as far as —Roy retired and he did a little bit of work with the Met Office after he retired but nothing very much and he spent most of his time gardening and going for walks and that sort of thing really for his retirement. But he didn’t play golf or do anything like that particularly.
CB: At what point did he leave the RAF? Was that after being stationed at Abingdon?
MW: What time?
CB: Yeah. So, you went to Aden.
MW: Yes.
CB: And he was still in the RAF then. Was he?
MW: No. He was back in civvies.
CB: Ok. So, when did he come out of the RAF?
MW: It must have been. It was — when we were married in ‘47 he was, he was still, he was back in to the Met Office so it must have been early ‘47 when he came out.
CB: So, by then the RAF had forecasters who were civilians and Met Office employees.
MW: Yes. You see they were civilians because — that was the difficult thing in the RAF. And I had difficulty with one on one occasion at Linton when I went into the briefing room with the maps and I found a civilian in there. A civilian man who — everything was so secret. So spot on with security.
CB: Yeah.
MW: And I said to him, ‘What are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘Well, I am the Met Officer.’ And I didn’t know that the Met officers were still civilians you see. Of course this was a problem in the RAF at that time. Some of the cooks were civilians. And one, one or two of the map people were civilians but not to do with intelligence. That was a different section. Navigation maps. Anything else there?
CB: Yeah. So he, in practical terms, if the Met observers were flying then they were part of the RAF is what you are saying. As I understand it.
MW: Yes. Exactly. Yes.
CB: Is that right? So, the war ended in Europe on the 8th of May 1945. Where was Roy then?
MW: He was still at Brawdy.
CB: Right. Oh at Brawdy still. Ok.
MW: And he was in the RAF at Brawdy. Yes.
CB: Yes. Then he went to Chivenor and he was still in the RAF.
MW: That’s right. Yes.
CB: So, after Chivenor then? Is that when, because the war had now finished, did he come out immediately then or was it only at a later —
MW: I can’t really remember that but he I think he came out quite soon and then he was, he went to Waddington.
CB: Yes.
MW: And he was certainly by ‘47. In April ‘47, when we were married, he was out of the RAF.
CB: Yeah.
MW: And back in civvies. [pause] You’re tired. I was doing that at church
Other: A short nap.
CB: Forty winks in church doesn’t do you any good does it? No.
MW: I know. I know. I get so tired.
CB: I know what you mean. Anyway, so that’s really useful because you’ve prompted me ‘cause I remember the point about the Met officers on airfields tended to be civilians. And so what you’re saying is –
MW: It was confusing.
CB: When the war finished.
MW: Yes.
CB: Then he wasn’t flying any longer. So he was flying from Chivenor still? Was he?
MW: From Chivenor?
CB: Yes.
MW: Oh yes.
CB: Yeah.
MW: Yes.
CB: Right.
MW: What were they doing in Chivenor? I can’t quite remember that very well. It might well tell you in there. It will. In the back.
CB: Yes.
MW: [unclear]
CB: We’ll have a look. And you talked about on the sorties then they were flying at different heights.
MW: Yes.
CB: What affect, what sort of strain were they under as a result of this sort of operation?
MW: What sort of —?
CB: Because —well they were sometimes high and low. And sometimes low. Did that put a strain on them?
MW: Absolutely. It did. Yes.
CB: In what way? How did that manifest itself?
MW: Keep going up and down. Yes.
CB: Yeah.
MW: And those were twelve hour shifts usually.
CB: Were they?
MW: It was very long. It was a long trip out.
CB: And what do you remember about the crews of these —?
MW: Oh, quite a lot.
CB: Go on.
MW: They were a very cheerful crew.
CB: Were they?
MW: We kept in touch until Steve died two years ago. He was the pilot. We’d been in touch all those years. Bob Hockey was the navigator. He was an extremely good navigator. In fact, in later years Bob navigated on Morning Cloud for Edward Heath.
