1
25
75
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/975/11296/PMacIntoshD1501.1.jpg
d4139b0ba70a29563d2e00741335bb71
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/975/11296/PMacintoshD1701.2.jpg
aa4e1956aa46ea8d7055920193709d30
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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MacIntosh, Donald
D MacIntosh
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Donald MacIntosh DFC (1922 - 2019, Royal Air Force).
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Donald MacIntosh and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
In accordance with the conditions stipulated by the donor, this item is available only at the International Bomber Command Centre / University of Lincoln.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-09-27
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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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MacIntosh, D
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Donald MacIntosh
Description
An account of the resource
Don MacIntosh was working as a policeman until he volunteered for the RAF. This was a Reserved Occupation and volunteering for aircrew was the only option available to him. He was posted to 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney and took part of the raid on the Tirpitz. After the war he continued flying in the civilian industry.
In accordance with the conditions stipulated by the donor, this item is available only at the University of Lincoln.
Creator
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Alastair Montgomery
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-09-01
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AMacIntoshD170901, PMacIntoshD1501
Conforms To
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Pending review
Format
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00:32:57 audio recording
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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Great Britain
Norway
Russia (Federation)
England--Lincolnshire
Russia (Federation)--Arkhangelʹskai︠a︡ oblastʹ
Contributor
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Julie Williams
9 Squadron
aircrew
Lancaster
pilot
RAF Bardney
Tirpitz
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/583/8852/PHolmesGH1604.2.jpg
134f273cd93e015a7d789b8e877b159b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/583/8852/AHolmesGH161016.1.mp3
cc225552ec17450d62364d1a1b362db0
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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Holmes, George
George Henry Holmes
G H Holmes
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Holmes, GH
Description
An account of the resource
Nine items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer George Holmes (b. 1922, 1579658, 187788 Royal Air Force) his log book, records of operation, newspaper cuttings and photographs of personnel. He flew operations as a wireless operator / air gunner with 9, 50 and 83 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by George Holmes and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-21
2017-01-14
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AH: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Anna Hoyles. The interviewee is Mr George Henry Holmes. The interview is taking place at Mr Holmes’ home [deleted] Lincolnshire on the 16th of October 2016.
GH: Yes. I had some very lucky escapes. We had, we were going to [pause] I’ve written it down. I’ve got a terrible memory.
[pause]
GH: Stuttgart in Germany. And of course they originated in France thinking possibly that there wouldn’t be many, many night fighters there but we got caught and we got shot and it took off the bomb bay doors. They fractured the starboard wheel, ruptured the main spar and left us with cannon shells stuck in the fuel tanks which is actually really instantaneous. And we did a belly landing when we got back and I was one of the first out and running. Somebody said, ‘Are you frightened?’ I said, ‘Have you seen a Lanc go up in flames?’ And the bloke said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well. Well, when you do you’ll run faster than I do.’ And actually they took these cannon shells away by the, if you handled the armament, whatever and emptied them they found out that the cannon shells actually had been filled with sand instead of explosives. Otherwise we would have gone up in one. And that was once. And another night someone on a circuit when we were coming, of course I was at Skellingthorpe at the time and there were about five or six airfields all around. And we had a bump and nearly got tipped over by the windstream of another aircraft. And when we landed there was about five foot off the end of the pit, of the end of the aeroplane gone. That was, I think we could call a very near miss. And all through my career they used to say you’ve got to get it right. The good crews survive and the bad crews don’t. But when you’re dealing with an aeroplane that’s attacking you at about between five and six hundred mile an hour you don’t have time to work out all the superlatives. You just learn how to, well you have to try to get him in to four hundred yards for the ammo to be, do any damage whatsoever. And these would wait about a thousand yards and pump these things in to you, you know. But, yes we lost a lot of young men at the time. Look back sometimes and I think how the hell did we get through it?
AH: How did you come to join the RAF?
GH: Mixed feelings. I was living in Kettering at the time and I would be about six years of age. I’d only just joined school which was a joining age in those days of about six years I think and I saw the R100 or the R101 in the sky. A most amazing sight. And of course everybody was reading Biggles books so I wanted to be a Biggles man. And my father wouldn’t sign any papers for me so when I was eighteen I went down and joined the RAF as an air gunner. But there were so many enlisting at the time it was over twelve months I think before I was called. And they wanted me to be a pilot or navigator. I said, ‘No. I want to be an air gunner W/Op.’ Anyway, I finished up there. They made me a wireless operator / air gunner. Well, up to going into the air force I’d hoped to be a semi-professional musician because I played the violin from seven years of age to when I went in the air force, eighteen. And I played the violin, trumpet and a mandolin. And the man who was teaching me he used to make instruments and he was going to teach me how to make them. And, you know when I went in the air force I was in the air force for just over five years. I couldn’t get back to the standard that I was in and work for a living at the same time because you’ve got to put about two to three hours a day in you know, to it. So I abandoned the musical stuff. And actually I was at an old miner’s school. A corrugated tin hut thing and when we moved to Leicester and I was a top boy at the school. The teaching, they taught us in that stinking little old tin hut was beyond their, what they were teaching us in there. They told me I couldn’t do joined up writing. We’d got to go back to scroll, you know. But I went to a school that was attached to the College of Art and Technology and I was studying textiles and hosiery. And I earned a very good living through the entire working life producing socks, stockings, knee socks and things like that. Of course you got paid in on production in those days. You didn’t get a standing wage. The more you made the more you got paid. And you were allowed ten needles per week and if you broke more than that you had to pay for them. Six pence each I think they were then. The unions would go bloody mad now wouldn’t they? [laughs] I had a very good education really. I was very fortunate. I was almost fluent in French. The French master said, ‘I can’t understand you, Holmes. You’re the worst pupil I’ve ever had. You’re always talking, take no notice, I can’t understand how you’ve got top of the class in French.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s simple. You gave us a half an hour’s homework and I always got an hour. So I worked harder than anybody else.’ [laughs] But I had a very good — my parents were not wealthy. My dad was a manager of a, the management of a grocery shop. You know these, what they were before the war. Several strains of food, food retailers and I really thought I was going to be a semi-professional musician. But I abandoned that scheme altogether and I got my sleeves rolled up and got stuck in this hosiery thing. ‘Til the war of course and then I couldn’t get, I couldn’t wait to get in the air force. And I finished up as a wireless operator / air gunner due to the fact, I always presumed, I don’t know whether it’s true or not but the fact that I had learned music, got some dashes and all like that. Morse code came easy and I was a very good operator. But apart from that I had a very happy marriage. I’ve got one son. He’s sixty seven now. And a he’s a fourth [unclear] at Judo. But life is a wonderful thing. Not to be wasted. And when you look at the war and see the number of thousands of young people who were wasted in the war. And the building and the costs. At the end of the day you have to sit around a table and talk it over from the first day. Save a lot of trouble and strife. But of course in those days Bomber Command was the thing.
AH: So you wanted to join Bomber Command?
GH: Oh yes. But then when you say wanted to join Bomber Command I’d always worked shifts. Night shifts and three shifts and things. I thought if I go in to the air force I’d be alright. And what did they do? They stuck me on Bomber Command. It was night work. But it wasn’t altogether good so as you look in the book you’ll see I did quite a number of daylight operations.
AH: Where did you train?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Where did you train? Where did you do your training?
GH: Where did I do my training? It was wonderful really. I I went to Blackpool first of all. That was the Number 10 RS something it was called. Signals Reserve or something. And they were all radio personnel in the air force up there. And we had a bloke called corporal [pause] I forget his name now. Corporal. Used to take us to the arm drill and foot drill. And his stage name was Max Wall. Can you imagine a man like Max Wall teaching you? Amazing. And then I went down to Yatesbury for a radio course. And I was posted then to Manby in the ground wireless op ‘til they could fit me into an air gunner’s course. Well, Manby in those days was number 1 AS. Air Armaments School and they taught bomb aimers and air gunners. We kept going to see the groupie and saying, ‘Get us on the course for air gunners.’ ‘No. You have to wait until you come through officially.’ When it did come through we was at a place called Evanton. About forty mile north of Inverness. First time I’d been to Scotland. In June it was. And it was a wonderful summer. And it was the first time I’d seen the shaggy Highland cattle. And I was taken by Scotland ever after that. Then after that, the gunnery course, I was sent to Market Harborough which is now a prison. And I used to push off home every night. After being there about three weeks the CO said, ‘We’re getting rid of you. You’re never here.’ It used to take me an hour to get home from Market Harborough on the local bus through all these villages. Little villages. And I was posted to Silverstone. And at Silverstone if you went in and out by railway you could get a train called the Master Cutler which was a high speed train from Sheffield to London and back. It used to do that in forty five minutes. That was quicker than being in [laughs] And I got crewed up there then and joined the [unclear] so to speak but I suppose if you were young men you had to be in something. You had no objection. I mean, no one wanted you to be a conscientious objector or anything. There we were. I joined Bomber Command and I was very lucky because I got with some good crews and I must admit I was commissioned towards the end of the war as a wireless op and I got operational strain and one thing or another. I was a bit of a drunkard. The only way of overcoming some of the strenuous [pause] I mean the beer we were drinking in those days I think was 1.2 percent alcohol. The water you washed the glasses in was stronger than the beer.
AH: So did you drink mainly beer? Or did you drink other stuff?
GH: No. No. The doc said, our doc on the squadron, ‘Go out and get pissed. It’ll do you good. Don’t go on spirits.’ And I was based around here. Around Louth. One way or another. It’s so that when my wife and I decided to come and live here it was after I’d retired. It was a home away from home really.
AH: Where were you first based? Where were you based first?
GH: Where was —?
AH: Where were you first based? Which was your first base? Where were you sent first?
GH: Oh. At a place called Bardney. Just outside Louth. And we got there. The place was, looked vacant and we got out the transport and looked around and looked in the ditches and it was full of bodies. We said, ‘What are you doing down there?’ They said, ‘Bugger off, there’s a fire in the bomb dump.’ So we said, ‘Oh, we’ll leave you to it then.’ But anyway a guy put it out. And then we went from that place. I did six ops there. And then we went to Skellingthorpe where the pilot was made up to a squadron leader. And we were only allowed two or three operations a month due to the losses of experienced crews. And by the time we’d done twenty trips together he, the pilot and the navigator went over to Pathfinders as the rest of the crew did. And the, the crew got sort of crewed up but the wireless, he didn’t want a wireless. He brought one with him, the pilot. So I was a spare bod and I went with an Aussie crew. His name was Cassidy and he’d got it painted on the side of a Lancaster. “Hop Along Cassidy’s Flying Circus.’ And I finished up at the one near Boston. What is it?
AH: Coningsby?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Coningsby?
GH: Coningsby. Yes. Yes.
AH: What squadron were you in first?
GH: 9. And then I went on to 50 at Skellingthorpe and then I went on to 83 at Coningsby.
AH: And what planes?
GH: Lancs. Well, after the war, if you look in the book look I went on a tour to South America. They sent three what were called Lancaster Mark 21s I think. But in actual fact they renamed them to Lincolns. It was a bigger aircraft that the Lancaster. Especially built for the war against the Japanese. And we went right down the west coast of Africa and then across over the Atlantic to Brazil and then right down to Santiago. Flew over the second highest mountain in the world I think it is. Aconcagua. But by then I’d decided I would take a course, this course on radiography, radio operating and get on to the public airlines. And I’d met my lady who I married and I found out that to be on public airlines you were away for home for anything from six weeks to three months. I thought well that’s not right. So I docked that and as I say I stayed in the hosiery trade. Yeah. Had quite a varied existence one way or another.
AH: What did you do in South America?
GH: Demonstrated the aircraft. I think they’d got that many four engine aircraft they didn’t know what to do with them and they were trying to flog them to anybody who’d buy them. God knows where all the aeroplanes went to. They just suddenly disappeared.
AH: And what was it like there?
GH: Pardon?
AH: And what was it like? Were they interested?
GH: Interesting.
AH: Were they interested in the aircraft?
GH: Oh very much so. Yes. Yes. Whilst we were there there was an earthquake in Peru and they wished us to send someone who would take some supplies over to Peru for the earthquake. And the air force said they couldn’t be allowed to do that because although we’d get to Peru and land they hadn’t got an air force runway long enough to take off so we’d be stuck. But yeah. Funny thing was we all decided when we were going to Brazil we would get together and learn Spanish. And when we got to Brazil they didn’t speak Spanish. They spoke Portuguese [laughs]
AH: How long were you out there for?
GH: Oh not very long. I should think, well if you look in the book it’ll tell you how long. About four weeks I think. We did one leg of the journey per day. And —
AH: And when were you demobbed?
GH: When? I think it was June of 1945.
AH: And how long were you in 9 Squadron?
GH: Pardon?
AH: How long were you in 9 Squadron?
GH: Only a few weeks. Not very long.
AH: What was it like?
GH: Quite an eye opener really. Mainly we were supporting the invasion. In fact that was the first time I’d ever seen the white cliffs of Dover coming back from France on D-Day. As I say all the boats going over.
AH: How did that feel?
GH: Have I —?
AH: How did that feel?
GH: Satisfied I would think would be the only expression. That we were doing something. And of course that’s another point. I mean I don’t know whether you’ve watched it on telly but they give you films of the actual landings in France and they chuck the blokes out into the water that was about six foot deep. They were drowned. Never got to France at all. Instead of waiting for the tide to go out. Some damned idiots in this military attitude.
AH: What did you think of Bomber Command?
GH: Well organised. To a certain extent they were very well organised. Many actual Bomber Command crews packed up before they’d completed a tour of course because it was a great strain. I remember doing a daylight on, I think it was at one of the flying bomb sites when they were launching flying bombs. And of course Bomber Command never flew in the way the Yanks did. They had three people from leading in and everybody was sort of doing what they called a gaggle at the back. And we were close up behind this three Bomber Command [pause] well, leaders I suppose and I looked up and saw an aircraft above was opening his bomb doors. I thought it’s going to drop on him shortly. Anyway he did. He dropped them and then it just floated down. Hit the aircraft on the right hand side, the starboard, knocked his wing off and he spun over and tipped the wing of the other who went that way and he tipped the wing of the other and went that way. And there were bodies without parachutes floating around and everything. And it was Cheshire who was controlling the raid. Called the raid off because he said the chaps didn’t stand a chance if we bombed it. So we flew back to the North Sea and dumped the bombs and went home. But the things like that they were happening every day. You know, I mean I’m afraid you accepted it.
AH: Do you remember where you were going on that raid?
GH: Not completely. No. Because there were one or two launch sites for flying bombs. I mean at one time as far as I know they were, they were launching something like ten thousand pound. Ten thousand flying bombs in a matter of a month or whatever, you know. I mean they were really showering the south of England with them. And —
AH: And how did you feel when you saw the bombs coming?
GH: I hope to God it misses me. To be truthful. But it was a sight, you know. Their only, these aircraft which they hit and damaged were only about a hundred, hundred and fifty yards in front of us. A matter of three seconds or something isn’t it? The speed we were flying at it could have been us. But many of the young lads who joined up when I joined up never finished. They were killed. A great deal of loss of human youngsters. Many of them technicians and people we missed after the war finished because of their experiences. And if you take that you promise me I will get it back?
AH: Yeah.
GH: Because I applied for the Aircrew Europe Star which was allotted to everybody who did two or more operations before D-Day which I did and I was told I didn’t, I hadn’t done enough. So when they issued the Bomber Command medal at the end of the war they said I couldn’t have that either because I’d got the 1939-45 Star or something. I don’t know. I thought well that’s great. I did twenty one ops and I never got a bomber medal. It’s unbelievable some fairy in Whitehall who was domineering the life span of the one doing the work. But the main thing I need at the present moment is some backup somewhere to get, I mean I mentioned to you earlier how much it cost. I was only getting two hundred and ninety pound a month. That’s about seventy pound a week towards the cost of being here and it was costing [pause] what was it? Well, a monthly, the monthly cost here is three thousand and forty one which is quite expensive. I think it’s a very good. I get my monies worth. But I think the company, the government or whoever, the Department of Works and Pension allow me something to help me pay for it and they want [coughs] they just knocked off the pension credit. I’m about two and a half thousand pound a month worse off when I got a pay rise of two pounds and fifteen pence [pause] In other words hard luck isn’t it? You know I mean I’m not the sort of person who is laid back and you handed something but I’ve worked all, all my own life. What I’ve got I’ve chased the work of one kind or another. Whether it was in the air force or out. And I’m disgusted actually to think the money that gets wasted.
AH: Could I just ask you a few more questions about the war?
GH: Yes.
AH: What did you think of the way Bomber Harris was treated?
GH: Disgustingly. As I said earlier he was blamed for bombing the population whereas the targets were selected by the War Committee. And the two leaders of that were Lord Portal and Winston Churchill. Bomber Harris was behind his crews all the way. Next question.
AH: Where did you go after 9 Squadron?
GH: With 50 Squadron at Skellingthorpe. That was, it was so far to the sergeant’s mess from where we were displayed in Nissen huts we used to go into Lincoln for breakfast [laughs]
AH: What sort of squadron was it?
GH: What 83? Er 50?
AH: 50.
GH: Very very compatible actually. The man who was my pilot took his place as flight commander was Metham. He finished up deputy leader of some bomber group. Was it Metham? He’s a well-known, established leader of the Royal Air Force.
AH: Was that a Pathfinder squadron?
GH: No. No. They only had two Pathfinder squadrons. They were both at Coningsby. 83 and 97.
AH: Were you in them at all?
GH: I was on 83. I did, I think nine trips with 83 Squadron. They said that it was easy on Pathfinders of course. You, if you’re first flare leaders putting the flares down you went over and laid your flares and shot off home but they didn’t tell you when you started laying your flares you had to put it in automatic pilot and you couldn’t drift. So by the time you got to the end of laying the flares the Germans had got all the information of what you were doing [pause]
GH: And I have the greatest admiration of the German people and Germany itself. Moreso than any other European country. I have a great ideal, great ideals of them. They’re a wonderful people. We should never have gone to war against them. Well, should we?
AH: What do you think we should have done?
GH: Pardon?
AH: What could, what could Britain have done instead?
GH: Shot Adolf Hitler. It was a dictator. A man who believes beyond his experience. I think, well what’s happening in the world today? I mean we’re now fighting the, oh ethnic crowds that we were fighting in the days of Christ. For two thousand years we’ve been fighting. Still doing it and we’ll lose in the end. Of course people say they mean good. If you read the Koran as far as I remember the first rule is thou shalt now kill. And I think the fourth one is thou shalt kill all non-believers. So it leaves you in a sticky mess. And they’re gaining popularity all the while.
AH: When did you read the Koran?
GH: I haven’t read the Koran. I’ve read extracts from it. I’m quite interested in reading other people’s religions and of course in actual fact I believe in the bible which says when you die it’s ashes to ashes and dust to dust. I don’t think there’s a heaven up there. I don’t think there’s anything like that. I think it’s just, you’re just dead meat. Unfortunately. And many many people leave their readings, writings and paintings to be perused over and you get the benefit of their experience.
AH: Have you written anything?
GH: Written anything? Only rude things on the wall [laughs]. No. I wish I could have written things. I was too busy with music. As I said I went to a school where we had possibly an hour to two hours homework every night of various kinds and I didn’t really get out amongst other young fellas of my age because I was doing one to two hours music training as well. Now, the school I went to had started a school orchestra. Violin, banjo and drums. And I loved music. But as I say when I went in the air force I didn’t take a violin with me and I should have done I suppose. After being in five years my fingers were all stiffened up with, didn’t work. So I abandoned it straightaway and got on with earning a living
[knocking on door]
GH: Come in.
Other: Sorry to disturb you.
AH: I’ll just put this on pause.
[recording paused]
GH: They don’t look like reading my writing for a start. But there’s a cutting in there I think I mentioned it earlier on from Stalin who stated he wanted the Bomber Command to burn Dresden because they were using it to refuel the battlefield. And it wasn’t so because after the war I were working with some of the replacement Polish people and they said they’d been in Dresden and there were no army facilities there at all. There was no reason for them to bomb it.
[pause]
GH: And I have a younger sister who’s ninety in October. Laurie. So we’re quite a long lived family aren’t we?
AH: How old are you?
GH: Ninety four. Feel a hundred and four [laughs] some mornings. Yes.
AH: You’ve got a picture here of Squadron Leader Munro.
GH: Yes. He wanted to crew up with us. He’s just recently died you know. A New Zealander. That was when I was at gunnery school at Scotland.
AH: Which one’s you?
GH: How dare you say that [laughs] I haven’t changed that much at all surely. I’m the shortest one. Yes. And that’s my favourite photograph of myself.
AH: That’s nice.
[pause]
GH: Yes. It’s a wonderful world and I’ve met some wonderful people and I’ve had some wonderful friends and relatives. It’s been enjoyment. Mixing the good with the bad makes you appreciate it all the more. We came out of there as you go in.
AH: You talked about the strain of it. What was the worst strain?
GH: Being with Bomber Command? Well, naturally the, the operations themselves. They were well organised, I don’t mean like that but I mean they always taught us the best crews will get through. Did I mention to you before luck has a lot to do with it? And I mean a matter of seconds in some cases. I never flew as an air gunner though. I was in the Home Guard before I went in the air force. In Leicester. Well a little village outside Leicester called Narborough. And they used to send me out on a railway bridge defending the bridge at night time with a bayonet fastened to a broomstick with string. I don’t know what you were supposed to do with it. I had a few thoughts. But by the time I went into the air force I was fully trained and I’d got a Canadian Ross rifle that was in a cloth bag with about two inches of grease all around it. And I cleaned it up and the stock of it was beautiful. Lovely gun. And one of the chaps, he was a sergeant. I think he must have been a sniper. He said, ‘I’ll teach you how to fire a gun George.’ Because,’ he said, ‘Let’s face it. Who’s the last person that knows when you’re going to pull the trigger?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Well you don’t pull the trigger. You squeeze your hand. And you don’t jolt it.’ And I could hit an eight hundred target, a bull at eight hundred yards. Which is quite good shooting I think. But I never did fly as a air gunner. I flew once as a tail gunner. And the tail one was like that. You knew all I got it I knew I wouldn’t have that for long.
AH: Did you get bombed yourself?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Did you get bombed yourself? In Leicester.
GH: Well, Leicester got bombed while I lived there. But we lived on the outskirts. And of course like most targets they usually go for the city centre first where all the main multiples are. And I was, I was quite happy in the Home Guard because we got very very good training. Initially it was useless. For the first two years. But when they got organised they got organised. And I sit and watch “Dad’s Army,” you know. And I I don’t know who picked the cast but it’s amazing to think [laughs] they look like real people [laughs] Anything else?
AH: Did you meet your wife during the war?
GH: No. I met her after the war. One of the boys who’s died in the last two years from Leicester was in training with me all the way through and he finished up at Coningsby on 97 Squadron and I finished up on 83. And his wife and my wife or future wife or his future wife, they used to go dancing Saturday nights together. And I met this girl one night in the RAF club. And I can’t understand that, I can’t explain the feeling but she was wonderful. And I said, ‘Can I see you again?’ And she said, ‘Well, I can’t see you for two weeks because I’m going up to Lincolnshire. To a town that you’ve never heard of.’ Well, I’d done all my training and everything here so I said, ‘Well, try me then.’ She said, ‘Louth.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got news for you. I can’t go to Louth again [laughs] They’d shoot me.’ And she was always dying her hair. I think after the first two months I knew her she must have had about six or seven changes of colour. She was lovely though.
AH: What was her name?
GH: Barbara. And when we first got married we had to live in the front room of my mum and dad’s house until we could get somewhere. Everyone does I suppose. And her uncle was a butcher and he used to do all the joints of meat for Leicester. And this friend of his, a friend of his or someone in the trade he dealt with was the housing minister for Leicester. And in those days you couldn’t get housed if you hadn’t got a wood licence. You had to have a timber licence. And he mentioned to this gent that I was having trouble with my wife’s breathing because my mother and father had a dog and she was allergic to dog hair. And he said to this young gent, ‘He’s just come out the air force and he definitely wants a house but, and his wife is allergic to dog hairs and has to get out, you know of home and have his own place.’ And the fellow twiddled it a little bit and got me a timber licence and away we went. We bought a semi for nineteen hundred quid. And then after a while we bought, we bought a complete des res like, you know what do you call it? A house on its own at, in Oadby near to Leicester at the back of the racecourse and you got a full view of the racecourse. And I used to say to people, ‘I’ve got a nice place. There’s about four furlongs of grass at the back and they came and cut it, you know regularly,’ [laughs] But as I say we had this problem with this hooligan who was threatening her so that’s how we moved to Louth. But I mean moving to Louth was like going next door to the pair of us because we’d both been here so many times.
AH: Did you like Louth?
GH: I think it’s very nice. And I think once you get into Louth the people will do anything but they’re a little offish at the start. But it’s a lovely little town. I was born in Mansfield. In the Sherwood Forest. But I did like Louth there. Very much.
AH: What was your home like there?
GH: Where?
AH: In Mansfield.
GH: Well, I was brought up with my grandparents. I wasn’t brought up with my mother and father. They couldn’t get anywhere to live in, although my sister had been born. They wouldn’t accept anyone with two children so they farmed me off with my grandparents. My grandmother Holmes, when I was six or seven or eight years of age taught me how to sew and darn and knit.
AH: Did you have use of that later?
GH: Yes. Because I went into the hosiery trade and it was the machines that knit things make exactly the same loop as you do a knitting pin. And of course as I say I, I had a quite a few jobs. The job I had at Byfords. The other chap working next to me who was in his forties hadn’t been taken to the army. Hadn’t been called up. With a wife and two children. He always used to go down smoking in the toilets about once every hour and I used to run his machines as well as mine. And one day, you used to put your earnings under the table where they kept all the yarns and everything. He had a sneaky look and he found out I was earning more than him. So he went to the manager and he said he didn’t see any reason why someone’s underage that were in machinery should be earning more than he did. So they said, ‘Oh alright, we’ll give you two of his machines. They had me in the office and they said, ‘You’ve been bragging.’ I said, ‘What about?’ They said, ‘What you earn.’ I said, ‘I daren’t tell my father what earn. He’d go mad.’ I was earning as much or twice as much as my dad. And they said, ‘Well, we’re going to take two of your machines off you and you’ll run them for him.’ So I said, ‘I have an idea now. You can stick them up your arse.’ And they gave him the bloody lot. I got sacked for insolence. I got another job. I was never out of work. I got training that was necessary and I could go anywhere. I worked at Byfords. They sacked me three times after that incident and a very good job. The only snag is when I went into it before the war you were using cotton and well, wool and the machines were covered in like a white powder from the cotton in the wool, you know. And after the war when they started using synthetic fibres I think the synthetic fibres were so small you swallowed them. And I have a difficulty with breathing actually which is due to that I think. But nobody would say so because you then would jump then and say I want paid for being. I don’t think, I don’t think there’s more than one or two hosiery factories left in Leicester and it used to be the main city for hosiery. But that was all, that was all shift work. Night work and not very conducive for family life. I used to go to work because I mean you were busy. It didn’t bother you but my wife was stuck at home on her own you know and I didn’t realise until after I’d lost her that that’s what the problem was really. Basically. But we had a good life together. Yeah.
AH: Was your father or your grandfather in the First World War?
GH: Both my father and my wife’s father were in the First World War. My wife’s father was stationed at Louth here. In the Leicester, what did they call it? It was a mountain brigade. And he was only a little bloke. Smaller than me. And he looked like, well you just couldn’t imagine him sat on a horse.
AH: What he was called?
GH: Pardon?
AH: What he was called?
GH: His surname? Evans. Evans. Good Evans. I went to Edmonton for my gunnery course and we had a group captain called Group Captain Evans Evans and he got awarded the French medal. The Croix de Guerre. And he said, ‘Although I flew in World War One I’ve not flown in World War Two and I don’t think I deserved it. So I shall get a crew together and fly.’ So I went to my CO and I said, ‘Look, old Evans Evans is getting a crew together.’ We had a chance to get in because at that time I was a spare. And he said, ‘No, I don’t think so. My wireless op is covering that because he’s one behind everyone else in the crew and we all want to finish together.’ And off they went and they were shot down by the Americans before they got to the war. Before they got to the war line they were shot down by the Americans. And the only one that got out was the rear gunner. So that was another lucky escape. Just how the penny drops isn’t it? Am I boring you? Say so if I am. Anyway [pause] I am suffering really from the breathing quite badly.
AH: Shall we finish?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Do you want us to finish?
GH: Yes.
AH: Thank you very much.
GH: Quite all right. If it’s been of any —
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with George Holmes
Creator
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Anna Hoyles
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-16
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AHolmesGH161016
Conforms To
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Pending review
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Contributor
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Cathie Hewitt
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Brazil
Chile
Germany
Great Britain
Peru
Chile--Santiago
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Stuttgart
Temporal Coverage
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1945
1946
Description
An account of the resource
George was born in Mansfield and was bought up by his Grandparents until he was seven when he moved back to his parents in Leicester where his Father ran a coffee shop. He was a semi-professional musician playing violin, trumpet and mandolin. He studied hosiery at college and worked in hosiery production his entire working life. He joined the Home Guard in Narborough, and recalls how he defended the railway bridge at night time with a bayonet fastened to a broom stick with string. After volunteering for the Air Force he was sent to Blackpool for training. The corporal who taught him foot drill went on to be the comedian Max Wall. He was then sent to RAF Yatesbury for his radio course, and then forwarded to the Air Armourers school. After completing the course, he was posted to RAF Evanton for a gunner’s course. His next posting was to RAF Market Harborough, but was only there for three weeks before he was sent to RAF Silverstone for crewing up. His first station was RAF Bardney with 9 Squadron for a few weeks. He remembers that when they arrived at Bardney it was deserted and they found everyone lying on the floor in the kitchen as the bomb dump was on fire. The crew were then posted to RAF Skellingthorpe in 50 Squadron and they completed 20 operations. George recalls a daylight operation on a V-1 site, and he witnessed the Lancaster that was above them blown up and seeing the bodies of the crew falling past their aircraft. The crew were then split up when the pilot and navigator joined the Pathfinders and he became a spare bod. He eventually joined an Australian crew in 83 Squadron at RAF Coningsby and completed a further nine operations. His pilot was called Cassidy and the nose art on the Lancaster was “Hop along Cassidy’s Flying Circus.” After the war he took part in a tour of South America and discusses an earthquake in Peru. He discusses his religious beliefs and how the war, Bomber Command, and Arthur Harris have been remembered. He met his wife Barbara after the war at a dance in the RAF club and they had one son.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:08:02 audio recording
50 Squadron
83 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
bomb dump
bomb struck
bombing
civil defence
crewing up
faith
forced landing
Home Guard
Lancaster
mid-air collision
nose art
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
RAF Bardney
RAF Coningsby
RAF Evanton
RAF Market Harborough
RAF Silverstone
RAF Skellingthorpe
training
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/595/8864/PLashamB1501.2.jpg
da6d480d6a799fe46724652cc35229e9
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/595/8864/ALashamB150716.1.mp3
8a9d33f42649006ef03208c246e5f74a
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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Lasham, Bob
R L C Lasham
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Lasham, RLC
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer R L C Lasham DFC and bar (1921 - 2017, 161609 Royal Air Force)and a photograph. After training in the United States and Canada he flew 53 operations as a pilot on 9 and 97 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Bob Lasham and catalogued by Nigel Huckins..
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AM: Okay, so this interview’s being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Annie Moody and the interviewee is Bob Lasham, and the interview’s taking place at Bob’s home in Wilmslow on today, the 16th of July 2015. So, thanks for agreeing, Bob, and if perhaps if we can start off and just tell me a little bit about early life, schooldays, et cetera?
BL: I’ll start at the beginning. I’m a Cockney; I came to be a Cockney because they say a Cockney’s someone who is, was born within the sound of Bow Bells, and I was born within two hundred yards of the Whittington Stone, where Dick is supposed to have heard the Bow Bells. Well, we had the Underground running underneath, tram running outside, I might not have done. But Laura and I [?] were on holiday to the Isle of Wight and the [unclear] Centre’s there, and I submitted their claim to them, they came to me [?] and they said ‘You’re trying to cheat, aren’t you?’ [slight laugh] So that was that. Elementary school, passed what they called a trade scholarship, so I went to a junior technical school in Kentish Town, travelling to and from on the Underground, penny return, yeah. [clock chimes]And – got my hearing aid in and it sounds so loud!
AM: And, as you can hear, it’s now eleven o’clock and the bells are chiming.
BL: Looking around for an apprenticeship, my parents said, ‘Look for a company which has a pension scheme.’ Went to three companies: Smiths, who used to make motorcars and instruments; a tool-making company in the middle of London, I would have liked to have gone there but they only had employed just over a hundred people, no pension scheme, so I went to British Thomson-Houston, very well-known company making heavy switchgear, electrical engineering. I realised later on I should have gone for mechanical engineering, but I wanted a reserved occupation. And, of course, the air raids started, and I realised ‘There’s a lot of work in this’. Whenever it was –
AM: [whispers] Sorry, carry on.
BL: Air raid one night, we all overlooked some playing fields, it was, like, a girls’ high school there, I used to look out of a window and watch them playing hockey, you know, dirty old, dirty old man, I was a young lad! [slight laugh] And the house directly opposite was bombed, we suffered some damage. If the bomb was at least a couple of seconds later, if it were coming from the east, it would probably hit our house. My parents were there, were in the Anderson shelter, I was asleep in the back bedroom, and I woke up covered with the ceiling. I think about that time I thought maybe it was safe to get out of London, and I think it was in about January or February ’41, signs were going up: people in reserved occupations can volunteer for flying duties in the Royal Air Force, the Fleet Air Arm, as part of [unclear]. So, couple of weeks later, I went down and volunteered, at somewhere near Euston it was, had an interview, very quick medical, and that was that. And three weeks later, had a letter from somebody or other saying would I go and report there again to register? I went in and saw the same people, said ‘Haven’t we seen you before?’ I said ‘Yes, you saw me about three weeks ago.’ ‘Oh, we’ve got all your details, you’d better go home.’ And I went home and waited, and finally called up in July, just after my twentieth birthday.
AM: So July 1940?
BL: 1941.
AM: ’41, sorry.
BL: ’41. By that time, well, production of air crew was like a Ford production line, it was running so smoothly. And [unclear] an Air Crew Reception Centre, AR – ACRC, known to everybody as Arsy Tarsy. Still to this days, you meet people, ‘Oh, were you at Arsy Tarsy?’ Yes. And er, there for, we were there for about ten days where we were kitted out, inoculations, FFI - Free From Infection. Look at the curly bits, make sure you’re not carrying livestock around. That continued as long I was an airman or an NCO, but once you were commissioned, they didn’t do it anymore; yeah, officers wouldn’t have to take their time with people [?], I suppose. While we were there – I can remember our first corporal – oh, we reported to Lord’s cricket ground, and there must have been an intake of, every week, about, I would say, three or four hundred, divided into flights of fifty, and the person in charge of our flight was Corporal Schubert. Whenever I hear a piece of grotty music, I always say ‘That sounds like Schubert’, and someone said ‘How’s that?’ I said ‘You’ve never met Corporal Schubert!’ But he was a good-hearted soul. A lot of the corporals had a grudge on their shoulder; they’d been in the Air Force for ten or fifteen years just being corporal, they knew we would be sergeants, you know, within no time at all. [Pause] Catering: we used to queue up in flights of fifty, eat in the London Zoo, and before we had a catering shed [?], knives and forks, as you walked out, you swirled about in a bucket of water and put them to dry; [stage whisper] I think the bucket of water was used for soup later on! But I seem to remember, we seemed to live mainly on kippers and sausages. Not many animals left in the zoo, but those that were, I’m sure, were fed a lot better than us. Still trying to think of the people I know; amongst the people I did know, a fellow called Harry Wilson, I’ll tell you about him later on. And we finally got our uniforms, and we used to have a little white flash in our caps to say you were a training air crew, and we all trooped off to, I think it was the Odeon in Leicester Square, to see “Target for Tonight”. I think we saw that and, when we came out, having made a big mistake. Anyway, next stop, Babbacombe Initial Training Wing: basic navigation, lots of keep-fit exercises, we had our own section on the beach, we could go swimming, were there for, I think it was about six weeks. Now, night train, next stop, Wilmslow [comical sotto voce] in the wild, woolly north, you know, and I can remember getting out of the station and walking through what is now Wilmslow Park – probably Wilmslow Park then– to the RAF camp, with carrying a kit bag very heavily loaded, and we were there for, again, for about couple of weeks. The second week there, we were all issued with civilian clothing, so we knew we were probably going to America. Two days later, they took them back again. I can - the only thing I can remember about it – the little belts children used to use with a sort of snake buckle on it, that was to keep the trousers up, yeah! Anyway, the Americans were not in the war, but they changed their laws so we could go into America in uniform – more of that later. And, once again, we travelled by night up to Gruddock /Grenock[?], all got on board the Louis Pasteur-it was a French cruise liner, French cruise liner. Some of us were sleeping on the floor, some on – stretching out on the tables with their heads up. I was a lucky one, I managed to get a hammock. We were there for about twenty-four hours, the boat was – in Gruddock [?], the boat was rocking up and down, and got up the next morning, there was a north westerly gale blowing, and a very small convoy, only about six, six vessels, and I was sick, practically everybody was sick, I should think. And then, that night, we left the convoy and sailed straight for Halifax. It was a fast boat like the Queen Mary, and we were there in eight, was it eight days, I think. Greeted at Halifax, a sort of [unclear] WVS, and they arranged to send telegrams to our folks in England saying that we’d arrived safely in Canada. Was a place called Malton in [pause] I’m not quite sure what the state was, except that it was a dry state, no alcohol for sale, and we were there not very long and, again, got on the train – four days. I couldn’t realise, no country could be that big, no! We had one stop in [pause] we stopped in Washington on the way down, that’s right, and we had some hours to spare, so some of us got hired a taxi, went to see the Washington Memorial and – Lincoln, sorry, the Lincoln Memorial –
AM: Lincoln Memorial.
BL: And then we arrived at Jacksonville in northern part of Florida. Again, we got off and we were taken out for dinner by the people of Jacksonville, I suppose, fifty of us by then. Was another night train and we arrived in Clewiston. I don’t know the geography of Clewi- Florida; at the bottom, there’s a very big lake-
AM: Yeah, I’m just working my way down.
BL: Lake Okeechobee, and we were just on the edge of Lake Okeechobee, in the middle of nowhere. Clewiston was a one-street town; they had a cinema, the Dixie Crystal – it’s funny how you remember these things – a bowling arrow – a bowling alley with a black boy to put the, ah, the skittles up afterwards, we did that. And they were surprised to see us in uniform because they had not been using it, and on the way down, someone enquired if we were an American football team ‘cause we were in uniform! [laughs] That’s beside the point. And we arrived overnight – seemed to have lost clothing overnight [?] – into breakfast, and there was this jug of light brown liquid to drink, it was cold tea! I never drink cold tea, but it was a great thirst-quencher. And we started flying on – it was called a Stearman, Stearman PT-17, and instructor was a chap called Tom Carpenter, and I was having trouble going solo – talk about luck! Half the course had gone solo and he hadn’t really told me what I was supposed to do, but on our desk – we had a big desk we used to use for swotting [?] – there was a book on flying training, and looked up landing. You – as you level out, you let the speed decay and finally your paces [?] down on three points; he didn’t tell me that I had to do that! Following day, I did three landings, he got out of the aeroplane and said ‘You can go solo’. [Unclear] he said ‘Look, Lasham, I was a bit bothered about seeing you doing that, sending you solo, but I’ve seen you recover from so many bad landings, I knew you’d recover from that.’ [laughs] And training proceeded. They had what they called a basic aeroplane then, a BT-13. My instructor was a Mr Dirigibus [?] - I think he had [unclear] – and he sent me solo very quickly; he didn’t like flying himself, I didn’t do much instruction with him. And then on to the Harvard afterwards, which was a nice aeroplane, and – remember the name of the – Charlie Miller was my instructor, he was a very nice fellow. Finally passed out, got my – we got our wings, I think it was in May.
AM: So how long had that taken?
BL: It took us about six months and quite a lot of the course failed. At that time, we were going out to America never, never having sat in an aeroplane at all, and usually about a dozen of the fifty would fail because they had no depth perception. And suddenly, someone in the UK realised we wasted a lot of money doing this, so they started getting people to start going solo in Tiger Moths over here before the sending them abroad, and the people in Canada, people in America, people in South Africa, people in Rhodesia, all over the world. And I finished me training, back to Canada, came back in a slower convoy, arrived in Liverpool. Liverpool was packed! [pause] I think that was the post, another charity appeal, I expect [sound of mail coming through the letterbox]. I’m sure you could have walked from Liverpool to Birkenhead just jumping from boat to boat. What a relief it was to get back in the UK! And down to Bournemouth, just two or three days in Bournemouth, we were sent on disembarkation leave, so I went home and saw my parents, saw my grandparents – they can bring you down – saw me granny, you know, sergeant’s, wing sergeant’s stripes, walked in, first thing she said: ‘Have you been up in an aeroplane by yourself yet?’ [laughs] Had no idea what was going on. Anyway, there’d be [unclear] an Advanced Flying Use, AFU, at Shorebury – you try saying ‘Shorebury, Shrewsbury, Shropshire’, which was the address, when you’ve had a couple of beers, you’re spitting over everybody! – and converted to Oxfords. And by that time, they’d ask you what you wanted to do, and, having been bombed in London, I thought ‘Oh, I’d like to be a night fighter pilot!’ So, came from there to RA – what was RAF Usworth, now, I think that’s the North East Air Museum now, just outside Sunderland. [Telephone rings] Forget it.
AM: You ignore the telephone, Bob?
BL: I, I do, yes; I can always pick it up later, see if there’s been a message. Err…Sunderland, near Sunderland. The, what they called the [unclear] side, the one hangar, was north of the Sunderland-Newcastle road. The southern part, which was the airfield, is now buried under the Nissan car factory.
AM: Right.
BL: Yes, yes. Anyway, they always had a medical when you arrived there, medical [?] inspection. I was in this chair, there was this beautiful, blue-eyed, young assistant, Joyce Farleigh [?] [pause, sounds of someone moving around the room]. Anyway, I saw her a couple of days later, we started going out together, and we were flying Avro Ansons, training radio observers. It was the airborne radar, preparation for going on to night fighters and, ah, [pause] were there for three or four months, so I got in quite a few more hours, which was useful later on, and then to Cranfield, for night fighter OTU, and enjoyed that, because we flew Blenheim 1’s, Blenheim 4’s, Blenheim 5’s, and then went on to Beaufighters. And taxied in one night, I put one beer on my Beaufighter whilst I was taxied [?] away onto the mud, put off the course [?] They were picky choosy, as my, as my grandchildren would say, and over half the course were failed. So I then went down to Brighton for what they called reselection, and [unclear] selection mark [?] ‘What would you like to go? Would you like to go to Air Transport Auxilliary, ATA?’ I said ‘No, I’d like to go to Bomber Command.’ So, finished up on Lancasters. Went to [pause] I – did I? No, I had to do another AFU on Oxfords, another few hours, and then finally to a place called Brigsley in Lincolnshire (that was really out in the sticks) and did my Lancaster conversion. One hour – two hours on Halifaxes and the rest on Lancasters, I’m glad I didn’t fly Halifaxes, I can’t remember the name of my instructor. Station commander there was a Group Captain Bonham-Carter. But basic radio receiver in the air force before that was called a TI-9 transmitter reception set, and he had a microphone in his battledress pocket ‘cause he was hard of hearing, and – I’m going aside a bit now – there was a museum at Winthorpe, just outside Newark; he founded it after the war.
AM: Oh, right.
BL: Back to where we were. He always made a point of [unclear] all the navigators, bomb aimers and pilots before they left. And I mentioned a chap called Harry, met up at ITW, he went to South Africa for his training, failed his pilot’s course, moved to old [?] Rhodesia and did his bomb aimer course. And we met up at Cottesmore when we were growing up; he said the first word he said to me was ‘Aren’t [?] you looking for a good pilot?’ and I said, you could [slight laugh] I said ‘Yes.’ He went in for an interview, Bonham-Carter, and got around that he’d failed his flying test, and Bonham-Carter said ‘What were you flying?’ He said ‘I was flying a Hawker Hart’ and that was the end of the conversation: Bonham-Carter deaf and a bloke who can’t fly a Hart. Switched off and Harry walked out! [laughs] What else happened there? Had a flight engineer - again, no flying experience. Waltzed through [?] his flight engineer’s course, airborne, and he was airsick every time he went up, so he had to be taken off-line. Now, a chap on the course with me was Mike Beetham [?].
AM: Oh, yes, yeah.
BL: Now, he’d gone off on a short course, I pinched his flight engineer, chap called Bill Gates [?], and he flew with me the rest of my operations. And then, from there to 9 Squadron, got there just before the Battle of Berlin. Not much happened there, oh, yeah, well, I suppose things did happen. Second, second dicky flight with a second pilot to fly it with – we didn’t, see, you just stood behind the chap who was flying – and it was the opening of the Berlin, Berlin and back, then, two or three nights later, going with my own crew, Berlin again, not, not a good start. And coming back – mind you, I was away [?] and new my first operation – Rear Gunner Eddie Clarke, now, he was an old man, he was in his thirties.
AM: Very old.
BL: Oh, ancient, yes, he’d been a driving instructor, and his oxygen had failed, and heating, obviously [?] had failed, and the net result was, he lost all the toes on his right foot, was taken off-line and we never communicated again, I think he pa – later on, when I was more experienced, I’d have come down to a lower altitude, but then they said ‘Stay with the stream’ and stay with the stream I did! [laughs] Great shame. I imagine, then, he probably had a job in the air force, he’d have kept his gunner’s badge, kept his sergeant’s stripes, possibly as a driving instructor. Incidentally, my wife did her driving at Liverpool – no, I’m sorry, Blackpool, yes, and passed her test there. [Pause] Anyway, 9 Squadron, again, luck. We used to do what was called bagging searches, so that I could look out my side and the flight engineer could look out his side, and we’d just started to roll and we were fired at, I don’t know, a [unclear], probably, so went into a corkscrew, and as we came up, I got another couple of bursts. If I’d have started that hanging search one second later, we’d have been shot out of the sky. My voice is going, isn’t it? [laughs] Anyway, we survived that. Again, rear gunner – from then on, we were getting any spare rear gunners – chap called Jack Swindlehurst, known as Jack Singleburst because he was a gunner, and a cannon shell hit the fire extinguisher behind his head and it peppered his shoulder with what was like gunshot wounds, but wasn’t seriously hurt, he was back flying again within a week. So, we carried on, and don’t think there were any other major, major instances there, and then Pathfinders.
AM: So this was 97 Squadron?
BL: 97 Squadron, yes, it was 9 Squadron before at Bardney. I wanted to go to Pathfinders, wireless operator said he’d be quite happy, so was my bomb aimer. Well, by that time, I’d collected another gunner, and a chap called Casson [?] (more on him later), and so off we went to Pathfinders. Now, a story goes around – I’m not sure this was my crew, which I suspect it was – three of them went to see Bennett and said ‘We don’t want to come to Pathfinders, we want to go back to your own squadron.’ He said ‘Well, I could post you back, but I’ll post every one of you to a different squadron.’ So they just decided to stick together. I made a promise, because people fell by the wayside, they’d be off flying, that I would carry on until everyone had finished his forty-five, which, that’s what took me up to fifty-three. So, off we went to Pathfinders. [Pause] Ah, luck again! I’ll come back to 9 Squadron: we were going to Leipzig, and I had a black navigator (my [unclear] chap was off with an appendix), Jamaican, the only black aircrew I ever met, very new, and they didn’t know anything about jet streams and so everyone arrived at the target early, apart from us, ‘cause he took us so far off track, we arrived there just as the raid was starting and came home, said there’ll be [unclear] there tonight, found out they’d lost sixty or seventy bombers that night. People were arriving early and circling, waiting for the Pathfinders to mark on time. They couldn’t mark early even if they arrived early, so again, luck came into it, yeah. Anyway, off to [pause] Warboys, that’s where we did three weeks’ Pathfinder training, including cross countries with an instructor, using the ground-marking equipment, H2S, and then to 97 Squadron at Bourn, and we were only at Bourn for three weeks, less than that, two weeks, didn’t operate from there, and we were posted back to 5 Group to do the marking for 5 Group, and Cochrane was CO, was Air Officer Commanding; it became known as Cochrane’s Private Air Force. Going back to Casson, my rear gunner. Just before leaving 9, I was allocated Casson, I think his crew had been killed, and he was unfortunate individual; he’d been a corporal physical training instructor, and I think he was rather keen to get the money of becoming a sergeant air gunner, but the only chap I’ve ever had had to have put on a charge. I felt he was – the crew used to go out to the aircraft every day, and the wireless operator was – wireless operator, rear gunner, [unclear] my upper gunner, and he never arrived on time and they had to clean his guns for him, so he was put on a charge that was modest and told not to do it again. But when we got to [pause] Warboys, doing our Pathfinder training, I was called to see Bennett himself, and my rear gunner had said he wasn’t going to – he was refusing to fly anymore, so Bennett said to me, ‘Well, when you get to squadron, don’t mention it to CO, because I think I’ve talked him out of it,’ but he hadn’t; when he got to Coningsby, he refused to fly, but I think he had more psychological problems. I gathered from my crew, amongst other things, he was incontinent, you know, he used to wet the bed, things like that, and he was taken off-line, what happened to him, I don’t know. Anyone who went – used to call it lack of moral fibre, anyone who had that disappeared quickly, because, in case it was catchy! Anyway, I was called in to see my CO, Wing Commander Carter, think it was, yes, and he told me what had happened, I said ‘Yes, I know.’ He said ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said ‘Well, Bennett told me not to,’ and I said ‘AOC tells you not to, you don’t,’ he understood that. And then I picked up a fellow called Edward Coke – Edward Cope, known as Joe to everybody, he was one of the fellows [?] before – he’d been on Sterlings, and he’d done with the [unclear] on Sterlings, and we flew together for the rest of the war. Not much happened at 97; we were very badly shot up over Bordeaux on one occasion in daylight, finished up diverting to Manston. Crew said they found over eighty holes in the aeroplane, mid upper gunner suffered some facial injuries; I think the Perspex surrounding us was shattered, bit went into his face, but even in later life, on certain days, you could just see the scars ‘round here, but he was very lucky, you know, all the rest of us got away with, without any problem at all. [Pause] Was that during the –
AM: How many operations did you do with –
BL: Fifty-three.
AM: Fifty-three.
BL: That was Bordeaux. [Pause] Collateral damage, we were bombing Munich, and I always used to make a point of going into the briefing room to find out where the latest searchlight belts were, used to do this at 9 Squadron. There was three of us used to be there: myself, Pilot Officer Blow and a chap called Bill Reid, we were the only three who ever did this and we all three survived our operations. So, we were over Munich, and we were coned by searchlights, you could see people weaving all over the sky to avoid it. I knew that it was clear to the near [?] south-east: full power, downhill as fast as we could go, and suddenly there was the most almighty clatter [coughs] we didn’t know what it was, and had to put one engine out of action, came back on three. We’d been hit by the small incendiary bombs, and they hadn’t burned; they made some holes in the wings, they knocked an engine out, and we came back –
AM: Came back on three engines.
BL: On three engines, they flew wonderfully well on three engines, and then [pause] I’m getting towards the end of my tour then. [Pause] D-Day; I remember D-Day very well. Wing Commander Carter, this target-if you can call it a target-we were over the French coast for about ten minutes, that was all, and we also had a Norwegian crew on board, chap called Jespersen. Lost two crews that night: Carter the CO and Jespersen. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, there was a Ju 88 patrolling there, got both of them. Everyone else thought it was a bit of a doddle, but on the way back, Harry was calling the H2S, he was, he’d become [?] my bomb aimer, there’s a set operator. Actually, because crews haven’t as a good a H2S, they just kind of scanned the channels; of course, it was full of ships, when we got back, we found it was D-Day.
AM: So you didn’t know it was D-Day, going to be D-Day?
BL: No, we were not told, we were – obviously, it was very important, because we always used to test our engines before we went to mix the magnesium – mag – magnetos were working, but the first time, there was a problem with two of the plugs, and the whole squadron, the squadron commander stationed and engineer were there, but – ground crew again: when the engine skipper ran the engine, switched it off, they knew which plugs it was, and we were on our way within five minutes and caught them up, so that was Operation D-Day. Operated again D-Day that night, I was rather pleased about that, and I think it went all fairly smoothly from there. I was off sick for a time, can’t remember what it was, and going back to a chap, Bill Reid, who’d driven across country, I said ‘Bill, do you think you could go up to Millfield, RAF Millfield?” That was where Joyce was stationed as an MT driver. I should say – go back again, when we – Joyce and I got engaged in 1941, and by nineteen-forty [pause] nineteen-forty – 1942, 1942, and then, when I went to Bomber Command, we decided to put it on hold – I mean, chances of surviving – so it was on hold. And we could [?] going up to Millfield, ‘Could you fly me up to Millfield?’ He said, ‘We could do that,’ he got the details there, he said ‘Well, I can get it, get it in, I think I can get it out’ – it was the middle of the, middle of the Cotswolds – not the Cotswolds, the, ah –
AM: Chilterns?
BL: No, meant up on Northumberland, the – ah, the Cotswolds, that’ll do, is it near Northumberland? No, the Cotswolds are lower.
AM: No, the –
BL: It’s the, ah [pause]
AM: Can’t remember.
BL: Should do it.
AM: It’s up above the Pennine Way.
BL: Oh, yes!
AM: It’s the – anyway, near Northumberland.
BL: And we arrived there. It was a fighter leaders’ school and they were training fighter leaders, and there was this great big aeroplane came in, and they were looking around at the great big bomb bay, and, sheer luck, Joyce was going on leave, so I waited for her. Went down to Newcastle, I spent the night in the YMCA, met her next day, went back to see her parents, and got [unclear] re-engaged. I only had two more to do, did the two ops, and then I finished. From the day going up to Millfield to see her to getting married, about three weeks went by. People now, saving up to get married, five thousand pounds, ten thousand. It cost me two pounds, three shillings and sixpence. And way I remember that, we had to – I went up with Joyce’s mother to arrange the wedding, saw the vicar, and he says, ‘That will be two pounds, three shillings and sixpence’, and two-three-six was also the phone box number of RAF Millfield where I used to talk to Joyce occasionally, and we spent the night in the same house; I slept with her father and Joyce slept with her mother.
AM: [laughs] This is the night before the wedding?
BL: The night before the wedding. We didn’t have a best man, but there was a, a relative who had a shoe shop, he was called in as best man; Joyce had an aunt, Aunt [pause] oh, I’ve forgotten her name now, her husband was in the air force but he was motor transport driver, he was a North hatter [?], she was Matron of Noffon [?], Matron of, ah, Honour. So, we walked down to the church, no taxis available – well, it was only just down the road, RAF Wooler – is it Wooler, in – what are those hills called, what would they be?
AM: Cheviots, it’s not the Cheviots?
BL: It is the Cheviots.
AM: Cheviots.
BL: Cheviots, of course, those are the big ones called the Cheviots.
AM: We got there between us!
BL: Yes! [slight laugh] And we walked back again and – where did we stay? It was an old lady we stayed with: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and she’d had Joyce a piece of lace done, and she wanted it back before we left, and we had our breakfast, caught the bus to Morpeth, stopped off and had tea, caught another bus to Newcastle, went to the cinema, the night train down to London packed like sardines. London – we, well, we were going to have our honeymoon in Exeter, the hotels were full, but Joyce’s parents knew someone who had a guest house down there, so booked us in there. So we had some – so I went up to see my mother, and she had met Joyce, and then down to Paddington Station, finally arrived in Torquay and met by somebody who took us to the house, absolutely shattered. Went to bed, we both fell fast asleep. [laughs] Anyway, I still remember the next day, I said to Joyce, ‘Well, what do you want to do now?’ She said ‘I’d like to buy a shopping basket, I won’t feel properly married ‘til I’ve got a shopping basket,’ and that was it, our honeymoon! Then back to the squadron, and they discovered I had a large spleen, so they were doing all sorts of investigations, I was at Coningsby for quite a long time; I thought I was on squadron strength and evidently I wasn’t, I was on station strength, so I finished [?] in October but I didn’t leave the squadron until beginning of January. They took me into Rawsby [?] Hospital. It had been what they used to call lunatic asylums, it was, yes, no privacy, all the doors opened both ways and the WCs, it was like the doors going into a Western saloon, know, they open both ways, so you – anyway, I had a, I still had a large spleen, so they gave me a temperate climate only better, ah, better category, which was just as well because it was about time they were thinking of going out to Japan and you would have had to go through tropical climates. Anyway, I was at Coningsby just doing nothing, you know, and eventually – oh, the commanding officer was a chap called Evans Evans, Tiny Evans, a Jimmy Edwards character - I’m going back, I’m going into reverse now. He decided he wanted to do some operations, so they said he could take my crew, and they did a couple of cross countries with him, so the first time, he put the aeroplane down and bounced over the [unclear] onto the aeroplane; the other time, he visited his brother, almost a twin, who was RAF commanding an American station, and he, he went down there with the crew and had a very liquid lunch, so he came back by taxi and the RAF took me down by transport to pick them up, and I met my crew outside the aeroplane, and the Americans were looking up at our bomb bay, their bomb bay was not as big as a sofa there, they could carry four thousand pounds, of course, we could carry eighteen thousand pounds, and to thrill them back [?]. One or two of them, they’d spent the night there, I think, had got these American woolly sheepskin hats on, one or two were smoking American cigars. Incidentally, people say that everybody smokes here, my crew didn’t smoke, I didn’t smoke.
AM: You didn’t smoke either?
BL: No, nope. And that was about the – oh [pause] Evans Evans, I got to know him quite well, very, very pleasant chap, and he wanted to sponsor me to go to Cranwell, he knew my background in engineering, to do an engineering course, and I said no, I wanted to carry on flying, so there was this vacancy going, Fighter [Unclear] Flight, flying Hurricanes. That was really good fun! Our CO was Les Munro –
AM: Oh, yes.
BL: Yes, he was New Zealander, wonderful character, and I remember when we were there, one night, we had a few drinks at the bar, and we knew we were operating, so we wouldn’t – the squadron was operating, we wouldn’t be working the next day, and I said ‘Would you mind if I took a Hurricane up to Millfield, to see my wife?’ and he said ‘Not at all.’ So, off, went off the next day, he’d forgotten: ‘Where have you been?’ ‘I’ve been to Millfield, you said I could go there!’ [disgruntled mutter-nonverbal]. One funny incident – well, funny for people who were watching it - at Metheringham was a FIDO station, you know, where they used to burn petrol and [pause] if you could imagine a triangle about so big with a metal pipe across, they used to pump petrol into it and that would clear the fog. I was waiting to take off in my little Hurricane, some other man [?] had a Spitfire: ‘Proceed to the end of the runway and use the taxiway.’ He started to turn off. ‘Proceed to the end of the runway and use the taxiway!’ Too late: there was the Spitfire standing on its tails [?]. Poor fellow, he spent the rest of his life trying to get, trying to explain why he did this, and everyone has heard that ‘cause he couldn’t say he couldn’t have heard the instruction. And then, about that time, maybe a bit earlier, an Air Ministry Order came out, an AMO: people who’d completed two operational tours and two non-operational tours could apply for secondment to BOAC or go to the Empire Test Pilots.
AM: So this is 1945.
BL: I’m in 1945 now, yes.
AM: Yeah.
BL: So, I applied for BOAC and got it and that was it, yeah. And I enjoyed it, I [pause] we did our training on Lanc – on Lancasters because we were going to fly Lancastrians, never came to anything-I had a Lancastrian on my pilot’s licence-and then we went down to Whitchurch, was a little aerodrome, it was the airport for Bristol in those days before they moved, and converted to Dakotas, and there was a couple of flights out as a second pilot to Cairo and back again and then they were, they were on a – just, what a lot of [unclear] – let’s say, anyway, I went to Northolt, where BEA – it was on land [?] BOAC, which was going to become-
AM: So they were just setting BOAC up at the time?
BL: Yes, but I was still in the air force on secondment and offered a contract with BOAC, and then BEA was formed, so I applied to fly for BEA and they offered me a contract, and they said, ‘You will never be worse off if you come to us instead of going to BOAC,’ flying out of Northolt. It was, it wasn’t no break going back to civvy life, it was like being on a squadron again, I knew half the people there, all second-tour people, and eventually, I got my command – Captain – and six hundred pounds a year. Six hundred pounds a year in 1946 was a lot of money; I remember when I was an apprentice, I was looking forward to the day when I’d be a rich man and earning five pounds a week! Six hundred pounds a year makes –
AM: In 1946!
BL: And, and then went into work one day and told I was going to Jersey. No choice in the matter, British Airways had nationalised Channel Island Airways and they wanted three Dakota crews out there, so myself, chap called Bill Hen, an ex-Battle of Britain pilot, and I can’t remember the third went out there with the three first officers, flying Dakotas and then flying de Havilland Rapid – de Havilland Rapide: [unclear] biplane, made of wood.
AM: Where were you flying to and who were the passengers? Were –
BL: Oh, this was civilians.
AM: So it’s a commercial airline by this time?
BL: Oh yeah, yeah, and became BEA, you see.
AM: But still on Dakotas, which had been flying in the war.
BL: Yes. Initially, BOAC would be carrying fifteen passengers and BEA were flying with eighteen passengers, and eventually they were modified, took the radio officer away, air officer away, and they called them Pioneers. We had thirty-two passengers, really squeezing them in in a Dakota.
AM: Thirty-two! So what was it like inside, then, for the passengers?
BL: Packed solid, yeah! The seats were about so wide –
AM: Bit like now, then, Ryanair.
BL: Yes, and flying Rapides, that was a – initially a seven-seater with a radio officer, and then a, and an eight-seater when you got rid of the radio officers. I must be one of the few people still living who flew Rapides into Croydon and into Gatwick, which was an, ah, a grass airfield.
AM: Oh, right! [laughs]
BL: A lot of grass airfields around at that time; Madrid, masses of runway, now, that used to be a grass airfield. And I carried on flying Dakotas in Jersey and –
AM: Did your - had your wife come over to live in Jersey?
BL: Oh, we’d all moved to Jersey.
AM: Okay.
BL: No NHS there; BEA paid my medical fees, I had to pay for Joyce and my son, quite expensive, ‘specially when you – antibiotics were a frightful price. We moved – we never bought anywhere in Jersey, we moved around in rented accommodation, and I quite enjoyed it there: come off a day’s flying, you know, and Joyce would meet me, have a swim before going home, and see so much more, know, you could swim from April through to September. I remember once, we come over on leave and up and gone to Druridge Bay in Northumberland, lovely summer’s day, I said ‘I’m gonna have a swim.’ I went off, I came back: ‘I thought you were gonna have a swim?’ I said ‘Yes, I got enough up to here, that was it!’
AM: So not cold up in Jersey?
BL: Well, yes. So, I think, in around Jersey, the tide doesn’t move in and out, it stays in the Gulf of Saint Malo, slowly, slowly warms up. My only accident occurred there; I stood a Rapide on its nose. No passengers on board, I put the brakes on too hard, it landed on its nose, bent propellers, and needless to say, there was a court of enquiry. But BEA was divided into two divisions then: British and Continental, and chief pilot of the British division was an old group captain I’d known in the air force, it was the old pals’ network.
AM: Old boys’ club.
BL: Yeah, he said ‘You can do’ – I spent the whole month doing [unclear], it was twelve flights a day, fifteen and twenty minutes, and nobody liked them because, it doesn’t sound very much, but twelve take-offs and landings, it was very tiring. [Pause] He was the chap – no, no, I was thinking of somebody else, at Northolt. There was one day, it had been snowing – this was nothing to do with me – and there was a Dakota took off and covered with snow and they’d had to clear the wings, and landed on top of a school and – sorry, landed on top of a house, just missed a school, and nobody was hurt, there was nobody in the house, all the crew got out. Needless to say, for the rest of his life, he was known as Rooftop Johnson, yeah, and he rose to great height and became a flight manager eventually. Viscounts, enjoyed flying those, and I – leaving Jersey, where did I want to go to? Well, my parents were living in London; Joyce’s mother, she was already by then in [unclear], so I chose Manchester, in the middle of nowhere, and –
AM: And that was Ringway Airport?
BL: Ringway Airport, yes, yes, little runways then, yes, passenger accommodation was in one of the hangars, and Smallman’s – was it Smallman’s – had the, had the restaurant there, the old RAF control tower, it was all very friendly. The crew hut was made of wood, you know.
AM: What year would – what year would that have been on now? Fifty -
BL: That would be 1953, yeah. And they booked me in at the Deanwater, Deanwater, just, just a room with a washbasin, no mod cons in those days, party on nearly every night, so getting to sleep was a bit difficult, and I was flying the next day, said to Joyce, ‘Go out and look for a house.’ Well, Joyce almost got lost, she picked me up, but we saw an advert, houses being built just the other side of Wilmslow, went to see one, saw the plot we liked and booked the house and [pause] by that time, I’d, was living in Baton [?] Road, Manchester, sharing a room with a wireless operator, he moved out and Joyce moved in with me, and we got the extra room, Michael was away at school, and we lived there ‘til we moved into the house, I quite enjoyed that. And then charge [?] came to convert to Tridents, which I did, yeah, lovely aeroplane, the Trident, and –
AM: How big is that, then? How big is the Trident?
BL: It was initially a ninety-seater with the –
AM: Ninety?
BL: Ninety.
AM: So much bigger.
BL: Much bigger, but the Viscount was about seventy or eighty, I think, I had the ninety-seater, and then there was the Trident 2 and the Trident 3, and the Trident 3 was – I think they’d gone up to about a hundred seats by then. They didn’t – it wasn’t really a commercial – they built a lot of them, though there’re many variants, I don’t think anybody made any money out of them, and [pause] back to Viscounts. Landing at Geneva, and, whilst I was with [unclear], and I was doing what we call a flapless landing ‘cause the [unclear] had been damaged, and landed, and as the nose wheel touched the runway, the whole back bit of the strut broke off, so we started to turn to the left and clear the runway, and there was a lot of smoke coming with the hot hydraulic oil. Passengers were evacuated, they didn’t use the chute, they got them out on the steps, and the fire was put out immediately. I’ve still got the headlines, was it ‘Bomber hero lands blazing aircraft [slight laugh] at Geneva’? And the reporters came ‘round to see Joyce, she knew nothing about it; well, she’d just had an airport – phone call from the airport saying ‘Bob, your husband, will be late coming home.’ The way they exaggerate these things!
AM: ‘Bomber Command hero’!
BL: Yeah, Bomber Command, oh, yes.
AM: Did they have air hostesses on the planes at this point? Did they have air hostesses and things like that on the planes at this point?
BL: No – oh yes, they did!
AM: Yeah.
BL: Yes, in Jersey, they were called flight clerks because they did all the paperwork as well.
AM: Okay.
BL: And all they did was hand out sick bags and barley, barley sugars, yes. [Pause] I’m trying to think of the funny incidents. When I was First Officer at Northolt, and I’d been flying – it was an unfurnished Dakota, the seats were there but nothing on the floor, and those days, the pilot had to brief the passengers, and chap called Panda Watson, he had a great big moustache, he was the skipper, and he went up to them all and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ and at that time, he slipped and fell on his –
AM: Oh, no!
BL: So, from then on, I – he kind of got me to do it. I remember doing briefing one day, just telling them where the escape exits were, where the life jackets were, I had one passenger say, ‘If I’d known it was so dangerous, I wouldn’t have, wouldn’t have flown!’ My parents used to come and see me in Jersey, but they wouldn’t fly; I would pay for their tickets, no, no, they came by boat, but Joyce’s mother came over several times and she was quite happy to fly. And, living in Jersey, we had a dear old neighbour, Mrs Brett, one of the old school, she lived next door, she was a widower for the second time, and she had some friends, and she used to go out, and going down to see her friends: hat on, folded umbrella or walking stick, upright, and she’d come back, hat on one side and a bit shaky on the stick. She liked – was it tonic red wine? I’ve forgotten what it was.
AM: Not, erm –
BL: It was – it wasn’t Sanatogen, it’s [pause] anyway, she was rather fond of it, and she was a dear old lady, she would knock on the door and say, ‘Are you at home?’ And we invited her in one day, we’d just got television in Jersey, and the Queen’s, Queen’s confrontation –
AM: Coronation, 1953.
BL: Queen’s coronation, not confrontation, she has many of those with her husband, I think! And she enjoyed that, and she used to talk about a wine she’d had in Italy called [stage whisper] Asti Spumante, a sparkling, sparkling, sweet, Italian wine, so we got a bottle of it and we had some sandwiches and she thoroughly enjoyed it. And when we moved from that house to another one, she gave Joyce a little silver napkin ring, and outside, this replica of sugar cane; her first husband was in trade, he was in sugar, yeah, and they lived in the Bahamas for many years, no children, but her second husband was a barrister, Mr Reginald Brett, so she always called herself Mrs Reginald Brett, never found out what her Christian name was, yeah. She died shortly before we left Jersey. Anyway, I wanted to get onto another type of aeroplane and we decided, like I tell you [?] to move to Manchester; people say ‘Why did you move?’ so I said ‘Well, we kept falling off the edge, so it was time to go.’ And that was almost the end, now: up to Manchester, converted to Tridents, and then on New Year’s Eve nineteen [pause] 1968, it must have been, Joyce had a – we were going out to a party, Joyce had a massive heart attack, went to Macclesfield. No – there was nothing there for heart attacks then, she was in a side room just receiving normal medical treatment, no, no resus units, no – what do they call them now?
AM: The – ah, the heart -
BL: Yes. Anyway, she survived, and that time, Manchester was converting to the Bac 1-11, the twin engine jet, and they were going to do a lot of, a lot of German internal flights, so I was going to be away for five or six days, or probably more than that, a month, five or six day tours in Germany, didn’t want to do that, so I stayed with the Trident and that did – I finished up going down to Heathrow for my last four years. [Pause] Nice little house in Windsor, it was a terraced house –
AM: In Windsor?
BL: In Windsor.
AM: Oh, very nice – oh well, so, sorry [?]
BL: Yes, it was, was nice, yes, we enjoyed it, Joy – but [unclear] Joyce never, apart from my working colleagues, she never got to know anybody there, they don’t speak to you there, we were living in Datchet initially, until we found somewhere to live. In Datchet, we were living in a 17th Century cottage, lovely old cottage, and it was run by two old dears next door, two ex-WAF who I think were both living together, if you know what I mean, yeah.
AM: I do.
BL: And then we got our own, own property, we saw a house in Datchet but decided against it; occasionally, the river would [?] slowly come into Datchet, then go out again, and we didn’t want a house that was going to be flooded.
AM: No.
BL: Whole thing, insurance premium would be very high, stayed in Windsor until I retired.
AM: So you flew all your working life?
BL: All my working life, yes, I retired in nineteen – retired from BEA in nineteen [pause] 1973, and moved back here, living in a very, very big house at Disley, almost a mansion, as someone called it, we were in, I think, four bedrooms, and, over the course of the year, made me bother [?] that they were used four, five times, so we cut our losses and moved here.
AM: And moved here. And it’s lovely, isn’t it?
BL: And got the Golden Wing [?], and then in nineteen-seventy – ’79 – through the old boy network, there was a job going, flying Viscounts up at Teesside, so I thought –
AM: So, after you’d retired –
BL: After I’d retired, the old boy network again, I knew the chap – it was a strange organisation, it was called Airbridge Carriers, so I was flying for Airbridge Carriers, being paid by Fields Aviation, and flying BenAir Viscounts, it was quite a mix-up. And so, we were flying out of Teesside, took the caravan up there, and that was it, we were quite enjoying that, ‘cause the people were friendly, Joyce wasn’t far from her mother, and then they decided we would have to go to Bristol. So, I decided I’d – I could have moved to Bristol, I couldn’t maintain my base where I was initially [?] at at Teesside, so I went down to Bristol, I was always accommodated in a hotel there, used to get [unclear] allowance, used to get so much an hour for being away from home, and flying the Viscount down to Bristol. Finally gave it all up and retired.
AM: And that’s it, you retired.
BL: I finally retired in nineteen – 1981, I finished flying, same year my father died, 1981, and that was it, end of flying career.
AM: Yeah. Blimey. The one thing I didn’t ask, go whizzing right back to the war years, was you’ve got the DFC?
BL: DFC and bar.
AM: And bar?
BL: Yes.
AM: So what did you get the DFC for?
BL: It was just end of, end of, end of tour.
AM: Okay, so doing a full tour.
BL: And the bar was end of second tour.
AM: And the bar was the second tour. Right.
BL: Yeah.
AM: Crikey.
BL: Yeah.
AM: There we are. I’m going to switch off now.
BL: Right, switch off now.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Bob Lasham
Creator
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Annie Moody
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
2015-07-16
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ALashamB150716
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
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.
Format
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00:57:50 audio recording
Contributor
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Richard Bracknall
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Bob Lasham began an electrical engineering apprenticeship with British Thomson-Houston before volunteering for the RAF in 1941, aged 20. He trained at Babbacombe and Wilmslow before continuing to Clewiston, Florida, to complete his training as a pilot. On return to the United Kingdom, he underwent further training before being transferred to Bomber Command where he converted to flying Lancasters. He joined 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney and participated in operations to Berlin and Leipzig. His aircraft was heavily attacked and his rear gunner lost the toes on one foot because of oxygen and heating problems. He transferred to 97 Squadron Pathfinders; his aircraft was badly damaged over Bordeaux, returning from an operation to Munich. He flew on D-Day and later joined a Bomber Defence Training Flight. After two tours, he became a civil pilot and flew with BOAC and BEA. He also relates his engagement and marriage; the role of luck in his survival; and the support of a veterans’ network after the war.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
United States
England--Lincolnshire
Florida--Lake Okeechobee
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Munich
France--Bordeaux (Nouvelle-Aquitaine)
Florida
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1944
5 BFTS
5 Group
9 Squadron
97 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
African heritage
aircrew
Beaufighter
Blenheim
bomb struck
bombing
British Flying Training School Program
C-47
Distinguished Flying Cross
Flying Training School
Harvard
Initial Training Wing
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
love and romance
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
pilot
RAF Bardney
RAF Cranfield
recruitment
searchlight
Stearman
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/121/2446/AEadyIET160628.2.mp3
a58a49784c2c048a7529917535777d5a
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
Eady, Liz
Liz Eady
I E T Eady
Description
An account of the resource
The collection consists of one oral history interview with Aircraftswoman Second Class Idina Elizabeth Tolley Eady (2131607 Royal Air Force), her service and pay book and three photographs. Liz Eady served as a telephonist at RAF Waddington.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Liz Eady and catalogued by Terry Hancock.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Eady, IET
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-28
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.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 28th of June 2016. I’m in Woking with Elizabeth Eady and we’re going to talk about what she was doing on the airfields in, during the war. So, Liz what are your earliest recollections of life?
IE: Do you mean life in the RAF?
CB: No at home.
IE: At home?
CB: Yes, and then leading to the RAF.
IE: Well we, we lived in a village and I was, I had a brother and a sister which – and there were also some other relations in the village. And then eventually – oh my father was, he grew tomatoes, cucumbers, he had about forty greenhouses. And then later on he was able to buy what was my grandfather’s house which had been divided into two. So, we had one half of it which was nearer to the town of Market Harborough. And we had a huge garden and we used to have lots of friends playing tennis and all that sort of thing. And then I went to a small private school, when I was what five would it be? Until I was eleven. And that was really very good. There was about ten of us altogether, boys and girls. And our classroom was in, what had been the stables of this house where the owner of the school lived. So, it was all quite sort of casual. And then, oh gosh I can’t remember. Oh, that’s right, then I had to come and I then went to – my Mother and Father thought because my, one of my Mother’s relations, their daughter had gone to Kettering High School, so that was my next place. Which really was a bit out of my depth. It was – so I did struggle for quite a while although I was very happy there because I made some very good friends. And I was keen on the sport. I represented them for tennis and all that sort. Gin, gin, it wasn’t gin [Laughs] and I was there for a little while and then my parents decided that probably it would be better if I went to boarding school. And I went to a private boarding school which was just outside Chorley Wood in Hertfordshire, was it called, Heronsgate, was the name of the village, which was run by two elderly sisters. Unfortunately, there was another girl there who had been at Kettering and she was very jealous of me if I had any friends there, so I wasn’t very happy. But I had some outdoor friends who were quite wealthy actually. But, and I used to go and stay with them sometimes at weekends because two of the children came to our school and I had to look after them, the little girl. And that was until – oh, I’ve got this wrong. That was before I went to Kettering High School. Kettering High School was my last one. Yes, they decided for some reason, I don’t know why, that they wanted me out of boarding school to be at home. Maybe because war was, you know, the way things were, it hadn’t actually started then. And I had to go home. And then I went to Kettering High School, that’s right. What did I do after that? Oh, that’s right. I very much wanted to be a dress designer. And I’d, there was, I started to go to Leicester College of Art. And it was a three-year course. And I’d got half way through when – I used to have to catch a train to Leicester, so I was having my breakfast early before anybody else to get the train. And then one day my Mother came in when I was having my breakfast and said ‘This is your last day, last week at college, you’ve got to go and get a job.’ And I thought ‘Gosh, what am I going to do?’ So, but there was no alternative. And I was just going down on the Monday morning. I thought ‘Well I must go in the town and see what, what sort of jobs there are going.’ And I happened to meet two people I knew and we got talking. And they said ‘Why don’t you come and join us? We’re at the corset factory but we’re working on parachutes and we need some more help.’ So, I thought ‘Oh, Father’ll go mad if he thinks I’m working at the corset factory, but still.’ So, I got an interview and I was working for AID, Aeronautical Inspection [department?]. And I was a leading viewer. I had five women under me. But because I wasn’t twenty-one I got half the pay. So, I was earning about two pounds fifty to their five pounds. Which was very difficult. And then my parents decided to move down to Buckinghamshire, Iver Heath. And where they had a village grocery store. And I was still at Market Harborough. But as I say I really hadn’t got enough money. I was dipping into my savings. So, I thought ‘Well I’ve got no alternative’. And I’d wanted to join the WAAF so I went home and I told them I was going home and I was going to join the WAAF. Which I did, I went for an interview at Northolt. And I got everything, they said they’d let me know. And that was about June I think, we got to September and I kept saying ‘I can’t think why I haven’t heard.’ Then it got to about October. I was doing the newspapers one morning, big headlines, ‘More women needed in the Armed Services,’ and I said to my Mother ‘Can’t understand this and I’m still waiting’ so she said ‘Oh no you won’t because your Father’s written up and said we can’t spare you.’ So big row, packed my bags and I was gone in a week. [Chuckling] And that’s when I went to, where did I go to? Oh gosh, I can’t remember. Might have been – oh Uxbridge I think it was, yes. And looking at the things, and I thought I’ll – I thought well I’d already done parachutes and so I said I’d like to go into that. But there were no vacancies for that and I really wasn’t sure. Then, I don’t know why, I just suddenly said telephonist. I thought ‘Well, it’ll give me a job after the war.’ And so I went to Harrogate first waiting for vacancy, I think I was there about a month, enjoyed Harrogate, had a wonderful time. Then they sent me to Bradford where I trained at the Bradford Telephone Exchange. And there were six of us and we were in civilian accommodation at night. And lovely lady she was, and she gave us too much food. [Laughs] I think she thought we were starving. And so really most of the mornings were taken up with our training and then we were sort of off duty quite early in the afternoon. And I discovered there was a wonderful lake up the road so we used to go and row, rowing. [Laughs] As I say there was about six of us. And there was one girl who had been a telephonist in civvie street. And anyway, we did the exam, and I had my paper and scribbled away at it. She kept going up for more paper, never seen anyone use so much paper, you know for an exam thing. I thought, ‘Well I’ve had it’ you know. And the next, well a week later when we had the, to go for the results, and the tutor said, when she came in, she said ‘I never thought I would have’ she said ‘It’s a tutor’s dream to have the perfect paper handed in’ and of course this girl was you know, it was hers.
CB: Yes.
IE: And it wasn’t, it was mine. A hundred per cent, and, first time in my life. [Laughs] And that’s when I was then sent to, I think it was Skellingthorpe. Oh no, no it wasn’t. It was Compton Bassett for training before I went onto telephonist job I think. Or did I go there first? I think I’m not sure.
CB: It’s alright.
IE: Anyway, I definitely went to Skellingthorpe. And there was already enough. I was a bit, you know, an extra bod there. And then they – I think it was the Rhodesians were at Waddington, and they were leaving to go elsewhere, so there was a vacancy for a telephonist at Waddington and nobody else was going to move, so I went. And that was wonderful. And the Rhodesians left and then we got the Australian squadron, two squadrons. 463 and 467. And I can’t remember. You’ll probably be able to tell me. I can’t remember, it wasn’t intelligence I don’t think. In the room I was in we had a switchboard there. And on the wall was the three, Waddington was the main base and then there was Skellingthorpe, Bardney and those. And then we had listed all the squadrons, what would that be?
CB: The operations board?
IE: Ah yes. But it wasn’t, was it operations? I don’t think so.
CB: It showed the availability of aircraft did it?
IE: Well, it was all listed up who was going where.
CB: Yes.
IE: And we had, quite, well they were mainly sort of Group Captains and such in there. I might tell you, when I knocked on, there was one. Oh, he loved his cups of tea. And I knocked, you know, go in salute smartly, ‘Good morning’ ‘Oh my God,’ he said ‘LACW Edey. Essence of pussy today chaps.’ I was the worst teamaker on the camp. Essence of pussy. [Laughter] He liked his tea, good and strong, plenty of sugar so his spoon stood up in the middle of it. [Chuckles] And I didn’t like tea anyway. But er, must have been operations was it?
CB: Well.
IE: No couldn’t have been.
CB: The other stations were satellites weren’t they?
IE: Waddington was the main base.
CB: Yes.
IE: And then the others were Bardney, Skellingthorpe what was the other one? Can’t think what I, what it was called now.
CB: But you were linking it all together were you?
IE: Um?
CB: You were linking the communications together?
IE: Oh yes. We were the main base, so I had a switchboard but I was also in touch with all the other, yes all the other –
CB: So, what was the task you were undertaking there?
IE: Um?
CB: What were you doing?
IE: Just on the switchboard, just answering whatever came in. And passing them onto whoever really. Just like an ordinary telephonist.
CB: Right.
IE: But mainly the calls were ones that didn’t go through the general switchboard and that.
CB: Because they were secure lines?
IE: Um. Yeah.
CB: That was the idea was it?
IE: Yeah, yes. Yes, so I did outside calls but the main ones inside were purely to the heads of the various departments. Like flying control and operations and that sort of thing.
CB: So what sort of shifts did you work?
IE: Um. Eight ‘til one, one to six. No, wait a minute, eight to one, one to six, oh yeah eight ‘til one, one to six. I’ve got it written down somewhere. Then to eleven and then eleven round ‘til eight o’clock in the morning. Is that four?
CB: Um, yeah.
IE: Yeah.
CB: So, a longer shift in the night?
IE: You had a long one at night, yes.
CB: Um.
IE: It was pretty quiet usually.
CB: Um. So, when the raids –
IE: Eleven ‘til eight.
CB: Yes.
IE: Yes.
CB: Um. How many switchboard operators, telephonists would there be on duty at any one time?
IE: In the main switchboard, they’d be three or four. I was on the main one to start with and then they transferred me to this other switchboard.
CB: All WAAF’s? No, no men on the exchange?
IE: Oh, we did yes. Yes, we did. I didn’t have one on that section, but on the main one yes, there were men. And there were you know in other stations in the group as well.
CB: So how many days did you work in a run?
IE: Yeah, there would be six days and then the seventh –
CB: Because Sunday was a working day like everything else?
IE: Oh yes, yes, yes. Yeah.
CB: So, six days on. How many off?
IE: Then there would be just the one. One whole day off as far as I remember.
CB: So, you’re on the airfield at Waddington. Where are you staying? What accommodation have you got?
IE: Oh, there were, what had been pre-war airmans’ married quarters. And that was the one in the photograph, we had a big room downstairs and then there was like the kitchen bit at the back. And upstairs, there was the main bedroom and a small room. Usually the small room was the sergeant or a corporal. And there was – it was just quite basic, you didn’t really. You went up to, you had to go out for your meals.
CB: Yes.
IE: You could, you know, boil a kettle and that sort of thing.
CB: But you ate in the Airmans’ mess?
IE: Yeah.
CB: How far away was that?
IE: Oh, only a few minutes’ walk. Yes, it wasn’t very far.
CB: ‘Cause the domestic site is near the technical site is it?
IE: Do you know I can’t remember. When I came, went down. No, ‘cause Waddington was a huge complex.
CB: Yeah.
IE: ‘Cause when you went down, and then there was like station headquarters and those. And a few, then further on were these billets like what were airmans’ married quarters, so they were away from the –
CB: They weren’t on the airfield were they?
IE: Yeah, the main headquarters.
CB: Um.
IE: And then just almost opposite us were the hangars. You know, right down the airfield.
CB: So, the airmans’ houses, were standard layout?
IE: Sorry?
CB: They were a standard layout, design?
IE: Yes. Yeah.
CB: How many WAAF’s in each one?
IE: Two, three. About six and a sergeant or corporal.
CB: Right, so.
IE: There were about three downstairs, three upstairs. Yes.
CB: So how many people to a room normally, a bedroom?
IE: Well yeah. Well the downstairs would be like, in the living quarters, that would be their sitting room but we had it as a bedroom.
CB: Yes.
IE: So, there was one there, there would be three.
CB: Right.
IE: And the same upstairs which would have been the bedroom. And then the corporal or sergeant would have a small, a small room.
CB: Um.
IE: I can’t remember what that was originally but yeah.
CB: So, you went to the Airmans’ mess for food? What was the food like?
IE: It wasn’t too bad actually. Yes, it was a big, huge, great room there. Yes, it wasn’t bad.
CB: Um. So, you’re working on shifts?
IE: Yes.
CB: How did the menu accommodate that?
IE: How many?
CB: How? You were working shifts?
IE: Yeah.
CB: So, people were wanting lunch at different times of the day, how did they organise that, the food?
IE: Oh, that I don’t know. Um, I don’t ever remember being told I’d got to be on a certain shift but it was just depending on you know my job.
CB: Um.
IE: What shift I was on.
CB: But they were serving food twenty-four hours a day?
IE: More or less I think, yeah I think so.
CB: Um, right.
IE: ‘Cause I sort of vaguely remember, you know, lines of people waiting to go in.
CB: Um.
IE: But it was quite big. It was on a separate – away from where we were. We had to go to this big building.
CB: Um.
IE: I can’t remember what else there was. But it was certainly – yes of course there would be. There was the Airmans’ Mess which we were in and then there would be an Officers’ Mess and um.
CB: A Sergeants’ Mess?
IE: I’m just trying to think, were we just WAAF in there? No, I think, I think it was a general mess.
CB: Yeah. What about the NAAFI?
IE: Never, never really went. There was NAAFI but I never really went to that. Don’t remember it anyway.
CB: So, when you’re working on shift?
IE: Yeah.
CB: Then how were you fed? Were you given a break or did you take food with you to eat during the shift?
IE: Well, we could take stuff with us. Yes, that would be more, rather than – no well part of our mealtime came out while we were on the shift wouldn’t it? Yeah.
CB: So, what I meant –
IE: So, you’d go for about, have about half an hour’s break.
CB: Yeah.
IE: For your meal.
CB: Um.
IE: And come back.
CB: Going to the Airmans’ Mess? OK.
IE: Yeah, yeah.
CB: And how did the WAAF’s get on together in these houses?
IE: Oh fine. Yes, well certainly there, there was no problem.
CB: So, you joined the RAF in 1940 was it? Did you join in 1940 or was it earlier? Or ’42?
IE: Wrote it down.
CB: ‘Cause you were born in ’23 weren’t you?
IE: Yeah. Because I didn’t go straight away because –
CB: You joined when you were nineteen?
IE: I did write it down. Oh, it must be there.
CB: OK.
JS: There’s something on here.
IE: I think I’ve got it written down over here.
CB: I’ll just pause then for a mo’.
IE: Pardon?
CB: I’ll just pause this.
IE: 1942.
CB: So, you joined the RAF 29th of October 1942?
IE: Yeah, I was enlisted. And then I was a telephonist 13th of June 1943.
CB: Right. When you qualified?
IE: Yeah. This is absolutely disgusting.
CB: OK.
IE: Alright.
CB: So that was just after you were twenty?
IE: Yes.
CB: And at Compton Bassett.
IE: Yeah.
CB: What did they teach you there? About the RAF or what were they teaching you? How to use the system?
IE: Oh, no it was drilling that sort of thing.
CB: Um.
IE: I don’t think we learnt too well –
CB: The –
IE: We had – ‘cause every time we were – the whole camp turned out. ‘Cause we were the only WAAF’s there, and they all turned out to watch us. And you can imagine the jeering that when on. I enlisted at Acton, June 1942, but Father wrote to have me deferred and I didn’t find out until October. So, I kept wondering then I found out. I’ve put in here, ‘Big row’. And I qualified as a telephonist, oh no it doesn’t say.
CB: OK.
IE: Until 4th of May 1946.
CB: Right. When you, what were you thinking you might do in 1946. Had you?
IE: Well this was when my Father had got me out.
CB: Yes.
IE: I didn’t really get a choice, I just had to –
CB: No.
IE: I just had to go home. But then just after that, once I got home the air force, or WAAF I suppose, got me a job as an – in a factory at er. By then we were in London, Brixton I think it was, where they were making blouses and that sort of thing. And I wasn’t very happy with that. I had a, the lady that I was working with, for, was very difficult at that time. And I thought well I’ve got to do something, you know carry on. And um, what happened? Something happened. I got to the point where I thought ‘This is no good, I’m not learning anything.’ ‘Cause they did it because I’d been learning to be a dress designer you see before I joined up. And then I was, my parents had this tobacconists/confectionery shop in West Norwood and so every now and again when I was off I used to help a bit. And this lady came in, we were talking and she said ‘Why don’t you,’ she said ‘I know it’s not the same sort of thing’ she said ‘But why don’t you go and work in a department store?’ She said ‘I can – there’s a very good – I know they’re looking for somebody in Gorringes in Buckingham Palace Road.’ So, I tootled along there and I was the sixth assistant in the hosiery department. I couldn’t serve anybody until the other five had got it. And when you’re on commission you don’t get much at the end of the week in those circumstances. But I enjoyed it, worked there for about five years I think.
CB: Um. What made you leave?
IE: Oh, I got offered something I’d been dying to do. It was something new and we’d had a girl who was working for [Unclear] and she was travelling round to different shops on sales promotions. I thought, ‘I’d like to do that.’ And I’d said to her, you know, ‘If you hear of any vacancies let me know.’ And I went back after lunch one day and there were two very smartly dressed gentlemen by our counter. I thought, ’They’ve come, they must be reps come to see the buyer.’ So, I went over and spoke to them. ‘Cause by then I was an under-buyer. And I said ‘Buyers are at lunch at the moment.’ So, they said ‘Yes, we know they are, she is, ‘cause it’s you we’ve come to see.’ I [Unclear] something. They were from I & R Morley, hosiery and knitwear, and they were just starting up this putting somebody into different department stores to promote their goods. And they said ‘Would I be interested?’ I said ‘Oh yes, I certainly am.’ And so I went for an interview, oh I could have dropped when I found where I was going to work. Arding & Hobbes in Clapham Junction it was the most awful place. [Chuckles] So, anyway I was there for, that was about September to Christmas. And just before that my boss came in and said ‘They need somebody up in Glasgow for two weeks’ and that was before Christmas. ‘Are you prepared to go?’ So, I said ‘Yes, go do anything.’ Better than sticking in Arding & Hobbes. And so, they sent me up to Glasgow. Which I thoroughly enjoyed that and then I went to Edinburgh the second week. And, of course no wonder this chap had gone sick. ‘Cause I didn’t get home until about two o’clock in the morning on Christmas Day, I had to come back by train you know. And, I mean it didn’t matter. So, after Christmas when I got back they called me back to the head office and said ‘Would you like the job of sales promotions all over the UK?’ I said ‘Yes please.’ So, I went for training and that’s what I was doing in different towns. Anywhere from Cornwall, South of England to Edinburgh, Glasgow. I think that was the furthest north I went. But it was, oh I really enjoyed that.
CB: Um. How long did you do that for?
IE: Oh, about three or four years yeah.
CB: Got tired of it?
IE: What did I do after that? Do you know I can’t remember. Oh yes, the buyer that I’d worked with when I was at Gorringes, ‘phoned me up and said she’d been, now been promoted to being a group buyer. And she said ‘I need somebody in the Camberley store in the hosiery department, would I be prepared to do that?’ Well, I was looking, you know, sort of vaguely looking for something to do. So, I went along for the interview to the director in charge of Camberley. And it was a new store, belonged to the Guildford Army and Navy Stores. And anyway at my interview he said ‘You’re too, you’ve got too much experience for that job. What I need is a floor manager for the ground floor’. So, I thought ‘Well that sounds more interesting,’ so I accepted. And they were the best years of store life that I ever had, it was wonderful. So, I had all the departments of the ground floor. The staff were fantastic, the only people that I couldn’t get on with were the buyers, the heads of department. And it was some months before I realised that it was the, and it was my fault in a way, because I hadn’t warned her that I was going to be the new floor manager. And so she was undermining me all the time.
CB: No.
IE: Yeah. Fortunately, she wasn’t there all the time ‘cause she went to all the different stores in her – that she had under her wing. And I did that for about six, five – right until retirement actually.
CB: So, you enjoyed that?
IE: Yeah and um. No, no it wasn’t. I did it for several years and then I heard that one of the directors from Army and Navy were coming. He was going to be in, based in Camberley. And I knew he didn’t like me, he hadn’t got any time for me. And so, I thought ‘I’ll do something else.’ And what did I do? Oh yeah, I applied for a job, something completely different. It was just sort of office work really.
CB: In a different?
IE: Yeah.
CB: Not in retail?
IE: No, no, no. It was, oh can’t think of the name of the people. Atlas Express Carriers.
CB: Oh.
IE: So, I went just as clerical and then I ended up in charge of the staff there. I got quite a big job there. And [emphatic] I got a pension which you don’t get in the retail, in department stores.
CB: Um.
IE: So that was, that was good.
CB: So, you were managing the whole place, were you?
IE: Yeah. Um, it was good. It was very – and I stayed there until I retired.
CB: What age did you retire?
IE: Um?
CB: What age did you retire?
IE: Sixty.
CB: Right.
IE: Yeah, you had to.
CB: Yeah, right. We’ll take a little break there.
IE: Yeah, OK.
CB: So, picking up on the story again now. We were talking about being at Waddington.
IE: Yes.
CB: And linking in with the other airfields at Skellingthorpe and Bardney.
IE: Yes.
CB: And you’re tying together the communications that are on the camp rather than outside.
IE: Yes.
CB: You’re talking to people on the ‘phone. To what extent were you dealing with other people on the station?
IE: Well really not a lot unless you went to a dance or that sort of thing. Or down at the local pub.
CB: Right.
IE: You know, but other than that because, you were in this sort of office with a switchboard and you didn’t really see anybody else much. But this one particular time there was an Australian. I think I’d met him at dance. And coming, I think when they were over the target, something like that. There was an aircraft, the aircraft, another aircraft had dropped their incendiaries. And it had, they’d hit Bill, I’ll call him Bill, hit Bill’s aircraft –
CB: Which was flying underneath?
IE: Bill’s aircraft which was flying below.
CB: Yes.
IE: And hit the, oh what was it? Anyway, one of the crew and badly injured him in his head and that and he died before they could get him back to England.
CB: Um.
IE: And I was on duty when they came back and Bill came into the switchboard, into the telephone exchange to tell me, you know, what had happened. He was in a real state. He just sat there, and, sort of trying to collect himself, until I’d finished duty and then we went and sat outside whilst he was talking about. And it was, you know, very sad ‘cause there was nothing they could do. If it had been a German it would have been different.
CB: Yes.
IE: But it wasn’t. It was one of ours. Yeah.
CB: And the crew is the family.
IE: Um?
CB: The crew is the family.
IE: Yes, of course, yes.
CB: So, it’s a very intense relationship.
IE: Yes.
CB: Um.
IE: Yeah, he was a nice chap. ‘Cause they had to go on and then ‘cause they were almost over the target.
CB: Was it? Do you know if the ‘plane was hit in other areas or just in that particular?
IE: No, just in that particular one. ‘Cause he managed to get it back.
CB: Um.
IE: Back to Waddington.
CB: You mentioned the activities, the social activities, where were those held on the station?
IE: Ah, in the dining, in the dining hall.
CB: Of the Airmans’ Mess?
IE: We had dances and that sort of thing.
CB: Yes.
IE: Mostly there, yeah.
CB: And how often did they take place?
IE: Oh, well certainly once a month. Sometimes if we got anybody else came in we might get something. Or we’d go down, ‘cause we were so near to Lincoln anyway so quite a lot of it we would go down into Lincoln.
CB: Um. And if there were dances organised off the station where would they?
IE: Oh, in Lincoln.
CB: They would?
IE: Mostly. Or sometimes at one of the other airbases.
CB: Um.
IE: Like Skellingthorpe or Bardney or somewhere like that.
CB: And how did you get around because there was less transport in those days?
IE: [Chuckles] Hitch-hiked.
CB: Yes.
IE: I was the worst person to hitch-hike anyway. I’d leave it to the others and then I’d hop on board. I hated doing that.
CB: Did you?
IE: Sometimes they did organise transport to fetch, fetch you.
CB: Fetch you back?
IE: Um.
CB: So, on your day off, which is only one in seven.
IE: Yeah.
CB: What did you do?
IE: Well mostly go out in Lincoln or one of the other places. I, even before I joined up, I used to love exploring into other places and see how people lived and that so.
IB: So, on an airfield there are a lot more people on the ground than aircrew but did the girls tend to gravitate more in one direction or another and which one was that?
IE: I don’t think so. I don’t – not really we – I think we tended to go off, apart from when there was a dance or something. I think we tended to go off to the village and go and explore. And there was quite a lot of places to go to on the outskirts, that we used to go walking and doing.
CB: So, you started at the bottom and got to LACW, what opportunity was there for advancement above that? To SACW for instance?
IE: No, well perhaps because I didn’t really bother. You know I was quite happy doing what I was doing. And apart from that you see by then I’d got my Father on my back wanting me out.
CB: Yeah.
IE: And as soon as the war had finished, that’s right it was just – ‘cause I missed all the V celebrations. I had to go, I was home on leave. And when I got back to camp he’d already done –
CB: Done the dirty on you.
IE: Done the dirty on me and I had to go straight back home. I was furious, absolutely furious. ‘Cause I really wanted to go on, you know, and further my career in the air force.
CB: Yes.
IE: I would have liked to have done that.
CB: Um. What sort of job were you hoping for next?
IE: Well I don’t know.
CB: In the RAF.
IE: Hadn’t really thought about, got into that. But, no he’d – when I got back to camp they said ‘Don’t know what you’ve been up to, but you’ve got to go and see the WAAF CO as soon as you’re back.’ Which I did and she said ‘Your release is through, go home.’
CB: So, you got leave, how much leave did you have in a year?
IE: In a year?
CB: Yes.
IE: I think you got, was it three?
CB: Three weeks was it?
IE: Seven days.
CB: And where did you go when you were on leave?
IE: I went home mostly. I think there was only about one when I didn’t and I been invited to um – yeah, ‘cause when I was at Lincoln I had my Mother’s sister lived at Doncaster so I could go, nip up there sometimes and stay with them.
CB: Um.
IE: And also I had her other sister was married to, oh what was he? Boston, he was um, oh what did they call them? He had a shop where they stocked all the things for the boats, barges and that sort of thing.
CB: Oh right.
IE: So, I used to go there sometimes.
CB: A quartermaster type job?
IE: Yes, and there was this shop.
CB: Um.
IE: And mostly I went to Doncaster, yeah.
CB: Right.
IE: My Mother’s elder sister.
CB: So how would you travel there on the train or hitch-hiking?
IE: I wasn’t very good hitch-hiking on my own. So, if I went with, if there were other people which I –
CB: Um.
IE: But I didn’t, I wasn’t very good at it.
CB: No.
IE: Because we’d have so many free passes for – I can’t remember how many. And you could travel, have a return journey for your leave which was quite good.
CB: Now as a telephonist you’re at the hub.
IE: Um?
CB: As a telephonist you’re at the hub of the communication.
IE: Yeah.
CB: On the station. Were you alert to what was going on or did you just plug in and you couldn’t hear what was happening?
IE: Um.
CB: On the conversations.
IE: Of course, most of the time you see I was on, I wasn’t on the general switchboard.
CB: No.
IE: See I was on the ones in operations and that.
CB: Um.
IE: So, I didn’t get to know a lot of the other things. But sometimes you know we’d get together and hear various things that were going on.
CB: Um.
IE: Not a lot really. I think really ‘cause you – they were pretty busy you know.
CB: Yeah.
IE: You didn’t get much time to find out anything.
CB: No. Now the loss rate amongst aircrew.
IE: There was?
CB: The rate of loss of aircrew.
IE: Oh yes.
CB: Was very high.
EE: Yeah.
CB: What reaction was there on the ground to that situation?
IE: I don’t think, I don’t remember having – I mean you really rather took it as, you know, accepted what was happening. People were there one day and then they weren’t there anymore.
CB: Um.
IE: I think if you took it too much to heart you wouldn’t survive, which sounds a bit cruel but –
CB: It’s the reality.
IE: The aircrew were the same.
CB: Of course.
IE: You know. What was it, they’d probably come in ‘Oh by the way did you hear so-and-so bought it last night?’ And that was it. Sounds a bit hard but.
CB: Well it is the reality isn’t it of the time?
IE: Um.
CB: It’s a defensive mechanism in many ways.
EE: Yeah.
CB: Of the horror of it I suppose.
IE: Just –
CB: What about?
IE: We used to get – I used to [Unclear] after the war when we got all about Dresden and all those sort of things. And you get this backlash of how dreadful it, you know, and what were we doing and that. And I used to get cross. ‘What do you think they were doing to us for goodness sake?’ You know what about Coventry?
CB: Um.
IE: And all those other things. I mean war is horrible.
CB: Um.
IE: But, so didn’t really talk about it after.
CB: No. Some of the girls will have had relationships with the aircrew.
IE: That’s very true.
CB: So how did that work?
IE: I do remember one or two were in a right bad state because their fella had not returned. But I really think you got – because it was happening all the time, it sounds a bit hard but you just were sorry at that moment and it was a shock, and then you just had to carry on. There was nothing else you could do, not really. But I think that’s why we had so many dances and that sort of thing to take your minds off it.
CB: Yeah. So how was the music supplied at the dances?
IE: Oh, there was a small band from local bands and that sort of thing. Yeah, from Lincoln.
CB: Yeah.
IE: Or round about.
CB: What about security? How tight was that on the station?
IE: I don’t really think it was. Looking back it seemed to be pretty lax. I mean you just wandered around. I mean you couldn’t go out or come back in again. You know, there was a sentry there which would charge you for coming in and out. But I must admit you did find a gap in the hedge sometimes, nip out.
CB: Yeah, yeah.
IE: But, um –
CB: Was the airfield surrounded with barbed wire or a fence of some kind, what was it?
IE: Oh, I don’t know, I can’t remember. I think it was fences and hedges.
CB: Um.
IE: Yeah.
CB: And what about anti-aircraft guns on the airfield?
IE: Yeah, they were around. They were circling right round the thing, but they weren’t that near to us.
CB: No.
IE: No.
CB: OK. Just going to pause again. Are you OK or do you need a glass of water? Jan, anything that comes out of the conversation, that perhaps ‘cause you’ve talked to Mary a good deal.
Unknown: No I don’t think so. ‘Cause she didn’t marry did she? Did she marry? Well that has –
CB: No, no, the lady we were talking about. Her fiancé was killed three months after she met him.
IE: Oh.
CB: So that was the same. I mean that was what you said earlier.
IE: Yeah.
CB: They don’t actually get, she didn’t get over it but she put it to one side.
IE: Um.
CB: But always remembered.
IE: Um.
CB: Yes.
IE: That’s true.
CB: So that’s what I’m just wondering you see.
IE: Yes, that it true. But –
CB: Oh, wait a minute. Right, we’re just talking about relationships a bit more.
IE: Um.
CB: Yes.
IE: Yes, it is true. I did know of one or two people who their fellas had been killed.
CB: Um.
IE: And they really went to pieces. But mostly, either that or quite often they got posted elsewhere so –
CB: What to non-operational airfields?
IE: Um, yeah. Yes probably, yes to pick up. But I do remember one or two very sad cases where they, the girl had really gone to pieces. And they had to, you know, go home or they ended up in hospital.
CB: Oh really, yeah.
IE: It’s very sad.
CB: ‘Cause on the air traffic front where they’re listening in to communication, that perhaps created a bit of an extra challenge did it?
IE: Um, what do you mean?
CB: So, the girls are in air traffic.
IE: Oh yeah.
CB: And so, they’re in touch with the bombers.
IE: That’s right. And you would hear them, I know where I was working you could hear them talking.
CB: Oh, could you?
IE: Yes, yes. I wish I could remember what it was called.
CB: So, your office was in the tower, was a room in the tower was it?
IE: No, no. No, I was on the station.
CB: Yes, but on [controlled?] area, on the technical site.
IE: Yes, there was intelligence and all those. I can’t remember what they were called. As I said on one wall there was the, all the stations in our group.
CB: Yes.
IE: Like Waddington, Bardney, Skellingthorpe.
CB: Yeah. Everything was listed up.
CB: Um.
IE: And as, and the names of the crew, the names on the crew. And it was awful once or twice that there were people I knew. Like for instance, I was very friendly, we had the Bomber Command film crew unit at Waddington and I was home on leave, one – Oh it was just as I was going to, I was on my way to Waddington, I’d finished my training so I was going to Waddington. And I was in our shop and I’d got my uniform on. This lady came in and she said ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were in the WAAF.’ So, Mother said ‘She’s just finished telephone training, and she’s posted she’s going off to Lincolnshire.’ So, this lady said ‘Where are you going to?’ I said ‘Waddington.’ She said ‘Oh, my husband’s at Waddington, do make yourself known to him, he’s in the film unit.’ And of course when I get there he’s only a squadron leader. [Laughs] So I didn’t, but he found me. He came and found me on the switchboard.
CB: Yeah.
IE: And so there were three camera men. And a friend of mine who was the corporal she and I used to go out, you know down to the pub, or somewhere. And so we used to meet up with the Crown film unit at the pub at Harmston, which was down the road. Used to borrow camp bikes and cycle off down there. It was great, used to enjoy that. So, there were three camera men and then sadly I was on duty one evening and the – in the ops room, and on the board, and I saw – oh, it was the, it was that raid on Dresden and John who was from Pinewood, the film studio, he wasn’t listed to go on the Dresden raid, the other camera man was going. But he thought it was going to be an interesting raid. So, he tried to beg a lift from someone somewhere and he tried other places in the group. And he managed to get on a flight so he could go and see this raid at Dresden. There was one Lancaster lost over Dresden wasn’t there?
CB: Yes.
IE: And he was on it.
CB: Good heavens.
IE: And gosh I thought ‘What do I do?’ I can’t ‘phone his wife.
CB: Yes.
IE: I can’t do anything. That was awful.
CB: Um.
IE: I found. You couldn’t contact anybody.
CB: No.
IE: To say, you know, this awful thing had happened. It happened to me again another time. A friend of mine that I’d worked with when I was in parachutes before I’d joined up. And she married aircrew at Market Harborough. And she said to him. Oh, he was then posted, I don’t know where it was, I can’t remember. Somewhere near Waddington and he was posted. And so she told him to come and look me up. And he rang me up so I met him in Lincoln, we went and had a cup of tea. A week later he was missing. It was just like that.
CB: Um.
IE: And you know nothing you could do.
CB: No.
IE: You couldn’t ‘phone up and say ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry,’ yeah. I found that difficult.
CB: Um.
IE: But the silly thing was that John in the film unit, he didn’t have to go. And he picked the wrong aircraft.
CB: Um.
IE: To go on.
CB: Extraordinary. So, what was this film unit doing most of the time?
IE: Oh, they went out on ops and would be filming wherever, you know.
CB: Um.
IE: That was mostly what they were doing.
CB: So, the WAAF’s were in quite good accommodation, but then the men had barrack blocks so they were quite comfortable as well were they?
IE: I don’t know. ‘Cause some of them, even at Waddington, some of the WAAF’s were in – I don’t know if I ever got into one of those blocks. Oh yeah, I did once somewhere. Can’t remember where it was now. Wasn’t too bad, no.
CB: No. A topic that is discussed a lot now is what is otherwise called battle fatigue. But in the war was called LMF, lacking moral fibre.
IE: Lack of moral.
CB: What do you remember about that?
IE: I remember one chap and he was in a very sad state. He was, he didn’t know what he was doing. And people were being a bit horrible about him, and said ‘Oh, he’s just putting it on.’ I don’t know whether he was or not but, but I don’t remember anything, anybody else particularly. But I think quite often they just moved them on.
CB: Um.
IE: You know.
CB: But he was aircrew was he?
IE: Mostly yeah. You couldn’t blame him could you? You know it’s pretty awful.
CB: Um.
IE: Yeah.
CB: And did you, were you aware of aircrew talking to the girls about their experiences? Or did they tend to keep it much to themselves?
IE: I think mostly they kept it to themselves, yeah. They didn’t – I mean apart from that one incident with Bill you see, because that had happened with this chap had been killed by friendly incendiaries.
CB: Yes.
IE: But he didn’t normally say. I think it was ‘cause he was so shocked he needed to talk to somebody.
CB: Um.
IE: but I wasn’t aware of. I think they probably amongst themselves rather than to us.
CB: Yes. Good, thank you very much indeed Liz. When the war ended, you went your own ways.
IE: Um.
CB: To what extent did you keep in touch with each other?
IE: Yes, well I did. There was, which one is it? Yes, the one in the middle at the back.
CB: In your picture, yes.
IE: Florence, and that’s her daughter.
CB: Oh yes.
IE: So, she’s my god-daughter.
CB: Yes.
IE: There on that little group.
CB: Um.
IE: Yes, I kept in touch with her, you know, we were good friends.
CB: Um.
IE: I’d go and stay with them right up until she died. And as I say, Trish she annoys me really in a way. She will treat me like a real old lady. [Laughter] I know I’m an old lady!
CB: You’re very sprightly.
IE: But I remember when Florence my friend, she was, oh I can’t remember where they lived, her husband died. And Trisha took me over to see her Mother in this home. And we went off into this room where she was, and there were other people there as well. And there she was sitting, with a shawl over her, and she was sitting like this. And I thought ‘That’s not my friend.’ She’s never been like that. And I was so shocked at the state that she was in. And anyway she said to Trish, ‘Would you go down to the shop round the corner’ and get me so and so, whatever. So, she went off, before that girl was out of the building off went the shawl. Mother in the kitchen buzzing around and that was a good lesson I learnt. You know it was really, it was amazing. But she does it to me. When she comes and visits, I’ve got a visit due sometime soon, and I dread it. And the first time, where was I? I wasn’t here, I was oh in another flat, further in Woking. And she came to visit me and she was helping me across the road. I was so cross. I said ‘Trisha, what do you think I do when you’re not here?’ You know?
CB: Yes.
IE: But she does you see?
CB: Yes.
IE: I’ve got a visit due soon and I really dread it. Bless her heart she’s a lovely person.
CB: Yes.
EE: But if only she’d just treat you normally.
CB: Yes.
EE: But [saying that?] but that was a good lesson to learn. That, um what happens when people sort of mother you when you’re really quite capable of carrying on.
CB: Yeah, yeah.
IE: Nobody does it to me here. [Laughs]
CB: Many of the aircrew didn’t get married in the war because they were nervous about leaving.
IE: That’s true, I believe so.
CB: Yes.
IE: Yes, yes.
CB: And were you aware of what happened afterwards, people?
IE: Not really, no I don’t.
CB: Because they married people who were clearly not in the RAF but I was.
IE: Yes.
CB: But I was interested in aspects where they had relationships.
IE: Ah, with other people.
CB: Relationships with WAAF’s and didn’t marry in the war.
IE: Yeah. I’m just trying to think if I know of anybody. Um, no. It was really only that one particular one.
CB: Um.
IE: And in that photograph I think two of them went to Australia.
CB: Did they really?
IE: And because there was quite an exodus of people going to Australia.
CB: Um. They weren’t following some of 463 and 467 Squadron?
IE: Um.
CB: Were they? They weren’t following the Australian aircrew back to Australia?
IE: Oh yes.
CB: Oh, they were?
IE: Oh, they were yes. Yeah, yes, they were. Nearly got there myself, I didn’t want to go and leave England.
CB: Did you? What was the attraction of Australia?
IE: Pardon?
CB: What was the attraction of Australia?
IE: Oh well it was my boyfriend went over there.
CB: Oh, did he?
IE: No, I made it quite clear I would never go.
CB: Oh right.
IE: Funnily enough of my sister’s children, two of them went to Australia.
CB: Did they?
IE: And one of them he did come back. He said he’d never worked so hard in all of his life. He was fruit picking, a fruit farm.
CB: Oh yes.
IE: The other one, I thought he was mad going. Because he was mad on animals and he was working at Chester Zoo. And then suddenly decides to go to Australia on this –
CB: Ten pound?
IE: Was it five years or whatever?
CB: Yeah.
IE: And I thought, I couldn’t understand that. But anyway, they arrived in Australia and he was workin up the west coast and what does he come across? A zoo. So, he got a job there in an Aussie zoo and then he came back and put in for another few years, he’s working in a zoo in Australia now.
CB: Oh really?
IE: Yeah, loving it. But the other one came back, he’s in England.
CB: Um.
IE: They were cousins, they weren’t –
CB: Final question. We’ve talked about the squadron associations, are mainly aircrew and mainly men.
IE: Yeah.
CB: So, to what extent did you feel linked to a squadron and then follow up with associations afterwards?
IE: Not, not really. I did join the WAAF Association.
CB: Um.
IE: And the trouble was that they met at Putney. And I was down here and it was such a job getting there and then crossing London.
CB: Um.
IE: Getting to there. And it was a bit boring. But I do belong to the RAF Association. I’m thoroughly disgusted with them. It’s about a year now. I used to join in everything when I was, belonged to it.
CB: Um.
IE: And we first used to meet in the town and it was, what’s his name? Pip. He’s RAF Association at Fareham. Pip, Pip something or other. And he used to be at the one here.
CB: At Woking, yeah?
IE: Yeah, Woking. And when I first joined, and I’d been doing some fundraising at the department stores I’d worked at and I managed to raise a really good sum. And he said ‘Would I do the Wings appeal?’
CB: Oh.
IE: So, I said ‘Yes, sure I would.’ Of course, I go to do it and of course I’m up against English RAF aren’t I? With all due respect to them, and nobody would help me.
CB: Really?
IE: ‘Cause I, first of all I –
CB: How strange.
IE: I said, you know, can you tell me if you’ve got any particular place you’d like to stand, you know, with your tin and the rest of it. No, they weren’t going to tell me anything. In fact, they weren’t going to co-operate with me at all.
CB: How strange.
IE: So, I thought ‘What am I going to do?’ And across the road, the house straight across the road, number twelve, a cousin of mine used to live there. And when I came, I used to during the war – I mean this was a lovely house. Oh no it was after the war. Anyway, I got, when I came to live in Woking, can’t remember how but I got friendly with them. And so, I was over there one day and I said ‘I’ve got this problem about collecting and nobody’s going to co-operate with me, where can I raise money?’ They said ‘Car wash.’ I said ‘Car wash, where am I going to do that?’ They said ‘You could do it there but people like having it done at home.’ And I don’t know where it is now, it might be there. I got photographs of these youngsters from across the road, and their friends all busy doing car washing. And I raised over two thousand pounds.
CB: Fantastic.
IE: And I never told the RAF Association what I’d been doing, doing it quietly. [Laughter]
CB: How funny.
IE: Yeah. And Pip, ‘cause in that time he’d already been sent over to Fareham.
CB: Um.
IE: But he’s still in touch, he still contacts me every now and again.
CB: Does he? Um.
IE: Yes, him and his wife, Betty.
CB: Yeah.
EE: But um the Woking RAF Association they don’t, didn’t like the WAAF at all. There were ten ex-WAAF at one time and now there’s one.
CB: Extraordinary.
IE: ‘Cause everybody got fed up with it and they just left, they didn’t.
CB: Yeah.
IE: Which is a shame really.
CB: Yes. What was the most memorable part of your RAF service?
IE: Oh gosh, well I think the days with the Australians in Waddington really were. I suppose that’s the time, and with the film unit. I think because that was the time when most things happened.
CB: Um.
IE: Really.
CB: So, did you get yourself on the film?
IE: On film? No, I ducked out. No, not that I know of anyway.
CB: No.
IE: never seen any –
CB: So, do we detect a bias here towards Australians? ‘Cause you had an Australian boyfriend.
IE: Not really, no, no. No I did, but unfortunately he also had a girlfriend in London where he went on leave.
CB: Oh.
IE: I was quite well aware of it.
CB: Oh, you were?
IE: And –
CB: Two-timer, right.
IE: Well he didn’t say and I wasn’t letting on I knew but his crew they didn’t like her.
CB: Oh right.
IE: They liked me. [Laughter]
CB: So, you didn’t swap him for an English version?
IE: No, no. Not really, I really wasn’t bothered. I, one way or another. After was it um, no, much to my Father’s disgust. I um, I got to within ten days of my, the date of my marriage and I chucked it in.
CB: Did you?
IE: It wasn’t RAF.
CB: Oh, right.
IE: It was very silly but. No, it was to do with money.
CB: Um.
IE: And it was so silly. But thank goodness I knew, I found out in time.
CB: Um.
IE: My Father wouldn’t speak to me for a long time and I never told him what, you know, exactly what had happened, so he didn’t know.
CB: No.
IE: All I got was a curt letter. ‘How very foolish, just like Aunt Lucy.’ Apparently, this was what one of his sisters did.
CB: Oh really.
IE: And that’s all I got. Sympathy, didn’t get any.
CB: Yes. So, you forged a good career instead?
IE: Yes. no, I had good friends so I was alright.
CB: Yes. Well, thanks very much Liz, it’s been fascinating.
IE: Oh well. I can’t think there’s anything else but –
CB: We’ve just been talking about the winter snow in this picture. And tell us what you had to do then.
IE: Yes.
CB: How deep was the snow?
IE: Oh, it would be up to your – more than knee deep.
CB: Yes, right up your thighs?
IE: Yes. And it would come down and we had to clear the runways. Of course, there was a mechanical thing.
CB: Yeah.
IE: But everybody that was off duty was given a spade.
CB: Oh.
IE: And shovel. Shovel the snow away.
CB: Yeah.
IE: And I found this, it was a Christmas card. I thought it was wonderful. That’s exactly what it was like.
CB: A picture of a Lancaster.
IE: Yeah.
CB: And ground crew shovelling the snow away. Yeah, so it would take some time to clear the runway ‘cause it’s long.
IE: Oh yes. Yeah, I mean there was people just shovelling, yeah.
CB: How long would it take to clear?
IE: Oh I don’t know –
CB: The runway.
IE: I mean most, part of it would be mechanical. You know, they’re have this whatever. I don’t know what it was but it would go down.
CB: Um.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Elizabeth Eady
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AEadyIET160628
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Description
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Before the war, Liz worked in aeronautical inspection at a factory which made parachutes. She had an interview in Northolt and enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in October 1942. She went to Uxbridge and chose to be a telephonist. After a month in Harrogate, she was trained at the Bradford Telephone Exchange. Liz was sent to RAF Compton Bassett for further training and then on to RAF Skellingthorpe. She took up a vacancy at RAF Waddington where there were two Australian squadrons (463 and 467 Squadrons).
Liz describes her work on the switchboard, the shifts and accommodation, as well as her social life. Her highlights were the Australians at RAF Waddington and the film unit operating from there.
After pressure from her father, Liz had to leave in May 1946, and went on to have a successful and varied career.