CB: Right.
MW: Yes. He was very good. And Taffy was the rear gunner I think.
CB: So, on what circumstance — you met Roy originally.
MW: Oh, probably at a mess dance or something although probably more likely it would have been at the music club because he wasn’t in to dancing. He would be at the music club. Or we used to go down to the coast. We could walk from Brawdy to [unclear] and there was a café down there. We used to go down there in sort of bunches of us, groups of us and have a cup of tea and a chat.
CB: Did the whole crew move around socially together?
MW: Yeah. Most of the time. Yes. Yes. They were always — they were always together at private functions and things. They were. You found that with the bomber crews. They all, they were always, if one came in to the office then the whole lot would be in. They would follow.
CB: They were the family.
MW: They were like a family. Yes.
CB: Their bond was extraordinary.
MW: It was. Yes.
CB: And it was just interesting to know about what it was like in the Met flights as well because that had a different danger.
MW: Oh, you read about this bond with the crew. They were like brothers really.
CB: Yeah. So, the Met flight. The squadrons like 517 that were collecting the Met information had the task of flying high and low. Twelve hour flights. To what extent was there a danger of enemy aircraft?
MW: Enemy aircraft.
CB: Interception.
MW: Very little.
CB: Right.
MW: Yes. I don’t think they had one. They did have one or two tragic things happen but it’s not worth going into those.
CB: What sort of things would happen?
MW: Well, one of them they were diverted because the weather was notoriously bad in Brawdy. You could be flying on the circuit ready to come in and the mist would just come down just in a sheet and you couldn’t land. You’d have to be, you’d be diverted somewhere. And this aircraft got diverted and didn’t know the area presumably and crashed into [pause] whether it was, I think he must have mistaken the, mistaken the cloud base for the, for the top of a cliff and they were all killed. I can’t really remember a lot of the details of that but it was quite tragic because Roy had actually flown with that pilot.
CB: Oh, really.
MW: He was a chap, I think he was either from New Zealand or Australia and he was called Skinner but I’m not [pause] they did have some — one or two near shaves. I remember Roy saying they went around three times trying to get into Brawdy and they bumped three times. It was all a bit — they made a bit of fun of it but it wasn’t funny at the time. They really weren’t. They had one or two. What else?
CB: Sorry.
MW: Anything else you want to —
CB: Yes. So as, meteorological observers — meteorological observers — Met observers were they trying to find good weather or bad weather?
MW: In the Met Office?
CB: Normally. When they were, when the squadron was going on its flights.
MW: Oh, they went. When it was good enough they went. It had to be very bad — they couldn’t take off or something. Otherwise they always went. Yes. Yes. As I say Brawdy was very bad in as much as it didn’t, it didn’t give you much, much time to get because the low cloud would come in very quickly. Within minutes. And you couldn’t manage.
CB: And at Chivenor where he moved to next what was that like for weather?
MW: Chivenor was better. Yes. Yes. Brawdy was unusual. I suppose along the Welsh coast you might expect that to happen really.
CB: Why did the squadron move to Chivenor? Do you know?
MW: We all moved. I don’t know why but we all moved there really. I moved into a map office that was [pause] I think, yes, the girl I took over from was being demobbed ‘cause she’d been in earlier but I worked quite a lot with the navigation officer at that stage rather than intelligence because at that stage I was really clearing up. The map offices were closing down. They didn’t need them at that stage, you see. They didn’t need maps and charts like we had done during the war. During the actual activities. So, and then when I came to Northwood from Chivenor it was equally the same. But I haven’t said about being at Shawbury and I was at Shawbury before I went to Brawdy.
CB: In Shropshire.
MW: I’d forgotten about that because I wasn’t really concentrating on me.
CB: No. No.
MW: We were concentrating on Roy. I was at Shawbury and we were doing a lot of work with — what was that aircraft?
CB: With the Halifax?
MW: No. It’s not a Halifax.
CB: I’ve got it here. I’ll pass it to you. Hang on. I’ll stop the tape for a mo.
[Recording paused]
CB: Now if we may just go back on Roy’s activities. You’ve got out the album and we’re looking at pictures in the album. This is showing low level pictures of ships that they photographed here. So were they, were there weather ships as well as aircraft gaining Met intelligence or was it only aircraft?
MW: I’m not sure but I think, I don’t think it was only aircraft that were involved.
CB: Right. Yeah. So, what was Roy’s attitude to his job flying as a Met observer?
MW: Oh, I think he enjoyed it. Yes. I think he enjoyed the company of being with a crew and being —he always wanted to fly because as you know they were all volunteers anyway.
CB: Absolutely.
MW: But he — the Coastal Command is quite different from Bomber Command and also with Fighter Command. They’re all individual flights and don’t really relate to each other very much [pause] but equally they were all doing their —
CB: So, there, 517 Squadron was his squadron flying out of Brawdy. What were the other squadrons there because you weren’t supporting 517 were you?
MW: Yes.
CB: Oh, you were.
MW: Yes.
CB: Right.
MW: By that time, Bomber Command, I’d moved from Bomber Command to Coastal.
CB: Yes. But there were several squadrons at Brawdy were there?
MW: No. Not really. I don’t think. There was 517. I can’t remember any other squadron.
CB: Ok. Right.
MW: Mind you we were running down you see.
CB: Yes. Because we’d got to the end of the war.
MW: This was late on, you see.
CB: And Roy was commissioned in the RAF in the war. He started as a flying officer. What rank did he progress to?
MW: He didn’t go any further than flying officer.
CB: Right.
MW: But he really didn’t, I said to him yesterday, ‘Do you know where your log book is?’ And he said he didn’t know exactly. He thought it might be in one of the top cupboards which I can’t get in to now but he said there isn’t a lot of information in the logbook but you are welcome to have a look at it.
CB: It would be useful to see.
MW: Right. Yes.
CB: Please because —
MW: I’ll get Richard to go up there.
CB: Yes. Thank you. It would set the scene really well on what’s going on. So, now we’re getting to the end of the war so the requirement for Met observers is different. Did he ask to transfer back to the Met office or was he just instructed to do it?
MW: No, he wanted to come back. He needed to. He wanted to get out of the air force to come back in to the Met Office because that’s where his work was, he felt. The work he needed to do.
CB: Then you went to Aden. So what was it like being in Aden?
MW: In Aden. It was very hot [laughs]. It was quite enjoyable really when you got used to the heat but being, in younger days you did get used to the heat and it’s — [pause] We lived in the Crescent Hotel which was, because he was entitled to RAF accommodation but not for a wife. So, he came out. There was very little accommodation for Europeans. We couldn’t really — it was very difficult and expensive to try and find. I went out by boat on The Windrush. It took fourteen days, fifteen nights to get there.
CB: Through the Suez Canal.
MW: And Roy said, ‘You don’t need to bring any wellie boots because it never rains here.’ It was pouring when I arrived.
CB: So, what other families were there?
MW: I hadn’t any family then.
CB: No. But other families. There were other wives there. Were there?
MW: Oh yes. Yes.
CB: And what did you do because it was hot and no house?
MW: Well, we — [pause] Yes. We had coffee mornings together and because we didn’t have any people like hairdressings or manicure ladies or anything it was quite a big social life. We were either dining out or dancing or something practically every night. And so we, if we had any skills at all we helped each other out with hairdressing and those sort of things. Roy had — Roy had to wear, in the mess, and when we were dining out, always white shirts and cummerbund. Black cummerbund and for the ladies it was always evening dress. You couldn’t go anywhere without evening dress. It was really quite formal in that respect.
CB: So, he was a civilian by then, and — but the circle of people was RAF.
MW: Yes. Officer class because Roy was then classed as an officer although he wasn’t in the RAF.