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2016-06-28
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Dawn Studd
Cathie Hewitt
Sally Coulter
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01:24:01 audio recording
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eng
Type
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Sound
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
463 Squadron
467 Squadron
entertainment
ground personnel
operations room
RAF Bardney
RAF Compton Bassett
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Waddington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/540/8780/AGilbertAC161013.2.mp3
d34798a44bdedb497b506541d0fc1232
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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Gilbert, Alexander Charles
A C Gilbert
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Gilbert, AC
Description
An account of the resource
21 items. An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Alexander Charles Gilbert DFC (b. 1921, 1336682, 186764 Royal Air Force) his log book, documents and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 9, 514 and 159 Squadrons. He was Awarded the Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 2020.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Alexander Gilbert and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
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2016-01-13
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 13th of October 2016 and we’re with Squadron Leader Alexander Gilbert DFC at Cheddington near Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire, and we’re going to talk about his career in the RAF, which was a long one. What do you remember in the earliest recollections then Alex?
AG: What do you mean? Going way, right back?
CB: Right from when you were really young.
AG: Ah, well, my father was a Hansom cab driver in London.
CB: Oh right.
AG: He joined the Army at the outbreak of World War One and served right through. And because he’d been a Hansom cab driver and knew all about horses they, he was assigned to what they called the Rough Riders, looking after horses, taking them across the Channel to France, and training horses and occasionally going down to Spain to purchase more horses and mules that were brought back for service in France. And at the end of the war, he was at this, this re-mount depot as it was called, at Swaythling in Southampton and he stayed there, and of course, he was married at the time. And from there, what could we say? I started school aged five, and I went to an elementary school and I left at fourteen, and then I was training or trying to become something in the art world, and I attended art school in Southampton. And then in November 1940, I volunteered to join the RAF and was called forward for service on the 7th of April 1941 and despatched to Uxbridge, where I spent three or four days being interviewed and processed, sworn in, all that sort of thing, and then assigned to a trade, and I was told I was to be trained as a Flight Mechanic Air Frames. From there, along with others, I proceeded to Blackpool where I carried out my recruit training on Blackpool sands, accommodated in one of the well-known Blackpool boarding houses. The training, as I remember it, lasted about four, four or five weeks. Recruit training and then we were moved to nearby Kirkham to, to carry out the trade training. The flight mechanics course lasted, as I remember, about eight, eight to ten weeks. At the end of the course, we had a final examination and the top third who passed out were retained to carry on to do a fitter’s course. I was in the top third so I stayed behind and completed the two courses, and at the end of it, I was a Group One Tradesman, Fitter 2A as they called them. I then had my, my first posting which was to what had been Exeter Airport, which was now a station that was occupied by a Spitfire squadron. I was only there about four weeks when the squadron was moved to an airfield near London. The air, the air, the ground crew were not required because the airfield that they’d gone to, already had ground crew, so we were dispersed and posted to various stations and I was posted to Calshot. Calshot was a very dreary place, it hadn’t changed, I don’t think, since World War One. The accommodation was pretty grim, I always remember the beds we had were iron plated, sort of, you know bedsteads. Very, very uncomfortable. The working hours, we worked, weekdays, every day, eight hours a day. We also worked weekends, Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings. We had the afternoons off at weekends, but because Calshot was rather isolated, there wasn’t anywhere to go anyway. So altogether it was a place that I, I really did not like at all. Anyway, apart from the work that we had to do, we also did guard duty at night along the Calshot foreshore, because there was the talk at the time about invasion and all this business, so we, we did these guard duties as well as our normal work. A very cold and uncomfortable place in winter time I can assure you, on the Calshot foreshore, very uncomfortable indeed. In early 1942, it was about March I suppose, a letter was pinned on the notice board. It said that the aircraft industry was expanding and there was a shortage of skilled tradesmen. RAF fitters were invited to volunteer for a short secondment to the aircraft industry. I thought to myself this is a way of getting away from Calshot so I volunteered. I didn’t really know what I was getting into actually. They told me I, yeah, I was to report to an office in Oxford, which I did. When I arrived there they said you will be working at the Cowley Motor Works. It was no longer a motor works of course, they were turning out parts for Lancaster aircraft, and they said, ‘You will work on permanent nightshift’. You start at 8 o’clock in the evening and you worked until 6 o’clock the next morning, with an hour’s break at night, and that was the routine. They gave me an address to go to where I would be accommodated. It was a house in the backstreets of Oxford that was owned by a young couple in their early thirties I suppose, and it was obvious from the start that they resented having a lodger, so there was no welcome at all. The woman took me up to what was to be my room, which had a bed, a table and a chair and that was it. It was a very depressing place altogether. I spent the night there, and the next morning, I had the same reception from this couple, not a friendly attitude at all, so I waited till they’d gone to work, packed my small bag and went back to the office I’d first reported to. The woman I saw, I explained to her about this place and I said, ‘I’m not going to stay there’, I said, ‘I am not going to stay in that place. Can you give me a new address? Another address to go to?’ So she said, ‘Yes, I’ll do that’. She said, ‘Here’s an address in Cowley’. I went there, a very nice street, the house very nice. Nice, nice couple, middle aged couple. The husband worked as a chef at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. She showed me to my room, very pleasant and comfortable, so that’s where I was whilst I worked at Cowley. The next day I reported to the Cowley Works to start work. The chap I saw said, ‘You will be working with a team of four’, there was already four there, ‘You’ll be, you’ll be number five, working with this team producing spars for the fuselage of Lancaster aircraft’. The four chaps turned out all to be Welshmen, they all came from the same place. They all knew one another well and I was taken into the team and we all got on quite well. That was it for the next five months or so. Then in early September, I received a letter to say that I was to be recalled and to report to Scampton, RAF Scampton, which I duly did, and on arrival at Scampton, I was told I was posted to 49 Bomber Squadron to work on Lancaster aircraft. I worked, I was on, on 49 Squadron through the winter of ’42/43, then in early ’43, I suppose it was about March time, a further letter appeared on a noticeboard to say that more and more four engine bomber squadrons were being formed, and there was a requirement for flight engineers, so I volunteered. At the time, there was no flight engineer training course and they said you would receive your training at the Rolls Royce works at Derby, and you would do a two week course on the Merlin engine and that would be it, which I did. After that, I was promoted to the rank of sergeant, given my flight engineer brevet, and then moved to Morton Hall where I would be crewed up. I got to Morton Hall and found that there were crews already there. There was the pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator and the two air gunners and now they wanted a flight engineer. The way we were crewed up was the other engineers and myself were put in to a hut and told to line up along one wall. The pilots then came in and lined themselves up on the opposite wall, and the procedure was that the pilot would look across at the engineers, look at one that he thought would, would be ok and ask him, and I was approached by a chap called Colin Payne who said to me, ‘How would you like to join my crew?’ And I said, ‘Yes please. I would’, because I liked the look of him, and then he took me outside to introduce me to the other crew members and that was it. We were then moved to Winthorpe to do our conversion course on the Lancaster, which we did, and from there, we had our first operational posting and we were posted to 9 Squadron at Bardney. While we were there, we did ten operations, including the three to Hamburg [pause]. At the time the squadrons, the Stirling squadrons in 3 Group were being converted to Lancasters, and new squadrons were starting to be formed. We were told that a new squadron was being formed at Foulsham, and was to be called 514 Squadron. It appears that they wanted two or three experienced crews to start the squadron off and then new crews would be added. So we duly reported to Foulsham where we did four operations with the newly formed 514 Squadron. The last of the four operations was to Berlin and when we were briefed, we were told that when we completed the operation, ‘You will not be returning to Foulsham. You will fly straight to Waterbeach’, which was to be the home of 514 Squadron, which was a rather odd thing to do because we had our belongings and all that sort of thing, and in, somebody wrote up afterwards what this was all about and there’s the letter there. Is that the one? The top one. “Get on your bike” or something, it says.
CB: “Posted via Berlin. Take [take] your bike”.
AG: That’s it. “Take your bike”, yeah. Yeah. I mean, this was the thing which you normally, they would never allow you to take anything.
CB: No.
AG: But we took all our stuff with us to Berlin and then to Waterbeach.
CB: Because you were moving airfield.
AG: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so that was that. So we arrived at Waterbeach, whilst we were at Waterbeach, we did another ten operations. So, so far we’d done ten at Bardney, ten at Waterbeach and I had done, and the four at Foulsham, a total of twenty four. The crew actually had done twenty five, there was one operation that I couldn’t go on because I had developed a nasty quinsy in my throat, and I couldn’t fly for three or four days, so I did one less operation than the rest of the crew. However, when they’d done twenty five and I’d done twenty four, we were then told that you had completed your first tour. Now this was five short of the normal thirty operations. The reason for this, I don’t know, whether it was because of the fourteen operations we’d done with 514 Squadron, ten of them had been to Berlin. Ten. Whether it was because of that, I don’t know but they said, ‘You have completed your first tour’ [pause]. The crew were then dispersed, of course, and posted to various training units. I stayed with Colin and we were posted as instructors to Number 3 LFS at Feltwell [pause], where we were until the, towards the end of the year. Well, we were, this was 1944, Colin said to me, ‘How would you like to go back on operations?’ I said, ‘Well I don’t mind’, so he said, ‘We will be posted to 149 Squadron at Methwold’, he said, ‘And I’ll try and contact some of the old crew members and ask them to join us’. He managed to contact the wireless operator and the rear gunner, and they duly arrived to join us at Methwold. We then picked up a new navigator, a new bomb aimer and a new gunner to replace the Australian. The Australian, by the way, was given a choice, having completed a tour of operations, either to stay in England or to go home to Australia, and he elected to go home. Now, among the operations we did with 149, we did the Dresden operation. We went to Dresden and we also did two Manna operations, dropping food. In our case, we dropped food to people in Rotterdam and The Hague [pause], and that was shortly before the war ended. At the end of the war, we started to get demobbed. I had been offered a four year extension, I didn’t know what I was going to do, by the way. I was married by that time, and my wife Dorothy had been a WAAF MT driver at Waterbeach. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and as I was offered this four year extension of service, I thought, I’ll take it and then make up my mind later about my future career or whatever. Anyway, I took the four year extension of service, stayed with the squadron until it was disbanded in January 1948, but during that time we did various exercises. We had a three, three, three or four day detachment to Trondheim in Norway, we did a trip to Juvincourt to bring back these chaps who’d been in the Army and been prisoners of war. We had an attachment to Gatow in Berlin, we did a tour of Germany by air, looking at some of the stations that we had bombed, some of the towns that we had bombed to see what it all looked like, and we had this trip to Pomigliano in Italy, and we had this two week detachment in the Canal Zone [pause]. And then, when the squadron was finally disbanded, there was no requirement, of course, for flight engineers, bomb aimers, air gunners or anything like that. The only aircrew they wanted to retain, were pilots and navigators, so I was transferred from the GD branch to the secretarial branch [pause]. I had two short, short postings, one to Watton and one to Bletchley Park which, at that time was the headquarters of Central Signals Area. You weren’t allowed in the house at that time, everything was all locked up and no one ever spoke about what, what was done at Bletchley during the war. No one ever said a word about it. One of the jobs I had to do whilst I was at Bletchley was opening the mail that came in, and one morning I opened the mail, opened this post gram, and found that I was posted to Hong Kong and I was posted to 367 Signals Unit, which was a Y station on Hong Kong Island. I travelled to Hong Kong by way of Singapore, on the troop ship Orbita, which took some five weeks to get to Singapore. I spent three of four days in Singapore and then boarded a Dakota aircraft to get to Hong Kong. We stopped on the way at Saigon to refuel and have something to eat, and the whole trip took eight and a half hours in this Dakota, and then arrived in Hong Kong. At the time, it was at the time that Chairman Mao was winning the war in China and people were flooding in to Hong Kong. Rich Chinese people who could afford anything, and any spare accommodation in Hong Kong was taken up by these people. So in our case, we were, I was occupied in the mess at Kai Tak, and it was a question of applying to get my wife to come and join me, which would take some time, and you just went on the married quarters waiting list, and again there were very few married quarters in Hong Kong, so you just had to wait a long time to get one. Anyway, my wife arrived in September with our newly born young girl, Janet, my daughter, and we were accommodated, like a lot of others, in one room in a hotel. Not, again, not very comfortable, waiting to be allocated a married quarter, but anyway, things in this hotel, it was hot, humid, again terribly uncomfortable, and every day I used to buy the China News, news, newspaper and see if there was any sort of accommodation being advertised. One day I bought the paper, and there was an advert in there which said there was an English family who worked in Hong Kong going home on leave, and their flat would be available. Offers were asked for, so I wrote, I sat down and wrote a letter which brought tears to the eyes of anyone who read it, and posted it off to this man called Alex MacLeod, who owned this flat. A couple of days later, he rang me up at the hotel and he said could I come over and have a chat with him and his wife, so Dorothy and I went across to the island, because our hotel was located in Kowloon on the mainland, and he took me up to the flat, introduced me to Joan, his wife, and after a short conversation they said, ‘We’re going to offer you the flat’. So we moved out of the hotel and into this flat, which we occupied for about two months whilst they were away in England. When they were due back, strangely enough, I rose to the top of the married quarters list and was offered a married quarter, so we moved in to the quarter and there we stayed until I completed my tour in Hong Kong in September 1953 [pause].
CB: We’ll just pause there for a mo.
AG: Do you want to go on there because we were now –?
CB: Yeah. Give you a –
[Recording paused]
CB: Ok.
AG: Right.
CB: So you’re in Hong Kong.
AG: In Hong Kong, completed nearly three years in Hong Kong, and when I came home, I was posted to 3513 FCU, Fighter Control Unit in Devonport as adjutant of the unit. We had an operational outstation at Hope Cove with a small staff at Hope Cove and [pause], I’m trying to get my thoughts right here. I completed a tour at 3513 and was then posted to 24 Group on the P staff. This was in Lincolnshire and –
CB: So what was P staff?
AG: P staff. P2 was Postings –
CB: Right.
AG: Postings of officers [pause]. I’d been there a short time and it was decided that the P staffs at Groups headquarters would be, would be closed down and they were no longer required, and so I was then posted to our headquarters, Technical Training Command at Brampton, again on the P staff [pause]. And whilst I was there my, I was then granted a permanent commission on the general list [pause]. From then I had various postings, I had two and a half years at SHAEF headquarters in Fontainebleau in France.
CB: What did you do there?
AG: I was the adjutant of the RAF support unit. Each of the nationalities at Fontainebleau, there were the British, the Americans, Canadians, French of course, they each had their own support staff and I was the adjutant of the RAF support staff [pause]. After that, my next posting was as recruiting officer at Brighton [pause], from there, I was posted to Headquarters Transport Command at Upavon, where I was the P1 staff officer responsible for courts martial boards of enquiry and all that sort of thing. I was there for only a few months when I was promoted to Squadron Leader and posted to the record office at Barnwood in Gloucester, where I was on the staff of the air commodore, the AOC [pause]. I did just over two years there and then I was posted to Aden on a twelve month unaccompanied tour of Aden. Whilst I was in Aden, they had a peculiar arrangement in Aden at the time. It was nearing the time when we were planning to get out of Aden anyway, to leave it and they had what they called continuity posts, which was a posting of two and a half years where you could be accompanied by your wife and family. A non-continuity post was a twelve month unaccompanied tour post which I, which I was in. Again, Aden, a dreadful place, we should have got out of Aden years ago but it wasn’t until 1967 that we finally left. I completed the twelve month unaccompanied tour, and on arrival back at the UK, was posted to Headquarters Strike Command at High Wycombe where I was on the aug staff [pause]. From there, I was posted to the Air Ministry on the staff of the director of manning. I did three and a half years at Adastral House in Holborn, which was part of the Air Ministry at the time. Nearing the end of my service, I had a final posting to Stanmore Park, where I was the deputy CO of Stanmore Park and that was my final posting, having then completed thirty five years in the service [pause]. Knowing that I was to be, leave the service in the October 1976, I had already started to formulate what I was going to do when I left the service, and I had applied for a job with the University of Buckingham, which I got. They had an offshoot of the University at Chalfont St Giles. By this time, of course, we’d bought this house in Cheddington, and the journey between here and Chalfont St Giles was twenty two miles. Anyway, which I had to do every day but I thought, well I’d got the job, and it seemed quite a good job looking after the admin side of the University of Buckingham at Chalfont. I had been interviewed for the job along with three others. They’d had a large number of applications to get this job, but anyway, there was three others and myself who were interviewed for this job. We spent a day at Chalfont, the morning we spent touring the place, and in the afternoon, the interviews were carried out, and the interview for each one of us lasted about three quarters of an hour or so, and we sat there then waiting to see who’d got the job, and at the end of the afternoon, the Vice Chancellor came in and said, ‘We’ve decided to give the job to Squadron Leader Gilbert’. So I thought, right. That was it. Now, this was before I had left the service. He said, ‘We will keep the job open for you until you leave the service in October’ [pause]. Shortly before I retired, I was in my office at, at Stanmore Park and I had a phone call from the Air Ministry, and they said, ‘We notice that you live near Halton’, they said, ‘Would you be interested in a retired officer job at Halton? The job would be for ten years after you leave the service and’, they said, ‘You’ll have to be interviewed of course, at Headquarters Air Cadets’. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll go there. I’m quite interested to find out what it’s all about’. So I, I went to Headquarters Air Cadets for this interview along, along with a number of others, and again at the end of the afternoon, the group captain, who was in charge of the interview board, came and said, ‘We’ve decided to offer the job to Squadron Leader Gilbert’. So I thought, right, I’ve got two jobs now. I’ve got the offer of a job at Halton and the job at Chalfont St Giles, and I thought, well to be very honest, Halton is quite close here, I would know all the routine of the service. I would still be in uniform as a squadron leader at Halton for ten years secure, secure employment, so I thought, well I will have to try, try and take this job. So I rang the Vice Chancellor at Chalfont and said, ‘Could I come down and see you?’ Which I did. I went down to him and explained what it was all about and I said, ‘To be quite honest, this job at Halton, I really know all about it. I know the routine of the service, it’s quite near my home and I feel that really, I ought to take this job’. He said, ‘I quite understand’, he said, ‘We will find somebody else’, and he said, ‘I wish you the best of luck’. So I started at Halton. I was the wing admin officer of Herts and Bucks Wing, Air Training Corps, and my job was taking care of all the ATC squadrons in Hertfordshire and in Bucks, and I completed that job for ten years. And that, I think, is the end of it.
CB: You decided to retire completely at age sixty five.
AG: At sixty five, I thought I have done enough. I have never been unemployed and I thought I’d, I’d done quite enough and that’s it.
CB: Very good. Let’s have a break.
[Recording paused]
CB: Geoff, thanks, sorry Alex. Thanks very much for all that stuff. What I want to do is run through some individual items. One of the things we touched on was Manna.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Now, this is quite important in a lot of ways, so could you just tell us how did you get involved in that and what, what happened and how did you feel?
AG: Well on the, towards the end of the war, we were told that the people in Holland were starving and a lot were dying. In fact, I was told eventually that twenty thousand Dutch people died of starvation, so we were told that we were to take part in what we was called Operation Manna. The word comes, you probably know –
CB: From heaven.
AG: The word comes from the bible, and when the Israelites and Moses were driven out of Egypt, they were starving and Moses prayed for them to get food, and it appears that a heavy dew descended on the land. This dew was sweet tasting and the Israelites were able to eat this stuff and so survive. And that is where, and Moses said, ‘This is Manna from heaven’, and that’s the way it came about. We did two food drops, one to Rotterdam, one to the Hague, flew to Holland with bomb bay laden with food and as we came in, in to the park at low level and dropped the food the people who’d gathered there all started shouting and cheering and all the rest of it. It was a sight that I will always remember, and it made us feel that we’d done something that was really worthwhile and that is the Manna story as far as I’m concerned.
CB: Then when you got back? So, you then got back and then what?
AG: Well got back and as I say, we did the two, two trips and then we just carried on with normal squadron duties.
CB: Right.
AG: But this happened, people don’t seem to realise that these drops took place while the war was still on. The Germans had agreed that they would not interfere with the Operation Manna.
CB: And what height and speed did you do this?
AG: We came in about five hundred feet, and the food was all in sacks on a wooden sort of arrangement. A pallet as they called it, a wooden pallet, and the food was all in sacks and the pallet was just dropped on to the park.
CB: A moving experience.
AG: Yeah. Very much so. Very much so. Never forget these people.
CB: No.
AG: Who were all so pleased to see us.
CB: And after the war did you ever go to Holland?
AG: No. No. No. Oh I went, when I was at Fontainebleau.
CB: Oh you did?
AG: I used to go, go up there occasionally. Oh yes. Yeah.
CB: Right.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Thank you.
[Recording paused]
CB: Now we’re just going on to your role as a flight engineer, because the flight engineer’s activities were actually quite busy. If we start with take-off, could you describe the take-off process and how the flight engineer gets involved in that, and what he does?
AG: Well at take-off, we go down the runway, the pilot takes the aircraft in to the air, and as he does so, the flight engineer gets the undercarriage up and adjusts the flaps, and that’s, that’s about it until you’re up. And er –
CB: But in fact, you take over the throttles at an early stage, so can you just describe that?
AG: And, and, yes, once you’re airborne at flying height, then you adjust the throttles to whatever speed, you know, the pilot wants, and the bombing height of course was between eighteen and twenty thousand feet each time. And that was it. Most of the trips took about four and a half to five hours, but of course, a trip like Dresden, we were airborne for eight and a half hours, and we went in across Germany but when we came out, we went north and flew over Denmark and came home, home that way.
CB: Right. So when you’re flying as an engineer, what do you do?
AG: Well, you’re doing really the log more than anything and anything else the pilots wants you to do, but normally, I mean, the whole crew would settle down really, and you were just airborne hoping you wouldn’t be attacked by a night fighter.
CB: Yeah. So when you fill in the log, what are you filling in and with what frequency?
AG: The frequency was about every half hour or so and you would put in what you thought was the fuel consumption at the time.
CB: So how –
AG: That sort of thing. Yes.
CB: How do you work out the transfer of fuel and what do you do?
AG: Yes. Well, you know that you’re on, say, a particular tank for a certain time and that it was time to transfer or refill that tank or whatever and you would do. It didn’t happen all that often of course, I forget now how many, how many petrol tanks there were on the Lancaster, I think it was two to three at each wing, something like that. I forget those details now, it’s too long ago and regrettably, all the booklets I had on the Lancaster I kept for many years, but with all my travels, eventually they were all discarded.
CB: I’ve got a pilot –
AG: Regrettably.
CB: I’ve got a –
AG: My daughter always swears at me, she says, ‘you should have kept all that stuff, Dad’.
CB: Yeah.
AG: You should have kept it all. Well I know that is true now but hindsight is all very well, isn’t it?
CB: Well perhaps it wasn’t so important then. I’ve got a –
AG: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: I’ve got a pilot’s notes, I’ll lend it to you.
AG: That’s right. Yeah. Well I had all the notes on the Lancaster, I could tell you all about it.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yes. Yeah.
CB: Now, why are you moving fuel?
AG: Because of weight, weight really, to get an evenly balanced aircraft.
CB: So you –
AG: That’s the only, only reason I can recall.
CB: So you’re moving it from the outer tanks to the inner ones, are you?
AG: That’s right, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So we finish the sortie and you’re coming in to land. What does the, what’s the tasks, the role of the flight engineer?
AG: Well once we’re on the circuit and we were called in, then it was undercarriage down and just standing by the pilot, and that was it really, making any engine adjustment as we came in. That was all. Yeah.
CB: So back on the stage of taking off, at what point and how do you balance the engines? Synchronise the engines.
AG: Once you’d got to a certain height.
CB: Right.
AG: Once you’d got to a certain height, yeah. Yeah.
CB: And the purpose of that is?
AG: Well you stayed on that, on that engine arrangement whilst, you know, whilst you were in flight. You could have been on that for some time.
CB: But –
AG: Some time without any change. You weren’t constantly changing. I mean, let’s be honest about it, with these operations, a lot of the time, a lot of the crew were doing nothing. Nothing. I mean the bomb aimer, he was doing nothing down in the front. The ones who were working the hardest were the pilot and the navigator. The wireless operator wasn’t allowed to transmit whilst you were over Germany, and the two gunners were just sat there, hoping that the aircraft wouldn’t be attacked. So there were long periods of inactivity let’s say, on the part of a lot of the crew.
CB: So you did a complete tour and other sorties as well.
AG: Yeah.
CB: How reliable was the aircraft and what sort of snags did you come up against?
AG: The aircraft was very reliable because your ground crew were the same people. You had the same engine fitter, the same air frame chap and the same armourer who looked after your aircraft. So after an operation, normally, you would go down to the flight lines, and they would say, ‘We’ve checked everything over. Will you give it an air test?’ So just Colin and I would clamber aboard the aircraft, go up for about twenty minutes, make sure that everything was working all right and land, and that was the air test after they’d serviced the aircraft, and that used to happen practically every time. Yeah.
CB: Now going back to the beginning of your career, in volunteering to join the forces, there was basically an option between the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. What prompted you to make the decision you did?
AG: I just didn’t want to join the Army or the Navy, and I thought I want to join, join the Air Force and that was it.
CB: To what extent did the Air Forces activities in the early part of the war, inspire people of your age? So, Battle of Britain, that sort of thing?
AG: Oh well, yes. You see our home was in Southampton, and out of interest, while I was training on that flight mechanics course at Kirkham, I had a phone call from my sister who said, ‘Last night, our house was destroyed’. It was bombed. She said, ‘We’re all alright, Dad and Mum because we were in an air raid shelter nearby, a service shelter and so we’re all alright’. And when I was in, told my flight commander, he said, ‘So you’re family are ok, are they? Nobody’s injured. No?’ I said, ‘No’. He said, ‘Then we can’t spare you any time off to go home’, so that was that. But in Southampton, before I joined the Air Force of course, the Battle of Britain was going on. The first RAF fighter pilot to get the VC got it over Southampton.
CB: Nicholson.
AG: Nicholson. And he was the first one and I saw him come down.
CB: Did you really?
AG: And he landed near where I lived, yeah, and it was all that sort of thing that inspired one. Oh yes, you know, join the RAF. That’s, that’s, that’s the place to join.
CB: Exciting.
AG: Exciting. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, just across the water, the Itchen, was the Supermarine Works.
CB: In the Isle of Wight.
AG: Was the first place to build the Spitfire aircraft, because the Spitfire, when the trials took place before the war, took place at Eastleigh Airport near Southampton.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah. So, and of course, the man who invented the Spitfire, RJ Mitchell, lived in Southampton at the time. In fact, there’s the plaque on the house now where he lived.
CB: What was the reaction of your parents to the destruction of their home?
AG: Ahh well, they, it was just one of the, I mean, this was happening all the time during the war and they rapidly found a place nearby. A house that they rented for the rest of the war.
CB: But they’d owned their own home before.
AG: No, it was a council house.
CB: Oh, was it? Right.
AG: It was a council, yes, it was a council house, and so that was that. So they rented this place whilst the war was on, and after the war, they rebuilt the council house where they’d lived and they went back to the same spot in a new house.
CB: Did they really?
AG: Yeah.
CB: And what about your sister’s reaction?
AG: [laughs] Well, well, you know it was all sorts of things. Strange things happening during the war and you just accepted it and, you see, you know in Southampton, I forget how many people were killed, between four and five hundred in air raids, and well this was what was going on. People, you know, in those days really didn’t complain as much as they complain today.
CB: Your sister is older than you or younger?
AG: Older.
CB: Older.
AG: Older. Yes.
CB: So did she have -?
AG: She, she, she, she, she was married and they lived in rooms in Southampton, because again, this question of accommodation, you know, wasn’t easy. Yes. And they lived in two rooms in Southampton.
CB: Was there a requirement by the government that people should give up space for people to live with them, because of the shortage of housing, or how did it work?
AG: I didn’t ever hear that was actually pressed all that much. No, no I didn’t, I didn’t. The only other thing I, I remember about the house being destroyed, was some of my belongings in it of course, and there was a compensation scheme and I got sixteen pounds compensation for the loss of my belongings in that.
CB: Right.
AG: When, when that happened.
CB: How did you feel about that?
AG: Sixteen. Well I thought, this isn’t much but in those days, again, sixteen pounds wasn’t bad.
CB: No.
AG: Wasn’t bad, no, so that was it.
CB: Changing now to when you joined the RAF and started your technical training.
AG: Yeah.
CB: How did that go? How was it set out, mapped out as a course and what did you do in the course?
AG: Well it, for each subject that you were taught, they had corporals as instructors, and you just attended this classroom and on a particular day or week they, you were, well they would talk about air frames or, or whatever. Yeah. I can’t, to be honest, I can’t remember a great deal about that.
CB: No.
AG: It was just that you attended class every day and that was it. Yes. Yeah.
CB: And then you went on to the more advanced operate, as a mechanics course.
AG: Yes. The –
CB: So how different was that?
AG: The fitter’s course was more advanced.
CB: Right.
AG: Yes, and again the detail, after seventy five years, I cannot remember.
CB: No.
AG: But we did this advanced fitter’s course and that lasted another six weeks or so, so altogether I was at Kirkham –
CB: Yeah.
AG: You know, for quite some time, doing the two courses.
CB: Yeah. Now when you were at Calshot then, on the board, a notice appeared saying they were looking for aircrew, what prompted you to –?
AG: No. At Calshot, they were looking for people to volunteer to work in the aircraft industry.
CB: Ah, that was the aircraft industry.
AG: That was the aircraft industry.
CB: Right. Ok.
AG: That’s right. Yes.
CB: So what prompted you to do that?
AG: Well I saw it as a way of getting out of Calshot.
CB: Yes.
AG: To be quite honest, I thought I’ll get away from this dreary place but I didn’t realise what I was getting in to, because the work in the aircraft industry was jolly hard. And long hours, long hours. I mean, 8 o’clock in the evening till 6 o’clock the next morning with an hour’s break in the middle of the night, and that was –
[phone ringing]
AG: Ah –
CB: Stop for a mo.
[Recording paused]
AG: Is that yours?
CB: No, it’s yours.
AG: That was, that was, that was as I said, I didn’t –
CB: This was at Cowley.
AG: I didn’t know what I‘d let myself in for.
CB: No.
AG: But if I’d, if I’d have known, I probably wouldn’t have volunteered.
CB: Yes.
AG: But however yeah, well it was because it was long hours.
CB: Yeah.
AG: And it was every night of the week except one. We had one night off at the end of the week.
CB: So, so what exactly were you making that was part of the Lancaster?
AG: These spars for the fuselage.
CB: Right.
AG: Yeah.
CB: So they’re effectively the circles of structure that hold the –
AG: That’s right.
CB: Skin together.
AG: Yeah. That hold the skin together. That’s it.
CB: Right.
AG: That was, yeah, yeah, along with these four Welshmen.
CB: But you got on well together so that was good.
AG: Oh we got along well together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So then you mentioned that you were recalled by the RAF to go back to a, to the front line as it were.
AG: Yeah.
CB: And you went to 49 Squadron. What did you do?
AG: Well I went to Scampton first.
CB: Scampton. What did you do there?
AG: Which was the base station.
CB: Yeah.
AG: As they called it.
CB: Ok.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Scampton so –
AG: One of the satellites was 49 Bomber Squadron.
CB: Right.
AG: And that’s where I went and –
CB: Doing what?
AG: Working on Lancasters.
CB: Right. What sort of things were you doing on the Lancaster?
AG: Well anything that needed doing to the fuselage or whatever, yeah, anything.
CB: How did the ground crews on the front line squadrons react to damage to the aircraft from flak and so on?
AG: Well, again, people just got on with it, you know. If there was damage, you just repaired it and that was it. Yeah.
CB: How did, how did you put patches on?
AG: Oh well with, with rivets or whatever, but again, getting into the detail of all this now, Chris, I’m afraid I can’t –
CB: That’s ok.
AG: I can’t remember it all.
CB: It’s ok. It’s simply that on some planes that had fabric.
AG: Oh yes, yeah, but certainly –
CB: So that I’m drawing a –
AG: But certainly not the –
CB: Differentiation.
AG: Lancaster.
CB: No.
AG: No.
CB: No.
AG: No.
CB: Ok. So there you are, working on the ground as a rigger.
AG: As a fitter.
CB: Fitter –
AG: Fitter.
CB: I should say.
AG: Fitter. Fitter Group 1 tradesman. Yes.
CB: Group 1 tradesman, and at that point, another letter appears inviting you to –
AG: At that point, another letter appears calling for volunteers.
CB: Yeah.
AG: To become flight engineers.
CB: What attracted you to that prospect?
AG: Well, I thought, well that sounds alright. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll give that a go. So I volunteered and as I say, after a very short interview, they said, ‘Right. There is no training course at the moment, at the present time for flight engineers, but you will do a two week training course at the Rolls Royce Works at Derby’, and that’s where I went.
CB: And that’s where you did your engine training.
AG: And I did on the Merlin engine. Price. Predominantly they talked about the Merlin engine.
CB: Yeah.
AG: And the engine handling characteristics and all this sort of thing. Yeah. That was quite good there, Derby, I mean two weeks wasn’t a long time really. It wasn’t a long training course, was it?
CB: No.
AG: But at the end of it, they said, ‘You’re now a sergeant, here’s your brevet’, and that’s it and, ‘You will be assigned to a crew’.
CB: So this officer selects you at the Heavy Conversion Unit did he?
AG: At, at the squadron.
CB: Yeah.
AG: At the squadron.
CB: At the squadron.
AG: You were just, you had this short interview.
CB: Straight to the squadron.
AG: A very short interview.
CB: ‘Cause they didn’t have a –
AG: Yes.
CB: Heavy Conversion Unit then.
AG: No. No.
CB: No.
AG: A short interview.
CB: Right.
AG: Whilst you were on the squadron
CB: Yeah.
AG: And then they said, ‘Right. You’re, yeah, we’ll take you as a flight engineer, and you’ll do your training at Derby’.
CB: Yeah.
AG: And that was it.
CB: So you join the squadron, you get in the aircraft. Now how do you feel about your situation?
AG: Once we’d started operations you mean?
CB: Yes.
AG: Ah. I think if you speak to anyone who’s done operations during the war, the first operation, you weren’t worried at all about it because you didn’t know anything about it, and off you went and you quickly, you quickly found out what it was all about, and it was thereafter that you felt a bit twingy at times. Yes. But not on the first operation because you didn’t know anything about it, about operations but thereafter, well. And of course, the whole thing about operations was luck. It was nothing to do with skill or anything else, it was pure luck if you got through a tour of operations. On 514, we were the first crew to complete a tour of operations. The first one.
CB: Right. Thank you.
[Recording paused]
AG: We were very lucky as I say.
CB: So, on, on operations then, these can last anything up to eight hours.
AG: Yeah.
CB: You did a whole tour and more.
AG: Yeah.
CB: So how would you describe the sort, the operations you went on? Were they eventful or quiet or what were they?
AG: No. The, to start with, the operations on Hamburg if you remember, there were three operations over a period of four days and we did three of the, we did all three of the four.
CB: Right.
AG: And after the first one, then a couple of days later, or perhaps it was the next night we went out again, but according to the logbook, you can see by the logbook, when you were a hundred miles away, you saw the light in the air, and that was Hamburg burning, and then you got near and you did your sortie and you did it. And then, as I say, we did three to Hamburg, three, three trips to Hamburg. Certainly you remember that well enough and –
CB: What was the reaction of the crew to that?
AG: Well, you know, they [laughs], we just thought, well there you are. In fact, in the logbook too, there’s the piece of paper which is a “News of the World” report who interviewed us. In the logbook.
CB: Yes.
AG: In the back there.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Somewhere. And that was after one of the Berlin trips, and I said to them, I said to this reporter at the time, ‘After the war, I’d like to go to Berlin and tour around to see what it looks like’, and it’s in the newspaper report.
CB: Right. So was it just a curiosity or –?
AG: Curiosity.
CB: Yeah.
CB: Yes. Yeah.
CB: To know how it had worked.
AG: That’s right.
CB: This, this article says, “Blood red pall –
AG: Yeah.
CB: Over the heart of Nazi Germany”. Right.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Ok.
AG: Yeah.
CB: And did you get attacked on any occasions or how did that work?
AG: No. No. Never, never got attacked. Never. No.
CB: So the gunners were keeping an eye out.
AG: The gunner was keeping an eye out, yeah, poor old Twinny in the, in the, the rear gunner, he often used to get off the aircraft with frost on his moustache. He was the only one who had a moustache and he had the frost on the moustache. It must have been pretty, pretty grim for him.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah. Especially when the flight was eight, eight, we, as I say, the longest flight was the Dresden one. That was eight and a half hours, but then there was the Nuremberg one which was quite a long flight, and the Munich one was a very long flight. So there were quite, quite a few long flights where poor old Twinny was freezing in the back.
CB: The Nurem –
AG: There was supposed to be some sort of heating but it’s quite often it wasn’t working. It didn’t work anyway. There you are.
CB: The Nuremberg one was clear weather and the loss rate was very high. What do you remember particularly about that?
AG: I remember that very, a great deal, the loss rate of aircraft was nearly a hundred. Nearly a hundred aircraft and so you’ll, you know, well there again, I thought, good God, you know. What are we doing, doing this? But there you are, but that was, that was the worst night of the war for the, for Bomber Command. Yeah.
CB: In what way did you feel –?
AG: Well because of the, the loss rate.
CB: Did you see bombers go down? Other bombers.
AG: At times, at times, at times you did, ‘cause over the target, you were sort of going in there about eighteen, eighteen to twenty thousand feet, but the German night fighters would fly above you and drop what they called candle flares, and these things slowly floated down and lit up the whole area.
CB: With a view to enabling them to see.
AG: With a view, with a view to them picking out the aircraft to attack.
CB: Right.
AG: And you were lucky that you weren’t attacked. Yeah. And again, the bombing run was the hair raising bit, because you came in and you had to go straight and level over the target so the bomb aimer could put his sights right and drop the bombs, but that again, was the hair raising bit, that bit where you had to go the same height for about three or four minutes.
CB: And then –
AG: Over the target.
CB: After the bomb release you still had to go straight and level.
AG: After the –
CB: To take the picture.
AG: Yeah. That’s right and then of course you got out as quickly as you could. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Always one way? Predictably always left or always right or what was it?
AG: Not always one way. Normally straight out and away, but I know the thought at the time was let’s get the hell out of here but again, you had to do your job.
CB: Yeah.
AG: And do that bombing run correctly.
CB: Yes. So you talked about Munich, what was partic, apart from the distance, what was particularly memorable about that.
AG: Again, I can’t, well, well no, I don’t. We just went to Munich, did the operation and that was it. Yeah.
CB: And then you mentioned Dresden. What’s memorable about Dresden?
AG: Dresden, I remember Dresden quite well because there was a lot of cloud over Dresden. A lot of cloud.
CB: At your height.
AG: At, at, at yes, well and below us, cloud below us. Yes, cloud below us. I do remember that quite, quite well, but again, we did the bombing run and of course, as you say, as you know with the bombing run, you were aiming your bombs at the Pathfinder markers.
CB: Yes.
AG: Yes. You know.
CB: Were they clearly visible?
AG: Yes. The red or the green markers and you were told at the briefing which ones to go for.
CB: Ah, right.
AG: To aim the bombs at.
CB: And on occasions did the, depending on where you were in the bombing stream, did the markers become obliterated by the fires and the smoke?
AG: Oh yes, yes, well they, yeah, that could happen quite easily. Yes, oh yes. The Pathfinders could drop the markers but then the fires would overcome them. Yes. That –
CB: And did they re-mark?
AG: No. Well, you heard of tales that they remarked, you know. You heard of Guy Gibson and how brave he was at doing this, and they used to hover around the target for some time but there you are. Yeah.
CB: So thinking of the war in total, what was the most memorable point in your perspective?
AG: Memorable points about the war. To start with getting away from Calshot was quite memorable I must say, working at the Cowley works was quite memorable. The Manna operation was, I suppose, one of the most memorable because to see the way that those people reacted when you dropped the food. I guess that was one of the most memorable.
CB: Their appreciation.
AG: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the way, the way they all responded when the thing hit the ground, you could tell. There was cheering and shouting and all waving their arms and all this business. Yeah.
CB: And –
AG: I remember that very well.
CB: Yes.
AG: Yeah.
CB: So when you got back from a sortie, there was always a de-brief. What was the de-brief after Manna flights?
AG: Well nothing very much, they just wanted to know whether the thing had gone, you know, because there wasn’t any hindrance as there would have been on an operation, a proper bombing operation. I mean, everything was there, quiet and you just came in to the park quietly and you did your drop. There was no interference from anybody. As I say the Germans had agreed that they would not interfere with Manna.
CB: And did you make the drop of the food at a reduced speed or the normal speed?
AG: No. At reduced speed, reduced speed. Yeah.
CB: To what?
AG: Yeah. Well I forget, but we reduced it so we were above stalling height, you know. To make the drop. If you were flying in too fast, you might, you might not drop it on the park, you might drop it on somebody’s house, so you reduced the speed coming in. Definitely, yes. Above stalling height.
CB: Good. Thank you.
[Recording paused]
AG: I forget where we’d been.
CB: Now one of the challenges in the bombing war was getting back to the airfield.
AG: That’s it.
CB: And the British weather with fog.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Was a pain.
AG: Yeah.
CB: So how did you deal with that?
AG: Yeah. Yeah. Well as I say, we were, we were, we were quite fortunate really but there was one time when we came back and there was this fog, and it was a question of, this fog was going to hang around for some time so FIDO came into operation each side of the runway, you know, these flames and things, so we landed that way. It only happened once.
CB: So it was a popular airfield that day.
AG: Yes [laughs]. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Because not many airfields had Fido, did they?
AG: No. No. No. No. FIDO.
CB: Right.
AG: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
CB: I forgot to ask you Alex, whether you had any links and what they were with the American Air Force or Army Air Force as it was.
AG: No.
CB: In those days.
AG: Nothing. Never. No.
CB: But their aircraft –
AG: No links whatsoever.
CB: No.
AG: No.
CB: But their aircraft, the Flying Fortress. What did you do there?
AG: What? Well he just took us up.
CB: So, so you went somewhere where you, what did you do? You flew somewhere.
AG: We flew to this base.
CB: Yeah.
AG: This American Flying Fortress base, met Colonel Jumper, the commanding officer and he, he gave us a flight in the Flying Fortress.
CB: So what was that like?
AG: Oh that, that was alright. Of course, he didn’t do anything drastic, we just went up and just flew, flew around for a while.
CB: Yes.
AG: Yeah. But we walked through, through the aircraft. Examined it, you know. Those, at the rear of the flying fortress each side, they had these machine guns, didn’t they?
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yes. Looked at all that and it was just a day out really.
CB: In terms of its sophistication and crew comfort compared with the RAF aircraft, what was that like?
AG: Oh I think that, I think we were slightly more comfortable than the flying fortress and the flying fortress crew, I forget how many there were, but I think –
CB: Eleven.
AG: There were about eight or nine of them.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah. In this what was regarded, compared to a Lancaster, was a smallish aircraft.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah but they had all these gunners on –
CB: Yeah.
AG: On the Fortress didn’t they?
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah.
CB: That’s why the bomb load wasn’t very big.
AG: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As I say, there we are.
CB: Right.
AG: I’m trying to think of any other highlights.
CB: Well.
[Recording paused]
CB: That’s it.
AG: In about April 1945, the rear gunner and I were called in and we were told that we had also been awarded the DFC because of the number of operations. The ten trips to Berlin and all this business.
CB: Yeah.
AG: So that’s the way we got it. It was regrettable I thought, that the wireless operator didn’t get it for some reason. I don’t know why.
CB: No.
AG: But it was just the rear gunner and myself.
CB: So the pilot and the navigator already had –
AG: The pilot –
CB: The DFC.
AG: They already had it, yeah. At the end of the tour.
CB: Yeah.
AG: They had got the DFC.
CB: Right.
AG: The pilot and the navigator only. But in the April ’45, the rear gunner and myself also got it.
CB: Right. Ok. And bomb aimer, nothing either.
AG: The bomb aimer. Well, the bomb aimer, at the end of the first tour, as I say, was regarded as the old man of the tour.
CB: Yeah.
AG: He was aged thirty two. Once he went off to this training unit, having completed the tour, we never heard of him again.
CB: No.
AG: Stan Young, his name was.
CB: Right.
AG: Stan Young. The pilot was called Colin Payne.
CB: Yeah.
AG: The navigator was Ken Armstrong. Now that’s another strange story about Ken Armstrong. At the end of our first tour of operations, Ken went off to a training unit, but then I don’t know if you know this, they started training people to work on British Airways after the war, but they already started recruiting them whilst the war was still on. And he, he applied for this and was recruited to go on the staff of British Airways before the war ended, and after the war, he ended up at Hurn Airport near Bournemouth where he operated from with British Airways. Ken then rose up in British Airways, and British Airways eventually did away with navigators and just kept pilots and, strangely enough, flight engineers. They were the only two crew members. And Ken, they kept two navigators back at British Airways headquarters at Heathrow, and he became quite a star navigator with British Airways, and whenever there was a royal flight, even though they had all the navigation aids, they always took a navigator with them, and he went on a number of royal flights and he ended up with the MVO, Member of the Victorian Order. And he became quite well known in British, they all knew Ken Armstrong because he was one of the two navigators left in British Airways, because they didn’t want navigators anymore with all, with all the navigation aids on board. But he, he did become quite well known. Yes. I mean my wife’s husband, Clive, ‘Oh yes’, he said, ‘Ken Armstrong. We all knew Ken Armstrong’.
CB: Your daughter’s husband.
AG: Yes.
CB: Ok.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Alexander Charles Gilbert
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Chris Brockbank
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2016-10-13
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Sound
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AGilbertAC161013
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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01:22:03 audio recording
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Alexander Gilbert, DFC, joined the Royal Air Force in November 1940, and was called forward for service on the 7th April 1941, rising to the rank of Squadron Leader. Alex had a very long and varied career for the Royal Air Force.
Upon his call up, he was trained as a Flight Engineer Air Frames where he passed in the top third of his class. He became a Group One Tradesman, Fitter 2A. He was posted to Calshot and then spent time working at Cowley Motor Works, manufacturing spars for the fuselage of Lancasters before being recalled and sent to Scampton.
He served with 49 Bomber Squadron before taking a Flight Engineers course and working on Merlin engines at Rolls Royce Works in Derby.
Alex was transferred to 9 Squadron at Bardney where he completed 10 operations, including 3 to Hamburg, then helped form 514 Squadron where he flew on missions to Berlin, and completed 14 operations. He became an instructor at No. 31 LFS at Feltwell, before returning to Operations at 149 Squadron in Methwold.
149 Squadron were involved in the Dresden operation and did 2 trips in Operation Manna, dropping supplies to Rotterdam and The Hague.
Alex had various other postings and completed 35 years’ service in the Royal Air Force, retiring at the age of 65.
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Vivienne Tincombe
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Pending revision of OH transcription
149 Squadron
49 Squadron
514 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
B-17
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
Cook’s tour
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
fitter airframe
flight engineer
ground crew
Lancaster
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Bardney
RAF Calshot
RAF Feltwell
RAF Foulsham
RAF Halton
RAF Kirkham
RAF Methwold
RAF Morton Hall
RAF Scampton
RAF Waterbeach
RAF Winthorpe
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/546/8787/PJohnsonKA1507.1.jpg
a4899a68c46a58711c699203c30b2867
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/546/8787/AJohnsonKA170403.2.mp3
eb18c023f71add18db542da2c8c7f140
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Title
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Johnson, Ken
K A Johnson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Johnson, KA
Description
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Three items. Two oral history interviews with Ken Johnson (b. 1924, 1595311 Royal Air Force) and one photograph. He flew operations as an air gunner with 61 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
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2015-06-03
2017-04-03
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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CB: We are now moving to another interview. My name is Chris Brockbank, and today is the 3rd of April 2017, and I’m in Doncaster with Ken Johnson who did two tours, and we’re going to talk about his life and times in the RAF. So, what’s your earliest recollection Ken? Of life.
KJ: In the RAF?
CB: No, in your family.
KJ: Oh, my family. Well, my father was a ironmonger, not an ironmonger, an iron moulder rather, by trade. So there was very little for that in Doncaster so he used to have to travel to Sheffield to work and he used to cycle there, do nine hours in the foundry and cycle home.
CB: Where were you living? In Doncaster?
KJ: Yeah. We lived, oh in that many parts of Doncaster it’s unbelievable. Hexthorpe, Doncaster, Balby, everywhere in Doncaster we’ve lived. I think he’d got a bit of gypsy in him, we never settled too far.
CB: Trying to be a moving target, was he?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Was he in the First World War?
KJ: No, no, he weren’t old enough.
CB: Right. And how many brothers and sisters did you have?
KJ: I had two brothers, no sisters. Both younger than myself and both have passed on.
CB: Right. Two brothers and two sisters.
KJ: No sisters.
CB: No sisters.
KJ: No.
CB: Just two brothers, yeah. And where did you go to school?
KJ: I started at Balby Infant’s School, I went to Hexthorpe, I went to Intake. I don’t think there’s many schools in Doncaster I haven’t been to.
CB: Why was that?
KJ: My dad, he’d got itchy feet. He could never settle at one place so we were always changing homes.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Aye. He’d brought a, he had it built, a bungalow at Finningley, a beautiful bungalow but my mother wouldn’t go to live there. She were a townie, she didn’t like countryside. Well we went, we lived there three days to be quite honest and that were it. She’d had enough.
CB: And what did you and your brothers think?
KJ: Pardon?
CB: What did you and your brothers think?
KJ: Well they were much younger than I. I was the eldest. There was one five years younger, and one ten years younger, so none of us really had any say in the matter. It was a bit unfortunate, keep having to change schools because you never got in to the ways of the school you were joining, but there you are. We had to knuckle under and put up with it.
CB: What did you do at school?
KJ: Just the ordinary schooling. No, er, I didn’t go to anything special you know, it was just the ordinary school.
CB: Yeah. And what did you do when you left school?
KJ: When I first left school we were living at Sheffield, which was just before the war, and I was a joiner’s apprentice, but when the war was, when the war started my dad said, ‘We’re going back to Doncaster. Sheffield will get bombed’, and he never said a truer word. It did. It got terribly bombed so we were back in Doncaster, and I was still in wood but it wasn’t a joiner’s apprentice, it were just a mundane. We were making clothes horses for people, for ladies to put their clothes to dry on. Clothes drier. And I stuck that for so long and then I went to work at British Ropes, down Carr Hill, in a reserved job which was making cables for barrage balloons. It was, it was a job that there were no joinings in the way. It had got to be a single wire and so it was classed as a reserved occupation. I only got in the RAF because I kept pestering them. I wanted to go and eventually they let me go. I always wanted to fly and I did plenty of that.
[pause]
CB: What type of flying did you want to do?
KJ: Anything. I were, I was prepared to do anything, and the quickest way — I mean a pilot and navigator and those sort of jobs, they were two or three years training and they had to go out to Canada and all like that. Well to be a gunner, it were only a matter of about eighteen months, so I chose the, oh at first it was like you said, wireless operator air gunner but that drove me mad that dit dit da dit dit da business, so I volunteered for a straight gunner and got away from it.
[pause]
CB: And what made you attracted to being a gunner particularly?
KJ: It was the easiest way of getting into aircrew. They needed two gunners to any other trade and I wouldn’t say my education were all that good anyway, so I chose the easy way, volunteered for a gunner.
CB: And when you started gunnery training, how did that go?
KJ: It went very well. I did that up at Dalcross in Scotland, so, yeah it went well. The flying part of it was exceptional ‘cause of the scenery, it was absolutely fantastic, the scenery we were flying over up in the north of Scotland. Aye. I never had any problems in that respect.
CB: What aircraft were you flying as training for that?
KJ: Originally Ansons, then we went on to Wellingtons and then finally Stirlings, and then finally Lancs, but I did all my operational flying on Lancs.
CB: So how did the gunnery course start? What did they do with you to begin with?
KJ: Well we used to go up in the aircraft. I think there were three, there might have been five, either three or five and your, your bullets that you would be firing had a different coloured paint on so they knew which, who had hit how many, and we flew up and then [pause], now I can’t remember the name of the aircraft. It was, it was originally supposed to be a fighter but it can’t have been fast enough so they used —
CB: And that was the Defiant.
KJ: Pardon?
CB: Defiant. With a turret on it.
KJ: No, these were the aircraft that towed the target.
CB: Oh right.
KJ: And I remember they were always Polish pilots, always Polish, which was a bit hectic at times.
CB: Did the tug ever get hit?
KJ: Oh yeah. It wasn’t as easy as you thought, but it, yeah, we, as I say these bullets had a different colour on so they could tell when the drogue came back who’d hit, how many times and so on.
CB: How well did you score?
KJ: Well I didn’t think it were very well. I usually averaged about .5, but there were some worse than me and some a heck of a lot better, so [pause], I mean when you got in a Lancaster and you were, you went into a corkscrew, it’s a wonder you hit anything because one minute you were upside down, the next minute you were stood on your toes. All over the place and you were supposed to — you’d sight. Gun sight was a coloured lit up small thing, and at certain points you were supposed to put the target, say a quarter of the way down or the other side of it, wherever you moved you were supposed to — well trying to remember that lot were impossible. All you could do were aim ahead of the enemy aircraft and just blaze away and let him come through your hail of bullets.
CB: But you had a means of targeting according to the type of aircraft. How did that work?
KJ: No, not really. No. You just had this —
CB: Based on wing span wasn’t it?
KJ: Pardon?
CB: Based on wing span.
KJ: Yeah, and as I say you just had this image, lit up image, and you were supposed, at any point where, same as if you saw the fighter coming from starboard, you’d, say, ‘Fighter starboard. Corkscrew starboard. Go’, and at that, he’d dive in toward the enemy fighter. Well you can imagine, the pilots used to really thrash the aircraft around to avoid being hit themselves and so it were very very difficult to go to the procedure that —
[banging noises]
Other: Sorry. I did that.
KJ: To go to the procedure that you were supposed to go through, but you just had to make, make the best of it as you went along.
CB: Yeah. So as you mentioned corkscrew.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: This was the way of evading an attacking fighter.
KJ: It’s what?
CB: So just talk us through. Who made the call for the corkscrew?
KJ: The gunner.
CB: Which one?
KJ: Which one? The one that saw the fighter coming first.
CB: Right.
KJ: He’d shout out, ‘Fighter starboard’, or port or upper or down, and you were supposed to wait ‘til they were two hundred yards away because if you did it too soon, they could follow you.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So you were, you judged when it were the right distance, and the, ‘Corkscrew starboard. Go’, and then the pilot would go towards the fighter that was after you.
CB: So that he would overshoot. Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So in the corkscrew, what exactly was the manoeuvre? He was pulling it round hard. Then what?
KJ: Well he dived.
CB: Right.
KJ: Then climbed.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Then climbed again, then down again, that’s where you got your corkscrew.
CB: Right.
KJ: It looked like a corkscrew going through the sky.
CB: Getting you back on track.
KJ: Yeah, and as soon as they broke away you stopped it and waited for them coming again and then started it all over again.
CB: How many times did you get attacked?
KJ: Oh quite a few times but we never, we got hit with bullets but we never got them in any vital places.
CB: Right. We’re ahead of ourselves in a way, but going back to training.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: In the first part of the training, you’re on the ground.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So how did they carry out that training? With what sort of weapon?
KJ: Well you had, you had the usual 303 Brownings that you’d be using in the aircraft, but there was a turret mounted on a railway track and you just went round this circuit, and the aircraft had come over with a drogue and you’d try to get as many shots in as you could. But they frowned on, there was some got, tried to be a bit crafty and waited till it was a dead shot and then you couldn’t miss, but they frowned on that. They wanted you to do it the hard way like.
CB: So what sort of height are these target tugs coming in at?
KJ: They’d be at same height as yourself but coming in from all different directions.
CB: I meant when you were on ground. You were on the railway tracks.
KJ: Oh.
CB: So, what height are they coming in?
KJ: Well the drogue was on the same track but ahead of you, and that’s where they didn’t like you waiting till they come to a corner, because then you could just bang away and ever hit, everyone had hit.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So they frowned on that, but it was tried to make it as realistic as possible, and then, on top of that, you’d got cameras in the ones that you were flying and you did the same thing with a camera.
CB: So how did they deal with deflection shooting training?
KJ: Well you were always in the, each position the plane was in, on your gun sight, there was a place you were supposed to put your, put your sight on this and then fire away there, but as you could imagine, when you were doing corkscrewing, you were up and down and one minute you was, your head was banging on the top of the turret. The next minute, you felt as though they’d put a tonne weight on your shoulders. It was very difficult to, to aim.
CB: Ok. Back at the training so after a certain amount of ground training, did you use shotguns for deflection training?
KJ: Yeah, yeah, did all that. Yeah.
CB: Right, and did you alternate between using the Browning 303?
KJ: Oh I did. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And the shotgun.
KJ: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So it was a clay pigeon.
KJ: Clay pigeon, yeah.
CB: Shot. Right. So then you come to the flying, so three of you in an Anson. Or five.
KJ: Aye. Yeah.
CB: How did that work?
KJ: And you took turns to climb in to the turret and do your, do your thing.
CB: Because it’s a mid-upper turret on the Anson.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Right.
KJ: Yeah, yeah, it was a twin engine. There were two very similar aircraft, Anson and Oxford, but I only ever heard of the Anson having the turret. Might have been Oxfords used for the same reason. There were no reason why not. They were almost alike aircraft [coughs] excuse me.
[pause]
CB: So in that aircraft, let’s say the Anson, you’ve got three or five students.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Who’s there guiding you?
KJ: Just the pilot.
CB: Was there another, an experienced air gunner?
KJ: Oh yeah, yeah, there would be, and he’d tell you when it was your turn to go in and come out.
CB: What sort of guidance did he give you?
KJ: Well he couldn’t do much at all except keep your eye on the target, and such tips as waiting while they were flying across you and getting ahead of them, and then really putting the bursts in. You were sure to hit something, but the thing that amused me — I thought these, when we got to that stage, I thought the people that were teaching us would have done operations but they hadn’t. They’d just, they’d been good in their training so they’d been held back as instructors.
CB: Was it actually a mix? Were there some people who were experienced?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Air gunners. Were there?
KJ: Well as I say there were, they’d done well in their training and they were held back.
CB: But there were people who’d been on operations there.
KJ: No. I thought there would be.
CB: But not at that time.
KJ: No.
CB: Ok. Right. And when you went up, how long was your go?
KJ: No more than half an hour. Yeah. From climbing in to climbing out of the turret. Yeah.
CB: Ok. And after Dalcross, then what happened?
KJ: After Dalcross, we were then went to OTU, our Operational Training Unit, and that was where you crewed up, but the normal thing was you’d get the same number of pilots, navigators etcetera, and they palled-up amongst themselves for a day or two, and then the pilot would say to one, navigators probably, ‘I want you as my navigator’. And that’s how it were crewed up, but I didn’t get that choice because when I went to OUT, there was so many crews ahead of us that hadn’t got gunners or they’d only got one gunner and needed another one, so we would, what would, what would you say, we were told which crew —
CB: Yeah.
KJ: We were going to be with.
CB: You didn’t get a choice.
KJ: I didn’t get a choice. I couldn’t have done better so. I remember we, we were, there’s Bruntinghorpe and Bitteswell. One was used for flying and the other was where you did your learning your other parts of the job, stripping guns down and all that sort of thing, and I remember I was told to go to the gatehouse where there was this navigator. He was going to be my navigator so he’d, I’d got to go see him and he would introduce me to the rest of the crew like. So we went, we went to the billets first the whole crew shared, well two crews shared a billet. There were fourteen beds in and he said, the navigator said, ‘Oh they’ll be going for lunch now to the sergeant’s mess so we’ll go meet the rest of the crew’. So we trooped off to the sergeant’s mess and there was a bit of a [pause] well I don’t know how to describe it, a bit of a hullaballoo going on. This pilot had gone in to the sergeant’s mess and he’d just picked out a gunner, a navigator and a wireless operator, ‘Come with me’, and he took them to a Wellington. They went off. He wanted to land at this aerodrome to meet a friend, but when they got there, they wouldn’t allow him, so he came back but he were in such a temper he tried to land without putting his wheels down. Made a mess of the undercarriage. Luckily, they all got away with it but he got put down in rank but lost about three ranks. And then we, we went into the mess and the navigator says, ‘Oh there’s the pilot’, and he were in a big armchair like this, with a sheet of newspaper over his face, away to the world, and this sheet of paper kept going up and down [laughs].
CB: As he puffed away.
KJ: As he were breathing. And he says, ‘There’s Harry’. His name was Harold really but he preferred being called Harry so, ‘There’s Harry there’, and I said, ‘Well don’t disturb him. He’s having a nice little nap there’. ‘Oh he’ll have to wake up for his lunch’, so he woke him up and introduced me. Shook hands with me, settled back down in his chair, pulled his paper down and went back to sleep [laughs], so that was my introduction to Harry Watkins.
CB: A flight sergeant.
KJ: Yeah. He’d, he was an amazing man he was. He was no bigger than me, no taller than me, maybe an inch but no more than that, but he’d got a chest on him like a barrel and he was strong as a bull. I’m sure he could have looped a Lancaster if he’d have wanted to, or if he’d been allowed to I should say, and he was a lot older than me. He’d gone to Finland to fight for the Fins against the Russians, and he were a fighter pilot and then when they signed a treaty, they sealed off the land borders so the only way they could get out, there was him and his friend, the only way they could get out was by sea, so they, they hired a trawler and they hit some very bad weather and almost drowned. A Russian gun boat picked them up, took them back to Russia and put them in a concentration camp. So he was ten, ten or eleven months in this concentration camp living on cabbage water. So by the time he got released, and the reason he’d got released was when the second front came, some of our soldiers that couldn’t get back to the beaches went to the Russians and they put them in this concentration camp, but the thing was, the British Consul had got a check on them. So they, as they were, they got them out, and these two other Britishers said, ‘When you get out, tell them there’s two more Englishmen in here wanting releasing’, and that’s how they got out. But he’d lost an amazing amount of weight, he’d, he had to go to Rhodesia to be built up before they’d let him sign up for the RAF. Aye. But he was an amazing man.
CB: But how did he come to go to Finland in the first place?
KJ: Well, you know, during the Spanish war.
CB: Ahh. The Spanish Civil War, yeah.
KJ: Some British were, well various —
CB: Yeah. The International Brigade.
KJ: That’s right.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Well, that’s how they did for Finland.
CB: Oh, did they?
KJ: Aye.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So, aye, anyway they got out and built him up and then let him join up.
CB: So how did the crew get together after they were, get on when they got together?
KJ: Well, at first you, all the different navigator, pilots etcetera, etcetera, they were all went in this big room and allowed to mingle and talk among themselves, and they palled up. That’s what it amounted to but as I say, I never had that choice.
CB: No.
KJ: Because I, they’d got, they were crewed up except for another gunner and they just said right, oh they gave us a test on aircraft recognition and the first ten I think it was, were allotted to crews that hadn’t got a gunner.
CB: Ok.
KJ: And I stayed with him. We did a tour. Well a lot just did the tour and then took a rest and probably they never got called on again, but we all volunteered to keep going.
CB: Oh. You all did? You all volunteered to keep going as a crew, did you?
KJ: All but two. One was the navigator and he’d got a wife and two kiddies and he didn’t think it were fair on them to just volunteer to keep going, and the other one was the wireless operator. He had a sick mother and there again, he thought it weren’t fair to her to, so, and as far as I know, they never did call them up again.
[pause].
KJ: I don’t know where any of the crew are. I know the pilot died ‘cause I got — it’s in the Midlands, his grave, but as far as I know, he just died of, well it wouldn’t be old age because he wouldn’t be all that old, but perhaps had some sort of illness.
CB: So we talked about the OTU and you’re getting together there.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: How long were you at the OTU and what were you doing?
KJ: We used to go on flights, cross country’s they called them, and you had, you were given a course that you had to take, and on the way, there’d be some bomb practice places and you’d call there and drop, drop a bomb. A four pound practice bomb on it and you got marks for that and you got marks for being at certain points at certain times. So we did very well at that because we’d got an excellent navigator and an excellent bomb aimer and an excellent skipper. And that, we went on these cross country’s, which could take ten or even twelve hours, and as I say, you’d had to call at it’d perhaps be a power station or something. It were a great big power station that became common afterwards, but it was the only one at the time in the Midlands somewhere and that was a favourite place for you to. Of course, you didn’t actually drop a bomb on there, it were just a case of photographing it as though you had bombed.
CB: So the OTU lasted?
KJ: Three months.
CB: Three months.
KJ: Yeah, perhaps more.
CB: And then you went to the HCU. So your OTU was at Bruntingthorpe.
KJ: Operationally, yeah.
CB: Then the Heavy Conversion Unit. The HCU.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Where was that?
KJ: That was at either Bruntingthorpe or Bitteswell, I can’t remember. The two B’s so I can’t remember which was which.
CB: But they were the OTUs weren’t they?
KJ: Yeah. Oh well we did us [pause], I can’t remember.
CB: Ok, but you said you moved to Stirling.
KJ: Yeah, we went on Stirlings. I hated them.
CB: Why didn’t you like that?
KJ: They weren’t very easy to fly in. They were, if you, if you had to, with a Lancaster, you drove towards the landing strip and then eased up so as you’d got a three point landing, but if you did that with a Stirling, it’d break it’s back and you’d be —
CB: Oh.
KJ: Yeah, and there was always plenty to let you know about it. Wreckage on the, on the airfield.
CB: Oh really. Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So how many, how long were you flying that before you changed to Lancaster?
KJ: Luckily it wasn’t too long. About six weeks that.
CB: And doing the same exercises or different?
KJ: Doing mostly the same things. Yeah.
CB: To what extent were you doing fighter affiliation?
KJ: Oh we were doing that. Every time we went up we’d have a bit of that in.
CB: Right.
KJ: You’d got to keep your eyes open in the gun turrets because they could come up on you anywhere, and you’d perhaps be like them cross country’s ten hours. Twelve hours in some cases.
CB: So that’s your HCU.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Then your first squadron you joined was?
KJ: 61.
CB: Where was that?
KJ: Skellingthorpe.
CB: Right.
KJ: Just outside Lincoln, and there were two squadrons shared the same airfield.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So when there was a bombing raid on, you’d get them coming from both sides but you used to take it in turns, 50, 61s and so on, until you’d got the two squadrons airborne. Yeah.
CB: And how many bombers in a squadron?
KJ: Eighteen. They’d usually aimed to have eighteen in the air.
CB: Oh in the air. Right. So not all of them flew, so how many aircraft were there?
KJ: Well no I mean, if there was anything serious like an engine change or anything like that, then one squadron or the other would be one down, but usually they aim for getting eighteen from each squadron on a raid.
CB: Ok. So when you got to the squadron then, when you got to the HCU, then the flight engineer and the rear gunner joined.
KJ: Yeah. Well only the flight engineer.
CB: Or the upper gunner which was you.
KJ: It was the upper gunner was the one that joined so far through.
CB: So you didn’t go to the OTU, or you did?
KJ: Yeah. Yeah. I joined them at —
CB: At the OTU.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And then —
CB: And at the HCU, then the flight engineer joined.
KJ: Joined us, yeah.
CB: Right.
KJ: And again, we didn’t have any choice, they just marched us on parade.
CB: Who was that?
KJ: They called him Fred Jowett.
CB: How did he gel? Bearing in mind you’d been together already?
KJ: It were, well he took up with the rear gunner, him and Fred were big friends, they used to go out.
CB: Carson Foy.
KJ: Yeah, used to go out drinking at night and all that sort of business, but he was married and I didn’t like the way he treated his wife, so I hadn’t got a lot of time for him.
CB: Oh.
KJ: He were good at this job but [pause] I always remember the parade when he was put in our crew, and he’d got a pair of trousers that he’d had widened like sailor’s trousers [laughs]. He got reprimanded for that and made to pay for them being put back to what they should be. And his, his cap, I think he must have cleaned engines with his cap, it were just one block of grease. He and his wife, whenever he got forty eight hour leave or anything like that, used to come home with me because his wife were in Army.
CB: Oh.
KJ: And she was stationed in Doncaster, she was a sergeant. And my mum and dad used to let them use their bedroom and I were kicked down to the sofa.
[long pause]
CB: So when you got to the squadron, what happened then?
KJ: Well not a lot of fuss made. All you, all you got at first, you did so many cross country’s to, with the aircraft affiliation also and bits thrown in to get used to what operational flying would be like. And then of course came the big day for the first op, and our first op was just after D-day and it was helping the Army. But they were so, the front lines were so close, we were given a signal to stop bombing, and I always remember it was “Billy Bunter” and we hadn’t bombed. We got to the target just ready to bomb, and this signal came. “Billy Bunter. Billy Bunter”, so we closed our bomb doors and changed back to go back home, but a lot of them kept bombing and the, the master bomber got fed up with them and he was really giving them a ticking off.
CB: For staying on.
KJ: For keep bombing.
CB: What was the target there?
KJ: Well, it were the enemy armoury. Tanks.
CB: Hitting Canadian troops were they?
KJ: Oh ours, yeah, a lot of ours were Canadian. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: No, I meant when the targets – they had, they had a friendly fire problem.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Was that why they stopped the bombing?
KJ: That’s right, yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Yeah, ‘cause when the two lines got too close, you couldn’t decide one from the other so. Aye.
[pause]
CB: What other, so in your first tour what other, what significant things happened there?
KJ: Well first tour, we were with the crowd, you know, with the main force, but our second tour, we carried the twelve thousand pound Tallboy bomb and it was chosen targets. The last one being Hitler’s guest house at Berchtesgaden.
CB: Right.
KJ: But he wasn’t there anyway so.
CB: Why were they bombing it then?
KJ: Well they didn’t know he weren’t. They thought he was there but apparently, he wasn’t when it —
CB: Still in Berlin.
KJ: Aye. In a bunker, underground bunker where he died anyway.
CB: So what significant events happened to you during the bombing raids? During the ops.
KJ: In what way do you mean?
CB: Well did you have any excitements or dangers? You got shot at a few times.
KJ: Oh we had some. I mean we got that time when aircraft above dropped his bombs on us.
CB: What happened there?
KJ: Three bombs hit us. One chopped off the starboard fin and rudder, one chopped off about five foot off the starboard wing, up to the starboard outer motor, and the third one hit the rear turret and took the rear turret away.
CB: And that’s why you needed a new rear gunner.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Did he get out?
KJ: Oh no. No. I’ve, I’ve been to his grave in Normandy.
CB: So this was a daylight operation was it?
KJ: Yeah. Yeah. I warned him about this, but the pilot says, ‘They’ll see us and they won’t drop them’, but almost as he said it, they were coming down on us.
CB: He couldn’t accelerate away.
KJ: No. He said, ‘There’s nothing I can do about it. We’re hemmed in’, so he just had to sit tight.
CB: So at night raids, you were in a stream. When you were bombing in daylight, how did you do that? Was it formation or still a stream?
KJ: Still a stream.
CB: Right.
KJ: You might get in a formation going backwards and forwards, but once you got near the target, you’re independent. You did as you want then.
CB: So without its turret, how did the plane behave? Rear turret.
KJ: Well we didn’t find any difference. In fact, he made a perfect landing when we got back, but it must have been, must have made a difference but he were a fantastic pilot so he dealt with it. When he got, when he got out the plane, his shirt was absolutely wet through. He must have fought it every inch of the way back.
CB: Because it had damaged the fin.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: One of them.
KJ: Well he’d only have part, part of his controls.
CB: And the wing. Which fin was hit?
KJ: Starboard fin.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And starboard wing.
CB: Oh it was, yeah.
KJ: So we were top heavy sort of thing.
CB: So you’re in the mid-upper turret.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: You’ve already warned the pilot about the plane above.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: What, what did you see when the bomb was coming down and the affect? How did this happen?
KJ: We’ll all I could see were these.
CB: A stick.
KJ: A full bomb bay full of bombs.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Coming down towards us and most of them slipping past on my left side.
CB: Right. You’re facing which way? Backwards?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Yeah. And I couldn’t help but see them because they were on top of me. It wasn’t a nice moment.
CB: So did some of them, they must have done, in a stick, some of them missed.
KJ: Yeah, quite a few of them went between the starboard wing.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And the starboard fin and rudder.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: More or less alongside me. Too close for comfort.
CB: So how much higher was this other plane?
KJ: It wasn’t too far above us because we were all supposed to be at the same height, but some used to go higher to avoid that happening to them, but the trouble is they did it to somebody else.
[pause]
CB: So you saw the bombs coming down.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: What, what was it like? Some were missing then. How many hit the turret?
KJ: There were three hit the aircraft.
CB: Right. Oh, three hit the aircraft. Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So one on the wing, one on the rudder.
KJ: And one on the rear turret.
CB: Yeah. So how did that come? That came straight down. Then how did you see it?
KJ: Well we got the, I’m getting mixed up with my starboard and, on the left hand side.
CB: On your left because you’re looking backwards.
KJ: They were all coming that side.
CB: Yes, the starboard side.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: And were you able to call out?
KJ: Well I did do, I warned him but he said, ‘Nothing I can do. We’re hemmed in’.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So we just had to sit there and hope for the best.
CB: So where did the bomb, where did it hit the turret? The one that hit the turret, where?
KJ: Straight on top.
CB: Straight in the middle.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: And the effect of that?
KJ: Tore it away from –.
CB: The whole of the turret.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Right.
KJ: There was just a gaping hole where the rear turret should have been.
CB: So what chances of survival were there for the rear gunner?
KJ: Zero.
CB: Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: And they didn’t explode because the primer.
KJ: No you wouldn’t.
CB: Hadn’t gone into action then.
KJ: You’d got that little.
CB: The delay.
KJ: Propeller that unscrewed as it dropped down.
CB: Right.
KJ: But it wouldn’t be, it wouldn’t be live until it was, say, a thousand feet.
CB: Right.
KJ: Above the ground and then it would slowly become alive.
CB: Right. So how many other members of the crew saw that?
KJ: Nobody apart from me.
CB: What effect did that have on you afterwards?
KJ: Well I were very, very upset because he were a friend of mine, the rear gunner.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: But I didn’t realise ‘till it were very late on in the war. We were coming back from a raid and it were a daylight, and as we crossed the Rhine, I saw these Typhoons going up and down and releasing rockets, and I’d never seen anything like that. At the gun emplacements along the Rhine. And I suddenly realised I was sweating and it were cold. There were no reason to be sweating, but that must have been nerves I should imagine.
CB: Yeah.
[pause]
CB: So after the raid did you, that particular one, where you lost your friend, did you fly the next day? Or was there –
KJ: Yeah. We were on ops the very next night, yeah.
CB: So was that better than having a rest or worse?
KJ: Well they told you it was for your own benefit if you —
CB: Yeah. Get up again.
KJ: So yeah, we were on another raid the following night.
CB: And how did that work for you?
KJ: It went pretty well really. A bit strange with getting a new voice from the rear turret but — [pause]. He were a farmer, he’d no need to be in the forces at all but he’d got two brothers that had adjoining farms, and they were looking after it for him.
CB: Which part of the country was that?
KJ: It was in the Midlands somewhere that they came from.
CB: Ok [pause], so apart from that one on the Rhine crossing, did you have any reaction on any other sorties?
KJ: Well er the Rhine, I didn’t know just how close it had come to that, but we got hit by shrapnel and one piece had gone through about two inches above my head, the top of my head and buried in the fuselage at the other side. The, one of the ground crew dug it out but he wouldn’t, I wanted him to give it to me but he wouldn’t. He hung on to it so —
CB: He wanted it did he?
KJ: Aye.
CB: Was it a bullet or shrapnel from flak?
KJ: Shrapnel from flak.
CB: Right.
KJ: A jagged piece about that.
CB: Yeah. About two inches, three inches.
KJ: It would have done enough damage anyway.
CB: Yeah. So when it hit your canopy, did it go through or did it shatter it?
KJ: It went through and then through the other side. The hole was pretty neat but there was a few cracks from it, you know.
CB: That was after the turret experience was it?
KJ: Yeah. We did, we did a tour and then instead of having a rest, we carried on with another tour.
CB: So those were both in the first tour.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Right. What caused you to do another go?
KJ: The pilot. He were a keen type and I wouldn’t have flown with anybody else if I could avoid it.
CB: That was 9 Squadron.
KJ: Yeah. He used to have his own way of taking off ‘til they stopped him doing it. They said, ‘We know you’re capable but somebody might try it and not be as successful as you’. You’re still, as we took off, he’d only just got airborne and he’d tilt over. It looked very spectacular from the ground but, well it looked spectacular from the gunner’s point of view as well, but he was warned off not to do it again.
CB: What did he do then? Bring the undercarriage up quickly or what?
KJ: Yeah. Quickly undercarriage up and he was already tilting his, er tilting the wing until it was, well it must have been pretty near the ground.
CB: He was turning his wing.
KJ: Anyway, he was ordered not to do it again.
CB: How did he feel about that?
KJ: Oh he took it all in good part. He were, he were a nice man was Harry Watkins.
CB: When you got your second rear gunner, because of the first one being lost, how did he get in with the crew or not?
KJ: Well he palled up straight. The engineer was a big drinker and so was this new gunner, so them two got on well together. I once counted that they had twenty two pints of beer.
CB: Each.
KJ: Each. They must have floated [laughs].
CB: Amazing. So how often did the crew go out together? These two clearly wanted to get ahead of the game.
KJ: When we were, if we were landing back at base very rare. If I wanted a drink, I’d have it in the sergeant’s mess but if you landed away from base, the officers could sub money from the officer’s funds so they’d sub so much money and treat us out for the night.
CB: How often did you find the pubs short of beer?
KJ: Did we find?
CB: The pubs short of beer. How often?
KJ: Oh, not very often, not very often [paused], but I used to like to stick to the sergeant’s mess.
CB: So how did you manage to keep in touch with Joan? Your future wife.
KJ: By mail, that were all, and get home as soon as soon, as often as possible. I used to, I were stationed quite close to Lincoln in both —
CB: In Bardney.
KJ: Both Bardney and Skellinghorpe.
CB: Skellingtorpe, yeah.
KJ: So it was an easy matter to get a train to Doncaster from them places. So if I’d got, if we weren’t flying that night, I’d take a chance on it and go home for the night. Only once did we nearly come adrift and that was, that was at Skellingthorpe, and from the bus stop to the camp was about a mile walk and all the way along, we could hear this tannoy saying myself and the engineer to report to the flights immediately. They’d come on an early morning raid they were going to do. Well they’d got reserves to go in our places, but the lad that were going to be the rear gunner, he said, ‘No. I’m not bothered. You go on’, so I got my raid in. But the engineer, this young man that were standing in for him had only got that one raid to finish his tour, so he said, ‘Oh no. I’m going on it’, so, but we both got the same punishment. Grounded for so many days and, not much like. A good telling off. It were a funny thing that, because the skipper always knew where we were, my home address, and he swore he’d sent a telegram but we never got it. So —
CB: That’s why you were late.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So what did they do to you?
KJ: We got a reprimand and confined to barracks for so long.
CB: How did the leave system work? How often did you get leave?
KJ: Oh with aircrew we were very lucky. We got a week’s leave every six weeks and you got a week’s pay from —
CB: Nuffield Fund.
KJ: Nuffield, aye. He also, when we went on leave, he gave us a week’s pay as well so a very popular man.
[pause]
CB: So you finished with 50 Squadron and went to 9.
KJ: Finished with 61.
CB: Finished with 61 Squadron and went to 9.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: How was the process and operation different from your previous experience?
KJ: Not a lot different really but we’d done more ops than others. We were senior crew like, ‘cause we’d done more than all the others, but it didn’t take long for somebody to overtake us, so —
CB: So here, you’re doing precision bombing.
KJ: Oh yeah.
CB: Tallboy, twelve thousand pounder.
KJ: Yeah
CB: So how did you do your training for that?
KJ: Well they did, I know the bomb aimers did have, we used to take up the bomb aimers to do this practice bombing and there were certain regulations laid down how they should treat this Tallboy bomb. ‘Course the Tallboy, you had to have special bomb doors. Normal bomb doors wouldn’t close over a Tallboy.
CB: How were the, what were these like?
KJ: They’d, they were shaped. Instead of just going around, they come down so far and then bellied out a bit and then came back in, so you could tell there was something different about them, and then, when them that carried the twenty two thousand pounder, they didn’t have any bomb doors on at all.
CB: The Grand Slam.
KJ: The Grand Slam. They just had a chain holding it up but I never carried that. We were, we stuck to Tallboys.
CB: How often did you have to, how often did you fail to drop the Tallboys or did you always drop them?
KJ: Well if we couldn’t be sure of the target, we’d orders to bring it back. Sometimes they changed their mind if conditions weren’t good and that, but as a rule, we brought them back because they cost so much to produce.
CB: And how did you feel about landing with such a heavy load on?
KJ: Well at first very tedious, very timid, but you got used to it like everything else.
CB: Your pilot was a good one so —
KJ: Oh a fantastic man, yeah.
CB: What sort of targets were you going for then?
KJ: With the Tallboy, they were chosen targets like dams or them viaducts.
CB: The U-Boat. Oh right.
KJ: And that type of thing. Things that you could knock down.
CB: So the Bielefeld Viaduct was brought down by a Grand Slam. Did you drop that?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Did that, was 9 Squadron involved in that?
KJ: Yeah. Always two squadrons. At first 617, like on the dam raid, there were only them.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: But subsequent raids they were losing more and more men, so they decided to lighten the load by putting two squadrons on these special targets rather than one, and the other squadron was Number 9, so it meant that 617 didn’t have to take it all.
CB: And how many ops did you do on your second tour?
KJ: Fifteen.
CB: And what, why did those stop?
KJ: Well, the war ended.
CB: It was the end of the war.
KJ: Yeah, thirty was a tour.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Well we did a tour but then we carried, agreed to carry straight on and we just carried on till the end of the war then, and the very last raid was Hitler’s guest house at Berchtesgaden.
[pause]
CB: So the war is over, now what did you do?
KJ: Well, they, they were getting ready to go to the Far East to carry the war to Japan, so I thought, well, I’ve done forty five ops, I’ve done my share. It wouldn’t be fair to the wife to carry on so I dropped out the race. But they never got there anyway, the war ended before they, they got to that point, so that was it.
CB: So the end of the war in Europe was the 8th of May, August was VJ day, so you were still in the RAF after that.
KJ: Oh yeah.
CB: What was going on? What were you doing then?
KJ: Well we were doing more or less the same things for so long, for about a year, and then we were put on ground staff jobs, and I got put on, well it were my choice, on driving. They were cook or drivers and I didn’t fancy cooking. I might have poisoned them all.
CB: Very likely. No, no, no. And what was, what determined the date of your demob?
KJ: It went on how old you were mainly ‘cause, and there was, the RAF for some reason was being held back ‘til last. So the Army and the Navy were getting demobbed, demobbed ahead of us but eventually the day came. But in that time, I’d been sent to Egypt and I was in charge of a lorry place which had forty five lorries, and I had to find loads for them going backwards and forwards. So, but eventually the day came when we came home [pause], and it was just a case of landing in Liverpool, going into this big hangar, big hangar and throwing my RAF kit into that, and walking out in a new suit. We got rigged out with civilian clothes.
CB: Right. What did they give you in civilian clothes?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: What did they give you?
KJ: A suit, shirt, tie, hat - which I never wore. I never wore a hat. The only time I wore a hat were in the RAF. And socks and shoes, the whole bag of tricks.
CB: So you came out of the RAF. Then what did you do?
KJ: Well my father had a little foundry and I went to work for him, but I did join the Observer Corps and I did another couple of years, part time of course, in the Observer Corps. We used to have exercises, mostly at weekends and we had a place out at Brampton.
CB: At Brampton.
KJ: Aye.
CB: Near Huntingdon.
KJ: Pardon?
CB: Brampton near Huntingdon [pause]. Where?
KJ: I thought it were Brampton. It was near Finningley.
CB: Ah.
KJ: Back side of Finningley. Actually we were in some gardens.
CB: Right.
KJ: There were like a hut there with a all glass top.
CB: Right.
KJ: So as you could see aircraft, and for a while it were interesting, ‘cause we did, we’d go on a weekend and we’d have to spot and record every aircraft we saw flying over. But then it got to nuclear business and the idea was you’d go out if there were a nuclear warning. We’d have to go out to the shelter and stay there till you got the all clear, but you were leaving your family behind. I said, ‘No. No. That’s not for me. If I go, we all go’, so I packed it in.
CB: In the Observer Corps, you were being paid as an employee were you?
KJ: In the Observer Corps? No. No, it were voluntary.
CB: So what was your job at the time?
KJ: I was working at er mining.
CB: In your father’s foundry.
KJ: Mining supplies. Engineering.
CB: Right. So you joined father’s foundry company.
KJ: Aye but –
CB: Then you changed from that.
KJ: I went to work for International Harvesters.
CB: Right. Oh right.
KJ: And learned more about machines, so I stayed at the Harvesters some years then. Twelve years I think.
CB: Did you? Right.
KJ: Aye, ‘cause my dad’s place – my mother was taken seriously ill. She died of cancer and my dad’s place had really gone to ruins. There was nobody knew how to run it like he did and he was at home all the time nursing mum, so I worked for Harvesters then for twelve year.
CB: And then what did you do? Did you do something after that?
KJ: I finished up at mining supplies.
CB: Right.
[phone ringing]
CB: We’ll stop it a mo.
[Recording paused]
CB: Where were the mining supplies? That was in Doncaster?
KJ: Carr Hill, yeah.
CB: In Carr Hill, yeah. And what were you doing there?
KJ: Engineering, running the machine.
CB: Oh right.
KJ: It was the, oh what did they call them?
CB: Milling.
KJ: Yeah. They were [pause]. Oh what did they call them? The machines that you put a programme in, and they —
CB: Yeah. CCN. Yeah
KJ: Yeah. So —
CB: CNC. CNC.
KJ: A lot of the young ones that were working there didn’t want to know, so I said I’d have a go at it, so I was taught how to run this machine and it fell in just natural, and that’s how I finished up working.
CB: How long were you with that one?
KJ: Oh a good, good, right to, after the war. I should say twelve, twelve years again.
CB: Right, and that brought you to retirement did it?
KJ: Yeah. Well I worked a long time after my retirement but eventually I had.
CB: Had to retire.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Right. I’m just going to pause.
[Recording paused]
CB: Right. So what would you say was the most memorable event in your time in the RAF?
KJ: I think obviously it would be I mean we’ve had some shaky dos as we used to call them, when we were being hit by flak and all that sort of thing, chased by fighters, but the worst experience was when we had the bombs dropped on us.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And we lost our rear gunner.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: That was the most memorable thing.
CB: Traumatic.
KJ: Traumatic, that’s a better word yeah. Yeah.
CB: Out of interest, what did the Air Force do about a memorial service after that? Did they do anything?
KJ: No.
CB: No, because it was just run of the mill.
KJ: That’s it, yeah, it was a risk you took.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: That were their thinking, yeah. I’ve been to, you know, the Spire in Lincoln.
CB: Yes.
KJ: Well I’ve been to that, and all the names of those that got killed are all on brass plaques around the Memorial, and where we used to call him Jack Foy, ‘cause his name was Carson Jack Foy, and if I stand up again at this particular plaque, his name just appears above my head.
CB: Does it really.
KJ: Aye.
CB: ‘Cause he’s one of the ones of the twenty six thousand two hundred in the rolls of honour. The three.
KJ: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: The three volumes.
KJ: His mother lost two sons within [pause] within a month anyway.
CB: Really.
KJ: We lost Jack and then a few days after it was D-day and his brother was in the Canadian Army and he was killed on D-day.
CB: Right.
KJ: So she lost two sons.
CB: Heartbreaking.
KJ: I used to write to his sister but I know, but, one time I weren’t well and I left it, and I thought oh it’s, I’ll leave it now so I didn’t bother after that.
CB: We didn’t really talk about the number of times you were actually attacked by fighters and your response to that in defence of the aircraft.
KJ: I should say at least a half a dozen times, and it depended which gunner spotted them first, because he would take over as the [pause], tell the skipper to go into a corkscrew, so you’d shout, ‘Corkscrew left. Corkscrew left. Go’, and off you would go.
CB: And everybody then held on.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: How many did you shoot down between you?
KJ: We only, we only claimed one but —
CB: Was that yours?
KJ: We, there were a few we discouraged shall we say.
CB: Yes. Did the, did the one you shot down, was that yours or was it Carson’s?
KJ: Well I said it was the rear gunner’s because he got better shots at it. I were only getting it as it whizzed by. Just get in front and blaze away and hope for the best, but the rear gunner was watching it from the time it started to come at us.
CB: What was it?
KJ: An ME109.
CB: Right. In the dark?
KJ: Yeah, it was dark. Yeah. We got chased with a ME101.
CB: 110.
KJ: 110. 110. But it were cloudy that day and we kept dodging into the clouds and losing him.
CB: Right.
KJ: But he persevered for a hell of a time. Every time we come out of the cloud, he were there.
CB: Yeah, because he’d got radar hadn’t he?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Yeah. Course we didn’t know that at that time.
CB: Was it possible for the mid-upper and the rear gunner to engage the target at the same time?
KJ: Oh yeah, yeah, no problem there. The rear turret as you were, you went on a duckboard from the, well it was the toilet there.
CB: At the back.
KJ: At the back, and from there to the turret, you’d got like a runway, thick plywood, and you walked along that to get into the rear turret. Well from there, right up to under my turret, the rear gunners had got four, well two each side, four rows of cartridges going on a conveyer belt.
CB: Twenty seven feet of them.
KJ: Pardon?
CB: Nine yards. Twenty seven feet.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Yeah, and mine were just in canisters either side of the guns.
CB: Right.
CB: So —
KJ: On the wall or on the floor?
CB: On the [pause] up, up same height as myself.
KJ: Right.
CB: So how many? You had obviously many less rounds. How many rounds did you have?
KJ: There were just a minute’s firing. One thousand something on each gun.
CB: Oh right.
KJ: So, but I mean the rear turret could go on for ages.
CB: How many rounds did the, that’s a lot of rounds on there stretched on the floor.
KJ: Oh yeah.
CB: For the rear gunner.
KJ: Yeah, yeah, coming right back from the rear turret to my turret and back again. Yeah, it was [pause] well it was about half way up the aircraft from the rear turret. Yeah. He’d a hell of a lot of cartridges, and you had incendiary bullets so you could see where you were, where your bullets were going.
CB: Tracer.
KJ: Tracer bullets.
CB: They were, they weren’t all tracer.
KJ: No.
CB: So it was, was one in how many?
KJ: One in every five, I think.
CB: Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: You needed that in the dark.
KJ: Yeah. Yeah. Then later on some of the rear turrets got .5s.
CB: Right at the end.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Just 2.5s. Yeah.
KJ: Two instead of four 303s, yeah.
CB: So how did you feel about your reduced fire power of only two guns in the mid-upper?
KJ: Well you’d have been happier with more, but you just had to make do. I mean the rear, rear gunner had got a lot more fire power than you.
CB: When you were zeroing in on the attacking fighter, which part of the fighter would you actually be aiming to hit?
KJ: Well the easiest way was get in front of him and fire and let him come through your hail of bullets.
CB: Right.
KJ: But they had a laid down plan. You’d got the gun sight which was about that big. A circle.
CB: Right.
KJ: With a dot in the middle.
CB: Three inches.
KJ: And you were supposed, at different points, when you were in the corkscrew, trying to escape, different points where you were supposed to put your gun, aim you gun, but it was impossible.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: I mean, one minute you were head were in the top.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: The next minute it felt as though somebody had put a tonne weight on your shoulders. So a lot of it was using your own judgement.
CB: The final question on this is, you and the rear gunner are in a section that is completely unheated.
KJ: Oh yeah. Yeah.
CB: So how did you feel during the flight?
KJ: Well we were issued with heated suits but the trouble was, nine times out of every ten, they weren’t tended for and one minute they were too hot and the next, when you turned them off they were too cold. So they weren’t a lot of good to be quite honest, but you had an electrically heated suit and then an overall suit over the top of that.
CB: There were two circuits were there in the heated suit? One each side.
KJ: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So did they always both work?
KJ: Oh some of them failed. Some of them had got, they were, they got that hot, within minutes you had to take them off. You couldn’t stand that. It were better to not get used to it.
CB: So what sort of lengths were the flights? They varied but, to the target but what length in hours was a typical flight.
KJ: I should say on an average about six, seven hours but I’ve done some up to twelve hours.
CB: What that would be? The longest ones.
KJ: Stettin.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Would be one of the longest ones. Right up in, well it were Russia at that time.
CB: Right out on the Baltic coast.
KJ: Yeah, that’s right.
CB: Did you, because you were getting to the end of the war, but you didn’t have, the Tallboy wasn’t used so you weren’t on the, some of the later raids to the cities.
KJ: No. Although I did Tallboy raids.
CB: Yes.
KJ: Some, some of my raids we carried the Tallboy.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: But a lot of it was, at the beginning in particular, you were going for German cities and you’d drop incendiaries and then the bangers after that, if you call them that. But you lit the target up with incendiaries first.
CB: But the four thousand pounder.
KJ: Yeah. Strangely enough, a lot of aircrew didn’t trust them. They were, they were very touchy if they got disturbed. They were likely to go off.
CB: Really.
KJ: After say, an hour, because they got an hour’s timing on them and probably when they’d been put up under, in to the bomb bays, somebody might catch them and that started the timing off.
CB: Oh.
KJ: But you didn’t know but you’d, after an hour, as you were crossing the channel, you’d see suddenly one in front of you blow up.
CB: And that was why was it?
KJ: That were why. Yeah. Yes very —
CB: What did they have in them then, that made them so sensitive?
KJ: Well it was the timer.
CB: I meant the explosives. It was a combination was it? Explosives and incendiary?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Was it?
KJ: No. High explosive bombs. No, I don’t think the incendiaries were as much to worry about.
CB: So you’re dropping Tallboys, and how accurate would you say you were doing that?
KJ: Well you’d got to be accurate because anybody that got outside the aiming point would get a real telling off. The bomb aimer would get, and of course the pilot wouldn’t be very pleased, so he’d put his two penneth in as well.
CB: And how well could you see the effect of those?
KJ: Oh on some raids you could see every bomb that dropped. See it hit the ground and see the explosion and everything, but, ‘cause the, with the Tallboy, when it hit the ground you’d get like throwing a pebble in water. You’d get them rings come up but they were pressure rings instead of —
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And if you got, if you were below eight thousand feet, they’d throw you all over the place if you got in that.
CB: Oh really.
CB: Oh yeah.
KJ: Yeah. Aye, ‘cause if we were dropping them, the rest of the force were told not to drop less than, not to go below eight thousand feet.
CB: But they didn’t explode on impact because they were designed for penetration weren’t they?
KJ: That’s right.
CB: So there was a delay?
KJ: Yeah. They’d an armour plating nose which buried in to the ground and then depending on the delay fuse, would depend on that when they went off.
CB: Now one of the targets for some time was U-boat pens. How well did they work on those?
KJ: With, I know we did U-boat, U-boat pens at Bergen in Norway and we’d got one hour timers on and they went through the top of the pen and they were half in the pen and the Germans thought they were duds but —
CB: Right.
KJ: On the hour they found out they weren’t.
CB: Right, but the hour delay was designed to get maximum effect of casualty.
KJ: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I say, they thought they were duds and by the time they found out they weren’t, it were too late.
CB: Viaducts. So you talked about those.
KJ: Pardon?
CB: With viaducts, were they effective on those?
KJ: Yeah. Oh yeah, because they used to bury under the, underneath and that caused them to crumble over.
CB: So how did you feel about it after you’d been on a raid?
KJ: [Laughs] Thankful that we’d come back. Yeah.
CB: I was thinking about your reaction to the result of your bombing.
KJ: Oh well, we were always pleased to see we, we’d made a mess of where we were bombing.
CB: Because unlike a normal raid, there wouldn’t be lots of smoke.
KJ: No. No. No.
CB: It would be clear cut, wouldn’t it? What you’d done.
KJ: Yeah. Yeah. As soon as a Tallboy hit the ground, you got those —
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Rings coming up.
CB: Shockwaves, yeah. And what about Grand Slams? Did you drop those as well?
KJ: We didn’t, no, there were only six. I think only three aircraft on 617 that were altered to carry them.
CB: Right.
KJ: Because they had no bomb doors on them.
CB: No.
KJ: Just they just went up, ‘cause the first time I saw them, I couldn’t believe my eyes. This damned great thing slung under an aircraft and no bomb doors. Aye.
CB: Did you do joint raids with 617, or were they all done separately?
KJ: No, the second tour, we were always with them, but the first tour was with general.
CB: Yeah, general bombing.
KJ: Bombing, yeah.
CB: Right. Thank you very much.
KJ: It’s a pleasure.
[Recording paused]
CB: Just one other thing, on the Tirpitz raids then, what happened there?
KJ: Well, they took the mid-upper turrets out altogether to lighten the load they were carrying, and they had a, they had a bigger bomb on, the twelve thousand pound bomb. But they were, they were special made bomb doors, they weren’t completely round, they’d got a dimple in them to go around the shape of the bomb.
CB: Right.
KJ: And every one of them bombs was turned in either Sheffield or Scotland, there were only two lathes big enough to do them. That’s why if we weren’t certain of the target, we had to bring them back.
CB: Expensive and scarce.
KJ: Oh yeah. Yeah.
CB: Right.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Ken Johnson. Two
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-04-03
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Sound
Identifier
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AJohnsonKA170403
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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01:39:45 audio recording
Description
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Ken Johnson was born in Doncaster. At the start of the war the family was living in Sheffield but his father decided they should move back to Doncaster to avoid bombing. Ken started work as a joiner and later made cables for barrage balloons. Despite being in a reserved occupation, he volunteered to join the RAF and trained in Scotland as an air gunner. He describes gunnery practice against towed targets and corkscrewing the aircraft. He formed a crew in the Operational Training Unit at RAF Bruntingthorpe. He talks about his pilot, Flight Sergeant Harold “Harry” Watkins, who fought in the Finnish Army against the Russians at the start of the war. Ken joined 61 Squadron at RAF Skellingthorpe flying Lancasters. His first operation was just after D-Day to bomb German armour but as they were too close to allied troops, it was aborted. Ken’s most traumatic experience was during an operation in July 1944, when an aircraft above his dropped its bombs and three bombs hit the aircraft including the rear turret, carrying it away with the rear gunner. On another occasion, anti-aircraft shrapnel missed Ken’s head by two inches. After completing a tour of thirty operations, most of Ken’s crew volunteered for a second tour. Transferred to 9 Squadron, many of his fifteen operations involved dropping the 12,000 lb Tallboy bomb. Ken describes the differences between the rear and mid-upper turrets including their armament. After the war, he served as an RAF driver in Egypt before being demobilised and returning to civilian life. He volunteered with the Royal Observer Corps for a couple of years.
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Nick Cornwell-Smith
Vivienne Tincombe
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Pending revision of OH transcription
61 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bomb struck
Lancaster
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bardney
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Dalcross
RAF Skellingthorpe
service vehicle
Tallboy
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1186/11758/PWatsonC1704.1.jpg
cf1ce61de2dfa140b6b4109391b34f14
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1186/11758/AWatsonC170628.2.mp3
f97648ac89c80e5091c56c9c1787f1e1
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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Watson, Clifford
C Watson
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. Two oral history interviews with Flying Officer Clifford Watson DFC (1922 - 2018, 1384956, 188489 Royal Air Force), a memoir, his service and release book, and a scrapbook containing photographs and documents. He flew operations as an air gunner with 150 and 227 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Clifford Watson and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-06-28
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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Watson, C
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 28th of June 2017 and I am with Clifford Watson at Fenstanton near Huntingdon to talk about his life and times in the RAF. So, what were your first recollections of life, Cliff?
CW: I was born in Barnoldswick, 1922 about three years after my father returned from the war, he opened a radio shop and was building radios and he was getting kits of radios from Pye in Cambridge and I went to the local infant school which was about fifty yards away from the shop. Two years later, my sister joined me there, that’s about the age of ten, my family moved to Keighley in Yorkshire, my father was engineer and manager of the radio relay system. Three years later we moved to Norwich where he established another radio relay firm rather, few years there we moved to London. Went to school at the age of ten, I was at the local elementary school in Norwich. At the age of thirteen, I went to the Norwich junior technical school and two years later to Unthank college in Norwich which a very different curriculum. I hated English literature there but I got a credit in the school’s certificate, by reading, another book overnight and I took the exam with a different book from the one I’ve been studying, I’d read it overnight and I got a credit. When I left the college at sixteen, I was, I was then, what’s the word? I was then with a firm of accountants in St Paul’s Churchyard and when I used to look out, yes, the war had just started and I used to look out through the window into that churchyard, there were a number of graves there and on one of them there was a double cross and it said neath this SOD, is another SOD, Adolf Hitler, it didn’t actually say SOD of course, it said it, yes, well, then the Blitz started and the family firm was in real trouble cause all the engineers had been called up, well, most of them, so I abandoned accountancy and went and helped the family firm in Battersea, I’d been there just a few months when four ladies came for a job, one of whom was a lady of eighteen and Hilda became my future wife, right from now.
CB: I stop, I stop for a minute. Just going back from your school days, what were the things you excelled at there?
CW: Well, at the elementary school, the age of thirteen, I wanted to get to the Norwich junior Tech but I needed recommendation for that, I had to do something and show that I was capable. My father got me a kit of parts for a radio, agreed it was a simple radio, it was from a [unclear] by Telecom, [unclear], I built the radio and gave a talk on it, demonstrating the thing working and I drew the circuit on the blackboard as I went along, told them how it worked, and that secured me a recommendation for the tech but there of course it was all physics, chemistry, mechanics and so on and two years there onto Unthank college, very different, I had, I carried on with tuition, with tuition in chemistry, physics I enjoyed, maths I enjoyed and all went well, that gave me five credits which gave me access to training as an accountant.
CB: Ok. You were talking a bit earlier about the shortage of engineers because they’ve been called up, so, your father tried to engage ladies, how did that go?
CW: Well, my father at that time was in Abyssinia and there was a manager there with little technical knowledge and instead of being a foreman with about six wiremen, there was me and four fourteen year old schoolboys and we were working on overhead lines, I was working about fifteen hours a day, I was earning, yes, fifty shillings a, yes, fifty shillings a week, at the end of the Blitz, well, almost the end of the Blitz, I’d had enough, and I thought the manager was, oh, I, one evening I was, I filled in my paperwork for the day, I put it in the secretary’s tray and there was an official looking document with my name on it and the manager was trying to, it was case it was the Ministry of Labour to get Clifford Watson exempt from callup. And I was furious, I tore the thing up, the next day, instead of going to work in overalls, I went in my best suit, well, my one and only suit and that’s when I went up town [unclear] made a beeline first for the Fleet Air Arm and things worked from there.
CB: So, when you went to, when you tried for the Fleet Air Arm, what happened? You went to the recruiting office.
CW: Well, I couldn’t get further than the door at the Fleet Air Arm.
CB: What did the man say?
CW: Can I help you, lad? That’s when I put on my Yorkshire accent [laughs] which wasn’t difficult at the time. The following, about a week later, I went to industrial house and there was very young [unclear] there, there’s a fairly big hall, half a dozen doors, each leading into a fairly small office and in each place there was I think five Lieutenant and a sergeant, when I went in, we were given a form which I filled in and I was given a card with a number on it and it was the number above the door or two numbers in fact, the doors were numbered and there was another number, when that number comes up on that [unclear] or those two numbers come up, you go through that door and I was interviewed by the officer and the sergeant and they said, this is a very, very preliminary interview, just want to give you some idea of how things go, and they asked a few questions: What did your father do? What do you do? Why do you want to join the RAF? And so on. Ok, there was an interview, there were about fifty people waiting and it was very pleasant, very pleasant too, they said, alright, we wish you luck, and you should hear from us within a few weeks. So I went back home, letter came, report to some place near Euston and I went there, we had three one-hour written papers and then an interview and a medical. At the interview I remember two questions, one was, which is colder, minus 40 Fahrenheit or minus 40 Centigrade? I pretended to work it out, I said, same thing, same temperature, well, I knew the answer, I didn’t need to work it out, but I pretended to do. Right, he said you’re, you know, in a flimsy belt, you’re half a mile offshore, a breeze is trying to take you, what was it [unclear] get it right, the breeze is trying to take you inshore, the tide is taking you out of shore, so in practice you stay put, you’re infested with alligators, all sorts of, animals in the sea but you’ve got to get ashore, what do you do? I said, I think the answer you want is that I lower the boat in the sea, increase the tide, the effect of the tide and reduce the windage, I think that’s your answer but I don’t like it and he laughed, yeah, he did laugh, he said, quite right. That was the two questions. [laughs] After that, that was about the interview, we already had the three written papers and there was nothing there particularly tricky and then there was a medical, half a dozen or so medical people, we went to each one and everything seemed alright, said, right, good show, we’ll let you know and I had a letter, a few weeks later, telling me to where to report but before I reported, I was to see a dentist for one filling and, two fillings and one extinct
CB: extraction
CW: One extraction. I did that and two fillings and one extraction at a cost of three shillings. Imagine today. Anyhow, I don’t question. And that was it. Eventually I was told where to report, meanwhile two other chaps locally had found that I was joining, I joined the RAF, so had they and the three of us got together and we travelled to Newquay together and in fact to Rhodesia together but years later, the one, the first one became captain of a Stirling and disappeared on his first trip. The other one, like me, came off the pilot’s course, I nearly said failed but I don’t agree with that term, I came off the pilot’s course with the other fellow and then carried on. He became a rear-gunner of a Stirling and they were shot up on all three trips which he did, different crew each time, first trip he ditched in the sea, two, he plus two survived, second trip they had to bail out, he and one other survived, third trip, they landed tail heavy, the turret came adrift with him in it, the aircraft bounced, blew up, killing everyone on board and Tommy woke up in hospital, that was there, carry on. [unclear] Whilst in Rhodesia, we were seven weeks at sea getting to Rhodesia, oh, getting to Durban and in Durban we had no money, we’d handed all the English currency in and they were to exchange it for local currency when we got to were [unclear] we were going and on the main track in Durban with no money and outside a Barclay’s bank was a rotary insignature, insignia and it said, Durban welcomes local visiting Rotarians, well, I wasn’t a Rotarian but my father was, I went in, could I see the manager please? I had an introduction card from Battersea Rotary. Let’s see the manager, please, well, the three of us walked in, saw the manager and I said, I’d like to borrow a couple of quid and send it back to you when we get to wherever it is we’re going. He reached into a drawer and gave each of us an envelope with the equivalent of ten pounds in each, he said, that with a compliment to a Rotary, don’t try to send it back, he said, you’re in Africa now, that was it.
CB: We’ll stop there just for a moment. Just quickly before we go on to your, more details of your flying training, Clifford, you mentioned the fact that you were interested in joining the Navy, as Fleet Air Arms, so-
CW: The reason, the reason I went to the Navy was the first one, all I wanted to do was fly and Fleet Air Arm needs pilots, it said, and as you’d heard, I got no further than the door, Fleet Air Arm pilots don’t work, that’s it, and I did, and that was the end of my naval experience. All I wanted to do was fly, that’s all, fighter pilot of course, but that didn’t matter, if anybody had said you prefer bombers or fighters, we’d seen plenty of fighters, it would have been fighters.
CB: There was a glamour in being a fighter pilot
CW: Mh?
CB: There was a glamour in being a fighter pilot at that time.
CW: Oh, everybody, all the boys wanted to be
CB: But, after being rejected
CW: Well, having seen bombers going down in flames and fighters getting away with it, fine, naturally they wanted to be fighter pilots
CB: Yeah. So, the effect of the rejection of the navy man, made you do what?
CW: So, the?
CB: The effect of talking with the man from the navy, that, what was the effect of that on you? You went home and then what?
CW: It didn’t worry me, except that I had this ridge across my nose, and I thought there’s no point in going into the RAF medical with a ridge on my nose
CB: From your glasses
CW: But, from the, yes, from the bridge as, but that disappeared, was only just a mark, so I left my glasses off and it made no difference, I passed the medical alright, in fact, quite often during the war I did wear glasses and I wore them flying in place of the goggles. The goggles were there but didn’t really need them, cause I did wear glasses, I remember a briefing one day and I put the glasses on and one of the officers was looking at that [laughs], a rear gunner wearing glasses? Oh, dear me! They made no difference,
CB: Just going to your experience in Rhodesia, so you did pilot training, how many hours did you do?
CW: Oh, I did eight hours flying with five different instructors and then, in six weeks, and a day or two before the end of six weeks, I got in a further three hours with a sergeant pilot who claimed to have been a Hurricane pilot in North Africa which we didn’t believe, so at eleven hours they were still, let’s get it right, yes, after six weeks, out of the course of fifty, there were still thirty on the course, only fifteen of whom had gone solo and I was one of the other fifteen who hadn’t and that fifteen had to see a fly test and everybody was scrubbed, everyone failed. Well, of that fifteen, twelve of us notified a grievance, we went through the grievance procedure, why had we failed? Why had I failed? And the CO pretended to look up his notebook, Watson you failed on two counts, a, you did wheel landings instead of three pointers, secondly you took off and climbed at half throttle. Well, I said, firstly, I landed exactly as I was instructed and secondly, if it took off and climbed at half throttle, I prefer a miracle and we could all do with one of them, I spoke twice out there, I remember and that was it, there was no appeal, everybody was taken off for some silly reason. A year later, Wing Commander Powell, Speedy Powell, who was in charge of all flying training became our group captain in North Africa and I was about to tell him it was a scam when he told me, he said, no, you didn’t fail, he said, they were just not in a SFTS, he says, to cope with the numbers from EFTS and there were hundreds of you waiting after EFTS to go to SFTS, so they established an air gunner training school and observer training school at Moffat near Gwelo. We were given the option of an observer course and they said, there’ll be a little, there could be a delay in getting on to the observer course, maybe a week or two delay, well, we’d already met people the previous night who’d been there for six months waiting for the thing, so they were not, they were dishonest, there was only one thing to do, and that was re-muster to air gunner and we, there were forty five of us on the course, there’s a picture of that with all those chaps in there.
CB: So, you became an air gunner
CW: Yes, it was an, I think it was an eight weeks course
CB: And where was that held?
CW: That was at Gwelo, aerodrome was called Moffat, at Gwelo near Marandellas in Rhodesia, I spent quite a lot of time on the farm at Marandellas, where there was a little girl called Wendy and I remember repairing a puncture on her bicycle, we had to do something in return for the hospitality. Everybody seemed to pass the air gunner course, I won’t comment too much on that [laughs]
CB: So, did you get your brevet at the end of that course or did you get it later?
CW: Oh, at the end of the course
CB: Then what?
CW: Yes, the two instructors there, they weren’t even qualified air gunners [laughs], I should delete that,
CB: What did you do the training on for air gunnery?
CW: They were Anson aircraft and Anson aircraft, yes, and there was a scarf ring with a Vickers gas operated guns and the only firing we did was on the beam at a drill [unclear] by a Miles Magister, Miles Master, which was, she was
CB: So, how did you get on with it?
CW: Oh, it’s rather, on the way back, we came via Cape Town and whilst we were in the transit camp the three of us went to, went to, oh my Gosh, I can’t recall the name, Muizenberg yes, we were in the beach in Muizenberg and a lady came to us about ten o’clock, she said, look, chaps, what are you doing for lunch? So, well, we’re not [laughs] see that big house over there? Come and see me there half past eleven, come and have lunch with us and we did, at the door ask for Mrs Macbeth. Ask for Mrs Macbeth, right, we duly went to the door and I asked for Mrs Shakespeare [laughs] Many, many years later I was on the [unclear] talking to an amateur in South Africa, I told him where I was and he said he was in Muizenberg and I said, I remember Muizenberg and I told him about that, he said, that place is now a guest house and that’s where I stay and that’s where I’m speaking from, not only that, but he said, whereabouts are you in Mbeya? And I told him, and I said, I’m in what’s the boys quarters at the back of the transferring station in the back of the cottage there in the boys quarters and he said, have a look through the, can you see the back door of the cottage? And I bent down, Yes, yeah, he said, is there a hole in the door, about a foot off the floor, in the middle? Yeah. He said, if you’d been down and looked through that hole, you’ll see a mark on the wall back, there’s a passageway, a mark on the wall. Have a look and I did, and it’d been, it had been plastered over, he said, that’s where my gun went off when I was careless, he was stationed there during the war. And, now, there were two coincidences, million to one, millions to one, infinitely to one, he was told about Mrs Shakespeare and we’d, he’d sat in the same seat during the war. Amazing. [unclear], Rhodesia was a wonderful place.
CB: And the local families, when you had time off, when you had time off from training, what did the local families do?
CW: Oh, on the farm? Oh, they were farmers, we tried to help out on farm, I did a bit of wiring whilst I was there, a lot of wires on pylons and they were in a bit of a state and I did a bit of tidying up there, I remember that
CB: Did they feed you?
CW: Oh yes, yes, was wonderful, Marandellas, that was. Yes, we were entertained quite royally in Rhodesia.
CB: So, we were talking about your holding point at Cape Town when that, what happened there? From Cape Town what happened?
CW: Well, from Cape Town we got on the boat and came back. It was a passenger liner, we’d gone out to Durban in the Mooltan, that was a cargo ship and we were down in, on the bottom deck, about three decks below, coming back we were on the Empress of Bermuda and there were people on it from the Middle East and quite a few Italian prisoners and we came back straight ten days, straight line ten days, the U-boats didn’t stand a chance, going out we had a terrific escort and must have been a dozen ships in that convoy, a dozen navy ships, coming back we were on our own and in a straight line [laughs]
CB: Cause it was fast
CW: It was fast, yes
CB: So, where did you dock?
CW: Where did we dock? Yes, Greenock, came back to Greenock, we had to carry our own kit bag, get our kit bag off the ship, we had full pack, a suitcase, and in fact we had two kit bags and we had to hang them over, one was for the flying kit, which was exactly as it was when we left, we didn’t even open the stuff, we didn’t need it in Rhodesia
CB: Because of the warmth.
CW: Mh?
CB: Because it was so warm.
CW: Yeah. We were and we lined up on the dock with all our kit and our red cap came along and recalled us to attention, right turn, double march, we just stood there with mouths open, double march, with all that clobber? there were no trollies, anything like that, we had to walk. I think we went straight to a train, I think the train is coming to the dock, I’ve got that picture, got on the train and we went back to West Kirby on the wirral. And that was it. From there, train down to Brighton and from, actually managed my pay book said I was, air gunner UT wireless op, which is what I said I wanted to do and he said, well, you can have the wireless op course if you wish, but it means going back to where they say, and you lose your tapes and you go back to where they say, forget that, he said, apply for another pilot’s course when you’ve done a couple of tours. Yes, oh yes, we were at Brighton, I was at Brighton for three weeks in a hotel, we would go in one direction, couple of miles and we’d have a lecture, then a few miles more and do a bit of swimming and that sort of thing, somewhere else do a bit of drill, bit of PT here there, just filling in time which all we wanted to do was get on. [pause] and we were posted straight to OTUs and I went to Finningley near Doncaster and that’s when I skivved off for Christmas and went to see my mother and got caught up in the time, was called out. Doncaster, there was an ENSA concert whilst we were there and the posters gave the impression that it was a real variety concert and they made it very clear, once you are in, you stay in, you don’t come out [unclear], you stay in, watch it, ok, it wasn’t a variety concert, it was an orchestra playing there, all playing classical music which was not really our kettle of fish. The only other ENSA concert I saw was at Kairouan when the Queen Mary came up, you know, the flat top thing, the Queen Mary came and there was a double grand piano on the back and a trailer where the pianist lived, it was Rawicz and Landauer and that was very good, I just sat there on my notebooks watching the, this on the piano and that was a real, they played stuff which appealed to us.
CB: Just to clarify the point, the Queen Mary is an aircraft recovery trailer.
CW: Yes, it was a big flat top carrying anything, tanks, aircraft
CB: So, you appreciated the music
CW: Yes, yes, it was good, was very good, but they were the only two ENSA concerts I saw
CB: So how long were you at the OTU?
CW: That’s a good point, about three months
CB: And you, what were you flying there?
CW: That was Wimpeys. Some Wimpey 1 Cs and then Wimpy 3s, mostly 3s.
CB: And from there where did you go?
CW: I gotta think.
CB: So, after the OTU you went to an HCU.
CW: No, no, we were on Wimpys. From 25 OTU Finningley we went to 30 OU, 30 OTU at Hickson, in Stafford and there we did more cross countries and whilst there we did three trips to France and then we were, then we joined, we went from there, we were there about three months, we went to 150 Squadron at Snaith. We didn’t do any flying from Snaith, one flight from Snaith was being detached overseas, they didn’t say where, we went to, one flight has to go, to go overseas, the other flight stays over Germany, so if you’d both give a preference of what you want to do and we opted to stay over Germany which meant of course that we went overseas. Our entire crew had trained overseas and we wanted to stay in England for a while but, no, from there we went back to West Kirby, back to West Kirby and we boarded a big, boarded a ship and on the deck there was some very big crates and the address Murmansk, it had been partly painted out, the name partly painted out. I said, Crickey, surely enough, we found later that they’d written Murmansk and partly rubbed it out so that the enemy looking at that thought we were going to Murmansk but that’s, that was what they said but we didn’t. We then from there down the Clyde, into the Med, then we went to Algiers, the troop ship just ahead of us was torpedoed and staggered into [unclear] and all the air gunners were on the deck of our troop ship, one air gunners, we’ve never seen the Oerlikon guns before, anyhow, that was it, and we disembarked in Algiers and in Algiers, yes, from Algiers we were stationed thirty miles south at Blida and there was a cargo ship unloading bombs and the bombs were put on ordinary bomb trolleys and trundled with tractors all the way to Blida and Blida is a very busy place, the Americans were there with all sorts of funny aircraft and we operated from Blida on Wimpys.
CB: Ok, we will stop there for a minute. Two, three disappointments in the RAF, yeah.
CW: No, two
CB: Two
CW: One was coming off the pilot’s course
CB: Yeah.
CW: [unclear] on 227 Squadron I was, the gunnery leader disappeared after a couple of weeks and I was a warrant officer then and I became acting gunnery leader and I stayed that way for six months as a flying officer doing the job and the wing commander commented on that and the adjutant oh, Cliff hadn’t done the gunnery leader course, so he said, better do the gunnery leader course. Couple of weeks later, I went up to Yorkshire somewhere and on the course thirty of us arrived to do it, we were given a test on arrival, we arrived on Sunday afternoon, Monday morning we all had a test and at the end of that we were divided into two flights, A and B, fifteen in each, I was in B flight and B flight was told to assemble in the hut next door, in the next hut, we did that, and we were each, we are not recording?
CB: Yeah, it’s ok.
CW: No, not.
CB: You don’t want to?
CW: No.
CB: No, ok. So you had a trip from Sir Archibald Sinclair. What did he say?
CW: Well, Archibald Sinclair thought we would be pleased at coming back through Sicily, Italy, France and so on, we weren’t amused but at Kairouan our diet was bully beef and biscuits. Each morning one member of the crew would go to the mess tent, collect two tins of bully and if we wanted, a few biscuits but they were big biscuits about six inches in diameter, but we used to go into the [unclear] city and I saw, we saw there once, oh, we had a Volkswagen there, a Volkswagen which had been abandoned, we shouldn’t really have gone anywhere near it, we were in big trouble for doing that, anyhow we went to this Volkswagen and one of the chaps fixed it, we more or less pinched the petrol, hundred octane petrol which didn’t do the engine any good and we used that at Kairouan, eventually it was confiscated by the military police, anyway in Kairouan, in
CB: Kairouan
CW: In Kairouan there was a vegetable stall in the market and there were some watermelons and we were admiring those, and the chap invited me to take one so I took it and gave it to him, he cut it up and we enjoyed this watermelon, it was lovely, I thought we could do with some of these back on camp, I bought two hundred of them [laughs] and oddly enough we could afford two hundred between us and we gave them in at the mess tent, some went over to the officer’s mess but when it came to use these watermelons, they were not watermelons at all, they were marrows, that didn’t matter to much because we stuffed them with bully beef, well the cooks did, how on earth, we loaded those watermelons into the Volkswagen but they turned out to be marrows we got there so, how that happened we don’t know, we just can’t understand. But, that was Kairouan, it was from Kairouan we saw this armada of Dakotas and gliders and they were going to Sicily and of course, soon after that we took off. A very interesting operations from, in North Africa, we felt we were dealing there with the Germans, with the military as apart from civilians, bombing them from four or five miles up, we were right down there with them, was a better feeling somehow, we felt we were a little bit nearer.
CB: What were your targets?
CW: Well, there’s a list of them here. In North Africa, all in North Africa, oh no, there’s a page full here.
CB: Ok.
CW: Tunis, Monserrato, Decimomannu, Tunis, Tunis again, Bizerta, Trapani and then there Villa Credo, Palermo, Napoli, Cagliari, Rome, Alghero, Castelvetrano, Chieti or something, Borezzo, Pantelleria, Sardinia, Sardinia, Sicily, Pantelleria, Napoli, Pantelleria, Pantelleria, that was in one night, twice to Pantelleria that night, Siracuse, Pantelleria, Messina, Napoli, Siracuse, Rome, Salerno, Bari, San Giovanni, Messina, Trapani.
CB: So, we are talking about largely mainland bombing, are we, what’s the balance between daylight and night bombing?
CW: This was all night bombing.
CB: All night bombing. Right.
CW: All night bombing.
CB: And how did you conduct the operations? Were you in a bomber’s stream or
CW: No.
CB: Were you in formation? Just as a gaggle.
CW: We’d take off one after the other independent to navigation all on the same route, ETA time on bombing, all the same, but operating independently, at maximum effort there, there were only twenty-six of us
CB: Right, how did you keep a sufficient spatial distance?
CW: What, from the others?
CB: Yeah.
CW: I didn’t even see them.
CB: Right. And you were all set the same height to operate from, were you?
CW: Yeah. Yes, yeah.
CB: And you, the speed was dictated in advance?
CW: Same, was the same, maximum economic cruising speed, it was the same for everybody.
CB: What would that be?
CW: I don’t know, it wasn’t my problem.
CB: No.
CW: One sixty-five knots. And, you can’t quote that, I’m not sure. I was the rear gunner.
CB: Right. Of course, yeah. So, in an operation, after dropping the bombs, you made your own way back
CW: Yes
CB: How easy was it to find the airfield that you started off from?
CW: Well, if, the navigator was pretty good, it was all dead reckoning now, there were no navigational leads at all or no electronic aids, then the navigator had a drift sight, I had a drift sight in the rear turret, I could, coming back over the sea, could drop a flame float, put the guns on that and of course, with the wind on the side and so on, we’re crabbing along, relative to the ground, the nose is not going straight forward, it’s on the
CB: You’d forward the deflection.
CW: There was a deflection
CB: To the navigator.
CW: And I could measure that deflection on the thing at the side and I would tell the navigator, we got sort of three degrees starboard drift or whatever and he would plot that, he could also measure the drift on his drift sight, and it was good, and of course, you hit the North Africa coast, and can see it and fly along if [unclear], if you’re too far east when you hit it but there were no other aids.
CB: So, the role of the gunner is to defend the aircraft. How many times were you attacked by German or Italian aircraft?
CW: No German aircraft, we saw a couple of Italian aircraft, one came up and we looked at it and looked as how it was, be a bit offensive, I fired at the bloke but he cleared off, we’d no trouble in North Africa. We got a bit closer to the enemy attacking, we were supposed to be strategic air force, that was the title but a lot of our work was tactical
CB: Supporting the army
CW: Supporting the army, attacking trains
CB: Yeah
CW: And so on. Low level stuff
CB: When you say, low level, what height are we talking about?
CW: Three hundred feet. Attacking a train at three hundred feet, there’d be three of us, we did two trips like that on the railway line from Suez up to Tunis, a German troop train on there, there’d be three of us, one aircraft would go directly above and bomb it and invariably stop it, stop the train. We would come upon the right, two hundred yards and strafing it, the train was stopped, the Jerries got off at the other side and they tried to get away a bit and that’s when the other fellow came in, number three, blazing with the front turret, and one beam gun and that was it, the three of us would carry on, turn round and then it depends what had to be done then, we didn’t want to derail, we didn’t try to derail the train, anything like that
CB: No, cause you needed the line
CW: We wanted the line for the army
CB: Army did, yeah, so
CW: One of the last things, in Tunis the Germans were evacuating from Bizerte, Bizerte?
CB: Yeah.
CW: Yes. And we was attacking the troop ships, we cut it down, well, I don’t know if it was us or one of them, anyway one of us caught a direct hit on a troop ship, which turned back and beached. And about a thousand British soldiers got off it. Three of them were killed, three British soldiers were killed by us but that was, that ship was full of POWs and it should have been lit up, by international law it should have been well illuminated
CB: Like a hospital ship
CW: But it wasn’t, there were no lights and there was nothing to tell us there were British on board, as far as we were concerned it was a German.
CB: Yeah.
CW: Anyhow, it beached, three thousand troops got off it and we met some of them in Tunis and we weren’t very popular
CB: No
CW: Because we’d killed three of their chaps but they didn’t think [unclear] the rest of us had done lucky [unclear] to be here, they did a good job and they didn’t think so
CB: Cause the Germans were evacuating with ships but also aircraft, so, did you have any role in trying to intercept the aircraft that were escaping? They had the big transport planes, the Arado
CW: We didn’t see any German aircraft, having said that I, I’ve got a vague idea we did once, there were two, one night we were on the way to Italy and at briefing they gave us position of a U-boat reported on, reported, a U-boat in that position and briefing officer, he said, if you see it, make it crash-dive, said, don’t try to bomb it, cause you won’t hit it, I wonder [unclear], speak for yourself, mate [laughs] just divert off normal track to that U-boat, if you see it, make it crash-dive, do a couple of circuits when you get to that spot and try and do that and we saw it and we went for it but we didn’t see it crash-dive but it, when we saw it, the bomb aimer saw the shape, it was just submerged, and he saw this cigar shape, we went down on it, and it’s big trouble when we got back. Can’t you tell a U-boat from a Royal Navy submarine? [laughs] How could we?
CB: No. No way. It’s a good thing you didn’t hit it then, with your bombs.
CW: The bloke was right. Don’t try to bomb it, you won’t hit it.
CB: No, Yeah. On that topic
CW: Speaking of submarines
CB: On that topic of U-boats, the U-boat base was at La Spezia in North West Italy, did you bomb La Spezia?
CW: I don’t think so. I don’t recall the name, no, it’s not here, we were told there was a refueling base, U-boat refueling at Alghero, refueling base, there’s a, oh dear, what do you call it?
CB: A long jetty
CW: A long jetty out, U-boat refuel at the end of the jetty and the oil is trundled down there, if there’s no U-boat there destroy the jetty, but try not to damage the town, strafe it but don’t, no, no bombs, use them on the jetty, and we did and we strafed the town but there was no U-boat there. It was an innocent fishing village but we were told that the U-boat refueling
CB: And this is before the Italian surrender of course, isn’t it?
CW: Oh yes, yes.
CB: In 1943. Yeah. Ok, so you, what else did you do during your tour?
CW: In Africa? Well, it was interesting, but we felt we were part of the war there. Between Sicily and mainland there are ferries going all the time and we bombed both terminals, we put [unclear] to the [unclear], to the, and we hit those terminals.
CB: You’d be flying at a higher level for that, what level would you be flying at?
CW: Six thousand feet was our normal bombing height. We were halfway there on Sunday, that was at three thousand feet.
CB: Were you? What sort of flak did you encounter?
CW: On Italy? A bit of light flak, that was all. On Rome, probably however six thousand and that was supposed to be an open city, we weren’t supposed to fight.
CB: What were you bombing? What were you bombing in Rome?
CW: On Rome, on the city, we dropped leaflets,
CB: Ah.
CW: Then we bombed the marshalling yards then down the Tiber to the Lido di Roma, seaplane base and we bombed that, we didn’t see any seaplanes, but we bombed the, we hit the hangars.
CB: So, what level of accuracy would you say you normally achieved?
CW: I would say pretty good, it wasn’t carpet bombing anywhere, we had, it was pinpoint bombing. Mind you, there were only twenty-six of us, maximum twenty-six.
CB: How many did you lose?
CW: We did lose one or two, we lost five percent, it was twenty-odd when maybe one wouldn’t get back, the losses were the same as over Europe, on average, which I know that’s surprising, probably for different reasons.
CB: So, you came to the end of your tours, then what?
CW: When we finished in, when we finished at Kairouan, we went on the Queen Mary up to Tunis, we had a spot of leave on one occasion, just after Tunis was liberated, or just after Jerry was kicked out, we went up to Tunis, there were several canteens and that’s where the bomb aimer ran into trouble, there were five of us, the canteen was crowded and four blokes got up just as we sort of got near the table, they got up and we sat down but there were five of us, so then the bomb aimer saw a spare chair a few yards away, picked it up, place was crowded, he put it over his head and walked towards our table and some happy soldier looked up, saw the chair hovering over his head, it went round and it gave such a [unclear], knocked him out, well, almost knocked him out, knocked him down, silly devil with a chair over his head.
CB: Yeah.
CW: And the red caps came and he was arrested and put in jail and the, was in at the police station and we moved from where we were staying to a hotel next to the police station, at 49 Rue De Serbie, I remember that address and Chadderton was in jail, was in prison, well we went into [unclear], the canteens were all crowded but there was another we came to, officers only, so, our tapes were just on one arm, on an elastic band, off with the tapes, off with the hat, and we went in, into the, into this posh hotel and sat there having a beer. About half an hour later, the bomb aimer, he almost turned white. I looked round and Speedy Powell was there, our group captain [laughs]. And of course, we got an [unclear], hello chaps, I didn’t realize you chaps were all commissioned [laughs], what are you drinking? [laughs] I thought, oh Crickey, we are in trouble here, so, I like to see a bit of initiative, jolly good, very good show, chaps [laughs], he spoke like that, Speedy Powell [laughs].
CB: How were you notified about
CW: He said, I’m going back, when you’re going back to Kairouan, he said, couple of days? He said, I’m going back tomorrow, give you a lift if you like and he did, he took us back to Kairouan. But first of all, we went to that prison, to the police station and he got Chadderton out, 49 Rue De Serbie, that’s where we were.
CB: So, you got back to camp, then what?
CW: Well, we got back and our tour was nearly finished, whilst at Blida we’d sleep, it was a question of crew but one aircraft per crew, you stuck to the same aircraft, that was yours whilst you’re here, well, there was no vacancy at the when we got there, we’d a spare week waiting for the aircraft and we went to a place called Setif on the coast, a big hotel there and we stayed in that hotel at RAF expense for a week, that was good. And the rooms were already occupied and there was real French entertainment, you see what I mean [laughs], that was, that shouldn’t have been really, anyhow sorry I digress.
CB: That’s alright. So, how did you know that you were at the end of your tour?
CW: We’d done two tours, we’d done, I think it was fifty four trips there, we could have come back after thirty five, it was normally thirty over Europe and thirty-five in the Med but we could opt to stay and do, carry on, which I preferred, and we did fifty-five, in fact we did more than that because a trip under three hours and there are quite a few, well, there are several, a trip under three hours only counted as a half [laughs], so you’d do trips to, well, like those trips to Pantelleria and Lampedusa just under three hours, but it was, you only, was credited with a half, and again you see, if you can’t take a joke, shouldn’t have joined [laughs], there was a Luftwaffe base on Lampedusa and we didn’t know it, we didn’t see it, we were bombing the harbour.
CB: So, did nobody attack the airfield?
CW: No, we didn’t do, I don’t think, I don’t know, we knew there was one, we were not told of any airfield, our job was the harbour
CB: So, you reached the end of the tour, what happened then?
CW: Well, we went on the Queen Mary to Tunis, then
CB: From Tunis, yeah
CW: And then in lorries to Algiers onto a troop ship and back to England, back to Greenock.
CB: What was it like on the troop ship?
CW: I’m just trying to think, yes, well, it was full of troops, I don’t think there were any Germans aboard
CB: Prisoners?
CW: I don’t, don’t remember much about it, the first troop ship coming back that was Empress of Bermuda, what was that airport we got from?
US: Bengasi?
CW: Down the road
US: Where are we?
CW: Mh?
US: Where are we?
CW: Monarch
US: Stansted?
CW: Monarch of Bermuda, that was, I think that was the, it was on that trip Monarch of Bermuda and they’re luxury airliners
CB: Right
CW: Luxury liners
CB: Yeah
CW: And it was good
CB: As a warrant officer, what facilities did you have? Sharing a room or four to a room?
CW: Oh, it didn’t make any difference,
CB: Right.
CW: Rank didn’t really mean very much and the skipper was the squadron leader, the only time we called him sir was if we had to, if there was any VIP nearby then, we might call him sir, otherwise it was Chess, his name was Chester, squadron leader Chester, he never did an OTU, he was- we’re on this thing.
CB: Yeah, go on. We’re stopping for a moment. We’ve restarted as you arrived in Greenock, what happened then?
CW: Well, we’ve come back from
CB: From Tunis. So, you’ve returned from North Africa to Greenock at the end of your two tours.
CW: Yes, from there we went by train down to Brighton, and of course and there it felt it split up and I was posted to, yes, I was posted to 84 OTU and second day I was there I was given a schedule of duties, lecture on the Browning gun, lecture on combat manoeuvre, the corkscrew and so on and I had this schedule, I said, I don’t like this, I haven’t done a course on the Browning gun, I’ve been using one for two tours but I’ve never done a course on it, what’s this corkscrew business? You’ve never heard of the corkscrew? No, what is it? The corkscrew, yes, on a bottle, well, I became an instructor on the corkscrew after I’d had some instruction and combat tactics, what can you do except move and fight it out, he said, what you need is an air gunner course, yes, I said, by all means, ok, I’ve done the job but that doesn’t make me a good instructor, no, I’m not instructing, so they gave me eight sprog air gunner trainees, to shepherd, I became a course shepherd and in doing that, I gradually picked up what really goes on and the corkscrew, you know about the corkscrew
CB: Yeah.
CW: I’d love to do another one [laughs], well, eventually we had, there was a complete crew and we went to Winthorpe and converted to Stirlings and on Stirlings we did a week of circuits and bumps and then cross-countries and then the first cross-country we went North towards Scotland to a bomb site, a bombing range rather, did an exercise there and on the way, or maybe the way back over Yorkshire, you’ll be attacked by a Hurricane, we need a good picture, make sure your guns are on safe and get a good picture of the Hurricane. We were attacked and the rear gunner hadn’t the vaguest idea, he said, weave skipper, weave, he was yelling, weave, it’s coming, it’s nearer and I thought, what the hell is that? He got no idea and the aircraft came from down starboard quarter, came right at us and then came in again and same again from the port quarter, nothing happened, and it came in, I was mid upper by that [unclear], it came in from the beam on the starboard and I gave, well by then was a textbook type of commentary winding up its corkscrew starboard go and nothing happened and the aircraft went underneath, came up on the quarter, more textbook but corkscrew port go, and that time we went dump up [unclear] up board, up starboard, down starboard, that was obviously the screen pilot the instructor.
CB: Ah.
CW: That was good. When, then, he said, on the way back, we’re going down on a raft off the Lincolnshire coast, we’re supposed to fire, strafe that raft but that’s what you’re supposed to do but don’t do that, there’ll be, there are seals on the raft, they live there, I knew that, they’ve been there dozens of times, just give a short burst in midair, fire at the moon, fire as it were , we did that and I just fired a short burst with one gun [laughs], cause they had to be cleaned afterwards, I fired a short burst, the rear gunner didn’t, ok, rear gunner, says the screen pilot, oh, no sir, the guns are faulty, I felt, Christ, was sort of physiology is that? They weren’t US, they were faulty, mid upper gunner, have a look, go and fix him. I went back to the rear turret, opened the flimsy door, and [unclear] pushed him aside, the guns weren’t even cocked, I said, where is your cocking toggle? He said, he didn’t understand, he didn’t know what a cocking toggle was, well, his hat was there, his fancy hat, remember that hat was there but took [unclear] the cockpit, number three gun I saw the thing, cause it was on safe, so I took the safety catch off and I yelled at him, now pull the trigger, botch the trigger, pull it, and he did, he nearly fell off the seat, he would have done if he hadn’t been tied down, said, now do the same as that to the other three, they’re the other two guns, cause one was a camera gun, and he hadn’t the vaguest idea so I did the same to the number four gun, fired that and he just, he hadn’t a clue, and ok but we’d fired from the rear turret. Next morning, the gunnery leader when I booked in as it were, he showed me a report from the screen pilot, do you agree with this? And it was that the rear gunner, he doubted if the rear gunner had had any operational training, did I agree? I said, not only I agree, I don’t believe he went to gunnery school, if he did, he didn’t learn anything literally and that’s what he wanted to know. I said, I’d like to see his logbook, well, it was the end of the month and the logbooks were in the flight office so I went to get them and I got them for the whole crew and I looked at this fellow’s logbook, he’d done no flying at all except at Winthorpe circuits and bumps, and the odd cross-country, that cross-country would have entered but there was nothing there except circuits and bumps but in the back was a certificate that he’d completed the air gunner course, very sad. Anyhow, we got rid of him, I said, he’s finished, that fellow, he’s not flying in my rear turret. I developed a little problem; would you mind if I?
CB: We’ll stop
CW: Nip up there for a second?
CB: So, you find the gunnery school
CW: Is that off?
CB: It’s on now, yeah, right
CW: Rear gunner had the faintest idea and he was sent to Eastchurch, he’d finished
CB: Now
CW: Now on the grapevine, all the information everybody seemed to know what was going on and the chap, the warrant officer on the clay pigeon shooting asked me what was happening, and in fact I didn’t know but he said, look, I want to join a crew and in fact he did, he joined our crew but he was a mid-upper gunner and I said, that’s fine, show me, you can have the mid-upper, I’ll have the rear, if they gunnery leader will agree and he did and the skipper agreed and we acquired a very good mid-upper gunner. Pete Foolkes, Pete Foolkes who eventually went to Canada, and stayed in and joined the Canadian Air Force, nice bloke.
CB: So that’s how you got into mid-upper, sorry, rear gunner, that’s how you became a rear gunner.
CW: I’ve always been a rear gunner.
CB: Yeah, quite.
CW: It was just that
CB: On the Stirling.
CW: I preferred the rear turret.
CB: Did you feel more comfortable with four guns?
CW: [laughs] That’s quite right, the mid upper did just have two, didn’t he, did?
CB: Yeah.
CW: I wasn’t too familiar with the mid-upper, I think you’re right, it’s bound to be [laughs].
CB: There was only space for two. There was only space for two guns.
CW: Yeah. Yes, yeah.
CB: So, you were at the OTU, after the OTU where did you go?
CW: Oh, OTU, right I’m with it again, we that was
CB: Winthorpe
CW: That was a conversion course
CB: Yes
CW: After an OTU.
CB: Alright, a conversion course
CW: A conversion course at Winthorpe
CB: Yes
CW: Well, from there, we went to Bardney
CB: Yeah.
CW: The skipper was promoted to squadron leader and he became flight commander, of A flight and A flight it worked in, with I think it was up at 9 squadron for a few weeks, I did the odd trips with, I think the first two trips from Bardney as part of 9 Squadron really at [unclear], from there we went to Strubby, did a couple from there and then on to Balderton, where the Americans had just left Balderton we moved in and B flight was already at Balderton. We then became a complete squadron of two flights and we operated from there, first trip was on Bergen, I did six trips with that squadron leader, first trip was on Bergen, and we were told to be a very careful run on a specific point in the docks, whatever’s there at that point, if anything, that’s the point to hit, be very careful and we went to the East and coming back, westerly course over Bergen, on the bombing run and there was an awful bang, a bit, wing went down, nose went down, we went down and the skipper, he was trying to hold back on the control column, nothing much was happening and we were going down and it was the navigator who went forward, crawled forward and turned it tail heavy, turned the elevator back and we came out and we came out at three thousand feet. What the bang was we’ve no idea, there was no damage anywhere but of course, the bomb doors were open and we came out at three thousand feet but we came out of it on quite a steep climb and we climbed up to eight thousand and the bomb aimer woke up, say skipper, can you go round again, we still got the goddam bomb [laughs] and Ted was the navigator, [unclear], oh, we are going round again and he pulled the jettison toggle and the bomb rolled [unclear], the bomb just went in the sea, complete waste of time the whole thing and we then came back and landed at Milltown and [unclear] Bergen.
CB: Where is Milltown in Scotland?
CW: Oh, Bergen, 28th of October 1944. Squadron leader Chester.
CB: So, this is with 9 Squadron.
CW: Oh no, no, that was all in the [unclear] of 227.
CB: Oh it was, right.
CW: Bergen, the next one was another fiasco to Walcheren. Walcheren, that was on the Zuiderzee and we were to bomb the sea wall, bomb the, not the sea wall, the, what it was called?
CB: The dikes.
CW: Dike, we were to bomb the dike and ahead of us, mind you, I’m in the rear, I didn’t see all this, there was another Lanc ahead and he went across the dike, stick the bombs right across and of course they all went in the sea, it only needed one bomb on the dike but they all went in the sea and our skipper, I can understand him, he thought, well what a ruddy silly way to destroy the dike, we were in the destruction business afterall, so we went round to the east and came in and went over the dike and dropped a whole stick of bombs all the way along the dike and destroyed it for half a mile, all they wanted us to do was make a hole in it so the water could come through, that’s what we were supposed to do, dug a hole in it and we were actually briefed to bomb a gun emplacement but that gun emplacement was already under water and the barrels were sticking out, there was no point in bombing that, we’d no secondary target so we decided, the skipper decided to do the job that he thought the others were going to do and we destroyed that wall for half a mile and it took, what was it? The pioneer corps I think it was, the pioneer corps took six months after the war to repair it and the skipper was in real trouble for doing that but that was a second trip on there. Next one was an ordinary trip to Hamburg and then Harburg which was a subsidiate, well, in the suburbs of Hamburg, that was long after the destruction of Hamburg, Heindbark, oh, that was a dam, Politz [laughs], Politz, a night raid of course, they were all night raids, Politz on the Baltic, night raid and the navigator, five minutes to Politz but everything was quiet, but by that time there should have been some action ahead, and two minutes to Politz, bomb doors open, ok, bomb doors open, and we, everybody thought, well, we are running up on Politz and we were over Politz and was absolute dead quiet, everything was quiet and then it started twenty miles to the south, fireworks below, twenty miles south and, oh Crickey, we’re twenty miles north of the target, and both the skipper, both the navigator and bomb aimer said, we are over Politz, we’re over the coast, but down there’s not over the coast, we are, we are over Politz, and the skipper wouldn’t have it, everybody is bombing there, we’ll join them and we did, and we destroyed an awful lot of good agricultural land. It was Pathfinder force, no, we weren’t using 5 Group Pathfinders, it was 8 Group Pathfinders, they put the markers down in the wrong place and that agricultural land was in a hell of a mess [laughs]
CB: [unclear]
CW: Many years later, I was talking to the air traffic controller in Nairobi, I was in charge of the con centre at night and we were having a little natter, and he mentioned the, he said, he told me, one night, when everybody bombed twenty miles south where they should have done, and I said, that was Politz was it? Politz! Yes, yeah! We were there at the same time and didn’t know it of course. But the interesting things like that you, happen, Politz, Houffalize, Houffalize, oh, that was the Falaise gap, yes, that’s when Jerry broke through, the Falaise gap, and it was very foggy, there was a film made with that raid, which was a lot of rubbish.
CB: Cause we are talking about France now in July ’44
CW: Yes, well, this was December ’44, Houffalize
CB: That’s not Falaise, is it?
CW: Mh?
CB: That’s not Falaise?
CW: Houffalize.
CB: Houffalize, right. Yeah.
CW: Wasn’t that the Falaise gap?
CB: No.
CW: Well, what was Houffalize?
CB: This is after Arnhem you are talking about now?
CB: [unclear] check it out. Yeah.
CW: Karlsruhe then Politz, Rositz, this is, can’t read that, these were spare boat trips, our skipper had finished by then
CB: Right.
CW: He did six and
CB: Where did he go?
CW: He went on a board of, no, he went on a summary of evidence, he was helpless, in fact at a reunion, many years later, the wing commander said, Chester was the biggest disaster that our squadron had, oh, he wouldn’t have said that if he didn’t mean it
CB: No.
CW: He got rid of him.
CB: Who was he replaced by?
CW: He was replaced with wing commander Balme, BALME, wing commander Balme, although he didn’t take up the point position of flight commander but he was there as a supernumerary, he did the job but didn’t sort of get recognition as a flight commander because he was more senior, I saw him in hospital in Nairobi, wing commander Balme.
CB: So, how many more ops did you do after that change?
CW: I did exactly twenty.
CB: Twenty, did you? Twenty more? Twenty in total? Ok.
CW: I was crazy to do with seventy-six, that was the number of ops, but I counted the halves as whole ones.
CB: Yeah.
CW: I don’t accept that it was half,
CB: It was a [unclear].
CW: Half a tour because
CB: Half an op. So, what caused the end of the twenty? Was it?
CW: Had finished D-Day.
CB: Right. No, ended the war, VE Day
CW: VE Day, sorry, VE Day.
CB: Yeah. So, from VE Day
CW: D-Day occurred when I was at OTU as instructor
CB: Yes
CW: VE Day, D Day, then we went to Molbice, Leipzig,
CB: Leipzig, yeah.
CW: With flight lieutenant Hobson to Leipzig, seven hours, Lutgendorf and Leipzig again, I went to Leipzig three times in all, twice on our own behalf and once with the Yanks [laughs]. Because we diverted to Norwich on one occasion, on one of those occasions, to, and Norwich, not Norwich airport as I knew it then but Horsham St Faith which became Norwich airport
CB: Which became Norwich airport, yeah.
CW: And that’s where I got the idea of a washing machine, that’s a different thing, and in Norwich, what a weird hang-up, I don’t know, not mentioned that have I?
CB: No
CW: No. We diverted to Norwich, and we were resting in a lounge, and very early morning a top sergeant came in, he said, say bud, who’s the headman? I said, him, woke up, what’s the problem? He said, we can’t get the overload tank off. Oh, don’t worry about that, the fighter engineer overload tank, we didn’t know what a tank, yeah, sure, it’s downgrade thing, and the bomb aimer woke up, I did describe it. Crikey that’s odd, that’s a four thousand pounder, no, don’t make bombs that big, that’s a four thousand pound bomb, what do you want, leave it! What are you doing? Anyhow, the skipper sent the flight engineer and the bomb aimer out to go out to look, they tried to take it off, it was, and the tannoy blared everybody to evacuate a mile from the Lancaster [laughs], oh dear, while we were three days in Norwich, which I’d welcomed because I’ve been to school there and I went to see an old girlfriend, Joyce, used to go to school with Joyce, and I went to see her in number one Chester Street and the warrant officer came to the door, I met Joyce and it was good, and he was flying Lysanders, anyhow and a crew came up from Balderton and moved the, took the bomb off [laughs]
CB: That’s why you were there so long because they hadn’t got anybody to move the bomb.
CW: No, they wouldn’t, they, the thing was on its own, they wouldn’t go near it after that.
CB: No
CW: But our own chaps came and shifted it
CB: Cause it would have been fused at that point, would it?
CW: No, it couldn’t have been, it wouldn’t have been.
CB: No. So, when you went on a, when you went
CW: The bomb aimer should have checked when we landed, make sure it’s got, in fact he should have checked before we landed,
CB: Before you landed, yeah.
CW: After we supposed we had dropped it, he should check
CB: So, thinking of fusing, when you got airborne with a full load, at what point were the bombs fused, ready for dropping?
CW: On the bombing run.
CB: Cause what I meant was that this bomb, if all the other bombs went, why would this one not be fused? So, there was a pin extraction job to do.
CW: [unclear] that’s a good point
CB: Cause the hang-up and the fusing are not related.
CW: I haven’t given thought to that one, I wouldn’t think it was fused, I don’t think it could have been
CB: I can’t see how it couldn’t have been, if you’ve dropped all the other bombs, but I don’t know of course, cause I wasn’t there.
CW: I think we bombed, I think we bombed out now, with the [unclear] if they were not fused, could be done,
CB: Yeah, the answer is I don’t know, something worth looking at but I would have thought that the fusing would’ve taken place in a, some time before release, all of them together, that’s what I meant
CW: Normally
CB: But had you dropped
CW: minutes to when you start the serious
CB: On the running
CW: left, left, steady business, yeah
CB: But on that particular op, did you drop bombs in earnest?
CW: I don’t remember, but I think we did
CB: Rather than dispose of them at sea?
CW: I’m not sure which raid it was actually was on
CB: Anyway, so, we’ve got to VE Day, what happened then?
CW: We got to VE Day
CB: You all stood down
CW: Oh, the war was about to end, isn’t it?
CB: Yeah.
CW: But Leipzig was the last raid,
CB: So, did you take part in Operation Manna to supply the Dutch civilians?
CW: No.
CB: And did you?
CW: [clears throat] long after the war I went to a reunion and there was a fellow there, he said he’d been shot down three months before the end of the war, he’d been shot down, he was looked after by a German family who was, didn’t like it. He was released, he left the family and joined when the Americans got close he joined the Americans and they got him back to Mildenhall by air and from there he hitchhiked back to Balderton, this is what he said, got back to Balderton and he said he arrived just in time to take part in Operation Manna and to bring prisoners back from Germany. And I listened to all this, he was a gunner, an air gunner, well, I didn’t recognize the bloke which that was not conclusive, I said, who was your skipper? Oh, he said, I didn’t have a permanent skipper, I did all the spare boat trips, remember Mcgilleyfrey, gunnery leader? Yeah, I said, who could forget? Mcgilleyfrey, I said, yeah, he said, who could forget old gilley. I said, remember Cliff Watson? No. I said, I was acting gunnery leader over that period, Mcgilleyfrey I’ve just invented, 5 group did not take part in Operation Manna, and what was the other point? And we didn’t bring prisoners, neither did we bring prisoners back from Germany, we didn’t take part in that and they came back from Belgium in any case, not Germany. I’d like to see your logbook, oh, he said, I’ll go and get it, he went out to his car and we never saw him again, but there’s lots of things like that going on. The navigator was at a reunion and he, there was a chap giving a talk on his experience in Malta, and one of the, he said, one of the chaps there was in Malta and he said that bloke’s talking an absolute load of rubbish, nothing of what he said actually happened. And I said, I was there, he’s challenged him, and he was on a lecture tour all over the place, lecturing on all this had happened to him in Malta and all a lot of nonsense
CB: Amazing.
CW: I worked with a chap in Nairobi like that, oh, he’d been everywhere, he’d flown Sunderlands from Belfast down to Southampton, from the factory in Belfast to Southampton, he’d been torpedoed in the Pacific, he’d done everything, he was working as a radio officer in Nairobi and we kept a card index system of his [unclear] [laughs]. It was a medical book, not a word of truth in any of it, he had on his briefcase, Slate VC, and he created the impression and deliberately set about to do so the impression that he had a VC, his name was Vivien Charles Slate, the VC was his initials, Slate VC, Vivien Charles [laughs] and everybody thought he had a VC, except some of us who knew better, oh, he’d flown everything, he wasn’t even a pilot, he’d been a pilot, a wireless op, he’d done it all, in actual fact he’d done nothing, he was a traffic control assistant, ok, might have done a good job, but [unclear] done [laughs], Slate VC
CB: Just quickly for background, the repatriation was Operation Exodus, just for the tape. That’s been fascinating, so I’m gonna stop the tape now. Thank you very much because you’ve had a good run and we’ll pick up the other bits later. Thank you very much indeed, Clifford.
CW: Oh, it’s a pleasure.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Clifford Watson. One
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-06-28
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AWatsonC170628, PWatsonC1704
Format
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01:57:17 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Clifford Watson at first wanted to join the navy because of a high demand in pilots. After being rejected, he joined the RAF and was sent to Rhodesia for pilot training, but then remustered to become an air gunner. He flew seventy-six ops in total. Was posted to North Africa and recounts various episodes: targeting enemy trains; flying operations over Italy; the accidental targeting of a ship full of British prisoners of war during the German evacuation of North Africa. Flew to Bergen with 9 Squadron and operations targeting dams in Holland. Recounts an operation to Politz on the Baltic, where they bombed the wrong target.
Contributor
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Peter Schulze
Steph Jackson
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Norway
Poland
South Africa
Netherlands
Tunisia--Qayrawān
Zimbabwe
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
Netherlands--Walcheren
Norway--Bergen
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
North Africa
Tunisia
Temporal Coverage
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1943
1944-10-28
227 Squadron
25 OTU
30 OTU
84 OTU
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
entertainment
Operational Training Unit
RAF Balderton
RAF Bardney
RAF Finningley
RAF Hixon
RAF Strubby
RAF Winthorpe
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/117/46467/SHarriganD[Ser -DoB]v330002.mp3
4ef11453b1a2f73ed4f05a602afc89ac
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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Cook, Kenneth
Kenneth Cook
Kenneth H Cook
Ken Cook
K H Cook
K Cook
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Wing Commander Kenneth Howell Cook DFC (b. 1923, 151017 Royal Air Force). Kenneth Cook flew 45 operations with 97 Squadron, Pathfinders.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-08-04
2016-07-25
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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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Cook, KHH
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Wing Commander Kenneth Cook DFC
1039-Cooke, Kenneth
Identifier
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SHarriganD[Ser#-DoB]v33
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Language
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eng
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Sound
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00:15:10 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending OH transcription. Allocated
Pending OH summary. Allocated C Campbell
Creator
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Claire Bennett
This Interview was recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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This item is being used for TOU9156 teaching. Do not publish transcription until June 2024.
Interviewer: Ok, Ken.
KC: Ok. Hello. This is Wing Commander Ken Cook DFC. I joined the Royal Air Force in October 1941, U/T air crew and after training in Canada I came, returned back to the UK, commissioned as a young pilot officer air bomber and went through various conversion training courses in the UK and eventually joined up with a crew. And our first squadron was Number 9 Squadron at Bardney in Lincolnshire flying Lancasters in Number 5 Group of Bomber Command. After about ten ops with 9 Squadron we were as a crew recruited by the Pathfinder Force which was based in Cambridgeshire and so we were as a crew posted to do additional specialised training as at that time new radar equipment was being brought in and introduced to Bomber Command and in my case it was my job to learn the gadgets known as H2S, Gee and Loran. So, my role changed from being a straightforward air bomber to becoming a radar navigator and air bomber and so it was my job particularly to work the H2S which had a capability for uses in airborne navigation device. And of course, also it’s main role with the Pathfinders was, was identifying German targets and it enabled the Pathfinder crews to find the German targets and to mark them with target indicators so that the main force crews of Bomber Command coming in behind us could identify where the target was and very often bombing on our markers. So we had to be very accurate how we dropped them and where we dropped them and I did this, I ended up doing a total of forty five ops, thirty five of those was as a member of a Pathfinder crew. We eventually having started out with the Pathfinders at Bourn in Cambridgeshire my squadron were then deployed in about April of ’44 to Coningsby in Lincolnshire to join with Number 83 Squadron that had been posted up there from Wyton. And our job was to work with the special force under Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire who was devising a system of finding the targets where the Germans where assembling V weapons on the French coast and in Belgium. And our job was to illuminate the target with parachute flares so that he trained a special force of Mosquito dive bombers that could lay the target markers in these tunnels so that our main force crews from 5 Group and other Groups could come over and do area or intensive accurate bombing as well on these targets. And I completed my forty fifth op in 1944 and was posted to RAF Fiskerton in Lincolnshire as the station radar nav officer. My job was to, we had two squadrons there, 49 and 189 and my job was to fly with these crews and check them out on their ability to use their radar equipment because now the main force were getting the same sort of radar gear that the Pathfinders had had for some time. And so it was my job to make sure the air crew when they, before they went on ops could operate their new radar equipment. And I stayed there for a year or two and eventually was posted to Headquarters, Number 1 Group at Bawtry as the Group radar navigation officer. My job was to oversee all the squadrons, all the Lancaster squadrons in 1 Group to ensure that the crews were properly trained in operating their radar equipment. Can I stop there? Right. Let’s carry on then.
[pause]
On some of the incidents that come to mind one in particular because the Lancaster bomber we all wear warm clothing because the, in the middle of winter the temperatures in the aircraft could become extremely low and in fact if you had to use the elsan at the back of the aircraft it would be extremely low and freezing. And on one occasion I was forced to go back there and use the elsan and I discovered the temperature was minus fifty three degrees Celsius and of course, in having to use the elsan and lower the clothing etcetera I found that my bottom was sticking to the seat to a little bit when I tried to stand up. But I had to stand up because at that time the skipper was calling me, ‘Come on, Ken. We’re only ten miles from the target.’ So I had to hurry up and get back. But in doing so I experienced a little a bit of pain [laughs] in certain lower regions. The other, some of the other aspects of my career was at having completed forty five ops I was then sent off to do jobs as I mentioned with other stations and other squadrons and taking me to the end of the war I applied for a Short Service Commission and this was granted. And after a couple of years the Air Ministry offered me a peacetime Permanent Commission which I accepted and I was down the rank of flight lieutenant and so I then was asked to move out from Bomber Command and become trained with peacetime navigation courses and I thought well, perhaps I’m going to shoot now into somewhere like Transport Command but none of it. Having completed my peacetime navigation course I was then asked by Air Ministry to go through the night fighter OCU at Leeming where I was then trained again to become a navigator radar operator with the AI equipment on night fighters. And so after the appropriate course at Leeming I was then posted to 23 Squadron at Coltishall on Mosquito Mark 36s and I flew with them for about two and a half years until one day I was told that I was to go back to Leeming as a squadron leader to set up the ground school for the introduction of the first jet night fighters. The Meteor NF11 was coming in and I was to head up the ground school with the expansion of the RAFs night fighter force both in the UK and Germany and also the odd squadron in Malta and Cyprus. And so I did that job for about two years and eventually was posted to RAF Newton which was then the headquarters of 12 Fighter Group as the Group navigation officer. And I did the staff duties there but also managed to keep on flying with some of the squadrons in 12 Group, night fighter squadrons until eventually one day the AOC asked me would I like to go back on a squadron as a flight commander. And so the AOC of 12 Group had me posted back to West Malling where I became a flight commander on number 85 Squadron as a navigator which was an unusual post which I enjoyed. And I did that for just over a year and one day the AOC of 11 Group sent for me and said, ‘Cook, do you think you could command a night fighter squadron?’ I said, 'Yes sir.’ He said, ‘Well, you’ve got one tomorrow. ‘You’re going to become a wing commander.’ And so I did that and I became the CO of one of the other squadrons at West Malling called 153 and I was made an acting wing commander and only had that job for about a couple of months when they decided to close the airfield because our flights were getting involved with civil aircraft flying in from the continent, particularly at night. And so they closed the airfield at West Malling and I, and I took 153 Squadron up to Waterbeach in Cambridgeshire and stayed with them for a while and eventually we changed our number to become 25 Squadron. And I completed my two years with the 25 squadron, 153/25 squadron and then one day I was told, ‘You’re going to the staff college.’ And I thought oh I’m going to learn to read and write again. But I did a one year course at the Staff College at Bracknell and after that the Air Ministry in their wisdom said, ‘You’ve done enough flying you’ve got to do an admin job.’ So they posted me and my wife to Aden as a wing commander in the organization branch which was concerned with improving the airfields throughout the Aden Protectorate and then up in the Gulf. So I did that for about two years and then I came back. I’m not quite sure what to do after that but I eventually did a job as the staff officer to the Home Commander, Home Defence Forces which was an organisation which has now been set up to deal with what would happen if there was a nuclear attack on Britain and what would the Air Force be doing to help out. And one of my jobs was to get involved with working out plans on that. And things have gradually moved along until eventually I decided to take early retirement and I left the RAF after twenty six years service in 1947.
Interviewer: And to go back to your, your Bomber Command days it’s always very interesting how the crews got together I think. Now, were you, how did you? I know you go into a sort of a hangar sort of thing and you mill around. There’s no organisation. Were you expecting that or, and did you know somebody? How did your crew come together?
KC: Well, when you got in the early stages of training you started to think about crewing up when you were flying on Wellingtons. You went, in my case I went to Cottesmore which was number 14 OTU and there you meet up with pilots, the wireless operator, straight navigator, air gunners. They were all brought in there and you’d chat with them and eventually you agreed to form a crew. And that’s what we did.
Interviewer: And it proved satisfactory.
KC: Yeah.
Interviewer: Didn’t it?
KC: For instance my skipper was an Australian.
Interviewer: Ah.
KC: Yeah. I was a West Country Gloucestershire man. The other navigator was a Yorkshire man. The mid-upper gunner was a Canadian. The wireless operator was a Londoner and the tail gunner was a Scotsman. That was my crew.
Interviewer: League of Nations.
KC: Yeah.
Interviewer: And you obviously all got on and you all gelled.
KC: We gelled. Yes. Yes. We stayed together for forty five trips. Yeah.
Interviewer: And you’ve mentioned Leonard Cheshire. Did you have much to do with him?
KC: Well, now Leonard Cheshire was based at Woodhall Spa but once we started and once my squadron had come up from 8 Group and we were now at Coningsby with alongside 83, the Pathfinder Squadron when we had briefings on a pre-briefing on a raid Cheshire would come in to see, hear to the breifing. But he particularly once we’d done the raid he would come back because often he would go on the raid himself. He would come back and listen to the debriefing and if things were not coming out clear from the debriefing of the crews he would cut in to explain what was going on where he was concerned in the air. To sort out any, so the intelligence people doing the debriefing could get a more accurate story of what was happening over the other side.
Interviewer: Did you form any opinions of him as a —
KC: Oh, he was the top boy really. Yes. He was, he had tremendous respect from all the all the, all the aircrew like myself.
Interviewer: Yes, so —
KC: What he was and what he did and of course he did a hundred ops, didn’t he?
Interviewer: He did.
KC: Yeah. Can I stop now?
Interviewer: Yeah [laughs] That was Wing Commander Kenneth Cook DFC, retired RAF Bomber Command talking at Thorpe Camp on the 24th Of September about his wartime experiences. Thank you, Wing Commander.
Ken Cook joined the RAF in 1941 and trained as a bomb aimer. He was posted to 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney. After approximately ten ops the crew were posted to the Pathfinder Force at RAF Bourn where he became radar navigator and air bomber. They were then posted to RAF Coningsby with 83 Squadron with the role of seeking V weapon launch sites. After forty five operations he was posted to RAF Fiskerton as station radar navigation officer. He then joined the HQ at RAF Bawtry as Group radar navigation officer. The 23 Squadron at Coltishall on Mosquitoes before being asked to form a ground school at RAF Leeming.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1944
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
23 Squadron
83 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
Lancaster
military living conditions
military service conditions
Mosquito
Pathfinders
radar
RAF Bardney
RAF Bawtry
RAF Bourn
RAF Coningsby
RAF Fiskerton
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/542/8782/AHardingV150520.2.mp3
73090ff7946ff4451cdd82def306eea2
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Title
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Harding, Victor
Victor Thomas Harding
V T Harding
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Harding, V
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Leading Aircraftsman Victor Harding (1234463, Royal Air Force). He served as an airframe fitter.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
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2015-05-20
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Claire Bennett; the interviewee is Mr Victor Harding. The interview is taking place at Mr Harding’s home in Queen’s Court, Retford, on the 20th of May 2015. Well Vic, would you like to tell us the date and place of your birth?
VH: Er, 05-03-22. We was in Middlesex.
CB: And can you remember your early childhood?
VH: Yes because I was born outta wedlock, and my mother sent me down to a home in Kent, to, to join the forces.
CB: And you stayed in a – you were in a –
VH: I stayed in a home – what you call a home for little [unclear], my daughter knows it ‘cause she took me there. And I was there ‘till I was nineteen ‘till I volunteered, joined the Air Force.
CB: And do you remember much about it? What are your memories of it?
VH: What the home?
CB: Yes.
VH: It was marvellous. It was run by ex-military people and they’re very very good to you. Plenty of discipline and everything, oh yeah. And when I was eighteen, that’s when I volunteered to join the Air Force then.
CB: What –
Other: You learnt, you learnt a trade in the home, didn’t you?
VH: Pardon?
Other: You learnt a trade in the home.
VH: Oh yes, in the – they, after you finish your schooling age, they had different trades there. They had the printing department, a cobblers, carpentry, tailoring department, trades to learn when you’ve finished doing your schooling.
CB: And you went in for –
VH: Tailoring. Because the war broke out, and then I volunteered for the Air Force.
CB: What made you choose the Air Force in particular?
VH: I don’t know really [laughs]. I just fancied it, you know. And they asked me if I wanted to be aircrew or ground staff, so I thought ‘I haven’t got the brains to be aircrew’ so I volunteered to be in the ground staff to maintain the air craft.
CB: You were mechanically minded?
VH: I was flying mechanic air frame lot of the time. Everything by the engines, yeah,
CB: Would you have liked to have flown?
VH: I would have done if I had brains, yeah. [Both laugh]
CB: But nobody said you didn’t have any brains, this is what you perceived. [VH laughing]
VH: Well, I didn’t think I would be qualified for it enough sort of thing.
CB: So where did you start your training? Where did you join up?
VH: I went to Blackpool, and I done my – I can’t remember whether it was six months training at Kirkham for a flight mechanics course. When I passed out, I was sent to Cottesmore to Operational Training Unit.
CB: And what was your training, you know, like? Did you enjoy it?
VH: I did, really enjoyed it.
CB: How did you get to the, the training place? Was it on the train?
VH: No the Air Force took me there, you know. I went to Cottesmore –
CB: Yes.
VH: And I was on old Southampton’s [?]. All the old stuff sort of thing ‘till I was qualified, and then when I was paid, I was put onto Bomber Command then.
CB: But, you would get your posting wouldn’t you, and then you’d have to get to your posting destination –
VH: That’s it, yeah they –
CB: Did you, did you go on the trains during the war?
VH: Pardon?
CB: Did you go the trains during the war?
VH: Trains?
CB: Mm.
VH: No.
CB: No?
VH: No, never went on trains.
CB: So how did you get around? Did the –
VH: The Air Force took me around, you know.
CB: Right.
VH: To different stations, yes.
CB: Right. So, so you’d, a group of you would go perhaps and they’d take you to the stations?
VH: Yeah.
CB: And what was your, you know, your time training? You know, what kind of accommodation did you have?
VH: Well, sometimes I was in Nissan huts, sometimes I was in buildings, you know. All depends where you were stationed sort of thing.
CB: Where was, where do you think your best station was? You enjoyed the most?
VH: Oh, best place was at Lakenheath. It was a brick building, but when the Yanks came and saw it they took it over. So we were putting Nissan huts [laughs].
CB: Well the Nissan huts I think were pretty sparse weren’t they?
VH: Yeah.
CB: And cold, is that your –
VH: That’s it, yeah.
CB: Is that how you remember them, or?
VH: Yeah.
CB: Am I wrong?
VH: That’s it [laughs].
CB: So you went – so your first main posting –
VH: My first posting was at Cottesmore.
CB: Right, and what planes would you be on?
VH: I was on the Anton’s, Oxfords, and just the, all the things to tinkle about with, you know. ‘Till I was posted on Bomber Command.
CB: And the planes, were they easy to maintain, or?
VH: Yeah, they were quite easy really.
CB: You learnt quickly?
VH: Yeah I did, yeah.
CB: Was it good training?
VH: Oh yes, I had six months training at Kirkham.
CB: And what were you –
VH: I was flight mechanic air frames on everything bar the engines.
CB: Right, so you would main – so what would that entail? So, tell me about, you know, all the details of it.
VH: Well, you looked after the runners and the balance and everything, you know.
CB: Right. And then you entered Bomber Command.
VH: That’s it, yeah.
CB: So your first, first job would be, or your first posting rather, would be –
VH: Ah [pause]. Cottesmore was the first one I went to with Operational Training Unit.
CB: Yes.
VH: Yeah.
CB: On OTU?
VH: Yeah.
CB: And, where did you go to after that?
VH: I went to quite a few stations. I went to Bardney for a while, Woodhall Spa, er, Lakenheath, Marham, all different stations you know. With all different squadrons that I went with.
CB: Yes, and what was your work there? Same sort of thing?
VH: Flight mechanic airframe. I done that everything bar the engines.
CB: What planes were you working on?
VH: I worked on Wellingtons, Mosquitos, Lancasters, Hamdy Hamptons [?].
CB: Did you ever go for a flight in these, any of these?
VH: Oh yes. So when they used to do something to the airframe or engines, you used to, we used to go up with them for an air test [emphasis]. Yeah.
CB: So you did you go for any long [emphasis] trips in them?
VH: Not really long trips, no. First I went I think was Peterhead, when we went up there to refuel them.
CB: And did you enjoy the flight? Do you think – did you –
VH: Well I love flying.
CB: Did you regret not going for aircrew?
VH: I don’t, no [laughs]. I think I would have enjoyed it, you know, but I might not be here today [both laugh].
CB: So where was your accommodation, say at Bardney? Where was – were you still in the Nissan huts?
VH: No, I think I was in buildings there, I think, I’m sure it was.
CB: Was it, were you, did you have accommodation with a family. Were you –
VH: No didn’t have it with no family.
CB: It was in an Air Force –
VH: Air Force quarters, yeah.
CB: Air Force quarters.
VH: Yeah.
CB: And what did you do, where did you go for relaxation in Bardney? Do you remember?
VH: Not really. Used to go out with the lads, you know, and have a drink and a smoke [laughs].
CB: Pubs? [VH laughs]. Dare I suggest? Do you remember Bardney at all?
VH: Not a lot, no.
CB: So your, was your life mainly in the, on the camp basically?
VH: It was on the camp, yes.
CB: So, the planes – explain to me how it works. So what would be your typical day?
VH: Well you go out on the dispersal plane [?]. The aircraft was there and you had to test the rudders, the elevators, the wings and everything. Then you had to test your hydraulics, make sure they are working and everything.
CB: And then you’d –
VH: Then you had to sign a form, Form 700, detailing what you had done and everything, and the pilot used to say ‘okay, I know that you’ve checked it.’
CB: And what planes would these be? Would these be –
VH: I used to be on Lancasters, Mosquitos, Hamdy Hamptons [?], Wellingtons –
CB: And what – but what about Bardney? Was it – what was it at Bardney?
VH: Bardney?
CB: Mm.
VH: I think I was on Lancasters there.
CB: Mm.
VH: Yeah.
CB: What did you think about the Lancaster as a plane?
VH: Marvellous aircraft, lovely.
CB: Did you think, you know , when you first saw it, overwhelming really? Like the size of it.
VH: Well, the size of it yeah [emphasis]. I mean, the wheels were bigger than me [both laugh].
CB: But was it a case of just, you know, getting on with the job as it were?
VH: Well it – true, yeah. I enjoyed the job, I did really.
CB: What was the food like that you had there?
VH: Very good there.
CB: And can you remember –
VH: And I met some very nice people, you know. Ground staff and aircrew and everybody and, I got on well with everybody.
CB: So you enjoyed your time there?
VH: I did [emphasis]. If I hadn’t got married I think I would have kept in the Air Force [both laugh].
CB: When did you meet your wife?
VH: In forty, forty-six, yeah.
CB: So after the war?
VH: No, just before I finished the war, yeah.
CB: Oh right. So you – I mean, good food in Bardney –
VH: Oh I had good food all the time I was in the Air Force, I can’t complain.
CB: Well, ‘cause there was rationing on wasn’t there?
VH: Pardon?
CB: Rationing on.
VH: Oh yeah, but we weren’t rationed [laughs].
CB: No?
VH: No.
CB: So you just had your normal food then?
VH: Yes, well, our food was lovely. Very good.
CB: Did you have a bike to go around on, or?
VH: I used to have a bike yeah, ‘cause when I was at Woodhall Spa I used to bike to Boston most nights, you know, if I wasn’t on duty and things.
CB: Right. So, ‘cause these, these airfields were spread out, weren’t they?
VH: Yeah.
CB: A lot of them. And you needed a bike.
VH: Oh yeah.
CB: So you were dealing with Lancasters, and where did you go after Bardney? Can you remember?
VH: No I went to that many. I went to Theddlethorpe [?], Bardney, Lakenheath, quite a few all local. All round Lincolnshire way, you know, most of them.
CB: Mm.
VH: The first I went away was at Marham in Norfolk.
CB: Yes?
VH: Mm.
CB: And what did you make of that? Did you –
VH: Marham?
CB: Mm.
VH: Quite a nice place. That’s where I had my first squadron of Mosquitos there.
CB: Right.
VH: Mm.
CB: So you worked on the Mosquitos there?
VH: Oh yes. I liked them I did [both laugh].
CB: The wooden wonder. [?]
VH: We had the first squadron of Mosquitos and first day we got there at Marham the Germans came along and dropped flares. I thought ‘oh there we’ve had it.’ But we got away with it [laughs].
CB: Is that the first time you’d had any –
VH: We had Mosquitos, yeah.
CB: Is this the first time you’d seen enemy action as it were, dropping bombs?
VH: Well it was, dropping flares over the place yeah. We thought ‘we’re in for it’ that night but we got away with it [both laugh].
CB: Oh dear. And do you remember anybody in particular, you know, friends?
VH: In the Air Force?
CB: Yeah, friends.
VH: Oh yes. Guy Gibson.
CB: If we’re – erm yes, that was at Woodhall Spa.
VH: Yeah.
CB: Did you work with him, or on – well, you were on 627 Squadron.
VH: Yeah. I was with Guy Gibson, I worked with Richard Attenborough, Group Captain Cheshire.
CB: Yes.
VH: Mm.
CB: So at Woodhall Spa, which is – did you finish at Woodhall Spa? Was that your last one before the end of the war?
VH: I think it was. I’m sure it was, yeah.
CB: And you were on 627 Squadron there –
VH: Yeah.
CB: Is that right? Were you, you were with other squadrons. 149 did you say?
VH: Yes, I was, yeah 149 Royal Canadian Air Force –
CB: You worked with the Canadians?
VH: Yeah, and [pause] a Jamaican squadron, I don’t know whether it was 139, I can’t remember what that was but whatever squadron it was I got on well with all of them. Canadian and the Jamaica squadron.
CB: Excellent. So at Woodhall Spa, how did you get there? Did you, did the Air Force take you there?
VH: Air Force. Wherever it was the Air Force took you.
CB: ‘Cause I think –
VH: Transport, you know.
CB: Right, ‘cause I think most people arrived at the station didn’t they?
VH: Yeah.
CB: And then they’d be picked up.
VH: Well I did. One time I was posted to, er, where was it, Oakington was it? Yeah, and I got a transport ticket to Oakham, yeah, I got the wrong place [both laugh]. I don’t think, I made a blunder [?].
CB: Well it can’t have been easy travelling around in the war.
VH: Oh yeah.
CB: You know, on the trains or whatever.
VH: Well it’s true.
CB: So you arrived at Woodhall Spa, and, on Mosqutios?
VH: Yeah.
CB: Did, where did you live at Woodhall Spa? Were you on –
VH: In billets.
CB: Again, what is –
VH: Woodhall Spa.
CB: - what is now Thorpe Camp? Was that where you were?
VH: Where?
Other: Thorpe Camp. You know where they’ve got the museum and that.
VH: Oh yeah.
CB: That’s where you were?
VH: Yeah.
Other: Yeah.
CB: What did you make of it, or what did you –
VH: Of Woodhall Spa?
CB: Yes.
VH: I loved it. Nice place.
CB: Did you go into the town very often?
VH: Yeah, I used to walk to Tatteshall and places like that which was nearby.
CB: Did you, you know, how did you relax there at Woodhall Spa? Would the, would the ground crew ever, you know, mix with the aircrew?
VH: Oh yes, quite often, yeah. I had a good mate there, Canadian chap, and I can always remember one night in the – he sat awake, the crew generally get together chatting before they go on a raid, and he was a rear gunner, and he was chatting [?] that night and I went over to him and I says ‘what’s wrong George?’ And he says ‘we’re not coming back tonight,’ I says ‘well don’t talk stupid.’ They didn’t.
CB: Wow.
VH: He had that premonition they weren’t coming back.
CB: Did you ever –
VH: That did upset me, you know, that did.
CB: Did you get that a lot, or was that just one you remember? Do you, you know –
VH: Ooh no, I remember quite a few who didn’t get back.
CB: Mm. But then, did they –
VH: Waited for them, but they never returned.
CB: Did they had the premonition though before they went?
VH: Yeah, one or two did.
CB: And how did you feel about that? It –
CB: Well I felt awful really. When you’re waiting for them and they don’t return, you know, really hits you.
CB: Mm. What was the atmosphere at, in the, on the airfield?
VH: Oh, it was very good really, yeah we all got on well together. The ground staff and the aircrew, you know.
CB: And you would, as you say, you would relax together, and –
VH: Oh yes, I mean, if you had no raids on and everything you’d go out and have a drink with the lads and the aircrew, you know.
CB: Do you remember the, where you would go in Woodhall Spa?
VH: No, I can’t remember, you’re going back –
CB: I think, I think it was the Mucky Duck, wasn’t it?
VH: Oh that, I was gonna say the Mucky Duck! [Other speaks in background but is unclear what is said. VH replies but this is also unclear.]
CB: Yeah, I think that was quite popular there wasn’t it?
VH: It was, yeah [both laugh]. Then I used to cycle sometimes into Boston.
CB: Yes. So you’d cycle into Boston did you say?
VH: Yeah, cycle into Boston, yeah.
CB: Right, that’s a fair way.
VH: Well, it was really, but –
CB: And, on your own, or with your friends?
VH: Yes, with a girl from there.
CB: Oh right [both laugh]. And what would you do in Boston? What did you think of Boston?
VH: I liked Boston I did. Boston Stump and all that. It’s quite changed from what it used to be, but it, I thought it was a lovely place at the time.
CB: And what did you do, where did you go?
VH: Go for a drink [laughs].
CB: Did you go to the glider drome? I think that was a popular place. No? Perhaps for the aircrew.
VH: Was it Withamgate [?]?
CB: Yeah.
VH: We used to go round there, and the Boston Stump and all round that way, hmm.
CB: So you enjoyed that?
VH: I did [laughs].
CB: And what would, ‘cause – there was some famous station commanders, well not, commanding officers at Woodhall Spa. Do you remember Cheshire?
VH: Group Captain Cheshire, yeah.
CB: What do you make –
VH: Guy Gibson.
CB: What did you make of Cheshire? What did you think of him?
VH: I got on well with all of them, yeah.
CB: Can you remember –
VH: They were quite good to us, they were really good to all the ground staff really, you know, ‘cause they relied on us sort of thing to look after them, didn’t they? [Unclear, both laugh].
CB: Indeed they did [VH laughs]. Especially I think, erm, Leonard Cheshire, he was particularly fond of his –
VH: Yeah. Cheshire [unclear] at one time didn’t they?
CB: Yes. And he would come and talk to you at, you know, when you were mending the aircraft?
VH: Yes, I mean, when there was no raids on or anything and things were easier, we used to go out and have a drink with them sort of thing, you know, they were just like talking to anybody. Except when you’re on the parade ground it had to be ‘sir’ sort of thing, you know.
CB: Did you do much parade ground?
VH: Pardon dear?
CB: Were you on the parade ground very much? Did it, was that part of your life?
VH: Playground?
CB: The parade ground.
VH: Oh, we didn’t do a lot on the parade ground, no, because it was mostly time on the, looking after the aircraft, you know.
CB: So you missed some of that out?
VH: Yes, oh yeah, we didn’t have a lot to do on the parade ground really.
CB: What was the discipline like?
VH: Pardon?
CB: What was the –
VH: Discipline? Discipline was quite good, strict, you know. See, see, discipline didn’t really bother me because being in a home was run by all ex-army people, I was disciplined there. I had to march to school and everything, you know. So going in the Air Force, it didn’t really hit me.
CB: So your time in the, the children’s home –
VH: Made me more or less fit for the Air Force really.
CB: So you look back on those as happy days, and –
VH: They were, yeah. That home was very good. ‘Cause my daughter took me up there few years back didn’t you, and it’s not the same place now, it’s been taken over by retirement people, and when they knew I was one of the boys who had been there, ooh they shook my hand didn’t they [CB laughs] made quite a fuss of me.
CB: Were there girls there as well or was it just boys?
VH: No, just boys, yeah.
CB: And you made some good friends there?
VH: Yes I made some good friends there, yeah.
CB: Did you manage to keep in touch with them afterwards?
VH: One or two of them, but when I went with my daughter last time, and I saw one or two of the names in the church who’d been, passed away, and killed and that during the war. That really upset me.
CB: Hmm. So at Woodhall Spa, another CO was Tate. Did you, did you come across Willy Tate very much?
VH: Pardon?
CB: Willy Tate, he was –
VH: Willy Tate? I can’t remember dear.
CB: No.
VH: No. You meet that many people you know, you can’t remember all their names, sorta thing.
CB: No, no of course not.
VH: No.
CB: So tell me what you remember of Guy Gibson.
VH: I found him very very good. Very good to the ground staff. I think he was a bit trick [?] with the aircrew, but to the ground staff he was magnificent.
CB: Well, that’s wonderful. So, you got, did you have a relationship with him? Did he you know help you, or come and chat?
VH: Not really no. Just ‘how are you sir’ and ‘your aircraft’s ready’ and that sorta thing you know.
CB: When the planes came back from their raids, and they were –
VH: That was lovely seeing them come back [laughs].
CB: Yes.
VH: But when you’re waiting, and yours don’t come back you think ‘oh, has it crash landed somewhere’ or ‘has it landed at another airdrome?’ And eventually you hear it hadn’t come back. It really upset you.
CB: Hmm. And then it would be your job to, to mend them. And get them back right?
VH: Yeah.
CB: Hmm. So were there any events that you can remember at Woodhall Spa? You know, things like, I don’t know, collisions, or, you know –
VH: There been one or two crash landings. I seen crash landings, yeah.
CB: What did you – can you remember how you would –
VH: We didn’t do nothing to it, the air, er, the fire engines and everything used to go out to them.
Other: But you remember the – when they were training for the Dambusters don’t you?
VH: Pardon?
Other: When they training for the Dambusters.
VH Oh yeah, when they training for the Dambusters. We wondering what was happening because they was training for about two or three months before they actually done it, and they come over and did what we called hedge-hopping, just come over the hedge, just miss us, you know, and you think ‘what’s going on?’ [CB laughs]. And they kept it a secret right ‘till the night they went. When they came out that night they said ‘this is it,’ so we said, ‘what,’ ‘what we’ve been training for you know when we come back’ [CB and VH laugh].
CB: So they were –
VH: Very secretive, it was.
CB: Yes.
VH: But when they came back they said ‘we done it’ [laughs].
CB: Right [both laugh]. So was – that was at Scampton, were you at Scampton at all?
VH: No that was at, er, Woodhall Spa [emphasis].
CB: Right.
VH: I never went to Scampton. Only went there for my medals didn’t I? That’s all.
CB: Mm. So you – how do you remember your wartime career?
VH: Yes I can do, yeah.
CB: And you, how do you remember it, with –
VH: Well I think it was quite good really because the – I was disobedient at home so going to the Air Force, that was more or less the same, sorta life, sort of thing.
CB: Mm. So [pause] the – I think some of what the personnel, the aircrew at Woodhall Spa, they were, they were known for their pranks, some of them. And I suppose the low flying would have been one of them.
VH: It was, yeah.
CB: Did you have any, many air raids there?
VH: No not really, no.
CB: So you, the Germans didn’t attack you –
VH: No.
CB: At Woodhall Spa? It was [unclear]
VH: No, no, they came over when we were at Marham, Norfolk, when we had the first squadron of Mosquitos. I thought ‘this is it,’ flares came down but as soon as the gun fire opened up they went [both laugh].
CB: So do you remember any time – the time that Guy Gibson took off on the night he was killed? Do you remember anything about that?
VH: Er, he just came out, and he just said ‘I’m gonna take this aircraft’ and that’s it. Just didn’t come back.
CB: No, he was with Warwick –
VH: Mosquitos.
CB: Yes, because he wasn’t too familiar with them, was he?
VH: No.
CB: So –
VH: It could have been that you see.
CB: Yeah. Was he – do you remember what his manner was like, how he –
VH: He was – I found him quite good myself.
CB: But he wanted to get back flying, didn’t he? Do you remember anything about that particular night, as to how he was?
VH: No, he came out that night and says ‘do you mind if I take the, this Mosquito?’ and I said ‘no sir,’ and he just got in it and went.
CB: And what did you feel when he didn’t come back?
VH: Well I felt awful really, you know. I wondered what, if he really knew in his own heart whether he was going to do anything. You don’t know what’s in their mind, do you really?
CB: No, no you don’t. But you, you just thought it was just another, another plane that hadn’t come back.
VH: Yeah.
CB: You didn’t –
VH: That’s true.
CB: Did you know straight away that – I mean he could have landed somewhere else. When did you find out that –
VH: Ah, we didn’t find out for [pause] two, two, three hours after. They must have rung round to see if he’d landed anywhere else, but, he hadn’t, so.
CB: No.
VH: I think over the hills was it, in Kent I think, where he actually crashed, I think.
CB: He crashed in Holland.
VH: Yeah, oh was it Holland?
CB: Yeah.
VH: I knew it was somewhere –
CB: Yeah, coming back from an operation. So, you, you remember it with fondness, the –
VH: Pardon?
CB: You remember it with fondness, your time in Bomber Command –
Other: Fondness, you enjoyed it.
VH: Oh I, I enjoyed all my life [?], I loved Bomber Command.
CB: So –
VH: And everyone I worked with. We all seemed to be like a family, sort of thing, you know, we worked ever so well together, the ground staff and the air crew did.
CB: And you went to Lakenheath. Were the Americans there at Lakenheath when you were there?
VH: Pardon?
CB: Were the Americans at Lakenheath, when you were there?
VH: Was I –
CB: Was the –
Other: Were the Americans there? Were the Americans there?
VH: Americans? Oh yeah, they took over because it was a nice place, you see [CB laughs]. Better than where they were! It was all big buildings and they took over and we were put in Nissan huts! [Both laugh].
CB: What did you make of them? Did you, did you get on well with them?
VH: Well we, yeah they were alright [both laugh].
CB: Did you have better food when they were around?
VH: Oh yes, definitely yes. They got the best off [both laugh].
CB: And where were you? Were you in billets again at Lakenheath?
VH: Yeah.
CB: So erm, did you ever have to, you know, live in, with a family or anything like that, or were you always in billets?
VH: Er, in billets or Nissan huts, you know.
CB: Yes.
VH: Yeah.
CB: So, you’re coming towards the end of the war. How did you feel, you know, we’ve just had VE day. How did you feel? You know, was it a relief, or were you, how did you feel?
VH: Well, I don’t know really. I don’t know whether I was [unclear] in the Air Force, but I’d just got married before I came out, you see so –
CB: Right, so where did you meet your wife?
VH: In Nottingham.
CB: At a dance, or?
VH: Pardon?
CB: Was it at a dance? A dance?
VH: Dance?
Other: Where did you meet Mum?
VH: Oh, I was having a drink [both laugh].
CB: And you obviously looked, saw her, and, you know, liked each other. So how long was it before you got married?
VH: Only about six months I think. Yeah, wasn’t long [both laugh]. And I got lovely daughters and a lovely son, he’s passed away bless him, about three year ago innit?
Other: Hmm.
CB: And did you –
VH: I had two lovely children, they certainly looked after me, they still do [both laugh], don’t you chick? Somebody does.
CB: Do you remember getting married, and the rationing?
VH: Oh yes. I had a double wedding. That’s my wife up there.
CB: Oh, that’s lovely. Where did you get married?
VH: Hyson Green, yeah.
CB: Well, she looks very nice with her dress on. So, the rationing didn’t bother you very much?
VH: No. Said ‘are you gonna get married the usual?’ and I says ‘no.’ [Both laugh.]
CB: And where did you live after you were married?
VH: Nottingham, yeah.
CB: And when did the war – was the war finished by then?
VH: Oh yeah, it had finished, yeah.
CB: So you, you came out of the Air Force in –
VH: Out of the Air Force in 1946.
Other: You made your suit though didn’t you?
VH: Hmm.
Other: You made your suit.
VH: Yeah I made my suit.
CB: Oh wow! You made your own wedding suit, that’s –
VH: Yeah because, in that home where, that I was telling you about, there was all different trades, and I went in the tailoring department. I done four years at, four years apprenticeship before I joined the Air Force, so I made my wedding suit.
CB: You kept the skills going [both laugh]. So what did you do when you came out of the RAF?
VH: Er [pause], I went to the co-op [?], I was only there one day, and then, I went to Boots then and I was there for thirty year.
CB: Worked in Boots the chemists?
VH: Yeah.
CB: Oh, what did you do there?
VH: Making medicines and everything [unclear from Other].
CB: Oh.
VH: And then when they stopped making their own medicines, I went on security, and stuff like that.
CB: So you were there for a long time. In Nottingham all the time?
VH: Oh yes –
CB: You settled there.
VH: Never left Nottingham did I? I was at Boots thirty year I was at Boots.
CB: Did you keep in touch in your, you know, your friends and your comrades in the Air Force?
VH: No, no, never kept in touch with any of them.
CB: Although you had good relationships with them all? You didn’t feel –
VH: But we didn’t, we didn’t keep in touch with each other no.
CB: So, your thirty years, what did you – [unclear] didn’t work in those days did they, do your wife, your wife, didn’t work?
VH: My wife? Yeah she was working, yeah.
CB: Did she work?
VH: What was mum now?
Other: Machinist.
VH: Oh, machinist, that’s it [both laugh].
CB: And then you had your children.
VH: Yeah, two lovely children. And my grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, they’re all marvellous to me they are.
CB: What did you feel about how Bomber Command was treated after the war?
VH: In which way?
CB: Well, when Churchill made his speech, he didn’t, after the war, he didn’t mention Bomber Command.
VH: I know.
CB: Because of all the bombing, and –
VH: Yeah.
CB: How did you feel about that? And you’ve only just had your clasp that you’re entitled to. How did you feel, after the war, and how you were –
VH: I don’t think they treated them as they should have been treated, myself, because they’d done a marvellous job.
CB: And you – you’ve gone down, have you seen the memorial in London? Have you gone –
VH: No I haven’t, no.
CB: But you – have you gone back to any of your stations that you’ve been at, because –
Other: We’ve been to Conningsby, we’ve been to a few with you, I’ve taken you to a few haven’t I?
VH: Yeah.
Other: Woodhall Spa we’ve been to.
VH: Yeah.
Other: We’ve been to Scampton now but –
VH: Been to Scampton –
Other: [unclear] did you?
VH: Hmm.
CB: So you, you went back to Scampton recently, I think, when was that?
VH: Yes, er, that was when I had my [papers shuffling].
CB: Your medal. Your medal.
VH: In that book there. [Papers shuffling, pause].
CB: I think, er [pause] ah. And what did you [pause], how did you hear about this, did they get in touch with you?
VH: No, when I moved to here, to Retford, I lost my medals, so I wrote up to administrative ends [?] explained who I was, when I started and when I, when I got demobbed, and they dealt and sent them back, er, sent me a new lot.
CB: And how did you get to go to Scampton? Did they write to you?
Other: A gentleman from Scampton in the RAF came to us here, and said could they present them to him.
CB: Oh. So what did you feel about that?
VH: It was great, wasn’t it?
Other: It was lovely.
VH: All the family went, it was lovely.
Other: It was a very special day, yeah.
VH: Yeah.
CB: They made a fuss of you?
VH: Yeah [laughs].
CB: Well that’s a lovely, lovely thing to remember, isn’t it.
VH: It is, yeah.
Other: And they also presented medals to these gentlemen, they’d just come back from Afghanistan.
CB: It’s lovely. [Pause]. Right Vic, so –
VH: I went, I went out to get the aircraft ready, prepared because there was a raid on, when the crew came out, I was just sitting there, and I’d got this terrible pain, you know, they says ‘come on we want to go,’ and I says ‘I can’t get out!’ So they lifted me out, and they rushed me to Kings Lynn hospital, I got my appendix [laughs].
CB: Do you remember the hospital you were in?
VH: Er [slight pause], no, er, it was Kings Lynn, but I can’t think of the name of the hospital.
CB: And how long were you in there?
VH: I was only in there a couple of week, if that.
CB: It’s quite a long time these days [both laugh]. And then it says you were transferred to Addenbrookes.
VH: Yeah, yeah I had something wrong with my thumb –
CB: Right.
VH: And the Air Force made a mess of it, so I ended up in Addenbrookes to have me nail took off.
CB: So what do you remember about being in hospital?
VH: Not a lot really, well, when I came out I got a fortnight’s holiday, er, was a camp.
CB: What was the food like?
VH: Good [emphasis, both laugh].
CB: So you, they sorted out your appendix problem –
VH: Oh yes.
CB: And then you, you went back. So it was, [pause], that’s some sort of home, admitted to Stowe, erm, I can’t quite read that. Was it just some sort of home that just was like a convalescent home was it?
VH: Yeah.
CB: And you were in there for a little while.
VH: Hmm yeah, two weeks I think [chuckles].
CB: So they certainly looked after the –
VH: They certainly looked after you, yeah.
CB: [Pause]. So you’ve lived in Retford for, how long now?
VH: Ten years now, innit chick? My daughter got me over here so she can look after me [laughs], don’t you chick.
CB: Do you get involved in any Bomber Command, you know, reunions, or?
VH: Oh no –
Other: You’ve started to now.
VH: Started going to a bit now, haven’t we, yeah. Scampton. We’ve been to one or two dos there haven’t we?
Other: Mm.
VH: Where was it that we went the other week?
Other: Woodhall Spa.
VH: Oh yeah we went to Woodhall Spa the other week, at a reunion day.
Other: Scampton last week, and a Lancaster came over.
VH: Yeah [laughs]. The Red Arrows were there, giving a display weren’t they. Lovely.
CB: Well I think, think that’s about it Vic, that’s been very, very interesting.
VH: Thank you very much.
CB: Thank you.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Victor Harding
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Clare Bennett
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2015-05-20
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Sound
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AHardingV150520
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Pending review
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Leading Aircraftsman Victor Harding.
Language
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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00:38:26 audio recording
149 Squadron
627 Squadron
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
fitter airframe
flight mechanic
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
ground crew
Lancaster
military living conditions
Mosquito
Nissen hut
RAF Bardney
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Kirkham
RAF Marham
RAF Woodhall Spa
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1186/18578/SWatsonC188489v1-1.2.pdf
41dce93a36a706458878ffce711dc143
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1186/18578/SWatsonC188489v1-2.1.pdf
78bceef44f30c4e1a4f2d533cd690cd9
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Title
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Watson, Clifford
C Watson
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. Two oral history interviews with Flying Officer Clifford Watson DFC (1922 - 2018, 1384956, 188489 Royal Air Force), a memoir, his service and release book, and a scrapbook containing photographs and documents. He flew operations as an air gunner with 150 and 227 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Clifford Watson and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-06-28
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
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Watson, C
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Photograph
JUST ANOTHER TAILEND CHARLIE
CLIFF WATSON DFC
HUNTINGDON
JUNE 1989
[page break]
[underlined] SEQUENCE [/underlined]
[underlined] File [/underlined] [underlined] Page [/underlined] [underlined] Location [/underlined]
[underlined] GROUP O [/underlined]
D 3 Joining up [underlined] AC2 [/underlined]
4 Babbacombe - 11 ITW Newquay [underlined] LAC [/underlined]
8 Troopship HMT Mooltan - Freetown - Capetown
G 7 Southern Rhodesia - Bulawayo [underlined] LAC [/underlined]
8 EFTS Belvedere Scrubbed TIGER MOTHS [underlined] AC2 [/underlined]
10 A/G Course, Moffat ANSONS [underlined] LAC-Sgt [/underlined]
11 Polsmoor Transit Camp [underlined] Sgt [/underlined]
J25 14 HMT Monarch of Bermuda
15 West Kirby - Bournmouth
17 25 OTU Finningley - Bircotes - WELLINGTONS
18 30 OTU Hixon - Sieghford
19 Leaflets to Paris
Wedding
J26 21 West Kirby - HMT Johan Van Vanderbilt
K1 23 Algiers - Blida - 150 Sqdn WELLINGTONS
K2 27 Fontaine Chaude (Batna) [underlined] FIt/Sgt [/underlined]
LT 32 Kairoaun
LU 35 On leave in Tunis, Chad in Jail
MT 46 End of First Tour - 47 raids
47 2 BPD Tunis - 500 mls. by lorry to Algiers
HXM Capetown Castle - Greenoch - West Kirby
NS 49 Screened 84 OTU Desborough
50 Norton, Sheffield Discip. course
53 W.O - 6th June D Day [underlined] W/O [/underlined]
OS 55 Aircrew Pool, Scampton - HCU Winthorpe STIRLING
56 Syerston Lanc. conversion LANCASTERS
P 57 227 Sqdn. Bardney – Balderton [underlined] P/O [/underlined]
60 DFC [underlined] F/O [/underlined]
63 End of Tour - VE Day
Q 67 Redundant - Photographic Officer, Farnborough
68 u/t Equipment Officer 61MU Handforth
[underlined] GROUP 4 [/underlined]
69 Lager Commandant, Poynton prison camp
2W 75 Civvy Street, Whitehaven Relay Service [underlined] MR [/underlined] .
79 Development Manager, Metropolitan Relays London
44 83 To Kenya, Kirksbridge Farm, Kiminini Kitale
48 85 HM Prison Service Asst. Supt. gr2
555 95 Civil Aviation Radio Officer
556 Mbeya Radio Supt.
557 103 UK leave PMG1 – Flt/RO lic. C. & G.
670 104 Eastleigh - Mwanza
107 Royal visit
680 113 UK leave
114 Entebbe Telecomm. Supt
115 Kisumu
700 123 Nairobi Comm. Centre Ast. Signals Officer
720 129 UK leave
750 134 Nairobi HQ & retirement
800 135 Laikipia Security Network
96 151 Pye Telecommunications, Cambridge Project Engineer
[page break]
[underlined] ILLUSTRATIONS [/underlined]
12A Air Gubber Coiurse 24 CAOS Moffat
15A Finningley Reg. Whellams
20A Bride & Groom 1/3/43
CW in flying kit
CW & HF at Richmond
26A Stan Rutherford with Hilda & Cliff at Richmond
Bill Willoughby (NAV) at Whimpey port gun position
Bill Willoughby & Stan Chatterton in their pits at Blinda
44A Pantelleria target photographs
48A CW with Mum, Barnoldswick
Skipper & B.A. with Hilda at Richmond
Skipper & Hilda at Richmond
48B Skipper& [sic] B.A. with Cliff at Richmond
Stan Rutherford in the snow, at Bircoates
Outside Chalet at Blida
Wimpey at Kaircan
48C At Richmond CW & Hilda
52A Warrant Officer parchment
54A three of Aircrew peeling spuds at Scampton incl. Frank Eaglestone
56A F/O Forster DFM 2nd tour Nav.
C.W.
W/O Foolkes at rear of NJ-P
64A Crashed Remains of 9J – O
64B F/O Cheale, F/O. Bates
S/Ldr Chester DFA with F/O Cheale, W/O Foolkes & F/O Forster DFM
64C More of 9J – O
64D F/O Ted (Ace) Forster DFM, CW & W/O Pete Foolkes
64E CW with rear turret of 9J – O
CW with motor-byke
Sgt. Geoff (Doogan) Hampson, Flight Engineer
64F Newspaper cutting
Start of Second Tour – Frank Eaglestone, Ted Forster & Pete Foolkes
More of 9J – O
64G Ted Forster Ready for Gerry?
Lunchtime over Homberg [sic]
64H P/O Bates (My last tour Skipper)
Part of F/O Bates’ usual crew
64J F/LT. Maxted (Gunnery Ldr) Pete Foolkes and F/O Sandford (spare gunner or Sqdn Adj?)
More of 9J – O
64K Doogan again
More of 9J – O
64L DFC Citation
64M Apology from H.M.
64N F/O Croker’s Lanc. on Torpedo dump at Wyke
Christmas Dinner at Wyke
Reverse of Pete’s Xmas Card 1989
Part of F/L Croker’s letter with Xmas Card
66A-H Examples of Battle Orders
[page break]
[underlined] DEDICATION [/underlined]
The section dealing with my R.A.F. career is dedicated to Lady Luck who shows no compassion, is completely immoral and yet cannot be bought.
After a remarkable interview on television recently, Raymond Baxter asked of Tom Sopwith "To what do you attribute your tremendous and unparalelled [sic] success over such a long period?” In his 94th. year he replied “Luck, pure luck”. His reply was the same when asked again at his 100th. birthday party.
This must apply to every aspiring aviator, and I was no exception.
[page break]
[underlined] THE EARLIEST YEARS [/underlined]
My first ten year or so were spent in Yorkshire, having been born on the [deleted] 22nd [/deleted] [inserted] 11th [/inserted] of February 1922, at 45 Federation Street [inserted] the home of my paternal Gt Grandparents [/inserted], Barnoldswick almost opposite nr. 26 where my Grandparents lived, and about two years after my father was demobbed from the Kings Own Yorkshire Light lnfantry after the Great War. My sister Winifred Sofia was born almost two years later on the 2nd. of January 1924. About that time the family moved to a shop at 33 Rainhall Road where my father established a wireless business. I attended the infants school only 50 yards away, often joined by Winifred.
At the shop, my father built radio receivers of the "Tuned Radio Frequency" type, (TRF), a good 10 years ahead of the superhet. At the same time he held one of the first radio amateur licences in Yorkshire, with the callsign 2ZA. His aerial was a wire to the top of a 50 ft. pole in the back yard and starting with a spark transmitter his first radio contact was with another amateur in Colne, whose transmitter output was connected between the gas and water pipes, He had no means of measuring his frequency but thought it was somewhere around 300 KHz. (1000 metres) He soon progressed to using valves and gradually higher frequencies, though almost everything was really trial and error. When communication progressed to "working" other countries the prefix G was added to UK call-signs. He once told me that his first telephony transmission was achieved using a GPO carbon microphone in the aerial circuit. The only receivable broadcast wireless station at that time was the BBC's 2LO and when people heard it for the first tine there was indeed great wonderment and excitement
In 1926 came the general strike. Money was very scarce and people were hungry. There was no money coming in and the shop closed down. The family moved to a house in Rook Street, close to the railway bridge and opposite the cobler's [sic] wooden workshop. Most of us wore clogs in those days, with leather tops and laces, and iron-shod wooden soles.
Before going to war my father had served an engineering apprentiship [sic] , and worked with steam engines. With outstanding debts at the shop and a wife and two small children to support, he volunteered to work with L.M.S. railway company, and drove a train between Barnoldswick and I think Skipton. The engine was pelted with stones at some of the bridges and he was very unpopular with the strikers, althought [sic] many of them were quite happy to use the train. Thus the family was sustained and he received a letter of thanks and a medalion [sic] from the chairman of L.M.S.
When things returned to normal the family moved again, to nr. 14 School Terrace in Dam Head Road and Winifred and I attended the infants and Junior Schools across the back street. My mother was able to resume working at the mill as a cotton weaver with her sisters Molly and Annie. Their brother Jim -my uncle- was a 'twister', that is he connected the cotton threads on the warp to tails ready for applying to the loom for weaving. The noise. in the weaving sheds was deafening and weavers were quite adept at lip reading. This had a great influence on their broad northern accent. Most weavers operated six looms, loading manually the weft into the shuttles before changing them. My uncle Charlie -the brother of my paternal grandfather=- was a manufacturer employing about a hundred people running 500 or so looms. I remember the big warehouse doors and the lift which was operated by water pressure. To go up, just turn on this tap!. Going down transfered [sic] the water back into a holding
[page break]
tank. There were two offices, large wooden boxes, one on each side of the big doors and just under the ceiling. Accessed by ladders. One office was for uncle Charlie and his clerk, and the other for the more junior staff. When I called to see them in 1941 I noted the intercom. system between the offices. It comprised, at each terminal, two empty Lyle Golden Syrup tins one for speaking into and the other for receiving. they were connected by two lengths of taught string which vibrated the diaphragms being the bottoms of the tins. I was surprised at their effectiveness. There was also a loop of string pulled manually between the two places with a small box attched [sic] for transferring documents. I was impressed. Uncle Charlie said he would consider changing the strings after the war.
At School Terrace my father carried on building wireless sets in the attic and also helped his friend Tom Shorrock who owned the local radio relay service. This comprised a wireless receiver and amplifiers connecting some hundreds of houses with a pair of bare wires to loudspeakers at a cost of ninepence per week for each loudspeaker. The idea appealed to my father and he was able to instigate some technical improvements. By then the wireless manufacturing industry had become well established and radios became readily available. My father had paid off his debts and was discharged from bancrupsy [sic].
At this stage we moved into a new house at 25 Melville Avenue. which was nearer to Fernbank Mill for my mother but also had an inside toilet and bathroom. It also had electricity mains in place of the more customery [sic] gas lighting. An electric soldering iron must have seemed luxurious after heating a copper bit on a gas ring.
Our school was only a few minutes walk from home. Gisburn Road Council School. I remember it and the teachers very well, Mr Alfred Green Petty.the Headmaster, Miss Housen who tought [sic] music english and poetry, and above all Mr Heaton who tought [sic] arithmetic, citizanship [sic] and physics. Miss Housen did not think much of my efforts, I couldn’t sing and disliked poetry, but I got on fine with Mr. Heaton, who also tought [sic] my father over 20 years earlier. Over a fairly long period he gave me extra homework in arithmetic most nights, generally a problem or two and he checked the results next day. It was almost private tuition and thanks largely to him, I excelled in the subject. I think children’s attitudes' in the main were very different to those of the present day. Discipline was strict by consent, not fear. Reward was achieved by effort alone and there was friendly competition between us. Most of us got the cane for some minor offence like climbing over the school wall, in my case refusing to stand in the front of the class and recite ‘the wreck of the Hesperus’. We did respect our teachers.
About this time we moved to a house in Headingley for just a few weeks and then on to. Fence, which we knew as wheatley Lane. During that period my father was working in London at Stag Lane fitting the electrics in Rolls Royces. My mother worked at the cotton mill nearby and Winifred & I were looked after partly by Mrs. Ingham who had a sweet shop. Our stay in Fence was also [deleted] m [/deleted] of short duration.
Tom Shorrock was a friend of Mr. Ramsbottom who was struggling with a one programme radio relay system in Keighley. He already had thriving electrical business and Tom introduced my father to him. So we moved yet again, to Keighley, and my father became Engineer and Manager of Ramsbottoms Radio Relay Service in the centre of Keighley. From 33 Lister Street, the Receiving and Amplifying Station the wires branched
[page break]
out on the roof tops in all directions. By then there were two BBC programmes, Home Service on 342 mtrs, and the Light Programme on 1500 mtrs, so they converted to two pairs for two programmes. We were living at 25 Lawnswood Road but soon moved to a new house at 21 Whittley Road. I recall helping Leslie Wright – Dad’s foreman to erect a garage which cost £7.10.0 to house the new Austin 7 which cost £75 taxed and insured. The other personality I remember well was Walter Spurgeon, chief wireman.
Winifred and I attended Holycroft Council School. Some of the lessons were by listening to the radio, an innovation in those days, and it was my job to check the radio was working, each morning.
It was in Keighley that Mrs. Alice Kilham, my father’s secretary came on the scene. She lived in Oakworth with her daughter Mary, her husband being in a sanitorium being treated for TB. During very cold winter around 1933 the snow was six feet deep and they came to live with us at Wittley Road.
Winifred and I were in the Girl Guides and Boy Scouts respectively and we decided to take the Signaller badge which meant sending and receiving the morse code. We were told the speed required was 12. Having established a battery and buzzer, and a morse key and headphones by the beds in each bedroom, we soon memorised the code and communicated with each other, quickly reaching 12 words per minute. Eventually we progressed to 18 words per minute and then went to take the test. Only then did we find that the speed required was 12 LETTERS per minute, not words. 12 letters is only 2 words per minute. However this faux pas proved very useful about eight years hence.
After just a few years in Keighley, the system was working well and no longer presented a challenge. My father was approached by a group of businessmen from Norwich who were interested in the “wired wireless” system. They were owners of radio busineses [sic] who felt they shouId have a stake in the competition and bank managers hoping to earn a quick buck. All the bank managers were Yorkshiremen. So Norwich Relays Ltd. came into being with premises in St. John Maddermarket, and my father became Engineer and manager, taking with him his secretary and foreman Lesley Wright from Keighley. Allan Moulton joined the firm and was responsible for obtaining wayleaves, that is obtaining permission from owners to put wires on their property. He was a popular figure in Norwich, his main qualification for the job was that he played cricket for Norfolk and knew most people who mattered. Leslie died whilst in his thirties in Norwich.
Once again we moved house, to 119 Unthank Road, and Mrs. Kilham and Mary moved into a cottage in Blickling Court near Norwich Cathedral. Winifred I went to the Avenues Council School initially but not for long. I remember getting a prize for my ‘lecture' on how a TRF wireless worked, showing them the working radio I had made. Probably not very accurate but there was no-one present who could contradict me, fortunately.
At 13 I changed to the Norwich Junior Technical School in St. Andrews. Soon after we moved house yet again to a new house, “Wayside", in Plumstead Road, on the boundary of Norwich Aerodrome. Winifred then joined Mary at St. Monicas private school. On Saturday mornings I attended Art School on the top floor. I achieved very little there, the art master quite rightly concentrating on pupils who showed some potential. For an enjoyable two years we concentrated on technical
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subjects, woodwork, maths, physics, Chemistry, mechanics, technical drawing, metal and woodwork etc. The masters I remember well, ‘Chemi’ Reed the principle, Mr. Abigail, Mr. McCracken and Mr. Lishman. At the end of two-year course I transfered [sic] to Unthank College in Newmarket Road, joining the 5th. form. This was big change for me, the emphasis was on classical subjects, in English literature we spent a whole year studying Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Spencer's Fairy Queen. I couldn't: get interested in either but I later achieved a credit in the School Certificate by answering questions on A.G. Street’s Farmers Glory which I read in bed the night before the exam. Mr. Bertwhistle the English Lit. master was furious. For Physics and Mechanics I had tuition from Mr. Horace, the Principal's son and on Wednesday afternoons I visited “Chemi” Reed's house at 33 Britannia Rd. for tuition.
In early 1939 my father, Mr. Moulton and Mrs. Kilham acquired six run-down relay firms and the Nuvolion loudspeaker factory in South London from a Mr. Olivisi, a Frenchman. My father moved to Stretham to a flat in Pullman Court and Mrs. Kilham and Mary and to duCane Court in Balham where the Moultons also had a flat. My mother and Winifred moved to a house in West Norwood and I became a boarder at Unthank College. Soon after taking the School Certificate I joined my mother in London and we moved to a flat in New Southgate. I became articled to George Eric Titley, a Chartered Accountant in St Paul’s Churchyard, commuting to the city 6 days a week by underground. Rail fare was tenpence return per day and I was paid ten shillings per week. Fifty pence in 2004 currency The firm was Gladstone Titley and Co. at 61-63 St. Pauls Churchyard and I was the junior with qualified accountants Joe Oliver, Clarke and Jenkins, and Miss Miller the Secretary. It was amusing 6 years hence when I barged into a Board Meeting at 69 Lavender Hill, Sqdn/Ldr Jenkins still in uniform was sitting there when F/O Cliff Watson appearedstill [sic] in Battledress. Jenkins was called up in 1940 as an Account Squadron Leader.
On the 3rd. of September 1939 War was declared and any plans we all had for the future were kiboshed. During the blitz in 1940 to be nearer my father and to help out at Relays we moved home to Ascot Court in Acre Lane, Clapham.
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[underlined] JOINING UP [/underlined] .
The outbreak of war found me as a clerk articled to a Chartered Accountant in St. Paul's Yard. London. At the age of 17 1/2 it went without saying that within a year or two my occupation would be changed way or another. In the family Radio Relay business men were already leaving to join to Forces. My father was on an army reserve and expected to be called up at any time. I felt my best course was to abandon accountancy for the time being and try and help out; so I joined the firm as a General Factotum. During the Blitz on London my job was fault-finding and replacing the overhead lines, knocked down by Jerry bombers where buildings and whole streets were destroyed. The Radio Relay Service, a two programme four wire system in those days, linked the BBC with some tens of thousands of homes in South London, homes where the radio was never switched off. The system carried air raid warnings also. All too frequently the radio was interrupted by an announcer at Scotland Yard with “Attention please, here is an important announcement, an air raid warning has just been officially circulated". There were occasions when bombs were dropped before the sirens sounded, but never before the announcement was made on our Radio Relay System.
September, aged 18 1/2, I found my employers were trying hard to register me as being in a reserved occupation. The Manager, Allan Moulton, had already been successful in his own case, which was reasonable. Someone had to run the firm and my father had sailed off to Abbysinia [sic] in March. At the time I was working literally 18 hours per day and my fifty bob per week hardly paid for digs.
On a very rare afternoon-off I was walking down Kingsway and tried my luck at the R.A.F. Recruiting office. One look at an applicant for aircrew wearing glasses brought an instant decision from the man at the door. I walked along the Strand and down Whitehall, and having removed my spectacles tried the Royal Navy. I completed the application form and was told that I would be called for interview eventually, but there was a very long waiting list.
I tried the R.A.F. again about a week later having left-off my spectacles for several days, and an application form for training as a pilot was completed. Had I previous flying experience? Yes. Fortunately I was not asked for details, as a passenger with Alan Cobham's Flying Circus might not have carried much weight. - In 1936 we had lived at a house called "Wayside” in Plumsted Road, Norwich, on the Mousehold aerodrome boundary, with a panoramic view of the aerodrome, and I was fascinated by it all like most boys of my age. It was to be three months before I heard from the R.A.F. - the Navy had missed the boat – I was to report to the Aircrew Selection Board near Euston station, on the appointed day about a week hence, for 'medical and academic examinations'. The letter added that in the maths exam `log tables but not slide rules are permissable [sic] ’.
The great day arrived, and at 8.30 am. with about 80 other applicants we were told there would be three one hour written exams, Maths, English and General Knowledge, followed by a medical and a brief interview. Maths was a typical 5th. form end of term test, and English an essay with a wide choice of subjects. General knowledge was mainly common-sense. One of the questions I recall; "Is the distance from London to Warsaw nearer 100, 600 or 2000 miles?”. The Medical Exam was carried out by about 6 examiners, probably Doctors, on a production Iine basis.
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Then the interview after a delay of some hours. Three uniformed R.A.F. officers who had obviously been places in previous wars. "Why do you want to fly"? I have forgotten the particular piece of flannel I used, but it brought no comment and another member of the Board fired his shot, "Which is colder, minus 40 Centigrade or minus forty farenheit [sic] ? Instant answer to that, I'd hear. it before somewhere. The third member asked "that does your Father do" I replied "He is an officer in the R.A.S.C. fighting the Italians in Abbysinia [sic] ". This brought a chuckle from two of them for some reason and the interview was over. I would be advised by post of their decision after the exam. results had been studied.
A week later I was told to report to Euston for attestation, actual reporting for duty would follow after some weeks. There was a brief ceremony and I was given a document which stated that " AC2 Clifford Watson 1384956 has been accepted for training as a pilot in the R. A. F. and is to be prepared to report for duty of a few days notice". It went on to state further that his teeth should receive the earliest attention, one extraction and two fillings.
About three months later my call-up papers arrived, and meanwhile I had met two other local lads whose paths had converged with my own and were to stay parallel for the next six months or so. Raymond Colin Chislett, the son of a Battersea butcher, .and Tom King., of Wandsworth. The three of us reported to the R.T.O. at Paddington and joined a party bound for Babbacombe near Torquay.
During the week at Babbacombe we were issued with uniforms, introduced to drill and Service discipline, lectured on the history of the R.A.F. and told something of what the future held for us. We were made to feel that we really belonged and were indeed priveleged [sic] to be chosen to follow in the footsteps of 'The Few'. We were perhaps more than a little naive to think that we were all destined to become fighter pilots, but we were made to feel that the fate of England and the empire rested entirely with us. The Bombers were taken for granted and were not in the forefront of than news at that time. In any case we Londoners had seen our Fighters in action and - we admit it - imagined ourselves in their shoes. There was a tremendous urge to get on with it and to make a success of it. A great sense of urgency prevailed. I remember well that first day in the Royal Air Force. We were advised to write down our Service numbers so we wouldn't forget them, and above all, we had strawberries and cream for tea. The last I saw of strawberries and cream for about eight years, and as for forgetting one's Service number...! Perhaps it was intended as a joke, but we were taking everything very seriously. At the end of the week there was another Pep talk, very well delivered by a Squadron Leader - and equally well received. He remarked that about Babbacombe, people will say "Never in the History of human conflict, have so many been burgered [sic] about by so few". A misquotation of those immortal words. He went on to say that the two most important weeks in your R.A.F. careers are the first and last, and "you have already survived 50% of them, Good Luck chaps, and have a good trip". There was probably a lot more feeling and sincerity behind those words than we realised at the time. He had seen it all and been there 'in the last lot'. "Have a good trip” was to have real meaning in due course.
A short journey by train took us to no. 10 Initial Training Wing at Newquay for 8 weeks of ground training. We were accommodated in
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Trenance Hotel, one of many taken over by the R.A.F. Another hotel was used for lectures in Navigation, Airmanship, Aerodynamics, Engines, Aircraft Recognition, Signalling, R.A.F. Law and Administration, etc. etc. some drill and P.T., and swimming in the local baths. The sea and beach were out of bounds due to mines and other surprises awaiting the enemy. I had to concentrate hard in the classroom on everything, except signalling. The required speed for sending and receiving morse was 12 words per minute and I had been happy at 18 w.p.m. in the Boy Scouts.
The 18 w.p.m. came about through a misunderstanding. My sister Winifred (a Girl Guide) and I were learning morse for our Signaller badges and were told that a speed of 15 was required, so we practiced until we were competent at 18. It was only when we took the test that we learned the required speed was 15 letters and not words per minute. However this mistake was now serving me well.
The only part I did not enjoy was the cross-country runs, but someone had to be in the last three. After two weeks we were told now that we had smartened-up a bit we would wear white flashes in our caps so we would not be mistaken for real airmen.
There was great speculation as to where we would go for flying training. Maybe stay in Britain, or was it to be Canada, U.S.A., South Africa or Rhodesia, and was there not a possibility of it being Australia?. Meanwhile we must concentrate on passing the current hurdle, it could not by any means be taken for granted that we would all pass the course. In fact after only four weeks, four out of the original 50 were "scrubbed" - a new word to add to our rapidly 'increasing vocabulary.
After about 5 weeks we were issued with some flying kit, boots and Sidcot suits, goggles, helmet and a full issue of gloves - silk, wool, chamois and gauntlets. 4 pairs worn together, and a fifth, electricalIy heated, yet to came. We were not to know that it would be 15 months before we wore any of this. I doubt whether our destination was known to anyone at I.T.W. except that it was overseas somewhere. Seven days embarkation leave and the entire course was posted to West Kirby, no. 1 P.D.C., near Birkenhead on the Wirral. We were joined by about 300 other u/t Pilots from other I.T.W.s and it was just a matter of waiting for the draft. There were parades each morning and we were allowed out of camp at mid-day. It was here that Tom, Ray and I teamed up with John Heggarty, a u/t Pilot who had been at 11 I.T.W. in Scarborough. He was from Birkenhead, of Anglo/French parentage. The four of us visited Liverpool every evening, a place crowded with Navy, Army and Air Force types mostly in transit to somewhere or other. Scores of ships were loading in the Mersey, but after a couple of weeks it was a special train for us to Greenock on the Clyde for immediate embarkation on the "Mooltan", a merchant ship of same 30,000 tons. Our 350 were accomodated [sic] on "D" Deck, just above the water-line, where we spent most of our time, not by choice but by order. Some slept on the mess tables, others under them, with the top layer of bodies in hammocks, a crippling device. To realise that hammocks were the traditional sleeping arrangements for British sailors left me unimpressed and I felt that something far more superior could have been devised. However, navies of many countries seem to favour them. Once aboard, there was no going back. On the second day aboard we were tugged down the Clyde and next morning counted over 40 big ships steaming very slowly in a north-
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westerly direction out at sea. Obviously we were bound for Canada, hence the heavy flying kit .and four pairs of gloves. A week ought to see us in the St. Lawrence. How wrong we were. the convoy was shepherded by some very impressive naval ships, Cruisers, destroyers etc. and Sunderland flying boats were in constant attendance for the first few days. After three weeks of steaming in all directions, first into the freezing cold, then warmer and finally very hot indeed, at 0500 one day the engines slowed and finally stopped; a rattling of chains and then silence. All very dramatic but a buzz on the P. A. system told us we had arrived in Freetown. Portholes were to remain closed. We may go up on deck but on no account were we to remove our shirts nor buy anything from the natives. By mid-day the temperature below decks was almost unbearable and there was no respite from that for a further two weeks. Salt water showers were available at all times, it was just a matter of stripping and walking through the shower. No need for a towel, but in any case that was reserved for absorbing perspiration and we became accustomed to the salt water. Food on board was very good under the circumstances. Two orderlies from each "table" would collect it from the galley (vocabulary still improving) and dish up, and after the meal two more orderlies would clean the tables and wash up. The chores were shared on a roster basis at each table, and each had some duty to perform every few days. We were very fortunate in that we were cadets and not yet real airmen we spent some of our time attending lectures in the second class lounge. We estimated there were about 3000 troops aboard. There was lots of talent for the almost daily concerts. A daily newssheet called "DER TAG”, together with the P.A. system kept us up-to-date with the news. The 9 o-clock news was a must.
Five weeks out of Liverpool it who getting cold again, even below decks, and greatcoats were essential deckwear for the endless lifeboat drills. There were lifeboats but for most of us it was a matter of parading on deck near a stack of Carley floats. The subject was better not discussed, there was no satisfactory answer to abandoning ship.
The Mooltan carried one gun mound at the stern above the propellers, manned by a RoyaI Artillery crew in transit. It seemed to be of about 4" calibre but was not fired during our voyage. It was said the deck would cave in, but this might have been an exaggeration. There were also two ramps off the stern for depth charges of which there was a supply near the ramps. The sixth week was really cold and wet and we estimated our position as somewhere in Antarctica. We then turned more or less north and after a total of seven weeks dropped anchor late one afternoon a few miles out at sea, with much speculation about our location. At about 7 pm. the shore was like Blackpool illuminations. Wherever we are, don`t they know there's a war on? A buzz on the P.A. system told us we would be disembarking next day and our British currency would be of no use to us in this foreign country. We should hand-in all currency, and get a receipt which would be exchanged for local currency when we got ashore. Next morning we entered the docks and disembarked. It was only then we found we were in Durban and were taken straight to the Transit Camp at Clairwood. The army contingent remained on-board and were understood to be bound for action in the Middle
East. So we had arrived in South Africa, and a very congenial and pleasant place it turned out to be.
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[underlined] SOUTHERN RHODESIA [/underlined] .
Clairwood Camp was just a few miles from Durban and there we spent 7 days, very enjoyable, but for the first two days, stoney broke. We had handed in all our money aboard ship but it was to be 10 days before it was exchanged for local currency. However, we seemed to get into Durban every day and we were made very welcome in the Service canteens and clubs.
Before I left England, I was given a card which stated that LAC Cliff. Watson was the son of a respected member of the Battersea Rotary Club and any co-operation afforded to him would be greatly appreciated. I noticed the Rotary insignia at the doorway of a Barclays bank in Durban and asked to see the manager. Could I please borrow £5 and I would refund it as soon as I was paid. 45 years later I would certainly not undertake such a venture. It happened to be the first Friday in the month which was the day of the monthly Rotary luncheon. The three lads from Battersea were invited to lunch and each given £10 on condition that we did not refund it. This was hospitality indeed. Several times in Durban we were entertained by the local people, and of course the environment was completely strange to us, so were the bunches of bananas, pawpaws and other fruits.
After about a week to regain our land legs, we embarked on a train and steamed north. The train was a coal burner and we were aboard for 3 days bound for Bulawayo. Food on the train was really first-class. At one stage we were told to disembark for a spot of exercise [sic] and whilst this was in progress the train moved off. We were marched in a direction at right-angles to that of the train and met up with it about an hour later. This was my first experience of African trains, and the 4-berth cabins, rather superior to even today's "sleepers" in Britain. Looking back on it 35 years later when I was concerned with radio communications between trains and stations in the U.K., - my firm was trying to Introduce a communications system-, I recalled chatting with the Radio Officer in his Radio Cabin on the train whist he was on the morse key in contact with the station at Mafeking. It was many years later that communication with trains in Britain was established.
After a very pleasant three-day journey, we arrived in Bulawayo and buses took us to Hillside Camp, formerly the Agricultural Show Ground. We were accommodated literally in what had been the Pig Sties. These were merely wattle poles supporting corrugated iron roofs with hessian round the poles to represent walls. The whole structure was whitewashed and with plenty of fresh air the accommodation was ideal. There must have been about 600 trainee pilots at Hillside Camp, and we embarked on a second I.T.W. course of ground training. There was however a single Tiger Moth on which we learned to swing the prop. and start the engine. So at last we had sat in an aeroplane although it wasn't going anywhere. At least it was supposed to be anchored down, but an Australian did taxi it a hundred yards or so after an evening of celebration.
Our stay in Bulawayo was certainly very pleasant, we visited Cecil Rhodes grave at Matopas, the ancient ruins of Zimbabwe, spent weekends on farms, enjoyed the swimming and so on, but our minds were on the war of which we were not feeling a part. Pearl Harbour had brought the
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Americans into the fray, several Capital Ships had been lost and things were going badly 'up north'.
In January came a very welcome posting, to 25 E.F.T.S. (Elementary Flying Training School) at Belvedere, on the outskirts of Salisbury. Here the day started at 0400 and we enjoyed tea and toast of our own making before assembling at 0425 for two-mile march to the airfield. By 0500 half the course would be standing-by for flying and the other half lectures and more ground training. Breakfast was between 0900 and 1030 hrs. which included the 2 mile march each way, and after breakfast the two halves of the course changed over. Flying started on the sixth of Jan. with what was to be a typical day, with 30 minutes of flying instruction at 0515, and lectures after breakfast. Addresses by two ex-fighter pilots F/O Newton and a Flight Sergeant whose left leg was in plaster. The following day I managed to get in an hour’s flying with P/O Bentley, concentrating on turns, glides and climbing. From the outset the instructor frequently cut the throttle without warning sometimes deliberately putting the aircraft into a spin. then telling the pupil to get on with it. My next flying session was with Ft/Sgt Oates as P/O Bentley was on leave and in six weeks of flying instruction managed 12 hours with 7 different instructors. A final three hours was spent with F/O Newton in one hour sessions and I was full of confidence and looking forward to the C.F.I.'s test the following day.
Maybe in retrospect I was over confident, even though most of my friends had been "scrubbed", including Hancocks, Robinson, Morgan, King, Barlow, Vivian, Bolton, Friend, Britton, Jones and Fry. Having made what I thought were two acceptable circuits and landings, the C.F.I.'s final remarks were "Sorry old lad, but as a Service Pilot you make a bloody good rear gunner". I did not regard these as being the words of the Prophet, but so ended my career as a u/t Pilot after 9 months in the R.A.F.
All was not lost however, like all the others whose Personal file was stamped "wastage", I found myself at Disposals Depot, which also happened to be at Belvedere, and in good company. All of us were sadly disillusioned and disappointed at failing the Pilot's Course, and the reasons given for the apparent failure were seldom accepted. Where do we go from here in the long term was the main question, and the opportunity to influence this came at an interview at Group H.Q. in Salisbury. The only guidance came from others who had already had their interviews and were awaiting a posting. The alternatives appeared to be many, we could opt out completely and remuster to ACH GD, reduced to the lowest rank of Airman 2nd. Class and thence take pot luck with no trade and no personal ambition. But we had joined the R.A.F. with too much purpose for this to be acceptable. We could apply for training as Observer which at that time embraced both Navigator and Bomb Aimer duties, but we were meeting chaps just starting that course who had waited six months for it after failing the pilot's course, and this indicated that it could be a year more before we qualified. The most logical answer appeared to be the Air Gunner Course which lasted only six weeks, and apparently with hardly any waiting list, so in less than two months it seemed we could become a sergeant with half a wing, not quite what we set out to achieve, but a far cry from where we stood at the time.
At the interview at Group H.Q. I asked why I had failed and was shown the comments made by my instructors. With the exception of the
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C.F.I.’s comment they were all favourable and I became a little argumentative. For the first time I learned that on the C.F.I. test I had climbed at less than full throttle but at the correct air speed with the normal rate of climb. What I should have done apparently was give it full throttle, keeping the correct air speed and letting the rate of climb take care of itself. On the training aircraft the emphasis had been on speed and rate of climb whereas it should have been on speed only and full throttle.
I remarked that the C.F.I.'s aircraft was more like a Gladiator than a Tiger Moth. The alternative careers were as we had deduced amongst ourselves and I applied to remuster to u/t Wireless Operator/Air Gunner and to do the A/G course as soon as possible. This was approved on the spot, and my file was endorsed “Watson requests an A/G course merely for the quickness in getting onto ops." I was supposed to start the course the following week.
It was to be three months before I was actively posted to Moffat to do the Air Gunner Course, and the greater part of this was spent on leave, returning to camp periodically to check progress. We had only to walk along the road away from town to be offered a lift which generally meant spending the rest of the day with new friends, and quite often arranging to spend a week or so with them. It was on the 15th. of Feb. Tom King and I were spending 10 days leave with our hosts Mr. & Mrs. Bedford at Poltimore Farm, Marandellas that we listened to Churchill's speech, with the dreadful news of the fall of Singapore. This led to a general discussion on the likely future plans of the war and it was generally felt there would be an allied landing at Dakar with the assistance of the French, and the forces would move north and then east to catch Rommel in a pincer movement. Not too far out in our argument, only 2000 miles, but we had the general scheme and timing right. Later we were shown around the tobacco "barns" where 12,000 leaves were drying in each of 10 barns. My diary records that "one of the most interesting things we were shown was the castrating of 300 pigs" A rather messy business", perhaps I was less squeamish in those days. Later about 2000 head of cattle were dipped including 3 wicked looking bulls. The two children tried to keep us amused, and with great success. We repaired their bicycles, small car, swing and dolls' house furniture, the dolls house being about 20 feet square. We carved out the names Wendy (8) and Cliff (20) on a tree and really began to enjoy the Rhodesian way of life. We cycled over to Chakadenga Farm and had tea with Mrs. Nash and also met the local jailer. We tried to repay all this kindness by making ourselves generally useful, and I recall changing the oil in Mrs. Nash's Chevrolet and repairing the lights. We also refitted the long-wire aerial on the house radio and refurbished the engine house which accommodated the lighting plant and batteries.
We tried to spend.as much time away from camp as possible, our idea being 'out of sight, out of mind'. Occasionally the S.W.O caught up with us and we were detailed for guard duty on the aerodrome, a 12 hour guard working 2 hours on and four off. The complete guard comprised 6 airmen, 4 on standby in the guard room, one cycling around the aerodrome and one standing in a sentry box at the side of the double gates which were normally closed. There were neither fences-nor ditches linking the gate posts and it was easier to drive a car onto the airfield on the wrong side of the gate posts than to bother with the gate. Generally the Orderly Officer carried out his inspection about 7.pm. but on one
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occasion suddenly appeared about 3 am. from the direction of the airfield and drove up to the main gate on his way out, parking so near the gate it could not be opened. I turned out the guard, which took about 5minutes and we were treated to a tirade and lecture covering several subjects including how utterly futile the guard was. One of the chaps said “you are absolutely right Sir" which made matters worse and he stormed back into his car. The headlights had been left on and the car wouldn't start, so we leaned our rifles against the sentry box and pushed the car backwards so we could open the gates. Finally the entire guard pushed the car forward and it started without trouble, but headed back towards camp. We decided to remain at the open gate, and a few minutes later the car returned at great speed, and disappeared through the gate in a tremendous cloud of dust without further formality. We had good laugh but it did little for the morale of chaps whose ambitions had been thwarted and who felt they were wasting their time in the R.A.F. and, even more so in guarding a gate which had no real purpose with blank ammunition and rifles which it would be too dangerous to fire. By the end of March the aerodrome guard was taken more seriously and comprised 24 Europeans and about 60 Africans, which meant the remustering aircrew trainees were on guard every few nights. I was given the job running the Post Office and Stores which exempted me from guard duties but also curtailed my leave periods.
On the 3rd. April Tom King and 20 others were posted to 24 C.A.O.S. at Moffat, near Gwelo, about half-way between Salisbury and Bulawayo, for their Air Gunner Course. The intake was 50 per month and we wondered where the other 40 had come from. Meanwhile Ray Chislett the other member of the Battersea trio- was doing extremely well at Cranbourne flying Oxfords. Root and Robertson were killed the previous day in a Harvard whilst officially on practice instrument flying but actually beating up a tree and misjudging matters
On the 1st. of May, I was posted to Moffat and started the A-G course. Things seemed to be happening in our favour at long last; and had been delayed because of a large influx of remustered ground crews who had got out of Singapore just in time, and also another large influx of Aussies for Air Gunner training. It was good to see Tommy King pass out as a Sgt. A-G and for Cpl. Luck to receive his commission.
On Sun. the 10th. of May there was a church parade in best blues and khaki topee, held in Gwelo. Two days later L.A.C. Chick Henbest, u/t A-G ex u/t Pilot shot a large hole in his own aircraft's tail. When he as charged with the offence he brought an expert witness, the Station Armament Officer ! - to state that such a thing was technically impossible. The Air-Gunner training was partly intergrated [sic] with that of the Navigator's, and on the 13th. May on such an occasion 'Ace' Buchanan and another A-G, piloted by Sgt. Reed, force-landed near QueQue and were missing for 5 hours
In the four weeks at Moffat we carried out 9 hours of Air firing in Anson aircraft using a Vickers Gas Operated gun of .303 calibre. This was mounted on a Scarfe ring with the gunner standing and firing at a drogue towed by a Miles Master aircraft. 200 rounds were fired during each exercise [sic] , the 3 "pans" of ammo. having been filled by the gunner and then 'doctored' by an armourer with faulty rounds, and other simulated faults. The only turrets available were on the ground, and comprised an ancient Frazer Nash, Daimler and electrical Boulton & Paul. A total of 4 hours was spent in them. We were supposed to swing the
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turret aiming at moving light images on the wall but in practice the bulbs in the ring-sights were all faulty.
On the 29th. May we graduated and were presented with brevets and tapes. The course was posted to Capetown but I had to report to Salisbury to give evidence at Gooding's Court Martial. Gooding had stolen my Agfa Carat camera and scores of other items in Bulawayo. Meanwhile on the news, 1000 Bombers over the Rhur [sic] again and 37 missing. A few days previously the very first raid on this scale was made on Cologne with 44 aircraft missing. The Middle-East war was becoming more intensive and in Russia Jerry was in real trouble, but we seemed a very long way from it all.
One of my friends on the Pilots course was Ian Smith who lived in Salisbury and with whom I used to go looking for buck in the early mornings. Ian had failed the course like most of us but being a Rhodesian had obtained his discharge locally and joined the Southern Rhodesia Light Battery currently at the K.G. VI barracks. I went to the barracks in the afternoon and saw Norman, and was introduced to Solomon, Slim and other Rhodesians in the S.R. Army Medical Corps. After tea in the mess we went to the local bioscope to see 'East of the River'. On the 13th. of June I managed to get another 19 days leave which was spent with Mr. & Mrs. James at their farm at Gilston, about 16 miles south of Salisbury. With three Aussies we had a wonderful holiday, riding, cycling, tennis, swimming, all at the farm. We rode up to the bushman's caves in a copje 4 miles into the bundu and photographed them. To the Aussies it was like being home and I concluded there was no alternative to this sort of life.
On my return to Disposals Depot my stolen camera was returned to me and I found that Gooding was on yet another charge,- stealing a W/T Set - . A few more days leave to say cheerio to all my friends in Salisbury, and I returned to Gwelo to find that I was posted to Bulawayo to give evidence at the Court Martial. I stayed with Mr. & Mrs. Rose for a week or so and spent some time at the Cement works where Mr. Rose was Manager. I was offered a job there if I would return after the war and for a long time this formed the basis of my post-war plan, but a great deal was to happen before that time came. The Court Martial was a very formal affair, and Gooding was charged with theft on about 45 counts. He had not disposed of anything he had stolen for personal gain, and pleaded Kleptomania. He was sentenced to dismissal from the R.A.F. after immediate return to U.K., and recommended for psychiatric observation. He survived the war, certified unfit for Military service and resumed his career with a firm of solicitors in Surrey. The case was finished just in time for me to join the rest of the course on the 1st. of July at Bulawayo station. In Gwelo I had bought a tin trunk which was now nearly full of presents, pyjamas for Hilda, stockings for Mum, embroidering material, tobacco, cigarettes, jam and so on.
After a 55 hour train journey we arrived in Kapstaad and enjoyed Iunch with John Heggarty before joining another train to Retreat and the drive to Polsmoor Transit Camp by bus. It rained heavily for a couple of days and the activity was just one big reunion. I met friends I had not seen since Newquay. Dicky Aires and Jack Frost were there as Sgt. pilots, Howard Iliffe (1090111) and Bob Hildred also, having trained as pilots at George, in the Union. Arthur Brittain a Sgt. Observer and Stewart Evans who was in the Officers Mess at Kumalo. In the next four
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weeks we spent most of our time in Capetown, making a beeline for the Soldiers Club. The welcome we received from the South Africans was positively overwhelming, and people were literally queueing up to entertain us. On the 4th. of July a group of four of us including Ray Chislett and two Maltese soldiers met Mrs. Williams and had tea at her flat. After tea we motored out to a vineyard and got quite merry on four glasses of their own wine. On the way out one of the tyres was punctured and it took us less than three minutes to change the wheel. In the evening we went to the Odeon Bioscope at Seapoint with complimentary tickets which appeared from out of the blue. Howard. Iliffe, John Heggarty and I spent a great deal of time together in Capetown where Howard & I met two young ladies. One of them, introduced as Cheri de la Chene said she was French and had spent five years in Paris, but she could not understand my efforts at speaking French. John Heggarty had quite a brainwave and I introduced him as a member of the Free French Forces,-L'Aviation Francais Libre-. John was absolutely fluent in native French and soon discovered that Cheri was neither French nor a University student, but a schoolgirl of 14 at the Convent. Whilst in Capetown I met Binedall with whom I used to correspond before the war, and he gave me a large matchbox which I left with Mrs. Williams' mother to be collected after the war. I have left it rather too late. The climb up Table Mountain with Ray was very interesting and from the top we had a wonderful view of Muizeuburg. This reminds me of one night during a trial blackout at Muizenburg, Heggarty and I met Mrs. Macbeth who invited us to dinner on the following day. We gladly accepted and on arrival at the house next day referred to her as Mrs. Shakespeare. This was laughed off and we spent a very enjoyable evening. After dinner we went to a show in Muizenburg and met a lady who had lived near Battersea Park. In 1952 in Mbeya in Tanganyika I was talking to another 'Radio Ham' in Muizenburg arid mentioned my faux pas with Mrs. Macbeth's name. He said he was living in Mrs. Macbeth's guest house and she had related the story at dinner only a few days previously. Stuttafords of Adderley Street provided a very interesting experience for Heggarty and me. We wandered into a tea-room the likes of which we had never seen before, it seemed the ultimate in luxury. We asked mildly for just two cups of tea but up came the whole works of silver teaset with lots of pastries and cakes. We said no thankyou, really, just two cups of tea, but the lady was adamant. We said it was jolly nice but funds were limited and the cakes were beyond our means. She said she would be very cross if we didn't have at least half a dozen cakes and then gave us a bill -for 1/3d. Fixed charge for two, she said. Wonderful people, it was embarrassing at times. We called in a Milk Bar for a milkshake and they insisted it was on the house. We would buy a bunch of grapes for a 'ticky', -3d- and they refused payment. One Saturday Ray and I spent the day with the Brandt family who lived at Rosebank . We went for a run with them in the car in the afternoon, round Table Mountain and took some very good photographs. They also drove us to the Lion Match Company's factory in Capetown, where we were given a tour - and quite a lot of labels- a wonderful finale to my first trip to Africa.
After meeting up with our old friends whose paths had taken many different ways and finally converged, but not without the loss of several due to accidents, the resentment at failing the pilot's course had just about worn off. The original crowd of rookies at Newquay were still basically together and covering all aircrew 'trades'. Someone had
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[photograph]
[underlined] AIR GUNNER COURSE [/underlined]
[underlined] APRIL 1942 [/underlined] [underlined] 24 C.A.O.S. MOFFAT, GWELO. [/underlined] [underlined] S. RHODESIA [/underlined]
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[underlined] POSTSCRIPT [/underlined]
The A/G course was rather an anti-climax after the concentration and determined outlook on the pilots course. Most of us felt we had wasted our time and had been let down.