CB: No. No. He had officer status. And was there a link with the navy and the army as well?
MW: Possibly, that I really didn’t know about. But I had a small job and I worked for British Airways. Or BOAC as it was then.
CB: Right.
MW: And I was, I suppose you would call it an air hostess but possibly not quite that strong. I went on the aircraft as they came in to land and told them — checked all their documents. The ones that were staying overnight — got them into the hotel. And the rest of them — told them where they were and what date. What the date was and what the time it was and made sure they were going in the right direction. And then I brought the other ones — anybody else back to the hotel. Collected them again in the morning to get them onto their flight. So, I did that for quite a while.
CB: So, when Roy went to Gan did you come back to the UK?
MW: Well, we came back from Aden.
CB: Yeah.
MW: Yes.
CB: Oh you did come back from Aden first. Yes.
MW: We came back from Aden to Abingdon.
CB: Right.
MW: And then we started the family and then we came here. It wasn’t until we came here that he, he went to Gan.
CB: Yeah.
MW: Roy went to Gan on his own.
CB: Yes.
MW: Because we couldn’t take families to Gan anyway.
CB: No. No. So what do you think Roy’s recollections of his flying times were?
MW: His?
CB: When he was flying as a Met observer.
MW: Oh very good. Yes.
CB: Yeah.
MW: They were a very happy crew. Yes.
CB: But he, he progressed well in civilian life and went around to all sorts of different places.
MW: Roy’s not ever been a very social person. This is his problem now. That he won’t socialise. Any socialising I’ve had to do and he had hardly any friends when he really left the RAF, the Met office, for that simple reason. That he doesn’t, he doesn’t know what to talk about other than the Met office or his family or perhaps the garden. Politically yes. He knows. If you want to know something he will, he can tell you the answers but he’s not a social person at all. Now, he’s having difficulty because he won’t socialise in the home. Yesterday, he was sitting on his own. But he’s got to be alright.
CB: Good. Thank you.
[Recording paused]
MW: His achievements.
CB: So, you said that Roy always wanted to be in the RAF but he was a clever boy at school.
MW: I mean his maths and science were exceptional and [pause] but the fact that the war was already on. Started. Decided, decided that he would miss university and go into the RAF but he couldn’t get in to the RAF at that time so he took the Met office.
CB: Do you remember why it was the RAF wouldn’t take him at that moment?
MW: I think it was, it was possibly due to age because he was only eighteen when he left the boarding school.
CB: Right. And had he identified that in going in the RAF he wanted to do Meteorology? How did he get into that?
MW: No. I think he was sort of, he was rather pushed in to that.
CB: Right.
MW: But his degree he was going to do on geography he did actually, started to do an Open University type of course. But he didn’t continue with it. The pressure in the Met Office was quite a lot really.
CB: How much do you know how he came to be guided towards the Met Office?
MW: With?
CB: How did, how did he join the Met Office?
MW: How did he? His job.
CB: How did he join it? Who persuaded him that that was the –
MW: I’ve no idea really.
CB: No.
MW: No. I think his leaning towards science had always — well I mean I think he would, if that’s where your strength was, in other words, wasn’t it?
CB: Now we spoke earlier about the situation of D-day particularly and the controversy about the forecasting there. Now, was Roy to some extent involved in the forecasting for D-day?
MW: No. Not really. No.
CB: Not directly.
MW: That was later you see and Roy was — I don’t think so. But I’m saying no but I wouldn’t be absolutely sure what he [pause]
CB: The reason I asked the question was because he was flying Epicure which was down in the Bay of Biscay. The concentration of shipping and air was based would be having weather from that area because on balance the British weather comes from the west. So that’s why I was asking the question.
MW: Yes. He may well have done. I wouldn’t be sure. I don’t know how I could — I could ask Brian Booth. He might know.
CB: Well we might pick up on that later.
MW: Yes.