During a "lecture" on the Browning gun by Cpl. Paddy Gilligan he noticed correctly that my eyes were closed and pointing to me, yelled "You, what was I saying?", I replied "You were saying 'as the breach block moves to the rear the cam on the rear sear rides along that on the barrel extention [sic] . . . ' There followed a discussion on my detailed phraselogy [sic] and he wound up by shouting "Your problem Watson is you don't speak effing english". I replied that I try to speak the King's english Cpl! and that did it, he swore to fix me. Study of the Browning gun comprised learning parrot-fashion the sequence of events and other odd statistics such as effective range and rate of fire. There was a drawing on the wall which gave us some idea of what it looked like, but the Browning was something for the future, the R.A.F. currently uses the V.G.O. or so we were told. The following day Gilligan told me to go to the billet and make sure the African had cleaned all the lampshades, including the one in his little room. This I did and two hours later reported they were all clean. The next day with no preamble I was told to report to the Orderly Room immediately. I was marched in to the C.O. and charged with failing to carry out an order, and also making a false report. Gilligan gave evidence and said the lampshade in his billet was filthy, I could not have checked it. The C. O. accepted this and I was given a severe rep. and 7 days jankers. I went straight away to the billet and I asked the S.W.O. to accompany me. He delegated a Sgt. Clerk and together we checked the offending lampshade. Sure enough it was filthy. I found the african cleaner and he swore that he had cleaned the shade but the Cpl. had then made him change it for one in the next but where they were all dirty. We all trooped next door and saw that all were indeed filthy except one.
The Sgt. could see what Gilligan was up to and endorsed my written report addressed to the C.O. which also applied for redress of grievance. The result was that my Severe Rep. was cancelled and so was the balance of the jankers.
At the end of the course the exam. papers were marked by Gilligan and he gave me 61% in all subjects which was the absolute minimum for a pass. Again I wrote to the C.O. and he agreed that Gilligan was up to his tricks again. He changed the exam. results to an average of 93% If I had not been so argumentative I could very well have "failed the course"
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to fly the thing, but there was a lot of other work to be done also. A cutting from the Rhodesia Herald whilst at Moffat spelt it out:-
I wished to be a pilot,
And you, along with me;
But if we all were pilots,
Where would the Air Force be?
It takes guts to be a gunner,
To sit out in the tail,
When the Messerschmitts are coming,
And the slugs begin to wail.
The plot's just a chauffeur;
It's his job to fly the plane;
But it's we who do the fighting,
Though we may not get the fame.
If we must all be gunners,
Then let us make this bet;
We'll be the best damn gunners
That have left this station yet
Nearly half a century later it does seem somewhat corny.
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[underlined] OPERATIONAL TRAINING. [/underlined]
And so to the 2nd. August 1942; we boarded HMT J/6, The Monarch of Bermuda and were shown to our cabins, stowed our kit and were issued with passes to go ashore until 1500 hrs. A last look at Table Mountain and Kapstaad and at 1630 on the 3rd. we left South Africa, hoping and firmly intending one day to return. The 10 day voyage to Freetown was a very pleasant cruise, escorted by two Battle Cruisers and three Corvettes and accompanied by The Empress of Russia, we ploughed along at a steady 12 knots. Our favourite pastime was reading the inter-ship messages on the Aldis lamps. Among other things we learned that one of the Empress's boilers was u/s and shut down. Which limited the speed of the whole convoy. There were several U Boat warnings during daylight and these coincided with lifeboat drills, which were taken very seriously.
The accommodation was very good, all the R.A.F. NCOs being accommodated six in each cabin. The cabins were equipped as they had been for luxury cruising pre-war, each with a toilet room with saltwater shower. The portholes remained open the whole time, but this time we were on 'A' and not 'D' Deck. In the Sgts Mess Italian P.O.W.'s waited upon us, and make a very good job of it. All fatigues are carried out by them and they caused no trouble at all. The vigilance of the Polish guards probably influenced that, their bayonets being fixed ALL the time, and there were few words passing between the guards and prisoners, just a few gestures with the bayonet. The Poles had been in action since August 1939 and were a long way from home, first defending their country, evacuating to Yugoslavia, and then making their way to Abadan to join the British. There were 1800 Italian prisoners aboard, mostly captured in Bardia and Tobruk about two years previously. They were a meek and miserable-looking lot. One of our 'stewards' who we called 'Grandpa' was a Cpl Major, and had medals for the Bolshevist and Abbysinian [sic] wars. He spoke very little English, but excellent French, and in return for a few cigarettes made me a bracelet in which he put photos of my fiancee [sic] , Hilda, and me. The material was similar to duralumin and he claimed it was a piece from a shot-down British Bomber in Abbysinia [sic] , a most unlikely story. His only tools were a pen-knife, a razor blade and a 4” nail for engraving. The Italians were confident the Axis would win the war and were expecting Stukas, Fokker Wolfe Condors and 'U' Boats to appear at any time.
There were several hundred European civilians aboard, mostly evacuees from Alexandria and Cairo, who seemed to think they owned the ship. Many of them were ducked during the Crossing the Line ceremony, we claimed exemption, being old timers at that sort of thing!!
There was some form of entertainment almost every evening; mainly variety concerts organised by the troops. During one of these I recall a wounded ex 8th-Army Soldier impersonating Stanley Holloway in his Northern accent with a poem,
"The Reason Why"
The unity of Empire .is seen in ships galore,
As they plough in convoy fashion, to Britain's island shore,
Across the world's big oceans, around continents as well,
The Bulldog breed keeps up the creed that history will tell.
We've roughed it on this convoy, we've lived like herded sheep,
Yet all can see, it's got to be, if freedom's cause we'll keep
We're mixed like breeded cattle, the R. A. F. as well,
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That R.A:F. who two .years ago Just drove the 'uns to 'ell.
They say the good ship Monarch, J6 her tag, goes back to Afric [sic] shortly,
but always behind that Flag.
The Flag we're fighting Jerry for,
the Flag of which we're proud,
the Flag which may be a tattered rag,
but with honoured blood endowed.
In that environment and atmosphere this was pretty stirring stuff.
On the 14th. of August we dropped anchor in Freetown. Just as a year ago, it was very hot and humid, with an overcast sky. This time we were not restricted to below decks, but enjoyed the freedom of the ship and were able to trade with the natives. Sunderland seaplanes were seen patrolling out to sea, with Walrus amphibeans [sic] doing about 60. m.p.h., around the harbour. There was lots of signalling between ships and we could cope with the morse, but the semaphore was too advanced and clever for us.
Sunday the 16th at 0600 the Monarch and the Empress slipped out of Freetown and rejoined the Royal Navy out at sea. We were a little concerned for an hour or two, as the sun was rising on the port beam, but we eventually turned right and the sun returned to it's proper place, astern. We expected to reach England by thursday, but rumours of the invasion of France were rife and my diary actually records that this might delay us a little!. The general topic of conversation was what would it be like going through Customs. We were advised on the P.A. system to hand in any unauthorised arms and ammunition, including loot taken from the enemy. I had 3 kitbags, a tin trunk, suitcase and issue R.A.F. webbing and packs, and somewhere in that lot was 25 lbs. of sugar, 10 lbs of tea, 8 pairs of silk stockings, 2 dress lengths, 15lbs. of jam, lady's pyjamas, 2000 cigarettes and other dutiable material. I also had a very small .22 revolver in my pocket and decided to risk it. It was really a toy, hardly a weapon of war. In the very early hours of the 26th. of August we docked at Greenoch. An hour later our party of 240 or so assembled on deck with a mountain of kit, all newly trained sprog aircrew sergeants. The train pulled in to within 100 yards of the ship and in less than 30 minutes we were on our way by train to Glasgow, then on to London. Whilst changing stations in London, I telephoned the office, BATtersea 8485, at 0730 and was disappointed that Hilda was not yet at work!
We arrived at no. 3 P.D.C. Bournemouth and moved into luxury hotels, expecting to be sent on leave immediately, hardly worth unpacking, but this was not to be. We were interviewed several times, medically examined, kit reorganised and generally messed about for a week. According to my pay book, I was a Sgt. Air Gunner, u/t Wireless Operator, and at one interview I was told that this could not be so. Either I could stay as a Sgt. A-G or lose my tapes and become an AC2 u/t Wireless op., eventually doing a wireless op. course. It was emphasised that the whole business of training was highly organised into streams, and once in the main stream it was better to drift with it rather than to try and change course. Streams could not cross, but only merge. All very academic and enlightening so it was agreed that u/t wireless op. would be deleted from my paybook, and of course, having done a couple of tours as a rear gunner I could always apply for a wireless course.
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That's what the man said and I was in no position to argue, 'Just a couple of tours'.
A week later we were on leave, and Hilda met me at Waterloo after just over a year apart. We had a few hours in London before going up to Barnoldswick to take my mother by surprise. After five rather hectic days of visiting relatives and friends we returned to London and met Hilda's parents and relatives, for just one day before returning to Bournemouth.
We were billeted in an attic at Ocean Lodge and took our meals at the Vale Royal. The food was the most unappetising and uninteresting we had seen in the R.A.F. so far. Life in Bournemouth consisted entirely of parades, square bashing, P.T. drill, lectures and swimming, each activity taking place some miles away from the previous one.
Bournemouth was full of sprog air crews, 90% Sergeants, few realised what the future might hold, and; in retrospect, I don't recall even thinking about it.
We were clear of Bournemouth on the 2nd. of October, and posted to 25 O.T.U., Finningley. near Doncaster.
The first 14 days were spent in lectures, practical work on guns in the armoury, and in firing on various ranges. We were introduced to the FN20 rear turret and relieved to have the opportunity of stripping the .303 Browning guns. We who had trained in Rhodesia did not advertise the fact that we had never actually seen a real Browning gun, only a wooden model, all our air-firing having been carried out on V.G.O.'s [Vickers Gas Operated) guns. We had spent several hours in a turret on the ground in Rhodesia. A Boulton & Paul electrically operated mid-upper type as fitted to a Defiant but bearing no resemblance to the rear turrets of Wellingtons and Whitleys.
11th. November was relatively peaceful at Finningley. In the world outside the Allies had landed in North Africa and occupied the coastal strip from Casablanca, through Oran to 50 miles east of Algiers where the big build-up was taking place. Jerry was being pushed towards Tunisia and Rommel's Afrika Corps was in full retreat in Libya, having been pushed out of Egypt, The Huns marched into hitherto unoccupied France and hard fighting was still going on in Stalingrad. Madagascar was in British hands. My diary records that Jerry lost over 600 aircraft in two days, according to the B.B.C. Nearer home I also recorded that "I flew today for the first time with my pilot, Sgt. Rutherford, and with Sgt. Bishop, W/optr., on circuits and bumps. Our Navigator Allan Willoughby is at Bircotes doing cross-countries". For some of us the pace was slow, and some of the time was spent in 'Brains Trust' sessions. Here a team of experts would sit on the platform and questions on any subject would be asked by the rest of us. In reply to the question "How do you think we should deal with the Huns after the war?", the M.O. replied "Castrate the bloody lot, the R.A.M.C. could do that in only a couple of weeks". Most of the discussions however were in a more serious vain. Over this period the weather was not very good. No 14 Course crews have been helping the Landgirls digging up potatoes and 12 Course chaps were heaving coal, We then had coal and coke allocated and delivered to our billets, which eliminated the need to pinch it from the Officers' Mess. we were accomodated [sic] in the peace-time married quarters close to their Mess.
One of our Wimpies from Bircotes crashed into a Beaufighter near Caernarvon where my sister was stationed in the W.A.A.F. There were no
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[photograph]
[photograph] [underlined] REG WHELLAMS [/underlined]] 1333520
[underlined] AT 25 OTU FINNINGLEY [/underlined]
(10 FORSTER RD. WALTHEMSTOW E.17 )
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survivors. A Defiant crashed near my home in Barnoldswick and we pressed on with the routine of local flying, stripping nothing more interesting than guns, and lectures and so on.
My diary records that on the 9th. December, after a little over two months we were taken by lorry to Bircotes to fly as a crew. Losses were high, on a Bullseye on London we lost three aircraft. One of them apparently ditched without trace near the French Coast, the only clue to this being their dinghy which would have been released automatically striking the water. A second crew headed by Ft/Lt. Anneckstein crashed into the watch office, killing the Bomb Aimer who was stretched out in the bombing position. A third crew crashed on landing at Bircotes, without fatality, but with the crew rather shaken-up. We were living Nissen huts about 2 miles from the 'hangars' and 3/4 mile from the in the other direction. The place was a sea of mud in parts and we generally washed AFTER breakfast for some reason which eludes me after 45 years
One point in favour of Bircotes, it was on the Great North Road and just before Christmas I enjoyed a 48 hr. leave with Hilda in London! I met Tommy King in Battersea who was a Rear Gunner on Halifaxes with three ops. to his credit, all to Italy. A brief respite and back to Bircotes. The flying aspect was proving more interesting now, I could see a little beyond my own situation and get involved to some extent in the general carry-on of working as a crew. We had a first-class Skipper, Sgt. Stan. Rutherford, a down-to-earth tough New Zealand sheep farmer. Our Navigator Allan Willoughby from the West country whom we regarded as the Academic member of the crew, but who suffered greatly from air sickness. On those occasions our Bomb Aimer Stan Chadderton from Liverpool took over the navigation without any problems. Stan trained as an Observer - which included both Bomb aiming and Navigating in the U.S.A. and we were thus very fortunate in having a standby navigator. Our Wireless Operator Harry Dyson was from Huddersfield possibly the socialite of the crew, and fancied his chances in the rear turret, giving me a welcome change on occasions.
I started the New Year well by having four runaway guns, over Missen, the bombing range, splattering a main road. The safety catches were 'off' and the guns ready for instant action almost all the time the air, and the reason the guns fired has not been fully explained. I vaguely put it down to a build-up of hydraulic pressure in the triggering system. This did not fool the Armourers who put it down finger trouble on my part - literally.
By the 7th. of Jan. we had completed all our day-flying details of cross-countries, bombing, air firing etc. and were suddenly posted to 30 O.T.U. Hixon, in Staffordshire to complete the night flying excercises [sic] . It took three days visiting various sections to obtain signatures on a Clearance Certificate before we were free of Finningly [sic] , and the after we arrived at Hixon, we were despatched to the satellite airfield at Seighford. A week later we were still without aircraft at Seighford and when the Skipper, Navigator and W/op went to Finningley to collect one, Stan Chadderton & I took French leave and shot off to see respective Hildas. It was on that leave that Hilda and I decided to get married and arranged for bans to be called in Seighford and Battersea.
On the 24th. Jan, our night-flying excercises [sic] almost completed we enjoyed a new experience. We were put on the battle order and briefed for an attack on Lorient. Everything was rushed and finally when
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boarding the aircraft -which was u/s-, the raid -or our part in it- was cancelled. We were to have dropped six 500 lb. bombs in 10/10ths cloud and were warned about the fighters and lots of flak. We found later that the Americans had bombed Lorient in the afternoon followed by 121 aircraft of Bomber Command that night. One Stirling was lost. In early Feb. we were doing a 6 hour cross-country operational excercise [sic] simulating a real trip and towards the end of it were joyfully bombing what was thought to be our target on the bombing range. After dropping two sticks of 11 1/2 lb. practice bombs the "target" lights were extinguished and although we remained over them for a further 20 minutes they did not come on again. Thirty minutes later "W" William landed at base amid great consternation. Apparently the O. C. Night Flying had thought we were lost and had been sending up rockets. These were seen by the Stafford Fire Brigade who came dashing out to Seighford expecting a major disaster. On reporting to the Watch Office the Skipper was congratulated upon a successful bombing attack on Hixon aerodrome.
A few nights previously Jock King and crew had crash-landed on the Yorkshire moors. They were over the North sea, badly iced up and losing height gradually until they ran out of it on the moor. The aircraft was a complete write-off and the Rear Gunner very badly injured by the Brownings crashing into his chest. On the 7th. Feb. the whole crew went to the local church and heard the Banns called. Two aircraft were lost from our unit the previous night, one piled straight in at Hixon, all killed, and Sgt. Browning bounced off the runway and finished upside down in the adjacent field. The 11th. Feb. was my 21st. Birthday and the Crew got absolutely sloshed in Eccleshall. It was a memorable party and the Skipper and Bomb Aimer got themselves lost on the way home and spent part of the night in a ditch. On the 14th. we completed the last of our cross-country details. The pages of my diary covering this trip are indistinct having been submerged in water in 1949, but there were problems. The first 4 hours were spent on accurately flown courses, but there was difficulty in keeping to specific heights. The aircraft seemed to climb and alternately lose height for no explicable reason and this distracted the Skipper from the required accuracy. Eventually with only 60 gallons of fuel indicated, the Skipper called "Darky Darky this is Nemo xx .....". Up came a 'gate' of two searchlights and signalled the direction of a friendly runway. 10 minutes later we all developed an instant inferiority complex, we had landed at Wyton, the home of 109 Squadron Pathfinders. One Wellington Mk.111 bombed up with four small practice bombs, was parked amid Lancasters, Mosquitoes and B17 Fortresses. However we were made very welcome and at 0400 hrs. thoroughly enjoyed the bacon, egg, fried sausages, toast and marmalade etc. Had I known then, that 40 years hence I would be retired and settled within 4 miles of Wyton I would have been a happier man. Aircraft on the first raid of the war had taken off from Wyton. The next two weeks were very active with little actually achieved. We were briefed almost every day for something which was cancelled every time but with one exception. We were told to do an air test on an aircraft which was parked near the perimeter fence. The rear turret was almost touching the fence at the other side of which was a haystack and chicken coop. The ground was muddy and rather more revs than usual were needed to free the wheels and move the aircraft forward. The hurricane strength wind created completely demolished the hen coop and the haystack, and many of the hens became airborne as never before. There
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was no time for recriminations however, on landing we went straight to the briefing room and learned we, were on a Nickel that night. The Oxford Dictionary gives a different meaning, but to Air Crews 'Nickel' is a generic term for a bum fodder or leaflet raid. It did imply that someone had some confidence in us, maybe. The target was Paris.
At last we were over enemy-occupied territory, still on our side of the Rhine, and still a long way from it, but we were getting nearer and there was no lack of confidence, at least initially. Problems developed, first my ring-sight ferrel broke off, so there was no hope of accurate aiming if attacked, then my intercom microphone ceased to function. The fault was later found in the Rotating Service Joint below the turret. We had a standby signalling system of push button and lamp, but that too was out of order for the same reason. I could hear the skipper calling me on a routine check but had no means of replying. Receiving no reply, Barry Dyson crawled back to the rear turret to check up, not knowing what to expect. He had overlooked the fact that we were at 15.000 feet - the highest we had been at that time- and almost passed out due to lack of oxygen. He reconnected his adapter to the system just in time. He was also inadequately clothed for a temperature of -18C but putting 1800 lbs of leaflets down the flare chute restored his circulation. Di banged on the turret door and we exchanged greetings. He returned to his office and reporting my situation to the Skipper. Meanwhile I was incommunicado for the rest of the trip, but I could hear the others conversing. Shortly after that I felt the rotation of the turret was becoming sluggish and I tried to fire a short burst. Three of the guns fired one round each and then stopped, but number one was working. I cocked and recocked the guns several times, tried firing them manually and eventually three were working. I fired a short burst and regained a little confidence. An hour after leaving Paris the turret rotation would not respond to the hydraulics so I ensured that manual operation was still possible. I knew that to bale out I would have to open the turret doors, then the aircraft bulkhead door, grab my parachute pack, drag it through both doors and into the turret, rotate the turret onto the beam, fit the 'chute, open the doors, disconnect the intercom and oxygen and go out backwards. I decided to give it a try except for actually bailing out - and decided it was probably not feasible in the time available, but I did get the parachute into the turret and tucked it down the side. I learned a lot that night, more had gone wrong in my department on that one trip than during all my training. Di learned the odd lesson too, to wear more clothing in case he had to move away from the hot air system under his table.
The following day we were advised that our O.T.U. course was completed and the Skipper was asked to state the crew's preference either to join a squadron bombing Germany or to go overseas. Our preference for Germany was unanimous; after all, I was getting married and most of us had already been overseas!. And so we went our separate ways on 7 days leave
March 1st, 1943 perhaps the most important day of my life, Hilda and I were married. Staying at Hilda's home I took my cousin Frank to Trafalgar Square and showed him the Lancaster bomber, then on to St. Pauls Churchyard where I used to work and showed him a Stirling Bomber. He was thrilled with London and with the aircraft in particular. At 1pm we met Mum and Topsy at duCane Court and lunched in Balham, and whilst Mum and the others went to meet Hilda's folks, I went on to the Church,
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St. Mary's in Battersea. Some years later when I saw the photographs I realised I was wearing a white shirt with my airman's uniform. Hilda joined me at the Alter [sic] and looked absolutely lovely in her white wedding dress. The service was grand and the organist played two hymns. The church bells remained silent, they were reserved for signalling a possible enemy invasion. We enjoyed a wonderful reception at Hilda's home and on Monday we went to Lancing on honeymoon, the guests of Mr. & Mrs. Pittock at 10 Orchard Avenue. After a few days at Lancing I returned to camp and somehow organised more leave. At 0300 on the 10th. however the police delivered a telegram-which stated "Report to Hixon immediately, posted overseas". I tried to convince them that it was a joke on the part of the crew, and I was not stationed at Hixon in any case. However, at 0700 Hilda accompanied me to Euston where we said goodbye on the platform for the last time for several months at least. One night spent at Hixon, and the following day we travelled by train with two other crews to no. 1 P.D.C. West Kirby.
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1st. MARCH 1943 (WHITE SHIRT) 25 O.T.U. FINNINGLEY
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SECOND HONEYMOON SEPT ‘43
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[underlined] SECOND TIME TO AFRICA [/underlined]
At West Kirby we handed in our blue uniforms and were issued with army Khaki battle dress and tropical flying bowlers and helmets. Within a few days we embarked on a Dutch Vessel, the Johan van Vanderbilt in the Mersey, and were allocated first and second class cabins still equipped to. peace-time standards. Service in the Dining Hall was fabulous, staffed by natives from the Nederlands [sic] East Indies. The cuisine was superb, there was white bread and butter and sugar on the tables. A full breakfast at 0800, a peacetime lunch at 1300, tea at 1630 and dinner at 1900. Coffee was available in the Snr. N.C.O's lounge at any time during the morning. The Army Privates' quarters were similar to those we had experienced on the Moultan, sleeping in the same place as they eat, scrubbing everything by 0830 and with lots of bull. They had to wear greatcoats at all times whilst on deck and carry their life-jackets and water bottles. They not only manned the guns but were also detailed for lots of guard duties. Everything seemed to be guarded, but the reason was generally obscure. The cabins were shared with the Army Snr. N.C.O.s and they felt it quite a change to enjoy such comfort. The main topic of conversation was speculation about our destination, North Africa, Middle East or Far East? At a lecture on the 20th. March a senior Army Officer gave us a talk in the big second-class lounge, a very interesting run-down on the state of the war in all theatres. He dealt at some length with the North African campaign and said that very shortly the 1st. and 8th. Armies would meet and a few days after that Jerry would be slung right out of Africa. He wanted to dispel all rumours that we were part of a force invading the south of France. I cannot recall whether we were actually told in so many words, but we expected our destination was either Algiers or Bone.
The armourment [sic] on the Johann was comparatively small. We had about 10 Lewis guns, .303 calibre, and a naval gun at the stern, all manned by the army. There were about 16 ships in the convoy, with troops and cargo, protected by 5 Cruisers and Destroyers, and 2 Corvettes. Not as impressive perhaps as in August 1941, but a more wartime environment.
It was a feeling not entirely new to us, we knew by calculation that it was the 21st. of March and we were sitting comfortably in the First Class Lounge enjoying a coffee, but whereabouts on the Atlantic ocean was the ship? We know we had been heading east all morning so the chances. were we are heading for Gibralter [sic] , it was not warm enough for Freetown to be our destination. Where we were bound was open to speculation like most other vital factors affecting us. What were we going to do when we get to wherever it was? We were a Wellington crew which did not rule out finding ourselves on a Boston or Mitchell doing close army support work. And what after we had completed a tour of ops.? Chad the Bomb Aimer and Di the Wireless op. were both keen to remuster and train as Pilots. Allan Willoughby said he was 'marlish' and quite happy to carry on navigating. I felt the war would be over before we had finished our first tour. The Skipper said little but probably thought we were a bunch of dreamers, comparing us with his sheep back in N.Z.. We were not in fact approaching Gibralter [sic] , we had passed through the Straits during the night.
At 0300 on the 22nd. we were approaching the minefield off Algiers and were attacked by a Ju88 torpedo bomber. We heard the Johan's guns open up
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and the Windsor Castle received a direct hit from a torpedo on her stern, three members of her crew being killed. She also lost her steering and means of propulsion. Efforts were made to tow her into Oran without success but she sank at 1700 the same day. The Service personnel and remainder of the crew were taken aboard destroyers. Hurricanes arrived within minutes of the attack, but just too late and not ideal aircraft for the job at 0300 hrs. My diary - written up a few days after the event,- refered [sic] originally to The Duchess of Windsor and this was changed a few years later to the Windsor Castle.
There was no longer any secrecy about our destination. Di said the R.A.F. had opened an O.T.U. in Algiers, and we were destined to do another course. There were lots of rumours, but one fact was established, we had been in the R.A.F. over two years and we felt it was high time we did something towards the war effort.
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At 0300hrs. on the 23rd. March we were paraded on deck thankful for our greatcoats, which we were still wearing with great discomfort when we disembarked at 1100. A brief stop at an Aircrew Reception Centre, a large hotel on the sea-front, before going to the Aircrew Pool at Surcouf, about 30 miles from Algiers. There was no great feeling of urgency here, the Allies had landed at Algiers on the 6th. of November and the Germans had already been driven some hundreds of miles, to the East.
It was just a matter of waiting, something that most servicemen became very good at. We could not take the initiative and start our own war, but could only make the best of it. Quoting from my diary, "Life at Surcouf is perfect, we share the officers' mess and enjoy typical French peacetime meals. Lots of Bully Beef but the Chef - a French Civilian - certainly knows how to camouflage it. Our chalet is literally on the beach and the sea never more than 20 yards away. We could swim all day long without the formality of swimming trunks, or walk around the village. Sometimes we hitch-hike Into Algiers". There was very little to do in the village, and I recorded that I found the French very unhelpful and generally impolite. We all carried side-arms of course. There was practically nothing to buy except strange local booze, the Americans had seen to all that when they passed through, and the bars seemed to be open all the time. Algeria was, politically, a part of Metropolitan France in the eyes of the French, it was home to many Frenchmen, and they probably realised it might never be quite the same again. After a three-week rest at Surcouf we reported to 150 Squadron at Blida, about 30 miles south of Algiers. This place was most certainly at war, there were Wellingtons, Hudsons, Hurricanes, Commandoes and Albacores for squadrons of Bomber, Coastal, Fighter and Transport Commands, and the Fleet Air Arm. With the exception of Transports and 142 and 150 Wellington Squadrons, all aircraft were controlled by Coastal Command. We were part of the North Africa Striking Force - so we were told. Life was good at Blida, most of the food was tinned and we enjoyed eggs and bully beef every day in the mess. Generally in the evenings we would have a fry-up of eggs and bread with more bully on the primus stove in the billet. The Mess Hall was used as both dining hall and lounge. The arabs wandered round the camp selling eggs and oranges but prefered [sic] to exchange them for food -- more bully beef.
The currency in use was the French Franc with an exchange rate of 200 to the £1 sterling in which we were paid. BMA (British Military Authority) notes were also in use but the most popular currency outside the town was the tin of bully. We were billeted in chalets formerly the peacetime living quarters of the French Air Force. Each chalet had four large rooms-and accommodated two Wellington crews. It was very pleasant to sit out on the verandah [sic] . My rather battered diary records that on the 28th. March 1943 we were discussing what we proposed to do on completion of our first tour. Rather naive, we would have little or no say in the matter. We had been allocated an aircraft, "F" for Freddie, but it was a case of one crew to one aircraft and its present owners had not quite finished their tour and were reluctant to part with it. For two days they had been bombing and straffing [sic] a large German convoy bound for Bizerta which was not left alone even when part of it had docked. We finally took over the aircraft and for five days were airborne for several hours each day. On the afternoon of the 5th. April we took off
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in "F" for Freddie for an hour's fighter affiliation excercise [sic] with two Hurricanes. Employing violent evasive action to make things difficult for the fighters, we crossed the coast about 10 miles east of Algiers at 3000 feet and passed directly over a British destroyer. The Navy was wide awake and saw a heavy bomber being chased by two Hurricanes, immediately opened fire on us with considerable light flak. The pilot of a third Hurricane which was on an operational patrol saw the mini-battle and joined in. When he saw that one of his chums was only 100 yards from my rear turret and happy to stay there, he realised that we were in a different ball game, peeled off and, carried on with his patrol, finally returning to Maison Blanche.
On the night of the 6th. April we bombed the Marshelling [sic] yards at TUNIS, with 3500 lb. and 54 30 lb. incendiaries. We bombed in one stick from 8000 ft. and surprisingly were held in searchlights which we lost at 3000 feet. Not a very good effort on our part, the bombs overshot the target but hit the aerodrome 3 miles north according to the timing point photograph. All 28 aircraft returned safely, two of them damaged There was little light flak but some heavy stuff said to be radar controlled. For an hour on the return journey I changed places with Harry Dyson, our Wireless op. On the 7th. we attacked troop concentrations at night making several bombing passes at low level and finally coming in very low firing 7 Brownings. Chad the bomb aimer used the two guns in the front turret, I had four in the rear and we carried beam guns on these occasions. Only the front gunner could see what he was firing at. One aircraft of 142 Squadron, G George was shot down by light flak. On the 10th. we raided MONSERRATO aerodrome in Sardinia, an aircraft was seen over the target with navigation lights on, visibility was good and we moved away hoping the runway lights would be switched in. The aerodrome remained in darkness and we dropped our bombs singly. There was no light flack from the aerodrome to worry us, and the aircraft with lights on was not seen again. After a further 30 minutes of stooging about we returned to Blida. There was a reasonable amount of heavy flak which we learned on return had downed one aircraft of 142 Squadron. - 2 in 2 nights-. On the way back a searchlight opened up a few miles ahead and the skipper put the nose down so we were at 2000 ft. when we passed directly over the searchlight. Stan Chadderton in the front turret opened fire and the Skipper told me when to open up, aiming straight down. The light stayed on after we had passed, pointing vertically, maybe we did a little damage, probably not. Inside the aircraft however, the dive had caused the Elsan lavatory to come loose and scatter it's contents over the floor.
The following morning, fearing the wrath of the ground crew when they saw the Elsan, we stayed in bed until noon and breakfasted in the billet. Eggs and fried potatoes, fried bread and tinned pears and fresh oranges, served by the wireless op. and rear gunner to the Skipper and the rest of the crew still in bed. In the afternoon we were stood down and Joe Shields (Sgt. Rimmer's Rear Gunner) and I went into Blida to try and find presents to take back to England. The bigger French shops were all closed - no stocks- and we scrounged around the Arab quarters, without success. I mentioned earlier that we always carried side-arms and several times we were crowded by the Arabs. Production of the revolver dispersed them but it could have been very tricky.
On the 14th. April we raided MONSERRATO for the second time, the first run-in at 8000 feet and then 6000 feet. Direct hits were seen on
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the aerodrome this time with 1000 and 250 pounders. No incendiaries were dropped but 10 minutes was spent 8 miles north of the town dropping leaflets. The leaflets were the "laissez-passer" type printed in German instead of the more usual Italian. An aircraft over the target area sporting an orange light seemed to be signalling to a searchlight. We assumed it was acting as a decoy for a night-fighter and the only one of us keeping an eye on it was the navigator standing at the astrodome.
The rest of us searched the allocated parts of the sky according to the book!. All our aircraft returned safely and reported good aiming. Photographs confirmed the success, but we had borrowed "M" Mother which was without a camera. The return journey was uneventful and crossing Mare Nostrum Di tuned in to the 9 o-clock news from London. The announcer Alvar Lidell read "Algiers reports that the R.A.F. Strategical Airforce in North Africa has continued to batter aerodromes in Tunisia and Sardinia, damaging runways and destroying aircraft on the ground, without loss to themselves". Someone remarked "That's one way of looking at it"!. Actually a few nights ago 142 Sqdn. had lost 2 in 2 nights. 150 Squadron had lost one but the crew bailed out. Four of the crew managed to get through the enemy lines but the Rear Gunner was wounded and there was no news of him for several weeks.
The docks at TUNIS received our attention on the night of the 17th. April, with very careful placing of 500 and 250 pounders. Direct hits were observed in the docks area and there was concentrated heavy flack. It didn't worry us, we were well below it at 6000 feet. There was lots of light flack mostly concentrated on an aircraft displaying red and green navigation lights. At one stage this aircraft came to within 600 yards on the starboard beam and we converged to about 300 yards. We clearly identified it as a Wellington and gave it a long inaccurate burst from the rear turret. On this occasion every fourth round was a tracer. The nav. lights were extinguished and the aircraft was not seen again. There was no satisfactory explanation as to the identity of this aircraft. A captured Wellington perhaps acting as a decoy but attracting most of the flak. Possibly one of ours with the lights switched on accidentally, one shall never know. Two aircraft are missing, piloted by Sgt. Chandler of 150 and Sgt. Lee of 142. One sent out an SOS and ditched but there was no signal from the other. On our return to Blida there was a blanket of cloud over the whole area and our 23 aircraft were diverted to Maison Blanche. One aircraft was known to have a damaged undercarriage, which collapsed on touch-down and was a write-off but there were no injuries. Road Transport was waiting to take us the 30 miles or so back to Blida and we finally got to bed at 6 am. We shared the lorry with Sgt. Leckie's crew who had bailed out over Tunisia on the 14th. The Squadron Leader had flown to Sousse and brought them back to Algeria. Leckie had himself crash-landed the aircraft with no hydraulics and only one engine, somewhere in Allied-occupied Tunisia.
On the 23rd. April my diary records a tedious week of activity which achieved very little. Every day we were briefed for a night op. and every day we did our Daily Inspections and air tests, but in the late afternoon the Sirocco came up suddenly and the trips were cancelled. During the week, two Albemarles crashed on the runway, both from Gibralter [sic] carrying supplies which included mail from U.K.
Our uniform since leaving West Kirby has been British Army Khaki but with shoes and no putees. Our R.A.F. blue shirts with collar and tie and also blue forage caps were not exchanged. We have no tropical
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kit and it is getting very warm here. Our aircraft "F" for Freddie, has been grounded all week with "G" George, both with a trimming box problem. The policy is still one crew to an aircraft, and we enjoyed a very easy week. On the 28th. we managed to borrow "D" Donald and bombed DECIMONANU again, this time with a 4000 lb. 'blockbuster’ and a few incendiaries for good measure. After bombing we stooged around for 30 minutes having a close look at fires on the ground. Searchlights waved about apparently aimlessly and the light flack with tracer seemed equally haphazard. At 3000 feet we were caught by one searchlight and within seconds were held in a cone of five. The lights were dazzling and the three of us manning guns all fired point blank, it being impossible to aim. In theory a combined rate of fire of over 8000 rounds per minute should have hit something worth while, but after a very short burst my four guns jammed, a problem seldom experienced. At only 3000 feet we were quickly out of range of the searchlights. We were over Blida at 0700 hours which was covered in fog and diverted again to Mason Blanche. We were not very popular at Maison B, everyone had-their own problems which were not always appreciated by others on different types of aircraft performing widely differing types of work. We were in bed at Maison B. by 1000 hrs. probably without the knowledge of the 'owners' of the beds who had spent the night in then; and there we stayed until 1700. The tinned steak pie for tea made a very welcome change. Our aircraft "F" for Freddie still had a faulty-trimming box.
It was only in the air we were able to listen to the Radio News from London, although we had a reasonable supply of current newspapers brought out by the steady stream of aircraft from U.K. On the 29th. we logged another trip to BIZERTA, this time in "T" Tommy with a 4000 pounder. Take-off was at 0005 hours and the weather the worst for flying we had yet experienced in Africa. The target was the docks and all was unusually quiet. The coast-line was visible through about 4/10ths cloud and on our first run over the docks we dropped incendiaries. Positive identification of the target, so round again to release the 4000 pounder which the press were refering [sic] to as 'cookies'. It seemed that over Germany the lads were dropping 8000 pounders. The flak and searchlights opened up simultaneously and was relatively intense. We found later that we were the first to bomb. Some had difficulty in finding the target due to cloud and the enemy was trying not to attract our attention. Again there was low cloud at Blida and we were diverted to Maison Blanche. Two aircraft were lost on the Bizerta raid, one landed at Bone (now renamed Annaba) with one engine u/s, and a 142 Sqdn. aircraft did a belly-landing on the grass at Maison B. On our return we found that Sgt. Leckie, operational again after being shot down in Tunisia, had crashed into the mountain immediately after take-off. Another 150 Sqdn aircraft crashed on take-off, barely getting airborne, and it was assumed that he had engine failure. Two of the crew actually survived the explosion. It had been a fateful night, we were briefed for take-off from west to east, with a left turn onto course. Just before take-off a strong wind developed from the west causing the duty runway to be changed from 09 to 27 and we took off from east to west. Sgt. Leckie turned left instead of right, straight into. the Atlas mountains, all killed instantly. Our own Bomb Aimer Stan had flown on a raid with Sgt. Leckie only two nights previously. When I revisited Blida on business in 1978 I was astonished to appreciate just how near those mountains were to Blida aerodrome..
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[photograph] WITH HILDA & THE SKIPPER SEPT ’43 RICHMOND ON THAMES
[photograph] BILL WILLOUGHBY NAVIGATOR AT THE PORT BEAM GUN POSITION
[photograph] NAVIGATOR & BOMB AIMER IN THEIR PITS
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The following morning an aircraft of 142 was seen to be making a peculiar approach, and just before touchdown. one engine cut and the other was going flat out, resulting in a spectacular disintegration at the side of the runway, in which no-one was seriously hurt. By the end of April we had four aircraft all Wellington Mk.10s equipped for carrying 4000 pound bombs. Bomb doors had been removed and they were said to have a special main spar.
On the 5th. May it was farewell to Blida, the war was moving east. Each crew was issued with a First World War Bell tent and this together with official stores and personal effects was piled into the aircraft. I remember the Wireless Op. Di and I putting our (stolen) palliases [sic] aboard for our Ground-crew passengers to rest on during the flight. A very thoughtful act on our part said the Skipper. It was just that Di and I intended to sleep in the manner to which we were accustomed. Our destination was Fontaine Chaude, about 250 Kms. ESE of Blida. About half way in deference to our guests we opened a tin of spam and served slices of spam followed by stewed plums from a large tin we had been hoarding. Our destination was a stretch of desert near a tiny village. After landing we pitched our tent and organised our palliases [sic] into beds with the help of a dozen or so empty boxes. Meanwhile vehicles were arriving with our squadron personnel, more stores, aircraft and by late evening we had a small township. A small marquee served as a Sgts. Mess and on the first evening we enjoyed stew and green peas followed by pears and real cream. These had been provided by the Americans on an emergency basis. The following day was spent partly on an aerodrome inspection. The war had passed through Fontaine Chaude and it was possible the Arab scavengers had overlooked bits of war material which could do damage to aircraft, particularly the tyres. There were no runways, only sand with some coarse grass.
Back to war next day and Group Captain (Speedy) Powell briefed us for a raid on TRIPANI, a naval base in Sicily. We were 30 minutes late on take-off due to delays in bombing-up. We carried only six 500 pounders instead of eight, and some incendiaries. We were 20 minutes behind the bomber stream of 26 Wellingtons. 'The bomber stream'!. This was an expression used by a newly joined crew who were very displeased with having to finish their tour in North Africa after starting it over Europe. They treated our desert war with some contempt after their recent experiences over Germany, but were reported missing about three weeks after joining us. We were in cloud shortly after take-off and nearing the target came out of it at 12,000 feet. We moved over towards a concentration of heavy flak bursts and the bomb aimer thought he had found a pinpoint through breaks in the cloud. The bombs were dropped into the area of flashes and fires on the ground but it was not a satisfactory raid. We lost two aircraft. One was seen to go down in flames over the target having been coned by searchlights. Sgt. Pax Smith, a New Zealander and crew ran out of fuel in pitch darkness and had strayed too far to the west, over Algeria. My diary records "They bailed out in an airmanlike manner but the Bomb Aimer was concussed and the Rear Gunner broke both legs on hitting the ground and rolling down the side of a hill. Three of the crew are in the rest camp at Constantine and the two inured in hospital in Algiers".
The reader might be surprised at apparent navigation errors such as this, but the only nav. aid available was a QDM (course to steer) to reach in this case Algiers, which would not have helped. We had no M/F
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Beacons on which to take bearings. The Navigator worked on his dead reckoning plot backed up by a visual pinpoint from the bomb aimer map-reading if visibility was suitable. Quite often the only aid was the Rear Gunner taking a drift reading from his turret. Over the sea the Wireless op. would drop a flame-float down the flare chute, which would burst into flames on striking the sea. The Rear. gunner would rotate his turret and depress the guns, holding the flame in his ringsight for ten seconds, then read off the drift on the indicator by his side. There was sometimes a drift indicator in the 'Nav. Office' also. The same procedure was used over the desert during the day using a smoke bomb in place of a flamefloat.
We learned that Sgt. Leckie who was killed hitting the mountain was Commissioned two weeks before his death and had also been awarded a D.F.C. for his crash-landing in Tunisia. So Sgt. Leckie was really P/O Leckie D.F.C. and didn't know it, but the end result was the same. He and our own Skipper, Sgt. Rutherford 416170 R.N.Z.A.F. had been great buddies for a long time. (or what was regarded as a long time in those days)
May 10 my diary states, a Boomerang lastnight. We took-off with a 4500 pound payload for delivery to PALERMO, the Capital of Sicily. About 30 min. after take-off the petrol cover on the port fuel tank came open and the Skipper had great difficulty in keeping the left wing up. There was no option but to jettison half the bomb load in the sea and return to base. There was an enemy air-raid in progress at Bone and we kept a few miles to the east of it with the I.F.F. on. Our own night-fighters operating from Maison Blanche were known to be very active and we had great faith in our I.F.F. We were first back of course - not really having been anywhere!- and we waited for the others in the debriefing tent. To no avail, they had been diverted and returned the following afternoon. We enjoyed an afternoon and evening off, and went by lorry to Batna, a small town about 30 miles from our base. There was little to be seen and nothing to buy and no sign of any social activity. Conversation with the natives was difficult and they were not interested in the war.
On the night of the 12th. it was the turn of NAPLES again, 21 aircraft with 90,000 lbs. payload bombed within five minutes of each other. It was a lovely night, visibility 30 miles and not a cloud in the sky. As we approached Naples we could clearly see Mt. Vesuvius and convinced ourselves we could see the thin column of smoke drifting from it. Our last pinpoint on the way out was the Isle of Capri and we gave it a short burst of .303 for good measure. A futile act but the guns had to be fired occasionally. At NAPLES we went straight in, the target was clearly visible and the one stick straddled the railway yards and industrial area. My diary records that flak was intense and said to be some of the hottest in Europe, and reading that after a lapse of 45 years causes me to question the authority for such a statement. It was a small target compared to some of those in Central Europe, and the 40 searchlights at Napoli were quite effective, but would have been more so if it had been dark. All our aircraft returned safely after a 7 1/2 hour flight, not a bad effort for Wimpies with no overload tanks. As the W/op describes it, we climbed into our pits just as dawn was breaking. By 0900 we had the option of discarding our mosquito nets and being pestered by the insects, or enjoying a turkish bath due to the heat. Our 1916 vintage bell-tent was reasonable for our crew of five although in earlier times it accomodated [sic] , goodness knows how, 22 soldiers.
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At about 1400 we were happy to get airborne again on an air test where we could cool down, but at 1700 it was briefing again. A "maximum effort" - another phrase. imported from our colleagues bashing away in Central and Northern Europe, on CAGLIARI, a port and industrial town in Sardinia. All 26 aircraft were over the target area within minutes of each other, again visibility was near perfect. Bombing heights were staggered and we bombed from 6000 feet. Our 4000 pounder landed just north of the railway yards among some tall buildings and started a fire. Our W/op Harry Dyson claimed at debriefing that he could feel the heat from our own fire when we turned in again to see the damage. Di was prone to exaggeration by this time, perhaps due to frustration of monitoring broadcasts from Base and seldom touching the morse key. We came back over the target at 2000 feet and the flames were leaping high. We could still see the flames from 70 miles away at 8000 feet on our way home. Listening to the B.B.C. we learned that American bombers had raided Cagliari earlier that day, "wiping the place out". They also claimed they could still see fires burning when they reached the African coast. In daylight too; our W/op was not alone in the exaggeration stakes. However, it was a very satisfactory raid. We were in a shallow dive when the bomb was released and is thought to have scraped the fuselage under the aircraft where there was damage to the geodetics and six feet of fabric had been torn off.
On the 15th. our crew was stood down for 24 hours and I received four letters from Hilda, the first for many weeks. At this rate of completing ops I should be home in less than three months. It was very tiring night after night, particularly as is [sic] was not possible to sleep comfortably in the heat of the day. The target was PALERMO, and three of our 25 aircraft failed to return, including Sgt. Rimmer, and Sgt. Alazrachi, the latter a Free French pilot. It is not known what happened to any of them except that one aircraft was seen to go down in flames over the target. Rimer's Rear Gunner was Joe Shields, one of the best, and the crew had been with us since O.T.U. at Finningley. Polfrey the Navigator, Cave the Bombadier [sic] and Jack Waters the Wireless-op, all very keen types.
On the 16th. it was our turn to make a fragment of history. For the very first time, the R.A.F. bombed ROME. Rome, we were told was an open undefended city, and we were briefed to fly from the mouth of the River Tiber, over the city dropping leaflets, and return at 5000 feet dropping more leaflets, then bomb the LIDO DI ROMA near the mouth of the Tiber. Our first bomb went in the river and the last one in the sea, but the rest of the stick neatly straddled the buildings at the Seaplane Base. Over the city itself, there was considerable light flack with tracer, aiming point- blank without result. Not bad at all far an open undefended city, but we were forbidden to display any hostility except dropping leaflets. Even the lids of the Small Bomb Containers loaded with leaflets were secured with wire so as not to fall on the Romans. Later the B.B.C. claimed there was no flak over Rome.
An easier trip the following night which after the event gave me a slight suggestion of a guilty conscience for the the [sic] very first (and last) time.
"Your target" said the Group Captain, "is the German 'U' Boat refuelling Base at ALGHERO, in Sardinia, put paid to it". Our bomb load was 7 x 500 pounders, 4 S.B.C.'s of 30 lb. incendiaries and 2 x 250 pound bombs. We overflew the target at 4000 feet and first dropped several sacks of
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leaflets. These were in Italian and told the people of Alghera that when we very shortly occupied their country and liberated them from the beastly Germans, they would be treated better than ever before, provided with medical aid and food, and every other possible benefit. All we need is a little co-operation and understanding from them. Having spread the gospel, we made three bombing runs over Alghero, at 3000, 1500 and 700 feet, all perfect O.T.U. practice type runs. On the last bombing run, Allan Willoughby manned the port beam gun, Dyson the front turret and the [deleted] the [/deleted] three of us fired our 7 Brownings at point-blank range into the chaos below. The sole opposition comprised two small-calibre machine guns which were soon out of action. Maybe it was a U Boat refuelling base, but only in the sense that it was a small fishing village and happened to have a jetty where drums of oil could be trundled down to a U Boat at the end of it. Our vision of a Sardinian type Lorient or Brest was soon dispelled. The BBC reported 'our bombers based in North Africa attacked targets is Sardinia lastnight'.
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For a couple of days our conversation had centred around an incident over the Lido di Roma. A seaplane base consists mostly of water; on our first run over it we had difficulty in locating the buildings and were hoping to see a tidy straight line of parked seaplanes. The Skipper decided to drop a flare and asked the Wireless Op. to arm no. 1 of 4 already in position in the flarechute. As he removed the safety pin the flare ignited and the top part of it shot through the roof of the aircraft with flames pouring out of the lower end, streaking past the rear turret.
The blinding light startled Stan Chadderton at the Bombing panel and he instantly jettisoned all the flares, undoubtedly preventing a major disaster. How easy it was to be shot down by one's own flare.
According to Intellegence [sic] reports, there were 1,100 casualties in our raid on Cagliari on the 13th., most of them having been caught by a single bomb. This figure is highly suspect but it originated from an Italian report.
On the 21st. it was a stooge over Sicily with 18 250 lb. bombs.
A convoy was within range of the Ju88 Torpedo bombers based in Sicily and our task was to try and keep them on the ground, or if they did manage to take off, prevent them from making an airmanlike landing on return. Aircraft took off singly starting at 1700 hrs.; we were the 24th. at 2045 hrs., with two others to follow. A direct flight to Castelvetrano, identify the aerodrome and one bomb away, then set course for Ciacco, same procedure, and on to Borezzo. If a flare path is seen anywhere give it priority and stooge around in that area for a while. All the bombs were dropped on the three targets and no flarepaths were seen. We concluded there were no enemy landings or take-offs, but one aircraft was seen to go down in flames into the sea; probably Sgt. Williams of our squadron who was on his first mission from Africa, although he had done several over Germany. At Castelvetrano there was lots of light flak using tracer, and we felt the heavy flak in some areas was predicted. We were not experiencing the 'thick carpets' of flak ever-present over Germany, perhaps ours was more personal, just a few batteries carefully aiming at one or two Wimpies.
It was all go, and on the 23rd. we did an easy 3 1/2 hour trip. 2 hours of which was over Africa. We crossed the Tunisian coast and reached Pantelleria 20 minutes later, an island only 7 miles in length with an aerodrome on the western side. Visibility was poor, but we went straight in and dropped 4,500 lbs. in one stick. These were plotted later as just to the south of the aerodrome. We cruised around out at sea for 20 minutes at 7,000 feet, studying four barrage balloons clearly visible at 5000 feet. On our return however there was no support for this theory from anyone else and we were told it was only heavy flak. This was of course quite possible, in poor conditions and with tired eyes imagination can take over. Within a week however, it was generally accepted that the enemy were deploying barrage ballons [sic] although not in great numbers. Most of our aircraft were not fitted with cable cutters on the leading edge of the wings. Pantelleria was an easy trip and we were advised that it would count only as half a trip towards our 35. We had generally assumed the first tour was 30 trips but it did not seem to worry anyone. The day. after the Pantelleria trip, the Squadron mascot, Wompo, or Wimpy. a pedigree Heinz 69 was killed in action. Whilst he was
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merrily chasing some small creature he was accidentally hit by a jeep driven by F/O Langlois, a pilot of 150. He was so badly damaged that one of the lads put him down with his Smith & Wesson .38.
On the 24th. we staggered off the desert in "F" for Freddie heading for Sardinia carrying eight 500 pound bombs and some incendiaries and it seemed ages before we reached even 100 feet. I was not aware of the drama in the front office, both the Skipper and Bomb Air were struggling even to keep us airborne. At about 500 feet it was not possible to maintain height and the Skipper had no option but to lighten the load quickly. Two 500 pounders were released and seconds later there was a tremendous bang from down below, but the aircraft began to maintain height. We were just within sight of the Sardinian coast with the engines overheating when the Skipper jettisoned the remaining bombs and nursed the aircraft back to Fontain Chaude. That was our second boomerang. Had we been carrying a 4000 lb. cookie the episode would have had a very different ending. By the 2nd. of June we had completed 6 more trips and moved camp further east, to Kairouan. Our patch of desert was about 6 miles west of the walled City, said to be the fifth most holy in the Moslem world. The place was very dry, and the well 100 yards from our tent was out of bounds. The R.A.M.C. and the Afrika Korps had both marked it as poisoned by their repective [sic] enemies. It was said to contain human remains, but tests carried out just before we moved on showed the water had not been polluted and was 100% fit for drinking. Meanwhile our water was delivered by two water bowsers each of which travelled 30 miles east to Sousse several times each day. Many years later the record shows that neither the Germans nor the Allies polluted any water supplies. After all, both hoped to recapture them and put them back to their own use. On the first night from Kairouan we were credited with one more trip, having completed two halves! That is, two trips to PANTELLARIA.
We took off in waves of 3 or 4 throughout the night, arriving over the target 45 minutes later. Our aircraft was "C" Charlie which carried one 4000 pounder. On the first run in we overshot, but came round again and in a typical OTU practice run, Stan Chadderton placed the bomb neatly in the centre of the small town. A 45 minute flight back to base and an hour's respite whilst the aircraft was checked, refuelled and bombed up, then the mixture as before.
On the 27th. we were piling into a lorry to go out to the widely dispersed aircraft; the nightly German raid on Sousse was in full swing when a single Ju88 came over to look at our flare path. He was clearly visible and stooged around at will for about 10 minutes before making a run at about 1000 feet dropping 3 bombs in a salvo 300 yards from the Sgts. mess. Nothing was hurt except our feelings and there was no material damage. We had no A-A guns, so the Luftwaffe did not receive the same energetic welcome handed out to us. We relied on Beaufighter squadrons for defence. The R.A.F. policy was reasonable, as the aircraft were dispersed over a wide area and a single stick of bombs would be ineffective against a single aircraft as a target on the ground. We took-off half an hour later for a tour of Sardinia, again with a payload of eighteen 250 lb. bombs. Our only brief was to stooge around between aerodromes and generally make a nuisance of ourselves. There were no allied troops in Sardinia yet so no special care was called for. Our bombs were expected to be released on aerodromes, searchlights and guns. The
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main object was to keep the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica on the ground. These trips were not very popular and provided good practice for Ju88 night fighters. We were stood down on the 3rd. June after doing two ops the previous night. We slept all morning and in the afternoon crowded into a lorry and went to the seaside. Monastir, near Sousse and we had our first baths since leaving Blida. We were in good company and had Mare Nostrum to ourselves with tens of thousands of other Allied troops. I have been there several times since and always think of the mass of naked troops in the sea. A good target for the the [sic] German aircraft? Not really, the scores of light A-A guns made it a very dicey target. The Allies must have had well over a thousand aircraft of different types in the area. The Arab town of Monastir was out of bounds to the Army but not, for some probably invalid reason to the R.A.F. We had a 'shufti' and two of us invested in a sort of haircut. Most of the inhabitants seemed to be French, Monastir having been the fashionable part of the Sousse area,
The night of the 4th. June was an unlucky one for 150 Squadron. We lost three of our 16 aircraft on the ground without intervention from the enemy. The aircraft were bunched fairly close together, having been bombed-up and ready for take-off. During a final check, a Bombadier accidentally released a flare which lay on the ground. He dashed off to find an Armourer to make it safe but within minutes the flare ignited. Within 15 minutes the whole area was ablaze and three aircraft, M Mike, A Able and P Peter, each complete with over two tons of bombs and full petrol tanks blew up. Our aircraft which was to have taken us twice to Pantelleria that night 'N' Nuts, together with seven others, was severely damaged. About half the squadron went to Panteleria [sic] , 2 half-trips and in full moonlight reported a couple of Ju88's circling the island. One aircraft returned with about 40
square feet of fabric torn off.
The following night a new target was added to our growing list, SYRACUSE in eastern Sicily, only a little light flak was encountered, and it was just a matter of bombing the water front. Our main task was in fact to drop leaflets on several of the coastal towns, working our way anticlockwise round Sicily. We passed slightly to the west of Pantelleria on the return leg and saw the Wimpies from the Western Desert squadrons bombing the island.
The exact words written in my diary are "bashing hell out of the island".
Our own Group Captain - "Speedy" Powell also went to Pantelleria but complained that his bomb did not explode. We riled him that it went into the sea. We were now seeing a great deal more of the British army and the Americans and we were realising just what small cogs we were in all the activity. We had an American guest with us when he ran us over to the Ops. Room in his personal jeep to collect lastnight's aiming point photograph. He noticed in the caption at the bottom of the photograph "280 deg.T" and remarked "Geez, mighty hot up there aint [sic] it?". It refered [sic] to our course, not the temperature, but we did not add any further complication to trying to explain.
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in the next 12 days we carried out only two raids, the first an easy one to PANTALARIA [sic], which surrendered the following day, and the second to a new target, MESINA [sic], the straits between the toe of Italia and Sicile [sic] . on the way out we passed very close to our favourite island and across Sicily to the target. The target was already marked with 14 flares by the Western Desert squadrons, and for the first time in North Africa that part of the job was done for us. I noted at the time that "the A-A defences were baffled by the number of aircraft over the target at the same time. There were 34 aircraft and only F/Lt. Langlois ran into trouble. He was caught in the searchlights from both sides of the straits and dropped from 11,000 to 2,000 feet to escape them. In doing so he flew through the balloon barrage, but without further incident.
My diary has recently been opened for the first time in over 42 years, so I have not pondered over its accuracy. 34 aircraft simultaneously over the target probably did seem like a thousand bomber raid to us!. Our Bomb Aimer that night was Ft/Lt. Casky, our own being in jail in Tunis. After our last trip to 'the' island we went to Tunis on a 48 hr. verbal pass. The Skipper had the trots, which we all suffered from time to time, and he tried to rest in the tent nearest the toilet trench. Willoughby the Navigator, Stan Chadderton Bombadier [sic] , Harry Dyson the Wireless Op and myself, Rear Gunner. We were each issued with two boxes of American "K" rations, and hitch-hiked first to Sousse and then to Tunis. The first leg was in the back of an Army lorry and the main leg up the coast road by R.A.F. "Queen Mary" which carried about a hundred of us. The whole trip took only 6 hours. The town of Tunis had been in Allied hands for 4 days and there were still a few Germans in hiding. We had given no thought to accommodation which did not seem to be important. Leaving Stan and Di in a canteen abandoned by the Germans, Wally and I eventually found an hotel near the docks area where we were able to book two rooms. I cannot recall the name of the hotel, but the address was 49 Rue de Serbie. The hotel was in very poor condition, no water, all the windows had been blown out, doors smashed, walls cracked and so on. No catering but we had our 'K' rations. Opposite the hotel was a bombed church and all around the buildings were either destroyed or severely damaged. The docks had been our main target in Tunis, and they were destroyed, with all the warehouses practically levelled out. One cargo vessel was beached and two others rested on the bottom. The Arabs were mostly friendly and told us the bomb damage in town was done mainly by 4 engined bombers is daylight, which let us off the hook. The European French were not so friendly, possibly many of them having lost comfortable homes. Some were quite abusive verbally but to others we managed to explain that we flew Chasseurs, pas des bombardiers. In our minds we had liberated the people of Tunis - and the rest of North Africa - from the Germans. We did not fully appreciate that the Arabs saw it differently. The Inglisi and Americans were no different to the Germans and Italians, and they in turn did no less for them than the French. They lived for the day when they would be left to manage their own affairs. In our wanderings around town we met a Tommy who was a Prisoner of War on a ship which had. been bombed at night a few miles out of Tunis. The ship was Italian, homeward bound and had been straffed [sic] by Spitfires during the day. The ship was spotted by two Wellington crews during a night raid on the docks, and the ship was
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bombed, then straffed [sic] from a few hundred feet. The vessel came to a halt and the 20 or so Germans and Italians abandoned ship. Three of the several hundred British prisoners had been regrettably killed in the action and all the others managed to get ashore in lifeboats and floats in the final days of the Axis evacuation of North Africa. The ship was without lights which should have been carried. Another 8th. Army private told us he was a P.O.W. being transferred from a lorry onto a boat about a week ago when about 30 Spitfires and Kittyhawks arrived and caused chaos with their 20 and 40 mm. cannon. The guards were overpowered and most of the 500 or so P.O.W.’s managed to get away. He spoke highly of the fighter pilots, convinced the attack was a very well-planned sortie to release the P.O.W.'s., not just to blaze away at anything German that dared to move. He could very well have been correct,
On our last evening in Tunis the four of us shared a battle of wine with a meal at a roadside cafe. When we were paying the bill we found there was money left over and asked for another bottle of their excellent wine. As the wine was brought over, a Sgt. M.P. standing behind us shouted "no more wine for them", after which Stan told him to mind his own business. The M.P. then grabbed Stan's arm and held it to his back, but seeing threatening movements from the rest of us, released it. Stan then turned quickly and thumped the M.P. who promptly disappeared. Shortly afterwards two R.A.F. Sgt. S.P.'s came is and asked if we had had some trouble and if so would Stan like to put in a complaint to the Provost Marshal? This seemed like a good countermeasure to a possible charge made by the Sgt. M.P. and Stan accompanied the two R.A.F. S.P.’s to the Provost Marshal's office. In reality this was the jail and as they entered the door the Sgt. M.P. set about Stan who gave as good as he got. But this was inside the jail, Stan was at a big disadvantage and about to spend the first of three nights in it. The jail was is fact next door to our hotel is Rue de Serbie. Willy and I did not suspect that Stan was in trouble, we assumed our S.P.’s were just being helpful, so we sat down again with the bottle. Perhaps Di's conscience was not quite so clear, and when he saw the S.P.'s coming he made himself scarce. We caught up with him later asking an M.P. where he could pinch a Jeep. The M.P. humoured him and directed him to an American car park with lots of Jeeps, but Di had seen a tramcar and decided to pinch that instead. Fortunately the tramcar was off the rails, and he changed his attention to the French tricolour on top of a derelict building. He climbed the building and removed the flag, then Willy and I managed to get him back to the hotel. Di's condition was not due to a session of heavy drinking, we had seen very little of anything alcoholic for a long time and two glasses of local wine would have been more than enough to really get him going.
The three of us hitch-hiked back to Kairoaun and reported the loss of one Bomb Aimer to the Skipper. The following day Squadron Leader Miller D.F.C. flew to Tunis and demanded Stan's release from jail. He had a major row with the same Sgt. M.P. who started it all and who was asking what authority the Squadron Leader had. The Squadron Leader pointed to his 2 1/2 rings of rank and the D.F.C. and asked the M.P. whether he thought they were scotch mist. Stan was released and back at Kairoaun was charged with causing an affray, resulting in a Reprimand. The Sgt. M.P. was charged and given a Severe Reprimand and reduced to Corporal.
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By the 16th. of June we were operational again as a crew. the target was again NAPLES, a 6 hour 15 min. stooge and rather tiring. There was a full moon and visibility was 25 miles. We could clearly see Pantelaria [sic] to port, and later, north of Sicily, the small island of Maritimo, just the tip of a mountain sticking out of the sea. The Isle of Capri provided a good pin-point. Over the target area there was 9/10ths. cloud so we bombed from above the flares. Flak was moderate and widely spread. There was slight consternation when one of my turret doors fell off for no apparent reason. I wondered what else would fall off but everything else seemed to be intact so it was just a matter of strapping myself in - which according to the book should be so in any case. Just after "bombs gone" I reported a twin-engined aircraft starboard quarter up at 1000 yards. The Skipper started to weave gently. and Di went to the astrodome position to search above the horizontal whilst I -theoritically [sic] at least-- concentrated on below the horizontal. This is not an easy task when the rear gunner is expected to ignore one fighter leaving it to his colleague whilst searching for others. Di became somewhat emotional to say the least, said it was not a fighter but merely flak, and then went on to give a commentry [sic] on searchlight activity and flak at least - by then- five miles away, and of only historical interest. Whilst in a turn to port the other aircraft was directly astern and I identified it as twin engined and without the high tail fin of the Wellington. The Skipper did a diving turn to starboard and we lost the other aircraft. Di claimed it was another aircraft not to be confused with the one he identified as flak! Normally Di stayed at his radio position, it was better that way. On the return journey, either there was a raid on Trapani or someone had strayed off-course. On the 18th. it was again to SYRACUSE, an exceptionally clear night, almost no cloud and a full moon. We could have dispensed with the flarepath on take-off and we felt as if we were doing a day trip. Over the target there was tracered flak up to 7,000 feet and we were geared up to bomb from 5,000 feet. We expected night fighters, and even day fighters, so went straight in at 5000 feet, bombed and straight out again, down to 3,000 feet for a quick tour of several nearby small towns and villages where we dropped leaflets. We were glad to get home that night, such met. and lunar conditions were hazardous. SALERNO again on the 21st, a routine trip, but on the 24th. of June I got a message to call at the 'Orderly Room', which in reality was the bell tent next to the C.O.'s tent. There was great discussion on which particular crime had caught up with me, but it was all very innocent. I came out of the bell tent as a Flight Sargeant [sic] much to the annoyance of the Sgt. Skipper and the three other Sgts. in the crew. It didn't help very much when I told them they need not call me Flight Sgt. ALL the time, just once in the morning and again in the evening.
In the early hours of the 26th. June we bombed the naval base of BARI in S. E. Italy, and it was an almost complete fiasco. It was not possible to see the ground due to haze, and the Western Desert aircraft had dropped the marker flares in the wrong place. Fires were started over an area of about 60 square miles, maybe one or two on the target by sheer chance. The target was a small oil refinery built especially to deal with the crude oil from Albania. Important to the Axis because that particular oil needed special treatment which, we were advised, only Bari could provide. We were now spending more and more time over the Italian mainland, for the first time we were seeing concentrations of
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lights in the form of a triangle which were assumed to be Prison and Internment Camps. On the way out we saw Trapani being bombed by our colleagues from the Western desert. The following afternoon it was too hot to sleep and I flew with Sgt. Whitehouse, a new pilot from Britain, in a brand new aircraft, 'D' Donald. We traced the path of the 8th. Army to beyond the Mareth line, at about 2500 feet. There were few battle scars; It was hard to appreciate that this was a place of such dreadful carnage so recently.
Kairouan was placed out of bounds due to Typhus, and there was nothing in the walled city to tempt us to ignore the order. The Arabs were less friendly and our revolvers were not looked upon merely as a taken of authoriity [sic] . According to a report in a Daily Mirror which took a few weeks to arrive, the lads were reported to have been given a hearty welcome by the French people in the Holy City of Kairouan. Actually there were only a handful of French remaining. Another Daily Mirror headline we found amusing was "BLOCKBUSTERS ON BIZERTA". It went an to say that "Lastnight our Bombers based in North Africa again pounded Bizerta; During the entire raid, blockbusters were dropped at the rate of one every two minutes. Absolutely correct, it was a raid from Blida, but it did not say that the raid was of 2 minutes duration and that we had only two aircraft able to carry the blockbusters. However, we looked forward to reading even an old Daily Mirror and to listen to the B.B.C. when airborne. Some of the stock phrases brought a chuckle at times 'Fires were left burning..', "Rear Gunners straffed [sic] the target..." "All opposition was overcome.." "Many two ton blockbusters ...." etc. etc, It appeared far more impressive in print than in reality doing it. Generally all we saw were explosions and dull red glows, tracer coming up and curving away passed us, and being blinded sometimes by searchlights. We did not picture at the time the loss of life down below and the damage caused to factories and buildings of all descriptions, in any cases, mostly houses. Straffing [sic] was invigorating and served to let off steam, but the supporting arithmetic was disappointing. An aircraft travelling at 180 m.p.h. (264 feet per second) over a target 360 yards in length would take 4 seconds to traverse the target. A .303 Browning has a rate of fire of 1200 rounds per min., the four in the rear turret having a combined rate of 4800 per min., or 80 rounds per second. There is time only for a 4 second burst of 320 rounds - not a lot - The Reargunner sees nothing of the target until it is passed and needs to be told when to open fire by someone in the front office. On straffing [sic] details it is likely the front turret with two guns, and one beam gun would be in use, increasing fire power by 75%, Possibly even a four-second burst once experienced at the receiving end might cause the enemy to duck next time we come by. This was an acceptable technique along a straight road. The aircraft was often fitted with two beam guns, one on each side, but only one was manned. Vision was poor from the beam positions and normally we would pass to one side of the target with one wing low. The gun on the other beam would have been aiming upwards. On the 28th 150 Sqdn. was stood down for 24 hours, but the previous night we paid a visit to SANGIOVANI on the southern toe of the Italian mainland: This was a daylight trip with four squadrons of Wellingtons to the train ferry terminal, a dock or lock which the ferry would enter and the water level be adjusted such that the level of the rails on land and ferry coincided. The train would then be shunted an or off the ferry as required. Flack was intense for
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Italian targets and there were trains both on-the ferry in dock and onshore. The whole lot was successfully reduced to a shambles but 6 of our aircraft failed to return. Our heaviest loss yet in a single night.
The 30th. of June was Willie's birthday and we celebrated it over MESINA. According to the B.B.C. we are blitzing both sides of the straits, Mesina to the west in Sicily and Sangiovani on the Italian mainland. The straits are only 3 1/2 miles wide, and carry the greater part of all enemy traffic to Sicily, entirely in German control with concentrated light flack [sic] from both sides and from ships in the middle. A trip lasting 5 1/2 hours.
The whole crew is beginning to feel the strain of long periods of intense activity. Although most of the memories are of the actual bombing ops., that was only a part of it. Aircraft had to be inspected daily on the ground and also air tested ready for the next trip, before bombing up. The Navigator had to prepare his flight plan prior to take off and this was done also on the many occasions when trips were later cancelled. All of us spent at least some time in the Intellegence [sic] Section to keep up-to-date with the position of the front line and the general trend. It was perhaps in some ways easier for us than for our counterparts in Europe. We had fewer distractions. There was no looking forward to a pint in the local pub. nor getting home to the family for a day or two. Not even the local cinema. There was very little booze to be had, I seem to remember a ration of one bottle of beer per fortnight which I used to take up on an air test to cool it down, and then give to the Armourers after landing. The batman was not going to ask "which suit and shoes are you wearing tonight Sir? " as he did later at Spitalgate. Evening wear was the same as for the rest of the day, shorts, perhaps a shirt, certainly no socks, and sandals on the feet. On the few occasions when we went out of camp we generally wore khaki battledress which we wore also of course on ops. I was finding it increasingly difficult to keep my eyes open at night for long periods, and finding it very tempting to rest my head on the guns and have a doze, but to do so would be absolutely unforgiveable. The Skipper was under an even greater strain and a six hour trip was 6 hours of concentrated effort. On one or two occasions he dozed off for maybe just a few seconds, but fortunately by his side most of the time was Stan Chadderton the Bombardier who very quickly realised the position and watched points up front. The amount of nattering in the air was on the increase, also. It was standard procedure to use oxygen at night regardless of altitude, and the microphones with their electrical heaters were built-in to the mask. Everyone was connected to the intercom system all the time except for the Wireless op. who was able to switch out his own connection when using his radio. Microphones were switched as required by individual wearers. The Skipper's microphone was switched on all the time and so too was the Rear Gunner's in danger areas. Procedures were relaxed somewhat in our particular theatre of war; we could get along quite nicely without oxygen below 10,000 feet and I don't recollect flying much above that height. Whenever I reported anything Di dashed to the astradome [sic] and objected. If the rotation of my rear turret was not rythmical [sic] both the Skipper and Navigator objected. The turret and guns presented an assymetrical [sic] shape to the slipstream with a consequent rudder effect. If I kept the turret facing starboard for too long the aircraft would do a gentle flat turn to starboard. Meanwhile the Skipper was trying to maintain a course determined by the
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Navigator who was keeping a watchful eye on his compass, perhaps not appreciating that it was the rear gunner making things difficult. Although the sides of the turret were clad with perspex, it was difficult to see through it with the degree of clarity required. In fact the perspex in front of the turret had been removed to provide a clear vision panel. Even on the ground the whole crew was getting very irritable with each other. For almost a year we had lived worked, ate and near enough slept together almost without a break, the same endless routine, and anything to which we could look forward seemed an awful long way off. Whose turn to carry the water, became a very important issue at times and would lead to an argument [sic] . After some very harsh wards we would agree that it was stupid to argue about such a trivial issue, which in turn led to a bigger argument on who started the argument in the first place. I remember Chad the Bombardier putting paid to the row one day by getting off his bed - known as a pit - and announcing "Well, I've get to go for a **, anyone care to join me'? The loo comprised a trench, 20 feet long, several feet deep and about one foot wide over which one crouched. There was a choice of direction in which to face, and one or two of the bigger chaps preferred to straddle the trench. There was no need to interrupt a conversation in going to the toilet.
By the end of June the length of tour was clarified. First it was to have been 30 trips as in Britain, then it had been increased to 40 as some trips were not very hazardous, then some of the trips counted only as halves, and the tour was again changed to be 250 hours of operational flying. The Western Desert tour was said to be 40 trips or 250 hours, whichever was the less. However, there were other things to think about. Sgt. Lee and two other pilots were paraded before the whole squadron Air Crews and called "Saboteurs" by the Group Captain, having between them written off five aircraft in taxiing accidents. Group Captain 'Speedy' Powell was a very keen type and conducted all the briefings himself, was generally the first one off the ground and first back in time for debriefing. Whilst we were resting he would sometimes return to the target in an American twin boomed lightning to try and assess the damage - or find what we had actually bombed!
On the night of the 30th. June we were stood dawn and watched 142 Sqdn. take off for southern Italy. The starboard engine of one aircraft cut a few seconds before the aircraft should have get airborne. The aircraft swung and crashed into a jeep which was waiting to cross the 'runway', killing both American occupants and breaking it's back, a complete write-off. My diary makes no mention of the fate of the crew. We had just been issued with a new aircraft, 'B Beer' and I spent most of the day cleaning the guns and turret which were still all greased up as when they left England. Normally this work was carried out by the Armourers, but I was expected to take an active interest in the guns and turrets. The guns were removed, stripped, soaked in petrol, thoroughly cleaned and reassembled, replaced in the newly-cleaned turret and then harmonised. In Britain the harmonising of guns was carried out by placing a board at a predetermined distance in front of the turret and adjusting the ring-sight and guns to line up with specific paints or circles on the board. In North Africa we placed a can or any handy object on the ground 300 yards away and pointed the guns and ring-sight at it.
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Another day-off on the 2nd. July and Jumbo Cox, a Navigator on 150 Sqdn. and I hitch-hiked into Sousse and spent a few hours in the sea. After our dip we queued for 20 minutes at a huge marquee and enjoyed the most wonderful mug of tea of all time. I have thought many times in the last 40 years of that mug of tea.
The 4th. of July turned out to be the-hottest in temperature we had experienced for a long time. We had bombed TRAPANI in the very early morning. Intensive flack and searchlights with tracer up to 5000 feet. At 2000 feet the temperature was 95 Farenheit [sic] and not much lower at 9,000 feet, our bombing height. I was wearing only trousers and a shirt and was soaked in perspiration. Even the slipstream felt hot when I put one hand outside. Apart from the oppressive heat, it was a routine trip, and we managed to sleep most of the following afternoon, in 130 deg. in the shade. The wind was from the south-west, straight off the Sahara, and several airmen passed out with heatstroke. Metal parts of the aircraft were too hot to touch and a Wellington on the ground of 37 Squadron went up in flames. On the night of the 6th, we were briefed to attack aerodromes in Sardinia, and Sgt. Chandler piloted the first aircraft off. Both engines cut immediately after take-off whilst his undercarriage was still lowered. With full fuel and bomb load he somehow managed to avoid the inevitable and landed in a cultivated area at the end of the runway. Some of the crew suffered minor injuries, but it was 40 minutes before the rest of us were given a green to take-off. The wrecked aircraft was directly under the take-off path. Seven aircraft failed to get off the ground, including ours, all due to engines overheating after running for over 40 minutes on the ground. We had also lost air pressure for the brakes. Of the aircraft which did take off none was successful in finding the target, flouted by bad weather over Sardinia. Sgt. Valentine was above 10/10ths cloud with engines overheating and deemed it necessary to jettison his bombs "over the sea". We were not generally briefed with the positions of Allied shipping convoys, but were routed away from them without being given the reason. Sgt. Valentine decided to return by the shortest route and when has bombs whistled down on the convoy the Navies took a very poor view and let fly with everything they had. This was a well-established practice on the Navy's part, so there was no cause for complaint. In all, that night was a waste of 30 tons of bombs, 4000 gallons of petrol and over 150 flying hours.
On the 7th. we visited an aerodrome at COMISO in Southern Italy, delivering 4500 lbs, of bombs. It was a new target to the R.A.F., and apparently undefended, Only three of us managed to locate it and we were lucky in the timing of our 3 flares in obtaining a pinpoint. We obtained good aiming point photograph which showed our stick of bombs had straddled the dispersal area, with the last two landing in the olive groves.
Nearly half a century later I wonder why we did not use the radio for communicating with other aircraft in providing mutual assistance. We had no V.H.F. but the TR9 H.F. R/T would have been adequate. Observing Radio silence I feel was taken to extremes, our signals might indicate our presence to the enemy, but they were aware of that in any case. They might home onto us, but our transmissions would have been brief and on a frequency initially unknown to the enemy. They were not equipped to respond fast enough to information gleaned by monitoring, neither was the area covered with direction-finding
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stations. I feel this was one of the matters where a principle had been established and which was not reviewed often enough under changing circumstances.
On the evening of the tenth of July, just before briefing we heard aircraft engines and it was like being at a cinema show. Wave after wave of Dakota transports thundered overhead on their way to Sicily. It reminded me of the film "An Engishman`s Home" and the massive formations of German bombers, but these aircraft were American and British and were definitely not making a film. At briefing Groupie put us in the picture. "Accurate timing and accurate bombing, more so than ever before" was his opening phrase. We were briefed to bomb a specific part of SYRACUSE whilst paratroops were being dropped close by and other paras were already in position ready to capture our target immediately after the bombing. Flares were dropped accurately and the target successfully bombed, although some bombs went in the sea because of its close proximity. We noted a very large fire at Catania and "a number of queer lights which suggested fifth column activity" according to my diary. 45 years later I wonder how I reached that conclusion. Looking down from about 9,000 feet on the southern coast of Sicily on the return journey, we saw the Navy shelling the coast and several searchlights on shore began to sweep out to sea. One of the searchlights located a ship and held on to it, whilst the others went on sweeping. From another ship there were just three flashes of light, and seconds afterwards, three flashes on shore, one in front of the offending searchlight, one slap on it, and the third behind it. That was one searchlight out of action, and the others switched off in sympathy. The Navy carried on firing without further interruption. My panoramic view of the action from nearly two miles above gave no indication of the destruction and agony caused by those three shots.
The following, night it was the turn of MONTECORVlNO in western Italy, a new German aerodrome. Over the target we narrowly missed colliding with Jack Alazrachi in `Q' Queenie. His starboard wingtip scored our port wing and my diary records "a very shaky do". Our stick straddled the aircraft parking area and we took an excellent aiming point photograph of 15 aircraft an the ground. It was later confirmed officially that our two squadrons destroyed 40 aircraft and damaged many more.
On the 13th. at briefing, Group Captain Powell grinned and glanced down at his flying boots and said "Yes chaps, we are in for an interesting trip, Jerry is landing a massive convoy at MESINA and we are instructed to smash it." We went out at 6000 ft. above sea level which, over Sicily averaged about 2000 feet above ground. I found it difficult to concentrate on a formal rear-gunner type search, there was so much activity. Ground detail could be seen very easily and the Tactical Air Force was observed bombing all over the island. There were flares everywhere, bombs creating havoc, flak barrages and intensive shelling by the Navies. Over our target, the flak was intense but scattered. Sgt. "Pax" Smith's aircraft was holed, something went through his bombing panel and made two big holes in the front turret. This crew, like most did not include a full-time front gunner, the Bombardier occupied the turret as and when expedient and on this occasion had just returned to the second dickie seat when the aircraft was holed. One aircraft was seen to crash and another, in flames, exploded on hitting the ground. At debriefing we learned that one Wellington of 142 Squadron was missing,
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and this was manned by six officers, five of whom had completed one tour over Germany. The sixth, flying as 'second dickie' was on his very first trip.
Another new target to us, on the 15th, CROTONIA, an aerodrome on the east coast of the toe of Italy. A routine trip out, good visibility and straight in to the taget [sic] . There were four flak batteries, but Sgt, Mickie Mortimer was just ahead of us and his first stick silenced all four. Our single stick straddled the aerodrome and enlarged the existing fires among aircraft on the ground. We stooged around for a little while watching aircraft blowing up and more bombs adding to the havoc on the ground. When all was quiet we dropped to 250 feet and went in with guns blazing and between us fired about 4000 rounds into the fires, We must have hit something. There were dummy fires to the north and south-east of the aerodrome, very unreal and no-one was fooled by them. On the way out of the target area we were followed. by an aircraft sporting an orange light, and at one stage took light evasive action, but he did not attack. Several other rear gunners reported the same experience, non [sic] was actually engaged. We were routed back round northern Sicily, as usual Trapani was being attacked and other targets nearby were being bombed. We were hoping to see the 142 Sqdn. aircraft with the blue light which we nearly shot down returning from Salerno. The Bombardier in the second pilot's seat reported two aircraft ahead, one with a white light which we assumed to be a decoy. We expected the aircraft to allow us to overtake, and whilst the one with the light drew our attention his chum would sneak is from another dirction [sic] . We lost both the other aircraft for a minute or two, then the aircraft with the light - this time a blue one - reappeared on the starboard bow at about 500 yards. Meanwhile Chad had taken over the front turret, but held his fire. He identified it as a Wimpey. The Skipper altered course and we passed about 100 feet below the Wimpy. I got a plan view of him and confirmed the identification. As he fell behind I flashed dah dah dit, dit dit dit on my inspection lamp. There was no reply from the other aircraft but it landed 15 minutes after us and taxied towards 142 dispersal, On that same trip two of us saw an aircraft at 800 yards on our port quarter up which closed in to 500 yards. He was at too great a range for our .303s, but we were ready for an instant dive to port. He surprised us by turning away to port at about 400 yards, and again two of us identified it as a Wimpey.
Enemy aerodromes continued to take up most of our effort, and on the night of the 17th. it was three hours each way to POMIGLIANO near Naples, passing round Vesuvius with it's dull red glow. The target was initially very quiet and consequently not easy to locate. On our first run in at 6000 feet, we were a few minutes early, but dead on time at 4000 feet on our second run. We were caught and held in searchlights, and the light flak was point-blank. Allan Willoughby claimed he could smell it when the Skipper asked him for a course for home after the second run-in. When Stan the Bombardier announced that we still had nine 250 pound bombs aboard, someone suggested we should jettisson [sic] them on the town. Allan suggested we strike at a village a few miles ahead but Stan refused to drop them anywhere except the aerodrome at Pomigliano. The third run-in was at 5000 feet and the searchlights got us again as soon as the bomb doors were open. We were in a cone of eight and it seemed we had the aerodrome to ourselves. The bombing was accurate and we lost height to 2000 feet, all quiet again. My part in all this had
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really been that of a passenger listening to and witnessing the drama, and I was not popular when I suggested to the Skipper that we go back at low level and put a few lights out. Chad was in favour and had the front turret in mind, Allan was not keen and didn't like the smell of flak, and Dyson thought the idea was 'plain stupid'. Dyson was probably right for the wrong reason, but the Skipper was thinking we had got away with it for well over 30 trips so far, and there was no point in tempting providence. A three hour stooge back to Blida with nothing but silence on the intercom. Other aircraft were seen in the circuit and our TR9 radio was out of order. This was a very low power transmitter/receiver operating between 4 and 8 MHz. and used by the Skipper to contact Air Traffic Control at Base. If we still had an acceptable reserve of fuel we would have gone away and returned in 30 miniutes [sic] , but fuel was low and the Skipper decided to land without any formalities or delay. This aroused the wrath of the Flight Commander who tore a terrific strip off him next day. Our report at debriefing was very different to that of Sgt. Whitehouse and crew, who said it was a wizard O.T.U. run, bombs slap on the runway, no flak, no searchlights and the whole thing was 'a piece of cake'. He had in fact been to the wrong aerodrome, Crotone, which we had pranged on the 15th. where the defences stayed silent in order not to attract attention. - an old Italian custom -. The reason for the accuracy of the searchlights was a layer of cloud at 10,000 feet, a full moon and clear visibility. We were silhouetted against the cloud even without the searchlights.
Two nights later Sgt. Whitehouse, this time officially and with the rest of us, went again to CROTONE. We were all very tired and I found it difficult to keep awake. Visibility was 15 miles with a nearly full moon and on the way out for long periods we actually enjoyed the visible company of other Wimpies. On arrival at CROTONE we were surprised to see fires already started and spent a good five minutes in ensuring that it was indeed the target, Two bombing runs were made, at 3000 feet and 1500 feet, dropping nine 250 pounders each time. The bombs were seen bursting among aircraft on the ground, some of which were already ablaze. 400 yards from the burning aircraft was a small wood which had obviously been hit and was burning merrily. My diary records "from the ground it would have seemed like Nov. 5th.
Rockets were going up and verries by the score.
Someone had pranged a pyrotechnic store."
We made a third run at 200 feet and spent some 1500 rounds at the aircraft on the ground. Other gunners did the same. We were amazed to find everything so easy, and no opposition as far as we know, our raid on the 15th. should have given them a good idea of what to expect. There were no dummy fires and still they make no effort to disperse aircraft. The absence of fighters was strange; even day-fighters would have been very effective under those conditions. One crew reserved an odd bomb for the village south of the arodrome [sic] . It had a 36 hour delay and landed in the centre of the village. Not a very nice thing to do, and an act certainly not in accordance with our leaflets. Sgt. Pax Smith the intrepid Kiwi was on the last trip of his tour and elected to hit a railway bridge near the coast. It also had a' 36 hour delay fuse and missed the bridge by 50 yards. The British army was not at all happy with Smithy's effort, they planned to use the bridge within a week or two and were going to some considerable trouble to make sure the enemy
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didn't blow it up. They hadn’t counted on Smithy, but fortunately he wasn't quite up to scratch an that last trip.
One night off and then back try the 'Big City" , the capital of Italia, not to be confused with the really big one, the Capital city of Deutchland, with which there was absolutely no comparison. It was over two months since we had been to Rome, and it was still supposed to be an 'Open, undefended City'. Our specific target was PRACTICA DI MERE, an aerodrome just to the southwest of Rome. The Groupy had made it very clear at briefing, that nothing must be dropped on Rome itself. The target would be marked by flares positioned by W/O Coulson of 142 Squadron. We had no target map but the the [sic] aerodrome was plotted on the map of Central Italy - probably half million scale -. As we were passing the island of Maratimo, Chad was in the second dickie seat, map in hand and decided to get a clearer view of Maratimo by opening the sliding window at his side. The map disappeared out of the window, but with Allan's D. R. navigation we reached the target as Coulson's flares went down. Target marking at that stage of the war in Italy was in its infancy and was carried out with flares designed for lighting up the ground. These were very different from the coloured Target Indicators used to such great effect over Germany. Bombing was not particularly accurate, but well clear of Rome itself, where there was plenty of light flak and searchlight activity which exploded the myth about an undefended city. This activity extended down the Tiber to the Lido di Roma, where the Radio Station was still operating. The Vatican was blacked out very effectively
On the 25th. we started 8 days leave, taking an aircraft back to Blida for an engine change and major inspection. We took advantage of the stores at Blida and were issued with new uniforms, shoes and anything we wanted, just a matter of signing for it, it was two years before the system caught up with me and I was debited with the cost.
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[bearer document in English and arabic]
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[photograph]
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TWO OF OUR AIMING POINT PHOTOS
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The first three days were spent in Algiers with Harry Dyson at the Hotel Radio Grand but the inactivity - or something - was too much for Harry so we returned to Blida, only to find the rest of our party had adjourned to the rest camp at Surcouf. I spent most of my time in the next few days in Blida, partly with a French-Arab family Iloupcuse Moka Mourice Bijoutier, at 11 Rue Goly, Blida. 30 years later I was able to find the area but no-one recognised either the name or the address. Like most places, Blida had changed a lot in the intervening years. I remembered it as an almost typical French village, beautifully clean, tables and chairs outside the cafes, and a very pleasant atmosphere. After 20 years or so of independence it was a very different story, and I thought a rather sad one. I made several excursions into Algiers where the Yanks had become very well organised. They had-taken over and re-organised six cinemas, all with continuous shows for about 12 hours per day, and open house to Service personnel. I visited all six. The N.C.O.'s Club in Rue d'Isley was our base camp in Algiers, where we enjoyed endless cups of tea and cakes. The Malcolm Club, exclusive to R.A.F. personnel provided a good hot meat each evening. It was on this leave that I visited the local Match Factory at Caussemille, being an ardent Philumenist - collector of matchbox labels-. The factory was at that time owned and operated by the French and I was given a conducted tour of the factory. Most of the labels presented to me at the factory are in my collection to this day. My next visit to the factory was 37 years later, when I met with a very cool reception. The French had gone long ago, only their name remained. In that area of Algiers, all the street names were written on the street signs in Arabic except one, Caussemille. This was the name of an old French or Belgian family of match manufacturers possibly difficult to translate into Arabic. I met several of the chaps from the Rhodesia training days, one had joined Coastal Command and was detached from 'U.K. to Maison Blanche on White Wimpies. It had taken him six months to complete 100 hours and he was rather gloomy about the next four hundred to complete his tour. He was in fact rather nervous, his job being mine-sweeping; I asked him "what height do you fly at?" He replied that `it was a two-dimensional job, no such thing as height'. Causing magnetic mines to blow up by flying over them at very low level could not have been very pleasant. Maison Blanche is now known as El Beda, the International airport of Algeria, not so well organised as it was in 1943, and not half so busy! Blida aerodrome is the Headquarters of the Algerian Air Force and is a prohibited area to foreigners.
At the end of our 8 days in comparitive [sic] civilisation, we were glad to collect our newly serviced Wimpey and return to Kairouan. I was immediately recruited to fly with Sgt. Stone to MARINA DI PAOLA. We stooged over northern Sicily is daylight and very close to Trapani our old favourite which had been severely bashed about. During the invasion it was subjected also to heavy Naval shelling. Being with a different crew perhaps made things more interesting, seeing how they reacted to various aspects, and I thought they had a rather strange and formal appoach [sic] . We did not see our bombs burst and our photoflash failed to go off. There was none of the usual binding we experienced with our own crew, everyone was pleasant, courteous and cheerful. At debriefing Group Captain Powell said "Good Show chaps, I expect you are glad to get onto ops at last, and that's the first one done". I was speechless but thinking about their next 44, maybe they were also. I can see "Speedy Powell" very clearly making
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that statement, a memory revived recently in the film "Target for Tonight" in which he was the Flight Lieutenant taking the briefing; the same very distinctive and distinguished voice.
On the night of the 4th., the crew not feeling particularly refreshed after its leave, our target was BATTAPAGLIA. It was daylight almost to the Italian Coast and we arrived with 20 minutes to spare, circling the target area. 'Bang on time we dropped the flares, but there were no bright lights'. The twenty minutes of sight-seeing had upset the routine and the flares were dropped on 'safe', and therefore failed to go off. We still had two flares so went down to 3000 feet and dropped the bombs through 9/10ths cloud using individual flares. 90 seconds after bombing, Stan identified the target 4 miles ahead. We had neither bombs nor flares left, and were depressed at putting up such a rotten show on what turned out to be the last trip of our tour. We could have done a spot of straffing below cloud, but instead called it a day.
The following night we waved the boys off to MASINA, and we felt rather sad that we were no longer operational. Sqdn. Ldr Garrad and crew were also no longer operational, having failed to return from MASINA. Someone suggested staying and doing another tour, but Dyson thought the idea was "stupid" - like most other ideas - and with deep regrets we said cheerio to our friends on 150 and 142 Squadrons, and climbed in the back of a lorry bound for Tunis. Pax Smith and Mickey Mortimer and crews were with us and we sat back and enjoyed the scenery, some taking pot-shots at nothing in particular with their revolvers. We had in fact lots of unofficial ammunition of 9mm. calibre, captured from the enemy. This fitted nicely into our .38 Smith & Wessons and differed from the .38 ammo. only in that it had no ejection flange at the end of the cartridge. This had the effect that we could use captured enemy ammo. but they could not use ours because of the flange.
We arrived at no. 2BPD in Tunis just in time for dinner and a cold shower, the first shower for about nine months. During our week or so in the Transit Camp, we had a sort of parade each morning and then were free for the day. It was on one of these parades that our Skipper's name was called to approach the C.O. "Sir, 416170". With no prior warning, the citation was read out and he was presented with the D.F.M. Next it was the turn of Mickey Mortimer to march up and also receive a D.F.M. I seem to recall that he did a somersault before saluting in front of the C.O., or was it a back somersault after receiving the award? either of which today seems quite incredible. Pax Smith had already received a D.F.M for his earlier exploits. My one other recollection of the Transit Camp was an old Italian Water Tanker which was used as a static water tank. It held 10,000 gallons of water and must have weighed over 53 tons when full. All 24 wheels were firmly embedded in the sand up to their axles. It was when we departed from Tunis by lorry for Algiers that one of the Canadian officers decided to hitch-hike back to U.K. and to rejoin the party at the Reception Centre. I learned later that he flew first to Algiers with the R.A.F. and then flew to U.K. with the Yanks. He was an old hand at that sort of thing, having hitch-hiked from Blida to New York and back with a colleague in less than a week.
Meanwhile the rest of us travelled the 500 miles to Algiers by lorry along the coast road, and after a few days in the transit camp boarded a troopship, the Capetown Castle, a passenger liner of the Castle line. We were accommodated in 4-berth cabins with full peace-time fascilities [sic] .
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each cabin was allocated one Italian P.O.W. who slept outside the door, and attended to the cleaning, dhobi etc. We were not impressed by the Italians as fighting men, but had no complaints of their ability and willingness in the job they were then doing. It was a very comfortable voyage and we lived it up in a manner to which we were certainly not accustomed.
After a very pleasant and restful 10 days or so we disembarked at Greenoch and I recollect forming up on the key [sic] prior to joining a train for Liverpool and West Kirby. A rather pompous redcapped Military Policeman called us to attention, right turn, at the double, march! It was more astonishment than lack of discipline which caused everyone to stay put. He was told to get his knees brown and get a few other things too, and we walked to the train, deliberately out of step. Our first steps back in England were certainly not going to be at the double ordered by Red Caps.
This was my fourth visit to West Kirby, where we were rekitted, saying cheerio to our Khaki battledress and tropical kit, documents checked, medical exam. and then disembarkation leave. It was at West Kirby that our Crew was really disbanded, very sad after working as a team for so long, but another phase of our careers was completed.
Of the Crew? Stan Chadderton was commissioned on his second tour and we have met several times in the past 40 years, but I have no news of the Skipper and the rest of the crew. Stan met the Skipper, then a Flight Lieutenant at Brise [sic] Norton at the end of the war on his return from a German P.O.W. camp. We can only hope he returned safely to New Zealand and was able to return in the farm. Allan Willoughby is thought to have ended the war as a Squadron Leader.
My association with the Wimpy was not yet over, however, it was still in use in large numbers in the U.K. for operational training, and was to remain so until the end of the war. More "Wimpys" were built than any other operational. bomber.
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[document from C-in-C]
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[photograph] C.W WITH MUM BARNOLDSWICK
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[photograph] HILDA WITH THE SKIPPER AND BOMB AIMER
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[photograph] [underlined] WITH THE SKIPPER & BOMB AIMER – SECOND HONEYMOON SEPT. 1943 [/underlined]
[photograph] [photograph]
[underlined] AT OUR CHALET AT BLIDA [/underlined]
WATSON – RUTHERFORD- DYSON – CHADDERTON & PADDY (MORTIMER’S FRONT GUNNER)
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[underlined] OUR 150 SQDN. SKIPPER SGT. STAN RUTHERFORD 416170 RNZAF [/underlined] [underlined] A WIMPEY AT BLIDA [/underlined]
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[photograph] AT RICHMOND SECOND HONEYMOON
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[warrant officer parchment]
52A
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[underlined] Screened [/underlined] .
September 1943 saw me at 84 O.T.U. Desborough, a Flight Sgt. with 43 ops under my belt, and that wonderful feeling of being ex-operational. For the next six months or so I was to be a "Course Shepherd", responsible for 12 Air Gunners. Desborough was a typical Operational Training Unit where, in the main, newly-trained aircrew were introduced to operational aircraft and the techniques of dealing with the opposition which was by no means limited to the Germans. There were three courses running simultaneously which gave ample scope to the Captains in making one of their most important decisions, that of selecting their crews.
For the first two weeks or so the training comprised mainly lectures and familiarisation with equipment. Air Gunners were generally able to make an early start with the flying where even on circuits and bumps an extra pair of eyes was to advantage.
The Course Shepherd ensured the smooth-running of the Air-Gunners training. There were specialist instructors for lectures on subjects such as guns, turrets and tactics, but the C.S. supervised their flying aspects and work on the range, in detail.
I particularly enjoyed the Fighter Affiliation sessions, where trainee gunners would take over the rear turret whilst being attacked by one or two Miles Masters or any other "Playmate" who could be cajoled officially to co-operate.
I would stand at the astrodome guiding the gunner with the timing of his advice and instructions to the Pilot. The standard evasive action (referred to later in 5 Group as "Combat Manouvre [sic] ") was the corkscrew, well known to, and anticipated by, the enemy, I might add that until I arrived at 84 OTU I had never even heard of the corkscrew. During the OTU excercises [sic] the fighter pilots were generally sporting enough not to press home their attacks with too much determination, but to allow the bomber sometimes to 'escape', thus giving the rear gunners - or some of them-- the false impression that they actually stood some chance of survival.
I felt quite at home in the "Wimpy" and encouraged the pilot to throw the aircraft around, and make the corkscrews rather more violent to simulate a real attack, where a quick getaway was the only solution to survival. For fighter affiliation excercises [sic] , the turret was equipped with an 8mm. Camera Gun, fitted in place of one of the four .303 Browning machine guns, the remaining three Brownings being de-armed. Each gunner plugged-in his own personal film cassette, and results were assessed the following day in the cinema.
Air firing excercises [sic] were supervised, where the speed of the Wellington was reduced, and a Miles Master would overtake about 3 or 400 yards abeam, towing a drogue. The gunner would be authorised to fire when the towing aircraft was outside his field of fire. He would then fire off about 200 rounds from each gun (five 2-second bursts), at the drogue. It was more than likely that air firing during his initial training had been carried out using a single gun not mounted in a turret. Air to ground firing was limited to a single exercise on a range near the coast, there being little scope for this type of work for heavy bombers over Deutchland.
Not very popular with the coming of Winter weather were the exercises at the firing butts or range. Six trainees would each be given a rear turret, together with four belts each of 200 rounds. He would
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mount the guns and fit the ammunition belts. Take-off procedure with safety catches 'on', then firing a few short bursts, landing procedure, clear the guns, etc. . Generally a few faulty rounds were deliberately built-in to create gun stoppages which the trainee had to clear. Finally he removed the guns from the turret and stripped and cleaned them ready for the next trainee.
All this took about three hours and it was on one of these sessions that unpleasantness developed with one of the trainees. Of the 12 Air Gunners in my little flock, eleven were Sergeants and one was an Acting Pilot Officer on probation. Like the others, his previous flying experience was limited to about 8 hours, and he had not yet been within 10 miles of an operational aircraft. He had been top of his course at Gunnery School and granted a Commission. I found that one of the Sergeants had fitted the guns in the turret and armed them with the belts of ammunition for him whilst I was busy with the others. He had managed to fire-off the rounds, and eventually, with some assistance the guns were removed. He flatly refused to clean the guns, claiming that it was an inappropriate task for an officer. I put it to him that although on a squadron the guns would be lovingly cared for by the armourers, he must still be fully au-fait with every aspect of guns and gunnery. He firmly refused to touch the guns and soil his hands and I told him that unless he gets on with it, we should be late for lunch. Four of the sgts. each took a gun and cleaned them. Some very cryptic comments were made by the Sergeants and I told the Ag. P. O. he was foolish. Later that day, to my absolute astonishment, I was marched in front of the C.O. and charged on a form 252 with insubordination. I was advised that an N.C.O. does not give orders to officers and I replied with something to the effect that I was the instructor and the officer the pupil, giving orders was an essential part of the job. Nevertheless, I was severely reprimanded. I had on several occasions applied for a posting back to operations, and the following day the Station W.O. told me my request had been granted and I was going to a squadron at Norton, near Sheffield in Yorkshire. Which squadron and with what type of aircraft was unimportant. I had never heard of Norton, bit hush-hush they had said. I should have realised that something was amiss, I was not being posted, but only detached. On arrival at Norton I found I was on an Aircrew Refresher Course which I was slow to realise was a correction or discipline course, a form of punishment. There were about 150 aircrew at Norton, from Flt/Lts to Sgts, almost all operational or ex-operational. At least I was among friends.
The day started with a call at 0600, on parade at 0630 , march to breakfast and an inspection at 0730 with greatcoats, followed almost immediately by a further inspection without greatcoats. This was followed until 1800 by sessions of drill, P.T. and lectures, with a break for lunch. Drill was just ordinary uninspiring square -bashing, wearing aircrew-issue shoes, and not boots. The instructor, said to be an L.A.C. Ag-Sgt. shouted commands and abuse, and was indeed very smart and probably efficient at his job, but utterly ignorant and useless off the barrack square. There was no rifle drill, and requests to introduce it were rejected. It was too easy for us to obtain .303 ammunition. P. T. was equally uninspiring and great emphasis was placed on recording improvement in performance as the training progressed. Lectures were farcical and covered most aircrew subjects, including navigation, gunnery, bombing techniques, target marking, etc. etc. There was not a
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flying badge among the instructors and obviously none had any flying experience in any capacity. No-one could possibly take the lectures seriously and there must have been some hair-raising answers in the written tests. The main problem was that at the slightest provocation one could be put on C.O.'s report. This was not a formal charge - which would have been on record - but an interview with the C.O. which would generally wind-up with an award of an extra 3 weeks at Sheffield. My policy was to keep my head down, or in modern parlance, to maintain a low profile. I generally managed to be near the back of the classroom and in the rear ranks on the drill square trying to be invisible. We were allowed out of camp after 1900, with an inspection at the gate, but lights out was at 2200, not allowing much scope. Most evenings were spent in the mess comparing notes and discussing our "crimes"; the instructors were conspicuous by their absence. I recall no-one admitting to flying or taxiing accidents, or misdemeanours whilst flying. Most of the reasons seem to have been absence without leave probably through boredom-, saying the wrong thing in an off-guarded moment or making someone more senior look silly. There was no connection between Norton and aircrew who were alledgedly [sic] L.M.F. or those who were reluctant to fly. Rather than charge a man formally with an offence, the easy way out was to send him on a "refresher course" with no reference to alleged crime or punishment. Operational aircrew discipline is often quoted as having been unique. All jobs were carried out with the same degree of dexterity, and responsibilities in the air within a trade were the same irrespective of rank. The Pilot was the Head Man, whether Squadron Leader or Sergeant. In the air, there were no formalities. The Pilot was 'Skipper' and no-one called anyone 'Sir'. This was generally so on the ground within the confines of the crew, but if it was a non-crew matter or there were V.I.P.'s about, a low-level type of formality might be introduced. Neither was there time for formality in the air where an attack may start and finish - one way or another - in seconds or less. On sighting a fighter at 300 yards a Rear Gunner in a film picked up a microphone and was beard to say "I say Skipper, I think we are being followed". A Guardsman might come up with "Permission to speak Sir", but life's not like that in the air.
Nearing the end of the 3-week course at Sheffield came the farcical final exams. I sailed through everything except P.T. where we were required to run 100 yards in 14 seconds. I was feeling fitter than I had for many years, but that 100 yards took me 17 seconds. Not good enough, try again. The second attempt took 19 seconds and the third attempt 24. I was told that "we would keep doing it all bloody night until I achieved it in 14 seconds". I merely said there was no point in attempting the impossible and I refused to carry out an unlawful order. So for me it was C.O.'s report next day. The C.O. said it was within his power to grant me an indefinite extension to the length of my course. I realised that to argue was probably futile and I recall being contradictory by saying something to the effect that "I have nothing to say except to remind everyone there is a real war going an out there and the sooner some of us get on with it the better". I don't know why I said it or thought what it might achieve, but I was easily provoked. I was awarded an extra 3 weeks at Sheffield, and was very surprised next morning when I was issued with a railway warrant to leave that morning with the others on my "course". I was convinced this was a mistake and succeeded in remaining invisible until I was well clear of Sheffield.
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Most of us felt the invasion of Europe was imminent and we had discussed our plans in the mess within earshot of the 'instructors'. When the balloon goes up, we return to base regardless of the opposition on the grounds that it was our duty to escape from captivity. In retrospect this was not entirely logical thinking but it might have influenced the C.O., I don't know. As far as I know there was no mass exodus and I have no idea how or when R.A.F. Norton was finally closed down. Suffice to say that it was a disgrace and an insult to aircrew, it would have been far more British to charge a man if he had allegedly done something wrong rather than take this easy way out. In general, training and lectures were taken very seriously by air crew and it could be claimed that the type and standard of lectures at Norton were in fact dangerous. Most of us realised it was just a load of absolute rubbish and did not take it seriously, and we had learned long ago to assess the value of the spoken word relative to the background and qualifications of the speaker.
The question of L.M.F. is an even more deplorable but entirely separate subject. Books have been written about it and it became a highly controversial issue. There were indeed some chaps who took such a bashing they felt they had had enough and to continue would increase the risk to the aircraft and crew or even crews. Most other operational aircrew have no less respect for them for admitting it and asking to be excused. L.M.F. and R.A.F. Norton were totally unconnected.
However, feeling very fit physically, and mentally ready to deal with the Ag. P. O. who knew all about the form 252 but couldn't strip even a Browning gun, I returned to 84 O.T.U. Desborough. A written request for an interview with the C.O. was given to the S.W.O. within minutes of arrival. I saw the Gunnery Leader and learned that I was to resume charge of the same course but less the sprog officer who was last seen on his way to Eastchurch as L.M.F and unsuitable for operations. I found later that he had been reduced to the ranks. It seems the other instructors had given him a very hard time all round, and particularly with combat manouvres where he was sick every time he flew. It was just not done to issue 252's but his chances of survival were improved. The C.O. agreed later that a mistake had been made and on paper my case had been reconsidered and the severe rep. withdrawn. Sheffield could not be undone and would have to be written off to experience, but he would see if he could hasten my promotion to W.O. and a posting to a real squadron.
At this time, the O.T.U. instructors were all crewed up and ready to back up the operational squadrons if necessary. Many of us were getting restless seeing a great increase in ground activity to the south and southeast. Lots of real aircraft, Lancasters, Halifaxes, Mosquitoes, Gliders etc. etc. and our status with the Wimpies as ex operational did little for our ego, making us feel like the 'has beens' we really were.
At about 0200 on the 6th. June, now a Warrant Officer, I was Orderly Officer and asleep in the duty room. The Duty Officer, a Ft/Lt. was flat out in the other bunk. A message was delivered marked "Top Secret" and I awakened the Duty Officer. He told me to open it. The message caused his to open a sealed envelope from his pocket and his exact words were "Christ, it’s started". 'It' was "Operation Overlord". Within a minute the Tannoy was blaring "All Duty Flight personnel to their flights immediately" 'All sreened aircrews to the Briefing Room
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at 0500," and so on. There followed a day of intense activity; air tests, bombing up, briefing, changing the bomb load, rebriefing, and the job of Orderly Officer went completely by the board.
In July, the great moment arrived, and our complete second tour crew of five was posted to Aircrew Pool at Scampton en route ultimately to a 5 Group Squadron.
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[photograph]
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[photograph] AT AIRCREW POOL SCAMPTON AUG ‘44
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[underlined] SCAMPTON [/underlined]
For Wellingtons we were indeed a complete crew, but we were not destined for Wellingtons, but Lancasters, and we needed either a Navigator or Bomb-aimer and another Gunner. Our Pilot and Observer had already completed tours on Blenheims and were good material for Mosquitos. They said cheerio on our third day at Scampton and were posted to a Mosquito Conversion Unit. The remaining three of us had ceased to exist as a crew and had become “odd bods”. We began to feel like members of staff but eventually we went our individual ways. Indeed I was put in charge of the Night Vision Centre for two months, until I met a pilot who was a Flight Lieutenant with a tunic that had obviously seen some service, and he had over 3,000 flying hours to his credit. With him was a Flying Officer Observer plus DFM, obviously clued up and who looked the academic type, a cheerful Flying Officer Bomb aimer and a Pilot Officer Rear Gunner. Four clued-up characters forming the nucleus of a gen crew. Somehow or other I became their other gunner and we were joined by a second tour F/Sgt Wireless operator and a Sgt. Flight Engineer ex fitter. A few days later we were posted to Winthorpe to 1661 Heavy Conversion Unit and settled into a course on Stirlings, flying together for the first time as a crew.
Familiarisation with a four-engined aircraft was the main purpose of the course; important to the skipper F/Lt. Chester who had been a Flying Instructor on Tiger Moths in Canada for a long time. He was about 8 years older than the rest of us and we were happy with his rather more mature approach to the job. The Flight Engineer, Sgt. Hampson, whom we called Doogan for no apparent reason, had flown on Liberators over Burma and nothing seemed to worry him unduly. F/O Pete Cheale was successful on two or three practice bombing sessions, and to F/O Ted Foster DFM it was all just routine stuff. F/Sgt. Frank Eaglestone’s radio was the same as on his previous tour, the good old R1155 and T1154 (still in service in 1960). The Rear Gunner was P/O Harvey who nattered endlessly about a chunk of flack [sic] still embedded somewhere about his person, and his first tour in general. He knew it all, or thought he did, but it soon became apparent that his experience was very limited and he had yet to do his first trip against the enemy. Because of this I insisted that he should have the mid-upper turret, and as Senior gunner, pulling a negative seniority in rank, I would take over the rear turret. He didn’t like that at all, and he left the crew. What became of him I don’t know, but Flt/Sgt Foolkes appeared from somewhere and took his place. Pete was one to take everything in his stride and was welcome to either turret. He preferred the mid-upper, possibly finding it more comfortable, being much taller than the average rear gunner. As for me, one rear turret was very much like another, the same Frazer Nash FN120 we had used on the later Marks of Wellington. A few mod cons perhaps, such as Hot air central heating in the turret. I recall that when we touched down on the runway at Winthorpe, the rear turret was still over the graveyard on the other side of the main road.
Whilst at Winthorpe, I found that 150, my old squadron, was about 20 miles away at Hemswell. I paid them a visit, but their only real link with the 150 of North Africa was the squadron number. 150 Squadron had been disbanded in Algiers though it’s final station was Foggia in Italy. I left
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it at Kairouan just before the move to Italy. Later it was re-formed with Lancasters and in theory had been in action since the beginning of the war, having been at the forefront with Fairey Battles in 1939-40 in France.
After about three weeks of routine and not very demanding training we graduated to the “Lanc” Finishing School” at Syerston. There we converted to Lancasters with about 14 hours flying, circuits and bumps, the odd practice bombing exercises, fighter affiliation and a Bullseye over London, co-operating with searchlights. Just what the Londoners down below thought of this aerial activity without an air raid warning was probably misconstrued. We were still in one piece, feeling fit, very confident and ready to join a squadron.
Our next move was to Bardney, near Lincoln, about 160 bods, and judging by their ranks and gongs, a rather experienced bunch, mostly second tour types. Bardney was the home of 617 and 9 Squadrons, rumours were rife of course. Were we obvious replacements for 617, where prestige was high and directly proportionate to the losses, - the highest in the Command? Our luck held, we were to become a new squadron, 227, just an ordinary Lancaster Squadron to enhance the might of 5 Group. It transpired that we were to become “A” Flight, and the Skipper was promoted to Squadron Leader. Meanwhile “B” Flight was forming at Strubby.
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[underlined] 227 SQUADRON [/underlined]
The first op. by aircraft of the newly-formed 227 Squadron was on the 11th. of October 1944 and most of us at Bardney were not even aware of it. Only three aircraft of "B" Flight, forming up at Strubby, were involved, a short early afternoon trip to FLUSHING. Three nights later "A" Flight provided three aircraft and "B" Flight four aircraft on a more typical raid by 240 aircraft of 5 Group on BRUNSWICK. The Squadron was beginning to take shape and on the 17th., two aircraft of "B" Flight joined 47 others on a short excursion to breach the dyke at WESTKAPELL. Two nights later was a 5 Group effort to NUREMBURG, with "A" and "B" Flights providing seven and five aircraft respectively. This fourth raid by 227 aircraft was only "A' Flight's second involvement, the aircraft and crews really becoming attached for this purpose to 9 Squadron.
On the 21st. October we were transferred to Balderton, at the side of the A1 near Newark and joined the crews of "B" flight.
Our Skipper had been promoted to Sqdn/Ldr. in command of "A" Flight, and was very such absorbed in getting his half of the squadron organised and operational, with little time left for actual flying. Our crew was kept busy in their respective sections, particularly Navigation, Bombing and Wireless, but there was not a great deal to be done in the Gunnery office: The Gunnery Leader was Flt/Lt. Maxted who occupied a small office in a sectioned-off Nissen hut. It was barely furnished with a desk and a few chairs; posters on the wall amplifying the vital issues and a notice board. The state of readiness of each aircraft and gunner was displayed with a record of daily inspections completed. The D.I. 's were an important part of the routine, and the gunners generally took part in the air tests prior to bombing up.
Our first mission as a crew was to Bergen in Norway. It was also a personal first trip for the Skipper, Bomb aimer and Flight Engineer. It was my 46th. op. but also my first in the mighty Lancaster. The Navigator, Wireless op. and Mid-upper gunner were all veterans having carried out their first tours on Lancs.
Our flight out over the North Sea which used to be called the German Ocean by some was uneventful, and Bergen was approached from the east at 10,000 feet. With the target ahead and in sight to those in the front office, all was quiet except for engine noise through someones [sic] microphone which had been left switched on. Peace was shattered by an almighty bang and shudder, confirming we had been hit, and the nose of the aircaft [sic] went down. I was forced against the left side of the turret unable to move, and found later the speed had built-up to over 370 mph. The Skipper was shouting for assistance. Ace the Navigator somehow managed to crawl forward a few feet and found Doogan with his head in the observation blister admiring the view of Bergen above. The Skipper had both feet on the dash trying to pull the aircraft out of the dive. The only control Ace could reach was the trimming wheel on the right of the Skipper's seat and he turned this to make the aircraft tail heavy. The nose came up and so did the target. The Flight Engineer added his contribution by exclaiming "Coo, i'n' [sic] it wizard". That was his opinion, but we were heading straight up the fiord and Ace brought this to the attention of the Skipper very smartly. Our height was down to 1500 feet and Ace and the Skipper somehow managed to turn the aircraft through 180
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degrees without hitting either the sea or the hills. Still tail heavy, we gradually climbed away to the west, and for the first time I saw the target, dead astern, always a welcome sight, and I set about sorting myself out from the intercom. leads, electrical heating cable, oxygen pipe and also checking that the turret doors would still open. Silence was broken about 100 miles from Bergen by our brash young Canadian Bomb Aimer, Pete Chiele, "Skipper, we still have the bombs-aboard". I think It-was Ace, who pulled the jettison toggle. At least my turret seemed intact and I took the opportunity of the lull in the drama of opening the turret door with my elbows, leaning backwards into the fuselage and making sure I could reach my parachute pack. Then a quick reversal and I was again "on the job” after a break of less than ten seconds. On the Wimpey and Lanc. the Rear Gunner had a choice of exits, either through the rear escape hatch inside the fuselage, or direct from the rear turret. I was well rehearsed in the latter method, first to rotate the turret dead astern, using the manually operated handle if there was no hydaulic [sic] pressure, then to open the sliding doors. These never failed to open on practice sessions, but an axe was provided inside the turret just in case. Then to remove the parachute pack from its housing and drag it carefully into the turret, placing it above the control column. Off with the helmet complete with oxygen mask, intercom, 24 volt supply and associated pipes and cables and also the electrical heating cable connector. The parachute pack was then clipped on, the turret rotated onto either beam, lean backwards and push with the feet. The alternative exit gave one more room to manouvre [sic] , but the escape hatch itself was rather narrow for a Rear Gunner wearing his full flying kit, particularly the 1944 version of "Canary suit", so-called because of its colour. There was also the phsychological [sic] aspect of deliberately entering an aircraft which was probably on fire. On the Wellington Mk1C with an FN20 turret and only two guns, there was provision to stow the 'chute pack inside the turret. Also the doors were hinged, opening outwards and they could be jettisoned. Although I mentioned being well rehearsed, drill was carried out with the aircraft stationary and upright, not quite the same as in an anticipated emergency bale-out. My only excuse for claiming the checking of my 'chute as practice was that I felt I should be doing something more useful than just sitting there, whilst there seemed to be so much happening up front. There was even more drama unfolding, the Wireless op. had passed a coded message to the Navigator instructing us to divert to Holme on Spalding Moor in Yorkshire, but only the W/op was issued with the code-sheet of the day. The Skipper did not receive the message in plain language until we were in R/T contact with Balderton, which was closed due to thick fog or very low cloud. However, the Navigator knew our exact location and there was fuel in the tanks. Eventually we re-joined the tail-end of the gaggle and landed at Holme. I recall spending the rest of the night on the floor in the lounge of the Sgts. Mess. The following morning we took a walk around the hangars and Doogan chatted with some ground crews who were changing an engine on a Halifax. He actually told then they were not going about it properly and their reaction was quite startling and informative.
Our second trip as a crew was two days later, to WALCHEREN in daylight. This was more reminiscent of our raids from North Africa except that 110 aircraft, including 8 Mosquitoes, took part. From North Africa our "Maximum Effort" had been two squadrons, a total of 26 aircraft, which
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seemed a lot at the time!. 12 aircraft from 227 took part, each having its own specific target, ours being a gun battery which was already completely submerged in water when we arrived. Just ahead several aircaft [sic] were bombing the sea wall and the Skipper decided to back them up, bombing from 3500 feet. The wall was breached and the sea poured through, but our bombs were all fused for delayed action which would not have amused the natives. In fact too much damage was done which, according to a story in Readers Digest, took over six months to repair. However, the main object was to silence the German artillary [sic] and this was achieved. This particular trip had been our introduction to the "formation" known as the "5 Group Gaggle". Pilots were not very practiced at Straight and level flying, it had been seldom recommended, and it seemed to me as a Rear gunner that everyone weaved along in the same direction, taking great pains to stay as far away as possible from other aircraft, but remaining in the stream.
Two days later Ches. and Co. joined 16 other crews from 227 on an afternoon excusion [sic] to an oil plant at HOMBURG. The ground was mostly obscured by cloud and visibility at 17,000 feet was poor, about three miles. Approaching the target a Lancaster in front of us was hit by flak and one engine was on fire. The aircraft passed below us and the fire was extinguished, but its no. 2 engine was stopped. It remained just behind us until we were over the target. The target was marked by 8 Mosquitoes of 8 Group, but marking was scattered over a wide area and out of the 228 Lancasters only 159 bombed. Results were poor, a recce. next day showed that most of the bombs had hit the industrial and residential areas. One Lancaster was lost, due to flak.
The following night 15 aircraft of 227 joined a total force of 992 aircraft on DUSSELDORF. Our Skipper flew as Second Dickie to F/L Kilgour, and the rest of us kicked our heels. This was the last heavy raid on Dusseldorf by Bomber Command, and 18 aircraft were lost. F/O Croskell and crew failed to return, our first 227 Sqdn casualties, but news was received shortly afterward they were safe in Allied hands. They were operational with the squadron again in Feb.
On the 11th. of November, we surprisingly found ourselves on the Battle Order for an evening raid on the Rhenania-Ossag oil refinery at HARBURG, close to the battered Hamburg. This was a 5 Group effort with 237 Lancasters and 8 Mosquitoes. 7 Lancasters were lost, including 9J"S" with F/O Hooper and crew. F/O Bates' crew reported that "oil tanks were seen to explode at 1924 hrs". but German records make no reference to the oil tanks, only that 119 people were killed and 5205 others were bombed out. Flak was not intense and the bombing appeared to be mainly on target. There were fighters about but the return journey was uneventful for us. Once again we were beaten by the fog at Balderton, and as our new F.I.D.O. was not yet operational, we were diverted to Catfoss. The night was spent in the chairs in the Sgts. Mess, but the officers among us were luckier to find beds.
For most of the following four weeks we were without either a Skipper or a Navigator. The Skipper was detached "on a course" and then spent a couple of weeks on a Summary of Evidence. Ace the Navigator was detached to Newmarket racecourse to clue up on some new equipment or technique. For three days I was detatched [sic] to Waddington as a Witnessing Officer at a Court Martial, which I found depressing. It seemed that at Waddington there had been an old car which was used by anyone who could find some petrol to run it. It was the property of an unlucky aircrew
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member who failed to return one night. The car was very useful, but whilst having neither licence nor insurance it was eventually involved in a serious accident, and the R.A.F. took over where the civilian court left off.
0n the 6th. December I had a letter of complaint from my mother, enclosing a newspaper cutting from the Barnoldswick & Earby Pioneer, showing a photo of me and referring to my award of a D.F.C. Why had I not told her? I don't think she ever believed me when I claimed that her letter was the first I knew of it. On Dec. 11th., with Ace still at Newmarket, we became 'Dambusters' - of a sort - for the day. Bomber Command Diary states " "233 Lancasters of 5 Group and 5 Mosquitoes of 8 Group took part. Hits were scored on the dam but no breach was made. 1 Lancaster lost". The squadron diary reflects a successful sortie, in that direct hits on the dam wall were observed, but the 1000 lb. bombs were too small for the purpose. My own recollection of the raid was quite different. We were stooging along just above cloud in company with scores of other Lancasters when the others were seen to be doing a 180 degree turn. Within seconds the sky within my range of vision was empty and in all directions no-one could see another aircraft. The mid-upper and I advised the Skipper that we were now unaccompanied and for 20 minutes we tried to impress upon him that we were extremely vulneruble [sic] (or words to that effect). We were just a few hundred feet above and silhouetted against a layer of stratus and I asked him to fly just inside the cloud, or at least just to skim the tops, but he replied that it was too dangerous, too much risk of collision. The mid-upper gunner agreed, collision from Gerry fighters. Vocabulary worsened and finally the Skipper realised we were 40 minutes and over 200 miles from the rest of the gaggle, we turned round. It has been suggested that as Flight Commander he must display a press-on attitude, and we were all in favour of this, but there was no-one around to impress and it was pretty obvious to the gunners that either Frank had missed a diversion message or we were in the wrong gaggle. Bomber Command Diary disproves the latter, but there is still uncertainty in my mind about that particular operation. Both Pete in the mid-upper turret and I realised that if we were attacked by fighters the Skipper would not take the slightest notice of our requests or advice. We were not disputing that the Skipper was in charge and the one who makes the decissions [sic] , but in our situation he had no choice other than to take advantage of the cloud. We regarded this as an expression of no confidence in the gunners, and we made it very clear to him both then and later that it was no way to finish a tour.
It was 10 days before we flew again, our 6th. trip with 227 embarking on their 22nd. trip as a squadron. The target was the synthetic oil plant at POLITZ, in the Baltic. 207 Lancasters and 1 Mosquito were detailed, including 13 Lancasters of 227. Two from 227 experienced mechanical failure and aborted soon after take-off. This was a long stooge, and 3 Lancasters were lost, plus a further 5 which crash-landed in England. The raid was successful, the main chimneys having collapsed and other parts of the refinery being severely damaged. On return to eastern England we were again unable to land at Base due to weather, and were diverted to Milltown, in Scotland. Fuel gauges were reading zero or less when a weary Ches. and crew finally landed after a trip lasting 10 hrs. and 15 minutes. F/O Croker in 9J"K" wound up at Wick, in Morayshire, his aircraft being so badly shot-up it was declared
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a write-off. The following morning we flew to Wick to join F/O Croker and crew and give then a lift back to Balderton. Among others, there was a Met. Flight at Wick, equipped with B17s, Flying Fortresses. It was their job to climb to a great height, making Met. observations, and some of their trips exceeded 12 hours duration. I recall the armourers at Wick cleaned and polished our three turrets and 8 Browning guns without being asked, and making a very good job of it too. Everyone was provided with beds, and it seems the officers were so comfortable the Skipper decided to stay at Wick over Christmas. The town of Wick was "dry', no pubs, but among the N.C.O's, this made no difference, we had no money with us. Normally on a diversion we didn't need any money, but for a several day stop-over it was embarassing [sic] to be absolutely without. We would like to have taken our turn in paying for the drinks is the Mess. I seem to recall trying to obtain an advance from Pay accounts without success, accompanied by the other two W/Os in our crew. I was reminded of one incident at Wick by Ace, our Navigator; We were not like most other crews, sticking together as a crew. The Commissioned officers kept to themselves, the three Warrant Officers maintained their own little triangle, and Doogan prefered [sic] his own company despite the W/O's efforts to get him to join us. It seems that one night at Wick we carried him and his bed outside and he awoke next morning in the middle of the parade ground which was covered is snow. I have no personal recollection of this, but there it is in black and white in Ace's book, 'Just Another Flying Arsehole'. We returned to Balderton on the 27th., with 14 of us aboard, and did not see the ground until we actually touched down. For the first time we landed with the assistance of FIDO, which was probably very scary for the pilot. In the rear turret I just got an impression of landing in the middle of a fire.
The following night we missed a trip to OSLO, our squadron providing only 5 of the force of 67 Lancasters. On the afternoon of the 30th. we were briefed for an evening take-off to HOUFFALIZE, a total force of 154 Lancasters and 12 Mosquitoes. German Panzers had broken through the American lines in a desperate attempt to thwart the Allied advance, in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. The weather gave the Germans the advantage, low cloud and thick fog prevented the 2nd. Tactical Air Force from playing its part to the full. With almost 100% Allied air superiority in the area, Typhoons and other fighters operating on a cab-rank principle responding in seconds to detailed requests from the chaps below, Gerry was learning what it was like to be at the receiving end of the slaughter he started is 1939. But not for that few days at the end of 1944 in the Fallaise gap. The close proximity of Allied troops called for great accuracy in bombing and straffing [sic] , and this was not possible in the prevailing conditions. Because of the bad weather in the target area, take-off was postponed every few hours but we were eventually relieved to get airborne about 0230. Conditions over the target were quite impossible and the flares dropped into the murk below probably caused hearts on both sides to miss a few beats. Some crews did bomb, but Chas. quite rightly felt it was too risky. We had not been briefed for any secondary target so our bombs wound up in the Wash. Finally, we landed at about 0830 after 24 hours of effort of one sort or another. Nothing really achieved, but at least we had tried.
It was about this time that my father visited the Squadron for a few days. He was a Captain in the R.A.S.C. recently returned from East
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Africa and awaiting release on medical grounds. He was very impressed with what he saw but we could not obtain authority for him to actually fly with us. On the Sunday morning he watched our parade and later mentioned that as the W/O called out names, one Ft/Sgt responded to at least five of them. Also that some were in best blues, some in battledress, one or two with greatcoats and one even with a raincape. Two were actually standing on parade with bicycles ready to shoot off somewhere immediately after the parade. His thoughts at the time were how can such an undisciplined lot perform any serious task. Later that morning sitting in the Gunnery Office, gunners came in with more of a wave than a salute, a brief word from them and I would put a tick on the board against their aircraft. I explained to my father that this was their way of reporting that their turrets and guns had received and passed the daily inspection. After lunch in the mess he noticed a great deal of activity and movement, and a clear but quiet sense of urgency. He asked what was happening and I showed him the Battle Order.
The following day he said how wrong was his first impression. Everyone had a job to do, they know what was required of them and they got as with it without any shouting of orders or people stamping around. I was Duty Gunnery Leader that night, as was my lot quite often over that period, and was able to show my father what made a squadron tick. He thoroughly enjoyed his stay, but I don't think he met the Skipper. In fact I don't think we saw anything of our Skipper during the whole month of January, by the end of which 227 had completed 33 ops. "A” Flight Commander's crew had totted up only 7 as a crew and some of us were not at all happy with this performance. On the 2nd. Feb. F/O Bates was short of a Rear Gunner and I could have kissed him when he asked me to deputise for WO Bowman. This was an experienced and popular crew who had already completed 14 trips of their second tour. Bowman was in fact the only one outside our crew I had known a year ago. We had carried out our first tours together on 150 Sqdn. Wellingtons, and he was the only other 227 bod with an Africa Star. I cannot recollect why he was not available that night. Our target was KARLSRUHE, a 5 Group effort of 250 Lancasters and 11 Mosquitoes, of which 19 were from 227. Cloud up to 15000 feet and the consequent difficulty in marking caused the raid to be a failure. 14 Lancasters were lost, including 9J"D" with F/O Geddes and crew. The total effort of Bomber Command that night was 1252 sorties. Targets included Wiesbaden's only large raid of the war, and Wanne-Eickel, neither attack was regarded as a success. Very little was achieved that night for a loss of 21 aircraft.
On the night of the 7th. Feb., F/O Bates was airborne again with 11 others from Balderton in a total force of 188 aircraft, to the Dortmund-Ems Canal. All 227 Sqdn. a/c returned safely, but 3 were lost in all. I was not with him this time although W/O Bowman was not available. After about 5 hours sleep the Battle Order for the coming night showed 18 crews from 227 sqdn., including F/O Bates, with F/O Watson as Rear Gunner. It felt great to be doing something useful. The weather en route was clear and there were still fighters about, largely responsible for the loss of 12 Lancasters, but the bombing was extremely accurate. According to Speer, the German armaments minister, the oil refinery was kaput for the reminder of the war and a big setback to the German war effort. All 227 sqdn aircraft returned safely, one, F/O Edge's 9J"B" having aborted with problems on 2 engines and landed safely at a farm in Norfolk. It was in fact F/O Bates’ 18th. and final trip on
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227 sqdn., a very satisfactory finish. It was a satisfying night too for 'our own' Navigator, Ted Foster who flew as a 'spare Bod' Navigator with F//Lt [sic] Pond. On the 14th. Feb., 6 weeks into what surely must be the final year in the war against Germany, we were no doubt startled to see our Skipper and crew on the Battle Order. A 5 Group effort, the target was ROSITZ oil refinery near Leipsig [sic] , a force of 232 Lancasters and Mosquitoes, including 12 from Balderton. Our aircraft was 9J"H" and a couple of hours or so after take-off the Skipper found he could not come to terms with his magnetic compass, the performance of which was erratic. An hour or so later the Giro compass also started to play up and fortunately the Skipper did accept the advice of the Navigator and turned back, navigating solely on "Gee" back to base. It was not possible to carry-on navigating to the target on "Gee", we would have [inserted] 14/2/45 Rositz [/inserted] been out of range long before the target was reached. 9J"G" skippered by F/O Tate had engine trouble just after take-off and returned on three engines. We were the second aircraft to abort on that trip. There were some ribald comments next day when the Instrument Section reported there was nothing wrong with either compass. The comments were not facetious however, no-one would seriously accuse either the Skipper or an experienced Navigator like Ace of pulling a fast one. Both I am quite sure would have preferred to take part in the destruction of Rositz This was in fact the Skipper's final trip, although we did not realise it at the time and still regarded his as our Skipper for the next two months.
The record shows that in the following four weeks Ace did three spare bod trips whilst the rest of the crew passed the time somehow. The spell was broken for me when F/Lt Hodson asked me to take over his rear turret on the 14th. of March. Ace had already done his last bombing raid although he too might not have realised it at the time. His grand finale, quite fitting was a daylight 1000 plus Bomber raid on DORTMUND on the 12th. of March, as Wing Commander Millington's Navigator. It was also to be the Wingco's final trip before swapping his duralumin pilot's seat with a little steel armour plating at his back, for I think a wooden one in the House of Commons where his back was probably just as vulnerable.
Our target was another oil refinery, at LUTZKENDORF, a typical 5 Group effort of 244 Lancasters and 11 Mosquitoes, 15 of the former being from Balderton. We enjoyed the company of F/O Howard as 2nd. Pilot. In fact five aircraft from 227 Sqdn. carried 'Second Dickies' that night. Out of a total of 18 aircraft lost, two were from 227 Sqdn., both with Second pilots. It was feared by many that carrying a Second Pilot increased the risk, but I did not share this concern. The Second Pilot it is true would take the place of the Flight Engineer who would either stand between the two pilots or sit on the dickie-seat. Some drills had to be slightly modified for the occasion, but I would have thought the presence of an extra bod would tend to put the others more on their toes. The crew I was with were on their 18th. trip and had been with the Squadron from the outset. Nothing untoward happened to us, there was the usual flack and searchlights, maybe fighters but one saw none. Bombing seemed reasonable well concentrated and photo-reconnaissance next day showed that 'moderate damage' was caused.
On the 7th. of April the squadron completed its transfer to Strubby, and was detailed for action the same night. I was favoured to fly once more with F/Lt Hodson and crew, LEIPZIG again, this time to the
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Benzol plant at MOLBIS. 13 Lancasters of 227 joined 162 others and 11 Mosquitoes, all from 5 Group. The weather was good, bombing accurate, and the oil plant put completely out of action. No aircraft were lost and the raid was considered a 100% success.
After a few hours sleep we were briefed for an attack on LUTZKENDORF, the same target as on the 14th. March. It had been attacked the previous night by 272 aircraft from 1 and 8 Groups who caused only moderate damage. I was detailed to fly with W/O Clements and crew who were on the 5th. trip of their first tour, in 9J"Q". On take-off the starboard outer engine failed and Ace who waved us off said he saw the aircraft sink to within a few feet of the ground; but that few feet made all the difference and the Skipper was able to gain height gradually until it was safe to jettisson [sic] the bombs in the sea. The trip was aborted and a safe landing made at Strubby. Subsequent inspection showed a fuel leak from no.2 port tank and oil leaks from the two outer engines. 242 aircraft were on this raid, and 6 were lost, but another oil refinery was put out of action for the rest of the war. The 19 aircraft put up by 227 all returned safely and were diverted to the west because of weather.
Two nights later, on the 10th. I was again with W/O Clements, to the Wahren Railway yards at LEIPSIG. The force of 230 aircraft comprised 134 Lancasters, 90 Halifaxes, and 6 Mosquitoes, of which 1 Lancaster and 1 Halifax failed to return. Immediately prior to take off I had trouble with the turret sliding doors, they wouldn't close, but I rotated the turret onto the port beam as was general practice for take-off with the doors open. This was spotted from the ground and the Skipper was told on R/T soon after we were airborne. I had to get out of the turret and through the bulkhead door to fix them, but finally managed to get then to slide. If I had failed to fix then nothing would have made me admit it, it would just have been a little draughty. The trip went very well, the marking was accurate and the bombing concentrated. Some flak and plenty of fighter flares about but we saw no fighters. It was a quiet return trip and all 227 aircraft returned safely.
That was my last trip and also the last for W/O Clements and crew. It was the 57th. involvement by 227 Squadron which was to carry out 4 more bombing raids, terminating with BERCHTESGADEN itself, on the 25th. of April. The war in Europe was virtually over, but our impression was that 5 Group was to form the nucleus of Tiger Force to help finish the job in the Far East and we would be a part of it. It was with these thoughts that I went on leave on the 26th. April, a spare bod without a pilot, but still expecting to fly again with the squadron..
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[photograph]
[photograph]
[photograph]
64A
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[photograph] [photograph]
F/O. CHEERFUL CHEALE R.C.A.F.
[photograph] [photograph]
F/O BATES F/O PETE CHEALE (BA) W/O PETE FOOLKES
S/LDR CHESTER (PILOT) F/O FOSTER
64B
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[photograph]
[photograph]
[photograph]
64C
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[photograph] F/O. TED FOSTER D.F.M.
C.W. PETE FOOLKES MID-UPPER
[photograph] [photograph]
64D
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[photograph] CLIFF’S OFFICE
[photograph]
[photograph] OUTSIDE OUR DES. RES.
C.W. & GEOFF HAMPSON (FLIGHT ENG
64E
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[newspaper cutting of D.F.C. award] [photograph]
227 SQDN W/OP – NAV – MID- UPPER
[photograph]
64F
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[photograph] [underlined] TED (ACE NAV) FOSTER D.F.M. BALDERTON NOV 44 [/underlined]
[photograph] [underlined] RUNNING UP ON HOMBERG 1/11/44 AT LUNCHTIME [indecipherable word] [/underlined]
64G
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[photograph] [underlined] F/O. BATES [/underlined]
[photograph] [underlined] F/O BATES W/O JENNERY (NAV) SGT. WESTON (FLT. ENG) [/underlined]
FEB 45
64H
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[DFC citation]
64L
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[letter from HM George VI]
64M
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[Sgt Mess Wick Christmas Menus 1944]
[photograph]
F/O CROKER’S LANCASTER AT REST IN TORPEDO DUMP XMAS ‘44
64N
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[inside of christmas card]
CHRISTMAS CARD FROM PETE IN CANADA
64P
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[photograph]
STIRLING AT H.C.U. WINTHORPE
[photograph]
AT BLIDA
[photograph]
LANCASTER AT SYERSTON
74A
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[letter of introduction to airfield manager in Iran]
154A
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[photograph]
F/LT. MAXTED (GUNNERY LEADER) PETE FOOLKES & F/O SANDFORD (SPARE GUNNER OR SQDN ADJ)
[photograph]
TED FOSTER WITH BITS OF 9JO
[photograph]
64J
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[photograph]
GEOF. HAMPSON FLT. ENG.
[photograph of 9J-O]
[photograph of 9J-O]
64K
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[christmas card]
CHRISTMAS CARD FROM PETE IN CANADA
64P
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[typewritten letter]
[underlined] PART OF F/L CROKER’S LETTER WITH XMAS 1990 CARD [/underlined]
64Q
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[location map for 1994 reunion]
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[underlined] FINAL LEG [/underlined]
Recollections of events in my final 15 months in the R.A.F. are reasonably clear but somewhat hazy of detail and of the order in which they took place.
I was still with the Squadron on VE Day, the 5th. April, on leave in London with Hilda. I recall going up to Leicester Square by tube train with my father, Alice and Hilda to join the celebrations and actually walking back the five miles to Lavender Hill in the early hours. This would explain why I had no knowledge of the Victory Parade at Strubby until I was shown a photograph of it many years later. I was on leave again in London in early August when the Americans dropped the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and suddenly the war was over. I was still in uniform and had to await my turn for demob.
I have no recollection of attending a Reselection Board when I was made redundant from flying, nor of actually leaving the Squadron. I think my first posting after the Squadron was to Gravely, as a Squadron adjutant. I had always thought that the Squadron was 106, but according to the Bomber Command War Diaries 106 was never at Gravely [sic] !. There is no mistaking the actual station, however, it is only 4 miles from my present home and parts of it are still recogniseable [sic] . I was astonished to find many years later that 227 Sqdn had transferred to Graveley about the 8th. of June and was disbanded there on the 5th. of September. I was there for about 6 weeks during which time we closed the Sargeants’ [sic] Mess and did a very little paper-work. We had neither aircrews nor aircraft, it was just a matter of holding office and very little else!. I probably spent most of it on leave.
I then became a Photographic Officer u/t and did a very interesting course at Farnborough which lasted 8 weeks. One of the instructors was a Sgt. Peter Clark, a leading Saville Row fashion photographer before the war and Hilda’s first employer. I went on leave yet again and was eventually told to report to 61 M.U. at Handforth in Cheshire as a u/t Equipment Officer. I duly reported to the Station Adjutant at Handforth feeling very much out of place. Of the hundreds of service types around only the ex-Air-Crew were in battle dress, the others were either in best blues or dungarees. I had always thought that battledress was the working uniform of the R.A.F., but it was not so at Handforth. I felt more as if I was in the Luftwaffe. The Station Adj. took me to see the Chief Equipment Officer, who was a Wing Commander and this feeling became even stronger. I reported formally and the C.E.O. said “And what the hell are you supposed to be?”. Those were his exact words and I did really wonder whether we were in the same air force. I replied that “I am here as a u/t equipment officer Sir”. “MM what’s your trade?” “Rear Gunner” – without waiting for the ‘Sir’, he exploded and almost shouted “That’s not a trade, it’s General Duties”. He was technically right but raising his voice unduly went on to add “You are supposed to be able to sit here and do my job, you’d feel a bloody fool doing my job, wouldn’t you!”. Fascinated by the smirk on his face and hypnotised by the Defence medal on his breast I just stood there in disbelief at this outburst and quietly laughed. “Well?” He wanted an answer and I said in a rather light vane “Yes Sir I would, but less of a bloody fool than some would have felt doing my job for the last three years”. That was it, he stood up and said “Right, come”. We went along the corridor and straight in to see the Station Commander, a Group Captain. The WingCo[sic] was very agitated and without preamble
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told the Groupie of my ‘gross insubordination’. He recited the dialogue in accurate detail and the Group Captain asked for my account. I agreed with the C.E.O.’s account but said that I was provoked, there was no reason for his outburst and I grinned only because I didn’t think he was being serious. Invited to comment the WingCo said he had been affronted by my being improperly dressed. I made no further comment and the Groupy told the WingCo that he would deal with the matter. The WingCo saluted and left, and I thought I was for the chop. The Group Captain sported R.F.C. wings and had obviously seen his share of action. He stood up and extended his right hand in friendship. “Sorry old chap, I didn’t get your name, do sit down”. I was back in the R.A.F. He asked “Where were you in Africa?” Not an idle question, followed by “Did you know Group Captain Powell?” Yes Sir, he was our Base Commander of 142 and 150 Squadrons, Speedy Powell of “F” for Freddie”. Speedy had been the Briefing officer in the film ‘Target for Tonight’. I mentioned some of his exploits and finally his loss, and the Group Captain was distressed. He told me that like the other 12 ex-Air Crew on the station, I was a square peg in a round hole, but to make the best of it and to go back to see him if I had a problem. In the mess that evening I met the others and soon found we were all on duty every day and every night. u/t Orderly Officer, then Orderly Officer, and through the whole range of Asst. Duty Officer, Duty Officer, Fire Picket, in-line Fire picket, Cyphers, Security, etc. etc. Only the ex Air-Crew Officers performed these tasks and after two weeks of this we agreed something must be done. One period of 24 hours I was Duty Cyphers Officer. This was just a title, there was neither Cyphers Section nor Intellegence[sic] Section and I found that for almost all the duties we were allocated there were no instructions. Several of us individually addressed the Station Adjutant in writing and one even enquired whether he should draw-up his own set of procedures for inclusion in Station Standing Orders. For reasons that could only have been sour grapes, there was a measure of ill-feeling between the ‘permanent’ equipment and Admin officers, and the air-crew types. Many of the former had spent the entire war at places like Handforth, and there is no doubt they did a vital job, and maybe were still doing it. In our case, the war for us was over, and after our experiences of the last few years there was a limit to the amount of being messed around that we were willing to accept. We discussed having fire drills with real fires and creating a few incidents for practice, but finally we drew lots and two of us applied through the C.E.O. to see the Group Captain. The C.E.O. refused permission so we made our request through the Station Adjutant. This was approved and we told the C.O. what was happening, we were being “imposed” upon from a great height. He called in the Station Adj. and told him that all Air Crew Officers would go on indefinite leave the following day. He told the two of us to ensure that all application forms were with the Station Adj. by 3 pm. And for me, it was straight to Whitehaven, in battledress.
I had applied for release from the Service under “Class B”, having an immediate job to take up which would in itself create work for 5 other ex-Servicemen. Hilda was in fact holding the fort in Whitehaven, and nothing came of the application.
It was about four months before I was recalled to Handforth, and immediately detached to no. 7 Site at Poynton to take over as Equipment Officer i/c and also as Officer i/c. the Prison Camp. There was an Equipment W/O running the Stores with about 200 Airmen and I agreed with him that it could
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stay that way. The Stores comprised 8 massive hangars full of equipment. I regarded my main job as O.C. the Stalag with its 1000 P.O.W.’s (750 Italian and 250 German) and my staff of 15 Air Crew N.C.O.s who had all been kriegsgefangener themselves. The Senior German prisoner was a Warrant Officer who spoke excellent English having studied it for 5 years in prison camps. Most of the prisoners, including the Italians, had been taken in the Western Desert. The Germans were very smart indeed, in contrast to the Italians, and the two axis partners had as little to do with each other as they could arrange. Gangs of prisoners were guarded by some of the 200 Airmen, supervised by ex-AirCrew NCO.s. The prisoners were not interested in escape, there would have been no point, but I put an immediate stop to their sneaking out of camp at night to try their luck. The German and Italian messes were separate from each other and staffed by R.A.F. cooks. The Germans asked if they could do their own cooking and I agreed but with nominal supervision of two airmen in case we had visitors. I made the same arrangement for the Italians but initially they refused. I appointed one of the Corporal Majors as Senior Iti [sic] and made him responsible. I threatened to fully-integrate them with the Germans if there was any nonsense, and with that some of them nearly burst into tears. They were a lazy shower. I had the Officers’ Mess all to myself, but that’s another story. It was a very cosy three months, with most long week-ends spent in Whitehaven where Hilda had taken-over the Relay system. It was also a tremendous anti-climax to the previous five years.
Eventually when the magic number 26 came up, I reported to R.A.F. Uxbridge for demob. and collected my pin-striped suit and a cardboard box to put it in. I realised then that my career in the R.A.F. was initially over. Straight to Whitehaven by train, still in battledress.
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[underlined] FIRST TOUR TARGETS [/underlined]
[table of targets and bomb loads]
71
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[table of targets and bomb loads continued]
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[underlined] 2nd TOUR [/underlined] [underlined] 227 SQUADRON [/underlined]
[table of targets and bomb loads with additions]
[underlined] 227 SQUADRON [/underlined]
After flying Beaufighters from Malta the Squadron folded in August 1944. The new Squadron was formed in 5 Group on 7/10/1944. Flying Lancasters from Bardney, Balderton and Strubby. Flew 815 sorties and lost 15 aircraft (1.8%) in 61 raids. 2 were also destroyed in crashes.
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[underlined] Back to Civvy Street [/underlined]
By early 1946 the great transition from War to Peace was taking place and many of us were gradually realising that we could now plan some years ahead with a very good possibility of surviving to carry them out. Of my colleagues at Metropolitan Relays, only Reg. Weller had paid with his life, having been killed in action in Italy, with the army. Allan Cutbush had been taken prisoner at Tobruk and spent some time in a prison camp in Italy. Eventually he escaped and spent a couple of years as an Italian farm worker. Soon after the invasion at Anzio he rejoined the Allies and had the greatest difficulty in convincing them that he really was a Private in the Royal Signals. Alan was first to be demobbed and rejoined the firm as manager of a newly aquired [sic] group of branches in the Mansfield and Retford areas. George Holah had left in 1939 to join the army, and spent the next six years in India, returning as a Major in the Indian army complete with an Anglo-Indian wife and family. George did not return to Relays, but joined the Metropolitan Police, and in 1975 was a Clerk in the Central Registry at New Scotland Yard. How he managed to transfer from being a private in the British army to a Commissioned Officer in the Indian army I don’t know, assuming it actually happened. I have not met George since 1939.
In June 1945, my father, Mrs. Kilham and Mr. Moulton bought privately another run-down radio relay system, West Cumberland Relay Services, Ltd., in Whitehaven, and I was invited to develop it. Although Germany had capitulated, the war was not yet over. Japan might have seemed a long way off but was still our Enemy and the job had to be finished. Meanwhile Hilda moved to Whitehaven and set-up home in the flat above the shop at 49 Lowther Street. Colin was then 9 months old and it was a further year before I was demobbed, but during that period I seemed to have spent most of my time in Whitehaven. Hilda kept the Relay ticking over, with very limited assistance from the staff, until March 1946 when I was given indefinite leave on compassionate grounds.
The relay was well and truly run down, with about 400 subscribers each paying 1/3d per week for two radio programmes. It was losing money fast, the entire network needed rewiring and the amplifiers and other equipment were just about a write-off. I had with me the name-plate from my office door at Poynton. One of the German prisoners had made it for me, a notice which proclaimed in Gothic characters
Obr. Lnt. Cliff. Watson D.F.C.,
LAGER COMMANDANT EINTRITT VERBOTTEN
I put this on my new office door, but drew a line through the bottom line.
Sorting out a fault on a 100 watt amplifier, I asked the engineer, Joe, for a soldering iron, and he said he never used one but preferred the special solder in a tube, which he handed to me. In that single sentence he had proved to me that his technical knowledge was just about zero. I demonstrated the solder’s futility by proving that it was not even an electrical conductor. Consequently all the equipment was full of dry joints and I spent a whole night in soldering connections. The stuff Joe was using out of a tube was for repairing small holes in pans and kettles. I was very disappointed in Joe, his technical
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knowledge was effectively less than zero. The next weekend he claimed to have worked all day Sunday clearing a line fault. He had deliberately caused this fault on the previous morning and I traced and corrected it myself within an hour of his doing so. He had shorted out two wires on our own roof and on Monday morning went straight onto the roof to remove the short. I was there waiting for him and sacked him on the spot for sabotage and dishonesty.
I thus took over the technical side but also looked closely at the system of collecting and keeping records of accounts and customers. The only record of payments was in the collector’s field book and there was no record of where the customers or relay installations actually were. I spent a week with the collector who was very reluctant to assist, and Hilda and I drew up a set of records and established a working system. In the next two weeks I found so many fiddles and had proof of so much skulduggery that I sacked the collector without notice. I found installations where the user claimed to have made one outright payment to the collector who had pocketed the money, a hundred or so loudspeakers recorded as being “on loan” which had in fact been paid for and all manner of other private arrangements. The collector was easily replaced, and Mr. Fee joined us. I was fortunate too in meeting Bert Wise, ex Royal Navy P.O. Telegraphist who had been on Submarines, and who took over the technical aspect including the outside lines. Bill Campbell, ex Royal Army Service Corps driver/mechanic was very quickly trained on installations and line work, assisted by John Milburn, a school leaver. John had a very broad Cumbrian accent and initially I found communication difficult, “As gan yam nar marra” meant “I am going home now chum”. I felt I ought to be replying in French or something other than English.
Bill Campbell’s first job was to take the train to London and bring back a vehicle. It was a new Hudson NAAFI wagon completely fitted out by Met. Relays and full of cable, bracket insulators etc. My first act was to buy a set of maps covering the area to a scale of 1:10,000, and display it on the wall. The idea was that if we could establish exactly where we were we stood a better chance of knowing where we were going. A basic plan for the overhead lines was derived and we worked as a team, stripping out old wiring, checking and replacing where necessary, and keeping a record of installations connected. When an installation was serviced and documentation complete we fitted a capacitor in the loudspeaker for technical reasons and a new programme selector switch. The capacitors were to prove very useful later. The service we had to offer at that time was poor, and although it was gradually improving, we were spending far too much time on fault-finding, diverting us from the main program. Within a month it was very clear that our top priority was to rewire and re-equip. I managed to convince the London Office of this and they sent me a team of 3 wiremen from London, led by Dennis Horton who was inherited as a foreman at Mansfield, complete with two Dodge trucks and tons of installation materials. For four months this team concentrated on rewiring for four programmes, gradually reducing and finally almost eliminating the line faults.
The receivers and amplifiers were at Harras Moor in a cottage, but this was at the end of a two mile line, too far from our main load. We ran a 6-pair cable the whole distance and used these as 600 ohm lines, to feed five 1 KW amplifiers at Lowther Street. A bank of 6 AR88 receivers was installed at Harras Moor and two “straight sets” on loop antennas for the BBC Home and Light programmes. In town we had 210v. DC mains and had to fit rotary
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invertors. We also installed a 9KVA petrol/paraffin engine-driven alternator for use during power cuts, which were all too frequent. I could never understand how the grid system could sustain power through seven winters of wartime industrial production and as soon as the war was over we had to live with power cuts. Harras Moor was providing us with four good radio channels, Home, Light and Third BBC, Radio Eirein, Luxembourg, Paris, New York and others from around the world. We were getting organised and I was able to concentrate on sales, keeping our own gang of three busy on new installations. Within two years we had 2,200 installations, including the two Music Halls, cinemas, and all the factories. In addition we were doing more than 90% of all the Public Address work in Cumberland, some of which were quite memorable. At Grasmere Sports the events included a Fell Race and the first year we gave a running commentary over our P.A. system. The runners were out of sight near the top of the fell, so for the following year we applied to the Post Office for permission to use an H/F radio link to cover the gap. This was refused, “you will have to apply for a telephone”! The following year Bert Wise and John Milburn climbed the fell with an Aldis Lamp and battery, and established themselves where they could see the runners at the top and the ‘ops room’ on the showground. I too had an Aldis lamp and Bert flashed me the numbers of the runners as they reached the top of the fell. This delighted the spectators but completely upset the bookies who alone had the complete information in previous years.
The Post Office were also upset, claiming they had a monopoly on signalling, but declining to put it to test in court. I suggested that to try and licence boy scouts to signal in morse code with torches was ludicrous. I enjoyed the atmosphere of these events and went to quite some lengths to obtain the appropriate marshal music. At a Conservative Party fete one particular rather rousing piece was played several times and I was asked by a retired General why the Hell I kept playing the Red Army March Past.!!
A month after taking over, Hilda and I went for a walk - with the pram - to Hensingham, about three miles inland, and I was surprised to see Relay wires between chimneys and lots of downleads. I had not expected to find another system so close and I checked at some of the houses, asking who provided the system! I was told it was owned by a builder called Leslie but it hadn’t worked for several years. Leslie was the fellow from whom the company had bought West Cumberland Relays, and on checking with him I found it was part of the ‘system’ we had taken over. Further search showed a line of poles stretching for about two miles across the fields which had originally linked the village to the lines in Whitehaven. It also showed that a whole area of Hensingham had no electricity, ideal for relay. There was already a big housing estate and this was being extended, and I decided there was adequate potential in the village, but to replace the trunk route to it would be too expensive. We compromised by obtaining four modified 50 watt Vortexion Amplifiers and four receivers from London. Fred Wright brought them by road in his small van, the logo on the side of which was “Radio Trouble-shooting Service”. I did my very best to put up a case for keeping the van, to no avail. The next day we installed the equipment in an air-raid shelter at Hensingham, as a temporary measure, and immediately started connecting subscribers. Within a few weeks the wiring reached the side of the village where the lines from Whitehaven went across the fields, and we began to replace one pair all the way to link with Whitehaven. With this in operation on the third channel we were able to switch
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off one of the Hensingham amplifiers. Later all four programmes were fed from Whitehaven and the station in the air-raid shelter dismantled. The amplifiers were put to use at Whitehaven Hospital and the Workhouse. Both places were wired for 4 programme relay, but at the flick of a switch microphones could be switched in for announcements, and in the case of the latter, to broadcast concerts from the stage.
It was at Hensingham that I found a row of about 30 terraced houses, all without electricity and all wired with three twin cables of different sizes. This rather intrigued me and I enquired further. Most of the houses had battery driven wireless sets which used a 75 volt dry battery for H.T., a 2 volt accumulator for L.T. and a 9 volt grid bias battery, and in one case I found one of these sets without batteries but connected to the 3 pair cable. The old lady owner said it had not worked for several years. I quickly found the man who recharged the accumulators and he confirmed that the cables I had seen were once used for providing power supplies to radios. I think the system must have been quite unique. Shortly afterwards, the houses were connected to the relay system. My only regret is that I didn’t buy up those radios and store them for 50 years. As more and more installations were connected on the Woodhouse estate, the load on the five mile line gradually became too heavy with a corresponding reduction in line voltage and therefore volume. To overcome this we rented an air-raid shelter from the British Legion on the estate and fitted 4 amplifiers to take the load. These were fed from the incoming line itself, but for emergency use we also fitted receivers. Later the receivers came in useful for about three months during reconstruction of an area over which our main line had been fitted. One of the radio dealers found that we were using local receivers and that they were subject to radio interference from vacuum cleaners, so he had a sales drive in the immediate area of our receiving station with rental vacuum cleaners at 1/- per week. Reception gradually deteriorated but after three months of emergency operation our main line was again complete and the receivers switched off. Reception then was near perfect on our system and dreadful for the rest when the vacuum cleaners were being used. He had put a lot of time and money into trying to wreck our system, and had a double-fronted shop in Lowther Street, but I was sorry to see his shop with a bicycle in one window and a Bible in the other when I left Whitehaven..
On a new housing estate where 5 new houses were commissioned each week, we took a gamble and wired them all. When the first tenants moved in the loudspeaker was playing and the tenant’s radio problems were resolved. After 3 or 4 weeks I would go along and generally sign them up. Some of them of course compared it to their own ‘wireless’ if any, which could not possibly reach our standard of reproduction and reception. There are very few places in and around Whitehaven where we had not fitted microphones and radio, and after reaching near saturation in two years there was little scope for further development.
Whitehaven had been a very satisfying experience, but was marred by the Williams Pit disaster where 160 miners were trapped underground and lost their lives. John Milburn’s father was among them. It was traditional for the eldest son to take over where the Dad left off, and we were very sorry indeed to lose John. Hilda had run the office and “showroom” assisted later by Connie Sim from St. Bees. Bill Campbell was still our mainstay on the lines.
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I handed over to Bert Wise, still wearing his Navy P.O.’s hat, and moved to Wandsworth as Development Manager for Metropolitan Relays. A flat was available for us above the shop at 111 Garratt Lane, but on arrival we found it occupied by squatters. For several weeks we lived with Hilda’s parents until the squatters moved to the second floor and we took over the first floor. They were a decent couple in their forties, and had been desperate for accommodation. Our shop had been empty so they moved in, knowing that when an eviction order was issued by the court, they would be allocated a council house or flat. It was a short-cut to the top of the housing list, and the firm had to go through the motions of demanding court action. The ground floor was established as a showroom, even with T.V. in the window, an impressive amplifier room and an office with the same old sign on the door, Lager Commandant!
The original plan was to develop the area working outwards from Garrett Lane and to use the linesman from H.Q. at Lavender Hill, but there was line work to be done from the very outset and it was this part of the job which would be the limiting factor in our rate of progress. I insisted that we employed our own gang of wiremen. Bill Cutler was my wayleave expert, and having planned the main basic routes of our main lines, it was Bill’s job to find out who the landlords were and to obtain their formal permission to fit our wires on or over their property, generally between chimneys. The easiest way was first to sell the relay service to the tenants and their order was used as the reason for our request to fit the wires. We started to run four main lines, no.1 along Garrett Lane to link up with the Lavender Hill system at West Hill. No 2 made a beeline west along Garrett Lane to a Council-owned housing estate which at the time had no electricity. No 3 went due south to Southfields and along Merton Road, over the Redifon buildings and on to Putney, and No. 4 went north towards Wandsworth Common. Everyone on the staff except me, but including Bill Cutler and the linesmen was given five shillings commission for each new customer they signed up. The average wage at that time was £7 per week (in London) and there were few days when the gang did not hand in the paper-work and deposits for customers they had signed up and probably already installed in addition to the day’s work allocated to them. Quite often we would have thousands of leaflets distributed to houses in a particular area which was proving difficult but which they needed to cross.
At about this time, my father retired and went to East Africa, settling at Kirksbridge Farm, Kiminini, 10 miles west of Kitale on the Kakemega Road, and about 260 miles from Nairobi.. He sold his controlling interest in Metropolitan Relays to Seletar Industrial Holdings, Ltd. and their representative, Colonel Slaughter, took over as Chairman. Mr. Moulton became Director & General Manager and I was Development Manager with sufficient shares to qualify for a seat on the board. At the time T.V. was still in its infancy, though beginning to catch on, but the main background entertainment would be the wireless for some time to come. Transistors were still in the experimental stage and Radio Relay provided an alternative to cumbersome and relatively expensive valve radios, with near perfect and trouble-free reception. As Development Manager I made sure I was not bogged down with routine day to day running, and at the outset established a reliable Manager at Garrett Lane, Jack Thompson, whose knowledge of the business was gleaned entirely from Bill Cutler and myself with on-the-job training. Bill had been with Radio Relay since about
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1930, except for during the war when he was a technician in the R.A.F. on Link Trainers.
I was asked to have a look at Yeovil in Somerset and see whether it appeared suitable to establish a relay system, and if I felt it so justified, to spend some time there making a detailed study. I spent a week studying the layout of the town, types of housing, probabilities of future development, the people and their attitudes and in discussion with the Borough Surveyor and Town Clerk’s office staff. I realised that Colonel Slaughter had been a senior army officer and also a senior civil servant for a long time, and that my future relationship with him depended to a large extent on the impression he gained from my first formal report. I recommended that it was a border-line proposition and included a financial budget for 5 years. It would be three years before the system was breaking even and this was too long. The Capital required was too high unless the system was subsidised by another well-established branch. I felt we could find better places to apply our efforts. The Colonel decided to have a look for himself and I went with him to Somerset a week later. Alone, he met the Council officials concerned and one of them agreed to support our application if a relative of his was given a seat on the board of the new company!. I had known of that before the meeting but thought it better not to be involved, nor to include thoughts of that nature in my report. The Yeovil proposal was dropped and I turned my attention to Maryport.
Whilst Bert Wise was on holiday Bill Cutler and I went to Whitehaven for two weeks to relieve him and also to investigate Maryport.
I had known Maryport for some years and I already knew that it would be a goer from the outset. With lots of Council houses (no wayleave problems on them), a working type population, even with an element of communism. It had known major unemployment and soup kitchens and was still a little Bolshie.
We had many friends in the area and a good popular working system in Whitehaven as an example. In that two weeks I produced the same type of report as for Yeovil, but recommended we should go ahead immediately. We saw the Council Officials and agreed a draft agreement with them, found suitable accommodation for a shop in town and a receiving station just out of town to which we could run our own lines. Two weeks later I returned with the Colonel and together we met the Council Committee and completed formalities. From then on it was all systems go. Bill Cutler asked if he could get it organised and he did a very thorough job, using the labour and resources from Whitehaven. He stayed on as Manager and a few years later took-over Whitehaven also when Bert Wise ran-off with his secretary, Connie Sim.
Meanwhile Garratt Lane was running smoothly, and number 1 line had reached East Hill. In a junction box on the wall of a block of flats we had two four-pair cables, one from Lavender Hill, and the other from Garratt Lane, and on an experimental basis we linked the two together, isolating the line at Garratt Lane. We were thus able to monitor the Lavender Hill system in our Control Room, providing their service to our installations on the way. The Garratt Lane amplifiers were fed by Post Office line from Lavender Hill, and each amplifier could provide 1 kilowatt of audio power, sufficient for 3000 loudspeakers. Most of the loudspeakers were switched to no. 2 channel, the Light Programme, still referred to as the Forces programme by the majority. Channels 3 and 4 were very lightly loaded and we were able to switch off the Garratt Lane amplifiers on these channels for most of the time. At that time my family
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home was the flat above the showroom at Garratt Lane, and was guarded by Rex, a huge Great Dane/Alsation [sic] hybrid. Only Hilda and the children could handle it, presumably because they fed it regularly, but everyone else - including me - had to be very cautious.
Eventually it took a bite out of the Manager’s wife and was returned to Battersea Dogs’ Home.
I was spending more time at Garratt Lane where progress was losing momentum, and extending our no. 3 line over West Hill to East Putney was proving difficult. Near Putney Bridge, still a mile from our lines was a highly suitable area of small houses and it was going to take a year to reach them at our current speed. Without much fuss we established a station in the basement of a shop in the middle of this area, using 4 receivers built by Fred Wright’s dept. and 4 small 50 watt Vortexion amplifiers. This station was identical to the one fitted at Hensingham. We then had a sales drive in that part of Putney with the emphasis towards West Hill, and in 4 months were able to link the two systems.
I was interested to recall that for monitoring our four programmes we used a modified aircraft type automatic bomb release mechanism. This was a uniselector type of relay unit which clunked round and changed programme every 30 seconds instead of releasing bombs.
All my staff were ex-Servicemen and there was a dynamic no-nonsence [sic] approach. In contrast to this, our General Manager Allan Moulton based at Lavender Hill, had a stock answer to any serious proposal for action put to him, of “Wait a little while and see what happens”. My attitude was that we know what we want to happen and it wont unless we make it. He didn’t like my Lager Commandant notice on the door either but there it stayed. In 1948 the war was not forgotten by most of us and many satisfactory business deals were made in that spirit of comradeship and trust.
In Feb. 1949 I found that someone called Fry had studied Belfast on our firm’s behalf and had strongly recommended starting a relay service there. The report came to me quite by accident and at the same time I found he was surveying Bath, introducing himself as Development Manager in Relay Association circles. I tackled Colonel Slaughter about it and he said it was news to him, but he took it up with Moulton to whom Fry was reporting. I found that Moulton resented the fact that I was responsible direct to the Chairman, and also that my contract detailed my renumeration including commission which was the £1500 per year, 4 times the average wage. To clear the air we had a formal meeting and I put forward my prediction for future development. I forecast that within 2 or 3 years a general rundown of the system would be inevitable with the increase of television; further that it would be prudent to reduce expenditure on “wired wireless” and to develop the rental side of both radio and T.V., but to reconsider with Fred Wright - who was not at the meeting - the policy of manufacturing T.V. sets. My prediction became factual and was influenced also by transistor radios of which we had no knowledge at that time. There was 33% Purchase Tax on most things including T.V. sets. This was payable at the point of sale and not on rentals. As our sets were never sold but remained the property of Met. Radio & T.V. Rentals Ltd. no Purchase Tax was payable. This loophole was soon to be closed, as forecast, and tax was payable on the rental itself. It became cheaper to buy sets from the big manufactures than to actually make them.
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The Colonel remarked that as Development Manager I was really saying we should stop developing, and I agreed. This set the scene for further discussion well outside the intended scope of the meeting. The Chairman asked Moulton for his views on likely technological advances, but Moulton had none and said we can only try and stay afloat, seeking support from Fry. The Colonel shot down Moulton completely and asked Fry to detail his relevant qualifications. After a silence Moulton was told to study the content of my prediction and not to go off at a tangent on development nor without reference to him. Fry was sent packing and the meeting was closed. I learned quite a lot from Colonel Slaughter, he had spent a long time in the Royal Engineers and one of his attributes was building a flat-bottomed boat on the Nile, one of the biggest in service. His personality was such that when he looked up and down disapprovingly at an obvious ex-Serviceman leaning over a bar, the man immediately took his hand out of his pocket and squared himself up. I actually saw this happen in Maryport, he had that effect on people. (That was in 1948, it might not be the same over 40 years later).
No more was heard of Fry, and I never did join the Board, I was too busy getting on with the job, but it was time for reflection. I realised that when my father was Chairman he had the engineering and technical aspects at his fingertips and he took care of them. He was succeeded by the Colonel who was a business-man but who had no backing on the engineering side. My brief was the Development of the Radio Relay Systems, I regarded technological changes as a matter for the General Manager, Moulton, but I was not responsible to him.
I met the Colonel again privately and I said it seemed that I was Development Manager in a firm which was not going to develop any further. Although there was plenty of routine work to be done I felt the Electrical Trades Union would soon start making things very difficult as it was doing in the Post Office. In view of the probable technological changes, I felt that Colonel Slaughter would rather sell-out than try to steer a ship without a rudder. I was being rather outspoken but straightforward and the Colonel approved of this. I told him I would like to call it a day and try my luck in Africa, Kenya was said to be a land of opportunity. If that failed there was always a job in Bulawayo 2500 miles further south of the Cement Works with Mr. Rose.
The Colonel agreed I could leave when convenient but if I wanted to return within 6 months, to drop him a line. It was four years since the war in Europe had ended. Britain was changing and so was the attitude of many people some of who were very disillusioned. Hilda and I agreed it was time to make a move.
And so in July 1949 I went to Africa for the third time, but with Hilda and the two children, not knowing what sort of a career I was seeking, but nevertheless full of confidence, and still with my Lager Commandant board.
The following year, Colonel Slaughter retired and Seletar’s controlling interest in Metropolitan Relays was sold to British Relay Wireless which later became Vision-Hire. Within a further 12 years the wired-wireless or Relay industry in the U.K. closed, being overtaken by technology.
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[underlined] KENYA [/underlined]
The flight to Nairobi was a very pleasant trip by Argonaut, calling at Rome, Benina, - which we had known as Bengazi [sic] -, Cairo, Khartoum and Entebbe. On the last leg of the flight we flew very low at times, quite unofficially to give us our first views of big game from the air. The flight was very enjoyable, in very easy stages, and in retrospect the Argonaut was about the most comfortable aircraft we were to fly in, in our many subsequent flights to Africa. It was I think the first and only time we travelled in first class.
We were met in Nairobi by Duncan Fletcher, a friend of my fathers, and spent the night at Torr’s Hotel, in Delamere Avenue, the leading hotel at that time. The Stanley Hotel across the road was being refurbished to become the New Stanley, and within a few years Torr’s was closed and became the Ottaman [sic] Bank. I recall the strawberry and cream cake for tea at Torr’s for which it had been famous for many years. The following day we journeyed the 260 miles by bus to Kitale. This was a road we would take many times in the years to come. The first half was tarmac, 100 miles of which from the top of the Nairobi escarpment, through Naivasha to Nakuru, having been built by Italian prisoners of war. From the top of the escarpment there was a wonderful view of the Rift Valley and Mount Longenot [sic], an extinct volcano, and to the west over the plains towards Mau Forest and Kisumu. The bus took us down the escarpment, dropping about 2000 feet to the floor of the Rift Valley, passed the little Italian church built by P.O.W.’s, and northwards past Lake Elementita and Nakuru, then the rough murram road to Kitale. The journey took about 10 hours, but was far from tedius [sic], there was so much to be seen.
Kitale seemed like a typical american western type of small town, the roads were not made up and the sidewalks were made of wood. Many of the buildings were made of timber clad with mabati - corrugated iron - and most europeans wore khaki drill. We were met at the bus station by my father and completed the remaining 9 miles of our journey to our new home, Kirksbridge Farm, Kiminini where a guest house had been built for us, about 100 yards from the main house. Colin and Wendy, aged 6 and 4 were introduced to the Ayah, the african nurse, called Nadudu, who spoke only Swahili and her tribal language, Kitoshi, but within a matter of days was communicating without difficulty with the children. Nadudu had her own rondavel, a thatched roundhouse on the lawn at the side of the guest house, and took care of all the children’s needs.
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[underlined] Hoteli King George [/underlined]
Life on the farm had provided a welcome anticlimax to just about everything that had gone before, but it could hardly be a long-term solution for a young couple with a growing family. We did not appreciate at the time the serious effects of the political unrest and changes which were beginning to take place. We thought that common sense would prevail and most of us felt we had a good working relationship with the Africans; only a misguided few claimed to really understand them! Neither Hilda nor I felt we were achieving a great deal on the farm and we agreed it was time to look further afield.
In April 1950, after almost a year in Kitale, I responded to an advert in our national newspaper, the East African Standard, for Prison Officers. Salary £550 per year, uniform and furnished accomodation [sic] provided, generous leave etc. Military experience advantageous, with the rank of Asst. Supt. of Prisons. One pip! At least the job would get us to Nairobi where most of the action was, and we would have an opportunity to look around, but it was also to give me an insight into a very different and often sordid aspect of life. My application was successful. Our family, Hilda and myself, Colin and Wendy, with Paddy and Jeep our two Alsations all crowded into the Austin A70 and once again made the now familiar safari to Nairobi. 150 miles of murram road, through the Transnzoia, and the plains around Eldoret settled almost entirely by South Africans from the Union, winding around ravines to Mau Summit, up and over the 11,500 ft. mountains at Timbarua to Nakuru then 100 miles of luxurious tarmac through Naivasha with its flamingoes [sic] , passed Elementita an extinct volcano, up the escarpment to Nairobi. The tarmac road was built by Italian prisoners of war in W.W.2, the best stretch of road in East Africa. We also took with us Edward Ekeke, an African driver who had been with my father in Abbysinia [sic] during the war. Although a Kikuyu he was a trusted servant, and if left alone by the politicians and other agitators would have stayed loyal, but tribal and other pressures on chaps like Ekeke were great, and in retrospect it was foolish of us to trust them. Ekeke returned to Kitale with the Austin for more personal effects and re-joined us after a few days. I think he must have finally returned to the farm by 'taxi', as the african buses were called.
As it claimed in the advert., accomodation [sic] was provided. It could have been described as a three-bedroomed chalet, the walls and roof being of mabati (corrugated iron), and was built on stilts about a foot off the ground. We learned that is [sic] was originally built at the other side of the prison and had been carried to its current location by 200 prisoners. As far as I remember, we moved straight into the 'house', and roughed it until Hilda made it comfortable. There was a bathroom, but the loo was a 'thunderbox' at the end of the back garden with a bucket which a gang of prisoners dealt with about 5 am. every day. The kitchen was a Colonial type near the back door, with a wood stove, and an adequate supply of kuni (firewood) provided by more prisoners.
The prison was totally enclosed within a high stone wall, designed to hold 700 prisoners, but with a prison population of about 1900 Africans, 180 Asians, 20 Somalis and 12 Europeans. Quite separate was a small compound for the Wamawaki, (women), with about 20 African and 1 Asian inmate (in for murder but only men were eligible for hanging, so she was serving life). The whole 2000 or so were in the care of about 9 European officers and 200 African Askari. The
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Officer i/c was 'Major' Martin M.C., W.W.1 Veteran,as [sic] Snr. Supt., his number 2 was Henry Thacker with 3 pips as a Supt. Henry spoke fluent Kikuyu in addition to Swahili, and in fact had a Kikuyu 'wife'. He had been in the Prisons service for 36 years at that time and sported one medal ribbon, on his right breast. Legend had it that it was awarded by the Royal Humane Society after he saved a cat from drowning, but Henry was on a totally different wavelength to other Europeans. Sid Swan with 2 pips was i/c the stores and accounts, having spent the war in the Kings African Rifles, and having been demobbed as a Major. Other junior officers like myself included Bunty Lewis, rather effiminate [sic] but nevertheless an ex Royal Artillery officer who had a Kenya-born wife; Paddy McKinney, a large hairy ex Irish Guards Sergeant; Jimmie Vant, ex Kings African Rifles, the son of a Keswick lawyer turned Kenya farmer. Jimmie and his wife Dulcie regarded themselves as Kenya settlers and claimed to spend most of their time at the ranch on the Kinankop, hence their landrover vehicle. Another officer, Whitehouse who joined about the same time as me seemed to spend most of his time off sick and did not stay with us very long. There were three other officers whose names elude me but they were all ex-service, and all lived just outside the wall of the main prison.
The Duty Officers i/c worked a shift system, 0600 to 1800, assisted by a "day-duties" officer during more or less office hours. The Duty Officer was responsible for the day to day activity in the main prison. We were each armed with an enormous ancient revolver of 0.45 calibre and six rounds of ammo., issued by Mr. Thacker. I objected to the rounds of ammo., pointing out they were dum-dums, the bullets having been filed down to within 1/8" of the cartridge cases., and they contravened the Geneva convention. I remember Henry saying "there is nothing in the Prisons Ordinance about the Geneva Convention, and that's all that matters"! We were ordered in writing to wear the revolver in its holster at all times when on duty, and I thought of my four Brownings of long ago to deal with one enemy, compared to a ridiculous revolver in a compound with nearly 2000 potential enemies. It was in fact general practice, strictly unofficial, to carry the revolver but to leave the ammunition in the safe, and the prisoners knew this. I did carry a loaded Czech. .25 automatic in my pocket of which the prisoners were not aware. Some months after I joined, the Snr. Supt. inspected Paddy's revolver and put him on a charge for not carrying ammunition, "contrary to station standing order number something or other". Paddy was eventually charged before the Commissioner of Prisons and pleaded not guilty, asking to see the written order. This was produced and the charge dismissed. The order refered [sic] to the revolver only, and not ammunition. All very childish, but Paddy of the Irish Guards was not one to be messed about. He produced his dum-dum bullets to the Commissioner who was astonished, and all the dumdums were withdrawn. Paddy also pointed out how ludicrous it was for a lone officer to carry firearms in a crowd of hundreds of prisoners, but the order remained. He was a likeable fellow and when the C.O. quoted the book of rules, Paddy made a detailed study of it. In addition to the Prisons Ordnance, we also had Station Standing Orders which gave Paddy ample scope for playing the barrack-room lawyer. He was seen one night at a party in the Military Police Snr. N.C.O.'s mess, and was put on [deleted] a [/deleted] two charges by Martin. Before the Commissioner he was charged with sleeping off the station and drinking whilst on duty. Again Paddy asked for the rule-book and pleaded not guilty. The book stated that an officer would not sleep off the station whilst
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on duty. Paddy agreed he had been at the dance all night and did not in fact sleep anywhere! case [sic] dismissed. Station standing orders also stated that an officer would not partake of alcoholic drink whilst on duty, but a further order stated that an "officer was deemed to be on duty at all times". It therefore followed that all Prisons Officers were required to be completely teetotal, and that was an unlawful order. Martin had met his match and was told to edit Station Standing Orders.
The day started at 0630 by unlocking the European cells and counting the inmates, whilst the Askari dealt with all the other prisoners. There was no point in an escape attempt by Europeans, they would not have got very far before being picked up, but for other races it was a different matter. They were guarded very closely. The four main racial groups were quartered separately for sleeping and eating, their customs and diet and indeed their whole culture differing considerably. Only the Europeans slept on beds, the others were not interested and prefered [sic] the floor, some with very thin mattresses. The Europeans wore shoes, the Somalis heavy boots, Asians wore flipflops and the Africans stuck to their bare feet which were generally tougher than any footwear. European food was probably similar to that in U.K. prisons, and with each race having its own traditional food, this was not a case of discrimination, each prefered [sic] its own. Each group also provided its own cooks. Some of the Asians in fact opted out of Prison food and had it sent in, but it was very thoroughly checked. Uniforms differed too, some compromise between standard prison garb and ordinary native dress. Europeans wore K.D. slacks and shirts with arrows printed on them. Africans wore white shirt and white shorts held up by string.
Two or three hours were spent in the early morning preparing prisoners for court, generally about 50 of them. Some were on remand, and others were convicted prisoners who were required to give evidence in cases where they were involved as witnesses. In the late afternoon all were returned to the prison possibly with changed status. The paper-work had to be watched very carefully, confusion could arise where one prisoner might have a conviction warrant on one case, a remand warrant on another and possibly a production order to appear as a witness in an entirely different case. It was not unknown for a prisoner to be involved in two cases under different names. Language sometimes presented a problem. The courts conducted the business in English and Kiswahili, but there were many tribal languages and quite often interpreters had to be employed. One such case was when 60 prisoners of the Suk tribe were charged with murder having massacred the District Commissioner and his staff of 12. The only interpreter who could cope with the Suk language translated into Kitoshi, and a second one translated from Kitoshi into Swahili. All 60 were hanged at the prison in due course. They seemed very young to me and I doubt if they really knew what it was all about. They were the ones rounded up by the Police after spears had been thrown at the D.C.'s party from a crowd of 2000 whilst he was reading the Riot Act -literally-.
Relationships between officers at the prison were generally very good, with the exception of Martin who thought he was playing soldiers and Thacker for whom we felt rather sorry. 36 years as a prisons officer must have warped his mind somewhat. After about two months I decided to be like the other officers and wear my medal ribbons, and that was when I first fell foul of Major Martin. He asked me what the first medal was and I told him. He said he
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had not authorised me to wear it and I laughed and said I didn't need his authority, the King's was good enough. Shortly after this I was on duty when 45 new African prisoners were admitted, but there were 50 warrants. Some were convicted on Capital Charges, (murder, manslaughter, rape etc). My Chief Warder had signed for 50 bodies and 50 warrants, but there were only 45 bodies. It was 5 pm and my obvious priority was to determine which 5 prisoners were missing. It took until 6.30 to sort it out, no-one was missing, the Court was at fault in issuing two warrants each to five prisoners, instead of one warrant and one production order each. Only then did I get around to locking up the European prisoners for the night, 30 minutes late, and I entered this in the log. The next day an Asian prisoner complained to an Asian Official Prison Visitor that the Europeans were not locked up until 6.30 whereas the Asian prisoners were locked up on time. This was racial discrimination and the official visitor reported the matter direct to the Commissioner. I was charged by Martin for failing to carry out a particular standing order in that I failed to lock up the Europeans at 6 pm. 'How do you plead?' saith [sic] the Commiss. 'I don't', I replied, 'I request the case be taken by the Member for Law & Order'. He was the member of Legislative Council equivalent to the U.K. Attorney General, and this was a genuine option available to an officer charged before the Commissioner, same sort of procedure as an Airman on a 252 asking for a Court Martial rather than take his C.O.'s verdict. The Commissioner suspended the charge for the time being and asked Martin why the charge was brought. I was then asked why I had failed and I said that I was the Officer responsible and in unusual circumstances I concentrated my action in what I considered the most important aspect, which was resolving the problem of the 5 apparently missing prisoners. I consider I acted correctly, regardless of Station Standing Orders. Martin said he had not known that and I suggested that he should read the duty log before signing it as seen, next time. I also suggested that an amendment be made to the standing orders to the effect that nothing contained therein would prohibit an officer from using his initiative when he felt it necessary. Anyhow, I went on, it is an unlawful order in any case, and that will be my alternative defence with the Member for Law & Order. The commissioner was intrigued and read out the order "You will lock-up the European prisoners at 6 pm.", looking to me for comment. I said it was an impossible order, locking-up people involves work which takes time, 6pm is a moment of time in which by definition no work can be done. I said the whole set-up is childish and the Commissioner asked Martin to withdraw the charge. It seemed I had joined Paddy in his war of attrition against Martin.
Our two alsations, Paddy and Jeep had settled-in very nicely, with only their hereditary training. Their self-appointed task of guarding Hilda and the children was unending. When the family was inside the house, one guard would remain with them whilst the other maintained watch on the verandah [sic] and patrolled outside in the garden. When the children were in the garden whilst prisoners were working in the area, either Paddy or Jeep would deploy themselves between the two groups. Only by instinct our dogs knew the prisoners were not to be trusted and were watched very carefully, but the African askari were regarded as allies. The prison was very close to the boundary of Nairobi National Park, and grew cabbages two feet in diameter in what must have been some of the most fertile land in Kenya, receiving all the effluent from the 2000 odd inmates. Late one afternoon an african prisoner in a work gang fancied his
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chances and made a run for it, sprinting along the road passed [sic] the house hotly pursued by about six askari. The askari were at a disadvantage wearing heavy boots and jerseys, but they were joined by Paddy and Jeep who caught up with the prisoner and arrested him in the Game Park. When the askari caught up with them they found the prisoner literally with his pants down, leaning exhausted against a post supporting a notice "Stay in Your Car, Beware of Lion".
It was essential but sometimes difficult not to become involved emotionally with the prisoners, almost all of whom had in their eyes suffered a grave injustice by winding-up in jail. One afternoon whilst I was on duty the Chief Immigration Officer, a Mr. Pierce, came to the prison and required me to serve a Deportation Order on a European Prisoner, Major Melbourn. I read the document first and found that Melbourn had been declared an 'undesireable [sic] immigrant' and was therefore to be deported within 5 days. Melbourn had in fact served about 12 months of a three year sentance [sic] for bigamy and would be required to complete the term in the U.K. He was 'undesireable [sic] ' because he had changed his job without permission. I remarked that this was a very lame excuse for such drastic action. After an exchange of views I said I had not sought his permission when I joined the Prisons Service and he advised me to do so without delay! A few days later I was detailed to escort the prisoner to Mombasa, and hand him over to the officer i/c of the prison at Fort Jesus. Meanwhile I had studied all the Melbourn files and they showed a good example of how a fellow could slip up over small technicalities which produced major consequences. Melbourn was a British Army officer serving overseas for almost the entire war. During the Blitz, his wife was in a Convalascent [sic] home in Liverpool which received a direct hit and she disappeared without trace like many others. He had been drawing a marriage allowance in the normal way and eventually reported to his C.O. that it should be discontinued because he believed his wife had been killed in an air-raid. He was advised that until he had proof of this the allowance would continue. He should have applied to the courts for it to be deemed that his wife had been killed but the environment of the Burmese jungle and other wartime pressures were not conducive to that sort of logic and he let the matter rest. After the war he made enquiries in Liverpool without result, and was eventually released from the Army having served for 30 years. Several years later he became engaged to the daughter of the French Consol [sic] in Nairobi, and when they were married he declared that he was a bachelor. They were Catholics and had he referred to himself as a widower, there could have been difficulties and the authorities would have required proof in any case, which he could not provide. Soon after the wedding someone who had been a clerk in the Pay Corps spotted the reference to 'Bachelor' and thought it rather odd that Melbourn had claimed a marriage allowance during the war. He reported this and the subsequent enquiry led to Melbourn being charged with bigamy and convicted. Whilst it was essential that justice must be seen to apply equally to all races, Europeans were the Bwana Mkubwas and were supposed to set an example. White men in jail were an embarassment [sic] to Government and wherever possible they were returned to the U.K. Melbourn had slipped-up on a second trechnicality. [sic] In the U.K. After [sic] demob. he and two ex-Army colleagues, all of whom had served in East Africa in 1945, decided to establish a business in Kenya, and the three applied for Entry permits, Employment passes, Dependants [sic] passes in two cases, and Residence permits. Complete with ambitious plans for the future and proper documentation
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the trio arrived in Nairobi and set about organising their new enterprise, one of the first acts being an application to register the name of their company. Whilst this was 'going through channels' problems came to light which could not have been foreseen and their plans had to be abandoned. Melbourn remained in Nairobi and obtained employment, and his two colleagues returned to U.K., disillusioned by the red tape. Whilst looking for a reason to declare Melbourn an undesireable [sic] immigrant the application for permission to work with a firm which did not exist came to light and provided the necessary ammunition.
On the night train to Mombasa Melbourn was very chatty, we were both in civvies, he was allowed to use his own money and I felt the best policy would be to let him have a few drinks and to sleep it off. He undertook to behave and understood that at the first sign of being unco-operative he would be handcuffed to his bunk. He told me his story which was the same as gleaned from the files, and added that he had made arrangements to escape at Suez and join the sister of one of the Somali inmates. I handed him over at Fort Jesus, wished him luck and had a look around Mombasa before returning to Nairobi on the night train. About two months later we learned that he had indeed jumped ship at Suez and was working as a Newsreader at Oomdemaan on Egyptian International Radio Broadcasts. I bought some brass plates from him in Nairobi which today are displayed at Wendy's home in Cherryhinton [sic] , and which remind me of the injustice metered out to one who served for 30 years in the British Army.
Another European prisoner, on remand, had been arrested for vagrancy. He was a British merchant seaman who felt like a change, had legally entered Kenya with proper documentation and had taken a job driving a native bus. The authorities deemed this was not a suitable job for a white man, declared him undesireable [sic] and deported him, by ship. He would have been quite happy to have joined a ship at Mombasa as crew-member or paid his own passage. He most certainly did not meet the definition of vagrancy, he had more than adequate means of support. I recall his bitterness when he said it was fair enough to drive a bloody army lorry for five years but not an african bus.
For nearly six months I relieved Ron Woods as officer i/c the Tailoring section of Prison workshops, whilst he was on home leave. In the workshop 200 prisoners beavered away sewing and stitching, 100 with sewing machines and the other half working by hand. We produced uniforms for all Government departments and also for prisoners and were allowed to undertake private work for anyone willing to provide their own material. One of the European prisoners had been a tailor in civvy street and he was very helpful. There was also a 'mechanical workshop' employing about 100, mostly producing articles in metal for Gov't departments, but also repairing and generally working on motor-cars. I took the opportunity of turning them loose on my father's Packard and they did a very good job. The Tailoring section even produced some seat covers for it without being asked. Shortly after the car was finished, a Salvation Army Major came to me and said that Johnson, a European prisoner who had worked on the car, had seen the light after several months of Bible study and was now determined to go straight. He was serving five years for armed robbery, having held up a taxi in Mombasa. The Major asked for my support for his application to the Parole Board and was in fact going to great lengths to secure the Prisoner's release. I declined my support, and told the Major he had been spoofed, Johnson would never go straight. However, the appeal
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was successful and Johnson suggested to me the night before his release that for a small fee he could arrange to 'steal' the car and drop it over Nairobi escarpment for me. Such were the people we were dealing it, [sic] [inserted] with [/inserted] but what finally became of him I don't know.
After several months we moved to a much nicer house in the prison officers' compound. Hilda was doing photographic retouching and finishing work in the city for Arthur Firmin, and life was without undue pressures. On saturday [sic] evenings we occasionally went to see our friends George and Iris Dent at the Oasis pub. George was an engineer with the Army Kinema Corporation and a very keen 'ham', VQ4DO, ex ZS6DO. At their parents' Pub George showed films which provided entertainment. This was before the days of television in Kenya. It was on the evening of one of our visits we were sitting in the Dent's home, Wendy was stretched out asleep on the couch and Iris's little boy was playing with his toy cap-gun. This reminded me that the pain in my rear was caused by my .25 automatic in my trouser pocket, so I moved the gun to my jacket pocket. Iris saw this move and said it looked a far nicer gun than her .38 and asked to see it. I handed it over, having checked there was no round up the spout and it was on safe. To our absolute astonishment, Iris cocked it, off with the safety catch and fired. The bullet demolished the leg of the couch less than a foot from Wendy's head. The song "Pistol-packing mamma" didn't seem at all funny any more. Colin was with us and had attended Nairobi Primary School for about two months. Wendy was looked after during the day by Nadudu, the Kitoshi ayah we had taken with us from Kitale. The children called her Bundudu.
With the withdrawal of the British Army from Kenya, George and Iris returned to South Africa, George taking up employment with the S.A. Broadcasting Corporation. Today the Oasis pub is thriving, still on the main Mombassa [sic] Road and close to Nairobi airport at Embakasi.
I was concerned only with Nairobi prison, but there were prisons in 8 or so towns, backed up by several camps. Later when Mau Mau really got under way, there were many more much bigger 'internment' camps. Some of them in my day were known as rather tough places. Hard Labour was still the prerogative of the courts; It meant exactly that, and was invariably stone breaking. A gang would be given a task of smashing up a number of very large boulders and feeding the fragments through a screen before putting them onto a lorry. Only when the task was complete would they be marched back to the living area. One of our camps was at Lokitong, about 450 miles north of Nairobi, and it frequently happened that prisoners had to be returned from there to Nairobi to attend court. There was no telephone, the only communication with the camp was was [sic] by a telegram to Kitale prison and thence a letter by bus and camel to the camp. It was generally a three-week process, so six weeks was needed to produce a prisoner from Lokitong to a court in Nairobi. I put up a written suggestion that in the absence of telephones we should establish a number of radio stations. I could undertake to establish the stations myself using ex-army 21 sets, maintain them and also to train the operators. The suggestion was submitted through Mr. Martin but addressed to the Commissioner, and according to the Chief Clerk went straight into Martin's waste paper basket. A few days later I delivered a copy direct to the Commissioner's office with a covering letter with my estimate of costs, about £100 per station plus my time and travelling.
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I promised instant communication with the camps but it was too revolutionary and there was no provision in the budget for it. About four years later the job was done for them by the Police at a cost of £700,000 with recurring annual expenditure of over £100,000. A lot of money in those days. Jimmie Vant became the Prisons Dept. Telecommunications Officer with no knowledge whatsoever of the subject. He didn't really need any, all the work was carried out by the Police which was staffed entirely by technicians on secondment from the U.K. Home Office. Such is the price of progress and sophisticated over-engineering. No doubt in the 1990s they will be able to spend even more millions and do the job via satelite [sic] .
Returning home one afternoon having collected Hilda and two other ladies from the city, and Colin from school, we found the prison surrounded by armoured cars and light tanks with hundreds of Police and Army personnel. Apparently there was a rumour of a pending mass breakout, but it was only a rumour. I regarded it as a show of strength for the benifit [sic] of the unruly.
The job in the Prisons Service was like no other I have held either before or since. It was work which started and finished according to the duty roster and activity was determined and limited by the various orders laid down. For every minor detail there had to be a written authority. The Prisons Service had become established about the turn of the century and the antiquated system did nothing to inspire enthusiasm. On one occasion Paddy Mc.Kinney and I were taking a five minute breather in the office and enjoying a coca-cola, when Martin came in and without preamble ordered us to put leg-irons on Mchegi, then stormed out again. Mchegi was a "casi kubwa", a 6'3" Kikuyu in a condemned cell. The leg-irons were a reprisal for Mchegi's offensive the previous day. Martin, on his round of inspection had moved aside the 6" square observation panel in the door of Mchegi's cell to look inside, and received the full force of the contents of the choo (night soil!) bucket in his face. Mchegi was awaiting hanging and had nothing to lose. He was a very dangerous individual who had already killed and because of his violance [sic] often remained in his cell during excercise [sic] periods. Putting leg-irons on this tough character was a formidable task and Martin knew that. Paddy startled me by suggesting that I should open the door of Mchegi's cell, and he would wait at the open end of the corridor where it entered the prison yard. I replied that I would rather he opened Mchegi's door and I would wait in the yard. However, Mchegi had no personal animosity towards me and Paddy's complete plan appeared rational. I opened the cell door with the greeting "Mjambo Mchegi", and he stepped out of the cell, seeing a clear passage to the prison yard and beyond to the open gate in the outside perimeter wall of the prison, with neither officer nor askari in sight. Mchegi recognised his chance to escape and made a dash for it. It was at the end of the corridor that Paddy stepped out hit him and simultaneously an askari tripped him up. Before Mchegi recovered four askari had rivetted on the leg-irons and dragged him back to his cell. A few minutes later Paddy and I were finishing our cokes in the office when Martin came in and remonstrated, "why haven't you carried out my order?" Paddy said we had done so and Martin exclaimed "impossible". When Martin was told just how it had been done we were both on a charge once more. The Commissioner reminded us that striking a prisoner was a very serious matter but when Paddy said it was the preferred alternative to shooting him, there was no answer, and the matter was dropped. Mchegi gave no more trouble and apologised to Martin for his indiscretion, and
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Paddy saw to it that Mchegi received his full ration of excercise [sic] time in the prison yard. It was about three weeks after the choo bucket incident that Paddy was in the yard and attacked from the rear by a prisoner with a pair of 12" scissors. Fortunately Mchegi was watching and although still in leg-irons tackled the assailant, overcoming him just in time. Paddy was still cut, but there was no doubt that Mchegi had saved his life. He took a great interest in Mchegi and asked why he had been a condemned prisoner for so long, just waiting for the death sentance [sic] to be carried out. Paddy saw to it that the stabbing incident received a great deal of publicity, and eventually Mchegi was released from jail. Some years later I found he was a Snr. Warder at the prison.
About the same time, a new recruit joined us, with the same rank, Asst. Supt. Gr.2, but we found his salary was in fact 2 increments (£120 per annum) higher than ours and we wanted to know the reason why. We were told that he had been in the armed services and was awarded two increments for war service. We, apparently, had been under the average age of entry for the Prisons service at the time of our war service. Our next move was to try and compare our respective efforts during the war, but the new recruit was very reticent about his service career, and somehow didn't seem to speak the language of the soldier. It was several weeks later we found he had been in the German Army and the rest of us felt this really was too much. Regulations on war service increments however did refer to the "armed services" and made no mention of which side a fellow was on. We were not still fighting the [deleted] a [/deleted] war, but we were a uniformed service after all. The Gerry could see he was not wanted and resigned.
After 12 months as a Prison Officer I was very disgruntled with the way of life and went to see the Commissioner and gave him one month's notice. This he accepted and on my return to the prison I was handed a letter terminating my appointment with immediate effect, signed by Martin.
I then set about thinking of another job, there was lots of scope and on the air next morning my father suggested I should go and see Joe Furness who was Director of Civil Aviation. Later that day, in prison uniform, I called to see the Personnel Officer of D.C.A., one Bert Leaman, and found there might be a possibility of joining the Telecommunications section, and arranged an interview for the following day.
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[underlined] CIVIL AVIATION [/underlined]
In April 1951 I joined the E.A. Directorate of Civil Aviation as a Radio Officer on a salary of £610 per year. I had no relevant qualifications for this job but I could cope with the morse code at 25 words per minute and had aquired[sic] a general background of aviation during the war years! The first two weeks were spent at R.A.F. Eastleigh studying the workings of the Telecommunications and Air Traffic Control systems, after which I was posted to Mbeya near the Tanganyika/Northern Rhodesia border at 6500 feet above sea level. The journey down to Mbeya was by road, 900 miles, and in the middle of the rainy season. Much advice was received, “all the hotels are closed”, “the roads are waterlogged and blocked”, “there is no petrol beyond Arusha” and so on. We decided to do the trip in four short stages of between 200 and 300 miles per day, with night stops at Arusha, Dodoma and Iringa.
Our 1949 Ford Prefect, KCC13, with 60,000 miles on the clock was reshod at a cost of £10. Recapped tyres were the vogue at that time, a practice which has since stopped, being said to be dangerous. However, those recaps. did 22,000 miles on some of the worst roads in the world, without problems, before being replaced, a better performance than the original new tyres. With the car loaded with household equipment, and with Colin and Wendy lying on blankets near the roof of the car we headed south down “the Great North Road”. The first 100 miles was tarmac and no problem in the pouring tropical rain. Always to the south of us -dead on track- were towering thunderheads of cumulo [sic] -nimbus, but nearing the end of the tarmac the rain stopped. Indeed for the next three days the rain stopped falling about twelve hours ahead of us, but also remained on our tail. On the second day, deep ruts in the road caused a broken rear spring near Dodoma, but this was repaired overnight at George’s Garage; very well equipped with spare springs was George. Crossing the hundreds of fords, or drifts was exciting and at times quite hilarious, many being over 100 years wide and comprising merely a strip of concrete 10 feet wide on the bed of the river. Most of them were covered by water, hiding the concrete and the only clue to its location was provided by the poles at each side of the drift. More often than not the river bed at the side of the concrete was worn away creating a drop of a foot or so. A piece of thick wire fixed to the front of the car together with a vertical line on the windscreen, could be lined up with the centre of the two distant poles. By ignoring everything else and having implicit faith in the navigational instrument, we always reached the other side without going over the edge. Without this blind faith there would have been a tendency to keep a little to the up-stream side of the drift. To go over the edge on the other side could have been disastrous. In two places on the second day we were really bogged down in mud but we quickly mastered the technique of driving in reverse over the worst parts, thus becoming front-wheel drive. The most interesting village we passed was Kondor Arangi, between Dodoma and Iringa, on the third day. A beautifully painted and spotlessly clean Arab village, probably unchanged for centuries and almost completely independent of the world outside. After over 35 years I can still recall the aroma of freshly-baked bread, and the welcoming atmosphere of the village. On through Iringa and the final leg of 250 miles of the beautiful scenery of Southern Highlands, completely unspoilt by development. After a night at the Iringa Hotel, we had made our usual early-morning start and reached Mbeya by mid-day. Straight to the Railway station in
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Mbeya, a typical East African Railways and Harbours station complete with platforms, but the nearest railway lines and trains were over 400 miles away. A search for Paddy and Jeep, our two alsations, which had been put on the train five days previously in Nairobi, was to no avail. It was to be a further three days before they reached Mbeya, very hungry and very thirsty. After a night in ‘Links’ Salter’s Mbeya Hotel we inspected our new home at the airport. Known as Wilson Airways Rest House, built in 1932 for use by British Airways – before the change of name to Imperial Airways, and B.O.A.C. – It was ‘U’ shaped with 2 kitchens and 10 bedrooms. No electricity of course but a dozen or so paraffin lamps took care of the lighting problem. An african [sic] was provided to carry water from a tap about four hundred yards away to keep our small tank topped-up. The house was very convenient at the side of the runway, actually the grass landing area. It was very pleasant to sit on the verandah[sic] where there was a wonderful view of Mbeya Peak. We had only two neighbours, the Claytons from Burnley who were ‘refugees’ from the groundnut scheme at Kongwa and now in charge of a tipper unit with the Public Works Dept., and Bwana Grigg, an old-timer who had been a prospector and was then a Weights and Measures Inspector.
Mbeya was our home for 2 1/2 years, the aerodrome had been up-graded from a one-man to two-man station open from 0600 to 1800 hrs. every day. My colleague was George Hanson, who originally hailed from Selby in Yorkshire, an ex-wireless operator in Royal Signals during the war who had joined E.A. Posts and Telegraphs as a Radio Officer in 1947. George had spent 3 years in Burma during the war and returned to Selby in 1946. To find his fiance [sic] in the arms of two Italian prisoners. According to George he gave the Italians a thrashing – which would have been very true to character – and left them with their heads jammed in the railings, to be released later by the fire-brigade. The Law caught up with him and George was given a dressing -down by the magistrate who said “We don’t want ruffians like you in this country”. George claims he told the magistrate to get some service in and his knees brown and the case was adjourned. At that time the Crown Agents were recruiting for East African Posts & Telegraphs Dept. and George felt it was time to emigrate. All aeronautical communications were handled by E.A.P. & T. until the end of 1950 when they were taken over by the Directorate of Civil Aviation. George and I had to cover 84 hours each week between us, thoeoretically[sic] a 42 hour week, but there was no provision for sickness, local leave, and the many chores which required both of us, like being in three places simultaneously. We were assisted by an african [sic] wireless operator, a Kikuyu 1200 miles from his home, a cleaner, a watchman, and a diesel mechanic, Kundan Singh Babra, all of whom lived on the station. George and I agreed our individual responsibilities, we would each carry out our 42 hours per week on watches, which included R/T to aircraft on HF and VHF, an aerodrome control function, W/T to Nairobi as required, originating meteorological reports each hour and coding them into Aero format, and customs duties. In addition, he would deal with all the admin., and I would see to the technical aspect of keeping the station on the air.
The station had been established in 1932 and the original Marconi M/F Beacon, a type TA4A was still in use and in immaculate condition. We had a stock of MT16 valves enough to last for another 30 years. We also had an ex-South African Air Force T1190 of 1933 vintage, fitted in 1940, and four ET4336 transmitters for working aircraft on R/T and Nairobi on W/T. Everything was in very good condition and gave me no problems. Our “office” was at the D/F
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(direction finding) station, and was fitted with one of the original DFG10 Marconi recieivers [sic] .
We could not see the runway from the office, which rather limited our scope in controlling it.
Each week, Mbeya had only 4 East African Airways scheduled Dakotas and Loadstars, on the Nairobi-Dar es Salaam route, plus a Beaver of Central African Airways from Blantyre in Nyasaland and one R.A.F. transport from Johannesburg to Nairobi. There were also up to a dozen or so charters which sometimes arrived with little or no notice. Our M/F Beacon was the only navigation aid for some hundreds of miles in all directions. The D/F Receiver was not in use and had a faulty power unit. This I serviced and used the receiver for monitoring Tabora’s M/F Beacon. We were operating also on 6440 KHz, the Salisbury F.I.C. channel, unofficially, to keep in touch with the Beaver aircraft which were not fitted with Nairobi F.I.C. channels. This proved very useful and also gave us a rapid link with Salisbury Ndola and Blantyre. One day and R.A.F. Anson called on [underlined] 6440 [/underlined] and reported his MF/DF receiver, - in his only [inserted in margin] NOT 6440 BUT 5190[?] [/inserted in margin] navigational aid – out of order. He was over mountains, - he hoped – in cloud, could we give him QDM’s, (courses to steer) on M/F ?. I told him to transmit on 333 KHz, the standard frequency for this purpose, and it took only a few seconds to retune the DFG10 to this frequency. For the next 2 1/2 hrs. I gave him a QDM every three minutes. The weather was bad and the aircraft eventually landed at Mbeya, staying overnight. The Navigator was visibly shaken, he did not know his position, only that if he acted on the QDM,’s he would eventually reach Mbeya. Only after landing could he calculate his ground speed, about 70 knots. On arrival over Mbeya the crew were able to see Mbeya Peak above cloud, This was five miles to the North of us and with a cloud base of 3000 feet above the aerodrome they were able to descent and land. All this would of course have been totally unacceptable to a civilian aircraft which would have possibly returned to it’s starting point. The R.A.F. aircraft without any Nav. Aids had really no option. Some weeks later we received a letter from the R.A.F. thanking us for the assistance we had given the Anson crew in providing M/F bearings thus preventing a possible disaster, etc. etc. Unfortunately this letter was also copied to D.C.A. H.Q. with another asking if the facility could be retained. The next mail brought a letter from our own boss, the Director of Civil Aviation.. “Whilst complimenting and thanking you for taking the initiative on this occasion…”. The letter went on to point out the legal significance of giving information to pilots and of undertaking to provide a direction-finding facility with 20-year old equipment and no spares. I made sure I could provide an alternative power supply of 2 and 130 volts which did not take much imagination and adapted some modern valves – type 6C4 – with bases to replace the original 1930 vintage triodes. There were not used in my 2 1/2 years in Mbeya and we continued to give bearings to the R.A.F. unofficially. About 2 years later a Pye VHF set was fitted together with a D/F antenna and also a modern Redifon M/F Beacon, both with an effective range no better than 25% of the 1932 equipment. This was not the fault of the manufacturers. In the case of the D/F the reason was the difference in propagation characteristics and with the M/F Beacon it would have been better to retain the original 1932 Marconi type antenna.
I have no notes of this period, but memories are many. I recall seeing a Cheetah on the grass landing area we called a runway, whilst carrying
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out a runway inspection. As I approached, the cheetah ran off. My foot was hard down doing 58 m.p.h. just behind it, but the cheetah gradually drew away. Daily inspection of the ‘runway’ was necessary. Ant-Bear holes appeared quite often, and just one of these was sufficient to wreck an aircraft. Africans had free access to the runway except when aircraft were actually using it. One evening a grass fire started and swept first along the windward side of the runway where the grass was long, and then crossed it in a line of flame and black smoke the whole length of the runway. Hilda and I were on foot at the other side of the runway and witnessed literally hundreds of snakes fleeing from the fire. There were lots of snakes and other creatures in that area which after all was open African bush. This was again highlighted at 6 am one morning when I drove to the D/F station and opened up the radio. It was still dark and there was a very pungent smell of pigs. I assumed there was a dead animal outside but within a few minutes it was daylight and having established contact with Nairobi on w/t and confirmed there were no overnight disasters requiring my attention, I went outside to investigate. There were elephants all over the place, standing there, and looking just as surprised as I was. I made a strategic withdrawal smartly into the D/F station and bolted the door. On my way to the office I had met the African nightwatchman who was waving his arms about and saying something about ‘tembo mningi sani”. The word Tembo was generally associated with Elephant Brand Beer, which was more a part of everyday life in our immediate area than the animal after which it was named. I assumed he had been drinking and thought no more of it. The africans too were soon awake and trying to chase the elephants out of the maize, throwing tin cans, stones and even pangas at them. Three africans were killed in the process. Meanwhile I telephoned the police who said it was not their shouri (affair), “tell the Game Warden”. It was then 6.15am. and the Game Warden would not take the matter seriously, claiming I was drinking too much, “see the M.O.”! There was a scheduled Dakota due at 7 am. and I asked the pilot to overfly the runway and make sure there were no elephants on it, and this he agreed to do. I gave him the surface wind and QNH and landing clearance, and he came straight in and landed, without checking. He too thought I was not being serious about the elephants. It was mid-day before the elephants left of their own accord and moved back towards the mountains to the south. The Africans said the elephant movement was a sure sign that Rungwe, our local dormant volcano was about to erupt, and the elephants had already received warning. They took me to the fire trench round the Shell petrol dump which was 10 feet deep, and showed me the alternate layers of volcanic ash and sandy soil, starting at the bottom with four inch layers. At the 5’ level about 8” layers, gradually thickening as compression decreased to a 12” layer of ash and finally, 18” of soil at the top. There was no record of the date of the last erruption,[sic] probably some hundreds of years ago. We did experience several earth tremmors [sic] in Mbeya, but it was a nice life and we decided to stick it out!
Colin and Wendy were attending Mrs. Maugham-Brown’s infants school in the town and were making very good progress. Hilda was doing retouching of photographs for Arthur Firmin which were sent to and from his Nairobi office by air mail. It was in Mbeya that I built my first amateur transmitter with bits and pieces from the junk box, and was soon in daily contact with the outside world on the morse key.
On the sixth of Feb. 1952 I called my chum in Liverpool as usual and he told me that all U.K. stations were closed for the day in deference to King
[inserted] G6YQ George [/inserted]
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George VI who had died during the night. Later that day Hilda and I went to Mbeya School to see Colin, expecting the football match to have been cancelled. I expressed my surprise to the Provincial Commissioner (the King’s direct representative) that the Union Jacks were not at half mast and the game still on. He told me not to spread rumours and he would deal with me after the game. Just after half-time a Police askari despatch rider drove onto the field and gave the P.C., who was referee, a message. The P.C. stopped the game and announced that the King was dead. He was very annoyed indeed that I had received the message direct from U.K., many hours ahead of the official channels. Mbeya had a local telephone service which did not connect with any other. It was also at one end of a single-wire line of about 1000 miles which was used for passing telegraph messages. This linked about 30 places ‘up-country’ with Dar es Salaam, the Capital. There was no other way officially of telecommunicating with Mbeya. It so happened that I had a pair of ex-military amplified telephones, which were battery powered, press-to-talk operation and which gave an amplification each of 20 dB (100 times). I sent one of these to Jimmie Waldron in Dar es Salaam and by arrangement he called me one morning at 0545 on this line. We had a first-class conversation which was truly remarkable. This was possible only because the operators at the 30 or so other stations were still asleep, and not interfering. I have no doubt this particular exploit would compare very favourably with the record longest telephone conversation over a single wire and earth, if indeed a record has been established.
George Hanson and I got on very well with each other, both being from Yorkshire and both being ex-Service, but eventually his tour of 2 1/2 years was completed and he was succeeded by Doug. Clifton, who was ex-PTT and R.A.F. ground wireless operator. We moved into the cottage vacated by George and family, near to the transmitting station, and I ran a mains cable underground between the two. This gave us 230 ac. Power for 12 hours a day and at night whenever the radio beacon was required for overflying aircraft.
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One quiet morning the Provincial Commisioner [sic] asked me to his home to discuss a problem, and on arrival I was told that the Governor, Sir Edward Twining was convalescing in Mbeya, having just arrived, but could stay only if he could speak regularly with the Chief Secretary in Dar es Salaam. The Police and Posts & Telegraphs Departments had already been approached and could not assist. I was authorised to cut clean across any rules and regulations in order to set up a communications channel. Back at the D/F Station I sent an official message on the Aeronautical W/T channel to CHF ZHTD (Officer i/c Airport Dar-es-Salaam) asking him to pass a message to Jimmie Waldron, P.T.T. Chief Engineer’s office. I told Jimmie of the Governors request and the powers bestowed upon us, and that I would call him on 7151 KHz which was just above the upper limit of the amateur 40 meter band. I would install a receiver at the P.C.’s house. Would he advise me of his transmitting frequency. Meanwhile I got the local P.T.T. to connect my second aerodrome telephone line to the second line to the P.C.’s house. This automatically provided a microphone for the P.C. and enabled me to make a simple connection to my amateur transmitter at the airport. Half an hour later I received a message on the aeronautical channel “Loud and clear on 7175, Dar es salaam calling you on 8775. A check on my local receiver and indeed there was Jimmie. I then drove to the P.C.’s house and retuned the receiver to 8775, and we had first class duplex communication. A lady’s voice came on “Is that you George?” “No Love, this is Cliff”. “Oh dear, this is Lady Twining, is my husband George there please?” I handed him the telephone and restrained myself from saying “It’s for you George, I thought your name was Edward”. For the next two weeks the link was in constant use and another letter of thanks was sent from D.C.A. in Nairobi.
Why the fuss one might say, but in 1952 it was the very first time [inserted] H E [/inserted] H.H. the Governor had spoken by private radio telephone to his Chief Secretary from outside Dar es Salaam. This was another ‘first’, also on an amateur basis.
At Mbeya Post Office I was introduced to the Manager of New Saza Gold Mine, which was about 100 miles north of Mbeya. He said his radio link with Mbeya had not worked for four years although experts from all over East Africa had tried to fix it. It was a simple w/t link to Mbeya Post Office where there was an operating position and transmitter set up on 3900 KHz which seemed to be a reasonable frequency for the job. “Fix it and you can name your price”, and I agreed to have a go on a ‘no pass, no fee basis’. I first set up a spare DCA transmitter keyed from the D/F station, rather than rely upon co-operation from the Post office. My own DCA operator would monitor. I called the local Post office from the aerodrome but there was no reply. This was the rainy season and it would be a three hour drive through the bush to New Saza, so I lost no time over the Post Office and set off in my Ford Prefect complete with two amateur transmitters and two receivers, any combination of which could do the job if all else failed. On arrival, their station appeared to be working and with adequate output, but I soon found the output stage was doubling to 7.8 MHz. and not amplifying straight through 3.9. A higher tapping on the coil fixed that and I called Mbeya Post office. No reply. Then I called ZEQ3, my own office at the D/F Station and my operator came up trumps. We were in contact with
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Mbeya. I asked my operator to ring the Postmaster asking him to kick his wireless operator. He found the transmitter had the wrong crystal in it and the receiver was also detuned. Having corrected this, all three stations were in contact. The station receiver at New Saza was a pre-war ‘straight set’, that is, not a superhet, and was not ideal, so I added one of my own receivers. In addition, I fitted a second operating position, with my own equipment and separate aerial, as a standby. The manager was delighted and I was rewarded handsomely. Only once in the next 18 months did I need to visit New Saza for a minor fault. Electrical and mechanical power for the mine was derived from a very old wood-burning steam engine of pre-1914 vintage and German manufacture.
On the road about half way to the mine, was Chunya, a typical American-type western one-horse town, the main street being unpaved and 200 feet wide. The place was almost derelict, a few prospectors still panned for gold in the stream, but in years gone by it had supported a population of over 2000. There was a Police post which sported a telephone connected to Mbeya Post office. The overhead line ran at the side of the ‘road’ and I had this in mind for emergency use. A field telephone was part of my standard safari equipment in the car. Later on I carried a transmitter on the aeronautical H/F channels in addition. Communications was often the key to survival.
One very hot day, about noon, George Blodgett, an American tourist, took off from Mbeya in his Cessna 180 with his wife and another passenger, continuing their round-the-world holiday. The aircraft carried the same load as when it took off from Dar es salaam without problem a week or so previously. But Dar was at sea level, and Mbeya at 6500 feet. Dar had a proper concrete runway with a clear flight path. Mbeya had a grass ‘runway’, much shorter and with a small hill at one end and a mountain within 4 miles at the other end. It was the slight banking to avoid the small hill which caused the aircraft to stall and plough along the ground, writing itself off. It took me several minutes to reach the wreck, to find a bewildered trio shaken-up, but physically unhurt. There was a strong smell of petrol which came from a 5 gallon can INSIDE the aircraft. The can had a hand pump and hose which fitted on the drain cock of a fuel tank inside the port wing. Transferring the petrol was achieved by opening a window and leaning out to fix the pipe. This rather surprised me as George was a very experienced pilot and was in fact the first to cross the Andes in Peru, solo, where some years later he went missing without trace. His life-story was written up in Time & Life and referring to his accident in Mbeya, it said he had crashed in the bush and the Despatcher from Mbeya trecked [sic] all night to reach the aircraft, to find George and his passengers surrounded by lions and tigers. Lions were a possibility but the only tigers in Africa are [deleted] a few imported ones in captivity. [/deleted] [inserted] in West Africa and are not tigers as we know them. [/inserted]
Mbeya was a peaceful place, and to a large extent we were able to plan our lives. Occasionally we became involved with the local tribesmen, particularly after one of their frequent skirmishes. Generally a small group would appear at the house bearing the injured on bicycles with blood all over the place, and asking me to take the casualties to hospital. The first time this happened I took them by car to the African Hospital and not really knowing the system, gave them my name. Some weeks later I received the bill. Subsequent deliveries were made in the name of Ramsey Macdonald!
Soon after joining DCA I noticed on one of many flight plans received the name of Iliffe as Captain of an incoming Dakota. When the First Officer
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called me on VHF I requested him to ask the Captain if the number 1090111 meant anything to him. Back came the reply, affirmative. I gave him my first service number 1384956 and after he had landed, went over to the Terminal Building to see him. There wasn’t much time for reminiscing but he marvelled that I had remembered his first service number. It was on a pay parade in Bulawayo that Howard’s name was not called with the others in alphabetical order. It was called at the very end when he gave his ‘last three’, somewhat disgruntled, as “Sir, One one bloody one”.
We had seen a great deal of each other on the troopship going to Durban and until our ways parted at Belvedere where Howard got his wings and my records were stamped ‘Wastage’. After his training at Belvedere, he completed S.F.T.S. on Oxfords and in U.K. converted to Dakotas. His war was on Transport Command, flying Dakotas. We met several times in the next 15 years, the last time being in 1965 when Howard was the Captain of a Comet of East African Airways returning to the U.K.
After 2 1/2 years in Tanganyika our tour was finished and we were due for 6 months leave in U.K.. We opted to travel by air rather than sea but did not realise when making the decision that this referred to trunk travel to U.K. from the International Airport of the territory in which we finished our tour. It was unlikely that we would return to Mbeya after leave, my successor expecting to stay for the full 2 1/2 years. All our effects were crated up whilst we spent the last week in Mbeya Hotel. The car was left with the Postmaster and Paddy our Alsation [sic] boarded with Mrs. Maugham-Brown. And so with four children, Christopher a baby of 4 months, we said farewell to Mbeya at the railway station, not by train but by diesel-powered bus - referred to as a ‘taxi’ by the Africans. The first leg took us the 250 miles through Southern Highlands to Iringa, where accommodation was reserved at Iringa Hotel. The next day was very similar, by another ‘taxi’ to Dodoma. The drivers were Africans, probably ex-Kings African Rifles, and their driving was of a very high standard considering the state of the road. There was some tarmac in the towns, but otherwise the road surface was graded murram, a well-packed reddish sand. This was apt to become corrugated after rain and scarred with deep wheel ruts. Ruts made by lorries could be quite deep and dangerous to cars with little clearance below. The ‘taxi’ took us direct to the railway station at Dodoma where we had been advised to request compartments as near to the engine as possible, where the sway is minimum. The first job was to wash all the nappies and as we had two compartments it was easy to sling a couple of lines and hang up the nappies to dry. It was very hot in Dodoma, and the carriage windows were all open because of the heat. In the evening the engine got up steam and the train moved off amid clouds of thick black smoke, most of which seemed to come in at the windows. For 18 hours we chugged across the plains with its tens of thousands of many different types of wild animals, gradually descending to the coast and becoming progressively hotter. Arriving in Dar es Salaam at about 4 pm., the temperature in the shade was 120 deg.f. and it was a great relief to flop onto the beds in the air-conditioned hotel. The evening was spent in trying to clean up our clothing and indeed ourselves, with Christopher’s nappies hanging on lines in the hotel room. The nappies dried within an hour but were still filthy. After a browse around the big stores in Dar, we handed in our 480 lbs. of baggage and placed ourselves in the capable hands of B.O.A.C.
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Our flight home was by Arganaut, [sic] 16 hours flying, stopping at Nairobi, Entebbe, Khartoum, Benghazi and Rome. Plenty of seat room, excellent food and a very comfortable flight. One engine developed trouble approaching Italy and we were delayed for 24 hours in Rome. The Romans were hostile to the British at that time, I cannot remember why this was so, but we enjoyed a conducted tour of Rome and first-class hotel accommodation. At breakfast next morning I thought I recognised a fellow at the next table. He was under the same impression and when he spoke to us there was instant recognition. He was the B.O.A.C. Rep. in Rome and we had seen a great deal of each other on the squadron in North Africa. He was then W/O Woolston, a pilot on 150 Sqdn. We arrived in London 24 hours late, but there were no complaints. B.O.A.C. had made the trip very enjoyable.
The greater part of our leave was spent in London with Hilda’s parents, and I took the opportunity of spending 12 weeks at the School of Telegraphy in Brixton, for an Intermediate C. & G. in Telecomms and a P.M.G 1st. Class licence. I was also on a course of Dexedrine to reduce my weight, eating very little and actually losing it at the rate of 1lb. per day, for 44 days. Peter Gunns, another D.C.A., Radio Officer had been at the school for 6 months and was doing the complete 12 month course for a P.M.G. second class licence. I decided to give it three months and take the first class ticket. The Principal at the school advised against it, almost everyone first obtained a second-class ticket before trying for a first. For three months I swatted hard, long into the night and then went to Post Office H.Q. in St. Martin-le-Grand and applied to take the P.M.G.1 licence. The Chief examiner asked to see my second-class licence and when I said I didn’t have one, he said “look son, try for a second class and if you pass, come back in a few years time and try for a first”. I replied that I was not interested in anything second-class and he shrugged his shoulders and booked me to take the exam. three days hence. The exam. took from 9 am to 5 pm., written and practical and was quite intensive. The final part was the morse test at 25 w.p.m. and the examiner was wearing an R.S.G.B. tie. I took a chance at the end of the test and sent, on the key ‘QRA? De VQ4BM’ and after an exchange of greetings he asked me if I was returning to Kenya. I replied “yes, but only if I pass this exam”. He sent QRX3 and left the room, returning with a smile and said “strictly off the record, you could book your ticket”. The next three days were taken up with City & Guilds exams, and I was delighted when my P.M.G. licence arrived by post. The following day, feeling on top line, Hilda and I went to M.C.A. Headquarters at Berkeley Square and I applied to take the Flight Radio Officer’s exam. I found this was held only twice yearly and by sheer coincidence the next one was the following day. I was told to just fill in the form, pay £3 and come back at 0830 the next day. I saw the Chief examiner and told him I wasn’t quite prepared for the exam. at such short notice, it was many years since I had studied the S.B.A. and Navigational aids. He told me not to worry about them and to check through the last 5 exam. papers, copies of which he lent me. They could be bought openly from the “shop” downstairs, but this was already closed. He also said “bear in mind that everything has its own natural frequency”. I spent until 5 am next morning making sure I could answer all the questions on those papers, and doubly sure of the compulsory questions. I noticed that
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year 4 had the same compulsory questions as year 1, and year 5 the same as year 2. Year 6 was to be my lot and if this was to be the same as year 3, on cathode ray tubes, all would be well, and I had a couple of hours sleep. It had taken me a long time to realise what the Chief Examiner had meant by “it’s own natural frequency”.
The exams were spread over a period of two days and I failed two of them. The first was a three-minute test writing down the phonetic alphabet and I wrote “Alpha bravo coca delta foxtrot golf hotel etc.” The examiner looked over my shoulder and remarked “what on earth have we here, have you never heard of able baker Charlie?”. I thought this was a catch and I said “yes but that went out three years ago when I.C.A.O. introduced this one”. It seemed that Britain was three years behind the rest of the world on this simple issue. I had however quite rightly failed on R/T procedure. All went well on a simulated flight from Manchester to Jersey when I received a chitty that both engines had stopped and we were on fire. There was already a M’iadez in force from another aircraft and I broke radio silence and put out my own “M’aidez” without the Captain’s authority and that was the end of the exam. FAILED! on two counts. I had passed two three hour written papers, a two hour practical exam., an hour’s morse at 25 w.p.m. and failed on two ridiculous details. I said I was sufficiently experienced to anticipate the Captain’s instruction to send out an SOS but the book does say that only the Captain has the authority. However, I paid another £3 which I could by then ill-afford and resat the two parts the following morning. The licence came by post a few days later. The R/T Procedure test was the same as before, and when we reached the point where I had put out my M’aidez I just sat tight. I heard the other aircraft transmit his SOS again and it was acknowledged by Jersey Approach. Without authority to transmit an SOS I could not break radio silence according to the regulations and I continued to sit tight. One minute of real time was equivalent to 10 minutes of ‘flying’ and after 30 minutes of theoretical flying time I removed my headphones and placed them on the table. The examiner did likewise and asked me what I thought I was doing.
I just said “swimming to the surface”. He laughed and said O.K. at least you didn’t originate a M’aidez. In the practical M.C.A. exam the equipment in use was the T1154 and R1155 and the main object of the examiner seemed to me to be one of getting me confused, argumentative and thoroughly rattled. Thanks maybe to the dexedrine I realised what his game was and remained very calm indeed. He admitted afterwards that he was trying to get me rattled, remaining calm and composed was all important in the air!. I cast my mind back 10 years but said nothing.
Meanwhile Peter Gunns was still plodding on and becoming very discouraged. I urged him to take the PMG2 the following week, there was little point in further delay. I spent a week with him going through every paper set for 5 years, and he was successful in the exam. A few weeks later we returned to Nairobi together. About 10 years later Peter died of a heart attack whilst on night duty in the Nairobi Communications Centre. He was taking a short break and read in the newspaper that Pinnocks had folded up. He had £15,000 invested with them, and the loss was too much to bear. After a few weeks at Eastleigh I was posted to Mwanza on the southern shores of Lake Victoria, again in Tanganyika.
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Our car, a Ford Prefect KCC13 (new price £400) and Paddy our alsatian, were nearly 1000 miles away in Mbeya and I was able to scrounge a flight as supernumery [sic] crew with East African Airways. The return journey by road with Paddy took 30 hours non-stop except for refuelling and for half an hour at dawn when driving was dangerous. The work in Nairobi was operating air/ground channels on R/T and W/T and also at the D/F station giving H/F bearings to aircraft on the Khartoum and Johannesburg sectors where navigation aids were few and far between. It transpired later that the D/F station was adjacent to the Mau Mau graveyard. I recall one day looking out of the door and seeing the police askari guard fast asleep with his loaded rifle on the ground beside him. More for security reasons than mischief I took the rifle inside the building and it was still there when I closed the station at 1830. But there was no sign of the askari, so I put the rifle in the loft of the small building, intending to do something about it next day. Somehow I forgot all about it for two weeks and then handed in the rifle at the R.A.F. guardroom and questioned why the police had taken no action. The askari had just disappeared without trace.
Once again our household effects were packed into crates, and despatched by ‘rail’ to Mwanza. We had exchanged our Ford Prefect for an Austin A70 and motored via Kitale (my father’s farm) to Kisumu where we boarded the M.V. Rusinga. The Rusinga ploughed clockwise round the lake shore calling at Musoma, Mwanza, Bukoba, Entebbe, Jinja and complete circle to Kisumu. Her sister ship the M.V. Usoga called at the same ports, but went anti-clockwise round the lake. A third ship, the M.V. Sybil was smaller and more or less a reserve vessel. Lake Victoria was the second largest inland sea in the world, and became the largest when its level rose 8 feet with the building of the dam at Jinja a few years later. The voyage of about 200 miles took a very pleasant 30 hours with one halt at Musoma. We were met at Mwanza Port by Johnny King who I was relieving. He said he expected to return to Mwanza in 6 months as it was his station and his wife’s father was Government entomologist permanently stationed there. His wife’s family were German, very domineering and forceful. I didn’t mind the mother’s clay pipe but took an instant dislike to her Bavarian-type husband. I insisted upon a proper formal take-over at the airport which was just as well, and the proper storage of King’s personal effects at P.W.D and not in the transmitter room. For a couple of weeks we stayed at Mwanza Hotel and then moved to a delightful house at Bwiru, facing north with a wonderful view over Lake Victoria. Palm trees in the foreground, paw paw trees in the garden and - we discovered much later - leopard in the hills at the back of the house. The water supply came from a storage tank half a mile up the hill via a metal pipe on the surface of the ground, and was always hot enough for a bath without further heating. The water had to remain in our roof storage tank for some time before we could regard it as being a cold water supply. Water and electricity could not be taken for granted in East Africa, but the house was connected to the town electricity supply.
The airport was a fairly new one about 10 miles east of town, by the lake shore, the single runway 18/36 being of grass. It was a neat little place, the transmitters being in the room below the Control Tower with two diesel engines and fire station being in a custom-built building 50 yards away. The
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transmitters were two RCA ET4336s, a G54 Redifon M/F Beacon and an ex-R.A.F. T1154. In the Control Tower was a Pye PTC704 VHF set with a direction-finding antenna. There were only 6 scheduled aircraft per week and an average of about 10 charters. This was a ‘one man’ station and my working hours were long. Perhaps the highlight of the tour was the four-day visit of H.R.H. Princess Margaret. The ten mile road to town was ‘tarmaced’ [sic] a few days before her arrival. The original murrum (red sand) surface was first graded and then covered by a quarter inch layer of chippings and sprayed with tar. The cost was £11,000 which was charged to my aerodrome maintenance vote. For the few days of the visit the road looked really superb, and then just a few days later it rained and the remains of the “tarmac surface” were cleared away by grader, the surface reverting to murram once more.
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Every effort was being made by the Administration to make the Royal Visit a success and the costs were covered somehow. The M.V. Sybil was in dock for 6 months at Kisumu being completely refitted so the Princess could spend just a few hours on the lake. An R.A.F. Shackleton flew down from Aden to provide an escort for the Sybil. Four radio stations were established on the boat, each with an operator, to contact the Police on H/F W/T, Aircraft on VHF, Mwanza Airport on H/F R/T, and E. A. Railways & Harbours. Just about every vessel afloat on Lake Victoria seemed to be milling around outside the harbour waiting for the Sybil and the Princess. A Widgeon aircraft, the only amphibean [sic] in E. Africa, was detailed to position itself at the end of the runway at instant readiness for take-off. The Shackleton took-off to patrol an hour before the Sybil was due to leave harbour, Captain Chris Treen positioned his Widgeon and stayed put with engines idling. All the Sybil's radios were tested and people were getting excited. We were then advised that it was a case of not tonight Josephine, H.R.H. had a headache, the trip was cancelled. The Shackleton, looking remarkably like a real Lancaster landed on my murrum runway, and the Widgeon had to be towed in backwards, the engines having over-heated.
In company with all the other Colonial officials I had been given six pages of foolscap telling me how to address the Princess and how to conduct myself in the Royal presence. There was also an application form for a Permit to be at the airport for her arrival and another application form regarding my being presented to the Princess. It was the two application forms which bugged me. I refused to apply for a permit to enter the airport where every aspect was my responsibility, if anyone denied me access, be it on their own head. "Before applying to be presented", the write-up stated, "You must qualify under at least one of the following headings:-
1. Be a Government Servant on a salary exceeding '£x'
2. Be a serving officer of H. M. forces,
3. Be a retired officer having held a rank above 'Y'
4. Hold a Civil Decoration equivalent or senior to an M.B.E.
5. Hold a military decoration.
6. Have already been presented to another member of the Royal Family.
There was virtually an order to apply if one qualified and this decided me to ignore the whole issue. I was not in favour of the pomp and circumstance and the relatively vast expenditure involved, and I was never any good at playing charades and other party games.
Just before the Royal Visit a gang of workmen turned up at the airport and were starting to fit a toilet suite in the 'Crew Room'. This was a small room where aircrews could relax and enjoy a little privacy between flights. Toilet facilities were quite adequate without specially converting the crew room for the Princess. I vetoed the plan, and finally the toilet wing, already with four Asian type and four European type loos was enhanced with one new and rather superior loo. The superloo did come in useful however; whilst the Princess was inspecting the guard of honour, the bare-chested Engineer of the Widgeon aircraft appeared inside the Terminal building,
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looking quite incongruous in his filthy shorts and sandals. I told him to keep out of sight until Princes Margaret had left. He did, and hid in the superloo. After the visit, someone fixed a royal coat of arms an the door to which I had the only key. I was tempted to replace the heraldry with a replica of the board made for me by one of the German prisoners at Poynton. written in Gothic characters "Lager Kommandant, Eintritt Verbotten".
The Royal Visit was the highlight of the decade for Mwanza, the road to the aerodrome was closed for three hours and all the Police were concerned only with the visit. It was during that three hours the villains broke into many European houses. We lost all our shoes which were not actually being worn at the time, some clothing, and all our clocks including a time-switch I had just repaired for someone.
There was one charter aircraft based at Mwanza, the Widgeon piloted by Chris Treen. It was a very busy aircraft, being an amphibean [sic] , going relatively short flights mostly around the lake shore. Chris had a full-time engineer who was not very co-operative, and the operation proved to be uneconomical although Chris tried very hard. He was on Transport Command during the war and later flew in the Berlin Air Lift, then flew the Widgeon from U.K., 6000 miles to Mwanza. The airline had its moments, on one occasion the Provincial Commissioner was climbing out of the aircraft at Ukerewe Island into a dingy which collapsed and he was nearly drowned. Submerged rack. and crocodiles added to the excitement
One of the busiest aircraft at Mwanza was a Miles Magister which, was owned privately and which has also been flown out from England by its owner, an official of the Lint & Seed Marketing Board, who also had an Aircraft Maintenance Engineers' licence. It became the main asset of the Mwanza Aeroclub and was very active at weekends.
The tribe an Ukerewe Island had it's own language, and the story goes that the District Officer studied the language and wrote a dictionary and grammar for it. Having done so he applied for the £60 per year "language competency allowance", and to qualify had first to pass the Official Colonial Office exam. in the subject. The Colonial Office department which organised such matters was duly asked to prepare an exam. and find an invigilator for it, but was not given the identity of the candidate. There was no record of anyone being able to speak the language, and they approached the obvious source, the District Officer Ukerewe. As a part of his normal chores he was pleased to prepare the two papers as 2 hours of translation each way between English and the native language of Ukerewe. On arrival in U. K. on leave, he received a letter from another Colonial Office department, addressing him by name and asking him to invigilate at as examination, giving the venue and date. Shortly after, yet another office wrote to him advising him that an examination had been arranged and wishing him luck in the exam. He hardly needed it, reporting as directed in his official capacities as both invigilator and examinee. Not only that, but he had also prepared the examination papers. He was the only European who knew the language and he got his £60. per annum. The common language with the natives was of course an up-country impure Swahili, as in all parts of East Africa.
I had studied Kiswahili in the Prisons Service and from books, but the grammatical version was spoken only at the coast and on the radio. The
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Africans in the Prison Service and those I worked with spoke the up-country version, almost completely ungrammaticaI. The further one went from the coast the more it became a matter of joining words together. Nevertheless, it was an interesting and descriptive Ianguage. Beautiful words like 'maradadi' which in fact is an adjective meaning 'beautiful', and 'tafadahali', said to mean 'please' , but I never actually heard an African use it. ' Asanti' meaning thankyou was frequently used. Calling someone a "shenzi" hardly needs translation.
The Caspair Lake Service operated daily. Based at Entebbe, a DeHavilland Rapide flew to Kisumu, Musoma, Mzanza, Bukoba and back to Entebbe. It called at Mwanza three times weekly and remained on the ground for 4 hours. Paddy O'Reilly was the most colourful of the pilots and on one occasion was missing when the aircraft was due to take-off. He had borrowed a native canoe and paddled out into the lake for some peace and quiet. He was very soon asleep and when he awoke he found he was two miles off-shore without a paddle. He was soon rescued and took off two hours late.
I had a very good African Assistant at Mwanza, Zepherino Shija, and he was a tremendous help in making things run smoothly. In fact my African staff were all good types, far from home, politicians and the trouble-makers to be influenced by them.
It was at Mwanza that I really became involved with radio repairs, and once I had repaired a few, word quickly spread and I was inundated with them. Many of the 'dukes' -shops- in town sold radios but hadn't the vaguest idea how they worked or how to repair them. Most of the radio owned by the Africans were powered by dry batteries, using a 4-pin plug on the power lead which was very often forced the wrong way into the socket on the battery. This instantly blew all four valves for which the shops charged 25 shillings each. I bought valves for 3 shillings each in quantity and sold them in sets of 4 for forty shillings, throwing in a new and better type plug. I must have repaired over a thousand radios in two years, plus many bigger sets for Europeans. Before very long I met Mr. Manning, the American Head of the African Inland Mission in the Province, and he showed me a room full of equipment, domestic radios, car radios, record players, tape recorders, transmitters, P.A. ampIifiers etc. etc. Every item was faulty. I was invited to repair what I could, keep what I wanted and throw out anything that was past it. Three trans-receivers were very attractive and they needed only setting up. Independent transmitter and receiver units powered from 115v a.c. but with rather limited frequency coverage of 5 to 8 MHz. I used them on the air for a couple of weeks and they were then taken by road to African Inland Mission stations in the Belgium Congo where they had a network on 7150 KHz. These sets were to prove very useful within a few years during the Congo rebellion which came with "Independence". It took me 6 months to empty the room, and all except three or four units were returned to use within the Mission organisation. Those three or four units caused a misunderstanding with Mr. Manning. I said "These units are U/S, best place for them is in the lake", and I could see that I had upset him. He associated my expression 'U.S' . with Uncle Sam, or the United States, but when I explained it meant ‘unservicable’ in English Service jargon a crisis was avoided.
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I met a fellow called Nawotsey, supposed to be a Belgian, who was making a fortune killing crocodiles for their skins. He had just about wiped them out on Lake Rukwa. His technique was to use an infra-red lamp and sniperscope at very close range, typically six feet. His equipment gave a lot of trouble and I charged him well over the odds for repairs. In reality he was German, and ex-German army. There were many of them in ex-German Tanganyika but few had the guts to admit it, and there was not a nazi among them, in theory.
Eventually one of the dukas offered me £50 per month cash if would stop doing radio repairs. This was not far short of my salary and quite a compliment, but not accepted.
We became very friendly with one German, Dr. Schupler, who had been a wartime Medical Officer in the Luftwaffe. He was serving in Dresden the night of the 13th. of February 1945 when it was attacked by over 800 R.A.F. bombers, followed by over 300 American Fortresses the next day, causing between them 137,000 casualties including an estimated 50,000 killed. A doctor somehow seemed to be in a different and acceptable category, but our talks had reminded one of a period I had almost forgotten, and about which I had stopped thinking. One good point in East Africa's favour, there was very little to remind us of the war. A row of ribbons perhaps on a police uniform, or a retired senior type using his old rank, but there were few occasions when we compared, notes on our respective war efforts. The Germans were supposed to be super-efficient, a myth already exploded, but in the main they were still mostly distrusted.
Mwanza was a peaceful place, there was only one murder during our 2 years residence, and that was committed by a mad african from Dodoma, 400 miles away. I could not have visualised at the time that within twentyseven years this nice little airport would be bombed by the Uganda Air Force. I can picture now the little bakery where the murder was committed. It was in same road just before we left that a hyena was running down the road to meet us. We were in the Austin A70 which already had a damaged right. wing and I put on full speed. We met the hyena head-on, relative speed about 70 and he was thrown completely over the car. He lay on the road for about two minutes, then picked himself up and loped off into the bush. We had ringside seats watching an interesting battle between hyena and baboon one evening. Our bungalow was on the hillside and the bedroom windows on one side were 15 feet above ground, and level with the tops of the pawpaw trees, heavily laden with fruit. The baboon were taking the fruit and being attacked by about a dozen hyena which were being thrown around by the baboon. The fight finished suddenly for reasons best known to the combatants. They might have sensed the presence of a leopard, which was very likely, but we were not aware of the leopards ourselves until a few weeks later. In the middle of one night we were awakened by a scuffling outside the window and there was the most obnoxious stench. There was the so-called laugh of the hyena and a deep sawing sound which we were told was a leopard. It seemed that a hyena had been dragging an old carcass along when it was disturbed by a leopard. The carcass was dropped outside our bedroom window and later one of them returned to collect it. Apparently baboon are the favourite diet of the leopard and everything including baboon and leopard dislikes the hyena. One of them cornered a neighbour’s dog in our garage and
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chewed off it’s vital parts before help arrived too late. Snakes too were in abundance around Mwanza, and a European girl had been crushed, but not fatally by a python near the lake shore. One of the houseboys hacked a monitor lizard to death, thinking it was a snake. Hilda recalls the occasion when I encountered a leopard on the driveway to the house and I got out of the car to tell her!. There was the occasion too when Paddy, our Alsatian was aware of a leopard outside the front door and Paddy's hair literally bristled. The leopard was probably aware of Paddy's presence also. I was away in Nairobi at the time
Some months before the end of our tour, we received a telegram from Les with the sad news that Hilda's father had died. At about the same time the Kenya Education authorities informed us that as we were no longer resident in Kenya, Colin and Wendy would have to leave Kitale School. The alternative was Kongwa, a school established at the time of the groundnut scheme, a British Government fiasco then almost fully wound up after wasting eighteen million pounds. Kongwa was about 400 miles away and difficult to reach from Mwanza, and as it would be only a temporary measure in any case, we felt it better that Colin and Wendy should return to U.K. We saw them off on the Dakota on an hour's flight to Entebbe where they were met by Flossy and Pi Reed. The following day they flew to London and stayed with Mum at Korella Rd., in Wandsworth.
In early June `57 it was time for home leave again and once more we packed all our household effects into huge crates ready for shipping to our next station which had not yet been decided. I had been promoted to Radio Superintendant [sic] in Mbeya and later to Telecommunications Supt. having passed departmental exams for the two lots of promotion. I was finally relieved by Sailor Seaman who immediately objected to the long working hours. The way of life on the outstations had a great deal to commend it. There was no television but we always had a good radio set. There was not the pressure we were to experience in later life and we made our own entertainment. It would be nice to go round again.