CB: Yes. So, what was the — what would you say was the highlight of Roy’s career in the Met Office? Or associated activities.
MW: I have to tell you Chris if I wanted to wind Roy up I would say, ‘You didn’t want a wife. You’re married to the Met Office.’ And quite honestly, he was. He enjoyed it. I think. Enjoyed the forecasting.
CB: Right.
MW: And he, he was involved in quite a few special things that went on and he had his picture in The Telegraph and The Observer on occasions when they were doing special things. But I don’t know [pause] it’s —
CB: This was Met office activities rather than the RAF. Yes.
MW: Yes. Since we’d been married but where those cuttings are I would have to get the boys to find them.
CB: Yes.
MW: You can’t reach them. You really can’t.
CB: What would you think in his mind was a particular low of his activities in — either in the RAF or in the Met Office?
MW: What?
CB: A low point.
MW: A low point.
CB: Yeah. That he didn’t like, in other words.
MW: Well, he didn’t like, in fact a lot of them didn’t like the fact that the civil service were not progressing or not keeping up with, with the scale of pay until well after we came here. I can’t remember the year now but the pay was very poor compared with industries. In fact, he did, when we’d been married nine months when he was posted to Aden and he seriously thought of giving it up then and applied to the various firms that dealt with the sort of jobs he felt the jobs he could do. In fact, he was offered various jobs but in the end the pension plus the wages — one outweighed the other, you see. And he decided he would stay with the Met Office. But it wasn’t until quite late on that the pension scheme and the salary came into line with the rest of the people. You probably remember.
CB: I remember that the civil service pay was a bit of a challenge some years ago.
MW: It must have been — it must have been about ‘62 when we did get a rise. And now of course the Met Office pension — well, I don’t know what I’d do without it.
CB: No. Quite.
MW: It is a very good pension.
CB: Yeah.
MW: On his on his grade.
CB: Yes. Ok. Did he have any inhibitions about his activities in the war? Were there things that he particularly didn’t like?
MW: I don’t think so. No. I don’t think. We were all very young you see I think.
CB: Yes.
MW: We didn’t really — and we went into the business of young men who decided to be conscientious objectors at one stage and I think we did go into that didn’t we?
CB: Yes. Yeah.
MW: But you had to be a certain type and I — very few of the boys that I met and knew who were [pause] well they all wanted the war over. Yes. They all wanted to be back in civvy street and doing the things they wanted to do but on a whole it was, it wasn’t a sad story at all.
CB: No.
MW: No.
CB: That’s really interesting and helpful. Thank you very much Mary. So, we’ll stop there and we’ve got the album so we’ll pick up various bits, if necessary, at another time.
MW: Ok.
CB: Thank you, Mary,
[recording paused]
MW: You may find them of interest. Otherwise —
CB: So, we’re talking about Brian Booth who was a Met Office colleague.
MW: Yes.
CB: And do you want to just describe what the key issues there are?
MW: This?
CB: The main issues associated with what Brian has said.
MW: Well no. I think, I mean Brian would be happy to talk to you.
CB: Yes.
MW: If you wanted to.
CB: Yes.
MW: But these are lectures that he’s given.
CB: Oh right. Ok.
MW: Over the years. Over the last few years. He’s still very much into doing the –
CB: Yes. Ok. So, we’ll —that’s a separate issue. I think I’ll start with this.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Mary Ward about her husband Roy Ward
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-04-24
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AWardEM160424
Conforms To
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Pending review
Description
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Roy Ward joined the Meteorological Office when he was 18 and served as a Meteorological officer with 517 Squadron. He returned to the Meteorological Office as a civilian after the war and his final job before retirement was as a weather forecaster at Heathrow Airport.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Cathy Brearley
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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
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Devon
Wales--Pembrokeshire
Heathrow Airport (London, England)
Format
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00:54:30 audio recording
517 Squadron
ground personnel
Halifax
meteorological officer
RAF Brawdy
RAF Chivenor