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Before leaving Mwanza I had ordered a VW Beetle on the home leave scheme stipulating the date and time that I would collect it in London. This resulted in a considerable saving. The cost was £330 delivered London whilst the price in East Africa was £1250. Colin and Wendy were already in Britain, only John and Chris were with us on this trip. From Mwanza we should have returned via the capital, Dar es Salaam, as we did from Mbeya, but for some weeks I had been pointing out the futility of the extra 1600 miles via Dar, when the the [sic] aircraft would go via Entebbe in any case. Sanity prevailed and we flew by DC3 to Entebbe, a nice lunch at the Lake Vic. and a 10 hour flight to the U.K. with one stop at Benghazi. I think that was our first trip by Jet aircraft, a Comet. I have flown in many jets since then, but none as comfortable and roomy as the Comet. The following day we went to Lower Regent Street and collected our new VW Beetle, which came into the showroom one minute ahead of schedule. I was very impressed by the German organisation. I was taken into a workshop and given some useful tips about the car which was to serve us well for over 200,00 miles most of which was on murrum, our reddish East African sandy soil.
In the following six months we made good use of the car, visiting my mother in Barnoldswick, the Yorkshire Dales, and whilst up north had a rendezvous avec Ace (Ted) and Mary Foster, Ace having been our second tour Navigator. Ted recalled this many years later and remembered an incident in a Southport restaurant. We were sharing two tables with Ted and Mary and their three children, making a party of 4 adults and 7 children. Ted alleges the waitress exclaimed “By gum are these all yours?” and claims I replied “No, they are from the local orphanage, we are just taking them out for the day”. She said that was right champion and gave us a discount! I went to Liverpool also and en-route noticed that a Police car had been right behind me for several miles. I slowed down to 30 for the next five miles and eventually the blue light came on and I was stopped. “What speed were you doing Sir?” An instant reply, “29.5 m.p.h. “The officer agreed with that and said “Why, it’s a lovely road and there’s no speed limit. When you slowed down from 80 to 30 we thought you had a problem, enjoy your visit Sir”. I had a “Visitor to Britain” sticker on the back which was supposed to help a little. In Liverpool I met Stan Chadderton, our First tour Bomb Aimer. I called at Stan’s house and his wife Hilda directed me to the Gladstone Dock where Stan was working, I seem to remember being introduced to his boss and Stan was given the rest of the day off. We adjourned to the Lord Nelson Pub and reminisced well into the night about our efforts in North Africa.
We had made another acquisition whilst in Mwanza. Clearly a base was needed in Britain even if my work was to be in East Africa. Les told us of a house in Glyn Neath called Glaslyn going for £1850 on the balance of a 999 year lease. I offered to buy it if the freehold was available. It was very quickly ours at a total cost £1910 and £25 solicitor’s fees. Hilda’s Mum moved into Glaslyn and Colin and Wendy had already joined her. Glaslyn was a comfortable and handy sort of place, only a few hundred yards from Aunt Doll’s cottage.
In early December I was told to report direct to Entebbe Airport to relieve Henry Day in charge of Telecommunications. I wrote to P.W.D. in Mwanza and asked them to send on our boxes and car by Lake Steamer to
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Entebbe, and completed other arrangements. Just before Christmas I handed over the new car to the A.A. near Tower Bridge and paid £75 for shipping it to Mombassa [sic]. Then with our four children and a mass of baggage we once again booked-in at Victoria Air Terminal and shortly afterwards we realised we had just been home for six months and were then in Entebbe. The Comet aircraft was flown by Howard Iliffe, 109011! but I discovered this too late to meet him.
At Entebbe we were met by Henry Day who had been in charge for six months in an acting capacity and he made it clear that as he was now demoted – with loss of acting pay – I could not expect any co-operation from him. For 10 days we stayed in the Lake Victoria Hotel, luxurious but not at all homely and with it’s population of some hundreds of cats living on the roof. We then moved into a house with a red mbati (corrugated iron) roof. Between the ceiling and the roof was a foot of sand and if the builders had been designing an oven it would have taken some beating. The red iron absorbed the heat from a tropical sun and it was retained by the sand. Entebbe was a pretentious place, not the capital of Uganda, which was Kampala 20 miles north, but where most of the senior Gov’t officials lived. The airport was a minor one to U.K. standards but trying very had [sic] to appear important. I found the whole place docile and yet offensive, “toffee-nosed” is the phrase which comes to mind. The job itself was not at all demanding, I had a team of about 8 Engineers including Frank Unstead and Gibby. Also three Radio Officers including Henry Day and several Africans to operate the teleprinters and radio links to Nairobi. There was little for me to do personally. Airport Management was taken care of by Uganda Government officers. The East Africa High Commission, of which the Directorate of Civil Aviation was a part, was responsible for Air Traffic Control and telecommunications. About six airlines had their own Station Managers and there was a great deal of empire building which led to over-manning and inefficiency. An individual’s importance was determined by the number of his subordinates and the extent of his warrant to incur expenditure. There was a great deal of ill-feeling too, between the officers of Government and those of the High Commission, later more appropriately renamed the East Africa Common Services Organisation. The latter was responsible for all communications in Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika, except for the actual maintenance of roads. It included E.A. Posts & Telegraphs, Railways & Harbours, Fisheries, Meteorlogical [sic] Depts., Civil Aviation and several Medical Research establishments. Politically, the scene was complex, Kenya was a “Colony & Protectorate” – some of each – Tanganyika was a Protectorate with a United Nations mandate and Uganda a combination of twelve Kingdoms formed into a ‘State’ with 12 Kings, a Prime Minister and also a President. It had its political problems but they were not mine. Dickie Dixon was Senior Air Traffic Controller and therefore Officer i/c Navigational Services in which capacity I was his deputy. As I was not at that time a qualified Air Traffic Controller, this led to friction, and as I have already implied, Entebbe was not a happy place. The crunch came when I was told by Dickie to compile all the Annual Confidential reports, including those for Air Traffic Controllers. I told him that I did not think it proper that I should report on officers whose qualifications I did not hold myself. He should do them himself and I would write them for all the Telecommom [sic].
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staff. The previous year he had reported on the Telecomms staff and I disagreed strongly with his findings in one case, that of Gibby who, he wrote, “was slow in carrying out a job”. He was indeed slower than most, but was also the most thorough engineer in the Department. When repairing an equipment he not only repaired the current fault but also brought it right up to the manufacturer’s specification. My personal relationship with Dickie deteriorated rapidly, and rather than speak to me he would write me memos. In one of his many memos he “required” a technical explanation of a particular problem, and I replied to the effect that “as the conductivity between the two points was less than half a mho, this was inadequate for proper operation”. He wrote to my Chief in Nairobi complaining that I was taking the Mickey, and this brought him a rude reply. I could have referred to “a resistance greater than 2 ohms” instead of “a conductivity less than half a mho”, which would have been more helpful, but I made my point.
One major problem at Entebbe was the absence of schools for European children, and Colin and Wendy had to go to Nairobi and Kericho respectively, as boarders. This would have cost little had I been stationed in Kenya and paid the statutary [sic] Education Tax, but as I was stationed outside Kenya and had not paid the Kenya tax I had to pay the full boarding fees. I was not alone in this of course, it was a problem for all families of the E.A. High Commission living in Uganda.
However, I learned that in June 1958 Dinger Bell was finishing his four year tour at Kisumu in Kenya, and I managed a transfer for myself, handing-over Entebbe to an officer returning from a U.K. leave. At that time we had two cars, and I remember taking the Austin A70 to Kampala and selling it in a bar to a consortium of five Africans for £25, each chipping in with a hundred shillings. We travelled to Kisumu by road, our effects going by lake steamer. It was an easy day’s drive round the north-east shores of Lake Victoria, through Jinja, with its crocodiles at the source of the Nile. This was in the days before the level of the Owen Falls dam was raised by eight feet. It was refreshing to arrive at Kisumu, and we were pleased with everything we saw. We spent the first week in the hotel, then moved in to Dinger Bell’s house at 55 Mohammed Kassim Road, near the African Broadcasting Service transmitting Station.
Kisumu Airport had been established about 1932, and had, like Mbeya been a scheduled stop on the Empire Air Route of (the original) British Airways. The lake was ideal for the Empire Flying Boats and our staff pilot, Capt. Casperuthus had many stories of flying Hannibal biplanes into Kisumu. During the Second World War it was taken over by the R.A.F. and used extensively by Catalina amphibeans [sic] and Sunderland seaplanes. R.A.F. aircraft of most long and medium range types were regular visitors, together with the 3-motor Junkers 52 transports of the South African Air Force. With two excellent murrum runways and four hangars, it had seen some service one way and another.
The Control Tower was a small two storey building of 1932 vintage, the ground floor being taken up completely by the transmitting room. The first floor comprised the Control “tower”, a small office, and store. Originally there had been a second floor with a glass top for good all-round vision but this had been removed at the end of the war and replaced with a tiled roof. The second floor became the loft and housed the VDF antenna. I
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found the transmitters had been sadly neglected for many years. Two RCA 4336 types were used on R/T., a third on W/T., and a new Redifon GR49 NDB. There was also a dual transmitter which was not on the inventory and which had in fact been ‘liberated’ from a Catalina, before it joined the other two scuttled in the lake at the end of the war. This set was the best of the lot, and certainly my favourite. It was complete with a 110v ac supply of 600 Hz, not 60 and within a month I had modified an old T1190 power unit to drive it. The M/F section was put into use in place of the Redifon beacon, and the H/F section performed wonderfully on the amateur bands.
Being a ‘one-man station’ my working hours were long, 7 days a week and seldom a whole day off, but I had a workshop and bench and put my waiting-for-aircraft hours to very good use, mostly repairing domestic radios. The transmitters were giving a lot of trouble. As an example, whilst tuning a rotary inductance on a 4336, a two inch nail providing an electrical contact dropped out and had to be bodged up again. The GR49, although nearly new, was using modulator valves at the rate of a pair every two weeks due to a missing relay and associated wiring which had actually been left out at the factory during production. Fortunately there was a good old T1154 which acted as a standby for all transmitters except VHF, so I was able to take each transmitter in turn out of use for as long as was necessary whilst I overhauled them. As this progressed I was enjoying the practical work and decided to make use of a three-foot cabinet which was not on charge. (I inherited quite a lot of useful ‘junk’ at Kisumu!). At the Fisheries office on the lake shore, also on the airport, I found that a vehicle had demolished a rondaval (a 12 ft. diameter building constructed of aluminium). I volunteered the services of my crash-tender crew to clear up the mess and to take away the wreckage. A few days was spent by the crash crew in cutting the best of the aluminium into 19” panels of standard sizes, and suitable chassis. One of the ET4336 transmitters was going to be off the air for several weeks waiting for spares, and in order not to delay my overhaul programme I built a two-stage transmitter on one of the 3 1/2” panels. This was a 6V6 crystal oscillator driving an 807 to a dipole antenna. The operator at Nairobi reported our signals as very good and better than they had been for a long time. 20 Watts in place of 400, but it was the dipole antenna in place of a random length of wire which made all the difference. Within three weeks the 3’ cabinet contained 4 transmitters and was providing all services except VHF and M/F Beacon. The overhauling programme was completed, the official transmitters finally tested and then switched off. For the next 18 months we operated almost trouble-free. My monthly engineering reports to H.Q. in Nairobi were mainly negative and referred to “routine preventative maintenance only”. However, Sid Worthy, Chief Telecomms. Engineer was not fooled, and in due course he wrote and asked why my monthly electricity bill was only a quarter of what it had been for many years. Before I had plucked up enough courage to reply, Sid arrived unannounced and went direct to the Transmitter room, finding the four big transmitters switched off. In the Control Tower he saw my all-purpose cabinet, and to put it lightly, he was not amused. I suggested to Sid that we should make our own single-purpose transmitters and dispense with the old uneconomical general-purpose types. He agreed there was no good technical or financial argument against this but what would he do with his army of 50
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or so engineers? He compromised and allowed me to leave my own equipment in use provided I removed it a month before I left Kisumu.
One of our friends at Kisumu, Jimmie Sanson was a very keen constructor of model aircraft and several he had made were lost in the lake. His final model was a rather superior type with six-foot wingspan and single engine using alcohol as fuel. The rudder was radio-controlled on 27MHz. and the aircraft made some very impressive flights at the airport. On one occasion it went up to about 2000 feet before it ran out of fuel and for almost an hour Jimmie kept it turning over the airport. The aircraft was trimmed slightly nose-heavy but apart from turns, he had no other control. Eventually it was so far down-wind that it was lost to sight and last seen heading for the mountains. After a period of calm, the wind changed in the early evening and Jimmie and I were standing outside the Control Tower lamenting his sad loss when one of the crash Crew shouted “Bwana, Ndegi ndogo narudi”. His eyesight was far superior to ours, we saw nothing until the aircraft appeared over the end of the runway and actually landed, after a record flight of over three hours. Up-dating the radio control was the next stage and two months and about £200 later an eight function system was completed, giving control of the engine, elevators, ailerons and rudder. The machine could then be made to taxi out, take off and carry out aerobatics. The engine was used in short bursts and as there appeared to be a permanent thermal over the runways during the warm days, thirty minute flights were quite routine. Eventually the aircraft was lost over Lake Victoria and probably joined the three Catalinas on the bottom. Perhaps one day a Catalina will be recovered from their fresh-water grave, but the Sanson special was lost for ever..
My official work ran quite smoothly, with a little excitement occasionally. At 3 am one night, Nairobi Flight Information Centre phoned and asked me to open up the VHF and call Alitalia 541 which was three hours overdue in Nairobi, from Khartoum, and with no radio contact for four hours. I sped through town doing over 70 m.p.h. to my Control Tower, switched on and called the aircraft. There was a weak signal in reply and I managed to get a class C bearing of 270 degrees. A second transmission confirmed this and I told the operator he was probably over the Congo, but certainly well to the west of Kisumu. I told him QDM Kisumu 090, but the pilot would not agree and said he was east of Kisumu, not west, and approaching Mombassa [sic]! His signals faded right out and I telephoned F.I.C. asking them to log the QDM of 090C that I had passed to the aircraft. After half an hour, whilst F.I.C was sending frantic messages to all points west, I heard the aircraft calling Kisumu and was soon in good contact giving QDM’s, his signals gradually improving. It was just 0530, 20 minutes before first light when I heard the aircraft and sent out the boys to light-up the gooseneck flares. Then he was overhead and decided to carry on to Nairobi. This was rather disappointing, and in fact the wrong decision, his endurance being insufficient for any further diversion. I was told much later that the Captain and Navigator had a row before take-off and were not on speaking terms. The aircraft was a DC8 and the Italian crew and passengers had been very lucky indeed. The police followed me through town and I was charged with speeding, but the fine of 60 shillings was refunded later by the court when the urgency became known.
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Some weeks later Nairobi F.I.C. phoned again, about 4 am., an Air Liban DC6 from Cairo was lost and was not within the scope of Nairobi VDF. The aircraft had made a brief contact on the area cover VHF through Lodwa, and another aircraft north-east of Kisumu had heard the DC6, but of course had no idea of range or direction. This time I went through town at a more reasonable speed, opened up the radio, and called Air Liban. The crash crew was called out and the boys started dispensing paraffin and setting out the flares right away. I called Nairobi on 5680 H/F R/T to establish my station was on the ball, and every two minutes called the Lebanese Airlines aircraft. About 20 minutes later the aircraft replied to my call and I gave him a QDM of 225, and was satisfied there was no risk of it being the reciprocal. Three minutes later I measured 230 and then 235. He said his Giro compass was u/s and his magnetic compass erratic, and that he would use a standby giro, set to my figure. He turned 10 degrees to port and the QDM increased, 10 degrees to starboard and the figure decreased, so he was heading for Kisumu, and not going away from it. The bearings were given every two minutes and were reasonably steady, and after about 25 minutes the pilot said he thought he could see the coast, meaning the shores of Lake Victoria. It was still very dark but a clear night (not a contradiction of terms) and the boys hurtled out to light up the goosenecks. I told the pilot the wind was north-easterly at 15 knots, he was down wind, duty runway 06. I reminded him of the very high ground 2 miles to the north of the airport and he replied “O.K. Bud, Thanks a lot, I’ll come straight in on 24, hope youv’e [sic] got some gas, we shure [sic] ain’t [sic]”. A few minutes later he made a good landing and parked outside the 1932 wooden terminal building. The Captain of the Air Liban DC6 was an American pre-war Veteran. I had completely forgotten to tell the East African Airways agent but did so at 0545. There was no catering at the airport so he found some buses and the passengers were taken to the hotel. I was also late in phoning the police who dealt with immigration, but they hadn’t a clue how to deal with 60 international transit passengers. Similarly, it was a new experience for Customs, so both departments decided to pretend it hadn’t happened.
The Captain asked me to tell the non-English-speaking African Shell Assistant to put 3000 gallons of 100 octane into the tanks. I translated to the startled assistant “Bwana Mkubwa anataka gallon elfu tatu, pipa sabini na tano”. That was 75 drums of petrol to be pumped by hand. Finally he compromised with 400 gallons, but it was still quite a task, even with only 10 drums.
The Captain was concerned about the limited fuel and lack of a reliable compass and we double-checked that the met. conditions to Nairobi were near perfect. A scheduled DC3 of East African Airways came in at 10am. And was taking off for Nairobi at 11 am. The two pilots talked together at length and studied the map. The DC6 took-off three minutes after the Dakota and the two remained in visual contact until Nairobi was in sight. Surprisingly, the DC6 did not carry a radio compass for M/F but relied entirely on VHF, which, in East and Central Africa was quite inadequate.
I was criticised by DCA for not informing them in detail of progress, and was conscious of this at the time, but had I done so, they would have confused the issue with lots of advice. A civilian airliner without a reliable compass would be a major issue. I operated an “aerodrome
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advisory service”, not being an Air Traffic Controller. F.I.C. would have tried to control my detailed activity, but with a bit of common sense, things worked out well.
The visit of Her Majesty the Queen Mother to Kisumu went off smoothly except that two European Police Inspectors on the airport main gate refused permission for me to enter without a permit. One of my passengers, an R.A.F. Wing Commander leaned out and said he was the Queen’s Pilot, better open the gate old chap. Police had been drafted in for this event from hundreds of miles. I remember little else about the Royal Visit, or it’s main purpose. On these occasions most of the senior officials climbed in on the act, establishing their own importance.
I do remember in detail the visit of Billy Graham. My brief from the organising committee was to provide the Public Address systems. The main system had to cope with an audience of 30,000 people, with three microphones for which I borrowed a 300 watt amplifier from Twenche Overseas Trading Co. in Nairobi and used my four 100 watt loudspeakers. In addition there were six other systems for separate areas where the audience spoke only their tribal languages. Each of the six would hear Billie Graham plus one interpreter translating into the appropriate tribal language for that particular group. There were nine microphones on the platform for the evagelist [sic] and 8 interpretors [sic]. In addition the Post Office ran a special line about a mile at the end of which they connected a candlestick type of telephone with a carbon microphone and place it with my nine microphones. This relayed the proceedings to another mass meeting in Nairobi. The microphone was ineffective until I connected the P.O. line direct to the main amplifier output via a suitable transformer. Billie Graham had a very efficient team. Harley and Bonnie Richardson are two I remember, both very hard working and leaving nothing to chance. They were backed-up by representatives from most church denominations.
The following Christmas, the missionaries approached me again, could I use my loudspeakers at the Church to simulate bells on Christmas morning. An interesting proposition, and someone had written to Bradford Cathedral to scrounge a tape of the Cathedral bells. I had to edit the tape considerably, as every two a rich Yorkshire-accented voice was superimposed with “You are listening to the bells of Bradford Cathedral”. I set-up the amplifier and loudspeakers at the Church at about 7 pm. On Christmas-eve and tested the system with a record of carols. Within minutes, people began to gather and joined in. The Vicar asked if I could connect a microphone and in no time at all he was conducting an impromptu carol service with a bigger congregation than he had enjoyed for a long time, well over 1500. At 7 am next morning I relayed the bells of Bradford Cathedral, but could not resist pre-empting them with a verse of ‘Christians awake’. The loudspeakers were in constant demand and were in use every day for two weeks during H.H. the Aga Khan’s visit. Events included H.E. the Governor’s barazas, opening a ginnery and so on, all official requests from the Provincial Commissioner. I was spending so much time away from the airport that I fitted a TCS12 Transmitter and a good H/F receiver in the car to work aircraft and keep in touch with the airport. At the African hospital I fitted a receiver and 50 Watt Vortexion amplifier imported by my father, and installed 30 loudspeakers round the wards. This was followed by a similar
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job at an American mission hospital about 30 miles from Kisumu, but more ambitious with microphones, tape recorder and record player. At the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Kisumu I fitted an amplifier and loudspeakers with microphones on the Altar and pulpit. Another system was fitted at the African Community Centre in Kisumu and one way and another I was kept very busy indeed.
The transmitter in the car was used also on the 40 metre amateur band to keep in touch with my father and amateur chums in Nairobi and other parts of East Africa. On one occasion Tom Mboya took an interest in it and was quite impressed. Tom was a Luo by tribe and a party leader of the Kenya African Democratic Union, a very nice chap with an attractive wife Pamella [sic], daughter of Mr. Odede, a Kisumu lawyer. Tom wanted to buy the transmitter but for me to sell it to him would not have been wise. Later Tom was shot and killed in Nairobi.
Kisumu was fairly well populated and within 10 miles or so of town we saw very few wild animals. The two exceptions were the protected herd of impala in Kisumu township and the hippo which abounded on the lake shore. They came ashore at night to graze and I encountered them on the aerodrome several times. One rather amusing occurrence, the airport was wide in area and Africans frequently trekked across the runway and even drove their cattle over it at most inappropriate times. On several occasions I impounded the cattle after due warnings and charged the owners with trespass under section 69 of the Colonial Air Navigation Act. When I found the offenders were getting six month’s imprisonment and losing their cattle, I stopped charging them and the Police insisted upon taking over this task. Finally they agreed to drop the practice, when I told them that I doubted whether the Colonial Air Navigation Act really applied in Kenya and in any case I had invented the content of section 69. However, the runways had to be watched carefully and checked every time there was an aircraft movement.
One morning at Kisumu a uniformed Prisons Askari I had known at Nairobi Prison in 1950 came to my Control Tower and after a smart salute handed me a note saying it was from Bwana Mkubwa ya Ndegi. It was from Commander Stacey-Colles R.N. Ret’d., my former boss and previous Director of Civil Aviation. He had arrived at Kisumu Prison only two hours earlier, and was serving a three year sentence. He had been found guilty of receiving money, a refund of an airline ticket issued by the High Commission and which he did not use. At the time he was in Britain having travelled home on a complimentary ticket from Air France. The official ticket was handed in to East African Airways and a refund obtained which was paid into his bank instead of the High Commission’s account. He claimed no knowledge of this and most of us believed him. He would not prejudice his career and Navy pension in this way, someone had fixed him. The note was a list of things he wanted, which I soon assembled and took to him at Kisumu prison, where I found I knew the Prisons Officer from 1950. A very embarrassing situation. I met Stacey and gave him the radio, writing materials, money, cigarettes and cakes from Hilda, on the first of many visits. Three days later the Askari was back with a long message in code for Muriel Pardoe, his former secretary in Nairobi. I sent this off straight away on the aeronautical W/T channel, addressed to HKNCHQPA, the ICAO address which would reach Miss Pardoe from any airport in the western world. HK was Kenya, NC Nairobi City, HQ DCA
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Headquarters and PA Personal Ast. To the Director. The code was in five letter groups with a double substitution of letters, a similar system to that used during the war.
The message was decoded by Muriel who obtained whatever it was Stacey was asking for and gave it to Capt. Casperuthus who was DCA pilot of the Avro Anson. Casper gave it to the Controller at Wilson airport who passed it to a pilot about to depart for Kisumu. The pilot handed it to me at Kisumu and I delivered it – whatever it was – to Stacey in prison the same day. Three days later the radio set came back to me with the askari, not working. Two of the valves had been swapped over, and I noticed a piece of paxeline had been fitted neatly inside the bottom of the set, forming a false bottom. Under it was a note asking me if I could fit a B.F.O. into it. This was a beat frequency oscillator and Stacey could want it for only one reason, to monitor morse, probably on the Prisons channel, to see what was happening. There were two spare holes for valve holders on the chassis and plenty of space for fitting a mains power supply, vacant in this case because it was a dry-battery receiver. I fitted the B.F.O. as requested, and also another valve as a flea-power transmitter, using just a channel freq. crystal about 6.5 MHz and a tuned circuit on the anode. Maybe 50 mW output, I had no means of measuring it, but I tested the set at a range of 2 miles using 3 feet of wire for an aerial it was received at the control tower. The morse key was just a matter of touching a wire to the chassis. I returned the set to Stacey personally and explained the switching of the B.F.O. and transmitter keying. He was delighted and agreed to be very careful, taking absolutely no-one into his confidence. About six weeks later I met my former colleague the Prisons Officer in town and he told me there was some concern over the prisoners getting confidential information before he received it himself. He quoted that a week ago a prisoner asked if he could change cells and share with a particular prisoner who would be transferred to Kisumu with three others on a date a week hence. He said the four arrived that day, how could the prisoner have known a week ago? It should have been obvious, there were many ex-service personnel who were good W/T operators and the Prisons Radio on 7 MHz could be monitored by anyone, the signals being in plain language morse. I said nothing. Stacey’s frequency was monitored at my office where I had a similar tiny transmitter. It was used at a specific time of day on only two occasions for test purposes, but he found it satisfying and consoling to have a personal and totally clandestine link to the outside world. It gave him a great deal of satisfaction and from my point of view did no real harm. Stacey was a great organiser and motivator.
The African Inland Mission in Mwanza had colleagues in the Sudan [author indicates with X and page footnote that it is Kisumu not Mwanza] who visited Kisumu frequently in their Cessna aircraft. They desperately needed two transmitters in the Sudan but were not able to obtain import permits. They could however get a permit to re-import a transmitter if it had been sent out of the country for repair. I suggested to them that they should send me a piece of otherwise useless equipment which might look like a transmitter to the uninitiated and send it to me as a transmitter for repair, together with the appropriate paper work. This was done and in an antenna tuning unit they brought me, I built a 10 Watt transmitter without changing it’s outward appearance in any way. A few weeks later a second one was built and the two did a very useful job in the Sudan for about six
[KISUMU NOT MWANZA]
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months until the African Inland Mission stations there were closed, and the missionaries withdrawn. The missions’ aircraft were also licenced on that frequency and I contacted them occasionally. It is most reassuring to be able to communicate with someone in times of trouble, and plenty of folks in Africa were in that situation.
But trouble was also brewing in the Belgian Congo, just across the Lake. Six months earlier, the Belgian Government had advised the missionaries and other settlers to leave, but many were dedicated to their work and some felt they were quite indespensible [sic]. The Belgiauns [sic] had handed over the reins of Government and administration hurriedly to a totally ill-equipped and unprepared Congolese. The consequences of withdrawal by the Belgians were clearly predictable but they succumbed to political pressures from all directions. There was human slaughter on a big scale, and the only information coming out of the Congo was on the frequency of 7150 operated by Mission stations, and also shared with East African amateurs. It was in Kisumu that I received a message from a mission at an Agricultural Station which read:-
“We are being menaced by 100,000 hostile savages. We have their chief as hostage and expect annihilation within one hour. We have ammunition but no guns, please advise Kamina”.
The amateurs among the DCA staff in Nairobi, of whom Viv Slight was one, had set up a W/T link to the Belgian Coast Station at Ostend, using a communications booth in the D.C.A. Communications centre and a powerful DCA transmitter at R.A.F. Eastleigh.. I relayed the message direct to them on the aeronautical W/T channel, and Nairobi passed it straight to Ostend, with a steady flow of other messages. Ostend relayed it to Brussels who passed it to the Military where it was relayed on it’s final leg back to Africa, to the Belgian Paratroop Base at Kamina. Within 20 minutes of my receiving the message at Kisumu, the paratroopers were airborne and the Agricultural Station was liberated. Hardly had I cleared the message when I received a correction to it which advised:
“Not one hundred thousand savages, only ten thousand”
When I passed this to Nairobi, the reply was “What’s the bloody difference”
There were many such stories during the evacuation of Europeans from the Congo. Uganda was the main escape route and DCA Nairobi asked that any aircraft available and pilots who could make it, should get to Entebbe and help in the evacuation regardless of Certificates of Airworthiness and Pilot’s licences. One of my ex-pilot friends evacuated about thirty people in several trips in a Rapide aircraft. The last aircraft he had flown was a Beaufighter during the war. Some thousands were got out from the Congo, one way or another, mostly via Kampala and Kisumu. The Kenya Girls’ High School in Nairobi (known as the Boma) was turned into a Medical Reception Centre the records of which show the dreadful experiences and medical remedial action taken. Wendy reminded me that she and all the other girls who were not taking G.C.E..s were sent home a week before the term was due to end, to maked [sic] room for the refugees. At Kisumu I met many who came out by road. Two middle-aged ladies came to my Control Tower and one phoned her parents in
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the United States with a terrible story of pillage and rape. A third, more elderly, who had three American Doctorate degrees – Medicine, Divinity and a PhD. – had devoted her entire working life to helping and teaching Africans, but she said a lifetime had made only a superficial advance from their savagery.
Most of our memories of Kisumu were of happier days. There was an excellent social club but we were not members due only to the lack of time. The children made good use of the swimming pool, the lake being too dangerous, not only with its hippo and crocs. but with Bilharzia and hook worm. Hilda enjoyed her painting and drawing and we even managed to take a few photographs.
After nearly three years at Kisumu, Colin was still at the Prince of Wales School in Nairobi and with Wendy at the ‘Boma’ we were not seeing very much of either. And so a transfer was arranged and we packed up our household once again and moved to Nairobi, to a lovely house in Nairne Road, near Wendy’s school.
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[underlined] D.C.A. HEADQUARTERS [/underlined]
It was then June 1960, the Mau Mau emergency was still with us, but 84 Squadron had finished their bombing of the Aberdares which had raised the eyebrows of a few ‘hasbeens’ like myself. I had talked with the crews of the R.A.F. Lincolns some time earlier at R.A.F. Eastleigh and it all seemed very unreal to me. Perfect weather, ceiling and visibility generally unlimited and no enemy opposition from either the air or ground. Bombing over the bush was a matter of a timed run at a specific speed from a firmly identified point on the ground. Hardly a challenge for the Chaddertons and Fosters of this world and I don’t know what comprised a tour. It reminded me of O.T.U. where I saw the log book of a fellow-instructor with 40 ops. to his credit. His first tour ops were shown in the normal way, Benghazi 0340, Benghazi 0345, Benghazi 0342, Benghazi 0350, about 6 pages of Benghazi and no other target. But then, there are those among us who never bombed B.G., so the song goes. I could visualise the log books with several pages of ‘Aberdares 0125…”. Some of the Africans reckoned it was “mzuri sana” (very good) for the terrorists, the bombing just laid on a supply of fresh meat without their having to hunt for it, but there was probably more to it than that.
My place of work was the Communications Centre in the High Commission Building, on the top floor, above the Inland Revenue office. My duties were those of Telecomms. Supt. i/c a watch, responsible for the operation of the telecommunications system. We were not really concerned with aeroplanes, only messages about their movements. We had Radio Teleprinter circuits with Johannesburg, Khartoum, Der es Salaam, Entebbe, and Gan, and teleprinters on line to R.A.F. Eastleigh, Wilson Airport, Nairobi (Embakasi) and the Flight Information Centre next door. Our internal communications, that is within East Africa, were mainly by W/T links, to Iringa, Songea, Mbeya, Mwanza, Tanga, Dodoma, Arusha, Kisumu etc. Every teleprinter link had a standby W/T channel and most of these were resorted to in the early mornings, about 4 to 6 am. Brazaville [sic] and Leopoldville in the Congo were only on W/T but there was little traffic to the west and none to the east except Gan. With Gan, we operated an emergency channel with a test message every twenty minutes, to supplement the R.A.F. network if required, but they seemed to manage quite well without us. We handled about 20,000 incoming messages per day in the Tape Relay Centre, and apart from one or two all had to be relayed out again and logged. We also had three ground to Air operating booths, two of which were always manned, working aircraft, one on HF/RT and the other HF/WT. The European Radio Officers preferred the latter, where often three messages per minute were handled for long periods.
As soon as an aircraft left, say, Khartoum, a message would be sent on the Fixed Service by RTTY to the Tape Relay centre which should reach F.I.C. within a few minutes of being originated, requiring two relays, at Khartoum and Nairobi Tape Relay Centres. The system was that the pilot would not need to call Nairobi until he reached the Flight Information Region Boundry [inserted] Boundary [/inserted] at 4 degrees North, as Nairobi F.I.C. should have already received all the information by teleprinter. However, this being Africa and therefore supposedly not very efficient, the pilot would call Nairobi as soon as he could after take-off, on HF/RT. On the older propeller jobs, (the real aeroplanes), this would have been
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carried out by the Radio Officer on W/T., where just a few groups in code meant a great deal, for example:-.
ZGU de VPKKL Nairobi this is VPKKL
QTN STKM 0201Z I departed Khartoum at 0201 GMT
QAH 24 TTT QBH My height is 24,000 ft. below cloud
QRE HKNA 0718 I am estimating Nairobi Airport at 0718
QRX FIR I will call you again at the Flight Information Boundary
The Radio Officer would write those 14 groups onto a pad and his Clerk would put two copies through the hatch to the Air Traffic Controller.
The Clerk would spend most of his time putting carbon paper between the pages, it was fast going during the busy periods, but was even faster before HF/RT was introduced.
The aircraft would remain in constant contact with Khartoum on VHF until it reached 4 deg. N. when Nairobi would become responsible. Many aircraft were still using W/T at the time. There was no really conscious use of code, it was as commonplace as plain language and to a radio operator the two were synonimous, [sic] as were the many technical and other abbreviations. One example which comes to mind was at a Board of Enquiry into an accident where an aircraft had crashed into Mt. Kilimanjaro. An elderly judge asked the Ground Radio Officer if there had been any radio message, and the R/O replied “Yes, I last worked the aircraft on C.W. at 0247” “What is C.W.?” asked the Judge, and the reply “C.W. is Charlie Whisky your worship” and the Judge nearly gave up, maybe thinking whether Irish or Scotch.
Some Radio Officers preferred to transcribe the morse and speech messages straight onto a teleprinter which produced a simultaneous page copy in front of the controller, but this method was not very popular. With several aircraft calling at the same time it was easy to make a mistake but too slow to correct it on the teleprinter. The F.I.C. Controller operated the VHF himself. The whole set-up was very well thought out and we were very well equipped. Communications were our line of business and we were highly organised.
The tour of duty was rather longer in Nairobi, where one had to work for 4 years to earn 6 month’s leave, compared to only 2 1/2 years in Tanganyika. I believe there was some reduction for the Kenya coastal strip. These were the rules established when East Africa was supposed to be an unhealthy and hostile place, and most of the Europeans were Administration officials. I always felt the home leave terms were over-generous, as we also enjoyed three weeks of “local leave” each year with railway warrants provided to any part of east Africa. Where there was no railway to our particular ‘holiday resort’ or we chose to travel by car we could claim car mileage costs. Most people preferred to go on leave by sea, depending upon the time of year, possibly home on a 10 day voyage via suez, returning on a 3 week cruise via the Cape of Good Hope, on Union Castle liners. Some preferred the long way round both ways, spending as much time at sea as possible and thus economising
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on accommodation costs in the U.K. My only experience of sea travel had been the four troop-ships and Hilda claimed she couldn’t swim; we wanted to spend as much time as possible with the folks back home so we chose to travel by air every time.
Within a year of our return to Nairobi, June 1961, political unrest was well to the fore and getting worse. Alice, my step-mother, was a Senior Secretary to an African Minister in the Secretariat, and felt it was getting too dangerous to remain. Luigi and Mary had already retired to Italy and Alice was preparing to join them. Most of us were expecting the balloon to go up at any moment and people were getting jittery. We had been close to the hiatus in the Congo and the more recent mutinies of the armies of Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda, and Europeans were beginning to leave. The weight of evidence of impending disaster was overwhelming and towards the end of June Hilda returned with the four youngest children to U.K., Colin remaining at the Prince of Wales School as a boarder. Alice and Brian returned to Italy shortly after and my father moved in with me at Nairne Road. My father and I had become very involved with emergency communications for the settlers up-country, which dominated our lives for the next few years, but this is a story unto itself and is dealt with in the chapter “Laikipia Security Network”. The mutinies referred to occurred soon after the British Forces had left Kenya, and the emergency was declared officially over. Some European Service personnel remained as advisers to the Kenya army - there was no Kenya Navy and the Kenya Air Force existed mainly on paper but with a few light aircraft. We awoke one morning to the news that the three separate armies many hundreds of miles apart, had thrown out their European officers and declared themselves independent of any authority. Within 48 hours and before they could organise themselves and cause any damage, very small forces of British troops appeared simultaneously near Nairobi, Jinja and Dar es Salaam, subdued and disarmed the lot, without any loss of life or limb. I recall a cartoon in the East African Standard, showing Jomo Kenyatta with both arms raised to paratroopers dropping from aircraft and the caption “How good it is to welcome old friends” - His arch-enemies for 10 years or so. I saw several hundred African soldiers sitting on the grass at Wilson Airport with three European soldiers guarding them with machine guns. There was a large pile of rifles and other weapons nearby, also guarded.
Life was not all traumatic, however, we had the occasional laugh. One of our officers, MacDonald, was on official leave of absence quite frequently and we understood he was masterminding a very hush-hush communications link direct to U.K. from Government House and even satellites had been mentioned furtively. This was before the days of the Sputnik when satellites were a part of science fiction. He was one of the [underlined] firt [sic] [/underlined] to retire and as he was leaving he let us into the secret. Mac. had indeed spent a great deal of time at Government House. He was a master baker and was responsible literally for the icing of the cake. He told us also that when he joined the Dept. he stated that his qualifications included a final City & Guilds Certificate. They did, he confided, as a Master Baker, but not in telecommunications.
One Sunday morning in October on duty at the Comm. Centre I found my African Supervisor was monitoring Reuter on teleprinter, and looking over his shoulder I read on the page copy that thousands of Africans armed to the teeth were surrounding the High Commission building and holding hostage the
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Europeans working inside. The report gave more detail of riots and demonstrations and gave the impression that we were really in trouble. I went out through a window and onto the flat roof of the High Commission building and gingerly looked over the parapet entitled to expect a hail of bullets. On the road was a police car with two officers watching a group of about 20 Africans, some of them supporting two banners on which was written “Wazungu Rudi Uliya” (Europeans return to Europe). That was the extent of the demonstration reported to the entire world in Reuter’s message. Had it occured [sic] in Cambridge it would not even have received a mention in the free local papers.
My tour of duty ended in December and I relinquished the house, my father moving into Plums Hotel. A nine hour flight to London, and I was home for Christmas.
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[underlined] Dec. ’61 ON LEAVE [/underlined]
Hilda and Anne came to London and I met them at Paddington. We intend to spend a week with Joan and enjoy a holiday in London, but Hilda had a rather worrying cold so we limited our stay to two days.
The next six months or so were spent on leave. With the exception of Colin who was in the R.A.F., the whole family was together in Wales at Glaslyn. My father was in Nairobi, and his regular letters referred to increasing unrest. He was working flat-out in building the ‘Watson Wonders’ and he asked me to take back 500 B7G valve holders and 150 modulation chokes
In May ’62 I said goodbye to the family and returned to Kenya. As I was unaccompanied, Sid Worthy the Chief Engineer asked me if I would housewarm for him whilst he was on his 6 months leave. This meant that he paid the rent but could just walk out without packing up his household and walk back into the same apartment on his return. There was a tendency for senior officers who were permanently based in Nairobi to try and retain the same house or apartment once they had found the right one. Rent was in fact 10% of salary and it was well worth it. My father moved in with me and together we carried on with the transmitters, having rented a workshop next to Stephen Ellis in Victoria Street. After only 3 months in the apartment I received a letter from Sid telling me he was returning immediately, could he please have his flat only a few days hence!. The following morning we were going up-country and I could see my father was a more than little depressed. He was driving like a madman down the Nairobi escarpment and I insisted that he let me do the driving. He told me he had to go to Mombassa [sic] next day, having received a telegram from Alice that she and Brian were returning on the Union Castle. This was supposed to be a surprise to him and I did not doubt that it was so, but Alice admitted later that she had in fact booked return tickets on the homeward trip. She had been totally dishonest in her statements about her intentions which had resulted in Hilda and the children staying in Wales. Our safari was cut short and we returned to Nairobi the same day, a 500 mile round trip. Alice’s return meant a complete change in plan; clearly she and my father expected to share my accommodation but with Sid’s return they had no option but to move into an hotel again. They were lucky in obtaining a couple of rooms at Plums, after only two nights in the flat. I moved into Woodlands Hotel, but applied for a housing allocation as my family had decided to return to Kenya. Hilda and the children rejoined [sic] me and we moved into a house at Likoni Lane, resuming a normal life except that it was dominated by the Laikipia network and work at the Comm. Centre. Within a year of my return I was promoted to Asst. Signals Officer and took over from Mike Harding As [sic] Officer in charge of the Communications Centre. This I had tried to avoid for a long time, not the responsibility, but the working hours. The new post meant working office hours and for the first time in my life I was working a five-day-week. On watches it had been a four-day cycle of say monday afternoon, tuesday morning and all tuesday night, then off duty until friday afternoon. The 2 1/2 days off within every 4 days had suited me very well and was a very popular roster with everyone. Office hours curtailed my visits up-country except at week-ends, but I did have every evening free. Very soon, each European Radio Supt. In charge of a watch had an African trainee assistant. Shortly afterwards one joined me. They were all supposedly bright boys from Secondary School and we delegated the routine work to them as much as possible. Their presence was resented by the old-timers among the
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wireless operators, who knew what they were doing and were very good operators, but their educational background was inadequate for the senior posts. Africanisation was the policy dictated to us and we bowed to the inevitable. I trusted most of my Africans, and there were about 180 of them working on the 4-day Watch roster at the Communications centre. Although many of them had served with the British Army both during and after the war, I could not completely lose sight of the fact that some had taken part in the Lare massacre when an African village was set ablaze and almost everyone slaughtered as they tried to escape. The majority of my staff were from the three main problem tribes, the Kikuyu, Meru and Embu, and a few of the Luo tribe from Nyanza.
My father’s farm had been abandoned long ago. It was not possible to obtain reliable labour during the Emergency, and the whole of the European settled areas was to be handed over to the Africans. There were already very few farmers left in the Trans-Nzoia and the Eldoret areas, the latter being mainly from South Africa. The Laikipia farmers were the last to hold out, except perhaps for the bigger ranches near Athi River.
Our next home leave was in June 1964 and the story of my activity over the three years leading up to it is synonymous with that of the Laikipia Security Network. The network seemed to priority over everything, but lives were at stake. Occasionally Hilda and the Children would go up-country with me, and one memorable week-end was spent with Tony Dyer and Family at their lovely home facing Mount Kenya. One afternoon Tony asked the children if they would like to go to a polo match and they took off in Tony’s Cessna from their own front door, landing at the side of the pitch. One of Tony’s sons was killed some months later whilst taking a gun out of the back of his vehicle. It was never discovered how the gun came to be loaded and with the safety catch off. Hilda and the children stayed too at the farm of Dr. Anne Spoerry, at Ol Kalau. Anne’s loo was a traditional type in the bushes down the garden, very comfortable and lined with bookshelves, full of the Lancet and other medical journals. Anne was a wonderful character. Only once did we go to the coast for a holiday, and this was two weeks spent at Likoni, near Mombassa [sic]. Unfortunately we chose to go in the rainy season but it was a welcome break. We took Chippy, our cockerel, and it followed us around everywhere, afraid of absolutely nothing. Chippy returned home one day in Nairobi with a broken beak and was unable to peck for food. Fortunately Jean and Dick Chalcroft came to stay overnight with us and Dick fitted a new lower section to the beak with the plastic resin we used in making dipole aerials.. It took an hour to cure, or set, and Jean and Dick held Chippy during that period, and again whilst they filed down the surplus plastic and polished the result. Chippy was ravenous and began to feed straight away, but was very aggressive towards humans, except for Jean and Dick, who took him back to their farm at Molo. I saw Chippy several times after that at the farm, lording it over the hens, and not another cockerel in sight.
One day I bought a petrol/paraffin engine-driven alternator and a bank of batteries, a complete 32 volt lighting set in fact, too good to miss for £25 in Nairobi. The dealer said the engine wouldn’t start although it had just been thoroughly overhauled. I knew that Jean and Dick were without power on their farm although their house was wired for a 32 volt DC system such as this. I knew too of Jean’s prowess with anything mechanical and I took the whole lot straight up to the farm at Molo. At 10pm. on the Saturday Jean started stripping down the engine whilst I was linking together the 26 alkaline cells
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and checking the house wiring connected to my car battery. Jean, assisted by Dick slogged on until 5am. in the light of an Alladin lamp, but she had discovered the trouble long before that. The timing was exactly 180 degrees out of phase. At 5am, just before dawn, the batteries being flat, Jean cranked the engine which roared into life, literally, we were deficient of a silencer for the exhaust. The batteries were taking a charge and we changed from petrol to paraffin and switched on a few lights in the house. The following evening the Chalcrofts were very proud of their lighting system. That sort of effort and co-operation did give one a great deal of satisfaction.
My recollections of work in D.C.A. over that period are very few.
We seldom talked of the war, but in the middle of one night I somehow got chatting to the F.I.C. Controller, Sqdn Ldr. Anderson DFC & Bar, who had also been in 5 Group on Lancasters. Andy said we were sometimes like a lot of sheep, he recalled one night having reached his ETA, all was very quiet except that markers had been dropped 20 miles to the south. Within minutes bombs were crashing down so Andie turned south for five minutes and joined in. Next day it was found that the target was 20 miles north of where most of the bombing had taken place. My reply was just “Politz”, we had done exactly the same thing, followed the flock. We talked together of flying during the war, several times, but my memories of the actual events are more vivid now, after 45 years, than they were 25 years ago. Perhaps because there was not a great deal in East Africa to remind me of it, compared to today, living 4 miles from Wyton on the approach to Alconbury. To see the Lancaster of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight fly over gives me rather more than a lump in my throat at times. Pathfinder House is not what it was with Don Bennet, either, it is now the place where I pay my rates, but they at least have a picture of a Lancaster on the wall near the Cashier’s office. A couple of years ago I asked one of the cashiers why it was called Pathfinder House, she had no idea, I asked what the aeroplane was and the answer was the same. I let the matter drop.
I had taken over the comm. Centre from Mike Harding who had retired prematurely, and his immediate predecessor had been “Bing” Crosby, ex Royal Signals. Bing was in Headquarters just along the corridor and came into my office every day to inspect an object pickled in a sealed jar which he had left on the shelf when he was promoted. Although he urged us to take good care of it, he used to look at it and say to it “You useless ruddy thing”, or words to that effect. Finally, on retirement, he came and collected it and let us into the secret, with the parting words “Oh don’t worry, the other one’s fine, you only need one you know”.
Alice and my father had left in May for Italy, to stay with Mary and Luigi. My own feelings were that he should have stayed in Kenya, possibly up country with Jean or with one of his many other friends among the Settlers. He had worked unceasingly on the network for over 4 years, but Alice insisted upon their return to Europe. In June ’64 it was time for home leave again. We were reluctant this time because there was so much happening up country and we expected it to be our final tour in East Africa together, unless I returned and carried on with communications on a commercial basis. This was still an option, communications had kept me very busy and with lots of ‘job satisfaction’, but it was DCA who had paid my salary. I still had a family to support, and there was a great deal of uncertainty in Kenya. And so it was we flew to London yet again, and joined Hilda’s Mum at Glaslyn.
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[underlined] ON LEAVE June 1964 [/underlined]
Before leaving for Wales we bought a second-hand Vanguard from a dealer in Putney which was to prove very useful in the next few months. At the end of our leave it was sold to the local Policeman for the same price.
A month or two before we returned, the house next to Aunt Doll had become vacant and was put on the market for £500. It was small and in shocking state, but a real snip so we bought it. Five months was spent in refurbishing it, building a bathroom, kitchen, replastering, new fireplace, rewiring etc. I remember John mixing at least a ton of concrete manually, he was a tremendous help. Electricity at the house had not been used for many years, and what little wiring remained, mostly twin flex, we ripped out. Electrical contractors quoted £900 to rewire, which was totally ridiculous, and finally John and I did it in one day, having spent about £50 on materials through an advert in Exchange & Mart. We tried to buy the field - or even part of it - at the back - of the house, but our lawyer said it was quite impossible to find out who owned the land. Many years later it transpired that it had in fact been owned for at least a hundred years by members of his own family.
Visits were paid to my other in Barnoldswick and to Joan and Ken in London, but the greater part of my leave was spent on the ‘new house’.
At the end of April Hilda’s Mum moved into her new home and made comfortable. From the house there was a wonderful view of the mountain separating the Neath and Rhonda valleys, with the river within 25 yards in the foreground. Perhaps it is only fair to mention the road between the house and river, but when the bypass was built a few years later this road carried little traffic.
In November ’64 I returned to Kenya unaccompanied, and being so, moved into Woodlands Hotel. The following day I was in touch with Laikipia and also back at work. I relieved Mike Harding as Asst. Signals Officer in Headquarters, Deputy to ‘Spud’ Murphy who was Telecommunications Officer (Operations). The job was just a matter of dealing with the steady flow of paper-work. Every piece of paper coming in was registered in Central Registry and filed by the Clerk. If he couldn’t decide which file to put it, he would open a new one. The file was then delivered - and booked out - to the officer thought to be the one who should deal with it. The officer would either add his comments as a minute and pass on the file to someone he thought might not return it to him, or if he felt he was authorised to make a decision, draft a letter for his immediate superior. Very occasionally, on an external matter he might even sign the letter “for the Director of Civil Aviation”. I was expected to finalise all matters concerning the operational aspect of the Telecommunications side of DCA, including all staff problems, their examinations and promotions.
Europeans were leaving the Directorate almost every week and being replaced by Africans. Those with African proteges training to take over the senior posts were most vulnerable. The Africans thought it was easy to sit back and authorise someone to go on leave, or to promote or reprimand another. The newcomers could read the many returns and forms but whereas a European officer could do every job subordinate to his own, the assistant had neither the experience, qualifications nor ability to do those jobs. In some cases the African was promoted and his former boss remained as his assistant. It was
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obvious who did the actual work. I found the work uninteresting, mainly it seemed just a matter of going through the motions and staying out of trouble by being non-committal, which was completely out of character. My main thoughts were with the 5190 Network, something that really mattered.
Sqdn. Ldr. Anderson was still with us and when he went on two week’s leave to the coast he asked me to sleep at his house, which made a welcome change from staying at the hotel. At about 3am on the third night there was a hullabaloo outside and a pounding on the door. “Police, open up”. I opened up, 9mm. Mauser ready, to be greeted by an African Police Inspector and about 15 Askari with enough weaponry to start a rebellion. Andy had told the Police he would be away for two weeks and would they please keep an eye on the house? I told them he had asked me to sleep there but they were not convinced. All my documents were at the hotel and eventually the Inspector ‘phoned the Acting Director of Civil Aviation at his house - Dickie Dixon, my old antagonist from Entebbe. Dickie was not amused, he never was, with me, but the Inspector was satisfied. A few nights later, about 10pm. I was lying on the bed reading, the house in darkness except for a small reading lamp. I heard footsteps on the gravel outside and quickly extinguished the light. I heard a key turning in the lock of the pateo [sic] door. By this time I was off the bed and standing at the bedroom door, left hand on the hall light switch and my Mauser in the right, cocked and with the safety-catch off. When the outside door opened I switched on the light and was startled to identify the intruder as Jimmie Sanson, whom I had not seen since we were in Kisumu. If he had been carrying a gun I might have blown his head off before it became unrecognisable. Andy had done it again, asking Jimmie also to keep an eye on the house. That night my car had been in Andy’s garage. On the following nights I left the car in full view outside, and with the a few lights in the house switched on.
For several years I had held one of the very few Flight Radio Officer Licences in the Department and frequently flew as Radio Officer first on the Anson VPKKK and later on its replacement, the Heron. On my last trip on the Heron we did a “tour of inspection” with visiting officials from ICAO in Montreal. Whilst supposedly inspecting the runways here and the Met. Station there, a V.O.R., D.M.E. and other aids to Aviators, in reality we enjoyed a visit to Zanzibar, flew around inside the Ngoro-ngoro crater, an extinct volcano well stocked with wild life, witnessed a specially-staged lion kill in Tsavo West National Park, and entered into the spirit of a very expensive ‘Cook’s Tour’. A few weeks later I did another tour of airports, inspecting the Telecomm. aspect and also giving morse tests to operators who were otherwise already qualified for promotion. I knew most of the staff and the stations also. 16 years previously I had first visited Iringa, which was then run by ‘Blossom’, Mrs. Brown, the only lady Radio Officer in DCA. Blossom was an ex-WREN officer who had specialised during the war in Japanese morse. I think she told me there were about 120 characters in their morse alphabet, and she used to transcribe in Jap. characters for hours on end. It was someone else’s job to translate them into English. Blossom had left some years previously. The morse tests were interesting, first the candidate sent for 10 minutes at 25 w.p.m. of 5-letter and figure groups, which was recorded on tape. The second test was 10 minutes of plain language, and the third receiving for 10 minutes of automatic morse. The fourth test was for the candidate to receive the morse recorded in the first two tests, without telling them of it’s origin. Many complained that the
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fourth test was unfair, the morse being very poor and difficult to read. Some found it difficult to believe the poor morse was their own! In general, the morse was, in fact, very good, most of the old-timers having been British Army trained, during the war.
Soon after the invasion of Zanzibar I flew there in the DCA Anson piloted by Capt. Casperuthus. The two Air Traffic Controllers had been deported to Mombassa [sic] and almost all the Telecomms. equipment was faulty. The teleprinter on line to Dar es Salaam still worked, however, and this was taken over by an African from Tanganyika. Zanzibar and Tanganyika became known as Tanzania and for the very first time customs and immigration formalities were introduced between the two. I recall paying customs duty in Dar es Salaam on 200 cigarettes bought in Zanzibar, although the price was the same in both places, and duty had been paid already to the same authority, the new government of Tanzania. There was no rational explanation to some of the politics in East Africa. Rumours were rife that a huge Russian biplane bomber made secret trips at night without contacting DCA, the aviation authority, and the machine was said to be in a particular hangar. We were intrigued by this and taxied very close to the hangar, a ‘deliberate mistake’, and took photographs of the aircraft. It was a biplane about three times the wingspan of a Tiger Moth, but we were not able to find anyone who had actually seen it airborne.
By May 1965 I was recovering transmitters from Settlers who were leaving the country, and these sets were more than meeting the demand for new ones. I felt that by the end of the year there would be very few Europeans left, and in that atmosphere of intense anti-climax I gave 6 months notice of my retirement. The leave earned would take me to just over my 44th. birthday when compensation for loss of office would be at its peak. Looking at this in more detail, compensation would have been reduced by £2,000 per year of delay. There was really little choice but to go.
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[underlined] JOB HUNTING [/underlined]
I returned home finally on the 11th. of November 1965 and joined Hilda and the family at Glaslyn, except for Colin who was in the R.A.F. in Aden. My father and Alice were settled in Voghera in Northern Italy. There was plenty of time to look for a job, as I was on full pay for about six months and could not really afford to start work until April. Had I started before that, it would have meant paying income tax at the U.K. rate for the previous year on my world income, so I was advised, probably wrongly.
I wrote many letters, one offering my services to O’Dorian of Redeffusion [sic]. They were at that time considering establishing a Radio Relay system in the African areas of Nairobi. Other firms were also interested and the City Council was monitoring a pilot scheme which I.A.L. had fitted about a year previously. The pilot scheme had been put out to tender and my father had submitted a bid to provide for a four-program system. The contract went to I.A.L. on the grounds that they had shown confidence in Kenya by being established there for many years and were a reputable firm. My father was invited to comment and said I.A.L.’s presence was nothing to do with confidence, they were wholly-owned by B.O.A.C. and were there to do aircraft radio maintenance for E.A. Airways also owned by B.O.A.C. As for being a reputable company, so are Marks and Spencers but like I.A.L. they have no experience in Radio Relay. I had seen the pilot scheme at Kaloleni. Each house had a loudspeaker on the wall with volume control, and the system was wired in D8 cable and flex, with no protective devices. Reception was poor and quality was that of a typical bus station P.A. system. I gave O’dorian [sic] a detailed report of what I thought could be achieved in Nairobi and also the whole of Kenya, together with the engineering detail, resources required, budgets etc. The report was mainly the result of my father’s efforts of two years previously, updated. I included my report of I.A.L.’s one programme pilot scheme the performance of which could induce the Council to reach only one conclusion about Radio Relay. One of not to bother with it. Transistor radios were then on the market at 40 shillings giving good world-wide reception, Moscow being a necessity. I mentioned too the near to impossibility of collecting payment from individual subscribers. Payment would have to be made by the authorities. O’Dorian thanked me for my interest and appreciated the report and said he would be in touch. About a month later he wrote again and said they had decided not to pursue any interest in Kenya.
I also tried West London Telefusion who I knew at working level in 1947, and had an interview in Blackpool with their M.D., and Personnel Manager, for a new post as Development Manager in Taunton, Somerset. The job was to establish a cable T.V. system. I was offered the job after a prolonged interview and at a good salary. I accepted there and then and was advised to start looking for a house around Taunton. Only the starting date was uncertain, but they agreed to confirm the appointment in writing and provide a detailed Terms of Reference. I was very surprised indeed a few weeks later when a letter from Mr Wilkinson said he was very sorry but had decided not to proceed with the Taunton project and all development was under review. I realised that cable TV was popular in fringe areas but more and more repeaters were being provided and the need for cable was reducing all the time. I am writing this in 1993 and the concept of cable TV has developed from the 1966 “amplified aerial” to a single coaxial cable providing over 30 T.V. channels, radio and telephone, and
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most recently, scanned T.V. Security Systems. The technological advances in Relay since its inception in my father’s time, around 1928 have meant many fresh starts for the industry.
I had an interview with Aero Electronics at Crawley – to whom I had a letter of introduction, and was offered the job of Development Engineer & Manager! I felt this was aiming rather high. The interview took place in a large country house, alongside which was a fairly new factory with lots of activity, and a sketch of which appeared on Aero Electronics letter heading. I later found that the factory had no connection with Aero Electronics, which was in fact a one-man show. The job would have been responding to overseas enquiries received mainly via the Board of Trade, designing a system and providing equipment, winding up with a quotation. On the face of it a very interesting prospect, but with no back-up of any sort, and relying upon other firms’ equipment. I felt it to be somewhat dicey, particularly when I was asked if I could type! I had to say it was a job for a team, not one man.
From Crawley I went to see G.E.C. at Coventry for interview as a “Production Team Leader”. The job turned out to be the leader of a team of about 12 assemblers and wiremen constructing telephone exchanges – one at a time. I was shown one being assembled and spent an hour with the Team Leader on one particular exchange which comprised thirty 7’ racks of relay panels, counters uniselectors, jack fields etc. As far as I could see it was just a matter of ensuring each item was in the right place and wired-in correctly. Turning down the job was the right decission [sic] for the wrong reason. There seemed to be thousands of people around all moving at the same time, and the environment depressed me. Although I was only vaguely aware of it at the time, that type of system would be giving way to electronic exchanges within a year or two.
Next stop was Redifon in Wandsworth, who were advertising for Test and Installation engineers. The job was described accurately but was basically testing H/F and M/F equipment at the end of the production line, with very occasional trips into the field on installation and commissioning work. There was great competition for the field work. I was offered the job but the Personnel manager told me to think very carefully, Wandsworth was a terrible place to live in. I was given two weeks to think it over, and turned down the offer. I asked the Personnel Manager what happened to the job I was offered in 1957. The requirement was for an engineer who had a PMG1 licence to operate on ships and an MCA Flight Radio Officers Licence to operate on aircraft. He was to take equipment to sea and into the air to ensure there were no problems, and if there were, to resolve them. That job really appealed to me and could very well have become what I cared to make it. Maybe. He looked up my file and told me the vacancy was not filled and the post was withdrawn.
I saw a job advertised for a Telecommunications Engineer for Gambia, 18 month tour, £3500 per year + 25% gratuity, and applied for it. A week later I was called for interview. I didn’t think there was the slightest chance of this happening, having applied out of interest and an expences [sic] paid trip to London. The interview went well and soon after my return to Wales a letter arrived asking me to confirm my acceptance on a salary of £2500. I was in a quandry [sic], I didn’t really want to go to Zambia, but wrote to the Crown Agents and pointed out the discrepancy between the advert of £3500 and offer of £2500.
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They regretted their mistake in the advert, and on those grounds I was able to decline
I applied for an advertised post of Signals Officer at the Ministry of Aviation’s Communications Centre at Croydon for which my D.C.A. experience fitted me well. The interview went off very well and I found that in some respects E. Africa was more up to-date than was the practice at Croydon. At the end of the interview they said they would write to me. About a week later their letter arrived and advised that I had not been selected but only because a more senior post would shortly become available and I was already short-listed for it. Good news indeed, but having heard nothing further after four months by which time we had moved house to Cambridge, I wrote to them. In their reply I was told that the letter offering me the job had been returned to them marked “Gone away”. As Communications Officer in charge at Croydon life would have been rather different.
Becoming more and more disillusioned with U.K. I went to see the Overseas Services Resettlement Bureau at Eland House, Victoria. I saw a Mr. Williams who was ex-Malaysia P.& T and we chatted for a while about the prospects of settling down to a job in the U.K. I had to agree that after 18 years in East Africa I was not impressed with what I saw in Britain nor with the people who occupied it, it was a vastly different place to the one I had left in 1948. He was quite right in saying that I first had to decide whether I wanted to stay and if so to make the best of it. What job did I want? I told him I had hoped to join Pye Telecomm’s technical sales dept. I knew Pye aeronautical equipment and felt I could fit in there, but had written and been advised there were no vacancies. “Did I still want the job?”. Having replied yes please he picked up the phone, and said “get me Ernie Munns at Pye”. Moments later he greeted someone in what I assumed was Malay, then switched to English “look Ernie, I’ve another bloody Colonial here, thinks Pye’s the ultimate., When can you see him?” We agreed 2pm the following day at Pye Telecommunications, Newmarket Rd., Cambridge. More words in Malay between them and he wished me luck.
I liked the friendly environment at Pye and was interviewed by Ernie Munns, head of Systems Planning Dept. and his deputy, Cyril Foster. The interview was constantly interrupted by the telephone and people barging in for instant decisisons [sic]. I recall Ernie asking whether I would be prepared to write a paper for a semi-technical customer on the relative merits of conventional VHF links and Tropospheric scatter and I said “yes”! Fortunately the phone rang and both interviewers were involved, which gave me a few minutes to think about it. I had heard of Tropo-scatter, but that was about all. I awoke to the question of “how would you go about it?” I replied that I would read up the subject in the Pye library. It must have been written up many times, I would study it and probably be able to quote a learned authority. I agreed that I didn’t know all the answers, and Ernie said “Thank god for that, one or two around here think they do”. I was told that my application was opportune, if I joined them I would be in the Aeronautical team headed by Cyril, which was currently preparing a factory order for equipment to re-equip 22 airports and several other sites in Iran, plus a lot of other orders for aviation equipment. Basically the job was block-planning of systems to meet the customers’ operational requirement, prepare quotations, to engineer the job in detail and to project manage the order to its conclusion. This was the sort of job offered by
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Aero Electronics but at Pye there was full backing from experts in all fields. The second part of the interview was with Cyril and the Personnel manager who said he would write to me with the result. The letter arrived a few days later offering me the post at £1250 per year and to start preferably on the first of April. This was gladly accepted. Hilda and I went to Cambridge and after a week’s run around by Estate Agents we found a nice 4-bedroomed house at 14 Greystoke Rd. near Cherry Hinton which was to be ready by the end of March.
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[underlined] AT PYE TELECOMMUNICATIONS [/underlined]
The first two years at Pye were spent as a Project Engineer in Systems Planning Dept, not in the Aviation team as hoped, but in Duncan Kerr’s team doing general systems. Also in the team were Jim Bucknell, Ian Douglas, and Mike Bavistock who had also joined Pye on April first. Duncan was away most of the time drumming up contracts with the Scottish Police forces but on our first day Mike and I did meet him briefly and he gave us two pink files. ‘Take one each’ said Duncan. ‘Turkey 10th Slice is now an order and needs a flimsy, and the Libya quote needs revalidating’. Mike and I hadn’t a clue on Pye methods and we decided to work together, providing a mutual back-up. It quickly transpired that we had something in common, Mike had been in the Gambia for three tours whilst I was in East Africa. I told him of my experience with the Crown Agents for the Gambia job and he had seen the advert for what had in fact been his post. He was not amused when he saw his £2500 a year job advertised with a salary of £3500.
Of the 36 people in the department, no-one was particularly helpful, in retrospect mainly because they were themselves under great pressure and had problems of their own. I saw the Chief Clerk, - later known as the Admin Group Leader – and said ‘Duncan wants me to do a flimsy, what’s a flimsy?’ He was most unhelpful although he was responsible for the admin. aspect of many hundreds of them. His philosophy was that he wasn’t going to help anyone who was on a bigger salary than his own. I had to go to Export Sales to find out what a flimsy looked like. It turned out to be an all-singing and dancing instruction to every dept. detailing all the action required in designing, manufacturing inspecting packing shipping and invoicing and even installation of a customer’s order. All the information available was entered on the forms and circulated around the departments. The initial circulation was programmed to take six weeks. The system was designed in detail and all the engineering information added with ammendments. [sic] Eventually there were so many ammendments [sic] I had to completely rewrite the flimsy after six weeks, and finally there was an issue 4. The job was eventually engineered by Dickie Wainwright – ex East African P.& T., following a departmental re-organisation, and I picked it up again at the delivery stage having moved to the Systems Installation Dept.
My performance on my first task in Pye was not at all brilliant, and about 18 months later when the installation was finished I issued a memo entitled “Lessons Learned on Turkey 10th Slice”. I started with saying that a week of training in Pye methods would have saved a great deal of cost and misunderstanding and went on to discuss the contract itself. The contract stated that ‘The Turkish Version of the contract shall be deemed to be the official version’, and it seemed there were many anomalies all to the advantage of the Turks, in particular to our agent, a chap called Avidor, who in fact translated the Turkish contract into English!. The system originally quoted was for a microwave chain the length of Turkey with a dozen or so links carrying teleprinter and telephones. We were awarded only the links, the radio parts of which were main and standby. One rediculous [sic] requirement in the Turkish version was that they wanted the main link in one place and the standby in another. We were providing main and standby transmitters etc within a link, not a completely seperate [sic] standby link. The whole thing was quite rediculous, [sic] no
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wonder it was given to one of the new boys and everyone else steered clear. The title of the contract simply meant that it was the 10th slice – or part – of a multi-million dollar allocation of N.A.T.O. funds. I don’t know how many slices there were, but one was enough for us.
With Mike’s first job, revalidating a quotation might on the face of it seem more straight-forward. It is just a matter of extending the date on which the offer expires, or is it?! The engineers who did the quotation with many versions over a period of 10 years, and the half dozen salesmen involved over different periods had all either left or moved on somewhere. Now they were all out of picture, it was Mike’s job, and he was on his own. Revalidation implied that he must thoroughly understand the customer requirement. The quotation comprised 18 volumes of A4 size, each 2” thick, plus a mountain of minutes of meetings and correspondance [sic] over a period of 10 years. Undertakings made in good faith years ago could well be quite impossible to honour, requiring endless variations to the tender document. Every change required approval from others in Pye. Every aspect had to be checked. Equipment from other manufacturers was included and confirmation of availability and price had to be obtained, every move documented and absolutely every aspect of the tender was Mike’s direct responsibility. When I think back to those days, I remember how every letter and memo originated had to be written out in longhand for the team’s typist to action. I understand the office system did not change in the next 25 years although there is much less of it. Mike asked me to sit in at his very first meeting on this project, the main purpose of which was to put him in the picture and answer any queries he might have. One item in the quote was ‘2 years Bavister £2000’ What’s that asks Mike. The finance dept man said it’s an accountancy term, just leave it in but add 10%. Two others had totally different ideas and finally a fellow woke up and said “I’m Bavister, I’m supposed to go out there for two years to help the customer”. There followed a discussion on the price of whether it was 2 or should be 20 thousand and which department accepted the responsibility. Mike asked why we are using scramblers bought from Redifon at £1200 each when we can make them. It turned out they were actually ours, produced in Cambridge for T.M.C. who sold them to Redifon who in turn mounted them on a panel with their label, and sold them back to Pye at about 10 times the price.
The Libya communication system itself was very good, a policeman on a camel with a hand-held portable could talk through a local Base station and several UHF links and an HF SSB link to his HQ 3000 miles away if required. Mike Bavistock saw the project through two revalidations and the tender’s final acceptance, and the production stage, over a period of 4 years. He went on to do many other big projects before deciding to resign and return to Africa to try and regain his sanity.
When I joined the department, one half prepared quotations and everything else with the exception of the detailed engineering. The other half were responsible for engineering and nothing else. The system was sound, one person should not have to divert his thinking from conditions of sale to pricing to shipping to the specific connections on a 131 way socket. After a while the system was changed whereby one man did the lot, and with a dozen or more projects on hand at any one time constant re-orientation was getting me down and I asked for a transfer to Systems Installation Dept. Meanwhile I pressed on
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doing many quotations and made sure I did not get involved with detailed engineering design or anything else which could delay my transfer. In fact I feigned some excentricity [sic] and got away with it. The pressure however was high and there was a great deal of jeolousy [sic] and backbiting in the department.
At one stage I did a couple of Fireman’s callout schemes and these were done on the electric typewriter by a typist who normally did only the conditions of sale. The only difference was in the number of base stations and portables, and the finance. Together using the same basic tape we could rattle off a quotation in half an hour. We made about 20 spare copies and sent them to Home salesmen who were not already in the know, to help them secure orders from their local fire services. This was very rewarding to Pye.
One monday [sic] morning I was given the job of providing a quotation to meet a requirement for the Yugoslavian police, to be ready by 4 pm on friday [sic] . It was a big job and I would have three chaps to assist me but I was not to make a start until the go-ahead was received from International Marketing Dept. At 2.15 pm I was told to forget it, it would not be possible to complete it in time. On Wednesday at 10 am I was told the job was on and vital, top priority. Drop everything and get on wth [sic] it. I would not have any assistants and would have to complete it myself. So one man had two days and two nights to do a job which was too much for 4 men in 5 days and 4 nights. I worked almost non-stop, all day and all night, mostly at home, and on the thursday [sic] I asked for a typist to be available for friday [sic] night. By 5 pm on friday [sic] the document was ready for typing, a very long technical description and equipment schedules. The prices had not been agreed with the finance dept, so I used standard Export price with 15% mark-up for luck. No signatures of approval were obtained from Snr. Management although a quote for over £100,000 needed signatures from three Directors and finally the Company Secretary. I did ‘phone Bert Ship who was responsible for determining delivery time and I put 5 months instead of his 9. The typist did not materialise, and as a last resort I took an office typewriter to my daughter Wendy’s home and she typed it overnight.
At 7 am on the saturday [sic] I assembled a batch of relavant [sic] publicity material and technical leaflets, and made 10 copies of the whole document, four of which I signed and gave to the Salesman at 9 am. He translated the Technical Description and schedules into Italian on his way to London Airport by road and to Milan by air. It was retyped into Italian on the Sunday and presented to the client in Rome on the Monday [sic] , by Pye Italy. A month later the Salesman told me we had got the job and thanked me, but there was no other official recognition. I was amused to have signed it myself, having cut through all authorities and proceedures. [sic] One copy of the file was circulated around for approvals by Mike Loose and this was completed a few days before we got the contract. Not all jobs were like that.
One particular quotation was done for Frank Mills, a salesman responsible for dealing with government departments in Wales. I had first known Frank when he was Provincial Police Signals Officer at Mwanza in Tanganyika when I was in charge of the airport. Prior to that he had been a Radio Officer with D.C.A. in East Africa. Frank had told me of his lucky escape when he went to Musoma on a routine inspection. An african [sic] sold him a live snake in a sack for a shilling and Frank decided its skin would make a good present. An 8 foot python for a shilling. First the python had to be killed and whilst still in the sack was placed in an empty 40 gallon storage drum. A pipe was connected between his
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landrover [sic] exhaust and the drum, and the engine left running. After an hour the python was removed and made ready for skinning, but first let’s take a few photographs. Off came Frank’s bush jacket, and the python wound round his chest and neck, with Frank gripping the snake’s head and looking it square in the eyes. The photos were taken and the snake lowered to the ground. It was sweaty work and Frank sat on the back of the landrover [sic] drinking a cool beer. After a few minutes the python slid away into the bush. However, Frank had arranged to collect the quotation at 1.30 pm. and as the hour approached it was ready in triplicate except for the three front labels. All the typists and secretaries were enjoying their lunch break, most of them sitting at their desks knitting or reading. Not one of them would type the labels, so I used a spare manual machine and typed them myself. It was their right to stop work between 1 and 2 and they would excercise [sic] that right regardless of everything else. Most of them didn’t speak to me for weeks. This childish attitude was only too prevalant [sic] throughout the organisation and was completely foreign to me. However, Frank collected his quotation and we had a short chat about old times. Tragically he was killed in a road accident next day whilst on the way to see his customer with the quotation.
After my 2 years or so in Systems Planning, Bill Bainbridge one of the two Field Controllers in Systems resigned to start his own business, Cambridge Towers, and I was fortunate in succeeding him. At the same time Harry Langley Head of Systems Installation moved into Sales and D.A.D. Smith took over as Manager of Systems Installation Dept., (S.I.D.). I got on very well with Harry Langley, he had been with the Kenya Police as a Radio technician seconded from the Home Office. Howard (Jimmie) James was the other Field Controller and between us we managed all S.I.D. projects, mainly installing and commissioning systems in the field, about 60% being overseas. In theory we had a Project Engineer heading each Installation team but as each was involved in several jobs at any one time it was never possible just to sit back and let the P.E. get on with it. He was likely to be abroad when most required.
[underlined] IRAN [/underlined]
One of the first jobs allocated to me in S.I.D. was the Iranian Airports project, Pye being a member of a consortium with Marconi, C & S Antennas, Redifon, G.E.C. and S.T.C. All came together as the Irano-British Airports Consortium to re-equip the major airports and aviation facilities in Iran. This was the project mentioned to me at my interview when applying to join Pye and Cyril Foster and Allan Breeze had devoted their last two years entirely to it, and much of 5 years before that. Allan in fact eventually went to Iran to commission the F.I.C. console. I had a great respect for him when we went to Iran together and whilst I was struggling along in French he was talking in Farsi with the hotel staff. He had been quietly studying it in Cambridge and could even read it, which was a tremendous achievement.
I became suspicious when I received a memo from D.A.D. Smith the Departmental Manager enclosing a change-note and asking me to confirm that we could still carry out our installation committment [sic] in Iran for the £85,700 he had quoted. A change-note was a notification from a Lab. making a minor change in the design or manufacture of a piece of equipment. In this case it refered [sic] to a resistor which would make no difference to anything except the parts list.
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[photograph of the head and shoulders of a man]
[Arabic writing]
[stamp]
[Arabic writing] G. Watson [Arabic writing]
[signature]
[Arabic writing] JSB/100/14/6/T [Arabic writing]
154A
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Not “will the change-note make any difference?” His subtle phraseology was making me responsible for the whole installation amount, not just a possible minor differe [deleted r [/deleted] nce. His figure was derived by taking 5% of the factory transfer price of the equipment which had no real relationship to the cost of fitting it, and was totally unrealistic.
I studied the draft contract and drew up an installation plan, and after a few days replied to my manager that “if the work can be carried out in the 12 month time scale as in the contract my estimate of costs is not £87500 but £250,000. I believed the work would take at least 5 years, it would not be possible to co-ordinate the many scores of officials with their different loyalties and the organisations involved. The final cost could very well be double the £250K. The end customer was the Iranian Director General of Civil Aviation, represented by Aerodrome Development Consultants Ltd., (A.D.C.) apparently a private firm, but wholly-owned by the then British Board of Trade and staffed by their officials. They were more than loyal to their Iranian masters.
After a great deal of arguement [sic] with A.D.C. and other Consortium members about methods, division of responsibilies [sic] , consequential losses and costs etc., the quotation was accepted including my price of £250K, and the contract signed. I was to live with that contract for exactly 10 years and have been sorely tempted many times to record the frustrations, stupidities and almost impossible business of working with the Iranians whilst retaining any degree of sanity.
It was the custom in Pye at the time, and a very good one, that before work was started on a major quotation, the comments of people with recent similar experience were sought as to its desireability, [sic] and with the question “Do we want the job?”. The file, an informal one came to me and in answer to that question I wrote in a light-hearted moment, “pas avec un barge pole.” I didn’t know that our masters Philips in Holland were involved until a minute came from them asking ‘vos ist ein barge pole’? This surprised everyone as the Dutch generally have no sense of humour where money is concerned.
One year from the signing of the contract, bang on time, we airfreighted the 26 racks of equipment and a mass of other material for installation at Meherabad airport, a direct flight from Stansted to Teheran where it was to be fitted. The pilot spent 36 hours under armed guard first for not having a “Certificate of no objection” from Iranian Airlines and secondly for paying a parking fee for only a 12 hours stay. There were many problems with that first consignement [sic] which provided a good pointer to the difficulties to follow. It was 12 months before the equipment was released from Customs and then it was stored in the open air outside the Meherabad receiving station for 6 months. Soon after that first air shipment I returned to Iran and spent 6 weeks studying the first 12 airport installations, including Meherabad, and re-formulating detailed plans. Meherabad was the main International Airport and included the Flight Information Centre. One problem at the F.I.C. was how to fit a 24 ft control console manned by 6 people whilst maintaining a full service on the old console which occupied the same floor space. In addition the contract stated that 12 racks would be fitted in the old equipment room on the fourth floor and 14 in a new equipment room on the second floor. This really was quite impossible and I was keeping the problem to myself. When I was discussing with the Iranians the work involved in their own equiupment [sic] room,
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they became extremely worried because their wiring was an absolute shambles with hundreds of multipair cables actually threading their way in and out and through racks which we had to replace with no interuption [sic] in the service.
They finally startled me by laying down the law and insisting that we stay right out of their old equipment room, and they would knock down walls between six offices on the second floor to house all 26 racks. This area was very close to FIC and made our job not only possible, but easy. Also the change was their firm requirement and we charged them £17,500 extra for the priveledge [sic] .
On Kushi Nostrat mountain, Marconi were to fit a Radar scanner, which we were to link to Meherabad by a 7GHz link, but the only way to reach the site was by helicopter, unless one was a mountaineer. There were no civilian helicopters in Iran and it was only when I put the problem to A.D.C. that I found the Radar stn. was to be at Kushi Basm and not Kushi Nostrat, a totally different mountain. This had an access road and Meherabad was a line-of-sight path of 32 miles. At a critical distance was a salt pan and we were supposed to go round this desert on a dog leg using a microwave link repeater. There was no suitable location for the repeater because of the “change” in location of the Radar site. This resulted in another variation to contract for a frequency and space diversity single link, less equipment than in the original contract but we got away with charging £18,000 more. Some of the problems were pathetic, others amusing. When I checked the earthing and lightening arrestor system at Meherabad I found the one inch copper earth lead was terminated not with an earth mat in the ground but to a spike stuck in a concrete plantpot on the first floor verandah. That was and probably is still there and highly dangerous. Incredible but true.
At Bandar Abbas Airport I prepared a detailed installation plan which together with others was discussed later at a monthly progress meeting in London. It bore no resemblance to a plan prepared by Redifon two years previously and we realised that since Redifon’s visit a new airport had been built about 9 miles away. More variatons [sic] to contract. There were 260 of them finally. At Bandar Abbas, the port of which was the main base of the Iranian Navy, I was with the Provincial Governor, an Iranian Air Force General and the Airport Manager. All three agreed it was permissible for me to use my camera. Later when an army corporal confiscated the camera they all denied it and simultaneously lost their ability to speak fairly good english, resorting to french in discussion with me. I had already met the works manager in charge of the extensive building operations who spoke excellent english and was apparently all-powerful. He not only recovered my camera from the army but also gave me a fine selection of photographic prints together with detailed architect plans of all the buildings. I did not see the three senior chaps again but the works manager put a car and driver at my disposal. I think he must have been related to someone important, maybe the Shah-in-Shah, or maybe he was a member of the secret police, there is no knowing.
A consignment of Redifon transmitters was held up in Customs for over two years with a documentation problem, and even the fixer employed was quite ineffective. To clear through customs it was necessary to get 120 signatures and rubber stamp impressions on the release document and this had to be done in a single day. This was finally achieved after the Shah had decreed that the equipment must be released, but the chap on the gate seemed to resent this interferance [sic] and refused to release it. The document with the signatures was out
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of date the following day so the man’s boss supported him and the equipment remained a part of the scenery. A week or two later, another department came into the act and gave notice that if Redifon did not remove it within 7 days, it would be sold off by police auction. Redifon did not appreciate my suggestion that we should go to the auction. The problem had arisen because one small item of equipment was refered [sic] to as a “tone transmitter”, the word transmitter being anathma [sic] to Middle east types. It did not appear on the schedule [deleted] d [/deleted] of approved tranmitters [sic] and was regarded with grave suspicion.
It took four months to amend the contract to exclude the tone transmitter and substitute a tone oscillator, - the same thing -, but even then 36 copies of the invoice had to be changed and re-submitted.
The Consortium offices belonged to the G.E.C.O.S. agent who kindly trebbled [sic] the size of them at the Consortium’s expence [sic] . All the members’ staff in Iran moved in and made themselves comfortable. About three weeks later a gang of workmen with demolition equipment reduced the new buildings to rubble and said “sorry, no planning permission”. Two months later the lawyers proved that all the proper authority and permissions were completely in order. The gang returned and said “sorry, ok you build”.
Despite all the red tape in Iran it was generally possible to get results eventually, the main difficulty was often finding out just which palms had to be greased. Our man in Iran for three years was Mike Cherry and he was successful in getting an amateur radio licence, with the call-sign EP2MC. Mike fitted an SSB125 transceiver in the office in Teheran and I was in daily contact with him from both my house and the office in Cambridge. By using very carefull [sic] phraeseology [sic] I was kept right up to date with progress in the field.
I was talking with Mike from the office one evening on 14 MHz when Dr. Westhead the Chief Executive came in and asked who I was talking with. I replied “to Mike Cherry, our man in Teheran, Sir”. He grimaced and said “Ah well, ask a stupid question..” The public telephone system to Iran was diabolical most of the time. I used to book a call for 4.30 am the following day and take it from home, which saved a great deal of time in both places. Teheran time was 2 1/2 hours ahead of U.K. On most occasions the Post Office telephoned several times during the night to confirm the call or advise of delays, which was very tiresome.
Monthly progress meetings were held in London, and at one of them I was asked to quote for additional work at Esfahan during the 2500 year celebrations, which were to take place before the new equipment was fitted. They required to talk with aircraft and I suggested they should do so on a mobile set which would be quite adequate. Our team would already be on site with the mobiles so without any fuss I quoted £300 which was put forward. At a board meeting a week later this was confirmed and the Pye member of the Board, Pat Holden who was also our International Marketing Director promptly withdrew it as I had not gone through the proper channels. The next day he sent for me and instructed me to cancel my quotation, and with a great thumping of the table told me to increase it £3000. Then followed a lecture that “we are here to make money, add a nought”. I told him the job would take about an hour and £300 was more than adequate. £30,000 was utterly rediculous. [sic] I told him “I was doing no such thing, put it in writing through the head of my department and meanwhile you are clear to return to earth”. I then excused myself and left him
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to it. I returned to my own desk 20 minutes later to find a note asking me to go and see the boss, not surprisingly. I told him exactly what had happened and he laughed. I said I thought I had burned my boats with Pat Holden and David Smith my boss said “far from it, he admires you for standing up to him and asks you to forget it.” I took no further action in this and in the event there was no income at all, but the job took only 30 minutes for one engineer.
Another equally challenging job was the installation and commissio [deleted] m [/deleted] ning of a UHF system within the London Stock Exchange. This employed 520 adjascent [sic] channels. The Base Stations in the basement comprised a transmitter and receiver for each channel, all being combined into one “radiating feeder”. About 600 pocketphones on the Stock Exchange floor were used by dealers working into this system. An invitation to tender for this job had been received by Pye about two years previously and comments invited from all technical departments. It was unanimously agreed that the job was quite impossible and must not be attempted. Pye did not quote for it and the contract was awarded to S.T.C. Mobile division. Nearly two years later Pye or Philips aquired [sic] that organisation and half the installation had been fitted. About 60 channels were in use and very unsatisfactory. Dealers received messages intended for others and signals faded out at the crutial [sic] moment. Firms were receiving wrong messages and transfering [sic] and buying shares erroneously through these faults. The task of bringing the job to a conclusion was allocated to me and I chose my favourite team of Nick Fox, Aussie Peters and Jack Faulkener.
There was a local Service Dept. depot at the Stock Exchange of four engineers who were struggling to get the system working and we took over from them. On arrival there was a flap on, a dealer had acted on a false message and bought some tens of thousand shares for which he had no client and he was stuck with them. He said he was going to sue Pye for his loss. He dropped that idea next day when he sold them at a profit. The main problem was loss of signals into the pocketphones on the Stock Exchange floor but we were not allowed onto the floor during dealing times to make tests. Eventually we were given an ultimatum to either fix it or remove it and face an enormous claim for damages.
This was very serious indeed and I reported back to Cambridge. The Engineering Director, Frank Grimm showed me a copy of his comments of two years ago when he said the job was quite rediculous [sic] and impossible, and that was the end of it. No-one wanted to know, “It’s your problem Cliff, get on with it”. So it was back to the Stock Exchange, and I demanded permission to see for myself what was actually happening by being on the floor during dealing hours, otherwise there was nothing more we could do. The Chairman gave permission, quite unprecedented and we were then able to make a more scientific approach. We stayed on that evening and with Jack Faulkener in the basement at the transmitters we measured signal strengths which were astonishingly high and with no blind spots. Jack reduced the base station transmitter power at the input to the antenna system until even with the antenna completely isolated the signals were far more than adequate. This provide the mathematicians were all wrong and we were all barking up the wrong tree. We then carried out the most elementary test of all, whilst receiving properly on a pocketphone we transmitted on other pocketphones – on other channels – at a distance of ten feet. We had found the reason for the problem, simple R/F blocking which should have been checked in the Lab. at a very early stage. That evening we modified 6
[page break]
pocketfones [sic] , fitting a 2 pf. capacitor at the receiver input and completely bipassing [sic] the transmitter output stage. They worked perfectly, and with no blocking even at 2’ distance between portables. We had found the answer and the next day, friday, [sic] we recovered all the 160 pocketfones [sic] and over the weekend modified the lot. Everything worked as it should and the customers were delighted. We had received no co-operation from anyone in Cambridge but word soon reached Cambridge that all was well. We deliberately kept them in the dark until I issued a formal report. I had of course no authority to modify equipment but deliberately flouted this on the grounds that someone had to do something constructive or we would have been thrown out of the Stock Exchange. It did not improve my popularity with the people who could influence my career.
In 1979 after being responsible for some dozens of major projects three more Field Controllers were appointed, Dave Buller Mike Simpson and Clive Otley and I felt that a change was long overdue. Relationships with the Departmental Manager and his yes-man deputy Joe were deteriorating rapidly. I transfered [sic] back to Systems Planning Dept. and overnight became a specialist in Radio Frequency propagation. I was in a small team headed by Dave Warford, and including Lewis Wicker and John Ewbank, and a trainee. Our job was to plan Radio Links and area coverage systems, within the parameters laid down by D.T.I.
At the outset my knowledge of R/F propagation (or Electromagnetic Radiation) was limited to my practical experience of what had been achieved and what had failed to work. The theoretical aspect was highly mathematical but fortunatly [sic] the subject was well written up and the principles well established. Dave Warford and Lewis Wicker were a great help in getting me onto the right lines.
A typical job would be a request from a salesman asking whether a radio link on a particular frequency band would work between two specific sites and if so what aerial height would be required? The first step would be to study the Ordnance Survey maps of 1:50000 scale, and plotting all the contours on the direct line between the points. From this information a profile of the earth’s surface would be prepared including the earth’s curvature
[inserted] To be continued [/inserted]
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[underlined] Dresden 13 – 14 February 1945 [/underlined]
At the end of January 1945, the Royal Air Force and the USAF 8th Air Force were specifically requested by the Allied Joint Chiefs of Staff to carry out heavy raids on Dresden, Chemnitz and Leipzig. It was not a personal decision by Sir Arthur Harris. The campaign should have begun with an American daylight raid on Dresden on February 13th, but bad weather over Europe pre-vented [sic] any American operation. It thus fell to Bomber Command to carry out the first raid on the night of February 13th. 769 Lancasters and 9 Mosquitoes were dispatched in two separate attacks on Dresden and at the same time a further 368 R.A.F aircraft attacked the synthetic oil plant at Bohlen near Leipzig. A few hours after the RAF raids 311 bombers of the 8th US Air force attacked Dresden. The following day (15 February 1945) the USAF despatched 211 bombers to bomb Dresden and a further 406 bombers on the 2nd March.
As an economic centre, Dresden ranked sixth in importance in pre-war Germany. During the war several hundred industrial plants of various sizes worked full-time in Dresden for the German War machine, Among them were such industrial giants as the world famous Zeiss-Ikon AG (Optics and cameras). This plant alongside the plant in Jena was one of the principle centres of production of field glasses for the Armies, aiming sights for the Panzers and Artillery, periscopes for U-boats, bomb and gun sights f or the Luftwaffe. Dresden was also one of the key centres of the German postal and telegraphic system and a crucial East West transit point with its 7 bridges crossing the Elbe at its widest point.
In February 1945 the war was far from over. The Western Allies had not yet crossed the Rhine, Germany still controlled extensive territories, and Bomber Command lost more than 400 bombers after Dresden. The war was at its height, the Allies were preparing for the land battles which would follow their crossing the Rhine, the Russians were poised on the Oder. This destruction of Dresden meant a considerable reduction in the effectiveness of the German Armed forces.
The Germans followed Hitler even after the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945 when its horrors were broadcast to the world. They continued to follow Hitler even after they watched the thousands of living skeletons from concentration camps being herded westward in early 1945.
A quote from former POW Col H E Cook (USAAF Rtd) "on 13/14 Feb 1945 we POWs were shunted into the Dresden marshalling yards where for nearly 12 hours German troops and equipment rolled in and out of Dresden. I saw with my own eyes that Dresden was an armed camp: thousands of German troops, tanks and artillery and miles of freight cars …. transporting German logistics towards the East to meet the Russians.”
[signed] Jim[?] Broom [/signed]
[page break]
[curriculum vitae page 1]
[page break]
[curriculum vitae page 2]
[page break]
[autographed photograph of Lancaster bomber]
[page break]
[history of Jack Railton and Emma Sharpe]
[page break]
[history of George Henry Watson]
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[history of Herbert Kilham]
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[history of Herbert Kilham continued]
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[photograph of male]
[page break]
[history of George Henry Watson]
[page break]
[history of Jack Railton and family]
[page break]
[history of Jack Railton and family continued]
[page break]
[history of Cliff Stark’s early years]
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[letter from LMS railway to C.W. Watson page 1]
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[letter from LMS Railway to C.W.Watson page 2]
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[letter from LMS Railway to C.W. Watson]
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
Just Another Tailend Charlie
Description
An account of the resource
A memoir written by Cliff Watson divided into 20 chapters.
The Earliest Years.
Born in Barnoldswick, then in Yorkshire, now in Lancashire in 1922. His father ran a wireless business until 1926. He describes his years at schools and a move to Norwich. The family then moved to London where he started an apprenticeship as an accountant.
Joining Up.
Cliff left the accountants to work in his father's radio business. Initially he was rejected by the RAF because he wore spectacles. He reapplied and passed various written, oral and medical examinations. Initial training was at Torquay then Newquay. Once training was complete he sailed from Greenock to South Africa.
Southern Rhodesia.
After acclimatisation in South Africa, Cliff and his colleagues were put on a sleeper train to Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Training commenced on Tiger Moths but he was 'scrubbed' or rejected. He was reselected as an air gunner and completed a course in Moffat, also in South Rhodesia. Hospitality in Rhodesia and South Africa was described as generous and excellent.
Postscript.
Cliff describes a run-in with a training corporal who took a dislike to him. Despite faked evidence he proved his points and emerged with a clean record and passed his exams.
Operational Training.
In August 1942 he sailed back to the UK. He was sent to Bournemouth for assessment, then on to RAF Finningley for training then RAF Bircotes for operations. Next was a move to RAF Hixon and its satellite airfield at Seighford. He married Hilda on 1st March 1943 during a week's leave.
Second Time to Africa.
He was then sent to West Kirby, Liverpool to join a ship sailing to Algiers, for further training. Their destination became Blida where they started operations on Tunis and Monserrato airfield. They then moved to a desert strip to the east by 250 kms. From there they continued operations into Italy. Later they moved to Kairouan and continued operations into Italy, mainly Sardinia and Sicily. Each operation is described in great detail.
He has included a letter in Arabic with instructions to take the bearer to British soldiers for a reward. At the end of his tour they sailed back to Greenock.
Screened.
After some leave Cliff's next posting was at Operational Training Unit Desborough where he helped train new gunners. Due to an argument with an officer he was sent to RAF Norton for correctional training. On his return his case was reviewed and the severe reprimand was removed from his record.
Scampton.
Scampton was Cliff's next operational base then Winthorpe for its Heavy Conversion Unit on Stirlings, followed by Syerston on Lancasters then Bardney.
227 Squadron.
Cliff joined 227 squadron at Bardney. Again he covers in detail each operation. His flight was later transferred to Balderton. During this period he was awarded the DFC.
Final Leg.
His squadron was transferred to Gravely at the end of the war. He did a photography course and was transferred to Handforth. There was little work, some unpleasantness and eventually a period of extended leave, a spell at Poynton looking after prisoners then demob.
Back to Civvy Street.
Cliff returned to Whitehaven to revitalise a radio company. He gives great detail about the improvements made. Later he set up a similar enterprise at Maryport. Wired radio services were set to become less popular and financially worthwhile so seeing the writing on the wall he decided to emigrate.
Kenya.
Cliff and family flew to Nairobi, then bus to Kitale where his father was.
Hoteli King George.
Dissatisfied with life on his father's farm, Cliff took a job as a prison officer. He and his family moved to Nairobi. He relates several stories about prisoners and their better qualities but in the end he gets restless and leaves.
Civil Aviation.
Cliff joined the East African Directorate of Civil Aviation in April 1951 as a radio officer. He and his family were relocated to Mbeya, 900 miles from Nairobi. His skills as a radio engineer were well used in this remote location. After 2.5 years the family returned to UK on leave. On his return he was posted to Mwanza, also in Tanganyika. He describes in great detail a royal visit. They left on leave in June 1957 and collected a VW Beetle for transport to Kenya. Their next move was to Entebbe. This was not a happy posting and led to a transfer to Kisumu in Kenya. After three years they transferred to Nairobi to spend more time with their children, who were at boarding school there.
D.C.A. Headquarters.
His role here was Telecomms superintendent. He describes in detail the operations of his section. This was an unsettled period in Kenya with many Europeans returning home.
Dec' 61 on Leave.
Leave was spent at their house in Wales then in May 1962 Cliff returned alone to Nairobi. His family did return later. By this time his father had abandoned his farm and was building radios.
On Leave June 1964.
He bought another house in Wales and spent his leave restoring it. His wife's mother moved in. In November 1964 Cliff returned alone to Nairobi. he left within a year due to the worsening situation.
Job Hunting.
Several electronics firms were approached offering Cliff's services. He attended an interview with Pye who quickly offered him employment.
At Pye Telecommunications.
He found his colleagues unhelpful. A great deal of time was spent on a Turkish quotation that had been in progress for 10 years. A quotation to the Iranian Directorate of Civil Aviation contained complications leading to Cliff revising the quotation. Later there was a complicated installation job at the London Stock Exchange. Eventually Pye pulled out from the bid but a rival company won it, only to be taken over by Pye. At first the system was troubled but after a simple modification it worked perfectly.
Dresden 13-14 February 1945.
A one page description of the bombing of Dresden.
Curriculum Vitae.
Cliff Watson's CV, dated 1976.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Cliff Watson DFC
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1989-06
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
192 typewritten sheets and photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SWatsonC188489v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Huntingdon
England--Yorkshire
England--Norwich
England--London
England--Torquay
England--Newquay
England--Birkenhead
Scotland--Greenock
Sierra Leone--Freetown
South Africa--Durban
Zimbabwe--Bulawayo
South Africa--Mahikeng
Zimbabwe--Harare
Singapore
South Africa--Cape Town
England--Bournemouth
France--Paris
Algeria--Algiers
Algeria--Blida
Tunisia--Tunis
Italy--Sardinia
Italy--Cagliari
Tunisia--Bizerte
Italy--Monserrato
Italy--Decimomannu
Italy--Trapani
Italy--Palermo
Italy--Naples
Italy--Rome
Italy--Lido di Roma
Italy--Tiber River
Italy--Alghero
Italy--Castelvetrano
Italy--Pantelleria Island
Tunisia--Sūsah
Italy--Syracuse
Italy--Messina
Italy--Salerno
Italy--Bari
Italy--Comiso
Italy--Crotone
Italy--Pomigliano d'Arco
Italy--Paola
Italy--Battipaglia
England--Desborough
Norway--Bergen
Netherlands--Walcheren
Germany--Hamburg
Norway--Oslo
Belgium--Houffalize
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Berchtesgaden
England--Whitehaven
Kenya
England--Yeovil
Kenya--Nairobi
Kenya--Kitale
Tanzania--Mbeya
Tanzania--Mwanza
Uganda--Entebbe
Kenya--Kisumu
England--Cambridge
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Düsseldorf
Zimbabwe--Gweru
Zimbabwe
South Africa
Sierra Leone
France
Algeria
Tunisia
Italy
Netherlands
Germany
Norway
Poland
Belgium
Tanzania
Uganda
Iran
North Africa
Germany--Nuremberg
Iran--Tehran
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Netherlands--Vlissingen
Germany--Homburg (Saarland)
Tunisia--Munastīr
Tunisia--Qayrawān
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Cornwall (County)
England--Cumberland
England--Devon
England--Hampshire
England--Huntingdonshire
England--Norfolk
England--Northamptonshire
England--Somerset
England--Lancashire
Italy--Capri Island
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
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Peter Bradbury
109 Squadron
142 Squadron
150 Squadron
1661 HCU
227 Squadron
25 OTU
30 OTU
5 Group
617 Squadron
84 OTU
9 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Albemarle
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
B-17
B-24
Beaufighter
bomb aimer
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
C-47
Defiant
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
ditching
FIDO
flight engineer
Flying Training School
Gee
ground personnel
Halifax
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hudson
Hurricane
Initial Training Wing
Ju 87
Ju 88
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
mess
military discipline
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Mosquito
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
prisoner of war
RAF Balderton
RAF Bardney
RAF Bawtry
RAF Catfoss
RAF Desborough
RAF Eastleigh
RAF Farnborough
RAF Finningley
RAF Graveley
RAF Hemswell
RAF Hixon
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Milltown
RAF Norton
RAF Scampton
RAF Seighford
RAF Strubby
RAF Syerston
RAF Waddington
RAF Wick
RAF Winthorpe
RAF Wyton
searchlight
Spitfire
sport
Stirling
Sunderland
Tiger force
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1895/35627/SGillK1438901v20027.2.pdf
4e1b16d68628369bb390ad6492ed4bdf
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
Gill, Kenneth
K Gill
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-09
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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Gill, K
Description
An account of the resource
One hundred and sixty-four items plus another one hundred and fifteen in two sub-ciollections. The collection concerns Flying Officer Kenneth Gill DFC (1922 - 1945, 1438901, 155097 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, documents, photographs and family and other correspondence. <br />He flew operations as a navigator with 9 Squadron before starting a second tour with 617 Squadron. He was killed 21 March 1945 having completed 45 operations.<br /><br />The collection also contains two albums. <br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2114">Kenneth Gill. Album One</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2117">Kenneth Gill. Album Two</a><br /><br />Additional information on Kenneth Gill is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/108654/">IBCC Losses Database.</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Derek Gill and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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My name is Derek Gill and I was born on the 20th April 1944 (same birthday as Adolph Hitler). So I am 67 years old.
I was 11 months old when my father was killed on Wednesday 21 March 1945.
My father F/O Kenneth Gill DFC was born on the 19 November 1922, when he died he was 22yrs and 4 months old.
He joined the RAF on 18 June 1941 aged 18 as a Volunteer Reserve and after initial training was transferred by Troopship on 6 Jan 1942 arriving in [inserted] Pan American Flying School Florida [/inserted] Monkton USA on the 20 January 1942 for initial Flying Training and then transferred to Canada in May 1942 until he qualified as an Air Navigator on 11 Sept 1942. [inserted] EMPIRE TRAINING COURSE. [/inserted]
On his return to the UK he joined No 29 Operational Training Unit at RAF Station North Luffenham flying Wellington Mk3's during December 1942. His first Operation was on the night of 25 Feb 1943 bombing Clermont Ferrand in France this operation took 7 hrs.
In March 1943 he was transferred to 1660 Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Swinderby flying Halifax Mk5's and then Lancaster's.
His second Operation was in a Lancaster Mk3 on the night of 18 April 1943 flying to La Spezia in Italy Mine Laying this flight lasted 9.5 Hrs.
On 20 April 1943 he was transferred to No 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney where he flew 26 Operational Flights with the same crew except for 3 ops Pilot F/LT Derbyshire, Flight Eng. Sgt Sullivan, Navigator Sgt Gill, Wireless Operator Sgt Overend, Bomb Aimer/Front Gunner Sgt Oakes, Mid Upper Gunner Sgt Cole and Rear Gunner Sgt Parsons. In Lancaster's. Targets were: Dortmund, Duisberg, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Essen, Wuppertal, Dusseldorf, Bochum, Oberhausen, Krefeld, Mulheim (returned early as Port outer was u/s), Gelsenkirchen, Cologne (Returned early rear turret u/s bomb load jettisoned, 21 miles from target, whilst testing rear turret a twin engine enemy aircraft made three attacks), Cologne, Essen, Milan, Nurnburg, Nurnberg(54 flak holes), Rheydt, Berlin, Munich, Kassel, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Dusseldorf, Berlin. completed on 19 November 1943 his 21st Birthday.
During these Operations was commissioned from Flt Sgt to P/O. on the 27 June 1943
On the 8 December 1943 he was awarded the DFC for his service with No 9 Squadron.
27 Dec 1943 promoted to F/O.
After completing the above missions he was transferred to No 5 Lancaster Finishing School at RAF Syerston as a Navigation Instructor (Bringing new
[page break]
Navigators up to speed on the different navigational aids being used on the Lancaster and also retraining older Navigators who where [sic] having difficulties with the new innovations.
Whilst at Syerston he met up with F/Lt Gumbley (pilot) and F/O Barnett (Flt Engineer) and at the end of their time at Syerston they were asked to join No 617 Squadron, so went around and completed the rest of the crew asking people who they new [sic] that had completed a Tour and were training new crews.
On the 27 September the New crew were transferred to No 617 Sqd RAF Woodhall Spa (Commanded by W/Cdr J B (Willie) Tait)
Pilot: Flt/Lt B.A. Gumbley DFM RNZAF Aged 29 Hawks Bay NZ.
Flt Eng: F/O E.A. Barnett (Men in Desp) Aged 21 Thorp Bay Essex.
Navigator: F/O K. Gill DFC Aged 22 Halton Leeds.
W/Op: P/O S.V. Grimes Aged 22 Suffolk.
B/A: F/O J.C. Randon Aged 23 Chesterfield Derbyshire.
A/G Mid Upper: F/Sgt J. Penswick Aged 23 London.
A/G Rear: F/Sgt G Bell Aged 23 Hull.
After training with the other crews from 30 Sept 1944 to 26 Oct 1944 they went on their first Operation with 617 flying to Lossiemouth and on the next day took off with a Tallboy Deep penetration 12000 lb Bomb, on board to attack the Tirpitz. They flew to Tromso Fjord (Norway) and after 4 runs over the Target decided that the cloud made accurate bombing impossible. For this operation the Mid-upper turret was removed in order to install the extra fuel tanks required to achieve the range to make the return flight. Even so they landed at Skatska (Coastal Command Airfield) in the Shetlands to top up with fuel as they had not allowed for returning with the Bomb on board (C/O was not impressed as if the bomb had gone off it could have wiped out the airfield), then flew to Lossiemouth returning to Woodhall Spa on the 30 Oct 1944. (Bringing the Tallboy all the way back). Top secret and scarce) 12 hrs
Only a crew of 6 as no mid-upper turret.
On the 11 November 617 and 9 Sqd returned to Lossiemouth and on the 12 flew back to Tromso Fjord and sunk the Tirpitz, bombing at 08:43 from 15400ft a Tallboy was seen to enter the water about 20 yds off the Tirpitz which capsized. (Still a crew of 6 but on this trip the mid-upper gunner was in the rear turret) 12.15 hrs
[page break]
Full Crew of 7
8 Dec Urft Dam. Not bombed as cloud cover was over target.
205 Lancs from 5 Grp carrying 1000lb bombs and 19 from 617 carrying Tallboys. 3.35 hrs
11 Dec Urft Dam Bombed from 6000 ft (Tallboy) could not see bomb burst because of cloud aircraft received minor damage to Tailplain. 5.30 hrs
15 Dec Ijmuiden E&R Boat Pens Bombed at 10000 ft hit NW corner of the Pens. 2.35 hrs
21 Dec Politz-Oil Refineries Bombed at 16900 ft (Tallboy) significant damage to target, landed at Metheringham using FIDO, transferred to Base by road and collected Aircraft on 23 Dec after fog had lifted. 9.45 hrs
24 Dec Command of 617 transferred from W/Cdr Tait to G/C Fauquier
29 Dec Rotterdam E&R Boat Pens Bombed at 16660 ft (Tallboy) Bomb unobserved owing to smoke, a good many near misses, no direct hits seen. 2.50 hrs
30 Dec Ijmuiden E&R Boat Pens Solid cloud over target did not bomb.
Tallboy returned. 2.20 hrs
31 Dec Horten (Oslo Fjord) Cruisers Kolin and Emden Ships travelling at up to 30 Knots difficult to bomb accurately, later on Crews were forced to bomb by moonlight or aim at the source of Flak some crews returned with their Tallboys. Bombed at 00.15 hrs from 10200 ft (Tallboy) near miss on port side of ship, ship appeared to stop. Later identified as a 10000 ton transport ship.
7.45 hrs.
3 Feb 1945 Pootershaven E&R Boat Pens (Midget Submarines) Bombed at 1552 from 13500 ft (Tallboy), bombed into smoke over the aiming point, Aircraft hit by Flak, fuselage and rear turret damaged, not seriously, no casualties.
2.50 hrs.
[page break]
6 Feb Bielefeld (Vielesible Viaduct) Aborted Aircraft targeted by accurate Flak on return route no damage suffered
5.45 hrs
14 Feb Bielefeld (Vielesible Viaduct) Aborted Flak encountered as the aircraft crossed the Rhine.
4.50 hrs
22 Feb Bielefeld (Vielesible (Viaduct) Target comprised two parallel twin track Railway Viaducts. Bombed at 16.10 (Second run Tallboy) 13700 ft. 3 arches at the western viaduct collapsed, but rail link remained on the other two tracks.
4.30 hrs.
24 Feb Dortmund-Ems Canal Aborted Recalled 30 miles from target because of unfavourable weather conditions.
4.40 hrs
13 Mar Bielefeld (Vieiesible Viaduct) Aborted 2 Aircraft were B1 (Specials) carrying the new 22000 lb Grand Slam Bomb (G/C Fauquier & S/L Calder). The aircraft were modified to carry the Grand Slam, Bomb doors removed and the fairings of the bomb bay, deletion of the Mid-Upper Turret and also the Main Radio and the Wireless Operator
4.20 hrs
14 Mar Bielifeld [sic] (Vieiesible Viaduct) Bombed at 1628 hrs from 11600 ft (Tallboy) Bomb believed to be a direct hit, S/L Calder Grand Slam falling 30 yds from viaduct (G/C Fauquier aircraft went u/s at start up. 460 ft of both Viaducts Destroyed Rail link severed completely.
5.00 hrs
19 Mar Arnberg Viaduct Bombed at 10.54 hrs from 12700 ft (Grand Slam) Bomb fell 50 yds south of aiming point as Pilots Bomb Aiming Indicator was not recording the Bomb Aimers alterations. Two or Three Spans of the Viaduct were brought down.
5.20 hrs
21 Mar Arbergen Railway Bridge near Bremen. The bridge was a double track Rail link across the river Weser 200 yds long.
[page break]
On this occasion Flak in the area was more intense and a number of Aircraft were damaged. A number of Me262 Jet Fighters were also encountered after bombing. The Target was rendered unusable although the main bridge was still intact.
The aircraft was a B1 Special although it was carrying a Tallboy, on this mission there were only 5 crew members onboard.
The Aircraft was hit by Flak during its run up to the target and dropped out of formation, causing F/Lt Price to take avoiding action. British records state that the aircraft received a direct hit and dived down out of control.
Witnesses on the ground gave a different account "The aircraft went down passing over the village of Okel heading in the direction of Riede at a hight [sic] of 2000ft. They do not mention that the aircraft was on fire at this stage, but state that it seemed to be flying extremely slow. As it flew over Riede the locale Flak Battery went into action, hitting one of the engines and setting the fuselage on fire. The aircraft made a 180 degree turn back towards Okel and crashed into a field. The witnesses said the aircraft did not explode immediately, but before it could be reached there was a violent explosion, reducing the aircraft to fragments and creating a crater 50ft deep by 100ft diameter.
The RAF Missing Research and Enquiry Service failed to find any German documentation regarding the incident or trace any burial for the crew. The identity of Fl/Lt Randon was established from a document found at the crash site leaving no doubt about the identity of the aircraft. Having no known grave the crew are commemorated on the RAF Memorial at Runnymede, my fathers name appears on Panel 267 and also on the 617 Sqd Memorial at Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire.
The Crew Comprised of:-
Pilot F/Lt B.A. Gumbly DFM RNZAF,
Flt Eng F/O A.E. Barnett (Men in Desp)
Navigator F/O K. Gill DFC CdG
Bomb Aimer F/Lt J.C. Randon
Rear-Gunner P/O G. Bell.
F/O K. Gill Total Flying Time Day Time 388.10hrs (74.45 Operations)
Night Time 279.15hrs (171.30 Operations)
Total Time 667.25hrs (246.15 Operations)
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
Biography of Kenneth Gill by son Derek
Description
An account of the resource
Gives service history of Kenneth Gill including training in Canada as navigator, training in England, operations on 9 Squadron with list of his crew. Details targets attacked. Commissioned and awarded Distinguished Flying Cross. After tour on Lancaster finishing school transferred to 617 Squadron, lists crew. Details operations and targets while on 617 Squadron. Includes attack on Tirpitz with tallboy bombs and list other attacks with this weapon. Describes final operation where Me 262s encountered but his aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed when unreleased weapons exploded, All crew killed. Lists crew.
Creator
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D Gill
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-04-20
1941-06-08
1942-01-06
1941-01-20
1942-09-11
1943-02-25
1943-03
1943-04-20
1943-11-19
1943-06-27
1943-12-27
1944-09-27
1944-10
1944-11-11
1944-12
1945-01
1945-02
1945-03
1945-03-21
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
New Brunswick--Moncton
United States
Florida
France
France--Clermont-Ferrand
England--Rutland
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
Italy
Italy--La Spezia
Germany
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Essen
Germany--Wuppertal
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Mülheim an der Ruhr
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Cologne
Italy--Milan
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Rheydt
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Munich
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Leipzig
Scotland--Moray
Norway
Norway--Tromsø
Germany--Euskirchen (Kreis)
Netherlands
Netherlands--IJmuiden
Poland
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Atlantic Ocean--Oslofjorden
Germany--Bielefeld
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Bremen
Great Britain
New Brunswick
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Personal research
Format
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Five page printed document
Identifier
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SGillK1438901v20027
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2011
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
1660 HCU
29 OTU
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bomb aimer
bombing
crash
Distinguished Flying Cross
flight engineer
Grand Slam
Halifax
Halifax Mk 5
Heavy Conversion Unit
killed in action
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 3
Me 262
memorial
navigator
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Bardney
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Woodhall Spa
Tallboy
Tirpitz
training
Wellington
wireless operator
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/376/7301/PHouriganM1804.1.jpg
710d60d65d0d6dc0948b05c33ec1e73c
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/376/7301/AHouriganM180416.2.mp3
e72ccdc7eb2d57d68e893377766b8057
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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Hourigan, Margaret
Margaret Hourigan
M Hourigan
Description
An account of the resource
158 items. An oral history interview with Margaret Hourigan (1922 - 2023, 889775 Royal Air Force) and 156 target photographs taken by 50 and 61 Squadron aircraft during 1944. Margaret Hourigan served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force as a plotter with Fighter Command before being posted to RAF Waddington and RAF Skellingthorpe with Bomber Command.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Margaret Hourigan and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-04-16
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.
Identifier
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Hourigan,M
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DE: So, a quick introduction, this is an interview for the International Bomber Command Centre. My name is Dan Ellin, today I am interviewing Margaret Hourigan nee Parsons it is the 16th of April 2018, we’re at the IBCC Digital Archive, Riseholme and also present in the room is David Hourigan. So, Margaret, could you start?
MH: Start yes.
DE: Start by telling us a little about your life?
MH: Yes, my childhood. If I start, I remember 1926, I remember the Great Strike. And my father was a miner when he came back from the War, the only job he could get, he was very badly wounded in the first World War. And I remember the, standing on the front step of our little house on Lowmoor Road and a man ran in toour front door. And the police outside, was it police or a soldier? On a black horse reared up and the man ran under the horse’s legs into our house and out the back door. And I don’t know what happened but police everywhere. I think the miners were striking, maybe they were being a bit angry, I don’t know. But my Dad was a safety man and so he was down the pit so it was OK. I remember that very plainly, I think it was 1926. I would have been four. And then, my Dad was very, very ill after that he got badly burnt at work. I remember [unclear] to think he was going to die. We were too little to know that. Anyway, he didn’t die, eventually he recovered. And I can’t remember moving but we moved to another house and my Nanna and Grandpa left and they had a fish and chip shop which we took over so my Dad worked there. He also worked at the pit, he also worked as a gardener for a doctor, and he also had his own allotment. So, he repaired our shoes and cut our hair when we had no money. And we were always well fed through the Depression years but I remember terrible scenes of children with no shoes in the snow. Awful things we saw at Kirkby. And I think then the miners didn’t get any help if they were injured at work. I think they went home and had to suffer. I can’t, I know we were all very Labour, when the Daily Herald paper came out we all thought we were in heaven, and all very Labour. I’m not now [chuckles] we were then. And we used to go to, when I was a little bit older, we used to go to Hucknall Air Display. There was a little aerodrome there, and they had Tiger Moths. I used to think ‘One day, God I’d love to fly them.’ And every year we visited until I went to work and then I decided that I would join up as soon as war was declared. Oh, belonged to the Labour Party League of Youth then and we were very hostile little bunch and when Mr Chamberlain came back from Berlin waving his bit of paper we all went mad and got very angry. And the Labour Party said they were going to disband us if we didn’t shut up. One of our trips was to go to the pictures and we sat down when they played God Save the Queen or King or we walked out according to our mood. Anyway, soon as war was declared whoosh we all joined up except one poor man who was a true conscientious objector. He never did join up and he had awful struggle, but he never gave in. We were all wimps, as soon as war was declared.
DE: What happened to him do you know?
MH: I don’t know. I know he was penalised and punished and treated like dirt. I don’t know. He didn’t die because one day David answered the telephone, somebody in Canberra saying ‘Anybody from Kirkby in Ashfield?’ And David rang up and said ‘Yes, my mother is.’ So he chatted I said ‘I remember his Dad he was a conchie.’ We never heard from him again. I mean I didn’t mean to be derogatory, I thought he was a wonderful man.
DE: Um. But you, you, you joined up?
MH: We joined the WAAFs yes. And I went to stay with my Auntie Margaret. She had a shop on Highson Green at Basford in Nottingham. And early hours of the morning I trotted off to Nottingham station. I went to St Pancras, how I got across London I don’t know. I’d never been before and I went to Kingsway and there was a male clerk there and a doctor. And they talked to me all morning and then the male clerk took me to the pictures at lunchtime. You know they had those newsreel places then, and I shut my eyes the whole way through because I thought if I can’t see, if my eyes aren’t good enough, they won’t take me I was sitting there [chuckles] [unclear] a right nutcase. Anyway, took me back to Kingsway afterwards and must have had a cup of tea or something. And the doctor said ‘You’ve got a heart of a lion.’ Always remember that.
DE: Um.
And then I had a medical, went home and I think it was very early January 1940 I got the call up. Freezing cold winter. I don’t know how I got to London, I suppose I did. And went to Watford, think it was Watford. And it was freezing cold there and a dirty, dirty billet the men had been in, and nobody had been in for months, anyway it was really dirty. And the water froze in the pipes, we couldn’t have a wash. The girls had water bottles that froze in bed. I woke up the next morning and I went to the sick bay, and I was covered in big red blobs. And the doctor said ‘Haven’t ever seen flea bites before?’ I hadn’t. Anyway, they must have gone away because we started marching up and down, up and down, and round and round, got our uniforms and then I was posted to Leighton Buzzard. I found I’d been enrolled as a clerk,special duties, so I must have talked well and got a very high classification. And went to Leighton Buzzard, started plotting. And then one day they said ‘You and two other girls are posted to Bawdsey Manor.’ It’s down near Felixstowe where Watson-Watt invented the radar. [unclear] arrived late at night, remember crossing water but it actually wasn’t an island, it was just a little inlet to get across to the house. And a man rowed the boat over and somewhere I met some soldiers. I don’t know how because they said would I ask the girls at the base if they would like to come to a dance? I thought they’d all be too posh to go but they ‘Oh yes.’ So, we went to the dance with the sailors, the soldiers and it was a huge house. Lots of rooms, lots of cockroaches. And in the morning I woke up and they had kedgeree for breakfast. I’d never seen it before. I was just used to cornflakes or porridge and they had this great big thing of kedgeree. Anyway, the Indian educated girls all loved it. A lot of girls had been brought up by their families living in India, they thought it was wonderful, I didn’t. Anyway, we started on the radar and we had a green screen, like a television screen, with a green line wavering line that went across it really quickly. And echoes, a big echo would be an aeroplane, and wiggle, wiggle so many in the group. I couldn’t do it, I hated it, made me feel sick. Anyway, I persisted and the other girls just had a little green handle, they could turn it and illuminate the echo and say ‘Twelve plus’ and ‘twenty thousand feet.’ I could not do it. So, I went to the WAAF officer in the end and I said ‘I hate it, I can’t do it.’ And there was a man in the office with her. He said. And she said ‘Yes, yes.’ I couldn’t go, he thought I knew too much. Anyway, outside was the big pylons, you know?
DE: Um.
MH: And one interesting day before I left we were walking, a WAAF and I, were walking along the edge of green grass and the Channel was here in front of us. And I could see ships out at sea and big black birds flying all round it. And I thought they were big huge seagulls. And as we were walking along we saw the Coastguard. He was dancing up and down, waving his arms at us. We thought ‘Oh, he’s gone mad.’ And when we caught up with him, just as we caught up with him, a low flying German aeroplane went over. It would only be a hundred feet, we could see the pilot laughing. And he said ‘I was trying to warn you.’ Well where could we go? Nowhere to lie down and hide. Anyway, he was laughing. The German pilot must have thought it was a bit of a joke. We were both in uniform.
DE: Um
MH: Anyway, he flew inland for a little while and he came out further down the coast, we could still see him. He wasn’t laughing when he came back out. And he went back. The black birds were the first attack on a convoy.
DE: I see.
MH: So that was that. Nearly written off before I started. And then I went to Fighter Command Headquarters at Bentley Priory in the ops room there, started plotting.
DE: And what was that like?
MH: Huge, and down, down, down underground. We lived in huts opposite and I remember I Winston Churchill coming in. I remember King George coming in, looking down on the plots. And must have started bombing. I remember Dunkirk about that time. I asked, anyway I got a bit lonely, the girls were all very posh shall we say. One girl’s father signed the pound note, I know that. If you told me who it was I’d tell you that was so but I can’t remember. But I know her father was high in the Government. They all came along with their gold braid to pick their daughters up in big cars and here’s poor little me from Kirkby. I had nobody to pick me up. And I decided to have my photograph taken. So, I went along to this photographer and I had a black velvet dress I remember and I said ‘Would you take it with me smoking a cigarette?’ He said ‘Indeed I won’t!’ I thought I’d be a film star. He said ‘Indeed I won’t!’ He did a lovely ‘photo. Anyway, I asked to go to 12 Group, I went to 12 Group headquarters then in Hucknall and I stayed there all through the Battle of Britain and the night bombing. I was plotting the night Coventry was bombed and there were so many plots on the table but we couldn’t relieve each other. We used to take time off, two people standing beside each other plotting and grabbing plots off. You plotted five minutes red, five minutes yellow and five minutes blue. Then you snatched the red off and started plotting red again and they knew the time upstairs, they could tell how old the plot was. And when they were over land the Observer Corps did all the plots. Out at sea we got the plots from the radar.
DE: Um.
MH: And the men who were plotting that night from Coventry, not one of the them left their posts. All of their houses were bombed, not all badly but all stayed with us. Thought that was rather wonderful. Didn’t get much praise at all really when they talk about the war now nobody remembers the Observer Corps do they?
DE: No, my grandfather was in the Observer Corps.
MH: Was he?
DE: How did, how did it feel then seeing, watching the plots of the German aircraft coming in?
MH: We were too damn busy to bother. We wrote a poem about it. I wrote it down somewhere I know. ‘A bloody raids coming roaring in, kicking up a bloody din. Who can spot their bloody game? Bloody seven, two and four, these and bloody thousands more. Across the bloody coast they came, bloody Jones is up above , he a bloody man we’d love. No bloody smoking says the cad, enough to drive us bloody mad.’ Because we knitted or sewed or read but the men got so bored they cracked up.
DE: Um.
MH: In the end, when we started we’d be half and half. By this time, this time, they’d might be two men left who were C3, they couldn’t go anywhere else.
DE: Right.
MH: So then after all that bombing I had trouble with varicose veins and I was going to hospital, hilarious story. Going to hospital for treatment. And one day I woke up, I didn’t know, somebody knocked on the door, I’d stripped my nightgown off, standing there stark naked and a big policeman walked in the door. And I stood there [exclamation noise], and I stood there and he shut the door and went out. I still stood there. And he came in again and I hadn’t moved. And I ran. He said ‘I’d never seen anything as pretty in all my life as your little bum waddling down the hall.’ He didn’t know it was me but I went to get the bus to go and have my injections for my varicose veins and he was there and I cut him dead. He said ‘I knew then it was you.’ Otherwise he didn’t. So that was all over the camp. ‘A WAAF’s been caught in the nude.’ And it was me. He said ‘Why didn’t you put some clothes on?’ I said ‘I couldn’t think.’ Anyway, Wing Commander Woods was the CO there and he said ‘Why don’t you put in for Bomber Command, there’s a sergeant’s job going there?’ So, I did and took me to Grantham for the interview and I marched in, polished up to the hilt, [unclear]into the hall, turned round and they were sitting at the table there. Whizzed round, slipped on my bum. And I tried to carry on, I couldn’t. Anyway, we all started laughing then that was OK, we were all at ease. And I got accepted and I was posted to Swinderby and then I went to Waddington. And then 44 Squadron left Waddington, the Rhodesians. We had no squadron there we had put in concrete runways. I don’t know why they keep saying that there were squadrons there, there weren’t. They put in a concrete runway.
DE: Yeah it was closed for a while.
MH: It was closed for quite a while.
DE: We interviewed a chap who was there when they were putting the runways in.
MH: Yeah, yeah. We had Irish labourers come in. They were awful, we hated them. I damn near got raped one night. They were so drunk luckily they couldn’t catch me. But we had to walk home from Waddington. I was with an Aussie sergeant, Bill. That’s all I know. And we walked up the hill, you know you get to the top of the hill? All the nice houses were. Over the top was flat. That side’s green,this side’s airfield. And we heard these men saying ‘No, no, no you hold her, you hold him and I’ll have her. No, no, no, no, you hold him and I’ll have her.’ I thought ‘What’d they say?’ And I said to Bill ‘There going to rape me!’ and as we were passing by, I don’t know if it was an ack ack army unit but there was a five barred gate and a shed. I knew there were soldiers in there, and I put my hand on top of that gate and I cleared it. And I ran into the hut, the men were all in the ‘jamas, laughing and talking, and I said ‘Those men are going to rape me.’ And a couple of them got dressed and then Bill arrived. He said ‘I couldn’t get over the gate.’ But I cleared it. Olympic runner honestly. Anyway, they took us back to camp and that was that. But we had lots of trouble with the Irish then, always drunk, always fighting. Anyway, I trained as a watchkeeper and then sometimes I went to Bardney, sometimes I stayed I went to Skellingthorpe. The first time I was at Skellingthorpe I was under flying control, little tiny ops room. All the room was full of men. Officers, group captains everybody. And the raid was coming through on my little telephone . And I never learnt French at school and the route was coming through in French. I couldn’t do it. I know what, one was [unclear]. On one of those photos we’ve taken upstairs. I can remember that. Anyway, I struggled and did it and you know your degrees, I put in sixty three degrees and all that. And I made, I did it alright. Anyway Flight Lieutenant Williams said ‘You did a good job Maggie.’ He helped me, sorted it all out. But that was my initiation Eventually, we moved to a big ops room at the Doddington end of Skellingthorpe and had a great big table in the middle. I had a little office and Squadron Leader Quinn was at that end in his little office. He was a station navigation officer. And intelligence there in another little room. Daddy, Squadron Leader Dodd, we called him ‘Daddy Dodd’ ‘cause he was in his thirties. Daddy Williams was in his twenties and I know Daddy Quinn was twenty-nine. We thought he was old. And I worked there from then on. I remember a Lanc’ crashing at the end of the runway and blowing a great big hole and all the windows in Lincoln High Street were broken. And this air gunner was still sitting on the hole. He must have been mad, never, ever heard of him again.
DE: Um.
MH: But that was, we used to go to the end of the runway and watch the boys go. Not so much coming back ‘cause they came back early in the morning. But I’d walk round the perimeter track and they’d be lying by the aircraft on a nice summers day waiting to take off. I never dared say ‘Good luck or God bless you.’ Thought they’d think I was putting a jinx on them, but I wanted to say something, but I daren’t, never did.
DE: Um.
MH: But in the, when we went to lunch mess at lunchtime they’d all say ‘What’s the petrol like Mag?’ It worked out, you know long or short trip. Or ‘What’s the bomb load?’ they’d know if that was a big one that was a short trip. Or a little one was a long trip. And they knew I knew. I knew they knew I knew but I couldn’t say anything to them. And we had Group Captain Jefferson there who was a very, very posh gentleman. It was all ‘Do, do, do,do you think Maggie. Do you think you could?’ I can’t tell you what he said, it’s too rude. But he always sat with me at night when they were off flying and Daddy Dodd used to go to Lincoln and stay at the hotel with his wife and we had a code that I had to tell him, if somebody was coming back early or something like that. He’d ring me and say, I can’t remember what the code was but ‘Yes, come back’ or ‘No, you don’t need to.’
DE: Right.
MH: We had a great rapport. And that’s pretty well it I think. I often went to Bardney and worked there. And I remember meeting the nicest man I’ve ever met in my life. A Flight Lieutenant Dennis Irving. He was a very Catholic gentleman who went to mass, said the rosary, prayed. Everybody knew, we all knew and yet he wasn’t a bit shy about it. Was a real Christian gentleman. And the funny thing was they all had to wear civilian clothes when they went home to Ireland. I worked with a WAAF who had to go home in civvies. And yet when my husband went in Ireland he said that he had to wear civvies there were U boat men in the pubs in full uniform. They weren’t happy.
DE: No, I can imagine.
MH: Anyway, I pretty well went along like that was escorted to station dances and pictures. I remember once going to the pictures, Casablanca. We all sang ‘You must remember this.’ The whole theatre was singing and really the rapport, you can’t imagine and the friendship. It was just something.
DE: Um.
MH: Sometimes I’d go to a meal and they’d be one sergeant sitting there, I can remember him. And I thought ‘I should talk to you.’ But how do you talk to a stranger who’s looking a bit grumpy? Anyway, I thought you’re not going to come back. And he didn’t. Sometimes things happen like that. I remember being madly in love with a boy. And I was hanging around the flying control and in the end the girls said ‘For God’s sake Maggie, clear off.’ [unclear] I had to go home. Anyway, he did his tour and went back to Australia. That was that. He was killed afterwards anyway. And one day Daddy Quinn said to me ‘Maggie, I’ve got good news for you. Mentioned in dispatches.’
DE: You were mentioned in dispatches?
MH: Um.
DE: What was that for?
MH: I suppose because I was a good girl, did my work well. I lost the citation, I’ve got the box, the packet that it came in but my son that went to America took everything, I never got it back. I’ve got the envelope and I’ve got the thing it came with.
DE: Right.
MH: It said.
DE: Well we could probably look it up and find it [unclear].
MH: That’s what came with it. You can’t look it up, it’s all gone.
DE: No, we can look it up in the Gazette. It says it’s dated the first of January 1946.
MH: [Rustling of paper] What this is? That’s what the citation was with.
DE: Yes.
MH: Yes, they said you could look at the what’s its name? The magazine.
DE: The Gazette?
MH: Yes, the Gazette. It’ll be in there. That’s what we did, a plotter.
DE: Yes. So what was your job like?
MH: In the operations room?
DE: In the watch office. What was your job in the watch office?
MH: Oh the – the ‘phone would ring in the morning. We had to get to work at nine o’clock. I was always late. And the ‘phone would ring and a voice would say ‘Ops on tonight, maximum effort.’ Or they’d say ‘Nothing on tonight.’ Soon as they said ops were on I rang the group captain and I rang both wing commanders from the squadrons and then flight commanders and then the bombing leader and engineer officer, flying control, intelligence. And they all started their work then and then we had teleprinters bringing all the information later on in the war so Groupie Jefferson used to come in and read it and the route and Squadron Leader Quinn would come in. He’d plan the route from that we were going to fly. Height, target. Then I had to look up the colours of the day and they had to fire those across the coastal path the naval ship or whatever when they were coming in.
DE: Um.
MH: And eventually they’d have to announce they briefing times and would have to announce the meal times. And then I would go off duty at five, five thirty. Would go down to the runway then and watch them going. And then one time I went off in the morning and it was terribly misty like it’s been here for the last week. Very low cloud. And Jock McPherson was in the control in his little black and white van at the end of the runway firing a Very cartridge. I said ‘Can I have one?’ He gave me one, we were doing one each. And fire it and the Lancaster would come out of the mist. Over the waafery, down to the end of the runway. If it had been three foot short we would have been killed. But nobody did they all landed, bang on the runway.
DE: Wow.
MH: I think they had a bomb load on too, I think they were coming back with a bomb load.
DE: Crikey.
MH: Anyway, they were hilarious things.
DE: Ah ha.
MH: Another time we were sleeping naked outside. There was a little garden, I think it was an officer’s garden, somebody lived there. A nice little garden of roses. We used to go out then take our clothes off and a bit of low flying went on [chuckles]. Anyway that was that I think. When the invasion was on that night I went out to the toilet, about five o’clock in the morning, or six. It was just turning light. The sky was black with aircraft. Couldn’t, could not believe so many aircraft and I thought ‘I’ll remember this as long as I live.’ Which I have.
DE: Did you know what it was then when you saw?
MH: Well, I knew when I saw it what it was. I didn’t know, didn’t know it was on until then. But we had two accidents. Another time a bomb went off in the dispersal. All of the Lancs were loaded and windows again went in the High Street. But the people were lovely to us. One of the girls that, a big store, don’t know what it was. Just above the Stonebow she always gave me silk stockings. They were very hard to get.
DE: Um.
MH: Um. And then one day the war was over. And 50 and 61 just disappeared. Groupie Jefferson just disappeared and a Group Captain Forbes came. And he was a very nice man, we always thought about him. He’d come back from Japan and his wife was interned. We could never work out how that happened, not Japan, Singapore.
DE: Um.
MH: Anyway, 463 came and they were being briefed to bring the prisoners back from Europe. And I was on, I went early and WAAF said ‘’I knew you’d come early tonight when they were here.’ All the officers were in the ops room being briefed. And I saw this blonde one leaning on the table at the back. I thought ‘Oh, he looks alright.’ I can’t remember him coming up to me but he must have ‘cause I went out with him that night and I married him. (chuckles). Two months later I married him and went to Australia.
DE: OK. Well why not?
MH: Um. It’s silly. Silly, silly, silly. I didn’t know if he had a job, didn’t know if he was a layabout or what. I mean they were all handsome in uniform, I never looked further than that. Anyway he went to uni, the Government paid for them all to go to uni if they wanted to and they’d matriculated, so he did. Did an economics degree and a commerce and he worked in the Government all his life. And I got presented to the Queen Mother when she came and had a good life.
DE: So, you met him after D-Day?
MH: After the war was over.
DE: Yeah.
MH: He was on 463 Squadron.
DE: And did you marry him in the UK?
MH: Yes I did.
DE: When did you both go to Australia?
MH: He went back that Christmas. We married in October, October the 30th He went back to Australia then Christmas and I went back the next August on the Orbita.
DE: What was that like?
MH: They divided all the first-class cabins for in about six. And there was hardly any water to wash yourselves. We were taking all our clothes off and going standing in a draughty doorway it was so hot. And when we were going down Suez Canal we were passing all the British ships coming home with all the troops. And they were ‘Where are you going?’ and the Aussies were shouting ‘We’re going to Australia, we’ve got all the girls.’ And the Englishmen ‘ Have they really got all the girls?’ We felt miserable then. The Aussies were awful. When we got to Port Said the people came along the boat, beside the boat, hauling up handbags and things for us to buy.
DE: Um.
MH: And the Aussies put hoses on them.
DE: Right.
MH: I know my husband said when he arrived back in Australia all the big dignitaries came out to meet the ships coming in and cheering the boys. My husband always called them ‘The Cheer Company’, cheer you when you go and cheer you when you come back. They put the hoses on them as well. And anyway then I had a horrible time. My mother in law hated, me she was Irish and blamed me for all the stuff going on in Ireland. I’d never heard of it. We were never taught at school anything about that.
DE: Um. So where did you live in Australia?
MH: We lived in Enfield, it’s not a terribly good area really. But they lived there, my mother in law lived there with her second husband. My husband’s father came back from the first World War with a, what did he have? Military Medal, and I think he was a bit shell shocked. He cleared off and left his family and never, ever heard what happened to him again.
DE: Um.
MH: Anyway, we’ve got his medal and he got a write up on. You know you can look it up on David’s mobile and he’s got all his citation.
DE: Yes. Never, ever heard from him again. Shame wasn’t it?
DE: Um.
MH: They had lovely grandchildren. I had eight children, three sets of twins, and two single girls. David’s a twin. I’ve lost three.
DE: Oh dear.
MH: Um. Anyway, that’s that. I think that’s told you everything.
DE: If it’s OK I’ll ask a couple more questions?
MH: Yes.
DE: What did your husband do after the war in Australia?
MH: He was an, he started off as an auditor and then he worked for the Leader of the Opposition who was a Labour man. Mr O’Halloran Giles, he worked for him. And then Mr O’Halloran-Giles.
DH: Mr O’Halloran?
MH: Um? O’Halloran Giles. Mick O’Halloran that’s right. And then he died and Frank Walsh was the second one. My husband worked for him and they were elected into office but my husband couldn’t go with him the Public Service wouldn’t let him transfer to the Premier’s office. So he stayed in the Public Works Committee and he worked for them for thirty odd years.
DE: Right, OK. Did you have a job?
MH: No.
DE: No.?
MH: Too busy. I beg your pardon I did have a job when I first went to Australia. My mother in law insisted that I went to work. And I was pregnant with twins, sick as a dog, morning sickness. And I went to work at [Myle?] Emporium, which was a bit like [TJ’s?] sort of place, and they were so sorry for me they put me in bed every day. They said I was the worst saleswoman they’d ever had. How could I go from my job to that?
DE: Quite.
MH: And [Lloyd?] used to meet me at the railway station on his way home and take me home. I couldn’t face his mother. And they drank and swore and called all the English ’Pommies bastards.’ And it was after the Bodyline cricket series when Ray Larwood was there, who was born, lived near where I lived in Nottinghamshire.
DE: Um.
MH: And were all Bodyline killers. She used to go on about it. Anyway that was that, eventually they left and sold us the house and left. We could never afford to move anywhere else then ‘cause all the children went to private schools. We had some nuns opposite our house. I had a knock on the door one day and they said ‘Can David and Diane come to school?’ I thought ‘Go to school with nuns, no.’ I said ‘No, we’re moving.’ Couldn’t think of anything else to say. I thought afterwards said to my husband ‘They looked, had nice faces.’ ‘Cause he was a Catholic, I didn’t know. Anyway they knew and anyway I went and said ‘Yes, they can come.’
DE: Um.
MH: They started off. And David and Diane went to school. Sister [unclear] had about a hundred children didn’t she David? All in one room. When I went there [hissing noise] they all had their front teeth missing. ‘Mrs Hourigan’s here, Mrs Hourigan’s here.’ Anyway I heard them talking one day and teaching them saying about Jesus and Jesus was God when he came to earth. And I said ‘What’s she saying? Jesus wasn’t God.’ So I said to her ‘Don’t agree with what you’re saying.’ So she said ‘Well the mother sets the religion, if you don’t like it.’ She said ‘Have to give it up, but.’ She said ‘Before you do that go for a retreat,’ I went for a retreat at Canberra College and I fell in love with it. What they were telling me, and the singing and the hymns and the incense. I was in heaven and I converted in 1954.
DE: Right, OK.
MH: Never regretted it. And with losing three children I can tell you I needed my faith.
DE: Um.
MH: David’s my right hand man. And when I came here for this reunion I had these photographs to give all these years. I’ve rung Bomber Command time and time again in London and they took a message once and I said that bombing photos and no idea, absolutely no idea what I was saying and then it’d only be a couple of months ago I rang my daughter who lived in Dorset died and my other daughter moved into her house. And I was telling Elizabeth and she said ‘Mum I’ll fix it.’ So she rang and she got Nicky Barr, is it Nicky Barr? Who said ‘I’m thrilled, thrilled, thrilled. We’re opening the memorial.’ She said ‘I’d love your Mum to come.’ So Nicky rang Annette who’s done the Australian contingent and Annette rang me and said ‘Do you want to come with us?’ I said ‘Oh, I’d give my right arm to come with you.’ So I did. And then when we were at? We were David, where I fell in love again?
DH: Coningsby.
MH: Coningsby. I saw the Millikin name on the wall. I said ‘I knew a Millikin.’ And Wing Commander Millikin’s in 61, 619 now.
DE: Ah ha
MH: And he said ‘You knew my, that would have been my grandfather.’
DE: Wow.
MH: He hardly believed me at first but when I told him things I knew about his grandfather he knew I was genuine. And he said ‘Did my grandfather kiss you?’ I said ‘I wish he would, he didn’t, he was married.’
DE: Well.
MH: But anyway he was really happy. And he was a lovely man his grandfather was. A happy one like this one, happy and kind.
DE: Um.
MH: We had all those events, I could tell you hundreds truly, things come back to me. I’m lying in bed at night, cor. Is the lake still at Skellingthorpe?
DE: Um, I’m not sure. Skellingthorpe has changed an awful lot because –
MH: I know it’s a town, village now.
DE: It was built on virtually all of the, all of the old RAF station yeah.
MH: I know the school’s Lancaster school isn’t it?
DE: Um.
MH: Where the watch office was they said, and the waafery was in the rookery.
DE: Oh right, yes. What was the waafery like?
MH: Oh, a few huts. I had to walk across an empty block to get in have a bath. Get your clothes off. You can imagine in the middle of winter going to have a bath?
DE: Did they have plugs in the baths?
MH: No, took your own plug. We found that everywhere we travelled, it all went to Ireland, there was never a plug in the bath.
DE: So what did you do?
MH: Put a plastic bag over it.
DE: Aha.
MH: And that sucks in stops the water flowing away. There was plenty of hot water.
DE: But it was a long walk from the?
MH: Not really a long walk, a cold walk.
DE: Cold?
MH: And being an NCO I had a room at the end of the hut. So all the girls were there, open beds, but I had a little private room. And a little stove and I used to fill it with flowers, from the. What’s those flowers David?
DH: Cinerarias??
MH: No, those big bushes, rhododendrons. Rhododendrons.
DH: Rhododendrons.
MH: Yeah.
DE: OK. Did you have any trouble with the girls in the rest of the hut?
MH: Never, never, no. One girl surprised us. She was sitting knitting baby clothes and suddenly they said ‘She’s gone.’ We didn’t know. Was pregnant. She’d gone. We had, some of the English airman used to be a bit snobby. When the Aussies came and the Rhodesians they were really, and the Canadians, they were really you know, didn’t care whether you were a sergeant or what. They were officers there agreeable but some of the British. One man I met, and he used to come in the ops room. They all came in the ops room at night when ops weren’t on and I had a kettle and a toaster and the NAAFI used to send me over a big lump of butter and a lot of bread and make toast. And anybody would turn up and have a slice of toast and a cup of something. And this man used to, flight lieutenant somebody or other, used to come and have a cup of tea and toast with me and Bill. Familiar yes, ‘Maggie fa, fa, fa’ and a couple of days later I went into town and I was walking up towards the Stonebow I remember on the right hand side. Met him with this civilian woman and of course I chatted to him like I had in the ops room the night before and he just cut me as dead as dead. I thought ‘You pig.’ The next time he came for cups of tea I tell you he didn’t get it. Hung his head. I thought ‘Don’t bother coming here.’
DE: I can’t say I blame you, that’s –
MH: No, no. But I found that, and they used to call the WAAF’s ‘camp bikes’ or ‘officer’s ground sheets’ was the pet one.
DE: Do you think that was justified or?
MH: No, [emphatic] no, no, no. When I look back and think how hard the girls worked. The MTT, the girls in the mess, and the equipment. And my friend used to drive the bomb trolley and people in the office, and teleprinters, telephone exchange, intelligence, meterology. We all worked so hard and we all believed we were shortening the war.
DE: Um.
MH: I never heard anybody say anything else. And David will laugh. I meant to tell you this story about David’s friend. When they were about eighteen, they were at Uni. And the man remembers to this day, he’s a professor now. Monash University but he knows Mrs Hourigan was angry with him. He said, what was it we were talking about? Bomber Command, we talk about Bomber Command the whole time my husband and I when we got back. We lived what had happened. And we were talking. And he said ‘Oh, they all went off.’ He said ‘They thought kill a few Germans tonight.’ And thought that of Bomber Command, and I said ‘Nothing of the kind.’ And David saw him recently and he said ‘Your mother still remembers then does she?’ He said ‘Yes, she does.’ I’ll never forget, I was so upset, so angry. And when I was in hospital last year the doctor said to me ‘I’ve heard that when they woke up in the morning they threw a dart at the wall. Wherever the dart landed they said ‘That’s where we’ll bomb tonight.’ I said ‘Nothing could be further from the truth.’
DE: So do you think in Australia Bomber Command has got an odd sort of reputation?
MH: I think it, I thought it was general because here for a long time we were wanted for being war criminals weren’t we?
DE: Um. Some people think that yeah. I just wondered if you thought it was different in Australia because you know I think.
MH: I think in Australia a lot of the people thought that the Bomber Command boys had been having a good time in England and they were being bombed by the Japanese. And when they went back it was ‘Oh you’ve been having a good time overseas, we’ve been suffering the Japanese.’ In fact when the War was over the squadrons were ordered to come back to fight Japan.
DE: Um.
MH: Only lucky that the Americans dropped the atomic bomb in August or they’d all have been coming back for that.
DE: Um.
MH: But I don’t think that they understood the War ‘cause they hadn’t been in it. ‘Cause when we’re lying in bed hearing the doodle bugs going round, buzz, buzz, buzz, and then the engine stop you think ‘Oh God, where’s it going to land?’ They had none of that.
DE: Quite, no.
MH: I remember being in Nottingham one night when Nottingham was bombed and I was with my Auntie. And she was a little way out of Nottingham and remember seeing all the incendiaries in the fields. We could see the bombs going down. And one night, we used to hitch, when we were in Fighter Command, we used to hitch hike to London on our days off and one night I remember being on top of a building and mines were coming down on parachutes. How I got up there I don’t know and the men were running around. What do you call them? Air raid wardens were running around with buckets and hoses and we’re up there laughing and dancing about, the WAAF’s and me. We never were in any danger ever when we were in uniform. Except those Irish men. Never forget them. But nowhere else, we went in, we were wandering around looking for a pub we could get a drink. [unclear] some places I can tell you wouldn’t go in. We’d open the front door awful, people with black eyes and black and they’d just look up, we backed out again. I don’t know what sort of den on iniquity it was, didn’t even know where we were.
DE: Um.
MH: But we’d hitch. And when we met the Canadians we cut all our buttons off and swapped with them. We came back to Nottingham without a button on our uniform. And they went off without buttons on theirs. I’ve still got Canadian buttons on mine somewhere. Don’t know where it is, my uniform is now. Think Michael took it to America
DE: Aha.
MH: So, that’s it I think.
DE: Okey dokey
MH: Are you happy with that?
DE: I’m absolutely very, very much so. I’m just having a look to see if I’ve got any questions I wanted to ask. Just going right back to the very start when you joined the.
MH: Um. WAAF’s.
DE: Did you, did you volunteer or were you?
MH: I volunteered.
DE: Why did you choose the WAAF’s? Why did you volunteer?
MH: I liked the air force. I used to read the Biggles books when I was a little girl.
DE: Um.
MH: You know Biggles and his second pilot was Algy and his engineer was Ginger, and I lived those books. And I just wanted to join the air force, thought it was wonderful.
DE: I was just wondering how volunteering during the war sort of fitted in with your early political beliefs?
MH: Forgot all about them. Voted Liberal ever since I came out, out to Australia. No, I remember in Hucknall a man, some officer I’ve forgotten who it was, he used to pick us all up, bit of a ratbag I don’t know. And he took us, this bunch of WAAF’s up to his house, he was filling us with gin I remember that, we were all merry. And he was asking us questions about politics and we were slamming the government, slamming this and that and he couldn’t believe his good fortune. We were telling him everything that was going to happen after the war. What we were going to do, burn the place down I think and start again. And then the next night he asked us to go back to his house again, we didn’t have any gin, he had another man there. He said ‘Tell him what you told me last night.’ Of course, we were all dumb, needed a gin to get us going again. He was very disappointed. We wouldn’t be wound up.
DE: Who do you think the man was?
MH: I don’t know who he was, he was some somebody, some politician I bet you. But when my husband worked for the Labour Party I was happy with them. Then we had a man who was a bit nasty, but he was openly gay and he was a nasty man as well. Had nasty habits and my husband had to work with him. Some of the time he really didn’t like him and I sort of went a bit off the Labour Party. And then I changed my mind.
DE: OK.
MH: And I thought in Australia the unions were running the show and my daughter’s husband, married a sailor, who was in Vietnam and the waterside workers wouldn’t ship any arms or food or anything over, and that put me off.
DE: Aha. OK.
MH: And one of the men asked me the other day, on one of the interviews what I thought about when people died. I didn’t always react you know, you saw missing, missing, missing, missing, missing. I know they were all terribly upset when Dambusters went and Henry Maudsley was a man from 50 Squadron who everybody loved. Oxford Blue and very educated. Lovely young man. And when we went into the chapel in Lincoln the candlesticks and crucifix are dedicated to Henry Maudsley, supplied by his family. So yesterday we put a poppy on him on the memorial. I forgot should have done one for Guy Gibson, I couldn’t think. ‘Cause I didn’t lose anybody.
DE: You didn’t?
MH: No.
DE: No.
MH: Not personally. But it was hard, I mean you knew that they’d been shot down. You knew the worry that they were going to be shot down. And some of them you looked at them and you knew they were going to get it ‘cause they were a bit –
DE: Bit shaky?
MH: They had a twitch or. And you always thought ‘Oh they’re going to cop it.’ And they did. And the mad ones, the ones you thought ‘You’re going to die.’ They survived ‘cause they were realistic, ‘We can’t possibly live.’ So.
DE: Um. Did anyone ever talk about lack of moral fibre?
MH: One man, one man, lack of moral fibre. It was awful. Ripped everything off him, all his ensignia, in front of the whole camp. I was reading about Group Captain Cheshire yesterday on David’s mobile. I saw ‘Group Captain Cheshire – Unknown Story.’ And read about him and he said with lack of moral fibre he had to be very strict because it could taint the whole lot of them.
DE: Um.
MH: He said he was very strict with it.
DE: So did you, did you see that actually happen with people having their?
MH: It did happen. It did happen.
DE: Where was that? Can you remember?
MH: Oh, I think it was at Skellingthorpe we had one. But they got sent away quickly because they’d taint everybody else. I know my husband said when he was flying his bomb aimer said ‘I can’t press the tit, I can’t press the tit!’ My husband said ‘You’ll faffing well press the tit or you’ll go with ‘em!’
DE: Your husband was a pilot?
MH: Yeah.
DE: How many ops did he do?
MH: About fifteen. He only came at the end of the war, he was only eighteen in 1942. I was two years older than him.
DE: Um.
MH: Never let me forget it. I was a cradle snatcher. [chuckles] But they looked so old the Bomber Command men, they all had grey faces. And there hair seemed to get colourless somehow they looked. Fighter pilots always looked gay and young and laughing. I know in the Battle of Britain I bet they didn’t but otherwise they were always gay and young. But the Bomber Command pilots always looked old.
DE: Why was that do you think?
MH: I don’t, because in the morning they’d know, ‘I might die tonight.’ And friends, people all around them were dying and I think that they knew how dicey their life was. And they’d live in a hut and come home and half the beds would be empty.
DE: Um.
MH: And sometimes when they took off in the morning they’d go to Germany and come back at say midnight and they’d be an intruder in the circuit. And one time was dropping bombs on the Waddington bomb dump. We thought it was hilarious at Skellingthorpe, bombing Waddington. They had Air Commodore Hesketh, we hated him. And he was a very bossy man, all his gold braid. And we didn’t have any of that at Skelly, only had the Groupie. They didn’t go around polishing boots and looking and making a parade and all like they did at Waddington.
DE: So do you think there was a difference between the permanent stations and the wartime stations?
MH: Yeah, I reckon. Well the Aussies were very casual. I remember one raid when the war began they handed, not when war began, when the D-Day began they handed the air force over to the army. It was the silliest thing they ever did. The army would call up, ‘Come and bomb this.’ And they’d get the bombs on the ‘plane. ‘No, don’t come now, we don’t need you.’ And then ‘Come and bomb this.’ They’d all get ready again, ‘No, don’t come we don’t need you.’
DE: Um.
MH: And in the end they said ‘Either take us off or the bombs sink in the ground.’ Anyway one time they said ‘We don’t need you, stand down but don’t leave the station.’ Course all the Skellingthorpe mob stayed around but the Waddington mob all shot into Lincoln. And within half an hour they called ops on again. And the police and SP’s were racing around trying to round the Aussies out of the pubs. We were all ready but they, they were very undisciplined like that.
DE: What was Lincoln like? Did you go out in Lincoln?
MH: Oh, incredible. At night when the bombers had taken off you just heard this roar, you can’t imagine. Well we had thirty six take off at Skelly, there were thirty six at Waddington, sixteen or seventeen at Bardney and Scampton and Woodhall Spa and East Kirkby all of them. All take off, all go over. They used to meet at Beachy Head and, or Reading sometimes and amalgamate there and then start flying out to Holland. But they’d just all roar over. Massive noise.
DE: Um. And of course working where you did you knew before they did where they were going?
MH: Absolutely. And when they did the Berlin run, I think it was 1944, they went to Berlin about five nights in a row. And Nuremburg was another one, they lost about ninety ‘planes that night. None of them liked going up the Ruhr, Cologne or. Some of them, I know they had fish names for targets and we had a [unclear] ‘phone scrambled if you wanted to talk privately you pressed the scrambler.
DE: Yes.
MH: I remember Air Commodore Hesketh rang one day. I didn’t know it was him. I picked up the ‘phone, I said ‘Hello, hello, hello.’ [loudly] ‘Air Commodore Hesketh here.’ ‘Oh,[long drawn in breath] beg your pardon sir .’ ‘I want Group Captain Jefferson.’ I suppose he said to Groupie Jefferson ‘She’s a right one in there.’ He would have defended me. I know he would. But we had a lot of fun, used to laugh a lot. And I never, ever worked out the bomb load. I could not do it.
DE: OK.
MH: I had to have one cookie, one thousand pounder, twelve SPC’s of incendiaries. And each Lancaster carried that. We had thirty two, thirty six whatever and I couldn’t do maths at all. I always rang Waddington the girls and said ‘How much bomb load have we taken off?’ And she would tell me. And I had to phone 5 Group and say ‘This much has gone.’
DE: Um.
MH: Once Groupie, Daddy Quinn came in with his slide rule. ‘Just do this Mag, just do this.’ I told him not to bother me. Can’t be bothered. I couldn’t cope, my little failing.
DE: You found a cunning way of getting round it.
MH: [laughing] We had, one night we had a camp concert. I was with this sergeant sitting there and a man who did tricks. What do you call ‘em? A conjurer. And he said ‘Two come up on the stage.’ He spotted us two sergeants sitting. ‘You come up.’ I had to get up and hold ropes and get things and next thing I kept dropping mine. Everybody was cheering, it was awful. Oh dear.
DE: Was that an ENSA concert?
MH: Yeah, yeah. And once we had some old ladies come, oh they were terrible. You had to sort of play a little tea thing in the afternoon. Fancy getting a bunch of airmen and airwomen and these old, fat old ladies with a cello, a big thing, and a piano and they’re all big stout old things in [silk?] dresses. We had to sit and listen.
DE: Not the sort of entertainment that you were after?
MH: No, no. No, no, no, no. Sometimes they were pathetic. I remember when I was young one of the WAAF’s in Skellingthorpe, not Skellingthorpe, [Waddington?] and this girl was singing. A pilot was sitting there she was singing at him and he was looking at her. Oh, they were so in love and she was really singing at him. She had on a pretty dress. All WAAF’s. We were slightly envious because in Fighter Command we didn’t see a man.
DE: Right, so Bomber Command was an improvement then?
MH: Bomber Command wall to wall men. But in 5 Command and 12 Group and Bentley Priory were just headquarters and Air Commodore um, you know the man who had his big wing and was always fighting? What was his name? Oh, can’t think. Anyway 11 Group fought with 12 Group because we had Douglas Bader and he wanted the big wings and [unclear] aeroplanes taking ten minutes to get off. He said ‘it goes in formation then.’
DE: Um.
MH: You could shoot them down. And he said, he said ‘if they drop after they drop their bombs it doesn’t matter.’ And 11 Group mostly were dropping them on my airfields. Anyway I can’t think, can’t think of the name. There was um. It’s gone, gone, it’s gone. It’ll come back to me, float back to me. My mind’s like a computer [unclear]. Anyway they had a lot of arguments about that. [unclear] once Douglas Bader came into the ops room we nearly all swooned away.
DE: Really?
MH: Um, um. See somebody with wings and young.
DE: Right. Yes.
MH: Never did get posted to ops in Fighter Command. I had this poor lover. David will laugh. What was his name? [unclear] and he followed me everywhere, he was a Canadian, and I did not want him. I never went out with him and they kept saying ‘He’s at the guardroom.’ And I wouldn’t go and talk to him and if I ever met a group of Canadians they’d say ‘You’re not Maggie are you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Oh, awful person.’ And in the end I asked one of them what happened to him. Killed, he flew into a hill.
DE: Oh dear.
MH: I had to pray for him all my life.
DE: Um.
MH: I didn’t want him though. He was about six foot six, he was, and I was only little. And this great big thing standing beside me. Only a little thing. Anyway that was, would have been about 1944 I suppose.
DE: Ah.
MH: Look at it now, 2018. He’s still on my conscience. You can’t make yourself fall in love though can you?
DE: No. And for you it happened with your blonde Australian from 463 Squadron.
MH: Um. All my babies were premature. I had nobody to help me. No mother, no sister, no aunties. No sisters, nobody. [rustling of papers]There’s my MID thing, is that good enough? Defence Medal, yeah MID. Ha, ha, ha.
DE: Well unless you can think of another anecdote to tell me?
MH: No, don’t think I’ve any more.
DE: I’m sure.
MH: We used hitch hike and sit on the tanks and drive to London. Never got into any harm. Just hop in the truck and it’s ‘Hop up love.’ And take us to London and drop us down, we stayed at the Waterloo Bridge. There was a Sally Army hostel nearby, we used to stay there.
DE: This was when you were on leave?
MH: On leave or weekends off. We worked night shifts we’re on, have a couple of days off. And what were those, Lyons Corner Houses then, they had like a restaurant. And they used to wheel a big trolley full of jelly cake, sort of like layers of cream and jelly. Could have a cup of tea and a slice of cake. Like being in heaven, used to have a slice of cake and a cup of tea.
DH: What was the story of your flight down the Ruhr after the war?
MH: Oh yes, yes.
DH: Oh, OK. Tell us about.
MH: Oh yes, we did a cook’s tour after the war. And I had two flights. I had one flight with a person just flying around over Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire. And when we got back he said that he hadn’t filled his logbook in because I’d been sick on his log, which was a dirty lie and I was really angry about that. And then we did a cook’s tour down, what they call a cook’s tour, down the Ruhr when the war was over. Oh, the damage was awful. And we were going round Heliogland and the ‘plane was going like that. [chuckling]
DE: You felt a bit airsick [unclear]?
MH: I felt sick.
DE: How many people went on an aircraft trip, cook’s tour?
MH: Oh, I think a lot of people went on if they wanted to.
DE: Aha.
MH: And you were lucky enough to get someone that would take you.
DE: So where did you stand on the aircraft?
MH: I stood behind the navigator some of the time.
DE: Aha. So you could look out and?
MH: Um.
DE: Yeah.
MH: I was scared though. I was really scared.
DE: Of flying?
MH: Um. To say I’d wanted to be an airman all my life I was really frightened.
DE: Um.
MH: Once we got in the thick cloud I remember flying over Nottingham in what they called cumulus nimbus, real thick black cloud. And I thought ‘If anybody else is in the cloud with us what’s going to happen?’ But there wasn’t anybody in with us.
DE: No.
MH: And then when you’re going down, to [makes vomiting noise] I don’t mind now, I fly on all the big ones.
DE: Yeah. They’re a little bit different aren’t they?
MH: Absolutely. We flew home in the, what’s it David? sleeper. It was non-stop.
DE: The Dream Liner?
MH: Dream Liner, non-stop from Perth to London.
DE: Um.
MH: Horrible, too long.
DE: Yeah.
MH: Can you think of anything else I’ve told you David that I’ve forgotten?
DH: I just noticed you said you flew home on the Dream Liner but your home’s in Australia.
MH: Oh I forget yeah [laughs]
DH: Her heart’s still in England.
DE: Fair enough.
MH: My heart’s always been in England.
DE: Um. Well thank you very, very much for coming here and telling me these stories.
MH: Thank you. Thank you for listening.
DE: No, my pleasure.
MH: Um.
DE: I shall press stop. Thank you very much.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Margaret Hourigan
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Dan Ellin
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-04-16
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AHouriganM180416
Conforms To
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Pending review
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Format
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01:13:32 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Margaret Hourigan grew up in and around Nottingham. Despite holding Labour principles she volunteered for the WAAF’s as soon as War was declared and was called up in January 1940. She Hourigan served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force as a plotter with Fighter Command before being posted to RAF Waddington and RAF Skellingthorpe with Bomber Command. She met and married an Australian pilot, and emigrated to Australia after the war. Margaret and her husband had eight children.
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
Contributor
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Dawn Studd
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
44 Squadron
463 Squadron
50 Squadron
61 Squadron
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
control caravan
control tower
Cook’s tour
entertainment
faith
George VI, King of Great Britain (1895-1952)
ground personnel
lack of moral fibre
memorial
military ethos
military living conditions
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
operations room
perimeter track
radar
RAF Bardney
RAF Bentley Priory
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Waddington
runway
service vehicle
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/592/8861/PJoynerJH1601.2.jpg
ff67cf547f2ebab0feec8e670ac8638a
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/592/8861/AJoynerJH161021.2.mp3
89510ebc25c0e353bb7aacf9484870fc
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
Joyner, John
John Howard Joyner
J H Joyner
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Joyner, JH
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with John Joyner (1924 - 2016, Royal Air Force), his memoir and scrap book. He flew operations as an air gunner with 189 and 101 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by John Joyner and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
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
DK: So let’s just make, make sure we’ve got the sound up. So this is David Kavanagh on the — where are we? 21st of October 2016, interviewing Mr John Joyner. [background noise] And the thing is, if I keep looking over like this I’m not being rude, I’m just making sure it’s still working.
JJ: Of course.
DK: ‘Cause I got caught out before and it suddenly stopped.
JJ: How long is the interview?
DK: As long as, as long as you like.
JJ: Go on. Carry on.
DK: What, what I’d like to ask you ask first of all, and I always ask this question, is, what were you doing immediately before the war?
JJ: What was I doing before the war? As I may recall that, um, I was working at a warehouse, at the Co-op, the CWS in London, and like a lot of other people I joined various organisations. In my case I joined the —
Ann: ATC
JJ: ATC. That’s right, the Air Training Corps.
DK: Air Training Corps, yep.
JJ: And we had the opportunity to fly then, you see, which was most interesting, apart from which it, extended my education, things like algebra and geometry and stuff I’d never encountered before. So it was like an extra, extra-curriculum for me. Most useful.
DK: So, what aircraft types did you fly in the ATC? Go up in the ATC?
JJ: In the ATC I think — you have the advantage of me now because you have this recording but let’s see —
DK: Would it be the Tiger Moth, would it?
JJ: That’s right. The Tiger Moth, yes, yes, yes. ‘Cause that was a dual seater, the Tiger Moth, and then we went on to four engine aircraft, two engine aircraft, and that was the Wellington. And that was when I had my head in the astrodome in the fuselage because we didn’t have a mid-upper turret. Our rear gunner, sadly dead now, was smaller than me so he was sort of, fell into the, fell into the nomenclature, the title of rear gunner, he could fit nicely into that space.
DK: Was height a big consideration when you were —
JJ: I think so really rather than somebody or other because you’d have to fold yourself to get into the turret. There wasn’t a great deal of room there.
DK: Just stepping back a little bit. What made you want to join the RAF? Because were you called up? Or what made you — as opposed to say the army or navy?
JJ: Again, that’s in the narrative that I provided but I think it was interesting, thought provoking, you know, flying.
DK: Did the Battle of Britain have any influence on you?
JJ: I think not. But you see, after all, I think I spoke about 1940. Well this was of course, that was of course, the Battle of Britain. When Britain came face to face with the enemy and you just wanted to take part and there were so many interesting things to do.
DK: Yeah. Was it, was it — how did you feel then about joining the RAF? Was it, I mean, you’d seen the Battle of Britain. Was it — did you want to be a fighter pilot or, was there anything that sort of drove you to —
JJ: I just wanted to take part.
DK: Right, okay.
JJ: I wanted to take part. At the time, of course, the idea of going into aircrew seemed distant but as to — no, it was the idea of joining the RAF to begin with. I think maybe because, perhaps, the local branch was rather more for me. But I think it suited me more the idea of possibly flying rather than marching up and down.
DK: Right, okay.
JJ: Mind you, commendable as these other services were and are. Yes.
DK: So, can, can you remember your first posting in the RAF, because you would have done your initial training, where you went to first of all?
JJ: Yes, well, because you see, it was decided that it’s in that account. But we were all sent to a place called Heaton Baths, swimming baths, and the idea was that we swam up. Those who could swim, could swim a length, and they were posted to Scotland where there were no swimming facilities. Whereas, if I’d used my head and not been able to swim I could have gone to Sutton Hoo, Weston Super Mare, or somewhere like that, I forget. It’s in the book somewhere.
DK: So, you showed you could swim and then they sent you to Scotland? [laugh]
JJ: That’s right. The swimmers went up there.
DK: It seems strange as it’s the Air Force. I can understand if you were joining the navy or something. [laugh]
Ann: Extraordinary, isn’t it?
DK: So, can you remember whereabouts in Scotland you went?
JJ: Oh yes. At St Andrews.
DK: St Andrews.
JJ: St Andrews. Actually at the university.
DK: Oh, right, okay.
JJ: Oh yes. It’s in there. We were billeted at a place called Rusacks Marine Hotel. That was first of all and then on to the university itself, which by that time had been taken over by the RAF. So we used to do our — we used to do our marching up and down the seafront there, jumping from one concrete block to another, and then eventually we were, we were posted to — let’s see. Yes, I think that was when we went to — they suddenly decided that we should all go for selection to Manchester.
DK: Right.
JJ: And so regardless of the fact that one of us had actually soloed, they made us all air gunners.
DK: So did you actually, um, take part in pilot training?
JJ: Well, only in as far as the, as the second pilot in a, in a Tiger Moth. That’s all.
DK: Right.
JJ: Not in the heavier stuff at all, no.
DK: So you were then allocated as a gunner?
JJ: That’s right.
DK: Yeah. So, did you then go off for gunnery training at that point?
JJ: Oh yes, yes.
DK: And can you remember where that was?
JJ: Yes. That was in Wales.
DK: Right, okay.
JJ: For the moment it escapes me.
Ann: Stormy Down, was it?
JJ: Pardon?
Ann: Stormy Down, was it?
JJ: Stormy Down. I think that would be right. Yes, I suppose so.
Ann: Sorry about me interfering.
DK: No, that’s okay. Don’t worry.
Ann: You see, John’s old and some things he can’t remember.
DK: It’s okay.
Ann: But I can remember. I’ve heard it so many times that I can come in with the odd name occasionally.
DK: You see, what we can do with the recording — obviously we won’t have a rough cut like this —
Ann: No, no, no.
DK: We’ll edit the bits out and, you know, we’ll just —
Ann: It’ll just be a story.
DK: A story, yes. Please do, you know.
JJ: Voices. Voices from the past.
DK: Voices from the past. That’s what it is. All our yesterdays. But what I was going to say is, so, for the benefit of the recording I know you’ve written it down, but what did the gunnery training actually involve?
JJ: Well, we sat in darkness to identify silhouettes of enemy aircraft and had to make a note of these, you know, because we were going to spend most of our time in the dark because by that time Bomber Command was flying at night, but not during the day, do you see?
DK: Yeah.
JJ: And so, we sat in there and then we went up in the, I think you mentioned the plane I was in, a dual, dual —
DK: The Avro Anson, was it?
JJ: Yes, that’s right. There was room for three gunners in there and we each fired into a drogue pulled by some unfortunate plane, de Havilland or something or other, and the idea was that we painted the nose of our bolts of ammunition with wet paint.
DK: Right.
JJ: Each of us is in primary colours so that these poor WAAFs, when the drogue was finally dropped over the airfield, they could identify how many hits, if any, you’d made on the drogue.
DK: And, how, how was your gunnery? Was it any good?
JJ: Well, it’s difficult to say because, you see, I can’t remember about my prowess but what I did do is that when I went finally for the interview, which is also in that account, they asked me a question about, not about gunnery, but it was about some superficial enquiry which I couldn’t remember. So they said, ‘Do you want to be a, do you want to be an air gunner?’ So I said, ‘Yes, please.’ So they said, ‘Right, you’ve passed.’ Because they closed down the Welsh station because it was going to be used for a — German officer POWs. So they wanted a nice, nice tidy finish. So I went on there. I don’t suppose it affected my skills as an air gunner in any way but, you know, that was all they had to —
DK: So, at that point you’d become a newly qualified gunner then?
JJ: That’s right, an air gunner.
DK: Air gunner.
JJ: It’s, it’s in the book.
Ann: If I’d known that’s what our lives depended on. All a shambles. [slight laugh]
DK: Well, this is the thing. The stories are coming out now.
Other: Oh yeah, I bet some of them —
JJ: We all had our wings and we met and posed for the camera in Trafalgar Square, London.
DK: Ah, so at that point then as a newly trained, newly trained air gunner, where was your next posting, the Operational Training Unit?
JJ: Well, I can’t remember, but what we did they piled us all in one enormous room and then the pilot just picked people out at random, who he wanted in his crew.
DK: How did you feel that worked? It’s very unusual that you were all piled in together and had to sort yourselves out. Did it, did it work well?
JJ: Well, hopefully. I mean but, you see, where is it now? There were forty seven casualties, deaths, on Bomber Command training, so clearly there was some of the skills, some of the skills were not as sharp as they might have been or, alternatively, they met with some terribly bad luck, you know.
DK: So when you’re in this big hall and you’re sorting the crews out, this pilot approached you, did he? He came up to you?
JJ: As far as I’m aware, yes.
DK: And can you remember his name, the pilot?
JJ: Oh, MacQuitty.
DK: Sorry, could you say that again?
JJ: It’s in there, yes, MacQuitty. He was —
DK: MacQuitty.
JJ: He came from —
DK: Sorry. What was his first name?
Ann: Tasmania.
JJ: Tasmania.
DK: And what was the first name?
JJ: MacQuitty It’s in there.
DK: It’s in there. MacQuitty.
JJ: Okay? Yes. MacQuitty
Ann: His surname.
JJ: Okay?
DK: Yes. MacQuitty and he was Tasmanian.
JJ: Yes, that’s right. Now, of the crew, when I organised the reunion in 1999, we were all there bar two, the wireless operator, who was dead, and the skipper, who was dead.
DK: MacQuitty.
JJ: But the remaining five of us: flight engineer, navigator, myself, mid upper, and rear gunner. So it was a very good effort.
DK: Can you, can you remember their names now, the whole crew?
JJ: Oh yes, it’s all there. It’s in the book.
DK: Yeah.
JJ: Sorry but —
DK: No, no. Don’t worry. So once the crew‘s got together with MacQuitty which — can you remember where you went to then, which Operational Training Unit?
JJ: Yes, that’s right. OTU. It’s on there. Excuse me, could I?
DK: Sure.
JJ: Is it there or not? Oh, it’s in the other one [background noise]
DK: [pause] Yes. It says the OTU.
JJ: Upper Heyford.
DK: Upper Heyford.
JJ: That’s right. Yes. And as you see, apart from these four there’s another two at the back, Waddington and, Coningsby. Yes. But do carry on.
DK: Sorry, and I mean — so, so once you’re at the Operational Training Unit, can you remember which type of aircraft you trained on there?
JJ: Oh, it would be the Wellington.
DK: Right.
JJ: Yes, because that was the first aircraft we used as a crew. But of course I didn’t have a mid-upper turret. I used to stand with my head in the astrodome and I was supposed to be looking out for — trying to avoid a collision with other aircraft on the circuits and bumps, you know, because we were all going round and round this airfield, landing and taking off, you see.
DK: Right, and, and did you decide with the other gunner as to who would be the mid-upper gunner and the rear gunner?
JJ: No. It was decided for us.
DK: Oh right. So, you, you were told you were going to be the mid-upper gunner.
JJ: I think the choice was limited. He was a slighter, less taller person than me and yes, that was the way it just worked out, that’s all. The others, of course, the others were trained crew members. They’d been to Canada and all sorts, you know.
DK: So, the pilot was Australian?
JJ: Yes.
DK: Were the other rest of the crew all British?
JJ: Yes. The navigator was English, the — as you say, [unclear] British. The bomb aimer was a Scot and so was the engineer, was a Scot.
DK: So after training at the OTU can you remember where you went to then?
JJ: Well, that would have been the Heavy Conversion Unit.
DK: Right.
JJ: Going from Wellingstons into Lancs? Yes I think so, yes, Lancs. But then of course we had a four engined aircraft and I had a turret. And one anecdote that’s perhaps not in the book is that the rear gunner, who had a heated suit found his leg was burning so he asked to leave the turret and come forward and he passed under me in the mid-upper turret, and I reported him passing through, and the skipper put the aircraft in quite a [unclear] down, in a nose dive down to oxygen level. He’d got a short circuit in his heated suit which was burning his leg. But he recovered fully and off he went again.
DK: You never had that problem with — did you used to wear a heated suit as well?
JJ: No. I don’t think so. I had fur-lined Irvin jacket I think. Yes, no, no, I had a - No, I think it was only the posh members up the front who had Irvin jackets. No, I just had an all-over suit.
DK: Sort of overalls?
JJ: That’s right.
DK: So, at the Heavy Conversion Unit then, that would have been your first sight of the Lancaster, was it?
JJ: Yes, it would have been.
DK: So what did you think once you saw these huge —
JJ: Pardon?
DK: What did you think of the Lancaster when you first saw it?
JJ: What did I think? Impressive. Certainly impressive is the word. A lot more room than I experienced before. And, yes, it’s a beautiful aircraft, we always felt. In spite of all the problems that they’d had with other aircraft in the past, heavy aircraft, you know, multi-engined aircraft, it was a beautiful aircraft and it was highly regarded by aircrews.
DK: Yeah. Did you feel safe, safe, in there or —
JJ: Quite safe but actually personal safety — excuse me. [pause] I thought I had a handkerchief somewhere.
Ann: I’ll get you one.
JJ: No, it’s alright dear. It’s alright. I’ve got one.
Ann: Have you got one?
JJ: Yes. [sneeze] Pardon me. Personal safety didn’t come into it. Somehow or other you just took part, you know. That’s right.
DK: I guess when you’re younger like that it’s a bit different.
Ann: Gung-ho.
DK: You’re a bit gung-ho.
Ann: Yes.
JJ: Well, you didn’t sort of — no, I don’t think there was any question of fear. No. We just were together.
Ann: [unclear] happen to me.
JJ: We were always together, you see. Sort of a [sneeze] as I say a unified confidence.
DK: Did you find you bonded very well with your crew?
JJ: Oh yes, yes, yes. I think it would have been a problem otherwise but, —
DK: So you all kind of, you all trusted one another to do —.
JJ: Oh, absolutely. Yes. Because, you see, when you think of the, although the bomb aimer could go into the nose to his couple of Brownings in the nose of the aircraft that wasn’t primarily his job. He was down there to drop bombs so, consequently, the rest of the crew depended on the mid-upper and rear gunner to defend the aircraft, you see, but of course this wasn’t always practical if you got a determined group of fighters attacking from different quarters.
DK: Mmm, and did that happen on a number of occasions then?
JJ: No, we weren’t attacked.
DK: You weren’t attacked.
JJ: No, I did report a, what I took to be, a Focke 190 when I was in Germany. I had a German but it fell away. Now, you could say, whether this chap had thought discretion was the better part of valour, bearing in mind he saw the two turrets were moving in his direction..
DK: That’s probably what it was. He saw you [laugh]. He saw you and scarpered [laugh].
JJ: That’s right. But you see otherwise, otherwise he would have been going into quite a hail of Browning 303s, you see.
DK: So, just stepping back a bit, after the Heavy Conversion Unit, is that when you were posted to your operational squadron?
JJ: That’s right, yes.
DK: And which squadron was that?
JJ: Sorry?
DK: Which squadron was that?
JJ: Well. It’s difficult to say I’m afraid, at this stage.
DK: It mentions 101 there. Is it?
JJ: Yeah, 101.
DK: 101 Squadron. Can I —
JJ: Possibly.
DK: Is it okay to take a look? It’s got here 189 Squadron?
JJ: Yes, again it could well be, I’m not sure. Can I just have a quick look?
DK: Yeah, sure, yeah.
JJ: Thank you. [pause] It’s a good will bin. Where am I? 920. Can you see a date on there? Telegram.
DK: Telegram, so that’s ‘Report to RAF Station Upper Heyford by twelve hundred hours, 5th of September.’
JJ: Could you see a date on the stamp?
DK: Oh yeah, 31st of August 1944?
JJ: 19 —
DK: 1944.
JJ: That sounds reasonable.
DK: So this was to your operational station then?
JJ: Yes. I think so. Yes.
DK: So initially you were based at Upper Heyford?
JJ: Yes.
DK: Yeah. So it was the squadron there.
JJ: Yeah.
DK: So can you remember the other stations you were based at? Upper Heyford and —
JJ: Well again I’m afraid they’re listed on there.
DK: Were you at Ludford Magna by any, at any —
JJ: Where?
DK: Ludford Magna.
JJ: Oh yes.
DK: Ah right, okay, so in that case then I’m assuming it was 189 Squadron at Upper Heyford, and 101 at Ludford Magna.
JJ: Yeah.
DK: Yeah. There’s, just for the recording here, I’ve got 16 OTU and yeah, 16 Operational Training Unit, 189 Squadron, and were you, were you at Bardney for a while?
JJ: Bardney, yes, yes. I don’t know why we were moving about quite a bit but we were.
DK: So you were at Bardney, Upper Heyford, Bardney, and Ludford Magna.
JJ: Yeah.
DK: Does that sound right? Okay?
JJ: Yeah, yeah.
DK: That makes sense.
Ann: Having listened to this, are they all like this when they’re talking?
DK: Yes.
Ann: ‘Cause they’re old men you see.
DK: Yeah, I know. [slight laugh] Don’t worry, don’t worry.
Ann: It’s a lot of remembering to do isn’t it?
DK: It is. Yes.
Ann: Well, I’m just wondering how he compared with some of the others.
DK: Just, just the same. I mean, I have difficulty remembering what I did this morning. [slight laugh]
Ann: Yes, yes. Well I do too, especially the detail that you’re asking there. I just wondered how he fits in with some of the others you’ve heard.
DK: You will find some things are remembered very clearly.
Ann: Yes.
DK: I mean, I’m very bad at, for example, remembering names.
Ann: I’m wonderful.
DK: That’s the thing.
Ann: I never forget.
DK: So, so, while John can obviously remember the station names, not always the number of the squadron. With other people it can be the other way round.
Ann: Other way.
DK: They can remember the number of the squadron but not the name of the station where they were based, so —
Ann: But what they miss out then are you able to find out? Pick out?
DK: So yes, yes. We’re hopefully, hopefully doing that as we go through it.
Ann: Yes. Yes. ‘Cause by the time you’ve listened to a few you’ll be able to match up.
DK: What I can do is, um, now I know it’s 189 Squadron and I knew 101 was at Ludford Magna, you know, I can confirm that, that’s were the squadrons so, you know. So that’s okay.
JJ: Wait, there’s another. Wait a minute there’s, there’s more. Just a minute, excuse me [cough].
Ann: Would you like any more tea?
DK: Oh, could I please? Is that okay?
Ann: Do you want any more John?
JJ: No thank you dear. Oh, that’s our skipper.
DK: Okay.
JJ: There’s grandfather.
DK: Who’s known as Mac.
JJ: Mac. That’s him. [pause]
DK: So can, can you recall how many operations you actually did?
JJ: No, I did just two.
DK: Just two, yep.
JJ: Because, you see, we flew into France first of all and then we flew into Germany as they were crossing the Rhine, the, our British armies, you see.
DK: Right.
JJ: And it was then when we got back — don’t forget, you see, we were, we weren’t technically members of the squadron and we got back to, to the squadron base where we were just about to be, go on, as a member of the squadron, when the skipper was taken off because of the loss of his second brother.
DK: Right.
JJ: So we became, what they called, a headless crew.
DK: So he, he lost both his brothers then?
JJ: Yes.
DK: So they took him off operations?
JJ: Took him off and put him on, um —
DK: Was it transport?
JJ: Yes, something like that.
DK: Yeah.
JJ: Sorry, I can’t find this. I’ve got an account somewhere or other. Excuse me.
DK: That’s okay. I’ve got it here.
JJ: No, I don’t think so, never mind. But I had a chronological account.
DK: It’s okay. I’ve got that. I’ve got it here. That’s the one.
JJ: Oh yes but I also had a chronological account.
DK: Oh right, okay.
JJ: Where we were but I can’t find it at the moment. Here we are.
DK: Ah, right. Okay. So the two operations you did then. Can you remember where they were to?
JJ: Yes. Again, that’s in the account.
DK: There was one to Germany, wasn’t there?
JJ: That’s right. Yes. So, I think in the margin I’ve put a note.
DK: That’s right. Yes. I did see that.
Ann: There we are.
DK: I’ve got Strasburg and Saarbrücken. Does that sound —
JJ: Sorry?
DK: Strasburg and Saarbrücken.
JJ: That’s it.
DK: Yeah. So, I’m just reading your account here, just for the recording. It says, ‘Our first operation together was into France and then into Germany, which was Strasburg and Saarbrücken.’
JJ: Yes.
DK: Yes, OK. So, this is a diversion with the main bombing at —
JJ: That’s right, yes. We were dropping Window, which you know about.
DK: Yeah, yeah. So was, was that just dropping Window? Did you just drop Window and no bombs or was it —
JJ: No, we didn’t drop any bombs at all.
DK: Just Window. So it was a diversion to the main raid at —
JJ: That was the main thing, yes. Have I been a satisfactory interviewee?
DK: You’ve been very good.
JJ: Thank you.
DK: Trust me. You may not think so but there’s a lot of information.
JJ: Is that your tea sitting there?
DK: That is. I’ve got another one. [slight laugh] There’s a lot of interesting information there.
JJ: Oh good. Um, well —
DK: Once you’d — just going back to your pilot then. Just — obviously he was taken off operations. What, what did you do then as a crew because obviously you —
JJ: We went back to what they called a holding unit because we were what they called a headless crew, so we went back to a holding unit and then we picked up a new skipper, who’d been a pre-war pilot.
DK: Oh, right.
JJ: Harrison his name was and, I think he’s there somewhere. Anyway, Harrison was the — and we continued with him until the — well I think we — I’m not sure whether we were de-mobbed after a while, obviously at the end of the war, but of course it was still a few, still a while to go. We were used in various capacities, I can’t remember the close details.
DK: No. I noticed on the account there that you flew some of the POWs, not POWs, some of the army, was it the army men back?
JJ: Oh, that’s true. Well, that was post-war, you see. Well, post, post fighting, shooting war, and, yes we flew out and brought them back to England. That’s right.
DK: So, that would have been Operation Exodus.
JJ: I suppose that’s what it was called. Yes, yes, yes.
DK: And was that to Italy?
Ann: Yes.
JJ: A place called Pomigliano. That’s right. Yes.
DK: Yeah, yeah, okay.
JJ: Did he get a second cup Ann?
Ann: Yes. He’s got a second cup.
DK: Very nice, very nice thank you. So, okay.
Ann: So you’ll know the whole story of the war won’t you by the time you’ve finished.
DK: Oh yes. Definitely.
Ann: Won’t you? Because you were only a little boy weren’t you? No, you weren’t alive then.
DK: No, I wasn’t alive.
Ann: You wasn’t alive.
DK: Well, I was born in ‘63 so —
Ann: Do you find it interesting?
DK: Oh yeah. Definitely.
Ann: Do you?
DK: It’s very interesting. Okay, so we’ll probably wind up there. I mean, that’s probably good enough. Just one final query. How do you look back now, after seventy years, at your period in the RAF in Bomber Command? Is it something you —
JJ: I haven’t really thought of it before but with satisfaction, with satisfaction, because I felt that I took part, even though it was in a minor capacity, but I took part and if I hadn’t been there somebody else would have had to be there. And we did some interesting and useful jobs. It’s difficult to say how valuable they were, in retrospect, but due to the limited numbers of trips that I actually made they have to be limited. But I mean you see some of these chaps, they did tours of ops, you see.
DK: Yeah.
JJ: Two or three tours of ops and they got the chop at the end sometimes, you know. Ridiculous. But, no. Then finally made redundant and that was it.
DK: So, what were you doing immediately after the war then? What career did you go into? Did you stay in the RAF?
JJ: No. I was — we had two weeks leave in which we were given our civvy clothes, I think, and a Trilby hat, and [laugh] yes, and back home again and went back to where I was more or less before, you see.
DK: Okay, okay.
JJ: At the Co-op and you just got on, but a very small cog in a big wheel, but nevertheless we were there.
DK: And just one final question. Just going back to your role as a gunner, what was your, this might sound a silly question, what was your actual role there? Is it just to keep an eye out of any problems or —
JJ: Oh yes. Attacking aircraft. You couldn’t do — you never fired at the ground or anything like that. It was to — you could fire. I’m not sure. I don’t think we could go through 360 degrees but through about most of it, in a wide arc, you see. Well you could fire independently of the rear gunner and, as I’ve explained there, yes we could probably give directions to the pilot to say, ‘Dive left,’ or, ‘Climb right,’ or something like that, you see, ‘Climb starboard,’ so as to increase the angle at which the fighter would have to occupy to follow behind the Lanc.
DK: To make it more difficult for the fighter to fire on you.
JJ: That’s right. Because they had to be in line with it. They couldn’t manoeuvre their guns.
DK: And from your two operations can you remember the flak at all coming up? The anti-aircraft fire.
JJ: Oh, you could see distant flak but we weren’t involved. We didn’t have any, as far as I remember, flak actually near our aircraft [cough] because, after all, we were a diversionary unit.
DK: Yeah.
JJ: So we were on — literally there but not on the sharp end, as it were, because that’s where they were crossing the Rhine into Germany.
DK: And what was your feelings once you’d landed back at base?
JJ: Euphoria, I suppose, and let’s go and have a pint somewhere or other, you know.
DK: So, post-war then, you’ve, you actually stayed in touch with your crew then, did you?
JJ: Well, what happened was, I get in touch, I kept in touch with the rear gunner. Why? I can’t remember. However, and so we spent cycling holidays together and all sorts.
DK: Okay.
JJ: Poor man was the last to go but the other people I wrote. Again, Justin’s got all this. There’s stacks of correspondence where I wrote to the, the police.
Ann: To try to trace them all.
JJ: Pardon?
Ann: To try and trace them all.
JJ: Yes, I wrote to the police to find out where our navigator had gone to because he’d been a policeman. And, yes. Some were more copious —
Ann: One worked in a bank didn’t he? So you wrote to a bank?
JJ: Well, that was Bill Jones.
Ann: Yes.
DK: And what was Bill Jones? He was the —
JJ: He was rear gunner.
DK: Okay. Rear gunner.
JJ: But the navigator, he went to lecture at Police College eventually, yes. And, er, I’m afraid these accounts are somewhere in those records Ann.
Ann: That my son’s got.
DK: Right, okay.
JJ: You see?
Ann: Do you want them? Would you like us to find them?
DK: Sure, yes, if you could. Yeah. I’m sure the IBCC would be interested. What we can do is take a copy of them.
Ann: Yes.
DK: For the books.
JJ: Would you find it tedious to go through all of it?
DK: No. I wouldn’t [laugh].
JJ: You wouldn’t?
DK: I find it very interesting.
JJ: Sorry?
Ann: Do you?
Dk: Oh yeah.
JJ: You would find it interesting?
DK: I’d find it very interesting, yes. I know the IBCC will.
JJ: Well, I’ll tell you what, let’s cast our bread upon the waters Ann.
Ann: Yes.
JJ: Literally. I’ve trusted this chap with my log book, right? I’ll ask Justin to bring back a whole bundle of stuff. Right? And then give it to you. How’s that? You can take a look through it.
DK: Yes. I can look at them again later. Okay, well what I’ll do, I’ll stop the recording there but thanks very much for that. That’s marvellous.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with John Joyner
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Kavanagh
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-21
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AJoynerJH161021, PJoynerJH1601
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.
Format
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00:35:20 audio recording
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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Germany
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1944
Description
An account of the resource
John Joyner was working for the Cooperative Wholesale Society in London and joined the Air Training Corps aged 16 in 1940. He later joined the RAF and trained as an air gunner, initially on Wellingtons and then on Lancasters as the mid-upper gunner. He discusses his training with 16 OTU. He was posted to RAF Upper Heyfield with 189 Squadron and flew two operations dropping Window before their skipper was taken off operations leaving them as a 'headless crew'. He was involved with Operation Dodge repatriating Army personnel from Italy. He returned to work for the Coop after demobilisation. He kept in touch with his rear gunner and organised a crew reunion in 1999.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Carolyn Emery
101 Squadron
16 OTU
189 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Lancaster
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bardney
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Upper Heyford
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/928/11171/ALinakerJ150924.1.mp3
3a460fac50d11fa36d2a5548c624bfeb
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
Linacker, Jack
Linacker, William John
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Jack Linacker (Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a rear gunner with 9 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-24
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. 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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Linacker, J
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DK: Right. David Kavanagh, International Bomber Command Centre interviewing Jack Linaker. Put that there.
JL: Yeah but you’ll have Jack Linaker. The name is William John.
DK: Oh.
JL: But everybody calls me Jack.
DK: Sorry. William John known as Jack Linaker.
JL: Yeah.
DK: Ok. I wonder if we could just, do you mind if you just pull one of these tables up? One of these. Just put that there and put the microphone on. I’ll put that there. You won’t have to shout then. Ok. So, so you were saying about the militia then?
JL: Pardon?
DK: You were talking about the militia.
JL: Yeah well —
DK: And the Territorial Army.
JL: Before the war started the government had a plan to call up young blokes like me. And I was called up. I had a medical examination and all the rest of it. I went to, had the medical examination and we were interviewed and, by, by these big shots like. And I said I wouldn’t mind being in the Guards. And this chap said —
DK: Right.
JL: ‘Well, you can’t be in the Guards Jack because you’re not tall enough.’ He says, ‘Join the artillery.’ So, he put me down for the Artillery. WelI, I thought that was great you know. So, anyhow, I was called up to go up to Bishop Auckland. To the Artillery.
DK: Yeah.
JL: And I went. I took it down to the steelworks and they sent it back. They said, ‘You’re not going. You’re staying here for the simple reason we’ve got that and we’ve got women coming in and you’ll be able to teach the women.’ So I didn’t get called up. And then eventually the war started. And the women come in to the steel works and there was me teaching women little jobs that men did. And I wasn’t, I wasn’t quite on — I think I was about twenty. I wasn’t twenty one but anyhow whilst the women was there we had we had rationed the chocolates and things like that. We could get it. And then anyhow these women they was very good to us all and all the rest of it. And the next thing is they told me I have to be transferred and they transferred me to Kettering furnaces.
DK: Right.
JL: And it was the worst bloody job I ever had in my life. I’m not kidding you.
DK: So how old were you when you started in the steel works then? Sixteen?
JL: We, when we come to Corby from Northampton we had nothing. My father was out of work. And he got a job as a work chauffeur.
DK: Right.
JL: So I’ll be about sixteen or seventeen.
DK: Right.
JL: When we came to Corby.
DK: So you’d be about sixteen or seventeen working in the steel.
JL: Yeah.
DK: Corby. Yeah.
JL: And I did get a job straight away. Of course, the steel, the Germans were still building the steelworks. And I biked to Kettering, and I got a job in Kettering where they made furniture. And then when, round about Whitsun time the bloke says, ‘Jack, I’m sorry. We don’t want you anymore.’ So I went back to Corby. Went down to the local dole place. They said. ‘You’re just right. They’re taking young lads into the steel works.’ So, I got a job in the steel works. And I’ll tell you what. Men were teaching me and they was on, one or two blokes who knew all about it but most, most of the chaps had come down from Scotland.
DK: Right.
JL: Where they’d had it, had it rough. So I never picked up the wages like, like the beginning of the steel works. So the first thing I did, I had to, in them days you handed your money over. I handed my mum over and she give me ten shillings. The first thing I did with that ten shillings, I went straight into Kettering and put the ten shillings down on a fifty bob suit.
DK: Right.
JL: The fifty bob tailors. And then the fifty bob tailors was bloody good in them days. So, anyhow that was it. In that time I used to go into Kettering. I did a bit of dancing and all the rest of it and I picked up a young lady there. We got on alright together and all the rest of it but one night when I was taking her home in Kettering her old man come out and he said, ‘If that’s one of them buggers from Corby he can bugger off.’ So anyhow, I said, ‘I’m not from Corby. I’m from Northampton.’ So he took me in. We had a cup of coffee and all the rest of it. I said, ‘I’ve missed the bus.’ He said, ‘You can borrow my bike.’ But that was the end. The Kettering people didn’t like the blokes from Corby. So anyhow, eventually I did take, take the job in Kettering. But it was the worst job I ever had. In the meantime I got married.
DK: Right.
JL: And I had to live with her mother. She told me, ‘If you marry me you’ll have to,’ But she wanted me to marry her because she was only eighteen and I was twenty or twenty one. But anyhow we got married. And the job I had in that place was bloody horrible. So I went straight down to the Labour Exchange and I volunteered for the RAF.
DK: Right.
JL: So, they filled in all the forms and all the rest of it and they sent me to Cardington. They sent me to Cardington. I passed the exam and all the rest of it. They interviewed and they said, ‘Right. We’ll put you down as a flight engineer.’
DK: Can you remember what year this would have been? Had the war started by this time?
JL: The war had started by that time. It would be —
DK: 1940 sort of time.
JL: You stay there.
[pause]
DK: So it would have been 1942 then.
JL: Yeah. So anyhow, as I said I went and had the interview and I had to come home. And they put me down for a flight engineer. And I was married. I was living with, with the mother in law and all the rest of it. And I thought this was, it was alright but the money was no good. Eventually I wrote to the RAF to call me up. And they did. And they sent me down to the RAF Regiment. And I went over to the Isle of Man and did training with the RAF Regiment and all the rest of it. And then eventually I was in the RAF Regiment and then others, others was volunteering. They wanted aircrew and all the rest of it. But I don’t know why, I never bothered about it. Then all of a sudden it come to my head and I went to see the adjutant. I said, ‘Look, I’ve got a paper here.’ I’ve got it still in there. I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind going aircrew.’ So he said, ‘Why not?’ So, he sent me up to London. I had an interview and I think I stayed at one of the posh places up London and they says, ‘What did you — ’ I says, ‘Well,’ I says, ‘I didn’t know what to do.’ So anyhow, he says, ‘Right. We’ll send you down.’ And they sent me down to the RAF Regiment, and I was with them and then all of a sudden I went and saw the adjutant. I said, ‘Look, I’ve got this bloody paper here. Aircrew.’ So he said, ‘Right.’ He sent me up to London again and the next thing is I was training to be an air gunner and I trained at, over the Isle of Man.
DK: Right.
JL: And from that on I met a friend of mine, Bunny Rothwell. And when, when we’d passed our tests we were sent out to Desborough way to our IOU and then we went and trained on Wellingtons and things like that.
DK: Yeah.
JL: You know.
DK: So when was your training first of all in the air? Was the Isle of Man — ?
JL: Yes. Well, the first time we went training in the air it was on Ansons.
DK: Right.
JL: And they had turrets on the ground and all the rest of it and that’s how we, how we trained. And then —
DK: So you trained on the ground first of all.
JL: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: And then in the turret in the, on the Anson.
JL: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DK: So what were your targets in the air then?
JL: Pardon?
DK: What were your targets? Your training targets.
JL: What?
DK: What were you shooting at?
JL: Well, they used to put a plane in the air with a bloody great big trailer on the back of it.
DK: Yeah.
JL: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
JL: We used to shoot at that.
DK: And try and avoid the plane.
JL: Yeah. Yeah. Of course the bullets was covered. All the rest of it.
DK: Right.
JL: And that would be on [pause] that would be Ansons.
DK: Right.
JL: That would be about 1944 on Ansons. And [pause] then they sent us to an OTU but we was on Wellingtons. And from Wellingtons, well we had the, I must admit we had the time of our lives because we used to bugger off when there weren’t anything else. And the next thing is, the next thing is —
DK: Is that where you met your crew?
JL: No.
DK: Oh you hadn’t met your crew yet.
JL: No. No. First of all they sent us to, we was on Wellingtons. And then they sent us to a Conversion Unit. And I don’t know why but I arrived a bit late. And they seemed to be all crewed. Crewed up. So when I walked down there the first bloke I met was Bunny Rothwell. And I was at air gunner’s school with him. So he says, ‘Just the man, Jack. You can come. You can be in our crew.’ He says, ‘We want a rear gunner.’ He said, ‘I don’t want [laughs] I don’t want to be the rear gunner,’ he said, ‘No. You. I’m the mid-upper.’ So, Curly Read was the pilot. And that’s how I got crewed up. And then —
DK: So this was on 9 Squadron was it? Or before? Before then?
JL: Just before then.
DK: Before. Ok.
JL: So we was in an OTU.
DK: OTU right.
JL: But we was training on Wellingtons.
DK: Right.
JL: Then we went on what they called Conversion Unit.
DK: Ok.
JL: And then we went over on Stirlings. The [pause] everybody hated flying in Stirlings. The aberration of the air force. So anyhow —
DK: You didn’t, you didn’t like the Stirlings then.
JL: No.
DK: No.
JL: So the next thing is we got called up they sent us to 9 Squadron.
DK: Ok.
JL: The best of it is when we got to 9 Squadron the bloody place was empty. So we went into the sergeant’s mess. So we said to said to the young, somebody in there, ‘Where are they?’ They said, ‘Shhhh top secret. They’re in Russia.’
DK: Right.
JL: So 9 Squadron was in Russia.
DK: The Tirpitz.
JL: We went, we went down to the local pub. The Jolly Sailor. And everybody in there, they knew, ‘Shhh top secret. They’re in Russia.’ And they, 9 squadron had flown out to Russia to get the Tirpitz because of that. But, ok. They was there. So, alright, they didn’t get it so when they did come back they brought a load of Russian money back which was worthless. So anyhow —
DK: No vodka.
JL: Yeah.
DK: No vodka.
JL: Anyhow, when we got back like, we got crewed up and all the rest of it.
DK: So which base was this then? Which RAF station? Was it Bardney?
JL: Yeah.
DK: Bardney. Yeah.
JL: And then we got crewed, we got a crew. Curly Read was my first pilot and we crewed up. And then [pause] right. We, we really, really enjoyed it at Bardney. That was around about 1944.
DK: Ok.
JL: And we’d already been [pause] we’d had already been to Munich.
DK: So where was your first?
JL: We’d been to, we’d been up to Norway.
DK: Right.
JL: To the fjords. The idea was to get hold of the boats that do that. So we had, whilst we was there me and my mate Bunny Rothwell we had, you know we really enjoyed ourselves. We used to go down to the local pub, The Jolly Sailor . Which ain’t there anymore and that. So when we, we carried on, we did a few flights and then we come back. It was very, oh we’d been up to Norway. We’d come back and it was very very foggy. He overshot the runway and he tried to get around again and he crashed. I fell out the rear turret. And the next thing is I was laid on the bloody floor in mud. The next person I saw was Bunny Rothwell. So we went over, saw Bunny. And as that one bloke stepped out of the plane and he fell down. And then another one come out. He fell down. I pulled the parachute cover up one of them and that was when the navigator and the bomb aimer, they was, they was killed. The pilot, we couldn’t find him. But he’d gone through the canopy. He was over, way over there but he was still alive but he had a [pause] skull. And the wireless operator he had a fractured skull. So that, that was him gone. 1944. Just before Christmas. So we moaned and moaned and moaned. They was, they was going to take them two lads back to where their parents was. And I managed to get home for Christmas, to Kettering. And that was on operation. We’d been to Stettin. Crashed on return to base. Then afterwards Ray Harris had these two air gunners and they got shot up well one day and he lost them. And then I joined Ray Harris and I flew, flew with Ray Harris right ‘til the end of the war. And he was the man who started the reunion. 9 Squadron. The first reunion we ever had was RAF Club Piccadilly. And he had a little bit in the News of the World about it. My mate Bunny Rothwell, he rung me and he said, ‘You’re going.’ So, we went down and we stayed the night at some hotel. We stayed at, went to RAF Club Piccadilly. When we, you’ll laugh at this bugger then. When we stayed the night we had the time of our life. We was going back to the hotel. When, when we got back to the hotel there was these women in the doorway and they said so and so and so and so, ‘You can have the night for us for thirty quid.’ And me and Bunny Rothwell bloody laughed our heads off. He said, ‘You’re a bit expensive.’ Anyway, we never had, we never took any notice of women. We just bloody went up. And we didn’t know half the stuff that went on in bloody London you see. So anyhow, we went, we went back to 9 Squadron and then well me, we had, any time we could get away we used to go down to Nottingham. Why we went to Nottingham it was always known that was the place for wine, women and song. This is true. One night we was down Nottingham. So we didn’t have to get back until the morning. So we booked a bed in, this is true, we booked a bed in at the YMCA. So, we went down to this pub, not a really nice pub. We’d become, I forget the name of it now. But anyhow, we was up the bar. We were having a drink. Now, this is a fact this lady come up to us. So she says, ‘Are you two boys in Nottingham for the night?’ We says, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well,’ she said, she was very nice, she said, ‘Well, my husband is in the Middle East and he’s a major. But it was always our intention if anybody was aircrew they could stay in our house for the night.’ We thanked her very much and all the rest of it. In the end we did go back to her place. So when we got to her place in Nottingham, lovely. Like that. The maid opened the bloody door and we sat down. We had a couple of drink and all the rest of it. So she said, ‘I’ll show you to your bedroom.’ She showed me to my bedroom. And then she showed Bunny to his bedroom. And we got up in the morning. We told her we had to be on Trent Bridge. We’d get the lorry back. So we went up. And we got up in the morning and there was the maid there. All that. And she come down and she said, ‘Don’t forget. Go back and tell your boys they could stay here anytime.’ So we went back and told the blokes about it.
DK: Yeah.
JL: And we had a laugh. Anyhow, when we got back we never bothered about going back to Nottingham. We’d go to anywhere. We’d jump and all the rest of it. And of course, I’d been married and my, and my wife had buggered off with the bloody Yanks.
DK: Oh no.
JL: So, that put the cap on married life. So anyhow, one day I went down to the mess. Picked up this letter and I read it. And I went straight down to the gunnery section. I says to Bunny Rothwell , you know the night we stayed at Nottingham?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Did you sleep with a woman?’ He says, ‘I did.’ I said, ‘And did you tell her your name was Jack Linaker?’ He said, ‘Yeah. I wasn’t going to tell her my own name.’ He says, ‘What’s the matter. I said, ‘She’s just died and left me all her money.’ [laughs] He tells the same story but the other way around.
DK: Yeah.
JL: So anyhow, we, I went. I started to fly with Ray Harris. He, he went out on the motorbike and he crashed the motorbike and hurt his leg. He never went flying again. And I flew with Ray Harris right until the war ended. We did a tour of all the places we —
DK: So how many operations did you do altogether?
JL: Pardon?
DK: How many operations all together?
JL: Counting leaflets I only did eighteen.
DK: Eighteen.
[pause]
DK: So how, how many were with the first crew and how many with the second crew?
JL: That, that was my second crew.
DK: Yeah.
JL: That would be 1945 would be the last time I flew on the squadron. Then I finished up in Singapore. Not flying but they sent me to Singapore and that, that was it.
DK: Were most of the flying night time? Was most of the flying during the night?
JL: Pardon?
DK: Were they daylight operations or during the night?
JL: During the night.
DK: During the night.
JL: I don’t, I don’t think [pause] I think I did one daylight raid.
DK: Right.
JL: Over in France.
DK: Did you, as an air gunner did you ever fire your guns while on operations?
JL: Once.
DK: Once.
JL: Once I fired them. Once. But the best of it is when you, when you went out with a squadron and that, the, the Germans could put up a Lanc, pull up a Lanc and they put it in the bomber stream. So, and also if anybody was tailing you you’d tell your pilot you were being tailed. He’d either dive to starboard or port you see. And one night a Mossie was there. And I said to him, ‘If that Mossie doesn’t get off our tails I’ll give him a shot.’ Anyhow, the Mossie, the Mossie buggered off and all the rest of it so that was it. And when I think about it and all the rest of it you know, I was a lucky bugger.
DK: The one time you did fire your guns can you remember what you were shooting at?
JL: Yeah. We saw this bloody Dornier come in but he was at quite a distance. So I told the pilot. I says, ‘I’ll give him a shot.’ And I did. And the next thing is he buggered off so we never saw him again. And the next time — I did fire once more. I’ll tell you what. We, we were going over. I think it was to Munich and they’d put the flood lights on. And I turned the guns down and threw a few shots at the —
DK: The searchlight.
JL: Searchlight.
DK: Searchlight. Yeah.
JL: And they went out and that was it.
DK: So, was, was your role then as an air gunner to be more of a lookout? To warn the pilot of dangers.
JL: Pardon?
DK: Is your role as an air gunner to warn the pilot of dangers?
JL: Well, the role of, the role — this is a fact. The role of a rear gunner. He had a life of four hours.
DK: Right.
JL: That’s what they said to that. So you’ve got to be lucky because many a time they get hold of the rear gunner and all they do is throw meat out. Now, one night, before, before we went on the squadron there was this pilot come in with a [pause] it was either a Hurricane or a Spitfire and he crashed. They couldn’t get him and he was screaming. Well, one of the blokes come out with his arm and he, he fired his gun straight into that because they couldn’t get the pilot out. And killed him.
DK: Oh dear. So how, as, as all these years later as you look back on your time in the RAF how do you feel about it now?
JL: The time I had in the RAF I did, I did try to stay on. Of course I was a warrant officer. And the bloke said to me, ‘You’ll drop a rank.’ And I said no. I’ll stay on but no drop. And that’s when I come out. Because I’d got to drop a rank. I wouldn’t have minded staying on if I didn’t have to drop a rank but I did. And I come home and I’d got, I’d got my job back in the steelworks and a bloody good job and all the rest of it. And then my father fell out of work. Me and my wife bought him a taxi and he run a, run a taxi. And then when that, I packed up the job when my dad died. I packed up my job at the steelworks which I shouldn’t have done and run the taxi business. And I should have bloody sold it out there then. So I didn’t.
DK: Do you look back on your time in the RAF as proud of that time or is it — ?
JL: I look back on my time in the RAF. I enjoyed every minute of it. I probably, I would have stayed on if I didn’t have to drop a rank.
DK: Yeah.
JL: But today you get different views. Now, we are always on about these migrants coming over and all that. When I think about it you see the little babies being pulled out. And I want, I look, I want to know, they would have been much better off staying in their own country. And I I look at children. Unfortunately, we never had any children what with one thing and another. It was something to do with the wife but we tried to have children and didn’t. But there was always kids in this house. And there’s that little girl up there. She would have stayed here. A relation of ours. This is me personally. Every child when they’re born should be baptised. Why they should be baptised? You never know what that child wants to grow up to be. So, like one of them who married in to royalty. He was baptised but he wasn’t confirmed. That. But he had to go and get, do it before he got married into royalty. But I still say I believe and sometimes I wonder why do I believe? But —
DK: Ok.
JL: It’s one of these things. I love to listen to Songs of Praise on Sunday and things like that. I do go in to church. I do say prayers. And sometimes it makes you wonder where was God?
DK: Yes. Very true. Ok. I’ll just pause.
[recording paused]
JL: Those electric clothes. You know, we was well looked after.
DK: So you had electrical —
JL: Yes.
DK: Overalls.
JL: What we used to do, we used to plug in before we got into the aircraft. In that. Got them warmed up and that and then we plugged ourselves in.
DK: So you felt very confident in the Lancaster then did you?
JL: Oh yeah. Never worried me, flying in the Lanc. I’ve seen one or two packed up flying. There was one bloke he’d done sixteen trips and he’d had enough. And they stripped him. Left his brevet on and stripped his tapes off of him because he refused to fly anymore.
DK: Right. So —
JL: And he’d done sixteen. And there, we used to go in to the mess sometimes and there was this bloody bloke he got his ticket. He was trying to feed the ducks on the bloody wall. And there was another bloke. He was in the, and he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t wash. And two of the blokes took him down to the showers. Washed him. Brought him back. He still refused to wash and we reckon he got his ticket in the end. He wouldn’t wash.
DK: So, the, the crash you were returning from Stettin?
JL: Stettin.
DK: Stettin when the aircraft crashed. And, and the crew, and the crew killed.
JL: Two of the crew was killed. That was Whitey and the bomb aimer. The other one was smashed in the head and all the rest of it but I, I was the first one to fly again. Bunny Rothwell, he started flying again. Then he went out on a motorbike and hurt his leg and crashed. He never flew again. So I was the only one that carried on flying until stopped. I had to go.
DK: What about —
JL: I had to go training somewhere and —
DK: So the bomb aimer was killed. And the pilot was killed.
JL: No. The pilot was —
DK: Bang on the head.
JL: Yeah.
DK: Oh. So was the flight engineer killed or —
JL: Yeah. The flight engineer was killed.
DK: The flight engineer and the bomb aimer were killed.
JL: Yeah.
DK: And the others all wounded.
JL: Yeah.
DK: Were you hurt yourself or —?
JL: The two was killed and I was alright. I managed to go home for that Christmas.
DK: Ok. It happened just before Christmas didn’t it?
JL: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DK: The 21st of December. So you were flying again back in March.
JL: Yeah.
DK: And that’s with Harris, I see. Yeah. So Flying Officer Read never flew again.
JL: No.
[pause]
DK: Ok.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Jack Linaker
Creator
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David Kavanagh
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-24
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ALinakerJ150924
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:36:08 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Jack Linaker was working in a reserved occupation as a steelworker before volunteering to join the RAF. He was originally told he would be trained as a flight engineer but as delays were frustrating he began training as a rear gunner. He joined 9 Squadron and crewed up with his friend who had been through the training with him. After one operation their aircraft crashed on return to base. The bomb aimer and navigator were killed and the pilot was wounded. Jack went on to fly with a new pilot who had lost his own gunners.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Kettering
England--Northamptonshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
crash
faith
Lancaster
Mosquito
RAF Bardney
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/859/11101/AHarrisIR-SW180324.2.mp3
9079e793b890b29a429fceba459dd629
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Harris, Pat and Frank
Pat Harris
Iris R Haris
I R Harris
Frank Harris
Stanley W Harris
S W Harris
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Iris 'Pat' Harris and Stanley 'Frank' Harris. Pat Harris's brother Flight Sergeant Jack Carter (576282 Royal air Force) was killed over Germany flying from RAF Bardney 22 March 1944.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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
2018-03-24
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. 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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Harris, IR-SW
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DB: Today, which is the 24th of March 2018 at 14.45 it’s Denise Boneham interviewing Pat and Stan Harris at their home in Diss. Pat, would you like to tell me a little bit about your brother’s service?
PH: Yes. He went in to the Air Force straight from school when he was almost seventeen. He went as a an apprentice, a toolmaker but the instruction was shortened because of the war and then immediately he’d qualified, he volunteered for aircrew and he became a navigator. And he was operating from Bardney in Lincolnshire.
SH: 9 Squadron.
PH: 9 Squadron, and he was with two Australians in the crew and one Canadian and one young man who was only eighteen. I didn’t know the other two at all. And then he was reported missing and unfortunately we didn’t know until after the war what had happened, which was a great strain on my mother who was home alone because I was already in the Wrens. And we finally found out that they had crashed in Germany and then they were buried after the war in Rheinberg and we have visited that cemetery which is beautifully kept. And it was great loss for my mum because there were three of us girls and one son so that was a bit sad.
SH: It was a long distance existence.
PH: My mother was living on her own. I didn’t have a father, and when I went in the Air Force err in to the Navy both my sisters were married so she was home alone. And I hadn’t been in, I was only seventeen and a half when I joined up so I’d only been in the Wrens about six months when he was reported missing which was a great shock being away from home and I really felt it greatly. My mum used to listen every evening on the wireless. They used to have a list when they heard about prisoners of war that, and she hoped that his name would come up but it didn’t. In fact, somebody of Jack’s age who had also been reported missing she heard his name which filled her with hope, but it wasn’t to be. So we didn’t know anything until the end which was pretty grim for my mum.
[recording paused]
PH: Yes. When Jack came on leave sometimes the Australians came, and in fact I have a treasured little photo of the pilot with my niece who at that time was a little tot of two, and I’ve got the snapshot here which is rather sweet. Yes, we knew them and sometimes I took Jack and the two Australians to the Kodak dances which I used to go to religiously [laughs] and, you know we loved having them. It was all very sad. I can remember, and he was a navigator, when we used to walk home from, if we’d been to a dance and he used to be pointing out the various star formations to one of the lads, Alan. And it was all very interesting to have them there and hear bits from their lives but they didn’t talk about a lot of what was going on of course. I didn’t realise it was 9 Squadron. They did talk about Bardney, and they were quite happy there and we have visited since. Since we’ve been up here we have been there but there’s more or less nothing to show which is a bit sad. But we went into the church there so it was nice to be able to point to where they’d been. Also of course his name is in the Cathedral, in the books there and they did, you know turn the page for us to see it which was rather nice.
[recording paused]
SH: Go on.
PH: Lincoln Cathedral. As a family we did visit Rheinberg quite often. My mother went until she was a bit too old. My eldest sister went regularly every year with the organised group until she was too old. So, we kept in contact and we were very very pleased with the condition of the cemetery which was beautifully kept.
[recording paused]
PH: Not the parents of one of the Australians that we knew, but a family friend in Australia who had also lost their son. And when I was back home having been discharged they came over because they wanted to see where he had trained. He was an only child, and where he had trained and that sort of thing. So they came to visit us on their travels on behalf of Alan’s parents. So that was interesting. It was nice to meet them.
[recording paused]
PH: The reason my brother went in to the Air Force in the first instance was because when he left school he had an idea that he would like to be a GPO engineer but he had to be eighteen, and he was only just seventeen. And my mother would not let him dawdle around for the next year and perhaps lose interest in things. So his second choice had been that he would like to go in to the Air Force so, and that’s why he became an apprentice toolmaker.
SH: You could say he was flying on Lancasters in 9 Group. In 9 Squadron.
PH: Oh, yes. He was flying on Lancasters in 9 Group. And I had only been in the Wrens about six months when we heard that he was missing, and quite a shock. He was then twenty one or twenty one and a half and it was rather sad that he had written to me a very long letter which I still have, when I went in to the Wrens telling me what to do and what not to do [laughs] and how to behave. I still have that letter. And I did get a letter from him after he was, just after he was missing. I’d just heard and this letter came and I had sent him a letter which was returned to me as well, which was sad. His name was John Carter but he was always called Jack, he always had been Jack and I have seen his name of course on the Memorial. And the Australians, the two Australians in Jack’s crew. One came from Melbourne, and one came from Broken Hill but I’m not sure which way around that was. But they fitted in very well when they came home with us and on the way home when we’d been to a dance my brother used to be pointing out the stars to the other two and what they meant which was quite interesting. Their names was Jimmy Jubb and Alan Johns.
[recording paused]
SH: When I joined the Air Force [pause] Oh God. In, in about, let’s see in about 1941 I joined the Air Training Corps in Harrow. And that was before there were several Air Training Corps squadrons around that area. And I stayed there, in there before going in to the Air Force. One of our civilian instructors took us and when I say us the football team, the cricket team and athletics to an airfield just outside London and he arranged for one of his colleagues who was stationed there to provide a Wellington for the day and to take us in twos. Fifteen of us. Fifteen others. So I put my hand up quickly with my friend Peter Robbins, he died just after the war in an air crash and we went up as the first two. We did one circuit and came in and landed because weather conditions. So out of all the people who went there for that day only two of us had a flight by a Polish pilot. And the civilian instructor had brought a fountain pen that he was going to give to the pilot at the end of the day and I always remember him saying, ‘What do I do with this now?’ [laughs] That was first flying. And from then on I went in to the Air Force under the category of PNB, pilot, navigator, bomb aimer. I got ten months deferred service, although I went in after six months with another course and it wasn’t long after that that all the training of pilot, navigators and bomb aimers was stopped. They’d got too many and all they wanted at that time were air gunners or wireless operator/air gunners. So I remustered as an air gunner and passed up, passed out in Dalcross in Scotland. From there I went in to a Wellington training course. I was a [pause] I’ve forgotten the name of the title anyway and we did a course at Silverstone and from there we posted. Oh, we converted on to Lancasters at Cottesmore, but by that time both the war had been ended and I did, so I didn’t, didn’t do any operational flying. And then after that, after the Jap war ended I went on to transport for about a year and a half and then was demobbed. Oh yeah. At, at Cottesmore we started flying on Lancasters, and there were two, there were ten, ten crews each of seven men in the course and one night in a circuits and bumps operation one of the Lancs crashed and they were all killed. But the crew that were killed there were seven, there were six officers in the crew and one rear gunner as a sergeant but that rear gunner because he was stationed with the officers and he had nowhere to go in the evening he always booked in with us. With my crew. And he went, he reported sick the day before that crash to go with my bomb aimer to meet a couple of WAAFs in, in Oakham, Rutland and he survived of course but the man that, or the crew that took his place, a warrant officer, he and the six officers were all killed. That’s just about a month after the Jap war ended. I remember that the pilot of that plane who was on our course he was getting married in two weeks time from that time. Yeah. That’s all. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. During our time at Cottesmore we were told that we were being trained for Tiger Force which was the British Government to send a force of RAF, Army and Navy out to the Far East to back up the Americans who they recognised had done so much for us in Europe. So that’s another point I never got to really [pause] To driving, yeah. When I came off flying I had another year and a half to do, to spend in the RAF, Air Force and we were able to choose the next, next part of the RAF training that we went in to. So I put down transport and I was sent up to a place called Dishforth, RAF Dishforth in Blackpool, and we trained on civilian cars. Austin 6s. And passed out there and was posted then to a place called Hinton in the Hedges, where they were preparing all sorts of vehicles. Every lorry you could think of was being serviced. And every day we would report there to drive them up to Manchester. Somewhere north of the Manchester and I think they were being issued to the French government. And then after that I was given the job of driving the army Matador with its trailer, eight wheel trailer, and we were clearing all the radar equipment all around Cornwall and Devon because it was being destroyed by the salt and the sea situation and I’d been sent out to there and collect them and bring them back to Welford near Reading. And then after that if course I was demobbed.
[recording paused]
SH: We went down to Sutton. Sutton Bridge. Do you know Sutton Bridge? I ended there. Yeah. And the other place we went to was an Army place up in Yorkshire. Now, I’ll just say, well it’s not much to say about demob really is there?
[recording paused]
SH: Oh, my goodness. When the war ended and my, one of my best friends who was, he had been a bomb aimer we, we more or less lost contact because he got married whereas I hadn’t been married. But somewhere six months to eight months after that that I met my wife Pat and it turned out that she had been in the Services. Demobbed a little earlier than me. She was in the Wrens and so we had quite a bit to talk about with the RAF and the Wrens. We were finances. Finances? Not finances.
PH: Fiancés.
SH: Fiancés [laughs] We were fiancés for about a year and now of course we’ve been married for seventy years. Our [pause] takes place in about —
PH: September.
SH: September this year. When I, when I first met Pat she gave up her dancing career and when I gave up I’d already, in order to meet people I’d joined a Cricket Club and I merely packed that in. So we then went on to live in a small little flat. From that flat we went in to her mother’s house because her mother had retired and gone down to Port Isaac in Cornwall. And from there we moved to North Harrow, another house. From there we moved to Ickenham, a much bigger house. And when I retired we came up to Diss in Norfolk, and we’ve made another move within Diss to get a smaller house to cut out the garden and the staircase and here we are in a small lovely little bungalow.
PH: My mum worked in an estate agents. She was a secretary and up came what we called the flat but actually it was the upstairs of somebody’s house. So we had the front room and a bedroom and the other bedroom had been turned in to a kitchen. But there was nothing at all in it except a cooker. We had no hot water. We used to go to my sisters to get bath once a week.
SH: I should have said all that actually, shouldn’t I? [laughs]
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Pat and Frank Harris
Creator
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Denise Boneham
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-03-24
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AHarrisIR-SW180324
Conforms To
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Pending review
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00:19:54 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Navy
Description
An account of the resource
Pat Harris’ brother John ‘Jack’ Harris joined the RAF straight from school as an apprentice. During the war he volunteered for aircrew and trained as a navigator. He was reported missing when Pat was serving in the Wrens. His death was finally confirmed and he is buried in Rheinberg Cemetery.
Stan Harris joined the RAF and began training as an air gunner just as the war was ending. During his training at Cottesmore the gunner of another crew who was a sergeant reported sick in order to meet some WAAFs along with the bomb aimer in Stan’s crew. While he was absent his crew including the officer who had replaced him were all killed.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
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1941
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
ground personnel
killed in action
Lancaster
navigator
RAF Bardney
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1156/11714/PThompsonS1601.1.jpg
fdbbac2ecccceaae191c5f43ca857fc3
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1156/11714/AThompsonS160712.2.mp3
d907dc0c5eda6817b961f27a6a485593
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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Thompson, Sam
S Thompson
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Sam Thompson. (1922 - 2022, 1083484 Royal Air Force) He grew up in Northern Ireland and volunteered for the Air Force. He flew operations as an air gunner with 103 and 9 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-07-12
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Thompson, S
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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GR: Morning. This is Gary Rushbrooke for the International Bomber Command Centre. I am with Warrant Officer Sam Thompson at his home in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire 12th of July 2016 and I’m going to hand you over to Sam. Sam, I know we’re in Lancashire at the moment but your accent is definitely not from Lancashire. Where were you born, Sam?
ST: I was born at Larne, just outside Belfast in Northern Ireland. County Antrim, Northern Ireland.
GR: Right. And did you grow up there? School there and everything.
ST: Oh yeah. I finished school. I think I was fourteen.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Fourteen was the, the age that you could leave school and start work. I think I did that now. I went to Magheramorne Cement Works where my father.
GR: Sorry?
ST: Magheramorne Cement Works.
GR: Cement works.
ST: There’s only two in Ireland. One in Northern Ireland and one in Southern Ireland.
GR: Right.
ST: They make cement. British, British Portland Cement Manufacturers.
GR: Oh yeah. I know who you mean. Yeah.
ST: Yeah.
GR: So —
ST: And I think when the war started my mother died.
GR: I’ll just backtrack. Brothers and sisters?
ST: Oh. I’ve got seven. I’ve got four brothers and two sisters.
GR: Four brothers and two sisters.
ST: Yeah. Two sisters. Yeah.
GR: And where are you in the hierarchy? Elder brother?
ST: I’m the middle one.
GR: You’re the middle one.
ST: Yeah. Yeah, I was the middle one.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah.
GR: What was growing up like in Northern Ireland?
ST: Well, we didn’t, we didn’t want for anything, Gary. We, we had, my dad had a good job and —
GR: Yeah.
ST: All our family had, and the cement works was, he was foreman and the eldest brother was manager of British Portland Cement Manufacturers. And I went. Started work as a, it’s called a flint picker.
GR: A flint.
ST: Yeah. Well amongst other limestone you get these hard stones. What do you call them? What do you call them? There’s a name. There’s a name for them.
GR: Right.
ST: It’s a hard flint. A bit of flint.
GR: Yeah.
ST: And they use that for different runs and I used to pick them from there and put them on this trolley that ran from underneath the conveyer belt. It was, it was alright. It was a little bit monotonous but —
GR: Yeah.
ST: And then my brother got promoted to undermanager and eventually reached manager. So I took his job and he was [pause] what the hell would they call it? [pause] Well, it was, it was a big conveyer belt and at the top was this bloody big heavy motor that brought the trolleys from the cement face or the limestone face.
GR: Yeah.
ST: And brought the limestone up to the crusher and it was crushed into cement.
GR: Yeah.
ST: So then I started there first and then I went I thought to myself one day, I said, ‘I’m not bloody stopping here. The war had started in [1934]. My mum died in 1939.
GR: Right.
ST: Yeah. So I gave myself a year so I thought to myself bugger this for a lark. So I’ll never forget my father standing at the door waving because the train went, the railway line was between this loch and my house and he was at the door waving me as I went to Belfast to join up.
GR: Oh right.
ST: In 1940.
GR: So had you made your mind up to —
ST: I’d made my mind up so I thought —
GR: To volunteer for the RAF.
ST: I want to join up in the RAF, so —
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah. So —
GR: Why the RAF?
ST: Well, I suppose it was a bit more bloody Brylcreemy you know [laughs]
GR: Yeah. Glamour boys.
ST: Class distinction.
GR: Yeah. I’ll be a fighter pilot. So —
ST: Yeah.
GR: So you set off.
ST: So I set off to Belfast —
GR: To Belfast.
ST: To join up and I went to Weeton just outside Blackpool.
GR: Right.
ST: Got all my kit together and then we went square bashing in Blackpool.
GR: Was that the first time you’d left Northern Ireland?
ST: It was. It was in that. And by Christ I was a virgin I was [laughs] And then that’s where my life started to be quite honest Gary.
GR: Yeah.
ST: I knew what it was like then instead of doing [unclear]. I mean I made up for it since.
GR: Good man. When you obviously went up to Belfast to join up were you with any friends or on your own or —
ST: No. I was on my own.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah.
GR: And your brothers. I don’t know whether they were older brothers or younger brothers. Did any of your brothers join up as well?
ST: No. No. There was only me.
GR: Yeah.
ST: They all worked in the, it was classified work.
GR: Classified work.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Producing cement you see for everybody.
GR: Right.
ST: Nearly all of my family worked in the cement works. It was there for everybody in Magheramorne to go to Magheramorne Cement Works.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Do you know what I mean?
GR: So out of the family.
ST: Of the family I was the only one who joined up.
GR: You were the one who joined up.
ST: There was a few joined up later on but I I ended up as aircrew you see.
GR: Yeah.
ST: They ended up as you know with trades. Different trades in the RAF.
GR: So from Belfast over to England and you said you arrived at —
ST: I did my, did my square bashing as they called it.
GR: Yes.
ST: At RAF Weeton. Then I went to there’s another one not very far from Weeton I went. Anyway, I was posted a few places.
GR: Doing basic training.
ST: Not knowing, yeah doing, yeah different places, doing. Then I thought to myself this is, they say they want bloody air gunners and wireless operators. So I said I’ll join up. So I went to join up as a wireless operator air gunner.
GR: Right.
ST: But I did alright in the theory but as a, I passed as an air gunner but I failed on theory as a wireless operator. I went to Yatesbury.
GR: Yatesbury. Yeah.
ST: Yeah. And did my wireless operators course there but I failed on, it was theory. Not so much practical. And then when I failed to make that I went as I joined up like a —
GR: So you were going to be a, yeah. You wanted to be a wireless operator air gunner.
ST: Yeah, and I failed so I went over as a straight air gunner.
GR: Straight air gunner.
ST: That was straight in. Straight into the tour without having to worry about it. Yeah.
GR: Yeah. Did you know then, obviously you didn’t know if you were going to be a mid-upper gunner or a rear gunner. Or —
ST: Well, I wanted to go to a mid-upper gunner and that’s what I finished up as.
GR: Right.
ST: But sometimes I felt, I felt uncomfortable cold in the rear turret. I changed over with the rear gunner and he come into mine for his little bit of warmth and [pause] and I went. I was posted to, and everything was sorted out as regards Weeton. I went to Porthcawl, Bridgend.
GR: Yeah.
ST: South Wales. And I ended up at 103 Squadron.
GR: Right.
ST: As an air gunner. Mid-upper. Mid-upper, yeah.
GR: What about the initial flying training? When did you first —
ST: Oh yeah. I went to Silverstone.
GR: Right.
ST: On Wimpies.
GR: On Wimpies.
ST: On Wellingtons. Yeah.
GR: Right. I’m just looking.
ST: Well, I think it’s in there but I —
GR: Yeah. I’m just looking through the logbook and I’ve got you were at Number 7 Air Gunnery School.
ST: Yeah.
GR: And your course finished around about the 25th of July 1942.
ST: Yeah.
GR: And then it looks as though you started flying training on Wellingtons.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Yeah. So yeah, July. July ’42. So when did you meet you first crew? How did you —
ST: Oh.
GR: How did you meet your crew and how did all that come about?
ST: I met them in the hangar.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah. He was Flight Sergeant Berry his name was. Ken Berry. Came from, I think he came from Southern Ireland. He was one of these la de da ones he was you know. But we soon, we soon gelled in.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah. We all met in this hangar and he come up and picked me for mid-upper gunner. Then he went around picking his bombardier and his engineer out of all the gunners that was there.
GR: Yeah. Yeah.
ST: Yeah. I don’t remember, I don’t remember much about my first crew. Although I did thirty operations with them.
GR: Yes. And I’m looking around about September 1942. You’re doing some flight training with Sergeant Berry.
ST: Yeah.
GR: As the pilot and —
ST: He was a nice big chap he was.
GR: Yeah. So 103 Squadron was a Halifax Squadron at the time wasn’t it?
ST: It was at the time and then they got these Lancasters and we all, we all stood around —
GR: Ok.
ST: The runway watching them come in. We counted nineteen of them. Nineteen Lancasters coming in.
GR: Yeah. Well —
ST: Not long after that we were all converted to Lancasters and —
GR: Yeah. Can you remember much about your first operation which was to Dusseldorf?
ST: To be honest, to be honest Gary they were just matter of fact.
GR: Yeah. How did you feel? I mean obviously you just qualified as an air gunner. You’re in your mid-upper turret. So you did your first operation.
ST: Yeah.
GR: No apprehension or —
ST: Well, I was bloody scared as hell but you didn’t show it.
GR: No.
ST: And anybody that says that aircrew wasn’t scared was a bloody liar.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Anyway, I had some, we had some dicey do’s you know like bloody we got shot up over the bloody Ruhr one day.
GR: I’m just reading here again in your logbook first operation Dusseldorf. Attacked by an ME110.
ST: Yeah. Yeah.
GR: Opened fire but no —
ST: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, we managed to get, get it shut out of the way but managed to —
GR: Yeah.
ST: Scare it off [laughs]
GR: So on your first operation you were attacked.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah.
GR: And quite an initiation in 1942. Dusseldorf, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven.
ST: Oh yeah.
GR: The first three operations.
ST: Yeah.
GR: So —
ST: We did, we did Berlin on the same day twice. It took, we took off at 12 o’clock. We were back about seven. That was, that was interrogation and everything else.
GR: Yeah.
ST: We went to bed. We were up again at bloody twelve. Briefing at three. We took off at five and we were back at twelve o’clock at night again. So we bombed Berlin twice on the same day.
GR: And —
ST: It’s in there. It’s in there somewhere.
GR: Yeah. I’m just, yeah 16th.
ST: Yeah.
GR: 16th and the 17th of January.
ST: Yeah.
GR: 1943.
ST: Yeah.
GR: And you had two trips just under eight hours each.
ST: Yeah. Yeah, that’s it.
GR: Twice to Berlin.
ST: Yeah. That’s it. Yeah.
GR: What was Berlin like?
ST: Bloody awful but I told you that, no. I wouldn’t say I wasn’t scared. I was bloody scared but I think you got used to it.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah. And I suppose there was a hell of a lot of bloody aircrew. I mean a hell of a lot of aircrew had it worse. Had worse.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Worse experiences than I had. I suppose I had a placid bloody two tours of operations. I mean we got shot up a few times but, we come back one day and we counted I think it was a hundred and forty five holes in the aircraft. And then another time we came back —
GR: I wouldn’t call that placid but —
ST: Yeah. Well, I mean it was [laughs] it was and you know the only, the only accident that happened to our crew was one of the little pieces of flak came in through the fuselage and hit the bomb aimer in the eye. That’s the only bloody —
GR: That’s the only injury.
ST: That is bloody good that is.
GR: It is.
ST: [unclear]
GR: Yes.
ST: Do you want the light on?
GR: No. No. I’m fine. I’m just looking. You obviously went to Milan.
ST: Oh yeah. We went to Italy. I think we did Italy three times.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah. And that was what? That was one of the times we went to I’m not sure whether it was Milan or Turin. It was one of them two. And we dropped our bombs and we were turning to come back over the Alps again and then that was a lovely sight that was. Coming in.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Over the Alps and going back and we were a little bit tired but all of a sudden I saw these little, little white specks in the front of us. I said, what the, ‘Skipper, what’s the, what are those planes in the front of us?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘It’s the Yanks,’ he said, ‘Coming in to —’ I found out later on that they were bombing Regency [Reggenza?] A place called Regency.
GR: Right.
ST: Further down south but over over to the right of Italy. I know where it is but I can’t.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Anyway, I said, ‘Oh bloody hell,’ I said. Then all of a sudden they were met by these bloody Focke-Wulfs and 109s and there I was sitting in my turret going around watching it you know. Going around at the same time. Getting back again as soon as we could. And they were getting shot down right, left and bloody centre.
GR: The Americans were.
ST: I said, ‘Look at that.’ Yeah.
GR: Yeah.
ST: The Yanks. The Yanks. I think they lost nineteen in that operation. Regency.
GR: God. Yeah.
ST: I checked up a little bit later.
GR: Of course, the Milan and Turin raids were daylight raids weren’t they?
ST: Yeah. Yeah.
GR: Yeah. So —
ST: Yeah.
GR: So you had a beautiful view of the Alps and a beautiful view of American aircraft being shot down.
ST: Yeah. Shot. Yeah. Yeah. We did. Most of them. Yeah.
GR: Yeah.
ST: But on 103 Squadron most was a night squadron.
GR: Yes.
ST: The second tour was mostly daylights.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah. But that was a bit of a special squadron as well. It was a sister ‘drome to 617.
GR: That’s right.
ST: But they took all the bloody —
GR: The glory.
ST: The glory.
GR: We could come on to 9 Squadron.
ST: Yeah.
GR: While you was at 103 I noticed that yes you did change over from Halifaxes to Lancasters.
ST: Yeah. That was early in, well on my first tour on 103 Squadron.
GR: Yeah.
ST: I think I did about eight or nine I think.
GR: Should I ask which aircraft you preferred? Was there any difference?
ST: Oh, well the Lancs, the Halifaxes were a bit more roomy.
GR: Yeah.
ST: The Lancs were, they were alright but you had that speed and height and they get you out of the way.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Where the Lancaster it was about two or three thousand feet below us but it couldn’t go any higher.
GR: Right. Was there much difference in the mid-upper turret between the two?
ST: No. No. No. I think I think they were Boulton Paul Defiants in the Lancaster and I think they were Frazer Nash on the Halifaxes.
GR: That’s it, yeah.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Yeah.
ST: That was the other one. It was a joystick.
GR: Oh right.
ST: Yeah.
GR: So one of them was a joystick.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Turning them about.
ST: The other one was a handlebar.
GR: Handlebar type.
ST: Yeah. Yeah.
GR: Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. So yeah. So I’m just progressing through your logbook. 1942 into 1943. Oh, they let you have Christmas Day at home. That looks good.
ST: Yeah [laughs]
GR: So, and —
ST: I got married. I got married in 1943.
GR: Right. Well, I’m just coming to the, what looks like the end of your first tour.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Yes, so you finished. Finished flying your first tour around about March 1943.
ST: Yeah. Yeah.
GR: So you got married in 1943. Who to?
ST: I got married. Well, I bloody had to poor wee bugger [laughs] She was a WAAF and —
GR: Come on. Tell me more.
ST: She was a WAAF. A WAAF in the sergeant’s mess.
GR: She was a WAAF.
ST: Yeah.
GR: In the sergeant’s mess
ST: A blonde. A blonde. As soon as I walked in the sergeant’s mess the first time I saw her she was at the hot plate. It was, there was a door for the waitresses to go in.
GR: Yeah.
ST: With the order and a door to come out with the order after you’d been served at the hot plate.
GR: Yeah.
ST: And she was standing taking, she was a cook. A cook in the sergeant’s mess. Oh, there’s a lot I could do for that blonde. Jesus, I never thought I’d be married to her for sixty one years. Yeah. So —
GR: Sorry, Sam. What was your wife’s name?
ST: Marjorie.
GR: Marjorie.
ST: Marj, yeah. Yeah.
GR: So your charms obviously worked on Marjorie.
ST: Eh?
GR: Your charms obviously worked on Marjorie.
ST: Oh, that did. Poor little soul.
GR: I think I’ll just pause it for a minute while Sam gets a photograph of Marjorie.
[recording paused]
GR: So you got married to Marjorie in 1943.
ST: ’43, yeah.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah. Yeah.
GR: Where was the wedding?
ST: The Registry Office in Derby.
GR: Right.
ST: Yeah. The Registry Office in Derby. I remember.
GR: Yeah.
ST: I remember that one. Her mother never did like me [laughs] Right until the day she died.
GR: Nothing wrong with aircrew so —
ST: [laughs] Yeah.
GR: Yeah. And I presume there was some children to follow.
ST: Oh, crikey. I had Maureen my eldest daughter. She lives in a bungalow over there.
GR: Yeah.
ST: ‘43.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Sammy, my eldest son. Sammy, you met —
GR: Yes.
ST: ’44.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Tony was born in 1946. My eldest son and then after that Sally, Karen.
GR: Yeah. So just working our way again through the logbook even though you’d been flying Lancasters for 103 Squadron they then sent you to Lanc Finishing School.
ST: Yeah. That was Silverstone.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Was that training other people or —
ST: Oh yeah.
GR: Yeah.
ST: We were taking this, they put me in charge of this group and I was a sergeant and I was taking this lot to the gymnasium. About thirty of them in, you know, in threes and up comes [unclear] come up with a bloody flag flying, ‘Stop.’ He shouted, ‘Sergeant.’ So, I bloody jumped back and went to see who it was. It was some bloody group captain or something. He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m taking these to the gymnasium. ‘Oh,’ he said, he says, ‘Right then.’ He says, and he had a look at my ‘39/45 star was on. That was the only one I had up on my medal. He said, ‘You’ve just been flying have you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ve just done a first tour at 103 Squadron, Elsham Wold.’ He said, ‘Would you like to go back?’ I said, ‘Well, yes, I would,’ I said, ‘But I’m supposed to be on resting for, you know finishing a first tour.’ Anyway, not long after that they asked me if I wanted to go to bloody Bardney for a second tour. And I thought to myself, God, what have I got to lose?’ And I went back and to 9 Squadron.
GR: So, 9 Squadron at Bardney.
ST: Yeah.
GR: I presume it was a different crew so you —
ST: Oh yeah. A different crew.
GR: Yeah.
ST: That was, it was an Australian crew I had then. Yeah.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah. An Australian crew. But —
GR: And were they a new crew? Or did you, were they already a crew when you joined? Or did you all —
ST: You know I am a little bit dubious about that. I’m just trying to [pause] Yeah, I think they were a crew then and they asked for me to, if I wanted to go as a mid-upper.
GR: A mid-upper gunner. Yeah.
ST: I said, yes I said. So I went down and finished. Finished my leave. He finished his first, no. Oh that’s it. I went with —
GR: Flight Sergeant Williams.
ST: Now, that was it. I did twenty with him and mine was finished. But I can remember something. Something happening or something and he ended up doing the last six with somebody else. So I don’t know what happened there.
GR: Unless Flight Sergeant Williams had done his full —
ST: Yeah.
GR: And he was tour expired.
ST: Yeah. Tour expired.
GR: So, so what was Bardney like? 9 Squadron at Bardney.
ST: Oh, it was, it was nice. Yeah. It was a good Squadron that was. Yeah.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Because at the time as you said earlier they were a sister squadron to 617.
ST: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we did all them special —
GR: Dropping the Tall Boy big bombs.
ST: Yeah. The only one that I —
GR: Yeah.
ST: Didn’t do was the Tirpitz. The first two attempts at the Tirpitz where they both, where they landed in Russia.
GR: Yeah.
ST: I didn’t go on that one. I think I was on holiday but then on the third one I think they sent us over on, was it October or something.
GR: Yeah. I’m just again just looking through the logbook to jog everybody’s memory. You’d done a few operations to Munster, Karlsruhe.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Just have a quick, quick, quick look. And at the time what a lot of people obviously don’t realise is you actually went to the Sorpe Dam.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Which was what the original Dambusters had done.
ST: Yeah. Aye, well they didn’t, they didn’t breach the —
GR: Sorpe.
ST: Sorpe. They missed it.
GR: Yeah.
ST: So they sent us back about October.
GR: That’s right. Yeah.
ST: And we breached it for them. So that was we sort of realised that we were just as important.
GR: Yeah.
ST: As that was.
GR: 9 Squadron. Dambusters.
ST: Yeah. That’s, that it. Yeah.
GR: Yeah. Yeah.
ST: And not exactly the 16th of May with the other big Mӧhne and Eder dam and the —
GR: Yeah.
ST: Sorpe and the other one that burst. But they didn’t do that on that op.
GR: Yeah.
ST: But you see —
GR: But then that operation does lead on to the 29th of October.
ST: Yeah. Yeah, it was somewhere around October.
GR: Yeah. Then you went to bomb the Tirpitz in Tromso Fjord.
ST: Yeah. They had tried two attempts at the Tirpitz but they didn’t do it. One of the chaps sent me that.
GR: Yeah.
ST: He charged me twenty quid for that and all.
GR: Just looking at the wall. A little bit of the Tirpitz.
ST: A little bit of the Tirpitz bulwark. Yeah.
GR: Yeah.
ST: It is nice. Twenty quid he charged me though.
GR: Yeah. Well, we’ll come back to the actual raid but after the war when the Tirpitz had turned turtle when it, when it was scrapped.
ST: Yeah.
GR: All the wooden deck which is, that is a little bit part of —
ST: Yeah. Yeah. The —
GR: All the local farmers used it for fencing. So all around Tromso all the fencing.
ST: Was it?
GR: After the war was made up from decking from the Tirpitz.
ST: Oh, bloody heck.
GR: So what was the actual raid like? Obviously, you took off.
ST: Well, to me it was easy.
GR: Yeah.
ST: To be quite honest.
GR: Because you flew up to Kinloss and then took off from Kinloss.
ST: Yeah. That was a bloody long, long run on one.
GR: Yeah.
ST: We stopped at Scotland to refuel.
GR: Yes.
ST: And we had the night there and then we took off in the morning again.
GR: Yeah.
ST: That, that wasn’t so bad. We come straight back again.
GR: And what was —
ST: Ours, ours was a near miss.
GR: Yeah.
ST: But I think, did we go in first or did 617 go in first? I think they went in first as usual and two of them hit the Tirpitz.
GR: Yeah.
ST: But we, I think they did say that ours dropped and caused it to capsize.
GR: Yeah.
ST: It was something to do with the vibrations or something.
GR: It was. Yes. And the grand, the Tall Boy bombs.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Were about twelve thousand pounders.
ST: And we had a near —
GR: Yeah.
ST: A near miss —
GR: And they reckon that even though the Tirpitz had been damaged.
ST: It was —
GR: Your near miss.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Or 9 Squadron when they dropped.
ST: Yeah.
GR: But then the, the near misses and the explosion.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Turned the ship over.
ST: Sort of was —
GR: Yeah.
ST: Was the, was the, yeah the instigator of, yeah.
GR: So we’ll have it on record that 9 Squadron sunk the Tirpitz.
ST: Well, we do say that don’t we [laughs]
GR: You knew that.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Yeah. And then obviously flew back via Kinloss.
ST: Yeah.
GR: And —
ST: Stopped overnight and then back the same day, the next day.
GR: Yeah. Yeah.
ST: It was bloody long. My bloody bum was frozen.
GR: Yeah.
ST: It was, it was numb by the time you came back you know.
GR: And back on the Tirpitz raid did you see any German day fighters? Any, you know Luftwaffe —
ST: No. Just a bit of flak. That was all.
GR: Flak. Yeah.
ST: I mean, as you say, as you read your history we were bloody lucky. And I was looking at it not a, not a week ago it came on here that they —
GR: Yeah.
ST: The day the Dambusters, but it was a different, different concept.
GR: Yes.
ST: They way they explained it to you.
GR: Yeah.
ST: And they said they were very lucky the fighters didn’t reach us there because a fighter Squadron.
GR: Went somewhere else.
ST: Either —
GR: Yeah.
ST: No, they went there. Saw there was nothing doing and turned and came back again. But that way, that time we were just on the way turning to come back home again. So they came up behind us but didn’t see us.
GR: Yeah.
ST: According to what that last —
GR: And of course, it was a daylight raid so —
ST: Yeah.
GR: Yeah.
ST: But the, as I say time was, you know I was following that. The pilot who led the raid, who led in the 109s and the Focke-Wulfs —
GR: The Focke, yeah.
ST: Yeah. You know. He seemed to know what he was talking about because he said that he got, he got as far, he didn’t get as far as the Tirpitz. He said when they realised that the raid was over so he turned back again.
GR: Turned back.
ST: To that bloody Air Force.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Air force where they were. That airfield where they were. I forget the name of it now. Where the fighter Squadron was.
GR: Yes. And I, I can’t. I can’t remember the name. So, yes. So your raid on the Tirpitz it was sunk and you got back.
ST: Yeah.
GR: And you got back well. More operations with 9 Squadron. It looks as though your second tour was completed.
ST: Yeah.
GR: On the 24th of February 1945.
ST: Yeah. I missed, I missed the last one that 9 Squadron did.
GR: Yeah.
ST: And that was the Eagle’s Nest.
GR: Berchesgaden. Yeah.
ST: Berchesgaden. I missed that one.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah. Yeah.
GR: Well, I have to read a little interesting bit in your logbook for that last operation which was the Dortmund Ems canal.
ST: Oh yeah.
GR: A bit of flak. Flea bites.
ST: [laughs] Oh well. Yeah. Flea bites.
GR: So what was flea bites? I don’t think I’ve seen flea bites written in a logbook before.
ST: We didn’t, they didn’t bother you so much you know. You got away from that one.
GR: Yeah.
ST: But we, I saw my bomb land at the end of the column and I could see it collapsing.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah.
GR: Yeah, so —
ST: That was, that was a daylight one and all.
GR: Yeah.
ST: It was. And we were lucky in a way as regards fighters you know. Other than those two connections there.
GR: Yeah.
ST: And lucky we got away with it. Mind you we had, we were all coming home one night, I think it was at night time. Yeah. Coming home one night and it was getting near the dawn and we were in cloud most of the time. So he eased up through the cloud and just before we broke the cloud I looked up and on my starboard and I said to the skipper, ‘Skipper, what the hell is that big thing on the, on the port side?’ He said, ‘What big thing?’ He looked out because he could see it from his window. He said, ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said [laughs] So we didn’t know what to do. Whether to have a shite or a hair cut. A big Condor.
GR: Oh.
ST: And that was one of their Coastal Command.
GR: Yes.
ST: And it was going out when we were going out. We were on the same, on the same course. And I could see every bloody gun on it. Well, we didn’t know what to do whether to bloody dive or get shot down or —
GR: Or go after it.
ST: Or go after it but it was a bit too bloody big that one was you know. Three oh, 303s against bloody their armament.
GR: Yeah.
ST: So we kept in tow with them for about ten, fifteen minutes and then the skipper said, ‘Well, I’ll ease down off the end of this cloud.’ So we went back in to the clouds again. And it just carried straight on.
GR: Yeah. Yeah. Was it like a reconnaissance aircraft?
ST: One of their, yeah. One of their Coastal Command ones.
GR: Yeah.
ST: It was a Condor. I did a little bit of research on it and that was heavily armed that one was.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah.
GR: So two tours completed for Bomber Command.
ST: Yes.
GR: Fifty operations.
ST: Yeah. I got recommended for the DFM but I didn’t get it [laughs]
GR: Oh dear.
ST: Yeah. I wasn’t exactly, I wasn’t exactly an angel of virtue you know. I was a little bit of a hard boy. Fly boy. You know. I liked my women and —
GR: Well, yeah. You settled. You settled down with one for sixty one years.
ST: I did settle down. Yeah. I had a couple of those years I must admit. I’ll hold my hand up. I had a couple of those years.
GR: Yeah.
ST: You know. Yeah. But I didn’t, I didn’t hurt her that much.
GR: No. That’s obviously. Yeah. So where was you on VE Day? As the war came to an end you’d finished your two tours. Can you remember where you were?
ST: I think, I think I went to bloody Porthcawl.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Near Bridgend.
GR: Training again or —
ST: Yeah.
GR: On leave or —
ST: Yeah.
GR: I think that was all we did. Yeah.
GR: And then what happened after? What happened after the war?
ST: Oh, I stopped in. I went, they sent me over in Germany for three years. I was in Germany for three years.
GR: Right.
ST: Yeah. Near, near a place called [unclear]
GR: With the Squadron or —
ST: No. On my own. I went as a, I was a MT officer.
GR: Right. Motor transport. Yeah.
ST: Yeah. I was, I was in charge of the MT section there.
GR: Right.
ST: Keeping everything on the road and —
GR: Yeah.
ST: Having a good time.
GR: And did all your crew go back to Australia?
ST: Yeah. They did.
GR: Yeah.
ST: But they’re all, they’re all dead now. I can’t understand it. I’m the only one left. Yeah. Yeah, the skipper died a little while ago. Then the bloody engineer lived a good while. The wireless operator he died as well. He was an Australian
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah. The rear gunner. Little Titch his name was. He went back up to Newcastle. He lived in Newcastle for a while after. I think that’s where he came from.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Yeah. He died.
GR: But twelve years in the RAF was it?
ST: Yeah.
GR: You did twelve years. Yeah.
ST: I came out in 1952.
GR: Yeah. And then you came out. Yeah.
ST: And I went to Rolls Royce and I was working at Rolls Royce.
GR: Right. What did you do at Rolls Royce?
ST: You know the turbine blades?
GR: Yes.
ST: They well milling them from a block. A block that size. Well, the little ones, turbine blades were that size.
GR: Yeah.
ST: Then they kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and the big engines they were that size. And they used to get them just one big block of cast iron.
GR: Yeah.
ST: And they used to do it from scratch in these special machines.
GR: Yeah.
ST: So [pause] and then I finished up. Came up here. I finished at Mullins. They made cigarette machines.
GR: Right.
ST: So that was a good, they had a very good pension. Mullins did. I did twelve years.
GR: Yeah.
ST: I did twelve years down there.
[phone ringing]
GR: The phone’s ringing so I will say Sam, thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Sam Thompson
Creator
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Gary Rushbrooke
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-07-12
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
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AThompsonS160712, PThompsonS1601
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Pending review
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Format
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00:33:52 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Sam Thompson grew up in Northern Ireland and volunteered for the Air Force. After training he completed two tours as an air gunner with 103 and 9 Squadrons. He took part in operations against the Tirpitz and served in Germany after the war.
He was on the operation that attacked the Sorpe Dam and the Tirpitz. Coming back from one operation he looked out and a Condor aircraft was flying parallel and he noted the armament it carried as they worried about how to get out of the situation.
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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Germany
Great Britain
Norway
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Sorpe Dam
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1945-02-24
103 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
Halifax
Lancaster
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
RAF Bardney
RAF Elsham Wolds
Tirpitz
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/502/8396/ACuthbertJ160507.1.mp3
85f4b9114692e4eb7f754f12301f44e0
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
Cuthbert, John
J Cuthbert
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Cuthbert, J
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with John Cuthbert (3006396 Royal Air Force) and two photographs. He flew operations as a mid-upper gunner with 189 Squadron from RAF Fulbeck.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-07
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
GC: This interview is being conducted on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archives. My name’s Gemma Clapton. The interviewee today is John Cuthbert and the interview is taking place at Ramsey in Harwich on the 7th May 2016. Also present is Sandra. I’d like to say thank you very much for talking to me today and could we start. Just tell me a little bit about life before the war and how you joined up
JC: Before the war. Yes. Well, I, I’d left school for some time and in fact had had a couple of jobs when I went with a friend of mine to Chelmsford, joined a radio course, a government sponsored radio course at the Chelmsford Technical College which I found a bit difficult at times although the radio side was ok. The idea was to train people up to take the place of technicians who had gone into the air force so it was a crammed four month course. In fact I came eleventh out of forty so I was quite pleased with that and some stayed on at Marconi’s at Chelmsford and others went on to Murphy Radio at Welwyn Garden City which I did. I went on to Welwyn Garden City where there was a very large ATC squadron. I was going to join the navy because it’s a naval port here and my friends were in the navy but I joined the ATC and we heard there was some flying going on at a little airfield called Panshanger, about five miles away and we used to hurtle off on our bikes and get a flight in a Tiger Moth. So that was the very first bit of flying I did in a Tiger Moth but I got ticked off for moving the wrong bit because you were sitting behind the pilot and he was a bit grumpy that day I think and subsequently I attended a summer camp with the ATC at RAF Westcott which was an Operational Training Unit with Wellingtons and we had the chance of flying on a cross country in one of those so I flew a four hour cross country in a, in a Wellington, which was great. Shared the crews flying rations. Chewing gum and barley sugar which we never had of course and I thoroughly enjoyed it and I volunteered for air crew at that time and you could go up for Cardington. You know it was RAF Cardington you attended for two or three days for medicals and all sorts of things and I didn’t think I’d pass to be honest. I didn’t think I’d pass the medical. On the train going to Cardington there were chaps sitting opposite me, rugby players and all this sort of thing and I felt about that size and I thought hmmn but in the event I did get accepted and some of the big chaps didn’t. Strange isn’t it? Yes, I got, I saw later on a document later on which said PNB material which is pilot/navigator/bomb aimer but I wanted to go in as a wireless operator because it was my trade and it was my hobby and so I duly got called up for training as a wireless operator/air gunner and completed all the initial training which incidentally didn’t get off to a very good start because the first Monday of the new course you were put on fatigues. Not a very good start for the course but, and there were various jobs from sweeping the NAAFI. The worst one was delivering coke to all the huts because there was hundreds of huts. Guess which one I got? I got the coke delivery with some other lads so we had to load up this flat truck lorry with sacks of coke and deliver them to the huts around the camp and half way through the afternoon it started to rain so you can imagine what state we were in and part of the route took us past station sick quarters and at the end, it was a lot of huts put together and at the end of one of the huts was a conservatory type affair and inside were two or three chaps in beds, white sheets, sitting up, reading books. I was wet, dirty and I said, ‘You lucky blighters.’ The next minute a lorry went around a corner, a sharpish corner and a load of sacks came over and propelled me on to the road and the medico came dashing out from sick quarters ‘cause they saw it happen and I wanted to get back on the lorry but they wouldn’t let me do that. They dragged me into sick quarters and laid me out on one of their nice clean beds, examined me, couldn’t find anything broken. They said, ‘Well you’ve got to be kept in in case you’ve got concussion,’ so I finished up in sick quarters, in a bed, in a room on my own feeling rather sorry for myself but I thought never wish anything on yourself. [laughs]. I thought that was very funny afterwards but of course I had to start a new course then because I’d missed, I was in there a week. Nothing wrong with me and they let me go. No, I didn’t get any sick leave. I was just discharged into the, into the course. So, anyway the rest of it went all ok. I got fatigues again of course the next Monday and I thought this is like Groundhog Day you know but it wasn’t. It was, I did some sweeping somewhere or other which was quite mild. I enjoyed the course though. We had to work hard. At the end of it we were to go on leave and then return or be posted to a radio school which was the bit I was looking forward to but instead of that we were called to the NAAFI for a meeting with a lot of top brass who came down and said, ‘Well, you chaps, you’ve finished this course,’ he said, ‘But I’m afraid that the radio schools are pretty full and you’ll be kicking about for some while,’ he said, ‘But what we do want is some air gunners. They’re fitting new turrets to the underside of the aircraft.’ This, well they did experiment with this but it wasn’t continued with. That was a lot of eyewash. There were no such thing during the war of mid under turrets. Not on British aircraft. They were just short of air gunners and they wanted the whole course to remuster. We would have been sent on leave, returned to Bridgenorth where we’d done our training. There was an elementary air gunner school there and on completion of that we would go to air gunners school and if we passed we’d be sergeant air gunners and the next move would be Operational Training Unit and then a squadron and this appealed to most of them. I didn’t particularly want to be an air gunner. I was good on the old keys you see and a friend of mine, I’d better not give his name but came from Brightlingsea said, ‘You’ll be the only one left here, John if you don’t remuster. You’ll be all on your tod,’ he said. So, in the end I agreed and remustered with the rest of the course and my friend Jack he later came in to the hut where we were getting ready to go on leave and he was a big chap, rugby player and he was crying. His eyes weren’t good enough for straight air gunner so he had to stay. Isn’t that strange? I met him after the war when I was on Transport Command down at Holmsley South. I met him in the sergeant’s mess and he’d got his signals brevvy up. I said, ‘Oh you made your signals course then Jack.’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘What did you do? Did you get on ops?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was instructor on the Isle of Man.’ I said, ‘You got me flying over hunland,’ I said, ‘Getting shot at left, right and centre and you’re enjoying the fleshpots of Douglas.’ ‘That’s right, John,’ he said. [laughs]. I said, ‘Well if I’d got the chop I’d have come back and haunted you.’ [laughs] But anyway he did, he did do the course and, but he never got on a squadron. So there we are but the rest of it was quite exactly as the top brass said. We went on leave, we came back and did Elementary Air Gunner School at Bridgenorth. Went on leave, came back and we were posted, I was posted to number 3 Air Gunner’s School at Castle Kennedy near Stranraer in Scotland. We used to fly up and down Luce Bay shooting at a drogue towed by a Martinet with a very frightened pilot, [laughs] I imagine he was anyway. Although there was a long, a long cable between the towing aircraft and the drogue that we fired at but that was all good fun. The only trouble was that we that were on Ansons, flew Ansons there. There was the pilot, the instructor and three UT air gunners so you each took it in turn to go in to the turret and fire and the ammunition was tipped with different coloured paint so that you knew which gunner had made which holes in it or none whatever the case may be and it was a strange little, it was a Bristol turret. As you elevated the guns up you went down and vice versa so it wasn’t, it wasn’t a lot of room in it so if you did anything wrong you got, it wasn’t easy. There would be the instructor yelling at you from the astrodome further up telling you to get the seagull out of your turret and all this sort of thing but it was very enjoyable and I passed out third in the course which I was quite pleased with at that considering I didn’t want to be an air gunner to start with. There was one unfortunate, well one unfortunate incident while we were there. The pilots were all Polish and they all wanted to be Spitfire pilots so when we’d finished the exercise, whatever it was, it was a lot of very low flying which was all great fun but this particular day this one went into a farmhouse and they were all killed and the three UT gunners in it were the only Scottish lads on the course and they were the ones in Scotland. They were the ones that were killed. I had to attend the boarding ceremony on the station. So, so that was that. We duly went on leave as sergeant air gunners or most of us did anyway and I think we went, we went, yes we went to Operational Training Unit then at Upper Heyford but that was where the ground schooling was done there which was quite a lot of that as you can imagine. Then we went over to the satellite airfield at Barford St John near Banbury of Banbury Cross fame, for the flying in Wellingtons so I was back in the Wellingtons. That was good fun. We crewed up there of course. That was quite remarkable, the crewing up. It’s, I think we were the only country who did it. You were just all put in to a hangar and said get on with it. Gunners, pilots, navigators. Well, I was in, I had an air gunner mate so we were together so there were two air gunners and the skipper was looking for two air gunners and we sort of collided with him and that was that. He was a big tall chap. I’ll have to show you a photograph. Wore a moustache. In fact he was known as The Count on the squadron because he could have been a Count. He was a public schoolboy but he was one of the lads, you know. He wasn’t, he wasn’t at all snooty with it and we found a bomb aimer and a wireless operator, Bill. And we hadn’t got a navigator. There was one who we eventually had but he’d been on a previous course and the aircraft had crashed and he’d walked out of it. We thought that might have been a bit of an omen [laughs]. Some funny things you think of. Anyway, Frank Johnson was the navigator and he was a damned good navigator. Anyway, we were crewed up and the first flying was circuits and bumps, of course with an instructor. First time we’d all flown together and I always remember the first, after the first hour of circuits and bumps the instructor got up to get out down the old ladder and we all pretended to follow him [laughs] because the skipper would be taking us but he turned out to be a very very good pilot of course and we did our day circuits and bumps and then our night circuits and bumps which was a bit more difficult ‘cause you got in to a Wellington in the front, under the nose and the propellers were very close to the fuselage and you had to go dead straight to the aeroplane otherwise you’d rather lose your head. In more ways than one. But that was fun and then we went back to Upper Heyford for ground school. It had a very complicated fuel system the Wellington and more than one crew were lost because they’d thought to have run out of petrol and in fact there was another tankful somewhere but they’d opened the wrong cocks, you know. So this, I forget, I think his name was Fry, Flight Lieutenant Fry, he was a genius. He’d fixed up a ground replica of this petrol system with pipes and levers and everything and fans and we all had to learn it. We all had to learn the fuel system by doing this, you know, this model. If you did anything wrong the fans would stop. So we got quite good at that but we didn’t have any trouble with the Wellington. The only thing that concerned me a little bit about them was at night when you did a night cross country or any night flying. They’ve got fabric covered wings, the Wellingtons. They were made of a geodetic construction but it was all fabric covered and they filled the tanks up in the wing and invariably some got spilled all over this fabric and as you took off sparks would be flying past from the engine and if you were in the astrodome looking out you wondered why you didn’t catch fire but they never did of course. It was flitting past too quickly but that was, that was an interesting point about the Wellington but we used to have some good cross countries in those. Four hours as a rule and a nice meal when you, before you took off and another one when you got back so that was good. From there, we all passed out there with flying colours and the next thing, I think we went to a, kicked our heals for a week or two at a, some place waiting for, but the next move was to a Heavy Bomber Conversion Unit on Stirlings, big four engine things but we couldn’t go directly. We had to wait out turn and eventually we were posted to RAF Swinderby on these confounded Stirlings which were very, very fine aircraft but the ones we had were well past their sell by date and I don’t think we ever flew without something going wrong and we were jolly glad to see the back of Swinderby I can tell you. All sorts of things happened. I mean, one of the worst ones I was in the rear turret, we were doing night circuits and bumps, two hour detail and we’d done about half of it and we were doing a landing and I thought, hello the old runway is still whizzing past fast. The brakes had failed. There was a yell from the skipper, ‘Brace, brace.’ Well, I was in the rear turret. I couldn’t do much but just hang on. The runway finished, the grass started, we went through a hedge, across a field and finished up with the bombing hatch over the Newark Lincoln Road so we were out of there a bit smartish because they had a habit of catching fire, these Stirlings. We plodded back to the peritrack and the transport came around to pick us up and we thought we were back to the mess for a meal now. No. No. Around the peritrack to another Stirling to finish the detail so we did another hour of night circuits and bumps so that didn’t, didn’t encourage me at all with those things. On another occasion the, it had an electric undercarriage, not an hydraulic one and if there was any failure at all with it you had to wind it up by hand or the flight engineer did. Well, no we hadn’t got a flight engineer there. Or did we? Yes, we picked him up, that’s right, we picked a flight engineer up at Con Unit. We didn’t, we didn’t have a flight engineer at the Operational Training Unit. They were still learning about engines somewhere. But yeah this damned thing wouldn’t wind down so we were pealing around for half an hour trying to get the undercarriage down so that was interesting. But the worst things that happened to us in a Stirling was on a cross country. This was October, November time and it was over Scotland and we were on our way home, on the homeward leg and the starboard outer engine overheated. Apparently they get, the oil gets super cool and thick and doesn’t circulate so the engine gets, and it’s called coring apparently. Anyway, they had to switch the engine down but that was alright but what wasn’t right was the propellers wouldn’t feather. It wouldn’t feather and stop so it was windmilling so not only had we lost an engine it was still being driven by windmilling causing a terrific lot of drag. Fortunately, we’d got the screen flight engineer with us instructing our flight engineer and he assisted on the way back. We called up. It was a system during the war called Darkie. They wouldn’t allow it now but the posters was of a little black boy. ‘If you’re in trouble call Darkie.’ Well we called Darkie but he wasn’t in unfortunately so we called Group or got on the radio and called Group and they said that we should try and zigzag home going near airfields which we did. We eventually got back to Swinderby and came in to land and the skipper, he’d learned or heard in the mess that you took the trim off if you lost, you know, were in really serious trouble with an engine and it would, it would straighten, help to straighten it up but it didn’t. It had the opposite effect and we swung towards a group of trees and there was a, ‘Brace. Brace,’ from the skipper again and the navigator, one of his jobs when you were landing and taking off was give the airspeed and a Stirling stalled at ninety miles an hour and I can hear Frank’s voice now saying, ‘Ninety. Ninety. Ninety,’ and I was just waiting to crash and then suddenly it was, ‘ninety five,’ and apparently the screen engineer and the skipper were pushing on the rudder to keep it straight and we overshot, went around again and came in safely and landed and when we got back to the control room they said, ‘We didn’t expect to see you lot again.’ So, [laughs] so that was the dark humour I’m afraid but that put me right off Stirlings that did. We were very glad to see the back of them. We did finish the course and I think we lost about five crews while we were there. All crashing. Not altogether the crew’s faults. You know, just and that invariably happened on a Saturday night and that was a Saturday night when we did our little performance so perhaps we were intended to go in. I don’t know. But the next posting was to RAF Syerston. Number 5 Lancaster Finishing School and it was like going from a clapped out old banger to a Rolls Royce, flying Lancasters. Yeah, that was really good. We had some very enjoyable times there. We had to do quite a lot of flying. Practice high level bombing and fighter affiliation where you have a camera instead of a gun and a Spitfire makes attacks on you and that’s all good fun. It is for the gunners and the pilot but not for the rest of the crew. They’re being chucked about all over the place. There was one amusing little incident while we were at Lancaster Finishing School. We came across, one afternoon coming back from somewhere or other, we came across a Flying Fortress flying back to its base somewhere I suppose and we came up to it and we had to slow down to keep, not keep up with it but to keep station with it and to exaggerate this and to show off a bit we dropped the undercarriage and put some flap down to slow the Lancaster down and we did the usual thumbs up and all this sort of thing and then up with the wheels, in with the flaps and zoomed off. I reckon they thought, ‘Show offs,’ but there we are. I’m afraid the skipper did do that a bit. The one I didn’t like him doing though was, which he did quite a bit on the squadron if we had to do any air sea firing we used to chuck a flame float in the water and then we’d fire at it as we went around but if he spotted any ships he generally introduced himself, you know, by going very low but what I didn’t, what I was scared of, he was going to do this with Royal Naval ships ‘cause I know from my experience at home that anything that flew was fired at. I don’t think they’d heard of aircraft recognition. They just fired at everything that flew. In fact they did bring a Fortress down in the river here during the war. It was out, stuck in the mud for ages wasn’t it? So, I had visions of the skipper doing a show off beat up on a destroyer or something and getting a few rounds up our backsides but on one occasion there was a whole line of, it was a very nice sight, of destroyers in line of stern and we got down the same level as level as them and flew along and so I think they flashed good luck to him on the aldis lamp but I had visions of them opening fire on us. I thought, I hope they know what a Lancaster looks like but there we are. So we passed out there ok and then, yes the skipper was anxious to get on a Pathfinder squadron. They did one tour of forty ops if they survived that long and you had to learn each other’s jobs and all about marking and all that sort of thing which we did. We swotted it all up and we duly went for our interview. It was a wing commander, I think, took it and we were all gathered in front of him answering questions and the skipper, his name was Clem Atting, by the way, his name. He had a scarf on. Weren’t supposed to wear scarves like that and the wing commander said, ‘Are you warm enough, Atting?’ ‘Yes, thank you sir. Yes. Very well.’ ‘Well take that bloody scarf off,’ he said [laughs]. So our interview went downhill from then on and needless to say we did not get to a Pathfinder squadron. We were posted to 189 at Fulbeck-in-the-mud we called it. Well when we got there we were issued with gumboots and I’d never, never heard of that before. We were issued with gumboots. So there we were and we were in wooden huts there though. They weren’t nissen huts. They were wooden huts and I remember, you know, that’s right we went there with four other crews because we went in convoy with another truck. There were four crews ‘cause they’d lost four aircraft and when we piled out of the aircraft er out of the trucks waiting to go to some billet somewhere I was hailed by a resident air gunner from the other side of the road, ‘Hello John.’ He said, ‘You’re a chop replacement.’ [laughs] I thought, ‘Good afternoon to you too.’ Well, we know we were obviously or else we wouldn’t have been sent there but I thought what a greeting, you know. We eventually got in our huts and I can very clearly see it now. The beds weren’t made up obviously, it was just, I just laid the biscuits out, flopped on it ‘cause we were a bit weary by that time and I looked back and on the wall there were twenty eight ticks. Was it thirty or, thirty well I think I’ve got in my notes somewhere that it was reduced to thirty three but I don’t think it was thirty three when we were there. I think it was thirty. Anyway, I thought crikey if this crew who were in this hut had done twenty eight, they were on their twenty ninth and they were shot down what hope have we got, you know? We don’t know anything ‘cause it is, it’s luck though really. Its luck. Absolute luck. I know you’ve got to know all your stuff but it is really luck whether you go down on your first or your last. I mean there were very experienced crews who were shot down when we were on the squadron. On one, on our first raid to Horten Fjord in Norway the master bomber was shot down who was in charge of the raid but there we are. Yes, there was another crew in the hut and they were just finishing theirs. They were just finishing. In fact they did finish their tour while we were there but they left behind their flight engineer who was slightly bad I think. Leo Doyle, I think his name was. He had a revolver in his flying boot and he didn’t want to go on leave and have a rest like you did after a tour. He wanted to join 617 squadron, you know and carry on which he eventually did and I met him after he’d been on it for a while and he said, ‘They’re mad,’ he said, ‘They’re quite mad.’ He said, I think he said they were doing a raid on Flushing and they were in line of stern in daylight and they were just getting shot up as they went in, you know. They didn’t take any evasive action. They were just making sure they hit the target so I mean he was, he was a bit flak happy but that was almost too much for him I think [laughs]. Dear of dear. I always remember him. But yeah, we, we’d, as I say our first, first raid was to Horten Fjord. It was a U-Boat base for the North Atlantic and we duly did our stuff there. It was a long sea trip and the Pathfinders marked the coast where we crossed, where we should cross in case you got off course over the sea, made sure you crossed at the right place but we avoided that like the plague because there was a night fighter station just around the corner at Kristiansand and we thought they could well be buzzing around there so we crossed a bit further east but I think we sighted a ME109. I think that was the occasion I sighted an ME109 astern of us but it didn’t attack us and we kept quiet as well. The second one was not quite so clever. That was at Ladburgen on the Dortmund Ems canal. It was at a place where the water was higher than the surrounding countryside and so the banks were very important and 5 Group’s job was to go there periodically and knock them down and we were, fortunately or unfortunately, that was our second raid. That wasn’t the first time they’d been there but obviously that was our first one there and there was a terrific lot of flak. Naturally they wanted to stop us. They got a bit grumpy about us knocking all this stuff down but we got, we got back ok. I can’t remember. I’ve got some notes here about them but the next one was to Bohlen and that was an oil refinery. Most of our raids were on oil refineries because at that time the Germans were very short of oil towards the end of the war and no we didn’t do much of this flattening of cities and things. We only did a couple of those I suppose. But Bohlen, that was a long trip but uneventful. The next one was to Harburg which was eventful. It was a great big oil refinery on the River Ems. It was both sides. it was a huge, huge place and we were routed in past the Frisian Islands who all had a go at us as we went past which I thought it was a bit uncharitable and then we turned right smartly, right over the middle of Hamburg which again, I thought was a bit silly because they all thought we were going to bomb Hamburg and of course everything went off there and I could see from the turret that the whole place was well alight. It was like day. Flames and flares and everything. It was, it was like hell. You know. Like flying into hell and as we came in I noticed that there was a JU88 poking about. It was so bright I could see the markings on the wings. I warned the skipper. I said, ‘A JU88 starboard quarter up. Prepare to corkscrew starboard,’ and at the same time Eddie Jordan the bomb aimer was giving his, ‘Left. Left. Steady. Right a bit’ and at the same time as he said, ‘Bombs gone.’ I said, ‘Corkscrew starboard. Go,’ as this blooming thing came in and I opened fire and it broke away. I don’t know whether I, I think I must have hit it but he didn’t hit us. That was the main thing. The purpose was to evade it, avoid it. Not to shoot down German aeroplanes but to not get shot down yourself but obviously if you could hit him you would. But we dived out of there at a terrific speed and into the darkness and comparative quiet and the skipper got his, got the heading for home, you know, or first leg of going home and off we went . I think the rest of the, when we got back to Fulbeck we found that there were four, there were four missing. Four of our lads were shot down including some very good friends of ours who arrived on the squadron with us you know, when we arrived. Flying Officer Smith. I can’t remember his Christian name. It was D. It might have been David but I’m not sure now but he did a remarkable thing. He, whilst doing this fighter affiliation at Lancaster, at er when we first got to the squadron you think you’re all ready to go into ops but you don’t. You do quite a lot of training and the drill was when you’d finished the exercise was to take the Spitfire back to Metheringham where it came from because he wouldn’t know where he was and then you know, a guy would go down and well on this occasion a Spitfire formated a bit too close and took about seven foot off the wing off the Lanc and Smithy baled the crew out, one of whom always said he’d have time to do his bottom straps up on his parachute. Well he didn’t. He went straight through his parachute harness and was killed when he hit the ground of course and the Spitfire wasn’t damaged and followed the parachute out to see but there was nothing on the end of it. And Smithy landed the Lancaster safely and it had, you know he was on the Harburg raid with us and he got shot down.
GC: You talk about your crew. Tell us a bit about what they were like. What kind of characters they were.
JC: Well, the other gunner, he was a good friend of mine. Much the same sort of type. Bit shorter than me. The flight engineer was quite old. Bert Shaw. He, he must have been nearly thirty. We were, I mean, I was nineteen, eighteen or nineteen. Skipper was twenty two. The others were about that age. I think I was the youngest but Bert, he was very nice. He was married and he was, he drove a fire engine in civvy life but he was very domesticated and he ironed our collars and things for us. He loved doing them. It was just as well because we couldn’t do it and the bomb aimer, he was Eddie Jordan. He was a nice chap. Very well spoken and educated. Like the skipper. Not that we weren’t but you know, he, they were a little bit, I think, better than ourselves. The wireless op Bill Mobley he was a good mate of mine. Got into a few scrapes. They borrowed the, him and a mate of his borrowed the flight commander’s motorbike one night and pranged it. Finished up in Wroughton Hospital and the next day the skipper said, ‘I think we aught to give Bill a look,’ and I said, ‘Well are we going over in the car?’ ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘We’ll fly over and so we did a low level attack on Wroughton Hospital. How we didn’t get, well he did get caught eventually. He, he, when you take off in a Lancaster you climb steadily until you get a good height before you bank. The skipper thought he was in a Spitfire and used to go off like, unfortunately one day the station commander was in the control tower when this Lancaster flew just overhead and he said, ‘Who’s that?’ ‘Flying officer Atting, sir.’ So Flying Officer Atting was sent to the naughty aircrew school at Sheffield for a week or was it a fort, a week I think. Flight lieutenants and above, flying officers and above went there to the naughty boys school and they had great fun there apparently. The first night he was there they, it was in a famous old hall and they took the fish down from the cabinets, set fire to some furniture and were toasting them apparently [laughs] But we went on leave so we thought it was a jolly good idea this Sheffield business but when we got back off leave and Clem came back and he said, ‘I’ll show you where we were.’ So we hopped aboard our aeroplane and duly went over to Sheffield and he showed us at very close quarters [laughs] the school.[laughs] It’s funny we didn’t all finish up there to be honest but you know, we should get into bits of bother but some things we got away with and it will probably catch up with me when they hear all this but some of it, when we were on ops we dropped stuff called Window. You’ve probably heard all about it. Strips, well it was in packs, packages and they were put down the flare chutes, down the chutes and when they got in the slipstream they burst open and scattered. Well, the skipper and the bomb aimer had girlfriends in this village not too far from Fulbeck and one afternoon we were stooging around flying and they thought they’d give them a look and I mean a look. Dear oh dear. We, I remember looking up at the church tower as we came past and we Windowed the village and they must have known who it was because at that time, or hitherto the markings, we were CA 189 squadron, our squadron letters were CA in big red letters on the aircraft followed by the letter L or E or whatever and they decided to outline it in orange which I thought was a bit unfair really but anyway they were done and of course they stuck out like a sore thumb. I don’t know which raid it was.
[pause]
Ah yes I think it was a place called Lutzkendorf, another oil refinery job and we were diverted to Manston because of fog everywhere and the next morning we took off to go fly back to Fulbeck and again this Window stuff, dropped by somebody else before it had burst open hit all our aerials and took them away so we couldn’t contact anyone on RT and another one of the other squadrons said, ‘Well follow us, you know. We’ll take you back.’ So we did. What we did we didn’t know was that this other character was going to visit his auntie on the way back [laughs] which was down in a valley so we duly followed him down and saw his auntie and flew back to Fulbeck and later on in the day there was a complaint. The adjutant received a complaint from a wing commander who was having his breakfast looking down on two, two Lancasters. Reported us. And the adjutant thought it was great fun and tore the complaint up into the wpb. So that was that. He was really good at that. He looked after us very well, did our adj. I got caught at home on leave cycling without my hat by a snotty provo flight lieutenant who didn’t know the front, the back of an aeroplane and I had to show him my pass of course, 189 Squadron, Fulbeck. The next day when I got back from leave the skipper said, ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘The adj has had a complaint from the provo marshall about you.’ I said, ‘Oh?’ ‘Cycling without a hat.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘It was duly filed.’ Considering most, a lot of his time was taken up writing letters to the families you know so to get one about someone not wearing a hat I can only just imagine what he thought. Well there we are.
GC: Sounds like you had more fun than serious stuff.
JC: Well we did have a lot of fun. We, the skipper was always, I mean you’d be wondering what to do one afternoon and the door would burst open. ‘Let us leap into the air,’ he would say. I don’t know what sort of excuse he gave to anybody to get and so off we’d go. Mind you there were official high level bombing practices and fighter affiliation with a Spitfire. One afternoon we were coming back from a high level bombing exercise which we couldn’t do because there was cloud everywhere and this Spitfire came up, went like that. And I went like that. And I said to the skipper, ‘I think he wants to play games,’ so we sort of meant to play around a bit and he went off and started making attacks on us and for half an hour we chucked that Lanc around the fire, around the sky and it was great fun. Well, it was for the gunners as I say and for the pilot. The rest of the crew were groaning and moaning. Hanging on tight. And I think Eddie Jordan had a bit of tooth trouble so that as we dived down that started making his tooth ache. So they didn’t think it was very funny but at the end of it he got in right close and went like that as much to say, you did alright. So that was good fun. But it wasn’t all like that you know. There was some dodgy bits. Really dodgy bits. Yeah. One of the other daylights we did was to Essen. That was a thousand bomber raid and that was quite a sight and we never did see the ground. It was covered in cloud and we had to bomb on a sky marker. Can’t remember the name of it. Wanganui flare I think they called them but you had to bomb on a certain heading otherwise you’d be all over the place and when we left, I always remember this, when we left the cloud which had been all flat there was a big bump in, over Essen and we never even saw the ground. So that was one occasion where we did what you might call open bombing, didn’t have a specific thing to hit. After that came Wurzburg. Now this was the, we didn’t, we didn’t go to Dresden. I’ve got a note in my diary that the boys have gone to Dresden. We didn’t. We were obviously stood down for some reason. Probably been the night before because you didn’t get to do two consecutive nights ‘cause you couldn’t really ‘cause you didn’t get up till lunchtime. You’d have to get up, have lunch and go straight into briefing so there was generally a night free but we went to Wurzburg which was a big open city and I don’t know why we went there but after the war I read it was troop concentrations. The Russians wanted us to sort it out and that was the only time we carried incendiaries, carried a cookie which was a four thousand pounder like a huge big dustbin and incendiaries and when we left the place the place was alight but on the way back we got into a bit of a spot of bother we were diverted, well we were routed home between Karlsruhe and Stuttgart. Two places to avoid like the plague. And we were poodling along in the dark minding our own business, halfway home and suddenly bump, the radar searchlight went straight onto us. The blue one. So I thought, ‘Hello. We’re in trouble here.’ That’s hastily followed by five ordinary ones so we are immediately floodlit and that was smartly followed by all the ackack guns in what we found out later was Karlsruhe. We’d gone right slam bang over Karlsruhe. We’d been flying straight and level for ages so they must have had us tuned up a treat so how they didn’t knock us out of the sky I’ll never know. It felt as though someone was banging the aircraft with a fourteen pound sledgehammer all over it. You couldn’t hear the engines, you know. I thought they’d all stopped you know one of those funny sort of things that happen you see and the skipper did everything with that Lancaster that, things you would do in a Spitfire short of rolling it and eventually we emerged into the darkness. The lights went out, the guns stopped and it felt awfully silent and the skipper called us all up in turn to see if we were alright and then he sent the flight engineer around with a torch to see if there was anything, damage anywhere. He couldn’t see anything obviously bad and we continued home rather silently but at lunchtime the next day we went down to the aeroplane to do our daily inspections and things and it was like a pepper pot. It had got shiny new squares of aluminium all over it where the lads had filled up, covered the holes up and I thought, ‘Blimey,’ I looked up at the mid upper turret and there were two or three right, right under that. They went in one side, straight across the aircraft and out the other side. It’s only aluminium and these were red hot bits of steel and they were, well why we weren’t seriously hit, or the engines, none of the engines were damaged.
GC: Was there a, or what was the main difference between day and night? Was there, was there did you prefer to do day or do night? Was one more dangerous than the other?
JC: Well, daylight was dangerous in that you could be seen. On the other hand you could see. You could see fighters but the daylight, I don’t think we had a fighter escort over Essen because there was too many of us. There was another one over Nordhausen which I’ll mention next but on that we had a fighter escorts, Typhoons, and they went in front of us strafing all the airfields, keeping them on the ground and then escorting us but we didn’t have [pause], later on we went to Flensburg. We didn’t have a fighter escorts then so I don’t know. Sometimes we did. But it could be very dodgy. A friend of mine, Basil Martin, unfortunately he’s dead now but he was on a squadron in 3 Group and they did a lot of daylights over France leading up to D-Day and after D-Day and they had quite a lot of fighter trouble. In fact, they had, I remember him telling me once there were three of them flying to the target in broad daylight and an ME109 came after them and shot the back one down, then the next one down and his gunner shot that one, shot the ME109 down. They didn’t get a medal for it though. They just got to the target and back again but there were a lot of very short, obviously into France, so very short operations and at one time they, you had to do, or so I heard after the war, that you had to do two of those to count as one ‘cause most of our trips were pretty long you know, sort of ten hours, ten and a half hours. Quite a long while. Yes. Yeah, that was the incident at Karlsruhe. Strangely, the earlier time that 189 lost four aeroplanes was when they went to Karlsruhe. Lost four. We were replacements for the ones that were shot down over Karlsruhe so they were trying to have a go at us as well you see. It’s strange isn’t it?
GC: Did you get superstitious about things like that?
JC: Well, I don’t know. You do get a bit that way. I always put my right flying boot on first and if I didn’t I took them both off and put them on again and people had lots of silly things that you did [pause]. But then nobody queried it.
GC: You also, you also talked about quote ‘hijinks’ in this Lancaster. What was it really like because a Lancaster is a big plane to be throwing around quite so willy nilly.
JC: Yes. Indeed. Well, I’ll tell you something we did one day which, nobody believed us anyway, so I might as well tell you and I couldn’t put it in my logbook otherwise we would have all been court martialled but it’s in my diary. We’d been up for some high level bombing practice over Wainfleet range which is in the Wash. There was an area there where you dropped [prunes?] as we called them. They were smoke ones in the day and at night they were flash and a chap, or I think there were two of them, sat in concrete bunkers taking a bearing on your hits so they could tell you what you’d missed or hit. Well, we got over Wainfleet range and you couldn’t see a thing. We were up at about eighteen thousand feet so the skipper said, ‘Well we’ll do a bit of three engine flying,’ so feathered the starboard outer and that meant, I was in the rear turret that meant I couldn’t use my turret. Then he did the port outer which, I mean the Lancaster will fly quite happily on two engines and then he did the starboard inner and I thought, ‘Oh hang on.’ I wound my turret by hand on the beam so that if necessary I could open the back doors and go out because we had, we had a pilot type chute then for the rear turret. You didn’t have to get out the turret but in the mid upper turret you had to get out, go a few of yards down the fuselage, get your parachute out of a housing, clip it on and then go to the door and, you know it was a bit of a palaver which a lot of people never made of course but anyway we’re flying on one engine. That was the port inner left. And he said, ‘Feather port inner.’ And the poor old Bert Shaw, his voice was getting drier and drier you know, he said, ‘Feathering port inner, skipper,’ faithfully doing as he was told and that meant shutting the engine down and then feathering it so they wouldn’t windmill. So there were four fans stopped. Poor old Bill Mobley, the wireless op, he’d got all this gear on. He thought, ‘That’s gone a bit quiet.’ He looked out the astrodome and saw four propellers stopped. He said, ‘You bloody fool,’ he said, ‘I’ve got all my electric gear on here.’ Well they wouldn’t have had enough on the batteries to unfeather so he shut everything off in a hurry and then came the dramatic words, ‘Unfeather starboard outer,’ and fortunately there was enough power to turn the props and it windmilled and fired. There was a puff of smoke came past the turret and I thought, ‘We’re alright now,’ and all four were running but we weren’t diving down very fast but apparently the skipper had seen a photograph of a Lancaster with all four engines feathered allegedly beating up the control tower but of course that was a trick photograph but the engines were all feathered. They were all stopped and feathered so it must have been done. So he, being a very, if someone could do it he’ll do it, you know. He’ll have a go.
GC: I must admit I’d heard that and you’ve just confirmed ‘cause everybody went, ‘No it can’t be done.’ I had heard it so. You just, you just proved it.
JC: Oh yes. We didn’t have, we weren’t engineless for very long because as I say the wireless op exploded. He should have told him what he was going to go ‘cause he’d got his radio gear on and all the nav equipment and everything.
GC: Yeah.
JC: All draining from the batteries which we wanted for that initial restart but I did quietly tell the fitter engines once ‘cause we used to have a beer with them, you know and he didn’t believe us and I thought, well that’s fair enough. I know it was true, the rest of the crew knew it was true but no one dare breathe a word officially about it or we would all have been, well the skipper would have been court martialled. That’s for sure. So that was, I suppose, the silliest thing we did. Although, I did something very silly once. In the mid upper turret there was, they were electrically fired and there was cut out gear so that you couldn’t’ shoot your fins off or kill the rear gunner or people up in the front you know and there was taboogie which lifted them clear as you went around. Well, we were up one day. We put a, put a smoke float out to shoot at and the blooming things wouldn’t work and I thought, ‘Oh hell.’ So I thought, well I can still fire them ‘cause I can fire them manually by pushing the [sear in] underneath the screw with my toggle and I waited until we were clear and did it and I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ And your mind plays tricks then. Everything went silent and I thought, ‘I’ve shot the blooming aeroplane down,’ and I hastily looked around at all the wing tips and everything and everything was all quiet and I never said a word. I reported that the guns wouldn’t fire and they were all put right but a few rounds had been fired and they would know that but nothing ever happened. I was lucky there. I could have done some damage to the aeroplane just because I wanted to fire the guns. Well, you know all the trouble you go to go out there and do everything and then you can’t do it but the bomb aimer had a slight accident once too because he, he was in charge of the front turret although I don’t think he ever went in it but you had to go out and do a DI on your guns every day and I was in the mid upper turret and I heard a single shot and that was from the front turret and that was Eddie had done it. He’d, because you cock and fire but you have to have the the fire on safety not on safe of course but to get around that you’ve got fire to put a breechblock forward and pull it back and take a round out. Anyway, this single shot went across the airfield, I don’t know where it finished up. We looked anxiously ahead of the aeroplane because out in dispersal but it must have passed over the airfield somewhere but we never heard of anyone being shot so we, we didn’t say too much about that.
GC: There was probably a cow lying in a field somewhere shot by a Lancaster.
JC: That was a bit funny that but there we are.
GC: What was it, I mean you, you’re a upper gunner which was quite a unique place? What was that like?
JC: Well it was, you were very exposed of course. You got a very good view of everything. I mean you could look all around three hundred and sixty degrees whereas in the rear turret your vision was limited to dead astern and each side although there was bits of equipment and stuff in the way. You couldn’t really see properly. The only proper way to see was straight ahead and there the, it was a clear vision channel, clear vision panel where the Perspex had been removed so you could see out better but your visibility wasn’t as good as in the mid upper which was just all Perspex so you had to make sure that was really clean. It was, it was quite a good, quite a good position I suppose but as I say very exposed I suppose but you could see what was going on. Wasn’t altogether a good idea. One of the scariest things was, that I found and no doubt other people thought so too was they never seemed to notice them but you could be flying along at night, pitch dark and suddenly on the beam there’d be a sudden big flare like a full moon, a new moon hanging in the sky. It was a German night fighter. You knew it was, you knew it was a fighter there, it was a great temptation to stare at the damned thing but you didn’t know because he was going to fly across and see who was silhouetted against these flares so you had to look into the dark part of the sky to see what he was up to and in the meantime your aeroplane seemed to be illuminated. Although it was all matt paint it used to shine and I thought you know he must see us and you’d stare and stare and look around and try and, but that was the scariest thing because you knew that a German night fighter had just done that and just dropped that flare with the very intention of seeing who he could see silhouetted against the light because it was a brilliant like a new full moon and it seemed to hang there for hours but in fact it was only a few minutes but it seemed ages before it fizzled out and then you’d get back to darkness.
[pause]
Yes, Nordhausen, that was another daylight. That was, in actual fact it was the place where they were making these rockets underground so we weren’t, obviously couldn’t do anything about that but there was lots of barracks there. A lot of troops and we, apparently the SS was supposed to have moved in and had made their headquarters there and so it was decided to give them a visit for breakfast and there was about two hundred and fifty of us from 5 Group with fighter escort who’d gone in front, spraying the airfield and when we left the whole place was alight. Blew the whole place up, the railway system you know which blew it up but there was an unfortunate incident. This is something you’d see from an upper turret. I was watching an aircraft from 49 squadron who were with us at Bardney. There were always two squadrons on RAF stations. We were with 49 squadron and their letters were EA and I was watching this. It was EA F-Freddie and I saw its bomb doors open. It was behind us and down like that, saw its bomb doors open and the cookie just came out and then the whole lot blew up. It had been hit by, hit by flak and it just, I could feel the heat from it. Or I fancied I could. You know, it was, it just fell away you know. No one got out of it of course. They would have all been killed instantly and I looked it up, I’ve got a book showing all the losses, 5 Group, Bomber Command losses and that was set in there of course, Nordhausen EA F. All black cross against all of them. I looked up the one of Smithy’s crew that was shot down at Harburg and I think, I can’t remember exactly, some of them were killed. Smithy and another one of the crew were very badly injured and they were taken to a prisoner of war camp. Why they weren’t taken to hospital I don’t know. Perhaps it was easier to take them to a prisoner of war camp where they died a few hours later. So they must have been in a bad way. So they, they were killed. But I was really sad about that because they, we knew them so well. You know they’d been with us. They’d joined the squadron with us and he’d done that jolly good landing with a damaged Lancaster and then well I imagine that was their fourth trip. That was our fourth but but that was the only one I actually saw blow up in daylight but at night you see rumours abounded that the Germans were firing up a shell called a scarecrow which burst with a lot of flame and smoke. The idea being to put the wind up the aircrew that it was an aircraft going down but after the war the Germans said, ‘We never had any such thing.’
GC: You didn’t see one.
JC: So what we thought, what we thought was a scarecrow was an aircraft. They said, ‘We never had any such thing.’ It was a rumour that was very strong. Oh that’s a scarecrow gone off. Look. But it was, in a way I suppose it was a bit of comfort because you’d think that wasn’t an aeroplane that was a scarecrow but I’m afraid it wasn’t. We had to mark, I had to tell the navigator of any aircraft going down because he marked them on his chart for use after the war to track down the, which they did, of course, they tracked down all these people. And they even tracked down some aircrew who were unfortunately handed over to the gestapo and the SS and some of them were shot and I mean that’s completely against the Geneva Convention but wherever they knew who it was who did it they caught them and they were brought to trial at Nuremberg.
GC: What else can you remember about serving during World War 2? What was life like on and off the base as well?
JC: Oh, well it was strange really because on the squadron you were living a perfectly normal, peaceful life. You’d go to the pictures, go to the mess, have a few beers or if you were stood down you could go in to Nottingham or somewhere, stay the night, have a few beers and it was a perfectly normal life and then someone would stick their head around the door and say there’s a war and you’d have to go down to the mess or somewhere to have a look at the battle order to see if you were on and if you were well that’s, you went to briefing and had your flying meal. The last supper as it was irreverently referred to and away you went and so suddenly you were transported from a peaceful English village to the middle of a war and back again. If you were lucky.
GC: How did you, when, when you came back like from an op what was the plane like? Was it quiet? Were people chatting or -
JC: We didn’t chat. That’s the remarkable thing when you see these films of, especially American ones they’re all yacketing away. There wasn’t a word over the intercom unless it was necessary. There were certain navigation beacons and things during the war which flashed letters and I’d report those to the nav to help his navigation and in the rear turret you could take a drift so he could check the wind. That was a big trouble, not knowing the direction of the wind because Group would give you a wind but it wasn’t always, it wasn’t always terribly accurate and you only wanted to be a few degrees off and you’d be miles out. So that was the navigation was, I think we did remarkably well but you could see, I could see the target from miles away. You know, there was a glow in the sky for a start because everyone’s been there before you. The Pathfinders have been there, been down and had a look, dropped what they called primary blind markers, there’d would be flares dropped all over the place. Light the whole place up. There’d be searchlights on looking for the aeroplanes and the whole place would be full of activity so a good quarter of an hour before you got there you’d hear all this chatter over the VHF about putting the target indicators down and the master bomber would be controlling all this as though it was a picnic you know. It was quite remarkable and you were still a quarter of an hour away. So by the time you got there you knew everybody [laughs] everyone would be well awake but you could see it quite clearly and you’d think to yourself you’ve got to go through all that lot and hopefully out the other side and if you were early you had to drop your bombs between two very specified times and if you were early you had to do an orbit and come in again which was not a terribly good idea but you had to do it. We did that once. We did that over Komotau. We got there a bit early and I remember thinking I’ll have to have a, keep a sharp look out here going around for a meander around first but of course in daylight it’s nothing like that. There’s just smoke and fire. That’s all you see. There’s not the, I don’t know it’s not the darkness there. Strange. But, as I say, life on the, you know, it’s strange, you just carried on normally. You’d go down to the section in the morning see if any, see what was doing. Do the aircraft, do your DI on the aircraft and have your meals in the mess. You wouldn’t know where the boys were going if you weren’t on, you know. You wouldn’t know that till they got back. You’d say, I remember watching when I got, first got on the squadron I wanted to see. I stood down by the flights one evening as they took off and two squadrons of Lancasters so that was about what thirty odd aircraft all in line around the peritrack going slowly past, then turning onto the runway where there was a black and white chequered caravan and there would be a group of people there waving goodbye to their friends or whatever and you’d get a green from the caravan and the brakes would be on, the engines would be revved up and then the brakes would come off and you’d surge forward to give you an initial kick down the runway. There would be a wave from these people. I don’t know whether they were pleased to see us go or what I don’t know but there was always a crowd there. WAAFs and all sorts giving you a wave and away you’d go down the runway hoping you get off ‘cause they were heavy. You’d got ten tonnes of petrol and six tons of high explosive and if there wasn’t much wind and you were on a short runway it was a bit iffy. It was a bit iffy. You wouldn’t miss the village by much.
GC: Do you remember anything else from serving?
JC: About life on the -
GC: Just life or ops or the crew.
JC: Well, there was another. The next raid we went to was Komotau in Czechoslovakia. That was an awfully long way to go. That was another oil refinery and when we got back over the coast there was thick fog everywhere and we were diverted to Gaydon. We’d never heard of it and the nav said to the wireless op, ‘Are you sure it’s Gaydon?’ [laughs]. And we were getting a bit short of petrol and everywhere over the countryside was just grey and another advantage of being in the mid upper turret I saw in the distance on the port side they looked like bees around a honey pot. I said, ‘There’s some aircraft over on the port side, skipper,’ and we flew over and there they were. There was our squadron and another one all milling around. That was still thick fog and it was a Canadian Operational Training Unit with Wellingtons and the poor chap on the caravan at the end all he could do was fire white very lights to show where the runway started and you knew the heading ‘cause you could see that from your paperwork and we came in, descended through this murk and fortunately there was a runway at the other end of it and we landed safely but we left two or three of the squadron in the fields around. We brought the crew back. We were stuck there for ages and didn’t even get a cup of tea. We were just stuck with our aeroplanes and I thought I don’t think much of this and eventually we, the fog cleared and we took off and got back to, got back to base but that was a bit, a bit naughty that. There were no facilities there at all for a safe landing. It was a case of dropping down through the fog and hoping you were over the runway and in, pointing in the right direction and as I say a lot of them didn’t. The other daylight we did was a place called Flensburg which was on the Danish German border on the bit of land that sticks up and I think we were after some shipping there in the harbour. When we got there there was a hospital ship in the harbour too and when we got there it was ten tenths of cloud so we had to bring them back or we should have brought them back. There was an area in the North Sea for dropping bombs safe you know which shipping were advised of and kept clear of but unfortunately some of the idiots with us were just dropping them as soon as they got over the sea and our aircraft, I mean I looked up and said, ‘Starboard skipper,’ and he was on the, and there were these blooming bombs dropping down. We could have easily been hit, hit with a bomb and shot, you know, knocked from the sky. We religiously went to this area in the North Sea where you should jettison your bombs and even then that was ten tenths of cloud and skipper went down through the cloud in case there were some ships there, there wasn’t and there was splashes going on all over the place from people dropping bombs through the cloud but that was, it’s disappointing when that happened. You go there, done everything and then you bring them back or come back. Quite often, well reading my diary it happened three or four times, we got out to dispersal and the raid would be cancelled for some reason and you’d be all psyched up for it and it was disappointing not to go, you know. You had to unwind then and go back to being in a village again. I mean it was strange. It was, being out at dispersal was the worst time, I think. You didn’t know what to say, what to do and then a verey cartridge would go off. In we go. As soon as you got on board the engine started. You were alright. You were, you were there and you knew what you were going, you knew where you were going and you knew what you had to do and you’re perfectly, perfectly happy.
GC: Can you remember the moment you found out the war was over? Can you remember what that felt like?
JC: Yes. I could remember that fairly well because we went out to a pub and there was no beer and we cycled around for all afternoon and there was no beer anywhere. It was an anti-climax really. You were so used to doing that, that way of life that when it stopped you felt you’d missed it in some ghoulish sort of way. I can’t quite explain it but, I don’t know, it’s like anything that you’re doing regularly and then it suddenly stops. However horrible it was you still miss it and I did miss it, I must say but we were kept busy. We had to, well one of the nicest jobs we did was bringing back prisoners of war. We flew in a field near Brussels and twenty [emotional]. Excuse me.
GC: Do you want to stop?
JC: There was twenty four of them at a time with their little bags of stuff and one of them crashed unfortunately. I don’t know why. Whether they got, ‘cause you had to be careful where they, where they were put because of the balance of the aircraft and one of them took off and crashed almost immediately and killed everybody on board. There was twenty four POW’s and the crew which wasn’t a good sign. But that was the only action that I know of. We brought them back. I can’t remember where we brought them back to. [pause] It was a little airfield. Dunsfold. Dunsfold. And there were ladies there to see to, you know I thought there would be flags flying and all this but there was a tent and some ladies, you know Women’s Voluntary Services or something making them some tea and supposedly dishing out railway warrants and one thing and another. I thought what a homecoming. I thought they’d be all, it was strange really I, ‘cause the ones we had were all ex-aircrew, well air crew. I mean, I don’t know what they’d been through of course individually but they didn’t look at all happy about going into an aeroplane. Perhaps their memories of the last time they were in it weren’t very good and they’d left on fire or something. They didn’t look at all happy really. Tried to chat to them and then as I say when we landed they all trooped out into this tent. All very well, you know, I know I didn’t expect the band to be playing but you know, I thought there’d be -
GC: Yeah.
JC: Some officers there or something to welcome them back. Perhaps that had already been done at Brussels. I don’t know. I don’t think they’d been hanging about long. I think they, you know as soon as they were released I think they were sent to this airfield. There were a lot of them. I mean there were eighteen thousand aircrew injured or POW’s. There was about ten thousand prisoners. We were told that they had a file on us all over there. Well, a lot of us you know. We weren’t allowed to take, we had to empty our pockets completely. Not a bus ticket or a cinema ticket or anything and we had emergency pack with barley sugar and chewing gum and fishing gear. I don’t know if anyone ever did catch anything with that. Silk maps of the countryside you were going to try and get out of. A whole load of stuff in a plastic case and that’s all you had. You had to hand everything else in. That was put in a bag and you collected it when you got back. Well, people were, I mean we had lectures on all this and when you were interrogated they’d say, ‘What’s on at,’ and they’d mention your local cinema, you know, ‘What’s on at the Regal this week,’ and all this sort of thing and you’d think well if he knows that he must know this you know and it was just a way of getting information out of you but as I say we weren’t allowed to have a bus ticket or a cinema ticket or anything in your pocket. There was money in this thing as well by the way and a compass of course so you could attempt to evade. Oh that’s another thing we did on the squadron. There was escape and evasion exercises. You’d be taken out, this happened two or three times, we were taken out in lorries, there were no signposts anywhere, taken out in lorries and dropped and you had to make your way back to camp. Unfortunately, we were dropped quite close to Newark and Nottingham and places like that and a lot of people bombed off into the town [laughs] so they weren’t a hundred percent successful but I did my own evasion, escape and evasion one night. I was on the old pits not thinking of anything in particular and the skipper put his head around the door and said, ‘Anyone want to go into Newark for a pint? He said, ‘I’ve got to go in on the motorbike. I’ll bring you back.’ So no one else said, I said, ‘Yeah. Ok,’ ‘cause they had lovely fish and chips in Newark and the beer wasn’t bad either so I went on the back of the motorbike with the skipper into Newark. We arranged a rendezvous for the return, 11 o’clock I think it was or half eleven which I attended but no one else did unfortunately. He didn’t turn up. So, I’ve got a heck of a walk here, back to Fulbeck. About twelve miles I think from Newark and I didn’t know the way either. It was a network of little roads all around that part of Lincoln you know. There’s no big main road as such. Anyway, I struck off due east I think and I thought well I must eventually come across it and walked and walked and walked and eventually saw a familiar looking nissen hut and, which was the washrooms and things on the outskirts of the airfield so I knew that I was, I was home. So, I went and had a drink. I remember putting my, cupping my hands under the tap and I had a go at him the next day. He apologised. He said, ‘I’m sorry, John,’ he said, ‘Things got a bit out of hand,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t get back until later,’ So whether he did ever turned up at the rendezvous I don’t know but I walked home back to Fulbeck. That wasn’t our only walk. We walked from Nottingham to Syerston Lancaster Finishing School. That was a whole crew of us. We’d overstayed our leave a bit at, in Nottingham, missed the last train, ‘cause we used to cycled into a place, leave your bike against the wall, get on the train and I mean your bike was there the next day. Nobody pinched bikes in those days but on this occasion we had to walk all the way back to Syerston and when we got back to camp we were on the early morning flying detail. Couldn’t have been worse really. We got some breakfast and then got into the air and that was that. Oh dear oh dear. So that was, life had its ups and downs you see, Gemma. It had its up and downs. In more ways than one of course. The last raid, believe it or not, was the same place we went on the first one. We went to Norway again to a place called Tonsberg but this was another oil refinery and as we got closer, I mean we’d normally bomb at about eighteen thousand feet. Something like that. The master bomber told the force to reduce height to, I think it was fifteen and then down to ten and I thought this is silly this is and then to eight. Eight thousand feet which put you in range of all the light flak that they hose up at you and I thought, and I mean it was like, literally flying into a, you think well we’ll never get out the other side without being hit by something and as we went in a searchlight came on us and the skipper said, ‘Shoot that out, John,’ because we were so low, you see and he banked the aircraft and I fired and it went out so that was that. One searchlight less. But we went in and bombed and we came out alright but I don’t think we lost any but there were aircraft lost due to this flak but during briefing the thing came up about this searchlight and the interrogating officer said, ‘Fired at, what eight thousand feet?’ And I said, ‘Well it went out.’ I didn’t say well the skipper instructed me to fire at it but he didn’t say anything, the skipper. He should have said, ‘Well I instructed him to fire,’ but he didn’t and I thought oh well. It did go out. I thought to myself the range of these bullets is quite, quite a long way and there’s no, gravity’s going to help them on their way and if they just hear a few bullets scattering around they’ll probably put it out and they did you see. I don’t suppose I hit the light. I probably scared the living daylights out of the crew.
GC: I was going to say how aware of other squadrons were you or what else was going on in the war?
JC: Well of course you’d read the papers. You see, we were in 5 Group and people said there’s 5 Group and there’s Bomber Command and it’s true we did have our own sort of little things. We had our own corkscrew procedure which was different to Bomber Command and a lot of the raids were 5 Group squadrons like the one at Nordhausen. That was just 5 Group squadrons. But having said that I mean a lot of the raids were from everybody, you know and we all used 100 Group. They had Lancasters and Flying Fortresses and all sorts and they did all these trick things with radio to fool the Germans, you know. For two or three weeks the German night fighter force was controlled by a flying officer in Uxbridge. German speaking flying officer in Uxbridge before they twigged that, you know, they knew it was being done. There were all sorts of tricks there was, with strange names, strange code names and some aircraft had different equipment to others. 49 squadron who we were, we were with at Fulbeck had Village Inn which was a radar equipment fixed to the rear turret which showed when a fighter was coming after you which was quite handy but we never had it. But they didn’t lose any aircraft well apart from the one that I saw blow up. That was from flak. That wasn’t from fighters. They didn’t lose aircraft like we did. I saw the flight engineer from one of the crews who was shot down over Harburg and he met the German night fighter pilot who shot them down and he’d made, it was a head on attack and that’s something you don’t read in the books because you’d never get a head on attack at night cause you’d never see them quickly enough but there was so much, it was so light from all the fires and flares they were doing head on attacks. That’s remarkable isn’t it? Well the one that came after us wasn’t. It was a normal sort of attack but the sneaky thing they did they was they had a gun, an upward firing gun the JU88s musicschragge or something they called it and they used to creep under the, under you and then just fire a few rounds into your wing where your petrol tanks were. So we used to do banking searches quite frequently so you could look down and see if there was anything going on but even that they knew about of course and they’d follow you around so that wasn’t foolproof but at least they knew you were alert and you know we were having a go. Having a look. I think that helps. If there’s one that’s going straight and level and not doing anything he’d going to be an easier target than the one who’s manoeuvring about the sky. There was one, well it wasn’t amusing for the poor WAAF but we got back. I don’t know which, I can’t remember what raid it was but anyway we got back to dispersal, we’d got out of the aeroplane and we were waiting for the truck to turn up and pick us up and it duly arrived and just as she got out a JU88 came over the airfield strafing the runway and everybody and everything and we just sort of looked lazily, you know. It was just part of the night for us but she dashed in to the arms of the skipper and we gave him a cheer of course. Poor girl. She was scared out of her wits. Well it was a bit scary I suppose for her. It’s not something that usually happens and this chap was firing and doing all sorts of things and they used to drop these anti-personnel butterfly bombs all over the place which was a bit, a bit naughty I thought because they used to come in and shoot aircraft down when they were coming in to land which I thought was very uncharitable. On the coast at night there were two searchlights like that that guided you back in over Lincolnshire and we avoided them like the plague and you were supposed to put your nav lights on to avoid collisions which we never did. Never put our nav lights on so perhaps that’s the sort of reason you get away with it, you know. But collisions, there were a lot of aircraft lost through collisions. When you think of it, in the night, no lights. I remember in the mid upper turret, well I don’t know whether if we were going out or coming home but I think we were coming home and I looked up and there was another Lancaster just slowly crossing us, ever so close, I reckon if I could put our hand out I could have touched his blister, you know his H2S blister and I daren’t say anything to the skipper ‘cause if he’d have dived his tail would have come up and hit him and I thought if we just keep going we’re going to miss and so we went like that and I, just afterwards, when it had cleared, I said, ‘We just had a near miss skipper.’ Nobody else saw it. It was really really close. We were just on a slightly different course and nearly at the same height within a foot or two. So that’s another you know a bit near. If he’d been a bit lower or we’d have been a bit higher we’d have collided. Surprising how many there were when you read of the crews that were lost due to accident. A lot of them over this country. Not over there. Over this country which is a bit remarkable. You said what did we do? One thing I did do after the war we did this Exodus, Operation Exodus, bringing prisoners of war back and on another occasion the crew had to go to Italy, to Bari to bring people back from there but the gunners, for some reason, didn’t go because they wanted to get more people on board I suppose but they brought us back some cherry brandy and stuff so we didn’t mind but what I did while I got the hut free was something I wanted to do. I’d got, in the Mae West’s, you know the inflatable thing the thing that inflated them was a little CO2 bottle. It was a cast iron bottle with a little neck on and when you pulled a lever down it broke the neck off and filled the thing up with air or carbon dioxide or something. Anyway, I thought if I filled the thing up with cordite that would be an ideal jet. So I wanted to make a jet propelled glider you see because the Australians were letting stuff off. They’d got hold of something, fireworks and things and I got a, got a cartridge and emptied it and carefully fed the, because the cordite was a little, little tiny rods, put it through the hole until it filled up and then left a little trail to a safe distance of the hut, the nissen hut and this was on the concrete step aimed out into space you see. I’d made a glider out of a cornflake packet that I’d scrounged and I got this all fixed up, lit it and it sort of worked. It fizzed across the floor, lit the thing, zoomed off, the glider fluttered down a few yards away and the CO2 thing headed off towards the officers mess the other side of the airfield and so I thought it was time to pack up and go. I got on my bike and went down to the mess and read the paper.
GC: Has he always been this much of a rogue?
SP: Yes. Yes.
JC: And that was a bit of fun.
SP: Yes. You used to wave your handkerchiefs at the air you told me.
JC: The other thing we did what we found out was to if you want to evacuate a nissen hut is to get a verey cartridge and take one of the shells out of the stars and drop it down the chimney when their bogie stove was alight and that shoots the bottom out, most of the contents of the bogie stove and everybody goes flying out. It was great fun. Oh dear of dear.
GC: It’s nice to know you was taking yourselves so seriously.
JC: Pardon?
GC: It’s nice to know you was taking it all so seriously. [laughs]
JC: Well, you know you’ve got too really. Frank Johnson, we had some reunion, crew reunions after. Three or four. And Frank, the navigator said to me that he’d been approached by from some quite high authority in government with a big questionnaire about morale of air crew during the war and I and I thought about that I thought well no one was sad or anything like that. In fact we were generally up to hijinks and then Frank said, ‘I put down that, practical jokes mainly from air gunners,’ he said. [laughs]. I think we kept ourselves alive really by laughing down and of course we had quite a, beer was quite plentiful then. Not very strong unfortunately but that was a favourite pastime either in the mess or down at the local, you know the local pub in the village and we didn’t have a cinema at Fulbeck. We didn’t have very much there at all. That was a bit dead really apart from the odd pub but Bardney did. They had a cinema there and we used to see things, films there. I went back to, well a summer camp with the ATC and of course visited some of the old airfields and we were at Binbrook one year and one of the other officers wanted to go to a place that he was in during the war. Forget the name of it now. He said, ‘You were up this way John, weren’t you? I said, ‘Yeah. Bardney.’ He said, ‘That’s not all that far away.’ So we duly went to Bardney. There wasn’t much left of it then. There was the old hangars were still there and a control tower and a sad looking windsock and I said, ‘Well the pub down the hill,’ I said, ‘Was called the Jolly Sailor,’ which was known as the Hilarious Matlow when we were there and we went down and went in for a pint and it was, instead of being little rooms as it was it was one big bar which killed it really but anyway, I ordered a couple of pints up and an old boy sidled up and he said, ‘You’ve just been up at the airfield haven’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Do you want,’ I thought he was on the [earhole] for a pint you see so, ‘No. No. No,’ he said, ‘I don’t want a drink.’ He said, ‘I can always tell,’ he said, ‘When you come [that thing there?] he said. So I said, he said, ‘What flight were you in?’ I said, ‘A flight. Squadron Leader Stevens. Yes that’s right,’ he said, ‘I knew him,’ and he knew the wing commander. He knew. We used to rattle the stuff off his mantelpiece apparently when we took off. But he was, you know, he was a nice old boy. He was obviously one of the locals who was there during the war. He must have put up with us when we went in the pub. But it was different and I don’t even know if it’s still there now because I’ve had it up on google and I can’t even see the pub anymore. I think it’s been knocked down or something. Isn’t that dreadful?
GC: Dreadful.
JC: I don’t know. All the memories of these places. If they could tell a story.
GC: Ah but that’s what you’re doing at the moment.
JC: Yes. We, after the war we had to start on Tiger Force training for the Far East which I wasn’t looking forward to to be honest. Fighting the Japanese. They didn’t play fair did they? And it consisted of long cross countries as a squadron in a gaggle. We didn’t fly in formation. We flew in a gaggle right over France and Germany and around and home and to do that, to prepare for long flights we shared our poor old flight engineer Bert Shaw. He was due for retirement anyway I think and we got a pilot flight engineer. There were lots of spare pilots about at the time. Young lad. Never done much. They put them through a quick flight engineer’s course at St Athan and sent them to the squadrons and we had one. He was such a nice chap. I can’t think of his name. Isn’t that awful? I have a photograph of him in one of the books, war books I’ve got. Anyway, he flew with us as a flight engineer. Well on one occasion and I was now the official rear gunner by the way. I was in the rear turret. We were coming back over France and I was awake because I noticed smoke whizzing past the turret you see. So I thought, hello, something’s going wrong up front you see so I called up the skipper and said, ‘One of your engines is on fire, skipper,’ and he relayed the message to the flight engineer who was down in the bombing hatch cooking his logbook for four engine flying so when the skipper said, ‘One of your engine’s is on fire,’ he thought he was pulling his leg. He said, ‘Well you’d better put the kettle on.’ [laughs] I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘It’s getting thick here.’ And anyway he came up and shut it down and feathered the propeller and the smoke abated. Bits and pieces came past and that was that. Went home the rest of the way on three engines but that, that was funny that was. Very funny.
GC: I’m just going to stop it for a moment because I’ve just spotted -
[machine pause]
GC: Just looking at the battery. But go on.
JC: Right [pause] ok. Yes. Well we eventually poor old squadron was sent to RAF Metheringham to disband which was all very sad. We had to take our aeroplanes with us. The ground staff got there in about a quarter of an hour I suppose. We got over Metheringham and there was ten tenths of fog. Absolute thick fog and we poodled around for about half an hour. We got all our stuff on board. Bikes and things in the bomb bay and they eventually decided to light up half the Fido for us. You know the old fog intensive dispersal or something. They lit up one side and it really did work. It just burnt the fog off. We came in, landed and we were there till November kicking our heels. I only flew, I was the only one of the crew who flew again, who flew from Metheringham and I was the Squadron Leader Stevens’s rear gunner when he wanted to go somewhere and my services were called upon but that was the only time I flew from Metheringham and the crew dispersed. The skipper went flying somewhere, the bomb aimer was commissioned and went off somewhere in charge of a radar unit and we were sent to a place ‘cause I wanted to go on to Transport Command and we were sent to the MT section of a little OTU at Whitchurch. I forget the name of the RAF station but I couldn’t drive. I had to drive, I suddenly had to learn to drive because I was, I was up at the station and the billets were about a mile down the road in a disperse place and it was bitterly cold and I wanted to get some blankets for the bed so I took, I pinched a [fifteen underweight?] truck, went down to the domestic site, picked up my blankets and as I did some of the other lads came out and said, ‘Are you going back to the station?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I said, I said, ‘I haven’t driven before.’ He said, ‘Oh it doesn’t matter.’ He said and they all piled in and I got in the front bit and drove them back. That was quite, quite a bit of a laugh there. Anyway, eventually I got on to Transport Command. I was posted to Holmsley. RAF Holmsley South, near Bournemouth. Had some fun down there. Some friends of mine took a boat out at night off the beach and got out quite a way and they realised that the people had taken the plugs out so people wouldn’t pinch the boats and they just [laughs] they had to dry out in the boiler room when they got back. And then I got posted to, we flew to Lyneham. You’ve all heard of Lyneham. That was the big transport place. We were there about a week and then I was posted to Waterbeach. RAF Waterbeach which was the nearest I ever got to home, as an air quartermaster flying with different crews. There were two flights we did there. There was United Kingdom - Changi in a York. That was in Singapore. And to Delhi with the freight. Freight run. And that, that was great fun. I did quite a few trips. It took five days to get to Singapore and a days there and five days back but we never did it in eleven days. There was always something went wrong. We had more trouble with Yorks than we ever had on Lancasters. I mean we only had that just one engine fire but with the Yorks we had to fly from the passenger run was from Lyneham because we’d go, we went from Waterbeach to Lyneham, picked up the passengers and went through customs and everything and the first leg was down to Luqa, RAF Luqa in Malta and from there to Habbaniya in Iraq and then to Maripur in India, down to Ceylon as it was and then across to Changi in Singapore. That was five legs. Getting up earlier and earlier every morning because you were losing time you see and then you had a day off and then you reversed it coming back but as I say we never did it. We had various problems. One of the engines seized up over the Med coming across to Malta. So we stuck at Malta for a week which was great fun of course. The only thing else, oh I was often the only NCO in the crew. The rest were all commissioned you know and they’d be in the mess and I’d be in the sergeant’s mess but apart from that it was alright. We all used to meet up during the day. The first trip I ever did we went, we got to Malta and they said, ‘You’re coming with us, John.’ So changed in to civvies. They took me down to Valetta, sat me outside a café place, table and chairs and they brought out something I hadn’t seen, of course, since the beginning of the war which was a plate of fancy cakes, ‘There you are, John,’ they said, ‘Tuck in.’ So it was all things like that. Things we hadn’t seen let alone eaten. That was good fun though flying like that but they, it was a bit dodgy especially the last leg from Ceylon to Changi. It was around Malaya there was terrific cumulous clouds. I mean these days they just fly over the top but we couldn’t get up there so you had, you couldn’t go through it because they was too dangerous. They could just pick you up and chuck you all over the place and so you had to go underneath and that wasn’t always very practical so there were some dodgy bits. The other time we had a bit of trouble it was a freighting run and we were coming back across the Mediterranean to Lyneham from where was it? Castel Benito. That’s right, in Libya and I noticed, just freighting run this was and I noticed the port inner engine, the exhaust which I could see very plainly from the window didn’t look right to me. It was, it was the wrong sort of colour you know and as the flight progressed so it got brighter and brighter and I got the skipper to come down and have a look. Ivor Lupton. I’ll always remember his name and he had a look. He said, ‘Keep an eye on it, John and if it gets any worse tell me.’ Well it did get worse. Flames started coming out of it so the flight engineer shut it down, feathered it and we made an emergency landing at an airfield called Estree in France where they hadn’t got any Merlin engines and we were stuck there for a week and had great fun there. We were in the transit mess but it wasn’t too bad. The food was alright and I paid a flying visit to Marseilles with, I can’t remember, was it the navigator or the wireless op? Anyway, he’d obviously got some business going on in, where’s the name of the place. Oh dear isn’t that awful? I’ve forgotten the name of the place on the coast of France further east. I said, ‘How are we going to get there?’ He said, ‘We’ll hitch.’ So we got on the road and we hitched and an old French car stopped, got in the back and the driver complete with, he hadn’t got any onions but that was the only thing he hadn’t got. And we went hurtling off in this old car through little villages, chickens scattering, you know. It was like something out of a film and, Marseilles that’s where we went and we eventually got there and he did his, what he had to do, got some nefarious thing going on. I had a wander around just and then we came back by the same method, getting a hitch. The French were delighted to give us a lift but they were very old cars and very dangerous and they’d be talking to you with their head, and we thought yeah, have an occasional look [laughs]. So that was a very adventurous time we had on the, on the Yorks. There was one or two incidents where we had a bit of bother but you know it was exciting part. Nice. I was rather sad to leave it all really but I thought well they won’t want air quartermasters forever. They’re called dolly birds now aren’t they but I had to work out, even on the passenger run, I had to work out the weight and balance clearance and all that sort of stuff so that the centre of gravity of the aircraft fell between two points so I had to find the water, weight of water, petrol and everything and passengers and you know it was quite an important job but I enjoyed it so I was rather sad when the last, the last thing came which involved, not for me personally but involved a rather dramatic encounter with HM customs but I can’t go in to that now. We haven’t got enough battery left [laughs]
GC: [?]
JC: So there we are. My RAF career in a nutshell.
GC: Well can I just say it has been an absolute pleasure and a great honour. That has been beautiful. Thank you very much.
JC: Pleasure.
GC: Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with John Cuthbert
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Gemma Clapton
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-07
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
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ACuthbertJ160507
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending OH summary
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.
Description
An account of the resource
John Cuthbert joined the RAF and initially trained as a wireless operator / air gunner but re-mustered as an air gunner. After training he was posted to 189 Squadron at RAF Fulbeck and flew operations as a mid-upper gunner. He talks about his light-hearted experiences with his crew as well as some of the tragedies he saw.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Germany
Norway
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Karlsruhe
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
02:06:23 audio recording
189 Squadron
49 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
bombing
crewing up
fear
Heavy Conversion Unit
Ju 88
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
military living conditions
military service conditions
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
radar
RAF Bardney
RAF Fulbeck
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Wainfleet
Scarecrow
searchlight
Stirling
superstition
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/184/3574/LSandersDS1869292v1.2.pdf
c6d8981948ad019c01c5ab80b2140bb0
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
Sanders, David
D S Sanders
Description
An account of the resource
19 items. The collection contains an oral history interview with Sergeant David Stuart Sanders (1925 - 2022, 1869292 Royal Air Force), his logbook, engineering documentation, operation schedules, a personal record of all his operations, a Dalton computer, a number of target and reconnaissance photographs. David Saunders was a flight engineer on 619 Squadron and 189 Squadron at RAF Strubby and RAF Fulbeck in 1944-45.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by David Sanders and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-05
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Sanders, DS
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
David Sanders's flying log book for navigators, air bombers, air gunners and, flight engineers
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Belgium
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Wales
Belgium--Brussels
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Flensburg
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Munich
Germany--Sassnitz
Germany--Steinfurt (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Netherlands--Veere
Norway--Bergen
Norway--Tønsberg
Poland--Gdynia
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
1944-10-06
1944-10-11
1944-10-14
1944-10-15
1944-10-28
1944-10-29
1944-10-30
1944-11-21
1944-11-22
1944-11-26
1944-11-27
1944-12-09
1944-12-12
1944-12-18
1944-12-19
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-02-08
1945-02-09
1945-03-03
1945-03-04
1945-03-05
1945-03-06
1945-03-07
1945-03-08
1945-03-12
1945-03-14
1945-03-15
1945-03-20
1945-03-21
1945-03-22
1945-03-23
1945-03-24
1945-04-23
1945-04-25
1945-04-26
1945-05-06
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.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One handwritten logbook
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
LSandersDS1869292v1
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
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
The log book covers the operational career of flight engineer David Sanders from 5 July 1944 to 29 May 1945. He joined 619 Squadron at RAF Strubby on 28 September 1944, from where he flew Lancasters on two daylight and three night time operations before being transferred to 189 Squadron at RAF Fulbeck in November 1944. From 21 November 1944 he flew a further four daylight and 14 night time operations, again in Lancasters. The majority of the targets his operations were over Germany, plus two to Poland, two to the Netherlands, and two Norway: Bergen, Bohlen, Braunschweig, Bremen, Dortmund, Flensburg, Gdynia, Hamburg, Heimbach, Karlsruhe, Lutzkendorf, Munich, Police, Sassnitz, Steinfurt, Tønsberg, Veere. His pilots on operations were Flying Officer Carter and Flight Lieutenant Barron. Later log book entries are about Operation Exodus (Brussels).
1661 HCU
189 Squadron
619 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
flight engineer
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Operation Exodus (1945)
RAF Bardney
RAF Dunholme Lodge
RAF Fulbeck
RAF St Athan
RAF Strubby
Stirling
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/357/5770/LGrimesS1271597v1.1.pdf
f78de867933d06f442ab2845bafcbb34
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
Grimes, Syd
Syd Grimes
S V Grimes
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer Sydney Grimes (173865, 1271597 Royal Air Force) a photograph, and his logbook. After training as a wireless operator/ air gunner he completed a tour on 106 Squadron at RAF Syerston. After a period as an instructor he joined 617 Squadron for his second tour where he took part in the attacks on the Tirpitz.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Syd Grimes 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
2015-11-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Grimes, SV
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
Sydney Grimes' observer's and air gunner's flying log book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LGrimesS1271597v1
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Description
An account of the resource
Royal Air Force observer's and air gunner's flying log book for Sydney Grimes, wireless operator, covering the period from 2 July 1942 to 22 August 1945. Detailing training, operations flown, instructional duties and post war flying. He was stationed at RAF Evanton, RAF Madley, RAF Cottesmore, RAF Wigsley, RAF Syerston, RAF Balderton, RAF Scampton, RAF Winthorpe, RAF Woodhall Spa, RAF Bardney and RAF Sturgate. Aircraft flown in were Dominie, Proctor, Botha, Wellington, Anson, Manchester, Halifax and Lancaster. He flew a total of 41 operations, 24 night operations with 106 squadron and 15 daylight and 2 night operations with 617 squadron. Targets were, Kiel, Frankfurt, Spezia, Pilsen, Stettin, Duisburg, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Essen, Wuppertal, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne, Turin, Hamburg, Berlin, Tromso, Urft Dam, Ijmuiden, Politz, Rotterdam, Oslo Fjord, Emden, Koln, Poortershaven, Viesleble [Bielefeld] viaduct and Ladbergen. His pilots on operations were Flight Lieutenant Stephens and Flight Lieutenant Gumbley.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Czech Republic
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Scotland
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Czech Republic--Plzeň
England--Herefordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Rutland
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bielefeld
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Ladbergen
Germany--Wuppertal
Italy--La Spezia
Italy--Turin
Netherlands--Ijmuiden
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Norway--Tromsø
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Germany--Düsseldorf
Poland--Szczecin
Germany--Urft Dam
Atlantic Ocean--Oslofjorden
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1943-04-04
1943-04-05
1943-04-10
1943-04-11
1943-04-13
1943-04-14
1943-04-16
1943-04-17
1943-04-18
1943-04-19
1943-04-20
1943-04-21
1943-05-12
1943-05-13
1943-05-14
1943-05-23
1943-05-24
1943-05-25
1943-05-26
1943-05-27
1943-05-28
1943-05-29
1943-05-30
1943-06-11
1943-06-12
1943-06-13
1943-06-24
1943-06-25
1943-06-26
1943-06-28
1943-06-29
1943-07-03
1943-07-04
1943-07-08
1943-07-09
1943-07-12
1943-07-13
1943-07-24
1943-07-25
1943-07-26
1943-07-27
1943-07-28
1943-07-29
1943-07-30
1943-08-23
1943-08-24
1944-10-29
1944-11-12
1944-12-08
1944-12-11
1944-12-15
1944-12-21
1944-12-22
1944-12-29
1944-12-30
1944-12-31
1945-01-01
1945-02-03
1945-02-06
1945-02-08
1945-02-14
1945-02-22
1945-02-24
1945-03-13
1945-03-14
1945-05-12
1945-06-25
1945-07-09
1945-08-07
1945-08-11
1945-08-20
1945-08-22
106 Squadron
14 OTU
1654 HCU
1661 HCU
1668 HCU
50 Squadron
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
Botha
Cook’s tour
Dominie
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 5
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Manchester
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
Proctor
RAF Balderton
RAF Bardney
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Evanton
RAF Madley
RAF Scampton
RAF Sturgate
RAF Syerston
RAF Wigsley
RAF Winthorpe
RAF Woodhall Spa
Tallboy
Tirpitz
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/947/10642/LMathersRW55201v1.1.pdf
24e0c69ee38451e3fab05ad8f99499e3
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
Mathers, Ronald
R W Mathers
Description
An account of the resource
20 items. The collection concerns Wing Commander Ronald Mathers DFC (55201 Royal Air Force) and consists of his log books, photographs, correspondence, his decorations, and copies of two letters from Dwight Eisenhower to Sir Arthur Harris. Ronald Mathers completed a tour of operations as a pilot with 9 Squadron from RAF Bardney. After the war he took part in victory flypasts and a Goodwill tour of the United States with 35 Squadron. The collection also contains a scrapbook of the Goodwill Tour to the United States.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Heidi Peace and Ingrid Peters, 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
2017-07-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Mathers, RW
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[Partial transcription]
[Underlined] ADDITONAL DETAILS RELEVANT TO BERLIN OPERATIONS RECORDED ON THIS AND OTHER ADDED PAGES ARE TAKEN FROM ALAN W. COOPERS’ BOOK “BOMBERS OVER BERLIN” FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1985 AND SUB TITLED “THE RAF OFFENSIVE NOV 43 – MAR ’44. [/underlined]
[Underlined] 16/17th DEC (The 6th raid of the offensive). [/underlined] Total of 418 Lancs & 9 Mosquitoes on a direct route from Ijmuiden on Dutch coast, due East to target with return north over Denmark. Fuel load normally 1750 galls. T.O.T. 2100hrs 10/10th Cloud. Wanganui marking. 25 a/c lost including two from 9 Sqn. P/O Black & crew + P/O Blayden & crew (all killed). Another 31 crashed on return due to adverse weather (low cloud & poor visibility).
[Underlined] 23/24th DEC (7th raid). [/underlined] 326 lancs, 6 Halifax, 6 Mosquitoes on a southern route (Ijmuiden, Aachen skirting Frankfurt, Leipzig + NNE to Δ) with return roughly due west skirting Osnabrϋck. [Inserted] TOT approx. 4.30. [/inserted] Attack was scattered due mainly to H2S U/S. and a total of 1281 tons of bombs were dropped for a loss of 15 a/c (4%) with another 32 damaged.
[Underlined] 29/30th Dec (8th raid). [/underlined] 457 Lancs, 252 Halifax, 3 Mosquito on a direct route from Hornsea to just north of Leipzig (approx. 110°) then NNE to Berlin and roughly due west back from north of the city. Weather over Δ expected to be 10/10th cloud tops at 4000’ & winds of 80mph at 25,000’. Diversionary attacks made on Magdeburg & Leipzig. 9 Lancs & 9 Halifax lost (2.8% of total) & 104 damaged (most losses by fighters). (This attack was the 94th raid on Berlin since 1940). Total bombs dropped = 1099 tons HE + 1215 tons Incendiary making a total for the “Battle of Berlin” of 14074 tons and involving 3646 a/c dispatched to Δ.
[Page break]
[Underlined] DETAILS FROM “BOMBERS OVER BERLIN” CONTINUED. (Added in December 1985) [/underlined]
[Underlined]1/2nd JAN (9th Raid). [/underlined] 421 Lancs involved. T/O delayed over 4 hours unril after 23.00hrs by deteriorating weather which gave variable layered cloud increasing to 10/10th over Berlin. Marking sparse & widespread but 9 Sqn thought it good. Route out almost due east and back well south on Cologne via Le Tréport to English south coast. 28 Lancs lost (6.7%) inc P/O Ward of 9 Sqn for total tonnage 1400. Heavy snow fell during and after return.
[Underlined] 2/3rd Jan (10th Raid) [/underlined] All available on snow clearing prior to T/O. 383 a/c but 72 returned early due to mistaken recall signal. Route out over Southwold to north of Δ and back slightly south of outward route. Heavy flak over Berlin. 27 lost.
[Underlined] 20/21 Jan (11th Raid and heaviest so far). [/underlined] 769 a/c. on northerly route out over Kiel canal, then between Hamburg and Lϋbeck and landfall over Schleswig-Holstein heading south for Berlin. Weather similar to forecast of 10/10th cloud over Δ and fine on return. 2400 tons dropped causing widespread damage, over 700 casualties and 10,000 homeless. 35 a/c lost (13 Lancs, 22 Halifax), 18 known due to fighter attack and 8 to flak damage.
[Underlined] 27/28th Jan (12th Raid) [/underlined] I was not on this operation in which 9 Sqn lost F/L James (aged 19) and 4 crew, with 3 becoming POW. Total losses were 32a/c.
[Underlined] 28/29th Jan (13th Raid [/underlined] & slightly unlucky for us although we didn’t realise it at the time). Total of 682 a/c inc 432 Lancs. T/o around midnight. Route out past Heligoland & over Denmark, then SE to Δ and return same way. Considerable Flak reported & losses 43. Considered a most effective raid with fires & explosions seen from beyond Baltic coast.
[Underlined] 30/31st Jan (14th Raid) [/underlined] 540 a/c on route over Denmark & approaching Berlin from NW, then out southwest for short leg before turning west & returning over Holland. TOT 20.15-20.30. 26 fighter combats recorded over Δ. 32 a/c lost plus 5 crashed or ditched on return.
[Page break]
[Underlined] 15/16th Feb(15th Raid) [/underlined] Total of 891 a/c (including 561 Lancs, 314 Halifax & 16 Mosquitoes), the largest force ever despatched to the ‘Big City’, plus 24 Lancs to Frankfurt and Mosquito attacks on 7 night fighter airfields. T/O between 5 & 6pm with return about midnight for a northerly route out over Denmark. Heavy flak experienced, particularly over enemy coast and the target. 42 a/c lost plus 4 crashed on return. 2642 tons dropped in 39 minutes.
19/20 Feb. LEIPZIG. [underlined] 78 [/underlined] lost (out of 800 – the second highest loss of the whole “Battle of Berlin”)
[Page break]
Frankfurt – The Raid on 22/23 March ‘44
816 aircraft took part – 620 Lancasters, 184 Halifaxes and 12 Mosquitoes. An indirect routes [sic] was used crossing the Dutch coast north of the Zuider Zee and then due south to Frankfurt. This, and a minelaying diversion at Kiel, confused the Germans for quite some time. Hannover being forecast as the main target. A few fighters eventually found the Bombers.
The marking and bombing was accurate and damage being more severe than in the raid 4 nights previous. There was severe damage to the industrial areas along the main road to Mainz. All parts of the city were hit but the full force of the attack fell in the districts to the west.
33 aircraft were lost on this raid – 26 Lancasters and 7 Halifaxes. 4.0% of force lost.
Further interesting facts:-
162 B-17s of the Eighth Air Force used Frankfurt as a secondary target when they could not reach Schweinfurt 36 hours after this RAF raid, further damage was caused.
The three raids of the 18th, 22nd and 24th March were carried out by a combined plan of the British and American air forces and their combined effect was to deal the worst and most fateful blow of the war to Frankfurt.
[Page break]
[Obscured text] concentrated between 10.25 and 10.43pm, but it started early and spread over an hour and many early aircraft (including mine) overshot the target on the first run and had to go round again, while others, even earlier, had to orbit & await the TI’s. The scatter caused by the wind broadened the stream from the planned few miles to 180 miles at the Baltic coast & resulted in many aircraft flying over defended areas. Losses were high at 72 (8.9%), of which at least 45 were due to flak, plus 5 crashed on return.
[Underlined] SUMMARY: [/underlined] The Battle of Berlin between 18 Nov ’43 & 24/25 March ’44 totalled 16 raids involving over 9000 sorties (1/3rd of total BC sorties in the period) with a tonnage of 30,800 bombs dropped and achieved the devastation of 5500 acres of the city at a cost of 569 a/c lost or crashed and 2938 aircrew killed. This compares with a total of 255 raids, 20407 sorties, 45515 tons of bombs and 870 a/c missing during the entire war against Berlin 1940-45 inc.
[Page break]
[Underlined] 24/25th March (16th + final raid [/underlined] of the “Battle of Berlin” and the last large scale attack by BC.) This raid was delayed from 21st Mar by unsuitable weather. 811 a/c took part with 147 other from OUT’s on diversions. Weather was forecast as variable medium cloud with clear skies above and light northerly winds. In fact, winds were over 100mph from the north and this was not appreciated until late on, if at all with the result that navigation went hay-wire and aircraft were, literally, as newspaper headlines recorded the next day, but with a different meaning, “out all over Germany”. The route ran down to Berlin from the NW and the attack was planned to be concentrated between 10.25 and 10.43pm, but it started early and spread over an hour and many early aircraft (including mine) overshot the target on the first run and had to go round again, while others, even earlier, had to orbit & await the TI’s. The scatter caused by the wind broadened the stream from the planned few miles to 180 miles at the Baltic coast & resulted in many aircraft flying over defended areas. Losses were high at 72 (8.9%), of which at least 45 were due to flak, plus 5 crashed on return.
[Underlined] SUMMARY: [/underlined] The Battle of Berlin between 18 Nov ’43 & 24/25 March ’44 totalled 16 raids involving over 9000 sorties (1/3rd of total BC sorties in the period) with a tonnage of 30,800 bombs dropped and achieved the devastation of 5500 acres of the city at a cost of 569 a/c lost or crashed and 2938 aircrew killed. This compares with a total of 255 raids, 20407 sorties, 45515 tons of bombs and 870 a/c missing during the entire war against Berlin 1940-45 inc.
[Page break]
The aircraft was then put on disposal until ATA pilot [obscured] it to deliver to the squadron. The Erks got a shock when [obscured] women collected these planes and flew them as good as any male pilot.
Then one day, we were all hauled out to put the black and white stripes on our aircraft. We were all half asleep slapping the paint on the wings and tail ends, ready for the invasion of France.
We were allowed knitting wool without coupons in air force blue – good job mum was a good knitter as she knitted me stockings to wear under the battle dress, jumpers and gloves which I could wear whilst filling the aircraft. Also a balaclava to keep my cars [sic] warm.
Aircraft in disposal were often covered in snow when ATA come to collect, which meant you used a rope one each side of the wing and tired [sic] to pull it to the win [sic] tip. It makes me shiver now to think how we coped with the winters in Scotland.
Having to fly with the aircraft you signed for and serviced. We lost 3 airmen from our site which were shot down over the North Sea. Thank god us girls all survived flying.
Leaving – Innes House
Getting back from the airfield one day we had a notice telling us we were being moved again. We gathered all our gear and
[Page break]
BERLIN – 24/25th March 1944
811 Aircraft – 577 Lancasters, 216 Halifaxes and 18 Mosquitoes. 72 Aircraft – 44 Lancaster and 28 Halifaxes lost. 8.9& of force.
The night became known in Bomber Command as ‘the night of the strong winds’. At every stage of the flight a powerful wind from the north carried Bombers south. This wind was not forecast accurately and it was so strong that various methods available to warn crews of wind change during the flight failed to detect the full strength of it. The Bomber stream became very scattered, particularly on the home flight and Radar-predicted Flak batteries at many places were able to score successes. Some of the Bomber force even strayed over the Ruhr defences on the return flight. Approximately 50 of the 72 aircraft lost were destroyed by Flak, most of the remainder being victims of night fighters. A Berlin report says that 14 Bombers were shot down by fighters in the target area.
The strong winds caused difficulties in the marking at Berlin with markers being carried beyond the target to the south west of the city. 126 small towns and villages outside Berlin recorded bombs. The majority of the damage in Berlin was in south western districts.
No industrial concerns were classed as destroyed but several important ones damaged. 5 military establishments were hit badly including the depot on the Waffen-SS. Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Division in Lichterfelde.
This was the last major RAF raid on Berlin during the war, but the city was to be bombed many times by small forces of Mosquitoes.
Details of the Berlin Raid from the Bomber Command War Diaries by Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt.
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
Ronald Mathers pilots flying log book. One
Description
An account of the resource
Pilots flying log book for Ronald Mathers covering the period from 8 May 1942 to 30 September 1944. Detailing his flying training, operations flown and instructor duties. He was stationed at RAF Sywell, RAF De Winton, RAF Swift Current, RAF Harrogate, RAF Shawbury, RAF Castle Donington, RAF Turweston, RAF Silverstone, RAF Morton Hall, RAF Winthorpe, RAF Bardney, RAF Lulsgate Bottom and RAF Swinderby. Aircraft flown were, Tiger Moth (DH82), Stearman, Oxford, Anson Wellington, Lancaster and Stirling. He flew a total of 30 night operations with 9 squadron. Targets were, Berlin, Frankfurt, Braunschweig, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Marignane, Essen, Nuremburg, Schweinfurt, St, Medard en Jalles, Toulouse, Mailly le Camp, Brest, Lille, Bourg Leopold, Tours, Duisburg and Brunswick. His first or second pilots on operations were Pilot Officer Turnbull, Sergeant Ryan, Flying Officer Reeve, Flight Sergeant Redfern and Pilot Officer Campbell. The log book also contains hand written and typed printed notes of the 11 operations carried out to Berlin. Also contains four photographs of crew members, bomb aimer ‘Doc’ Brown, navigator ‘Tom Cave, wireless operator ‘Jock’ Donaldson and rear gunner ‘Nobby’ Bartlett.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Anne-Marie Watson
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
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LMathersRW55201v1
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
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Belgium
Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Alberta--De Winton
Belgium--Leopoldsburg
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Northamptonshire
England--Shropshire
England--Somerset
England--Yorkshire
France--Brest
France--Lille
France--Mailly-le-Camp
France--Marignane
France--Saint-Médard-en-Jalles
France--Toulouse
France--Tours
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Schweinfurt
Germany--Stuttgart
Saskatchewan--Swift Current
Saskatchewan
Alberta
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1943-12-16
1943-12-17
1943-12-20
1943-12-21
1943-12-23
1943-12-24
1943-12-29
1943-12-30
1944-01-01
1944-01-02
1944-01-03
1944-01-14
1944-01-15
1944-01-20
1944-01-21
1944-01-28
1944-01-29
1944-01-30
1944-01-31
1944-02-15
1944-02-16
1944-02-19
1944-02-20
1944-02-21
1944-03-10
1944-03-11
1944-03-15
1944-03-16
1944-03-22
1944-03-23
1944-03-24
1944-03-25
1944-03-26
1944-03-27
1944-03-30
1944-03-31
1944-04-26
1944-04-27
1944-04-28
1944-04-29
1944-04-30
1944-05-01
1944-05-02
1944-05-03
1944-05-04
1944-05-08
1944-05-09
1944-05-10
1944-05-11
1944-05-12
1944-05-19
1944-05-20
1944-05-21
1944-05-22
1944-05-23
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
1660 HCU
1661 HCU
17 OTU
9 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
bomb aimer
bombing
Bombing of Mailly-le-Camp (3/4 May 1944)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
Flying Training School
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Bardney
RAF Castle Donington
RAF Morton Hall
RAF Shawbury
RAF Silverstone
RAF Swinderby
RAF Sywell
RAF Turweston
RAF Winthorpe
Stearman
Stirling
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/714/17632/LBlowH158577v1.1.pdf
efb1310acab9ed075cc762a68f8656a6
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
Blow, Harold
H Blow
Description
An account of the resource
One log book containing photographs. The collection concerns Harold Blow (158577 Royal Air Force). He completed a tour of operations as a pilot with 9 Squadron and served as an instructor. After the war he served with 616 Squadron until he was killed on 22nd May 1954 flying a Meteor.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Patrick Blow and catalogued by archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-04-22
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
Blow, H
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
Harold Blow’s pilots flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Pilots flying log book for Harold Blow, covering the period from 22 January 1942 to 30 May 1946 and from 10 July 1949 to 20 May 1954, detailing his flying training, operations flown, instructor duties and post war duties with 616 Squadron. He was stationed at RAF Sywell, USAAF Americus, USAAF Cochran Field, USAAF Moody Field, RAF Carlisle, RAF Little Rissington, RAF Chipping Warden, RAF Silverstone, RAF Winthorpe, RAF Bardney, RAF Bruntingthorpe, RAF Finningly, RAF Bishops Court, RAF Shawbury, RAF Tangmere, RAF Church Fenton and RAF Takali. Aircraft flown were, Tiger Moth, Stearman PT17, Vultee BT 13a, Beechcraft AT10, Oxford, Wellington, Manchester, Lancaster, Harvard and Meteor. He flew a total of 30 night operations with 9 squadron. Targets were, Kassel, Dusseldorf, Modane, Berlin, Frankfurt, Stettin, Magdeburg, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Schweinfurt, Augsburg, Essen, Nuremburg, Toulouse, Tours and Aachen. <span>His pilot for his first 'second dickie' operation was </span><span data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559739":200,"335559740":276}">Pilot Officer Turnbull</span>. There is a green endorsement at the end for skill in bombing the target and returning with a damaged aircraft after a mid-air collision. The log book also contains four crew pictures with details and a paper clipping after his tour of the far East. Harold Blow was killed on 22nd May 1954 flying with 616 Royal Auxilliary Air Force flying a Meteor 8.
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
LBlowH158577v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Malta
Poland
United States
England--Cumbria
England--Gloucestershire
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Northamptonshire
England--Shropshire
England--Yorkshire
France--Modane
France--Toulouse
France--Tours
Georgia--Americus
Georgia--Macon
Georgia--Moody Air Force Base
Germany--Aachen
Germany--Augsburg
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Magdeburg
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Schweinfurt
Germany--Stuttgart
Northern Ireland--Down (County)
Poland--Szczecin
Germany--Düsseldorf
England--Sussex
Georgia
Great Britain
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1943-10-22
1943-10-23
1944
1944-03-30
1944-03-31
1944-04-05
1944-04-06
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1943-11-03
1943-11-04
1943-11-10
1943-11-11
1943-11-18
1943-11-19
1943-11-22
1943-11-23
1943-11-24
1943-12-16
1943-12-17
1943-12-20
1943-12-23
1943-12-24
1943-12-29
1943-12-30
1944-01-01
1944-01-02
1944-01-05
1944-01-06
1944-01-21
1944-01-22
1944-01-27
1944-01-28
1944-01-29
1944-01-30
1944-01-31
1944-02-15
1944-02-16
1944-02-19
1944-02-20
1944-02-24
1944-02-25
1944-02-26
1944-03-01
1944-03-02
1944-03-15
1944-03-16
1944-03-18
1944-03-19
1944-03-22
1944-03-23
1944-03-24
1944-03-25
1944-03-26
1944-03-27
1944-04-10
1944-04-11
1944-04-12
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
11 OTU
1661 HCU
17 OTU
29 OTU
9 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Kassel (22/23 October 1943)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
bombing of Toulouse (5/6 April 1944)
Flying Training School
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Manchester
Meteor
mid-air collision
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Bardney
RAF Bishops Court
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Carlisle
RAF Church Fenton
RAF Finningley
RAF Little Rissington
RAF Shawbury
RAF Silverstone
RAF Sywell
RAF Tangmere
RAF Winthorpe
Stearman
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1277/19137/LOwenDE1153507v2.1.pdf
4e8224b0d4e784e17c8ec259cc504ae5
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
Owen, David Eric
D E Owen
Description
An account of the resource
Two Log books belonging to D E Owen (153507 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 149, 617 and 9 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Marian Owen 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
2015-06-23
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
Owen, DE
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
D E Owen’s flying log book for navigators, air bombers, air gunners, flight engineers. Two
Description
An account of the resource
Flying log book for navigators, air bombers, air gunners, flight engineers for D E Owen, flight engineer, covering the period from 29 August 1942 to 9 May 1946. Detailing his flying training operations flown and instructor duties. He was stationed at RAF Stradishall, RAF Mildenhall, RAF Lakenheath and RAF Scampton, RAF Balderton, RAF Syerston, RAF East Kirkby, RAF Bardney, RAF Waddington, RAF Salbania and RAF Binbrook. Aircraft flown in were, Stirling, Lancaster and Oxford. He flew 24 night operation with 149 squadron and one operation with 617 squadron until crashing on Salisbury plain during low level exercise and being admitted to hospital During his time with 617 Sqn he had one flight piloted by Guy Gibson (27.7.43 low level cross-country). He returned to flying on 2 February 1944 and then completed 3 daylight and 3 night operations with 9 squadron. Targets were, St Jean de Luz, Stuttgart, Turin, Bordeaux, Duisburg, Lorient, Hamburg, Cologne, Nurenburg, Munich, Mannheim, Rostock, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Le Creusot, Milan, Merseburg, Bremen, Farge, Molbis, Lutzkendorf and Prince Eugen. He had one Cook's tour flight and participated in Operation Exodus and Operation Dodge. His pilots on operations were Flight Lieutenant Kellaway and Wing Commander Harrison.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
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
LOwenDE1153507v2
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
England--Lincolnshire
England--Suffolk
France--Le Creusot
France--Lorient
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Merseburg
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Rostock
Germany--Saxony
Germany--Stuttgart
Italy--Milan
Italy--Turin
France--Bordeaux (Nouvelle-Aquitaine)
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
France--Saint-Jean-de-Luz
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1942-11-16
1942-11-17
1942-11-22
1942-11-23
1942-11-28
1942-11-29
1942-11-30
1942-12-16
1942-12-17
1942-12-20
1943-01-15
1943-01-23
1943-02-03
1943-02-04
1943-02-05
1943-02-13
1943-02-14
1943-02-15
1943-02-16
1943-02-17
1943-03-03
1943-03-04
1943-03-08
1943-03-09
1943-03-10
1943-03-11
1943-03-12
1943-04-15
1943-04-16
1943-04-17
1943-04-18
1943-04-20
1943-04-21
1943-05-22
1943-05-23
1943-05-24
1943-05-25
1943-05-26
1943-05-27
1943-06-11
1943-06-12
1943-06-19
1943-06-20
1943-07-29
1943-07-30
1944-01-14
1944-01-15
1945-03-22
1945-03-27
1945-04-07
1945-04-08
1945-04-09
1945-04-13
1945-05-04
1945-05-12
1945-06-13
149 Squadron
1657 HCU
1668 HCU
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
air sea rescue
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Cook’s tour
crash
Distinguished Service Order
flight engineer
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
mine laying
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Oxford
RAF Balderton
RAF Bardney
RAF Binbrook
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Lakenheath
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Scampton
RAF Stradishall
RAF Syerston
RAF Waddington
Stirling
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/540/23324/LGilbertAC186764v1.1.pdf
38ddea336417bf8ba52ad3f92fa027c2
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
Gilbert, Alexander Charles
A C Gilbert
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Gilbert, AC
Description
An account of the resource
21 items. An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Alexander Charles Gilbert DFC (b. 1921, 1336682, 186764 Royal Air Force) his log book, documents and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 9, 514 and 159 Squadrons. He was Awarded the Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 2020.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Alexander Gilbert and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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
Alexander Gilbert’s navigator’s, air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Navigator’s, air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book for A C Gilbert, flight engineer, covering the period from 16 June 1943 to 3 July 1956. Detailing his flying training, operations flown and instructor duties. He was stationed at RAF Winthorpe, RAF Bardney, RAF Foulsham, RAF Waterbeach, RAF Feltwell, RAF Woolfox Lodge, RAF Methwold, RAF Tuddenham, RAF Stradishall and RAF Watton. Aircraft flown in were Manchester, Lancaster, Oxford, Flying Fortress, York, Dakota and Anson. He flew a total of 33 operations, 10 night operations with 9 Squadron, 14 night operations with 514 Squadron, 5 daylight and 4 night operations with 149 Squadron plus two Operation Manna. Targets were Hamburg, Mannheim, Nurnberg, Leverkusen, Monchen Gladbach, Berlin, Munich, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Laon, Rouen, Wiesbaden, Hohenbudberg, Dresden, Bocholt, Hallendorf, Kiel, Rotterdam, and The Hague. His pilot on operations was<span data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559739":200,"335559740":276}"> Squadron Leader Payne. </span>The book also records flights on Operation Exodus, Cook's Tours and one Operation Dodge flight.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
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
LGilbertAC186764v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Rutland
England--Suffolk
France--Laon
France--Rouen
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bocholt
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Leverkusen
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Mönchengladbach
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Salzgitter
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Wiesbaden
Netherlands--Hague
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1950
1955
1956
1943-07-27
1943-07-28
1943-07-29
1943-07-30
1943-08-02
1943-08-09
1943-08-10
1943-08-11
1943-08-22
1943-08-23
1943-08-27
1943-08-28
1943-08-30
1943-08-31
1943-09-03
1943-09-04
1943-09-06
1943-09-07
1943-11-03
1943-11-06
1943-11-18
1943-11-19
1943-11-22
1943-11-23
1943-11-26
1943-11-27
1943-12-16
1943-12-20
1943-12-23
1943-12-29
1943-12-30
1944-01-01
1944-01-02
1944-02-15
1944-02-16
1944-02-20
1944-04-10
1944-04-18
1944-04-19
1945-01-28
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-02-09
1945-02-13
1945-02-14
1945-03-11
1945-03-22
1945-03-29
1945-04-09
1945-04-10
1945-04-30
1945-05-04
1945-05-23
149 Squadron
1661 HCU
514 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
B-17
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
C-47
Cook’s tour
flight engineer
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 2
Lancaster Mk 3
Manchester
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Oxford
RAF Bardney
RAF Feltwell
RAF Foulsham
RAF Methwold
RAF Stradishall
RAF Tuddenham
RAF Waterbeach
RAF Watton
RAF Winthorpe
RAF Woolfox Lodge
training
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1895/35680/LGillK1438901v1.1.pdf
1fcaf9a0c545538c4700852b3da1bf4c
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
Gill, Kenneth
K Gill
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-09
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
Gill, K
Description
An account of the resource
One hundred and sixty-four items plus another one hundred and fifteen in two sub-ciollections. The collection concerns Flying Officer Kenneth Gill DFC (1922 - 1945, 1438901, 155097 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, documents, photographs and family and other correspondence. <br />He flew operations as a navigator with 9 Squadron before starting a second tour with 617 Squadron. He was killed 21 March 1945 having completed 45 operations.<br /><br />The collection also contains two albums. <br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2114">Kenneth Gill. Album One</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2117">Kenneth Gill. Album Two</a><br /><br />Additional information on Kenneth Gill is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/108654/">IBCC Losses Database.</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Derek Gill and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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
Kenneth Gill’s observer’s and air gunner’s flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Observer’s and air gunner’s flying log book for K Gill, navigator, covering the period from 17 May 1942 to 21 March 1945 when he was missing on operations. Detailing his flying training, operations flown and instructor duties. He was stationed at RCAF Chatham, RAF North Luffenham, RAF Swinderby, RAF Bardney, RAF Syerston and RAF Woodhall Spa. Aircraft flown in were Anson, Wellington, Halifax, Lancaster, Hudson, Tiger Moth and Stearman. He flew a total of 46 operations, one with 29 operational training unit, one with 1660 conversion unit, 26 with 9 squadron and 18 with 617 squadron. His pilots on operations were Flight Lieutenant Evans, Flight Lieutenant Derbyshire, and Fl;ight Lieutenant Gumbley. Targets were Clermont Ferrand, Spezia, Dortmund, Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Essen, Wuppertal, Bochum, Oberhausen, Krefeld, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne, Milan, Nurnberg, Rheydt, Berlin, Munich, Kassel, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Tromso - Tirpitz, Urft Dam, IJmuiden, Politz, Rotterdam, Horten, Pootershaven, Bielefeld, Ladbergen, Arnsberg and Arbergen.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943-02-25
1943-02-26
1943-04-18
1943-04-19
1943-05-04
1943-05-05
1943-05-11
1943-05-12
1943-05-23
1943-05-24
1943-05-25
1943-05-26
1943-05-27
1943-05-28
1943-05-29
1943-05-30
1943-06-11
1943-06-12
1943-06-13
1943-06-14
1943-06-15
1943-06-21
1943-06-22
1943-06-25
1943-06-26
1943-06-28
1943-06-29
1943-07-08
1943-07-09
1943-07-25
1943-07-26
1943-08-07
1943-08-08
1943-08-10
1943-08-11
1943-08-27
1943-08-28
1943-08-30
1943-08-31
1943-09-03
1943-09-04
1943-09-06
1943-09-07
1943-10-03
1943-10-04
1943-10-05
1943-10-20
1943-10-21
1943-11-03
1943-11-04
1943-11-18
1943-11-19
1944-10-29
1944-11-11
1944-12-11
1944-12-15
1944-12-21
1944-12-22
1944-12-29
1944-12-30
1944-12-31
1945-01-01
1945-02-03
1945-02-06
1945-02-14
1945-02-22
1945-02-24
1945-03-13
1945-03-14
1945-03-19
1945-03-21
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Poland
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Rutland
New Brunswick--Chatham
France--Clermont-Ferrand
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Arnsberg
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bielefeld
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Euskirchen Region
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Rheydt
Germany--Wuppertal
Italy--La Spezia
Italy--Milan
Netherlands--Hoek van Holland
Netherlands--IJmuiden
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Norway--Horten
Norway--Tromsø
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Germany--Bielefeld
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Arnsberg
Germany--Bremen
New Brunswick
Norway
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Cara Walmsley
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LGillK1438901v1
1660 HCU
29 OTU
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
Air Observers School
aircrew
Anson
bombing
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hudson
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
mine laying
missing in action
navigator
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bardney
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Woodhall Spa
Stearman
Tallboy
Tiger Moth
Tirpitz
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2003/38297/LBrownCR1334289v1.1.pdf
1fe47202b7a12860ceb8e665d188f006
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
Brown, Cyril Robert
C R Brown
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
2017-12-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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
Brown, CR
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. The collection concerns Cyril Robert Brown (b. 1921, 1334289
Royal Air Force) and contains his log book and a photograph. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 106, 9 and 617 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Susan Crosby and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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
Cyril Robert Brown’s flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
C.R. Brown’s Flying Log Book from 5 April 1942 to 7 May 1946 detailing training, operations and instructional duties as a bomb aimer. Based at Portage La Prairie (No. 7 Air Observers School), Paulson (No. 7 Bombing and Gunnery School), Winnipeg (No. 5 Air Observers School), RAF Kinloss (No. 19 Operational Training Unit), RAF Winthorpe (1661 Conversion Unit), RAF Syerston (106 Squadron), RAF Bardney (9 Squadron), RAF Woodhall Spa (617 Squadron), RAF Swinderby (1660 Conversion Unit), RAF Skellingthorpe, RAF Sturgate and RAF Waddington (61 Squadron). Aircraft flown: Anson, Battle, Whitley, Manchester, Lancaster and Stirling. Records a total of 35 night operations. Targets in France, Germany, Italy and Norway are: Angoulême, Berlin, Bochum, Brunswick, Clermont-Ferrand, Cologne, Dortmund-Ems Canal, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Hamburg, Hanover, Krefeld, Leverkusen, Lyons, Magdeburg, Mannheim, Metz, Milan, Modane, Mölbis, Mulheim, Munich, Nordhausen, Nuremburg, Oberhausen, St Etienne, Tonsberg, Turin and Wurzburg. Later notes include a Cook's Tour flight and participation in Operations “Dodge”, “Spasm”, “Wastage” and “Frontline”. His pilots on operations were Flight Sergeant Brown, Pilot Officer Whetter, Flying Officer Ham, Squadron Leader Howroyd, Flying Officer Cole, Flight Lieutenant Hadland, Flight Lieutenant Lipton and Flying Officer Bain. <br /><br />This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form. No better quality copies are available.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943-06-12
1943-06-13
1943-06-14
1943-06-15
1943-06-21
1943-06-22
1943-07-03
1943-07-04
1943-07-09
1943-07-10
1943-07-12
1943-07-13
1943-07-24
1943-07-25
1943-07-26
1943-08-07
1943-08-08
1943-08-10
1943-08-11
1943-09-23
1943-09-24
1943-09-27
1943-09-28
1943-10-18
1943-10-19
1943-11-10
1943-11-11
1943-11-18
1943-11-19
1943-11-23
1943-11-24
1944-01-01
1944-01-02
1944-01-03
1944-01-14
1944-01-20
1944-01-21
1944-01-22
1944-01-28
1944-02-15
1944-02-16
1944-03-04
1944-03-05
1944-03-10
1944-03-11
1944-03-15
1944-03-16
1944-03-17
1944-03-20
1944-03-21
1944-03-23
1944-03-24
1944-03-25
1944-03-26
1945-03-03
1945-03-04
1945-03-16
1945-03-17
1945-04-04
1945-04-07
1945-04-08
1945-04-26
1945-04-27
1946
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Norway
Scotland
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
France--Angoulême
France--Clermont-Ferrand
France--Lyon
France--Metz
France--Modane
France--Saint-Étienne (Loire)
Italy--Po River Valley
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Essen
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Leverkusen
Germany--Magdeburg
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nordhausen (Thuringia)
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Würzburg
Italy--Milan
Italy--Turin
Manitoba--Portage la Prairie
Manitoba--Winnipeg
Norway--Tønsberg
Scotland--Moray
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Manitoba
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Format
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One booklet
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
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David Leitch
Identifier
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LBrownCR1334289v1
106 Squadron
1660 HCU
1661 HCU
19 OTU
61 Squadron
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
Air Observers School
aircrew
Anson
Battle
bomb aimer
bombing
Bombing and Gunnery School
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
Cook’s tour
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Manchester
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bardney
RAF Kinloss
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Sturgate
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Waddington
RAF Winthorpe
RAF Woodhall Spa
Stirling
training
Whitley